A review of mathematical models of formal organizations — why and how they failed —

This paper examines, both conceptually and mathematically, five attempts of mathe‐matizing Blau's theory of differentiation in organizations, which seem to have suffered rather suspicion or neglect than serious attention from organizational researchers. Such attitudes toward the mathematization hitherto are not ungrounded. Meyer was unfortunately guided by his misconception of the role of deductive theories. Hummon failed to point out logical unsufficiency of Blau's verbal inference. Land's model was too ambiguously constructed. Baseline models by Mayhew et al lacked a substantive study of organizational differentiation. The simultaneous differential equation model by Hummon et al was not particularly an organizational mqdel. All but the last attempts involve even some important mathematical errors, which make their failures decisive. This paper, however, do not intend to show, by examining those attempts, that mathematical modeling should in general appear as unpromising. Appropriately constructed mathematical models are still believed to be helpful to the theoretical study of differentiation in organizations.