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Arizona’s anti-immigration policy has attracted many critics across the country, including activists and politicians in California and Washington D.C.  A number of these critics have called for a boycott of Arizona businesses.  Protesters lined up outside Wrigley Field today where the Chicago Cubs hosted the visiting Arizona Diamondbacks, encouraging fans to boycott the game.  Some associations have already pulled conventions from Arizona cities.

Boycotts with diffuse targets aren’t usually as successful as boycotts with specific organizational targets (which is one reason boycotters have focused their efforts on the Diamondbacks), but there are a couple of reasons that this boycott may have real teeth.  The first is that the boycotts are being mobilized through institutions, like associations and conventions. Working through institutional means avoids the problem of trying to convince consumers to change their buying habits. Research on boycotts shows that consumers don’t like to change their buying habits, and so even ideologically supportive consumers will often fail to follow through with a boycott once they get to the store. But if associations cancel conventions, the losses to the tourism revenue of Arizona will be much greater. The associations essentially make the decision for the consumer.

Another reason Arizona should worry about the boycott is that it is affecting the reputations of local businesses. The Diamondbacks, while not a huge source of revenue for the state, are a stand-out organization that represents the entire state. Baseball is obviously worried about the potential image consequences that the immigration law is creating. The player’s union, which consists of a healthy proportion of Latino players, released a statement criticizing Arizona for the policy.  A real indicator of the boycott’s success will be if MLB announces that it will take the 2011 All-Star game away from Arizona, where it is currently scheduled. Other businesses associated with Arizona are also distancing themselves from the state (who knew that AriZona Iced Tea was actually made in New York?).  The reputational consequences may also be long-term. If Arizona doesn’t do something to change the public’s perception, businesses may think twice before moving their operations to the state. Following the supply chain theory of activist influence, as activists put pressure on local businesses, those businesses will in turn get sick of all the negative attention and start griping to their legislators.

Arizona can’t afford more hits to their reputation. They’ve already suffered enough from the recent decline in housing prices, and Arizona is not exactly thought of as having a booming economy right now. As my research shows, organizational targets that have suffered recent reputational declines are much more vulnerable to boycotts. Arizona isn’t in a strong reputational position to suffer more hits to their reputation.

Boycotts are essentially impression management tools. The boycott keeps the Arizona immigration law in the news and keeps people talking about its consequences. As Guillermo pointed out in a comment in Fabio’s earlier post, right now roughly half of Americans think the law is okay, but as the law attracts more negative attention and as the debate continues, some of those lukewarm supporters will turn into critics. Roughly 25% of boycotts that get some national media attention are successful in getting concessions from their targets, and this boycott is certainly getting media attention. The boycott keeps attention focused on the law, and that’s not something Arizona businesses will be happy about.

I lived in California during the Prop 187 era. The lesson that I learned is this: you can win big points with anti-immigrant policy but lose in the long term. In Arizona, the new immigration law will certainly help the GOP win over the next few years in that state, but it seems to be political suicide to me. According to the Census, about 30% of the Arizona population is of Latino origin. And of course, immigrant families tend to be larger than natives. The wiki estimates about 460,000 illegal immigrants, out 6.5 million people. So even if they all left, you’d still have a hefty 25% or so of the population whose friends, parents, and neighbors have now been separated from you. Also, young people in the majority ethnic group won’t be attached to the policy as older voters, and, like in California, may go to the other party. Populist politicians and anti-immigration voters will see a modest decrease in public expenditures, but they will get a huge voting bloc that will hate the party for decades. Just look at California. See how Prop 187 helped the California GOP in the 16 years since its passage.

I couldn’t sleep last night and I thought some wee-hour TV (yes indeed, at 4am) would take care of things.  Boy was I wrong.  I ran into the PBS NOVA documentary Mind Over Money (it appears the documentary was just released a couple days ago, and it’s now online). Be sure to watch it — it’s very good.

The documentary features interesting discussions and debates about the efficiency (and not) of markets, emotions, value and decision-making, rationality, bubbles (housing and tulips), and so forth.   The documentary is peppered with interesting experimental findings, highlights of research and engaging interviews with scholars such as Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Jennifer Lerner, Robert Shiller, Richard Thaler, Vernon Smith, etc, etc.

I’m guessing most orgtheory readers are quite familiar with the central issues raised in the documentary, but it’s definitely still worth watching and I can see this documentary being very useful in the classroom.   Good stuff.

Let’s say each case has a paragraph of text. How can I tell Stata to search the paragraph and tell me if the string is in there? In my case, I have data on articles within a scientific specialty. The abstract is stored as a string variable for each case. I would like to see if the abstract mentions research method (e.g., did they do an experiment?)

