From cupright@Princeton.EDU Sun Jul 29 18:08:05 2001 Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 18:33:20 -0400 (EDT) From: Craig B Upright To: cupright@Princeton.EDU Subject: org notes More particularly, as Sinchcobe (1964) has argued, organizations foiunded at a particular point in time tend to share certain characteristics with other organizations established at the same time. The characteristcs also tend to be quite stable over time. It is as if organizations in the same cohort are imprinted in some fashion by administarative images, techonological imperatives, and evnironmental constraints prevalent at the time of the founding. it becomes especially importint, then to assess factors present at the time at which social movements give rise to new tipes of formal organizations. p. 119 W.Richard Scott, 1983, "Reform Movements and Organizations: The Case Of Aging." Chpater 5, pp. 115-128 in _Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality_, edited by John W. Meyer and W. Richard Scott. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. A second problem confronting all attempts to identify "similar" products or services is that of substitutability. It is often the case that produts and servies that are grealy dissimilar in form or compostition may be addressed to the same need or function. Along the continuum of form versus function, we stress the criterion of function; we wish to include within the same sector units supplying products or services that are apparently dissimilar but funtionally equivalent. For example, faith healers, holistic health and other "alternative" health providers would be included within the health care soctor. On the other hand, it is important to recongize that a given structure may be supplying diverse functions (both manifest and latent) and that there maly be disagreements among participants and abservers as to waht functions are being performed.. Such diagreements create definitional problems, but they also signal ambifuities or disputs over domain definition -- a significant attriburte of any sector (Thompson, 1967; Braito, et. al,. 1972) p. 138 Scott, W. Richard and John W. Meyer. 1983. "The Organization of Societal Sectors." Chapter 6, pp. 129-154 in _Organizational Environments_. Beer has pointed to the main attractions of applying autopoiesis to Organizations and societies in the quotation above. Many social institutions, from small clubs, groups, and families, through varying sizes of Organization, right up to societies, countries, and cultures, exhibit a tremendous, lonterm stability and persistence. Despite significant changes in their environment and tremendous internal structural changes of both member and relationships, some such entities have maintained a continual identity over long periods of time. In many cases (e.g., some religions and culture) this is in the face of deliberate and sustained attempts to destroy them. Are these not precisely the charactistics that the idea of a self-producting system can explain? p. 121 Minger, Joh. 1995. Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of Autopoiesis. New York: Plenum Press. by \it{organizational field} we mean those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resouce and product consumer, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar servies or products. The virtue of this unit of analysis is that it directs our attention not simply to competing firms, as does the population approach of Hannan and Freeman (1977), or to networks of organizations that actually interact, as does the interorganizational network approach of Laumann, galaskiewicz, andMarsden (1978), but to the totality of relevant actors. In doing this, the field ie\dea comprehends the importance of both \textit{connectedness} (see Layumann, Galaskiewicz, and Marsden 1978) and \textit{structural equivalence} (White Boorman, and Breiger 1976). The structure of an organization field cannot be determined a priori but must be defined on the basis of empirical investigation. Fields only exist to the extent that they are institutionally defined. The process of institutional definition, or "structuration," consists of four parts: an increase in the extent of interaction among organization in the field: the emergence of sharply defined interaction among organization in the field; the emergence of sharply defined interorganizationl sturctures of domination and patterns of colation; an increase in the information load with which organizations in a field must contend; and the development of a mutal aware\ness among participants in a set of organizations that they are involved in a common enterprise (DiMaggio 1983). pp 64-5 DiMaggion and Powell. "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality." The first [of three aspects of institutionalization have have thus far received scant attention] has to do with models of diffusion. Studies of the diffusion of new organizational forms usually emphasize organization imperatives and local decisions, implicitly suggesting that organization forms are standardized through the effortless evolution of commonsense undestandings about how to organize. By contrast, among the musems we see substantial discord about key aspects of museum form and function as well as the emergence of a national infrastructure--at which professional organizations supported by philandthropic foundations are at the core--committed to speeding and shaping the diffusion process. Hte second lesson concerns tensions within the institutionalization process. Instituional theorists have focused upon the tendency for organization forms to become more legitimate as they win wider acceptance. In the museum field, however, the price of acceptance was the mobilization of a constituency, including professionals and social reformers, with interests that diverged from those of the founding local elites. In oteher words, the diffusion process not only legitimated the museum as an organizational form, but at the same time legitimated conflict over the interpretation of the museum's mission. Third, professionals were at the forefront of suchy debates, as scholarship about organizationl professionals would lead us to expect. What is striking, however, is how little conflict occurred \textit{inside} organizations and how much was played out \textit{at the level of the field.} professionals seem to have possessed a dual conscioiusness that enabled them to function as conservatives in organizational roles at the same time they used fieldwide organizations to lauch attacks on the system that employed them. pp. 268-9 Dimaggion, 1991. "Constructing an Organizationl Field as a Professional Project"