orgtheory.net

Following up on Brayden’s post, here’s my FB network, minus a few isolates:

The graph clumps into several connected subgroups. There’s family in Ireland, sociology types, philosophy types, and blogger types — these categories aren’t necessarily exclusive. An imaginary prize to the first commenter who can guess the identity of the node colored in green, who seems to be at the center of everything.

Bernie Hogan, who I mentioned in an earlier post, has written a very cool application for Facebook that creates network matrices of your friends (you can analyze the networks in UCINET or GUESS).  With these networks you can see how your friends are connected to one another via Facebook. It’s a fun application and doesn’t take long to use. The application would come in handy if you were teaching a social networks class. Almost all undergrads and most graduate students have Facebook accounts these days and so it wouldn’t be out of line to use this as an assignment.

Here’s my Facebook network. The names have been changed to initials so that you can’t readily identify who these people are without some personal knowledge of my network.  Click on the image to enlarge and you might be able to find yourself. I have four main friendship clusters, two of which are completely isolated. Of my 141 friends, only 4 of them are isolated from the rest of my network. Interestingly, my friends from academia are grouped into two mostly distinct clusters. Granted, Facebook networks don’t exactly map onto real world relationships (I see gaps in this network that don’t exist outside of Facebook) but, in general, the clusters seem to indicate real patterns of interaction.

Do yourself a favor this weekend and pick up a copy of Jon Elster’s Reason and Rationality – an elegant little book published by Princeton Press based on a lecture that Elster gave at the Colége de France in 2006. If you’re a fan of Elster, you know that he is one of the more sophisticated living theorists of rational thought and decision-making. This book summarizes his thinking about the relationship between reasons and rational thought. They are linked through, and sometimes confounded by, emotion or passion. Here are a few phrases from the beginning of the book:

The rational actor is one who acts for sufficient reasons. These reasons are the beliefs and desires in light of which the action appears to be appropriate…The idea of rationality is often but wrongly related to that of the actor’s private good or self-interest in the moralists’ sense. Anyone who is pursuing the common good can – and even ought to – do so in a rational manner…From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not…Although they are different, the two norms encounter a common obstacle, namely, the passions (2-4).

Elster quotes La Bruyere, “Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but its greatest triumph is to conquer a man’s own interest.” This is the central theme of the essay – passion is the ultimate arbiter of human behavior. People feel constrained to act with reason – to provide justifiable accounts of their behavior – and to act rationally – to show that they are using appropriate/optimal means – but at its core behavior is motivated by a hierarchy of emotions. These emotions inform belief and shape the preferences individuals pursue. Strong emotions can make some reasons suddenly more urgent than they might have been before (or than they would be from a historical perspective). Expressions of self-interest or altruism are often strategic attempts to shape a public’s understanding of how one came to make a decision, but their function is often to obcure the emotional component of that decision.

The book reinforced my belief that the study of emotion and decision-making is an understudied aspect of economic sociology. It’s not that we don’t care about emotion, but it’s a difficult aspect of market behavior to observe and analyze. Here’s my earlier post on what economic sociology might learn from social psychology.

As discussed here before, computational research has incredible potential for social scientists interested in studying patterns of communication, the emergence of networks and beliefs, etc. The big problems with this kind of research for the time being are getting access to the data, figuring out how to process it, and dealing with privacy issues. The latter issue heated up last year when it was revealed that data gathered from university students’ Facebook networks could be used to identify the supposedly anonymous students.  This is a thorny issue. How does one use rich online data about people’s communication and consumption habits without exposing them?

The Facebook drama continues although it has most recently been amplified by Facebook itself. As many of you probably know, Facebook recently redefined their Terms of Use. The changes effectively gave Facebook ownership over any piece of information posted on its website. Those of you who use Facebook would suddenly have given rights away to any content posted on your profiles, including pictures and personal information. Some Facebook users were, of course, outraged over this. The Consumerist blog called for a boycott of the website. Facebook, recognizing the image crisis it suddenly had, quickly took action and changed the Terms of Use back to their September 2008 form.  While this is all well and good for the hundreds of thousands of Facebook users who don’t want to lose complete ownership of their online content, it creates a headache for scholars who want to use Facebook to study online networks. Syracuse University’s Ines Mergel highlights the problems (and potential solutions) of Facebook data collection on the Complexity and Social Networks blog.

