orgtheory.net

When you and I wake up in the morning a series of unconscious microhabits of perception and appreciation take over. These habits structure our “common-sense” perception of the physical and the social worlds. In fact these habits dictate a specific partition of the everyday objects that we encounter into those that are “animate” (agents) and “inanimate” (non-agents). Within the subset of agents that we endow with “animacy” we distinguish those that have a resemblance to you and me (we use the term “humans” to refer to them) and those who do not. We treat the “humans” in a special way, for instance, by holding them responsible for their actions, getting mad at them if they do not acknowledge our existence but we have previously acknowledged theirs, saying “Hello” to some of them in the morning, etc. We also ascribe distinct powers and abilities to those humans (and maybe to those furry non-human agents whom we have grown close to).

The most important of these powers is called (by some humans) “agency.” That is the capacity to make things happen and to be the centers of a special sort of causation that is different from that which befalls non-human agents and non-agents in general (such as my lamp). This is our common-sense ontology.  Bruno Latour does not experience the world in this way. In Bruno’s experience, the world is not partitioned into a set of “animated” entities and a set of “non-animated” ones.  After much wrestling with previous habits of thought and experience (which Bruno imbibed from his upbringing in a Western household and his education at Western schools), Bruno has taught himself to perceive something that we usually do not notice (although I hasten to add, it is available for our perception only if we started to make an effort to notice): a bunch of those entities that the rest of the world does not ascribe that special property of “agency” to (because the rest of us continue to hold on to our species-centric habit of thought that dictates that that this capacity is only held by our human conspecifics), actually behave and affect the world in a manner that is indistinguishable from humans.  For instance, they act on humans, they make humans do things, they participate (in concert with humans some of the time; in fact humans can be observed to “recruit” these non-human agents and these “non-agents” for their own self-aggrandizement projects) in the creation of large socio-technical networks that are responsible for a lot of the “wonders” of modern civilization.

The important thing is that now Bruno is able to directly perceive (in an everyday unproblematic manner) that these “machines” and these “animals” are the source of as much agency (sometimes even more! ), than other humans. Bruno has gotten so good at practically deploying this new conceptual scheme (along with the radically new ontological partition of the world that it carries along with it) so as to transpose this newly acquired and newly mastered habits of perception and appreciation to discover evidence of the agentic capacities of those entities that were previously thought not to exercise it, in the history of Science and Politics.  He has even uncovered evidence of humans being aware of this evidence, but then he noted that they proceeded to hide this evidence by creating elaborate systems of ontology and metaphysics in which non-human agency was explicitly denied, and in which it was explicitly conceptualized as being an exclusive property of so-called “persons” (where persons is now a category restricted to humans) only. These “human” agents were now thought to reside in a special realm that these human apologists called “society.” This “society,”—these thinkers proposed—was organized by a specific set of properties and laws that were distinct from those that “governed” (the humans even used a metaphor from their own way of dealing with another! ) the “slice” of the world that was populated by those entities which “lacked” this agency (the humans called these latter “natural laws”).

Giddy with excitement at this discovery, Bruno even wrote a book in which he announced the entire cover-up to the rest of his human counterparts. But the basic point is as follows: When Bruno experiences the world directly, or when Bruno’s brain simulates this experience (e.g. when reading a historical account of the discovery of the germ theory of disease) he does not deploy our common-sense ontology. Instead he practically deploys a conceptual scheme that in many ways does “violence” to our common sense ontology by radically redrawing and liberally redistributing certain properties that we restrict to a smaller class of entities. Bruno is thus able to perceive the action of these “agents” both in the contemporary world and in past historical eras in a way that escape most of us. In fact, Bruno recommends that if you and I want to see the same things that he sees, and if you and I want to escape the limits of our highly restrictive “common-sense” ontology (in which such things as “society,” “persons,” “animals,” “natural laws,” etc. figure prominently) that we begin by (little by little) divesting ourselves of old habits of thought and perception and acquiring the new habits that he has worked so hard to master.

