How Institutions Form 1

Running head: HOW INSTITUTIONS FORM

How Institutions Form:

Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy

Hallett, Tim, and Marc Ventresca. 2006b. “How Institutions Form: Loose Coupling as a
Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.” American Behavioral Scientist.
Special Issue: Institutions in the Making: Identity, Power, and the Emergence of New
Organizational Forms. 49, 7: 908-924. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/49/7/908.abstract

Acknowledgements:

We thank both colleagues and institutions: Elizabeth Armstrong, Lonnie Athens, Tim Bartley,

Howard Becker, Amy Binder, Gary Fine, Brooke Harrington, Bill Kaghan, Rodney Lacey,

Eleanor Lewis, Ryon Lancaster, Doug Orton, Charles Perrow, Fabio Rojas, Michael Sauder, and

Michael Schwalbe. We benefit from the insights of participants in the PEC workshop at Indiana

University, Strategy and Practices Workshop at Oxford, and the 2004 ASA culture roundtable.

Key comments came from contributors to this volume at the New Models of Management

Workshop at Skagen, DK 2005. Special thanks to Patti Gumport, Director and colleagues at the

Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research (SIHER), Stanford University for a congenial

working venue and intellectual space.

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 How Institutions Form 2

Abstract

This paper uses a mid century text to reengage a late 70s concept in order to answer a

new century question. We return to Alvin Gouldner’s classic (1954) study Patterns of Industrial

Bureaucracy to reexamine the “coupling” concept in contemporary institutionalism in a way that

engages the question: “How do new institutional forms emerge?” Based on Gouldner’s detailed

observations of work in a gypsum mine, we argue that coupling processes are key mechanisms in

the emergence of institutional forms. Coupling processes describe how existing and available

elements are (re)combined into new forms that bridge broader rationalized myths and local

practices. Examining coupling as a dynamic process and activity helps us to understand how the

institution of bureaucracy emerged in the gypsum mine and interacted with previous social

orders of authority and control. Gouldner’s account of coupling at the mine is a story of formal

and informal power struggles and active conflict, and it is a story that brings the process of local

institutional formation into sharp relief.

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How Institutions Form:

Loose Coupling as Mechanism in Gouldner’s Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy

How do institutions form? This question is central to research in organizational analysis

and other key social science and policy research. Oftentimes, the answers to the questions we ask

are implicit in earlier research, even though we must labor to read these works anew.1 Thus,

when confronted with the “new” question that motivates this issue of American Behavioral

Scientist--“How do new institutional forms first emerge within and among organizations?”-- we

look to Gouldner’s (1954) classic study of authority, bureaucracy, and change in a 1940s gypsum

mine, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy. We use this study and Gouldner’s insights to refocus

on the potential of the “loose coupling” concept for understanding institutional processes and the

mechanisms by which institutions form. In contemporary research “loose coupling” is typically

treated as an outcome, but returning to Patterns provides a different account of how coupling

occurs and matters for emerging institutional forms. It is a process story of tangible conflict and

active power struggles, competing definitions of the situation, a narrative that links external

meanings with local organizational knowledge and practices. It is a story that sheds light on how

bureaucracy, at that time in American history a new institutional form, emerged at the mine.

To make the case for this account, we first problematize how the coupling concept has

been used in the literature, and we explain why Patterns is a good place to look at coupling as a

process linked to institutional formation. Gouldner’s focus on local work arrangements and

activity in addition to external organizational pressures contains wisdom that, ironically, has

become “decoupled” in contemporary institutional research focused on macro environments.

After discussing the background of Gouldner’s study and some links to contemporary debates in

1
Sociologists too often have amnesia when it comes to the work of the past (Gans 1992). This amnesia is
debilitating, not because is shows a lack of respect for our predecessors, but because it stunts the accumulation of
knowledge and the forward progress of research. For an alternative view, see Stinchcombe (1982).

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the new institutionalism in organizational analysis, we turn to Gouldner’s discussion of the

“indulgency pattern”—the social order that characterized life at the mine before the arrival of

bureaucracy. Then we examine how a new manager tried to impose a tightly coupled pattern of

bureaucracy (which Gouldner labels “punishment centered bureaucracy”). This imposition was

met with resistance, and the emergent conflict revealed a power struggle and generated another

coupling, this one “loose” in nature (which Gouldner labels “mock bureaucracy”). Though

conflicts in the mine produced a loosely coupled form of bureaucracy, cooperation created

another, more tightly coupled form based on shared interests (which Gouldner labels

“representative bureaucracy”).

