orgtheory.net

An incisive rebuttal laying bear bare the overdetermined intersection of social identity theory, categorization, hierarchy and agency within organizations.  Bravo.

Clearly, organizational theory would be better off if it had more bears.

Previous quizzes: The Third Reich; Stalinists; Andorran Politics; world’s oldest firm; branches of the US armed services

Which sociologist was president of the American Statistical Association?

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A recent post reminded me of an orgtheory incident from 2007, I don’t think we ever posted about it.

Fabio used the term “reputation capital” in a post and got this email:

To: Rojas, Fabio Guillermo

From: xxxx (and xxxx’s lawyer cc:d)
Sent: Sun 3/25/2007 12:47 PM
Subject: Reputation Capital(R) – Please Reference

Fabio – trust this note finds you well.

In your blog: http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/quentin-tarantino-economic-sociologist/ you reference reputation capital.  Please accept this note as a friendly reminder that Reputation Capital® is a registered trademark of this firm and our suite of professional services.  I’d kindly request that you:

A)     Reference “® The Nour Group, Inc. 2002-2007″ next to the term,
B)     Reference our firm somewhere as a footnote with the above ®, or
C)     Remove the term and / or the blog entry all together

Please confirm your receipt of this email and thank you in advance,

Signed by

xxxx

So, consider this post a friendly public service announcement.  If you use the term “reputation capital” — remember that it has been trademarked (see here, renewed in 2006).

Here’s “reputation capital” and “reputational capital” in google scholar.

Lera Boroditsky on how language shapes thought (video from Long Now Foundation, FORA.tv).

A journal editor has been sued for running a negative book review.  The book’s author, a law professor, says that the review was “defamatory and [asked] for it to be taken down,” specifically because it could “cause harm to her professional reputation and academic promotion.”

More @ mobylives.

Teppo’s efforts to create a crowdsourced ranking of management journals tipped off quite a debate on the OMT (Organization and Management Theory) listserv about the validity of such rankings.  The debate centered on whether crowdsourced rankings were too subjective, merely representing prestige differences rather than actual quality differences, and ignored objective data (e.g., citation patterns) for assessing journal quality. Teppo and Bill Starbuck were kind enough to post on the OMT blog some thoughts about the ranking. Bill knows something about journal prestige and quality. In 2005 he published a paper in Organization Science that questioned whether the most prestigious journals actually published the highest quality articles. Here’s the abstract for that paper:

Articles in high-prestige journals receive more citations and more applause than articles in less-prestigious journals, but how much more do these articles contribute to knowledge?  This article uses a statistical theory of review processes to draw inferences about differences value between articles in more-prestigious versus less-prestigious journals. This analysis indicates that there is much overlap in articles in different prestige strata. Indeed, theory implies that about half of the articles published are not among the best ones submitted to those journals, and some of the manuscripts that belong in the highest-value 20% have the misfortune to elicit rejections from as many as five journals. Some social science departments and business schools strongly emphasize publication in prestigious journals. Although one can draw inferences about an author’s average manuscript from the percentage in top-tier journals, the confidence limits for such inferences are wide. A focus on prestigious journals may benefit the most prestigious departments or schools but add randomness to the decisions of departments or schools that are not at the very top. Such a focus may also impede the development of knowledge when mediocre research receives the endorsement of high visibility.

Live coverage of the Egypt protests, at Al Jazeera (English).

Abdul Alkalimat, over at Illinois-Urbana, has set up a series of great web site on various Black Studies topics. His latest is a site documenting Harold Washington. Required reading for students of Chicago’s politics and Black Power. Recommended.

The Academy of Management is doing a social media survey.  And, the AOM Connect twitter feed.

