neither the really young nor really old
There seems to be a tendency that the big theoretical breakthroughs (the classics of the disciplines) come from people of a certain age and experience. This age pattern is probably found in many disciplines. In math it is thought that all of the big ideas come from people under the age of thirty. If you’re a genius you’ll know it, or at least others will know it, by the time you’re done with grad school. Is this true for organizational theorists? Is there an optimal time to produce that theoretical masterpiece?After much “systematic” analysis, I think you can argue that there is an optimal stage in your career at which org. theorists tend to produce great pieces. Take five works that are often seen as groundbreaking and that are associated with the formation of a new theoretical perspective. I couldn’t get the ages of all the authors, but by looking at their CVs we can tell how long they were out of grad school before publishing the seminal work. We also know what their academic rank was at the time of publishing.
- “Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony,” 1977
- John Meyer, associate professor at Stanford and 12 years from PhD; Brian Rowan, grad student at Stanford
- “The population ecology of organizations,” 1977
- Michael Hannan, associate professor at Stanford and 7 years from PhD; John Freeman, assistant professor at Berkeley and 2 years from PhD
- The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective, 1978
- Jeffrey Pfeffer, associate professor at Berkeley and 6 years from PhD; Gerald Salancik, professor at Illinois (not certain when he got his PhD although I’d guess it was in the late 60s, early 70s, since Salancik was an assistant professor in 1974)
- “The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields,” 1983
- Paul DiMaggio, associate professor at Yale and 4 years from PhD; Walter Powell, assistant professor at Yale and 5 years from PhD
- “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage,” 1991
- Jay Barney, associate professor at Texas A&M and 9 years from PhD
Most of the authors were associate professors, leaning toward the newish side of being an associate, at the time of publication. The average time from PhD for the authors was about 6 years (probably slightly more if you include Salancik). This was a young-ish crowd, but not too young. Most of them, especially the first authors of the papers, had established publishing records and were well on their way to being big names in the field.
So based on this quasi-systematic analysis and if you believe these are the classics in organizational theory, it’s safe to say that the optimal career stage for coming out with that big idea paper (or book) is when you’re a new associate professor. It’s reasonable to deduce from this that most of the authors began working on these ideas when they were assistants. So why are organizational theorists such late bloomers, compared to mathematicians anyway? Here are a couple of possible reasons:
- Doing organizational theory is a cumulative process. You can’t build a wall without learning how to lay a few bricks first. Much of the early work needed to build a theory consists of doing empirical research. You generate some findings, puzzle over why they’re so, and then gradually come up with the big aha! By contrast, mathematicians or even economists can generate a big idea by simply sitting down with a paper and pencil and deriving it logically. Org. theory is too inductive for that.
- Legitimacy. You may have really good ideas, but nobody listens to you until you establish yourself as a serious scholar. The message for young scholars is that if you want to be a real theoretician, it would help to prove yourself as an empirical researcher first.
- Doing theory is risky. Getting tenure is based, at least in part, on proving yourself with publications. Publishing research using established theory is less difficult to do. Either you can hope for that one big breakthrough, or you can take the less risky route of publishing in already established fields first and then go for the breakthrough.
So why don’t the big breakthroughs come from the old guys? Well, this one is easier to answer. If you’ve established yourself in a particular theoretical vein, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to defeat that theory and build a new one. It is a time to fortify your theory, tying up loose ends, etc. You’re at the stage in your career when you should be basking in the glory of having done something significant, writing books and book chapters, accepting awards and honorary PhDs, fostering new grad student talent, etc.
The inference is a little tricky. Paul DiMaggio once told me that the idea came to him in grad school but he submitted it a year or two into being an assistant. Also, in Paul’s case, he’s done additional top quality work, so you can’t really chalk it up to youthful genius. Time of publication (early associate) may just indicate how slow things can be.
However, the pop ecol paradigm fits the youthful genius thing better. Hannan had already published ecological papers (e.g., his ecological theory of race) and org ecol was simply another application of ideas hatched by Amos Hawley and the human ecology school. So maybe that was one powerful youthful idea, played out many times.
fabiorojas
March 21, 2008 at 4:29 am
“You’re at the stage in your career when you should be basking in the glory of having done something significant, writing books and book chapters, accepting awards and honorary PhDs, fostering new grad student talent, etc.”
Ew! As a hopelessly naive and mildly ambitious student with some hope of one day holding a Ph. D., I really hope I never want to settle into that kind of stagnant self-satisfaction.
Not that it’s descriptively wrong — I just take prescriptive issue with the norm.
praxeologicalGoertzelite
March 21, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I tend to agree with Fabio…I bet the difference in relative biological age between mathematicians and sociologists terms of the creative hatching of a new idea is probably not very large. The delay has more to do with characteristics of sociology as a scientific field, with its long papers, relatively long waits for publication, somewhat sluggish (but reliable) channels of collective recognition, somewhat less consensus as to reputational merits within the core network of scholars, etc.
