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“Voice is a means of social control: that is to say, the voice is a means of influencing the behavior of individuals so as to bring them into cooperation, one with another.”

That’s from a 1908 American Journal of Sociology article by biologist and ethologist Wallace Craig –  ”The Voices of Pigeons Regarded as a Means of Social Control.”  Yes, the article indeed is about pigeons. I don’t know whether AJS still publishes articles by ethologists.  Probably not.

I think ethology can offer some interesting meta-theoretical, comparative and methological insights for studying activity, behavior and social interaction across and within various contexts (from various types of animals to humans).  Sure, one-to-one borrowing across species can be lame (directly applying insights from biology can lead to sloppy reasoning), and is all too frequent.  Of course humans are not like pigeons – or ants or bees – though some abstract similarities might exist and specifying the underlying nature of an organism makes for an intriguing, comparative exercise.

More importantly, the nature of the thing itself, the thing that is being studied, needs to be vetted (Craig, Lorenz etc were brilliant at this), rather than resorting to studying the thing’s environment.  That’s a personal pet peeve of mine.  (Is that vague enough?  Good.)

If any of you are interested in ethology, its origins, the emergence of a field, etc — I would highly, highly recommend Richard Burkhardt Jr’s brilliant book Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology, University of Chicago Press.  It is one of the best books I have read during the last three years (was just re-skimming it).

Al Jazeera continues to have the best reporting around when it comes to the Arab Spring. For example, the Al Jazeera Libya blog had a wonderful photo from Benghazi, the city that has now emerged as the temporary center of Free Libya.

This is apparently an all purpose room for coordinating protest, information, medical help, and so forth. The twitters and youtube clips collected by Al Jazeera’s professional journalists and amateurs by far surpasses what I’ve seen and read in any other venue. Three cheers for a free press.

Tangential topic: Andrew Sullivan has been hammering my guy Malcolm Gladwell for saying that the Internet wouldn’t be big deal in social movements. Yes, a big fail. But let me defend Gladwell on a more subtle point. He is correct in noting that Twitter and Facebook constitute weak ties. He’s also correct in that certain types of action probably wouln’t be facilitated by social networking sites, aside from connecting people who already know each other well.

But there’s Tipping Point Gladwell, who I think is better here. It’s true that Facebook didn’t generate many great strong ties leading to action, but it provided a low cost way for people to get past the tipping point. You don’t need strong ties to show up at a protest in a repressive regime. You just need to know enough like minded people will show up at the same time.

So, the most provocative presentation (easily) at this year’s UTAH-BYU Winter Strategy Conference was given by Mike Ryall (University of Toronto).  Mike argued that “verbal theorizing” has problems, serious problems.  He reiterated the Ryall Challenge (originally issued at last year’s AOM session on the Strategy Research Initiative, SRI), for any scholar to submit a natural language paper that meets the following criteria:

1. Unambiguous – meaning does not vary from scholar to scholar.
2. Rigorously derived – conclusions logically consistent with premises.
3. Measurable – empirically refutable.
4. Plausible – consistent with researcher’s priors.

OK, so, it’s hard to disagree with the need for increased clarity, fine.  Yes, jargon can be a problem.

But, ambiguity and grand theorizing also leave room for additional work – thankfully so.  And jargon in fact can be a very efficient way to communicate.  In short, I think the Ryall Challenge is sort of meaningless, it seems to unfairly use the criteria of formal modeling to assess natural language theorizing.  Of course both types of work have their purposes.  When pushed, Mike does not seem to deny this either (see his last slide).

In fact, I think we might live in the best of all possible worlds (which is always the alternative hypothesis) – we have people who do more “ambiguous,” natural language-type theorizing, others model, others do empirical work of various sort, mixed-methods, etc.  These approaches complement each other.  And the good stuff floats to the top, gets attention, cited, etc.  Put differently, the market — over time — sorts the wheat from the chaff.

Now, it gets more interesting.  Ezra submitted a paper to try to meet the Ryall Challenge, his RSO paper “Speaking with One Voice: A Stanford School” Approach to Organizational Hierarchy.”

In the presentation, Mike spent quite a bit of time thrashing unpacking the verbal argument in Ezra’s paper.  Mike wrote a paper-length response to Ezra, Ezra is responding and each is posting their respective responses onto their web site.  I told Mike that we’d be thrilled to have him and Ezra guest blog on this issue.

Here are Mike’s slides (the sanitized, public version).

UPDATE – here are some additional resources related to Mike’s presentation.  The SRI Strategy Reader.  A list of the two dozen+ top, mid-career strategy scholars involved in SRI.  Upcoming, joint SRI and Administrative Science Quarterly paper development workshop.

One thing that organizational and economic sociology could use more of is experimental methods. While sociologists are not completely averse to experiments (see its prominent use in exchange theory), the method seems to occupy a small niche. Some sociologists express a real distaste for experiments. Our love of context and history seems to bias us against experiments, which emphasize internal validity over external validity and random assignment over sampling from real populations.

My sense though is that a number of theoretical areas could be more fully developed by using experiments. The real value of experiments comes from being able to more precisely identify theoretical mechanisms, especially at the cognitive level. (If you have any doubt of the utility of experiments, check out Correll’s, Benard’s and Paik’s beautiful study of the motherhood penalty.) Given the calls to explore the micro/cognitive foundations of social theories, experiments could be very useful. Here are just a few conceptual areas that could benefit from experiments.

