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From exploring our world.

Slovenia is one of the smallest countries in Europe, established in 1991 after the break-up of former Yugoslavia and the communist system.  Unlike most other East European states, the country has never had its own independent state but has always been subsumed under different kinds of territorial arrangements, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, or the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Although it has been one of the most economically successful postsocialist countries, generally, one can say that Slovenia’s recognizability among the world’s countries is pretty low.  Its name makes it easily confused with Slovakia (the republic of former Czechoslovakia) and Slavonia (the region in former Yugoslavia).  Its national flag is almost identical to the Slovakian one, except of the details of the code of arms, and features stripes of red, blue and white, which are very common on many of the European flags.

In the strategy for national economic development written in 2001 as part of Slovenia’s accession efforts to the European Union, tourism development has been identified as a strategic development direction, although the country has been receiving only about 0.3% of European tourists.  Observers have long lamented that this is due to the low recognition of the country in the eyes of the world, but systematic efforts to increase the country’s visibility on a global map and to market it as a tourist destination, began only after the country acceded to the European Union (EU) and was preparing for the EU presidency, beginning January 2008.  As part of these efforts, in the spring of 2005, the government established the Sector for Promotion and International Cooperation, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and charged the Slovenian Tourist Office (STO) with a creation of a crucial marketing tool – a CNN spot.

The Gladiator – Thumbs Down

What is appropriate for a country presentation?  What best captures the “essence” of a country?  What would be attractive to a global citizen?  STO got $1 million dollars to create a CNN spot.  How to begin? Got to have a catchy slogan! At that time STO used “Slovenia: The Green Piece of Europe” in general promotion with four little flowers as a logo. The first decision was to keep the little flowers but change the slogan to “Slovenia: The Perfect Getaway.” Immediately upon the first official presentation of these choices in April 2006, the Minister of Foreign Affairs voiced his outrage, saying the little flowers were ridiculous and “getaway” was more like prison than a desirable tourist destination. So, STO rescheduled the first CNN airing, ditched the flowers for a sketch of a Slovenian flag and “A Perfect Getaway” with “A Diversity to Discover. The actual spot featured mostly the natural beauties of the country, including the sea, the vineyards, Lipizaner horses, fields, rivers, the Karst caves, mountains, interspersed with images of outdoor activities like sailing, horse-back riding, golfing, and skiing.  Only about a third of the spot featured images of the urban environment, in particular the coastal city of Piran, and the architecture and arts of the capital city of Ljubljana.  The spot ended with an image of a woman throwing two hands full of wheat grains up in the air, followed by a close-up of a hand caressing a wheat field and the slogan, “Slovenia: A Diversity to Discover.” The selection of this imagery was not straightforward, since Slovenia is a mostly urban country with only about 6 percent of employment in the agricultural sector.  Also, some of the countryside imagery portrayed the country as if it had vast open lands that people typically experience while horseback riding.  In contrast to such images, the country lacks such open lands, with only 20,000 square kilometers that is more hilly than flat, where horseback riding cannot be counted among the usual pastimes of Slovenians. And one cannot help but to think how strongly the image of a hand caressing the wheat field resembled the early scene from the Gladiator movie.

Donna Summer – Thumbs Up

Something else had to be done! In July 2006, the Government Communication Office issued a public call for proposals, in the form of an anonymous competition open to anyone.  In the message accompanying the call, the Government Communication Office wrote that Slovenia needs a new logo and slogan which will increase its recognizability.  They stated that Slovenia needs a clear and short message, which will evoke the right association with Slovenia.

In the fall of 2006, the jury met, consisting of the Ministers of Culture, Foreign Affairs and Economy, State Secretary at the Office of the Prime Minister, State Secretary at the Government Office for European Affairs, the Director of the Government’s Communication Office, two designers, an ethnologist, and a famous Slovenian wine-producer.  The chosen slogan was I Feel Slovenia, with the segment “love” in S-LOVE-nia written in bold, as in I Feel Love. The creators of the slogan explained: “We borrowed the slogan I Feel Love from pop music, because it is widely recognizable and popularized across the globe. It is known all over the world… Thanks to Donna Summer, the slogan is so simple that it needs no explanation, and speaks for itself. That was the intention” (reported in Hočevar 2006).

Despite some further protests by the public and the professional design community, I Feel Slovenia was accepted as an official slogan by the National Assembly at a special session. In a statement issued to the public, the Representative of the Government’s Communications Office revealed as much about his perception of country’s character as he explained about the choice of the new promotional slogan:

“I feel Slovenia slogan… with emphasized word “love,” sends a double message: Slovenia is a country… which attracts amiably or with love. At the same time the words capture the positive, loving impression or relation, which the visitor retains after the visit of Slovenia. This means that [the visitor] does not forget the country and its people and holds a positive, personal relation to it. Among all the country names, Slovenia is the only one with the English word “love” in its name, which is definitely a particularity, which creates a unique word play… The word “love” is principally something positive, attractive, easy, possibly witty… It represents encouragement to the inhabitants of Slovenia…. It promotes a higher level of commitment, and, above all, confidence…” (Communication Office 2007).

Thanks, Disco Queen!

The LA Times has an interesting article about a man who dresses up as a bear and relieves you of personal items that bring painful memories:

A biting wind whipped down a dark street, where a man crouched in the shadow of a building. He pulled on black gloves and glanced up and down the avenue. Satisfied that no one was watching, he pulled a mask the size of a beach ball out of a bag, pulled it onto his head and wriggled it into place: snout in front, eye holes over his own, rounded ears pointed skyward.

Death Bear was ready for his mission.

A man in the second-floor unit of a nearby apartment building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn was desperate to get rid of something that was too torturous to keep but impossible to discard.

The anguished individual had turned to Death Bear, a macabre performance artist who silently walks the city streets in a one-man quest to relieve people of painful remnants of the past: love letters, photos, gifts, dog tags, underwear — a lot of underwear, it seems — anything that might reduce an otherwise well-functioning person to a sniffling wreck.

I’ve got a pile of rejection letters that’s too painful to see…

I watched the “Food Revolution” television show. The concept is simple – a Brittish chef goes to the most obese popoulation in West Virginia, the most obese state, and tries to get people to change their eating habits. There’s a great scene in FR where the chef shows a West Virginia family a table with all the food they ate last week. It’s a pile of nasty, fried food. The freezer -no joke - was filled with a stack of frozen pizzas. The mother was, justifiably, shocked. Later, the chef goes to a local elementary school and pulls up a truck – full of the fat that is served in the cafeteria in a typical week.

