environments and organizations – socio 355 essay assignment this …

Socio 355 Essay Assignment This essay will constitute 20% of your final grade. Assignment Read the Wikipedia article and the attached Social Forces article about women’s college in the United States, answer the following questions in your essay 1. Describe the historical trends of American college education from early 1940s to the present, in terms of co-education and single-sex education. In your description, please highlight the heterogeneity or homogeneity of colleges in the United States at different time periods. 2. In your opinion, between heterogeneity and homogeneity, which aspect of the population of American colleges is more salient? In other words, which aspect do you think is the main feature of the population of American colleges throughout the history? If you think that American colleges have changed a lot between homogeneity and heterogeneity over the decades, you can identify the main feature for each historical period. Explain your choice. 3. Pick a theory from the three perspectives – resource dependence theory, institutional theory, and population ecology – to explain the process in which the primary feature (you identified in question 1, either homogeneity or heterogeneity) become established. In your explanation, please emphasize the mechanisms that lead to the formation of homogeneity or heterogeneity, whichever you were trying to explain. 4. Explain how your perspective falls in the open-system theory category. Do you think your explanation gained more power to explain the historical changes of American colleges by looking at the heterogeneity or homogeneity of the population and the conditions that contributed to the characteristics of the population? If yes, explain why. If no, explain why. Criteria A. This essay should have a clear organization, compelling arguments, and a coherent narrative. B. Your description of the population of American college and your explanations of the processes should heavily draw on relevant readings from the 4 articles. If you found any references in the 4 readings useful for your argument, you are welcome to cite them too. Aldrich, Howard E and Jeffrey Pfeffer. 1976. “Environments and Organizations.” Annual Review of Sociology 2:79-105. DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48(2):147-60. Hannan, Michael T and John Freeman. 1977. “The Population Ecology of Organizations.” The American Journal of Sociology 82(5):929-64. Hillman, Amy J., Withers, Michael C., Collins, Brian J, 2009, Resource Dependence Theory: A Review, Journal of Management Format We anticipate that the essays will be about 6 double-spaced (typed) pages in length NOTES: We don’t have to use any additional resources, maybe fore question #1, you could. I’m attaching all the necessary papers here. Heterogeneity and homogeneity is only in terms of gender meaning that single sex women’s colleges (homogeneity) vs, coeducational colleges(heterogeneity