I’ve been having a discussion with Sean over the meaning of my latest paper, which shows that Democrats stopped showing up at antiwar rallies after Obama’s inauguration. Sean wrote: “ i am trying to unpack the assumptions that go into the idea of being “anti-bush” which are separate from being against his policies. of course, it could (should) go beyond the war: economy, social issues, budget priorities, tax policies, etc. but i think its reasonable to assume that his role in the war took center stage in the widespread anti-bushness of democrats.”

Here is what I wrote in response. I suggest at the end that if partisanship is a big factor in movement politics, you should see a huge GOP drop off at Tea Party demonstrations:

… Let’s say someone is extremely partisan, then they approve/vote for the person/party and not the policies. A simple example: many important elements of the Obama HCR were done in Massachussetts first by Romney, yet Romney criticized these very policies. It’s pretty obvious that he’s showing a preference for the people associated with the policies, not the policy itself.

In contrast, the issue driven person votes only for policies and not people or parties. The “peaceniks” you describe in the first comment fit this bill. As long as there is any presence at all in Iraq, they’ll be marching in the street, no matter who is the president.

Of course, in real life, there are few people at either extreme point of the spectrum. Probably the best description is that people make judgments on the bundle of people and policies. If your party is in power, you probably guess that they are pushing policies you like, or are doing the best they can with policies you don’t like. If it’s the opposite, you asssume that these policies just represent what’s so horrible about the other party.

From this perspective, you can then imagine antiwar crowds as being a mix of people: people for whom the war is just the worst aspect of an incompetent Republican presidency and those who are just anti-war in general. So when a democrat gets in, the partisans give him the benefit of the doubt, while the policy protesters stick to protest. So when the other party is in power, protest is an opportunity for an alliance between these two crowds and the opportunity makes no sense when there is a new government. And the regressions show bundling: self-identified democrats tend to give Obama a higher evaluation in his handling of the war than non-democrats. Democrats are more likely to say specific anti-Bush things and non-democrats are more likely to mentions their radical ideological perspective.

The real test of the hypothesis is if you see a similar shift in the Tea Party when the next GOP president comes in. Right now, I’d bet that you get a high proportion of GOPers at Tea Party events. If I am right, that should drop when a GOP president comes in and all you’ll be left with is anti-tax extremists and third party populists. If I am wrong, they will still rally in large numbers and insist that the new GOP president repeal HCR.

Anyone want to take a bet?

I love any good effort at grand unification — here’s Herbert Gintis, rather ambitiously, lecturing on “Five Principles for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences.” Here’s the paper with the same title.

My favorite quote from the talk: “All of life is game theory.”

Update:  A version of this paper was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

When I worked as a staff member at various journals, I saw very few appeals that worked. But later, I have met people who have successfully appealed negative journal decision at some well known places. Maybe appeals weren’t seen by the staff, so perhaps I didn’t know about them. Is this common? Have you appealed a negative journal decision? What happened?

The current issue of The Journal of Law and Economics has an interesting paper: “Quality and the Commons: The Surf Gangs of California.” So, as is might be evident from the title, the paper looks at how local surf gangs create property rights at various surf breaks along the California coast.  The upshot of the paper — the better the surf spot, the more ownership is exerted by local surf gangs, the more “localism.” The data is clever (compiled from surfline.com, using user-generated “localism” as a variable — some problems, but interesting nonetheless), the argument has some interesting nuance — worth reading.  Here’s the abstract:

In open‐access settings, high‐quality resources are lucrative, yet fencing out potential entrants may be very costly. I examine the endogenous creation of property rights, focusing on the incentives that resource quality provides to close the commons. Analytical examples explore the incentives of locals to increase or decrease the strength of property rights conditional on how locals and nonlocals value the quality of the resource. The empirical analysis looks at a unique resource—surf breaks—and estimates the relationship between the exogenous quality of the resource (waves at the surf break) and local attempts to seize the common surf break. Using cross‐sectional data on 86 surf breaks along the southern California coast, this paper finds that a 10 percent increase in quality leads to a 7–17 percent increase in the strength of property rights.

The paper has some nice links with Acheson’s The Lobster Gangs of Maine.

Harvard’s Division of Social Science hosted a symposium of “big thinkers” in social science, asking the scholars to reflect on the hardest problems of social science. The thinkers included people like Ann Swidler, Roland Fryer, and Nassim Taleb. The website contains video links to their remarks and a poll asking people to rank just how hard and important these problems really are.

