questions for originalists
There’s a bunch of legal theories that assert that a statute, regulation, or constitution should be strictly interpreted in terms of the author’s intention or the common sense meaning of the words as they were used at the time of the writing of the text. I get it. We should figure out what the law actually means, not what we want it to mean. And for a lot of everyday law, I can buy it.
But still, theories of intent and meaning leave me scratching my head. For example:
- What if the legislators don’t know the meaning of the law? For example, when big laws are passed, like the Patriot Act or the Affordable Care Act, the text is literally thousands of pages. A lot of folks literally don’t know what they are voting for. What is the “intent” of the law?
- What if the legislators didn’t write the law? A lot of legislators rely aides and others to actually write the text. Does interpretation of the law rest on what some clerk thinks?
- If multiple people authored the law, whose meaning or intent takes precedence?
- What if the law uses really vague words? For example, people argue over “cruel and unusual” punishment. Even back in the day, people must have had differences in opinion. Do you have to somehow go back in time and take a survey to figure out what the average American in 1789 thought was cruel and unusual?
- What if the original meaning or intent of the law was muddled to start with? Is there an assumption that legislators have a sort of papal infallibility that ensures a clear “intent” that we must discover?
Just curious…
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live feed for workshop on computational social science
If you are interested, check out the cool live feed for an ongoing workshop organized by orgtheory alum David Lazer: computational social science (at Harvard’s Institute for Qualitative Social Science).
Lots of interesting topics being discussed today, and the next two days: using twitter as data, visualizing networks, self-organization, dynamics of human proximity. You can find the conference program here. You can also follow the conference hashtag on twitter: #compsocsci12. Check it out.
book spotlight: philanthropy in america by olivier zunz
Students of orgtheory should like Philanthropy in America by Olivier Zunz, a well known American historian at the Unviersity of Virginia. PiA is a comprehensive overview of the non-profit sector in America. If I teach a graduate course on the non-profit sector, I’d definitely put this on the reading list. You would be hard pressed to find another book that so deftly conveys the ups and downs of the non-profit world. It’s a nice compliment to more social science approaches like The Non-Profit Handbook that focus on questions that economists and sociologists would ask.
Much of the material will be familiar to students of the non-profit sector, especially the chapters on post-war philanthropy. We get a chapter on the 1969 tax reform act. The various approaches to philanthropy over the years get a lot of coverage (e.g., civil rights oriented charity vs. Cold War era programs of the 1950s). PiA also has some material on the most recent wave of philanthropy driven by the new superwealthy, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
What orgtheory readers will find most rewarding is the emphasis on the changing nature of the state-non-profit relationship. Zunz correctly points out that Americans have never exactly sorted out how they feel about the non-profits. Sometimes, non-profits are treated as central actors in American social policy. At other time, Americans view philanthropists as wealthy meddlers.
No where is this more apparent than in a highly instructive chapter about the 1920s. Hoover, contrary to popular wisdom, did not respond to the great depression by ignoring people and relying on the free market, though he did engage in laissez-faire rhetoric. Instead, Hoover believed in strong Federal intervention in the economy, but he wanted much of the effort channeled through philanthropic organizations. It’s a view that is not common now, but it might be called “local charities/national direction.” FDR also believed in having a strong welfare state, but his approach was to exclude private third parties and administer relief programs directly through the state.
Overall, a solid book that will lead to more insight into the evolution of the non-profit sector.
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the failure of the republican vice presidency
People say the Vice Presidency is useless, but I disagree. About 1 in 8 VP’s become President. Lyndon Johnson allegedly accepted Kennedy’s offer because he figured that a 16% of becoming President was nothing to laugh at. That’s why it is so disappointing to see that Republican VP’s and nominees in the post war era have been of particularly low caliber, especially in comparison to the top of the ticket. The top of the ticket has been filled with Senate leaders, popular governors, and an enormously successful general. The #2 slot? Not so great.
It didn’t start out so bad. In 1948, the first post-war election, the VP nominee was Earl Warren, a California politician, Berkeley graduate, and future Supreme court justice. ’60 wasn’t bad either. Henry Cabot Lodge was open to civil rights and seemed to have many virtues.
Then, the problems start. Nixon, who was Eisnehower’s #2, was brilliant yet twisted and vengeful. William Miller, who ran with Goldwater, was a rather obscure Congressman who contributed little. The real slide starts with ’68. Agnew was run out of office due to tax evasion. His replacement, Gerald Ford, took over after Nixon (a former VP) resigned. Ford pardoned Nixon and doesn’t have much to show for his short time in the White House.
In my view, Bush I was probably the last respectable GOP VP or nominee. Even though I disagreed with him hugely, he was actually a figure of national prominence and was deeply knowledgeable about important issues. Even when he did things that I thought were immoral, they were relatively contained (e.g., the Gulf War did not turn into an invasion of Iraq).
Then the GOP goes 0-5 in my book. Bush’s VP was Dan Quayle. I don’t think he was a moron. Rather, he was a competent, but undistinguished, Indiana legislator from a political family. The next VP nominee was Jack Kemp. His nomination had no impact on the party, even though he had a passed some notable legislation on taxation earlier in his career.
The real disasters hit in the 2000s. Dick Cheney was hugely instrumental in one of the Republican Party’s biggest policy failures ever – the Iraq War. He also instituted torture. The last VP nominee was Palin, governor of Alaska. In principle, not a crazy pick, but upon closer examination, a disaster as well – a quitter, demagogue, and simply not informed on crucial issues.
