THE USE AND TRANSFORMATION OF FORMAL DECISION-MAKING CRITERIA - SENTENCING GUIDELINES, ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXTS, AND CASE PROCESSING STRATEGIES

Recent sociological research in organizations has emphasized the ''fil tering'' of externally-imposed formal policies and rules through local organizational cultures and strategic interaction processes. This typ e of generic organizational process assumes special importance for cou rts and sentencing, subjects of policy-oriented and social problems di scourse for over three decades. Eisenstein and associated (1977, 1988; Flemming, Nardulli and Eisenstein 1992) point out that the contexts o f local ''court communities'' and the formal and informal case process ing norms of courtroom workgroups are at least as important as formal laws and state-level policies in determining ''contours'' of criminal justice. Our study focuses on the use and transformation of sentencing guidelines in the interorganizational relations and workgroup case pr ocessing strategies in local courts. We draw on the organizational con cepts of ''embeddedness'' (Perrucci 1994) and ''properties in use'' (P eyrot 1995) of formal decision-making tools to frame our analysis. We present qualitative interview and field data on organizational context s and case processing strategies from three different-sized county tri al courts in Pennsylvania, a state whose courts have operated under se ntencing guidelines for over a decade. Among the highlights of the ana lysis are our findings that DA's offices can use sentencing guidelines as management tools, judges can use them to legitimate their sentenci ng practices in political disputes, and both prosecutors and defense a ttorneys use them as important tools of uncertainty reduction in their guilty plea strategies. More generally, we argue that the implimentat ion of externally imposed formal rules and decision-making criteria de pends on local relationships, activities, and informal decision-making criteria.