Institutionalized organizations, such as police departments, operate in environments that are complex, with values. Police organizations must display, in their organizational behavior and design, that they care about constituents’ concerns. Institutional theory began being used by police theorists and researchers in the 1990's to account for the constraining or enabling effects of the institutional environment on police organizations. It emerged as a way to explain the behavior and structure of criminal justice organizations and interorganizational fields. This article is divided into three sections: (1) an overview of institutional theory and a review of writings on the application of institutional theory to the police; (2) a review of research conducted on institutional theory across the field of criminal justice; and (3) a contrasting of the competing notions of institutions and utility in institutional theory, as well as locating police organizations within Giddens’ model of human agency. References