From King to Court Jester? Weber s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory

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1 501 Authors name From King to Court Jester? Weber s Fall from Grace in Organizational Theory Michael Lounsbury and Edward J. Carberry Abstract Michael Lounsbury Cornell University, USA Edward J. Carberry Cornell University, USA While the work of Max Weber was an omnipresent guiding force in the early development of organizational theory, contemporary scholars have seemingly little connection to that heritage. In this paper, we probe the dynamics of Weberian organizational theory scholarship from mid-century to the present and examine how shifts in research orientation have facilitated Weber s apparent fall from grace. We draw on a dataset of all articles published in the from 1956 to 2002 to track shifts in Weber citation patterns and three streams of Weberian-inspired organizational research: intraorganizational, social organization and organization-environment relations. We show how the shift from the early bureaucracy and social organization studies of the 1950s and 1960s to the more instrumental, resource focus of the organization-environment tradition in the 1970s and 1980s went hand-in-hand with the marginalization of Weber in organizational theory. We also show that Weber has increasingly been cited in a ceremonious way over this time period. However, we also examine contemporary trends and identify opportunities for more direct engagement with Weber s scholarly corpus in organizational theory. Keywords: Weber, organization theory, power, bureaucracy Weber has all but dropped from sight because the questions addressed by organizational researchers have not been and are not now the issues raised by Weber, good intentions and multiple citations notwithstanding. (Meyer 1990: 191) Organization Studies 26(4): ISSN Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) Max Weber s corpus of writings remains a fount of inspiration for many sociologists and other scholars. In organizational theory, where the impact of his work has arguably been the greatest, engagement with Max Weber s scholarship has dwindled to a whisper, although there may be the occasional howl. This is despite the fact that Weber is widely acknowledged as one of the founding fathers of organizational theory. From pioneering research in the mid-20th century that built on Weber s theory of bureaucracy to contemporary research on organization-environment relations, it is undeniable that organizational theory is profoundly imprinted by the Weberian gaze. Yet, current researchers rarely cite Weber, and if they do, it is more often than not a mere ceremonial nod. In this paper, we take a closer look at how Weber has informed organizational theory by providing a detailed explication of the historical dynamics DOI: /

2 502 Organization Studies 26(4) of Weberian-inspired research on organizations through an examination of all articles that cite Weber from 1956 to 2002 in the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), the premier scholarly outlet for organizational theory research. While Weber s contributions to our understanding of organizations and the development of organizational theory include his emphasis on authority, domination, power, and conflict within organizations as well as his attention to the complex connections between organizations and broader social, political, and cultural dynamics, our ASQ data show that organizational scholarship has increasingly moved away from a direct engagement with such Weberian problematics. This is mainly due to the concomitant shift in research orientation since mid-century within North American organizational theory in the 1970s towards more instrumental and structural conceptions of organizations operating in narrowly conceived resource environments, most vividly evidenced in the organization-environment tradition (e.g. see Hinings 1988; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2002). However, we argue that the time is ripe to more explicitly revisit the work of Weber as a way to understand how organizations may be changing in tandem with broader societal and global shifts as well as to more generally reconnect the study of organizations to broader societal concerns (see also Stern and Barley 1996; Hinings and Greenwood 2002; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2002). In the following section, we provide a brief overview of Weber s approach to the study of organizations, including his historically situated understanding of the origins of bureaucracy. Next, we draw on our analysis of ASQ articles to track the historical dynamics of the intraorganizational, social organization, and organization-environment relations content streams. While we show that Weber s relevance has empirically declined in terms of citations and depth of engagement, we conclude with a discussion of where we see opportunities for the revitalization of Weber s work in contemporary organizational research. For instance, we believe that current efforts to understand issues having to do with globalization, postindustrialism, and varieties of capitalism in the information age make Weber s historical analyses of capitalism, domination, authority, legitimacy, and inequality as relevant today as they were during the transitions to industrialization, urbanization, and rudimentary forms of market capitalism in his lifetime. In addition, new research on the relationship between social movements and organizational behavior provides particularly fertile ground for a reengagement with Weber. Finally, Weber s distinctive theory of economic sociology could help bridge theoretical divisions between network-oriented research, rational choice approaches, and more culturally-oriented institutional scholarship within organizational theory. Weber s Approach to Organizations and Organizing The legacy of Max Weber looms large within sociology, particularly within economic sociology, the sociology of religion, social stratification, and organizational sociology. Weber s corpus of scholarship includes efforts to

