An organization experiences coercive isomorphism when another organization on which it depends requires it to adopt a structure. An example of coercive isomorphism is in U.S. hospitals’ adoption of practices required by the Joint Commission for Medicare reimbursement eligibility.

In this case, mimicking another organization perceived as legitimate becomes a “safe” way to proceed. Mimetic isomorphism is in contrast to coercive isomorphism, where organizations are forced to change by external forces, or normative isomorphism, where professional standards or networks influence change.

Mimetic pressure arises when companies engage in competition seeking superior performance [19]. This research evaluates the institutional responses to coercive, normative and mimetic pressure in light of adoption of EMA.

Isomorphism, in modern algebra, a one-to-one correspondence (mapping) between two sets that preserves binary relationships between elements of the sets. For example, the set of natural numbers can be mapped onto the set of even natural numbers by multiplying each natural number by 2.

1. The pressure of other people that leads us to conform to their demands.

The normative force is the quality which turns a standard into a norm. This standard of behaviour is not very clear and detailed in all cases.

In law, as an academic discipline, the term “normative” is used to describe the way something ought to be done according to a value position. From another value position, the purpose of the criminal justice system could be to protect individuals from the moral harm of wrongful conviction.

A Normative theory describes an ideal way for a media system to be controlled and operated by the government, authority, leader and public. These theories are basically different from other communication theories because normative theories of press are not providing any scientific explanations or prediction.

Deontology, teleology, consequentialism and character-based ethics are not in themselves ethical theories – they are types of ethical theory. Natural moral law is seen by most people as one type of deontological theory; Kant’s theory of the Categorical Imperative is another.

Sociologists (Zetterberg, 1965) refer to at least four types of theory: theory as classical literature in sociology, theory as sociological criticism, taxonomic theory, and scientific theory. These types of theory have at least rough parallels in social education. Some of them might be useful for guiding research.

As mentioned in Fig. 1.4, deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics are the three normative theories concerning ethics. Besides these just covered theories, there are three other approaches, which deserve attention.

The main difference between normative ethics and descriptive ethics is that normative ethics analyses how people ought to act whereas descriptive ethics analyses what people think is right. Descriptive ethics, as its name implies, describes the behaviour of people and what moral standards they follow.

Metaethics is the study of moral thought and moral language. The metaethicist is interested in whether there can be knowledge of moral truths, or only moral feelings and attitudes, and asks how we understand moral discourse as compared with other forms of speech and writing.

Ethics and scientific knowledge Most famously, David Hume (1711-1776) summed this up in what he termed the naturalistic fallacy, which suggests that one cannot infer from is to ought, nor can one make an inference from scientific observations to ethical arguments.

Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or …

When individuals are deciding what to do for themselves alone, they consider only their own utility. For example, if you are choosing ice cream for yourself, the utilitarian view is that you should choose the flavor that will give you the most pleasure.

Utilitarianism has been rightly called universal hedonism, as distinguished from the hedonism of Epicurus, which was egoistic.

Motive utilitarianism concerns the utilitarian assessment of motives. Classical act utilitarianism is typically construed as holding that motives are themselves irrelevant for the deontic evaluation of actions. The view holds that the best motives are those that yield optimal utility.

Today utilitarians often describe benefits and harms in terms of the satisfaction of personal preferences or in purely economic terms of monetary benefits over monetary costs. Utilitarians also differ in their views about the kind of question we ought to ask ourselves when making an ethical decision.

Utilitarianism says that the morally best thing to do is to promote everyone’s values (by maximizing welfare), with all values treated equally. Many other ethical philosophies say that morality consists of promoting only some values, or promoting some values as more important than other values.

The second most common criticism of utilitarianism is that it is impossible to apply – that happiness (etc) cannot be quantified or measured, that there is no way of calculating a trade-off between intensity and extent, or intensity and probability (etc), or comparing happiness to suffering.