Here’s my comment. If you want to be  great sociologist  and you want to help the greater good, do a food ethnography. Serisouly. Find a bunch of families from two strata that have wildly different weight distributions and then follow them around and record every morsel of food they eat. Every bit. Do what they do in food revolution and show how income, class, and culture all come together in producing obesity inducing diets.

There are academic studies of food consumption, but they are often based on surveys. I’m a big survey fan, but in this case, the survey isn’t likely to capture the subtlety of food, even if people honestly try to report their intake. A deep fried chicken isn’t the same as roasted chicken. Peanut oil is different than corn oil. Frozen peas are different than fresh peas. Steamed is different than raw. The only way that we can truly know what diets are like for the morbidly obese is to conduct an intense audit of diet, along with ethnographic notes abour frequency, preparation, and related issues.

My hypothesis is that obesity inducing diets are questions of political economy and culture, but not micro-economics. Political economy in the sense that the foods produced are designed for the convenience of producers, to satisfy regulation, and to increase customer pleasure with sweets. Culture in the sense that certain foods become deeply ingrained, an often unquestioned, habits. People get used to certain good or bad diets. In other words, the menu of items that people eat is mass produced processed carbs with lots of fructose. These foods then become ingrained habits that are hard to shake and even have an addictive quality to them.

It’s not micro-economic in the sense that diets become un/healthier due to prices. For example, some economists have argued that lower prices and faster prep time encourages more caloric intake. Or that people become fatter if they happen to live nearby a fast food joint. It might be true ini theory, but notice that people rarely increase intake of healthy foods. People live pretty darn close to farms, but you don’t see them lining up for fresh veggies.

So if you need a block buster topic, think about this one. If you do a good job with it, you’ll help lots of people.

Jenn Lena points us to this incredible archive on Erving Goffman, the social psychologist probably best remembered for his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  He laid the foundation for a theory of impression management in that book, claiming that every individual is an actor on a stageperforming for an audience.  The front stage is where the performance takes place, using various impression management tools to articulate particular images to the audience, and the backstage, he argues, is where the protected self resides. Goffman believed that individuals build a strong barrier between the front and backstage, partly because the individual is vulnerable in the backstage but also in order to preserve the authenticity of the front stage performance.

The remembrances of Goffman in the interview portion of the archive are precious. They reveal some consistencies about Goffman’s front stage performance – people saw him as a prickly individual unperturbed by many social conventions. Almost uniformly people believed that Goffman could be an a-hole. The interviews also reveal something about Goffman’s backstage though. For example, Kurt Lang’s interview reveals that Goffman was very concerned about hierarchy and informal status. For this reason his election as ASA president meant a lot to Goffman. We learn from Charles Glock that Goffman was always gathering data on social interaction, which may have contributed to the perception that Goffman was an unrepentant jerk.

I sensed that in his interaction with other people he was frequently, if not always, engaged in research, using the interaction to gather data on some new insights he was perusing. His doing this, I suspect, sometimes produced the kind of negative reactions to him which you detail in your piece. In this connection, I remember at a party at which I believe I first met him, he came up to me to introduce himself and as we talked, he moved ever closer to me until I withdrew. Strange behavior, I thought at the time, only to recognize later that it was one of his research tricks.

Rodney Stark reacted differently to this annoying tendency.

I noticed that [Charlie] Glock mentioned that Goffman would slide [?] into you and keep people kind of backing off as he kept entering their space. . . .  But, some of us just don’t back up.  Once he did this to me and [was so close] that I said, “Shall we dance?”

Stark also believes that Goffman was continually making up for his rather short appearance.

I think that was in many ways [an attempt to] compensate for the fact that he was looking up to everyone in the room.  You know Gertrude Selznick?  She was Philip Selznick’s wife.  She died a few years ago.  In those days she would come to the Survey Center, her husband was of course a very prominent full professor at the sociology department.  And I remember one day at a party she got smashed and yelled across the room, “Erving, you son of a bitch, you are right off the page of [Thomas] Hobbes – nasty, brutish, and short”. . . .

But other sociologists, once they got past his aggressive impression management skills grew to appreciate Goffman. Neil Smelser has particularly nice things to say about Goffman’s loyalty as a friend (although his first impression of Goffman was exactly what you’d expect).  William Gamson discusses some of the contradictions in Goffman’s personality (e.g., his identification with the “beautiful losers” and his habit of picking on the most vulnerable).

All in all, the archive provides a very interesting window into an unconventional scholar’s life.

Question for the demographers: Where in the US is there a high female/male ratio? Where do women signficantly outnumber men? Lots of places have many men – take any company town where men dominate the profession (military bases, hi tech). But I can only think of one really big example: low income African American neighborhoods. The incarceration of Black men drastically increases the gender ratio. I can think of smaller examples, like women’s colleges or female religious institutions. Anything else?

It’s hard to let David Brooks’s piece in the New York Times this morning go without a comment.

First there’s the title: History’s Return.  A reference to Fukyuama’s pronouncement that we had reached:

…not to an “end of ideology” or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.

Brooks extrapolates from this: economics won the game; not just as a discipline, but as the intellectual underpinning of economic and political liberalism from here on out.  Oh really?  Not so fast, he says:

…the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009… is a climax of sorts because it exposed the shortcomings of the whole field.  Economists and financiers spent decades building ever more sophisticated models to anticipate market behavior, yet these models did not predict the financial crisis as it approached. In fact, cutting-edge financial models contributed to it by getting behavior so wrong — helping to wipe out $50 trillion in global wealth and causing untold human suffering… More than a year after the event, there is no consensus on what caused the crisis. Economists are fundamentally re-evaluating their field.

Which leads to this hopeful prediction:

One gets the sense, at least from the outside, that the intellectual energy is no longer with the economists who construct abstract and elaborate models. Instead, the field seems to be moving in a humanist direction. Many economists are now trying to absorb lessons learned by psychologists, neuroscientists and sociologists. They’re producing books with titles like “Animal Spirits,” “The Irrational Economist,” and “Identity Economics,” about subjects such as how social identities shape economic choices.

Words to stir the soul of any self respecting economic sociologist / organizational theorist.  Yet, somehow, I’m not stirred.  I don’t believe the day of the economists’ intellectual hegemony has ended.

