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Paul supporters recently caused a disturbance at the 2008 Nevada Republican Convention.

Long shot presidential candidates are usually vanity candidates. But once in a while you get someone who wants to make a point and really doesn’t care if they win. This year’s “candidate with a cause” is Ron Paul, who ran on a distinctly anti-war stance in the GOP primary. The underlying issue is that the Iraq War is actually a divisive issue within the GOP. Paul is the vehicle for this mood.

This issue is not going away. Paul came in 2nd in the Nevada caucus. Paul routinely polls 10-15% in the last round of GOP primaries, suggesting that about 1/8 of the GOP, at least, will not just roll over and support McCain, who supports the war. Furthermore, the Paulists have adopted the mode of contentious antiwar activists. For example, they recently stormed the Nevada GOP state convention and got their people voted in, which lead to a walk out by mainstream Republicans.

Turns out that the Paul people won’t let up. There are news items about protests planned at the GOP convention, which is coming up this August in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The idea is they will hijack the convention and publicly embarrass McCain during his nomination. People will quickly forget Huckabee and Romney, but Paul will be remembered as the beginning of the conservative crack up of 2008.

And it gets worse. Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr will run - and likely win - the Libertarian Party nomination. As a real politician, Barr understands that if he plays his cards right, he can peel of 1-2% of the national GOP vote, which might be enough to help Obama win in Ohio, Colorado and other swing states. So while this may be the year of Obama, he’ll enjoy the assistance of radical republicans and their anti-war supporters.

Via Greg Mankiw, Heckman and Fontaine summarize research on the GED in this report. The findings shed a negative light on the GED. It’s probably one of the most important reports in a while on high school graduation and college entrance. In this post, “high school completion” means you got your diploma at the end of high school. Key points:

• People who get the GED have the same cognitive skills as high school completers, but not the same social skills.
• Getting the GED does not mean that you will earn the same or have the same life course outcomes as high school completers. GED holders look the same as people who never completed high school at all.
• The shrinking gap between black and white high graduation rates is due to the fact that studies lump black GED and diploma holders together. Turns out that there is no racial convergence once you look at high school completers only.
• A substantial chunk of black high school graduates are actually incarcerated black men who earn the GED through correspondence courses.
• Once you remove GED holders from high school graduation statistics, college enrollment figures closely match high school completion rates. E.g., dropping male high school completion rates correlate tightly with shifting M/F college enrollment ratios.
• Taking into account immigrants who need American diplomas doesn’t change this picture.

In other words, GED’s usually don’t help people move up and they seriously distort our national statistics. With a few exceptions, GED’s go to people who don’t have the behavioral discipline to complete formal schooling. Because of these distortions, many erroneously believe that high school graduation has improved since the 1960s and that’s not true. Score a point for the “school as signal” side of the argument. Very sobering stuff. Definitely worth the read.

One of my favorite papers ever is Camic’s (1992), “Reputation and Predecessor Selection: Parsons and the Institutionalists” (see here for a previous post on the general subject matter). The paper has two general lines of argumentation, one empirical-historical, the other theoretical.

On the empirical front, Camic tackles the long held notion that the primary reason why Parsons “turned to the Euros” (Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, Marshall) as a way to establish the conceptual credentials of his theory of action was because the American intellectual scene of the period consisted of a an a-theoretical wasteland. Camic shows, that this thesis is simply not tenable. Autochotonous conceptual resources existed in the U.S. (including within the very American institutionalist economics that Parsons imbibed at Amherst) that were sufficient to mount an attack on (marginalist) utilitarianism and behaviorism. Thus, Parsons turn to the European masters cannot solely be explained by the reason that he gave, which was that they and only they had converged on a model of action that allowed sociology to transcend the aporias of psychological and economistic reductionism.