This post at Unfogged reminded me of what a crazy, high risk venture seeking an academic job really is. Like most things in life, attaining truly elite status in your field requires talent and dedication, involves luck (e.g., good timing) and positive performance feedback, and is only attainable for a small number of position seekers. In some disciplines, getting any sort of decent job in academia is a low probability event. Achieving in academia is a process with multiple selection moments at which a seemingly promising scholar can be removed from the game. For those who manage to stay in, this is the best job in the world. For those who don’t make it, deciding to get a PhD could have been have the worst decision in their life, leading to lots of other life calamities and distress. Take, for example, this testimony:

Between illness, errors and just being lazy sometimes, I fell behind, especially on publications — the main currency by which academic merit is measured. I’ve come to realize, in comparing my qualifications with those of my peers, that I just realistically can never catch up to someone who came out of the gate with a degree in my field, multiple publications, and health intact. Compounding the difficulty is that my husband did get a tenure-track job, at an amazing research university that is, quite frankly, way out of my league. So, if I want to live in the same city as my husband, I’m pretty much stuck — realistically, I will not get a job at his university, or hell, any university at this point. I scrape by teaching the occasional class for peanuts, and one other prof has taken enough pity on me to let me work in her lab so I can pretend to continue my research.

…

The problem is that emotionally, I can’t drop it. It’s like having a painful sore in my mouth that I keep poking with my tongue — all day, every day, I’m angry, bitter and heartbroken. I resent my husband so much for having what I can’t get that I can barely stand to be in the same room with him, I’m so consumed with jealousy. The workload of a professor is far more brutal than many realize — 60-hour workweeks are the norm, and actually you don’t stop working over the summer, you just stop getting paid — so my husband naturally has little time and energy left over for any housework, which naturally falls on my shoulders. And this ENRAGES me — it’s like I’m not just unable to get my dream job, I’m doomed to 1950s housewife drudgery while my husband does the important stuff. My resentment toward my husband is on the verge of causing me to leave — and it’s not his fault.

One of the main problems with academic training, as I see it, is that we’re horrible at articulating plan Bs for students. For those who are successful in academia, which constitutes the entire population of PhD advisers, Plan B is distant and unthinkable. Unlike other professional training, like MBA programs or law school, PhD programs don’t have an infrastructure designed to help students deal with these sorts of career or life contingencies.  Psychologically we don’t know how to prepare students for any sort of life outside of academia.

Somehow we have to get past this mental model that not achieving spectacular success in academia is equivalent to life failure.

I was not aware of this, but various media outlets have been turning their attention to sociologist Frances Fox Piven. This has gone beyond criticizing her views, which is entirely legitimate. they are now using smear tactics and encouraging extreme rhetoric that encourages harassment. The Nation has an article that reports on the issue:

Piven says that “right wing operatives” recently visited her home to interview her for a video that would be part of their “term paper.” The “operatives” turned out to both be individuals working for Andrew Breitbart’s blog. According to Piven, Beck “picked” her (and her late husband, Richard Cloward) because she wrote “a little article” for The Nation last year talking about the problems in organizing the unemployed, so the unemployed can have an impact in American politics.

There is also harassment, which followed her being singled out by Glenn Beck on his television show. From the NY Times:

Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler. Anonymous visitors to his Web site have called for her death, and some, she said, have contacted her directly via e-mail.

Fortunately, Piven appears to take this in stride and does not appear to be fazed. We welcome criticism, but not “interview traps” and cowardly threats. These are out of bounds.

Over at Scatter, Dan Myers has posted a letter from the section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements with suggestions about what you can do. There is one thing they omitted: calling advertisers. Here’s a list, compiled by Beck’s defenders (scroll down). People are entitled to disagree with Professor Piven  -I certainly do on many issues- , but they should do so in a way that doesn’t encourage people to make threats. Media personalities should make it clear during their programs that they want these tactics to stop. Until that happens, advertisers should take their funds elsewhere.

Brayden is correct. Shamus’ book is good. And I can’t wait to see what Brayden, and other orgheads, have to say about it. If you haven’t been following the story, Shamus Khan is a sociologist at Columbia, a sociology blogger, and has written a book on St. Paul’s School, an elite boarding school. Shamus is a graduate of St. Paul’s and later came back to do research on it through ethnographic methods. He became a teacher and resident at the school for a year. Privilege is his analysis of what exactly happens at these elite boarding schools.