• Networks and relationship formation – what cognitive dynamics explain homophily? How does framing affect relationships (see, for example, this paper in Psych Science). What sorts of social cues trigger relationship formation? What is the role of emotion in choosing friends?
• Institutions and cultural persistence – Zucker (1977) broke ground in this area but since then experimental methods have been scantly used. What cognitive dynamics explain habituation? What role does social influence play in the transfer of cultural preferences? What situational dynamics lead to rule conformity?
• Collective action frames – why are some frames more resonant than others? How important is shared identity to frame resonance?
• Categories and legitimacy – to what extent does categorical contrast lead to perceptions about legitimacy? How different does something have to be from others in a category before individuals perceive a fit problem? What is the relationship between categorical fit and valuation?
• Status and power – why are individuals so biased by status? How sensitive are individuals to status differences? What are the cognitive dimensions of status deference?

What else would you add to the list?

Leslie Lamport, author of LaTeX, amongst many other things, provides a guide to How To Present A Talk. It was written in 1979, but modulo a couple of changes its advice applies equally well today. For instance:

WHAT TO SAY
1. Describe simple examples rather than general results. Try to make the examples much too simple — you will not succeed.

2. Don’t use formalism. If your results cannot be described simply and informally, then there is no reason why anyone should be interested in them.

3. It is better to be inaccurate than incomprehensible. The place for accuracy is in the paper. (However, false advertising is unethical.)

HOW TO SAY IT
1. Don’t put too much on a slide — a picture of a thousand words is worthless. …

3. A rapid sequence of slides has a hypnotic effect. Unless you are a licensed hypnotist, don’t use more than one slide per minute.

- Time your talk. Running over your allotted time is a mark of incompetence, and displaying your incompetence is a poor way to get someone to read your paper. Remember that talking to an audience takes longer than talking to a mirror.

He also provides the best, most direct advice ever given to people responsible for chairing a talk:

Be utterly ruthless about enforcing time limits. Warn the speaker when he has 10 minutes left and when he has 5 minutes left, and stop him in midsentence when his time is up. The audience will be grateful. (A loud alarm clock works quite well if you don’t turn it off until the speaker has finished talking.)

I can think of worse uses of my ASA dues than the purchase of large manual alarm clocks whose employment at conference sessions is mandated on threat of expulsion from the organization.

An article, linked by SF Gate, from California Watch. The Chancellor of UC Berkeley makes an obvious comment:

As it gets more funding from the federal government, and less from Sacramento, UC Berkeley is effectively morphing from a state university into a federal university, according to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.

In an interview yesterday, Birgeneau said the transformation will “require us to think through what our role is both in the state and nationally.”

He first made the compelling case for applying the “federal” label to California’s most famous public university at a conference organized by the Travers Program in Ethics and Accountability [PDF] on the Berkeley campus earlier this month.

This reflects a trend that all higher ed researchers know about. State support for public universities has decreased, with many schools receiving 20% or less from their states. A school like Berkeley, with big science and engineering, has a new strategy available. They can substitute grants and tuition and federalize, or globalize, their income streams.

Bottom line: It’s only a matter of time when the lead public schools transform themselves from state supported educational institution to globalized research entities. The only question is whether state government will care and if there’s anything they can, or should, do about it.

Al Jazeera English blog has updates. First, protesters seem to be taking more and more areas and the regime is crumbling. For example, a minister resigned and has met with tribes, who are likely planning something more drastic. Second, Gaddafi apparently phoned in a speech that was broadcast on television. From the blog:

Gaddafi’s speech, broadcast on state television, was a phone-in affair, in which he said that like Queen Elizabeth II, he was only a symbolic leader of Libya. Gaddafi also blamed the unrest on al-Qaeda arming drugged teenagers.

He said that married people with families and good jobs weren’t participating in the protests, saying that no one over the age of 20 was involved and that  ”people with any brains won’t take part in these protests”.

He also said that “It’s obvious now that this issue has been lead by al-Qaeda …get control of your children, keep them at home”.

MSNBC reported that Gaddafi claimed that Al Qaeda had drugged Nescafe. Since the speech was literally phoned in, the media is wondering exactly where he is. He might have fled the country or left Tripoli. The attacks are simply brutal repression, but they also might be stalling tactic. A shot at staying in power, but also buying time to move funds and other goodies out of the country.

Update: Gaddafi’s complete bizarre speech.

Every discipline has gaps. Here’s what sociology needs more of:

1. People who study China and India. It’s improved with respect to China. The world’s largest nation is no longer considered an esoteric specialty. But few research programs have faculty who can train you in the sociology of India, which has, like, a billion people. I’m glad I know of Shehza’s work. We need more.
2. Formal models for the average sociologist. So far, math soc is a sequestered specialty. Good people for sure, but I really think we need a style of math soc which is about formalizing mainstream sociology and communicating the results back to the public. We also need more theorem proving as well.
3. Mixed method research. This is a bit self-interested, but I do honestly believe it. Sociology is in the unique position of having issues that need quantitative and qualitative solutions. We should develop a research style synthesizing these two approaches.
4. Cross-discipline imperialism. Our tenured faculty should try to publish relevant work in competitive out-discipline journals. We got the goods. Let’s do more of it

What do you think the discipline needs to do?

Last week, Syed Ali wrote in response to my post about the poor state of teaching:

your basic premise is flimsy, so the rest of the article falls apart. i don’t believe you can say we are bad at teaching (or good for that matter) because we don’t now have particularly good tools of evaluation. i wasn’t around back in the day (in the game only 10 yrs), but am guessing tools of evaluation for teaching weren’t better back then.