On the theoretical front, Camic uses his case study of Parsons to adjudicate between two models of what he refers to as “predecessor selection.” This is a choice that all intellectual entrepreneurs face when they are in the process of establishing a theoretical perspective. Predecessor selection is not just an optional adjunct to crafting a perspective, but a key component in any intellectual entrepreneurship project. Selecting the “right” predecessors is crucial, because the existence of predecessors provide a fledgling theoretical paradigm with the cognitive legitimacy required to outdo competitors.

What are these two models of the predecessor-selection process? One Camic refers to as the “content-fit” model and the other as the “reputational” model. The content-fit model claims that in scientific fields, intellectual entrepreneurs select predecessors based purely on considerations of conceptual content, and how well that content “fits” with the intellectual perspective that is being developed. The reputational model on the other hand, claims that issues of content are secondary (for one, what “some predecessor said” can–within some limits–always be molded to the focal creative project of the entrepreneur as the case of Parsons clearly shows), so what is primary is the reputation of a given set of predecessors on the intellectual entrepreneur’s local intellectual mileu. Ceteris paribus, high reputation predecessors will be selected over low (or uncertain) reputation ones, regardless of issues of content fit.

Not surprisingly, Camic argues that for the case of Parsons and Structure, the reputational model accounts for the historical facts, while the content-fit model leaves a lot to be desired. Various American theorists existed that could be used to establish Parsons’ charter, yet Parsons ignored them in favor of high reputation (in LSE, Heidelberg and Harvard) Euro-theorists. Furthermore, while Parsons claimed (in a letter to Jeff Alexander) that he had left out Simmel from TSA solely due to issues of content, it can also be argued that Simmel got cut due to his uncertain reputation in Parsons local intellectual environment. Thus the reputational model explains not only the European/American difference, but also processes of selection within the set of available European theorists themselves.

While Parsons is certainly today (as per one of this post’s tags) “obscure sociological theory” it is clear that the process of reputation selection happens all of the time in organizational theory. However, because we are all naive, “content-fit model” believers, we miss the (interesting!) reputational dynamics going on right under our noses.

Where do you need to look to see this PS dynamics at work in OT? Well, you need to look at the “grand” statements that introduce a “perspective”! For instance, it is clear that DiMaggio and Powell’s (1991) famous “Introduction” to the Orange Bible, can be interpreted as a giant job of predecessor-selection for the perspective (Bourdieu and Giddens). Prima Facie evidence that is consistent with Camic’s contention that this process is driven by intellectual reputation and not content, is Lounsbury and Ventresca’s (2003) brief for the “new structuralism” in organizational theory. Here, Bourdieu shows up as a predecessor of a paradigm in organizational theory that is in many ways opposed to the New Institutionalism of which, if we believe DiMaggio and Powell, he is also a predecessor. Camic’s reputational model of predecessor selection also explains why Giddens pretty much disappears from L & V’s radar: the reputational fortunes of Bourdieu and Giddens have experienced diametrically opposed trajectories in the American academy of late, with Bourdieu’s reputation soaring, and Giddens’s remaining flat (on this last count see Sallaz and Zavisca 2007).

Ok, I got this smiley baby and I start wondering - why exactly is lil’ Merlyn smiling at me? I have two theories:

1. Symbolic interactionism - An environmental stimulus (me) elicits positive emotional states, which triggers involuntary facial muscle tightening. Babies learn to instantly smile at certain stimuli becuase of their symbolic connotations.
2. Goffmanian chain ritual - The baby is only smiling because I’m smiling.* The smile is a sort of institutional ceremony, where’ll she’ll get positive environmental feedback. Smiling is done so we can move on to other actions like eating and paddle ball.

So if you believe #1, baby smiles are value driven. If you believe #2, you assume some degree of baby instrumentality. Babies, in Goffman’s terms, “carry the line” just to keep the interaction going. Of course, even babies must realize that there’s a mixed equilibria - sometimes you smile ‘cuz you like it and sometimes ‘cuz you have to. My guess is it’s a 70/30 split on this issue. Your thoughts? Any research on the social psychology of baby smiles?

