Organizational Structure and the Institutional Environment: The Case of Public Schools

Work on this paper was partially supported by a grant from the Texas Christian University Research Foundation. The author wishes to thank John W. Meyer, W. Richard Scott, Lynn Zucker, and two anonymousASQ reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Revisions of the manuscript were supported bya grant from the National Institute of Education, Department of Education, under Contract No. 400-80-0103. The contents of this paper do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Education and the National Institute of Education. This paper develops an institutional approach to the problem of administrative expansion in public schools. It is argued that public schools add and subtract administrative positions to come into isomorphism with prevailing norms, values, and technical lore in the institutional environment. Using historical data on school districts in California, the natural histories of three specific types of administrative services were traced from their emergence as innovations to their diffusion and retention at the local level. The historical data revealed that administrative services supported by balanced institutional environments diffused morewidelyandwere morestably retained atthe local level than were services supported by imbalanced institutional environments. Further data analysis contrasted the institutional approach with more common approaches that stress size as a causal factor promoting innovation and structural differentiation. The data revealed that organizational size alone was an insufficient explanation for structural expansion and demonstrated the utility of examining the institutional determinants of organizational structures-