The book is an examination of how elites are made and how they relate to the rest of the world. Shamus’ argument is pretty simple. Elites used to be about entitlement. Things were handed to you. Now, elites are about being “at ease” in the world. Elites have to still put in the work and effort, but they see the world as something to exploited and leveraged, rather than a constraint. Modern elites are capable of straddling different social arenas with ease and cross boundaries. A simple but very profound point.

What does this have to do with a prep school? Schools like St. Paul’s, through rituals and interaction, instill this sense of ease among its students. It’s not merely about displaying status. Of course, there’s a lot of that. It’s also about learning how say what people want to hear, to be able to hang out with many kinds of people (not just rich people), and learn that what will fly in a given situation. It’s about learning that life is not a constraint, but a game to be learned. The joy of reading Privilige is seeing the nuances and contradictions of that ethos in vivid detail.

Let me conclude by situating this book within the sociology of education. Shamus isn’t quite right in stating that we don’t know much about elites. It’s more accurate to say that stratification researchers don’t have good ethnographic evidence on the socialization and habitus of elites. However, there is a lot of good recent stuff on the educational institutions of elites. I’d start with Duffy and Goldberg’s Crafting a Class, which discusses how elite liberal arts colleges admit students. Then I’d go with The Chosen, Karabel’s epic analysis of HYP admissions. I’d also add in Mitchell Steven’s ethnography of liberal arts admissions, Creating a Class. These books are all about how “the system” sees their relationship with the elites.

Shamus’ book fills in the crucial missing piece. It’s a well grounded description of the people who are the ”input” into the elite higher education system.  It’s a view of elite life from the ”training camp,” right before they are unleashed into American society. Highly recommended to anyone interested in stratification and education.

Daniel Bell has died at the age of ninety one. The New York Times has an obituary, and I’m sure there will be more to follow elsewhere. I heard a story once about Bell being asked what he specialized in. “Generalizations”, he replied. But not the sterile, merely verbal generalizations of something like structural-functionalism. Bell was prepared to sick his neck out. This meant he could get things wrong. His cultural criticism in particular has not aged well: his worries about “aggressive female sexuality”, for instance, or his view that the “new sound” of the Beatles made it “impossible to hear oneself think, and that may indeed have been its intention” are unlikely to play so well today. But we should be so lucky to coin so many phrases that become part of the language — “The End of Ideology”, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society“. The latter book, in particular, is one of the most impressive pieces of economic sociology written in the twentieth century. It asks a big question about the future, it works out an answer, and gets it mostly right. At the beginning of his academic career Bell was on the periphery of the self-consciously scientific sociology department at Columbia that had Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld at its core. (A little like C. Wright Mills, interestingly enough.) I believe they thought of him more as a journalist and political type, at least initially, given his background at Fortune magazine. Yet a book like The Coming of Post-Industrial Society has more truly scientific spirit about it than Social Theory and Social Structure.

Over the Martin Luther King Day holiday I started reading what I thought were two unrelated books: a novel by Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America, and Shamus Khan’s new book about elites in a prestigious boarding school, Privilege. By the end of the week I realized that the two books have fairly similar themes. Parrot and Olivier, which is loosely based on Alexis de Tocqueville’s visit to America, and Privilege are both about how people negotiate social hierarchies, figuring out how to maximize the potential of their role in that hierarchy and, if they’re lucky, to move up that hierarchy. Of course, the point of a hierarchy is that the positions at the top are limited in number and difficult to attain. Thus, people who start at the top find it easier to reproduce those positions than people at the bottom are able to move up.  In some systems, like the old French aristocracy, upward mobility was nearly impossible, but in other systems, like present day U.S., moving up the ladder depends in part on your ability to master the nuanced rules of the game at each successive level.

Shamus’s book deserves a post of its own. I’ll comment more on it later, but for now let me just say that it’s a really great read. Somebody forgot to tell Shamus that sociology is supposed to be dryly written.

