the luhmann challenge!!!

I challange you, Luhmannites. In 150 words or less, can you give me an example of an empirical phenomenon or puzzle that was clarified, explained, or resolved using autopoeisis or any other of Luhmann’s concepts? For example, will I understand the rise of capitalism in England better? Why African Americans have lower levels of education than Whites? Increased political polarization in America? Seriously, dudes, throw me a bone. Name me one empirical question that I can better answer because I spent the weekend reading Social Systems.* I dare you. I double dog dare you.

* And yes, I also checked out some of his “empirical” works like The Reality of the Mass Media. Still feel burned.

UPDATE: I’m changing the terms of our agreement.  Every 60 minutes that pass without a clear empirical application of autopoiesis, one of these fellows will “accidentally” find themselves underneath an annotated copy of Social Systems.

iron cages and friendly skies

This may be old in the blogosphere, but I was just forwarded this nice Weberian reading of Up in the Air, posted by Susan Herbst on Inside Higher Ed.
Short version:

George Clooney’s character:   perfect Weberian character, except that he isn’t fully comfortable with his iron cage or the rationalizing force of technology.

Vera Farmiga’s character:  a ”Weberian monster of sorts,” well-adapted to her iron cage.

There’s more there too, including some nice teaching ideas.  Worth a read:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/01/08/herbst

unexpected sentence of the day

Can you guess the source of this sentence?

Such a thesis posits an imprinting factor stronger than any of those identified in Lorenz’s geese!

Hint: It’s neofunctionalism…

why did the chicken …

Thanks to the orgtheory team for inviting me to post some food for thought in the coming days–I really enjoy the sense of community this site fosters.

Rather than starting with something heavy, let me celebrate that community by opening with a request: please join me in using the old “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke to reflect on what organization theory is.

If you have a moment, comment to this post by giving the theory that is supplying the punchline and the answer itself.

Drawing on the two theories I find myself using most often, here are some examples to get us started:

Institutional theory:
(Whining just a bit) “But all the other chickens are doing it, mom.”
-OR-
(Winking) “I don’t really cross it, I just pretend like I’m going to until nobody is looking.”

Organizational ecology:
(Dryly) “Cross the road? I think of it more as exiting the population, really.”

I’m sure these could be done in other ways, and better, so I’d like to hear from others on both these theories and other perspectives such as a network perspective, social movements, TCE, and so forth.

OK, but why?

Mostly for fun, of course, but also to warm up to one of the topics that interests me most, which is how org theorists can embrace their diversity and yet find the coherence needed to be relevant, both in the academy and beyond.

Thanks for playing!

(In case my examples don’t make this perfectly clear, there is absolutely no requirement that these quips by either really funny or even entirely fair.)

welcome mark kennedy!

We’re pleased to have Mark Kennedy join us as a guest blogger.  Mark is an Assistant Professor at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

Mark’s research relates to categories, meaning and structure in markets and society.  (Here’s an engaging ASR piece for anyone not familiar with Mark’s work.) You can learn more about his research here.

Welcome Mark!

samuelson vs. parsons

By the 1940s, economics and sociology mirrored each other. Emerging from political economy in  Europe and progressive politics in America, these two disciplines reached a point where a single prominent scholar tried to lay the groundwork for their field. Paul Samuelson recast economics as an application of decision theory. Talcott Parsons  recast sociology as an issue of systems theory. This post is a sketch of what I think the consequences are.

1. Obviously, Samuelson won in his discipline, while Parsons lost. Economists who don’t use the language of utility maximization, linear programming and Samuelson’s other ideas are quickly relegated  to the margin. Parsons does have some very prominent followers, but it’s hard to describe neo-functionalism as a dominant school.

2. Samuelson and Parsons different trajectories, I think, can be ascribed to simple idea. Samuelson made it possible to simplify and unify economic discussion. Once you accept that everything is a choice maximizing utility, then you create a simplified language. Of course, specific applications can be nasty, but you provide a basic cognitive foundation for the discipline. Even people who disagree can do so in a shared framework. In contrast, Parsons was a synthesizer and his works tend to combine different ideas than distill and simplify them. People found the ideas bizarre and not useful. That’s unsustainable over the long run.

3. Another issue: tractability. The move to economics as decision theory meant that an army of followers could elaborate and apply the idea. You had a road map, albeit one with a lot of calculus in it. A college freshman with a little calculus could easily make sense of basic economics. In contrast, structural functionalism was notoriously hard to comprehend or apply. Even in anthropology, the discipline that spawned functional arguments, it is thought that functional arguments are hard to prove.

4. Bracketing: Earlier political economists (like Weber) worked on issues such as the meaning of social action, personal identity, social systems, etc. Modern economics, for the most part minimizes these issues by bracketing them. What matters is the observed behavior and revealed preferences. The stuff behind the preferences, or even variances in preferences (heterogeneous agents) , is off the table. In contrast, Parsons didn’t have a “master variable” to which all other concerns could be suboridnated. No bracketing could occur.