We conclude that new institutional forms (in this case “bureaucracy”) are always

assembled, reconfigured, edited, and negotiated through plural coupling processes. Prevailing

views of institutionalism importantly focus on broad rationalized systems of meanings and

struggles among logics in fields of activity, but without sufficient concurrent focus on the

practices and local activities which both support and refract macro logics (Brown, 1978;

Friedland & Alford 1991). Because of this focus on the macro environment and diffusion

processes, contemporary institutionalism has fewer tools to anticipate the emergence of the

different patterns of bureaucracy that Gouldner describes in situ. However, rereading Patterns

with a contemporary eye helps us to understand where new institutional forms come from, and

how they combine both durable features common to prototypes and also remain negotiated and

fragile in local practice.

The Coupling “Problem” in Contemporary Organizational Research

The idea of “coupling,” and loose coupling in particular, first came to prominence in the

ideas and writings of a group of dissenting sociologists and social psychologists working on

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problems of change and reform in public schools in the mid-1970s.2 This research community

introduced the loose coupling concept as a system description, to challenge a common image of

an organization as a set of densely linked elements held together by technical interdependencies

and formal control structures.3 Coupling, simply put, directed analytic attention to the variety of

couplings in inter-organizational relations and made such linkages and their impact an empirical

a question, rather than making assumptions about necessary couplings.

The imagery of loose-coupling challenged the assumption that organizations operated

with intentional plans, clear means-end goals, responsiveness, and coordination. Moreover, it

took into direct account the then novel idea of broader environments that interpenetrated

organizations, further challenging the analytic integrity of a unit-level organization. It introduced

an argument about educational bureaucracies as exemplars of loosely-coupled organizations

characterized by weak ties, ritualized activity, inconsistent responses, and segmentation with

regard to plural external environments. The concept of loose coupling was analytically powerful

because it helped scholars to understand why many organizations (particularly public agencies

and cultural organizations) continued to operate by familiar routines and practices despite waves

of policy reforms and environmental pressures to change.

Weick’s (1976) paper on “educational organizations as loosely coupled systems” made

the full argument. In this paper (1976, p. 17), he called for descriptive studies to refine our

understanding of the different kinds of couplings and the mechanisms through which they are

created. Though coupling related to environmental pressures, he argued that researchers would

want to study coupling in terms of local organizational processes. The notion of coupling was

2
This was a conversation shared among researchers at a 1974 Conference at Stanford School of Education that
included organization theorists, sociologists, and historians of education (Orton, personal communication).
3
However, Weick actually cites two earlier studies that invoked the concept: An article by Glassman (1973) and an
unpublished manuscript by March and Olsen (1975).

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 How Institutions Form 6

incorporated into emerging insitutionalisms. This argument was congenial to ideas about

ambiguity and how organizations change developed by March and colleagues (March & Olson

1976) and also to early papers on social charters and institutional effects (Meyer, 1975; 1977)

and a key statement on ‘institutionalized structures as myth and ceremony” (Meyer & Rowan

1977; 1978).

Meyer and Rowan (1977; 1978) argued that many of the formal structures of

organizations incorporate broader cultural rules, what they terms ‘rationalized myths’ in the

Durkheimian sense of accounts that provide meaning and rationales for activity. They made a

dual argument in a series of papers. On one hand, they propose that conformance with these rules

provide the organization with legitimacy on the terms of key authoritative external audiences and

arbiters (e.g., state agencies, professional associations, and other publics). This legitimacy

enhances the organization’s prospects for survival. However, many of these institutional rules

conflict with the needs of actual work activity and so they extend the work of Thompson (1967).

Organizations avoid conflict by buffering “their formal structures from the uncertainties of

technical activities by becoming loosely coupled, building gaps between their formal structures

and actual work activities” (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, pp. 340-341). Through loose coupling,

organizations incorporate elements proposed by broader cultural rules, even as technical

activities are largely unaffected (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Pfeffer, 1981).

They made a second argument in the same paper, developed more fully in a companion

chapter (Meyer & Rowan, 1978). Here, they argue that loose coupling is less of a strategic action

and more a mechanism by which ‘rationalized building blocks’ of organization available in the

environment are recombined and bundled into categorically-correct forms. This argument,

somewhat more provocative, does not start from the a priori organization seeking legitimacy, but

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rather starts from the a priori rationalized cultural rules and social ‘charters’ (Meyer, 1975) that

specify a vocabulary of forms. This argument recognizes that activity is present and that

rationalized myths provide the recipes for assembly of elementary forms in the organizational

landscape—schools, firms, hospitals, etc. Coherence, coordination, control, and ultimately,

forms of coupling are firmly rooted in rituals of deference and demeanor, of “logics of

confidence” and “logics of avoidance” (Goffman, 1959; Meyer & Rowan, 1978).

