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Lots of good stuff in the comments about my post on the identification movement. I’ll take that up next week, but today, I’d like to further illustrate what I mean by talking about health care reform. It’s fair to say that Atul Gawande’s (justly) celebrated piece in the New Yorker became exhibit A in the administration’s effort to reform the health care system. Gawande’s article focuses on the delivery of health care services in McAllen, TX, one of the most expensive market in the US for medical care.

Though Gawande is not a social scientist (he is a surgeon by training), one senses that he approaches the “cost conundrum” with an open mind. And he usefully contrasts his observations of medical practices in McAllen with what’s happening in El Paso, another Texas county with reasonably similar demographics, but no worse average health outcomes. His explanation for variation in health expenditures not explained by “fundamentals” (cost of living, patient heterogeneity, etc.) is appealing to orgheads, regardless of their disciplinary persuasion. What Gawande finds in McAllen is a referral system between generalists and specialists that looks and smells like medical payola, and high-powered market incentives leading to a general erosion of professional norms. The inescapable conclusion: it is possible to cut health care costs without affecting the quality of care, but it will require a mix of legal and “cultural” interventions (most notably in medical schools).

Its audience may not be social scientists, but the piece nonetheless puts forth a perfectly plausible and interesting hypothesis, with first order policy implications to boot. My question: how do we know if it’s right? And how would an applied economist obsessed with causality approach the cost conundrum issue that motivated Gawande’s piece?

Enter my MIT colleague Joe Doyle. In what I will call his “vacation from hell” paper, Joe does something very clever. One problem with Gawande’s analysis is the presumption that patient populations are similar across geographic areas. As Joe puts it:

“Estimates of returns to healthcare spending can be confounded by the fact that individuals in worse health receive more care. In fact, there is a strong positive correlation between spending and mortality at the individual level, even after controlling for observable characteristics such as age and comorbidity levels. Regional measures of spending intensity aggregate the choices made at the individual level, which can again confound comparisons.”

To deal with this issue, he looks at mortality outcomes among tourists in Florida who have a heart attack, and how that varies depending on whether the area in which they are vacationing are low- or high-spending areas. The point is that these patients end up in medical systems that were not designed with them in mind. Furthermore, since we are looking at an emergency condition, they are unlikely to have engaged in a lot of comparison shopping. I’ll spare you many of the details (read the paper!), but I will point out that (1) areas that receive a lot of tourists can be found among high and low-spending Florida HSAs; and (2) Joe is careful to compare areas that are close demand substitutes among tourists.

What does he find? In short, mortality from AMI is much lower in higher-spending areas for tourists, but not for locals. In other words, selection matters a lot when making these geographic comparisons of expenditures and health care outcomes.

What should we make of this result?

At the very least, the study should give pause to reformers who believe that it will be easy to slash health care costs without affecting outcomes. Health care reform, the public option, etc. might be good ideas, but they are unlikely to be a free lunch. This does not mean that Gawande is wrong. As Joe will be the first to recognize, there is probably a lot of waste in the health care system. But this situation reminds me of the marketing director’s dictum: “I know that half of my advertising budget is pure waste. I just don’t know which half.” Similarly, we may need Gawande’s scalpel, rather than Perter Orszag’s hatchet, to cut into health care spending without affecting health care outcomes.

That’s the policy lesson. But what does this have to do with “two empirical cultures”?

First (this will answer the first of Fabio’s comments), there is nothing “high tech” about the paper. It’s all totally transparent, and for the most part just uses OLS. In fact, the whole movement is predicated upon the idea that a lot of effort will go in the upfront design of the study (setting up the right comparison), so that one can tell the whole (or at least most of the) story with a simple table of means. There is nothing here that I could not explain to my mum.

Second, I don’t know whether Joe’s paper is “cute.” I’m pretty sure it’s clever. And I am absolutely sure it is important. Although lots of people accuse Steve Levitt of practicing “cute-o-nonics,” perhaps his most well known study dealt with abortion and crime. It might well have been wrong, but it certainly was not trivial.

Third, quasi-experimental papers are often criticized on the ground that they strike the wrong trade off between internal and external validity (I hear echoes of this criticism in Brayden’s comment, but I may have misunderstood him). Generalizing a result such as Joe’s is certainly fraught with hazards. What about other states? What about other, non-emergency, diagnostics? etc. To this I would retort that making the McAllen vs. El Paso comparison the ideological lynchpin of health care reform is also dangerous. But more importantly, it may be more useful to try to replicate Joe’s findings using a different, but equally convincing quasi-experimental approach, rather than cutting corners on establishing a clear causal effect using a much larger dataset.

Finally, Joe’s paper has fairly little to say about mechanisms. How do high spending areas do it? The paper is just not set up to answer this in detail. In contrast, Gawande’s piece was all about mechanisms. My sense is that this is precisely what org theorists find unappealing about the identification movement. And I will agree there is a relative paucity of “whodunnit?” in papers exploiting natural experiments. There are two counter arguments. First, social scientists should have no business talking about the mechanisms driving a causal relationship before they make sure the relationship is indeed causal (the “polishing brass on a sinking ship” metaphor comes to mind). Second, what is true of quasi-experimental papers is not true of papers that implement field experiments (as in here). And though Ezra reminded us that economists did not pioneer this methodology in the social sciences, they are making up for lost time. Up until the beginning of the summer, the E52 building at MIT was teeming with grad students working on field experimenst for their dissertation, very often with topics that are eminently soc-friendly, such as networks, discrimination, peer pressure, etc. What are econ soc grad students up to these days? I sense a very different order of priorities, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

More next week!

I just noted that former orgtheory guest blogger (as well as my former colleague at Emory) Russ Coff is guest blogging over at our evil twin blog, O&M.  Be sure to follow his posts!

John Gruber mentions a report in the New Scientist about some research showing that people prefer cockiness to expertise:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are.

Now, this preference would be irritating but tolerable if cockiness was at least reasonably well-correlated with competence in practice, so that it wouldn’t usually be a mistake to plump for the cocky judgment over the quiet one. And it would be a little better if the two were actually uncorrelated. But as a famous paper by Kruger and Sunning showed, people who are bad at what they do are generally also incapable of understanding that they suck — and this directly contributes to inflated self-perception. So, incompetence tends to make people cocky and people prefer cocky judgements over demonstrated expertise, which is pretty much the worst of both worlds.

I made three claims in my previous posts. First that economists were, as a group, much less wedded to a single model of human behavior than they used to be. Second, that “modeling for the sake of modeling” is a much less prevalent phenomenon. Third, there is a growing place in the literature for research that is only loosely motivated by theory but makes convincing causal arguments (and sometimes informs theory as a result, see here). Now, clearly, there is wide variation in the extent to which these developments have taken hold, across institutions, across subfields, and across journals. But the fact that there exists significantly more diversity in research styles and approaches today than in a previous era seems true as a factual matter.

[As an aside, I do not have a problem with "neoclassical research" per se, maybe in contrast with many orgtheory readers. The paper by Acemoglu & Pischke I mentioned previously is a beautiful example of applied economic theory that yields testable empirical implications that one probably would not have been able to anticipate before the modeling exercise.]

