brayden in da house!!!!!

Fellow blogger Brayden will be speaking at the University of Michigan in the Strategy seminar at the Ross School of Business. Friday morning at 10:30pm. Required attendance!

if i lived in new zealand…

… I could be a test pilot for a friggin’ ject pack!!!! Awesome!!!

tolerating failure

Chris Uggen points to an interesting paper coauthored by one of his colleagues in Minnesota’s Carlson School that shows a link between an organization’s tolerance for failure and innovation. Tracy Yue Wang and Xuan Tian find that venture capital firms that tolerate more failure are more likely to produce highly innovative IPOs. They operationalize failure tolerance as the waiting time before terminating an underperforming project. The longer a VC waits to terminate a failed project, the more tolerant it must be of failure. Here’s the paper.

At one level this seems like a standard high risk/high reward model of innovation. But I think the argument is a bit more nuanced.  Usually we think of risk tolerance as seeking projects that have high performance variance.  But even big risk takers are encouraged to cut and run when it’s clear that it isn’t working. Failure tolerance might be something else entirely. Tian and Wang argue that failure tolerance involves a sort of cultural transformation in the way one’s organization views and accepts failure.

After addressing the endogeneity issue, we go further to investigate the persistence of the failure tolerance effect on startups’ innovation. We find that the effect of VC failure tolerance on startup firms’ innovation persists long after VC firms exit their investments. More interestingly, the effect is even more persistent if an entrepreneurial firm starts to interact with VC investors in the beginning stages of development when the firm’s culture is immature. These results suggest that the failure tolerance effect reflects not just a direct and temporary VC firm influence while the VC investors are present in the startup firm, but also a more persistent cultural effect. That is, the VC investors’ attitudes towards failure have likely been internalized by the startup firm and become part of the firm’s culture.

Interesting idea.

dude, what happened to analytical marxism?

Analytical marxism – a big deal about 20 years ago. Big names, fancy books… but you don’t hear much these days. Why not? Can anyone help me out here? The wiki just has a section called “denoument” that’s uninformative.

thank you!

I’d like to thank our February guest bloggers – Tim Bartley and Mark Kenendy. Great job – very stimulating posts.

finance and human values – from “the point”

There’s a hip new magazine from the University of Chicago, “The Point.” The goal is to provide long form, substantive responses and critiques to various issues. From an article about finance in the American economy by Etay Zwick:

The myth of the financial sector goes something like this: only men and women equipped with the highest intelligence, the will to work death-defying hours and the most advanced technology can be entrusted with the sacred and mysterious task of ensuring the growth of the economy. Using complicated financial instruments, these elites (a) spread the risks involved in different ventures and (b) discipline firms to minimize costs—thus guaranteeing the best investments are extended sufficient credit. According to this myth, Wall Street is the economy’s private nutritionist, advising and assisting only the most motivated firms—and these fitter firms will provide jobs and pave the path to national prosperity. If the rest of us do not understand exactly why trading credit derivatives and commodity futures would achieve all this, this is because we are not as smart as the people working on Wall Street. Even Wall Street elites are happy to admit that they do not really know how the system works; such admissions only testify to the immensity of their noble task.

Many economists have tried to disabuse us of this myth. Twenty-five years before the recent financial crisis, Nobel Laureate James Tobin demonstrated that a very limited percent of the capital flow originating on Wall Street goes toward financing “real investments”—that is, investments in improving a firm’s production process. When large American corporations invest in new technology, they rely primarily on internal funds, not outside credit. The torrents of capital we see on Wall Street are devoted to a different purpose—speculation, gambling for capital gains. Finance’s second founding myth, that the stock market in particular is an “efficient” source for funding business ventures, simply doesn’t cohere with the history of American industrial development. When firms have needed to raise outside capital, they have generally issued debt—not stock. The stock market’s chief virtue has always been that it allows business elites to cash out of any enterprise by transferring ownership to other elites. Old owners then enjoy their new wealth, while new owners manage the same old corporation. The reality is that business elites promote the stock market far more than the stock market promotes economic growth.

And:

the one with the discussion of gender and biology

A few weeks ago, Omar wrote a dismissive comment about the role of biological arguments in the sociology of gender:

But the main point is this: all of these lines of research, from studies of child rearing, housework, sex-work, gender stratification in occupations (e.g. Charles and Grusky) and organizations, etc. have little to do with biology. These lines of work will continue on their merry way regardless of what position sociologists decide to take on the biology/gender debate. They are about cultural frames, institutions, organizations, sorting, cumulative advantage mechanisms and micro-interaction not about whether certain traits are the result of “biology” or “socialization.”

Since I’m not a specialist in gender, I can’t say if biological theories are supported, but I can say that it’s not theoretically irrelevant. A few reasons:

1. Biology is a cost and constraint on action: For example, in studies of achievement in science, it is often argued that female scientists have lower achievement because they must take time out for childbearing, while men do not have the same constraint. Reproduction simply is a hard time budget constraint.
2. Biology may affect preferences: We have a lot of evidence that personality and temperment vary greatly among people, leading to different life course outcomes, consumption patterns, career choices, and political participation. Theoretically, these might be linked to biologically defined sex.
3. Biology may affect strategies and risk taking: It is often found in studies of bargaining and negotiation that women and men employ different strategies reflecting different levels of percieved risk and pay-off. Theoretically, these might be related to biologically defined sex.

I am not claiming that any of these hypotheses are true. For example, I used to believe hypothesis 1 (childbearing decreases time for scientific research), but now I think academic career gender gaps are probably better explained in terms of networks within the academy (i.e., achievement seems to depend on getting in the right invisible college). I’m open to the possibility that the null hypothesis on gender is true on all these types of issues, but it’s not something to be assumed away. It’s got to be proven.

soc phd programs #10: gender

Previous editions: strat/work, education, org studies,  culture, urban, soc psych, demography, political sociology, health.

