orgtheory.net

1. Lawyers, from Volokh.

2. Political science professors, from Andrew Sullivan.

3. English professors, via Jacob Levy.

To balance out some of our “metal” posts, here are a few links related to Gregorian chant:

• Very cool directory of Gregorian chants, inchoro.net, with musics and lyrics.
• Of course the wikipedia Gregorian chant entry.
• Björk interviews chant-inspired Arvo Pärt.
• The New Liturgical Movement.
• Stanford’s William Mahrt keeps chant alive.  Here’s an article on “Gregorian chant as a paradigm for sacred music.”
• The Guidonian Hand illustrated by William Mahrt (here’s the notation).
• David Hiley’s Gregorian Chant (Cambridge University Press) is a good intro: history, evolution, technique, the basics.
• A 1906 book (translation, in the public domain) on the New School of Gregorian Chant.
• And, lots of chant-related links at music.princeton.edu.

I thought about making the title of this post, “the coming war in academia,” but I decided that would be too over-the-top. Nevertheless, there is a battle emerging in the state of Texas over the best way to measure the academic performance of professors. The public universities are in the trenches of this debate because they are partially funded by taxpayers who are starting to ask what good comes from public education.  If the state is going to spend millions of taxpayer money on public universities, the argument goes, there should be some tangible benefits that come from this investment. And the benefits, they would argue, should be produced in a more cost-effective way. From the public’s perspective, what we see instead of cost savings are rising tuition rates and unemployed graduates.

The solution? Increase professors’ accountability by making them justify their employment costs. If you can’t show improvements in test scores or other performance metrics, then make them show that they’re profitable for the institution. The most stark example of this practice comes from Texas A&M. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s reporting:

[P]erhaps the most far-reaching initiative is the cost-benefit balance sheet at Texas A&M, the oldest public university in the state. Each faculty member is assessed on criteria including the number of classes that they teach, the tuition that they bring in and research grants that they generate.One metric divides their salary by the number of students that they teach. The range is striking. Some nontenured lecturers earn less than $100 for each student they instruct. Other professors are teaching such small classes that their compensation works out to more than $10,000—in a few cases, more than $20,000—per student.

Mr. Criscione, the assistant professor studying parasites, came out at $23,563 per student. He says that is because he was setting up his lab and applying for grants most of that year, as is standard for new hires in the biology department, so he supervised just two students.

Faculty on the huge flagship campus, which serves 39,000 undergraduates here in east-central Texas, say some of the data on the spreadsheet are inaccurate, including inflated salaries and missing grants. They also say it’s unfair to judge their productivity by class size when they often can’t pick what they teach but are assigned by their department heads.

And they point out that the data do not take into account the many hours spent preparing lectures, advising students, serving on curriculum review committees or making other contributions to the college community. “A 50-minute lecture takes me two days to prepare,” says Mr. Criscione. “There are 24 lectures in a semester, so you do the math.”

Is this the inevitable result of the customer-centric model of the university? Combine that with the rising tide of dissatisfaction with state governments’ use of resources, and you have a perfect storm for this sort of thing.  I think in the long run state budget crises will be resolved and taxpayers will become less angry, but in the short term public universities are under enormous pressure to show accountability. These short term pressures may have lasting effects on academia and may significantly alter public education in the U.S.

A student in my undergraduate social theory class forwarded me this picture depicting life from the Marxist perspective.

Mario Small with the Hoosier Protection Service

Last Friday, orghead Mario Small gave a talk at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, jointly sponsored by sociology. He gave a wonderful talk on his new research on social capital in organizational settings. I won’t go into that, you should read the book.

I will mention one valuable exchange. One of our post-doctoral visitors asked about his field site. Do the lessons from child care centers and tie formation carry over to other settings? Mario roughly said the following:

When thinking about field research, we often confuse the place of observation with the unit of analysis. In other words, we observed interactions, not child care centers. If we observe interactions in other places that also have similar characteristics, it is fair to ask if we observe the same outcomes. In other studies of similar interactions, there is some support for my main ideas.