Here’s my summary of the Republican vice presidents and nominees:
- Two who helped make the world a better place (Lodge, Warren)
- One who gets my grudging respect (Bush I)
- Three who had little impact (Miller, Quayle, Kemp)
- One who was mildly bad (Ford)
- Three complete disasters (Palin, Cheney, Nixon)
Not a great record, especially since one of them got arrested, another would have been arrested, and a third publicly defends torture. I sure hope Romney exercises better judgment than his predecessors.
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stuart kauffman on the craziness of semiotics, theories of everything, and everything else
A talk Stuart Kauffman gave last month in Estonia on From Physics to Semiotics.
facebook strategy – ads or platforms?
I get Google. A billion people use the website, stick advertising on it. Amazon and Walmart destroy the competition with economies of scale. Facebook’s strategy is a little more opaque to me. Right now, it’s going gangbusters on ad dollars. Is that the main strategy? Envelope calculation: $100bn in market cap/a claimed 800m active users = $125. Does that sound right? Does that average user generate at least $125 of income for Facebook’s advertisers as a whole?
I suspect Facebook’s strategy is mixed. It’s obviously ads because young people (=discretionary income) love Facebook. But I suspect that Facebook is gearing up to be a major platform, an all purpose social space where people can do things. That leads us into the world of apps and income sharing from apps. Developer Steve Yegge made this distinction in a much hailed rant on Google+. Yegge pointed out that Amazon had built an amazing library of APIs that allowed third parties to collaborate with Amazon and mine its databases. I suspect Facebook is committed to this direction. Ads create enough revenue, but the goal is to create an appapalooza on par with Apple’s App Store. It’ll be interesting to see if that’s worth $125 a user.
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a physicist, psychologist, mathematician, economist, orgtheorist…walk into a bar…and talk about collective behavior
A few years ago I was spending quite a bit of time looking at how scholars across disciplines (from the natural sciences to different social sciences) deal with matters of collective behavior, coordination and social aggregation. Mathematicians and physicists study various issues related to the matter (e.g., signals, aggregation in networks), as do biologists (e.g., collective animal behavior), political scientists (e.g., voting), economists (e.g., preference aggregation), psychologists (social interaction) and sociologists (social influence). Naturally there are significant differences (e.g., across social contexts and species), but I presumed that much can be (and already has been) learned across disciplines.
I pitched the idea of putting together an interdisciplinary special issue on collective behavior and social aggregation and the journal Managerial and Decision Economics was willing to take the risk (big-time thanks to the editor Paul Rubin!). After a couple years of work, the special issue will finally be published this year— it is titled “the emergent nature of organization, markets and wisdom of crowds.”
The set of scholars contributing include folks from political science (Scott Page), physics (Claudio Castellano), mathematics (David Sumpter), sociology (Robb Willer, Siegwart Lindenberg), strategy (Nicolai Foss), economics (Bruno Frey, Bart Wilson, Peter Leeson), psychology (Steve Kozlowski), etc.
For anyone interested, the list of all the paper titles and contributors can also be found below the fold. The final papers will be available on MDE’s early view over the next couple weeks. One of the special issue papers is already there: Pete Leeson, of pirate political economy fame, and Chris Coyne’s paper on “Wisdom, Alterability and Social Rules.”
I’m still quite enamored by the possibilities of more systematically looking at comparative similarities and differences across disciplines (issues of collectives, behavior and aggregation – as well as comparative methodological and epistemological matters), so if anyone is interested in these issues, please send me a note. I’m entertaining the idea of putting together a conference in the future.
claude fischer on recent poverty research
Boston Review has a new article by sociologist Claude Fischer on the topic of poverty research. He covers a lot of ground in a few pages. For example, I didn’t know the following:
Critically, understand that the long-term poor are a small minority of a minority. Most of those counted as poor in a given year are poor temporarily because of setbacks such as layoffs, family break-ups, car breakdowns, or medical emergencies. (Note, too, that we are not talking about the severely physically or mentally disabled; the controversy is about the able-bodied.) Social welfare scholar Mark Rank estimates that about half of all Americans will be poor sometime between the ages of 25 and 75, and perhaps a fifth will go through both poverty and affluence. Only about 2 percent, perhaps even less, will be poor most of their lives from 25 to 60 years of age.
This by itself has an important policy implication. The lion’s share of poverty policy should be about helping people protect themselves from temporary income drops or helping people get satisfactory job/income levels after a recession.
Fischer then approaches poverty from a cultural toolkit perspective. If you are middle class, you demand things. If you are poor, you know your place and keep your head down:
In their [poor people's] worlds, staying humble is usually the best way to keep their jobs or their kids in school. Sharing what money they have rather than saving it, or risking a job to drive a friend, increases the odds that they will be helped when the inevitable crisis hits. And where there are many predators, it makes sense to be distrustful or even predatory in turn.
In other words, being middle class involves a balance of professional cooperation and conflict. Being poor is about avoiding workplace conflict and inefficient handling of personal relationships.
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is gaydar, like, real?
Yeah, it’s real. I didn’t know this, but there’s a literature on gaydar and psychologists have shown that gaydar is real, at least among college students who take psychology experiments. The latest in the genre is a new PlosOne article by Joshua Tabak and Vivian Zayas called The Roles of Featural and Configural Face Processing in Snap Judgments of Sexual Orientation.
The new study tries to figure out what facial figures trigger accurate attributions of sexual orientation. An experiment demonstrates that homosexuality in women is easier to guess because the facial features correlated with sexual orientation are more exaggerated in women. I’d be interested in what sociologists of gender and sexuality think of such experiments.
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phd mentoring techniques
When it comes to doctoral students, there are two issues for faculty: 1. Should you agree to be an adviser? and 2. How should you train people?
Agreeing to be an adviser: Overall, my opinion is that every student who can demonstrate that they can finish a dissertation should have an adviser. The student needs to show an ability to independently generate competent work. If the student can’t do that, the department needs some clear signals early on – a failed qualifying exam, strong criticism of the master’s thesis, and so forth.
