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On this blog I’ve been told to avoid certain things in letters of recommendation. For example, “hard working” has a bizarre secret reading of “untalented.” Someone once told me that “please call me,” a boiler plate sentence, actually means “this person is psychotic but I can only tell you over the phone.” Allegedly, saying that one is good at teaching, has good people skills, or is caring also broadcasts “loser.” At the end of the day, is there anything I can write short of “this person is a genius” that won’t be wildly misread as a secret code for dork? My goal is to write well considered, high information letters for non-geniuses who clearly deserve jobs and admission to graduate school. So, please, tell me the secret code! I’m tenured and I still don’t know it!

Paul Ingram, Lori Yue, and Huggy Rao have a paper in a recent issue of AJS that looks at the success of community activists who protest the openings of Wal-Mart stores in their neighborhoods. The article begins with these intriguing facts:

During the period starting from 1998 and ending in 2005, Wal-Mart floated 1,599 proposals to open new stores. Wal-Mart successfully opened 1,040 stores. Protests arose on 563 occasions, and in 65% of the cases in which protests arose, Wal-Mart did not open a store.

It’s pretty astonishing that local activists were able to thwart Wal-Mart’s efforts to open a store 65% of the time. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, surely has the political capital to win many more of these battles, and yet they frequently succumb to activist pressures. Why? The article explains that we can better understand this outcome if we think of the interaction between Wal-Mart and its activist nemeses as a sort of strategic dance in which Wal-Mart probes its environment to test the level of community support for a store and retracts when it views protests as a signal of potential regulatory costs and weak customer enthusiasm. One reason I like the study is because it promotes the idea that activists protests are a sort of market signal that shapes producer entry and adaptation to local consumer demands. In this sense, protests and other forms of public activism indirectly shape market supply.

Another reason to like the study is that it is one of the few organizational studies of Wal-Mart. It is surprising that there is so little organizational research on Wal-Mart given its dominance in the global market, its prominent position in American consumer society, and its broad political influence.  It’s also a relatively unique organizational phenomenon. Part of what allowed it to capture the global retail market is because it was more quickly able to adapt to the new market environment where global supply chains became a source of competitive advantage.  Wal-Mart is the GM of contemporary capitalism, and yet compared to GM in the 40s-60s, organizational scholars have yet to really make it a primary object of study.

As Jerry Davis has pointed out (see, for example, the comments in this post), our theories of organizations are not well suited to studying these new sorts of organizations that dominate the current market. Wal-Mart would seem like a good place to start.  I expect orgheads to fill me in on what I’m missing here (e.g., dissertations being written, articles I haven’t yet noticed).

The grad skool rulz

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

A question that often comes up with graduate students on the market is: what jobs should I apply for? I think there is a fairly simple way to figure this one out:

1. Go to the job announcement web site/publication of your discipline. Write down every job that you are even remotely qualified for.
2. Do the same for related disciplines. For example, in my case, I’d be qualified for sociology, but I’m also qualified for management, education or policy (if it’s orgtheory related).
3. When I say “anything,” I mean “anything,” unless it’s clearly nutty. For example, my job was advertised, I believe, as “social psychology” and “culture.” On the other hand, there are clear lines around some specialties. I could never plausibly be a demographer or an ethnographer, so I’d never submit an application.
4. Then set a minimal level of happiness for yourself and cross off schools that don’t make it above the bar. For example, if you like research and dislike teaching, cross off liberal arts colleges. If you don’t think you’ll be happy competing for constant journal publication, cross of the R1 schools. And so forth.

This is a time for complete self-honesty. The average job candidate gets one or two job offers and there is no predicting where you will get that offer. So don’t put anything on the list where you suspect that you will be really, really unhappy.

At the same time, don’t be too picky. For example, there are about 200 research oriented universities in the US and each of those has multiple programs that might employ you. If you say “bleh, I hate the Midwest,” then you will miss a lot of great schools. Even if the school where you get a job isn’t as fancy as you had hoped, you can move up if you work hard and maintain a strong scholarly publication record. In the end, more schools are better. Unless you live in some hyper defined niche, you should be applying to dozens and dozens of schools.

What about post-docs? I get asked that a lot. Here’s my view:

1. First, figure out if your field requires post-docs. In sociology, you can get an Ivy League position right out of grad school. But in biology, it’s really, really hard, nearly impossible.
2. Then, figure out if your family can tolerate moving around a lot. Don’t make your life miserable in pursuit of the perfect post-doc. How many of us are willing to risk divorce over an extra year of funding? Work hard, but respect your family.
3. If you can tolerate moving and they exist in your field, then post-docs can be good. But you have to be careful.
4. Some post-docs are glorified research assistants. In some fields, you are required to do that sort of work. But in others, you should avoid these post-docs unless you really have no other choice. Sure, your CV may have an extra publication, but as author #10 you won’t get much credit.
5. The bottom line is that in post-doc optional fields, some post-docs are worse than assistant professor positions. So be very careful about where you go. The best post-docs are light on teaching and give you some autonomy for your own research.
6. To get good post-docs, read the CV’s of successful people in your field. You can also network. A good buddy gave me an excellent reference for a very good fellowship I got. Bug your friends about it.