5. Revulsion vs. embracing: Many economists may disagree on specific policy issues with Samuelson, but only a small contingent of heterodox economist will dismiss his formalism as the starting point from which all else springs in economics. Even when Samuelson’s framework is found wanting, economists try to modify it rather than abolish it (e.g., behavioral economics). In contrast, sociologists seem to have dismissed Parsons his entirety without any successful attempt at introducing a new language for sociology. It doesn’t seem as if any incremental knowledge or tool set emerged from the decades when Parsons dominated the field.

In other words, it might be argued that Samuelson helped economics by providing parsimony. Parsons did the opposite. He offered complexity, which created a distaste for theory or formalization among many in the generation following Parsons.

statistics quiz

Rest in Peace Pete

Richard “Pete” Peterson, one of the original founders of the ASA section on Culture died yesterday.  It is a strange feeling, since I actually never knew him very well, yet it seems like somebody I actually was close to is now gone.  Two great culture scholars who actually did know him closely have more personal reflections here and here.  My only major interaction with him was at Boston ASA were I actually felt useful for once:  he needed to go to an ASA session that was way across one of those weird tubes that connect the various buildings and I was going to that same session (Paul DiMaggio was presenting a paper).  When we got there, Pete said to Paul: “Hey Paul, Lizardo helped me get here.” Score!

Peterson (1979) wrote one of the two–the other one being of course Swidler (1986)–key theoretical articles that helped shake the study of culture in sociology out its Parsonian hangover.  Peterson was clear that they key was to get away from culture and values and towards the empirical study of culture as “expressive symbols.”  Although a healthy return to studying values empirically has been enacted of late, a lot of us wouldn’t be making a living without this reorientation of the field.  One of Peterson’s major contributions was in taking a good dose of Columbia style organizational sociology (via Gouldner) and some non-negligible industrial economics to bring empirical specificity to the study of what Hirsch referred to as culture industry systems.  This came packaged as the “production” approach to the study of culture.  His famous distillation of the production approach as “6-step” model is still one of the greatest things to teach undergrads (Peterson 1985; see also Peterson 1990 on Rock and Roll).

Today, after hundreds of articles and enough books to fill out a couple of shelves, we have learned more about the production side of culture than seemed possible a mere 30 years ago (see Peterson and Anand 2004 for the latest review, and see DiMaggio 2000 for a retrospective). It is important to underscore however, that for Peterson the production perspective was a general perspective on the study of all forms of culture, including, science and religion in addition to the arts (the classic ABS special issue that he edited in 1976 is still a must read).

Yet, it was in studying the consumption side (it should be noted that very few scholars, this side of Pierre Bourdieu have actually been able to make theoretical contributions on both sides of the production/consumption divide), that Peterson would make what may in the end be remembered as his most enduring contribution.  First, in re-defining measures of cultural behavior away from the loaded terms inherited from mass culture approaches as “patterns of cultural choice” (Peterson 1983). Then in a series of now classic papers in the early and mid-1990s (Peterson 1992; Peterson and Simkus 1993; Peterson and Kern 1996) revolutionizing the study of arts participation with his proposal that the best way to describe the cultural stratification system of the United States was not as an “elite-mass” division but one premised on the division between omnivores and univores. We are still digesting and exploring the wide-ranging implications of this Kuhnian gestalt shift, as omnivores and univores appear to show up everywhere we look (Peterson 2005).

So maybe that’s why I feel like I knew Pete so well even if I really didn’t: those citations (Peterson 1992, Peterson and Kern 1996, Peterson 2005) roll out of my keyboard and into almost every paper that I write almost automatically.  I think they will continue to do so for a long time to come.

pukeworthy comparisons and insight into relative depravation

Steve Levitt, has a provocative blog post up today.  Forwarding a reader’s email he asks:

“What other benefits can be found in poverty? Obviously there is a difference between the regular poverty of say, a good chunk of Western college students versus the extreme poverty of many people in Africa. Depending on the situation, I am thinking there could be a connection between poverty and with things like creative resourcefulness and happiness.” Your thoughts?

As for thoughts, an orgTheorist who shall go nameless posted this on his facebook page questioning whether Steve might have had an aneurysm.  Its hard to disagree with that sentiment.

But then it did make me think of Amartya Sen’s argument in Development as Freedom.  In a nut shell, Sen’s goal is to shift the debate away from mainstream economists’ notions of utility and from philosophical (sociological?) questions of justice or fairness to emphasize the capability of people to do and be what they value.

Echoing Levitt’s reader’s (puke-worthy, yet nevertheless thought provoking) comparison of Western college students and “people in Africa” (whatever that means given that it is a continent of 1 billion people and countless cultures and subcultures), Sen’s argument is, fundamentally, that poverty is relative.

If a lack of income is standing in the way of doing things you want to do — worship, vote, be comfortable — then you are poor.  But those restrictions can come just as easily from social norms, religious edicts or political structure as income.  At the same time, simply having a low income does not make one either poor or unhappy.  The Botswanan bushman who is living a full and meaningful life within a traditional society is neither unhappy nor poor because he has full capability to achieve what he wants to achieve in life.