I am most interested in discussing the cross-disciplinary appeal of the identification movement, because I see no particular reason why it should remain confined to applied economics. I also want to be careful and separate normative from positive claims. It’s not that I don’t make value judgments on these things, I certainly do, as many of my colleagues will attest. But these seem to me to be conversation stoppers. orgtheory readers care about social movements and diffusion phenomena, and it is in that spirit that I would like to proceed. What are the barriers to adoption?

Ezra mentions in his comments that experiments (both lab and field) have a storied history in Sociology, one that probably predates the wide adoption of experimental methods in economics. He is of course correct. But I will maintain that sociologists/org theorists and economists tend to place their emphasis on different features of an empirical research project. I’d like to discuss this through examples in the next few posts.

One comes from the personal experience of presenting the same paper to Sean’s group at Chicago GSB, and to various seminars in econ departments. I don’t want to provide a lot of detail, but the basic point of the paper is to look at the effects of collaboration with a superstar scientist by examining what happens upon the sudden and unexpected death of said superstar. After establishing the basic facts (research output goes down, gradually and permanently), we try to elucidate the mechanisms that could explain this, and we have some success (I think!) demonstrating that it is driven, at least in part, by a genuine loss of ideas. I had great fun presenting to both audiences. But the great majority of the questions I got from Sean’s colleagues were in the form of provocative/intriguing suggestions on how to dig deeper on the mechanisms. I could not necessarily act on these suggestions in this particular paper, but these discussions certainly planted the seeds of future projects using the same basic design (e.g., how does the network heal after the [plausibly exogenous] loss of central actor?)

My econ colleagues, on the other hand, did not buy the basic research design, at least not right away (maybe one hour and 15 minutes into the seminar!). They made the reasonable point that it is problematic to use colleagues of stars who have already died as controls for those who experience the loss of a superstar currently. They pointed out that there could be unobserved, collaboration-specific life cycle effects that might bias the results downwards. And much time was spent on discussing the construction of control group that would allay these fears. It’s not that economists did not care about mechanisms. They did, but – dare I say it – in a relatively less sophisticated way than Sean, Matt, Damon and Co. Mostly, they wanted to know if superstars mattered because of their connections or because of their ideas. And that was that.

This contrast encapsulates what I mean by “two empirical cultures.” Many orgtheory readers teach at business schools, and therefore are used to present their work to “mixed audiences.” But these two audiences were as homogenous as it gets, and it may explain why these differences are so salient in my mind.

Thanks to colleagues, friends and orgtheory readers and lurkers for contributing to my cancer fundraising efforts! To meet my goal, I only need to raise $50 more —- the fundraising website can be found here.

Hmm, now I “just” have to do the 332 km cycling race itself, coming up September 12th.  Been training and should be in good shape to pull it off.  Perhaps I’ll twitter the event en route with my iphone, though I don’t know what else I could report on other than the pain.  Fantastic cause though — thanks again to the orgtheory donors!!

Andrew Sullivan recently linked to a Ross Douthat essay that favorably compared our interventions in Iraq and the Philippines. If you don’t remember your history, the US went to war against the Spanish in 1898 and gained control of various Spanish colonies such as Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. Douthat made the comparison because the Philippines is now a society that benefited from being allied with America, despite some initial problems.

If you know about this conflict in detail, there are very strong comparisons and you get a way different picture:

1. A Culture of Interventionism: For years before the Spanish American War and the Gulf Wars, people were itching for a fight. The Monroe Doctrine asserted that America could interfere in the Americas. The Carter Doctrine said we could interfere in the Persian Gulf.  In the first case, war mongers wanted to stick it to the Spanish in Cuba. In the later case, neo-cons wanted to stick it to the Baathists in Iraq.

2. Flimsy Pretext for War: In both cases, the killing of Americans motivated the war. But in each instance, the actual case for war was weak. In the Spanish-American war, the incident was the destruction of an American vessel, the Maine. Now, many historians will admit that no one really knows who blew it up and it might have blown up by accident. There are rival theories. In the Iraq War, the war was motivated by weak, probably non-existent, links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And of course, the weapons of mass destruction never materialized.

3. The Media Gets in a Frenzy: In the Spanish American war, the Spanish are depicted as a despotic enemy. In the second Gulf War, the bogey man is weapons of mass desctruction, repeated thousands of times.

4. Quick Victory over the Enemy State: Confronted with the US Navy, the Spanish are devastated in 3 1/2 months. In 2003, the Baathist state barely lasts a month against the US Army and the Marines.

5. People Welcome the Americans, But Later Get Upset: In both cases, the oppressed peoples actually did welcome Americans. To be honest, Americans are way nicer than most other folks because we are a great country. However, Americans weren’t in a rush to grant autonomy to either the Philippines or Iraq. Add into the mix the heavy handed tactics in both countries and the occasional atrocity and you get some very angry people.

6. Insurgency Breaks out and 5,000 American troops die: Current casualty toll in Iraq – about 4,600 coalition troops. The Philippine-American War? About 4,200 hundred troops. Just replace “harsh desert war” with “harsh jungle ambushes.” It was a bit slower in the Philippines because you have to slog through a lot of jungle.

7. Racial Undertones and Pushing Christianity: In both cases, Muslims were a key issue. In modern times, we’re concerned about Islamic states. In the Philippines, there were many battles and disputes with south Muslim Philippine groups. Much of the population is Catholic, but the south was hard core Muslim. There was the “Moro Rebellion,” which is all about Muslim resistance to Americans and everything else from the West.

8. Eventually Things Chill Out Because No One Wants to Fight Forever: After about ten years, the guerrilla war ends. People tire out. People accept America as the new colonizer, though they are certainly better than the Spanish. Will this happen in Iraq? We don’t know.

So, yes, Douthat is right. There is a strong analogy and this is the lesson from the Philippines: There is always a group of people itching for a fight with a Bad Guy. Sooner or later, they’ll get it because we’ll get panicked over a serious, though circumscribed, problem. The public will buy whatever lame link you can provide to the Bad Guy, partially because the Bad Guy is actually evil. Since we have better technology and military organization, we’ll clean the floor with the Bad Guy government. The people we conquer will love us for about a year until they realize that we want to be their mom and dad. Sure, they’ll be angry for a while, but if we just burn through a few thousand troops and a hundred thousand civilian casualties, we’ll grind those folks into the ground and the next generation will grudgingly accept us. That’s the implied foreign policy framework. I just need an explanation of what makes that a “conservative” policy.

Thanks to Sean for inviting me to contribute to orgtheory, a blog I read avidly. I am indeed an applied economist, but one who is in the pretty unusual (and I would argue, enviable) position to count many org theorists and econ sociologists as colleagues and coauthors (or both). Though I began my career interested in organizational economics in general, and in firm boundaries issues in particular, these days my research sits squarely at the intersection of several subfields of economics – technical change, org econ, and health.

I thought I might try to start a discussion between what I see as the real dividing line between applied economics and what I will call “applied sociology” – that part of the field that is interested in positing and testing empirically hypotheses regarding different aspects of social organization, using the tools of statistics (this would encompass most, but maybe not all of org theory scholarship).

Sociologists often emphasize differences in assumptions, such as rationality, methodological individualism, or exogenous preferences. Surely, this would have been right twenty or maybe even ten years ago. Since then, two things have happened.

