Paul DiMaggio: Organizing

Paul DiMaggio is American sociologist. Explore interesting quotes on organizing.
Paul DiMaggio: 24   quotes 0   likes

“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

Change , Dependency

“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

Motivation

“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

Life

“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.