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In retrospect, one of the most extraordinary features of the support from faculty was that they encouraged me to follow my interests rather than being concerned about making sure that I would contribute to enlarging their research agenda. I say, in retrospect, because it has only been in seeing how often graduate students are given limited options by faculty that I have understood the model that I was taught at Stanford. Each faculty member I interacted with knew that I was developing a different agenda either because of my interest in ethnography or because of my interest in different disciplines than theirs. Seymour Martin Lipset, similarly, could clearly see that I was not following in his footsteps, yet hired me as a research assistant and provided important input for my dissertation work. When I returned from doing fieldwork in Washington, DC, Joanne Martin's expertise in studying culture and narratives helped me to make sense of my data and helped provide a different perspective to the ambiguity and choice scholarship. My work was more closely related to that of my dissertation advisor, Jim March, though he was also in a position to see how my ethnographic leanings would uncover issues that required me to move in directions other than his work. Yet, he defended and supported my choice even to the point of walking me through the conundrums that arose while I was working as a policy analyst and doing fieldwork.

Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any time during the last four decades, there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Stanford University faculty and doctoral students interested in studying organizations. They have been scattered across the campus, often in small groups within larger schools and departments. They have been based in the Sociology Department and the Organizational Behavior and Strategy areas at the Graduate School of Business. There were always a handful at the Education and Engineering schools, as well as a scattering of individuals doing related work in Psychology, Political Science, and Anthropology. In spite of their numbers, before the Stanford Center for Organizational Research (SCOR) was founded in 1972, many of these faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students felt rather isolated. They had little contact with colleagues across campus who shared their interest in organizations and little collective clout when resources were being distributed.

I was a doctoral student in the Organizational Behavior (OB) Ph.D. program in the Graduate School of Business (GSB) from 1984 to 1989 and a faithful participant in the annual Stanford Organizations Conference at Asilomar, on the shores of the Pacific. I worked under the guidance of Professors Joanne Martin, Rod Kramer, Robert Sutton, and James March. I also benefited from the support and guidance of sociology professor Richard Scott in his capacity as director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Institute of Aging (NIA) Fellows Training Program in which I was a pre-doctoral fellow from 1985 to 1988. The reflections that follow are based primarily on my experience as a student during this vibrant period, although, as a current a faculty member within the School of Education at Stanford, I cannot resist drawing occasional comparisons between the organizations community then and now.

Stanford contributed significantly to the organizational culture movement that occurred in organization studies from 1970–2000. This chapter traces developments at Stanford and puts the contributions of its researchers and scholars in the context of the many influences that shaped the study of organizational culture during this period. In addition to the historical account, there is speculation about why the culture movement at Stanford more or less ended but might yet be revived, either by those studying institutionalization processes or by those who resist them.

In 1981, W. Richard (Dick) Scott of Stanford's sociology department described a paradigmatic revolution in organizational sociology that had occurred in the preceding decade. In Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Scott, 1981), he depicted the first wave of organizational theory as based in rational models of human action that focused on the internal dynamics of the organization. He described the second wave, found in human relations theory and early institutional theory, as based in natural social system models of human action but still focused on the internal “closed system.” A sea change occurred in organizational theory in the 1970s as several camps began to explore environmental causes of organizational behavior. The open-systems approaches that Scott sketched in 1981 were still seedlings, but all would mature. What they shared was an emphasis on relations between the organization and the world outside of it. The roots of these new paradigms can be traced to innovations of the 1960s. Contingency theorists Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (1967) had argued that firms add new practices and programs largely in response to external social demands and not simply to internal functional needs. James Thompson (1967) argued that organizations come to reflect the wider environment and particularly the regulatory environment.

When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1993, the university was a thriving site of organizational research. The department of sociology served as a sort of epicenter, with workshops on organizational ecology (led by Mike Hannan), organizations in the world polity (John Meyer and Francisco “Chiqui” Ramirez), and healthcare organizations (Dick Scott). In the school of education, Jim March was intriguing a new generation of students with his puzzles and wisdom. In addition to Mike Hannan's joint appointment, the Graduate School of Business featured such luminaries as Jeff Pfeffer, Joanne Martin, Jim Baron, Joel Podolny, and Bill Barnett. Slightly further afield, Ray Leavitt and Michael Fehling had begun to train engineers to think about organizational issues, as they developed computer simulations with nuanced attention to cognitive and decision-making processes. Steve Barley would join (what was then) the department of industrial engineering in 1994 and Mark Granovetter would join the department of sociology in 1995, adding fresh insights from the sociology of work and economic sociology, respectively, to what was already a firm foundation for organization studies. The umbrella organization that linked many of these efforts was the Stanford Consortium on Organizational Research (SCOR), which had been guided by Dick Scott's able leadership since 1988 and hosted an annual organizations conference at the beautiful Asilomar retreat in Monterey, California.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.

In their original invitation, editors Kaye Schoonhoven and Frank Dobbin urged the contributors to this volume to be substantive and scholarly in their approach to their essays. I have tried to honor their request by summarizing the results of a programmatic line of scholarly inquiry on a thorny academic problem. It is also a problem of enormous and enduring real-world importance: As the world continues to confront divisive and escalating conflicts over how to share increasingly scarce global resources, we need to have a better understanding of when and why people are willing to cooperate to solve such problems.

The notion, technologies and organizational elaboration of traceability have become more prominent and more systematic in recent years in many different fields, notably food. This chapter argues that traceability has many faces: it is a programmatic value embedded in norms and regulations; it is a frontier of technology development such as blockchain, and it is a continuous processual and political dynamic of organizational connectedness, leading also to resistance. These different aspects make up “traceability infrastructures,” which embody a number of tensions and dynamics. Three such dynamics are explored in this chapter: the tension between organizational entities and meta-entities, problems of agency and the distribution of responsibility, and dialectics of connectivity and disconnectivity. These three dynamics generate three testable propositions, which define a prolegomena for a new subject of “traceability studies.” Overall, traceability is argued to be an ongoing process of connecting discrete agencies – a process of “chainmaking” – and is formative of more or less stable forms of distributed agency and responsibility.