First, economists have become much less wedded to any single of model of human behavior. You’ll see much less articles in journals motivated by a puzzling anecdote (e.g. why do prices end in .99?), and building out of it an elegant game theoretical model in which the puzzle arises in equilibrium as a second best solution (see this and this for echoes of this debate). Models are much more likely to be constructed with a specific empirical question in mind, and are only considered useful if the data permits to distinguish between the mechanism the model posits and alternatives (see here and here for two relatively recent examples).

The second change is that applied work in economics tends to be less tied to formal models than in the past. The poster child for this trend is of course Steve Levitt of freakonomics fame, but David Card, Josh Angrist, and Esther Duflo (among many others) are probably the intellectual leaders of what I will call, for lack of a better word, the “identification movement.” This has not been uncontroversial (and see here for a rebutttal).

In my next posts, I’ll try to explain why I think this movement has been altogether a good, and maybe even a great thing for the social sciences. I’ll try to be honest about the costs as well. But I am especially eager to find out why this movement has had, as far as I can tell, little influence on empirical practice in sociology, and more specifically, org theory.

Here’s a question for Emily Post or Ms. Manners: what does one do with blogging on an academic CV?  Should it be on the CV?  Is it not worthy?  Lets make it a poll!

We have a number of guest bloggers lined up in the coming months.  Among them will be Pierre Azoulay.  Pierre is an Assistant Professor at MIT and a Research Fellow with NBER.  He styles himself mainly as an economist, but with his research on networks and diffusion and on the agency of embeddedness (among other sociologically oriented leanings), Pierre has plenty to say to orgTheorists.  But for the most part, Pierre writes and thinks about technology — regardless of disciplinary bent — and I’m sure will have plenty to add to the discussion over the next month or so.  Bienvenue Pierre!

Trade Balance - Medical Equipment, 2008

Matt Yglesias makes the point that the price of new cars has not increased as fast as inflation over time, nor have High Definition TVs which have seen costs come down.  He wonders why the same hasn’t happened for health care technology:

This gets back to some of the perversities of fee-for-service medicine. The current market creates strong incentives for people to develop “better and more expensive” methods of treatment, but almost no incentive to develop “as good but cheaper” methods of treatment. Both kinds of innovation, however, are extremely valuable. The world’s resources are limited, and the development of cheaper methods of treatment would allow for more overall treatment and thus better outcomes.

In short, I’d say the answer comes down to China, or really its relative absence from the health care market.  As an NPR report from a few days ago illustrated nicely, the reason consumer goods like TVs, toasters, shoes and even cars has come down has a lot to do with the unsustainable trading relationship between the U.S. and China.

Key point: consumer goods are transportable.  But health care is fixed in place.  You get sick where you live.  So while capital is free to scurry the globe in search of cheap labor and factor inputs for consumer goods, health care has to contend with the realities of operating in a high-wage, highly-regulated society.

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One of the big issues in Austrian economics is entrepreneuship. It goes something like this:

Capitalist economies depend on cycles of creativity and destruction. Markets settle into rigid patterns, then creative individuals see something that others don’t. They organize to gather resources so they can take risks. If successful, the entrepreneurs topple incumbent industries by drawing away customers with innovative products and services.

It’s a cool idea. It’s likely Schumpeter’s enduring legacy in the wider intellectual world. But there’s a few problems with Austrianism’s focus on entrepreneurs. What’s so special about the Austrian account? Does it add anything to what a standard search theory already has? Why should we accord any special role to entrepreneurs other than being first in line?

I think a better account of entrepreneurs can be hatched from recent work in institutional theory. A key idea in organizational institutionalism is the “field” – all the social junk that constitutes the population of organizations. One important element of the field are framings. These are the commonly shared perceptions and beliefs among people within the field. Frames are just beliefs about the “way we do things in this business.”

Most folks have a fairly well developed status quo bias. Most folks tend to accept what is already done in the industry.  They accept the frames that are out there. Seeing what is not done can be hard. It is also cognitively and organizationally complex. Even if you understand what is inadequate by current standards, formulating an alternative can require deep cognitive skills and getting a firm together requires social skills.

But even this account is incomplete. How do entrepreneuers actually get people to cooperate? Doesn’t everybody else suffer from status quo bias? Why would anyone work for the crazy entrepreneur? Wouldn’t investors just run off? Well, recent work in organizational theory has a solution here: institutional work. According to this view, there’s a class of actions aimed at defending or supporting the ways we see things. Some people are good at framing issues, pointing out contradictions, and getting people to invest in new rules. The emerging institutional work lieteraure builds on ideas about leadership, rhetoric, and agenda setting.

Here’s the contrast. In Austrian economics, entrepreneurs just pop out of the woodworks and transform the world. Anyone, anywhere can be entrepreneurial. But entrepreneurial research has consistently shown that entrepreneurs are distinctive people. Organizational sociology shows why this must be the case. To see opportunities requires people who can’t accept the institutional framework of their organization or market that everyone else accepts. Then, you have to actively work to reframe things so people will go along with you. That requires a special personality or biography that will allow you to see what others, literally, can’t. In this account, you retain the “creative destruction” aspect of entrepreneurs, but you also get a sense of what the work of entrepreneurship is all about and why only certain kinds of people can do it.

If you buy this argument, you’ve got a new twist to an old economics joke: An economist, a sociologist, and entrepreneur walk into a room. An economist sees a $20 bill on the floor. He says: “That money can’t be there. If there were really money on the floor, somebody would have taken it already!” The sociologist says, “Hold on, the money is actually there – nobody took it because we’ve been socialized not to see it.” The entrepreneur says, “while you guys have been arguing, I’ve just made myself twenty bucks!” Ok, maybe not a great joke, but you get my point.

Robert Putnam’s latest book is in the works and his focus is on the role of religion as a driver of the decline in civic participation.  The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson provided a preview:

Putnam asserts, “religious Americans are nicer, happier and better citizens.” They are more generous with their time and money, not only in giving to religious causes but to secular ones. They join more voluntary associations, attend more public meetings, even let people cut in line in front of them more readily. Religious Americans are three to four times more socially engaged than the unaffiliated. Ned Flanders is a better neighbor.

Theology is not the predictor of civic behavior; being part of a community is. People become social joiners and contributors when they have friends who pierce their isolation and invite their participation. And religious friends, says Putnam, are “more powerful, supercharged friends.”

Its hard to make much sense from a second hand summary. So, I’m not really sure how to resolve the circularity inherent in the idea that “being part of a community” predicts civic participation.

But from a quick read of Gerson’s piece, I’d say its a useful step for Professor Putnam to identify a stronger causal driver in the decline of social capital.  I came away from my initial reading of Bowling Alone with the idea that it all basically boiled down to the growth of television.  Given that the measure of social capital in Bowling Alone was strongly tied to religious participation, I suppose it made sense to go this route.

I’ll look forward to the book when it appears sometime next year apparently.

The current health care reform initiative raises the issue of administrative costs.  Almost every policy initiative comes with promises that the new policy is affordable because we, the public or some private entity, will make huge savings by cutting administrative costs. It’s an attractive argument. Don’t cut the stuff you like. Cut the faceless bureaucrats who administer the service.

