2000 Max Weber Award

Elisabeth Clemens, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

This year’s call for nominations for the Weber award brought an exceptional number of wonderful books. Of the nineteen nominees, all made significant contributions and more than a few were serious contenders for the award. In terms of both quantity and demands for keen discrimination, this represented a real challenge for Mitchell Abolafia, Peter Frumkin, Marc Ventresca, and myself. In the end, we decided to award the prize jointly to Howard Aldrich of the University of North Carolina and Marie-Laure Djelic of the Ecole Superieure des Sciences Economiques in Cergy-Pontoise, France.

In Organizations Evolving, Howard Aldrich has crafted an elegant synthesis of a wide range of recent research on organizational emergence and change. Through reviews that encompass both his own empirical contributions and those of many others, he articulates an evolutionary framework that harnesses key insights of organizational theory to the analysis of social change. Beyond this theoretical contribution, each chapter represents an act of service to the discipline. Aldrich surveys what we have learned, what questions remain unanswered, and what questions we haven’t yet tried to ask. Organizations Evolving will provide a foundation and inspiration for new empirical contributions and theoretical transformations.

Marie-Laure Djelic speaks directly to the split personality of institutional theory-its concern for both the diffusion of legitimate forms and the durability of embedded arrangements. Exporting the American Model: The Postwar Transformation of European Business explores how “the American model” of large corporations and competitive markets was selectively imposed on and appropriated by France and Germany in the postwar reconstruction of their economies. (Italy, by comparison, declined to conform; its relatively unreconstructed business system would then inspire the literature on industrial districts decades later.) Through rich case studies of economic policy and politics, Djelic demonstrates how the diffusion of models required, and was mediated by, coercive and normative and mimetic processes that operated through complex transnational networks. Exporting the American Model is an incisive study that advances both institutional theory and the history of business systems.