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)

Organizational ecologists have always argued for the need to take account of the whole industry while studying how certain characteristics might affect the mortality of
organizations. They argued that concepts such as legitimacy and competition were the driving forces behind organizational dynamics. Recently, researchers have started to pay more attention to a usually ignored topic: audience perceptions. Legitimacy, for example, is no longer modeled as the number of organizations in a population. It is now
thought to be dependent on how audience members perceive these organizations. By bringing audience members into the picture, the topic of identity has become of central
importance. This thesis seeks to study how identities affect the life chances of organizations within the context of the Lebanese newspaper industry.

Identities, categories, and clusters : a study of category dynamics and cluster spanning in the Lebanese newspaper industry 1851-1974

Category dynamics and cluster spanning during the emergence of the Lebanese newspaper industry (1851-1879).

The present paper aims at contributing to the discussion on the determinants of organizational diversity by illustrating the process of identity-based resource partitioning observed in the German electricity market after deregulation from 2001 to 2008. We contend that the demise of regional utilities contributed to sharpen the identity of municipal utilities as oppositional identities to that of nation-wide utilities, ultimately creating durable boundaries among forms. Identity-based partitioning however heterogeneously affected the growth of municipal utilities due to the substantial differences in terms of strategies and endowments such firms. The potential ramifications of peripheral firms’ success on the distinctiveness of their collective identity and, thus, for the durability of diversity are discussed.

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Filippo Carlo Wezel

Papers

Small is beautiful? Organizational identity and growth rates in a partitioned market.