orgtheory.net

Whether you think he’s right or wrong on the substance, you can’t fault Nick Bostrom for a lack of ambition in his titles —- here’s one: “The Future of Humanity.”

An upcoming special issue of Erkenntnis (a journal in analytic philosophy) focuses on the topic of “reduction in the special sciences” (associated with this 2008 conference, here are some earlier versions of the papers in the special issue).

Here are some of the issues that the special issue will wrestle with:

Science presents us with a variety of accounts of the world. While some of these accounts posit deep theoretical structure and fundamental entities, others do not. But which of these approaches is the right one? How should science conceptualize the world? And what is the relation between the various accounts? Opinions on these issues diverge wildly in philosophy of science. At one extreme are reductionists who argue that higher-level theories should, in principle, be incorporated in, or eliminated by, the basic-level theory. According to this view, higher-level theories do not ultimately exhibit conceptual integrity or provide genuine explanations. At the other extreme are pluralists who take higher levels of description and explanation seriously and argue for their independence and indispensability.

As is readily evident from the abstract, one of the contributions is of particular interest to me, the piece by Jack Vromen: “Micro-foundations in Strategic Management: Squaring Coleman’s Diagram.”

Abstract

Abell, Felin and Foss argue that “macro-explanations” in strategic management, explanations in which organizational routines figure prominently and in which both the explanandum and explanans are at the macro-level, are necessarily incomplete. They take a diagram (which has the form of a trapezoid) from Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)/London, (1990) to task to show that causal chains connecting two macro-phenomena always involve “macro-to-micro” and “micro-to-macro” links, links that macro-explanations allegedly fail to recognize. Their plea for micro-foundations in strategic management is meant to shed light on these “missing links”. The paper argues that while there are good reasons for providing micro-foundations, Abell, Felin and Foss’s causal incompleteness argument is not one of them. Their argument does not sufficiently distinguish between causal and constitutive relations. Once these relations are carefully distinguished, it follows that Coleman’s diagram has to be squared. This in turn allows us to see that macro-explanations need not be incomplete.

I’ll post a final/copy-edited version of the response into the comments (once we get it back).

Isaac Waisberg highlights the problem of citation-itis.

The baseline for evaluating the NRC is something like:

Is it better than if you randomly grabbed a bunch of people in the lobby at ASA and just asked them about the most famous programs? Is there more information than if you just counted articles in the top 2-3 journals?

From what people have seen, the NRC assessment seems to have some serious issues. First, the rankings are five years out of date, so productivity can easily have gone up or down. Second, as noted here, but in other places, the NRC seems to have some seriously mistaken information. Third, their processing of information seems off. For example, in sociology, a book is weighted the same as an article, which, if you know the field, is seriously mistaken. Fourth, by creating ratings based on the size of confidence intervals, you make some serious errors.

Despite these problems, the assessment seems to have gotten the general landscape of the field right, but there are serious errors in the details, which are likely generated by the problems listed above. This probably speaks to the  fact that status orders are robust in many ways. Even flawed measurements will tell you that Florida is below New York. But as an exercise in illuminating the dynamics and subtly of academic status orders, you’d be better spending some time as the annual convention’s general reception.

One of the grad skool rulz, “Am I Done yet?,” has been reprinted in Inside Higher Ed. Check it out.

Ah crud! The free downloads are just research methodology. Anyone out there buy the entire book? If so, can you clip and paste the soc rankings for me in the comments or email them to me?

The NRC will be having a press conference at 1pm in Washington to unveil the new system to the public. Post your comments and predictions in the comments section. Last week’s poll showed that orgheads thought that about 8 of the 10 programs would remain in the top 10. If you are in DC, take photos and I’ll post them.

Two weeks ago, I reviewed Between Movement and Establishment, an institutional analysis of youth advocacy groups. My big complaint was that institutional scholars needed to get up to speed and work on policy. Lots of good work on describing youth advocacy organizations, not enough on the outcomes. So what can institutionalists add to debates over organizational outcomes and policy? A few suggestions:

1. Institutionalism is pretty useful for coming up with hypotheses about the creation and adoption of policies. The movement/institutional literature has good descriptions of how interest groups affect the policy environment. For example, one hypothesis is that movement generated policies usually have to be watered down to be accepted. Another hypothesis is that policy adoption waves are like management fads. There’s already a decent literature on this in org studies and public policy.
2. Institutional theory has promise on the issue of implementation. Once the organization adopts policy, how does it get translated into practice? The new research on institutional work I think has promise. You have to consider what organizational leaders do to make something acceptable, or to reframe the rules so that new policy is possible.
3. Outcomes – here the link is less obvious. One way that institutionalism could contribute is to discuss how culture affects the definition and monitoring of outcomes. Another insight, drawing from our former guest Michael Sauder, is that the ranking/rating of outcomes creates new incentives for organizational behavior, “teaching to the test.” I wonder if there’s an interesting story about how institutional processes change the behavior of people targeted by policy (performativity strikes again!!!!). It’s a stretch, but worth considering.