Looking through the list of problems, there are a number of problems that are unarguably hard and important (e.g., Swidler’s question: How do societies create or re-build effective, powerful, and resilient institutions (for instance, governments)?). Some of the questions are hard but maybe not as important (e.g., Fowler’s question: What causes clustering in social networks; for example, how much is it the effect of shared environment (individuals in the cluster are connected by some shared context that isn’t obvious); homophily (the tendency of similar people to like and associate with each other); or — most interesting — influence?). Other problems seem more like general speculative questions but not fundamental problems (e.g., Carey’s question: How do we understand the human capacity to create and articulate knowledge?).  And others are straightforward research questions (e.g., King’s question: What is the relationship between democratization and international conflict?).

The symposium’s Facebook page lets readers offer their own problems. Some of my colleagues at Kellogg suggested a few additions to the list. Does organizational theory have any hard problems of its own? Even if the problems are hard, are they that important? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Recently, at another blog, it was asked if there was any argument against cloning one self and raising the child. My gut intuition is that, yes, there is an ick factor, but it’s not inherently bad or evil. The ick factor I can explain. We probably have a hard wired desire for a little genetic diversity in our lives.

I don’t think it’s unethical, but it’s harder to see the intuition. Consider the following hypothetical case:

Say a woman is trying IVF and she has two eggs fertilized. One begins gestation inside the woman and the other is kept frozen. A few years later the child grows up and discovers that there is an identical twin. He has the embryo implanted, it matures, and he raises his brother.

Now, how is this any different, morally, from an older sibling raising a younger sibling? None, as far as I can tell. Thus, if we can accept raising a delayed twin, we can probably accept raising a clone, long as they are treated with the respect that any child deserves.

The counter arguments focused on how weird it would be. Yes, you’d probably need an extreme personality to do it. Even though I was a pretty decent kid, I don’t want to do this. Glad my daughter is different than me. Other arguments focused on how you’d be engaging in making a “mini-me.” Lots of parents want to mold their kids, but we don’t stop them. Also, we overestimate similarity. Clones will grow up in different social environments, and there’s a bit of evidence that this matters. Even twin studies show lots of unexplained variance.

Perhaps the strongest argument is about externalities.  Too many clones wreck the gene pool, or creates political problems. True, but we still allow people to intermarry and strive for cultural and ethnic purity. Not much of a difference, but we permit it. In the end, I’ll file this under,  maybe its ok, but its weird.

Rachel Toor, a creative writing professor, has some interesting thoughts on making academics better writers.  She gets her inspiration from George Orwell. Every academic should read the Orwell essay, “Politics and the English Language.” It has good advice and is also pretty funny. Orwell begins the essay with a rancorous reaction to some unfortunate academic prose:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

I’m going to use that last line in my next review.

Toor’s advice is more directly pointed at young academics, who she probably feels are capable of changing the nature of academic writing.  She encourages academics to get rid of needless jargon and to find more direct ways to convey their meaning.

By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.

Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in. And it’s a result of lazy thinking. Most of us know that we may not be writing as well as we could, or should.

Toor and Orwell lay out some simple rules to follow. I can’t argue with them, although I think one of the most important rules of academic writing is left out: remember your audience. Jargon isn’t always bad, especially when you can communicate something more clearly using jargon than you could trying to spell it out in everyday language. As I’ve said before, “Good jargon communicates a clear idea to the right audience. Bad jargon is language that signals ideas that are not very clear or concepts that may imply different things to different people in the same audience.” Sometimes people use jargon in the way that Rachel suggests, to appear smart when their ideas aren’t very sound. Avoid that. But if there’s a word that makes perfect sense to your audience in the context you’re using it, then by all means use jargon.

I’m running for a position on the Publications Committee in this year’s ASA Elections, and voting has just opened. So, naturally, I am hereby soliciting your vote. This may seem like an impersonal broadcast post, but if you look closer you’ll see it’s really directed at you alone. Just think of those good times we spent together. (You know, before that unfortunate incident, which absolutely was not my fault.)

Sadly, election to the Publications Committee does not empower me to hand out free ASR articles to people. Nevertheless, if it will secure your support I will probably go ahead and promise to do that anyway.

If you want to learn mathematical sociology, you don’t have many good options. There are very few math soc courses. Or you can do a math intensive area and then pick up various journals. Or you can pick up books, many of which are out of date. I remember being in grad school and reading Coleman ’64. Good for its time, but terribly outdated. But I’ve found a solution. James Montgomery, a Wisconsin soc prof/econ PhD, has a very nice website with his math soc course notes. The lectures will be a text book. I say it hits the right note. It has classical math soc, like influence models and Markov chains, but newer stuff like cultural evolution models and segregation dynamics.

