orgtheory.net

By now you’ve probably read Simon Johnson’s piece in the Atlantic about financial elites and the current economic crisis. If you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for??? This is the best analysis I’ve read about the power dynamics behind the crisis. Johnson, a former head of the IMF, understands well the politics in making sweeping economic reforms and so he speaks with a credibility that few have.  He also sounds a lot like an economic sociologist.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world (emphasis mine).

There are many ways that the economic crisis could change the kinds of phenomena that economic sociologists study. One possibility is that it will reignite our interest in elite control and the power and politics of markets. Given the recent culture-ification of economic sociology, it might also be nice to blend these two programs by, for example, looking at how elites use cultural resources to sustain their positions of power and to win political battles.

The Obama adminsitration fired the GM head today, and already, some bloggers are having a hissy fit. If you strongly believe against state market interventions, fair enough. But to compare this to 30′s style fascism or socialism is kind of missing the point.

First, it helps to lay out what political economy has been about for the last 150 years or so. In ye olden days, people truly despised the capitalist system. Some folks, like the socialists, just wanted to abolish it and just have the state do everything. The social democrats and the Keynesians wanted to control it and spread the wealth. The fascists also wanted to control it, but mainly as a tool for nationalism and clientelism, rather than redistribution. There were some who loved capitalism, but that’s a story for another day.

But we’ve seen none of the above. There’s no attempt to abolish the system, and no attempt to set up vast new welfare programs, though we’ll likely see piecemeal efforts on health and related issues. Neither is there an attempt to set up a massive patron-client state, in the way the fascists did in the 30s.

Instead, we’ve got “quarterback capitalism.” The idea is pretty simple: don’t challenge the major features of capitalism, but opportunistically fix what you can with buy outs, loans, subsidies, and other ad hoc interventions. Reminds me of the great quarterback Randall Cunningham, who could scramble his way out of any mess. The idea behind Bush-Obama policy is that what ever mess you’ve got, you can probably fix with the right hodgepodge of incentives. The Federal government is the nimble quarterback who can get you out of the squeeze.

With regard to GM, Obama didn’t do what the fascists actually did – which was to make everyone dependent on the state so they could engage in militarism. Basically, the current strategy is to do what one can to save the financial and manufacturing infrstructure of United States, but not in ways the challenge the underlying structure. Better regulations for banks; new management for the auto people; a little help for homeowners. For GM, it was pushing out old management in exchange for money, a typical move in the private sector. Whether this is good is certainly for debate, but it certainly isn’t a return to fascism, socialism, or laissez-faire economics.

Ever felt continental philosophy would make sense if someone would just explain it in clear, simple English? If so, these youtube clips are for you! Hubert Dreyfus, philosopher from UC Berkeley, in a great 1980 interview clearly tells you all you need to know about Heidegger.

• Part 1.
• Part 2.
• Part 3.
• Part 4.
• Part 5.
• Bonus round: Dreyfus talks about why computers can’t think.

Now my hamsters can have their way with that old copy of Being and Time.

A few weeks ago, I was having dinner with econ soc trainee Dan Hirschman and Jerry “I’ve Got a Cool New Book” Davis. At one point, our dinner conversation went just like this, except that I’ve  heavily paraphrased and completely invented much of it:

Fabio: Blah, blah, performativity is for posers, blah, blah.

Dan: What do you mean?

Jerry: The fried chickpeas taste like bacon. Very bacony.

Fabio: Well, I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems as if performativity is a facile concept in that actors can just summon new social structures, kind of like a zippy self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jerry: Chickpeas, anyone? They’re really good.

Dan: Well, Fabio, what do you think of Foucault?

Fabio: Blah, blah, [insert tedious academic ramble], construction of subjects is cool, blah, blah, blah.

Dan: Ah ha! If you believe people can create epistemic systems and our subjectivities form within those systems, then Callon’s performativity is a pretty easy extension!

Fabio: You have tricked me, Dan of Ann Arbor! Curse you and your European social theory!

Jerry: I’m eating the last chickpea.

Actually, I ate the last chickpea that night, but that’s besides the point. If you’d like to read Dan’s version of this conversation (chickpea free) and his informative discussion of performativity, click here. And, Kieran, if it’s one thing that Dan, Jerry, and I can agree on about your upcoming visit is that you *will* love the chickpeas.

This conference looks to be really good.  The invitation is open to anyone who wants to attend. My sense is that this is going to be a HUGE topic in social movement research for the next several years. More information here.

