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I’m co-teaching a short and quite eclectic doctoral seminar on “collective action and organization theory” with Henri Schildt here at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki.

The class readings list is rather exploratory.  We’ll only meet four times, so there isn’t room for a whole lot. We picked a set of readings that sounded fun and interesting (some classics as well as recent stuff).  At the risk of public ridicule – here’s a draft of the syllabus.  If you have any thoughts or feedback (additions etc), feel free to leave a comment.

Your co-authors are probably just as busy as you are.  So how do you get co-authors to focus on your joint project?  There’s no manual on this.  It’s probably highly idiosyncratic: depends on the unique working relationship that you have with your co-author.

But what might be generic strategies for “motivating” co-authors? (This presumes that you yourself are motivated.)  Here are some quick strategies that come to mind:

• Corner your co-author.  Erdos famously showed up at co-authors door steps (even at 2am) — incidentally he had LOTS of co-authors (511!) — and exclaimed “my mind is open.”  Try something like that.  More generally, physical proximity (despite the advantages of technology) tends to focus attention — so taking time to work on projects at conferences etc can pay off.
• Pester your co-author.  In the digital era one can usually find co-authors lurking somewhere online. Skype, Facebook and other social media are good “control” devices. 
  
• Bag the project. If your co-author doesn’t seem willing to work on the project, maybe the project is lame.  Bag it — and work on something more interesting.   
• Pretend your co-author doesn’t exist.  Take charge and just work on the project yourself, as if you’re the sole author.  The risk of course is that your co-author doesn’t agree with your arguments/work, but that might be a risk worth taking.  More likely, your co-author will appreciate your work and it will push the project forwards.
• Pre-commit to intermediate deadlines.  Pre-commit yourself to intermediate deadlines and do the same with your co-authors (I’ll finish “x” by next Wed).  Co-authorship itself is sort of like a commitment device (well, among other things), it can keep us focused.
• Pick good co-authors in the first place.  Probably the easiest way to manage co-author relationships is to have good ones in the first place.  “Good” might have a lot to do with compatibility of work styles, similarity of perspectives, etc.

Drop any additional ideas into the comments.

1. Keynes vs. Hayek, round 2.

2. Bangable Dudes in History.

3. Oscar Wilde vs. The Jersey Shore (thanks, Dan).

4. Peer review foul calls.

Olderwoman has written a fascinating post on Scatterplot about the political conflict brewing (or boiling over perhaps) in Madison as the UW-Madison contemplates separating itself from the larger Wisconsin university system.  The move would allow them to raise tuition and would grant the university some autonomy from the state.  Of course, the change is complicated by the current, messy politics of Wisconsin and is made even messier, as OW describes in her post, by the conflicts of interest that faculty have as citizens who typically support more progressive policies while also being stakeholders in a research institution striving to maintain its elite status. Here’s a highlight from her post:

As I have debated this issue with grad students (who are mostly lined up in opposition to the plan), I have been trying to unravel the threads of interest involved. The students tend to emphasize concerns about tuition. Issues of access and affordability are real ones. They are issues now, as state funding continues to decline. All predictions about how this issue would play out under different structures are entirely hypothetical. One group argues that to change from being a public university is to give up forever on the idea of more tax dollar subsidies for tuition. Another group argues that the only way to increase affordability is to raise tuition simultaneously with raising financial aid — effectively to charge a sliding scale that depends on family income; people who advocate this disagree about which structure is most likely to do this. As that is all hypothetical, that particular debate is solely one of opinions.

But the whole tuition debate — one I am sympathetic to as a progressive — cuts entirely differently from the issue of what is good for an elite research university. If my goal is access to high quality education for youth of modest means, wouldn’t I just stop funding an elite research university entirely? Wouldn’t that access goal be better met with an institution staffed by lower-paid faculty teaching three or four courses a semester than by an institution staffed by higher-paid faculty whose major interest and time commitment is to their research/scholarship? The trend at elite schools is toward inequality: higher and higher salaries for the high-performing research faculty, and more and more teaching done by lower paid adjunct faculty.

