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So, there’s another journal in the mix: Global Strategy Journal.  While the journal enters an extremely crowded space (I can’t keep track of all the management/international journals out there these days), my prediction is that Global Strategy Journal will quickly become a top outlet in the area of international business and strategy.   Why?

First, the journal is associated with the Strategic Management Society (SMS), which owns one of the top strategy journals in the field, Strategic Management Journal (SMJ).  Not only is SMJ a fantastic journal outlet, but SMS has also recently (successfully) launched a sister entrepreneurship journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, which appears to be attracting fantastic work (I’m perhaps biased on that point).  Second, the new journal has selected two fantastic editors: Steve Tallman and Torben Pedersen (along with excellent associate editors).  My guess is that within several years this journal will become a preferred outlet for scholars doing international management research (along with such journals as the Journal of International Business Studies, JIBS).

Daniel Schneider of the Princeton sociology department was nice enough to share his research on the sociology labor market. He has graciously given me permission to reprint his email here:

As the sociology job market gets going each year, there’s always a fair amount of anecdotal evidence swirling around about which departments’ students fair best.  Posters to this blog have discussed how this sort of “graduate student perspective” on sociology program rankings isn’t necessarily reflected in the US News or NRC rankings.  Some insight into how the departments stack up in terms of graduate student placement is offered in Burris’ (2004) ASR article.  But, the data he uses is now 15 years old.

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One of my favorite books of the last year is On Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo, a political scientist at George Mason University.  Heclo’s short book tries to describe a particular orientation toward social institutions and to advocate for this general way of thinking (and acting).  Taking a stance that he recognizes to be “unfashionable,” Heclo argues that institutions are basic fonts of human values and vital sources of personal identity.  He suggests that (many) institutions deserve respect and admiration and require stewardship from their leaders.  He also notes that this sense of institutional obligation and responsibility is often lacking, and elaborates many of the negative consequences which stem from institutional neglect.

Heclo’s book duly notes institutions’ checkered history and spells out their many oppressive potentialities.  It also provides a very long list of good reasons for the widespread contemporary distrust of governmental, business, and not-for-profit institutions.  Nevertheless, Heclo stresses that:

“…it is possible to imagine being both thoroughly modern and more deeply committed to institutional values.”  “By thoroughly modern,” he continues, “ I mean that we will have to continue to be distrustful of institutions and to guard against their power over us.  However, I also think that we can achieve a saner way of life by more self-consciously learning how to think and act institutionally.”

Heclo‘s book elaborates his core concept of “institutional thinking” and provides some good examples of it.  It also effectively contrasts its preferred stance (i.e., “to distrust but value”) with the prevailing social-scientific view which “expects the worst because it has already reached the conclusion that institutions and their leaders are generally oppressive and self-serving.”  (For one interesting explanation of this latter view, see James Stever’s book The Path to Organizational Skepticism).

I like Heclo’s book for a number of reasons.  First, anyone who read my earlier posts will likely note its strong familial relationship to Selznick’s “Hobbesian Idealism.”  Heclo, like Selznick, emphasizes the essential duality of institutions.  While he acknowledges that they frequently frustrate ideals, he also follows Selznick in viewing institutions as these ideals’ best and only real friend (i.e., as the very things that serve to give our ideals “life and hope”).  Second, Heclo’s perspective also stresses that it is possible – and often desirable– for people to willfully commit to particular institutions and the values which they embody.  In this sense, his perspective is substantially at odds with much contemporary institutionalism.  In that literature, there is a tendency to view institutions as mere control structures (which induce “conformity”), and to see agency as something that happens “against” or “outside of” institutions’ otherwise constraining influence.  Third, Heclo’s perspective provides a viable platform for criticizing the many institutional failures that seem to be continually occurring around us.   Heclo articulates a normative vision even as he acknowledges the darker, persistent, and often more obvious realities of institutional life.   Finally, I like Heclo’s book because it points out the difference between “thinking about institutions” and “thinking institutionally.”  He argues that much of the academic theory and research on institutions is, in fact, “anti-institutional” in nature.  His book encourages scholars to see institutions from “within,” and to embrace an actor-centric viewpoint.  While this viewpoint is, of course, partial and limiting, I think that  it provides an opportunity to see some important things that we are otherwise apt to miss.

I will be interested to hear what you think about this book and my summary of it.    In future posts, I will also try to identify some other contemporary scholars who are, in different ways, “taking values seriously” and thus building on Selznick’s legacy.

I finished reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. It’s a good book, and I’ll blog it later. For now, I’d like to focus on his description of celebrity. The way Martin describes it, celebrity is a two sided thing. Fame does help with money, jobs, and the like. But it also utterly destroys your privacy. Just going to the mall can entail battling paparazzi. Casual conversations are destroyed by autograph requests. You become paranoid about your friend’s ulterior motives. Room service – the pleasure of the tired traveler – is ruined when the waiters repeat your jokes, for the 100th time. Life is a monotonous battle to just be normal.

On this count, academia is a good deal. Academic celebrities can get the good side of celebrity, with none of the downsides. Academic celebrities are respected by their peer group, have relatively easy access to funds, and have some confidence that their work will be enjoyed after they’re gone. A smart academic can leverage their skills into high paying fields like consulting or popular writing and make quite a bit of income.

But there aren’t the down sides – no stalkers; average people treat you normally; etc. There is also a great deal of freedom to experiment. Sure, many academics will repeat themselves until they die, but you won’t lose your job if you start a quirky new line of research, much in the same way a musician or actor could lose an audience.

The Financial Times is posting some ongoing lectures by George Soros on a ‘general theory of reflexivity.’ Most of what is there, so far, will be old news to social science readers: reflexivity of theories (and, actor’s reflexive beliefs vis-a-vis reality), the self-fulfilling and performative nature of expectations, subjectivity/objectivity in natural versus social sciences etc.

