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)

This is a study in industrial sociology; it a partial report, to be followed by another, of an investigation of singel factory seen in the light of Max Weber's theory of bureacracy.

Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.

Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care

This paper responds to the empirical and analytical challenge that surrounds tracing the constitution of 'power effects of corporate strategy discourse' notably documented in Knights and Morgan's seminal contribution. To meet the empirical challenge,interaction is centralized and ethnographies of strategists at-work are extended to include audiorecording their naturally occurring talk-based interactive routines over time/space. To meet the analytical challenge, the paper turns to two distinct social science traditions—Habermas' critical social theory and ethnostudies set against the stance of 'supplementation'. Habermas' schema suggests a re-conceptualization of strategic practice as a process where strategists routinely draw upon four forms of knowledge, which arguably 'makes-up' any 'Discourse'. These knowledges concern the external, social and subjective domain with the overarching knowledge being language use. Each also raises associated validity claims. While brief, the ethnomethodological perspective provides the fundamental methodology and indicates the ways further analytical texture is yielded to strategizing processes. Taken together, the paper paves the way for fine-grained studies of the everyday interactional constitution of power effects yielding that 'capillary image' of power relations. Two brief transcribed strips of interaction are reproduced from an earlier ethnography to illustrate theoretical, conceptual and analytical possibilities for critical analyses. A complexified notion of 'competence' constituting practice is maintained with the conclusion touching upon how this approach also potentially contributes to critical management education.

Discourse and the everyday interactional constitution of ‘power effects’

Although the lion’s share of scholarship in management and organization studies conceives of organizations as entities within which communication occurs, “Communication Constitutes Organization” (C...

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The Communicative Constitution of Organization, Organizing, and Organizationality:

Resurrecting organization without renouncing society: A response to Ahrne, Brunsson and Seidl

Perceiving megatrends as empty signifiers: A discourse-theoretical interpretation of trend management

Why is it so plausible that business organisations in contemporary society use values in their communication? In order to answer this question, a sociological, system theoretical approach is applied which approaches values not pre-empirically as invisible drivers for action but as observable semantics that form organisational behaviour. In terms of empirical material, it will be shown that business organisations resort to a communication of values whenever uncertainty or complexity is very high. Inevitably, value semantics are applied in organisations first when the speakers are uncertain about which stakeholders to whom they have to address (uncertainty) or when different stakeholder groups have to be addressed simultaneously (complexity); second, when the identity of the organisation has to be described; and third, when future strategic options that cannot be expressed by quantitative terms have to be communicated. Values accordingly play a role in organisational practice when certain aspects are indeterminate. Therefore, they are a means for organisations to communicate under fuzzy circumstances. On the basis of these findings, new approaches to value management can now be formulated.

Rethinking the Role of Value Communication in Business Corporations from a Sociological Perspective – Why Organisations Need Value-Based Semantics to Cope with Societal and Organisational Fuzziness

Formalität und Informalität in Organisationen

This paper presents an analysis of how the narratives of medical professionalism have changed historically based on doctor’s autobiographies. Three different phases of narrating professionalism have roughly been distinguished. The first is marked by the struggle to professionalise medicine itself (second half of the nineteenth - twentieth century). The second is the Phase of Normality where the legitimization of medical professionalism is self-evident in the face of societal crises such as epidemics (early twentieth century - late 1960s). In the Phase of Crises (ca. late 1960s - now) the authoritative doctor is no longer the (only) legitimate source of medical decision-making. In this situation, the will and wellbeing of the individual patient is found to be a key element in how doctors themselves legitimise their actions. We reject the de-professionalisation thesis and argue that strengthening the patient’s perspective is an appropriate tool to recover the crisis of medical professionalism.

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Victoria von Groddeck

Papers

Resurrecting organization without renouncing society: A response to Ahrne, Brunsson and Seidl

Perceiving megatrends as empty signifiers: A discourse-theoretical interpretation of trend management

Rethinking the Role of Value Communication in Business Corporations from a Sociological Perspective – Why Organisations Need Value-Based Semantics to Cope with Societal and Organisational Fuzziness

Formalität und Informalität in Organisationen

Normality, Crisis and Recovery of narrating medical Professionalism