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How Institutions Form
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Running head: HOW INSTITUTIONS FORM
How Institutions Form:
Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy
Hallett, Tim, and Marc Ventresca. 2006b. “How Institutions Form: Loose Coupling as a
Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.” American Behavioral Scientist.
Special Issue: Institutions in the Making: Identity, Power, and the Emergence of New
Organizational Forms. 49, 7: 908-924. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/49/7/908.abstract
Acknowledgements:
We thank both colleagues and institutions: Elizabeth Armstrong, Lonnie Athens, Tim Bartley,
Howard Becker, Amy Binder, Gary Fine, Brooke Harrington, Bill Kaghan, Rodney Lacey,
Eleanor Lewis, Ryon Lancaster, Doug Orton, Charles Perrow, Fabio Rojas, Michael Sauder, and
Michael Schwalbe. We benefit from the insights of participants in the PEC workshop at Indiana
University, Strategy and Practices Workshop at Oxford, and the 2004 ASA culture roundtable.
Key comments came from contributors to this volume at the New Models of Management
Workshop at Skagen, DK 2005. Special thanks to Patti Gumport, Director and colleagues at the
Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research (SIHER), Stanford University for a congenial
working venue and intellectual space.
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Abstract
This paper uses a mid century text to reengage a late 70s concept in order to answer a
new century question. We return to Alvin Gouldner’s classic (1954) study Patterns of Industrial
Bureaucracy to reexamine the “coupling” concept in contemporary institutionalism in a way that
engages the question: “How do new institutional forms emerge?” Based on Gouldner’s detailed
observations of work in a gypsum mine, we argue that coupling processes are key mechanisms in
the emergence of institutional forms. Coupling processes describe how existing and available
elements are (re)combined into new forms that bridge broader rationalized myths and local
practices. Examining coupling as a dynamic process and activity helps us to understand how the
institution of bureaucracy emerged in the gypsum mine and interacted with previous social
orders of authority and control. Gouldner’s account of coupling at the mine is a story of formal
and informal power struggles and active conflict, and it is a story that brings the process of local
institutional formation into sharp relief.
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How Institutions Form:
Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy
How do institutions form? This question is central to research in organizational analysis
and other key social science and policy research. Oftentimes, the answers to the questions we ask
are implicit in earlier research, even though we must labor to read these works anew.
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Thus,
when confronted with the “new” question that motivates this issue of American Behavioral
Scientist--“How do new institutional forms first emerge within and among organizations?”-- we
look to Gouldner’s (1954) classic study of authority, bureaucracy, and change in a 1940s gypsum
mine, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. We use this study and Gouldner’s insights to refocus
on the potential of the “loose coupling” concept for understanding institutional processes and the
mechanisms by which institutions form. In contemporary research “loose coupling” is typically
treated as an outcome, but returning to Patterns provides a different account of how coupling
occurs and matters for emerging institutional forms. It is a process story of tangible conflict and
active power struggles, competing definitions of the situation, a narrative that links external
meanings with local organizational knowledge and practices. It is a story that sheds light on how
bureaucracy, at that time in American history a new institutional form, emerged at the mine.
To make the case for this account, we first problematize how the coupling concept has
been used in the literature, and we explain why Patterns is a good place to look at coupling as a
process linked to institutional formation. Gouldner’s focus on local work arrangements and
activity in addition to external organizational pressures contains wisdom that, ironically, has
become “decoupled” in contemporary institutional research focused on macro environments.
After discussing the background of Gouldner’s study and some links to contemporary debates in
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Sociologists too often have amnesia when it comes to the work of the past (Gans 1992). This amnesia is
debilitating, not because is shows a lack of respect for our predecessors, but because it stunts the accumulation of
knowledge and the forward progress of research. For an alternative view, see Stinchcombe (1982).
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the new institutionalism in organizational analysis, we turn to Gouldner’s discussion of the
“indulgency pattern”—the social order that characterized life at the mine before the arrival of
bureaucracy. Then we examine how a new manager tried to impose a tightly coupled pattern of
bureaucracy (which Gouldner labels “punishment centered bureaucracy”). This imposition was
met with resistance, and the emergent conflict revealed a power struggle and generated another
coupling, this one “loose” in nature (which Gouldner labels “mock bureaucracy”). Though
conflicts in the mine produced a loosely coupled form of bureaucracy, cooperation created
another, more tightly coupled form based on shared interests (which Gouldner labels
“representative bureaucracy”).
