Paul DiMaggio

The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

Socially Embedded Consumer Transactions: For What Kinds of Purchases Do People Most Often use Networks?

Why and to what extent do people make significant purchases from people with whom they have prior noncommercial relationships ? Using data from the economic sociology module of the 1996 General Social Survey, the authors document high levels of within-network exchanges. They argue that transacting with social contacts is effective because it embeds commercial exchanges in a web of obligations and holds the sellers network hostage to appropriate role performance in the economic transaction. It follows that within-network exchanges will be more common in risky transactions that are unlikely to be repeated and in which uncertainty is high. The data support this view. Self-reports about major purchases are consistent with the expectation that exchange frequency reduces the extent of within-network exchanges. Responses to questions about preferences for in-group exchanges support the argument that uncertainty about product and performance quality leads people to prefer sellers with whom they have noncommercial ties. Moreover, people prefer to avoid selling to social contacts under the same conditions that lead buyers to seek such transactions; and people who transact with friends and relatives report greater satisfaction with the results than do people who transact with strangers, especially for risk-laden exchanges

The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective

Students of management are nearly unanimous (as are managers themselves) in believing that the contemporary business corporation is in a period of dizzying change. This book represents the first time that leading experts in sociology, law, economics, and management studies have been assembled in one volume to explain the varying ways in which contemporary businesses are transforming themselves to respond to globalization, new technologies, workforce transformation, and legal change. Together their essays, whose focal point is an emerging network form of organization, bring order to the chaotic tumble of diagnoses, labels, and descriptions used to make sense of this changing world. The first three chapters report systematically on change in corporate structure, strategy, and governance in the United States and Western Europe, East Asia, and the former socialist world. They separate fact from fiction and established trend from extravagant extrapolation. This is followed by commentaries on them: Reinier Kraakman affirms the durability of the corporate form; David Bryce and Jitendra Singh assess organizational change from an evolutionary perspective; Robert Gibbons considers the logic of relational contracting in firms; and Charles Tilly probes the deeper historical context in which firms operate.

Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers

Much research on the “digital divide” presumes that adults who do not use the Internet are economically disadvantaged, yet little research has tested this premise. After discussing several mechanisms that might produce differences in earnings growth between workers who do and do not use the Internet, we use data from the Current Population Survey to examine the impact of Internet use on changes in earnings over 13-month intervals at the end of the “Internet boom.” Our analyses reveal robustly significant positive associations between Web use and earnings growth, indicating that some skills and behaviors associated with Internet use were rewarded by the labor market. Consistent with human-capital theory, current use at work had the strongest effect on earnings. In contrast to economic theory (which has led economists to focus exclusively on effects of contemporaneous workplace technology use), workers who used the Internet only at home also did better, suggesting that users may have benefited from superior access to job information or from signaling effects of using a fashionable technology. The positive association between computer use and earnings appears to reflect the effect of Internet use, rather than use of computers for offline tasks. These results suggest that inequality in access to and mastery of technology is a valid concern for students of social stratification.

CULTURAL DEMOCRACY IN A PERIOD OF CULTURAL EXPANSION: THE SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF ARTS AUDIENCES IN THE UNITED STATES*

Students of American society, from the times of Tocqueville and Veblen, have been concerned with the social role of high culture in a democracy. The debate over the extent and consequences of elite dominance of the arts constituency has been intensified in recent years by the rise of government support for the arts. Little is known about the social composition of the arts constituency. Drawing on 268 largely unpublished studies of visitors to museums and audiences of live performing arts, we conclude that the gender and age composition of the arts audience is little different from the general public. However, the social class composition is strikingly elite: audiences are better educated, of higher occupational standing and more affluent than the general populace. Conversely, blue-collar workers, individuals with low incomes or little education, and racial and ethnic minorities are found to be greatly underrepresented. Analysis of differences between and within art forms reveals that museums, particularly science and history museums, draw a broader audience than do performing arts events; frequent attenders within most forms are found to be more elite than irregular consumers. Assessment of audience composition trends since the early 1960s indicates no movement toward a broader inclusion of the public, suggesting that a recent expansion in the scale of arts activities and government subsidies has not been accompanied by a democratization of cultural consumption