What sociology programs are good for studying gender? I’ll also accept programs in related disciplines if they regularly produce scholars who are empirically minded social scientists, as opposed to political theorists or legal scholars who talk about women’s rights. Stanford is strong in this area: Paula England, Cecilia Ridgeway, and Shelley Correll. As a historically strong social psychology program, I bet other faculty would be helpful as well. Add other gender strong programs in the comments.

notes and fieldnotes on cultural wealth

I do realize that sociologists are not necessarily trained in the history of the world and its regions, so before offering some scraps from my fieldnotes on how cultural wealth manifests itself in the marketplace, I will provide some background on Thailand and its history of impression management.

Thailand is among the medium-sized countries in Southeast Asia whose name means “land of the free.”  Nearly a tenth of the country’s labor force works in the travel and tourism sector, which generates up to 7 percent of the country’s GDP, exceeds all other sectors in export earnings, and represents the largest contribution to GDP compared with other countries in the region.  The 2007 report of the Economist Intelligence Unit notes that Thailand’s travel and tourism sector accounts for about “27% of the regional market and 1.5% of the world market.”  In the late 1970s, Thailand’s fourth National Economic and Social Development Plan (1977-1981) officially recognized tourism development as critical for the country’s economic development,[1] and the eighties and nineties represented a golden age for Thailand’s tourism boom, heralding the 1990s when Thailand registered the highest economic growth rates in the world.

The ascent of Thailand to the number one tourism spot did not result from “natural” conditions.  Instead, the character and nature of the country had to be cultivated.  Its cultivation depends on the accumulated, contingent encounters that the country’s official and unofficial representatives have had with other country representatives higher in international status.  These encounters have had their own manifest goals that did not always recognize or fully anticipate how their realization would affect the country’s attractiveness for outsiders.  For example, the Thai historian Thongchai argues that Thailand’s political leadership emphasized the country’s cultural as well as its political coherence as a means of protecting its territorial sovereignty.  When the French began establishing protectorates where large populations of Laos people settled, they began to eye the northeast of Thailand where there are now more people of Lao descent than there are Lao in Laos.  Thai diplomacy emphasized the cultural coherence of its northeastern territories with the rest of Thailand’s political body.  This emphasis on defining the cultural and geographic boundaries of the country, and the pressure of having western colonial powers pressing against the northeastern, northwestern, and southern borders had clear political aims, but the latent function was the defining of the national character of Thailand.  The Thai government consolidated a cultural reputation for being a kingdom whose cultural traditions had not been interrupted or destroyed by colonial incursions.

The political goals of remaining free from colonization and of obtaining the respect of world powers such as the United States have led to image outcomes the country’s leadership did not intend, namely as a place for no-holds-barred fun, sex, and sun.  As the United States military established bases in Thailand during the conflicts in Vietnam and in Indo-China, Thailand’s reputation flourished as a perfect getaway for rest, relaxation, and commercial sex.  Indeed, the US military treaty with Thailand designated it as an official site for US soldiers to enjoy “Rest and Recreation” in the 1960s and 70s (Enloe 1989; Nuttavuthisit 2009; Truong 1990).  When these soldiers returned home, they carried with them fantastic tales of the beaches of Pattaya and the brothels of Bangkok mixed with the wonders of temples, palaces, and exotic marketplaces.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the majority of tourists to Thailand are single men or that weekend flights from more repressive countries such as Singapore are full of men taking a weekend escape to Bangkok, some dressed in their designer jeans and tightly fitting tops, wheeling a carry-on sufficient for the task at hand.  The nightlife does not equal commercial sex, but the trade is such that newspaper editorials have lamented that Thailand gets too much press for sex and nightlife but not enough for its history, food, temples, culture, and natural beauty.

According to marketing specialist Krittinee Nuttavuthisit working on the Branding Thailand Project (The Branding Thailand Project was initiated in 2001 by the Government of Thailand in cooperation with the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University), the commercial sex trade has emerged as a blot on the nation’s image in recent consumer surveys.  Nuttavuthisit highlights some of these negative perceptions based on thirty in-depth interviews in the United States and on one hundred and twenty online surveys.  Some of the online questions include: “What is the first country that comes to mind when thinking about ‘silk?”; “What are the first words that come to mind when thinking of Thailand?”; “Which three words describe Thai products?”  Among the responses to these queries, commercial sex work, the poor, and poverty stood on the negative side of the ledge and the exoticism of the country as well as the friendliness of its people stood on the positive side.  Nuttavuthisit argues that people who have never been to Thailand had bad impressions of the country based on television programs and magazine articles about Thailand’s commercial sex trade and child prostitution.  With an estimated two to three hundred thousand sex workers in Thailand according to the United States Department of State Human Rights Report (2007), and with reports in The Economist stating “throw a stone in Bangkok, and the chances are you will hit a gambler or a brothel goer” as well as depictions of the sex industry in a Christina Aguilera music video and in the “Bridget Jones’ Diary: The Edge of Reason” movie (Nuttavuthisit 2009), such negative perceptions present themselves as easily recognizable and quickly associated characteristics of Thailand;  “The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1993) once referred to Bangkok as ‘The capital of Thailand, a place often associated with prostitution’” (quoted in Nuttavuthisit 2009: 5).