From Social Network to Social Movement

WEDNESDAY,
April 1, 2009
10:00am-4:30pm
John Chipman Gray
2nd Floor, Pound Hall
Harvard Law School
*Public invited, RSVP required
Digitally-connected social networks are fast becoming a key ingredient of today’s social movements. But scholarship about networks – social, professional, and otherwise – has only just begun to penetrate political science and legal literatures. This workshop seeks to propel that integration. Key questions will include: given recent research insights about social movements, and new technology enabling transnational social networks, what are the points of synergy between successful social movements and robust social networks? What do today’s digitally-connected social movements teach us about the relationship between networks and movements? Are online social networks merely a laboratory for testing empirical claims about social movements, or do they exhibit unique network properties? Do they perhaps offer new political opportunities?

Strategy, planning, management, execution, and quasi-emergent synergistic properties … clearly this film needs to be shown as a matter of routine in MBA courses. Specifying who exactly should be the farmers, the dogs and the sheep can be left to the class as a team-building exercise.

If you’re unconvinced that academic rankings matter to organizational outcomes, you’ve never been associated with a professional school. I used to joke with Teppo about the size of the poster that hung in the glass doors of the Marriott School building announcing BYU’s ranking in BusinessWeek’s top 10 undergraduate business programs. (I can only imagine what calamity of modesty hangs from the doors now that BusinessWeek ranked BYU 22nd among MBA programs!) Business, law, and medical schools care greatly about where they’re ranked because ranking is tightly connected to revenue streams. The relevance of rankings changes the schools’ administrative practices and policies; they adapt what they do to excel according to the criteria of the ranking systems. This behavioral transformation is one of the main points made by Michael Sauder and Wendy Espeland in their research on rankings and reactivity (see these past posts about their work).

Is there a similar kind of reactivity influencing the kind of scholarship academics do? Do we care so much about which journals are ranked highly that we choose research topics, theories, and methods that would help us get published in those journals? These are questions that came to mind when skimming this interesting exchange in the recent issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education – the Academy journal that publishes essays about the practices of business education and scholarship. The lead article by Nancy Adler and Anne-Wil Harzing presumes that the current ranking system does not provide incentives to management scholars to do research about “questions that matter most to society.” The leading organizational and management journals (e.g., Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science), they argue, do not promote research that benefits the public good. And because business schools tend to reward scholars for publishing in these journals, our literature lacks the public impact it might otherwise have. They quote the former president of the Academy of Management, Steven Kerr, who said that we have mistakenly embraced the practice of “of rewarding A [publications in a narrow set of top-listed journals] while hoping for B [scholarship that addresses the questions that matter most to society].”  Adler and Harzing (somewhat ironically) use institutional theory to support the idea that the norms of the field pressure schools to become isomorphic in their estimation of journal quality and to reward scholars accordingly.

A number of scholars, including the dean of the Kellogg School, respond to Adler and Harzing and based on a quick skim, the responses are cautionary when engaging with A&H’s idea that we should put an immediate moratorium on all rankings. One of my first responses to A&H’s argument is that, unlike professional school rankings, scholarly output rankings don’t really exist in a formal sense. There may be lists of top journals (e.g., ISI’s Web of Knowledge) but journals are not formally ranked in the same way that schools are. I suspect that schools would actively resist such a ranking. There’s a benefit to having some ambiguity about what is a top journal. It allows local elites (i.e., those who are dominant in any one school) to assert their own definition of status (which itself revolves around the field’s definition of status). Thus, at school X, the status hierarchy of journals will have a more disciplinary feel, while at school Z the hierarchy is more firmly rooted in the management journals. Having a slippery, informal, and local status system allows departments to make tenure decisions based on its particular personality rather than on a strict count of publications (granted, some schools have formalized their review process to the point that counting publications is the most important way of assessing scholarly quality).  The fuzziness of the status hierarchy also gives more weight to outside letter writers, who can provide a quality assessment from the point of view of the scholar’s audience and peers.

There is a more general point of disagreement I have with the claim that current management scholarship matters little to society. This claim, which has been made by many others (see, for example, Teppo’s post about our “theory fetish”), typically privileges one world view over another and is asserted when one theory or one topic of interest is not getting as much attention as the claimant would like. I cringe when I hear management scholars argue that we need to become more relevant because what they often mean is that our scholarship should have a greater impact on the way business is done. While I can’t disagree with the idea that I’d like the business community to read and care about my research, there is a lot of research out there that I’d prefer the business community never heard of at all. Further, my idea of improving the public good is probably somewhat different than views held by other scholars. Rather than getting in a shouting match about which values our top journals should promote, I think the academic community (and the nonacademic community) is better off if we leave it to journals to figure out what is high quality scholarship and then let the market of ideas take over to sort the relevance of those ideas.

