[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Workers were organizing to socialize the saleof labor power, defensively pitting a united labor force against a united cap-italist class.Philanthropists were creating foundations to combine the re-C O N C L U S I O N 273sources of the wealthy into more rational and sustained programs.Andgovernments were forming a new type of organization, different from exec-utive, judicial, and legislative bodies that had previously governed:  inde-pendent regulatory agencies that were socializing the monitoring of foodproduction, transportation, commerce, and the production of social statis-tics.Individualism was increasingly a hollow, albeit still formidable, ideol-ogy beckoning more toward a past that had never really existed than affirm-ing the present.Thus socialized activities are more than networks; they areorganized in institutions.HISTORYMy orientation to sociology is fundamentally historical.This means first ofall that explanations of events must treat their context in historical terms:How did the context itself get created? How does the explanation of similarevents change under different historical situations? How does the long-termtrajectory of structural change affect particular events? It is the considera-tion of power the ways in which the actions of some are explained interms of their relationship to others that provides the dynamic dimensionto a historical perspective.Who is able to determine the outcomes? Whatresources and capacities can they mobilize that determine the outcome? Andhow did they acquire those resources and capacities? As the configurationof power changes so moves history.Throughout this analysis, references have been made to the immediatecontext within which people were making decisions, and attention has beenpaid to explaining who was able to influence how those circumstances wereconstructed.It is not enough to posit that new technologies  requiredmore capital, depicting firms unproblematically adopting the corporateform, analogous to buying a new coat if one needs to warm oneself.Theneed for a coat does not explain why some people own coats and others donot.Setting aside the knotty issue of whether the  need was an objectivesituation determined only by technology, a full explanation would still haveto address the issue of why the needed capital had been mobilized and whyincorporation was necessary to gain access to it.When states  needed tobuild canals and railroads, why did they turn to investment bankers andbond markets? The immediate context was that investment bankers andbond markets were already the institutionalized means by which govern-ments raised funds for specific projects like fighting wars.To understandwhen and why railroad companies privatized, one must take into accountthe immediate context of the depression of the 1830s, the ascendance of theantistatist branch of the anticorporate movement through the rise ofJacksonian democracy, and the interpretation of corruption and failedcanal ventures in antistatist terms.Such events set the context for the devel-opment of the institutions of corporate capitalism that were there in the late274 C H A P T E R N I N Enineteenth century when industrialists  needed them.As with the discus-sion of power, my approach to history also yields general propositions un-derlying the account in earlier chapters: (1) Institutions change the contextwithin which people act so that causes of the first appearance of a phenom-enon differ sharply from later appearances.(2).Because institutions tend tomake taken-for-granted relationships seem natural and consensual, alonger-term trajectory of explanation is necessary to reveal underlyingpower relationships.1.Institutions change the context within which people act so that causesof the first appearance of a phenomenon differ sharply from later appear-ances.This is a central insight of the institutionalization perspective in or-ganizations (Meyer and Scott 1983; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Tolbertand Zucker 1983; Zucker 1983; Powell and DiMaggio 1991).The very factthat new organizational forms appear becomes part of the context withinwhich later organizations are created.When new organizational forms areinstitutionalized, they are adopted with much weaker external causation.The new organizational form takes on a self-reproducing power (Meyer andRowan 1977).The historical forces that shaped the Baltimore and OhioRailroad, the first major railroad company, including the competitionamong seaboard cities for access to the hinterland, the coalition of mer-chants and city officials that mobilized the capital, the willingness of the cityand state governments to contribute capital, the semipublic rights, entitle-ments, and responsibilities defined in the charter, and the developmentalstrategy that created infrastructure ahead of demand, were very differentfrom the forces that shaped later railroad companies.Later railroads couldbe established and expanded within the structure of finance, law, technol-ogy, and organization institutionalized by the earlier railroads [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]