The Tourism Authority of Thailand and the Department of Export Promotion have focused considerable energies on changing Bangkok to be a place associated with culture, heritage, fashion, and high-quality tourism.  Thai food is a cultural resource that enables the government to promote Thailand as a distinguished “Kitchen to the World”; Thai textiles and handcrafted jewelry, “Land of Fashion”; Thai artisans concentrated in the Chiang Mai Province, “City of Handicrafts”

Scraps from an Ethnographer’s Notebook

Here are some observations from three years ago a the Bangkok International Gifts (BIG) Show:

• The physical layout of the fair leaves no doubt that there is a “charity” display of the One Tambon One Product (OTOP) goods beside the food court and there is the high-end display with the award winning designs at the polar opposite of the hall away from the food court.  At the heart of the hall is the officially sanctioned art where the placards provide the categorical identities for Thai art forms.
• Just behind the Bangkok International Housewares (BIH) exhibit is the 13^th National Ceramics Exhibition.  The national ceramics competition is the official cultural institution with non-monetary motives and it is juxtaposed with a display of the top house-wares in a museum like arrangement.  But placards on the museum exhibit are in Thai whereas those for the BIH showcase are in English.  This may create greater distance, barriers to entry for outsiders who are the English speakers.  This increases the authority of the cultural certifying institution’s display, perhaps.  [Fieldnotes 20 April 2007, Impact Center, Thailand]

Last week in Chiang Mai I spoke to some exporters who participated in that trade show three years ago. One informant talked about the difficulty of maintaining Thailand’s stature as an advanced country with unique cultural offerings, especially with the rise of China, Vietnam, and other sites with much lower costs or production. (This is complicated by the fact that a number of buyers are interested in “Asian” rather than in Thai-specific cultural motifs.) The only way that these exporters can survive is by moving up in the value chain and cultivating the symbolic value of their goods. They find themselves subject to the actions of the nation-state and other actors who promote different narratives about what Thailand and its people have to offer. Even the trade show hosted in Thailand by the Thais has run into trouble, according to some of the exporters I visited, because the government initiative to promote small village enterprises has started to contaminate the high-end exporters who compete on design and quality rather than on sympathy and price. I’m still writing up these notes about how these exporters and how the Department of Industrial Promotion use “Thainess” to increase the value of their products. These notes and others scraps are on their way.

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[1] (“History of Thailand’s National Tourist Office,” http://expo.nectec.or.th/tat/stable/history.html, accessed June 10, 2007.

hillary, categories and identities: who can speak?

Every once in a while, a singular event challenges me to think about familiar topics in new ways. That happened for me last month when I heard about and then read the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission.

The specific situation that brought these issues to the Supreme Court was whether Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group (website), could offer “Hillary: the Movie” (see the trailer here) through pay-per view television distribution. In its opinion (read it yourself), the court overturned several decades of legal precedent by striking down rules that limit corporate speech in the context of elections. For background, the opinion headnote (syllabus) explains:

As amended by §203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), federal election law prohibits corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for speech that is an “electioneering communication” or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate. 2 U. S. C. §441b.

Writing for the majority, however, Justice Kennedy acknowledges, “The movie, in essence, is a feature-length negative advertisement that urges viewers to vote against Senator Clinton for President.” So the court clearly saw it as electioneering. Rather than allowing the film as some clever way around existing limits (which is essentially what Citizens United was trying to do–see p. 9), the court said the limits established by §441b were themselves unconstitutional. About §441b, the opinion concludes (p.. 23), “Its purpose and effect are to silence entities whose voices the Government deems to be suspect.” Historically, media corporations have received the exemptions that allow them to run op-ed pieces, and the court notes this as a contradiction that invalidates the rule. Ultimately, the opinion concludes (p. 56), “under our law and tradition it seems stranger than fiction for our Government to make this [corporate] speech a crime.”

This ruling–and the broader topic of who gets to speak and when–has re-affirmed my belief in the relevance of research in organization theory. While it’s a wide field, there are plenty of scholars who, like me, think a lot about how interactions between social structure and cognition either challenge or reinforce categories, identities, institutions and logics. Speaking for myself, I’ve been particularly interested in public discourse found in the media and, lately, the role of corporate voice in media coverage.

Here are a few of the things this case has made me ask:

• Are there situations where organizational scholars should not view anthropomorhpic treatment of an organization as a level of analysis error?
• What does it mean for org theory that corporations are legally defined to be fictitious persons?
• If corporations are fictitious persons, what real persons are they most like?
• Since the modern corporate form tends to concentrate power in the hands of a small group of managers and directors (who, incidentally, are often not easily distinguishable as agents versus principals), does it make sense to think about how individual interests become corporate ones, and vice versa?
• As media corporations shed the facade of objectivity in favor of new more engaged styles of journalism aimed at a particular audience (such as the left or the right), what role does the popularity of these positions play in the valuation of the corporation?
• If corporations do become more active in political speech, will we see market institutions–things like the routines for mergers and acquisitions–morph into tools for silencing or activating corporate voices?

If you read or heard any of the analysis about this opinion or saw President Obama’s comment about this decision in his State of the Union message, you know this opinion has gotten a lot of people talking and thinking, not just me.

How about you? Comments welcome …

religion, science, and social movements

I should have seen this coming. Creationist advocates who have sought to change the way schools teach evolutionary theory now have a new target: climate change science. Movement activists urging schools to change their science curriculum are now linking their cause to anti-climate change rhetoric. Here’s a bit from the NY Times article:

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

This case is a fascinating example of movement framing. Benford and Snow call this frame bridging. Movements strengthen their cause by bringing together different coalitions of people to work together in a united cause. The framing part consists of rhetorically aligning the ideas so that they are seen as compatible or complementary.

But the case also made me think of another interesting theoretical issue. The Creationist movement has always tried to pose a real threat to the autonomy of science education by urging that a different logic of assessment and analysis should replace the standard scientific method. While I have no problem with this logic on its own, I think that most scientists find the logic of religion as incompatible with scientific training. Discussions about how the two coincide take place in philosophy classes or in the hallway after class. When you dogpile the issue by adding anti-climate change science to the agenda, I think the movement becomes a much more serious threat to scientific authority. The purpose (or at least the potential consequence) of the movement is to knock scientific authority off its pedestal that it has acquired in modern society. It’s a reverse of the trend that most of the 20th Century witnessed in which science gradually displaced religion as the primary arbiter of truth and understanding.

my third worst restaurant moment

1. Waitress: “We don’t have the clams.”

political science exports?