If a student is in good standing, then you should accept a student as long as you aren’t overburdened. Even though I am still early in my career, I feel no problem accepting any student who asks for help. My belief is that as long as I am qualified and not overextended, I have an obligation to help a student complete their degree.
Even though I have an open policy, that doesn’t mean that just anyone can sign up. I expect students to treat their doctoral dissertation seriously. So I usually make most students do some task, like a literature review, or prepare some of their own data for analysis before I officially sign up. My experience is that if you can’t do that simple task in a timely fashion, it’s unlikely that you can finish the degree.
Technique: I train graduate students in the way that we would train anyone else: repetition. I encourage frequent meetings that are focused on doing specific tasks, like prepping data, making a table, or writing up field notes. I also encourage the completion of concrete tasks like preparing a paper for journal submission.
Philosophically, I believe that a lot of doctoral training is ritualistic. The real test of academia is blind peer review. The faster you get to it, the better. The implication is that I place little weight on proposals, defenses, and so forth. If a student can push a paper through the arduous publication process, the dissertation and its rituals will take care of themselves. This doesn’t mean that I’ll accept a junky dissertation. What it does mean is that I encourage publication first because it is the core skill of the academic profession.
Finally, I make sure to have a constant, non-stop, conversation with students about their career goals. If they are interested in a teaching intensive career, then I don’t worry too much about journal placement. If they want to compete for research or elite liberal arts positions, they’ll need to focus early and hard on publication.
That’s my formula: focus on publication quality research from the get go; constant interaction; and pegging outputs to career goals.
Experienced advisers are encouraged to relate their training strategies in the comments.
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is a harvard degree really worth the same as a colgate degree?
A question for my brothers and sisters in the economics profession: Why do very different private colleges charge roughly the same tuition? For example, a full blown elite research 1 school like the University of Chicago charges about $42k per year. Harvard charges about $39k if you add tuition and the required health fee together. An elite liberal arts college like Swarthmore charges about $40k a year. A much less well known private college like DePauw charges $38k a year. Colgate charges about $45k per year.
The big savings come from going to tiny schools (e.g. Coe charges $33k a year, or Notre Dame of California charges $24k a year). Why is the price/prestige curve flat except for tiny liberal arts colleges? If you believe the Dale/Krueger paper on college choice and income (e.g., doesn’t matter which college you go to, for the most part), then these prices merely reflect that colleges are just selling a generic job market certification that any institution can provide. Other explanations?
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mucca pazza, again
Performing at Euclid Records in Chicago this April.
A few years ago, we discussed Chicago alt-marching/punk band Mucca Pazza. They continue to make music and were recently featured on NPR’s blog “All Songs Considered.” Congratulations!
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kids, minimal group affiliations and intergroup bias
Here’s an interesting piece extending Tajfel et al by studying 5-year-olds and intergroup bias: “Consequences of ‘‘Minimal’’ Group Affiliations in Children” Child Development. So, do 5-year-olds have a bias toward members of their in-group, even if they are arbitrarily assigned to these groups? They do.
Interesting paper. The paper also raises questions about whether in-group bias is learned (“enculturation,” Spielman, 2000), or whether it perhaps is an evolutionary-survival-type thing, or something driven by expectations of reciprocity or competition. Or something else.
Here’s the abstract:
Three experiments (total N = 140) tested the hypothesis that 5-year-old children’s membership in randomly assigned ‘‘minimal’’ groups would be sufficient to induce intergroup bias. Children were randomly assigned to groups and engaged in tasks involving judgments of unfamiliar in-group or out-group children. Despite an absence of information regarding the relative status of groups or any competitive context, in-group preferences were observed on explicit and implicit measures of attitude and resource allocation (Experiment 1), behavioral attribution, and expectations of reciprocity, with preferences persisting when groups were not described via a noun label (Experiment 2). In addition, children systematically distorted incoming information by preferentially encoding positive information about in-group members (Experiment 3). Implications for the developmental origins of intergroup bias are discussed.
what is it like to be a professor?
Got a recent email from Ben. He bought the Grad Skool Rulz and is seriously thinking about graduate school. He is curious about what it’s like to be a working academic. Smart guy. Ask now.
Here’s how I’d describe it. There are three stages to being a tenure track professor professor: trainee (grad student), probate (tenure track), and zombie (tenured prof). It’s important to recognize that this does not describe the majority of academics. These days, the average college instructor is an adjunct (part time) instructor). Some people like this arrangement, especially clinical faculty, such as lawyers, who are hired to teach the occasional course in a professional school. For most, however, the adjunct career track is low paid work that requires “freeway flying” between far flung campuses.
But let’s stick to the tenure track because that’s what Ben is shooting for:
- Trainee: Graduate school is uneven. The first two years are courses, then you have an extended period of self-directed study and research. You also have to learn to be an adult. Learn to do your work without a boss or deadline. Don’t get published and you’ll get a career failure. Don’t do your dissertation and you have nothing to show for your work.
- Probate: Assistant profs are paid and have a high stress level. It usually takes a long time to execute a project and get it published. You may have five or six years, but it goes by quickly as you work on these big projects. The difference between trainee and probate is quality. The dissertation is a student exercise, so a competent work will get approved. In contrast, the competition is tough for journals and publishers. Top publishers routinely reject 90%+ of submissions. The other big difference is teaching. Research faulty teach 4 courses a year, though they can buy some out. Liberal arts faculty do more.
- Zombie: You have enough experience with publishing and you’ve managed to balance teaching and research demands. The killer here is committee work. If you are in a research department, you also have graduate student training.
