From King To Jester

From King to Court Jester?
Webers Fall from

Grace in Organizational Theory
Michael Lounsbury and Edward J. Carberry
Abstract
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 Webers apparent fall from grace. We
draw on a dataset of all articles published in the Administrative Science Quarterly
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 Webers 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)
Max Webers 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 Webers
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 Webers 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 organi-
zational theory by providing a detailed explication of the historical dynamics
Organization
Studies
26(4): 501525
ISSN 01708406
Copyright 2005
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks,
CA & New Delhi)
501 Authors name
www.egosnet.org/os DOI: 10.1177/0170840605051486
Michael
Lounsbury
Cornell University,
USA
Edward J.
Carberry
Cornell University,
USA
02_Lounsbury_correxs 10/3/05 2:50 PM Page 501
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 Webers contributions to our understanding of organizations
and the development of organizational theory include his emphasis on
authority, domination, power, and conict within organizations as well as his
attention to the complex connections between organizations and broader
social, political, and cultural dynamics, our ASQdata 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 Webers 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
Webers 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 Webers 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 Webers 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, Webers
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.
Webers Approach to Organizations and Organizing
The legacy of Max Weber looms large within sociology, particularly within
economic sociology, the sociology of religion, social stratication, and
organizational sociology. Webers corpus of scholarship includes efforts to
502 Organization Studies 26(4)
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 Webers overall thinking about organiza-
tions, 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 rst English translation of Webers 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 rst 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 Webers 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 Webers 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 specic 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, Webers contributions to organizational
Lounsbury & Carberry: From King to Court Jester? 503
theory are also contained in his analyses of intraorganizational power and
conict, and how systems of authority were connected to broader socio-
historical 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 Webers
analytical framework (Roth 1978). In contrast to Webers denition of power
as the probability that one actor is in a position to carry out his own will despite
resistance, he dened 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 specic 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, Webers 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 eeting, Weber spent more time tracking the historical shift from tradi-
tional 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 develop-
ment 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.
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 efcient system of administration, Derlien
(1999) has noted that organizational theory has widely mischaracterized
Webers 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 Webers theory of bureaucracy as prescriptive
was the result of the mistranslation of Webers work by Parsons. Nonetheless,
Weber did recognize that bureaucratic systems were more efcient 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 ofcial positions within a bureaucracy were lled according to
technical qualications 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 ofcials 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 conict (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 Webers 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 Webers 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
although Webers writings had a profound inuence 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 contem-
porary organizational theory and economic sociology have a restricted picture
of Webers theory of organizations. These criticisms suggest that, although
Weber has inuenced 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 Webers
scholarship has informed research in organizational theory, we performed a
citation analysis of Max Weber in the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ)
from 1956 to 2002. Our analysis focusses on the evolutionary dynamics of
three distinct Weberian-inspired research streams and the depth of engage-
ment that organizational scholars have had with Weber. In this section, we
rst 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 inuence (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 nal
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 supercial 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 rst step of our analysis, we counted the number of articles in
ASQ that cited Weber. Although this provided an initial glimpse into the
general inuence of Weber, we then coded each article along two dimensions
to understand the historical dynamics of how Weber was actually employed.
We rst 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
1956; Guseld 1958; Stinchcombe 1959). We coded an article as intra-
organizational 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 organiza-
tions that builds on and extends that early work (e.g. Barker 1993; Adler and
Borys 1996; Martin et al. 1998). The third and nal category was organization-
environment, 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 organiza-
tional environments as resource spaces to be navigated, whether resources
are dened as forms of capital, legitimacy, or labor. Research on organization-
environment 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 articles 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
signicant 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 ASQcitation patterns are not anomalous and provide a
useful window into shifts in Weber citation patterns.
Second, we concentrated our analysis on those articles that specically
cited Weber. Our analysis, therefore, does not capture the cumulative effect
of a theorist like Weber. For example, while Webers 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
inuenced 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 Webers work.
To situate our citation analysis of ASQ, we rst 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-specic 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 ASQhas 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 2002. This gure 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 ASQand Organization Studies,
the prominent European management journal founded in 1980. The average
citation percentage was 15% in both journals from 1980 to 2002. 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 organiza-
tion 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 ASQcited Max Weber; of these,
140 (59%) were coded as intraorganizational, 58 (24.4%) were classied 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 2002. 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 ASQarticles)
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ASQ AMERICAN MANAGEMENT
SOCIOLOGY ORGANIZATION STUDIES
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.
Figure 1. Organizational Theory Articles Citing Weber in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Studies,
and American Management and Sociology Journals (%)
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 intraorgani-
zational articles between 1968 and 1982 and a sharp drop in social organization
articles between 1961 and 1964. The modest increase in the percentage of
articles citing Weber between 1977 and 1987 reects 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 inuence since 1956. 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 1997.
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 1992.