Why do some theatres innovate more than others? An empirical analysis

Abstract The authors develop a measure of the ‘innovativeness’ of the repertoires of U.S. resident nonprofit theatres and test hypotheses about the relationship between environmental and organizational factors and innovation. Access to potential patrons rich in cultural capital appears to make theatre repertoires more innovate, while dependence upon the market (as opposed to grants and contributions) is associated with greater conformity of repertoire. Theatres with smaller budgets to maintain, fewer seats to fill, and less need for earned income are less conformist in their programming than are large theatres with capacious houses and high rates of earned income. Holding size and dependence on earned income constant, there is no evidence that age, structural differentiation, or the presence of subscription audiences—all associated with ‘institutionalization’ – have either a negative or a positive impact on innovation. New York theatres innovate more, and are less negatively affected by growth and the market, than theatres elsewhere in the U.S. It is suggested that artistic innovation has come to depend overwhelmingly on the behavior of formal organizations and that, consequently, we must understand the principles that govern the relationship of such organizations to their economic and social environments in order to understand artistic change.

How Network Externalities Can Exacerbate Intergroup Inequality

The authors describe a common but largely unrecognized mechanism that produces and exacerbates intergroup inequality: the diffusion of valuable practices with positive network externalities through social networks whose members differentially possess characteristics associated with adoption. The authors examine two cases: the first, to explore the mechanisms implications and, the second, to demonstrate its utility in analyzing empirical data. In the first, the diffusion of Internet use, network effects increase adoptions benefits to associates of prior adopters. An agent-based model demonstrates positive, monotonic relationships, given externalities, between homophily bias and intergroup inequality in equilibrium adoption rates. In the second, rural-urban migration in Thailand, network effects reduce risk to persons whose networks include prior migrants. Analysis of longitudinal individual-level migration data indicates that network homophily interacts with network externalities to induce divergence of migration rates among otherwise similar villages.

The production of scientific change: Richard Peterson and the institutional turn in cultural sociology

Abstract The production perspective posits that the content of formally produced symbol systems is shaped by the social context of their production, distribution and use. I draw on the insights of the ‘production of culture’ perspective introduced by Richard Peterson in 1974 to analyze the development and influence of that same perspective. Using a combination of intellectual history and citation analysis, I demonstrate that the production perspective rapidly acquired a central position in the new sociology of culture that emerged in the 1970s; that it became hegemonic within the sociology of art and media; and that, by the 1990s, its influence could be seen in the study of informally produced culture and in the humanities. The production perspectives success is explicable as a function of (a) its intrinsic merit in generating compelling explanations; (b) the environment into which it was introduced, which lacked seriously competitive paradigms in the areas of arts, media, and informally produced culture; (c) Petersons use of institutions to disseminate the perspective and create an academic minisocial movement on its behalf; and (d) his framing of the perspective, which at once located it in the great tradition of sociological theory but at the same time left it sufficiently unfinished that others could appropriate it to their own uses.

Culture and Social Psychology Converging Perspectives

dynamic networks in conjunction with other forms of non-relational data. From this per spective, psychologists and sociologists both can model, for example, the diffusion of stereotypes or racial prejudice in a social system based on assumptions about how people process outgroup information and the likelihood of intergroup interaction. Together, these independent streams of research can jointly develop a structural the ory of action that explains how neural and social networks change reciprocally. It is here that the future (understanding) of inequality lies. R6F6R6NC6S

Enacting community in progressive America: Civic rituals in national music week, 1924

Abstract This paper explores civic rituals in the late Progressive Era U.S. by focussing on an effort to replicate one ritual observance simultaneously in many locations: National Music Week, 1924. To gain insight into the changing relationship between localities and centers during this period, we examine the organizational strategies Music Weeks promoters employed, before focussing on the local observances. Because the same stimuli elicited responses in 452 places, we can explore how variation across places in community structure, organizational styles, and institutional logics is reflected in civic ritual. We do so ideographically, focussing closely on four observances, and quantitatively, using data on sponsorship, content, and participants for 419 observances and a sample of 833 specific events. Observances in small places were dominated by traditional rituals of ratification , which affirmed the existing social order and the place of elite voluntary associations in it. Rituals of intergenerational unity celebrated community as families and youth achieving together in the public sphere. Rituals of civic identity constructed communities as aggregates of individuals, celebrating community en masse as citizen/consumers. In large cities, rituals of incorporation , reflecting urban machine politics and an inchoate corporatist logic, enacted community by symbolically annexing problematic subgroups to the whole.