Texto 03 - Organization Theory - Modern Symbolic and postmodern perspectives Matriz 2

(Chapter 6); as physical structures that support and constrain both activity and meaning
(Chapter 7); and as arenas within which power relations express themselves through
organizational politics, conflict and control (Chapter 8). These core concepts are related in
numerous ways, yet each will contribute something unique to your understanding of
organizations and organizing. As you read and reread these chapters, strive to develop your
appreciation for both the similarities and differences between the concepts because this
will develop your imagination for theorizing.
In addition to providing exposure to the core concepts of organization theory, Part II
will present several different theories of organization that were built using the core
concepts. Within each chapter these theories will be presented in historical order; in most
cases this means beginning with modern and proceeding to symbolic-interpretive and
postmodern perspectives, although organizational culture is an exception in that
symbolic-interpretivists were complicit with modernists in introducing this concept into
organization theory. This format should help you to experience organization theory as an
unfolding series of challenges and disagreements among theorists and their ideas about
and different perspectives on organizations and organizing.
The theories I am going to present will not only give you exposure to the various
types of explanation, understanding and appreciation offered by organization theory,
they will also provide a means to describe some of the skills and practices organization
theorists use. In discussing how theorists produce theory, I mean to encourage you to
become more actively theoretical in your approach to organizations and in your management
practices. In this regard, Part III will show you how organization theorists sometimes
combine concepts, theories and perspectives to analyze and recommend action on practical
18 WHAT IS ORGANIZATION THEORY?
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issues and problems such as organizational design, organizational change, knowledge
management and organizational learning (Chapter 9). The final chapter will introduce
you to ideas that lie on the horizon for organization theory: critical realism, network theory,
organizational aesthetics, complexity theory and organizational identity (Chapter 10).
Thus Part III will show you some of the tricks of the trade practiced by organization
theorists.
A Conceptual Model of Organization
Throughout this book I will provide many conceptual models such as you see in Figure 1.2.
These models visually represent theories as sets of concepts and their relationships.
Organization theorists use them to make abstractions seem more tangible. Figure 1.2, for
example, is a visual way of communicating my definition of organizations as technologies,
social structures, cultures and physical structures that exist within and respond to an
environment. The grey tint over the entire model indicates that all of these elements of
organizing are colored by relations of power.
Diagrams such as Figure 1.2 can help you to remember a great deal about the theories
you will be studying. Giving these diagrams close attention will often reveal aspects of
organization theory that are subtle but important. For example, let the interconnections of
the four small circles in Figure 1.2 remind you that none of these concepts or the theories
and perspectives associated with them is complete in itself; each shares some aspects with
the others and it is the combination of these different ways of knowing that will allow
you to produce rich and complex explanations and descriptions of organization, or to
WHY STUDY ORGANIZATION THEORY? 19
Culture
Social
Structure
Technology
Physical
Structure
Figure 1.2 A model for the concept of organization
The five intersecting circles of this model represent the organization as five inter-related phenomena conceptualized
as shown. Power, a sixth core concept, is symbolized by the grey tint that infuses the other circles.
These six concepts will be examined in depth in Part II of the book.
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challenge theories offered by others. Now imagine that each of the circles is a sphere spinning
on its axis and rotating around the others. Let this image remind you that these core
concepts are dynamic, mutually reactive parts of an organization interacting with and
within an environment. Then focus on the intersections of the circles and the gray tint
infusing them all. Let these features of the model remind you that any conceptual distinction
can be regarded as insupportable, that from some other perspective your distinctions
will break down and blend into each other.
I should warn you that, as you move toward understanding each core concept, there
will be times when you get caught in the intersections and become confused as to which
concept, theory or perspective you are using. Expect this. Try not to feel discouraged when
it happens because this is part of the process of becoming knowledgeable about organization
theory. Trust that out of your confusion new possibilities for theorizing, designing and
managing organizations will emerge in ways that you would never have imagined before
you studied organization theory.
20 WHAT IS ORGANIZATION THEORY?
SUMMARY
A theory attempts to explain (modernist), describe so as to produce understanding and appreciation
of (symbolic-interpretive), criticize or create (postmodernist) a segment of reality. Which of
these purposes you believe theory serves depends on your ontological and epistemological
assumptions. The particular focus of a theory is called its phenomenon of interest. In organization
theory the primary phenomenon of interest is the organization. A theory consists of a set of concepts
and the relationships that tie them together into an explanation (or an understanding, critique
or creation) of the phenomenon of interest.
Because of the complexity and pluralism of organizations, managers who make sense of
and use multiple perspectives are better able to bring their knowledge of organization theory to
bear on the wide range of analyses, decisions and plans their organizations make each and every
day. This book is built upon the framework of multiple perspectives, and in particular, modern,
symbolic-interpretive, and postmodern perspectives will structure our discussion. Studying organization
theory from multiple perspectives will help you to enlarge your knowledge base, master
a wide range of skills and see situations in different ways—all of which are crucial for understanding,
analyzing and managing the complexities of organizational life.
The modernist perspective focuses on the organization as an independent objective entity and
takes a positivist approach to generating knowledge. Modernist organization theorists focus on how
to increase efficiency, effectiveness and other objective indicators of performance through the application
of theories relating to structure and control. The symbolic-interpretive perspective focuses on
the organization as a community sustained by human relationships and uses a predominantly subjectivist
ontology and an interpretive epistemology. Instead of treating organizations as objects to be
measured and analyzed (modernist perspective), symbolic-interpretivists treat them as webs of
meanings that are jointly created, appreciated and communicated. Symbolic-interpretive organization
theory explores how meanings are created and realities (note the plural) made sensible to those who
participate in sustaining them.
Meanwhile postmodernism will generate healthy skepticism toward any dominant theory
and will license you and others to try something completely different. The postmodern perspective
does all this by expanding the focus of theorizing from the organization per se, to how we
speak and write about organizations. Thus one phenomenon postmodern organization theory
addresses is theorizing itself: how what you may perceive as stable or objective elements of
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organizations and organization theory (structure, technology, culture, control, etc.) are but the outcomes
of linguistic convention and discursive practice. As such, postmodernism always makes
you aware that theories are open to revision and invites you to ask who supports them and why.
You should recognize, however, that most postmodernists would object to being categorized as
they are in Figure 1.1 and Table 1.2. Remember, postmodernism challenges categories, seeking
to undermine them by blurring their boundaries and exposing the motivations that produced or
maintain them. In the case of Figure 1.1, for instance, a postmodernist would probably argue that
this typology objectifies organization theory and theorizing in ways that reproduce and legitimize
seeing the field as constructed of modern, symbolic-interpretive and postmodern perspectives,
when other perspectives might be promoted at the same time or instead of these (some others
will be discussed in Chapter 10).
I believe that the best theories are those that you have found or invented to match your own
experience of organization. In this book you will learn about the theories of organizations and organizing
that others have developed and the skills they used to formulate them. This will give you a
foundation for your own theorizing. You can use the already formulated theories as they stand, if
this proves useful to your purposes, or as inspiration for your own theory-building efforts, but in
either case, using organization theory will require both the mastery of existing theories and personal
development of the skills of theorizing, analysis, interpretation and critique. Just remember:
when you want to apply your abstract reasoning to concrete situations you will need to reverse
the process of abstraction and that will require you to perform a creative act.
Finally, you have your own reasons for studying organization theory. Mine are that organization
theory broadens my appreciation of organizations and the world in general and opens my
mind to new ideas and possibilities for change and transformation. I am constantly renewed by
my work in this field and find that the ideas it has given me promote an increased ability to
develop new concepts and theories and enhance my ability to learn. Although it may hold other
meanings and possibilities for you, I hope that my enthusiasm, which is built on my own particular
needs, values and experiences, will inspire you to explore and learn to use organization theory
in ways that enhance your life and career.
WHY STUDY ORGANIZATION THEORY? 21
KEY TERMS
phenomenon of interest
theory
concepts
abstraction
chunking
multiple perspectives
modern
symbolic-interpretive
postmodern
ontology
objectivist
subjectivist
epistemology
positivist
interpretive
ENDNOTES
1. See Miller (1956).
2. The multiple perspectives approach to
organization theory has been employed by a
variety of researchers. One of the earliest and
most influential of these was American
political scientist Graham Allison (1971),
who analyzed the Cuban Missile Crisis using
several different theoretical perspectives. John
Hassard (1988, 1991; Hassard and Pym 1990)
has been particularly active in promoting
Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) framework.
W. Richard Scott (1992) presented rational,
natural, and open system views of
organizations, while Joanne Martin (1992)
built her analysis of organizational culture
theory around a multiple perspective
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Prehistory
Smith, Adam (1957). Selections from “The Wealth of
Nations” (ed. George J. Stigler). New York:
Appleton Century Crofts (originally published
in 1776).
Marx, Karl (1954). Capital. Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House (first published in
1867).
Durkheim, Émile (1949). The division of labor in
society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press (first published in
1893).
Taylor, Frederick W. (1911). The principles of scientific
management. New York: Harper.
Follett, Mary Parker (1923). The new state: Group
organization and the solution of popular government.
New York: Longmans, Green and Co. (originally
published 1918).
Fayol, Henri (1919/1949). General and industrial
management. London: Pitman (first published in
1919).
Weber, Max (1947). The theory of social and economic
organization (ed. A. H. Henderson and Talcott
Parsons). Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press (first published
in 1924).
Gulick, Luther, and Urwick, Lyndall (1937) (eds.).
Papers on the science of administration. New York:
Institute of Public Administration, Columbia
University.
Barnard, Chester (1938). The functions of the executive.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Modernist perspective
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von (1950). The theory of
open systems in physics and biology. Science, 111:
23–8.
——(1968). General systems theory: Foundations,
development, applications (revised edn.). New York:
George Braziller.
Trist, Eric, and Bamforth, Kenneth W. (1951). Some
social and psychological consequences of the
22 WHAT IS ORGANIZATION THEORY?
REFERENCES
approach including integration,
differentiation, and fragmentation
perspectives.
3. This assumption is important because theorists
use language to create and communicate their
theories and if language did not align with
reality then it would be impossible to lay claim
to positive knowledge.
4. See Schneider (1993) for further discussion and
analysis of this ongoing debate.
5. Foucault (1977).
WORK CITED IN FIGURE 1.1 IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER BY PERSPECTIVE
Allison, Graham (1971). The essence of decision:
Explaining the Cuban missile crisis. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Burrell, Gibson, and Morgan, Gareth (1979).
Sociological paradigms and organizational analysis.
London: Heinemann.
Foucault, Michel (1977). Power/knowledge (ed. Colin
Gordon). New York: Pantheon.
Hassard, John (1988). Overcoming hermeticism in
organization theory: An alternative to paradigm
incommensurability. Human Relations, 41/3:
247–59.
——(1991). Multiple paradigms and organizational
analysis: A case study. Organization Studies, 12/2:
275–99.
——and Pym, Denis (1990) (eds.). The theory and
philosophy of organizations: Critical issues and new
perspectives. London: Routledge.
Martin, Joanne (1992). Cultures in organizations:
Three perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Miller, George A. (1956). The magical number
seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our
capacity for processing information. Psychological
Review, 63/2: 81–97.
Schneider, Mark A. (1993). Culture and enchantment.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Scott, W. Richard (1992). Organizations: Rational,
natural, and open systems (3rd edn.). Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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WHY STUDY ORGANIZATION THEORY? 23
long-wall method of coal-getting. Human
Relations, 4: 3–38.
Boulding, Kenneth E. (1956). General systems
theory—The skeleton of science. Management
Science, 2: 197–208.
Simon, Herbert (1957). Administrative behavior
(2nd edn.). New York: Macmillan (first published
in 1945).
March, James G., and Simon, Herbert (1958).
Organizations. New York: John Wiley.
Emery, Fredrick (1960) (ed.). Systems thinking.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin.
——and Trist, Eric L. (1960). Socio-technical
systems. In Management science models and
techniques, Vol. 2. London: Pergamon.
Burns, Tom, and Stalker, G. M. (1961/1995). The
management of innovation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Woodward, Joan (1958). Management and technology.
London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
——(1965). Industrial organization: Theory and
practice. London: Oxford University Press.
Lawrence, P. R., and Lorsch, J. W. (1967).
Differentiation and integration in complex
organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12:
1–47.
