Both of these books are concerned with how global social movements are refracted through national cultural and legal systems. Both find that new norms spread across countries, in this case originating in the United States and then spreading through feminists to Europe. But both find diffusion...

The Economic Sociology of Capitalism might have been titled The Sociology of Economic Institutions. The chapters, presented at Cornell in September 2001, catalog current thinking about how institutions lead to regularities in economic behavior. They define institutions variously as cognitive...

Thirty years ago, new institutional theory challenged the then dominant functionalist explanations of organizational behavior by pointing to the role of meaning in the production and reproduction of organizational practices (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Meyer & Scott, 1983). But new institutional theory was...

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to analyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades. This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior...

Has federal antidiscrimination law been effective in moving women and minorities into management? Early studies show that government affirmative action reviews improved the numbers, and rank, of blacks, but evidence of what has happened since 1980 is sparse. There is little evidence that civil...