First, its not like we haven’t been saying this all along.  Brooks makes it seem like sociologists, psychologists and the like have been waiting for our moment.  Sociology and the humanists originated the field and we never really went away (its worth remembering that Max Weber called himself an economist; Act I in Brooks’s formulation was preceded by a whole lot of people we would today call humanists, political scientists and sociologists who were unpacking the nature of economic activity and action). So one has to ask: if we’ve been right all along (and I think we have been) then why should we think that this crisis will be the one to change the game back in our favor?

Otherwise put: why did they win the day for the last half of the 20th Century?  One idea: it is because economists give definitive answers.  They are comfortable with saying “this is the right answer” or “this is a set of principles on which to make in informed choice”, even if they are eventually proved wrong.  That isn’t going to change.

And it isn’t just bravado.  People who need to make decisions want a rationale for those decisions to be conveyed with clarity. For as much as I think sociology and our sister — humanist oriented — disciplines come closer to understanding reality, we nevertheless will continue to lose arguments because of the wishy washy way we make our arguments.  There is little interest or tolerance among economic sociologists for articulating a coherent, prescriptive, philosophy of economic action.

Until we do, I’m afraid we are always going to be playing second fiddle.

My colleague Brendan Nyhan has a NY Times Op-ed on the subject of people’s beliefs about health care. The message is simple. Even as health care is enacted, people will still cling to wrong beliefs about the policy. A few choice clips:

Studies have shown that people tend to seek out information that is consistent with their views; think of liberal fans of MSNBC and conservative devotees of Fox News. Liberals and conservatives also tend to process the information that they receive with a bias toward their pre-existing opinions, accepting claims that are consistent with their point of view and rejecting those that are not. As a result, information that contradicts their prior attitudes or beliefs is often disregarded, especially if those beliefs are strongly held.

Unfortunately, these tendencies frequently undermine well-intentioned efforts to counter myths and misperceptions. Jason Reifler, a political scientist at Georgia State, and I conducted a series of experiments in which participants read mock news articles with misleading statements by a politician. Some were randomly assigned a version of the article that also contained information correcting the misleading statement.

Our results indicate that this sort of journalistic fact-checking often fails to reduce misperceptions among ideological or partisan voters. In some cases, we found that corrections can even make misperceptions worse. For example, in one experiment we found that the proportion of conservatives who believed that President George W. Bush’s tax cuts actually increased federal revenue grew from 36 percent to 67 percent when they were provided with evidence against this claim. People seem to argue so vehemently against the corrective information that they end up strengthening the misperception in their own minds.

Recommended!

This week Congress passed a health care bill that promises to extend coverage to millions of uninsured citizens. Everyone who’s followed the bill’s passage knows how difficult and heated the process has been. Most Democrats supported the bill, but no Republicans voted in favor of it. Now that the measure has passed and President Obama has signed it, the bill has to go back to Congress for another vote due to some parliamentary complications. While the bill will likely pass again, the contentiousness over the bill hasn’t ended. Republican state attorney generals are fighting the bill in court, and some Democrat members of Congress are requesting extra security because of threats made against them.

Throughout all of this, the Tea Party movement, a consortium of grass-roots neoconservative groups, has continued to rally against this measure and others that they perceive will increase taxes and give more oversight to federal government. The Tea Party movement has expanded nationwide rapidly over the last couple of years, groups popping up all over the country. The emergence of the movement in some ways is the mirror image of the Moveon.org phenomenon of the Bush years, and in this case represents a backlash against the election of President Obama, the incompetence and disunity of national Republican leaders, and the failure of the Republican Party to influence policy over the last half decade. Tea Party members are angry, passionate, and eager to fight. Some might even say that The Tea Party movement has become the face, or at least the conscience, of the Republican Party.

So the Tea Party, like many national grass-roots movements of this type, has made a lot of noise and captured much media attention. But has the movement had any real impact on policy? Did they shape the outcome of the health care bill? Have they changed, or will they change, the outcome of any elections? One could make the argument that had the Tea Party movement not formed, Republican leaders would have been less bold in resisting the Democrat’s health care reform. One might also make the case that the Tea Party movement revitalized the rhetoric of the Republican Party and shaped the party’s agenda for the upcoming elections, providing much needed fuel for a party that seemed like it had run out of ideas during the McCain campaign. But you could also argue that the Tea Partiers have increased competition within the Republican Party, creating schisms within the party that might actually help unpopular Democrats to hold their seats. Perhaps by moving the debate within the Republican Party further to the right, the Tea Partiers have made the Republican Party even more marginal and less relevant to the majority of Americans.  The increased competition and ideological radicalization might actually make the net impact of the Tea Party movement negative.

I’m interested to hear what others think. Has the Tea Party movement had any impact? If so, what kind?

Having presented in an economics workshop and seeing economists in action, I think the norm is that you can interrupt whenever you want and can ask any question. Fierce argument is encouraged. For a while, I thought it was a cool idea. Who doesn’t want criticism? Aren’t we supposed to mercilessly question our assumptions and let the truth stand out?

After a while, I’ve decided that I don’t like “econ rules.” I have seen too many talks where people never get to their main conclusion. People waste time with questions that are satisfactorily answered in later slides. With experienced authors, interruptions are merely time wasters. They know the limits of the study already, have done reasonable jobs in addressing the issues, and will tell you about them in a minute … if you would just shut your mouth. The norm creates bad incentives for younger scholars as well. Instead of working at smooth delivery and clear presentation, talks can be bloated affairs designed to combat questions.

Don’t misinterpret this. I am not claiming that people should pull their punches in seminars. The quality of our work depends on strong criticism. But can’t criticisms be held until the person actually gets to their conclusion? Isn’t the point to hear a research presentation, not the posturing of audience members? If my time is worth money, don’t these endless questions cost me $40/hour (or more)?

Thought experiment: What would economic theory look like if you weren’t allowed to use the concept of equilibrium? A few thoughts:

• Programs and routines: Following March and Simon ’58, you could imagine people as rule followers. This version of economics would then be about habits instead of choices. Satsficing instead of optimization.
• Genetically determined routines:  People are randomly assigned behavioral rules, agents are born with routines. Unsuccessful agents are weeded out, or modify behaviors according to some rule. You might then have equilibria describing populations of actors, thought not their individual behavior. You actually find this in population biology and some kinds of game theory.
• Autocatalytic behavior: John Padgett has pushing this recently. Assume that agent behavior is triggered by other behavior, just like chemicals (  2H+ O -> H2O). No rationality, just responses to other agents. Then you can actually get self-sustaining reactions that mimick trade patterns.

