orgtheory.net

Marion Fourcade’s new book, Economists and Societies, is a fascinating comparative study of the economics discipline in three countries, the U.S., Britain, and France. The richness of the book’s historical details guarantees that every reader will learn something new about the countries’ systems of higher education. It’s remarkable how different they are. For example, the British university system is highly concentrated, replicating the British society’s larger class system, which leads to a great deal of tolerance for within-class preferential treatment. Here’s an example of that tolerance that really surprised me:

In contrast to the United States, where elevation to a professorship has been part of the normal development of academic careers, in England few people ever achieved such status. Even today, many remain in inferior grades their entire lives or receive this surpreme academic honor late in their career, someitmes only as they near retirement and rarely ever outside of LSE/Oxbridge. Joan Robinson, for instance, did not become a professor until the ripe age of sixty-two. And such a well-respected economist as Roy Harrod never rose higher than a readership at Nuffield College.

How academic appointments was decided was often mysterious. The absence (or great scarcity) of higher degree diplomas meant that appointments occurred very early in people’s careers, sometimes immediately after college…..This informality partly reflected the generally intimate nature of the British college system – the very small worlds within which students were groomed and careers were made. Appointments rested frequently on personal contacts and recommendations, and an informally shared sense of who was promising and brilliant…To some extent, the job selection process today is still much more casual than in the United States and especially France….William Baumol (from the United States) and Kevin Lancaster (from Australia), who had come to study at the LSE, were appointed to the school’s faculty barely a few weeks into their postgraduate degree. Formal requirements mattered less than personal connections to the university (especially at Oxford and Cambridge, which tended to recruit their own) and signs of academic brilliance such as first-class honors (even when obtained in subjects other than economics) (143-144).

It’s hard to imagine how so much trust could be given to the judgment of a few professors at prestigious universities without the cultural acceptance of Britian’s peculiar class structure.  One outcome of this culural elitism in higher education is that the U.K.’s business elite puts much less trust in the profession of economics than is true in the U.S.

Dave Arneson recently died. He was the co-author, with Gary Gygax, of the first version of “Dungeons and Dragons.” I won’t repeat my rant about what a great game D&D is – you can read it in my post following Gygax’s passing, but I will share my one random encounter with Dave.

Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Davidson revives the discussion (also carried on recently over at Orgs and Markets) over whether social capital is really “capital”.  I am sensitive to the idea that spreading a word’s definition too thin ultimately leads to the word losing meaning.  That is definitely a danger here and so it’s incumbent on people who use the term (like me) to build the case.

I define capital as any asset available for use in the production of further assets.  One might dismiss that as only “capital in the loosest sense”, but I think its a fairly precise and also widespread understanding of the word.  To be a form of capital then, social capital must beget the production of further assets.  Four kinds of further assets, in particular, are important: information, control, trust and collective action.  These correspond to the two major kinds of social capital:

1. Read the rest of this entry »

The lashing of business schools continues. Here’s a recent BusinessWeek article: MBAs: Public Enemy No. 1? Readers, so far, feel that some MBAs (was it their education?) are at least partially responsible for the economic meltdown — see results on the right. HBR’s online forum on ‘how to fix business schools’ also has a (longer, 11-question) survey on the topic — you can take it here (results apparently will be posted soon).

Here’s a Rakesh Khurana interview, published two days ago, on the future of the business school.

Over on the CT Daniel Davies compares the competitive structure of the Premier League with the American sports leagues. The usual critique of the Premier League is that only one or two teams have a real shot of winning a championship during any given year. The U.S. sports leagues by comparison are more volatile with teams moving in and out of contention for the league titles quite regularly.  Davies notes that once you limit the geographical size of the American leagues though, the number of teams in contention is quite similar to the number in the U.K. The difference between the two countries, then, is mostly about size – the United States sheer size gives them more large local fan bases than the U.K. does.  If the American leagues were to expand, giving an NFL team to every small city that could support a 5,000 person stadium, you’d see just as much concentration of winning in the U.S. Here is his summary:

I think my conclusion is that the American sports leagues achieve the illusion of competitiveness by severely restricting the number of teams – note that there is no promotion or relegation to the NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL. The UK system should probably be seen as one in which the real league is the European one – the Champions League – but in which the minor-league teams are allowed to play against the major ones. I guess it’s something of a judgement call whether this is better or worse for the fans of non-Big-Four teams than a league in which they supported a team which had a chance of winning, but much less local connection to them (for example look at the geographical map of MLB support). It is true that there’s only four teams in the Premier League that have any realistic chance of winning, but there’s only three teams that have any chance of being the top NFL team in California, because it only has three teams.