One core value question is whether you support the idea of an elite research institution or not. Should there be major public research institutions at all? And if so, what does it take to maintain them? Can an elite research university survive with an egalitarian ethos in the face of competition from the unapologetic elitist private institutions?

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By way of Stewart Lee in the Guardian:

Once upon a time, royal marriages were political acts that forged links between different nations. Instead, William and Kate’s wedding will bind this nation to itself, and in marrying so very far beneath himself, I believe the young prince has made a heroic and deliberate sacrifice to achieve this end. … The Fisher King must search the devastated terrain for the Holy Grail, and drink from it to heal the land. Broken Britain is that wasted land. William is that Fisher King. Kate Middleton is that lovely grail, full not of the blood of the crucified Christ, but of the blood of the Middletons, who run a children’s partyware business in Berkshire. And Kate’s wedding to wise William is a ritual that may help to fix what David Cameron’s vision of the Big Society so far has not. For in choosing Kate, a simple girl from a school near Swindon, as his bride, William is in fact taking each and every British subject – man, woman, old, young, black, white, Christian and Muslim – into his royal bed, and binding us all to each other in the white heat of his princely passion. … The prince has taken his lowly bride from within this charged landscape, where our ancestors celebrated the union of man and woman in stone and earth, and began the communal processes that forged a nation from their descendents, the broken nation that William the Fisher King must now heal. Our shaman-prince could not have chosen a better receptacle for his magical purposes than Kate Middleton, a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon-shadowed swamplands.

Question: How are electronic journals treated in hiring and promotion decisions? I refer to peer-reviewed journals that are primarily electronic. Under what conditions are electronic journals taken seriously? My sense is that e-journals have little status except:

• Specialties dominated  by computer based research (e.g., the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation)
• High status presses that heavily promote the e-journal (e.g., the Berkeley Electronic Press titles)

Even then, they usually take second place behind more traditional journals. For example, B.E. Press titles may count a little toward promotion, but they aren’t comparable to the regular flagship or field journals in most disciplines.

Your thoughts? If you have experience in hiring or promotion, please add your comments.

Jonathan R. Cole has a very insightful article on why the 2010 NRC ranking was such a fiasco. He was a member of the committee charged with producing the ranking, but resigned when it became clear that the project would not create valuable data. Key quote:

Any experiment or study designed by a committee whose members are chosen not for their particular expertise but for their disciplinary balance is more likely to fail than one that selects members solely for their expertise in the subject under study. This committee, which was made up of committed and distinguished individuals, had relatively few with significant experience with social-science data and the statistical methods used to create the rankings. That increased the probability of failure.

Sounds right to me. Social scientists will tell you that reputation can be measured, albeit imperfectly. They will also tell you how to design evaluations of reputation data. Cole’s article suggests that the NRC committee was unwilling to engage with that literature or rely on people who specialize in rating and evaluation of educational outcomes. Cole also noted that creating rankings would suggest that some programs do a poor job in graduate training, which made some people want to avoid simpler rankings.

Harold Garfinkel, who brought phenomenology back to the core of social theory, died last week in Los Angeles. His best-known work, Studies in Ethnomethodology, has led a double life. It’s put to work in introductory courses so that people can read about breaching experiments, and maybe do some minor ones themselves while pining for the days before IRBs. Here its contents are often played for laughs, or the general lesson that social life is a funny old thing and simultaneously more rulebound and more fragile than one might expect. On the other hand, the essays are a thoroughgoing and deep critique of the Parsonian approach to theorizing action, and relentlessly problematize the ongoing accomplishment of everyday life.

In the 1980s, the main problematic of social theory was micro- vs macro- and how to reconcile them. A common line of argument was that macro-theory required microfoundations, and these foundations were to be sought in the stable preferences and actions of (perhaps rational) individuals. Garfinkel’s vision of micro and macro was very different. Unlike the perhaps difficult but ultimately comforting search for a well-founded base to build society on, the ethnomethodological approach was more like the discovery of subatomic states and quantum-mechanical phenomena: way up there in the world of big celestial bodies, things looked orderly and stable, and there was some plausible prospect of discovering laws of society. Even a little further down the scale you could see where the structure was, even if it was inevitably messier. Studies in Ethnomethodology, however, zoomed in even closer on the micro-level and found that it wasn’t a level at all, that everything was constantly on the verge of going completely to hell, and that chaos loomed at every turn. Even today, when I read the breaching experiments it’s still striking just how quickly things move from an ordinary, boring interaction to a bunch of confused, upset, and very, very angry people who don’t know what is happening.

