Planners in Madrid [also] used their images to build new institutions. … This empirically-based life cycle theory of institutional evolution suggests that the constitutional image sustaining the institution undergoes a change or is replaced by a new image, leading to a new or reformed institution. A life cycle typology of institutional transformation is formulated with four variables: type of change, stimulus for change, type of constitutional image, and outcome of the transformation.
By linking the life cycle hypothesis with cognitive theories of image formation, and then situating their synthesis within a frame of cognition as a means of structuring the institution, this book arrives at a new theory of institutional evolution. The constitutional image represents the institution's ideology and precepts that are replicated over space and time via structures and processes. Changing the constitutional image in the minds of the institution's members yields a change in the institution.
Further details