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Economic sociology these days seems preoccupied with “performativity.”  That attention is well-deserved because the notion that the use of a model can improve its predictive fit is a powerful idea.  (For a graphic representation of the concept, see the excerpt by Brooke Harrington.)  But perhaps it’s time for a corrective look.

Graduate seminars are a useful barometer of when a concept starts to run past its purposes.  Some decades ago it was “socially constructed,” next “embeddedness” took its turn, and then for a brief while “boundary object.”  (I can’t begin to list all the things that students told me were boundary objects.)  Today it’s “performativity.”  The problem was not just that the terms were used, but that instead of being asked as a question (“how is it socially constructed and why does that matter?”) reference to the concept becomes the quick answer to almost any kind of question regardless of how far away from the original idea.  People who have experience leading graduate seminars will recognize what I’m talking about.  There’s a pretty good discussion going on, and just when things are getting perplexing and difficult (i.e. good, as in potentially productive), someone voices the solution (“It’s a clear case of performativity, right?) and it suddenly seems to close the conversation.

With all the talk about economists performing the economy and models performing markets, perhaps we are losing site of skilled performance.  Charlie Smith addresses such skilled performances in a recent paper, “Coping with Contingencies in Equity Option Markets” (forthcoming in The Worth of Goods:Valuation and Pricing in the Economy, edited by Patrik Aspers and Jens Beckert, Oxford University Press).  Smith distinguishes among three strategies for confronting uncertainties.  The first, “Making Sense” entails imposing some kind of narrative account on events initially experienced as chaotic.  “Routines,” the second strategy imposes some sort of behavioral order.  The third, “Acting Sensibly,” the least common but the most interesting, doesn’t seek to impose an overall order.  It is a method for handling the contingent and the disorderly.  In this rich study of option traders, Smith analyzes the practices of juggling multiple rules of thumb in managing option positions.

Daniel Beunza and I take a similar analytic approach when moving from how models make markets to understanding how traders actually use models.  We conduct an ethnographic account of merger arbitrage as a reflexively skilled performance, with reflexivity socially distributed inside and outside the trading room.  “Models, reflexivity, and systemic risk: a critique of behavioral finance,” available here, is a paper with a twist.  When the system lacks requisite diversity (or dissonance), the unintended outcome of the attempt to deal with the fallibility of financial models is systemic risk.

I’ve also been exploring these themes in a presentation called simply Performance.  It’s one of several ‘silent lectures’ — a genre I’ve been working on for my undergraduate teaching.  They’re intended to evoke the multiple, intertwined meanings of some basic concepts. As I’ve discovered in my teaching, sometimes silence on my part is the best way to stimulate students to become active in the process of making associations.  Each silent lecture is a PowerPoint slide show, typically with about 100 images and few words.  The presentations are self-timed.  Load the PowerPoint, click ‘view slide show,’ and it runs itself, usually under 10 minutes.

I’ve found silent lectures to be a very effective way to stimulate discussion, even in a relatively large lecture course with as many as 80 students. There’s clearly no “right answer” (a dagger that kills good discussion) and the students get that right away.  One can sense that there’s lots of energy in the room, people really want to talk, and so I just get out of the way and listen in amazement at the connections they’re making.

Silent lectures are available for download on my website here.  Please feel free to use them in your teaching.  I ask only that you credit the source and that you send me an email to let me know that you’ve used one.  Of course, I’d appreciate feedback:  I continue revising and tweaking them.  But I know that folks are busy.  It’s enough just to drop me a one line note (“used your slide show in my course”) so I can track usage.

Performance opens with musicians, dancers, and actors performing.  Then athletes.  Audiences applaud.  We see judges, report cards, stock tickers, measurements, Top Ten lists, and online ratings of restaurants, movies, politicians, and professors. Various performance venues, material and virtual — from stadiums and lecture halls to surgeries and Second Life.  Students get it that the images of the CEOs of the big automakers and investment banks testifying before Congress refer to a kind of performance about performance.

The slide show explores the interplay of the real-time skilled achievement of effective performance and the evaluative principles of measurement.  From the bedroom to the boardroom, pharmaceutical companies and management consultants promise enhanced performance.  We live in an age of performance anxiety.

I talked about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with Maurizio Catino, a colleague from the University of Milano—Bicocca, whose work on organizational disasters and organizational myopia offers interesting insights on the topic. You should consider Maurizio the real blogger today, since all the ideas in this post come from him.

The conversation started out from a quite casual question I had, namely whether BP is really the best actor to handle the crisis. Most people, and the US President among them, have taken for granted that BP should be in charge and lead the oil spill “response” efforts. Indeed, BP is the most qualified actor available – the company has a better technical understanding and expertise than any public agency – and has all the interest in cleaning up its mess (or, more realistically, to contain the oil spill). Although I buy these arguments, I wonder whether some of the organizational problems that lead to the spill, are also in place in the planning and execution of the efforts to stop it. Maurizio’s answer raised interesting considerations concerning BP’s risk management philosophy, and the causes of its sloppy management.

