orgtheory.net

To highlight how theories may become self-fulfilling, in my undergraduate class yesterday we talked about the relationship between who wins the Super Bowl and that year’s stock market performance. Apparently, if an NFC team wins, the stock market will be up that year—-the relationship is quite strong, though obviously the relationship is fraught with all kinds of problems.  There’s a whole literature citing and discussing the NFC-stock market relationship.  So, if the Arizona Cardinals win on Sunday, you know what to do.

Here’s a related piece, from Journal of Finance (2007), on “sport sentiment and stock returns” (also discussed here by Brayden).

A few months ago the thought of assistant professors not having their contracts renewed because the university couldn’t afford it seemed implausible.  Like the chief archivists, I haven’t heard of this actually happening, but now the idea doesn’t seem that far of a stretch. The failing economy has taken its toll on academia like it has everywhere else. Here are just a few of the (potential) consequences of the crisis:

1. Everyone suffers but the crisis may actually decrease some of the inequality between the haves and have-nots in academia. State universities are dealing with lower tax revenue but private universities have probably been harder hit because their endowments – which used to seem like limitless wells of slack resources – have declined considerably in value. This article claims that private universities’ endowments declined by 22.5% on average.  While places like Harvard and Dartmouth aren’t suddenly poor, their expectations have to adjust dramatically. New building plans have been set aside, planned centers may not open, etc.
2. Say goodbye to some of your dear friends. Administrative staff have been the first to go.
3. Many of us have already been told not to expect pay raises or to expect very small raises. That sucks, but if you’re bummed about not getting a raise you can at least take comfort in knowing you have a job.
4. Shrinking to non-existent job market. The sociology and psychology job markets have already tanked. A lot of great new PhDs will not have jobs at the end of this year, and the prospects will be no better (and probably worse) in the year to come. Many universities, including elite institutions like Stanford, implemented hiring freezes this fall. Some places didn’t start the hiring freeze until after they’d already interviewed a slate of candidates. I even heard rumors of one place that revoked an informal offer to a candidate because the dean couldn’t get the money for the hire.  Next year will only be worse. Even the b-school market, which for the past few years has had a job surplus, will likely dry up.
5. Some schools will use this as an opportunity. If you’re a school with an empty chaired position or another available pool of money, now is the time to steal promising or prestigious scholars from other top universities.  The likelihood that the competing school can match your offer is considerably lower this year than it has been in the past. For this reason, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some limited movement among full profs or star associates.
6. PhDs will improve in quality over the next several years. Everyone knows that a recession tends to drive smart people back into the warm arms of grad school. This means that the application rate will increase and schools will be able to be more selective. Some people who might have ended up at Harvard, Berkeley or Princeton in years past will end up at slightly lower ranked schools. There will be more very talented applicants than there will be acceptance offers.
7. Here’s what I really hope doesn’t happen – schools will use the economic crisis as an opportunity/excuse to cut some faculty positions permanently.

We did this one a while back. Let’s update: I still think Stanford and Northwestern are the places to beat. NWU has Wendy Espeland, Bruce Carruthers, Carol Heimer, Art Stinchcombe, Susan Thistle, and Robert Nelson. The b-school has sociologically minded folks as well: Brayden, Brian Uzzi, and Paul Hirsch. Stanford, in soc, has Mark Granovetter, Michael Hannan, Henning Hillman, Xueguang Zhou. In other departments, tons of orgs/soc folks: Woody Powell, Dick Scott, John Meyer, James March, Huggy Rao, Dan McFarland. Add your other nominations in the comments – remember the dept must have at least three active folks in orgs.

My question: how should academia approach small, third tier journals?* In a previous post, I linked to research showing that these journals do actually publish some highly respected material. The gist is that the average third tier article isn’t cited much, but these journals publish occasional winners who do much better than the bottom articles in the elite journals. The issue is that when it comes to rewarding people, we have essentially two models: (a) immediate reward for publication in top journals/presses or (b) you wait a few decades when it’s clear that a low status publication was actually any good. Is this a good model?

There’s a standard justification for this policy. Publication in a third tier journal is usually seen as a clear signal that the research is weak. Basically, “third tier publication” = failed research article. A few comments on the policy: First, a journal may be third tier simply because it has a narrow audience, not due to quality. Second, top journals may make mistakes and reject good articles. Reviewers may not like a new argument, or the topic may seem odd. Third, statistically speaking, many third tier articles aren’t good, so I believe the policy has some justification.

Now, if you completely believe in the standard rap against third tier journals, then there are some serious implications. One is that all the tiny journals should be shut down immediately. No need to waste time or resources on junk. Another implication is that you should count these articles against people. Don’t reward people for junk. If you are skeptic, then you should be at least agnostic. You shouldn’t be terribly impressed with third tier articles, but you might adopt a more agnostic stance toward their quality.

