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.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Europe and the People without History

'Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony', American Journal of Sociology, 83, pp. 340-63.

List of Maps and Figures ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Notes on Transliteration, Translation, and Pseudonyms xvii CHAPTER 1: Marginal Margins 1 CHAPTER 2: Travels 40 CHAPTER 3: Moving Mountains 89 CHAPTER 4: The Balkan Fractal 128 CHAPTER 5: Counting 159 CHAPTER 6: Embodied Recounting 176 CHAPTER 7: Developments 218 APPENDIX: Tables 249 Notes 261 Bibliography 279 Index 297

Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border

A Sense of Border

The current financial and fiscal crisis within the Eurozone is the latest in a series of events to have occurred in recent decades that have been altering the meaning, purpose, and form of European borders. These events include the multiple border-altering experiments of the European Union (EU), the end of the Cold War, and the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. Cumulatively, the position of Europe, as a place and as an idea, has been undergoing considerable relocation as a result. This large-scale political reorganization of spatial location has led to a shift in focus within European border studies: The way the ground underneath people's feet can be shifted turns out to be as important as the way people themselves move from one place to another, or the way people form politically inflected identities in relation to territories.

Borders and the Relocation of Europe

Much has been made of the spacetransforming and spacedefying characteristics of information and communications technologies. This focus tends to separate the spatial characteristics of these technologies from those of the Euclidean world; it also takes the spatial characteristics of the Euclidean world for granted. Yet anthropologists have shown that place making in any spatial context is a complicated process, always involving an entanglement of imagination, politics, and social relations. This paper, by focusing on the promotion of the development of information and communications technologies through the public sector in Europe, shows that these technologies have become as much a part of political place making as other transportation and communication technologies in the past. Using our ethnographic research on several European Unionfunded projects based in Manchester, we argue that many of the perceived difficulties experienced in projects which envision these technologies as holding the potential for...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/432649

Scales of Place and Networks

Acknowledgements - Introduction - A Matter of Identities - Spaces in Between - Relations Within: Continuity and Discontinuity - Comparative and Historical Review - From the Outside In: a Political Economy - Difference and Desire: the Sexuality Debates - Appendix A: 'Clause 28' - Appendix B: Subjects Covered in Life History Interviews - Notes - Bibliography

Sarah Green

Papers

Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border

A Sense of Border

Borders and the Relocation of Europe

Scales of Place and Networks

Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and Beyond in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Battles of London