Analysis of Approaches to Essential Filling of the "Institutional Environment" Category

The article analyzes the approaches to defining the category "institutional environment" found in modern scientific foreign literature. It is shown that the specified category has not found an established categorical design, despite the relevance of the specified concept, because a coherent and effective institutional environment becomes a key element for the progressive development of society in the conditions of post-industrialism. By forming values, norms, rules, and habits, it affects the behavior of individuals and organizations, which contributes to social coordination and cooperation, the resolution of disputes and conflicts, social order, stability, predictability, and sequence of social processes, which reduces entropy and crisis processes in society. The institutional environment provides a basis for the interaction of all the main elements of society: economic, political-legal, social, environmental, etc. Considering this, it is extremely important to understand the essence of the specified category, which is the basis for building effective theories and models that allow to construction of an adequate and effective institutional environment within the state. It has been demonstrated that there are several approaches to defining the concept of the institutional environment. The first involves the selection of the generic concept of the institution as the main component of the institutional environment, which is a set of institutions within a certain system and elements that influence its development within the framework of a complete social system. The second approach involves structuring the elements of the institutional environment according to the form of their manifestation; the third – building a hierarchy of institutions; the fourth is the selection of three dimensions of the institutional environment. Finally, the last approach involves the division of institutions in the structure of the institutional environment into groups depending on the type of relations that have developed between the subjects of the specified sphere or system, or according to the functions, it performs. As a result of the research, the author's definition of the concept of "institutional environment" is presented.