orgtheory.net

Call for papers on research about the organizations of musical performance:

American Orchestras Summit at the University of Michigan: Creating Partnerships in Research and Performance

Co-Hosted by the League of American Orchestras, University Musical Society, the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, and Arts Enterprise

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

While orchestras and universities share many goals from great music making to transformational education, collaborations between academics and institutions of performance are infrequent and fleeting. On January 26–28, 2010, a landmark conference concerning the American orchestra will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to address the division between practitioners and scholars. Its goal is collaboration by leveraging the tools of academic research to address questions of mutual concern to musicologists, organizational theorists, cultural leaders, arts administrators, musicians, and other stakeholders. We will explore two issues in particular: 1) organizational structures and strategies— past and present—that have aided (or hindered) orchestras’ success and 2) the symbiotic relationship between an orchestra and its community. We hope that by considering the institutional history and practices of the American orchestra, we can better understand and address the challenges and opportunities of the present.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dana Fisher, political sociologist at Columbia, has two podcasts on her book Activism, Inc., at Future Majority blog and Stanford University Press blog.

Thanks to Jerry Davis for a provocative and engaging set of blog posts.  All of Jerry’s posts can be found by clicking here.  And, be sure to keep track of Jerry’s prolific work, here’s his web site.  (Also check out his recent book, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America.)

Thanks again Jerry!

The recent and abrupt end of that whole “shareholder capitalism” fad that swept the US indicates that we are at an interesting turning point in the organization of the economy.  Surprisingly, this may be an opportunity for organization theory to have a place in creating a more humane society in the US.

My previous posts (and recent writings) have described developments that undermine the idea of a society of organizations in the US.  One is the disaggregation of production into an OEM model, where the parts needed to create a (temporary) organization are widely available (even to a guy in Irvine with an idea for cheap LCD televisions to compete with Sony and Samsung).  Another is the hegemony, and then the downfall, of the shareholder value model.

Meanwhile, back at organization theory, the dominance of neo-institutionalism has rendered the field largely irrelevant to any practical concerns.  We’ve got a lot of fun exposes of hypocrisy, documentation of diffusion processes dressed up in sociological mumbo-jumbo, and arid discussions of agency-structure dialectics.  But our understanding of organization design – formerly the practical application of organization theory — has languished, and other fields have stepped into the breach (particularly economics and information systems). 

But if the rightful domain of shareholder capitalism has retrenched, as I believe it has, then this might be an opening to rehabilitate organization theory, and even neoinstitutionalism, in the service of creating more participative enterprises.  Institutionalists describe the process by which entrepreneurs draw on the parts available (strewn around the landscape, in Meyer and Rowan’s imagery) to create organizations or projects.  One of the recurring themes of the literature is the role of bricolage (building “with the ruins” available), while another is the pervasive use of analogies and metaphors in creating new forms.  (“It’s like a McDonald’s drive-through for kidney transplants.”)  This kind of thing can be taught, say, to paying customers in b-schools.

If I’m right about the end of the “society of organizations,” or at least the end of the dominance of 20th-century-style encompassing corporations, then we may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of new organizational forms.  This time, however, we may be able to escape the utter dominance of shareholder value.  It’s happened before — consider the explosion of cooperative forms created in response to the first wave of corporatization, documented by the estimable Marc Schneiberg.  We still have a surprising number of such non-corporate forms around, even in the US: State Farm Insurance (a mutual), Land ‘o Lakes (a producer cooperative), REI (a consumer cooperative) and the 8000 non-profit credit unions that enroll an amazing 86 million Americans.  (It turns out the US is already socialist, but doesn’t know it.)  And how about Wikipedia, Linux, and the various social movements that generate spontaneous collective action in the absence of a profit motive (e.g., Iran’s “Twitter revolution”)?

Another world is possible, and Art Stinchcombe is its prophet. We’ve been dealt a hand of fantastic new technologies for organizing, and are temporarily free of some of the old constraints in which all enterprises have to end up with an IPO.  Organization theorists can midwife a new period of experimentation by compiling our “flea market” of alternative organization types, and mashing them up with new technologies that lower the costs of coordination.   Examples include Kiva (www.kiva.com), which allows people to do individual micro-lending, or sourceforge.org, where you can post or contribute to open-source projects.  (Incidentally, I’d love examples of this, if people have them.) 

So, to the barricades, or the organization design classroom!  I’m waiting to see that iPhone “democracy app” that turns GM into a kibbutz.

From an essay by start-up guru Paul Graham:

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.

It wasn’t always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space.

Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.

How to wean your self from too much stuff?

The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don’t use much because it’s too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For example, the “good china” so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that it’s fun to use, but that one must be especially careful not to break it.

Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

Definitely worth the read.

Previous installments: strat/work, education, org studies,  culture, urban, soc psych, demography.

This week – political sociology. I don’t mean political sociology as in the “personal is political.” I mean political sociology as in stuff that happens in and around states. So here I would include: voter behavior/public opinion; states; political parties; interest groups/social movements; studies of citizenship and political status; regional and global institutions; revolution studies; the law and policy formation.

In this vein, I’ll nod to my colleagues. Indiana is not traditionally known for political sociology, but the last ten years have drawn an extremely strong group in political sociology: Clem Brooks (public opinion), Brian Steensland (welfare state studies), Tim Bartley (movements/institutions/state regulation of industry), Ho-fung Hung (the Chinese state, especially early modern), Ethan Michelson (contemporary China & the law), Art Alderson (the politics of stratification), Paulette Lloyd (global institutions, network analysis, the UN), Pam Walters (states and schooling), and myself (social movements, antiwar politics, the Black power movement).

Let me draw attention to a department that has popped up on this blog: UC San Diego. Usually known as a fortress of culture and science studies, they’ve also cultivated a strong group in political sociology: Amy Binder (movements & culture), Isaac Martin (tax politics – see my book review here), Kwai Ng (language & law – my book review here), Ivan Evans (movements), David Fitzgerald (ethnography), Jeffrey Haydiu (movements), Martha Lampland (political economy), Richard Madsen (China), John Skrenty (policy/law), Carlos Waisman (Latin America/development), Leon Zamosc (movements).

Add more political sociology depts in the comments.

In my previous posts, I’ve discussed the issues of analyzing “unusual” cases,  gaining access to organizations and dealing with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) about human subjects.  Now I’ll turn to the topic of conducting ethnographic research.  Later, I’ll follow up with a post about writing up research.

Here are some of the readings that I recommend to fellow colleagues and assign to students about how to conduct ethnographic research.  In alphabetical order:

Becker, Howard S.  1998.  Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  Stuck on something in your analysis?  Becker suggests several ways of unraveling puzzling phenomena.

Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw.  1995.  Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.  Consult this book for different ways to write up fieldnotes.

Geertz, Clifford.  1977.  “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geertz reveals the chain of events that allow him and his wife to gain access to a community.

Harrington, Brooke.  2002.  “Obtrusiveness as Strategy in Ethnographic Research.”  Qualitative Sociology 25(1): 49-61.   Harrington analyzes how Michael Schwalbe (Unlocking the Iron Cage, 1996, Oxford University Press) conducted his research as an observer and participant  in the men’s movement.

IDEO Method Cards. 2002.   IDEO, a product design firm which uses observations of consumers to refine their designs, produced this deck of 51 cards about the research and design process.  Handy for those who want to brainstorm.

Lamont, Michele and Patricia White.  2005.  Workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Qualitative Research.  An attempt to set interdisciplinary standards for qualitative research under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.

Malinowski, Bronsilaw.  1989.  A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.  An anthropologist’s diary reveals the ambivalent feelings and physical distress that a researcher might experience while in the field.

National Science Foundation.  2004.  Workshop on the Scientific Foundations of Qualitative Research.

Weiss, Robert S.  1994.  Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies.  New York: Free Press.  This book covers the fundamentals of conducting interviews.

Yin, Robert K.  2009.  Case Study Research Design and Methods.  4th ed.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.  The go-to “totem” for case studies.

What are the resources that you would recommend to colleagues and/or students on how to conduct ethnographic research?  In the comments, you can suggest books, articles, or other documents.

From Computaional Legal Studies, the entire US code as a citation network.

UPDATE: Isaac did some additional analysis for ASQ, ASR, SF, etc — really interesting.

Isaac Waisberg (Stanford WTO PhD student) has put together this figure on average American Journal of Sociology (AJS) article length.  Average article length ranges from some 14-15 or so pages in the late 1800s to some 40+ pages now; so, average article length has almost tripled. I’m not quite sure what this tells us (the accumulation of knowledge?), though it’s sort of interesting.

And, more here, including a number of references and comparison of AJS to the American Economic Review.  Referencing and page numbers appear to have remained relatively stable in the flagship journal of economics.

A lot of people have been trashing macroeconomists for not predicting the current recession. I think it’s a bit of a silly criticism, considering the nature of the problem. The best response I have read is that macroeconomics is like seismology. Predicting earthquakes is nearly impossible, but there is still much to be learned from studying them.

I’d like to dig into the analogy. Why is macroeconomics like seismology? There are a few important similarities:

• Unobservable variables: It’s hard to measure what happens under the earth and it’s hard to measure complex flows of money and credit in the economy.
• Qualitative phase transitions: Physical systems can suddenly go from seemingly stable to collapse (e.g., think calm weather to storm, over a day, or no movement to earthquake). Social systems (including the economy) can do the same (e.g., riots break out, financial panics occur). As any physicist can tell you, this is *really* hard to model.
• Connected parts: The economy (like an ecosystem or weather system) has all these interconnected parts. It’s common knowledge that recessions often start in one sector and ripple out. Sadly, it’s also common knowledge in engineering that systems with loops and feedback can be very hard to model.
• Aggregation problems: It is well known in physical science that “scaling” is a problem. Any freshman can easily model two billiard balls, but modeling dozens, or millions, is beyond most science.

Let me add a purely social science point about macroeconomics:

• The elements of the system can choose to change the system. The people in the economy can change the rules of the game. What if electrons had attitudes? It’d be a modeling nightmare!

There’s also a statistical point. Recessions are relatively infrequent and hard to compare, kind of like the study of political revolutions in political sociology.

Taken together, it’s easy to see why micro & macro are vastly different creatures because they lie at the different ends of the complexity scale. Micro really is like freshman physics. The elements of the system are simple, and the equations relating the elements of the system can often be solved in nice closed forms. There are lots of nice theorems to help you keep count of the exchanges (e.g, the welfare theorems, general equilibrium theorems).

Macro is the opposite – everything that makes microeconomics a tractable science doesn’t apply. Nothing at all is simple. Tons of actors. Actors who invent things (like financial instruments) that change the system.  For that reason, I have a huge amount of scientific sympathy for macroeconomics.

Higher education is a split system. On the one hand, you have elite research universities and liberal arts colleges. These institutions have a built in market demand – people want the prestige of spending time with leading thinkers. On the other hand, you have the other 95% of the higher education system: the army of community colleges, state colleges, and technical colleges. These colleges survive on a simple model: they sell basic training at a high price (a few hundred $ per credit) and the labor is cheap (often grad students or adjuncts).

Now, as reported by the Washington Monthly, there is a serious challenge to the system: a firm called StraighterLine now offers credit for $99/month. The concept is simple. For $99, you log into a web site and take as many courses you want via podcasts and videos. Instructors help you out via email and messages. Chat rooms help you work with other students. Study as fast or slow as you want. Most courses count for credit at real colleges, who have partnered with StraighterLine to provide instructors.

Though they overstate the point a bit, the Washington Monthly article is correct in pointing out that this firm undermines the business model of the community and state colleges. Why spend thousands of dollars, when you can get your math-accounting-econ courses efficiently done from the comfort of your own home? Working on the weekends, a lot of folks could do three or four basic courses for about $300. Huge savings – not just on tuition, but also on travel, lodging, books, etc. Sooner or later, people will realize that a lot of basic education can be done in this manner.

The teaching schools will change, but they will survive. Many teach vocational topics that probably can’t go online: police training/forensics, teacher training, nursing, etc. But it will be a different world when millions go the world of virtual education.

Photo credit: Steve McConnell / UC Berkeley. Photo date: 1/8/2007 12:02:36 PM. Courtesy University of California, Berkeley.

One of the key insights I picked up from Jerry’s book (see related posts here, here, and here) is that the large organization is no longer the central unit of society. By saying that a “society of organizations” is dead, Jerry is tackling Perrow’s thesis that large organizations can explain pretty much everything we see in social life. Here is a bit from Perrow’s 1991 paper “A society of organizations.”

I argue that the appearance of large organizations in the United States makes organizations the key phenomenon of our time, and thus politics, social class, economics, technology, religion, the family, and even social psychology take on the character of dependent variables. Their subject matter is conditioned by the presence of organizations to such a degree that, increasingly, since about 1820 in the United States at least, the study of organizations must precede their own inquiries….[I]n my grandest proposition I argue that organizations are the key to society because large organizations have absorbed society. They have vacuumed up a good part of what we have always thought of as society, and made organizations, once a part of society, into a surrogate of society (725-726).

