Decades of ASQ Covers (in One Fun Video), plus Howard Aldrich on What Theoretical Contribution Is Not

Discover a cautionary tale on theorizing, watch our timelapse video of past covers, and submit your own image for a future issue!

Many Decades of ASQ Covers in 2 Minutes

Music by Max from Pixabay.

Submit Your Photos for ASQ’s Next Cover!

As part of our anniversary celebrations, we created a time-lapse video featuring all the past covers. ASQ covers have a rich history, showcasing the thoughtful work of past editors. Initially, the editors collaborated with museums and artists to feature thought-provoking artwork—sometimes commissioning pieces with an organizational focus. Later, the focus shifted to photography from around the world, often contributed by ASQ authors, editors, and their friends and family.

Today, cover images are selected from a small group of contributors, including artist Sreedhari Desai, whose stunning oil paintings appear annually. We’d like to take this opportunity to invite our community to participate. If you or someone you know has photos to share, we’d love to hear from you!

How to Participate: Send a high-resolution photo you’ve taken to jfriedman@cornell.edu. We’ll accept submissions throughout April. Then, in our May newsletter, we’ll share a selection of images for the community to vote on. The winning photos will grace the cover of a future issue!

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How Talcott Parsons Failed His ASQ Audition:
A Cautionary Tale of What a Theoretical Contribution is Not

By Howard E. Aldrich

Parsons was a leading figure in social science when he published in the inaugural issue of Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), yet Howard Aldrich’s analysis reveals that his ideas failed to resonate with ASQ’s audience and the broader fields of organization studies and management. His story serves as a cautionary tale of how even the most luminous contributions can be consigned to history’s archives when they fail to engage their intended audience.

Who now reads Parsons? It turns out, almost no one—at least not in the pages of Administrative Science Quarterly. This was my first surprise when I set out to examine Talcott Parsons’ legacy in organizational studies. The man who dominated mid-20th century sociology and wrote two articles in the very first volume of ASQ has been cited in its pages only 35 times in seven decades. More striking still, those few citations are mostly superficial, referencing Parsons’ work as an afterthought rather than engaging with it seriously. How did this happen? My investigation led me to an unexpected answer: Parsons failed his audience. His highly abstract, insular theorizing—focused on grand systems rather than the messy realities of organizations—left little room for empirical research or theoretical engagement. In addition, he failed to engage with work of his contemporaries in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Selznick, Blau, Gouldner, and Merton. By the time new institutional theory emerged decades later, it had subtly rejected Parsons’ assumptions while appearing, superficially, to echo them. In this essay, I unravel the paradox of Parsons’ fleeting influence in organizational studies and explore what his failure tells us about how theories gain—or fail to gain—traction.

The Historical Context

In the opening sentence of his 1937 book, The Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons (Parsons, 1937) quoted Brinton (Brinton, 1933): "Who now reads Spencer?” and added a footnote: “Not, of course, that nothing in his thought will last. It is his social theory as a total structure that is dead.” But today, the joke is on Parsons. As we were already saying at the University of Michigan when I entered graduate school back in 1965, “Who now reads Parsons?” Although Parsons earned pride of place in two issues of the inaugural volume of Administrative Science Quarterly, those two papers have only been cited 35 times in the pages of ASQ in the years since they were published. Indeed, they were cited only 5 times in the past 25 years. His lack of influence within ASQ surprised me, given his prominence in the social sciences in the mid-1950s, and thus I set out to see if I could understand it.

I begin with two observations. First, there were only 11 articles in the first two issues of ASQ, and Parsons authored two of them. James Thompson, the editor, and Edward Litchfield, the Dean of the Cornell business school, also authored papers in the first issue. I’m not sure what Thompson and Litchfield intended to accomplish by inviting Parsons to write two essays. They may have felt that his prestige would attract more readers to the first issue, especially from sociologists. However, I noticed that in his two-page editorial essay introducing the first issue, Thompson made no reference to Parsons’ papers, mentioning only the first and last papers in the issue. I suspect that Parsons’ work didn’t fit the empirical direction Thompson wanted ASQ to take.