Question: What theories or research methods have been exported by political science to other social sciences? Poli sci has been a big importer. They sucked up rational choice and identification from econ, and now they are importing social network analysis from sociology. Do they have a trade imbalance?

thinking about the cultural wealth of nations

The two of us started talking about the cultural wealth of nations in the summer of 2006. We ended up as roommates in Durban for the World Congress of Sociology where we talked about how the narratives people tell about places influence the investments people are willing to make there. We were coming at the phenomenon from rather different empirical projects. Fred had been in Thailand and Costa Rica looking at handicraft markets and Nina was engaged in a study of foreign direct investment in Central and Eastern Europe. While our industries and our research sites were different, they led us to similar conclusions, namely that countries can be rich or poor in different types of “culture” and that these stocks of cultural wealth have real material consequences for local, regional, and national industries.

In concrete terms, this is what we saw. National governments used their industrial policies to present a particular “face” for the nation. What types of industries the government supported depended not only on its potential profitability but also on how these industries would represent a country’s cultural attributes. These concerns with face meant that indigenous arts were promoted in Thailand but largely ignored in Costa Rica. In a rather different context, Nina observed that foreign investors coming from different places were evaluated differently. By virtue of being Italian versus German, for instance, an investor was considered a more or less likely partner in a transaction because of the cultural conceptions surrounding their national origins and implications this had for the way they were thought of doing business. We were both convinced that these aspects of culture, in both material-object and reputational forms, have significant economic impacts but have not garnered enough attention from sociologists.

Identifying Existing Stocks of Cultural Wealth

But what exactly is cultural wealth? We believe it derives from the reputational attributes and cultural products of a nation. On the one hand, when one sees national governments expending resources to market the reputations and symbolic attributes of their countries to attract world tourists and foreign investment, for the sake of national economic development, one bears witness to the creation and maintenance of that nation’s cultural wealth. The narratives widely disseminated in the global, English-language press describing the country’s major attributes capture these reputations as well. On the other hand, we also consider a country’s cultural wealth to include the number and the significance of its world heritage sites, its stock of art and artifacts exhibited in the top ten international museums of art, and the number of widely recognized international arts prizes earned by its citizens. These wealth holdings are unevenly distributed across the globe and they may change over time. Monuments, rare objects, and narratives may mature, growing older and more valuable, or they may atrophy as the narratives become dull and less compelling.

Moreover, in many countries where cultural wealth is not widely recognized as existing, we argue, its absence and the need for its activation has been a product of local and national politics.

Activating Cultural Wealth

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) maintains the World Heritage Sites Registry.  But it would be a mistake to rely solely on this or similar existing databases of cultural heritage without understanding the politics and logistics of the database construction. Not all country governments are equally competent or motivated to register their stocks of cultural heritage with UNESCO, for instance. Some countries are better at this than others. Likewise, a country may have latent sources of cultural wealth but these sources have not yet been recognized by reporters working for the global, English-language news wires.

It is apparent that there are many regions or nations in the world whose cultural wealth has not yet been activated. The activation process is comprised of social performances and impression management strategies that influence how different audiences of observers, opinion makers, producers, and consumers experience and understand cultural wealth.

Audiences have a limited attention space and scarce resources for purchasing performances and cultural goods. As more cultural suppliers enter the stage, it becomes increasingly difficult for audiences to distinguish one cultural form from another. Rather than distinguishing a Thai from a Burmese style of production, general audiences may only be able to detect that these styles are simply “Asian.” The accompanying narratives of cultural specificity may not be compelling enough to triumph over other narratives. To address this problem, some cultural producers exploit the multivocality of their country’s culture and may innovate in style so that their products are inflected with, but not tethered to, original motifs and cultural narratives. These modifications may make the original motifs more salient as a source of contrast or more obscure as memories fade and few originals remain. Moreover, deciding what exactly should be represented as “authentic” to a particular nation, is a matter of politics with different social groups upholding different, even competing, interpretations.

The Way Forward

These are just a few of the questions we address in an edited volume we are working on. We’ve gathered a group of sociologists and historians along with a development practitioner to explore what cultural wealth is and how it works. Over the course of the next month, we’ll introduce you to some of these people and their work. We received an invitation to send the volume for review to Stanford University Press and a publication subvention from the ASA’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline.

At the end of this week, you will receive a “Dispatch from the Field.” Fred is currently in Thailand and will be talking about boundary work in the marketplace. He’ll share some observations from entrepreneurs he’s met and from his own observations at trade shows and other market venues. Nina’s travels to Eastern Europe are coming up later in the month, and she’ll be reporting on the construction of cultural wealth in Slovenia, a country that is trying to place itself on the cognitive map of tourists and investors. Next week we’ll begin to highlight some of the ideas from “The Cultural Wealth of Nations” volume. Stay tuned

cool books of 2009

Some books we discussed last year:

• The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies by Mark Chiang
• Market Rebels by Hayagreeva Rao
• Research in the Sociology of Organizations (Vol. 26) edited by Brayden King, Teppo Felin, and David Whetten
• From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana
• Social Structures by John Levi-Martin
• The Common Law in Two Voices by Kwai Ng
• Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America by Jerry Davis

Kieran’s reading list from 2009, Teppo’s and Brayden’s.

march guest blogging team – fred wherry and nina bandelj

It’s my pleasure to announce March’s guest bloggers, who will jointly write their posts as a team: Fred Wherry and Nina Bandelj. Fred is an economic sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies globalization, culture and markets. We reviewed his book on craft markets here. Nina is a sociologist at UC Irvine. She’s published on the global economy in ASR, Theory and Society, and Socio-economic Review. Let’s give a warm welcome!