First of all, it is relevant here to consider the distinction between a probability-based and a possibility-based approach to risk management. In the first case, companies base their risk-management strategies on the probability that an adverse event would occur. In the latter case, companies consider all the possible adverse events – i.e., all the events that have some chance to occur – and devise strategies for their prevention as well as crisis management plans. From a normative point of view, if we want to protect society and the environment from negative externalities due to organizational failures, we need to make sure that high-risk organizations move away from a probabilistic risk management philosophy, and develop a “think the worst” attitude in the consideration of high-impact events. The problem with the probabilistic approach is that it leads to underestimate the level of perceived risk of disastrous events in case they have a low probability of occurrence. In other words, to prevent future disasters, high-risk companies should give less attention to “what is the likelihood of an adverse event to happen?”, and focus on “what should be done in case an adverse event happens?” This is an important consideration especially in the light of the fact that oil reserves are shrinking and more hazardous drilling sites will be explored in the near future.

This leads to a second set of considerations concerning governmental regulation and supervision. President Obama compared the oil spill to the 9/11 terroristic attack, while some of his detractors are trying to cast it as his Katrina. Of course, Obama has no interest in being associated with G.W. Bush’s mismanagement of the Katrina disaster, and would rather prefer to appear as the commander in chief of a “mission accomplished”. Nonetheless, this might not be the best way to frame the events. Let us consider their nature. Both 9/11 and Katrina are extremely rare events, but 9/11 was also unexpected, and unpredictable (a black swan), while Katrina was a natural disaster of exceptional magnitude that has been underestimated by the government. Relying on the classical distinction between risk and radical uncertainty (which goes back to Keynes), while Katrina was a predictable event, the 9/11 attack was not (although security agencies had valuable information, they lacked the interpretative framework in which civilians planes could be used as weapons).

Since the BP oil-spill was a predictable event, we should conclude that it bears closer resemblance to Katrina than 9/11.  And, we argue, it is in the government interest to frame it in these terms. A company cannot be blamed for not preventing an unpredictable event. In contrast, in order to promote “possibility-based” risk management strategies, governments should require that high-risk companies provide ex ante a detailed plan for the prevention and crisis management of adverse predictable events. For instance, governmental authorizations of offshore drilling should be contingent upon the presentation of a safety and recovery plan in case of an oil spill. In sum, while it might be politically wise (in the short-term) for Obama to cast the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a 9/11 type of disaster, it might be counterproductive in the long term, because it gives BP an alibi. In contrast, what the government should do is to promote regulation that would force companies to think about solutions to potential disasters and devote resources to this goal.

Getting companies to internalize negative externalities is not an easy task, and now it is even harder due to the diffusion of legal responsibility (i.e., see a list of “guilty parties” involved in the BP operation), and the physical separation between the management and the place in which the activity takes place. A successful example of risk management is Du Pont’s solution to the problem of securing the production of explosive material. The company forced its managers to live with their families inside the factories. In striding contrast, Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP went sailing this week-end, but he was far away from the Gulf of Mexico. To some extent, management’s physical distance from the disaster translates into cognitive distance. The sloppy management and organizational failure of BP is partly due to the fact that their headquarters did not supervise the network of suppliers in a reliable way. Moreover, the organization was blind and deaf to signals coming from latent factors and near miss (see BP worker Tyrone Benton’s interview) and its response efforts were, at times, hilarious…

In sum, what I got out of this conversation is that, yes, BP should be in charge of cleaning up its mess, but the government should make sure that in the future high-risk organizations give up some of their optimism, and start thinking the worst. Only in this way, the worst can be “contained”.

Since sports are still a hot topic for the summer orghead, I thought I’d throw up a post about the recent changes in the competitive field of college sports. Those of you who follow college athletics may have been as intrigued as I was by recent events that nearly led to the dramatic collapse of the college conference system. Every day seemed to offer new crucial details about the behind-the-scenes attempts by college presidents to gain or maintain positions in athletic conferences in their attempt to sustain competitive advantages over their peers or gain access to new sources of revenue or not move down the college athletic status hierarchy.  As Gordon Smith says, “the end game is power.” Power allows you to determine which schools can share in the revenue generation of the highest-profile sport in college sports – football.

The Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, is at the center of this power game. A number of politicians have claimed that the BCS violates anti-trust laws by precluding certain schools from gaining access to the highly prized championship games and hence excluding them from an important source of revenue generation. Nathaniel Grow, a legal scholar at the University of Georgia, has a new paper describing the anti-competitive dynamics behind the BCS. Here’s a summary from the Sports Law Blog:

First, I assert that the BCS can be attacked as an illicit group boycott, insofar as it distributes revenue unequally and without justification, to the detriment of universities in the non-BCS Conferences. For example, following the 2009-10 season, the BCS distributed at least $18 million in revenues to each of the six BCS Conferences, while the five non-BCS Conferences received a total of only $24 million, despite two non-BCS schools (Boise State and TCU) having been selected to participate in BCS bowl games. Thus, despite increased access to BCS games for the non-BCS schools, the non-BCS Conferences still face significant differential treatment with respect to the financial payouts accompanying an appearance in a BCS bowl game.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, the BCS can also be attacked as an illegal price fixing scheme, due to the fact that it enables formerly independent, competing entities (the participating BCS Conferences and bowl games) to collectively determine the amount of revenue to be distributed to BCS participants.

What Grow doesn’t focus on are the status implications of the BCS.  Membership in a BCS conference has become the de facto boundary marker of status in college athletics. If you’re in a BCS conference, you have higher status in sports, and if you’re not, you lack it.  The status distinction is even used by commentators from sports outside of football (e.g., a college baseball analyst might describe TCU as not belonging to a BCS conference when marveling that a lower status school can compete at such a high level in the college world series).  The implications are pretty severe. High status schools get more air time on television. They become the focus of the public eye. This leads to Matthew effect dynamics that reproduce their position in the status structure (e.g., high status schools expend less effort in recruiting better athletes; high status schools get more revenue due to their better television contracts which allows them to build better facilities). Initially small differences in athletic quality become much bigger over time due to these dynamics.

