Revitalizing Organizational Theory Through a Problem-oriented Sociology
Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship
ISBN: 978-1-83549-591-9, eISBN: 978-1-83549-588-9
ISSN: 0733-558X
Publication date: 23 September 2024
Abstract
Organizations remain a vital sociological topic, but organizational sociology, as a subfield, has evolved significantly since its inception. In this paper, I argue that organization sociology is becoming increasingly disconnected from organizational theory, as currently conceived. The focus of sociological research on organizations has become more empirically grounded in the study of social problems and how organizations contribute to them. Sociologists continue to see organizations as important actors in society that play a role in shaping social order and as contexts in which social processes play out. I propose two main sociological approaches for organizational research, which I describe as “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as platforms and locations of social interactions and the building of community. These approaches are somewhat disconnected from the sort of grand theorizing that characterizes much of organizational theory. I argue that the problem-oriented sociology of these two approaches offers a vital way for organizational scholars to expand and theoretically revitalize the field.
Keywords
Citation
King, B.G. (2024), "Revitalizing Organizational Theory Through a Problem-oriented Sociology", Clegg, S., Grothe-Hammer, M. and Velarde, K.S. (Ed.) Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 90), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 19-54. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20240000090002
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024 Brayden G King
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This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode.
Laments of the decline of organizational sociology have become common in recent years (Gorman, 2014; King, 2017; Scott, 2004). One underlying reason for the supposed demise of organizational sociology is that the subfield has become less theoretically vibrant and less central to the discipline and, consequently, less important to sociology departments themselves (Gorman, 2014). But I contend that our view of organizational sociology’s place in the discipline is slanted by looking back nostalgically to an era when the subfield was, arguably, at its peak of theoretical creativity. In the 1970s and 1980s, sociology was fertile ground for offering new theories of organizations, which went on to seed the maturing field of organizational theory. Institutional theory (e.g., Meyer & Rowan, 1977), organizational ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), and network theory (Burt, 1980) all blossomed during this period. The careers of these theories’ progenitors thrived as well, leading some of them (and their students) to emigrate to business schools. Increasingly, scholars who adopted these perspectives found their homes in business schools, and not surprisingly, many of the scholars who used the theories in their own empirical work imbued those theories with a more managerialist orientation. Rather than simply explain how organizations come to be and interact with other elements of society, organizational theories were now meant to also explain how to make organizations better or how to make them better serve the purposes of managers.1 Sociologists became less interested in these theories as they mutated.
But that is just one narrative of what happened to the subfield of organizational sociology. Another way to read the history of organizational sociology is one of success. Organizational sociologists developed uniquely sociological views of organizations, which departed in important ways from economics-oriented approaches; those perspectives proved useful for management scholars, and they incorporated key insights into their own research about how organizations behave (or ought to behave). Management scholars borrowed extensively from sociology, and the new field of organizational theory thrived as a result (Lounsbury & Beckman, 2015; Whetten et al., 2009). Organizational sociology succeeded precisely because it had practical and applied implications! But a consequence of this success was that organizational theory began to develop a life of its own, distinct from the discipline of sociology.
Another consequence of vibrancy of organizational theory was a distancing from the founding discipline of sociology (and we can include anthropology and psychology among the disaffected disciplines). Organizational theory (or organization studies) became its own settled field, as Leopold Ringel (2024) argues in this volume. Even though organizational theory will always be profoundly influenced by the early importation of sociological theories, it has since evolved into a distinctive field and grown distant from the discipline of sociology, as the ongoing theoretical concerns of sociologists seem to differ from what organizational theorists care about. This is the story we often hear, at least.
But I will argue that sociologists have not moved on from organizational sociology at all or at least not from “a sociology of organizations” (Lammers, 1981). Organizations continue to be a concern of much theoretical and empirical sociology. Due to their prominent role in most societal dynamics, sociologists need to theorize what organizations do, how they influence societal dynamics, and how they serve as social contexts for groups and individual behavior. The kinds of organizational phenomena that sociologists analyze range from the sources of economic and social inequality to the drivers of political participation. And of course, the forms of organizations that sociologists study are equally varied, including voluntary associations, schools, and the business establishments that management scholars typically study. Moreover, sociologists are increasingly interested in organizations because they see them as contributors to social problems (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988), such as inequality or climate change, as well as offering the tools for interventions that can help alleviate those problems.
Organizations matter because they are fundamental building blocks of society. Perrow’s (1991) and Coleman’s (1982) basic observation that organizations facilitate much of social life still remains true. We rely on organizations to accomplish our collective endeavors, not to mention our personal ones. Organizations are as relevant as ever. The question that organizational scholars should ask is not, is organizational sociology in decline? But rather, they should ask, what does organizational sociology look like today? What is its relationship to the broader field of sociology?
In this paper, I offer a reading of contemporary organizational sociology based, somewhat selectively, on research published in the traditionally most important journals in US-based sociology and one European journal: American Sociological Review (ASR), American Journal of Sociology (AJS), and European Sociological Review (ESR). Searching the keywords, titles, and abstracts of articles for mentions of “organization” and “organizational,” I identify 118 articles published about organizations in these top sociology journals during a 10-year time span from 2012 to 2021. By selecting exclusively only those articles published in elite sociology journals, the group of articles is an idiosyncratic subset but one that, I believe, accurately reflects how organizations are represented in mainstream sociology. When organizational theorists say that sociologists no longer care about organizations, they usually say this in reflection of journals like ASR, AJS, and ESR. Although there is some engagement with organizational theory as typically conceived, most of these articles are not written with organizational theorists as their primary audience. But they are, undoubtedly, organizational in their focus. The articles touch on a variety of sociological themes, ranging from culture to employment discrimination.
Based on my reading of these articles, I identify two approaches to organizational sociology that currently thrive in the discipline: “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as contexts of social interactions and the building of community. Both approaches allow for the study of organizations as part of society and, importantly, as both drivers of and solutions for the pressing social problems of society.
A common theme within these articles is understanding the role of organizations in creating and magnifying important social problems. This theme, I will argue, is rooted in a long sociological tradition in understanding the causes and implications of social problems and is now the orienting perspective within mainstream sociology (e.g., Schneider, 1985). Rather than starting from a common theoretical orientation – as is true with economics’ adherence to rational choice – or a methodological approach – as is true of psychology’s embrace of experimental positivism – what sets sociology apart is its interest in explaining and potentially offering solutions to social problems, such as inequality. Sociologists often find that organizations take center stage in their explanations for these social problems. The approach that sociologists take to study organizations depends on whether they cast the organization as a unit within society or as a social structure or platform that is worth interrogating on its own.
Articles that capture the organizations within society approach cast organizations as basic building blocks of social structure. Some organizations, such as corporations or grassroots movements organizations, are created to accomplish some social purpose, like generating wealth for owners or pursuing a social justice cause. Organizations, whether they intend to or not, also create, reproduce, and amplify basic inequalities within society, as when a business organization enables wealth generation for an elite few. Another type of article in this genre of organizational sociology focuses on the organization as a social actor. That is, it conceives of the organization as pursuing some purpose and emphasizes the agentic qualities of the organization. Research in political sociology, for example, often analyzes organizations as powerful entities that put their goals and interests above those of individuals in mass society. Analyses of this type depict organizations as bodies of concentrated resources that are able to leverage institutional mechanisms of control to wield their power. Other studies in this vein highlight the extent to which organizations serve as gateways to larger institutions or as the purveyors of public goods, as was the case of Lipsky’s (2010) “street-level bureaucracy.”
Articles that capture a society within organizations approach usually analyze organizations as platforms and spaces that host the social dynamics that interest the authors. This kind of research recognizes that many of society’s meaningful interactions, such as the building of community, take place within the boundaries of formal organizations. Often, these studies focus on the workplace. Scholarship on occupations, professions, and work focuses on organizations because that is where people do their jobs. In this sense, organizations are primary sites of other fundamental social processes that sociologists care about, including processes of conflict, cooperation, and creativity. But this genre of sociology also emphasizes organizations as locations where elite reproduction takes place. Much of this research examines internal stratification of resources among competing groups and individuals.
