[Ed note: This is the 12th of 14 posts in a virtual panel on The Future of Organizational Sociology.]

Organizational sociology, I would argue, has become increasingly sophisticated over the years; but it has done so in ways that make it less interesting to non-organizational sociologists and, hence, less able to survive outside the hothouse microclimate of a self-styled organizational studies program. From my particular vantage point in a sociology department on a campus without a business school, the problem is this: Most of my students – graduate as well as undergraduate – arrive in sociology with interests that they do not see as organizational: Globalization and development, health and medicine, environment (yes indeed Chick!), social movements, inequality, urban structure, science and technology, occasionally law. But only rarely “organizations.” I (like most readers of this blog, I suspect) see all these topics as profoundly and thoroughly organizational. But how do I make that case to the next generation of sociologists?

Of course, I can share my excitement for the ins and outs of organizational ecology and institutional theory, resource dependence and network embeddedness, even institutional economics and competitive strategy. But these conversations all too often end on an awkward note: “Wow,” says the student, “You really seem to like this stuff. So what does org theory tell us about [insert a “non-organizational” topic from the list above]?” I pause and gather my thoughts: “It tells us that organizational practices are institutionally constructed and constrained; that outcomes are shaped by cultural and political forces; that interorganizational exchanges are embedded in social networks; that organizational boundaries are porous; that workplaces are rife with interpersonal dynamics and informal structures and biases; that…” “Wait,” says the student, sounding as though I’ve just plucked away the football that he/she was about to kick, “so why should I study organizations, then, instead of studying institutions or culture or politics or networks or small-group processes?”

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[Ed note: This is the 11th of 14 posts in a virtual panel on The Future of Organizational Sociology.]

A response to the question of what is the future of organizational sociology first depends on understanding how the institutional and organization environment has changed.

In commenting on changes I make some assumptions, i.e., an open systems perspective and competition for attention occurs in an ecology of institutional space.

Below is a partial natural history of observations, not necessarily in an event sequencing order or from systematic research. I don’t know much about blogging and assume that the purpose is to be provocative to raise questions that generate discussion.

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[Ed note: This is the tenth of 14 posts in a virtual panel on The Future of Organizational Sociology.]

I was happy that the Organizations, Occupations and Work Section sponsored a panel discussion at the American Sociological Association meeting this year (2014) on this topic—one that has long been of concern to me. I’m old enough to remember when organizational sociology was a major focus of our discipline and occupied a central place in the programs of leading sociology departments. In its modern guise, this field emerged slowly in the late 1950’s, grew to prominence during 1970s, and was still strong well into the 1980s. We then witnessed the sad spectacle of the majority of graduates of these programs being snatched up by business schools, with others moving into various administrative or policy programs. These graduates continue to teach and study many aspects of organization, but their agenda has been curtailed by the context in which they operate and is often inflected by the dominance of economics in these settings. In this brief essay, I propose to respond to and amplify the comments of the some of the panel members, in particular, Howard Aldrich and Lis Clemens.

I was surprised (shocked!) to hear Howard opine that organizational sociology could have no future because it had no past! For evidence, he pointed to the fact that most of the contemporary research on organizations published in the leading sociology and management journals deals with contemporary organizations, mostly located in the U.S. I think this observation is empirically biased because it excludes the large and rich array of studies published as books and monographs. (Sociology is fortunate enough to be a two-literature field: we still write and value books as well as articles!) But, whether or not the evidence is confirmatory, it is irrelevant to the issue of concern. A review of what contemporary sociologists are currently doing tells us nothing about the past history of our area of scholarship!

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[Ed note: This is the eighth of 14 posts in a virtual panel on The Future of Organizational Sociology.]