• Facebook does not allow research (or anyone) to store data more than 24 hours, which makes it difficult to clean, analyze and of course at the end publish the data
• Data needs to be anonymous (especially in SNA network data cannot be anonymous – we need to know what kind of actors are nominating other actors and longitudinal data analysis seems to be impossible)
• So far I have identified three different ways to collect/use Facebook data, although at this point it is unclear how people can comply to the first two bullet points.

1. Bernie Hogan at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK, has created a Facebook application available on iTunesU to analyze Facebook data (open iTunes -> iTunes -> Oxford University).

2. Dataverse project at Harvard’s Berkman Center has made available Facebook data.

3. Create an application or a group on Facebook where you can find a way to have people give their consent to collect data on their online behavior and contacts.

The latter solution seems problematic to me because any network created where people joining know beforehand they’re giving permission to someone to analyze that network will have some obvious selection bias. The whole point of analyzing Facebook data, as I see it, is that you can look at the emergent properties of networks as they take place in a natural(?) environment. The moment you start getting people’s informed consent before they join the network you destroy the natural setting.

Still, I’m very interested in how one might overcome this problem. My belief is that Facebook and other online network sites hold enormous potential for studying  a range of emergent social phenomena, including collective action and the spread of beliefs. We just have to figure out how to deal with the privacy issue.

When I was visiting the Bay Area a couple of years ago I heard about a movement among San Francisco city workers to ban bottled water distribution on city property (I think they eventually made this a policy).  The “ban the bottle” movement has now started to take hold on U.S. university and college campuses. Student-led environmental activist groups are leading the way, pushing administrations to consider adopting more environmentally-sustainable policies.  Here’s this description of an early success from Inside Higher Ed:

Many in the “Ban the Bottle” camp are taking inspiration from Washington University in St. Louis, where university money is not supposed to be spent on bottled water — the sale of which is banned on campus as of January 1 (although it’s still being sold in one market through March 15 due to a contractual obligation).

Washington University officials have been flooded with dozens of requests for information — how’d they do it? — and on Friday they hosted a conference call explaining how. “I hope it can be one of those things that we can be the first domino that falls,” said Deborah Howard, special assistant to the executive vice chancellor of administration.

“It wouldn’t have been successful without the student campaign. We wouldn’t have done it. There’s too much resistance,” Howard said – resistance tied to revenues. While Washington saves money in not having to buy bottled water for catered events, “campuses make a lot of money in dining services and vending machines selling bottled water.”

This is an excellent example of the impact that student movements can have in creating market changes.  No other organization is as susceptible to collective action among its members than universities. Universities depend on students for revenue, and they are very susceptible to reputational changes in the way they treat their students. Universities can’t easily expel students who mount collective action campaigns against the organization, making it very difficult to shake off unrest. Further, because they tend to be centers of innovation and social progress, their various constituencies (primarily students, faculty, and alumni) expect them to be cutting edge and take stands for the public good.

One of the leading scholars of student activism is Nella Van Dyke. This article looks at how campus cultures of student activism influence the likelihood of future collective action. This paper examines coalition building among student activist groups. Her paper with Marc Dixon and Helen Carlon assesses how mobilization efforts by the AFL-CIO spurred labor activism on campuses in the 1990s.  Of course, orgtheory has our own resident expert on student activism. Fabio has published an article and a book about student movements and the spread of African-American Studies programs.

…at least according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett.

First, Ann Arbor orgheads might want to come by and say hello at this week’s ICOS workshop. I’ll be giving a talk on how authority in organizations stems from “institutional work.” The talk will be about how college administrators in the Third World Strike acquired coercive authority and wielded it against black student activists. Here’s a youtube clip of the college administrator in question – SI Hayakawa, who later went on to be a United States senator. I will be introduced by Dan “A Budding Sociologist” Hirschman.

Second, I’ll be taking an orgtheory vacation till March 1. At that time, we have a SUPER COOL NEW GUEST BLOGGER.

Third, I just have to show you this picture, click here for others:

Buh-bye!!

In grad skool rulz #9, I argued that graduate students should not pay for their own education. Why? Academia doesn’t pay well. If you want talented people specializing in things like Croatian syntax, don’t saddle people with mortgage sized debts on the way out. Every self respecting arts and science program should have a healthy system of fellowships, tuition waivers, and teaching opportunities to minimize debt.

