Comparing Rule Histories in the U.S. and in Germany: Searching for General Principles of Organizational Rules

In this paper we explore processes which affect revisions and suspensions of organizational rules. Prior research has explored organizational rules in the context of American universities and established a number of hypotheses about rule change. We continue this line of research by testing the main hypotheses of this research program in a rather different context, personnel rules of a German bank. In order to compare processes of rule change across the two contexts, we formulate and test identical models in the two contexts. Our results indicate that revisions and suspensions of organizational rules follow quite similar patterns in both contexts. We submit that these similarities support the idea that organizational rules follow inherent, general principles which apply across cultural, geographical, and organizational differences.