Thompson, James (1967). Organizations in action.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Symbolic-interpretive perspective
Schütz, Alfred (1967). The phenomenology of the
social world (trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert).
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press
(first published in 1932).
Whyte, William F. (1943). Street corner society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Selznick, Philip (1949). TVA and the grass roots.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goffman, Erving (1959). The presentation of self in
everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
Gadamer, Han-Georg (1994). Truth and method
(second revised edn., translation revised by
J. Weinsheimer and D. Marshall). New York:
Continuum (originally published as Wahrheit
and Methode.by J. C. B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck,
Tubingen, 1960).
Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas (1966). The
social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology
of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Weick, Karl E. (1979 [1969]). The social psychology of
organizing. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Geertz, C. (1973). Interpretation of cultures. New
York: Basic Books.
Clifford, James, and Marcus, George E. (1986)
(eds.). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of
ethnography. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Postmodern perspective
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1959). Course in general
linguistics (trans. Wade Baskin). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Foucault, Michel (1972). The archeology of knowledge
and the discourse on language (trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith). London: Tavistock Publications.
——(1973). The order of things. New York: Vintage
Books.
Bell, Daniel (1973). The coming of post-industrial
society. New York: Basic Books.
——(1976). The cultural contradictions of capitalism.
New York: Basic Books.
Jencks, Charles (1977). The language of post-modern
architecture. London: Academy.
Derrida, Jacques (1978). Writing and difference (trans.
Alan Bass). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
——(1980). Of grammatology (trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1979). The postmodern
condition: A report on knowledge (trans. G.
Bennington and B. Massumi). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, Richard (1980). Philosophy and the mirror of
nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The dialogic imagination:
Four essays (trans. Chorale Emerson and Michael
Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lash, Scott, and Urry, John (1987). The end of
organized capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Selected writings (ed.
M. Poster). Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press.
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Texto 03 - Organization Theory - Modern Symbolic and postmodern perspectives Matriz 1

and practitioners report feeling is the result of not recognizing that the application of theory
is a creative act. A belief that abstract theory can generate instant solutions to specific
problems is naïve. It is equally naïve to reject theory as having little value simply because
you have not yet learned how to use it. Theory is better suited to raising important questions
at critical moments and reminding you what relevant knowledge is available, than it
is to providing ready-made answers to your problems. Use theory as a tool to help you
reason through complex situations; do not expect it to guarantee your success.
Multiple Perspectives
Different ways of looking at the world produce different knowledge and thus different
perspectives come to be associated with their own concepts and theories. This is the case with
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the multiple perspectives you will study in this book—modern, symbolic-interpretive and
postmodern. The concepts and theories of a particular perspective offer you distinctive
thinking tools with which to craft ideas about organizations and organizing. Depending
upon your intentions, you may find that particular perspectives have greater appeal than
others for your purpose. The more knowledge you have of multiple perspectives, concepts
and theories, the greater will be your capacity to choose a useful approach to dealing with the
situations you face in your organization.
British sociologist Gibson Burrell and British organization theorist Gareth Morgan
were among the first to draw attention to the multiple perspectives of organization theory
in their highly acclaimed book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis,
published in 1979.2 They argued that knowledge is based on different paradigms, each with
its own assumptions about the world. Paradigms encourage researchers to study
phenomena in different ways.3However, be sure to notice that paradigm differences are not
just academic; they become practical when knowledge is used to create a more desirable
reality or better ways of organizing. Beliefs, assumptions and knowledge of the world
influence how researchers carry out their research, how leaders design and manage their
organizations and how each of us relates to the world and to other people. For example,
whether you assume that your organization is best run as a well-oiled machine, a web of
meaning, or a broken mirror will influence what you perceive to be the best way of
designing your organization and managing its people. As you will see, the three
perspectives used in this book draw upon significantly different assumptions about the
organizational world and consequently will lead you to think about organizations in
different ways (e.g., as machines, cultures or fragmented images) and thus to seek different
kinds of knowledge about them.
I am committed to maintaining multiple perspectives in organization theory for a
number of reasons. First, today few would disagree that organizations operate in complex,
uncertain, and often contradictory situations. Managers and employees are expected to do
more with less, to maximize both short-term gain and long-term investment, and be more
efficient as well as more humane and ethical. Confronting such a variety of contradictory
forces demands the broadest set of concepts and theories that your mind can
grasp. Learning to think about organizations using the multiple perspectives
presented in this book will help you embrace complexity and uncertainty and their contradictory
demands. Second, recent corporate scandals, such as those that occurred at
Enron, the FBI, and Parmalat, raise questions about the nature of ethical action and
the pressures managers face when trying to act in socially and organizationally responsible
ways. Learning to use multiple perspectives can help make you aware of the assumptions
and values underlying your theory and practice, which in turn should make you more
conscious of your reasons for doing things and better able to understand the reasons
behind the actions taken by others. As you begin to grasp the differences between
perspectives, you will become aware that what you consider reasonable is defined by the
perspective you take. Being able to reflect on your own reasoning processes and compare
them to those used by the people around you will develop your ethical awareness. Third,
by learning organization theory, by knowing how to theorize, and by understanding
how different perspectives influence the way you and others experience, interpret
WHY STUDY ORGANIZATION THEORY? 11
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and shape organizational realities, you will become a more effective member of any
organization you join.
In order to compare modernism, symbolic-interpretivism and postmodernism, you
will need to examine the assumptions underlying each of these perspectives. A good place
to begin is with the important philosophical choices of ontology and epistemology.
Ontology is concerned with how you choose to define what is real, whereas epistemology
is concerned with how you form knowledge and establish criteria for evaluating it.
Thinking about ontology and epistemology is a useful place to begin because these philosophical
choices explain basic differences between the perspectives of organization theory.
Although they are difficult philosophical issues, by giving ontology and epistemology
some attention now, you will begin to learn why different perspectives lead to different
ways of theorizing organizations and how modern, symbolic-interpretive and postmodern
perspectives make distinctive contributions to organization theory.
Ontology
Ontology concerns our assumptions about reality. Is there an objective reality out there or
is it subjective, existing only in our minds? In ordinary, everyday life, you probably take
your assumptions about what exists for granted because you believe you know what the real
world is. You get up, drive to work, do your job as a student, manager or administrator, go to
meetings, write reports, establish policy etc. You don’t question whether these things are
real or have an existence independent of you; you know your car exists because you drive it.
But does your job exist if you are not there to perform it? Does your report describe what is
really going on or does it describe only what you think is happening? Philosophers
sometimes refer to these as existential questions because they attribute existence to one set
of things (reality), but not to another (the unreal, metaphysical or fantastical). Depending
upon your perspective, you will give some things the status of being real, while you
disregard others. These ontological assumptions about whether a particular phenomenon
exists or is merely an illusion (e.g., culture, power, control) lead to arguments between
those who maintain different perspectives and cause them to set up separate and
sometimes conflicting research communities.
Ontology is also concerned with the question of agency—do people have free will
and are they wholly responsible for their own actions, or is life predetermined, whether
by situations or by God? Subjectivists stand at one end of the reality continuum in
their belief that something exists only when you experience and give it meaning. At the
other end, objectivists believe reality exists independently of those who live in it.
Seen from the subjectivist point of view, people create and experience realities in different
ways because individuals and groups have their own assumptions, beliefs, and perceptions
that lead them to do so. Seen from the objectivist point of view, people react to what is happening
around them in predictable ways because their behavior is part of the material
world in which they live and is determined by causes, just as is the behavior of matter. In
between these points of view you can find many combinations of subjectivism and
objectivism.
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Epistemology
Epistemology is concerned with knowing how you can know. Typical questions asked by
those investigating epistemology include: how do humans generate knowledge, what are
the criteria by which they discriminate good knowledge from bad (e.g., true from false,
valid from invalid, rational from irrational, scientific from pseudoscientific), and how
should reality be represented or described? Epistemology is closely related to ontology
because the answers to these questions depend on, and in turn help to forge, ontological
assumptions about the nature of reality.
Table 1.2 summarizes the key ontological and epistemological differences of the
modern, symbolic-interpretive and postmodern perspectives and their implications for
organization theory.
Positivist epistemology assumes you can discover what truly happens in organizations
through the categorization and scientific measurement of the behavior of people and
systems. Positivists also assume that language mirrors reality, that is, reality and its objects
can be described using language without any loss of meaning or inherent bias.4 For positivists,
good knowledge is generated by developing hypotheses and propositions, gathering
and analyzing data, and then testing the hypotheses and propositions against the
external reality represented by their data to see if they are correct. In this way, modernists
can develop general theories explaining many different aspects of one overarching reality,
and make predictions about the future.
Positivist epistemology is based on foundational principals that celebrate the values
of reason, truth and validity. Positivist organization theorists study organizations as
objective entities and are attracted to methods adapted from the physical or hard sciences.
They gather data using surveys and laboratory or field experiments relying upon measures
of behavior that their assumptions lead them to regard as objective. Based on statistical
analysis of the data collected using these methods, they derive theoretical models that they
believe provide factual explanations of how organizations operate.
Antipositivist or interpretive epistemology assumes that knowledge can only be created
and understood from the point of view of the individuals who live and work in a particular
culture or organization. Interpretivists assume that each of us acts in situations and
makes sense of what is happening based on our experience of that situation and the memories
and expectations we bring to it. This means that there may be many different understandings
and interpretations of reality and interpretive epistemology leads us to use
methods designed to access the meanings made by others and describe how they come
to make those meanings. However, we know that our understanding of others is
filtered through our own experiences, and therefore we can never be objective about the
interpretations made by others.
What interpretivists believe they can do is work alongside others as they create their
realities and, by studying their interpretations and interactions in particular situations,
develop intersubjective awareness of and appreciation for the meanings produced. This
stance is what turns a researcher into an interpreter, bridging meaning between the
researcher’s academic experiences and the experiences of organizational members. Both of
these experiences are subjective, and bias is controlled (but never eliminated) through
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14 WHAT IS ORGANIZATION THEORY?
Table 1.2 Summary of the three perspectives of organization theory
Modernism Symbolic interpretivism Postmodernism
Ontology Ontology Ontology
Objectivism—belief in an objective, external Subjectivism—the belief that we cannot know an Postmodernism—the belief that the world appears
reality whose existence is independent of our external or objective existence apart from our through language and is situated in discourse; what is
knowledge of it subjective awareness of it; that which exists is that spoken of exists, therefore everything that exists is a
which we agree exists text to be read or performed
Epistemology Epistemology Epistemology
Positivism—we discover Truth through valid Interpretivism—all knowledge is relative to the Postmodernism—knowledge cannot be an accurate
conceptualization and reliable measurement knower and can only be understood from the point account of Truth because meanings cannot be fixed;
that allows us to test knowledge against an of view of the individuals who are directly involved; there is no independent reality; there are no facts, only
objective world; knowledge accumulates, truth is socially constructed via multiple interpretations; knowledge is a power play
allowing humans to progress and evolve interpretations of the objects of knowledge
thereby constructed and therefore
shifts and changes through time
Organizations are Organizations are Organizations are
Objectively real entities operating in a real Continually constructed and reconstructed by Sites for enacting power relations, oppression,
world. When well-designed and managed their members through symbolically mediated irrationality, communicative distortion—or arenas of
they are systems of decision and action interaction. Organizations are socially constructed fun and playful irony. Organizations are texts
driven by norms of rationality, efficiency realities where meanings promote and are produced by and in language; we can rewrite them so
and effectiveness for stated purposes promoted by understanding of the self and as to emancipate ourselves from human folly and
others that occurs within the organizational context degradation
Focus of Organization Theory Focus of Organization Theory Focus of Organization Theory
Finding universal laws, methods and Describing how people give meaning and order to Deconstructing organizational texts; destabilizing
techniques of organization and control; their experience within specific contexts, through managerial ideologies and modernist modes of
favors rational structures, rules, interpretive and symbolic acts, forms and processes organizing and theorizing; revealing marginalized and
standardized procedures and routine practices oppressed viewpoints; encouraging reflexive and
inclusive forms of theorizing and organizing
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rigorous training in self-reflection. Such training is designed to teach you to separate your
interpretations from those of the people you study. This method allows you to describe
how meaning was made in particular situations and among particular people and to offer
your understanding for others who were not there to witness what you experienced.