The epistemological payoff of doing this would be to see the world just as Bruno sees it: a world in which humans are just one of another class of agents and which agency is shared equally by a host set of entities that our common-sense ontology fails to ascribe agency to (and which we thus fail to perceive the everyday ways in which these alleged non-agents exercise a sort of “power” and “influence” on our own behavior and action). In this way Bruno recommends that the ontology specified in our common sense be reduced and displaced by that specified in what he now calls “actor-network theory.” But this is a terrible name, for this is not a “theory” but a viewpoint; a way of practically reconfiguring our perception of the social and natural worlds. In fact this last sentence just used categories from the old ontology for in Bruno’s world, the “master-frame” that divides the things of “nature” from “social” things (Goffman 1974) is no longer operative and no longer serves to structure our perception.

Recently, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) issued a request-for-proposal that invited researchers to develop theory to predict when and where social networks would emerge. They want to know how “networks” like Al Qaeda come to be. This caught my eye because I think the idea of networks emerging only makes sense if you are confusing networks with groups.

Networks are clearly popular. Every new club, association, organization and website today wants to be called a network. Network is the new group. What might have been called the “Lexington Preservation Society” in the past would very likely be called the “Lexington Preservation Network” if formed today. The popularity of the term probably does reflect a greater awareness of interpersonal relationships, but I don’t think there is a fundamental difference between these uses of “network” and the now replaced “group”.

Let’s test your network IQ. Suppose I told you I was studying a network with no ties: just a set of individuals. Does this violate your sense of network? If so, I think you are thinking of a group. Groups (certainly in contrast to classes) have a certain degree of internal cohesion. What if I said my network had lots of ties, but they were organized into three fragments or islands, such that all ties were within the fragments and none between. Would you say I have three networks instead of one? If so, I think you’re thinking of a group. Groups have some kind of boundary. They may be fuzzy, contested, or dynamic, but the notion of a boundary is fundamental to the notion of group.*

Networks, in contrast, have arbitrary boundaries and no expectations of cohesion. They are analytical devices. I call a network into existence simply by picking a population of nodes I would like to study and selecting a type of social tie that may connect these nodes. For example, I could choose to study friendships among the set of students living on one floor of a freshman dorm at a university. At the start of the semester, the network may be completely empty of ties: no one is friends with anyone else. A few weeks later, I may find that there are many pairs of students who are friends, and maybe even one or two short chains where A is friends with B who is friends with C. By the end of the semester, I might find that nearly everyone is at least indirectly connected to everyone else by some kind of path, and I may also find that some groups have emerged in which members have more ties with each other than to outsiders.

Note that conceptualizing the network in this abstract way has certain advantages. For one thing, it makes it easy to talk about network evolution. A network doesn’t emerge fully formed out of the Void — it evolves. But what is “it”? If you let me define the network in my arbitrary way, I can watch how “its” structure changes over time from having no ties to the end-of-semester structure (and, over the ensuing decades, perhaps back to having no ties). For another thing, it unconfounds the network from its structure. The number of ties now becomes a variable, so I can do things like test the hypothesis that a team’s performance increases with the number of trust ties. The degree of fragmentation is also a variable. As a result, a counter-intelligence agency can measure the extent to which it has succeeded in fragmenting a terrorist network.

The abstract approach does introduce some limitations. In this way of conceptualizing networks, it no longer makes sense to ask what the best way is to uncover a network. Should I measure interaction or affect, or something else? The answer is: you can measure anything you like – whatever you do measure defines a network. You can study the interaction network, the affective network or even the network of who doesn’t know whom. In the abstract approach, it also doesn’t make sense to ask, as the Dept of Defense has asked, when will a network emerge? The answer is: whenever an analyst conceives it. The network is always there. It is only the structure that changes over time. It is not a thing in the same way that a group is.

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*Ok, I know that the fragments bit is actually more about cohesion than boundaries. So sue me.

