The role of status and institutional pressure on organizatonal change: Sports as a visibility strategy of colleges and universities, 1891--1995

This dissertation examines the effect that organizational status and institutional support have on the likelihood of an organization adopting and abandoning programs and strategies. This dissertation also introduces the concept of activity status---the status of the program and strategy to be adopted or abandoned---and examines its effect.;I develop propositions that assert that high status organizations are likely to be the first to adopt and abandon activities, organizations that have institutional support are more likely to adopt and less likely to abandon, and organizations adopt high status activities and abandon low status activities. To test these propositions I examine a college's likelihood of adopting and abandoning football, basketball, ice hockey and lacrosse.;To test these propositions I use event history methods to examine 553---non-women's only, founded prior to 1906---colleges' likelihood of adopting basketball, lacrosse, and ice hockey from 1895 until 1995. I also examine their likelihood of abandoning football, lacrosse, and ice hockey. Higher education represents an appropriate place to tests these concepts as the adoption of athletics represented major decisions for college and universities at the end of the 19th century. Since then, there have been numerous debates about the relationship between higher education and athletics. Empirically, I find that high status schools are more likely to adopt basketball and lacrosse. There is no relationship between status and abandonment. Schools that have institutional support are also more likely to adopt all 3 sports and less likely to abandon them. I find mix support for the status of the activity.;This suggests new directions for the study of social movements, collective action and organizational change. The literature on collective action suggests that elite actors would be the last to join a social movement; this dissertation find high status organizations to be the pioneers in diffusion of collegiate sports. This dissertation also extends the social movement literature by suggesting another mechanism by which social movements originate and evolve. This dissertation develops novel ways to examine organizational status, institutional support, and activity status---concepts that have been difficult to operationalize.