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Last week I started reading Matthew Desmond’s On the Fireline, a fascinating ethnography of wildland firefighting in Arizona that explores the nature of this highly unpredictable work and the organizational setting that facilitates risk-taking among firefighters. Desmond, who wrote this book as a PhD student in sociology (wow!), was an experienced firefighter before he began the official study and so the ethnography is unusually detailed and nuanced. What surprised me about the book was how organizational the analysis was. Although the book is written from the theoretical perspective of a symbolic interactionist and cultural sociologist – Goffman meets Bourdieu – the organizational setting figures prominently. Desmond could just as easily have written this book as a contribution to organizational theory, especially to the literature on work, routines, and bureaucratic rules. He investigates how firefighters engage with the rules of firefighting. On the one hand, they are extremely diligent in emphasizing safety rules and response routines (e.g., the regional leader regularly drills the fighters on “The Ten Standard Fire Orders and the Eighteen Situations that Shout ‘Watch Out!’”, making them perform push-ups if they forget one), but on the other hand, rules and routines are often stretched or discarded in particular firefighting situations. When reacting to a fire, rather than follow rules precisely, the firefighters rely on their intuitive know-how, which Desmond refers to as their “organizational common sense.”

By organizational common sense, I mean the set of unquestioned assumptions beneath organizational behavior and dialogue, tacitly agreed on by members of the organization, that buttresses organizational orthodoxy and ensures consensus among members of the organization. The degree to which people comply with the practices and doctrines of an organization depends, above all, on the degree to which they accept the elementary set of givens, the unspoken common code, that makes organizational thinking and behavior possible. When individuals accept the common sense of the organization – when they begin to think as the organization thinks (without thinking about it), to develop a professional disposition constituted by the culture of the organization, and to accept systems of classification it assigns – they are able to function within it as ‘productive members’ whose productivity, of course, contributes to the reproduction of the organization’s common sense (emphasis mine; 117-118).

Desmond isn’t saying that organizational members just replace one set of formal routines or rules for another more informal set of prescribed behaviors. It becomes clear throughout the ethnography that the common sense he refers to actually enables members of the organization to solve problems, deal with uncertainty, and react to danger. Organizational common sense is the unspoken code that coworkers share that gives them flexibility in applying formal rules, routines, etc. For firefighters, this common sense cannot simply be acquired by experience but is a part of their cultural DNA, or habitus, which he calls “country masculinity.” People who don’t acquire the country masculine habitus growing up in a rural area are unlikely to pick it up later. Thus, the organization of wildland firefighting relies heavily on recruiting from areas of the country where people are trained and socialized with this particular cultural toolkit.

Although Desmond doesn’t make this connection (mainly because he’s writing to a different audience), his study helps bridge the gap between micro and macro-explanations of how routines and culture gets translated into organizational practices. People who are critical of an overly-top-down view of organizational learning and routine-building ought to pay attention to Desmond’s interesting study. Do you hear me Teppo?

On trying to break the world record for highest parachute jump. Held by Joe Kittinger who jumped 102, 800 feet in a 1960 Air Force experiment.

Here is Jürgen Habermas’ Twitter feed. No, really. One can’t quite be sure, of course (maybe a German speaker can point to some coverage of this in the German press?), but it seems on the level. If so (even if it’s him via an assistant), that is pretty outstanding, because my ASA Publications Committee slogan can now be “Jürgen Habermas is on Twitter but ASR still requires paper submissions”.

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No… it’s the animal spirits

Howard Zinn died today. He’s the author of A People’s History of the United States, perhaps the most well known book presenting American history from a highly critical  perspective. The book depicts the development of the American state as one episode of repression after another, and it focuses a lot on social movements. I find the book  interesting because it’s a serious departure from traditional “great man” history. Social history is rather normal now, but it wasn’t when he wrote the book.  People on the right find it an unfair depiction of American history, left historians have also lamented its reliance on simplistic “us vs. them” narrative. In addition to his work as a historian, Zinn also was an activist, who worked to end segregation within the history profession and help the civil rights movement in other ways. Later, he spoke out against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.     

 — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  

• Cognition is social.
• Context matters.
• Meaning is mostly post-hoc and a posteriori.
• Horizontal distinctions often become vertical.
• Purity is brittle.
• Most outcomes are contingent.
• Competition drives social life.
• People work lazily to get what they think they want using the tools in easy reach.
• Rules and conventions underdetermine action.
• Everyone plays multiple games.
• Relationships are largely outside one’s control.
• Networks are the skeletons of fields
• Institutions sculpt networks and condition their consequences
• Players can’t accurately map their fields or their networks.
• Constructed things are not unreal.
• Social science should also explain how statements become true or false.
• The minimal interesting unit of analysis is three entities interacting [3].
• Fidelity should often trump parsimony.
• Analogies allow ideas to travel. Travel is transformative.

On re-reading, I realize that I stole many of them. Yet they still paint a loose, idiosyncratic, and contradictory portrait.  Such is my mental life.  

Huzzah.

[1] Hubris, thy name is Jason. 

[2] Kieran, I’ll take my fountain pen with a left oblique nib. You can hold the unicorn tears.

[3] One of my psychologist colleagues responded to this with “Freud thought we were all three people interacting.”

Like Jeremy Freese before me, I’m running for the ASA’s Publications Committee. I’m stuck on my platform: as I recall, Jeremy promised automatic entry in a lottery for an ASR publication, an end to waterboarding, and the elimination of the requirement to cite the city of publication in bibliographical references. The latter, I think, was especially vital in securing his election. But what remains to be done? I think I’ll have to promise everyone a free Apple Whatever-Tomorrow’s-New-Magical-New-Device-Is-Called. Except the 2 percent of voters who continue to submit paper ballots. To those people I can promise a fountain pen and a nice cup of cocoa.

On Wed January 27, the Universityof Michigan will host the American Orchestras Summit. It’s free and open to the public. The conference is about the changing nature of the orchestra as an institution and organizational form. Academics, musicians, managers, composers. Everyone will be there.  Here’s the schedule. I’ll be moderating a panel on the orchestras as an organizational form: ”Thinking Outside the Box: Organizational Structures and Strategies.” PIERRE BOULEZ will be at the conference on Thursday. This is essential if you care at all about cultural organizations or you want to meet Pierre Boulez.