Gilles Beauchamp asked: What do you think is the most important breakthrough in sociology since 2000? A few candidates:

1. Global inequality has decreased because of economic liberalization in China and India.  Global inequality is the result of cross national differences, less than domestic differences. Until the rise of China and India, global patterns of inequality have been stable since the industrial revolution (Firebaugh/Moran/Hung & Kucinskas).
2. The creation and development of the ERGM model in network analysis. Non-technical explanation: In normal statistics, you can often safely assume that two observations are independent. E.g., my age and your age normally don’t cause each other. This is not true in network data. E.g., my social tie may be correlated with your social ties; very messy. The ERGM model accounts for this problem. HUGE technical advance done by teams of statisticians and sociologists. (starts with Wasserman with p*, Buskens goes to  ERGM in the 2000s).
3. Showing the consequences of mass incarceration of American Blacks (Western, Pager, Quillian, etc.)
4. Using genetic markers and other biological variables to predict social behavior, such as racial self-identification, gender traits, or criminality (Guo, Udry).
5. Explaining the “financialization” of the American economy (Davis, Kripner, etc).

Add your own “best” findings/developments from 2000 in the comments.

There is a town in Peru where people fight to settle grievances during the holiday season. Go to :30 in the clip. Festivus lives.

Over at Econlog, I got into a debate with economist Arnold Kling about teacher effectiveness. He takes an extremely skeptical view:

I am afraid that I am skeptical of Rick Hanushek’s claim that the best teachers are really effective and the worst are really ineffective. If that were true, then I think we would observe private schools dramatically outperforming public schools, holding student characteristics constant, and I do not think that is what the data say. Instead, when we see differences, those differences typically do not persist over time.

In education research, intensive efforts are made to find differences caused by teachers or other inputs. This is a worthwhile effort, but whenever studies are published showing such differences, they need to be discounted heavily for the biases induced by various filters in the research and publication process. The likelihood of any strong difference holding up in repeated study is quite low.

Here is my response. I think Arnold is making a huge mistake in interpreting the teacher effectiveness literature. The take home messages are:

The most recent issue of ASQ has a review by Peter Foreman of the RSO volume on “comparative organizations” that quite a few of us were involved with.   Comparative issues also remain popular on this blog.

Ronald Coase turns 100 years old tomorrow.  Organizations and Markets has the scoop, though 100 years is definitely worth celebrating here at orgtheory.net as well.

(Peter’s post also points out how The Economist gets some of the Coasean story wrong, for example by reinforcing an artificial dichotomy between the resource-based view and transaction cost economics and the matter of “organizational advantages” versus transactions costs.)

In 1903 Rainer Maria Rilke responded to a young poet (Rilke himself was only 28 at the time) who asked for feedback on his writing and poetry.  The response is cordial, though Rilke also tells the budding writer, “may I just tell you that your verses have no style.”

He then goes on:

You ask whether your verses are any good.  You ask me.  You have asked others before this.  You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work.  Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing.  You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now.  No one can advise or help you – no one.  There is only one thing you should do.  Go into yourself.  Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.  This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?

Judge for yourself whether there is any applicability for writers beyond poets.  Interesting nonetheless.

Here’s an English translation of the full letter (including the subsequent nine letters — a precursor of sorts to grad skool rulz).  The German here (including other Rilke letters).

Faceboook strategies:

1. Avoid Facebook.
2. Minimalism. Provide your name and just enough information so that people you know can contact you.
3. Portal. You maintain a Facebook profile and add occasional announcements. Facebook is like an interactive rolodex. Not your main source of social input, but it’s pretty handy.
4. Facebook for fun. When you think of Facebook, this is what you think of. Lots of friends, lots of links, comments, games. Basically, it’s a fun mirror of your regular life.
5. Facebook as amplification of self. You use  Facebook to do new things. You create groups that would be impossible, or create new friends that you couldn’t have in real life.

What did else did I miss in this typology of Facebook use?

