varieties of coercive experience
We got into a good discussion about coercive processes in organization theory, based on Michael’s work. One thing that got my goat was that “coercive” could mean a wide range of things, and you can find all of them used in the literature:
- Legitimate coercion: The state uses legitimate force to punish orgs that fail to staisfy the state’s standards.
- Quasi-legitimate coercion: States punish orgs that fail to comply with standards issued by non-state entities.
- Illegitimate state coercion: State uses force against orgs, but in a way that is not recognized as legitimate.
- Illegitimate non-state coercion: Private actors using force to ensure compliance from orgs.
- Power of certification and shunning: Some actors hold the power to award status to orgs, and it’s universally recognized as defining a legitimate organization, but no violence is used. Comply or be shunned.
- Power of certification and cost increase: Same as above, but orgs still considered legitimate if they fail to comply. However, costs of operation go up because status comes with priviliges. This is a broader case of #5.
Once you spell it out, you see that “coercive process” means a whole lot of different things. For example, D&P(’83) clearly say they mean #1 and #2. We can think of public reporting for publicly traded firms as an example of #1. Medical institutions must often obtain private certification, but it’s backed up by state force (#2). Michael’s work on law school rankings is #6 - you can drop from the rankings and still operate, just at a way higher cost. Movement repression studies fall into #3. My work on movement tactics and org change is #4. Religious certifications may be a good example of #5 - who would go to a church that claimed to be Catholic but was not recognized as such by the Vatican? I think Brayden’s work, with Sara Soule, is a combination of #4 and #6 (private persons using force to trigger costs on orgs). I don’t think I have any broader point, other than that researchers ought to be careful when tossing “coercive” around.
who would go to a church that claimed to be Catholic but was not recognized as such by the Vatican?
Some people would.
Incidentally, the best example of the flexibility of the term “coercion” is its regular use in the context of Human Subjects Review, where it is synonymous with “modest financial incentive.”
Kieran
20 Jun 08 at 12:18 pm
So I guess the Quebec Court ruled this father was too coercive in grounding his daugher.
mikemcbride
20 Jun 08 at 7:29 pm
Nice post, Fabio. Although I don’t have as much of a problem calling something coercive as long as the people experiencing it feel as though they are compelled to do something against their will, I am completely behind being more specific about the sources of coercion and how these varying sources might act differently or produce different consequences. That is, I don’t mind using “coercion” to describe a category of related processes as long as we are specific about what we mean by it.
Tangentially, the way I read D&P, their description of coercion does not preclude your #5 and #6, and possibly even #4–it’s pretty general when you look at it. So maybe they are the ones who took your goat–good luck getting it back (the wide moats and big ogres at those private elite colleges are tough to get past).
Michael
20 Jun 08 at 7:48 pm
We (Sarah Soule and I) actually don’t describe the effect that movements have on corporations as coercive, although I can see how it might be conceptualized as such. Our idea is that social movements often have very little ability to directly exert leverage over a company’s tangible resource base, but they do have the ability to shape the perceptions that the public has of a company by communicating new information and challenging the authority of their targets. The consequence of the information generated by protests is to damage the company’s intangible assets (e.g., their legitimacy and reputation).
So I guess you could call the ability to damage a company’s image a form of coercion. But I think you could just as easily say that a social movement’s influence is normative - social movement actors offeri new standards used to judge a company’s performance or with which to assess the cultural fit of an organizational form (Rao, Morrill, Zald). This particular case just illustrates to me why D&P’s three kinds of isomorphism (and by implication, three kinds of social influence) were meant as ideal types. In reality, the three kinds of social influence often overlap quite a bit. The ambiguity around these kinds of forces makes me more interested in the mechanisms underlying influence (e.g., protest as a form of information transmission) and assessing their mediating effects on corporate changes/outcomes.
brayden
21 Jun 08 at 12:09 am
Back on June 10 , when I asked “So why do we still only have three kinds of forces? “, I didn’t anticipate I would get this many answers. I am enjoying this a great deal.
I think this discussion has made it clear that many of us would rather interpret Dimaggio and Powell fairly liberally than see their article as a strict or restrictive definition of isomorphic forces.
What have we lost and what have we gained by moving to a more liberal interpretation of Dimaggio and Powell 1983? Why are we doing this? Are we sliding slowly toward a Kuhnian revolution by stretching our theories until they are unrecognizable?
Is this
Alison
21 Jun 08 at 9:34 pm
Hi, Alison. I am very wary of liberal interpretations because they lend themselves to “it’s been before.” For example, you could have scholarship on the many types of “coercion” described above and a person could quite legitimately say “D&P covered that already,” if they truly believed that you could interpret D&P so broadly. Also, there is value in being precise. The issue in neo-institutional studies is similar to that in philosophy of science - where everything for a while was getting labeled as a “paradigm” to the point that no one knows what was really meant by Kuhn,
fabiorojas
22 Jun 08 at 12:49 am
I think that Dimaggio and Powell did not anticipate that they had written a truth that would remain eternal and universal. They did not publish it on stone tablets.
They said that they thought Weber had been right, but that he was no longer right. There were new conditions. Ceteris non sunt paribus.
Twenty five years later, have firms changed? Has the notion of firms changed? Then why would forces which act on firms follow exactly the same streams as they did in the early 1980’s?
alisonkemper1
22 Jun 08 at 8:02 pm