Paul DiMaggio
Paul DiMaggio is a leading academic in the fields of culture and economic sociology.
DiMaggio has been a professor of sociology at Princeton since 1992, after a decade at Yale and graduate training at Harvard. DiMaggio's major works have been in corporate organization, and the strategic formation of "high culture". His recent research explores social inequality in the internet.
The world of corporations, DiMaggio argues, is heavily influenced by "institutional isomorphism": companies adopt business practices not because they are efficient (per se), but because they furnish legitimacy in the eyes of outside stakeholders - lenders, government regulators, and the like. The need to maintain the confidence of poorly-informed outside parties means that corporations are less creative and innovative in their business practices. The pattern can also be seen in non-profit groups and government agencies that imitate the language and styles of the corporate world in order to appear more efficient.
In his cultural studies, DiMaggio's historical research documented the self-conscious creation of "high culture" in colonial New England. Unsettled by the weak class distinctions in the colony, local elites created a "sophisticated" culture (via the arts, universites, and the like) that would separate commoners from those of high standing. Today, classical music is often broadcasted outside 7-11 convenience stores to discourage teenage loitering. DiMaggio's research shows that this type of exclusionary motive was central in the creation of American "high culture".
DiMaggio's recent research considers the cultural advent of the internet. He compares the emergence of the internet with the rise of television in the 1950s. Television was introduced to American consumers in 1948, and within ten years 90% of households had TV. In contrast, internet difusion (introduced on a large scale in 1994) seems to have stalled at 60% of American households. Underlying this is the "digital divide" - sharp inequalities in internet usage by race, income, and education level. These inequalities were not found in the adoption of TV in the 1950s, suggesting that the internet will continue to be a class-based technology.
Selected Works
The Twenty-First Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective (Editor). Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001.
The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. (With Walter W. Powell.) American Sociological Review 1983 Vol 48(2).
Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston, Part I: The creation of an organizational base for high culture in America. Media, Culture and Society. 1982. Vol 4(1).
Socially Embedded Consumer Transactions: For What Kinds of Purchases do People Use Networks Most? (With Hugh Louch.) American Sociological Review. 1998.
Information Inequality and Network Externalities: A Comparative Study of the Diffusion of Television and the Internet. (With Joseph Cohen.) The Economic Sociology of Capitalism, edited by Victor Nee and Richard Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press