Historian John Hope Franklin died yesterday.  A seminal historian and major figure in the American academy, Franklin paved the way for writers and scholars to seriously address the African American role in this nation’s history. My own work on the institutionalization of Black Studies was made possible by his work. He also was a fine human being and helped the Civil Rights movement with some of its biggest victories, such as his research on behalf of the team that litigated the Brown v. Board case. Click here for a longer commentary on Franklin from the Racism Review blog.

Get the entire book – Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know about Academia from Admissions to Tenure – for only $2. You can read it on personal computers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads, and smart phones.

Previous grad skool rulz.

I strongly believe that most people who enter graduate school can successfully complete the program. However, it is also important to know that academia is not the right choice for everyone – even among those who possess the talent to complete the PhD degree. Think of this post as a guide for answering the question: “how do I know this is really the best choice for me?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Forget about learning to play the piano or violin — I’m going to have my youngest daughter start playing the iphone ocarina.  Here is Stanford’s Ge Wang demonstrating the instrument (along with its social applications) and you’ll find a slew of youtube clips online as well.  Here’s a dreamy rendition of Stairway to Heaven on the new instrument.

Or, maybe I’ll just go with the iphone guitar.

For me, one of the more interesting scholarly resources on the web has been the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — non-crowd-sourced entries by folks who know what they are talking about. (That’s not a dig on wikipedia, I go there more and more to start learning about various topics.)

Here’s an excellent entry on Models in Science. And, if you are longing for Kuhnian intuition in the previous entry, then here’s the angle for you: The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge; or, this one on Social Epistemology.

Simple vs Complex

In the tradition of Murray Davis, via this guy. Getting stuck in the lower right-hand “everything is all very complicated” box is a real rhetorical problem in social science.

I’ve been away from orgtheory for the last week and see that I missed a lot of interesting posts.

At the ESS annual meeting in Baltimore, organizations scholars showed their enthusiasm and dedication for orgs research by showing up at the Networks and Organizations session at 8:30 AM(!) on Sunday morning. Not only was turnout impressive, but the papers were great too! I’m looking forward to seeing these papers in journals a few years from now. (I also attended a great mini-conference on family and work. More on that in a future blog.)

As I was preparing to attend the conference, a friend and colleague pointed out that it seems like women are disproportionately involved in organizing sociology conferences. I haven’t done any analysis of conference organizing committees, but the committee thank-yous prior to the ESS presidential address certainly suggested that this might be true. If this is the case, I can think of a few possible reasons: 1) Women dominate paid and unpaid administrative work in many organizations; 2) Conference organizing and committee work can be pretty thankless, and some high status folks (a majority of whom are men) may be uninterested; 3) Although conference organizing may be thankless, it potentially exposes the organizers to new people in the profession. Some may use this as an opportunity to expand their networks, and research on career advancement strategies suggest that developing diverse networks (and mentors) may be particularly important for women and racial/ethnic minorities.

Does anyone have evidence on whether women are overrepresented in conference organizing? Other conjectures about why this might be the case?

Here we go again: A famous paper by Dale and Krueger claims that going to an elite college doesn’t matter. Their proof: students admitted to more selective schools who instead go to other schools make just as much as those who enrolled in the selective schools. Settled? Not so fast. Robin Hanson kicks up dust by going back and rereading the papers. First, there is an effect – if you don’t use any control variables. Second, there is an effect of selectivity if you use a selectivity measure other than college SAT. If you use the Barron’s selectivity index and tuition charged, then you get effects.

The comments at Hanson’s blog and Marginal are both worth reading. A few good points: people who select into less competitive schools may be less motivated; tuition may correlated with family SES and family connections can get you into the right jobs; the Dale and Krueger paper does not control for occupation; elite schools tend to be stepping stones to absurdy well paying sectors like finance. Bottom line: colleges sort both on family and ability/drive, so you can find a regression to suit your taste. Other views? Dead horses are available in the comment section.

David Pennock wrote down some thoughts about the output of the scientific community, noting that the large majority of research publications has very little impact. A few publications not only dominate the attention of the relevant discipline but an equally few seem to be the most profound in their practical application. What does this mean about the scientific program? How much waste is there in science? Pennock offers several different views on the “(very) long tail” of science, one of which is more or less similar to my own view.