Nerds to aisle 4: Help me out, folks. I finished watching RahXephon, the mysterious Japanese anime about mechas who battle through singing. I’m interested in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but the wiki suggests that the two series are very similar. Since I tend to watch TV in bulk (many episodes in a few sittings), I don’t want to spend time on a nearly similar narrative. I’m only going to invest the time if NGE is a clearly different/superior series. Opinions? Advice?

Want to feel positive and accepting toward strangers?  Apparently holding a warm beverage will help.  Here’s an engaging clip, highlighting John Bargh’s work, on priming and social behavior.

1. When the current Congress began session in January 2009, the Democrats could only depend on 58 votes. The only reason that the Democrats had a 60 vote supermajority last week was that (a) Arlen Specter defected to avoid primary challenge and (b) the razor thin race in Minnesotta went to Al Franken. Otherwise, it was 58 votes, if you count Lieberman. So what’s different now than twelve months ago? Was the Obama honeymoon period that crucial to the Democratic legislative strategy? Did Democrats have no back up plan if they couldn’t get 60? Was their only plan to peel off one or two Republicans?

2. There’s a nice blog post on the Washington Post-Harvard post-election poll in Massachusetts. As usual, the hysteria does not match the evidence. Compared to 2008, voters tended to feel better about the economy and they wanted to support  health care reform. A slim majority approved of Obama’s agenda. The respondents did show dissatisfaction with the Senate, many favored split government, and they were unimpressed with the Democratic nominee. In other words, the “angry voter” story is just wrong. It’s more about a superior Republican campaign, some hesitation about one party government, and disapproval of the Senate.

There’s been a justifiable sense of dread within the humanities. The recession has devastated the academic job market in a field that was already experiencing profound problems. Given that I admire the arts, I offer the following constructive solutions:

1. Slash doctoral programs: Clearly, the persistent problem is a massive over supply of PhD’s in the humanities. As many folks point out, graduate programs are great at producing ABD’s who are cheap teachers. The down side is that you have an army of people that the system can’t take when they graduate.  Since the jobs are few, training programs should be small.
2. Increase masters programs: If we slash PhD programs, who will teach the masses? This is pretty easy – massively increase the MA programs. If people want to take an extra year or two learn some topic and “try out” academic life, why should we stop them? When they enter, give them a crash course in teaching, give them a section, and reduce their tuition. At age 23, spending an extra year doing intro Spanish or Writing I isn’t a big deal. No need to have the 32 year old ABD doing that stuff. If you are worried about quality, have an exam before they can teach. The other cool thing about the expanded MA is that we give lots of people a chance, but we cut them off quickly and don’t drag them out for years. You don’t have an army of disgruntled & unemployed research specialists.
3. Reclaim the Canon: Professional prestige is based on resources. What’s the one thing that the humanities is really, really good at and that no one else really does? The canon- and it should be what the humanities pushes on undergrads. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not of the view that great literature ended in 1850 and was only produced by dead white dudes.  Rather, I’m making an argument about comparative advantage. The humanities programs should be about thinking about the best culture we have produced. They should ask what is valuable about new culture. While deconstructing Star Trek can be fun, it should be kept in the electives and at professional conferences.  Undergraduate education is the public face of the humanities. It should embody the best we have to offer. Therefore, humanities programs should require or emphasize courses focusing on the best in the arts. You’ll get more respect that way.

These suggestions aren’t limited to the humanities. Rather, any field that has a weak non-academic market could be helped these recommendations (e.g., political theory): cut advanced training, get cheap labor in ways other than PhD programs, and focus on what’s absolutely vital. A world were training is linked to markets but justified by value is better than a world were people are trained for non-existent jobs and their work is justified on academic fashion.

The program where I teach is a liberal arts undergraduate major in the study of organizations.  My particular framing of that topic is so broad that I tend to talk simply about organization (or even just coordination) when describing our focus. The faculty includes psychologists, a political scientist, sociologists and this year we’re hoping to add an historian.  Many of us have joint appointments with relevant departments.  The program is poised to grow.  Expansion raises interesting questions about what, precisely, a liberal arts oriented organizational studies should look like.

One possibility is to move more deeply into core arts and sciences areas and away from the various professional schools. We’re doing a pretty good job of connecting to the social sciences, so a reasonable next step might be to look for ways to engage with the humanities.  That leaves me with a problem.  I’m unclear about what a humanist scholar of organizations might do.  I have no idea where to find one.

There have been several posts here about the novels etc. that are useful teaching tools.  Jim March famously draws on “great books” to teach leadership.  I’m spending much time thinking about how innovations emerge from communities,  status, honor, &  reciprocity, and ambiguity.  Books by humanists aid me in all those regards.

Still, most of the connections I can readily point to represent our (social science and management types) attempts to use their (humanists) work to our ends.  I have little sense of how a card-carrying literary theorist, area studies person, art historian, design type, philosopher, or classicist (to name just a few) might approach questions pertinent to a broadly conceived OT in order to develop their own intellectual agendas.

Since the guys at orgtheory.net have been kind enough to turn me loose in the bully pulpit, I figured I’d put the question to everyone here.

What might humanist approaches to organizational scholarship look like?  Is it even sensible to talk about a humanities based contributions to OT?

Abdul Alkalimat, a leading figure within Black Studies and professor of library sciences at Illinois-Urbana, has revised his website “eblackstudies.com.” The new feature is that he’s scanned texts in the history of Black Studies and made them free to the public. Very cool. Required reading for folks in ethnic studies, race & ethnicity, social movements, and the politics of higher ed. Recommended!

Randomness is sort of a fun, alternative explanation for lots of things: organizational success (as discussed by Alchian, 1950), and, say, writing.  I’ve been revisiting Seth Lloyd’s short book Programming the Universe and he has a nice writing-related discussion building on an old favorite, the infinite monkey theorem.

So, the question is: how long would it take, via a random process, for monkeys to type up Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

There are about fifty keys on a standard typewriter keyboard.  Even ignoring capitalization, the chance of a monkey typing “h” is one in fifty.  The probability of typing “ha” is one-fiftieth of one in fifty, or 1 in 2,500.  The probability of typing “ham” is one in fifty time fifty time fifty, or 1 in 125,000.  The probability of a monkey typing out a phrase with twenty-two characters is one divided by fifty raised to the twenty-second power, or about 10^-38.  It would take billion billion monkeys each typing ten characters per second, for each of the roughly billion billion seconds since the universe began, just to have one of them type out “hamlet. act i, scene i.”

