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

A sociological conceptualization of the non-profit organizations and sectors

In recent years, interest in aesthetic education and the arts has grown at a rapid pace. Educators concerned about the role of aesthetic education in the schools have formed associations which, along with foundations and government agencies, have held several major conferences on issues relating to the arts in education?. The National Endowment for the Arts, with its Artists-in-Schools Program, has sought to bring artists into schools on a massive scale. The activities of several foundations and agencies culminated in the publication of Coming to Our Senses: The Significance of the Arts for American Education,2 which has brought the problems faced by educators and the relevance of aesthetic education to the attention of decision makers

The Arts in Education and Cultural Participation: The Social Role of Aesthetic Education and the Arts.

This paper proposes a systematic approach to the study of immigration and art by considering relevant theoretical concepts. We focus on the role of institutions and economic change as forces shaping the expressive alternatives of immigrants and their children.

Immigration and the arts: a theoretical inquiry

Little empirical work has estimated the actual importance of factors said to affect the extent to which applied social research is utilized by client organizations. To identify the salience of various factors in facilitating or inhibiting the use of applied research, we have examined the application of one form of research in one decentralized setting-the utilization of audience studies by arts organizations. Drawing on the findings of 25 intensive case studies of diverse audience research, we specify the critical factors affecting utilization of audience studies in arts-organization policy making. Studies were most likely to have powerful effects (a) when their findings confirmed the predilections of arts managers, (b) when an influential person actively sought implementation, and (c) when researchers were involved on a sustained basis in staff deliberations. Studies were not utilized (a) under conditions of high staff tumover, (b) when organizations lacked the resources to use their findings, and (c) wh...

Decentralized Applied Research: Factors Affecting the Use of Audience Research by Arts Organizations

Since the publication of Collins’s Interaction Ritual Chains, much interaction has moved from face-to-face to online settings. Interaction Ritual Chain (IRC) theory was based on the former, and Collins has expressed a combination of skepticism and ambivalence as to the theory’s applicability to online interaction. This chapter draws on Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres to adapt key concepts from IRC theory to the online world. Using more than 40,000 postings from two time-delimited Intranet discussions at a global corporation, we find that IRC theory is effective in predicting which posts contribute to robust conversations by eliciting responses. As in face-to-face interaction rituals, shared topical focus contributes to success, and interactions are characterized by temporal rhythms similar to, but longer than, those in face-to-face talk. We conclude that, under the right conditions, online interaction can produce emotional energy and that IRC theory is a valuable resource in understanding communication online.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

A sociological conceptualization of the non-profit organizations and sectors

The Arts in Education and Cultural Participation: The Social Role of Aesthetic Education and the Arts.

Immigration and the arts: a theoretical inquiry

Decentralized Applied Research: Factors Affecting the Use of Audience Research by Arts Organizations

Interaction ritual threads does IRC theory apply online