He clarifies further (providing more fuel for Jerry’s fire):

By “large organizations absorbing society” I mean that activities that once were performed by relatively autonomous and usually small informal groups (e.g. family, neighborhood) and small autonomous organizations (small businesses, local government, local church) are now per- formed by large bureaucracies. This is the “pure” case of absorption – the large organization with many employees. As a result, the organization that employs many people can shape their lives in many ways, most of which are quite unobtrusive and subtle, and alternative sources of shaping in the community decline (726).

It is this last aspect that has changed the most. If public corporations have been broken up into their constituent parts, the large organization (i.e., the large employer), no longer exists as it once did. What is it replaced with?  While we know that businesses have become disaggregated into smaller units of larger supply chains, like interchangeable Lego parts, the characteristics of those organizations are fairly unexplored.

Read the rest of this entry »

My undergraduate studies were in a science field and I’ve come to really appreciate that education. Aside from the particular topic (math), I also gained a basic scientific literacy. Why? Because most science B.A. programs require or strongly encourage the following: calculus, physics, chemistry, computer programming. Even though you were required to know one field in some depth, you were expected to know basic ideas from other fields. And of course, many applied & topical areas (engineering, geology, medicine, etc) require at least basic knowledge in all these areas.

However, I have found that is not the case in the social sciences. Students may develop a broad social science education, but most programs do not require it, nor do faculty really encourage it. So you have the bizarre situation of econ majors who have never read a real history tome, or sociologists who don’t know what expected utility is.

So what would a “core” social science curriculum look like if it were designed to be basic knowledge for any social scientist? In no particular order:

• Psychology and decisions: Preferences and choices from multiple perspectives – micro-economics; bounded rationality; personality psychology; prospect theory; tool kit/situational psychology; etc.
• Social Structure: Theories of hierarchies, organizations, networks, states, and other “macro structure.”
• Classics of Social Thought: Start with Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Locke and move forward. Maybe add a follow up semester on recent theory.
• Meaning and culture: Definitions of culture and subjective in various disciplines.
• Research & explanation: One semester quantitative, one semester qualitative.

You’ll notice that most components already exist at nearly every university. The main thing is simply to insist that these ideas represent the core of the social sciences and that everyone be exposed. It’s not too crazy to ask that a social science major know what a demand curve is, or that they read classic ethnography. Wouldn’t we laugh if a biology major didn’t know Newton’s Laws?

This curriculum is designed to segue into the majors as normally imagined. The soc major would be a few more courses on issues such as inequality and race. The poli sci major could continue reading political theory and apply decision theory to voting and policy making. It’s also flexible in that social science develops, much can be substituted.

In her first hearing, Justice Sotomayor said something that startled a number of observers:

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court’s majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges “created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said. “There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”

Of course, pundits were quick to point out that you can’t expect much based on a single comment, but it is interesting. American law treats actions channeled through organizations as fundamentally different than those coming from individuals. If Sotomayor’s comment does reflect a systematic skepticism of corporate rights, then one might ask where she draws the line. Limited liability? Protection for public servants? Is an appeal to public interest the basis for preserving some corporate rights? It’ll be interesting to see if this issues pops again and how various justices handle it.

Jerry Davis’s new book will certainly challenge your way of thinking, especially if you’re a dyed in the wool organizational theorist. His book, along with his article “The rise and fall of finance and the end of the society of organizations,” contests the view that corporations are a core structure in society.  Although they were once social institutions, having been infused with value and a kind of “soulful” meaning to communities and wielding massive economic and political power, corporations are now reducible to contracts, relational or otherwise. The reason for this change was that society itself transformed. People reconceptualized the organization as something other than an institution with indebtedness to its society and members and as something less than a political juggernaut. Through legal changes, deregulation, and changes in corporate and investor practices, the corporation is now nothing more than a legal shell that houses economic exchange of various types. If you don’t believe this, Jerry would probably point to the securitization of corporate assets, noting that everything about a corporate entity can be bought and sold in small chunks on a securities exchange. The reconceptualization of corporations as bundles of assets has reduced their responsibility to anyone other than their shareholders. This gradual drift from “welfare capitalism” has been accompanied by a deterioration of employee commitment to corporations.

In his book Jerry provides an intriguing historical account of this change. Some important facts stick out in his analysis. 1) Due to the takeover wave of the 1980s and subsequent changes in agglomeration, the average company is now much less diversified than it was 30 years ago. In 1980 the median large manufacturer operated in three industries; by 1995 the number of industries had been cut to one. 2) Employment concentration has weakened over time. In 1960 the top ten firms employed roughly 5% of the U.S. workforce. In 1980 this number declined to 4.6% and by 2000 the top ten employed less than 3%. 3) The largest firms today, like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, have high employee turnover rates, especially when compared to the old large employers in manufacturing industries. The median employee in transportation manufacturing has a tenure of eight years, while the average tenure in the food services industry is 1.5 years. Thus, the more dominant employers in today’s age are less likely to retain their employees than was true in the past. The implication of this is that the social bonds between the corporation and its employees are disintegrating.

Consider this description of the corporation in chapter 3 of his book:

After the bust-ups of the 1980s, the idea that the corporation was nothing but a nexus, and that it had no special connection with its employees, became increasingly true. Firms became adept at retaining contractors rather than hiring permanent employees; outsourcing tasks outside their “core competence;” and engaging in more-or-less temporary alliances rather than vertical integration. The conglomerate had rendered dubious the idea that the corporation had an organic unity: parts came and went through acquisitions and divestitures, and to find a “core” or “essence” to an ITT was a fool’s errand. The network organization took the next logical step: the corporation was not attached to particular parts, or even to particular members. It was, “in a very real sense,” simply a nexus of contracts that existed to create shareholder value (91-92).

Such is the state of the corporation. A bedraggled, ineffectual monster of yesterday. Or is it?

Jerry’s book is  extremely useful I think for pointing out important corporate trends and challenging organizational theorists to adapt to the new economic conditions. And the book also raises important questions, including: if the employment relationship has changed, what function do corporations have in today’s society? Why do we still continue to see corporate hierarchies even in the midst of this reshuffling of parts? Where is the center of power now? Even if corporations are on their way out, what should we make of extensions to their citizenship rights? Who or what should the state regulate or do we live in an era in which regulatory control of corporations (read: anti-trust and competitive practices) makes less sense? Or are we fooling ourselves? Is shareholder value just another shield to justify managerial  policies (policies that may, in fact, benefit only the managerial class)? Who captures wealth in the system described by Jerry? And if corporation is not the primary medium for wealth generation, what should we study – the contract?

