Since the middle of the 19th century, the formal organization has been constructed as a legitimate collective actor in and of itself. How did it rise to sit alongside the nation-state as one of the principal forms of collective action in modern society? The authors argue that the scientific epistemology of the Enlightenment provided a model in which the social world, like the natural world, was to be understood through the classification of forms and the enumeration of particular instantiations. Individuals deliberately created the modern organization by asserting a universal form through the symbolization of isomorphism and by enumerating individual identities through the symbolization of cultural identity. Neoinstitutional theory documents the first process, whereas organizational theory documents the second. The authors argue that these two theories highlight different aspects of a single process: the social invention of the organization as collective actor.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
2.
Anderson, P. (1974). Lineages of the absolutist state. London: New Left Books.
3.
Barley, S. R. , Meyer, G. W., & Gash, D. C. (1988). Cultures of culture: Academics, practitioners, and the pragmatics of normative control. Administrative Science Quarterly, 33, 24-61.
4.
Baron, J. N. , Dobbins, F. R., & Jennings, P. D. (1986). War and peace: The evolution of modern personnel administration in U.S. industry. American Journal of Sociology, 92, 350-383.
5.
Bellah, R. N. , & Hammond, P. E. (1980). Varieties of civil religion. New York: Harper & Row.
6.
Boli, J. (1987). Human rights or state expansion? Cross-national definitions of constitutional rights. In G. M. Thomas, J. W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez, & J. Boli (Eds.), Institutional structure: Constituting state, society, and the individual (pp. 133-149). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
7.
Chandler, A. D., Jr. (1977). The visible hand: The managerial revolution in American business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8.
Cole, R. E. (1989). Strategies for learning: Small-group activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish industry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
9.
Creighton, A. (1989). The emergence of incorporation: Standardization and growth in the nineteenth century. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Stanford University.
10.
Davis, G. (1991). Agents without principles: The spread of the poison pill through the intercorporate network. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36, 583-613.
11.
Davis, G. F. , Diekmann, K. A., & Tinsley, C. H. (1994). The decline and fall of the conglomerate firm in the 1980s: The deinstitutionalization of an organizational form. American Sociological Review, 59, 547-570.
12.
DiMaggio, P. J. , & Powell, W. W. (1983). The Iron Cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, 147-160.
13.
DiMaggio, P. J. , & Powell, W. W. (1991). Introduction. In W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 1-40). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14.
Dobbin, F. , Sutton, J., Meyer, J., & Scott. W. R. (1993). Equal opportunity law and the construction of internal labor markets. American Journal of Sociology, 99, 396-427.
15.
Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
16.
Durkheim, E. , & Mauss, M. (1963). Primitive classification. London: Cohen and West. (Originally published 1903)
17.
Edelman, L. (1992). Legal ambiguity and symbolic structures: Organizational mediation of civil rights law. American Journal of Sociology, 97, 1531-1576.
18.
Fligstein, N. (1990). The transformation of corporate control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
19.
Friedland, R. , & Alford, R. (1991). Bringing society back in. In W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 232-266). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
Geertz, C. (1980). Negara: The theatre-state in nineteenth century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
21.
Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
22.
Hamilton, G. G. , & Biggart, N. W. (1988). Market, culture, and authority: A comparative analysis of management and organization in the Far East. American Journal of Sociology, 94, S52-S94.
23.
Hobsbawm, E. J. (1983). Introduction: Inventing traditions. In E. J. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (Eds.), The invention of tradition (pp. 1-14). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
24.
Krasner, S. D. (in press). Westphalia. In J. Goldstein & R. Keohane (Eds.), Ideas and foreign policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
25.
Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
26.
Latour, B. (1990). Postmodern? No, simply amodern! Steps towards an anthropology of science. Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Science, 21, 145-171.
27.
Martin, J. , Feldman, M. S., Hatch, M. J., & Sitkin, S. B. (1983). The uniqueness paradox in organizational stories. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, 438-452.
28.
Meyer, J. W. (1994). Rationalized environments. In W. R. Scott & J. W. Meyer (Eds.), Institutional environments and organizations: Structural complexity and individualism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
29.
Meyer, J. , Boli, J., & Thomas, G. (1987). Ontology and rationality in the Western cultural account. In G. Thomas, J. Meyer, R. Francisco, & J. Boli (Eds.), Institutional structure: Constituting state, society, and the individual. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
30.
Meyer, J. , & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340-363.
31.
Perrow, C. (1991). A society of organizations. Theory and Society, 20, 725-762.
32.
Perrow, C. (1992). Organizational theorists in a society of organizations. International Sociology, 3, 371-380.
33.
Peters, T. J. , & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence. New York: Harper & Row.
34.
Piore, M. J. , & Sabel, C. F. (1984). The second industrial divide: Possibilities for prosperity. New York: Basic Books.
35.
Presthus, R. (1962). The organizational society. New York: Knopf.
36.
Roy, W. (in press). Socializing capital. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
37.
Schutz, A. (1962). The collected papers of Alfred Schutz. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff.
38.
Scott, W. R. (1987). Organizations: Rational, natural and open systems (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
39.
Scott, W. R. , & Meyer, J. W. (1983). The organization of societal sectors. In J. W. Meyer & W. R. Scott (Eds.), Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 129-154). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
40.
Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration. New York: Harper & Row.
41.
Sevon, G. (1996). Organizational imitation in identity transformation. In B. Czarniawska & G. Sevon (Eds.), Translating organizational change (pp. 49-67). Berlin: de Gruyter.
42.
Shapin, S. , & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
43.
Shenhav, Y. (1995). From chaos to systems: The engineering foundations of organizational theory, 1879-1932. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, 557-586.
44.
Strandgaard Pedersen, J. (1991). Continuity and change (Samfundslitteratur Ph.D. Series, No. 2.91). Copenhagen, Denmark: Copenhagen Business School Press.
45.
Strandgaard Pedersen, J. , & Dobbin, F. (1996). Constructing organizations: Neoinstitutionalism and organizational culture (Papers in Organization, No. 21). Copenhagen, Denmark: Copenhagen Business School.
46.
Sutton, J. , & Dobbin, F. (1996). The two faces of governance: Responses to legal uncertainty in American firms, 1955-1985. American Sociological Review, 61, 794-811.
47.
Sutton, J. R. , Dobbin, F., Meyer, J. W., & Scott, R. (1994). The legalization of the workplace. American Journal of Sociology, 99, 944-971.
48.
Thomas, G. M. , & Meyer, J. W. (1984). The expansion of the state. Annual Review of Sociology, 10, 461-482.
49.
Watkins, S. C. (1991). From provinces into nations: Demographic integration in Western Europe, 1870-1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
50.
Weick, K. E. (1993). Sensemaking in organizations: Small structures with large consequences. In J. K. Murnighan (Ed.), Social psychology in organizations: Advances in theory and research (pp. 10-37). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
51.
Whyte, W. H., Jr. (1956). The organization man. New York: Simon & Schuster.
52.
Wuthnow, R. (1987). Meaning and moral order: Explorations in cultural analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
53.
Wuthnow, R. (1989). Communities of discourse: Ideology and social structure in the reformation, the Enlightenment, and European socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
54.
Zerubavel, E. (1991). The fine line: Making distinctions in everyday life. New York: Free Press.
