1. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS REVISITED...Social Structure and Organizations Revisited, Volume 19, pages 3–36. ... yet congenial set of sociological approaches to organizational

1. SOCIAL STRUCTURE ANDORGANIZATIONS REVISITED

Michael Lounsbury and Marc J. Ventresca

Sociological studies of complex organizations chronicle a long history ofanalytic concern with the linkages between wider societal arrangements and thestructure and activities of organizations (Perrow, 1986, 2002). In fact, it is onlyin recent decades and among some theorists and empirical researchers that attention has narrowed from a focus on institutionally-rich studies of laborunions, schools, firms, government bureaus, social movement organizations,advocacy groups, nonprofit agencies, and sundry varied organizations, to a focuson formal organizations as abstract instrumentally-oriented entities operating inenvironments that are narrowly conceptualized as material resource spaces. Overthe past decade, however, there have been an increasing number of calls torevisit the dynamics of organizations and society (e.g. Friedland & Alford, 1991;Scott, 2001; Stern & Barley, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1997).

This chapter identifies common concerns and research opportunities forcontemporary organizational sociologists interested in social structure as a morerichly textured n-dimensional space in which organizations navigate. To situateour agenda, we discuss key themes from mid-century organizational sociologyin light of current cultural and social theory, highlighting how more recent workbuilds upon and extends the mid-century social structural tradition and wherenew work can take shape. In particular, we revisit the 1965 essay by ArthurL. Stinchcombe, “Social structure and organizations,” that anchors a concep-tion of social structure and organization that is useful for an emergingcommunity of structurally-oriented organizational researchers.

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Social Structure and Organizations Revisited, Volume 19, pages 3–36.Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd.All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.ISBN: 0-7623-0872-9

The arguments we make and that the chapters in this volume extend arebasic: U.S. sociologies of organization into the 1960s argued directly and purposively for understanding how broader social structures, and typically, thepolitics of resources and authority, shaped organizational actors and activity.This work built on the foundations of mid-century sociological analyses ofpower, conflict, and authority, itself the legacy of early 20th century “old” institutionalisms in economics and sociology. By the early 1970s, sociologistsand, increasingly, colleagues in management and other professional schools hadgenerated a distinctly different set of theoretical arguments and empiricalresearch traditions. This work grappled with and developed two themes thatcharacterize the modern synthesis in organizational sociology: (1) the shift to“open systems” approaches (e.g. focused attention on organization-environmentrelations), and (2) the burdens of the legacy of narrow readings of Weber onbureaucracy, to the neglect of Weber on domination and other critical traditions. The new theories were varied, but several general analytic featuresbecame increasingly prominent as the work accumulated and as researcherssought to develop a more “synthetic” organization theory.

We suggest that social exchange approaches to power and aspirations formore parsimonious quantitative models animated this new work, which in turn,reinforced restricted conceptions of politics, resources, and the interplay amongthese in societal context. The institutional and legal bases of organizationsbecame implicit, typically unexamined or assumed. Theory and empirical workpaid less attention to wider societal patterns and distributions of resources.Concomitantly, midcentury attention to social structure became transformed intoconceptions of abstract, exogenous environments that constrained, and in many ways, determined organizational structures and behavior (via functionalimperatives such as legitimacy or efficiency).

This introduction provides context for a set of original empirical papers and thematic commentaries. We review the heritage studies of organizationalsociology from the 1950s through the early 1970s and probe Stinchcombe’s1965 essay to sound out analytic legacies and opportunities for contemporaryresearch. We then discuss developments in the organizational research agendain the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting how a focus on social exchange approachesto power reconceptualized social structure and restricted the intellectual andpolicy opportunities of organizational sociology. We close with the outlines ofan alternative agenda, comprising a set of research reports that highlightopportunities for a renewed social structural approach to organizational analysisthat both enriches the conceptions of politics and societal struggle central tothe vision of Stinchcombe 1965 and extends this tradition in light of

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contemporary trends in social and cultural theory. We see developments in theanalysis and theorization of culture as providing particularly promising newdirections for social structural approaches to organizations. For instance, wenote that emerging new structuralisms in cultural sociology and the study ofstratification (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Mohr, 2000) provide key conceptual andmethodological developments that could be fruitfully integrated into the agendaof organizational sociology.

We argue that the time is ripe for organizational researchers to renew attentionto broader social structures and to bring “society” back to center stage. “Society”here includes social structure in the idiom Stinchcombe (1965) called for andalso in ways that more directly engage contemporary emphases on both distri-butions of resources and meanings along with the everyday social practices thatsupport and can contribute to the reshaping of social structure (Bourdieu, 1984;Clemens, 1997; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Stryker, 1994). Our efforts in thisvolume aim to bring together a diverse, yet congenial set of sociologicalapproaches to organizational analysis that highlight the vibrancy of the socialstructural tradition in organizational sociology as well as the value of moreconsciously recognizing these works as part of an ongoing project.

“SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS” ANDMID-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO

ORGANIZATIONS

Since mid-century, the scope of research on organizations in sociology hasnarrowed from a concern about the role of organizations in society with a big“S” (Michels, 1949; Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Stinchcombe, 1965) toperspectives that emphasize concrete exchange processes within and betweenorgnizations and organizational demography (Hannan & Freeman, 1977; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Williamson, 1985). These developments have greatlyenhanced our understanding of the variety of ways organizations are affectedby transactions with other organizations in their environment and focused on new levels of analysis and often alternative causal mechanisms. Theseapproaches have also facilitated the development of substantial empirical and theoretical literatures. But one effect of these trends is that the study oforganizations has become disconnected from the study of societal stratification,politics and social change that provided core problematics in earlier sociologicalstudies of organizations and society. Further, much empirical research onorganizations has come to emphasize a highly rationalized and instrumentalconception of interorganizational relations in contrast to views that highlight

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ambiguity over uncertainty and treat these relations as politically-inflected andculturally-embedded (March & Olson, 1976; Dacin, Ventresca & Beal, 1999).

In the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists charted a political economy approachto organizations, informed by middle-range theorizing and rich empirical casestudies. These sociological approaches to organizations were informed andintertwined with the study of broader political processes and related societal-level social structures. These studies did not focus narrowly on organizationalphenomena, nor did they try to build a synthetic theory of organization. Instead,organizations were seen as sites for understanding the constitution andconsequences of modern forms of power. This sensibility was derived from the work of Max Weber and other early theorists of domination and authority,institutional economists such as Veblen, Commons, and Schumpeter whotheorized about industry and economic change, and modern sociologicaltheorists such as Parsons and Merton. The research extended classic Weberianconcerns with power, domination, authority, and legitimacy, with a focus onorganizations as one important kind of social structure.

These works conceptualized social structural forces quite broadly as includingpatterns of ideas, values, elements of stratification, and social interactions – inessence, the stuff of social organization in its raw form. Social structure wasoften treated as a social fact, confronting actors with durable but not obduratepatterns of resources and meaning. Empirical research, however, also investi-gated social structure as emergent – the outcome of intentional choices,strategies, and politics. Pivotal studies in this period provided us with a vividvocabulary for modern organization theory.