MBA NDA Q&A

An anonymous correspondent newly-enrolled in an Executive MBA program writes:

Does your B-school allow students to sign NDAs when working on projects or disclosing non-public company information in the classroom? They may just use an honor system. But I’m interested to know.

So what’s standard practice at your school? Inquiring minds want to know.

puzzles of csr

“Corporate social responsibility” has become a booming area of research.  A lot of CSR research isn’t very good, and much of the good stuff is spread throughout a variety of disciplines (political science, sociology, geography, business, anthropology, etc.), across a number of different cases (labor, forestry, pollution control, fairtrade, etc.), and often not explicitly categorized as being about CSR. 

In winding down my stint here, I want to highlight a couple of areas where I think the comparative strengths of organizational theorists/researchers could really help to make a big splash in the study of CSR.  I started out intending to write a list of “big questions” in the study of CSR, but that quickly became overwhelming.  So I’ll just mention a couple of areas where an organizational approach could really help.

1. Organizational environments and the “endogeneity of CSR”

CSR scholars often debate the factors that lead firms to adopt CSR policies and whether there’s a “business case” for CSR.  But they rarely take account of the sophisticated and productive literature that’s emerged around questions of how organizations respond to pressures for equality in employment (e.g., Edelman, Dobbin, Sutton, Kelley, Kalev, and others).  It seems plausible that the “endogeneity of law” process described by Edelman et al has an analogue in an “endogeneity of CSR” process.  Here, rather than starting with the ambiguity of legal mandates, one would start with ambiguity in firms’ environments as a result of pressures from activists, shareholders, etc.  CSR practices are adopted (with help from various consultants and NGOs) and then theorized as efficient and profitable.  That’s just a sketch of part of the story, but you hopefully get the idea.  I haven’t yet seen anyone with the data to pull this off yet, but it strikes me as worth doing.

2. Implementation and the firm as a political coalition

One of the great weaknesss of most CSR research has been that it assumes that firms–and even entire supply chains–are unified actors.  Thus, if Wal-Mart, the Gap, Nike, etc. adopt a policy and develop plans for implementation, it’s often assumed that this will translate into meaningful changes “on the ground.”  This of course ignores a bunch of barriers that typically get in the way of implementation, including weaknesses in auditing and conflicts between transnational standards and domestic politics.  (These kinds of barriers are increasingly becoming clear.  This paper by Locke et al is just one example of work that illustrates this.)  But more fundamentally, this ignores the idea that firms are coalitions, operating through what Cyert and March called the “quasi-resolution of conflict.”  One simple piece of evidence that this approach can help to make sense of CSR’s lack of impacts comes from research (like Locke et al’s) showing that compliance departments rarely have significant power relative to sourcing departments.  I think this could be taken even further in looking at the supplier firms–the true “black box” of research on CSR.

I’ll leave it at that, though there’s plenty more that could be said about the importance of studying *organizing* around CSR standards, particularly in terms of efforts by workers and civil society actors in developing countries.  I hope organizational scholars will take up the task of contributing to a critical, rigorous, and international research literature on CSR.

roach clip institutionalism

There is now a company in Lansing, Michigan that teaches you how to legally grow and sell medical marijuana. There’s also a medical marijuana grower’s school in California. From the HydroCollege web site:

Welcome to HydroCollege, here at HydroCollege we teach Michigan residents who are interested in useing or growing marijuana for medicinal purposes how to become legal to do so or possibly become a Michigan caregiver and be able to grow from 12 to 60 plants in your house and also be able to carry 2.5 ounces to 12.5 ounces and provide marijuana to others.  My name is Danny Trevino and i am the instructor of HydroCollege. I started HydroCollege on Jan 12th 2009 and i am the first medical marijuana college in Mi and was in the television news for it www.myspace.com/hydroworldlansing if you want to view the video.
         I started HydroCollege because people kept coming in to HydroWorld Hydroponics my medical marijuana store and they didnt know how to grow effectively even though they bought a book they still needed to know some hands on approach.

There are important questions for the half-baked institutionalist.  1. How did the Federal gov’t prevail over the states for so long on medical marijuana when the regulation of medical practices resides with the states and voters supported it? 2. What governance mechanisms had to loosen up so that HydroCollege could legitimately operate? 3. How long will it take for mom ‘n’ pop medical marijuana dealers to be run out of town by medical professionals?

chalk another one up for the stanford marshmallow experiment

One for the annals of delayed gratification: A Ryanair passenger won €10,000 on an in-flight lottery scratchcard. But, as you might expect, the flight attendants didn’t have the money for him right there and then. He became angry and frustrated. In the face of urgings to the contrary from the crew and other passengers, he threw a fit and ate the ticket.

sociology of gender question

Ok, I’ve been reading Connell, West, Connell and a bunch of other classic gender folks. What do you think describes the view of sociology of gender community these days?

economics and deconstruction

So, last week, I presented at the Oliver Williamson seminar on institutional analysis, based in the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley.  (This week, I presented for Labor Studies here at IU.  How’s that for variety?)  It was a great experience and a smart crowd–predominantly made up of economists, and playing by economists’ rules for talks.  I was glad to make it through the bulk of the material I wanted to share, and thankful that the intellectual sparring (which I even mildly enjoyed) wasn’t hostile.  I heard “we don’t usually get sociologists” several times.  I was actually surprised that the worlds of “business and public policy” (primarily economists) and “management of organizations” (more psychologists and sociologists) don’t overlap so much, at least in this particular setting.

One side reflection….

…Economists are pretty damn quick and agile when it comes to using notions about signaling and agency theory to undercut arguments about cultural categories in markets.

