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Happy New Year’s Eve from London! We are celebrating the New Year here by exploring London and its wonderful attractions. There is an emerging theme that I feel very happy about: detective stories. Yesterday we visited Sherlock Holmes’s museum in Baker Street. Later we met with dear friends and discussed recent work by Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell. We are soon off to see the Mouse Trap by Agatha Christie - the longest running show of any kind in the world (https://www.the-mousetrap.co.uk/online/). As you may know, it is an ingenious play with a great twist in the end. Why am I so happy? Because I am a great amateur of crime fiction in its various sub-genres. My greatest favorite – well, one of them – is the Finnish author Matti (Yrjänä) Joensuu. He has written detailed realistic crime novels over a period of more than 30 years. They are literary ambitious and often focus more on the social and societal explanation of the crime than the solving of the crime by the hero (or anti-hero) called Harjunpää.

What does it have to do with organization theory? A great deal because there is an interesting analogy between detective work and conducting organizational research of abductive kind. People such as Barbara Czarniawska and Mats Alvesson & Dan Kärreman have compared qualitative analysis with detective work and mystery solving. I have been working for some time on the idea that the analogy has its pros and cons, but that we should expand the view so that we also see the parallel between mystery writing and research as authoring. I have a paper that I have been working on for some time, but I would love to get feedback on this idea as well as new insights.

If when you woke up this morning you thought that:

a) there’s a world of objects out there the qualities of which exists independently of your perception and conceptualization;

b) these objective, mind-independent qualities inhere in those objects are “carried” or “conveyed” (mechanically, electromagnetically, chemically, etc.) to your senses which then deliver them to your mind, which them synthesizes them in thought (implying for instance that vision is inherently distinct from touch, etc.)

c) these sense “data” are the bedrock foundation upon which fancier “thought castles” (theories, beliefs, speculations, etc.) are built;

d) the sense-data are indubitable and unchangeable while theories about them come and go, implying that perceptual judgments are themselves not “theoretical.”

Then you should….

Wait. Let me pose a riddle first.  What do a radical Marxist interpreter of Heidegger and Husserl, an (equally radical?) defender of capitalism and liberal democracy, and a nondescript philosopher trained in the analytic tradition have in common?

Answer: they all agree in suggesting that propositions a-d above are false, and largely agree on what propositions they should be replaced by:

a) there’s a world of objects out there all right, but their qualities are mind-dependent.  The ways the objects are organized in relation to one another (objectively) is analytically and empirically distinct to the way that the objects are organized in relation to us.

b) there is no such thing as mind-independent sensory qualities.  Qualities are constructed through an interactive process between (mindful) bodies and the world.

c) there is no meaningful distinction between so-called “sense-data” and theoretical judgments.  There’s only the distinction between theoretical judgments that we are habituated to make in real-time, and those that we have we have to learn propositionally and with some difficulty: perception is theoretical all the way down. That means that we can be taught to perceive the world in radically different ways from the ones that we are accustomed to.

d) this also means that perceptual judgments can change over time and be radically overturned (although it is hard).  Thus, objectivity is not an epistemological issue associated with some indubitable bedrock of experience, but a socio-historical accomplishment that is always transitory and provisional.

The three little books in which (some version of) all of these theses are defended, and which surprisingly converge on the same solutions (independently of one another) are, F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order, Paul Churchland’s Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, and (a recently translated set of radio lectures delivered in the French equivalent of NPR in 1948) Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s The World of Perception.

Each of these books can be read in a few hours (the Merlau-Ponty lectures are the length of an article), and all of them will provide a nice payoff (at least they will make you think about things that you don’t think about very often in a different way).

Read footnote 3 of this article (The Mertons, a tape recorder and a quasi-Freudian slip).

A Drifting Life is a really, really long autobriographical manga. The author describes life in 1950′s Japan, his encounter with Western culture, and his successful effort to redefine manga into an adult genre. It’s a straightforward story: the author begins writing manga for fun, but has to grow up when it becomes a job. It’s simultaneously a memoir and tutorial on the theory and history of manga. It’s also a very beautiful book, with many stunning panels and a great cover (a big theme in manga marketing). Probably the best $30 you can spend on reading material. Recommended.

Via A&L Daily — a New Scientist article on the Peter Principle (with citations to Bob Sutton, Ed Lazear, etc).

It’s been seven years since I graduated from Chicago. I’ve been thinking a bit about the program’s history and legacy. You might summarize the high points of Chicago this way:

• Urban studies, with a very heavy ethnographic and ecological focus: The tradition continues to this day with some great faculty (such as guest blogger Mario Small).
• Interactionism: Not always in the soc dept, but the early days had Mead and Dewey, followed by some Chicago school writers, then followed by Blumer. Then interactionism kind of stopped for a while after Blumer, but it gets picked up from time to time.
• Big N survey research: Chicago has been a pioneer in this area with the GSS, NELS, NORC, the Health and Life Surveys, etc. Still going strong.
• Orgs & networks: The phrase “Chicago School” doesn’t ususally remind you of this area, but the dept has been very strong since the 1980s: Clark and Blau taught organization theory there; Bidwell’s work on schools as orgs was done there; Laumann’s org state work was done at Chicago; most of Gould’s career was spent there; Burt is there; Padgett is there; etc. And these folks have all churned out tons of students who populate modern org studies, including myself.

