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1. Social structure and organizations revisited
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1. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND
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ORGANIZATIONS REVISITED
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Michael Lounsbury and Marc J. Ventresca
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13
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15 Sociological studies of complex organizations chronicle a long history of
16 analytic concern with the linkages between wider societal arrangements and the
17 structure and activities of organizations (Perrow, 1986, 2002). In fact, it is only
18 in recent decades and among some theorists and empirical researchers that
19 attention has narrowed from a focus on institutionally-rich studies of labor
20111 unions, schools, firms, government bureaus, social movement organizations,
21
advocacy groups, nonprofit agencies, and sundry varied organizations, to a focus
22
23 on formal organizations as abstract instrumentally-oriented entities operating in
24 environments that are narrowly conceptualized as material resource spaces. Over
25 the past decade, however, there have been an increasing number of calls to
26 revisit the dynamics of organizations and society (e.g. Friedland & Alford, 1991;
27 Scott, 2001; Stern & Barley, 1996; Stinchcombe, 1997).
28 This chapter identifies common concerns and research opportunities for
29 contemporary organizational sociologists interested in social structure as a more
30111 richly textured n-dimensional space in which organizations navigate. To situate
31 our agenda, we discuss key themes from mid-century organizational sociology
32 in light of current cultural and social theory, highlighting how more recent work
33
builds upon and extends the mid-century social structural tradition and where
34
35 new work can take shape. In particular, we revisit the 1965 essay by Arthur
36 L. Stinchcombe, “Social structure and organizations,” that anchors a concep-
37 tion of social structure and organization that is useful for an emerging
38 community of structurally-oriented organizational researchers.
39
40111
Social Structure and Organizations Revisited, Volume 19, pages 3–36.
Copyright © 2002 by Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISBN: 0-7623-0872-9
3
4 MICHAEL LOUNSBURY AND MARC J. VENTRESCA
1 The arguments we make and that the chapters in this volume extend are
2 basic: U.S. sociologies of organization into the 1960s argued directly and
3 purposively for understanding how broader social structures, and typically, the
4 politics of resources and authority, shaped organizational actors and activity.
5 This work built on the foundations of mid-century sociological analyses of
6
power, conflict, and authority, itself the legacy of early 20th century “old”
7
8 institutionalisms in economics and sociology. By the early 1970s, sociologists
9 and, increasingly, colleagues in management and other professional schools had
10111 generated a distinctly different set of theoretical arguments and empirical
11 research traditions. This work grappled with and developed two themes that
12 characterize the modern synthesis in organizational sociology: (1) the shift to
13 “open systems” approaches (e.g. focused attention on organization-environment
14 relations), and (2) the burdens of the legacy of narrow readings of Weber on
15 bureaucracy, to the neglect of Weber on domination and other critical
16 traditions. The new theories were varied, but several general analytic features
17 became increasingly prominent as the work accumulated and as researchers
18
sought to develop a more “synthetic” organization theory.
19
20111 We suggest that social exchange approaches to power and aspirations for
21 more parsimonious quantitative models animated this new work, which in turn,
22 reinforced restricted conceptions of politics, resources, and the interplay among
23 these in societal context. The institutional and legal bases of organizations
24 became implicit, typically unexamined or assumed. Theory and empirical work
25 paid less attention to wider societal patterns and distributions of resources.
26 Concomitantly, midcentury attention to social structure became transformed into
27 conceptions of abstract, exogenous environments that constrained, and in
28 many ways, determined organizational structures and behavior (via functional
29 imperatives such as legitimacy or efficiency).
30111
This introduction provides context for a set of original empirical papers
31
32 and thematic commentaries. We review the heritage studies of organizational
33 sociology from the 1950s through the early 1970s and probe Stinchcombe’s
34 1965 essay to sound out analytic legacies and opportunities for contemporary
35 research. We then discuss developments in the organizational research agenda
36 in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting how a focus on social exchange approaches
37 to power reconceptualized social structure and restricted the intellectual and
38 policy opportunities of organizational sociology. We close with the outlines of
39 an alternative agenda, comprising a set of research reports that highlight
40111 opportunities for a renewed social structural approach to organizational analysis
that both enriches the conceptions of politics and societal struggle central to
the vision of Stinchcombe 1965 and extends this tradition in light of
Social Structure and Organizations Revisited 5
1 contemporary trends in social and cultural theory. We see developments in the

2 analysis and theorization of culture as providing particularly promising new
3 directions for social structural approaches to organizations. For instance, we
4 note that emerging new structuralisms in cultural sociology and the study of
5 stratification (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Mohr, 2000) provide key conceptual and
6 methodological developments that could be fruitfully integrated into the agenda
7
of organizational sociology.
8
9 We argue that the time is ripe for organizational researchers to renew attention
10111 to broader social structures and to bring “society” back to center stage. “Society”
11 here includes social structure in the idiom Stinchcombe (1965) called for and
12 also in ways that more directly engage contemporary emphases on both distri-
13 butions of resources and meanings along with the everyday social practices that
14 support and can contribute to the reshaping of social structure (Bourdieu, 1984;
15 Clemens, 1997; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Stryker, 1994). Our efforts in this
16 volume aim to bring together a diverse, yet congenial set of sociological
17 approaches to organizational analysis that highlight the vibrancy of the social
18 structural tradition in organizational sociology as well as the value of more
19
consciously recognizing these works as part of an ongoing project.
20111
21
22 “SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATIONS” AND
23 MID-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO
24 ORGANIZATIONS
25
26 Since mid-century, the scope of research on organizations in sociology has
27 narrowed from a concern about the role of organizations in society with a big
28 “S” (Michels, 1949; Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Stinchcombe, 1965) to
29 perspectives that emphasize concrete exchange processes within and between
30111 orgnizations and organizational demography (Hannan & Freeman, 1977;
31
Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Williamson, 1985). These developments have greatly
32
33 enhanced our understanding of the variety of ways organizations are affected
34 by transactions with other organizations in their environment and focused
35 on new levels of analysis and often alternative causal mechanisms. These
36 approaches have also facilitated the development of substantial empirical
37 and theoretical literatures. But one effect of these trends is that the study of
38 organizations has become disconnected from the study of societal stratification,
39 politics and social change that provided core problematics in earlier sociological
40111 studies of organizations and society. Further, much empirical research on
organizations has come to emphasize a highly rationalized and instrumental
conception of interorganizational relations in contrast to views that highlight
5
1 ambiguity over uncertainty and treat these relations as politically-inflected and

2 culturally-embedded (March & Olson, 1976; Dacin, Ventresca & Beal, 1999).
3 In the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists charted a political economy approach
4 to organizations, informed by middle-range theorizing and rich empirical case
5 studies. These sociological approaches to organizations were informed and
6
intertwined with the study of broader political processes and related societal-
7
8 level social structures. These studies did not focus narrowly on organizational
9 phenomena, nor did they try to build a synthetic theory of organization. Instead,
10111 organizations were seen as sites for understanding the constitution and
11 consequences of modern forms of power. This sensibility was derived from
12 the work of Max Weber and other early theorists of domination and authority,
13 institutional economists such as Veblen, Commons, and Schumpeter who
14 theorized about industry and economic change, and modern sociological
15 theorists such as Parsons and Merton. The research extended classic Weberian
16 concerns with power, domination, authority, and legitimacy, with a focus on
17 organizations as one important kind of social structure.
18
These works conceptualized social structural forces quite broadly as including
19
20111 patterns of ideas, values, elements of stratification, and social interactions – in
21 essence, the stuff of social organization in its raw form. Social structure was
22 often treated as a social fact, confronting actors with durable but not obdurate
23 patterns of resources and meaning. Empirical research, however, also investi-
24 gated social structure as emergent – the outcome of intentional choices,
25 strategies, and politics. Pivotal studies in this period provided us with a vivid
26 vocabulary for modern organization theory.
27 Selznick (1949) highlighted how organizational efforts to reshape the
28 environment are explicitly enmeshed in broader political negotiations. In turn,
29 he treated organization-building as a complex endeavor that required leaders
30111
to integrate an organization’s goals and operations with the demands, goals
31
32 and orientations of its institutional milieu (Selznick, 1957). Gouldner (1954)
33 concentrated attention on how formal variations in work situations affected labor
34 relations tactics and developments within a highly stratified industrial bureau-
35 cracy. Lipset, Trow and Coleman (1956) showed how a union organization was
36 able to successfully build a monopoly around typographical skills. Stinchcombe
37 (1959) argued that the social organization of work in bureaucracies or more
38 autonomous craft occupations was contingent upon technical features of work
39 processes. Bendix (1956) helped to forge a comparative tradition that high-
40111 lighted how variations in state-building projects and associated ideas of authority
result in distinct institutional and organizational configurations of work and
management practices. Duncan (1960) showed how the class structure of
resources in metropolis regions shaped industrial organization.
1 This sampling of studies share a number of analytic features and commit-