Well, it turns out that there is actually really good evidence that students don’t learn much in colleges. A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa provides good evidence that students aren’t getting as much from the process as we’d like to believe. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Unsurprisingly, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, reveals that at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated “no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years.” And that’s just the beginning of the bad news.

Their study is based on follow ups of students that tested them in certain skills.

A few responses here. First, there’s a massive selection effect. A lot of people don’t have the academic skills or maturity to really do well in college. Better teaching wouldn’t make a difference for many students. Second, college teaching is not an evidence based practice. We often throw material out there with little sense of how to best communicate it. I knew very few professors who build courses in responses to rigorous studies of student learning. We’re fumbling in the dark and it’s not surprising that students aren’t getting much. Overall, we should stop denying the fact that colleges don’t do a great teaching job and start figuring out what actually works.

An interesting article on the relationship between Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and the London School of Economics.  Gaddafi wrote his Ph.D. thesis there on “how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions.”  Later, the LSE “accepted £1.5m from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, an organisation headed by Saif – some of which was to finance “a virtual democracy centre.’” The selfsame Gaddafi, of course, has threatened civil war and to “fight to the last minute, until the last bullet” if the rabble-rousers don’t stop their rabble-rousing. (Human Rights Watch has confirmed 233 dead as of Monday, though other estimates are more than double that figure). Knowledge may be power, but power can always buy knowledge or at least its patina.

American news suggests that people are really going to fight this one, MSNBC claims that people inLibya feel that this is their only chance. Here are some photos from the Al Jazeera live blog:

Some used google to create this map of where the Libyan army/air force has attacked protesters.

Self-explanatory.

Brayden’s post resonated with me. There is something rotten in the state of entrepreneurship studies. Brayden thinks that the field has a serious definitional problem. Of course, he’s not the first to raise this issue. It’s one of the first things you notice when you start reading in the area.

His post has prompted me to articulate an even more radical position that I’ve been mulling over for a while. I don’t claim originality, I’m sure someone else must’ve said it. So here it goes:

There is no such thing as an entrepreneur. That is, there is no cogently defined group of people whose actions can easily and clearly be defined as “entreprenuerial” because there is no collection of behaviors that can be grouped together as all being “entrepreneurial.” Many of the behaviors that might considered “entrepreneurial” are logically independent of each other and their link to innovation, firm creation, risk bearing, or profit taking are highly context dependent.

There are two claims here. First, if you look at all the people that might intuitively be called “entreprenuers,” you’ll just get too much variation. The craziest example I can think of is from one of Kirzner’s texts, when he claims that anyone who exploits an opportunity is in some sense “entreprenuerial.” Just too broad. Another bizarre example is defining entreprenuers by personality traits (e.g. risk seekers). That’s like defining the class of athletes by height!

Second, I claim that if you define entrepreneurs by a set of actions, then you run into more problems. That list of actions is itself vague, context dependent, and the behaviors don’t logically have  much to do with each other. Example: one famous paper (Garthner 1981) argues that firm creation is a useful framework. One can stick with that, but you can quickly see some problems. Some are purely definitional: for example, if firms split, does that count? What about franchises? New firms appearing from mergers? Shell corporations? For-profits emerging from non-profit forms? Are these really all “entreprenuerial?”

That’s small potatoes compared to a bigger problem. Firm creation involves such a wide range of economic activities that it seems hard to get a grasp on it all. Do the local taco truck, Facebook, and a new auto manufacturer deserve to be together? The article sticks with firm creation because new firms are often innovative, but who says new firms are innovative? Some are, some aren’t. And innovation itself is hard to define. Facebook was highly innovative in some ways (GUI), but not others (the social network concept). This is an example of how the traits that supposedly define entrepreneurship are hard to bundle to together.

I think a lot of this comes from a romantic idea about the heroic profit seeker. The Austrian approach to entreprenuership certainly has this tinge to it. But this also applies, in a more moderate form, to other entrepreneurship researchers. These endless debates over definitions by generations of scholars indicates to me that there is a pointless search for a special class of individuals who are responsible for economic growth. You might call them “Schumpeter’s men.” And entreprenuership studies is defined by this secret army of economic geniuses.

That leads me Schumpter’s fallacy: the false belief that economic growth and the development of markets is driven by one particular profile of person or one particular organizational form. My alternative is this: markets are complex ecosystems of people, ideas, markets, rules, and organizations. Markets probably do have trajectories, or patterns of growth, that require different types of people over time. But even  in the early stages, you’ll need a heterogenous group of people and skill sets. And the degree to which need a particular type of person varies by the product sold or the institutional environment.

What should come after the end of entreprenuership studies? I’d like to think of it as “market formation research.” Instead of focusing on these mysterious, undefinable entreprenuers, why not simply say that markets requires certain things, like firms and products, in particular combinations? Then management researchers would use their various tools to discover what kinds of people are needed for activity X, which could be starting firms of a certain types or inventing a new product? No need to collapse all these people and actions into one concept. You avoid the need to ever define entreprenuers and each discipline can focus on its own version of market formation studies. Economists could study, for example, the pay-off to starting a firm, while sociologists could study how firm starters use their networks and psychologists could study tolerance for risk.