Parrot and Olivier isn’t quite as good as I hoped. If you’re a fan of Tocqueville, you might be disappointed like I was by Carey’s frivolous depiction of him. I didn’t recognize the brilliant intellectual in his Tocqueville embodied in the character Olivier de Garmont. But the novel is superb in other ways, most notably in its ability to juxtapose Tocqueville’s world of French aristocracy with the new meritocratic class system of America.

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Going to Davos is expensive. From the NY Times today:

Just to have the opportunity to be invited to Davos, you must be invited to be a member of the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit that was founded by Klaus Schwab, a German-born academic who managed to build a global conference in the snow.

There are several levels of membership: the basic level, which will get you one invitation to Davos, costs 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $52,000. The ticket itself is another 18,000 Swiss francs ($19,000), plus tax, bringing the total cost of membership and entrance fee to $71,000.

But that fee just gets you in the door with the masses at Davos, with entry to all the general sessions. If you want to be invited behind the velvet rope to participate in private sessions among your industry’s peers, you need to step up to the “Industry Associate” level. That costs $137,000, plus the price of the ticket, bringing the total to about $156,000.

Not surprisingly, like most conferences, you feel like you are being left out:

But all this spending may soon be going out of vogue. As one attendee, the author David Rothkopf, recently wrote on his blog, “The entire endeavor is fading for several reasons, all associated with the inadequacy of Davos as a networking forum.”

He explained, “As Steve Case, founder of AOL, once told me while standing at the bar in the middle of the hubbub of the main conference center: ‘You always feel like you are in the wrong place in Davos, like there is some better meeting going on somewhere in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at. Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere.’”

You can buy a lot, but you can’t buy respect.

Erik over at The Monkey Cage points me towards the excellent Better Book Titles, where you can find numerous contemporary and classic works slightly altered in a way that the title is more informative about their actual content. In closing he says,

If you can do anything like this with a political science book, I’d consider putting it on the Cage.

So what he’s looking for are titles that better convey the core of the argument of academic monographs. Like this.

Of course, we shouldn’t just pick on the famous. So here’s another one, a bit closer to home.

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Of all academic areas, you would think management would be the logical place for unrestrained economic imperialism. Yes, b-schools do employ many of the world’s leading economists, but that’s only half the game. They also employ leading sociologists, psychologists, statisticians, and even a historian here and there. Management PhD holders employ a wide range of approaches. Some are economists, but you also get people doing things that are psychology or sociology. Leading management journals are not de facto economics journals. Why?

A few hypotheses:

1. Supply: Economists shy away from applied topics. Maybe the study of firms is not attractive enough for some reason.
2. Cultural: There’s a culture of pluralism in b-schools that’s very strong. If so, where did that culture come from?
3. Relative strength: Maybe the organizational psychologists and economic sociologists are very strong scholars and are able to hold their own in turf wars.
4. More mathy: B-schools house people other than economists who know math, like the operations research or the financial engineering folks, so economists don’t have an advantage.
5. Selection effect: Non-economists who go to b-schools already like econ, so they get along and learn to co-exist.
6. Path dependence: A lot of key management research precedes the economic imperialism of the 1980s. So they are hard to dislodge.
7. Demand: MBA students want more than economics in the curriculum.
8. Demand, II: Funders want non-economists in the faculty.

Any evidence? Other hypotheses? Good question for a sociologist of science. Comments from management faculty and economists encouraged.

I’m done reading the last installment of Stephen Donaldson’s “Covenant” series. Interesting reading for people interested in the tortured/confused hero genre. Ending is very good. If you want this book, free of charge, write something in the comments and send me your physical address via email. One commenter will get the book in a few weeks.

Positive organizational scholarship (POS) — which builds on the positive psychology movement — is getting lots of attention.  Here are a few links:

• The wikipedia entry for positive psychology
• U of Pennsylvania’s Seligman gives a TED primer on the positive psychology movement
• The epicenter of POS, University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Scholarship
• Positive organizational scholarship wiki
• Wiki entry for positive organizational behavior
• POS scholar Ryan Quinn (et al) maintain a blog
• The University of Pennsylvania ‘Authentic Happiness’ web site has lots of positive psych-related tests, tools etc
• Then there’s the whole field of happiness economics

There you have it.  Have an uplifting, flourishing and happy weekend.