2 ments that were available for organizational sociologies that followed. While
3 eclectic in their treatments of “organizations” as an analytic construct, they
4 provided empirical challenges to the then-prevailing ideal typical conception
5 of organizations as tightly-coupled, integrated, functional, and unitary. They
6 focused on work, on how things got done, and on the varieties of social
7
organization of such activity. They recognized and provided explanations for
8
9 conflict and change, often through rich case studies of complex organizational
10111 systems that focused on both resource and exchange linkages, but also on
11 authority relations that took shape and became manifest in meaningful contexts
12 of beliefs, ideologies, and cultural models. In this way, they stand distinct
13 from much contemporary organizational studies in administrative science and
14 other strands of organization theory that focus primarily on technical contin-
15 gencies of organizations and inquire into optimal configurations or patterns.
16 Stinchcombe’s 1965 essay, “Social structure and organizations,” is one
17 foundational statement for a more politically-oriented organizational theory that
18 foregrounds broader societal processes. It is also one of the works from this
19
period that continues to be a pivotal citation in varied contemporary theoretical
20111
21 and empirical research. In current research, Stinchcombe 1965 is usually cited
22 as the source of claims about how social structure imprints new organizational
23 forms in time-inflected ways or how new forms may suffer from a liability of
24 newness. We instead read Stinchcombe 1965 as an essay that, in the words
25 of Merton (1987), aimed to “specify ignorance” for the development of new
26 knowledge of organizations. We believe the richness of ideas and arguments
27 in this paper remain under-explored. The focus of his essay on grounded studies
28 of politics, stratification and resources, ideas, and the societal context of
29 organization importantly informs the agenda that research in this volume charts
30111 out. Further, it provides a clear point of engagement with contemporary social
31
theory and analysis of organizations.
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33 Stinchcombe’s analytical lens, often richly soaked in historical detail and
34 informed by the breadth of the Weberian gaze, provides a wide angle view of
35 organizational life as influenced by conflicts over forms of administration (craft,
36 professional, bureaucratic), the social organization of markets and societies, the
37 stability of political regimes, social classes and other kinds of status groups.
38 In his characteristically eclectic style, Stinchcombe defined a brand of organi-
39 zational analysis that seeks to systematically uncover the “relation of society
40111 outside organizations [social structure] to the internal life of organizations”
(1965, p. 142). Stinchcombe’s attention to how organizational dynamics are
centrally connected to societal values, power structures and related features of
stratification, however, is too frequently neglected in the wisdom taken from
7
1 his essay. Stinchcombe’s scholarly corpus is remarkable for its breadth, volume,
2 and acuteness with regard to major sociological subfields as well as for its
3 empirical ambitions. Committed to the notion that good sociology involves
4 developing theoretical generalizations, Stinchcombe’s intellectual curiosity has
5 provided us with insights into a wide variety of empirical domains such as
6
construction (1959), police administrative practice (1963), a high school (1964),
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8 love (with Heimer, 1980), Eighteenth century French stratification and revolu-
9 tion (1982), third party buying in insurance (1984), careers in computer software
10111 firms (with Heimer, 1988), the political economy of the Carribean (1995), and
11 the social structure of market liquidity (Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 1999).1
12 The 1965 essay was prominent in the Handbook of Organizations, one
13 of the first efforts to compile and overview research in the emerging field of
14 organization theory. The Handbook assembled an eclectic mix of articles that
15 provided overviews of research streams on different kinds of organizations,
16 of research methods employed, and of how the study of organizations is central
17 to extant disciplinary traditions in sociology, psychology and political science.
18
Stinchcombe makes three points in the first pages of his agenda-calling essay:
19
20111 (1) research and theory on the linkage between social structure and organization,
21 or “the external relations of organizations” is “underdeveloped” and of “little
22 beauty or power” (1965, p. 143); (2) social structure comprises “. . . groups,
23 institutions, laws, population characteristics, and sets of social relations that
24 form the environments of the organization . . . any variables which are stable
25 characteristics of the society outside the organization” (1965, p. 142); and
26 (3) methods can and should draw from eclectic and “strategic” empirical samples
27 to generate propositions about social structure and organization.
28 The chapter itself is organized as commentary with propositions on five
29 general research questions that develop opportunities at the intersection of social
30111
structure and organization, typically based in a few available research studies,
31
32 and illustrated with new or borrowed data to underscore the import of close
33 empirical work in his version of general theorizing. First, what is the effect of
34 social structure on the rate of foundation of new organizations, particularly orga-
35 nizations of a new kind or structure? Second, how can we explain, in social
36 structural terms, the correlation between the time in history that a particular
37 type of organization was invented and the social structure of organizations of
38 that type that exist at the present time? Third, what is the relation of organi-
39 zations to the use of violence in the larger society (e.g. revolution), particularly
40111 violence and unrestrained competition in the political arena (including
organizational stratification as outcome and mechanism)?
Fourth, how do organizational arrangements affect the relations between
social classes in the larger society (intraorganizational stratification as the case
1 where classes meet and define broader working relationships)? Fifth, what is
2 the effect of organizations on social structure (more particularly the effect of
3 the mere presence or absence of organizations on the solidarity and feeling
4 of identity of “communal” groups)? Further, Stinchcombe identified common
5 features in this mix of topics: each has to do with some aspect of the relation
6 of organization to the environing social structure and each treats characteristics
7
of formal organizations as variables, rather than as components of ideal types
8
9 (a commitment challenged by the paucity of available empirical studies and
10111 data sources) (1965, pp. 143–145). While the essay is certainly wide-ranging
11 (perhaps sprawling), it is remarkable to note how distant much of contempo-
12 rary organizational theory seems to be from Stinchcombe’s concerns about
13 situated historical analysis, the dynamics of social identity and class, and societal
14 transformation.
15 The citation history of the 1965 paper provides an empirical indicator of its
16 popularity while also raising a provocative set of issues that inform the main
17 arguments of this essay and the empirical work in this volume. We identified
18 and coded over 750 citations to “Social structure and organizations”, from its
19
publication through 2000 in the Social Science Citation Index.2 These citations
20111
21 are predominantly in social science journals, with the largest proportions over
22 time in sociology and management journals. Substantial citations also occur in
23 journals in political science and international studies, in public health and educa-
24 tion, and in over 15 other disciplinary and research fields. Figure 1 reports the
25 annual count of citations disaggregated by academic area journals in sociology,
26 management, and other knowledge domains.
27 Overall, there is a secular trend of increases in annual citation counts,
28 providing evidence that the paper has increasingly become a key reference for
29 new scholarly work. The specific pattern, a succession of peaks, each followed
30111 by a few years of citation counts at that higher level, suggests that different
31
research communities and emerging theoretical traditions have found the paper
32
33 useful and relevant as a touchstone. When we disaggregate the overall counts
34 by academic area, two further compositional trends become visible. First, a
35 larger share of citations to this paper over the years has typically been in jour-
36 nals other than discipline-identified sociology journals. Second, the substantial
37 increases in citations to the paper since the early 1990s came primarily from
38 citations in articles published in management journals, relative to pre-1980
39 compositional patterns.
40111 These trends confirm the continued recognition of Stinchcombe (1965) as a
foundational contribution in the field of organizational theory. We also believe
that the citation patterns are suggestive of broader changes that have shaped
research on organizations. The sustained, but relatively lower levels of citations
9
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3
4
5
6
7
8
9
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12
13
14
15
16
17
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19 Fig. 1. Annual Citation Counts of Stinchcombe 1965 Essay by Academic Area
20111 Journals, 1966–2000.
21
22
23 since the early 1980s in discipline-identified sociology journals may track the
24 fate of mid-century sociology research sensibilities in “modern” organization
25 theory. The increased number and proportion of citations to Stinchcombe
26 (1965) in management journals beginning around 1980 provides an indicator
27 of a shift in intellectual and professional venues for researchers concerned with
28 topics linked to the claims of the paper. We argue that as business school
29 faculty became more prominent in driving the growth of organization theory
30111
(particularly “macro” approaches and “synthetic” organization theory distinct
31
32 from the case-study based traditions of research on firms, agencies, or other
33 organizations located in substantive contexts like labor, social movements,
34 education, and the like), and as management journals became central arenas
35 for the construction of organizational knowledge, Stinchcombe (1965) was
36 narrowly appropriated. It has increasingly become a ceremonial progenitor
37 citation in a few lines of research, most vividly in organizational ecology
38 and corporate demography, and in some institutional theories of organization.
39 From this reading, the citation history of this paper tracks important shifts in
40111 the field of organization theory as a subfield and its central concerns and
commitments (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002).
We next offer an account of how the development of organizational theory as a
subfield redirected and fragmented the wider agenda for which Stinchcombe
1 argued. In the spirit of Merton and Stinchcombe, we then “specify ignorance” by

