Institutions and Organizations

W. Richard (Dick) Scott received his PhD from the University of Chicago and is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology with courtesy appointments in the Graduate School of Business, Graduate School of Education, and School of Medicine at Stanford University. He has spent his entire professional career at Stanford, serving as chair of the Sociology Department (1972–1975), as director of the Training Program on Organizations and Mental Health (1972–1989), and as director of the Stanford Center for Organizations Research (1988–1996). Scott is an organizational sociologist who has concentrated his work on the study of professional organizations, including educa­tional, engineering, medical, research, social welfare, and nonprofit advocacy organizations. During the past three decades, he has concen­trated his writing and research on the relation between organizations and their institutional environments. He is the author or editor of about a dozen books and more than 200 articles and book chapters. He was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine (1975), served as editor of the Annual Review of Sociology (1987–1991), and as president of the Sociological Research Association (2006–2007). Scott was the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Management and Organization Theory Division of the Academy of Management in 1988, the Distinguished Educator Award from the same Division in 2013, and of the Richard D. Irwin Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management from the Academy of Management in 1996. In 2000, the Section on Organization, Occupations and Work of the American Sociological Association created the W. Richard Scott Award to annually recognize an outstanding article-length contribution to the field. He has received honorary doctorates from the Copenhagen School of Business (2000), the Helsinki School of Economics and Business (2001), and Aarhus University in Denmark (2010).

"This book offers a comprehensive synthesis of previously divergent theoretical perspectives in the study of institutions and organizations. Concise, clear, and insightful, the book is the best short introduction to institutional theory in general and the contributions made particularly by sociologists. This book also contributes to the construction of general tools for studying institutions and organizations by providing comprehensive analytic concepts and frameworks. . . . It will be one essential tool for my research and also my coursework."

• PrefaceIntroduction1. Early Institutionalists2. Institutional Theory Meets Organizations3. Crafting an Analytic Framework I: Three Pillars of Institutions4. Crafting an Analytic Framework II: Logics, Agency, Carriers, and Level5. Institutional Construction6. Institutionalization7. Institutional Processes and Organizations8. Institutional Processes and Organization Fields9. An Overview, an Observation, a Caution, and a SermonReferencesIndexAbout the Author