orgtheory.net

I’m now fully integrated into facebook, friends and all.  (Worlds are colliding.)  Brayden talked about tools for visualizing one’s facebook network, so I decided to have my MBA org theory students map their facebook networks and to bring them to class.  We had a great discussion about various network concepts based on the personal visualizations.  The visualizations helped us to seamlessly work in the assigned networks readings/concepts.  The simplest tool we found is ludios.net’s nexus friend grapher, it generates your facebook network with the click of a button and has some fun features.

Crooked Timber has a seminar on Steve Teles’ Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. We covered it last year: read the back and forth between Teles and I here. Here’s my contribution to the Crooked Timber seminar:

Steven Teles’ The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (RCLM) is an important book. It is one of the few studies to thoroughly address the institutionalization of conservative politics. It’s also a well motivated account. Using ideas from contemporary sociology, Teles frames the conservative legal movements as an example of resource mobilization. Winning elections isn’t enough to implement conservative policy. One must create conservative networks and organizations that can be used to fight and win court battles.

In this response to RCLM, I’d like to argue that conservative legal movement is a failed movement. We have come to view the period from the 1970s to the 2006 Congressional election as an unqualified victory for the American right. Republicans put three of their own in the White House and gained control of the House of Representatives. The 9/11 era allowed a conservative White House to restructure the Federal government and expand its powers.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are some interesting advances in how some journals and online media are broadening the scientific conversation — here are a few of my favorite examples:

• I absolutely love the format that the über-cross-disciplinary journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences uses by inviting a dozen+ responses to articles —- here’s a fantastic example: Henrich et al., “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28.  So, in total the article is 62 pages long, but see the brilliant (and wildly cross-disciplinary) discussion and exchange that ensues on pages 21-62.
• Seed Magazine is doing some great things to foster dialogue online and in print.
• The time has come —- open access to journals! Surely there is a sensible model to make it work.
• contexts.
• iTunesU is a daily must.
• ePrint archives obviously are huge (SSRN, arXiv, etc).
• The Economist’s Voice is interesting, and the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) more generally seems to be aggressively growing (up to some 39 journals now) and relevant.  BEPRESS was only started ten years ago.
• Some journals, like the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy, are podcasting. I briefly listened to one of their short podcasts — essentially the podcast covered the latest journal issue, the main findings of each piece and featured some additional discussion.  (Here’s the podcast site for the Journal of Law, Economics and Policy.)
• The journals Nature and Science do a great job of packaging things online and also allowing for various formats.

OK, so, most folks in academia are probably familiar with the above.  But, it’ll be interesting to see how “scientific conversation” evolves more generally, and how organization theory-related journals adapt and innovate given some of the above.

All journals should follow the practice of Organization Science by posting forthcoming articles online prior to the publication date.  The practice gets fresh content to readers sooner and enhances the spread of knowledge. The April 27 slate includes an interesting slate of advance articles, including the Felin & Foss critique of theories about self-fulfilling prophecy and a comment by Fabrizio Ferraro, Jeff Pfeffer, and Bob Sutton. The blog will host more of that content in the coming weeks when Fabrizio graciously makes a guest appearance on orgtheory. I look forward to hearing him and Teppo duke it out cordially discuss their different points of view. But if you can’t wait, you can check out the exchange in Org. Sci now.

The slate also includes a really cool study by my neighbors to the south, Damon Phillips and Young-Kyu Kim, that looks at the practice of using pseudonyms to mask the identities of jazz musicians during the 1920s. Jazz record companies that catered to highbrow musical tastes, the cultural elite, and Victorian values wanted to take advantage of the potential sales revenue that would come from signing lowbrow jazz artists, but they didn’t want to consequently threaten their own producer identity. The solution was to sign the lowbrow jazz musicians anyway and give them a pseudonym that enhanced their legitimacy.  So for example, Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five was released under the pseudonym Eddie Gordon’s Band. They find that firms founded during the Victorian Era were more likely to use pseudonyms, suggesting that these firms were attempting to preserve their identity as highbrow producers through this deceptive practice. They also find further evidence that this deception was strategic. They summarize:

Our findings suggest that acts of deception can be used to preserve a firm’s identity. In our study, Victorian Era firms shunned the direct financial gains of fully participating in the lowbrow product space to preserve their higher-status identities, forged at founding. Instead of employing identity-transforming or identity-enhancing acts (Rao et al. 2003), we uncover deception through the use of pseudonyms as identity-preserving acts. Pseudonyms allowed the Victorian Era firms to participate more fully in the center of the jazz market while preserving their identities as highbrow producers. These deceptive acts also allowed Victorian Era firms to more sharply signal their identity when the actions of competing Jazz Era firms made it less clear that Victorian Era firms were distinctly associated with highbrow music (14).

