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)

This study examines change initiated from the center of mature organizational fields. As such, it addresses the paradox of embedded agency—that is, the paradox of how actors enact changes to the co...

Institutional entrepreneurship in mature fields: the big five accounting firms

Through the juxtaposition of theory and a meso-level empirical illustration of the environmental disclosures included in the annual reports of Canadian public companies operating in the mineral extraction, forestry, oil and gas, and chemical industries over the 1982 to 1991 period, the current study attempts to increase our understanding of the role and functioning of environmental disclosures. Our analyses focus on three concerns: the influence of external pressure on environmental disclosures in annual reports, including the amount and types of strategies used in disclosure; the characteristics of environmental disclosure vis-a-vis other “social” disclosures; and the association between environmental disclosures and actual performance. We question whether such disclosures highlight positive environmental actions, obfuscate negative environmental effects or both.

Managing Public Impressions: Environmental Disclosures in Annual Reports

This is a study in industrial sociology; it a partial report, to be followed by another, of an investigation of singel factory seen in the light of Max Weber's theory of bureacracy.

Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.

Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies. A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity-one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist-and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic "development" pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action. In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action. J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

A Postcapitalist Politics

This review paper argues that the institutions and sites of professionalization projects and regulatory processes matter. The institutions and locations where regulation takes place affect both the outcome of the regulatory process and the legitimacy of the rules and practices produced. Changes in regulatory processes affect opportunities for democratic control and legitimacy. A common position in the accounting literature is to examine both the process of professionalization and accounting and audit regulation within and around professional associations and related organizations, such as standard setting bodies and regulatory agencies. We argue that professional firms are increasingly important in professionalization and regulatory processes and have not received the attention that they warrant: an examination of the multi-national professional service firms (currently known as the Big 4) can enhance an understanding of professionalization and professional regulation. We suggest that these are important sites where accounting practices are themselves standardized and regulated, where accounting rules and standards are translated into practice, where professional identities are mediated, formed and transformed, and where important conceptions of personal, professional and corporate governance and management are transmitted.

Accounting, professions and regulation: Locating the sites of professionalization

The numerical form of accounting has been interpreted as a use of metaphor (Morgan, Accounting, Organizations and Society, pp. 447–486, 1988). The dominance of quantification in accounting has also, more conventionally, been legitimated by claims to the representational accuracy of numbers and a model of scientific theory and practice (Mattessich, Accounting and Analytical Methods, Irwin, 1962; Chambers, Accounting Evaluation and Economic Behaviour, Prentice-Hall, 1966; Accounting, Organizations and Society, pp. 167–180, 1980). In this paper the preference for quantification in accounting is explained alternatively in terms of the development of inscriptions that enable action at a distance (Latour, Science in Action, Open University Press, 1987). The development of accounting is considered in terms of a continuing refinement of mobile, stable and combinable inscriptions that expedite long distance control. The paper concludes that studies of accounting metaphor are incomplete if they cannot address the processes that adjudicate the choices and production of metaphor.

Accounting numbers as 'inscription': action at a distance and the development of accounting.

In this article we explore how notions of the client and client service are constructed within two `Big 5' professional services firms. Drawing upon a range of qualitative materials, we argue that the client is a central term in the socialization of trainee accountants within these firms and the emergence of their professional identities. We illustrate this with reference to recruitment, appraisal and daily work practices. We then move on to consider the power effects of a discourse that privileges the client in this way by attending to what is `written out' of such a discourse. We suggest that management control, friends, family and the profit motive are all written out. However, we also point to what such a discourse enables, both materially and symbolically, for the trainees in the study.

In the Name of the Client: The Service Ethic in Two Professional Services Firms

The study of the relationship between accounting and social change has entered the agenda of accounting research. Adopting the mode of analysis of Burchell et al. (Accounting, Organizations and Society (1985) pp. 381–414), this paper develops the concept of the arena as being dependent upon a process of translation (Latour, B., Science in Action, 1987). The process of translation is elaborated through a study of the genesis of the standard setting programme in the U.K.

On the arenas of accounting change: the process of translation

As Giddens has observed “Nothing is clearer than that gender is a matter of learning and continuous work, rather than a simple extension of biologically given sexual difference” (1991, p. 63). In this paper, we discuss the processes of professional socialization implicated in the reproduction of gender relationships in UK offices of two multi-national audit firms. The gendering of audit firms is viewed as connected not simply to important elements of the formal organizational structures, such as temporal organization and appraisal processes, but also to the tacit, informal components, such as the correct form of socializing involved in `getting in and getting on' [Sociology 28 (2) (1994) 479] within Big Five audit firms. Our focus is upon practices, including the discursive practices trainees pick up and mobilize during their everyday interactions. In our conclusion, we signal how informal and formal organizational processes are intertwined so as to reproduce gender domination, and comment upon the problems that policy initiatives and reforms face in attempting to redress organizational gender imbalances.

Keith Robson

Papers

Accounting, professions and regulation: Locating the sites of professionalization

Accounting numbers as 'inscription': action at a distance and the development of accounting.

In the Name of the Client: The Service Ethic in Two Professional Services Firms

On the arenas of accounting change: the process of translation

“Helping them to forget..”: the organizational embedding of gender relations in public audit firms