What next? I have no idea! On the one hand, it’s not hard to build on these traditions. There are excellent scholars in all areas that can be hired. You might also try to create new areas, but that’s hard, since we seem to be at the tail end of a normal science cycle in sociology.  Finally, Chicago might give in to isomorpshism. I’ve been told that this has happened in Chicago economics – the econ dept’s newer faculty don’t particularly share the techniques or the views of the older faculty; it’s no longer a bastion of markets, except among the very senior faculty. If Chicago soc hired the best and brightest from other programs, they’ll resemble other programs. In any case, I’m quite eager to see what the future holds for the alma mater.

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

This is easy, since Indiana is usually regarded as a leader in medical sociology & health. The following folks do health in one way or another: Pam Jackson (mental health, race & health), Scott Long (aging), Jane McLeod (mental health, life course), Eliza Pavalko (aging, life course, health care politics), Bernice Pescosolido (suicide, mental health, networks), Quincy Stewart (race, mortality, demography), Peggy Thoits (mental health, life course). I also count in some ways – I’ve publised on health & networks and my RWJ works focuses on data analysis in health contexts and the organizational context of medical research.

Add other health heavy programs in the comments.

College football fans were shocked this weekend when Urban Meyer resigned as head coach of the Florida Gators. Coaching resignations are fairly common in a sport/business of such high stakes and with such an uneven distribution between the big winners and the rest, but this resignation came out of nowhere and left a lot of dropped jaws. The reason for this is that Meyer is relatively young and is at the top of his game. After a quick rise through the head coaching ranks with notable stops at Bowling Green and Utah, Meyer found himself in a cushy position at one of the top programs in the country. In his five years at Florida, Meyer won two national championships, two SEC championships, and three BCS appearances (he had another BCS appearance and a national coach of the year honor while at Utah). No one expected a guy like this to call it quits at this point in his career.

Meyer is resigning because of health concerns related to the stress and work demands of the job. Granted, being a college football coach must be one of the most demanding jobs you can find, especially when the position is in a program where people expect you to contend for a national championship every year. The season, which runs from September to the beginning of January, is only part of the workload. A head coach is constantly recruiting, practicing, and watching over his student athletes to make sure they don’t get in trouble and stay eligible. Meyer was apparently one of the hardest working coaches you’ll find, putting in long hours and working even when he wasn’t working (e.g., a reporter recently claimed that Meyer often texted coaches, players, and recruits while sitting in church with his family). Rather than pulling back the throttle a bit, Meyer obviously felt like the only solution was to disengage completely.

What interests me about this is the timing. Coaching is hard work, but why quit now? I heard an interesting theory this morning on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters. The reporter (which one said it I can’t remember) wondered if Meyer would still be coaching next season if the Gators hadn’t lost the SEC championship game to Alabama earlier this month. The loss was so mentally exhausting and emotionally painful that it endangered Meyer’s physical health. He was hospitalized shortly after the game with chest pains and has revisited the hospital several time since then. Apparently doctors don’t think Meyer has a heart defect or any other kind of lasting physical damage, but the stress of the job, accentuated by the loss to Alabama, caused the symptoms.

Now, of course, we don’t know the whole story, but it appears that the loss to Alabama was a precipitating factor in causing the quick decline of his health. As one reporter said on the ESPN show, coaches always talk about losing as being more painful than winning is joyous. In most circumstances the pain of losing is a good motivator for hard work. The threat of losing helps you keep your edge. This theory of motivation might be related to social psychological findings about loss aversion – people are more willing to take risks to avoid loss than they are to make gains. But in the case of Meyer we see that loss aversion isn’t just a cognitive bias, it has emotional and physical consequences as well. People hate loss so much, and some people hate it more than others apparently, that losing may actually cause them to be sick. Anyone who’s ever competed for anything before knows this to be true. Once you’ve experienced that pain, you’ll do a lot to avoid it in the future. But what if loss is so painful that experiencing it can actually jeopardize your health and well-being? Well, in that case, it may be best to follow Meyer’s lead and find some other way to experience fulfillment.

UPDATE: Although there isn’t a lot of research on emotion and loss aversion, at least one behavioral economist thinks there is a link. From a recent Journal of Marketing paper by Colin Camerer: “My intuition is that loss aversion is often an exaggerated emotional reaction of fear, an adapted response to the prospect of genuine, damaging, survival-threatening loss. People overreact to small losses in their long lives that are not truly life threatening (e.g., Loewenstein et al. 2001). Many of the losses people fear the most are not life threatening, but there is no telling that to an emotional system that is overadapted to conveying fear signals.” The fear of loss may be more rational than Camerer thinks though if loss causes real emotional and phsyical pain. Avoiding loss may just be another way of avoiding pain.

