Influencing Ideas A Celebration of DiMaggio and Powell (1983)

Few papers achieve the success of DiMaggio and Powell's 1983 "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." The impact of the paper, as indicated by its citation count and its influence on a wide range of disciplines, has been extraordinary. Furthermore, the paper's influence continues to increase. Here we celebrate this exceptional paper and offer observations on how ideas become adopted, institutionalized, and sometimes translated in ways not necessarily intended by their authors. We also note the vagaries of the process by which journals assess the caliber of papers submitted to them-after all, this paper was initially rejected!