It turned out to be difficult to build on the discovery of the foamy, swirling reality that society was supposed to rest its weight on. Beyond some passing remarks I’ve seen in print or heard in person by those who were connected with Garfinkel and his circle, I don’t really know (nor do I much care) why the research program stalled out or became marginalized in the way that it did. Maybe it was the problem faced by a lot of phenomenological work, which finds it hard to reconcile its key insight (based on first-person experience) with a generative research program. Maybe it was a failure to transcend a little cult of personality. Maybe it was opposition from better-positioned competitors. I don’t know. Either way, it seems like a waste. But the core contribution is still there, and Garfinkel represents a vital link between the Husserlian tradition of the early 20th century and contemporary developments in the theory of social fields.

My research on the partisan dynamics of the antiwar movement has caught the attention of John Stossel of Fox Business News. In today’s blog post, Stossel says:

Last week, I argued that some regimes are targeted because they are ideologically or personally provocative. Lots of nations murder their citizens in large numbers, but we only seem to care in some cases. It’s not the only reason nations wage war against evil regimes, but it’s probably a contributing factor in many cases.

My latest evidence: the relative lack of concern over Syria. The Syrian regime is simply evil: decades of murdering citizens; sponsoring terrorism; and now shooting protesters. The Syrian government is also Baathist, which means it is of the same ideological orientation as Saddam Hussein’s former regime. And it is also one of the regional powers responsible for making Lebanon a living hell in the 1980s and 1990s. So you would think that people in the West would be yelling for an invasion or bombing of Syria.

But I haven’t seen any calls for the prevention of genocide in Syria nor is there any sign that Western nations are doing much to help Syrian demonstrators. Today, Christopher Hitchens is calling for the invasion of Libya. So why do we care so much about Libya? Sadly, I think it boils down to the fact that Qadaffi is simply a goofy, if evil, character who thumbs his nose at the West, while Syria does its evil in silence.

Follow up to last week’s question about skin color. Are there any communities where natural dark skin color is prefered to light skin color? If so, can you specifiy under what conditions this occurs?

Aside from being my collaborator on social movement research, Michael Heaney is interested in research methods. He has published a new article on causality in social network analysis in the journal American Politics Research. This paper, co-authored with James Fowler, David Nickerson, John Padgett and Betsy Sinclair, addresses the problems with making causal claims with network data.

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networksto understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

The full paper is here. Recommended.

So, orgtheory.net turns five years old today.  Thanks, all, for contributing (guest blogging, commenting, reading etc)!

Here’s what contributors, friends, commenters and readers had to say about the blog.

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Andrew Sullivan raised a sociological issue today - is deafness an ethnicity? This question is raised by People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry, a book on deaf culture by Harlan Lane, Richard C. Pillard, and Ulf Hedberg.

Sounds like Lane et al are on the right track. There are some real signs that the deaf community is acquiring the features of an ethnic group. One is intermarriage – deaf people nearly always marry other deaf people. The endogamy rate is 90%, which is higher than many ethnic groups. They also have shared communication practices, such as ASL, and there is a strong preference for co-ethnics, as many deaf people prefer to socialize with other deaf people.

There is some evidence against the deafness as ethnicity hypothesis. For example, deafness is not a cultural trait transmitted automatically by families. Many deaf people are born to non-deaf people. Also, it is not clear to me that deaf parents would automatically socialize hearing children into deaf culture. I presume such children would easily learn ASL and other practices, but do they assume deaf as their main ethnic self-identification?

It gets murkier on some other levels. For example, ethnic groups tend to form residential clusters. Socializing with co-ethnics leads to co-residence. Aside from medical facilities and educational institutions, are there deaf neighborhoods? Also, ethnicity can often be a master status that gets wrapped into other issues. For example, there are Black and Korean churches. Are there deaf churches or deaf restaurants?