However, once you pry, you find it very difficult to find rational arguments behind claims for administrative costs. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask someone – “For policy X, what, exactly, is the minimum administrative cost? How did you arrive at that number? What will you cut to reach that point?” I’ve tried this a few times, and I haven’t gotten far. Most of the time, people really have no idea about whether administrative costs are reasonable. I even once stumped an economist with this question. Sometimes, people will point to services provided in other nations, but once you dig, these nations controlled costs by changing the nature of the profession (e.g., see Sean’s discussion of shifting doctors from free floating contractors to salaried employees). This isn’t to say that no one ever saves on administrative costs, or that no one has any reliable information, but cutting administrative costs is often the weakest part of the argument. Real savings come with innovations and changing incentives, not cutting paperwork.

In the current health care debate, at least one proposal has been made regarding administrative costs: the digitalization of health records. There are good reasons for this. They can be easily transmitted from one doctor to another, you save space, and they can be quickly searched for scientific purposes. However, digitalization has costs. Someone has to enter the data. Then you need hardware and software. You also need computer specialists to maintain and update the information. There will be periodic upgrades, for if they don’t happen, it’ll be worse than using paper. Even if you save money on managing patient records, there might arise new kinds of administrative work that needs to be done as medical organizations evolve. For example, there might be medical information specialists who can be hired to search databases for specific issues, like contagious disease outbreaks or looking for cancer trends.

In other words, it’s not clear at all that the new way of administering the organizations is cheaper. And if it is, it’s not clear that it won’t be replaced by new administrative costs. And I bet that many analyses may not even get that far. Bottom line: If the whole proposal depends on shady arguments about saving adminsitrative costs, you’d better think twice.

There are a lot of things I like in the health care reform bills passing through Congress.  Most importantly, all of them make it easier for individuals and small businesses to buy insurance.  But what is not clear is how the reforms will achieve the equally important goal of controlling costs.  President Obama gives a two-piece answer to this question.  The first is rationalizing care and eliminating wasted dollars, largely by digitizing medical records.  The second has to do with moving away from “fee-for-service” system, which provides incentives for doctors to over-treat illnesses, and toward the one where doctors are compensated based on a combination of cost reduction and quality.

To work, both of those fixes have to be effectively implemented at an organizational level.  They will require changing the way doctors, nurses and other medical care providers do their job.  And that means changing the organizational rules by which hospitals and doctors offices operate.  But what that organizational model will look like has not been specified.  It might look like the Mayo or the Cleveland Clinics which use computerized records, pay doctors salaries and reward them for patient outcomes rather than per service.  Yet as the New York Times points out, only one plan in Congress addresses the organizational model and that one is just a pilot program.  Massachusetts is looking at ways of urging doctors to shift into salary-based provider networks.  But there’s no discussion of a mandate or of anything with teeth that would move the medical industry in that direction.

How many reform movements have succeeded in winning legislation meant to change society, but then fail to actually change anything?  Too many to count.  Why?  Because the devil in achieving real change is in the details of organizational implementation.

Specifically: even if reforms are enacted, those who want to maintain the status quo can simply let reforms pass and then either comply only symbolically or make sure that the reforms are implemented in ways that  effectively maintain the system in place.  News that the American Medical Association has signed on to major elements of the reform process is important to getting reform passed through Congress.  But what really matters is how reforms are implemented inside hospitals and doctors offices.  In other words, in the absence of a specific plan for how to restructure the way medical care is organized, the endorsement doesn’t mean a whole lot.

In fact, I fear that it makes it more likely that history will repeat itself.

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Sean isn’t the only blogger who has a problem with Richard Florida. A group in Toronto founded a new blog with the sole purpose of offering a rebuttal to Florida’s ideas and the policies he advocates (I checked and Sean is not one of the blog founders). In short, Florida advocates policies and infrastructures that help cities recruit more creative professionals, which in turn helps the cities build wealth and prosper. The blog (HT to Urbanorgs), creative class struggle, maintains that cities latch on to Florida’s ideas as a way to “build money-making cities rather than secure livelihoods for real people.” A selection from a recent post about the problems in Albuquerque, NM, a city that Florida rated as one of the best mid-sized cities in the U.S., demonstrates why this group believes Florida’s ideas are dangerous.

Florida’s creative class is popular in New Mexico and elsewhere because the index obscures the overwhelming data illustrating the contradictions of the system Florida has chosen to celebrate—a system that cannot function without extreme levels of inequality.

The beauty of an index is its simplicity: you take a few variables, calculate a number and rank. Multiple data sets are blended into a “Creativity Index” or a “not-so-creative index” or a “reliable-ranking-produced-by-a-social-scientist index.” The purpose of the index is to measure only certain variables—in this case, those associated with the creative class. To accomplish this, one has to cancel out or ignore two-thirds of the city’s population. The act of isolating the creative class and ranking the locations where its members live depoliticizes this group of often middle-class workers, and their choices, by emphasizing the individual. It allows employers free rein to exploit these workers by emphasizing the benefits to the local economy, and it encourages government to focus its limited resources on those with skills and means while ignoring those most in need (emphasis mine).

It’s not often that you see a movement expressly dedicated to combating one person’s ideas. For you movement and class theory junkies, the blog is worth reading. Also, I second Teppo’s endorsement of Whale Wars as fun tv-watching with a movement angle.

UPDATE: For those interested in engaging with Florida’s theory of the creative class, here are a few links to some papers in which he addresses some of his critics: a paper in the Journal of Economic Geography that weighs the relative effects of the creative class and human capital on regional development, a Washington Monthly column in which he discusses inequality, an essay from The Atlantic about the geographic sorting of classes, and another essay about spiky globalization and the distribution of prosperity. It’s clear from these papers that Florida is interested in inequality, but he and the creative class struggle bloggers probably disagree about the particulars.

Jumping in front of Dan Perjovschi’s “The Arizona Drawing,” 2009 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

1. A blog about jumping in art museums.

2. In San Francisco this week? Why not drop by Shatfest? “Khaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!”

3. Check out the blog of career counselor Penelope Trunk. A mix of career advice, personal memoir and family life. No holds barred, such as her account of being a 9/11 survivor. Also recommended are posts summarizing happiness research.

In Slate this week, there’s a dialogue between Sudhir Venkatesh and Patrick Keefe, the author of The Snakehead, a book about human smuggling from China to New York. There’s a lot to be learned about the global networks that make smuggling possible, and the consequences for the people who migrate in this fashion. Click through the whole exchange. Recommended.

Every once in a while, I’ll write down lists of “open problems” – lists of empirical or theoretical issues that I think are unresolved in sociological research. Here’s a few:

• Twenty+ social movement problems
• Seven Organization Studies problems
• Five problems about the behavior of intellectuals

What other fields do you think need problem lists? Are there any big problems that sociology has ignored? Consider this an open thread on the need for research on your favorite topic.

Here are some empirical issues in the study of intellectuals that sociologists should think harder about:

1. Intellectuals and authoritarianism: Are intellectuals any more or less likely than average folks to gravitate toward authoritarian politics? Case in point: intellectuals and the Soviets. I can easily see a college professor cheering on the Communist Party in 1910, but to do so during the era of Stalin is simply crazy. Why did that happen? Update: I’m asking about Western intellectuals who loved Stalin. Of course, folks in Russia didn’t have much choice.