Taking an interpretive epistemological stance helps you to become sensitive to how
people make meaning to the point where, while you will never be able to fully understand
or predict the meanings others will make, you can develop your intuitive capacity to
anticipate the range of meanings that are likely to emerge in given circumstances
by specific people with whom you share adequate intersubjective understanding. Perhaps
most importantly, your growing appreciation for the limits of understanding will prevent
you from ever claiming to fully know another’s meaning and will open you to deep
listening.
Comparing Modern, Symbolic and Postmodern Perspectives
You might think of ontology and epistemology as commitments you make to your
preferred genre of organization theory. To take a modernist perspective, you must commit
to limiting what you count as knowledge to what you can know through your five senses.
Of course modernists augment their five senses with sense-enhancing devices (e.g., microscope,
telescope), but what counts as data is what is collected by the eyes, ears, nose, tongue
or skin. Modernists claim that ‘I saw (heard, smelled, tasted or touched) my data, and you
can confirm them for yourself by replicating my procedures’.
Symbolic-interpretivists are willing to extend the definition of empirical reality to
include forms of experience that lie outside the reach of the five senses, as do emotion and
intuition. As a result of this subjectivity, their findings cannot be easily replicated by
others. The commitment these researchers make is to be true to their personal experience
and to honor the accounts and explanations made by others. What is more, symbolicinterpretivists
focus on meaning and understanding as it occurs in particular contexts;
consequently their findings should not be generalized beyond the context in which they
were produced. Modernists find this problematic—can we really call what we create knowledge
if we are unable to replicate studies or apply their findings to other organizations?
As opposed to generalizability, symbolic-interpretivists sometimes use verisimilitude (the
resonance of one’s own experience with the experiences of others) as the basis for claiming
they have made a contribution to understanding.
Because of the differences in their assumptions, modernist and symbolic-interpretive
researchers endlessly debate methodology. For instance, modernists say subjectivity undermines
scientific rigor, while symbolic-interpretivists say it cannot be avoided and, indeed, is
required if we are to study meaning. Modernists typically believe that subjective understandings
introduce bias, and bias is precisely what science seeks to eradicate in pursuit of
the rational ideals of modernism. Lurking behind these epistemological positions is an
irresolvable debate between their differing ontologies that permit symbolic-interpretivists
to investigate meaning as a subjective phenomenon, while modernists are precluded by
their ontological assumption of objectivity from allowing the subjective to enter their
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science. As you will see in the following chapters, these differences in assumptions mean
that modernist and symbolic-interpretive organization theorists define organizational
concepts differently and use different research methods that often cause them to disagree
rather violently with one another.
Turning to postmodern perspectives, there is even more trouble to be found.
Postmodernism diverges from the other two perspectives in its unwillingness to seek Truth
(spelled with a capital T to indicate the idea of truth in any final or irrefutable sense), or to
make permanent ontological or epistemological commitments such as those that give rise
to modernist forms of scientific endeavor or to symbolic-interpretive descriptions of
meaning and human meaning making activity. Seen from these other perspectives, postmodernists
seem to flit between philosophical positions. They often refuse to take even a
temporary philosophical stand because they believe that doing so privileges some forms of
knowledge over others and this violates postmodern ethics.
Many postmodernists trace the ethical foundations of postmodernism to the French
poststructural philosophers, especially to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. For example,
Foucault argued that, since knowledge is power, when anyone privileges particular forms of
knowledge, they push other forms to the margins where they are likely to be ignored.5
Derrida observed that this is because modern thought is binary and binary thinking leads us
to center our attention on one element of a pair while ignoring or denigrating its opposite or
other (e.g., true/false, nature/culture, reality/representation). Therefore the development
and use of knowledge are always power plays that must be resisted for the sake of the powerless.
Many postmodernists commit themselves to uncovering and challenging all forms of
power (including knowledge) in order to expose the sources of domination that are so easily
taken for granted. They do so by decrying the privileged and bringing those people and ideas
relegated to the margins out of the shadow of their repression. (If this and other statements
about postmodernism confuse you, don’t worry, you will find a more elaborate introduction
to postmodernism in Chapter 2 and a more thorough treatment of power in Chapter 8.)
The other two perspectives have not ignored the challenge laid down by postmodernists.
First, symbolic-interpretivists, and more recently modernists, have tried to respond
to this challenge within their own systems of belief and commitment. The result has been
some movement toward greater self-consciousness about the assumptions each perspective
makes, and how these commitments apply to the practice of social science and the
theories that result from their application. For example, postmodernists have critiqued
cultural anthropologists (both modernist and symbolic-interpretive) for their co-optation
by Western governments to aid in the subordination of indigenous and aboriginal cultures.
Postmodernists argued that cultural anthropologists, seduced by the allure of government
grants and a romantic vision of helping less advanced cultures progress toward the ideals of
Western civilization, conspired in the colonization of non-Western peoples to the
detriment if not the destruction of many native cultures. The response by Western anthropologists
was to give voice to the members of the cultures they studied by inviting them to
help interpret the data collected about them, and in some cases to write cultural reports
themselves. Aboriginal reports are, of course, no freer of self-interest than any other, but by
juxtaposing reports from many perspectives you can begin to learn about the range
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of biases that appear in all data. Watch the film Rabbit-Proof Fence to get a taste of aboriginal
self-reporting on the injustices experienced by native Australians when European
colonizers attempted to Westernize their culture.
As you can see, the issues of ontology and epistemology are complex and are
understood differently when viewed from within each perspective. To get a feel for how
different these perspectives can be, take the well-known question: if a tree falls in a forest
and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? To the modernist the answer is yes
because the tree and sound are real and can be measured; therefore it doesn’t matter
whether anyone is there to experience the tree falling or not—knowledge of what happens
when a tree falls generalizes to all falling trees. To the symbolic-interpretivist there is no
way of knowing the answer to this question because there is no one to experience the tree
falling. Although a symbolic-interpretivist could study how different people make sense of
the question, if no one is present when the tree falls then there is no meaning to address
apart from that of the rhetorical move of asking a hypothetical question. To a postmodernist
the answer is likely to be a set of entirely different questions: Who has the right to ask
or answer this question? Whose interests have been marginalized and violated in the
process?
Returning to our prior discussion of concepts, you should now be ready to refine your
understanding of a concept by applying the three perspectives. Notice that modernists
emphasize the representative aspect of concepts—concepts align with objects in the real
world (e.g., the concept of dog represents real dogs). Symbolic-interpretivists emphasize
the agreement among the people of one culture to call things by the same names (e.g., the
English word dog versus the French chien), pointing out that you construct concepts in the
context of intersubjective meanings and vocabularies shared with other members of your
culture. Postmodernists emphasize the ever-changing relationship between concepts. For
the postmodernist all words, including concepts, are defined in relation to other words
(dog versus cat, mouse, house, life) rather than in relation to objects in the real world; no
word’s meaning can be fully or finally determined because each use brings a word into relationship
with a different set of other words and this continually changing juxtapositioning
causes its meaning to endlessly shift.
It is important to understand the differences in the applications of the perspectives
because these differences are not only crucial to how theory is created but also to the way
organizing is practiced. If you take the objectivist stance that an organization is a formal
structure with an internal order, a set of natural laws governing its operation, and roles that
must be carried out in a deterministic manner by organizational members, you will
manage your organization and act differently toward it and others within it than if you
adopt either the subjectivist stance or the postmodern perspective. Similarly, if you take the
subjectivist stance, that organizations have no objective structure but are continually
constructed and maintained by people as they try to make sense of what is going on, you
will manage your organization differently than if you assume the postmodern perspective
and thereby maintain skepticism toward the idea that knowledge is anything more than a
ploy to gain power over others. It is important to know what your underlying assumptions
are when you apply your theories because each set of ontological and epistemological
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assumptions will exercise a different influence on the way you design and manage your
organization.
Plan of the Book
Part I of the book describes the approach I will use to help you learn organization theory
and develop your capacity to theorize. Chapter 1 has introduced you to several core ideas—
theory, theorizing, concepts and abstraction—and to the three perspectives that form the
framework of this book—modern, symbolic-interpretive, and postmodern. Chapter 2
presents a historical account of the economists, sociologists and classical management
scholars whose work inspired the first organization theorists and to some of the theories
that subsequently shaped the three perspectives of organization theory.
Part II of the book will present you with the core concepts that contemporary
organization theorists use to explain, understand and theorize organizations. In these
chapters you will learn to look at organizations as constituents of a larger environment
(Chapter 3); as social structures ordering the activities of their members (Chapter 4); as
technologies for producing goods and services for society (Chapter 5); as cultures that
produce and are produced by meanings that form the symbolic world of the organization

Texto 03 - Organization Theory - Modern Symbolic and postmodern perspectives - Português - Matriz

What is Organization Theory?
theorist /’ ΙərΙst/ n. a holder or inventor of a theory or theories.
theorize/’ ΙəraΙz/ v. intr. (also -ise) evolve or indulge in theories.
theorizer n.
theory /’ ΙərΙ / n. (pl. -ies) 1 a supposition or system of ideas
explaining something, esp. one based on general principles
independent of the particular things to be explained (opp.
HYPOTHESIS) (atomic theory; theory of evolution). 2 a speculative
(esp. fanciful) view (one of my pet theories). 3 the sphere
of abstract knowledge or speculative thought (this is all very
well in theory, but how will it work in practice?). 4 the exposition
of the principles of a science etc. (the theory of music). 5
Math. a collection of propositions to illustrate the principles of
a subject (probability theory; theory of equations). [LL theoria
f. Gk theo–ria f. theo–ros spectator f. theo–reo– look at]
Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary
PART
I
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Why Study Organization Theory?
Organization theory is not an easy sell. Unless you are naturally drawn to the abstract, you
probably expect this subject to be dry, unconnected to practical matters and perhaps a little
boring. Even if you are enthusiastic about abstractions, it can be daunting to confront as
many of them at one time as organization theory asks you to do. So why would anyone sign
up to study this complex and difficult subject matter?
There are many different answers to this question. For some, studying organization
theory is motivated by curiosity. They wonder what it would be like to think like an organization,
to get inside organizing processes far enough to reveal the intricate organizational
patterns that make organizations understandable. Others are motivated by the attraction
of stretching their minds in new ways. For example, organization theory draws on the sciences,
the humanities and the arts, and so presents the intellectual challenge of thinking
in interdisciplinary ways. Some turn to organization theory in the hope that it will improve
their chances of becoming successful executives in business, government or non-profit
organizations. Table 1.1 lists some of their specific reasons. For me, it was something else
entirely. I came to organization theory reluctantly when it was foisted upon me as a requirement
of my doctoral program. To say that I did not appreciate organization theory when I
first encountered it would be putting it mildly.
In a way, my initial disaffection with organization theory inspired this book. Once I
began using organization theory, my experiences convinced me that this field of study is
not only valuable—it is interesting! Organization theory has helped me time and again to
analyze complicated situations in the organizations with which I have worked, and to discover
or invent effective and creative means for dealing with them. It has opened my mind
to many aspects of life both inside and outside organizations that I previously took for
granted, and it has given me both mental discipline and a wide-ranging knowledge of
many different subjects. My amazement at how relevant and valuable organization theory
can be caused me to reverse my initially low opinion of the field and find great enthusiasm
for it. It is this change in my perception that led me to write this book. Through it I hope to
share my insights and enthusiasm with you as you discover the benefits and attractions of
organization theory for yourself.
Whether you come to organization theory out of curiosity, a desire to improve your
chances of success in life, or simply because somebody made you do it, there are three interrelated
things I can tell you that will ease your way into this complex subject. The first involves
theories and theorizing, the second concerns abstraction and its place in theory development,
and the third explains why you need to study organizations from multiple perspectives. I will
introduce you to each of these topics in the following sections of this chapter.
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Theories and Theorizing Organizations
You might be surprised to learn that you use theory everyday, and so does everyone else.
Take for example any old adage that seems true or wise to you. One of my favorites is ‘You
can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Old sayings like this one are filled
with common sense (e.g., about what you can and cannot do for others) and common
sense is a theory about how to understand and negotiate life. More generally, whenever you
create your own meaning or grasp someone else’s, you make things, feelings, ideas, experiences,
values and expectations into ideas or concepts. In doing this you explain yourself
and your world and this constitutes theorizing. Organization theorists specialize in developing
this human capacity to make and use theory. They hone their theorizing skills by
refining conceptual distinctions and using them to create sophisticated explanations
4 WHAT IS ORGANIZATION THEORY?
Table 1.1 Some applications of organization theory
Strategy/Finance Those who want to improve the value of a company need to know how to
organize to achieve organizational goals; those who want to monitor and
control performance will need to understand how to achieve results by
structuring activities and designing organizational processes.
