Paul DiMaggio

Bio: Paul DiMaggio is an academic researcher from New York University. The author has contributed to research in topics: The arts & Cultural capital. The author has an hindex of 52, co-authored 156 publications receiving 75860 citations. Previous affiliations of Paul DiMaggio include Yale University & Boston University.

Classification in Art.

Abstract: A framework is proposed to analyze the relationships between social structure, patterns of artistic consumption and production, and the ways in which artistic genres are classified. This framework helps to integrate findings of consumption surveys and to explain the emergence of new artistic genres as a form of ritual classification. Societies' artistic classification systems vary along four dimensions: differentiation, hierarchy, universality, and boundary strength. These dimensions are affected by formal characteristics of social structure, the organization of educational systems, and internal relations among cultural dimensions. The dynamics of ritual classification are mediated according to whether artistic production is carried out through commercial, professional, or bureaucratic means.

Have Americans' social attitudes become more polarized?

Abstract: Many observers have asserted with little evidence that Americans' social opinions have become polarized. Using General Social Survey and National Election Survey social attitude items that have been repeated regularly over 20 years, the authors ask (1) Have Americans' opinions become more dispersed (higher variance)? (2) Have distributions become flatter or more bimodal (declining kurtosis)? (3) Have opinions become more ideologically constrained within and across opinion domains? (4) Have paired social groups become more different in their opinions? The authors find little evidence of polarization over the past two decades, with attitudes toward abortion and opinion differences between Republican and Democratic party identifiers the exceptional cases.

Cultural Capital, Educational Attainment, and Marital Selection

Abstract: Although Weber distinguished sharply between "class" (an individual's market position) and "status" (participation in a collectivity bound together by a shared status culture), only measures of the former have been included in most empirical analyses of the stratification process. In this article a measure of status-culture participation (or cultural capital) is developed from the responses of men and women interviewed in 1960 by Project Talent. Questions tapped a range of high-cultural interests and activities. Analyses of data from a follow-up study 11 years later show significant effects of cultural capital (with appropriate controls) on educational attainment, college attendence, college completion, graduate attendance, and marital selection for both men and women.

Structures of capital : the social organization of the economy

Abstract: 1. Editors' introduction PART I: THEORY BUILDING IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY 2. Clean models vs. dirty bands: differences between economics and sociology PAUL HIRSCH, STUART MICHAELS and RAY FRIEDMAN 3. The paradigm of economic sociology: premises and promises RICHARD SWEDBERG, ULF HIMMELSTRAND and GORAN BRULIN 4. Marxism, functionalism and game theory JON ELSTER PART II: ALTERING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ORGANIZATIONS 5. Economic theories of organisation CHARLES PERROW 6. The growth of public and private bureaucracies MARSHALL W. MEYER PART III: FINANCE CAPITAL 7. Capital market effects on external control of corporations LINDA BREWSTER STEARNS 8. Bank hegemoney in the United States BETH MINTZ and MICHAEL SCHWARTZ 9. Accounting rationality and financial legitimation PAUL MONTAGNA PART IV: THE STATE AND CAPITAL 10. Business and politics in the United States and the United Kingdom MICHAEL USEEM 11. Political choice and the multiple 'logics' of capital FRED BLOCK 12. Private and social wage expansion in the advanced market economies ROGER FRIEDLAND and JIMY SANDERS PART V: MANAGEMENT, ENTREPRENEURS, AND CAPITAL 13. Visions of American managements in post-war France LUC BOLTANSKI 14. Markets, managers and technical autonomy PETER WHALLEY 15. A critique and reformulation of immigrant enterprise ROGER WALDINGER.

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

Abstract: 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.

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: 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.

Strategic responses to institutional processes

Abstract: 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.