#1 isn’t bad and #2 is a straight forward application of current institutional theory. Doing #3 for real would be a home run.

A couple of months ago I was fortunate to get my hands on two new books that deal with the relationship between culture and the economy: Viviana Zelizer’s Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy and Douglas Holt’s and Douglas Cameron’s Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands. Fans of Zelizer will appreciate the book as an opportunity to revisit some of her classic pieces, which she bookends with current commentary on how her work has evolved over time.  I found this commentary especially interesting. It shed a lot of light on the motivation for the original studies while also bringing coherence to the totality of her work. For newcomers to Zelizer, the book is a must-read. Zelizer is one of our most original and important theorists in economic sociology, as well as a fine researcher of rich empirical studies. The chapters on life insurance, pricing children, and earmarking monies are fascinating studies of how economic transactions take on special cultural significance. One of her most important insights is that social relations imbue transactions with special meaning that make them incommensurable.

The last chapters of the book synthesize her theoretical contributions by introducing the concept “circuits of commerce.” These circuits refer not just to networks of exchange (which could just as easily be described using network terminology) but also shared accounting systems and meanings that enable moral evaluation of the exchanges. Circuits of commerce carve out an area of social life and create boundaries that sustain identity and community interaction. It is through the creation of these circuits that economic exchange expresses culture. Zelizer believes it is impossible to separate the two (hence her rejection of the “hostile worlds” approach). Economic exchange doesn’t destroy culture, it actually produces/reproduces it. Culture is the dependent variable in economic exchange, not the reverse.

Holt’s and Cameron’s book has a different flavor. They’re writing as much to practioners (e.g. brand ma-nagers) as they are to academics. But their conceptual framework is grounded in cultural sociology. I’ve been a fan of Douglas Holt since reading this fascinating article in the Journal of Consumer Research about  branding attempts to co-opt consumer movements. The book follows a similar vein, arguing that brand innovation is often the result of producers figuring out how to take advantage of ideological streams caused by major social disruptions. So, for example, Ben & Jerry’s tapped into an “ideology that responded to [Americans'] collective desires for a commercial counterpoint to Reaganism” (80). By drawing on an opposing cultural toolkit, one more resonant with the ideals and values of hippie culture, they produced a strong brand identity that thrived on the margins, until it eventually became cool and diffused throughout the middle-class. But brands don’t just co-opt cultural movements to create innovations. They argue that brands actually create cultural innovation by pushing the ideological frontier to its extremes and giving consumers products through which to enact that ideology. One can now consume what one believes!

Holt’s and Cameron’s book is full of detailed case studies, some of which work better than others. My biggest disappointment with the book is its unwillingness to push theoretical boundaries. By trying to write to two audiences, practitioners and academics, the book falls short in realizing its theoretical potential. Still, there is much here to like about the production of culture. Given that organizational theorists are just beginning to pay attention to cultural sociology, I expect that someone in our field will take up this kind of argument soon.

I recently saw a film called Proteus, which was about the life and times of 19th century biologist Ernet Haeckel. The movie discusses Haeckel’s fascination with “radiolaria” – tiny organisms that have beautiful shells. As they consume even smaller organisms, they excrete calcium and make elaborate shells. Here are some drawings and photos of these elegant creatures. The photo above is from a Florida State biology lab. The photos/drawings below are from the Proteus movie web site and Haeckel’s book.

Over at MR, there’s a discussion of disciplinary trade, a favorite topic of mine. Tyler cites Justin Wolfers:

What is interesting to think about are the terms of trade between economics and all these other disciplines. We are clearly a net exporter to political science and sociology. [emphasis mine]

I was surprised by this. If anything, sociologists are pretty hostile to economics. Wolfers does admit he had a sociologist on his committee and he’s probably more engaged with sociology than most economists, but I don’t really agree with this assessment. Here’s what I think the exchange is between sociology and economics:

• Overall, economists and sociologists don’t really engage each other, except in a few specialties. I’ve never seen a sociologist rave about an AER article, nor have I seen an economist pick up a copy of AJS. Graduate curricula rarely acknowledge the other side. Basically, each discipline thinks the other is, well, deeply flawed.
• Soc -> econ: Economists often use sociological ideas with some frequency, but they don’t give much credit. For example, a number of economists are starting work in network analysis. But I doubt that they will acknowledge the 40+ years of work by sociologists and anthropologists. Similarly, Akerlof is getting high fives for the Soc 101 observation that personal identity matters. It’s like a sociologist in 2010 claiming the power and beauty of marginal utility.
• Econ -> soc: Quantitative sociologists routinely import statistical techniques developed by economists. Game theory pops up from time to time. I think there’s a fair discussion of economic theories of family, crime, politics, and religion in sociology, but I wouldn’t describe these as standard theories in those areas. There are vast areas of the profession where economic theories simply aren’t present (e.g., ethnography, urban studies, life course studies, most social psychology, network analysis).