3 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 503 understand the origins of Western rationalism, capitalism and bureaucracy in works such as The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1930) and his comparative studies of world religions such as ancient Judaism (1952), Confucianism and Taoism in China (1951), and Hinduism and Buddhism in India (1958). His comparative historical orientation to the study of ideas and the economy importantly shaped Weber s overall thinking about organizations, embedding his conceptualization of organizations in a broad political sociology of economic life which is especially evident in his encyclopedic masterpiece Economy and society (1978). 1 Weber is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of organizational theory, mainly because of his insights into the functioning of bureaucracy, the dominant administrative system that emerged with capitalism. Although Economy and society was originally published posthumously in 1922, the first English translation of Weber s writings on bureaucracy did not appear until 1946 with the publication of From Max Weber (Gerth and Mills 1946). The following year, Talcott Parsons translation of the first four chapters of Economy and society was published (Weber 1947). This included three sections of Chapter III entitled Legal Authority with a Bureaucratic Administrative Staff. 2 As Scott has noted, these translations were crucial to the development of scholarly interest in Weber in the United States: Shortly after selections from Weber s seminal writings on bureaucracy were translated into English during the late 1940s, a group of scholars at Columbia University under the leadership of Robert K. Merton revived interest in bureaucracy and bureaucratization, its sources, and consequences for behavior in organizations. Scott (1995: 17) This gave rise to a number of studies such as those by Selznick (1949), Gouldner (1954), Blau (1955) and Lipset et al. (1962) that provided a solid foundation for the emergence of organizational theory as a distinct specialty area. Much of this early research focussed on empirical examinations of the existence of ideal type bureaucracy as posited by Weber (Albrow 1969). 3 Although Weber articulated an eloquent description of bureaucracy that continues to provide a baseline for organizational theorists, to fully appreciate the depth of Weber s analysis of bureaucracy and his continued relevance for organizational theory, it must be placed within his broader historical analysis of the development of capitalism, systems of domination and authority, and social organization. For instance, in tracking the development of capitalism in Western societies, Weber highlighted how traditional structures of power and domination in social life were replaced by new forms of domination emanating from the institutional development of bureaucracy, calculable law, and democracy that supported the genesis of capitalism. For Weber, the structure and social reality of modern economic organizations and administrative systems, including bureaucracy, emerged out of specific historical processes relating not only to markets, trade, and technology, but also to political and legal structures, religion, and socio-cultural ideas and institutions. In addition to his deep analysis of the socio-historical context in which the modern organization developed, Weber s contributions to organizational

4 504 Organization Studies 26(4) theory are also contained in his analyses of intraorganizational power and conflict, and how systems of authority were connected to broader sociohistorical dynamics (Hinings and Greenwood 2002). Weber conceptualized struggles for power, authority, and domination as pervading all social life, including organizational and bureaucratic life. The concept of domination, often rooted in authority systems, is a foundational element of Weber s analytical framework (Roth 1978). In contrast to Weber s definition of power as the probability that one actor is in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, he defined domination as the probability that a command will be obeyed by a group of persons, typically through voluntary compliance or an interest in obedience. Domination, therefore, is not the forceful imposition of power, but relies on a shared belief system that structures interactions between and among rulers and subjects. As a result, domination cannot be understood as the mere sum of isolated occurrences of specific social relationships, but as the outcropping of the institutionalization of values and norms that stabilize and govern a wide range of social, economic, and political behavior. In particular, Weber s typology of administrative systems traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal represent three kinds of authority systems that differ primarily in the types of belief or cultural systems that legitimate the exercise of authority (see Scott 1995: 11). These three ideal-typical administrative systems provided an overarching framework by which Weber tried to understand the key distinguishing aspects of modern bureaucracy, a rational-legal administrative system. In contradistinction to rational-legal authority that is rooted in a belief in legal codes that justify normative rule patterns and the right of those in authority to issue commands under those rules, charismatic authority rests on the heroism or exemplary character of a particular individual, and traditional authority is supported by longstanding beliefs, customs, and traditions. Since charismatic authority is more fragile and fleeting, Weber spent more time tracking the historical shift from traditional to rational-legal authority systems as a way to understand the origins of modern modes of economic and social action. 4 The transformation from traditional to rational forms of authority emerged out of macro-historical changes relating to the development of capitalism. As Collins (1986) has articulated, Weber saw the development of capitalism as resulting from a complex causal chain and unique patterning of events rather than a linear progression or process of evolution. At the core of the development of capitalism was the emergence of the modern state and an economic ethic that broke down the barriers between internal and external economies. However, capitalism did not usher in the rational-legal form of domination. Instead, rational-legal ideas rooted in a number of interpenetrated social, economic, religious, and political developments, including the development of bureaucracy, enabled capitalism to emerge. To wit, bureaucracy was not the natural by-product of capitalism, but rather a precondition for the latter since it developed from the presence of literate administrators, long-distance transport and communication, writing and record-keeping technology, and other factors. To Weber, bureaucratic administrative systems represented the most sophisticated expression of rational-legal authority.