Despite this early centrality of loose coupling as systems and mechanism in the new

institutionalism, much subsequent empirical work pushed these views to the side as a substantive

topic: one line of research focused on macro structural environments and so neglected coupling

processes, another line of research treated coupling only as a strategic outcome. Local processes

like loose coupling were glossed in the emerging focus on inter-organizational relationships

(Scully & Segal, 2002, Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997, p. 411) and the abstract focus on

Durkheimian like “institutional logics” (Stinchcombe, 1997). Over time neo institutional

research has become less and less engaged with the local dynamics of real, working

organizations.

This is problematic, because institutions are not inert categories of meaning. Rather, they

are “inhabited” by people and their activity (Scully & Creed, 1997). The development of

couplings is one such activity. Nearly 15 years after the coupling concept first emerged, Orton

and Weick’s review of the literature (1990, p. 218) criticized research that oversimplified loose

coupling by treating it as a “flat” and “static” organizational feature. They reiterated the call to

study coupling as a process, “as something that organizations do, rather than merely as

something they have” (emphasis added). They also call for attention to loose coupling as a

situated system process, not only or even as a strategic one.

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 How Institutions Form 8

With few exceptions (Coburn, 2004), this call has gone unrecognized, let alone answered.

The silent response is symptomatic of what DiMaggio (1988), paraphrasing Gouldner, argued in

his essay on the ‘pathos of bureaucracy’: A need for a more supple conception of agency and

activity, and more direct recognition of power including cultural politics. Organizations, even

highly “institutionalized” ones, are filled with activity and ferment (Fligstein, 2001; Lounsbury,

Ventresca, & Hirsch, 2003). The overly blunt use of concepts like ‘institutionalization’ and

truncated research designs has restricted the potential contributions of this line of work

(Schneiberg & Clemens, forthcoming; Scully & Meyerson, 1996). The coupling concept ought

not to be used as a static aside to focus on macro structural environments, but as a dynamic

activity and local process. This is especially the case when new institutional forms are in the

process of emergence.

Almost 30 years after the concept was first introduced, we still have an impoverished

sense of what couplings actually look like and how they coalesce at the local organizational

level. How do couplings develop, and what can they tell us about the emergence of new

institutional forms? To answer this question, we go back in time over fifty years to Gouldner’s

gypsum mine.4 We do so for three reasons. First, Patterns takes as its focus the “premier”

institution in organizational sociology—bureaucracy. Moreover, Gouldner studied bureaucracy

during a time in American history when it was a new institutional form. Though Gouldner was

not writing in the contemporary era, in many ways Patterns can be read through the lens of

contemporary scholarship. When examined with this gaze, Patterns is centrally about

institutional formation—not just how a new organizational logic diffuses, but how it evolves

during conflict and power struggles at the local level.

4
Gouldner’s work is of course the focus of much debate Buraway (1982).

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 How Institutions Form 9

Second, Patterns is recognized as a pillar of organizational sociology. DiMaggio, (1988)

cites it prominently in his invocation of the “pathos of bureaucracy,” and Perrow paraphrases it

at length in his opening to Complex Organizations (Perrow, 1986, pp. 1-3). The legitimacy of

Patterns within organizational sociology ought to make our use of it to explore issues of

coupling and institutional emergence all the more compelling.

Third, though the imperative of “new” research propels us forward, the historical

development of sociology equips us with hindsight and a reason to look back, not to forget.

Oftentimes these classic works speak to contemporary debates (if only we would listen), and we

situate this paper in the genre of revisiting sociological classics for the purpose of gaining new

insights. 5 While this reason is somewhat trite, it remains valuable.

For all of these reasons, it makes good sense to couple “new” research on institutional

formation with the past.

The Intellectual Context, Purpose, and Relevance of Patterns

Gouldner wrote Patterns at key moment in the development of organizational studies.

Sociology was transitioning from the work of Parsons towards more empirically driven theories

of the “middle-range.” Modern organizational theory was nascent. Researchers studied situated

organizations with attention to work and occupations, and the border between studies of work

and research on organizations was porous (Stern & Barley, 1996). Building from interests shared

with his dissertation advisor, Robert Merton (1940), and another of Merton’s students, Selznick

(1949; 1957), Gouldner sought to “evaluate,” “modify,” and “redirect” Weber’s theory of

bureaucracy via an empirical study of work patterns in a gypsum mine (1954, p. 9; Merton, 1982,

5
Other works in this genre include Handelmen’s (1976) reinterpretation of Donald Roy’s “Banana Time” and
Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent, which revisits the shop floor in Roy’s work over four decades years later.
(Burawoy 1979, 2003).

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p. 919). Gouldner’s empirical approach fit the spirit of Weber’s “verstehen.” Gouldner used

ethnographic field observations to “get closer” to actors and action.

Gouldner used the data collected at the mine to confront the prevailing readings of Weber

on bureaucracy as an “ideal type” and “iron cage.” This confrontation was made possible by a

serendipitous moment in his field site: In the midst of the study, the incumbent manager (“Old

Doug”) died and was replaced by an outsider (“Vincent Peele”), a professional manager. This

event created a unique opportunity to observe the local emergence of bureaucracy.