Good point. Also check out Mario’s blog.

I am done with Sara Micklem’s Wildfire, the sequel to Firethorn. Definitely an example of despair in fantasay literature. Strongly recommended.

My current habit is to give away most fiction that I read.*If you want this book for free, simply say so in the comments and send me an email. I’ll randomly choose someone and send them the book in the next few weeks.

* Except my rare and nearly complete collection of Frank Herbert novels.

The OMT blog is hosting a series of guest commentaries about the “organization of political campaigns and campaign finance.” The first post is written by former orgtheory guest blogger, Ed Walker.  He writes about the corporate financing of political activities in the post-Citizens United era (the Supreme Court case that ruled corporations’ political donations were a form of free speech). Ed makes the link between this phenomenon and a growing interest in organizational theory about the social movement-like aspects of corporate political behavior.

Although this undisclosed electoral fundraising mechanism may be new, there’s a growing body of work that links together research on social movements and organizational theory in order to understand how corporations, since the 1970s, have made strategic efforts to reshape the civic and political landscape.  Some, such as Stanford’s Steven Barley, have drawn our attention to the means by which corporations have created new organizational fields in order to shape the federal policy domain over the past forty years.  David Vogel’s earlier work linked the mobilization of Naderite and Public Interest Movement organizations in the seventies to a more activist stance among the nation’s leading corporations.  Mayer Zald and Mike Lounsbury have been encouraging organizational theorists to return to the study of elites, expertise, power, and the traditional questions of political sociology as they relate to understanding organizations.  I find that particular prod to be quite welcome, as others are also connecting political changes in organizations to the reconfiguration of stakeholder practices.

My own work complements this research by investigating the expansion of the field of public affairs consulting since the early seventies (ASR article page, ungated PDF).  These organizations comprise a multi-million dollar industry in their own right, helping corporations and industry groups to create forms of grassroots organization of their own….The major implication of this recent work, then, is that a richer and deeper understanding of the role of corporations in the public domain over the past four decades is needed.  This understanding calls our attention to the fact that although the Citizens United ruling was indeed historic in its unleashing of anonymous corporate electoral spending, we know as organizational scholars that structural transformations can often have a much greater influence than changes in resource flows.  It seems clear that direct corporate interventions in American civic and political life have been common since long before the Supreme Court’s January decision was handed down.

Check the OMT blog regularly to see additional contributions by other organizational scholars.

Which prominent sociologist was responsible for these lovely words about Stalin?

Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also – and this was the highest proof of his greatness – he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

and

Three great decisions faced Stalin in power and he met them magnificently: first, the problem of the peasants, then the West European attack, and last the Second World War. The poor Russian peasant was the lowest victim of tsarism, capitalism and the Orthodox Church. He surrendered the Little White Father easily; he turned less readily but perceptibly from his ikons; but his kulaks clung tenaciously to capitalism and were near wrecking the revolution when Stalin risked a second revolution and drove out the rural bloodsuckers.

Answer below the fold…

Read the rest of this entry »

Barry Bonds made more money in one year than all the late-1960s San Francisco Giants made throughout their whole careers (Barry Bonds’ father, Bobby, played on that team).  What has changed in the intervening decades?

Malcolm Gladwell answers this question in his recent New Yorker piece titled Talent Grab.  He tells the story of Marvin Miller, a former chief negotiator for the United Steelworkers Union who took the reins of the Major League Baseball Players Association and radically changed the institutions that shape the appropriation of rents.  The story has something for everyone — some of the 60s Zeitgeist, a window into how we think about (I suppose, the “social construction” of) talent, the co-evolution of institutions and power, interesting economic questions about the imputation and appropriation of value, links to Alan Fiske’s work on relational forms, etc, etc.  Good reading.

