Isomorphism of organizational names: A institutional analysis on pharmacy names in Ankara

Within the continiously changing environment, organizations are adopting various enviromental changes in oreder to survive their existence. By the way, institutional perspective describes how organizations survive and succeed through congruence between organizations and the expectations from its environment. According to institutional theory, organizations have to adopt structures and processes to please outsiders. Followingly, institutional environment is composed of norms and values from stake holders and reflects what the greater society views as correct ways of organizing and behaving.Organizations have a strong need to appear legitimate. In doing so, organizations behave toward environment acceptance rather than toward internal technical efficiency. An organizaton that conforms to societal rules obtain legitimacy and increases its chance for survival. Thus, being efficient is not the only way that organizations can survive.Organizations which appear in similar environments are said to experience comparable demand over what is generally regarded as being acceptable behaviour and consequenlty, will have similar structures and processes. With interorganizational relationships, organizations become more similar to each other. In institutional approach, this simiarity is called `institutional isomorphism?. Institutional isomorphism is the emergence of a common structure and approach among organizations in the same field.The need for legitimacy means that the organizations will adopt structures and activities that are perceived as valid, proper by external stakeholders. Legitimate organizations increase their chance for survival. Organizatons which target to achieve legitimacy, try to get identity that is suported by the environment.The reason behind getting organizational idenity is enviromental acceptance and getting distinguished place within the whole organizations. For getting identity, they use some symbolic elements such as specific logos, color, organizational names, communication types and behaviour styles.In this research, we focus on organizational name, which is one of the element of organizational identity. Organizational names locate an organization in institutonal space, as a member of an organizational field and cue its distinctiveness for quality, service or products. Names identify organizations and voicing their claim on specific region of institutional space.Isomorphism with symbols authorized by the institutional environment secures legitimacy and comprehensibility for he organization. By choosing names that are symbolically isomorphic, organizations locate themselves within institutional contex which lend them comprehensibility amd legitimacy. The term `symbolic isomorphism? is used for this process.Following institutional approach, we developed an argument. Our argument says that organizations choose symbolically isomorphic names to become legitimate. To justify our argument, we made a quantitative research, We took 1342 pharmacy names that are located in centre of Ankara. We saw that pharmacy names in Ankara shows some categoric features. The owner of pharmacies use some sources fro naming. We allocate these sources as, location, owners name, health and ancestor.Our findings from the research shor that, in some distiricts of Ankara, pharmacy names are symbolically isomorphic. For being legitimate, pharmacy owners choose names that are symbolically isomorphic.To conclude, we found that institutional factors affect pharmacy owners in choosing names. We can say that, organizations?s name functioned as a legitimating artifact and followingly, symbolic isomorphism appears in the field. By the way, findings are consistent with the basic argument of institutional theory that we mentioned before.