Paul DiMaggio

Paul DiMaggio is an American sociologist, born in Philadelphia in 1951, who is a professor of sociology at New York University after a long career at Princeton and earlier at Yale, where he directed the university's program on nonprofit organizations. With Walter W. Powell he developed the concept of institutional isomorphism, the argument that organizations adopt common practices not necessarily because they are efficient but because doing so confers legitimacy in the eyes of outside stakeholders, a foundational contribution to institutional theory in the sociology of organizations. He has also written on the formation of American high culture in the late nineteenth century through institutions such as museums and orchestras, and more recently on inequality in internet access and use. He earned his doctorate in sociology from Harvard in 1979.