9
These overall trends show that engagement
with Weber was most signicant between 1956 and 1967, but then dropped
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Note: Data are three-year smoothed
Figure 2. Articles Citing Weber in ASQ by Social Organization, Organization-Environment and Intraorganizational
Content Streams (%)
signicantly 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: 19561970; 19711989; and
19902002. The rst 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 organi-
zation and intraorganizational articles, there were relatively few ceremonial
citations.
Within the social organization category, the early articles engaged directly
with Webers 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 Webers
theory of bureaucracy and bureaucratic authority. Many of these focussed on
case studies of single organizations and attempted to critique, revise, rene,
or expand Webers 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 Webers
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Note: Data are three-year smoothed
Figure 3. Ceremonial Weber Citations as % of Total Articles Citing Weber in ASQ, 19562002
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 organization-
environment 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 intraorgani-
zational research in the 1970s can be characterized as one away from direct
studies of Webers 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 Webers 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 organization-
environment 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 organization-
environment. Furthermore, the rise in ceremonial citations continued and
reached a peak of 62.5% in 1992. Between 1990 and 1992, only ve articles
cited Weber, while only one article cited Weber in both 1994 and 1995.
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 Webers legacy and call for more social organization research
(Blau 1996; Scott 1996; Stern and Barley 1996). In addition, intraorgani-
zational 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
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 ASQdata 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 Webers 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 nal period, 19902002, 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 Webers work could be quite fruitful for the eld.
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 genres 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 elds 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 eld 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
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 eld is the appropriate analytical
focal point for neoinstitutional researchers.
While eld-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 dened 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 eld 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 dened 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 rmly embedded
within broader historical contexts that are shaped by complex social, political,
and cultural processes. Similarly, authority, domination, and conict continue
to permeate organizational life. Webers 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.
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 identied as manifestations
of this transformation, from the rise of temporary work and the end of
bureaucratic career trajectories, to the attening of organizational hierarchies
and the emergence of network forms of organization. Webers focus on how
systems of authority emerge and become institutionalized, and his attention
to how broader social, political, and culture processes inuence 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 self-
managed teams, total quality management (TQM), and other forms of
employee involvement have become an important way for the postindustrial
rm 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 Webers theory of bureaucratic authority in his study of self-
managing 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 atten
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 Webers
analytical approach to how authority systems develop and become institu-
tionalized would be particularly useful for answering such questions.
We also know very little about the eld-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
the rm, new ideologies about managing and organizing, the impact of
technology on social organization, new patterns of consumption, and cultural
denitions and images of work and leisure. Webers 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 todays 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 signicance of international capital markets. The rise of the network form
has meant that everything a rm 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 rm have
meant that the activities and meaning of organizations have been reduced to
their nancial 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 Webers 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 stratication.
In doing so, organizational researchers must examine how social, political,
and economic realities inuence the generation of new types of administra-
tion, organizational structures, and forms of domination, and in turn, how
new organizational realities inuence 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 congurations 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
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 meansends 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 identied 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.
Webers 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 move-
ments 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 Webers 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 efcacious. 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.
2003; Davis et al. 2004), and we believe the research at this interface is
providing a robust direction for social organization research that fruitfully
embeds questions about organizations and organizing in broader societal
dynamics.
Economic Sociology
Finally, during the last 20 years, economic sociology has witnessed a dramatic
resurgence of interest, producing what is now called the new economic
sociology. The growing number of readers and textbooks highlight the
vitality and diversity of interest in this growing domain (e.g. Granovetter
and Swedberg 1992; Smelser and Swedberg 1994; Carruthers and Babb
2000; Biggart 2002; Swedberg 2003; Dobbin 2004). While sociology journals
have seen a growing number of economic sociology articles published
since the 1980s, ASQ itself published 15 such articles from 1994 to 2000.
Hence, this is an area of research that has become important in organization
theory proper.
As Swedberg (1998) details, in addition to the historical analysis of
capitalism and systems of domination that situated his theory of bureaucracy,
Weber made the rst systematic attempt at formulating a distinctive economic
sociology. Weber developed an original theoretical framework for examining
economic phenomena by offering a sophisticated denition of economic
social action and using this as the basis for examining economic organization
generally. In particular, he was attempting to bridge the divide between the
rational actor of economic theory and the socially constructed nature of
reality, a divide that remains relatively unexplored (Swedberg 1998). Going
back to Weber may not only provide inspiration for the development of
more historical comparative approaches to economic sociology (e.g. see
Stinchcombe 1983), but may provide a useful starting point for dialogue
among structurally-oriented network research, rational choice approaches,
and more culturally-oriented institutional scholarship. In particular, Webers
attention to the interpenetration of culture and rationality is apropos to
research camps that emphasize one to the exclusion of the other (see Strang
and Macy 2001).
This is particularly evident in eld analyses that employ practice
theories and relational methods to study temporal and spatial variations in
meaning and the ways in which actors, enmeshed in relatively durable power
relations, engage in continual struggles for positional advantage (Bourdieu
1977). For example, in an analysis of the cultural and organizational dynamics
underpinning the 1992 impeachment of Brazilian President Fernando
Collor de Melo, Mische and Pattison (2000) highlighted how pro- and anti-
impeachment organizational coalitions formed as a result of discursive
positioning in the eld of Brazilian politics. They showed how a wide variety
of organizational forms, the interconnections and alliances between them,
and their discursive claims about the particular kinds of projects in which
they were engaged, shaped the impeachment dynamic. Since Weber has been
such a central gure in economic as well as organizational sociology, it is not
surprising that the recent rise of organizational theory interest in the domain
of economic sociology provides fertile ground for reengagement with
Webers work.