The field of college athletics seems like an industry ripe for analysis by organizational theorists and economic sociologists. As an example of the kinds of research that can be done see Washington and Zajac (2005) on status evolution in NCAA basketball.  If you’re interested in the implications of status differences or anti-competitive strategies, college sports is the place to be.

Erika Summers Effler’s new book, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups, delves deeply into the inner lives of social movement organizations. One of the things I like about the book is the rich description of interpersonal interactions that sustain movement organizations facing perpetual failure. The big idea is that emotions are the fuel that keep social movement groups moving, especially in situations where the group is struggling to meet expectations. Here is a great example, in which Summers Effler demonstrates how leaders of movement groups use failure to build a narrative about the organization and cement their own leadership.

Leaders were made and reaffirmed in the recovery of the groups following collapse. To recover, leaders had to pull themselves up by their emotional bootstraps, evoke the emotions associated with success and expansion, and craft the stories that made sense of the groups’ failure….Both of the groups rode emotional roller coasters, but the leaders rode more extreme ones, benefiting the most from success but also losing the most and feeling the most drained and stuck when the group failed. They had all of their proverbial eggs – in this case, identity, expectations, and interaction tools and strategies – in one interaction basket. they stood to gain more when they were able to pull a group back from the edge of disintegration, but they also stood to lose more if the group disintegrated. Charismatic leaders were like emotional batteries. These emotional batteries keep the scenes together through maintaining the focus of attention and the positive emotions associated with this focus (125-6).

I’d say this is true of all kinds of leaders. As I mentioned last week, middle managers, an understudied type of leader, are in many ways the emotional core of their organizations. They keep their teams moving forward by setting the emotional tone of the group. The costs of motivating people certainly go up when the group experiences failure, but the rewards for getting the group through that crisis situation are high. This is, I think, what Summers Effler is getting at in her cases. Leaders have to expend more of their emotional energy when a group is in decline, but if the group is able to recover the leader gains charisma and other sorts of political capital. Moreover, skillful leaders can use those moments of failure to sharpen the identity of the organization. In the face of failure, key questions about organizational identity – “who are we? what is unique about this organization?” – matter much more than during times of abundance. Only an organization that can offer positive, affirmative answers to those questions can make the case that it is worth saving (or at least worth expending emotional energy for).

What can economic sociology contribute to the national debate in the wake of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?  There are many frames and perspectives that can be brought to the discussion, and in multiple registers of theory, research, policy, and advocacy.  In welcoming other points of entry, I point to one obvious topic: call it accountability or restitution.  More forcefully, think of retributive justice. What is the price that BP should pay for the destruction of lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment?  And just as important, how should that be determined?

Fortunately, we don’t start entirely from scratch.  Marion Fourcade has been producing a series of papers on the problems of pricing following environmental disasters.  Among these is “Price and Prejudice: Economic Theory as Cultural Practice,” forthcoming in The Worth of Goods: Valuation and Pricing in the Economy, edited by Patrik Aspers and Jens Beckert (Oxford University Press) available for download here.

Marion’s case is that of the Exxon Valdez supertanker that ran aground in March 1989, despoiling Alaska’s Prince William Sound with a spill of 30,000 tons (nearly 11 million gallons) of crude oil.  Her study focuses on the $1.025 billion court settlement that included $500 million in punitive damages.  The crux of the analysis highlights how various federal and state agencies hired environmental economists who recommended a method (new at the time) of passive use damage evaluation – “passive use” because it focuses on resources that people are unlikely to use directly. The key technique in this method was a “contingent valuation survey” administered in four locations across the United States.

Survey respondents were given visual and oral information about the spill and its effects, as well as informed about a Coast Guard program to prevent future spills.  Basically, (and not at all unlike being asked how much you would pay for a basket of groceries) they were asked how much their household would be willing to pay for the program to be implemented.  The result was $31 per median household.  The economists aggregated these individual “preferences,” multiplying by the number of US household, to derive the figure denoting American’s total willingness to pay (a measure of utility loss) for the environment of Prince William Sound.  That figure, in turn, was the basis for the government’s legal case and, therefore, the key determinant of the price that Exxon paid in the ultimate settlement.

Marion dissects the “epistemic culture” of the economists’ contingent valuation – with its assumptions about aggregating individual preferences disconnected from the preferences of other individuals and therefore of any real social context.  And she criticizes the confined character of the survey instrument – with its framing of asking citizens how much they would be willing to part with their own money rather than asking them how much the violator should pay from corporate coffers.

There are many insights in this paper.  What interests me, as a point where I would critically depart, are the conclusions that Fourcade draws.  Although she doesn’t use these exact words, essentially Marion points to the price that we pay (as a society) whenever we make a monetary valuation of a non-market, public societal good. The very act of “putting a price” tips the scales in favor of the economists’ expertise and their market or quasi-market framings.  The title could be restated: not simple “price and prejudice” but price yields prejudice.  I’m wondering if this need be the case.

Two comments, an observation, and then a suggestion meant to provoke more sociological contributions to the BP justice debate.  First, I have an obvious affinity to Marion’s work because it resonates so much with arguments I made in the opening and closing pages of my book, The Sense of Dissonance.  The challenge for economic sociologists is to develop concepts and analytic strategies that address the problem that “value” is almost always bound up with “values.”  In fact, all the really interesting questions about economic value are always, inextricably, tied to questions about moral economy.  Hence my book’s subtitle: Accounts of Worth. In studying the limitations in the ways in which Exxon was called to account, Marion addresses this problem head on.