We conclude that new institutional forms (in this case “bureaucracy”) are always
assembled, reconfigured, edited, and negotiated through plural coupling processes. Prevailing
views of institutionalism importantly focus on broad rationalized systems of meanings and
struggles among logics in fields of activity, but without sufficient concurrent focus on the
practices and local activities which both support and refract macro logics (Brown, 1978;
Friedland & Alford 1991). Because of this focus on the macro environment and diffusion
processes, contemporary institutionalism has fewer tools to anticipate the emergence of the
different patterns of bureaucracy that Gouldner describes in situ. However, rereading Patterns
with a contemporary eye helps us to understand where new institutional forms come from, and
how they combine both durable features common to prototypes and also remain negotiated and
fragile in local practice.
The Coupling “Problem” in Contemporary Organizational Research
The idea of “coupling,” and loose coupling in particular, first came to prominence in the
ideas and writings of a group of dissenting sociologists and social psychologists working on
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problems of change and reform in public schools in the mid-1970s.
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This research community
introduced the loose coupling concept as a system description, to challenge a common image of
an organization as a set of densely linked elements held together by technical interdependencies
and formal control structures.
3
Coupling, simply put, directed analytic attention to the variety of
couplings in inter-organizational relations and made such linkages and their impact an empirical
a question, rather than making assumptions about necessary couplings.
The imagery of loose-coupling challenged the assumption that organizations operated
with intentional plans, clear means-end goals, responsiveness, and coordination. Moreover, it
took into direct account the then novel idea of broader environments that interpenetrated
organizations, further challenging the analytic integrity of a unit-level organization. It introduced
an argument about educational bureaucracies as exemplars of loosely-coupled organizations
characterized by weak ties, ritualized activity, inconsistent responses, and segmentation with
regard to plural external environments. The concept of loose coupling was analytically powerful
because it helped scholars to understand why many organizations (particularly public agencies
and cultural organizations) continued to operate by familiar routines and practices despite waves
of policy reforms and environmental pressures to change.
Weick’s (1976) paper on “educational organizations as loosely coupled systems” made
the full argument. In this paper (1976, p. 17), he called for descriptive studies to refine our
understanding of the different kinds of couplings and the mechanisms through which they are
created. Though coupling related to environmental pressures, he argued that researchers would
want to study coupling in terms of local organizational processes. The notion of coupling was
2
This was a conversation shared among researchers at a 1974 Conference at Stanford School of Education that
included organization theorists, sociologists, and historians of education (Orton, personal communication).
3
However, Weick actually cites two earlier studies that invoked the concept: An article by Glassman (1973) and an
unpublished manuscript by March and Olsen (1975).
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incorporated into emerging insitutionalisms. This argument was congenial to ideas about
ambiguity and how organizations change developed by March and colleagues (March & Olson
1976) and also to early papers on social charters and institutional effects (Meyer, 1975; 1977)
and a key statement on ‘institutionalized structures as myth and ceremony” (Meyer & Rowan
1977; 1978).
Meyer and Rowan (1977; 1978) argued that many of the formal structures of
organizations incorporate broader cultural rules, what they terms ‘rationalized myths’ in the
Durkheimian sense of accounts that provide meaning and rationales for activity. They made a
dual argument in a series of papers. On one hand, they propose that conformance with these rules
provide the organization with legitimacy on the terms of key authoritative external audiences and
arbiters (e.g., state agencies, professional associations, and other publics). This legitimacy
enhances the organization’s prospects for survival. However, many of these institutional rules
conflict with the needs of actual work activity and so they extend the work of Thompson (1967).
Organizations avoid conflict by buffering “their formal structures from the uncertainties of
technical activities by becoming loosely coupled, building gaps between their formal structures
and actual work activities” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, pp. 340-341). Through loose coupling,
organizations incorporate elements proposed by broader cultural rules, even as technical
activities are largely unaffected (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Pfeffer, 1981).
They made a second argument in the same paper, developed more fully in a companion
chapter (Meyer & Rowan, 1978). Here, they argue that loose coupling is less of a strategic action
and more a mechanism by which ‘rationalized building blocks’ of organization available in the
environment are recombined and bundled into categorically-correct forms. This argument,
somewhat more provocative, does not start from the a priori organization seeking legitimacy, but
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rather starts from the a priori rationalized cultural rules and social ‘charters’ (Meyer, 1975) that
specify a vocabulary of forms. This argument recognizes that activity is present and that
rationalized myths provide the recipes for assembly of elementary forms in the organizational
landscape—schools, firms, hospitals, etc. Coherence, coordination, control, and ultimately,
forms of coupling are firmly rooted in rituals of deference and demeanor, of “logics of
confidence” and “logics of avoidance” (Goffman, 1959; Meyer & Rowan, 1978).
Despite this early centrality of loose coupling as systems and mechanism in the new
institutionalism, much subsequent empirical work pushed these views to the side as a substantive
topic: one line of research focused on macro structural environments and so neglected coupling
processes, another line of research treated coupling only as a strategic outcome. Local processes
like loose coupling were glossed in the emerging focus on inter-organizational relationships
(Scully & Segal, 2002, Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997, p. 411) and the abstract focus on
Durkheimian like “institutional logics” (Stinchcombe, 1997). Over time neo institutional
research has become less and less engaged with the local dynamics of real, working
organizations.
