The Comparative Analysis of Organizational Forms: Considering Field and Ecological Approaches

The ‘‘first generation’’ (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the ‘‘nuts and bolts’’ of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or ‘‘organizational attributes’’ (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the ‘‘technical core’’ of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations. As has been noted by most observers of the field, organizational theory moved from a focus on the ‘‘innards’’ of the organization and from a