* I define “third tier” to be legitimate academic journals that aren’t flagship journals, well known speciality journals, or those published by major national or regional associations. These include most student run journals, journals run by obscure departments or occupational groups,  journals for unpopular specialties, journals from small countries, or journals that have simply not risen to the top in a well regarded specialty.

Translation: A bird wins the lottery and decides to go to the travel agency, where the travel agent is a guy who annoys him. “I wish to travel somewhere in the world.” “Choose a spot on this globe, bird brain.” “Let’s see… let’s see…” “Hurry up.” “None of these spots work for me. Do you have another globe?” Another cheap shot from Condorito.

Dick Langlois drew my attention to a special issue of Business History Review honoring Alfred Chandler. Among the many notable scholars writing essays is Neil Fligstein, whose book The Transformation of Corporate Control acknowledged Chandler as an important influence. Reading Chandler was a memorable experience for me. After Weber, Chandler’s Strategy and Structure and The Visible Hand were two of the first books I read when preparing for my organizational theory preliminary exam in grad school. Like Fligstein I was impressed by Chandler’s focus on the big, historical questions. While we often equate Chandler with arguments of efficiency and organizational structure, his greatest contribution was drawing attention to the large societal changes associated with the rise of the corporate form. Fligstein points out how this broad, historical treatment differed greatly from the dominant sociological scholarship on organizations of the 1960s and 70s.

Chandler’s outlook presented a twofold challenge to sociologists of organizations. First, their concern to construct a scientific theory of organizations meant that sociologists had given up on the Weberian project of understanding how historical forms like the corporation emerged and were transformed. This made it hard for them to ask the big questions, such as those proposed by Chandler and Weber. Chandler’s relentless historicism pushed sociologists to move away from the idea that a scientific theory of organizations would account for the emergence and dynamics of these institutions. Instead, sociology had to recognize that there was a time when such organizations did not exist, and to acknowledge that new organizations and organizational forms were constantly appearing.

Second, these sociologists’ narrow focus on a few organizational characteristics, and their determination to view all organizations as the same, prevented them from considering the ways that firms differed from state bureaucracies and nonprofits. It also discouraged scholars from analyzing what the relations might be among governments, firms, and nonprofits. The sociology of organizations in the form that it existed could not get back to Weber’s original formulation, which stressed the interdependence of the various factors that produced modern society. Eventually, organizational theorists confronted both problems and began to evolve a new set of views.

Fligstein then argues that institutional theory, population ecology, and the comparative study of capitalism were, in some ways, reactions to and critiques of Chandler. For example, organizational ecology explicitly rejected the idea that you could understand historical evolution of organizational forms simply by looking at the most successful survivors; they maintained that population analysis was the only valid way to understand the dynamics of form evolution. Some scholars, like Fligstein, Dobbin, Perrow, Roy, and Freeland actually reanalyzed the historical cases that inspired Chandler’s original thesis, demonstrating how Chandler failed to consider alternative explanations for the rise of (and variation in) the dominant corporate form.

Fligstein’s take on Chandler is interesting (and I think it’s safe to say that few sociologists know or understand Chandler’s work better). Usually the emergence of institutional theory and organizational ecology are attributed to Stinchcombe’s (1965) paper on social structure, but Fligstein points out that they were also reactions to Chandler’s naive historical view. I think Fligstein is certainly correct that the new wave of theorizing about organizations in the late 1970s were rejections of the static theories of organizational heterogeneity that dominated the 1960s, while also being rejections (especially DiMaggio and Powell 1983) of Chandler-like theories of competition and organizational efficiency. What I’m less convinced of is that organizational scholarship has fully embraced the comparative, historical analysis typical of Weber. It’s true that we’re much better now than we were at incorporating history into our analyses, but I think we’re still lacking in the comparative side. More on that later.

The North Shore is ruled by a strict code of localism and tradition. Failing to respect that code can lead to serious sanctions, including public beatings. No, I’m not talking about Chicago’s North Shore, which is considerably more benign; I’m talking about Oahu’s surf scene.

This article and video from the NY Times discuss how the “rules of the game” are enforced on the North Shore by a gang of local surfers who call themselves the Wolfpak. From the point of view of the locals the rules bring order to what are becoming increasingly congested waves. The water is free to everyone and so there needs to be some way to ensure that surfers share the resources and, most importantly for the Wolfpak, make sure that there are enough waves for the locals to ride. One of the things I like about the video is that it is very apparent how connected the “rules of the game” are to the surfer power structure. The Wolfpak design and enforce rules that ensure order, true, but the rules also reproduce a power structure that is favorable to locals and keep outsiders on the outside.  This is not dissimilar to what goes on inside most organizations, although with less physical violence, in which rules of the game define how resources are used and shape power relations.  The video just makes this point with a little more entertainment value, which might make it a good class resource.

Fun: A few years back, I bought some “boomwhackers.” It’s pretty simple – boomwhackers are just tubes of different lengths, you whack ‘em, and they make notes. Since they are tuned to the C major scale, you can easily make music. It’s a very silly and very musical toy. Here’s some of my favorite boomwhacker youtube clips:

Ninjas doing a boomwhacker Christmas.

