John W. Meyer

World Society and the Nation‐State

The authors analyze the nation‐state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics: (1) properties of nation‐states that result from their exogenously driven construction, including isomorphism, decoupling, and expansive structuration; (2) processes by which rationalistic world culture affects national states; (3) characteristics of world society that enhance the impact of world culture on national states and societies, including conditions favoring the diffusion of world models, expansion of world‐level associations, and rationalized scientific and professional authority; (4) dynamic features of world culture and society that generate expansion, conflict, and change, especially the statelessness of world society, legitimation of multiple levels of rationalized actors, and internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

Organizational environments : ritual and rationality

Introduction - W Richard Scott From Technology to Environment PART ONE: THE INSTITUTIONAL ORIGINS OF ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE Institutionalized Organizations - John W Meyer and Brian Rowan Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony Institutional and Technical Sources of Organizational Structure - John W Meyer, W Richard Scott, and Terrence E Deal Explaining the Structure of Educational Organizations PART TWO: VARIETIES OF INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS The Structure of Educational Organizations - John W Meyer and Brian Rowan Health Care Organizations in the 1980s - W Richard Scott The Convergence of Public and Professional Control Systems Reform Movements and Organizations - W Richard Scott The Case of Aging The Organization of Societal Sectors - W Richard Scott and John W Meyer The Organization of Environments - W Richard Scott Network, Cultural, and Historical Elements PART THREE: FRAGMENTED CENTRALIZATION AND ITS ORGANIZATIONAL CONSEQUENCES Centralization of Funding and Control in Educational Governance - John W Meyer Centralization and the Legitimacy Problems of Local Government - John W Meyer and W Richard Scott Organizational Factors Affecting Legalization in Education - John W Meyer Innovation and Knowledge Use in American Public Education - John W Meyer Conclusion - John W Meyer Institutionalization and the Rationality of Formal Organizational Structure

The Effects of Education as an Institution

Education is usually seen as affecting society by socializing individuals. Recently this view has been attacked with the argument that education is a system of allocation, conferring success on some and failure on others. The polemic has obscured some of the interesing implications of allocation theory for socialization theory and for research on the effects of education. But allocation theory, too, focuses on educational effects on individuals being processed. It turns out to be a special case of a more general macrosociological theory of the effects of education as a system of legitimation. Education restructures whole populations, creating and expanding elites and redefining the rights and obligations of members. The institutional effects of education as a legitimation system are explored. Comparative and experimental studies are suggested.

The Worldwide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century

The authors analyze the rapid worldwide expansion of higher educational enrollments over the twentieth century using pooled panel regressions. Expansion is higher in economically developed countries (in some but not all analyses) as classic theories would have it. Growth is greater where secondary enrollments are high and where state control over education is low, consistent with conflict and competition theories. Institutional theories get strong support: growth patterns are similar in all types of countries, are especially high in countries more linked to world society, and sharply accelerate in virtually all countries after 1960. The authors theorize and operationalize the institutional processes involved, which include scientization, democratization and the expansion of human rights, the rise of development planning, and the structuration of the world polity. With these changes, a new model of society became institutionalized globally-one in which schooled knowledge and personnel were seen as appropriate for a wide variety of social positions, and in which many more young people were seen as appropriate candidates for higher education. An older vision of education as contributing to a more closed society and occupational system—with associated fears of “over-education”—was replaced by an open-system picture of education as useful “human capital” for unlimited progress. The global trends are so strong that developing countries now have higher enrollment rates than European countries did only a few decades ago, and currently about one-fifth of the world cohort is now enrolled in higher education.

The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency

Much social theory takes for granted the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors—individuals, organizations, nation states—are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded in culture. Accordingly, while there is much abstract metatheory about “actors” and their “agency,” there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an “actor,” and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their internal decoupling, their extraordinarily complex structuration, and their capacity for prolific collective action.

World Expansion of Mass Education, 1870-1980

Newly available enrollment data for over 120 countries for the period 1870-1980 are used to examine theories of mass educational expansion. Event-history analyses indicate that mass educational systems appeared at a steady rate before the 1940s and sharply increased after 1950. Pooled panel regressions show that the expansion of mass education, once formed, followed an S-shaped diffusion pattern before 1940, continuing with added force later. Expansion is endemic in the system. National variation exists; indications of national modernization or of structural location in world society, however, have only modest effects. It seems that mass education spreads in a world organized politically as nation-states and candidate states. Rates of appearance of mass education and of expansion accelerated sharply after World War II, with the intensification of the nation-state model and the centrality of mass education in this model.

Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets

Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; however, retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964. The findings highlight the way in which American public policy, with its broad outcome-oriented guidelines for organizations, stimulates managers to experiment with compliance mechanisms with and eye to judicial sanction. In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions.

Institutional structure : constituting state, society, and the individual

PART ONE: THEORETICAL ISSUES Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account PART TWO: THE WORLD-POLITY AND STATE STRUCTURE The World-Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State World-Polity Sources of Expanding State Authority and Organization, 1870-1970 Regime Changes and State Power in an Intensifying World-State-System Structural Antecedents and Consequences of Statism PART THREE: CONSTITUTING NATION AND CITIZEN Human Rights or State Expansion? Cross-National Definitions of Constitutional Rights, 1870-1970 Global Patterns of Educational Institutionalization On the Union of States and Schools World-Polity Sources of National Welfare and Land Reform PART FOUR: CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN INDIVIDUAL The Ideology of Childhood and the State Rules Distinguishing Children in National Constitutions, 1870-1970 Self and Life Course Institutionalization and Its Effects The Political Construction of Rape PART FIVE: RATIONALIZATION AND COLLECTIVE ACTION Comparative Social Movements Revivalism, Nation-Building and Institutional Change PART SIX: THE POSSIBILITY OF A GENERAL HISTORICAL THEORY Institutional Analysis

The Structuring of a World Environmental Regime, 1870–1990

In recent decades a great expansion has occurred in world environmental organization, both governmental and nongovernmental, along with an explosion of worldwide discourse and communication about environmental problems. All of this constitutes a world environmental regime. Using the term regime a little more broadly than usual, we define world environmental regime as a partially integrated collection of world-level organizations, understandings, and assumptions that specify the relationship of human society to nature. The rise of an environmental regime has accompanied greatly expanded organization and activity in many sectors of global society. Explaining the growth of the environmental regime, however, poses some problems. The interests and powers of the dominant actors in world society—nation-states and economic interests—came late to the environmental scene. Thus these forces cannot easily be used to explain the rise of world mobilization around the environment, in contrast with other sectors of global society (for example, the international economic and national security regimes).

The Legalization of the Workplace

This study uses longitudinal data on nearly 300 American employmers over the period 1955-85 to analyze the adoption of disciplinary hearings and grievance procedures for nonunion salaried and hourly emplyees. Hypotheses are developed from an institutional perspective that focuses, first, on uncertainty arisin from government mandates concerning equal employment opportunity and affirmative action and, second, on the role of the human relations professsions in constructing employment-relations law and prescribing models of compliance. Event-history techniques are used to test these hypotheses against competing arguments concerning the internatural structure and labor market position of employing organizations. Results on all outcomes strongly support the institutionalist model.