Here’s Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington trying to work through this.

Via Cosma Shalizi, reports of a very interesting piece of work: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour, C. Eisenegger, M. Naef, R. Snozzi, M. Heinrichs & E. Fehr, Nature 463, 356-359 (21 January 2010). The abstract:

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics⁷. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.

Bill Simmons is one of my all-time favorite sports columnists. For those of you who don’t follow sports (I’m looking at you Jerry), Simmons is a combination of a pop culture sponge, a sports geek, a comedian (I think he used to write jokes for Jimmy Kimmel), and a prolific writer. His columns are witty, meandering, ranting, long, and always entertaining. Simmons writes a lot and he writes really well. I’m slowly making my way through his enormous tome, The Book of Basketball, and I’m blown away by the level of detailed knowledge he has about the game (even if it almost makes me cry every time he mentions Karl Malone’s inability to play in the clutch). I saw Simmons on a late night talk show recently, and I got really interested when the host asked him to talk about what it’s like to write as much and as well as he does. Simmons compared writing to the game of golf. It’s something you have to work at every day if you’re ever going to be  good at it. If you stop writing, you’ll likely lose some of that touch it’s taken so long to develop. I thought this was a great analogy for writing, and because I’ve wanted to say something on this blog about the practice of writing social science for a while now, I thought I’d expound on the analogy.

Let me just say up front that I am not a good golfer at all and I consider my writing skills a work-in-progress.  My golf game is so bad that I’ve won the most improved award in our family golf tournament for the last three years mainly because I don’t qualify for any other award and because my loving family thinks that my skills can’t be getting worse. I aspire to be a good writer. I think writing is one of the most undervalued abilities in social science. Great writers can turn a good idea into a great paper. Bad writers can turn a great idea into a pretty confusing paper. So writing is important.

This post is about developing good writing habits. I’m probably not the best person to give tips on how to write. If you want that kind of advice, I recommend Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research. It’s a handy reference book and has lots of good tips for organizing your ideas.  I also highly recommend reading Ezra Zuckerman’s “Tips to article writers.” (I think about Ezra’s advice on framing your argument as a puzzle whenever I start a new paper.)

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I have a question for Congress wonks out there: Why is it that 60 votes are crucial for Democrats and not Republicans? In 2006, the Republican party didn’t seem terribly afraid of the 44 Democrats in the Senate, even when they filibustered certain judicial and administrative appointments. In other words, why was the GOP able to make things work with 56 votes but democrats are afraid when they have 59?

Which of these explanations is correct?

• As the larger party, the Democrats aren’t really a single unified group. There’s really about 5-8 Democrats who represent a more conservative strain that Republicans can rely on. So 41 republicans are really 50 republicans. This is a twist on the ol’ Dems and Repubs have different cultures.
• Actually, the GOP didn’t get much done in the Senate. Aside from the war on terror, Senate Republicans in the Bush years can’t claim much. Democrats wielded veto power, but we don’t remember it as well.
• Health care is special. It’s the defining issue this Congress, health care legislation is notoriously difficult to pass, and the GOP benefits from the status quo. In a zero sum environment on a defining issue that matters only to one side, you get an asymmetric situation where all one side needs is 40 and the other needs 60, instead of each side needing 50 to win.
• The imperial presidency. Obama wants to do things within a legislative framework, while Bush did things no matter what the Congress said (remember signing orders?). So the GOP doesn’t care about what is actually passed when their guy is in the White House.

Other explanations?

My early experience of  faculty meetings led me to believe that they often approximate Monty Python sketches. So naturally when it came time to pitch ideas for my first Michigan Sociology Cabaret, I reached deep into the archive of my impudence and proposed the title of this post: “I’m not deadwood yet . . . I think I’ll write a book!” [1]  More discrete voices prevailed [2].  A few short years later I find myself pondering book writing.

I’m an inadvertent article person. In grad school I would have sworn books would be my primary medium [3]. But somehow the dissertation never got revised. Interesting article ideas kept popping up, grants got funded, and soon I was running research projects based around big data collection, divided labor, collaboration, and sundry interdisciplinary configurations.  Lots of time spent observing and thinking about the work of large scientific research teams may also have inclined me in this direction. A lot of what I know about structuring collaborative research I learned by studying biologists.

As I approach the end of my first decade post-dissertation, I find myself wondering what I’d leave on the table by working to turn myself permanently into this dude.

The cost of that model is the need to keep feeding the beast, the sense that I can only tackle questions I know enough about to deconstruct into tasks that can be shared with co-authors and students, and the non-negligible training and translation efforts that go into team-based, interdisciplinary research. Well, that and the fact that my work now has so many moving parts that my professional life has come to feel like a ping-pong match with a meth-addled squid.

The benefits are immense, but mostly stem from a depth and range of thought I could never manage on my own.  I’m fairly committed to the idea that cognition is social, so no surprise that my intellectual process requires the friction of multiple perspectives. Plus I often get to drink good wine with friends and call it “work.”  I should add that I’m easily bored and team science keeps things interesting. Still, I sometimes jones for a quieter, more integrated and contemplative scholarly life.

[1] If you’re not sure why that might be funny, go watch this.

[2] Another idea rightly consigned to the ash pile of sociological comedy was Qual Eye for the Quant Guy: “What do you mean I don’t attend to contingency? Did you see the three way interaction in my last ASR?”

[3] Of course I also went to grad school thinking I would do theory, critical post-post-structuralist theory.  Here’s two and a half cheers for being beaten into the middle range.

This one goes out to “Jerry” in Ann Arbor, a very special orgtheorist…

What form of executive leadership does Andorra have? Who is the head of state?

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Given how serious things have been lately, I thought you might enjoy some fun videos of the bicycle kick:

From Klaas Jan Huntelaar, the master of the bicycle kick:

Another master, Ronaldhino:

Soccer legend Klaus Fischer:

Jason’s last post brought up some good issues about research on higher ed. But I side with the skeptics a bit. We actually know a bit about higher ed, even if it’s not recognized as a formal specialty in sociology or management. Consider the following:

• Access and outcomes: We know a lot about who gets into higher ed and why. We also know who graduates.
• Life course: We know quite a bit about life course – how going to college allows you to get into better segments of the labor market and how it affects long term well being such as health.
• Org population: We know a fair amount about the organizational population, especially the liberal arts and research sectors.
• Sociology of science: We know a lot about the work inside higher ed. It’s called the sociology of science. We know about citations, pay, career patterns, & productivity of scholars.
• Global diffusion: We know a fair amount about the international growth of higher ed.