Perhaps the biggest qualifier is that deaf does not replace other traditional identities. Given a choice, would deaf be the identity be preferred over white identity? Would someone sign “I’m not White, I’m deaf?” I have no idea, but doing an experiment would be a great way to see the boundaries of deaf identity.

Bottom line: It’s fair to say that deaf culture is truly distinct and possesses many traits of an ethnic group such as high endogamy rates and distinct cultural practice. But it’s also true that it’s not always transmitted to offspring and it may not be the case that people replace regular ethnicity (white, black) with deaf in their self-description. Maybe it is a sui generis phenomena that combines features of ethnic and non-ethnic groups.

When I was in grad school, power elite theory seemed antiquated, an explanation founded on paranoid underpinnings. It was an undergrad-ish view of the world. Sure, Domhoff was fun to read in your SOC 101 class, but as an explanation for state behavior it sucked. Skocpol said so. Sociologists weren’t getting jobs selling power elite stories. People on the job market talked about status dynamics, social movements, categories, and other important stuff.

And then the financial crisis happened, and the government bailed out a bunch of firms and through good journalism we learned that a lot of that money directly funded the investment projects of Wall Street executives’ wives. And we learned that Goldman Sachs never rests and never loses. And we figured out that ex-Goldman executives are now basically running our economy (and perhaps the world). And we found out that grass roots movements are covertly being funded by the super wealthy Koch brothers.  It turns out that the power elite has been really busy while sociologists have been off studying other things.

To be fair, not all sociologists stopped engaging with elite theory. The holdout Mark Mizruchi, for example, hasn’t stopped (even though even he thinks that the elite has become fragmented, causing individual firms to pursue  their own business interests more vigorously).  His work and the research of others like him (e.g., Val Burris) makes me feel silly for ever doubting the power of the elite. I encourage you to read Mark’s excellent 2004 article from Theory and Society, “Berle and Means revisited: The governance and power of large U.S. corporations.”  It’s a great scholarly article that will rejuvenate your interest in elite theory while also making the classic work of Berle and Means (written in 1932) seem very contemporary and sexy. Perhaps there will be a resurgence in this area of economic and political sociology in the next few years.

Question for sociologists of race: In many cultures, darker skin is low status. However, tanning makes your skin darker and is often seen as an improvement. Why is tanning the exception to the dark skin/low status rule?

For better or worse, this thing we call orgtheory.net has been around for almost five years.  So, since that mega-anniversary is coming up in two days, we want to hear what you think about the blog. 

Why do you read orgtheory.net?  And, fill in the blank: orgtheory.net is…

Click the link above and answer those two questions.   We’ll reveal the answers in two days.  Whether you hate or love the blog, let us know what you think!

I will be making day trips this month to two art fairs: MDW (Apr 23-34) and Artchicago/Next (Apr 29-May 1). Anyone interested in hanging out in Chicago or making the trip from Indiana please contact me.

Shamus brings my attention to a Slate article written by Sudhir Venkatesh that extols a new book by Elijah Anderson. Fair enough – sounds like important work, but he goes one step further and works in a slam against modern sociology. The title is “What is the Matter with Sociology?”  Shamus cites Venkatesh on the offending passage:

A crippling debate now pits the “quants,” who believe in prediction and a hard-nosed mathematical approach, against a less powerful, motley crew—historians, interviewers, cultural analysts— who must defend the scientific rigor and objectivity of any deviation from the strictly quantitative path. In practice, this means everyone retreats to his or her comfort zone.

Frankly, I am puzzled. The attitudes Venkatesh describes are certainly found among many social scientists, but this is simply not an accurate portrayal of modern sociology. As I’ve argued before, the quantitative-qualitative split is a thing of the past. I myself have actually published articles in multiple genres, such as ethnography, archival work, and survey analysis. A few days ago, I saw Rob Sampson, of the Harvard Soc Dept, gave a talk on a forthcoming book. In one hour, he showed survey data, network analysis, field experiments, first hand accounts, and even photography. William Julius Wilson, perhaps the  most famous urban sociologist in the world, published work that combines surveys and interviews. All over the profession, you see more and more scholars who liberally combine different methods.