My only criticism is that it exclusively focuses on computational models and solving particulat models and less on theorem proving. As I’ve suggested before, math soc has enough computational models, but we need to build a core set of “classic math soc theorems” that define the field, in the same way the microeconomics is built around a set of equilibrium theorems. Aside from that, I recommend that people interested in math soc read this website. I hope to buy the book one day.

orgtheory.net “burst” onto the scene four years ago today.  Here’s a few highlights and observations:

• We’ve had some brilliant (34 to be exact) guest bloggers.
• To date, there have been a total of 2,436 posts with 12,141 comments.
• We’ve had some vigorous debates about the legitimacy of blogging, what is bloggable, etc.
• orgtheory.net posts (Brayden just pointed this out to me) have now been cited in forthcoming scholarship, see this RSO [pdf] piece by Ezra.
• Fabio’s grad school rules have gotten lots of attention.
• The economics versus sociology debate remains a hot one.
• Performativity is a frequent topic (very frequent).
• We don’t shy away from long, article-length blog posts.
• Neither do we shy away from obscure sociological theory.
• orgtheory.net is both loved and hated.
• We’ve made presidential predictions/nominations.
• And, rubbed shoulders with the political elite.
• We like good books.
• Our evil, younger twin continues to pick on us.
• Scatterplot also teases.
• Sadly, this post by Fabio, about ferrets, remains extremely popular.
• There is one photo of the orgtheory crew (pre-Sean), well, and there’s this photo, fanny pack and all.

Beyond the above, there have been many gaffs, excellent posts, moments of brilliance as well as mediocrity, quite excellent (and not so) exchanges of ideas, fun debates, etc.   Hopefully the blog will continue to provide a welcome distraction to readers, as it does for us.  Thanks for engaging!

The San Francisco Gate has photos of the 1906 earthquake.

Daniel Beunza addresses the difference between economic sociology and behavioral finance in a new blog post.  Daniel provides an answer to the question of what makes them different, drawing of course on his own work in the social studies of finance. Both fields are interested in how market outcomes deviate from those you’d expect given the lens of the efficient market hypothesis, but Daniel asserts that behavioral finance looks to individual biases as a source of inefficiency while economic sociology focuses on the social conditions (e.g., technology) that cause deviations in pricing.

Although their perspectives are quite different, Daniel’s post reminded me of something Ezra Zuckerman wrote in his 2004 ASR paper on the structural incoherence of markets. In that paper’s conclusion, Ezra compares sociological accounts of markets to behavioral finance and draws a very similar conclusion. Here’s Ezra’s take:

My approach is thus not framed at the level of the individual decision-maker. Rather, I challenge the assumption made by the EMH that the social structural environment typical of financial markets always has the necessary features to support the highly sophisticated social learning necessary for incorrect models of valuation to be driven from the market. The question is, to what extent can a financial market be likened to a laboratory in which hypotheses about the meaning of economic news can be tested with experimental results that are immediate and clear to all concerned? (427-28)

The biggest difference between the two subfields is that economic sociology is much more interested in the “architecture of markets” while behavioral finance is still more or less interested in the limits of individual decision-making. As a test of this hypothesis, check out Lounsbury’s and Hirsch’s forthcoming volume about the sociology of the financial crisis. You won’t find many papers that talk about the irrational investor. Most of the papers are about institutional design. Ezra’s contribution to the volume follows his previous line of thought. Here’s an excerpt:

I argue that a sociological approach to regulating securities markets requires a clear stance on the relationship between price and value, one that combines (a) the contrarian thesis that there are objective criteria by which one can assess value more accurately than the current market price; (b) the constructionist thesis that prices are governed by commonly known beliefs that can vary substantially from the objective reality they purport to reflect; and (c) the realist thesis that the market comprises powerful mechanisms (arbitrage and learning) that, when working properly, close the gap between the contrarian’s private belief and common knowledge, thus producing reasonable prices. This intergrated “rationalist” perspective understands the real estate bubble as the product of institutional conditions that fostered pluralistic ignorance regarding the extent of bearish sentiment.

CK Prahalad — well-published strategy scholar, management guru, champion of the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (here’s a 2004 Guardian piece) — passed away yesterday.  Here’s the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal.

I’ve been playing around with Anne-Wil Harzig’s Publish or Perish software, an interesting tool.  The software pulls citation information from Google Scholar and provides a handy interface (here’s a screenshot) to analyze and generate various citation-related statistics: a listing of all papers, total citations, cites/year, Hirsch’s h-index, Egghe’s g-index, etc, etc (here’s a primer on the various citation metrics).  One can also do citation analysis by journal, disciplinary area etc.  You can download the software for free (Windows and Linux versions).

All of these citation analysis tools (like Social Science Citation Index) of course have their unique problems (e.g., accuracy, journal coverage — here are some caveats to using citation analysis), but as crude tools they can be handy.