We’re excited to have Steve Borgatti, social networks guru, guest blogging here at orgtheory.net.  Steve Borgatti is Professor and Chellgren Endowed Chair at the University of Kentucky.  You can find additional information about Steve and his research on his web site.

Orgheads might be particularly interested in his forthcoming Organization Science piece on (pdf) ”Network Theorizing” — the article addresses confusion associated with network theorizing, the nature of network theorizing, the generation of new network theory, etc.

We look forward to Steve’s posts!

I read Boltanski and Thevenot’s 1999 article in the European Journal of Social Theory (B&T). Let me state my views up front. First, the basic ideas are actually fairly simple. But in sticking with the genre of European critical theory, simple, yet  important, points hide behind poor writing. Second, the paper’s basic observation didn’t strike me as totally original. Third, the paper is still very important because there’s a very important research problem that *could* have been developed further. In more detail:

1. B&T’s basic point is that people employ different ways for justifying certain actions or practices. The main insight is that there are multiple ways that social life can be justified. E.g., something can be justified in terms of its cost or in terms of aesthetics. The consequent problem is how, empirically, people resolve conflicting claims over what is justified.

I have to say that I was very, very underwhelmed by this basic point. Perhaps there is a context that I am missing and that this might be viewed as important in that context. From my view, I thought of work addressing the point that people use different justifications to order or organize social situations. For example, we can go back to Kenneth Burke’s analysis of motives and justifications, or we can reread the many analyses of framing that stem from Goffman’s seminal book. More recently, there’s a lot of work on classification, commensurability, and competing institutional logics. I found Tilly’s approach to justificaiton, Why?, to be interesting. In one way or another, these works all deal with struggles over the legitimate or appropriate valuing of people and objects.

Perhaps B&T is a big deal if you are a hard core Bourdieuian and you think that all people do is parrot the institutional imperatives of their social field. That’s really a problem with Bourdieu. If B&T helps you get beyond that, then great. But if you read other sociology, it’s a lot less impressive.

2. The importance of this paper, in my view, is what is hinted at the end. B&T raise the point that resolution of the conflict stemming from rival justifications is complicated and messy. Sometimes you get compromises, sometimes you get domination, and sometimes the  issue is left unresolved.

That’s a very fertile observation. I sure wish that the book deals with that topic because it is truly an open question in social theory.  It would be a real accomplishment to come up with a convincing theory of how rival justifications are resolved and back it up with some systematic evidence. I am way more interested in the resolution of justifications than classifying them. Would such a theory employ a rational choice approach? A cognitive approach? Perhaps readers more versed in B&T’s works can tell me if that is addressed in the book length treatment of this argument, or in the articles.

A seasonal message from Jamie Targett, our Director of Corporate Affairs

Soon it will be time to remove all traces of the officially authorised low-key festive accessories that have decorated our offices during the festive season. Time also to turn our faces towards the future that is to come. Time to evaluate our personal strategic objectives and our intended goal outcomes. Time to contemplate our game plan, examine core competencies, reinforce best practices, break out of silos, exert maximum leverage, evolve new synergies and maximise our skill sets.

A very happy management-oriented New Year to you all.

Given my recent concern with the politics of mortgages, Monica Prasad was nice enough to share a working paper called “The Credit/Welfare State Tradeoff: A Demand-Side Theory of Comparative Political Economy.” You can read it here. She gave me permission to give public comment and critique. I am not in political economy, nor am I am expert in banks or financial regulation, so take that into account as you read the comments.

Let’s start with the paper’s main motivation: Traditional political economy can’t explain the fact that (a) the US has more banking regulation than Europe and that (b) a modest amount of deregulation resulted in more bad consequence in America than in  Europe. Existing theories focus on the evolution of industry and the institutions they set up, resulting in states that regulate industry and tax incomes in different ways (“varieties of capitalism,” VoC). Prasad’s alternative is that economies are best understood as agglomerations of firms who are subject to regulations pushed by adversarial interest groups.

