orgtheory.net

One for the annals of delayed gratification: A Ryanair passenger won €10,000 on an in-flight lottery scratchcard. But, as you might expect, the flight attendants didn’t have the money for him right there and then. He became angry and frustrated. In the face of urgings to the contrary from the crew and other passengers, he threw a fit and ate the ticket.

Ok, I’ve been reading Connell, West, Connell and a bunch of other classic gender folks. What do you think describes the view of sociology of gender community these days?

So, last week, I presented at the Oliver Williamson seminar on institutional analysis, based in the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley.  (This week, I presented for Labor Studies here at IU.  How’s that for variety?)  It was a great experience and a smart crowd–predominantly made up of economists, and playing by economists’ rules for talks.  I was glad to make it through the bulk of the material I wanted to share, and thankful that the intellectual sparring (which I even mildly enjoyed) wasn’t hostile.  I heard “we don’t usually get sociologists” several times.  I was actually surprised that the worlds of “business and public policy” (primarily economists) and “management of organizations” (more psychologists and sociologists) don’t overlap so much, at least in this particular setting.

One side reflection….

…Economists are pretty damn quick and agile when it comes to using notions about signaling and agency theory to undercut arguments about cultural categories in markets.

Here, that occurred when I talked about Love and Kraatz’s interesting finding that corporate downsizing in the 1980s had negative effects on firms’ reputations (relative to their competitors).  Love and Kraatz show that these effects are robust to controls for financial and market performance and argue that they represent an evaluation of firms’ “character” and trustworthiness.  It’s a nice paper and interesting argument, which differs from neo-institutionalist lines about conformity with the dominant institutional logic (in this case, of shareholder value).  The economist counter-argument was that downsizing is really a signal that the firm knows it will be in trouble in the future–and therefore provides valuable information about the firm’s market value.  This isn’t picked up in measures of market performance because it’s really a forecast of performance to come, not a reflection of curent performance. 

In a discussion a few years ago, something similar happened when I used Zuckerman’s ”categorical imperative” findings to demonstrate the effects of legitimacy.  Then, the counter-argument, if I remember correctly, was that the real problem with firms that don’t fit the expected categories is that they are scattered in such a way that generates agency problems that ultimately devalue them.

My goal is not to argue about which interpretation is right.  In my view, these two papers are super-high quality and go to great lengths to establish their findings.  The point is that it’s amazing how quick one can be to undermine a rigorously developed argument with a wave of the hand.  From one perspective, this could be an indication of the power of a strong paradigm.  But I think it also reflects a tendency toward deconstruction in that paradigm…and I mean this in something not too terribly far from the Derrida/Foucault sense.  All that is solid melts into thin air.  Arguments become increasingly hard to operationalize, models become impossible to properly specify, and therefore more falls back on the paradigmatic assumptions.  My sense is that sociologists are more pragmatist in their orientation:  Build with what you have; talk, talk, talk  to sort it out.

Just a scattered thought, which maybe has implications for Mark’s earlier post about org theory and institutional economics.

Next step, coming soon…a more substantive post….no more mentions of Williamson, I promise.

John Searle has written a new book that should be of interest to many of you. Following the line of thought of his earlier The Construction of Social Reality, Searle’s Making the Social World tries to explain how we create a world of institutions, like organizations and culture, from a physical world that seems to play by a different set of principles. He starts by identifying a simple principle that he thinks can explain much of what counts for social reality. Here’s an excerpt from the introductory chapter:

It is typical of domains where we have a secure understanding of the ontology, that there is a single unifying principle of that ontology. In physics it is the atom, in chemistry it is the chemical bond, in biology it is the cell, in genetics it is the DNA molecule, and in geology it is the tectonic plate. I will argue that there is similarly an underlying principle of social ontology, and one of the primary aims of the book is to explain it. In making these analogies to the natural sciences I do not imply that the social sciences are just like the natural sciences. That is not the point. The point rather is that it seems to me implausible to suppose that we would use a series of logically independent mechanisms for creating institutional facts, and I am in search of a single mechanism. I claim we use one formal linguistic mechanism, and we apply it over and over with different contents (7).

The claim that I will be expounding and defending in this book is that all of human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same logical form as) [Status Function] Declarations, including the cases that are not speech acts in the explicit form of Declarations (13).

Searle isn’t saying that every speech act makes the world change and therefore has a declarative effect.  But some sorts of speech are intended to “change the world by declaring that the state of affairs exists and thus bringing that state of affairs into existence” (12). These declarative speech acts, then, are the fundamental units of any institution because without them humans would be completely constrained by reality as it stands now. They would be unable to create anything new.

Needless to say, the performativity folks will eat this up.

Many of my economist friends wonder why org theorists make such big deal out of conformity and, to a lesser extent, categories.

Maybe it’s because they never watched Sesame Street, and we did. After all, with a simple song (One of these things is not like the other, one of these is not the same…), this seemingly wholesome bastion of public television edutainment taught a generation of kids to spot categories and reject misfits, and quickly! (Watch it on YouTube.)

Lately, the Apple iPad has made me think about these issues and, of course (!), about org theory. It leads to some questions for org theory readers, which are stated at the end of this post.

Jumping into the org theory part takes me to Ezra Zuckerman’s (1999) “categorical imperative.” Roughly speaking, this is the idea that non-conformists pay a price for their deviance, which includes, but is not limited to, being overlooked, dismissed or discounted, especially by third-party evaluators that try to make a living as critics, analysts or experts. Similar findings have been shown in, to name just a few studies I like, actors (Zuckerman; Hsu), wine (Negro, Hannan and Rao), and markets for professional services (Leung). So, for everyone 10 tries at creating a new market category, we can all probably find 9 or so failures. Furthermore, for each success, I bet I can find a situation where a few deviants started to find each other and somehow find themselves part of what they had tried to leave behind–a crowd that gives them legitimacy, even as it also makes them compete. (I say something along these lines in articles in Poetics, ASR, and in a working paper probably getting brutalized by reviewers somewhere right now.)