Axel F – the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. Satisfying.

Shine.

Led Zepplin?

Spencer Dorn, of Cal State Long Beach, wrote “Cylindrophoncities,” a piece for boomwhacker quintet. Very nice.

This is another reason for the existence of Econ Journal Watch, the online journal of critiques and commentary on academic economics. The current issue has an article on the topic of women in the economics profession by Christine Jonung and Ann-Charlotte Stahlberg. A while back, they wrote an article documenting the paucity of women in academic economics. 30% of PhD grads are now women, but, depending on which country you look at, 5-8% of full profs are women. There were responses, and now they published a rejoinder.

The rejoinder is interesting, because it’s skeptical about many offered explanations:

• Yes, there are measured cognitive differences between men and women, but that doesn’t settle the issue. Though cognitive ability has more variance for men (ie, more geniuses and duds), women and men are relatively strong in different traits that’s you’d imagine would be useful for academic work. Also, there’s some national variance in the mean difference between men and women. Some countries have men and women equal, while others have one gender scoring higher than the other. So aside from the variance differences, evidence of gender differences are not strong, nor convincing. Finally, I’d add that there’s a threshold effect issue. Sure, you may need X level of IQ to be an academic, but it’s not clear that higher ability, by itself, gets you anything extra. If it’s one thing that research on achievement shows, ability is just the beginning.
• Socialization/preference arguments are not strong. Some folks think that women avoid economics as a profession because they are discouraged from math intensive occupations, dislike the macho atmosphere of economics programs, or prefer occupations that are more compatible with family life. The last two explanations are tough to support because other demanding academic professions – like biology and the law – now have many, many women.
• Jonung and Stahlberg do note that there are gender related differences in risk preference, at least in experimental work. Some people suggest that risk preferences might translate into career choices. However, academic economics is a remarkably low risk occupation, compared to the rest of academia. A PhD who fails to get an academic job can easily earn $100k in the private sector as a consultant or analyst. Economists can also work in the Fed and other well paying gov’t institutions. It’s not at all like getting a PhD in philosophy or the humanities, where failure in the market can mean completely abandoning the career or accepting miserably paying adjunct work. If it’s about risk, then women should be flocking to economics like they flock to medicine and the law (both hard fields with many women).
• I don’t think that J&S succeed in dismissing the hypothesis that there are gender differences in the desire to pursue math. Nearly all math intensive academic occupations have female PhD rates of 10-20%: engineering – 12% women, physics and astronomy – 14%, computer science 17%. Mathematics itself is an outlier – about 30% female PhD in the early 2000′s. I have an explanation below for this anomaly.
• J&S also ask: what’s the big deal? Who cares about gender balance? If the whole science is just about utility maximization, then who cares about the biology of the person doing the equations? They have a plausble answer: mixing men and women means different applications of the same tools to wider phenomena, which can only enrich the field.

I was also surprised that there wasn’t an orgtheory/sociology answer: perhaps women don’t have the same access to the networks of elite academic economics. Economics appears to me, an outsider, to be a fairly closed social system. Top jobs go to people from top departments who have sympathetic advisers. Top papers are often vetted at the “right” panels and the NBER, which is determined, of course, by the top people. Publication can depend on making a single expert in the field happy with your paper. While this is true in all academic fields, that elites set the agenda, it seems to be unusually strong in economics. The career is extremely path dependent in economics, to my eye. You don’t see too many outsiders in the field rise to prominence in top econ departments. So if women are not invited as often to working groups in graduate school, or whatever, then it could have a real impact on placement and eventual promotion.

After reading this, and my own knowledge of the academic system, I’d timidly offer the following model about gender and academia. (a) In non-physical science fields, the end of institutional discrimination in the 60s and 70s quickly lead to a big boost in grad school enrollments and professorships by women. Basically, all the humanities, the social sciences, biological and health fields, and many other areas have been desegregated by gender, relatively speaking. (b) The story is different for anything that has math. First, people really seem to differ in their desire to do math, but the evidence doesn’t tell us if it’s socialized differences or not. Second, many of these fields make it difficult for people not plugged into elite networks to get and keep top jobs. (c) Math itself is an exception because of it’s unusually open culture. This is not to say that people aren’t snobs, but math is not a field with professional norms that revolve around elite networks. Anyone may submit to journals, advisors don’t take all credit, etc. It’s very possible in this system to succeed even if you don’t have the best connections.

From whitehouse.gov.

Doing fieldwork in Washington, DC today. A few photos from a rally.

A protester engages in street theater, making a point against water torture.

A man participates in the shoe toss against Bush.

Man inside a Bush effigy costume is interviwed by a Telesur camera crew. Interestingly, foreign media appear to be much more interested in peace protests than domestic media, at least as indicated by camera crews.

