Download 1. social structure and organizations revisited

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1.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND
ORGANIZATIONS REVISITED
Michael Lounsbury and Marc J. Ventresca
Sociological studies of complex organizations chronicle a long history of
analytic concern with the linkages between wider societal arrangements and the
structure and activities of organizations (Perrow, 1986, 2002). In fact, it is only
in recent decades and among some theorists and empirical researchers that
attention has narrowed from a focus on institutionally-rich studies of labor
unions, schools, firms, government bureaus, social movement organizations,
advocacy groups, nonprofit agencies, and sundry varied organizations, to a focus
on formal organizations as abstract instrumentally-oriented entities operating in
environments that are narrowly conceptualized as material resource spaces. Over
the past decade, however, there have been an increasing number of calls to
revisit the dynamics of organizations and society (e.g. Friedland & Alford, 1991;
Scott, 2001; Stern & Barley, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1997).
This chapter identifies common concerns and research opportunities for
contemporary organizational sociologists interested in social structure as a more
richly textured n-dimensional space in which organizations navigate. To situate
our agenda, we discuss key themes from mid-century organizational sociology
in light of current cultural and social theory, highlighting how more recent work
builds upon and extends the mid-century social structural tradition and where
new work can take shape. In particular, we revisit the 1965 essay by Arthur
L. Stinchcombe, “Social structure and organizations,” that anchors a conception of social structure and organization that is useful for an emerging
community of structurally-oriented organizational researchers.
Social Structure and Organizations Revisited, Volume 19, pages 3–36.
Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISBN: 0-7623-0872-9
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MICHAEL LOUNSBURY AND MARC J. VENTRESCA
The arguments we make and that the chapters in this volume extend are
basic: U.S. sociologies of organization into the 1960s argued directly and
purposively for understanding how broader social structures, and typically, the
politics of resources and authority, shaped organizational actors and activity.
This work built on the foundations of mid-century sociological analyses of
power, conflict, and authority, itself the legacy of early 20th century “old”
institutionalisms in economics and sociology. By the early 1970s, sociologists
and, increasingly, colleagues in management and other professional schools had
generated a distinctly different set of theoretical arguments and empirical
research traditions. This work grappled with and developed two themes that
characterize the modern synthesis in organizational sociology: (1) the shift to
“open systems” approaches (e.g. focused attention on organization-environment
relations), and (2) the burdens of the legacy of narrow readings of Weber on
bureaucracy, to the neglect of Weber on domination and other critical
traditions. The new theories were varied, but several general analytic features
became increasingly prominent as the work accumulated and as researchers
sought to develop a more “synthetic” organization theory.
We suggest that social exchange approaches to power and aspirations for
more parsimonious quantitative models animated this new work, which in turn,
reinforced restricted conceptions of politics, resources, and the interplay among
these in societal context. The institutional and legal bases of organizations
became implicit, typically unexamined or assumed. Theory and empirical work
paid less attention to wider societal patterns and distributions of resources.
Concomitantly, midcentury attention to social structure became transformed into
conceptions of abstract, exogenous environments that constrained, and in
many ways, determined organizational structures and behavior (via functional
imperatives such as legitimacy or efficiency).
This introduction provides context for a set of original empirical papers
and thematic commentaries. We review the heritage studies of organizational
sociology from the 1950s through the early 1970s and probe Stinchcombe’s
1965 essay to sound out analytic legacies and opportunities for contemporary
research. We then discuss developments in the organizational research agenda
in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting how a focus on social exchange approaches
to power reconceptualized social structure and restricted the intellectual and
policy opportunities of organizational sociology. We close with the outlines of
an alternative agenda, comprising a set of research reports that highlight
opportunities for a renewed social structural approach to organizational analysis
that both enriches the conceptions of politics and societal struggle central to
the vision of Stinchcombe 1965 and extends this tradition in light of
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contemporary trends in social and cultural theory. We see developments in the
analysis and theorization of culture as providing particularly promising new
directions for social structural approaches to organizations. For instance, we
note that emerging new structuralisms in cultural sociology and the study of
stratification (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Mohr, 2000) provide key conceptual and
methodological developments that could be fruitfully integrated into the agenda
of organizational sociology.
We argue that the time is ripe for organizational researchers to renew attention
to broader social structures and to bring “society” back to center stage. “Society”
here includes social structure in the idiom Stinchcombe (1965) called for and
also in ways that more directly engage contemporary emphases on both distributions of resources and meanings along with the everyday social practices that
support and can contribute to the reshaping of social structure (Bourdieu, 1984;
Clemens, 1997; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Stryker, 1994). Our efforts in this
volume aim to bring together a diverse, yet congenial set of sociological
approaches to organizational analysis that highlight the vibrancy of the social
structural tradition in organizational sociology as well as the value of more
consciously recognizing these works as part of an ongoing project.
“SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS” AND
MID-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO
ORGANIZATIONS
Since mid-century, the scope of research on organizations in sociology has
narrowed from a concern about the role of organizations in society with a big
“S” (Michels, 1949; Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Stinchcombe, 1965) to
perspectives that emphasize concrete exchange processes within and between
orgnizations and organizational demography (Hannan & Freeman, 1977;
Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Williamson, 1985). These developments have greatly
enhanced our understanding of the variety of ways organizations are affected
by transactions with other organizations in their environment and focused
on new levels of analysis and often alternative causal mechanisms. These
approaches have also facilitated the development of substantial empirical
and theoretical literatures. But one effect of these trends is that the study of
organizations has become disconnected from the study of societal stratification,
politics and social change that provided core problematics in earlier sociological
studies of organizations and society. Further, much empirical research on
organizations has come to emphasize a highly rationalized and instrumental
conception of interorganizational relations in contrast to views that highlight
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MICHAEL LOUNSBURY AND MARC J. VENTRESCA
ambiguity over uncertainty and treat these relations as politically-inflected and
culturally-embedded (March & Olson, 1976; Dacin, Ventresca & Beal, 1999).
In the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists charted a political economy approach
to organizations, informed by middle-range theorizing and rich empirical case
studies. These sociological approaches to organizations were informed and
intertwined with the study of broader political processes and related societallevel social structures. These studies did not focus narrowly on organizational
phenomena, nor did they try to build a synthetic theory of organization. Instead,
organizations were seen as sites for understanding the constitution and
consequences of modern forms of power. This sensibility was derived from
the work of Max Weber and other early theorists of domination and authority,
institutional economists such as Veblen, Commons, and Schumpeter who
theorized about industry and economic change, and modern sociological
theorists such as Parsons and Merton. The research extended classic Weberian
concerns with power, domination, authority, and legitimacy, with a focus on
organizations as one important kind of social structure.
These works conceptualized social structural forces quite broadly as including
patterns of ideas, values, elements of stratification, and social interactions – in
essence, the stuff of social organization in its raw form. Social structure was
often treated as a social fact, confronting actors with durable but not obdurate
patterns of resources and meaning. Empirical research, however, also investigated social structure as emergent – the outcome of intentional choices,
strategies, and politics. Pivotal studies in this period provided us with a vivid
vocabulary for modern organization theory.
