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

Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and politi...

/pdf/varieties-of-american-popular-nationalism-4q6aqbia99.pdf

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

Much research on the “digital divide” presumes that adults who do not use the Internet are economically disadvantaged, yet little research has tested this premise. After discussing several mechanisms that might produce differences in earnings growth between workers who do and do not use the Internet, we use data from the Current Population Survey to examine the impact of Internet use on changes in earnings over 13-month intervals at the end of the “Internet boom.” Our analyses reveal robustly significant positive associations between Web use and earnings growth, indicating that some skills and behaviors associated with Internet use were rewarded by the labor market. Consistent with human-capital theory, current use at work had the strongest effect on earnings. In contrast to economic theory (which has led economists to focus exclusively on effects of contemporaneous workplace technology use), workers who used the Internet only at home also did better, suggesting that users may have benefited from superior...

https://scholar.harvard.edu/bonikowski/files/dimaggio-bonikowski-make-money-surfing-the-web.pdf

Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers

Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass‐Culture Theory

Most studies of the digital divide are concerned with the simple criterion of access, usually in the convenient locale of one’s home. That divide could be exacerbated by usage differences after such access has been achieved, however. This article takes advantage of usage data from the General Social Survey and other surveys to examine whether more highly educated respondents also have such advantages in usage processes after access has been achieved. Education has emerged from the NTIA and other national surveys as a more important multivariate predictor than income. Using a framework developed by DiMaggio and Hargittai (2001), it is found that college-educated respondents possess clear advantages over high-school educated respondents in using the Internet to derive occupational, educational and other benefits. The clearest advantage appears in terms of the types of sites visited, uses made and political discussion. Here, multivariate evidence shows that education—and occasionally income, age and marital status—is associated with consistently more long-term uses related to enhanced life chances via work, education, health or political participation; education is also related to less use for simple, short-term, entertainment or personal purposes. The advantages to the college educated are also evident in their keeping in contact with a wider range of friends and relatives, particularly by email. On the other hand, in several areas (e.g. search strategies employed; receiving assistance from relatives) little gap by education exists.

/pdf/new-social-survey-perspectives-on-the-digital-divide-4y1c167vnt.pdf

New social survey perspectives on the digital divide

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 organization 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 structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers

Market Structure, the Creative Process, and Popular Culture: Toward an Organizational Reinterpretation of Mass‐Culture Theory

New social survey perspectives on the digital divide

A gaiola de ferro revisitada: isomorfismo institucional e racionalidade coletiva nos campos organizacionais