neither the really young nor really old
There seems to be a tendency that the big theoretical breakthroughs (the classics of the disciplines) come from people of a certain age and experience. This age pattern is probably found in many disciplines. In math it is thought that all of the big ideas come from people under the age of thirty. If you’re a genius you’ll know it, or at least others will know it, by the time you’re done with grad school. Is this true for organizational theorists? Is there an optimal time to produce that theoretical masterpiece?After much “systematic” analysis, I think you can argue that there is an optimal stage in your career at which org. theorists tend to produce great pieces. Take five works that are often seen as groundbreaking and that are associated with the formation of a new theoretical perspective. I couldn’t get the ages of all the authors, but by looking at their CVs we can tell how long they were out of grad school before publishing the seminal work. We also know what their academic rank was at the time of publishing.
“Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony,” 1977 John Meyer, associate professor at Stanford and 12 years from PhD; Brian Rowan, grad student at Stanford “The population ecology of organizations,” 1977 Michael Hannan, associate professor at Stanford and 7 years from PhD; John Freeman, assistant professor at Berkeley and 2 years from PhD The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective, 1978 Jeffrey Pfeffer, associate professor at Berkeley and 6 years from PhD; Gerald Salancik, professor at Illinois (not certain when he got his PhD although I’d guess it was in the late 60s, early 70s, since Salancik was an assistant professor in 1974) “The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality...