I like Davies’s notion that the American sports leagues “achieve the illusion of competitiveness.” This, in fact, seems to be the major objective of their industry structure. Eric Leifer’s (here I go again, another Leifer post) underrated book, Making the Majors: The Transformation of Team Sports in America, describes how professional sports leagues in the U.S. created this illusion. The major achievement of American professional sports, he maintains, is the creation of a recurring drama of competition in which teams survive to fight another day, which gives local fans hope that next year will be their break-out year.

Behind the drama of victory and defeat, imposed by commentators and publics on the basis of differences of a few points, there is an underlying sameness and repetition. The drama of producing winners and losers is not a one-shot affair but a continuous process that strangely does not transform itself over time. Publics remain interested, leagues remain viable, owerns and teams remain hopeful throughout the repetitive process of producing winners and losers. This is a remarkable achievement, one that should provide continuing inspiration for organizers of all sorts (pg. 26).

The achievement rests on the ability of the leagues to eradicate the potentially poisonous effects of losing. Teams go through losing periods (if you’re  a Detroit Lions fan, you know how poisonous this can be), which has the potential to drive away fans. Even if leagues were to subsidize losing teams (as they do), continual loss of fan support is unsustainable. Leagues have to figure out how to keep fans coming even if their teams experience losing periods. Read the rest of this entry »

New York Angel – 1965.

If you’re a fan of Miles Davis’ 1970s electronic music, you’ve run into the art of Mati Klarwein, whose art graces the cover of two of Miles’ albums. Now deceased, Klarwein’s family has created a web site dedicated to his art.

It’s a delight for any one with a taste in visionary art. Perhaps the best summary of Klarwein’s art is that it’s joyous, a bit surreal, and universal. The colors are bright and his subjects diverse. Like the best sci fi novel covers, everything’s a little familiar, but very strange; you’re at the cusp of what you know and what you might know. If you want to see images played with a Miles Davis soundtrack, click here. Enough chat- check out the site and judge for yourself.

Leh C’est Beau – 1976

Quadsearch, a meta-search engine, has a cool feature that allows you to track citations, scholar h and g-indices, etc — see here.  You can also run comparisons — here’s one on Albert Einstein and strategy’s own Jay Barney.  (Jay’s 1991 article has now been cited 12,081 times, not bad for a former sociologist.)

Greg Mankiw points toward a recent CBO report arguing that a national health care system would not improve American companies’ competitiveness. His case essentially rests on the following sentence in the report:

…cash wages and other forms of compensation would have to rise by roughly the amount of the reduction in health benefits for firms to be able to attract the same number and types of workers.

The upshot: national health care would turn out to be a zero sum game as far as competitiveness is concerned because employers would end up having to pay more to attract employees.

Mankiw focuses in on a very narrow definition of ‘competitiveness’: for him, it all seems to come down to labor costs.  The thing is, competitiveness can be defined in a few ways.  One is increasing the long term endogenous growth potential of the economy relative to other advanced economies. Another is increasing the productivity of American workers vis-à-vis others countries’ workers.  Mankiw is likely right that health care reform would not improve competitiveness if you restrict it only to mean labor costs.  But in either of the alternative senses, health care reform would plausibly contribute to American competitiveness.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve got an idle hour sometime in the next couple days — I highly, highly recommend this EconTalk podcast from two days ago: Leeson on Pirates and the Invisible Hook. The discussion covers all kinds of engaging issues: the social organization of pirates, governance, recruiting, incentives and motivation, pirate strategies, etc.  Here’s the book (by Princeton University Press): The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Previous orgtheory Pirate posts, including previous references to Leeson’s work, here.

As a side note, two plugs.

1) EconTalk is fantastic (my iPod-capable device generally downloads the latest edition within days of it being broadcast, and thus I don’t have idle moments any more).

2) Is Princeton University Press brilliant, or what?  I love their book selection, fantastic —  a visit to their “new in print” section usually always yields something that is a must-read.

