black studies – 9% institutionalized?
Last week’s post on black studies, institutional theory, and social movement theory resulted in an important question: what can you say about a movement’s impact on an organizational field if only 9% of the targeted organizations implemented the movement’s proposed changes (e.g., black studies programs)? As a few comments point out, there are different levels of institutionalization, as suggested in the organizational change literature. My contention is that a movement can be more strongly institutionalized in some ways and not others. It’s useful to define some terms:
- Super institutionalization: In this case, the social movement demands and gets a completely new field of organizations and it is considered legitimate. The community responds to a movement by giving them an entire world of organizations. Some folks proposed this for black studies – people pushed for entire “black studies colleges” – but it didn’t happen.
- Strong institutionalization: The movement demands new subunits, policy change, and personnel in existing organizations and gets them. My book focuses on this outcome and shows that is happens about 9% of the time.
- Medium institutionalization: Organizations respond to movements not by acquiring new resources, but implementing change through rearranging existing resources. This also happened for black studies – people cobbled together programs by renaming courses, shifting around professors, and other modifications of the curriculum. A lot of degree programs operate mainly by pulling together existing courses into a program.
- Weak institutionalization: There is no formal recognition of the movement in the organization, but change is implemented completely within existing practice and structure. This also happened to black studies, when every humanities professor added black themed ideas in their courses.
- No institutionalization: Targeted organizations completely reject any and all movement proposals, even informally.
It’s probably best to think of institutionalization as a range of outcomes, with one movement’s outcomes concentrated somewhere in this continuum. From my book, based on chapter 6, I’d say black studies hovers around 2-4, with more emphasis on 2-3 in the research university. For example, only 9% of all universities have black studies degree programs, which I’d put in slot #2, but the number is 50% for research universities.
Abdul Alkalimat’s study looked at black studies a little more recently than I did. He included minor degrees and used a more expansive definition of program, and came up with 311 universities, or about 20% of all 4 year institutions. So he measures 2-3 a bit more. Wade Cole’s work in the Sociology of Education indicates that by looking at courses, you see a deeper penetration of this movement. And of course Bryson’s work on multiculturalism suggests that many, many humanities programs adopted ethnic themed curricula. So maybe I’d say that if you look at higher ed as a whole, black studies was institutionalized as 0% super, 10% strong, 20% medium, 50%+ weak, and <5% complete rejection.
The bottom line: Institutionalization of a movement is about a range of simultaneous outcomes which have to be measured in different ways. Black Studies is a mix of strong to weak institutionalization, with a heavy tilt toward weak.
I think part of the discussion in the comments to your last post revolved around whether the adoption of black studies programs by universities resembled a kind of isomorphism (which I claimed it did not). But to say that something becomes isomorphic doesn’t mean that it becomes institutionalized, or vice versa. It’s possible that something can be institutionalized without becoming isomorphic. That is, you can imagine a practice that is generally accepted as legitimate and that has transcendent value but that also is not a practice that most organizations adopt. Perhaps the practice has become seen as a necessary/highly desirable feature for only a subset of all organizations in the field.
Isn’t this basically what happened with black studies? Only certain types of universities were ever expected to have black studies?
brayden
April 21, 2008 at 5:01 am
“That is, you can imagine a practice that is generally accepted as legitimate and that has transcendent value but that also is not a practice that most organizations adopt. Perhaps the practice has become seen as a necessary/highly desirable feature for only a subset of all organizations in the field.”
Perhaps this is why I sometimes veer back towards Parsons. Ceteris paribus, if people really cared and valued a practice, then why not do it? I’d frame it this way: practices can be legitimate (people accept them as appropriate), practices can be institutionalized (there are formal structures perpetuating the practice), and practices can be isomorphic (most organizations enact the practices). So black studies, in this view, is legitimate, somewhat institutionalized but definitely not isomorphic. The black power movement succeeded in legitimation, but not in institutionalization or isomorphic-ization.
Fabio Rojas
April 21, 2008 at 2:43 pm