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)

Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function

Review of 'Understanding knowledge as a commons. From theory to practice.' edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom

The role of the World Bank

Understanding the Process of Economic Change

In this chapter we illustrate how the public sector might fail in narrowing spatial inequalities, and how both underdeveloped markets and urgent territorial needs create in peripheral areas robust individual incentives to turn into non-profit activities or even household production. In all those situations, a well-developed non-profit sector can offer marginalized or excluded social groups a legal and ethical opportunity to obtain a decent income by offering rewards (monetary or nonmonetary) in exchange for volunteering, allowing households to afford the cost of living. Laying on the results of the analysis, we discuss four cases of successful cooperation among SSE institutions by one side, and the private and the public sector on the other. In all those cases, the private and the public sector decided to facilitate the development of the non-profit sector by contracting out part of the production process to reduce costs and achieve a higher level of effectiveness. The result was successful because the non-profit sector did not incur in the opportunistic behaviors that might affect profit-oriented activities. Therefore, we suggest how local inter-institutional cooperation among the SSE, the private and the public sector should become the norm rather than the exception, in order to achieve at the same time a higher level of equitable and sustainable development and well-being.

Providing Public Goods and Commons. Towards Coproduction and New Forms of Governance for a Revival of Public Action [Offrir des biens publics et des communs. Vers la coproduction et de nouvelles formes de gouvernance pour la revitalisation de l'action publique]

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01964961/document

Miguel Gordo

Papers

Providing Public Goods and Commons. Towards Coproduction and New Forms of Governance for a Revival of Public Action [Offrir des biens publics et des communs. Vers la coproduction et de nouvelles formes de gouvernance pour la revitalisation de l'action publique]

Providing Public Goods and Commons. Towards Coproduction and New Forms of Governance for a Revival of Public Action.