Sources of Organizational Change

了解组织随时间变化的方式和不变化的方式最近已经成为社会学研究议程的前沿。两个主要的理论观点已经出现来解释组织如何以及是否适应不断变化的环境。在人口生态学的观点中，组织被视为在其成立时采用适合于环境的技术和社会限制的结构安排。随着时间的推移和组织的发展，这些安排被认为越来越难以改变。这导致了在同一时代创建的组织将具有相似的结构的预测，并且这些结构的相似性将随着时间的推移而持续存在。相比之下，制度视角强调社会、法律和政治定义作为组织结构决定因素的重要性。从这个有利的角度来看，随着这些定义的变化，组织也在变化，调整它们的结构以符合普遍的理解和期望。因此，制度预测是，在任何给定的时间点，组织将表现出结构上的相似性，而不管它们是什么时候成立的。目前的研究将通过对高校的队列分析来检验这些不同的预测。队列分析是一种人口统计学技术，可以识别人口变化的三个独立来源：队列效应，由具有代定义特征的成员的出生和死亡产生；时期效应，由具有代定义特征的成员的出生和死亡产生；时代效应：由于广泛采用新的行为或特性而产生的时代效应；以及自然成熟过程中产生的年龄效应。目前的奖金是在妇女计划研究机会资助项目下颁发的，将支持以适合队列分析的形式编制一套关于美国所有学院和大学特征的数据集。这项工作旨在证明队列分析对组织问题的有用性，以及促进我们对组织变革决定因素的理解。

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.