Second, the abstract to Parsons’ first paper defined organizations as social systems oriented toward specific goals that contribute to a major function of a more comprehensive system: “such an organization is analyzed in terms of an institutionalized value system, above all defining and legitimating its goal, and of the mechanisms by which it is articulated with the rest of the society in which it operates.” Initially, I thought this could be interpreted as foreshadowing the foundational principles of what became the neoinstitutional theory of organizations. Parsons described his approach as a cultural-institutional view and emphasized that organizations must find legitimacy through their connection to the larger society.

Thus, the unusual amount of space allocated to Parsons’ work suggested to me that the editorial team might have thought he was onto something, and Parsons’ terminology of “institutional” and legitimacy” suggested that his work might have been an overlooked gem in the history of neoinstitutional theory. However, as I investigated the extent to which his work was cited and how it was used in the pages of ASQ, my initial surprise vanished. Instead, I concluded that Parsons was done in by his lack of engagement with the organizational scholarship of his day, his closed conceptual system, and his failure to generate any insights that could be followed up by empirical research.

What Parsons Proposed

To fully appreciate my argument, I recommend you read both of Parsons’ papers. Given the complexity of his scheme, I cannot do it justice within the space constraints of this blog. Here, I will just summarize the papers’ contents. Part I laid out Parsons’ theory, based on his AGIL framework and four pairs of pattern variables, each representing a fundamental characteristic of all human systems. The AGIL scheme is a model that outlines four fundamental functions any social system must fulfill to maintain stability and achieve its goals: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency. The pattern variables are a set of dichotomies that describe the choices individuals face in social interactions. Part I has sections on the concept of organizations, the structure of organizations, the mobilization of resources, the mechanisms of implementation (policy decisions, allocative decisions, coordination decisions), and institutional factors in the structure of organizations (which concerns the factors that ensure compatibility of organizational actions across the great variety of organizations in a social system).

Part II is devoted to his classification of types of organizations and some illustrative cases. His three cases are “the business firm,” “the military,” and “the university.” These examples serve as a definitional and classificatory exercise. Parsons used his AGIL scheme from The Social System (Parsons, 1951) as his framework because it is a “general classification of the functional imperatives of social systems…” and when we understand those imperatives, we can “identify the principal mechanisms necessary to bring about the attainment of the goal or the organization purpose” (Parsons, 1956b: 238). Parsons claimed that the AGIL scheme works at the levels of total societies, small groups, and at an intermediate level in between.

Parsons clearly treated the invitation as an opportunity to explain his structural-functional approach to the scholars studying organizations and management, rather than a way to show how his work fit into the overall field of management and administrative science. Part I contained only 10 footnotes and citations to just five works that were written by other authors. Part II contained only three footnotes and five citations, with three citing his own publications and two citing Harvard colleagues.

Research Design

To assess Parsons’ influence on articles in ASQ, I followed the lead of contemporary bibliometrics and used citations to his two 1956 papers by subsequent authors as an indicator of scholarly influence (Teixeira, 2011). I used an online search tool to find all articles citing Parsons that were published from the inception of ASQ in 1956 through issues published in 2024. I distinguished two groups of citations in my coding. First, I located all the papers that cited either of the two essays published in volume 1 in 1956. In addition to the author, title, and publication information, I also searched for and took detailed notes on the text surrounding the material in which the citation occurred. Fortunately, most authors who cited Parsons did so briefly, rather than in multiple places and extended discussions. Second, I located all the papers published between 1956 and 2024 that cited other books and articles written by Parsons.

