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Role strain has many negative outcomes. While the majority of role strain research has focused on its effects, this study explored possible antecedents of role strain among staff at a large, urban Southern jail in the United States. Based on regression analysis of survey data, instrumental communication, views that policy is followed, input into decision-making, formalization, and supervisory support each had significant negative effects on role strain. Administrative support and positive relations with coworkers, however, had nonsignificant effects. Jail administrators should attempt to reduce role strain by creating clear structure of job duties and expectations (formalization), providing staff with a greater organizational voice (input into decision-making), explaining the importance of organizational policies being followed and how they benefit staff, improving the flow of critical information about job and organizational matters (instrumental communication), and training supervisors about how to provide support to their subordinates and reward them for doing so (supervisory support). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of informal economies is structured by conflict between governmental strategies of confinement, to places, times and how things are done, and the transgression of these confines by informal actors in pursuit of survival or advantage. This article examines the influential development program of formalization in the context of these conflicts. Informality can be formalized in two ways, by eradication and by regularization. Building on their past ethnographic research on informality, the authors use released confidential Hong Kong colonial government documents to explore the informal discussions among policy makers about how to respond to informal practices, and how their understanding of street vendors influences their chose of confinement strategies. While insisting on eradication for squatters, various forms of regularization were attempted for street vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research offers relatively little insight into the organizational design correlates of entrepreneurship in established firms. We argue on theoretical grounds that the same organizational designs support the realization as well as the discovery of opportunities. Specifically, decentralized structures are associated with opportunity realization as well discovery, and this effect is reinforced by formalization. Decentralization gives managers the discretion and autonomy needed to recognize and realize opportunities, while formalization enables the standardization and codification of actions and processes. To test these ideas, we use a data-set based on paired responses from 474 Danish firms operating in several industries for our analyses. We find that decentralization and formalization have direct, positive, and significant associations with opportunity realization. We also address how these organizational design variables are related to opportunity discovery. We find similar effects. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our reasoning and results, such as implications for the idea in the innovation and organizational learning literatures that optimal performance over time requires that firms either vacillate between organizational designs or adopt ambidextrous designs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China has long utilized community-based corrections for offenders. Before 2003, however, the practice lacked formalization and professionalization. Since 2003, prison overcrowding, a need for cost-effectiveness, and a move toward a more civilized method of reforming offenders have sped up China’s use of community corrections. Based on a literature review of Chinese language publications and face-to-face interviews with local community corrections leaders and officers in Hubei, China, this is an exploratory study of community corrections in mainland China. We briefly examine the practice’s developmental history and five types of sanctions—public surveillance, probation, parole, temporary execution of a sentence outside a confinement facility, and deprivation of political rights. China’s community corrections’ characteristics and implementation are investigated. Finally, the article discusses problems and challenges to China’s community corrections system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars and practitioners agree that referrals provide firms with better workers. Economists and sociologists debate whether the underlying mechanism behind such relations is a better match between workers and firms or an advantage conferred by social relations. Building on insights from network theory and cognitive psychology, we offer a new approach to the debate, arguing that network relations can also create evaluative bias. We reexamine the connection between social ties and workers’ performance using unique data on the actual productivity of sales employees and their evaluations in a large global firm. Results suggest that the preexistence of ties between an incoming employee and insiders in the firm creates an evaluative advantage—an advantage that is unrelated to workers’ concrete performance. We discuss the implications of these results for a relational approach to social stratification, organizations and work, as well as social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A great deal is known about how managers influence team empowerment, but very little is known about what organizations do to influence empowerment. Using teams drawn from 94 Chinese high-technology companies, the authors show that organizational decentralization enhances empowerment when decision making is delegated downward even when not directly delegated to teams. Prior research has presented both a positive and negative view of formalization, and this study found that the organizational level to which formalization is applied makes a difference. Formalization of organizational processes enhances team empowerment by reducing uncertainty within the firm, whereas formalization of jobs and roles moderates the effect of decentralization and reduces team empowerment by reducing teams’ flexibility in taking advantage of decentralization. These results show the importance of organization structure as an antecedent of empowerment and highlight the contrasting effects of different types of formalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the authors discuss the evolution of trust, distrust, and formal coordination and control in interorganizational relationships. They suggest that the degrees to which managers trust and distrust their partners during initial stages of cooperation leave strong imprints on the development of these relationships in later stages of collaboration. This derives from the impact of trust and distrust on (a) formal coordination and control, (b) interorganizational performance, and (c) the interpretations that managers attribute to the behavior of their partners. Collectively, the authors' arguments give rise to a conceptual framework that indicates that there is a high propensity for interorganizational relationships to develop along vicious or virtuous cycles. By integrating and reconciling previous work on the trust-control nexus and by emphasizing the dynamics associated with it, the article contributes to a more comprehensive and refined understanding of the evolution of interorganizational cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to identify some structural and cultural barriers to employees' trust in management. Multilevel analyses of data from 160,577 employees in 46 countries suggested that job formalization is negatively associated with trust in management, especially in individualistic countries, and that this relationship is mediated by less open employee-management communication. By contrast, in collectivistic countries no strong link was found between job formalization and both trust and open communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I describe in this paper some of my efforts in developing formal theories of social processes. These include work on models of occupational mobility, on models to describe the emergence of expectations out of performance evaluations, and on the graph theory formulation of the Status Characteristics theory. Not all models have been equally significant in developing theory. However, the graph theory formulation has played a central role in the growth of the Expectation States program. It has been involved in the generalization of theories, the integration of theories, and in the construction of highly sensitive tests of theories that would be impossible without the inferential capacities of formalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenneth Allan and Jonathan Turner's article, "A Formalization of Postmodern Theory," is a wonderful example of intellectual courage and honesty. They seek to subject selected theories associated with postmodernism to the rule of formal theory construction. Their article is a rare instance of scientific regard for ideas too often dismissed by those who have not the least idea what they are about. Allan and Turner, by contrast, understand their subject very well. Their method is careful and compelling. Yet, if there is such a thing as a postmodern world, it may be one unready to submit to formal analysis. The resistance of the postmodern to formal methods is discussed with specific reference to culture and the idea of the subject. Whatever one may think of their argument, Allan and Turner have set a very high standard for respectful behavior among sociologists--a standard that prevails but rarely these days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In data in standard form on seventy manufacturing organizations in three countries, consistent relationships are found between variables of organization context or `task environment' (size, dependence, technology) and measures of structure (Formalization, Specialization, Autonomy). These support the hypothesis that relationships will be stable across societies. Even though culturally shaped variations may occur in some features of organizations, contextual constraints or pressures will persist. Simply stated, if Indian organizations were found to be less formalized than American ones, bigger Indian units would still be more formalized than smaller Indian units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lack of consensus exists on the relationship between modernization and formalization in organizational recruitment. The absence of agreement is partially a product of the failure to examine recruitment as a dual process of information dispersion and selection. After empirically examining recruitment as a two-stage process in Detroit and Yokohama, it was found that the discrepant findings are in part a result of different temporal focus in the recruitment process by researchers. The article points to the necessity of studying the entire recruitment process and the need to isolate the contingencies that shape the character of employee acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's comments to the article, The Niche Hiker's Guide to Population Ecology: A Logical Reconstruction of Organization Ecology's Niche Theory, by Gábor Péli. Theory formalization, once positioned at center stage in sociology, currently plays little role in general sociological work. For about a decade beginning in the mid-1960s, the promise was held out that formalization--especially mathematization--would improve the quality of sociological theorizing and promote the development of cumulative theoretical knowledge about general social processes. Today, formalization lies on the discipline's periphery, as a specialized activity remote from the development and evaluation of sociological theories. This marginalization and devaluation of formalization partly reflects sociology's retreat from general formulations. But it also surely reflects an assessment that the payoff to the style of formalization prominent during the heyday of this movement had not met expectations. This is not the place to attempt a full assessment of what went wrong in sociology's fiirtation with formalization. But one thing seems clear: there was a mismatch between theories and formalization tools. The available natural-language theories were--and are--partial and imprecise; use of the formal languages, especially mathematics, demanded closure and extreme precision.