Marketing Marketers know that to create a successful corporate brand they need to
get the organization behind the delivery of its promise; a thorough
understanding of what an organization is and how it operates will make
their endeavors to align the organization and its brand strategy more
feasible and productive.
Information technology The way information flows through the organization affects work processes
and outcomes, so knowing organization theory can help IT specialists
identify, understand and serve the organization’s informational needs as
they design and promote the use of their information systems.
Operations Value chain management has created a need for operations managers to
interconnect their organizing processes with those of suppliers, distributors
and customers; organization theory not only supports the technical aspects
of operations and systems integration, but explains their socio-cultural
aspects as well.
Human resources Nearly everything HR specialists do from recruiting to compensation has
organizational ramifications and hence benefits from knowledge provided
by organization theory; organizational development and change are particularly
important elements of HR that demand deep knowledge of organizations
and organizing, and organization theory can provide content for executive
training programs.
Communication Corporate communication specialists must understand the interpretive
processes of organizational stakeholders and need to address the many
ways in which different parts of the organization interact with each other
and the environment, in order to design communication systems that are
effective or to diagnose ways existing systems are misaligned with the
organization’s needs.
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(theories) that far outstrip common sense. As they do so they participate in the invention
of new ways of looking at experience and its phenomena. The basic difference between
common sense theorizing and the theorizing academics do is the added care academics
take to specify their practice, correct its errors and share their theories with others, thereby
contributing to systematic knowledge-building efforts.
Theories are built from abstractions known as concepts. One concept—called the
phenomenon of interest—is selected from all the others as a focus for theorizing and then
related concepts are defined and used to explain that one. Consider Albert Einstein’s theory
that E mc2. Energy (E) was Einstein’s phenomenon of interest and he explained it
using the concepts of mass (m) and a constant representing the speed of light (c). The
squaring of c, and its multiplication by m, specify how these explanatory concepts are
related to the phenomenon of interest and form Einstein’s theory about the relationship
between energy and matter. In a nutshell, E mc2 shows what theory is—a set of concepts
and the relationships between them proposed to explain the phenomenon of interest.
Sometimes the explanation of a phenomenon is too complex for precise specification
using a mathematical formula. This is the usual case for phenomena involving human
behavior because human behavior is notoriously unpredictable, except under tightly
constrained conditions like those psychologists create in laboratories where the ordinary
influences of everyday life can be controlled. For this reason explaining organizations
where humans are at work often demands the use of statistical probabilities rather than
precise formulae. Alternatively, researchers turn to metaphor or analogy to explain their
phenomena. Sometimes theorists do not even attempt to explain phenomena; instead
they develop understanding and appreciation or give practical guidance. You will meet all
of these kinds of theorizing in the pages that follow as we wend our way from theories of
organization that take physical science as their model, to those that find their foundations
in the humanities and the arts.
Given the volume and variety of organization theories, you may find it somewhat
ironic to call this field of study organization theory. While the name suggests that there is
only one—a single, integrated, overarching explanation for organizations and organizing—
in fact there are many organization theories and they do not always fit neatly together.
Some people see this diversity as a stumbling block for an academic discipline because, in
their view, if there is no agreement on what a field has to offer then it probably has little to
offer at all. Others try to excuse the situation arguing that organization theory is a young
field that will eventually work out its differences and come around to the singular perspective
that they believe defines a mature academic discipline.
I take an altogether different view. Along with a number of other organization theorists,
I believe that organization theory always has and always will embrace multiple perspectives
because it draws inspiration from a wide variety of other fields of study, and
because organizations will remain too complex and malleable to ever be summed up by any
single theory. In my view the diverse theoretical base of organization theory is something
to celebrate, not only because it offers a broad perspective on organizational life that
encompasses scientific explanation, human understanding and artful appreciation, but
because it creates more possibilities for effectively designing and managing organizations.
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6 WHAT IS ORGANIZATION THEORY?
Semiotics and Hermeneutics
Folklore Studies
Cultural Anthropology
Social Psychology
Biology-Ecology
Political Science
Sociology
Engineering
Smith (1776)
Marx (1867)
Durkheim (1893)
Taylor (1911)
Follett (1918)
Fayol (1919)
Weber (1924)
Gulick (1937)
Barnard (1938)
Von Bertalanffy (1950)
Trist and Bamforth (1951)
Boulding (1956)
March and Simon (1958)
Emery (1960)
Burns and Stalker (1961)
Woodward (1965)
Lawrence and Lorsch (1967)
Thompson (1967)
Schütz (1932)
Whyte (1943)
Selznick (1949)
Goffman (1959)
Gadamer (1960)
Berger and Luckmann (1966)
Weick (1969)
Geertz (1973)
Clifford and Marcus (1986)
Saussure (1959)
Foucault (1972)
Bell (1973)
Jencks (1977)
Derrida (1978)
Lyotard (1979)
Rorty (1980)
Lash and Urry (1987)
Baudrillard (1988)
Economics
Cultural Studies
Literary Theory
Poststructural Philosophy
Postmodern Architecture
Linguistics
PREHISTORY
1900–1950s
MODERN
1960s and 1970s
SYMBOLICINTERPRETIVE
1980s
POSTMODERN
1990s
Figure 1.1 Sources of inspiration for organization theory
The boxes show the four major perspectives on organizations used as a framework for this book. The dates inside the boxes indicate the decade when
the perspective became recognizable within the field. Contributing disciplines are indicated above the boxes and some of their influential thinkers are
listed below. Notice that some contributions pre-date their influences on organization theory considerably, indicating the lag in communication between
disciplines.
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Figure 1.1 will give you appreciation for the ambitious reach of organization theory.
The figure displays the many academic disciplines from which organization theorists have
drawn inspiration. The top part of the figure shows the academic disciplines that have contributed
to organization theory while the bottom part names some major thinkers from
these disciplines whose ideas have shaped the field. Be sure to notice that the contributing
disciplines range from the natural and social sciences to the humanities and arts.
Now look at the middle part of Figure 1.1. The first box, labeled prehistory, represents
sources of ideas about organizations that occurred before anyone considered organization
theory to be a discipline in its own right. Thus the authors listed below the prehistory box
did not theorize organization from a single perspective nor did they intend to create the
field of organization theory; they had their own disciplinary communities, shown at the
top of the figure, to which they were oriented when they wrote. Nonetheless the authors
grouped in the prehistory category provided organization theory with its formative concepts
and their ideas served as reference points around which the perspectives of organization
theory later developed. When you become familiar with these authors, you will hear
echoes of their words in the many concepts and theories that make organization theory
what it is today, and you will recognize how their work contributed to one or more of the
three perspectives that form the remaining boxes in the middle of Figure 1.1.
The order of the boxes from left to right in the middle of this figure gives a sense of
how the field has changed over time (don’t panic, you will get more information about the
multiple perspectives of organization theory in a minute). But it would be a mistake to think
that newer perspectives have replaced older ones; perspectives accumulate in organization
theory and over time they influence one another as organization theorists take in more and
more of the ideas this field of study offers.
To get a grip on what I mean by perspectives, you may find it helpful to compare them
to literary or film genres (e.g., drama, romantic comedy, horror), styles of painting (e.g.,
classical, impressionist, post-impressionist, cubist) or types of jazz (Big Band, Bebop, Cool
Jazz, Fusion). Just as these genres encourage certain forms of artistic expression, theoretical
perspectives encourage certain ways of thinking and speaking. And not unlike genre in the
arts, it is only after the appearance of a critical mass of theories using similar underlying
logics and vocabularies that anyone identifies them as having come from the same perspective
and articulates what the assumptions underpinning that perspective are.
Thelonious Monk, among others, was playing Bebop before anyone acknowledged this as a
new type of jazz or gave it a name. Similarly Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx
were writing about bureaucracy and authority before organization theory was known by
this name. Thus, the different perspectives on organization theory developed at different
times and continue to develop in reaction to one another. Today their proponents form
communities within organization theory whose members think and do research in similar
ways that you will soon learn to distinguish from one another.
Interplay among the perspectives of organization theory produces continuous
change in each of them, which is one reason why it can be difficult to make a case for one
particular way of sorting through the ideas of organization theory, including the one
diagramed in Figure 1.1. However, if you are a newcomer to the field, you will probably
appreciate a little order; most people find it useful to hear about how others have come to
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terms with the diversity of organization theory. But please feel free to rearrange, change or
even abandon any of the schemes presented throughout this book when you are ready to
create your own. In Part III I will introduce you to the organization theorists who are currently
challenging the dominant perspectives by inventing new concepts and theories.
Eventually some of them will combine their work into new perspectives that will stand
alongside those that provide the framework for this book. But before you are ready to tackle
all these current issues in organization theory, you need to know something about what
organization theory is and where it came from. Let me start you off with some basics
concerning theory and theorizing.
Concepts and Abstraction in Theory Development
Concepts provide mental categories for sorting, organizing and storing experience in
memory. They are ideas formed by the process of abstraction. Webster’s New World
Dictionary defines abstraction as the ‘formation of an idea by mental separation from particular
instances.’ This means that you build concepts in your memory on the basis of your
acquaintance with instances that are familiar to you, either as the result of personal experience,
or based on what others tell you. For example, your concept of dog is built upon your
personal encounters with representatives of this class of animal such as dogs you have
owned or that have bitten you; upon stories you have heard others tell about their experiences
with dogs; and upon encounters with non-dogs that, when you were a young child,
helped you to build this concept by teaching you what a dog is not (‘No, that’s a cat’).
Think of your concepts as empty baskets to be filled with experience. If you first
encounter concepts through academic study, you will likely experience it as empty. This is
one reason why organization theory appears to many as dry and boring when they first
encounter it. To enrich your concepts you must fill them with meaning by relating personal
experiences to them in much the same way you did when you learned the concept of
dog as a young child. That is, you must gather specific examples that fit each concept until
it is more or less fully formed. Of course you can continue enriching your concepts for the
remainder of your life, like experts do. For example, a person who trains dogs learns more
about them all the time, just as an organization theorist continually seeks different ways of
understanding and explaining organizations. This means that, at least for experts, some
concepts will be continually expanding. There is no end to the subtlety you can develop by
enriching your concepts and, of course, by adding new concepts to your knowledge base.
The trick is to get the process of abstraction going.
It is important to remember that, in this book, you will mostly encounter other
peoples’ concepts. Your task will be to relate these concepts to your own experience and
other knowledge that you have stored in your memory. I will present the concepts of organization
theory in ways designed to trigger associations with experiences you have had so
that you can fill your concepts with your own meanings. With each new concept you
encounter, try imagining what it is that you have personally experienced that might relate
to it. Keep a journal of these ideas with different sections dedicated to describing the
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examples you relate to each concept. Be playful. Do not feel constrained to obvious associations;
also challenge yourself to consider experiences you only intuitively sense are applicable.
As you do this you will begin to embed concepts in your own experience as well as
placing your experience in the context of your conceptual knowledge. Comparing your
examples to those of your classmates, colleagues, or others you know who are interested in
organizations will also expand your understanding and hone your conceptual abilities.
As your pool of concepts and theories expands, you will find yourself analyzing your
experiences in new ways, for instance, by relating experiences that you never before
thought of as related, or by seeing hidden or disregarded aspects of a situation in which you
were involved. In other words, use your personal experience to develop concepts with
which you can understand or build theories, and then use your concepts and theories to
better understand your experiences. This sort of give and take between theoretical understanding
and personal experience is essential to the development of your theorizing skills
of abstraction, reasoning and application as well as to your knowledge of organizations and
organizing.
Although concepts are associated with specific examples, a concept is not a simple
aggregation of all the information you remember about specific examples. A concept is
much more compact than this. To form a concept, ignore the unique elements or features
you associate with specific examples and focus on only those aspects that are common to
all the instances to which the concept applies. Thus, the concept dog is associated with four
legs, a tail, a cold wet nose when it is healthy, and two ears, but not black spots, big paws, or
a habit of jumping on strangers, which are features of particular dogs, but not all dogs.
Seen in these terms, abstraction is the process of removing the unique details of particular
examples so that only their common aspects remain. Of course abstraction does not
happen in one move; learning is involved in the movement from multiple concrete
examples to an abstraction.