The passengers of US Airways 1549 are extremely lucky. The pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, was an experienced US air force pilot – and an organizational scholar who researched airline safety. Sullenberger has two masters degrees in industrial psychology and public administration and he works with an organization studies group at Berkeley called the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. Of course, disaster was averted by Sullenberger’s outstanding pilot skills, but I also like to think that, just maybe, orgtheory helped a little bit too.

Why do we see little to no cross-fertilization between social psychology (especially the sociological variety) and economic sociology? It seems strange that there is so little overlap given that these areas are interested in similar kinds of outcomes and phenomena, e.g., valuation, status, power. Sociological social psychology studies the bread and butter concepts of sociology – status and identity, for example – while economic sociology tends to use bread and butter concepts to explain market phenomena. Yet strangely there is little cross-citation between the subfields. It’s almost as if they don’t know the other exists.

I think the potential for theoretical cross-fertilization is quite high though. Here are some places where social psychology and economic sociology ought to converge.

• Theories of value – Shane Thye‘s excellent research on value shows how value gets constructed through association with status characteristics. Thye completes the trifecta by, in turn, demonstrating that higher valuation gives high status players power in dependence relations.
• Exchange theory -  exchange theory is a way of understanding social relationships that emphasizes the emergence of social structure as the result of ongoing exchanges and dependencies between actors. Although there seem to be obvious connections between network analysis and exchange theory the two rarely talk to each other. Strangely, exchange theory has provided little leverage in explaining market relationships.
• Affect control – affect control theory posits that individuals have to square their actions with the emotions they experience. Individuals try to emote in appropriate ways but when they don’t, they change the way they view their situations. Strangely, economic sociologists have very little to say about the emotional experience of markets, although our own experiences suggest that affect plays an important role in shaping individual market relations.
• Symbolic interaction – Status is a big deal in economic sociology but reputation gets relatively little airplay. My sense is that this is because reputation is a much more subjective construct while status is positional. Gary Alan Fine’s work on reputational entrepreneurship, however, seems highly relevant to how market actors attempt to change their relations with other market actors through impression management.  Where is the front stage and back stage of markets anyway?

This post isn’t meant to say that there is absolutely no contact between economic sociology and sociological social psychology (I await your comments pointing out the areas of convergence that I’m overlooking). Tim Hallett is bringing symbolic interaction to institutional theory. E-Z has a new project on status with two prominent social psychologists, Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelly Correll. Resource dependence theory was spawned by Emerson’s power dependence theory. But the possibilities for future cross-fertilization seem pretty open. Bridging the two would seem to be a goldmine for enterprising grad students.

So, this semester I launched that graduate readings class on “organization theory in novels” — thanks a million to orgheads for their brilliant suggestions!

I have some quite exceptional graduate students in the class (there’s only six of us), and our first session today was fantastic. We started with a shorter reading, Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street.  Boy—Melville’s essay is beautifully written, funny, and packed with insights into all kinds of organizational and managerial issues: job design, equity, incentives and motivation, purpose, responsibility and morality, emotion and social interaction, etc.  In fact, in retrospect we perhaps should have narrowed our discussion to a few themes, but in all, I thoroughly recommend the essay for purposes of discussing various organizational issues.  (Perhaps I’ll post more specifically on a few themes in the future.)

Next? Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.

Attention! I am fielding a survey of protesters during the inauguration. I’ve had two cancellations from people I’d been expecting to help me. If you want to make $15/hour handing out surveys in DC during the Obama inauguration, email ASAP!!! It’s easy and fun (and cold!). My email is frojas AT indiana dot edu. Forward this to your friends. Thanks.

Remember the famed “triangulation” strategy of the Clinton presidency? No, I am not going to claim that Obama will magically be immune from the need to pander to the center. That’s just life in a democracy. Once the center abandons you, you’re out of a job.

However, there are cases where pandering to the center gets you nothing and compromises your ethical view. That’s how I viewed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” There’s much evidence that American society is moving toward toleration of sexual orientation, even back in the 1990s. Ending discrimination in the military would’ve caused social conservatives to yell, but the policy didn’t buy Clinton any conservative votes and the furor would’ve died down sooner or later. And heck, it didn’t prevent the paralysis of his administration caused by the Gingrich Revolution and the impeachment crisis. No one during the impeachment said, “thank god we approved don’t ask, don’t tell. The republicans truly respect the President now. Otherwise, we’d be toast.”

So I was pleasantly surprised to see this item, linked by drudge. In a news show, Obama’s Press Secretary Joe Gibbs was asked by a viewer about the don’t ask policy:

Thadeus of Lansing, Mich., asks, ‘Is the new administration going to get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy?’” said Gibbs, looking into the camera. “Thadeus, you don’t hear a politician give a one-word answer much. But it’s, ‘Yes.’”

Probably a slip, but likely an indicator of Obama’s take on the issue. If this holds up, and we see an executive order, it shows that Obama is taking a cue from Truman, who essentially bypassed the legislature and simply ordered that the Army and Navy stop segregation. As this handy timeline shows, it wasn’t easy and there was much resistance, but Truman essentially said “no more segregation – why? Because I’m the President of the United States. Deal with it.” Give ‘em hell, Barry.