Selznick (1949) highlighted how organizational efforts to reshape theenvironment are explicitly enmeshed in broader political negotiations. In turn,he treated organization-building as a complex endeavor that required leaders to integrate an organization’s goals and operations with the demands, goals and orientations of its institutional milieu (Selznick, 1957). Gouldner (1954)concentrated attention on how formal variations in work situations affected laborrelations tactics and developments within a highly stratified industrial bureau-cracy. Lipset, Trow and Coleman (1956) showed how a union organization wasable to successfully build a monopoly around typographical skills. Stinchcombe(1959) argued that the social organization of work in bureaucracies or moreautonomous craft occupations was contingent upon technical features of workprocesses. Bendix (1956) helped to forge a comparative tradition that high-lighted how variations in state-building projects and associated ideas of authorityresult in distinct institutional and organizational configurations of work andmanagement practices. Duncan (1960) showed how the class structure ofresources in metropolis regions shaped industrial organization.


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This sampling of studies share a number of analytic features and commit-ments that were available for organizational sociologies that followed. Whileeclectic in their treatments of “organizations” as an analytic construct, theyprovided empirical challenges to the then-prevailing ideal typical conception of organizations as tightly-coupled, integrated, functional, and unitary. Theyfocused on work, on how things got done, and on the varieties of socialorganization of such activity. They recognized and provided explanations forconflict and change, often through rich case studies of complex organizationalsystems that focused on both resource and exchange linkages, but also onauthority relations that took shape and became manifest in meaningful contextsof beliefs, ideologies, and cultural models. In this way, they stand distinct from much contemporary organizational studies in administrative science andother strands of organization theory that focus primarily on technical contin-gencies of organizations and inquire into optimal configurations or patterns.

Stinchcombe’s 1965 essay, “Social structure and organizations,” is one foundational statement for a more politically-oriented organizational theory thatforegrounds broader societal processes. It is also one of the works from thisperiod that continues to be a pivotal citation in varied contemporary theoreticaland empirical research. In current research, Stinchcombe 1965 is usually citedas the source of claims about how social structure imprints new organizationalforms in time-inflected ways or how new forms may suffer from a liability ofnewness. We instead read Stinchcombe 1965 as an essay that, in the words of Merton (1987), aimed to “specify ignorance” for the development of newknowledge of organizations. We believe the richness of ideas and argumentsin this paper remain under-explored. The focus of his essay on grounded studiesof politics, stratification and resources, ideas, and the societal context oforganization importantly informs the agenda that research in this volume chartsout. Further, it provides a clear point of engagement with contemporary socialtheory and analysis of organizations.

Stinchcombe’s analytical lens, often richly soaked in historical detail andinformed by the breadth of the Weberian gaze, provides a wide angle view oforganizational life as influenced by conflicts over forms of administration (craft,professional, bureaucratic), the social organization of markets and societies, thestability of political regimes, social classes and other kinds of status groups. In his characteristically eclectic style, Stinchcombe defined a brand of organi-zational analysis that seeks to systematically uncover the “relation of societyoutside organizations [social structure] to the internal life of organizations”(1965, p. 142). Stinchcombe’s attention to how organizational dynamics arecentrally connected to societal values, power structures and related features ofstratification, however, is too frequently neglected in the wisdom taken from


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his essay. Stinchcombe’s scholarly corpus is remarkable for its breadth, volume,and acuteness with regard to major sociological subfields as well as for itsempirical ambitions. Committed to the notion that good sociology involvesdeveloping theoretical generalizations, Stinchcombe’s intellectual curiosity hasprovided us with insights into a wide variety of empirical domains such asconstruction (1959), police administrative practice (1963), a high school (1964),love (with Heimer, 1980), Eighteenth century French stratification and revolu-tion (1982), third party buying in insurance (1984), careers in computer softwarefirms (with Heimer, 1988), the political economy of the Carribean (1995), andthe social structure of market liquidity (Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 1999).1

The 1965 essay was prominent in the Handbook of Organizations, one of the first efforts to compile and overview research in the emerging field of organization theory. The Handbook assembled an eclectic mix of articles thatprovided overviews of research streams on different kinds of organizations, of research methods employed, and of how the study of organizations is centralto extant disciplinary traditions in sociology, psychology and political science.Stinchcombe makes three points in the first pages of his agenda-calling essay:(1) research and theory on the linkage between social structure and organization,or “the external relations of organizations” is “underdeveloped” and of “littlebeauty or power” (1965, p. 143); (2) social structure comprises “. . . groups,institutions, laws, population characteristics, and sets of social relations thatform the environments of the organization . . . any variables which are stablecharacteristics of the society outside the organization” (1965, p. 142); and (3) methods can and should draw from eclectic and “strategic” empirical samplesto generate propositions about social structure and organization.

The chapter itself is organized as commentary with propositions on fivegeneral research questions that develop opportunities at the intersection of socialstructure and organization, typically based in a few available research studies,and illustrated with new or borrowed data to underscore the import of closeempirical work in his version of general theorizing. First, what is the effect ofsocial structure on the rate of foundation of new organizations, particularly orga-nizations of a new kind or structure? Second, how can we explain, in socialstructural terms, the correlation between the time in history that a particulartype of organization was invented and the social structure of organizations ofthat type that exist at the present time? Third, what is the relation of organi-zations to the use of violence in the larger society (e.g. revolution), particularlyviolence and unrestrained competition in the political arena (including organizational stratification as outcome and mechanism)?

Fourth, how do organizational arrangements affect the relations betweensocial classes in the larger society (intraorganizational stratification as the case


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where classes meet and define broader working relationships)? Fifth, what isthe effect of organizations on social structure (more particularly the effect ofthe mere presence or absence of organizations on the solidarity and feeling of identity of “communal” groups)? Further, Stinchcombe identified commonfeatures in this mix of topics: each has to do with some aspect of the relationof organization to the environing social structure and each treats characteristicsof formal organizations as variables, rather than as components of ideal types(a commitment challenged by the paucity of available empirical studies anddata sources) (1965, pp. 143–145). While the essay is certainly wide-ranging(perhaps sprawling), it is remarkable to note how distant much of contempo-rary organizational theory seems to be from Stinchcombe’s concerns aboutsituated historical analysis, the dynamics of social identity and class, and societaltransformation.

The citation history of the 1965 paper provides an empirical indicator of itspopularity while also raising a provocative set of issues that inform the mainarguments of this essay and the empirical work in this volume. We identifiedand coded over 750 citations to “Social structure and organizations”, from itspublication through 2000 in the Social Science Citation Index.2 These citationsare predominantly in social science journals, with the largest proportions overtime in sociology and management journals. Substantial citations also occur injournals in political science and international studies, in public health and educa-tion, and in over 15 other disciplinary and research fields. Figure 1 reports theannual count of citations disaggregated by academic area journals in sociology,management, and other knowledge domains.

Overall, there is a secular trend of increases in annual citation counts,providing evidence that the paper has increasingly become a key reference fornew scholarly work. The specific pattern, a succession of peaks, each followedby a few years of citation counts at that higher level, suggests that differentresearch communities and emerging theoretical traditions have found the paperuseful and relevant as a touchstone. When we disaggregate the overall countsby academic area, two further compositional trends become visible. First, alarger share of citations to this paper over the years has typically been in jour-nals other than discipline-identified sociology journals. Second, the substantialincreases in citations to the paper since the early 1990s came primarily fromcitations in articles published in management journals, relative to pre-1980compositional patterns.

