reviving resource dependence theory

A while ago I asked, “what happened to resource dependence theory?” Although resource dependence theory seemed to be the dominant macro-organizational theory of the late 1970s, by the early 1990s the theory was eclipsed by institutional theory and population ecology. In the previous post, I offered some reasons for why this might have happened, but I stopped short of doing any serious analysis or a literature review.  So I was happy to see that Tyler Wry, Adam Cobb, and Howard Aldrich have a paper in the latest Academy of Management Annals that tackles this question and offers some thoughts about the future of RD theory.  Based on their analysis, the problem is worse than I imagined. Not only is RD theory cited less than those other theories, but it also seems to be the case that most citations to RD theory are fairly superficial. On a positive note, RD theory has become associated with a few fragmented communities of scholars who were interested in studying the particular strategies that Pfeffer and Salancik suggested actors/organizations ought to take when seeking to gain control over dependencies. From the Wry et al. paper:

[W]e conducted a systematic analysis of every study that cited External Control in 29 highly regarded management, psychology, and sociology journals between 1978 and 2011. Given the breadth of empirical domains covered by RD, our analysis focused on identifying how, and to what extent, each article used the perspective. Our results indicate that there is merit in Pfeffer’s assertion that RD serves primarily as a  metaphorical statement about organizations. Though External Control continues to be cited at an enviable rate, the vast majority of citations are ceremonial—variously used as a nod toward the environment,  resources, or power. Results also show that beneath an ever growing citation count is a fragmented landscape of scholars whose primary interest is in the specific strategies discussed in External Control —mergers and acquisitions (M&A), joint ventures and strategic alliances, interlocking directorates and executive succession—rather than the underlying perspective….To say that RD has been reduced to a metaphorical statement about organizations, however, belies its considerable impact. Indeed, while RD lacks a coterie of followers and has failed to catalyze a dedicated  research programin the vein of NIT or OE, it has had a uniquely broad influence within management scholarship. Scholars have drawn on RD to derive key hypotheses in the study of M&A’s, joint ventures and  strategic alliances, interlocking directorates, and executive succession, with the hypotheses largely supported (Hillman, Withers, & Collins, 2009).

They also suggest that its time to revive RD theory in organizational analysis. Why should we do that? 

religion and immigration rights in the US

Yesterday’s WSJ featured an interesting (gated) front page article on growing support among some evangelical congregations for extending immigration rights to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on the Bible to justify “welcoming the stranger,” leaders have urged outreach efforts and political mobilization for overhauling immigration reform, even though these activities may alienate some congregants and politicians. According to the WSJ, one opposing politician has countered supporters’ assertions with the claim that “The Bible contains numerous passages that do not necessarily support amnesty and instead support the rule of law. The Scriptures clearly indicate that God charges civil authorities with preserving order, protecting citizens and punishing wrongdoers.” Clearly, groups and individuals are tapping logics of religion and the state to offer various rationales for the status quo versus change.

Sociologist Grace Yukich has conducted research on a similar movement for immigration rights among Catholic groups. Her forthcoming book One Family Under God: Religion and Immigration Politics in the New Sanctuary Movement (Oxford) examines how supporters simultaneously engage with a larger social movement at the grassroots level and reshape the composition of their flock. Check out more about Yukich’s work via her blog posts on Mobilizing Ideas and The Immanent Frame.

delegitimization as a new world order

Imagine going to the ATM and discovering you can’t withdraw your money because the ATM is out of cash. Not only that, but the bank is closed because of a national holiday so you can’t use the bank teller to withdraw money, electronic transfers of funds are frozen, and the stores refuse to accept credit cards out of concerns that electronic payments won’t be made. If you are able to get to your money, you learn that 6.75% of your funds (or 9.95% if you are a lucky ducky with over 100K euros in your account) will be converted into bank shares under a compulsory levy intended to prop up the banking system. The mortgage payment that you scheduled, the student loan check that you deposited to pay for your education, the vendors that you need to pay for your small business – all are up in the air.

Even if you are told “nevermind, we’re re-evaluating that policy, back to the drawing board!”, what’s the rational thing to do? Most likely, you as a depositor will lose trust in the banking system and pull out as much as you can. If you are in an adjoining country with a shared currency, the mattress, precious metals, and alternate currencies are looking like more attractive places to keep your money. This is the scenario currently unfolding for residents in Cyprus and those who were parking their money in what seemed like a safe haven.

Less than a year ago, Greece was in a similar situation and is still dealing with the consequences. Now, it’s Cyprus’s turn. These supposedly one-off, “unique” situations involving untested interventions are becoming regularities as banking and governance systems around the world are becoming more tightly coupled together. Although Chick Perrow‘s Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies discusses nuclear plants and chemical plants, his concept of how reactions, once started, are hard to stop (much less understand) in tightly coupled systems, is a helpful read. Add to his concept the erosion of a shared understanding and belief in institutions for a potent mix – that is, the delegitimization processes of trust in banking and governance that we may be seeing in the EU.

For those of us who have been living under the various rocks of committee work/teaching/research/other commitments, a little background reading: Dealbreaker’s take, with plenty of links to others’ analysis, Reuters,and Zero Hedge’s mordant posts.

open thread – call for questions for ESS conversation on Fri., March 22, 2013

As I posted earlier, I’ll be presiding over a conversation between George Ritzer and Carmen Sirianni from 3:30-5pm on Fri., March 22, 2013 at ESS in the Whittier Room (4th Flr) of the Boston Park Plaza hotel.

In the past several years, disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Katrina have sparked growing interest in what both conventional and innovative organizations can (and cannot) do given conditions of uncertainty vs. certainty. Both featured scholars’ work cover the limits of particular organizing practices (i.e., Ritzer’s work on McDonaldization), as well as the potential of organized action (i.e., Sirianni’s work on collaborative governance). Thus, I’ve given this particular conversation the broad title “Organizations and Societal Resilience: How Organizing Practices Can Either Inhibit or Enable Sustainable Communities.”

What would you be interested in hearing Ritzer and Sirianni discuss about organizations and society? Please put your qs or comments in the discussion thread.

For those unfamiliar with Ritzer and Sirianni, here is some background about their work:
George Ritzer is best known for his work on McDonaldization and more recently, the spread of prosumption in which people are both producers and consumers.

J. Mike Ryan‘s interview of Ritzer about his McDonaldization work:

J. Mike Ryan’s interview of Ritzer about why we should learn about McDonaldization (corrected link):

Carmen Sirianni is known for his work on democratic governance.