PS. At older ages, you might have a third type of smile as situational signal. The baby might internally be happy but suppress the smile until they know it’s ok to smile. So they wait for other people to smile first to show it’s ok to smile and admit that you enjoyed what just happened. My guess is that this doesn’t happen till about 12 months or so because you need highly strategic babies. In contrast, options 1 and 2 could probably be pulled off by fairly young babies, starting around 3 months.

* I don’t consider mimetic smiling where baby is just copying what I do. It’s obviously important, but here I’m focusing on smiling with a purpose rather than practice smiling.

I just noted that Mark de Rond — one of the more interesting and thoughtful scholars that I know (and presently a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford) — has a new blog. And, watch for this forthcoming book of his: The Last Amateurs: To Hell and Back with the Cambridge Boat Race Crew.

I like systematic approaches to theory building. While theorizing undoubtedly can be a messy process (and, is often characterized as such), nonetheless I think it’s also extremely beneficial to step back and try to systematically follow an analytical process. (Perhaps theorizing begins with the former and moves toward the latter as one works on a project).

There are a few books that masterfully explicate their underlying approach to building theory. Coleman’s chapter 1, titled metatheory, in Foundations of Social Theory is a fantastic example, though perhaps more focused on justifying his particular theoretical effort.

Homans offers some more general advice — or, “rules of theory-building” — in his book The Human Group:

1. Look first at the obvious, the familiar, the common. In a science that has not established its foundations, these are the things that best repay study.
2. State the obvious in its full generality. Science is an economy of thought only if its hypotheses sum up in a simple form a large number of facts.
3. Talk about one thing at a time. That is, in choosing your words (or, more pedantically, concepts) see that they refer not to several classes of fact at the same time but to one and only one. Corollary: Once you have chosen your words, always use the same words when referring to the same things.
4. Cut down as far as you dare the number of things you are talking about. “As few as you may; as many as you must,” is the rule governing the number of classes of fact you take into account.
5. Once you have started to talk, do not stop until you are finished. That is, describe systematically the relationships between the facts designated by your words.
6. Recognize that your analysis must be abstract, because it deals with only a few elements of the concrete situation. Admit the dangers of abstraction, especially when action is required, but do not be afraid of abstraction.

Read the whole chapter (titled “Plans and Purposes”), it’s very insightful.

*** I might note that both of the above examples are void of considering the “sociology of knowledge”-related issues of theory building. So, for example, the results of theorizing should be counter-intuitive and “interesting” (for example, see this Davis 1971 piece), which goes counter to Homans first point. Etc. (Maybe a post on these issues later.)

“Do people mix at mixers?” This is the question that Paul Ingram and Michael Morris address in a paper with one of the more ingenious study designs I’ve seen. The paper, “Do People Mix at Mixers? Structure, Homophily, and the ‘Life of the Party,’” appears in a recent issue of the Administrative Science Quarterly. Using electronic name tags that allow the researchers to track the movements and interactions of attendees of a business school mixer, Ingram and Morris are able to figure out which attendees shared face time and how long their interactions lasted.

The results indicate that people are more likely to interact at parties with people they already know well, and with people they are indirectly connected through third party ties. Thus, if you and I share a common friend but do not share a direct pre-mixer tie, we’re much more likely to interact at a party than two completely disconnected people would. The results then provide evidence that structural conditions shape patterns of interaction in a conversational setting. Surprisingly, the results do not indicate that people are more likely to interact with similar others. One might expect the homophily principle to be in play at mixers - that you will seek out others who share similar values, characteristics, etc. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. The latter non-finding is especially surprising because of the vast amount of evidence indicating that friendships and other type of associations tend to form among people with similar demographic characteristics. Ingram’s and Morris’s findings suggest that homophilous attraction, at least in a conversational setting, may be based more in structural conditions than in preferences for likemindedness.

Thus our result supports McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook’s (2001) claim for the primacy of structure as a cause of homophily and derives from just the sort of dynamic analysis they call for as necessary to separate confounded accounts of the origins of network ties.

Score a point for the structuralists in the room.