Still, this isn’t the whole story, is it?

In the technology world, engineers and entrepreneurs have this crazy idea that it’s somehow a good thing to come up with new things that don’t fit existing categories. They’re so drunk with enthusiasm for this that they seem to want to do it all the time. Probably to make it sound like it isn’t just ill-advised gambling, they call it “innovation”, like giving it a name makes it more real, or something. (See Rosa et al., 1999.) Of course, they still mostly fail at it. I’m not sure, but I think this obsessive rush to deviate could be related to the history and lore of computers. It is replete with stories of misfits–computers that didn’t fit established categories of their day–that somehow caught on and siphoned demand away from dominant markets. Everybody seems to want to make that list as inventors of the “next big thing.” There is even a wacky museum dedicated to all this. I can’t say if the whole innovation thing will catch on, but it certainly makes for interesting studies.

Kidding aside, you can also see this in several things Ezra has written about how actors escape the pressures of conformity. There is the idea that what economists call “abnormal returns” tend to go to innovators, a la Schumpeter (see Zuckerman 1999: 1402-1403). Also, in his paper with Damon Philips, there is the point that high and low status actors feel greater pressures for conformity than middle-status actors. Even so, I’m definitely with Ezra on the conformity pressures that categories produce, but I’m also puzzled by the question of how new categories arise. As my wife and kids would testify, this puts me on the lookout for misfits or category-blenders or misfits that seem like they might make get recognized as belonging to new categories, even if they initially strike many as ungainly hybrids. You can hear nastily critical comments to that effect about the iPad, netbook computers, or before that, the smartphone. Even before that, the same goes for the minicomputer, the PC, the workstation, and so on. (Gordon Bell has a nice little paper on this that boils a lot of this history down into a single diagram–see Figure 1. For engineers: there really is a Figure 1 in Bell’s paper.)

In the technology context, it is clear that being the prototype for today’s established category may not translate into being the prototype for the next big thing. Since being a perfect fit for the slide rule category just isn’t worth what it used to be, it’s useful to think about the currency of a category, the topic of a paper I”m revising for RSO with student Jade Lo and Mike Lounsbury.) Because a picture’s worth a thousand words, here’s an admittedly non-artistic collage that combines some well-accepted categories with misfits aiming for currency of their own.

Fun with categories ... in high-tech gadgets

So here are some questions for you:

1. In addition to the categorical imperative, what else affects the dynamics of market categories?
2. Any predictions about whether the iPad will take off or fizzle out?
3. Or, should org theorists leave all this super-macro “organizations and markets” stuff to other fields?

To start the discussion, here are few ideas about #1 that are already out there:

• luck (path dependence),
• product features (rational choice in marketing),
• producers’ perceptions of threat and opportunity (I have a piece with Peer Fiss about this in AMJ),
• audience judgments and critics’ opinions (as in the growing ecological literature on categories),
• the social psychology of comparison processes and similarity judgments (in the spirit of Brayden’s recent post).

At least to me, what makes all this an interesting topic–and fair game for org theorists–is that it requires looking beyond the effects of institutionalized categories to the processes and institutions that contribute to institutionalizing them. Yuck, that’s a mouthful, I know. The point is that categories have histories in which organizations, entrepreneurs and innovators interact with critics, distributors, key customers and other arbiters of taste to try to influence their intended audience to see their misfit products as deserving categories of their own–and all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto, as the saying goes.

Right now, people are choosing graduate programs. Here is the soc phd program series:  strat/work, education, org studies,  culture, urban, soc psych, demography, political sociology, health. What topics do you think need to be in there?

The famed Greensboro sit in of February 1960, which lead to the creation of SNCC. From a nice Slate slide show of great civil rights movement photography that focuses on SNCC.

The LA Times asked authors to give writing advice. Will Self:

Stop reading fiction – it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already (assuming, that is, you’ve read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven’t you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

Rose Tremain:

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of Negative Capability and Kipling’s advice to “drift, wait and obey”. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

Sarah Waters:

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

Check it out.

I’ve been attending the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE, pronounced like “sassy”) meetings for a few years now.  It’s an eclectic group, attracting heterodox economists, political scientists and sociologists of a variety of stripes and multiple nationalities.  Never a dull time.

The meetings bounce back and forth between the US and Europe.  This year they are in Philadelphia, June 24-26, and the deadline for submissions is looming this week.  A quick turn around for those late to the game, but one good thing about SASE is that submitting is simply a matter of putting together an abstract… the paper comes later (hello escalation of commitment, a.k.a., a useful forcing mechanism).

Personally, I find its a very good crowd to try out new ideas on.  Open, interesting, eclectic and tolerant.  It also represents one of the few places where OrgTheorists get equal time and equal billing with kindred disciplines.

The trick to any conference, and SASE is no exception, is to find the right group to hang out with.  A little time rifling through the various “networks” as well as the “mini-conferences” is worth the effort if you are thinking of tossing your hat in to the ring.

I once read on a science blog once that scientists have a few tricks they just repeat over and over again in the careers. So I got to thinking, what’s my distinctive trick as an academic? I think it’s this: Fabio is really good at assembling big data from unexpected sources. The Black Studies book relies on material from about twelve different archives, manyof which were never used before. My antiwar research is a massive longitudinal survey of street protesters (N>8,000 right now), a technique that most folks didn’t think could provide useful data. What’s your distinctive trick?

The NY Times has a nice article on Google’s head quarters. My co-blogger, Sean Safford, comments:

Sean Safford, a professor who studies organizations and markets at the University of Chicago, noted that Google was replicating traditional company-town practices by placing housing for its employees near its headquarters.