Gladwell’s piece extensively cites Aya Chacar and Bill Hesterly’s excellent 2008 article published in Managerial and Decision Economics, Institutional settings and rent appropriation by knowledge-based employees: the case of Major League Baseball. (W00t! W00t! to Aya and Bill.)  Here is the abstract:

We examine the role of institutional settings in determining rent appropriation by employees. Based on an inductive historical study of owner–player relations in Major League Baseball from the inception of professional baseball to the present, we show that both formal and informal institutional rules can dramatically influence rent appropriation. We draw upon anthropology research on social relations to understand how differences in informal norms regarding the social relations between the owners and the players affect appropriation. Our findings show that when social relations are defined by authority ranking, pay is determined more by fiat than by market forces or bargaining.

BONUS:  For more, also see this piece by Aya and Bill — Chacar, A.S. & Hesterly, W. 2004.  Innovations and value creation in Major League Baseball, 1860-2000. Business History, 46: 407-438.

Hard core orgtheorist and former guest Katherine Chen was featured in the LA Times this week in an article about Burning Man research:

Harvard-trained sociologist Katherine K. Chen wrote the book “Enabling Creative Chaos,” along with several academic papers, detailing the event’s evolution from a weekend camping trip on a San Francisco beach into an unconventional corporation with a $10-million budget and 2,000 volunteers.

High five!!

Philosophy TV hosts a conversation between Ned Hall and L.A. Paul on the counterfactual analysis of causation. It is, of course, must-see TV on any plausible account of necessity.

In the interests of full disclosure, something, something, something. I’ll think of it in a minute.

The Academy of Management has a new “Strategy as Practice” interest group.  Former orgtheory guest blogger Saku Mantere is involved, along with many others (David Seidl, Curtis Lebaron, etc).  Here is the new Strategy as Practice website (it just went ‘live’).

A few days ago, I wrote a ranking of research and listed “history of social thought” as last. Jacob Levy wrote:

The mathematician Benoit Mandlebrot died a few days ago. I never met the man, but his work impacted me in three ways.

1. His book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, blew my mind in junior high school. I grew up in a small town on the Jersey Shore. Wonderful place, but not a place to learn science. One day, on a trip to New York City, my father, a math teacher, took me to a big Barnes and Noble warehouse somewhere in Manhattan. It wasn’t a bookstore in the normal sense with bookshelves. It was a big storage space. The aisles had those big metal shelves used to stack textbooks. My dad brought me to one spot and there were a few copies of Mandelbrot’s book. The book was beautiful. When I opened it, I saw equations. This was not a high school algebra text book. It was a serious science book. The concept of a book that was so path breaking and yet so beautiful blew my mind. It would be years till I could appreciate what was inside, but rarely has a book impacted the way I thought about science.
2. The book did, eventually, teach me some math. I learned about Cantor sets, Hausdorff dimension, and fractals from the book.
3. Later, oddly, as a sociologist, Mandlebrot’s critique of financial economics taught me a great deal about the sociology of science. Mandlebrot’s critique was that economists had failed to appreciate the importance of distributions without finite means (e.g., you can’t integrate over the real line and get a finite number). Ignoring these distributions meant that you assumed that price fluctuations were relatively constrained. Economists like integrable distributions because they make nice publishable models. The deeper lesson is the the limits of tools can shape what scientists do. For that reason, hard problems (e.g., non-integrable price distributions) are abandoned in favor of easier problems.

And of course, we all loved those super cool fractal screen savers!

Our friend, Dan Hirschman, posted a link to this chart from the humor website Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Having worked at three different universities in the past three years, I’ve been thinking lately about how the places we sit affect the research we do.

First, a brief autobiographical note, which sets the stage for some questions about organizational homes…

I did a PhD in sociology at a large public university on the West Coast.  As I was finishing my dissertation on egg and sperm donation, I was thoroughly enmeshed in conversations with sociologists and sociology, but my physical office was in an interdisciplinary center on genetics.  As a graduate fellow there, I attended talks by geneticists and philosophers, legal scholars and anthropologists, all of whom were concerned in some way with molecular genetics, particularly in how it was changing medicine.