A brief video of Sirianni arguing that citizens should be “co-producers” in building society.

A more extensive video of Sirianni presenting on his book Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance (Brookings Press, 2009).

thank you john padgett and woody powell

I’d like to take a moment to thnk our February guest bloggers – Woody Powell and John Padgett. They wrote about their new book The Emergence and Organization and Markets. You can their blog posts here.

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the emergence of organizations and markets, part 2: a guest post by john padgett and woody powell

A guest post by John Padgett and Woody Powell about their new book The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. Read post #1 here:

Single autocatalytic networks generate life, but they do not generate novel forms of life. There is nothing outside of a single decontextualized network to bring in to recombine with what is already there. Self-organizing out of randomness into an equilibrium of reproducing transformations, the origin of life, was a nontrivial accomplishment, to be sure. But this is not quite speciation, which is emergence of one form of life out of another.

Transpositions and feedbacks among multiple networks are the sources of organizational novelty. In a multiple-network architecture, networks are the contexts of each other. Studying organizational novelty places a premium on measuring multiple social networks in interaction because that is the raw material for innovation. Subsequent cascades of death and reconstruction may or may not turn initial transpositions (innovations) across networks into system-wide invention.

Through fifteen empirical case chapters, Padgett and Powell extracted eight multiple-network mechanisms of organizational genesis:

emergence of organizations and markets, part I by padgett & powell

A guest post by John Padgett and Woody Powell about their new book The Emergence of Organizations and Markets:

Innovation in the sense of product design is a popular research topic today, because there is a lot of money in that. Innovation, however, in the deeper sense of new actors—new types of people, new organizational forms—is not even much on the research radar screen of contemporary social scientists, even though “speciation” (to use the biologists’ term for this) lies at the heart of historical change over the longue durée, both in biological evolution and in human history. Social science—meaning mostly economics, political science and sociology—is very good at understanding selection, both at the micro level of individual choice and at the macro level of institutional regulation and lock-in. But novelty, especially of actors but also of alternatives, has first to enter from off the stage of our collective imaginary for our existing theories to be able to go to work. Our analytical shears for trimming are sharp, but the life forces that push up novelty to be trimmed tend to escape our attention, much less our understanding. If this book accomplishes anything, we at least hope to put the research topic of speciation—the emergence of new organizational forms and people—on our collective agenda.

february guest bloggers: john padgett and woody powell

It is my pleasure to announce our February guest bloggers: Woody Powell and John Padgett. Professor Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, Communication, and Public Policy at Stanford University. Professor Padgett is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Woody and John are both leading figures in the study of organizations and networks. Professor Powell is co-author, with Paul DiMaggio, of the groundbreaking “iron cage” article and then went on to publish a series of highly influential papers in social network analysis. John Padgett is one of political science’s leading formal modellers, having written seminal papers on budgeting & garbage can processes, the courts, and state formation. His most well known work is likely the “Medici paper,” which used network analysis to describe the cultivation of political power in early modern Italy and introduced the idea of “robust action” into modern social theory.

They will be discussing their new book: The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. Here’s a summary:

The social sciences are rich with ideas about how choice occurs among alternatives, but have little to say about the invention of new alternatives in the first place.  These authors directly address the question of emergence, both of what we choose and who we are.  With the use of sophisticated deductive models building on the concept of autocatalysis from biochemistry and rich historical cases studies spanning seven centuries, Padgett and Powell develop a theory of the co-evolution of social networks.  Novelty in new persons and new organizational forms emerges from spillovers across multiple, intertwined networks.  To be sure, actors make relations; but the mantra of this book is that in the long run relations make actors.  Through case studies of early capitalism and state formation, communist economic reforms and transition, and technologically advanced capitalism and science, the authors analyze speciation in the context of organizational novelty.  Drawing on ideas from both the physical sciences and the social sciences, and incorporating novel computational, historical, and network analyses, this book offers a genuinely new approach to the question of emergence.

This week and next week, I’ll post some thoughts that John and Woody have shared with me. This is *required* reading for sociologists, management scholars, political scientists, and economists. And yes, there, will be a quiz!

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trouble in institutionalist land

Last week, I argued that there was kind of a big problem in modern sociology: one of our dominant macro theories is highly inconsistent with many of our favorite micro theories. If we look at various popular account of individual action in cultural sociology (e.g., toolkit theory), many don’t produce isomorphism.

Here’s the outline of the argument:

• The gist of institutional theories of isomorphism is that people working in org fields experience pressures for conformity. If you don’t follow a pre-existing cultural script, you can’t run your organization. 
• For this argument to work, you need to assume that people respond to their environment in fairly uniform ways.
• In the original D&P ’83 article, in the hypotheses section, they admit variance when status orders are weak. Otherwise, the prediction is when status orders are well established, or when high status actors propagate norms, you get conformity.
• Different authors offer different social psychological mechanisms. D&P ’83 and ’91 (the intro) often appeal to a wide range of scholarship to justify isomorphism. They appeal to Berger and Luckman, as well as Bourdieu. You can also concoct a rational choice version, which is consistent with resource dependency arguments.
• If you actually read the fine print of these social psychology theories, most do not predict isomorphism, except Bourdieu’s habitus theory. For example, Berger and Luckmann’s book describes how people develop a stock of knowledge that defines their social reality. Fair enough. But nowhere do B&L ever say that this social reality is highly uniform, resistant to change, or otherwise offer a mechanism that acts as an iron cage. The slip is that “taken for granted” is interpreted as “hard to challenge.” Look at Griswold’s theory of cultural objects, or Zelizer, and it’s all about local constructions of meaning. Does not imply isomorsphism. Another case is rational choice institutionalism, where you set up a game theory model to predict norm following. Fair enough, but you have lots of hidden assumptions – uniform agents, low enforce costs, etc. Drop these and you get heterogeneity. Indeed, what you get is from the way less popular Meyer and Rowan ’77 institutionalism.

Of course, I am not the only person who noted these issues. DiMaggio’s idea of the inst entrepreneur is one attempt to get around this problem. The Clemens and Cook ’99 note that even iron cage institutionalism only predict stasis if you assume perfect reproduction. Admit imperfect reproduction and the theory breaks down. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to logics, institutional work, and conflict/movements. Substantively, it’s an implicit rejection of earlier institutional. Theoretically, it’s (almost) a complete reworking of the theory. These may not be institutionalist in the sense of the 70s or 80s, or even early 90s, but at least it is consistent with how many sociologists describe motivation and action.