Just over a decade ago, going through the IRB process seemed relatively new and simple:
While in graduate school, I took the required research methods class, which included discussions of research ethics. For both my qualifying paper and dissertation, I designed my study and submitted my research plans to Human Subjects, Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB, which reviews research proposals to ensure that the rights and well-being of human subjects are adequately protected. If my memory serves me correctly, a consent forms for interview was not yet standard. However, an anthropology student told me that her book publisher had asked her to get written permission to publish quotes from their interviews. She was having difficulties re-contacting people she had previously interviewed for a study. This made a big enough impression upon me that I developed my own consent form that not only explained my study and interviewees’ rights, but also outlined how the research might be used for future publications. Now, these kinds of forms are standard.

Currently, the IRB process is rationalized, with a “one size fits all” approach:
As a new professor at a state university, I was required to complete and pass multiple-choice quizzes for the on-line course Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). Several of the modules concerned medical research, which is the main “model” for the IRB process.

Because I changed institutions and my original CITI certificate will soon expire, I took a new set of modules and multiple choice quizzes yesterday afternoon. Interestingly, I missed the same trick question that I probably got wrong 3 years ago:

“Where can student researchers and/or student subjects find reliable additional resources regarding the IRB approval process?

A. IRB

B. Student Advisor

C. “Gray’s Anatomy”

D. The Student Union

E. Compliance Office.”

I chose A., but according to CITI, the correct answer is B.

While I have learned a few new esoteric facts (example: educational testing is exempt from review), the main lesson I’ve learned over the years is that IRBs, like many institutions, are demanding more assurances of predictability and rationality. Just like Donald Rumsfeld’s quote about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns,” researchers face an on-going conundrum: anticipate and articulate risk, even before the research has started, and reevaluate and adjust as the research progresses.

Ethnographic research and risk

In their 2004 article “Bureaucracies of Mass Deception: Institutional Review Boards and the Ethics of Ethnographic Research” (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595: 249-263), Charles L. Bosk and Raymond G. De Vries explain how this anticipation of risk is an especially difficult task for ethnographers. Bosk and De Vries also make a number of suggestions, including learning from the example of the Netherlands, which exempts social science research from review, barring “a demonstratable psychological or physical burden” (259).

During my Burning Man research, one of the decisions that I made about risk was (1) whether or not to disguise the Burning Man event, and (2) whether or not to automatically disguise the identities of interviewees. I decided that disguising Burning Man was too difficult given that only one temporary arts event in the desert exists. This decision linked to my next decision: I also decided to give interviewees a choice of whether to have a pseudonym and disguised characteristics. Most chose to use their real names, but a few noted information that they wanted kept confidential or requested that I check with them before using quotes, which I respected. In my writings, I felt that as long as the information conveyed was not potentially harmful to individuals, it was important to use people’s real names in reporting their experiences.

Years later, with the book and articles in print, I revisited that decision. Several follow-up conversations with new volunteers and interviewees reinforced my decision to use real names. One interviewee expressed surprise and delight about reading about creative work that she had forgotten. Another interviewee who no longer volunteers worried that if he returned to the organization, he would be turned away by new volunteers and staffers who were unfamiliar with his previous contributions. A new volunteer recounted to me her realization that an organization would continue, despite her departure, and that no visible trace of her contributions would remain.

A conventional organizational history might reduce these people’s experiences to a few key figures and facts. For new volunteers, the opportunity to read and understand details about their predecessors’ experiences humanizes an otherwise unknowable void. For longtime volunteers and organizers, remembering their own words and experiences provides a much-needed moment to reflect on the past, the present, and the future.

Readers, your comments, please:

(1) Does your institution require you to get a CITI certification or to otherwise demonstrate IRB “competency”?
(2) Your thoughts on the IRB process, particularly in relation to ethnography?
(3) Your or others’ experiences with follow-up or returns to the field?

Shi, Adamic, Tseng, and Clarkson have a cool new article on the impact of interdisciplinary work. Using citations of academic articles and patents, they report the following:

We find that a publication’s citing across disciplines is tied to its subsequent impact. In the case of patents and natural science publications, those that are cited at least once are cited slightly more when they draw on research outside of their area. In contrast, in the social sciences, citing within one’s own field tends to be positively correlated with impact.

It’s a nice article. I recommend that you look at it.

Here’s my comment: We have two views on interdisciplinary work. The skeptics think that most interdisciplinary work fails because you have to water down both sides. The advocates believe in a “structural holes” argument. Group A may benefit from knowing what group B knows. Knowledge may be complimentary.

My personal view is that is that research is a low average/high variance business. Most of the time , we’re better off deepening our knowledge and the cost of inter-disciplinary work is too high. But progress can often be made by taking a gamble on combining ideas. Here’s more evidence for that view:

By plotting mean proximity as a function of impact, we observe that both very low and very high impact papers tend on average to cite outside of their area more often. Since very low impact publications include many publications that cited outside of their discipline but failed to attract notice, we are left with the portion of cited publications where citing outside of ones discipline is positively correlated with impact. These results suggest that citing outside one’s discipline is a gamble. While risking not being cited at all, publications that incorporate work from other disciplines tend to make more significant contributions.

Now, the question is – why are the social sciences the exception here? Knowledge is knowledge. My hunch is that social scientists have a taste for group identity, to take an Akerlof spin on it. An anthropologist cites other anthropologists to show in-group identity, as do most other social scientists (e.g.,  sociologists citing sociologists/econ/etc). Citing too many articles from other fields is interpreted as not being really in the group. If it’s true, then we’re really missing out.

In general, there seem to be to two mindsets in the social sciences. The first I call “precision modeling.” The attitude might be summarized this way:

Social science should focus on simple & clearly defined concepts. Real science is when you formalize these simple concepts into models. The height of empirical research is clear identification of cause and effect mechanisms implied by such models.

The second attitude I call “thick accounts.” Here’s my summary:

Social science should be built around a tool box of flexible concepts. These flexible concepts can be juxtaposed, elaborated and rephrased. The height of empirical research is when researchers can use this tool box to interpret an otherwise opaque complex social domain.

In the first box are folks like modern economists, experimentalists, and generative grammar people. It’s all about seeing first principles and all about tool building. It’s about a style of positivist certainty. A premium is put on tools that extract conceptual clarity. In the second camp, you see qualitative folks, most sociological institutionalists, and historical people. Since formal models usually require simple actors and simple situations, these people can’t stand tool-centric theories that can’t accomadate meaning and eliminate complexity.

Of course, the issue is trade-off. You have to accept generalizability and clarity and dump the overall gestalt. This probably explains the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various social sciences. Economics has good models for how people respond to prices, but they seem to utterly struggle with topics that scream for complexity (e.g., explaining the Great Depression & many macro topics). In contrast, qualitative sciences seem to do better at stuff like discussing cultural change, but I wouldn’t trust ‘em with stuff like tax policy analsyis.

I was reminded of this issue while reading James Jasper’s Getting Your Way. It’s a very nice treatment of conflict, negotiation and related topics. On one level, it’s a discussion of the complexity of conflict: you have corporate actors; evolving goals and pay-offs; etc. On a deeper level, it’s a insightful critique of game theory. Game theory’s biggest insights come from understanding relatively simple situations,  but Jasper argues, convincingly, that the actors and games are evolving and complex. You then have a choice: try to build super fancy models or shift to the “thick accounts” approach where you think about the different mechanisms and how they fit together. In sociology, we usually opt for (b), but in economics you move into a world of math, which may have a tenuous relationship with empirical research.

From a working paper by political scientists Sarah Anzia and Christopher Berry:

We argue that the process of selection into political office is different for women than it is for men, which results in important differences in the performance of male and female legislators once they are elected. If voters are biased against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female candidates will succeed in the electoral process. Furthermore, if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, or if they underestimate their qualifications for office relative to men, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates. We argue that when either or both forms of sex-based selection are present, the women who are elected to office will perform better, on average, than their male counterparts. We test this central implication of the theory by using legislators’ success in delivering federal spending to their home districts as our primary measure of performance. We find that congresswomen secure roughly 9 percent more spending from federal discretionary programs than congressmen. This amounts to a premium of about $49 million per year for districts that send a woman to Capitol Hill. Finally, we find that women’s superiority in securing particularistic benefits does not hurt their performance in policymaking: women also sponsor more bills and obtain more cosponsorship support for their legislative initiatives than their male colleagues.

Politico provides a summary of the research. Perhaps another implication of the theory is that as gender biases become less influential in the election process you’d expect that men and women will become more equitable in their Congressional performance.  I wonder if the same effect holds true among women executives. Are women executives stronger performers relative to their male counterparts?

In this and my upcoming posts, I’ll talk about a few of the many steps that can either advance or stymie a research project.  Since this is my area of specialty, I’ll focus on ethnographic research.  One of the biggest hurdles to ethnographic research is gaining access.  Luckily for my project, the Burning Man organizers immediately gave permission for me to observe their inner workings, including access to meetings that were closed even to insiders.

More researchers have shared how they gained access to their respective field sites, particularly the workplace.  I’ll mention several examples here.

I. Overt observers and participant observers:

In the introductory chapter to Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (2008, Stanford University Press), Amy Hanser briefly recounts how she became an “intern” store clerk in a Chinese department store.  The unexpected media coverage of the “Western researcher” in a Chinese store then facilitated access elsewhere.

As Celeste Watkins-Hayes describes in The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (2009, University of Chicago Press), a respected senior scholar and public figure can facilitate initial introductions.

In the appendix to Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics (1996, University of Chicago Press), Daniel Chambliss details how he first gained the trust of informants via informal conversations, typically held over lunch, as a prelude to gaining official access to an organization.

II.  Covert participant observers

A few researchers find that gaining access as an overt observer is too difficult or problematic for their field sites.  Therefore, Laurie Graham worked on the assembly line without revealing her research agenda for On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese Model and the American Worker (1995, ILR Press).  Similarly, Yuko Ogasawara signed up with temp agencies to gain access to Japanese corporations; however, she notes that when asked, she told her colleagues that she was interested in knowing more about work in corporations.  See Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies (1998, University of California Press).

Do you have any recommendations for how you or another researcher gained access to an organization or organizations?  Please put them in the comments.

What articles have the best discussion sections and conclusions? My request is selfish. There’s an article that needs an improved discussion section. When I write, I often consult publications that I consider models of good writing. However, I usually focus on the core argument, often presented at the beginning, rather than what happens at the end. So what are examplars? Feel free to promote your own articles if you really think you have a rockin’ discussion section.

From the economist, David Hakes:

Think back to your first years in graduate school. The most mathematically complex papers required a great deal of time and effort to read. The papers were written as if to a private club, and we felt proud when we successfully entered the club. Although I copied the style of these overly complex and often poorly written papers in my first few research attempts, I grew out of it quite quickly. I didn’t do so on my own. I was lucky to be surrounded by mature confident researchers at my first academic appointment. They taught me that if you are confident in your research you will write to include, not exclude. You will write to inform, not impress. It is with apologies to my research and writing mentors that I report the following events.

The preference falsification in which I engaged was to intentionally take a simple clear research paper and make it so complex and obscure that it successfully impressed referees. That is, I wrote a paper to impress rather than inform—a violation of my most closely held beliefs regarding the proper intent of research. I often suspected that many papers I read were intentionally complex
and obscure, and now I am part of the conspiracy.

I suspect that adding overly-complex math to a paper is specific to economics, but I also suspect that every social science has issues like this, whether it’s writing 20 more pages of text than you need or adding extra controls to your model that don’t really improve the specification. Generally I think the review system works great. My papers have improved over the course of the review process.  But I can also see alternative ways of writing papers that might lead to clearer arguments, more straightforward results, etc. Altering the way we write articles though requires cooperation from reviewers who prefer to hold on to the conventions we’d like to see changed. And, in a way, even if they aren’t very efficient in distributing information or developing theory, these conventions may be effective in reducing conflict about the “right way” to do research.

Every prof has a course that they’ve got down solid. Mine is undergraduate social theory. Students really, really like this course. Since social theory is often seen as a thorny course to teach, I’ll share my experiences and teaching strategy. Let’s start with my assumptions:

• Most undergrad theory students will not go to graduate school.  Don’t teach them as if reading Weber foot notes will consume the rest of their lives.
• The social theory course is intimidating. We expose students to thinkers who write in a difficult style and work with huge ideas.
• Students know the material is supposed to be hard, but they chose the major. They are willing to give it a shot.
• Nearly every piece of writing can be broken down into a few ideas and transmitted to an educated person.
• The great social thinkers are part of our heritage. They are worth teaching so students will have an exposure to the achievements of our intellectual culture.