Selznick (1949) highlighted how organizational efforts to reshape the
environment are explicitly enmeshed in broader political negotiations. In turn,
he treated organization-building as a complex endeavor that required leaders
to integrate an organization’s goals and operations with the demands, goals
and orientations of its institutional milieu (Selznick, 1957). Gouldner (1954)
concentrated attention on how formal variations in work situations affected labor
relations tactics and developments within a highly stratified industrial bureaucracy. Lipset, Trow and Coleman (1956) showed how a union organization was
able to successfully build a monopoly around typographical skills. Stinchcombe
(1959) argued that the social organization of work in bureaucracies or more
autonomous craft occupations was contingent upon technical features of work
processes. Bendix (1956) helped to forge a comparative tradition that highlighted how variations in state-building projects and associated ideas of authority
result in distinct institutional and organizational configurations of work and
management practices. Duncan (1960) showed how the class structure of
resources in metropolis regions shaped industrial organization.
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This sampling of studies share a number of analytic features and commitments that were available for organizational sociologies that followed. While
eclectic in their treatments of “organizations” as an analytic construct, they
provided empirical challenges to the then-prevailing ideal typical conception
of organizations as tightly-coupled, integrated, functional, and unitary. They
focused on work, on how things got done, and on the varieties of social
organization of such activity. They recognized and provided explanations for
conflict and change, often through rich case studies of complex organizational
systems that focused on both resource and exchange linkages, but also on
authority relations that took shape and became manifest in meaningful contexts
of beliefs, ideologies, and cultural models. In this way, they stand distinct
from much contemporary organizational studies in administrative science and
other strands of organization theory that focus primarily on technical contingencies of organizations and inquire into optimal configurations or patterns.
Stinchcombe’s 1965 essay, “Social structure and organizations,” is one
foundational statement for a more politically-oriented organizational theory that
foregrounds broader societal processes. It is also one of the works from this
period that continues to be a pivotal citation in varied contemporary theoretical
and empirical research. In current research, Stinchcombe 1965 is usually cited
as the source of claims about how social structure imprints new organizational
forms in time-inflected ways or how new forms may suffer from a liability of
newness. We instead read Stinchcombe 1965 as an essay that, in the words
of Merton (1987), aimed to “specify ignorance” for the development of new
knowledge of organizations. We believe the richness of ideas and arguments
in this paper remain under-explored. The focus of his essay on grounded studies
of politics, stratification and resources, ideas, and the societal context of
organization importantly informs the agenda that research in this volume charts
out. Further, it provides a clear point of engagement with contemporary social
theory and analysis of organizations.
Stinchcombe’s analytical lens, often richly soaked in historical detail and
informed by the breadth of the Weberian gaze, provides a wide angle view of
organizational life as influenced by conflicts over forms of administration (craft,
professional, bureaucratic), the social organization of markets and societies, the
stability of political regimes, social classes and other kinds of status groups.
In his characteristically eclectic style, Stinchcombe defined a brand of organizational analysis that seeks to systematically uncover the “relation of society
outside organizations [social structure] to the internal life of organizations”
(1965, p. 142). Stinchcombe’s attention to how organizational dynamics are
centrally connected to societal values, power structures and related features of
stratification, however, is too frequently neglected in the wisdom taken from
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his essay. Stinchcombe’s scholarly corpus is remarkable for its breadth, volume,
and acuteness with regard to major sociological subfields as well as for its
empirical ambitions. Committed to the notion that good sociology involves
developing theoretical generalizations, Stinchcombe’s intellectual curiosity has
provided us with insights into a wide variety of empirical domains such as
construction (1959), police administrative practice (1963), a high school (1964),
love (with Heimer, 1980), Eighteenth century French stratification and revolution (1982), third party buying in insurance (1984), careers in computer software
firms (with Heimer, 1988), the political economy of the Carribean (1995), and
the social structure of market liquidity (Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 1999).1
The 1965 essay was prominent in the Handbook of Organizations, one
of the first efforts to compile and overview research in the emerging field of
organization theory. The Handbook assembled an eclectic mix of articles that
provided overviews of research streams on different kinds of organizations,
of research methods employed, and of how the study of organizations is central
to extant disciplinary traditions in sociology, psychology and political science.
Stinchcombe makes three points in the first pages of his agenda-calling essay:
(1) research and theory on the linkage between social structure and organization,
or “the external relations of organizations” is “underdeveloped” and of “little
beauty or power” (1965, p. 143); (2) social structure comprises “. . . groups,
institutions, laws, population characteristics, and sets of social relations that
form the environments of the organization . . . any variables which are stable
characteristics of the society outside the organization” (1965, p. 142); and
(3) methods can and should draw from eclectic and “strategic” empirical samples
to generate propositions about social structure and organization.
The chapter itself is organized as commentary with propositions on five
general research questions that develop opportunities at the intersection of social
structure and organization, typically based in a few available research studies,
and illustrated with new or borrowed data to underscore the import of close
empirical work in his version of general theorizing. First, what is the effect of
social structure on the rate of foundation of new organizations, particularly organizations of a new kind or structure? Second, how can we explain, in social
structural terms, the correlation between the time in history that a particular
type of organization was invented and the social structure of organizations of
that type that exist at the present time? Third, what is the relation of organizations to the use of violence in the larger society (e.g. revolution), particularly
violence and unrestrained competition in the political arena (including
organizational stratification as outcome and mechanism)?
Fourth, how do organizational arrangements affect the relations between
social classes in the larger society (intraorganizational stratification as the case
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where classes meet and define broader working relationships)? Fifth, what is
the effect of organizations on social structure (more particularly the effect of
the mere presence or absence of organizations on the solidarity and feeling
of identity of “communal” groups)? Further, Stinchcombe identified common
features in this mix of topics: each has to do with some aspect of the relation
of organization to the environing social structure and each treats characteristics
of formal organizations as variables, rather than as components of ideal types
(a commitment challenged by the paucity of available empirical studies and
data sources) (1965, pp. 143–145). While the essay is certainly wide-ranging
(perhaps sprawling), it is remarkable to note how distant much of contemporary organizational theory seems to be from Stinchcombe’s concerns about
situated historical analysis, the dynamics of social identity and class, and societal
transformation.
The citation history of the 1965 paper provides an empirical indicator of its
popularity while also raising a provocative set of issues that inform the main
arguments of this essay and the empirical work in this volume. We identified
and coded over 750 citations to “Social structure and organizations”, from its
publication through 2000 in the Social Science Citation Index.2 These citations
are predominantly in social science journals, with the largest proportions over
time in sociology and management journals. Substantial citations also occur in
journals in political science and international studies, in public health and education, and in over 15 other disciplinary and research fields. Figure 1 reports the
annual count of citations disaggregated by academic area journals in sociology,
management, and other knowledge domains.
Overall, there is a secular trend of increases in annual citation counts,
providing evidence that the paper has increasingly become a key reference for
new scholarly work. The specific pattern, a succession of peaks, each followed
by a few years of citation counts at that higher level, suggests that different
research communities and emerging theoretical traditions have found the paper
useful and relevant as a touchstone. When we disaggregate the overall counts
by academic area, two further compositional trends become visible. First, a
larger share of citations to this paper over the years has typically been in journals other than discipline-identified sociology journals. Second, the substantial
increases in citations to the paper since the early 1990s came primarily from
citations in articles published in management journals, relative to pre-1980
compositional patterns.