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deep culture and organization theory

This weekend, Omar wrote a detail post about the “depth” of culture, the degree to which some idea is internalized and serves as a motivation or guide for action. I strongly recommend that you read it. What I’d like to do in this post is use Omar’s comments as a springboard for thinking about organizational behavior.

The reigning theory in sociology of organization is neo-institutionalism. The details vary, but the gist is that the model posits a Parsonsian theory of action. There is an “environment” that “imprints” itself in organizations. Myth and Ceremony institutionalism posits a “shallow imprinting” – people don’t really believe myth and ceremony. Iron cage institutionalism takes a very “deep” view of culture. Actors internalize culture and then do it.

Omar posits, I think, is a view of culture that is constitutive (you are the ideas you internalize) and interactive (your use of the idea modifies the cultural landscape). Omar wants to get away from the metaphor of “deep” vs. “shallow” culture. He also discusses dual process theory, which merits its own post.

What is important for organization theorists is that you get away from Parsons’ model:

Note that conceptually the difference is between thinking of “depth” as a property of the cultural object (the misleading Parsonian view) or thinking of “depth” as resulting from the interaction between properties of the person (internalized as dispositions) and qualities of the object (e.g. meaning of a proposition or statement) (the Bourdieusian point).

The implication for orgtheory? Previously, the locus of orgtheory has been the “environment” – all the stuff outside the organization that people care about. That’s highly analogous to “culture” getting internalized deep within the individual. Thus, different institutional theories reflect a deep/shallow dichotomy. If you buy Omar’s post-Swidler/post-Giddens view of things, then what is really interesting is the interaction creating at the point of contact between environment and organization. Orgs don’t passively await imprinting. Rather, there is variance in how they respond to the environment and there is interesting variation in the adoption/importation of stuff from the environment.

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what have we learned from jerry davis and other neo-institutionalism haters?

I’ve finished writing a brief bibliography on institutionalism, which includes a section on the critics that I blegged about earlier. What did I learn from reading the critics? Well, the critics come in a few flavors:

1. Weak model of human behavior – This can be found in Stinchcombe’s Annual Review and the discussion of the “cultural dupe” model. The good news, for institutionalists, is that this problem has been addressed. Between the inhabited institutions folks like Hallett and his buddy Marc Ventresca and the Lawrence/Suddaby institutional work folks (including myself), I think we’ve simply abandoned the DiMaggio and Powell 83 model of behavior and replaced it with an improvement (people have agency, but they must deal with institutions).
2. Vague – Jerry and others have claimed that the theory is vague or incoherent. This obviously motivated the Jepperson ’91 chapter and the endless army of books that followed (Scott 2000, the handbook of organizational institutionalism, etc). My verdict is mixed. A lot of basic ideas, like “field,” still retain the “you know it when you see it” flavor and are quite vague.
3. Empirically false – No one, I think, has successfully answered the Kraatz and Zaajc (1996) article, which speaks to a major chunk of institutional theory – the view that organizations must act in accordance with cultural scripts to ensure survival. Jerry Davis is right about this. Yet, other rather simple neo-institutional hypotheses have been repeatedly tested. For example, there’s a lot of evidence for mimetic isomorphism in various fields. The recent work by Sauder/Espeland/etc focuses on how practices (such as rankings in higher ed) become taken for granted, which supports a Zucker 77 kind of institutionalism.  Also, it seems nearly impossible to test the “B” hypotheses in DiMaggio and Powell 83 because you need to compare fields, which seems hard since fields can only be defined inductively.

My verdict? The haters are correct. New institutionalism has a number of severe issues. The good news is that some problems have been dealt with in positive ways, such as a better model of individual action. It’s really a rejection of late 70s/early 80s organizational institutionalism, but that’s ok . Other areas are mixed. I’d say that at least one major hypothesis has been refuted, while others seem to be ok. Finally, there seems to be some fundamental conceptual issues (e.g., how to know a field, what exactly counts as an institution) that really need to be rethought from the ground up.

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trashing new institutionalism bleg

I’m trying to collect major (and minor) critiques of either new institutionalism. So far, I’ve got Perrow ’86, Kraatz/Zajac ’96, Hirsch ’97, Mizruchi et al (not quite a critique), Herrigal’s 2005 discussion of recent political science institutionalism in Socio-economic Review, and my own critique of Fligstein’s Architecture on the Journal of Institutional Economics.

What else? What am I missing?

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interviewing Roger Friedland

The OMT Blog has a great interview with Roger Friedland, one half of the duo that wrote the now classic 1991 paper about institutional logics. I highly recommend reading the entire interview. In the interview he talks about how the institutional logics paper was inspired by a heated debate with Theda Skocpol, why he’s the Rip Van Winkle of institutional theory, and what organizational scholars can learn from studying religion. I enjoyed this bit:

A few months ago a graduate student approached me in Banff, Canada, where I had been invited to give a talk to a group of management scholars who do institutional research.

“Nice to meet you,” he said as he extended his hand.  “Can I tell you something.  It is a little embarrassing.”

“Go ahead,” I encouraged him.

“Well, I thought you were dead.  I didn’t see your name after that 1991 piece.”

I laughed; I loved it.

The “Old” New Institutionalism versus the “New” New Institutionalism

I signed on to blog on Orgtheory a couple of months ago with the express purpose of writing about “A Theory of Fields” (Oxford Press, 2012), my new book with Doug McAdam. So here it goes.

Today I want to explain something about the shape of research in organizational theory for the past 35 years ago in order to situate “A Theory of Fields” in that research. The cornerstones of the “new institutionalism” in organizational theory are three works, the Meyer and Rowan paper (1977), the DiMaggio and Powell paper (1983), and the book edited by Powell and DiMaggio (1991).

I would like to take the provocative position that since about 1990, most scholars have given up on the original formulation of the new institutionalism even though they are ritually fixated on citing these canonical works. It is worth thinking why they found that formulation limited.