Sen likes to point out that in his wanderings in Calcutta’s ghettos, he never encountered anyone who said that their poverty made them unhappy.  The same, I venture, could not be said of your average college student living on loans.  Myself, I remember spending a few very miserable winters in Ithaca eating ramen noodles.  Yet, the capabilities of the Calcuttan ghetto-dweller to achieve the things they may want to achieve are vastly inferior to the capabilities of the students.  So why are they happier?  The difference is, essentially, ignorance: the poor in Calcutta make-due under overwhelmingly adverse circumstances while students in the US feel worse off relative to others in society.  The poor may seem happier, but their happiness is in light of their relative lack of freedom compared to the US student.  Which is worse?  Sen argues that happy ignorance is not bliss.  I’d say I have to agree.

crocodile tears lie thick on the page of the American Political Science Review

I was reading Cohen, March & Olsen’s “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” this week and, by coincidence, also looked at some of World Society: The Writings of John Meyer, a collection of Meyer’s most important work edited and introduced by Georg Krücken and Gili Drori. Sadly it is far, far too expensive and only available in hardback at the moment. (I got it after reviewing a manuscript for Oxford.) In “Reflections: Institutional Theory and World Society”, Meyer takes on a string of critics. Here’s one bit connected to the Garbage Can paper:

External models flow into the structures of actors in highly decoupled ways. Policies and structures tend to be poorly linked to each other, and often poorly linked to internal subunits and to practices. This is true on an individual case by case basis even when at the systemic level there is a good deal of overall coherence. The decoupling idea has the most massive empirical support in studies of individual actors as in the famous gaps between norms and behavior. It is a central finding in the study of organizations … It is a routine observation in studies of nation states … And it is well-theorized in institutionalist reasoning. … Realists have the greatest difficulty with the decoupling idea. They imagine that social structural rules arise because powerful political and economic actors want them in place, and want them implemented. If this doesn’t happen, someone is cheating, or someone is asleep, and in any case great long-run stresses must be resolved. Permanent decoupling … is a problem for most realists. One can see the extreme tension, for instance, in an attack on a precursor of institutionalist thinking – the famously imagistic paper by Cohen, March and Olsen called “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972) – by Bendor et al. (2001) thirty years after the original paper was published. The original paper had some creative imagery about decoupling at its core, and was widely cited for this: it also had some illustrative simulation models that were given little subsequent attention. Unable to effectively attack the core imagery, Bendor et al. devote extraordinary effort to destroy the simulation models, clearly attempting to undercut the whole subsequent institutionalist development (2001: 189): “We believe it is possible to revitalize the [theory] … this operation would deprive the [theory] and the March-Olsen variant of the new institutionalism of a certain mystique. Without this bold move, however, there is little chance that these ideas will shed much enduring light on institutions.” Crocodile tears lie thick on the page of the American Political Science Review

theory development as goal displacement

William McKinley has an interesting essay about the state of organization theory in the most recent Organization Studies. I’m not sure that I agree with McKinley’s sentiments, but his argument is provocative and worth considering seriously. Here’s a portion of the abstract:

In this essay I argue that organization theory has witnessed a significant displacement of ends over the last 30 years.Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s the dominant goal of the discipline was achieving consensus on the validity status of theories, today the overriding goal appears to be development of new theory. Formerly new theory development was considered a means to the end of attaining consensus on theory validity, but was not the only activity deemed necessary to accomplish that goal. In addition, instrumental standardization and replication were viewed as important. The contemporary displacement of
ends toward new theory development creates the paradox that organization theory today is both epistemologically simpler (in terms of the intellectual activity deemed desirable) and more complex theoretically than it was 30 years ago.

McKinley’s argument is similar to something Donald Hambrick wrote in AMJ a few years ago, in which he claimed that organizational scholars have a “theory fetish” that “prevents the reporting of rich detail about interesting phenomena for which no theory yet exists.” McKinley takes it a step further and claims that we have too many theories and that now would be a good time to start testing some of them. While it’s true that most theoretical advancements are accompanied by empirical analysis (e.g., ASQ rarely, if ever, publishes a paper without some empirical analysis), he argues that these findings are not often replicated, leading to a proliferation of new theoretical propositions that never get past the initial stage of investigation. The lack of replication is not limited to organizational theory, of course. Jeremy Freese has claimed that sociology suffers from the same avoidance of replication.

Rather than focus so much on theoretical development, McKinley would have us focus more (or at least as much) on theory testing and replication. He even suggests that we might consider dividing the labor of the field between theorists and empirical researchers. I remain skeptical, in part, because I’m not sure that trying to develop theoretical consensus is a good thing or even practical. In his essay he actually illustrates the difficulty of a “validity status” approach to theories. In the 1960s a rash of scholarly activity developed around testing hypotheses about the relationships of different structural elements of organizations. Debate erupted when the Aston group and John Child disagreed about how activity structuring related to authority concentration. I don’t want to lay out the whole history of the brouhaha here, but the point is that the groups couldn’t come to an agreement about why or if the two structural elements were correlated. McKinley reports that despite a decade’s worth of research on the matter, the disagreement was never resolved and eventually scholarship moved in a different direction.