These trends confirm the continued recognition of Stinchcombe (1965) as a
foundational contribution in the field of organizational theory. We also believe
that the citation patterns are suggestive of broader changes that have shaped
research on organizations. The sustained, but relatively lower levels of citations
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Fig. 1.
Annual Citation Counts of Stinchcombe 1965 Essay by Academic Area
Journals, 1966–2000.
since the early 1980s in discipline-identified sociology journals may track the
fate of mid-century sociology research sensibilities in “modern” organization
theory. The increased number and proportion of citations to Stinchcombe
(1965) in management journals beginning around 1980 provides an indicator
of a shift in intellectual and professional venues for researchers concerned with
topics linked to the claims of the paper. We argue that as business school
faculty became more prominent in driving the growth of organization theory
(particularly “macro” approaches and “synthetic” organization theory distinct
from the case-study based traditions of research on firms, agencies, or other
organizations located in substantive contexts like labor, social movements,
education, and the like), and as management journals became central arenas
for the construction of organizational knowledge, Stinchcombe (1965) was
narrowly appropriated. It has increasingly become a ceremonial progenitor
citation in a few lines of research, most vividly in organizational ecology
and corporate demography, and in some institutional theories of organization.
From this reading, the citation history of this paper tracks important shifts in
the field of organization theory as a subfield and its central concerns and
commitments (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002).
We next offer an account of how the development of organizational theory as a
subfield redirected and fragmented the wider agenda for which Stinchcombe
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argued. In the spirit of Merton and Stinchcombe, we then “specify ignorance” by
identifying contemporary problematics and opportunities for organizational sociologists interested in the relationship between organizations and social structure,
and then introduce empirical papers that develop elements of this agenda.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY
AS A SUBFIELD: INSTRUMENTAL EXCHANGE
APPROACHES AND DISSIDENT VOICES
While some researchers have attended to ideological shifts in core imageries
and metaphors of organization (Barley & Kunda, 1992; Morgan, 1998), modern
organizational theorists as a whole have aspired to develop research in the
idiom of normal science as a strategy to build a professional subfield that would
appear respectable among neighboring social science fields. In U.S. sociology
departments, organizational theory as a synthetic research tradition has had
limited spread, with research and training concentrated among a relatively
few universities. The aspiration to build a theory of complex and formal
organization, latterly organization theory, has been historically contested by a
wider sociological community skeptical of the abstraction. Specialty concentrations in organizational analysis began to appear in sociology departments
in the late 1960s, often accompanied by foundation and federal support for
research in applied areas (e.g. education, mental health and policy services).
In the 1970s, however, sociologists trained in organization theory began to
migrate to several companion professional schools, most prominently and
consequentially to schools of management and business, also to schools of
education, law, and public health. These peregrinations inevitably affected the
development of organizational research.
Introductory seminars in contemporary organizational theory often begin
with the modern synthesis – especially with the development of contingency
theory in the mid-1960s in the work of James D. Thompson and the empirical
studies of Lawrence and Lorsch. Instead of focusing on how social structure
shaped organizations, contingency theorists built on the administrative theories
of Taylor, Barnard and Fayol to identify optimal or necessary structure-context
congruence and develop prescriptions about how managers can take effective
actions that enhance the performance of their organizations. Initially,
administrative-based theories were considered alongside the social structural
tradition in sociology. For instance, the inaugural 1956 issue of the
Administrative Science Quarterly included articles by the administrative theorist
James D. Thompson as well as by the grand structural functionalist sociologist
Talcott Parsons. The American Sociological Review in those same years
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published works more distinctly in the social structural tradition. Over the next
10–15 years, however, research in organization theory tended to focus on
internal organization structure and process and the relationship between
organizations and their resource environments, to the relative neglect of studying
how organizations are related to broader social structures (Stern & Barley,
1996). One of the main factors driving this shift in research sensibilities
towards resources and away from social structure had to do with the efforts
of organizational scholars to professionalize around issues of management
and organizational effectiveness. This professionalization mainly occurred
through the Academy of Management, the leading professional association for
management researchers
The Academy of Management was founded in 1936, but operated very
informally up until the 1970s (Wrege, 1988). The first issue of the Academy of
Management Journal was published in 1957, and during the 1960s, the Academy
grew in membership as management schools began to focus on research and
as the number of management faculty overall increased. As a result, the
Academy of Management changed from an organization built on close personal
friendships to one that was more formalized, differentiated, and professionally
run (Wrege, 1988, p. 28). In 1969, seven professional interest subgroups were
created: Corporate Strategy, Management History, Operations Analysis,
Organizational Studies, Personal and Industrial Relations, Philosophy, Values
and Styles, and Social and Public Issues. In 1971, ten professional divisions
were put in place including the Division of Organizational Behavior and the
Division of Organization and Management Theory.
The creation of the Organizational and Management Theory Division marked
the formation of a formal subfield for organizational theorists with all the
self-conscious professional apparatus involved in managing and maintaining a
jurisdictional boundary – professional prizes, organizations, informal colleges
etc. This boundary-making, however, reduced the cross-border trade with
subfields in sociology that focused on stratification and culture (with a few
notable exceptions among researchers whose work directly engaged both
organization theory and other sociological subfields (e.g. Aldrich, Bacharach,
DiMaggio, Kanter, Hirsch, Peterson, Zald). The formalization of the Academy
and changes in the research aspirations of leading management schools (as well
as other professional schools, many of which began to hire social science
disciplinary-trained faculty beginning in the 1970s) changed the terms and stakes
of research on organizations. In addition, the presence of Academy-affiliated
infrastructures supporting research laid the groundwork for the growth of
managerially-oriented organizational researchers whose work emphasized
instrumental notions of organization and social exchange processes.
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The growing prominence of administrative theories in the study of organizations
not only gave rise to more managerially-based theories and concepts about organizations, but also redirected research agendas and publishing among sociologists
studying organizations in this more synthetic way. For example, William
Evan (1963) developed organizational set analysis (from Merton’s role theory, via
Blau & Scott, 1962) that was employed to study resource flows in industries
(e.g. Hirsch, 1972). In a different vein, Peter Blau aimed to develop propositional
theories about formal organizational structure and administrative capacity (Blau
& Scott, 1962; Blau & Schoenherr, 1971). Stinchcombe, even with a continued
focus on broader relationships between organizations and society, published
Creating Efficient Industrial Administrations (1974). The shift in sensibilities was
away from asking research questions about organizations and society and towards
focusing more concretely on processes of organizational management and how
resource connections shape organizational systems (Perrow, 1986).
Nonetheless, many sociologists continued to work on problems having to do
with social structure and organizations. Coleman (1974), for instance, put
forward provocative arguments about the institutional and legal foundations of
modern corporate actors and their role in the “asymmetric” power balance in
modern society. The “organizational society” thesis, that maintains that modern
societies are actually organizational societies, also emerged (see Perrow, 1991,
2002). Dornbusch and Scott (1975) examined the legitimacy of authority in
careful social psychological terms and linked broader societal conditions to the
determinants of effective and legitimate exercise of power. Building on
Aldrich’s (1976, 1979) emerging evolutionary perspective, Benson (1977)
promoted a dialectical view of organizational processes that derided the growing
prominence of rational-functional theories of organizations. While this work
kept alive the aspirations of midcentury organizational sociologies, new sociological research on organizations took a different form.