5 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 505 It is within this sophisticated historical analysis that Weber assessed the operation and consequences of the bureaucratic form. While Weber argued that bureaucracy was an extremely efficient system of administration, Derlien (1999) has noted that organizational theory has widely mischaracterized Weber s view of the effectiveness of bureaucracy as a prescriptive model of how administrative systems should be structured. According to Weiss (1983), this narrow characterization of Weber s theory of bureaucracy as prescriptive was the result of the mistranslation of Weber s work by Parsons. Nonetheless, Weber did recognize that bureaucratic systems were more efficient than traditional administrative systems that often relied on overt force and coercion, and charismatic systems that were less stable and enduring than either traditional or bureaucratic systems. Furthermore, Weber claimed that the emergence of bureaucracy contributed to a leveling of social differences because official positions within a bureaucracy were filled according to technical qualifications rather than the personal loyalty to a master. Despite the positive consequences of bureaucratic administration, Weber was deeply concerned with the concentration of power and the tragically dehumanizing nature of life in bureaucracies. Although bureaucracy has its own logic and power, and opens up administration to broader groups of people, it is still similar to traditional authority, controlled by a master or group of masters that use it to advance their own ends (see also Perrow 2002). As Weber (1978: 980) noted, the bureaucratic structure goes hand in hand with the concentration of the material means of management in the hands of the master because the rules of bureaucracy restricted officials from ownership in the organization, and the hierarchical nature of the bureaucratic structure made it ultimately obedient to the commands of the master. Another negative consequence is the emergence of what Whyte (1956) called the organization man, in which the orientation towards the rational technical rules of bureaucracy and obedience to its abstract norms of legal-rationality leads to the creation of the infamous iron cage, a dehumanizing subservience to the rational rules of administration. While most organizational theory scholars have bracketed investigation of the positive and negative sides of the bureaucracy coin, the downside of bureaucracy garnered some attention by intraorganizational researchers in the 1950s and 1960s who examined authority conflict (e.g. Gouldner 1954; McEwen 1956; Scott 1965; Crozier 1969) and subsequent research that has had a more critical edge to it (e.g., Barker 1993; Adler and Borys 1996; Ezzamel and Willmott 1998; Martin et al. 1998). Most organizations analysts have favored more neutral empirical analyses, whether they explicitly relied on Weber s model of bureaucracy to guide intraorganizational research, drew on his comparative historical understanding of organizing to investigate broader questions about social organization, or ceremoniously cited his work to pay homage to the classics in an effort to situate empirical research in a broader tradition of thought. Despite Weber s foundational impact on the development of organizational theory, some scholars have claimed that Weber has been narrowly interpreted by organizational scholars. Scott (2003: 43), for example, has noted that

6 506 Organization Studies 26(4) although Weber s writings had a profound influence on the development of organizational theory in the United States... because his arguments were available in disconnected fragments, they were taken out of context and incorrectly interpreted. Similarly, Swedberg (1998: 169) opined that contemporary organizational theory and economic sociology have a restricted picture of Weber s theory of organizations. These criticisms suggest that, although Weber has influenced many organizational scholars, the full range of his contributions has yet to be explored. An Analysis of Weberian Scholarship in Organizational Theory To develop a more concrete understanding of shifts in how Weber s scholarship has informed research in organizational theory, we performed a citation analysis of Max Weber in the (ASQ) from 1956 to Our analysis focusses on the evolutionary dynamics of three distinct Weberian-inspired research streams and the depth of engagement that organizational scholars have had with Weber. In this section, we first describe our analytical strategy and then discuss our results. Analytical Strategy Citation analyses of the organizations literature have taken three general forms. The most basic form consists of counting the number of times a particular work, author, or group of authors has been cited as a way to assess the overall level of influence (e.g. Usdiken and Pasadeos 1995). The second form of citation analysis involves both counting citation frequencies and classifying the citation and/or article according to a coding scheme (e.g. Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975; Aldrich 1998; Hargens 2000). The final form of citation analysis involves more in-depth content analysis of the text containing and relating to the citation (e.g. Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997). While counting citation frequencies is the simplest and quickest approach, it provides a more superficial analysis than that provided by deeper content analyses. The main downside of textual analysis of latent meanings in text is that it is more subjective than the other two analytical strategies. To track the usage of Weber by organizational theorists, we chose to employ a middling strategy of combining citation counts with an analysis of how the content of articles varied across time and space in their usage of Weber. In the first step of our analysis, we counted the number of articles in ASQ that cited Weber. Although this provided an initial glimpse into the general influence of Weber, we then coded each article along two dimensions to understand the historical dynamics of how Weber was actually employed. We first constructed a simple coding scheme based on three broad conventionally understood streams of Weberian-inspired research: social organization, intraorganizational, and organization-environment. 5 Research in the social organization tradition more directly examines the embeddedness of organizational phenomena in their broader societal contexts (e.g. Parsons

