Wuthnow and Shrum - Reputational Status of Organizations in Technical Systems

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Reputational Status of Organizations in Technical Systems

Wesley Shrum; Robert Wuthnow

The American Journal of Sociology

, Vol. 93, No. 4. (Jan., 1988), pp. 882-912.

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9602%28198801%2993%3A4%3C882%3ARSOOIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

The American Journal of Sociology

is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgThu Jul 5 00:01:52 2007

Reputational Status of Organizations inTechnical systems1

Wesley Shrum

Louisiana State University

Robert Wuthnow

Princeton University

An important, but relatively neglected, aspect of social stratificationin modern societies is the reputational status associated with com-plex organizations in interdependent organizational fields. In thisstudy, social factors influencing the reputational status of researchorganizations in large-scale, cognitively diverse, multisectoral"technical systems" are examined. Data are drawn from interviewswith personnel from a national U.S. sample of

50

organizationsengaged in research on nuclear-waste management and

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organiza-tions involved in photovoltaics research. The reputational status ofeach organization was assessed by knowledgeable respondents fromother organizations in each system. A model is presented that char-acterizes reputational status as a function of organizational per-formance, organizational structure, and network position. Supportis obtained for the model by the use of both subjective and objectiveindicators, including evidence of the mediating effects of networkposition. Further results obtained from a blockmodel analysis indi-cate that ties to specific blocks are a more important determinant ofreputational status than block membership.Sociologists are periodically asked to assess the reputations of one an-other's departments in formal surveys of academic faculty. From the

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This research was conducted under grant PRA-7920573 from the National ScienceFoundation's Program on Innovative Processes, "Networks of Scientific and Techno-logical Information Exchange in the Technical Innovation Process," Robert Wuth-now, Principal Investigator. We wish to thank James R. Beniger for his collaborationthroughout the project. We also wish to thank Patricia Woolf, Laura Schrager, CathyLeeco, and Karen Cerulo for their invaluable assistance. Paul DiMaggio and severalanonymous readers made valuable suggestions on earlier drafts. Requests for reprintsshould be sent to Wesley Shrum, Department of Sociology, Louisiana State Univer-sity, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803.

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1988 by The University of Chicago.

All

rights reserved.

0002-9602/88/9304-0005$01.50

882

AJS

Volume 93 Number

4

(January 1988): 882-912

Status of Organizationsresults, average "quality ratings" or "prestige rankings" are calculated foreach department. This process of determining the relative status of com-parable programs in organizations is, in various forms, widely used.Program directors in federal research agencies routinely estimate the rep-utational quality of contractors and grantees in this manner. Investmentbrokers create formal indices of the relative quality of corporations. Cor-porate officers, selecting from among bidders, judge the potential qualityof competing subcontractors. Sometimes these evaluations are based on"objective" measures, such as profit margins, personnel, capital funding,or products; on other occasions, the ratings are made more subjectively orqualitatively. These examples point to an important, albeit relativelyneglected, aspect of social stratification in modern societies: the relativeprestige or reputational status of organizations (Caplow 1964; Perrow1961; Galaskiewicz 1979, 1985; Boje and Whetten 1981; Knoke 1983;Laumann, Knoke, and Kim 1985; Paulson 1985).This paper proposes and tests a model of reputational status based oninformation obtained in a network study of two national interorganiza-tional systems. We discuss the concept "technical system" as a particulartype of interorganizational field in which valid assessments of reputa-tional status are especially important. Drawing on previous arguments inthe organizational literature, we develop an explanatory model that em-phasizes the significance of network position as a mediating factor amongorganizational performance, organizational structure, and reputationalstatus. This model is then examined utilizing measures of interorganiza-tional network variables obtained in a large-scale study of two technicalsystems.

TECHNICAL

SYSTEMS

In previous papers, we have introduced the concept "technical system" todesignate a centrally administered network of actors oriented toward thesolution of a set of related technological problems (Shrum, Wuthnow, andBeniger 1985; Shrum 1984a, 1984b; cf. Price 1963; Ravetz 197 1; Hannayand McGinn 1980; Ziman 1984). In comparison with scientific specialties,technical systems: (1) are larger, having technical personnel numbering inthe thousands instead of the dozens or hundreds;

(2)

are formally orga-nized to achieve a specific set of technical objectives (e.g., putting a manon the moon, finding a cure for cancer, developing a defensive systemagainst ballistic missiles); (3) are more diverse, both in terms of disciplin-ary or subdisciplinary expertise and in terms of sector (e.g., government,university, private firm) and occupation (e.g., scientist, research adminis-trator, policy analyst); and (4) are heavily dependent on the state for thesetting of research objectives, provision of resources (funds, equipment,

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