We’re thrilled to have Fabrizio Ferraro as our next guest blogger here at orgtheory.  Fabrizio is an associate professor at IESE and he does interesting research on open source organizing and performativity (he’s also involved with organizing this upcoming workshop on the politics of markets).  To get a flavor for some of his work, here’s a recent AMJ article, with Siobhan O’Mahony, on “the emergence of governance in an open source community.”

Fabrizio’s guest stint coincides with a dialogue and set of articles that are published in the most recent issue of Organization Science:

• Here’s the introduction to this discussion by Linda Argote, the editor of Organization Science.
• Felin, T. & Foss, N.J. (2009). Social reality, the boundaries of self-fulfilling prophecy, and economics.
• Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. (2009). How and why theories matter: A comment on Felin and Foss.
• Felin, T. & Foss, N.J. (2009). Performativity of theory, arbitrary conventions, and possible worlds.

It’s a thrill to see that there are forums (beyond blogs) and journals that allow for meaningful conversation, disagreement and a vetting of both sides of an issue.  Fabrizio and I disagree on some issues related to economics and society, performativity, the role of theory, etc — but, that’s what makes discussion and interaction engaging.  Fabrizio and I talked about this orgtheory guest stint last year and undoubtedly some of his posts will relate to the above discussion (and/or whatever else he’d like to post about).

OK, enough promotion.  Fabrizio — great to have you here at orgtheory!

Attention network wannabes! The ICPSR has announced FIVE courses for you to take if you want to be a network dood. Check it out – if you go to the Ann Arbor one, drop me a note! Go below the fold if you’re interested.

Read the rest of this entry »

The recent nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has a few bloggers asking if she’s the first Hispanic nominee. The issue is whether Benjamin Cardozo counts as Hispanic. Volokh says yes, since Portugese counts as Hispanic under American law.

My take: Cardozo definitely counts as Latino under many definitions, but not Hispanic under the usual definition. To see where I’m coming from, consider the following dimensions of Latin ethnicity:

• Latin – any group that descends from and retains substantial post-Roman language, culture and institutions. Under this super broad definition, “Latin” includes most of South/Central America, Italy, Iberia, France, parts of the Balkans, the Philippines, and even parts of India (Goa, specifically).
• Iberian – any group that descends from Spain, Portugal, or its colonies. In this definition, you have Spain, Portugal, and its former colonies, but not Romania, Italy and other non-Iberian Latin areas.
• Iberian Americans – any group emerging from Spanish or Portuguese colonization in the Americas. European Spaniards and Portuguese do not count, though the descendants do.
• Hispanic/Latino Americans – Spanish speaking/cultural/institutional descent groups in the Americas.

There are other distinctions – and this does not exhaust the possibilities:

• Chicanos -  second+ generation people of Mexican background who are in the United States, especially in Texas and California
• Mestizo – people of mixed Indian and Spanish/Portuguese ancestry, in any place (this is how I myself)
• There are some people of Spanish ancestry and Jewish culture residing in the American Southwest and some other places.

So, yes, Cardozo is obviously “Latino” or “Iberian” in many senses of the word. He was culturally Portuguese, not Spanish. A few bloggers noted that he actively associated with Portuguese cultural groups at various points in his life, which means that he saw himself as belonging to that sort of Latin ethnic group. But if you mean something like mestizo or Spanish speaking Hispanic, which many people might (see this wiki discussion on US bureaucratic categories), then that’s not Cardozo, but is Sotomayor.

PS. There have been Italian justices, like Scalia, who would count under the broadest “Latin” category.

We want to thank Sean Safford for guest blogging here at orgtheory.net for the last several weeks. Sean’s posts about the new spirit of capitalism and the future of unions are instant orgtheory classics.  You can read all of his posts here. I’ve also written a couple of posts about his wonderful new book (here and here), Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to pick it up over the summer.

The good news is that, while Sean is exiting as a guest blogger, he’s here to stay as a permanent resident of orgtheory! I’m happy to announce that Sean is joining us as a regular contributor on orgtheory. We look forward to many insightful (and relevant) posts from him in the future. Welcome again Sean!

I’ve got planned the remaining grad skool rulz installments:

• getting published as a grad student
• conferences/networking
• how you know you are done
• the job market
• the job interview
• filing your dissertation and the defense
• a few words on starting your career

What other topics should be in the rulz? Here is the list of previous rulz. Please put your suggestions in the comments. Thanks.