What is our understanding of organizational sociology if we consider articles from this sample as the foundation of the subfield? I will argue in this paper that it gives us a more empirically grounded view of organizational sociology that is rooted in an effort to understand society itself and the problems within that society. But empirically grounded research is not necessarily theoretically vacuous. In fact, this type of research, which begins with an exploration of an empirical problem or puzzle, creates the seeds for new theoretical insights. Beginning with an empirical puzzle was the starting place for most of the theoretically fruitful papers that shaped the period of high creativity in organizational sociology in the 1970s and 1980s. Scholars like John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977) did not begin writing about “rationalized myths” in an effort to revolutionize organizational sociology and found a new theoretical literature on institutions. Rather, their analysis was an effort to understand the empirical puzzle of why schools adopted the language of rationalization without any real behavioral commitment to the formal structures left in its wake. They were trying to understand a basic social problem that persisted in educational organizations. This insight led to a theoretical breakthrough that not only changed the way we conceive of Weberian bureaucracy and rationalization processes but also reoriented our study of institutions in organizations (Scott, 1992).
As mentioned before, the purpose of much contemporary organizational sociology is to shed light on basic social problems. This type of organizational research, while fundamental to sociology, is somewhat different from the way that organizational theorists have come to approach research, in which the question of “theoretical contribution” reigns supreme and motivates the impetus for the study. Rather than seek theoretical insights from developing a better explanation of a social problem or empirical puzzle, organizational theorists usually begin by finding a theoretical puzzle and trying to find an ideal organizational setting in which to resolve that puzzle (or at least that is the way papers are written). This difference in framing research creates distance between the body of contemporary organizational sociology and organizational theory, at the current moment.
In this paper, I discuss the implications of taking organizational sociology on its own terms. I argue that the potential for developing novel theoretical insights is still there, but creating a fruitful dialogue between the two fields may require loosening our expectations about what constitutes a theoretical contribution and focusing more on the problem-oriented nature of empirical research.
Organizational Research in Sociology
In pursuing a grounded approach to understanding the contemporary state of organizational sociology, I selected all articles in the ASR that included “organization” or “organizational” as a keyword or word in the title of the paper. The same search in the ESR yielded zero articles, and the AJS does not include a keyword search. To create comparable results for these journals, I expanded the search to include all articles with the word “organization” in the abstract. I eliminated articles that used the term “organization” to describe a structure other than a formal organization, as for example, when an article describes the “social organization” of a neighborhood. AJS yielded the greatest number of articles with 52, ASR had 47, and ESR had 18. These represent roughly 15% of all articles published in AJS, 10% of articles in ASR, and 3% of articles in ESR.
I coded key features of each article that came up in the search. Organizational form refers to the type of organization(s) analyzed in the research. Forms can be as abstract as a general kind of organization, as is the case with Ray’s (2019) theory of “racialized organizations,” or quite specific, as in the of Fligstein et al.’s (2017) research on the Federal Reserve Bank. The most typical form was “employer.” In this case, the kind of organizational form likely varied, as it was often self-reported by an individual survey participant simply as the organization that employed them.
Theory refers to the primary theoretical orientation(s) that the authors use to motivate their analysis. In some cases, it was stated quite clearly, but in many cases, especially in work that is more problem oriented, the theoretical orientation refers to a broad literature on the topic that has built-in assumptions about the behavior or social dynamic in question. Method refers to the type of analysis applied in the study. In most cases, I simply note the most prominent method used, but when multiple methods were applied equally, I listed both methods.
Outcome of interest is the object of the study design. In quantitative studies, outcome refers to the dependent variable of the analysis, but in many qualitative studies, the outcome is a process or dynamic the authors are seeking to shed light on. Unit refers to the unit of analysis that the authors are interested in examining. In quantitative studies, the unit of analysis is relatively straightforward, but in qualitative studies, it is not always clear. I chose the unit of analysis that seemed most relevant to the research question posed by the authors.
Finally, I coded each article by the organizational approach evident in the paper. The approach is a categorization of the author’s interest in organizations. To code these approaches, I first created two subcodes: level of theorizing and organizations’ role in the theorizing. For the level of theorizing, I focused on the primary mechanisms used by the authors to generate an explanation for their outcome of interest. The second subcode, organizations’ role, was more specifically about where the organization resided in the authors’ chain of theorizing.
If the authors are interested in organizations as structures or actors that they want to explain or as structures or actors that influence broader society in some way, I categorize their approach as “organizations within society.” In these studies, the main theoretical lens explains how organizations shape the broader society in which they are a part or how they operate and function as social units. Studies of this type are generally quite “macro” in their flavor. Individuals may be present in the study, but organizations operate as actors in their own right alongside individuals. For example, consider the case of an organization seeking to shape the mindset of policymakers and thereby shape legislation (Best, 2012). The focus of studies like this is about the existence and impact of organizations on broader societal, and more specifically legislative, outcomes; hence, I refer to this approach as organizations within society.
If the authors are interested in organizations as contexts in which societal dynamics play out, I categorize their approach as “society within organizations.” Sociologists often study organizations simply because this is the place where society happens. Individuals rely on organizations for forming a community, getting jobs and income, and doing a variety of other things that require collective endeavors. For many of these studies, the main interest of the authors is not the organizations themselves, but rather the outcomes that take place within organizations. For instance, if a scholar is interested in explaining why some occupations have a greater gender pay gap than others, they are likely to turn to organizations as a location for their study (e.g., van Hek & van der Lippe, 2019). Many of these studies include organizational practices, rules, or other dynamics as key variables in their analysis, but not all do. These studies tend to be more “micro” in that they are interested in outcomes experienced at the individual level of analysis. For example, Qvist et al. (2018) focus on voluntary organizations as a setting to understand better why certain individuals dedicate more hours to volunteering than others.
Articles Using an “Organizations Within Society” Approach.
| Author(s) | Year | Title | Published | Organization Form | Theory | Method | Outcome of Interest | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S. Y. P. Choi; R. David | 2012 | Lustration systems and trust: evidence from survey experiments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland | AJS | Government agencies | Lustration systems | Survey research | Trust in government | Citizens |
| D. J. Wang; S. A. Soule | 2012 | Social movement organizational collaboration: networks of learning and the diffusion of protest tactics, 1960–1995 | AJS | Social movement organization | Diffusion theory | Network analysis; protest data | Tactical diffusion between organizational dyads | Dyad |
| H. R. Greve; H. Rao | 2012 | Echoes of the past: organizational foundings as sources of an institutional legacy of mutualism | AJS | Nonprofit organizations; cooperatives | Imprinting theory; institutional theory | Panel data; longitudinal analysis | Founding of cooperative stores | Norwegian communities |
| I. B. Vasi; B. G. King | 2012 | Social movements, risk perceptions, and economic outcomes: the effect of primary and secondary stakeholder activism on firms’ perceived environmental risk and financial performance | ASR | Public corporations | Social movement theory; sociology of risk | Longitudinal analysis | Risk perceptions | Company/year |
| R. K. Best | 2012 | Disease politics and medical research funding: three ways advocacy shapes policy | ASR | Advocacy organizations | Political agenda setting | Longitudinal analysis | Funding and legislative attention to diseases | Disease as treated in congress/year |
