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 roles of husband and father subject the "progressive" trade-union leader to conflicting demands. This problem may be resolved either by the redefining of his roles as leader or husband-father or the relinquishing of them. Such conflicts, however, appear to operate within limits set by the whole social structure. During the war the improvement in the labor market increased the prestige of the major social norms, particularly the goal of individual success, conventionally obtained. Thus, there was relatively less pressure on the leaders to conform to the deviant value-system of their union.

Attitudes of "Progressive" Trade-Union Leaders

Studies in leadership : leadership and democratic action

Whatever may be said of the failures of Marxism, these are essentially intellectual and theoretical failures-for example, the failure of its predictionsthat are, quite properly, important to intellectuals and scholars. Yet Marxism has in no realistic sense been a failure as a politics. For if by "politics" we mean the struggle for power in the state, then Marxist politics has had an historically unparalleled success. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the revolutions of the twentieth century without seeing the role that Marxism and Marxists have played in them. In about half a century something like half the world has come under the governance of those defining themselves as Marxists. No other system of thought in human history has ever had so extensive a success, let alone in so brief a period.

The metaphoricality of Marxism and the context-freeing grammar of socialism

/pdf/the-dark-side-of-the-dialectic-toward-a-new-objectivity-2z83zrg2yb.pdf

The Dark Side of the Dialectic: Toward a New Objectivity

Marxism developed increasingly from a scientific to a Critical Marxism that was much more voluntaristic and stressed consciousness and conscious organization — rather than emphasizing a spontaneous economic evolution that first develops the forces of production. This long-term shift in Marxism is visible in Leninism: Leninism formulates a conception of a “vanguard” revolutionary organization more nearly akin to Bakuninism than to Marxism and adapts the old conspiratorial secret society to a Marxist rhetoric of theory and science by speaking of the vanguard cadres as “professional” revolutionaries. It also devoted increasing attention to the peasantry as an ally of the proletariat with a revolutionary potential. This increasing world drift of Marxism, toward a less economistic and more voluntaristic theory, has more usually been called a “critical” Marxism, when found in Western Europe. Critical Marxism has, therefore, seemed to some, such as Merleau-Ponty or Perry Anderson. a distinctively “Western Marxism.” This, how-ever, misses the point of the greater political success of Critical Marxism in the Third World. In less industrially advanced countries, Critical Marxism's reliance upon the peasantry has been even greater and its convergence with Bakuninism even more obvious. In Asia — including Tsarist Russia and other less developed regions, Scientific Marxism's insistence upon a prior industrialization made it seem irrelevant and generated apathy and passivity among revolutionaries who did not want to spend their lives making a bourgeois revolution. This shift suggests that there was a potential mutual transformability of Marxism into Bakuninism. Each might, under certain conditions, become the other.

Alvin W. Gouldner

Papers

Attitudes of "Progressive" Trade-Union Leaders

Studies in leadership : leadership and democratic action

The metaphoricality of Marxism and the context-freeing grammar of socialism

The Dark Side of the Dialectic: Toward a New Objectivity

Marx's last battle