These trends confirm the continued recognition of Stinchcombe (1965) as afoundational contribution in the field of organizational theory. We also believethat the citation patterns are suggestive of broader changes that have shapedresearch on organizations. The sustained, but relatively lower levels of citations


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since the early 1980s in discipline-identified sociology journals may track thefate of mid-century sociology research sensibilities in “modern” organizationtheory. The increased number and proportion of citations to Stinchcombe(1965) in management journals beginning around 1980 provides an indicatorof a shift in intellectual and professional venues for researchers concerned withtopics linked to the claims of the paper. We argue that as business schoolfaculty became more prominent in driving the growth of organization theory(particularly “macro” approaches and “synthetic” organization theory distinctfrom the case-study based traditions of research on firms, agencies, or otherorganizations located in substantive contexts like labor, social movements,education, and the like), and as management journals became central arenasfor the construction of organizational knowledge, Stinchcombe (1965) wasnarrowly appropriated. It has increasingly become a ceremonial progenitor citation in a few lines of research, most vividly in organizational ecology and corporate demography, and in some institutional theories of organization.From this reading, the citation history of this paper tracks important shifts inthe field of organization theory as a subfield and its central concerns andcommitments (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002).

We next offer an account of how the development of organizational theory as asubfield redirected and fragmented the wider agenda for which Stinchcombe


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Fig. 1. Annual Citation Counts of Stinchcombe 1965 Essay by Academic AreaJournals, 1966–2000.

argued. In the spirit of Merton and Stinchcombe, we then “specify ignorance” byidentifying contemporary problematics and opportunities for organizational soci-ologists interested in the relationship between organizations and social structure,and then introduce empirical papers that develop elements of this agenda.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL THEORYAS A SUBFIELD: INSTRUMENTAL EXCHANGE

APPROACHES AND DISSIDENT VOICES

While some researchers have attended to ideological shifts in core imageriesand metaphors of organization (Barley & Kunda, 1992; Morgan, 1998), modernorganizational theorists as a whole have aspired to develop research in the idiom of normal science as a strategy to build a professional subfield that wouldappear respectable among neighboring social science fields. In U.S. sociologydepartments, organizational theory as a synthetic research tradition has hadlimited spread, with research and training concentrated among a relatively few universities. The aspiration to build a theory of complex and formalorganization, latterly organization theory, has been historically contested by awider sociological community skeptical of the abstraction. Specialty concen-trations in organizational analysis began to appear in sociology departments in the late 1960s, often accompanied by foundation and federal support forresearch in applied areas (e.g. education, mental health and policy services). In the 1970s, however, sociologists trained in organization theory began tomigrate to several companion professional schools, most prominently andconsequentially to schools of management and business, also to schools ofeducation, law, and public health. These peregrinations inevitably affected thedevelopment of organizational research.

Introductory seminars in contemporary organizational theory often begin with the modern synthesis – especially with the development of contingencytheory in the mid-1960s in the work of James D. Thompson and the empiricalstudies of Lawrence and Lorsch. Instead of focusing on how social structureshaped organizations, contingency theorists built on the administrative theoriesof Taylor, Barnard and Fayol to identify optimal or necessary structure-contextcongruence and develop prescriptions about how managers can take effectiveactions that enhance the performance of their organizations. Initially,administrative-based theories were considered alongside the social structuraltradition in sociology. For instance, the inaugural 1956 issue of theAdministrative Science Quarterly included articles by the administrative theoristJames D. Thompson as well as by the grand structural functionalist sociologistTalcott Parsons. The American Sociological Review in those same years


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published works more distinctly in the social structural tradition. Over the next10–15 years, however, research in organization theory tended to focus oninternal organization structure and process and the relationship betweenorganizations and their resource environments, to the relative neglect of studyinghow organizations are related to broader social structures (Stern & Barley,1996). One of the main factors driving this shift in research sensibilities towards resources and away from social structure had to do with the efforts of organizational scholars to professionalize around issues of management and organizational effectiveness. This professionalization mainly occurredthrough the Academy of Management, the leading professional association formanagement researchers

The Academy of Management was founded in 1936, but operated veryinformally up until the 1970s (Wrege, 1988). The first issue of the Academy ofManagement Journal was published in 1957, and during the 1960s, the Academygrew in membership as management schools began to focus on research andas the number of management faculty overall increased. As a result, theAcademy of Management changed from an organization built on close personalfriendships to one that was more formalized, differentiated, and professionallyrun (Wrege, 1988, p. 28). In 1969, seven professional interest subgroups werecreated: Corporate Strategy, Management History, Operations Analysis,Organizational Studies, Personal and Industrial Relations, Philosophy, Valuesand Styles, and Social and Public Issues. In 1971, ten professional divisionswere put in place including the Division of Organizational Behavior and theDivision of Organization and Management Theory.

The creation of the Organizational and Management Theory Division markedthe formation of a formal subfield for organizational theorists with all the self-conscious professional apparatus involved in managing and maintaining ajurisdictional boundary – professional prizes, organizations, informal collegesetc. This boundary-making, however, reduced the cross-border trade withsubfields in sociology that focused on stratification and culture (with a fewnotable exceptions among researchers whose work directly engaged both organization theory and other sociological subfields (e.g. Aldrich, Bacharach,DiMaggio, Kanter, Hirsch, Peterson, Zald). The formalization of the Academyand changes in the research aspirations of leading management schools (as wellas other professional schools, many of which began to hire social science disciplinary-trained faculty beginning in the 1970s) changed the terms and stakesof research on organizations. In addition, the presence of Academy-affiliatedinfrastructures supporting research laid the groundwork for the growth ofmanagerially-oriented organizational researchers whose work emphasizedinstrumental notions of organization and social exchange processes.


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The growing prominence of administrative theories in the study of organizationsnot only gave rise to more managerially-based theories and concepts about organi-zations, but also redirected research agendas and publishing among sociologistsstudying organizations in this more synthetic way. For example, William Evan (1963) developed organizational set analysis (from Merton’s role theory, viaBlau & Scott, 1962) that was employed to study resource flows in industries (e.g. Hirsch, 1972). In a different vein, Peter Blau aimed to develop propositionaltheories about formal organizational structure and administrative capacity (Blau & Scott, 1962; Blau & Schoenherr, 1971). Stinchcombe, even with a continuedfocus on broader relationships between organizations and society, publishedCreating Efficient Industrial Administrations (1974). The shift in sensibilities wasaway from asking research questions about organizations and society and towardsfocusing more concretely on processes of organizational management and howresource connections shape organizational systems (Perrow, 1986).

Nonetheless, many sociologists continued to work on problems having to dowith social structure and organizations. Coleman (1974), for instance, putforward provocative arguments about the institutional and legal foundations ofmodern corporate actors and their role in the “asymmetric” power balance inmodern society. The “organizational society” thesis, that maintains that modernsocieties are actually organizational societies, also emerged (see Perrow, 1991,2002). Dornbusch and Scott (1975) examined the legitimacy of authority incareful social psychological terms and linked broader societal conditions to thedeterminants of effective and legitimate exercise of power. Building onAldrich’s (1976, 1979) emerging evolutionary perspective, Benson (1977)promoted a dialectical view of organizational processes that derided the growingprominence of rational-functional theories of organizations. While this workkept alive the aspirations of midcentury organizational sociologies, new socio-logical research on organizations took a different form.