Prasad’s main critique is that these traditional theories would predict that America would have pretty lax regulation of banks, when you actually have more regulation of banks than in Europe. I don’t see this observation as a stunning take down of the VoC view. Maybe banking is an outlier and the typical American firm is still more regulated than in Europe. If you look at the Index of Freedom, often used as a basic measure of economic liberalization, the US still does better than most countries. Yes, it’s from a partisan think tank, but it’s ranking seem plausible to me. I think I need an argument about why banking somehow shows a problem with our understanding of what counts as a liberal country, or why we should care about an exception like banking.

Ok, but it still is a pretty important question: banking is more regulated in America, why? Monica’s argument boils down to an issue of state formation. The US was created by land expansion. Farmers and settlers needed credit  So when banks went bust, they demanded tougher regulation. This observation also leads to a solution to (b). Since everyone is using tons of credit, bank turbulence will have have a bigger impact. This raises Prasad’s last point: Why do people need so much credit? It’s because they need income support because we have a thin welfare state. Prasad proves the first point with a sketch of the origins of bank regulation, they second point is shown with a regression showing a negative correlation between welfare state benefits and household debt in a panel of OECD countries.

I am not enough of an expert on American state formation to judge this argument, but it does have some appealing attributes. For example, the modern American regulatory state was set up by agrarian populists who were pretty angry at Wall Street. That’s not quite the case for the European welfare states, which have a different history. It also provides a natural explanation of how we arrived at a state where home equity is a central feature of personal finances, which is not the case in Europe.

My critiques are the following. First, I’m a little surprised at the centrality of banking in the paper’s framing. Maybe the paper would be best framed as the interesting and dangerous alliance of agrarian politics, credit expansion, and welfare state support. A hard core VoC’er might say that either banking is exceptional (which it is) or that state building through land development is exceptional (which it is), but that other parts of the economy fit the VoC model. Second, to make the broader political economy point, I think I need some discussion of how interest group access to the state is radically different in Europe than in America, and how that would result in a systematic difference in regulation across industries.

Overall, a stimulating paper. Outside my area, but I learned quite a bit.

I like this.

A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal.  In a new paper in Biology Letters, 25 8-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bubmblebees can learn to reconize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns.

More @ Wired.  Full text Biology Letters paper here.  I love the figures (move over Tufte and Rosling).

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a very important institution for historians and social scientists. It has a very deep collection of historical materials on many aspects of African American history. I even used it in writing my own book. Recently, my colleague Khalil Muhammad, an assistant professor of history at Indiana University, has accepted a position as head of the Schomburg. Here’s an interview with the “Left of Black” internet show, check it out.

Amartya Sen’s book The Idea of Justice (Harvard, 2009) is easily one of the best books I have read over the last couple years. Genius. The topics discussed in the book include social welfare, choice and comparative institutions, governance, philosophy, justice and equity, ethics.  Here Sen gives the cliff notes at the Common Wealth Club of California (Feb 2010):

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I haven’t been following this story, Fraudbytes offers a summary of links:

Going Concern recently interviewed us about E&Y and Lehman–check it out here.  The accounting news source also has a great roundup of other thoughts and opinions on the case from around the blogosphere.  I would also encourage readers to check out David Zaring’s thoughts on the matter over at The Conglomerate.

1. This blog is responsible for $6,000,000,000 in economic growth.

2. Nobody knows what strategy is.

3. Sociologists still don’t like biology.

4. Social structure is hard to understand.

5. Kieran and I can live without Luhmann.

Nominate your favorite posts in the comments.

The most recent issue of Strategic Organization has an article on high-quality research in strategy: “The Strategy Research Initiative: Recognizing and encouraging high-quality research in strategy” — written by a group of mid-career strategy scholars affiliated with the Strategy Research Initiative (members are listed here).

The table below summarizes what the authors are calling for.