Via the Nation, Alexander Cockburn has a scathing column about newspapers. He says that newspapers have never lived up to their role as the independent voice. Let ‘em die! A few clips, from the ungated version:

In other words, any exacting assessment of the actual performance of newspapers rated against the twaddle about the role of the Fourth Estate spouted by publishers and editors at their annual conventions would issue a negative verdict in every era. Of course, there have been moments when a newspaper or a reporter could make fair claims to have done a decent job, inevitably eradicated by a panicky proprietor, a change in ownership, advertiser pressure, eviction of some protective editor or summary firing of the enterprising reporter. By and large, down the decades, the mainstream newspapers have — often rabidly — obstructed and sabotaged efforts to improve our social and political condition.

And, he puts the 70s swell of investigative reporting in place:

The early and mid-1970s saw a brief flare-up of investigative zeal, but not long after Nixon had been sent packing, Katharine Graham, boss of the Washington Post Company, used the occasion of the annual meeting of the Newspaper Publishers Association to issue a public warning to reporters not to get any uppity ideas about shining too intrusive a searchlight on the way the system works: “The press these days should … be rather careful about its role. … We had better not yield to the temptation to … see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.”

Cockburn might be understating the case. Even when the press has gotten it right, and hounded politicians with muck raking, it’s usually personal scandal, not policy. Watergate was about Nixon’s personal corruption, as was Drudge’s outing of the Clinton scandals. I know more about Larry Craig’s personal life than his policies.To this day, I fail to understand why mainstream media sources played along with the Reverend Wright non-issue during the democratic primaries.

The press is notoriously good at making hay of an individual’s failings, but has collectively struck out on major policy issues. The media was unusually deferential on the wind up to the Iraq War, as it was during the Vietnam era. While the press seems to play a role in policy disputes, it’s usually as the front line for various parties, rather than hard hitting third party critique.

Going on a trip this week. Recommend good airport reading. Both academic or non-academic acceptable. However, the reading must be physically light. No 800 page Neal Stephenson hardbacks. Use the comments.

It’s been seventeen years since Bill Clinton first proposed, and then backed away from, allowing gay and lesbian members of the US military to serve openly.  Since then, 20 of the 26 members of NATO—the US’s closest military and cultural allies—have changed their policies to permit gay men and women to serve.

Organizational theorists spend a good deal of time looking at why organizations adopt new policies and practices.  Conventional wisdom holds that practices either acquire legitimacy and diffuse within an organizational field or organizational leaders calculate costs and the benefits and act accordingly.  But the status of gay people has been normalized both in American society and among western societies broadly for some time now.  Moreover, the costs and benefits have been exhaustively researched and show no downside and strong upside.  Still, the policy stands in place.

This strikes me as the flip side of isomorphism: some organizations actively resist influence of their environment.  Org Theory has long been concerned with the question of organizational inertia.  But inertia is different from intransigence.  Inertia is passive.  Intransigence is defiant.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Few weeks ago, I dedicated an edition of the grad skool rulz to the subject of when to quit. The comments were good and a number of questions were raised. Fellow blogger and awesome culture researcher Jenn Lena wrote:

If you are on facebook, I’ve written an orgtheory blog quiz. Have at it.

Update: Out of a dozen quizes, seems like Brayden is the most popular among us. Congratulations!!!

Update 2: The late returns are coming in from Gary, Indiana and Omar Lizardo is now making a serious break for the #2 position.

Final Update: Brayden and Omar are tied for the lead.

NYTimes economics doyenne Catherine Rampell has discovered the joys of Muckety.com, calling it, quite appropriately, “catnip for conspiracy theorists.”

Muckety, if you haven’t seen it, is essentially what would happen if Mark Mizruchi and Don Palmer had a love child, which then became an expert in java animation.  It takes board interlocks to new heights with data on everything from who was suspected in Vince Foster’s suicide to the Board of Directors of AIG. It packages it all up into very slick looking network visualizations.  And all of it’s for free.

Unfortunately, the catnip doesn’t entirely extend to network theorists.  The problem has to do with the “boundaries of the network“.  The value of seeing a network is in finding out who is not connected and for that, you need a good sense of the boundaries of the network.  The problem with the Muckety is that it forces you to build the network from a single ego.  You can expand any of ego’s connections.  But you essentially have to chose between expanding the names you recognize (problem: selection bias) or else expand everything and see what pops up.  Problem: you are quickly overwhelmed. The boundary expands infinitely.