Heading up the coast, I settled in at another large public university in California to do a postdoctoral fellowship in health policy.  Surrounded by a handful of other postdocs who had been trained as sociologists, political scientists, and economists, our offices were located in the heart of a public health school.  Here, I worked on turning some embryonic ideas about studying genetic testing into a full-fledged research agenda, all the while chatting with economists and political scientists about how they conceptualize and study the world.  One of those casual conversations resulted in a collaborative project with a political scientist that involves an experimental survey design, which is pretty far removed from my graduate training in qualitative methods.

Then, for the past year, I’ve been an assistant professor in a sociology department at a private university on the East Coast, and it’s too soon to tell in what ways this new setting will influence my research trajectory.

In moving from one organizational home to another, each transition involved meeting new people, working in new surroundings (sociology departments and interdisciplinary programs), and entering a new stage (grad student, postdoc, assistant professor).  In some cases, the effects of sitting in a new place are quite direct, as when my initial interests in genetics developed over time into a new book project, or when talking with a political scientist became a side project.  But I think the effects can be more subtle as well, such as when the preoccupying concerns of those who are nearby influence one’s own thinking, from which research questions to ask to how to go about answering them.

Certainly, people have more and less choice about where they end up sitting, and there are a lot of reasons why people might go sit in one place or another.  Moreover, there are broader institutional and economic factors to consider, with just one example being the funding priorities of different programs.  Putting these kinds of considerations into the background for the moment, and focusing more on the level of interaction, here are a few questions for the readers of OrgTheory…

To what extent do you think your organizational home matters, either for the kinds of research you do or for how you do it?  In what ways does it matter?  Does it matter more for people who are in earlier stages of their careers?

Our former guest, Mario Small was cited in the NT Times about the revival of cultural explanations in the study of poverty:

Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.

Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.

Mario isn’t the only friend of orgtheory in the NY Times. Shamus Khan of Scatterplot blog appeared in an article about the study of elites:

Shamus Rahman Khan, a conference organizer and assistant professor of sociology at Columbia, seemed to be most at ease with the conflict. The son of a Pakistani father and Irish mother who both emigrated to the United States, he said he came from a wealthy but not elite family. His father, a successful surgeon, paid his son’s way to the St. Paul’s School, a top boarding school.

Yet when Mr. Khan arrived there in the mid-1990s, he said he lived in the “minority students dorm.” He used that experience and a later teaching stint at St. Paul’s to write a book on the nature of advantage, “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School,” which will be published by Princeton University Press in January.

“Is it morally responsible for you to get your kids into very expensive schools if it will advantage them?” Mr. Khan said. “It’s hard not to do it. But by doing it, you’re not explicitly squirting some other kid in the eye with pepper spray. It’s more subtle.”

Check it out!!!!

It’s official, Kieran is a nerd (and clearly, a more well-organized nerd than I am).

This month, a number of left and antiwar organizations have mobilized around the country. My collaborator, Michael Heaney, has organized a team of students to study these events as part of their undergraduate research experience. Here’s some annotated photos, from the blog he keeps:

Undergraduate Erin Reed is asking a street protester in Chicago to complete a survey.

Monica Shattuck describes the exciting emotional build up of the rally.

Monica Shattuck, Rayza Goldsmith, and Courtney Lantzer interview key Chicago movement leader Carl Rosen about his activism.

We all know that only three real science Nobels exist: Physics, Chem, and Medicine/Physiology. Social scientists can get their consolation prize via the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Fabio has already started some sort of countdown clock until a sociologist (presumably Granovetter) gets that one. Given our facility with adopting victim postures, it is easy to scare up some indignation as to why a sociologist has never won a Noble, real or fake.

But the real problem with carving up the scientific space in such an ancient way is that the most important scientific cluster that was actually born in the twentieth century was actually left out. So it is really cognitive science (and to some extent its older psychology cousin) which has gotten the shaft, with people that have produced scientific contributions of a magnitude that dwarfs that of 90% of the people who have received the SRPIESIMOAN never having received any recognition.