UPDATE #2: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve never been religious about sports, but I’ve never turned down the chance to see a great athlete. I was lucky enough to see a recent Lakers-Pistons game. Detroit flailed, but it was still a pleasure to Kobe Bryant play. It was obvious to a non-sports person that he was obviously on another level. Then I got to thinking, what other great athletes have I seen? Here’s the list:

• Pele: There was a time when soccer was briefly popular in the US. The American club, the New York Cosmos, hired Pele. My dad, a Colombian soccer nut, just had to go see a  game. He told me that I’d tell my kids that I saw Pele. I have! Bonus round: Best of Pele’s goals.
• The 1980s Philies: Grew up around the city of brotherly love, so I got many chances to see the Phillies at their height in the 1980s – Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt,  Steve Carlton. Also got to see Cal Ripken, Jr when the Orioles played Philadelphia in ’83.
• The 1994 Brazilian soccer team: Need I say more?  Romário, Bebeto, Dunga, Taffarel, and Jorginho? Saw them play in LA vs. Sweden, another great team, for the semi-finals.
• Zoran Primorac & Ilija Lupulescu: The Killerspin Table Tennis Club opened up a few blocks from the University of Chicago. The owner wanted to bring world class table tennis to America, so he invited these amazing East Europeans to Chicago. Here’s Primorac, a former European Champion and World Champion runner up, at the 2003 World Cup. Watching Lupulescu, world champion in mixed doubles, practice was also amazing. I have a signed Primorac t-shirt.
• Randy Johnson: Skipped some ASA session to catch a game with the D-backs. Wasn’t his best performance, but you could still see some flashes of brilliance.

Now I can add Kobe Bryant. It’s funny. When the other players come out, they high five and do little tricks. But when Kobe came out, he was almost silent. His performance speaks for itself.

Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays to you all! I have been spending the past couple of days with our family at my wife’s parents in Iitti, about 150 km North East from Helsinki. I felt very touched by the Christmas church and opportunity to light candles at the cemetary.

I have also been thinking about global industrial restructuring and its two faces. This region called Kymenlaakso is one of the central places for Finnish pulp and paper industry. It is easy to see how the paper mills have contributed to growth and development of the communities at least ever since the early 18th century.  Mills and facilities of increasing size have been built alongside rivers and lakes because of logistics and access to power. Cities have then grown around theses mill sites, and the production – especially the exports – have provided employment, brought revenue, and created prosperity to this region. Here – as is the case elsewhere in Finland – industrialization has progressed hand in hand with the development of Nordic welfare state. As a cyclical business, this industry has brought with it good but also bad times for the local people. The recent industrial restructuring has, however, implied unprecedented changes. Unlike before, major mills have been shut down, even in cases where these units have been profitable per se. The local people – managers included – have felt powerless, and most of them share the view that this production or these jobs will never come back. From a financial or strategic perspective, it is easy to understand that this is what the paper and pulp groups have to do to cut down overcapacity in this mature business. In fact, I have good friends working for these companies making such decisions, bearing the heavy burden of moral responsibility on their shoulders. Nevertheless, my greatest sympathy goes to those who have lost their jobs and have dim prospects of finding new ones. This also happened to someone close whose family is now struggling with this issue.

I plan to continue to study global industrial restucturing because of its relevance to so many people. Together with my good friend Janne Tienari we had a paper in AMR in 2008 and there is a forthcoming paper co-authored with Niina Erkama coming out in Organization Studies very soon. I’m glad that I started to study these phenomena from a critical angle, but wish that I could do much more and have something new and meaningful to say – and not only for scholars.

I hope that you are not depressed by these thoughts but can feel grateful for all the good things in life and can enjoy the very well deserved holidays!

Article contains spoilers.

This year is a great year for science fiction films. District 9 and Avatar are not only good science fiction, they’re just plain good. Both will be remembered as top notch films. But at the end of the day, I’d have to say that District 9 is a more consequential film. Don’t misunderstand me, I thought Avatar was great. But Avatar is  a feel good action film, while District 9 actually asks some tough questions and really makes you think.

Avatar is about a human being who sides with a nature worshiping alien race in a fight against a corporation who wants to take their land. District 9 is about how human beings deal with an unexpected alien refugee problem. The second is a much more interesting scenario than the first. Let’s break it down:

• Aliens: Avatar’s aliens are beautiful and wise. Classic “noble savage.” Seen that a million times before. District 9 aliens are odd looking, have disgusting personal habits, and operate a very hierarchical society. It’s easy to love people when they’re pretty, but it’s easy to be racist when they are ugly. That’s interesting.
• The hero: Avatar has a classic hero who overcomes obstacles. By joining the pretty aliens, he regenerates himself into a better person and he is healed.  Nice theme for kids. But silly for adults. As many people point out, District 9′s “hero” is a human bureaucrat who is clearly out of his league when the evil corporation is hired to forcibly move the alien ghetto. The guy is more realistic – we sympathize because he’s trying to be a good family man, but he’s clearly a dork. More of an anti-hero. Even when he “joins” the other side, it’s only because he thinks he can be cured of a genetic disease that’s turning him into an alien. He hates the aliens. “Racism” does not magically disappear when you contact other people (or aliens) like it does in Avatar.
• Politics: Avatar has a simple, but effective, corporations vs. aliens theme. In contrast, District 9 has more realistic politics. At first, humans are curious about the aliens and even welcoming. Later, they become a “social problem.” Aliens have weird habits, they attract the mafia, buy drugs, etc. Corporations are just the tool that people use to “solve” the alien “question.”
• Sociology: Avatar is world systems theory, developed humans (the West) exploit Third World peoples (the Na’vi). In District 9, the issue is more complex. The aliens obviously are technologically superior, but we only see the refugees in the South Africa ghetto. The alien society spills out into the human society, despite the fences erected around the ghetto. Kind of like the various well between nations set up around the world. There’s an interesting ecology & symbiosis that we can only imagine.