What other non-equilibrium models might be used to describe economic behavior?

The essence of Obama is that he’s a master of rules, possesses extreme patience, and is all about big picture thinking. If you look at his greatest moments, they stem from these traits. Obama’s first electoral victory, for Illinois State Senate, came from eliminating Alice Palmer by showing she didn’t have enough valid signatures. Later, he bumped Hillary through an extremely complex strategy that focused on peeling off enough delegates so that he didn’t need need the constituencies that would be tied to the Clintons, such as older women and white Southern Democrats. This weekend, health care legislation passed through an even more complicated strategy that involved neutralizing insurance companies, limiting Democratic defectors, and understanding the more arcane Congressional rules. The result? The fist health care legislation to make it out of committee in decades, and the first major social reform since the 1960s.

These traits have proven time and time again to be  of extreme importance. They will make Obama one of the most consequential presidents. They will allow him to continue to expand the American welfare state and pick up on the work of the Johnson, and to some extent, the Nixon administrations.

However, I do have a suspicion that the same traits won’t be as effective in foreign policy issues. Obama recognizes that some people can’t be moved and then he devises a way around them using his institutional  mastery. This is way harder to do foreign policy. Example: closing the Guantanamo prison. In principle, this should be easy. As commander in chief, he could, through executive order, demand a review of the prison and then administration officials would then come up with a plan to move prisoners to other locations. And this is exactly the administration’s approach.

The problem? Once you move someone to American soil, they have legal rights, which triggers trials and political problem. One plan to build a maximum security prison in Illinois to house prisoners got shot down, which might be the first state to ever reject a prison in modern times. You can’t drop them back where they belong – their native government isn’t hot to accept someone who is either a genuine threat, or who might have been radicalized because they were in prison. At best, a few prisoners have been sent to various nations, such as Palau and Bermuda, often in secrecy or cover of darkness.

The point that I am trying to make is that foreign policy is not an arena with well defined rules that can be mastered and deployed against enemies.  The international system is the opposite, it’s been called a global anarchy. States do what they can get away with and global institutions are of limited help. If you have a hunch that there’s enough frustration with the current party leader, you can devise a primary strategy to pull these folks together and limit the opposition. In contrast, there are no rules in foreign affairs, just balances of power. Guantanamo remains open because Obama can’t, or won’t, make a person’s right to a trial disappear, nor has he been able to get many states to accept these prisoners. You can’t “work around” the problem. You have to either force the issue or persuade people. A number of commentators have come to a similar conclusion in Middle east policy. His policy appears disjointed and reactive, probably because their isn’t a concrete goal that can be achieved nor a clear institutional framework to be manipulated.

This isn’t to claim that Obama will be a foreign policy disaster. Quite the contrary. He doesn’t appear eager to start wars, intentionally anger allies, or abandon global institutions just to show his toughness. By itself, not making things worse is a phenomenal improvement over his predecessor. There’s a lot to be said for that. Instead, what I am claiming is that the brilliant legislative moments of this weekend emerge from a specific way of doing politics that doesn’t translate well into international relations.

In his famous book, The Wealth of Nations published in 1779, Smith railed against the protectionist mercantilist system prevalent in Europe at that time and argued that the principles of free trade, competition, and choice, are the conduits of economic development. Smith argued for the power of free-markets where individuals pursue their self-interest which ultimately makes everyone better off. As Smith wrote, the individual is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention… By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it” (Smith [1779] 1900: 345).

Following Smith, economist David Ricardo furthered the critique of mercantilism in his theory of “comparative advantage,” ([1817] 1996) arguing that economic development (although the term was not coined yet during Ricardo’s time) results from a country specializing in what it produces most efficiently and then trading these goods with other countries that specialize in other goods.

After the World War II, “development” became an explicit project of the international community, because the nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America lagged substantially behind (McMichael 2000). In these regions, politically embedded agrarian structures prevailed and the challenge was to achieve an industrial transformation. Many economists argued that this can be achieved by opening these states to foreign capital which would increase the overall stock of capital in a country and create positive development spillover effects for the domestic economy (Kindleberger 1970; Stopford and Wells 1972; Knickerbocker 1973; Hymer 1976), although this premise of positive effects of foreign investment was questioned by the dependency school (Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Gereffi 1978, 1983; Evans 1979). Rather, as Evans argued, economic development resulted from connecting state and civil society in the form of “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995), which allowed for strategic economic management. On the other hand, the socialist states of Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam engaged in a centralized large-scale industrialization with a goal to catch up and surpass the advanced West (Kornai 1992).

Hence, most research on development has focused on the industrial manufacturing capacities of underdeveloped countries, and how the unleashing of these capacities, either through centralized command economy, foreign capital or embedded autonomy, can assure economic growth. Much less has been written on the role of cultural attributes of nations as vehicles to economic development promoted by the strategic impression management of a country. This is one of the points we want to develop in our Cultural Wealth of Nations project.

We want to argue that cultural (tangible and intangible) attributes of countries have to be managed to generate the kinds of favorable impression that might attract tourists as well as financial investments into the country and that might privilege goods and services being sourced therein.  To understand how state and non-state actors manage the favorable evaluation of the country’s attributes, we turn to the concept of impression management.  Erving Goffman initially articulated the concept as a strategy undertaken by individuals in interaction.  We extend Goffman’s framework to include organizations– teams of actors and directors.  The management of external impressions enables the conversion of symbolic capital into economic capital, with the country’s cultural heritage and its intangible characteristics being translated into significant contributions to GDP.

In Goffman’s framework, the actor “takes a line.” Each knows his or her role in the play and no one betrays the rest of the cast by deliberately enacting a foreign script.  The cast and its director discipline the actors (dramaturgical discipline) to make sure that they stick to the script.  And the team is circumspect (circumspection) in preparing for their performance so that they minimize the elements that might derail a believable performance.  So long as the audience thinks that the actors are acting in good faith, the audience forgives minor slip-ups by pretending that such slips did not occur or by following improvised lines meant to bring the play back on line (exercising tact).  The actors respond to the tact of the audience by themselves exercising tact (tact regarding tact).   It is this process of acting in good faith and engaging with the reactions of one’s audience that helps us better understand the dynamics of cultural markets.

Overall, the impression is socially constructed, which means that it does not have to be genuinely authentic, as long as both the performers and the audience understand it as such. The challenge then is for the image-makers to tap into globally available frames that would resonate as attractive by the global audience, while at the same time making sense for the performers. Moreover, unlike individual-level impression management, country-level impression management, because it involves multiple actors, is necessarily embedded in domestic cultural politics and shaped by the political history and encounters that the country’s official and unofficial representatives have had with other countries’ representatives higher in international status.