Via ALDAILY, here’s some discussion about Erik Olin Wright’s book Envisioning Real Utopias.  Here’s the book (including numerous, downloadable chapters).

I just looked up orgtheory.net on technorati (a blog search engine), and it appears we are in good company — with a celebrity gossip blog, an ultimate fighting blog, a book blog, a blog about the oil business, etc.  And, good to know that orgtheory has the same amount of “authority” as those blogs (listed here).

Peers also listed below the fold.   Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Yglesias offers  a very good reason to make organizational design more prominent in org. theory.

Via John Gruber, Horace Dediu looks at how poorly analysts fared when it came to predicting the size of the market for the iPad. Apple sold just shy of fifteen million iPads in 2010. (starting in April, when it launched.) Every pundit with any kind of audience underestimated how successful it would be, usually by a long ways. Moreover, Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes that professional analysts (employed by investment firms and so on) did much worse than “unaffiliated” analysts with blogs, even when it came to just the previous quarter:

In our ranking of the best and worst Apple (AAPL) analysts for Q1 2011, which lists them based on how accurately they predicted seven key numbers — revenue, earnings, gross margins and unit sales — the unaffiliated analysts … took 9 out of the 10 top spots. The bottom 20 spots were all held by professionals working for the banks and brokerage houses. Taken as a whole, the numbers they sent their paying clients were off by a margin (9.04%) more than twice as big as those generated by the guys who do it for free (3.94%).

I have a limited amount of sympathy for the analysts. Predicting the future is rather harder than predicting the past. But it’s strictly limited, because even a cursory survey of the field shows that IT punditry is stuffed to the gills with people who don’t seem to know anything. Even so, the fact that everyone got it badly wrong is striking. After Steve Jobs demoed the iPad last year, I asked the undergraduates in my Organizations and Management class whether they planned to buy one, and whether they thought it would be a success. The students in this class are a broad cross-section of the Duke undergraduate population, with majors from a lot of different fields. Without exception, they thought Apple had laid an egg with the iPad and that it was impossible to see any use for the device that (a) wouldn’t be better satisfied by either a phone or a laptop and (b) would still be worth paying the asking price for. I’m teaching the same course this semester, so yesterday I asked the class how many of them owned an iPad. A small number did: a bit less than one in ten. (This in a population where, on the one hand, most could afford an iPad if they wanted one but, on the other, almost everyone already owns a laptop for schoolwork.) Then I asked how many of them knew someone outside the class who owned an iPad. Everyone put up their hand.

If you love organization theory and institutional analysis, you’ll find the most recent edition of the Academy of Management Journal very interesting. December 2010 is dedicated to exploring new directions in the study of organizational environments. Here’s the table of contents.

A few highlights: Mukti Khaire, one of the very first orgtheory guest bloggers, has  an article, co-written with R. Daniel Wadhwani,  on the development of the Indian art market:

Changing Landscapes: The Construction of Meaning and Value in a New Market Category—Modern Indian Art

Stable category meanings act as institutions that facilitate market exchange by providing bases for comparison and valuation. Yet little is known about meaning construction in new categories or how meaning translates into valuation criteria. We address this gap in a descriptive study of these processes in an emerging category: modern Indian art. Discourse analysis revealed how market actors shaped the construction of meaning in the new category by reinterpreting historical constructs in ways that enhanced commensurability and enabled aesthetic comparisons and valuation. Analysis of auction transactions indicated greater intersubjective agreement about valuation over time as the new category institutionalized.

Matt Kraatz, also a guest, analyzes the adoption of new practices with a study of enrollment management practices, written with institional theory guru Marc Ventresca and Lina Deng.

