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.

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The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258788.pdf

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

Stakeholder theory has been a popular heuristic for describing the management environment for years, but it has not attained full theoretical status. Our aim in this article is to contribute to a theory of stakeholder identification and salience based on stakeholders possessing one or more of three relationship attributes: power, legitimacy, and urgency. By combining these attributes, we generate a typology of stakeholders, propositions concerning their salience to managers of the firm, and research and management implications.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/259247.pdf

Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and What Really Counts

This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the operation and outcomes of interfirm networks that are guided implicitly by ceteris paribus assumptions. While economies of time due to embeddedness have obvious benefits for the individual firm, they also have important implications for allocative efficiency and the determination of prices. Under the conditions, social processes that increase integration combine with resource dependency problems to increase the vulnerability of networked organizations. The level of investment in an economy promotes positive changes in productivity, standards of living, mobility, and wealth generation.

Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness

This article applies the convergent insights of institutional and resource dependence perspectives to the prediction of strategic responses to institutional processes. The article offers a typology of strategic responses that vary in active organizational resistance from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. Ten institutional factors are hypothesized to predict the occurrence of the alternative proposed strategies and the degree of organizational conformity or resistance to institutional pressures.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258610.pdf

Strategic responses to institutional processes

An Old Institutionalist Reads the New Institutionalism@@@The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis.

In seiner Untersuchung „Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus“ warnte Max Weber vor der Eigendynamik, die der durch Askese geleitete rationale Geist entfaltet habe, und behauptete, das die rationale Ordnung unter kapitalistischen Bedingungen zu einem stahlharten Gehause geworden sei, in dem die Menschheit — von der Moglichkeit prophetischer Wiederbelebung einmal abgesehen — eingeschlossen sei, „bis der letzte Zentner fossilen Brennstoffs vergluht ist“ (Weber 1952: 181f.). Im Rahmen seiner Herrschaftssoziologie nahm Weber dieses Thema erneut auf und behauptete, das die Burokratie als organisatorische Verkorperung dieses rationalen Geistes ein so wirkungsvolles und machtiges Mittel zur Kontrolle von Mannern und Frauen sei, das der einmal in Gang gesetzte Burokratisierungsprozes unumkehrbar sei (Weber 1968). Das Bild eines stahlharten Gehauses blieb angesichts der zunehmenden Beschleunigung des Burokratisierungsprozesses standiger Begleiter der Gesellschaftswissenschaftler, doch obwohl sich die Burokratie in den achtzig Jahren seit Webers Arbeiten unablassig ausgebreitet hat, gehen wir davon aus, das nun eine andere Kraft die organisationale Rationalisierung vorantreibt.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

An Old Institutionalist Reads the New Institutionalism@@@The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis.

Das „stahlharte Gehäuse“ neu betrachtet: Institutionelle Isomorphie und kollektive Rationalität in organisationalen Feldern1

Culture out of attitudes: Relationality, population heterogeneity and attitudes toward science and religion in the U.S.

Country music: Ballad of the silent majority

The production of scientific change: Richard Peterson and the institutional turn in cultural sociology☆