Some law and economics resources.  First, from the first author’s web site, here’s a link to a full-text pdf (25 Mb) of Robert Cooter and Thomas Ulen’s (third edition) 477-page primer on law and economics.  Second, here’s an online encyclopedia of law and economics.

In a 2006 review article for the Journal of Institutional Economics, I concluded that economic sociology might have much in common with heterodox economics. Let me spin this out for the case of austrian economics. Here’s a lengthy wiki primer, but, in a nutshell, Austrianism focuses on issues like disequilibrium, entrepreneurship, and viewing markets as rational, but spontaneously, emerging complex orders. It’s a strand of econonomics that casts markets as good social institutions based on acquring knowledge, learning, and problem solving.

Here’s the links:

• Austrians and economic sociologists share a strong taste for inductive learning from qualitative examples and a distaste for mathematical models.
• They both view markets as socially constructed entities. They both place much importance on actors who shake up the status quo by doing things that others don’t see. “Entrepreneurs” appear prominently in both theories.
• They both view equilibrium models as missing the point, or at least not where the action is.
• They both view markets as complex, decentralized moral orders, not mechanical asset sorting processes.

Now, here are some divergent points:

• Political disagreement: Austrians are very strong defenders of markets. Sociologists tend to be the opposite.
• Austrians reject statistics, but most sociologists accept statistics as an important form of theory testing.
• Austrians adopt a government “one drop” rule: any touch of state intervention interrupts the natural development of markets. Economic sociologists often view states as providing regulation or infrastructure.
• Austrians adopt the economically oriented individual as the basic model of human behavior, even though it’s not the same as the neo-classical homo economicus. Economic sociologists view both of these models as historically specific and not generalizable.
• Austrians view non-market actors (movements, states, interest groups, ethnic groups) with skepticism. Economic sociologists are more likely to see these folks in a positive light because they help establish what is legitimate and moral.

Connecting economic sociology is an interesting idea, because Austrianism is way more open to outsiders than neo-classical economics. I’d be interested in how economic sociology could better be integrated with Austrianism, or any other heterodox approaches.

You know the rules: list soc PhD programs in an area that have at least three active members. This week’s field: education. I’ll start with my own employer – Indiana. We’ve got folks in nearly every major aspect of education: Armstrong (higher ed/campus life), Corsaro (childhood/development/ethnography), Eder (adolesence/qualitative), Hallett (org studies/leadership), Lee (Asian Am/achievement), me (higher ed/orgs/politics), Powell (achievement/family), Walters (historical/race/political comparative). Add more in the comments.

According to the Daily Mail, owners of the captured Sirius Star paid $3,000,000 and had it parachuted onto the boat. Ironically, some of the pirates died as they tried to get away with the ransom, they were drowned by choppy waters while fighting over the money. Previous orgtheory pirate posts: Brayden on Pete Leeson, me on on Pete Leeson,.

So, there hasn’t been much time of late for any extra reading, but here’s some “quick takes” on books that I’ve recently purchased (a few of which I subsequently read, others not):

Alinsky, S. 1989. Rules for Radicals. Vintage Books. Had to buy it, given all the fuss.  Have skimmed various parts, am ready for action!  (Well, depending on the cause.)

Antognazza, M.R. 2008. Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press.  This puppy’s some 600 pages, tackled a few parts, thick reading.

Burkhardt, R.W. 2005.  Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology. University of Chicago Press. I picked this book up on a whim at the local bookstore — its brilliant!  A beautiful discussion of key scholars in ethology, their “bildung,” contributions, the surrounding historical context, etc.   A fantastic read.

Grenander, U. 1996. Elements of Pattern Theory. Johns Hopkins University Press.  Interesting book — maybe more on this one later.

Lloyd, S. 2006. Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. Vintage Books.  This book is really fun — loved it!  Read it in one sitting.

Pentland, A. 2008. Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World. Bradford Books.  Have not even opened it up yet.

Pierson, G.W. 1938. Tocqueville in America. Oxford University Press.  800+ pages by historian George Pierson on Tocqueville’s American journey — interesting, though I’ve only read a few parts.

Brad DeLong, when he sets his mind to it, is one of the clearest writers in economics today, persuasive in rhetoric and in fact. In this paper he argues that many members of the Chicago school have departed from Milton Friedman’s views in an important way. While Friedman and Keynes differed on technical issues, they agreed that “it was the business of the government to boost asset prices via open market operations and bank rescues” when “the money stock and the flow of aggregate demand started down.” The contemporary Chicago school has twisted this view, he says, to argue that government interference with the market is never a good thing. This leads DeLong to the following questions:

• “Why aren’t the members of the Chicago School today – Kehoe, Chari, Christiano, Cochrane, Mulligan, and many many others – the disciples of Milton Friedman as far as stabilization policy is concerned?
• Whose disciples are they, instead?
• And why?”