Is the tail…

Good?

Is the tail actually crucial to the scientific process? Are some breakthroughs the result of ideas that percolate through long chains — person to person, paper to paper — from the bottom up? Is science less dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants than giants standing on the shoulders of dwarfs? I published a fairly straightforward paper that applies results in social choice theory to collaborative filtering. Then a smarter scientist wrote a better paper on a more widely applicable subject, apparently partially inspired by our approach. Could such virtuous chains actually lead, eventually, to the truly revolutionary discoveries? Is the tail wagging the dog?

Bad?

Are the papers in the tail a waste of time, energy, and taxpayer dollars? Do they have virtually no impact, at least compared to their cost? Should we try hard to find objective measures that identify good science and good scientists and target our funding to them, starving out the rest?

Ugly?

Is the tail simply a messy but necessary byproduct (I can’t resist: a “messessity”) of the scientific process? Under this scenario, breakthroughs are fundamentally rare and unpredictable hits among an enormous sea of misses. To get more and better breakthroughs, we need more people trying and mostly failing — more monkeys at typewriters trying to bang out Shakespeare. Every social system, indeed almost every natural system, has a long tail. Maybe it’s simply unavoidable, even if it isn’t pretty. Was the dog simply born with its (long and scraggly) tail attached?

Discuss.

Man on Wire is a 2008 film about Philippe Petit, the man who walked between the World Trade Center buildings in 1978. It’s a moving film about a truly audacious, yet beautiful, act, but the story also has many interesting connections to orgtheory.

First, what makes the story interesting is its organizational context. Of course, anybody who tightrope walked across any space a quarter mile up is notable. But part of the attraction is how Petit and his crew pulled this off inside the giant bureaucracy. For example, to get access to the technical specifications of the towers, Petit and his associates passed themselves off as a French newspaper crew doing a story about the construction of the tower. Also, Petit spent many months spying on the towers, not just for architectural reasons, but to sense how a French street performer, his equipment, and his team could infiltrate the top floors of a well guarded office complex. Solution: Get some insiders who can provide cover, buy business suits so you won’t like a street bum, and learn to play hide and seek with the security guards at night.

Second, there’s an interesting interplay between the Petit himself and the organization that helped him out. Each time he does a major rope walk, he assembles about 5-10 people to help with every detail from finance to building little paper models of the buildings. An important issue is that his friends knowingly put him at risk and they can also be legally liable for anything bad that happens. One way to overcome this is charisma – an expert performer, he knows how to pull people in. He has a very attractive intensity. He also has a knack for recruiting people who are into adventures. There’s also an interesting “sunk cost” psychology. Working on such an intense project, once people commit they *really* want to see the walk happen.

Third, the success of the project completely transforms the organization. Pulling off the WTC walk turned Petit into a global celebrity, but changed the relationships he had with the people who helped out. The girlfriend, for example, realized that he was simply different after the walk. Petit had done something so unique and remarkable and he emerged as someone else after the stunt. His friends who helped him were burned from the experience. Some, just from the stress of doing it, others, from the threat of legal action. The short lived organizations around Petit are pulled together by vision, charisma, and technique, but are nearly impossible to sustain.

I have more respect for Petit and what he does after seeing this movie. Sure, he’s an attention grabber, but, as he says, he doesn’t court death. The goal of his massive preparation isn’t to risk death, it’s to defy gravity, break boundaries, and fly. And there’s an utter joy to what he does because he knows that it is completely safe, at least for him!

Via Scatterplot – a visual representation of the relationships between the sciences (the article is here).

You know the rules: list phd programs in the designated area. Must have at least 3 active faculty members in the area. Sociology of culture: Northwestern – Fine, Espeland, Griswold. Add other culture strong programs in the comments.

I’ve been attending the Western Academy of Management conference this weekend, organized this year by Brayden’s department chair Paul Hirsch.  I haven’t attended the conference for a long time, but I must say that the conference is great: it has a very unique and fun culture, and it’s nice and small.  Consider attending next year, the conference will be in Kona, Hawaii.

Tonight’s keynote address was given by Jerry Davis, the talk was based on his forthcoming Oxford University Press book Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America.  The presentation was excellent—full of interesting charts related to how the US economy has evolved from a corporate- centric model to a market-centric one. Not sure I agreed with everything (though, the history of finance certainly isn’t my research area either, so what do I know)—but the arguments certainly are interesting and provocative; I look forward to reading the book.    The book is sure to get lots and lots of attention in the next couple months, it’s extremely timely.