Building on the foundations of rational-functional approaches to organizationscience, new social structural approaches increasingly penetrated “mainstream”organizational research in the administrative traditions. From the late 1970s, anovel set of research initiatives in organizational sociology became codified andpackaged into standard research strategies that produced research in the idiomof normal science (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002). These included extensions in theinstitutional analysis of organizations (e.g. Meyer & Scott, 1983; Scott & Meyer,1994; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001), organizational demography (e.g.Hannan & Freeman, 1977; Carroll & Hannan, 2000), and network methods andtheory (e.g. Baker, 1984; Burt, 1992; Podolny, 1993; Nohria & Eccles, 1992;White, 2001). Hence, while social structural approaches to organizations havebeen present in some form all along, the more recent lines of work have


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de-emphasized a focus on conflict, situated case analysis, and broader socialstructural considerations that provided key intellectual commitments forStinchcombe and his contemporaries.

Specifically, we claim that as organizational theory emerged as a manage-ment subfield, the conceptualizations of both social structure and organizationsbecame increasingly materialist and instrumental, animated by the growingallure of social exchange and resource dependence logics (e.g. Emerson, 1962;Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). In these treatments, social structure finds expressiononly in a conception of the “environment” that is abstract, unitary and exogenous to the actual workings of organizations and social life (see Scott,2001). The instrumental approach de-emphasized the insights of politicaleconomy approaches to organizations (Perrow, 2002; Stern, 1979; Zald, 1970)that underscored complex organizational arrangements in heterogeneous relation to varied constituencies; in addition, prominence was given to the notionof “uncertainty” in preference to the recognition of fundamental ambiguity andloose-coupling that animated works in the behavioral and cognitive traditions(Brown, 1976; March & Olsen, 1976; Meyer & Rowan, 1978; Weick, 1995).These shifts reinforced a conception of organizations as goal-driven unitaryentities that are interlocked in concrete exchange relations. Absent is the insightthat wider environments provide constitutional materials for organizations – particular elements and also ideologies and rationales that are contingent,time-dependent, and potentially in conflict one with another. Further, researchbegan to focus on resources as the main driver of structure and activity, withoutsufficient attention to how social structure mediates the effects of resources andindeed the very notion of what comprises a resource.

The instrumentalist imagery is quite explicit in organizational demographywhere empirical analyses have tended to focus on how competitive interactionsamong producer organizations are modulated by shifts in population-levelresource spaces (Hannan & Freeman, 1989). In many variants of networkanalysis, the life chances of organizations are determined by their network position among resource flows (e.g. Burt, 1992; Mizruchi & Schwartz, 1987).Even organizational institutionalists have focused a great deal of energy onprocesses of diffusion where organizations tend to become more homogeneousin appearance as a result of isomorphic processes (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;Strang & Soule, 1998). Much of this institutional work in the 1980s and early1990s conceptualized organizations as passive, legitimacy seekers and environments as powerful, obdurate structures (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). Notethat whether organizations are assumed to be legitimacy-seekers or motivatedby efficiency or resource dependence logics, all are functional imperatives thatinvolve depicting organizations as instrumental actors.


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These sociological perspectives on organizations not only conceptualizedsocial structure and organizations in instrumental terms, but also neglected andleft behind the study of work and occupations (Lounsbury & Kaghan, 2001),and eschewed questions related to social stratification and social change. Bytruncating the sociological imagination in available conceptions of social structure and of organization for more tractable and conventional conceptions,organizational theorists aimed to further their subfield project by developingformal, abstract general theories about organizations that embraced “cleanmodels” over “dirty hands” (Hirsch, Friedman & Michaels, 1990). These effortshad the effect of sidelining concerns with history, context, and more situated,relational approaches to social analysis – a central methodological commitmentfor Stinchcombe (see his 1997 essay on the virtues of early 20th century institutional economics) and to contemporary students of organizations such as(e.g. Abbott, Barley, Breiger, Clemens, DiMaggio, Espeland, Granovetter,Heimer, Hirsch, Padgett, Powell, Stark, Stryker and many of this volume’scontributors).

However, the more instrumentalist and exchange-based accounts today appearto be rejoining a dialogue that is animated by contemporary social theoreticconsiderations and a concern with broader societal issues. This work comesboth from the margins of dominant research strategies and arguments, but alsofrom their cores. For example, organizational demographers have recentlyexpanded their analytical lens to incorporate elements of culture through thestudy of identity (e.g. Carroll & Hannan, 2000; Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000)and how societal transformations enable new organizational forms to emerge(e.g. Haveman & Rao, 1997; Ventresca & Lacey, 2001). Others have extendedecological insights to analyze the dynamics of labor markets across firms with the intent of explicitly connecting organizational theory to the study of stratification (e.g. Haveman & Cohen, 1994). From a slightly differentperspective, Baum and Oliver (1992) have shown how connections between non-profit day care centers and state governmental agencies shape day caresurvival outcomes. And studies of entrepreneurship in broader social structuralcontext are renascent (Aldrich, 1999; Schoonhoven & Romanelli, 2001;Thornton, 1999).

While the network analytic tradition has always had a strong connection tothe study of stratification and labor markets (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Granovetter,1974; White, 1970), this richer tradition has only recently begun to influencethe study of organizations through concepts such as embeddedness and socialcapital (e.g. Adler & Kwon, 2002; Dacin, Ventresca & Beal, 1999; Gabbay &Leenders, 1999; Granovetter, 1985; Zukin & DiMaggio, 1990; Uzzi, 1996).Even though some of this research remains sympathetic to more instrumental


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notions of organization (e.g. Burt, 1992; Lin, Cook & Burt, 2001), there is greatpotential for this line of work to generate increased attention towards problemsof how organizations are interpenetrated with broader societal concerns (e.g.Breiger, this volume; DiMaggio, 1986; Nelson, 2001; Padgett & Ansell, 1993).For example, Padgett and Ansell advance a multi-network conception of socialstructure and contingent social action, to underscore how the distinctive patternsof 15th century Florentine social, commercial and political life enabled a styleof governance. Powell and colleagues (e.g. Powell, Koput & Smith-Doerr, 1996;Powell & Owen-Smith, 1998) depict the evolution of university-industry rela-tions around the emerging field of biotechnology in analogous terms: a focuson multiplex ties that comprise less obdurate, but still consequential, socialstructures that shape organizational forms and careers.

