Sociologists From The United States

"Social behavior is an exchange of goods, material goods but also non-material ones, such as the symbols of approval or prestige. Persons that give much to others try to get much from them, and persons that get much from others are under pressure to give much to them. This process of influence tends to work out at equilibrium to a balance in the exchanges"

"To consider social behavior as an exchange of goods may clarify the relations among four bodies of theory: behavioral psychology, economics, propositions about the dynamics of influence, and propositions about the structure of small groups."

"1950: George Homans, The Human Group — advances small-group theory and research; attempts to extrapolate from a single group to understanding the social system."

"A comparative social science requires a generalized system of concepts which will enable the scientific observer to compare and contrast large bodies of concretely different social phenomena in consistent terms."

"The more sectors in which the organization subject to rationality norms is constrained; the more power the organization will seek over remaining sectors of its task environment... many constraints and unable to achieve power in other sectors of its task environment will seek to enlarge the task environment."

"Organizations in Action (1964) [was] a masterpiece on the behavior of organizations, incorporating an open-systems perspective to explain the influence of technology on the matter in which work systems are structured for task accomplishment."

"Thompson’s Organizations in Action was published more than three decades ago but is still one of the classics of organization theory. The book provides a unifying perspective on open- and closed-systems thinking in organization theory that has been recognized as an important contribution in its own right (Scott 1998). The environment is a key source of uncertainty for an organization, and Thompson argued that much of organizational action can be explained by the need to reduce uncertainty. Consider a specific action such as “buffering” (e.g., building warehouses or storages), aiming to seal off the organization’s technical or operational core from environmental uncertainty. The main lines of his arguments always are couched in explicitly formulated propositions but also are brought to life by examples such as the typologies of technologies (long-linked, mediating, or intensive), interdependencies (pooled, sequential, or reciprocal), and coordination (by standardization, by plan, or by mutual adjustment). His typologies have inspired much research in organizational design (Galbraith 1977) and contingency theory (Mintzberg 1979)."

"The incorporation of subsidiary competencies along with major missions is commonplace in organizations of all types and is not a major discovery. But our proposition is not an announcement of the fact; rather it attempts to indicate the in which domains are expanding"

"Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to anticipate and adapt to environmental changes which cannot be buffered or leveled."

"When buffering, leveling, and forecasting do not protect their technical cores from environmental fluctuations, organizations under norms of rationality resort to rationing."

"Organizations under norms of rationality seek to place their boundaries around those activities which if left to the task environment would be crucial contingencies."

"Success in the sociologists' aim might lead, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, to "systems so perfect that no one would need to be good." This view forgets that men long ago committed themselves to the endeavor to control their own collective behavior, not only in the ways sanctioned by the churches but in others, by making it to men's interest to do good. And they have increasingly based the endeavor on an understanding of natural laws of human behavior, those of economics, for example. So that the question is not: Shall this kind of control be undertaken? but: Where shall it stop? A sociologist might also argue that his religious critics have more faith in him than in their own doctrine, the doctrine that man is infinitely tough and resourceful and is not easily cheated of his freedom to sin. What God has given no man can take away, certainly no sociologist. More seriously, he might argue that the social sciences are not in train to eliminate morality but to make greater demands of it. A sociology that shows us unsuspected or not hitherto understood ways in which men are bound up with one another invites more refined answers to the question: "Am I my brother's keeper?""

"Most of our beliefs about complex organizations follow from one or the other of two distinct strategies. The closed-system strategy seeks certainty by incorporating only those variables positively associated with goal achievement and subjecting them to a monolithic control network. The open-system strategy shifts attention from goal achievement to survival and incorporates uncertainty by recognizing organizational interdependence with environment. A newer tradition enables us to conceive of the organization as an open system, indeterminate and faced with uncertainty, but subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing certainty."

"Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to seal off their core technologies from environmental influences."

"Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to buffer environmental influences by surrounding their technical cores with input and output components."