If you have other questions about selecting schools and post-docs, put them in the comments.

If you are looking for a weekend dose of epic mythopoetics then look no further than the most recent issue of Tolkien Studies.  Finally Kalevala and Tolkien buffs can get their hands on Tolkien’s “Story of Kullervo” and drafts of his “Essays on Kalevala.”

And, here’s Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s painting “Kullervo’s Curse.”

This has been bouncing around the blogosphere for a few days and I thought you’d find it interesting. Dan Edstrom is a securitization auditor, which is a fancy way of saying that he’s an expert in figuring who owns what in the world of securities. This is his attempt at figuring out who actually owns his mortgage note.

It’s now well known that the banks have been acting in bad faith with regard to properly recording their loans, which has caused severe problems. What’s worse is that the courts have shown no interest at all in enforcing the rules. Sure, borrowers screwed up, but we don’t need courts condoning fraud.

Another deeper issue is that economies need some degree of transparency when it comes to property rights. If you can’t figure our who owns what, even if it’s something as abstract as an income stream, then that corrodes the entire system. What effect will this have on other sectors of the economy? Will murky titles “infect” other industries? Will this signal to other industries that it’s ok to be lax with ownership and title as long as courts look the other way?

“Mortals,” a black metal band from Brooklyn.

Last week was a good week. I met a lot of dear friends and heard a lot of good talks. But I’ll also remember last week for its heavy metal content. One orghead volunteered to go out with me to the Empty Bottle, for a metal meetup. So here we go.

First up was “97-shiki,” a local Chicago band that plays what I’d call punk with a twinge of industrial and Ornette on trumpet. They weren’t metal, but I’m glad I saw them. The hip thing is to sell cassettes (!), but with a code so you can download the music. Second up was “Mortals,” a traditional metal group from Brooklyn situated squarely in the cookie monster/black metal genre. A bit noisier than 97-shiki, and often battling feedback on the monitor. Got the CD, Savanger. My two year old daughter loves “Wolf metal.” She also loves the fact that girls can play metal really, really loud. Two thumbs up from clan Rojas. The last band was Wizardry, another black metal band from Brooklyn. Interestingly, the most danceable of the evening, as noted in various blogs.

Finally, our good friend asked about “The Ontology of Noise,” a recent ambient music release from Nana April Jun, who is Christofer Lämgren, the Swedish sound and installation artist. Connection to metal?

The Ontology of Noise researches the dark associations of post-black metal. No traditional instruments are used on the album and all techniques are digital in their application. There are almost no arrangements or layers, but the pieces consist of single streams which change intuitively. This makes The Ontology of Noise a concrete journey through an abstract language evolving around light and darkness, nature and artificiality, and sometimes even takes the form of a sound very similar to an electric guitar…

The Ontology of Noise explores the filmic qualities of noise – the image-creating mechanisms that arise almost hallucinogenically from subtle variations of frequences. By using a special set of digital mastering and filtering techniques, the recordings often sound very much like the sounds of nature; wind in trees and water. The Ontology of Noise opens up an audial perception for these sounds of nature and ask questions about their ontology..

The older I get, the more I love metal.

We got into a bit of an argument recently over the role of philosophy in sociology. I’m a bit of a skeptic. Sure, we can all really argue about whether we “really” understand causation, but at the end of the day, we care about more about progress than linguistic precision.

That doesn’t mean that sociology and philosophy shouldn’t speak to each other. I think that sociology raises a number of interesting questions for philosophy such as:

• Groupiness/emergence. States, markets, cultures – these are all more than the sum of the parts. Why? In sociology, former guest Keith Sawyer has a number of articles on this topic.
• Socialization and human action. Many things, like religious choice, seem to be the outcome of socialization. What does socialization say about will and choice?
• Ethics: A lot of us are tribalists – we like people of our group more than other people. What sorts of ethics are reasonable in a world of tribalists?

What other sociology inspired questions should philosophers consider?

Our recent discussion on organizational ethnography led me to a new question: Who are the best ethnographers in sociology? Since that’s not my principle research method, I won’t hazard an answer, but I invite you to offer your own nominations. I require the following:

• The scholar must be known primarily as an ethnographer
• Be known for innovative or unusually skillful ethnography
• Be known for consistently good work (e.g., at least two high quality books or major articles from multiple ethnographic projects)
• Be known for advancing new theories/ideas or testing important hypotheses with ethnographic data

Ethnography fans, use the comments and please show your work!

Last week, the Social Science History Association had an “Author Meets Critics” panel about Michele Lamont’s book “How Professors Think,” which we’ve discussed here and here. Based on comments left by readers and my own impressions, I raised the following points:

1. Lamont needs to”get tough” with respondents. It seems as if she accepts too much the ethos of “pragmatic professionalism” provided by the respondents. Consensus magically emerges in a room of rival disciplinary culture. That was Thomas’ point.
2. Lamont needs to be more careful about what can be accomplished with an ethnography of that field site. The sort of multi-disciplinary consensus is an artifact of that field site. My point is that this is still extremely important. Elite fellowships can set the tone for the rest of the profession.
3. Lamont needs to focus on outcomes. Does the creation of excellence have any tangible effects?