2. Influence and Personality: Neil Gross’ book on Rorty made a simple point that biography can profoundly shape intellectual output. Here’s the broader question – is personality or biography the main predictor of why people produce their type of scholarship? Or is there a real impact of mentoring/exposure? Of course, we exempt technical areas (e.g., you need to go to medical school or produce medical research), but it seems important in the humanities and social sciences.

3. Anti-intellectualism and politics: Which political groups love or hate intellectuals? For example, populists, especially those of conservative bent, hate intellectuals. Libertarians love their philosophers and economists, and socialists enjoy high theory. Why?

4. Networks and Ability: Are networks and scientific ability endogenous? A common finding is that high achieving intellectuals have ties to high achieving mentors. Is this “scouting” – smart people can spot other smart folks? Or does the collaboration and contact add value to the career?

5. Autonomy and Repressive States: How do intellectuals retain their autonomy in coercive institutions? For example, when most of Soviet science went down hill, the mathematical and physical sciences remained outstanding. How did that happen? Is anything similar happening in China? What about states that hate intellectuals, like Cambodia during the Khemr Rouge era?

I am a little late to this, but last week a bit of a debate erupted about whether it is better or worse to split-up the political and commercial capitals of countries. It was sparked by an off-hand concluding remark by Luigi Zingales in an article for the City Journal on whether New York is likely to retain its title as the world’s financial capital:

The Founding Fathers wisely decided that the nation’s political capital should be separate from its financial capital (in both senses of the word). Now this splendid segregation has ended. 

Greg Mankiw picked up on that quote and spread it around the interwebs.

Then Matt Yglesias weighed in, countering with the boring vs. exciting capital hypothesis:

One model, seen in France and the UK, is of a single dominant city. Another model, seen in Italy, is where your capital is also your largest city (Rome), but the main financial and business center is elsewhere (Milan). Then you have your scenarios, seen in the US and Canada, where a capital is established someplace a bit random specifically to avoid choosing between major cities. This tends to lead to capital cities with a reputation as ‘boring.’

No one was taking this too seriously.  But they raise some interesting questions about the relationship between government and economic growth.  Zingales and Mankiw’s idea is that separating government from the financial sector is a good thing.  They don’t really expand on why, but I can guess at their reasoning: they think that a financial industry that is too close to government is likely to be over-regulated and hamstrung.  Yglesias’s idea is simply that stand alone government capitals may be boring (Springfield, Ottawa) or beautiful (Edinburgh, Rome), but whether the capital stands apart shouldn’t matter for much when it comes to actual growth.  I’d offer two contrasting alternative hypotheses for why co-locating government and industry might actually matter:

1. The Full of Themselves Hypothesis:  This one has to do with status hierarchies.  Where the government capital is also in the largest city, your status as a government type competes with other status hierarchies (industry, media, education, etc).  But in places where the government is the most important game in town, there is really only one status hierarchy.  My idea is that legislators are more full of themselves in places where government is the big dog in town.  The prediction, then, is that that would be worse for economic performance as legislators go off willy-nilly coming up with big, but ill-conceived, ideas.
2. The Social Capture Hypothesis:    This one has to do with networks.  Where the government capital is also in the largest city, you’d expect bureaucrats and legislators to hobnob fairly regularly with elites from industry and other sectors.  This should tend to make their decision-making more elitist (and in the case of finance, more sympathetic to the interests of bankers).  Where government stands alone, government should be (a) less beholden to elite interests and/or (b) more influenced by a wider spectrum of special interest group lobbying.

Thanks to the joys of Wikipedia, it’s fairly simple to pull down a few quick and dirty statistics.  Nothing definitive, but enough to whet the appetite…

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The publishing industry is in sad shape, we are told. Some think that newspapers and books may soon become a thing of the past due to the onslaught of free information on the net. The current economy hasn’t helped any. As Andy noted on Scatterplot, university presses are cutting back on costs, inhibiting them from attending academic meetings this year. Still, despite all of this doom and gloom, I have hope. The editor of the University of Minnesota Press recently joked that “the crisis in scholarly communication is now in its fifth decade.” Academic publishing has never been the most profitable business, but it’s been sustainable. Why? Because academics like books. How else would we communicate our academic identities to visitors if not for books adorning our office shelves?

I personally love books. I don’t feel complete if I’m not in the process of reading a book. Journal articles are great, but books are more complete and richer. They give authors the ability to dig deeper into arguments and go off on interesting tangents. I learn a lot from those side trips. Books can also be more emotionally rewarding than articles, which in the end helps me remember the takeaway better. By the end of a book, you feel like you’ve been somewhere. I like academic books for the same reason I like novels. They get me inside the head of someone other than myself.

One unfortunate consequence of the b-school-ization of organizational theory is that we seem to have fewer books on the topic than we used to. The classic books in org. theory haven’t changed much over the years, although perhaps fewer students read them than was true 20 or 30 years ago. Selznick, Gouldner, and March and Simon still deserve reading today. But what about recent history? What’s been written in the last couple of decades that will stand the test of time? Here are a few of my favorite org. theory books written in that time period. As you’ll notice, most of them are not really organizational in the same sense that March and Simon would be, but they’re in the same ballpark and they definitely should be read by organizational scholars of all types.

• Elisabeth Clemens, The People’s Lobby – Started off a new variant of institutional theory focusing on the heterogeneity of organizational forms and practices; I have a thing for suffragists
• Wendy Espeland, The Struggle for Water – Commensuration and identity; why we all can’t just get along
• Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision – A tour de force in archival research; organizational culture can kill
• Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes – Incredibly interesting stories about the inner lives of organizations at the executive level
• Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual – Probably not on most of your radar screens but it should be; game theory gets cultural
• Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior – Why corporations overpay CEOs; all about the irrational pursuit of charisma
• Neil Fligstein, The Tranformation of Corporate Control – This one was on my prelim list and I can remember several pivotal a-ha moments I had while reading it; Chandler meets conflict theory

I left some obvious classics, like Structural Holes, off the list because the content was first written as articles and later compiled as books. Still great books. I also left off three books written by my co-bloggers because everyone knows I think they’re awesome. What’s on your list?

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A few weeks ago, I wrote on the importance of publishing in graduate school and how one might do it. A few folks asked for a post that describes the publication process in more detail. Here it is:

• Let’s assume that you already have a manuscript that you’ve circulated and presented multiple times. Let’s assume that it’s a journal article, and not some other form of publication. Now you want to take the big step and get it in print.
• Choose a target. As I wrote before, you probably want to start with a top journal, a respected specialty journal, or a respected regional journal. Ask around if you don’t know the hierarchy of your field.
• Go to the journal web site and make sure the paper is in the right format. Social Science Quarterly, for example, is very insistent on short papers. AJS, for example, routinely publishes longer papers. Editors will tolerate a little fuzziness about length, but they will return a paper if it is way too long (e.g., the limit is 30 pages and the paper is 60).
• Write a cover letter that briefly explains the purpose of the paper. If you are in an unusual field (e.g., Eskimo linguistics), you might want to provide names of possible reviewers.
• Should I suggest reviewers? If you are asked, it might help. But otherwise, don’t do it. Why? You have no idea who is a speedy or fair reader. Why recommend someone who might tank you? Sleep better at night by letting the editors choose reviewers. Remember, that’s their job.
• Upload/send it out once it’s in the format.

What happens next? Journals vary a bit, but it usually goes something like this:

• The journal is run by a bunch of folks: the editors who make the final decisions; the associate editors, who help the editor but usually don’t have final say; the editorial board – a  few dozen scholars who agree to review papers but do not formulate decisions; the managing editors, a secretarial person who does all the paper work. Most editors/editorial board members are scholars/scientists/professors. Managing editors can be a professor, student, or a clerical person.
• The managing editor is the person in charge of shepherding the paper from submission to final decision. This is the person you contact for normal questions like “Did you guys get my paper?” Smaller journals may not have a separate managing editor.
• The journal editor, associate editors, and the managing editor may look at the paper and make a snap judgment about whether the paper fits or is good enough to be reviewed. Soc journals will review most papers if it at least looks plausible, while biological journals will often “bench reject” about 50% of submissions.
• Once the paper is deemed reviewable, the main or associate editor will assign reviewers. How does that happen? A few ways – people who are well known for work in your area may be asked to read the paper; perhaps an associate editor or editorial board member will write a review; they may look at the references and say “if person X is cited, they must be an expert.” If the paper is deemed to be of low quality, a graduate student may be asked to review it.
• Mix of reviewers: Varies a lot. Some journals will rely heavily on the editorial board. Some may mix between a famous person and a new person.
• Once the reviewer agrees to read the paper, they get a hard or electronic copy and a form they have to fill out. Usually, they are asked to grade the paper on some scale, provide comments for the author, and confidential comments for the editor.
• Number of reviews: Varies a lot. If a paper is atrocious in the eyes of the editor, they may simply wait for one review and reject. Most journals will try to get 2-4 reviews. If a review is incompetently done, they may try another reviewer. As a former managing editor and student editor, my belief is that it usually takes about 5-6 requests to get 2-3 decent reviews.
• Once the editor or relevant associate editor reads your paper and the reviews, they make a judgment: accept (with possibly require revisions); revise and resubmit; and reject.
• How do they decide? In most cases, it’s obvious. At the most competitive journals, a lot of papers get 2-3 negative reviews, so it’s easy to make the decision. If the reviews are truly ambiguous, the editor may read the paper herself, or ask for additional advice from associate editors or other scholars. Then, they just have to be the decider!
• What counts as good? In general, well written articles that work within the mainstream do well at many journals. Thus, you should try to show mastery of contemporary ideas and methods. There’s also luck – some reviewers may have a soft spot for your ideas. Connections matter as well – scholars and editors may be more generous to friends. And of course, there will always be editors who just have a special gift for identifying what’s truly original and innovative and they’re willing to go with a cool idea, even if the reviewers didn’t get it.
• The author receives a letter with the decision and copies of comments written by reviewers. Some editors will write a long explanation of the decision, while others will stick to short form letters.
• How long does this take? In many fields, about 1 month to process the paper, 2-3 months to wait for reviews, 1 month for make the final decision. About 4-6 months is decent. Some journals fall into disarray each stage can take forever. Editors don’t have time to read papers; managing editors are lazy about getting reviews; etc.  In some areas, it can take a year or more to get a decision.

Eek! I just opened my journal decision letter! What does it mean?

• Accept or accept contingent on revisions: This is good news! Take the afternoon off! Just do the revisions ASAP and get that guy into print.You’ll have to format the paper in the way demanded by the journals and correct the proofs. You’ll see paper copies (if they still exist) in about a year. An accept on the first round is fairly uncommon in most fields.
• Revise and resubmit: Technically, your paper has been rejected, but the editor thinks it might be publishable if certain changes are made. We’ll talk about R&R’s in some detail below. But this is good news!!!
• Reject: :(  Don’t feel so bad. Everyone has rejected papers. It’s actually the most common outcome in most decent journals.

Let’s get into detail about R&R and reject. Let’s start with R&R:

• With an R&R, you’ve been given the option to revise. What should you do? In most cases, you should revise the paper and give it another shot. Why? With the current journal, you have a decent chance at getting something out of the process. An R&R means that the editor finds *something* valuable and is seriously considering your paper. If you go to another journal, you usually have to start all over again with no promises.
• Once in a while, you decide that revision isn’t a great idea. For example, if you are persuaded that the revisions are literally impossible, or completely stupid, you might try another journal. If the editor acts strangely, then maybe it’s not worth the effort. But this is rare. You should almost always revise.
• After you read the letter and the comments, put it away for a few days and try to mellow out and develop some distance.
• Read the comments, both from the editor and the reviewers and try to summarize them. Then make a “to do” list of specific recommendations (“you have to cite this,” “use robust standard errors,” etc.).  Then do as many of these things as possible.
• Then think again about the gestalt of the paper and the reviews. How does it all fit together? How can you rewrite the paper so that it will still be readable and offer a coherent argument?
• Once you’ve shown the paper to people and you feel that you’ve put in 110%, write the revision memo. That’s a document where you explain in detail what you changed. In general, I recommend extreme detail so that you show reviewers that you took what they said seriously. Also, sometimes you simply can’t do what everyone asked, so explain why and do so clearly and in detail. Write a new cover letter with a paragraph or two explaining how the new paper has addressed the reviewer comments.
• Then send the whole bundle back to the journal.
• The R&R process varies. Some journals have editors read the new paper “in house.” Others will send it back to the old reviewers, some will mix, and some will (frustratingly) send it back to completely new reviewers. You really don’t have control over this.

Reject – what does it mean? Here you have to be brutally honest and ask why you have failed. A good piece of advice is that nearly any paper can be improved. But aside from that generic advice, here’s more detailed ideas:

• Maybe the paper is good, but not a good fit for the journal. You can tell if this is the case if the reviewers says “this is a good paper and it’s a solid contribution, but to another field.” Solution: Do a few minor revisions, and send it back out immediately to a new journal.
• Maybe the reviewers just didn’t get it or they are incompetent. It happens. Sometimes you have an idea that the readers just didn’t dig. Once again, send it out ASAP to a new journal.
• Maybe your paper has some real issues. Read the reviews. If they raise a lot of good points, then maybe your paper isn’t ready yet. So be honest with yourself. We can all improve and the reviewers are doing you a favor. If three reviewers all say, “Y needs fixing,” then they’re likely right. So go back to the woodshed and do the recommended fixes.
• Maybe your paper is just bad. It happens. We have a cool idea and our friends agree. But reviewer X points out a devastating logical flaw. Suck it up and put it to sleep.
• Appealing decisions: Once in a while you feel that something just wasn’t right. If you can logically explain why the decision was in error (and not just vent), an editor may change her mind. Doesn’t happen often, but it’s worth considering in extreme cases.
• When can I send a rejected paper back to the same journal? In general, once a paper is rejected, send it to a new journal. But in some cases, you may want to go back. For example, if it’s a flagship journal, an acceptance can be a career maker. So here’s my advice: send it back if the paper has been truly revised and is really different. If you did all the changes and it’s way better, then send it back.
• Mixed reviews. Sometimes the reviews are all over. In that case, just do what seems reasonable and send it out ASAP.
• Bottom line: Keep sending them out. If you work hard at revising your work, you’ll get accepted sooner or later. And volume is often the key.

Finally: Where should I send rejected papers? The rule of thumb is: start at the top and let the editors decide where it lands. Some scholars, especially at elite research departments, will only bother with the top. Here’s my view: unless the paper is logically flawed or just lame, the paper was written for a reason, to bring knowledge. Who says that the top 10 journals have a monopoly on knowledge? We should all aim high, but we shouldn’t let career ambition impede our core mission: generating knowledge.  And we sometimes have to go to small outlets to make that happen.

There’s a blogger party at ASA organized by Tina Fetner. Here’s the information, posted by Tina at Scatter blog. Since I’ve missed a number of recent conferences, I didn’t catch up with people who tried to meet me.  If you want to connect, drop me an email. In addition to the blogger party and ASA more generally, I’ll be at the econ soc mini-conference and bumping around SF the day before.

I don’t know if there have been any Academy of Management sessions on blogging before (I know ASA has had several), but this year CV Harquail has done a boatload of work by putting together a session and, quite appropriately, an associated blog with all the details: insightstoactions.com.

Jerry Fodor, always a delight to read, addresses why’s he’s against darwinism and evolutionary psychology (pdf).  Even “Granny” makes a re-appearance. (Here’s a great opening paragraph, jstor gated — “Granny and I think that things have gone too far…” More on Fodor’s Granny here, by Daniel Dennett.)

It came out this week that the CIA had assembled teams of hit men to take out al-Qaeda operatives. Justifiably, there is much discussion about the Bush White House’s attempt to hide these efforts from Congressional oversight. However, for students of military organization, the revelations are interesting for what they reveal about the difficulty of clandestine work within the West’s military and ethical value system. The LA Times has a revealing article on the subject.

The issues:

• Collateral damage: The gov’t is only hunting down al-Qaeda, not all of Afghanistan. You must avoid civilians.
• Secrecy: Unlike conventional military ops, the CIA wants there to be no visible link to the US gov’t.
• Non-suicide mission: To quote a former CIA official who was interviwed for the story – “Even if an assassination team were deployed and succeeded in killing a senior Al Qaeda figure, “what happens to the shooter?” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official. “We don’t send people on suicide missions. I’m sure they were troubled by how to get the guy out of there.”

These comments are revealing. On a superficial level, they indicate how hard it is for a foreign power to secretly assert their influence. To get close to any leader, you need insiders, but as one official said: “If you’re born in Kansas, you’re always from Kansas…I don’t care you long you grow your beard, you’re still from Kansas.”

There’s also a deeper issue. The West has developed important ethical standards for mass violence. We simply won’t do to Afghanistan what Russia did to Chechnya: burn the entire country down to just to get to a handful of militants. Western publics are often horrified when their governments violate these rules.

We also place great value on our own soldiers. Though soldiers will sacrifice themselves for their unit during battle, I am not aware of any significant examples of “kamikaze” strategies in recent Western milirary history. Missions that require a soldier’s self-destruction are carried out only as an extreme, often improvised, last resort.

Both of these norms, though far from consistently enforced, show how Western miliitary operations have evolved in response to our values. Despite the protestations from some that our government owes nothing in supporting the rights of non-citizens, the reality is that even the CIA, an organization dedicated to covert warfare, will still respect the basic humanity of its soldiers and those in other nations.

I just got back from a much needed three week vacation with the family and feel well rested and ready for work (and blogging).  Included in my beach reading was this agreeable little book containing oral histories of professional baseball players during the first turn-of-the-century. The book, The Glory of Their Times, is full of surprising anecdotes about the way the game used to be played. Among other things, we learn from their histories that fans used to sit right on the field during games and that they would often spill onto the field after games to talk to players and cause a ruckus. Fred Merkle’s  “bonehead” play against the Chicago Cubs in 1908 , in which Merkle forgot to touch second base after a hit that supposedly drove in the game winning run, occurred in the midst of an onslaught of fans rushing the field to congratulate the Giants for a victory. Unfortunately for Merkle, one of the Cubs noticed the error and pointed it out to the umpire, who decided that the game should end in forfeit because the Giants couldn’t clear the field of their fans. The book is full of all sorts of interesting details like this, which reinforce in the mind of the modern baseball fan that the game has changed significantly in the past 100 years and that steroids is really just a blip on the radar screen when viewed from that perspective.

Much of what has changed about baseball over the last century, including the outlawing of performance enhancing drugs, can be seen as an attempt to standardize performance so that it appears to the public, or at least to baseball’s fan base, that there are fair conditions for competition. The idea that professional sports is designed such to create the illusion of competitiveness is something I talked about in an earlier post. One of the primary ways that professional sports leagues do this is to reduce behavioral variety in the game itself. For baseball this has meant creating expectations of conduct for fans (e.g., fans are no longer allowed or encouraged to sit leisurely on the field during games), getting rid of the spitball and other performance oddities, regularly replacing the ball in order to maximize hitting regularity (rather than hitting conditions worsening throughout the game), regulating off-the-field player behavior, etc. Some of these changes came as the result of prominent crises in the game (e.g., the Black Sox scandal introduced a number of changes in policy) but many were adopted gradually and diffused as common solutions to collective action problems within the game (e.g., ballpark dimensions).

Standardizing behavior (and setting audiences’ expectations) is not only fundamental to sports organizations but is a basic function of any organization. Organizations remold some portion of the world to generate a particular set of behaviors, outcomes, performance, etc. They are designed to wash out noise and create a predictable set of outcomes. Even failing organizations do this, although they may regularly produce something the world doesn’t want. This aspect of organizations has been discussed by a number of theorists. It is central to Weber’s idea of bureaucracy as an instrument of control. Hannan and Freeman touch on this when they talked about the need for organizations to produce “reliability and accountability.” Learning theory is all about how organizations routinize human behavior. It’s also central to my latest paper with Teppo and Dave Whetten (now available on the Organization Science website). The idea is most succinctly captured, I think, by Bruce Kogut when he said that “organization by firm is variety reducing” (pg. 408). Organizations are designed to create more homogeneity within their boundaries than exists outsides those boundaries.

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In honor of my good friend Kazim Ali who is blogging on poetry at the Kenyon Review, an homage:  The eight limbed path of social science:

1. Positive action:  Argue for something.
2. Restraint:  Keep it real.  Don’t over-claim.
3. Posture:  Invest in a good chair.
4. Learning of breath:  Measured rhythm and pace.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.
5. Stillness of the senses:  Save the incendiary stuff for a blog.
6. One-pointed focus:  ‘nuff said.
7. Stilling of the mind-states:  Chill out.  Luminous ideas may erupt.
8. Understanding:  Social scientists cannot write by numbers alone.

A lousy legislative system and an out of control referendum system have always made it hard for California to settle its state budget. But the chickens have come home to roost. An article in Inside Higher Education describes upcoming furloughs (= layoffs) and massive budget cuts. It’s hitting the UC hard.

The article makes a few good points. During severe crisis, it’s hard for administrators to argue for maintaining current budgets when kindergarten teachers are getting fired and everyone else gets IOU’s. There’s also the relative impact. The UC gets only a small fraction of its budget from the state. Like many public schools, it’s now a quasi private “state supported” institutions, rather than an old fashioned state university. With grants, endowments, patents, tuition, and other income sources, a massive state budget cut is still relatively small.

Here’s what I predict for the University of California in the short to medium term. First, the recession will force the UC to further develop its identity as a “state supported” institution. Given the choice between the university and other public services, voters and policy makers will continue to put funds in other areas first. The UC will adapt by finding more income aside from the legislature.

Second, given the relatively good working conditions and pay (yes! just look at faculty salaries in other regions!) and its global position, the UC will likely be able to create new cohorts of top notch faculty, especially the young ones.

Third, the recession will cement a regrettable trend: increasing “fees” and other costs so that the UC will resemble a gigantic private school with a public school logo. It’s definitely not what Clark Kerr had in mind with the California Master Plan for Higher Education. I hope that when this crisis is over in a few years that folks out in California will figure out ways to bring back that vision.

OK, I don’t think we’ve used the handy survey feature here at orgtheory before, so here goes.  So, with reference to the previous post — here’s an unscientific and anonymous poll (don’t worry: it’s anonymous, only the numbers/percentages are reported):

So, I’m reviewing a piece for a journal today.  I wondered: is blind peer review an illusion?  First, the sub-circles that many of us hang out in often are so small that one is likely to have seen the piece presented previously (probably worth sending the editor a note if you know the authors).  Second, with tone, citation patterns and sub-topic one can often pick out, say, a Lizardo from a King.  Third, it can be all-too tempting and easy to google the title of the manuscript, and more often than not one is likely to find the authors. I don’t know how widely “googling” is used by reviewers, it would be interesting to find out via an anonymous survey.

I think journals are doing various things to address the above matter; for example, requesting authors to remove their papers from web sites.  But with SSRN, conference posting of papers, etc, blind review might now be an illusion.  I don’t know how this affects the reviewing process overall, though I am guessing it introduces some bias.  Even Fabio’s proposal for triple blind review does not solve the problem of the potential biases (one way or the other) associated with knowing the author(s) of an article that one is reviewing.

“Only the freshest orgtheory!!!”

I enjoy reality shows that focus on skills, such as cooking or fashion design. A favorite is “Kitchen Nightmares.” Gordon Ramsay, a world class chef, goes to failing restaurants and tries to fix them up. Unsurprisingly, this show is rich in orgtheory:

• Identity matters: As if he were reading the latest Hsu and Hannan article, Ramsay is obsessed with simplifying the identity of a kitchen. Sushi and tandoori? Hogwash! Mexican tofu? Blahh!!!
• Vertical organizations: No flat hierarchies here. Problems are solved when owners and managers start telling people to do their %$^$ing jobs.
• No globalization: The cuisine may be global, but the ingredients have got to be local.
• It’s about habitus: Cooking is not just a job for Ramsay. He insists that workers work in kitchens because they love food and the hospitality business. It’s much more than a way to make a buck.
• Groupiness: The best food comes when everyone works together. Weak links are a disaster.

I strongly recommend this show to undergrads interested in org behavior. Much food for thought. According to the wiki, 50% of the restaraunts closed despite Ramsay’s intervention. That’s marginally better than the 60% rate at which most restaraunts close.

The Journal of American History ran a kind review of From Black Power to Black Studies. Here’s the review at History Cooperative via the Michigan library. Richard H. King picks up on an important theme of the book – it’s not right to think of movement-target interactions as a zero sum game:

To conclude, Rojas offers two optimistic interpretations of his own conclusion. First, the move from social movement to academic discipline was a process, not of co-optation, but of mutual transformation. Second, black studies programs can be seen as an example of a “counter center, a formalized place inside mainstream institutions where alternative viewpoints are established.”

Indeed, social movement research tends to underestimate the important of mutual influence. This might be due to the fact that some famous movements are genuinely involved in zero sum games: revolutionaries and incumbent governments are by definition mutual antagonists; labor and management fight over the same pie, at least in the short term; civil rights groups had to fight racist organizations.

But it’s also the case that the interaction between the movement and the target is transformational. In my case study of the black power movement and universities, I argued that Black Studies, the academic outgrowth of black power, changed people’s views of what was appropriate to study in other disciplines. It also provided a justification for radical spaces inside mainstream organizations, like universities. Rather than engage in a zero sum game over the curriculum, the Black Studies movement increased the scope of higher education, which allowed later generations of scholars to create new identities.

The bottom line is this. Scholars and activists might view movements as facing a choice between victory or cooptation. You get what you want, or the system gets what it wants. Here’s a different view. The real choice is between cooptation and evolution. Organizations and societies are stable and there are many mechanisms ensuring that things don’t get out of hand. There a lot of incentives just to continue doing what everyone else is doing. However, a strategic social movement might see this as an opportunity. Institutions must be renewed and activists will then have a chance to make sure that their goals are built in to the system, even though it may require recasting the movement’s most cherished goals. That’s coevolution, and it’s not a bad thing.

1. My collaborator Michael Heaney has set up a blog that comments on network analysis and political science. Here is the network diagram of Republican interest groups, circa 2008, as measured by convention delegate co-memberships.

2. Grad students Josh McCabe, David Pontoppidan, and Brian Pitt have created “The Sociological Imagination.” A post on neurosociology, Goffman as individualist, and the economics profession.

3. The Racism Review continues to be the go to place for sociology and critical race studies. Interesting and frequently updated: Joe Faegin on race and internet & the Sotomayor nomination. Jessie Daniels on the Philadelphia pool dispute & recent hate crimes.

Roger Penske is purchasing Saturn and the implications are possibly far reaching.  If a crisis, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste then the auto industry circa 2009 presents a golden opportunity to see how a crisis opens opportunities to re-write the rules that govern an industry.  Penske’s gambit aims to do that and if he succeeds it could fundamentally change the way cars are designed and manufactured.

Saturn has been cast in the role of change agent before.  The company was conceived in 1982 as a “new kind of car company, making a new kind of car.”  Back then, the rap on the American car industry was that it produced poor quality goods.  That problem, in turn, was blamed on ossified relationships between the car companies and their “stakeholders”: relationships with the unions had become paralyzingly adversarial, relationships with suppliers were dictatorial, the companies’ own designers weren’t cooperating across divisional boundaries and the dealer network were unwieldy.  Saturn was meant to push the reset button on all of these relationships.

Saturn’s new model worked, for a while.  Its quality ratings were high and the brand developed a strong customer base.   But rather than spreading into the rest of GM, the opposite happened: GM re-colonized Saturn.  When Saturn opened a new plant in Wilmington, Delaware in 1996, it was stripped of most of the key organizational innovations of the original plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.  Labor-management cooperation was replaced with a regular pattern contract, the car’s design was outsourced to a GM subsidiary, Saturn’s relationships with suppliers reverted to form, and plant’s managers were brought in through GM’s regular management career channels.  Saturn became just another GM subsidiary.

That is, with one exception: the brand and the dealer network maintained a good deal of independence. And they are essentially what Roger Penske has now purchased: not a company that makes cars (GM will continue to design and manufacture vehicles for the time being after which Penske plans to outsource manufacturing to a global network of manufacturers), but a brand and a distribution channel.

On first inspection, that doesn’t seem to be the stuff of fundamental industry change.  But it could turn out to be just that if Penske is able to capture power in the value chain and use it to influence the way cars are designed and manufactured.  The open question is whether Penske has the wherewithal to pull it off.

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