I’m finishing a visit to France where I attended an Organization Studies workshop and then spent several days sightseeing. I’ll write more later about the workshop, although if you’re interested you can find out more here. What I wanted to write about now, as I spend my last night in Paris, is how delighted I am by French society. In addition to the great bread and other food, awe-inspiring museums, amazing castles, and quiet idyllic countrysides, one thing that really struck me is how alive French intellectual life is. People read, everywhere. Bookstores abound. Even the magazine stands and tobacco stores are intellectually vibrant. Today I passed by a magazine with a picture of Derrida on the cover.  I don’t know what the article was about but I gathered it had something to do with Derrida’s legacy. Derrida isn’t the only French theorist whose face I’ve seen on books or magazines since I arrived. Philosophers seem to have a special place here.  Apparently Bourdieu was a rock star (or at least a combat sports star) in France.

So what is it about the French that make them so interested in philosophers and theorists? Why is Derrida a household name in France? Why isn’t he know in the U.S.?  If any of you Francophiles have any good answers, I’d love to hear them.

Valerio Bacak, currently of the Universtiy of Zagreb, will enter the Penn demography & sociology program this fall. He has done some neat interviews with leading social theorists:

• Gary Alan Fine on Ethnography
• Jeffrey Alexander on the strong program in cultural sociology
• Erik Olin Wright on Marxism

Recommended.

My friend Fen Lin has passed to me this post-doc opportunity at the City University of Hong Kong. It’s below the fold.

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As many of you know, I study the spread and localization of packaged software such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in institutions of  higher education. In this line of literature, a new concept has emerged to discuss linkages between organizations called the “agora.” ERP, as a product, is specific enough for higher education as a sector, but generic enough that the systems need to be localized to some extent during implementation (Cornford & Pollock 2003:111; Pollock et al. 2007).

Software modules in ERP for higher education mainly include human resources, student information services, and financial operations, which handle tasks essential for running a university (like payroll and promotions) but have little to do with a university‘s public image (like professors and promotional websites). ERP’s primary advantages are related. First, data storage is centralized. Rather than having numerous databases, an ERP centralizes data storage into a single grid (Davenport 1998). ERPs provide “real-time” data to university officials. As a result, their decisions can be made with the best possible information, which improves upon previous systems where data were commonly outdated (Pollock 1999). Third, data are authoritative. With ERPs, data storage is centralized so that data can be accessed by any functional area with permission to access them. This eliminates the problem of “competing” data (Swartz & Orgill 2001:21). Lastly, students, faculty, and staff are turned into “self-service” users who monitor their own relationship to the university (in the form of scheduling, pay, payments, insurance, grades, etc.) rather than having those tasks administered by support staff (Pollock 2003).

Now, I first read about the ‘agora’ concept in Pollock and Williams’ (2008) newish book Software and Organisations on the “biography” of contemporary ERP. Their analysis, which spanned decades, multiple sectors of the economy, numerous suppliers and adopters of packaged software, which itself took on many forms, their respective support and implementation experiences, and countless additional actors — and all this happened in what they are calling an “agora.” Now even their broad analysis was conducted in segments and episodes, inter-related as they may be, from particular vantage points; each analysis adding another slice of the “agora,” a term borrowed from Kaniakakis (2006; 2008), which is:

an extensive, seamless web of social (or rather, socio-technical) relations over time; there are no walls or gullies that allow what is ‘outside’ to be reliably fenced out/factored out of the analytic picture … [which draws] attention not only to the heterogeneity of players but also the intricate and heterogeneous pattern of linkages that exist between these players (Pollock & Williams 2008:292).

Such dynamics cannot be captured by standard-fair STS concepts like “network builder” (Hughes 1993) or “heterogeneous engineering” (Latour 1987; Law 1987 [ch 6]) because agoras are of no one’s making and instead materialize from multiple linkages constituted by coordinated and uncoordinated events and actions over time. They are not really “just” networks or communities. They are not “just” markets or fields either. Instead, this model of organization contains and is constituted by organizations whose forms are not necessarily suboptimal and their behaviors are not necessarily strategic. Instead, the assumption is that they are all relationally defined and operate relationally. As such, their heterogeneous contents — machines, software, office buildings, offices, analysts, their publications, their publications in use, vendors, their support desks, their users, etc. — are held together by shifting “linkages,” which is not to say networks or communities because what binds them is not merely interest or commonality. The task then, is to search for “cues” Pollock and Williams (2008) say, cues for where to study these linkages (and when, given that they also theorize the significance of temporal aspects of design and organization in a non-trivial way). The emphasis on inter-organizational consequences and processes is appealing to me, given my commitments to new institutional theory, which appears to have finally arrived to STS.

This is a third-wave of theory for STS, and it is related intensely to the role of organizations and places their operations central to the field of STS. On the one hand, it is a beautiful view — multiple vantage points collected in differing locations at multiple times. However, is it a view of the kitchen sink? I am cautious to criticize this approach as I to believe it to be a significantly novel approach to STS that outside scholars could also take-up. Still, the concept was designed to overcome such naive notions as “actor-network,” in part, because the term has been used in so many competing (and often clumsy) ways, but also to get away from the idea that “anything” can be included so long as we follow the actors.