Tons of fun, not especially useful.  Maybe I’m too much of a network purist.  But would it be so hard to build in the ability to input a list of organizations or people and then have Muckety draw the network?  The site offers a few ways of “filtering” the data which is meant to have the same effect, but it’s clunky.

As Sean reminded us in an earlier comment, one of the interesting themes of his book, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, is “the relationship between organizations and the communities they inhabit.” I think that’s an important theme to dissect.  Once upon a time, community was a fairly important concept/phenomenon in American sociology. The Lynds classic Middletown study sought to explain the class and power dynamics of a typical American community. A lot of the early research in American sociology was case studies of specific communities. Ferdinand Tönnies created the conceptual dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft to describe key differences in human relationships, noting that some relationships (Gemeinschaft) are based in a sense of belonging and obligation typical of community. In the 1970s a series of studies by Joe Galaskiewicz, Ed Laumann, and Peter Marsden explored the link between community and organizational networks. In their view, communities made up of interorganizational linkages that constituted a community’s structure. Organizations both depended on their communities for resources and communities needed organizations for collective coordination.

But in the last twenty years or so community sociology experienced a real decline in popularity and centrality in the discipline. Community, it seems, is a much less important concept now than it was when the Lynds studied Muncie, Indiana. When I was an undergrad looking at potential grad schools one of my main interests was the study of communities. In fact, my first two published papers are in this area. But when I emailed a prominent professor in this area (who was a member of one of the best sociology departments in the country) he strongly discouraged me from studying community. He hinted that if I wanted a job I ought to study something else. Advice heeded.

There are a couple of obvious reasons that the study of community (especially in relation to business organizations) has waned in importance. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that I’ve been thoroughly exposed to health policy, I’ve come to appreciate a simple lesson about policy making: the effectiveness of policy depends on the maturity of the field. If a policy domain is young, you can come up with some policies that are simple and achieve some basic objectives, even inefficiently. If it’s a mature area, then you are dealing with problems that are complex and therefore high cost. The effect of policy may also be low.

Examples:

• Eduction: Easy early policy solution – compulsory schooling, subsidized education. Hard late policy problems – race gaps in educational acheivement.
• Health: Easy early policy solution – mass vaccination, sanitation. Hard late policy problems – self-control problems (e.g., smoking, morbid obesity), insurance, reducing late life medical costs.
• Banking: Easy early policy solution – have compulsory bank insurance. Hard late policy problems – securitization and controlling business cycles.
• National security: Easy early policy solution – compulsory mass armies to secure state from the others. Hard late policy problems – high tech terrorist networks, controlling large weak states (e.g. Afghanistan, Pakistan).

It’s a sobering realization for a social scientist, but I think it shows how social science might fruitfully develop. In graduate school, we’re encrouaged to come up with simple models that fit into neat 35 page papers. But maybe we need a social science that focuses more on when simple solutions work, and when complexity is more appropriate.

Richard Florida and Richard Posner are guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan this week.  They each use their first posts to engage in the politics of labeling, identification and categorization.

Posner’s post is a typically thoughtful expository on why the current crisis should be labeled a “depression.” He rejects the prevailing definitions of recession and depression in favor of an alternative that comes pretty close to the notion of a “deep crisis” as it’s employed by Fligstein, Powell and others: a depression is a downturn that undermines fundamental assumptions about the forces that shape the economy. Recessions, in contrast, correct imbalances, but they don’t fundamentally alter underlying assumptions. Of course, by this definition you can’t really tell if you are in a recession or a depression while it is occurring. It’s not, in that sense, ‘objective’ since you can only tell if you were in one retroactively.