Given the intellectual connections and affinities between the “new” and “old”institutionalisms (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997), it is no surprise that institutionalscholars have more directly tried to build on and extend research mandates laidout by Stinchcombe and others. One important strand of institutional analysisdeveloped research strategies grounded in diffusion processes, but othersengaged the broader comparative-historical tradition to examine state-societyrelations and their effects on organizations (Djelic, 1998; Schneiberg &Clemens, forthcoming; Schofer & Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001). For instance,Dobbin’s (1994) study of the development trajectories of railroads in the U.S.,Britain and France linked differences in the governance, funding, and overallindustry strategies among these three cases to characteristic and chronic politydifferences and their expression in policy styles. Moving up a level of analysis,Meyer and colleagues (e.g. Meyer, Boli & Thomas, 1987; Frank, Hironaka & Shofer, 2000; Strang, 1990; Ventresca, 1995) have focused a good deal ofattention on how cognitive models and beliefs emerge at the world system asa result of actions by transnational NGOs, international political arenas such as the United Nations, and other policy experts who are authoritativelycredentialed. Moving to lower levels of analysis, many contemporary institu-tional scholars have also begun to focus on problems of institutionaltransformation and practice variation in an effort to redress the earlier analyticalfocus on organizational homogeneity (e.g. Lounsbury, 2001; Ruef & Scott,1998; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999).

In addition to these shifts toward a richer conceptualizations of social structureand organizational process, there have been important discipline-wide method-ological advances in the analysis of social structure that may help to expandorganizational sociology while also reuniting it with other sociological subfieldssuch as those that focus on politics and culture. Of course, at mid-century, therewere few subfield boundaries that segregated the analysis of organizations from


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politics, culture, social movements and stratification. Today, at the intersectionof the sociology of culture and institutional analysis, new structuralist methodssuch as Galois and tripartite lattice analysis have been developed to measuremeaning systems (e.g. Breiger, this volume; Mische & Pattison, 2000; Mohr,1998, 2000). Those methods take inspiration from network analysis, but havebeen used to study the evolution of practices in a way that takes seriously thedual relationship of structure and action (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 2000). Whilethe emergence of these new analytical approaches have fostered “a newstructuralist project in cultural analysis” (Mohr, 2000, p. 57), these methodsmay also help to fuel a new structuralism in organizational theory by providinga way to represent the complex interrelationships among the multi-dimensionalcultural and resource spaces (i.e. fields) in which organizations and practicestake shape and change. Ragin’s (2000) fuzzy set analytical approach can alsobe extended to important problems having to do with categorization andboundary dynamics (e.g. Bowker & Star, 1999; DiMaggio, 1997; Lamont &Molnár, forthcoming).

Further, methodological and conceptual developments in the analysis of timevia event history analysis and sequence analysis also promise important reorientations in modeling and analysis that move us beyond the limitations ofassuming a general linear reality (Abbott, 2001). While event history analysishas been a staple in institutional and ecological approaches to organizationssince the early to mid-1980s, sequence analysis has been absent from the toolkitof organizational researchers. Also, on the horizon are important new break-throughs in the development of more dynamic forms of network analysis aswell as agent-based and related evolutionary modeling techniques (see researchemerging from Santa Fe Institute workgroups) that will no doubt help to expandour ability to theorize about mechanisms of institutional change in a much moregrounded, yet non-reductive way. In general, organizational theory has muchto gain by reaching out to these disciplinary-wide developments that can beused to generate new insights about organizational process in a way that givesprimacy of structure, but can appreciate its complexity and multidimensionalitywhile also attending to the role of actors in generating shifts in structural composition.

Hence, as we scan empirical and methodological developments across organizational theory and the wider discipline, we are encouraged by thegrowing sensibilities towards richer sociological analyses of organizationalphenomena that take society and societal level dynamics more seriously. Thesedevelopments give credence to and support our interest in further expandingthe scope of organizational theory to embrace richer notions of social structureand organizations. We believe that the most exciting work going forward will


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be less paradigmatic and, in a sense, will involve blending across previouslyclosed perspectives in organizational theory such as organizational demography,network analysis and institutionalism, while also reconnecting the study of organizations to the core of the discipline and increasing traffic among varioussubfields. To wit, we call for organizational theorists to engage more fully withcontemporary social theoretic and methodological developments and to use ourwell-developed organizational lens to explore big questions about social changethat speak to broader audiences in sociology, across the social sciences, and inpolicy circles (Fligstein, 2001). The chapters in this volume, to which we nowturn, move us further in this direction by reporting on careful empirical studiesthat engage and extend theory on social structure and organization in impor-tant new ways.

REVISITING STINCHCOMBE 1965: THE CHAPTERS THAT FOLLOW

Our commitment is this volume is to encourage re-engagement with the classicconcerns of Stinchcombe and mid-century organizational sociology, but to doso in the idiom of contemporary social and cultural theory. This stance is conge-nial with other recent statements of new directions and available researchopportunities in organization theory (e.g. Aldrich, 1999; Schneiberg & Clemens,forthcoming; Scott, 2001) but motivated by a distinct concern: the relationshipbetween social structure and organization. Stinchcombe’s “environing socialstructure” has been supplanted by the rise of overly instrumentalist and at-timesdetermining conceptions of social structure and by overly instrumentalist andpurposeful conceptions of organizations. We offer the arguments and empiricalchapters in this volume to redress this situation. We have assembled researchreports that engage, celebrate, critique, and redirect Stinchcombe’s 1965 essayin the service of crafting three broadly defined research streams.

First, we offer empirical papers on politics and organizations that areconcerned with the institutional struggles that occur in the midst of making neworganizational forms, as well as with the conflicts that penetrate organizationallife from the outside. Second, a section on embeddedness and entrepreneurshipbreathes fresh life into the analysis of new organizational forms and their envi-roning social structure by linking context and stratification processes to thesimple “newness” issues. Finally, in a section on culture and organizations, weexplore how organizational fields support ideas like religious doxa and howorthodoxies of belief configure interorganizational relations. In addition, weconclude each section with thematic commentaries by Robin Stryker, Ronald


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Breiger and Elisabeth Clemens, respectively, that further highlight researchquestions and directions that are promising. Finally, Arthur Stinchcombeprovides a closing essay on his own reflections and ideas about future researchin a postscript to the volume.

While all empirical contributions to the volume find inspiration in the socialstructural approach that Stinchcombe’s work exemplifies, the chapters differ intheir conceptualization of social structure and approach to institutional analysis.Some chapters are more sympathetic to the “old” institutional sensibility ineconomics à la Veblen and Commons (Van deVen, 1993; Stinchcombe, 1997;Yonay, 1998) and sociology à la Merton and Selznick (DiMaggio & Powell,1991) that animates Stinchcombe’s approach to social analysis. Other contrib-utors are more clearly influenced by contemporary trends in social andorganization theory that include a focus on cultural analysis, discourse, meaningsystems, and the interplay of resources and meanings (Bourdieu, 1984;DiMaggio, 1997; Mohr, 1998; Sewell, 1992). We see this more culturally-oriented work as an extension of the social structural tradition in a contemporaryidiom of culture post-Parsons, rather than as a fundamental break with a longertradition of studies of society, politics, and change. Many of the chaptersspecifically focus on the interplay of culture, politics, and organization.