This is problematic, because institutions are not inert categories of meaning. Rather, they
are “inhabited” by people and their activity (Scully & Creed, 1997). The development of
couplings is one such activity. Nearly 15 years after the coupling concept first emerged, Orton
and Weick’s review of the literature (1990, p. 218) criticized research that oversimplified loose
coupling by treating it as a “flat” and “static” organizational feature. They reiterated the call to
study coupling as a process, “as something that organizations do, rather than merely as
something they have” (emphasis added). They also call for attention to loose coupling as a
situated system process, not only or even as a strategic one.
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With few exceptions (Coburn, 2004), this call has gone unrecognized, let alone answered.
The silent response is symptomatic of what DiMaggio (1988), paraphrasing Gouldner, argued in
his essay on the ‘pathos of bureaucracy’: A need for a more supple conception of agency and
activity, and more direct recognition of power including cultural politics. Organizations, even
highly “institutionalized” ones, are filled with activity and ferment (Fligstein, 2001; Lounsbury,
Ventresca, & Hirsch, 2003). The overly blunt use of concepts like ‘institutionalization’ and
truncated research designs has restricted the potential contributions of this line of work
(Schneiberg & Clemens, forthcoming; Scully & Meyerson, 1996). The coupling concept ought
not to be used as a static aside to focus on macro structural environments, but as a dynamic
activity and local process. This is especially the case when new institutional forms are in the
process of emergence.
Almost 30 years after the concept was first introduced, we still have an impoverished
sense of what couplings actually look like and how they coalesce at the local organizational
level. How do couplings develop, and what can they tell us about the emergence of new
institutional forms? To answer this question, we go back in time over fifty years to Gouldner’s
gypsum mine.
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We do so for three reasons. First, Patterns takes as its focus the “premier”
institution in organizational sociology—bureaucracy. Moreover, Gouldner studied bureaucracy
during a time in American history when it was a new institutional form. Though Gouldner was
not writing in the contemporary era, in many ways Patterns can be read through the lens of
contemporary scholarship. When examined with this gaze, Patterns is centrally about
institutional formation—not just how a new organizational logic diffuses, but how it evolves
during conflict and power struggles at the local level.
4
Gouldner’s work is of course the focus of much debate Buraway (1982).
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Second, Patterns is recognized as a pillar of organizational sociology. DiMaggio, (1988)
cites it prominently in his invocation of the “pathos of bureaucracy,” and Perrow paraphrases it
at length in his opening to Complex Organizations (Perrow, 1986, pp. 1-3). The legitimacy of
Patterns within organizational sociology ought to make our use of it to explore issues of
coupling and institutional emergence all the more compelling.
Third, though the imperative of “new” research propels us forward, the historical
development of sociology equips us with hindsight and a reason to look back, not to forget.
Oftentimes these classic works speak to contemporary debates (if only we would listen), and we
situate this paper in the genre of revisiting sociological classics for the purpose of gaining new
insights.
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While this reason is somewhat trite, it remains valuable.
For all of these reasons, it makes good sense to couple “new” research on institutional
formation with the past.
The Intellectual Context, Purpose, and Relevance of Patterns
Gouldner wrote Patterns at key moment in the development of organizational studies.
Sociology was transitioning from the work of Parsons towards more empirically driven theories
of the “middle-range.” Modern organizational theory was nascent. Researchers studied situated
organizations with attention to work and occupations, and the border between studies of work
and research on organizations was porous (Stern & Barley, 1996). Building from interests shared
with his dissertation advisor, Robert Merton (1940), and another of Merton’s students, Selznick
(1949; 1957), Gouldner sought to “evaluate,” “modify,” and “redirect” Weber’s theory of
bureaucracy via an empirical study of work patterns in a gypsum mine (1954, p. 9; Merton, 1982,
5
Other works in this genre include Handelmen’s (1976) reinterpretation of Donald Roy’s “Banana Time” and
Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent, which revisits the shop floor in Roy’s work over four decades years later.
(Burawoy 1979, 2003).
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p. 919). Gouldner’s empirical approach fit the spirit of Weber’s “verstehen.” Gouldner used
ethnographic field observations to “get closer” to actors and action.
Gouldner used the data collected at the mine to confront the prevailing readings of Weber
on bureaucracy as an “ideal type” and “iron cage.” This confrontation was made possible by a
serendipitous moment in his field site: In the midst of the study, the incumbent manager (“Old
Doug”) died and was replaced by an outsider (“Vincent Peele”), a professional manager. This
event created a unique opportunity to observe the local emergence of bureaucracy.