“It will be so interesting to see how much of their human resources strategy is about creating a community feeling that goes beyond the offices,” Mr. Safford said. “Sometimes when you’re competing for workers and prominence, there’s a need to stick your chest out and say, ‘We’re the big dogs in town.’ ”

Our good ol’ buddy Jerry Davis also chimes in on the topic of different forms of community investment by firms:

Perhaps uniquely, Google is also casting itself as a partner with NASA, now the proprietor of Moffett Field. This partnership is making Mountain View a stop along the virtual route to Mars and the real route to the Moon.

“It’s a cool anomaly because the company-town tradition had basically died in the U.S.,” said Jerry Davis, a professor at the University of Michigan, who has written about the ties between companies and cities. “It’s interesting to see Google put their touches on the idea.”

Historically, company towns have grown up around organizations with large manufacturing operations that can support thousands of local workers. To attract top executives to often less-than-ideal locales, the companies donated large sums to cultural institutions.

“The main reason Ford put money into the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is to make it plausible to recruit executives to Detroit,” Professor Davis said. “It was a human-resources move as much as it was philanthropic.”

Check it out! Hat tip to William S.

The American Prospect has an article on a big change in the antiwar movement: the shift away from mass protest to more “behind the scenes” activism. A few choice clips:

The anti-war movement’s tactical shift is not without risk. Media tend to report the anti-war movement as a series of manifestations, and as a result the public tends to perceive it that way. Leaders of the four major anti-war organizations interviewed for this article reported their groups were involved in behind-the-scenes organizing ahead of Obama’s escalation announcement, including congressional lobbying, small protests, mailings, and anti-recruitment organizing — and expressed frustration that none of that work had been recognized by the press.

By moving away from protests, the repertoire the public and media most associate with it, the anti-war movement is taking a big gamble. But if it successfully combines attention-grabbing street antics with congressional lobbying efforts and new claims that relate the war to the recession, the movement just might be able to bring itself out of the cold and make good on its early promise.

The author, Colin Asher, was nice to enough to interview me and I pointed out that the movement has had trouble capitalizing on public opinion. Even though polls show unhappiness with the war, the movement has had trouble getting attention in a bad economy. The movement has noticably shrunk:

This confluence of events weakened the anti-war movement to such an extent that protests held on the eighth anniversary of the war’s start — a date that came the week after a series of insurgent attacks killed nine U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan — were just barely larger than those held in the first weeks after the war began. “Leading organizations have shrunk or disbanded,” Rojas says. “They aren’t in much of a position to push anything because they’re in a period of transition.”

Even though both wars are still ongoing, it seems like a recession and democratic president have rolled back the movement to its earliest days. Time will tell if that’s a permanent state.

One of the best consequences of coming to Kellogg is that I’ve been exposed to a lot more psychological research. Half of my department consists of social psychologists who study the micro-mechanisms that affect individual and group behaviors. Methodologically, the research is overwhelmingly experimental. Much of it looks at the biases and heuristics that shape judgment, decision-making, and interpersonal interaction.  One of the most famous examples of this kind of research is Kahneman’s and Tversky’s finding of loss aversion – the notion that people are more likely to take risks to avoid losses than they are to get potential gains. Because this research has direct implications for how people make choices and trade-offs, the program has had a big impact on behavioral economics, showing that people’s choices often deviate from rational expectations. Social psychology has had less influence on organizational theory.

It’s strange that social psychology and organizational theory have had so little cross-fertilization. In business schools the two are often thrown together in the same department, and so the two groups frequently intermingle as colleagues. They sometimes share grad students, but usually those students face the choice of specializing in one or the other. There are some exceptions to this. Jim Westphal, for example, has taken a lot of insights from group process theory and applied it to corporate governance, but even when borrowing occurs, it tends to move from the more meso-related theories of social psych to a similar meso-level of theorizing in organizational theory. Why do we not see more crossover from the micro-world of judgment and decision-making to the macro-world of institutions and fields?

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Teaching research is notoriously hard because there are selection effects at every turn. Students select into schools, teachers select into the profession. Students aren’t randomly matched to teachers inside schools and students aren’t randomly assigned teacher attention. Policies aren’t randomly assigned to schools or teachers. It’s nice to see this review of teacher performance research by Michael Podgursky and Matthew Springer in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Seems like there’s been some progress on the issue:

• There’s a lot of evidence that teachers matter, more so than schools. In most cases, descriptive studies show consistent teacher effects. There’s just tons of classroom/teacher variation in most large data sets from large school districts. In contrast, school effects are all over the place. Sometimes you find them, sometimes you don’t.
• There’s a lot of evidence that teacher credentials don’t matter. The same data sets show almost negligible effects of credentials. Thus paying people merely for degrees earned is likely not a good idea.
• Principals seem to have a good idea of who is a good teacher. Multiple studies of qualitative evaluation in different types of schools usually find that people who have recieved good evaluations (and often higher pay) often have better classroom outcomes.
• It’s very hard to evaluate the exact role that pay has in performance. Aside from the selection issues, there’s also a mixture problem. Performance pay is always mixed in with other pay schemes, like seniority.
• Despite these problems, most random assignment studies of performance related pay find a positive effect.
• The downside is that the effects are short lived, suggesting that education needs to be sustained over multiple grade levels.

Bottom line: Getting an ultimate perfectly identified answer is nearly impossible, but the evidence does suggest that teachers matter and they respond to incentives, but that, like most educational interventions, incentives must be sustained over time.

The LA Times has a series of interesting articles on the rise of a new type heroine trading ring (here, here, and here). Normally, the drug trade is a fairly centralized affair, with a few syndicates violently battling for dominance within a specific urban area. And each syndicate is often a hierarchically organized network.