Building on the foundations of rational-functional approaches to organization
science, new social structural approaches increasingly penetrated “mainstream”
organizational research in the administrative traditions. From the late 1970s, a
novel set of research initiatives in organizational sociology became codified and
packaged into standard research strategies that produced research in the idiom
of normal science (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002). These included extensions in the
institutional analysis of organizations (e.g. Meyer & Scott, 1983; Scott & Meyer,
1994; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001), organizational demography (e.g.
Hannan & Freeman, 1977; Carroll & Hannan, 2000), and network methods and
theory (e.g. Baker, 1984; Burt, 1992; Podolny, 1993; Nohria & Eccles, 1992;
White, 2001). Hence, while social structural approaches to organizations have
been present in some form all along, the more recent lines of work have
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de-emphasized a focus on conflict, situated case analysis, and broader social
structural considerations that provided key intellectual commitments for
Stinchcombe and his contemporaries.
Specifically, we claim that as organizational theory emerged as a management subfield, the conceptualizations of both social structure and organizations
became increasingly materialist and instrumental, animated by the growing
allure of social exchange and resource dependence logics (e.g. Emerson, 1962;
Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). In these treatments, social structure finds expression
only in a conception of the “environment” that is abstract, unitary and
exogenous to the actual workings of organizations and social life (see Scott,
2001). The instrumental approach de-emphasized the insights of political
economy approaches to organizations (Perrow, 2002; Stern, 1979; Zald, 1970)
that underscored complex organizational arrangements in heterogeneous
relation to varied constituencies; in addition, prominence was given to the notion
of “uncertainty” in preference to the recognition of fundamental ambiguity and
loose-coupling that animated works in the behavioral and cognitive traditions
(Brown, 1976; March & Olsen, 1976; Meyer & Rowan, 1978; Weick, 1995).
These shifts reinforced a conception of organizations as goal-driven unitary
entities that are interlocked in concrete exchange relations. Absent is the insight
that wider environments provide constitutional materials for organizations
– particular elements and also ideologies and rationales that are contingent,
time-dependent, and potentially in conflict one with another. Further, research
began to focus on resources as the main driver of structure and activity, without
sufficient attention to how social structure mediates the effects of resources and
indeed the very notion of what comprises a resource.
The instrumentalist imagery is quite explicit in organizational demography
where empirical analyses have tended to focus on how competitive interactions
among producer organizations are modulated by shifts in population-level
resource spaces (Hannan & Freeman, 1989). In many variants of network
analysis, the life chances of organizations are determined by their network
position among resource flows (e.g. Burt, 1992; Mizruchi & Schwartz, 1987).
Even organizational institutionalists have focused a great deal of energy on
processes of diffusion where organizations tend to become more homogeneous
in appearance as a result of isomorphic processes (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;
Strang & Soule, 1998). Much of this institutional work in the 1980s and early
1990s conceptualized organizations as passive, legitimacy seekers and
environments as powerful, obdurate structures (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). Note
that whether organizations are assumed to be legitimacy-seekers or motivated
by efficiency or resource dependence logics, all are functional imperatives that
involve depicting organizations as instrumental actors.
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These sociological perspectives on organizations not only conceptualized
social structure and organizations in instrumental terms, but also neglected and
left behind the study of work and occupations (Lounsbury & Kaghan, 2001),
and eschewed questions related to social stratification and social change. By
truncating the sociological imagination in available conceptions of social
structure and of organization for more tractable and conventional conceptions,
organizational theorists aimed to further their subfield project by developing
formal, abstract general theories about organizations that embraced “clean
models” over “dirty hands” (Hirsch, Friedman & Michaels, 1990). These efforts
had the effect of sidelining concerns with history, context, and more situated,
relational approaches to social analysis – a central methodological commitment
for Stinchcombe (see his 1997 essay on the virtues of early 20th century
institutional economics) and to contemporary students of organizations such as
(e.g. Abbott, Barley, Breiger, Clemens, DiMaggio, Espeland, Granovetter,
Heimer, Hirsch, Padgett, Powell, Stark, Stryker and many of this volume’s
contributors).
However, the more instrumentalist and exchange-based accounts today appear
to be rejoining a dialogue that is animated by contemporary social theoretic
considerations and a concern with broader societal issues. This work comes
both from the margins of dominant research strategies and arguments, but also
from their cores. For example, organizational demographers have recently
expanded their analytical lens to incorporate elements of culture through the
study of identity (e.g. Carroll & Hannan, 2000; Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000)
and how societal transformations enable new organizational forms to emerge
(e.g. Haveman & Rao, 1997; Ventresca & Lacey, 2001). Others have extended
ecological insights to analyze the dynamics of labor markets across firms
with the intent of explicitly connecting organizational theory to the study
of stratification (e.g. Haveman & Cohen, 1994). From a slightly different
perspective, Baum and Oliver (1992) have shown how connections between
non-profit day care centers and state governmental agencies shape day care
survival outcomes. And studies of entrepreneurship in broader social structural
context are renascent (Aldrich, 1999; Schoonhoven & Romanelli, 2001;
Thornton, 1999).
While the network analytic tradition has always had a strong connection to
the study of stratification and labor markets (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Granovetter,
1974; White, 1970), this richer tradition has only recently begun to influence
the study of organizations through concepts such as embeddedness and social
capital (e.g. Adler & Kwon, 2002; Dacin, Ventresca & Beal, 1999; Gabbay &
Leenders, 1999; Granovetter, 1985; Zukin & DiMaggio, 1990; Uzzi, 1996).
Even though some of this research remains sympathetic to more instrumental
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notions of organization (e.g. Burt, 1992; Lin, Cook & Burt, 2001), there is great
potential for this line of work to generate increased attention towards problems
of how organizations are interpenetrated with broader societal concerns (e.g.
Breiger, this volume; DiMaggio, 1986; Nelson, 2001; Padgett & Ansell, 1993).
For example, Padgett and Ansell advance a multi-network conception of social
structure and contingent social action, to underscore how the distinctive patterns
of 15th century Florentine social, commercial and political life enabled a style
of governance. Powell and colleagues (e.g. Powell, Koput & Smith-Doerr, 1996;
Powell & Owen-Smith, 1998) depict the evolution of university-industry relations around the emerging field of biotechnology in analogous terms: a focus
on multiplex ties that comprise less obdurate, but still consequential, social
structures that shape organizational forms and careers.