2 identifying contemporary problematics and opportunities for organizational soci-
3 ologists interested in the relationship between organizations and social structure,
4 and then introduce empirical papers that develop elements of this agenda.
5
6 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY
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8
AS A SUBFIELD: INSTRUMENTAL EXCHANGE
9 APPROACHES AND DISSIDENT VOICES
10111
11 While some researchers have attended to ideological shifts in core imageries
12 and metaphors of organization (Barley & Kunda, 1992; Morgan, 1998), modern
13 organizational theorists as a whole have aspired to develop research in the
14 idiom of normal science as a strategy to build a professional subfield that would
15 appear respectable among neighboring social science fields. In U.S. sociology
16 departments, organizational theory as a synthetic research tradition has had
17 limited spread, with research and training concentrated among a relatively
18 few universities. The aspiration to build a theory of complex and formal
19
organization, latterly organization theory, has been historically contested by a
20111
21 wider sociological community skeptical of the abstraction. Specialty concen-
22 trations in organizational analysis began to appear in sociology departments
23 in the late 1960s, often accompanied by foundation and federal support for
24 research in applied areas (e.g. education, mental health and policy services).
25 In the 1970s, however, sociologists trained in organization theory began to
26 migrate to several companion professional schools, most prominently and
27 consequentially to schools of management and business, also to schools of
28 education, law, and public health. These peregrinations inevitably affected the
29 development of organizational research.
30111 Introductory seminars in contemporary organizational theory often begin
31
with the modern synthesis – especially with the development of contingency
32
33 theory in the mid-1960s in the work of James D. Thompson and the empirical
34 studies of Lawrence and Lorsch. Instead of focusing on how social structure
35 shaped organizations, contingency theorists built on the administrative theories
36 of Taylor, Barnard and Fayol to identify optimal or necessary structure-context
37 congruence and develop prescriptions about how managers can take effective
38 actions that enhance the performance of their organizations. Initially,
39 administrative-based theories were considered alongside the social structural
40111 tradition in sociology. For instance, the inaugural 1956 issue of the
Administrative Science Quarterly included articles by the administrative theorist
James D. Thompson as well as by the grand structural functionalist sociologist
Talcott Parsons. The American Sociological Review in those same years
11
1 published works more distinctly in the social structural tradition. Over the next
2 10–15 years, however, research in organization theory tended to focus on
3 internal organization structure and process and the relationship between
4 organizations and their resource environments, to the relative neglect of studying
5 how organizations are related to broader social structures (Stern & Barley,
6
1996). One of the main factors driving this shift in research sensibilities
7
8 towards resources and away from social structure had to do with the efforts
9 of organizational scholars to professionalize around issues of management
10111 and organizational effectiveness. This professionalization mainly occurred
11 through the Academy of Management, the leading professional association for
12 management researchers
13 The Academy of Management was founded in 1936, but operated very
14 informally up until the 1970s (Wrege, 1988). The first issue of the Academy of
15 Management Journal was published in 1957, and during the 1960s, the Academy
16 grew in membership as management schools began to focus on research and
17 as the number of management faculty overall increased. As a result, the
18
Academy of Management changed from an organization built on close personal
19
20111 friendships to one that was more formalized, differentiated, and professionally
21 run (Wrege, 1988, p. 28). In 1969, seven professional interest subgroups were
22 created: Corporate Strategy, Management History, Operations Analysis,
23 Organizational Studies, Personal and Industrial Relations, Philosophy, Values
24 and Styles, and Social and Public Issues. In 1971, ten professional divisions
25 were put in place including the Division of Organizational Behavior and the
26 Division of Organization and Management Theory.
27 The creation of the Organizational and Management Theory Division marked
28 the formation of a formal subfield for organizational theorists with all the
29 self-conscious professional apparatus involved in managing and maintaining a
30111
jurisdictional boundary – professional prizes, organizations, informal colleges
31
32 etc. This boundary-making, however, reduced the cross-border trade with
33 subfields in sociology that focused on stratification and culture (with a few
34 notable exceptions among researchers whose work directly engaged both
35 organization theory and other sociological subfields (e.g. Aldrich, Bacharach,
36 DiMaggio, Kanter, Hirsch, Peterson, Zald). The formalization of the Academy
37 and changes in the research aspirations of leading management schools (as well
38 as other professional schools, many of which began to hire social science
39 disciplinary-trained faculty beginning in the 1970s) changed the terms and stakes
40111 of research on organizations. In addition, the presence of Academy-affiliated
infrastructures supporting research laid the groundwork for the growth of
managerially-oriented organizational researchers whose work emphasized
instrumental notions of organization and social exchange processes.
1 The growing prominence of administrative theories in the study of organizations

2 not only gave rise to more managerially-based theories and concepts about organi-
3 zations, but also redirected research agendas and publishing among sociologists
4 studying organizations in this more synthetic way. For example, William
5 Evan (1963) developed organizational set analysis (from Merton’s role theory, via
6 Blau & Scott, 1962) that was employed to study resource flows in industries
7
(e.g. Hirsch, 1972). In a different vein, Peter Blau aimed to develop propositional
8
9 theories about formal organizational structure and administrative capacity (Blau
10111 & Scott, 1962; Blau & Schoenherr, 1971). Stinchcombe, even with a continued
11 focus on broader relationships between organizations and society, published
12 Creating Efficient Industrial Administrations (1974). The shift in sensibilities was
13 away from asking research questions about organizations and society and towards
14 focusing more concretely on processes of organizational management and how
15 resource connections shape organizational systems (Perrow, 1986).
16 Nonetheless, many sociologists continued to work on problems having to do
17 with social structure and organizations. Coleman (1974), for instance, put
18 forward provocative arguments about the institutional and legal foundations of
19
modern corporate actors and their role in the “asymmetric” power balance in
20111
21 modern society. The “organizational society” thesis, that maintains that modern
22 societies are actually organizational societies, also emerged (see Perrow, 1991,
23 2002). Dornbusch and Scott (1975) examined the legitimacy of authority in
24 careful social psychological terms and linked broader societal conditions to the
25 determinants of effective and legitimate exercise of power. Building on
26 Aldrich’s (1976, 1979) emerging evolutionary perspective, Benson (1977)
27 promoted a dialectical view of organizational processes that derided the growing
28 prominence of rational-functional theories of organizations. While this work
29 kept alive the aspirations of midcentury organizational sociologies, new socio-
30111 logical research on organizations took a different form.
31
Building on the foundations of rational-functional approaches to organization
32
33 science, new social structural approaches increasingly penetrated “mainstream”
34 organizational research in the administrative traditions. From the late 1970s, a
35 novel set of research initiatives in organizational sociology became codified and
36 packaged into standard research strategies that produced research in the idiom
37 of normal science (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002). These included extensions in the
38 institutional analysis of organizations (e.g. Meyer & Scott, 1983; Scott & Meyer,
39 1994; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001), organizational demography (e.g.
40111 Hannan & Freeman, 1977; Carroll & Hannan, 2000), and network methods and
theory (e.g. Baker, 1984; Burt, 1992; Podolny, 1993; Nohria & Eccles, 1992;
White, 2001). Hence, while social structural approaches to organizations have
been present in some form all along, the more recent lines of work have
13
1 de-emphasized a focus on conflict, situated case analysis, and broader social