The paper uses incredible data. It’s also nice to see a paper that treats identity at the organization-level in a sophisticated way, showing how firms actively and symbolically manage their audiences.

It’s very cool that you can learn about abstract math with youtube videos. Here are videos about topology, the science of flexible shapes:

1. “Not Knot” Part 1 and Part 2. This video explains what’s cool about knots. A bit slow at first, but it gets super deep and heavy by part 2.

2. The Alexander Horned Sphere. Strangely, you can deform a sphere so that the exterior area is connected, yet has holes in it. Freaked me out when I learned about this bad boy as an undergraduate.

3. Sphere Eversion: Assume the surface of a ball is permeable – can you flip it inside out with creating cusps or sharp points? Yes – part 1 and part 2.  A bit long and wordy, but definitely worth it.

I recently discovered wordle.net.  It’s addicting. You can throw in as much text as you’d like, copy in an article, and then you can play with various visualizations (fonts, formats, etc) of the key words.  I tried to throw in the RSS feed for orgtheory, but it only grabbed a dozen or so of the latest posts.  So, instead I pasted in the text of an article.  I like the propaganda-like feel of the above poster.

On second thought, propaganda-wise, I might like the key words for this article better:

It’s very important for scientists to tackle important puzzles. So I got to thinking: what are important puzzles in organization studies? Here’s a few. I focus on puzzles generated by empirical observations, not “theory driven” puzzles (e.g., how do institutionalists explain social change). In no particular order:

1. The M-form: Why is the M-form so robust? There have been claims that we’ll switch to team centered organizations, or flattened hierarchies, or open source internet based organizations, or whatever – but it hasn’t happened. Why? If we have switched, what sorts of industries require M-forms? Just manufacturing?
2. The consulting profession: How can you characterize the consulting business? What range of activities count as consulting? Why do firms bother? When do consultants create value? When is it ritual?
3. Executive compensation: Is there any “rational” way to link corporate performance to pay? Is there any way to overcome principle-agent problems for executives and retain the pay-performance link?
4. Public-private hybrids: Some organizations, like universities, are essentially multi-sector hybrids. When does that happen? What factors predict the emergence of hybrid organization structure?
5. The regulatory regime of American finance: Were changing de/re-regulations of finance in the 1990s and 2000s a case of industry capture or economic theory? In other words, did the change in the finance sector follow a theory of what finance should be, or was it the industry controlling the regulators?
6. Finance’s power: Will the recession decrease the authority of finance professionals in American business? (I.e., Will it reverse Fligstein’s findings?)
7. How has the Internet changed political organizations? Is it just one tool in the service of traditional politics? Or is there a new politics associated with online life?

Add your own problems and responses in the comments.

Henry Niman has created a helpful google map to track the incidence of the H1N1 swine flu.  Undoubtedly those who are studying the origins and diffusion of the swine flu will be working with a much more fine-grained map of individual networks and social interaction.  The H1N1 swine flu outbreak entry on wikipedia is also very informative (though obviously subject to corrections).

As a student of academic disciplines, I’m always on the prowl for upstart intellectual movements. So it was with great pleasure that “exopolitics” came to my attention. You see, traditional political science has yet to fully come to grips with the social implications of extraterrestrial contact. That’s why we need exopolitics – form the website:

Exopolitics is the study of the key individuals, political institutions and processes associated with extraterrestrial life. This website produces exopolitics papers and news using scholarly standards developed by the author from almost two decades of academic research in major U.S. and Australian universities. Information concerning extraterrestrial life and technology is kept secret from the general public, elected political officials & even senior military officials. The supporting evidence is overwhelming in scope and shows that decision making is restricted on a strict ‘need to know’ basis.