Politics and Organizations

A central theme in institutional analysis has to do with how organizations areimportant actors that shape and are shaped by broader political processes(Gouldner, 1954; Perrow, 1991; Selznick, 1949). Stinchcombe discussed organizations as providing important tools for societal stratification in the eraof Gesellschaft. That is, “the system of stratification among organizations, ratherthan the class system of individuals and families” (1965, p. 144) provides the foundation for elites to engage in political competition. Building on this imagery,he then developed an argument about the relationship between organizationalstratification and the sociology of revolution (pp. 169–180). This passage opensup a variety of questions about how competition among organizations and organizational forms is embedded in political struggle, how the creation of newkinds of organizations requires modifications to extant institutions or thebuilding of new institutions that support those new forms, and how changes toan organizational stratification system or the emergence of new organizationalforms is fostered by political crises.

The empirical papers in this section restore attention to the institutionally-and politically-contested nature of social structures, both patterns of resourcesand systems of meanings that configure economic and social worlds and the


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sources of change in them. Marc Schneiberg’s (this volume) chapter on mutualfire insurers, for example, highlights how new organizational forms are forgedwithin the crucible of broader societal conflicts over economic development.Linking old and new institutional arguments, Schneiberg shows that mutualssimultaneously embodied particular “problem-solving” strategies and a theoryof economic order – a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” of farmers,merchants and independent producers that directly challenged corporate liberalvisions of combinations, trusts and economic centralization. Struggles amongthese competing visions within fire insurance took place on varied terrain,hastened under conditions of crisis occasioned by fires that ravaged citiesthroughout the nineteenth century. But in the end, the viability of mutual formsrested on a socio-industrial order characterized by a specific balance of politicalpower, anti-corporate social movements, a supportive ecology of churches andlocal organizations, and the availability of mutual templates.

Andrew Spicer (this volume) builds on Stinchcombe’s notion of the“revolutionary situation” to explore the rise and fall of mutual funds associatedwith mass privatization in Russia. Moving beyond standard ecological analysesof organizational form growth and decline, Spicer highlights how organizationalforms that are made possible by revolutionary situations are inextricably bound up in, even imprinted by, broader political struggles to resolve societalconditions of ambiguity and instability. Spicer tells a persuasive story abouthow the absence of institutional structures inhibits new forms and hence, howthe legitimacy and survival of organizational forms may require proponents tobe actively engaged in state-building projects that ultimately provide groundrules for organizations in a society. He argues that mutual funds in Russia inthe early 1990s lost out at the organizational level because they were inept at the institutional level.

Maureen Scully and Amy Segal (this volume) focus attention on intraorga-nizational social-movement activity in a way that harkens back to mid-centurysociologies of organizations by conceptualizing organizations as contested siteswhere broader societal conflicts play out. They integrate organizational andsocial movement perspectives in their investigation of how activist employeesin a particular firm mobilize identity claims (in this case, race and gender) and resources to challenge organizational elites in an effort to reconstruct theirorganizational context in a way that would be more hospitable to their identityconcerns. Building on Zald and Berger (1978), an underappreciated call for research on social movements in organizations, Scully and Segal argue forattention to employee activism as an activity that can enhance our understandingof how social movements penetrate organizational life and facilitate organiza-tional and personal change in important and consequential ways.


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These three chapters importantly push organizational theory towards questionsabout collective action that become manifest in the rise and fall of organizationalforms as well as the construction of workplace environments. As such, thiswork connects to a growing interest in combining the study of collective actionwith organizational analysis (e.g. Balser, 1997; Clemens, 1997; Creed & Scully,2000; Davis & McAdam, 2000; Fligstein, 1996; Lounsbury, 2001; Rao, 1998;Rao, Morrill & Zald, 2000). In the spirit of revisiting Stinchcombe, we believethat there are exciting opportunities for organizational researchers to empiricallystudy how organizations are bound up in the politics of stratification, enablingfurther theorization about the conditions and mechanisms that give rise to new kinds of actors and practices, remake the beliefs and material resourcedistributions that underpin societal stratification, and facilitate organizationaland societal changes. The empirical chapters in this section further highlightthat we need to be attentive to how these dynamics play themselves out at manylevels of analysis. A focus on the rise and decline of organizational formsprovides insights into macro level politics, but, according to Scully and Segal,we also need to pay much more attention to how social movement processestake place in the everyday workings of organizations.

The Embeddedness of Entrepreneurship

A second broad theme in the study of social structure and organization is how social structure affects the founding of new organizations. On this generaltopic, Stinchcombe (1965, pp. 145–169) proposes an historical perspective on organizational creation that emphasizes the conditions under which certainorganizational forms are created and how those forms are influenced by socialstructures that exist at the time of organizational founding. Despite the wide-ranging discussion of these issues that focuses attention on how entrepreneurshipis embedded in broader societal institutions such as regulatory structures, strat-ification systems, labor markets and the like, organizational theorists have tendedto selectively draw on his idea that entrepreneurial firms and organizations tendto suffer from the liability of newness (pp. 148–150) without fully appreciatinghow that theoretical claim was conditional upon broader social structures.

For instance, Stinchcombe focuses on the capacity for new organizations todevelop new roles and routines that vary based on the distribution of general-ized skills outside an organization, the initiative of employees in the labor force,the degree of trust among workers based on competence in work roles, and thecompetitive relations among producers and consumers. All of these elements,in turn, are to some extent rooted in broader institutions that shape variationamong these factors. Over the past couple of decades, however, organizational


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ecologists have cast doubt on Stinchcombe’s liability of newness propositionby rigorously studying the effects of organizational age and size as populationsevolve. Many of these studies have shown that after controlling for size, theliability of newness effect dissipates and is replaced by liabilities of old age(see Carroll & Hannan, 2000; also Ruef, this volume). Many of these studies,however, are relatively inattentive to the social structural conditions that delimitentrepreneurial efforts, or render aged organizations unfit.

The papers we offer in the section on The Embeddedness of Entrepreneurshipextend a broader social structural sensibility to the study of organizationalcreation. Ruef (this volume), for instance, draws on earlier Stinchcombianinsights to study how entrepreneurship is influenced by factors having to dowith status, the processes by which resources are mobilized and legitimacyattained, and organizational imprinting. Ruef argues that by attending to thesebroader forces and processes in which entrepreneurs are embedded, we maydevelop insights into the conditions under which certain kinds of organizationsmay experience the liability of newness vis-à-vis other liabilities associated withorganizational age. As such, Ruef contributes to the development of a richerinstitutional ecology (e.g. Baum & Powell, 1995; Haveman & Rao, 1997) thatis attentive to the constitutive aspects of society.

Burton, Sørenson and Beckman (this volume) track the organizational originsof the founders of new ventures to investigate how industry stratification caninform the ecological analysis of start-up organizations. They draw on a sampleof Silicon Valley start-ups to highlight how founders who come from prominentfirms are more likely to be innovative and attract external financing. This paperis novel because it provides insights into how organizational dynamics are fueledby the flow of particular people. This is part of a growing line of work thatconnects the tradition of organizational demography to studies of labor marketsand strategic human resources (Baron, Hannan & Burton, 2001; Hannan, Burton& Baron, 1996; Haveman & Cohen, 1994; Phillips, 2001). This direction of research is particularly promising and has usefully contributed to ourunderstanding of how intraorganizational processes relate to broader macroorganizational dynamics.