| J. Alcacer; P. Ingram | 2013 | Spanning the institutional abyss: the intergovernmental network and the governance of foreign direct investment | AJS | Intergovernmental organizations | Relational theory | Gravity models | Foreign direct investment flows | Country network dyads |
| A. Goldstein; H. A. Haveman | 2013 | Pulpit and press: denominational dynamics and the growth of religious magazines in Antebellum America | ASR | Religious organizations (as represented by religious magazines) | Social movement theory; economic theories of religion | Longitudinal analysis | Magazine foundings | Denomination/year |
| E. d. Graauw; S. Gleeson; I. Bloemraad | 2013 | Funding immigrant organizations: suburban free riding and local civic presence | AJS | Immigrant service organizations | Social construction theory; civil society | Interviews | Source of funding for organization; how organizations procured funding | Immigrant organization |
| G. Negro; F. Perretti; G. R. Carroll | 2013 | Challenger groups, commercial organizations, and policy enactment: local lesbian/gay rights ordinances in the United States from 1972 to 2008 | AJS | Commercial organizations linked to gay/lesbian | Social movement theory; organizational ecology | Longitudinal; hazard models | Policy passage of anti-discriminatory policy | Municipality |
| M. T. Heaney; F. Rojas | 2014 | Hybrid activism: social movement mobilization in a multimovement environment | AJS | Social movement organizations | Social movement theory; organizational identity | Survey research | Movement organization membership | Individual activist |
| D. Riley; J. J. Fernández | 2014 | Beyond strong and weak: rethinking postdictatorship civil societies | AJS | Political parties; cooperative organizations | Civil society | Archival research | Organizational membership | Parties and organizations |
| J. P. Steil; I. B. Vasi | 2014 | The new immigration contestation: social movements and local immigration policy making in the United States, 2000–2011 | AJS | Social movement organizations | Social movement theory | Archival research | Adoption of pro-immigrant ordinances | Local municipality |
| D. Strang; R. J. David; S. Akhlaghpour | 2014 | Coevolution in management fashion: an agent-based model of consultant-driven innovation | AJS | Firms | Management fads; diffusion | Computational experiments; agent-based modeling | Adoption of management fads | Firms |
| A. J. Sharkey | 2014 | Categories and organizational status: the role of industry status in the response to organizational deviance | AJS | US firms | Status theory; social evaluation | Financial analysis | Investor reaction to earnings restatements (car) | Firms at time of earnings restatements |
| A. Wimmer | 2014 | Nation building. a long-term perspective and global analysis | ESR | Voluntary and civic organizations | Theory of state formation | Longitudinal analysis | Number of voluntary associations | Nation-state |
| G. C. Gray; S. S. Silbey | 2014 | Governing inside the organization: interpreting regulation and compliance | AJS | Business organizations | Institutional theory; regulatory compliance theory | Ethnography | Perceptions of regulatory control and compliance | Individual managers; organizational perspective |
| G. C. Mora | 2014 | Cross-field effects and ethnic classification: the institutionalization of Hispanic panethnicity, 1965 to 1990 | ASR | State agencies; Hispanic civic organizations | Field theory; social construction of categories | Archival and interviews | Emergence of new ethnic category | Historical process |
| G. Negro; F. Visentin; A. Swaminathan | 2014 | Resource partitioning and the organizational dynamics of “fringe banking” | ASR | Payday lenders | Resource partitioning theory | Longitudinal analysis | Entry and exit rates of payday lenders | Wisconsin county |
| T. Bartley; C. Child | 2014 | Shaming the corporation: the social production of targets and the anti-sweatshop movement | ASR | Multinational firms | Social movement theory; power analysis | Longitudinal analysis | Firms become target of an anti-sweatshop campaign | Firm/year |
| M.-H. McDonnell; B. G. King; S. A. Soule | 2015 | A dynamic process model of private politics: activist targeting and corporate receptivity to social challenges | ASR | Firms | Social movement theory | Longitudinal analysis | Receptivity to activists | Firm/year |
| J. J. Savelsberg; H. N. Brehm | 2015 | Representing human rights violations in Darfur: global justice, national distinctions | AJS | Media companies | Media and ideological bias | Archival research; content analysis | Reporting of violent crimes | Media frames |
| M. Smångs | 2016 | Doing violence, making race: southern lynching and white racial group formation | AJS | Southern democratic party | Collective identity; resource mobilization | Event history analysis | Public lynchings | County |
| A. De Wit; R. Bekkers; M. Broese van Groenou | 2016 | Heterogeneity in crowding-out: when are charitable donations responsive to government support? | ESR | Nonprofit organizations | Welfare state regime theory | Survey research | Donations to nonprofit | Individuals |
| B. Eidlin | 2016 | Why is there no labor party in the United States? Political articulation and the Canadian comparison, 1932 to 1948 | ASR | Political parties | None | Comparative historical analysis | Formation and endurance of labor party | Country |
| H. R. Greve; J.-Y. Kim; D. Teh | 2016 | Ripples of fear: the diffusion of a bank panic | ASR | Banks | Diffusion theory | Longitudinal analysis | Bank experiencing a run | Bank |
| J. R. Levine | 2016 | The privatization of political representation: community-based organizations as nonelected neighborhood representatives | ASR | Nonprofit community organizations | Political sociology | Ethnography | Political role of community organizations | Community organizations |
| N. Fligstein; A. F. Roehrkasse | 2016 | The causes of fraud in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009: evidence from the mortgage-backed securities industry | ASR | Mortgage securities issuers | Theories of white collar crime | Longitudinal analysis | Settlements over alleged fraud | Firm |
| S. Liu; H. Wu | 2016 | The ecology of organizational growth: Chinese law firms in the age of globalization | AJS | Chinese law firms | Social ecology | Longitudinal | Organizational growth | Law firm |
| A. D. Çakmaklı; C. Boone; A. v. Witteloostuijn | 2017 | When does globalization lead to local adaptation? the emergence of hybrid Islamic schools in Turkey, 1985–2007 | AJS | Turkish high school organizations | Globalization theory | Longitudinal analysis | Founding rate of hybrid organizations | School district |
| J. A. Kitts; A. Lomi; D. Mascia; F. Pallotti; E. Quintane | 2017 | Investigating the temporal dynamics of interorganizational exchange: patient transfers among Italian hospitals | AJS | Italian hospitals | Exchange theory; network analysis | Network analysis | Patient transfers between hospitals | Hospital dyads |
| J. Murray | 2017 | Interlock globally, act domestically: corporate political unity in the 21st century | AJS | G500 firms | Elite and class theory | Longitudinal analysis; network analysis | Common political donations | Firm dyads |
| K. Tsutsui | 2017 | Human rights and minority activism in Japan: transformation of movement actorhood and local-global feedback loop | AJS | Social movement organizations | World polity theory; organizational institutionalism | Interviews | Movement dynamics | Three Japan-based movement organizations |
| C. Tuğal | 2017 | The uneven neoliberalization of good works: Islamic charitable fields and their impact on diffusion | AJS | Islamic charitable organizations | Political economy; neoliberal diffusion | Interviews | Transformation of charity organizations | Turkish and Egyptian charitable fields |
| J. Jourdan; R. Durand; P. H. Thornton | 2017 | The price of admission: organizational deference as strategic behavior | AJS | Market finance organizations | Category theory; symbolic interactionism | Longitudinal analysis | Deference on social capital | Firm-year |
| K. Pernell; J. Jung; F. Dobbin | 2017 | The hazards of expert control: chief risk officers and risky derivatives | ASR | Banks | Institutional theory; moral licensing | Longitudinal analysis | Adoption of risky financial derivatives | Bank-year |
| Y. Shi; F. A. Dokshin; M. Genkin; M. E. Brashears | 2017 | A member saved is a member earned? the recruitment-retention trade-off and organizational strategies for membership growth | ASR | Organizations (general) | Organizational ecology | Formal model/simulation | Organizational growth | Organization |
| E. M. McDonnell | 2017 | Patchwork leviathan: how pockets of bureaucratic governance flourish within institutionally diverse developing states | ASR | State organizations in developing countries | Bureaucracy theory | Comparative historical; interviews | Coexistence of bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic features | State organization |
| C. Arndt | 2018 | White-collar unions and attitudes towards income inequality, redistribution, and state–market relations | ESR | Labor unions | Labor and industrial relations | Survey research | Attitudes about economic redistribution | Individual union members |
| D. Clifford | 2018 | Neighborhood context and enduring differences in the density of charitable organizations: reinforcing dynamics of foundation and dissolution | AJS | Charitable organizations | Organizational ecology | Longitudinal analysis | Organizational foundings and dissolution | Neighborhoods |
| M. A. Kadivar | 2018 | Mass mobilization and the durability of new democracies | ASR | Social movement organization | Social movement theory; democratization | Mixed; longitudinal and case study | Democratic breakdown | Nation-state |
