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

The nonprofit economy : Burton A. Weisbrod, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988) pp. 251, $22.95

Using data from a representative sample of Americans aged 18 and over who were surveyed in 1993, the authors explore public attitudes towards a range of issues related to cultural authority and cultural diversity in higher education and the arts. The issues addressed include support for the role of the classics in education; willingness to alter literature curricula to make room for work by women and people of color; bilingual education in the schools; confidence in the curricular judgment of teachers and professors; the value of modern art; the relative quality of high, popular, and folk culture; and the extent to which the ability to recognize excellence in art is rare or widespread. Analyses belie the notion that Americans' attitudes reflect a "culture war" that pits supporters of the classics and high culture against advocates of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Three separate and largely orthogonal dimensions emerged out of the analyses: support for traditional high culture; support for cultural diversity; and skeptical attitudes towards cultural authority. No tendency was observed for people who support traditional high culture to oppose multicultural reforms (or vice versa). Indeed, educational attainment was strongly associated with support for both. Analyses also disconfirm arguments that high culture has lost legitimacy or credibility since the 1960s, or that there has been any "closing of the American mind." Although support for cultural diversity has grown since the 1960s (in part due to a decline in racism), baby boomers and members of "Generation X," including those who attended college during the 1960s and in later decades, are as likely as their counterparts in previous generations to agree that the classics are important and that there is merit in "modern art." In other words, contemporary Americans acknowledge the value of conventionally defined high culture while at the same time discerning value in other cultural forms and often approving of reforms that enhance cultural diversity.

Public Attitudes Towards Cultural Authority and Cultural Diversity in Higher Education and the Arts

(1998). Comparing Sample Frames for Research on Arts Organizations: Results of a Study in Three Metropolitan Areas. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society: Vol. 28, Arts Management and Marketing Research, pp. 41-66.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

The nonprofit economy : Burton A. Weisbrod, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988) pp. 251, $22.95

Public Attitudes Towards Cultural Authority and Cultural Diversity in Higher Education and the Arts

Comparing Sample Frames for Research on Arts Organizations: Results of a Study in Three Metropolitan Areas

Cytopathologist-performed ultrasonography-guided fine-needle aspiration of head and neck lesions: the Weill Cornell experience

Progressivism and the arts