7 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? ; Gusfield 1958; Stinchcombe 1959). We coded an article as intraorganizational if its analytic focus was on internal organization dynamics. Intraorganizational research includes many classic studies of bureaucracies and their dynamics (e.g., Gouldner 1954; Janowitz and Delany 1957; Zald 1962) as well as more contemporary ethnographic research inside organizations that builds on and extends that early work (e.g. Barker 1993; Adler and Borys 1996; Martin et al. 1998). The third and final category was organizationenvironment, which captures articles primarily concerned with the interaction between organizations and their environments. Articles in this genre tend to conceptualize organizations primarily in instrumental terms and organizational environments as resource spaces to be navigated, whether resources are defined as forms of capital, legitimacy, or labor. Research on organizationenvironment relations includes studies rooted in paradigmatic theories of contingency (e.g. Pugh et al. 1969), resource dependence (e.g. Pfeffer et al. 1976), organizational demography (e.g. Haveman 1993), institutional analysis (e.g. Strang 1987), and transaction cost economics (e.g. Ouchi 1980). The second part of our citation analysis examined whether articles used Weber in a substantive way or cited his work more ceremoniously. This distinction is similar to the organic/perfunctory dimension advanced by Moravcsik and Murugesan (1975: 88) that distinguishes articles based on whether the reference is truly needed for understanding the referring paper... or is mainly an acknowledgement that some other work in the same general area has been performed. For our purposes, a ceremonial citation was one that noted or cited Weber but engaged in little or no discussion of the relation of the particular work of Weber with the article s theoretical argument or empirical analysis. Articles coded as substantive used Weber in many different ways, but are all similar in that they engage with Weber in a more significant way than a passing reference. Substantive articles, for example, include those that directly tested or applied a theory of Weber, those that used a concept from Weber as a theoretical basis for research or to operationalize a variable, and those in which Weber was not a primary component of the theory or research approach, but provided a key supporting point that was discussed extensively. Our two-part coding strategy allowed us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of Weberian scholarship than that which would emerge through counting citation frequencies. However, our approach has distinct limitations. First, we focus on evidence from one journal. We chose ASQ because it has been the premier outlet for organizational theory research since the 1950s, allowing us to systematically analyze historical shifts in the citation and use of Weber in organizational theory. To limit the bias inherent in focussing on one journal, we also examined Weber citations in Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Organization Studies. Our analyses show that the ASQ citation patterns are not anomalous and provide a useful window into shifts in Weber citation patterns. Second, we concentrated our analysis on those articles that specifically cited Weber. Our analysis, therefore, does not capture the cumulative effect

8 508 Organization Studies 26(4) of a theorist like Weber. For example, while Weber s theory of rationalization provides a crucial theoretical foundation for the new institutionalism (e.g. Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), articles in this research stream may not directly cite Weber even though they may have been influenced by his work. Finally, since our analysis does not include in-depth textual analysis, it does not tap into some of the complex ways in which Weber has informed different streams of organizational theory, both in ASQ and in other venues. Despite these limitations, our methodology allows us to examine the ways in which North American organizational scholars have used Weber, explicate some of the key dynamics within Weberian organizational scholarship, and assess the extent to which authors have directly engaged with Weber s work. To situate our citation analysis of ASQ, we first track aggregate Weber citation patterns in prominent US management journals (ASQ, Academy of Management Journal, and Academy of Management Review), sociology journals (American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review), and in Organization Studies. For the management journals, we counted all articles that cited Weber. Since Weber is a theoretical pillar for a diverse range of sociological inquiry, we only counted organization theory-specific articles that cited Weber in the sociology journals. 6 Results Figure 1 examines the historical patterns of citations in ASQ as well as the other management and sociology journals from 1958 to 2002, providing the yearly percentages for the total number of organization theory articles citing Weber. 7 The most notable trend is that the percentage of articles citing Weber in ASQ has steadily declined since its peak of 36.5% in 1961 to its lowest point of 6.8% in 1991, with an increase from 1977 to 1987, a sharp decrease from 1989 to 1992, and a modest increase up to 15% by This figure also reveals that the annual percentage of Weber citations has been consistently higher in ASQ, Organization Studies, and the sociology journals than in US management journals, although the gap has narrowed substantially over time. While the annual citation percentages for US management publications are lower than those for ASQ (5% vs. 19%), there were peaks around 10% in the mid-1960s, mid-1970s, and mid-1990s. Despite variance in peaks and troughs, the pattern of Weber citations is comparable in ASQ and Organization Studies, the prominent European management journal founded in The average citation percentage was 15% in both journals from 1980 to For the sociology journals, articles examining organizations and citing Weber tended to be generally higher (around 24%) than in ASQ on average, but the general pattern of declining citations were similar. 8 The citation of Weber in organization articles in sociology journals peaked at around 50% in 1959, bottomed out at 10% in 1987, then increased to around 30% by the new millennium. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics underlying these broad trends, we now turn to our more detailed citation analysis of Weber in ASQ. Between 1956 and 2002, 238 articles in ASQ cited Max Weber; of these,