The answers to these questions is the fun part of the paper, which I encourage you to read yourself since it’s pretty short and comprehensible. The answer will also intrigue you Marxists out there. The part of the answer that fascinated me is this notion that some economists have taken the free market orthodoxy as a moral belief, altogether bypassing debates over technical solutions to the current financial crisis.  Markets are supposed to punish people for their excesses, they say. Restraining this punishment is interfering with the natural order of things. DeLong writes that this sort of dogmatic belief in markets moves economics dangerously closer to theology as a view of the world.

One reason I like the journal Organization Studies is that it’s not afraid to buck convention and get a little wacky sometimes.  Risk taking helps us further theory development, shake off the shackles of institutional theory, etc. Take for example this new call for papers, “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Organizations: What Can Psychoanalysis Offer Organization Studies Today?” While most psychological perspectives on organizations come from social psychology, this special issue will highlight research that delves deeper into the unconcious desires of organizational beings. Papers are due November 30.

Can you guess the analogy I’m making? It’s this: For each pair of presidents, the first started policies that the second one got credit for. The second in each pair didn’t actually reverse much done by the first, but rather just expanded and amplified the trend. For each pair, the public, and often the well educated public, believes that the second president was a complete opposite of the first. A few sketches:

• Hoover may have talked about free markets, but pursued many policies that expanded the state’s presence in the economy. For example, Hoover pushed for protecting American agriculture via tariffs, asked employers to not lay off workers, increased government spending on infrastructure, and created institutions to save failing banks. He also established the Reconstruction Fincance Corporation to help support local businesses and agriculture. He also raised the taxes on the highest earners from 23% to 63%. FDR’s subsequent public works projects and bank regulations were built on the foundation laid by Hoover.

Of course, this phenomena is not limited to democrats who take credit for policies implemented by republicans. Conservatives should be thanking Jimmy Carter for all the help he gave to Reagan:

• Carter began the substantial liberalization of the American economy in the 1970s. In 1979, he argued for substantial de-regulation of interstate transport. Carter’s 1979 message to Congress talks about how trucking shouldn’t be protected from competition. Same goes for dergulation of airlines, energy, and railroads. Maybe not as dramatic as Hoover’s setup of the New Deal, but still a phenomenally important change in the economy. And who gets credit for being the free market champion? That’s right: Ronald “Deficit” Reagan.

Now, we’re seeing the same process all over again with Bush. Though he talks tough on markets, his administration has essentially created giant slush funds for constituents in finance and other sectors of the economy, the opposite of “hands off.” With the meltdown in progress, Bush has now set up a number of programs that will be picked up by the next administration: bailouts for financial institutions, bailouts for mortgage holders, bailouts for Detroit. The Economist recently labeled it “disaster socialism.” Use economic catastrophes to shift risk to the public purse, and help your buddies in the process. My opinion is that Obama will be more effective at using these tools, he’s much more in command of policy than Bush seemed to be and possesses remarkable political skill to get policies that he wants. But he’ll also be the beneficiary of the Hoover effect, he’ll get credit for policy streams started by his predecessor.

Happiness, like obesity and everything else (ok, so, I’m still doubtful), spreads through networks.

Some findings:

A happy friend who lives within a half-mile makes you 42% more likely to be happy yourself. If that same friend lives two miles away, his impact drops to 22%. Happy friends who are more distant have no discernible impact, according to the study.

Similarly, happy siblings make you 14% more likely to be happy yourself, but only if they live within one mile. Happy spouses provide an 8% boost – if they live under the same roof. Next-door neighbors who are happy make you 34% more likely to be happy too, but no other neighbors have an effect, even if they live on the same block. 

Physical proximity seems important.  There must be some virtual, “exposure”-effect too — who, after all, is not instantly in a better mood after getting an email loaded with emoticons ;) or after reading TSS or after seeing this gang cheerfully following Fabio’s fanny pack?

Here’s more, at Edge, summarizing the associated British Medical Journal article by Christakis and Fowler, and including an extension and graph looking at happiness and online effects.  

Tomorrow’s topic for my org theory MBA class (yes, we already started this week!) is the importance of theory (even for die-hard practitioners), including a fun discussion of correlation versus causation.  I have a few tricks up my sleeve (a coin toss experiment, a discussion of the NFC-stock market link and other weird correlations, etc — I’ll post these, along with the readings, tomorrow into the comments), but, what tools or experiments do you know of to highlight correlation versus causation and the associated importance of theory?

The Matthew effect is one of sociology’s favorite explanations. It has been particularly prominent in organizational research that seeks to explain how advantage is reproduced. Take Podolny’s wonderful work on status. The underlying causal mechanism in the connection between status and performance, he argues, is a Matthew effect whereby high status actors reproduce their structural positions because they “obtain greater recognition and rewards for performing a given task at a given level of quality and lower-status actors receive correspondingly less” (21). For high status producers, this means they can charge higher prices for the same quality goods as their lesser status competitors and they can produce it at a lower cost because employees and suppliers may be willing to operate at a discount to be associated with the high status producer.

