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)

Getting to YES. Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Sociology has recently witnessed a rapprochement between research on organizations and research on law. This essay reviews a number of central developments and tendencies in this emerging literature, with a particular emphasis on the characteristics of law as an element of the organizational environment. We begin by distinguishing two metatheoretical perspectives on law and organizations: the materialist perspective, which portrays organizations as rational wealth-maximizers and sees the law as a system of substantive incentives and penalties; and the cultural perspective, which portrays organizations as cultural rule-followers and sees the law as a system of moral principles, scripted roles, and sacred symbols. Within each of these traditions, we examine three distinct facets of organizations' legal environments: the facilitative environment, in which law passively provides an arena for organizational action; the regulatory environment, in which law actively seeks to control organizational behavior; and ...

The Legal Environments of Organizations

Most accounts of organizations and law treat law as largely exogenous and emphasize organizations' responses to law. This study proposes a model of endogeneity among organizations, the professions,and legal institutions. It suggests that organizations and the professors strive to construct rational responses to law, enabled by "rational myths" or stories about appropriate solutions that are themselves modeled after the public legal order. Courts, in turn, recognize and legitimate organizational structures that mimic the legal form, thus conferring legal and market benefits upon organizational structures that began as gestures of compliance. Thus, market rationality can follow from rationalized myths: the professions promote a particular compliance strategy, organizations adopt this strategy to reduce costs and symbolize compliance, and courts adjust judicial constructions of fairness to include these emerging organizational practices. To illustrate this model, a case study of equal employment opportunity (EEO) grievance procedures is presented in this article.

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The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth

This article examines the rise of diversity rhetoric in U.S. management and how that rhetoric reframes ideas inherent in civil rights law. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of the professional management literature (mid‐1980s–mid‐1990s) illustrate a managerialization of law, a process by which legal ideas are refigured by managerial ways of thinking as they flow across the boundaries of legal fields and into managerial and organizational fields. The managerial conception of diversity adds a variety of nonlegal dimensions of diversity (e.g., personality traits) to the legally protected categories like race and sex, and it disassociates diversity from civil rights law.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/321303

Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law

Many employers create internal procedures for the resolution of discrimination complaints. We examine internal complaint handlers' conceptions of civil rights law and the implications of those conceptions for their approach to dispute resolution. Drawing on interview data, we find that complaint handlers tend to subsume legal rights under managerial interests. They construct civil rights law as a diffuse standard of fairness, consistent with general norms of good management. Although they seek to resolve complaints to restore smooth employment relations, they tend to recast discrimination claims as typical managerial problems. While the assimilation of law into the management realm may extend the reach of law, it may also undermine legal rights by deemphasizing and depoliticizing workplace discrimination.

John M. Lande

Papers

Internal Dispute Resolution: The Transformation of Civil Rights in the Workplacewith Lauren B. Edelman and Howard S. Erlanger