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)

Organization and Management is a comprehensive text and is structured to meet the syllabi requirements of various universities and professional institutes, particularly the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. It fills the need for a systematically-organised quality text, written in an easy-to-read style. It adopts the basic approach of treating an organization as a system and management as an art. It presents concepts and principles as guides for management and not as rules of thumb, and emphasizes the need for managers to relate decisions to operating situations.

Organization and management.

This review represents the third in an annual special feature in Police Practice and Research: An International Journal. It provides a cross‐sectional analysis of the police literature for the year 2002, highlighting the substantive categories of the literature as well as distribution of publication medium and methodological typology. In doing so, the authors provide a ‘snap shot’ of the current research trends in policing and state both the substantive and methodological research patterns of this specific field of criminology.

Trends in police research: a cross‐sectional analysis of the 2006 literature

Police researchers have largely ignored the role thatorganizational and environmental factors play indetermining how officers behave during interactions withcitizens. This has resulted in a body of policing knowledgethat contains little information about how and whypolice practices are affected by features of the agenciesofficers work for and forces outside police departments.This article points out the consequences of this dearth ofknowledge for understanding what the police do andwhy they do it, reviews the limited literature onorganizational and environmental determinants of policeactivity, and calls for a research program that views interfacebetween police organizations and their environments asa central question.

Environment and Organization: Reviving a Perspective on the Police

A limited amount of research has examined the relationship between characteristics of police organizations and policing styles. In particular, few studies have examined the link between organizational structures and police officer arrest decisions. Wilson’s (1968) pioneering case study of police organizations suggested that individual police behavior is a function of departmental goals that occur within the broader political climate of a community. Wilson suggested that agencies could be classified into three typologies: the watchman style, the legalistic style, and the service style. The present study examines the influence of organizational characteristics associated with these styles on individual officers’ arrest rates using nationally representative data from large police agencies. Findings suggest that police officer arrest decisions are partially explained by variations in police organizational structures. The implications of these findings for contemporary organizational explanations of police beh...

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The Organizational Determinants of Police Arrest Decisions

According to community policing advocates, police agencies should implement a variety of important organizational changes. These changes are supposed to occur in a number of different substantive domains, including the culture, behavior, and structure of police organizations. This paper examines the evidence for change in just one of these domains: formal organizational structure. Based on concepts derived from organization theory, and using data from six different data sets, the paper explores whether the structures of US police organizations changed during the 1990s. Overall, it finds mixed evidence. Some changes have occurred in the direction encouraged by community policing reformers, some changes have occurred in the opposite direction, and some changes have not occurred at all.

http://www.edmaguire.net/download.php?down=userfiles/articles/Maguire_Shin_Zhao_Hassell_2003.pdf

Structural change in large police agencies during the 1990s

For the past 35 years, Wilson’s theory of local political culture has influenced many students of policing and has greatly contributed to the erudition of American police practices. Wilson, based on empirical study, found that variation in the structural arrangements of police organizations could be explained by examining the local political culture of the municipalities in which they are located. Police departments in cities with a professional form of government, for example, focused more on law enforcement activities and had a more bureaucratic structure than agencies residing in cities with a traditional form of government which focused more on order maintenance activities and, correspondingly, had a less bureaucratic structure. The purpose of this paper is to test the utility of Wilson’s theory in today’s police organizations. Data collected from a sample of large, municipal police departments were included in the analysis. The findings suggest that the relationship between local political culture and police organizational structure that Wilson identified many years ago has indeed attenuated. The sample of large municipal police agencies, finds no relationship between local political culture, as measured by Wilson, and four dimensions of organizational structure: formalization, vertical differentiation, functional differentiation, and centralization.

Jihong “Solomon” Zhao

Papers

Structural change in large police agencies during the 1990s

Structural arrangements in large municipal police organizations: Revisiting Wilson's theory of local political culture