My days are usually divided into teaching days and research days. Personally, I try to cram all classroom time, office hours, and grading into a few long days. It’s about minimizing transaction costs. So a few days a week, I roll into campus late in the morning and teach these long seminars and meet with students. Since I pack a lot into a few days, this may go into the evening, especially if I have afternoon/night classes.
Research is a bit different. Since I am a multi-method researcher, doing research can mean very different things. Currently, I am involved in some surveys. So I spend time writing grants. At other times, I do ethnography. So it’s about making travel arrangements or deciphering field notes. Then, at other times, I may be programming. But unless I am traveling, research usually means reading current research,,working with data, and writing papers/book manuscripts. That entails sitting in front of computers for a long time.
Teaching and research are interrupted by committee meetings. This is utterly boring. Sometimes the meetings are boring and crucial (like hiring or promotion), or boring and not crucial (listening to an administrator tell us about the latest mission statement). Regardless, they are a necessary evil of the academic profession. I am lucky to be in a program where meetings are kept to a minimum.
At the zombie level, you also do a lot of evaluation. Senior professors are asked to review papers for publication, book manuscripts and write letters of recommendation, including tenure letters.
Finally, Ben asked about research topics. This is easy. Just pick up the journals, books, and recent dissertations in your area. Read them and see if they inspire you. If they leave you cold, then academia probably isn’t for you.
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the upcoming tea party president
Now that things are wrapping up, let’s ask: what did we learn from the 2012 GOP presidential primary? I’ve always viewed the national GOP as a contest between two factions, social conservatives and establishment Republicans, with a libertarian fringe that pops up from time to time. Mitt Romney, the apotheosis of establishment guys, won out over a gaggle of social conservatives and libertarians. Seems like business as usual in the GOP, right?
Dig deeper. There’s a case to be made that the age of the establishment Republicans is finally over. In my state, Dick Lugar, the stately older conservative got bumped by a Tea Party upstart in a primary. The two candidates who won states in the presidential primary, Santorum and Gingrich, are social conservatives who grabbed the Tea Party label. Gingrich’s career is over, but Santorum is still quite young. Most of the Republicans who seem influential, from Sarah Palin to Chris Christie, are riding the Tea Party label. There are no Bushes, or Doles, or old Nixonites left.
My prediction: This is the last presidential election cycle where establishment Republicans are in charge of the ship. The establishment’s “bench” has been decimated by defections and primary bump-offs. Those who remain are probably cowed by the Tea Party. In other words, if Romney loses, the successors will be Tea Party adherents. In a system where power see-saws between parties, that means were going to have a Tea Party president within the decade. Start preparing now.
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The Fragile Network of Econ Soc Readings
The current issue of Accounts has an interesting article by Dan Wang called “Is there a Canon in Economic Sociology?”. It’s a study of the contents of more than fifty Econ Soc syllabuses looking to discover which authors are most often assigned. (I don’t remember seeing the call for the data, which is odd.) There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, including a variety of measures of “canonicity” and different ways of counting the importance of different texts and authors. Once you start thinking about it, there are all kinds of complications involved in deciding how to code and classify things. Here I just want to higlight an interesting aspect of this network of references:
According to the article, this picture presents the largest component of reference class session co-listings. “Nodes represent references, node size reflects degree centrality, and more orange nodes reflect higher degree centrality. A tie between two nodes signals that two nodes have been co-listed in the same class session on at least two separate syllabi. Tie thickness reflects the number of syllabi on which two references were co-listed in the same class session.” Note that the unit here is articles, so authors may appear in different places in the figure based on different works of theirs.
Two things struck me about this. First was that the visualization is consistent with the field characterization in Marion Fourcade’s ABS piece from a few years ago—you’ve got the structural/embeddedness people and the broadly cultural/Zelizerian work forming one large group, and then (disconnected from both) the insurgent social studies of science/finance people. Second, though, was that the network is quite fragile. But, second, the big component in the network is fragile. If you deleted Geertz (1978), Granovetter (2005), and Swedberg (2001), then you’d have four separate components which you might crudely characterize as soc of finance, culture/Zelizer, Granovetter/network embeddedness/social capital, and Polanyi/political embeddedness. Moreover, two of the bridge pieces are more reviews than research pieces: the Granovetter 2005 is his JEP piece, I think, and the Swedberg piece is his “Sociology and Game Theory” paper, I believe. The Geertz paper (the Bazaar one) is a surprisingly tenuous bridge between the structural and the cultural approaches.
Another thing I’d be interested in seeing is the list of actual works the labels refer to—most of them I know unambiguously, but there are a few that are ambiguous (because the author published more than one thing that year) and I’d be interested in seeing which one is being counted.
Update: As Omar points out below, this fragility interpretation is all wrong, because I failed to notice the tie is defined by whether the readings are assigned in the same week or not. As you were.
books and business cycles
Guest blogging for Megan McArdle at the Atlantic, Garrett Jones summarizes a new paper in the American Economic Review showing that books sales predict business cycles:
She [Michelle Alexopoulous] found that books really do predict booms. In her paper looking at new books from 1955-1997, she found that new technical books predicted between 1/6 and 1/5 of all medium-term changes in business capital investment. Total GDP and (to a more modest extent) hours of work moved together with new tech books, usually with a lag of a couple of years.
Further, she found that a good economy didn’t predict more tech books, and a bad economy didn’t predict fewer. So reverse causation isn’t the story.
Finally, as a placebo, she checked to see whether years when lots of history books were published tended to precede economic booms. They didn’t. Alexopoulos made a good effort of kicking the tires on this hypothesis. And remember: She only looked at technical books: There are surely a lot of other new ideas in fields like management, biotech, and accounting that matter for business productivity, and they also seem to come in waves.