So there are a couple of takeaways from this. The first is that empirical investigation in organizational scholarship will not always lead to the establishment of theory validity, or at least not consensus, because organizations are so contextually different from one another, making it difficult to build or validate theoretical propositions that hold true in every context.  Even when one does find a seemingly valid theoretical proposition, e.g., density-dependence, scholars will continue to debate about what the mechanisms are underlying the empirical relationship until eventually one or both groups get tired of arguing about it and move on to something else. My second takeaway is that it’s not clear that replication or theory validity testing is always very theoretical. Looking back at the Aston group, we wonder if there was any kind of theory in their project at all.  The main purpose of the project, from what I can tell, was descriptive not explanatory.  Once Child found an anomaly in his replication of their study, the real theorizing began (hmm, how do we explain this apparent difference in findings???).  So maybe I just have a difference in opinion with McKinley about what constitutes theory. Theory is not about establishing relationships between variables; theory is developing a view of the world that explains why things work the way they do. If you have good theories, you can start to derive hypotheses about particular empirical relationships. Or alternatively, you may have to alter your theories to make room for deviations observed in empirical research. This is why inductive research is important. But the ultimate goal of theory isn’t to just build more propositions; it’s about creating paradigms that make sense of our world.

INstitutions

First, thanks to Fabio and others for the introduction.  Jason is a tough act to follow….

I’ll take Fabio’s bait on the “Indiana School” of institutionalism (but not on the rankings).  There’s no doubt that there was a critical mass of institutionalists here when I started–and I would add Ethan Michelson to the list, whose paper on the translation and indigenization of legal forms is a great example of where diffusion research is heading.  We were all well imprinted by the time we arrived in Bloomington, but I do think we pushed each other in useful directions, and will continue to in the coming years.

As the comments to Fabio’s post pointed out, the “Bloomington school” is the more well-known of the Indiana institutionalisms, especially with Lin Ostrom becoming a Nobel Laureate.  (I learned that you can’t technically call the Economics prize a “Nobel Prize.”)  This raises the question of what the relationship is, or could/should be, between the various institutionalisms.

Lots of others have considered the linkages and disjunctures between organizational neo-institutionalism and rational choice/economic institutionalism much more comprehensively than I can.  Suffice it to say that while both are middle-range theories of social order, they differ a lot in epistemologies, assumptions about collective action, orientations to efficiency, etc.  Yet perhaps just by virtue of sharing a name, some horse-racing and borrowing occurs across the two literatures.  (I made my own foray into this genre here, and some weak ties to the “Bloomington school” led to further engagement.)  My guess, however, is that the organizational neo-institutionalists have paid a lot more attention to the rational choice and economic institutionalists than vice versa.  (Has anyone tried to document this sort of thing?  One great polemical piece by Akos Rona-Tas and Nadav Gabay comes to mind.)  Regardless of the reasons for this (of which there could be many) and notable exceptions (of which there are several), the result seems to me to be that organizational neo-institutionalists are pretending to be in a conversation, but there’s no real conversation partner there. 

Is it worth continuing that conversation, or should organizational neo-institutionalists focus on the task of developing their own theoretical language and apparatus, where concepts like “field overlap,” “settlement,” and “translation” become more central than “transaction costs” and “second-order collective action problems?”  With an onslaught of handbooks of neo-institutionalism and some notable agenda-setting papers of late, it seems to me that sociologists are trending toward playing their own game–that is, carving out a unique space for organizational neo-institutionalism.  I think it’s a good move, so long as we don’t wall ourselves off or return to oversocialized conceptions of action or byzantine Parsonian exercises.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll try to share a few ideas about organizations that have come up in my work on regulation, global standards, and “corporate social responsibility” for labor and the environment.

take back the sociology rankings!!

There is no reason to wait for NRC rankings. We should do our soc rankings and make them open source.  If you think this is a cool idea, here’s how you can help out:

1. We need some volunteers to set up a wiki soc ranking page and manage it.
2. The wiki should start with this list of NRC ranked soc PhD programs.  The list can be amended with information from ASA publications or other sources.
3. Volunteers would select a few schools, collect data for them, and upload it to the wiki. With only 100+ PhD programs, a small handful of volunteers could do this quickly.
4. What’s the data? I suggest that we start with “Big 2″ and “Big 4″  rankings. In other words, how often do faculty publish in the leading genreal interest journals? The Big 2 are AJS/ASR. The Big 4 are AJS/ASR/SF/Social Problems.
5. For each department, find out how often people affiliated with that program publish in those journals over the last 10 years (1999-2009). The suggested rules: (a) the person has to be affiliated with the soc program at time of publication because we’re ranking soc programs, not people or universities; (b) collect both unweighted and weighted data; (c) also collect data on first authors (i.e., how many “lead authors” are at that program).
6. In the wiki list of programs, you list the data for each school. Each program has the total number of articles in the Big 2/4 journals, the weighter bumber, and the number of lead authors. Once every school has data, we can make
7. What about other ways to rank programs? What about books? Or other journals? Job placement? That’s the cool thing about open source.  Collect the data, load it, and create your own ranking. Make up any rating you want. Just do it!