There’s been a rise in a new type of network that peddles a low quality form of heroine (“black tar”) in small towns and rural areas. A few key points:

• Rural folks vs. urbanites: The black tar peddlers are mainly from a very rural part of Xalisco, Mexico. In contrast, the  major drug cartels are centered in major urban centers.
• High vs. low margins: Black tar peddlers target places that are overlooked by the major crime families and they’re willing to accept some low profits.
• Networks vs. hierarchies: Black tar peddlers have informally organized themselves. There’s no “don” or crime boss. The point is to be as low profile as possible.
• Pizza delivery vs. department store: Black tar peddlers don’t make their customers travel. They deliver – fast and cheap. This is unlike urban areas where buyers go street markets.
• Direct marketing: Black tar peddlers often target methodone clinics, oxycontin addicts, and others who might be unusually suscpetible to black tar additiction. No need to “push it” on the inexperienced. The black tar peddlers also acquire clients by personal reference from current addicts.

It’ll be interesting for crimimologists and orgtheorists to see if this is part of a wider shift, or just a specialized development.

You be the judge. Theory…

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For mathematical sociologists, network people and statisticians: A lecture by CMU’s Stephen Feinberg on using algebraic geometry to study p1 network models.

Steven Strogatz, a well known applied math and network researcher, has a piece in the NY Times on balance in networks. Check it out!

Just noticed the back cover of Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, by eminent Standford University professor Jim March.  I guess the proofreader was satisficing or engaging in sensible foolishness.  (Funny how easy it is to overlook the one in the Moch and Pondy blurb though.)  And this is from the 4th printing!

Reminds me of this, which showed up on Amazon for a little while before the book was released.

Should org theorists just make peace with life in the ghetto, or should we work and write in ways that engage the world of ideas outside our hood, so to speak? (I hear there is one.)

Tim raised a related question (see post): should neo-institutionalists focus on developing their own language and perspective, or acquiesce to using terms that make institutional theory more accessible to outsiders? In answer, he wrote,

“[s]ociologists are trending toward playing their own game–that is, carving out a unique space for organizational neo-institutionalism.  I think it’s a good move, so long as we don’t wall ourselves off or return to oversocialized conceptions of action or byzantine Parsonian exercises.”

In the spirit of using orgtheory to create good exchange, I’m going to take a somewhat contrary position on this question in the hopes it will spawn debate that will teach me something new. In my view, elaborating a distinctive language system is only desirable if it permits important conversations that wouldn’t occur otherwise. When the uniqueness of a language does little besides serve the purpose of protecting a community identity, it is easy for everyone else to conclude that community can be safely ignored.

But if you’re like me, you don’t want to be ignored. (OK, office hours after midterms might be an exception.) Instead, my ambition for org theorists is that we would be increasingly invited out of our ghetto to talk about the cool things we’re doing in it, and for that to happen, we’re going to have to care about letting people know that those things are. While developing a unique language system is generally good for clarity and community solidarity, becoming unintelligible to the outside world undermines the possibility of being understood in ways that increase the odds of making connections that help our ideas travel beyond the ghetto a bit more.

How you think about Tim’s question has a lot to do with whether you believe there is anything more than a pretend-conversation to be had. I share Tim’s sense that the historical conversation between org theorists and institutional economists has been less than satisfying, but my colleagues who do TCE feel exactly the same way about what they regard as sociologists’ frosty reception to their attempts to use the language of neoinstitutional theory. With apologies in advance, we can be a bit like the caricature of the French–never sufficiently appalled at the way people butcher our language when they try to speak it.

Rather than drag this post out with a long argument for the rather simple point I’m making, I’ll pick up the details in whatever conversation ensues, and for now, leave it at this simple conclusion: whether we develop a new and distinctive language or not, let’s at least encourage and reward some of our number to become bilingual and, dare I say it, represent us well to those who can’t quite get our language right.

What ever happened to the rating agencies?  Back in the heyday of the financial meltdown, there was lots of talk about how Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and Fitch caused (or at least exacerbated) trouble by recklessly under-estimating the risks of securities.  And of course, there was lots of discussion about why these supposed arbiters of trust failed so spectacularly and what to do about it.  There were rumors of rating agencies tossing out AAAs without even opening the books.  (“Grade inflation” of a different sort!)

But then recently, things seem to have gone quiet on the rating front.

Even before the crisis, there was a bit of debate about whether the rating agencies were trustworthy or not.  In a brilliant stroke of titling (“The Siskel and Ebert of Financial Markets“), Frank Partnoy argued that the problem was that these supposedly private agencies actually have a state-supported oligopoly and their decisions make certain courses of action obligatory.  This removes the discipline of the market and reputational incentives to generate accurate information.  Partnoy favored dropping rating altogether, while others used this diagnosis to argue for more fully marketizing these opaque oligopolies.  In recent New Yorker article, James Surowecki echoes this argument, but also makes the interesting claim that big investors prefer to have even flawed rating agencies there in order to simplify their decision-making and have someone to blame when it all goes wrong.

It turns out that organizational and economic sociologists have some important things to add here.  A few papers from the upcoming ”Markets on Trial” volume tackle the rating agencies head on.  Neil Fligstein and Adam Goldstein argue that you can actually see an inflection point (around 2003) when the ratings for the subprime market start to bear no relationship to reality.  Papers by Bruce Carruthers and by Akos Rona-Tas both apply arguments about performativity and reactivity to this context.  Carruthers argues that new rating methods for the subprime market were shared publicly, leading bond issuers and raters into a “co-performativity of the models embodied within the rating methods.”  And he goes further to argue that it is commensuration (achieved through rating) and expert communities, not “animal spirits,” that brought on the herd mentality.  Rona-Tas uses a fascinating comparison of corporate credit rating and consumer credit rating (think, “free credit report.com” dudes) to explore the conditions for reactivity (gaming the system, or “counter-performativity”) and endogeneity (obscuring causal chains).