As with any academic speciality, you need a journal: “Exopolitics Journal.” It’s reviewed and is on its third volume. You can also get a ceritifcate and diploma from the Exopolitics Institute, which offers a full curriculum with intro and advanced courses. The exopolitics movement is tied to a political science professor who came to believe that international conflict was driven by ET’s who interfere in human affairs. Here’s the lecture. Founding figures, expert training, and peer review – I see an APSA section in formation!

A few weeks ago, South Park ran an episode about Kanye West’s inability to get a lame joke about fish sticks. The premise was that West took himself way too seriously, but there was a recurring theme about people who steal creative work. Specifically, South Park just came right out and accused comedian Carlos Mencia of being a hack who steals other comedians’ jokes. A google search quickly revealed that Mencia isn’t the only one accused of plagiarism. A number of prominent of stand up comics have been accused of repeatedly lifting work without credit – Milton Berle,* Denis Leary, Robin Williams, Dane Cook, and there are many more.

Turns out the comedy world is one without enforceable property rights. It really is possible to build a career just repeating other people’s jokes. Just read the Dead Frog blog, which focuses on stand up. Over and over, comics use similar jokes. Sometimes it’s just convergence on obvious topics (e.g., “no comic owns Clinton —- jokes, it’s a public resource”). Other times it’s obvious, some comics copy lengthy jokes nearly verbatim from other comics. And ususally, there’s not much to be done.

However, once in a while, even in this anomic environment, property rights do work well enough to satisfy the prediction of Coase’s Theorem. Case in point: a story (possibly an urban legend) about Robin Williams from Gelf Magazine:

According to comic Steve Hofstetter, Williams’s thievery has gotten to the point that when comics call his manager and say that the two of them had performed at the same club recently, his manager will simply say something along the lines of, “What did he take, and how much do you want for it?” (Gelf was unable to reach Williams or his manager for comment.) Con’s Skyler Stone says that Williams “used to stand in the back of the club with a checkbook”…

Link to Coase’s Theorem? The theorem, roughly speaking, says it doesn’t matter how you initially assign property rights, but in a zero transaction cost environment, you will reach the same efficient outcome. In this case, Robin Williams is willing to respect other comics rights, long as they complain, which is a low cost action (at least compared with lawsuits and other enforcement actions). So you get the same assignment of resources: Williams, the better performer, has more market value and just buys out jokes belonging to others as if he had just hired them, or owned the jokes in the first place. Classic Coase? You be the judge!

*From Gelf Magazine: In the 1950s, one-line legend Milton Berle poked fun at his own thievery, once saying that a comedian made him laugh so hard, “I nearly dropped my pencil.” Take my blog, please!

I found that my network data is missing one node, probably from clip and paste – the UCINET editor seems to truncate the first case of pasted data. Anyway, is there a way in UCINET to add a single node and it’s adjacent nodes ( x y1 y2 … y3) to an existing UCINET data set without redoing the whole thing?

A quick heads up on two of our upcoming guest bloggers.

First, starting in early May, Sean Safford will be guest blogging about his recently published book Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: Social Networks and the Transformation of the Rust Belt (Harvard University Press).  Be sure to secure yourself a copy.  And, start reading now so you can join the discussion.

Second, Fabrizio Ferraro will be guest posting in late May.  Fabrizio will be posting about his work on the role that economics plays in society, the role that theories play in shaping behavior, performativity, etc.  (Here’s a pdf of Ferraro, Pfeffer & Sutton [2005], which highlights some of the key issues.)   We are trying to time Fabrizio’s guest stint with the publication of a related set of articles in the next issue of Organization Science.  We’ll provide the appropriate links as soon as the articles are available.

So, no time to relax now that classes are over (for some of us) — start reading Sean’s book!

When he’s posting consistently, Peter Levin may be my favorite sociologist blogger. He’s witty, informed, opinionated, appropriately snarky, and smart. He also tends to think about a lot of the same issues that I do, although we usually come at the issues from different directions and often draw different conclusions. But that’s one of the reasons the blog is so great. It’s no fun reading something you always agree with, right?