9 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 509 Figure 1. Organizational Theory Articles Citing Weber in, Organization Studies, and American Management and Sociology Journals (%) AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION STUDIES ASQ SOCIOLOGY Note: Management journals include Academy of Management Journal and Academy of Management Review. Sociology journals include American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology. Data are three-year smoothed. 140 (59%) were coded as intraorganizational, 58 (24.4%) were classified as social organization, and 40 (16.6%) were coded as organization-environment. Figure 2 examines the historical trends for the percentage of ASQ articles citing Weber, broken down by genre. The percentage of intraorganizational articles rises steadily from 1958 to its highest point in 1968 (29.7%), declines dramatically to 6% by 1982, increases between 1982 and 1985, and then decreases again to its lowest point in 1996 and 1997 (1%) before a slight rebound to around 6% by The annual percentage of social organization articles peaked early in 1961 at 15.8% of all ASQ articles, remained relatively stable at lower citation rates between 1970 and 1990, and experienced a slight resurgence in the 1990s; the average citation rate of the social organization tradition was around 7% up until 1970, dropped to 3% from 1970 to 1990, and has increased to 5% since then. The percentage of organization-environment articles citing Weber was low until the late 1970s, mainly because that tradition was still emerging at that time. We coded only 11 Weber-cited articles (or 1% of all ASQ articles)

10 510 Organization Studies 26(4) Figure 2. Articles Citing Weber in ASQ by Social Organization, Organization-Environment and Intraorganizational Content Streams (%) SOCIAL ORG ORG-ENV INTRAORG Note: Data are three-year smoothed from 1956 to 1978 as organization-environment. However, the percentage of articles in this genre increased dramatically from 0.8% in 1977 to a peak of 11.6% in 1987 before falling sharply in the 1990s. If we return to the overall citation trends for Weber in ASQ (Figure 1), a more nuanced picture emerges. The peak of 36.5% in 1961 represents a large number of intraorganizational and social organization articles. The gradual decline between 1961 and 1977 primarily represents the gradual decline in intraorganizational articles between 1968 and 1982 and a sharp drop in social organization articles between 1961 and The modest increase in the percentage of articles citing Weber between 1977 and 1987 reflects the increase in the number of organization-environment articles, although the peak period of these articles was much lower than the peaks for the other two categories. The sharp drop in the percentage of articles citing Weber between 1989 and 1992 represents the nadir of Weberian influence since In this period, there is a decrease in all categories of articles. Finally, the increase in percentage of Weber citations that started in the 1990s is the result of sharp increases in social organization articles since 1995 and in intraorganizational articles since Figure 3 shows the historical trends in the percentage of articles that cite Weber ceremoniously. At its lowest in 1967, less than 20% of the articles cited Weber ceremoniously. This percentage rose sharply between 1967 and 1972, decreased between 1973 and 1975, but then increased gradually to its peak of just over 80% in These overall trends show that engagement with Weber was most significant between 1956 and 1967, but then dropped

11 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 511 Figure 3. Ceremonial Weber Citations as % of Total Articles Citing Weber in ASQ, Note: Data are three-year smoothed significantly between 1967 and 1992, the period in which the number of organization-environment articles increased. To analyze temporal shifts in the three streams of research, it is useful to parse our analytical frame into three periods: ; ; and The first period contains the highest overall percentage of ASQ articles citing Weber (24.5%). The early years of ASQ were dominated by articles in the intraorganizational and social organization streams of research as well as by substantive engagement with Weber (only 43% of the citations were ceremonial). Intraorganizational articles increased sharply from 1958 to 1967, but then dropped in the last three years, while social organization articles reached their peak during the early 1960s. Among both social organization and intraorganizational articles, there were relatively few ceremonial citations. Within the social organization category, the early articles engaged directly with Weber s broad view of bureaucracies as systems of authority that emerged within particular socio-historical contexts (e.g. Stinchcombe 1959; Constas 1961; Presthus 1961). Intraorganizational articles examined a wide range of phenomena, but approximately half explored aspects of Weber s theory of bureaucracy and bureaucratic authority. Many of these focussed on case studies of single organizations and attempted to critique, revise, refine, or expand Weber s ideal type bureaucracy through penetrating analyses of internal organizational dynamics (e.g. McEwan 1956; Bennis 1959; Peabody 1962; Albrow 1969). Towards the end of the 1960s, challenges to Weber s