And, indeed, the moderator of the lectures, the philosopher Colin McGinn, extensively cites Popper and wikipedia in his discussion of self-fulfilling prophecies, bank runs, expectations, etc.

My two cents?  The problem I have with reflexivity, or the self-fulfilling prophecy argument, is that it often is framed as a seemingly boundaryless argument, as if objective reality doesn’t even exist.  Furthermore, reflexivity doesn’t identify mechanisms, it doesn’t answer upstream “why” questions.  And, reflexivity is often framed in a way that denies all human rationality (the classic bank run example illustrates this), without appropriately accounting for uncertainty.  We’ve hashed some of this already in previous posts (for example, here), so I won’t belabor these points.

That said, it’s fantastic to nonetheless see some public discussion on issues of reflexivity — parts of the Q&A (e.g., here’s part 1)  are also interesting.

Get the entire book – Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know about Academia from Admissions to Tenure – for only $2. You can read it on personal computers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads, and smart phones.

Eszter recently had a good post on the role of conferences. Here’s Eszter’s other professional advice columns. I think we’d agree on many points, but not on others. Here’s my take on the conference world. Previous grad skool rulz.

First, you have to figure out how important conferences are in your discipline for publication. For example, conference proceedings are the primary publication venue in computer science. In contrast, most social sciences assign no value to most conference proceedings. Lesson: If conference proceedings matter for your discipline, you had better show up!

Second, find out the informal rules of your discipline. It’s often the case that specialized conferences and department workshops are where work gets vetted. It’s often the case that the people at these venues will be the reviewers at major journals. If you have already responded to their criticisms, it’s more likely that they will help you in the review process. In contrast, panels at national conferences are populated with a random assortment of folks. These people need to hear your ideas, but it’s not likely that it will help with regard to professionalization.

Third, there is no replacement for working hard on your research. Yes, it is good to get feedback, but too many conferences can take time away from data collection, analysis, and writing. There is definitely a trade off. One solid journal hit is more important than attending dozens of conferences.

Fourth, there are important indirect effects of conference attendance. People meet you. They can put a face to a name. You get invited to visit places to speak, even grad students. You might get invited to submit to a journal or edited volume. You might also meet people and make new friends. This is all important.

Fifth, there is conference etiquette. Most conferences have an informal dress code. Nothing fancy, but if you are giving a talk, nice slacks/jacket/dress are good. Also, people expect you to talk about your research.  It’s a conference after all, so people want to hear about your work. So have a 1 sentence summary ready to go. Push your cookie!

Sixth, remember that conferences are business meetings. It’s ok to approach people for business purposes. At ASA, there are job placement services, data sales people, book editors, college deans, and people who give money out for foundations. It’s totally ok to meet these people and start a conversation – it’s the reason they showed up.

Seventh, you can go on the cheap and save money. Drive instead of fly. Student registration fees or one day fees are lower. Double up on hotel rooms. Many colleges and universities have student travel funds. Ask around. Heck, ask your mom for money.

To summarize: Conferences are useful, but not a make or break deal. You should definitely go, but don’t let it crowd out your research or teaching. When you do go, be aware that it’s a business meeting and plan accordingly.

This Friday, 2pm at the Multi-Purpose Room at the Cornell University’s Africana Studies & Research Center. Email me if you are interested in meeting before or after the talk.

I attended a really interesting conference this weekend that brought together some leading economic sociologists and organizational scholars to talk about the financial crisis.  Research in the Sociology of Organizations will publish the conference’s papers. You can download early drafts of the papers here.

The authors were asked to think about what sociological theory has to say about the causes of the financial crisis and to speculate about potential solutions. The conference was mainly focused on the former question, although towards the end discussion drifted to policy.  The papers were very diverse, but one idea came up in several papers. The idea was that the crisis was a kind of normal accident that was made possible by the organizational structure of the financial system. As Charles Perrow theorized, accidents can be thought of as the product of organizational systems that are highly complex and tightly coupled. Decision-makers have a hard time figuring out how the system works as a whole due to its complexity, but when one part of the system breaks down, for whatever reason, the entire system is vulnerable to collapse due to the interdependence of the different parts. The idea comes out most strongly in the papers by Schneiberg and Bartley and Palmer and Maher.

The conference created a lot of lively discussion about the need to make economic sociology more relevant to policy.  Although no single policy solution emerged, it was one of the best conversations I’ve ever been a part of in which economic sociologists strive to make their research relevant and not just theoretically interesting. So it was a good step forward. Still, I wondered what policy experts and regulators would say to the commentary. As Jerry Davis remarked in his concluding comments, “markets on trial” felt a bit like a kangaroo court. No financial economists or fed officials attended. Of course, I don’t think that the ideas need to be validated by an economist to make them good, but if economic sociology is ever going to make a move into the realm of regulation and policymaking, that interaction needs to take place.

The other part of this equation is the political mobilization it would take to make the policy solutions of economic sociologists politically viable.  One only needs to look to law and economics to see an example of how academics mobilized their ideas as part of a political coalition to institutionalize a particular set of policy solutions. As we talked about in a series of posts last year, Steven Teles’s fascinating book about the rise of the conservative legal movement illustrates how this coalition formed and influenced regulatory processes. Making major transformations like some of the scholars propose requires having access to mobilizing resources and a political will that economic sociologists haven’t had in the past.  The workshop was a great opportunity to get something like that started.

I find it interesting that I almost never hear anyone take back a review. Some famous articles have been rejected at one or more journals. Theory of the Firm was rejected, as was the DiMaggio and Powell iron cage article, I believe. There’s a saying in science departments: The history of science is strewn with articles rejected by Nature and Science. Most people don’t like to admit they were wrong, but I would expect at least a few people would fess up and explain why, at the time, they thought their review of a now famous article was (or remains) justified. Any examples?