Findings

Figure 1 displays, by decades, the number of papers published in ASQ that cited Parsons’ 1956 ASQ papers and the number of papers that cited other works by Parsons during the same period. The figure is based on the number of papers citing Parsons, rather than on the number of citations in each paper, because I was interested in authors’ awareness of Parsons’ 1956 papers, not in the total citations Parsons received. Between 1956 and 2024, 128 papers cited something published by Parsons. Most of the citations were not to the 1956 articles. Only 35 papers cited the two Parsons ASQ papers and 101 cited other works by Parsons. Only 8 papers cited both the 1956 papers and something else by Parsons and no author did that after 1997. (For a point of comparison, ASQ published 1,772 articles between 1956 and 2024.)

Viewed in terms of citations, since 1956, in 128 papers, ASQ authors have cited Parsons’ work 161 times, with 65 of those citations to work published before 1956, 35 to the two ASQ papers published in 1956 and 61 to his other publications in 1956 and afterward. Apart from The Social System (Parsons, 1951), which received 29 citations, and Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Parsons, 1960), which received 17 citations, no other publications from Parsons received more than 7 citations.

Few authors publishing in ASQ took any notice of Parsons’ efforts to attract organizational scholars to his cultural–structural approach. Even the authors who were aware of Parsons’ other work mostly ignored the two 1956 papers. Raw citation data, however, don’t give us a sense of the extent to which those who did cite his 1956 papers might have spotted something that others had missed. It is possible those who used his work recognized its implications for the developments in new institutional theory that only became fully apparent two decades later. Assessing this speculation requires us to go beyond the raw citation data and closely examine the text. Accordingly, I examined the context of the citations to Parsons’ 1956 papers and looked for hints that the citing authors were engaging with Parsons’ potentially proto-institutional ideas.

A closer look at how Parsons was used

A review of the 35 papers that cited Parsons' 1956 ASQ articles reveals a pattern of limited engagement with his core ideas. Most citations are "honorific" or "legacy" citations, offering generic support to a declarative statement rather than substantive engagement with Parsons' cultural-institutional theory. I identified five ways in which Parsons' work was referenced: (1) in support of a general definition of organizations; (2) acknowledging his argument for multiple levels of analysis; (3) citing him as an example of “social systems” analysis; (4) a generic argument that organizational contexts are important; and (5) an assertion that organizations derive their legitimacy from the larger institutional context in which they are embedded.

First, many authors cited Parsons (1956) merely to support the basic idea that organizations are defined by their focus on goals. They engaged only superficially with Parsons' work, as this concept could have been attributed to many other organizational theorists. For example, Levine & White (1961: 588) cited Parsons to make a generic point about organizations being defined by their focus on goals: “Parsons, for example, has defined an organization as a ‘special type of social system organized about the primacy of interest in the attainment of a particular type of system goal.’” This is the only reference to Parsons in their article.

Second, some authors referenced Parsons' distinction between technical, managerial, and institutional levels of responsibility. This distinction was substantially expanded and clarified in Parsons (1960) and is the reference usually cited in the organizations literature when people reference Parsons’ three-level scheme. However, in ASQ, authors often used these references as a starting point for critiques, arguing that Parsons' framework did not go far enough in differentiating levels of analysis. For example, Terreberry (1968) cited Parsons at two points in her paper, with the first showing that her definition of organizations could be derived from Parsons’ and the second pointing out that he had made distinctions across three levels of organizational analysis. Beyond these two limited points, she made no other use of Parsons in her paper. Third, Parsons' work was occasionally cited as an example of a social systems perspective on organizations. However, authors often failed to elaborate on or meaningfully integrate Parsons' specific ideas. For example, Kaplan (1968) cited Parsons as an example of the social systemic perspective on organizations, but made no other use of Parsons’ ideas.

Fourth, some authors acknowledged Parsons' recognition of the importance of organizational context. However, they often argued that he overemphasized a single dimension of context, such as social function or charter (Holdaway et al., 1975). For example, Ranson, Hinings, and Greenwood (1980) mentioned Parsons in passing as recognizing the concept of "institutionalized environments," alongside Hirsch (1975). However, they did not engage with Parsons' work beyond this initial acknowledgment. Fifth, Parsons was mentioned as a scholar who used the concept of "legitimacy." However, these mentions were typically brief and did not delve into Parsons' broader theoretical framework. For example, Geletkanycz and Hambrick (1997: 676) briefly mentioned Parsons as a scholar who used the concept of legitimacy: “Scholars have long argued that legitimacy is an important organizational resource (Parsons, 1956a; Perrow, 1970), helping to sustain the firm's operations by engendering the support and endorsement of key external constituencies.” In the rest of their essay, Geletkanycz and Hambrick made no mention of Parsons.