If you are like me, you treat meetings like dentist visits - you’re happy to go if you have to, but you’ll need Highlights for Children to survive. But how do we minimize time spent in the meeting itself? I propose the “pre-attended meeting.” It’s kind of like a pre-owned car. For a small fee, you can get a coupon excusing you from the meeting. The person issuing the coupon has attended exactly this type of meeting and can vouch that the buyer doesn’t have to show up. For example, if you are trying to avoid a meeting about the need to repaint the department front office, your coupon might say:

To Whom it May Concern,

Professor X is excused from attending the upcoming meeting on front office repainting. Having attended many of these meetings in the past, it is safe to say that at least one person will propose a nasty 70s avocado green. This person should be ignored. Then, the committee will gravitate towards a few safe colors, like institutional beige, or a nice powdered blue. The committee will choose the color that is cheapest and hasn’t been done in a while. Since we know what the decision will most likely be like, Professor X does not have to attend. S/he expresses his preferences with the color chart below and gives the committee chair his/her vote should his/her prefered color (fuschia) not be chosen.

Sincerely,
Dr. Geraldo Edley
Class of ‘22 Thomas Kincaid Professor of Interior Design

Ideally, the office decoration committee chair could then collect coupons from the whole committee and just make the decision. Committee chairs would accept coupons issued by authorities on certain kinds of meetings. In an efficient system, people could trade coupons on an open market and minimize the population of meetings. You have nothing to lose except your meetings. 

Reading a lot of economic sociology, you realize that the area has a wide range of goals:

1. Econo-trashing: the point of economic sociology is to combat even the most basic ideas of economics. Sociology is the antidote to economists. Consider Polanyi the guiding light here, with assists from everyone from Marx to Parsons. The logical outcome is that you try to replace the fundamentals of economics with some new ideas, but sometimes it’s enough to show that some cherished economics idea is wrong.
2. Econo-augmentation: You admit people actually have goals and they maximize, but you add a twist. Maybe people maximize status, instead of money, or social approval. Maybe they have a weird utility functions that includes networks, or they interact in funky games, or social context shapes perceptions. A lot of Akerlof style economics is in this vein.
3. Econo-integration: You try to combine the fundamentals of sociology and economics. Following Harrison White, you make arguments about how economic behavior and social structure are endogenous. Few people can even pull this off becuase you have to like economics as much as soc, and have the skills to boot. Basically, you want to be the kwisatz haderach of the social sciences.

I’d probably be drifting from #2 (the rational choice of my youth) to #3. The topics we’ve covered on this blog are all over the place. I’d put performativity in camp #1 and Levitt style applied econometrics in camp #2. It’s hard to find many people who try to pull off #3, but maybe a Ron Burt style “rationality inside structures” approach would fit. A few years ago, Rationality and Society ran a discussion where these three options were discussed as possible outcomes of the dialogue between soc & econ, but I haven’t any essays tackling this topic since then.

Private equity investor, George Soros, has a new book coming out. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal Soros talks about the book and his views on market fluctuations. I haven’t read the book yet, but the description in the WSJ article makes him sound a lot like an economic sociologist.

In his latest book, “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets,” Mr. Soros argues that the current credit crisis conforms to his longstanding view that markets drive fundamentals, instead of the other way around, producing bubbles and crashes– a dynamic he has dubbed “reflexivity.”

The book argues the subprime crisis has triggered the bursting of a “super-bubble” that has been building for 25 years. Prior crises, from the 1987 stock market crash to the emerging markets crisis of 1997 were merely “testing events,” he writes. Because the authorities successfully averted catastrophe in those events, they encouraged consumers and investors to believe markets were fundamentally self-stabilizing and built up even more leverage, he wrote.