Here’s the big gaps in higher ed research:

• Dark matter: There are 7,000+ institutions of higher ed. A small fraction are research schools or liberal arts schools. There’s an ocean of community colleges, vocational schools, and biblical colleges. In sociology, researchers know very little about this sector. In higher ed programs, there’s actually some knowledge about the community colleges.
• Boundary zones: As Jason eloquently pointed out, higher ed is close to every major institution. Jason’s own research on bio-tech and the academy is about one such border zone, which may explain why he thinks higher ed is  understudied. These zones *are* understudied.
• Organizational Forms: We know very little about the organizational forms of higher ed. For example, are business schools always found with medical schools? Structurally, how are the biblical colleges different than other liberal arts colleges?  The “blue print” issue is pretty much unexplored. This may be a variant of the dark matter problem.
• Professorial and student politics: Here we have a lot of empirical facts and research, but no great theory to tie it all together. My work is one attempt to get at this.
• Organizational culture: There’s a whole area in higher ed called “Student affairs” and deals with how people get through the university. There isn’t any grand theory of how students experience the university that would satisfy a hard core sociologist. It’s practitioner oriented.
• Deans and other administrators: Aside from the occasional study of university presidents, social scientists are almost silent on deans and provosts, who weild real power in universities. This is similar to soc of ed: tons on teachers, almost nothing on principals.
• State-college relations: Once again, most social scientists are silent governance.
• Learning: What do people retain from college? Does any of it help aside from the professions?
• Graduate education: Except for Burris’ piece on the academic job market in sociology, there’s a pitiful amount of sociological research on graduate education.

A related issue is that higher ed research is often seen as “navel gazing.” I was told that by some prominent  folks in grad school. This struck me as bizarre. Higher ed is probably the third or fourth largest industry in America and you need to go through to get anywhere. Also, a lot of great classical and modern sociologists have studied higher ed. Among my contemporaries, I count Kieran (philosophers), Jason (bio-tech), Neil Gross (professor politics), Marion Fourcade (the economics profession), Elizabeth Armstrong (college sex cultures), Michael Sauder (status/law schools), Michele Lamont (culture and judgment among profs) and Mitchell Stevens (admissions). Classical sociologists  include Durkheim, Parsons, Weber, and Bourdieu. Maybe people don’t realize this and think higher ed research is trivial. But it’s really important.

Anyway, I say the glass is half full. In a lot of areas, we have the answers. But there are some pretty massive gaps, and that’s a good thing for all the grad students out there.

I spent part of Friday grabbing daily  stock price data from CRSP. My organization-level dataset uses GVKEY (the primary Compustat identifier) as a key.  CRSP is an issue-level dataset (a company can issue more than one security). It uses a variable called PERMNO as a unique identifier.  Luckily lots of folks are looking to match price data to fundamental data, so there’s a complete and well-documented link table.  Problem solved, right?

Not so much.  It turns out there’s also an underlying difference in how the datasets handle mergers. Compustat seems to extend their data backward after merger. So if firm A merged with or was acquired by firm B at time T, Compustat often puts both pre and post-T data under the identifier for the successor, firm B.  CRSP keeps firm A and firm B issues separate and generally terminates firm A’s issue at merger/acquisition.

The upshot is that I end up with a lot of cases where the same GVKEY points to multiple  PERMNOs.  The duplicates require a mess of work to figure out when the PERMNOs in question point to legitimate primary and secondary issues and when they are artifacts of the strategy for handling mergers [1]. I’ve run into this problem with merging datasets before.  These differences have killed at least one interesting collaborative paper.

There seem to be three ways to treat mergers in panel datasets:

1. We treat mergers as if the successor/acquiring firm consumes the whole history of the merged/target firm.  This is the COMPUSTAT way.
2. We treat mergers as the death of the merged/acquiring firm and assume that the merger carries none of its history into the successor organization. This is the CRSP way.
3. We treat mergers as two deaths and one birth, implicitly assuming that the successor firm is a new entity  that contains none of the history of either of its progenitors.

Such different approaches are annoying when you draw on multiple data sources.  But I think this is one of those data management issues that speaks to larger conceptual fuzziness.

I/O economists seem to favor number 1, perhaps because mergers and acquisitions represent the combination of firm-level capacities. But presumably, some capabilities transfer imperfectly or not at all.

Ecologists and others interested in industry vital rates seem to favor number 3, perhaps because merger and acquisition are often a time for restructuring. If we expect that form is really sticky, though, then this feels like a bit of a cheat.

Finance types appear to favor #2, perhaps because they are really interested in investor behavior and investors can’t buy into firms that aren’t independent.  But, I suspect that investors who own stock in a successor as a result of buying into a progenitor don’t separate their decisions about the former from their history with the latter.

I don’t like any of the options. Nevertheless, I think some combination of #1 and #2 is closest to face valid.

I’m struggling with this because I think one key to figuring out the dynamics of strategic alliance networks will be linking up vital rates of nodes with vital rates of ties. Strategic alliances routinely weather the merger or acquisition of one of their original partners.  The failure of such relationships can also trigger mergers.

So (among other things) I need a way to figure of when ties outlive the nodes that originally formed them.  That means that I need to adopt a version of #1 where some but not all of the history of merged/acquired firms passes into their successors.  That turns out to be exceptionally difficult to do.

Esteemed orgtheory.net readers: What do you think is the most reasonable option?

[1] Sometimes it’s really, really nice to have RAs.

Many times sociological analyses of institutionalization, especially those located in the “normative” and “cognitive” pole as defined by Scott (2008), and especially those associated with neo-institutionalism are accused of putting forth an “oversocialized” conception of the actor, and sometimes even the P-word is used:  institutional theory is “Parsonian” (this is usually followed by a reference to Garfinkel and the whole “cultural dope*” thing).

