When I taught in Saskatchewan, our Economics and Sociology Departments were on the same floor. Our Dean, a sociologist, joked that this was convenient: economists study how people make choices, and sociologists study how people have no choices. We viewed each other warily.1
Because economists think we are able to make choices, and that we are all at least reasonably rational and well-informed (I know, I know…), then it must be that the outcomes we get are at least somewhat efficient. Sociologists are not so sure: are we trapped in bad equilibria with no clear way out?
One way to conceptualize the difference is to ask how we feel about the fact that I am typing this blog post on a keyboard with the keys QWERTY along the top row, even though that arrangement of keys was designed for a typewriter with the goal of minimizing the times that the hammers would jam with a quick typist, but where that technical issue is long out of date. Would a better arrangement of keys be more efficient? An economist might say, well, if there were a better arrangement of keys, an arrangement so much better that it would be worth switching over, then at some point we would have done that. It must be that the gains in typing speed are just not very much, not enough to make it worth it. A sociologist might respond, how do you know this? What if the current arrangement of keys actually is quite inferior, but there are just too many institutional barriers to undergoing what would be on net a positive change?
When it comes to the design of institutions and firms, including nonprofit firms and arts-related firms, a question we could ask is: why, within fields, do institutions all look sort of the same?
An economist might answer: over time there were better and worse ways of organizing things that were tried, but firms that adopted the better structures flourished and those that didn’t went bust. So, if in the end we see similarities in how things are structured (and these structures can become codified in regulations eventually), it must be because these structures make sense. In a famous example of this approach, Fama and Jensen (1983) explain why big corporations, for-profit and nonprofit, have boards of directors who oversee management, though restricting themselves to approving (or not) major strategic directives (i.e. no micro-managing) and appointing (or firing) senior management (but not staff below the top levels). It is, they say, what must have been the most sensible arrangement for large, complex firms.
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell published “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields” also in 1983. I mentioned it very briefly here on the occasion of Powell coming to give a talk at our school - let me take a deeper dive into why they find that the similarities we see across firms might not be optimal at all.
In short, there are forces that guide institutions in any field - art museums, colleges, “placemaking” initiatives (we will get to those later in this series), for example - to adopt the same structures,2 and make it unlikely that leadership at these institutions will attempt to break out of the conformity even if the commonly-used structure is not very good. Economists look at firms and think: if this is how they do things, it must have been established over the decades through a sort of Darwinian evolution that this is the structure best-adapted to the environment for survival. DiMaggio and Powell say: not so fast.
They give three reasons for institutional isomorphism.
Coercive isomorphism results from conditions external to the organizations pressing them to adopt similar processes. This might result from government regulations - to register as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the US there are certain procedures that must be followed (although often what gets written into government regulations arise from what had previously become standard practice) - but also from other sources. Let’s consider big-money arts nonprofits in the United States. Philanthropic foundations and private donors will have expectations on practices held by the organizations if they are going to be willing to give funds, and this will go beyond what is legally required of a nonprofit firm: is there a strategic plan in place? Are there performance measures of the “outcomes” stated in the plan? Are there programming aspects that attempt to attract “nontraditional” audiences? Is the programming “relevant” to our political situation? None of these are strictly necessary for an arts organization to function, but I would claim they have become necessary when it comes to trying to raise money through means other than selling tickets.
Mimetic processes are those that come from management having little incentive to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. First, if we observe most all other organizations in our field doing things in a particular way, it saves a lot of time and energy to go along with that rather than trying to see if there are superior processes. Second, consider the risks for the manager in departing from what is common practice across the field. If trying a new way of doing things fails, the manager simply looks inept: “don’t you even know how art museums work?” If it succeeds, okay, but as a nonprofit there is not a big profit bonus to the manager. A sole proprietor / manager of a commercial entity gets all the returns if an innovation goes well - they might be quite inventive if they want to take a risk. But that is not true at the Springfield Symphony.