So here is a post that Peter wrote about the problems of aggregating knowledge/opinions/information. He’s less than enamored with so-called efficient attempts to aggregate knowledge as a way to influence opinions and enhance decision-making.

[T]here are some things to think about here that make this ‘new’ system quite problematic. And I ain’t sayin’ so just because I’m an expert (after all, the policy people really don’t come talking to sociologists, despite my preferences). There are one specific and one theoretical.The first specific is that some people are just crazy, and aside from creating a tail-end of a distribution curve, it’s not at all clear what these folks contribute to the crowd. Old but still hilarious is Andy Baio’s Amazon Knee-jerk Contrarian Game. Personally, I like the ratings game at Yelp, an often-loved but massively crowd-sourced guide….

More theoretically, it has never really be adequately explained why a ‘market-like’ information crowd-sourcing should work. I understand why markets might produce a price that incorporates most public and private information about a commodity. But the widespread substitution of expertise with data mining and crowd-sourcing is a market metaphor more than a market. Why should a metaphor work? This is at the heart of someone like Daniel Davies’ criticism. And I get that sometimes aggregation does work. But there’s no good reason why.

My own feeling is that, using March’s metaphor of ‘exploitation’ and ‘exploration’ (where the first is the plumbing of existing knowledge/arenas, and the second is the seeking out of new opportunities), aggregation mechanisms are better at exploitation than exploration. They do better with existing standards of knowledge, of tastes, of commodities, than they do with something that is new.

Go read the whole post to get a better sense of why Peter thinks that people are sometimes just plain wrong. He quotes a review of MoMA that is pretty funny. While I agree with Peter that the reviewer doesn’t have good taste, something about Peter’s take didn’t feel right to me. After sleeping on it, I think I understand why. The problem is that the reviewer’s belief that modern art is over-rated will be consistent with the view of a good percentage of the population. And so for a certain group of people out there, that opinion will be valid and a useful piece of information when deciding what to do in NYC. The problem isn’t that the reviewer is a moron, it’s just that his tastes are completely different than Peter’s or mine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the 2009 rankings of Sociology programs from U.S. News & World Report. As before, Berkeley and Madison are #1 and #2 (actually I think they were tied for #1 last time round). But Princeton is now #3 alongside Michigan; Harvard, Stanford, Chicago and UNC tie at #5. Northwestern and UCLA are tied, rounding out the top 10. It’s been interesting to watch Princeton move way, way up the list over the past few rounds.

Insert the usual disclaimer here about how rankings are of course an imprecise and indeed crass measure of something as intangible and diaphanous as intellectual quality and academic excellence, that we have little time and less respect for such quantified anti-intellectual crudities put out by cheap news magazines on the basis of dubious methods, and that that prospective graduate students should instead rely multiple sources of advice to best judge the fit of a program with their interests before they hey look our Department moved up from last time but the other guys are still totally overrated.

My six-year old daughter plays soccer.  Earlier tonight I attended another game.  For roughly 45 minutes I watched six-year olds swarm around the ball.  The soccer ball acts as an attractor and the herd of eight girls are consistently, for the full 45 minutes, within 15 feet of the ball.  The activity, if captured from above, would likely look very similar to the kind of swarm behavior we see in nature.

Of course, in this situation swarming seems sub-optimal. An alternative set of rules might be more effective. A few weeks ago I ran into CV Harquail‘s (from Authentic Organizations) beautifully simple rules for playing soccer.  A role-based approach:

Strikers: Center & Score!
Midfielders: Move it up!
Defenders: Take it to the side!
Goalie: Grab it!

I like that: nice and simple. 

OK, while I’m in book-plugging mode — here’s another must-have book: Rich Burton’s (long-time Duke org theorist) book Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach (Cambridge University Press).  I’ve plugged the book before. The book does not collect dust on my shelf as I refer to it frequently myself, or often it’s out on loan with one of my graduate students.

Organizational design is sort of a lost art.  If organizational design is simply window-dressing, about legitimacy, then the functional and practical aspects can quickly get lost in the mix.  This book is about the nuts and bolts, both a theoretical and a practical guide.