The “agora” is a somewhat novel way to rethink the linkages that bind groups, people, places, and things over times and in multiple sites through variously coordinated and uncoordinated ways … and it may one day find its way to org theory, if it has not (to some extent) already arrived.

NOTE: this is the image I used to study the formation of the Athenian Agora while studying abroad as a young college student — if you’re out there, thanks Anne!

Normally, I don’t like drawing attention people’s appearances, but I just have to this one time…Evan Carmichael, a blogger and long time orgtheory fan, made this picture to accompany his list of top 50 HR blogs. If you doubt it’s Brayden, check out the book titles.

Here is what Brayden really looks like from his faculty website.

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Our friend Edward Walker is helping out with a conference. It’s called Democratizing Inequalities. It’ll be at NYU and it focuses on new forms of political participation.

Climate change e-petitions. Community visioning sessions. Stakeholder task forces. Health policy dialogues. Grassroots philanthropy. In 2010, the sheer number of invitations to “have your say” can seem overwhelming. The unexpected triumph of progressive values inherent in bottom-up engagement has been hailed by observers as a civic renaissance, a collaborative revolution, a new participation economy. It would appear that public participation is more widespread than ever.  But, contrary to long-held assumptions about the relationship between democratization and social equality, this expansion of political equality has been accompanied by a corresponding decline in social and economic equality.

This conference investigates the consequences of the movement since the 1960s to expand participation across the political and economic  landscape.

Check it out!

Ronnie James Dio died a few days ago, of stomach cancer. He was the front man for Black Sabbath in the post-Ozzy era. His own band, Dio, was an outstanding metal band. He’s responsible for popularizing the devil’s horn sign, and providing a really heavy vocal style. His tunes also had rock solid grooves. 

I only got into metal a few years ago and I quickly fell in love with Holy Diver, probably his most shredding tune. It’s funny. At the time of its release, Holy Diver was slammed for indulging in demonic iconology. But if you took the time to read the lyrics, I thinks its about the difficulties of the righteous as they dive into a world of evil. Here’s the original video. Epic. Killswitch does a shredding version of it as well, but more courtly and less barbarian. Click on it below.

Gladly, Ronnie Dio had a sense of humor. Check out this clip from the movie Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, a light hearted satire of metal. Rated R for foul language.

Thank you.

New institutionalists like Meyer and Rowan use the term “decoupling” to describe a phenomenon: when employees or managers create and maintain gaps between the formal and informal, mainly, gaps between formal policies and organizational practices on the ground. This literature, then, at its core is about creating and maintain gaps. The upshot: decoupling allows firm managers to appear bona fide on the surface (thus gaining legitimacy) in the eyes of relevant external agents and funding sources, and they can do this while keeping the organization (back home) flexible enough to maintain old practice inconsistent with external demands or allow employees the freedom to pursue other matters of operational interest.

In contrast, one of the livelier debates in contemporary STS is about work-arounds (sometimes referred to as “kludges”), a term that Pollock (and others) use to describe the following phenomenon: when employees, mainly programmers in Pollock’s research, bypass certain elements of software coding in order to make failing systems operate (at least, for a while). Of course, this raises the issue of “who’s developing software?” when users contribute and share such work-arounds with designers hired by software firms. In the end, he says the boundary separating users and designers is a dynamic network effect; sometimes expanding, other times contracting, but certainly not static; work-arounds become a way to understand users’ and designers’ relational qualities. In addition, work-arounds are not just liberating; meaning that work-arounds do not merely “free” users from the constraints “scripted” into technologies; instead, work-arounds are also the source of much tension in the workplace, and even between workplaces (especially between client organizations and vendors of packaged software). As a class of phenomenon, work-arounds happen when employees create and maintain fits amid gaps, in the above cases, between packaged software systems and organizational operations. This literature, then, at its core is about creating and maintain fits.

So, its not that simple to compare them — right? Decoupling is mainly about inter-organizational relations with implications, sometimes obvious at the level of work, for organizations. Working-around is mainly about inter-organizational relations with implications, oftentimes obvious at the level of work, for organizations. Oh wait, maybe they do have something in common, even if they were birthed in homes far, far from one another.

A new line of research could look at how once decoupled policies and practices (and maybe even machines) get fit back together — when, why, and under what circumstances. It would help us to understand the boundary between or maybe alignment of policies and practices as relational, dynamic network effects. No doubt, the growing conceptual apparatus used to study work-arounds could be used to describe the reunion between formal policy and organizational practices called “work” (or would we be writing about “work-togethers,” which sounds terrible?).

Likewise, that work-around literature might learn something about where (some) gaps come from in the first place, if only STS would consider policies and practice in work-around literature, which they increasingly are. Still, in defense of new institutionalists, there must be examples where creating, not fixing, gaps promotes the organization’s well-being — a potentially important lesson for work-around literature.

The upshot for organizations: by comparing what it takes to create and maintain a gap and what it takes to create and maintain a fit between policy, practice, and maybe even some supporting software the choice to couple or decouple might be more efficiently or strategically decided upon. Or, are these theoretical approaches too analytically divorced to cogently compare….?