The Meyer/Rowan and DiMaggio/Powell position on organizations is that actors in organizations do not have interests and that their actions are “programmed” by scripts. Moreover, actors are unable to figure out what to do, so they either follow the leader (i.e. mimic those they perceive as successful), act according to norms often propagated by professionals, or else find themselves coerced by state authorities. The Meyer/Rowan and DiMaggio/Powell world was not only void of actors; it was also void of change. Once such an order got into place, it became taken for granted and difficult to dislodge. “People” in this world told themselves stories, used myth and ceremony, and they decoupled their stories from what they were doing. This meant that the consequences of their actions were not important.  DiMaggio recognized this problem in 1988 when he suggested that in order to explain change we needed another theory one that involved actors, interests, power, and what he called “institutional entrepreneurs”.

The core of organizational studies since the early 1990s has been to reintroduce interests, actors, power and the problem of change into the center of organizational studies. Indeed, the field of entrepreneurship in management studies is probably at the moment, the hottest part of organizational theory. If one looks at these papers, one still sees ritual citing of DiMaggio/Powell and Meyer/Rowan. But the core ideas of these papers could not be farther from those works. The focus on entrepreneurial studies is on how new fields are like social movements. They come into existence during crises. They invoke the concept of institutional entrepreneurs who build the space and create new cultural frames, interests and identities. In doing so, the entrepreneurs build political coalitions to dominate the new order. Indeed, the gist of the past 15 years of organizational research is entirely antithetical to the “old” new institutionalism.

I submit to you that the time is now right to reject the “old” new institutionalism” entirely, free our minds, and produce a “new” new institutionalism.

ASA session with Fred Block: Democratizing finance

In a series of posts about real utopias (see the earlier posts by Gar Alperovitz and Jerry Davis), we’ve invited Fred Block, professor of sociology at UC-Davis, to write about his session that will take place Sunday at 10:30 at the ASA conference.

My Real Utopia proposal for this ASA meeting is on “Democratizing Finance.”  It is posted at the Real Utopias website.  Writing this was much more difficult than I ever imagined, and this draft still needs a lot of work.   It was hard because at the current moment, getting unemployment in the U.S. down to 7% seems unimaginably difficult and unrealistic goal.    It follows that major structural changes such as democratizing finance appear to be wildly utopian with no element of realism whatsoever.  The other problem is that almost all the work we have in the sociology of finance is focused on what happens in one or another specific market.   We have very little work that generates an overview of the financial system as a whole, but serious reform has to look at the entire structure.

My argument proceeds through the following steps:

ASA session with Gar Alperovitz: A pluralist commonwealth and a community-sustaining economy

We’ve invited Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, to write about his ”real utopia” session with Steve Dubb that will take place at the upcoming ASA conference (details below).

Our session, “A Pluralist Commonwealth and a Community-Sustaining Economy,” aims to prompt broader discussion of what we see as a central question of our times: “If you don’t like capitalism and you don’t like traditional socialism, what do you want?”  For too long those seeking to “change the system” have been taunted by the famous Margaret Thatcher line, “There is no alternative.”  We think it is time to begin to systematically think through the building blocks of what a systemic alternative that moves beyond the old options of state capitalism and corporate capitalism might look like in the real world.

Based on ongoing research on various forms of emerging democratic ownership being done at the Democracy Collaborative, the paper also suggests some practical paths that we believe can help move in the proposed direction. We hope our panel and the paper spark an intellectually rigorous, fun, and engaging discussion of these topics.

The essay is posted at the Real Utopia website, and the session will take place Friday, August 17, 8:30am-10:10am.  We welcome those of you get up early morning on Friday to join us!

deep springs and institutional isomorphism

A few days ago, I posted about Deep Springs College’s decision to admit women in 2013. In the comments, “Frances Quarel,” disputed my contention that the decision reflected institutional pressures (i.e., single ed was a much less legitimate organizational form in the 2000s). Essentially, Quarel argued that Deep Springs reflected *no* response to the institutional environment. Quarel correctly notes that the Deep Springs displays very little resemblance to other colleges. So isomorphism is a bad explanation.

My response: theories of isomorphism are usually arguments about resource dependency. In most formulations, the argument is that the more that an organization requires material or symbolic resources, the more it will be susceptible to external pressures for conformity. If you want to establish a university with thousands of students and tons of research grants, you’ll probably need to conform. If you want to let thirteen dudes clean stables and read Plato on a desert ranch, no need to conform. As long as you have a little pot of money, nothing will prevent you from doing your own thing.

So I’d agree with the general thurst of Quarel’s comment. Deep Springs hasn’t conformed much to the higher ed system. But that doesn’t mean that Deep Springs is completely immune to external pressures. The school just has a very low responsiveness to the outside world. The new co-ed policy reflects one of the ways that the college is connected to a broader institutional environment – the association with Telluride and newer cohorts of students, who turn into the alumni who then pressed for change. The emergence of coed education as a taken for granted standard in higher wasn’t hatched in the deserts of California.

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book spotlight: philanthropy in america by olivier zunz

Students of orgtheory should like Philanthropy in America by Olivier Zunz, a well known American historian at the Unviersity of Virginia. PiA is a comprehensive overview of the non-profit sector in America. If I teach a graduate course on the non-profit sector, I’d definitely put this on the reading list. You would be hard pressed to find another  book that so deftly conveys the ups and downs of the non-profit world. It’s a nice compliment to more social science approaches like The Non-Profit Handbook that focus on questions that economists and sociologists would ask.

Much of the material will be familiar to students of the non-profit sector, especially the chapters on post-war philanthropy. We get a chapter on the 1969 tax reform act. The various approaches to philanthropy over the years get a lot of coverage (e.g., civil rights oriented charity vs. Cold War era programs of the 1950s). PiA also has some material on the most recent wave of philanthropy driven by the new superwealthy, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What orgtheory readers will find most rewarding is the emphasis on the changing nature of the state-non-profit relationship. Zunz correctly points out that Americans have never exactly sorted out how they feel about the non-profits. Sometimes, non-profits are treated as central actors in American social policy. At other time, Americans view philanthropists as wealthy meddlers.

No where is this more apparent than in a highly instructive chapter about the 1920s. Hoover, contrary to popular wisdom, did not respond to the great depression by ignoring people and relying on the free market, though he did engage in laissez-faire rhetoric. Instead, Hoover believed in strong Federal intervention in the economy, but he wanted much of the effort channeled through philanthropic organizations. It’s a view that is not common now, but it might be called “local charities/national direction.” FDR also believed in having a strong welfare state, but his approach was to exclude private third parties and administer relief programs directly through the state.

Overall, a solid book that will lead to more insight into the evolution of the non-profit sector.