Jerry Saltz, the art critic, has a nice column called “Ask an Art Critic.” In the latest installment, he rails, justifiably, against cookie-cutter museum shows that replay the same old hackneyed themes:

Halbreich’s show uses more than 120 works to illustrate ideas about process, post-minimalism, installation art, activist intervention, site-specificity, dematerialization, politics, gender, ethnicity and current events. In other words, the show is about everything and nothing and could contain anything. At MoMA and elsewhere, curators obsessively examine these same ideas, often with the same artists. Making matters worse, there’s so much other work out there these days that is breaking free of or even integrating these ideas in new exciting ways. I could imagine a whole show of recent abstract painting and sculpture that would shed all sorts of light.

Fair enough. If you are a fan of contemporary art, you don’t go to museums to see the cutting edge. You go to see the golden oldies.

But that leaves an interesting question – what *are* museum curators doing if they aren’t going to the cutting edge? A few hypotheses:

1. Fall back: Finding the cutting edge is just as hard as being on the cutting edge. Golden oldies is a fall back position, but they really do desire to do new things.
2. Mimetic isomorphism: Curators are sheep. You copy what high status people did in the recent past. It protects you from angry board members.
3. Consumption: Curators are tempted by the desire to enjoy good established art. Arranging a show of recently trendy work is probably easier than getting the money to buy it yourself.

My vote is for some mix of 2 and 3.

It was inevitable — we have competition: OrgTheory, based in Seattle.   But, with our far-reaching presence (from the Rockies to the Mid-West to the Atlantic, not to mention our international correspondents) and our far-reaching product offering (from organizations to markets to ferrets), I am confident that we’ll be able to hold our own.

Hmm, ironically that business corresponds directly with what most people think I do when I say “organization theory.”

What does the repeal of DADT say about social movement theory?

If you believe in the Burstein hypothesis (movements don’t matter, just public opinion), you’d point to the fact that the American government only moved way, way after public opinion had moved. If you believed in the Fetner hypothesis, you might argue that public opinion moved because of movement activists. Which one do you believe? What evidence do you have?

I found this interesting, the Strategic Management Society (respected body of academics and practitioners in the area of strategic management) is looking at creating a “strategy certification.”  Here’s the logic:

You have your taxes completed with the help of a CPA and make your financial investments with counsel from a CFA. You might exercise with a certified personal trainer or a certified yoga instructor or send your invoices to be put into Quickbooks by a certified virtual assistant. So, of course, when you are developing strategy—a strategy that may require you and your organization to take considerable risks or make sizable investments and difficult decisions—you call on the insights of a certified strategist.

If only there was such a person. [More here.]

“Certifying” a strategy raises some interesting questions.  So, what Certified Public Accountants do is one thing.  Auditing and certifying the financials of an organization is based on the principles of comparative similarities (for example, based on rules such as the GAAP).  Strategic activity, on the other hand, is about comparative differences between organizations — differentiation is the sine qua non of strategy.   Organizational strategy, furthermore, is forward-looking and thus it is hard to somehow “certify” subjective assessments — where agreement is extremely unlikely — and the prospects of some radical innovation or course of action.  What to one looks like an escalation of commitment, to another might look like a bold strategy.   In short, I find it hard to see what exactly could be certified about an organization’s strategy.

I suppose one might think about certification and stakeholder-related considerations (indeed, these are raised in the above link), but then we get into all kinds of value-related issues.  For example, I’m guessing we would get a wide range of opinions from organizational scholars on whether Wal-Mart’s strategy should be certified.  This certification issue seems fraught with some of the same problems as “evidence-based management” — passing muster depends on whose evidence we are using and who is certifying.  And, don’t extra-institutional actors, essentially, provide a type of legitimation that proxies certification —- protests and activism send signals that serve as a de facto, albeit ex post and noisy, certification.

