Elisabeth S. Clemens

The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis*:

Institutional theory rests on a rejection of reductionism. Instead of reducing higher-order phenomena to aggregates of behavior, institutional theory reverses this causal imagery. It attributes the behavior of organizations and nation-states to contextual factors, notably organizational fields, national institutional systems, or the emerging global polity, Institutionalists, particularly within sociology, also emphasize specifically cultural mechanisms for these higher-order effects. This article develops the methodological foundations for these claims. It surveys and elaborates research designs for documenting higher-order effects and for differentiating the cultural mechanisms of institutional influence. It also presents new strategies for assessing multiple logics and the coherence of institutional orders, moving beyond adoption and diffusion studies to analyze the dynamic and contested processes of institutionalization and institutional change.

Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change: Women's Groups and the Transformation of U.S. Politics, 1890-1920

Although social movements are often presumed to cause change, the dominant theoretical accounts lead to the opposite conclusion. To explain how challenging movements do produce institutional change, this article introduces the concept of organizational repertoires. Groups marginalized by existing political institutions have an incentive to develop alternative models of organization. These alternative models, in turn, are more likely to be adopted by other political actors to the extent that they embody familiar, but previously nonpolitical, forms of organization. This argument is illustrated with an analysis of political innovation by womens groups in the United States at the trun of the century.

Remaking modernity : politics, history, and sociology

I Introduction Social theory, modernity and the three waves of historical sociology Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens & Ann Shola Orloff II Historical sociology and epistemological underpinnings The action turn? Comparative historical inquiry beyond the classical models of conduct Richard Biernacki Overlapping territories and intertwined histories: Historical sociologys global imagination Zine Magubane The epistemological unconscious of American sociology and the transition to post-Fordism: The case of historical sociology George Steinmetz III State formation and historical sociology The return of the repressed: Religion and the political unconscious of historical sociology Philip Gorski Social provision and regulation: Theories of states, social policies and modernity Ann Shola Orloff The bureaucritization of states: Toward an analytical Weberianism Edgar Kiser & Justin Baer IV History and political contention Mars revealed: The entry of ordinary people into war among the states Meyer Kestmbaum Historical sociology and collective action Roger Gould Revolutions as pathways to modernity Nader Sohrabi V Capitalism, modernity and the economic realm Historical sociology and the economy: Actors, networks and context Bruce Carruthers The great debates: Transitions to capitalisms Rebecca Jean Emigh Professions: Prodigal daughters of modernity Ming-Cheng Lo VI Politics, history and collective identities Nations Lynette Spillman & Russell Faeges The trouble with citizenship Margaret Somers Ethnicity within groups Rogers Brubaker VII Afterword Logics of history? Agency, multiplicity and incoherence in the explanation of change Elisabeth Clemens

Identity Realization and Organizational Forms: Differentiation and Consolidation of Identities Among Arizona's Charter Schools

Organizations in an emerging organizational population face an identity problem. Collectively, organizations cannot yet rely on a coherent and stable definition of what membership in that new industry means. Individually, each organization must also establish its own distinctive identity to differentiate itself from competitors and secure resources. To explore the relationship between differentiation and the consolidation of recognizable identity element clusters, we examine the emergence of organizational form in the early years of the Arizona charter school industry. This industry is particularly interesting for scholars studying institutional processes because the legislative mandate of the new industry was for schools to experiment and provide education in an unconventional manner. Thus, the legislative definition of the organizational form or template for the charter school identity was intentionally underspecified. Using inductive analysis and regression models, we examine the process of identity realization occurring among charter schools and assess how the local institutional context of charter schools affected the realization process. The analyses demonstrate that new industries may come to be characterized by multiple element clusters; a single label for an organizational form may be linked to different combinations of identity elements. Our results also demonstrate that identity realization at the organizational level occurs through mimicry and differentiation processes and is facilitated by the local institutional context. In particular, the diversity of organizational resources available to industry entrepreneurs enables identity differentiation from ones peers.

Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity, and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology

Sociology as a discipline is intimately entwined with modernity, both as lived and as theorized. Sociologists have galvanized distinctive mechanisms of social rationalization and technical regulation (not least statistics and surveys) and authored ideas of the modern social space as a realm that we denizens inhabit and control. Sociologists also have helped define modernity’s significant Others, including the categories of tradition and postmodernity. They have applied their intellectual energy to formulating what might be called the ‘‘sociological modern’’: situating actors and institutions in terms of these two categories, understanding the paths by which they develop or change, and communicating these understandings to states, citizens, all manner of organizations, and social movements—as well as vast armies of students. On this basis, sociologists have helped build and manage today’s sprawling, globally extended social edifice while simultaneously trying to diagnose and dismantle its disciplinary aspects and iron cages. The discipline is itself a product of modernity, not simply in its institutions but also, as we will argue, in its theoretical core. The formation of modernity now figures as a place of disorder as well as dynamism—troubled, fissured, perhaps even in civilizational crisis. This is all the more ironic now that capitalism—surely a core constituent of modernity—is thought by some to have arrived at a point of triumphant stasis, the highest stage and culmination of history.∞ In this unsettled time,

Securing Political Returns to Social Capital: Women's Associations in the United States, 1880s–1920s

Securing Political Returns to Social Capital: Women’s Associations in the United States, 1880s–1920s Social capital has proven exceptionally fruitful as a metaphor. By invoking anancial imagery, this phrase points to the generative power of social ties, their capacity to produce social goods such as economic growth or effective governance. But metaphors are also dangerous, not least because they assert multiple dimensions of similarity, some of which may be inappropriate or positively misleading. Prominent among these potential false parallels is the presumption that social capital is marked by the same portability or fungibility that makes anancial capital such a powerful motor of economic growth and transformation. In its purest form, economic capital is not tied to particular persons, places, or objects, but “presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn.” Social capital, by comparison, is fundamentally embedded, rooted in “norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement.” The very term “social capital” embodies a seeming paradox—a deeply embedded capacity for social action that is transposable from one setting to another, from one domain to other diverse projects.

