'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 \nCapitalism, Max Weber warned that the rationalist spirit ushered in by asceticism had \nachieved a momentum of its own and that, \nunder capitalism, the rationalist order had become an iron cage in which humanity was, save \nfor the po~sibility of prophetic revival, imprisoned "perhaps until the last ton of fossilized \ncoal is burnt" (Weber, 1952:181-82). In his \nessay on bureaucracy, Weber returned to this \ntheme, contending that bureaucra.:y, the rational spirit&s;s organizational manifestation, was \nso efficient and powerful a means of controlling \nmen and women that, once established, the \nmomentum of bureaucratization was irreversible (Weber, 1968).