Davis also gave an admirable Jimmy Stewart impression of the strikingly relevant bank run scene from It’s a Wonderful Life (here’s the short 20 second scene from the movie).

The book’s full description can be found here, on the publisher’s web site.

And, an online copy of the book’s preface.

Here’s some advance praise for the book by Jeff Pfeffer:

In this intellectual tour de force, Jerry Davis describes the evolution of the American economy to where we are now—where everything is a security or an option and, therefore, tradable in some sort of market. He also details the profound costs we have paid for this evolution. Timely, engaging, and filled with facts and analysis, Managed by the Markets explains how we got to where we are and maybe, just maybe, where we need to go next.

Gabriel Rossman returns to blogging with one of the most awesome blog descriptions ever – Stata, Sociology, and Diffusion Models (HT to Jenn). Gabriel writes about methodological and theoretical problems and then writes down related Stata script. For example, check out this post discussing the publication bias favoring statistically significant findings. The end of the post contains a Stata simulation producing two literatures, one based on a spurious effect and the other on a true effect. This really is one of the most brilliant blogging ideas ever! We need more of this kind of blogging.

As many of you may recall, Gabriel is a former orgtheory guest blogger and (oh yeah) also a sociologist at UCLA.

I just finished watching “Milk,” the biographical film about San Francisco politician and activist Harvey Milk. Having been a Bay Area person for eight years, I knew the story fairly well, but I still enormously enjoyed the film and Sean Penn’s acting. The movie reminded me of Tina Fetner’s book, which I reviewed last year, because Tina covers in great detail the push and pull of gay rights activists and the emerging Christianist movement. The movie documents how Milk’s political work fit into that whole late 70s dynamic. Another neat aspect of the film was showing how the gay rights movement bled into San Francisco and California electoral politics, via Milk’s campaign organization. That’s a big theme that my co-author and I push – the “party in the street,” which is what we call the social domain where street politics intersects with party politics. I’m curious as to what Tina might have to add about this film?

Say you’re smart.  Really smart.  And talented too.  What would it take for you to go work for AIG?

“Institution” is one of those mushy words that means very different things in very different contexts. Case in point: David Henderson of Econlog reports on a paper by Peter Blair Henry and Conrad Miller.  After adopting socialist policies in the 1970s, Jamaica has much less growth than its sister island of Barbados, which insisted on free trade and resisted nationalization. Slam dunk for institutional theories – change the rules and you get different results? Not so fast,  Henry and Miller report:

From 1960 to 2002, Barbados’ GDP per capita grew roughly three times as fast as Jamaica’s. Consequently, the income gap between Barbados and Jamaica is now almost five times larger than at the time of independence. Since their property rights and legal systems are virtually identical, recent theories of development cannot explain the divergence between Barbados and Jamaica. Differences in macroeconomic policy choices, not differences in institutions, account for the heterogeneous growth experiences of these two Caribbean nations.

Then, Henderson responds:

Henry and Miller pitch their study as a critique of the Douglass North view that institutions are crucial for economic growth. They point out that both countries were British colonies until the 1960s and, therefore, had a two-party political system, a free press, constitutional protection of property rights, and the English common law. The difference in performance, they say, was not due to different institutions but to different macro policy. But aren’t such big differences in macro policy–nationalization and distribution of wealth in one case and not in the other–themselves a difference in institutions?

That’s what I thought – under nearly any definition of “institution,” a socialist economy counts as different institutionally from a market economy. The NBER paper is gated, but the abstract suggests that they mean something like “property rules alone don’t explain outcomes.” That’s a fair point, but I think there’s a deeper point: any set of written rules depends on values, which then drives politics, which then drives enforcement and interpretation.

An economist who might focus primarily on written codes, might say that Barbados and Jamaica have the same rules, so they have the same institutions. The sociologist would infer that people’s values had changed if they elected a socialist government, which then changes the meaning of the rules. So they do *not* have the same institutions anymore, at least in the sociological sense of the word. In the end, Henry and Miller are right. If you give two communities the same rules, they may not end up the same way. But they miss the bigger point – interests and values govern the rules, and that’s the key difference.

Penn sociologist David Gibson has joined the Complexity and Social Networks blog. This addition gives everyone another great reason to add this blog to your daily reading list. Gibson’s first post is about the social capital consequences of Facebook. After noting that Facebook reportedly adds 600,000 users a day (if you’re not on there yet, you will be), he wonders if Facebook will contribute to a buildup of anti-social capital, which is “a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely those whose main consequence is that you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online.”