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conference for orgtheory in developing regions

Writing from the home office in Switzerland, Tim draws my attention to a conference for management PhD scholars interested in development. From the call for papers for the UNDP Development Academy:

The oikos UNDP Young Scholars Development Academy 2012 provides PhD students and young scholars working on poverty, sustainable development, and the informal economy from an Organisation and Management Theory perspective a platform to present and discuss their on-going research projects with fellow students and senior faculty.

Research on inclusive business models, market development and sustainability between the informal and formal economy is a promising and challenging field for young researchers and PhD students. It calls for a multitude of methods, combination of disciplines in strategy, organisation studies, sociology, anthropology and economics, and new research designs, e.g. market ethnography in organisation studies.

Great opportunity for orgtheory PhD students and tenure track/post docs. Check it out.

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the different bourdieus

Bourdieu is everywhere in social theory these days. Ranging from practice theory to studies of taste and consumption, you can find Bourdieu lurking in the background and quite often taking center stage. Bourdieu may be the most blogged-about theorist here on orgtheory. He’s so easily transportable because of the generality of his concepts and because he wrote extensively on so many different things during his career. Given the expanse of his theoretical contributions, it can sometimes be hard to pin down Bourdieu as a theorist. The reason for this, suggests my prolific co-blogger Omar Lizardo in this commentary forthcoming in Sociological Forum, is that Bourdieu’s contributions to American sociology have occurred over various stages, creating multiple clusters of Bourdieuian-influenced theorists. Depending on which cluster you’re a part of, you’re getting a slightly different angle on the Bourdieuian perspective.  I highly recommend reading Omar’s commentary for anyone who thinks they know (or would like to get to know) Bourdieu’s work. It helps put Bourdieu in historical context.

The final stage of Bourdieuian influence, which is an emerging trend Omar admits, is focused on embodiment, cognition, and action. Although he doesn’t mention it in the essay, I have noticed that a strong community in institutional theory has really grabbed on to this this aspect of Bourdieu. Institutional theory in the late 80s through the mid-90s was heavily influenced by Bourdieu’s field theory (Omar’s stage 2 of Bourdieuian influence), but in recent years institutional theorists have become less interested in the constraining aspects of field forces and more interested in how institutional change bubbles up from below, which places more emphasis on agency and reflexive cognition. Scholars interested in institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work (for example, read Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca), in particular, seem to be drawing more and more from Bourdieu’s theory of practice.  The attractiveness of practice theory is that you don’t have to completely shed your structural view of institutions and fields to develop an endogenous explanations for how people create local worlds of resistance and novelty. Although I think it’s fair to question how well executed many of these studies are, I’ve noticed that a large portion of institutional theory has moved from stage 2 in Omar’s depiction of Bourdieu to stage 3.

Perhaps this is the reason why I’ve heard so many grumblings from people in the institutional theory world about Fligstein’s and McAdam’s work on “strategic action fields.” The F&M conceptualization of institutions and change is still very stage 2 in its understanding of how actors are situated in a field and how fields evolve over time. But this no longer resonates with many institutional theorists, who have already moved beyond this conceptualization of institutions to a stage 3 model in which actors are embedded in multiple fields and possess more agency than the actors of a fixed field world. While the former view is more structural and deterministic, the latter view is more cognitive and stochastic. F&M do very little to bridge stage 2 with stage 3 Bourdieu (although one could argue, but they don’t, that the concept of “social skill” derives from practice theory).

For more orgtheory commentary on Fligstein’s and McAdam’s SAF, see here and here.

cohort replacement and institutional change

Institutional theorists have become obsessed with explaining sources of institutional change in organizations. During neoinstitutional theory’s rise to prominence, it was mostly a theory of stability and homogenization of society, but in the last decade or so more and more institutional scholars have started focusing on change dynamics. There are some obviously good reasons for this, including the purpose of making institutional theory a more useful tool. Theories of institutional change often try to find endogenous explanations, e.g., institutional contradictions, competition between institutional logics. Still most of these explanations, because they give primacy to higher-level processes, ignore what’s going on at the ground level or at least fail to take into account the processes whereby people change their beliefs, adapt values, and alter their identities to make room for a new institutional practice.

In our rush to generate endogenous explanations for institutional change, it seems that some of the obvious micro-level processes of institutional change have been ignored. This research completely ignores the people whose “hearts and minds” must change in order to actually create lasting institutional change, even though for a new routine to become institutionalized people have to put it into action and for a new policy to be seen as “legitimate” people have to be convinced of the policy’s appropriateness. Perhaps the lack of emphasis on these micro-dynamics is the result of methodological biases. Demographic analysis, public opinion research, and experimental methods are mostly outside the toolkit of most institutional theorists. And yet, there’s probably a lot we could get from these analyses.

One potentially very important mechanism of institutional change is cohort replacement. By that I mean the replacement of old guards of organizational members and leaders with newer cohorts who have different beliefs, opinions, and values. It’s strange, when you think about it, that institutional theorists haven’t considered in any serious way how cohort replacement affects organizational practices and policies, even though opinion research indicates that cohort differences explain significant variation in beliefs and attitudes. Cohort differences may often matter more than life stage differences in explaining political opinions and attitudes. Take the case of liberalizing beliefs about same sex marriage. One study indicates that about half of the growth in support for same sex marriage is the result of cohort replacement. Younger generations are simply more open to this practice than preceding generations. We can expect that in a couple of generations, same sex marriage will be legal everywhere due to cohort replacement.

How might cohort replacement explain organizational change? One way to examine this would be to look at how demographic differences across organizations explain openness to new policies/practices or rates of early adoption. Another fruitful path would be to explain how cohort replacement creates identity conflict in organizations, a potentially crucial source of friction underlying change. Cohorts, in this sense, could be conceptualized as the carriers of different identities and logics. A nice illustration of this type of research is Nancy Whittier’s 1997 ASR paper about micro-cohorts and the transformation of the feminist movement. Even though the paper is often cited as an important illustration of how collective identity matters in movements, I think it’s undervalued as a study of institutional change.  Another potential line of investigation would be to examine the link between cohort replacement and selection processes at the field level-of-analysis.  One of my students pointed out to me yesterday that Haveman’s and Rao’s 1997 AJS paper on the thrift industry relies to an extent on the imagery of cohort replacement to explain why certain forms of thrift were selected.

