MIZRUCHI, Mark S <br/><br/>
The social construction of organizational knowledge :  a study of the uses of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism 

 - Ithaca :  Johnson Graduate School of Management,  December 1999 
<br/><br/> Arguing that knowledge in the social sciences is socially constructed through the selective interpretation of major works, we examine the fate of a classic article in organizational theory, DiMaggio and Powell`s 1983 essay on institutional isomorphism. We show that one aspect of this aticle, the discussion of mimetic isomorphism, has received attention disproportionate to its role in the essay. A detailed examination of 26 articles in which researchers attempted to operationalize various components of DiMaggio and Powell`s model shows that measures used to capture one of their concepts could have served as valid measures of one of the others. Findings show that DiMaggio and Powell`s thesis has become socially constructed,as authors have selectively appropriated aspects of the work that accord with prevalent discourse in the field, and that centraly located researchers in sociology and organizational behavior are more likely  than other scholars to invoke this dominat interpretation of their article