Summarizing, here are Professor Lamont’s responses:

1. She uses introspection to inform her ethnography. Sure, people sometime have ulterior motives, but they also have other motives. As Benjamin Greer pointed out, this is also an attempt to move away from Bourdieu’s extremely skeptical view, where everything is a lie meant to promote social status. Lamont then aligned herself with Boltanski on that point. Since I am not knowledgeable about Boltanski, I am not sure exactly how that theory gets you beyond the habitus theory. Well versed orgheads should chime in here.
2. She did acknowledge that the original title was “Cream Rising,” which suggests a study of elite choice making instead of a broader study of academic culture.
3. I can’t remember if she addressed outcomes, but it certainly is a great future project.

Other panelists raised different issues. Steve Epstein raised the issue of generalizability (see point #2); Regina Werum wanted more analysis of the grant screening process; James Evans claimed that Lamont’s quantitative analysis is not as informative as it appears, at least when using information theoretic measures. If you were there, or want to add one last word on the book, please use the comments.

I’ll be in Helsinki next week, at Aalto University and the Hanken School of Economics.  I know there are some orgheads in Helsinki (hi mom and dad! — ok, perhaps a few others), send me a note if you have time to meet up for lunch or something.  And tips for any new, good Helsinki lunch spots are always appreciated.

To me, the most depressing thing about The Chronicle‘s ghostwriting confession (see Teppo’s earlier post) was this admission:

I haven’t been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don’t know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there’s Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I’ve taken hundreds of crash courses this way.

Seriously? You can write a sociology dissertation without once ever going to the library? I’m sad, very sad.

I’ll be at SSHA in downtown Chicago on Thursday. Come by the panel and say hi. I’m also available for lunch or dinner on Thursday, during SSHA. If you are interested in fancy pants stuff, I’d be up for visiting one or more of the following on Wed/Thu: the Empty Bottle, the Velvet Lounge, the Gene Siskel Film Center and curious places in the South Side. Email me if you are interested.

The Rolling Stone magazine has a very informative article by Matt Taibbi on a Florida foreclosure court. The idea is pretty simple. The state of Florida has created courts  meant to speed through the truly massive wave of foreclosures. The problem is that courts are rubber stamping foreclosure cases on fraudulently purchased and underwritten mortgages.

The basic procedure is as follows. A bank decides to foreclose on a property. Sometimes for legitimate reasons, at other times in error. Then they bring the case to court. In a normal repossession of property, the plaintiff has to show that they actually have a claim on the property. Once you show that you have standing and the defendant has defaulted, you can repossess the property. That’s the foundation of the law: show you have a legitimate claim and then show default.

What has now become clear is that banks are unable to legitimately claim that they have standing in a vast majority. In other words, they can’t show that they actually own the loan any more and therefore have no standing in a foreclosure cases. The reason is that banks were in a rush to sell mortgages and bundle them into securities. The paperwork is so shoddy that no one can tell who legitimately owns a loan anymore. This isn’t a case of losing some paperwork. It is a case of not knowing who legitimately owns the loan.

It is now clear that banks are now clearly involved in massive fraud. As Taibbi reports, banks are obviously doctoring paperwork, which is simply forgery and fraud. Even a non-lawyer can tell the paper work is doctored: mortgages sold to banks that don’t exist anymore; loans sold that were already default (which is illegal); purchase and sell dates that make no sense; paper work changing between court hearings; etc. The shameful thing is that the courts simply don’t care. They give banks multiple chances to “correct” paperwork.

At this point, all I can conclude is that courts have become accomplices in fraud. Perhaps the Florida “rocket docket” court is an extreme case, but it seems endemic to the system. Taibbi notes that nearly all third party investigation reveals massive documentation problems. Rather than let private business sort out the mess it has made, courts are allowing banks to manufacture paperwork for loans they may have sold off or that were illegally sold off.

One can rightly complain about greedy borrowers, but there is an even deeper issue here: the rule of law.  Anybody who believes in free markets or good government must agree that the basic principles of law must be applied. You must own the loan and have it properly documented. Courts should come down hard on those who push fraudulent paperwork. Otherwise, the courts become hustlers in robes.

The issue of ghostwriting seems to be a popular topic of late.  Science magazine has an article about ghostwriting in the medical profession (some egregious issues there!).  The Chronicle has an intriguing piece about an academic ghostwriter, shadow scholar “Ed Dante,” who has written everything from undergraduate term papers to a dissertation in sociology.  The wiki entry on ghostwriting is actually quite interesting, it delineates all the forms that ghostwriting takes in various disciplines.  (And, here’s an interesting discussion, in the New York Times, about the ‘market’ for ghostwriters and the $500,000 paid to Hillary Clinton’s ghostwriter.)

I don’t know what forms ghostwriting takes in the case of orgtheory.  Here are some potential candidates:

First, inadvertent ghostwriting, where the the ghost would prefer not to be one.  I have anecdotally heard of graduate students involved in research projects, even to the level of extensive writing, who then were not included in the list of authors in the eventual publication.  Perhaps they get acknowledged in the footnotes, but I’m guessing that type of acknowledgment, if co-authorship is actually warranted, is just a slap in the face.  There are many shades of gray here (when exactly does someone become a co-author, or not?), and all kinds of questions about what it means to contribute, along with disciplinary or institutional norms — definitely sticky issues.  I am guessing that civility, fairness and professionalism reign in most doctoral programs when it comes to including graduate students as co-authors.