More generally speaking, there should be a stronger link between research on organizational demography (e.g., see Damon Phillips’s work on law firms; Heather Haveman on managerial tenure) and institutional theory. Obviously, rates of entry and exit of managers affect organizational processes. The question for institutional theory is, how do these demographic changes affect institutional stability and heterogeneity?

cognition and the naturalness of institutions

Here’s a recent piece that might interest some orgtheory readers (pdf): Boyer & Petersen, 2011. “The naturalness of (many) social institutions: evolved cognition as their foundation.” Journal of Institutional Economics.

Abstract: Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become ‘natural’, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What are required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.

stages of institutionalist experience

Brayden wrote a very perceptive post about institutional theory’s displacement of resource dependency theory. That post inspired me to think about the history of institutional theory as it is practiced in soc, o.b., and management:

1. Paleo or “old” institutionalism: I think this was hatched by various folks like Sumner, Selznick, Merton, and others. Idea was simple. Communities have social practices or mores that shape social change. Selznick famously worked on the co-optation side of the story.
2. Proto institutionalism: Somewhere between Parsons, definitely in the old or “paleo” camp, and the DiMaggio/Powell/Meyer/Rowan spectrum, were people shifting from local social processes to global forces. Stinchcombe definitely fits, as does the work that grapples with org structrures and resource flows, even when it is not overtly focused on environments.
3. The New Institutionalism: The institutionalism we all know and love. Probably the big dispute was over the sources of structure – rational response to task completion or legitimacy signal? This move completed the switch from local community to polity/field/sector as the source of legitimacy. Rather quickly, this became the “go to” theory for a generation of sociologists who needed to justify their own studies of the social sources of org behavior.
4. Disputed Institutionalism: Starting in the late 1990s, perhaps with Davis and Thompson’s work on shareholder revolts or Clemens’ book on lobbying, people started linking conflict with institutions. This blew up with the work of Soule, Schneiberg, and Bartley. I’d also put myself in this camp because I view institutions and new org forms as long term consequences of political mobilization. The focus is still on non-local environments, but conflict revolves around cultural scripts, which is then filtered through statute and custom.
5. The New Micro-institutionalism: For a while, I thought that institutionalism was played out. Once you admit people could argue with institutions, there wasn’t much left to say. But then I read the stuff on institutional work by Suddaby & Lawrence. A simple point, we need a better account of the things that are done to create/defend/destroy institutions. My most very recent work employs these ideas.

So what’s next for institutional theory? Every time you think we’re done, some pushes it in a new direction.

On scientific skepticism…why it’s best to double (and triple) check, even when the data fit the profile

The New York Times recently carried a story that highlights the importance of scientific skepticism, even in the face of strong evidence. The author, Dr. Danielle Ofri, was seeing a patient, Mr. S, who had been diagnosed with HIV years prior while incarcerated. Apparently, not only did the medical test offer a positive diagnosis, but Mr. S’s social experiences were thought to be consistent with many of the risk factors associated with HIV. He was an inmate on Rikers Island, one of the most notorious jails in the country. For a variety of reasons, inmate populations in our nation’s jails and prisons have, on average, higher rates of HIV, hepatitis, TB and other communicable diseases than the rest of the population.  The man was also a former IV drug user, and using unsterilized needles is a leading mode of HIV transmission.  In fact, whenever Mr. S went to visit his doctor, nurses struggled to find healthy veins to draw blood to test his T-cell counts and viral loads, markers of HIV progression in the body. After years of taking HIV medications and doing annual blood work (as the routine blood tests that most HIV-positive individuals have every 3-6 months were deemed impossible given the condition of his veins), a nurse practitioner approached the situation with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism and asked for a new HIV test.

Turns out, Mr. S was never HIV positive.

Rather, the first test was a false positive.  Dr. Ofri wondered, “how the misdiagnosis could have persisted for so long — why we chose to explain his vigorous T-cells by classifying him as a nonprogressor, rather than considering that his initial H.I.V. test might have been incorrect.”

Mr. S likely wasn’t retested after the positive test result, Dr. Ofri hypothesizes, partly because his social experiences confirmed a positive HIV diagnosis. In short, he fit the profile due to his drug and incarceration history.  Years and thousands of dollars in HIV drugs later, it is discovered that he’s not HIV positive after all. The “profile” didn’t fit the man.

False positives are rare in HIV testing, but they do happen. As a result, many of the respondents in my HIV research describe being tested and retested to make sure that the results are accurate.

I guess the moral of the story is…. respect the science, but test and evaluate again. This applies of course to medicine, in which biological markers and social factors are interpreted together by health professionals to offer a diagnosis. But this also applies to social scientists, so that we can catch those unexpected instances in our data when 2+2 does not in fact equal 4.

What is a catch-all bureaucracy?

As the national unemployment rate continues to hover around 9.1%, I can’t help wondering how individuals are navigating an organization that is now an important part of their lives: their local unemployment office.

The aim of my book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (Univ of Chicago Press 2009), was not solely to talk about welfare caseworkers. Rather, I was interested in using the case of welfare offices to tell a story about a larger set of organizations. Catch-all bureaucracies, I argue in the book, are government agencies called upon to be the societal arms of “help,” broadly defined. In light of ongoing debates about the remedies for high unemployment, these institutions remain central to our understanding of how those who are economically struggling navigate both macro-level economic and political transformations and micro-level conditions and struggles that shape their financial outlooks.

Michael Lipsky (1980) famously defined street-level bureaucracies as institutions in which government workers interact directly with citizens and exercise substantial discretion in their jobs. However, it would be a mistake to lump all street-level bureaucracies together—harboring the inaccurate assumption that they contain similar levels and kinds of social meaning and subsequently face similar organizational dilemmas. What separates catch-all bureaucracies from other street-level bureaucracies—such as Departments of Motor Vehicles, City Halls, or public services in the most affluent communities—is how the manifestations of personal and group struggles with economic deprivation are readily apparent within their borders. As clients wrestle with unemployment’s causes and consequences, they in turn bring a myriad of concerns and situations into these institutions, placing unique demands on the employees who work in them.

How does race inform professional identities?

Did you know that while blacks comprised 10.9 percent of the total labor force in 2006, they constituted one-fourth of the workers determining eligibility for individuals applying for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, unemployment benefits, social security, public housing, and other state assistance (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2007)?