Two years ago a Washington, DC woman was arrested and charged with murdering her four daughters, ages 5 to 16. Their bodies had been decomposing in the home for about four months and may have done so for longer if deputy federal marshals had not arrived to serve the family with an eviction notice. I could go on about the ironies of a system that seems to remember the existence of vulnerable children only when the time comes to take away some benefit as opposed to when they should have been receiving services but that would be a purely political and emotional argument. The point here is to remind us all that not all bureaucracies are created equally. Specifically, some are much more mired in routinization and extreme divisions of labor than others.

Across the country, local and state agencies responsible for the well-being of children and families have been under scrutiny, generally as a result of the tragic loss of a child or children in a home that was under the supervision of these households but somehow slips through the administrative cracks. The tragedy is then not simply due to the often horrific nature in which these children die but also because of a sense that their deaths could have been prevented IF ONLY these agencies were fulfilling their roles. After the public outrage comes the creation of a task force to investigate these agencies, the public firings of a few officials, and the report that points to a lack of coordination among the various governmental agencies and employees responsible for tracking these families. I haven’t conducted the analysis as yet but I’ll bet my mint condition X-Men #1 that in every one of these public cases that lack of coordination and communication across job titles and across agencies are given as primary factors for the “failure” of these systems to protect these children until it is too late.

This leads me to two questions. The first is why do some bureaucracies more closely resemble this organizational type than others? That is, is there a specific historical trajectory an organization follows to take it down this path? Second, if we can assume that I am correct in my observations regarding the lack of coordination and communication in these cases, what can be done about it? If we can assume away any ‘friction” such as costs, is there a way to institute organizational change such that these problems might actually be resolved?

In the current political climate, with health care reform on everyone’s mind, there is a lot of  fear that PACs (Political Action Committees) are controlling the policymaking process and that this is the reason that progressive reform of any substantial nature is having a hard time getting through Congress.  Corporations are shaping the way legislators vote (or will vote) on reform and this causes the Congressional committees to come up with reform measures that are more industry-friendly than they would otherwise be. Given my cynical nature I’m not going to deny that PACs have some influence over the process, but I think a careful look at the research on the topic would make us be a little more skeptical.

Is there any evidence that PACs change the way Congress votes on bills? Most of the research indicates a very weak link between PAC campaign donations and roll-call voting. If there is a link at all, it would be limited to specific conditions. PACs have the most influence on roll-call voting when the issue is not highly visible and not very ideologically divisive.  Lawmakers put themselves at risk with voters if they were to not support highly visible measures that their constituents favor and that corporations are against.  Visibility puts them under a microscope and should make democratic representation work more effectively. Similarly, when there is steep ideological divide over an issue, lawmakers have more to gain by siding with their constituents  or with their party than with some corporate coalition. The reverse might be true if PACs were allowed to give unlimited funds to candidates, but this just isn’t true.  PACs are constrained by campaign finance laws in the amount they can give, which means that each individual PAC provides a small proportion of the overall campaign budget.  The implication of these findings is that PACs should be most influential in shaping Congressional voting on issues that have low visibility and that are less ideologically divisive. Health care reform is not either of those things.

So does this mean that corporations have no effect on the outcome of health care reform? Absolutely not. One way that corporate/industry lobbies will influence outcomes is by shaping the party line on an issue. Businesses can donate more to a party than they can to any individual candidate and thus have the potential to shape which way a party will fall on an issue. The implication of this is that you might see that parties are more united over issues in which corporate lobbies are strong. Perhaps this is why corporations spend a lot more money on lobbying parties than they do on PACs (Table 7 in this paper shows that companies spend around 30 to40 times more on lobbies than they do on PACs; they also spend a lot more on philanthropy than they do on PACs).  Thus, by shaping the parties’ interests, they shape policymaking. But this mechanism should only work when there is strong party cohesion on an issue. In health care reform, the Democrats are divided and this is why it’s so hard to get anything done.

Another way in which corporations can influence policymaking is through managing public opinion. Given this is not regulated, it’s hard to tell how much money companies (or their industry associations) spend on public relations campaigns, but my guess is that it’s much, much more than they spend on PACs. This makes sense from their perspective because they realize that lawmakers are always beholden to the wills of their constituencies. Thus, if you can get the people on your side, a company doesn’t have to worry at all about the effect of the PAC.   I suspect that this year the health insurance industry has spent more on public relations campaigns than they ever have before (both by mobilizing astroturf rallies and through more traditional means) and that this is a major reason why the public has become lukewarm in its support for a public option in health care reform. But you can’t blame the PACs for changing the way the public feels about it.

From the Selvedge Yard blog: Miles Davis and John Coltrane performing at Jazz club Cafe Bohemia in New York City, ca. 1956.

1. Awesome Tapes from Africa - A blog with mp3′s of very cool, but extremely rare, cassette tapes of pop, rap, and traditional music from Africa. “Some of my favorite Mandingo griot music from Mali. The electric kora rises to particularly gratifying heights throughout (don’t you dare hate on electric kora, my dudes).” ’nuff said.

2. A blog about blogs that have only one post.

3. All things Miles Davis. And a blog about the yet unproduced Miles Davis movie.

A few days ago, Thomas asked whether the 9/11 Truth people could be considered a social movement. It was a methods question, so let’s start with a definition. This is what I regard as a social movement:

A social movement is an organized group of people who pursue political, social, or economic change through non-institutionalized strategies.

This definition works for me because it taps into the idea that movements are trying to change something in some sort of systematic or organized fashion. At the same time, there is some tension between them and the rest of society, so they may choose to assert influence in non-establishment ways (e.g., protest vs. voting).

