The Decoupling of Outlet from Impact

Recently I had the happy task of contributing to a forthcoming issue of the American Behavioral Scientist honoring my PhD advisor, Paul DiMaggio. The papers engage with different aspects of Paul’s very varied work in organizations, culture, institutional analysis, and other topics. My paper, which you can read a draft of here, puts his most-cited paper, [DiMaggio and Powell, 1983], in the context of other highly-cited papers in sociology since the 1930s, and tries to see what that can tell us. It tries to do that through the lens of the paper itself. “The Iron Cage Revisited” is one of the most successful articles in the history of sociology. Web of Science says it has accumulated over thirty-two thousand citations; Google Scholar puts the figure at over seventy-seven thousand. It is the most-cited paper ever published in the American Sociological Review, and the most-cited sociology paper written in the 1980s. Its core ideas—coercive, normative, and especially mimetic…