At the end of the day, I loved both films. Avatar’s contribution is outstanding technique and strong linear story telling. It’s visually outstanding and fun to watch. But District 9 lives up to the best of science fiction by creating a fictional world that’s allows us to think about some very hard questions.

The New York Times and The Morgan have uploaded the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. Very cool: you can toggle each manuscript page (edits and all) with the actual text, you can add notes to the manuscript (an effort to crowd source/figure out edits), etc.  Dickens’ handwriting, as you see below, is something else — glad we can type now.  Cool project.  You can listen to some interesting info on the project here.

On this Christmas day, I’d like to express some gratitude:

• To my friends and family, for being so wonderful.
• To the orgtheory crew, for creating this cool online community.
• To our guest bloggers, for bringing fresh ideas.
• To the orgheads, for hundreds of great comments. It’s the lifeblood of the blog.
• To our buddies at other blogs, like Organizations & Markets, Scatter, & Sociological Imagination.
• To my colleagues at IU, Michigan, and the RWJ, for pushing me in great directions.

Thank you! Have an excellent holiday.

Update: I got a snuggie!

New Republic has an interesting article on the shift in b-schools from management to consulting:

But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.” 

And:

The new managerial class tended to neglect process innovation because it was hard to justify in a quarterly earnings report, where metrics like “return on investment” reigned supreme…

The country’s business schools tended to reflect and reinforce these trends. By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to be overachiever types motivated primarily by salary rather than some lifelong ambition to run a steel mill. And there was a lot more money to be made in finance than  manufacturing. A recent paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef shows that compensation in the finance sector began a sharp, upward trajectory around 1980.

My take: It’s not clear to me that this is such a bad thing. It really depends on what you think about the modern American economy. If, like Jerry Davis, you think that transition to securitized virtual firms is bad, then this is just another symptom of the problem. If you think that the economy is now different and America’s advantage is in financial machinery, then maybe it’s ok. Either way: who *is* training the managers? Our products have been getting better over time – who’d doing that? Is it all foriegn firms?

There’s a funny series of youtube videos about why the Phantom Menace is such a horrible, horrible film. The gimmick is that the narrator is a demented psychopath, the only person who would spend the time putting together this 70 minute deconstruction of a lame movie. Given that I was bored and a hard core Star Wars geek, I ran the videos while working the other day. And I must admit, it’s some of the most cogent film criticism I’ve ever seen. It’s not Pauline Kael, but if you ever wanted a straightforward explanation of how to make a simple, narratively driven action film, you won’t find a better explanation. He lays out what makes most kids’ films fun and memorable, and shows how Phantom Menace violently breaks ever single one of these rules.

Even if this isn’t your cup of tea, you might like the last two sections where he makes a point that every orgtheorist might enjoy. George Lucas has done two things that rob him of the ability to make truly good film: gain total control over the film making process, so no one else can interfere, and surround himself with people who are scared to criticize him. Basically, modest amounts of adversity and criticism can help alot – a point that all of us should appreciate.

Another Life google archive photo.

I’ve been grading for the past several days.  I’ve thought about switching to the “staircase” method (recommended by O&M a few years ago).

Or alternatively, I’ve thought about using  a “first impressions” method of grading.  So, Nalini Ambady’s research on “first impressions” shows that students can accurately judge a teacher’s abilities by watching a short 10-second clip —  I wonder about the reverse, and also about whether I can grade a paper by the “first impression” I get within 10-seconds from the opening paragraphs.  I’m guessing that grades based on reading just the opening paragraphs versus the full paper would be very highly correlated.  Alas, I’m trying to also teach something and provide feedback, and not just give a grade.

How would you explain what various social scientists do? Here’s a partial list, parentheses are discpline I think are particularly strong on the topics:

• Decision theory – why do people choose what they do? how do they weigh costs and benefits? (econ, psych)
• Meaning – what do people believe? (soc, psych, anthro)
• Structure – what’s the pattern of human relations? (soc, anthro)
• Population – how many people do we have? Are they sick or healthy? Why? (demography – soc, econ, anthro)
• Power and influence – why do people do what other people want? (soc, psych, political science)
• rules and conventions – how did we get the rules, norms, and rules that regulate our society? (all disciplines)
• life course – what happens to people during their lives? (econ – jobs, social roles  – soc, poli sci – political participation)
• inequality – why are some people more wealthy/prestigious than others? (econ, soc)

Feel free to add your own in the comments.

I want to thank Eric Abrahamson and Ed Walker for guest blogging at orgtheory this past month.   Their posts were intriguing and thought-provoking. You can read all of Ed’s posts here. Eric’s posts can be found here.

Thanks for contributing guys!

Scatter has a nice discussion about students: should we encourage someone to continue if they can’t get more than F? What should we tell people so they have rational expectations of the course? It got me thinking. In general, people have gotten pretty comfortable in my courses, but it didn’t start that way. What did I learn about classroom management?

Lesson 1: Put yourself in the shoes of the student. What would be a reasonable and typical student belive about your course? Example: Social theory – “This is is going to be impossible.” Example: Intro soc – “I just need one more elective.” Etc. Empathy goes a long way here.

