Forging the Iron Cage: Interorganizational Networks and the Production of Macro-Culture

This article examines how organizations participate in shaping the cultural environments of the nations that they inhabit. Cultural environments, we argue, emerge in a primarily unintended fashion as a consequence of routine, network interactions among organizations in four overlapping yet analytically distinct sectors: government, the mass media, educational institutions, and the business community. Differences in the structure of these national networks condition dynamic patterns of change in nations' cultural environments. In highly centric national networks, government will tend to dominate the production of cultural environments. In less centric networks, other institutional sectors play more commanding roles.