The Social Invention of Collective Actors: On the Rise of the Organization

Since the middle of the 19th century, the formal organization has been constructed as a legitimate collective actor in and of itself. How did it rise to sit alongside the nation-state as one of the principal forms of collective action in modern society? The authors argue that the scientific epistemology of the Enlightenment provided a model in which the social world, like the natural world, was to be understood through the classification of forms and the enumeration of particular instantiations. Individuals deliberately created the modern organization by asserting a universal form through the symbolization of isomorphism and by enumerating individual identities through the symbolization of cultural identity. Neoinstitutional theory documents the first process, whereas organizational theory documents the second. The authors argue that these two theories highlight different aspects of a single process: the social invention of the organization as collective actor.