Lesson 2: You can adjust your class without dumbing it down. Think about what students expect and help them adjust to the class. For example, in any course which is an elective, I provide a lot of structure: power points, frequent quizzes. Basically, if they just follow the instructions, they will get something out of the course and they will do ok on the grade. In social theory, I do a lot of personal contact to help warm people up because social theory terrorizes students. Memorize their names (other courses are lecture halls), let people chat at the beginning of class, tell fun stories, etc. Of course, I don’t spend most of my time doing this. But I have to do *something* to lighten people up. Otherwise, they’ll be pretty hostile to my subtle discussion of Marxist alienation theory.

Lesson 3: Design the grading scheme so that (a) the student must acquire some basic knowledge to pass, and (b) it is acheivable by students who typically show up when they put in reasonable effort. The standards will vary from course to course. Intro will require much less dedication than social theory, which is a marathon of reading and writing the way I teach it.  That way, you won’t have armies of angry students who study all night, got an 32% on the exam and only got a D- minus reward. Basically, if you show up and put in effort, you will likely get something like a 70% on my exams, and that will get you somewhere in the C+/B- range.

Lesson 4: Variance: I try to make exams and quizzes have easy and hard questions. That (a) provides the challenge that people need to improve, (b) makes them study harder, and (c) creates a rational case for why some people gets A’s and others get C’s.

Lesson 5: Say “yes.” Unless the request is truly onerous, I grant most student requests. Need an extra day for the paper? Sure. Need a few more minutes on the exam? Go ahead. In life, it’s usually better to get an extension and do a better job than turn in horrible work. If people abuse the privilige, I then resort to the syllabus. “A paper a month later? Hmmm…. that’s a bit extreme… let’s see… a grade deduction per day… that would give you a maximum grade of F——-… still interested?”

Lesson 6: Reduce grade disputes – A few strategies: employ tests with actual answers, such as multiple choice, short answer, etc.; clearly put the formula for grades in the syllabus; give some modest extra credit opportunities; if a person disputes the answer, ask them to show you in the readings why the given answer isn’t right; if a person disputes the paper grade, read the paper out loud and critique as you read – people will usually appreciate their less than perfect prose when read out loud. In other words, be open minded about grade dispute, but make it so that answers are clear and that alternate answers are welcome if there’s an actual basis. Otherwise, make it clear that they are wasting their time arguing with you.

Lesson 7:  Stubborn people. If you have truly tried to make the class comfortable and you have been flexible, it’s easy to dig in your heels with stubborn students. And stay tough. Don’t waffle. Being tough also helps with class management. If students know you aren’t a push over, then they’ll be better in class.

In an article dealing with Black/White differences in arts participation (which I am re-reading for completely unrelated reasons), written with Francie Ostrower and published at Social Forces, Paul DiMaggio cites his empirical chapter in what became the Orange Bible as forthcoming in a book entitled The New Institutionalism in Organizational Theory.  So maybe organizational theory is indeed dead (which might be the reason for the change in planned title), but organizational analysis is alive and well.

I have just come back from a visit to Lyon, France – which is actually my second home base. I was fortunate to serve on the jury (committee) of Gregoire Croidieu who defended his thesis on persistence in the French wine industry at University of Lyon 3 and EMLYON Business School. Among other things, he explains how the so called Médoc classification in Bordeaux wines that was created in the 1850s has persisted until these days as the basis of the organization of wine production there – and had a huge effect on others elsewhere. The thesis is very inspiring and shows how institutional theory can be pushed further and applied in a fascinating way – which feels especially important given our recent discussions about the death of and (lack of) relevance in organization theory. Interestingly, his main argument was to emphasize the regional identity and loyalty, not economic interest or shared beliefs, as bases of persistence and resistance to change. Together with Gregoire and his supervisor Philippe Monin, we have now plans to use this case to spell out a discursive perspective on institutionalization and persistence. One of the starting points is that this classification and talk about wines is all about discourse. Another one is that this discourse has been mobilized in various ways by a number of actors throughout the years to further their interests or promote a specific identity. Yet another one is that this discourse has proved to be flexible and compatible with very different conditions and prevailing ideologies. I do think that discourse plays a major role in insitutionalization, but that we still lack elaborate models and in-depth historical analyses of this issue.

The visit to Lyon was also interesting in the sense that I could again see how different the practices in doctoral programs and vivas or defences are across countries. I have firsthand experience in terms of serving on a jury or committee or acting as an opponent in several countries. Finland ranks number one in formality, Sweden in the quality of dialogue but perhaps also in conflict avoidance, Denmark in focus on practical relevance that sometimes overrides the theoretical side, UK in focus on theoretical argument but also in lack of transparency in evaluation, New Zealand in straightforwardness, Canada in positive atmosphere, Israel in originality, and France in terms of intimidation of the candidate (not this time though) and the quality of food and drink after it’s all over. I hope that no one is offended. I’ll try to collect more experiences and write a book about these cultural differences when I retire (although I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in such a book).

A graduate student here at Northwestern, Nicholas Pearce, and I have written an essay about the influence of social movements on markets for next year’s Annual Review of Sociology. A number of you offered very useful feedback on the paper. Thank you! Now that it’s finally finished, I thought I’d post a link to the paper so that you can see the end product. It still needs to be copy-edited but we’re not planning on making any major changes.  Writing this paper has been a real treat (although it was a lot more work than I thought it would be).

