1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Paul DiMaggio

Paul DiMaggio Quotes

Paul Joseph DiMaggio is an American educator, and professor of sociology at New York University since 2015. Previously, he was a professor of sociology at Princeton University. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. January 1951
Paul DiMaggio photo
Paul DiMaggio: 12   quotes 0   likes

Famous Paul DiMaggio Quotes

“Institutionalism purportedly represents a distinctive approach to the study of social, economic, and political phenomena; yet it is often easier to gain agreement about what it is not than about what it is.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 1

“What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as afield, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes—coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 147; abstract

“By organizational field, we mean those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 148

“[Schemata are] knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information.”

Paul DiMaggio

Paul J. DiMaggio (1997). "Culture and Cognition." Annual Review of Sociology, 23: p. 269.

“The new institutionalism focuses instead on nonlocal environments, either organisational sectors or fields roughly coterminous with the boundaries of industries, professions, or national societies. Environments, in this view, are more subtle in their influence; rather than being co-opted by organisations, they penetrate the organisation, creating the lenses through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action and thought.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12-13.

“The new institutionalism in organization theory and sociology comprises a rejection of rational-actor models, and interest in institutions as independent variables, a turn toward cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supra-individual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individual’s attributes or motives.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 8

Paul DiMaggio Quotes

“Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim's exhortation to study 'social facts as things', yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 1

Literature , Study

“Both the old and new approaches share a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organisation, and each views institutionalisation as a state-dependent process that makes organisations less instrumentally rational by limiting the options they can pursue. Both emphasise the relationship between organisations and their environments, and both promise to reveal aspects of reality that are inconsistent with organisations’ formal accounts. Each approach stresses the role of culture in shaping organisational reality.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12

Reality , Dependency

“Although there are as many ‘new institutionalisms’ as there are social science disciplines, this book is about just one of them, the one that has made its mark on organisation theory, especially that branch most closely associated with sociology.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 1

Books , Science

“Organizations tend to model themselves after similar organizations in their field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 152

Success

“Organizations may try to change constantly; but, after a certain point in the structuration of an organizational field, the aggregate effect of individual change is to lessen the extent of diversity within the field.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 148

Change

“Organizations compete not just for resources and customers, but for political power and institutional legitimacy, for social as well as economic fitness.”

Paul DiMaggio

Source: "The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields," 1983, p. 150.

Similar authors

Herbert A. Simon photo
Herbert A. Simon 58
American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and p…
Max Weber photo
Max Weber 41
German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist
Theodor W. Adorno photo
Theodor W. Adorno 90
German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for …
Gunnar Myrdal photo
Gunnar Myrdal 26
Swedish economist
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk photo
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk 9
First Czechoslovak president
Erich Fromm photo
Erich Fromm 117
German social psychologist and psychoanalyst
Ludwig von Mises photo
Ludwig von Mises 62
austrian economist
Antonio Gramsci photo
Antonio Gramsci 22
Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and lingu…
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada photo
Toni Morrison photo
Toni Morrison 184
American writer