Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 17. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 1997 by Elaine Romanelli

Taking a step back from these chapters and considering them collectively, I found them a rich source of big new ideas about research on important organizational phenomena. Two broad ideas attracted my attention in particular. First, the meso perspective is not merely a call for considering individuals as productive of organizational phenomena or organizational context as a control on individual behavior. Rather, it illuminates the very great inseparability of individual cognition and behavior from organization-level action. Ocasio's paper on the role of cognition in organizational responses to economic adversity and the papers by Van Dyne, Cummings, and Parks and by Ashforth and Humphrey, on individuals' roles and labels in organizations, make this point richly clear. Second, concepts of time and timing have "arrived" in organizational theory in an integral rather than additive way. While Albert's paper alone explores time as its unitary subject, virtually all of the papers address, almost without commentary, many different notions of time, e.g., entrainment in House, Rousseau, and Thomas-Hunt's chapter, dynamic path dependency in Miner and Haunschild's paper, continuity and change in Arrow and McGrath's chapter, and institutional history in Ocasio's and Miles and Creed's papers. Time is not represented here merely as a dimension of temporal distance; rather, time here is history or "plot," to use Albert's word, that locates possibilities for action in an interrelated and path-dependent stream of decisions and activities.

I do have a general criticism of most of the chapters in this volume, however, and one that stems probably from the "bigness" of ideas presented. Most of the chapters, in my opinion, try to cover too much ground, first reviewing a broad but often disjointed array of related literatures, then presenting frameworks and models, followed by detailed examples, and often too-numerous propositions. In most cases, the forest gets lost in the depiction of the trees. While I would recommend each of the chapters in this volume, and the volume as a whole, to researchers interested in these big ideas, I cannot promise an always enjoyable read.

Elaine Romanelli School of Business Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057