Opening of the SCANCOR-Weatherhead Partnership
Date and Time
Location
"The Cultural Dependence of Highly Institutionalized Organization”
Speaker:
John Meyer, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Stanford University.
Contact:
Catherine Nehring
cnehring@wcfia.harvard.edu
Chair:
Frank Dobbin, Director, SCANCOR-Weatherhead Partnership; Faculty Associate. Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.
Abstract:
Contemporary organizations reflect organizational theories, which thus have an interdependent relationship with their objects of study. An older modernity imagined bureaucracy as canonical everywhere. The post-War breakdown of this model, generated models of organizations as rational, autonomous, and responsible managed "actors," and as made up of schooled individuals now seen as actors. The worldwide success of such notions and organizations in every social sector reflecting them -- indicated, for instance, by the global explosion of business schools -- generates greatly expanded managerial responsibilities in densely organized environments asserting these responsibilities. So contemporary organizations theory is filled with depictions of complex environments, multiple and inconsistent logics or orders of worth, and resultant limited or "partial" possibilities for coherence, intensifying myths of managerialism. The fragile structures – hyper-organizations -- that result depend heavily and increasingly on cultural legitimacy rather than clear functional justifications. As legitimacy weakens in a post-neoliberal period, substantial changes in organizational theories and models should follow.