12 512 Organization Studies 26(4) ideal type bureaucracy based on larger samples of organizations began to emerge within the intraorganizational stream (e.g. Kaplan 1968a; Meyer 1968; Pugh et al. 1968). In contrast to the large number of intraorganizational and social organization articles, there were only six organization-environment articles during this period. During the period between 1971 and 1989, the percentage of articles citing Weber in ASQ rose incrementally but then fell. Of the 107 articles citing Weber in this period, 61 were intraorganizational, 25 were organizationenvironment and 20 were social organization. During this period, the ratio of substantive to ceremonial citations shifted as the percentage of articles that cited Weber ceremoniously rose to 59%. Intraorganizational articles continued to dominate, but two-thirds of these articles were ceremonial citations, as opposed to less than half in the previous period. The shift in intraorganizational research in the 1970s can be characterized as one away from direct studies of Weber s theory of bureaucracy and authority to articles on organizational structure that cited Weber ceremoniously (e.g. Mohr 1971; Pheysey et al. 1971). Some articles in the 1970s did examine authority, but emphasis was on variable operationalization and structural characteristics, not on the struggle and contestation inherent in organizational life (e.g. Hrebiniak 1974; Ouchi and Dowling 1974; Bacharach and Aiken 1976). By the beginning of the 1990s, Weber was still an important reference point for scholars examining intraorganizational phenomena, but substantive citations that referenced Weber s concepts of authority, domination, and bureaucracy had diminished. Between 1971 and 1989, the percentage of social organization articles remained fairly steady, both in terms of the number of articles and the percentage of ceremonial citations, but the percentage of organizationenvironment articles citing Weber increased sharply, especially in the 1980s. The most prominent Weberian-inspired theoretical approach to the relationship between organization and environment in this period was institutionalism (e.g. Baron et al. 1986; Strang 1987), and about half of all organization-environment articles cited Weber substantively. By the late 1980s, Weber citations in organization-environment articles had declined precipitously. The most recent period of Weberian scholarship had the fewest Weber citations. Of the 40 ASQ articles citing Weber from 1990 to 2002, we coded 17 as social organization, 15 as intraorganizational, and 8 as organizationenvironment. Furthermore, the rise in ceremonial citations continued and reached a peak of 62.5% in Between 1990 and 1992, only five articles cited Weber, while only one article cited Weber in both 1994 and However, the numbers alone do not tell the entire story of the current period. Although the percentage of substantive citations in the social organization stream fell to 35%, three special dialogue articles in this period engage directly with Weber s legacy and call for more social organization research (Blau 1996; Scott 1996; Stern and Barley 1996). In addition, intraorganizational articles in this period revealed an important reconnection with Weberian concepts of bureaucratic authority and domination in the workplace (Barker 1993; Adler and Borys 1996; Martin et al. 1998). The content of many

13 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 513 of these articles and the way in which they engage with Weberian scholarship suggests an important shift, particularly towards the end of the period, towards broader uses of Weber that were evident in the 1950s and 1960s. Overall, the ASQ data show that between 1956 and 1970, the legacy of Weber loomed the largest in organizational theory, as demonstrated by the number of substantive citations in the intraorganizational and social organization traditions. The former remained close to Weber s concepts of domination and authority within bureaucratic structures, while the latter offered analyses of bureaucracies that were rooted in broader socio-historical analyses. The period from 1970 to 1989 represented a time in which articles in ASQ became more disconnected from the Weberian themes of intraorganizational authority, and the interaction between organizations and richly conceptualized social, political, and cultural environments. By the beginning of the final period, , the legacy of Weber appears to be quite tenuous within organizational scholarship published in ASQ. However, since 1993, there has been a modest growth in the number of articles that reconnect with the broad intellectual legacy left by Weber and his concerns with authority, domination, and situated socio-historical analysis. We applaud this direction and research, and believe that more direct engagement with Weber s work could be quite fruitful for the field. Discussion: The Relevance of Weber for Contemporary Organizational Theory Despite recent efforts to reconnect with core Weberian issues of bureaucracy and social organization, the long secular decline in the number of substantive citations suggests that the overall relevance of Weber to organizational theory scholars has waned. However, although intraorganizational research citing Weber is still below its historical average (6% vs. 11%) and the percentage of organization-environment articles citing Weber remains at its relatively low average of 3%, Weberian-inspired social organization articles are now above that genre s historical average (6% vs. 4.7%). Hence, even though scholarly use of Weber has narrowed over time with the ascendancy of organization-environment research, the social organization tradition does appear to be resilient, and we believe that it is this tradition that provides the best avenue for the future reengagement with Weber by the discipline. In fact, we believe that the most provocative intraorganizational and organization-environment research has actually begun to shift towards the social organization tradition and highlights the power of that lens. For instance, new institutional research has increasingly moved away from a more restricted resource dependency view of organization-environment relations that was popular through the 1980s to develop richer analyses of fields that take culture and social organization seriously (e.g. Thornton and Ocasio 1999; Ruef 2000; Scott et al. 2000). This research builds on the idea of field in the natural sciences to examine regularities in the actions of actors by recourse to position vis-a-vis others (see Martin 2003 for a review). The concept was imported and adapted to neoinstitutional approaches to organizational

