The dynamics of organizational rules, Stanford University, 1891-1987

This dissertation examines systematically the dynamics of formal rules in a university organization in its one-hundred-year history. In contrast to the classical view, which sees organizational rules as efficiency driven and instrumentally oriented, this study treats the dynamics of rules as the outcome of organizational learning and institutional processes.; The research consists of two parts: the first part is a quantitative study of the rule dynamics in the framework of event history analysis. Here I explore the effects of path dependency, attention allocation and historical context on the rate of rule founding and the rate of rule change over time. The second part focuses on a detailed study of the evolution of rules in the faculty tenure area. Historical context and local events are introduced to examine the rule making, interpretation and implementation processes and their relationships with the authority structure, conflicts and compromise, and environmental changes.; I found that organizational rule making and rule change are largely in response to crises and highly sensitive to historical context. Internally, both attention allocation and path-dependency contribute significantly to the evolution of rules. Rule dynamics is triggered by organizational search for solutions to new problems and emergencies. Moreover, organizational problem-solving is a process of local search for global solutions. That is, solutions to problems and crises often take the form of adopting externally constructed symbols and rules. These findings depict the evolution of organizational rules as an adaptive process constrained by both the internal knowledge structure and the institutional environment. On the basis, organizational learning and the institutional processes have converged to produce rule dynamics at the organization level.; I propose to treat rule dynamics as a state-shifting process: Rules can be tightly coupled or loosely coupled in practice; they can serve the function of procedures or abstract principles. They shift from one state to another, depending on the interaction between the internal learning process and the external institutional constraints. In this sense, the coupling between rules and conduct, between formal structures and activities, between organizations and environments, is a varying process.