In other words, as people get ready to create wealth, they require new knowledge, a search indicated by book sales. Nice paper.
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Gayja Vu
Michael Dorf and Sid Tarrow have an Op-Ed piece today on CNN titled “How the right helped launch same-sex marriage movement.” It’s a clever argument about the role that the conservative movement played in galvanizing and even decisively re-orienting the direction taken by one of its antagonists, to its likely long-run cost:
How, in less than a decade, did America go from being a country in which some states punished gay sex with criminal penalties to one in which the highest elected official in the land now champions the right of same-sex couples to marry? The answer can be found in the interaction between supporters of marriage equality and the Christian conservative movement over the past few decades. As late as the 1980s, same-sex marriage was on virtually no one’s radar screen. … It happened like this: In 1993, in the case of Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court decided that the state’s prohibition on same-sex marriage was discriminatory. In 1998, Hawaii’s voters passed a referendum giving the legislature the right to declare same-sex marriage illegal, but in the meantime, social conservatives had taken the issue to the national stage, where it promised to pay handsome dividends. Same-sex marriage was still so unpopular that in 1996, tremulous Democrats joined Republicans in overwhelmingly passing the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, signed by President Bill Clinton. … DOMA was thus a preemptive strike by the opponents of marriage equality.
But the act helped to call into being the very marriage equality movement it aimed to combat. Encouraged by their surprising, if temporary, success in Hawaii, and outraged by the blatantly homophobic arguments that had been made in favor of DOMA, the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender movement reluctantly began to turn its energy and resources toward the goal of marriage equality.
This was a fundamental shift, not made without controversy within the movement, where many worried that calling for marriage equality would unleash the fury of the Christian Right. Whereas many activists had given higher priority to such issues as employment discrimination, HIV/AIDS education and protection against hate crimes, the denial of marriage equality now came to be seen as a broad symbol of second-class citizenship for LGBT Americans.
And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage. Nice—counterintuitive, compelling, and more than a little ironic. But while I was reading this it struck me that I had heard this argument made somewhere before. Where? Oh yeah.
In her 2008 book, helpfully titled How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism, Tina Fetner argues, in part:
To many, it may have appeared that the push for legislation on same-sex marriage was driven largely by the lesbian and gay movement, but in the early 1990s few lesbian and gay movement organizations were engaged in activism around this issue. There had been a few unsuccessful court cases in which same-sex couples challenged marriage-licensing practices, when one case in Hawaii caught the nation’s attention, as well as that of the lesbian and gay movement. In Baehr v. Lewin … the Hawaiian state supreme court ruled that the practice of denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples would be unconstitutional unless the state could provide a “compelling state interest” for it … Up to this point, same-sex marriage had not been a top priority for the lesbian and gay movement. Many in the lesbian and gay community oppose same-sex marriage as a patriarchal, heterosexual institution … Others saw [it] as an equal rights issue and, indeed, supported an assimilationist tack … Rather than spark a major internal debate … most lesbian and gay movement organizations simply ignored the issue putting it on the back burner in light of other priorities such as non-discrimination ordinances and anti-gay violence. …
Religious right activists, on the other hand, saw their opposition to same-sex marriage as an issue with strong cultural resonance and popular support. Many leaders in the religious right considered marriage to be a tipping point for conservatives who had not yet joined the movement. … From this perspective, to allow two men to marry would trample upon a holy gift. The idea of two women or two men marrying each other evoked such passion among conservative, evangelical Christians that the religious right considered this to be an issue worth pursuing.
Pursue it they did, in a massive grassroots mobilization throughout the country. At the federal level the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was quickly passed by the Senate and House and signed into law by President Clinton. … Leaders in the religious right may have thought that this issue would be an easy victory, given how important the symbolic aspects of marriage are to many people. … However, perhaps unexpectedly, this issue has also mobilized the lesbian and gay movement in response, including many lesbian and gay people who had not previously been involved in activism (Pinello 2006).
Dozens of new lesbian and gay movement organizations emerged to fight for same-sex marriage. National organizations began to devote resources to the marriage issue and, to varying degrees, to partnership issues more generally. To a greater extent than ever before, lesbian and gay movement organizations began to frame lesbian and gay rights in terms of relationships and families, rather than just individuals.
And thus did we start down the road toward the unlikely spectacle of a Black President endorsing gay marriage.
Of course, Dorf and Tarrow might have come up with this idea themselves: they’re smart people. If they did, I can see why they might want to claim it as their own—it’s a good idea! Too bad. It seems to me they were scooped fair and square by someone writing five years ago, and they should have acknowledged it. I suppose it’s not outside the realm of possibility that while researching the question of how the religious right shaped lesbian and gay activism they never came across How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. Either way, it looks like a case of credit where credit’s due. I’m well aware that the literary conventions of Op-Eds do not accommodate the tedious mechanics of scholarly attribution. But there’s plenty of room for a single “As sociologist Tina Fetner has argued in her book …” —if not in this particular Op-Ed, then at least next time round.
my god, it’s full of stars!
I just love Astronomy magazine and its website. They have a cool photo feature called “Picture of the Day.” This one was contributed by reader by Kfir Simon from Gan Yavne, Israel.
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gay rights, politicians, and public opinion
Roughly speaking, political science research shows that politicians follow voter preferences, but there are some big exceptions. Turns out that gay rights is one of those big exceptions. A paper by Katherine Krimmel, Jeffrey Lax, and Justin Phillips of Columbia political science uses recent data and compares with roll call votes on voter views on gay rights. The conclusion from the comparison?