| Y. Long | 2018 | The contradictory impact of transnational AIDS institutions on state repression in China, 1989–2013 | AJS | Chinese health organizations | Institutional theory; social movement theory | Multi-site field research | State repressions of aids activists | Government organizations |
| M. Ruef; A. Grigoryeva | 2018 | Jim Crow, ethnic enclaves, and status attainment: occupational mobility among U.S. blacks, 1880–1940 | AJS | Self-employment | Ethnic enclave theory; ecology | Archival; longitudinal analysis | Self-employment; income attainment | Census tracts |
| M.-H. McDonnell; B. G. King | 2018 | Order in the court: how firm status and reputation shape the outcomes of employment discrimination suits | ASR | Employers | Status and reputation; social evaluation theory | Cross-sectional analysis | Liability in lawsuits; punitive damages | Employment discrimination lawsuit |
| D. J. Wang; H. Rao; S. A. Soule | 2019 | Crossing categorical boundaries: a study of diversification by social movement organizations | ASR | Social movement organization | Social movement theory | Longitudinal analysis | Social movement organization diversification | Social movement organization |
| R. A. Benton; J. A. Cobb | 2019 | Eyes on the horizon? Fragmented elites and the short-term focus of the American corporation | AJS | Corporations | Elite theory; social networks | Social network analysis; longitudinal analysis | Corporate short-termism | Firm-year |
| J. E. Fiel; Y. Zhang | 2019 | With all deliberate speed: the reversal of court-ordered school desegregation, 1970–2013 | AJS | School districts | Racial composition theory | Longitudinal analysis | Dismissal of desegregation orders | District-year |
| B. Reinsberg; A. Kentikelenis; T. Stubbs; L. King | 2019 | The world system and the hollowing out of state capacity: how structural adjustment programs affect bureaucratic quality in developing countries | AJS | State bureaucracies | Weberian bureaucracy theory; world systems | Longitudinal analysis | Bureaucratic quality | Nation-state bureaucracies |
| J. Go | 2020 | The imperial origins of American policing: militarization and imperial feedback in the early 20th century | AJS | Police departments | Imperialism | Comparative case analysis; archival analysis | Militarization of police | Police departments |
| N. P. Marwell; E. A. Marantz; D. Baldassarri | 2020 | The microrelations of urban governance: dynamics of patronage and partnership | AJS | Nonprofit organizations | Urban governance | Social network analysis; event history | Tie formation and dissolution | City council member and nonprofit dyads |
| C. M. Smith | 2020 | Exogenous shocks, the criminal elite, and increasing gender inequality in Chicago organized crime | ASR | Organized crime organization | Network analysis; organizational restructuring | Network analysis; case study | Changes in network and its consequences | Organizational network |
| J. Rözer; H. G. van de Werfhorst | 2020 | Three worlds of vocational education: specialized and general craftsmanship in France, Germany, and the Netherlands | ESR | Vocational educational programs | Occupational training | Variance decomposition | Training program education-to-work link | Training program |
| L. B. Doering; K. McNeill | 2020 | Elaborating on the abstract: group meaning-making in a Colombian microsavings program | ASR | Banks | Organizational theory; microsociology | Cross-sectional analysis and interviews | Financial interest | Savings group participants |
| T. Shiff | 2021 | A sociology of discordance: negotiating schemas of deservingness and codified law in U.S. asylum status determinations | AJS | Asylum agencies | Institutional theory; practice theory | Archival research; interviews | Determination of asylum | Asylum officers |
| A. Wimmer | 2021 | Domains of diffusion: how culture and institutions travel around the world and with what consequences | AJS | Organizations (in general) | Diffusion; institutional theory; globalization | Theory development | Diffusion of organizational templates | Organizations |
Articles Using a “Society within Organizations” Approach.
| Author(s) | Year | Title | Published | Organization Form | Theory | Method | Outcome of Interest | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| F. Varese | 2012 | The structure and the content of criminal connections: the Russian mafia in Italy | ESR | Organized crime organizations | Social networks | Network analysis; content analysis | Organizational structure of a mafia cell | Social network |
| C. Turco | 2012 | Difficult decoupling: employee resistance to the commercialization of personal settings | AJS | Nonprofit organization | Institutional theory; conflict | Ethnography | Employee resistance | Employee groups |
| K. Karpinska; K. Henkens; J. Schippers | 2013 | Retention of older workers: impact of managers’ age norms and stereotypes | ESR | Employers | Rational choice theory | Vignette study; surveys | Perceptions of early retirement | Managers |
| J. Rydgren; D. Sofi; M. Hällsten | 2013 | Interethnic friendship, trust, and tolerance: findings from two north Iraqi cities | AJS | Civil society organizations | Network theory; relational analysis | Network analysis | Friendship ties | Individual networks |
| N. Gerstel; D. Clawson | 2014 | Class advantage and the gender divide: flexibility on the job and at home | AJS | Workplaces | Class theory; gender | Survey; interviews; observations | Temporal flexibility in work | Individual employees |
| P. Lichterman; N. Eliasoph | 2014 | Civic action | AJS | Housing advocacy organizations | Civil society | Ethnography | Styles of civic action | Civic projects |
| A. Kalev | 2014 | How you downsize is who you downsize: biased formalization, accountability, and managerial diversity | ASR | US firms | Bureaucracy theory; institutional theory | Longitudinal analysis | Minority representation in managerial jobs | Firms |
| A. Lara-Millán | 2014 | Public emergency room overcrowding in the era of mass imprisonment | ASR | Public emergency rooms | Stigma theory; criminology | Ethnography | How er professionals decide which patients are deserving of pain medication | Er unit |
| B. A. Rissing; E. J. Castilla | 2014 | House of green cards: statistical or preference-based inequality in the employment of foreign nationals | ASR | Department of labor; regulatory agency | Employment discrimination models | Logistic regression of certification approval | Application approval | Application from foreign-national |
| A. D. Reich | 2014 | Contradictions in the commodification of hospital care | AJS | Hospitals | Commodification and moral markets | Ethnography; interviews | Commodification of hospital care | Hospitals |
| B. Klandermans; J. van Stekelenburg; M.-L. Damen; D. van Troost; A. van Leeuwen | 2014 | Mobilization without organization: the case of unaffiliated demonstrators | ESR | Social movement organization | Social movement theory | Survey research | Protest participation | Individual activist |
| C. Noelke; D. Horn | 2014 | Social transformation and the transition from vocational education to work in Hungary: a differences-in-differences approach | ESR | Employers; schools | Comparative economy | Difference-in-difference | Individuals’ unemployment | Individuals |
| E. L. Kelly; P. Moen; J. M. Oakes; W. Fan; C. Okechukwu; K. D. Davis; L. B. Hammer; E. E. Kossek; R. B. King; G. C. Hanson; F. Mierzwa; L. M. Casper | 2014 | Changing work and work-family conflict: evidence from the work, family, and health network | ASR | Employer | Employee work-life balance | Randomized field experiment | Flexible work arrangements | Individual employee |
| J. B. Sørensen; A. J. Sharkey | 2014 | Entrepreneurship as a mobility process | ASR | Employers | Organizational demography; entrepreneurship | Longitudinal analysis | Rate of entrepreneurship entry | Individual employee |
| P. Wiepking; R. H. F. P. Bekkers; U. O. Osili | 2014 | Examining the association of religious context with giving to non-profit organizations | ESR | Religious organizations | Rational choice theory; religious competition model | Survey research | Religious donation | Individuals |
| R. Braunstein; B. R. Fulton; R. L. Wood | 2014 | The role of bridging cultural practices in racially and socioeconomically diverse civic organizations | ASR | Civic organizations | Diversity research | Ethnography | Processes that enable participant diversity without destroying cohesion | Faith based organizational coalition |
| D. Baldassarri | 2015 | Cooperative networks: altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and sanctioning in Ugandan producer organizations | AJS | Ugandan producer organizations | Group processes; network theory | Field experiment | Cooperation between groups | Groups |
| F. Dobbin; D. Schrage; A. Kalev | 2015 | Rage against the iron cage: the varied effects of bureaucratic personnel reforms on diversity | ASR | Employers | Bureaucracy theory; job autonomy; accountability theories | Longitudinal analysis | Changes in managerial diversity | Firms |
| J. Berger; A. Diekmann | 2015 | The logic of relative frustration: Boudon’s competition model and experimental evidence | ESR | Employers | Game theory | Lab experiments | Frustration with promotion opportunities | Individual |
| J. Rosenfeld; P. Denice | 2015 | The power of transparency: evidence from a British workplace survey | ASR | Employers | Transparency theory | Survey research | Wages | Individuals |
| T. Anttila; T. Oinas; M. Tammelin; J. Nätti | 2015 | Working-time regimes and work-life balance in Europe | ESR | Employers | Comparative economy | Survey research | Work–life balance | Individual employee |
