A New Semi-Regular Series Of Posts: The Classics of Organization Theory

I've been working at Government Executive since 2007, and while I've learned a lot about how organizations work simply by reporting, I decided that it was time that I learned a little bit more about the academic work underpinning a lot of assumptions on my beat. As a result, for the next four or so months, I'll be reading my way through some of the key articles and books about how organizations, from government bureaucracies to academic departments to non-profits work, and blogging once a week about how what I learned from them applies to what I see in my reporting. First up, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell's "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Field."