While there is sometimes a counter-majoritarian pro-gay bias, there is more often a much larger counter-majoritarian anti-gay bias. This anti-gay bias appears to have grown over time. The ideological direction of incongruence varies by legislator characteristics such as race. Black congressman are more likely to vote against their constituents’ preferences in favor of gay rights, relative to white (Democratic) congressman. This has important implications not only for congressional politics and democratic representation, but also judicial treatment of gay rights issues.
Bottom line: Gay rights are delayed because politicians are too scared to vote the way we want them to.
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new book – the organization of higher education
My friend Michael Bastedo at Michigan recently published a new collection of essays called The Organization of Higher Education: Managing Colleges for a New Era. The book introduces the reader to cutting edge research in universities, strategy, and organizational behavior.
Chapters include Brian Pusser and Simon Marginson on global rankings, J. Douglas Toma on strategy and Anna Neuman on organizational cognition in higher education. Social movement fans should check out my chapter on movements and higher education.
Recommended!
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gabriel rossman, pirate!
Our friend and guest blogger emeritus, Gabriel Rossman, has an article in the Atlantic on the subject of piracy. Gabriel uses piracy as an opportunity to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of traditional economic explanations. The key point is that people will often rely on ideas of what is “fair” versus an application of price theory.
Although the discipline of economics has many valuable things to teach us about how markets work, especially in the long-run, the subjective experience of someone bargaining does not necessarily reflect thinking through how a rational actor would apply price theory (competitive markets) or game theory (monopolistic markets) to the situation. Rather people take moralized approaches to exchange and seem to apply various relational models to exchange, which includes not only market exchange but also gift exchange, patron-client ties, and primitive communism. Moreover, even when people accept that a situation is one of market exchange it does not come naturally to think of price like modern economists think of it, as “market clearing.” Rather much as people intuitively expect physical objects to behave by Buridan’s impetus rather than Newton’s inertia, people’s intuitive notions about price can have less to do with how economics thinks of it than how Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx thought of it, as “just price” or “fair price.”
Recommended.
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brutal book review
From Nina Strohminger’s review of philosopher Colin McGinn’s book on The Meaning of Disgust. From the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticsm:
In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. Colin McGinn’s book belongs to the latter category.
It gets better:
The sad fact is the reader would learn more about disgust by reading Mad magazine.
For the rest of us—those who actually care about disgust, or aesthetic emotions, or scholarship at all— the book is bound to disappoint. “Who can deny the mood-destroying effect of an errant flatus just at the moment of erotic fervor?” he writes. McGinn’s book is just such a flatus, threatening to spoil an exciting intellectual moment for the rest of us. Sometimes with books, as with farts, it’s better to just hold it in.
Nina, don’t damage the fine reputation of Mad magazine.
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the naomi schaefer riley/black studies thing
For the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of email over a recent blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, wrote a post about how Black Studies should be eliminated because of the low quality of its research, especially its dissertations. Not surprisingly, there was an outcry and the Chronicle fired Schaefer.
Even though I’ve spent my career analyzing the discipline of Black Studies, I’ve been slow to respond for a few reasons. I was traveling while this broke out last week. Scholars within Black Studies are perfectly capable of defending themselves. Also, I didn’t want to comment while people slinging mud back and forth. Instead, I’m writing a detailed commentary for the Teachers College Record that will appear next month.
Probably the most important reason that I didn’t rush to respond is that I’ve heard this before, many times. While doing the research for my book on Black Studies’ history, I read many, many calls for the elimination of Black Studies from conservative pundits.* The roster of conservative Black Studies haters is a long one: San Francisco State’s John Bunzel (1969), Martin Kilson at Harvard (1970s), Charles Sykes’ Profscam (1988), Dinesh D’Souza Illiberal Education (1991), John Derbyshire in National Review Online (2002), Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2005), and now we have Naomi Schaefer (2012). There are so many, I’m sure I’ve missed some good ones.
The pattern goes something like this. A conservative writer will get an op-ed, or blog post in modern times, and call for the elimination of the field. Sometimes, it’s part of a book attacking higher education for being too liberal. Then, liberals will jump into the fray. There are charges and counter charges of racism. Then, silence for a few years and the whole pattern starts over. It’s an academic Seinfeld episode. No hugging, no learning.
When I read Schaefer’s criticism, I just said to myself, in a Reaganesque tone, “There you go again.” It becomes so predictable after a while, so bland. Even within the history of Black Studies skepticism, Schaefer’s screed isn’t that insightful. Basically, the entire blog post is simply picking a few unfinished dissertations and mocking them. Dissertations certainly deserve criticism, but Schaefer even admits that she hasn’t read them. She just hates the concept of the dissertations. For example, one mocked dissertation addresses the role of Blacks among midwives. Schaefer finds this to be a silly topic. All I can say is that a conservative who thinks childbirth to be unworthy of scholarly attention reveals an epic smallness of mind.
That’s why I didn’t rush into this. No need to jump into a predictable fight that I’ve seen too many times before. Instead, I’ll slow down and write a detailed commentary on a question that I wish that Schaefer had addressed: who gets their own their own discipline? In the mean time, I’ll be happy to watch from the sidelines. Maybe, if Schaefer decides to explore the field of Black Studies and do the readings, I’d be happy to send her a copy of my book and we could have an extended discussion about Black Studies’ history and its scholarly contributions.
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* And yes, Schaefer fits the mold. She’s given a two week journalism seminar at Hillsdale College, which is a well known conservative liberal arts college. She also writes for publications with conservative editorial boards such as the Wall Street Journal. Being conservative neither qualifies or disqualifies you from commenting on Black Studies, but it does fit the broader pattern of conservative attacks on the discipline.
herbert simon’s organizational life-world
Former orgtheory guest blogger JC Spender has written a mega book chapter titled (pdf) Herbert Alexander Simon: Philosopher of the Organizational Life-World. The piece is part biography, part intellectual synthesis, part tribute. I read it and learned lots that I did not know about Simon. If you’re an orghead, the piece is certainly worth reading.
what’s the right price for a hostage?