Rich was in town a few weeks ago and I had a chance visit with him about this book and his work more generally.  He incidentally also has a organization design-related software application, OrgCon, that is meant for both practitioners and students.  I have not had a chance to play around with hit, but plan to do so soon.  I cover some basics related to organizational design in my graduate org theory course, but, based on the queries I get from class alums, design is something that practitioners are heavily wrestling with these days and thus I plan on adding more organizational design into my course.  More on that later (along with a bleg).

Most of us stare at type all day.  I don’t know that we think much about it.  I don’t. We sort of just go with the default settings of our word processor and move on with life.  And, journals use their established types and formats, so we don’t really need to think about that either.

However, I recently acquired Robert Bringhurst’s book Elements of Typographic Style, and now I more clearly see how type matters.  The book is beautiful, and the first chapter brilliantly delineates why we should care about typography.  If you read nothing else — at least skim through the first (1.1.) sub-section on “first principles.”  The subsequent chapters get into all kinds of detail about choice of type, space and lay-out, audience, origins of various fonts, font families, etc, etc.  [Well, the chapters are quite poetically labeled: 1) The Grand Design, 2) Rhythm & Proportion, 3) Harmony & Counterpoint, 4) Structural Forms & Devices, etc.]  A fantastic reference book.

Now that I’m armed with this information — I don’t know what I’ll do differently.  I suppose I could be more cognizant about how I typeset the working papers I circulate.  orgtheory.net could probably also be aesthetically optimized.  Also, frankly, we could use some lobbying to change the less-than-optimal fonts and lay-outs of some of our journals.  For now, I’ve got plenty of other things to address: grading finals, research and writing.  Oh, and that tenure thing.

Here’s a primer on Elements of Typographic Style — applied to the web.

After John Hope Franklin died, there was a discussion on H-Afro of his role in the field of Black Studies. I noted that he was a skeptic, even though his books influenced a generation of Black Studies scholars. In an essay on the Root, Henry Louis Gates wrote that Franklin even tried to persuade scholars not to join the Afro-Am program at Harvard.

In an insightful note, list moderator and Black Studies scholar Abdul Alkalimat wrote about his discussion with Franklin in the 60s at the University of Chicago:

I was a grad student at the U of Chicago when Prof. Franklin arrived.  I was elated but headed for a sobering realization that we were in different generations.  He was from those kept out trying to get inside of the system, while I was inside trying to get out!

When I advised him of my desire to leave grad school to join SNCC he said don’t do it, you’ll waste your career.  He indicated that he had been asked to go to Mississippi and head up the Freedom school curriculum, but instead he was going to be the first Black scholar to teach southern white grad students at Maryland about the Reconstruction.  We disagreed.  I went to Mississippi, and had the career I choose.

This insightful comment raises an important issue for scholars of color. One career model was defined by people who were fighting against exclusion. A minority intellectual was supposed to be excellent so that they might find entry into the mainstream. Another model came out of nationalist politics. Intellectuals embodied what was distinctive about the historical conditions that shaped the community and would work in institutions that supported the community (such as the Freedom School mentioned above).

But what about today? The “pioneer” and the activist-scholar don’t quite capture the range of possibilities. Minority scholars aren’t fighting segragation and nationalist institutions no longer have the pull they once had, though there is still room for activist intellectuals. Perhaps the answer is what one might call “minority scholar 3.0.” These scholars embody the professionalism that one would expect, but produce scholarship that walks a fine line between speaking to the mainstream and addressing community concerns.

In sociology, DuBois epitomized this model. While he certainly would have enjoyed breaking barriers in the academy, his greatest contribution was in being  a highly original academic who could combine mainstream social science with insights drawn from the historical experience of African Americans. It’s interesting that decades after his death that we’re still mining that model and it still holds promise.

An orgtheory lurker just contributed $25 (that’s a “bronze-level” contribution) to the effort to raise money for cancer research — thanks!

OK, so, I’m not going to necessarily dwell on the fundraising effort here at orgtheory (unless I get desperate towards the end), but contributions from orgtheory folks are most definitely appreciated.  I’ll keep you apprised of developments with training, fundraising and whatever else, interesting happens.

