This study assesses the institutional impact of coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures on job-training programs and the extent to which the institutionalization of such programs is contingent upon the environment in which organizations operate. Event-history analysis of a retrospective data set (1967 to 1997) of 301 American organizations indicates that having an external human resources attorney and competing with a number of other organizations with training—two of the mimetic institutional effects—are the driving factors behind the spread of job-training programs. Furthermore, these mimetic institutional pressures exert a stronger impact on governmental organizations' choice to adopt training programs than on for-profit firms. Governmental agencies appear to be more responsive to institutional influences because, compared with for-profit firms, they are in greater need of external legitimation of their procedures and operations, one of the crucial benefits of being an institutional conformist.
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