Bourdieu had a nice analytical distinction the “Field of Cultural Production” essay between the biological age and the “institutional age” (or something like that) of a cultural producer that I think fits nicely into this discussion (i.e. a biological “older” individual can be “institutionally young within a culture production field if she or he is relative newcomer). Bourdieu himself fits the mold, since the basic ideas were already there in a series of papers he wrote in the late 1950s and early 1960s (in his late twenties and early thirties).
Also, you do find patterns that fit the “mathematics” mold outside of org theory. Not surprisingly the easiest examples are from other members of the Harvard network group. For instance, Ron Breiger wrote his classic 1974 paper on the duality of persons and groups and came up with the CONCOR algorithm while still in grad school.
Omar
March 21, 2008 at 1:24 pm
My point about legitimacy is that the ideas are there, but it takes a while before you generate enough public recognition to be able to get a major theoretical feat published. As I said in the post, most of these people had already published enough empirical stuff to merit tenure, and so it’s clear that they were actively publishing ideas they’d been working on since grad school. But why did their theoretical breakthrough end up getting in print AFTER the empirical papers? This is where I think risk and legitimacy comes into play. You have to establish yourself as a legitimate scholar first before others you gain that “collective recognition” for the big theory idea and before you’re comfortable with putting a more risky piece out there for scrutiny.
brayden
March 21, 2008 at 2:07 pm
praxe… – I don’t mean to say that these authors aren’t productive anymore. This is a set of extremely productive academics; I definitely wouldn’t describe them as stagnant. I meant to convey that there are few incentives to develop a new theory if you’ve already developed one that is widely considered to be useful/important. Their productivity is directed towards tweaking and tightening (which is what most of us spend our entire careers doing!).
Of the authors on this list, Jeff Pfeffer stands out as someone who has departed most from the theory he helped create. In the later stages of his career, Pfeffer has turned to social psychology and has been at the head of the evidence-based management movement. Still, he is most well known, at least among macro scholars, for the resource dependence perspective.
brayden
March 21, 2008 at 2:54 pm
There is a long tradition in creativity research of measuring the ages of peak productivity and peak creativity, in a range of disciplines. The most active contemporary researcher doing this is Dean Keith Simonton, but Adolphe Quetelet did it first in 1835, and there are studies of large datasets in the first half of the 20th century too. The bottom line is that, in general, the curve of creativity over the lifespan is an inverted U, with the peak at some point in mid career. However, the peak age varies dramatically by discipline. Math and physcis have the earliest peaks. In the social sciences, the average peak age is in the 40s and 50s. In the humanities, it’s the 50s and 60s.
The good news for us is that although it’s an inverted U, the drop-off after the peak really isn’t that dramatic (except in the arts, but that’s not us; and, this seems to be historically unique to fine arts in recent years; see David Galenson’s interesting book PAINTING OUTSIDE THE LINES). For theoretical work as opposed to empirical work, there is hardly any drop-off at all; more like a steady line, an asymptote.
Simonton, D. K. (1997). Creative productivity: A predictive and explanatory model of career trajectories and landmarks. Psychological Review, 104(1), 66-89.
Simonton, D. K. (1999). Creativity from a historiometric perspective. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The handbook of creativity (pp. 116-133). New York: Cambridge.
Galenson, D. W. (2001). Painting outside the lines: Patterns of creativity in modern art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
keithsawyer
March 21, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Once again, Keith leaves me impressed with his knowledge!
fabiorojas
March 21, 2008 at 3:37 pm
To follow on Keith’s fine summary (and because I’m mired in this body of scholarship today): there is an alternative finding in Howard Gardner’s work (with colleagues), that creative individuals need 10 years to master a domain, at which point they have an initial breakthrough, with subsequent breakthroughs at decade intervals. The later ones tend to be more integrative and synthetic, less abrupt and iconoclastic.
[I'm biting from a summary in Policastro and Gardner, "From Case Studies to Robust Generalizations," pp. 211-225 in Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.]
jlena
March 21, 2008 at 5:32 pm
brayden,
Admittedly, my response was somewhat intentionally over-the-top with the harsh adjectives; I also did/do agree that the motivation you describe probably is a common cause of older academics producing fewer revolutionary ideas.
But if folks generating “big theoretical breakthroughs” are not generally considered less stagnant or more productive than folks intent on tweaking, why do studies/inquiries of the sort in your original post inevitably focus on the emergence of revolutionary ideas? Is the enthusiasm for exciting, paradigmatic or just-sub paradigmatic change misplaced, or is it in some sense just a small part of the picture? I’ve always taken the focus of inquiry in studies like those keith described to be a kind of tacit argument that creative peaks are, in some sense, “the best,” or desirable, etc.
Some of the counterarguments to this are obvious, but I’m not certain the underlying point can be overwhelmed.
praxeologicalGoertzelite
March 22, 2008 at 5:06 pm
babies?
joe omahoney
March 27, 2008 at 10:49 am