However, we don’t have that financial system for MBA’s, MD’s, and JD’s. Why? Students in these fields will, sooner or later, have fantastic job opportunities. It’s reasonable to ask them to pay for a resource that yields such a high return.

Economics has shifted from lowly paid arts and science to well compensated professional field. Consider the following: In an article on the crummy academic job market, the Wall Street Journal reports on a University of Arkansas study that shows that entry level econ PhD’s make $86,000 (scroll about half way down). That’s right – an average econ PhD with few (or no) publications makes the same as a full professor in many arts and sciences areas. If an economist lands a job at a leading program, the assistant professor salaries easily start at $100,000+. B-schools start even higher. In the private sector, consultancies and related work are better compensated.

Let me emphasize this: professional economists do better than nearly any other arts and science field (except maybe computer science) and do well compared to lawyers and MD’s.

Do not interpret this as class warfare. If an economist has more market value than a Bach specialist, that’s fine with me. We need to pay top dollar for highly talented people. But if they are doing so well, it obviates the argument for a subsidized graduate education and we should treat the economics graduate degree more like an MD than a philosophy PhD.

PS. There’s a collective action issue – no PhD program wants to be the first to pull the plug on comfortable graduate fellowships. That doesn’t undermine my main point, but it does show the futility of this post!

Being in any “creative” profession can be tough—-for example, writers and artists seem to suffer (at least stereotypically) rather tortuous, rejection-filled lives; lives that perhaps are punctuated with euphoria, but often end in obsession, drunkenness and/or early death.

I don’t know how comparatively tortured the life of an academic is, probably somewhere between the ordered life of an accountant or engineer and the tortured writer.  We certainly deal with plenty of rejection—well, some of us more than others.  Elizabeth Gilbert gave an impassioned and personal TED talk this month on how one might deal with rejection: consider yourself — like the poet Ruth Stone or the musician Tom Waits — a conduit for deity.  Then, when you fail, its not all on your shoulders.

N+1 magazine has a lengthy response by Gideon-Lewis Kraus to Neil Gross’ book on Rorty.  Here’s the previous orgtheory review of Gross. Choice clips – Kraus’ thinks Gross’ focus on self-concept is lame:

Gross ends up trying to turn Bourdieu on his head. He has replaced a story about obedience to an all-encompassing environmental force with a story about the dictates of an adamantine inner one. What he has taken over from Rorty is the idea that a teleology of social status may say more about the self-importance of sociologists than it does about the behavior of actual people. But Gross cannot untether himself from teleology.

Kraus trashes Rorty (and Gross) for too much introspection and professional “knowingness”:

In the late sixties, Rorty began to refashion himself as a participant in wider communities because American philosophy was, even to the most casual observer, irrelevant to the rest of American cultural life. But it was a moment where sociology had yet to succumb to the pressure to professionalize. (Gross’s book is fine on the causes of disciplinary professionalization: vast increases in postwar university enrollment due to the GI Bill and a general rise in affluence, coupled with Cold War interest in university science and a new, post-Hiroshima admiration for the structure of scientific inquiry, among other factors, led to a need for bureaucratic entrenchment designed to credential more efficiently the growing middle class and to gain funding by aping the guys over in the physics building.) While philosophers were writing articles in Zapf Dingbats for a select conspiracy of moon-men, sociologists were still happy to write books like The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and The Triumph of the Therapeutic.

In light of what has happened to sociology since then, I suspect it is no accident that Gross has written a book in which attentive fidelity to disciplinary objectives is characterized as “strategic,” and in which a thinker becomes interesting and broadly relevant once he’s decided to inquire, in a mood of expansiveness and curiosity, about what other thinkers see as the centers of human life. I’d like to imagine, then, that the secret furious wish of Gross’s book is the idea that he might, in unsettling the reliance on ideas of status and strategy by gesturing toward a more robust way to talk about academic decision-making, assist in the rehabilitation of his field. He might help his colleagues in sociology withdraw from the suicidal intoxication of professional knowingness. Even if he only succeeded in part—if he clings to an obverted relic of the old piety—he has still chosen a subject notorious enough to get his book read by people outside his department, and even outside of the academy. And he has chosen a model whose own career might encourage his colleagues within the department to embark upon more variegated exchanges with odder partners.