For instance, Hirsch and Lounsbury perceptively note that an intriguing irony of the neo-institutional defocalization of action, conflict and strategy is

…the close similarity of…neoinstitutionalism to the very Parsonian model from which it has worked so hard to distance itself…To the extent [that] Parsons’s general theories generated serious dissents for being too committed to isomorphism, to quick to accord functionalist legitimacy to existing structures and outcomes, too focused on stability rather than change, and too slow to see conflict or change as endogenous, the new institutionalism seems eerily close to old Parsonian theory.  In Garfinkel’s terms, individuals following the new cognitive scripts are as likely to be “cultural dopes” following taken-for-granted scripts as they were when following out the internalized norms, values and socialization espoused by Parsons (1997:  415).

That neo-institutional theory is “Parsonian” in itself would not be surprising, insofar as it was indeed Parsons who (at least theoretically) pointed the way towards considering the larger environment in which organizations are located as a primary factor. But the main problem with the “Parsonian” criticism as directed to a given deployment of institutional theory is that the adjective is bandied about as a vague characterization, and the reference to either Wrong or Garfinkel ends coming out more as a “I scored a point against the theory” (after all, if you can corner some theory into “cultural dope” land you know you got it in trouble) than as a substantive criticism.

In any case, I must confess that until now, I never actually understood, exactly what the whole cultural dope thing was all about anyways, and by implication never really appreciated what was so bad about it.

But now I think I (kind of) get it.  And I think that it is possible to come up with a more concrete definition of what makes a given account of norms or cognition in institutional analysis Parsonian, which will move this criticism closer to a productive analytical assessment that could be used to fix what’s wrong with a given way of conceptualizing the process or the role of institutions and institutionalization in organizations.  In fact, I think that a more concrete definition of when an account of norms in institutionalism has gone Parsonian can even help the theorist understand when such an account is actually warranted (I happen to be of the opinion “never”) and can be coherently defended.

The technical criterion for “Parsonian” comes from John Heritage’s (1984) brilliant distillation of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology.  In discussing “the problem of reflexivity” Heritage (1984: 30) notes that the key problem that Garfinkel had vis a vis the Parsonian account of “socialization of norms” is that the actor was denied (by theoretical fiat) a particular sort of subjective orientation towards norms.  This orientation was simple self-consciousness.

That is, Parsons defined “internalization” as “unconscious introjection” which meant that if an actor was socialized into a norm, then the actor was unconscious of how that norm determined her conduct.  In essence, the Parsonian socialized actor cannot take norms as an object of reflexive consideration and strategization, for if that were the case then the norm would lose its status as “normative” and would become just another instrumental resource for action.  This is Parsons (1951: 37) as quoted in Heritage (1984: 30-31):

There is a range of possible modes of orientation in the motivational sense to a value standard. Perhaps the most important distinction is between that attitude of expediency at one pol, where conformity or non-conformity is a function of the instrumental interests of the actor, and at the other pole the ‘introjection’ or internalization of the standard so that to act in conformity with it becomes a need disposition in the actor’s own personality structure, relatively independently of any instrumentally significant consequences of conformity. The latter is to be regarded as the basic type of integration of motivation with a normative pattern-structure of values.

Thus, as Heritage (1984: 30) notes, while the actor may orient himself reflexively (and thus strategically) to all sorts of elements in her environment Parsons “excludes as objects of the actor’s orientation the cultural values which the actor has internalized” (italics in original).  Why is Parsons’ adamant about excluding the reflexive mode of orientation towards norms?  Heritage notes that Parsons main (theoretical) concern revolved around the fact that if actors where allowed to “adopt a reflexive attitude to their normative environments” then that would open up the possibility of their also “acting manipulatively in relation to them” which means that “actors who can manipulate their conduct in relation to a normative environment are those who can act strategically.” For theoretical reasons that need not concern us here, Parsons could not have any of that (e.g. actors acting strategically and manipulatively in relation to the norms that they are expected to conform to).

This is then the technical criterion of “Parsonian” for any theory.  If a theory does not allow the actor self-reflexive (and thus manipulative) subjective access to institutionalized norms it is technically Parsonian (notice that the theory would also have to offer some story as to how a norm can become so “deeply internalized” that actors end up not being aware that they are acting in accordance to it).  More precisely, if the theory defines institutionalization as norms acquiring such a character that actors cannot be so oriented towards, then it is Parsonian.

I have argued before than at the cognitive pole, this sort of account of institutionalization is incoherent.  For actors would have to be treated as not being capable of “thinking otherwise” and no (sociological) theorist is ever in a position to make this judgment about an actor given the data at hand (but maybe in the future a neuroscientist might!)  At the normative pole, this sort of Parsonian institionalization story is also, for similar reasons, incoherent, and any account that relies on it must suffer the analytic consequences.  For in this Parsonian account, actors cannot bring to conscious awareness the rules that they are presumably following, nor can they take a strategic attitude towards those rules.  No theorist is ever in a position to make that call in a manner that can be defended using the usual canons of evidence.

Moreover, we know that this account of normative institutionalization is empirically false.  Actors take strategic and calculative orientations towards institutionalized normative structures all of the time (Oliver 1991), and those structures are no less institutionalized for it.  In fact, it is clear now to me that Tolbert and Zucker’s (1996: 169) zeroing on the fact that institutional theory contains “an apparent logical ambiguity…one which involves the phenomenological status of structural arrangements that are the objects of institutionalization processes” and their recommendation that removing this ambiguity leads to a reconciliation of “rational actor” with “oversocialized” models is actually a much more insightful criticism than I initially thought.  For by “phenomenology” Tolbert and Zucker are clearly knocking close the reflexivity problem.  This is what I called “Goffman’s dilemma.”  The reason why institutional theory becomes indistinguishable from “resource dependence” theory once actors are allowed to be reflexive about their normative commitments is precisely connected to Parsons’ (pseudo)problem.  Once an institutional analysis stops being Parsonian, it indeed becomes indistinguishable from resource dependence theory at the level of empirical implications (at least at the organization level in terms of incentives for adoption).

Thus, with the abandonment of the notion that something can be strongly institutionalized at the “phenomenological” level (e.g. actors cannot do or think otherwise or a norm that becomes the subject of reflexive calculation all of a sudden loses its status as normative) one part of the Tolbert and Zucker’s criticism does lose force, which is the part that is centered on the anxiety that institutional theory would no longer be “unique” vis a vis resource dependence theory.  My response to the fear that institutional theory might become just a fancy version of (rationalist) resource dependence theory, is: so what?  At least it is a more conceptually defensible theory, which does not have to rely on (implausible) Parsonian assumptions about unconscious internalization or about culture as a constraint on behavior.And anyways, as exemplified in the research done by Tolbert and Zucker, Oliver, Suchman, Zajac/Westphal, etc. is not that IT and RD become completely indistinguishable, but more than the range of explanatory phenomena over which each theory is in “charge” becomes a fuzzier continuum of behavioral responses and not a sharp dichotomy between strategic rationality and unconscious normativity.