Here, that occurred when I talked about Love and Kraatz’s interesting finding that corporate downsizing in the 1980s had negative effects on firms’ reputations (relative to their competitors).  Love and Kraatz show that these effects are robust to controls for financial and market performance and argue that they represent an evaluation of firms’ “character” and trustworthiness.  It’s a nice paper and interesting argument, which differs from neo-institutionalist lines about conformity with the dominant institutional logic (in this case, of shareholder value).  The economist counter-argument was that downsizing is really a signal that the firm knows it will be in trouble in the future–and therefore provides valuable information about the firm’s market value.  This isn’t picked up in measures of market performance because it’s really a forecast of performance to come, not a reflection of curent performance. 

In a discussion a few years ago, something similar happened when I used Zuckerman’s ”categorical imperative” findings to demonstrate the effects of legitimacy.  Then, the counter-argument, if I remember correctly, was that the real problem with firms that don’t fit the expected categories is that they are scattered in such a way that generates agency problems that ultimately devalue them.

My goal is not to argue about which interpretation is right.  In my view, these two papers are super-high quality and go to great lengths to establish their findings.  The point is that it’s amazing how quick one can be to undermine a rigorously developed argument with a wave of the hand.  From one perspective, this could be an indication of the power of a strong paradigm.  But I think it also reflects a tendency toward deconstruction in that paradigm…and I mean this in something not too terribly far from the Derrida/Foucault sense.  All that is solid melts into thin air.  Arguments become increasingly hard to operationalize, models become impossible to properly specify, and therefore more falls back on the paradigmatic assumptions.  My sense is that sociologists are more pragmatist in their orientation:  Build with what you have; talk, talk, talk  to sort it out.

Just a scattered thought, which maybe has implications for Mark’s earlier post about org theory and institutional economics.

Next step, coming soon…a more substantive post….no more mentions of Williamson, I promise.

the social world according to searle

John Searle has written a new book that should be of interest to many of you. Following the line of thought of his earlier The Construction of Social Reality, Searle’s Making the Social World tries to explain how we create a world of institutions, like organizations and culture, from a physical world that seems to play by a different set of principles. He starts by identifying a simple principle that he thinks can explain much of what counts for social reality. Here’s an excerpt from the introductory chapter:

It is typical of domains where we have a secure understanding of the ontology, that there is a single unifying principle of that ontology. In physics it is the atom, in chemistry it is the chemical bond, in biology it is the cell, in genetics it is the DNA molecule, and in geology it is the tectonic plate. I will argue that there is similarly an underlying principle of social ontology, and one of the primary aims of the book is to explain it. In making these analogies to the natural sciences I do not imply that the social sciences are just like the natural sciences. That is not the point. The point rather is that it seems to me implausible to suppose that we would use a series of logically independent mechanisms for creating institutional facts, and I am in search of a single mechanism. I claim we use one formal linguistic mechanism, and we apply it over and over with different contents (7).

The claim that I will be expounding and defending in this book is that all of human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same logical form as) [Status Function] Declarations, including the cases that are not speech acts in the explicit form of Declarations (13).

Searle isn’t saying that every speech act makes the world change and therefore has a declarative effect.  But some sorts of speech are intended to “change the world by declaring that the state of affairs exists and thus bringing that state of affairs into existence” (12). These declarative speech acts, then, are the fundamental units of any institution because without them humans would be completely constrained by reality as it stands now. They would be unable to create anything new.

Needless to say, the performativity folks will eat this up.

apple’s ipad: one of these things …

Many of my economist friends wonder why org theorists make such big deal out of conformity and, to a lesser extent, categories.

Maybe it’s because they never watched Sesame Street, and we did. After all, with a simple song (One of these things is not like the other, one of these is not the same…), this seemingly wholesome bastion of public television edutainment taught a generation of kids to spot categories and reject misfits, and quickly! (Watch it on YouTube.)

Lately, the Apple iPad has made me think about these issues and, of course (!), about org theory. It leads to some questions for org theory readers, which are stated at the end of this post.

Jumping into the org theory part takes me to Ezra Zuckerman’s (1999) “categorical imperative.” Roughly speaking, this is the idea that non-conformists pay a price for their deviance, which includes, but is not limited to, being overlooked, dismissed or discounted, especially by third-party evaluators that try to make a living as critics, analysts or experts. Similar findings have been shown in, to name just a few studies I like, actors (Zuckerman; Hsu), wine (Negro, Hannan and Rao), and markets for professional services (Leung). So, for everyone 10 tries at creating a new market category, we can all probably find 9 or so failures. Furthermore, for each success, I bet I can find a situation where a few deviants started to find each other and somehow find themselves part of what they had tried to leave behind–a crowd that gives them legitimacy, even as it also makes them compete. (I say something along these lines in articles in Poetics, ASR, and in a working paper probably getting brutalized by reviewers somewhere right now.)

Still, this isn’t the whole story, is it?

In the technology world, engineers and entrepreneurs have this crazy idea that it’s somehow a good thing to come up with new things that don’t fit existing categories. They’re so drunk with enthusiasm for this that they seem to want to do it all the time. Probably to make it sound like it isn’t just ill-advised gambling, they call it “innovation”, like giving it a name makes it more real, or something. (See Rosa et al., 1999.) Of course, they still mostly fail at it. I’m not sure, but I think this obsessive rush to deviate could be related to the history and lore of computers. It is replete with stories of misfits–computers that didn’t fit established categories of their day–that somehow caught on and siphoned demand away from dominant markets. Everybody seems to want to make that list as inventors of the “next big thing.” There is even a wacky museum dedicated to all this. I can’t say if the whole innovation thing will catch on, but it certainly makes for interesting studies.