It’s not hard to foresee why someone without such connections would fair better at school, in the workplace, and in their family relations than someone with them, other things being equal.

Of course, the problem is not merely time diverted from more serious pursuits–exercise, learning, thinking long and hard about life’s problems, interacting with those with whom one shares microbes–but also the disclosure of personal and potentially damaging information. That might point to yet another kind of capital, which I’ll call non-self-disclosure capital, which is the state of not having made public (especially online) information about yourself that could result in a serious loss of face, life prospects, and possibly safety if the information gets circulated beyond its intended audience.

I tried to add David as my friend on Facebook, but he was nowhere to be found.

Here’s an essay I’ve written about the research on social movements, politics, and markets. Feedback welcome!

We value markets for their stability and predictability, the seeming ease with which they help us accomplish the mundane tasks of our lives, and the promise they hold in bringing to fruition our greatest desires. But markets, despite their many benefits, are also hotly contested sites of political action. Markets often generate dissatisfaction among a portion of the population even as they bring satisfaction to others. This discontentment sometimes gets translated into contentious activism, such as protests and boycotts, which are not inconsequential for their corporate targets or markets. Recent research has begun to shed light on how the “contentious politics” of activists shakes investor confidence, influences corporate policymaking, and brings change to markets.

Contentious politics refers to collective action that uses controversial tactics like street protests, demonstrations, or boycotts to publicly air grievances and demand change.  Social movements like the civil rights movement or, more contemporarily, the gay and lesbian rights movement frequently use the tactics of contentious politics.  While much contentious political action is targeted against the state, contentious politics often bleeds into markets. Market actors like corporations draw considerable attention from activists and markets themselves can be politicized.  When targeting market actors, social movements often bypass the state altogether, preferring to protest corporations or industries directly to demand product recalls, urge more equitable hiring policies, or challenge a company’s morality. One study estimates that nearly 20% of all protests target corporations.

Social movements protesting against the “moral offenses” of the market have been especially evident in recent years. Last summer conservative activists held rallies outside Viacom’s annual shareholder meeting to protest the marketing of adult-oriented content on television programs targeted at youth. Human rights activists held protests against and promoted a boycott of Coca-Cola last year because of the company’s sponsorship of the Olympics in China, which they hold responsible for numerous human rights violations. The current economic crisis has also drawn its share of attention from political activists. In December of 2007 Jesse Jackson led a march on Wall Street to protest the “corporate greed” that protestors claimed led to the swell of home foreclosures. The marchers also called for the banks to restructure delinquent loans so that economically vulnerable people might be allowed to stay in their homes.  In all of these cases, protestors questioned the public virtue of the market.

It’s clear from these examples that contentious politics often bypasses the state, opting for a more direct confrontation of the financial sources of power. What’s not clear from these examples is whether contentious politics really matters. Read the rest of this entry »

Every time there’s an Enron style scandal, or a ponzi scheme of Madoff proportions, or even AIG execs taking the money and running, you hear it: “Blame the b-schools! The egg heads ruined it for the rest of us!”

Well, maybe… if you assumed that mba’s learned much in b-school. Now, before my orgtheory buddies jump on me, let me assure you that I greatly respect my b-school colleagues. But here’s the question: what skills do people actually learn in b-school and use on the job? How much influence do we have on these folks? Does a business ethics professor yelling at type-A 28 year old Wall street wannabes have any effect?

Here’s the deeper question. Yes, MBA education does expose people to some rigorous tools – economics, behavioral science, applied statistics, etc. But what evidence do we have that this makes them better decision makers? In other words, what systematic evidence do we have that MBA’s provide real skills and that it’s just not another credentialling or sorting mechanism? I’m open to evidence either way.

Scatterista and loyal orghead Shamus draws my attention to a rising social movement in Pakistan: the “Long March.” The blog operated by Action for a Progressive Pakistan documents what’s happening out there. Motivated by heated US-Pakistan relations, corruption, and other issues, the APP has organized a march to the capital. Their blog provides daily coverage of the movement. This post has video coverage of day 1. This post describes how the capital has been shut off to prevent mobilization and there have been mass arrests. It could be a massive event, so it’s definitely worth learning about. Here’s a BBC article about the build up to the march.

