Institutional Isomorphism and all that
A history
I always liked having my arts administration students discuss Powell and DiMaggio’s 1983 essay “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields”, published in the American Sociological Review (paywalled, sorry - if you can’t get a hold of a copy, send me an email). I think the students found it interesting too, because it centered them to some degree: why do organizations in the arts (and education as well) all come to resemble each other? In part it is because it is easier and cheaper to copy what others do rather than to try to reinvent the wheel, in part because managers face a lot of downside risk if they try something radically different (if it fails they get fired, but not much bonus if it succeeds),1 and in part because of professional programs, like those in arts administration, that across the country, with little variation from school to school, teach future managers more or less the same things about “this is what an arts manager does.”
My own training was in economics, which takes the approach that if we observe institutions setting themselves up in a common way, it must be because that way is efficient; inefficient organizational forms will lose money and go broke. What we observe must be some sort of optimum: that’s the message of Fama and Jensen, for example, also from 1983. But DiMaggio and Powell say, not so fast, the common structures we observe might in fact be far from optimal, but where it is in the interests of individual managers to just muddle through with the way things are.
Well, this week our campus is hosting W.W. “Woody” Powell, for a couple of lectures, and one of them is a look back at the “Iron Cage” paper - how it came to be written, how it was received (outright rejection by the American Journal of Sociology, over 68k citations now, nobody knows anything), and the environment in which is written. The talk will be based on a new paper, co-written with the great Paul DiMaggio, that is open access (!), and if this sort of thing interests you well worth your time.
Indeed, if even performance that is most generously described as mediocre wins one the maximum allowable bonus from the institution’s trustees, why even try?
Excellent footnote!