Following the panel on “The Future of Organizational Sociology” at the 2014 American Sociological Association meeting, there seems to be a worry that we’re a subfield that is out of touch with mainstream sociology. But for a field in trouble, organizational sociology does very well in our discipline’s most important journals. Looking at issues of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review published in the last year (since June 2013) and based on my rough coding of abstracts, articles that are primarily about organizations, occupations, and work made up 29% of AJS articles and 32% of ASR articles. The articles cover a diversity of theoretical and empirical issues, from explaining businesses’ responses to economic recessions, the influence of category-spanning on hiring among freelance workers, to the effects of corporate downsizing on management diversity. If I had included all articles that use organizational theories, in some way, to explain a phenomenon, the percentages would be much higher. Based on these numbers, it’s hard to see how anyone could make the case that the future of organizational sociology is anything but bright.

So why is there such fear that organizational sociology’s future is in danger? Clearly, the existence of high quality research on organizations and work is not the problem; rather, I think the fear reflects changes in the constitution of the subfield itself. Our concerns stem mainly from the lack of organizational scholars in sociology departments and an increasing association of organizational sociology with business schools. Some people worry that organizational sociology is being diluted as a category of sociological research due its increasing presence in business schools. If organizational sociology is no longer taught in sociology departments or practiced by people who have PhDs in sociology, the subfield is going to become disassociated from the rest of sociology and lose its relevance.

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[Ed note: This is the sixth of 14 posts in a virtual panel on The Future of Organizational Sociology.]

Organizational sociology may have reached its high water mark 25 years ago, when Chick Perrow penned “A society of organizations.” Perrow argued that organizations had absorbed society, which implied that organizational sociology was now the master key for making sense of society. He stated, “I argue that the appearance of large organizations in the United States makes organizations the key phenomenon of our time, and thus politics, social class, economics, technology, religion, the family, and even social psychology take on the character of dependent variables.” Stratification happened through organizational practices of hiring and promotion. Work went on inside organizations, structured by organizational rules. Social movements increasingly constituted themselves as formal organizations. In a society of organizations, organizational sociology should be the sun around which the other subfields in sociology orbit. Instead, organizational scholars are scarce on the ground in most departments today, as if the Rapture had come and left behind only the demographers and criminologists.

Many or most of the disappeared wound up in business schools. It’s not hard to see why: the money is better, and the jobs were more plentiful. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that b-schools are crammed full of organizational sociologists, at least in North America. While fancy schools like Stanford, Northwestern, and MIT are strong outposts for organization theory, most schools are not. Hiring is typically driven by teaching needs, and there is surprisingly little demand among MBA students for courses on organization design (much less institutional logics or categorization). Most organization theorists in business schools wind up teaching strategy and, if they want to get tenure, publishing work that can pass for strategy. All of this bodes ill for organization theory, wherever it is done.

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At the 2014 American Sociological Association meeting this past summer in San Francisco, I organized a well-attended panel session entitled, “Does Organizational Sociology Have a Future?” At the panel, we heard thoughtful and provocative talks from five distinguished panelists. Four of them hailed from sociology departments: Howard Aldrich (UNC-Chapel Hill), Elisabeth Clemens (University of Chicago), Harland Prechel (Texas A&M) and Martin Ruef (Duke). The fifth was from a business school: Ezra Zuckerman Sivan (MIT Sloan).

In response to the great audience interest, I have worked with the editors of this blog to continue the discussion here as a virtual panel. The panel begins with short essays from the five original panelists, who recapitulate and in some cases extend their remarks from the ASA session. These will be followed by additional contributions from Gerald F. Davis (University of Michigan), Heather Haveman (UC-Berkeley), Brayden King (Northwestern), Charles Perrow (Yale), W. Richard Scott (Stanford), Mark Suchman (Brown), Patricia H. Thornton (Duke), Matt Vidal (King’s College London) and myself.

We are going to post one essay per day beginning with the original panel and the continuing with the new commentators in alphabetical order.

We hope this panel will kickstart a wider and much-needed debate, and we welcome your comments in the comment section below each post!