rank this
Ok, before I start to fill up the “what does this have to do with organizational theory” bin here at the home office of the orgtheory web site (located, surprisingly enough, in beautiful downtown Montevideo—the guys here are pretty mum about the revenue that a site like this generates, but when the private jet, with that nice new-private-jet-smell, picks you up, you know that this is a first class operation), I feel obligated to write a post at least somewhat relevant to orgth and/or eory.
My recent work in this area, much of it co-authored with Wendy Espeland, concerns the effects of educational rankings on the organizations they evaluate—trying to figure out what these effects are, why they have been so powerful, the process by which they are generated, etc. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of this topic is that it is pertinent to so many issues in organizational research: coercive isomorphism, loose vs. tight coupling, accountability and measurement, organizational status, field change, and so on. While the connections between rankings and these aspects of organizational theory have a few downsides—for instance, different reviewers insisting that one particular issue is “really what’s going on here”—it has been rewarding to think about, on the one hand, how these concepts help explain rankings and, on the other, how the case of rankings might inform or expand these concepts. Here are a couple of examples that I’ve been mulling over lately but haven’t thought through yet—so reactions and input would be much appreciated.
First—and related to the interesting recent posts and discussions here about the Harrison White notes—I have been thinking about how the emergence of rankings has changed the network of connections in the fields they evaluate. What is especially interesting to me is how rankings have changed the content of ties within a field rather than creating new connections or destroying old ones. Instead, they have altered how actors are able to use/exploit existing ties within their field: current students, for example, now have a tool that they can use to press for changes in administrative policy, faculty have a tool to negotiate salaries and jobs, and school presidents and legislators have a tool to make funding decisions. So while a chart comparing the maps of the network connections before and after the rise of the rankings would show that the structure of ties has changed very little, the nature of the ties—how people can use them, to what purpose, and how effectively—has changed a lot. Any ideas about similar cases of this type of field change?
Second, as Wendy and I argue in our paper on the reactivity of rankings, the periodicals that publish rankings have produced significant coercive pressures on the organizations they evaluate. In effect, they have become regulators of these organizations. What is interesting about this is that these rankers, such as U.S. News, have been able to produce coercive pressures without any legal backing, state mandate, or the support of a powerful professional entity (like an accrediting body). Rankers are simply magazines and newspapers—journalists, editors, and a few statisticians—that have managed to create (accidentally, they insist) an apparatus that generates coercion to conform to the standards they invent. Again, we’ve been trying to come up with other examples of coercive isomorphism that originates from non-governmental or non-professional sources. Social movements—at least before the goals of the movement are adopted into law—might provide some examples. Others?
It’s great to have you here and everything, but let’s stop talking about the jet, OK? It’ll offend the latté egalitarianism of the Scatterplot crowd.
Any ideas about similar cases of this type of field change?
I need to revise my Specialization and Status in Philosophy paper.
Kieran
June 10, 2008 at 5:38 am
Great post Michael! Glad to see you made good use of the jet.
It’s interesting that you brought up social movements as a possible example of a coercive force. As I read your first question about how rankings changed the relations between actors in a field, I actually thought that social movements might have this effect on fields. Rather than coercing organizations to do things, which is difficult to do if you’re a cash-strapped activist organization without much resource leverage, I think social movement activists wield influence by changing the frame/discourse around the appropriateness of actions and that this provides a new set of cultural meanings with which to order relations between actors in the field. By creating alternative standards that organizations can use to distinguish themselves (hey, we’re green friendly!), social movements help redefine relationships and provide new metrics of comparison.