So, are you looking for a good, digestible, practitioner (yet science-based) book on organizational change?  Look no further, I recommend Heath & Heath’s recently released book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.

The book does an excellent job packaging — as does the previous Heath & Heath book, Made to Stick — scientific findings from various disciplines and bringing change-related ideas to life, in digestible form.  For example, there’s an interesting discussion of this study of hotel maids, exercise and the placebo effect.  And, there’s a very engaging discussion about the practical implications of “ego depletion” — I did not know about this research —, about how self-control is an exhaustible resource. Etc. Etc.  Stories abound in the book, interwoven with interesting scientific nuggets.

The screen shot on the right gives you an idea of the central points of the book.  But, get a copy: it’s worth reading.  I don’t read or recommend very many practitioner-type books — but Switch is definintely one of the better practitioner books that I have read on change.  I’ll probably use the book in my MBA Organization Theory class next year (to give the poor students a mid-semester reprieve from Meyer & Rowan, Hayek and other abstractions that we read).

The most recent issue of the Journal of Institutional Economics has an excellent exchange of ideas on organizational economics.  The issue begins with an essay by Richard Posner: “From the new institutional economics to organization economics: with applications to corporate governance, goverment agencies, and legal institutions.”

The essay indirectly and directly touches on all kind of questions:  What are comparative similarities in governance between private versus public organizations?  What role do incentives and compensation play?  What is organizational economics?  Are executives overpaid?  Many of these issues are discussed in the context of looking at two government organizations — the intelligence community broadly, and the FBI.  Interesting stuff.

Even cooler than the essay itself: more than a dozen scholars were asked to write essays in response to the above, and they also raise a host of new issues: Who are actors and entities, what are markets?   What is the role of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation?  Do theories readily apply across various contexts — e.g., across different types of organizations?  Where is mainstream economics versus more heterodox approaches?  Etc.  The responders include Elinor Ostrom, Bruno Frey, John Roberts, etc.  And, Posner then in turn responds to these comments.

Highly recommended.

Observe how Democratic participation sharply drops after the Obama inauguration.

My collaborator, Michael Heaney, and I have a new working paper called “The Partisan Dynamics of Contention: Demobilization of the Antiwar Movement in the United States, 2007-2009.” The key argument is that the decline of the antiwar movement can be attributed, in part, to the fact that Democrats have stopped using the peace movement as a platform for anti-Bush sentiment. In other words, at its peak, the ranks of the antiwar movement were swelled by partisans. Once Obama won the presidency, and other issues emerged, the movement shrank when Democrats stopped showing up. The remaining protesters were more likely to be non-partisan or third party, and these non-Democrats were more likely to disapprove of Obama’s management of Iraq and Afghanistan.  When Democrats gained power, the movement converged on a core of peace activists who were not strongly identified with the Democratic party.

There are 9.3 quintillion possible ways to fill out the NCAA March Madness brackets (for non-US readers, here’s a primer on the madness) — that’s a lot of possibilities.  In other words, not all possible brackets will get filled out by the millions of people engaged in this activity.

So, what’s the best way to make your picks?  Random guessing won’t get you too far.  If you just use the ex ante seeds for filling out your bracket, you’ll do ok. On that, here’s an interesting 2001 Management Science piece highlighting various bracket strategies: “March Madness and the Office Pool.” Here’s a shorter primer essentially on the same piece.

The New York Times has a piece on crowdsourcing the NCAA tournament.

And, Science Daily works through some of the same intuition.

And finally, some Georgia Tech engineering profs say they have it figured out — here’s their LRMC model.  Here are their picks.

I need one or two people to help me field a survey in Los Angeles (Hollywood & Vine) this Saturday at a protest. $20/an hour for one or two hours. Please email me a frojas indiana edu. Thanks.

PS. If you want a sense of what surveying protesters is like, click here for a write up of a previous survey.

During my visit to Michigan last week, someone pointedly objected to the idea that social movements can have a profound impact on the trajectory of markets. The person argued that markets would respond to consumer demand. If there was demand for the kinds of changes social movements proposed, then companies would change their employment policies, offer more environmentally responsible products, etc. Changes in corporate behavior, the person claimed, were simply reflective of changes in consumer demand. Implicit in the argument was an assumption that efforts to change markets through contentious means would simply introduce inefficiencies.

The argument was very straightforward and elegant, but of course I had to disagree. My counterargument was that social movements influence markets in at least two ways: 1) by creating innovative ideas that some suppliers are willing to experiment with and 2) by shaping consumer demand.  On the supply side, movements bring radical ideas into markets. Although they’re typically not moved primarily by the profit motive, activists imagine the world as it could be, not as it is, and this vision of tomorrow tends to be associated with a variety of innovative ideas that may be picked up by entrepreneurial organizations. Radically new products or policy ideas don’t easily take hold. Transforming them from ideas to actual practices often requires mobilization among people who are ideologically committed to the idea, and are thus willing to take on the greater risk. The process of transforming these innovative ideas into practice may involve cultural framing and may invoke deep-seeded identities or commitments in the producers.

On the demand side, social movements mobilize members of their communities to support their causes, creating sentiments favorable to the adoption of the new innovations. Generating consumer demand often involves figuring out how to frame the new product so that it will be desirable by consumers who are only passively supportive of the actual cause. For example, the creation of mass demand for hybrid cars was partly spurred by environmentalists’ efforts to portray green friendliness as not only socially desirable but also as status-enhancing and cost-cutting. Movements, however, are most effective at creating demand when they target their fellow true believers. By activating ideological beliefs, movements are able to build long-lasting commitment to innovative practices or products. Demand may be endogenous to social movement mobilization.

For great examples of research on the transformative effects of movements on markets, I recommend reading a paper by my colleagues at Northwestern, Klaus Weber, Kate Heinze, and Michaela DeSoucey, “Forage for thought: Mobilizing codes in the movement for grass-fed meat and dairy products.” This paper is especially interesting for understanding how movements affect entrepreneurs’ framing of a radically new product. I also recommend a paper by Shon Hiatt, Wes Sine, and Pam Tolbert, “From Pabst to Pepsi: The deinstitutionalization of social practices and the creation of entrepreneurial opportunities.” They look at how the Temperance movement created opportunities for the soft drink industry, in part by creating demand for new beverages that could replace alcohol. Temperance leaders were smart and knew that you couldn’t convince beer drinkers to stop drinking altogether. They just needed to find a substitute product, which in this case happened to be rootbeer!

