orgtheory.net

For several years I have been harping about the declining significance of the organizations that organization theorists write about in the US.  Much of the field seems to imagine a society comprised of countable organizations, like an urn filled with balls of different colors, even as the organizations we encounter turn out to be Potemkin Village facades. (Fabio recently addressed the conundrum of sampling organizations.)  I’ve described instances of this in previous posts about OEM medical research, pet food, blood thinner, and CIA assassinations.

On occasion, real organizations with actual employees disappear, but like the aroma of an adolescent male who’s been gulled by Axe commercials, their scent lingers on in the form of “brand equity.”  This morning’s New York Times Magazine gives an example of such a ghost organization: Linens ‘n Things, a large US retail chain that was recently liquidated and all its 589 outlets shuttered. As is often the case, the brand name itself was auctioned off in the liquidation, and is now attached to an online retail site operated by a generic e-commerce contractor.  According to the article, “Linens ‘n Things itself now has few direct employees, or even a full-time chief executive.”  (Something similar happened to Circuit City, which went from good to great to liquidation last fall, shedding 34,000 employees. Its brand was purchased by Systemax Inc. and now graces another website.)

We might think of this as the hermit crab approach to organizations.  There are several examples of well-known manufacturers that have effectively disappeared but left behind familiar brand names that were profitably re-purposed (cobbled together? recombinated? bricolaged?).  Memorex had a memorable ad campaign for blank audiotapes in the 1970s (“Is it live, or is it Memorex?”), and enough consumers remembered it that it was worth attaching the name to blank CDs and USB drives.  Polaroid’s dormant label was also floating out there for re-use in electronic products unrelated to instant photography, like portable DVD players.  And Westinghouse, founded in 1886 in Pittsburgh and long the major American rival of GE in businesses such as power generation, morphed into CBS in the 1990s, losing its industrial businesses along the way. (It was subsequently acquired by Viacom, then spun off again.)  You can now buy a “Westinghouse” LCD television at an online “Circuit City” store, although the product bears no relation whatsoever to the old Westinghouse Electric company.

The generic infrastructure for producing and distributing goods has become so well-articulated that creating a firm is now a lot like snapping together an Ikea project.  As Meyer and Rowan (1977: 345) put it, “the building blocks for organizations come to be littered around the societal landscape; it takes only a little entrepreneurial energy to assemble them into a structure.”  My favorite example is Vizio, which is one of the three largest flat-panel television “producers” in the US.  It was created a few years ago by a Taiwanese-born entrepreneur in Irvine who recognized that flat-panel TVs are largely built from commodity parts, so he pitched Costco on a low-priced product to be built by a Taiwanese contract manufacturer that one of his friends had founded.  Vizio is now distributed through several chains, including Costco and Sam’s Club.  It turns out that a half-dozen employees can be enough to build a major business that competes with Sony and Samsung. 

 There are still some brand names floating free out there.  It might be a fun class project for orgtheory to buy the Pontiac brand, work out a distribution deal with AutoNation or Penske, and find an up-and-coming Chinese maker of electric autos to supply product.  It won’t bring any jobs back to Detroit, but it might show a practical application of new institutional theory.

Three h1n1 resources:

1. Here’s Henry Niman’s new h1n1 map and flutracker, with some nice options for visualizing the data. 
2. The “2009 flu pandemic” wikipedia site continues to be informative.
3. Here’s the CDC’s guidance document for universities for the 2009-2010 academic year. 

If networks and political science is your interest, please check out the recent American Politics Research. An entire issue dedicated to networks in political science:

• Michael T. Heaney and Scott D. McClurg. Social Networks and American Politics: Introduction to the Special Issue American Politics Research 2009 37: 727-741. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Jennifer Nicoll Victor and Nils Ringe The Social Utility of Informal Institutions: Caucuses as Networks in the 110th U.S. House of Representatives American Politics Research 2009 37: 742-766. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Matt Grossmann and Casey B. K. Dominguez Party Coalitions and Interest Group Networks American Politics Research 2009 37: 767-800. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Manoj K. Shrestha and Richard C. Feiock. Governing U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Self-Organizing and Multiplex Service Networks
  American Politics Research 2009 37: 801-823. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Jan E. Leighley and Tetsuya Matsubayashi The Implications of Class, Race, and Ethnicity for Political Networks American Politics Research 2009 37: 824-855. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Casey A. Klofstad Civic Talk and Civic Participation: The Moderating Effect of Individual Predispositions American Politics Research 2009 37: 856-878. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Seung-Jin Jang Are Diverse Political Networks Always Bad for Participatory Democracy?: Indifference, Alienation, and Political Disagreements American Politics Research 2009 37: 879-898. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Mathew D. McCubbins, Ramamohan Paturi, and Nicholas Weller Connected Coordination: Network Structure and Group Coordination American Politics Research 2009 37: 899-920. [Abstract] [PDF] [References] [Request Permission]
• Robert Huckfeldt Interdependence, Density Dependence, and Networks in Politics
  American Politics Research 2009 37: 921-950.

Check it out!!!

Thanks to Pierre Azoulay for a provocative guest stint on orgtheory.   You can find all of Pierre’s posts here, along with my attempt to goad him, just a little.  Look for Pierre’s work by keeping up with his webpage and his activities at NBER.

This quarter I’m teaching my first PhD course. The course is about the politics of the corporation. Although I’ve tried to include readings from various disciplines and perspectives (e.g., law, economics, political science), the class is really about the political sociology of corporations/business.  Here is the syllabus. Feedback is welcome!

1. Computational Legal Studies by Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito. Nerds + Law school. Networks, simulations, Supreme Courts. Gotta love it.

2. Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth faculty and current RWJ scholar, has a blog on political science and current events.

Here’s a facebook post that I ran into on an orgtheory fan’s wall:

I love orgtheory.net in a totally unhealthy way.

Comments

Anonymous 1: ugh!

Anonymous 2: Yeah, ugh.

Anonymous 3: I think that site [orgtheory.net] sums up why I dropped out of grad school.

The criminal justice system is run by human beings who occasionally make mistakes. This means that a certain percentage of people in jail will be there by mistake. What can be done about this? It helps to classify wrongfully convicted persons:

1. Prosecutor Misconduct: You’re in jail because the prosecutor/police/judges acted wrongly.
2. Technical limitations: You’re in jail because we had limited tools for processing and evaluating evidence.
3. Changing Evidence: We have new evidence, or we now believe that the old evidence was flawed.
4. False positive: Everyone acted in good faith and the science normally works, but there is randomness in the process.

We already have some limited tools, especially for type #1 wrongful convictions. For example, we have procedural rights designed to limit prosecutor misconduct. The appeals court will sometimes overturn convictions if the prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence, or otherwise acted in egregious ways. Occasionally, state and federal agencies will investigate out of control courts. From my limited understanding of the criminal system, these tools are in place, but hard to use. In general, the public and the higher courts show extreme deference to police and prosecutors, meaning that these are pretty weak tools for overturning wrongful convictions.

If you are the victim of  false positive error (#4), then there’s not much to do except wait for conditions #2 and #3 to occur. But that doesn’t help because the American criminal system simply doesn’t care if you are in jail for the wrong reasons. Once you are in prison, you should stay in prison. The goal is not justice, it’s convenience for the courts and political leadership. For example, it took years for courts to accept DNA evidence, and instead the courts trusted witnesses and finger print analyses, and other methods which forensic scientists now know are weak. And even though DNA evidence is now accepted by courts, it’s only for current cases. It’s very hard to get old evidence tested with new techniques.

The problem is two fold. First, few people have articulated principles designed to improve the accuracy of court convictions. For example, one might formulate a new principle for criminal law: all persons convicted of serious crimes have the right to re-analyze evidence with technologies that experts believe are superior than the earlier technology. Also, all persons convicted of serious crimes have the right to have convictions thrown out if they are based on technologies that were shown to be seriously flawed by scientific experts. As far as I can tell, there have been few efforts to articulate post-conviction rights aside from a vague right to an appeal based on either misconduct or the mis-application/un-constitutionality of law.

Second, there is a serious political problem. Elected leaders have strong incentives to jail people, but not to correct errors. You can win an election by locking people up, but it’s hard to find people who won elections by freeing the innocent. It’s probably because incarceration is so stigmatizing that a politician taints himself by associating with a jailed person, even if there’s serious evidence of innocence. Thus, we should try our best to remove these decisions from the hands of judges and politicians who must kow tow to the public.

I don’t have any snappy conclusions, except to articulate a few proposals:

• Add a new right for convicted people: If your case depends on science or evidence that experts now believe is bogus, you have the right to challenge your conviction and have the evidence re-tested. This is a right, not a privilege.
• Don’t let elected leaders, judges, and prosecutors decide what is good science. There should be a permanent panel of independent experts who issue judgments on what is good or bad evidence. This shouldn’t be hashed out in court. There courts should rely on experts who are acting independently of any particular case. Of course, these people will be subject to political pressures, but at least it’s one or two steps removed from electoral politics.
• There should be periodic reviews of evidence for and against certain types of evidence. These should be mandated by law. Don’t wait for states or the Feds to review the reliability of certain techniques, or they’ll drag their feet. The panel of experts should convene every couple of years to assess new knowledge on issues like eye witness testimony, hand writing analysis, etc. These recommendations should become standard practice through the law.

In case you were wondering, the case that motivated this post was about an arson expert who showed that the state of Texas executed man who did not murder his three children by setting his home on fire. The local prosecutors were using outdated fire science. Even when the evidence was mounting that the man was likely innocent, the judges and the governor simply chose not do anything. ’nuff said.

Richard Peterson has updated the reference list for his 2004 ARS paper on the production of culture (with N Anand). Gabriel has posted the entire list, complete with links, on his blog. A couple of thoughts on this. First, this strikes me as a potentially useful contribution of academic blogs. Papers need updating all the time, and blogs provide the perfect outlet for updates, additional commentary, etc. Second, it seems a little odd that the prdouction of culture perspective doesn’t get more play as a kind of organizational theory. True, it’s not a general theory of organizations (of course, you might say the same thing about institutional theory or any other of the major paradigms) but it is a useful perspective for thinking about the consequences of organizational life on the broader cultural system. If one purpose of organizational theory is to explain how organizations affect society, then there really ought to be more engagement with the production of culture perspective. Here’s Peterson’s brief summary of what the perspective is all about:

The production of culture perspective focuses on the ways in which the content of symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. Initially practitioners of this perspective focused on the fabrication of expressive-symbol elements of culture such as art works, scientific research reports, popular culture, religious practices, legal judgments, journalism, and other parts of what are now often called “the culture industries”. More recently the perspective has been successfully applied to a range of quite different situations where the manipulation of symbols is a by-product rather than the purpose of the collective activity.

Via Cosma, comes the following article:

Since the publication of Robert K. Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or countries. However, these studies seldom control for the intrinsic “quality” of papers or of researchers–”better” (however defined) papers or researchers could receive higher citation rates because they are indeed of better quality. Using an original method for controlling the intrinsic value of papers–identical duplicate papers published in different journals with different impact factors–this paper shows that the journal in which papers are published have a strong influence on their citation rates, as duplicate papers published in high impact journals obtain, on average, twice as much citations as their identical counterparts published in journals with lower impact factors. The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.

The full paper has some more detail. Duplicates are defined as those papers published in different journals but which nevertheless have the same title, the same first author, and the same number of cited references. With this definition the authors find 4,532 pairs of duplicates in the Web of Science database across the sciences and social sciences. (This is a pretty striking finding in itself.) Remember that the impact factor of a journal is meant to be a (weighted) product of the number of citations to articles in that journal — i.e., a journal’s prestige is a function of the quality of the articles appearing in it. But here we see that, for the same papers, the impact factor of the journal affects the citation rate of the paper. The mechanism is straightforward, but it’s neat to see it shown this way.

(Appropriately enough, I have posted this at both Crooked Timber and OrgTheory. We’ll see which one gets the links and comments.)

Our evil twin, Orgs and Markets, covers the Inside Higher Ed article that discusses how some sociologists have econ envy, an article that generated a bit of chuckling. And I can’t blame them: sociologists do have econ-envy. It’s a bigger, more prestigious field that has a lot of policy influence. Peter even cited examples where economists were responsible for eliminating sociology programs (Washington, Rochester), but, to my knowledge, no economics program at a major university has ever been eliminated.

When it comes to policy, I’ll side just a little bit with economists who poo-poohed the sociologists. If it’s something like setting interest rates, or the technical issues of taxation, I think we should get our advice from people who study the topic for a living. At the same time, sociologists should really stand up for themselves. Sociology is a discipline that’s contributed a great deal to our culture, often in ways that have pretty important applications for policy and business:

• Network analysis: That’s right. Decades before the physics people got into the game, sociologists were the main force behind network analysis, now a key tool in studying everything from terrorists groups to the structure of the Internet. Thank you, sociology!
• Social psychology: Biases in decision making? Issue framing? Reference groups? Social roles? Yup, sociologists have been key players in inventing and developing these ideas – especially in applied areas. Thank you, sociology!
• Demography: Some basic tools of studying populations, such as the Kitagawa decomposition, came from sociologists. Thank you, sociology!
• Focus groups: A key tool in marketing and many other areas. That’s right – invented by seminal sociologist Robert Merton. Thank you, sociology!

It’s not very hard to see how these ideas, and others, would have applications in a whole range of areas in policy from national security, to health, and even economic policy. But of course, economists know this already – they’ve been doing sociology for years!

Here’s a very provocative and terse discussion/interview (mp3) with Richard Rorty — covering topics such as analytics versus historicism in philosophy, and then a postphilosophical discussion about why the world needs to be more like the United States and why the United States needs to be more like Norway.

Here’s a video about a recent economics blogging get-together — well, the video is also a plug for the sponsoring institution, the Kauffman Foundation (for those who are not familiar: the foundation sponsors a vast amount of entrepreneurship research in the US).

In the video various bloggers (including the dynamist, marginalrevolution, etc) reflect on the role of blogs in public discourse, the role of bloggers in prediction, bloggers and capitalism/the crisis, entrepreneurship in society, and various other topics.  Here are a few, bold predictions from the end of the clip: “Blogs will last forever, I don’t think it’s a phase” (that’s from Tyler Cowen), and “blogging is the new establishment, and it will start to act like an establishment really soon” (Amity Shlaes).

The always-interesting James Surowiecki has a new piece in the New Yorker looking at the psychological biases that are hampering health care reform.

[T]he public’s skittishness about overhauling the system also reflects something else: the deep-seated psychological biases that make people resistant to change. Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called “endowment effect”: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it….What this suggests about health care is that, if people have insurance, most will value it highly, no matter how flawed the current system. And, in fact, more than seventy per cent of Americans say they’re satisfied with their current coverage. More strikingly, talk of changing the system may actually accentuate the endowment effect. Last year, a Rasmussen poll found that only twenty-nine percent of likely voters rated the U.S. health-care system good or excellent. Yet when Americans were asked the very same question last month, forty-eight per cent rated it that highly. The American health-care system didn’t suddenly improve over the past eleven months. People just feel it’s working better because they’re being asked to contemplate changing it.

This suggests that the psychological bias was actually triggered by the way health care reformers (and the Obama administration, specifically) framed the issue. The endowment effect could just as easily be used to support the offering of new entitlements (e.g., by emphasizing the long-term degradation of health care quality under the current system). Paul Pierson’s work suggests that government entitlement programs are inertial for the same reason. Once an interest group develops around a particular government program or policy, reform is met with extreme resistance by the beneficiaries of the program who fear losing their valued entitlements. This dynamic leads to prevents what Pierson and other political scientists call “welfare state retrenchment.”

The big problem with health care reform, as Surowiecki sees it, is that its proponents framed the reform as an attempt to cut costs. This framing automatically invoked the loss aversion biases of the general public. It didn’t help that reform opponents latched on to the bias and have milked it for all its worth.

Such anxieties have certainly been stoked by the reams of disinformation that have been spread about the Obama plan. They may also have been exacerbated by the Obama Administration’s initial emphasis on the way the plan would help hold down health-care costs. This approach was understandable: most people think health care is too expensive, so the ability to hold down costs seems like a selling point for the plan. The problem is that once you start talking about cost-cutting you make people think about what they might have to give up. And that makes them value what they have more highly.

It’s odd in retrospect that the Obama administration, for all of their respect for and reliance on scientific experts, didn’t seem to consult any social psychologists when devising the critical framing of this reform effort.

The revelation that hundreds of articles published in medical research journals were actually written by contractors in the employ of pharmaceutial companies, and fronted by high-status “authors” at fancy universities, seems to be part of a broader movement toward an OEM (“original equipment manufacturer”) format among organizations.  Pet food laced with melamine was sold under over 100 brand names but produced by the same vendor in Ontario, poisoning thousands of pets in the US.  Baxter Health’s blood thinner heparin, manfactured by a Chinese contractor, killed 81 and injured hundreds of others due to toxins in its supply chain (which reaches back to rural pig farmers).  The dream of financial economists, in which the corporation is nothing but a nexus-of-contracts, seems to have come true.

The OEM format has also found traction in the US federal government.  Vigorous interrogation, extraordinary renditions to allies with different cultural traditions around prisoner treatment, you name it — they often turn out to be done by contractors.  Nowadays, you can’t even trust the label on a CIA assassination, as it might turn out to be Blackwater.  Don’t brand names mean anything any more?

The American OEM state in its current version traces back to the Clinton administration.  As part of his “reinventing government” initiative, Clinton sought to emulate some of the best practices of the corporate world to enhance government efficiency.  A principal way this was accomplished was by the use of contractors.  The Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 (“FAIR Act”) mandated that every Federal agency and department — including the military — identify any activities they do that could in principle be done by contractors, and put them out for bid each year.  Activities that were “inherently governmental” were supposed to be immune from contracting, but the boundaries around that term proved porous.  (What could be more inherently governmental than assassination programs?)

Federal civilian employment declined every year under Clinton from a high of over 3 million at the start of his term to 2.7 million at the end, and it has stayed at almost precisely this number ever since. At the same time, there has been a burgeoning growth of contractors, with annual spending growing from $200 billion to $400 billion under Bush. This sector is far larger than many of us realize, and contract employees evidently outnumber Federal employees by a big margin. “The biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin,… gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.”  Indeed, the three largest remaining US-based manufacturers are all military contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman).

Organization theorists by and large have not caught up with this model of the OEM state. We’re still accustomed to thinking of states as sovereigns, the source of laws and regulations (although recent work by Joel Baum and Anita McGahan on the growth of neo-mercenary corporations is a great start). Of course the OEM state is not entirely new: Italian merchant states of the Renaissance also contracted out for military and tax services. And many states are in effect run as conglomerate businesses (e.g., Singapore, Dubai). But is there more work out there examining the OEM state? If not, why not? (Can we convince any promising grad students to abandon performativity or actor-network theory for a dissertation on the forms of 21st century states?)

Ron Coase is well known for writing a small number of hugely important articles. The top two are the papers that presented Theory of the Firm and “Coase’s Theorem.” There is a third that gets a bit of discussion, The Lighthouse in Economics. The wiki summary gives you the gist:

This paper challenges the traditional view that lighthouses are examples of public goods by showing that privately owned lighthouses existed in England. Coase aligned lighthouses more with club goods because they are excludable by way of charging port fees. Stopping short of a full analysis, the paper is generally viewed as an excellent insight into the dimensions of public goods and an invitation by Coase for a full economic analysis of the lighthouse.

This is usually seen as a defense of markets. Just because something is a non-excludable good, it doesn’t follow that it can’t possibly be provided by private means. In Coase’s case, he found that lighthouses can be privately owned.

I think there’s a flip side to this kind of argument. Just as public goods might be privately provided, many services can be satisfactorily provided by other sorts of non-private institutions. My argument isn’t about excludable goods, it’s about one of Coase’s empirical observations. In Coase’s article, he mentions the existence of private, public, and hybrid lighthouses. Obviously, there are a variety of political coalitions that support these arrangements.

So I present an anti-theorem*: The institutions that can provide a public good at some minimal level are varied. For each institutional arrangement, there is likely some coalition that is willing to vote/pay for it.  In other words, nations probably have multiple market/political equilibria that can generate a wide range of sustainable policies. Furthermore, inertia will guarantee that these varied policies will have a considerable life span. The take home point is not to think about policies as optimal technical solutions. Instead, one should think first about the relative strength of the coalitions available when the institution was created and the range of supportable outcomes.

* An anti-theorem: An additional observation that is intended to undermine an earlier insight. In this case, Coase was trying to make way for market based solutions to public goods problems. My point is that the range of observed organizational forms indicates that there’s no particular reason to believe that the market solution will be popular, given that it’s just one of a range of solutions, each with differing, possibly superior, economic and political attributes.

I was rereading him a bit over the weekend, though. Ian Craib once remarked that Talcott Parsons’ approach to social theory put him in mind of an office clerk who was too intelligent for his job, and so passed the time by devising ever more complicated ways to file the very dull paperwork he was assigned. Luhmann, of course, felt that Parsons was not nearly abstract enough. I was struck by Luhmann’s opening remarks, “Instead of a Preface to the English Edition”, of Social Systems:

This is not an easy book. It does not accommodate those who prefer a quick and easy read, yet do not want to die without a taste of systems theory. This holds for the German text, too. If one seriously undertakes to work out a comprehensive theory of the social and strives for sufficient conceptual precision, abstraction and complexity in the conceptual architecture are unavoidable. Among the classical authors, Parsons included, one finds a regrettable carelessness in conceptual questions—as if ordinary language were all that is needed to create ideas or even texts. … Translating the book into English multiplies the difficulties, because English, unlike German, does not permit one to transform unclarities into clarities by combining them in a single word. Instead, they must be spread out into phrases. From the perspective of English, German appears unclear, ambiguous, and confusing. But when the highest imperative is rigor and precision, it makes good sense to allow ambiguities to stand, even deliberately to create them, in order to indicate that in the present context further distinctions or specifications are not important.

Where have I heard this sort of attitude before? Here is the “Preface to the English-Language Edition” of Distinction*:

In its form, too, this book is “very French”. This will be understood if the reader accepts that, as I try to show, the mode of expression characteristic of a cultural production always depends on the laws of the market in which it is offered … [T]he style of the book, whose long, complex sentences may offend—constructed as they are with a view to reconstituting the complexity of the social world in a language capable of holding together the most diverse things while setting them in rigorous perspective—stems partly from the endeavour to mobilize all the resources of the traditional modes of expression, literary, philosophical, or scientific, so as to say things that were de facto or de jure excluded from them, and to prevent the reading from slipping back into the simplicities of the smart essay or the political polemic.

If you are like me, this sort of thing makes you want to find the nearest Grand Theorist and beat them to death with a copy of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Confessing such irritation, of course, forces one to play the role either of positivist philistine or plain-speaking old blowhard — an unpleasant choice of critical positions which, I daresay, was just what Bourdieu had in mind when he had the barefaced cheek to type the passage above. Luhmann plays the same game. But I wonder whether an unwillingness to accommodate the simple-minded is a wise strategy for someone who cares have his work remembered at all. Even Hume took the trouble to condense and then rewrite his Treatise after it fell dead-born from the press.

__
* Which did make it onto the syllabus. Draw your own conclusions.

A number of recent conversations have revolved around the following issue: how, exactly, does one count organizations? If I wanted to do my own population level study, how do I develop a list of all relevant organizations? For the sake of argument, let’s assume you have a decent definition of the population. You know an organization of type X when you see it. There are number of strategies you can employ to build a census or sample:

1. Publicly certified organizations: In some cases, organizations might be required to register themselves with the government. Political action committees, for example, must be registered. There may also be accreditation: an organization needs the state or some other group to sanction them. Then some government (or quasi-gov’t) organization will likely have a list of all orgs in your population.
2. “People friendly” organizations: These are organizations which make it possible for outsiders to contact them. For example, they may be listed in directories. They might also be in the telephone book, or they may have a professional association that lists them in a nice book.
3. Visible organizations: Some industries have organizations that are easy to spot. For example, it’s not too hard to find every auto firm that has ever produced a car because when you produce cars, you are covered in all kinds of media.

Ok, that was easy. But some populations are harder to sample or enumerate:

1. Hypernetwork sampling: Consider churches. Some are huge, some are tiny. Some literally exist in garages, others on the internet. And there is no requirement that they register with the government, unless they need tax exempt status. So you take a sample of people and ask them to list their religious affiliations. That’s called “hypernetwork” sampling. Eliminate the repeats, or weight by frequency.
2. Snowball sampling: Some groups don’t want to be found. Or they only serve specific populations and this won’t show up in a random sample of people. Then you find one or two prominent orgs in the field, and ask leaders to list other org. Go to the leaders of those orgs and repeat. If you do this a few times with different starting points, you’ll get a reasonable sample.

As you can see, these is nothing obvious or easy about the task, especially for organizations that are under no obligation to register with the state or otherwise present themselves to the public. It’ll will also depend on your research question. For example, if I wanted to study highly influential antiwar orgs (a project I am currently working on) then I only need to find some threshold and work from there (e.g., registered as a 501(c)). But if I wanted to study the small army of antiwar organizations that exist in every small town then I will not have the luxury of organizational directories. I will need a more aggressive sampling strategy that may involve hypernetwork sampling, media analysis, and so forth. And of course, if I am studying illegitimate or marginalized orgs (e.g., criminal groups or anarchist synidcates), ethnographically driven snowball sampling is my only choice.

Sean mentioned the Economist’s story of a few weeks ago. As I hinted in an earlier post, the identification movement has not been received enthusiastically in all corners of the economics profession. I think it is useful to bear in mind what the alternatives favored by Heckman & Urzua and Deaton are; my guess is that they will sound pretty unappealing to most orgtheory readers.

Among their critics, the knock against identificationistas is that they are “mere statisticians.” The models estimated in the typical IV paper are often loosely inspired by economic theory (horror of horrors, they might even be motivated by sociological or psychological theories!); the parameters identified are not policy-relevant because they cannot be traced in a simple way to equilibrium relationships derived from a model in which agents optimize (to which I answer: “guilty as charged, your honor”).

The alternative is to build a strucural model. The idea is to “take directly to the data” a particular model, as opposed to test some or all of the implications of a model. As an interesting example, I would offer my colleague Tavneet Suri‘s analysis of hybrid corn use among Kenyan farmers.

The great advantage of the structural approach is that one recovers directly estimates of theory-relevant parameters. As a result, researchers can make statements about the welfare effects of a policy, or simulate the effects of alternative policies. This comes at a cost, for all the conclusions require that we maintain the assumption that the particular model estimated is a plausible and not-too-inaccurate approximation of the real world. Personally, I tend to view economic models as parables; there are very few that I would have the confidence to take directly to the data.

Very recently, combining randomization with structural modelling has emerged as an approach delivering the best of worlds. A recent paper by Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, and Stephen Ryan provides a nice illustration. The call for more papers using such “mixed methods” was also one of the punchlines in Guido Imbens’ thoughtful reply to Deaton (2009) and Heckman & Urzua (2009).

The point made by Sean in an earlier post is well-taken. I offer the following, possibly apocryphal quote from David Romer:

Good papers in economics have three characteristics: A viewpoint. A lever. A result.

I think this is not limited to economics. And it is a useful lens through which to understand research based on the “pick the data carefully” approach. In such papers (in addition to Isabel’s magnum opus, I also think of Roberto Fernandez’s study of skill-biased technological change in a single plant), the careful picking *is* the lever.

A world in which the only type of acceptable lever is a valid instrumental variable would be an intellectually poorer world. At the same time, picking and twisting strategies are potentially complements, not substitutes.

An orgtheory-relevant illustration of the pick & twist approach is Scott Stern‘s analysis of wage-setting in the labor market for pharmaceutical scientists. Scott not only picks the data carefully; he also chooses to conduct the study at the job offer level, rather than the individual level. And he demonstrates how fully controlling for individual heterogeneity overturns the conclusions that would have been reached in an individual-level research design [to this day, this paper remains one of my all-time favorites].

First off, thanks to the orgtheory crew for inviting me on as a guest blogger.  I am clearly the oldest one in the room by a couple of decades, which reminds me of that Mos Def concert I attended a couple of years ago. I can only hope that blogging does not lead to Twitter and piercings.

It has recently come to light that major drug companies routinely contract with ghostwriters to draft journal submissions favorable to the drug companies’ products and then shop them around to high-status researchers to serve as their “authors.”  The most recent example is Wyeth, which evidently paid for over two dozen published papers (at $25K a pop) supporting the use of hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women.  Wyeth sold $2 billion per year of such drugs in 2001.  The following year, Wyeth’s sales plummeted when a large Federal study found that hormone replacement drugs increased the risk of cancer, heart disease, and stroke.

Wyeth was far from alone, as apparently ghost-written journal articles are an open secret in the industry, widely used as a marketing device by big pharma companies for drugs ranging from fen-phen (which causes heart damage) to Vioxx (which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke).  In fact, Merck funded the creation of a faux-journal in Australia, the “Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine,” which ran for 3 years to push its pain reliever Vioxx until the drug was removed from the market.

Top medical schools are rife with researchers who have attached their names to articles that, in some cases, they have barely read.  Some journals have adopted policies requiring the disclosure of financial relationships, and Sen. Grassley is attempting to use NIH funding as a lever to stop the practice.  But the prior scientific record, going back at least a dozen years, evidently contains hundreds of articles that are effectively marketing propaganda for drug companies.

I had two divergent reactions to this revelation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Freakonomics blog hosted a forum of a number of scholars addressing the question, “How much do protests matter?” The consensus seems to be that protests matter, but not always in the ways we expect. Protests matter much more for their cumulative effect than for the direct effect of any single protest. My favorite answer (not surprisingly) comes from David Meyer of UC-Irvine’s sociology department. An excerpt:

A protest is a signal about who you are, what you want, and what else you might do…When people protest, they tell authorities that they’re unhappy about something, and implicitly threaten to do more than protest: vote, contribute money, lobby, set up a picket, blockade a clinic, or try to blow up a building. Opponents and allies in government make judgments about how strong and widely held demonstrators’ grievances are. Demonstrators can force leaders to explain, again and again, what they’re doing and why….Demonstrators also signal to other citizens who might share their views that they are not alone, that things could be otherwise, and that they might be able to do something about it. The large national event that receives coverage in The New York Times reflects hundreds of smaller, less-visible actions and meetings in church basements and living rooms around the country, as people develop the temerity to think they can change the world. Sometimes they can.

I like the idea of saying that protests are signals. It corresponds with Spence’s definition of signals. The costlier a protest is to organize, the more value it should have in the eyes of third parties.  I also like thinking of protests as signals because it suggests that protests are informational. One of the main functions of protests is to communicate new information about a social issue to a broader public (even if only to let others know that some people are really pissed off about this issue!). If you just can’t get enough of protests (and believe me, I understand the fascination), I wrote a post addressing this question a few months ago.

I’m teaching graduate social theory this fall. Which is to say, next week. Here’s a first cut at the syllabus. Duke has a one- rather than two-semester theory requirement (though this is partially offset by the way my colleague Jim Moody teaches the Proseminar), which makes designing the course a bit tricky. I remain dissatisfied with the current version. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

President Obama has been invoking the phrase “New Foundation” when he talks about the economy.  The term implies that there was an “old foundation” and that we are now in need of something to take its place.  I think that is exactly right.  But what that vision is or should be has so far not been articulated.  That’s particularly true when it comes to growing, maintaining and rebuilding the country’s innovation and manufacturing capabilities.  Its time we start giving it some serious thought.

Read the rest of this entry »

For previous orgtheory posts on college rankings: b-schools, sociology PhD programs, b-schools again,Sauder on the SAT/ETS.

Inside Higher Ed has a nice article on the annual US News college ranking. As to be expected for the rest of my natural life, two or three schools jockey for top spot based on a bizarre weighting of good and bad quality measures. But the Inside Higher Ed crew has a nice article where they examined the survey forms submitted by 48 public institutions. According to “Reputation without Rigor” by Stephanie Lee, a cursory inspection shows fairly little gaming, but a lot of poorly completed surveys. A few choice clips:

Among those that did provide their responses, several revealed major oddities. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the provost’s most recent peer assessment form gave the highest possible rating, “distinguished,” to just two institutions: its own and the New School.

To every other university but one, Madison’s response gave the second-lowest rating, “adequate.” Those 260 “adequate” institutions included Harvard, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Only Arizona State University scored below all the rest, given the lowest rating of “marginal.”

This news surprised Julie Underwood, then-interim provost, when informed by Inside Higher Ed this month. That’s because she didn’t fill out the survey submitted in her name. As many other officials do, she sent it to an administrator to complete on her behalf — in this case, Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning, who had never filled it out before. Underwood did not give her input or approval before he returned it to U.S. News.

Brower says he was responding as neutrally as possible to a “bad survey” and an “impossible question” that have gained what he views as a “shocking” degree of importance. Universities are “good in some areas and not good in others,” he says, and catch-all ratings ignore those nuances.

“I first looked at this and started considering every institution and trying to fill it out that way. And I thought, if anyone were to ever ask me this and say, ‘Why did you put this institution as strong versus good?,’ I wouldn’t have an answer,” says Brower, who has been researching higher education for 25 years and became vice provost in 2007. “That was to me less defensible than saying, ‘It’s a mixed bag, here’s a neutral response.’ ”

Brower’s idea of a neutral response was to deem every institution “adequate” — which he interpreted to mean “good enough” — except for those he says he knows extremely well. Having worked at Madison since 1986, he says he is “very confident about saying that we’re an excellent, distinguished school.” As for the New School, Brower says he admires its focus on writing seminars, internships and other programs aimed at improving learning outcomes. One of his sons is a rising sophomore at the New School, but Brower says he has long been impressed with the university, regardless of family ties.

He would not elaborate on why he singled out Arizona State as “marginal,” saying, “They were hit very hard by the economy and I know their program and felt like I couldn’t rate them just kind of neutrally.”

Some other odd balls from the batch: Read the rest of this entry »

Please welcome Jerry Davis to orgtheory.net!

We’re excited to have Jerry guest blogging here.  He is the Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.   Jerry has made some foundational contributions to organization theory and sociology — in the areas of networks, social movements, governance etc etc.  Most recently Jerry has published a provocative book, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (Oxford University Press).  The current issue of the Academy of Management Perspectives has an excellent article that summarizes central themes from the book.“The Rise and Fall of Finance and the End of the Society of Organizations.”

You can learn more about Jerry’s research on his web site. Again, great to have you here Jerry!

Cesar Chavez and Marshall Ganz

A lot of research on social movement outcomes tries to explain under what conditions movements are likely to experience success. Weight is given to the movement context (i.e., political opportunity structures) or the kinds of tactics used by the movement. There are fewer studies examining the effects of leadership on movement outcomes. Marshall Ganz is the major exception. Ganz, at least partly due to his own experience as a labor organizer, studies how leadership and organizing capabilities affects movements’ chances of success. Leadership may explain why even movements that lack good political opportunities and that are relatively powerless are capable of shaping their environment and improving the lives of their members. Resources matter, of course, but resourcefulness (i.e., knowing how to use those resources) also matters (see Ganz’s 2000 AJS paper for more on this; also see my previous post on Ganz and organizing).

The importance of leadership to movements is also the theme of Ganz’s new book, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement. The book is truly unique given Ganz’s perspective as both a social movement theorist and as someone who was actively involved in most stages of the farm worker movement. Ganz gained his initial experience working in the civil rights movement during Freedom Summer but soon thereafter he joined Chavez’s forces, eventually becoming the director of organizing for the United Farm Workers. Because of his intimate knowledge of the events and internal happenings of the movement, Ganz provides a detailed and rich history of how it all happened. But he also takes the time to step back and analyze the movement from a sociological perspective. I doubt I’ve read a book like this before.

Ganz’s view of leadership is based on the idea that the main function of leaders is to set strategy, a combination of targeting, tactics, and timing. Unlike much of the strategy literature in organizational research (in which strategy has become equated with performance outcomes), Ganz is really interested in how leaders formulate strategy and adapt their strategies to fit the new challenges that face an organization.

Strategy is a verb – something you do, not something you have. An ongoing interactive process of experimentation, learning, and adaptation, we strategize as we act. Because the unknown is almost by definition such a big factor in social movements, we often can’t get the information we need to make good strategic choices until we begin to act…So, in discussing effective strategy, I refer not to a single tactic, but to a whole series of tactics through which strategies may turn short-term opportunity into long-term gain. And long-term gain is most securely won when one not only acquires more resources (higher wages, for instance) but also generates new institutional rules that govern future conflicts in ways that privilege one’s interests (pg. 10).

Read the rest of this entry »

The Economist airs some inter-disciplinary dirty laundry within the identification movement.  On one side, the forces aligned behind isolating causality through the use of instrumental variables:

Often derived from a quirk in the environment or in public policy, [instrumental variables] affect the outcome (a person’s earnings, say, to return to the original example) only through their influence on the input variable (in this case, the number of years of schooling) while at the same time being uncorrelated with what is left out (scholastic ability). The job of instrumental variables is to ensure that the omission of factors from an analysis—in this example, the impact of scholastic ability on the amount of schooling—does not end up producing inaccurate results.

On the other are leading lights such as James Heckman and Angus Deaton:

According to Mr Deaton, using such instruments to estimate causal parameters is like choosing to let light “fall where it may, and then proclaim[ing] that whatever it illuminates is what we were looking for all along.”

Their alternative: model the selection effect directly by first predicting, for instance, whether a woman is likely to want to leave the market for some period of time to raise a family and then use that model as a control when you estimate discrimination.

Here’s the rub: the article poses these as an either-or choice.  But choosing to employ a selection model involves its own trade-offs. More importantly, instrumental variables and selection models are hardly the only options available.

Read the rest of this entry »

A basic question for social studies of policy is this: which policies go together? Why does one person believe policy X and Y? In other words, why should flat taxes and gay marriage go together (or not)? For a while I believed the following answer:

Ideology: People tend to be attracted to simple world views that assign value to policies that clearly promote that world view. For example, libertarians support policies that minimize government growth. E.g., they nearly always oppose taxes. Socialists promote worker rights and restraints on corporations.

But I realized that policies are bundled in some weird ways. People can say, “I’m conservative/liberal” and adhere to policies that seem to contradict the stated ideology. So now I believe this:

Pragmatic Policy Networks: The same person can promote policies X and Y for multiple reasons. Some reasons are ideological, but these may not be as important as other reasons. For example, partisanship may matter a lot. If a Republican president promotes X, then other Republicans will assimilate that as a “conservative idea.” Thus, policies may not be linked on their relation to abstract goals, but they may be linked by the need to build coalitions, support leaders, or whatever.

Once I accepted the pragmatic view, it has been way easier for me to understand the weird combinations of policies described as “liberal” or “conservative.” In orgtheory talk, policies, actors, and ideologies are “loosely coupled things.”

The new Contexts is out and it has some serious orgtheory in it:

• Our own Brayden has a cover story discussing activism and corporate behavior. A must read.
• Katherine Chen has an article about her ethnography of the Burning Man organization.
• Bruce Carruthers has an article on the economic institutions behind the current financial crisis.
• Editors Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen wonder if it’s really true that we’re all socialists!
• Lane Kenworthy discusses popular misconceptions about taxation.

In the culture section, I have an article discussing the slow disappearance of the traditional paper based library and an artist who documents that process. Many other good ones: Barbara Risman discusses why public policy needs social science;  Jonathan Markovitz discusses art responding to Abu Ghraib; and there are many others.

Only go below the fold if you crave ASA escapades…

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another engaging TED talk, this one by Janine Benyus on biomimicry.  And, be sure to also check out her asknature.org project which features a catalogue of functions found in nature along with potential applications for design: the biomimicry taxonomy.

Thou Shall Not Select on the Dependent Variable…Even if your heart is in the right place. Even if you are addressing the broader public.

Megan McArdle has an interesting post detailing her reasons to oppose the Obama Administration’s plans to reform the health care system. She makes the reasonable point that the rest of the world free-rides on the US health care system, in the sense that it is the rents earned by pharmaceutical firms/device makers/medical professionals in America that provide incentives for R&D investment. Because I think there is more than a grain of truth to the general thrust of our argument, I’d like to make three counterpoints.

First, there is a particular direction to the technological change that is induced by the waste in our health care system; for example, there is just not a lot of incentive to develop cost-reducing technologies. This point was made a long time ago by Burton Weisbrod, but it bears repeating.

Second, Megan seems to assume that expected profit opportunities are solely determined by future prices. In fact, expected health care expenditures is what should enter the entrepreneurial calculus. Any reform that significantly broadens access to health care could have a positive impact on pharmaceutical profits, even if pressures are brought to bear on the level of pharmaceutical prices. Two papers in the literature suggest that “quantity shocks” can spur pharmaceutical innovation: Amy Finkelstein studies the impact of reimbursement mandates for certain types of vaccines; Acemoglu and Lin look at the impact of population aging on the type of pharmaceutical products being developed.

Finally, while I have no doubt that price controls, holding expenditures constant, would have a negative effect on innovation incentives, we should wrangle with the magnitude. In Megan’s welfare calculus, only the suffering of tomorrow’s patients appear to receive a positive weight. Whether that’s correct depends on the discount rate (one could argue it should be zero), as well as on the elasticity of R&D investment to expected prices. Nailing down that parameter would seem to be rather important before making grand claims regarding the optimality of reform.

My colleague Jim Moody sent along this interesting graph. He took all papers cited by an ASR, AJS, or Social Forces publication since 1999. He then mapped the top 50 such citations (actually 53, because there were some ties) as a citation and co-citation network. Here’s the result.

Some quick observations. First, reading anti-clockwise from the right, it looks like the core of the field is Stratification, Networks, Organizations, Social Movements — and HLM methods. Second, despite Sociology’s alleged inability to forget its founders, only one piece of work in the Top 50 citations was published before 1965, and that’s Weber (1922). Third, it’s great that the visualization shows Swidler (1986) and Sewell (1992) right where they belong — trying to bridge structure (on the right) with agency (on the left).