Becoming What You Are: The Reproduction of Organizational Status Orders in Uncertain Environments

This article proposes that organizations stabilize status orders by differentiating key activities in ways that tend to reinforce important audiences’ quality assessments. It outlines and tests a relational dynamic in which organizations signal “who they are” through “what they do”: higher status is reproduced by distancing from lower status organizations that compete with one another by hedging their profiles within less legitimated areas, thereby preserving or increasing the relative symbolic distances between higher and lower status positions. This is used to explain the puzzle of undergraduate program differentiation in the U.S. during a period of increasing uncertainty. Results from longitudinal models support the framework: adopting a less legitimate profile diminishes reputation for higher-status institutions, but decreases the likelihood of downgrades for those lower in standing; consequently, illegitimate change is more strongly linked to declining economic resources for higher status institution...