2 structural considerations that provided key intellectual commitments for
3 Stinchcombe and his contemporaries.
4 Specifically, we claim that as organizational theory emerged as a manage-
5 ment subfield, the conceptualizations of both social structure and organizations
6
became increasingly materialist and instrumental, animated by the growing
7
8 allure of social exchange and resource dependence logics (e.g. Emerson, 1962;
9 Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). In these treatments, social structure finds expression
10111 only in a conception of the “environment” that is abstract, unitary and
11 exogenous to the actual workings of organizations and social life (see Scott,
12 2001). The instrumental approach de-emphasized the insights of political
13 economy approaches to organizations (Perrow, 2002; Stern, 1979; Zald, 1970)
14 that underscored complex organizational arrangements in heterogeneous
15 relation to varied constituencies; in addition, prominence was given to the notion
16 of “uncertainty” in preference to the recognition of fundamental ambiguity and
17 loose-coupling that animated works in the behavioral and cognitive traditions
18
(Brown, 1976; March & Olsen, 1976; Meyer & Rowan, 1978; Weick, 1995).
19
20111 These shifts reinforced a conception of organizations as goal-driven unitary
21 entities that are interlocked in concrete exchange relations. Absent is the insight
22 that wider environments provide constitutional materials for organizations
23 – particular elements and also ideologies and rationales that are contingent,
24 time-dependent, and potentially in conflict one with another. Further, research
25 began to focus on resources as the main driver of structure and activity, without
26 sufficient attention to how social structure mediates the effects of resources and
27 indeed the very notion of what comprises a resource.
28 The instrumentalist imagery is quite explicit in organizational demography
29 where empirical analyses have tended to focus on how competitive interactions
30111
among producer organizations are modulated by shifts in population-level
31
32 resource spaces (Hannan & Freeman, 1989). In many variants of network
33 analysis, the life chances of organizations are determined by their network
34 position among resource flows (e.g. Burt, 1992; Mizruchi & Schwartz, 1987).
35 Even organizational institutionalists have focused a great deal of energy on
36 processes of diffusion where organizations tend to become more homogeneous
37 in appearance as a result of isomorphic processes (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;
38 Strang & Soule, 1998). Much of this institutional work in the 1980s and early
39 1990s conceptualized organizations as passive, legitimacy seekers and
40111 environments as powerful, obdurate structures (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). Note
that whether organizations are assumed to be legitimacy-seekers or motivated
by efficiency or resource dependence logics, all are functional imperatives that
involve depicting organizations as instrumental actors.
1 These sociological perspectives on organizations not only conceptualized

2 social structure and organizations in instrumental terms, but also neglected and
3 left behind the study of work and occupations (Lounsbury & Kaghan, 2001),
4 and eschewed questions related to social stratification and social change. By
5 truncating the sociological imagination in available conceptions of social
6 structure and of organization for more tractable and conventional conceptions,
7
organizational theorists aimed to further their subfield project by developing
8
9 formal, abstract general theories about organizations that embraced “clean
10111 models” over “dirty hands” (Hirsch, Friedman & Michaels, 1990). These efforts
11 had the effect of sidelining concerns with history, context, and more situated,
12 relational approaches to social analysis – a central methodological commitment
13 for Stinchcombe (see his 1997 essay on the virtues of early 20th century
14 institutional economics) and to contemporary students of organizations such as
15 (e.g. Abbott, Barley, Breiger, Clemens, DiMaggio, Espeland, Granovetter,
16 Heimer, Hirsch, Padgett, Powell, Stark, Stryker and many of this volume’s
17 contributors).
18 However, the more instrumentalist and exchange-based accounts today appear
19
to be rejoining a dialogue that is animated by contemporary social theoretic
20111
21 considerations and a concern with broader societal issues. This work comes
22 both from the margins of dominant research strategies and arguments, but also
23 from their cores. For example, organizational demographers have recently
24 expanded their analytical lens to incorporate elements of culture through the
25 study of identity (e.g. Carroll & Hannan, 2000; Carroll & Swaminathan, 2000)
26 and how societal transformations enable new organizational forms to emerge
27 (e.g. Haveman & Rao, 1997; Ventresca & Lacey, 2001). Others have extended
28 ecological insights to analyze the dynamics of labor markets across firms
29 with the intent of explicitly connecting organizational theory to the study
30111 of stratification (e.g. Haveman & Cohen, 1994). From a slightly different
31
perspective, Baum and Oliver (1992) have shown how connections between
32
33 non-profit day care centers and state governmental agencies shape day care
34 survival outcomes. And studies of entrepreneurship in broader social structural
35 context are renascent (Aldrich, 1999; Schoonhoven & Romanelli, 2001;
36 Thornton, 1999).
37 While the network analytic tradition has always had a strong connection to
38 the study of stratification and labor markets (e.g. Breiger, 1995; Granovetter,
39 1974; White, 1970), this richer tradition has only recently begun to influence
40111 the study of organizations through concepts such as embeddedness and social
capital (e.g. Adler & Kwon, 2002; Dacin, Ventresca & Beal, 1999; Gabbay &
Leenders, 1999; Granovetter, 1985; Zukin & DiMaggio, 1990; Uzzi, 1996).
Even though some of this research remains sympathetic to more instrumental
15
1 notions of organization (e.g. Burt, 1992; Lin, Cook & Burt, 2001), there is great
2 potential for this line of work to generate increased attention towards problems
3 of how organizations are interpenetrated with broader societal concerns (e.g.
4 Breiger, this volume; DiMaggio, 1986; Nelson, 2001; Padgett & Ansell, 1993).
5 For example, Padgett and Ansell advance a multi-network conception of social
6
structure and contingent social action, to underscore how the distinctive patterns
7
8 of 15th century Florentine social, commercial and political life enabled a style
9 of governance. Powell and colleagues (e.g. Powell, Koput & Smith-Doerr, 1996;
10111 Powell & Owen-Smith, 1998) depict the evolution of university-industry rela-
11 tions around the emerging field of biotechnology in analogous terms: a focus
12 on multiplex ties that comprise less obdurate, but still consequential, social
13 structures that shape organizational forms and careers.
14 Given the intellectual connections and affinities between the “new” and “old”
15 institutionalisms (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997), it is no surprise that institutional
16 scholars have more directly tried to build on and extend research mandates laid
17 out by Stinchcombe and others. One important strand of institutional analysis
18
developed research strategies grounded in diffusion processes, but others
19
20111 engaged the broader comparative-historical tradition to examine state-society
21 relations and their effects on organizations (Djelic, 1998; Schneiberg &
22 Clemens, forthcoming; Schofer & Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001). For instance,
23 Dobbin’s (1994) study of the development trajectories of railroads in the U.S.,
24 Britain and France linked differences in the governance, funding, and overall
25 industry strategies among these three cases to characteristic and chronic polity
26 differences and their expression in policy styles. Moving up a level of analysis,
27 Meyer and colleagues (e.g. Meyer, Boli & Thomas, 1987; Frank, Hironaka
28 & Shofer, 2000; Strang, 1990; Ventresca, 1995) have focused a good deal of
29 attention on how cognitive models and beliefs emerge at the world system as
30111
a result of actions by transnational NGOs, international political arenas such
31
32 as the United Nations, and other policy experts who are authoritatively
33 credentialed. Moving to lower levels of analysis, many contemporary institu-
34 tional scholars have also begun to focus on problems of institutional
35 transformation and practice variation in an effort to redress the earlier analytical
36 focus on organizational homogeneity (e.g. Lounsbury, 2001; Ruef & Scott,
37 1998; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999).
38 In addition to these shifts toward a richer conceptualizations of social structure
39 and organizational process, there have been important discipline-wide method-
40111 ological advances in the analysis of social structure that may help to expand
organizational sociology while also reuniting it with other sociological subfields
such as those that focus on politics and culture. Of course, at mid-century, there
were few subfield boundaries that segregated the analysis of organizations from
1 politics, culture, social movements and stratification. Today, at the intersection

