Status and Power Preliminary Examination Question #4 (September 1996)

“What is the relationship between class analysis and institutional or organizational analysis of status and power?  Are they competing perspectives?  Complimentary?  Do they ask similar questions, or are they investigating different dimensions of inequality?”

Submitted to Prof. Mark S. Mizruchi

October 3, 1996

The 1970's saw the advent of open systems perspectives on organizations (Mizruchi and Galaskiewicz 1994).  During that decade, organizational analysis recognized the centrality of organizational environment in constraining and penetrating organizations, and institutional analysis conceptualized organizations as functioning in the context of the cultural rules and beliefs of the wider institutional environment (Scott 1995).  Class analysis sought both to study links between firms’ internal states and segmented labor markets (Burawoy 1979; Edwards 1979) and to develop an early form of the social class model of intercorporate relations (Mizruchi and Galaskiewicz 1994).  Fueled by the implications of the open systems perspective, the next 15 years saw the development of syntheses represented by the new institutionalism in organizational analysis (Scott 1995; DiMaggio and Powell 1991) and the work of Mizruchi (1992) and others.  Three prototypical examples of class, organizational and  institutional analysis may be identified from that period: Wright (1986); Stinchcombe (1990), and DiMaggio and Powell (1983), respectively.  The relationship between these forms of analysis will be explored by asking whether they address different dimensions of inequality; exploring their roots in classical (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) and early modern (Mills, Dahrendorf and Polanyi) theory; presenting prototypes and  definitions of each form of analysis; identifying the  questions each asks; and asking whether they are competitive, complementary or both.