Logical formalization is a formal method for the analysis of theoretical arguments in the social sciences. Hannan and Freeman's organizational niche theory (1989) is rebuilt by means of First-Order Logic, and its predictions are derived as theorems. Translation into a formal language makes the theory's inference structure transparent and accessible to discussion, repair, and development. The consistency of the model can be checked by computational means. The logical approach helps to specify niche theory's domain: it points out hidden assumptions, highlights spots where the reasoning has to be modified, and provides solid foundations for further theory building. Moreover, the established premise set also allows for the deduction of some new results. Logical formalization supports empirical research by delineating constraints on and explicit relations between sociological concepts, facilitating their appropriate operationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of the functions of sex-role ascription is based upon the assumption that many societies are organized around the conjugal family as the bask economic unit and that that are skills which each family must possess to be "successful" Formalization of the analysis concludes that when most families consist of male-female pain (with or without children), when mating is voluntary, when the number of skills needed for successful family maintenance is large and when most people are capable of acquiring the skill, the utility of ascription is maximal. However, when there is some scarcity of Inherent aptitude and when societies are capable of identifying those individuals with aptitude, the functionality of ascription diminishes, and ascription eventually becomes dysfunctional. It Is argued that the tatter set of conditions are precisely those which tend to characterize modem industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the growth of systematic-formal theories and quantitative methods for empirical research, or the formalization of theory and method. Trends in the formalization of theory and method as of January 1981; Growth of research programs; Opposition to formal theorizing and quantitative methodology.