Example 1: AJS publishes an article with authors from Arizona, Arizona, Northwestern, and Penn State. Arizona gets: +2 to its unweighted Big 2 and Big 4 ratings, +.5 to its weighted Big 2 and Big 4 ratings, and +1 to its “lead author” Big 2 and Big 4 ratings. 

Example 2: Social Problems publishes an article with authors from the Chicago b-school and Maryland. The Chicago soc program gets +0 to all ratings (the author is not in the soc program). Maryland gets +1 to its unweighted Big 4 rating, +.5 to its weighted Big 4 rating, +0 to the “lead author” Big 4 rating. Maryland gets +0 to all Big 2 ratings from that article.

With only 100+ schools in the US, I bet a team to 10 volunteers could produce this rating in a week or so. If someone had an RA to use, I bet they could crank it out in a week or so. If this were quickly done, it would encourage people to do book, specialty, or placement based rankings. If done decently, it’d be huge improvement over the non-existent NRC ratings, or the subjective rating produced by asking dept chairs about their impression of programs.

thanks jason

We’d like to thank Jason Owen-Smith for his fabulous guest blogging stint here at orgtheory.  Having him with us was a great way to kick off the new year/decade of orgtheory blogging. You can find all of his blog posts here. Thanks Jason!

the indiana institutionalists

Indiana is known for a lot of things, like social psychology or education. It’s not known for its recent strength in institutional theory, but it should be. From around 2000 to the present, Indiana has had an unusual concentration of people working on a distinctive strand of institutional research, often merging cultural and political processes. Such people would include Tim Bartley, Tim Hallett, Elizabeth Armstrong, Brian Steensland, Melissa Wilde, and myself.

What are common themes among this group?

• Institutional creation and destruction: While earlier work focused on constraints and “taken for grantedness,” there was a lot of work on how institutions are made or destroyed, which dovetails nicely with recent writings on “institutional work.” For example, my own work focuses a great deal on how student activists and administrators fight over what the rules are in higher education. Tim Bartley’s work focuses on how activists managed to create and (partially) influence global industrial regulations.
• Cultural constitution of policies and institutions: A number of people worked on the interesting question of how culture is a force that generates or modifies insitutions. Brian Steensland argued in a really great book that Nixon era poverty alleviation policies were crucially shaped by cultural categories and they ultimately crippled the policy proposal.  Melissa Wilde, now at Penn, wrote a great article and book about how Vatican II – an entirely new institutional order – was built on the culture of “collegiality” among liberal Catholic elites.
• Local action: A lot of institutional writing at Indiana obsessed over the issue of how broad institutional mandates get translated into specific organizations, often with chaotic results. Tim Hallett, with Marc Ventresca, has come up with his “inhabited institutions” to explain that institutions get seriuosly distorted inside specific orgs. In a forthcoming solo piece, Tim discusses how dropping myth and ceremony (i.e., stop pretending) can lead to serious org conflict. Elizabeth Armstrong, now at Michigan, has a great article claiming that movements are domain and institution specific, rather than generically oriented towards the state.

The bottom line of the Indiana institutionalists? You might call it the “power and culture” approach to organizations and institutions. (a) Culture, power, and institutions are endogenous. Institutions assign power but power can be made by making/unmaking institutions. (b) Institutions must be enacted and can’t always be taken for granted (contra Zucker and ‘83 D&P). (c) Doing what institutions demand can lead to their modifcation and erosion. (d) Institutions are not the same as culture. Culture is weilded and deployed to form groups that can be mobilized to create/attack institutions.

jim march’s passion and discipline

OK, I did not know that Jim March’s movie on Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership, Passion and Discipline, is posted online.  If you haven’t seen the movie yet — highly recommended: the movie has some thoughtful insights related to imagination and reality, consequentialist versus identity-based logic, learning from failure, joy, etc.

philip dick documentary

Here’s a free version of a documentary on the Berkeley-raised, enigmatic sci-fi writer Philip Dick (part 1, other eight parts here).

And, here’s the BBC documentary on Philip Dick (part 1, other five parts here).

our new guest blogger – tim bartley!!!

I’m pleased to announce that Tim Bartley will be our guest in February. He’s my colleague at Indiana sociology.  He’s published in AJS, Social Problems, Research in Political Sociology and other venues on the topic of movements, industrial regulation, and the environment. Please give a warm orgtheory welcome!

organizational common sense and wildland firefighting

Last week I started reading Matthew Desmond’s On the Fireline, a fascinating ethnography of wildland firefighting in Arizona that explores the nature of this highly unpredictable work and the organizational setting that facilitates risk-taking among firefighters. Desmond, who wrote this book as a PhD student in sociology (wow!), was an experienced firefighter before he began the official study and so the ethnography is unusually detailed and nuanced. What surprised me about the book was how organizational the analysis was. Although the book is written from the theoretical perspective of a symbolic interactionist and cultural sociologist – Goffman meets Bourdieu – the organizational setting figures prominently. Desmond could just as easily have written this book as a contribution to organizational theory, especially to the literature on work, routines, and bureaucratic rules. He investigates how firefighters engage with the rules of firefighting. On the one hand, they are extremely diligent in emphasizing safety rules and response routines (e.g., the regional leader regularly drills the fighters on “The Ten Standard Fire Orders and the Eighteen Situations that Shout ‘Watch Out!’”, making them perform push-ups if they forget one), but on the other hand, rules and routines are often stretched or discarded in particular firefighting situations. When reacting to a fire, rather than follow rules precisely, the firefighters rely on their intuitive know-how, which Desmond refers to as their “organizational common sense.”