Now, there is a kernel of truth. There are *some* faculty who believe that you have to be quantitative or qualitative, but I think these are from an older cohort. And yes, people obviously specialize.  Overall, though, the quant-qual dispute is a red herring. It’s dead. People seem to broadly agree that sociology can absorb multiple methods. Sociology has thankfully moved beyond that issue – and that’s a good thing.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a blog post by Brad DeLong about the future of economics education. While most of the comments to my post were about the content of economics education, what really struck me in DeLong’s original post was how academic majors  reinforced students’ pre-existing political biases, rather than informing or changing them as we like to be a good liberal arts education will do. Right-leaning students leave economics feeling justified that the market will solve every social problem (or if it doesn’t, it’s not a social problem we ought to do anything about). Left-leaning students leave sociology feeling justified in their beliefs that the state ought to do more to resolve social problems. This is a problem of confirmation bias. Our brains are not very good at evaluating evidence that doesn’t conform to our pre-existing beliefs.

New research by legal scholar Dan Kahan shows that political ideology strongly shapes our willingness to believe scientific evidence. It turns out that it’s not just a problem among Republicans. Here’s a summary by Chris Mooney in Mother Jones:

In Kahan’s research (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either “individualists” or “communitarians,” and as either “hierarchical” or “egalitarian” in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: “The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert.” A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert “depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another.” The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that “expert,” in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist’s position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a “trustworthy and knowledgeable expert.” Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist’s expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another study (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)

Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever. In other words, people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario. A hierarchal individualist finds it difficult to believe that the things he prizes (commerce, industry, a man’s freedom to possess a gun to defend his family) (PDF) could lead to outcomes deleterious to society. Whereas egalitarian communitarians tend to think that the free market causes harm, that patriarchal families mess up kids, and that people can’t handle their guns. The study subjects weren’t “anti-science”—not in their own minds, anyway. It’s just that “science” was whatever they wanted it to be.

I suppose another implication of this is that as society becomes more politically polarized, the less influential scientific evidence will be in persuading anyone to change their political positions.

I think this anecdote is amusing:

In the Winter 1986 issue of The Paris Review, before Obreht could write and before Wallace had published his first novel, that American master, E. L. Doctorow, sat down with George Plimpton for the quarterly’s “The Art of Fiction” interview series.  For the first time in the series’ history, the interview was conducted in public at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and Doctorow drew an audience of about 500 according to the Review.

After a brief introduction, Plimpton and Doctorow sat across from one another, and Plimpton, who found Doctorow “retiring,” began. “You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook,” he said.  At this, Doctorow launched into an anecdote about a time when one of his daughters came downstairs before school and asked for an absence note.  “So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again.”  Soon, Doctorow found himself knee-deep in drafts, panicking, while his daughter’s bus driver leaned on the horn outside.  “Writing is immensely difficult,” he told Plimpton at the end of the anecdote, “The short forms especially.”

We should add to our “tips for writers” list that good writers never stop being self-critical.

A few weeks ago, Ezra noted that Chinese universities were at the center of the Cultural Revolution. That drew my attention to an important fact about Chinese universities – they have been at the center of world events. I can count at least three major events that were anchored to a substantial degree in Chinese colleges:

1. Anti-colonial politics: the early 20th century May 4th movement (1915).
2. The Cultural Revolution (1960s).
3. The democracy movement (1989).

I can’t think of any other higher education system that had three major political effects in a period of 70 years.

Why? A few hypotheses:

1. Big: As the biggest country, anything that happens in China’s colleges will have a big impact.
2. High esteem: Chinese higher education is more central and more esteemed than its counterparts in other nations.
3. Ecological: (This is Zhao’s argument) Chinese universities are just set up in ways that make it really easy to get influential movements off the ground.

What are your thoughts?

NPR has run an article on the disappearance of the antiwar movement. A few choice clips:

At least since the stormy 1960s, whenever America has gotten involved in deadly combat on foreign soil, large crowds of peace-promoting citizens have gathered in Washington and other cities to demonstrate against war.