This article presents a research on the determinant of organizational structure. The development of new theories of the causes or consequences of internal networks as an aspect of organizational structure is to test predictions from existing theories of organizational structure. The framework that guides this inquiry is the familiar contingency theory perspective on structure as determined by certain exogenous organizational and environmental states. A now-voluminous body of research literature based on a variety of measurement strategies and organizational populations testifies to the effects of variables like size, age, function, and uncertainty or variability in organizational technologies and task environments. This approach builds on work suggesting that internal networks constitute yet another stage in the structuring of organizations. Like the much-researched structural properties of centralization, formalization, and differentiation which were the objects of past empirical studies of structure, there are strong grounds for presuming that internal networks vary in response to the contingencies of size, technology, and environment.

The article examines the relationship between performance, decision-making processes, and emergent organizational structure. The literature on strategic decision making focus on the process from many perspectives; however, the basis for the examination appears to come from, in most cases, the search and choice process undertaken as a result of some kind of dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs. One of the more parsimonious characterizations of the decision-making context was developed by scholars J.D. Thompson and A. Tuden who defined the context in terms of the degree of agreement on goals and means, giving rise to four basic strategies or methods of decision making: computation, majority judgment, compromise, and inspiration. They argued that the most "dangerous" situation is where there is a lack of agreement on both goals and means or the one calling for the "inspired" decision. The inspired decision can be found in conditions of perceived anomy, or normlessness. Inspired decisions generally try to create order out of chaos by deciding on a new, usually computational process for decision making. The different effects that environmental uncertainty and dynamism have on organizational formalization was of great interest in this study. Since formalization refers to rules, policies, and other constraints upon the process, this stress would condition the way an organization adapts and develops the behaviors used in the decision-making process.

A formal model is developed facilitating (1) an integration of theories dealing with organization-environment interaction, and (2) an explanation of how an organization's boundaries become increasingly permeated by the environment. It is argued that rates of change per se represent the principal impetus in promoting adaptive exchanges between an organization and its environment, both for long-term (evolutionary) and short term (mutational) changes In the environment. The model reveals that a key variable in organization-environment interdependencies is the ratio of legitimate demands placed upon the organization by the environment to either the capacity or minimum performance levels of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an understanding of the procedures and processes whereby new organizations emerge during periods of collective stress. The research on emergent organizations indicates that they arise during periods of collective stress, serve as transitory social systems providing neglected community inputs and, then, dissolve after the troublesome period has passed. The relative success in meeting increased demands and the degree of formalization achieved by a new organization both seem to be contingent upon the length of the time-lag between the emergence of the organization and the initial response of existing organizations. In addition, the efforts of a new organization are likely to be more poorly coordinated and less effective than those of the already existing organizations. Thus, if the goals of the new and existing organizations are the same, and the existing organizations are better equipped to achieve the goals, existing organizations should be expected to absorb the personnel of emergent organizations, leaving the new organization without a base. With a prolonged impact, however, existing organizations shift to survival maintenance, providing an opportunity for new organizations to gain footing and formalize.

This article discusses the mathematical formalization of Durkheim's theory of division of labor. An illustration of the interplay of the dual processes of theoretical specification and parameter estimation, was provided. It was said that Durkheim's analysis of the division of labor begins with a distinction between two forms of social organization, mechanical and organic. According to Durkheim, the first type describes the relatively undifferentiated mode of social organization found in small isolated populations which have achieved little control over their environment. The basis of solidarity in this type of society is likeness or similarity. Durkheim observed that modern Western societies were increasingly characterized by differentiation of social activities, and the concept of the organic type of social organization was designed to refer to the structural characteristics of such societies.

The term "formalization," as used in this paper, means the observance of a conventional set of rules in order to make explicit the logic of scientific proof. If a science is presented in this way, it is said to be "formalized," otherwise it is "unformalized." The advantage of formalization is that it makes it easier to judge the quality of proofs offered. An incident from the life of political thinker Thomas Hobbes illustrates this. One day in a gentleman's library the philosopher noticed a copy of Euclid's Elements lying open at a certain theorem. Reading it, he exclaimed with an oath, "This is impossible!" but his curiosity led him to read the proof which referred him back to other propositions and these, to others again. He continued until he saw clearly the whole logical ground for the proposition that had originally attracted his attention and he had to admit that the demonstration was sound. The incident had a profound effect on the thought of Hobbes. For present purposes the point of the story is that formalized demonstrations can convince even a skeptical reader because their logical ground is displayed systematically and explicitly.

Formalization of activities in rural churches is explained as a consequence of (1) the normative organization set to which the church is oriented, and (2) the resources available to implement normative models. Data front a study of 505 rural churches in Missouri are reported. Formalization is indicated by the presence of a variety of educational programs and organizations. Organization set membership is based on church-sect identification. Membership size indicates resources. Church-groups are found to be more formalized than sect-groups and more responsive to size increments in the implementation of a formalized model. Sect-groups are more likely than church-groups to maintain a number of worship and evangelistic services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a hypothesis on the growth of bureaucracy. The author states that the bureaucratic tendencies are not only presents in political institutions but also in all social institutions including business corporations, industry, churches and other institutions. The history of voluntary organizations of American culture depicts the beginning of the process of formalization. A chairman is selected after some conferences for considering some problem and then the problem is broken down to elements and various committees are appointed to solve it. All these tendencies point-out to the formalization of the organization.