The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

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.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

We distill existing literature on theoretical contribution into two dimensions, originality (incremental or revelatory) and utility (scientific or practical). We argue for a revision in the way scholars approach the utility dimension by calling for a view of theorizing that would enable theories with more “scope” (both scientific and practical utility). We also argue for an orientation toward “prescience” as a way of achieving scope and fulfilling our scholarly role of facilitating organizational and societal adaptiveness.

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Building Theory about Theory Building: What Constitutes a Theoretical Contribution?

Impact of lean manufacturing and environmental management on business performance: An empirical study of manufacturing firms

Despite the centrality of meaning to institutionalization, little attention has been paid to how meanings evolve and amplify to become institutionalized cultural conventions. We develop an interactional framing perspective to explain the microprocesses and mechanisms by which this occurs. We identify three amplification processes and three ways frames stack up or laminate that become the building blocks for diffusion and institutionalization of meanings within organizations and fields. Although we focus on “bottom-up” dynamics, we argue that framing occurs in a politicized social context and is inherently bidirectional, in line with structuration, because microlevel interactions instantiate macrostructures. We consider how our approach complements other theories of meaning making, its utility for informing related theoretical streams, and its implications for organizing at the meso and macro levels.

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From Interactions to Institutions: Microprocesses of Framing and Mechanisms for the Structuring of Institutional Fields

Is the New Institutionalism a Theory

Many organization studies (OS) scholars are motivated by the desire to generate theory and research that is relevant to practicing managers. But concerns about the irrelevance of OS theory and research surfaced early in the field's development and have intensified recently. Many believe that a growing preoccupation with theoretical and methodological rigor underpin the increasing generation of theory and research that is irrelevant to managers. But there is little empirical research on: 1) historical trends in theoretical and methodological rigor, 2) historical trends in relevance, and 3) the relationship between the two. This is partly because the measurement of theoretical and methodological rigor, as well as of relevance, is fraught with conceptual problems. This article describes a study that attempts to address these gaps in our knowledge, partly by tackling the conceptual problems responsible for them. We then present preliminary findings from that study. We conclude by pondering the value of resear...

Brian Dick

Papers

Is the New Institutionalism a Theory

Rigor and Relevance in Organization Studies