Principles of Economic Sociology. “Organizational Structure, Environment, and Performance: The Role of Strange Choice.” Sociology 6:1–22. DiMaggio, Paul. 1990. Selznick pioneered a structural functional theory of organizations, establishing the (old) institutional approach. Managers are responsible for gaining favorable exchanges and avoiding debilitating dependencies. “The Intraorganizational Power Struggle: Rise of Financial Personnel to Top Leadership in Large Corporations, 1919–1979.” American Sociological Review 52:44–58. New York: Macmillan. Bureaucracy. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1994. The passage of laws, allocation of resources, changing regulatory frameworks, and provision of failure protection (bankruptcy protection and assuming medical and pension obligation) changed organizational environments and advanced the interests of some organizations. The theoretical effort should be to unravel the ways in which the contingencies of markets and legitimacy are intertwined for both public and private and dominant and subordinate organizations. (2008). Cyert, Richard and James March. Fligstein (2001:34–35) adds rules of exchange that define who can transact with whom and the conditions under which transactions are carried out, such as setting standards of weights, enforcement of contracts, and setting health and safety standards. 1982. Michels, Robert. “Markets as Politics: A Political-Cultural Approach to Market Institutions.” American Sociological Review 61:656–73. In recent years the subject matter of the sociology of work has changed somewhat. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. Variation in forms and activities of organizations may occur in a “planned or unplanned” manner. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. These approaches combine normative and instrumental elements reminiscent of Weber’s work. Sociology of work 1. As such, it has a number of levels of concern: the individual WORKER, the work GROUP, the ORGANIZATION and society. 1957. Emery, Fred E. and E. L. Trist. 1996. Boundaries between the organization and the network are often vague, and familial traditions and societal obligations provide social norms that substitute for formal controls. Radical commentators have shifted the discipline to some extent to focus more explicitly on the structure of the relationship between employees and employers, and the inequities that flow from this. To manage these problems, each approach is distinguished by the adaptive mechanisms offered that change organizational structure, strategies, and practices that are designed to improve organizational performance. The sheer capacity to enact an environment implies that the resource dependency model is most appropriate for large, powerful, and dominating organizations. 17–31 in Organizations in Industry: Strategy, Structure and Selection, edited by G. Carroll and M. Hannan. Industrial sociology emerged in the 1930s with the HAWTHORNE STUDIES. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Scholars examine how states shape the environment of organizations, affecting their emergence and decline, form, and effectiveness, and how large organizations, in turn, affect the patterns of interactions and the subsequent policy directions of the state. Uzzi, Brian. Swartz, David. Swedberg, Richard. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. New York: Free Press. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 143–63 in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by W. Powell and P. DiMaggio. “The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect.” American Sociological Review 60: 674–98. 1996. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. In contrast with approaches that explain organizational change through adaptation of individual organizations, population ecology scholars emphasize selection processes such as competition embedded in the environmental or ecological conditions of a population of organizations. Blau, Peter and Marshall Meyer. 1987. “Organizational Structure.” Annual Review of Sociology 1:1–20. As in Barnard, organizational equilibrium represented a balance between the contributions of members and their organizational rewards. In addition, changes in the labour market – the decline of manufacturing employment, for instance – have generally caused sociologists to widen their focus from (male) production workers in paid employment to all kinds of work activity. Networks foster access to resources (Powell and Smith-Doerr 1994), mutual interests and defense (Gerlach 1992), legitimacy or public approval (Galaskiewicz 1985), and better and quicker response to external demands (Uzzi 1996). Albany: State University of New York Press. This article sketched different approaches to the sociology of organizations implying a few theoretical and empirical programs for the twenty-first century.