American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply Bourdieu's approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse, evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind ...of sweeping analysis that makes Bourdieu's classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are being pursued piecemeal, in distinct paradigmatic projects that explore the character of fields, the emergence of organizational habitus, and the changing forms of capital that are key to the control of modern organizations. A number of these programs build on the same sociological classics that Bourdieu built his own theory on. These share the same lineage, even if they were not directly influenced by Bourdieu.
Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; however, retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity ...(EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964. The findings highlight the way in which American public policy, with its broad outcome-oriented guidelines for organizations, stimulates managers to experiment with compliance mechanisms with and eye to judicial sanction. In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions.
Between 1970 and 2000, Stanford University enabled and supported an interdisciplinary community of organizations training, research, and theory building. This title summarizes the contributions of ...the main paradigms that emerged at Stanford in those three decades, and describes the sociological conditions under which this environment came about.
Starbucks’ decision to put 175,000 workers through diversity training on May 29, in the wake of the widely publicized arrest of two black men in a Philadelphia store, put diversity training back in ...the news. But corporations and universities have been doing diversity training for decades. Nearly all Fortune 500 companies do training, and two-thirds of colleges and universities have training for faculty according to our 2016 survey of 670 schools. Most also put freshmen through some sort of diversity session as part of orientation. Yet hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace. We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors. That colleges and universities in the United States persist in offering training to faculty and students, and even mandate it (29% of all schools require faculty to undergo training), is particularly surprising given that the research on the poor performance of training comes out of academia.
Most employers installed sexual harassment grievance procedures and sensitivity training by the late 1990s. It was personnel experts, not courts, legislatures, or lawyers, who promoted these ...antiharassment strategies, drawn from the profession's tool kit. Personnel succeeded because it was executives, not public officials, who defined professional jurisdiction, and executives proved susceptible to personnel's argument that bureaucratic routines could reduce legal risk. With each landmark in harassment law, more employers adopted the grievance procedures personnel advocated despite negative reviews from lawyers. Employers who consulted personnel experts were more likely to join the bandwagon, those who consulted lawyers were less likely. The case holds lessons for the evolution of professions, because executives play an increasing role in defining professional jurisdiction. Adapted from the source document.
Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists ...prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, dediversification, debt financing, and outsider board members. Management did not swallow the pills prescribed to moderate risk: executive equity holding and independent boards. Thus, in practice, the remedy heightened corporate risk-taking without imposing constraints. Both recessions of the new millennium can be traced directly to these changes in strategy. To date, regulators have proposed nothing to undo the perverse incentives of the new “shareholder value” system.
In Search of Identity and Legitimation Pedersen, Jesper Strandgaard; Dobbin, Frank
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
03/2006, Letnik:
49, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the late 1970s, neoinstitutional and organizational culture theorists challenged prevailing rationalist organizational paradigms by introducing social constructionism to the field of ...organizations. Despite their common foundation, these approaches built on seemingly contradictory empirical observations. Institutionalists observed that organizations actively copy one another’s practices, resulting in substantial isomorphism, whereas culture theorists observed that organizations institutionalize distinctive cultures comprising practices that set them apart from others. These seemingly contradictory findings reflect processes of organizational identity formation and interorganizational construction of legitimacy as they have evolved since the rise of the corporate form in the 19th century. Formation of identity through uniqueness and construction of legitimacy through uniformity are two sides of the same coin. Research on management schools suggests organizations pursue individuation through uniqueness and legitimacy through commonality simultaneously and that organizations bridge the two processes in four ways, which the authors dub imitation, hybridization, transmutation, and immunization.
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