Precarious Values and Mundane Innovations: Enrollment Management in American Liberal Arts Colleges

Drawing primarily from Selznick’s institutionalism, we make a general case for renewed attention to the “mundane administrative arrangements” that underlie the organizational capacity for value realization and a particular case for the study of value-subverting management innovations. An empirical study of “enrollment management” in liberal arts colleges reveals this ostensibly innocuous innovation’s value-undermining effects and identifies the organizational and environmental factors that have made these venerable organizations more or less susceptible to its adoption.

Lots of other goodies: Lok on organizational identity; Battilana and Dorado address organizational identity with a study of micro-finance groups; Marquis and Huang discuss founding conditions and path dependence in the banking industry; McClean and Benham discuss corporate misconduct. And there’s tons more!

Finally, if you’d like to read my latest thinking on institutions, movements and organizational change, I have an article about how organizational leaders can expand their power through manipulating institutions (“Power Through Institutional Work”). I explain how one college president used the institutional disruption associated with the Black Student movement to redefine his powers and repress the movement (sort of!).

Satoshi Kanazawa seems to believe that intelligence explains, well, a lot of stuff.  Here’s what intelligence is correlated with:

• a preference for classical music – Kanazawa, Satoshi and Kaja Perina.  Forthcoming.  “Why More Intelligent Individuals Like Classical Music.”  Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
• physical attractiveness – Kanazawa, Satoshi.  2011.  “Intelligence and Physical Attractiveness.”  Intelligence. 39:  7-14.
• substance abuse – Kanazawa, Satoshi and Josephine E. E. U. Hellberg.  2010.  “Intelligence and Substance Use.”  Review of General Psychology. 14:  382-396.
• being a night owl – Kanazawa, Satoshi and Kaja Perina.  2009.  “Why Night Owls Are More Intelligent.”  Personality and Individual Differences. 47:  685-690.
• being a liberal and an atheist – Kanazawa, Satoshi.  2010.  “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent.”  Social Psychology Quarterly. 73:  33-57.
• all kinds of other stuff – Kanazawa, Satoshi.  2010.  “Evolutionary Psychology and Intelligence Research.”  American Psychologist.  65:  279-289.

We all want sharp graduate students and colleagues, so based on the above we could almost develop a Kanazawa-quotient, a simple heuristic for hiring and selection.  If you meet, say, three-four of the criteria, you should receive serious consideration: you like classical music, are attractive, have a substance abuse problem, are a night owl, liberal and an atheist.

More Kanazawa here.

Previous 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.

I was recently asked by Simone about publication strategies for graduate students. My response: First, consider your goals and work backwards. Second, there are rules of thumb and mitigating circumstances.

In general, start by asking yourself, if I want job X, what is required?

• Elite research schools: In sociology or management, you usually need your name on a publication in a top journal. If you work in a field where top journals don’t take many articles (e.g., ethnography and ASR), you can get away with a very high quality specialty journal hit. Elite programs will usually scoff at regional journals if that’s your sole publication.
• Most research schools: Once you get beyond, say, the top 20 in your field, you can publish in a wider range of journals and still get a good job. These include the stronger regionals and good specialty journals.
• Liberal arts colleges: This is tricky. Too much publication and not enough teaching can be bad. Yet, you still need publication in respected places. So I think one quality publication and a strong teaching portfolio is good.
• MA/BA prorgams: One or two quality articles non-laughable journals will put you in the zone.

Second, rules of thumb:

• Low ranked PhD program: If you are at a low ranked place, you will need to overcompensate to move up in the hierarchy.
• Elite PhD program: People cut you slack if you are elite. If you can produce a cool project, it doesn’t need to immediately come out in a leading journal. The PhD program’s brand/star adviser’s name will help you out.
• Funky vs. obscure: If you can’t land a paper in a top tier journal because of the topic, it’s sometimes better to place it in a cutting edge journal than in a low status journal, as long as the cutting edge journal really exists in an interesting niche.
• Journal ranking:  top general journals > top specialty > respected regionals > low ranked regionals. There are always some journals that are orthogonal and don’t fit in the ranking.
• Discipline crossing: If it’s appropriate, it may be better to publish in a strong journal in another discipline than have the paper in an obscure in-discipline journal.
• Foreign: If it’s appropriate for the topic, non-American journals may be good as well.
• Take more time: If you can’t land a journal article because it needs to be better, sometimes it’s better to take an extra year (if finances permit) and get you article accepted.
• Edited volume contributions and book reviews won’t help your job prospects.

