The Role Values Play for Agency in Institutions

Although values play an important role as normative ends that drive human agency in institutions, new institutionalism (NI) has paid limited attention to them. Consequently, NI tends to be driven by structural determinism and comes somewhat short when explaining agency in institutional structures. In order to better understand how values promote action in institutions, we conduct a literature review of 122 journal articles published between 1989 and 2016 that draw on NI to study the value-laden management concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We make three contributions. First, we show how considering values enhances our understanding of behavior in various institutional contexts at the micro-, meso and macro-level of analysis and reveals a more-balanced view on the structure-agency duality. Second, we map the NI/CSR field conceptually, indicating areas of current contributions and providing insight into recent developments. Finally, we present under-explored themes and directions for future research.