Because of the Matthew effect the rich get richer. Success breeds more success. We see this in the business world, and as a commenter argued last week in a post about the Detroit Lions, we see a similar pattern of advantage reproduction in sports.  Winning teams increase their revenue, which gives them the slack they need to acquire better players, better facilities, etc. In college sports, winning makes it easier for programs to recruit the top players in the country, increases alumni donations, and ensures that the team remains in the media spotlight. USC has more talent now than they did when they first returned to the national spotlight in 2002 precisely because all of their success and consequent media attention enabled them to recruit the best players at every position.

While the Matthew effect seems well founded, especially in the world of sports, I think there’s a countervailing effect at work that in certain conditions causes the playing field to become more even than you’d otherwise expect. I’ll call it the Job effect – to those who have been given shall be taken away. Those who have been blessed will also be tested. Success breeds envy and contempt, which causes competitors to ratchet up their efforts to undermine the successful organization.  This attempted flattening of the playing field takes place in a couple of ways. First, competitors of a successful program will use their counterpart’s success to justify adding more resources to their arsenal and improve their own competitiveness. You often see this intensified competition in local division races.  The Yankees unparalleled success in the 1990s led to an increased effort by the Red Sox organization to improve its team and beat the Yankees. While winning the World Series was always the ultimate goal for the Red Sox, it took having the Yankees win several World Series in a row for the Red Sox to change some pretty pathetic organizational ways. The arms race in the East division of the American League intensified as a result. During every offseason we get to see the Yankees and Red Sox vie for the best free agents on the market. This competition for players means that the Yankees pay a much higher premium for talent than they would otherwise, and some have argued that this has hurt the Yankees ability to build a coherent team. Given the tendency for success to intensify competition, it’s no surprise that we often see one or two divisions dominate an entire league.

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I’m not the type of guy to drop “post-Fordism” into conversation, but I found the web journal Fast Capitalism interesting reading. Run by theory maven Ben Agger, it features all sorts of neat critical theory essays. Sadly, there are few URLs for specific articles, but it’s not hard to find these essays by starting with the table of contents:

• “I’m in the library,” by Audrey Sprenger, an audio ethnography of how people use the library. (Vol 4)
• “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m proud” – a mestizaje analysis of post-Katrina activism  by Harriford and Thompson. (vol 4)
• An entire issue (Vol 3) of responses to Virginia Tech.
• Lemert has an interesting meditation on Mao and Baudrillard as people caught up in wild Disneyland realities. (Vol 3)
• Mark Rudd on why there were many Jews in SDS (Vol 1.2)

An interesting collection of personal thoughts and theory ruminations. Just  hope they fix the URLs.

UPDATE: Gabriel has a nice comment (#3) where he shows how to link to articles directly.

I want to start a new occasional series on orgtheory called “soc phd programs,” a list of schools that are *currently* strong in an area. Sort of an informal resource for people who want to know what schools are good in certain areas that can be changed with time. The rules are simple. I’ll name an area. In the comments, you name the school and three scholars who are currently active in that area. Emeritus profs, lecturers, and post-docs, for this purpose, don’t count. They have to be active scholars who can supervise doctoral students. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what “active” means, but please don’t include the prof who had one pub in the area 20 years ago, or the scholar whose work is so vague or famous that it can plausibly be attached to any field (e.g., Paul DiMaggio is definitely a stretch for demography). I’ll also accept a broad definition of “sociology program.” Long as the program can plausibly produce someone recognizable as a sociologist in topic X (i.e., b-schools). If you can name successful recent graduates, please do so.

You can write in your own  grad program, or one you want to apply to. Doesn’t have to be fancy, long as the school has a deep and active pool in this area.

So here we go: stratification – income, jobs, prestige, occupations, hierarchies, class structure, etc. We’ll do race and gender later, so stick to the labor/markets side of things. I’ll put in my own PhD program just to start off: Chicago – it has a number of scholars who are active and well known in start/work/occupations – Kaz Yamaguchi, Andy Abbott, Rafe Stolzenberg, Yang Yang. Please add more in the comments.

Here’s the slip:

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I was talking to fellow junior scholar a while ago and she asked how I would classify myself as a scholar. I thought about it moment and then said, “I’m a Huggy Rao wannabe.”  My friend smiled and said, “I am too! Aren’t we all?” And it’s true.  Huggy is the perfect role model for young organizational theorists. In the era of middle-range theory dominance in which old theories are increasingly blurring into one another, he is the prototype of what a theoretician should be. Rao is highly respected because he creatively moves theory forward by making connections between theories and exploring the common mechanisms in different streams of research. He is also a great storyteller, which makes his papers all the more interesting.

