BUS 374 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Tomato Soup, Canned Tomato, Servant Leadership

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Business Administration
• Course: BUS 374
• Professor: Rajiv Kozhikode

Document Summary

The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields: this paper suggests that organizations are similar. And they are similar because rationalization and bureaucracy has made it necessary for organizations to professionalize and establish standards to survive in a competitive market place: this paper starts by revisiting the idea that organizations are bureaucratic. In a bureaucratic organization important decisions are made by people with authority who need not necessarily represent people whom the decisions affect. A field emerges around the production of tomato soups: because this field becomes more and more established, the producer is no longer making the tomato soup in a large pot in her kitchen. She learns about what is acceptable and what the best processes is. She finds out what her competition is doing and try to emulate that. They are two kinds or ideas/conceptualization of isomorphism. Government and professional agencies have standards and rules on what is considered as ok.