Paul DiMaggio

Paul Joseph DiMaggio (born January 10, 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American educator, and professor of sociology at New York University since 2015. Previously, he was a professor of sociology at Princeton University.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, DiMaggio earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard in 1979. He was the executive director of Yale's program on nonprofit organizations (1982–87), and through 1991 he was a professor in the sociology department at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1984–85) and at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1990). He also served on the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and on the board of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

DiMaggio's major works have been in the study of institutions and organizations and the formation of "high culture" in the U.S. His recent research explores social inequality in the Internet.

According to Dimaggio, belief systems and cultural frames are imposed on and adapted by individual actors and organisations. Thus, roles are for a large part determined by larger structures.

In a much-quoted article, DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell argued that organizations, whether corporate, governmental, or non-profit, adopt business practices not because they are efficient, but because they furnish legitimacy in the eyes of outside stakeholders, e. g. lenders, government regulators, and shareholders, as they need to maintain the confidence of these often poorly-informed outside parties . This makes them less creative and innovative in their practices, and leads to institutional isomorphism.

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