Obviously, both of these last papers build on theories of performativity in markets and on Espeland and Sauder’s work on reactivity, which focuses on ratings of law schools (and occasionally also business schools).

All combined, I think this makes the topic of rating and ranking (plus related issues of categorization and certification) one of the most vibrant areas of for theory today.  If I’m not mistaken, there will be a fascinating panel on this at the SASE conference in Philadelphia this summer.  In any case, maybe this announcement (“the SASEs are coming!” ala the title) induces performativity (but not reactivity).

The question is, what other cases of rating/ranking deserve to be on the list of cases to explore?  And are they really comparable?  A short and rough initial list includes the following:

• academic rankings
• credit rating
• ratings of corporate social responsibility
• movie ratings

P.S.  I’m headed to Berkeley next week to present in the Oliver Williamson seminar on institutions.  I promise a field report toward the end of next week.

There’s a pretty wide spread feeling that letters of recommendation are very inefficient. Scatter has a very good discussion here, check out olderwoman’s comment. Leiter Report, a professional philosophy blog, has a very nice discussion of how people may not know the “code” when writing the letters, and thus unintentionally damage their students. On this blog, I’ve proposed eliminating letters of recommendation in many cases.

So I got to thinking, to have any decent opinion on letters of recommendation, you need at least a theory of how they operate. Here is what you need to know:

1. “Codes”: does the letter writer know the formal and informal standards for writing letters?
2. Incentives I: Does the letter writer have any incentive to write a truthful letter? Is there any reason to belive that letter inflation can be contained?
3. Incentives II: Does the letter writer have any incentive to write a proper letter if they know the “codes?” Even if they are honest, why would people take the time to write letters?
4. Validity: Do letters actually predict performance?
5. Value added: What does the letter add that is not obvious from observed behavior?
6. Costs: What is the abosolute and relative cost of letters in terms of processing and managing them?

Here’s what I think are the answers:

1. Obviously, there seems to be a huge variance in letter writing codes. In my own case, I always thought that “hard working” was a good and rare attribute. Omar points out that the wider academe sees this as a signal of low quality (i.e., they compensate for lack of talent with extra effort, which is somehow a bad thing). It’s clear that simply getting the form and filling it out is insufficient.
2. The folk wisdom is that most fields suffer from letter inflation. I am not sure what incentives people have to write accurate letters. People say “I don’t trust letters from so and so.” But who cares? Will that change so and so’s behavior? Not a chance. It probably punishes the applicant.
3. There is little evidence that people will take the time to write lengthy and carefully crafted letters. Most seem generic. I’ve seen many files that are incomplete. The faculty simply fail to write the letters.
4. There’s concrete evidence here. Letters are a poor predictor of performance in the settings where they have been studied. Here’s a clip from an article in the journal Public Personnel Management : “Even though references are commonly used to screen and select employees, they have not been successful in predicting future employee success (Muchinsky, 1979). In fact, the average validity coefficient for references is only .13 (Browning, 1968; Mosel & Goheen, 1959). This low validity is due mostly to four main problems found with references and letters of recommendation: Leniency, knowledge of the applicant, low reliability, and extraneous factors involved in the writing and reading of letters of recommendation.” There’s a number of studies in psychology and medicine about letters and future perfomance. The studies show letters aren’t very good. They’re glorified junk.
5. In most cases, the value added is small. For example, don’t you know enought about a student from the 30+ college courses reported in the transcript? And their standardized tests, often taken multiple times? And the writing sample? That’s a huge amount of information and better than what almost all letters contain.
6. Costs: It takes time to write letters, ship them, recieve them, sort them, and read them. Lot’s of time. There’s storage and postage. There’s also the time it take students to hound faculty to get the letter done and even then, too many job and grad school applicants don’t have complete files that are often discarded because they could only get 2 of 3 letters. There’s a significant cost.

That’s it in a nutshell: People don’t know what letters are about, they have incentives to write lousy letters, letters don’t predict performance, and there’s a non-trivial cost. Why on earth do we keep doing it?

If you want my “subtle” opinion, mandatory letters should be abolished in most educational settings. Students should be encouraged to submit letters only if they feel that there’s something that’s not clear from the transcript (e.g., a semester of bad grades due to death in the family). Letters might also be required in cases where the committee reading papers truly needs external evaluation. For example, junior job canidadates often have thin publication records and non-specialists might find it hard to understand what’s good in a dissertation. But in most cases, we have a pretty good sense of what’s happening with a student.

I challange you, Luhmannites. In 150 words or less, can you give me an example of an empirical phenomenon or puzzle that was clarified, explained, or resolved using autopoeisis or any other of Luhmann’s concepts? For example, will I understand the rise of capitalism in England better? Why African Americans have lower levels of education than Whites? Increased political polarization in America? Seriously, dudes, throw me a bone. Name me one empirical question that I can better answer because I spent the weekend reading Social Systems.* I dare you. I double dog dare you.

* And yes, I also checked out some of his “empirical” works like The Reality of the Mass Media. Still feel burned.

UPDATE: I’m changing the terms of our agreement.  Every 60 minutes that pass without a clear empirical application of autopoiesis, one of these fellows will “accidentally” find themselves underneath an annotated copy of Social Systems.

This may be old in the blogosphere, but I was just forwarded this nice Weberian reading of Up in the Air, posted by Susan Herbst on Inside Higher Ed.
Short version:

George Clooney’s character:   perfect Weberian character, except that he isn’t fully comfortable with his iron cage or the rationalizing force of technology.

Vera Farmiga’s character:  a ”Weberian monster of sorts,” well-adapted to her iron cage.

