What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

/pdf/the-iron-cage-revisited-institutional-isomorphism-and-xas5qn5nhy.pdf

The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

In this paper, the concept of social capital is introduced and illustrated, its forms are described, the social structural conditions under which it arises are examined, and it is used in an analys...

/pdf/social-capital-in-the-creation-of-human-capital-1836wo2872.pdf

Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital

Job Demands, Job Decision Latitude, and Mental Strain: Implications for Job Redesign

A model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior. The model shows how selection can operate against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system. Three instances of altruistic behavior are discussed, the evolution of which the model can explain: (1) behavior involved in cleaning symbioses; (2) warning cries in birds; and (3) human reciprocal altruism. Regarding human reciprocal altruism, it is shown that the details of the psychological system that regulates this altruism can be explained by the model. Specifically, friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system. Each individual human is seen as possessing altruistic and cheating tendencies, the expression of which is sensitive to developmental variables that were selected to set the tendencies at a balance ap...

/pdf/the-evolution-of-reciprocal-altruism-36v5rn897k.pdf

The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism

■ Abstract The recent proliferation of scholarship on collective action frames and framing processes in relation to social movements indicates that framing processes have come to be regarded, alongside resource mobilization and political opportunity processes, as a central dynamic in understanding the character and course of social movements. This review examines the analytic utility of the framing literature for un- derstanding social movement dynamics. We first review how collective action frames have been conceptualized, including their characteristic and variable features. We then examine the literature related to framing dynamics and processes. Next we review the literature regarding various contextual factors that constrain and facilitate framing processes. We conclude with an elaboration of the consequences of framing processes for other movement processes and outcomes. We seek throughout to provide clarifi- cation of the linkages between framing concepts/processes and other conceptual and theoretical formulations relevant to social movements, such as schemas and ideology.

/pdf/framing-processes-and-social-movements-an-overview-and-2fo6scjphe.pdf

Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment

More Notes on Sociology's Coming Crisis

And the tragic vision in sociology

Notes on Technology and the Moral Order.

It is one thing when a system is young, still forming its boundaries, and when its principal adversaries are outside of it, but quite another when it becomes old enough to have a past containing commitments which it has made and with which it must somehow live. In this chapter, a view in three stages of the evolution of Marxism in the lifetimes of its founders is offered, which devolves around this transition.

Anomalies and the Evolution of Early Marxism

I want to begin here by reexamining the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) as an anomaly—that is, as a moment of aborted creativity—in Marxism. I have earlier indicated that the texts bearing on the AMP, and the other social forms developed after the dissolution of the primitive (tribal) commune, are extremely skimpy. I am neither the first to suggest this, nor does this view go unchallenged in discussion among Marxists and “Marxologists.” Thus, for example, M. Shapiro1 has also stressed the brevity with which Marx treats the AMP which, in turn, has drawn a dissenting rejoinder from Umberto Melotti. Melotti argues, however, not without certain internal contradictions, that “Marx did not make just a single stray reference to the Asiatic Mode but actually dealt with it quite extensively.” One may take this as typical of the level with which such discussions are pursued. Having set up a straw man—i.e., “a single stray reference”—which he correctly rejects, Melotti then proceeds to draw a patently false conclusion, i.e., claiming Marx “dealt with it quite extensively.” There are “many passages” (left uncited) which Melotti claims “presuppose” such a concept; then, he adds, Engels “uses it in several letters.”2 Even Melotti’s avid defense of the textual basis of the AMP is not precisely overwhelming.

Alvin W. Gouldner

Papers

More Notes on Sociology's Coming Crisis

And the tragic vision in sociology

Notes on Technology and the Moral Order.

Anomalies and the Evolution of Early Marxism

State and Class in Marxism