A subtle aspect of the definition is that it’s about a group’s role. A group, in some cases, may act in ways that are non-institutionalized, while acting “normally” in other cases. Take the civil rights movement. Collectively, influence was asserted in traditional ways (litigation) and in non-traditional ways (non-violence). Various conservative elements in America are the same way. When the GOP was dominant, they acted through voting and electoral mobilization.  Now that they are out of power, they have set up the Tea Party protest events. Third example: European social movements often turn into political parties. So you can be both a movement and interest group, possibly at the same time.

What about the 9/11 Truth crowd? If you buy the definition, they are a movement. Group of people who want social change? Check – they want us to change our beliefs about 9/11. Organized? Yup – they have conferences, networks, and organizations. Non-institutionalized strategies? A little bit – they show up at protests. I don’t know if they do other contentious activities, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Next Friday, I’ll be speaking at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Africana Studies & Research Center at Cornell University. Come on by and say hello! I’ll post the schedule when it’s announced.

“Pragmatism asks its usual question:  ‘Grant an idea to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?’… What, in short, is the truth’s cash value in experiential terms?”

William James, Pragmatism, 1907:92.

My last post tried to expose some of the philosophical foundations of Selznick’s theory.  Specifically, I tried to show how his perspective on organizational values is rooted in John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism.  The post generated very little discussion (at least until just recently).  Maybe this was just because I posted it on a Friday.  But, I also suspect that I tried to say too much.   Sometimes trying to “get to the bottom” of a theory is a mistake — particularly if we do it too quickly.  People can agree or disagree with a theory’s core premises and concepts once they are laid out, but there may not be too much left to talk about afterwards.

In any case, a different way in which to approach Selznick’s theory is to take a forward-looking view and subject it to William James’ “pragmatist question.”  This approach would seem particularly appropriate in Selznick’s case, given his avowed commitment to pragmatism and to “normative theory,” more specifically.  I have spent a long time thinking about what “concrete differences” might result if we were to take values more seriously and treat them as if they were real.  I have also thought quite a bit about what might happen if we followed Selznick and conceptualized organizations primarily as “vehicles” for the realization of various values (i.e., as social “means” that exist in order to facilitate the achievement of larger “ends”).

I can’t, of course, predict the full effects of such a shift, and many unintended consequences might arise in the unlikely event of its occurrence.  Nevertheless, I see a number of positives. Organization theory (and institutionalism more specifically) might quickly become more managerially relevant and ethically-consequential if more scholars assumed a Selznickian perspective in their research.  I also think that many organizational researchers might become less “naively cynical” to the extent that they followed Selznick’s lead.   I recognize that concepts like leadership, integrity, and organizational “character” are scientifically problematic.  I am also well-aware of the difficulty involved in theorizing (and empirically discerning) substantive rationality.  However, I am really bothered when I see such concepts reflexively dismissed.  I am equally bothered when I see values routinely being converted into arbitrary social constructions or reduced to the mere shadows of power relationships .  Selznick’s theory provides, at bare minimum, a reason to be suspicious of such treatments.  Espoused ideals may often be bogus, but this is not inevitably the case.

This last caveat points to the thing that I think I like best of all about Selznick’s theory.  Specifically, it allows (even compels) you to be idealistic and cynical, optimistic and pessimistic, and positive and negative — all at the same time.  As Krygier notes, Selznick is a “Hobbesian Idealist.”   His work is concerned both with the conditions and processes that “frustrate ideals” and with those that give them “life and hope.”  My sense is that he is more idealist than Hobbesian, but it seems to be pretty much neck and neck (maybe 51% to 49%).  This is about as much idealism and optimism as I can muster on most days, and definitely as much as I can sustain over any extended period of time.

Truth be told, I think Popper would have approved of the identification effort. How could the person who advanced falsification not have approved of an attempt to address endogeneity and unobserved variables? But most people ignore an important aspect of Popper’s beliefs about scientific theories. He also thought that theories deserve special attention if they make unexpected predictions. Thus, falsification was very powerful if combined with creative derivation of hypotheses.

Now, identification is not in any way contrary to that view. Instrumental variables, or any other technique addressing identification, can be used to test  unexpected hypotheses. However, real scientific practice is about trade offs. Should I spend my time on theory building or some other activities? My view of the identification craze isn’t that it’s wrong. My view is that it’s “end game.” In other words, identification is a luxury when you have an abundance of data and a pretty clear idea about what causal effects you care about. It’s the epitome of normal science.

That’s why I keep a little distance from the identification craze. Sure, I’ll agree it’s important, but too much identification means that you are unwilling to do difficult theory work that’s needed for real scientific progress. You’ll reject research questions that don’t have some built in identitifcation strategy. Any time people focus on tools, they tend to work less on coming up with novel predictions and they work on adjudicating between the same old competitors.

Taken during the antiwar protest in SF last weekend. ’nuff said. Special thanks to Tamara, Andrei, and Herbert for helping me out.

The most recent issue of Capitalism and Society has a host of provocative and interesting articles.  For example, there’s an essay by Jon Elster on ‘excessive ambitions’ — here’s the abstract:

The current financial crisis has brought out a fatal flaw in the foundations of the economic theories that guided economic agents and regulators: the unwarranted claim to precision and robustness. In this article I try to diagnose this flaw and discuss possible remedies. I argue that actual agents are intrinsically less sophisticated than the models assume they are, and that the various proposals to sustain the models by appealing to “as-if rationality” all fail. I next consider behavioral economics as an alternative to the standard models, claiming that while they may allow for successful retrodiction, they do not hold out much promise for prediction. I also discuss the use of statistical models, arguing that they are subject to so many traps and pitfalls that only a handful of elite practitioners can be trusted to use them well. Finally, I offer some speculations to explain the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models.

And then a piece by Thorbjørn Knudsen and Richard Swedberg on capitalist entrepreneurship, with a comment by Mark Granovetter.

Previously on orgtheory: counting organizations can be a tricky thing.

