qu’il repose en paix, Michel Crozier

It has been a while since I have posted on orgtheory.net and sadly I am jumping back into the fray to announce the death of one of the great men of organizational sociology.  Michel Crozier died last night in Paris.  He was 91.

I moved to Paris two years ago to join the research center that Crozier founded, the centre de sociolology des organisations.  The CSO is associated with the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).  Crozier also taught at Sciences Po for many years.

Crozier’s intellectual journey began, as mine did, with a study of the United States labor movement.   But it was his 1964 book, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, that established him as a major voice in our field.  That book challenged (or maybe it is better to say, evolved) the Weberian view of bureaucracy.  Before him, organizational theory focused largely on what we could see in an organizational chart.  What went on behind that chart — the interpersonal relationships in which were embedded multiple, often contradictory systems of power — was seen as a distraction or, worse, something to be suppressed.   Along with his contemporary, Alvin Gouldner, Michel Crozier brought these kinds of relationships into the light.   This led Crozier to conclude that organizations limited actors as much as they enabled them; that organizations were not simply solutions to problems, they were problems to be solved too.  Myriad schools of thought within our field have followed from this.

Moreover, as I have come to understand, the distinction that many of us Americans hold on to between “objective” social science and the messier “real” world of administrative control (and  reform) holds much less sway here in France.  Crozier was not “just” an academic.  He was a critic and a crusader for changes in French society and beyond.  It was from this side of his work that his student and collaborator, Erhard Freidberg, set the intellectual tone for Sciences Po’s Master of Public Affairs, of which I am now the Director.  So I owe him not only an intellectual debt of gratitude, but an organizational one as well.

Bon voyage Monsieur Crozier.  Reposez en paix.

how feminists killed feminism

A friend recently linked to an article in the Daily Mail by Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker. Rebecca Walker describes her contentious relationship with her mother. A lot of it is simply competitiveness, a mother who must out do the daughter. It is also easy for successful people to ignore their family, but Rebacca places a lot of the blame on feminist ideology. For example:

According to the strident feminist ideology of the Seventies, women were sisters first, and my mother chose to see me as a sister rather than a daughter. From the age of 13, I spent days at a time alone while my mother retreated to her writing studio  -  some 100 miles away. I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.

And:

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

This article reminds me of a question that a number of sociologists have considered: Why is feminism being rejected as a political identity? After reading Walker’s essay, I now better appreciate the contours of feminist thought. First,there is the stuff that Walker doesn’t talk about. A lot of feminism and women’s right’s theory addresses the issue of status and equality. On this side of things, feminists clearly won. Women have the right to vote, they occupy positions of leadership, and they have access to nearly all professions. An important legacy of feminism, but not mentioned.

Walker’s essay instead focuses on another feature of feminist theory: the attack on traditionally feminine traits, motherhood, and domesticity. I am not referring to the argument that women should have the option to work outside the home. Rather, there is a stronger argument saying that motherhood and domesticity is inherently bad. Rebecca Walker’s essay is an insightful illustration of this. Rather than admitting that her daughter is simply different and that she enjoys family life, Alice Walker views domestic life, including her own and her daughter’s, as a betrayal of women’s rights.

Once you disentangle these two sides of feminism, things are a little less puzzling. After winning the battle on rights and equality, people quickly took these things for granted. They forgot who fought for things like the right to go to attend the same colleges as men, or easy access to birth control. Instead, the average person probably focuses on the more sensational features of feminist thought such as the view that motherhood is slavery.

I’ll end on a scholarly  and tactical note about social movements. The trajectory of post-70s feminism is interesting because it shows how a successful group can lose influence by shifting focus from demands that have wide appeal to demands that have little appeal. The lesson is that if you win battle, it is often smarter to retrench than to overextend.

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how do graduate students actually choose their advisers?

In a past installment of grad skool rulz, I offered advice for choosing a dissertation adviser. The idea is simple. Nobody is perfect, but you want someone who has at least a few good traits and no horrible traits. As I was thinking about this post, I wondered – how do graduate students actually choose their advisers? Do people actually methodically try to find a match or do they just “fall” into it? Why do people get stuck with horrible (or good) advisers?

In my own case, I just fell into it and it worked out. I worked with to faculty based on similar research interests (education) and style (both normal science types). But what about people who choose poorly? Part of the issue is that there simply isn’t enough information. Unless you are in a large program, most faculty won’t have more than one or two students in their career. In other cases, students don’t have much choice. For example, if you want to study sociology of science at Indiana, there’s really only one choice. Yet, I still see some students choose advisers who have well developed reputations for being difficult, or advisers who have really slim track records in placing students.  My guess is that students believe that they’ll be the exception to the rule.

Consider this post an open thread on how to effectively find an adviser in graduate school. What are you considering as you choose an adviser?

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raise your hand if you’re a functionalist… neo-functionalist? … anyone? anyone?

Now that I’ve been on faculty for almost ten years, I’ve spent a lot of time reading journal articles, manuscript submissions, book proposals, tenure files, and hundreds (!) of job applications. I’ve notice that almost no-one self-describes as a functionalist or neo-functionalist, except a few senior scholars like Jeffrey Alexander or Paul Colomy. This is surprising because sociologists still do research on social norms, social systems, and social differentiation, which are issues of central importance to classical structural functionalism. Why?

1. Maybe people still do neo/functionalism, but they just don’t use the old jargon. Since Parsons got banished in the 1970s, maybe people don’t even know they are functionalists since they aren’t exposed to it. Call it functionalism on the “down low.”
2. Maybe people simply migrated out of American sociology. Luhmann is clearly a neo-functionalist but he’s more popular in areas like media studies. He’s also a Big Deal in European sociology.
3. Maybe there is a notable crowd of functionalists, but they simply don’t run in my circles.
4. Functionalist ideas were imported/distorted by modern sociologists. A lot of folks have argued that institutionalism is a sort of modern day functionalism.
5. Redefinition: The topics of interests to functionalists (e.g., norms) are better analyzed when recast in other theories. For example, the rational choice theory of norms has more appeal than Parson’s theory.
6. Elite abandonment: Maybe it is just the structure of the profession. The elites killed functionalism by not hiring them in leading programs. With only a few functionalists (any other than Alexander?) in top 20 programs, it is nearly impossible to train a self-sustaining cohort of functionalist scholars.

Other ideas? Can any neo/functionalists enlighten me?

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orgtheory poll: your favorite bourdieu book

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swidler’s theory of social structure

Bleg: What is the theory of social structure (if any) that follows from the toolkit/culture in action argument? Canonical reference?

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how to live a happy life

For seventy five years, Harvard University has conducted a longitudinal study of 269 men who graduated in 1938. It’s an attempt to learn, in detail, about the factors that might contribute to a good life. Business Insider has a nice summary of a new book, Triumphs of Experience, that presents the results of the study. A few take home points:

• Alcoholism is a disorder of great destructive power.” Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives; it was strongly correlated with neurosis and depression (which tended to follow alcohol abuse, rather than precede it); and—together with associated cigarette smoking—it was the single greatest contributor to their early morbidity and death.
• Above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t matter. I assume that it doesn’t matter for the types of life course outcomes social scientists measure (employment, health, happiness, marriage).
  
• Relationships matter, a lot: “Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87,000 more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.” and “Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.”
• Dad matters as well: “warm childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety, greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age 75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.”

The formula for a good life: no alcohol or smoking; be nice too people, especially your kids; and you’re probably good enough to get what you want out of life.

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