By organizational common sense, I mean the set of unquestioned assumptions beneath organizational behavior and dialogue, tacitly agreed on by members of the organization, that buttresses organizational orthodoxy and ensures consensus among members of the organization. The degree to which people comply with the practices and doctrines of an organization depends, above all, on the degree to which they accept the elementary set of givens, the unspoken common code, that makes organizational thinking and behavior possible. When individuals accept the common sense of the organization – when they begin to think as the organization thinks (without thinking about it), to develop a professional disposition constituted by the culture of the organization, and to accept systems of classification it assigns – they are able to function within it as ‘productive members’ whose productivity, of course, contributes to the reproduction of the organization’s common sense (emphasis mine; 117-118).

Desmond isn’t saying that organizational members just replace one set of formal routines or rules for another more informal set of prescribed behaviors. It becomes clear throughout the ethnography that the common sense he refers to actually enables members of the organization to solve problems, deal with uncertainty, and react to danger. Organizational common sense is the unspoken code that coworkers share that gives them flexibility in applying formal rules, routines, etc. For firefighters, this common sense cannot simply be acquired by experience but is a part of their cultural DNA, or habitus, which he calls “country masculinity.” People who don’t acquire the country masculine habitus growing up in a rural area are unlikely to pick it up later. Thus, the organization of wildland firefighting relies heavily on recruiting from areas of the country where people are trained and socialized with this particular cultural toolkit.

Although Desmond doesn’t make this connection (mainly because he’s writing to a different audience), his study helps bridge the gap between micro and macro-explanations of how routines and culture gets translated into organizational practices. People who are critical of an overly-top-down view of organizational learning and routine-building ought to pay attention to Desmond’s interesting study. Do you hear me Teppo?

it’s very hard to jump 103,000 feet

On trying to break the world record for highest parachute jump. Held by Joe Kittinger who jumped 102, 800 feet in a 1960 Air Force experiment.

not your father’s communicative action

Here is Jürgen Habermas’ Twitter feed. No, really. One can’t quite be sure, of course (maybe a German speaker can point to some coverage of this in the German press?), but it seems on the level. If so (even if it’s him via an assistant), that is pretty outstanding, because my ASA Publications Committee slogan can now be “Jürgen Habermas is on Twitter but ASR still requires paper submissions”.

posted without comment

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

howard zinn, rip

Howard Zinn died today. He’s the author of A People’s History of the United States, perhaps the most well known book presenting American history from a highly critical  perspective. The book depicts the development of the American state as one episode of repression after another, and it focuses a lot on social movements. I find the book  interesting because it’s a serious departure from traditional “great man” history. Social history is rather normal now, but it wasn’t when he wrote the book.  People on the right find it an unfair depiction of American history, left historians have also lamented its reliance on simplistic “us vs. them” narrative. In addition to his work as a historian, Zinn also was an activist, who worked to end segregation within the history profession and help the civil rights movement in other ways. Later, he spoke out against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

fragments and aphorisms

The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.     

 — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  

I keep notebooks, lots of them. When I flip through, I typically find incorrect output, scribbled curses, doodles, and unsorted shards of thought.  It’s then that Uncle Ludwig consoles me [1].  In one particular moleskine [2], I’ve collected the scraps I often mutter to myself or scribble in the margins of manuscripts. Here, with little commentary and less order, are nineteen.  

 

• Cognition is social.
• Context matters.
• Meaning is mostly post-hoc and a posteriori.
• Horizontal distinctions often become vertical.
• Purity is brittle.
• Most outcomes are contingent.
• Competition drives social life.
• People work lazily to get what they think they want using the tools in easy reach.
• Rules and conventions underdetermine action.
• Everyone plays multiple games.
• Relationships are largely outside one’s control.
• Networks are the skeletons of fields
• Institutions sculpt networks and condition their consequences
• Players can’t accurately map their fields or their networks.
• Constructed things are not unreal.
• Social science should also explain how statements become true or false.
• The minimal interesting unit of analysis is three entities interacting [3].
• Fidelity should often trump parsimony.
• Analogies allow ideas to travel. Travel is transformative.

 

On re-reading, I realize that I stole many of them. Yet they still paint a loose, idiosyncratic, and contradictory portrait.  Such is my mental life.  

Huzzah.

[1] Hubris, thy name is Jason. 

[2] Kieran, I’ll take my fountain pen with a left oblique nib. You can hold the unicorn tears.

