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Banana time followed peach time by approximately an hour. Sammy again provided the refreshments, namely, one banana. There was, however, no four way sharing of Sammy's banana. Ike would gulp it down by himself after surreptitiously extracting it from Sammy's lunch box, kept on a shelf behind Sammy's workstation. Each morning, after making the snatch, Ike would call out “Banana time!” and proceed to down his prize while Sammy made futile protests and denunciations… Sammy… never did get to eat his banana, but kept bringing one for his lunch. (From “ Banana Time”: Job satisfaction and Informal Interaction , by Donald F. Roy (1989) . Although early work on institutions examined the habituation of behavior in small groups (i.e., as with what occurred within the organization above) ( Roy, 1989 ; Zucker, 1977 ), most subsequent organizational research on institutions has involved taken-for- granted beliefs and actions that occur at the level of industries (i.e., across organizations) ( Tolbert and Zucker, 1983 ; Fligstein, 1985 ; Mezias, 1990 ). Discussion of institutions within organizations – or “intraorganizational institutions” – does not appear in the chapter on institutional theory in the recently published, Handbook of Organizations ( Tolbert and Zucker, 1996 ), or in Powell and DiMaggio's (1991) review of institutional theory. Nevertheless, a closer look at organizational ... log in or subscribe to read full text