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Today I ran across this beautiful paragraph from an American Political Science Review article (1963) by Peter Blau:

In general, a situation of collective dependence is fertile soil for the development of authority, but its development is contingent on judicious restraint by the superior in the use of his power. If he alienates subordinates by imposing his will upon them against their resistance, they will obey only under duress and not freely follow his lead. If, on the other hand, he uses some of his power to further their collective interests, the common experience of dependence on and obligation to the superior is apt to give rise to shared beliefs that it is right and in the common interest to submit to his command, and these social values and the corresponding social norms of compliance legitimate and enforce his authority over them, as has been noted. In brief, coercive power and authority are alternative forms of social control, which are incompatible, but which both have their roots in conditions of collective dependence (313).

Blau is in fine form here. The paragraph is rich with testable propositions about authority, none of which he actually investigates empirically in the article. I identified the following implied propositions, but there may be more.

• Groups with greater member interdependence will have higher levels of authority legitimacy (i.e., shared beliefs of the rightness of a superior’s command).
• Superiors who exercise power against the will of group members will lose the legitimacy of their authority.
• Superiors who sacrifice to provide collective benefits for the group will enhance the legitimacy of their authority.
• Both of the above effects are moderated by group member interdependence.

I’m teaching graduate social theory again this semester, and I ended up taking a hatchet to the syllabus. This time round we’re looking at things more thematically than chronologically, because I decided I didn’t want to be doing the History of Ideas all the time. Comments, suggestions, incoherent grunting, and bitter laughter at the sad, sad, state of the field are welcome.

The Organization and Management Theory (or OMT) division of the Academy of Management has a blog.  And orgtheory’s very own Brayden is the editor (chair/or something equivalent).   The latest post is an interview with Jane Dutton, University of Michigan.

It’s great to see the OMT division blogging.  I know there are active discussion boards and email listservs within the Academy of Management, though I believe this is the first AOM division with an official blog (though I haven’t checked, probably some dormant ones out there).  I’ll definitely be linking to any interesting content.

So, for what it’s worth, I think there are two keys to blogging nirvana — these points came up in my comments during the AOM blogging session that Chris Marquis and Andy Hoffman organized in Montreal a few weeks ago: 1) lots of semi-interesting content (with an emphasis on lots), and 2) “voice” and having an angle.

I don’t think “institutional” blogs/bloggers are in any way hampered in terms of ensuring lots of content, but I do think that institutional blogs definitely are a different type of animal altogether when it comes to voice.  Institutional bloggers are obviously acting in a role, and this role tends to set boundaries for the types of things these bloggers can and do post about (for example, probably no ferret posts — hmm, that’s a good thing, perhaps orgtheory needs an institutional affiliation), there are expectations in terms of professionalism, tone and voice, understandable problems with any type of evaluative content or strong opinion, etc.

For the above reasons many institutional blogs often turn into message boards (listings of conferences, special issues, links to papers, advertising etc), which obviously serves an important purpose (and as readers know, we also do our fair share of this type of posting).  But I think it is also important to, somehow, build in some mechanisms (or whatever) that allow for voice and perspective, some kind of unique angle.  (Undoubtedly the new OMT blog will find novel ways to do this.)  So, what are good examples of successful institutional blogs (perhaps ASA’s Contexts)?  Which institutional blogs do you follow regularly and what specifically makes them successful?

I was recently watching What We Want, What We Believe, a massive 4 DVD anthology of rare video and audio materials related to the Black Panther Party (BPP). What We Want has two fascinating interviews with former FBI agents who tracked and meddle with the BPP. There’s interesting stuff to be had in the interviews. M. Wesley Swearington worked for the LA “race unit” in the FBI, whose job it was to follow and disrupt radical, and many not so radical, black political organizations. Swearington helped BPP defense lawyers discover massive troves of files that documented the extensive surveillance and infiltration of the BPP. William A. Cohendet worked in the San Francisco FBI office collecting data and writing extensive reports on the BPP.

Observations, in no particular order:

• The bureaucratic structure of the FBI makes it very easy for individual actors to maintain plausible deniability. Only certain agents have access to certain files, files are detached from each other, information is distributed across networks, agents may not know which other agents are collaborating with other agencies, etc. While most agents almost certainly knew what was going on in some broad sense, only a few elites really had a sense of what the entire picture looked like. Thus, it is fairly easy to convince yourself that *your* actions weren’t that important to the whole affair.
• Self-selection: The FBI established a “race unit” to follow black political groups. This is not the same thing as investigating particular crimes. This was a political surveillance unit. Also, one of the FBI officers insisted (unsurprisingly) that race unit agents were highly racist. That’s another lesson: repression requires specialization and attracts people who are emotionally attached to repression. Perhaps this is a rejection of the banality of evil hypothesis.
• Lax legal rules facilitate repression. There are numerous instances where law enforcement repressed political groups with arrests based on flimsy evidence.* Once courts get into the habit of accepting evidence that would be rejected in a freshman rhetoric seminar, it’s not hard to repress people. The example that stuck with me – Los Angeles BPP leader Geronimo Pratt was convicted for murder and the only evidence was testimony from someone who was not there. Unsurprisingly, the court vacated the conviction when it was revealed that the main witness was an FBI informant.
• The Black Panthers were a delicate organization. In the Cohendet footage, the interviewer is dismayed when he insists that the BPP would have floundered even without the FBI infiltration. I agree with this assessment. The leaders often had criminal records before they became political activists. The FBI harassment was sometimes minor, but it lead to bitter, sometimes violent, disputes.** The BPP was simply a group incapable of resolving its internal problems in a constructive way. Given what I know about them from reading both the friendly and skeptical literature on them, I’m convinced that the BPP had a short shelf life from the start.

