Industry Associations as Change Agents: The Institutional Roles of Newspaper Associations

This article explores the institutional roles of industry associations, employing institutional theory to identify and characterize the roles of leading associations in the newspaper industry. Using four leading newspaper associations as cases, the authors explore association functions evidenced through interviews with their key executives. The paper finds that the association leaders tended to emphasize normative functions, while associations’ operational executives tended to focus onmimetic and coercive functions.