There’s more there too, including some nice teaching ideas.  Worth a read:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/01/08/herbst

Can you guess the source of this sentence?

Such a thesis posits an imprinting factor stronger than any of those identified in Lorenz’s geese!

Hint: It’s neofunctionalism…

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the orgtheory team for inviting me to post some food for thought in the coming days–I really enjoy the sense of community this site fosters.

Rather than starting with something heavy, let me celebrate that community by opening with a request: please join me in using the old “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke to reflect on what organization theory is.

If you have a moment, comment to this post by giving the theory that is supplying the punchline and the answer itself.

Drawing on the two theories I find myself using most often, here are some examples to get us started:

Institutional theory:
(Whining just a bit) “But all the other chickens are doing it, mom.”
-OR-
(Winking) “I don’t really cross it, I just pretend like I’m going to until nobody is looking.”

Organizational ecology:
(Dryly) “Cross the road? I think of it more as exiting the population, really.”

I’m sure these could be done in other ways, and better, so I’d like to hear from others on both these theories and other perspectives such as a network perspective, social movements, TCE, and so forth.

OK, but why?

Mostly for fun, of course, but also to warm up to one of the topics that interests me most, which is how org theorists can embrace their diversity and yet find the coherence needed to be relevant, both in the academy and beyond.

Thanks for playing!

(In case my examples don’t make this perfectly clear, there is absolutely no requirement that these quips by either really funny or even entirely fair.)

We’re pleased to have Mark Kennedy join us as a guest blogger.  Mark is an Assistant Professor at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

Mark’s research relates to categories, meaning and structure in markets and society.  (Here’s an engaging ASR piece for anyone not familiar with Mark’s work.) You can learn more about his research here.

Welcome Mark!

By the 1940s, economics and sociology mirrored each other. Emerging from political economy in  Europe and progressive politics in America, these two disciplines reached a point where a single prominent scholar tried to lay the groundwork for their field. Paul Samuelson recast economics as an application of decision theory. Talcott Parsons  recast sociology as an issue of systems theory. This post is a sketch of what I think the consequences are.

1. Obviously, Samuelson won in his discipline, while Parsons lost. Economists who don’t use the language of utility maximization, linear programming and Samuelson’s other ideas are quickly relegated  to the margin. Parsons does have some very prominent followers, but it’s hard to describe neo-functionalism as a dominant school.

2. Samuelson and Parsons different trajectories, I think, can be ascribed to simple idea. Samuelson made it possible to simplify and unify economic discussion. Once you accept that everything is a choice maximizing utility, then you create a simplified language. Of course, specific applications can be nasty, but you provide a basic cognitive foundation for the discipline. Even people who disagree can do so in a shared framework. In contrast, Parsons was a synthesizer and his works tend to combine different ideas than distill and simplify them. People found the ideas bizarre and not useful. That’s unsustainable over the long run.

3. Another issue: tractability. The move to economics as decision theory meant that an army of followers could elaborate and apply the idea. You had a road map, albeit one with a lot of calculus in it. A college freshman with a little calculus could easily make sense of basic economics. In contrast, structural functionalism was notoriously hard to comprehend or apply. Even in anthropology, the discipline that spawned functional arguments, it is thought that functional arguments are hard to prove.

4. Bracketing: Earlier political economists (like Weber) worked on issues such as the meaning of social action, personal identity, social systems, etc. Modern economics, for the most part minimizes these issues by bracketing them. What matters is the observed behavior and revealed preferences. The stuff behind the preferences, or even variances in preferences (heterogeneous agents) , is off the table. In contrast, Parsons didn’t have a “master variable” to which all other concerns could be suboridnated. No bracketing could occur.

5. Revulsion vs. embracing: Many economists may disagree on specific policy issues with Samuelson, but only a small contingent of heterodox economist will dismiss his formalism as the starting point from which all else springs in economics. Even when Samuelson’s framework is found wanting, economists try to modify it rather than abolish it (e.g., behavioral economics). In contrast, sociologists seem to have dismissed Parsons his entirety without any successful attempt at introducing a new language for sociology. It doesn’t seem as if any incremental knowledge or tool set emerged from the decades when Parsons dominated the field.

In other words, it might be argued that Samuelson helped economics by providing parsimony. Parsons did the opposite. He offered complexity, which created a distaste for theory or formalization among many in the generation following Parsons.

Richard “Pete” Peterson, one of the original founders of the ASA section on Culture died yesterday.  It is a strange feeling, since I actually never knew him very well, yet it seems like somebody I actually was close to is now gone.  Two great culture scholars who actually did know him closely have more personal reflections here and here.  My only major interaction with him was at Boston ASA where I actually felt useful for once:  he needed to go to an ASA session that was way across one of those weird tubes that connect the various buildings and I was going to that same session (Paul DiMaggio was presenting a paper).  When we got there, Pete said to Paul: “Hey Paul, Lizardo helped me get here.” Score!

Peterson (1979) wrote one of the two–the other one being of course Swidler (1986)–key theoretical articles that helped shake the study of culture in sociology out its Parsonian hangover.  Peterson was clear that they key was to get away from culture and values and towards the empirical study of culture as “expressive symbols.”  Although a healthy return to studying values empirically has been enacted of late, a lot of us wouldn’t be making a living without this reorientation of the field.  One of Peterson’s major contributions was in taking a good dose of Columbia-style organizational sociology (via Gouldner) and some non-negligible industrial economics to bring empirical specificity to the study of what Hirsch referred to as culture industry systems.  This came packaged as the “production” approach to the study of culture.  His famous distillation of the production approach as “6-step” model is still one of the greatest things to teach undergrads (Peterson 1985; see also Peterson 1990 on Rock and Roll).