This bureaucratic logic had grown in strength after World War II, when organizations of

many types began to adopt the bureaucratic practices that had made the mobilization for war a

success (Selznick, 1949; Baron, Dobbin, & Jennings, 1986). It was a period of industrial change,

and Gouldner documents how this broader change affected not only the mine, but also the

community that was its home. In the first chapter of Patterns, Gouldner describes how “the ebb

of ruralism may be witnessed”:

The countryside was becoming industrialized and the farms mechanized. Canning,
gypsum, paper, and other light industries moved in and grew. Farmers retired their
horses, took to tractors, and adopted all manner of mechanical loaders, balers, and silage
apparatus. Commercial farming was started; farming was becoming more of a business,
like any other, and much less of a distinctive “way of life” (1954, pp. 42-44).

Gouldner embeds his observations of the mine within this environment. Along with

industrialization, the community and the mine were confronted with a new rationality, a

bureaucratic one. Gouldner provides an empirical account of the sources and effects of this new

form of rationality, promoted by the main regional office and enacted locally in the succession

from “Old Doug” to Peele. Gouldner reports:

The main office executives told Peele of his predecessor’s shortcomings, and expressed
the feeling that things had been slipping at the plant for some time. They suggested that
Old Doug. . . had grown overindulgent with his advancing years, and that he, Peele,
would be expected to improve production. As Peele put it, “Doug didn’t force the

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machine. I had to watch it. Doug was satisfied with a certain production. But the
Company gave me orders to get production up” (1954, p. 71).

The new management introduced a number of new rules and practices—hiring people outside of

kinship networks, increasing the amount of paperwork, and rigidly enforcing disciplinary

procedures—accompanied by a new emphasis on hierarchy.

However, these bureaucratic trappings were not simply a response to production

concerns. Rather, they were a practical expression of rationalized myths of productivity and

efficiency. Gouldner explains that “With the renewed pressure of postwar competition, the main

office expected things to start humming; traditional production quotas were about to be

rationalized” (1954, pp. 71-72, emphasis added), and “Peele, therefore, came to the plant

sensitized to the rational and impersonal yardsticks which his superiors would use to judge his

performance” (1954, p. 72).

While rationalized myths of productivity help explain the emergence of bureaucracy at

the mine, the shift in personnel is also central. Peele entered the mine as an outsider unable to tap

existing social networks, but with a mandate to change productivity. As a result, the informal

relations of power and influence based on long standing social interactions between Old Doug

and the workers were closed to Peele. The formal authority supplied by bureaucracy was the

option that remained (1954, p. 98).

Gouldner’s account of external environmental changes and pressures as they relate to the

mine foreshadow many of the concerns of contemporary institutionalism. A key question for an

institutionalist is “why bureaucracy as an organizational form for this mine?” In answering this

question, Patterns displays the power of institutional analysis. Gouldner develops a magisterial

account of external sources for the formalization of controls at the mine, the pressures for

increased production coming from the regional office and more diffusely from a national postwar

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focus on productivity and rationality, and the mythology of bureaucracy as the appropriate

solution. These concerns populate contemporary research on inertia (Hannan & Freeman, 1984;

Bartunek, 1984) isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powel,l 1983) and the spread of formalized, modern

personnel practices (Baron, Dobbin, & Jennings, 1986; Dobbin, Edelman, Meyer, Scott, &

Swidler, 1988; Dobbin, Sutton, Meyer, & Scott, 1993; Dobbin & Sutton, 1996; Edelman 1990;

1992). Gouldner also recognized the set of rationalizing beliefs that accompany managerial

succession, and the ways in which certain people (like Peele) are “carriers” of institutional

processes (DiMaggio, 1988; Scott, 2001, p. 79).

However, the analytic value of Patterns for our understanding of the coupling process

and institutional formation becomes most evident when we examine how these external pressures

collided with the prior local order, or what Gouldner describes as the “indulgency pattern.” It is

in this collision that different couplings between environmental pressures and local practices

were actively negotiated by the people in the mine, and from which the different forms of

bureaucracy (“punishment-centered,” “mock,” and “representative”) emerged.

The Indulgency Pattern

Institutions seldom emerge from green field sites (Kogut & Zander, 2000; Lawrence &

Suddaby, 2005). Gouldner goes to great lengths to describe what life at the mine was like before

the introduction of formal bureaucracy. Gouldner labels this prior order the “indulgency pattern.”

It consisted of routinized interactions characterized by management responsiveness towards the

workers, leniency and the flexible application of rules, second chances, and a blind eye towards

pilfering (1954, pp. 47-56). As a part of the indulgency pattern, Old Doug “Never came around

much; ‘ran the plant by phone’; gave the workers free (gypsum) board; related to everyone in a

friendly and personal way; did not push men for their absences” (p. 82).