But Rorty is instructive if you want to leave a discipline, not if you want to save one. Rorty’s last year in the Princeton philosophy department was 1981. For the next sixteen years he was University Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia. He retired out of Stanford’s Comparative Literature department, though his initial hope in moving west was that he might be named Transitory Professor of Trendy Studies. Philosophy, for its part, is less relevant than ever; its graduate programs continue to attract students drawn to haughty ascetic ideals of purification rather than aspirations to the enlargement of the self. Rorty, from time to time, seemed genuinely sad about this. The publication of Richard Rorty got Gross tenure. With the strategic portion of his career thus concluded, one wonders what Gross’s own intellectual self-concept might do for the sociological project.

Check it out.

Update: I already have a volunteer! Thanks a lot.

Orgheads: I will be visiting LA on business from Feb 25-27 (3 days -wed/thu/fri). I will be doing work at two LA archives. My time is limited, I only have time to quickly scan materials. I need someone to meet me at the archives, help me sort papers, and then copy files and mail them to me quickly. The archives charge a lot per page of copying if they do it. That’s why I’m hiring someone to help me. $15/hour. Good work for someone with a historical bent. Contact me at f r o j a s indiana edu. Thanks.

Moneyball and Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis has a fascinating article in the NY Times about Shane Battier and the intangibles of basketball (thanks for the tip John!). I’ve never been a huge fan of Battier but it’s because he’s always played on teams that I haven’t liked. As the article points out, he has an uncanny ability to make the opposing team play worse than they normally would. How he does it exactly is a mystery.

We’ve talked about groupiness in sports teams before. The idea is that team sports can’t be reduced to their individual components (or even to their individual statistics).  Team performance is a group outcome. Each players’ ability to perform is affected by every other player’s performance. This is why you can take a team of good players and they do not automatically turn into a good team. Good teams figure out how to play together and take advantage of task and skill interdependence.  Valuable team players like Battier know how to use their skills to complement the skills of the other players on their team. Lewis explains why basketball is especially groupy:

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

Social capital isn’t always good for economic performance. In fact, if you have too much of the wrong kind of social capital, you may become incapable of responding to sudden changes in your economic environment (this is one of the paradoxes of embeddedness). Dense networks, for example, may weigh down and limit the flexibility of communities to respond to environmental shifts that threaten the viability of local industries, strangulating the community’s efforts to adapt to those changes. Sean Safford, my neighbor to the south, talks about this and other themes in his new book on the radio program, Smart City. It’s an interesting interview with lots of organizational theory throughout. Sean’s book Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt is now on Amazon. I’ve just added it to my shopping cart!

1. The original iron men.

2. The fight over iron: The New York Review of Books mixes it up over Guns, Germs, and Steel.

3. PBS documentary on iron man Andrew Carnegie. Wiki fact: he once offered $20 million to the US to liberate the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American war. The gesture was refused and a decades long guerilla war ensued.

4. The Iron Man comic is the first mainstream super hero comics to feature an alcoholic protagonist.

5. Eric Dolphy, multi-instrumental jazz star of the 60s, records the hip “Iron Man.”

6. Black Sabbath rulz!

7. Sage commentary on Iron Man and Black Sabbath by expert musicologists.

Orgheads are dizzy with glee over the most recent issue of the American Sociological Review, which is thick with organizational or economic sociology-related content. If they’re not substantively organizational, the papers all deal with concepts that are core to organizational sociology, like status. Take the first paper by the uber-productive Robb Willer, which examines how status rewards motivate cooperation and help groups overcome the collective action problem. The issue also features an article by former orgtheory guest blogger, Michael Sauder, coauthored with Northwestern’s Wendy Espeland, which looks at how law school rankings change law schools as schools internalize the new performance standards and become self-disciplining.  Their paper draws extensively from Foucault’s theory of discipline and contributes to theories about how organizations respond to their environments. More orgtheory posts on Sauder’s work can be found here and here.

Two social movement/organizational theory papers are also in the issue. Ed Walker looks at the founding of “grassroots lobbying firms” – “firms, which provide services to businesses, trade associations, public interest groups, and government clients, [that] assist their clients by provoking citizen activism in their favor.”  He argues that the “privatization of civic life” is in part driven by business groups, which are using these grassroots groups to promote their interests in the policymaking realm.  Klaus Weber, or that guy in the office next to mine, has a paper in the issue coauthored with Huggy Rao and L.G. Thomas that looks at how the anti-biotech movement influenced German pharmaceutical firms’ product offerings. If you’re at all interested in work related to social movements and organizational change, you should read this paper now!! It is one of the best things I’ve read in this area of research given the sophistication of the data (they use archival, interview and secondary data sources to provide detailed case studies of the six leading pharma firms in Germany) and the importance of the research problem – “to understand how external contestation manifests itself in the internal polity of organizations.” By conceptualizing the firm as a unique kind of political setting, Weber et al. develop a nuanced process model of “how movements penetrate organizations” that takes the organization-level of analysis seriously. Definitely worth a read.

