more sociologists who should win the econ nobel prize
Last week, I discussed how sociologist Mark Garnovetter might legitimately be considered for the economics Nobel memorial prize because he studies the economy and has had a measurable academic impact similar to other prize winners. Here’s a short, and incomplete, list of sociologists and management scholars who have made a serious impact on the study of economic behavior and whose work has hit 1,000 citations in Google Scholar, which is what a lot of prize winners reach:
- Ron Burt – sociologist at the Chicago School of Business. Big idea: innovation is tied to structural empty spaces in networks. Citations: 2435 for his book Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition.
- Ranjay Gulati – management scholar at the Kellogg School of Management. Big idea: contracts and alliances emerge from transactions embedded in social networks. Citations: 1,055 for his 1995 AMJ article.
- Jay Barney – management scholar at the Ohio State Fisher College of Business. Big idea: you can’t compete away firm advantages if firms have distinct resources that micro-monopolies. Citations: 6,550 citations of his Journal of Management article.
- Walter Powell - sociologist at the Stanford School of Education. Not only did he co-author the 1983 blockbuster article with DiMaggio that inaugurated the institutionalist turn in sociology and political science (4,667 citations), he has also been instrumental in developing the idea that networks are a crucial element of markets. Citations: His 1996 ASQ article on firm collaboration networks has topped 1,400 cites.
Instead of going to some narrow technician in the second tier of elite economists, why not be daring and give it to a sociologist?
Interesting and logical choices! Your lineup is full of scholars whose ideas are fairly congruent with economic perspectives. Only Powell stands out as offering an arational view of human behavior (and only slightly so).
brayden
October 9, 2007 at 3:00 am
If you set your benchmark at 1000+ citations, you’ll have to list dozens of other folks – Spender (our very own guest blogger), Pfeffer, Ghoshal, Dyer, Singh etc etc.
I think the bottomline is that there still is a divide between economics and the social science disciplines proximate to it – though, at least the Schelling prize in small part suggests a somewhat broader definition of economics (and, I suppose folks like Simon, Hayek and others also did the same).
tf
October 9, 2007 at 7:05 am
Actually, if you look at some of the recent prizes, you see a bit of diversity in disciplinary training – Kahneman (psych), Herb Simon (poli sci), Aumann (math). It’s the tie to debates over neo-classical economics that ties them together.
fabiorojas
October 9, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Err… all North-American? Bravo…
typewritten
October 9, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Ranjay Gulati is a North American?
fabiorojas
October 9, 2007 at 3:50 pm
You are right.
(On the 1000+ citation issue, I think a big issue driving the numbers is discipline-specific citation/referencing patterns, it appears that in orgs and soc scholarship the norms of citation are vastly different, compare average number of references in a AJS/AMR article vs. an AER/JPE article.)
tf
October 9, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Diego: I agree with you that google scholar counts are not to be taken too seriously, but they do serve as a rough estimate of a work’s impact. I doubt that any paper that got only one or two cites would be considered prominent, and I doubt that a paper gathering thousands of cites is not having *some* impact. My hypothesis is that if you showed a panel of specialists lists of papers and asked them to rate their importance, it would correlate pretty darned well with the google scholar count.
The other issue you raised is about quality of papers. In my original post, I didn’t go purely by citation count, but each of the scholars has written material that I, and many others, find highly illuminating. The citation count just brings attention to the fact that I am not alone in thinking that a lot of good scholarship on economic institutions happens in fields adjacent to economics like management or sociology. Why shouldn’t we reward that?
fabiorojas
October 9, 2007 at 4:23 pm
But what all of those non-economics folks have in common is that their ideas have been taken up and cited frequently by economists. When Granovetter, Barney, or Gulati start getting cited regularly by economists in mainstream economics journals (and their work is perceived as having opened up a new area of inquiry in the field of economics), I think they’ll have a better chance of making the short list. Until then, the orgtheorists will just have to dream….
brayden
October 9, 2007 at 4:25 pm
That gets back to the fact that non-economist winners have all been folks who have modified the neo-classical model, not people who approach things from a distinctly sociological perspective. Maybe we should set up the “Brayden King Memorial Prize in Sociological Contributions to Economics.” I’ll chip in a free lunch for the winner.
fabiorojas
October 9, 2007 at 4:28 pm
[...] 10 October 2007 The econo-blogosphere is all atwitter in anticipation of Monday’s Nobel Prize announcement. (Yes, I know it’s the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and not a “real” Nobel, but the prize money spends just the same.) Mankiw, Cowen, Boettke, and other bloggers have made their recommendations and issued their forecasts. Even the sociologists have gotten into the act. [...]
A Nobel for Organizational Economics? « Organizations and Markets
October 10, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I think that the first sociologist to win an econ Nobel will be a 98-year old Scott Boorman after there’s an information cascade that leads this article:
Boorman, Scott A. 1975. “A Combinatorial Optimization Model for Transmission of Job Information through Contact Networks.” Bell Journal of Economics 6:216-49.
to become a citation classic among economists. Of course, by that time Britney will be a model parent and Lindsey the main spokesperson for alcoholics anonymous.
Omar
October 10, 2007 at 8:52 pm
they have a stock trade on potential nobel prize winners, here.
Tina
October 10, 2007 at 9:33 pm