Today, after hundreds of articles and enough books to fill out a couple of shelves, we have learned more about the production side of culture than seemed possible a mere 30 years ago (see Peterson and Anand 2004 for the latest review, and see DiMaggio 2000 for a retrospective). It is important to underscore however, that for Peterson the production perspective was a general perspective on the study of all forms of culture, including, science and religion in addition to the arts (the classic ABS special issue that he edited in 1976 is still a must read).

Yet, it was in studying the consumption side (it should be noted that very few scholars, this side of Pierre Bourdieu have actually been able to make theoretical contributions on both sides of the production/consumption divide), that Peterson would make what may in the end be remembered as his most enduring contribution.  First, in re-defining measures of cultural behavior away from the loaded terms inherited from mass culture approaches as “patterns of cultural choice” (Peterson 1983). Then in a series of now classic papers in the early and mid-1990s (Peterson 1992; Peterson and Simkus 1993; Peterson and Kern 1996) revolutionizing the study of arts participation with his proposal that the best way to describe the cultural stratification system of the United States was not as an “elite-mass” division but one premised on the division between omnivores and univores. We are still digesting and exploring the wide-ranging implications of this Kuhnian gestalt shift, as omnivores and univores appear to show up everywhere we look (Peterson 2005).

So maybe that’s why I feel like I knew Pete so well even if I really didn’t: those citations (Peterson 1992, Peterson and Kern 1996, Peterson 2005) roll out of my keyboard and into almost every paper that I write almost automatically.  I think they will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Steve Levitt, has a provocative blog post up today.  Forwarding a reader’s email he asks:

“What other benefits can be found in poverty? Obviously there is a difference between the regular poverty of say, a good chunk of Western college students versus the extreme poverty of many people in Africa. Depending on the situation, I am thinking there could be a connection between poverty and with things like creative resourcefulness and happiness.” Your thoughts?

As for thoughts, an orgTheorist who shall go nameless posted this on his facebook page questioning whether Steve might have had an aneurysm.  Its hard to disagree with that sentiment.

But then it did make me think of Amartya Sen’s argument in Development as Freedom.  In a nut shell, Sen’s goal is to shift the debate away from mainstream economists’ notions of utility and from philosophical (sociological?) questions of justice or fairness to emphasize the capability of people to do and be what they value.

Echoing Levitt’s reader’s (puke-worthy, yet nevertheless thought provoking) comparison of Western college students and “people in Africa” (whatever that means given that it is a continent of 1 billion people and countless cultures and subcultures), Sen’s argument is, fundamentally, that poverty is relative.

If a lack of income is standing in the way of doing things you want to do — worship, vote, be comfortable — then you are poor.  But those restrictions can come just as easily from social norms, religious edicts or political structure as income.  At the same time, simply having a low income does not make one either poor or unhappy.  The Botswanan bushman who is living a full and meaningful life within a traditional society is neither unhappy nor poor because he has full capability to achieve what he wants to achieve in life.

Sen likes to point out that in his wanderings in Calcutta’s ghettos, he never encountered anyone who said that their poverty made them unhappy.  The same, I venture, could not be said of your average college student living on loans.  Myself, I remember spending a few very miserable winters in Ithaca eating ramen noodles.  Yet, the capabilities of the Calcuttan ghetto-dweller to achieve the things they may want to achieve are vastly inferior to the capabilities of the students.  So why are they happier?  The difference is, essentially, ignorance: the poor in Calcutta make-due under overwhelmingly adverse circumstances while students in the US feel worse off relative to others in society.  The poor may seem happier, but their happiness is in light of their relative lack of freedom compared to the US student.  Which is worse?  Sen argues that happy ignorance is not bliss.  I’d say I have to agree.

I was reading Cohen, March & Olsen’s “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” this week and, by coincidence, also looked at some of World Society: The Writings of John Meyer, a collection of Meyer’s most important work edited and introduced by Georg Krücken and Gili Drori. Sadly it is far, far too expensive and only available in hardback at the moment. (I got it after reviewing a manuscript for Oxford.) In “Reflections: Institutional Theory and World Society”, Meyer takes on a string of critics. Here’s one bit connected to the Garbage Can paper:

External models flow into the structures of actors in highly decoupled ways. Policies and structures tend to be poorly linked to each other, and often poorly linked to internal subunits and to practices. This is true on an individual case by case basis even when at the systemic level there is a good deal of overall coherence. The decoupling idea has the most massive empirical support in studies of individual actors as in the famous gaps between norms and behavior. It is a central finding in the study of organizations … It is a routine observation in studies of nation states … And it is well-theorized in institutionalist reasoning. … Realists have the greatest difficulty with the decoupling idea. They imagine that social structural rules arise because powerful political and economic actors want them in place, and want them implemented. If this doesn’t happen, someone is cheating, or someone is asleep, and in any case great long-run stresses must be resolved. Permanent decoupling … is a problem for most realists. One can see the extreme tension, for instance, in an attack on a precursor of institutionalist thinking – the famously imagistic paper by Cohen, March and Olsen called “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972) – by Bendor et al. (2001) thirty years after the original paper was published. The original paper had some creative imagery about decoupling at its core, and was widely cited for this: it also had some illustrative simulation models that were given little subsequent attention. Unable to effectively attack the core imagery, Bendor et al. devote extraordinary effort to destroy the simulation models, clearly attempting to undercut the whole subsequent institutionalist development (2001: 189): “We believe it is possible to revitalize the [theory] … this operation would deprive the [theory] and the March-Olsen variant of the new institutionalism of a certain mystique. Without this bold move, however, there is little chance that these ideas will shed much enduring light on institutions.” Crocodile tears lie thick on the page of the American Political Science Review

William McKinley has an interesting essay about the state of organization theory in the most recent Organization Studies. I’m not sure that I agree with McKinley’s sentiments, but his argument is provocative and worth considering seriously. Here’s a portion of the abstract:

In this essay I argue that organization theory has witnessed a significant displacement of ends over the last 30 years.Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s the dominant goal of the discipline was achieving consensus on the validity status of theories, today the overriding goal appears to be development of new theory. Formerly new theory development was considered a means to the end of attaining consensus on theory validity, but was not the only activity deemed necessary to accomplish that goal. In addition, instrumental standardization and replication were viewed as important. The contemporary displacement of
ends toward new theory development creates the paradox that organization theory today is both epistemologically simpler (in terms of the intellectual activity deemed desirable) and more complex theoretically than it was 30 years ago.