Kidding aside, you can also see this in several things Ezra has written about how actors escape the pressures of conformity. There is the idea that what economists call “abnormal returns” tend to go to innovators, a la Schumpeter (see Zuckerman 1999: 1402-1403). Also, in his paper with Damon Philips, there is the point that high and low status actors feel greater pressures for conformity than middle-status actors. Even so, I’m definitely with Ezra on the conformity pressures that categories produce, but I’m also puzzled by the question of how new categories arise. As my wife and kids would testify, this puts me on the lookout for misfits or category-blenders or misfits that seem like they might make get recognized as belonging to new categories, even if they initially strike many as ungainly hybrids. You can hear nastily critical comments to that effect about the iPad, netbook computers, or before that, the smartphone. Even before that, the same goes for the minicomputer, the PC, the workstation, and so on. (Gordon Bell has a nice little paper on this that boils a lot of this history down into a single diagram–see Figure 1. For engineers: there really is a Figure 1 in Bell’s paper.)

In the technology context, it is clear that being the prototype for today’s established category may not translate into being the prototype for the next big thing. Since being a perfect fit for the slide rule category just isn’t worth what it used to be, it’s useful to think about the currency of a category, the topic of a paper I”m revising for RSO with student Jade Lo and Mike Lounsbury.) Because a picture’s worth a thousand words, here’s an admittedly non-artistic collage that combines some well-accepted categories with misfits aiming for currency of their own.

Fun with categories ... in high-tech gadgets

So here are some questions for you:

1. In addition to the categorical imperative, what else affects the dynamics of market categories?
2. Any predictions about whether the iPad will take off or fizzle out?
3. Or, should org theorists leave all this super-macro “organizations and markets” stuff to other fields?

To start the discussion, here are few ideas about #1 that are already out there:

• luck (path dependence),
• product features (rational choice in marketing),
• producers’ perceptions of threat and opportunity (I have a piece with Peer Fiss about this in AMJ),
• audience judgments and critics’ opinions (as in the growing ecological literature on categories),
• the social psychology of comparison processes and similarity judgments (in the spirit of Brayden’s recent post).

At least to me, what makes all this an interesting topic–and fair game for org theorists–is that it requires looking beyond the effects of institutionalized categories to the processes and institutions that contribute to institutionalizing them. Yuck, that’s a mouthful, I know. The point is that categories have histories in which organizations, entrepreneurs and innovators interact with critics, distributors, key customers and other arbiters of taste to try to influence their intended audience to see their misfit products as deserving categories of their own–and all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto, as the saying goes.

what needs to be in soc phd programs?

Right now, people are choosing graduate programs. Here is the soc phd program series:  strat/work, education, org studies,  culture, urban, soc psych, demography, political sociology, health. What topics do you think need to be in there?

50 years since the greensboro lunch counter sit-in

The famed Greensboro sit in of February 1960, which lead to the creation of SNCC. From a nice Slate slide show of great civil rights movement photography that focuses on SNCC.

put that book down and start writing

The LA Times asked authors to give writing advice. Will Self:

Stop reading fiction – it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already (assuming, that is, you’ve read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven’t you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

Rose Tremain:

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of Negative Capability and Kipling’s advice to “drift, wait and obey”. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

Sarah Waters:

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

Check it out.

sassy: s.a.s.e.

I’ve been attending the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE, pronounced like “sassy”) meetings for a few years now.  It’s an eclectic group, attracting heterodox economists, political scientists and sociologists of a variety of stripes and multiple nationalities.  Never a dull time.

The meetings bounce back and forth between the US and Europe.  This year they are in Philadelphia, June 24-26, and the deadline for submissions is looming this week.  A quick turn around for those late to the game, but one good thing about SASE is that submitting is simply a matter of putting together an abstract… the paper comes later (hello escalation of commitment, a.k.a., a useful forcing mechanism).

Personally, I find its a very good crowd to try out new ideas on.  Open, interesting, eclectic and tolerant.  It also represents one of the few places where OrgTheorists get equal time and equal billing with kindred disciplines.

The trick to any conference, and SASE is no exception, is to find the right group to hang out with.  A little time rifling through the various “networks” as well as the “mini-conferences” is worth the effort if you are thinking of tossing your hat in to the ring.

http://www.sase.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=46

your sociology trick

I once read on a science blog once that scientists have a few tricks they just repeat over and over again in the careers. So I got to thinking, what’s my distinctive trick as an academic? I think it’s this: Fabio is really good at assembling big data from unexpected sources. The Black Studies book relies on material from about twelve different archives, manyof which were never used before. My antiwar research is a massive longitudinal survey of street protesters (N>8,000 right now), a technique that most folks didn’t think could provide useful data. What’s your distinctive trick?

sean safford and jerry davis on google

The NY Times has a nice article on Google’s head quarters. My co-blogger, Sean Safford, comments:

Sean Safford, a professor who studies organizations and markets at the University of Chicago, noted that Google was replicating traditional company-town practices by placing housing for its employees near its headquarters.

“It will be so interesting to see how much of their human resources strategy is about creating a community feeling that goes beyond the offices,” Mr. Safford said. “Sometimes when you’re competing for workers and prominence, there’s a need to stick your chest out and say, ‘We’re the big dogs in town.’ ”

Our good ol’ buddy Jerry Davis also chimes in on the topic of different forms of community investment by firms:

Perhaps uniquely, Google is also casting itself as a partner with NASA, now the proprietor of Moffett Field. This partnership is making Mountain View a stop along the virtual route to Mars and the real route to the Moon.

“It’s a cool anomaly because the company-town tradition had basically died in the U.S.,” said Jerry Davis, a professor at the University of Michigan, who has written about the ties between companies and cities. “It’s interesting to see Google put their touches on the idea.”

Historically, company towns have grown up around organizations with large manufacturing operations that can support thousands of local workers. To attract top executives to often less-than-ideal locales, the companies donated large sums to cultural institutions.

“The main reason Ford put money into the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is to make it plausible to recruit executives to Detroit,” Professor Davis said. “It was a human-resources move as much as it was philanthropic.”