In the thicket of cursory treatments of Parsons’ ideas, a few exceptions stand out for the way they engaged more substantively with him. For example, in his foundational paper on organizational effectiveness and institutional environments, Hirsch (1975) explicitly credited Parsons as the originator of the concept of organizations having "institutional environments," offering a clear endorsement of Parsons' contribution to this area. Note, however, that Parsons used only the terms “institutional patterns” and “institutional structures” in his papers, and the word “environment” appears only three times in the two papers. Beyond that positive mention in the second sentence of the paper, Hirsch ignored Parsons’ work in the rest of his paper. Pfeffer (1973) included Parsons (1956a) as one of five scholars in a citation in which he singled out Selznick’s work but made no further mention of Parsons in his paper.

Stern and Barley (1996) provided a more extensive analysis of Parsons' work, crediting him with calling attention to the role of organizations in the larger sociocultural system. They acknowledged Parsons' emphasis on the compatibility of institutional patterns and the integration of organizations within society. Their extensive discussion of Parsons’ contributions to thinking about organizations as embedded in an institutional context, made in historical hindsight, stands in marked contrast to the other 34 papers that cited Parsons.

Overall, my analysis of the ways in which authors used his work suggests that Parsons' 1956 ASQ papers had limited direct influence on subsequent research published in the journal. While his work was occasionally acknowledged, it was often used for generic support or as a point of departure for criticism. Thus, it was selectively useful but unintegrated into mainstream organizational studies. The lack of deep engagement with Parsons' ideas may help explain why his ASQ publications never became foundational texts in the field of organizational studies. Paul Hirsch, in commenting on my early draft of this paper, reminded me that the early manifestos of what became neo-institutional theory ignored Parsons’ characterization of the institutional level as a context in which rules and norms come about, seeing instead the currency of legitimacy as a mythology which could be manipulated by organizations seeking legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan, 1977).

Why was Parsons so seldom used?

Given Parsons’ privileged position as an author of two papers in the first volume of ASQ, why was he so seldom cited and, even when cited, treated as a convenient legacy source to support generic statements? I suggest two possibilities: (1) his insular approach; and (2) his advocacy of a sociological theory that had gone out of fashion by the late 1960s.

First, as Cheng et al. (2023: 522) noted in their paper on the conditions enabling novel intellectual contributions to diffuse and become integrated into later scientific work, “an idea is likely to diffuse … when it is deeply integrated into extant research traditions, and when it achieves coherence through consistent conceptual linkages to the established body of knowledge.” Parsons made little attempt to situate himself within the community of scholars studying organizations in the 1940s and 50s. I have noted that there were only seven citations in his two papers to the work of other scholars, and two of them were to his colleagues at Harvard.

More distressing, however, was his apparent lack of awareness concerning the work of sociologists such as Peter Blau, Alvin Gouldner, Philip Selznick, Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert Merton, and William Foote Whyte. Gouldner’s two books—Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Gouldner, 1954a) and Wildcat Strike (Gouldner, 1954b)—were in-depth ethnographic reports of bureaucratic organization and resistance to it, phenomena very relevant to Parsons’ discussion of intraorganizational dynamics. Two of Selznick’s books, TVA and the Grassroots (Selznick, 1949) and The Organizational Weapon (Selznick, 1952), were landmarks in the development of the notion of organizations engaged in struggle, conflict, and co-optation with their environments, and Pfeffer (1973) made a point of singling out Selznick as a scholar who emphasized organizations coming to terms with their environments. Parsons also ignored Selznick’s (1948) essay in the American Sociological Review, “Foundations of the Theory of Organization,” an article that should’ve been a key touchstone for his analysis.