You may wonder why you would want to drop all the interesting details out of your
daily experiences in order to build concepts. One reason is that abstraction gives you an
increased ability to process more information and/or to process information more quickly.
When you encounter a new example of a well-developed concept, you have numerous bits
of information about that object or idea at your fingertips. If you recognize an object as a
dog, you may instantly be aware of the possibility that it will growl if it feels threatened.
This information has immediate practical value. Concepts also make it possible to communicate
knowledge to others. For instance, once your children know what a dog is, you can tell
them that some dogs bite and so they should not reach out their hands to a strange dog
until they are confident it is friendly.
In addition to giving you the ability to communicate with others, abstraction gives you
enormous powers of thought. It allows you to associate volumes of information with a single
concept and thereby to process this information rapidly whenever you think of, or with, the
concept. You can see the importance of this aspect of abstraction in terms of the psychological
process known as chunking. Cognitive psychologists tell us that humans have the
capacity to think about, roughly, seven pieces of information (plus or minus two) at one time.1
This means that you can think about seven different dogs and nothing else, or, through
chunking larger portions of your knowledge, you can think about all the dogs in the universe
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and six other kinds of animal as well. You can even think about the entire animal kingdom
and have room to think about six more things besides. Chunking illustrates the power of
abstraction—using concepts allows you to consider large blocks of knowledge at once, a
handy capacity to have when your daily activity demands that you understand and stay
abreast of developments within a complex entity such as an organization.
Chunking makes an important contribution to theorizing—it permits us to relate
large bodies of knowledge to each other. Remember, a theory is an explanation rooted in
the specification of the relationships between a set of concepts (e.g., E mc2). When the
concepts upon which a theory is built are defined at very high levels of abstraction, the
theory becomes very general which means that it applies across many situations with few
or no limiting conditions. Of course this is part of the danger with theory; by leaving out so
many of the details of specific circumstances and meanings as we ascend the heights of
abstraction, we can be lulled into thinking that we understand everything. If we assume
our knowledge is more general than it is, we may apply it to the wrong situations or be willing
to impose our beliefs on others when it is inappropriate or misleading to do so.
Therefore, be sure to notice that there is both something gained and something lost when
you use abstraction. You gain the ability to think about numerous instances, but you lose
the rich detail that the individual cases contain and the depth of knowledge these details
describe.
As a theorist, you will want to learn to use abstraction because it permits you to
communicate and understand general ideas about complex subjects, such as organizations.
This will enable you to see day-to-day issues in a larger perspective that expands your
thinking and gives you ready access to accumulated knowledge. But you should also
remember that abstract reasoning alone will not provide the important details that you will
confront in your role within a specific organization. Applying theory, which is wedded to
abstract reasoning, demands that you be able to add critical details back into your formulations
after you have analyzed and understood the more abstract aspects of the situation at
hand. You will want to develop both concepts and theorizing skills with a broad base of
personal experience and then translate your abstractions back into specific understanding.
I believe a great deal of the frustration with organization theory that many students

Texto 23 - Institucionalized organizations - formal struture as myth and ceremony - portugues

®
Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
Author(s): 3ohn W. Meyer and Brian Rowan
Source: The American J’ournai of Socioiogy. Vol. 83. No. 2. (Sep.. 1977). pp. 340-363
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Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony1
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan
Stanford University
Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of ration alized institutional ruies. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and increased complexity of formal organizational structures. Institutional rules function as myths which organizations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects. Organizations whose structures become isomorphic with the myths of the institut ional environment—in contrast with those primarily structured by the demands of technical production and exchange—decrease internal coordination and control in order to maintain legitimacy. Structures are decoupled from each other and from ongoing activities. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of corifidence and good faith is employed.
Formal organizations are generally understood to be systems of coordinated and controlled activities that arise when work is embedded in complex networks of technical relations and boundary-spanning exchanges. But in modern societies formal organizational structures arise in highly institut ionalized contexts. Professions, policies, and programs are created along with the products and services that they are understood to produce rationall y. This permits many new organizations to spring up and forces existing ones to incorporate new practices and procedures. That is, organizations are driven to incorporate the practices and procedures defined by prevailing rationalized concepts of organizational work and institutionalized in society. Organizations that do so increase their legitimacy and their survival prosp ects, independent of the immediate efficacy of the acquired practices and procedures.
Institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs function as powerful myths, and many organizations adopt them cerem onially. But conformity to institutionalized rules often confiicts sharply
1 Work on this paper was conducted at the Stanford Center for Research and Development in Teaching (SCRDT) and was supported by the National Institute of Education (contract no. NE-C-00-3-0062). The views expressed here do not, of course, reflect NIE positions. Many coileagues in the SCRDT, the Stanford Organizations Training Program, the Americ an Sociological Association’s work group on Organizations and Environments, and the NIE gave help and encouragement. In particular, H. Acland, A. Bergesen, J. Boli-Bennett, T. Deal, J. Freeman, P. Hirsch, J. G. March, W. R. Scott, and W. Starbuck made helpful suggestions.
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with efliciency criteria and, conversely, to coordinate and contrai activity in order to promote efficiency undermines an organization’s ceremonial conformity and sacrifices its support and legitimacy. To maintain ceremonial conformity, organizations that reflect institutionai rules tend to buifer their formal structures from the uncertainties of technicai activities by becoming loosely coupled, building gaps between their formal structures and actual work activities.
This paper argues that the formal structures of many organizations in postindustrial society (Beli ‘1973) dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environments instead of the demands of their work activities. The ftrst part describes prevailing theories of the origins of formal structures and the main problem the theories confront. The second part discusses an alternative source of formal structures: myths embedded in the institutional environment. The third part develops the argument that organizations reflecting institutionalized environments maintain gaps between their formal structures and their ongoing work activities. The final part summ arizes by discussing some research implications.
Throughout the paper, institutionalized rules are distinguished sharply from prevailing social behaviors. Institutionalized rules are classifications built into society as reciprocated typifications or interpretations (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 54). Such rules may be simply taken for granted or may be supported by public opinion ar the force of law (Starbuck 1976). Institutions inevitably involve normative obligations but often enter into social life primarily as facts which must be taken into account by actors. Institutionalization involves the processes by which social processes, obligat ions, or actualities come to take on a rulelike status in social thought and action. So, for example, the social status of doctor is a highly institutionalized rule (both normative and cognitive) for managing illness as well as a social role made up of particular behaviors, relations, and expectations. Research and development is an institutionalized category of organizational activity which has meaning and value in many sectors of society, as well as a collect ion of actual research and development activities. In a smaller way, a No Smoking sign is an institution with legal status and implications, as well as an attempt to regulate smoking behavior. It is fundamental to the argument of this paper that institutional rules may have effects on organizational structures and their implementation in actual tecimical work which are very different from the effects generated by the networks of social behavior and relationships which compose and surround a given organization.
PREVAILING THEORIES OF FORMAL STRUCTURE
A sharp distinction should be made between the formal structure of an organization and its actual day-to-day work activities. Formal structure is
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a blueprint for activities which includes, first of ali, the table of organization:
a listing of offices, departments, positions, and programs. These elements are linked by explicit goals and policies that make up a rational theory of how, and to what end, activities are to be fitted together. The essence of a modern bureaucratic organization lies in the rationalized and impersonal character of these structurai elements and of the goals that Iink them.
One of the central problems in organization theory is to describe the conditions that give rise to rationalized formal structure. In conventional theories, rational formal structure is assumed to be the most effective way to coordinate and control the complex relational networks involved in modern technical or work activities (see Scott 1975 for a review). This assumption derives from Weber’s (1930, 1946, 1947) discussions of the historical emergence of bureaucracies as consequences of economic markets and centralized states. Economic markets place a premium on rationality and coordination. As markets expand, the relational networks in a given domam become more complex and differentiated, and organizations in that domam must manage more interna! and boundary-spanning interdepend encies. Such factors as size (Blau 1970) and technology (Woodward 1965) increase the complexity of interna! relations, and the division of labor among organizations increases boundary-spanning problems (Aiken and Hage 1968; Freeman 1973; Thompson 1967). Because the need for coordination increases under these conditions, and because formally coordinated work has comp etitive advantages, organizations with rationa!ized formal structures tend to develop.
The formation of centralized states and the penetration of societies by politica! centers also contribute to the rise and spread of formal organization. When the relational networks involved in economic exchange and political management become extremely complex, bureaucratic structures are thought to be the most effective and rational means to standardize and contro! subu nits. Bureaucratic control is especially usefu! for expanding politica! centers, and standardization is often demanded by both centers and periphe ral units (Bendix 1964, 1968). Political centers organize layers of offices that manage to extend conformity and to dispiace traditional activities throughout societies.
The problem. Prevaiing (heoties assume lhal lhe coordination and control of activity are lhe crilical dimenswns on which formal organizalions have succeeded in lhe modern world. This assumption is based on the view that organizations function according to their formal blueprints: coordination is routine, ru!es and procedures are followed, and actual activities conform to the prescript ions of formal structure. But much of the empirical research on organizat ions casts doubt on this assumption. An earlier generation of researchers concluded that there was a great gap between the formal and the informal organization (e.g., Dalton 1959; Downs 1967; Homans 1950). A related
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observation is that formal organizations are often Ioosely coupled (March and Olsen 1976; Weick 1976): structural elements are only loosely linked to each other and to activities, rules are often violated, decisions are often uni mplemented, or if implemented have uncertain consequences, technologies are of problematic efficiency, and evaluation and inspection systems are subverted or rendered so vague as to provide little coordination.
Formal organizations are endemic in modern societies. There is need for an explanation of their risç that is partially free from the assumption that, in practice, formal structures actually coordinate and control work. Such an explanation should account for the elaboration of purposes, positions, policies, and procedural rules that characterizes formal organizations, but must do so without supposing that these structural features are implemented in routine work activity.
INSTITIJTIONAL SOURCES OF FORMAL STRUCTURE
By focusing on the management of complex relational networks and the exercise of coordination and control, prevailing theories have neglected an alternative Weberian source of formal structure: the Iegitimacy of ration alized formal structures. In prevailing theories, legitimacy is a given:
assertions about bureaucratization rest on the assumption of norms of rationality (Thompson 1967). When norms do play causal roles in theories of bureaucratization, it is because they are thought to be built into modern societies and personalities as very general values, which are thought to facilitate formal organization. But norms of rationality are not simply general values. They exist in much more specific and powerful ways in the rules, understandings, and meanings attached to institutionalized social structures. The causal importance of such institutions in the process of bureaucratization has been neglected.
Formal structures are not only creatures of their relational networks in the social organization. In modern societies, the elements of rationalized formal structure are deeply ingrained in, and reflect, widespread understandings of social reality. Many of the positions, policies, programs, and procedures of modern organizations are enforced by public opinion, by the views of important constituents, by knowledge legitimated through the educational system, by social prestige, by the laws, and by the definitions of negligence and prudence used by the courts. Such elements of formal structure are manifestations of powerful institutional rules which function as highly rationalized myths that are binding on particular organizations.
In modern societies, the myths generating formal organizational structure have two key properties. First, they are rationalized and impersonal pres criptions that identify various social purposes as technical ones and specify in a rulelike way the appropriate means to pursue these technical purposes
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rationally (Eliul 1964). Second, they are highly institutionalized and thus in some measure beyond the discretion of any individual participant or organization. They must, therefore, be taken for granted as legitimate, apart from evaluations of their impact on work outcomes.
Many elements of formal structure are highly institutionalized and function as myths. Examples include professions, programs, and technologies:
Large numbers of rationalized professions emerge (Wilensky 1965; Beli 1973). These are occupations controlled, not only by direct inspection of work outcomes but also by social ruies of licensing, certifying, and schooiing. The occupations are rationalized, being understood to control impersonal techniques rather than moral mysteries. Further, they are highly institutiona lized: the delegation of activities to the appropriate occupations is socially expected and often legally obiigatory over and above any calculations of its efficiency.
Many formalized organizational programs are also institutionalized in soc iety. Ideologies define the functions appropriate to a business—such as saies, production, advertising, or accounting; to a university—such as instruction and research in history, engineering, and literature; and to a hospital—such as surgery, internal medicine, and obstetrics. Such classifications of organiz ational functions, and the speciflcations for conducting each function, are prefabricated formulae available for use by any given organization.