14 514 Organization Studies 26(4) analysis via Bourdieu by DiMaggio (1983) and DiMaggio and Powell (1983) in now classic statements. As opposed to focussing on the study of single populations of organizations as organizational ecologists emphasized, DiMaggio and Powell (1983) argued that the field is the appropriate analytical focal point for neoinstitutional researchers. While field-oriented research has taken shape slowly, it has become increasingly popular as a way to account for both local, situated action on the one hand and societal level processes on the other (see Scott 1994). Fields have been defined as both the organizations that produce common outputs (whether these are automobiles, social services, or spiritual salvation) as well as the organizations that supply resources, effect constraints, or pose contingencies, particularly government agencies, trade associations, and professions (DiMaggio 1983). The field concept can be extremely useful for mapping how structures, stabilized through entrenched power relationships, change as a result of dynamics that involve a renegotiation of those power relationships. To the extent that organization-environment research begins to account for the multidimensional nature of the contexts within which organizations operate, this tradition begins to merge with longstanding conceptualizations and research strategies in the social organization tradition. There have also been efforts to bring together intraorganizational and social organization research by examining the coevolution of organizational and institutional processes (Baron and Bielby 1980; Barley 1996; Lounsbury and Kaghan 2001). Greenwood and Hinings (1996) developed a framework that focussed attention on how the internal dynamics of organizations may lead some organizations to respond differently than others despite exposure to the same institutional pressures, highlighting the importance of studying internal organizational dynamics in concert with broader social organizational processes. Ruef and Scott (1998) demonstrated the fruitfulness of a more detailed multilevel approach to institutional and intraorganizational change in their study of how the legitimacy of hospitals with different ownership characteristics shifted in tandem with a transformation in logics. All of this research could be usefully advanced by more directly engaging with the work of Weber. As organizational theory and research became concerned with organizational effectiveness and organizational environments narrowly defined as resource spaces, it lost touch with the location of organizations in society and the persistence of systems of power both within and outside organizations. However, organizations remain firmly embedded within broader historical contexts that are shaped by complex social, political, and cultural processes. Similarly, authority, domination, and conflict continue to permeate organizational life. Weber s attention to the interaction between society and intraorganizational processes provides an especially useful way to open up new approaches to multilevel research. We see at least three areas where such a multilevel Weberian perspective would be particular valuable: analyses of postindustrial forms of organizing; the emerging literature connecting the study of social movements and organizations; and the application of theoretical and research approaches of economic sociology to the study of organizations.

15 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 515 The Postindustrial Organization Numerous scholars have claimed that the globalization of production and consumption markets, the compression of product cycles, and the expanding role of information technology in production has ushered in a postindustrial economy and society (e.g. Piore and Sabel 1984; Applebaum and Batt 1994; Barley and Kunda 2001). A large and diverse group of trends relating to contemporary organizational life have been identified as manifestations of this transformation, from the rise of temporary work and the end of bureaucratic career trajectories, to the flattening of organizational hierarchies and the emergence of network forms of organization. Weber s focus on how systems of authority emerge and become institutionalized, and his attention to how broader social, political, and culture processes influence organizational life offer a useful framework for understanding the causes, characteristics, and consequences of this transformation both inside and outside of organizations. For example, systems of decentralized decision-making such as selfmanaged teams, total quality management (TQM), and other forms of employee involvement have become an important way for the postindustrial firm to organize (Applebaum and Batt 1994; Cole 1995; Osterman 2001) but we know very little about the extent to which these systems have altered bureaucratic authority patterns. Barker (1993) presents an instructive application of Weber s theory of bureaucratic authority in his study of selfmanaging teams. He found that a system of bureaucratic authority evolved into a new system of concertive control in which value-based normative rules... controlled [employees ] actions more powerfully and completely than the former system (Barker 1993: 408). In his ethnographic study of the work of technicians, Barley (1996) argues that the pressures for organizations to flatten their hierarchies and authority systems do not stem solely from organizations reacting to external pressures, but from the broader distribution of technical expertise within the postindustrial organization. These two contributions demonstrate how the Weberian perspective can be used to examine how and why authority relations are changing, but many questions remain regarding the extent to which decentralized management approaches alter, replace, or reinforce bureaucratic authority systems. A deep engagement with Weber s analytical approach to how authority systems develop and become institutionalized would be particularly useful for answering such questions. We also know very little about the field-level conditions under which new systems of authority in the postindustrial economy emerge and become institutionalized, or are contested and resisted, and how these processes are related to broader social and political systems. Existing explanations view the emergence of these systems primarily as rational organizational responses to distinct competitive challenges. There have been remarkably few studies that have examined the extent to which the postindustrial forms of organizing have been shaped by broader societal dynamics, such as political struggles surrounding the welfare state, the accumulation crises of advanced capitalism, social movements around globalization, the rise of the shareholder view of