On the Atlantic blog, former orgtheory guest blogger, Gabriel Rossman, runs through the complications in deriving the price pirates should ask for a hostage.
[M]uch like how most people who haven’t studied statistics balk at the idea that the ratio of sample size to population size is irrelevant to statistical inference, people seem to have a strong intuition that the “market price” is relevant to a bilateral monopoly even though the whole idea of a bilateral monopoly is that there is not really a market but only a series of discrete one-off transactions. In the absence of substitutability, “comparable” transactions are irrelevant as they don’t imply opportunity cost. This is the main thing I found so fascinating about the Planet Money episode, over and over again the hostage’s party balked at the pirates demands as unreasonable in being out of line with the “market price.” We only get the pirates’ story second hand, but apparently at no point did they explain to the hostage’s party that “market price” doesn’t really exist in a bilateral monopoly. (Maybe Mogadishu University needs a better econ department).
There are two ways, which are only partially incompatible, to look at why people insist that there is a market price. The simple model is to see us as making Bayesian inferences about the price the other party is willing to accept. If a pirate asks me for $10 million when I know that previous ransoms for similar hostages from similar pirates were about $1 million, I face two possibilities. It may be that I’m facing an usually greedy or unreasonable pirate and $10 million really is the price from which he will not budge. However it seems more likely that I’m dealing with a regular pirate, who like most pirates in the past will ultimately settle for about $1 million but who is just floating a high initial figure in case I’m especially bad at this. In this sense the distribution of prices for similar transactions may not be directly relevant in the sense of providing opportunities for substitution (or the credible threat to avail myself of them) but it is still relevant as information about the zone of possible agreement. This is consistent with the Planet Money story in that Filipinos are cheaper to ransom than Europeans by an order of magnitude.
I’m amazed that pirates negotiate at all. Doesn’t this diminish their control? Do kidnappers do the same thing? Given that all of my knowledge of kidnapping scenarios is based on movies, my sense is that kidnappers try to avoid negotiation as this just seems to be a tactic used by law enforcement to ferret out their position. Why wouldn’t pirates operate by the same code?
homo bay areaus
What is it about the Bay Area? I lived there for eight years and I’ve continued to maintain ties for another fifteen. Yet, it wasn’t until last Thursday, when I was visiting with my former student Rashawn Ray, that I was bluntly asked “what’s the deal with Bay Area people?” It’s not just an urban place, it’s not just a diverse place, and it’s not just a liberal place. There’s something more to it than that.
Let’s start with the Bay Area’s unique geography. It’s a ring shaped community that stretches from Silicon Valley, up through Richmond, around Marin, into San Francisco and then down into the peninsula. Each area represents a different type of community. In Silicon Valley, you are at the commanding heights of the world economy, while in Richmond you have the remnants of the Black working class. In Berkeley and Stanford, you have intellect and high culture. San Francisco is a petri dish of grungy subcultures. There’s also the Bay Area’s place in the global economy. It’s a compact metropolitan area perched between the American West and the Pacific.
This helps us flesh out the Bay Area ethos. It’s intellectual, multicultural, and highly liberal. It’s ambitious and extremely competitive, while being precious and a bit snooty. It’s also grungy and alternative. Appearing effete from the outside, but up close, it’s a culture based on hard work. As my spouse likes to say, Danville is where you live if you’ve earned your money. You’ll see a lot of Asian engineers and managers in Danville.
There’s one aspect of the Bay Area ethos that deserves mention – its heterogeneous pragmatism. People will bring together all kinds of different skills and life experiences in their work. For example, I recently met a man who was in the army, studies circus art, like juggling, and now does traditional healing like shiatsu. This man exposed his son to many of these skills, which helped the son excel in high school athletics and earn a scholarship at a leading university.
It’s this ability to successfully bring together seemingly unrelated skills is very Bay Area. Perhaps the most remarkable example is Steve Jobs, who brought a love of calligraphy and design to the staid hobby of home computing. It’s not surprising that Jobs grew up in the Bay Area. In contrast, most of the other Silicon Valley moguls built their fortunes by exploiting a single idea (e.g., DOS or social networking), often hatched in other places.
The Bay Area ethos is a rare conglomerate of things that don’t normally go together. It should be enjoyed.
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Practical and Theoretical Knowledge
My friend Jason Stanley has a blog post up at the New York Times‘s Opinionator section that might be of interest to you social theorists out there. Jason’s a philosopher of language who teaches at Rutgers. He attacks a distinction which is by now extremely well-entrenched in social theory generally and in specific theories of action in the sociology of culture, the sociology of organizations, and elsewhere—namely, the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge:
Humans are thinkers, and humans are doers. There is a natural temptation to view these activities as requiring distinct capacities. When we reflect, we are guided by our knowledge of truths about the world. By contrast, when we act, we are guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions. If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. …
Most of us are inclined immediately to classify activities like repairing a car, riding a bicycle, hitting a jump shot, taking care of a baby or cooking a risotto as exercises of practical knowledge. And we are inclined to classify proving a theorem in algebra, testing a hypothesis in physics and constructing an argument in philosophy as exercises of the capacity to operate with knowledge of truths. The cliché of the learned professor, as inept in practical tasks as he is skilled in theoretical reasoning, is just as much a leitmotif of popular culture as that of the dumb jock. The folk idea that skill at action is not a manifestation of intellectual knowledge is also entrenched in contemporary philosophy, though it has antecedents dating back to the ancients.