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To explain the development of the indulgency pattern, Gouldner describes how the mine

was “enmeshed in a network of kinship relations” (p. 56). The workers describe how “the

supervisors here have known each other for a long time. They grew up together. The same with a

lot of the men.” (p. 39). As a result, “everybody’s sociable” and Gouldner describes “friendly

and highly egalitarian relationships between supervisors and workers. ‘You see,’ explains a

mechanic, ‘the bosses associate with the men. They will drink with them at the saloon or

restaurant, and there is a fine sentiment’” (p. 39). These routinized but informal interactions

precluded domineering management tactics and hierarchies. To quote one of the foremen, “You

can’t ride the men very hard when they are your neighbors.” (p. 56).

While these relations subverted formal authority, the indulgency pattern supplied the

management with an abundance of informal legitimacy in the eyes of the employees. It prompted

the workers to react favorably to the difficult and dangerous labor at the mine, and to trust the

management and follow its lead (pp. 55-57). In summarizing Old Doug and the indulgency

pattern, Gouldner states that the workers praised Doug for “his informality, his lack of emphasis

on formal hierarchy and status, his laxness with the rules, his direct interaction with the

workers.” However, Gouldner adds: “These, typically, are traits which are the antithesis of

bureaucratic administration” (p. 82). With the passing of Old Doug and the arrival of Peele, the

end of indulgency was near.

The Imposition of a Tight Coupling: “Punishment-Centered Bureaucracy”

Peele came to the mine with a fundamentally different mindset than his predecessor.

Gouldner states that with the arrival of Peele, “A college educated, authority conscious, rule-

oriented individual was substituted for an informal, ‘lenient’ man who had little taste for ‘paper

work’” (p. 63). Peele carried the logic of bureaucracy into the mine (DiMaggio, 1988; Berger,

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Berger, & Kellner, 1974), and used his formal authority as manager to create a tighter coupling

between bureaucracy and everyday work practices. This coupling first took the form of

increasing supervision. Where Old Doug trusted that the workers would get their jobs done,

Peele put them on watch. As one worker said, “Peele is like a mouse in a hole. You don’t know

when he will pop out” (Gouldner, 1954, p. 87). Peele required that his foremen do the same:

Peele’s new directives called for weekly and daily reports from foremen and building
supervisors. . . In its turn, this constant check on the foremen necessarily constrained
foremen to check up on the workers. As they perceived the source of the increasing
pressure on them, the workers said: “As the super goes, so go the foremen” (p. 66).

This coupling was tightened further by management activities that emphasized formality:

Formal rules that had been ignored were being revived, while new ones were established
to supplement and implement the old. Emphasis upon hierarchy and status were rupturing
the older informal ties. Distinctions between private and company property, between
working and private time were expanding. A cold, impersonal “atmosphere” was slowly
settling on the plant (p. 69)

The imposition of a tight coupling between the logic of bureaucracy and everyday practices

began to squeeze the life out of the indulgency pattern.

The actions of the new management and Peele’s efforts to create a tight coupling

generated a particular form of bureaucracy which Gouldner labels “punishment-centered

bureaucracy.” In this tightly coupled pattern, formal rules are enforced for their own sake,

regardless of their utility, and deviations are met with punishment.6 One of the examples of

punishment-centered bureaucracy involved new disciplinary measures. In the past, the workers at

the mine could spend lax periods during their shifts away from their machines, and they could

circulate and converse among friends. But now these “delinquent” actions were met with a

“warning notice.” This notice consisted of a paper form with a long checklist of offenses onto

which names, dates, and times were documented. The notice had to be signed by the

6
Punishment-centered bureaucracy is the pattern of bureaucracy the Gouldner associates with Weber’s “iron cage.”

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management or foreman as well as the offending worker (p. 67). This was a dramatic shift from

the lax enforcement of rules and the “second chances” that characterized the indulgency pattern.

A related example of punishment-centered bureaucracy involved strict enforcement of the

“no-absenteeism” rule. During the era of the indulgency pattern, employees could occasionally

skip work with little justification or prior notice, particularly when gypsum orders were slow.

Absenteeism cost little in the way of productivity, and counted much towards the informal

legitimacy of the old management. However, the new management strictly punished absences,

and the rule was formalized by extensive paperwork, sending a shock through the employee

ranks (p. 208). Moreover, because the rule required permission to leave work for such things as

wedding, funerals, or sick relatives, it restricted the workers’ control over their outside behavior,

and began to colonize their private lives (p. 213).

