Is the institutional review of institutional and innovative policy instrumental or ceremonial? A multiple case study on the institutional review of policies and procedures in Department of Energy nuclear and nuclear waste facilities

We adopt the theory of institutional change to investigate whether institutional review is instrumental or ceremonial, focusing on the role of institutional policy in horizontally integrating the enterprise. We conduct a qualitative multiple case study, examining a case at a United States Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear facility and another at a DOE nuclear waste facility. We use several DOE documents comprising several hundred pages. Our findings indicate that the review of the formation and revision of institutional policy is instrumental rather than ceremonial. We demonstrate that intra-firm cross-organizational innovation can be facilitated through institution-wide reviews of institutional policies (new policies and revisions) in the institutional policy process. This collaborative management leads to the development of dynamic capabilities, which are hallmarks of high-flex organizations. We find that institutional policy acts as a mediating artifact for knowledge and innovation, enabling cross-organizational collaboration in knowledge creation and innovation. While institutional policy is primarily internal, some aspects may originate from external institutions, particularly when policies restate or implement laws or regulations. We find that the DOE and its “big science” program exhibited dynamic capabilities without the external forcing function of a mishap, suggesting that institutional change or transformation in the big science context can occur endogenously. This study lies at the intersection of dynamic capabilities in strategic management, organizational learning (particularly organizational innovation and knowledge creation), and institutional economics. We contribute to theory by synthesizing a portion of institutional economics—namely institutional change—with the theory of dynamic capabilities, identifying instrumental values as encompassing both ordinary and dynamic capabilities. We apply the dynamic capabilities framework of strategic management to public firms and expand the scope of the mediating artifact. Although the context of this study is public administration, the results are also applicable to private administration.