So for instance, there will never be a “Nobel” for Noam Chomsky. Jean Piaget could never win one either. Stanley Milgram? You might be bar-none one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, but sorry! You are a “psychologist” (unless you are a psychologist who studies “economics” related stuff like DK you are out). Allen Newell? Too bad; we gave a SRPIESIMOAN to your co-author Herbert Simon for a bunch of random stuff, but ignored the fundamental work in Artificial Intelligence and Human problem solving that he did with you. So Herbert Simon will forever be referred to as “A Nobel Laurate” but you are just Allen Newell. George Miller? Your foundational work on the limits of human cognitive processing capacity might have jump-started the cognitive revolution and actually provided the main inspiration for Simon’s work, but you get nada. This list could of course be expanded indefinitely (e.g. Marvin Minsky, Schank and Abelson, Eleanor Rosch, Rumelhart and McClelland, etc.).

It’s become apparent that many Republicans adhere to the theory of the expansive executive branch. Whether it be law enforcement, legislative initiative, or foreign policy, the executive branch is to be followed and given the benefit of the doubt. Of course, I think Democrats follow this in practice as well. Partisanship often requires that dissent be muted to further some agenda. However, it’s only in the Republican party that there’s been such an open endorsement of strong executive power all the way from the intellectuals down to the rank and file of the party.

This raises an interesting question. Is the expansive executive theory consistent with the principles of American government? Even though the Constitution was intended to increase executive power over the Articles of Confederation, it seems highly unlikely that the Constitution was meant to grant nearly unlimited power to the executive. In fact, the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights have so many anti-executive features in it, including things that are dear to conservatives such as the Second Amendment,* that it’s hard to believe that the Founders ever intended any other interpretation.

That raises an even deeper question about the expansive executive argument and the general intellectual tenor of the modern Republican party. It’s one thing to say that the government should switch policies. But it’s entirely another thing to move ultimate authority away from the courts and the legislature to the executive, which is what a lot conservative writings and jurisprudence suggest. What you get is a philosophy that’s less about specific policy proposals and more about proposing a fundamental shift in the way the Federal government is run.

Of course, the case is overstated a bit. No one has proposed abolishing Congress or appropriating local government, Hugo Chavez-style. But in an number of major policy domains, the shift is obvious. Congress should not decide when to go to war. They should verify what the President has done and not interfere. The Courts should not second guess police and prosecutors. Individual rights in criminal cases are subordinate to the needs of the state. These are the most egregious cases, there are more subtle cases.

Overall, I think there are many positive things about conservative thought. Tradition is important to consider, government ought not be a burden. But the trends I’ve identified above make me think that there’s been slip from these insights into an embrace of power for its own sake.

* If private citizens are supposed to own guns as a bulwark against tyranny, then doesn’t that imply some strong limits to executive power?  Tyranny essentially means “executive out of control,” which means things like jailing people without due process and torturing them. I really don’t see any other way of reading the Second amendment if you start with the “anti-tyranny” interpretation.

The BBC has a 15 minute video on poverty and politics in Gary, Indiana – town that’s suffered greatly in the deindustrialization of the Midwest. Recommended.

According to lore, ant colonies provide a template for human society and organization.  Ant colonies are decentralized and extremely efficient, reciprocity and community are the norm, ants are moral and happy (ok, I made the latter up).  The ant-human comparison is frequently made relative to organizing and the argument essentially is that we can learn a lot from ants.  Now and then, in the heat of a classroom discussion, I have also succumbed to a few organizational ant-human comparisons, though I’ve also argued (conveniently: depending on the point I want to make) that there are more differences than similarities.

So, both sides of this discussion — what humans can learn from ants and what they can’t — have recently shown up in the popular press.

• On the “ants rock” side of the argument you would expect to find sociobiologist E.O. Wilson: here’s a recent piece on “Ants and Us.”
• On the slightly more skeptical side (though definitely not in all cases), Deborah Gordon has recently written a thoughtful piece titled “Colonial Studies.”

It would actually be quite interesting to develop some kind of cross-species taxonomy relative to organizing and organizations, comparative organizational ethology or something equivalent.  I don’t know what the relevant dimensions of comparison should be, though the following seem like important ones: nature of environment, nature of task, nature and capabilities of organism, (feasible) forms of aggregation, influence, communication and decision-making dimensions, technologies and tools, etc, etc.