I’m also thinking that I can’t pull off the 332 km effort without a nice, vintage fanny pack. (Hmm, that might throw off the aerodynamics on the downhill).  Fabio:  What do you say?

So, here’s my effort at a public, Jeremy Freese-like commitment to do something.  I signed up.  I’ll be riding in one of the longest, single-day cycling races (206 miles, 332 km): LOTOJA.  As the name implies, the race goes from for Logan, UT to Jackson Hole, WY.

As if the distance isn’t enough, the race features some 10,000 vertical feet of climbing (see chart below — well, at least miles 60-75 will be fun).

It’s all for a great cause — I’ll be raising money for the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.  Here’s my fund raising page (I’ll spice it up a bit more later).

I’ll try to provide whatever organizations-related insights might come to mind through the training process and of course from the race itself.

Previous editions of soc phd programs: strat/work, education, org studies,  culture.

Here we go: urban sociology. I’ll take the easy one – Chicago. (Former guest blogger) Mario Small – inequality/race, Omar McRoberts – religion in urban settings, Terry Clark – urban politics, Richard Taub – entrepreneurship in urban environments, Ed Laumann – urban networks/sexual markets. In the comments, add other programs strong in urban studies.

Andrew Sullivan linked to a web site that allows you to make your own church sign images. Some silly signs…

Kieran’s talk, as expected, was very good. In a few weeks, ICOS will put the audio up on the Internet. But for now, I’d like to articulate a point that was raised in post-talk cookies and coffee session: why is it that some topics are low prestige in philosophy but high prestige in other fields? My question was motivated by continental philosophy – considered piña colada by mainstream philosophy, but high status in literary studies and such.

My answer: Start with Abbott’s observation that occupational status is boosted when the group has exclusive access to knowledge and skills (e.g., only certified MD’s can practice medicine). Then, you notice that academic disciplines and specialties boost their status in the same way, like being math based (e.g., econ). By my count, there are three forms of intellectual capital in the academy:

• Academic Connoisseurship: Knowing a lot about an area, and knowing the academic way of writing and talking. Basically, all disciplines have this.
• Demanding jargon: Developing terminology and ways of talking that’s inscrutable to outsiders.
• Math/technology: Turning everything into math, or you require the use of technology and experiments.

The flip side is a selection process. People are attracted to certain disciplines because they seek specific kinds of knowledge. The people in a history program, for example, have bought narrative as the way to convey knowledge.

So let’s get back to continental theory. In philosophy, you have people who are willing and able to adopt symbolic logic – so math stuff wins, continental theory is seen as garbage. In the rest of the humanities, people prefer thick description and narrative, and many don’t have symbolic skills, so various math invasions lose to continental theory (e.g., cliometrics, stilometry). In soc, I think we’re between “jargon” and “high tech,” since we like thick description and statistics.

I’m trying out twitter. I’ll cover Kieran’s talk via twitter. My user name: fabiorojas.

[Kieran asked me to delete this very nice photo that I pulled from the ICOS website.]

[If you want to see the photo, click on the ICOS link below. It's a quite nice, big warm smile. The sort of smile you have when one wins the Masters, or gets a nice set of reviews from a journal. Charming, really.]

Kieran will speak at Michigan’s ICOS workshop on Friday! Here’s the abstract:

Specialization and Status in Philosophy

Rating and ranking systems that aim to quantify excellence,prestige or quality are increasingly common and increasingly influential in settings as varied as hospitals, wineries, baseball teams, and business schools. Using an influential reputational survey, The Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), I describe and analyze the relational structure of prestige in English-speaking Philosophy Departments. I am interested in three problems. First, an “internal” one: what is the social structure of status in the discipline? Second, an “external” one: what effect has the PGR had on the discipline of philosophy? And third, the harder problem of linking the internal and external perspectives: how have philosophers and other interested parties used the information supplied by the report? I will try to take advantage of some nice features of the PGR data to say something about each of these questions.

Starts at 1:30 pm, Room K1310, Ross School of Business at the U of Michigan. Be there or be square!

Here in Ann Arbor to give a talk to the ICOS people. As it happens, Mary-Nell just put this postcard image up on FB. Hmm.