Second, Marion’s conclusions point to some important theoretical challenges.  Does “price” somehow inevitably come down to “market price”?  Are all monetary valuations necessarily market pricings?  There are some good reasons to think not.  Economic historians and economic anthropologists provide numerous examples.  State-socialism might provide others.  (Some would argue, however, and not without reason, that monetary valuations under central planning weren’t really prices, in fact, that monetary valuations were some other kind of numerical assignment but not really money.)  These are interesting questions – for economic sociologists and for the critical study of accounting.  They quickly move into questions about calculation.  If we posit that there are non-market orders of worth, do these have distinctive rationalities that are, nonetheless, recognizable as “calculation”?  As Wendy Espeland shows in her work, the challenges grow even greater when the commensurabilities are being constructed in societies in which the dominant logic is a market logic.

Ordinary language never resolves theoretical questions.  But it can sometimes suggest a moment of insight, an avenue of escape from the cognitive traps of scholastic discourse.  In common parlance we can say that someone has “paid a price.”  The revealing aspect of the phrase is that context typically indicates that the price that was paid was not calculated on market terms.  It is, nonetheless and quite emphatically, a price. Indeed, a non-market price. We hear the phrase in many domains.  Someone who acquired wealth by such disloyalty to friends that the price was dishonor.  A former colleague who accepted a senior administrative university post at the price of her academic standing.  A painter or writer who achieved celebrity status at the price of no longer being taken seriously as a creative artist.  A politician who… and so on.

So, in everyday language, “price” can be an expression that points quite directly to the very heart of the problem where differing orders of worth are somehow compared without ever being made strictly commensurable.  Such a price is not a market price; but it is a price that is identifiable.  It can and often does have a magnitude (“a big price,” “a small price”).  The timely question, in the BP case, is how can it made be quantifiable?

One alternative to the economists’ contingent valuation would be to ask respondents what percentage of BP’s average annual profits over the past decade should be paid as the price of environmental destruction.  Or perhaps it should be “how many years’ worth of profits should BP pay?”  Newspaper accounts suggest that BP’s recent annual profits are in the $17 billion ballpark.   (Reuters recently reports that “Credit Suisse estimated BP’s share of the clean up tab to as much as $12 billion, taking Exxon Mobil’s Valdez spill in 1989 as benchmark and including $4 billion of fines” [my emphasis].

An idea that I’ve been mulling over would also involve a survey technique.  It worked for the economists, after all, and has a certain legitimacy.  But it would not ask respondents to state what they would be willing to pay, nor would it prompt them to state a particular numerical figure that BP should pay.  That is, unlike contingent valuation, it would not ask people what they would be willing to pay and then use that figure as the basis for assigning BP’s damages.  Instead, they would be asked to think about something that the public is already paying for (and that, therefore already has a price). And then use these “comparisons” as the basis for assessing the damages that BP should pay.

What is it worth to restore the Gulf Coast and enact protective measures to insure that nothing like this ever happens again?  But respondents would not be asked to give any figures other than simple counts that make a comparison to something that already exists.  How many space shuttle flights would it be worth?  Two? Ten? Twenty? More?  Here, too, the respondent would not be given any figures about these expenditures.  The basic idea of the exercise is a kind of implicit barter: Point to something that people already think about as serving some public purpose and then ask how many of these is some other thing worth.  How many fifth generation fighter bombers?  Twenty, fifty, a hundred?  How many next generation aircraft carriers?

Ten space shuttle flights would be $15 billion. That’s given by the average cost per flight  ($1.5 billion) based on the cost of the entire space shuttle program.  But maybe the question should be “how many space shuttle programs?” (That program was estimated at $170 billion in 2008 dollars).  The program cost of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor has been estimated at $65 billion; and a 2009 report estimates that the Gerald Ford-class aircraft carrier will cost $14 billion including research and development.  Even with just a couple of those it starts to add up to serious money.

Alternatively, the price to be paid should not be limited to monetary penalties.  A tough prison sentence of the CEO of a highly profitable company might yet be the most effective retributive justice if the aim is not only to restore the environment but also to change the behavior of the senior executives of other highly profitable corporations.

David Stark is chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University.

Since I am blogcation, I shall not start any World Cup threads until July 1 for the quarter-finals. Please direct all World Cup comments to our existing thread here. Today’s topic: Once again, Spain doesn’t live up to promise, stumped by Swiss guard.

I’ll not be watching Barack Obama address the nation this evening from the Oval Office.  I’d like to, but there’s a six hour time difference because I’m in Paris this month on a visiting position with a very bright group around Pierre-Paul Zalio at the Ecole Normale Superieure-Cachan.

Europe gives a very interesting vantage point from which to watch the national calamity unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and in Washington.   British Petroleum’s misadventure has been a disaster, economically and environmentally.  But the response of the White House has been just as disastrous.

I don’t know what President Obama will choose to tell the American people this evening.  But the actions of his administration to date do not make me hopeful.  It was an article in today’s NY Times that prompts me to post on this topic. Speaking to fishermen in Theodore, Alabama, the president is quoted:

“Now I can’t promise folks that the oil will be cleaned up overnight,” Mr. Obama said. “It will not be.” More businesses will be hurt and people will be angry. “But I promise you this, that things are going to return to normal.”