2 of the sociology of culture and institutional analysis, new structuralist methods
3 such as Galois and tripartite lattice analysis have been developed to measure
4 meaning systems (e.g. Breiger, this volume; Mische & Pattison, 2000; Mohr,
5 1998, 2000). Those methods take inspiration from network analysis, but have
6 been used to study the evolution of practices in a way that takes seriously the
7
dual relationship of structure and action (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 2000). While
8
9 the emergence of these new analytical approaches have fostered “a new
10111 structuralist project in cultural analysis” (Mohr, 2000, p. 57), these methods
11 may also help to fuel a new structuralism in organizational theory by providing
12 a way to represent the complex interrelationships among the multi-dimensional
13 cultural and resource spaces (i.e. fields) in which organizations and practices
14 take shape and change. Ragin’s (2000) fuzzy set analytical approach can also
15 be extended to important problems having to do with categorization and
16 boundary dynamics (e.g. Bowker & Star, 1999; DiMaggio, 1997; Lamont &
17 Molnár, forthcoming).
18 Further, methodological and conceptual developments in the analysis of time
19
via event history analysis and sequence analysis also promise important
20111
21 reorientations in modeling and analysis that move us beyond the limitations of
22 assuming a general linear reality (Abbott, 2001). While event history analysis
23 has been a staple in institutional and ecological approaches to organizations
24 since the early to mid-1980s, sequence analysis has been absent from the toolkit
25 of organizational researchers. Also, on the horizon are important new break-
26 throughs in the development of more dynamic forms of network analysis as
27 well as agent-based and related evolutionary modeling techniques (see research
28 emerging from Santa Fe Institute workgroups) that will no doubt help to expand
29 our ability to theorize about mechanisms of institutional change in a much more
30111 grounded, yet non-reductive way. In general, organizational theory has much
31
to gain by reaching out to these disciplinary-wide developments that can be
32
33 used to generate new insights about organizational process in a way that gives
34 primacy of structure, but can appreciate its complexity and multidimensionality
35 while also attending to the role of actors in generating shifts in structural
36 composition.
37 Hence, as we scan empirical and methodological developments across
38 organizational theory and the wider discipline, we are encouraged by the
39 growing sensibilities towards richer sociological analyses of organizational
40111 phenomena that take society and societal level dynamics more seriously. These
developments give credence to and support our interest in further expanding
the scope of organizational theory to embrace richer notions of social structure
and organizations. We believe that the most exciting work going forward will
17
1 be less paradigmatic and, in a sense, will involve blending across previously

2 closed perspectives in organizational theory such as organizational demography,
3 network analysis and institutionalism, while also reconnecting the study of
4 organizations to the core of the discipline and increasing traffic among various
5 subfields. To wit, we call for organizational theorists to engage more fully with
6
contemporary social theoretic and methodological developments and to use our
7
8 well-developed organizational lens to explore big questions about social change
9 that speak to broader audiences in sociology, across the social sciences, and in
10111 policy circles (Fligstein, 2001). The chapters in this volume, to which we now
11 turn, move us further in this direction by reporting on careful empirical studies
12 that engage and extend theory on social structure and organization in impor-
13 tant new ways.
14
15
16 REVISITING STINCHCOMBE 1965:
17 THE CHAPTERS THAT FOLLOW
18
19
20111 Our commitment is this volume is to encourage re-engagement with the classic
21 concerns of Stinchcombe and mid-century organizational sociology, but to do
22 so in the idiom of contemporary social and cultural theory. This stance is conge-
23 nial with other recent statements of new directions and available research
24 opportunities in organization theory (e.g. Aldrich, 1999; Schneiberg & Clemens,
25 forthcoming; Scott, 2001) but motivated by a distinct concern: the relationship
26 between social structure and organization. Stinchcombe’s “environing social
27 structure” has been supplanted by the rise of overly instrumentalist and at-times
28 determining conceptions of social structure and by overly instrumentalist and
29 purposeful conceptions of organizations. We offer the arguments and empirical
30111
chapters in this volume to redress this situation. We have assembled research
31
32 reports that engage, celebrate, critique, and redirect Stinchcombe’s 1965 essay
33 in the service of crafting three broadly defined research streams.
34 First, we offer empirical papers on politics and organizations that are
35 concerned with the institutional struggles that occur in the midst of making new
36 organizational forms, as well as with the conflicts that penetrate organizational
37 life from the outside. Second, a section on embeddedness and entrepreneurship
38 breathes fresh life into the analysis of new organizational forms and their envi-
39 roning social structure by linking context and stratification processes to the
40111 simple “newness” issues. Finally, in a section on culture and organizations, we
explore how organizational fields support ideas like religious doxa and how
orthodoxies of belief configure interorganizational relations. In addition, we
conclude each section with thematic commentaries by Robin Stryker, Ronald
1 Breiger and Elisabeth Clemens, respectively, that further highlight research

2 questions and directions that are promising. Finally, Arthur Stinchcombe
3 provides a closing essay on his own reflections and ideas about future research
4 in a postscript to the volume.
5 While all empirical contributions to the volume find inspiration in the social
6 structural approach that Stinchcombe’s work exemplifies, the chapters differ in
7
their conceptualization of social structure and approach to institutional analysis.
8
9 Some chapters are more sympathetic to the “old” institutional sensibility in
10111 economics à la Veblen and Commons (Van deVen, 1993; Stinchcombe, 1997;
11 Yonay, 1998) and sociology à la Merton and Selznick (DiMaggio & Powell,
12 1991) that animates Stinchcombe’s approach to social analysis. Other contrib-
13 utors are more clearly influenced by contemporary trends in social and
14 organization theory that include a focus on cultural analysis, discourse, meaning
15 systems, and the interplay of resources and meanings (Bourdieu, 1984;
16 DiMaggio, 1997; Mohr, 1998; Sewell, 1992). We see this more culturally-
17 oriented work as an extension of the social structural tradition in a contemporary
18 idiom of culture post-Parsons, rather than as a fundamental break with a longer
19
tradition of studies of society, politics, and change. Many of the chapters
20111
21 specifically focus on the interplay of culture, politics, and organization.
22
23 Politics and Organizations
24
25 A central theme in institutional analysis has to do with how organizations are
26 important actors that shape and are shaped by broader political processes
27 (Gouldner, 1954; Perrow, 1991; Selznick, 1949). Stinchcombe discussed
28 organizations as providing important tools for societal stratification in the era
29 of Gesellschaft. That is, “the system of stratification among organizations, rather
30111 than the class system of individuals and families” (1965, p. 144) provides the
31
foundation for elites to engage in political competition. Building on this imagery,
32
33 he then developed an argument about the relationship between organizational
34 stratification and the sociology of revolution (pp. 169–180). This passage opens
35 up a variety of questions about how competition among organizations and
36 organizational forms is embedded in political struggle, how the creation of new
37 kinds of organizations requires modifications to extant institutions or the
38 building of new institutions that support those new forms, and how changes to
39 an organizational stratification system or the emergence of new organizational
40111 forms is fostered by political crises.
The empirical papers in this section restore attention to the institutionally-
and politically-contested nature of social structures, both patterns of resources
and systems of meanings that configure economic and social worlds and the
19
1 sources of change in them. Marc Schneiberg’s (this volume) chapter on mutual