"If we now reintroduce the conception of the complex organization as an open system subject to criteria of rationality, we are in a position to speculate about some dynamic properties of organizations."

"Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to smooth out input and output transactions."

"A central purpose of this book is to identify a framework which might link at important points several of the now independent approaches to the understanding of complex organizations."

"Institutions are human behavior, and they are, therefore, to be explained by the characteristics of that behavior."

"If we wanted to establish the reality of a social system as a complex of mutually dependent elements, why not begin by studying a system small enough so that we could, so to speak, see all the way around it, small enough so that all the relevant observations could be made in detail and at first hand?"

"If you peruse the table of contents of a textbook on organizational theory or search the web for courses in organizational sociology, you cannot help but notice how many of the key contributors to the field spent time at Stanford between 1970 and 2000, as faculty members, post-docs, or graduate students... Of the five most influential macro-organizational paradigms in play today — institutional theory, network theory, organizational culture, population ecology, and resource dependence theory (in alphabetical order) – Stanford served as an important pillar, if not the entire foundation, for all but network theory. By the 1990s, it became an important site for network theory as well."

"Institutional theories of organization provide a rich, complex view of organizations. In these theories, organizations are influenced by normative pressures, sometimes arising from external sources such as the state, other times arising from within the organization itself. Under some conditions, these pressures lead the organization to be guided by legitimated elements, from standard operating procedures to professional certification and state requirement, which often have the effect of directing attention away from task performance... Institutional theories of organization have spread rapidly, a testimony to the power of the imaginative ideas developed in theoretical and empirical work."

"The fact that each nation came to believe in the virtue of whatever policy happened to be in effect when recovery began supports [the] argument that haphazard economic vacillations play an important role in determining which policy strategies become constructed as economically efficacious. This also tends to undermine the realist/utilitarian view, which suggests that policy improves over time as rational policymakers learn more about universal economic laws from experience, because wildly inconsistent policies won favor in different contexts."

"Shared cultural meaning, as it is institutionalised in public policies and state structures, influences the pragmatic solutions groups envision to such instrumental problems as economic growth."

"Modern institutions are transparently purposive and that we are in the midst of an evolutionary progression toward more efficient forms."

"Entrepreneurs are often driven by vision and they embody that vision for those who choose to join and follow them. I spend some time in my book observing entrepreneurs “pitching” their companies to venture capitalists, and I note how often venture capitalists view the personal characteristics of the entrepreneur as about the most certain feature of an investable project. Technologies may change; markets may change; but the energies, vision, and commitment of the entrepreneur can be as durable, and as pertinent, as anything else in the scene."

"Business is business, and scientists who work in the commercial sector are expected to contribute to profits. Yet a strong contrast between the search for profits and the search for knowledge doesn’t describe industrial science very well in the early twentieth century and describes it less well today. For one thing, the distinction between knowledge and commercial goods makes less sense in the “knowledge economy” than it once may have done. We now understand that both knowledge and durable goods may each have monetary value. For another, to say that people working in industry are driven by money may miss as much as it gets right. Scientists who want “interesting work” and good conditions for doing it may find these in industry, while money may be as much a sign that one’s work has succeeded as it is a motive for doing it. Nor should one neglect aspects of altruism, even utopianism, that one can readily find among scientists and engineers working in industry, and, of course, expecting to be rewarded: some pioneers of the internet thought they might make societies more democratic and less authoritarian; many scientists working in biotech reckon their labors might cure dread diseases."

"In 1680, Robert Boyle published the Second Part of his Continuation of New Experiments Physico-mechanical, Touching the Spring and Weight of the Air. ...According to Boyle's preface, the experimental work... was mainly done by a remunerated technician... Denis Papin. The air-pump with which the experiments were performed was... of Papin's own design... At least some, and perhaps the greatest part, of the design of the experimental project was also owing to the technician. ...It seems also that the technician was partly, if not mainly, responsible for the composition of the experimental narratives."