Given the intellectual connections and affinities between the “new” and “old”
institutionalisms (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997), it is no surprise that institutional
scholars have more directly tried to build on and extend research mandates laid
out by Stinchcombe and others. One important strand of institutional analysis
developed research strategies grounded in diffusion processes, but others
engaged the broader comparative-historical tradition to examine state-society
relations and their effects on organizations (Djelic, 1998; Schneiberg &
Clemens, forthcoming; Schofer & Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001). For instance,
Dobbin’s (1994) study of the development trajectories of railroads in the U.S.,
Britain and France linked differences in the governance, funding, and overall
industry strategies among these three cases to characteristic and chronic polity
differences and their expression in policy styles. Moving up a level of analysis,
Meyer and colleagues (e.g. Meyer, Boli & Thomas, 1987; Frank, Hironaka
& Shofer, 2000; Strang, 1990; Ventresca, 1995) have focused a good deal of
attention on how cognitive models and beliefs emerge at the world system as
a result of actions by transnational NGOs, international political arenas such
as the United Nations, and other policy experts who are authoritatively
credentialed. Moving to lower levels of analysis, many contemporary institutional scholars have also begun to focus on problems of institutional
transformation and practice variation in an effort to redress the earlier analytical
focus on organizational homogeneity (e.g. Lounsbury, 2001; Ruef & Scott,
1998; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999).
In addition to these shifts toward a richer conceptualizations of social structure
and organizational process, there have been important discipline-wide methodological advances in the analysis of social structure that may help to expand
organizational sociology while also reuniting it with other sociological subfields
such as those that focus on politics and culture. Of course, at mid-century, there
were few subfield boundaries that segregated the analysis of organizations from
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politics, culture, social movements and stratification. Today, at the intersection
of the sociology of culture and institutional analysis, new structuralist methods
such as Galois and tripartite lattice analysis have been developed to measure
meaning systems (e.g. Breiger, this volume; Mische & Pattison, 2000; Mohr,
1998, 2000). Those methods take inspiration from network analysis, but have
been used to study the evolution of practices in a way that takes seriously the
dual relationship of structure and action (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 2000). While
the emergence of these new analytical approaches have fostered “a new
structuralist project in cultural analysis” (Mohr, 2000, p. 57), these methods
may also help to fuel a new structuralism in organizational theory by providing
a way to represent the complex interrelationships among the multi-dimensional
cultural and resource spaces (i.e. fields) in which organizations and practices
take shape and change. Ragin’s (2000) fuzzy set analytical approach can also
be extended to important problems having to do with categorization and
boundary dynamics (e.g. Bowker & Star, 1999; DiMaggio, 1997; Lamont &
Molnár, forthcoming).
Further, methodological and conceptual developments in the analysis of time
via event history analysis and sequence analysis also promise important
reorientations in modeling and analysis that move us beyond the limitations of
assuming a general linear reality (Abbott, 2001). While event history analysis
has been a staple in institutional and ecological approaches to organizations
since the early to mid-1980s, sequence analysis has been absent from the toolkit
of organizational researchers. Also, on the horizon are important new breakthroughs in the development of more dynamic forms of network analysis as
well as agent-based and related evolutionary modeling techniques (see research
emerging from Santa Fe Institute workgroups) that will no doubt help to expand
our ability to theorize about mechanisms of institutional change in a much more
grounded, yet non-reductive way. In general, organizational theory has much
to gain by reaching out to these disciplinary-wide developments that can be
used to generate new insights about organizational process in a way that gives
primacy of structure, but can appreciate its complexity and multidimensionality
while also attending to the role of actors in generating shifts in structural
composition.
Hence, as we scan empirical and methodological developments across
organizational theory and the wider discipline, we are encouraged by the
growing sensibilities towards richer sociological analyses of organizational
phenomena that take society and societal level dynamics more seriously. These
developments give credence to and support our interest in further expanding
the scope of organizational theory to embrace richer notions of social structure
and organizations. We believe that the most exciting work going forward will
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be less paradigmatic and, in a sense, will involve blending across previously
closed perspectives in organizational theory such as organizational demography,
network analysis and institutionalism, while also reconnecting the study of
organizations to the core of the discipline and increasing traffic among various
subfields. To wit, we call for organizational theorists to engage more fully with
contemporary social theoretic and methodological developments and to use our
well-developed organizational lens to explore big questions about social change
that speak to broader audiences in sociology, across the social sciences, and in
policy circles (Fligstein, 2001). The chapters in this volume, to which we now
turn, move us further in this direction by reporting on careful empirical studies
that engage and extend theory on social structure and organization in important new ways.
REVISITING STINCHCOMBE 1965:
THE CHAPTERS THAT FOLLOW
Our commitment is this volume is to encourage re-engagement with the classic
concerns of Stinchcombe and mid-century organizational sociology, but to do
so in the idiom of contemporary social and cultural theory. This stance is congenial with other recent statements of new directions and available research
opportunities in organization theory (e.g. Aldrich, 1999; Schneiberg & Clemens,
forthcoming; Scott, 2001) but motivated by a distinct concern: the relationship
between social structure and organization. Stinchcombe’s “environing social
structure” has been supplanted by the rise of overly instrumentalist and at-times
determining conceptions of social structure and by overly instrumentalist and
purposeful conceptions of organizations. We offer the arguments and empirical
chapters in this volume to redress this situation. We have assembled research
reports that engage, celebrate, critique, and redirect Stinchcombe’s 1965 essay
in the service of crafting three broadly defined research streams.
First, we offer empirical papers on politics and organizations that are
concerned with the institutional struggles that occur in the midst of making new
organizational forms, as well as with the conflicts that penetrate organizational
life from the outside. Second, a section on embeddedness and entrepreneurship
breathes fresh life into the analysis of new organizational forms and their environing social structure by linking context and stratification processes to the
simple “newness” issues. Finally, in a section on culture and organizations, we
explore how organizational fields support ideas like religious doxa and how
orthodoxies of belief configure interorganizational relations. In addition, we
conclude each section with thematic commentaries by Robin Stryker, Ronald
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Breiger and Elisabeth Clemens, respectively, that further highlight research
questions and directions that are promising. Finally, Arthur Stinchcombe
provides a closing essay on his own reflections and ideas about future research
in a postscript to the volume.
While all empirical contributions to the volume find inspiration in the social
structural approach that Stinchcombe’s work exemplifies, the chapters differ in
their conceptualization of social structure and approach to institutional analysis.
Some chapters are more sympathetic to the “old” institutional sensibility in
economics à la Veblen and Commons (Van deVen, 1993; Stinchcombe, 1997;
Yonay, 1998) and sociology à la Merton and Selznick (DiMaggio & Powell,
1991) that animates Stinchcombe’s approach to social analysis. Other contributors are more clearly influenced by contemporary trends in social and
organization theory that include a focus on cultural analysis, discourse, meaning
systems, and the interplay of resources and meanings (Bourdieu, 1984;
DiMaggio, 1997; Mohr, 1998; Sewell, 1992). We see this more culturallyoriented work as an extension of the social structural tradition in a contemporary
idiom of culture post-Parsons, rather than as a fundamental break with a longer
tradition of studies of society, politics, and change. Many of the chapters
specifically focus on the interplay of culture, politics, and organization.