From a recent news item in the Onion:

CHICAGO—A University of Chicago freakonomics professor told General Electric investors Monday to keep a close eye on recent fluctuations in the heights of competitive powerlifters from Mexico. “Usually we can count on a stable average of 5 feet 8 inches, but last month’s quarter-inch drop in height among Mexican dead-lift competitors in the middle-heavyweight division could spell disaster for GE’s aviation and software subsidiaries,” freakonomist James Duncan said. “But, like anything else, a shrewd investor must always ask himself one thing: How many hot dogs did I eat last year?” Duncan previously gained recognition for tracking first-time home ownership and teenage mothers’ gum purchases against the Times Tom Jones Is Played Per Day Index.

Wondering if Jim Heckman had a hand in this…

Taken by Saul Aguirre 2010.

A few weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Art Chicago and Next. It’s a show I’ve attended off and on since 2002 or so. Art Chicago is the big fair, attracting blue chip galleries. Next focuses on smaller emerging galleries and artists. There’s also an antique fair as well, but I didn’t have time.

Overall, the fairs were an improvement over previous years when the fairs lost their way and galleries kept their best stuff for the Miami and New York shows. I saw some confusing booths, but I was still happy to find neat stuff. The Antena space is run by Miguel Cortez. I met Saul  Aguirre, who took this photograph as part of his art piece protesting the Arizona immigration laws. He used real manacles, to remind people of the reality of being picked up by the police. I enjoyed Miguel’s odd cell phone photography, including this piece.

Perhaps the most delightful thing was seeing how various Chicago galleries have really developed. The Corbett vs. Dempsey booth had a number of good pieces. I really enjoyed the  work of John Sparagana. Similarly, I liked the Greg Stimac pieces at the Andrew Rafacz booth. The Golden space has numerous good works from Jessica Labatte. Also worth seeing are the works of Zoe Crosher at DCKT, which is in New York. Crosher has done this weird elliptical photography based on the photos of a 1970s call girl. There were some intriguing, if a bit disturbing, photo collages by Todd Pavlisko at Charest-Weinberg and cool urban landscape geometries by Ross Racine at EO Art Lab, such as the one untitled piece below.

In the last few weeks, I’ve blogged about the toxic culture found in medical institutions. It’s not that physicians intend to harm anyone. It’s that they have accepted the idea that hazing and brow beating people is acceptable at work, leading to horrible consequences. This attititude of extreme professional authority means that they resist all criticism and direction unless it comes from other physicians.

There’s no silver bullet . But I do have a suggestion, which someone suggested to me recently, for one particular issue. A common problem is that physicians, for whatever reason, often forget all the minute details needed to successfully treat patients. Young physicians may simply not have all the experience needed to competently handle all patients. They may make blunders reading charts or handling simple diagnoses. Older physicians may be doing something very complicated and forget something very simple, like washing your hands. In other words, medicine is complex and human beings are limited, even the ones who went to med school.

The solution is the division of labor. Did you forget to wash you hands in the ICU? Aren’t sure that you cleaned that site for the central line? You need someone whose job it is to enforce checklists. In other organizations, this is routine. As Atul Gawande reminds his readers, this is normal when doing something like flying a plane. Can’t remember all the safety checks? No problem – make a list and then your co-pilot will go over it with you.

The problem with toxic medical culture is that it encourages physicians to assume nearly all responsibility for everything. That encourages you to dump on people who don’t have your professional status. The people in the medical institution who have the knowledge and ability to help you double check your work – nurses – have no reason to help you. Perhaps the most common complaint among nurses about doctors is that doctors trash them whenever they assert themselves. Of course, someone has to be in charge, but nurses are now treated like clueless paralegals instead of helpful advisers.

By shifting nurses from abused OR gophers to advisers and checklist enforcers, physicians can vastly improve safety outcomes. Just making sure that you wash your hands *every single time* instead of when you remember, or care, to do it you can help patients and save millions. Nurses can also be hugely helpful to physicians in training. Do you really want young and sleep deprived interns doing doling out drugs without some double checking? If not, think about nurses. They’re here to help.

I’ve been traveling the United Kingdom for the past week, from Edinburgh to London — visiting some universities as well as engaging in more touristy things.

Today, while traipsing through the heart of London, between Westminster Abbey and Big Ben, I ran into the “democracy village” protest: a small tent city smack on parliament square.   I guess the protest was started three+ weeks ago, on May 1st, and the hope is to carry the effort into perpetuity.  The protest represents an amalgamation, a motley crew really, of various causes — the green movement, land rights advocates, communists, anarchists and so forth.  Overall, war protest appears to be the central thread that holds the effort together.  The protesters have even managed to plant a communal garden right there on parliament square.  (I’ll perhaps post some pictures later.)

Here’s the web site of Democracy Village.  Here’s a short video by the Guardian, and a short article.

Dear orgheads: I have recently completed a short manuscript about recent sociological theory. The goal is to understand the different strands of theory that inform contemporary empirical work, ask why there are gaps between camps, and what the future might hold. The book is written for a general reader  interested in how sociology is practiced today, not a specialist in history of social thought. If you are interested in seeing the ms, email me privately (frojas at indianadotedu). All you have to do is promise not to circulate the ms and give me some comments in the next three weeks (it’s short). You’ll get into the acknowledgments and I will owe you comments and a coffee.

36 pages into Pfeffer and Sutton’s book on evidence-based management Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense the authors mention a case study at Harvard by Porter and Bong, which emphasized “competitive strategy.” The paper is an analysis of the California wine market and Mondavi’s position in it, which, according to Pfeffer and Sutton, misses the mark.