A few days ago, we got into a good discussion about the organizational culture of hospitals. The professional identity of many doctors is tied up with a need to assert authority and treat subordinates as inferiors rather than team members. This, it turns out, has severe consequences for patient safety. A surgeon or a physician can routinely ignore vital information about patients that may improve their care or even save their lives.

The orgheads noted that the stubborness of medical professionals is tied to professional identity and authority. Then, Katherine raised an important point – toxic culture is not limited to hospitals. All kinds of organizations eschew team work in favor of the exalted professional. Universities are full of professors who answer to no one, police departments have officers who are treated as ultimate authorities on certain cases, etc.To tease out this insight, let me state it more directly:

 Exalted Professional Syndrome: An organization suffers from EPS when it is based on a culture that values professional autonomy over everything else. EPS is characterized by the following traits:

• The organization is a college of experts who answer to no one.
• The experts value their own autonomy over task completion, cost-benefit analysis, and performance.
• The experts operate in a strictly hierarchical fashion, ignoring the input of subordinates, rather than work as a team. The experts don’t trust information by qualified outsiders.
• Managers have difficulties monitoring or controlling expert work.
• Customers and clients are treated as problems to be solved rather participants in a process. In other words, work is problem oriented rather than people oriented.

This isn’t to say that EPS totally disables organizations. If you have talented experts, they will ensure that much gets accomplished. But routine improvements in performance are delayed or obstructed because it may result in a distribution of authority. For example, doctors don’t want nurses to tell them to wash their hands because nurses aren’t supposed to tell doctors what to do – even if washing hands can save live and millions of dollars! So, what do you think?

There might well be something wrong with me, but I just watched Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and liked it.  Apparently some list it as one of the top fifty worst movies of all time, but the movie had me from the get-go. The movie certainly does not follow the usual arc — the traditional Proppian or Campbellian meta-narrative — but it’s quite intriguing.

I liked the puzzles that Marienbad contains.  The movie raised questions rather than gave answers.  The movie wrestles with some interesting themes: determinacy, chance and possibility, the nature of reality, perception and time, and so forth.  Classic themes, right?

In terms of interpretation, I certainly don’t have anything profound or new to add to whatever one might find online about this movie.  However, I would definitely recommend the movie: it’s slow yet gripping, both hopelessly and brilliantly abstract, beautiful in it’s own austere way, and refreshingly different.  Maybe one has to be in just the right mood to enjoy the movie — possibly so.

You need to check out this new article in AJS, “Social influence and the autism epidemic” by Ka-Yuet Liu, Marissa King, and Peter Bearman.  The paper fits in the growing literature on social networks, interpersonal influence, and health outcomes (see Teppo’s take on the topic), but the conclusions are somewhat different than its predecessor studies. Obviously, it would be ridiculous to say that somebody can catch autism from a neighbor, but it’s not unreasonable to think that other social mechanisms might lead to a diffusion of the autism epidemic. The authors point to several possible mechanisms:  shared exposure to autism-causing toxicants or viruses (i.e., environmental effect), parents’ residential choices might cause them to sort themselves into neighborhoods where autism is prevalent (i.e., selection effect), or parents might learn about the symptoms of autism from other parents in their social networks and receive other helpful information that assists in autism diagnosis (i.e., social influence). In the latter case, social networks do not cause autism, but they do increase the likelihood that autism is diagnosed.

Through a careful analysis, Liu et al. are able to show that the social influence mechanism explains the correlation between autism diagnosis and living close to another child previously diagnosed with autism. Here’s a summary from the paper’s conclusion:

One does not “catch” autism from someone else, yet a social diffusion process contributes significantly to the increased prevalence of autism. We observe a strong positive effect of proximity to other children with autism on the subsequent chance of diagnosis, robust to a range of individual- and community-level controls in both urban and less urban areas. In addition, close proximity to a child with autism was inversely associated with the likelihood of subsequent sole MR diagnosis, while it correlated strongly with the chance of autism-MR diagnosis. Proximity also increases the chance of autism rather MR diagnosis given the same level of severity in autism symptoms. Social influence arises strongly for high-functioning cases of autism. The effect of proximity is also more prominent in younger children, when diagnosis is more difficult and parental resources are more important. Children who were diagnosed with autism have a similar mode of referral as that of their nearest neighbor with autism before their diagnosis. All of these findings are consistent with a mechanism of social diffusion of awareness of the symptoms and the benefits of treatment and are inconsistent with competing explanations.