Finally, Sacks (this volume) offers a perspective on entrepreneurship thatfocuses on more classical sociological concerns having to do with stratification.Based on extensive fieldwork and research on the venture capital industry, Sacks echoes Ruef’s findings by deconstructing the notion of the liability ofnewness – how the social status of a founder (e.g. as proxied by race andgender) differentially affects the experience of newness, in this case access toventure capital. In particular, he illustrates how venture capitalists, operatingunder conditions of extreme uncertainty and ambiguity rely on cues associated


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with social, financial and reputational capital to make judgments about financingprospective ventures.

The papers in this section extend our understanding of organizational creationand entrepreneurship by specifying how societal forces embed and shape thoseprocesses. These papers, therefore, not only provide fresh insights but new directions that help forge a deeper synthesis between the sociological study oforganizations, societal stratification, and institutions (Stinchcombe, 1986).Pioneering work in the study of stratification and organizations (e.g. Baron &Bielby, 1980) identified the research potential here. In recent years, studies of market transitions and organizational mechanisms of stratification in post-socialist societies further highlighted the institutionally-contingent featuresof stratification (Guthrie, 1999; Keister, 2000; Li & Walder, 2001; Nee, 1996).We believe, and as these papers differentially highlight, that a focus on theintersection of labor market processes and organizations that accounts for the role of professionalization processes, occupational expertise and personnelflows is particularly promising. This line of work will also help to further reunitethe study of organizations with that of work and occupations and other importantethnographic traditions linked to subfields such as science and technologystudies (e.g. Barley & Kunda, 2001; Hargadon & Douglas, 2001; Lounsbury& Kaghan, 2001; Owen-Smith, 2001) as well as culturally-oriented approachesto stratification (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 1995; Tilly, 1998).

Culture and Organizations

For mid-century sociologists, norms and values provided key components forexplanations of social structural stability and change (see DiMaggio & Powell,1991). Stinchcombe, for instance, discussed norms as an element that helps tomaintain institutional stability and the reproduction of stratification systemsthrough socialization. Conversely, it is uncertainty about societal norms or weakcommitment to institutional norms that provides the condition for social trans-formation and revolution. Values and beliefs, however, did not provide a focalpoint for analysis (but see Stinchcombe, 1968, pp. 107–118). Instead, they wereoften conceptualized as a glue that holds together other, more material, socialstructural elements. As institutional analysis has developed over the past threedecades, however, attention to broader belief systems has come to center stage(e.g. Clemens, 1997; Dobbin, 1994; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001).

New institutionalists in organizational sociology, for instance, make claimsabout how social structures of resources and meanings, anchored in particularcultural rules and patterns of relationships affect organization and field-levelstructures and behavior. They use a definition of institutions as “cultural rules”


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(Meyer, Boli & Thomas, 1987) that identify categories of social actors and theirappropriate activities or relationships (Barley & Tolbert, 1997). This perspectivepoints to a conception of institutions as generative of interests, identities and appropriate practice models that take shape at the interface of widersociocultural contexts and particular social systems (Meyer & Rowan, 1977;DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Dobbin, 1994; Scott & Meyer, 1994).

The chapters in the Culture and Organizations section of the volume extendthe institutionalism of Stinchcombe and other mid-century organizational sociologists by highlighting how processes of organizational creation andbuilding are importantly informed by and contribute to broader scale culturaldynamics. Focusing on the rise of a radical group of scientists in the 1960s,Science for the People, Moore and Hala (this volume) shed light on the symbolicprocesses by which organizational actors are constituted. They highlight how agroup of “radical” scientists who dissented from the mainstream scientificcommunity constructed a social movement organization with precariousboundaries that spanned the fields of professional science and the New Left.Sympathetic to the constructivist strands of mid-century social structuralanalysis, updated with contemporary social-theoretic insights, Moore and Hala provide a content-full social structural analysis that is attentive to themicro-relational processes that comprise organizations.

Stevens (this volume) reports on how ideas and broader field social structuressupport the vitality of U.S. conservative Protestant organizations. ExtendingStinchcombe’s (1965) discussion of the organizational production of solidarity,he argues that the robustness of conservative Protestantism has to do with thesuccessful embedding of the faithful in dense and nested organizational relationsand the ability of that movement to spawn new organizations that reinforce thefaith through practices and routine everyday interactions. Contributing to bothorganizational theory and the sociology of religion, Stevens provocativelyexpands the purview of organizational analysis and provides a grounded,relational perspective on how ideas are organizationally sustained.

Investigating the emergence of gay and lesbian identity organizations in theSan Francisco area, Elizabeth Armstrong (this volume) highlights the processesby which societal transformation related to the rise of the New Left fosteredan “identity logic of political organizing,” which in turn enabled new kinds oflesbian/gay organizations to emerge. Like Schneiberg and Stevens, she sees thecultural templates available to actors as limiting the ways they can organize.Before the emergence of the New Left, homosexual activists lacked a modelof organizing that could successfully produce widespread organizational growth.The New Left, by providing a context of collective creativity, made possiblethe creation of a new organizational model. She theorizes that contexts of


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collective creativity, characterized by the intersection of multiple cultural strains, dense interaction, and uncertainty, may play a role in accounting forthe emergence of innovative organizational forms.

These papers in the section on culture and organizations are at the cuttingedge of research that draws on currents in social theory and cultural sociologyto expand the social structural tradition by emphasizing the importance ofsymbolic boundary processes and commensuration (Espeland & Stevens, 1997;Lamont & Molnár, forthcoming). This work extends analyses of politicalprocesses and embeddedness by highlighting how broader belief systemsconstrain and enable the actions that are possible (Bourdieu, 1984). All threechapters in this section highlight how broader symbolic ideas constitute actorsand their identities, but also shed light on how collective action and other formsof micromobilization can help to reshape symbolic meaning structures (Fligstein,2001). While our knowledge of the dynamics of symbolic structures is stillquite limited, these chapters provide solid leads on the kinds of mechanismsthat can inform a broader theory of institutional emergence and change(Clemens, this volume). More pointedly, no theory of institutional change canclaim to be complete without attending to the broader cultural ideas that providethe symbolic gridwork that consequentially define and shape social organization.

VOLUME POSTSCRIPT AND FURTHER RESEARCH

In a postscript, Stinchcombe (this volume) reflects on developments in organizational theory over the past four decades and offers some of his ownsuggestions for future research. This essay emphasizes familiar themes – situated analysis, the specificity of cases and grounded mechanisms, but alsocharts out terrain that is particular to recent cultural and social analysis.Stinchcombe argues for primary attention to a sociology of commensuration,the politically-inflected activity that establishes comparable metrics amongdisparate elements of social life and hence renders these tractable to authorityand power (Espeland & Stevens, 1998). He focuses on “evangelism,” or theproselytizing work done by existing organizations (including social networks)to sponsor and replicate themselves. He proposes this process as an alternativeto conventional mechanisms of institutional change that neglect the activitiesof existing organizations. Finally, he refreshes a network theory of legitimacyand truth-telling with a statement of the socially-generated and situated natureof “truth” in a community of practice. In short, Stinchcombe revisitsStinchcombe 1965 in the spirit of contemporary studies of culture, politics, andorganizations. Epistemologically, he continues to push us towards the study of


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mechanisms that connect variation in social structure to variation in organiza-tions, practices and other entities and flows at a lower level of analysis.

