It is primarily due to the work of Peter Berger and colleagues (Berger and
Luckmann, 1967; Berger, Berger. and Kellner, 1973) that institutionalists have
slowly begun to advance the argument that the modern conception of rationality
is itself a social and cultural construction-a collective, socially realized and
enforced agreement emphasizing the value of identifying specific ends and
developing explicit, formalized means for pursuing them. We social scientists
have been slow to recognize, as Dobbin points out "that rationalized organizational
practices are essentially cultural and are very much at the core of modern