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.

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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

The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology

The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.

The New Class of intellectuals and intelligentsia are the relatively more educated counterpart—often the brothers, sisters, or children—of the old moneyed class The early historical evolution of the New Class in Western Europe, its emergence into the public sphere as structurally differentiated and autonomous social stratum, may be defined in terms of certain critical episodes The special privileges and powers of the New Class are grounded in their individual control of special cultures, languages, techniques, and of the skills resulting from these The New Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of a historically and collectively produced cultural capital The New Class's special speech variant stresses the importance of particular modes of justification rather than diffuse precedents or tacit features of the speech context The New Class is a center of opposition to almost all forms of censorship, thus embodying a universal societal interest in a kind of rationality broader than that invested in technology

The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class

The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

This is an account of a myth created by and about a magnificent minotaur named Max-Max Weber, to be exact; his myth was that social science should and could be value-free. The lair of this minotaur, although reached only by a labrynthian logic and visited only by a few who never return, is still regarded by many sociologists as a holy place. In particular, as sociologists grow older they seem impelled to make a pilgrimage to it and to pay their respects to the problem of the relations between values and social science.

/pdf/anti-minotaur-the-myth-of-a-value-free-sociology-4ckd54fxyl.pdf

Alvin W. Gouldner

Papers

The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology

The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.

The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class

The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology