Lynne Zucker, "The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence," 1991

This chapter is one of two written by women in the section on organization. As you can see, the women are few and far between. Consider than as you read this summary.

First, you need to understand what the term "institution" means in the context of this article. This article is the only one in this section of the prelim reading list that is not in any real way about firms or businesses, but is about a broader concept. The author gives this quote: "The only idea common to all usages of the term 'institution' is that of some sort of establishment of relative permanence of a distinctly social sort." In this sense, language is an institution; art is an institution; Bally's Total Fitness is an institution. What Zucker is interested in, however, is how some social attribute or other comes to persist over time and through generations, and in the role that institutionalization plays in this process.

That is a rather complex introduction to a very simple idea. In order for an attribute to endure through time, it must a.) be transmitted from one generation to the next, b.) once in a succeeding generation the attribute must be maintained by that generation, and c.) the attribute must resist attempts to change it. The example that Z. uses is an experimental one, and frankly it could be argued that she does a poor job of convincing us that her example applies to the real world, but for the moment let us assume that it does.

The experiment which is the basis of the chapter (it is chapter 4 in the DiMaggio book on neoinstitutionalism- Z. is a neoinstitutionalist) is one involving a spot of light on a wall in a dark room. Successive "generations" of women (who knows why only women were chosen, perhaps to control for gender influences) are shown this spot light for a few seconds, and then asked to record how far they think the light moved while the room lights were out. Then they were asked to announce how far they thought the light moved, but the first person asked was not chosen at random: In some of the experiments, one woman would be asked to be the "light controller," and she would actually turn the light on and off; once the room lights were back on, she would be asked first how far the light had moved, and then the other women would be asked to answer the same question, in the presence of the first woman. Then the light-controller would be replaced and one of the newer women would take her place, and the experiment would continue.

HOWEVER- in the first phase of the experiment, the light-controller would be a plant, and would intentionally report a high distance of movement for the light spot! The other women would also report large distances because the first woman had the institutionalized authority (as light-controller) and because she was asked first. Over time, however, this effect dwindled, and women reported smaller and smaller (and more accurate) distances of travel.

NOW, there were several versions of this experiment. In another version, a particular "plant" who was NOT the light controller (in a context where the light was being controlled by someone else altogether who was not part of the experiment) would be asked first, and the other women would offer their perceived distances after her. It was found that the role of a particular woman's personality was a weaker establisher of consistent transmission rates than institutionalization was. In other words, if the woman was a light-controller in a particular experiment, her opinion was more likely to be respected, and transmitted, even if it was wrong, than the opinion of another woman who was simply asked first and who had no particular institutionalized basis for her authority. The article includes some curvilinear graphs depicting the rate at which the influence of personality versus the influence of institutionalized authority dwindled over time, and these graphs clearly indicate the power of authority, even in as simple a job as projecting a spot of light on a wall, in ensuring the persistence of [inaccurate] cultural information.

The theory here is that people in positions of authority or office have greater influence over which particular cultural items get transmitted to the next generation than do others in a society.

The interesting point of the article, however, has to do with the role of social control. Z. makes the point that one of the ways that a cultural artifact can be transmitted is if there are sanctions to reinforce the transmission- but she cleverly points out that it is in conditions where no sanctions exist that the likelihood of successful transmission is greatest!

Two examples to prove her point (first hers, then mine): "Laws regulating black-white interaction in the South were enacted only after the institution of slavery was challenged." There was no need to regulate this interaction because violations of the social norm (the barrier between blacks and whites) was taken for granted and was not violated. The prejudicial conditions were not threatened because slavery was stable.

My example: the "sanctity of marriage acts" now being passed throughout the U.S. by states that are afraid that gay marriages performed in Hawaii might have to recognized in Alabama. Alabama did not have, did not need, a Sanctity of Marriage Act because the institution of marriage was not threatened with violation (by anyone with the power to proclaim real change). It took the arrival of real legal threat, Hawaii's state-wide policy change, to create the perceived need for sanctions in other states to ensure the unchanged transmission of the cultural artifact of marriage. This is the place (and it is all too brief) where Z.'s argument finally gets interesting, and where I think it has its greatest implications.

I will let her sum up her argument: "As predicted, it was found that the greater the degree of institutionalization, the greater the generational uniformity of cultural understandings, the greater the maintenance without direct social control, and the greater the resistance to change through personal influence." I think Z. is right on the money... I just find myself wishing she had used some more "substantial" context than experimental spots of light on the walls of dark rooms.

How does any of this relate to organizations?? Beats me. This chapter really falls outside of the standard realm or org literature. The neoinstitutional point, however, is that people will behave "irrationally" (i.e., will second-guess themselves and conform to irrational social demands) in an irrational way when the conditions dictate that this is appropriate. Weber would not have predicted the same thing that Z. did... In Weber's world, the reproduction of cultural dead weight is non-rational and there is no reason to do it, therefore it will not happen. Z.'s point is that there can be and are "reasons" to do it, but we have to look more carefully at the world than Weber did to understand why and how. Institutions (literally, people who have power within institutions) are a large part of this reason.