The Lid on the Garbage Can: Institutional Constraints on Decision Making in the Technical Core of College-Text Publishers

Abstract

The two authors participated equally in this paper. Elaine Backman provided extensive comments. Andrew Abbott, Carol Connell, David Garfinkle, Michelle Lamont, James March, Joanne Martin, Laurie Mason, John Meyer, John Newhagen, Linda Pike, Ann Swidler, and anonymous ASO reviewers also made helpful suggestions. In a study of college physics and sociology textbook publishers, coercive, mimetic, and normative forces in the institutional environment are shown to order the decision and access structures of garbage can systems and to account for a uniformity of outcomes that is unexpected from garbage can decision models. Interviews with editors established that decision making in textbook publishing conforms with the garbage can model and helped us determine the ten best-selling introductory texts in each field. Optimal matching, a quantitative technique for content analysis, was used to demonstrate that differences in the homogeneity of contents and sequencing of material in these textbooks are determined by the degree of development of paradigms in the academic discipline. We show that, in contrast to Thompson's (1967) model, organizations with ambiguous core technologies can benefit from opening their technical cores to be shaped by the institutional environment.'