Reproducing Organizational Status Orders: Academic Program Differentiation in U.S. Colleges and Universities, 1970-1990 †

This article proposes that organizations respond to environmental uncertainty by differentiating profiles of key activities in ways that reproduce status orders. The higher an organization’s status, the more audiences monitor it for signals of general strengths, leading to more institutionally legitimate forms of differentiation; while the lower an organization’s status, the more it competes for an audience’s recognition through signals of specific competencies, leading to less legitimate but potentially advantageous forms of differentiation. The framework is supported by examining the status-contingent consequences and causes of undergraduate program differentiation trajectories during a period of increasing environmental uncertainty: the likelihood that adopting a less legitimate program profile leads to a diminished status-related evaluation increases as status increases; adopting a more legitimate profile enhances status-related evaluations most clearly among middle-status organizations; consequently, as status increases illegitimate change is more likely a result of economic resource decline; while, in general, higher status colleges and universities react to increasing uncertainty by differentiating at slower rates and in relatively more institutionally legitimate ways. This further integrates institutional and strategic understandings of how environmental pressures shape organizational change.