"There is a crisis of for work in our field, as in many other academic disciplines. One of its causes is a pathological form of the professionalism that we so greatly value. “Hyperprofessionalism” is a disease whose symptoms include self‐referentiality, self‐absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus. This essay describes some features and consequences of hyperprofessionalism in the history of science and offers a modest suggestion for a possible cure."

"As I indicated, there is a very pronounced tendency to identify science with what’s done in academia—and especially in the great research universities. But the facts suggest otherwise. At least from early in the twentieth century, the majority of American scientists were employed not by institutions of higher education but by industry and government. And that remains true today. Yet much modern commentary, especially from academic social scientists, viewed industry as a problematic environment for science. I’m not at all sure that’s right. If we compare, so to speak, apples with apples, and look at the pure research done in industry and that done in academia, many of the most popular contrasts describe the situation rather poorly."

"Between 's birth in 1632 and his death, drunk and drowned, in 1676, he was, at different stages of his convoluted career, classicist and underlibrarian at the , physician to the fashionable in England and Jamaica, publicist of chocolate as a stimulant to "moderate venery," gossip tittle-tattling on the nude tub-frolics of the king's mistress, defender and explainer of 's stroking cures of , and historian of early Christianity and Islam. A prolific pamphleteer, Stubbe's writings on religion and politics were among the most pungently provocative of mid-seventeenth-century England. Historians of science encounter Stubbe mainly as the perpetrator of prose muggings of the in the early 1670s."

"faces a renaissance if the leaves of social change can be read correctly. The permissive freedom of the 1960s and 1970s is being curtailed by some harsh economic realities. Parents and students alike are seeking the economic promise of job guarantees when the students graduate. Liberal arts education is on the defensive. Such training must demonstrate it has vocational opportunity or can be converted to such opportunity by postgraduate training. Sociologists who have had the freedom to do their own thing for 20 to 30 years are being forced to make some agonizing appraisals. The entire field of sociology has been placed under scrutiny. The drastic cuts in research funding are only one index of the governmental depreciation of sociology and most other social sciences. The loss of sociology majors and enrollments is another index of student and parental lack of confidence in sociology as a good investment. Academic sociologists who have placed applied sociology in a second-rate category are beginning to recognize that research training of graduate students must turn to applied training or jobs will not be available for many, if not most, of their graduate students. In a similar manner, research funding and graduate fellowships will not be available unless this change is made."

"I find myself in complete agreement with Delbert Miller's argument that industrial sociology needs to be reestablished as a separate discipline-separate, that is, from organizational sociology, sociology of occupations, sociology of work, etc."

"As Miller and Form (1951) have suggested, the beginnings of industrial sociology as a specialized field within sociology can be traced to the Hawthorne experiments that took place at the Western Electric Company in Chicago between 1924 and 1927. Industrialization, which already had taken firm hold across Western society by the early 1900s, had given rise to a unique social form known as the bureaucracy or formal organization. Max Weber put organizational study "on the map," as it were, and by the time of his death in 1920 his work had laid the groundwork for the development of a full-blown research and theory agenda in bureaucracy and formal organization."

"It is the big enterprises which occupy the strategic centers. Most small businessmen, independents, professionals and even farmers gain their livelihood largely as suppliers or as distributors for the large enterprises. It is the large enterprises which establish the price and wage policies of the nation. The pattern of union-management relations is set by the contracts drawn between big labor and big business. Governmental regulations grow up to harness and channel the economic power and practice of large enterprise. The personnel policies adopted by the large industry become the models for the entire industrial society."

"Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and increased complexity of formal organizational structures. Institutional rules function as myths which organizations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects. Organizations whose structures become isomorphic with the myths of the institutional environment-in contrast with those primarily structured by the demands of technical production and exchange-decrease internal coordination and control in order to maintain legitimacy. Structures are decoupled from each other and from ongoing activities. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of confidence and good faith is employed."