Check it out! Hat tip to William S.

peace politics in the american prospect

The American Prospect has an article on a big change in the antiwar movement: the shift away from mass protest to more “behind the scenes” activism. A few choice clips:

The anti-war movement’s tactical shift is not without risk. Media tend to report the anti-war movement as a series of manifestations, and as a result the public tends to perceive it that way. Leaders of the four major anti-war organizations interviewed for this article reported their groups were involved in behind-the-scenes organizing ahead of Obama’s escalation announcement, including congressional lobbying, small protests, mailings, and anti-recruitment organizing — and expressed frustration that none of that work had been recognized by the press.

By moving away from protests, the repertoire the public and media most associate with it, the anti-war movement is taking a big gamble. But if it successfully combines attention-grabbing street antics with congressional lobbying efforts and new claims that relate the war to the recession, the movement just might be able to bring itself out of the cold and make good on its early promise.

The author, Colin Asher, was nice to enough to interview me and I pointed out that the movement has had trouble capitalizing on public opinion. Even though polls show unhappiness with the war, the movement has had trouble getting attention in a bad economy. The movement has noticably shrunk:

This confluence of events weakened the anti-war movement to such an extent that protests held on the eighth anniversary of the war’s start — a date that came the week after a series of insurgent attacks killed nine U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan — were just barely larger than those held in the first weeks after the war began. “Leading organizations have shrunk or disbanded,” Rojas says. “They aren’t in much of a position to push anything because they’re in a period of transition.”

Even though both wars are still ongoing, it seems like a recession and democratic president have rolled back the movement to its earliest days. Time will tell if that’s a permanent state.

social psych and org theory

One of the best consequences of coming to Kellogg is that I’ve been exposed to a lot more psychological research. Half of my department consists of social psychologists who study the micro-mechanisms that affect individual and group behaviors. Methodologically, the research is overwhelmingly experimental. Much of it looks at the biases and heuristics that shape judgment, decision-making, and interpersonal interaction.  One of the most famous examples of this kind of research is Kahneman’s and Tversky’s finding of loss aversion – the notion that people are more likely to take risks to avoid losses than they are to get potential gains. Because this research has direct implications for how people make choices and trade-offs, the program has had a big impact on behavioral economics, showing that people’s choices often deviate from rational expectations. Social psychology has had less influence on organizational theory.

It’s strange that social psychology and organizational theory have had so little cross-fertilization. In business schools the two are often thrown together in the same department, and so the two groups frequently intermingle as colleagues. They sometimes share grad students, but usually those students face the choice of specializing in one or the other. There are some exceptions to this. Jim Westphal, for example, has taken a lot of insights from group process theory and applied it to corporate governance, but even when borrowing occurs, it tends to move from the more meso-related theories of social psych to a similar meso-level of theorizing in organizational theory. Why do we not see more crossover from the micro-world of judgment and decision-making to the macro-world of institutions and fields?

teacher performance research

Teaching research is notoriously hard because there are selection effects at every turn. Students select into schools, teachers select into the profession. Students aren’t randomly matched to teachers inside schools and students aren’t randomly assigned teacher attention. Policies aren’t randomly assigned to schools or teachers. It’s nice to see this review of teacher performance research by Michael Podgursky and Matthew Springer in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Seems like there’s been some progress on the issue:

• There’s a lot of evidence that teachers matter, more so than schools. In most cases, descriptive studies show consistent teacher effects. There’s just tons of classroom/teacher variation in most large data sets from large school districts. In contrast, school effects are all over the place. Sometimes you find them, sometimes you don’t.
• There’s a lot of evidence that teacher credentials don’t matter. The same data sets show almost negligible effects of credentials. Thus paying people merely for degrees earned is likely not a good idea.
• Principals seem to have a good idea of who is a good teacher. Multiple studies of qualitative evaluation in different types of schools usually find that people who have recieved good evaluations (and often higher pay) often have better classroom outcomes.
• It’s very hard to evaluate the exact role that pay has in performance. Aside from the selection issues, there’s also a mixture problem. Performance pay is always mixed in with other pay schemes, like seniority.
• Despite these problems, most random assignment studies of performance related pay find a positive effect.
• The downside is that the effects are short lived, suggesting that education needs to be sustained over multiple grade levels.

Bottom line: Getting an ultimate perfectly identified answer is nearly impossible, but the evidence does suggest that teachers matter and they respond to incentives, but that, like most educational interventions, incentives must be sustained over time.

the new social organization of the illegal narcotics trade

The LA Times has a series of interesting articles on the rise of a new type heroine trading ring (here, here, and here). Normally, the drug trade is a fairly centralized affair, with a few syndicates violently battling for dominance within a specific urban area. And each syndicate is often a hierarchically organized network.

There’s been a rise in a new type of network that peddles a low quality form of heroine (“black tar”) in small towns and rural areas. A few key points:

• Rural folks vs. urbanites: The black tar peddlers are mainly from a very rural part of Xalisco, Mexico. In contrast, the  major drug cartels are centered in major urban centers.
• High vs. low margins: Black tar peddlers target places that are overlooked by the major crime families and they’re willing to accept some low profits.
• Networks vs. hierarchies: Black tar peddlers have informally organized themselves. There’s no “don” or crime boss. The point is to be as low profile as possible.
• Pizza delivery vs. department store: Black tar peddlers don’t make their customers travel. They deliver – fast and cheap. This is unlike urban areas where buyers go street markets.
• Direct marketing: Black tar peddlers often target methodone clinics, oxycontin addicts, and others who might be unusually suscpetible to black tar additiction. No need to “push it” on the inexperienced. The black tar peddlers also acquire clients by personal reference from current addicts.

It’ll be interesting for crimimologists and orgtheorists to see if this is part of a wider shift, or just a specialized development.

ice skating performativity

You be the judge. Theory…