I do understand the context: the president was speaking to people who have lost jobs and paychecks, whose livelihoods are insecure, and whose futures are uncertain.  We can only hope that their lives will return to normal as soon as possible.

But these are times, in policy terms, when things should not return to normal. Yet, I am worried that they will.

My European friends are shocked that the White House has not used this crisis to announce bold plans in the fields of energy and the environment. They look at the paltry prices we pay for gasoline, encouraging waste and destruction. They point to countries like Denmark, the largest exporter of wind turbines, and they wonder about America’s supposed technological superiority. They pity that so few of us have had the pleasure of boarding a comfortable train for inter-city travel. Yes, a pleasure: no standing in line to get a ticket, no standing in line at the security check, no standing to wait for your luggage.  On the Cologne to Paris trip, they serve a wonderful breakfast, brought to your seat, with a cloth napkin and real (non-plastic) silverware. This at a modest price for an economy ticket on a high-speed, non-polluting ride.

If the daily images of destruction on the Gulf Coast are not a wake up call, they wonder, how long will their American cousin Rip van Winkle sleep and what further environmental catastrophes will occur during our slumber?

For an administration that came to office under the banner “never let a crisis go to waste,” the White House has been worse than passive.  Instead of launching new initiatives, federal agencies were continuing old policies for more than a month after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.  Ian Urbina, reporting in the NY Times on May 24^th:

“The records indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.”

What would I like to read when I wake up tomorrow morning?  I would be hopeful for our future if the president used this speech to tell the American public that these are not normal times.  It’s not enough to clean up the Gulf Coast.  We need to steer our economy away from dependence on petroleum and make huge investments – in research, development, and infrastructure – for solar, wind, and other sustainable energy production as well as for transportation that moves us quickly and comfortably without destroying the environment.  And doing that will generate millions of new jobs.

The White House cannot control the press.  But it can set the agenda.  We should be hearing about how many new jobs will be created for every 1,000 new wind turbines erected on the Great Plains – jobs not only constructing them in “red” states like Nebraska and Oklahoma but jobs manufacturing them in “contested” states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Imagine the nightly news if new initiatives were launched immediately: after every segment with images of dying birds and ocean life, there could be a segment on the alternative energy programs.  “A National Academy of Sciences study estimates that [such and such tens (hundreds) of thousands of jobs] will be created by the administration’s new program for sustainable energy.”  After those horrible and interminably repeated images of the oil spouting from the ruptured pipe, a segment on solar power, an interview with a North Dakota wind farmer, a segment on rapid transit… This crisis is a real opportunity.

I wish we would be hearing this soon.  But I am not hopeful.  My wife and I campaigned door-to-door in Allentown, Pennsylvania for a candidate whose slogan was “Yes we can!”  Since taking office, it has seemed more like “Maybe we can’t.”

David Stark is chair of the Sociology Department at Columbia University.



Summer is a great season for guest blogging at orgtheory. We’d like to give a big welcome to David Stark, the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and the chair of Columbia’s Department of Sociology, as our newest guest blogger.  David is also the director of the Center on Organizational Innovation.  David’s 1996 AJS paper, “Recombinant property in East European capitalism,” is an org. theory classic and is a staple on any economic sociology reading list. You can download many of his papers here, or follow this link if you want to learn more about his new book, The Sense of Dissonance. ASA’s economic sociology section profiled his book in its recent newsletter.

Welcome David! Glad to have you with us.

To continue along the line of Michael Heaney’s pretty image of an issue network that Fabio posted two days ago, here’s a few other images of `ideas’ networks (rather than more common `social’ networks) from a study on American political belief systems.

Most research in public opinion and political sophistication relies on the assumption that U.S. citizens organize their political belief system according to the liberal and conservative categories. Yet not all of them do. In “Political belief networks,” a paper I wrote with Amir Goldberg, a graduate student in Sociology at Princeton, we show that there are at least two distinct ways in which Americans combine their political preferences. Namely, a first group of people, the “Ideologues”, organize their political attitudes according to the liberal-conservative ideological continuum and show very high levels of constraint between issues across all issue domains. For instance, if an Ideologue is conservative on economic issues (yellow dots) s/he is also conservative on moral (red dots) civil rights (green dots), and foreign policy (blue dots) issues.

Ideologues (Data: ANES 2004)

In contrast, members of a second group, the “Alternatives”, reject the association between economic and civil rights attitudes, on the one hand, and moral issues, on the other. As the dashed lines (which indicate negative correlations) suggest, Alternatives tend to be morally conservative and socially liberal, or vice versa (i.e., a member of this group who is pro-choice, is likely to oppose economic redistribution and the promotion of civil rights).

Alternatives (Data: ANES 2004)

These results are obtained using Relational Class Analysis (RCA), a novel network-based method that Amir has developed (more about the method here) which is particularly suited for detecting individual heterogeneity in the combination of ideas, preferences, and other cognitive objects. This analytical strategy both identifies different organizations of belief systems and classifies respondents into different groups without relying on any assumption concerning how cognitive objects are interconnected or individuals are grouped.