The main point is that social movements aren’t necessarily drags on market efficiency.  As Huggy Rao advocates in his book Market Rebels, social movements can, in fact, be sources of innovation and dynamism. If you’re interested in learning more, Nicholas Pearce and I have a new review paper on this very topic.

Nice video of philosopher Martha Nussbaum discussing her seminal book on morals, The Fragility of Goodness. Is it just me, or was television better in the past?

Andrew Perrin has a discussion of an article on evolutionary psychology and gender:

just finished reading Rosemary Hopcroft’s interesting article, Gender Inequality in Interaction – an Evolutionary Account (Social forces 87:4, June 2009). If I understand the article correctly, it argues essentially that frequent female deference to men is (a) well demonstrated; (b) subconscious; and (c) the result of evolutionary pressures. There’s an interesting spin, which is that because these preferences or behaviors are subconscious, feminist approaches like consciousness raising might work to change them. But otherwise the article strikes me as open to several important alternative hypotheses.

The principal alternative hypothesis results from the time problematic. Like other studies based on evolutionary psychology, the article is premised on behaviors having emerged during the Evironment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), a period of historical development in which human genetic characteristics are said to have become relatively fixed. But there are important differences in gendered behavior, including sex deference, sexual preferences, and male “control” of female mates, across the historical time period that comes after the EEA. Thus the constant the article seeks to explain really isn’t a constant at all!

Then, a debate over EP ensued. Kieran summs up the skeptics:

While it’s fun to think of oneself as bravely confronting the PC orthodoxy with Science, a relevant consideration for “what makes a plausible social-scientific hypothesis” is the past performance of theories of more or less the same form. “Didn’t this turn out to be an ugly, dead-end waste last time round?” is a reasonable question. You might think that the EP program avoids the problems of its precursors. Maybe it does. You might believe that it’s the true future of social science. Maybe it is. But given the long history of intellectually shonky and, yes, politically repellent efforts in this vein, you can hardly pretend that the burden of proof is on other people to prove you wrong.

Check it out.

Fellow blogger Brayden will be speaking at the University of Michigan in the Strategy seminar at the Ross School of Business. Friday morning at 10:30pm. Required attendance!

… I could be a test pilot for a friggin’ ject pack!!!! Awesome!!!

Chris Uggen points to an interesting paper coauthored by one of his colleagues in Minnesota’s Carlson School that shows a link between an organization’s tolerance for failure and innovation. Tracy Yue Wang and Xuan Tian find that venture capital firms that tolerate more failure are more likely to produce highly innovative IPOs. They operationalize failure tolerance as the waiting time before terminating an underperforming project. The longer a VC waits to terminate a failed project, the more tolerant it must be of failure. Here’s the paper.

At one level this seems like a standard high risk/high reward model of innovation. But I think the argument is a bit more nuanced.  Usually we think of risk tolerance as seeking projects that have high performance variance.  But even big risk takers are encouraged to cut and run when it’s clear that it isn’t working. Failure tolerance might be something else entirely. Tian and Wang argue that failure tolerance involves a sort of cultural transformation in the way one’s organization views and accepts failure.

After addressing the endogeneity issue, we go further to investigate the persistence of the failure tolerance effect on startups’ innovation. We find that the effect of VC failure tolerance on startup firms’ innovation persists long after VC firms exit their investments. More interestingly, the effect is even more persistent if an entrepreneurial firm starts to interact with VC investors in the beginning stages of development when the firm’s culture is immature. These results suggest that the failure tolerance effect reflects not just a direct and temporary VC firm influence while the VC investors are present in the startup firm, but also a more persistent cultural effect. That is, the VC investors’ attitudes towards failure have likely been internalized by the startup firm and become part of the firm’s culture.

Interesting idea.

Analytical marxism – a big deal about 20 years ago. Big names, fancy books… but you don’t hear much these days. Why not? Can anyone help me out here? The wiki just has a section called “denoument” that’s uninformative.

I’d like to thank our February guest bloggers – Tim Bartley and Mark Kenendy. Great job – very stimulating posts.

There’s a hip new magazine from the University of Chicago, “The Point.” The goal is to provide long form, substantive responses and critiques to various issues. From an article about finance in the American economy by Etay Zwick:

The myth of the financial sector goes something like this: only men and women equipped with the highest intelligence, the will to work death-defying hours and the most advanced technology can be entrusted with the sacred and mysterious task of ensuring the growth of the economy. Using complicated financial instruments, these elites (a) spread the risks involved in different ventures and (b) discipline firms to minimize costs—thus guaranteeing the best investments are extended sufficient credit. According to this myth, Wall Street is the economy’s private nutritionist, advising and assisting only the most motivated firms—and these fitter firms will provide jobs and pave the path to national prosperity. If the rest of us do not understand exactly why trading credit derivatives and commodity futures would achieve all this, this is because we are not as smart as the people working on Wall Street. Even Wall Street elites are happy to admit that they do not really know how the system works; such admissions only testify to the immensity of their noble task.

Many economists have tried to disabuse us of this myth. Twenty-five years before the recent financial crisis, Nobel Laureate James Tobin demonstrated that a very limited percent of the capital flow originating on Wall Street goes toward financing “real investments”—that is, investments in improving a firm’s production process. When large American corporations invest in new technology, they rely primarily on internal funds, not outside credit. The torrents of capital we see on Wall Street are devoted to a different purpose—speculation, gambling for capital gains. Finance’s second founding myth, that the stock market in particular is an “efficient” source for funding business ventures, simply doesn’t cohere with the history of American industrial development. When firms have needed to raise outside capital, they have generally issued debt—not stock. The stock market’s chief virtue has always been that it allows business elites to cash out of any enterprise by transferring ownership to other elites. Old owners then enjoy their new wealth, while new owners manage the same old corporation. The reality is that business elites promote the stock market far more than the stock market promotes economic growth.

And:

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A few weeks ago, Omar wrote a dismissive comment about the role of biological arguments in the sociology of gender:

But the main point is this: all of these lines of research, from studies of child rearing, housework, sex-work, gender stratification in occupations (e.g. Charles and Grusky) and organizations, etc. have little to do with biology. These lines of work will continue on their merry way regardless of what position sociologists decide to take on the biology/gender debate. They are about cultural frames, institutions, organizations, sorting, cumulative advantage mechanisms and micro-interaction not about whether certain traits are the result of “biology” or “socialization.”