The second form of ghostwriting, well no, it’s opposite (sort of), is where a person somehow makes a ghostly appearance as an author even though they may not have contributed at all.  Co-authors get included for various reasons (including some more unorthodox ones): perhaps they provide data, run or analyze the data, write a portion of the article (even just the introduction, I heard about this on a well-cited article, one co-author was brought in to write the introduction), provide a valuable idea or good feedback — perhaps defensible forms of co-authorship.  But, I am guessing that co-authors might get included, say, just for the sake of their name, or perhaps they wield sufficient power to somehow get added to a publication.  (I suppose the opposite could theoretically also occur, specifically where someone is heavily involved in a project but then insists on not being listed as a co-author on a publication.)

Third, the line between heavy editing and writing.  I have heard, from friends who have published in these outlets, that some unnamed, highly popular practitioner journals essentially re-write your work, to the point where it no longer resembles your work at all.  Perhaps these are isolated incidents — I don’t know what, if any, ethical issues are involved here — or perhaps this is just an instance of good editing.

I guess the above is raising some ethical issues when it comes to ghostwriting, certainly there seem to be some legitimate forms.  Overall, the matter of ghostwriting is very relevant not just to teaching (I received a ghostwritten paper from a graduate student some years ago) but obviously also relevant to our research, given that our primary research output is writing.

UPDATE:  You can join a live chat, tomorrow (11/17), noon Eastern, that The Chronicle is guest hosting with academic ghostwriter and shadow scholar Ed Dante.

UPDATE 2: Hadn’t seen this — The Chronicle has a video about an essay mill.

A regular reader of orgtheory sent me an email asking, what are the best organizational ethnographies? “I’m looking for what people think are the best organizational ethnographies put out in the last couple of decades.  Everyone knows about Jackall’s Moral Mazes and Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporation, but I’m looking for some newer important stuff.”

Two great ethnographies that immediately come to mind are Katherine Chen’s Enabling Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man and Matt Desmond’s On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters.  Both books are about atypical organizations, and both delve into the nitty gritty details of social interaction that allow those organizations to carry out their work. Both are also great in discussing organizing processes (as compared to organizational structures). What other organizational ethnographies, in book or article format, stand out?

A little while ago, I wrote a post about how I was skeptical about most claims for small government. Simply put, most people are unwilling to cut the three or four major items that constitute the vast majority of the Federal budget. In the comments, Gabriel wrote that it’s more important for social scientists realize that small government attitudes correlate with other behaviors. Being for “small government” might actually mean, for example, opposing expanding entitlement programs.

I’d like to riff off Gabriel’s comments. Assume that small government ideology is, for most people, not meant to be taken literally. Sure, a few hard core libertarians want a strict roll back of the state, but most conservatives don’t really mean it. They might oppose expanding social security, for example. So, we are left with a question: Why choose the small government frame for your point? Why not “big government but good government?”

Here’s my theory of how frames are attached to policies. Call it the two step process of attaching policies to frames:

• Self-image: Limited government plays into the conservative self image as mature adults.
• The “switch:” Conservatives don’t want to be seen as mean. Cutting grandma’s social security is bad. Appeal to an abstract principle as cover for your real beliefs. You don’t hate grandma, you just have the public good in mind.

One can make an analogous argument for how liberals frame issues.

The next issue is making the connection between self image, abstract switching and the specific bundle of policies promoted by conservative small government rhetoric. The following things are bundled by conservatives: social traditionalism; defense; assistance for Wall Street. These aren’t even compatible on some level. A lot of small town social conservatives, for example, are appalled at Wall Street’s behavior.  You need a lot of taxation to support the American military.

What ties them together is self-image. The way most people think about business or the military or traditional families is that these are Very Serious. And they are. I don’t think that anyone would see service in the armed services as a joke, or doubt that private enterprise is important. Still, they don’t fit together terribly well, even if cheering them has a similar affect on an individual’s self image.

The final step of the argument is that “limited government” is a decent way to pull various folks (social conservatives and Wall Street) together. One can say that legalizing gay marriage is a state intrusion on traditional marriage, which it is, even though I think it is justified. One can also say that certain regulation or taxation of industry is an example of big government. I can’t imagine many other frames that can successfully tie together such a weird coalition.

Final comment: This isn’t to say that “limited government” is an easy framing to use. It leads to all kinds of problems because of the “Our benefits are justified, but their benefits are not” issue. This is a huge problem when trying to expand the base. The national GOP, for example, has desperately wanted to recruit Latinos into the coalition and they seem like a good fit. But social conservatives often adopt anti-immigrant stances (an example of “free markets are good, but not for people living across the border”) and alienate constituencies that really important in places like California and Florida.

Andrew Gelman wants to understand what the big deal is about Erving Goffman.  After an initial run in with a couple of Goffman-admiring commenters, Andrew read one of Goffman’s articles and came back with more questions. Here’s an excerpt from his recent post:

It’s always amusing to see white-collar types treated anthropologically, so that’s fine. But then Goffman continues:

Sometimes, however, a member of an organization may fulfill some of the requirements for a particular status, especially the requirements concerning technical proficiency and seniority, but not other requirements, especially the less codified ones having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work.