The bottom line is that there’s a huge gap and little trade. It’s a shame, as I’ve written before, there’s a real potential for fruitful work between sociologists and economists.

Next Friday, Oct 1,  I will be at the ASALH meetings in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ll be on a panel on the new historiorgaphy of Black Studies. It’ll have some cool people on it, like Martha Biondi (Northwestern), Ron Bailey (Georgia), Abdul Alkalimat (Illinois) and Stefan Bradley (St. Louis). The panel will be at the Convention center, room 302C. If you are in that area and would like to have lunch or hang out, please email me. I am available from noon till about 2:30pm. Hope to see you there.

We’ve discussed the Tea Party on this blog a few times (here, here, here, here, here). Consider this post an open thread on the Tea Party. Here are my observations. Add your own in the comments. I don’t claim originality:

1. The Tea Party, I think, is another wave of conservative populism that pops up from time to time. In the 1950s, we had McCarthy and Birchers. Then we had the Silent Majority in the 1970s and conservative Christianity in the 80s and 90s.
2. In surveys, Tea Party sympathizers appear to be older, middle class, socially conservative Whites. This is definitely a movement with a well defined social base, not a broad shake up of American politics.
3. Contrary to my friend Brendan Nyhan, the odd beliefs about Obama held by many in the movement aren’t a mysterious resistance to information. It’s just a smear. It’s no different than what the nutty branch of any party says about the leaders of the other side (e.g., what Michael Moore says about conservative politicians).
4. The best way for moderate Republicans to win this battle is to run in the general election, Lieberman style. Even if you loose, you can still win.
5. The connection between the Tea Party and the GOP is pretty obvious. To my knowledge, all Tea Party candidates have run as Republicans. Virtually all money from Tea Party organizations supports Republican candidates. Tea Party sympathizers in public opinion surveys rarely say they are Democrats.
6. The link to social conservatism is pretty obvious. No Tea Party candidate has, to my knowledge, come out in favor of socially liberal policies like gay marriage, drug legalization, or increased immigration. Tea Party candidates also tend to have very public connections to conservative religious groups.
7. The link to libertarian economics is confused. Virtually all Tea Party candidates talk about small government, but getting them to say what they’d cut is nearly impossible.
8. The electoral track record is mixed. On the one hand, they won some elections. But these people were often saved by elite endorsements, not superior campaign skills. Many would have flopped without the Palin or Tea Party express endorsement. The Tea Party candidates don’t show too much ability in building a big Reagan style coalition. This year, they’ll win due to the hit that Presidents take in off year elections. But if the economy does well and Obama gets credit, how will Tea Party endorsements help in two years?
9. I don’t know what the ultimate impact will be. It could be a 1994 type of incident, with the radicalism petering out after facing the realities of governance. Or, it could be the 1980s, when social conservatives began populating the state.
10. One more came to  mind: the Tea Party is the expression of any one interest. There’s no corporate conspiracy behind it. It really is a decentralized sort of deal, even though varies parties, such as the Fox news wing of the GOP, are trying to influence it. As Francesca Polletta noted in a recent article, it’s a modernized version of New Left decentralized politics.

Add your own comments.

As an employee of a large public university, I often think about college athletics. I’ve come to the conclusion that athletes in the big sports should be treated as university employees. In other words, we should probably abolish the concept of “scholar athlete” for these individuals and treat them like regular people. They do a service, they should get compensated.

Moving to an employee model of college sports solves a number of problems:

• First, the scholar athletes do a lot of work, they often get injured, and they don’t get paid. This is simply a scandal. If some one takes a risk so you can be entertained on Saturday afternoon, they deserve compensation.
• Second, it removes the conflict of interest between the faculty and the athletes. How many professors have been encouraged to change grades or be lenient with athletes? By taking them out of class and removing them from the academic component of the university, the problem is gone.
• Third, this will eliminate some of the behavioral problems found on college campuses. If athletes are paid, they become regular citizens and are regulated as such. If they  misbehave, it’s off campus and on their own dime. Let the cops take care of it, just like we do with older athletes.
• Fourth, the employee model would greatly minimize campus corruption. We know that people break NCAA rules all the time with gifts and such. If they are employees, they get paid what they deserve and there is no need for secret gifts. They won’t take graft if they got a decent paycheck. And remember, there’s no law against simply giving an athlete a gift if you really love them that much.
• Fifth, profits should guide action. By pretending college sports are a non-profit activity, many people don’t realize that the major sports are only profitable at the big campuses. In football, for example, most programs lose money, except for those at the top of the BCS.  Sports lose money at most places. By making sports a regular revenue generating activity, we’d be more willing to ask about profits and whether subsidies are merited.
• Sixth, spread the wealth. Even among profitable programs, income is often reinvested in the sport. By making sports just like any other business, we’d pay everyone involved their market value and then calculate the profit, which can then be given to traditional academic activities. In other words, we should treat big sports as a profit center and investment.