I’ll probably continue making animal-human organizational comparisons — I actually feel like I learn quite a bit from reading about organizing, decision-making etc in the animal kingdom (recently: dolphins) — but a systematic program to classify and look at comparative similarities and differences would be fascinating, fun and instructive.

Supper Clutter XXL is a sculpture by Angela De La Cruz, who is a finalist for this year’s Turner Prize.

This week’s book forum post will discuss chapters 2-4 of Social Structures. These chapters all deal, in one way or another, with inequality. I’d say that the main take home points are:

• True equality in networks is possible, but hard to achieve. There are lots of reasons why inequality emerges, such as people associating with popular people.
• Equality has uses, so people will trie to create practices that mitigate inequality.
• Sometimes inequality is very durable and some kinds, like domination, are rather strict. Domination, as opposed to inequality, is actually rare.
• There are also lots of cool factoids. E.g., status for boys is alpha male oriented, status for girls is defined in terms of the omega (least) girl. There’s also a neat classification of gang leadership structures in chapter 4.

The major comment I’d like to make is that Levi Martin’s theory is a sort of pragmatic structuralism. To understand this subtle point, consider a classical structuralist like Levi-Strauss. In his world, tie formation rules are just applied, even if people don’t quite grok them. The result is the creation of vast structures. E.g., certain cross cousin marriage rules create cyclic family trees.

Levi Martin raises an important issue. In actual field work, such “pure” structures are in fact rare. What sort of happens is that people apply the rules and then there’s some unexpected issue that comes up. Then, people abandon, modify, or change the rule. One of Levi Martin’s more interesting examples is marriage in caste systems. There’s a bit of male hypogamy, but strict hypogamy can undermine generalized reciprocity, which has the nice side effect of reducing inequality enough to make people get along. The solution, in India and early European tribal system, is to designate some lower caste me as more “worthy” than others, which creates a little more exchange in the system.

At the end of the day, Levi Martin rides a fine line. On the one hand, these examples do show the limits of models where actors just bluntly apply tie formation rules. Raw structuralism is just empirically wrong, if conceptually elegant. However, I sense a creeping functionalism in Levi Martin’s account from time to time. Equality (or other social formations) is good for group stability, so when it breaks down, people try to mess with the system to fix it (e.g, general reciprocity as a solution to overly skew distributions of exchanges). The book never veers directly into functionalism, but it sure does come close. To avoid functionalism, you’d need a decent micro-account of why people sense that the current social structure is wrong. Maybe the explanation can be evolutionary or rational choice. Not Levi Martin’s charge, but surely worth thinking about.

We’ve had ‘em for two weeks now. Questions:

1. Were they as bad in other disciplines as they were in sociology?
2. How are administrators responding to the rankings? Aside from being nice in public, are deans changing their behavior? Do they accept the rankings or find them sketchy?
3. How have things gone down in departments where the rankings are highly inaccurate? For example, Berkeley and Northwestern got slammed in one of the ratings. Have the deans at those schools recognized the lameness?
4. Don’t you now all agree that we should take back the rankings?
5. Is there any indication at all that NRC has realized that it bungled the job and will do better next time, in 2030?

Anonymous comments encouraged!

At the ASALH meetings in Raleigh, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel with historians on the new research on the Black Studies profession. A lot of good discussion. Here, I’ll re-iterate one point I made at the panel. It’s very hard to analyze Black Studies because it’s a complicated thing. The Black Studies field is (a) a social movement, (b) academic discipline and (c) organizational behavior. It’s also embedded in the story of Civil Rights, Black power, and enrollment trends at colleges. For these reasons, it’s very hard to write a convincing account of the field. Focus on one topic, say movement politics, and you miss a lot of other stuff. It’s also a contentious field, so you get a lot of polemics as well.

The panel also got heated when someone asked about the future of the field. One panelist correctly pointed out that there is a rhetoric of crisis. Black Studies is always in crisis. This was in response to a comment, where I pointed out that many programs have really, genuinely, have had problems. I also added the following.