Similarly, tcchnologies are institutionalized and become myths binding on organizations. Technical procedures of production, accounting, personnel sel ection, or data processing become taken-for-granted means to accomplish organizational ends. Quite apart from their possible efficiency, such institut ionalized techniques establish an organization as appropriate, rational, and modern. Their use displays responsibility and avoids claims of negligence.
The impact of such rationalized institutional elements on organizations and organizing situations is enormous. These mIes define new organizing situations, redefine existing ones, and specify the means for coping rationally with each. They enable, and often require, participants to organize along prescribed lines. And they spread very rapidly in modern society as part of the rise of postindustrial society (BelI 1973). New and extant domains of activity are codified in institutionalized programs, professions, or techniques, and organizations incorporate the packaged cedes. For example:
The discipline of psychology creates a rationalized theory of personnel selection and certifies personnel professionais. Personnel departments and functionaries appear in alI sorts of extant organizations, and new specialized pcrsonnel agencies also appear.
As programs of research and development are created and professionals with expertise in these fields are trained and defined, organizations come under increasing pressure tu incorporate R & D units.
As the prerational profession of prostitution is rationalized along medical lines, bureaucratized organizations—sex-therapy clinics, massage parlors, and the like—spring up more easily.
As the issues of safety and environmentai poliution arise, and as relevant
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professions and programs become institutionaiized in laws, union ideologies, and pubiic opinion, organizations incorporate these programs and prof ess ions.
The growth of rationalized institutional structures in society makes formal organizations more common and more elaborate. Such institutions are myths which make formal organizations both easier to create and more necessary. After ali, the building blocks for organizations come to be littered around the societal landscape; it takes only a little entrepreneurial energy to assembie them into a structure. And because these building blocks are considered proper, adequate, rational, and necessary, organizations must incorporate them to avoid illegitimacy. Thus, the myths built into ration alized institutional elements create the necessity, the opportunity, and the impulse to organize rationally, over and above pressures in this direction created by the need to manage proximate relationai networks:
Proposition 1. As raiionalized inslüutional ruks arise in given domains of work activity, formal organizations form and expand by incorporating lhese rules as siruclural elemenis.
Two distinct ideas are implied here: (lA) As institutionalized myths define new domains of rationalized activity, formal organizations emerge in these domains. (1B) As rationalizing institutional myths arise in existing domains of activity, extant organizations expand their formal structures so as to become isomorphic with these new myths.
To understand the larger historicai procesa it is useful to note that:
Proposition 2. The more modernized lhe society, lhe more extended lhe rationali.zed instilutional siructure in given domains and lhe grealer lhe number of domains containing rationalized institutions.
Modern institutions, then, are thoroughly rationalized, and these ration alized elements act as myths giving rise to more formal organization. When propositions 1 and 2 are combined, two more specific ideas follow: (2A) Formal organizations are more likely to emerge in more modernized societies, even with the complexity of immediate relational networks held constant. (2B) Formal organizations in a given domam of activity are likely to have more elaborated structures in more modernized societies, even with the complexity of immediate relational networks held constant.
Combining the ideas above with prevailing organization theory, it becomes clear that modern societies are fihled with rationalized bureaucracies for two reasons. First, as the prevailing theories have asserted, relational networks become increasingly complex as societies modernize. Second, modern societies are fihled with institutional rules which function as myths depicting various formal structures as rational means to the attainment of desirable ends. Figure 1 summarizes these two iines of theory. Both lines suggest that the postindustrial society—the society dominated by rational organizat ion even more than by the forces of production—arises both out of the
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The prevalence of
rationalized
institutional clemente
presence and
Societal elaboration of
rsoderniat ton formal organizational
structures
The co.plexity of
‘networks of social
organization and
exchenge
FIG. 1 .—The origina and elaboration of formal organizational structures
complexity of the modern social organizational network and, more directly, as an ideological matter. Once institutionalized, rationality becomes a myth with explosive organizing potential, as both Eliul (1964) and Beli (1973)— though with rather different reactions—observe.
The Relation of Organizations to Their Institutional Environments
The observation is not new that organizations are structured by phenomena in their environments and tend to become isomorphic with them. One explanation of such isomorphism is that formal organizations become matched with their environments by technical and exchange interdependenc ies. This une of reasoning can be seen in the works of Aiken and Hage (1968), Hawley (1968), and Thompson (1967). This explanation asserts that structural elements diffuse because environments create boundary-spanning exigencies for organizations, and that organizations which incorporate structural elements isomorphic with the environment are able to manage such interdependencies.
A second explanation for the parallelism between organizations and their environments—and the one emphasized here—is that organizations struct urally reflect socially constructed reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967). This view is suggested in the work of Parsons (1956) and Udy (1970), who see organizations as greatly conditioned by their general institutional environments and therefore as institutions themselves in part. Emery and Trist (1965) also see organizations as responding directly to environmental structures and distinguish such eflects sharply from those that occur through boundary-spanning exchanges. According to the institutional conception as developed here, organizations tend to disappear as distinct and bounded units. Quite beyond the environmental interrelations suggested in opens ystems theories, institutional theories in their extrerne forms define organiz ations as dramatic enactments of the rationalized myths pervading modern societies, rather than as units involved in exchange—no matter how comp lex—with their environments.
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The two explanations of environmental isomorphism are not entirely inconsistent. Organizations both deal with their environments at their boundaries and imitate environmental elements in their structures. However, the two lines of explanation have very different implications for internal organizational processes, as wiIl be argued below.
The Origins of Rational Institutional Myths
Bureaucratization is caused in part by the proliferation of rationalized myths in society, and this in turn invoives the evolution of the whole modern institutional system. Although the latter topic is beyond the scope of this paper, three specific processes that generate rationalized myths of organizat ional structure can be noted.
The e14.zboration of com pkx relational networks.—As the relational networks in societies become dense and interconnected, increasing numbers of ration aiized myths arise. Some of them are highly generalized: for example, the principies of universaiism (Parsons 1971), contracts (Spencer 1897), restitut ion (Durkheim 1933), and expertise (Weber 1947) are generalized to diverse occupations, organizational programs, and organizational practices. Other myths desenhe specific structural elements. These myths may oniginate from narrow contexts and be applied in different ones. For example, in modern societies the relational contexts of business organizations in a single industry are roughly similar from place to place. Under these conditions a particularly effective practice, occupational specialty, or principie of coordination can be codified into mythlike form. The laws, the educational and credentialing systems, and public opinion then make it necessary or advantageous for organizations to incorporate the new structures.
The degree of colkctive organizalion of Lhe environmenL—The myths generated by particular organizational practices and diffused through relational networks have legitimacy based on the supposition that they are rationaily effective. But many myths also have oticiai legitimacy based on legal inandates. Societies that, through nation building and state formation, have developed rational-legal orders are especially prone to give coilective (legal) authority to institutions which legitimate particular organizational structures. The rise of centralized states and integrated nations means that organized agents of society assume jurisdiction over large numbers of activity domains (Swanson 1971). Legislative and judicial authonities create and interpret legal mandates; administrative agencies—such as state and federal governments, port authorities, and school districts—establish rules of practice; and licenses and credentiais become necessary in order to practice occupations. The stronger the rational-legal order, the greater the extent to which rationalized rules and procedures and personnel become
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institutional requirements. New formal organizations emerge and extant organizations acquire new structurai elements.
Leadership efforts of local organizaiions.—The rise of the state and the expansion of coilective jurisdiction are often thought to result in domestic ated organizations (Carison 1962) subject to high leveis of goal displacement (Clark 1956; Seiznick 1949; and Zaid and Denton 1963). This view is misl eading: organizations do often adapt to their institutional contexts, but they often piay active roles in shaping those contexts (Dowling and Pfeffer 1975; Parsons 1956; Perrow 1970; Thompson 1967). Many organizations actively seek charters from coilective authorities and manage to institut ionalize their goais and structures in the ruies of such authorities.
Efforts to moid institutional environments proceed along two dimensions. First, powerful organizations force their immediate relational networks to adapt to their structures and relations. For instance, automobile producers help create demands for particular kinds of roads, transportation systems, and fueis that make automobiles virtual necessities; competitive forms of transportation have to adapt to the existing relational context. But second, powerful organizations attempt to build their goals and procedures directiy into society as institutional rules. Automobile producers, for instance, attempt to create the standards in pubiic opinion defining desirable cars, to influence legal standards defining satisfactory cars, to affect judicial ruies defining cars adequate enough to avoid manufacturer iiabiiity, and to force agents of the collectivity to purchase oniy their cars. Rivais must then compete both in social networks or markets and in contexts of institutional rules which are defined by extant organizations. In this fashion, given organizational forms perpetuate themseives by becoming institutionaiized rules. For example:
School administrators who create new curricuia or training programs att empt to validate them as legitimate innovations in educational theory and governmentai requirements. If they are successful, the new procedures can be perpetuated as authoritatively required or at least satisfactory.
New departments within business enterprises, such as personnel, advertisi ng, or research and deveiopment departments, attempt to professionalize by creating mies of practice and personnel certification that are enforced by the schoois, prestige systems, and the iaws.
Organizations under attack in competitive environments—small farms, passenger railways, or RolIs Royce—attempt to establish themselves as cent ral to the cultural traditions of their societies in order to receive official protection.
The Impact of Institutional Environments on Organizations
Isomorphism with environmental institutions has some crucial consequences for organizations: (a) they incorporate elements which are legitimated externaily, rather than in terms of efliciency; (b) they employ external or
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ceremonial assessment criteria to define the value of structural elements; and (c) dependence on externally fixed institutions reduces turbuience and maintains stability. As a result, it is argued here, institutional isomorphism promotes the success and survival of organizations. Incorporating externally legitimated formal structures increases the commitment of internal particip ants and external constituents. And the use of externa! assessment criteria— that is, moving toward the status in society of a subunit rather than an independent system—can enable an organization to remam successfui by social definition, buffering it from failure.
Changing formal slruclures.—By designing a formal structure that adheres to the prescriptions of myths in the institutional environment, an organizat ion demonstrates that it is acting on collectively valued purposes in a proper and adequate manner (Dowling and Pfeffer 1975; Meyer and Rowan 1975). The incorporation of institutionalized elements provides an account (Scott and Lyman 1968) of its activities that protects the organization from having its conduct questioned. The organization becomes, in a word, legitimate, and it uses its iegitimacy to strengthen its support and secure its survival.
From an institutionai perspective, then, a most important aspect of isomorphism with environmental institutions is the evolution of organizat ional language. The labeis of the organization chart as well as the vocabul ary used to delineate organizational goais, procedures, and policies are analogous to the vocabuiaries of motive used to account for the activities of individuais (BIum and McHugh 1971; Miils 1940). Just as jealousy, anger, altruism, and love are myths that interpret and explain the actions of individuais, the myths of doctors, of accountants, or of the assembiy une expiam organizationai activities. Thus, some can say that the engineers wiil solve a specific problem or that the secretaries will perform certain tasks, without knowing who these engineers or secretaries will be or exactly what they wiIl do. Both the speaker and the listeners understand such statements to describe how certain responsibilities will be carried out.
Vocabularies of structure which are isomorphic with institutional rules provide pnident, rational, and legitimate accounts. Organizations described in legitimated vocabularies are assumed to be oriented to collectively defined, and often collectively mandated, ends. The myths of personnel services, for example, not only account for the rationality of employment practices but also indicate that personnel services are valuable to an organization. Emp loyees, applicants, managers, trustees, and governmental agencies are predisposed to trust the hiring practices of organizations that follow legitim ated procedures—such as equal opportunity programs, or personality testing—and they are more willing to participate in or to fund such organizat ions. On the other hand, organizations that omit environmentally legitim ated elements of structure or create unique structures lack acceptable
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legitimated accounts of their activities. Such organizations are more vuinera ble to claims that they are negligent, irrational, or unnecessary. Claims of this kind, whether made by internal participants, external constituents, or the government, can cause organizations to incur real costs. For example:
With the rise of modern medical institutions, large organizations that do not arrange medical-care facilities for their workers come to be seen as neglig ent—by the workers, by management factions, by insurers, by courts which legally define negligence, and often by Iaws. The costs of illegitimacy in ins urance premiums and legal liabilities are very real.