This bureaucratic logic had grown in strength after World War II, when organizations of
many types began to adopt the bureaucratic practices that had made the mobilization for war a
success (Selznick, 1949; Baron, Dobbin, & Jennings, 1986). It was a period of industrial change,
and Gouldner documents how this broader change affected not only the mine, but also the
community that was its home. In the first chapter of Patterns, Gouldner describes how “the ebb
of ruralism may be witnessed”:
The countryside was becoming industrialized and the farms mechanized. Canning,
gypsum, paper, and other light industries moved in and grew. Farmers retired their
horses, took to tractors, and adopted all manner of mechanical loaders, balers, and silage
apparatus. Commercial farming was started; farming was becoming more of a business,
like any other, and much less of a distinctive “way of life” (1954, pp. 42-44).
Gouldner embeds his observations of the mine within this environment. Along with
industrialization, the community and the mine were confronted with a new rationality, a
bureaucratic one. Gouldner provides an empirical account of the sources and effects of this new
form of rationality, promoted by the main regional office and enacted locally in the succession
from “Old Doug” to Peele. Gouldner reports:
The main office executives told Peele of his predecessor’s shortcomings, and expressed
the feeling that things had been slipping at the plant for some time. They suggested that
Old Doug. . . had grown overindulgent with his advancing years, and that he, Peele,
would be expected to improve production. As Peele put it, “Doug didn’t force the
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machine. I had to watch it. Doug was satisfied with a certain production. But the
Company gave me orders to get production up” (1954, p. 71).
The new management introduced a number of new rules and practices—hiring people outside of
kinship networks, increasing the amount of paperwork, and rigidly enforcing disciplinary
procedures—accompanied by a new emphasis on hierarchy.
However, these bureaucratic trappings were not simply a response to production
concerns. Rather, they were a practical expression of rationalized myths of productivity and
efficiency. Gouldner explains that “With the renewed pressure of postwar competition, the main
office expected things to start humming; traditional production quotas were about to be
rationalized” (1954, pp. 71-72, emphasis added), and “Peele, therefore, came to the plant
sensitized to the rational and impersonal yardsticks which his superiors would use to judge his
performance” (1954, p. 72).
While rationalized myths of productivity help explain the emergence of bureaucracy at
the mine, the shift in personnel is also central. Peele entered the mine as an outsider unable to tap
existing social networks, but with a mandate to change productivity. As a result, the informal
relations of power and influence based on long standing social interactions between Old Doug
and the workers were closed to Peele. The formal authority supplied by bureaucracy was the
option that remained (1954, p. 98).
Gouldner’s account of external environmental changes and pressures as they relate to the
mine foreshadow many of the concerns of contemporary institutionalism. A key question for an
institutionalist is “why bureaucracy as an organizational form for this mine?” In answering this
question, Patterns displays the power of institutional analysis. Gouldner develops a magisterial
account of external sources for the formalization of controls at the mine, the pressures for
increased production coming from the regional office and more diffusely from a national postwar
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focus on productivity and rationality, and the mythology of bureaucracy as the appropriate
solution. These concerns populate contemporary research on inertia (Hannan & Freeman, 1984;
Bartunek, 1984) isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powel,l 1983) and the spread of formalized, modern
personnel practices (Baron, Dobbin, & Jennings, 1986; Dobbin, Edelman, Meyer, Scott, &
Swidler, 1988; Dobbin, Sutton, Meyer, & Scott, 1993; Dobbin & Sutton, 1996; Edelman 1990;
1992). Gouldner also recognized the set of rationalizing beliefs that accompany managerial
succession, and the ways in which certain people (like Peele) are “carriers” of institutional
processes (DiMaggio, 1988; Scott, 2001, p. 79).
However, the analytic value of Patterns for our understanding of the coupling process
and institutional formation becomes most evident when we examine how these external pressures
collided with the prior local order, or what Gouldner describes as the “indulgency pattern.” It is
in this collision that different couplings between environmental pressures and local practices
were actively negotiated by the people in the mine, and from which the different forms of
bureaucracy (“punishment-centered,” “mock,” and “representative”) emerged.
The Indulgency Pattern
Institutions seldom emerge from green field sites (Kogut & Zander, 2000; Lawrence &
Suddaby, 2005). Gouldner goes to great lengths to describe what life at the mine was like before
the introduction of formal bureaucracy. Gouldner labels this prior order the “indulgency pattern.”
It consisted of routinized interactions characterized by management responsiveness towards the
workers, leniency and the flexible application of rules, second chances, and a blind eye towards
pilfering (1954, pp. 47-56). As a part of the indulgency pattern, Old Doug “Never came around
much; ‘ran the plant by phone’; gave the workers free (gypsum) board; related to everyone in a
friendly and personal way; did not push men for their absences” (p. 82).