This seemed naive at best and obnoxious at worst. As if, whenever someone is not promoted, it’s either because he can’t do the job or he can’t play the game. Unless you want to define this completely circularly (with “playing the game” retrospectively equaling whatever it takes to do to keep the job), this just seems wrong. In corporate and academic settings alike, lots of people get shoved aside either for reasons entirely beyond their control (e.g., a new division head comes in and brings in his own people) or out of simple economics.

Goffman was a successful organization man and couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the losers in the promotion game. It wasn’t enough for him to say that some people don’t ascend the ladder; he had to attribute that to not fulfilling the “less codified [requirements] having to do with the proper handling of social relationships at work.”

Well, no. In the current economic climate this is obvious, but even back in the 1960s there were organizations with too few slots at the top for all the aspirants at the bottom, and it seems a bit naive to suppose that not reaching the top rungs is necessarily a sign of improper handling of social relationships.

My emailed response to Andrew is in the post. Here’s an earlier post about Goffman’s controversial personality.

If you don’t have time for lengthy highbrow literature, you might take a quick look at the poet Samuel Menashe’s excessively concise and compressed work.  The poetry foundation has an archive of some of his poetry.

In the below WNYC clip Menashe (who turned 85 a few months ago) calls for even more compression, recites some of his work and talks about how he wrestles with each word:

Dear content analysis freaks:

Say you have a sample of 100 interviews (or articles or whatever) and you are doing an inter-coder reliability study. Should you do all 100 interviews? Should you do a sub sample? What is standard? In other words, how much reliability analysis is enough? Is redoing the entire corpus standard in content analysis? If not, when do you know that you are done? What article or book addresses this issue? As usual, cites and details are appreciated.

The OMT blog has posted an announcement about a conference to be held in June, 2011 about “coordination among and within organizations.”  One of the things that makes the conference unique is that it is jointly sponsored by three heavy-hitters in organizational theory: Administrative Science Quarterly, the Organization and Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management, and HEC Paris, one of Europe’s top business schools. The coming together of such important sponsors suggests this is a topic worth paying attention to. Here is more on the topic itself:

The usefulness of such a conference is especially high because the field may need some revitalization. Work on hierarchical control in organizations has produced useful findings, but is less relevant to issues of horizontal coordination in organizations or coordination among organizations. Work on the effects of structures that have a role in coordination (such as networks) has significantly advanced our knowledge, but has come to a point in which more work on coordination activities is needed. Thus the time has come to encourage research that advances thinking and produces new evidence on coordination activities.

Coordination activities are a sufficiently broad set of phenomena that I imagine a lot of empirical work could fit in the category. It’s clear from the announcement though that the organizers are looking for innovative theoretical approaches. It’s time to push the boundaries of thinking. The conference also seems aimed at giving junior scholars a chance to get good feedback from established figures in the field.

Read the announcement (link above) for more information about submission deadlines, etc. You should direct questions about the conference to Henrich Greve or Rodolphe Durand.

Former orgtheory guest blogger Mike McBride (UC Irvine, Economics) was recently featured in a podcast on club models of organization and religious free-riding.  Interesting discussion not just for economists and sociologists of religion but for any orgtheorist.  Here’s a link to Mike’s orgtheory posts.  And, you can find Mike’s recent work on his web site.

The site has other interesting podcasts, including UCSD’s Eli Berman on religious terrorism (the podcast focuses on his 2009 book Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism).

Here’s an engaging 2009 piece by Noam Chomsky that covers wide swaths of the philosophy of science — empiricism versus rationalism, the nature of will, philosophy of mind, the evolution of scientific thought, etc:

Chomsky, N. 2009. The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden? Journal of Philosophy 106: 167-200.

[Sorry, the journal web site does not allow one to link directly to papers, but you can easily find the volume --- though it's probably gated if you are not at a university.]

The whole paper is, sort of, addressed at (or at least linked to) the arguments of the “greats” in the history of science — Newton, Galileo, Locke, Hume, etc.  One of the more interesting, big picture-type papers I’ve read in a while.  (Perhaps some semi-intelligent commentary later, once I digest a few things.)

And while we’re in Chomsky mode — you might check out this recent book (the first chapter features the above article):

Bricmont, J.& Franck, J. (eds.) 2009. The Chomsky Notebook.  Columbia University Press. [Amazon.com link here.]

Lieberson and Horwich’s article on implication (profiled yesterday) raised an issue that I think is very important in social research. I call it the “scientific method fallacy.” Here’s how  I would explain it:

The scientific method fallacy is when a researcher mistakenly assumes that a tool used by physical scientists is the only legitimate way to do research. In other words, they move from “X is a great tool for science” to “X is the only way to do science.”

Examples of the scientific method fallacy: “Experiments are the only way you can really know anything.” “You really don’t have a clear theory unless it is expressed mathematically.”

The underlying philosophical claim is that science is pragmatic. The world is too complex and hard to be captured by any single tool, so we need multiple tools. A formal model, or an ethnographic observation, is a map of the world, not the world itself, which suggests the needs for more kinds of maps.