16 516 Organization Studies 26(4) the firm, new ideologies about managing and organizing, the impact of technology on social organization, new patterns of consumption, and cultural definitions and images of work and leisure. Weber s expansive analysis of the emergence of capitalism incorporated a wide range of societal phenomena, and our analysis of the postindustrial organization will be incomplete until it incorporates such a similarly expansive lens to examine the impact of contemporary social, political, and cultural change on organizations. Some might argue that the transformation to a postindustrial society has rendered Weber, who was observing the emergence of the mass production economy, peripheral to today s organizations. However, the extent to which bureaucracy has in fact become less prevalent remains a very open question. Although the last two decades have ushered in a variety of organizational forms that are much different from the ideal type of bureaucracy described by Weber a century ago, bureaucratic forms remain central and important ways of organizing. For Weber, bureaucracy is a durable social form that is very successful in maintaining itself. Furthermore, the movement towards postindustrial forms of organizing may represent the next stage in the progressive rationalization of economic and social life as described by Weber, rather than anything fundamentally new. Davis and McAdam (2000), for example, have argued that the postindustrial transformation has been driven by two forces: a movement away from the bounded organizational form and the significance of international capital markets. The rise of the network form has meant that everything a firm might do has a ready market comparison in the form of a specialist contractor (Davis and McAdam 2000:199). Likewise, the power of capital markets and the shareholder conception of the firm have meant that the activities and meaning of organizations have been reduced to their financial statements. Hence, it remains an open question whether postindustrial forms of organizing represent dramatic departures from the processes of rationalization that coevolved with industrial capitalism or an important expansion of them. To remain honest to Weber s legacy, organizational theorists need to examine the ways in which new forms of domination and authority are emerging in the postindustrial age, how these relate to rational-legal forms of domination, and how they relate to issues of power and stratification. In doing so, organizational researchers must examine how social, political, and economic realities influence the generation of new types of administration, organizational structures, and forms of domination, and in turn, how new organizational realities influence social and political life outside of organizations. Social Movements and Organizations Major transformations such as the emergence of new postindustrial forms of organizing often involve social movement-like processes that challenge existing configurations of resources and meanings (Fligstein 1996). While Weber is not known as a social movement theorist per se, his discussions of the relationship between substantive and formal rationality provide useful

17 Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 517 focal points for those interested in the study of values (and valuing) and economic organization. Formal rationality is the extent of quantitative calculation or accounting which is technically possible and which is actually applied (Weber 1978: 85). In sharp contrast to means ends calculations, substantive rationality draws attention to how social action is shaped by ultimate values. This kind of social action often motivates social movement activists who challenge conventional arrangements and authority systems that rely on institutionalized arrangements rooted in formal rationality. The tension between substantive and formal rationality becomes especially apparent when aspects of society that are considered sacred are profaned by equating their purported value to the price that these products can bring in the course of commercial exchange (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Such tensions have been identified in the development of money (Simmel 1978), efforts to establish commercialized blood banks (Titmuss 1971), and the pricing of children (Zelizer 1994). Beyond the study of bureaucratization and co-optation, an analysis of the intertwining of different forms of rationality should also be crucially important to those interested in how social movements penetrate organizations, leading to changes in the structures, practices, and ideas that shape economic activity (e.g. Zald and Berger 1978). For instance, as Lounsbury (2001) showed, social movement activity tied to ecological and recycling concerns that penetrated particular colleges and universities facilitated the creation of new full-time recycling coordinator positions that brought young ecological activists into the physical plants of schools, creating tension around how to value various solid waste practices of the university. While many ecological activists believe that recycling is the right thing to do from a moral standpoint, those promoting recycling needed to engage in formalistic dialogue and evaluation of solid waste practices to form a bridge between the formal rationality of extant physical plant staff and their substantive rationality in order to garner resources for the creation of recycling programs and a broader set of ecological practices. Weber s theoretical discussion of the routinization of charisma has also provided an apt metaphor for those studying the bureaucratization of social movements. For instance, scholars showed how the initial ferment of movements often becomes packaged into more bureaucratically structured social movement organizations, leading to the co-optation of movement leaders and participants as well as the subversion of the original goals and ideals of movements (Michels 1962 [1911]; Selznick 1949; Zald and Ash 1966). More directly highlighting the utility of Weber s comparative historical lens, Clemens (1997) comparative historical analysis of three kinds of movements and the organizational forms they used to contest extant political institutions highlights the value of Weberian scholarship. She showed how social movement activists rely on cultural repertoires in choosing organizational forms in an effort to alter social organization, but that their choice of forms must be neither too similar nor radically different from what is acceptable by incumbents in order for the activism to be efficacious. The current literature on social movements and organizations is burgeoning (e.g. Strang and Soule 1998; Davis and McAdam 2000; Rao et al. 2000; Lounsbury et al.