Sources of Organizational Change

了解组织做和不做的方式 随着时间的推移，最近出现了变化， 社会学研究议程。 两大理论 已经出现了一些观点来解释 组织适应不断变化的环境。 在 从人口生态学的角度来看，组织被视为 采用适合技术要求的结构安排， 和社会环境的限制， 铸造. 随着时间的推移，随着组织的发展， 假设安排越来越难以 变化 这导致了一种预测， 在同一个时代创造的，将共享类似的结构， 这些结构上的相似性将随着时间的推移而持续存在。 的 相比之下，制度视角强调 社会、法律的和政治定义的重要性， 组织结构的决定因素。 从这个Vantage 一点，随着这些定义的变化，组织也在变化， 调整他们的结构，以符合普遍的 理解和期望。 因此， 预测是，组织在任何给定的时间点 无论何时， 成立了。目前的研究将测试这些不同的 通过对大学的队列分析进行预测， 高校 队列分析是一种人口统计学技术， 允许识别3个单独的人口来源 变化：群组效应，由出生和死亡人数 具有世代特征的成员;时期 影响，产生的出生和死亡的成员， 世代定义的特征;时期效应， 通过广泛采用新的行为或属性而产生; 以及自然成熟过程产生的年龄效应。 的 目前的奖项，根据妇女的研究机会 规划补助金计划，将支持数据的准备 美国所有学院和大学的特点， 适合于队列分析的表格。 这项工作旨在 展示队列分析对组织的有用性 问题，以及促进我们对 组织变革的决定因素。

Understanding the ways in which organizations do and do not change over time has recently come to the fore of the sociological research agenda. Two major theoretical perspectives have emerged to explain how and whether organizations adapt to changing environments. In the population ecology perspective, organizations are seen as adopting structural arrangements suited to the technological and social constraints of the environment at the time of their founding. Over time and as organizations grow these arrangements are assumed to be increasingly difficult to change. This leads to the prediction that organizations created in the same era will share similar structures, and that these structural similarities will persist over time. The institutional perspective, by contrast, emphasizes the importance of social, legal, and political definitions as determinants of organizational structure. From this vantage point, as such definitions change, organizations also change, adapting their structures to conform to prevailing understandings and expectations. Thus the institutional prediction is that organizations at any given point in time will exhibit structural similarities regardless of when they were founded. The present research will test these differing predictions through a cohort analysis of colleges and universities. Cohort analysis is a demographic technique that allows the identification of 3 separate sources of population change: cohort effects, produced by births and deaths of members with generationally defined characteristics; period effects, produced by births and deaths of members with generationally defined characteristics; period effects, produced by widespread adoption of new behaviors or attributes; and age effects, produced by natural maturation processes. The present award, made under the Research Opportunities for Women Planning Grant Program, will support the preparation of a data set on characteristics of all U.S colleges and universities in a form suitable for cohort analysis. The work is intended to demonstrate the usefulness of cohort analyis to organizational questions, as well as to advance our understanding of the determinants of organizational change.