If this is your topic, the interviews are worth tracking down.

* BTW, I am not knocking all police arrests. There were clearly some folks who were violent and need to be locked up.

** Interesting example: The FBI had a habit of circulating slanderous flyers and spreading rumors about various BPP activists. One of them targeted a woman in the New York BPP chapter. When told about this many years later, she reported that she was  indeed ostracized, but had no idea why. She had never seen the flyer about her. This surprised me. Who would abandon their friend because of a nasty flyer found on a subway or park bench? Wouldn’t you show the flyer? If that’s how the rank and file act, the organization isn’t going to be around long.

The Paris Review is a top literary outlet and thus getting an acceptance from that journal can represent a major turning point in the career of an aspiring writer.

Well, The Paris Review recently got a new editor, Lorin Stein (formerly a senior editor at FSG), and last month he decided to rescind the publication of numerous poems that had been accepted by the previous editor.  Imagine that…getting an acceptance and then getting an email (in some cases, a couple years later) saying that your publication is ‘de-accepted.’

Here are the full details of this story.

None of these are suitable for children:

1. Llamas with hats, I.

2. Llamas with hats, II.

3. Hate your McConaughey.

4. Fredrick Douglass after two bottles of wine.

5. Objectivist parenting.

Here’s a recent article, from First Monday, that proposes some new, net-based metrics to measure scholarly impact —- “Scientometrics 2.0: Toward New Metrics of Scholarly Impact on the Social Web.”

Welcome to the world of Yuuki Spencer! More clips: Spencer in a battle, back stage showing off, and 2008 World Championship finale.

A while back, Jeremy turned me on to the work of John Henrich, a psychologist at UBC. Henrich is one of those people who travels to far off places and has people play games, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma or the Ultimatum Game. One of the things you learn is that there is substantial variation in how people play these games outside of Western cultures. There’s a nice article in the National Post about his research and his hypothesis that we are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). In other words, comfortable Westerners really view things differently than non-industrialized people.

Take the Ultimatum game, where person #1 can split $100 and offer it to person #2. If person #2 rejects, no one gets anything. If person #1 accepts, then person #2 keeps what is offered and #1 gets the rest. Economic theory suggests that something is better than nothing, so people will accept what is offered, even if it is just $1. What happens in Western societies is that player #1 offers around $48, while player #2 rejects if the offer is under $40. When Henrich’s team discovered is that there are cultures were people will accept the low ball offers because, as economic theory suggests, something is better than nothing – it’s free money! Westerners reject low offers, maybe because they feel insulted, or they want to punish player #1 for making a low offer.

If you follow rational choice sociology, this should not be surprising. The work of Werner Raub and Vincent Buskens is all about “embeddedness” of games – the social context of the game affects how people play it. Even in Western culture, researchers have found real differences in game play. I learned from Werner, when he visited Chicago a while back, that students and business people play the trust game differently. His argument was that business people show more trust because they work in a world of cooperation, where students live in a world of short term relationships.

The lessons I take from this research:

• For game theory: Rather than going on insane mathematical excursions, maybe game theorists should work on simple games and variation in play. How do people interpret the game? How does heterogeneity of players affect the outcomes? I think this is more interesting than the umpteenth behavioral paper about risk that’s based on college students.
• For economic theory: Let me phrase this in econo-talk so that you guys can understand… People have different utility functions for money and they have complex utility functions. If you believe  the research, there are cultures where people have nice linear utility functions for money. In the West, we may decide that we don’t value money and that we value fairness, or that we value punishing other players. Showing real differences in utility functions across cultures is pretty friggin’ important.
• For economic sociology:  What sorts of cultures produce “homo economicus?” What needs to happen to create a society of cooperators? Are the behaviors in these games observed in real economic transactions? Henrich’s writings cite anthropological research on these cultures, but more can be done, especially in Western cultures and focusing on transactions. For example, maybe someone like Sudhir Venkatesh could have people in inner city neighborhoods or low income schools play these games. Then we could see later if game play is correlated with certain job search behaviors or life course outcomes.

Good stuff.

If you just got an article rejected from a journal and are depressed by journal acceptance rates in the social sciences (e.g., good “organizational” journals have a 5-10% acceptance rate, or so), then you might comfort yourself by looking at the acceptance rates of literary outlets, whether magazines or journals.

Duotrope Digest has a nice database (though, only with user-provided info) and it essentially confirms that there is a less than 1% acceptance rate for top outlets publishing fiction or poetry (for example, in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares).   Britain’s top poetry outlet, Poetry Review, advertises that they get 60,000 submissions a year and publish 120 of them.

A while ago, I was asked a question that went something like this: “Black Studies programs were created at a time when there were few voices from the Black perspective in the public sphere. But now, we have people like Bill Cosby – public figures addressing Black topics. What is the role of Black Studies now?”

First, I think the questioner has a legitimate point. We now have many qualified people addressing issues relevant to people of color. Some, like Skip Gates, are lauded academics, while others, like Tavis Smiley, are more like journalistic commentators. Regardless, the point is well taken – just turn on the television and you’re bound to find African American social commentary.

Second, what makes Black Studies distinct in the present is its political perspective. I don’t mean that all Black Studies professors are fist pumping radicals. I mean something a bit more restrained and common sense. Black Studies professors are in the business of studying the distinct experience of the African American community. That’s not something you find much in academia and it’s a perspective the deserves to be heard.