In this nal section, we have highlighted how organizational scholarship
could benet from a serious engagement with Webers core analytical
framework, a framework that takes seriously the dynamics of domination and
conict within organizations and the complex social, political, and cultural
context in which organizations are embedded. We believe that Webers
corpus offers a sophisticated lens through which organizational theory can
begin to make deeper connections between systems of authority inside of
organizations, and broader structures of power and privilege within society,
as well as the complex ways in which such systems and structures are
legitimated. In its primary focus on developing a science of effective
organizational management and its view of environments as resource spaces,
contemporary organizational theory has become alarmingly disconnected
from such issues, which were at the core of Webers attempt to understand
modern capitalism. The time is ripe to more critically reect on dominant
strands of organizational research that valorize instrumental conceptions of
organizing with an eye towards managerial relevance.
Webers historical analyses of capitalism, domination, authority, and
bureaucracy are as relevant today as they were during the transitions to
industrialization, urbanization, and rudimentary forms of market capitalism
in his lifetime. Like the time of transformation in which Weber developed his
ideas, we grapple with contemporary transformative issues involving the
growing importance of information technology, globalization, and post-
Fordist forms of organizing economic activity. Current researchers would be
wise to revisit Webers corpus since his foundational statements and empirical
efforts provide many insights into current issues and problems in addition to
offering many unsolved puzzles that should fuel future theoretical research
and development. Our hope is that this may also provide an opportunity for
further collaboration and dialogue among organizational theorists in America,
Europe, and elsewhere.
We would like to thank Richard Swedberg for his very astute and helpful insights about Max
Weber and Weberian scholarship. Royston Greenwood, Tom Lawrence and three anonymous
reviewers also provided very sage comments and suggestions that usefully sharpened our
arguments.
1 For more complete explications of Webers scholarship, see Bendix (1960), Ksler (1988)
and Swedberg (1998).
2 The relevant sections on organizations in Economy and society include: Part 1, Chapter
I, section 12; Part 1, Chapter III, sections 35; Part 2, Chapter II; Part 2, Chapter X, section
3; and Part 2, Chapter XI.
3 Webers model of bureaucracy included administrative characteristics such as a xed
division of labor, a hierarchy of ofces, a set of general rules that govern performance,
the separation of personal from ofcial property and rights, and the selection and
promotion of personnel on the basis of technical considerations and merit (see Scott 1992
for a more complete discussion).
4 As part of Webers analysis of charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority systems,
he developed the idea of rationalization that was the process by which, for example,
Notes
charismatic and traditional forms changed to become more formally rational, often in
accordance with rational-legal authority systems (see Weber 1978: 11211122).
5 Our categorization of ASQ articles was inductively derived, but guided by our
understanding of the literature.
6 For our analysis of sociology journals, we searched for articles that cited Weber and had
any of the following words in the abstract: bureaucracy, bureaucratic, organization,
organizational, rm, administration, or administrative.
7 We began counts for ASQ from its inception in 1956; for the Academy of Management
Journal from its inception in 1957; for the Academy of Management Review from its
inception in 1976; and both sociology journals from 1956, although both were founded
prior to 1956. Since there is variation in the volume of articles across our journal
categories, we focus on Weber citation percentages across the total number of articles by
category to gain leverage in comparability.
8 The dramatic spike in Weber citations around 1978 in sociology journals may be partially
due to the Roth and Wittich translation of Economy and Society published in that year.
9 The general pattern in ceremonial citations is similar in ASQ and Organization Studies in
the period from 1980 to 2002. The average percentage of articles citing Weber
ceremoniously over this time period was only slightly higher in ASQ (64% vs. 60%).
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Professor Michael Lounsbury is the J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship
and Personal Enterprise at Cornell University. His research focusses on the
relationship between organizational and institutional change, social entrepreneurship,
and the rise of new industries and practices. Recently, he has been working on projects
that investigate the emergence of the recycling industry and the dynamics of the
mutual fund industry. Professor Lounsbury serves on a number of editorial boards
and his work has been recently published in journals such as Administrative Science
Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and Social Forces. In addition, he is
the series editor of Research in the Sociology of Organizations published by Elsevier.
Address: J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship, Cornell University, 367 Ives
Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
E-mail: mdl18@cornell.edu
Edward J. Carberry is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Cornell
University. His research interests reside at the intersection of institutional theory, the
sociology of work, and social stratication, with a particular focus on employee
ownership and structures of decentralized authority.
Address: Cornell University, Department of Sociology, 323 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY
14853, USA.
E-mail: ejc36@cornell.edu
Michael
Lounsbury
Edward Carberry

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