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

(1983). Cultural Policy Studies: What They are and why We Need Them. Journal of Arts Management and Law: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 241-248.

Cultural Policy Studies: What They are and why We Need Them

Case studies suggest that important changes in the composition and structure of boards of trustees of non-profit organisations have occurred in recent decades. The nature of these changes, and how they may vary across industry and locale, are not well documented. This pilot study compares changes in structure and board membership of three elite non-profit organisations in two cities at three points in time: 1925, 1955 and 1985. This study focuses on governing boards of the major art museum, largest non-profit hospital and local United Way of Boston and Cleveland. Board members' biographical data are used to assess models of board diversification based on environmental pressures and changes in local elites. We find evidence that trusteeship varies historically, regionally and across industries, and we set the stage for broader-based empirical comparative work on changes in non-profit boards of trustees.

Variations in trusteeship: cases from Boston and Cleveland, 1925–1985

Organization without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools.

Sociological theory and historical precedent suggest that pandemics engender scapegoating of outgroups, but fail to specify how the ethnoracial boundaries defining outgroups are drawn. Using a survey experiment that primed half of the respondents (California registered voters) with questions about COVID-19 during April 2020, we ask how the pandemic influenced attitudes toward immigration, diversity and affect toward Asian Americans. In the aggregate, the COVID prime did not affect attitudes toward immigrants, but did reduce support for policies opening a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and reduced appreciation of California?s diversity. Respondents reported rarely feeling anger or fear toward Asian Americans, and rates were unaffected by the COVID prime. A non-experimental comparison between attitudes toward immigrants in September 2019 and April 2020 found a positive change, driven by change among Asian-American and Latino respondents. The results provide selective support for the proposition that pandemics engender xenophobia. At least in April 2020 in California, increased bias crimes against Asian Americans more likely reflected politicians? authorization of scapegoating than broad-based racial antagonism.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/socf.12750

Has Pandemic Threat Stoked Xenophobia? How COVID-19 Influences California Voters’ Attitudes toward Diversity and Immigration*

This two-part special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (that is, this volume and the one that will follow it in July 2002) emerged from the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Research on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. The purpose of the committee is to help research on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector to achieve greater visibility, greater coherence, intellectual momentum, and intellectual direction. A central part of this fieldbuilding initiative is to promote the development of intellectual and material resources for studying philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Toward this end, the committee decided early in its work to examine the quality and availability of data on nonprofit organizations and philanthropy by commissioning the essays included in this volume.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

Cultural Policy Studies: What They are and why We Need Them

Variations in trusteeship: cases from Boston and Cleveland, 1925–1985

Organization without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools.

Has Pandemic Threat Stoked Xenophobia? How COVID-19 Influences California Voters’ Attitudes toward Diversity and Immigration*

Data to Support Scholarship on Nonprofit Organizations: An Introduction