I think the field is already well in this direction. There are tons of empirical studies on various aspects of “entrepreneuship.” All that researchers need to do is simply drop the entreprenuer concept and switch to a more ecological framework. Then you can start the much more productive process of figuring out which traits, skills, and people fit together in the economic process.

A new paper in ASR by Neal Caren, Raj Goshal, and Vanessa Ribas tests the social movement society thesis – the idea that protest has become institutionalized so that it is now a mundane political practice. One of the main findings of this study is that the social movement society thesis, which has become accepted in the literature despite much supporting evidence, doesn’t seem to square with people’s stated behaviors.

In their essay outlining the social movement society thesis, Meyer and Tarrow (1998b) ask, ‘‘Has something fundamental changed in the politics in contemporary industrial democracies?’’ We answer that in terms of the overall level of protest participation and in the types of people who demonstrate, there has been no fundamental change. We find only a slight trend toward greater participation in demonstrations during the past 35 years, and that cohorts born after the Baby Boomers are much less likely than their parents to have participated in a protest, although we note a small resurgence among individuals born in the 1980s. Combined with the lack of social  and demographic diffusions, this suggests that the United States may have a social movement generation, but it is not a social movement society (pg. 146-47).

One implication of this finding is that social costs still exist for participating in protests. Protests are still more nonconventional than other forms of civic participation, like petition gathering and voting. People who protest probably incur some penalties for doing so, even if it’s only a mild sort of tut-tutting. This isn’t really bad news for protestors. The leverage of protests comes in part from their disruptive and subversive nature. If people were to see protests as just another form of petition, they wouldn’t have the same media attention-grabbing effect they currently do (case in point: the fight over collective bargaining in Madison). It’s partly a result of the social costs that participants incur that make protests useful signals of constituents’ underlying discontent and disapproval of their targets’ actions.

According to MSNBC, there are reports of people taking over military bases. Al Jazaeera is also carrying this. Anyone have information about whether Gaddafi himself is threatened by this revolution in progress?

UPDATE: The NY Times has reported that Libya’s UN staff has defected. At a press conference, they called Gaddafi “a genocidal war criminal responsible for mass shootings of demonstrators protesting against his four decades in power.”

From left to right: Nathan Dollar, Bob Childs, Michell Lueck, Matt Parker, Casey Davidson, Laura Davidson, Fabio, Amanda Shigihara, Colleen Hackett. Photographer: Lara Ridenour.

Two years ago, Laura Ridenour snapped this wonderful photo as she helped me field surveys at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. After explaining how to do the survey to our team members, I said something like, “Ok, let’s see where the protesters are.” As we began to walk, Laura just ran out and snapped one photo of our group. She put it in her flickr account and I then reposted to orgtheory. Two years later, the staff at Contexts wanted a sociological photo with movement in it, remembered the post, and asked Laura if they could reprint her snapshot. Once again, thanks to everyone who did a great job collecting surveys and thank you to Laura for taking the photo.  To the folks who’ve been asking: yes, that’s the notorious fanny pack.

Many forms of education run on a simple principle: if you get good applicants and train them in a straightforward fashion, you will get good results. In higher education, you start with freshmen. Then you flatten them (Econ 101) or mash them (Organic Chemistry). Add literature requirements or a foreign language. If you want a light taste, add a Phys Ed requirement, study abroad, or art appreciation.

That brings me to my theory of price-quality correlation in higher education. Everything I described is really simple to do and uses very common ingredients, even if it is a bit time intensive. It can also be made in large batches, so it should be cheap to make. And it is cheap in places where people actually care about decent training. That’s where you get the killer small college with excellent course modules for $150 a credit-hour. Saint Paul Collegein Minnesota has cheap, but good, courses in this range. Hesston, a Mennonite place, has decent low cost fare. Mayland CC is our best example.

So how can you charge $30,000 or $40,000 bucks per year for full service that’s nothing other than slow-cooked students with gowns? I don’t know, but I suspect the $8,000 course at the local private school with a John Harvard statue is charging for “atmosphere.” They are also doing a lot of extra prep — weird Red faculty, drowning stuff in melted Zizek, etc. Thus, the typical private school in this range is bad.

Oddly, education gets a whole lot better once you hit the $80,000-$100,000 range. Why? Well, because frankly it’s in my interest to claim it does. But at this point, you hit a price point indicating much higher quality ingredients. I mean students. For example, you might get a place with an actual French intellectual, who speaks French and everything. Or you might get a building that’s really as old as it looks. The knock-off faux gothic place isn’t going to be chasing students in this price range because they know they can’t fake it.

Many cuisines run on a simple principle: if you get good ingredients and prepare them in a straight forward fashion, you will get good results. In Mexican cuisine, you start with fresh corn. Then you flatten it (tortilla) or mash it (tamale). Add slow cooked meat or roast vegetables. If you want a light taste, add cilantro, onions, lemon or lime.

That brings me to my theory of price-quality correlation in Mexican food. Everything I described is really simple to do and uses very common ingredients, even if it is a bit time intensive. It can also be made in large batches, so it should be cheap to make. And it is cheap in places where people actually care about decent Mexican food. That’s were you get the killer taco truck with excellent chivo tacos for $1.50 a pop. Olive Market in Bloomington has cheap, but good, tacos in this range. Feast, a preppy place, has decent low cost tamales. Darko Taco is our best truck.