"The authors analyze the nation-state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics:"

"Contemporary institutional theorizing in the field of organizations dates back thirty-odd years. This particularly describes what are called new or neo-institutionalisms. These terms evoke contrasts with earlier theories of the embeddedness of organizations in social and cultural contexts, now retrospectively called the ‘old institutionalism’ (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). They went through a period of inattention, so that when institutional thinking came back in force after the 1960s, it seemed quite new. Institutional theories, as they emerged in the 1970s, received much attention in the field, along with other lines of thought emphasizing the dependence of modern organizations on their environments. Perhaps surprisingly, they continue to receive attention, and seem to retain substantial measures of vigor."

"Most institutional theories see local actors – whether individuals, organizations, or national states – as affected by institutions built up in much wider environments. Individuals and organizations are affected by societal institutions, and national-states by a world society."

"Some institutionalist lines of thought, arising particularly in economics and political science, retain very strong notions of society as made up of bounded, purposive, sovereign, and rational actors. In economics, these might be individuals or organizations, operating in market-like environments. In political science, they might be sovereign national-states operating in an almost anarchic environment. Institutionalism, in such schemes, involves the idea that some fundamental institutional principle must be in place before systems of such actors can effectively operate. The classic core principle required in economic versions is property rights (North & Thomas, 1973). In international relations theory it is the principle of nation-state sovereignty (Krasner, 1999)."

"Moving further away from realist models, we come to some core ideas of modern sociological institutionalism (see DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001; Jepperson, 2002; Hasse & Kruecken, 2005). Here, actors are substantially empowered and controlled by institutional contexts, and these contexts go far beyond a few norms or network structures. Further, these contexts are by no means simply constructions built up by the contemporary actors themselves, but rather are likely to have prior and exogenous historical origins."

"Globalization need not work this way. Its benefits can be steered to all nations and to all levels in each nation in a more equitable manner. But a free-market, laissez-faire process will not do this automatically. It will require governmental regulatory action with guidelines and incentives that can best be established at the world level."

"Humans will probably always need the help of especially gifted moral leaders in order to extend the bonds of caring and trust beyond the easy range of the family and the face-to-face community. Such bonds have become essential to the future of humanity."

"The positive and negative consequences of the various kinds of globalization and of economic growth versus economic stagnation are consistent with the Renewed Darwinism Theory's proposition that one's sense of dA fulfillment is relative to that of other people to whom one compares oneself. The innate insatiable drive to acquire cannot be fulfilled, even by a steady increase in wealth, if one is steadily falling behind others. This may be illogical—a Porsche is a Porsche, no matter what's parked in the driveway next door—but it is the way our minds have evolved to work."

"Paul R. Lawrence [was] a renowned sociologist and a pivotal figure in the intellectual history of who was one of the world's most influential and prolific scholars in the field of organizational behavior."

"Sales personnel in all six organizations indicated a primary concern with customer problems, competitive activities, and other events in the marketplace. Manufacturing personnel were all primarily interested in problems of cost reduction, process efficiency, and similar matters."

"Other things being equal, differentiation and integration are essentially antagonistic, and that one can be obtained only at the expense of the other."

"Documents and records can seldom be taken for what they purport to be. They are not neutral and objective accounts of organizational purposes and activities but reflect the biases and interests of those who compile and use them. To take at face value reports of such complex and sensitive matters as costs, productivity, or hiring priorities is naive."

"To deal with the much-discussed but still poorly understood complex of economic affairs known as globalization, we must examine its several forms from a Renewed Darwinian Theory point of view. Some can have positive effects for all parties while others inherently benefit the rich and strong at the expense of the poor and weak. Furthermore, some can be beneficial but also lend themselves to abuse, especially by people without a conscience, and therefore call for some kind of world-level impulse/check/balance control."

"The act of segmenting the organization into departments would influence the behavior of organizational members in several ways. The members of each unit would become specialists in dealing with the particular tasks. Both because of their prior education and experience and because of the nature of their task, they would develop specialized working styles and mental processes."