This is a comprehensive analysis of the present state of organization theory. The author traces the evolution and particularly the more recent history of the field, and its scope and content. He then considers the relevant literature organized by major issues and concepts. Jeffrey Pfeffer makes the point that the world of organizations the book surveys has changed in four important ways: the increasing externalization of the employment relation and the development of the new employment contract; the change in the size distribution of organizations, with a comparative growth in the proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational governance and decision making; and the increasing salary inequality within organizations in the U.S. compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes make it especially important to understand the organizations themselves. The author is a major scholar in the field of organizations and his perspective should be of considerable interest to scholars and students in the field.

1. Anti-management paradigms in organization theory 2. Structural contingency theory of organizational adaptation 3. A critique of population-ecology theory 4. A critique of institutional theory 5. A critique of resource dependence theory 6. A critique of organizational economics 7. Towards a unified theory of organizational structure 8. A way forward for organizational structural theory.

? 1991 by Cornell University. 0001 -8392/91/3603-0333/$1 .00. The research reported here explores how institutional practices change over time in an interorganizational field, in the historical context of the U.S. radio broadcasting industry. It identifies three endogenous mechanisms of change: analogies that are used to make sense of and manage new phenomena, private agreements between identifiable parties, and conventions, the practices adopted by some constituents to solve coordination problems. The use of each mechanism is associated with the nature of the goods transacted within a field and triggers change in established practices as actors attempt to realize value from their transactions. After describing each mechanism as found in the radio broadcasting industry, we focus our historical analysis on conventions. It reveals that conventions were introduced into the broadcasting field by fringe players to deal with shifting coordination problems and competitive pressures. Once they were adopted by the central players, these conventions transformed the organization of the industry by changing the basis of transactions and became its new institutional practices. We conclude that the organization of a field is not permanent, but is contingent upon institutionalized definitions of what is being transacted.

This paper is an attempt to clarify the meaning of the term 'an organization' based on the Weberian distinction between corporate groups and organizations and to identify the managerial role imbedded in his definition. This is done in two stages. First, Weber's definition is theoretically analyzed and its logical implications are presented. In the second stage, the hypotheses generated from these implications are empirically tested. By utilizing data collected from 64 U.S. national manufacturing trade associations, Weber's analytical distinctions between corporate groups and organizations are examined. The patterns of findings are congruent with Weber's argument that organizations are a distinct subset of corporate groups. In addition, findings suggest that the existence of a staff distinct from the members of the group is critical for understanding the nature of organizations.

This paper is an attempt to extend and amplify the concept of transaction and its relation to alternative organizational forms. Based on the institutional economics tradition of Commons (1924), the economics of internal organizations (Williamson 1975), and recent developments in organization theory (Ouchi 1980), it proposes a conceptual scheme to explain what distinguishes organizational forms and the transformation of these forms under the condition of future uncertainty. The implications of this framework for organization theory and design are also discussed.

This paper is an attempt to describe the organization of interorganizational fields with the concept of horizontal hierarchy. It specifies certain structural properties of interorganizational field based on different types of linkages between organizations, and develops testable hypotheses by focusing on the interrelationships between the properties of these linkages within the conceptual definition of horizontal hierarchy. These hypotheses are later tested on data collected from manpower organizations in 17 communities of a large midwestern state.

This article reports the results of a longitudinal investigation of how interpretative schemes of organizational members change through time, and whether any contextual factors are related to this change. In an exploratory study of two bureaux of an American state highway department, which are different in terms of work demands, interpersonal interactions, and subordinate-superior relations, multidimensional scaling methodology is utilized to detect any changes in the perception of interpersonal interaction, which is assumed to represent the interpretative schemes of organization members. Results show that during a period of five years neither the perception of interpersonal interaction nor the contextual variables changed to a considerable degree. The only change which occurred is related to the surface articulation of interpersonal interaction, which is directly influenced by the day-to-day activities of the members.

The authors would like to thank Mr. Robert Williams, a member of the Chicago Board of Trade, for his valuable comments and assistance and the CBT library personnel for their help during the collection of data. The authors also would like to thank Professor Owen Gregory for providing the daily price data from the Archives of the Chicago Board of Trade. This article reports the results of a longitudinal study designed to show (1) how stability of interorganizational transactions is achieved within the working rules of an interorganizational organization and (2) how the working rules of such an organization are changed as a result of environmental uncertainty. The study investigates the relationship over time of rule changes at the Chicago Board of Trade to uncertainty in commodity futures prices and to volume offuturestransactions in a period of 84 months. The findings support the proposition that the transformation of working rules is partly associated with the level of uncertainty in the exchange environment-

This research was partly supported by a grant from the Bank Administration Institute. The effect of environmental diversity and volatility on decision-making strategies is examined for 41 independent banks. Uncertainty is defined and measured in terms of an entropy equation, which combines environmental and probabilistic sources of decision uncertainty. Uncertainty was associated with loan managers' perceptions of the uncertainty of loan repayments and the information they collected before deciding on a loan application. The normal operations procedures used by the banks to process loans varied with the diversity, but not the volatility, of their environment. Volatility was associated with the uncertainty experienced for particular decisions. A theoretical framework with the implication of the two sources of uncertainty is discussed.e