Abstract

SANDOVAL ARAGON, Sergio Lorenzo. The International Circulation of Sociological Ideas: "The Tortuous Case of The Iron Cage Revisited". Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2023, vol.46, n.2, pp.17-43.  Epub May 10, 2024. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v46n2/94540.

An analysis of the origin and trajectory of the article The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) is carried out, whose citation statistics indicate that it has had a growing diffusion and influence, mainly in the United States. A descriptive bibliometric analysis and a systematic bibliographic review show that this article was a specific product of the sociology of organizations, which provides models and methods to disciplines external to sociology, especially management and business, which explains why it has been from these disciplines -eventually dominant in the United States- that it has enjoyed wide popularity, although it is also observed that the article is increasingly influential in a growing and heterogeneous number of disciplines other than sociology. To explain this peculiar trajectory, a model of the scientific field and scientific innovation is used. According to this model, the specialties or subdisciplines that occupy a position of heteronomy and low scientific capital within a disciplinary field tend to influence heterogeneous and external disciplines and professional fields more than their own disciplinary field, in this case sociology. The trajectory of The Iron Cage Revisited coincides with this prediction of the model, thus providing evidence that this is the position occupied by the specialty of which it was a product, the sociology of organizations. It is argued that that article owes its relative explanatory force to its underlying theoretical structure, which was extracted, without acknowledging it, from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, whose high degree of generalization favors its ubiquity in different fields and disciplinary subfields. It is also explained that the absence of an explicit reference to the work of the French sociologist was due to the restrictions and structural demands that affected the position of the authors in the American academic field in the 1980s.

Keywords : American sociology; heterogeneity organizations; scientific field; sociological knowledge; structural reasoning.

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