Thirty years ago, new institutional theory challenged the then dominant functionalist explanations of organizational behavior by pointing to the role of meaning in the production and reproduction of organizational practices (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983). But new institutional theory was...

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to analyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades. This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior...

Has federal antidiscrimination law been effective in moving women and minorities into management? Early studies show that government affirmative action reviews improved the numbers, and rank, of blacks, but evidence of what has happened since 1980 is sparse. There is little evidence that civil...

What does globalization mean for the modern corporation? There is a lot of theory out there. Many have taken the intrepid step of speculating about the implications for the firm. Few have gone to the trouble to look into the matter. Looking at how a multinational actually operates is not for the...

Students of economic behavior have long subscribed to the common sense view that natural laws govern economic life. In the discipline of economics, the prevailing view is that economic behavior is determined exogenously, by a force outside of society,rather than endogenously, by forces within....

The bankruptcy of Enron in December 2001 marked the beginning of broad awareness that American corporations had left behind the strategy of expanding through diversification that was the hallmark of the 1950s through the early 1980s. CEOs now mad it job one to meet the earnings projections of...

This book at first appears to be Perrow's own history of the modern corporation, but it turns out to be a critique of the canon and a fresh look at the historical material presented by others. As such, it is a lot closer in format and goals to Perrow's classic Complex Organizations (New York:...

What causes large numbers of firms to change strategy and structure in tandem? Organizational institutionalists find that managerial and professional groups that span organizations develop new models of organizational efficiency -- models that are typically in the interest of the group pushing them

In 1950, T. H. Marshall suggested that "social citizenship" rights were the last frontier in formal citizenship protections. First came civil rights and basic freedoms in the eighteenth century, second came political rights with the extension of suffrage during the nineteenth century, and third...

IN RECENT years, sociologists have returned to study the field's first subject, economic behavior. Beginning in the 1840s, Karl Marx tried to understand the economic underpinnings of class relations and political activity. Forty years later, Émile Durkheim explored how work was divided up in...