The analysis of strategy in organizations and the institutional theory have been developed, until recently, as incompatible approaches to decision and action. However a set of new organizational researches based on institutional theory are trying to conciliate the idea of strategic agency and the influence of institutional patterns to explain how decisions are taken and how organizations connect to their environments. As the field of strategy research has not yet seriously taken that possibility, with some few but relevant exceptions, it seems that new contributions are required. So, the main purposes of this paper were: to summary institutional theory perspectives in organization academic field and to suggest new theoretical and conceptual insights for the strategy theory from an institutional point of view. It is possible to conclude that the effort to conciliate those theoretical streams - strategy in organizations and institutional theory - is useful to organization theory, as much as to overcome some difficult aspects of strategic and institutional phenomena.
strategy; new institutionalism; institutional environment; action