Take the example of Indian rug making. Indian rugs often used child labor to make their products. Human rights organizations protested against them and started making noise in legislatures in countries like Germany, which was a major importer of Indian rugs. As a result of all this noise and cries for tighter regulation, a few Indian rug manufacturers stepped up and offered to voluntarily abide by better standards and demonstrate this by stamping their rugs with a label indicating they were made without child labor. The rug manufacturers didn’t change their ways simply for moral reasons, of course; they saw this as an opportunity to use a new standard created by social movement activists to distinguish themselves from their competitors in the market. They weren’t coerced at all. They were taking advantage of the alternative standard to reorder the status distinctions in the market, moving their own companies to the top of this informal hierarchy. There may have been the fear of potential coercion (should countries like Germany pass laws requiring higher labor standards and governmental monitoring), but the strategy taken by these activists was also motivated by their own perceived interests and the desire to distinguish their companies from the competition. Without activists providing the new cultural mindset (i.e. a new frame), the anti-child labor rug manufacturers would likely never have settled on this strategy.
brayden
June 10, 2008 at 7:05 am
Montevideo, jet; darn — I knew something was being kept from me. I was told that our downtown Fresno office/hole was our only location and public transport our only mode of transport.
tf
June 10, 2008 at 9:06 am
Interesting points, I think there are two things I’d respond with:
1) It’s important to capture the distinction between ‘market pressures’ and the kind of coercive pressures you’re talking about. Maybe what’s distinctive is precisely that these are groups which we would not really expect to be able to exert coercive pressures on organizations they were otherwise not engaged with. I’m not being as clear as I’d like to be, but the rankings case captures a dynamic that demonstrates non-market (or non-direct market) forms of commensuration that affect organizations’ practices/identities/etc.
2) I’m thinking about the Chicago Climate Exchange as another example, where it was created to establish a trading exchange in carbon credits. It was done so in the absence of coercion from the EPA, and with no legal authority at all – they use Memoranda of Understanding, which have some force under commercial law but not nearly the force of formal regulation.
But – and it’s a large but – the success of the CCE (limited, not great success by the way) depends on the threat of regulation coming down the pike. An interview with Richard Sandor is revealing for his answer to the question of why companies would get involved in the CCE with no carbon cap they need to abide by (around 2:00): if you’re not at the negotiating table, you’re on the menu.
Maybe in the same way, law schools find the US News rankings to be a sort of preemptive push that both challenges their autonomy but also legitimates their importance. Because maybe there is a threat that down the pike will come some realization that law schools, like med schools, and other like organizations, are protective cartels for professions that may have been useful in the past but are no longer useful in the present. Status rankings allow some of these to maintain their elite status, while sloughing off the bottom rungs. (the discussions of banks cutting off student loans to ’second-tier’ schools rings in here).
Peter
June 10, 2008 at 12:42 pm
What does coercion mean in this context? I think Peter is right that the coercion is not exerted by the rankers, but by the looming spectre of regulators.
How can a newspaper be considered coercive in the same way that a government is? Or is there another mechanism in play?
BTW, Forrest Briscoe and Sean Safford have a terrific paper that links social movements and rankings: “The Nixon in China Effect: Activism, Imitation, and Institutionalization of Contentious Practices.”
Alison Kemper
June 10, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Michael:
1. You’ll have to return the jet with a full tank or pay the refill fee.
2. I’ve always been bugged by the term coercive here. In the D&P(1983) they limit coercive pressures to those associated with the state, or those professional groups who can revoke some formal status. Rating agencies (credit agencies for people/firms, school rankings, “sweatshop free” rating orgs) possess something that is qualitatively different: the ability to award stamps of approval, but noy legal or quasi-legal authority. For example, schools that don’t do well with rankings can still operate, but they lose customers. They aren’t barred from the org field.
Anyway, good work!
fabiorojas
June 10, 2008 at 5:33 pm
schools that don’t do well with rankings can still operate, but they lose customers. They aren’t barred from the org field.
I think you’re pretty wrong here, Fabio. As Jenn points out, banks have started cutting off loans to students going to these kinds of schools. Sure, no one is hitting these schools on the head or literally forcing them to pay attention to rankings, but it seems decidedly coercive to me. Or at least I don’t see why this is more or less coercive than barring them from the org field altogether.