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To explain the development of the indulgency pattern, Gouldner describes how the mine
was “enmeshed in a network of kinship relations” (p. 56). The workers describe how “the
supervisors here have known each other for a long time. They grew up together. The same with a
lot of the men.” (p. 39). As a result, “everybody’s sociable” and Gouldner describes “friendly
and highly egalitarian relationships between supervisors and workers. ‘You see,’ explains a
mechanic, ‘the bosses associate with the men. They will drink with them at the saloon or
restaurant, and there is a fine sentiment’” (p. 39). These routinized but informal interactions
precluded domineering management tactics and hierarchies. To quote one of the foremen, “You
can’t ride the men very hard when they are your neighbors.” (p. 56).
While these relations subverted formal authority, the indulgency pattern supplied the
management with an abundance of informal legitimacy in the eyes of the employees. It prompted
the workers to react favorably to the difficult and dangerous labor at the mine, and to trust the
management and follow its lead (pp. 55-57). In summarizing Old Doug and the indulgency
pattern, Gouldner states that the workers praised Doug for “his informality, his lack of emphasis
on formal hierarchy and status, his laxness with the rules, his direct interaction with the
workers.” However, Gouldner adds: “These, typically, are traits which are the antithesis of
bureaucratic administration” (p. 82). With the passing of Old Doug and the arrival of Peele, the
end of indulgency was near.
The Imposition of a Tight Coupling: “Punishment-Centered Bureaucracy”
Peele came to the mine with a fundamentally different mindset than his predecessor.
Gouldner states that with the arrival of Peele, “A college educated, authority conscious, rule-
oriented individual was substituted for an informal, ‘lenient’ man who had little taste for ‘paper
work’” (p. 63). Peele carried the logic of bureaucracy into the mine (DiMaggio, 1988; Berger,
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Berger, & Kellner, 1974), and used his formal authority as manager to create a tighter coupling
between bureaucracy and everyday work practices. This coupling first took the form of
increasing supervision. Where Old Doug trusted that the workers would get their jobs done,
Peele put them on watch. As one worker said, “Peele is like a mouse in a hole. You don’t know
when he will pop out” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 87). Peele required that his foremen do the same:
Peele’s new directives called for weekly and daily reports from foremen and building
supervisors. . . In its turn, this constant check on the foremen necessarily constrained
foremen to check up on the workers. As they perceived the source of the increasing
pressure on them, the workers said: “As the super goes, so go the foremen” (p. 66).
This coupling was tightened further by management activities that emphasized formality:
Formal rules that had been ignored were being revived, while new ones were established
to supplement and implement the old. Emphasis upon hierarchy and status were rupturing
the older informal ties. Distinctions between private and company property, between
working and private time were expanding. A cold, impersonal “atmosphere” was slowly
settling on the plant (p. 69)
The imposition of a tight coupling between the logic of bureaucracy and everyday practices
began to squeeze the life out of the indulgency pattern.
The actions of the new management and Peele’s efforts to create a tight coupling
generated a particular form of bureaucracy which Gouldner labels “punishment-centered
bureaucracy.” In this tightly coupled pattern, formal rules are enforced for their own sake,
regardless of their utility, and deviations are met with punishment.
6
One of the examples of
punishment-centered bureaucracy involved new disciplinary measures. In the past, the workers at
the mine could spend lax periods during their shifts away from their machines, and they could
circulate and converse among friends. But now these “delinquent” actions were met with a
“warning notice.” This notice consisted of a paper form with a long checklist of offenses onto
which names, dates, and times were documented. The notice had to be signed by the
6
Punishment-centered bureaucracy is the pattern of bureaucracy the Gouldner associates with Weber’s “iron cage.”
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management or foreman as well as the offending worker (p. 67). This was a dramatic shift from
the lax enforcement of rules and the “second chances” that characterized the indulgency pattern.
A related example of punishment-centered bureaucracy involved strict enforcement of the
“no-absenteeism” rule. During the era of the indulgency pattern, employees could occasionally
skip work with little justification or prior notice, particularly when gypsum orders were slow.
Absenteeism cost little in the way of productivity, and counted much towards the informal
legitimacy of the old management. However, the new management strictly punished absences,
and the rule was formalized by extensive paperwork, sending a shock through the employee
ranks (p. 208). Moreover, because the rule required permission to leave work for such things as
wedding, funerals, or sick relatives, it restricted the workers’ control over their outside behavior,
and began to colonize their private lives (p. 213).