Similarly, environmental safety institutions make it important for organiz ations to create formal safety rules, safety departments, and safety prog rams. No Smoking rules and signs, regardless of their enforcemerit, are necessary to avoid charges of negligence and to avoid the extreme of iliegitim ation: the closing of buildings by the state.
The rise of professionalized economics makes it useful for organizations to incorporate groups of economists and econometric analyses. Though no one may read, understand, or believe them, econometric analyses help legitim ate the organization’s plans in the eyes of investors, customers (as with Defense Department contractors), and internal participants. Such analyses can also provide rational accountings after failures occur: managers whose plans have failed can demonstrate to investors, stockholders, and superiors that procedures were prudent and that decisions were made by rational means.
Thus, rationalized institutions create myths of formal structure which shape organizations. Failure to incorporate the proper elements of structure is negligent and irrational; the continued fiow of support is threatened and internal dissidents are strengthened. At the same time, these myths present organizations with great opportunities for expansion. Affixing Lhe right labeis to activities can change them into valuable services and mobilize the commitments of internal participants and external constituents.
Aiopting externa! assessment criteria.—In institutionally elaborated env ironments organizations also become sensitive to, and employ, external criteria of worth. Such criteria include, for instance, such ceremonial awards as the Nobel Prize, endorsements by important people, the standard prices of professionals and consultants, or the prestige of programs or personnel in external social circles. For example, the conventions of modern accounting attempt to assign value to particular components of organizations on the basis of their contribution—through the organization’s production funct ion—to the goods and services the organization produces. But for many units—service departments, administrative sectors, and others—it is utterly unclear what is being produced that has clear or definable value in terms of its contribution to the organizational product. In these situations, account ants employ shadow prices: they assume that given organizational units are necessary and calculate their value from their prices in the world outside the organization. Thus modern accounting creates ceremonial production
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functions and maps them onto economic production functions: organizations assign externally defined worth to advertising departments, safety departm ents, managers, econometricians, and occasionaily even socioiogists, whether or not these units contribute measurabiy to the production of outputs. Monetary prices, in postindustrial society, reflect hosts of cerem onjal influences, as do economic measures of efficiency, profitability, or net worth (Hirsch 1975).
Ceremonial criteria of worth and ceremonially derived production func-. tions are usefui to organizations: they legitimate organizations with internai participants, stockholders, the pubiic, and the state, as with the IRS or the SEC. They demonstrate socially the fitness of an organization. The inc orporation of structures with high ceremonial value, such as those reflecting the latest expert thinking or those with the most prestige, makes the credit position of an organization more favorable. Loans, donations, or investments are more easily obtained. Finaliy, units within the organization use cerem onjal assessments as accounts of their productive service to the organizat ion. Their internal power rises with their performance on ceremonial measures (Salancik and Pfeffer 1974).
Stabiizalion.—The rise of an elaborate institutional environment stabilizes both external and internal organizational relationships. Centralized states, trade association, unions, professional associations, and coalitions among organizations standardize and stabiiize (see the review by Starbuck 1976).
Market conditions, the characteristics of inputs and outputs, and techn ological procedures are brought under the jurisdiction of institutional meanings and controis. Stabilization also results as a given organization becomes part of the wider coliective system. Support is guaranteed by agreements instead of depending entireiy on performance. For exampie, apart from whether schools educate students, or hospitais cure patients, people and governmental agencies remam committed to these organizat ions, funding and using them almost automatically year after year.
Institutionally controlled environments buifer organizations from turbul ence (Emery and Trist 1965; Terreberry 1968). Adaptations occur less rapidly as increased numbers of agreements are enacted. Coilectively granted monopolies guarantee clienteies for organizations iike schoois, hospitais, or professionai associations. The taken-for-granted (and Iegally regulated) quality of institutionai rules makes dramatjc instabilities in products, techniques, or poiicies uniikely. And legitimacy as accepted subu nits of society protects organizations from immediate sanctions for variat ions in technical performance:
Thus, American school districts (like other governmental units) have near monopolies and are very stable. They must conform to wider rules about proper classifications and credentiais of teachers and students, and of topics of study. But they are protected by rules which make education as defined
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by these classifications compulsory. Alternative or private schoois are poss ibie, but must conform so closely to the required structures and classificat ions as to be abie to generate little advantage.
Some business organizations obtain very high leveis of institutional stab iiization. A large defense contractor may be paid for foilowing agreed-on procedures, even if the product is ineifective. In the extreme, such organizat ions may be so successfui as to survive bankruptcy intact—as Lockheed and Penn Central have done—by becoming partially components of the state. More commonly, such firms are guaranteed survival by state-regul ated rates which secure profits regardiess of costs, as with American public utiiity firms.
Large automobile firms are a little less stabiized. They exist in an environm ent that contains enough structures to make automobiles, as conventionaily defined, virtual necessities. But stlll, customers and governments can inspect each automobile and can evaluate and even legally discredit it. Legal action cannot as easily discredit a high schooi graduate.
Organizalional success and survival.—Thus, organizational success depends on factors other than efficient coordination and control of productive activities. Independent of their productive efficiency, organizations which exist in highly elaborated institutional environments and succeed in bec oming isomorphic with these environments gain the legitimacy and res ources needed to survive. In part, this depends on environmental processes and on the capacity of given organizational leadership to mold these processes (Hirsch 1975). In part, it depends on the abiiity of given organizations to conform to, and become iegitimated by, environmentai institutions. In institutionally elaborated environments, sagacious conformity is required:
leadership (in a university, a hospital, or a business) requires an unders tanding of changing fashions and governmental programs. But this kind of conformity—and the almost guaranteed survival which rnay accompany it— is possibie only in an environment with a highly institutionalized structure. 1» such a context an organization can be locked into isomorphisrn, cerem onially refiecting the institutional environment in its structure, funct ionaries, and procedures. Thus, in addition to the conventionally defined sources of organizational success and survival, the foliowing general assertion can be proposed:
Proposition 3. Organizaiwns lhat incorporate socieially legitimaled ration alized ekmenls in (heir formal siructures maximize their legiimacy and increase lheir resources and survival capabiilies.
This proposition asserts that the iong-run survival prospects of organizat ions increase as state structures elaborate and as organizations respond to institutionalized ruies. In the United States, for instance, schools, hospitais, and welfare organizations show considerabie ability to survive, precisely because they are matched with—and almost absorbed by—their institut ional environments. In the sarne way, organizations fail when they deviate
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from the prescriptions of institutionalizing myths: quite apart from technical efliciency, organizations which innovate in important structural ways bear considerable costs in legitimacy.
Figure 2 summarizes the general argument of this section, alongside the establishcd view that organizations succeed through efficiency.
INSTITUTIONALIZED STRUCTURES AND ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIVITIES
Rationalized formal structures arise in two contexts. First, the demands of local relational networks encourage the development of structures that coordinate and control activities. Such structures contribute to the efficiency of organizations and give them competitive advantages over Iess efficient competitors. Second, the interconnectedness of societal relations, the coilective organization of society, and the leadership of organizational elites create a highly institutionalized context. In this context rationalized struct ures present an acceptable account of organizational activities, and organiz ations gain legitimacy, stability, and resources.
AlI organizations, to one degree or another, are embedded in both relat ional and institutionalized contexts and are therefore concerned both with coordinating and controlling their activities and with prudently accounting for them. Organizations in highly institutionalized environments face int ernal and boundary-spanning contingencies. Schools, for example, must transport students to and from school under some circumstances and must assign teachers, students, and topics to classrooms. On the other hand, organizations producing in markets that place great emphasis on efficiency build in units whose relation to production is obscure and whose efficiency is determined, not by a true production function, but by ceremonial definit ion.
Nevertheless, the survival of some organizations depends more on managi ng the demands of internal and boundary-spanning relations, while the survival of others depends more on the ceremonial demands of highly institutionalized environments. The discussion to follow shows that whether an organization’s survival depends primarily on relational or on institutional demands determines the tightness of alignments between structures and activities.
Elaboration of rationalized Organizational coformity
institutional myths with institutional yths
OrganiionaJefficiency
Fio. 2.—Organizational survival
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Types of Organizations
Institutionalized myths differ in the completeness with which they describe cause and effect relationships, and in the clarity with which they describe standards that should be used to evaluate outputs (Thompson 1967). Some organizations use routine, clearly defined technologies to produce outputs. When output can be easily evaluated a market often develops, and cons umers gain considerable rights of inspection and control. In this context, efficiency often determines success. Organizations must face exigencies of dose coordination with their relational networks, and they cope with these exigencies by organizing around immediate technical problems.
But the rise of collectively organized society and the increasing interc onnectedness of social relations have eroded many market contexts. Increasingly, such organizations as schools, R & D units, and governmental bureaucracies use variable, ambiguous technologies to produce outputs that are diflicult to appraise, and other organizations with clearly defined techn ologies find themselves unable to adapt to environmental turbulence. The uncertainties of unpredictable technical contingencies or of adapting to environmental change cannot be resolved on the basis of efficiency. Internal participants and external constituents alike cail for institutionalized rules that promote trust and confidence in outputs and buifer organizations from failure (Emery and Trist 1965).
Thus, one can conceive of a continuum along which organizations can be ordered. At one end are production organizations under strong output controis (Ouchi and McGuire 1975) whose success depends on the managem ent of relational networks. At the other end are institutionalized organizat ions whose success depends on the confidence and stability achieved by isomorphism with institutional rules. For two reasons it is important not to assume that an organization’s location on this continuum is based on the inherent technical properties of its output and therefore permanent. First, the technical properties of outputs are socially defined and do not exist in some concrete sense that allows them to be empirically discovered. Second, environments and organizations often redefine the nature of products, services, and technologies. Redefinition sometimes clarifies techniques or evaluative standards. But often organizations and environments redefine the nature of techniques and output so that ambiguity is introduced and rights of inspection and control are lowered. For example, American schools have evolved from producing rather specific training that was evaluated according to strict criteria of efficiency to producing ambiguously defined services that are evaluated according to criteria of certification (Callahan 1962; Tyack 1974; Meyer and Rowan 1975).
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Structural Inconsistencies in Institutionalized Organizations
Two very general problems face an organization if its success depends primarily on isomorphism with institutionalized rules. First, technical activities and demands for efficiency create conflicts and inconsistencies in an institutionalized organization’s efforts to conform to the ceremonial rules of production. Second, because these ceremonial rules are transmitted by myths that may arise from different paris of the environment, the mies may conflict with one another. These inconsistencies make a concern for efficiency and tight coordination and control problematic.
Formal strilctures that celebrate institutionalized myths differ from structures that act efficiently. Ceremonial activity is significant in relation to categorical rules, not in its concrete effects (Merton 1940; March and Simon 1958). A sick worker must be treated by a doctor using accepted medical procedures; whether the worker is treated effectively is less imp ortant. A bus company must service required routes whether or not there are many passengers. A university inust maintain appropriate departments independently of the departments’ enrollments. Activity, that is, has ritual significance: it maintains appearances and validates an organization.
Categorical rules conflict with the logic of efficiency. Organizations often face the dilemma that activities ceiebrating institutionalized rules, although they count as virtuous ceremonial expenditures, are pure costs from the point of view of efficiency. For example, hiring a Nobel Prize winner brings great ceremonial benefits to a university. The celebrated name can lead to research grants, brighter students, or reputational gains. But from the point of view of immediate outcomes, the expenditure Iowers the instructional return per doilar expended and Iowers the university’s abiiity to solve immediate logistical problems. Also, expensive technologies, which bring prestige to hospitals and business firms, may be simply excessive costs from the point of view of immediate production. Similarly, highly professionalized consultants who bring external blessings on an organization are often difficult to justify in terms of improved productivity, yet may be very important in maintaining internal and external Iegitimacy.
Other conflicts between categorical rules and efficiency arise because institutional rules are couched at high leveis of generalization (Durkheim 1933) whereas technical activities vary with specific, unstandardized, and possibly unique conditions. Because standardized ceremonial categories must confront technical variations and anomalies, the generalized rules of the institutional environment are often inappropriate to specific situations. A governmentally mandated curriculum may be inappropriate for the students at hand, a conventional medical treatment may make little sense given the characteristics of a patient, and federal safety inspectors may intolerably delay boundary-spanning exchanges.
