The decline of organizational sociology? An empirical analysis of research trends in leading journals across half a century

Michael Grothe-Hammer,Sebastian Kohl

doi:10.1177/0011392120907627

Michael Grothe-Hammer, Sebastian Kohl

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120907627

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Abstract

Recent works see organizational sociology at the brink of irrelevance. Against this backdrop, in this article the authors want to explore the current state of organizational sociology empirically. They employ a variety of manual, automated and semi-automated content analyses to examine research articles published in generalist sociology journals since the 1950s. Contrary to contemporary pessimistic assessments, the results indicate that organizational sociology has not significantly declined over time. However, the study finds an increasing concentration on quantitative research designs, business-related topics, and only two dominant theory perspectives – neo-institutionalism and the network approach. A multifaceted decrease in variety rather than an absolute decline could be the right diagnosis.

Highlights

Is organizational sociology becoming obsolete? Organization-sociological work is said to have ‘largely disappeared’ (Gorman, 2014) from the sociological discourse
A diversity of theoretical perspectives emerged in the 1970s (Colignon, 2007; Scott, 2004), including new institutionalism (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), population ecology (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), resource dependency (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) and transaction cost economics (TCE) (Williamson, 1981)
Both reviews agree on six major theoretical perspectives in organizational sociology that were prevalent when the two reviews appeared: contingency theory; transaction cost economics (TCE); resource dependency theory; population ecology; institutional theory;6 and network approaches

Summary

Introduction

Is organizational sociology becoming obsolete? Organization-sociological work is said to have ‘largely disappeared’ (Gorman, 2014) from the sociological discourse. By creating a distinctive notion of organization, phenomena such as enterprises, militaries, associations, or monasteries could be analyzed and understood on a generalized theoretical basis At this time, the structural-functionalist (for example, Parsons, 1956) and the strategic-contingency (for example, Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967) approaches are said to have dominated this new subdiscipline, which concentrates on internal aspects of organizations (Colignon, 2007). Randall Collins (1986) hypothesized that this stagnation could be because scholars ran out of adequate research questions within the existing theoretical perspectives Following this stagnation, a diversity of theoretical perspectives emerged in the 1970s (Colignon, 2007; Scott, 2004), including new institutionalism (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), population ecology (Hannan and Freeman, 1977), resource dependency (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) and transaction cost economics (TCE) (Williamson, 1981). They laid the ground for a prosperous diversity of organization-sociological works and became institutionalized during the

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