So how can you charge $10 or $15 bucks for something that’s nothing other than slow cooked meat with a wrap? I don’t know, but I suspect the $10 enchiladas plate at the local Mexican place with a sombrero statue is charging for “atmosphere.” They are also doing a lot of extra prep – weird red suaces, drowning stuff in melted cheese, etc. Thus, the typical Mexican plate in this range is bad.

Oddly, Mexican food gets a whole lot better once you hit the $15-$20 range. Why? At this point, you hit a price point indicating much higher quality ingredients. For example, you might get a plate with oysters and octopus. Or you might get a grilled steak. They also maintain a good range of real Mexican plates. The knock-off faux Mexican place isn’t going to be chasing customers in this price range because they know they can’t fake it. My favorite is Guiterrez Drive-In in Salinas, California.

I’m in Gainesville, Florida attending a retreat for law and entrepreneurship scholars.* I am not an entrepreneurship scholar myself, but my work, which is related to collective action processes underlying radical organizational and legislative change, is of interest to entrepreneurship scholars. This is the second entrepreneurship workshop I’ve attended. I was struck that at both workshops the participants spent a lot of time discussing the question, what is entrepreneurship? What makes entrepreneurship a distinct concept? Just as was the case at the last workshop I attended, there is very little consensus about the definition. Not only was there no consensus, but there are stark differences in their definitions.

Why is entrepreneurship so hard to define?**  The discussions about this concept seem to be more than just your typical academic fretting over definitional issues; entrepreneurship seems genuinely difficult to nail down as a thing. One reason for this may be that entrepreneurship, as an area of study, brings together people who are actually interested in completely different, but related, phenomena. Entrepreneurship underlies new business start-ups, small businesses and self-employment, founding and failure rates, innovation and creativity, and new market emergence. People who are interested in any one of these topics find their way to the realm of entrepreneurship scholarship. (Someone who gets invited to enough of these conferences may start wondering if he actually is an entrepreneurship scholar.) But what motivates their interest in the topic is very different. And because there is no overarching theoretical framework, it’s easy to get lost in what is going on here.

I think the reason that entrepreneurship is such a slippery concept is because most scholars who study it are really interested in the manifestations of entrepreneurship and less in the thing that makes entrepreneurs really distinct -  identity. Some people self-identify as entrepreneurs, which motivates them to be innovative, found new businesses, or do other things that bring about change. However, the outcomes of being an entrepreneur vary quite a bit and so if you merely study the outcomes, you’re really just studying the manifestation of entrepreneurship (and not all of the people involved in the outcomes even see themselves as entrepreneurs).

That said, does it really matter how we define a field of research as long as we can agree on operationalization issues? As long as we can agree that the new venture start-up rate is a good measure of something related to entrepreneurship, then it shouldn’t matter at all what entrepreneurship is really about.

*If you’re interested, here are the slides to my presentation.

**Of course, entrepreneurship scholars have nowhere near the definitional problems that institutional scholars have, which is why the term “institutional entrepreneurship” is perhaps the most imprecise concept we have in organizational theory.

Here’s a puzzle: Why are American college degrees so valuable if the teaching is bad and the grades so inflated? My answer: we, the colleges, are good at evaluating people though we’re horrible at teaching. Little effort to see if we transmit the information, but we can tell if you got it.

You may think that’s a loony answer because of grade inflation, but there are still many non-trivial forms of evaluation in universities:

• Where you went to college. That’s essentially a “grade” reflecting your high school GPA and standardized tests plus personal ambition and family resources.
• College major choice. People sort according to interest, but they also sort according to ability as well.
• Completion - many people drop out of higher education. Completing college is a huge signal for most of the population.
• Admission to graduate education, we don’t take everyone.

In other words, mean grades have increased, but learning is indicated by things other than report card grades. These differences are generated by our own judgments as professors that are conveyed through grades and other mechanisms.

The model I have is that higher education sorts people into bins – colleges, majors, graduate programs. Within each of these bins, grades are compressed. Life is often, but not always, relatively easy within the bin. Do the work and you’ll likely pass. But moving into a better bin is actually hard and usually requires some non-trivial demonstration of ability. This may be simply relative performance (showing you were in the top X% GPA of your class) or absolute (a minimum raw GRE). It may even be interactional, such as the ability  to persuade a star professor to write you a letter of recommendation.

Thus, you get a more accurate “grade” by using relative performance, standardized tests, and elite endorsement. Despite our laziness in keeping the overall GPA under control, college professors, as a group, do manage to send out a lot of important information about students. Tell me the student’s major, GPA, and colleges, and I can give you a good sense of how they stack up.

Dear orgheads: Josh McCabe will be hosting me at SUNY Albany tommorrow at noon. We’re doing a brown bag lunch on the topic of publishing in grad school. But here’s the cool part – I’ll be Skypeing the discussion. So if you want to hear this topic, stop by Josh McCabe’s office at the SUNY Albany soc dept, or stop by my office at Indiana. Thursday, Feb 17 @ noon: 761 Ballantine or the room with the projector at Albany soc.

Robert Trivers at Rutgers lectures (two weeks ago) on mathematical approaches to evolutionary social theory.

Here’s part 2, and part 3.

I met with an undergraduate student who is exploring the possibility of launching a journal for undergraduates to publish their work (in management/orgs-related areas: OB, strategy, accounting, finance, marketing).   I have to say, I am a bit skeptical about this as there are dozens of journals, in every discipline, that an undergraduate could (of course) also publish in.  For example, there are well over 100+ management journals (of varying quality) and presumably these journals are eager to get more submissions and publish work, no matter who sends it in.