Criticisms:

• What about social mobility? Aren’t athletics a way for some people to go to college? First, we can make tuition and room and board part of the package. For every year dedicated to full time sports, we give people a year of free education. Second, the scholar athlete model detracts from education. As experience shows, most students prefer to work on sports. Athlete graduation rates, quite frankly, are pathetic at many schools. Let them do sports full time. When their athletic career is over, they can come back an do school full time. That will make it easier for people to concentrate on school and complete their degree.
• What about money “small” sports like field hockey? Fair point. Most athletic programs are not the albatrosses I am criticizing. There’s a simple solution here as well. Treat them like we would treat any other campus activity – as an activity to be encouraged, but not at the expense of academics. If a sport grew in popularity and it became viable as a business and career, we’d switch from subsidized academic unit to business and start paying people.
• What about the collegiate spirit? Sports and academics are apples and oranges. We don’t need sport to prove that we love higher education. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong in having paid athletes. It’s just like advertising. Instead of paying for a billboard, the university has some sports teams. What’s so bad about that? All kinds of organizations have fun activities that draw people.

Bottom line: Sport is an interesting, entertaining and desirable activity, but mixing it up with higher education provides the wrong incentives. Let’s get away from that model and treat it like the business it ought to be.

This may be the best literary take on market speculation I’ve ever read:

“Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce the figure to three, perhaps even two.”

“How does it work? I asked him. “I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?”

“No,” he said, “Well, yes, that’s a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation.”

“Speculation?” I repeated. “What’s that?”

“Shares are constantly being bought and sold,” he said. “The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they might be worth, in an imaginary future.”

“But what if the future comes and they’re not worth what people thought they would be?” I asked.

“It never does,” said Matthew Younger. “By the time one future’s there, there’s another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people’s imagination, so they fall. It’s our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls – and, conversely, to get you into another when it’s just about to shoot up.”

“What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?” I asked him.

“Ah!” Younger’s eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back to his small mouth and chest. “That throws the switch on the whole system, and the market crashes. That’s what happened in ’29. In theory it could happen again.” He looked somber for a moment; then his hearty look came back – and, with it, his booming voice as he resumed: “But if no one thinks it will, it won’t.”

“And do they think it will?”

“No.”

“Cool,” I said, “Let’s buy some shares.”

This is from the weird and brilliant Remainder by Tom McCarthy.

In the latest ASQ, I’ve got a review of Between Movement and Establishment, a book on youth organizations written by Milbrey McLaughlin, W. Richard Scott, Sarah Deschenes, Katherine Hopkins, and Anne Newman. I liked the book. I’ve always wondered what was up with this nebulous field of non-profits. A key clip:

The most distinctive contribution of Between Movement and Establishment is the observation that coalition building and civic capacity are organizational outcomes. A key theme is that youth advocacy organizations can only assert their influence on school districts and health services by mobilizing various constituencies in the Bay Area. Therefore the rise of youth advocacy groups entails a broader political development. Sometimes this happens at the grassroots level. Youth advocacy groups may target churches and neighborhood groups in an attempt to infl uence local school boards, and these relationships can assume a life of their own. Mobilizing for youth and education has the consequence of developing a neighborhood’s political capacity. At other times, youth advocacy groups target the state government to create bridges between local constituencies and state agencies.

Even though I think this is an important issue, I did have one big criticism. I thought  there was too much on fields and governance, not enough discussion of outcomes:

Organizational governance and structure is discussed at length but the discussion of outcomes is surprisingly brief. For example, in a chapter called “Diverse Ways of Making a Difference,” the authors describe the different outcomes generated by youth advocacy groups. There are social logics, coalitions, and civic capacities, but a surprisingly limited discussion of young people. On many occasions, the book mentions specific policies: funding for after school programs (p. 106); mandated funds for youth services in the San Francisco city budget (p. 137); targeting blighted properties that attract crime (p. 103); and promoting small schools (p. 104). But the book does not ask a crucial question: Did children have better lives because of the reforms advocated by these groups? Do drop-out rates decrease? Do more children make the transition to college? Do fewer young people end up in prisons because of programs promoted by these organizations?

In other words, like much institutional writing, a lot of attention to fields and populations, not too much on outcomes. The next generation of scholars should tackle this head on, especially in an era when we are generating so much new knowledge about assessing policy outcomes. Despite my criticism, I did find this book good and recommend it to scholars interested in educational politics and organizations.

Dan Hirschman has a review of Kristin Luker’s book on research gestalt, Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in the Age of Info-Glut .  A few clips:

Salsa Dancing is not for everyone (much as salsa dancing is not for everyone, including me!). Luker’s book is specifically aimed at scholars doing “non-canonical”, usually qualitative research. And indeed, I think her division of the world of social science (really, sociology) research into two camps is one of the single most useful contributions of the book. This division is not based on methodology, in the old sense of “kind of data”, but rather in the kind of questions we are asking – and Luker argues that the non-canonicals have a lot of learn from the canonicals, and a lot to learn about how to talk to them and convince them of the value of our work.

And:

rather than producing a random sample from an exhaustive (or nearly) frame of everyone you wish to generalize about, salsa-dancers should seek out “data outcroppings”, rich sites where the dynamics of interest should be easiest to see. Unfortunately, such sampling can (just as canonicals always allege) create a problem of bias that weakens generalizability. The non-canonical researcher relies on a logical generalizability rather than a statistical one – e.g. I have no reason to think that the public school I studied in my fieldwork is different from most other schools in ways that would affect my findings, and I put the burden on your to show me what I have logically missed. Having a few cases, or at least a shadow comparison, can help with this sort of argument. Luker also pushes us to generalize up, rather than across – not simply generalizing to all sites similar to where we do our fieldwork, but to broader kinds of problems (“how classes reproduce themselves without seeming to” p. 126).

Check out the book and the review.

Last week, Mark Hayward, of the Texas soc program, gave a talk on some forthcoming work on education & health. For decades, researchers have known that education is correlated with health, but there aren’t many good explanations for why health improves with education.

Hayward’s research group made a key observation. If you believe in a human capital model, it’s reasonable to expect that more education means more health – a linear prediction. The more education you get, the better you are. If you believe the credential/signal model of education, you expect “steps.” Once you get a high school degree, that’s your credential and you don’t get more benefit by attending a single extra year of college. The curve is flat, until you hit the next step. Hayward’s team then got mortality data on, like, a million people who also reported their educational level in years. That means you can see if mortality is linear in years, or has a “step function.”

The answer? Overall, the American population appears to have steps AND a linear effect. In other words, each year of education decreases mortality until you hit the credential, then you get a discontinuous boost to health, and then it decreases until you hit the next credential.

The other finding is that Blacks and Whites have very different mortality-education gradients. Whites look like the average: linear decreases with a few jumps. The Black education-mortality curve actually is flat with steps – the one predicted by the pure credential/signaling model.

Why the difference? I am not sure, but I had a few ideas. (1) Blacks and Whites get different things out of school that are tied to health behavior. Maybe Whites get both increase income from education credential, but also a different way of accessing health. Blacks might get the credential boost, but then rely on the same inefficient ways of managing health used by less educated Blacks. (2) Blacks and Whites go different institutions, so it’s not reasonable to expect uniform effects.

The deeper message, which Hayward emphasized, was that we often pretend that our variables are nice and linear. Resources work the same way for everyone. Just add “education” to your variable and you’re done. This sort of research is another reminder that resources and people are heterogeneous, and that social scientists and policy makers should take lesson seriously.

I think there’s a great book to be written about Indian Americans. I bet some of this might already be in the assimilation literature, but no one has pulled it together into a coherent story. The sociological issue is how people transplant status orders. In other words, how do the status systems from India live on in the United States, where Indians occupy a wholly different ethnic and racial landscape. Here are the questions I’d like answered:

1. Which castes are represented among immigrants? Is immigration from India a privilege for high caste people? A strategy for low caste people? Made easier by social capital from the occupations associated with a specific caste?
2. What’s the difference between high caste immigrants and low caste immigrants? How many Dalits have come to the United States? How did they get here? How are their life course outcomes different than other Indian Americans?
3. Labor market entry: What strategies do Indians use when entering various professions that are based on status from the home country? Do people in different castes choose different kinds of jobs? If so, why doesn’t college disrupt that process and homogenize Indian Americans?
4. Politics: Are Indian Americans conservative? How do Indian Americans “fit into” the grand coalitions that define the Democratic and Republican parties? Are they Democrats because they are immigrants? Are they Republicans because of a nationalist tendency? Does that vary by caste?
5. Marriage and family: How often do Indian Americans rely on more traditional ways of finding a spouse? Does going to college change that?