To reprise our main argument, we believe that a common intellectual commit-ment that runs throughout many of the empirical chapters in this volume andis emphasized in the postscript has to do with a resounding rejection of overlyreductive, materialist and instrumentalist notions of organization and socialstructure. Instead of conceptualizing organizational behavior as primarily influenced by exchange relationships, the essays here advocate a more culturally- and politically-rich focus on how broader elements of stratificationand societal beliefs embodied in category schemes such as logics, models, andframes constitute social actors and change as a result of multi-level politicalprocesses that involve not only producer organizations but also state agencies,trade associations, social movement organizations and other field-level organi-zations. Hence, we agree with Stinchcombe (this volume) that culturalapproaches to social structure can usefully extend the mid-century structuraltradition and foster the development of novel theoretical insights by focusingour attention on important new problems and questions. The politics of commen-suration (Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 2000; Espeland & Stevens, 1997; Heimer,2001) and associated processes of boundary making, maintenance and erosion(Lamont & Molnár, forthcoming) provide important avenues for future research,but in no way exhaust the variety of ways that a focus on cultural processescan reorient and renew a broader social structural approach to organizations.Empirical chapters in this volume highlight multiple directions that include thestudy of organizational forms, societal logics, social movements, flows of ideasand people, and more generally, the dynamics of social organization.

We do not advocate for the replacement of a one-sided view of organiza-tions as mainly influenced by instrumental exchange processes with anotherone-sided view of organizations as culturally constituted. We view symbolicand material realms as mutually constituted (Bourdieu, 1984; Sewell, 1992).Nonetheless, given the historical marginalization of cultural perspectives inorganizational theory, it may be useful to valorize that dimension of analysisgiven the current imbalance in the literature. For instance, we know very littleabout how collective forms of rationality emerge, erode and become transformed(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). While institutionalists in the 1980s tended to distin-guish between the ideas of technical efficiency and institutional forces, moreattention needs to be directed towards the social construction of performanceand how the ability to judge performance or efficiency depends upon the kindof institutional infrastructure that is built (Fligstein, 1990; Powell, 1991; Strang& Macy, 2001). Further, we know little about how social and organizationalchange is influenced and shaped by multiple forms of rationality (Friedland &


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Alford, 1991; Stryker, 2000; Weber, 1978), how actors manipulate symbolsystems to gain or reproduce social status (Bowker & Star, 1999; Breiger, 1995;Hirsch, 1986; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Tilly, 1998), and how organizationscome to define their interests in the first place (Clemens, this volume). Thesekinds of problematics can help to restore broader societal sensibilities to thestudy of organizations and renew the social structural tradition in light ofcontemporary developments in social theory.

More concretely, we believe that organizational sociology can make headwayin these directions by focusing on the study of variation. While the new institutionalism in organizational analysis became prominent through the studyof isomorphism and the winnowing of variation (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991),much could be gained by systematically investigating how variation is created(Stinchcombe, 1997). This means that instead of looking for broad patternsacross many cases, we must dig deeper into our empirical research sites bydisaggregating populations into types and identifying dimensions of variation(Ragin, 2000). A focus on variation leads us away from aspirations of grandtheory (Parsons, 1949; Kiser & Hechter, 1998) and towards a more middlerange focus on mechanisms and boundary conditions (Granovetter, 1985;Hedström & Swedberg, 1998; Merton, 1957; Somers, 1998; Stinchcombe,1983).

Already fruitful empirical avenues include the study of how variation in prac-tices becomes instantiated (DiMaggio & Mullen, 2000; Lounsbury, 2001;Schneiberg & Bartley, 2001), how the actual practices of organizations deviatefrom their symbolic claims (Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000; Meyer & Rowan,1977), how organizational forms and practices shift or get transformed overtime (Leblebici et al., 1991; Scott et al., 2000; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999), hownew kinds of organizational forms emerge (Haveman & Rao, 1997; Rao, 1998;Ruef, 2000), and how comparable kinds of practices diffuse differently (Davis& Greve, 1997; Strang & Soule, 1998). Per the arguments of this chapter andthe articles in this volume that contribute to these research directions, futureresearch must continue to focus on the interplay of action and structure, but inways that take both the political and cultural components of structure seriously(Brieger, this volume; Mohr, 2000; Stryker, this volume) while also attendingto the role of invention, innovation and the origins of change (Clemens, thisvolume; Moore & Hala, this volume). While it is unlikely that simple rationalchoice approaches to organizational action will contribute to our further under-standing of these kinds of questions, more direct attention to the role of actorsis needed. For instance, it would be particularly fruitful to continue developinglinkages between structural approaches to organizations and Carnegie schoolinsights that emphasize how choice is shaped by time-inflected flows of people,


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solutions, problems and decision situations that occur in more or less ambiguousenvironments (Heimer, 1985; Heimer & Stinchcombe, 1999; March & Olsen,1976; Ocasio, 1997; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). These theoretical efforts shouldbe facilitated by methodological advances such as those involving the modelingof structure (Breiger, 2000, this volume).

Stinchcombe 1965 charted out terrain in organizational analysis of sociologicalconcern. Among other tasks, his essay was an exercise in “specifying ignorance,”that is, in identifying research opportunities neglected or ignored because there waslittle intellectual infrastructure to guide the questions or because empirical sourceswere uncongenial. In short, being the good pragmatist that he is, he worked withthe resources and tools at hand to chart a set of questions that gave voice to theinstitutionalisms of early 20th century U.S. social science (Stinchcombe, 1997;Scott, 2001: chapter 1). The papers in this volume make headway in this project –creating new analytic and methodological language, exploring novel data sources,and speculating about new directions in the sociological study of organizations.The social structural tradition of organizational analysis has proven to be a robust,progressive tradition and is alive and well.

NOTES

1. While obviously leaving a lot of major works out of that abbreviated list, this isneither the place nor the purpose for a full celebration of Stinchcombe’s body of research.Instead, we concentrate our attention on and revisit the well-cited 1965 paper, “Socialstructure and organizations” in an effort to uncover and highlight aspects of the socialstructural tradition that could usefully extend and invigorate contemporary sociologicalapproaches to the study of organizations.

2. We used SSCI to identify all citations of this paper between 1964 and 2000, usingboth computerized indexes and a handcheck to capture citations to the paper using variantversions of the title and author name.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jenny Omundson provided expert research assistance in the citation analysistracking Stinchcombe (1965). We would like to thank Howard Aldrich, LisClemens, Paul Hirsch, Chick Perrow, Dick Scott, Art Stinchcombe, Mayer Zald,participants at the Social Organization Seminar (SOS) at the University of Arizona, participants at the Workshop on Organizations, Institutions, andChange (WOIC) at Northwestern University, as well as all volume contributorsfor all their comments, suggestions, enthusiastic support, and encouragement.We would like to especially thank Elizabeth Armstrong for her very detailed


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editorial comments and Marc Schneiberg for gently nudging us to be moreconcrete about the theoretical claims and directions that comprise our agenda.

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1. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS REVISITED...Social Structure and Organizations Revisited, Volume 19, pages 3–36. ... yet congenial set of sociological approaches to organizational