The literature on surveying organizations paints a glum picture. Getting someone in an organization to fill out a survey can be tough. Response rates can easily dip below 20%. It makes sense. If you send a survey to the front office at GM, assuming one still exists, it’s a low priority. And if the staff cares, they might send it to the public relations person who may be the person you don’t want. Even if you get someone to fill out the form, they may do a Really Bad Job. Perhaps an atrocious job.

But there are situations where you can get some good response rates. For example, if the organizatons are “user friendly.” I bet if you surveyed liberal Christian churches, you’d get a good response rate. There’s also an exception to the “size is good” rule in org studies: small orgs may do better in survey response than large orgs. If you called businesses associated with the local chamber of commerce, it might not be too hard to locate the owner after a few calls. It’s way easier than finding who’s in charge of your bank. Of course, you can always boost your response rates using the tricks of normal person surveys: follow ups, elite endorsements, university affiliations.

Finally, it may be the case that someone’s already done the work for you. I know that the Census bureau enumerates businesses, so that can help. Hospitals, universitities, primary/secondary schools, and non-profits are all required by the governmnent or their professional association to report some kind of data that can be accessed by the public.

Here’s a video of Wayne Baker presenting his work (with Sheen Levine, former orgtheory guest blogger), at ASA, on generalized reciprocity.

For your Halloween-y pleasure, Gabriel Rossman has brilliantly put together the complete set of sociological theories of zombie epidemics. Here are my favorites (but seriously, read them all):

Cultural toolkit. Being mindless, zombies have no cultural toolkit. Rather the great interest is understanding how the cultural toolkits of the living develop and are invoked during unsettled times of uncertainty, such as an onslaught of walking corpses. The human being besieged by zombies is not constrained by culture, but draws upon it. Actors can draw upon such culturally-informed tools as boarding up the windows of a farmhouse, shotgunning the undead, or simply falling into panicked blubbering.

Social movements. The dominant debate is the extent to which anti-zombie mobilization represents changes in the political opportunity structure brought on by complete societal collapse as compared to an essentially expressive act related to cultural dislocation and contested space. Supporting the latter interpretation is that zombie hunting militias are especially likely to form in counties that have seen recent increases in immigration. (The finding holds even when controlling for such variables as gun registrations, log distance to the nearest army administered “safe zone,” etc.).

Conversation Analysis.

1  HUMAN:    Hello, (0.5) Uh, I uh, (Ya know) is anyone in there?
2  ZOMBIE1:  Br:ai[ns], =
3  ZOMBIE2:       [Br]:ain[s]
4  ZOMBIE1:              =[B]r:ains
5  HUMAN:    Uh, I uh= li:ke, Hello? =
6  ZOMBIE1:  Br:ai:ns!
7  (0.5)
8  HUMAN:    Die >motherfuckers!<
9  SHOTGUN:  Bang! (0.1) =
10 ZOMBIE1:  Aa:ar:gg[gh!]
11 SHOTGUN:         =[Chk]-Chk, (0.1) Bang!

If any orgheads are up for Sunday breakfast or lunch in San Francisco, drop me an email.

Thanks for the comments on my first post, and sorry it’s taken a couple of days to get back on task.  The questions that were raised are great ones, and they set the stage for most of what I’d like to accomplish in this post and future ones.  As I said last time, my sense is that most organization theorists have (for better or worse) only seen the tip of the Selznickian iceberg.  As Brayden rightly and helpfully points out, Selznick’s major contributions to OT occurred very early in a remarkably long and prolific career that (for whatever reason) subsequently gravitated in a different direction.  My overarching goal is simply to reveal a little more of “the Selznick we don’t know,” and to explore his potential relevance for contemporary organizational studies.

Teppo and Brayden’s questions about what Selznick means by “authentic” or “genuine” values is an important one that cuts straight to the heart of his thought.   Selznick (believe it or not) really does propose that there are some things that are objectively good and truly valuable.  His entire oeuvre is deeply and explicitly rooted in John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism, a philosophy that sees values as naturally emerging from the existential strivings of the human species.  Consider the following:

Friendship, responsibility, leadership, love, and justice are not elements of an external ethic brought to the world like Promethean fire.  They are generated by mundane needs, practical opportunities, and felt satisfactions.  ‘The loftiest edifices,’ wrote George Santayana, ‘have the deepest foundations….’  These words reflect a long tradition of understanding that authentic human ideals have material foundations  (The Moral Commonwealth, p. 19).

Importantly, Selznick recognizes that there are multiple objective values and further stresses that these values exist in perpetual tension with each other (as with liberty and justice, for instance).  He is an avowed pluralist.  Though Selznick does not explicitly note the connection, I find a very strong affinity between his thinking and that of the pluralist political philosopher Isaiah Berlin – who also espoused an “objective” form of value pluralism.  It is also important to note that while Selznick embraces science, he firmly rejects scientism and its attendant reductionism and determinism.  To say that lofty cultural edifices have material foundations is not to deny the reality, the power, or the loftiness of the edifices themselves.  It is also not to deny that these edifices have been constructed by humans (and are therefore subject to human revision, reconstruction, and improvement).  (Remember Humanist Science).   The following quote elaborates:

Naturalism does not dismiss or deprecate the expressive symbolism of religion, art, or politics; neither does it reduce religion to fantasy, politics to power, or love to attachment.  Indeed, all reductionist strategies are suspect as failing to respect the integrity of the subject matter  (A Humanist Science, P. 30).

