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 organizers and early managers of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and similar institutions throughout the United States were in the business of mapping and defining cultural boundaries. By cultural boundaries. I mean boundaries between cultural forms that also serve to define and to maintain boundaries among people, since shared tastes and cultural experiences provided a fundamental source of feelings of solidarity to participants in social groupings (DiMaggio and Useem, 1977). Mary Douglas (1966: 138) has written, 'It is my belief that people really do think of their own social environment as consisting of other people joined or separated by lines which must be respected'. The same can be said of cultural forms-varieties of art, leisure, cuisine or sport-that are identified with or monopolized by specific status groups. People perceive such forms as naturally distinct. An orchestra that performed a popular tune on a program of Beethoven would shock its audience. We do not expect to hear chamber music at a rock concert, nor do we expect to see magazine advertisements hanging next to old masters on the walls of an an museum. Such juxtapositions shock because they violate ritual boundaries that emerge out of and reflect the ways in which social groups organize themselves and categorize one another. Cultural categories reflect social distinctions and transform them symbolically from social accomplishments to natural facts. The strength of the boundaries among artistic genres varies with the importance of those genres to the ritual life of social groups. Strong classifications are highly ritualized. In modern societies, performances and exhibitions are often what Bernstein (1975a: 54) has called 'differentiating rituals'. rituals that 'deepen local attachment behaviour to. and detachment behaviour from, specific groups' .1 Every status group needs elements of a culture that it can call its own. A shared culture plays an important role in the ritual life of a group; it also serves as a signalling device, enabling members to recognize other members and to detect outsiders. As We ber noted, mastery of the elements of a status culture becomes a source of honor to group members. Particularly in the case of a dominant status group, it is important that their culture be recognized as legitimate by, yet be only partially available to, groups that are subordinate to them. For Boston's cultural capitalists of the nineteenth century, the organizational separation of high from popular culture (described in DiMaggio. 1982)was necessary, but not adequate. High culture would have to be imbued with sacredness, and, as sacred, removed from contact with profane or popular culture (see Douglas, 1966). The purification of the classification high v. popular, the driving of profane culture

Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art:

The World of Foods@@@Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities.

The authors describe a common but largely unrecognized mechanism that produces and exacerbates intergroup inequality: the diffusion of valuable practices with positive network externalities through social networks whose members differentially possess characteristics associated with adoption. The authors examine two cases: the first, to explore the mechanism's implications and, the second, to demonstrate its utility in analyzing empirical data. In the first, the diffusion of Internet use, network effects increase adoption's benefits to associates of prior adopters. An agent-based model demonstrates positive, monotonic relationships, given externalities, between homophily bias and intergroup inequality in equilibrium adoption rates. In the second, rural-urban migration in Thailand, network effects reduce risk to persons whose networks include prior migrants. Analysis of longitudinal individual-level migration data indicates that network homophily interacts with network externalities to induce divergence of ...

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How Network Externalities Can Exacerbate Intergroup Inequality

This paper reviews what we know about inequality in access to and use of new digital technologies. Until recently, most research has focused on inequality in access (the "digital divide"), measured in a variety of ways. We agree that inequality of access is important, because it is likely to reinforce inequality in opportunities for economic mobility and social participation. At the same time we argue that a more thorough understanding of digital inequality requires placing Internet access in a broader theoretical context, and asking a wider range of questions about the impact of information technologies and informational goods on social inequality.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art:

The World of Foods@@@Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities.

How Network Externalities Can Exacerbate Intergroup Inequality

From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use: A Literature Review and Agenda for Research on Digital Inequality

Political Networks: The Structural Perspective.