But striving for objectivity would miss the point of arguing over a label. At a moment of heightened uncertainty, the contest over the label is as important as its content (if not more). At this uncertain moment, people don’t quite know how behave.  Should I assume the world will “get back to normal” once things settle down and therefore just hunker down until it blows over? Or, should I be prepared to make some significant adjustments in the way I conceive of my role, my identity and my behavior because the world is going to look significantly different on the other side? Should the government stand back and let the economy work itself out? Or, should the government provide clarity and shape the system in fundamental ways? The answer depends on which label you subscribe to. If Posner’s definition gains widespread acceptance, it suggests one course of action in response to uncertainty over another. It also suggests that the Obama administration is right to take drastic measures because if it doesn’t influence the world that results from this crisis, someone else will.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’m broadly on Fabio’s side when it comes to the question of the vagueness of concepts in the social sciences. I think my main caveat is that, based on the evidence, successful social science requires precisely specified concepts coupled with a willingness — perhaps elevated to a principle — to strategically ignore any amount of empirical evidence accumulated against them.

But enough trolling. Beyond the problem of vague concepts lies the question of vague argument. On the plane home this Sunday I read Jon Elster’s new book on De Tocqueville. It’s typical Elster: incisive, clever, restless, and weirdly dissatisfying. At one point he remarks that too many writers are not clear enough to be wrong. And then, in passing,

Tocqueville here relies on what I called the first law of pseudo-science, “Everything is a little bit like everything else.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Just over the left shoulder of the provost.

From the home office in Virginia, a loyal orghead draws my attention to an Inside Higher Ed article on cut backs in PhD programs. Bottom line: PhD programs are getting cut left and right.  Even at fancy pants schools. A few responses:

• Many programs routinely fail to place a majority of their graduates into teaching positions – even in good times. This is because doctoral enrollments in many departments are not geared toward market demand, it’s geared towards teaching undergraduate sections. Program shrinkage will help chip away at some of these problems.
• At the margin, a few more fancy pants faculty will switch from grad seminars to undergrad classes. With fewer grad students, fewer seminars to teach.
• The cuts may possibly increase the demand for tenure track/permanent lecturer faculty. The adjunct system is made possible by armies of underemployed PhD’s who can’t be absorbed into the system. Reducing that supply will mean a shift to  possibly permanent positions.
• Small units will be most affected. Large units can “cover” – you teach more undergrads, find grant money for research assistants, etc.
• People will be shifted “down the system.” A marginal admit at a top 5 program now becomes an admit in a top 20 program. Etc. The people most likely to be shut out of an education are those at the bottom.
• Ironically, for the same reason, low ranked PhD programs will see a modest increase in the quality of students.

So my overall take is that cuts in graduate enrollments will help us get closer to a point where most admitted students have a fair shot at a decent university career. But that will happen only if there is a good faith effor to preserve current faculty positions, which is reasonable given that the economy will eventually turn around.

Finally, I want to emphasize a point about doctoral education laid bare by the higher ed article: many deans and chairs set enrollment targets based on teaching needs, endowment income, or other income flows. Graduate education policy should be pegged to market demand. Ignoring market signals about your program graduates is a huge disservice to the students who show up and simply incompetent policy making.

In a show of defiance toward the Giro D’Italia organizers, the cyclists on Sunday took some collective action: they halted the stage 9 race midway and collectively addressed the tifosi at hand.  The current race leader, Danilo di Luca, with several cycling greats at his side (including Lance Armstrong), addressed the crowd, apologized for the slow pace of the day, chided organizers for the dangerous course, and then the “race” continued.  Here’s the footage.

The mid-race assessment by cyclists that the course (a 10-lap loop around the streets of Milan) was too dangerous is sort of an interesting strategy — there are, after all, far more dangerous courses in professional cycling.  That said, perhaps the temporally salient accident and resultant coma of Pedro Horillo contributed to this, or perhaps the peloton just decided they needed an extra break. 

The race organizer did not mince words (translation via steephill.tv):

This [the rider protest] was premeditated. What’s more, hardly sitting on their bikes, the riders were obviously perplexed by certain features, fears that we shared, and we nuetralized the course. In the first 4 laps, they rode at 33 kilometers per hour, in the final three at 50 km/hr: The course was not that difficult. Yesterday at Bergamo, I cancelled all the celebrations, because not far away, there was a young man, Horrillo, who was at risk for his life. This gesture of the riders did not show respect to the Giro or to the people of Milano. The fact is that this circuit should continually have raised the action. It is necessary to get up into the saddle: When one becomes old, the legs grow shorter, the tongue grows longer.

Well, despite today’s incident, the Giro of course is one of the classic, great races in cycling (this year marks the 100th anniversary).  And, if you want to get a feel for the race itself, I’d highly recommend you watch Tuesday’s stage 10 race (you can watch the Giro live on Universal Sports), from Cuneo to Pinerolo, sure to feature some brilliant climbing and likely to be decisive in terms of the overall winner.

