Influence and Isomorphism: The Decoupling of Impact From Publication Venue in American Sociology

DiMaggio and Powell’s “The Iron Cage Revisited” is one of the most influential articles in the history of sociology. This article examines its place amongst other citation classics in the field over almost a century. Taking a cohort-based approach, I identify the 10 most influential articles published in each decade from the 1930s to the 2010s. I show that “The Iron Cage Revisited” marks an inflection point in the discipline’s expansion and consolidation. It is the high-water mark of a particular sort of article: a theory article published in one of the discipline’s two leading generalist journals. And it marks the beginning of a long and still-continuing decoupling of the most influential work from the highest-prestige journals. I suggest the reasons for this shift are to be found in how the structural and demographic expansion of American higher education in the post-World War II period was processed within the discipline, in ways consistent with the arguments laid out in DiMaggio and Powell.