Tolbert and Zucker make a theoretical mistake by retaining a place (however delimited) for a Parsonian (via Berger and Luckmann) notion of institutionalization, one in which culture keeps its “power to determine behavior” (Tolbert and Zucker 1996: 175).  I think that this view of culture–and Brayden agrees–as an internalized “determinant” of behavior is simply indefensible from a cognitive viewpoint, so it should just be tossed.  It is not a service for institutional theory to be built on such shaky cognitive micro-foundations.  For any of the things that are subject to institutionalization, whether it be rules, norms or “cognitive templates” it is clear that nothing can ever be so deeply institutionalized that actors cannot do, conceive or imagine otherwise, nor can something be so deeply institutionalized that actors are simply incapable of taking a calculating, cynical, strategic attitude towards it (in terms of “norm compliance” or “cognitive template adoption” or both).

In fact, the evidence shows that actors are always thinking, doing and imagining otherwise (and are constantly strategizing and cynically adopting), and that this imagining-otherwise capacity and this ability to cynically adopt might (under some circumstances) be the actual reason for why something persists.  In fact, “invidious imagining otherwise” (e.g. conservatives obsessed with liberal debauchery or liberals obsessed with conservative “craziness” or the constant remembrance of really bad things such as the holocaust or slavery) is probably a key signal of that the opposite of what’s being fantasized about is institutionalized in my neck of the woods (e.g. democracy vis a vis Nazism).

I think that once we get over this conceptual hump, and also get over the Parsonian fear that allowing for the strategic orientation towards norms is equivalent to admitting to their lack of capacity to serve as behavioral referents (a fear that persists in Tolbert and Zucker and even Scott) then the ghost of Parsons will be permanently exorcised from institutional theory.

*The emergence of this “cultural dope” meme is in itself interesting. Garfinkel’s preferred term is “judgmental dope, of a cultural or psychological kind” (1967: 67) which (not to be too much of a theory dork here) carries fundamentally different implications than “cultural dope,” since the cultural dope is a special kind (the sociologist’s) of judgmental dope (1967: 68); this means that there are “psychological dopes,” “anthropological dopes” and maybe even “management dopes”.

One of the most interesting things about electoral politics is that you don’t need to be particularly charismatic or knowledgeable if you have the right networks. Especially in smaller elections, where having a few key connections can mobilize the voters who make the difference. Consider the following quote from Martha Coakley, the Mass. democrat who is running for Ted Kennedy’s seat. A reporter asked if it was wise to rely on party insiders and unions:

“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands? This is a special election. And I know that I have the support of Kim Driscoll. And I now know the members of the [Salem] School Committee, who know far more people than I could ever meet.’

Of course, she can still lose. A string of nasty comments probably means that she will. Still, if Coakley merely did the minimal PR and said nice things, she could probably win this contest. There are many politicians (Bush II, Daley, Jr.) who got to where they were merely by not saying offensive things in public and relying on pre-existing networks.

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Given Fabio’s last couple of posts (and before he finishes eating my lunch), I thought I should move this one up in the queue. Conversations at a conference organized a few years back by Mitchell Stevens, Elizabeth Armstrong, and Richard Arum shaped my thinking. I commend to you the Annual Review of Sociology piece they produced, but they bear no responsibility at all for my wild-eyed ranting.

Let me start with a modest proposition:  The university is the most important institution in contemporary society and the one about which we know the least.  The organizations and institutions of contemporary higher education are undergoing far-reaching  transitions that stand to remake key features of our social world, but we have largely ignored those changes.  Fabio points to one such shift in the funding model for higher education and a recent WaPo op-ed by Steve Brint highlights some implications for admissions.  But why should we expect something seemingly innocuous like a slow but dramatic decline in the proportion of state funding in public university budgets to fundamentally alter bigger things like the stratification order?                                             

The contemporary university is the only institution that is one step from all parts of our society.  If you start on a big university campus you can easily reach, well, anywhere.  I challenge you to think of another contemporary institution that is a hop away from professional sports, healthcare, the military, government, high culture, religion, science, the boardroom, activism, the financial system . . . the list could go on. The university is our key institutional hub.  I can think of no equivalent. There’s no church that does the trick (though a diffuse notion of christianity might come close), civic organizations are on the decline, the all volunteer military is increasingly isolated from the bulk of the citizenry, one might even argue that in the era of the long tail popular culture will fail to serve as a social glue.  That leaves the campus.

Despite all this, we have very few systematic studies of the university qua organization. We know suprising little about their internal workings. Perhaps this is because they are such giant, unwieldy beasts.  Still, the multi-divisional firm isn’t exactly a lemonade stand and we’ve been beating our heads against it for years. Perhaps studying our own institutional home is just too uncomfortable?  But, then again, there’s a whole lot of the sociology of me out there.  I think the problems is that we don’t have a language sufficient to let us grapple with the interesting questions at stake. 

 Stevens and colleagues point us in the right direction by thinking in metaphorical terms of about what these beasts do and for whom. In addition to being a hub, they take universities to be temples,  sieves, and incubators.  Legitimating knowledge and credentialing experts, sorting and classifying people, and socializing citizens add some serious breadth to the portfolio, which gets even broader when you take into account the economic development role that has become a significant part of many campus efforts. No surprise, I guess, but I’m most fascinated by the idea that the university is one of the few remaining cross-roads of civil society.  In order to do that successfully, universities have to be stable, something increasingly at risk as public funding declines.  They also have to be traversable shortcuts across societal domains, which requires broad access and a form of transparency. Finally, they have to be generative of both well-understood and novel things.  That’s a tough organizational hat trick to pull off.

If a group of organizations is positioned one step from everywhere and we inadvertently but fundamentally change their key features, then we have every reason to expect unintended consequences to ramify quickly and to reach far out into the world. We’re particularly at risk when the changes we make alter the things that enable universities to be institutional hubs.  If we monkey too much with the balance between access and excellence or between social engagement and institutional autonomy,  for instance,  then I think the stakes are higher than we know.  But those are precisely the issues in play when we think about changing funding, or admissions, or the role of academic science vis-à-vis commerce or  . . .