So, we’ve talked before about the challenges associated with academic presentations.  I still struggle with the form—-15 minutes to try to squeeze in a whole research paper! Now I try to do much less.  But, I am still looking for brilliant examples of strong academic presentations. (If you know any examples online, drop a link into the comments.)  I just got a copy of Nancy Duarte’s book Slideology and must say that that the book has much that even a die-hard, Dad’s tie and powerpoint-using, 100 words per slide-cramming, directly-from-the-slide-reading academic might learn from.  And, here’s the slideology blog with lots of helpful tips.

One of the books that orgtheory gave a lot of attention in the last year was Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. The book is part history and part theoretical investigation of the educational problems associated with the modern business school. One of Khurana’s main points is that the slanted focus towards economics that is given in MBA training has damaged the professional values and authority of management.  Armed with only the tools of financial/economic analysis, the modern manager is incapable of guiding his organization with any kind of moral authority. Agency theory, in particular, takes quite a few knocks in the book.

In the most recent issue of ASQ, Martin Ruef has written a thoughtful and somewhat critical review of Khurana’s book. Ruef offers an alternative interpretation to Khurana’s thesis, suggesting that the transformation of the business school is a function of resource dependence on a market for ideas and training that managers will find appealling. The dependence of business schools on support from the business community, expressed today in revenue flowing from executive education, shapes how/what the schools teach in in the classroom (and perhaps even what we study). Ruef calls on readers of Khurana’s book to think more about how this market logic prevents business schools from promoting a professionalizing curriculum.

This section of the book leaves the reader with an indelible image of a few neoclassical economists, perhaps aided by an institutional economist or two, standing over the body of the once-mighty general manager. But if words could kill, then other social scientists may well have served as accomplices to the purported crime. After all, anti-managerialism has had a firm foothold in organizational sociology since the 1970s, portraying managers who seem to be shackled by inertia, resource dependencies, or myth and ceremony (Donaldson, 1995). And other disciplines have hardly been immune to similar predispositions, lest we forget that an influential account of organized anarchy (Cohen, March, and Olsen, 1972) was coauthored by two scholars with political science Ph.D.s. It is more likely, of course, that we flatter ourselves by thinking that intellectual perceptions of organizations could matter so much. My alternative history of the “rise” of a market logic in business education takes a different tack—by returning, full circle, to the origins of American business education in the nineteenth century. To quote singer David Byrne, it’s the “same as it ever was.”…

The view on business schools and management science appears more ambivalent in the twenty-first century. Educators try to produce business “leaders” as a vague substitute for business managers; contemporary research on organizations tends to offer contributions to the anti-managerial paradigms that first appeared thirty years ago. If an ethos of professionalism in business schools is the only victim of these developments, then I suspect that many of us will not be attending the funeral. In America, business education was born from a market logic that touted commercial credentials in the nineteenth century and, in many respects, so it remains today. But if the majority of our scholarship on organizations is now conducted in business schools, then another, perhaps more innocent victim may be organizational theory itself. Sidelined by the vocational requirements of teaching MBAs how to find jobs, negotiate salaries, start up companies, form social networks, and be “leaders,” business school faculty may yet lose the ability to conduct critical inquiries into the nature of organizations and the policy implications of organizational activities.

You may ask: what does Teppo Felin do when he’s not communicating to the scientific world through orgtheory? Answer: He writes cutting edge papers on organization theory. With Nicolai Foss, super-sociology dude Peter Abell and others, Felin has a series of papers on performativity and the foundations of organization theory:

• A paper on the logical foundation of organizational routines – coming out in Managerial and Decision Economics!
• A paper on social reality and the self-fulfilling prophecy – in Organization Science!
• An AMR paper on knowledge in organizations with WS Hesterly!

Check it out!

Despite the harsh winter weather, it seems that more and more people are begging for money on the street corners and in the subway stations near my neighborhood. Perhaps more surprising is the addition of middle-aged and able-looking men to the “regulars,” many of whom have more obvious mental or physical challenges. In other signs of the recession, the grocery store near my parents’ suburban home has stopped carrying organic and gourmet items. But more jarring to me, the store has actually removed aisles and shelves, presumably so it doesn’t have to carry as much inventory. This is what’s happening in Massachusetts, at least from my very limited view, and MA is a state much less affected by unemployment than Michigan, California, Nevada, South Carolina, or neighboring Rhode Island, all with unemployment rates over 9%.