2 fire insurers, for example, highlights how new organizational forms are forged
3 within the crucible of broader societal conflicts over economic development.
4 Linking old and new institutional arguments, Schneiberg shows that mutuals
5 simultaneously embodied particular “problem-solving” strategies and a theory
6
of economic order – a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” of farmers,
7
8 merchants and independent producers that directly challenged corporate liberal
9 visions of combinations, trusts and economic centralization. Struggles among
10111 these competing visions within fire insurance took place on varied terrain,
11 hastened under conditions of crisis occasioned by fires that ravaged cities
12 throughout the nineteenth century. But in the end, the viability of mutual forms
13 rested on a socio-industrial order characterized by a specific balance of political
14 power, anti-corporate social movements, a supportive ecology of churches and
15 local organizations, and the availability of mutual templates.
16 Andrew Spicer (this volume) builds on Stinchcombe’s notion of the
17 “revolutionary situation” to explore the rise and fall of mutual funds associated
18
with mass privatization in Russia. Moving beyond standard ecological analyses
19
20111 of organizational form growth and decline, Spicer highlights how organizational
21 forms that are made possible by revolutionary situations are inextricably
22 bound up in, even imprinted by, broader political struggles to resolve societal
23 conditions of ambiguity and instability. Spicer tells a persuasive story about
24 how the absence of institutional structures inhibits new forms and hence, how
25 the legitimacy and survival of organizational forms may require proponents to
26 be actively engaged in state-building projects that ultimately provide ground
27 rules for organizations in a society. He argues that mutual funds in Russia in
28 the early 1990s lost out at the organizational level because they were inept at
29 the institutional level.
30111
Maureen Scully and Amy Segal (this volume) focus attention on intraorga-
31
32 nizational social-movement activity in a way that harkens back to mid-century
33 sociologies of organizations by conceptualizing organizations as contested sites
34 where broader societal conflicts play out. They integrate organizational and
35 social movement perspectives in their investigation of how activist employees
36 in a particular firm mobilize identity claims (in this case, race and gender)
37 and resources to challenge organizational elites in an effort to reconstruct their
38 organizational context in a way that would be more hospitable to their identity
39 concerns. Building on Zald and Berger (1978), an underappreciated call
40111 for research on social movements in organizations, Scully and Segal argue for
attention to employee activism as an activity that can enhance our understanding
of how social movements penetrate organizational life and facilitate organiza-
tional and personal change in important and consequential ways.
1 These three chapters importantly push organizational theory towards questions

2 about collective action that become manifest in the rise and fall of organizational
3 forms as well as the construction of workplace environments. As such, this
4 work connects to a growing interest in combining the study of collective action
5 with organizational analysis (e.g. Balser, 1997; Clemens, 1997; Creed & Scully,
6 2000; Davis & McAdam, 2000; Fligstein, 1996; Lounsbury, 2001; Rao, 1998;
7
Rao, Morrill & Zald, 2000). In the spirit of revisiting Stinchcombe, we believe
8
9 that there are exciting opportunities for organizational researchers to empirically
10111 study how organizations are bound up in the politics of stratification, enabling
11 further theorization about the conditions and mechanisms that give rise to
12 new kinds of actors and practices, remake the beliefs and material resource
13 distributions that underpin societal stratification, and facilitate organizational
14 and societal changes. The empirical chapters in this section further highlight
15 that we need to be attentive to how these dynamics play themselves out at many
16 levels of analysis. A focus on the rise and decline of organizational forms
17 provides insights into macro level politics, but, according to Scully and Segal,
18 we also need to pay much more attention to how social movement processes
19
take place in the everyday workings of organizations.
20111
21
22 The Embeddedness of Entrepreneurship
23
24 A second broad theme in the study of social structure and organization is
25 how social structure affects the founding of new organizations. On this general
26 topic, Stinchcombe (1965, pp. 145–169) proposes an historical perspective
27 on organizational creation that emphasizes the conditions under which certain
28 organizational forms are created and how those forms are influenced by social
29 structures that exist at the time of organizational founding. Despite the wide-
30111 ranging discussion of these issues that focuses attention on how entrepreneurship
31
is embedded in broader societal institutions such as regulatory structures, strat-
32
33 ification systems, labor markets and the like, organizational theorists have tended
34 to selectively draw on his idea that entrepreneurial firms and organizations tend
35 to suffer from the liability of newness (pp. 148–150) without fully appreciating
36 how that theoretical claim was conditional upon broader social structures.
37 For instance, Stinchcombe focuses on the capacity for new organizations to
38 develop new roles and routines that vary based on the distribution of general-
39 ized skills outside an organization, the initiative of employees in the labor force,
40111 the degree of trust among workers based on competence in work roles, and the
competitive relations among producers and consumers. All of these elements,
in turn, are to some extent rooted in broader institutions that shape variation
among these factors. Over the past couple of decades, however, organizational
21
1 ecologists have cast doubt on Stinchcombe’s liability of newness proposition