Here’s the abstract:

While much of economic sociology focuses on the stabilizing aspects of markets, the social movement perspective emphasizes the role that contentiousness plays in bringing institutional change and innovation to markets. Markets are inherently political, both because of their ties to the regulatory functions of the state and because markets are contested by actors who are dissatisfied with market outcomes and who use the market as a platform for social change. Research in this area focuses on the pathways to market change pursued by social movements, including direct challenges to corporations, the institutionalization of systems of private regulation, and the creation of new market categories through institutional entrepreneurship. Much contentiousness, while initially disruptive, works within the market system by producing innovation and restraining capitalism from destroying the resources it depends on for survival.

I’m not really a connoisseur of poetry, wish I was, but Wallace Stevens is one poet I enjoy reading. His poems are frequently about the nature of reality.

We’ve had lots of discussions here at orgtheory about the nature of reality: the role of theories in explaining or constructing reality, the relationship between theory and data/observation, perception and reality, performativity, etc. Poets have wrestled with related issues and Stevens is a master in this domain. You might, for example, read Stevens’s poem “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” or his poem “Description without Place.” The latter poem provoked William Carlos Williams to write a poem in response: “A Place (Any Place) to Transcend All Places.”

[I would like to try some kind one-time experimental class on poetry, the 'classic novels and organizations' readings class last year was a fun experiment, though that might be a stretch.]

Here are the opening stanzas of Wallace Stevens’s The Man with the Blue Guitar –

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

…additional excerpts here.

The NY Times has a nice forum on changing race relations in China. Indiana’s Ho-fung Hung got to participate:

Today’s racialist self-perception of Han Chinese can be traced back to the rise of Chinese nationalism amidst the chaotic collapse of the Qing empire in 1911. The Qing empire was multi-ethnic and ruled by the Manchus.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of years ago, Bryan Caplan, a good friend of mine, wrote a very controversial book called Myth of the Rational Voter. The concept is simple: people cast their votes in very dumb ways, so aggregating votes will not yield optimal policy. After Bryan’s book was published, all kinds of people criticized him. But I wasn’t persuaded that Bryan’s point was wrong. Voters are systematically irrational. Not only does the median voter have appallingly low knowledge of government and economics, the average person has all kinds of views that are at odds with what experts in various fields believe to be true and the best policy. Democracy does not magically cancel out voter irrationality.

There’s one response to the irrational voter problem that I haven’t seen discussed: What if being in a democracy changes the policies that people want? What if democracy encourages nice culture? We assume median voters and democratic states are independent of each other. I think it may be the case that democracies can change preferences, often for the better. Call it the nice democracy thesis.

Consider the following facts:

• According to political scientists, warfare between democratic states is extremely rare.
• Social movement scholars have noted that democratic states repress dissidents a lot less than they used to.
• Over time, democratic states have treated citizens much more nicely than they used to. It’s hard to argue that the average citizen in 2000 isn’t better off than in 1900, when we treated women, minorities, gays, and other folks in truly horrible ways.
• Even criminals have gotten better treatment. The death penalty is gone in nearly all industrialized democracies and most democracies have functioning, if imperfect, notions of proportional punishment.
• There’s even some limited evidence that democracies can rub off on their non-democratic neighbors.
• Warfare, minority repression, and dissident repression continue as usual in non-democratic states.

These facts suggest to me that voters are getting nicer in some pretty important ways, even if they have a poor understanding of economics or political theory. Why? I find the answer in modern evolutionary theory. It’s been argued by anthropologists that human beings may be programmed to be pro-social to people within our group. In other words, most folks can learn to be cooperators in the right environment. What if democratic politics is one such environment? If politics is about expressing views through voting instead of coercing the other side, that triggers cooperation. And cooperators like other cooperators. So people are less likely to demand the punishment of others through wars and repression. Maybe the voters are still dumb, but I can live with democracy if they’re nice.

If you ever wondered about Obama the speaker and Obama the policy maker, here’s the connection: he’s a standard issue liberal, but his rhetoric is very inclusive. It makes most folks feel like he’s on your side, even if he isn’t. How inclusive? Consider the following post from blogger Dan Drezner:

Oh, professors of introductory international relations classes everywhere are thanking their maker for Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (well, except those in Steve Walt‘s classes). It’s a gift to anyone who needs to come up with a final exam question at this stage of the semester. Pick a paradigm, and you can find a sliver of the speech dedicated to its theoretical propositions.

Later, he argues that you can find endorsements of just about any international relations theory in Obama’s Nobel speech:

• Neoliberal institutionalism
• Social construcivism
• Democratic peace theory
• Feminist IR theory (I think it’s there, but you have to squint)
• Human security

He’s not alone. Andrew Sullivan thought it was about Niebuhr style Christianity, with a dash of Camus. What else? A defense of Dogme 95 film making? A refutation of the designated hitter rule?

Exercise: read Obama’s speech and come up with your own interpretation. I’ll post the funniest reading of the speech, long as it’s textually based. Heck, I don’t care. Just make it funny.

Hat tip to Margarita Rayzberg, from the home office in Washington!

According to the New York Times. Here’s a nice summary of his contribution to social science:

In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.

When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague.of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.

He’s also known as the author of a seminal economics textbook.

A few that I’ve heard recently…

1. Awesometastic:  Better than fantastic.

2. Meatnostic: Tries to be vegetarian, but occasionally has seafood, poultry and not too much read meat. But they’re really trying.