The issue also has articles by Cecilia Ridgeway et al. about the emergence of status distinctions, Nina Bandelj on the construction of global demand for foreign direct investment, and Gret Hsu et al. on the consequences of multiple category memberships.  All of those papers look really interesting and are in my need-to-read pile, which seems to be growing exponentially these days.

Tina, over at Scatter, says that Canadians can’t buy my book from a popular online book retailer. Well, who needs Canada? I mean, c’mon, can you take a country seriuosly if the flag yells “prune me?” Let’s rip the McKenzie brothers and go to Amazon, where is my book is for sale to any person with MONEY. That’s the way we like it in America. You can really stick to the hockey puck nation by assigning my book in courses in movements, organizations, soc of ed, and ethnic studies. Free desk copies can be acquired once you assign it in a course. Long live shameless self-promotion, better than mom and apple pie.

Classic debate concerning the school/income correlation: Does education actually give you skills that make you valuable? Or is it merely a signal that you are smart and hard working? Here’s another thought experiment: Say person X went to MIT and got a computer science degree. Then say person Y logged into Academic earth, the web site of free university courses, and listened to every free lecture in the engineering curriculum at MIT. She then also downloaded all the free lecture notes from the MIT CS department. And she did all the homework problems. Who would make more money, in the long run, after graduation? Why? If you believe Y will make more or just as much, why don’t you quit school and just self-educate?

My answer: In the short term, X is still more valuable in the labor market. She may know the same basic raw material, but being in a dense engineering environment add more value. She knows the practice of engineering better than the isolated self-educator. In the long run, Y would probably have more labor market value. Being able to self-educate at such a high level, Y probably has enormous discipline and motivation. She can probably catch up on the informal dimensions of engineering. Your answer?

Was anyone really surprised when A-Rod was found to have used steroids? Not me. I’m a Giants fan, and as a fan of the Giants and Barry Bonds I long ago lost my innocence when it comes to the steroid question. Of course the best players in baseball used steroids! Duh.  The owners of Major League Baseball created enormous incentives for players to do so and they provided few to zero mechanisms to hold players accountable for using illegal substances. Heck, steroids weren’t even explicitly banned by baseball during the steroid era.  So what do you expect to happen when high rewards go to players who use steroids and the organization they work for fails to do anything to discourage their use? Rampant steroid use!!! It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

Or does it? A fan poll at ESPN.com shows that the majority of fans (61% the last I checked) hold the players responsible for the spread of steroids in baseball. I just can’t fathom this logic. Baseball fans have somehow fooled themselves into believe that steroid users were a few bad apples and continue to demonize those players who were known to have used. I thought that this A-Rod revelation might be the final nail in the coffin that causes fans to lose their innocence forever. But this doesn’t appear to be the case.

Sports fans recreate the illusion of individual accomplishment every year. They believe that athletic competition really does reward individual merit and that the best individuals find a way to rise to the top. They believe this despite the fact that the most popular sports tend to be team sports in which interdependence is a major factor. We’ve talked about the team in team sports here before.  It’s almost certainly true that there are great athletes out there who simply outshine their opponents when called upon, but the ability of any great athlete is modified by the team context and, more generally, by the competitive context. A-Rod is great, no doubt, but would he have been able to maintain his greatness in an era when great pitchers were using steroids to enhance their recovery and strength? Would he have been able to attain super-stardom without the use of steroids in a field of other steroid users who were setting new records right and left?  Maybe not, we just don’t know. The point I’m trying to make is that A-Rod was acutely aware of the competitive problem he faced by not using steroids and that is why he chose to use. It’s the same reason that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens – the two other superstars of this generation of baseball players – chose to use steroids. It’s the reason that hundreds of lesser talent also used.