Third, if for no other reason, we need Black Studies because it yielded the Boondocks. That’s right. The guy who writes the Boondocks, Aaron McGruder, majored in African American Studies at Maryland. In my view, the entire field has justified its existence in that way.

Network analysts can roughly be divided into two camps: those who look at the “whole” network and those who concentrate on individuals and their “local” set of network connections.  One problem often raised about network analysis is that the two camps have relatively little to do with each other.

Indulging in my side interest in urban transportation planning, I came across a discussion of the different ways that people navigate physical space.  It got me thinking about parallels to the way people navigate social space and about how different people approach the question of social “navigation”.  It speaks to this bridging of the two network camps.

First, some terminology:

Humans have two methods of navigation.  Spatial navigators can construct maps in their heads as they experience a place, and also tend to be good at using maps as navigational aids.  Narrative navigators navigate by creating or following verbal directions.  For spatial navigators, the answer to the question where? is a position in mapped space.  For narrative navigators, the answer to where? is a story about how to get there.  Obviously, this is a spectrum; many of us are in the middle with partial capabilities in both directions.

The same concept, put differently:

[Giuseppe] Iaria and McGill University researcher Véronique Bohbot demonstrated in a study they published six years ago that our mapping strategies fall into two basic categories. One is a spatial strategy that involves learning the relationships between various landmarks—creating a map in your head, in other words, that shows where the flower shop is in relationship to the movie theater and to the Wendy’s. The other is a stimulus-response approach that encodes specific routes by memorizing a series of cues, as in: Get off the bus when you see the glass skyscraper, then walk toward the big park.

Lets put this in terms of social structural navigation.  Say you have a hipster friend who wants to go on a date with a Polish kid who the friend has been eying for a while, but doesn’t see a route in.   Plenty of people think about social structure in the same way that roughly half of the population thinks about physical space; that is in narrative terms: “So, hipster from Williamsburg, you want to figure out how to ask that Polish kid out on a date?  Well, Pauline used to own the store with Mitch, but they split up and he started his own store.  I think that kid works for Mitch and I am going to dinner with Pauline so I can see if she’d ask Mitch to make an introduction.”

Myself, however, I’m a spatial navigator when it comes to physical geography.  When I ask my phone for directions, it initially pops up with a series of “turn left here, go right there” instructions which I ignore completely as I head straight for the map.  I then assess the whole map and adjust the route the computer gives me in light of information I might have, for instance, that I know there’s a really great cupcake shop on a slightly altered route.  In fact, I do this in a lot of areas involving instructions: for instance, I tend to improvise based on recipes I look up rather than following exactly what the cook-book says.

And, not surprisingly, I do it too when it comes to social space.  Rather than specific individuals and their connections, I tend to think in terms of cliques and the key people within those cliques.  Carrying on the example from before:  “Mitch and Pauline don’t talk any more.  No love lost in that breakup.  But, I’ve noticed that Mitch has a few Polish kids who are here for the summer working for him.  I don’t know if this kid is one of them, but I see a bunch of them downing vodka shots at the Pig Wednesday night.  That’s when you and the rest of the hipsters are normally drinking G&Ts at the Governor Bradford.  I can’t guarantee it, but you might want to consider boogieing across the street.  I bet he’ll be there.”

Both approaches will get you to the destination, but the cognitive map that gets you there is different.

This distinction has the potential to be very useful both for how we teach network concepts and also for pointing toward research directions attempting to bridge individual and network levels of analysis.  Read the rest of this entry »

This line from a rejection letter ought to make you feel better after reading your most recent.

I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.

This rejection was just one of five. Luckily for everyone involved, the author eventually found a home for his work and the rest is history.

A few years back, Tyler Cowen asked me about James Coleman’s major contributions. I wasn’t expecting the question, so I didn’t have a good answer. Well, better late than never.

Social Theory:

• In Foundations of Social Theory, Coleman insisted that sociological arguments be translatable into statements about individual action. This is best stated in the “Coleman diagram.” He correctly pointed out that many sociological arguments talked about macro processes, without offering an account at the micro level
• Coleman suggested that many sociological theories can be usefully stated as game theory problems, a fairly radical statement for its time (the late 1980s)
• Social Capital: Although he wasn’t the first person to push the idea, Coleman’s 1986 article has become the standard reference on how group properties can facilitate individual goals

Empirical methods:

• Coleman was one of the very first social scientists in the 1960s to use massive data sets to investigate social policy
• Stochastic process models: Coleman’s 1964 book on mathematical sociology was one of the first to introduce Markov chains into the field.

Sociology of education :

• Coleman’s use of massive survey data in 1966 showed that achievement is linked mainly to family, not school resources.
• Later, Coleman was one of the first to document white flight, a consequence of busing
• One of the first to systematically document the differences in student achievement between public and private schools
• The Adolescent Society: This book is a fine discussion of the competing values in the school, the peer driven society of the student vs. the academic driven ethos of the teacher

Organization theory & network studies:

• Coleman, Lipset and Trow’s book on union politics remains an outstanding case study of how hard it is to prevent oligarchic tendencies in organizations
• Written with Katz and Menzel, the diffusion of medical innovation study documented a crucial feature of innovation – the importance of opinion leaders and personal contacts in getting people to adopt it.

Finally, I’d say that Coleman brought guts to sociology. Many of Coleman’s intellectual moves were risky: promoting math in a math-unfriendly field; skepticism toward school policies favored by many sociologists; a strong embrace of rational choice. There were not easy positions to take in his day.