In the paper we show that the organization of belief systems is related in a non-trivial way to individuals’ sociodemographic profiles. While rich and religious, as well as poor and non-religious people tend to belong to the Ideologues group, rich and non-religious, and poor and religious respondents tend to belong to the Alternatives group. In general, we find that respondents’ sociodemographic profiles, particularly their income, education, and religiosity, stand at the core of the different ways in which they understand politics. When their economic interests and social identities are incompatible with the prescriptive liberal-conservative polarity (i.e., high earners with weak religious commitments), individuals gravitate toward alternative ways of conceptualizing the political debate. Alternatives’ deviation from the orthodox political view makes sense in that it effectively accommodates their otherwise irreconcilable interests and social identities.

This raises the question of how citizens define their partisan allegiances in the presence of competing interests and political views. The political debate, at least insofar as it is represented in the media, is primarily organized around a liberal-conservative framework. How do Alternatives strike a balance between their political preferences? We find that when faced with seemingly competing opinions on economic and moral issues, Americans are more likely to privilege their conservative views, and identify with the Republican Party.

To many of you these results might seem quite trivial. Indeed, all of us have come across “Alternatives” in our life (or fall in such category ourselves). Nonetheless, journalistic as well as expert accounts of public opinion and political behavior are traditionally based on considerations about single variables rather than individuals, and systematically fail to recognize the tensions actual people have to deal with in their attempt to make sense of politics. For instance, we believe that churchgoers are likely to hold conservative preferences on moral issues, and therefore lean toward the Republican Party. In reality, things are more complicated: whether church attendance translates into moral conservatism and moral conservatism translates into a preference for the Republican Party depends on the entire socio-demographic profile of the individual, as well as his/her organization of beliefs. In sum, next time you read (or argue) that rich people are Republican, and secular people are Democrats, think twice.

While in my office this afternoon, in the midst of writing my first post for OrgTheory (coming soon), I got distracted by something happening outside my window. Here we go:

NYC: Saturday, June 13 @ 5pm

It took a while to figure out what was going on, till the chant “go Green” suddenly revealed the aim of the gathering: it must have been a street celebration to honor Robert Green, England goalkeeper and US new super-hero. Or what else could it be? I haven’t seen anything else in the news recently.

We’re delighted to introduce Delia Baldassarri as our newest orgtheory guest blogger. Delia is an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she is also an affiliate with the Office of Population Research and the Center for the Democratic Study of Politics. Delia’s theoretically creative and methodologically sophisticated research is at the intersection of social networks, cognition, political sociology, and collective behavior. She addresses questions like, what kinds of social networks strengthen civil society? and how does political polarization affect American political attitudes?  Her papers, which can be downloaded here, have been published in journals like the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology.  Welcome Delia!

The US Social Forum is an upcoming political convention in Detroit and it’s shaping up to be a huge event. My research partner, Michael Heaney, and I will be there to conduct research on the antiwar movement and its connection to other policy issues. Michael asked me to post this diagram that he made, even though I’m on blogcation. It maps out policy issues according to panel co-mentions. In other words, we looked at all panels in the US Social Forum program and coded the broad policy issues addressed by the panel. Two topics are connected if at least one panel mentions both of them. Thicker lines means more co-mentions. Our issue – the antiwar domain - fairly central, but not as prominent as other topics like racism or immigration.

So, who here doesn’t love grand theories and efforts at unification?  Here’s an interesting article, by MIT’s Max Tegmark, on “The Mathematical Universe” —- an argument for an observer-independent objective reality that is “an abstract mathematical structure” (in the vein of the universe as bits/informational computation).   The article also has an interesting discussion about the relationship between computable universe and physical reality.

There’s more: here’s Figure 1.  (I am guessing that some readers might object with sociology being “derived” from “more fundamental” disciplines above it.)

It’s hard to write academic pieces well.  Getting the evidence right takes skill, time and patience.  Making sure I have the literature down and accounted for means revisiting notes taken years ago and stashed somewhere I can’t quite remember.  But for me, the hardest part of writing a paper is the framing because framing is generally about recognizing how I, and most everyone else who has tackled this problem, was wrong in some way.  In other words, just about every good piece of organizational theory written in the 20th century follows a general formula which begins by saying: organizational theorists have argued X, but I am going to contradict that to argue that Y holds instead.

After months — sometimes, years — of wrestling with an idea or a data set, finding that contradiction can feel impossible.  But it has to be done.  It’s what makes people read your work and, to some degree, what makes them believe you.  That realization came from the inevitable grad school airing of Murray Davis’s classic essay “That’s Interesting! Toward a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology.”  Murray writes:

An audience will consider any particular proposition to be worth saying only if it denies the truth of some part of their routinely held assumption-ground. If it does not challenge but merely confirms one of their taken-for-granted beliefs, they will respond to it by rejecting its value while affirming its truth. They will declare that the proposition need not be stated because it is already part of their theoretical scheme: “Of course.” “That’s obvious.” “Everybody knows that.” “It goes without saying.”

Recently I was reminded of this idea when I was reading an interview with Ira Glass, the host of public radio’s This American Life.   He was asked “what is the big pay off  for the listener in stories… “  To which he replied:

Well, if the story works, you become the character, right? You agree with their early point of view, and then when it gets shattered, you are shattered with it. So in the storytelling, you want to manipulate the evidence and the feelings so that the audience is right there agreeing with the person who’s about to be proven wrong. When that happens, if it’s done right, you as the audience get flipped upside down.

He goes on to talk about a few of the best This American Life stories about being wrong and brings up the Squirrel Cop story and their series on the mortgage crisis.  [Both well worth listening to.]  Or, there is this lovely animation of a story on This American Life which is about being wrong about being wrong.