| J.-P. Ferguson | 2015 | The control of managerial discretion: evidence from unionization’s impact on employment segregation | AJS | Employers | Inequality; discrimination theories | Regression discontinuity | Occupational and establishment segregation | Employing firm |
| S. B. Srivastava; E. L. Sherman | 2015 | Agents of change or cogs in the machine? Reexamining the influence of female managers on the gender wage gap | AJS | Employers | Inequality; gender theories of discrimination | Longitudinal analysis | Gender wage gap | Individual employee |
| D. Tomaskovic-Devey; M. Hällsten; D. Avent-Holt | 2015 | Where do immigrants fare worse? Modeling workplace wage gap variation with longitudinal employer-employee data | AJS | Employers | Inequality; wage discrimination; power | Cross-sectional analysis of workplaces | Immigrant-native wage gaps | Employer establishment |
| P. Catron | 2016 | Made in America? Immigrant occupational mobility in the first half of the twentieth century | AJS | Employers | Assimilation theory | Longitudinal analysis of employment histories | Occupational mobility | Immigrant employees |
| A. Goldberg; S. B. Srivastava; V. G. Manian; W. Monroe; C. Potts | 2016 | Fitting in or standing out? The tradeoffs of structural and cultural embeddedness | ASR | Employers | Cultural sociology; network analysis | Longitudinal analysis | Individual attainment | Individual employee |
| D. Minkoff | 2016 | The payoffs of organizational membership for political activism in established democracies | AJS | Political and civic organizations | Social movement theory; civil society | Survey research; propensity score matching | Political activism | Individuals |
| P. Moen; E. L. Kelly; W. Fan; S.-R. Lee; D. Almeida; E. E. Kossek; O. M. Buxton | 2016 | Does a flexibility/support organizational initiative improve high-tech employees’ well-being? Evidence from the work, family, and health network | ASR | Employer | Worker well-being | Field experiment | Changes in worker well-being | Individual employee |
| A. E. Kentikelenis; L. Seabrooke | 2017 | The politics of world polity: script-writing in international organizations | ASR | International nongovernmental organizations | World-culture theory; power-political theory | Archival data | Script writing about capital allocation | Transcripts of board meetings |
| C. Herring | 2017 | Is diversity still a good thing? | ASR | Business establishments | Diversity research | Cross-sectional analysis | Firm performance (various) | Establishment |
| D. Stojmenovska; T. Bol; T. Leopold | 2017 | Does diversity pay? A replication of Herring (2009) | ASR | Business establishments | Diversity research | Cross-sectional analysis | Firm performance (various) | Establishment |
| F. C. Wezel; M. Ruef | 2017 | Agents with principles: the control of labor in the Dutch East India Company, 1700 to 1796 | ASR | Dutch east India company | Agency theory | Longitudinal analysis | Desertion | Individual seafarers |
| M. E. Brashears; M. Genkin; C. S. Suh | 2017 | In the organization’s shadow: how individual behavior is shaped by organizational leakage | AJS | School clubs/teams | Organizational ecology | Cross-sectional analysis | Similarity in behaviors | Individual students |
| N. Fligstein; J. Stuart Brundage; M. Schultz | 2017 | Seeing like the fed: culture, cognition, and framing in the failure to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 | ASR | Federal reserve bank | Framing theory; culture and cognition | Topic modeling | Frames used to make sense of the financial collapse | Meeting transcripts |
| Y. Lu; R. Tao | 2017 | Organizational structure and collective action: lineage networks, semiautonomous civic associations, and collective resistance in rural China | AJS | Civic associations | Collective action theory; social movement theory | Longitudinal analysis | Petitions | Rural Chinese villages |
| E. Hirsh; Y. Cha | 2018 | For law and markets: employment discrimination lawsuits, market performance, and managerial diversity | AJS | Employers | Institutional theory; law and society | Longitudinal analysis | Gender and racial representation in management | Employer establishments |
| V. J. Roscigno; C. Sauer; P. Valet | 2018 | Rules, relations, and work | AJS | German employers | Bureaucracy theory | Survey research | Job satisfaction and fairness perceptions | Individual employee |
| H.-P. Y. Qvist; L. S. Henriksen; T. Fridberg | 2018 | The consequences of weakening organizational attachment for volunteering in Denmark, 2004–2012 | ESR | Voluntary organizations | Organizational attachment | Longitudinal analysis | Hours spent volunteering | Individual volunteers |
| J.-P. Ferguson; R. Koning | 2018 | Firm turnover and the return of racial establishment segregation | ASR | Business establishments | Occupational segregation theory | Longitudinal analysis | Racial composition | Establishment |
| N. Wilmers | 2018 | Wage stagnation and buyer power: how buyer-supplier relations affect U.S. workers’ wages, 1978 to 2014 | ASR | Publicly traded companies | Wage premium and buyer power theory | Longitudinal analysis | Wages | Firm-year |
| A. Saatcioglu; T. M. Skrtic | 2019 | Categorization by organizations: manipulation of disability categories in a racially desegregated school district | AJS | School district | Categories and inequality | Mixed; longitudinal and interviews | Excess costs for disability categories | Disability categories |
| J. L. Nelson | 2019 | How organizational minorities form and use social ties: evidence from teachers in majority-white and majority-black schools | AJS | Secondary schools | Race and networks | Multi-site ethnography | How white and black teachers form social ties with other teachers | Relationship |
| L. Smith-Doerr; S. Alegria; K. H. Fealing; D. Fitzpatrick; D. Tomaskovic-Devey | 2019 | Gender pay gaps in U.S. federal science agencies: an organizational approach | AJS | Government agencies | Gender pay gap theory | Longitudinal analysis | Gender pay gap | Individual employee |
| M. Giesselmann; S. Bohmann; J. Goebel; P. Krause; E. Liebau; D. Richter; D. Schacht; C. Schröder; J. Schupp; S. Liebig | 2019 | The individual in context(s): research potentials of the socio-economic panel study (SOEP) in sociology | ESR | Employers | None | Survey analysis | None | Individual linked to organizational |
| M. van Hek; T. van der Lippe | 2019 | Are female managers agents of change or cogs in the machine? An assessment with three-level manager–employee linked data | ESR | Employers | Gender pay gap theory | Cross-sectional; cross-national | Gender pay gap | Individual employee |
| R. Taiji; M. C. Mills | 2019 | Non-standard schedules, work–family conflict, and the moderating role of national labour context: evidence from 32 European countries | ESR | Employers | Flexible work arrangements | Cross-sectional; cross-national | Work-family conflict | Individual employee |
| V. Ray | 2019 | A theory of racialized organizations | ASR | Organizations (general) | Race theory | Theory building | Racialized practices in organizations | Organization |
| L. A. Rivera; A. Tilcsik | 2019 | Scaling down inequality: rating scales, gender bias, and the architecture of evaluation | ASR | University | Gender evaluation theory | Field experiment | Performance ratings | Instructor-course |
| A. D. Reich; S. J. Prins | 2020 | The disciplining effect of mass incarceration on labor organization | AJS | Labor organizations | Labor market theory | Longitudinal analysis | Membership in labor organization | Individual employee |
| A. H. Wingfield; K. Chavez | 2020 | Getting in, getting hired, getting sideways looks: organizational hierarchy and perceptions of racial discrimination | ASR | Health care organizations | Racial discrimination theory | Interviews | Perceptions of racial discrimination | Individual employee |
| A. Ranganathan; A. Benson | 2020 | A numbers game: quantification of work, auto-gamification, and worker productivity | ASR | Garment manufacturing factory | Quantification of work | Natural experiment | Worker productivity | Individual employee |
| A. Storer; D. Schneider; K. Harknett | 2020 | What explains racial/ethnic inequality in job quality in the service sector? | ASR | Employers | Flexible work arrangements | Survey data | Job quality | Individual employee |
| D. R. Schaefer; D. A. Kreager | 2020 | New on the block: analyzing network selection trajectories in a prison treatment program | ASR | Prison based therapy organization | Network theory | Network analysis | Network tie selection | Individual prisoner |
| F. Bernardi; C. J. Gil-Hernández | 2020 | The social-origins gap in labour market outcomes: compensatory and boosting advantages using a micro-class approach | ESR | Employers | Effectively maintained inequality theory | Cross-sectional regression | Occupational status and net income | Individual employee |
| G. Altomonte | 2020 | Exploiting ambiguity: a moral polysemy approach to variation in economic practices | ASR | Post-acute care unit; health care | Ethnography; interviews | Moralization of economic goals | Organization | |
| J. M. Calarco | 2020 | Avoiding us versus them: how schools’ dependence on privileged “helicopter” parents influences enforcement of rules | ASR | Public elementary school | Organizational theory; cultural capital | Ethnography | Homework rule enforcement | Teachers |
| S. Gorleer; P. Bracke; L. Hustinx | 2020 | The organizational field of blood collection: a multilevel analysis of organizational determinants of blood donation in Europe | ESR | Blood donation organizations | Organizational field theory | Survey analysis | Lifetime prevalence of blood donation | Individual blood donors |