JC Spender (orgtheory.net’s first guest blogger) has a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal about innovation: “Who has innovative ideas? Employees.”

A while back, Omar wrote a very nice post explaining why interdisciplinary research tends to be very bad.  The argument is pretty straightforward. Academic labor markets are built around departments; if your discipline is strong, no need to debase yourself by working in other areas. I agree with Omar, a lot of interdisciplinary work is bad for the reasons he cited. However, I’ve come to the belief that interdisciplinary work can be good, but only in a different work environment.

Why do we need interdisciplinary work? Simply speaking, there’s a lot of legitimate research that is simply beyond the scope of a single discipline:

• Medical research often requires MDs, biochemists, and statisticians.
• Physics research, like particle physics, often requires teams of physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer science people.
• Genome research requires biologists, statisticians, and computer scientists.
• Policy research often needs legal and policy scholars, as well as social scientists who focus on research design.
• Historical and anthropological research may need bread and butter historians, but also physical scientists who can analyze physical evidence of past cultures.

Projects in these areas are all interdisciplinary and important, and they are successful.

If there is good work, why does interdisciplinary work have such a bad reputation? I think the answer is that  good interdisciplinary research exists outside of departments, while bad interdisciplinary research exists inside departments. In other words, if you are a strongly disciplinary academic and you are good, it is likely that you have no need or desire for interdisciplinary work. As Omar pointed out, interdisciplinary work is often promoted by either older faculty who want to try new things or edgy young faculty with nothing to lose. Strong mid-career people don’t rush to other disciplines.

So where do these successful interdisciplinary projects live? The list I provided suggests that they are likely to exist in funded research centers. It’s a plausible hypothesis. Departments are all about purity. Proving you are a more technical economist, or a more reflexive sociologists, then the next person. Grant agencies usually don’t care about such things, at least not as much as tenure committees. Grant agencies care about specific problems and are much more likely to pay for people who can help you solve the problem, regardless of their pedigree.

The policy implication? If you are a dean and want really good interdisciplinary research, remove the purse strings from departments. Create slots that are not tied to any one department and award pay raises for department faculty who publish quality pieces in other field’s journals.

I recently got a copy of Social Structures by John Levi-Martin. We’ve discussed this book a few times on the blog. It’s a wonderful “big think” book that pulls together a lot of empirical research on networks and social organization. On October 1, I’ll start the discussion. Hope you can participate.

There were two very strong math soc panels on Monday morning. I was lucky to be on the 8:30am panel, so I caught three excellent papers:

• There was a neat talk by Guillermina Jasso and the late Sam Kotz about the impact of mathematical sociology on statistics. The point is simple. If you model how people judge what is fair, then you are lead to a new family of distributions that are unstudied in statistics. Here’s the relevant paper in the journal Statisctica Neerlanda.
• A team* from UC Riverside did an interesting simulation of world systems, showing how conflict and trade are affected by networks, which leads to hierarchy among countries.
• Jesse Clark of Georgia did an affect control simulation addressing self-control. Soc psych isn’t my specialty, so I didn’t get the nuances, but I thought it was a very interesting application of the Heise framework.

Also, a great crowd – a big crowd for learning math so early in the morning! It’s unfortunate I could make the other math soc panel. If you were there, I’d love to see your comments.

*Robert Alan Hanneman (University of California-Riverside), Jesse Bradford Fletcher (University of California-Riverside), Christopher Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside), Kirk S. Lawrence (University of California-Riverside), Hiroko Inoue (University of California-Riverside), Richard Evan Niemeyer (University of California-Riverside), Jacob Apkarian (University of California-Riverside)

I learned recently that Philip Selznick, the great organizational sociologist and legal scholar, passed away on June 12. Here is an excerpt from the Berkeley press release:

“The Berkeley community lost one of its post-war academic giants, whose scholarship and leadership helped shape the theory and sociology of organizations and transform the social study of law,” said David Lieberman, professor at UC Berkeley School of Law (Berkeley Law) and a close colleague of Selznick’s.

Selznick was considered a founder of the institutional perspective in organization theory.

“He showed that organizations are living institutions imbued with cultural and informal characteristics that can constrain and also enhance rationality,” said Lauren Edelman, associate dean of Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and a professor of law and sociology.

Selznick is credited with helping transform the social study of law by developing a new scholarly approach, one that combined elements of traditional jurisprudence concerning the aims and nature of law with social science understandings of organizational dynamics and constraints.

“The resulting mixture of institutional realism, social theory and normative inquiry offered a novel approach to the understanding of legality and the rule of law while making a decisive contribution to the developing field of law and society,” added Lieberman.

I am an admirer of Selznick and feel lucky that I was able to talk with him on the phone a couple of years ago.  He was still interested in scholarship and was willing to help out a young scholar like myself. I’m grateful for that.

We’ve written a lot about Selznick here at orgtheory. Here are some highlights:  Matt Kraatz on Selznick’s ideas about ideals and ethics, institutional thinking, authentic values, and a humanist science; Selznick on the formation of character as a life-stage process;  Selznick’s underrated Leadership in Administration; Omar on why Selznick is due for a revival; and the major contribution of organizational theory comes, of course, from Selznick.

1. Framing: What do we want? BRAINS!!!! When do we want it? BRAINS!!!!

2. Network Analysis: The respondent is more likely to join the zombie social movement if bitten by a zombie with whom they have weak ties.

3. Resource mobilization: The success of zombie mobilization depends on the ability to appropriate fresh brains.

4. Political opportunity structures: Zombie uprisings are correlated with weak states. As states weaken, genetically modified viruses leak from unguarded secret labs, leading to zombies.

5. The Burstein Hypothesis: There’s no real theoretical reason  for sociologists to single out zombies. The undead are just another interest group that wants the government to help them eat brains. As long as the median voter doesn’t care about their brains, zombies will be able to influence policy makers. Political scientists should pay more attention to zombies.

I’ve been attending the Academy of Management meetings since 2005, my first year as an assistant professor, and I’ve been going ever since.  One reason I started going was because I suddenly had more travel money and I figured I might as well spend it by going to Hawaii (not a hard decision). But after my first experience there I realized that I should have been attending as a grad student too. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t on my radar. I think most sociology grad students are like that and don’t really know what the Academy has to offer. Here’ s my plug for why sociology grad students studying organizations, work and professions, or economic sociology ought to attend.

• Opportunities to present your research. The number one reason for attending AOM is that they have more sessions on organizations-related topics. If your work is of reasonable quality, there’s a good chance that you’ll present in a session and not a roundtable. Because the organizers have so many more accepted papers, the sessions tend to be more-or-less coherent too. There is a strong likelihood that you’ll end up in a session with other scholars with a great deal of theoretical or substantive overlap.
• Immediate feedback. The Academy reviews every paper that is submitted. Like a journal submission, your paper will be sent to three anonymous scholars in your area of study who will give feedback on your work. I was delighted by this aspect of the Academy since nothing close to this happens at ASA. Each section picks its best papers and publishes them online in the official proceedings of the conference (a great CV line for a grad student). So if for no other reason, you should submit to the Academy meetings because it gives you a great opportunity to get early feedback on your research project.
• Finding your crowd. The Academy’s Organizational and Management Theory section is a lot like the economic sociology section of the ASA, only bigger and more intellectually diverse. If you read ASQ or Organization Science, then you know the players. I was surprised to find so many of the same groups of people in both locations. If the conferences don’t overlap, you can spend two weeks in a row cavorting with many of the same scholars.
• Networking. Because the Academy has more organizational scholars, you can expand your network greatly by hanging out at receptions, going to sessions, or just running into people in the halls. It’s also a great place to meet other grad students interested in similar substantive or theoretical topics who you wouldn’t normally meet simply because they’re trained in a business school setting rather than in a sociology department.
• Professional development. One of the great functions of the Academy meetings is a system they’ve created to promote the professional development of graduate students. The first couple of days of the conference includes professional development workshops (PDWs), some of which are specifically designed to socialize grad students in particular areas of scholarship. Eminent scholars in the field, many of whom are trained as sociologists, talk to students about how to publish your research, how to manage your career, etc. You’ll need to get your department’s or advisor’s endorsement to attend but definitely try be involved in one.
• Great receptions. Let’s face it, the food at the AOM receptions is much, much better than what you’re used to at ASA. In addition to the official AOM receptions you need to attend some of the department parties. Open bars are pretty common.

So, the biggest downside is money and potential competition with the ASA meetings. My advice to you would be to try to find travel grants to help pay for the trip. If the conference is held in a proximate location, the decision to attend is much easier. Find some grad students from the business school who are attending and see if you can room with them. Once you’re there, you can almost survive on a diet of cheap lunches and reception food.

I believe someone on this blog banned the word “performativity” some time ago — but, I’m going to lift the ban for a second and give a quick report on the performativity session at the Academy of Management in Montreal last week.

The session was well attended and good fun.  It involved Fabrizio Ferraro and Daniel Beunza, Yuval Millo, Nicolai Foss and me, and Bruce Kogut.  As I’m sure that the Socializing Finance folks will also give a report,  I’ll just give a quick summary of our presentation.

First, we (this is co-work with Nicolai) discussed some good news (slide #1) about the performativity argument vis-a-vis markets:

• It attempts to open the black box (construction) of “markets.”
• Performativity focuses on actors and their subjectivity, along with the specific tools, devices and socio-political machinery of market construction.
• Often provides rich histories of economic phenomena.

Then the bad news about the performativity of markets argument:

• Simply: it’s wrong (this was slide #2).

More seriously, one way to perhaps summarize the issue with the performativity argument is that it suffers from a serious endogeneity problem.  Namely, the performativity approach selects a particular model (theory, device, etc) and traces it’s “effect” (diffusion, use) through history, post hoc, without looking at the set of possible models (or devices) that might have been chosen or created.  In fact, performativity assumes that models, a priori, are “arbitrary” and thus ignores (even rejects) the underlying “reasons” for why the particular model (or device etc) has an effect or perhaps is better than feasible alternatives.    So, let me elaborate:

• The performativity argument mistakes uncertainty for performativity.  In other words, what seemingly looks like performativity is actually the “best efforts” and guesses of actors to understand states of the world or create devices to explain it.  Given this uncertainty it is unfair to simply label this initial work by actors as a performance, though this is precisely what the performativity argument does: it takes imperfect models, developed by informationally-constrained actors, and traces the diffusion, uses and aberrations of these models (the data of performativistas).
• Put differently, performativity samples on the dependent variable by only focusing on the successful models rather than the set of possible models (or looking at how, given heterogeneity, a particular model emerges).
• Furthermore, performativity not only dispenses with notions of truth, but also comparative notions such as “better.” According to performativity, there is no way to judge a priori, the truth of models is directly linked with the diffusion or social acceptance of these model, and their self-fulfilling nature.
• So, performativity, then, essentially confounds social acceptance and diffusion with performance itself without recognizing the rationality and informational constraints of human agents. That’s a problem.
• Performativity rejects any notions of being (granted, subjectively) able to assess the environment.  To get more concrete — Fabrizio for example talked about how socially responsible investment vehicles (tools, markets, etc) were created, and cited performativity as the explanation.  But clearly the construction of this market is not impervious to an actual, real market opportunity.  Or?  Can any market be performed?
• The whole counter-performativity notion directly refutes performativity itself.  The performativity argument is self-refuting in several ways.  First, performativity has to logically allow, though doesn’t, for some kind of a priori reality that is being modified by the performance.  Second, if performance is the only act in town, then there is no way for counter-performance to emerge.  For example, the notion of a bubble (well, specifically the “pop” of a bubble) is logically not explainable from a performativity perspective.
• I have often wondered how the performativity program reflexively sees itself.  So, for example, if, as performativistas say, economists are engaged in an arbitrary performance, what is the performativity program itself doing?  It seems to implicitly take on a rather privileged stance vis-a-vis itself, though this stance (again) is self-refuting given the assumptions that performativity makes about the exercise that others are engaged in.
• Yuval kept talking about “testable reality” and “prediction” vis-a-vis performativity.  His point, I think, was that social acceptance is the test, but note again that agents are deliberating about the potential uses of a model or device under uncertainty, with feasible alternatives and informational constraints, and that is quite different from performativity.  One can’t simply point at Ptolemy’s geocentric model and tell a performativity story.
• A final concern is that the performativity of markets/finance argument builds directly on the Edinburgh strong programme of research (and science and technology studies), which fundamentally dispenses with the very notions of science and knowledge (a la Barnes and Bloor: prediction and explanation, reason and rationality are thrown out the door).

OK, that’s my quick laundry list.

Overall, despite my pessimism about performativity argument, I do think that we need additional theorizing and empirical unpacking of the notion of “markets” — something that the performativity program is attempting to do.   There are clearly important processes of social construction going on in markets, and understanding the actors, their subjective assessments and models, influence processes and mechanisms, tools, devices etc seems central for a proper understanding of markets.  So, I’m glad the performativity folks are also addressing these types of issues and are willing to engage in friendly interactions and lively debates.

Is delayed retirement to blame for tough academic job markets? The New York Times has a debate at “Room for Debate.” My contribution is here. Thanks for reading.

Like many orgtheory readers, I’m flying to Atlanta today. I missed the ASA meetings last year, and so I’m ridiculously excited to go to the meetings to see all of my grad school buddies, hear sociologists talk, think about sociology 24/7, etc. While I’m there I plan on seeing a Braves game with the Scatterfolks and getting a bite to eat at Gladys and Ron’s Chicken and Waffles.What else should I be doing? More importantly, where should I be eating?

It looks like there are many good sessions to choose from this year. I’m participating in “Organizational and Institutional Politics” (Tuesday at 12:30) and will be a discussant for “Collective Behavior: Cultural and Political Processes” (Monday at 2:30). I will not, however, participate in the OOW session on “Knowledge, Work, and Innovation” (Saturday at 4:30; the ASA only allows two events per member, after all), but my name might show up on a slide somewhere in the midst of presenting. Post any other session recommendations in the comments.

And of course, don’t forget the annual blogger party! Tina has more info at Scatter.

It’s been great blogging this month, and I hope I haven’t dragged the level of discourse on the blog down too far from Delia’s and David’s lofty heights, despite the appearance of furry thermometer and bacteria costumes.

To sign off, some topics I didn’t get to:

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Your bingo card for this year’s ASA conference in Atlanta.

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Last week, I presented some reasons to think that faculty diversity is important. This week, I want to discuss concrete actions that might lead to more diversity. Maybe you’re a bleeding heart liberal, or maybe you just want to do right the next time someone from a really disadvantaged background shows up in your graduate program. Either way, increasing faculty diversity requires considerable effort and won’t happen by itself. Furthermore, it requires commitment. Like teaching, successfully increasing diversity will get you no reward. You will need commitment and a concrete plan.

Here are my thoughts. I phrase things in terms of ethnic diversity, but my advice is fairly generic. Adjust accordingly.

1. We must not have any illusions about the way that academia operates. The American university system is organized around 200 institutions that produce the bulk of PhDs who go on to teach in the most desirable colleges and universities. Furthermore, the best positions in any field usually go to graduates of the top 10-20 PhD programs. That’s the first lesson: if you have a talented person who is thinking about academia, don’t let them settle for second best. They have to go to the highest ranked program possible. This may be obvious to professors, but it is not obvious to students, especially those from modest backgrounds, and many don’t even apply to the strongest graduate programs.

2. Get your own graduate program in order. My observation is that minority students are the “canaries in the coal mine.” If your program is dysfunctional, students from the disadvantaged backgrounds will be the first to drop out, or fail out, or get undesirable jobs. Even if you think diversity is a bogus issue, everyone will benefit from a well run graduate program.

3. Graduate admissions: If you are on the hiring committee, look for signs of quality in students aside from the traditional one. For example, many top programs love to take Ivy League graduates. Those are strong programs, but that puts many students at a disadvantage, especially minority students who didn’t have the funds, knowledge, or access to these institutions when they were in high school. So be broad minded in looking for quality.

4. Working with the mainstream: Minority students, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, are likely to come up with ideas that are, frankly, hard to publish. Instead of just shutting them down, teach them how to translate their idea into something that *can* get published. It’s tricky, but you have to recognize where they are coming from, and then show them how to make the connection to the discipline. Otherwise, you risk sending the message “academia isn’t for people like you.” Instead, the message should be “this is how you turn your idea into something that can appeal to people.”

5. Quality time: It sounds trite, but you really need to have some quality time with graduate students. If you don’t actively do this, then you might easily forget. Some faculty make no effort to connect, leading to dissertations that never get done. Others may gravitate toward favorite students, who might be from the same group/background. So make an active effort to get people in the office.

6. Smart advice – from day 1! Get a brutally honest assessment of what it takes to make it in your field. Then tell it to your grad students – and tell them very early in the program. This is doubly important for minority students, because they will rarely get hired on good intentions and faculty connections. They need to signal they that they have the right stuff.

7. Work opportunities. If you have a project that allows for students to co-author, consider all your graduate students and show everyone how to publish in your area. Don’t just rely on the super-star student. Everyone can contribute and some will  grow into great researchers, if given the chance.

8. Hiring committees: This is where the rubber hits the road. First, don’t just rely on your faculty buddies for personal references. Second, sit down and read the applications. And don’t just look for a quick publication in the hot journal. Read the publications and the sample dissertation chapters. By going to faculty connections and hot journal hits, you are already biasing the process towards people with the connections and who can quickly work the system, rather than giving people the best opportunity to signal their quality.

Add others in the comment section.

January is about the best time of the year to be in the Southwest.  While most of your friends are out shoveling snow, you are enjoying crisp, sunny days in the 70s and low 80s.  Not directly related to this, but AZ sociology is one of the best places in the world to be introduced to a variety of methodological approaches.  It is certainly the part of my graduate education that I now appreciate the most.

I just found out that all of this will come together in the Arizona Methods Workshops to be held on January 6th-8th of next year (2011 for those of you who are counting).  See the flyer here with cost and lodging info.  Charles Ragin, Erin Leahey, Ron Breiger and Scott Eliason will be holding court on everything from centrality measures, latent variables with multiple indicators, the difference between coverage and consistency in a QCA analysis and log-linear modeling strategies. Certainly enough to satisfy even the most demanding methods head!

Economics had its biggest extra-disciplinary impact in political science. More than any other discipline in the arts and sciences, political science has institutionalized economics. Political science and policy programs routinely teach micro, PhD economists are employed at nearly every major program, journals publish tons of game theory, and politics is probably the most popular non-commercial topic addressed by economists.

This isn’t to say that economic theory hasn’t impacted other disciplines; there are rational choice researchers in nearly every social science discipline. Also, I am not saying that  political science was completely conquered by economics. Political science programs still house theorists, qualitative researchers, public opinion folks, American institutionalists, and other people who don’t care much for supply and demand curves. However, the absorption of economic theory restructured the landscape of political science so much that there was a disciplinary counter movement against rational choice, the “perestroika” movement.

This got me thinking: why was political science so susceptible to economic theory? We’ve discussed this a bit before (part 1 and part 2), but I wanted to add a new hypothesis: economists increased their impact by changing political science’s focus. By adopting economic theory, political science decreased the emphasis on power and shifted to problems of choice. From an economic stand point, that’s logical. Economic theory starts with utility functions and moves on from there.

But that’s an incomplete picture for a political scientist. A political scientist should care about power and all the ways it’s exercised, created, legitimized, challenged, and displayed. That isn’t always going to be a matter of a rational choice analysis. There are social, psychological, and even aesthetic aspects of power that are important for political scientists to comprehend. However, by accepting decision theory as the foundation for social science, you move to a situation where you focus on political choices that people make, such as voting, coalitions and so forth, which can all be modeled using standard economic tools. You can then ignore other aspects of politics that are hard to model, or that might require qualitative analysis. Dumping power and shifting to choice meant that political science was open to a new style of analysis, which quickly became prominent.

A family member sent me the following link: an illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (by Matt Might, U of Utah School of Computing):

First, let me thank Teppo for inviting me to post on orgtheory– this is a terrific blog, and I am honored to contribute.  I am going to begin with a somewhat revised version of a parallel post of mine to the netgov blog.  I have this long standing interest in the use of DNA in the criminal justice paper– an edited volume, a few papers– plus an interest in how the incidental digital traces that are created by routine processes might reveal interesting patterns in collective human behavior.  Something that combines both are data on hits from the national DNA database system.  Every state maintains databases of DNA profiles from (1) crime scenes, and (2) known individuals who have “qualified” to be in their state’s database (usually but not always because they have been convicted of a felony).  The objective of this system is to create matches between crime scenes, and between crime scenes and known individuals– needless to say, these matches can be quite helpful to investigations.  That’s a story for another day, however.  What else is interesting is that these matches also create a record of the geography of crime (with the significant caveat that a hit between an offender and a crime scene does not mean that they committed the offense).  Further, these matches are (generally) uncontaminated by biases in detection– e.g., it is not the case that hits are more likely to be detected if they come from someone who lives near by.  It is notable, therefore, that the large bulk (~85%) of hits come from within states, confirming a literature on distance to crime that most crime is local.  Further, one can get a crude picture of the long distance relationship by looking at interstate hits.  Below, for example, is a map of interstate hits for Massachusetts (this does not include data from the Boston crime lab).  (Thanks go to Sune Lehmann for his help in producing this map.)

Clearly, there is a strong clustering of interstate hits in the region, with a vast over representation of hits from New England, and secondarily from New York and New Jersey.  What is interesting is that as ones goes beyond the region, the relationship with distance disappears– likely reflecting migration patterns whose relationship with distance beyond the immediate region is itself probably tenuous.  The take away from this post is in part regarding this picture of the geographic pattern of criminal behavior, but also the possibilities that data that new technologies produce may provide a high fidelity picture of important social phenomena.

I had a crazy idea while talking to some friends over dinner Saturday night. Why not create a universal peer review system that applies to all journals in a field? The problem with the peer review system, as many see it, is that it takes so darn long to get a paper from first submission to publication stage and it tends to exhaust really good reviewers (who sometimes may be asked to review 3-4 papers a month). The world would be a better place if we could kill these two birds with one stone by shortening the time to publication and using reviewers’ time more efficiently. A universal peer review system would deal with those problems.

The idea stems from the law review system in which people submit their papers to a clearinghouse where it can then be assessed by all of the law review editorial staffs that the author targets for submission. You can submit to as many law reviews as you’d like. Once one law review accepts the paper  a bidding war begins between the reviews. The author almost always takes the offer from the most prestigious law review, which often doesn’t come until a number of lower-tier publications have made their case for why you should publish the paper in their review. It may be easier to convince a higher tier journal to accept your work if you already have 15 acceptances. The system is fast. You submit papers twice a year, which is followed by 2-3 months of negotiation until all of the publishable papers are divvied up among the reviews.

Someone suggested it would be great to have the same process with management (or sociology) journals, but the barrier, of course, is that we rely upon peer review, whereas law review editors rely upon their own intrinsic criteria.  You could make it work though, I think, if you were to create a universal peer review system. Authors would submit their work to a clearinghouse and check the journals to which they wanted to submit. The system would then pick reviewers from an approved list of reviewers from the set of journals that the author submitted to. You would probably pick more reviewers (4 or 5) given the need to ensure an accurate estimation of quality. In addition to the normal feedback and ranking of quality,  reviewers would be asked to rate the journal in terms of its appeal to various audiences (e.g., does this paper appeal to a general management audience? sociological? economics? etc.) The reviewers themselves could be ranked according to reliability and taste so that the editors could assess the fit of the paper to their journal. Once all of the papers are reviewed (you should be able to do this in a month since reviewers will only be doing this twice a year), the editors could start sorting the database and finding papers that fit their journal’s criteria of quality. Once they’ve identified some subset of papers they find worthy of publication the bidding could begin. Once a paper was accepted, of course, the editor and perhaps a subset of the first-round reviewers would commit to work with the author until the paper was in acceptable shape for publication; however, the biggest chunk of work for reviewers would come at the front end, when assessing the quality of papers.

Why would this work? Well, for obvious reasons it would be great to have a system that pushed papers to publication quicker. Many papers, especially those that deal with timely topical issues, lose their relevance unless published immediately. Even theoretical papers are sometimes outdated by the time they are published. I see this as a huge problem with our field. It would also put more incentive on the authors to publicly air and get feedback on their papers before submitting their work to journals. While I’m okay with a paper being submitted that isn’t 100% ready (what paper is?), I’m afraid that too many low quality papers are submitted simply because the author is looking for developmental feedback. With a one-and-out system like this, authors would be more diligent in seeking feedback and polishing their work before submitting. I also like the idea because it would allow innovative ideas to rise to the top. During the bidding process, naturally intriguing papers that might not fit the conventional model of a journal might suddenly appear more publishable if they are vigorously pursued by many other journals in a field.  Perhaps the best reason for doing this is that it would vastly cut down on the amount of time scholars spend reviewing work. Some papers get submitted 5+ times before being accepted. Multiply that by the number of reviewer hours you used to move that paper to publication and you get a sense of the inefficiencies of the current system. (I’d argue that most papers are only marginally improved by going through multiple rounds of review.)

I’m sure that you readers can think of many reasons why this system wouldn’t work, but I’m willing to bet that we could collectively figure out a way to implement the system despite the reservations. It may seem like a crazy idea, but I think it’s a potentially very effective solution to our field’s inefficiencies.

For more crazy ideas on improving the peer review system, see Fabio’s suggestion for a triple-blind peer review process.

The Internet has been set abuzz by a paper  by Vinay Deolalikar, of HP, who claims to have solved the notorious P/NP problem. His solution depends, interestingly, on the application of graphical models of random variables, the statistical foundation of p* models, which appear in sociological studies of networks. I don’t know much else, the paper is very long and requires much knowledge in many areas of math that are beyond what most non-specialists would know, but he claims that experts are optimistic. If verified, it would be a huge discovery.

For anyone not at AOM, a Sunday afternoon question that has been bugging me lately: what is up with this TEDTalks phenomenon?

TED logo, from www.ted.com

Any theories? Is this the second coming/Hollywoodization of popular 19th and early 20th century adult education movements like the Lyceum, Chautauqua, and Forum movements, or the democratization of elite retreats like Bohemian Grove and Sun Valley, kin to the Aspen Ideas Festival and Renaissance Weekend? Or both, or something else entirely (possibly the next step in Fred Turner’s story)?

We’re excited to welcome David Lazer as a guest blogger.  David is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science at Northeastern University and the Director of the Program on Networked Governance (PNG) at the Kennedy School, Harvard.   David has done research on networks and social influence, governance, information and society and so forth.  Additional details about his work can be found here or here.

Welcome David!  We look forward to your posts.