Despite the external pressures from the regional management and the broader industrial

landscape, the emergence of punishment-centered bureaucracy was not the inevitable outcome of

macro institutional forces. After all, the previous management had lived and worked in this same

context. Punishment-centered bureaucracy only emerged with the tangible efforts of the new

management to create a tight coupling between these external pressures and everyday life at the

mine. Nor was this the end of the story.

Conflict, Resistance, and Loose Coupling: “Mock Bureaucracy”

The activities and the tight coupling that generated “punishment-centered bureaucracy”

were made possible by Peele’s formal authority as manager. However, formal authority is not the

only kind of power in organizations, and organizational cultures carry their own informal

legitimacy (Hallett, 2003). The indulgency pattern was one such culture, and the workers held

fast to its set of informal rights and expectations. The workers actively resisted the changes in the

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mine, setting up a struggle in which the formal authority of the management and the informal

legitimacy of the indulgency pattern collided. As a result of this conflict, the workers and the

management negotiated a loose coupling, which produced what Gouldner calls “mock

bureaucracy.”

Gouldner describes the workers’ response to the tightly coupled, “punishment” form of

bureaucracy as “bitter discontent” (1954, p. 68). The new emphasis on supervision violated the

norms of equality that characterized the indulgency pattern, and Gouldner reports that “the more

a supervisor watched his subordinates, the more hostile they became to him” (1954, p. 160). This

was especially the case in the sub-surface mine, where the workers believed that the dangerous

nature of the job gave them the right to take occasional liberties, especially in regards to

absenteeism.

The emerging conflict took a number of forms, and the workers resisted in ways both

tacit and overt. One of the tacit responses involved acts of “bureaucratic sabotage,” or “deliberate

apathy fused with resentment, in which, by the very act of conforming to the letter of the rule, its

intention is ‘conscientiously’ violated” (1954, p. 175). Though punishment-centered bureaucracy

could regulate basic behaviors, it could not regulate feelings and attitudes. The workers would

not break any rules, but they would not put forward any extra effort or enthusiasm to make the

product of their labor better. They would punch in and out of work exactly on time, but they

would not volunteer for extra hours when gypsum orders were high. This kind of basic “activity”

without sincere “participation” undermined the very productivity that the management sought to

increase.

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The tacit resistance of the workers also sabotaged Peele’s legitimacy. The workers

accomplished this through the development of a “Rebecca Myth.”7 In their interactions with each

other (and with the researchers), the workers idealized Old Doug and held Peele to an unrealistic

standard that glorified and exaggerated the indulgency pattern:

Peele’s the opposite of Doug. . . He’s always around checking on the men and standing
over them. As long as production was going out Doug didn’t stand over them. Peele is
always around as though he doesn’t have faith in the men like Doug (1954, p. 81
emphasis in original).

When Doug was here, it was like one big happy family. Peele is all business (1954, p.
81).

When Doug was here, all you had to say to Doug was, “Say, Doug, I need some board for
the house”. “Take a truck or a box car and fill ‘er up,” he would say. “But git it the hell
out of here”. With Peele, you have to pay for any board you take (1954, p. 81).

Though the old indulgency pattern had been disrupted, its symbolic power was stronger than

ever (Hallett, 2003), and these interactions undermined Peele’s authority. These observations led

Gouldner to criticize Weber’s view of authority: “For Weber, authority was given consent

because it was legitimate, rather than being legitimate because it evoked consent. For Weber,

therefore, consent is always a datum to be taken for granted, rather than being a problem whose

sources had to be traced” (1954, p. 222).

Eventually these tacit conflicts and power struggles burst to the surface in the form of a

wildcat strike that Gouldner dissected in a companion book published in 1955. Gouldner

demonstrates that the apparently spontaneous strike was actually the product of bureaucratic

violations of the autonomy and control that the workers cherished under the indulgency pattern.

During the strike the workers fought for higher wages. However, Gouldner argues that the wages

at the mine had always been low. During the time in Gouldner’s research when Old Doug was

7
Gouldner takes this term from a novel by Daphne DuMaurier about a young woman who married a widower, but
was vexed by the memory of his first wife (Rebecca), whose virtues were incessantly celebrated by her husband
(1954: 79).

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still alive and so was the indulgency pattern, a worker told him: “I like it here. They don’t push

you around. A man’s got his work to do and they leave him alone. You know that’s one of the

reasons they pay so low around here. . . The pay is like a balance for the working conditions. It

sort of balances things” (1955, p. 32, emphasis in original). The workers did not mind the low

wages as long as they felt that they were being well treated. It was only when the low wages

were fused with a tightly coupled “punishment” form of bureaucracy that the strike erupted.

These conflicts made the tightly coupled pattern of bureaucracy unmanageable. A

compromise had to be made, and this compromise is, to the contemporary reader, very much a

loose coupling. Gouldner labels it “mock bureaucracy,” and he describes it as a work pattern in

which bureaucratic rules are in place but are largely ignored or inoperative. As an instance of

loose coupling, the mock bureaucracy involved an implicit agreement where the workers let the

management save face and have their rules as long as they looked the other way as the workers

went about their daily lives.