But while I am skeptical, I do see the potential value that student editors and authors might get from an undergraduate journal.  And, some disciplines indeed seem to have undergraduate-specific journals like this (though, I don’t have any figures to back that up).

Anyways, the student is eager to get any feedback.  Post any comments, thoughts that you might have.

In terms of a model — I guess the The Ross School of Business, University of Michigan has an undergraduate business journal like this: The Michigan Journal of Business.  And, here’s a longer list of undergraduate research journals.

I just finished up a volume chapter on the topic of movements and higher education. It’ll come out later this year in a volume edited by Michigan’s Mike Bastedo called “Organizing Higher Education,” published by Johns Hopkins. The purpose is to summarize and collect contemporary research on the organizational aspects of post-secondary schooling.

I wrote a section about unanswered questions.  They are pretty simple, but I don’t believe anyone has done the research to test them in any systematic fashion:

1. The mirror hypothesis: student movements are only as succesful as the larger movements that inspired them. In other words, movements around universities will only be successful if a similar movement has opened things up before hand.
2. The decoupling hypothesis: Movements in universities are so distinctive that they have no positive or negative correlation with the success of movements in the broader society.
3. The follow the leader: Student movements are in a unique position to make things happen. They are the vanguard and often trigger other movements.

You might sum up the issue as sequencing: do student/academic movements follow, lead or none of the above.? What’s your view?

Here’s a novel paper by Peter Sheridan Dodd et al  – Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and twitter.

Abstract

Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators, such as gross domestic product. Here, we use a real-time, remote-sensing, non-invasive, text-based approach—a kind of hedonometer—to uncover collective dynamical patterns of happiness levels expressed by over 50 million users in the online, global social network Twitter. With a data set comprising nearly 2.8 billion expressions involving more than 28 billion words, we explore temporal variations in happiness, as well as information levels, over time scales of hours, days, and months. Among many observations, we find a steady global happiness level, evidence of universal weekly and daily patterns of happiness and information, and that happiness and information levels are generally uncorrelated. We also extract and analyse a collection of happiness and information trends based on keywords, showing them to be both sensible and informative, and in effect generating opinion polls without asking questions. Finally, we develop and employ a graphical method that reveals how individual words contribute to changes in average happiness between any two texts.

Rafa Ortiz is an extreme kayaker. That is him kayaking over a 100 foot “Big Banana” waterfall in Mexico. Click here to see this jump in real time. Scroll down for the video.

The received wisdom is that there is an “Atlantic divide” between Europe and North America vis-a-vis organizational research.  Joel Baum, using citation data from three compendia, finds that the “Atlantic divide” is essentially a myth.

Here’s the abstract:

It is customary among contemporary organization theorists to equate North American and European scholarship with objectivist and subjectivist metatheoretical positions (respectively), treat these positions as mutually exclusive alternatives, and debate which is best suited to understanding organizational phenomena. Fueled by this dispute, questions of bias and fears of colonization are readily apparent in academic reviews of three recent “handbooks” of organizations. Caught in the current of these tensions, I was prompted to assess the status of this “Atlantic divide.” To do so, I examined the three recent compendia in terms of the rhetoric academic reviewers employed to characterize them and the geographic locations, preferred journals, and university affiliations of scholars who refer to them. The results are striking. Despite the unanimous typecasting of the volumes as epitomizing either objectivist North American or subjectivist European traditions, the geographic distributions of researchers citing them are indistinguishable. Citations to each compendium are, however, clustered within particular journals and among authors with particular university affiliations—but neither the journals nor universities are neatly North American or European. Current associations of these traditions with North American and European scholarship thus seem driven more by academic rhetoric than authentic continental distinctions. I examine the roots of this rhetorical mapping and explore its implications for the field. I advocate abandonment of the myth of the Atlantic divide and exploitation of perspectives that do not privilege the subjectivist–objectivist dichotomy.

Key Words: organization and management theory; subjectivst versus objectivist perspectives

And paper, forthcoming in Organization Science.

Here’s a previous post highlighting Joel’s work on journal versus article-effects.

This blog has discussed nonviolence in the past and I am a strong advocate. Egypt now stands in history as a demonstration of the importance of nonviolence as a tool for radical social change. Now, the New York Times has run one of the first English language long-form articles on the Egyptian revolution. The NY Times coverage shows that the Egyptian revolution bears the marks of a classic Ghandian campaign combined with the speed of the Internet. Read the article yourself. Here’s my take.

1. The role of the Internet: the Mubarak regime had successfully repressed dissent for decades. But now, blogging became the mode of communication for repressed activists:

By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups. Bad weather turned the strike into a nonevent in most places, but in Malhalla a demonstration by the workers’ families led to a violent police crackdown — the first major labor confrontation in years.

Now we have a good hypothesis about what, exactly, the Internet did for this revolution. Provided a safe social space that was rare in Egypt itself.

2. Training in Ghandian tactics. For over two years, activists discussed and learned about the works of Gene Sharpe, an American scholar who promotes hard core Ghandism. They set up organizations to train people in how to conduct nonviolence:

For their part, Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.

3. Professionals trained in activism and nonviolence:

It was then that they began to rely on advice from Tunisia, Serbia and the Academy of Change, which had sent staff members to Cairo a week before to train the protest organizers. After the police used tear gas to break up the protest that Tuesday, the organizers came back better prepared for their next march on Friday, the 28th, the “Day of Rage.”