If you actually look at what scientists do, you see that no single method rules, even though some are clearly more popular than others. Instead of saying that “real scientists use X,” one should  read science journals. A medical journal might include randomized controlled trials, qualitative case studies, observational data, and even opinion pieces. In engineering, it is common to find reports on prototypes. You can learn a lot from building something, even if they theory isn’t nice and neat. There’s even “grounded theory” in the physical sciences from time to time. For example, when the first particle colliders were invented, physicists had a great time just seeing what new particles were made and how that might lead to new theory. And of course, you also see lots of formal models and controlled experiments across scientific areas.

The bottom line is that reality is more complicated than suggested by those pushing the scientific method fallacy. Real science is messy and that means that science progresses on multiple fronts. If an experiment can be done to convincingly settle an issue, great. But a lot of times, it’s not possible, or even desirable. The lesson for social scientists is that we should stop listening to those who say “real science is done this way” and instead have the courage to make science’s many tools work for us. And that’s the way real science works.

From recent Sociological Methods and Research:

• Multiple Informant Methodology: A Critical Review and Recommendations by Stephan M. Wagner,Christian Rau,and Eckhard Lindemann. They treat multiple organizational informants as a coder reliability problem.
• An entire issue dedicated to optimal matching and sequence issues.
• An alternative to QCA from Michael Baumgartner of the University of Bern.

From recent Sociological Methodology:

• Gang Guo continues research on DNA markers and social behavior.
• Liberson and Horwich push implication.
• Gabriel Rossman,Ming Ming Chiu,  and Joeri M. Mol use network analysis to dig into bribery practices in the pop music industry.

Check it out.

In my undergraduate social theory class, I teach a little bit of Durkhem’s The Division of Labor and Simmel’s essay on the problem of modern culture, as anthologized in the Levine volume. Last week , multiple students asked: How are Simmel and Durkheim’s criticism’s of modernity different?

I had to admit that they formulated very similar criticisms: modern society was dysfuntional because we are disconnected. However, Durkheim and Simmel had very different proximate causes for modernity’s problems. Simmel was not quite obsessed with the development of capitalism as a root problem, while Durkheim, and other classical theorists, definitely though that the capitalist division of labor was the fundamental issue in modernity.

The Simmel take on capitalism was always a bit conflicted. Yes, he could  be extremely critical. When I took an undergraduate theory course, he was presented as a sort of Marxist. The city was the nexus of capitalism, and they city depersonalized you. But if you read Philosophy of Money in its entirety, you’d see he also had a number of very positive things to say about modern economic institutions. So it’s not just a case of anti-capitalist critique.

That leads me to my main point about Simmel’s view of modernity. I think ultimately it’s a cultural argument. The formlessness of modern life, his terminology for anomie, was less about social differentiation (i.e., the capitalist way of organizing work) and more about the lack of values that provided order for the spirit. Individualism, which is not logically connected with modern capitalism, was the culprit. Anomie reflects a shift in culture, not just a technical development.

So, theory heads, did I get this one right?

The Journal of Management has received increased attention over the years — I’m guessing Jay Barney’s 1991 article (now at 16,000+ citations) put the journal on the map, and the journal continues to publish highly-cited “review” issues twice a year, along with other work.

Now the Journal of Management has a podcast (it appears to be a regular feature, though I can’t tell).  I believe they are the first orgs-related journal with a podcast.

I’ve been reading a lot of Selznick lately in preparation for a review essay I’m writing about his contribution to organizational theory. One of the works that stood out to me as being under-appreciated was “A Normative Theory of Culture,” coauthored with his spouse Gertrude Jaeger.  The piece links aspects of pragmatist philosophy with sociological and anthropological views of culture (from the 1960s), arguing that the key elements of culture are symbols that facilitate individuals’ expressions of authenticity and connect individuals with communities.  The article probably didn’t have the effect they hoped, although Gertrude said it was the contribution of which she was most proud. The lack of positive reception for the article may have been because Jaeger’s and Selznick’s perspective ran contrary to the cultural relativism taking hold at the time (Peterson also claimed in an Annual Review piece that the poor reception was due to J&S’s “assertion of the moral superiority of fine art over popular culture, hardly a popular notion at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”). In fact, they argue that some culture may be better than others in sustaining “symbolic experience,” and thus it makes sense for sociologists to evaluate the relative value of different cultural elements, i.e., of different symbolic systems. They explicitly promote a normative view of culture.

Here is a statement from the paper about assessing the value of culture:

A normative concept of culture entails, of course, an appropriate theory of value. In contemporary social science, there is a strong tendency to adopt a “subjectivist” view of value. On this view, values come down to preferences, usually distinguished by their stability or scope from other, more transitory preferences. Ultimately, values are in people’s hearts and heads, not in the world. It is people who give value to objects and institutions.

An alternative approach sees values as objective. This requires that the assertion, “friendship is a value” be recast to read: friendship has value. Friendship is then seen as an arrangement which (objectively and causally) can, under certain conditions, provide experiences that are felt as good and not merely said to be good. An objective value is not a disposition to act, however broad or fundamental. It is, or is the source of, a good experience of a certain kind (pg. 667).

