'The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields', American Sociological Review, 48, pp. 147-60.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber warned that the rationalist spirit ushered in by asceticism had achieved a momentum of its own and that, under capitalism, the rationalist order had become an iron cage in which humanity was, save for the po~sibility of prophetic revival, imprisoned "perhaps until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt" (Weber, 1952:181-82). In his essay on bureaucracy, Weber returned to this theme, contending that bureaucra.:y, the rational spirit's organizational manifestation, was so efficient and powerful a means of controlling men and women that, once established, the momentum of bureaucratization was irreversible (Weber, 1968).