This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal education through both coercive and seductive means. This approach advances organizational theory by highlighting conditions that affect the prevalence and effectiveness of buffering. Decoupling is not determined solely by the external enforcement of institutional pressures or the capacity of organizational actors to buffer or hide some activities. Members' tendency to internalize these pressures, to become self-disciplining, is also salient. Internalization is fostered by the anxiety that rankings produce, by their allure for the administrators who try to manipulate them, and by the resistance they provoke. Rankings are just one example of the public measures of performance that are becoming increasingly influential in many institutional environments, and understanding how organizations respond to these measures is a crucial task for scholars.

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.

Drawing on a 15-month ethnographic study of a drug court, we investigate how actors from different institutional and professional backgrounds employ logical frameworks in their micro-level interactions and thus how logics affect day-to-day organizational activity. While institutional theory presumes that professionals closely adhere to the logics of their professional groups, we find that actors exercise a great deal of agency in their everyday use of logics, both in terms of which logics they adopt and for what purpose. Available logics closely resemble tools that can be creatively employed by actors to achieve individual and organizational goals. A close analysis of court negotiations allowed us to identify the logics that are available to these actors, show how they are employed, and demonstrate how their use affects the severity of the court’s decisions. We examine the ways in which professionals with four distinct logical orientations—the logics of criminal punishment, rehabilitation, community accountability, and efficiency—use logics to negotiate decisions in a drug court. We provide evidence of the discretionary use of these logics, specifying the procedural, definitional, and dispositional constraints that limit actors’ discretion and propose an explanation for why professionals stray from their “home” logics and “hijack” the logics of other court actors. Examining these micro-level processes improves our understanding of how local actors use logics to manage institutional complexity, reach consensus, and get the work of the court done.

This article analyzes a process by which established organizational fields change through the incorporation of new field-level actors. Drawing on 137 in-depth interviews with U.S. law school administrators and faculty, the paper demonstrates how the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools gained a foothold in the field of legal education, how the dynamics of the field helped entrench the field position of USN and its rankings despite spirited opposition from key actors, and how these same dynamics explain how a seemingly minor change—the addition of a single actor to the roster of existing field actors—transformed many aspects of this field. A close examination of this new model of field change enhances field theory by underscoring how field characteristics, such as the interconnections among actors and the web of mutual influence that these imply, themselves can facilitate change. Substantively, this research provides insight into the way that those who measure, credential, or certify key field actors and activities can achieve pervasive influence over the fields they evaluate.

In recent years, there has been a tremendous proliferation of quantitative evaluative social measures in the field of law as well as society generally. One of these measures, the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools, has become an almost obsessive concern of the law school community, generating a great deal of speculation about the effects of these rankings on legal education. However, there has been no attempt to systematically ascertain what, if any, effects these rankings have on the decisionmaking of students and schools in the admission process. This article documents some of these effects by conceptualizing rankings as a signal of law school quality, investigating (1) whether students and schools use this signal to make decisions about where to apply and whom to admit, and (2) whether the creation of this signal distorts the phenomenon—law school quality—that it purports to measure. Using data for U.S. law schools from 1996 to 2003, we find that schools' rankings have significant effects on both the decisions of prospective students and the decisions schools make in the admissions process. In addition, we present evidence that the rankings can become a self‐fulfilling prophecy for some schools, as the effects of rank described above alter the profile of their student bodies, affecting their future rank. Cumulatively, these findings suggest that the rankings help create rather than simply reflect differences among law schools through the magnification of the small, and statistically random, distinctions produced by the measurement apparatus.

For organizations, as for individuals, status position governs access to a variety of valued rewards. To uncover the causes of status position, recent research has focused on the relationship between the attributes of individual organizations and their standing in a status hierarchy. Although this research has made valuable contributions to our understanding of both the consequences of status to organizations and the determinants of status, its emphasis on organizational attributes has not addressed how the characteristics of status systems shape the nature and distribution of these positions. Drawing on data from 134 in-depth interviews with law school administrators and faculty, this article investigates how variations in the characteristics of status systems influence status processes. Concentrating on the theoretically underdeveloped role that third parties play in status systems, I examine how a third party change -the emergence and increasing popularity of the U.S. News and World Report's law school rankings -has had powerful effects on the shape of the status hierarchy of legal education as well as the values that underlie this hierarchy. These changes have, in turn, transformed the landscape of positions that are available to actors, the process by which these positions are allocated among various actors, and the bases upon which this allocation is carried out.The effect of status position on social actors has been a long-standing and wide-ranging subject of sociological inquiry. With a lineage that dates back at least to the classic works of Veblen and Weber, the consequences of status have been carefully detailed across a spectrum of levels of analysis, stretching from individual interactions in small task groups to cross-national comparisons of occupational status attainment and mobility.One's standing in a status hierarchy, as organizational scholars have amply demonstrated during the last decade, is consequential for organizational as well as individual actors, and the outcomes associated with an organization's status position have been shown to be varied and far-reaching. High status not only provides a competitive advantage for firms as it signals the quality of the firm's products (Fombrun, 1996;Fombrun & Shanley, 1990) and thus "lowers the cost of producing and selling a good of a given quality" (Podolny, Theor Soc (2006) 35: 299-321

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This article proposes an interactionist framework for the study of status stratification. This framework returns the focus of status research to how status works, especially emphasizing the symbolic and contextual aspects integral to the concept. By closely examining how status is indicated, how it is employed, and how it is maintained or changed over time, an interactionist approach provides an explanation on how status affects both individual and organizational behavior-an explanation that is currently lacking in status research. In addition, the development of this framework provides an argument against critics of interactionism who question whether this perspective can contribute to the study of social stratification. This article makes evident that status stratification, with its intimate ties to the symbols and contexts, proves to be an area of study ideally suited to the interactionist perspective.