Black Studies is going down a few paths. First, the field has stabilized. Programs are not going to be closed. Second, life in research programs is very different than other institutions. Leading universities are expanding their Black Studies PhD programs. Third, undergraduate programs at non-research institutions tend to have small faculties and low enrollments. Thus, the field is stable overall, expanding a bit on the graduate level, with more limited growth, or even decline, at the undergraduate level. Yes, Black Studies, has had more than its fair share of enemies, but we also needed a grounded description of what’s happening now.

Western civilization is great, but Columbus represents its worst tendencies. Columbus, for example, was an avowed slaver and colonialist. To counter Columbus Day, I celebrate Lapu Lapu Day, in honor of the Filipino tribal leader who resisted Ferdinand Magellan and thus represents the first known successful example of self-defense from Western conquest.

This month’s guest blogger is Rene Almeling. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University and is working on a super cool book called Sex Cells: The Medical Market in Eggs and Sperm, now under contract with the University of California Press.  It compares how reproductive cells, and the women and men who donate them, are culturally and economically valued. Given that the recent Nobel prize in medicine went to the physician who invented IVF, this is a great time to have Rene blog and talk to us about her work. Welcome aboard!!!!!

Here’s how I evaluate research importance in social science. Averages, of course:

1. Great problem, great solution.
2. Great problem, partial/boring solution.
3. Decent problem, great solution.
4. Great problem, empirical/descriptive work.
5. Decent problem, partial/boring solution.
6. Decent problem, empirical/descriptive work.
7. Small problem, any solution.
8. Bizarre/highly technical approaches to any problem.
9. Definitional/taxonomic/philosophical writings on any problem.
10. History of social thought.

Random comments: I love good research in all categories. Social science journals usually only deal with #5 and up. Grad students dream of #1, but you usually start with something lower on the list. Great researchers can do it many ways – the once in a lifetime #1 or the expert who hammers home a bunch of #4′s. #8 may be in the eye of the beholder. European/critical theory people love #9 and #10. Strong disciplinarians would move #8 a few notches, perhaps to #5.

Last night, during a social theory class, a student asked about Mead’s “I/me” distinction and the humanities. Apparently, various folks in the areas of theater and drama theory employ the I/me distinction. The student asked who came first: Mead or the drama people? I have no idea! Anyone out there can help me?

From XKCD, via Sullivan. See the bigger map here.

Malcolm Gladwell has decided to delve into the waters of social movement theory. In this essay he does a nice job discussing the implications of research on social movement mobilization and networks for the current wave of political activism that some attribute to online social media. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media could revolutionize the ability of activists to organize, some think. They argue that the recent activism in Iran exemplifies the new form of mobilization, as agitators take to the internet to mobilize support for their causes and to coordinate protests in the street. Gladwell is skeptical. Citing research by the likes of Doug McAdam, Aldon Morris, and Mark Granovetter, Gladwell argues that mobilization tends to occur through strong network ties, not through the weak ties of social networking websites. Weak ties are better at transmitting information than they are at getting people to sacrifice and commit to movement causes.  The riskier the action or the more commitment required, the more critical strong ties will be to mobilizing activists.

You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry [through social media], because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

Twitter didn’t create Iran’s Green Revolution. Face-to-face networks were likely the glue that kept the protestors together, especially as the potential costs of protesting increased. However, Twitter mattered in one really important way – it allowed Iranians to communicate messages about their movement to a global audience. This matters because movements create leverage by appealing to third-parties to support their cause and withhold resources from their targets. Like I argued in an earlier blog post about this topic:

Tweeting gives outsiders direct access to the voice of the protestors. Coupled with public protest and an inflammatory situation, tweeting is an audience-creating machine.

Twitter is a broker of many weak ties. It connects a variety of clusters in the global social network, making it possible to communicate rapidly and efficiently to a large number of people. This is why Twitter, and the weak ties it brings with it, is such a valuable asset to social movements. With that one caveat, I think Gladwell seems spot on in his essay.