Sources of Organizational Change

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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.