Declining food pantry stocks, rising foreclosure rates, and failing businesses are dominating the news, with stories on increasing church attendance and rising crime also appearing. Besides the obvious economic measures, where should social scientists be looking for the consequences of economic distress? Are any of you Orgtheory folks willing to make predictions about changes in non-economic trends? For example, I’m predicting that we’ll see a modest decrease in marriage rates and increase in teen births.

FYI: For the data nerds out there, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is set to release the January local area unemployment rates at 10am.

I’m involved with an informal interdisciplinary group here at my university (with folks from computer science, engineering, political science etc) and all of us are interested in modeling of some sort or another.  This week’s reading is fantastic—-Scott Page’s (2008) Journal of Theoretical Politics piece on “uncertainty, difficulty, and complexity.” So, if your models and research on organizations, institutions, behavior, decision-making etc involve elements of uncertainty, difficulty or complexity, then I highly, highly recommend this piece.

According to the NY Times, the current economic crisis is raising questions about mathematical finance. On the one hand, mathematical finance is a serious attempt to figure out how markets work. On the other hand, models are built on weak assumptions and traders use them to justify actions:

But it gets more complicated than that. For example, markets are not perfectly efficient — prices do not always adjust to right level and people are not perfectly rational. Indeed, Dr. Derman said, the idea of a “right level” is “a bit of a fiction.” As a result, prices do not fluctuate according to Brownian motion. Rather, he said: “Markets tend to drift upward or cascade down. You get slow rises and dramatic falls.”

One consequence of this is something called the “volatility smile,” in which options that benefit from market drops cost more than options that benefit from market rises.

Another consequence is that when you need financial models the most — on days like Black Monday in 1987 when the Dow dropped 20 percent — they might break down. The risks of relying on simple models are heightened by investors’ desire to increase their leverage by playing with borrowed money. In that case one bad bet can doom a hedge fund. Dr. Merton and Dr. Scholes won the Nobel in economic science in 1997 for the stock options model. Only a year later Long Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund whose directors included the two Nobelists, collapsed and had to be bailed out to the tune of $3.65 billion by a group of banks.

Afterward, a Merrill Lynch memorandum noted that the financial models “may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore reliance on these models should be limited.”

That was a lesson apparently not learned.

The article brings up a lot off that we’ve discussed on this blog. For example, like many observers, I’ve been amazed that models, which justify vast economic transactions, insist on mathematically simple assumptions. They help you with deriving nice results, but have important inaccuracies:

Dr. Taleb has waged war against one element of modern economics in particular: the assumption that price fluctuations follow the familiar bell curve that describes, say, IQ scores or heights in a population, with a mean change and increasingly rare chances of larger or smaller ones, according to so-called Gaussian statistics named for the German mathematician Friedrich Gauss.

But many systems in nature, and finance, appear to be better described by the fractal statistics popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM, which look the same at every scale. An example is the 80-20 rule that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work, or have 80 percent of the money. Within the blessed 20 percent the same rule applies, and so on. As a result the odds of game-changing outliers like Bill Gates’s fortune or a Black Monday are actually much greater than the quant models predict, rendering quants useless or even dangerous, Dr. Taleb said.

“I think physicists should go back to the physics department and leave Wall Street alone,” he said.

Can the crisis de-perform finance? I leave that to the MacKenzie-ites to discuss.

Contexts Crawler drew my attention to a NY Times article about the congested job market in the social sciences and humanities. As discussed in an earlier post, the economic crisis has really hit the academic job market hard. Veteran PhD students are waiting for news of potential hiring opportunities “like planes hovering over La Guardia.” Contexts is asking you to share your own stories of frustration with the job market in their comments section (anonymously, of course).

Stakeholder theory seems intractable—it suggests that governance ought to (somehow) consider and reconcile the interests and preferences of various organizational stakeholders.  But, the problem is that matters of stakeholder conflict and uncertainty do not really get vetted (stakeholder governance of course works great if interests happen to be aligned), and more generally stakeholder theory does not seem to provide mechanisms to resolve concerns related to the ordering of disparate stakeholder interests and preferences. [Issues we've discussed before.]

I just attended the Utah-BYU Winter Strategy Conference last weekend, and Joe Mahoney gave a very nice overview of stakeholder thinking, in particular focusing on economic and legal approaches to thinking about stakeholder governance, specifically matters related to property rights.   Not sure Joe’s paper necessarily resolves the concerns many have about stakeholder governance, but, nonetheless he gave a very engaging presentation on the matter —- (pdf) here’s the associated paper—specifically calling for strategy scholars to return to their stakeholder-inspired roots.