Rao’s new book Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations was released by PUP last month. This book is an engaging account of how people with innovative ideas use collective action to mobilize those ideas and get them into markets. The book talks about activists who want to introduce new innovations (e.g., automakers in the early 20th Century) as well as activists who want to stop innovation from having a broad impact (anti-biotech activists pressuring German pharmaceutical companies).  For those of you who are familiar with Rao’s scholarly papers, there is not a great deal of new theory in the book, since much of the book summarizes his research. The newest ideas come in chapter 5, which features a working paper about shareholder activism, and chapter 7, which discusses a forthcoming ASR paper with Klaus Weber and L.G. Thomas on anti-biotech activists. The book effectively frames the research on social movements and markets in a way that appeals to a broad audience, including practitioners.  Rao’s framing relies on the imagery of energy:

The detailed histories of several markets presented in this book show that collective voice shapes markets by activating new identities through hot causes that arouse emotions and create a community of members, and through cool mobilization that allows participants to realize collective identities…Causes that lack heat fly below the radar – they do not arouse intense emotions or mobilize public opinion. A cause needs to be hot, especially when the grievances or issues underlying the cause spill over across multiple jurisdictions or professions…Cool techniques of mobilization are oppositional, dramatic, and insurgent – they need audience participation to be filled in and to be learned. By contrast, cold techniques of mobilization typically involve the head of the audience and not the heart of the audience – they seldom engage people in creating a sense of community (172, 175, 177).

My favorite chapter is about the auto enthusiast clubs. The SMJ paper on which this chapter is based is, I think, Rao’s most important paper to date. The chapter provides more color and richness to the story than the original article did. The paper on which chapter 7 is based will be one of the most important papers about social movements and organizational policymaking in the years to come. The paper, in effect, explains how movements get inside closed organizations. The book is a perfect weekend read for the orghead, but I think the book is framed in a way that would make it accessible to an undergraduate economic sociology or complex organizations course. You could also use the book in an MBA course on organizational change.

Honestly, we’re not sore losers here at the OT, but we’ll admit to being a little agitated at being the runner-up in the TSS Best of 2008 award to that irreverent Drek! We’d rather lose to the gracious Jenn anyday. We’re doing our best to maintain our composure and taking comfort in the knowledge that the undisputed K.O.A.S.B. is back where he belongs.

I’d never read “Fast Capitalism” before, but I was lucky to find this essay by social theorist Charles Lemert. In it, Lemert asks why Mills is still remembered while Gouldner fades. A few key clips:

Yet, when men (and I mean men) are remembered or ignored, the cause must be sought in the work, which in these two instances is symptomatic of their personal styles. Yet, today, Mills is very well remembered, if mostly for his famous slogan that revived a sociology which, in 1959, was ill-prepared for the revolutionary decade already brewing. The Sociological Imagination comes to mind even among those who would never think of reading Mills seriously. The concept, as distinct from the book, was the acknowledged inspiration of an American New Left of mostly white northern students who took from the slogan a sufficient justification for demanding and proposing the outlines of a better world, as only the more serious among them studied the corpus as source books for, as Dick Flacks put it, making history.

An honest admission of the limits of Mills’ work:

Still, it is hard to imagine how anyone would today begin a project on power with primary reference to Mills. The work of advancing his conception of power as having economic, political, and cultural expressions was already been done by Pierre Bourdieu among many others, just as Bill Domhoff and others have fleshed out the idea of elites working in a community of interest, if not a conspiracy. Then, there is the Foucault-problem for even so subtle a top-down theory of power as Mills’s—power is culture/culture is power; both arise as much from the bottom as from above. Whatever we eventually determine globalization to be about, it is at least about the requirement that now we must think about power with respect to its many articulations, including those by which it colonizes the culture that colonizes everyday life. Elites remain, of course, but the metaphoric lesson of 9/11 is that the lesser powers resist and confound the global elite even the higher circles work their will down upon the nameless masses.

This pithy summary of Gouldner gets it right. Even when you get beyond the tedious style of Gouldner (one book was called “The Anti-Minotaur”!), you aren’t left with much to work with if you are a revolutionary wannabe:

Gouldner had no illusions about the potency of sociology in particular or of enlightened knowledge in general. For him critical theory was rooted in an insight that even the younger Habermas of Knowledge and Human Interests grasped only partially and passingly. Knowledge of all kinds is interested, to be sure; and the interest in emancipation is indisputably foundational to a critical theory. But does it follow thence that emancipated reason liberates us from the varieties of bondages that afflict the human condition? Certainly not.

Bottom line: Pessimism doesn’t sell, but nifty clean concepts do. I can buy that. Read the whole essay, definitely worth the read for theory heads.

Open Democracy, vial AL Daily, has an essay on the appeal of Stalinism by Arseny Roginski. Why is it, after a century of war and death, that Russians romanticize the Stalinist state? Roginski’s essay hits the right notes: seeking Russian greatness, inability to admit killing your own people, a refusal to assign moral blame for failure. One summary is that the victory of WWII allowed Russians to cultivate a myth of greatness that conveniently elided the harsh reality of mass murder. However, I found an interesting comment by Roland Brown: