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If you’re interested in food and social movements, then you should check out Steven Shapin’s LRB review of a new book about the rise and fall of French cuisine. Readers familiar with Rao, Monin and Durand (2003) will recognize the first part of the storyline. Nouvelle cuisine rose to prominence as the new French style in the 60s and 70s, replacing the “cuisine classique” that relied on heavy sauces and lots of butter and cream. The nouvelle cuisine was “simpler, lighter, fresher, prettier, healthier, at once more artistic and more ‘natural’, more open to foreign inspirations, especially from Japan.” The thesis of the book, however, is that nouvelle cuisine was a victim of its own success as some of its early stars sought fame and growth over adherence to the basic cooking rules they established. France has since been replaced as the center of the cooking universe by the U.S. and Britain (of all places).

The demise is partly due to an economic shift in France, where resources are more constrained and people have become less interested in fine dining than was true in the past, but it’s also attributable to a “failure of nerve and imagination” spawned by a revision of what it means to be a successful chef in France.

[I]t was betrayed, Steinberger says, by the media-savvy chef Paul Bocuse, wrongly identified as a leader of nouvelle cuisine. The new cuisine revolution needed its Trotsky, but what it got in Bocuse was its Stalin. What Bocuse did was to erode culinary creativity by taking its human source away from the stove. He established a new conception of what it was to be a successful ‘executive’ chef: abandoning the kitchen, launching frozen food lines in France and Japan, and turning himself into a global brand. The model was followed by a younger generation of star chefs, such as Alain Ducasse.

Shapin (and I assume Steinberger) associates this conception of excellence with a horse race logic. The goal is to be the fastest growing, the biggest, etc.  Unfortunately, in their efforts to grow and dominate the market, the chefs distanced themselves from the core standards of excellence that defined their genre. The horse race conception contrasts sharply with a dog show conception of success. Dog show awards are not based on being the fastest, the biggest, or the most dominant. “Best in show” is rooted in standards of authenticity – i.e., the best representation of a type. Increasingly, foodie culture in the U.S. and other parts of the world has begun to adhere to these “best in show” standards as they seek for authentic representations of food. Here’s Shapin on the comparison between the two:

[P]art of what’s been happening in the foodie world is a rejection of the exclusive horse-race metric in favour of the dog show: very good stuff which is not necessarily more expensive, more elaborate or more innovative, but which is truer to type. It’s not a matter, as Voltaire said, of the best being the enemy of the good; what’s at issue are different conceptions of what is good and what is best – whether the beagle that loses a race with a whippet is necessarily an inferior dog.

I think this is a fascinating distinction, which probably has relevance to industries outside of cuisine as well, especially other cultural industries where authenticity matters.

A few weeks ago, I bought “playmobil 5878″ from a toy store in Ann Arbor. I thought it was really cool that you could buy a social protest action figure at a regular toy store. Later, I found that toy web sites call this “police and bandit.” Maybe. But look at the following photos from the Toronto Star, which covered recent G20 protests. A specter haunts the European toy business, the specter of anarchism!

When people argue about academic tenure, they tend to rely on simple and often inaccurate ideas. The reasoning is sloppy. For example, blogger Megan McArdle wrote that

“Lifetime drycleaning”?  “Permanent tax advisor”?  When an academic starts pushing the tenure model for anywhere outside academia, I will find their defense of its use in academia more convincing.

The implication is that tenure only exists in the academy. This is incorrect. The truth is that tenure is rare, but it does appear in a number of circumstances outside of higher education.

Let’s start with a simple definition of tenure: you have tenure if you have de facto life time employment in an organization; you can’t be fired or laid off unless you are in gross violation of your contract or the organization is in dire financial straights; this is usually achieved after some probationary period. So, then, what industries have tenure for employees? I’ll stick to the US, since that’s what I know.

• Public education (teachers, not administrators)
• American civil servants
• Professors – both public and private
• The Roman Catholic Church
• Law firms with “partner” systems
• Architecture firms with “partner” systems
• Private medical practices often have partner systems

It is true that most private sector work is not organized as tenured employment. But there are significant private and public sectors that have tenure. In many cases, these are voluntary choices and not mandated by government. Law firms were not forced into the partner system. You also can’t blame tenure on government subsidy that forces private institutions into the tenure system. For example, most Ivy League schools had de facto tenure systems in the 19th century, and there’s no evidence they were forced into it by the rise of public land grant schools.

I don’t know the history of the law or medicine well enough, but my guess is that the examples above are all about professional control of work. These are all groups of people who do not want professional managers and owners to determine what happens at work. In higher education, we don’t let donors or MBAs determine who gets promoted. So we let the insiders do it. Same with the church, law, and medicine. They don’t want stockholders or middle management to have ultimate power in their profession. So they set up organizations as “colleges of peers.” The tenure and partner system may be economically inefficient, but that doesn’t mean that it’s crazy or can’t appear in a market economy.

Getting back to Megan McArdle, you can see the error in her example: “Permanent tax advisor.” Tenure doesn’t mean that you personally would have a permanent tax advisor. just as academic tenure doesn’t mean that you have a permanent teacher. It means that a tax advisor would be a permanent member of an accounting firm. And guess what, Megan, we have those – they’re called partners!

I supported the stimulus package, but agree with the likes of Ryan Avent that the problem with Obama’s stimulus was that it was not only poorly executed, but that that execution is rooted in a systemic problem:

A country committed to stimulus will take care to prepare to use stimulus. It will construct a system of automatic stabilizers that provide immediate counter-cyclical aid as an economy deteriorates. It may have a backlog of needed infrastructure projects at the ready, which can be rushed into action as conditions warrant. A country generally skeptical of stimulus, on the other hand, will reach for it in an emergency and find that it is unprepared. Automatic stabilizers will be too small and will require constant Congressional maintenance. Too few projects will be shovel-ready. The need to legislate will lead to inclusion of pork items that aren’t particularly stimulative. Stimulus will be less targeted, timely, and effective as a result.

My take for some time has been that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are no more pro-Keynesian than Greg Mankiw or other detractors of a stimulus approach.  And, just as it was a bad idea  to have a government with a distaste for government running major a government operation like the response to Katrina (i.e., G.W.B.), it has been a problem having economists running the response to the crisis who are implementing a Keynesian approach while quietly holding their noses.  Which brings me to Martin Wolf’s insightful post on how the politics of supply-side economics have influenced modern thinking both among Democrats and Republicans: Read the rest of this entry »

Previous grad skool rulz.

Get the entire book – Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know about Academia from Admissions to Tenure – for only $2. You can read it on personal computers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads, and smart phones.

Maybe you got a job. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just decided academia isn’t for you. Regardless, there comes a time when you have to complete the dissertation and move on with your life. This is how you do it.

1. Tell your adviser and other faculty mentors that you are ready to finish up. This usually comes up around the time you accept a job offer. If you aren’t going into academia, you will want to have a heart to heart with your adviser. Your professor may not be ready to let you go, but be firm here. If academia isn’t your career goal, there’s no point in wasting time. Just politely say, “I have chosen another career path and I would like to complete my degree before I do so. Can you help me out? What do I need to do?” Repeat as necessary.
2. Go to the graduate chair and/or secretary and ask for the university, college and dept rules concerning dissertations. You should have gotten the written rules by now, but if you haven’t get them.
3. Ask about the informal norms of the department and discipline. Ask recent grads and profs.
4. Prepare a complete draft of your dissertation. Nothing succeeds like success. People will have to graduate you if you submit a competent and complete document, even if it’s imperfect. And if you are a control freak, just let it go. By this point, the dissertation is a pedagogical exercise. Just get it done.
5. Give every committee member a complete document, or as close to it as you can. Do this about 2-3 months before you need to file your dissertation with the university. It should also be at least a month or so before the dissertation defense, if your university has one.  Directly ask them: “I would like your feedback.” Get this feedback in writing.
6. After about a month or so, gather all written and oral comments and make a long, detail memo explaining how you responded to every comment. Then, give the revised & complete document to everyone again, a few weeks before they have to sign off and/or have the dissertation defense.
7. Most universities, though not all, will require a committee meeting to discuss the quality of the dissertation and approve it. Start scheduling this about 1-2 months before it needs to happen. Faculty are traveling and have conflicting schedules. It can be tricky to get everyone in the room, or on the conference.
8. If you have a defense meeting, then you show up and give a summary of your research. That will be followed by Q&A. If you gave everyone the chance to write comments, there will be little surprise by this point. If you wait to the last minute to give the dissertation, there may be surprises. You will be asked to leave the room. There will be a discussion. When you come back, you will be asked to revise the document. The final revisions are usually negotiated between the dissertation director and the PhD candidate.
9. If you don’t have a meeting, then you usually have each faculty member sign off individually. Just make an appointment and get their feedback. If you get conflicting instructions, just ask your chair and it’ll get cleared up.
10. Once the final document is settled upon by student and chair, it must be submitted to the library. Yes, that’s right. The library. For the rest of eternity, your dissertation will be available to scholars. With ProQuest, it can be downloaded, just like any book.
11. For that reason, the university will not let you graduate until the library has accepted the document. Therefore, you should take at least 3-4 weeks before the deadline just for formatting. Weeks? Yes. Libraries are very, very fussy. They will reject your document on details like margin width, paper quality, and footnote format. They want all documents to look the same. You can do it your self, or pay someone to format it. Either way, it’ll take a few weeks to get it all right.
12. Since dissertation submission is very fussy, many university libraries or graduate schools will have an office where you can have the document examined. Take your dissertation in a week before or so. Thus, if you have to fix something, you have time. DO NOT WAIT TILL 3pm ON THE LAST DAY.
13. You’re done. Get a life.

Sample time line. Let’s say you settled on a job around Feb. 10.  Here’s what graduation may look like for you:

1. Feb 15: Thank your advisers and raise the issue of filing your dissertation.
2. Mar 1: Start settling on an approximate time for filing. Say June 1.
3. Mar 30/April 1: Start giving sample chapters, or the whole dissertation, to the committee. Start negotiations for dissertation hearings.
4. April 21: Give revised document w/memo to everyone.
5. May 1: The hearing happens. They ask for some final edits.
6. May 10: Your adviser gives the final sign off.
7. May 17: Bring the final, final document to the library/graduate office.
8. May 21: You get a phone call saying you screwed up the margins. You have to redo the whole document.
9. May 25: You stay up all night and reformat the whole thing and bring it in. They take it.

As you can see, it’s a very legalistic process. So prepare and give yourself time. Especially in “long clock” disciplines that aren’t used to quickly graduating people after the job search.

Dissertation defenses:

1. The dissertation defense is a European ritual. The idea back then was that anyone could challenge your work in public. So some departments have public defenses still. People show up. Often your friends and family show up. Other department members show up, etc. In modern times, many universities have private defenses. It varies.
2. The modern defense tends to have the same format. Before the meeting, they have a 10-20 minute discussion of the work. Then you are invited into the room. At that point, you usually give a summary of the research.
3. After the summary, the faculty speak. Sometimes, it’s critical. Other times it’s friendly. Let them talk. Often, the chair takes notes, as does the student. Usually the discussion starts with the shortcomings of the work as discussed in private. How would the student fix these problems? How does this dissertation push a scholarly agenda? If it’s public, the chair will allow interested audience members to ask questions. Unless they are a specialist in this area, people rarely ask questions.
4. About an hour later, the chair summarizes the discussion. In modern times, people rarely “fail” the dissertation hearing. Usually, you are done or you have to do revisions, which can sometimes be extensive. Either way, you’re good. The revisions are essentially a contract that says “if you do what we ask, you are done.” Congratulations, doctor!
5. Failure: Even though I’ve never been witness to this, dissertation defenses sometimes go very, vary bad. The cases I’ve heard of usually fall into a few categories. Unseen flaws: If you are doing some sort of very technical work, someone may spot a logical flaw that undermines the whole project. For example, if you are a math student, a flaw in your proof may be spotted in the defense hearing. Goodbye super cool theorem. Shoddy/Rushed Work: The other case is that you didn’t show your work to the committee and you never had a chance to work out the problems. In that case, they are justified in keeping you back. It’s true that dissertations are imperfect student projects. But it’s also true that they must meet the minimal standard of competence in science. If it is just badly done, you can fail. Mean advisers: Some professors seem to enjoy torturing graduate students and tanking them in hearings. No matter how good you are, they will throw up their arms and claim that you haven’t done anything.
6. Countering failure: The “unseen flaws” scenario is the easiest one to work with. Yes, you’ll graduate a little later than expected, but you will finish. Just take the summer or the fall to work on another project, or remedy the problem in the current project. You’ll be be done. If you rushed the job, it’s your own fault. Period. By this point, you should have gotten feedback from multiple advisers.  You should have given them copies of the work a month or two before hand. So gather up your energy and do things the right way. If you prepare and work hard, you’ll be done. If you have a mean adviser, who just sprung on you, then you will need to be extremely patient. Have multiple meetings with the person. Get everything in writing and revise your dissertation. Send out the revisions to all people on the committee. Get advice from the graduate chair. You can usually deal with the mean adviser with sun light. If everyone knows that you have done all humanly possible revisions, then they will likely over rule the chair and let you graduate.

What if people don’t want to graduate you? There are departments where people take forever to graduate. Rather than seeing the dissertation as a student exercise, it has to be perfect and groundbreaking. So they make students write these endless documents. Other departments are wracked with apathy. Even if you produce the document, professors can’t be bothered to read or respond. In each case, get the rules, follow them, produce chapters, and get feedback.  In all cases, document everything and show that you did your best. If people refuse to budge, then you can justifiably approach the chair/graduate dean for grievance and advice. “Look, I gave everyone my revisions and nobody has said anything in 8 months. Help me. What do you think I should do?” In most cases, a well documented grievance can give the chair or dean something to work with and you will get done.

Overall, finishing the dissertation is usually pretty routine. Most of the time, you do the work, they tell you to revise and you are done. But it helps to know about the whole process. You don’t want to pay another semester of tuition because you formatted the dissertation incorrectly. And of course, if there’s a rough patch, you’ll know how to come up with a solution.

A quick break for a link from a Deadline.com junkie. NY Mag has an interesting short piece by Mark Harris on the massive lobbying effort behind the recent prohibition of movie futures trading (sought by Cantor Fitzgerald, which owns Hollywood Stock Exchange, an internet trading game):

Game over. Or, more precisely, “Attempt to turn game into non-game in which your irrational exuberance about Taylor Lautner could actually bankrupt you”—that’s over.

Harris also points out the “quaint accounting eccentricities” of net profits participation (the topic of a recent kerfuffle on Deadline, worth a look too). Mark Weinstein has argued in the Journal of Legal Studies (1998:68) that:

“Net profits,” as used in Hollywood to define a contingent compensation contract, is unrelated to “net profits” as defined by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. “Net profits” is a contractually defined term, the meaning of which is well understood in the industry.

But it’s clear from the comments among industry watchers on Deadline that only some folks understand this alternate meaning, and to be fair, Weinstein acknowledges that defending net profits is “the second-easiest way to start a fight at a pool party on the west side of Los Angeles.” Unusual alliances, insiders’ frustration with defending and explaining practices to outsiders, commensurating artistic production– all the makings of really great cases to discuss with students. I like to use Olav Velthuis’s Talking Prices in my economic sociology course for exactly this reason, but given that students’ knowledge of the contemporary art world is limited, I’d love for someone to give Hollywood– and Taylor Lautner‘s $7.5 million abs– the economic soc treatment (building on existing legal studies/comm work or not).

So… anyone out there who shorted Inception? (Which you could not pay me enough to see, as long as we’re talking prices.) I know Dave Grazian is working on reality tv and neoliberalism. Any great work on the film industry that works well with students? And what is the easiest way to start a fight at a pool party in west LA?

June and July have been orgtheory heaven for me, in large part due to our guest bloggers. We’d like to thank David Stark and Delia Baldassarri for their excellent stints as guest bloggers. Their posts have been fascinating and always fun to read. You can find all of David’s posts here. All of Delia’s posts are here.

If you’re interested in how Gladwell creates these tsunamis, check out this article in Psychology Today. Personally, I think the backlash against Gladwell is a little much. Yeah, he could be more careful when constructing his overviews of scientific research, but if he were too careful he would be boring to read and the general public would stop reading. If he became a boring writer, the public  would know no more about social science than they did before Gladwell. The problem isn’t Gladwell; the problem originates in a reading public who doesn’t have the time or interest in reading nuanced scientific studies with findings based on probabilistic outcomes. Gladwell has just figured out the best way to write about scientific research for this audience.

Former guest blogger, Vermont prof, and RWJ fellow Ed Walker has a Contexts podcast on activism. Recommended.

Lab in the field setting... (Uganda, summer 2009)

Behavioral games are abstract situations in which individuals have to allocate resources between themselves and other players and allow to study strategic interdependence in decision making: participants have to take into account the objectives and strategies of the other players. For instance, in the Public Goods game each player is allocated an endowment (i.e., 10 coins, generally corresponding to a consistent proportion of a daily wage), and must decide how much of his endowment to keep in his personal pocket and how much to put in a group pot. The total amount donated to the group pot is then doubled and redistributed evenly among all the players. For the individual, the optimal strategy is to give nothing and “free-ride” on other players’ contributions to the collective fund, while the most profitable outcome for the group is that all players contribute everything.

Differently from what a rational choice model would predict, experimental results have shown that in the first round of a public goods game players contribute, on average, between 40 to 60% of their endowment. Although cooperation in real life occurs more often than a rational choice approach would suggest, most economists did not consider observational evidence sufficient to assess between egoistic and altruistic models of human behavior, because in real life (seemingly) altruistic/non-selfish behavior can always be explained as covertly oriented to increase one’s reputation, psychological well-being or being enforced by internalized social norms and fear of social sanctions. Indeed, it was experimental evidence coming from behavioral games to put in jeopardy the micro-foundation of the rational choice approach by documenting people’s predisposition to reciprocity, cooperation, and altruism in completely anonymous settings.

I have to admit that my first reaction to experimental literature was: “only an economist would need laboratory experiments to realize that selfish motives are not the only drive in human behavior.” Nonetheless, I am grateful that these games have been developed, since they represent an extremely useful tool for social science research, as I had the chance to experience first-hand in my current research on farmer organizations in rural Uganda.

In collaboration with Guy Grossman, a graduate student in political science at Columbia University, I conducted a quite innovative research that combines experimental evidence from behavioral games played in the field with social networks information and observational data. The research involved more than 3,000 farmers and local leaders from 50 farmer cooperatives through Uganda. Goal of the research was to understand how producer organizations in development countries solve classic problems of collective action. The study focuses on the role of social and spatial networks, associational capital, and leadership accountability in affecting economic and social outcomes.

To give you a sense of how behavioral games added to our study consider the following example. One of our hypotheses was that leaders’ accountability and their willingness to monitor and sanction non-cooperative behavior greatly influences group outcomes. Unfortunately, this hypothesis is hard to test relying exclusively on observational data, because of selection and measurement issues. Thus, to capture the role of legitimacy and the effects of a centralized sanctioning system we designed a novel adaptation of the public goods game in which players were randomly assigned to three different conditions. The first condition (baseline), simply replicates 6 rounds of a conventional public goods game. In the two other conditions, after two preliminary rounds of play, one of the players was selected out of the session to become a monitor endowed with sanctioning power. The monitor could spend 1 coin to take away 3 coins from players whose contribution level he disapproves. In the second condition (random monitor), the monitor was selected through a random lottery, while in the third condition (elected monitor) the monitor was elected by the players using a secret ballot. Results, reported in the figure below, suggest that in the presence of a centralized sanctioning system, players significantly increase their contribution to the public good: in both elected and random monitor conditions players contribute more, on average, than in the baseline. Moreover, the process of monitor selection is consequential: elected monitors are perceived as more legitimate and thus exert a greater authority.

Average contribution in the Public Goods game

Interestingly, we find that behavior in games is related to real life economic performance: the more productive members of the farmer organizations (namely, those who sell their crop in bulk through the organization) give higher contributions in the elected monitor condition, thus suggesting that centralized sanctioning and leader legitimacy are relevant factors in explaining organizational outcomes. This finding shows that behavioral games can be used not only to capture underlying behavioral tendencies common to all human beings (or profound cultural differences across societies) but also to measure differences between individuals (or groups) that derive from their individual and group experiences. In this respect I think lab in the field experiments that incorporate behavioral games into socially meaningful settings are an interesting addition to the social science research (out of the lab) tool-kit.

I was reading Dorothy Height’s memoir this spring and was struck by how often Height’s work for the National Council of Negro Women was tied up in financing, acquiring, managing, and transferring buildings, from NCNW’s first headquarters and Mary McLeod Bethune’s last home, the Bethune Council House, now owned by the National Park Service, to the current offices at 633 Pennsylvania Ave. Both NCNW buildings are loaded with symbolism, and both were problematic for the organization. Height struggled to keep the grand Victorian home on Vermont Avenue as a HQ for a growing organization, while dealing with a fire and an extensive restoration– resolved by sale to the Park Service for $632K in 1991. The purchase of the latter in 1995, initially put on the market by Sears for $21 million, required indefatigable networking, extreme creativity, and the “corporate citizenship” of Sears, First Union Bank, Ford, Chrysler, and GM.

The space that Height devotes to describing her own and others’ work on these properties is comparable to that spent discussing Wednesdays in Mississippi– these places for the work also clearly required collective organizational work. That wouldn’t be so remarkable– think about the sheer amount of time homeowners spend talking about upkeep and remodeling headaches (says a glazed renter)– but what I’d like to draw attention to is the deep meaningfulness of the organizational work buildings require.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the Boston Review, Claude Fischer reviews The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, a recent book about inequality and its effects. Standard fare if you know the inequality literature, but worth reading. Fischer hammers home the main point. Finding smoking gun evidence of the link between inequality and outcomes can be pretty hard:

One concern is how we measure inequality. Researchers often use a measure of the distribution of income—usually, the “Gini coefficient”—or compare the income of the richest 10 or 20 percent of the population to that of the poorest 10 or 20 percent.

But different metrics produce different results. Good and comprehensive measures of inequalities in accumulated wealth rather than annual income show much greater inequality: in 1999 an American family at the 80th percentile of income made about two times what a family at the 50th percentile did, but the family at the 80th percentile in wealth owned about six times the assets of the 50th-percentile family. On the other hand, good and comprehensive measures of consumption indicate less inequality: a family at the 80th percentile of spending paid only 1.5 times as much for food and clothing as did a family at the 50th percentile. American families almost all the way down to the very poorest own cars, televisions, and the like, and some commentators point to such consumption numbers to dismiss the concern about income inequality.

And

Grant that inequality is often correlated with bad outcomes. Is inequality therefore the cause? With overly bold claims such as, “we have shown that reducing inequality leads to a very much better society,” Wilkinson and Pickett assert that there is more than a correlation here, that inequality is a—perhaps the primary—cause of bad outcomes such as violence, short lives, repression of women, psychological depression, and so on. Here is where most of the academic controversy focuses: is there some other factor that is really at work, such that income inequality is just a side issue? Researchers have put much of the data Wilkinson and Pickett use onto statistical torture racks trying to extract truthful confessions, but often elicit only garbled croaks.

And this is daming:

One recurrent issue in trying to explain any causal factor concerns the geographical level at which inequality operates. In the research literature, the strong correlations between inequality and bad outcomes tend to be seen when comparing nations, but when researchers compare smaller units, towns or neighborhoods, the connection between inequality at the local level and outcomes is considerably weaker. This is puzzling for the psychological analysis: wouldn’t people be more psychologically affected by their neighbors’ wealth than by the wealth of folks far away, say, in Malibu or on the Vineyard? The authors firmly argue that, no, what matters is where you—and your neighbors—fit in the national hierarchy; people know their national rank, and that is what generates the angst. Perhaps.

Definitely worth a read.

My collaborator, Michael Heaney, is helping to organize a networks conference & training session next summer. Here are the details:

“4th Annual Political Networks Conference and Training, June 14-18, 2011

Please SAVE THE DATE on your calendar for the 4th Annual Political Networks Conference and Training to be held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, June 14-18, 2011.

The Conference and Training will be held at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and will be organized roughly as follows:

TRAINING June 14-16

June 14: Conceptual Introduction to Network Analysis (Beginner level) June 15: Computer Applications in Network Analysis (R, Siena) June 16: Specialized Topics in Network Analysis

CONFERENCE June 16-18

June 16, 5pm: Keynote Address and reception June 17: First day of panels, plenary address, poster session June 18: Second day of panels, plenary session, business meting

Read the rest of this entry »

Some years ago, when they were little kids, my children developed a hybrid game.They’d taken their Monopoly board over to a friend’s house.  They’d remembered to bring back the board, but they’d forgotten the houses and hotels.  What to do?  So, they started to use Lego building blocks in place of the houses and hotels.  But, with the Lego pieces offering more affordances, they immediately began to construct ever more elaborate structures.  Even when the Monopoly pieces were returned, the Legos were much preferred and they played it again and again that year while they were first-graders in Budapest. Was it Monopoly? Was it Legos?  It was “Legopoly.”  Over time the rules evolved away from bankrupting one’s opponents and toward attracting customers to the plastic skyscrapers that towered over the Monopoly plain.

The story of my kids’ recombinant game was relegated to a footnote in my book, The Sense of Dissonance.  The context is a story about a friend who had played Monopoly as a kid back in the communist era by turning over the officially sanctioned game “Economize Wisely” and drawing out the Monopoly real estate from memory. But because they then made their moves on the capitalist game with the communist pieces, the game evolved in interesting directions.   It seemed like an apt metaphor for the postsocialist transformations: not playing on the ruins of communism but playing with the ruins.  In Eastern Europe at that time (and still in some parts of the former Soviet Union) actors were not playing by just one set of rules but within several.

But the two stories are not just metaphors.  Although they are quite literally “toy versions” of a model, they can be taken as actual cases of rules co-evolving and new games emerging as agents play in simultaneous multiple games.  In social life, such multiple games are not that uncommon, as we frequently encounter situations in which there are multiple rules operating according to heterogeneous principles of valuation.  How will game theory tackle these questions?

In sociology, Norton Long made the first significant contribution in his 1958 classic, “The Local Community as an Ecology of Games” AJS 64(3), and John Padgett and his co-authors have since developed that notion in a series of important articles.

At a conference some years ago, I told game theorist Adam Brandenburger that I hadn’t paid much attention to game theory but that I would when it gave serious treatment to the problem of strategic action in multiple games. Although game theory might have many agents and strategies, there was always only one game (or pay-off function).  Adam sent me a copy of paper, “The power of paradox: Some recent developments in interactive epistemology” and I saw that these issues were starting to be addressed.

Two recent articles show that it is indeed time to pay attention because game theory is now grappling with this problem head-on. In “Co-creating Games: A Co-evolutionary Analysis”  (available here), Jason Potts and John Banks do important conceptual work with a model that includes an analysis of a massively multiplayer game. Santa Fe Institute colleague, Scott Page and co-author Jenna Bednar offer similar insights but from a more technical perspective.  See their “Can Game(s) Theory Explain Culture?:  The emergence of Cultural Behavior Within Multiple Games.”

In my reading, each paper still lacks a sociologically robust concept of identity.  But these are important papers.  There is no reason that economics should have a monopoly on game theory any more than that sociology should have a monopoly on multiple games.   Our work as sociologists and theirs as economists will be improved when more of us are making simultaneous moves in each of the others’ games.

In their 2009 City & Community article “The Missing Organizational Dimension in Urban Sociology,” Michael McQuarrie and Nicole Marwell argue that urban sociologists should pay attention to the insights of org sociology and stop treating formal organizations as “derivative rather than productive of urban social life.” While focused on “the role of organizations in urban structuration,” the authors suggest that org sociology also has something to learn from urban scholarship on the study of place and the relationship of orgs to their geographic environments.

I’m going to take Mike and Nicole one step further and propose that we think more deeply about the relationship of organizations to their immediate physical environments. When sociologists talk about architecture with respect to organizations, they are usually speaking metaphorically, but organizations also have a built landscape in which all those structuring routines and practices take place. Buildings are the containers in which most organizational life happens, but they are also much more than that, and urban sociology has a lot of tools that can help us think through the multivalent role of architecture and the built environment in organizational life (symbolic, historic, aesthetic, economic, social, political…).

Of course, org scholars have not ignored place or architecture, with Christopher Marquis looking at local community influences, Judith Blau looking at architecture firms, and Beth Duckles and others studying green buildings and the LEED certification system. Additionally, there is plenty of attention to companies’ strategic management of real estate portfolios, and all kinds of institutional actors in the housing industry are suddenly under the microscope. But I think the more prosaic questions (of where organizations conduct their actual work, how they get there, how they deal with property maintenance and organizational growth, and how the shape and history of particular buildings influences what goes on within) are really interesting, in part because we are all intimately familiar with the tensions between the simultaneous meaningfulness and seeming intractability of our workaday surroundings. Or maybe I’m the only one whose office is in a basement? If not, please empathize below. More to come, but first: any favorite org pieces that come to mind on this subject– or thoughts on the larger intersection of urban/org sociology? Feel free to brag about your own urban/org work (Sean)!

If you loved our earlier post on Steve Jobs humor, you’ll love this video.

Russ Roberts had a nice podcast with Johanna Blakley, a scholar at USC who studies technology, fashion, and entertainment. In the middle of the talk, Blakley makes a very interesting point about fashion and intellectual property. The fashion world has virtually no property rights. You can copyright patterns, but you can’t copyright or patent clothes. Basically, anyone can reproduce any piece of clothing ever made. The consequences:

• The lack of intellectual property has not led to a demise of creativity in fashion.
• The opposite is true. If you can recycle the entire history of fashion, you get an amazing amount of creativity. There’s no limit to mixing and matching.
• People maintain their status by doing things in very, very specific ways in clothes. In the same way that singers make their mark by tone and delivery, designers make clothes that are hard to reproduce.
• Knock-offs: There are knock-offs. Firms will quickly create cheap knock-offs of famous people and intentionally make it look off – think “almost Mizrahi.”
• Famous designers copy from people off the street. May firms send trend spotters to hip neighborhoods.

What I learned from the podcast is that you don’t need intellectual property rights to have a booming industry. The fashion world example seems to support intellectual property right critics who think intellectual property actually suppresses economic growth. What do you think?

Previous grad skool rulz.

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These notes were prepared for sociology graduate students. As usual, please adjust for the standards in your own discipline.

The job talk is an example of public speaking. Here are some tips on how to improve your job talk skills and public speaking more generally.

• Do not improvise your talk. Prepare an outline of the talk. If it helps, write out the talk in its entirety.
• How to organize your talk I: Start the talk with the main point. Example: “Scholars tend to think X, but my analysis of the GSS shows that X is not true.” Do not “surprise” the audience by not telling them the major point of your talk.
• How to organize your talk II: Job talks usually have (a) an introduction where you tell the audience what your research is about and what you have proved, (b) a section motivating your research – the “who cares?” part of the talk, (c) a middle that is the “meat” of the talk – your hypotheses, data, etc. (d) conclusion talking about what you might do in the future. Of course, not every job talk conforms to this outline, but if you don’t know what else to do, this will be ok.
• Attitude: When you give your job talk, be enthusiastic and confident. People want to hear about your talk. Show them that you care.
• Practice your job talk: A research presentation is like performing music – you have to practice to do it well.
• Practice I: After you write a first draft of the talk, practice in front of a mirror and use a clock. Your talk should be 30-45 minutes.
• Practice II: Eliminate the “ums” and “ahs.” Practice so that you speak clearly.
• Practice III: Try not to hide behind lecterns, tables, etc. Speak directly to the audience. Look directly at the audience.
• Practice IV: Do at least one or two practice job talks. Get feedback from people. Did I communicate my point clearly? Did I speak clearly? Were my visual aids confusing or helpful?
• Practice V: In addition, to practice talks in public, practice at home. Practice the entire talk so many times that you have the talk almost memorized. Practice until you are sick of the talk. I practiced my job talk (about 35 minutes) about 30 times – no exaggeration.
• Visual aids: In general, I recommend against using visual aids. They distract the audience from what you have to say. However, it’s ok to use a few visual aids to summarize the main points, present a picture or a table of regression results.
• Back up visual aids: It’s often a good idea to have extra slides. During my Indiana job talk, Pam Walters asked me a question and I pulled out an extra transparency that had the answer. Consider your visual aids to be tools, use the right one for the right job – but have the tool box handy in case you need extra help.
• Be yourself: If you are funny, it might help to say something funny. If you are serious, then don’t try to be funny. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right.
• Rude interruptions: Sometimes people will interrupt your talk. If you can answer the question quickly, do so. Otherwise, say something like: “That’s a good point. I would like to answer your question at the end of the talk.” If the person just doesn’t stop, then let them ramble and signal to the moderator that you need to continue. In some cases, you can’t do much except let the person go on.
• Questions I: People will often ask tough questions. Fortunately, you can prepare for them. Here are some common questions in sociology job talks. Write down and practice your answers: “Why is this sociology?” “Isn’t this obvious?” “Hasn’t this been done before?” “What did X have to say about this?” “Why did you omit my favorite variable?” “Your method is completely wrong.” “How does this relate to –my favorite topic-?”
• Questions II: Sometimes people ask good questions that are really hard. A few hints – write the question down, ask for clarifications on the question, admit that you don’t have a complete answer, find a related topic that you do know about. If the question was a true baffler, you could also email the person and say: “Nice question this afternoon. I’ve had some time to think and my opinion is…”
• Questions III: Write down questions and look at the person when you answer. This will show that you are engaged.
• No matter what: don’t lose your cool!! Be in control, even if somebody gives you a hard time, just smile and say that they have great questions. As one person says, “loss of control=loss of job.

The nice thing about the job talk is that it is the one thing you can control the most. So be prepared and enjoy the experience.

As Omar’s foodie comment suggests, many scholars see resource mobilization theory as one of those tried-and-true theoretical perspectives that really can’t offer many new insights. It’s been around a long time, and many a social movement paper has used RMT for theoretical guidance. McCarthy and Zald wrote their 1977 treatise as an attempt to crystallize emerging concepts that the new structuralists, like Tilly and Oberschall, were already empirically examining. Social movement theory has since been heavily influenced by that paper. You can barely find a social movement analysis that doesn’t somehow grapple with the basic notion that movement dynamics can be explained by their access to certain kinds of resources. Have we reached the point where RMT is stale and ready for retirement?

In short, no. RMT is nowhere close to being stale. In my mind scholars have barely scratched the surface of the RMT goldmine. If you don’t believe me, go back and read M&Z again. Forget everything you think you know about the theoretical perspective, and pay attention to what they actually say in the article. Many of their propositions are related to social movement industries (SMIs), those collections of movement organizations that work around similar political and social issues. Most social movement research examines one or two campaigns, ignoring the broader SMIs in which those campaigns are embedded. Most social movement theory is thoroughly case study-oriented, whereas M&Z call for more comparative studies of aggregated campaigns. M&Z encourage scholars to examine the historical changes in society that leads to transformations in SMIs. Thus, most of their propositions require more longitudinal data than most movement scholars currently use.

Take some of the propositions from their paper.

• The greater the absolute amount of resources available to the SMS [social movement sector] the greater the likelihood that new SMIs and SMOs will develop to compete for these resources.
• Older, established SMOs are more likely than newer SMOs to persist throughout the cycle of SMI growth and decline.
• The more competitive a SMI (a function of the number and size of the existing SMOs) the more likely it is that new SMOs will offer narrower goals and strategies.
• The larger the SMS and the larger the specific SMIs the more likely it is that SM careers will develop.

Note to grad students interested in social movements: M&Z is a rich source of theoretical propositions! While a few scholars have tried to test the propositions directly (e.g., Sarah Soule and I specifically examine the effects of SMI competition and SMS discretionary resources on specialization within SMIs), we still have few systematic analyses at the SMI level. It’s not as if it’s been completely ignored (e.g., Minkoff’s research on the women’s movement), but there is still  untapped potential in RMT.  For example, we still know little about how societal resources affect fluctuation in SMI emergence and adaptation. Similarly, besides Minkoff’s work, there has been little theoretical development about the relationships between SMIs (e.g., competitive and cooperative relationships between SMIs). For more about the potential of RMT to address unexplained movement phenomena, see Minkoff’s and McCarthy’s 2005 Mobilization article.

My prediction is that RMT will be with us for a long time.

Over at our evil twin, Nicolai Foss covers the Weick/Basbøll  dispute. In passing, he says that “sensemaking has a distinct pomo connotation.”  What’s post-modern about people interpreting things? Isn’t that psychology 101? If Nicolai is correct that creating meaning and value is post-modern, then economics is just one calculus drenched homage to Derrida. Isn’t economics based on the subjective theory of value? Commodities don’t have  intrinsic value, people assign them value, which is an example of … sensemaking. Bet you didn’t know the AER was a Straussian crypto-celebration of Lyotard.

In his Theory of Valuation (1939) John Dewey makes the following observation:

“[W]hen attention is confined to the usage of the verb ‘to value’, we find that common speech exhibits a double usage. For a glance at the dictionary will show that in ordinary speech the words ‘valuing’ and ‘valuation’ are verbally employed to designate both prizing, in the sense of holding precious, dear (and various other nearly equivalent activities, like honoring, regarding highly) and appraising in the sense of putting a value upon, assigning value to. This is an activity of rating, an act that involves comparison, as is explicit, for example, in appraisals in money terms of goods and services.”

Thus, in addition to market pricing, Dewey points out that valuation can also occur through prizing, suggesting that, in addition to market competition, valuation in modern economies can occur through organized (or semi-organized) competitions.  While awaiting Wendy Espeland’s new book on ratings and rankings, I briefly discuss how tests and contests interplay with ratings and rankings, and then point to some promising new research on the sociology of competitions.

Rankings, an ordinal list, can result from tests or from contests. Start with contests, and take first the forms in which competitors play against each other. The score in such a contest indicates which player (team) performed better (earned more runs or goals, ran faster, jumped higher) against another or others on a given day. The score of a soccer match is the result of a direct, head to head competition.  And the aggregation of these scores (in, for example, win-loss records) results in rankings – whether it be a soccer league or of all the professional tennis players or of all the Grand Master chess players in the world.  Note that in such contests there are referees and timekeepers but not judges. Technology contests (e.g., solving the problem of determining latitude on the open sea, building the fastest computer, the lightest airplane, robotic cars on ever-more challenging terrain) operate according to similar principles.

But there is another kind of scoring in contests where judges are involved.  Contestants do compete with each other in a given event at a given time.  But the scores, from which rankings are derived, indicate the degree of conformity to some set of relatively standardized criteria for evaluating performance.  Think of Olympic sports such as gymnastics, with their indices of “technical” and (contested) “artistic” scoring.  In a sense, these are contests organized around more or less simultaneous tests.  In principle, judges are not supposed to be ranking the performers directly but, instead, should be rating them according to how well they pass the set of tested performance criteria.  Thus, in contests organized around tests, rankings result from ratings.  These can be the averaged scores of several judges (e.g., various Olympic sports), the aggregations of scores across multiple judges (e.g., cumulative grade point averages), or an aggregation or index of the scores of a single judge across several evaluation criteria (e.g., rankings by critics in technology fields such as software, or think of FICO scores and bond ratings).

Contests in grant and fellowship competitions (e.g., most consequential, in terms of budget expenditures, grants competition at the National Science Foundation) frequently mix scoring a la tests with head-to-head agonistic competition (see Michele Lamont).  In such a mixed system, judges, juries, or “scientific review panels” use scoring procedures (“rate this candidate”) to produce a “short list” of finalist competitors, frequently available at the outset of their face-to-face meeting.  Jurors typically confer that this is merely a “provisional” or “rough ranking.”  The subsequent head-to-head competition directly comparing finalist proposals frequently overturns the initially-scored “rankings.”  It is telling that panelists often refer to this moment of agonistic competition as “agonizing” work.

The mixed character of grants and fellowship competitions also points to an important feature of certain types of competitions:  the selection criteria guiding the judges are not given at the outset but emerge during the jury’s deliberations.  Such is frequently the case in architectural competitions, as Kristian Kreiner demonstrates in a series of exemplary studies.  At first glance, the evaluative principles governing the jurors’ decision seem to be fixed at the outset: they are established in the “program,” the brief specifying the problems that the architectural design must solve.  But the various features of the client’s desiderata are frequently contradictory:  not all can be optimized or even harmoniously satisficed.  Indeed, as Kreiner shows, the greater the elaboration of multiple performance criteria, the more likely the winning entry will ignore the program, with aesthetic principles trumping other evaluative principles in the jury’s decision.

More importantly, Kreiner examines, in detail, the processes and practices whereby jurors (and hence clients) use the entries to learn more about the actual problems that can be solved and the operative principles for assessing a successful performance. What seems to be a case of analytic problem solving turns out to be a situation of interpretation (see Lester and Piore). Architectural competitions are an example of Dewey’s pragmatist approach through which we discover our principles for evaluation in the action of valuation. They are a social technology for exploration in the search when we don’t know what we are looking for but can recognize it when we find it.

Fred Block, over at UC Davis, forwarded me this announcement about a recent conference on relational sociology. The papers look exciting and I hope to see the special issue soon. Two came from our good friends Nina Bandelj and Fred Wherry. Here’s the announcement:

“Relational Work Conference, UC Davis

On May 1^st, 2010, a workshop was held at UC Davis under the sponsorship of Politics & Society and the Graduate School of Management on the concept of relational work in economic sociology.  The idea was to explore using the concept of relational work as developed by Viviana Zelizer and Charles Tilly as a tool for analyzing a wide range of different market situations.  The papers explored performance circuits, egg donation, university-industry collaborations, governance of internet commons, the government’s role in the commodification of land, and sub-contracting relations in heavy industry.  The plan is to revise the papers for subsequent publication in Politics & Society. The following papers were presented:

• Nina Bandelj,  UC Irvine,  “What Work Can Relational Work Do For Economic Sociology?”
• Viviana Zelizer,  Princeton, “How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does that Mean.”
• Dina Biscotti, UC Davis,  William Lacy, UC Davis,  Leland Glenna, Penn State University, and Rick Welsh,  Clarkson University, “ Constructing ‘Disinterested’ Academic Science: Relational Work in University-industry Agricultural Biotechnology Research Collaborations.”
• Aaron Shaw, UC Berkeley,  “Relational Work as commons governance: distributed informational production, moderation, and filtering at Daily Kos.”
• Frederick Wherry,  University of Michigan,  “Zelizerian Performance Circuits in the Marketplace.”
• Jennifer Haylett, UC Davis,  “One Woman Helping Another:  Family and Motherhood in Egg Donor Narratives.”
• Nathaniel Freiburger, Nicole W. Biggart, and Thomas D. Beamish,  UC Davis, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Toward an Understanding of the Relational State.”
• Sarah Quinn, UC Berkeley,   “Securitizing Social Relations.”
• Josh Whitford,  Columbia University,  “Waltzing, relational work and the construction (or not) of collaboration in manufacturing industries.”

Other participants included Nicole Biggart and Fred Block, UC Davis,  Matthew Keller, Southern Methodist University, Magali Sarfatti Larson, Temple University, Stephanie Mudge, UC Davis,  Marian Negoita, UC Davis,  Leslie Salzinger, Boston College, Andrew Schrank, University of New Mexico,  Michael Peter Smith, UC Davis, Valery Yakubovich,  University of Pennsylvania.”

Me: female comparative sociologist w/ seasonal laptop burns, likes fieldwork on the beach, fanny packs… Hi everyone and happy summer! As an avid reader of orgtheory with a raging case of manuscript-induced cabin fever, I love what the guys have created here and am thrilled to be blogging this July/August. My current research involves a few projects relevant to readers of this blog, so prepare yourselves for org brain picking about those and other things on my mind. I’m also mildly obsessed with the political cultures of commenter communities, so I hope in addition to sharing some of my summertime fixations to spark some serious and not so serious commenting.

Just to get things started and raise the stakes a bit with fabulous prizes: My brothers are in the mail order food business. This means that, in addition to having logged many hours shipping grits to Alaska, I happen to fancy culinary analogies. One of my favorites: “civil society is the ‘chicken soup’ of the social sciences” (Rosenblum and Post 2002:23). What other food analogies can you dream up for particular scholarly preoccupations? Include a brief explanation. A delicious can of boiled peanuts for the best entries posted in the comments, to be bestowed at ASA in Atlanta or by ground service to the AOM crowd. The perfect locavore complement to section reception cheese cubes!

Here’s mine, in honor of Bastille Day and the Marquis: If civil society is the chicken soup of the social sciences, then deliberative democracy is the cassoulet of political theory—a rich, messy stew of folk origins whose consumption often has more to do with patriotic experience than everyday sustenance. Bonus analogy for those facing the market this fall: C. Wright Mills has become the mayonnaise of teaching philosophy statements in sociology—a bland but obligatory condiment that’s best in small quantities.

We’d like to welcome Caroline Lee as our newest orgtheory guest blogger. Caroline received her PhD in 2006 from UC-San Diego and is now an assistant professor of sociology at Lafayette College. Her research draws from political sociology, social movement theory, and economic sociology. Her AJS article, “Is There a Place for Private Conversation in Public Dialogue? Comparing Stakeholder Assessments of Informal Communication in Collaborative Regional Planning,” won the 2008 outstanding article award for the Collective Behavior and Social Movements section of the ASA. Her recent research focuses on the professionalization of advocacy/activism and the privatization of democracy. You can find a complete list of Caroline’s publications here.

We’re glad to have you join us Caroline!

Who do you write like? Enter a few paragraphs of your text in this website’s analysis engine and it’ll spit out a famous author whose writing yours closely resembles.  It turns out that one of my papers is written in the style of Isaac Asimov. In another paper I am Vladimir Nabokov. Having Lis as a coauthor must have brought the Nabokov out of me.

It turns out many sociologists’ writing resembles the prose of H.P. Lovecraft, whose guiding literary style was “cosmic horror” and who is associated with the subgenre weird fiction.

Ben Casnocha got in trouble for saying that liberals were giving tacit support to the war in Afghanistan by not actively protesting or complaining. Justifiably, the commenters criticized Casnocha. Many liberals do vocally oppose the war in Afghanistan.  But there is a kernel of truth behind Casnocha’s comments: the ferocious and highly vocal antiwar movement has pretty much shrunk from view, much of it has to do with Democrats not showing up anymore.

So let’s start with some basic facts:

• Polling data shows a decline in support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade. For example, a CNN poll from May 2010 shows that 62% of respondents want the Iraq war to end. The Polling Report collects poll results from various organizations and you can read this page on Afghanistan. Except for the Fox polling outfit, most report over 50% for “oppose the war” (CNN) or “not worth fighting” (ABC news).  Presumably, these percentages against the Afghanistan war would be higher for self-identified Democrats.
• Many liberal organizations, such as Moveon, have publicly opposed both wars, as have numerous liberal and  political Democratic leaders.
• The organized antiwar movement has collapsed. My collaborator and I have been studying antiwar protest since 2004. We have found that (a) the size of protests has drastically shrunk and (b) the % of the crowd that is democrat has drastically decreased. Here’s the previous post (“democrats dump the antiwar movement“). This will appear in the journal Mobilization in early 2011.
• Antiwar organizations have experienced severe reductions in contributions and other forms of assistance in the period following Obama’s election. For example, UFPJ, a leading antiwar organization, has converted itself mainly to an online presence because of severe budget problems.

The bottom line: People oppose the wars, but it simply isn’t a priority. People in general, including Democrats and liberals, oppose the war but they have stopped showing up to antiwar rallies, they’ve stopped giving money to antiwar groups, and they have stopped putting pressure on Democratic politicians to stop the war.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. Perhaps it is just partisanship. To some degree this is true. My survey data, and other polling, suggests that Democrats are more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Obama. Another reason might be that Democrats oppose the war in general, but feel that Obama’s specific policies are good. If you look at the Feb 2010 Newsweek poll, you’ll see that respondents think Obama has the best policies for Afghanistan (46%), at least when compared to Congressional Republicans (27%). Third, other issues may have simply displaced the war. The economy and health care reform are pretty important and they directly affect more people than the wars.

Over at Scatter, Andrew asked about a classic issue in network theory. Is influence really asserted through the tie, or is it really just correlated personal characteristics? Does Brayden influence me because we know each other, or because we tend to think the same things because we are both cool dudes?*

Brendan Nyhan sent me a link a few weeks ago addressing this issue. Here’s the summary of a working paper by Cosma Shalizi and Andrew C. Thomas:

1. Influence or social contagion: Because they are friends, Joey’s example inspires Irene to jump. Or, more subtly: seeing Joey jump re-calibrate’s Irene’s tolerance for risky behavior, which makes jumping seem like a better idea.
2. Biological contagion: Joey is infected with a parasite which suppresses the fear of heights and/or falling, and, because they are friends, Joey passes it on to Irene.
3. Manifest homophily: Joey and Irene are friends because they both like to jump off bridges (hopefully with bungee cords attached).
4. Latent homophily: Joey and Irene are friends because they are both hopeless adrenaline junkies, and met through a roller-coaster club; their common addiction leads both of them to take up bridge-jumping.
5. External causation: Sometimes, jumping off a bridge is the only sane thing to do:

Check it out.

* It’s just an example, Brayden. Calm down

Previous grad skool rulz.

Get the entire book – Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know about Academia from Admissions to Tenure – for only $2. You can read it on personal computers, Nooks, Kindles, iPads, and smart phones.

This post was originally written for graduate students in sociology. The advice applies to other fields, with suitable modifications. E.g., many fields have short interviews at annual conventions during the winter break. Sociology’s job market happens in the fall, so there are no Christmas time interviews.

Initial Remarks: The job search process is harrowing for academics. Unlike other professionals, such as doctors or lawyers, there is little guarantee that a person completing their terminal degree will land a job teaching and doing research in their area. At a top medical school, the question is if you will get the residency of your choice. At a top graduate program, it’s often doubtful that someone will be offered a job at all. Despite this difficult situation, I believe that you can prepare yourself and greatly improve the chance that you will get an academic job. What follows are my opinions on junior level academic job searches, with an emphasis on sociology.

Question 1: Should I go on the job market?

Answer: You get 1 point for each “yes” to the following questions. The more points you score, the better prepared you will be for the job market. As usual, adjust for your field. For example, in short clock fields, where you leave after 4 years, you probably won’t have the chance to publish much.

• Have I finished my dissertation proposal?
• Have I completed the data collection for my dissertation?
• Have I completed at least one polished chapter of my dissertation?
• Do I have more than one chapter of my dissertation completed?
• If I get a job, can I complete the dissertation by the summer before I have to start?
• Do I have a published article in a reputable refereed journal?
• Do I have multiple articles?
• Are any of those articles in the top journals?
• Do I have a book contract? (this often counts for two points)
• Do I have the support of my committee? (counts for multiple points)
• Do I have teaching experience? (counts for more if you want a liberal arts position)

Of course, you should always consult with your committee so that everybody is aware of your progress and you are get feedback on your writing. If you have published an article, make sure your committee knows about it. If you have decent drafts of some dissertation chapters, make sure your committee sees them.

I also note that few people can answer “yes” to the all of the questions. But you need to have *something* going for you.

Question 2: When should I think about the job market?

Answer: In sociology, the job market starts in September. So start thinking and planning the spring or summer before the market. As you will see, there is a bit of paper work, so it behooves you to plan this ahead of time. Many fields have job markets that take off during the winter, so you have to start planning everything in the fall.

Question 3: How does the job market work? Once again, written for sociology. Adjust for your own field.

Answer: It goes something like this…

1. In the spring, summer and fall, department chairs and deans will make decisions about hiring. If they decide they need people, they will advertise in the ASA job bulletin and other forums. Some departments will “scout” at the ASA meetings.
2. Applications are due in the fall. Many are now due in late August, September and October.
3. Your application has to have a cover letter, a CV, writing samples and 3 letters of recommendation. Work on these during the summer, so it’s ready to go in the fall. There are books that give great advice on cover letters and the rest of the paperwork. Ask your committee for help as well.
4. The search committee first weeds applications based on very broad criteria by about 50%. This is based on school reputation, research areas and other easy to observe factors. Then applications are weeded by what the department really needs or wants. This produces a “long short list” of 15-20 names. The “short list” is created after close scrutiny and reading. Then people argue over who to invite for a face to face interview. This happens in Fall and early winter
5. The candidates are flown out to the campus. Usually, 2-3 candidates per position. You have to give a research talk and meet people so they can see what you are like. It’s very personal at this stage. The visit includes a “job talk” – which is a 30-45 minute presentation of your research in a public forum.
6. After everybody interviews, the department makes a final choice. Sometimes they don’t get the first choice and will go after second/third choices. This process can take many months. Some departments will choose not to hire people.

Question 4: How do I write a cover letter?

Answer: It’s pretty standard. Your letter is addressed to the search committee or department chair, as listed in the advertisement. The first paragraph explains who you are and what job your are applying for. “My name is Fabio Rojas. I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago and I am applying for an assistant professor position at Indiana University as listed in the ASA bulletin.”

For research intensive schools, the next two or three paragraphs explain your research and publications in terms that people in your discipline can understand. A little self promotion is ok. Mention publications in fancy journals, or that you won dissertation of the year award. Don’t mention people who endorse you (“My adviser is highly regarded XX.”) The next to last paragraph should mention teaching, For teaching schools, it’s the reverse. The big chunk of the letter is about teaching experience. Research accomplishments are second. Overall, cover letters are about 2 pages, sometimes 3.

Question 5: How do I prepare my self for an interview?

• Be prepared. If you are prepared, then you will be relaxed and you will give a better impression.
• People will ask you predictable questions. “What will you teach?” “What will you do after your dissertation?” Prepare some answers. These are obvious questions.
• Learn about the dept. you will visit. Read the web site, look at some papers published by faculty. I’m always fascinated by what other people are working on.
• Be nice. Even if you have an intellectual disagreement with someone’s research, be open and generous when you meet them.
• Humor and demeanor: Be “vanilla” – don’t swear or be sarcastic. Your friends may find you funny, but somebody who doesn’t know you might find your jokes raw and wicked humor off-putting.
• Never badmouth anybody. If someone asks you a question about a professor you hate, like: “I heard Professor X is awful.” Simply say, “Professor X has always been kind and generous towards me.” Or if you can’t say that without hysterically laughing, say, “Professor X’s research is really admirable.”
• Be honest. It’s better to emphasize your good points rather than mislead. If you hate math, don’t say you can teach regression. If you think post-modernism is for the birds, don’t say you’ll teach cultural sociology. Just move the conversation towards your strong points.
• Appearance: You don’t need an Armani suit to succeed but wear nice clothes. Have them dry cleaned. Make sure they fit. Guys should wear jacket and tie. Ladies should wear blouses. In our modern age, the ladies can wear slacks. Have your hair and nails cut, brush your teeth, etc. Simple things go a long way. Trust me.
• Other etiquette. Use common sense – be nice toward people, don’t get drunk during social events, take a real interest in others.

Question 6: See the next grad skool rulz (#26).

Question 7: Bad situations. Sometimes interviews have awkward moments. For example, in the real world, some people will make sexual advances towards others or engage in some form of harassment. If the behavior is mild, it’s probably best to ignore them. Life has bad moments you have to endure. If it’s more serious, then you should definitely say something like, “I don’t think that’s appropriate.” If the behavior is really off the wall, feel free to contact the department chair or to consult with someone you trust. It’s often the case that boorish behavior is part of a larger pattern, and others will know how to handle it, or at least make things tolerable until the end of the interview. The key is to get help and not let things get out of control.

Question 8: Success. After the interview, the department will decide who will get a job offer. This is out of your control – once you’ve completed the interview, it depends on budgets, personalities and other factors. In some departments, the chair makes final decisions and in others, committees make the decision. In most cases, the offer has to be approved by the dean or some other academic manager. The department chair usually does the work of contacting job candidates and formally offering the job. An offer consists of:

• A position (assistant professor, associate prof, etc)
• Salary
• Equipment (computer, transcriptions devices, etc)
• Eesearch assistance (money or assistants)
• Other goodies (summer support, course releases, research funds, etc.)

Get this in writing! You can negotiate a lot of stuff and ask for more, but you might not always get it. Ask your committee and other job seekers what the market will bear. Get everything in writing. You usually have a few weeks to a month for negotiations. When you are done negotiating, sign the contract and mail it back. Now finish your dissertation!

Question 9: Failure. Sometimes you fail to get a job – and this is a real possibility in the academic market place. Unlike the other professions, there are relatively few academic employers and excellence in research does not always translate into success. There are two possibilities you must consider:

• You have done everything right but suffered bad luck. This is quite common. The average academic job seeker only has two or three interviews and gets a single offer. This single opportunity could be thwarted by events beyond your control. An unexpected budget cut could mean your job was eliminated at the last minute. Maybe there is an unexpected conflict over the hire. There are a million other reasons you don’t get an offer – and you will never know why!
• You are screwing up. This is also a real possibility. Ask yourself how you might have given a bad impression or otherwise made a mistake. Here are some common errors: (a) poorly prepared/delivered job talk; (b) you are no where near completing your dissertation and everybody knows it; (c) you are rude towards people when you visit and they are insulted – this is quite common; (d) your research is hard to sell; (e) you are “packaged” incorrectly – for ex, your committee thinks you are God’s gift to quantitative research but you barely understand regression; (f) you flubbed basic questions such as what you will teach and what your future research will be like. Fortunately, most job search mistakes can be fixed and you will improve your odds the next time around.

Overall, the academic job search is a dragged out, often arbitrary process. The bright side is that you can still prepare and fix your mistakes if things don’t work out. You do have a great deal of control over what happens to you.

1. Slate reviews penalty kick research.

2. Chiaporri, Levitt and Groseclose’s paper arguing that penalty kicks display mixed strategy equilibria.

3. Using network theory to analyze passing patterns in football matches.

4. Puyol’s grabbed Robben, thus depriving the Dutch of an upset. Was that an example of rational cheating?

It’s common for people to address missing data by imputing missing data in the independent variables and using the amended data in a regression analysis. In a regression analysis, it’s ok to do because the covariance matrix from the imputed data is supposed to resemble the original data.

Question: Is it good or bad to impute data for descriptive analysis? In my case, I want to build a paper around a series of comparisons/t-tests. Should I stick with the original survey data or impute? The reason I am favorable to imputation is that the survey has 200 cases and the comparison group is about 25% of the sample. Thus, even a few missing cases will result in a loss of precision.

A couple of years ago Gordon Smith and I had a paper published in the Arizona Law Review that imported insights from organizational theory to legal scholarship on contracts. Although the article has yet to make a big splash, I still think the potential is there for organizational theory to have a big impact on corporate legal scholars. The reason is that law professors are borrowers. Legal scholars don’t come up with their own theories of the social/economic worlds. For the most part, they have looked to economics to guide their thinking in corporate law, but as we saw following the recent financial crisis, even the most ardent participants in the law and economics movement have had doubts about the viability of this orthodox tradition. The time is ripe for the borrowing of new theories.

Imagine that a group of corporate law profs got together to read organizational theory. What would you recommend they read? Here are a few suggestions:

• The classics of course.
• There is a lot of great work in the economic sociology of law that has yet to seep into the corporate law literature. I’m thinking of Edelman’s work on the ambiguity of law and organizational compliance; Suchman and Edelman on the normative and cultural aspects of firms’ legal environments (in particular, see Edelman’s 1990 AJS piece on the indirect effects of law); and Dobbin and Sutton on the normative role of the state in shaping corporate policy.
• Agency theory has largely guided legal scholarship on corporate governance. OT’s contribution is to examine the limitations of agency theory in explaining executives relationship with shareholders. In particular, I recommend Westphal and Zajac on the symbolic management of shareholders and their related work on board independence and CEO power. Their work demonstrates why some of the solutions to agency problems touted by economists don’t work like you’d expect.
• Organizational scholars have recently been interested in alternative forms of corporate regulation, including private certification systems as a means to control firm behavior. I recommend Bartley’s work on the political construction of private certification systems; Vogel’s essay on why private regulation has emerged to make up for the deficiencies of global and national regulatory regimes; and Dobbin and Dowd and Fligstein on the effect of anti-trust and other kinds of regulation on the competitive strategies of firms.