I have written extensively on the increased racial diversity within the employee ranks of street-level bureaucracies. This focus gives us a window into the lives of public workers (a group that has gotten a lot of attention in light of the efforts to reduce their collective bargaining power); and research in this area also encourages us to think about the elements of professional identities.  In the abstracts that follow, I point you to articles written by yours truly that take up the questions, “How are professional identities of workers within organizations informed by their racial, class, and gender identities, and how do these intersecting social and professional identities shape events on the ground?”

the era of public university privatization

Olderwoman has written a fascinating post on Scatterplot about the political conflict brewing (or boiling over perhaps) in Madison as the UW-Madison contemplates separating itself from the larger Wisconsin university system.  The move would allow them to raise tuition and would grant the university some autonomy from the state.  Of course, the change is complicated by the current, messy politics of Wisconsin and is made even messier, as OW describes in her post, by the conflicts of interest that faculty have as citizens who typically support more progressive policies while also being stakeholders in a research institution striving to maintain its elite status. Here’s a highlight from her post:

As I have debated this issue with grad students (who are mostly lined up in opposition to the plan), I have been trying to unravel the threads of interest involved. The students tend to emphasize concerns about tuition. Issues of access and affordability are real ones. They are issues now, as state funding continues to decline. All predictions about how this issue would play out under different structures are entirely hypothetical. One group argues that to change from being a public university is to give up forever on the idea of more tax dollar subsidies for tuition. Another group argues that the only way to increase affordability is to raise tuition simultaneously with raising financial aid — effectively to charge a sliding scale that depends on family income; people who advocate this disagree about which structure is most likely to do this. As that is all hypothetical, that particular debate is solely one of opinions.

But the whole tuition debate — one I am sympathetic to as a progressive — cuts entirely differently from the issue of what is good for an elite research university. If my goal is access to high quality education for youth of modest means, wouldn’t I just stop funding an elite research university entirely? Wouldn’t that access goal be better met with an institution staffed by lower-paid faculty teaching three or four courses a semester than by an institution staffed by higher-paid faculty whose major interest and time commitment is to their research/scholarship? The trend at elite schools is toward inequality: higher and higher salaries for the high-performing research faculty, and more and more teaching done by lower paid adjunct faculty.

One core value question is whether you support the idea of an elite research institution or not. Should there be major public research institutions at all? And if so, what does it take to maintain them? Can an elite research university survive with an egalitarian ethos in the face of competition from the unapologetic elitist private institutions?

Fligstein and McAdam on Strategic Action Fields

The most recent issue of Sociological Theory features an article by Fligstein and McAdam entitled “Towards a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields.”  In this paper F & M, attempt a “grand” conceptual synthesis (and also attempt to draw a systematic outline of the empirical implications of) a series of recent trends towards the integration of organizational, institutional and social movement theories.  This is a place where the literature has been kind of awkwardly moving for a while now (e.g. Scheneiberg and Clemens 2006; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Rao 2008; Evans and Kay 2008; King and Pearce 2010), but which is finally given a measure of overall conceptual coherence in this piece.

The theoretical motor of the entire paper is very parsimonious version of field theory.  This is also a place where the literature had been awkwardly moving, with various people inventing and re-inventing a field perspective using all sorts of different language and terms such as ecologies, and multiple institutional logics (e.g. Abbott 2005; see also here).  F & M bring order to what could have been some overwhelmingly complicated proceedings through their economical meta-concept of “strategic action fields” (as well as other secondary and very handy distinctions).  This concept is supposed to subsume older versions (including sectors, movement industries, organizational fields and I would add Abbottian ecologies) of the same general thing; essentially SAFs are sites where collective actors struggle for what is at stake (what Bourdieu referred to as “illusio”), taking each other into account while doing so.  The general dynamics of SAFs can then be described using the combined resources of “French” field theory (e.g. dominated/dominant, doxa, struggle for recognition, etc.), American reconceptualizations thereof (e.g. Fligstein’s theory of social skill) and standard concepts taken from social movement (incumbent/challenger, contention, mobilization, framing, etc.) and organizational theory (institutional logics).

This paper is an absolute must-read.  Easily one of the most important conceptual advances in organizational and social movement theory (in fact one of the  ambitious claims of the paper is that these two realms are empirically co-extensive, so there should be brought under a single conceptual framework) in recent memory.

libya: this is what ‘virtual democracy’ looks like

An interesting article on the relationship between Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and the London School of Economics.  Gaddafi wrote his Ph.D. thesis there on “how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions.”  Later, the LSE “accepted £1.5m from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, an organisation headed by Saif – some of which was to finance “a virtual democracy centre.’” The selfsame Gaddafi, of course, has threatened civil war and to “fight to the last minute, until the last bullet” if the rabble-rousers don’t stop their rabble-rousing. (Human Rights Watch has confirmed 233 dead as of Monday, though other estimates are more than double that figure). Knowledge may be power, but power can always buy knowledge or at least its patina.

zizek and ramadan on egypt

After a couple of weeks during which Joe Biden claims that Mubarak is not a dictator, an NPR commentator says that Arabs have an innate preference for dictatorship, and Tony Blair declares essentially that “We Are All Mubarak,” I found this refreshing.  The main point: no outcome—whether it be the mythic Western-style liberal democracy, the feared Islamic theocracy, or something altogether different—is predestined in Egypt.  Oh, and I think Zizek means to say Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, not Tom and Jerry, around the 20 minute mark.

amj is orgtheorytastic!!!

If you love organization theory and institutional analysis, you’ll find the most recent edition of the Academy of Management Journal very interesting. December 2010 is dedicated to exploring new directions in the study of organizational environments. Here’s the table of contents.

A few highlights: Mukti Khaire, one of the very first orgtheory guest bloggers, has  an article, co-written with R. Daniel Wadhwani,  on the development of the Indian art market:

Changing Landscapes: The Construction of Meaning and Value in a New Market Category—Modern Indian Art

Stable category meanings act as institutions that facilitate market exchange by providing bases for comparison and valuation. Yet little is known about meaning construction in new categories or how meaning translates into valuation criteria. We address this gap in a descriptive study of these processes in an emerging category: modern Indian art. Discourse analysis revealed how market actors shaped the construction of meaning in the new category by reinterpreting historical constructs in ways that enhanced commensurability and enabled aesthetic comparisons and valuation. Analysis of auction transactions indicated greater intersubjective agreement about valuation over time as the new category institutionalized.

Matt Kraatz, also a guest, analyzes the adoption of new practices with a study of enrollment management practices, written with institional theory guru Marc Ventresca and Lina Deng.

