Sociology of organizations in the search for the level of analysis W� Richard Scott (2014: 106) distinguished six possible levels of institutional

analysis of organizations� Starting from the one closest to the human individual these are: organizational subsystem, organization, organizational population, or-ganizational field, societal level (society), and world system� Obviously, the level of organization was initially the most interesting for the study of organizations�

As I have demonstrated in Chapter 1, for some sociologists, organization was a sufficient meso-level of analysis allowing to understand the relation between an individual and the whole society� Yet, for the sociology of organizations the important topic of studies are phenomena which occur not only inside a single organization but go beyond it, thus being located “somewhere between” organi-zations (Pawlak, Srokowski 2014)� As for the old problem of sociology, another

“obvious” level of analysis was the societal level, important for institutional stud-ies of organizations because of the influence from the political institutionalism for which the study of nation-state institutions is crucial (March, Olsen 1989)�

Yet, this macro-level of analysis was not sufficient for understanding organiza-tions� Society is “too far” from organizations as too far from them are other mac-ro structures: sectoral or transnational ones�

Another quite “obvious” level of analysis was the level of population� If it is recognized that there exist organizations of certain types (i�e� schools, hospitals, car factories), it is possible that the study of populations of organizations of a given type will bring knowledge about these organizations as such� Michael T�

Hannan and John Freeman (1977: 934) defined population as an aggregate of or-ganizations that “must be alike in some respect, that is, they must have some unit character�” They stressed that populations are “abstractions useful for theoreti-cal purposes” (Hannan, Freeman 1977: 934)� It is the researcher who for his or her analytical purposes defines population using the criterion of unit character�

Trade unions, political parties, or newspaper companies are apparent examples of organizational populations, but the unit character might be also of a hidden

type, not perceived by members of organizations who are being researched� The work of Hannan and Freeman were inspired by population biology and ecology and aimed to build a model of analysis in order to better understand the com-petition and selection processes among organizations� Yet, what this approach lacks, is the good conceptualization of relations with organizations belonging to other species� Organizations do not only compete with ones similar to them, but they also relate to organizations which are very much different from them�

The concept of the organizational field allows to better understand the rela-tions between different kinds of organizarela-tions – this seems to be the key to the success of this concept� The notion of organizational field was introduced by Paul J� DiMaggio and Walter W� Powell in seminal paper “The Iron Cage Revisited:

Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields”

(1983)� The authors were trying to solve paradoxical puzzle: why organizations become increasingly similar as they try to change themselves? Common sense suggests that change should cause increasing dissimilarities and complexity among organizations� DiMaggio and Powell distinguished three mechanisms of institutional isomorphic change: coercive, mimetic, and normative� In order to grasp the processes resulting in organizational homogeneity there was a need to study organizations in a perspective allowing to see how they relate to each other�

DiMaggio and Powell defined the organizational field as “those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key sup-pliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organi-zations that produce similar services or products” (DiMaggio, Powell 1983: 148)�

As an advantage over other attempts to grasp the meso-level unit of analysis, the authors highlighted that field directs attention to the totality of relevant actors and not only competitors� The organizational field could be regarded as a tool to understand a given organization in the context of its environment, but it quickly became an insightful level of analysis by itself (Scott 2014: 223)�

The three types of institutional isomorphism introduced by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) go hand in hand with three pillars of institutions – the conceptu-alization of institutions developed by Scott (2014)� The coercive isomorphism re-flects the regulative pillar by which institutions are manifested in rules and codes regulating actions; the mimetic isomorphism reflects the cognitive pillar by which institutions shape the way people perceive the world outside; and the normative isomorphism reflects the normative pillar connected with moral valuations of ac-tions� It is important to remember that Scott’s pillar distinction is an analytical one – it helps to understand the various modes by which social life is influenced by institutions� In a similar way, the three types of isomorphism are ideal types�

Here I intend to contribute to the development of a field theory by theorizing how different types of isomorphism connect organizations with entities from various levels of analysis: coercive isomorphism connects organizations with state and the macro-level; mimetic isomorphism connects organizations with other organizations and the meso-level; and normative isomorphism connects organizations with individuals and the micro-level�

Coercive isomorphism which stems from the actors’ preoccupation with le-gitimacy (DiMaggio, Powell 1983: 150) is the mechanism by which powerful ac-tors put pressure on organizations to achieve their conformity� In many fields, the powerful actors who are capable of setting or executing regulations are state agencies�¹⁶ Clearly, in this branch of theorizing about social processes the state is not conceptualized as a single actor� State is rather described as a constellation of organizational actors: ministries, agencies, and other bodies which often compete for resources in a given field� Still, they are enabled with unique powers to coerce other organizations� I would, therefore, say that the focus on coercive isomor-phism is a good way of exploring relations of organizations with the state or other huge, powerful, and complex organizations which operate on a macro-level� In this understanding, the macro-level equals societal level� Simultaneously, it helps to unpack the concept of state and other macro-actors, because the empirical studies of given fields show that the state with which actors interact or which is able to coerce them is not some kind of a far abstraction, but it manifests itself in concrete organizational units, i�e� taxation authority or immigration bureau�

The mimetic isomorphism, which is an effect of organizations’ search for successful models in conditions of uncertainty (DiMaggio, Powell 1983: 151), connects organization with other organizations� It is a phenomenon occur-ring strictly on the meso-level of analysis� Modeling sometimes occurs when organizations interact and thus become in direct contact with each other� Yet, very often modeling requires some kind of mediation� Models which are to be mimicked are distant, and in order to follow them, organizations use simplified images of models� In the process of diffusion, a model is translated to the local

16 Of course, one cannot limit coercive isomorphism to relations with a state� There are other kinds of powerful actors which are capable of exerting coercive pressures� On the market, these are large companies able to set standards to which smaller companies must conform� There are supra-state level actors capable of setting coercive pressures:

European Union is a good example� There are also soft-law regulators which do not have state capacities of coercion but are still able to use the organizations’ hunger for legitimacy in order to influence them: the examples here are creators of rankings, or all sorts of fair trade certifiers�

context after a travel of ideas (Czarniawska, Joerges 1996; Djelic 2008)� In a way, boundaries of a field are defined by a range of a potential models to which un-certain organizations relate to� Thus, mimetism seems to be a phenomenon from the meso-level of analysis�

Normative isomorphism stems from the fact that members of professions are present in nearly all aspects of organizational life (DiMaggio, Powell 1983: 152)�

Furthermore, the salience of professions and professionals in the new institu-tional organization theory is perceived as growing� Scott (2008) announced that professionals are “lords of the dance” and that they are the most important agents of institutional change� Bromley and Meyer (2015) show that the global increase of organizations is strongly correlated with the growth of higher education and occupations – which are professions or aspire to be professions – that require diplomas� The authors particularly point to the fact that the occupation of a man-ager is becoming professionalized� Professionals are members of organizations whose important normative orientations are shaped by professions crosscutting various organizations and often various organizational fields� Professions are also a special kind of meso-level structures which could be analyzed as social fields�

Thus, professionals as individuals put pressure from the inside of organizations to conform to their normative orientations which are shaped because of belong-ing to a profession� DiMaggio and Powell (1983) pointed to two most important factors contributing to forming normative pressure: professionals are, to a large extent, products of educational institutions which shape their norms; and profes-sionals are usually members (sometimes obligatory) of professional associations and other kinds of networks� Normative isomorphism in this way connects or-ganizations with other structures through individuals which, on the micro-level, in their everyday actions, bring in the norms shaped in other contexts�

The organizational field is a space where the state and general social pres-sures are present, but it also allows to understand actors� In the new institutional theory of organizations, the focus is on organizations as actors, but also other collective actors are recognized as field members, i�e� more loosely organized social movements or other social groups� Yet, organization is here a crucial unit of analysis� The assumption underlying the new institutional theory of organiza-tions is that nearly all social process in the late modern world are happening in or through organizations, and organizations as a cultural form of collective action are globally expanding (Bromley, Meyer 2015)�

The organizational field in this approach is a real entity� It is not just an ana-lytical tool or a construct, but it exists, which allows to talk about the ontology of fields� They exist “to the extent that they are institutionally defined” (DiMaggio,

Powell 1983: 148)� Thus, the ontological status of fields is similar to the status of institutions� Fields bind organizations but are clearly an institutional phenom-enon� The new institutional theory of organizations is in its assumptions based on social constructivism of Berger and Luckmann (1967), so both fields and in-stitutions exist as externalizations of people’s cognition and actions� The field, in order to emerge, requires: an increased interaction between organizations;

developed structures of domination and patterns of coalition; an overwhelming information load to be processed by organizations; a mutual awareness of or-ganizations involved in “something” they share in common� In short, “one actor takes note of another and through this process of referencing one another, actors bring a field into existence” (Wooten, Hoffman 2008: 138)� The field is a space of structuration process described by Anthony Giddens (1979)�

As Wooten and Hoffman (2008) stressed, after the focus on isomorphic pres-sures resulting in relative homogeneity of organizations within the field, insti-tutional scholars turned to study conflicts and other forms of field dynamics�

The change on the field level became (before it was a change on the organiza-tion level triggered by the field level processes) a research subject of growing interest� To simplify, the causes of the change could be found in a field – the results of endogenous institutional processes; or the causes might be external to a field – like exogenous shocks destabilizing the relations between the actors in a field (Greenwood, Suddaby, Hinings 2002)� Subsequently, another aspect of conflictual character of organizational fields started to be emphasized – namely, the aspect of power and dominance, so the situation of fields seemingly being settled and quite started to be explained with the work of maintenance done by powerful actors (Lounsbury, Glynn 2001)� Consequently, more focus was set by new institutionalism on the heterogeneity within fields than on homogeneity� A growing body of research dealt with issues like conflicting institutional logics present in fields (Friedland, Alford 1991; Thornton, Ocasio, Lounsbury 2012), which resulted in production of hybrid organizations (Pache, Santos 2013) or the development of the ability called “institutional ambidexterity” (Jarzabkowski et al� 2013)� My intention here is not to go deep in considerations of various un-derstandings of organizational field concept in new institutionalism, but rather to show that there is an on-going theoretical discussion on the nature of fields, which is very thoroughly tested in research� New institutional conceptualization of fields (and a broader new institutional theory of organizations) is often pre-sented as a study of isomorphism, conformity, and stability – yet it is an oversim-plification usually caused by the sin of describing the new institutionalism only on the basis of its founding texts from the break of 1970s and 1980s� This sin of

oversimplifying and not noticing the newer developments in new institutional theory is also committed by proponents of the strategic action field theory (Flig-stein, McAdam 2012; Kluttz, Fligstein 2016) described below, in Section 2�4�

The belief that fields exist as a real thing is in some way shared with Bourdieu’s approach, although he underlines their objective ontological status� In the new institutional theory of organizations fields exist, but their ontological status is of an intersubjective nature� Yet, there are some researchers who would say that they use organizational fields rather as an analytical tool, and that they do not perceive fields as something real but rather a heuristic thanks to which it is eas-ier to grasp social phenomena occurring on the meso-level� Thus, the field is then an analytical tool which helps to understand what is going on between ac-tors constellating around a given issue which brings them more or less together (Hoffman 1999)�

A good way to observe the transformations of new institutional theory of or-ganizations is to check whether there are any definitional changes in W� Richard Scott’s Institutions and Organizations (Scott 1995; 2014) book, which is upgrad-ed every few years and summerizes the most recent developments in theory� In 1995, he defined the organizational field as “a community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than actors outside the field” (Scott 1995: 56)� Yet, in 2014 the definition was changed to “a collection of diverse, interdependent organizations that participate in a common meaning system”

(Scott 2014: 106)� The changes of definition are significant and are a good il-lustration of the changes in the new institutional theory of organizations in the last 20 years�

Firstly, Scott replaces “a community of organizations” with “a collection of diverse interdependent organizations�” “Community” is a much stronger term denoting that a category called with this name has a kind of a common identity or “spirit�” “Collection” simply means that in a field there are organizations, but there is nothing that binds them� “Community” was replaced by “collection,” yet a description was added that these organizations are “interdependent,” which means that they are in some kind of relations, but they do not create one “body�”

It was also stressed that the organizations in a field are “diverse,” which reminds about the differences between the notion of a field and the previously discussed notion of population� It also highlights the heterogeneity of fields and possible divides present in the fields� The previous use of the term “community” was ob-scuring the divides and rather stressing what they had in common�

Secondly, Scott deleted the line “whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than actors outside the field” (Scott 1995: 56)� The reason for this – according to my interpretation – is that new institutional schol-ars realized that the crucial relation in fields is not interaction but orientation to each other� Actors who orient themselves to each other do not have to enter exchanges, conflicts, or cooperations, but they are somehow aware of their exist-ence� The newer definition includes nothing about more frequent interactions with other actors from the field because, according to a plethora of studies, inter-actions between actors from various fields are quite common� Although usually studies focus on a concrete field, the scholars’ awareness of inter-field relations in the recent years has been growing�

What remained in Scott’s definition is the “common meaning system,” which means that although replacing “community” with “collection,” the theorist high-lights that a field includes some shared cultural elements� Even if the field is a sphere of a conflict, its participants more-or-less agree on what the stakes of this conflict are�

In the new institutional theory of organizations, the field is one of the most central and vital terms (Scott 2014: 219; Wooten, Hoffman 2008: 142)� This ap-proach explains organizations with external processes, not with what occurs inside organizations� Thus, space, arena, industry, population, or the field are levels of analysis which seems to be indispensable� The new institutional think-ing about fields was, to some extent, inspired by Bourdieu’s theory, but it de-veloped footed in empirical studies of inter-organizational phenomena� As the new institutionalism in organizational theory has recently increased its interest in agency on expense on the interest in conformity, it also increased its interest in fields understood not only as spaces of isomorphism but as spaces bringing meaning for organizational action�

2.4 Towards an integration of the field theories: strategic action