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Every paper needs a theme. Luckily, the venue defines the theme for me; how did the initial conditions at Stanford affect the development and diffusion of population ecology as a theoretical research program. I use the term theoretical research program reluctantly, especially considering the context of the department of sociology at Stanford University during the 1970s and 1980s (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). Nonetheless, I believe that population ecology can be usefully described as such. It is not a theory but rather a collection of theories developing over time with progressive problem shifts. There are methodological rules that define what paths of research to pursue and to avoid (Pfeffer, 1993, p. 613).

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

In the late 1970s, the much beloved tradition of Asilomar began. But then, of course, it was not even located at Asilomar. Rather it was a much smaller event that was held at Pajaro Dunes. Nonetheless, it featured what ultimately became the traditional blend of informal sessions that mixed students and faculty from around the University. The most memorable conference of that time featured working papers by Jeff Pfeffer and Jerry Salancik, John Meyer and Brian Rowan, and Mike Hannan and John Freeman. Each of these pairs of authors presented fledgling work that would go on to become keystone statements for three highly influential theories: resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), “new” institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and population ecology (Hannan & Freeman, 1977).

A summer spent at Stanford University in 1973 contributed significantly to my emerging perspective on organizations and generated the spark I needed to begin working on what became Organizations and Environments (Aldrich, 1979). Dick Scott invited me to be the second visiting scholar to participate in the Research Training Program on Organizations and Mental Health, following my Cornell colleague, Karl Weick, who had done it the year before. Curiously enough, Paul Hirsch, a former colleague of mine in graduate school, was the third visiting scholar in the program. I taught an organizational theory course to a class that included Chuck Snow, Kaye Schoonhoven, and a number of Mike Hannan and John Meyers' students. I suspect that I learned as much over those three months as did the students in my course.

This chapter attempts to explain why the community of scholars at Stanford University generated an unparalleled amount of highly influential theory and research on organizations in the last three decades of the 20th century.¹

Research has found a subgroup of conservative white males have lower perceptions of risk across a variety of environmental and health hazards. Less research has looked at the views of these “low risk” individuals in group interactions. Through qualitative analysis of a technology deliberation, we note that white men expressing low risk views regarding technologies for energy and the environment also often express high social risks around potential loss of control. We argue these risk perceptions reflect identification with corporate concerns, usually framed in opposition to government and mirroring arguments made by conservative organizations. We situate these views within the broader cultural struggle over who has the power to name and address risks.

In this article, I propose a theory of network opportunity emergence. The core of the argument is that as an overall industry network structure becomes centralized, opportunities emerge for new entrants. As the institutional environment evolves toward a centralized network flow structure, innovators can identify newly emerged rich resource niches that serve as the perfect breeding ground for an entrepreneurial start-up. While the framework is an aggregate level conceptualization of market opportunities, it also identifies specific actionable opportunities at a very micro level. Examples from the networks of the airline industry illustrate the logic. I conclude by discussing the innovation and entrepreneurship implications for a wide variety of industries and network tie types, calling for utilization of the framework to answer a broad variety of research questions.

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.

Group incentive schemes have been shown to be positively associated with firm performance but it remains an open question whether this association can be explained by the motivating characteristics of the group-incentive scheme itself, or if this is due to factors that tend to accompany group-incentive schemes. We use a controlled experiment to directly test if group-incentive schemes can motivate sustained individual effort in the absence of rules, norms, and institutions that are known to mitigate free-riding behavior.

We use a controlled lab experiment that randomly assigns subjects to one of three compensation contracts used to incentivize an onerous effort task. Two of the compensation contracts are group-incentive schemes where subjects have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of their coworkers, and the third (control) is a flat-wage contract.

We find that both group-incentive schemes resulted in sustained, higher performance relative to the flat-wage compensation contract. Further, we do not find evidence of free-riding behavior under the two group-incentive schemes.

Although we do find sustained cooperation/performance over the three work periods of our experiment under the group-incentive schemes, further testing would be required to evaluate whether group-incentive schemes can sustain cooperation over a longer time horizon without complementary norms, policies, or institutions that mitigate free-riding.

By unambiguously showing that group-incentive schemes can, by themselves, motivate workers to provide sustained levels of effort, this suggests that the “1/n problem” may be, in part, an artifact of the rational-actor modeling conventions.