| S. J. Correll; K. R. Weisshaar; A. T. Wynn; J. D. Wehner | 2020 | Inside the black box of organizational life: the gendered language of performance assessment | ASR | Fortune 500 tech company | Viewing and Valuing Social Cognitive Processing Model | Content analysis; cross-sectional analysis | Performance rating | Performance evaluation |
| T. Kristal; Y. Cohen; E. Navot | 2020 | Workplace compensation practices and the rise in benefit inequality | ASR | Employers | Workplace compensation practices | Longitudinal analysis | Hourly inequality | Employer-job |
| J. Chu | 2021 | Cameras of merit or engines of inequality? College ranking systems and the enrollment of disadvantaged students | AJS | Colleges and universities | Rankings systems | Longitudinal analysis | Disadvantaged student enrollment | College-year |
| L. Zhang | 2021 | Shaking things up: disruptive events and inequality | AJS | Employers | Disruptive events and inequality | Longitudinal analysis; difference-in-difference | Change in occupational composition & segregation | Firm-year |
| F. Zimmermann | 2021 | Managing the gender wage gap – how female managers influence the gender wage gap among workers | ESR | Employers | Gender pay gap theory | Longitudinal analysis | Gender wage gap | Employer-employee |
| J. Laurence | 2021 | The impact of youth engagement on life satisfaction: a quasi-experimental field study of a UK national youth engagement scheme | ESR | Clubs and voluntary associations | Subjective well-being literature | Difference-in-difference | Life satisfaction | Individual youth |
| N. Wilmers; C. Aeppli | 2021 | Consolidated advantage: new organizational dynamics of wage inequality | ASR | Employers | Wage inequality theory | Longitudinal analysis | Wage inequality | Occupation-workplace |
Tables 1 and 2 display the coded variables for each article found in my search. Table 1 includes all articles that use an “organizations within society” approach, and Table 2 includes all articles using the “society within organizations” approach. There are 32 articles using an “organizations within society” approach and 51 articles using a “society within organizations” approach.
One of the most notable aspects of the papers represented here is the sheer diversity of theoretical perspectives represented. Whereas many organizational scholars associate sociology with one of the core theories exported from sociology to organizational research, such as institutional theory or organizational ecology, these theories are not well represented in the mix of articles. Institutional theory only appears as a primary theoretical orientation in five articles, with an additional three articles framed around diffusion theory (a strong corollary of institutional theory). Organizational ecology or resource partitioning theory is only a primary orientation in four articles, with an additional article motivated by “social ecology” (which is a Chicago school of sociology theory about local ecologies of relationships between organizations and individuals). And interestingly, two of the articles using an ecological framework are derived from the network-based approach to ecology as originated by Miller McPherson and associated with the concept of Blau Space (Brashears et al., 2017; Shi et al., 2017). This version of ecology is far less common in studies published in organizational or management journals.
The most common theory represented in the studies is social movement theory, which is a primary motivating theory for 11 articles. The presence of so many social movement-related papers is indicative of the strong interest that sociologists have in bottom-up theories of social change, often represented in the form of collective action taken by activists. Much of this research is organizational inasmuch as one of the core theories – resource mobilization theory – is about how organizations provide infrastructure and other resources for the emergence and mobilization of movements. Moreover, in recent years, there has been a surge of research that uses insights from social movement theory to explain corporate and market outcomes (e.g., Bartley & Child, 2014; McDonnell et al., 2015). Organizations are often both the targets of movement mobilization and inputs for anti-corporate campaigns.
The broad mix of remaining theoretical orientations reflects, in my view, the social problem orientation. Rather than seeking to contribute to a particular theoretical perspective, this paper sets out to better understand a problem. In what follows, I will discuss the theoretical ambiguity of organizational sociology and what it says about the discipline and its relationship to organizational theory.
Theoretical Ambiguity and Problem-oriented Sociology
Many scholars’ views of organizational sociology reflect their training in seminal texts, such as Clegg (1989), Scott (1992), or Aldrich and Ruef (2006), that seek to lay out a coherent perspective of organizations as a social phenomenon, usually finding their roots in classic sociological theory. These perspectives bring together various strands of theoretical and empirical work into a cohesive framework. Within the perspective, one can deduce theoretical expectations and eventually hypotheses. The sociological perspectives, perhaps intentionally so, were developed as alternatives to economic perspectives that had become dominant but that sociologists viewed as too normative and not consistent with the social constructionist lens that runs throughout most sociology. Numerous cohorts of organizational scholars, of which I was a part, viewed these texts as the baseline for their training and as ideal models for how to theorize and conduct empirical work. Theoretical contributions, we were taught, were meant to be in conversation with these guiding frameworks. When a new framework emerged, you could do good scholarship by tagging on your own ideas to it in a generative fashion. This is what organizational scholars think of as a theoretical contribution when they do research. How do I contribute to an existing framework by adding a new idea, a new mechanism, modifying the boundary conditions of the theory, etc.?
But it is apparent from reading the articles listed here that this is not the only way to do organizational research, and it is certainly not the most common way to do organizational sociology. Rather, a different way of doing organizational sociology is what I will refer to as “problem-oriented” sociology (Prasad, 2021). The main purpose of this kind of sociological research is to identify social problems and then shed light on them, explain why they exist, and analyze what accounts for variation in exposure or consequences from those problems. Some research is even framed as an attempt to solve those problems (see, e.g., Prasad, 2021).
Problem-oriented sociology, of course, relies on scholars sharing an understanding of what important problems are. As sociologists, we take for granted that problems are inherently socially constructed, but nevertheless the problems that motivate the discipline’s interest tend to have high agreement among sociologists as being problems and they receive a high proportion of public attention (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). The “social problems” perspective has a long history in sociology, with an early emphasis on crime and deviance and gradually morphing into programmatic research on various forms of inequality (e.g., Schneider, 1985; Spector & Kitsuse, 2017). In many cases, research seeks to understand the negative consequences of various social phenomena (e.g., wealth inequality; racial bias), which further justifies the phenomena as a problem worth solving. When there is high agreement about the phenomenon as having negative consequences, scholars are “studying what is popularly seen as a social problem” (Prasad, 2021, p. 33).
After reading the articles sampled for this paper, one can see the authors’ interests in the topics as emanating from their desire to label, understand, and, if fortunate, add insights about how to solve a particular social problem. The best example of this type of research, of which there are numerous in the list of articles, is related to social and economic inequality, whether based on race, gender, or some other form of group membership. Ridgeway (2014) captured well the sociological urge to study inequality in her presidential address for the American Sociological Association:
Sociologists want to do more than describe social inequality. We want to understand the deeper problem of how inequality is made and, therefore, could potentially be unmade. What are the mechanisms? How do we uncover them?
Ridgeway goes on to urge sociologists not just to consider how resources and power shape inequality but also status – or signifiers that convey respect or prestige – influence inequality between groups.
Naturally, organizations are an ideal place in which to study all three of Weber’s (1968) sources of inequality – resources, power, and status – because it is in organizations that they accrue. Some have argued that the pursuit of these three kinds of resources motivates most organizational actions (King & Walker, 2014). Organizations are made up of various kinds of resources, bundled together in structures and routines. Organizations convey power on groups or individuals through their control of those resources and ability to exert authority on who else has access to them. And organizations are carriers of status and grant status to individuals, although not equally to all groups (see, e.g., Croidieu & Powell, 2024, this volume). Thus, as scholars seek to study the problem of inequality, they easily find their way to organizations as an object or at least context for their analyses.