Getting data would be hard, since most surveys probably don’t have enough people from this group. And the selection effects are nasty, so identification fanatics need not apply. In the right hands, this could be a seminal project in stratification research

Edward noted last week that the NRC announced that their rankings will be out in late September. Who thinks that the soc rankings will be much different than the 1994 version?

Bruce Kogut has a post at Socializing Finance that might interest many readers.

Yesterday and today I attended a conference at the University of Michigan about corporate social responsibility in a global world.  Kiyoteru Tsutsui of Michigan sociology put the conference together with the help of the Japan Foundation. One of the unique aspects of this conference was the diversity of scholars who presented. Most of the participants had a strong disciplinary focus (either from sociology, political science, or economics). Few had a traditional management focus. As one of the discussants (an esteemed management scholar himself) noted, this was a big shift from past conferences on CSR he’s participated in. Research on social performance, ethics, and corporate responsibility grew in the business schools, in part as a reaction to the growing interest in these issues among actual managers.  Members of the Academy of Management who were interested in social responsibility issues were not in the mainstream, however, and had to huddle together in their own division (Social Issues in Management), creating their own conferences and journals. The disciplines stayed away from CSR studies like they were the plague.

It looks like that is beginning to change. Based on the scholarship I’ve seen at this conference, work on CSR by organizational theorists from the disciplines is  suddenly in vogue.  Phd students in sociology, for example, are suddenly making CSR the focus of their dissertations. Political scientists, economists, and sociologists are bringing their own theoretical toolkits to the table, giving CSR studies a new flavor and level of rigor. Could this mean that CSR research will suddenly start appearing in journals like ASR and ASQ?  Will the Social Issues scholars be included in these new conversations? Another potential concern is that as sociologists and political scientists move into CSR territory, the object of analysis shifts from a focus on performance and consequences to an examination of the origins of CSR. Sociologists, of course, see CSR as an interesting social and organizational phenomenon in its own right. Thus, the old guard, with their links to practice and implementation, may become lab rats in the studies of the new guard, as scholarship begins to focus more on adoption, diffusion, and variation in use.

Reminder: On Oct 1, we’ll have a book forum on John-Levi Martin’s “Social Structures.” Above is an example of a social structure, the moeity: the orgtheory world is split into two rival kinship groups – the good orgtheory and the evil organziations and markets.

Okcupid is a dating web site and their research blog just released a report on race and dating. They took a sample of 500k+ “about me” pages and did word counts. The findings are presented in the word graphs featured on the post. What does one learn?

• White guys like to rock: Van Halen, Frank Zappa and even joke group Tenacious D.
• White ladies are the #1 Red Sox fans. I don’t understand why that is the #1 key word for this group.
• Black men and women agree on soul food, but not Alicia Keys.
• Latin men and women both agree on the merengue. Latin men (ahem) like being tough – they mention UFC, the Marines and other super tough words. But they also mention being funny. Latin women mentioned sensitive  movies like Sixteen Candles.
• There are a bunch of other word lists. I found the South Asian male list to be notable. They mention mechanical engineering (!), consultant, and freakonomics (!).  I would like to know from readers if dropping the words “instrumental variable” into conversation really helps in that dating market.

Required reading for sociologists of dating.

The Paris Review‘s author interviews are enjoyable to read (you’ll find many of the greats on the list, going back to the 1950s).  Here’s a snippet from a 2008 interview with Umberto Eco (full interview here).

INTERVIEWER: Are you still obsessed with television?

ECO: I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses. And then I try to use it as material for my work. But I am not a glutton who swallows everything. I don’t enjoy watching any kind of television. I like the dramatic series and I dislike the trash shows.

Political scientists have long documented the polarization of the courts. But a new data shows it’s even gotten to the level of the clerks. From an NY Times article:

Each justice typically hires four clerks a year. Since Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court in 2005, Justice Antonin Scalia has not hired any clerks who had worked for a judge appointed by a Democratic president, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has hired only two. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, only four of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s clerks on the Roberts court came from judges appointed by Republicans. The early data on President Obama’s two appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, show a similar pattern.

It’s an extremely insular field:

Indeed, if Justice Kagan’s recent hiring is any guide, a Supreme Court clerkship may even be a prerequisite for a Supreme Court clerkship. Three of her four clerks have completed clerkships with other members of the court, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy.

It even continues beyond the clerkship:

Clerks from conservative chambers are now less likely to teach, according to the Vanderbilt study, which looked at data through 2006. If they do, they are more likely to join the faculties of conservative and religious law schools. Republican administrations are now much more likely to hire clerks from conservative chambers, and Democratic administrations from liberal ones. Even law firm hiring splits along ideological lines.

