Professions.

Professions, of which academic disciplines are a special case, contend with one another for resources and authority based in succession their claim to specialized expertise (see especially, Abbott, 1988) Thus, interdisciplinary cooperation is normally resisted, despite lip service, because it threatens a discipline's resource base by dint of eroding its claim to unique knowledge. Gibbons' assault in succession the artificial barriers between disciplines is therefore contemplative and welcome. His general arguments, moreover, are commons with which I find it hard to disagree - so as his view that "the chiefly successful literatures are those that mix detailed description, informal theory, and formal modeling" (p 146) And like at least an other sociologists (cf. White, 1992) I support the pursuit for formal models and have occasionally indulged in them myself (Granovetter and Soong 1986 1988) nevertheless the destination that Gibbons and I the two seek may require longer and more arduous travel than he imagines. I want to focus les in succession the content of the standards themselves than on the way in which they articulate with broader, especially noneconomic, theoretical relate tos about organizations.

Gibbons states that his arguments could be applied to formal patterns of all kinds, but he focuses in this paper forward rational--choice models. Certainly most economists work within a rational-choice framework, and thus I will also address my answer to such models. It is well to continue in mind, however, that formal archetypes need not make rational-choice assumptions and that to endorse the united is not to assume the other.(1)

Gibbons hints that formal models can "check the internal consistency of informal rational-choice arguments" in organization theory. He notes, however, that "far from all arguments in organization theory are informal rational-choice arguments, on the other hand some are" (p. 152). This raises the question of whether most numerous organization theory may not fall outside the purview of rational-choice standards of the sort Gibbons discusses, and if in the way that why. If it does, then the place of arguments presented here may have alone narrow application. The case from Crozier's (1964) Bureaucratic Phenomenon that he pick outs for special analysis, however, certainly appears apt. Indeed, Crozier himself, introducing the regulation clerical agency that Gibbons moulds states that its "actors appear to be the pair extremely rational and extremely predictable, as if they were playing a game that followed an experimental model" (1964: 12)

on the other hand one may wonder how many ethnographies of organizations could have been thus introduced.(2) In fact, it casts out that members of this organization were unusually constrained in their possibilities, abundant more so than abstract actors in the type that Gibbons constructs. For, far from being able to make decisions about in what manner to allocate capital and accumulate information, the clerical agency's division heads had leeway solitary on trivial issues, in an organization that was "rigid, standardized and impersonal" (Crozier, 1964: 12) not to mention chronically underfund through the Ministry of Finance (1964: 13-15) This makes the clerical agency a rather special case of the formal mould which thus adds little to Crozier's account, as Gibbons himself acknowledges. Gibbons would be forward stronger ground simply to argue that his reading of Crozier inspired a formal prototype that served less to improve upon Crozier's explanation than to spread up a new line of argument for similarly constituted organizations in which actors have more discretion, of the like kind as the universities that Gibbons gives as an example. In as it is a case, the relation between the formal archetype and the organizational literature is not single in kind of explication and elaboration if it be not that rather, of heuristics and inspiration.

There are larger issues to be considered about the clerical agency. abundant about its form is to be explained on institutional and cultural setting. That it was chronically underfund mirrors Crozier tells us, the "habitual thrift of the French Ministry of Finance and the usual [French] distrust of parliament for the executive" (1964: 13) nevertheless beyond this, one might want to inquire by what means the organization acquired such salient characteristics as its absence of informal collective action and the difficulty of communication across hierarchical plains Rational-choice models in isolation might allude to that these characteristics result from organization members' maximizing a certain objective function, just as the dean in Gibbons' gauge chooses her strategy based forward the values of relevant parameters, which may then fe back onto organizational form (though the dynamics of like feedback remain to be worked out) still Crozier argues explicitly against similar endogeneity, claiming instead that these organizational characteristics mirror deeply rooted aspects of French culture: "If they already exist as distinct cultural patterns, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition traits as the isolation of the individual and the lack of informal activities may act as powerful incentives for the exhibition of this kind of bureaucratic hypothesis of organization" (1964: 216).