ABSTRACT
Amitai Etzioni, the author of compliance theory, was primarily a theorist, although he did make occasional research contributions. Compliance theory itself is in large part a dictionary of terms and variables for the study of organizations. That Etzioni defined his terms but did not operationalize them, and thus failed to contribute in the area of measurement, represents a major shortening of his approach. He tended to rely on others in this regard and was only partially successful in adopting this procedure; thus in many respects the theory remains untested. The basic presentation of compliance theory occurs in Etzioni (1961), with a second edition in 1975 that includes the studies operationalized by others and proposed by Etzioni as tests of that theory. A second version of the second edition is Gross and Etzioni (1985), which does not add much to the research pool as a function of the intervening ten years. Thus the limited research on compliance theory extends only over a rather short period, tapered off over time as Etzioni moved to other endeavors, and often consists of qualitative case studies that do not qualify as true tests of the theory.