In other words, it’s probably best to shoot for the top journals. The issue is “plan B” and there are many options. It depends a lot on who you are, your goals, and the type of research. Your journal placement should signal that you are interesting as a scholar. Journal placements are part of your professional identity. You don’t need every thing to be in journal #1, but all your articles should make a positive impression.

Remember back in the fall when Fabio talked about sociology’s new attempts to articulate cultural explanations for inequality?  That research has started to catch some flack by those who see it as an embrace of the old “culture of poverty” argument. Never mind that Small, Lamont and Harding explicitly said in this essay from the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that one reason that inequality scholars should study culture “is to debunk existing myths about the cultural orientations of the poor”; critics of the essay argue that Small et al. are resurrecting the culture of poverty thesis. Of course, the loudest critic so far is Stephen Steinberg, who published a sorta response to their Annals piece in the Boston Review (I say sorta because much of Steinberg’s essay seems to be more about William Julius Wilson and less about the Annals piece). Here’s an excerpt:

Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”

Mario offers a short response to the Steinberg essay here. I doubt this is the last we’ll hear of this exchange. More needs to be said, obviously.

The main problem I have with Steinberg’s argument, as a complete outsider to the field, is that he seems to be saying that we should reject all cultural mechanisms that might explain variance in poverty, regardless of their actual explanatory power. This dogmatic stance seems very anti-science and anti-scholarly inquiry. Rejecting explanatory mechanisms without empirical evidence is a sure way to stultify the progress of knowledge about our social world.

The appropriate reaction by a critic, in my view, would be to go to the actual studies and identify what you think is empirically wrong their arguments. If you could identify holes in the analysis, you can make the claim that the theory is weak. But to simply say “we don’t need more research of this type,” without actually considering the empirical basis for the claims Small et al. make, is pretty weak.

Interesting discussion at Science magazine on how to gain immortal fame in science, based on the analysis of Google books.  Here are the immortal superstars.  Here’s the associated article, by Jean-Baptiste Michel et al, on ‘culturomics.’

The foreclosure crisis has revealed that banks do not have the standing to sue for foreclosure in many cases. This is not a case of giving handouts to borrowers who are in over their heads. Rather, it’s an issue of property law. If Brayden loans me money, then he can sue me for non-payment. If Brayden sells the loan, the new owner can sue me, not Brayden. That’s why courts are *supposed* to ask for the loan note, to verify that a foreclosing bank really does have the right to foreclose. Similarly, if a bank sells a mortgage, the title gets transferred to the new owner, who then has the right to sue.

Journalists and researchers have discovered that banks have essentially sold off loans without keeping adequate records. They wanted the mortgage security market money and they wished to avoid the taxes and paperwork associated with making loans legal according to state and municipal law. The Massachusetts Supreme court has agreed with this point. Banks, in some cases, have screwed up the title and can’t sue.

The interesting question for orgtheorists is how other states and the Feds will react. Isn’t collusion to avoid taxes a form of organized crime? How will foreclosure lawsuits and statutes diffused throughout the American legal system? Will the Massachusetts Court case lead to any serious attempt to clean up this mess?

Indiana University of Pennsylvania students have created a Second Life simulation of the Civil Rights movement. Here’s the story.

A few weeks ago, I began a series of posts on the subject of small government rhetoric. My main point is that most people who push for small government don’t really mean it. In this post, I’d like to elaborate on an another point. Small government policy faces some big obstacles. The first and foremost is that people love government. And they love big government.