Here’s my strategy:

• The readings: Make them read the originals! No textbooks – they become crutches. Make them grapple with great ideas. That’s what college is for!
• The topics: Greatest hits. Unless you’re getting a PhD in the subject, most people will not have the patience for reading all 1,000 pages of Economy and Society. So Weber and other core figures get one or two lectures. I use the Lemert reader – lots of short, but dense, readings.
• The topics II: I teach a core module on classical theory (inc. Simmel & soc psych), a module on race, gender and sexuality and a model on assorted modern topics.
• Classroom: At first, I give a few lectures, then I move into a free form discussion led by me. Since most students seem paralyzed by reading original work (because they’ve done watered down texts for four years), lecturing usually makes it worse. I need to soften them up with neat stories, humor, and a relaxed atmosphere. Dorm room chat is a better model than master scholar transmitting brilliant ideas.
• Discussion style: I have a few strategies. I will make students read a passage and then we will puzzle over it: “alienated labor? Wonder what that means?” Another tactic is to focus on the key concepts for the day and work through popular culture. Youtube clips help a lot here. I also throw in the occasional personal anecdote, just to get them mellowed out from a weekend of reading Mead. However, the goal is to allow the students to extract the core idea from the readings. Short handouts with a selected quote or key words helps.
• Constant work: Social theory is not a topic you can really master by “dropping in” when exam time comes around. You need a sustained effort to really get a grip. Thus, I concoct an assignment for nearly every class meeting – a short summary, a quiz, whatever. I also use the daily summaries to motivate class discussion – “I’m glad you mentioned double consciousness – what does that mean?”
• Relaxed days: Since there is an incredible amount of work, I have “safety valves.” There are some days where nothing is due. You can also drop the two lowest marks for daily summaries (essentially allowing a skip or two during the semester).
• Essays: There’s a lot of writing. I avoid the generic “summarize X and critique it.” Instead, my assignments usually start by asking students about a topic. Later assignments require the students to use various ideas in social theory to analyze that topic. It’s very hard because they have to really master the idea before they can even start writing. And they can’t crimp off the Internet or wikipedia because they chose the topic and the theory (“How am I going to write a feminist analysis of Halo?”)
• The mellow Fabio: Given the huge amount of work and the fact that people may not do well at the start, I’m pretty lenient when people are late with assignments. I also provide multiple opportunities to pull up your grade.

In other words: My social theory class raises the bar for most sociology undergrads and I demand commitment and I create assignments that encourage commitment. At the same time, I try to pace the work and provide a relaxed environment. I also try to make social theory describe the world people live in. Add your own social theory tips in the comments.

For previous orgtheory discussion of right politics: Brayden on the emerging sociology scholarship of the right; Steve Teles and I discuss his book on conservative lawyers here, here, here, and here; my post on Nixon’s legacy.

The Chronicle has an article on Berkeley’s new center for the study of conservative politics by Columbia prof Mark Lilla. (Click here for the Center website). A few clips from Lilla’s article:

It’s not even clear that the faculty members involved have figured out what terms like “right wing” and “conservative” might mean. The Web-site blurb introducing the center describes anti-Communism as the “transcendent” issue for the right for most of the 20th century, and says that since the end of the cold war, right-wing groups have “spun on to the political stage with centripetal energy,” whatever that means. This statement does not inspire confidence. In fact, the right-wing political parties in Europe have much older pedigrees, going back to the 19th-century counterrevolution. So do American and British conservatism, which came onto the political scene at least a century before 1989. In his recent book, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (Yale University Press), Patrick Allitt, a professor of history at Emory University, explores the full range of conservative concerns: states’ rights, religion, the corruptions of urban life, immigration, the League of Nations, mass democracy, creationism, the New Deal, free markets, race, and so on.

Agreed. Many folks are very uncomfortable with the idea and have inaccurate views. This, however, I found bizarre:

But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn’t matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries’ books and views, but we know how rarely that happens. That’s why political diversity on the faculty does matter. As it stands, there is a far greater proportion of conservatives in the student body of typical colleges than on the faculty. A few leading thinkers on the right do teach at our top universities—but at some, like Columbia University, where I teach, not a single prominent conservative is to be found.

While it’s true that some disciplines, like soc, are conservative light, there are many more in economics, politics, the law schools, and business. There should also be many in the sciences, where, presumably, your politics wouldn’t matter. Columbia should have a number of prominent folks. I think he exaggerates here. But here’s a good quote:

There are lessons for conservatives, too. Anti-intellectualism has always dogged conservative tradition (you betcha!), and figures like David Horowitz, who stoke the hysteria, only contribute to the dumbing down. Hopped up on Fox News, too many young conservatives have become ignorant of the conservative intellectual tradition and incapable of engaging civilly with their adversaries. The truth is that a former student of Paul Lyons probably has a greater chance of becoming a serious conservative thinker than a follower of Horowitz does.

We should get people reading great ideas from all traditions.  Can’t argue with that.

The Supreme Court heard a case yesterday that may have major implications for the legal rights given to corporations. While in many ways corporations have already risen to the level of “personhood,” they have been traditionally limited in their ability to exert political influence. Corporate electioneering, for example, has been the subject of campaign finance reform. In the past the court has come down on the side of those wishing to curb corporations’ influence (read: business influence) in the political process.  In the current case though the corporate person in question is a non-profit organization, Citizens United, that in 2008 produced a movie critical of then-presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and sought to distribute the movie via cable.  The Federal Election Commission ruled that the movie was nothing more than a corporate attempt to alter an election outcome and banned the distribution of the movie during the primary.The case  in front of the Supreme Court sought to reverse this ruling. (NPR’s coverage of the case is worth listening to.)

The case boils down to the question, do corporate persons have the same rights of free speech granted to individual persons? I don’t have any legal expertise and so I don’t feel qualified to debate the merits of the case, but what I can say is that the court ruling could further cement the legal fictionalization of the corporate person. It’s also interesting to me that the attorney general’s office didn’t even try to counter the idea that corporations are, in fact, persons. This idea is so taken-for-granted in our society that we no longer question whether it’s appropriate to extend individual rights to corporations (although Justice Ginsberg did raise this question). The distinctions made between different kinds of persons have completely blurred.

The case is also interesting to me because it illustrates the importance of theorizing organizations as actors (in contrast to mere aggregations of individuals or contracts). While it’s true that corporations are “legal fictions” and are thus social constructs, their taken-for-granted status in society has real, objective effects on the distribution of power in society. The subjective has become real.

For some interesting background reading on corporate personhood I highly recommend Coleman’s The Asymmetric Society (a classic essay in organizational sociology!). To learn more about the history of the invention of corporate actors’ rights, I second David K.’s recommendation of Ted Nace’s Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (especially pp. 19-26 & 191-209; you can download the entire book for free on his website).

Question: Why are ASR & Contemporary Sociology different journals? I’m not talking administratively – the running of reviews and articles are different businesses that require different editors. But many major journals (most?) combine books reviews and articles in one product: Social Forces, AJS, ASQ, most major history journals, and most major humanities journals. I think the only major exception are economics journals. The Journal of Economic Literature is separate from the AER. Idiosyncrasy or is there a reason? In a discipline that values books and articles, it would seem important to keep them together.

