Cambiamento istituzionale e organizzativo: verso un approccio multidimensionale

The contribution summarizes the results of some reflections on the theme of institutional change, starting from the premise of the impossibility of decoupling that concept from that of organizational change and therefore from the social, economic, and cultural environment. Such a perspective imposes to overcome North’s metaphor on institutions as rules of the game and organizations as players, in order to move towards a more complex and multidimensional model, which takes into account - as reminded by Greif - that institutions are not rules, but self-enforcing systems of rules, norms, beliefs, and organizations. The author also outlines some implications of this theoretical framework, for example with regard to the practices of participation of the actors in the processes of institutional and organizational change. The concluding section introduces the dimension of space into the model, by proposing a reinterpretation of the territory as a process of reflective institutionalization.