Institutional-Level Norms and Organizational Involvement In a Service-Implementation Network

This article, which focuses on organizations that serve seriously mentally ill adults in a single community, is an attempt to explain the involvement of these organizations in a network of service delivery, a “service-implementation network.” With the use of an institutional theory perspective four hypotheses were developed, each focusing on an aspect of an organization's service orientation thought to reflect its commitment to and support of institutional-level professional norms with regard to network involvement. Data were collected on twenty-eight of the thirty-one health and social service agencies that made up the service-implementation network for adults with serious mental illness in one city. Results were generally supportive of the hypotheses, although the strength of the findings varied depending on whether network involvement was measured as either service-link density or multiplexity.