W. Richard Scott

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

A Multidimensional Model of Organizational Legitimacy: Hospital Survival in Changing Institutional Environments

Using data on 143 hospital organizations, this article examines the antecedents and effects of two forms of organizational legitimacy (managerial and technical) over a 46-year period. Results show that both the managerial and technical forms provide notable improvements in organizational survival chances but that the strength of each effect varies over time depending on the nature of the institutional environment. Variation also appears in the antecedents of legitimacy - for example, the ability of a hospital to secure approval for its managerial practices depends on the correspondence between its mission and the logic of the surrounding institutional environment. The results suggest that a multidimensional model can reveal nuances of organizational legitimacy that are missed by more unitary conceptions.

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.

Lords of the Dance: Professionals as Institutional Agents

More so than other types of social actors, the professions in modern society have assumed leading roles in the creation and tending of institutions. They are the preeminent institutional agents of our time. Different professions work in various ways: some attempt to create general cultural-cognitive frameworks; others to devise normative prescriptions to guide behavior; and still others to exercise coercive authority. Also, individual professionals assume varying roles within their professional community: some concentrate on devising and testing general principles, others transport these ideas to varying communities; and still others work to apply the principles to individual cases. Professions themselves adhere to an institutional model, but this model has undergone important changes over time.

Organizations and Movements

Introduction There is little question that two of the most active and creative arenas of scholarly activity in the social sciences during the past four decades have been organizational studies (OS) and social movement analysis (SM). Both have been intellectually lively and vigorous in spite of the fact that scholars in both camps began their projects during the early 1960s on relatively barren soil. Students of OS took up their labors alongside the remnants of scientific management, their human relations critics, and scattered studies of bureaucratic behavior. SM scholars were surrounded by earlier empirical work on rumors, panics, crowds, and mobs together with a “smorgasbord” of theoretical perspectives, including the collective behavior, mass society, and relative deprivation approaches (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1988: 695). In both situations, prior work provided scant theoretical coherence and little basis for optimism. Moreover, in this early period no connection existed or, indeed, seemed possible between the two fields since the former concentrated on instrumental, organized behavior while the latters focus was on “spontaneous, unorganized, and unstructured phenomena” (Morris 2000: 445). OS began to gain traction with the recognition of the importance of the wider environment, first material resource and technical features, then political, and, more recently, institutional and cultural forces. Open systems conceptions breathed new life into a field too long wedded to concerns of internal administrative design, leadership, and work group cohesion.

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.

Technology and the Structure of Subunits: Distinguishing Individual and Workgroup Effects.

This study was carried out in association with the Stanford Center for Health Care Research, William H. Forrest, Jr., Director. It was conducted as part of a larger project on the quality of surgical care, known as the Institutional Differences Study, with Forrest, Scott, and Byron Wm. Brown, Jr., as principal investigators. The project was supported by Contract PH 43-63-65, National Institute of General Medical Sciences administered through the National Center for Health Services Research, HEW. Additional support for this study was obtained from the Organizational Research Training Program at Stanford University under a training grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, HEW.

The Changing World of Chinese Enterprise: An Institutional Perspective

Recent developments in institutional theory are reviewed in order to provide a conceptual framework within which to locate and consider studies of changes in Chinese enterprise. Institutional theory emphasizes the role played by regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive processes in shaping social behavior and social structure. Changes in Chinese organizations are described and evaluated at three levels: societal, organizational field (state-owned enterprises), and individual organizations. Western models of organizing are introduced via numerous mechanisms, but must be adapted to fit the distinctive institutional characteristics of China.

Reflections: The Past and Future of Research on Institutions and Institutional Change

The study of institutions has a long history, but recent efforts stress the significance of symbolic elements in shaping social life. Although institutional processes and structures operate from the most micro interpersonal level to the most macro transocietal level, most research during the past few decades has concentrated on higher levels, such as the organization field. Institutional scholarship has been strongly influenced by structuration theory and, as a consequence, has given increasing attention to processes of institutional reinforcement and change. Directions of development showing promise include attention to intermediaries in fields, social movement processes, instituted modes of change, and transnational institution-building.

Who Needs to Know What? Institutional Knowledge and Global Projects

Projections for future demand in infrastructure and buildings indicate that there will be increasing opportunities for firms to engage in construction projects around the world. However, international construction projects also face numerous uncertainties. Foreign firms engaged on these projects must work in unfamiliar environments, with differing regulations, norms, and cultural beliefs. This can increase misunderstandings and risks for the entrant firm. To reduce these risks, successful international firms strategically increase their understanding of the local area by collecting knowledge that is important for a given foreign project. This study compiles and analyzes data from 15 case studies of three types of international firms (developers, contractors, and engineers) engaged in international infrastructure development to identify the types of institutional knowledge that informants indicate are important for their international projects. Using institutional theory, we categorize the kinds of knowledge about foreign country operations that managers deem to be important, expanding prior studies by attending to normative knowledge in addition to regulative and cultural knowledge. Finally, we analyze the importance of different categories of knowledge according to firm type. This analysis provides entrant firms a tool to help identify important types of institutional knowledge to collect as they undertake international projects.