According to the model suggested by this supposed dichotomy, exercises of theoretical knowledge involve active reflection, engagement with the propositions or rules of the theory in question that guides the subsequent exercise of the knowledge. Think of the chess player following an instruction she has learned for an opening move in chess. In contrast, practical knowledge is exercised automatically and without reflection. The skilled tennis player does not reflect on instructions before returning a volley — she exercises her knowledge of how to return a volley automatically. Additionally, the fact that exercises of theoretical knowledge are guided by propositions or rules seems to entail that they involve instructions that are universally applicable — the person acting on theoretical knowledge has an instruction booklet, which she reflects upon before acting. In contrast, part of the skill that constitutes skill at tennis involves reacting to situations for which no instruction manual can prepare you. The skilled tennis player is skilled in part because she knows how to adjust her game to a novel serve, behavior that does not seem consistent with following a rule book.
… But once one begins to bear down upon the supposed distinction between the practical and the theoretical, cracks appear. When one acquires a practical skill, one learns how to do something. But when one acquires knowledge of a scientific proposition, that too is an instance of learning. In many (though not all) of the world’s languages, the same verb is used for practical as well as theoretical knowledge (for example, “know” in English, “savoir” in French). More important, when one reflects upon any exercise of knowledge, whether practical or theoretical, it appears to have the characteristics that would naïvely be ascribed to the exercise of both practical and intellectual capacities. A mathematician’s proof of a theorem is the ideal example of the exercise of theoretical knowledge. Yet in order to count as skilled at math, the mathematician’s training — like that of the tennis player — must render her adept in reacting to novel difficulties she may encounter in navigating mathematical reality. Nor does exercising one’s knowledge of truths require active reflection. I routinely exercise my knowledge that one operates an elevator by depressing a button, without giving the slightest thought to the matter. From the other direction, stock examples of supposedly merely practical knowledge are acquired in apparently theoretical ways. People can and often do learn how to cook a risotto by reading recipes in cookbooks.
Jason develops the point a bit more in his post and rather more rigorously in recent book, which I haven’t read in any detail as of yet. I won’t say that I’m entirely convinced, and in particular I wonder whether the argument he’s making is going to turn on some very fine-grained aspects of technical philosophy of language which I’m not really in a position to assess. However, the strong division between practical and theoretical knowledge is such a shibboleth in social theory—variously entrenched in Wittgensteinian, phenomenological and cognitive versions—and such a great deal rests on it, that it’s worth taking the time to think against it once in a while to see where that goes.
what does your facebook news feed look like?
I don’t prune my friendship network on Facebook. I friend just about anyone and this is what I get. What does yours look like?
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fascists in the desert
Over at Souciant, Charlie Bertsch has an essay on right wing populism in Arizona. He argues that Arizona populism is a bad sign because it shows how fascist tendencies have moved from the hinterlands into a major population center:
Could a similar normalization of extreme ideas be underway in the United States? Even as poll after poll documents a liberalization in American attitudes with regard to controversial issues such as gay marriage, medical marijuana, extramarital sex and intellectual property, conservatives in the country’s smaller, more rural states have managed to pass a range of measures that would turn back the clock fifty years or more. And this legislative push is no haphazard affair, but the result of careful planning by right-wing groups who have been greatly dissatisfied with the pace of “progress” at the national level.
What makes Arizona particularly significant in this context is that, unlike states like Alabama, Kansas or South Dakota, the population is much larger and located predominantly in two large metropolitan centers. Despite its large number of retirees, the state looks a lot more like the future of the United States — or at least how that future looked in the recent past, before the global recession — than the other states at the vanguard of the conservative backlash against the depravities of postmodernity.
I’m not a populist and I think anti-immigration sentiment in Arizona is profoundly bad. But I’ll disagree with Charlie a little on the meaning of Arizona.
Arizona is a state that has had a long history of white privilege. A lot of it has to do with the fact that White settlers could prosper while Mexican migrants were ping-ponged by the Mexican and American governments. Thus, I’ve viewed Arizona’s strident race and immigration politics as reactionary but specific. These conditions don’t exist to the same degree in other nearby states, such as Colorado or New Mexico.
We should definitely be on the watch for populism and its extreme cousin, fascism. But maybe the message of Arizona isn’t that it’s the future. Rather, as Charlie suggests in other parts of his essay, the lesson is that a place with a lot of White resentment of migrants is a great incubator for policies that can be copied by racial demagogues in other places.
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questions for celeste watkins-hayes and others about africana studies
Recently, our friend and emeritus guest blogger, Celeste Watkins-Hayes helped organize a conference at Northwestern on the topic of African-American Studies doctoral programs. Sadly, I was not able to attend, even though I’ve spent much of my academic career analyzing the evolution of African-American Studies. I hope that the proceedings will be published so I can read what people have to say about the status of the field.
Until then, I was hoping participants in the conference could tell me if any of the following questions were addressed:
- Temple University began its doctoral program in 1983. Has there been any comprehensive analysis of the graduates of that program? How many graduates? Where do they teach? Do they produce well cited scholarship?
- Any evidence that the afrocentric approach incubated at Temple is being transmitted through its PhD graduates? Or is this a dead issue in the field?
- Imbalance: Numerous observers have noted that Africana doctoral programs have done well and they’ve expanded in elite research institutions, but Africana Studies remains an embattled field of study in other institutional contexts. Is this claim true? If so, how can the recent growth of Africana Studies be translated to liberal arts colleges and regional universities?
- PhD Careers: Africana Studies units tend to be small in size. Is there enough room to absorb the PhD graduates? Or is the Africana Studies PhD more like an interdisciplinary degree that allows you to teach in a range of social science and humanities programs?
Any insights into these questions, or other comments on the conference welcome.
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