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.

/pdf/the-iron-cage-revisited-institutional-isomorphism-and-xas5qn5nhy.pdf

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

Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (Report Monograph)

Non-Profit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint.

The nineteenth century was marked by what historian Lawrence Levine has called a “sea change” in American culture. During the first part of the century, urban Americans shared a common culture, which they experienced at home and in a relatively undifferentiated set of public entertainments. By 1900, the arts were becoming sharply stratified. Works that just a few decades before had been presented in mixed programs to mixed audiences were now enclosed in nonprofit art museums and orchestras, part of an upper-class culture set off by a distinctive ideology and etiquette of appropriation. This classification and sacralization of the arts was accomplished by urban elites, members of a new industrial and commercial upper class actively engaged in transforming itself into a status group, with command over authoritative cultural resources.1

The Problem of Chicago

opportunities and work supports often did not happen, wages did not raise families out of poverty, benefits to help offset low wages were nonexistent, and the transitional and postemployment supports promised by PROWRA were sparingly distributed, if at all. Perhaps the most extreme suffering discussed was hunger, and in particular, child hunger. Although liberal policies allowing for education were related to more positive outcomes, only Kentucky had more progressive policies that validated education as a legitimate work activity. Participants in the other three states experienced a loss of access to educational opportunities. Ironically, participants in this study report more employment support from the Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) program than from TANF. While this is a worthwhile book for those interested in economic development, inequality, rural sociology, and/or policy analysis, there is one limitation. Even though the authors state they use a theoretical framework, they do not explicitly do so. When reading this book, several potential theories came to mind (e.g., black feminist theory and intersectionality theory). However, discussion of the current debate of whether it has been welfare reform legislation or a strong labor demand that caused a decrease in caseloads is not a theoretical framework.

Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties:

Most institutional theories are good at explaining the persistence of institutions but few are good at explaining change. Too often, we are forced to rely on some sort of external shock—an economic depression, a lost war, a demographic catastrophe—as a deus ex machine to extract us from this dilemma. Alternately, we can rely on gifted and far-sighted actors—entrepreneurs or visionaries—to produce change. Such explanations are unsatisfying, the first because much change occurs in between catastrophes and the latter because the distribution of entrepreneurs and visionaries is itself nonrandom in ways that require explication. Thus, in producing an innovative account of endogenous change applicable to a broad range of events, DellaPosta, Nee and Opper (henceforth DNO) perform a great service. Their model strikes the right balance between detail and elegance, and their case studies demonstrate the breadth of cases to which the theory applies. Having read the article in draft and then, having read it for a second time in its published version, I found myself with few criticisms but many reflections: The article is good to think with. So this essay will be less of a critique and more an elaboration of some thoughts that

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts (Report Monograph)

Non-Profit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint.

The Problem of Chicago

Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties:

Layers of endogeneity—How porous boundaries between state and society complicate institutional change