Since I’m not a specialist in gender, I can’t say if biological theories are supported, but I can say that it’s not theoretically irrelevant. A few reasons:

1. Biology is a cost and constraint on action: For example, in studies of achievement in science, it is often argued that female scientists have lower achievement because they must take time out for childbearing, while men do not have the same constraint. Reproduction simply is a hard time budget constraint.
2. Biology may affect preferences: We have a lot of evidence that personality and temperment vary greatly among people, leading to different life course outcomes, consumption patterns, career choices, and political participation. Theoretically, these might be linked to biologically defined sex.
3. Biology may affect strategies and risk taking: It is often found in studies of bargaining and negotiation that women and men employ different strategies reflecting different levels of percieved risk and pay-off. Theoretically, these might be related to biologically defined sex.

I am not claiming that any of these hypotheses are true. For example, I used to believe hypothesis 1 (childbearing decreases time for scientific research), but now I think academic career gender gaps are probably better explained in terms of networks within the academy (i.e., achievement seems to depend on getting in the right invisible college). I’m open to the possibility that the null hypothesis on gender is true on all these types of issues, but it’s not something to be assumed away. It’s got to be proven.

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

What sociology programs are good for studying gender? I’ll also accept programs in related disciplines if they regularly produce scholars who are empirically minded social scientists, as opposed to political theorists or legal scholars who talk about women’s rights. Stanford is strong in this area: Paula England, Cecilia Ridgeway, and Shelley Correll. As a historically strong social psychology program, I bet other faculty would be helpful as well. Add other gender strong programs in the comments.

I do realize that sociologists are not necessarily trained in the history of the world and its regions, so before offering some scraps from my fieldnotes on how cultural wealth manifests itself in the marketplace, I will provide some background on Thailand and its history of impression management.

Thailand is among the medium-sized countries in Southeast Asia whose name means “land of the free.”  Nearly a tenth of the country’s labor force works in the travel and tourism sector, which generates up to 7 percent of the country’s GDP, exceeds all other sectors in export earnings, and represents the largest contribution to GDP compared with other countries in the region.  The 2007 report of the Economist Intelligence Unit notes that Thailand’s travel and tourism sector accounts for about “27% of the regional market and 1.5% of the world market.”  In the late 1970s, Thailand’s fourth National Economic and Social Development Plan (1977-1981) officially recognized tourism development as critical for the country’s economic development,[1] and the eighties and nineties represented a golden age for Thailand’s tourism boom, heralding the 1990s when Thailand registered the highest economic growth rates in the world.

The ascent of Thailand to the number one tourism spot did not result from “natural” conditions.  Instead, the character and nature of the country had to be cultivated.  Its cultivation depends on the accumulated, contingent encounters that the country’s official and unofficial representatives have had with other country representatives higher in international status.  These encounters have had their own manifest goals that did not always recognize or fully anticipate how their realization would affect the country’s attractiveness for outsiders.  For example, the Thai historian Thongchai argues that Thailand’s political leadership emphasized the country’s cultural as well as its political coherence as a means of protecting its territorial sovereignty.  When the French began establishing protectorates where large populations of Laos people settled, they began to eye the northeast of Thailand where there are now more people of Lao descent than there are Lao in Laos.  Thai diplomacy emphasized the cultural coherence of its northeastern territories with the rest of Thailand’s political body.  This emphasis on defining the cultural and geographic boundaries of the country, and the pressure of having western colonial powers pressing against the northeastern, northwestern, and southern borders had clear political aims, but the latent function was the defining of the national character of Thailand.  The Thai government consolidated a cultural reputation for being a kingdom whose cultural traditions had not been interrupted or destroyed by colonial incursions.

The political goals of remaining free from colonization and of obtaining the respect of world powers such as the United States have led to image outcomes the country’s leadership did not intend, namely as a place for no-holds-barred fun, sex, and sun.  As the United States military established bases in Thailand during the conflicts in Vietnam and in Indo-China, Thailand’s reputation flourished as a perfect getaway for rest, relaxation, and commercial sex.  Indeed, the US military treaty with Thailand designated it as an official site for US soldiers to enjoy “Rest and Recreation” in the 1960s and 70s (Enloe 1989; Nuttavuthisit 2009; Truong 1990).  When these soldiers returned home, they carried with them fantastic tales of the beaches of Pattaya and the brothels of Bangkok mixed with the wonders of temples, palaces, and exotic marketplaces.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the majority of tourists to Thailand are single men or that weekend flights from more repressive countries such as Singapore are full of men taking a weekend escape to Bangkok, some dressed in their designer jeans and tightly fitting tops, wheeling a carry-on sufficient for the task at hand.  The nightlife does not equal commercial sex, but the trade is such that newspaper editorials have lamented that Thailand gets too much press for sex and nightlife but not enough for its history, food, temples, culture, and natural beauty.

According to marketing specialist Krittinee Nuttavuthisit working on the Branding Thailand Project (The Branding Thailand Project was initiated in 2001 by the Government of Thailand in cooperation with the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University), the commercial sex trade has emerged as a blot on the nation’s image in recent consumer surveys.  Nuttavuthisit highlights some of these negative perceptions based on thirty in-depth interviews in the United States and on one hundred and twenty online surveys.  Some of the online questions include: “What is the first country that comes to mind when thinking about ‘silk?”; “What are the first words that come to mind when thinking of Thailand?”; “Which three words describe Thai products?”  Among the responses to these queries, commercial sex work, the poor, and poverty stood on the negative side of the ledge and the exoticism of the country as well as the friendliness of its people stood on the positive side.  Nuttavuthisit argues that people who have never been to Thailand had bad impressions of the country based on television programs and magazine articles about Thailand’s commercial sex trade and child prostitution.  With an estimated two to three hundred thousand sex workers in Thailand according to the United States Department of State Human Rights Report (2007), and with reports in The Economist stating “throw a stone in Bangkok, and the chances are you will hit a gambler or a brothel goer” as well as depictions of the sex industry in a Christina Aguilera music video and in the “Bridget Jones’ Diary: The Edge of Reason” movie (Nuttavuthisit 2009), such negative perceptions present themselves as easily recognizable and quickly associated characteristics of Thailand;  “The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1993) once referred to Bangkok as ‘The capital of Thailand, a place often associated with prostitution’” (quoted in Nuttavuthisit 2009: 5).

The Tourism Authority of Thailand and the Department of Export Promotion have focused considerable energies on changing Bangkok to be a place associated with culture, heritage, fashion, and high-quality tourism.  Thai food is a cultural resource that enables the government to promote Thailand as a distinguished “Kitchen to the World”; Thai textiles and handcrafted jewelry, “Land of Fashion”; Thai artisans concentrated in the Chiang Mai Province, “City of Handicrafts”

Scraps from an Ethnographer’s Notebook

Here are some observations from three years ago a the Bangkok International Gifts (BIG) Show:

• The physical layout of the fair leaves no doubt that there is a “charity” display of the One Tambon One Product (OTOP) goods beside the food court and there is the high-end display with the award winning designs at the polar opposite of the hall away from the food court.  At the heart of the hall is the officially sanctioned art where the placards provide the categorical identities for Thai art forms.
• Just behind the Bangkok International Housewares (BIH) exhibit is the 13^th National Ceramics Exhibition.  The national ceramics competition is the official cultural institution with non-monetary motives and it is juxtaposed with a display of the top house-wares in a museum like arrangement.  But placards on the museum exhibit are in Thai whereas those for the BIH showcase are in English.  This may create greater distance, barriers to entry for outsiders who are the English speakers.  This increases the authority of the cultural certifying institution’s display, perhaps.  [Fieldnotes 20 April 2007, Impact Center, Thailand]

Last week in Chiang Mai I spoke to some exporters who participated in that trade show three years ago. One informant talked about the difficulty of maintaining Thailand’s stature as an advanced country with unique cultural offerings, especially with the rise of China, Vietnam, and other sites with much lower costs or production. (This is complicated by the fact that a number of buyers are interested in “Asian” rather than in Thai-specific cultural motifs.) The only way that these exporters can survive is by moving up in the value chain and cultivating the symbolic value of their goods. They find themselves subject to the actions of the nation-state and other actors who promote different narratives about what Thailand and its people have to offer. Even the trade show hosted in Thailand by the Thais has run into trouble, according to some of the exporters I visited, because the government initiative to promote small village enterprises has started to contaminate the high-end exporters who compete on design and quality rather than on sympathy and price. I’m still writing up these notes about how these exporters and how the Department of Industrial Promotion use “Thainess” to increase the value of their products. These notes and others scraps are on their way.

Every once in a while, a singular event challenges me to think about familiar topics in new ways. That happened for me last month when I heard about and then read the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission.

The specific situation that brought these issues to the Supreme Court was whether Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group (website), could offer “Hillary: the Movie” (see the trailer here) through pay-per view television distribution. In its opinion (read it yourself), the court overturned several decades of legal precedent by striking down rules that limit corporate speech in the context of elections. For background, the opinion headnote (syllabus) explains:

As amended by §203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), federal election law prohibits corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for speech that is an “electioneering communication” or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate. 2 U. S. C. §441b.

Writing for the majority, however, Justice Kennedy acknowledges, “The movie, in essence, is a feature-length negative advertisement that urges viewers to vote against Senator Clinton for President.” So the court clearly saw it as electioneering. Rather than allowing the film as some clever way around existing limits (which is essentially what Citizens United was trying to do–see p. 9), the court said the limits established by §441b were themselves unconstitutional. About §441b, the opinion concludes (p.. 23), “Its purpose and effect are to silence entities whose voices the Government deems to be suspect.” Historically, media corporations have received the exemptions that allow them to run op-ed pieces, and the court notes this as a contradiction that invalidates the rule. Ultimately, the opinion concludes (p. 56), “under our law and tradition it seems stranger than fiction for our Government to make this [corporate] speech a crime.”

This ruling–and the broader topic of who gets to speak and when–has re-affirmed my belief in the relevance of research in organization theory. While it’s a wide field, there are plenty of scholars who, like me, think a lot about how interactions between social structure and cognition either challenge or reinforce categories, identities, institutions and logics. Speaking for myself, I’ve been particularly interested in public discourse found in the media and, lately, the role of corporate voice in media coverage.

Here are a few of the things this case has made me ask:

• Are there situations where organizational scholars should not view anthropomorhpic treatment of an organization as a level of analysis error?
• What does it mean for org theory that corporations are legally defined to be fictitious persons?
• If corporations are fictitious persons, what real persons are they most like?
• Since the modern corporate form tends to concentrate power in the hands of a small group of managers and directors (who, incidentally, are often not easily distinguishable as agents versus principals), does it make sense to think about how individual interests become corporate ones, and vice versa?
• As media corporations shed the facade of objectivity in favor of new more engaged styles of journalism aimed at a particular audience (such as the left or the right), what role does the popularity of these positions play in the valuation of the corporation?
• If corporations do become more active in political speech, will we see market institutions–things like the routines for mergers and acquisitions–morph into tools for silencing or activating corporate voices?

If you read or heard any of the analysis about this opinion or saw President Obama’s comment about this decision in his State of the Union message, you know this opinion has gotten a lot of people talking and thinking, not just me.

How about you? Comments welcome …

I should have seen this coming. Creationist advocates who have sought to change the way schools teach evolutionary theory now have a new target: climate change science. Movement activists urging schools to change their science curriculum are now linking their cause to anti-climate change rhetoric. Here’s a bit from the NY Times article:

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

This case is a fascinating example of movement framing. Benford and Snow call this frame bridging. Movements strengthen their cause by bringing together different coalitions of people to work together in a united cause. The framing part consists of rhetorically aligning the ideas so that they are seen as compatible or complementary.

But the case also made me think of another interesting theoretical issue. The Creationist movement has always tried to pose a real threat to the autonomy of science education by urging that a different logic of assessment and analysis should replace the standard scientific method. While I have no problem with this logic on its own, I think that most scientists find the logic of religion as incompatible with scientific training. Discussions about how the two coincide take place in philosophy classes or in the hallway after class. When you dogpile the issue by adding anti-climate change science to the agenda, I think the movement becomes a much more serious threat to scientific authority. The purpose (or at least the potential consequence) of the movement is to knock scientific authority off its pedestal that it has acquired in modern society. It’s a reverse of the trend that most of the 20th Century witnessed in which science gradually displaced religion as the primary arbiter of truth and understanding.

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1. Waitress: “We don’t have the clams.”

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Question: What theories or research methods have been exported by political science to other social sciences? Poli sci has been a big importer. They sucked up rational choice and identification from econ, and now they are importing social network analysis from sociology. Do they have a trade imbalance?