Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations. - Review - book review

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2000 by Beau Weston

Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, edited by N. J. DEMERATH III, PETER DOBKIN HALL, TERRY SCHMITT, and RHYS H. WILLIAMS. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 410 pp. $55.00.

The premise of Sacred companies is that the analysis of religious organizations needs better organization theory, and the analysis of secular organizations needs better religious theory. The book succeeds well in bringing the "new institutionalism" in organization theory to bear on a variety of religious organization issues. It is much less successful in its other aim - to export insights from the sociology of religion to organization theory in particular, and to mainstream secular sociology in general.

The book is the fruit of a three-year project, funded by the Lilly Endowment, and run through the Program on Non-Profit Organizations (PONPO) at Yale. PONPO's long-running Complex Organizations Seminar became the testing ground for the new institutionalism, especially of Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell. The influence of their 1983 American Sociological Review article, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields" can be felt in every chapter of Sacred companies. As a participant in that seminar in the mid-1980s, I can testify that it was a vibrant intellectual project, but a secular one, and I commend co-editor Hall for bringing this large group of distinguished sociologists of religion together with the Yale complex organizations group.

The new institutionalist theory of organizations is an alternative to the standard economic theory, which sees organizations as rational actors maximizing profit. The appeal of this new theory for students of religious organization is that it sees organizations as also driven by a desire to establish cultural legitimacy by adopting the values, cultures, rituals, and forms of the leading organizations in a field. An insight of this population ecology approach for example, is that organizations in a field change not primarily through adaptation by old organizations, but by their displacement by new kinds of organizations. This might be helpful to the sociology of religion in understanding the proliferation of megachurches.

The overview essay by DiMaggio on the relevance of organization theory to the study of religion is a fine framing of the issues and a useful introduction to neo-institutionalism for sociologists of religion. Some of the more valuable empirical studies are Hall's contention that rational bureaucratic organization was developed first by nineteenth-century religious reform organizations, Mark Chaves's continuation of his argument that the real cleavage in denominations is between the religious authority hierarchy and the church's bureaucratic agencies, Penny Becker's excellent study of conflict within different types of congregations, and Laurence Iannacone's installment in his "why strict churches are strong" series. N. J. Demerath, the director of the project that produced this book, has several contributions. The most interesting of these, I thought, was his study with Mark Templeton on the pushes and pulls within the Presbyterian Church in the US/Presbyterian Church of America schism.

The least successful aspect of Sacred companies is the attempt to apply sociology of religion insights to secular organizations. Several game efforts are made, notably by Demerath and Rhys Williams, and also in the project's manifesto by Demerath and Thomas Schmitt, but they are hampered by a very broad functionalist definition of religion. This lets them find "the sacred" in every sort of organization, but it doesn't look like the kind of religion any religious organization or person would recognize.

Sacred companies does advance the study of religious organizations. It will not, though, be the vehicle with which sociologists of religion retake the old Weberian and Durkheimian center of the discipline.