This isn’t the place to undertake a lengthy literature review, but suffice it so say that there’s a lot of good contemporary work that examines small pieces of the university puzzle, some of it done by folks posting right here. There are even a few older, classic works.  But I don’t think anyone out there is trying to eat the whole enchilada.  There’s a marvelous book to be written about these issues in the context of University of California system, where efforts to stave off the implosion of one of the institutional wonders of the world yank all this stuff right to the surface.  Dissertation anyone?

Consider the following two facts:

• Many state universities obtain only about 20% of their income from state governments. The rest is from tuition, grants, merchandise, and other income streams.
• Some school districts rely on private gifts to pay for salaries, facilities, and equipment. Here’s a story about LA school district officials who are privately paid for.

These are both cases where public institutions have quietly moved into a sort of hybrid private/public state. Due to rising costs and shifting priorities in state legislatures and municipal governments, educational institutions have had to rely on private funds.

A few comments. First, this has gone relatively un-noticed and unopposed in the American polity. Sure, insiders know this has been happening, but if in 1970 you had a bill in Lansing that proposed devolving the University of Michigan, there would’ve been a riot. There is a very interesting process of de-institutionalization happening and we don’t really understand how it happened, other than to say that the publics preferences shifted away from education. Second, I don’t know what the impact of this semi-privatization is. Did it save public universities from a losing battle over state funds with other groups such as the police? Did this shift to private funding stabilize what was happening already in schools? Unclear to me. Third, what do state governments do with their remaining leverage? What do they demand from universities in exchange for that 20% of the budget?

Chris Rock makes Blau (1977: 35, T1) funny.

I. Mark Chiang’s book, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, is an addition to the growing literature on ethnic studies and multiculturalism in the academy. It discusses an issue that, suprisingly, has not recieved much attention in the literature: what’s the deal with Asian American Studies? Is it a discipline? Is there really an “Asian America” that you can study in the same way that there’s a Black America?

Chiang’s approach draws heavily on Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic capital. His goal is to understand the academic object that Asian Americanists have developed and how that relates to different audiences inside and outside of the academy – the “cultural capital of the field.” In true Bourdieu-ian fashion, Chiang tries to explain how the object of Asian American Studies enabled the creation of the field. Perhaps Chiang’s biggest insight is that this ultimately required a form of “nonrepresentative representation.” In more plain language, you can’t act as a political advocate in your scholarship for Asian Americans. Instead, you must abstractly study their culture.

Long time readers of this blog know that the evolution of Black Studies has been a central focus of my research. Thus, I am very  interested in how a Bourdieu-ian analysis differs from my very anti-Bourdieu-ian take on things. Chiang and I both agree on the basic dilemma for ethnic studies. The ethnic studies movement was very community oriented, but exists in an institutional framework that imposes a Mertionian universalism. You must strive to be value free and non-political in your work. Chiang and I also agree that ethnic studies has experienced a corresponding shift to professionalism. Community members and activists do not define later generations of ethnic studies. De-radicalization is required for acceptance into the field. Very Bourdieu.

Here’s where we depart. Chiang, I think, views Asian American Studies as a field that has shifted to a professional mode where value is determined through technical skill. For example, he relies on this view when describing a highly contentious dispute in 1999 over a book award (more below). He thinks the conflict revolved around those who valued the book in question on its technical features, while opponents focused more on negative representations of characters from specific ethnic groups. Thus, a focus on the technical analysis of Asian American culture, rather than representation of Asian American people, is the “cultural capital” of the field.

In contrast, I would suggest that Asian American Studies, like Black Studies, might be in a sort of intermediate position that allows for both highly technocratic discourse and political advocacy, which in turn affects the rest of the university. This is the position I took in Chapter 7 of From Black Power. In other words, ethnic studies retains an oppositional stance because it is situated within a mainstream institution while being highly reflexive. Very un-Bourdieu.

II. Let me now change subjects by discussing the concluding chapter that focsuses on the dispute over the 1999 Association for Asian American Studies book award. The essence of the dispute was that Filipino activists and academics believed that Lois-ann’s Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging relied heavily on negative stereotypes of Filipino characters. This is a very sensitive issue because Filipinos and other Pacific islanders are low status in Hawaii. Not surprisingly, Yamanaka’s texts had generated intense feelings before, during, and after the award. Here’t the Atlantic Monthly on the controversy. In covering this part of the book, let me disclose that I am married to a person who strongly opposed the award, so I’ll tread lightly here. It’s also important to note that Chiang admits that he voted to revoke the book award.

Chiang’s explanation of the conflict was that it reflected unresolved tensions about the field’s basic object of study – Asian America.  By engaging in nonrepresentative representation, the AAAS book award committee engaged in a highly technical analyis that viewed the negatively portrayed Filipino characters as a literary tool. The opponents thought that was disingenuous, in the same way that whites sometimes exonerate themselves from racist utterances by insisting that it was ironic or humorous.  Chiang casts this episode as a fight between those with the right kinds of capital (AAAS insiders) and those who don’t (Filipino academics and writers).  It was a fight, ultimately, between those who worked with the idea of Asian American Studies as the study of culture against those who promoted Asian American Studies as the representation of the community.

Now, it is likely true that the book award committee saw themselves as rewarding a book on technical grounds. It seemed to me, at the time and now ten years later, that the conflict was about something much larger and it wasn’t cultural nationalism in ethnic studies. The ultimate root of the conflict was about ethnic hierarchy. Yamanaka’s books had already attracted considerable critique, but what really triggered outrage was that a professional association that was rewarding someone who benefited from racial inequalities that the association was supposed to be against. In other words, Asian American Studies had built an egalitarian identity around this idea of studying a pan-ethnic community. Yet, this same community was rewarding an author for exploiting some very real inequalities. The book award signalled to a marginalized group that their inferior position could be used to win awards.

To be fair to Chiang, he does address this issue from time to time in the text. For example, he notes that Yamanaka is highly dismissive of protesters and tells them to write their own novels. Chiang correctly notes that some groups don’t have regular access to publishers, so they are reduced to complaining about other people’s books. Chiang is clearly sympathetic. Chiang also notes that protestors pushed their own policy proposal to minimize ethnic inequality within Asian American Studies. However, these issues are subverted to a narrative about nonrepresentative representation.