I don’t think this is particularly shocking. A few facts:

• Most people have government programs that they love a lot. Conservatives love the police and the military. Liberals love social services. The difference between liberals and conservatives is not that one is for more government and the other wants less government. They just want government to do different things.
• There are some big programs that most people support, like Medicare.
• A consistent finding of polls is that people who favor cutting government rarely favor cutting specific programs like Social Security.
• It is remarkably hard to cut government, even in America. Only recessions can dent state budgets, and then only temporarily.
• People may slam government in the abstract, but they love specific people a lot. You know the old joke, “Congress is a bunch of thieves, but my representative is great!”
• Surveys show that few people are hard core libertarians, who favor cutting both defense and social programs. In other words, lots use libertarian rhetoric but not many people actually support libertarian policies (privatizing old age benefits, drastically reducing defense).

One puzzle that remains is the persistence of small government rhetoric. What gives? My analysis is cynical. I think a lot of politics is group status politics in disguise. Small government rhetoric is convenient. It’s an easy justification to attack resource transfers to unpopular groups. For example, Tea Party conservatives oppose the bailout, a hand out to corporations. But few have called for systematically cutting back the Federal Reserve or the Treasury. Another case: immigration. They believe that immigrants are unjustly sucking up jobs and tax dollars. So cut the services that they use. The small government position is more palatable than saying “I hate banks” or “I hate Mexicans.”

So what’s a serious small government proponent to do? First, proponents of limited government should make it clear that they aren’t conservatives, Tea Party people, liberals or whatever. Second, focus on issues of high relative impact. For example, liberals and conservatives have pretty much failed on some important issues like the drug war, stopping needless war, and developing a humane immigration policy. These are all policy domains that lead to bigger, and unneeded, government. They are policy areas where you won’t be swamped by other interest groups. Third, counter-signal. If you really believe that small government is good for everyone, why not work for some low status people? Fighting for estate tax repeal or lower capital gains may have some abstract policy merit (or not), but I’m sure it won’t persuade people to really adopt your position. Instead, why not pick a fight that shows you favor freedom for everyone and not just people in your tax bracket?

An effort to crowdsource MBA program rankings.

Rank here: http://www.allourideas.org/mbarankings

[With big apologies to those with rankings fatigue.  This one's, largely, targeted toward a different population.  Actually, sort of an interesting self-selection that occurs with these rankings --- more on that later.]

A Social Networks reading list that I put together with a colleague for a graduate seminar that we taught a couple of years ago might be of interest to some of you.

A few weeks ago, Kentucky artist Stephen Irwin abruptly died from heart failure.  As reported in the Courier-Journal, he was well known in Louisville and was developing a dedicated following in New York, Berlin, and London. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to his work. In his short career, he focused on two topics. Early on, he produced very delicate etchings and drawings. Ascent/Descent (2004), shown here, is a good example. Later on, he moved to producing delicate things from very indelicate things. For example, he made series of edgy works where he took adult magazines and selectively rubbed out the image, creating ghostly traces. It was critical art. Take something blunt and carve the noise away, you could see the beauty and horror underneath. His work will be highlighted in a show called “The Way We Are Now” at the Cincinnati Art Museum, starting January 29, 2011. He was part of the Zephyr Gallery collective in Kentucky and showed at Invisible-Exports in New York. (Warning: Irwin’s adult themed art not appropriate for work or people under 18!)

Is Administrative Science Quarterly really the #9 journal in management (as suggested by ISI/impact factors a few years ago)?  Pl-eez!  Is Management Science really #24 (as ranked by ISI in 2009) among management journals?  Is the Journal of Product Innovation Management, ahem, really a better management journal than Organization Science (relegated to #13! in 2008)?

Now you can decide.

Inspired by Kieran and Steve’s ranking initiative (of sociology departments, see here), here’s an effort to crowdsource management journal rankings:

RANK HERE: http://www.allourideas.org/management

Sure, a ranking like this has lots of problems: apples and oranges (organizational behavior, strategy, org theory journals all in one), the lack of disciplinary journals (for now), etc. It’s certainly not definitive.  But I think a crowdsourced ranking of management journals might nonetheless be quite informative, and it certainly won’t make the mistake of keeping ASQ, Organization Science or Management Science out of the top 5.  Well, we’ll see.

Updated map of where the votes are coming from: