Dimaggio and Powell Industry Analysis

¶ … DiMaggio and Powell Industry Analysis The intent of this paper is to explore industries that best illustrate the concepts in DiMaggio & Powell's article. Isomorphism's illustration in the disk drive industry is analyzed from the coercive, mimetic, and normative mechanisms the authors analyze and present in their article.

Isomorphism & Storage Technologies: Made for each other Isomorphism is excellently illustrated in the disk drive industry, where both the competitive and institutional dynamics of that industry have forced a rapid homogenization of the most critical processes once invented to provide competitive differentiation. True to the research of DiMaggio and Powell (1983) the very processes which at the onset of this industry which were meant to be competitive differentiators turned through time into the mile markers of industry homogenization and consolidation.

Starting at the center of the disk drive industry's innovation is the implicit assumption that Moore's Law applies even more to storage technologies vs. microprocessors. Gordon Moore is one of the founders of Intel Corporation and is credited with the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, Intel (2006). The disk drive industry's proving of Dr., Moore's law was already in full fruition in 1965, when the Dr.

Moore first wrote this prediction, and disk drive manufacturers including IBM, Control Data, Fujitsu, and others aggressively pursued doubling and tripling storage densities every twenty four to thirty months, according to Disk Trend Research (2006). Even in these early years of the industry showed what has proven to be best practices in Isomorphism as marketing, sales, production, product planning, and service strategies all aligned to the common goal of driving up the densities of storage platters in disk drives.

This singleness of purpose in the industry just took three product generations (translated into a short fifty months) until time-to-market and speed was all that mattered, and this transformation happened in the 1970s. Fast forward to the 1990s and the industry is in pricing free-fall, with not just companies but entire segments of the entire industry for sale, like four or five factories scattered throughout the U.S., Japan and Taiwan.

If DiMaggio and Powell had not discovered Isomorphism by 1983 all they would have had to do was spend a week in San Jose, California with Seagate and others who in that time period were selling in volume. Exploring the Facets of Institutional Isomorphism as it relates to the storage industry The three mechanisms of institutional isomorphism are also present in the disk drive industry.

The coercive, mimetic, and normative aspects of this industry are primarily driven by the industry's rapid reliance on price as the single most critical differentiator across competitors followed by availability. This industry's rapid race into isomorphism was made even more rapid when the three mechanisms of isomorphism are taken into account. In terms of coercive isomorphism, the disk drives' industry has at times be hypocritical in their practices on the one hand and their reliance on government intervention on the one hand.

When Japanese manufacturers were the first to generate the highest densities and the lowest cost per GB and in turn beat other nations; manufacturers to the next level of performance, U.S. And westernized nations aggressively used anti-dumping policies through their governments in an attempt to slow down the technological leads in other nations. Yet these same disk drive manufacturers would load up their channels and report shipped storage products as sold on their balance sheets when they had merely been sent to distribution partners.

This level of coercive isomorphism became heightened and was driven by manufacturers looking for differentiation through public policy, having exhausted product-related differentiation as products at this point were different only on price and their date of availability. The disk drive industry is a best practices study of mimetic isomorphism. Starting from the entrepreneurs who started the industry including Alan Shugart, a fascinating man with a gift for visualizing entire logic circuits in his head and who worked in IBM's R & D.

Center prior to starting Seagate to the vision of Finis Conner who perfected the small disk drive for Compaq (later HP) who also looked to form factors as the mimetic isomorphism-like responses to a growing need for storage capacity. Finis Conner especially looked to differentiation through product intelligence and value of greater integration of product components. This strategy of differentiation through value of electronic components and intelligence through integration were all standard responses to forces on the industry to pursue the trajectory of mimetic isomorphism.

Normative isomorphism also is exemplified by the growth trajectory of the disk drive industry in that once pricing and availability became the only differentiators, the professionalization of the industry became commonplace.