As I wrote this, it occurred to me that much organizational theory is useful to legal scholarship because it shows the unintended consequences that legal changes have on corporate and executive behavior.  What other recommendations would you make? Feel free to post them in the comments.

While prepping to teach a graduate seminar in classical theory seminar a couple of years ago, I decided to buy this edited volume featuring a series of Durkheimian scholars dealing about the role the notion of “representations” played in his work.

This is one of those Routledge hardback-only deals that is only of interest to a small audience of cognoscenti, which means that you can only find it for exorbitant prices at the usual used book sites.  The price was indeed exorbitant, but I decided the shell the big bucks anyways (as opposed to a lot of edited volumes, this one was actually worth it).  The seller said that the book in good condition, and the pages were generally all clean except for some writing in the first page.  I remember seeing that the book indeed had some writing, but it only consisted of some sort of note written by a person who bought the book and obviously sent it to somebody else as a gift or something.  I didn’t pay too much attention to it at the time.  The note in the first page is shown below.

When I picked up the book again a couple of months ago it struck me this scribble might actually be more significant than I first realized.  I don’t want to proffer any grandiose theories here, but I submit to you that the writer (“Bill”) is William S. F. Pickering (the book’s editor and a well-known Durkheim scholar and founder of The British Center for Durkheimian Studies) and the intended recipient (Bob Jones) is not a third-generation hellfire and brimstone evangelist, but the equally renowned Durkheim scholar Robert Alun Jones.  Since I now own the book, either Prof. Jones wasn’t very impressed (which I doubt because the chapters are great), or he figured (correctly) that there was a good market for these kinds of hugely overpriced limited edition books among suckers like myself (other scenarios are of course possible, maybe involving a forgetful Professor lending his book out to a starving grad student).

A few weeks back, Robin Hanson wrote an article about the nature of violence among early humans. Like many folks in the evolutionary camp, Hanson examined ethnographic data on isolated, tribal societies to get a sense of what early humans might have been like.

In reading his post, I became uneasy with the key empirical argument – that isolated tribal societies are a reasonable, though imperfect proxy, for early humans. On its face, plausible, but on deeper reflection, open to criticism. Here’s why:

• A key feature of humanity is mimicry and adaptation. Humans are unique in having an extremely well developed ability to learn from each other and develop very deep reservoirs of knowledge.
• A second feature of humanity is sociality – we tend to create these large amorphous social systems. At first, through kinship, but later through other institutions.

The early human population is diffusionist and expansionist. This is reflected in what anthropologists believe to be true about the relatively speedy spread of many institutions like agriculture. Social groups link up through trade and cross marriage. So when anthrpologists find a secluded foraging society, the first inclination is that they must have been refugees from some bigger society.

So here’s the criticism of the primitive society as early human proxy hypothesis: If you are still isolated and foraging after all this time, you are a statistical outlier and you were probably never like the norm, even millions of years ago. It’s like thinking that a dwarf is just like a child because of an observed lack of height. The lack of height is a sign that the person is not biologically average. Similarly, if a group is still isolated and foraging, isn’t it a sign that they aren’t typical? Isn’t there some massive selection going on if a group just refuses to adopt institutions and culture from other groups?

Question: Why don’t we see more economist/sociologist co-authorships? I was thinking about the Venkatesh/Levitt gang papers. It’s hard to find other good examples. In my own life, it’s puzzling – I’ve worked with sociologists, political scientists, physicians, computer scientists and even an English professor. Yet, no economist has ever offered to work with me, even though they’ve been more than happy to read papers and give advice.

Before you laugh it off, consider the benefits:

• Sociologists have lots of great ideas that just beg for formalization and testing.
• Sociologists are much better at gathering data than economists – we’ve do surveys (e.g., GSS, NELS), ethnography, case studies, and historical work. As Levitt found out, we’ve got some rockin’ data.
• Sociologists are willing to consider formalization: network analysis, stochastic models, game theory, QCA are all formal methods that have traction in the field.
• Economists are very good at formalization, which sociologists are just bad at.
• Economists have been moving into non-market topics for years. I bet that many would find sociological ideas fun as well.
• Economists tend to more insistent on inference issues, even though soc journals do publish the occasional identification oriented paper.

A few reasons for the barrier:

• Hostility: Economists think sociologists are morons (Greg Clark has said so in public). Sociologists think economists are idiot savants who overstate what they know.
• Language barrier: Economists refuse to work with people who don’t buy their rational actor model, which means that it’s a no-go from the start.
• Professional penalties: Perhaps this is just a version of hostility, but maybe sociologists or economists would be punished for publishing in the other field’s journals. It might be considered the kiss of death for junior faculty to work with people in the other field.
• Division of Labor problems: A lot of papers are written when one person has an idea and the other person has technical skills. Perhaps the average sociologist simply doesn’t find the economist tool box useful, or vice versa. The soc and econ skills aren’t complementary.
• Geography: A lot of co-authorship emerges when people have offices next to each other. Maybe the disciplines are just too separate on campus. At Berkeley, where I did my undegrad degree, econ was in the same building as statistics and math. At Chicago, they were in the same building as soc, but on different floors and people rarely spoke to each other. Recently, econ completely moved out of the social sciences building. At Indiana, I have only had interactions with one economist, who chaired a dissertation that I consulted on.
• Misperception: Maybe each field has an outdated view of the other. A lot of economists have essentially abandoned math heavy models and now do applied stats, which is really close to what many sociologists do. Similarly, maybe economists think sociology is all about Habermas and Foucault and that sociology has no place for economic arguments. For example, in that Greg Clark op-ed, he makes it sound like sociology departments are 100% radical Marxists. A quick flip through any journal shows that is not the case.
• Trade imbalance: Economists are used to imperializing other fields. Really absorbing sociology means importing ideas and maybe economists are not used to that. I bet it goes the other way. Sociology is used to exporting ideas (e.g., networks, social construction) and not used to importing.

Any other thoughts?

Robert Putnam and Jeb Bush have an editorial in the Washington Post today arguing for more coherent — and embracing — approach to immigration.  They draw on a theme I also touch on in my book.

A century ago, religious, civic and business groups and government provided classes in English and citizenship. Historian Thomas P. Vadasz found that in Bethlehem, Pa., a thriving town of about 20,000, roughly two-thirds of whom were immigrants, the biggest employer, Bethlehem Steel, and the local YMCA offered free English instruction to thousands of immigrants in the early 20th century, even paying them to take classes. Today, immigrants face long waiting lists for English classes, even ones they pay for.

I figure if Fabio can plug his book, then I can too.  In Chapter 4 of Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, I talk about the differences between how immigrant workers were treated in Bethlehem and Youngstown.  In both places, local elites saw the arrival of new immigrants as a threat.  But they defined the threat differently.  In Bethlehem, the threat was seen as the break down of community.  And so business and civic leaders took action to create bridges to immigrant groups (largely through religious outreach: that is, through organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association).  This had the effect of forging ties both between the elites and the working classes and among the various ethnic immigrant communities that made up the working class.

Elites in Youngstown interpreted the threat, not in terms of community, but in terms of elite’s interests.  And so their approach took a different form as well:

The connections among founding families forged through their economic, civic and neighborhood ties led elites in Youngstown to circle the wagons against the new arrivals.  The strategy that emerged to deal with the threat was essentially divide and conquer.  By controlling settlement patterns through their control over real estate, [Youngstown's] founding families fragmented the city’s new immigrant working class into separate ethnic enclaves, a strategy later reinforced by the law-and-order and obviously racially and ethnically divisive approach favored by the Ku Klux Klan.  Ethnic differences among early northern European settlers subsided as salient sources of identity; class interests were forefront in the minds and actions of various groups in [Youngstown region].

It seems to me that we continue to face this choice and Bush and Putnam are (explicitly) advocating for the approach that prevailed in Bethlehem.  History is on their side, as the differences between these two communities turned out to be very important in the long term.  The cross-cutting ties that Vadasz discussed laid the ground work for far more cooperative relationships with labor unions and, indeed, much more control on the part of business owners over Bethlehem’s unions.  The divide and conquer approach in Youngstown sewed mistrust both among workers and, certainly, between workers and company managers.  In the short term, the differences were stark: the Little Steel Strike of 1937 turned violent in Youngstown with dozens of pickets killed.  The strike largely missed Bethlehem and, in general, labor relations and social order were far calmer there.  More importantly, in the long run, the integrative approach that prevailed in Bethlehem made that community far better prepared for the demands of a global economy than Youngstown has proven to be.

(P.S., the BBC has been doing a series on the revival of the US Rust Belt, including a segment on Youngstown).