Marshall Ganz is a legendary labor organizer who gained experience in the civil rights movement as a recruit to Freedom Summer and later joined Cesar Chavez’s farm worker movement. Ganz, in his second career, is now a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he teaches a course on organizing and leadership. He’s also published some fairly important academic articles, including this paper in AJS on the importance of leadership in social movements.

His website has a lot of useful content on organizing and leadership, including videos of his Harvard lectures. His notes on organizing are incredibly useful and information-rich! They include discussions about the importance of relationships, leadership, and narratives to organizing collective action. There is enough material here to write a book that would rival Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. But in my view Ganz moves well beyond Alinsky’s pragmatic approach by emphasizing the importance of values and identity to motivating people even in the most hopeless conditions. Ganz’s notes are a must read for anyone interested in grass roots organizing or leadership (of any kind!).

Here is a video of Ganz talking about the organizing success of the Obama campaign:

1. Econ Journal Watch is out – and here’s “Intellectual Hazards,” a list of interesting quotes comparing old and new ideas in economics.

2. Back at Gabe’s house, Code and Culture, Pierre is a new blogger and has two posts on R vs. Stata and how to make R behave. Meanwhile, the Rossman does a hazard analysis of how people unsubrsribe to email lists. As usual, Code and Culture is the place to beat if you like your cultural sociology mixed in with detailed discussions of stata output.

3. A colleague drew my attention to “Letters to Our Daughters Project,” where women academics explore their careers and lives. Valuable reading for anyone interested in gender and the academy.

Kieran gave a workshop in Chicago last week.  His insights were, of course, engaging.  But meeting with some students afterward, their first comments had to do with how he presented his data.  He got mad props for great use of color, movement and animation, and generally for wringing clarity out of empirical messiness.

Experiments with data presentation have been scarce in orgtheory.  Jason Owen-Smith, Woody Powell and colleagues have produced some intriguing movies showing network formation of biotechnology in San Diego using pajek.  But cool as those movies are, they don’t quite reach the visual impact of, say, the visualization of shipping traffic or taxi-cab movements in London as captured by the BBC program “Britain from Above.”  Or, of the neato interactive graphic that appeared in the New York Times last year, showing the ebb and flow of box office receipts reaching back to 1986.  (These and a few others were highlighted by the folks at flowingdata.com as among the best of 2008.  Visualcomplexity.com is another place to go looking for data as visual art.  Btw, technical info on how that NYTimes graphic was produced is found in this paper).

Geographic data is particularly amenable to artistic renditions, often with menacing overtones: for instance, visualization of Walmart spreading like a disease, or Slate’s recent look at the deterioration of the US economy.

Visualizations have been around for a while.  But might the future lay in audio?  For instance, re:sound, a program on Chicago Public Radio, had a story this afternoon recounting the lives of refugees who had migrated to the US.  Good story.  But this sound installation, called Chorus of Refuge, got my attention (scroll down and hit play on the audiofile called AfghanistanBurmaBurundiIraqSomaliaSudan).  It takes the voices from the refugee interviews, modulates them both rhythmically and tonally and then coordinates them into a performance.  As the presenter on the radio show put it, “the details of the refugees’ stories are different, but the arc is the same”.  Sounds like logitudinal data analysis to me.  I think its pretty stunning.  It reminds me also of “Lost Tribes of NYC” which superimposes the voices of New Yorkers on to inanimate objects around the city (watch that video to the end).

The Atlantic has one of the most profound articles I’ve read in a while: a summary of George Vaillant’s research on a cohort of 268 men over their entire lives. It’s one of those rare studies that tracks people over the entire life course. Vaillant is part behaviorist and part pyschoanalyst, so he’ll crunch numbers and then give you some high quality thick description. A sample:

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.

What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”

A must read.

The February 2009 issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a great paper and exchange on bayesian reasoning (pdf, not sure if its gated): “Precis on Bayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning,” by Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater. (The paper was published along with 22 short responses — again, I love that format: what a great way to have a meaningful scholarly conversation!)