Economic sociologists actually don’t have much to say about market bubbles (although see Abolafia and Kilduff 1988). The topic of market bubbles lies almost completely in the domain of our friends in behavioral economics and finance. But the idea that markets may drive fundamentals seems like something a sociologist might write. I suppose if you were to read this from a very abstract point of view, this is what many economic sociologists are saying - markets (conceived as relations between actors producing, selling, and buying stuff) create the conditions wherein productivity, performances, etc. are generated and measured. But I’m not sure that the sociological notion of embeddedness (as its currently used in the literature) gives us much leverage in understanding how/why bubbles rise and crash. To develop a good sociological theory of market bubbles you’d need to be able to identify triggering mechanisms (i.e., factors that cause expectations of market value to rise or fall). To do that you should have more than just a list of “precipitating factors,” you’d actually need a fleshed out theory of value construction. And that’s something we lack in our field.

For other discussions of value at orgtheory, see here and here.

I bought my first ebook some five years ago; its a book I like quite a bit: Chomsky’s (brilliant) Cartesian Linguistics (if you buy the book, get the edition with the excellent, long introduction by James McGilvray). I also recently bought Hedstrom’s book Dissecting the Social as an ebook. What I love about ebooks is the ability to search for various terms. Marking and highlighting is also a snap. Google Books of course has also been brilliant and tremendously helpful (the only problem with Google Books has been that I quite quickly run out of the number of pages that I can view — can’t wait until that library somehow gets opened up via subscription, or something). Project Gutenberg is also great.

The only downside to ebooks of course is that reading them on a computer screen is not optimal or always feasible. There have been various ereaders (tablets, etc) before, but Amazon’s “Kindle” is the first one I am actually tempted to buy, it appears to mimic various paper-like features. Now, I just need to see if I can justify getting it. Let me know if you have experiences with Kindle or equivalent ereaders.

I was just now skimming (while looking up some of his other work) Lazarsfeld et al’s book Academic Mind: Social Scientists in Time of Crisis. Kind of a fun book, though not too optimistic about the professional standing of social scientists. Here’s apparently how social scientists felt various other professions would rank professors.

“Suppose a typical businessman [congressman or college trustee] were to rank these four occupations by the esteem he hold for each—in what order do you think he would rank each?” The figure’s slightly confusing, but, you get the point.

The book also has all kinds of descriptive statistics related to productivity, social scientist voting behavior, department-effects, age-effects, university-effects, etc etc.

While having dinner with some friends a couple of months ago someone asked me which blogs I read daily. This question led to a fun conversation in which we learned a lot about each others’ tastes. I realized that talking about blog reading is a new way to evaluate taste among this generation of cultural snobs. Add blogs to books, music, and movies as material for listmaking.

So here is what I tend to read daily (I have a lot of other blogs in my RSS reader but not all of them update daily):

• Sociology-related: Scatterplot, Chris Uggen, Blue Monster, Total Drek, Sociological Images (great new addition)
• Other academic: Crooked Timber, Marginal Revolution, Conglomerate
• Culture: Bookslut, Bookninja, Paper Cuts, You Ain’t No Picasso, I Guess I’m Floating
• Sports: McCovey Chronicles, Jazz Notes
• Political: Matthew Yglesias (the ONLY political blog you need to read if you’re liberal)
• Miscellany: Unfogged, Apostropher

I used to read more political blogs, but I found that they became overwhelming and that they made me paranoid. Beyond reading the New York Times, Yglesias is now my censor for political news.

Which blogs do you read?

Econ Journal Watch has a symposium on why there are so few women who are full professors of economics. The main article is by Christina Johnung and Ann-Charlotte Stahlberg. Basically they reprise the “leaky pipe line” idea, but this time for women in the economics discipline and with some new data.

Perhaps the most interesting response is offered by sociologist Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics. She says that lifestyle choices are often incompatible with top level achievement. The discussion on studies of mathematically precocious children is worth the read. Psychologist John Johnson agrees, adding that there’s a well developed vocational psychology model that explains the sort of finding presented by Johnung and Stahlberg.

