Organizational decision-making and the emergence of academic disciplines

Sociologists have developed environmental and structural approaches to the analysis of an organization's structure and behavior. Environmentalist theories, such as neoinstitutionalism and population ecology, focus on organizational environments as motivations for bureaucratic behavior, while structuralist theories focus on the internal features of an organization. I present three empirical studies testing environmentalist and structuralist hypotheses about organizational change in the university.; The first study tests the hypothesis that protest has a significant effect on the creation of Black Studies programs. I test the neoinstitutionalist mimicry hypothesis, which asserts that organizations copy each other. Internal university structures such as size, resources, and student demography might prevent change. Protest and prior program foundings have positive effects on Black Studies program creation. Size is found to have significant positive effects and the proportion of students who are black has an negative curvilinear effect.; The second chapter examines the philanthropic sponsorship of organizational change in the university. I assess this hypothesis through a case study of the Ford Foundation's sponsorship of Black Studies programs in the 1970s. Evidence suggests that most sponsored programs retained an integrationist orientation. However, some programs adopted nationalist approaches to Black Studies, indicating the influence of criticisms of the Civil Rights project and the articulation of an alternative agenda for black higher education.; The final chapter tests ecological hypotheses about the growth of computer science programs. Population ecologists hypothesize that available resources—“niche size”—and competition over resources—“resource partition”—affect market entry. I test ecological hypotheses with data on intended college major and the creation of computer science programs in universities. I find that the proportion of high school students intending to major in computer science has a significant positive effect on computer science program creation. I also find that the number of universities occupying the niche has a negative effect. Size has significant positive effects. The proportion of students majoring in either engineering or physical sciences also has a positive effect. These results hold when controlling for niche width and density, suggesting that internal structure and economic competition both contribute to the growth of computer science programs.