The Economist has a cool “what’s in the journals” web feature — and none other than orgtheory’s own B. King also gets highlighted for his recent work on protests and corporate reputation: see here.  Also featured: that piece by Steven Levitt on the economics of prostitution, a piece by Matt Kraatz and Geoffrey Love on downsizing and corporate reputation, etc.

I took this morning off to hear arguments before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. I found myself thinking about the sociology of the judges’ interaction and about the lessons it implies for us Joe Shmoe academics when we interact with each other in public.

In this instance, the forces shaping their motivations were warped by the fact that one of the judges, Diane Wood, is on Obama’s short list for the Supreme Court nomination.  Judge Wood was not the one making the arguments.  Her role was to ask questions.  But, there’s no doubt about it, asking those questions was a performance; it was a show. It would have been even if the press wasn’t scrutinizing her every word. Judges in a setting like an en banc panel ostensibly ask questions to help them decide a case. Yet, everyone knows that’s not all that’s motivating them. Questions are aimed at their fellow judges either to recruit allies to their side or buttress against the their ideological opponents.  Also, judges, like the rest of us, are conscious of their status and the performance they give in the hearing is a non-trivial part of how they are sized up. There are times when the attorney standing at the bar seems completely peripheral to the agenda of the judges.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has been in an academic research seminar. The dynamics are not all that different: questions are aimed at multiple audiences and one’s colleagues and students often edge out the author as the intended target.  Done poorly, that generates questions that simultaneously manage to be unhelpful to the author and fail to achieve the intended goal of impressing the others.  But there are ways of squaring the circle.  Judge Wood was a tour de force on the bench and she’s got my vote for SCOTUS.  Her colleagues Frank Easterbrook and, of course, Richard Posner, also made strong impressions.  It leads me to a few off hand thoughts on how to give a good “performance” as a member of the audience in a research seminar based on watching the judicial pros go at it (and more than a few orgtheory pros go at it in my day-to-day life)…

Read the rest of this entry »

Evil twin conspirators Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss have been ragging on management scholars for using ill-defined concepts, like routines and leadership. When I read the post, I thought it was odd – aren’t all social science concepts a simplification of complex behaviors? What is democracy? What is a market? What is an organization? These are all broad, inherently fuzzy concepts, but it doesn’t mean it’s dumb to talk about them.

I was reminded of a valuable exercise that Don Levine once did in a graduate seminar. Thoroughly versed in the history of social thought, he could take nearly any concept offered by students and then give a long discussion of how many very smart people had argued over its definition, formalization, and operationalization. I even offered my own example: among mathematicians, it’s recognized that there are multiple and incompatible definitions of things like sets and numbers. True, it may not matter to a typical mathematician, but there’s a fundamental ambiguity about basic math that allows one to logically construct some pretty exotic version of the integers.

Back to social science, I’d argue that the underlying concepts of any social science are inherently vague. Formalizing them allows you to ignore the ill-defined nature of the process so you can make a clean academic model. It doesn’t address the underlying mess. Here’s an example to twink an economist like Peter Klein: price. If you define price as a real number (or function) then it’s pretty clear. Heck, economists even have the “law of one price,” which says if things are efficient, identical products cost the same.

But if you start with “what you have to give to get X,” then things get hairy pretty fast:

• in a barter system, there is not a single number, but a list of exchange rates with different commodities.
• in many tribal cultures, there are significant gift economies, where there is not an obvious, or stable, “price” or exchange ratio, just some generalized expectation of reciprocal obligation
• Many markets have haggling, the “price” depends not on information about supply and demand or other economic information, but on personal ability to argue. In other words, sticker price, or a single price, is sort of meaningless, at best you have a range of prices depending on how hard people push various personal interactions.
• Some markets are so differentiated that producers offers prices based on minute personal characteristics that leads to a vague price. Think car dealers – advertised price, dealer sticker price, haggled price, price conditional on subtle variations in the car, and price contingent on local markets conditions can be substantially different. In this case, price is a Jackson Pollock splatter, not a well defined number.
• there seems to be price dispersion in some markets, and this is the subject of research by many economists

We can define away the ambiguity of the situation by saying “there is a single price – if there is no friction, everyone has identical information, if we stick to intra-temporal comparisons, and equivalent abilities of buyers and sellers to bargain in identical ways.” Well, of course, but you’ve just defined aways alot of interesting things about prices! So, Peter amd Nicolai, I’ll stick with my fuzzy management concepts.