Types of inequality abound in organizations. Studies of inequality end up being one of the main types of papers in the “society within organizations” approach. Scholars recognize that inequality, bias, and discrimination abound in society and that we can better understand their sources by looking inside organizations where they are reproduced. In some papers, scholars portray organizations as the mechanism that accounts for inequalities, creating the structural fabric that allows certain kinds of discrimination to persist (e.g., Smith-Doerr et al., 2019). Many papers listed here relate to gender inequality and, even more specifically, to the causes of the “gender pay gap” (e.g., Rivera & Tilcsik, 2019; Smith-Doerr et al., 2019) or gender bias as manifest in organizational evaluation practices (Correll et al., 2020). In most of this work, gender inequality is not only viewed as a problem to explain but also one that can be alleviated if we used organizational interventions consistent with the findings of the analysis. Much inequality research links problem identification with problem solving. If society happens inside organizations and we want to fix society’s problems, naturally we turn to organizations as both the culprits and the potential saviors.
Inequality is not the only social problem that raises its head in the problem-focused research found in these papers, but it is the most common one, especially in the papers using a society within organization approach. Other problems include employee well-being and life satisfaction, worker productivity, performance ratings, and cooperation.
Much problem-oriented sociology is characterized by a loose theoretical orientation. By loose, I mean that the paper is not driven by a theoretical question at all. Instead, theory is in the background, offering expectations about what is contributing to the problem under investigation. In many cases, the theoretical background is not even a coherent theoretical framework but rather a literature of prior research and its associated findings. Consider, for example, Wilmers’ (2018) article about wage stagnation. Rather than turn to a single theory about why wages stagnate, he instead looks at all of the available research on wages and market structure and uses that to generate hypotheses about how buyer power influences suppliers’ wage-setting practices and ultimately wage differentials between firms. Reading theory this way can be shocking for an organizational theorist who is accustomed to having their feet held to the fire by reviewers demanding a theoretical contribution! There’s no attempt to draw on resource dependence theory or formulate different types of Weberian power. Instead, Wilmers focuses squarely on “buyer power” as a practical construct that has relevance for the problem at hand – explaining wage differences across firms. In the conclusion, the author describes how the paper tests and extends economic segmentation theory, but prior to mentioning it in the conclusion the term “economic segmentation” is only mentioned twice. To be fair, there isn’t a great need to describe the theory in detail. It is obvious from his description of buyer power what the theory is about.
Many of the “organizations within society” papers also tackle social problems, examining the role of organizations in formulating policy change (or resisting policy change) that might help resolve an existing social problem or by exploring the dynamics by which organizations contribute to or even create intermediate solutions to systemic problems. Steil and Vasi (2014), as an example of organizations contributing to policy changes, find that the presence of immigrant community organizations facilitated the passage of pro-immigrant ordinances in cities. Fiel and Zhang (2019), in contrast, show that the politics of local school districts influence the reversal of desegregation orders, a policy measure used to combat racial inequality in the education system. As an example of organizations creating intermediate solutions to social problems, McDonnell (2017) demonstrates that Ghanaian state organizations often have unique bureaucratic structures in order to adapt to the cultural and social needs of the communities in which they are embedded.
Not all problem-oriented papers are as loose with theory, as illustrated by some of the papers using an “organizations within society” approach. These papers use theory explicitly as a way to explain the problem at hand and generate hypotheses. For example, Pernell et al. (2017) seek to explain why banks begin adopting risky financial derivatives, a practice that they associate with the global financial crisis of the 2000s. To generate theoretical expectations, they draw from institutional theory as well as psychological theory on moral reasoning. In their conclusion, they contrast the implications of their study with what one would expect if deriving policy from agency theory. Thus, in the paper’s conclusion, they offer generalizable policy solutions that would potentially combat dangerous risk-taking. The paper’s theoretical contributions, as often conceived of by organizational theorists, are quite modest, but they nevertheless use theory deftly to diagnose the problem and find potential solutions.
It is clear from reading many of the problem-oriented papers that they embrace theoretical ambiguity. Rather than see that the purpose of the paper is to build or generate new theoretical insights, they instead allow theory to sit lightly in the background, or they draw liberally from various theories to shed light on a social problem. Doing this helps them get greater leverage over what is actually contributing to the problem. They are open to the idea that a single theoretical framework might not be sufficient to explain the problem. Moreover, their entire focus on the organization – as its own unit of analysis or as a context in which the problem is occurring – is to get better leverage in targeting the problem. The organization is often the problem itself, and that is why they are driven to study them.
This approach to scholarship is quite different from what we see in a typical publication in an organization theory journal, where the emphasis is placed on theoretical novelty. The reason for doing a study – at least as expressed by reviewers – is to make a theoretical contribution. Usually, we know if someone has made a theoretical contribution because they have identified a “theoretical gap” prior to doing the study and then they seek to address the gap with the new study, often by inventing a new concept or mechanism of explanation. Addressing problems or practical implications usually only enter the discussion on the back end of a paper and may even find their home in a section of the paper designed for that purpose. Showing the managerial implications of one’s research is a bonus for any study, but even this aspect of organizational research is quite different from what we see in contemporary organizational sociology. Drawing out the implications for managers is not warranted and may even be looked down upon by sociologists. The problems that interest sociologists derive from a different set of assumptions about why scholars engage in research and are usually focused on improving the collective good rather than simply benefitting the organization itself or a subset of elites within that organization.
Engaging with Social Problems and Theoretical Development
One could conclude from reading the above description of contemporary organizational sociology that the field has entered a stage of normal science. We have enough theory now that we can use it as a tool to incrementally arrive at the answers to societal and organizational problems. And I would certainly agree that much of the research has embraced the spirit of normal science. But I think that characterizing the entire field in that way leads us to ignore the potential for creativity and idea generation had by organizational sociology. Moreover, I think we sometimes dismiss normal science as being theoretically vacuous when, I would argue, it can be the basis for important new theoretical insights.
In the last part of this paper, I focus on this theme: studying organizations as actors and sites where society plays out gives us unique opportunities to develop theory. One reason for this is that it frees scholars from being entirely bound by the constraints of existing theory and getting caught up in siloed conversations about theory that have little relevance to scholars outside that theoretical tradition. When the entire purpose of research is to contribute to theoretical frameworks, over time, research in that area becomes narrower in its focus and offers more obscure innovations that can only be appreciated by the most ardent fans of the theory. Theory becomes its own goal and becomes delinked from the pressing empirical issues that call our attention to organizational research in the first place.
In contrast, when we approach empirical research as an attempt to better understand and (potentially) offer solutions to a social problem, we wear less opaque theoretical blinders. Seeing research through the lens of “social problems” gives scholars the opportunity to offer up new explanations and in the process rethink why organizations operate and function as they do.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, some of the most important theoretical innovations made in organizational theory came about because scholars were trying to better understand an empirical puzzle or problem. Meyer and Rowan (1977) and DiMaggio and Powell (1983), two of the most important starting points of institutional theory, began as attempts to explain why organizations adopted practices and formal structures that did not always make logical sense. From the point of view of Meyer and Rowan, the schools they studied may have even looked quite dysfunctional, even if they purported to do things for rational purposes. The theory of institutions they helped create came from a genuine struggle to understand social problems that previous theories fell short of explaining.
Not all organizational sociology seek to do this, but there are some good examples of theoretical development that emerge out of empirical puzzles and grappling with real social problems happening within those organizations. I provide two examples. The aforementioned McDonnell’s (2017) investigation of pockets of high performing bureaucracies alongside highly dysfunctional organizations in Ghanaian government yields a theorization of a new type of bureaucracy – interstitial bureaucracy. By trying to shed light on why these highly effective bureaucracies exist, she is also able to help explain what is absent in the less effective bureaucracies next to them. Through interviews and comparative case analysis, she identifies the microfoundations of bureaucracy through which individuals tie together local culture and institutions to the ideal type of Weberian bureaucracy. Her approach – contrasting the ideal type with the reality she observes in her data – identifies adaptive characteristics local bureaucrats used given their interstitial position. McDonnell’s study and a series of other papers related to the administration of public services (e.g., Lara-Millán, 2014; Seim, 2017) breathe new life into bureaucratic theory and rejuvenate interest in variation in bureaucratic forms. These studies also remind us of organizational sociology’s intellectual connections to urban and community sociology and public administration research.