The study supports a social influence model of diffusion.  But unlike most diffusion studies in organizational research, which usually conceive of social influence as mimesis, the study points to information exposure as a mechanism. Children are more likely to receive an autism diagnosis because their parents  learn more about the disease due to their increased exposure to other children with autism. They know which doctors to seek, which questions to ask, which programs to access, etc., all of which facilitate the diagnosis.  The process seems generalizable. The spread of many social and organizational phenomena, but especially those that involve complex systems of adoption or diagnosis, could be accounted for by increased exposure to information about the phenomenon in question.  The spread of iPhones, organizational policy fads, or the diffusion of automobiles may all have been facilitated by this sort of social influence.

I’d like to thank our March guest bloggers Fred Wherry and Nina Bandelj. Great work!

Once again, Russ Roberts brings us interesting stuff. There’s a new podcast with sociologist Katherine Newman on her research on the working poor. Bonus round: Diane Ravitch on education. Here’s an earlier post on the Roberts interview with Viviana Zelizer.

John Dickhaut passed away last week.  John was a professor at Chapman University’s Economic Science Institute; a group of brilliant economists, including Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith who is in his 80s and extremely active.

I had a chance to briefly interact with John last semester, while giving a talk at Chapman University.  When I walked into his office for a one-on-one interaction, I was surprised at how carefully he had read the paper I was presenting that day.  We had an extremely engaging discussion about the arguments in the paper (he had written up some notes ahead of time) and numerous, numerous related topics.  I left very impressed with John’s ability and eagerness, really quite unmatched (in my experience), to cross disciplinary boundaries.

John’s interdisciplinary interests are evident from his research record.  He has done interesting work related to game theory and trust, the emergence of markets and transactions, reciprocity and exchange, neuro-economics, etc.  For me, one of his more intriguing, recent lines of research looked at how record-keeping facilitates exchange —- here’s a 2009 PNAS publication: “Recordkeeping alters economic history by promoting reciprocity.”

John’s contributions will be missed.

Online Guitar Hero simulator: JamLegend.

What beliefs did you have that were falsified through your research? If you aren’t a researcher, what beliefs did you have that were falsified by reading up on some topic? Here’s five of my falsified beliefs:

1. An organization’s ideology affects the technology it uses. I had this idea that being more democratic or radical would make movement orgs more likely adopt facebook and the like. Wrong. It’s mainly path dependence and org vintage, at least according to my data on antiwar groups.
2. Philanthropists can coopt social movements because of resource dependency. After doing my research on the black studies movement, I believe movements can shape the agenda, which attracts philanthropists. But they tend to support who they like rather than coopt radicals.
3. Ethnic studies is widely institutionalized. I used to believe, like many people, that the movements of the 60s totally flooded the academy. Wrong. The academy did take a leftward shift, but much of it was in political attitudes, not academic programs. Depending on the definition, 10-20% of universities have ethnic studies, most of them concentrated in research universities. These are also small programs. Actually, the big change in the post-1960s era is the spread of vocational and interdisciplinary programs, not identity politics programs. At most, the politics of the 60s affected courses and research topics, but that’s also widely exaggerated.*
4. Litigation does not prevent medical misbehavior. Many don’t know they’ve been harmed, many are afraid to sue, which is risky, and sensational pay outs are rare. This one isn’t from my own research.
5. Protest is common. In my studies of college protest, I found that the rate of protest was fairly low among colleges in the 60s. I bet the rate is even lower today. I now think protest is just one occasionally used tactic and it’s not terribly important in many cases.

It’d be cool if other bloggers did this – Jenn Lena, Jeremy, Andrew? Care to offer your falsified beliefs?

* Yes, people do cultural studies, but all English programs still teach Shakespeare and most dissertations and journals still deal with highly conventional topics.

It is a truism in the social study of science that innovations in knowledge production occur mostly through informal networks.  By the time you read it in the journals it is old news for the people at the knowledge frontier.  That’s why is so important for most of us who are still getting the hang of things, to learn how knowledge is really produced, or at least to learn the tack of guessing backwards from the finished product(s) to the way in which really good work is actually put together from scratch.

In American Sociology, this general rule is probably most applicable to network analysis.  The basic innovations (and innovators) of the so-called “Harvard-School” centered around Harrison White were certainly part of an informal network endowed with their own set of, never published, shadow texts in which the basic programmatic theses were written (For a nice discussion of this see Santoro 2008, and this post and this post).

More recently there has been a move towards a more historically nuanced and more culturally sensitive take on networks.  This intellectual movement, like the original network incursion, developed around an informal circle of young and more established scholars.  Once again Harrison White (now at Columbia) was in the middle of things (but this time he was joined by Charles Tilly).  Out of this “school” came such scholars as Mustafa Emirbayer, Ann Mische, David Gibson, Eiko Ikegami, Victoria Johnson and others.

In a fantastic chapter forthcoming in the Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis, Ann Mische reconstructs this backroom history.  She also outlines some of the recent “turns” that that the study of the relationship between culture and networks has taken.

A highly recommended piece.  It goes very well if you pair it with Pachucki and Breiger (2010).

I’m a fan of some of Bronislaw Malinowski’s work.  Here’s an engaging BBC documentary about him (the below is part 1 — here are all the parts).  Very interesting (well, don’t let the acting throw you off).  Particularly, see the interesting analysis (in part 4) of the purposes and reasons of the Kula Expeditions in Trobriand society.

If you are not familiar with Malinowski’s work, here’s a short primer (pdf, American Anthropologist, 1943).

Robert Paul Wolff — the well-known philosopher of politics and political economy, late convert to Afro-American studies, and author of some very good books including the best explanation of how to approach Marx’s ironic, sarcasm-laced prose style — has lately been keeping a blog, and writing his memoirs. There are some very good stories, mostly about philosophers.

Most sociologists are unaware that Talcott Parsons’ son Charles Parsons is a well-respected philosopher of logic, mathematics and language. Wolff knew him as a student, and Chapter 4 has a good story about Parsons, Snr:

Charlie was a very serious, very brilliant, very compulsive young man of middle height, with sandy hair. He was an academic brat, having grown up in the family home in Belmont during the time that his father was a famous senior professor in the Harvard Social Relations Department. Talcott Parsons had been responsible for introducing American readers to the works and theories of Max Weber, the great German sociologist. But unlike Weber, whose books were deep, powerful investigations of the roots, structure, and functioning of modern bureaucratic capitalist society, Parsons produced vast, empty, classificatory schemes that were devoid of any real power or insight. Poor Charlie, who lived very much in the shadow of the great man, was in fact much smarter than his father, and I have always suspected that he knew quite well how meretricious his father’s theories were. But during all the time I knew him, he never said a word about the matter. …

One story will give some sense of the burdens laid upon him by his parents. Our second year together, Charlie very kindly invited me to join his family for Thanksgiving dinner at their colonial Belmont home. … A topic was proposed for discussion during the taking of the wine, and we entered into a lively debate, while papa sat in a corner with a pad and pen and wrote another book, nodding into the conversation from time to time without actually joining it. At issue was whether it would be immoral for the aunt to buy a new car before her present vehicle had entirely worn out. Strong views were offered pro and con, but in the end, a consensus was reached that this would indeed be immoral. At no time, I am happy to say, did the discussion descend to the level of considerations of prudence. It was all on a high moral plane.

Finally dinner was served. After we had seated ourselves around the table, Mrs. Parsons, who was herself a social scientist, turned to Ann and said, “Ann, would you bring in the potatoes, please?” She then explained to me, as the guest, “It is traditional in our family for the older daughter to bring in the potatoes.” Next, she turned to Susan, and said, “Susan, would you bring in the vegetables?” Once again, she explained, “In our family, it is traditional for the younger daughter to bring in the vegetables.” Finally, she turned to her husband, and said, “Talcott, would you carve the turkey?” Yet again, “It is traditional in our family for the father to carve the turkey.”

At first, I was utterly mystified by these elaborate explanations, until, with a flash of methodological insight, I realized what was going on. This was a collection of intellectuals who had read in books that one of the latent functions of social rituals was to preserve the unity of kin structures. So they were deliberately, by the numbers as it were, reenacting a social ritual that they had self-consciously created in an effort to reinforce the ties that bound them. It was a textbook exercise, complete in every way save for any vestige of spontaneous feeling or manifest pleasure.

Professor Parsons proceeded to address the bird, a big, beautifully cooked production to which he applied a carefully sharpened carving knife. He made a series of passes that barely damaged the turkey, producing a neat stack of extremely thin slices. Each plate received one of them, together with a spoonful of the potatoes and the vegetables, a bit of stuffing, and a dollop of gravy. Then we dug in.

Coming as I do from a culture in which eating occupies pride of place among all the bodily functions, including sex, I inhaled my plate of food almost before the others had taken up their knives and forks, and looked around expectantly for seconds. But they were not to be. The turkey, still almost whole, was returned to the kitchen, and plates were ceremonially cleared, ready to be washed, though in my eyes they barely needed it.

“I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.”

From Roger Ebert’s essay on Pink Floyd: The Wall.

In previous posts, I argued that movements should spend their efforts on primaries if they want to shape a major political party. The logic is simple: the primary is usually the only time that a movement can inflict serious costs on an incumbent. In the general election, movements are ignored by voters. Once in office, elected officials usually have more important things to do than respond to activists. Even if you lose the primary, you force the politician to either move toward you, or spend precious resources. And of course, once in a while you win.