Howdy, folks!  I just flew back from the annual Burning Man event located in the Nevada Black Rock Desert.  Despite a severe sleep debt and a growing backlog of tasks, I am ready to discuss orgtheory with all of my esteemed colleagues!  Thanks to the organizers of orgtheory for inviting me as a guest blogger.

While at Burning Man, fellow Burners expressed their continuing interest in understanding how organizations, including those that deviate from the “norm,” such as communes and co-ops, can function and thrive.  But some of you may wonder: what can such organizations tell us about organizations in general?

In medicine, unusual cases, such as the neurological abnormalities described by Oliver Sacks, help unveil how normal bodies function.  Likewise, “unusual” organizations can similarly shed insight into how conventional institutions operate. For example, I show how the growing organization behind the Burning Man event uses a mixture of bureaucratic and participatory/collectivist practices to navigate problems common to all organizations.

However, atypical cases can present challenges.  One practical issue involves acclimating an audience with a not-yet-taken-for-granted phenomenon. For example, in writing books or articles, researchers must decide when to introduce what and when, and how much detail to give without obscuring the central focus. Researchers also must make explicit links between their cases and a larger phenomenon; otherwise, their work will be dismissed as interesting but too narrowly focused or even worse, irrelevant.

Those who examine unusual cases face thorny issues about legitimacy.  As I was warned by one senior colleague, timing matters.  Start too far ahead or behind a curve, and you not only may have to self-fund your research, but you also may risk laboring in relative obscurity until the higher beings of your discipline smile upon you, or you form a research/writing support group, whichever comes first.  Fellow scholars may also find it difficult to categorize your work within the accepted canon, forcing you to do more legwork to establish where your research belongs and what audiences would benefit from your work.

To inspire readers to expand their horizons, I’ll showcase several researchers who have used seemingly unusual organizations to explain larger phenomena.

Before she became known for her work on tokenism (Men and Women of the Corporation, 1993, Basic Books) and for her prolific writings as a management guru, Rosabeth Moss Kanter studied communes. Her first book Commitment and Community revealed why some groups dissolved while others thrived, thus uncovering conditions that increase or decrease social cohesion. Some social movements scholars consider this to be her best work.

Similarly, before she became famous for the cultural tool kit and other writings, Ann Swidler produced Organization Without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools (1979, Harvard University Press).  Swidler showed that in the absence of formal organizational authority, teachers tried – often unsuccessfully – to direct students at two free schools.  These findings are pertinent not just to alternative schools, which still exist, but also to contemporary workplaces that rely upon participatory practices.

In Opposing Ambitions: Gender and Identity in an Alternative Organization (1996, University of Chicago Press), Sherryl Kleinman revealed how gender ideologies are reproduced, even in an organization devoted to egalitarian ideals. She also discussed the difficulties of conducting such research, including her initial concerns about her study of an alternative health clinic, in Feminist Fieldwork Analysis (2007, Sage) and Emotions and Fieldwork (co-authored with Martha A. Copp, 1993, Sage).

Sociology of work scholars have also produced timely research on “unusual” organizations.  Jeff Sallaz’s research shows how workers adapt to the routines imposed by casinos.  In a similar vein, Steven H. Lopez‘s research discusses how nursing home aides reconcile time constraints and routines.

In addition, the sociology of religion has recently produced interesting research on “unusual” organizations.  For instance, Jerome P. Baggett’s research on the voluntary association Habitat for Humanity recounts the difficulties of organizing on the basis of a religion while promoting more secular purposes.

Do you have any other favorites or recommendations of past or up-and-coming research on “unusual” organizations to add? Please put them in the comments!

I’d like to introduce our new guest blogger: Katherine Chen! She’s currently an assistant professor of sociology at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center at CUNY. She’s the author of Enabling Creative Chaos, a super cool new book on the Burning Man Organization, published by the University of Chicago Press. Katherine also maintains a blog on organization studies. Welcome!

An article in Inside Higher Ed about the new realities of the academic job market. Although the article focuses explicitly on political science, I think the lessons and insights apply to most markets. Grad students are already well aware of the scarcity of jobs this year, but department chairs, advisors, and graduate directors should definitely read this.

I’ve always liked b-schools. My first real social science job was working as Berkeley management scholar Thomas Marschak’s research assistant on a project concerning Hurwicz style mechanism design. He was super nice and I learned quite a bit about social science from him. At Chicago, org theory was seen as naturally interdisciplinary – with representatives in the b-school (Burt, Phillips, Stuart, and others), soc (Laumann), ed (Bidwell, Bryk), political science (Padgett) and many other depts. My own adviser, Rafe Stolzenberg wrote some very interesting papers on orgtheory in the 70s, including this one on the effect of firm size on rate of return to education (jstor link here). Orgtheory was well represented in the world of sociology and in many other fields as well. The disciplines and professional schools could easily co-exist.

However, going on the job market in 2002/2003, I found that this was not a view shared by everyone. During an informal interview, a person from a highly regarded program asked bluntly: “Why should we hire you? Isn’t organization theory moving to the business schools?” I was flabbergasted. I then mumbled something like, “Well, my research shows that social movements have important impacts on universities, and the social movement/orgs area will be important.” History shows that I was correct. The movement/orgs field has been a great area.

But years later, the interaction still leaves me with a lingering question – is there any concrete reason to believe that organization studies (and now economic sociology) can’t flourish in both sociology and strategy/org departments? Personally, I think that we can all get along, but I’ve heard other people say that b-schools (and other professional schools) are killing soc of orgs via brain drain. What do you think?

Nina Perlove, playing a composition by Jacques Ibert.

A 1957 clip of Jean Pierre Rampal playing Debussy’s Syrinx.

Eric Dolphy, on flute, with the John Coltrane quartet, on My Favorite Things. Go to 4:08 for the flute solo. But you should really listen to the whole thing.

Chicago powerhouse jazz composer and performer Nicole Mitchell on a solo composition. I’ve seen her play multiple times and she’s utterly amazing. She’s playing in trio format here, with Hamid Drake and Harrison Bankhead.

The metaphor that labels education as an “investment in human capital” and friendship as an “investment in social capital” has gone from an academic provocation to a corrosive b-school cliche. But there is one case where “human capital” is exactly the right term: corporate-owned life insurance, a.k.a. “dead peasants insurance” or “dead janitors insurance.” “Through so-called janitors insurance, hundreds of companies have taken out life-insurance policies on millions of workers of all kinds — with the companies as the beneficiaries. Employers take out the coverage because the policies provide tax-free investment buildup for the companies and provide tax-free death benefits when the workers, former employees and retirees die.”