Sometimes these kinds of switch-backs can lead to juicy interpersonal drama.  Intellectual history is rife with examples of students’ “killing the father” which is to say, publicly contradicting the theories that one’s own mentors and advisers championed.   But the sweetest examples are those rare, revelatory, instances when big deal thinkers confront and admit their own wrongness after years and decades of towing the line.

It’s all a reminder to me that, while we strive for scientific rigor in our work, the best orgTheorists are also excellent storytellers whose goal is not simply to find sociological “truth”, it is to influence discourse; to change the way people think by exposing their own intellectual struggles in a way that sheds light.  And it makes me wonder: where will the next great contradictory switchback come from in OrgTheory?

Quy Nguyen Huy reviews Paul Osterman’s book, The Truth about Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter, in the latest issue of ASQ. Huy and Osterman both believe that middle managers are understudied contributors to the business world, given their closeness to the actual work, innovation, and productive efforts in our economy. Huy’s own work suggests that middle managers play an important role in sustaining the emotional energy of an organization. Their ability to cultivate positive emotional states has a big impact on an organization’s ability to facilitate successful change. When middle managers resist change and fail to attend to the emotional states of employees, organizational change tends to produce resistance and a lack of commitment. When middle managers attend to the emotional states of their employees, radical change is embraced and is more likely to produce positive outcomes for the organization.

So research indicates that middle managers are critical components to some of the most important organizational outcomes, like innovation and change. This intuition makes it all the more surprising that most organizations have tended to de-prioritize their investment in middle management. Businesses increasingly see middle managers as expendable. The result is that managers have become less committed to and less emotionally invested in their companies. Huy summarizes Osterman on this point:

Osterman suggests that middle managers in U.S. corporations live in a “small world” that has limited horizons. Beyond focusing on their day-to-day jobs and committing to their colleagues, the middle managers he studied saw no larger purpose in what they were doing. This suggests, among other things, that middle managers are neither truly committed to their employers nor fully engaged in executing the firm’s
strategy. This fi nding is supported by Osterman’s survey of recent M.B.A. graduates, who hold a deeply cynical view of their employers.

This finding resonates with my own experience in teaching MBA students, who have already internalized the degraded image of middle managers in the corporate world. At the beginning of each quarter I ask the students to tell me where they see themselves working in 5 and 10 years after graduation. Most students see themselves working up the corporate ladder after five years, presumably in some middle management position. But after 10 years their visions change pretty dramatically.  A few say they hope to be promoted to some executive position. But a surprisingly large number of students say they’d like to be running a nonprofit or charity, starting their own business, or working for an independent investment fund. Few, if any, see themselves as corporate managers. Why is that? I think it’s because, as Osterman and Huy point out, the role of middle manager has become so degraded that it can no longer be equated with success. It’s too bad. Organizations, by making middle management expendable and by paying more and more money to top executives while not giving equivalent income increases to middle management, has unintentionally devalued one of their most important assets. It’s no wonder that new talent sees middle management as small and trivial work.

First, I’d like to thank Nick Rowland for a stimulating series of posts on the sociology of technology. Great job. Second, I’m going on blogcation until July 1. I’m prepping for the move back to Bloomington, I have a round of field work, and a high school reunion. That won’t leave time for much blogging over the next few weeks. Third, if you want to chat or meet, email me. I’ll be in Ann Arbor for the rest of June and sporadically in July. Then, I’ll be at GenCon, the Association of Black Sociologists, and the ASA meetings (see the sessions on collective action and mathematical sociology) in August. If you are at any of these events, I’d love to meet you.

I’ve been reading/skimming James Watson‘s book Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, here’s a pdf of the first chapter.  (Watson certainly is not afraid of controversy, and portions of this book are no exception.)  The book is a personal memoir of sorts, and offers some semi-entertaining “lessons remembered” at the end of each chapter.  Many of these lessons are explicitly targeted toward academics.

So, the book has…

• advice for graduate students: choose a young thesis adviser, take courses that initially frighten you, humility pays during oral exams,
• advice on how to select projects: work on big problems, stay curious, leave a research field before it bores you,
• advice on how to run a research team/dpt: run a benevolent dictatorship, hire spunky lab helpers, delegate lots, never let students see themselves as research assistants, walk the grounds, promote key scientists faster than they expect, become chairman,
• advice on personal interactions: avoid boring people and social get-togethers, read the New York Times, don’t be the brightest person in the room, use first names as soon as possible, schedule as few appointments as possible,
• advice for your free time: exercise, don’t golf, work lots, two obsessions are one too many,
• advice on where to sit during a research seminar/presentation: front row if the title really interests you, otherwise back row,
• advice on how to stay at the forefront of your field: travel, join the editorial board of new journals, stay in touch with competitors,
• advice on how to spend your Nobel prize money: buy a house,
• etc, etc.

Overall, the book is a quick and light read and has some fun nuggets of wisdom applicable to any academic.

Organization Studies sponsored a workshop last week in southern France on social movements, civil societies, and corporations. I was lucky enough to be one of the conveners of the workshop. One of our goals was to bring people together who don’t normally have a lot of conversation, either because they’re separated by geographical distance or by disciplinary or theoretical differences.  Based on that goal, the workshop was incredibly successful.  People attended the conference from all over the globe, and the theoretical perspectives represented were extremely diverse.  We organized sessions around some topics germane to contemporary social movement theory (e.g., framing and discourse, dynamics of contentious mobilization) but other sessions pushed the theoretical boundaries (e.g., hegemonic struggles and civil resistance, historical changes in corporate power).

