Globalization and Organization: World Society and Organizational Change

All around the world, societies are experiencing an explosion of organizations and organizing: community clubs, religious groups, social movements, as well as schools, hospitals, businesses and government agencies, increasingly take the form of complex and formal organization. Why? Why is global society recast in this format and why so fiercely? This book explores various dimensions of the trends of expansion, formalization, and standardization of organizing worldwide by exploring such organizational legacies as accounting, business management, corporate social responsibility, and performance benchmarks. Featuring contributions from prominent academics, the book argues that these processes can be attributed to globalization and to its specific tendencies of universalism, rationalization, and rise of the modern notion of the strongly bounded and purposive social actor. An application of institutional arguments to global issues, the book will be of interest to academics and researchers of Organization Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and Geography.

About the Author

Gili S. Drori is a lecturer in Stanford University's programs on International Relations and International Policy Studies. She is the author of several papers and chapters on science and development, comparative science education, political discourse, and the role of policy regimes in worldwide governance. She is senior author of Science in the Modern World Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization (with John W. Meyer, F. Ramirez, and E. Schofer, Stanford University Press, 2003). John W. Meyer is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of many books and papers on comparative sociology, organizations, world society, and the sociology of education, including National Developments in the World System (with M. Hannan, Chicago, 1979), Institutional Environments and Organizations (with W. R. Scott, Sage, 1994), and Science in the Modern World Polity (with Gili S. Drori, F. Ramirez, and E. Schofer, Stanford University Press, 2003). For several decades Professor Meyer has been a leading figure in sociological institutionalism, a line of thought that has been central in the development of modern organizations theory, and in sociological studies of the global system. Hokyu Hwang is a Senior Social Science Researcher at the Center for Social Innovation, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is currently involved in the Stanford Project on Emerging Nonprofits, which looks at rationalization of the San Fransisco Bay Area nonprofit sector. His research intersts include organizations, comparative sociology, economic, and political sociology.