2 by rigorously studying the effects of organizational age and size as populations
3 evolve. Many of these studies have shown that after controlling for size, the
4 liability of newness effect dissipates and is replaced by liabilities of old age
5 (see Carroll & Hannan, 2000; also Ruef, this volume). Many of these studies,
6
however, are relatively inattentive to the social structural conditions that delimit
7
8 entrepreneurial efforts, or render aged organizations unfit.
9 The papers we offer in the section on The Embeddedness of Entrepreneurship
10111 extend a broader social structural sensibility to the study of organizational
11 creation. Ruef (this volume), for instance, draws on earlier Stinchcombian
12 insights to study how entrepreneurship is influenced by factors having to do
13 with status, the processes by which resources are mobilized and legitimacy
14 attained, and organizational imprinting. Ruef argues that by attending to these
15 broader forces and processes in which entrepreneurs are embedded, we may
16 develop insights into the conditions under which certain kinds of organizations
17 may experience the liability of newness vis-à-vis other liabilities associated with
18
organizational age. As such, Ruef contributes to the development of a richer
19
20111 institutional ecology (e.g. Baum & Powell, 1995; Haveman & Rao, 1997) that
21 is attentive to the constitutive aspects of society.
22 Burton, Sørenson and Beckman (this volume) track the organizational origins
23 of the founders of new ventures to investigate how industry stratification can
24 inform the ecological analysis of start-up organizations. They draw on a sample
25 of Silicon Valley start-ups to highlight how founders who come from prominent
26 firms are more likely to be innovative and attract external financing. This paper
27 is novel because it provides insights into how organizational dynamics are fueled
28 by the flow of particular people. This is part of a growing line of work that
29 connects the tradition of organizational demography to studies of labor markets
30111
and strategic human resources (Baron, Hannan & Burton, 2001; Hannan, Burton
31
32 & Baron, 1996; Haveman & Cohen, 1994; Phillips, 2001). This direction
33 of research is particularly promising and has usefully contributed to our
34 understanding of how intraorganizational processes relate to broader macro
35 organizational dynamics.
36 Finally, Sacks (this volume) offers a perspective on entrepreneurship that
37 focuses on more classical sociological concerns having to do with stratification.
38 Based on extensive fieldwork and research on the venture capital industry,
39 Sacks echoes Ruef’s findings by deconstructing the notion of the liability of
40111 newness – how the social status of a founder (e.g. as proxied by race and
gender) differentially affects the experience of newness, in this case access to
venture capital. In particular, he illustrates how venture capitalists, operating
under conditions of extreme uncertainty and ambiguity rely on cues associated
1 with social, financial and reputational capital to make judgments about financing
2 prospective ventures.
3 The papers in this section extend our understanding of organizational creation
4 and entrepreneurship by specifying how societal forces embed and shape those
5 processes. These papers, therefore, not only provide fresh insights but new
6 directions that help forge a deeper synthesis between the sociological study of
7
organizations, societal stratification, and institutions (Stinchcombe, 1986).
8
9 Pioneering work in the study of stratification and organizations (e.g. Baron &
10111 Bielby, 1980) identified the research potential here. In recent years, studies
11 of market transitions and organizational mechanisms of stratification in
12 post-socialist societies further highlighted the institutionally-contingent features
13 of stratification (Guthrie, 1999; Keister, 2000; Li & Walder, 2001; Nee, 1996).
14 We believe, and as these papers differentially highlight, that a focus on the
15 intersection of labor market processes and organizations that accounts for
16 the role of professionalization processes, occupational expertise and personnel
17 flows is particularly promising. This line of work will also help to further reunite
18 the study of organizations with that of work and occupations and other important
19
ethnographic traditions linked to subfields such as science and technology
20111
21 studies (e.g. Barley & Kunda, 2001; Hargadon & Douglas, 2001; Lounsbury
22 & Kaghan, 2001; Owen-Smith, 2001) as well as culturally-oriented approaches
23 to stratification (Bourdieu, 1984; Breiger, 1995; Tilly, 1998).
24
25 Culture and Organizations
26
27 For mid-century sociologists, norms and values provided key components for
28 explanations of social structural stability and change (see DiMaggio & Powell,
29 1991). Stinchcombe, for instance, discussed norms as an element that helps to
30111 maintain institutional stability and the reproduction of stratification systems
31
through socialization. Conversely, it is uncertainty about societal norms or weak
32
33 commitment to institutional norms that provides the condition for social trans-
34 formation and revolution. Values and beliefs, however, did not provide a focal
35 point for analysis (but see Stinchcombe, 1968, pp. 107–118). Instead, they were
36 often conceptualized as a glue that holds together other, more material, social
37 structural elements. As institutional analysis has developed over the past three
38 decades, however, attention to broader belief systems has come to center stage
39 (e.g. Clemens, 1997; Dobbin, 1994; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001).
40111 New institutionalists in organizational sociology, for instance, make claims
about how social structures of resources and meanings, anchored in particular
cultural rules and patterns of relationships affect organization and field-level
structures and behavior. They use a definition of institutions as “cultural rules”
23
1 (Meyer, Boli & Thomas, 1987) that identify categories of social actors and their
2 appropriate activities or relationships (Barley & Tolbert, 1997). This perspective
3 points to a conception of institutions as generative of interests, identities
4 and appropriate practice models that take shape at the interface of wider
5 sociocultural contexts and particular social systems (Meyer & Rowan, 1977;
6
DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Dobbin, 1994; Scott & Meyer, 1994).
7
8 The chapters in the Culture and Organizations section of the volume extend
9 the institutionalism of Stinchcombe and other mid-century organizational
10111 sociologists by highlighting how processes of organizational creation and
11 building are importantly informed by and contribute to broader scale cultural
12 dynamics. Focusing on the rise of a radical group of scientists in the 1960s,
13 Science for the People, Moore and Hala (this volume) shed light on the symbolic
14 processes by which organizational actors are constituted. They highlight how a
15 group of “radical” scientists who dissented from the mainstream scientific
16 community constructed a social movement organization with precarious
17 boundaries that spanned the fields of professional science and the New Left.
18
Sympathetic to the constructivist strands of mid-century social structural
19
20111 analysis, updated with contemporary social-theoretic insights, Moore and
21 Hala provide a content-full social structural analysis that is attentive to the
22 micro-relational processes that comprise organizations.
23 Stevens (this volume) reports on how ideas and broader field social structures
24 support the vitality of U.S. conservative Protestant organizations. Extending
25 Stinchcombe’s (1965) discussion of the organizational production of solidarity,
26 he argues that the robustness of conservative Protestantism has to do with the
27 successful embedding of the faithful in dense and nested organizational relations
28 and the ability of that movement to spawn new organizations that reinforce the
29 faith through practices and routine everyday interactions. Contributing to both
30111
organizational theory and the sociology of religion, Stevens provocatively
31
32 expands the purview of organizational analysis and provides a grounded,
33 relational perspective on how ideas are organizationally sustained.
34 Investigating the emergence of gay and lesbian identity organizations in the
35 San Francisco area, Elizabeth Armstrong (this volume) highlights the processes
36 by which societal transformation related to the rise of the New Left fostered
37 an “identity logic of political organizing,” which in turn enabled new kinds of
38 lesbian/gay organizations to emerge. Like Schneiberg and Stevens, she sees the
39 cultural templates available to actors as limiting the ways they can organize.
40111 Before the emergence of the New Left, homosexual activists lacked a model
of organizing that could successfully produce widespread organizational growth.
The New Left, by providing a context of collective creativity, made possible
the creation of a new organizational model. She theorizes that contexts of
1 collective creativity, characterized by the intersection of multiple cultural

2 strains, dense interaction, and uncertainty, may play a role in accounting for
3 the emergence of innovative organizational forms.
4 These papers in the section on culture and organizations are at the cutting
5 edge of research that draws on currents in social theory and cultural sociology
6 to expand the social structural tradition by emphasizing the importance of
7
symbolic boundary processes and commensuration (Espeland & Stevens, 1997;
8
9 Lamont & Molnár, forthcoming). This work extends analyses of political
10111 processes and embeddedness by highlighting how broader belief systems
11 constrain and enable the actions that are possible (Bourdieu, 1984). All three
12 chapters in this section highlight how broader symbolic ideas constitute actors
13 and their identities, but also shed light on how collective action and other forms
14 of micromobilization can help to reshape symbolic meaning structures (Fligstein,
15 2001). While our knowledge of the dynamics of symbolic structures is still
16 quite limited, these chapters provide solid leads on the kinds of mechanisms
17 that can inform a broader theory of institutional emergence and change
18 (Clemens, this volume). More pointedly, no theory of institutional change can
19
claim to be complete without attending to the broader cultural ideas that provide
20111
21 the symbolic gridwork that consequentially define and shape social organization.
22
23 VOLUME POSTSCRIPT
24 AND FURTHER RESEARCH
25
26 In a postscript, Stinchcombe (this volume) reflects on developments in
27 organizational theory over the past four decades and offers some of his own
28 suggestions for future research. This essay emphasizes familiar themes –
29 situated analysis, the specificity of cases and grounded mechanisms, but also
30111 charts out terrain that is particular to recent cultural and social analysis.
31
Stinchcombe argues for primary attention to a sociology of commensuration,
32
33 the politically-inflected activity that establishes comparable metrics among
34 disparate elements of social life and hence renders these tractable to authority
35 and power (Espeland & Stevens, 1998). He focuses on “evangelism,” or the
36 proselytizing work done by existing organizations (including social networks)
37 to sponsor and replicate themselves. He proposes this process as an alternative
38 to conventional mechanisms of institutional change that neglect the activities
39 of existing organizations. Finally, he refreshes a network theory of legitimacy
40111 and truth-telling with a statement of the socially-generated and situated nature
of “truth” in a community of practice. In short, Stinchcombe revisits
Stinchcombe 1965 in the spirit of contemporary studies of culture, politics, and
organizations. Epistemologically, he continues to push us towards the study of
25
1 mechanisms that connect variation in social structure to variation in organiza-