Precarious Values and Mundane Innovations: Enrollment Management in American Liberal Arts Colleges

Drawing primarily from Selznick’s institutionalism, we make a general case for renewed attention to the “mundane administrative arrangements” that underlie the organizational capacity for value realization and a particular case for the study of value-subverting management innovations. An empirical study of “enrollment management” in liberal arts colleges reveals this ostensibly innocuous innovation’s value-undermining effects and identifies the organizational and environmental factors that have made these venerable organizations more or less susceptible to its adoption.

Lots of other goodies: Lok on organizational identity; Battilana and Dorado address organizational identity with a study of micro-finance groups; Marquis and Huang discuss founding conditions and path dependence in the banking industry; McClean and Benham discuss corporate misconduct. And there’s tons more!

Finally, if you’d like to read my latest thinking on institutions, movements and organizational change, I have an article about how organizational leaders can expand their power through manipulating institutions (“Power Through Institutional Work”). I explain how one college president used the institutional disruption associated with the Black Student movement to redefine his powers and repress the movement (sort of!).

urb/orgs part 3: land trusts, elites, and the public good

16 June 1947

Motored to Brockhampton, arriving in the cool of the evening. How beautiful this place is. I walked down to Lower Brockhampton just before dark, the trees dead quiet, not even whispering, and the undergrowth steaming. Two enormous black-and-white bulls gave me a fright by noiselessly poking their great faces over a gate and peering at me in a meditative manner. This evening the whole tragedy of England impressed itself upon me. This small, not very important seat, in the heart of our secluded country, is now deprived of its last squire. A whole social system has broken down. What will replace it beyond government by the masses, uncultivated, rancorous, savage, philistine, the enemies of all things beautiful? How I detest democracy. More and more I believe in benevolent autocracy. (Lees-Milne 2009, p. 18)

This little gem comes from the diaries of James Lees-Milne, the Historic Buildings Secretary of England’s National Trust. The extensive diaries of Lees-Milne’s journeys around the British countryside acquiring properties for the Trust are very funny and gossipy stuff for Merchant Ivory fans or those with a bent for real estate exotica. His personal life was even juicier. Mike McQuarrie asked in an earlier comment why cheap, low-quality architectural design for the masses is so “anti-social,” and Lees-Milne’s elegy vividly shows how preservation movements are tied up with anti-democratic sentiment and social control– a standard critique in a wide variety of environmental literatures (my favorite here). In my last post in this series, I talked about the often unheralded role of real estate in organizational life, using Dorothy Height’s memoir of her work with the National Council of Negro Women as an example. This time, I stick with life-writing about organizational work, but shift to consider a special kind of organization–  private land trusts and historic preservation societies that seek to conserve real estate itself, typically for its architectural, historic, or environmental value.

Herefordshire bull, 2008, by Arun Marsh

world cup survey

institutional dualities

I generally try to avoid the question, “what is an institution?” When grad students want to engage the question, I usually refer them to other people who’ve written about this (e.g. Scott; Jepperson). The problem with defining something as ubiquitous and varied-in-form as institutions is that your definition is almost always going to be wrong to someone because it leaves out a phenomenon that another scholar thinks of as being institutional. Definitions of institution tend to be either too broad or too narrow and never very precise. So with that caveat, I’m pointing you to a new definition that probably suffers from those same problems. The definition is worth considering though because it helps to illuminate some theoretical problems, and possibly mechanisms, that I think are important to consider when doing institutional analysis.

John Mohr and Harrison White published an intriguing paper in Theory and Society in 2008 that reconceptualizes institutions as a set of dualities – or relationships between varying levels of interaction and meaning that constitute one another. The following figure comes from that paper and diagrams their basic argument:

The three circles correspond to different levels of social organization (self, group, field) that are linked together by structural dualities. But within each circle, other relational dualities define the space. At the level  of the self there is a duality that inheres between mind and body, of knowing and doing. In a group, there is a duality linking stories to social networks. At the level of an institutional field, there are systems of rhetoric and systems of social organization. Our contention is that institutions subsume these relational sub-systems and the various articulations that link them together (496).

They make the additional point that institutions, when conceived of as dualities linking fields, groups, and selves, are really meso-level phenomena. They are glue that keeps individuals, organizations, and fields coherent.

Once you begin to see institutions as a set of dualities, you also get a sense for how and when institutional change takes place. They use several examples of institutional change in the paper to illustrate, including the emergence of rock ‘n roll and the introduction of new academic fields.  Radical institutional change usually stems from intermediaries linking different rhetorics and stories with unfamiliar kinds of social organization and networks. This sort of institutional change is rare since it requires that openings for boundary spanners exist (e.g., DJs in markets with both white and black audiences; performers like Elvis who had familiarity with different styles/rhetoric). In other words, sites for institutional change of this type typically occur in institutional sites with “over-bridging” or “the sustained juxtaposition of multiple styles within the same institutional site.”

Most institutions though are resilient because they have evolved to ward off contradictory styles and have segregating mechanisms that keep intermediaries out. Resilient institutions, then, have structural linkages that bridge across field, group, and self so as to reproduce consistent meanings.

The article has some bite, I think, because it identifies specific mechanisms that help flesh out staple concepts from the neo-institutional theory toolkit like mutability and institutional logics.

asr’s new home

Am I the only one who is ecstatic about the American Sociological Review’s new online home at Sage?  Okay, ecstatic may be too strong, but I am very happy to see the Sage connection, which I think makes ASR more accessible and MUCH easier to download. Now, if we can only convince ASR to stop requesting paper copies during the submission process….

The latest issue of ASR has a few articles that may be of interest to organizational scholars. Thomas Maher looks at uprisings in Nazi death camps to explain when collective action is likely to arise among oppressed groups that have few opportunities or resources. The context is interesting because death camps are obviously one place where structural opportunities are limited, but yet some groups were still able to take collective action and mount resistance. He maintains that collective action in repressive regimes is more likely to occur when people perceive a threat as immediate and lethal.  Judith Stepan-Norris and Caleb Southworth examine the effect of competition among rival unions on the growth of union membership. Gregory Hooks and Brian McQueen add an interesting new chapter to the study of the welfare state in the U.S. Their study suggests that the rise of the military industrial complex created a competing institution around which conservative voters and legislators rallied and sink federal resources, limiting support for the Democrat’s agenda and stunting the growth of a welfare state comparable to those seen in Europe. Definitely worth reading.