Pfeffer and Sutton claim that Mondavi did not participate in the conventional wisdom that his wines would flourish by thwarting his competitors (but without citation, unless the entire passage references American Vintage). Early on in the now popular wine country destinations such as Napa or Sonoma visionaries such as Robert Mondavi (read on his rise and fall) opted for a somewhat surprising inter-organizational strategy: do not merely raise your wines to world class and do not worry about making, for example, Napa Valley synonymous with “good California wines” — instead Mondavi would raise California wine in general to the status of world class. This, of course, had the side-benefit of uniting wine firms and discouraged, in theory, inter-winery competition in favor of raising all the vineyards and wineries together — and phenomenon Pfeffer and Sutton casually label “reputation spillover.” Still, despite this effort toward commonwealth, I am sure that while all wineries in some way benefited from growing legitimacy in their region, the wineries did not  invest and benefit evenly during the process (i.e., this strategy benefits some organizations more than others).

Now, why mention this? I believe I have stumbled upon another such inter-organizational strategy emerging in Kentucky regarding beloved bourbon. “Not all whiskey is bourbon, but all bourbon is whiskey” they will tell you when you get your first tour on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, which is the distillers equivalent of a “wine country” for vineyards.

Part of their “scripted” history:

In 1999, the Kentucky Distillers’ Association formed the Kentucky Bourbon Trail® to give visitors a firsthand look at the art and science of crafting Bourbon, and to educate them about the rich history and proud tradition of our signature spirit.

As it happens, Maker’s Mark, perhaps the most popular of all KY bourbon, initiated much of the contemporary efforts to raise the status of bourbon in general (rather than just Maker’s status). Another geographically-located instance where the conditions under which such a strategy might prevail would seem to be partially explained by common product and geography — and, I’m sure, a lot more.

I recently suggested to a colleague at another institution that they turn the college into a laboratory and discover how they want to implement their new first year student program. The college wanted to revamp their existing “freshman seminar” in order to improve learning outcomes amid demands for greater accountability and enhanced assessment.

She was selected to sit on the committee examining current practice, assessing benchmarking opportunities, and figuring out how in the world to localize this best practice (i.e., rigorous and systematic skills training for incoming freshman). During the meeting, she suggested just as we had discussed: select two or three models deemed most fit for the college, implement them, and then study them closely for short- and long-term benefits and liabilities, and then, with all the data, make an informed decision instead of going “all in” on a program they hope will work well locally.

What did she get in response to her suggestion that the university practice  evidence-based administration? A concentrated pool of experts that made up the working committee burst into laughter.

Instead, they are gearing-up to implement a new model they think will work; however, when she asked, “how can you be sure?” The room, formerly filled with laughter, was silent.

Recently, the New York Times published a short Op-Ed piece “Plan B – Skip College” wherein author Jacques Steinberg asks “WHAT’S the key to success in the United States?” and answers his question by saying that conventional wisdom dictates “go to college.” He then challenges this assumption.

Steinberg’s articles implicitly asks readers to adopt an evidence-based approach to managing their personal affairs (on EbM see Pfeffer and Sutton or, better yet, Teppo’s post on EbM, or, even better yet, Teppo’s post on evidence based living).

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Steinberg states:

Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.

You don’t need a college education to get jobs in growing job categories, it seems (so long as we just ignore pay, promotion, and schedule structure[?]).

Interesting as this thought might be during graduation season (I am referring primarily to high school graduation season but also college graduation when the clock starts ticking to pay off those students loans), “conventional wisdom” makes ears burn in org theory.

Explicitly, Steinberg states that the conventional wisdom goes a little something like this:

The idea that four years of higher education will translate into a better job, higher earnings and a happier life — a refrain sure to be repeated this month at graduation ceremonies across the country — has been pounded into the heads of schoolchildren, parents and educators.

As someone interested in diffusion, a historical account of this conventional wisdom guided by theory would seem to be an interesting idea (unless someone knows of a research study like this already done or underway).

A good possibility to study this matter: Bruno Latour’s (somewhat under-appreciated) diffusion model in Science in action set about 100 or so pages into the book. Latour describes a series of techniques that make the originator of the idea or, in this case, conventional wisdom, progressively less obvious and their fact, message, or machine spread more widely. This idea, that diffusers will attempt to cover their tracks so that the machine, for example, appears to be so superior that it spread as if by its own volition has hardly been studied in STS (and perhaps elsewhere) despite its significance for a truly Latourian actor-network model of diffusion (or, in Latour’s terms, a model of translation). Such a project would start with the obvious question: where did this conventional wisdom come from?

There’s a saying at orgtheory conferences. There’s no such thing as an organization, just the activity of organizing. What does that mean?  It’s misleading to think of organizations as rigidly defined things, like buildings. Instead, the word “organization” only refers to a bunch of people doing things together. In The Assymetric Society, James Coleman had a nice metaphor. An organization is like a swarm of gnats – clearly flying together, even if the pattern isn’t so obvious.

Who is responsible for modern sociology’s obsession with organizations as things? That’s right, Max Weber. In that famous passage, he had a nice definition. It’s a hierarchy with clearly defined jurisdictions, written rules, and so forth. What’s the problem with this definition? It’s patterned after the large corporate forms that were emerging in the late 19th century. An “organization” is something that looks like the German state, the Church, and so forth. Of course, that’s what gets transmitted in classes. Weber also emphasized the contingent nature of organizational forms. But alas, that subtly gets tossed.

The result? Once you buy the organization as a very patterned behavior, a hierarchy with certain features, then the theoretical tendency is to see that thing everywhere. For Barnard, it was about how leadership occurs in the hierarchy. For Parsons, the analysis was all about explaining how the organization had different hierarchical subsystems and institutional links to its environment. For the Carnegie school, it was about explaining the limits of hierarchy. For the neo-institutionalists of the 1980s, it was about the social reproduction of the hierarchy and social control of the organization through institutions. The organizational field is just a pile of orgs that need some sense knocked into them.

But there is hope, there’s an alternate organization theory that pops up, but it hasn’t been pieced together. There’s an orgtheory without Weber that really is about organizations as places where organizing happens, not just the big corporate forms that gets taught via the watered-down Weber. I think it goes something like this:

1. Open systems & Coase: An organization is some stable pattern of work and command in a larger social environment. There’s no reason to think orgs have well defined boundaries.
2. Goal displacement/principle agent problems: Control is problematic. Some organizations are defined by a lack of clear command. Goals get transformed and changed.
3. Networks instead of hierarchy/Powell: Control in orgs and fields can happen in many ways, non-hierarchical networks characterize many fields.
4. Implicit order: Work gets done according to both formal and informal routines.

In other words, the corporate forms that inspired Weber’s definition are simply one end of the spectrum. The military, or GM, is an extremely stable pattern of work where goals are rigidly enforced and hierarchies are strongly institutionalized. But once you realize that classic organizations are an extreme of the spectrum, then you realize there’s a lot more to life in orgtheory.

Of course, if you are on top of the org lit, you alredy know this. For example, our guest Katherin Chen wrote about the burning man organization, which is very un-Weberian and has all kind of crazy organizational issues. Siobhan O’Mahony wrote about the online software community. Clearly organized, but definitely on the far end of the spectrum as well. In my world, social movements seem to straddle the classical Weberian mode and the informal as well. In other words, non-Weberian orgtheory is already being done. It just needs to be pulled together into a new paradigm.

I generally try to avoid the question, “what is an institution?” When grad students want to engage the question, I usually refer them to other people who’ve written about this (e.g. Scott; Jepperson). The problem with defining something as ubiquitous and varied-in-form as institutions is that your definition is almost always going to be wrong to someone because it leaves out a phenomenon that another scholar thinks of as being institutional. Definitions of institution tend to be either too broad or too narrow and never very precise. So with that caveat, I’m pointing you to a new definition that probably suffers from those same problems. The definition is worth considering though because it helps to illuminate some theoretical problems, and possibly mechanisms, that I think are important to consider when doing institutional analysis.

John Mohr and Harrison White published an intriguing paper in Theory and Society in 2008 that reconceptualizes institutions as a set of dualities – or relationships between varying levels of interaction and meaning that constitute one another. The following figure comes from that paper and diagrams their basic argument:

The three circles correspond to different levels of social organization (self, group, field) that are linked together by structural dualities. But within each circle, other relational dualities define the space. At the level  of the self there is a duality that inheres between mind and body, of knowing and doing. In a group, there is a duality linking stories to social networks. At the level of an institutional field, there are systems of rhetoric and systems of social organization. Our contention is that institutions subsume these relational sub-systems and the various articulations that link them together (496).

They make the additional point that institutions, when conceived of as dualities linking fields, groups, and selves, are really meso-level phenomena. They are glue that keeps individuals, organizations, and fields coherent.

Once you begin to see institutions as a set of dualities, you also get a sense for how and when institutional change takes place. They use several examples of institutional change in the paper to illustrate, including the emergence of rock ‘n roll and the introduction of new academic fields.  Radical institutional change usually stems from intermediaries linking different rhetorics and stories with unfamiliar kinds of social organization and networks. This sort of institutional change is rare since it requires that openings for boundary spanners exist (e.g., DJs in markets with both white and black audiences; performers like Elvis who had familiarity with different styles/rhetoric). In other words, sites for institutional change of this type typically occur in institutional sites with “over-bridging” or “the sustained juxtaposition of multiple styles within the same institutional site.”

Most institutions though are resilient because they have evolved to ward off contradictory styles and have segregating mechanisms that keep intermediaries out. Resilient institutions, then, have structural linkages that bridge across field, group, and self so as to reproduce consistent meanings.

The article has some bite, I think, because it identifies specific mechanisms that help flesh out staple concepts from the neo-institutional theory toolkit like mutability and institutional logics.

Edited by Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy, “It’s Time to Reboot America” has an interesting array of contributors from Newt Gingrich to Howard Rheingold to academics like Susan Crawford. In all, the document reads like one might expect that it should: it is both casual and critical, but not academic (lacking citations around nearly every bend).

The impetus: authors were asked to respond to this framing

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

Now, for some of us, this reads like an undergraduate critical thinking assignment (I had success with this as an assignment, in fact, and success using some of these essays at the undergraduate level).

Still, as an STSer, I must be critical of one message. Many of the authors’ essays hinge on a few lines in the preface, which read:

The Internet is putting individual voters, and networks of activists, in positions that used to be the sole reserve of professionals. Today anyone can be a reporter, a fundraiser or a community organizer; all it takes is an Internet connection and a compelling message (1).

Now, I’m all for Utopian thinking and celebrating the transformative power of the internet; however, does everyone really have (equal) access? Obviously, it was a rhetorical question, but, from what I could tell, the term “poverty” does not appear in this document. And only after reading 200+ pages into the book is the “digital divide” finally given mention and it is by none other than Harry Boyte (founder and co-director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute on Public Affair’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship). But Harry asks readers to consider the international digital divide rather than thinking about the national debate over the (some say growing) gap between who does and does not have nearly unlimited access to the internet at essentially any time.

Worse, however, is that there is no underlying model of technology espoused here despite the significance of technology for nearly every claim in the book. Well, to be fair, there is no clear model used other than technological determinism (in a form that Langdon Winner referred to as naive).

So, here’s US Patent #4,009,525, from 1977: an apparatus for the simulation of interpersonal relationships and activity.  The apparatus nicely captures all the key dimensions: compliance with society, influence dynamics, personal interests, gender, etc — beautiful.  Here’s the patent on the USPTO web site.  Here’s a sketch (click to enlarge):

Quick question: Do any of the Supreme Court justices have significant experience as criminal defense attorneys? It seems as if the justices have experiences in courts (obviously), the Federal government and academia. The private practice experience involves a lot of business law & international law, and of course some work at the appeals and supreme courts. Alito and Sotomayor were prosecutors. There’s some public interest work (Ginsburg, Roberts a little bit). The wiki says Kennedy took over his dad’s law practice for a while, but it didn’t say what kind of law. So am I correct in noticing that defense attorneys are persona non grata?

The LA Times reports on a newly signed Arizona bill that prohibits ethnic studies in public schools. I’d like to gently remind Arizona republicans that Ronald Reagan approved of ethnic studies, as reported in my book on the rise of the ethnic studies movement. Yes, it’s true. Here’s the quote from a 1969 interview with Reagan, when he was governor:

While I have supported black studies programs and as a trustee, one must really ask whether the demand for a completely autonomous is not in reality a request for sanctuary from the rigors of the institution, a sanctuary from the normal standards? If that is what it is then what in reality, will these students have when they leave the institution, what will they have learned, and will they be able to compete in the outside world. On the other hand, it is possible that you can justify a black studies program on its symbolic value alone. But an all black studies department would not be useful. What we really should do is get some whites into the black studies department to learn something about black people. [emphasis mine]

What’s the context? Reagan was California governor during the Third World Strike, a bitter dispute at San Francisco State College over ethnic studies and other issues. He’s clearly not a huge fan, but reluctantly admits that it might be ok if it’s extended to white students, and if it maintains high academic standards. In other words, even Ronald Reagan thought that ethnic studies could be a valuable thing, especially for white people. Source: Interview with Ronald Reagan. February 18, 1969. RG 283. Records of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Box 12 LBJ Library, Austin, Texas.

Recently, Allen Wilhite (Department of Economics,University of Alabama in Huntsville, wilhitea@uah.edu) and Eric A. Fong (Department of Management, University of Alabama in Huntsville, fonge@uah.edu) have been looking into “editorial citation requests.” Also referred to as Journal Self-Citation (Communications of the Association for Information Systems has a nice 22 article collection on the topic), editors ask authors to include a number of citations (not in your original paper) to your paper that [conspicuously] come from the editor’s journal.

I have had this experience in the past and I think Fabio might have too. Back then, as a graduate student, I didn’t think anything of the practice as I was mainly focused on publishing rather than potential ethical issues for editors.

So, what are some thoughts about this, ethically speaking? Also, what about as a strategy to increase the citation rate of the journal or its ranking? Is this a viable practice whereby editors force at least somebody to read their sometimes obscure journals? Is there an underlying model driving this behavior among editors?

My take, at least when it happened to me, was that the journal wanted to know how a topic in the literature played out broadly in the field but also how it has been raised narrowly in their particular journal. It was rationalized to me and my co-author as “making certain of the fit of your article with our journal” … talk about a precise pressure point!

See Wilhite and Fong’s on-line solicitation and survey below.

The East Bay Express has an article on a private management consultant named John Williams. His claim to fame is that he believes that government statistics consistently underestimate how bad the economy is. In some cases, it’s political. Presidents want the bureaucracy to report numbers that make them look good. In other cases, it’s technical. Economists have shifted the definition because they have more sophisticated ways of measuring something. Either way, Williams thinks it’s bad, bad news. People are acting as if the economy is good when it is not. If you’re curious, here’s his website.

What I find interesting is that William’s has touched on a very sensitive issue in economics – the nature of macroeconomic statistics. On the one hand, the academic economists consulted by the East Bay Express staff treated Williams like a crank. From their point of view, he’s some obscure nut who doesn’t even really understand the real issues with government statistics. But if you know about the economics profession, there is serious debate suggesting that poor use of (often flawed) government statistics is a serious problem.

Don’t believe me? Just read Christina Romer’s ”Is the Stabilization of the Postwar Economy a Figment of the Data?” in American Economic Review 76 (June 1986): 314-334. The argument is pretty simple, and it validates Williams general view that economic statistics are not handled in the best of ways. Romer asks if it really is true that the American economy is more stable post-Great Depression:

I find that the methods used to construct the historical series exaggerate cyclical fluctuations in industrial production. When this exaggeration is taken into account, there is very little stabilization between the pre-1914 and the post-1947 years.

In other words, an objective “fact” about the economy turned out to be not true when closely examined. The economics professions view of a very important business cycle is based on lousy statistics. This isn’t to say that a guy like John Williams is always right. Not every government number is a tainted thing. But his general point is right. The construction of economic facts is exactly that – a construction that can be done well or poorly. And as Romer shows, policy can be guided by these poorly constructed facts. And as our friend Dan Hirschmann will tell you, the guys who invented economic statistics often opposed their unqualified use in policy making, a lesson that’s forgotten by those who don’t know their history.

Fans of Tocqueville ought to read James Wood’s essay in the New Yorker that discusses two new books on the scholar, one a history by Leo Damrosch of his visit to America and the other a novel by Peter Carey about a Tocqueville-like character visiting America for the first time.  Woods contends that Damrosch does not completely address Tocqueville’s religiosity – an important feature of his theory about the way democracy works. It’s funny that I’d missed this part of Tocqueville as well. Religion is obviously present in his observations of Americans – how could he not include them? – but Woods maintains that Tocqueville saw the two institutional forces, religion and democracy, as being linked through more than just associations.

Repeatedly, he returns to three religious concerns: he earnestly believed that American democracy was providential; he thought that there was an intimate connection between social equality and Christian equality (since Christ had proclaimed the good news for all, irrespective of color and creed, and insisted that the last shall be first); and he lamented that, in France, religion was not on the side of equality but on the side of order and hierarchy. Seen in this stained-glass light, “Democracy in America” is obviously a nineteenth-century book about the fragility of faith, written on the threshold of the age of Darwin and Flaubert and Ernest Renan, a book as much about moral authority as about freedom, and about how to retain the former in an age of the latter—when, as he writes, “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished,” and “the lights of faith are obscured.” The prestige of royal power has vanished, Tocqueville says, “without being replaced by the majesty of the laws.” Matthew Arnold could not have put it better…..

Religion is thus vitally beneficial, but not only because it equalizes. It also places crucial checks on equality’s equalizing tendencies—it cleans up its own joyous mess. Society, Tocqueville felt, needs religion’s emphasis on the afterlife. God guarantees the authority of morals (goodness comes from God), and, more generally, religion leads democratic man away from the narcissism and materialism endemic to non-aristocratic societies. Yet how does one continue to renew religious belief in an age of radical doubt? Tocqueville’s solution has a whiff of characteristic French cynicism, even of hypocrisy. It is basically what Voltaire called croyance utile, “useful belief.” Religion doesn’t have to be true, Tocqueville thought, but it is very important that people profess it. (emphasis mine)

Wood’s view of Tocqueville puts him in the same terrain as Durkheim, although Tocqueville treats religion (coupled with  democracy) as a potential modernizing force. Without democracy, you might say, religion looks a lot like the tribal beliefs of Durkheim’s mechanistic society, but when linked to democratic participation, religion is something else altogether. One of my favorite books on religion and political movements is Michael Young’s Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement, which happens to be written about the same era of religious fervor and push for democratization (via abolition, woman suffrage, and the reimagination of government as a tool to address moral and social problems) that Tocqueville observed.  You might argue that religion would have to be the language that American political movements would use because the U.S. was such a religious country, but Young’s book, which I believe is consistent with Tocqueville, shows that religious devotion and intensity increased as the result of political organizing.

I’m with Swedberg that Tocqueville is an underappreciated organizational theorist. He’s also a pretty good cultural sociologist.

My time at Michigan is coming to a close. I’ve met many wonderful people, but I’m still interested in meeting more people. If you are in the Ann Arbor area and you want to meet, email me – lunch at campus and late night coffee are good times.

Chomsky’s provocative response to a question from the audience:

There’s no theory in the social sciences…

…the term theory should not be applied to fields as intellectually thin as the social sciences…

…there’s just some common sense observations.

Movements face a tough choice in American politics – which major party  is better for your interests? Third parties, as I’ve argued, are a waste of time. That brings me to Obama and conservatives and libertarians. Since the GOP was in meltdown mode in 2008,  some conservatives and libertarians supported Obama. Now, people are asking whether Obama was the right choice because he pushed health care reform and other measures.

Here’s my response. In modern American politics, you don’t face a choice between limited government and growing government. American politics is about the choice between the welfare state and the war state. Roughly speaking, Democratic presidents tend to promote ambitious welfare state expansions (Truman – Fair Deal; LBJ – Medicare; Clinton – health care reform; Obama – health care reform). Republicans have tended to promote national security and war (Regan – the 80s build up, Lebanon, Star Wars; Bush I – Panama, Gulf War I; Bush II – Iraq & Afghanistan). There’s recent research suggesting that military spending serves the same purpose for GOP politicians as the welfare state does for Democrats. Of course, some presidents, like Nixon, manage to promote welfare state expansion and war making at the same time.

So we have almost 70 years of post-war American history. Limited government just isn’t on the menu. Instead you have to choose between leaders who expand the state for military purposes and those who expand the state for social purposes. I’d be interested in any argument suggesting that McCain would have sharply curtailed state growth in any significant way.

Don’t ask me how, but I got to reading the wiki on entomophagy (e.g., eating bugs). It was interesting, though not shocking. My father was from Colombia and often told me about the gourmet ants the Indians would eat. What I found interesting is that there’s an genuine anthropological dispute over why people in industrialized countries don’t eat bugs anymore. The issue is this. As people move to agriculture, and later industrialization, people stop eating bugs and many cultures develop taboos. The idea is that high status foods are associated with less labor intensive activities like cattle or chicken raising. Another idea is that bugs are considered bottom dwellers, so they are improper (e.g., they aren’t kosher in Judaism).

Here’s the problem with these theories – most people industrial societies eat tons of shrimp, crabs, and mollusks. Essentially, people are comfortable eating aquatic bugs. These don’t require a whole lot of advanced technology to cultivate and they are usually bottom dwellers. Even more puzzling, many of these animals look a lot like bugs, especially lobster and shrimp. You could argue that some bugs cause disease, so that gets all bugs banned. But all kinds of mammals and birds carry disease and we still eat the safe ones. Heck, we know chickens carry disease, yet we still eat them if they are sanitized. What’s your explanation of the bug taboo/shrimp non-taboo in industrialized societies?

The Nation has an interview with historian Tony Judt. His new book, Ill Fares the Land, is an argument for the European style welfare state. A few clips:

There are two different considerations here. The first is the social reality of the social democratic state—the activist state, if you like—with collective responsibility across space and time for other people’s interests. That is almost inevitably going to survive in one form or another. In my world it was pretty clear which aspects of my parents’ world would survive into ours; in my kids’ world, it’s not at all clear which aspects of my world will survive into theirs. With globalization, with the fear of economic change, with the insecurities that the twenty-first century is going to bring, which are going to be far greater than those of the twentieth, the level of insecurity is going to have the paradoxical effect of throwing people back on the state much more, looking to it for everything from medical protection to physical protection to job guarantees to protection against outside competition and such. So the question is not going to be, Will there be an activist state? The question is going to be, What kind of an activist state?

And that brings us to the second consideration, which is how we think about it. We’ve emerged from a twentieth century which we’ve learned to think of as a kind of seventy-year running battle between the over-mighty state and the wonders of individual freedom. Extreme forms of individualism versus extreme forms of collective enforced authority. Roughly speaking, Stalin versus the tea party. That’s a caricature of the twentieth century. But it’s one that we have to a large degree internalized, so when people think of the political choices facing them, they think of them in terms of maximized individual freedom versus maximized collective repression, or power or authority or whatever. And then they think of any changes with one or the other, regrettable compromises with freedom or so on. We need to change that conversation so we can think of the state not as some external creature that history has imposed upon us but simply as a way of collective organization that we chose to place onto ourselves. In that sense the liberal state either has a future or it doesn’t, but it really is up to us.

Here’s our previous discussion of Judt and postwar European history.

On this day, in 1937, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg burst into flame while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The fire was brief, lasting less than a minute. Of 97 on board, 35 died on that lead balloon (and another passed away on the ground). The catastrophe robbed the airship industry of its previously strong levels of public legitimacy (see Harry Dick’s The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships: Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg). The Hindenburg disaster is still something of an unsolved case, meaning that to this day an exact “cause” (in the engineering sense of the word) is unknown, although numerous theories have been proposed.

An unexpected personal link to this story: I recently finished reading a book where the Hindenburg was the primary setting; it was 2000 mystery novel The Hindenburg Murders by Max Allan Collins, American mystery writer who wrote Road to Perdition, Dick Tracy comics, and television’s Dark Angel. As I am posting this, a friend of mine mentioned that there is also a pretty good short story about two lovers who were crewmen aboard the airship (but we don’t know the author).

Cool graphic for public consumption.

Reminds me of something I read a while back about how biologists, back in the day, used to take oodles of art courses, in particular, drawing courses. They were required to do this, of course, because pre-camera the biologist also had to visually depict their specimen in the field. Of course, with the advent of cameras and especially now with digital cameras, such skills are deemed essentially “useless” to the field.

Still, this image makes me wonder if a little more art would add something to our work … unless this smacks too much of “science by IKEA.”

In our discussion of college students, our guest, Nick, wrote:

Moreover, college admissions boards SELECT students according to non-academic criteria now more than ever so who should really be surprised that they are more active in non-academic endeavors?

Yes, we get the students that the admissions office selects for us. At the most elite schools, it isn’t such a big deal. The over achieving Ivy League kid will show up no matter what we do. But at most colleges, the result is to fill the classrooms with people who don’t want to be there.

So we see decoupling: the professors want academically oriented students but the admissions office want a mix of academic kids, athletes, affirmative action, and legacies plus a few wild cards. Is it time for professors to assert more influence over admissions? Will the fund raising office allow us to do that?

Here’s a set of twenty-six short youtube clips on game theory (by an enterprising graduate student at the University of Rochester) —- stag hunt, prisoner’s dilemma, centipede, battle of the sexes, etc, etc.   Potentially a nice resource for teaching.