A chief example involved the “no smoking” rules. These rules were formalized, but for

the most part, the workers considered them “dead letters,” and so did the management. The mine

was filled with signs that proclaimed the rules and punishments, but these rules were not

enforced, except when an insurance or fire inspector came to the mine. Both the new

management and the workers agreed to this arrangement, and when it was breeched, punishment

occurred not through the formal warning notices, but through informal interactions. As one

worker explained, “There are a few guys who didn’t even stop smoking when the inspector

comes around. They are troublemakers, and we let them know where they get off” (1954, p. 186,

emphasis in original).

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 How Institutions Form 19

Where punishment-centered bureaucracy was interpreted as a violation of the old

indulgency pattern, “mock” bureaucracy was interpreted as the indulgency pattern dressed in

bureaucratic clothing. Here Gouldner anticipates a set of ideas that are central for the new

institutionalism: “rationalized myths” and the companion terms “myth and ceremony” (Meyer &

Rowan, 1977). Recall that in classical usage, “myth” does not connote the modern sense of false

or incorrect claims. Rather, they are the accounts of fundamental cultural and ontological

ordering that embody how and why everyday reality takes the forms it does. Myths are the

source origin accounts that authorize and justify the character of everyday life. “Rationalized

myths” then map onto Weber’s concern with the rise of technical mean-ends chain and with the

broader “disenchantment” of modern society – that is, the reduced play of awe and majesty in

their varied forms as sources of authority and the growth of apparently technical solutions.

Recall also that Meyer and Rowan (1977; 1978) develop in considerable detail the

microprocesses that undergird and support organizations assembled from rationalized structural

elements like organization charts, personnel procedures, the mandates and rules of state agencies

and professional expertise: the “logic of confidence” and other face mechanisms incorporate the

ideas of micro interaction orders, ritual, deference and demeanor as the cohering texture of

organizations.

However, instead of presuming that loose couplings prevent conflict, Gouldner

demonstrates how mock bureaucracy is a living thing that develops in the midst of on-going

conflict. Gouldner argues that the emergence of bureaucracy and the forms that it takes can only

be understood “in terms of a balance of power, of the relative strengths of opposing groups. It

was by no means the inevitable outcome of an irresistible force” (1954, p. 154, emphasis in

original). Instead of glossing these local dynamics to instead focus on macro “logics” and

19
 How Institutions Form 20

environments, this rereading of Patterns makes the coupling process central and identifies it as a

mechanism through which new institutional forms emerge. This reading of Gouldner provides

the basis for both appreciating the Meyer and Rowan arguments that rationalized myths of

efficiency and productivity got coded into formal structures, and also for extending this point by

focusing on how local struggles and interests confront and edit these abstract forms (e.g., myths

and ceremonies of bureaucratic efficiency) with evidence about practical activity and local

context.

Shared Interests, Cooperation, and Coupling: “Representative Bureaucracy”

In discussing loose-coupling, Weick and colleagues (1976; Orton & Weick, 1990; Weick,

Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) note that it is not that entire organizations are “loosely coupled,” but

rather some aspects are tightly coupled while the relationship between others is loose. Coupling

is a multi-dimensional process (Spillane & Burch, 2005). Though the conflict between the

workers and the management generated a loose coupling and a pattern of “mock” bureaucracy,

the management and the workers did have some common interests which provided fertile ground

for a tighter coupling that formed voluntarily around some concerns

Gouldner labels this emergent pattern “representative bureaucracy.” A key example

involved safety operations. Gouldner describes the safety operations as the most

“bureaucratically organized” sphere of the mine. There were extensive formalized rules,

regulations, paperwork, and reports that centered on the safety program. In contrast to mock

bureaucracy, these were not “dead letters.” In contrast to punishment-centered bureaucracy, the

safety operations were not met with worker resistance. One worker explained: “Safety is another

story. The men won’t resist that. It’s for their own good. They don’t want accidents, if they can

help it” (1954, p. 184, emphasis in the original).

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 How Institutions Form 21

Though the safety operations consisted of a tight coupling between bureaucracy and

actual practices, this coupling was not imposed from above, but rather involved “the day-to-day

participation of the workers in its administration” (pp. 204-205, emphasis in original). Through

ongoing worker-management interactions, the safety rules were negotiated, enforced, and obeyed

(p. 204). Moreover, these interactions had the latent function of building solidarity out of

relationships that had been antagonistic. To quote one of the managers:

It is really wonderful how things can be worked out in this safety field. You must know
Tenzman? He’s regarded as a troublemaker. But when he got involved in safety work and
discussed this with his supervisors, why they came away saying, ‘He’s not a bad guy
after all.’ He gained a lot of respect for himself (p. 201).