[3] One of my psychologist colleagues responded to this with “Freud thought we were all three people interacting.”

platform

Like Jeremy Freese before me, I’m running for the ASA’s Publications Committee. I’m stuck on my platform: as I recall, Jeremy promised automatic entry in a lottery for an ASR publication, an end to waterboarding, and the elimination of the requirement to cite the city of publication in bibliographical references. The latter, I think, was especially vital in securing his election. But what remains to be done? I think I’ll have to promise everyone a free Apple Whatever-Tomorrow’s-New-Magical-New-Device-Is-Called. Except the 2 percent of voters who continue to submit paper ballots. To those people I can promise a fountain pen and a nice cup of cocoa.

american orchestras!

On Wed January 27, the Universityof Michigan will host the American Orchestras Summit. It’s free and open to the public. The conference is about the changing nature of the orchestra as an institution and organizational form. Academics, musicians, managers, composers. Everyone will be there.  Here’s the schedule. I’ll be moderating a panel on the orchestras as an organizational form: ”Thinking Outside the Box: Organizational Structures and Strategies.” PIERRE BOULEZ will be at the conference on Thursday. This is essential if you care at all about cultural organizations or you want to meet Pierre Boulez.

anime consultation

Nerds to aisle 4: Help me out, folks. I finished watching RahXephon, the mysterious Japanese anime about mechas who battle through singing. I’m interested in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but the wiki suggests that the two series are very similar. Since I tend to watch TV in bulk (many episodes in a few sittings), I don’t want to spend time on a nearly similar narrative. I’m only going to invest the time if NGE is a clearly different/superior series. Opinions? Advice?

warm fuzzies and decision-making

Want to feel positive and accepting toward strangers?  Apparently holding a warm beverage will help.  Here’s an engaging clip, highlighting John Bargh’s work, on priming and social behavior.

let’s have a little sanity from the democrats…

1. When the current Congress began session in January 2009, the Democrats could only depend on 58 votes. The only reason that the Democrats had a 60 vote supermajority last week was that (a) Arlen Specter defected to avoid primary challenge and (b) the razor thin race in Minnesotta went to Al Franken. Otherwise, it was 58 votes, if you count Lieberman. So what’s different now than twelve months ago? Was the Obama honeymoon period that crucial to the Democratic legislative strategy? Did Democrats have no back up plan if they couldn’t get 60? Was their only plan to peel off one or two Republicans?

2. There’s a nice blog post on the Washington Post-Harvard post-election poll in Massachusetts. As usual, the hysteria does not match the evidence. Compared to 2008, voters tended to feel better about the economy and they wanted to support  health care reform. A slim majority approved of Obama’s agenda. The respondents did show dissatisfaction with the Senate, many favored split government, and they were unimpressed with the Democratic nominee. In other words, the “angry voter” story is just wrong. It’s more about a superior Republican campaign, some hesitation about one party government, and disapproval of the Senate.

how to save the humanities

There’s been a justifiable sense of dread within the humanities. The recession has devastated the academic job market in a field that was already experiencing profound problems. Given that I admire the arts, I offer the following constructive solutions:

1. Slash doctoral programs: Clearly, the persistent problem is a massive over supply of PhD’s in the humanities. As many folks point out, graduate programs are great at producing ABD’s who are cheap teachers. The down side is that you have an army of people that the system can’t take when they graduate.  Since the jobs are few, training programs should be small.
2. Increase masters programs: If we slash PhD programs, who will teach the masses? This is pretty easy – massively increase the MA programs. If people want to take an extra year or two learn some topic and “try out” academic life, why should we stop them? When they enter, give them a crash course in teaching, give them a section, and reduce their tuition. At age 23, spending an extra year doing intro Spanish or Writing I isn’t a big deal. No need to have the 32 year old ABD doing that stuff. If you are worried about quality, have an exam before they can teach. The other cool thing about the expanded MA is that we give lots of people a chance, but we cut them off quickly and don’t drag them out for years. You don’t have an army of disgruntled & unemployed research specialists.
3. Reclaim the Canon: Professional prestige is based on resources. What’s the one thing that the humanities is really, really good at and that no one else really does? The canon- and it should be what the humanities pushes on undergrads. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not of the view that great literature ended in 1850 and was only produced by dead white dudes.  Rather, I’m making an argument about comparative advantage. The humanities programs should be about thinking about the best culture we have produced. They should ask what is valuable about new culture. While deconstructing Star Trek can be fun, it should be kept in the electives and at professional conferences.  Undergraduate education is the public face of the humanities. It should embody the best we have to offer. Therefore, humanities programs should require or emphasize courses focusing on the best in the arts. You’ll get more respect that way.

These suggestions aren’t limited to the humanities. Rather, any field that has a weak non-academic market could be helped these recommendations (e.g., political theory): cut advanced training, get cheap labor in ways other than PhD programs, and focus on what’s absolutely vital. A world were training is linked to markets but justified by value is better than a world were people are trained for non-existent jobs and their work is justified on academic fashion.

humanist ot?