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Last week, sociologist Jonathan Imber wrote an article about The Forty Year Failure of American Sociology, which has been picked up by Pete Boettke, Josh McCabe, and others. The article is a response to the NY Times article on sociologists who are coming to grips with culture as an explanation of poverty.

A few comments:

1. Completely rejecting personal beliefs and attitudes as an explanation for persistent poverty was likely a bad idea. I am glad urban sociologists are now getting away from extremely structuralist explanations of poverty.

2. Urban poverty research is a really bad place on which to make a blanket judgment on sociology. In lots of areas, especially those with little ideological charge, there’s a lot of good research. Network analysis? Yup, that’s us. Institutional theory? Yup, that was us as well. The new cultural analysis? Once again, sociology is doing well. Even in politically touchy areas, there is more variance than you might expect. For example, there’s a lively debate over the effects of marriage and divorce, and some prominent sociologists are well known advocates of a traditional family values view, such as Chicago’s Linda Waite.

3. Almost any discipline can be seen as a permanent failure if you pick on its worst parts. Physics hasn’t yet come up with the “grand unified theory,” and macro-economics doesn’t make economics look pretty. Bogus sciences? Not at all. These are all tough problems. Same with sociology. Lot of hard and controversial problems.

4. There’s actually a lot of high quality urban poverty research written by folks who are liberal that anyone would be impressed with. Gerry Suttles’ Social Organization of the Slum remains a classic. There a lot to be impressed with in modern accounts as well, such as Guinier’s Sidewalk or Venkatesh’s Off the Books. Even if you don’t like how personal responsibility for poverty is addressed, you can’t get a better account of how life is organized in poor neighborhoods.

5. In the end, I am more impressed with real research than complaints and hand wringing. I look at James Coleman. As we’ve discussed before, Coleman came up with ideas that went against the grain in sociology, even though he was liberal himself. He could have just given up, but he didn’t he hung in there and was vindicated on the strength of the research findings. In the end, I am more impressed with that than worrying about how evil the mainstream of the profession is.

I wonder how many folks are serious about limited government rhetoric. Here is an easy litmus test to see if someone is actually serious about small government. Ask them what they would do to considerably scale back the size of the American federal government. These are the only correct answers:

• Massive cut backs on defense (20%): close bases, reduce standing forces, reduce deployments in Iraq and/or Afghanistan
• Massive cut backs on social security (20%): raise the retirement age; means test benefits; cut back benefits
• Massive cut backs on Medicare (21%): means test; limit benefits; age grade.
• Another 14% of the federal budget has to do with some type of fairly popular social safety net outlays, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit or additional elderly support.

Here are some wrong answers. Saving money is wise, but cutting these items isn’t a plausible way to substantially reduce government:

• “waste”
• “discretionary spending”
• “administrative costs”
• preventing fraud
• NPR
• foreign aid
• benefits to illegal immigrants
• the Department of Education
• the Bridge to Nowhere

In other words, about 85% of the Federal budget is about stuff that most people like. The stuff that people tend to offer for cuts, such as foreign aid or “waste,” doesn’t address the main issue. The typical proponent of small government would likely not dare cut the things that actually contribute to the overall size of government.

The Social Science History Association will have a panel on Michele Lamont’s How Professors Think. The panelists include Regina Werum, Steven Epstein, James Evans and myself. It will be in Chicago on November 18, 2010 at 2:30pm at the Palmer House Hilton. [Anyone have the room #?]

My comments will be along the lines of my earlier post, where I responded to a talk Lamont gave at the University of Michigan. Post your own questions on the book in the comments.  I will summarize them and include them in my own comments.

Here’s a very interesting observation that I recently came across:

The history of say, the sociology of nationalism or the sociology of religion might be written a one in which an initial competition between Marxist, Durkheimian and Weberian approaches to nationalism or religion–which were also Marxist, Durkhemian and Weberian approaches to anything else—has gradually given way to internal debates about nationalism or religion among specialists in those areas and the development of in-house “theories of” nationalism or religion.  From there it has sometimes been a short step to the jettisoning of the formal theoretical apparatuses altogether and a readiness to embrace increasingly interdisciplinary inquiries into the phenomenon of nationalism or religion.  Indeed, it is now possible to devote an entire career to one specialist area without worrying too much about the integrity of the [theoretical] tools one deploys to study it.  This sequence–sociological inquiry into X on the basis of established disciplinary procedures, expansion of the discipline by means of the increasing proliferation of specialist areas, development of localized substantive theories within those areas, abandonment of formal theory altogether, and embrace of interdisciplinary methods and the establishment of departments or centers of  ”X studies”—was what the German sociologist F. Tenbruck had in mind in his essay on “the law of trivialization” (Turner 2010: 30).

This seems to me to do a good job of intuitively describing the fate of many fields in sociology and their relationship to their more mature “interdisciplinary” cousins.  For instance, there is the sociology of religion, and there are “religious studies.”  There is the sociology of race and ethnicity and there are “race and ethnic studies.”  There is the sociology of gender and there are “gender studies,” (sociology of organizations versus organizational studies?).  This also seems to agree with my impression that the work done under the interdisciplinary banner tends to be a little loosey-goosey, more descriptive and generally less interesting (with exceptions) than its more disciplinary classical or post-classical counterparts.  I wouldn’t go so far as calling this type of work “trivial” but I’d have to agree that there is certainly something of a transformation towards less compelling, more delimited and generally more circumscribed questions as we move along the gradient from classical, to post-classical to interdisciplinary “X-studies.”

Conversely, we can surmise that areas that are successful in partially resisting the move, may keep their original appeal.  I think the recent move towards performativity in economic sociology represents the first attempt to move the field from its postclassical, disciplinary form to a more interdisciplinary format (e.g. “social studies of the economy”; just like Mertonian “sociology of science” was transformed into “social studies of science” during the 1970s and 1980s).  If successful in reorienting the field we can predict that work on social studies of the economy will become less tied to classical or post-classical questions (e.g. Zelizer’s running argument with Marx, Simmel and Weber; Granovetter’s via media between under and over-socialized conceptions of the actor, etc.), more concerned with relatively minute conceptual, epistemological and methodological issues, and more dependent on micro-descriptive case study material.  If unsuccessful, we get to keep economic sociology as it now stands, but it is likely that post-classical “fatigue” will soon set in.

This is already what has happened to much that goes by the name of “organizational studies” in Europe and the U.S. which contrasts sharply with what used to go by name of “the sociology of organizations” along the same dimensions (e.g. circumscription versus ambition, descriptivism versus substantive theory, etc.).  The much ballyhooed “crisis” of organizational theory (which we have devoted some attention to here in the past), may then be recast simply as an abortive transition towards interdisciplinary “trivialization” manifested as (the lingering feeling of) being stuck in an intermediary status quo: neither here (sociology of organizations) nor there (organizational studies).  Organizational theory is in crisis because this type of “theoretical” concern (tethered by an umbilical cord to big or medium-sized classic questions) simply does not fit the organizational studies mold.

This year’s Loebner Prize went to Bruce Wilcox’s chat bot Suzette.  The contest pits chat bots against each other, a Turing test of sorts, in an effort to dupe humans into believing that they are chatting with an actual human rather than a bot.  Here are the results (including chat transcripts).  Apparently Suzette has been inundated with chat requests, but you should be able to see how she fares once they clean up the technical difficulties (here).

Part 1, Part 2

Levi Martin crams a lot of stuff into his writing. Feels like a Summarize Proust Competition and I’m not doing too well…

Anyway, the last three chapters of the book turn to a new topic: social control. In the first half of the book, Levi Martin discussed social structures in terms of inequality. Social structures are created and modified as a result of inequality. Now, the issue is influence and coordination. How is it that simpler structures are built up into larger things like states and armies?

Levi Martin’s answer has to do with patronage and brokering. As I noted, a short blog post doesn’t do justice to the argument, but the idea is that communities often end up with patronage structures. The key is then to make the patrons brokers in a larger system. The rank and file get goodies and inequality is addressed. The patrons get the influence that they need to control people. And the monarch (or other leader) gets the ability to mobilize huge masses, when the occasion arises. This basic logic for aggregating smaller patronage groups into massive structures can be seen in commerce, politics, and religion.

If you know about the history of the firm or the European state, this story is plausible. One might argue, for example, that the period between late antiquity and the modern nation state is just one long effort at reforming a pile of patronage relationships from the Roman system to the sovereign nation states. This is also consistent with recent business history. Freedman’s re-reading of GM’s history backs this point up. The firm works when division heads are allowed to broker between the central office and the rest of the firm.

One interesting point to raise with this whole story is the role of discipline. The point of Weber, Foucault, Gorski, and others is that modern social structures require modern self-disciplining people. Levi Martin does allude to this point, but it plays a secondary role. The need for control, influence, equality, etc drives social structure. In this respect, there’s a lingering functionalism in the text, but it’s one I can live with.

A related point has to do with institutions. In Levi Martin’s text, my sense is that culture and institutional logics play a secondary role as well. But one of the most interesting things about modern life is the correlation of culture and social structure. The rise of large states and firms coincides with ideas of rationality, individualism, and democracy. Reading Social Structures, it would be hard for me figure out whether culture is a cause or effect of social structure.

Overall, I liked Social Structures and it gives us much food for thought. I’ll teach it in my upcoming graduate course on social organization.

Via Harriet — apparently the poets D.A. Powell and Randall Mann were sick of reading long-winded book reviews and they put together the One Sentence Review. The project was short-lived but now the one sentence reviews are all captured at Michigan Quarterly Review.

The one sentence review might be something to extend into the domain of double-blind peer review as well.  OK, that’s not reasonable, though I have heard that the length of peer reviews has been an issue in the past — I have anecdotally heard of mega-20+ page reviews.  Overall, review length is probably highly variable, contingent on various factors: the paper itself, reviewer, editor, journal, discipline, etc.  I don’t know if length-related peer review norms have changed over time (anyone know?), but my sense (for the journals I deal with) is that two-three pages is the norm these days.

Here are some other, more serious orgtheory ideas and posts related to peer review:

• Triple blind peer review.
• Universal peer review.
• The illusion of blind peer review.
• Many other peer review-related posts here.