Works
- Bureaucratic and craft administration of production: a comparative study, Administrative Science Quarterly 4(2), from page 168, 1959
- Social structure and organizations, In James G. March (ed.), Handbook of Organizations, Rand McNally, Chicago, 142 to 193; reprinted in Joel A. C. Baum and Frank Dobbin (eds.), Economics Meets Sociology in Strategic Management, Advances in Strategic Management 17, 2000, 229 to 259, 1965
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The liability of newness and imprinting
Ideas
Liability of newness. New organizations fail at higher rates because they must learn new roles, build trust among strangers, and form ties to outsiders all at once. Caveat: Freeman, Carroll, and Hannan (1983) found it in three populations; Bruderl and Schussler (1990), known here only secondhand, argued for a liability of adolescence instead. Only passages of the chapter were read.
Liability of newness and imprinting. Stinchcombe argued that new organizations fail more often and that organizations founded at a given time build their structures from the social resources then available and tend to keep them once they are institutionalized, an argument later called imprinting. Caveat: Later ecology research tested the liability of newness with mixed results.
Craft administration. Comparing the mass production and construction industries, argued that the professionalized manual labor force of construction serves the same functions as bureaucratic administration in mass production and is more rational in the face of construction's economic and technical constraints: craft administration substitutes professional training of manual workers for detailed centralized planning of work, and the lack of bureaucracy in construction is explained by economic instability. Caveat: A comparison of two industries, from which Stinchcombe revises Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.