Despite the external pressures from the regional management and the broader industrial
landscape, the emergence of punishment-centered bureaucracy was not the inevitable outcome of
macro institutional forces. After all, the previous management had lived and worked in this same
context. Punishment-centered bureaucracy only emerged with the tangible efforts of the new
management to create a tight coupling between these external pressures and everyday life at the
mine. Nor was this the end of the story.
Conflict, Resistance, and Loose Coupling: “Mock Bureaucracy”
The activities and the tight coupling that generated “punishment-centered bureaucracy”
were made possible by Peele’s formal authority as manager. However, formal authority is not the
only kind of power in organizations, and organizational cultures carry their own informal
legitimacy (Hallett, 2003). The indulgency pattern was one such culture, and the workers held
fast to its set of informal rights and expectations. The workers actively resisted the changes in the
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mine, setting up a struggle in which the formal authority of the management and the informal
legitimacy of the indulgency pattern collided. As a result of this conflict, the workers and the
management negotiated a loose coupling, which produced what Gouldner calls “mock
bureaucracy.”
Gouldner describes the workers’ response to the tightly coupled, “punishment” form of
bureaucracy as “bitter discontent” (1954, p. 68). The new emphasis on supervision violated the
norms of equality that characterized the indulgency pattern, and Gouldner reports that “the more
a supervisor watched his subordinates, the more hostile they became to him” (1954, p. 160). This
was especially the case in the sub-surface mine, where the workers believed that the dangerous
nature of the job gave them the right to take occasional liberties, especially in regards to
absenteeism.
The emerging conflict took a number of forms, and the workers resisted in ways both
tacit and overt. One of the tacit responses involved acts of “bureaucratic sabotage,” or “deliberate
apathy fused with resentment, in which, by the very act of conforming to the letter of the rule, its
intention is ‘conscientiously’ violated” (1954, p. 175). Though punishment-centered bureaucracy
could regulate basic behaviors, it could not regulate feelings and attitudes. The workers would
not break any rules, but they would not put forward any extra effort or enthusiasm to make the
product of their labor better. They would punch in and out of work exactly on time, but they
would not volunteer for extra hours when gypsum orders were high. This kind of basic “activity”
without sincere “participation” undermined the very productivity that the management sought to
increase.
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The tacit resistance of the workers also sabotaged Peele’s legitimacy. The workers
accomplished this through the development of a “Rebecca Myth.”
7
In their interactions with each
other (and with the researchers), the workers idealized Old Doug and held Peele to an unrealistic
standard that glorified and exaggerated the indulgency pattern:
Peele’s the opposite of Doug. . . He’s always around checking on the men and standing
over them. As long as production was going out Doug didn’t stand over them. Peele is
always around as though he doesn’t have faith in the men like Doug (1954, p. 81
emphasis in original).
When Doug was here, it was like one big happy family. Peele is all business (1954, p.
81).
When Doug was here, all you had to say to Doug was, “Say, Doug, I need some board for
the house”. “Take a truck or a box car and fill ‘er up,” he would say. “But git it the hell
out of here”. With Peele, you have to pay for any board you take (1954, p. 81).
Though the old indulgency pattern had been disrupted, its symbolic power was stronger than
ever (Hallett, 2003), and these interactions undermined Peele’s authority. These observations led
Gouldner to criticize Weber’s view of authority: “For Weber, authority was given consent
because it was legitimate, rather than being legitimate because it evoked consent. For Weber,
therefore, consent is always a datum to be taken for granted, rather than being a problem whose
sources had to be traced” (1954, p. 222).
Eventually these tacit conflicts and power struggles burst to the surface in the form of a
wildcat strike that Gouldner dissected in a companion book published in 1955. Gouldner
demonstrates that the apparently spontaneous strike was actually the product of bureaucratic
violations of the autonomy and control that the workers cherished under the indulgency pattern.
During the strike the workers fought for higher wages. However, Gouldner argues that the wages
at the mine had always been low. During the time in Gouldner’s research when Old Doug was
7
Gouldner takes this term from a novel by Daphne DuMaurier about a young woman who married a widower, but
was vexed by the memory of his first wife (Rebecca), whose virtues were incessantly celebrated by her husband
(1954: 79).
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still alive and so was the indulgency pattern, a worker told him: “I like it here. They don’t push
you around. A man’s got his work to do and they leave him alone. You know that’s one of the
reasons they pay so low around here. . . The pay is like a balance for the working conditions. It
sort of balances things” (1955, p. 32, emphasis in original). The workers did not mind the low
wages as long as they felt that they were being well treated. It was only when the low wages
were fused with a tightly coupled “punishment” form of bureaucracy that the strike erupted.
These conflicts made the tightly coupled pattern of bureaucracy unmanageable. A
compromise had to be made, and this compromise is, to the contemporary reader, very much a
loose coupling. Gouldner labels it “mock bureaucracy,” and he describes it as a work pattern in
which bureaucratic rules are in place but are largely ignored or inoperative. As an instance of
loose coupling, the mock bureaucracy involved an implicit agreement where the workers let the
management save face and have their rules as long as they looked the other way as the workers
went about their daily lives.