The articles claims that this is recent, which I’ve heard from political scientists. I am not shocked at polarization. I am shocked that it took this long to happen! The Supreme Court has nearly 200 years of history, yet justices treated the clerkship more like an apprenticeship open to either party for most of that history. Why the change in the last 20 years?

Hypotheses:

• Ideology wasn’t always so correlated with party. You didn’t need to be partisan to get people you liked.
• The entire law profession is more ideological, the Supreme Court is just slow in catching up.
• The post-Nixon era: By making the GOP into a solidly conservative, Southern party, you created a demand for solidly GOP clerks and justices who reflected that new partisan demand for justices. Note that these highly partisan clerks and justices all start appearing around 1980 or so, after the GOP shift.
• Television: Before TV and mass media, the law could be more open. Now, you have to satisfy the litmus test to survive the political process.

Any other thoughts?

This photo is from Wired, which has a nice feature on NASA photos of the planet Saturn. Janus is above the ring, Rhea is below.

Mark Doty on why poetry matters now (click to listen: I like the delivery).

An older essay by Dana Gioia titled why poetry matters?

John Barr’s controversial essay American Poetry in the New Century.

Dana Goodyear essentially responds to Barr and provides some context (the politics of poetry, money and poetry, etc — extremely interesting).

Eli Siegel on the immediate need for poetry.

Jay Parini’s book why poetry matters (Yale University Press).  I read it last month, a good book.

A discussion at Poetry Magazine about whether poetry has a social function.

Newsweek on the end of verse.

A recent topic in economic sociology is the effect of cultural schema on markets. The argument, put forward by multiple scholars, like our friend Ezra and Hannan/Hsu/Polos, is that buyers and sellers punish products/firms that don’t conform to type. That brings me to the George Foreman Grill (GFG).* A student and I got into a discussion of products like the GFG, which are sold through infomercials. We observed that the GFG seems to be an exception to the rule that products sold on informercials remain low status. Given the theory, you’d expect low status informercial products to be punished by consumers if it were to appear in mainstream venues. However, unlike its infomercial fellow travelers,  the GFG seems to have “migrated” from TV ghetto to mainstream product. So, when can a product can “jump” from the informercial category to “legitimate product?”

A few hypotheses:

• The product resembles other high status products.
• The product is obviously and clearly superior, which explains why the kind-of useful Shamwow remains in the informercial ghetto.
• Endorsed by a high status celebrity.

Any other guesses? What other infomercial products have gone mainstream?

*Disclaimer: I own a GFG and use it frequently.

Question: Has an orgtheorist ever headed a major American university? Were they successful? For the sake of this question, someone is an orgtheorist if they are a social scientist who focuses primarily on organizations or management. So it could be an economist, education scholar, public administration researchers, etc.

Cal Newport is an MIT computer science post-doc and college advice dude. He has some books and an interesting blog. I thought orgtheory readers might enjoy this post about a computer science professor named James McLurkin. It’s hard to find such a nice statement about what it takes to be a truly good academic. The post is about how he earned his reputation as a top researcher in grad school, which lead to an excellent career.

Here’s the key passage:

1. To become a star, in graduate school or elsewhere, you need to make an important advance in your field.
2. Important advances require bleeding-edge expertise. (Once this expertise is gained, however, the breakthrough itself will probably seem obvious.)
3. Therefore: To become a star, you should focus on getting to the bleeding edge of your field as quickly as possible.

Newport observes that step #3 is really, really hard because it requires a person to go beyond their comfort zone, but not too much. How does that work? Most people tend to repeat what they know. It is daunting to work on a project where you don’t know the answer, or how it will work out.  If you stick with what is easy, you don’t progress. Conversely, if your project is too hard, then you won’t be able to learn from it and you will get stuck.

The trick is to build up skills by doing projects that stretch you, but not too much. If you can do that a few times in a row, you will likely get to the cutting edge of the field:

James describes this lesson as perhaps the most valuable he learned as an undergrad at MIT. Under the tutelage of his supervisor, he honed his ability to choose projects that were hard enough to stretch his ability, but still reasonable enough that he could complete them. She wanted him to be ambitious and set big goals, but she had no tolerance for goals so big that they were beyond his ability to finish in a reasonable time frame.

Awesome!