I’m not saying that as a baseball consuming public we should just call it good and move on, but I do think that the narrow focus on the individual players as a source of the steroid problem is completely uncalled for. Why not blame the owners? They were obviously profiting from the steroid era (at least as much as the players were). They had the power to negotiate for greater control of substance testing in players. They could have used the media in a campaign to institute testing before it became a huge problem (Bob Costas and others were calling for more intense scrutiny for a long time). It’s not as if they weren’t aware of steroid abuse. They could have done more and they didn’t because they were basking in the glow of the home run and the revenue it brought. So before you blame and unthinkingly reject their Hall of Fame-worthiness, it’s about time someone started holding owners accountable for this mess.

The Times Online broke a story that caught my attention: there is evidence that the data behind the original vaccine/autism article was fabricated. The background: In 1998, the Lancet published an article reporting on 12 case studies where autism symptoms and bowel problems were said to follow MMR vaccinations. It was thereafter conjectured that MMR vaccines contained something that caused a violent reaction (as indicated by bowel problems) and led to developmental problems.

When I first heard of this idea, I thought it might be true. The history of medicine is filled with cases of things we do to ourselves that make us sick. Then, I heard that scientists had tried to verify the vaccine/autism link and were hard pressed to do so. This report from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development summarizes a number of studies where epidemiologists simply couldn’t find a vaccine/autism link. Examples: autism rates were increasing before the introduction of the MMR shot and there was no jump when it was introduced; natural experiments showed no link – autism rates and timing of symptoms were similar in groups with different vaccination schedules; children diagnosed on the autism spectrum often had symptoms before the MMR shot; etc. Basically, anytime someone tried to look for more systematic evidence for a link, it was very hard to find.

I thought “case closed – we had an interesting hypothesis and then tested it.” But, as all parents of young kids know, there is enormous controversy over autism and vaccines, even when the aforementioned studies showed it was a tenuous link. I find this to be interesting. I definitely think that we should reconsider any medical treatment that might have such a serious side effect. On the other hand, I am also willing to discard a hypothesis when sympathetic researchers just don’t find much evidence for it. Except for the people who originated the theory, why should anyone have a vested interest in the hypothesis? Especially when non-vaccination can lead to life threatening illnesses?

One way to approach it is as a social movement problem. The autism/vaccine hypothesis generated a community of people who really cared about the issue and struggled against a skeptical establishment. This can lead to important change. However, it can also have counter productive effects. The social movement community can have inertia when the cause itself may come into question. I’d be very interested in how the a/v hypothesis community is dealing with the revelation that a founding text, the 1998 Lancet article, has now come into serious question.

Tocqueville’s Political Economy is the title of  a new Princeton University Press book by Richard Swedberg.  Here’s the first chapter.  If Swedberg’s previous papers on Tocqueville are anything to go by, then the book should be fantastic.

In his review of the movie Fanboys, Roger Ebert has the best summary of the nerdcore sub-culture:

A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It’s all about them. They have mastered the “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.

Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad-lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That’s why it’s excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They’re always asking you questions they know the answer to.

Fanboys = a bizarre form of cultural capital? Perhaps…

Blackprof.com has been a favorite of mine since it started. I always thought a black perspective on law and academia might be a nice counterpoint to Volokh. However, it’s now firmly entrenched in left2right territory, even though it had periods of high activity. Hasn’t been updated since Dec 8 and too much focus on celebrity issues like OJ Simpson. It also had some well known guests and it raised some good issues. Too bad. Now that we have a black POTUS and a black AG, you’d think there’d be high demand for the blog. RIP, blackprof. Previous posts on blackprof.com.

Check out this essay about the potential of computational social science in today’s issue of Science magazine.  A slew of notable social scientists including David Lazer, Nicholas Christakis, Gary King, Michael Macy, and my colleague Noshir Contractor make the case that more funding, attention, and serious energy should be put into the study of social life on computer networks (e.g., the Internet, mobile phones).

The capacity to collect and analyze massive amounts of data has transformed such fields as biology and physics. But the emergence of a data-driven “computational social science” has been much slower. Leading journals in economics, sociology, and political science show little evidence of this field. But computational social science is occurring—in Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo, and in government agencies such as the U.S. National Security Agency. Computational social science could become the exclusive domain of private companies and government agencies. Alternatively, there might emerge a privileged set of academic researchers presiding over private data from which they produce papers that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Neither scenario will serve the long-term public interest of accumulating, verifying, and disseminating knowledge.