From Discover magazine, a basic analysis of GRE scores from different fields. We do pretty bad in math, but ok, though not great, in writing and verbal scores. The chart makes sense. A few comments:

• The surprise for non-academics is that economics has converted itself into a kind of engineering. The profile of students is pretty much what you get in engineering and most physical sciences. It’s also apparent in their approach to research, mimicry of physical science.
• I’m a little surprised that business does so badly  in these comparisons. It’s a competitive field and the b-schools often have high quality economics and statistics programs.
• Academia does break up into big clusters, a la Snow’s two cultures thesis. I think you could argue that the humanities have a more verbal profile than the bio/social sciences/professions cluster (minus econ).
• Philosophy is the only field that does not fit into one of the two (or three) major camps. Probably the only “sui generis” discipline, which kind of makes sense.

Interesting stuff.

Google’s latest toy allows you to search for words or phrases in its vast library of books. It will then graph the trend of the occurrences of those words over time. It’s super fun.

I created this graph searching for the following terms: organizational theory, management theory, and administrative science. As you can see, until the late 1950s “administrative science” was the most common term. “Management theory” or “organizational theory” didn’t even register until the 1940s. Around the mid-50s these latter two began to rise at roughly the same rate, surpassing “administrative science” in the late 1950s. It’s also striking that both seem to be declining now.

One reason for their decline may be the rapid rise of strategic management. If you add the term, “strategic management,” to the graph you get a really striking story. Strategic management didn’t seem to exist until the mid-70′s, but it experienced a rapid surge in popularity, quickly taking over management and organizational theory. It now dwarfs the other three in popularity. The frequency of “strategic management” is roughly twice that of “management theory,” the next most popular term.

This isn’t a very formal test, but the data from Google books seems to confirm the intuition that strategic management as a subfield of management theory has become a dominant way of thinking about organizations (although there is plenty of room for heterogeneity, like you see on orgtheory.net). For more on this topic, see this post about strategic management as a social movement.

1. Crazy infomercial blog. Highlights: Tajazzle, FloBee, and  Rejuvenique .

2. A Life Well Wasted, an excellent podcast on the world of video games.

3. Esoteric programming languages. My favorite: Whitespace, the language based only on white space characters like spaces and tabs.

You heard right. The American Sociological Association has decided to change the location of their 2011 meetings from Chicago to somewhere other than Chicago. I’m personally hoping it’s Nashville.

I heard a rumor about this yesterday but I didn’t think it would happen so quickly.

Continuing our conversation about journal submission practices, I thought I’d point you to a new study that shows that scholars may hurt their chances of getting published because they submit their papers during the wrong season.  The paper, “Write when hot – submit when not: Seasonal bias in peer review or acceptance?” tracks the submission and rejection rates at two psychology journals, Psychological Science and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and finds that there may be a link between seasonal submission rates and the likelihood of being rejected. Here’s the abstract:

At a top psychology journal, Psychological Science (PS), submissions peak during the summer months. We tested whether this seasonal submission bias decreases the likelihood of a paper being accepted in that period. Month of submission data was obtained for all 575 publications in PS for the period 2003-2006. Whereas submissions to PS were higher in the summer, there was no evidence that most accepted publications were originally submitted in the summer. Thus, contributors submit to PS when the likelihood of acceptance is the lowest – creating their own entrance barrier. A similar seasonal pattern was not identified for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, another top psychology journal. Using the Web of Knowledge database, we further assessed whether overcoming the seasonal entrance barrier influences the number of citations a paper receives in subsequent years. We discuss the possibility that the different rejections policies in the two journals, employing desk rejections or not, may explain this discrepancy, and explore a range of alternative hypotheses.

If the latter hypothesis is true – that journals employing desk rejections are more likely to reject a paper when the number of submissions are highest – then it makes sense to be cautious in submitting papers to journals that desk reject a lot of papers during the hot season. For most sociology and organizational theory journals, I believe the hot season is early fall. The annual meetings have just been held and people are excited to submit their newly polished papers. If the journal doesn’t desk reject that much, then the seasonal effect shouldn’t hurt you.

Personally I try not to worry about this sort of thing. I just submit a paper whenever I feel it’s ready to go (i.e., I’m sick of looking at it). I doubt this study will change the way I do anything, but it’s still interesting to think about.