But what if you want to kill off a movement in a party? Consider the case of Charlie Crist, the Florida GOP governor who is on the way to losing the primary against a Tea Party/conservative candidate. He’s already suggested that he’s running in the general no matter what. He’s going to be a Republican and just continue on. This isn’t crazy. Joe Lieberman lost the 2006 Senate primary to an antiwar Democrat, but went on to win the general.

This suggests to me that there’s a flip side to primaries. If the incumbent doesn’t care what happens in the primary, he can still cobble together a coalition in the middle. The primary winner is boxed in by the radical flank. There might be a more general lesson. Maybe moderate candidates should just treat primaries as loss leders. You need them for publicity and then grab the middle in the general.

Bottom line: Primary challenges only matter if everyone takes them seriously. Moderates can stamp out radicals by treating primaries as delegitimized rituals and win elections with moderate voters. Do that enough times and the movement will be seen as pointless.

Am I the only one who is ecstatic about the American Sociological Review’s new online home at Sage?  Okay, ecstatic may be too strong, but I am very happy to see the Sage connection, which I think makes ASR more accessible and MUCH easier to download. Now, if we can only convince ASR to stop requesting paper copies during the submission process….

The latest issue of ASR has a few articles that may be of interest to organizational scholars. Thomas Maher looks at uprisings in Nazi death camps to explain when collective action is likely to arise among oppressed groups that have few opportunities or resources. The context is interesting because death camps are obviously one place where structural opportunities are limited, but yet some groups were still able to take collective action and mount resistance. He maintains that collective action in repressive regimes is more likely to occur when people perceive a threat as immediate and lethal.  Judith Stepan-Norris and Caleb Southworth examine the effect of competition among rival unions on the growth of union membership. Gregory Hooks and Brian McQueen add an interesting new chapter to the study of the welfare state in the U.S. Their study suggests that the rise of the military industrial complex created a competing institution around which conservative voters and legislators rallied and sink federal resources, limiting support for the Democrat’s agenda and stunting the growth of a welfare state comparable to those seen in Europe. Definitely worth reading.

As part of my RWJ research, I’ve been thinking a lot about patient safety. One example that sticks with me is from Peter Pronovosts and Eric Vohr’s book on patient safety, Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals. In one incident, he recalls that a patient undergoing surgery developed a latex allergy, which means that patient reacts badly to the surgeon’s gloves. Pronovost was the anesthesiologist and recommended that the surgeon change to non-latex gloves. The surgeon refused and the patient continued to have a reaction. If the surgeon did not immediately change gloves, the patient’s allergic reaction would escalate and the patient would die. Flummoxed by the surgeon’s refusal to change gloves, Pronovost tries to reason with him – changing gloves is a cheap and easy thing to do.  If he’s wrong, then nothing is lost. The patient is already having a reaction to something. If he’s right, the patient won’t die. The surgeon refused to change gloves. Pronovost only won when he threatened to call the hospital administration and disrupt the surgery. The surgeon relented, changed gloves, and the patient completed the procedure without any more problems.

This got me thinking: what kind of organization allows it employees to routinely ignore experts and others with “on the ground” knowledge? The answer: hospitals. Pronovost reports on something that is very common in medical practice: attending physicians and surgeons are encouraged to take a highly antagonistic stance toward subordinates. Nurses, medical students, residents, and even other lower ranked surgeons rarely are allowed to add their views on a particular patient or case. Many hospital employees live in fear of the surgeons and physicians they help. It’s not limited to the top of the chain. Even junior nurses live in fear of senior nurses. This isn’t a huge secret, and it’s been written about before, but I’m glad Pronovost is making a serious effort to link this toxic culture to patient safety.

On a deeper level, what sort of organization would allow people to develop such toxic relationships? I don’t have a complete answer, but I think some of it has to do with a combination of high professional autonomy and a garbage can structure. Hospitals, as far as I can tell, aren’t organizations that make one product with a centrally controlled assembly line. Instead, they are a place were “problems” (patients) drift from place to place  (ICU, regular, OR, etc) where they might be “solved” (stop showing symptoms) by some random assortment of people who have limited attention (the physicians, nurses, and surgeons). Each physician isn’t in charge of a patient, they do specific procedures and pass the problem along to other people.

Combine that with extreme professional autonomy and you get toxic culture. Each person has a small domain and limited time, but they have little connection to each other and a lot of stress. It’s litte surprise that toxic culture emerges since people are loosely connected and no superiors who monitor them.

Over at Scatter, Jessica has an insightful post on raising kids in grad school. Extremely good. Check it out.