It might have more useful to describe two parallel problems for Asian American Studies. First, the field has to contend with an institutional system that demands value free inquiry. The solution to the problem is “nonrepresentative representation.” Second, the field is egalitarian in its ethos, but its members are stratified by nationality and have unequal access to the academic system. This problem is unsolved. These are distinct, but interrelated, issues and recognizing them more clearly I think could have improved the analysis of the book award incident.

III. Even though I critique Chiang a bit, I feel that this is an important book for anyone interested in the dynamics of ethnic studies. It expands on issues in my book, Amy Binder’s book Contentious Curricula, Small’s article on Black Studies, Boxer’s work on women’s studies, and Yamane’s book on multiculturalism. It’s also useful because it’s both an insider’s account and uses analytic tools from the social sciences and humanities. Recommended.

I’ve often heard scholars assert that culture and social structure are really secondary to economics (e.g., see Fukuyama’s discusison of culture in his Trust book). When I hear such arguments, I think: “what about religion?” Religion is present in almost every society. It is a set of ideas that people are willing to do die for. And religious affiliations affect who we marry, how we work, how we vote, and how we live. Yet, it’s hard to chalk religion up to purely instrumental motives. It appears to be a purely cultural, and hugely important, aspect of human culture.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that people haven’t tried. There is the theory of religion as a club good, pushed by  Innaconne and others, which asserts that religious behavior (e.g., church affiliation and attendance) is driven by the desire to belong to exclusive groups. In an nutshell, it’s a rehash of Weber’s theory of status groups. Read Innaconne’s summary JEL article here, which explains his approach and many other topics in the economics of religion.  It would be crazy to dispute the key insight of the club good theory. Lots of people do join churches because of the social benefits and many denominations are set up to provide social and tangible goods to members. Coleman’s famous article on social capital relied on that crucial observation.

At the same time, the club good theory misses the most important thing about religion: it’s religious!! There is nothing in the theory that explains why groups based on spiritual beliefs should be more common, more successful, or more durable than non-religious groups. If religion is primarily a club good, why not just make a big fraternity and ditch God?

Of course, secular fraternities to do exist but they don’t seem to be a serious competitor to religion. In fact, some groups, such as Middle Eastern populations, have chosen to become *more* religious in the face of secular Western social organization. God is not impressed with club goods. At this point, I think it would be sensible to appeal to social or psychological explanations of religion. Then one might use the club good theory to explain how social or pyschologically created demand leads to “market structure” (attendence, # of churches, etc).  Very econ soc, not very neo-classical.

OK, this is too cool not to post about: a free text-to-movie app, from xtranormal.com.

So, you can select from dozens of different characters, voices and accents, behaviors, camera angles, music, backgrounds etc and essentially create your own script and cartoon movie, for free.  It’s super easy, fast and way too much fun.

I started constructing a death match and dialogue between orgtheory and our evil twin, O&M (the app has some great, professor-ish characters, settings, accents, etc) — but alas, I’ve got some other things pressing.

I got some very useful feedback on my O&M syllabus, so I’m chancing my arm again. This one is a brand new small-group undergraduate seminar taught under the auspices of the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Participants are seniors of various majors taking an Ethics concentration, and this course is a “capstone” course where they are expected to write a fairly substantial paper. I want to teach debates about ethics/morality & the market more or less from the point of view outlined in this article (which you should all assign, btw). I remain dissatisfied with this version of the syllabus, as it really is a first go at it. As before, thoughts and suggestions are welcome, with a bias against adding five or six additional articles each week.

“Sergeant, from now on, I don’t want anyone to come in and see me while I’m in my office. Is that clear?” — Maj. Major Major Major, Catch-22

Yesterday, for the first time in 15 months, I managed to completely clear my review queue.  For seven minutes, my reading choices needed to take no one but myself into account.  I considered picking up one of the new books in the teetering pile on my desk.  I pondered taking some of my more recent journals out of plastic.  Then I made the mistake of opening my e-mail to grab a forthcoming article I’d been meaning to look at. Rookie mistake.

Don’t get me wrong. I have moderately well-developed and  strict rules for saying “no” to review requests of various sorts, but it appears they need to be tightened. I’m considering adopting a modified Major Major (or perhaps Groucho Marx) rule, something like “I will only review for journals that don’t ask me to.”

I also had a longish talk with a talented undergraduate about the pros and cons of graduate school.  The two experiences got me thinking about occupations (like ours) that are about the development of expertise or (dare I say it) taste.  In academe skill and experience are inversely related to the average quality of the things one evaluates. 

Think about it. The first years of graduate school are typically an exercise in dismembering works that are hand selected to represent the best of the field.  After dispensing with the best work of the last few decades, people progress to dissertation research where they must ransack the literature on a topic. That task requires them to learn to draw quality distinctions among a wide range of pieces whose variance is nevertheless restricted by the simple fact that they are all published. 

With the first job, reviewing and reading of student work (e.g. draft dissertation chapters and master’s theses) increases. At some point in the career trajectory one begins to read more unpublished (and often unfinished) stuff than one does published, pre-screened stuff. That shift should be accompanied by a changed evaluative stance.

In the early years, critique is about identifying holes and mistakes that make ideas less plausible. In the later years, critique is about identifying the germs of ideas worth  development despite the current holes and mistakes.  The shift is subtle and took me a long time to identify. If I reviewed a piece of yours during my first couple of years as an assistant prof, my apologies.

This is what I was unable to get across to that talented undergraduate.  If you want to go to grad school because you just love tearing apart complicated ideas, then you may be setting yourself up for a fall. No good deed goes unpunished in academia. Demonstrating that you have the skills and taste to make and support quality distinctions among ideas simply guarantees that you will read more and more stuff that is less and less well-developed.

Mario pointed me to this fascinating NY Times tool that allows you to track Netflix rentals by zip code in some of the nation’s major metropolitan areas. You could waste a lot of time looking at this stuff. Or if you happen to be someone like Omar or Mario, you could turn this data set into a fancy ASR article.

My favorite Netflix rentals from 2009 were Mad Men, seasons 1-2, but it appears that my neighbors in the 60091 zip code weren’t that into the show.  It made the top 50 in the zip codes to the north (Winnetka) and south (Evanston) of mine though. Maybe I should seek greater homophily and move.