Dear orgheads:

A student asked me this. What is the best social science research on the slow food movement?

On the OMT blog, Huggy Rao, the editor of ASQ, talks about the pressures that young scholars face to publish early and often.

We find that our desk reject rate has gone up – people may be tempted to send papers too early in the process. My advice to younger scholars is to expose their ideas to selection pressure in the form of seminars and presentations and then send it to ASQ. This will give you your best shot.

Huggy suggests that young scholars don’t seek enough feedback before submitting their papers for review. We hear the clock ticking, leading us to send papers off to journals before we get the necessary feedback that would help they sufficiently mature. Younger scholars also face another problem – the inability to accurately assess the fit of their paper with the journal’s personality and expected quality. An editor at another top journal recently told me that senior scholars are much more careful about which papers they’ll send to a top journal. They’re more likely to send papers to specialty journals first. Of course, younger scholars don’t have tenure and so we feel more pressure to publish in journals of the caliber of ASQ, ASR, or AJS.  We almost always send our papers to these journals first, regardless of the breadth or depth of the paper.

I doubt this is a problem that will go away anytime soon. As European and Asian schools  give their scholars more incentives to publish in top American journals, the competition will only increase, leading to more congestion in the review queue. Huggy’s advice would seem even more apt in these circumstances. The young scholars who succeed in getting published will be those who get proper feedback before submitting, who allow their papers to develop, and who figure out how to appropriately match their paper with the right journal.

Do you have a nagging suspicion that sociology needs to develop a post-Bourdieusian perspective? Maybe you need a little sociology to help you get through those frustrating family dinners with non-sociologists? Or perhaps you need to vent your Festivus rage.

We here at orgtheory are here to help. I am organizing a “mini-seminar” on a single article, Boltanski and Thevenot 1999 (see cite below). I will download and read this article and post on December 26, 2010. I am just too curious. Some say it’s more Continental clap trap, others say it’s Durkheim on a stick. No harm in actually reading it. Let’s check it out.

Cite:

Boltanski and Thevenot. “The Sociology of Critical Capacity.” European Journal of Social Theory 2:3 (1999): 359-377.

A friend pointed this out to me:

Programming sticks upon the shoals
Of incommensurate multiple goals
And where the tops are no one knows
When all our peaks become plateaus
The top is anything we think
When measuring makes the mountain shrink.
The upshot is, we cannot tailor
Policy by a single scalar,
Unless we know the priceless price
Of Honor, Justice, Pride, and Vice.
This means a crisis is arising
For simple-minded maximizing.

— Kenneth Boulding

in Mesarovic, M.D. 1964, (ed.), Views on General System Theory, Wiley.

I’m thinking about doing a sabbatical/leave of absence sometime in the near future.  Hoping to get some advice (and perhaps this advice would be helpful for others as well).

So, if you’ve done a sabbatical, leave of absence, or perhaps some kind of visiting appointment, I would love your thoughts on the following types of questions:

• What should one think about in terms of selecting a university?  Naturally extant friendships and research links drive much of this process, but I would nonetheless enjoy getting any thoughts.
• What are the benefits of being at a “research center” (e.g., CASBS) rather than a university?  I thoroughly enjoy interdisciplinary interaction and my sense is that centers try to facilitate this.  (Though, of course interdisciplinary interaction can also happen within universities.)
• When is the right time to do these types of leaves?  I am guessing much of this is driven by the faculty’s needs (and perhaps, universities policies), but curious to get any feedback.
• What, if any, are the risks of doing a sabbatical or leave of absence?  I don’t see any downsides really, well, other than the usual headaches that are associated with making all the arrangements (moving, financing, etc).
• What else should be considered?  Family considerations of course are a very big issue.  But, what other issues should be considered?

The benefits of a year away seem pretty obvious: a chance to re-charge and renew oneself and research, opportunities to interact with new colleagues, start new projects, not teach (or, teach less), etc.  But, I can imagine that sabbaticals might also disappoint, so just trying to think through the central issues.