Another example of theoretical development that came about through a problem-oriented focus is Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations. The problem that Ray seeks to explain is why seemingly race-neutral organizations are quite critical to the reproduction of racial disparities in society. His theoretical innovation is to bring Du Boisian critical race theory into conversation with organizational theory to develop a theory about how race becomes instantiated and reproduced in organizational structure. Organizations, Ray (2019, p. 26) writes “are racial structures” inasmuch as “race is constitutive of organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes.” He goes on to develop a set of assumptions and mechanisms to support this idea, as well as proposing an agenda for future research.
Both of these studies offer innovative ways of viewing organizations. And although it is clear that the authors were well read in organizational theory, they did not begin their papers as seeking to work within the constraints of a given theoretical framework. Instead, they approach their research by pointing to an existing social problem and then wrestle with existing theory that cannot easily account for the problems they are trying to explain and solve. It is the contradiction and tension that their empirical problems have with existing theory that gives impetus to new theory. In the case of Ray (2019, p. 46), he proposes that “organizational theorists should abandon the notion that organizational formations, hierarchies, and processes are race-neutral.” Organizational theory should incorporate insights from race theory about how organizations are manifestations of racial structures that reproduce and reinforce inequalities. His theorizing opens the door for a new way to theorize organizations and race. Given organizational theorists’ interest in conceiving of “organizational practices … as being central to the reproduction of inequality” (Amis et al., 2020, p. 195), it makes sense that organizational scholars would heed Ray’s urging to integrate race theory with our own understanding of organizations. Theoretical innovation is likely to come from tackling these problems empirically.
Sociology’s gravitation around social problems also encourages scholars to study a broader variety of organizations. Whereas the tendency in organizational research is to study for-profit businesses,2 sociological research on organizations is more inclusive, including research on nonprofit organizations, schools, social movement organizations, and government agencies. Organizational variety allows scholars to push against long-held theoretical assumptions about organizations, which may be only true of the for-profit organizations that management scholars study, and opens the door for comparative organizational research (King et al., 2009). In short, by expanding the variety of organizations studied, scholars will be able to test the scope conditions of existing theory and create new opportunities for theoretically generative analysis.
Conclusion
Organizational sociology, despite reports of its demise, is alive and well and regularly published in top sociology journals. And yet, it does seem to be the case that organizational sociology has grown somewhat distant from the broader community of organizational scholars. I have sought to understand this by looking more closely at the research that sociologists have published about organizations in the past decade.
One of the main implications of this paper is that the distance between organizational sociology is partly a function of very different approaches to doing organizational research. Whereas much research in management and organizational specialist journals is motivated by identifying theoretical gaps or puzzles to resolve, much of the organizational sociology published in sociology journals is problem oriented. Explaining organizations and why they do what they do or how people behave in them is not the primary purpose of this research. Rather, sociologists are more likely to try to explain and identify solutions to social problems by studying organizations’ roles in those problems. This research is in conversation with a “social problems perspective” of sociological research that seeks to identify, explain, and conceive of solutions for society’s pressing problems. Organizations, because of their prominent role in society as either social actors or rich social contexts, are naturally caught up in those problems. They are often conceptualized as a source of the problem, although organizational interventions may also offer potential solutions as well.
The two approaches to studying organizations in sociology reflect the problem-oriented nature of research. An organizations within society approach implies that organizations are important actors and structures through which resources, power, and status are channeled. Organizations may impede change, especially when it is in the interest of the elites guiding them. But organizations can also be powerful agents for shaping the future of society, as we see in the case of Best (2012) in which she studies how interest groups draw attention to new diseases and advocate for federal funding to fight them. Many of the social movement theory papers in the sample are very much about organizations as drivers of social change. The second approach is more about what happens inside organizations. A society within organizations approach implies that organizations are contexts in which social dynamics play out, for good or bad. Many of society’s problems therefore can only be understood and combated by studying how organizations work and what role they play in the perpetuation of those problems.
Research of this type is often theoretically ambivalent, choosing those theoretical tools that give them the best leverage in understanding the problem. But it doesn’t always have to be that way. In fact, I would argue that some of the most innovative theoretical development comes when tackling an empirical problem that existing theory cannot easily explain. This is where the real potential for theoretical innovation lies.
For organizational scholars, more generally, organizational sociology offers a potential model for our own development. If we continue down the current path of publishing, in which theoretical contribution is valued above all, scholars will continue to be incentivized to do research that primarily addresses theoretical gaps or resolves theoretical puzzles, but perhaps at the expense of doing work that has broader social relevance. Moreover, given complaints about how much organizational theory has become more specialized, more jargon-filled, and less innovative, perhaps there is room for a different approach to organizational scholarship – one more grounded in real-world problems and connected to a broad variety of social settings.
As I have argued in this paper, studying organizations where we find problems does not have to be vacant of theoretical development. In fact, we may find that grounding organizational analysis in social problems will trigger new innovations and change how we think about theoretical contributions to focus more on explanation, rather than situating findings within an umbrella theoretical framework. Generating theoretical insights from the study of social problems has the potential to unleash organizational analysis from the stifling conformity imposed by dominant theoretical paradigms, find ways out of theoretical silos, and lead scholars to rethink what constitutes a theoretical contribution. Finally, the approach laid out by organizational sociology will encourage organizational scholars to expand their view of what constitutes an organization and consider the organization’s place in the broader social world. Undoubtedly, this repositioning of organizations will open up new theoretical possibilities.
Notes
Many organizational theory journals now encourage authors to include a section about managerial implications at the end of their articles.
Granted, not all departments where organizational research takes place today are as management-dominated as American business schools. European schools of organizational studies or nonprofit management departments introduce key sources of heterogeneity in the kind of organizational research that is done, and of course as I show here, sociology departments continue to be a bastion of organizational research, although less likely to be labeled as such.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to participants in the EGOS sub-theme on Doing Sociology in Organization Studies for their helpful feedback. I also appreciate Omar Lizardo for reading a previous draft and sharing his insights.
- Prelims
- Sociological Thinking in Contemporary Organizational Scholarship
- PART 1. THE PLACE OF SOCIOLOGY IN ORGANIZATIONAL SCHOLARSHIP
- Revitalizing Organizational Theory Through a Problem-oriented Sociology
- Organizational Sociology and Organization Studies: Past, Present, and Future
- Facing Up to the Present? Cultivating Political Judgment and a Sense of Reality in Contemporary Organizational Life
- PART 2. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN AND THROUGH ORGANIZATIONS: Organizations within Society: Organizational Perspectives on Status and Distinction
- Status in Socio-Environmental Fields: Relationships, Evaluations, and Otherhood
- Organizations as Carriers of Status and Class Dynamics: A Historical Ethnography of the Emergence of Bordeaux’s Cork Aristocracy
- PART 2. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN AND THROUGH ORGANIZATIONS: Society within Organizations: Organizational Perspectives on Social Integration and Marginalization
- Organizations as Drivers of Social and Systemic Integration: Contradiction and Reconciliation Through Loose Demographic Coupling and Community Anchoring
- Why Organization Studies Should Care More about Gender Exclusion and Inclusion in Sport Organizations
- PART 3. REDISCOVERING SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS FOR ORGANIZATION STUDIES: Reflexivity and Control
- Narrating the Disjunctions Produced by the Sociological Concept of Emotional Reflexivity in Organization Studies
- The Promise of Total Institutions in the Sociology of Organizations: Implications of Regimental and Monastic Obedience for Underlife
- PART 3. REDISCOVERING SOCIOLOGICAL CLASSICS FOR ORGANIZATION STUDIES: Organizing and Organization
- Why Organization Sociologists Should Refer to Tarde and Simmel More Often
- Organization Systems and Their Social Environments: The Role of Functionally Differentiated Society And Face-to-Face Interaction Rituals