The agreement and solidarity of “representative bureaucracy” emerges from this cooperation and

dialogue of interests.

In comparing the success of representative bureaucracy to the failure of punishment-

centered bureaucracy, Gouldner argues that the traditional Weberian approach “fails to weigh the

possibility that a bureaucracy’s effectiveness, or other of its characteristics, might vary with the

manner in which rules are initiated, whether by imposition or agreement” (p. 20). Gouldner also

rejects Weber’s description of bureaucracy as a formal structure of oppressive conformity--the

infamous “Iron Cage.” While punishment-centered bureaucracy is the form that is least attentive

to the interactions that support informal administrative legitimacy, mock and representative

bureaucracies are based on implicit and explicit agreements between workers and management,

creating a more optimistic alternative.8

By double fitting Weber’s theory with his observations of the mine, Gouldner developed

a supple, complex picture of bureaucracy. Instead of treating bureaucracy as a monolithic

organizational form with “Gibraltar-like stability,” Gouldner notes that Weber “thought of
8
This is where Gouldner hoped that bureaucracy could be tamed to serve human goals within socialism, instead of
subverting them (Stein 1982: 891-892).

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 How Institutions Form 22

bureaucracy as a Janus-faced organization. . . On the one side, it was administration based on

expertise; while on the other, it was administration based on discipline” (p. 22). Weber seemed to

recognize multiple types, if only implicitly, and Gouldner rejected the ideal typical image of

bureaucracy as a rational, efficient organizational form (an image that some of his peers had

begun to take literally).

Patterns is still relevant. Two years removed from the fiftieth anniversary of its

publication, Patterns speaks to contemporary concerns. When read with a contemporary gaze,

Patterns is a dynamic story of contextual pressures, local activity, conflict and power struggles,

and the couplings through which new institutional forms emerge.

Conclusion

How can organizational sociologists explain the emergence of new institutional forms? In

answering this question, we argue that the coupling process is central. New institutional forms

emerge as environmental pressures are coupled with everyday organizational life. This coupling

process is not seamless. It is not inevitable, and it is not a perfect reflection of broader social

“logics.” Rather, it is a dynamic local activity of fits and starts. The coupling process is not

merely one of ceremonial dressing, where the organization drapes itself in legitimate clothing

even as the underside remains unchanged. It is also a process of tangible conflict and power

struggles. If we are to understand institutional formation, we must understand these mechanisms.

This is best accomplished by a return to research within actual organizations.

To support our argument about coupling and the emergence of new institutional forms,

we return to an old study of bureaucracy. Gouldner studied bureaucracy at a time in which it was

a new institutional form. Though he embeds the gypsum mine within a particular historical

context, he focuses his analytic gaze on the actions and interactions of the mine personnel in

22
 How Institutions Form 23

relation to this context and the established indulgency pattern. His account of the different

activities and changes in the mine, the emergence of the different patterns of bureaucracy

(punishment-centered, mock, and representative), and the conflicts and couplings therein remind

us that institutions are inhabited by people and their doings. As Gouldner says succinctly:

“bureaucracy is a man-made instrument and it will be made by men in proportion to their power

in a given situation” (p. 27). This insight is too often lost in the contemporary focus on extra-

local environments and inter-organizational processes.

Finally, we suggest that rereading Patterns can help bring an end to the “family quarrel”

between old and new institutionalism (Hirsh & Lounsbury, 1997). In the caricatures of “old” and

“new,” Gouldner is categorized as old.9 However, we argue that he is better viewed as a bridge

between the two. As we have seen, Patterns can be usefully read through the lens of new

institutionalism. Gouldner’s concern with the broad diffusion of bureaucracy, the spread of

modern personnel practices, the authorizing beliefs that accompany these practices, and mock

bureaucracy as a kind of “myth and ceremony” are central to the “new” institutional project. His

astute focus on local activity, intra-organizational processes, conflict, and power resonate with

“old” institutionalism. Old and new are not incommensurate (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997). They

can, and should, be coupled.

9
In saying this, we recognize that after Patterns, Gouldner’s sociology took a decidedly Marxist turn, and he
certainly would not have thought of himself as an instutionalist. We are referring specifically to Patterns as it is seen
in organizational sociology. It is notable that Patterns actually fits into Gouldner’s developing Marxist project.
Maurice Stein, who was Gouldner’s comrade and research assistant during the study, explains “our search was for
ways in which the process of bureaucratization could be tamed before it subverted the human goals of socialism”
(Stein 1982: 891-892). For a penetrating analysis of Gouldner’s total sociological program and persona, see James
Chriss’ Alvin W. Gouldner: Sociologist and Outlaw Marxist (1999).

23
 How Institutions Form 24

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