Lack of empathy may be one reason that people rationalize heinous acts like torture. My colleagues at Northwestern, Mary Hunter-Morris (also of Harvard Law) and Loran Nordgren, and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon have written a new paper explaining how social psychological tendencies make it difficult for interrogators to assess the difference between “enhanced interrogation” and torture. Even interrogators with good intentions may push the limits of acceptable interrogation techniques too far because of these systematic biases. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:

We identify the existence of two separate systematic psychological biases that impede objective application of the torture standard.  First, the self-serving bias – a bias that motivates evaluators to interpret facts or rules in a way that suits their interests – leads administrators to promote more narrow interpretations of torture when faced with a perceived threat to their nations’ national security.  Thus, the threshold for torture is tendentiously raised during exactly the periods of time when torture is most likely to be used.  Second, our own research on the hot-cold empathy gap suggests that an assessment of an interrogation tactic’s severity is influenced by the momentary visceral state of the evaluator.  People who are not currently experiencing a visceral state – such as pain, hunger, or fear – tend to systematically underestimate the severity of the visceral state.  We argue that, because the people who evaluate interrogation tactics are unlikely to be experiencing an extreme visceral state when making their evaluations, the hot-cold empathy gap results in systematic underestimation of the severity of tactics.  This, in turn, leads to an under-inclusive conception of ‘torture’ being applied in domestic interrogation policy and international torture law.

Of the two biases, the empathy gap is especially interesting to me. This bias would seem to most severely impair people who are in the greatest need of empathy. If you’re living a comfortable lifestyle in a wealthy suburb, you’re inclined to underestimate the severity of living conditions of lower-income families. If you’ve never experienced any kind of addiction, you probably underestimate the challenges that a drug addict faces in giving up drug use. But what makes the empathy gap so critical to understanding the definition of torture is that it virtually ensures that interrogators will underestimate the visceral impact of any kind of interrogation tactic they use. If the legal system doesn’t impose strict, objective boundaries on interrogation techniques, the tendency will be for interrogators to gradually move to more and more extreme tactics. Scary.

FYI, the authors recently submitted the paper to a number of law reviews.

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 is a follow up to grad skool rulz #15: working with your committee. The other grad skool rulz are here.

I was recently asked – what are you allowed to say to faculty members? This is an important question. Students should know what is off limits and professors should have a sense of what the boundary is.

First, you have to be a little honest about your relationship with Professor X. There’s a huge range in what people find acceptable. Some professors treat advisees as quasi-family members. They invite them to dinner all the time, socialize with them, and so forth. Others are much more guarded. One friend had an adviser who was extremely guarded. He would show up to the weekly meeting, discuss his research for an hour, and when time was up, he’d leave. After a few years of this, the dissertation was done, but there was almost no social interaction. I’m probably in the middle. I’m friendly and chatty, but I meet students during business  hours. I normally don’t socialize with students off-campus, unless we have a genuine common extra-academic  interest.

Ok, what can you talk about? You should be able to have a conversation with your professor on the following topics.

• Intellectual matters: Your adviser should be open to any question relating to your discipline. “How do you prove this result? What do people think about this book? What is your opinion of this hypothesis?” All legitimate, even if she says, “Gee, that’s a good question – I don’t know!” The point of being a professor is knowledge. If you can’t share it with the graduate students, what’s the point?
• Evaluation of professional work: You should be able to ask – “how good is this?” and get a reasonable answer. Success depends on producing strong work. Your adviser should be able to give you his/her opinion on how you are doing and convey it in a professional manner.
• Professionalization: There’s all kind of tacit knowledge about how academia works. You can always ask questions like: How does publishing work? What is a “good journal” in my area? How do I get a job? What do people do at academic conferences?
• Major life crises: Once in a while, really bad things happen. I mean *really* bad things happen. At the very least, your adviser should know why you’ve been slow on email. Some people can sympathize, or even help you. At other times, maybe your professor can guide you in the right direction. For example, I once had an LGBT student who had a very serious issue. I am  not gay, so I thought it was inappropriate for me to advise this person. However, we do have an LGBT counselor on campus whose purpose is to help students. Some faculty have tin ears, but it’s better to have people informed and maybe you can get some help.

Let’s move on to more subtle issues:

• With most faculty, most small talk is ok. Professors are human beings who watch tv, read the Internet and so forth. Chit chat is ok.
• I’d tend to shy away from the ups and downs of personal life.
• I’d reserve complaining for your friends.
• I’d avoid gossip about faculty and other graduate students. That should probably be reserved for your friends.
• You can always ask how your personal experience might (adversely) affect your career. For example, if you have some family planning issues, speak up.

Criticism. We all need it, but it’s hard for professors to hear it:

• If you have a real beef, float it by the graduate director or some other people you can trust.
• Accusing people is usually bad form. It’s often better to say “Professor X, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but I was confused by … ” Give people the benefit of the doubt and provide a way for the situation to be peacefully resolved.

The rule of thumb is “be professional.” Unless you have a super touchy feely adviser, you should stick to your research and professional issues.

Update: There was originally a passage that sent the wrong message. The updated post responds to that. If it interests you, the original can still be found in the comments thread.