Social science research tends to lag real world phenomena but the lack of research emphasis on Internet phenomena (e.g., online activism, Web-based organizations) seems astounding given the amount of time that we, as academics alone, spend communicating and learning through or adding data to online networks. As Lazer et al. argue in this essay, some of this lack of attention can be attributed to funding issues and, correlated with that, inadequate social science training in computer programming.

By the way, David Lazer has a very cool blog about complexity theory and social networks. Definitely worth adding to your RSS feed.

Mark Lombardi is a sociologist’s artist. Sometime in the 1990s, the occasional painter decided to start visualizing his research on political figures and scandals. For years, he collected notecards that documented links between particular people and institutions, but it was hard for him to really see what was happening. Then he came upon the idea of drawing the links as a diagram – just the way a sociologist would. A new career as a cutting edge artist was born.

He called his works “narrative structures,” because they linked groups and people via media reports. I’m a little surprised that his work hasn’t had more impact on sociologists. It’d make a great cover for an issue of Sociological Methodology or Social Networks. Peter Bearman would approve. Sadly, Lombardi passed away in 2000, but we still have his works and his gallery, Pierogi 2000, has issued a book of his work for a new travelling exhibition. Enjoy.

Bill Clinton, Lippo Group and China Ocean Shipping Co. aka COSCO
little rock-jakarta-hong kong c.1990s (5th version), 1999
Graphite and red pencil on paper, 60.5 x 75 inches
Private Collection

George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens
c. 1979-90, 5th Version
1999

A loyal orghead asks:  “How should students approach beginner lecturers when their class isn’t going too well, attendance has dropped, and the lecturer hasn’t yet considered there may be a problem with their teaching style? Should one of us approach the lecturer individually, or should we collectively do something? Should faculty be informed, especially considering the early stage in their career?”

Here’s my response:

1. First, if you are near the end of the semester, it’s probably best to be brutally honest, but constructive, in the evaluations. There may not be enough time for anything else. Be specific: “I was confused by the lectures.” “You didn’t explain the readings enough.” Etc. If enough students do that, most instructors will get the hint.
2. Second, if there is still enough time in the semester, you can go to office hours or send email. Once again, be nice but specific. “I really want to learn, but I am having severe problems with X.” Once again, if multiple people do that, then most folks get the hint.
3. Third, depending on the class and the nature of the problem, you could just raise your hand during class and say “we like the class, but we are having an issue with X.”
4. Fourth, if the instructor is completely out of whack, then you should definitely consult the dept chair, the undergrad chair, one of the undergrad advisers, or even the dean. You should only do this if the problem is really severe.

Which option should you use? No fixed rule. It depends on the teaching issue. For example, #3 helped me fix a problem once. I once totally bungled a book order for a class. The students totally got on my case – in class and a bunch of them did it. Book orders have been totally on time since then. #1 also helped me. For a while, I wrote a lot on the chalk board. Big mistake (a post for another time). It’s too late to completely change the lecture style in the middle of the semester, but hearing about my horrid chalk board technique on the evals helped me change. Here’s a case where things didn’t work at all. I was once a substitute for a popular teacher. The students did #4 – they went to the dean to complain that they liked the other teacher better than me. Not constructive. However, talking to the chair or dean may really help with a class where the teacher and students have developed a contentious relationship. #2 is really good for issues like super hard exams. A few students could go to office hours and politely explain how, in your opinion, the test seemed to be totally unrelated to the homework. Many instructors will be sympathetic and try to accomodate.

Other thoughts from students and teachers?

I agree with Peter. This post on  significance tests by Andrew Gelman is an “excellent discussion starter for a graduate course in research methods.”  Graduate methods training in social sciences really needs this kind of substantive discussion about the meaning of statistical results to supplement the mathematically-oriented focus of econometrics courses and the toolkit style of many sociology methods courses.  Let me also add that I admire anyone who has the ability to teach graduate stats courses. I loved those courses at Arizona, mainly due to the enthusiasm of my intructors. Those of you who have taken a stats course from the great Miller McPherson will know what I mean when I appreciate this enthusiasm. It takes a special personality and dedication to be a good stats teacher.

Seriously.  So, who says we’re wasting time blogging around here?

Omar’s post on the long tail, here, makes it into the comments pages of HBR, here (copied below the fold).

