CORPORATE ORGANIZATIONSthat the church and town became corporate per-
sons, the university of the Middle Ages moved
towards the corporate form.
The early corporations played rather passive
roles. Essentially, they held property for a collec-
tive, whose members might change from time to
time. Contrastingly, the corporations of the twen-
tieth century constitute spirited forces. They hire
multitudes of employees. They produce goods
and services and mold ideals and tastes. The deci-
sions their leaders make about where to locate
often determine which locales will prosper and
which will languish.
The influence that corporations have produc-
es concerns about the control of them. Much of
the work on corporations that sociologists have
undertaken highlights these concerns. The work
on control and corporations covers three topics:
the means through which corporations control
their employees; the allocation of control between
owners and managers; and the extent to which
societies control corporations. For all three topics,
control implies command over the affairs of and
operations within the corporate organization.
CONTROL OVER EMPLOYEESThe corporate form has a long history, yet it did
not typify the early factories that manufacturers
established in the United States. Before the early
1900s, most factories operated as small operations
under the control of a single entrepreneur. The
entrepreneur hired an overseer who might in turn
choose a foreman to hire, discipline, and fire
workers. Through consolidation and merger, the
economic landscape of the 1920s revealed far
more large organizations than had the tableau of a
half-century earlier.
More changed over the years of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries than just the
size of organizations. The corporate form spread;
the faceless corporation replaced the corporeal
entrepreneur. Corporations moved towards pro-
fessional management. Factories that businessmen
once controlled personally now operated through
abstract rules and procedures. The people whom
the workers now contacted on a regular basis
consisted of staff for the corporation and not the
corporate owners themselves. Bureaucratic tenets
took root.
A bureaucracy constitutes a particular mode
that organizations can take. Consistent with all
organizations, bureaucratic ones divide up duties.
Two features separate a bureaucracy from other
modes, however. First, a system of ranks or levels
operates. Second, fixed rules and procedures gov-
ern actions. The rules define the tasks, responsi-
bilities, and authority for each office and each level.
Few of the factories in nineteenth-century
America operated as bureaucracies. Instead, the
individuals who made the products decided how
the work would be done. A minimum number of
levels existed. Supervisors or foremen hired and
fired workers, but workers made the rules on the
work itself. The workers were craftsmen or arti-
sans, and they contended that only those who
possessed the skills that the work demands should
decide how or if it should be divided. Gradually,
machinery took over the skilled work. Machines
and not workers controlled the pace. By the end of
the 1920s, neither the laborers nor the machinery
shaped the work. Professional managers did. These
managers enforced rules and oversaw an organiza-
tion where specialized tasks and graded authority
prevailed (Nelson 1975; Clawson 1980; and
Jacoby 1985).
The corporation of the late twentieth century
continues to operate as a bureaucracy. Some sources
argue that efficiency explains the adoption of the
bureaucratic model (see especially Chandler 1980,
1984). Others challenge the emphasis on efficien-
cy, charging it with being overly rational or too
apolitical. The first challenge appears most nota-
bly in the work on organizations as institutions.
This literature regards survival as the premier goal
for any organization. The closer an organization
approximates an institution—an element taken
for granted in the society—the greater its chances
for survival.
According to the institutional perspective, or-
ganizations adopt practices that appear to be rea-
sonable. Myths develop about which patterns prove
most useful and efficient, and any organization
that does not adopt a pattern that the myth favors
courts failure (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio
1988; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Tolbert and
Zucker 1983; also see Scott 1987 for a review of the
different branches of institutional theory).
A different argument maintains that the em-
phasis on efficiency fails to capture the politics of