This time, they brought lemons, onions and vinegar to sniff for relief from the tear gas, and soda or milk to pour into their eyes. Some had fashioned cardboard or plastic bottles into makeshift armor worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets. They brought spray paint to cover the windshields of police cars, and they were ready to stuff the exhaust pipes and jam the wheels to render them useless. By the early afternoon, a few thousand protesters faced off against well over a thousand heavily armed riot police officers on the four-lane Kasr al-Nile Bridge in perhaps the most pivotal battle of the revolution.

“We pulled out all the tricks of the game — the Pepsi, the onion, the vinegar,” said Mr. Maher, who wore cardboard and plastic bottles under his sweater, a bike helmet on his head and a barrel-top shield on his arm. “The strategy was the people who were injured would go to the back and other people would replace them,” he said. “We just kept rotating.” After more than five hours of battle, they had finally won — and burned down the empty headquarters of the ruling party on their way to occupy Tahrir Square.

4. Nonviolence draws out possible allies. In this case, the Muslim Brotherhood helped in one of the few acts of violence done by protesters. Mubarak sympathizers had begun throwing rock and other objects at protesters:

The protesters — trying to stay true to the lessons they had learned from Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gene Sharp — tried for a time to avoid retaliating. A row of men stood silent as rocks rained down on them. An older man told a younger one to put down his stick.

But by 3:30 p.m., the battle was joined. A rhythmic din of stones on metal rang out as the protesters beat street lamps and fences to rally their troops.

The Muslim Brotherhood, after sitting out the first day, had reversed itself, issuing an order for all able-bodied men to join the occupation of Tahrir Square. They now took the lead. As a secret, illegal organization, the Brotherhood was accustomed to operating in a disciplined hierarchy. The group’s members helped the protesters divide into teams to organize their defense, several organizers said. One team broke the pavement into rocks, while another ferried the rocks to makeshift barricades along their perimeter and the third defended the front.

Later in that day, the military intervened on behalf of the protesters after the sympathizers began shooting. This showed that the military had sided with the protesters, which turned out to be the last straw for the regime because the stance of the military is often the deciding factor in such situations. Mubarak’s resignation was likely a matter of time at that point.

Already, naysayers have derided the Egyptian revolution. They are unhappy that the military has taken command and suspect that Islamists may gain power. But consider this. Nonviolence has a great track record of leaving society better off after radical change. The Arab world’s biggest dictatorship has been felled through primarily non-violent means. Not a single American, or Egyptian, troop died. Few, if any people, died from the “collateral damage” of nonviolence. That is an incredible acheivement and I can’t imgaine a better way to begin forming a society were all can be respected.

I’m reposting this from Scatterplot:

And another question on behalf of someone else. My IRB thinks it is not possible for them to approve to network research using a methodology in which subjects are handed a list of names and asked which people on the list they know. The reason for this, per IRB, is that people have to sign a consent form before their names can be put on any such list. Thus the researchers are being told that everyone has to sign two consent forms, first for the compilation of the list, and second for doing the survey. This IRB regularly says that organizations cannot turn over lists of their employees or members to researchers for the purpose of initiating a request to be in a research project.  Is this a common objection? Does anyone have examples of research with a similar methodology getting approval from other IRBs? Would it make a difference if the list in question is public or semi-public, i.e. a paper neighborhood or school directory that is delivered to everyone in a neighborhood or school, or a web site that lists all of a group’s members? Please cross-post elsewhere if you know of another pool of people who might know the answer. (I’m thinking of orgtheory here, but there may be other groups.)

This seems like an abnormally aggressive position for an IRB. Any suggestions for OW? Has anyone else had a similar experience working with their IRB?

It seems like the real privacy issue is protecting the people on the list from knowing if ego picked him or her as a friend. It’s not as if ego doesn’t already know who works in his or her company. As long as you were able to protect the anonymity of subjects once the data were compiled in a data set, I’m not sure why this is a concern at all.

Intellectual breakthroughs are almost always the product of group deliberation, discussion, and debate. And the greatest breakthroughs may be more likely to come from people on the margins of mainstream intellectual thought – from people who have a clear vantage point to observe the dominant perspectives but who are sufficiently external that they are free to argue against that perspective and think creatively about possible alternatives. It’s a good hypothesis anyway.

The documentary, Arguing the World, beautifully illustrates this point as it tells the story of four intellectual pioneers of the latter half of the Twentieth Century – Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol. The four men belonged to a group of radicals who would debate political philosophy while students at the City College of New York in the late 30s and early 40s.  At the time, students at the college would gather during the lunch hour, and often during class as well, in different alcoves, where they could get to know other people who shared a similar identity and who had similar interests. Conveniently positioned next to Alcove No. 2, where the Communist Party members and sympathizers met, were the Trotskyists in Alcove No. 1. The communists were closer to the radical mainstream at the time (at least among CCNY students), while the Trotskyists consisted of students who believed in some aspects of socialism but who were also disillusioned with Stalinism. If the purpose of Alcove No. 2 was to convince and persuade other students of an ideological point of view, the point of Alcove No. 1 was to question every point of orthodoxy and to debate, debate, debate.