3. Negative Fun:  “Broke my toe – that was negative fun.”

Another big issue in our discussion about the future of organization theory must be its practical relevance. A few months ago my 10-year old son Elias asked me about my work, and I was pleased to tell him that I study organizations and explained what they are. I was struck by his reaction: “Huh, there is no need to study that.” I thought about his response and told him a couple of days later about a research project that I am working on with Joep Cornelissen and Saku Mantere. We have a paper on the accidental shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in a London tube station a couple of years ago. The Metropolitan Police thought that he was a terrorist and tragically killed this innocent man. We focus on sensemaking and communication and explain the unfortunate outcome by commintted interpretation that was built up by idiomatic expressions that could be interpreted in different ways. I was really happy that Elias was all ears when I told about this research project.

I’m not saying that all organization research needs to focus on issues that are easy to understand and appear relevant for 10-year olds or managers. However,  it is useful and refreshing to think about ways in which organization theorists could make themselves more visible and useful. This may sound naïve, but everyone is now looking at Copenhagen and most of us are hoping that political decision-makers and other stakeholders would get organized to fight global warming. I don’t think that anyone has considered that organization scholars could play the role of experts or be proactively involved in designing structures  and processes that would help out in this joint endeavor. I have also thought about the EU and the various ways in which we as scholars could be involved in studying but also developing this gigantic bureacracy.

Against this background, I’m very glad to see that there are openings to this direction. For example, the new Editorial team of Organization Studies is encouraging people to connect organization theory with broader societal issues and concerns. Also, I have been involved in planning for a Second International Conference for AOM that would focus on developing management and organization research and education in places where help is needed. I hope that I will happen.

Once again, congratulations to Indiana faculty member Elinor Ostrom on winning the Nobel Memorial prize in economics. Photograph of the prize banquet, from the SF Gate website. Also in the photo is Jack W. Szostak, who won the prize in medicine.

So you’re looking to get some good civic experience and become a major player in community politics? Although conventional wisdom would suggest that you join a bowling league or a political activist group, a new study by Matthew Baggetta in Social Forces tells us that the ideal organization for gaining valuable civic experience may be a choral society.  Choral societies, Baggetta argues, have organizational characteristics ideal for providing civic training to its members.  Any good civic organization should provide its members with three kinds of opportunities: chances for interpersonal interaction (i.e., network building), governance experience (including the opportunity to represent one’s fellow members), and institutional relationships (i.e., connections to other community organizations and institutions).

When compared to other kinds of civic organizations, choral societies excel in giving members exposure to all of these opportunities. Baggetta’s evidence suggests that they give more opportunities for interpersonal interaction and building institutional relationships than political organizations. The reasons for this are that choral societies do not have professional staffs like most political organizations, they are not extremely hierarchical, they tend to collaborate with other organizations in the community, and they have frequent meetings with high intensity interaction. As far as a civic organization goes, choral societies are excellent incubators for potential community leaders.

I think Baggetta’s article is especially interesting when compared to Ed Walker’s work on privatizing civic participation. As Ed has reminded us in an excellent series of blog posts, not all civic organizations are equal. Using corporate resources to create top-down, grassroots organizations (an apparent misnomer) may even even stifle community collaboration and weaken local social capital.  Unlike choral societies, corporate-sponsored civic organizations may simply provide their members too few opportunities for interpersonal interaction, governance experience, and institutional relationships. Rather than build communities, these organizations may substantially weaken them.

Reading Baggetta’s paper also reminded me of the fascinating new book by Mario Small, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life.  Read the rest of this entry »

.. by living in a van, just like this Duke grad student.

Michael Tomasky’s provocative article a little while back in the NYRB, which discussed the Tea Parties and new right-wing protest movements, had me thinking about what initial insights social movement theory can offer to understanding this recent wave of activism. There are clearly certain aspects of this — such as the role of conservative talk radio, Glenn Beck, Freedomworks, concerns about whether the events should be considered “Astroturf,” and ties to the Republican Party — that make this case rather unique; on the other hand, there seem to be other aspects that fit broader patterns.

It’s probably not too much of a stretch to argue that social movement actors and other organized advocates have come to see the advantages of forms of mobilization that: (1) are coordinated centrally but executed in a decentralized fashion, (2) take a multi-pronged strategy, (3) involve building a broad coalition and (4) also resist heavy reliance on any single tactic (as Alinsky once pointed out, tactics that organizers depend on for too long run the risk of becoming stale, predictable, and ineffective; Barbara Epstein’s great book on antinuclear protest in California in the late 1970s showed, for example, what negative consequences followed when organizers relied too heavily on civil disobedience).

The use of the web in organizing appears to be encouraging the further expansion of centrally-coordinated local events, as groups like MoveOn and the Tea Party organizers have become quite skilled in coordinating local events all across the U.S. simultaneously.  The decentralized nature of web and social networking technologies seems to encourage further participation in events that take place all across the country at one moment, ala MoveOn’s vigils to support Cindy Sheehan in August 2005. Perhaps this repertoire will come to replace the mass Washington demonstration as the primary form of large-scale public protest in the U.S.; whether coordinating local events all across the country gets more media attention (or is more influential in shaping policy) than a single large demo is an empirical question.

