The social construction of organizational knowledge: A study of the uses of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism

Arguing that knowledge in the social sciences is socially constructed throu gh the selective interpretation of major works, we examine the fate of a cl assic article in organizational theory, DiMaggio and Powell's 1983 essay on institutional isomorphism. We show that one aspect of this article, the di scussion of mimetic isomorphism, has received attention disproportionate to its role in the essay. A detailed examination of 26 articles in which rese archers attempted to operationalize various components of DiMaggio and Powe ll's model shows that measures used to capture one of their concepts could have served as valid measures of one of the others. Findings show that DiMa ggio and Powell's thesis has become socially constructed, as authors have s electively appropriated aspects of the work that accord with prevalent disc ourse in the field, and that centrally located researchers in sociology and organizational behavior are more likely than other scholars to invoke this dominant interpretation of their article.