The program where I teach is a liberal arts undergraduate major in the study of organizations.  My particular framing of that topic is so broad that I tend to talk simply about organization (or even just coordination) when describing our focus. The faculty includes psychologists, a political scientist, sociologists and this year we’re hoping to add an historian.  Many of us have joint appointments with relevant departments.  The program is poised to grow.  Expansion raises interesting questions about what, precisely, a liberal arts oriented organizational studies should look like.

One possibility is to move more deeply into core arts and sciences areas and away from the various professional schools. We’re doing a pretty good job of connecting to the social sciences, so a reasonable next step might be to look for ways to engage with the humanities.  That leaves me with a problem.  I’m unclear about what a humanist scholar of organizations might do.  I have no idea where to find one.

There have been several posts here about the novels etc. that are useful teaching tools.  Jim March famously draws on “great books” to teach leadership.  I’m spending much time thinking about how innovations emerge from communities,  status, honor, &  reciprocity, and ambiguity.  Books by humanists aid me in all those regards.

Still, most of the connections I can readily point to represent our (social science and management types) attempts to use their (humanists) work to our ends.  I have little sense of how a card-carrying literary theorist, area studies person, art historian, design type, philosopher, or classicist (to name just a few) might approach questions pertinent to a broadly conceived OT in order to develop their own intellectual agendas.

Since the guys at orgtheory.net have been kind enough to turn me loose in the bully pulpit, I figured I’d put the question to everyone here.

What might humanist approaches to organizational scholarship look like?  Is it even sensible to talk about a humanities based contributions to OT?

new black studies archive

Abdul Alkalimat, a leading figure within Black Studies and professor of library sciences at Illinois-Urbana, has revised his website “eblackstudies.com.” The new feature is that he’s scanned texts in the history of Black Studies and made them free to the public. Very cool. Required reading for folks in ethnic studies, race & ethnicity, social movements, and the politics of higher ed. Recommended!

writing isn’t easy

Randomness is sort of a fun, alternative explanation for lots of things: organizational success (as discussed by Alchian, 1950), and, say, writing.  I’ve been revisiting Seth Lloyd’s short book Programming the Universe and he has a nice writing-related discussion building on an old favorite, the infinite monkey theorem.

So, the question is: how long would it take, via a random process, for monkeys to type up Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

There are about fifty keys on a standard typewriter keyboard.  Even ignoring capitalization, the chance of a monkey typing “h” is one in fifty.  The probability of typing “ha” is one-fiftieth of one in fifty, or 1 in 2,500.  The probability of typing “ham” is one in fifty time fifty time fifty, or 1 in 125,000.  The probability of a monkey typing out a phrase with twenty-two characters is one divided by fifty raised to the twenty-second power, or about 10^-38.  It would take billion billion monkeys each typing ten characters per second, for each of the roughly billion billion seconds since the universe began, just to have one of them type out “hamlet. act i, scene i.”

Here’s Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington trying to work through this.

naturalizing the social, and vice versa

Via Cosma Shalizi, reports of a very interesting piece of work: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour, C. Eisenegger, M. Naef, R. Snozzi, M. Heinrichs & E. Fehr, Nature 463, 356-359 (21 January 2010). The abstract:

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics⁷. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.

writing is a lot like golf

Bill Simmons is one of my all-time favorite sports columnists. For those of you who don’t follow sports (I’m looking at you Jerry), Simmons is a combination of a pop culture sponge, a sports geek, a comedian (I think he used to write jokes for Jimmy Kimmel), and a prolific writer. His columns are witty, meandering, ranting, long, and always entertaining. Simmons writes a lot and he writes really well. I’m slowly making my way through his enormous tome, The Book of Basketball, and I’m blown away by the level of detailed knowledge he has about the game (even if it almost makes me cry every time he mentions Karl Malone’s inability to play in the clutch). I saw Simmons on a late night talk show recently, and I got really interested when the host asked him to talk about what it’s like to write as much and as well as he does. Simmons compared writing to the game of golf. It’s something you have to work at every day if you’re ever going to be  good at it. If you stop writing, you’ll likely lose some of that touch it’s taken so long to develop. I thought this was a great analogy for writing, and because I’ve wanted to say something on this blog about the practice of writing social science for a while now, I thought I’d expound on the analogy.

Let me just say up front that I am not a good golfer at all and I consider my writing skills a work-in-progress.  My golf game is so bad that I’ve won the most improved award in our family golf tournament for the last three years mainly because I don’t qualify for any other award and because my loving family thinks that my skills can’t be getting worse. I aspire to be a good writer. I think writing is one of the most undervalued abilities in social science. Great writers can turn a good idea into a great paper. Bad writers can turn a great idea into a pretty confusing paper. So writing is important.

This post is about developing good writing habits. I’m probably not the best person to give tips on how to write. If you want that kind of advice, I recommend Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research. It’s a handy reference book and has lots of good tips for organizing your ideas.  I also highly recommend reading Ezra Zuckerman’s “Tips to article writers.” (I think about Ezra’s advice on framing your argument as a puzzle whenever I start a new paper.)