The Tea Parties have built a broad but loose coalition across a wide range of constituencies. Ganz’s now-classic paper on “resources and resourcefulness” in farmworker organizing showed that “leadership teams that combine insiders and outsiders, strong and weak ties to constituencies, and diverse yet salient repertoires of collective action have greater capacity to develop effective strategy than those that do not” (p. 1015). Various political strategy manuals contend that an issue advocacy campaign that doesn’t include both insider and outsider tactics, or avoids attempting to bring multiple constituencies on board, may be doomed from the start. On the other hand, Jasper (2004) identifies the “extension dilemma”: broad coalitions often hold a less coherent set of goals and, naturally, have greater difficulty in coordinating collective action. Accordingly, certain media accounts are now suggesting that the tenuous coalitions that underlie the tea party protests may be fracturing.

Certain connected insiders have been present in organizing these events from the start, connecting grassroots activists with professional strategists and inside advocates. There are advantages to this. Levitsky (2007) finds that organizational diversity within the GLBT movement in Chicago helped to support a coherent movement identity: professionals engaged in lobbying and litigation often reported a cooperative division of labor between themselves and grassroots organizers, and vice versa. Similarly, I have found in some of my research that member-based advocacy organizations often display a mutually supportive, rather than competitive, relationship with non-membership advocacy organizations (like think tanks, policy institutes, legal advocacy organizations, etc.); grassroots activists and professional, staff-driven groups often complement one another. Banaszak’s new book discusses how feminist activists within the federal government played a central role in advocating for policy change on women’s movement issues.

Also, as Nella Van Dyke points out, there are broader issues of political opportunity to consider, as the movement has a number of elite allies but is not, it would seem, responding to the opening of new federal-level political opportunities. Instead, she attributes this new mobilization to threats:

…protest on the part of relatively privileged groups may be especially likely in response to threats. These groups already enjoy some level of resources and political opportunities, and therefore may be inspired to protest when they face a loss of resources or allies. Thus, political opportunity theory must recognize the mobilizing effect of threat, especially for reactive and right-wing movements.

Thank you Teppo and all others for this opportunity to get connected and share my thoughts about organization theory and other things! I usually hate it when people push their agendas and worldviews on others, but bear with me this time. So I’ll do some marketing for EGOS (www.egosnet.org). As Teppo mentioned, I am the Chair of EGOS and strongly believe in what it stands for. We need organizational research that is rooted in social sciences and the humanities, and pluralistic in perspectives and methods, often critical in orientation, and open for new ideas and innovations. In these senses, EGOS provides an alternative to and complements what AOM and SMS have to offer. Having observed the discussions in the forum and elsewhere, I get the feeling that there is a growing sentiment that one of the things to do to develop organization theory is precisely to deepen our understanding of the ‘social’; how organizational phenomena are inherently social and in many ways social constructions. EGOS is a good place for such discussion, and I wish you all welcome to Lisbon in early June 2010!

Having got this piece of advertising out of the way, let me share another idea that has been in the back of my mind for a couple of months. I actually got it from Mary Jo Hatch at CBS who has been thinking about the death of organization theory. At first, that thought struck me as strange given the growth of organizational research, its increasing recognition beyond management and organization studies, and the fact that whether we like it or not, our contemporary (global) society is increasingly organized. But what she meant is that organization theory is squeezed by OB on the one hand and strategic management on the other with respect to curricula in business schools and may also have lost some of its sex appeal vis-à-vis other areas such as strategy. Maybe it’s time to take this issue seriously and pause to think what we consider as organization theory and how we feel about its future.

If you are honest with yourself, you have to admit that the typical moment in an SNL broadcast is lame. Audience silence, sketches with no pacing or point, comedians way out of their league. At the same time, SNL keeps churning out really memorable comedy, from the icky, to the sublime, to the sorely needed. What explains this bizarre skew distribution of output? How can a show that is so predictably lame have such a long tail?

My explanation is two fold: SNL relies on institutionalized audiences and produces occasional gems with a garbage can model of comedy production. On the first point, SNL is a classic institutionalized organization. It’s continued survival is not accounted for by its output. Just check out fan discussions. Even die hards will admit there have been stretches of *years* where the show’s quality is atrocious. The show is peppered with a ream of horrible actors and incompetent guest hosts. And don’t get me started on all the horrific SNL movie spin-offs such as It’s Pat, The Ladies Man, and Coneheads. The show is a comedy Chernobyl.

The forces of capitalism should’ve put this puppy to sleep ages ago, but the show retains non-laughing audiences who boost ratings. I guess the show’s occasional high points and path breaking past are enough to keep executives from axing the show. People must feel an institutionalized desire to watch the show. It’s just what you do on the weekend and you just tolerate it and pretend it’s all ok.

This brings me to my second point. The show’s halo effect helps it last long enough so they can gather the people needed for it’s garbage can style production system. In organization studies, we call an organization a “garbage can” if stuff gets done when streams of people and events randomly come together. SNL is well known for hiring a bunch of people and just having them write a bunch of sketches. Unlike most television, the actors, the writers, and the producers are often the same people. So everybody is rushing and just writing about a whole crazy range of things. They throw themselves at the political issue of the week, or various pop culture trends, or whatever. And if you throw enough comedians at enough issues with 90 minutes of time to fill, you will surely generate the occasional zinger, even though make a lot of junk.

This makes me glad that I have the Internet. In the 1980s and 1990s, I would actually have to watch an entire show hoping to find that precious sketch that worked. Too many times, I’d sit around at 1am , all disappointed and ask – that’s it? But now I can let other people distill the weekly 1.5 hour SNL broadcast into what it truly deserves to be: a five minute youtube clip.