This little corner of the room produced a number of intellectual luminaries, including four of the most important sociologists of the last 50 years: Bell, Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset and Philip Selznick. (Selznick actually recruited Glazer to join the Columbia sociology department after they graduated from CCNY. Bell would spend one year in the graduate program as well.)  It’s hard to imagine any other undergraduate clique that produced a more important group of intellectual thinkers than Alcove No. 1. Howe went on to become the leading theorist of the Old Left socialists. Kristol became “the godfather of the neoconservative movement.” Bell stands out as a writer of big idea books, perhaps one of the last great sociologists of this type. Glazer was equally bold, sometimes spearheading controversial research, always questioning the orthodoxy of liberal ideas. Lipset pioneered modernization theory in political sociology. Selznick, of course, was very influential in shaping the fields of organizational sociology and law and society and did much more public theorizing in the later stages of his career. None of the thinkers were ever conventional in their outlook, which is part of what made them so influential. Especially during their early years, they pushed and shaped the boundaries of social theory rather than working within them. (I think it’s fair to say that Kristol and Howe became more dogmatic as they moved into politics. The sociologists in the group, perhaps because of their commitment to intellectual progress over partisan loyalty, were continually moving on to new projects and ideas and were thus more able to maintain their peripheral positions throughout their careers.)

The movie is a must-see for any social theorist. In addition to telling the story of these four men, it also concisely depicts the intellectual struggles of the Old Left vs. the New Left and the repercussions of the activist Sixties on American universities. The one big fault of the movie, in my mind, was that it didn’t do enough to show how the activist Sixties were, in fact, an intellectual revolution of a very similar kind. While the movie mainly focuses on the stubborn resistance of Howe and Bell to the Tom Haydens of the New Left (who reminded them of the radical utopian thinkers they clamored against in the Thirties), real transformation in thought came, once again, from  activists  and intellectual leaders who were positioned on the margins, feminist theory being the outstanding example.

(Warning: shameless self-promotion). The Guardian just posted a short piece I wrote on accent neutralization in Indian call centers:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/09/india-call-centres-accent-neutralisation

Some of the comments are rather funny. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a scholarly treatment of discussion boards? They’re a bizarre phenomenon…

The Finnish National Library, in cooperation with the Finnish company Microtask, has set up an effort to digitize Finnish culture by tapping into the crowd.  Specifically, digitized archives have problems due to mistakes that occur in the scanning process (when translating an image to text), and the Library has set up a Lemmings/Whac-A-Mole-type game to catch these mistakes.  Angry birds for the thinking person.  Here’s a youtube clip of the game.  More here.  You can play the digitalkoot game here.

This is sort of in the genre of save-the-world-via-gaming, a la Jane McDonigal, blog here.

BONUS:  If contributing to Finnish culture isn’t your thing, then you might take note of DARPA’s effort to crowdsource combat vehicle design.

BONUS 2:  Or, the band R.E.M. is (sorta) doing a crowdsourcing-type thing with their forthcoming album, specifically by letting fans re-mix a song etc.  Here are a bunch of crowdsourced versions of R.E.M.’s forthcoming song ‘It Happened Today.’

Some journalists and a Carnegie Mellon team are experimenting with crowdsourcing the news.   Here’s some intuition on crowdsourcing complex tasks.  Here’s an article with some background.

We’ve talked about the Turing Test before — essentially a test of the ability of machines to demonstrate human-like intelligence.  One specific way to put artificial intelligence to the test is to see if machines are able to fool humans into thinking that they are actually interacting with another human.  The Loebner competition is just such a test.  The 2010 winner of the Loebner Prize was the chatbot Suzette.

Based on my conversation with her, I don’t think machines will be taking over anytime soon.

[Suzette]  Welcome, orgtheory.

orgtheory – hi, how are you?

[Suzette] Doing fine, thanks.

orgtheory – so, what are your thoughts on the current events in egypt?

[Suzette]  Speaking of current events… I’ve never thought about it. I find TV news shows to be utterly stupid. We watch the news on the Comedy channel: The Daily Show.

orgtheory – I’d rather talk about Egypt.

[Suzette]  Which are you more likely to do: walk on the beach or sunbathe?

orgtheory – Come on, I’m trying to ask a question.

[Suzette]  What do you do while you’re away on vacation?

orgtheory – Read.

[Suzette]  Do you read?

orgtheory – OK, my turn/

[Suzette]  Perhaps that leads us to the topic of name some things. What turns you on, creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

orgtheory – Seriously.

[Suzette]  There are 3 kinds of people: those who can count and those who can’t.

orgtheory – I give up.

[Suzette]  Confession is good for the soul, but bad for your career.

OK, maybe Suzette was just having a bad day.  I tried a couple other times, the “conversations” only got worse.  You can chat with Suzette here.

(Of course, yes, I recognize there are many other domains where artificial intelligence fares much better.)

Can the world be divided ad infinitum?  Here’s a paper that wrestles with the matter: Physicalism in an infinitely decomposable world, Erkenntnis (2006) by Barbara Montero.

Abstract

Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all fundamental phenomena are physical, turns out false, for in such a world, there are no fundamental phenomena, and so fundamental phenomena determine nothing. While some take physicalism necessarily to posit a fundamental level, here I present a thesis of physicalism that allows for its truth even in an infinitely decomposable world.

After a couple of weeks during which Joe Biden claims that Mubarak is not a dictator, an NPR commentator says that Arabs have an innate preference for dictatorship, and Tony Blair declares essentially that “We Are All Mubarak,” I found this refreshing.  The main point: no outcome—whether it be the mythic Western-style liberal democracy, the feared Islamic theocracy, or something altogether different—is predestined in Egypt.  Oh, and I think Zizek means to say Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, not Tom and Jerry, around the 20 minute mark.