Peter
June 10, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Peter: I say you are correct and I was wrong on the details, but banks revoking loans still seems different that state regulation. The issue is that student loans are a subsidy, not a coercive mechanism. Here’s an example:
- a doctor that loses accreditation can be put in jail if they continue to medicine
- a school that loses accreditation can still teach long as they don’t claim to be accredited, it’s just more expensive to do so.
Or to put it more succinctly, I find it odd in org studies that “coercive= you increase the cost,” while the common sense definition (and the one found in early neo-I work) is that “coercive = application of force via the state or quasi-state group.” These are different processes.
fabiorojas
June 10, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Huggy Rao has a great paper from 1994 about how creating ranking systems in the nascent auto industry yielded certification contests that verified the legitimacy of new automakers. In that paper, Rao makes the point that rankings create the new standards of legitimacy. The rankings are not really coercive, but they do enable constitutive legitimacy.
brayden
June 10, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Michael, Could you describe in more detail why you call them regulators? I confess I haven’t read your paper (yet!).
mikemcbride
June 10, 2008 at 7:41 pm
What I don’t get is why I have to type out all of my responses when most of you are sitting only a few beach chairs away (with those goofy “orgtheory” hats on, no less).
Lots of good help here and too much to respond to, but let me take up the coercion question a bit. I share some of the reservations expressed above and I am also not convinced that it is the right way to express what is going on. According to a strict definition of coercion–something like, the ability to use or draw upon physical force to make someone do something they don’t want to–this obviously doesn’t qualify. However, the way I read D&P and others who have use the concept (e.g., Mizruchi and Fein), the definition of coercive isomorphism is somewhat looser and actually shades into arguments about resource dependence. So, using the case I know the most about, USN put a system in place that has made administrators feel like they have little choice but to make decisions they wouldn’t make otherwise; administrators (rightly or wrongly) experience it as coercion because even though no one is going to jail, they feel as though they are left with (forced into) only one reasonable line of action: conform to the criteria of the rankings (this is overstating it somewhat, but you can see what I mean).
Anyway, it’s a good question. On the practical side, one is left to wonder what to call these pressures if not coercive (mimetic or normative certainly don’t capture what is going on).
Michael
June 10, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Mike: This “regulator” stuff isn’t in any of the papers, so you haven’t missed anything–just an idea that’s being floated. I think calling them regulators is not intuitive (or, I guess, literally accurate) but it helps to understand the effects such measures can generate.
Those who produce rankings might be characterized as informal regulators because they create standards (e.g. what constitutes a good law school) and rules (e.g. how to calculate your employment rate) that schools are compelled (if not coerced) to abide by. So, although they have and claim no formal power over these schools, the effects are similar to other types of regulation.
Brayden: I agree about the Rao paper (and it is good to bring up here).
Michael
June 10, 2008 at 7:54 pm
The Rao paper is >10 years ahead of any other work in this field. I once said of Rao that he works like Gretzky: he skates to where the puck is going to be.
Why are there no mechanisms outside DiMaggio and Powell? When I was so very stuck, I went back to their article and reread it. Their argument is predicated on the end of market forces and the hegemony of bureaucracy.
Since they wrote it in the early 1980’s they were likely right.
But we don’t have that kind of firm any more. Firms are financialized according to such divergent thinkers as David Vogel and Donald MacKenzie.
So why do we still only have three kinds of forces? (I really don’t know. This is not a rhetorical question.)
The beach here in Toronto has no ice, but it’s otherwise not the place to be for another couple of weeks, BTW.
Alison Kemper
June 11, 2008 at 12:02 am
Alison: I agree with your question about the three forces, and I think the debate over the appropriateness of the “coercion” in the case of the rankings supports a re-thinking of this. By the way, thanks for the lead on the Briscoe and Safford piece–it looks very interesting.
Michael
June 11, 2008 at 4:38 am
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