The welfare state's other crisis : explaining the new partnership between nonprofit organizations and the state in France

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Delegation to Nonprofit Organizations and the Crisis of State Capacity Chapter 2: The Failure of Existing Theory: A Literature Review Chapter 3: The Nonprofit Sector in France: Past and Present Chapter 4: Laying the Groundwork for Delegation: Three Programs for Reform Chapter 5: Political Struggles over NonprofitsO Roles: 1974-1981 Chapter 6: A Policy of Delegation and Inclusion: The New Socialist Government in Power Chapter 7: The New Power of Nonprofits: Poverty Policy Initiatives of the 1980s Chapter 8: Nonprofits to the Rescue? Appendix Notes Interviews References Index

The Democratic Dilemma: Aligning Fields of Elite Influence and Political Equality

Abstract Regardless of whether “elite” is defined with respect to social status, economic wealth, or professional accomplishment, these sources of advantage are blunted by democratic political commitments to equality. This durable dilemma has shaped the institutional development of the American polity and the economy, as those with extra-political advantages have sought new forms of political influence, at times subverting rules or advancing cultural projects that elaborate an image of corporations as moral actors or the development of a “business creed.” American elites have also worked at the margins of the formally democratic policy to construct fields of public action that are accepted as public, legitimate, and admirable, but not strictly democratic. Corporate philanthropy has been central to these efforts. Organizations like the Community Chest can be understood as practical responses to the constraints of ideological commitments to political egalitarianism. This line of response to the democratic dilemma is “constructive” in the nonnormative sense that it produces new fields of social action and reconfigures institutional arrangements. By linking economic position to civic influence, organizations of this type translate economic power into elevated influence over public affairs through the constitution and stabilization of partially hybridized forms or fields.

OF TACTICS AND TRAUMAS

During the long 19th century, modernization progressed, peace prevailed, and many of the now-recognized classics of sociological theory were composed. For all their differences, the founding figures sought to understand a social world organized toward progress, whether through competition, differentiation, or revolution. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others were preeminently theorists of modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, it brought events barely imagined in their philosophies: world war, genocide, and ramifying conflicts among groups identified by race, religion, ideology, and ethnicity. Thus, a new age demanded a new philosophy. Sociological insight infused efforts to understand why “nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed,” to quote the opening lines of Karl Polanyi’s ([1944] 2001:3) The Great Transformation. The quest for understanding followed the development of imperialism, driven by capitalist expansion and resulting in the dehumanization or objectification of subject peoples, marked by skin color or culture as “not us.” In her magisterial The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt ([1948] 1968) tracked the parallel ascendance of imperialism and nationalism, which fueled a terrible conjuncture of the dehumanization of “others” and a demand for the homogeneity of a sovereign people. But whereas Arendt’s others were the displaced, the stateless, the victimized, the decades after World War II provided ample evidence of the capacity of the oppressed as agents in their own right. Violence in the service of a liberation struggle could also repair the psychic damage of colonial domination, argued Frantz Fanon ([1963] 2004) in The Wretched of the Earth. For all their differences, Polanyi, Arendt, and Fanon advanced an analysis in which capitalism led to imperialism which led—along paths overseas and in Europe—to the cultural degradation and dehumanization of other humans marked off by some difference. And once humans were understood as beasts, as things, anything could happen and, tragically, did. Although world war, imperialism, decolonization, and genocide are among the most notable sociological phenomena of the 20th century, these efforts to excavate their origins have had remarkably little impact on the sociological canon. Although the works cited in the previous paragraph were major efforts to bring the resources of philosophy and social theory to bear on the great issues of the 20th century, they rarely figure in the common reading of the discipline. Thus, each cohort of new sociologists encounters the world with theoretical tools ill-suited for addressing these major questions. Gender, race, ethnicity, and religion are shoehorned into a theoretical framework developed to address class, or they are quarantined in specialized bodies of theory. Normative theory develops

Commentary: The Many Paths from Protest to Politics

At a moment when public talk centres on austerity, debt, and recession, it is easy to assume that public protest will be driven by economic grievances. The central surprise of this study of ‘subterranean politics’ (see ‘The “bubbling up” of subterranean politics in Europe’ by Kaldor & Selchow, 2013, this issue) is that many of the protestors locate the central problem in political life, in the failure of democratic politics as it has come to be institutionalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, a large part of the contentious politics playing out in the plazas, squares, and piazzas of Europe involves efforts to re-imagine institutional politics—or an alternative to it. By crossing the conceptual divide between protest and democratic deliberation, this wave of political mobilization challenges some of the most basic categories of political sociology. This rich description of new patterns of protest and oppositional politics across Europe pushes us to assess the concepts and analogies that guide our interpretations and shape our expectations about the consequences of this wave of mobilization. Above all, this wave of protests across Europe demands that we again ask a familiar question: how does protest matter? As is often the case early in the effort to grapple with something new, vivid language does much of the theoretical work: subterranean politics, bubble up, resonance, and ‘strike a chord’. The great virtue of this collective report from the field (and squares and plazas) is that it pushes us to think carefully about the specific processes captured by this compelling vocabulary. How do the participants in and analysts of ‘subterranean politics’ think that it works?