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)

Introduction Part I. Theory of Collective Action: 1. The construction of collective action 2. Conflict and change 3. Action and meaning 4. The process of collective identity Part II. Contemporary Collective Action: 5. conflicts of culture 6. Invention of the present 7. The time of difference 8. Roots for today and for tomorrow 9. A search for ethics 10. Information, power, domination Part III. The Field of Collective Action: 11. A society without a centre 12. The political system 13. The state and the distribution of social resources 14. Modernization, crisis, and conflict: the case of Italy Part IV. Acting Collectively: 15. Mobilization and political participation 16. The organization of movements 17. Leadership in social movements 18. Collective action and discourse 19. Forms of action 20. Research on collective action.

Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age@@@The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society

The Social Contexts of Research. Edited by Saad Z. Nagi and Ronald G. Corwin. Pp. xii + 409. (John Wiley: New York and London, August 1972.) £5.65.

Sociology of Science

The politics of life itself Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

Planet of slums

Foodways of the urban poor

The political ideology of neoliberalism is widely recognized as having influenced the organization of national and global economies and public policies since the 1970s. In this article, we examine the relationship between the neoliberal variant of globalization and science. To do so, we develop a framework for sociology of science that emphasizes closer ties among political sociology, the sociology of social movements, and economic and organizational sociology and that draws attention to patterns of increasing and uneven industrial influence amid several countervailing processes. Specifically, we explore three fundamental changes since the 1970s: the advent of the knowledge economy and the increasing interchange between academic and industrial research and development signified by academic capitalism and asymmetric convergence; the increasing prominence of science-based regulation of technology in global trade liberalization, marked by the heightened role of international organizations and the convergence of scientism and neoliberalism; and the epistemic modernization of the relationship between scientists and publics, represented by the proliferation of new institutions of deliberation, participation, activism, enterprise, and social movement mobilization.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/41475706

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach

In the twenty-first century, the production and use of scientific knowledge is more regulated, commercialized, and participatory than at any other time. The stakes in understanding these changes are high for scientist and nonscientist alike: they challenge traditional ideas of intellectual work and property and have the potential to remake legal and professional boundaries and transform the practice of research. A critical examination of the structures of power and inequality these changes hinge upon, this book explores the implications for human health, democratic society, and the environment.

The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power

The New Political Sociology of Science

Organic food production isn’t the food movement of the moment, but, as Brian Obach argues, it has structured the hopes and dreams of many kinds of activists, from environmentalists to health advocates to small farmers and, more recently, Big Agriculture growers and sellers. Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States documents some ideological conflicts among these actors and some of the policy failures and successes—depending on who you ask—that have resulted from efforts to create national, state, and industry standards. The conceptual and empirical puzzle on which the book hangs is why organic coalitions have not been able to form or win new benefits from the state—a problem that Obach sees as critical to the spread of organic farming. The theoretical home of the book is in the traditional understanding of U.S. and European social movements: a pluralist society with multiple competing groups that, via social movements, occasionally petition a relatively autonomous state to make legal changes that ensure a collective good. For Obach, coalitions, not single actors, are expected to be stronger players in these struggles. Although organic agriculture is more widespread in the United States than it has been in the past, and although there is higher consumer demand, the puzzle that motivates the study is why there is no unified coalition or movement around organics that would, presumably, ensure their spread. Obach reviews the now-familiar origins of organic gardening as a home-based practice that first took root in the 1930s and 1940s among rural families who were influenced by religious beliefs and its spread to the small-scale farming movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He gives welcome emphasis to the less well-known advocate Rudolph Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, a movement that promoted spiritual approaches to the land and humans’ relation to it and specifically rejected the use of synthetic fertilizers. Steiner’s work influenced other popularizers, but particularly the founder and editor of Organic Gardening, Jerome Rodale. Rodale’s magazine served as how-to guide and means of communication for the organic small-farm movement that came later, and it played a key role in generating the now-familiar interest in organic food as a means to good health. Obach neatly divides proponents of organic agriculture into two groups, ‘‘tillers’’ and ‘‘spreaders,’’ drawing on Julie Guthman’s analysis of the values underlying organic agriculture laid out in Agrarian Dreams. Tillers, in Obach’s view, see organic production as a component of small-scale farming and communitarianism and tend to work at the local and state level; reformist ‘‘spreaders’’ want organic agriculture to be widespread and to have standards largely governed by the state, no matter who grows the food. The perspectives of the spreaders is foregrounded in the book; even when Obach offers up an analysis of tillers’ perspectives, it is usually given through the voice of the spreaders. Obach is sympathetic to the work of the reformers in Washington, D.C. whose work has resulted in the creation of national standards. These standards require stringent bookkeeping and also allow a wide range of soil and animal inputs, such as animal waste. Larger growers have the resources to comply with the labeling and bookkeeping standards, and many are more interested in market share than in the environmental consequences of various inputs. The iterations of federal policy that form the backbone of current federal standards, and their relationship to the many state and third-party standards that existed before and after the 1990s, are the central focus of much of the book. Readers seeking high levels of detail about debates among tillers and spreaders around the passage of regulations, such as the National Organic Program, will find much to appreciate here. Obach’s pluralist assumptions mean that international trade concerns and standards, and a government that, during the 1990s, was being reconfigured as a vehicle with 344 Reviews

Kelly Moore

Papers

Foodways of the urban poor

Science and neoliberal globalization: a political sociological approach

The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Networks, and Power

The New Political Sociology of Science

Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States