Garret Jones’ response starts from a bio-psychological point of view, but says economics should also support narrative styles of research, so that economics will resemble other disciplines with more balanced M/F ratios like sociology, legal scholarship, and the humanities. Dierdre McCloskey discusses how economics might attract more women if it stopped being a man’s game focused on scoring mathematical theory points. McCloskey’s view is valuable since it’s the only comment written by a transgendered person who experienced high level economics from the perspective of men and women.

Over the past week I’ve seen a number of statements praising the late, great Charles Tilly. As I said in a comment to Mario’s post about Tilly, he truly was a shining light to many younger scholars and he will be missed. I was pleased to discover that Paul DiPerna interviewed Tilly last fall and posted the interview on his website, Blau Exchange. Paul has interviewed a number of interesting scholars in the social sciences. Teppo earlier linked to his interview with Christine Beckman.

In his interview with Tilly, Paul discusses Tilly’s training, how he became interested in social movements as a social phenomenon, and Tilly’s thoughts on the future direction of sociology. Tilly warns sociologists to not get “blindsided” by neuroscience and to develop “relational analyses that provide valid explanations of individual behavior and are accessible (at least in simplified form) to readers outside of social science.” As always, Tilly was concerned with making sociology relevant and understandable. I find it interesting that Tilly’s prediction of where sociology is going was much more focused on the individual level than it was on the “large structures” that occupied so much of his own theorizing.

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

A few days ago, I was asked “what’s hot in social movements?” A few ideas, in no particular order:

• Brayden’s work on corporate responses to protest and competition with movement industries.
• Fellow Arizonian Tim Bartley has written a series of thoughtful papers on whether organizations self-police in response to activists and other pressures.
• Also, in an IU vein, my colleague Elizabeth Armstrong wrote on riots and collective memory.
• Ann Mische’s book on identities and networks in Brazilian politics. Very Harrison White, very cool.
• I read a recent article in Moblization asking about the effect of incarceration on movement politics by Pamela Oliver. Good question!
• You can read Paul Burstein’s work, where he disputes many basic ideas about movements, such as whether they have any effect independent of public opinion.
• There is good work on transnational activism by Sidney Tarrow.
• Recent working papers on networks, transnationalism, and protest by Dana Fisher are interesting as well.

Of course, I would be a poor blogger if I didn’t plug my own work on how movements initiate organizational change via analysis of the black studies movement,* or my recent work on organizational networks within the antiwar movement (see my co-author’s site for the latest). Please add your own “hot” social movement research or plug your own research in the comments.

* Yes, click on the link, especially if you need to fill space in that movements, political soc, or soc of ed syllabus! You know you want to!

Sean Malloy, professor of history at UC Merced, discovered 10 photographs of the aftermath of the atomic attack at Hiroshima, while researching his book on the end of World War II. Turns out that an American serviceman discovered the photos in a cave near Hiroshima and deposited them at the Hoover Institute’s archives in California under the condition that they not be released until 2008. The serviceman doesn’t know who took them and Malloy wants the public to provide any information they might have to help identify the photographer. They are very graphic and you can see them here, at Malloy’s university web site.

An article in Nature that may be of interest to our readers: “Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks.” (A non-gated link to the working paper version.) The upshot? “Taken together, our results suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.”

And, some past orgtheory networks posts; its been a popular topic.

I was reading Richard Hamming’s address “You and Your Research,” which has miscellaneous advice for academic productivity. Hamming, famous himself, interacted with many of the top minds of his time, in particular, Claude Shannon (information theory), and folks associated with the Manhattan Project and Bell Labs.

Here’s Hamming on subconscious problem-solving:

Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Hamming’s address has other interesting advice too. For example, how to spend your time at lunch. Whether to keep your office door open or closed. The need for scientists to “sell” their theories. And, the critical need to be able to articulate the most important problems of one’s field. Etc.

As the semester winds down, I’d like to inform my fellow orgheads of my short term plans. Starting in August, I’ll be a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. I am still IU faculty, but I’ll be taking a teaching break to work on health related research, like this stuff. If you are in Ann Arbor, please drop by the School of Public Health and say hello. We’ll have coffee - on me!