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A little while ago at the Michigan orgtheory seminar, Michele Lamont spoke about her research on how professors evaluate things. Her big theoretical goal was to argue against the Bourdieu/Collins view, which is that academics are competing with each other for position (Bourdieu) or attention (Collins). She argues that her analysis of how people make judgments in fellowship competitions shows that there’s more to academic life than competition. Overall, I agree. Academia is about more than jockeying for power.

At the same time, I was skeptical and asked a question. I asked if her case – fellowship and grant evaluation panels – was idiosyncratic. Lamont’s answer (rephrased): No, this is is not idiosyncratic. Academia is built on evaluation panels – graduate admissions, hiring, tenure and promotions. This happens all the time.

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Over at Socializing Finance, Columbia sociologists Daniel Beunza and David Stark comment on the future of sophisticated modeling in the finance industry. They note that some have blamed the current crisis, at least in part, on the “black box” financial models that caused investors to be overconfident in their projection of asset values. Others maintain that the models did not go far enough and that in the future we need better models to fully account for the risks in the market.

Does Wall Street need more models or less models? We see this as a false choice. The debate, in our view, needs to shift from the models themselves to the organization of modeling. We have identified a set of organizational procedures, which we call “reflexive modeling,” that lead to superior financial models.

The blog post is accompanied by a new paper in which Beunza and Stark study reflexive modeling in the context of an equity derivatives trading room.  For more on the organization of trading see Beunza’s and Stark’s 2004 paper about the “tools of the trade.”

In universities, we often find instructors who, to be charitable, don’t take their teaching duties seriously. It’s easy to understand. Teaching well is challenging and it’s not rewarded as much as research. I’m not here to argue that we should change the incentives, but there are a number of compelling ethical reasons for teaching well.

• You owe it to yourself: When you teach, you do it in front of others. Teach in a way that encourages your students to respect you.
• You owe it to the discipline: If you want your discipline to be respected, teach in a way that earns the respect of students who form judgments about your field. This is also self-serving. Students who respect your topic may grow into wealthy and influential leaders who can fund your area.
• You owe it to the students: Students have voluntarily taken a few years of their lives to study at your college. Many pay large fees to be there. Make it worth their time.
• You owe it to other teachers: Mastery of the craft of teaching brings prestige and honor to the entire teaching profession, from kindergarten to PhD programs. Make teaching an activity that people want to do and respect, not avoid.
• You owe it to society: Professors, especially the tenured, are subsidized by tax payers, donors, and every day people who send their children to your college. We live a life of financial stability so we can create knowledge and transmit it to the next generation. There’s a janitor who’s working overtime to make sure his daughter can attend your intro calculus class. Honor that trust.

The modern university may be geared primarily toward knowledge creation, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have other important missions. Just because our subject motivates our work, it doesn’t follow that we can treat teaching as a cancerous burden. It’s a privilege and an honor.

I do think that economic thought has an upper hand when it comes to explaining and describing business cycles. At the same time, I think sociology can add some needed perspective to macro-economic explanations. Let’s say you believed the following things about the sources of the current economics disaster:

1. Traditional rules for lending were relaxed, if not abolished.
2. Oversight of financial institutions was weakened, or people chose to ignore the warning signs.
3. Masses of people were engaged, essentially, in a giant scam – hoping that they could exploit loose credit lending rules and the masses of money that went along with it.

If you really believed in any, or all, of the above hypotheses, then sociology has a lot to offer to conventional macro-economics. First, you might ask who acted as the “institutional entrepreneur.” Taking a move from the Lounsboury crowd, you might guess that somebody put in a lot of effort to re-frame old lending rules as out of date. For example, for decades, the rule was that you could afford a mortgage that was about 2.5 /3 times your annual pre-tax income. Who abolished that rule? Why did people, like mortgage officers, suddently abandon a rule that worked for decades? I think a framing/soc pysch + inst. entrepreneur approach could be helpful.

Second, you could start thinking about which behaviors are deviant (criminals) vs. new legitimate rules. Which financial rules were adopted by the professional finance field as legitimate and which were the result of illegitimate behavior? This is an important distinction because it makes one think how financial problems are tied to “top down” legit change and “bottom” criminal work. Also, in the messy world of finance, I’d probably borrow a trick from Sudhir Venkatesh’ book on the illicit urban economy and try to emphasize the blurry boundary between “right” and “wrong.” I think sociology has a lot to say about this crisis.