Legitimacy

This city's mad in the head
And sick in the soul
All the stars flew away
A long time ago
Oh, isn't that nice
Like Miami Vice
--Flesh For Lulu

A central tenet of institution theory is that compliance with institutional rules (a.k.a. isomorphism) bestows legitimacy on the compliant. In this context, legitimacy is social recognition and acceptance, sort of a like permission slip to go about your business and function in society.

If you've been using a purely economic framework to make sense of the crazy behavior that we've seen recently, then you're probably scratching your head. But if you realize that sometime behavior is sometimes motivated by cravings for legitimacy, then things seem to fall more into place.

If the rules reward crazy behavior with legitimacy, then you'll generally get more crazy behavior.