It happened in 2007, when tens of thousands congregated on the National Mall and heard actors Sean Penn, Jane Fonda and Danny Glover speak out against President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. It happened in 1991, when throngs rallied against U.S. involvement in the first Gulf War. And it has happened more than a dozen other times since the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam in 1965.

Now, despite the U.S. military’s concurrent and costly entanglements, the National Mall is quiet and the streets of Washington are pretty much protester-free.

The lack of noise and the apparent nonchalance raises the question: Where have all the protesters gone?

A citation to my own research:

To buttress his assertions, Boaz cites a recently published study of anti-war protesters. The research was conducted by Michael Heaney of the University of Michigan and Fabio Rojas of Indiana University. It concludes that the anti-war movement in America evaporated because Democrats — inspired to protest by their anti-Republican feelings — stopped protesting once the Democratic Party achieved success in Congress in 2006 and then in the White House in 2008.

“As president, Obama has maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan,” Heaney, an assistant professor of organizational studies and political science, said in a news release. “The anti-war movement should have been furious at Obama’s ‘betrayal’ and reinvigorated its protest activity.”

Instead, Heaney continued, “attendance at anti-war rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement have dissipated. The election of Obama appeared to be a demobilizing force on the anti-war movement, even in the face of his pro-war decisions.”

Check it out.

Update: There’s also a Wall Street Journal take on the article as well. Read it here. Keep an eye out for a brief write up in the print edition.

I’ll make a confession. I like television. Not all television, but really good television dramas that use novel-like storytelling (which as far as I can tell is an innovation of the last decade) is compelling in a way that films are not.  You get more character development, more intricate plots, more nuanced morality tales, and better accounts of organizational, social, and institutional life. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should rent one of the series below and see if you have a taste for it.

For you who have seen at least one of these shows, which of these series is the best drama for orgheads? I’ve excluded anything that hasn’t been in production during the last five years (sorry Sopranos). Of course, none of the shows are perfect, but they’re all compelling in their own individual ways. Friday Night Lights is about a small town and the high school football team around which that team revolves, focusing on how relationships bind and enable economic and social mobility. The Wire is a gritty “Dickensian” story about cops, drug dealers and politicians in Baltimore that dramatizes the power of institutions over individuals and the systemic dysfunctions of race, economic inequality and crime in urban society.  Breaking Bad is about a high school math teacher who discovers he is dying of cancer and turns to cooking meth as a way to financially support his family after his death. The show traces Walt’s moral decline as he navigates the seamy underbelly of power, exchange, and control that makes the criminal world function. Mad Men follows the lives of an advertising agency in the 1960s, focusing on the normative constraints of status attainment and impression management in what is (now obviously) a racist and sexist society. Battlestar Galactica is about a group of military officers who manage to escape Earth just before a band of beings of artificial intelligence take over and annihilate the human race. The show follows their search for a new home for human society and depicts the reinvention of society in brutal conditions in which survival is the most immediate goal.

Iván Szelényi in fine form

Yale’s Open Courses projects has some very interesting offerings, including Shelley Kagan’s famous course on Death, and Chris Hayes’ Introduction to the Old Testament. Right now they’re featuring Foundations of Modern Social Theory taught by the terrific Iván Szelényi, seen here in full flow and looking rather like a dapper, more genial and engaging version of a statue to some cold-war communist party leader. The course really does take a “Foundations” approach, starting with Hobbes and spending quite a bit of time on Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Smith—not so common in sociology these days. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim get multiple lectures to themselves, while Mill, Nietzsche, and Freud get air time as well. Great stuff.

From time to time, people ask me if they should submit to journal X. It depends a lot on your career goals, the scope and quality of the paper, and so forth. But I am also sensitive to journal response times. I don’t want the grad student or junior faculty to send a paper to a journal and then wait 18 months for a one sentence rejection letter.

My question to you all – what journals in sociology and management do a particularly good or bad job processing papers? For example, ASR has a well earned reputation as a paper processing machine. What other journals treat authors well?

Please use the comments to praise, or tweak, journals for exceptionally good (or bad) treatment of authors. And don’t complain about rejections. Get over it!