Politics and Organizations
A central theme in institutional analysis has to do with how organizations are
important actors that shape and are shaped by broader political processes
(Gouldner, 1954; Perrow, 1991; Selznick, 1949). Stinchcombe discussed
organizations as providing important tools for societal stratification in the era
of Gesellschaft. That is, “the system of stratification among organizations, rather
than the class system of individuals and families” (1965, p. 144) provides the
foundation for elites to engage in political competition. Building on this imagery,
he then developed an argument about the relationship between organizational
stratification and the sociology of revolution (pp. 169–180). This passage opens
up a variety of questions about how competition among organizations and
organizational forms is embedded in political struggle, how the creation of new
kinds of organizations requires modifications to extant institutions or the
building of new institutions that support those new forms, and how changes to
an organizational stratification system or the emergence of new organizational
forms is fostered by political crises.
The empirical papers in this section restore attention to the institutionallyand politically-contested nature of social structures, both patterns of resources
and systems of meanings that configure economic and social worlds and the
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sources of change in them. Marc Schneiberg’s (this volume) chapter on mutual
fire insurers, for example, highlights how new organizational forms are forged
within the crucible of broader societal conflicts over economic development.
Linking old and new institutional arguments, Schneiberg shows that mutuals
simultaneously embodied particular “problem-solving” strategies and a theory
of economic order – a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” of farmers,
merchants and independent producers that directly challenged corporate liberal
visions of combinations, trusts and economic centralization. Struggles among
these competing visions within fire insurance took place on varied terrain,
hastened under conditions of crisis occasioned by fires that ravaged cities
throughout the nineteenth century. But in the end, the viability of mutual forms
rested on a socio-industrial order characterized by a specific balance of political
power, anti-corporate social movements, a supportive ecology of churches and
local organizations, and the availability of mutual templates.
Andrew Spicer (this volume) builds on Stinchcombe’s notion of the
“revolutionary situation” to explore the rise and fall of mutual funds associated
with mass privatization in Russia. Moving beyond standard ecological analyses
of organizational form growth and decline, Spicer highlights how organizational
forms that are made possible by revolutionary situations are inextricably
bound up in, even imprinted by, broader political struggles to resolve societal
conditions of ambiguity and instability. Spicer tells a persuasive story about
how the absence of institutional structures inhibits new forms and hence, how
the legitimacy and survival of organizational forms may require proponents to
be actively engaged in state-building projects that ultimately provide ground
rules for organizations in a society. He argues that mutual funds in Russia in
the early 1990s lost out at the organizational level because they were inept at
the institutional level.
Maureen Scully and Amy Segal (this volume) focus attention on intraorganizational social-movement activity in a way that harkens back to mid-century
sociologies of organizations by conceptualizing organizations as contested sites
where broader societal conflicts play out. They integrate organizational and
social movement perspectives in their investigation of how activist employees
in a particular firm mobilize identity claims (in this case, race and gender)
and resources to challenge organizational elites in an effort to reconstruct their
organizational context in a way that would be more hospitable to their identity
concerns. Building on Zald and Berger (1978), an underappreciated call
for research on social movements in organizations, Scully and Segal argue for
attention to employee activism as an activity that can enhance our understanding
of how social movements penetrate organizational life and facilitate organizational and personal change in important and consequential ways.
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These three chapters importantly push organizational theory towards questions
about collective action that become manifest in the rise and fall of organizational
forms as well as the construction of workplace environments. As such, this
work connects to a growing interest in combining the study of collective action
with organizational analysis (e.g. Balser, 1997; Clemens, 1997; Creed & Scully,
2000; Davis & McAdam, 2000; Fligstein, 1996; Lounsbury, 2001; Rao, 1998;
Rao, Morrill & Zald, 2000). In the spirit of revisiting Stinchcombe, we believe
that there are exciting opportunities for organizational researchers to empirically
study how organizations are bound up in the politics of stratification, enabling
further theorization about the conditions and mechanisms that give rise to
new kinds of actors and practices, remake the beliefs and material resource
distributions that underpin societal stratification, and facilitate organizational
and societal changes. The empirical chapters in this section further highlight
that we need to be attentive to how these dynamics play themselves out at many
levels of analysis. A focus on the rise and decline of organizational forms
provides insights into macro level politics, but, according to Scully and Segal,
we also need to pay much more attention to how social movement processes
take place in the everyday workings of organizations.
The Embeddedness of Entrepreneurship
A second broad theme in the study of social structure and organization is
how social structure affects the founding of new organizations. On this general
topic, Stinchcombe (1965, pp. 145–169) proposes an historical perspective
on organizational creation that emphasizes the conditions under which certain
organizational forms are created and how those forms are influenced by social
structures that exist at the time of organizational founding. Despite the wideranging discussion of these issues that focuses attention on how entrepreneurship
is embedded in broader societal institutions such as regulatory structures, stratification systems, labor markets and the like, organizational theorists have tended
to selectively draw on his idea that entrepreneurial firms and organizations tend
to suffer from the liability of newness (pp. 148–150) without fully appreciating
how that theoretical claim was conditional upon broader social structures.
For instance, Stinchcombe focuses on the capacity for new organizations to
develop new roles and routines that vary based on the distribution of generalized skills outside an organization, the initiative of employees in the labor force,
the degree of trust among workers based on competence in work roles, and the
competitive relations among producers and consumers. All of these elements,
in turn, are to some extent rooted in broader institutions that shape variation
among these factors. Over the past couple of decades, however, organizational
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ecologists have cast doubt on Stinchcombe’s liability of newness proposition
by rigorously studying the effects of organizational age and size as populations
evolve. Many of these studies have shown that after controlling for size, the
liability of newness effect dissipates and is replaced by liabilities of old age
(see Carroll & Hannan, 2000; also Ruef, this volume). Many of these studies,
however, are relatively inattentive to the social structural conditions that delimit
entrepreneurial efforts, or render aged organizations unfit.
The papers we offer in the section on The Embeddedness of Entrepreneurship
extend a broader social structural sensibility to the study of organizational
creation. Ruef (this volume), for instance, draws on earlier Stinchcombian
insights to study how entrepreneurship is influenced by factors having to do
with status, the processes by which resources are mobilized and legitimacy
attained, and organizational imprinting. Ruef argues that by attending to these
broader forces and processes in which entrepreneurs are embedded, we may
develop insights into the conditions under which certain kinds of organizations
may experience the liability of newness vis-à-vis other liabilities associated with
organizational age. As such, Ruef contributes to the development of a richer
institutional ecology (e.g. Baum & Powell, 1995; Haveman & Rao, 1997) that
is attentive to the constitutive aspects of society.
Burton, Sørenson and Beckman (this volume) track the organizational origins
of the founders of new ventures to investigate how industry stratification can
inform the ecological analysis of start-up organizations. They draw on a sample
of Silicon Valley start-ups to highlight how founders who come from prominent
firms are more likely to be innovative and attract external financing. This paper
is novel because it provides insights into how organizational dynamics are fueled
by the flow of particular people. This is part of a growing line of work that
connects the tradition of organizational demography to studies of labor markets
and strategic human resources (Baron, Hannan & Burton, 2001; Hannan, Burton
& Baron, 1996; Haveman & Cohen, 1994; Phillips, 2001). This direction
of research is particularly promising and has usefully contributed to our
understanding of how intraorganizational processes relate to broader macro
organizational dynamics.
Finally, Sacks (this volume) offers a perspective on entrepreneurship that
focuses on more classical sociological concerns having to do with stratification.
Based on extensive fieldwork and research on the venture capital industry,
Sacks echoes Ruef’s findings by deconstructing the notion of the liability of
newness – how the social status of a founder (e.g. as proxied by race and
gender) differentially affects the experience of newness, in this case access to
venture capital. In particular, he illustrates how venture capitalists, operating
under conditions of extreme uncertainty and ambiguity rely on cues associated
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with social, financial and reputational capital to make judgments about financing
prospective ventures.
The papers in this section extend our understanding of organizational creation
and entrepreneurship by specifying how societal forces embed and shape those
processes. These papers, therefore, not only provide fresh insights but new
directions that help forge a deeper synthesis between the sociological study of
organizations, societal stratification, and institutions (Stinchcombe, 1986).
Pioneering work in the study of stratification and organizations (e.g. Baron &
Bielby, 1980) identified the research potential here. In recent years, studies
of market transitions and organizational mechanisms of stratification in
post-socialist societies further highlighted the institutionally-contingent features
of stratification (Guthrie, 1999; Keister, 2000; Li & Walder, 2001; Nee, 1996).
We believe, and as these papers differentially highlight, that a focus on the
intersection of labor market processes and organizations that accounts for
the role of professionalization processes, occupational expertise and personnel
flows is particularly promising. This line of work will also help to further reunite
the study of organizations with that of work and occupations and other important
ethnographic traditions linked to subfields such as science and technology
studies (e.g. Barley & Kunda, 2001; Hargadon & Douglas, 2001; Lounsbury
& Kaghan, 2001; Owen-Smith, 2001) as well as culturally-oriented approaches
to stratification (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 1995; Tilly, 1998).
Culture and Organizations
For mid-century sociologists, norms and values provided key components for
explanations of social structural stability and change (see DiMaggio & Powell,
1991). Stinchcombe, for instance, discussed norms as an element that helps to
maintain institutional stability and the reproduction of stratification systems
through socialization. Conversely, it is uncertainty about societal norms or weak
commitment to institutional norms that provides the condition for social transformation and revolution. Values and beliefs, however, did not provide a focal
point for analysis (but see Stinchcombe, 1968, pp. 107–118). Instead, they were
often conceptualized as a glue that holds together other, more material, social
structural elements. As institutional analysis has developed over the past three
decades, however, attention to broader belief systems has come to center stage
(e.g. Clemens, 1997; Dobbin, 1994; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001).
New institutionalists in organizational sociology, for instance, make claims
about how social structures of resources and meanings, anchored in particular
cultural rules and patterns of relationships affect organization and field-level
structures and behavior. They use a definition of institutions as “cultural rules”
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(Meyer, Boli & Thomas, 1987) that identify categories of social actors and their
appropriate activities or relationships (Barley & Tolbert, 1997). This perspective
points to a conception of institutions as generative of interests, identities
and appropriate practice models that take shape at the interface of wider
sociocultural contexts and particular social systems (Meyer & Rowan, 1977;
DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Dobbin, 1994; Scott & Meyer, 1994).
The chapters in the Culture and Organizations section of the volume extend
the institutionalism of Stinchcombe and other mid-century organizational
sociologists by highlighting how processes of organizational creation and
building are importantly informed by and contribute to broader scale cultural
dynamics. Focusing on the rise of a radical group of scientists in the 1960s,
Science for the People, Moore and Hala (this volume) shed light on the symbolic
processes by which organizational actors are constituted. They highlight how a
group of “radical” scientists who dissented from the mainstream scientific
community constructed a social movement organization with precarious
boundaries that spanned the fields of professional science and the New Left.
Sympathetic to the constructivist strands of mid-century social structural
analysis, updated with contemporary social-theoretic insights, Moore and
Hala provide a content-full social structural analysis that is attentive to the
micro-relational processes that comprise organizations.
Stevens (this volume) reports on how ideas and broader field social structures
support the vitality of U.S. conservative Protestant organizations. Extending
Stinchcombe’s (1965) discussion of the organizational production of solidarity,
he argues that the robustness of conservative Protestantism has to do with the
successful embedding of the faithful in dense and nested organizational relations
and the ability of that movement to spawn new organizations that reinforce the
faith through practices and routine everyday interactions. Contributing to both
organizational theory and the sociology of religion, Stevens provocatively
expands the purview of organizational analysis and provides a grounded,
relational perspective on how ideas are organizationally sustained.
Investigating the emergence of gay and lesbian identity organizations in the
San Francisco area, Elizabeth Armstrong (this volume) highlights the processes
by which societal transformation related to the rise of the New Left fostered
an “identity logic of political organizing,” which in turn enabled new kinds of
lesbian/gay organizations to emerge. Like Schneiberg and Stevens, she sees the
cultural templates available to actors as limiting the ways they can organize.
Before the emergence of the New Left, homosexual activists lacked a model
of organizing that could successfully produce widespread organizational growth.
The New Left, by providing a context of collective creativity, made possible
the creation of a new organizational model. She theorizes that contexts of
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collective creativity, characterized by the intersection of multiple cultural
strains, dense interaction, and uncertainty, may play a role in accounting for
the emergence of innovative organizational forms.
These papers in the section on culture and organizations are at the cutting
edge of research that draws on currents in social theory and cultural sociology
to expand the social structural tradition by emphasizing the importance of
symbolic boundary processes and commensuration (Espeland & Stevens, 1997;
Lamont & Molnár, forthcoming). This work extends analyses of political
processes and embeddedness by highlighting how broader belief systems
constrain and enable the actions that are possible (Bourdieu, 1984). All three
chapters in this section highlight how broader symbolic ideas constitute actors
and their identities, but also shed light on how collective action and other forms
of micromobilization can help to reshape symbolic meaning structures (Fligstein,
2001). While our knowledge of the dynamics of symbolic structures is still
quite limited, these chapters provide solid leads on the kinds of mechanisms
that can inform a broader theory of institutional emergence and change
(Clemens, this volume). More pointedly, no theory of institutional change can
claim to be complete without attending to the broader cultural ideas that provide
the symbolic gridwork that consequentially define and shape social organization.
VOLUME POSTSCRIPT
AND FURTHER RESEARCH
In a postscript, Stinchcombe (this volume) reflects on developments in
organizational theory over the past four decades and offers some of his own
suggestions for future research. This essay emphasizes familiar themes –
situated analysis, the specificity of cases and grounded mechanisms, but also
charts out terrain that is particular to recent cultural and social analysis.
Stinchcombe argues for primary attention to a sociology of commensuration,
the politically-inflected activity that establishes comparable metrics among
disparate elements of social life and hence renders these tractable to authority
and power (Espeland & Stevens, 1998). He focuses on “evangelism,” or the
proselytizing work done by existing organizations (including social networks)
to sponsor and replicate themselves. He proposes this process as an alternative
to conventional mechanisms of institutional change that neglect the activities
of existing organizations. Finally, he refreshes a network theory of legitimacy
and truth-telling with a statement of the socially-generated and situated nature
of “truth” in a community of practice. In short, Stinchcombe revisits
Stinchcombe 1965 in the spirit of contemporary studies of culture, politics, and
organizations. Epistemologically, he continues to push us towards the study of
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mechanisms that connect variation in social structure to variation in organizations, practices and other entities and flows at a lower level of analysis.