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Yet another source of conflict between categorical rules and efficiency is the inconsistency among institutionaiized eiements. Institutionai environm ents are often piuralistic (Udy 1970), and societies promulgate sharply inconsistent myths. As a resuit, organizations in search of external support and stability incorporate ali sorts of incompatible structural elements. Professions are incorporated although they make overlapping jurisdictionai ciaims. Programs are adopted which contend with each other for authority over a given domam. For instance, if one inquires who decides what curricula will be taught in schools, any number of parties from the various governm ents down to individual teachers may say that they decide.
In institutionalized organizations, then, concern with the efficiency of day-to-day activities creates enormous uncertainties. Specific contexts highl ight the inadequacies of the prescriptions of generaiized myths, and incons istent structural elements conflict over jurisdictional rights. Thus the organization must struggle to iink the requirements of ceremonial eiements to technical activities and to link inconsistent ceremoniai eiements to each other.
Resolving Inconsistencies
There are four partiai solutions to these inconsistencies. First, an organizat ion can resist ceremonial requirements. But an organization that neglects ceremonial requirements and portrays itself as efficient may be unsuccessful in documenting its efficiency. Also, rejecting ceremonial requirements negiects an important source of resources and stability. Second, an organizat ion can maintain rigid conformity to institutionalized prescriptions by cutting off external relations. Aithough such isolation upholds ceremonial requirements, internal participants and external constituents may soon become disillusioned with their inability to manage boundary-spanning exchanges. Institutionaiized organizations must not only conform to myths but must also maintain the appearance that the myths actuaiiy work. Third, an organization can cynically acknowledge that its structure is inconsistent with work requirements. But this strategy denies the validity of institut ionalized myths and sabotages the legitimacy of the organization. Fourth, an organization can promise reform. People may picture the present as unworkable but the future as fihled with promising reforms of both structure and activity. But by defining the organization’s valid structure as lying in the future, this strategy makes the organization’s current structure iliegitim ate.
Instead of relying on a partial solution, however, an organization can resolve conflicts between ceremonial rules and efficiency by employing two interrelated devices: decoupiing and the Iogic of confidence.
Decoupling.—Ideally, organizations buiit around efficiency attempt to
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maintain dose alignments between structures and activities. Conformity is enforced through inspection, output quality is continuaily monitored, the efficiency of various units is evaiuated, and the various goals are unified and coordinated. But a policy of dose alignment in institutionalized organizat ions merely makes public a record of inefficiency and inconsistency.
Institutionalized organizations protect their formal structures from evaluation on the basis of technical performance: inspection, evaluation, and control of activities are minimized, and coordination, interdependence, and mutual adjustments among structural units are handied informally.
Proposition 4. Because alienipts to control and coordinate activities in instilulionalized organiza&ms kad to conflicis and loss of legitimacy, ele,nents of structure are decoupled from activilies and froin each other.
Some welI-known properties of organizations illustrate the decoupling process:
Activities are performed beyond the purview of managers. In particular, organizations actively encourage professionalism, and activities are delegated to professionals.
Goals are made ambiguous or vacuous, and categorical ends are substituted for technical ends. HospitaIs treat, not cure, patients. Schools produce stud ents, not learning. In fact, data on technical performance are eliminated or rendered invisibie. Hospitais try to ignore information on cure rates, public services avoid data about effectiveness, and schools deemphasize measures of achievement.
Integration is avoided, program implementation is neglected, and inspect ion and evaluation are ceremonialized.
Human relations are made very important. The organization cannot form ally coordinate activities because its formal rules, if applied, would generate inconsistencies. Therefore individuals are left to work out technical interd ependencies informally. The ability to coordinate things in vioiation of the rules—that is, to get along with other people—is highly valued.
The advantages of decoupling are clear. The assumption that formal structures are realiy working is buffered from the inconsistencies and anomalies involved in technical activities. Also, because integration is avoided disputes and conflicts are minimized, and an organization can mobilize support from a broader range of external constituents.
Thus, decoupiing enables organizations to mahtain standardized, legitim ating, formal structures whiie their activities vary in response to practical considerations. The organizations in an industry tend to be similar in formal structure—reflecting their common institutional origins—but may show much diversity in actual practice.
The logic of contidence and good faith.—Despite the iack of coordination and control, decoupled organizations are not anarchies. Day-to-day activities proceed in an orderiy fashion. What iegitimates institutionalized organizat ions, enabling them to appear useful in spite of the lack of technical valida-
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tion, is the confidence and good faith of their internal participants and their externa! constituents.
Considerations of face characterize ceremonial management (Goffman 1967). Confidence in structural elements is maintained through three practices—avoidance, discretion, and overlooking (Goffman 1967, pp. 12— 18). Avoidance and discretion are encouraged by decoupling autonomous subunits; overlooking anomalies is also quite common. Both interna! participants and external constituents cooperate in these practices. Assuring that individual participants maintain face sustains confidence in the organiz ation, and ultimately reinforces confidence in the myths that rationalize the organization’s existence.
Delegation, professionalization, goal ambiguity, the elimination of output data, and maintenance of face are alI meclianisms for absorbing uncertainty while preserving the formal structure of the organization (March and Simon 1958). They contribute to a general aura of confidence within and outside the organization. Although the literature on informal organization often treats these practices as mechanisms for the achievement of deviant and subgroup purposes (Downs 1967), such treatment ignores a critical feature of organization life: effectively absorbing uncertainty and maint aining confidence requires people to assume that everyone is acting in good faith. The assumption that things are as they seem, that employees and managers are performing their roles properly, allows an organization to perform its daily routines with a decoupled structure.
Decoupling and maintenance of face, in other words, are mechanisms that maintain the assumption that people are acting in good faith. Professionalizat ion is not merely a way of avoiding inspection—it binds both supervisors and subordinates to act in good faith. So in a smaller way does strategic leniency (BIau 1956). And so do the public displays of morale and satisfaction which are characteristic of many organizations. Organizations employ a host of mechanisms to dramatize the ritual commitments which their participants make to basic structural elements. These mechanisms are especially common in organizations which strongly reflect their institut ionalized environments.
Proposition 5. The more an organization’s slruclure is derioedfrom institul ionalized myths, lhe more it mainlains elaborate dispkys of confidence, satisfact ion, and goodfaith, inlernally and exlernaliy.
The commitments built up by displays of morale and satisfaction are not simply vacuous affirmations of institutionalized myths. Participants not only commit themselves to supporting an organization’s ceremonial facade but also commit themselves to making things work out backstage. The committed participants engage ii informal coordination that, although often formally inappropriate, keeps technical activities running smoothly and avoids public embarrassments. In this sense the confidence and good faith
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generated by ceremonial action is in no way fraudulent. It may even be the most reasonabie way to get participants to make their best efforts in situat ions that are made problematic by institutionaiized myths that are at odds with immediate technical demands.
Ceremonial inspection and evaluation.—Aii organizations, even those maintaining high leveis of confidence and good faith, are in environments that have institutionalized the rationalized rituais of inspection and evaluat ion. And inspection and evaluation can uncover events and deviations that undermine legitimacy. So institutionaiized organizations minimize and ceremonialize inspection and evaluation.
In institutionaiized organizations, in fact, evaluation accompanies and produces iliegitimacy. The interest in evaiuation research by the American federal government, for instance, is partly intended to undercut the state, local, and private authorities which have managed social services in the United States. The federal authorities, of course, have usually not evaiuated those programs which are completely under federal jurisdiction; they have only evaluated those over which federal controis are incompiete. Similarly, state governments have often insisted on evaluating the special fundings they create in welfare and education but ordinarily do not evaiuate the programs which they fund in a routine way.
Evaluation and inspection are public assertions of societai control which violate the assumption that everyone is acting with competence and in good faith. Vioiating this assumption lowers moraie and confidence. Thus, evaluation and inspection undermine the ceremonial aspects of organizat ions.
Proposition 6. Instiiukonalized organizaiion seek lo minimize inspeclion and evaluoJion by bolh interna! managers and externa! constiluenis.
Decoupling and the avoidance of inspection and evaluation are not mereiy devices used by the organization. Extemal constituents, too, avoid inspecting and controliing institutionalized organizations (Meyer and Rowan 1975). Accrediting agencies, boards of trustees, government agencies, and individuaIs accept ceremonially at face value the credentiais, ambiguous goals, and categorical evaluations that are characteristic of ceremonial organizations. In elaborate institutional environments these external constit uents are themseives likely to be corporatdy organized agents of society. Maintaining categoricai relationships with their organizational subunits is more stabie and more certain than is relying on inspection and control.
Figure 3 summarizes the main arguments of this section of our discussion.
SUMMARY AND RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS
Organizational structures are created and made more eiaborate with the rise of institutionalized myths, and, in highly institutionalized contexts,
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American Journal of Sociology
Tbe decoupling of atructural aubunita fro. each other and fro. activity
Iao.orpbiae with an
____________ Rituala of confidence and
elaborated inetitutional ood faith
environ.ent
The avoidance of inspection
and effective evaluation
FIG. 3.—The effects of institutional isomorphism on organizations
organizational action must support these myths. But an organization must also attend to practical activity. The two requirements are at odds. A stable solution is Lo maintain the organization in a loosely coupled state.
No position is taken here on the overail social effectiveness of isomorphic and loosely coupled organizations. To some extent such structures buifer activity from efficiency criteria and produce ineffectiveness. On the other hand, by binding participants to act in good faith, and to adhere to Lhe larger rationalities of the wider structure, they may maximize long-run effective.n ess. It should not be assumed that the creation of microscopic rationalities in the daily activity of workers effects social ends more efllciently than commitment Lo larger institutional claims and purposes.
Research Implications
The argument presented here generates several major theses that have clear research implications.
1. Environments and environmental domains which have institutionalized a greater number of rational myths generate more formal organization. This thesis leads to the research hypothesis that formal organizations rise and become more complex as a result of the rise of Lhe elaborated state and other institutions for coilective action. This hypothesis should hold true even when economic and technical development are held constant. Studies could trace the diffusion to formal organizations of specific institutions:
professions, clearly labeled programs, and the like. For instance, the effects of the rise of theories and professions of personnel selection on the creation of personnel departments in organizations could be studied. Other studies could follow the diffusion of saies departments or research and development departments. Organizations should be found to adapt to such environmental changes, even if no evidence of their effectiveness exists.
Experimentally, one could study the impact on the decisions of organizat ional managers, in planning or altering organizational structures, of hypot hetical variations in environmental institutionalization. Do managers plan differently if they are informed about the existence of established occupations or programmatic institutions in their environments? Do they plan differently
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if they are designing organizations for more or less institutionally elaborated environments?
2. Organizations which incorporate institutionalized myths are more legitimate, successful, and likely to survive. Here, research should compare similar organizations in different contexts. For instance, the presence of personnel departments or research and development units should predict success in environments in which they are widely institutionalized. Organizat ions which have structural elements not institutionalized in their environm ents shouid be more likeiy to fail, as such unauthorized complexity must be justified by claims of efliciency and effectiveness.
More generally, organizations whose claims to support are based on evaluations should be less likely to survive than those which are more highly institutionalized. An implication of this argument is that organizations existing in a highly institutionalized environment are generally more likely to survive.
Experimentally, one could study the size of the loans banks would be wiliing to provide organizations which vary only in (1) the degree of environm ental institutionalization, and (2) the degree to which the organization structurally incorporates environmental institutions. Are banks willing to lend more money to firms whose plans are accompanied by econometric projections? And is this tendency greater in societies in which such project ions are more widely institutionalized?
3. Organizational control efforts, especially in highly institutionaiized contexts, are devoted to ritual conformity, both internally and externally. Such organizations, that is, decouple structure from activity and structures from each other. The idea here is that the more highly institutionalized the environment, the more time and energy organizational elites devote to managing their organization’s public image and status and the iess they devote to coordination and to managing particular boundary-spanning relationships. Further, the argument is that in such contexts managers devote more time to articulating internal structures and relationships at an abstract or ritual levei, in contrast to managing particular relationships among activities and interdependencies.
Experimentally, the time and energy allocations proposed by managers presented with differently described environments could be studied. Do managers, presented with the description of an elaborately institutionalized environment, propose to spend more energy maintaining ritual isomorphism and lesa on monitoring internal conformity? Do they tend to become ina ttentive to evaluation? Do they elaborate doctrines of professionalism and good faith?
The arguments here, in other words, suggest both comparative and experimental studies examining the effects on organizational structure and
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coordination of variations in the institutional structure of the wider environm ent. Variations in organizational structure among societies, and within any society across time, are central to this conception of the problem.
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