Chapter 1 Organizational institutionalism at Stanford: Reflections on the founding of a 30-year theoretical research program

Abstract

My intent in this chapter is not to review this ever-expanding body of work, which now encompasses all sorts of “new” institutionalisms applied to micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of social analysis in a wide variety of fields. Rather, I propose to stay a narrower course, focusing on the “new” organizational institutionalism that emerged at Stanford in the 1970s. To a considerable extent, this focus excludes from sustained attention the growth of world polity theory, a body of work that is closely aligned to organizational institutionalism, but that was developed somewhat independently of Scott by Meyer and his associates (for an excellent, short overview of this line of work, see Jepperson, 2002; otherwise, see Meyer et al., 1997 or Meyer, 2000). In focusing on organizational institutionalism, I will add only marginally to what has already been written. My first task will be to describe the earliest developments of this form of analysis in the 1970s and early 1980s at Stanford, since describing how research programs in organizational studies got founded at Stanford is a major theme of the present volume. After that, I will advance some ideas about how and why this research program became so influential, in so many fields of study.

Citation

Rowan, B. (2010), "Chapter 1 Organizational institutionalism at Stanford: Reflections on the founding of a 30-year theoretical research program", Bird Schoonhoven, C. and Dobbin, F. (Ed.) Stanford's Organization Theory Renaissance, 1970–2000 (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 28), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2010)0000028005