To reprise our main argument, we believe that a common intellectual commitment that runs throughout many of the empirical chapters in this volume and
is emphasized in the postscript has to do with a resounding rejection of overly
reductive, materialist and instrumentalist notions of organization and social
structure. Instead of conceptualizing organizational behavior as primarily
influenced by exchange relationships, the essays here advocate a more
culturally- and politically-rich focus on how broader elements of stratification
and societal beliefs embodied in category schemes such as logics, models, and
frames constitute social actors and change as a result of multi-level political
processes that involve not only producer organizations but also state agencies,
trade associations, social movement organizations and other field-level organizations. Hence, we agree with Stinchcombe (this volume) that cultural
approaches to social structure can usefully extend the mid-century structural
tradition and foster the development of novel theoretical insights by focusing
our attention on important new problems and questions. The politics of commensuration (Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 2000; Espeland & Stevens, 1997; Heimer,
2001) and associated processes of boundary making, maintenance and erosion
(Lamont & Molnár, forthcoming) provide important avenues for future research,
but in no way exhaust the variety of ways that a focus on cultural processes
can reorient and renew a broader social structural approach to organizations.
Empirical chapters in this volume highlight multiple directions that include the
study of organizational forms, societal logics, social movements, flows of ideas
and people, and more generally, the dynamics of social organization.
We do not advocate for the replacement of a one-sided view of organizations as mainly influenced by instrumental exchange processes with another
one-sided view of organizations as culturally constituted. We view symbolic
and material realms as mutually constituted (Bourdieu, 1984; Sewell, 1992).
Nonetheless, given the historical marginalization of cultural perspectives in
organizational theory, it may be useful to valorize that dimension of analysis
given the current imbalance in the literature. For instance, we know very little
about how collective forms of rationality emerge, erode and become transformed
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). While institutionalists in the 1980s tended to distinguish between the ideas of technical efficiency and institutional forces, more
attention needs to be directed towards the social construction of performance
and how the ability to judge performance or efficiency depends upon the kind
of institutional infrastructure that is built (Fligstein, 1990; Powell, 1991; Strang
& Macy, 2001). Further, we know little about how social and organizational
change is influenced and shaped by multiple forms of rationality (Friedland &
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Alford, 1991; Stryker, 2000; Weber, 1978), how actors manipulate symbol
systems to gain or reproduce social status (Bowker & Star, 1999; Breiger, 1995;
Hirsch, 1986; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Tilly, 1998), and how organizations
come to define their interests in the first place (Clemens, this volume). These
kinds of problematics can help to restore broader societal sensibilities to the
study of organizations and renew the social structural tradition in light of
contemporary developments in social theory.
More concretely, we believe that organizational sociology can make headway
in these directions by focusing on the study of variation. While the new
institutionalism in organizational analysis became prominent through the study
of isomorphism and the winnowing of variation (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991),
much could be gained by systematically investigating how variation is created
(Stinchcombe, 1997). This means that instead of looking for broad patterns
across many cases, we must dig deeper into our empirical research sites by
disaggregating populations into types and identifying dimensions of variation
(Ragin, 2000). A focus on variation leads us away from aspirations of grand
theory (Parsons, 1949; Kiser & Hechter, 1998) and towards a more middle
range focus on mechanisms and boundary conditions (Granovetter, 1985;
Hedström & Swedberg, 1998; Merton, 1957; Somers, 1998; Stinchcombe,
1983).
Already fruitful empirical avenues include the study of how variation in practices becomes instantiated (DiMaggio & Mullen, 2000; Lounsbury, 2001;
Schneiberg & Bartley, 2001), how the actual practices of organizations deviate
from their symbolic claims (Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000; Meyer & Rowan,
1977), how organizational forms and practices shift or get transformed over
time (Leblebici et al., 1991; Scott et al., 2000; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999), how
new kinds of organizational forms emerge (Haveman & Rao, 1997; Rao, 1998;
Ruef, 2000), and how comparable kinds of practices diffuse differently (Davis
& Greve, 1997; Strang & Soule, 1998). Per the arguments of this chapter and
the articles in this volume that contribute to these research directions, future
research must continue to focus on the interplay of action and structure, but in
ways that take both the political and cultural components of structure seriously
(Brieger, this volume; Mohr, 2000; Stryker, this volume) while also attending
to the role of invention, innovation and the origins of change (Clemens, this
volume; Moore & Hala, this volume). While it is unlikely that simple rational
choice approaches to organizational action will contribute to our further understanding of these kinds of questions, more direct attention to the role of actors
is needed. For instance, it would be particularly fruitful to continue developing
linkages between structural approaches to organizations and Carnegie school
insights that emphasize how choice is shaped by time-inflected flows of people,
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solutions, problems and decision situations that occur in more or less ambiguous
environments (Heimer, 1985; Heimer & Stinchcombe, 1999; March & Olsen,
1976; Ocasio, 1997; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). These theoretical efforts should
be facilitated by methodological advances such as those involving the modeling
of structure (Breiger, 2000, this volume).
Stinchcombe 1965 charted out terrain in organizational analysis of sociological
concern. Among other tasks, his essay was an exercise in “specifying ignorance,”
that is, in identifying research opportunities neglected or ignored because there was
little intellectual infrastructure to guide the questions or because empirical sources
were uncongenial. In short, being the good pragmatist that he is, he worked with
the resources and tools at hand to chart a set of questions that gave voice to the
institutionalisms of early 20th century U.S. social science (Stinchcombe, 1997;
Scott, 2001: chapter 1). The papers in this volume make headway in this project –
creating new analytic and methodological language, exploring novel data sources,
and speculating about new directions in the sociological study of organizations.
The social structural tradition of organizational analysis has proven to be a robust,
progressive tradition and is alive and well.
NOTES
1. While obviously leaving a lot of major works out of that abbreviated list, this is
neither the place nor the purpose for a full celebration of Stinchcombe’s body of research.
Instead, we concentrate our attention on and revisit the well-cited 1965 paper, “Social
structure and organizations” in an effort to uncover and highlight aspects of the social
structural tradition that could usefully extend and invigorate contemporary sociological
approaches to the study of organizations.
2. We used SSCI to identify all citations of this paper between 1964 and 2000, using
both computerized indexes and a handcheck to capture citations to the paper using variant
versions of the title and author name.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jenny Omundson provided expert research assistance in the citation analysis
tracking Stinchcombe (1965). We would like to thank Howard Aldrich, Lis
Clemens, Paul Hirsch, Chick Perrow, Dick Scott, Art Stinchcombe, Mayer Zald,
participants at the Social Organization Seminar (SOS) at the University
of Arizona, participants at the Workshop on Organizations, Institutions, and
Change (WOIC) at Northwestern University, as well as all volume contributors
for all their comments, suggestions, enthusiastic support, and encouragement.
We would like to especially thank Elizabeth Armstrong for her very detailed
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editorial comments and Marc Schneiberg for gently nudging us to be more
concrete about the theoretical claims and directions that comprise our agenda.
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