Here is final program if you’re interested. This link takes you to a list of downloadable papers from the workshop.

Now is a good time to announce that we (Frank den Hond, Frank de Bakker, Klaus Weber, and I) are accepting submissions for a special issue of Organization Studies on social movements, civil societies, and corporations.  We’re looking for papers from diverse theoretical perspectives, empirical contexts, and methodological approaches.  You do not need to have attended the workshop to submit a paper.  The deadline is November 30th. You can find the official call for papers here. If you have any questions about submitting a paper, please contact me or one of the other editors of the special issue.

One important lesson I have learned from the recession is that mortgages are social institutions. Prior to the recession, I had always thought that mortgages were asocial – just loans, with a few quirky characteristics. Perhaps the big exception was the interest-tax deduction, which is clearly political nature. But a recent post by Arnold Kling makes me rethink this position. If you look at home mortgages across the world, you see huge variation. In fact, the more you look, the more you find that the classic 30 year mortgage is a bizarre anomaly.

For example, many Western European nations have 5-10 year mortgages. It is perfectly reasonable to have 5 year mortgages in many nations and it’s stable long as you demand a big down payment. Commenters pointed out that the only common example of 30 year mortgages is Germany, where people build high quality homes and pass them on to children. In other words, if you loosened up all the rules that encourage the classic 30 mortgage, you’d get more variety.

A second article caught my attention. The NY Times had an article a while back on an economist who thought that it was perfectly legitimate for individuals to walk away from bum properties. Corporate entities do that all the time. That got me to thinking – why do people cling to homes when they know it’s financially impossible to hang on? One reason is obviously cultural. Americans love property. It’s also political. The American state has totally bought into the cult of home ownership. There are also legal cosnequences. If you are a manager of a firm, you don’t get a hit from walking away from a mortgage. If you are individual, your credit is gone for the next 5-7 years.

I don’t think I have any deep take away point, but it might be this. We are sitting around blaming fancy wall street types for the real estate implosion. Instead, we should blame ourselves more for instituting rules that create bizarre, unweildy mortgages. Speculating on these investments is just the last step in a chain of very bad policy decisions.

Recent article in UK’s Telegraph reads

A British scientist claims to be the first human to have been infected with a computer virus after he contaminated an electronic chip which was inserted into his hand.

The implications for the future are clear enough, according to Dr. Gaston of the University of Reading

Dr Gasson’s chip, a refined version of the ID chips used to track animals, has been programmed to open security doors for him and to unlock his mobile phone automatically.

The results allegedly prove the principle that in future, human implants like this could contaminate increasingly complex medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants.

Interesting in its own right, and suppose it goes without saying that this adds another layer to Haraway’s fast-and-loose observation that we are increasingly becoming cyborgs.

The New York Times has an article on people who take out way too much money to cover the costs of leading schools. And yes, if you take out $100k+ for a fancy private school, it’s nearly impossible to back in any reasonable amount of time unless you are in a high paying professional major. Two comments:

1. The tone of the article is right. There’s a point at which this is simply insanity. An education should be a vehicle for life, not a decades long financial albatross. Especially since the evidence that we have is that college, for many folks, is really signalling. In other words, you are likely to make a lot of money, even if you don’t go to the fanciest school. You’ll be able to signal your skill one way or the other. Unless you do a technical major, college doesn’t make you more valuable. People are taking insane amounts of debt for something of modest market value.

2. The article reports an interesting fact. The *average* student only has $22k of debt. That’s the amount of a new car, which can be paid off fairly quickly. This belies a myth that the press perpetuates. They make it sound like all students leave with $100k+ loans. In fact, the opposite is true. Most people leave with modest loans because they attend modest colleges with modest price tags. College is affordable for most folks.

Bottom line: There are two college experiences in America. The elite, private college game and everything else. The first is financial suicide for all but the wealthiest, but the second is often pretty good and available to most people.

Brian Pitt, Delaware PhD student and Soc Imagination blogger, has an article on Peter Berger in Society. A few clips:

Abstract Invitation to Sociology makes known that sociology is a coherent and value-added academic discipline. In exploring the continuing relevance of Invitation to Sociology, the time is ripe to reconsider sociology as a value-added intellectual enterprise. This paper answers this question: What does sociology have to offer beyond what the humanities and its sister social sciences already provide? This paper answers this question by identifying the four elements that compose the sociological tradition. These elements are social action; embeddedness; social problems; and social construction. I argue that these elements are more pronounced in sociology than in any other academic discipline, and hence contribute to the value-added character of sociology.

Dude, I [heart] Brian Pitt. And:

Having adopted the perspective in Berger’s Invitation to sociology almost nine years ago, I simply cannot recount the number of times that I have read a piece of sociological literature and said to myself, “I will never look at prostitutes or drug dealers (or another group) in the same way again.!” Of course students in other disciplines have similar moments. Each moment is somewhat different, I contend, because the  consciousness acquired as a sociologist is somewhat different from other disciplinary perceptions. I have identified and expounded on what I—and Berger—take to be the four value-added elements of the discipline, which congeal into the unique consciousness that sociology provides. These distinguishing elements are a focus on social action; a focus on contextual embeddedness; a focus on social problems; and a focus on social construction. To be sure, these elements are seen in other academic disciplines. But, unlike other disciplines, these traditions are central to sociology. And hence, they provide sociologists with a one of a kind perspective that goes beyond what is seen in the humanities and other social sciences.

Check it out.