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...

Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, American employers adopted sexual harassment grievance procedures and anti-harassment training in droves even though legislation did not require these programs and the courts had not unequivocally vetted them. Where did these strategies come from and how...

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...

This paper charts the transformation of the employment relation-ship in different industries during the second quarter of this century and is based on a representative sampling of U.S. business organizations. The first section documents changes in the control systems that prevailed in U.S....

This paper examines historical differences in personnel practices among U.S. industries to explore the roots of modern "bureaucratic" work control. We report multivariate analyses of data describing organizational personnel practices, collected by the National Industrial Conference Board between...