Graduates from Columbia, such as Lipset and Blau, were making important contributions to organizational analysis in the 1950s with books such as Union Democracy (Lipset, Trow, and Coleman, 1956) and The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (Blau, 1955). Blau was a student of Robert Merton at Columbia University, who in turn had studied with Parsons at Harvard, and so there was an opportunity for Parsons to become informed about their work. Finally, William Foote Whyte, who earned his PhD at Harvard, wrote about human relations in various industries in the 1940s and 50s, including a perceptive analysis of the organizational structure of restaurants (Whyte, 1948). Parsons was either unaware of these publications or chose to ignore them. Whatever the reason, he missed an excellent opportunity to acknowledge and incorporate the work of highly relevant and creative organizational scholars.

Second, although Parsons was a vigorous proponent and proselytizer of his approach, he was undone by a turn toward more materialist and conflict-oriented approaches in sociology in the 1960s. Blau (1996: 172) summed up Parsons’ fading reputation among organizational sociologists with her comment, “Parsons' structural-functionalism is a world view that did not stand the test of time…[I think it is because of] Parsons' assumptions about the overly taut integration of the systems' components (personality, social, and cultural), his Western-centric view of values, and a teleological account of social change.” Although Parsons was still taught in graduate Departments of Sociology in the 1960s, his work was offered as being of historical interest and as a cautionary tale for us to avoid.

Conclusion

I began this project with the thought that Parsons might have been a pioneer who belongs in the group that foreshadowed new institutional theory in organizational scholarship. He wrote about “institutions” and “values” and took a very sociological approach. However, Parsons took some positions that new institutional theories rejected from the very beginning of their emergence, such as organizations being structured for efficiency and effectiveness, and organizations faithfully reflecting societal values. For example, Tolbert responded to an initial draft of this paper by pointing out that Meyer and Rowan (1977) offered a critique of that work by noting that “these elements were often adopted, not to solve problems of coordination and control, but to send signals to the environment (consumers, suppliers, etc.) that the organization could be relied upon, was legitimate.” As David, Tolbert, and Boghossian (2019: 12) noted, “the relative neglect of the influence of social norms and interpretations in organizational analyses from the late 1950s onward (when organizational studies began to evolve as a distinctive area of social sciences) helps to account for the receptivity of researchers to institutional theory in the late 1970s, and for its continued popularity today as an alternative to more materialist approaches.”

My analysis has shown that from the very beginning, the organizations studies community mostly ignored Parsons’ two essays in ASQ. In the first decade after their publication, only four authors in ASQ cited the two papers. Although there was a moderate burst of interest in the next several decades, Parsons mostly served as a convenient reference for ASQ authors on which to hang commonplace observations about organizations and their environments. His social systemic cultural/institutional approach was simply ignored. In the process, the organizational studies scholarly community lost sight of the nugget of insight that Parsons offered concerning the institutional embeddedness of organizational actions. However, that promising point was overshadowed by major problems with his work, such as his failure to recognize Selznick’s contributions to institutional analysis.

Parsons’ insularity and lack of interest in engaging the organization studies community meant that he had little chance of recruiting research active scholars to help spread his perspective. Instead, after the very chaotic decade of the 1960s, when there was no clear theoretical consensus, new approaches emerged out of sociology in the 1970s that highlighted the role of power, conflict and competition, institutional legitimacy, and sense-making, along with a host of related theories. Parsons’ lack of influence stands as a cautionary tale for contemporary scholars and highlights the importance of building on and creating space for others in one's theorizing. Parsons had his moment in the sun, but his inability to engage with his ASQ audience relegated his legacy to the shadows of organizational studies.

Acknowledgements

I received helpful suggestions from Steve Barley, Christine Beckman, Robert David, Jerry Davis, Joan Friedman, Paul Hirsch, Pedro Monteiro, Pam Tolbert, and Nele Terveen.

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