Wal-Mart was the biggest user of COLI in the 1990s, taking out insurance on 350,000 of its workers, and received some negative attention for it a few years ago. But bankers now appear to have taken the lead in perfecting this innovation, using death benefits on current and former workers as a tax-free means to fund executive bonuses and retirement income. “The insurance policies essentially are informal pension funds for executives: Companies deposit money into the contracts, which are like big, nondeductible IRAs, and allocate the cash among investments that grow tax-free. Over time, employers receive tax-free death benefits when employees, former employees and retirees die.”

Insurers had a strong interest in building this business, of course, and those interested in “institutional entrepreneurship” might find a great tale in how insurance companies managed to persuade state regulators that companies had an “insurable interest” not only in current employees but in those they had fired years ago. (The Wall Street Journal describes one bank that bought life insurance on a credit risk manager who had already survived two brain surgeries; fired him four months later; and subsequently collected $1.6 million when he died.)

The financial services industry is regarded as a wellspring of American innovation. Many of the fruits of this innovation have been enjoyed around the world in the past two years. But insurance rarely gets its due. Yet from Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens to AIG’s Hank Greenberg, the insurance business has nurtured artistic genius, in music, poetry, and legal legerdemain.

Stanford University Press has just published “The Common Law in Two Voices” by Kwai Ng, of UC San Diego sociology. It’s a highly intriguing book that explores the deep relationship between culture and political institutions.  Based on an ethnography of the Hong Kong court system, Ng examines a fascinating natural experiment: what happens to the law when you keep the same formal institutions, but change the language? Before the Chinese take over, Hong Kong courts used the British law and the English language. After the take over, same law, but you now used Cantonese, and other languages.

One might think this might be another tale of world polity theory. A Western institution imposes itself even in the face of indigenous culture, as indicated by the use of Cantonese. One might also think that this might a Foucaldian tale of resistance – the locals use the differences in language to resist Western imperialism. Nor is this a tale of translation, where there are shifts in meaning due to multiple conventions.

Gladly, Ng goes beyond these theories and offers a more penetrating analysis: language indicates the link of the courts and the legal system to external audiences and political institutions. The use of English acts as a sort of constraint, which limited the sorts of claims and arguments that could be made. Furthermore, the orderly nature of Hong Kong courts rested on a linguistic dominance. The use of English only permitted court participants to state claims in highly abstract terms. In contrast, permitting Cantonese and other forms of Chinese allowed actors to reframe claims in more resonant terms. Claims then carried all kinds of moral, biographical, and cultural meanings. In other words, claimants bring their own common law into the court through the gateway of judicial bilingualism. Ng backs up this fascinating story with close readings of court cases, ethnographic data, and interviews with all kinds of legal actors.

This is a really solid book that’ll be of interest to org theorists, law & society people, ethnographers, and cultural sociologists. It’s a great way to get beyond first generation institutionalism. We get a story of  how politics creates institutions, rather than institutions creating politics. Linguistic transitions, and the politics they reflect, are a great site to study this process. Recommended!!

A commenter asks a good question: Is evidence-based management still alive?

From my perspective, here are a few questions and concerns related to evidence-based management:

1. Whose evidence? Even in the academic literature there is no consensus on such basic things as, say, the proper role of incentives in organizations — and thus one can invariably find “evidence” and arguments to support almost any management practice.
2. Who has time for evidence?  So, managers deal with highly uncertain situations and amassing evidence for, say, a particular strategy can be hard if not impossible, certainly time consuming.  In practice, managers may not be able to spend time pulling together information, or information simply may not be available, and thus managers just have to act. There’s a tendency by academics to gleefully point to various stupid mistakes that managers and organizations make — undoubtedly they do.  But sometimes I wonder, particularly when I’m cynical: what, if anything, would get done if academics ran organizations?
3. What does evidence and data tell us?  In other words, there’s an important epistemological question related to evidence as well: does data tell us the truth?  Evidence tends to give primacy to what we see, observe, perceive — usually in the form of data.  But, while we can readily see that the sun revolves around the earth, we now of course know otherwise.  Thus, rather than give sole primacy to empirics and data — which evidence-based management seems to emphasize — I think theory and logic also deserve careful consideration.

Michael McQuarrie and Nicole Marwell have a provocative article in the latest issue of City and Community about the need to bring more organizational theory into urban sociology. Naturally, I concur. They claim that “urbanists” don’t pay enough attention to the role of organizations in producing community and neighborhood phenomena. Too often organizations urbanists view organizations as just 1) reflections of local neighborhood effects (e.g., social integration),  2) as locations for neighborhood interaction, or 3) as vehicles in political class struggle. Urbanists, they say, haven’t properly theorized organizations’ capacities in creating local orders and linking individuals in a community to broader society. They refer to Giddens’s notion of structuration, making the case that organizations are the important bridges between social integration (at the local level) and systemic integration (at the societal level).

The connection we see between urban sociology, organizations sociology, and structuration is that we think organizations are key sites of urban structuration. They are locations of both systemic and social integration. Organizations are the medium through which systemic processes reach the street corner; they make state and market resources available, socialize individuals into a society beyond the neighborhood, and constitute social identities that have relevance beyond the neighborhood. At the same time, organizations are settings in which neighborhood social integration is produced in interaction. In churches, corner stores, coffee houses, schools, community centers, political clubs, and workplaces neighborhood residents interact to produce shared meanings, mutually intelligible practices, and identities all of which refer to and reproduce a shared experience of place.4 In this sense, neighborhoods are sources of innovation, creativity, and cultural meanings that have relevance for society-wide institutions. At the same time, resources that have society-wide meaning, such as money or votes, are essential for neighborhood residents no matter how specific the culture of the neighborhood is. People who work in and run organizations must grapple with the tension that this recursive process produces. In institutional terms, organizations must mediate the local and extra-local dimensions of their environment. Because of this, organizations are mediators of social and systemic integration and, therefore, instrumental in the process of urban structuration (pg. 257).

It’s interesting they frame it this way. In organizational theory “structuration” isn’t as resonant now as it once was. We don’t pay a great deal of attention to the connective role that organizations play between individuals and society.  As McQuarrie and Marwell note though, there was a time though when organizational sociologists were much more interested in community (see, for example, the work of my advisor Joe Galaskiewicz and the early research of my co-author Dave Whetten). More recently the interest in local community effects has reemerged through the work of younger scholars like Chris Marquis, and my esteemed co-blogger Sean Safford has brought organizational theory to the study of urban redevelopment. On the urban sociology side, Mario Small has conceptualized organizations as community brokers. It would be really great if urbanists and organizational scholars reinvigorated the conversation between the two fields. Perhaps the time is ripe for a boom in the study of organizations and urban communities.