The Social Construction of Organizational Knowledge: A Study of the Uses of Coercive, Mimetic, and Normative Isomorphism
研究指出社会科学知识通过选择性解读经典文献而社会建构，以DiMaggio和Powell1983年关于制度同构的论文为例，发现模仿同构被过度关注，而实际测量中不同概念可互换，且核心学者更倾向主导性解读。
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 article, 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 centrally located researchers in sociology and organizational behavior are more likely than other scholars to invoke this dominant interpretation of their article.