What is in a reputation anyway? Organizational scholars have had a lot to say about this recently as reputation, along with status, has become one of the driving concepts of inquiry in organizational theory in the last decade or so. Scholars have different views on this. Some say reputations are merely signals of quality, others believe that reputations indicate symbolic conformity to norms and cultural rules, and others think that reputations convey an audience’s approval of an organization’s desirable character traits. Geoffrey Love and Matt Kraatz put these ideas about the basis of reputation to test in an article in the most recent issue of the Academy of Management Journal.  They examine the effects of corporate downsizing on reputational changes (as measured by position in Fortune‘s Most Admired Companies index).  If reputation is merely a signal of quality or technical efficiency, then once you take into account the performance effects of downsizing, downsizing shouldn’t have a direct effect on reputational change. If reputation displays symbolic conformity, then downsizing should lead to positive reputational changes (especially given that the audiences who evaluate firms in the Fortune index are peer executives and industry analysts who should value a firm’s willingness to become more efficient). If reputation is about organizational character, then downsizing should lead to reputational decline, given that it demonstrates that a firm is willing to renege on commitments to key stakeholders. Reneging on its prior commitments is a violation of the firm’s established character.  The results provide support for the latter hypothesis but they also suggest that over time (from the mid-80s to mid-90s) the negative effect of downsizing on reputational change dissipated. That is, as downsizing became more common, audiences began to perceive it less as a character flaw.

Although analysts and executives clearly took character into account in adjusting the reputations of downsizing firms, it was not the only signal they considered, and they did not weight it equally in all times and all cases. As Figure 1 shows, downsizing had a strongly negative effect at the outset of the study period: this effect almost completely dissipated by 1994. This large decrease in effect suggests that changing cultural norms may play a key role in determining what counts as an opportunistic act. Though downsizing never acquired the positive reputational valence posited under the symbolic conformity explanation, it did appear to shed its negative connotations as it became more and more ubiquitous (330).

I’m a big fan of the idea that organizations develop distinct characters or identities and that their identities “become infused with value.”  This study is a nice contribution in that it shows exactly how reneging on one’s serious commitments leads to devaluation, even under conditions when the market should otherwise reward a firm for doing something that makes it more technically efficient, but it also shows how those characters are situated in a larger cultural environment. Audiences are less willing to punish organizations for failing to live up to their character commitments when cultural norms become permissive of these types of violations.

There’s an interesting podcast by Russ Roberts. He interviews Robin Hanson, the author of the Overcoming Bias blog. Roberts asks: how do economists deal with their personal biases? He offers a simple example: He’s a free market economist, so he thinks minimum wage is a bad policy. On the other hand, some other smart people think it’s a good idea.  People praise the minimum wage study that suits their biases. How does he know that his free market preferences aren’t steering him away from the truth about minimum wage laws? In general, are scientists trapped in bias?

Around minute 14, Hanson has an interesting answer. Here’s a paraphrase:

You might believe that all scientific theory is tainted by our personal biases, or that scientists are bias free. But there’s a third alternative: bias affects us the most when we have the strongest personal interests. On non-political issues, you can expect more honest discussion and consensus among scientists, which likely represents the best they can do on an issue and the public is likely to believe them. But when it’s a hot button issue, all bets are off.

Hanson then offers a nice example. People trust physicists when they explain quarks, but people distrust them on global warming.

That brings me to sociology. I think it’s to our collective credit that we analyze topics that might be called “social problems.” Stuff like racism and crime. If you believe the theory cited above, we’re setting ourselves up for problems. We base our identity on issues that naturally work against scientific consensus and public acceptance of our results.

Personally, I’m ok with that. There’s always a division of labor and sociology, as a profession, has done well to settle on social problems, even if the public is a bit skeptical. But I’m also thinking about how the problems of ideological interest might be mitigated. One approach is hyper professionalization – we become rigidly academic as a way to question our own biases. Maybe we might have a more confessional approach – we have frequent public discussion of our political beliefs and how that affects the sociology we produce. A third approach is competition – we ask people of different political views to analyze the same problems and judge the results. We’ll believe X even if person with a prior against X admits it might be true. What are other ways to address our biases?