Selznick’s invocation of the concept of integrity in the prior quote points (albeit indirectly) to the other way in which values are (or at least can be) authentic.  Specifically, he emphasizes that individual organizations (and persons) can be more or less genuine in their orientation toward the values they espouse.  He stresses the possibility (and desirability) of value-rationality (or ‘substantive rationality’) in the Weberian sense.  Integrity is (thus) a critical concept (arguably the critical concept) in his theory of the organizational institution (which is co-equally a theory of leadership).  While his definition of the integrity concept is characteristically loose and multifaceted, he begins by noting that “to act with integrity is to have values and take them seriously” (The Moral Commonwealth, p. 213). In Leadership in Administration (p. 60), he avers that the leader’s basic imperative is “always to choose key values and to create a social structure that embodies them.” In a footnote to this very sentence he observes that this aspect of leadership work “may be compared with individual moral experience, wherein the individual existentially ‘chooses’ self-defining values and strives to make himself an authentic representative of them, that is, to hold them genuinely rather than superficially” (p. 60).

Those familiar with Selznick’s institutionalism know that he sees the definition of values and the pursuit of integrity as pragmatic concerns, as well as moral ones.  Consider:

The protection of integrity is more than an aesthetic or expressive exercise…  It is a practical concern of the first importance because the defense of integrity is also a defense of the organization’s distinctive competence (Leadership in Administration, p. 139).

Willie’s comments on my first post present a direct (and important) challenge to this thesis — which is at the very core of Selznick’s theory.  Specifically, Willie implies that organizations focused on values are apt to become inert and anti-democratic.  These concerns are worth thinking about and discussing.  I’ll have more to say about them in my next post.  I’ve probably said enough for now.

P.S.  If any of you are looking for a more detailed (but still digestible) explanation of Selznick’s larger social theoory, I strongly recommend Martin Krygier’s introductory chapter in this fabulous book of essays on Selznick’s intellectual legacy.  You can read much of it online, and his essay is not the only good one.  I also recommend reading just the preface and introductory chapter of Selznick’s Moral Commonwealth (also available online).

Michael Roston points out a very interesting tale of two numbers in the news yesterday:

Perhaps you’ve heard that the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached 10,000 today, finally, at long last…

But it turns out that while Mr. Dow Jones believes that our Great Recession is over (that’s a joke), one invisible hand in our market doesn’t know what the other is doing.

That’s right, the Pentagon reported on this day of Dow 10,000 that our strained Armed Forces have beat their recruiting goals for the fiscal year, driven by economic unease. (h/t: the Daily Dish).

Here here! for pointing out the obvious. Seriously.  The man makes a good point.

The AFL-CIO and the Economic Policy Institute make another good point: the current recession is hitting women worse than men, and  minorities worse than non-minorities.

One reason women workers are so adversely affected by manufacturing job loss is that they are concentrated in industries that have been drastically affected by the surge in cheap imports over the past decade, such as textiles, apparel and leather. Women make up more than 50 percent of the total workforce in these industries. Faced with high levels of foreign competition, these jobs have had high levels of trade-related job displacement.

Not good.  So what to do?

One idea that has been proposed is to redirect stimulus and TARP funds to smaller regional banks where it is more likely to go to support small businesses where conventional wisdom suggests more jobs will be created in the short term.

That’s not a bad idea, per se.  But it doesn’t solve the larger problem which is that the U.S. economy has been putting off a denouement with itself for decades: the engine that built and sustained the middle-class is broken and we need to figure out what to do about that.   Sometimes its important to take a step back and think about the big picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Econ prof and  podcast host Russ Roberts apparently will debate Keynesian economics on tv using rap. From Bruce Bartlett, via Andrew Sullivan:

What is funny about Richard’s experience is that he wasn’t bumped for a bigger name, but for another economist prepared to make his points in the form of rap. I’m not making this up. For a segment on the economics of John Maynard Keynes, this news program found someone who apparently has produced a rap video on the subject. Here is the relevant portion of the e-mail Richard got canceling his appearance:

“We just learned that Russ Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, who was our second choice for the anti-Keynes position, is shooting a rap video about Keynes and Hayek next week in New York.  He has written the lyrics (they are quite good), hired rappers and musicians, and tapped professional music video producers  –  there will be bling, babes, limos, the works.” (My emphasis)

Richard received this e-mail as he and I were having dinner and I almost fell on the floor laughing. The absurdity of being rejected for an economist who brings bling, babes and limos to the table was bad enough. The idea of making a rap video about Keynesian economics made it even more absurd. But what really cracked me up was the idea of Russ Roberts doing this. Even by the standards of economics professors he’s pretty nerdy. I can’t even begin to imagine how he could do a rap video of anything, let alone Keynesian economics.

I guess we can file this next to the sociology rap. Knowledgeble musicologists will recognize this as an example of the nerdcore genre.

There’s a lot of muckity-muck going on about the credit market implosion last fall. You can now ignore all those fancy pants theories because I have discovered the real reason credit dried up: phone trees. If you want to know why no one could borrow money from banks, all you have to do is try to call a bank up and see if you can find a real human who can give you a loan. Seriously, try it out.

Of course, the theory is a little more complicated than that. We’ve had phone trees for decades, so why now? It’s simple. Deregulation of banks in the 1990s meant a wave of growth, which meant you needed massive call centers to take customers who would normally have gone to local brick and mortar banks. It took a little while, but now the call centers are so huge and so many people are online, that the modal outcome of a phone call is to be disconnected while waiting for a transfer en Español.

Here’s what it has come to at our evil twin blog O&M:

So, we’re leaving the serious discussion to our goody two-shoes organizations twin?

O&Mers have higher opportunity costs than the bloggers at our good-twin site…

From the comments:

I’m ashamed that your “friend” Teppo is getting more comments on his post than O&M posts are getting. The shame. Out Williamson-ed by sociologists.  Life is bitter.

Here’s the post.