2 tions, practices and other entities and flows at a lower level of analysis.
3 To reprise our main argument, we believe that a common intellectual commit-
4 ment that runs throughout many of the empirical chapters in this volume and
5 is emphasized in the postscript has to do with a resounding rejection of overly
6
reductive, materialist and instrumentalist notions of organization and social
7
8 structure. Instead of conceptualizing organizational behavior as primarily
9 influenced by exchange relationships, the essays here advocate a more
10111 culturally- and politically-rich focus on how broader elements of stratification
11 and societal beliefs embodied in category schemes such as logics, models, and
12 frames constitute social actors and change as a result of multi-level political
13 processes that involve not only producer organizations but also state agencies,
14 trade associations, social movement organizations and other field-level organi-
15 zations. Hence, we agree with Stinchcombe (this volume) that cultural
16 approaches to social structure can usefully extend the mid-century structural
17 tradition and foster the development of novel theoretical insights by focusing
18
our attention on important new problems and questions. The politics of commen-
19
20111 suration (Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 2000; Espeland & Stevens, 1997; Heimer,
21 2001) and associated processes of boundary making, maintenance and erosion
22 (Lamont & Molnár, forthcoming) provide important avenues for future research,
23 but in no way exhaust the variety of ways that a focus on cultural processes
24 can reorient and renew a broader social structural approach to organizations.
25 Empirical chapters in this volume highlight multiple directions that include the
26 study of organizational forms, societal logics, social movements, flows of ideas
27 and people, and more generally, the dynamics of social organization.
28 We do not advocate for the replacement of a one-sided view of organiza-
29 tions as mainly influenced by instrumental exchange processes with another
30111
one-sided view of organizations as culturally constituted. We view symbolic
31
32 and material realms as mutually constituted (Bourdieu, 1984; Sewell, 1992).
33 Nonetheless, given the historical marginalization of cultural perspectives in
34 organizational theory, it may be useful to valorize that dimension of analysis
35 given the current imbalance in the literature. For instance, we know very little
36 about how collective forms of rationality emerge, erode and become transformed
37 (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). While institutionalists in the 1980s tended to distin-
38 guish between the ideas of technical efficiency and institutional forces, more
39 attention needs to be directed towards the social construction of performance
40111 and how the ability to judge performance or efficiency depends upon the kind
of institutional infrastructure that is built (Fligstein, 1990; Powell, 1991; Strang
& Macy, 2001). Further, we know little about how social and organizational
change is influenced and shaped by multiple forms of rationality (Friedland &
1 Alford, 1991; Stryker, 2000; Weber, 1978), how actors manipulate symbol
2 systems to gain or reproduce social status (Bowker & Star, 1999; Breiger, 1995;
3 Hirsch, 1986; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Tilly, 1998), and how organizations
4 come to define their interests in the first place (Clemens, this volume). These
5 kinds of problematics can help to restore broader societal sensibilities to the
6 study of organizations and renew the social structural tradition in light of
7
contemporary developments in social theory.
8
9 More concretely, we believe that organizational sociology can make headway
10111 in these directions by focusing on the study of variation. While the new
11 institutionalism in organizational analysis became prominent through the study
12 of isomorphism and the winnowing of variation (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991),
13 much could be gained by systematically investigating how variation is created
14 (Stinchcombe, 1997). This means that instead of looking for broad patterns
15 across many cases, we must dig deeper into our empirical research sites by
16 disaggregating populations into types and identifying dimensions of variation
17 (Ragin, 2000). A focus on variation leads us away from aspirations of grand
18 theory (Parsons, 1949; Kiser & Hechter, 1998) and towards a more middle
19
range focus on mechanisms and boundary conditions (Granovetter, 1985;
20111
21 Hedström & Swedberg, 1998; Merton, 1957; Somers, 1998; Stinchcombe,
22 1983).
23 Already fruitful empirical avenues include the study of how variation in prac-
24 tices becomes instantiated (DiMaggio & Mullen, 2000; Lounsbury, 2001;
25 Schneiberg & Bartley, 2001), how the actual practices of organizations deviate
26 from their symbolic claims (Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000; Meyer & Rowan,
27 1977), how organizational forms and practices shift or get transformed over
28 time (Leblebici et al., 1991; Scott et al., 2000; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999), how
29 new kinds of organizational forms emerge (Haveman & Rao, 1997; Rao, 1998;
30111 Ruef, 2000), and how comparable kinds of practices diffuse differently (Davis
31
& Greve, 1997; Strang & Soule, 1998). Per the arguments of this chapter and
32
33 the articles in this volume that contribute to these research directions, future
34 research must continue to focus on the interplay of action and structure, but in
35 ways that take both the political and cultural components of structure seriously
36 (Brieger, this volume; Mohr, 2000; Stryker, this volume) while also attending
37 to the role of invention, innovation and the origins of change (Clemens, this
38 volume; Moore & Hala, this volume). While it is unlikely that simple rational
39 choice approaches to organizational action will contribute to our further under-
40111 standing of these kinds of questions, more direct attention to the role of actors
is needed. For instance, it would be particularly fruitful to continue developing
linkages between structural approaches to organizations and Carnegie school
insights that emphasize how choice is shaped by time-inflected flows of people,
27
1 solutions, problems and decision situations that occur in more or less ambiguous
2 environments (Heimer, 1985; Heimer & Stinchcombe, 1999; March & Olsen,
3 1976; Ocasio, 1997; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). These theoretical efforts should
4 be facilitated by methodological advances such as those involving the modeling
5 of structure (Breiger, 2000, this volume).
6
Stinchcombe 1965 charted out terrain in organizational analysis of sociological
7
8 concern. Among other tasks, his essay was an exercise in “specifying ignorance,”
9 that is, in identifying research opportunities neglected or ignored because there was
10111 little intellectual infrastructure to guide the questions or because empirical sources
11 were uncongenial. In short, being the good pragmatist that he is, he worked with
12 the resources and tools at hand to chart a set of questions that gave voice to the
13 institutionalisms of early 20th century U.S. social science (Stinchcombe, 1997;
14 Scott, 2001: chapter 1). The papers in this volume make headway in this project –
15 creating new analytic and methodological language, exploring novel data sources,
16 and speculating about new directions in the sociological study of organizations.
17 The social structural tradition of organizational analysis has proven to be a robust,
18
progressive tradition and is alive and well.
19
20111
21
22 NOTES
23
24 1. While obviously leaving a lot of major works out of that abbreviated list, this is
25 neither the place nor the purpose for a full celebration of Stinchcombe’s body of research.
Instead, we concentrate our attention on and revisit the well-cited 1965 paper, “Social
26
structure and organizations” in an effort to uncover and highlight aspects of the social
27 structural tradition that could usefully extend and invigorate contemporary sociological
28 approaches to the study of organizations.
29 2. We used SSCI to identify all citations of this paper between 1964 and 2000, using
30111 both computerized indexes and a handcheck to capture citations to the paper using variant
31 versions of the title and author name.
32
33
34 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
35
36 Jenny Omundson provided expert research assistance in the citation analysis
37 tracking Stinchcombe (1965). We would like to thank Howard Aldrich, Lis
38 Clemens, Paul Hirsch, Chick Perrow, Dick Scott, Art Stinchcombe, Mayer Zald,
39 participants at the Social Organization Seminar (SOS) at the University
40111 of Arizona, participants at the Workshop on Organizations, Institutions, and
Change (WOIC) at Northwestern University, as well as all volume contributors
for all their comments, suggestions, enthusiastic support, and encouragement.
We would like to especially thank Elizabeth Armstrong for her very detailed
1 editorial comments and Marc Schneiberg for gently nudging us to be more

2 concrete about the theoretical claims and directions that comprise our agenda.
3
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1. Social structure and organizations revisited

Article · January 2002

Michael Lounsbury Marc Ventresca

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1 contemporary trends in social and cultural theory. We see developments in the

1 ambiguity over uncertainty and treat these relations as politically-inflected and

1 This sampling of studies share a number of analytic features and commit-

1 argued. In the spirit of Merton and Stinchcombe, we then “specify ignorance” by

1 The growing prominence of administrative theories in the study of organizations

1 de-emphasized a focus on conflict, situated case analysis, and broader social

1 These sociological perspectives on organizations not only conceptualized

1 politics, culture, social movements and stratification. Today, at the intersection

1 be less paradigmatic and, in a sense, will involve blending across previously

1 Breiger and Elisabeth Clemens, respectively, that further highlight research

1 sources of change in them. Marc Schneiberg’s (this volume) chapter on mutual

1 These three chapters importantly push organizational theory towards questions

1 ecologists have cast doubt on Stinchcombe’s liability of newness proposition

1 collective creativity, characterized by the intersection of multiple cultural

1 mechanisms that connect variation in social structure to variation in organiza-

1 editorial comments and Marc Schneiberg for gently nudging us to be more

1 Stern, R. N. (1979). The Development of an Interorganizational Control Network: The Case of

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