Joshua Gamson – sociologist of culture – won a 2009 Guggenheim fellowship. In grad school, I enjoyed Freaks Talk Back. Here is his faculty web page list of books. Very cool!

Also, close to my own heart, avant garde jazz musician Wadada Leo Smith won an award. My favorite album: The Reflactivity Recordings. Yo Miles! is also worth repeated listenings, especially for fusionistas.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that Susan Watkin of Penn’s soc dept also won! And Robert Smith of CUNY! Right on!

So, this weekend’s stealth operation by US Navy snipers sort of changed the rules of the game.  What do the pirates do next and how does the civilized world respond?  How do you think the civilized world versus pirates game will evolve from here?

The January AJS has an article called “Microclass Mobility: Social Reproduction in Four Countries” by Jonsson, Grusky, DiCarlo, Pollak and Brinton. I call it “Buffy stakes another undead servant of Marx.” Allow me to explain…

If you aren’t familiar with recent debates in stratification research, a key issue is whether there really is such a thing as “big class” (e.g., the manual laborers) or if it really determines a lot about your life course. One alternative, pushed by many folks, is that industrial society is actually about sorting into occupations. The Jonsson et al. article is another shot in this war and they come out strongly in favor of occupational sorting as the prime mechanism behind the intergenerational transmission of inequality. They call it “micro-class.”

A clip from the abstract best summarizes the issue: “In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big‐class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.”

It’s a nifty article, and it’s essentially a series of cross tabulations and log-linear models showing that much of inter-generational mobility is better described as occupation-occupation mobility. They call it “disguised” – if you look at only big classes, you miss important stuff, but if you break it down by small categories of people (occupations) you see “pockets” of non-mobility that dominate big class analyses. A more quant jock way to say is “mixture model” – there seem to be multiple processes happening to different populations, a direct refutation of the classical Marxist view.

The article also has a nice summary (lit review?) of how we think people generate advanatge to their kids and the digrams are winners. Methods wise, I also like how they were able to tease out some nice cross-national comparisons, yet reinforce the bottom line. Recommended.

I’m a bit of a health nut.  I grew up on wheat grass juice, wheat crust vegetarian pizzas, soy and organic food.

But, to my chagrin, I calculated the other day that roughly seventy percent of my calories that day came from cadbury mini eggs.   That can’t be good.  Cadbury mini eggs luckily are seasonal and can’t be stashed — I tried last year, they seem to lose their “freshness” after a while.

Scatter had a nice discussion of the literature review last week. Ideally, an article doesn’t need an exhaustive lit review. Instead, the author should cite the most important papers and extract the issue to be addressed in the paper. But, as comments noted, this ideal isn’t what always happens.

So what is the “real” lit review for? Here’s a theory of what actually happens in lit reviews:

• The lit review ideal: Sometimes, you actually get a succinct summary of the issues that serve the main argument.
• The pay-off: You do a lit review to build a coalition for the paper. Reviewers are more likely to approve if they see their own stuff cited.
• The signal of group membership: You do a lit review to show you care about the field. For example, the economist Oliver Williamson once published an AJS piece on transaction cost economics. The lit review was all soc of orgs, though it had little to do with the paper. I suspect he only did it to make reviewers happy so it could get through a soc journal.
• The ritual: Some reviewers do actually expect an exhaustive list of all articles in the area and some journals do actually expect a “lit review” section. It’s not common in soc, but I’ve seen it in other fields.
• Fighting Conventional Wisdom: Sometimes there is a commonly held belief about what is proved in the literature and you need the exhaustive lit review to prove otherwise, even if it’s not conceptually important.
• Signal of expertise: If the reviewers are new to you and your work, or you are pushing an unusual idea, you might do a fancy lit review to show competence.

I am agnostic about all of this, since you could make a cogent argument for each. Perhaps papers are so varied that we shound’t have a single “ideal” for a lit review. Your opinions?

Now that Brayden has jumped the shark with the orgtheory Facebook group, I don’t feel so bad letting the public see this photo, which originally appeared here.

Let’s take a moment to thank our most recent guest blogger- Christine Percheski. Thank you!