The sports pages have been a-buzz with the story of Rush Limbaugh’s bid for part-ownership of the St. Louis Rams and the ensuing flurry of opinion on whether his bid should be considered, let alone accepted. Most of the opinion against Limbaugh is centered on comments he has made in the past, deriding the press’s coverage of quarterback Donovan McNabb’s contribution to the Eagle’s performance on the field as a bit of “social policy.” Limbaugh felt that McNabb’s press coverage was due more to the media wanting a Black quarterback to do well than to his actually doing well. There is a list of statements attributed to Limbaugh that have been added to this one as reason for denying him the opportunity to become a part of the Rams’ franchise in particular and the NFL as a whole.  The rationale behind this seems to be that his comments are “divisive.” Largely absent from these discussions are the role that part-owners play in the day-to-day decision making of a team and what other criteria are used to determine whether someone is or a group of someones are worthy to own part of the franchise.

I personally find that Mr. Limbaugh is a vulgarian and he should be called to task for many of his comments. I’m just not certain whether this is ample reason to say no to his money. Missing from the conversation is an analysis of the potential benefits Limbaugh, his money, his business acumen, his marketing genius, and his connections could bring to the franchise. There also needs to be a more detailed account of the liabilities he could bring beyond potential “divisiveness.”  Could his presence result in a large number of Rams fans changing loyalties (thus negatively affecting ticket sales)?  Could it cause a drop in ad revenue? Might it actually cause divisions within the boardroom that would directly affect the franchise and its players in negative ways? Analyses such as these could possibly put to the rest the murmurings that this is a conspiracy against the Right, that Limbaugh’s freedom of speech is not being respected, and that somehow the media is yet again punishing a White male for speaking “truth” about the shortcomings of minorities.

“Most of my specialized writings in the sociology of organizations and the sociology of law have been preoccupied with the conditions and processes that frustrate ideals or, instead, give them life and hope.”

Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth, 1992:x).

“Here we see … the chief feature of humanist science:  Analytical and empirical study of ideals, understood as at once latent in and threatened by the vagaries of social life.”

Selznick,  A Humanist Science, 2008:5).

Many thanks to Brayden and the other orgtheory.net folks for inviting me to guest blog.  It is a privilege to be asked, and an honor to follow  the many smart, thoughtful, and thoroughly impressive persons who have previously filled this role.

I am a first time blogger and I’m not entirely sure where (or how) this guest stint will end up.   But, I’d like to begin with a discussion of Philip Selznick and his rather unique theoretical (and meta-theoretical) perspective.  Selznick has obviously been an influential figure in the development of organization theory, in general, and institutionalism, in particular.  In more recent years, scholars have also made sustained efforts to recover the lost insights of his “old” institutional theory, thus filling critical gaps in the neo-institutional perspective and  (presumptively ) “ending the family quarrel” between them.  Brayden has also recently has recently sung Selznick’s praises on this very website.  This is all great in my book.

The thing that motivates me to bring up Selznick (yet again) is my nagging (and growing) sense that we’ve failed to do full justice to his larger theoretical perspective.  I have recently spent a good deal of time reading through Selznick’s canon and reflecting upon its meanings (including his most recent book, which he published last year at the age of 89).  In the process, I have become increasingly cognizant of the limitations of much recent organizational scholarship that has invoked Selznick’s name and tried to draw from his theory.  (I should hasten to add that this criticism extends to some of my own prior research).

The particular aspect of Selznick’s perspective that I have recently found most intriguing (and occasionally perplexing) is its preoccupation with “genuine” human ideals and the factors that facilitate or undermine their realization.  As my post’s opening quotes reveal, Selznick sees this focus as the master theme which ties together his life’s work.  He also sees it as the very foundation for his vision of a “humanist science” (which is obviously a rather challenging concept in its own right).

In future posts, I’ll likely have more to say about why Selznick thinks we should take ideals seriously, about what this task appears to entail, and about what might happen if we were to follow his advice in organizational studies.  I’ll also add some of my own thoughts about the benefits, costs, and potential perils of following this course (in so much as I understand it).  In the process, I’ll also try to provide some relevant current examples and to connect Selznick’s ideas with some of the recent topics that have been discussed in these pages (e.g.,  Jerry’s prophesy of the coming post-capitalist utopia and Willie’s call for “normative theory” in response thereto).

In the interim, I’d love to hear any initial reactions from the crowd.  Is the idea of putting values and ideals at the very center of organization studies a goofy one (i.e., an unfortunate suggestion proffered by an otherwise brilliant mind?).   What possible difference (good or bad) might it make if we tried to do this?  Do you have even a general sense of what it means to “take ideals seriously” and do “humanist science?”  Is this interesting, or would you  like to hear me talk about something else instead?

The following fact was recently told to me: apparently, the leading physics journals no longer accept social network analysis, even though these articles are now among the most cited in these journals. I found this odd. From a “pure” perspective, it makes sense: why should a journal dedicated to stuff like quantum mechanics accept articles on the Internet just because a physicist wrote it? On the other hand, it seems like disciplinary suicide. Why ditch the folks who’ve done such great work? Obviously, physicists have made wonderful contributions to the study of social networks and that’s a highlight of contemporary physics, then so be it. Furthermore, I was informed that socio-physics is a tough sell on the physics job market. Apparently, most tenure track socio-physics people teach in social science/professional units & most physics programs don’t hire new PhDs in this area.

In contrast, the economics profession seems to strongly support boundary crossing, long as you stick to some variant of the neo-classical framework. It’s hard to find a topic in the social sciences where economists – often highly regarded ones – haven’t treaded. Also, I have rarely heard of an economist who was punished for publishing in non-social science areas like math, statistics, and the sciences. Diedre McCloskey, if she wanted, could probably get away with an article or two in literary journals. Sure, there’s a core to the economics profession, but there are lots of well supported outposts.

So we have an interesting puzzle: two highly regarded fields with an abundance of clever people. Yet, one has very tight internal control, while the other is quite pleased with imperialism. The flippant answer is that, well, economists are self-interested. By requiring people to use a neo-classical framework, you maintain the brand. By allowing imperialism, you increase the value of the brand. But why don’t physicists do the same? Why don’t they say (like economists do), “we’ll just come in and clean up?” As a field with some serious internal problems (small market/running out of easy problems), conquering other disciplines would seem like a good solution. Both economists and physicists are encouraged to comment.

