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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Series Preface -- Introduction -- PART I CONTINGENCY THEORY -- 1 'Organization Design: An Information Processing View', Interfaces, 4, pp. 28-36. -- 2 'Organizational Structure, Environment and Performance: The Role of Strategic Choice', Sociology, 6, pp. 1-22. -- 3 'Alternative Forms of Fit in Contingency Theory', Administrative Science Quarterly 30, pp. 514-39. -- 4 'Organizational Structures in Japanese and U.S. Manufacturing', Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, pp. 338-64. -- PART II RESOURCE DEPENDENCE THEORY

Status has become an increasingly influential concept in the fields of organizational and economic sociology during the past two decades. Research in this area has not only helped explain behavior within and between organizations, but has also contributed to our understanding of status processes more generally. In this review, we point to the contributions of this field in terms of the determinants of status, the effects of status, and the mechanisms by which these effects are produced. We next appraise the way in which a network approach has contributed to our formal understanding of status positions and status hierarchies. We then highlight recent studies that demonstrate the value of studying the structures of status hierarchies themselves rather than focusing solely on the actors within them. After suggesting potential directions for future research, we conclude by calling for renewed efforts to translate concepts and theories across levels of analysis and substantive commitment in order to build more general theories of status processes.

For the past half-century, the study of organizations has been an active area within sociology. I provide an overview of the emergence of this specialty during the second half of the twentieth century, its relation to the larger field of organization studies, and the important theoretical advances associated with the adoption of an open system framework during the 1960s. Among the recent trends I describe are changes in our conceptions of organization boundaries, strategies, and controls, and the beginning of a shift from an entity-based to a process-based view of organization. Evidence of success—the number of sociologists now employed in professional schools—simultaneously raises concerns about the source of future organizational sociologists.