McKinley’s argument is similar to something Donald Hambrick wrote in AMJ a few years ago, in which he claimed that organizational scholars have a “theory fetish” that “prevents the reporting of rich detail about interesting phenomena for which no theory yet exists.” McKinley takes it a step further and claims that we have too many theories and that now would be a good time to start testing some of them. While it’s true that most theoretical advancements are accompanied by empirical analysis (e.g., ASQ rarely, if ever, publishes a paper without some empirical analysis), he argues that these findings are not often replicated, leading to a proliferation of new theoretical propositions that never get past the initial stage of investigation. The lack of replication is not limited to organizational theory, of course. Jeremy Freese has claimed that sociology suffers from the same avoidance of replication.

Rather than focus so much on theoretical development, McKinley would have us focus more (or at least as much) on theory testing and replication. He even suggests that we might consider dividing the labor of the field between theorists and empirical researchers. I remain skeptical, in part, because I’m not sure that trying to develop theoretical consensus is a good thing or even practical. In his essay he actually illustrates the difficulty of a “validity status” approach to theories. In the 1960s a rash of scholarly activity developed around testing hypotheses about the relationships of different structural elements of organizations. Debate erupted when the Aston group and John Child disagreed about how activity structuring related to authority concentration. I don’t want to lay out the whole history of the brouhaha here, but the point is that the groups couldn’t come to an agreement about why or if the two structural elements were correlated. McKinley reports that despite a decade’s worth of research on the matter, the disagreement was never resolved and eventually scholarship moved in a different direction.

So there are a couple of takeaways from this. The first is that empirical investigation in organizational scholarship will not always lead to the establishment of theory validity, or at least not consensus, because organizations are so contextually different from one another, making it difficult to build or validate theoretical propositions that hold true in every context.  Even when one does find a seemingly valid theoretical proposition, e.g., density-dependence, scholars will continue to debate about what the mechanisms are underlying the empirical relationship until eventually one or both groups get tired of arguing about it and move on to something else. My second takeaway is that it’s not clear that replication or theory validity testing is always very theoretical. Looking back at the Aston group, we wonder if there was any kind of theory in their project at all.  The main purpose of the project, from what I can tell, was descriptive not explanatory.  Once Child found an anomaly in his replication of their study, the real theorizing began (hmm, how do we explain this apparent difference in findings???).  So maybe I just have a difference in opinion with McKinley about what constitutes theory. Theory is not about establishing relationships between variables; theory is developing a view of the world that explains why things work the way they do. If you have good theories, you can start to derive hypotheses about particular empirical relationships. Or alternatively, you may have to alter your theories to make room for deviations observed in empirical research. This is why inductive research is important. But the ultimate goal of theory isn’t to just build more propositions; it’s about creating paradigms that make sense of our world.

First, thanks to Fabio and others for the introduction.  Jason is a tough act to follow….

I’ll take Fabio’s bait on the “Indiana School” of institutionalism (but not on the rankings).  There’s no doubt that there was a critical mass of institutionalists here when I started–and I would add Ethan Michelson to the list, whose paper on the translation and indigenization of legal forms is a great example of where diffusion research is heading.  We were all well imprinted by the time we arrived in Bloomington, but I do think we pushed each other in useful directions, and will continue to in the coming years.

As the comments to Fabio’s post pointed out, the “Bloomington school” is the more well-known of the Indiana institutionalisms, especially with Lin Ostrom becoming a Nobel Laureate.  (I learned that you can’t technically call the Economics prize a “Nobel Prize.”)  This raises the question of what the relationship is, or could/should be, between the various institutionalisms.

Lots of others have considered the linkages and disjunctures between organizational neo-institutionalism and rational choice/economic institutionalism much more comprehensively than I can.  Suffice it to say that while both are middle-range theories of social order, they differ a lot in epistemologies, assumptions about collective action, orientations to efficiency, etc.  Yet perhaps just by virtue of sharing a name, some horse-racing and borrowing occurs across the two literatures.  (I made my own foray into this genre here, and some weak ties to the “Bloomington school” led to further engagement.)  My guess, however, is that the organizational neo-institutionalists have paid a lot more attention to the rational choice and economic institutionalists than vice versa.  (Has anyone tried to document this sort of thing?  One great polemical piece by Akos Rona-Tas and Nadav Gabay comes to mind.)  Regardless of the reasons for this (of which there could be many) and notable exceptions (of which there are several), the result seems to me to be that organizational neo-institutionalists are pretending to be in a conversation, but there’s no real conversation partner there. 

Is it worth continuing that conversation, or should organizational neo-institutionalists focus on the task of developing their own theoretical language and apparatus, where concepts like “field overlap,” “settlement,” and “translation” become more central than “transaction costs” and “second-order collective action problems?”  With an onslaught of handbooks of neo-institutionalism and some notable agenda-setting papers of late, it seems to me that sociologists are trending toward playing their own game–that is, carving out a unique space for organizational neo-institutionalism.  I think it’s a good move, so long as we don’t wall ourselves off or return to oversocialized conceptions of action or byzantine Parsonian exercises.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll try to share a few ideas about organizations that have come up in my work on regulation, global standards, and “corporate social responsibility” for labor and the environment.