As discussed previously, Williamson’s Nobel prize is a huge win for organization theory as well.  Williamson’s work provides a central foundation for many organization theory, strategy or organization economics PhD seminars being taught at business schools. (On the other hand, and this really surprised me, Steven Levitt mentions that young assistant professors in economics are scarcely aware of Williamson’s work.) And, Williamson’s work is heavily cited in our top organization theory and strategy journals, much more so than in mainstream economics.

So, who’s carrying Williamson’s work forth and taking it into new directions?  Williamson’s graduate students are now largely working in business schools, mostly in management and strategy departments (as verified by Peter).  Their work is taking transaction cost economics, and discussions of organizational boundaries, into interesting new directions.  In sum, the “Williamson 2.0″ School seems to be focusing on the following areas: heterogeneity, microanalytics and boundaries.  Here’s a quick summary of a few of the interesting “Williamson 2.0″ strands that I’ve come across:

• Jackson Nickerson and Todd Zenger have written an important paper on envy and the boundaries of the firm.  This paper beautifully links insights from social psychology and economics to help us further understand the micro, social interactional factors that impact organizational boundaries.
• Kyle Mayer and Nick Argyres have done interesting work on “learning to contract.” This work touches on important issues related to how contracting is learned, how it evolves and impacts organizational heterogeneity.
• Foss and Foss have published a very nice article on property rights and transaction costs.
• Nickerson and Zenger have also written an article on “problem-solving.” The article makes important links between knowledge-based arguments and transaction costs, helping us better understand both organizational boundaries and heterogeneity.
• Joanne Oxley and Brian Silverman have done interesting work on transactions, alliances and R&D.
• Williamson’s work is strongly influencing research in international business as well, for example, see the work of Mauro Guillen, Jean Francois Hennart, Peter Buckley, John Dunning, etc. (Perhaps the best taste of this will come from reading the Journal of International Business Studies.)
• Peter Klein and Michael Sykuta have a promising volume forthcoming on transaction cost economics, with an introduction by Oliver Williamson. (And, big congrats to O&M’s Peter Klein for having his article cited in the Nobel Committee’s scientific statement.)
• Joe Mahoney’s Economic Foundations of Strategy is a nice doctoral level book that touches on central issues related to heterogeneity and organizational economics.

More broadly, I think there are other currents in organization theory — beyond more “traditional” Williamsonians — that also relate to Williamson’s work:

• As Williamson mentions in his 4am phone interview, transaction cost economics is part of a wider “Carnegie” program of research — and thus if we broaden Williamson 2.0 to include the Carnegie School, then we should also point to the work of many other scholars: obviously Jim March, but also Gavetti, Levinthal, Ocasio, and many others.
• Also, Williamson’s work gets lumped into “new institutional economics” (which includes a rather broad array of scholars: Greif to Cheung to North, etc), and the link with “institutions” thus also brings in organizational sociology. So, here I’d recommend the work of, say, Victor Nee, and particularly (and, I’m a fan of this paper), Ingram and Clay’s effort to broadly link institutional work from economics and sociology: “choice-within-constraints: new institutionalism and implications for sociology.”
• Also, I should note that the “resource-based view” (RBV) of strategy (13,700+ citations, not bad) has a long relationship with transaction cost economics.  The relationship between the RBV and transaction cost economics has always been a bit conflicted, Williamson has essentially been a foil of sorts for many strategy scholars.  However, there are of course attempts to reconcile resource-based and transaction costs intuition, I’ve even heard talk of “a unified theory” at various professional meetings, though have not seen it materialize quite yet.

The above is a very selective (and likely, biased) sampling of Williamson 2.0 research, so please feel free to add additional strands of work into the comments.

I’m happy to welcome our newest guest blogger, Matt Kraatz, to the orgtheory fold. Matt is in the College of Business at the University of Illinois and is one of my department’s outstanding alumni. His research touches on various core issues in organizational theory, including institutional and strategic change, organizational adaptation, reputation dynamics, and organizational character.  His 1996 paper with Ed Zajac about adaptation among private liberal arts colleges, in which they demonstrated the “limits of new institutionalism,” is one of his best known papers. We’re excited to have you with us at orgtheory Matt!

Andrew Sullivan recently asked: if Obama shouldn’t have won, then who? Sullivan had an excellent suggestion, Neda, the woman murdered while protesting fraudulent election results in Iran. I have another suggestion: Indiana Senator Richard Lugar. I think he has a remarkable track record.

• In 1960, Lugar was elected to the Indianapolis school board and was one of the first people to promote desegregation. He chose his own high school to start with and it was quickly integrated. As Mayor, he helped develop policies for a unified urban government, which helped prevent white flight in the 1970s.
• In the 1980s, Lugar intervened in the People Power Revolution in the Philippines. Scholars now recognize his pivotal role. Not only did he, along with Congressional Democrats, help edge Marcos out of power, he allegedly asked Reagan to withdraw support from the Marcos regime, allowing non-violence to take its course.
• Since then, Lugar has been the American politician most responsible for monitoring and reducing nuclear and conventional weapons. For example, with Sam Nunn, he helped get the resources to create a facility for destroying military supplies in Russia.

Any single one of these actions is highly meritorious. All three is outstanding. Is it any wonder that Lugar runs unopposed?

Let’s thank Katherine Chen for guest blogging this September. Here’s her book and her blog. Great work!

The Nobel prize news today is encouraging. It’s clear that this is a good prize. You should definitely read Teppo and Sean’s informative responses. I’ll take a moment to also congratulate my colleague Lin Ostrom for continuing the tradition of excellence at Indiana. She joins three other Hoosiers who have won the Nobel prize: James Watson of DNA fame and biologists Salvador Luria and Herman Muller. Congrats!