The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions
Frank Dobbin,John Sutton +1 more
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In this article, the authors analyzed data from 279 organizations and found that these legal changes stimulated organizations to create personnel, antidiscrimination, safety, and benefits departments to manage compliance, yet middle managers came to disassociate these new offices from policy and to justify them in purely economic terms, as part of the new human resources management paradigm.Abstract:
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal policy has revolutionized employment rights. Equal employment opportunity law, occupational safety and health legislation, and fringe benefits regulation were designed to create employee rights to equal protection, to health and safety, and to the benefits employers promise. In event‐history analyses of data from 279 organizations, this research finds that these legal changes stimulated organizations to create personnel, antidiscrimination, safety, and benefits departments to manage compliance. Yet as institutionalization proceeded, middle managers came to disassociate these new offices from policy and to justify them in purely economic terms, as part of the new human resources management paradigm. This pattern is typical in the United States, where the Constitution symbolizes government rule of industry as illegitimate. It may help to explain the long absence of a theory of the state in organizational analysis and to explain a conundrum noted by ...read more
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Institutional theory and institutional change: introduction to the special research forum
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors put forth a call for papers on the study of institutional theory and institutional change, and they received over 75 manuscripts for review, with a focus on institutional change.
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The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets
Devah Pager,Hana Shepherd +1 more
TL;DR: This discussion seeks to orient readers to some of the key debates in the study of discrimination and to provide a roadmap for those interested in building upon this long and important line of research.
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Approaching adulthood: the maturing of institutional theory
TL;DR: In this article, the authors summarize seven general trends in the institutional analysis of organizations which they view as constructive and provide evidence of progress in the development of this perspective, emphasizing corrections in early theoretical limitations as well as improvements in the use of empirical indicators and an expansion of the types of organizations included and issues addressed by institutional theorists.
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Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields
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TL;DR: In this paper, a brief sketch of a general theory of strategic action fields (SAFs) is given, with a discussion of the main elements of the theory, describe the broader environment in which any SAF is embedded, consider the dynamics of stability and change in SAFs, and end with a respectful critique of other contemporary perspectives on social structure and agency.
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Organizational Responses to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box
TL;DR: It is argued that external constituents—including customers, regulators, legislators, local communities, and environmental activist organizations—who interact with influential corporate departments are more likely to affect facility managers' decisions and thus adopt different management practices.
References
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Book ChapterDOI
The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Journal ArticleDOI
Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
John W. Meyer,Brian Rowan +1 more
TL;DR: Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules as discussed by the authors, and the elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and i...
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Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications.
Book ChapterDOI
Social structure and organizations
TL;DR: The relation of the society outside organizations to the internal life of organizations is discussed in this article, where the authors focus on the effects of organizational variables on the surrounding social environment, including groups, institutions, laws, population characteristics, and sets of social relations that form the environment of the organization.
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