A chief example involved the “no smoking” rules. These rules were formalized, but for
the most part, the workers considered them “dead letters,” and so did the management. The mine
was filled with signs that proclaimed the rules and punishments, but these rules were not
enforced, except when an insurance or fire inspector came to the mine. Both the new
management and the workers agreed to this arrangement, and when it was breeched, punishment
occurred not through the formal warning notices, but through informal interactions. As one
worker explained, “There are a few guys who didn’t even stop smoking when the inspector
comes around. They are troublemakers, and we let them know where they get off” (1954, p. 186,
emphasis in original).
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19
Where punishment-centered bureaucracy was interpreted as a violation of the old
indulgency pattern, “mock” bureaucracy was interpreted as the indulgency pattern dressed in
bureaucratic clothing. Here Gouldner anticipates a set of ideas that are central for the new
institutionalism: “rationalized myths” and the companion terms “myth and ceremony” (Meyer &
Rowan, 1977). Recall that in classical usage, “myth” does not connote the modern sense of false
or incorrect claims. Rather, they are the accounts of fundamental cultural and ontological
ordering that embody how and why everyday reality takes the forms it does. Myths are the
source origin accounts that authorize and justify the character of everyday life. “Rationalized
myths” then map onto Weber’s concern with the rise of technical mean-ends chain and with the
broader “disenchantment” of modern society – that is, the reduced play of awe and majesty in
their varied forms as sources of authority and the growth of apparently technical solutions.
Recall also that Meyer and Rowan (1977; 1978) develop in considerable detail the
microprocesses that undergird and support organizations assembled from rationalized structural
elements like organization charts, personnel procedures, the mandates and rules of state agencies
and professional expertise: the “logic of confidence” and other face mechanisms incorporate the
ideas of micro interaction orders, ritual, deference and demeanor as the cohering texture of
organizations.
However, instead of presuming that loose couplings prevent conflict, Gouldner
demonstrates how mock bureaucracy is a living thing that develops in the midst of on-going
conflict. Gouldner argues that the emergence of bureaucracy and the forms that it takes can only
be understood “in terms of a balance of power, of the relative strengths of opposing groups. It
was by no means the inevitable outcome of an irresistible force” (1954, p. 154, emphasis in
original). Instead of glossing these local dynamics to instead focus on macro “logics” and
How Institutions Form
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20
environments, this rereading of Patterns makes the coupling process central and identifies it as a
mechanism through which new institutional forms emerge. This reading of Gouldner provides
the basis for both appreciating the Meyer and Rowan arguments that rationalized myths of
efficiency and productivity got coded into formal structures, and also for extending this point by
focusing on how local struggles and interests confront and edit these abstract forms (e.g., myths
and ceremonies of bureaucratic efficiency) with evidence about practical activity and local
context.
Shared Interests, Cooperation, and Coupling: “Representative Bureaucracy”
In discussing loose-coupling, Weick and colleagues (1976; Orton & Weick, 1990; Weick,
Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) note that it is not that entire organizations are “loosely coupled,” but
rather some aspects are tightly coupled while the relationship between others is loose. Coupling
is a multi-dimensional process (Spillane & Burch, 2005). Though the conflict between the
workers and the management generated a loose coupling and a pattern of “mock” bureaucracy,
the management and the workers did have some common interests which provided fertile ground
for a tighter coupling that formed voluntarily around some concerns
Gouldner labels this emergent pattern “representative bureaucracy.” A key example
involved safety operations. Gouldner describes the safety operations as the most
“bureaucratically organized” sphere of the mine. There were extensive formalized rules,
regulations, paperwork, and reports that centered on the safety program. In contrast to mock
bureaucracy, these were not “dead letters.” In contrast to punishment-centered bureaucracy, the
safety operations were not met with worker resistance. One worker explained: “Safety is another
story. The men won’t resist that. It’s for their own good. They don’t want accidents, if they can
help it” (1954, p. 184, emphasis in the original).
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21
Though the safety operations consisted of a tight coupling between bureaucracy and
actual practices, this coupling was not imposed from above, but rather involved “the day-to-day
participation of the workers in its administration” (pp. 204-205, emphasis in original). Through
ongoing worker-management interactions, the safety rules were negotiated, enforced, and obeyed
(p. 204). Moreover, these interactions had the latent function of building solidarity out of
relationships that had been antagonistic. To quote one of the managers:
It is really wonderful how things can be worked out in this safety field. You must know
Tenzman? He’s regarded as a troublemaker. But when he got involved in safety work and
discussed this with his supervisors, why they came away saying, ‘He’s not a bad guy
after all.’ He gained a lot of respect for himself (p. 201).