But what if the common practices are not the best for everyone? When the Covid came there was a rush amongst performing arts organizations to throw things online. At first, of course, these were pretty low tech - I saw a Zoom version of The Importance of Being Earnest. It was cheesy, but a way for a local group to keep in touch with its local audience. I watched it, why not? My classes, as they very suddenly moved online, featured videos I made in my back yard or in my garage with my phone - the one I made on the practice of “muddling through” has had surprising staying power. But then the mimetic trend was “we need to invest in really top-rate digital programming - this is the future!”. I wrote at the time that it wasn’t really: local organizations’ major strength was in being local, and being a part of the culture life of their town. But no one from away will want to watch the Shelbyville Light Opera Company on streaming; they’ll watch the Met (I return to this issue at the letter S). Still, through various means we see arts organizations deciding that if a new technology is available - “let’s find new reasons for people to look at their phones when they visit!” - they had better adopt it to “keep up.” And I just doubt whether this has been a good thing.3
Normative pressures are, well, about norms: what is generally understood by managers as “the way things are done.” Professional education has a lot to do with this.
I used to ask my students in our Masters program in Arts Administration to think at a meta level about what we were doing. First, it was truer than we like to admit in recruiting students that our Masters program was pretty similar to what they would get at a different Arts Admin program in a large American university.4 After all, as we designed our curriculum we were faced with coercive and mimetic pressures to align with other programs. Even when I used to make trips to other campuses to serve as an external reviewer of their programs, what I was mostly doing was seeing that the campus that invited me was not out of line with what one would expect of the type of program being offered. Sometimes these norms are codified - if you are in a Public Affairs school accredited by NASPAA, I feel for you, and the work that goes in to establishing your isomorphism - but not always (Arts Administration programs are not accredited by any formal body, and it was a hill I was ready to die on to keep it that way).
Second, our program, through teaching a common body of learning re management, fund raising, marketing, and all that, was sending out into the arts sector people with a training in management common to all the graduates of other programs, and as all these alumni go to different organizations, and move between them, there are common understandings of how this all works. Graduates are urged to present themselves as people with these understandings - a bit of browsing through LinkedIn tells you all you need to know on this.
The use of external consulting firms only strengthens these norms, as they bring from client to client a common understanding of “this is how things are done”, with little attention to what might be special features of this particular client. A “strategic plan” written with the “help” of an outside consultant is guaranteed to be bland, and exactly like the plan they have done for every other client in the field (consultants have isomorphic pressures too).5 And when you do a cost-benefit analysis of the person-hours involved in writing the plan, both internal and external, relative to the benefits of writing down what for the most part you already do, except that now you will do it more excellently, well…
The problem here is not just that DiMaggio and Powell have identified some sources of isomorphism. It is that the common practices we arrive at are not necessarily good ones, and that they can be hard to break out of - there’s a reason their paper uses Max Weber’s metaphor of the “iron cage.” Isomorphism is not just sameness; it is also inertia. In a post yesterday on our current political upheaval, in which people express dismay about “norms being broken”, Paul Musgrave gave a timely reminder that not all norms are good ones, that breaking norms can, sometimes at least, lead to better outcomes. If a leader, in the arts or education or politics is “breaking norms”, we ought to ask whether it might have been one worth breaking, inching us towards what might be a better equilibrium.
On the other hand, sometimes norms are good. Not just in backstage management, but in what is presented to audiences, who might like the familiar as a part of its charm. Not everybody attending a symphony concert, or an art museum, or a church service, wants innovation, and they prefer the old way of doing things because it is the old way, because it is their old way - I think we are most of us Chesterton / Oakeshott small-c conservatives about at least some things.
So where is the balance? In thinking carefully about what you are doing, whom you are trying to serve and how best to do that. Being aware that coercive, mimetic and normative pressures might be biasing your thinking, and that you should be know of their subtle pressures as you plan, as you make changes, or not.
I was glad to move to a public affairs school where the economists and the sociologists are e pluribus unum; sometimes we even sing in the same bands with each other…
How did “DEI” become the one and only way for institutions to express and (sort-of) act on a goal of increasing the participation of people who otherwise might be excluded, as staff or audience?
I volunteer tutor math at our high school, and let me be the fogey to say that the move, in in-person instruction, to have all assignments and all texts online, and have students struggle as much with the tech problems in navigating between platforms as they do with Pythagoras, has been bad, very bad. Hard copy textbooks and assignments on paper were good, actually, for things like learning Algebra I.
To any parent who has been with their children through the “college tour” ritual, I don’t need to tell you about isomorphism in the undergraduate world.
I took part in working on a strategic plan that was devised and written entirely internally, and ones that have had consultants involved, and my anecdata is that there is a very big difference between the two.
Double-like this one but only one heart allowed