The agreement and solidarity of “representative bureaucracy” emerges from this cooperation and
dialogue of interests.
In comparing the success of representative bureaucracy to the failure of punishment-
centered bureaucracy, Gouldner argues that the traditional Weberian approach “fails to weigh the
possibility that a bureaucracy’s effectiveness, or other of its characteristics, might vary with the
manner in which rules are initiated, whether by imposition or agreement” (p. 20). Gouldner also
rejects Weber’s description of bureaucracy as a formal structure of oppressive conformity--the
infamous “Iron Cage.” While punishment-centered bureaucracy is the form that is least attentive
to the interactions that support informal administrative legitimacy, mock and representative
bureaucracies are based on implicit and explicit agreements between workers and management,
creating a more optimistic alternative.
8
By double fitting Weber’s theory with his observations of the mine, Gouldner developed
a supple, complex picture of bureaucracy. Instead of treating bureaucracy as a monolithic
organizational form with “Gibraltar-like stability,” Gouldner notes that Weber “thought of
8
This is where Gouldner hoped that bureaucracy could be tamed to serve human goals within socialism, instead of
subverting them (Stein 1982: 891-892).
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22
bureaucracy as a Janus-faced organization. . . On the one side, it was administration based on
expertise; while on the other, it was administration based on discipline” (p. 22). Weber seemed to
recognize multiple types, if only implicitly, and Gouldner rejected the ideal typical image of
bureaucracy as a rational, efficient organizational form (an image that some of his peers had
begun to take literally).
Patterns is still relevant. Two years removed from the fiftieth anniversary of its
publication, Patterns speaks to contemporary concerns. When read with a contemporary gaze,
Patterns is a dynamic story of contextual pressures, local activity, conflict and power struggles,
and the couplings through which new institutional forms emerge.
Conclusion
How can organizational sociologists explain the emergence of new institutional forms? In
answering this question, we argue that the coupling process is central. New institutional forms
emerge as environmental pressures are coupled with everyday organizational life. This coupling
process is not seamless. It is not inevitable, and it is not a perfect reflection of broader social
“logics.” Rather, it is a dynamic local activity of fits and starts. The coupling process is not
merely one of ceremonial dressing, where the organization drapes itself in legitimate clothing
even as the underside remains unchanged. It is also a process of tangible conflict and power
struggles. If we are to understand institutional formation, we must understand these mechanisms.
This is best accomplished by a return to research within actual organizations.
To support our argument about coupling and the emergence of new institutional forms,
we return to an old study of bureaucracy. Gouldner studied bureaucracy at a time in which it was
a new institutional form. Though he embeds the gypsum mine within a particular historical
context, he focuses his analytic gaze on the actions and interactions of the mine personnel in
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23
relation to this context and the established indulgency pattern. His account of the different
activities and changes in the mine, the emergence of the different patterns of bureaucracy
(punishment-centered, mock, and representative), and the conflicts and couplings therein remind
us that institutions are inhabited by people and their doings. As Gouldner says succinctly:
“bureaucracy is a man-made instrument and it will be made by men in proportion to their power
in a given situation” (p. 27). This insight is too often lost in the contemporary focus on extra-
local environments and inter-organizational processes.
Finally, we suggest that rereading Patterns can help bring an end to the “family quarrel”
between old and new institutionalism (Hirsh & Lounsbury, 1997). In the caricatures of “old” and
“new,” Gouldner is categorized as old.
9
However, we argue that he is better viewed as a bridge
between the two. As we have seen, Patterns can be usefully read through the lens of new
institutionalism. Gouldner’s concern with the broad diffusion of bureaucracy, the spread of
modern personnel practices, the authorizing beliefs that accompany these practices, and mock
bureaucracy as a kind of “myth and ceremony” are central to the “new” institutional project. His
astute focus on local activity, intra-organizational processes, conflict, and power resonate with
“old” institutionalism. Old and new are not incommensurate (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). They
can, and should, be coupled.
9
In saying this, we recognize that after Patterns, Gouldner’s sociology took a decidedly Marxist turn, and he
certainly would not have thought of himself as an instutionalist. We are referring specifically to Patterns as it is seen
in organizational sociology. It is notable that Patterns actually fits into Gouldner’s developing Marxist project.
Maurice Stein, who was Gouldner’s comrade and research assistant during the study, explains “our search was for
ways in which the process of bureaucratization could be tamed before it subverted the human goals of socialism”
(Stein 1982: 891-892). For a penetrating analysis of Gouldner’s total sociological program and persona, see James
Chriss’ Alvin W. Gouldner: Sociologist and Outlaw Marxist (1999).
How Institutions Form
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24
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