Academia is one step closer to embracing open peer review (hat tip to David Kirsch). The Andrew W. Mellon foundation has given NYU and MediaCommons $50,000 to develop and test an open peer review system for academic journals. We’ve had a lot of debate here about how to improve the review process, which has included some modest and crazy proposals. Open peer review is one potential solution to the problems inherent in the review process – e.g., getting good reviewers, determining the quality of papers, etc. Open peer review would allow authors to post their papers online and anyone could step in and serve as a reviewer, offering public comments and suggestions through multiple iterations of paper revision.  Editors use the feedback posted on the online system and monitor revisions to determine which papers should ultimately make it into their journal.  It uses a crowdsourcing logic to move papers to publication. If  you get more eyes on a paper, the author gets better feedback during the revision process and editors will be better at filtering out lower quality papers.

A couple of journals have already tried open peer review. In 2006 Nature‘s experiment was seen as a failure, but four years later the humanities journal, Shakespeare Quarterly, used it quite successfully, which has prompted the journal to try it again. I like the idea of making peer review more open and competitive. I’m not one of those who thinks the peer review system is currently broken (by and large I’m happy with the quality of articles published in our fields’ top journals), but I think we should be embrace technological opportunities to improve the system. One upside of an open peer review system would be improvement in paper quality, but more importantly I think that open peer review could speed up the peer review process. If you allow more people to quickly gain access to a paper, you wouldn’t have to wait months and months to hear back from the editors’ assigned reviewers. Feedback and revision could occur simultaneously, which is really an ideal model for social science.

There are some serious downsides to consider. Some authors will resist having their work vetted openly.  Public criticism can be hard to take, especially if you’re a junior person seeking tenure. The system might frustrate scholars of all rank and status who don’t want to let the public in to see their half-baked ideas and analysis. In some ways we’re all invested in the illusion that great scholarship just blossoms on its own – we’d rather not let everyone see how the sausage is made, especially when it’s of our own making. There is also the potential for a tragedy of the commons scenario. Currently, the direct incentive to peer review is to maintain one’s good standing with journals we’d like to publish in some day.  If no one is calling on you to review, the system completely relies on professional norms and reviewers’ good will. Open peer review might work well for one or two special issues, but when the novelty wears off and the system is congested with hundreds of submissions, willingness to review might dissipate. Sadly, I also think it’s possible that the system could be overloaded quickly if everyone just starts posting their crap online. Open peer review would require that authors take responsibility in submitting papers selectively.

I think we could overcome these obstacles, but it would requires some innovative solutions (e.g., editors could choose which papers get posted online for review and desk reject the rest). Someone will eventually have to take the risk and volunteer to be the journal to try the model out in our field. Given the risk involved, my guess is that the instigator will have to be one of the well established, high status journals if this is going to have any chance of success. Perhaps a special issue of ASQ or AJS is in order.

Lee Dye of ABC news ran an article on our research showing how Democrats have abandoned the antiwar movement. A few choice clips:

“Democratic departures left the antiwar movement fragmented and empowered radical elements within the movement,” the study says.

That’s a vastly different picture than the one just six years earlier when protesters around the world took part in “The World Says No to War.” Approximately 10 million people were mobilized in hundreds of cities worldwide for that event, described as “the largest internationally coordinated protest in history.”

And:

“The threat to peace from the Obama administration, as perceived by the grassroots constituency of the antiwar movement, must have been very small,” the study concludes. The reduced numbers proved “devastating to the financial base,” leaving antiwar leaders with little choice but to move from the streets to the Internet.

“What’s left in the antiwar movement today is the hardcore,” Heaney said in the interview, “the people who are more or less professional activists. It’s just a small group of people that’s left.”

But the wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now, to a much lesser extent, Libya. So where have all the flowers gone?

As a former antiwar protester himself, Heaney was willing to go well beyond the scientifically-based research that resulted in the study and offer a few personal opinions. Does he feel “betrayed,” to use his study’s own word, by Obama.

“I feel disappointed he has continued some of the Bush policies,” Heaney said, but not betrayed. After thinking about a question for what seemed like a full minute, he said he never really expected Obama to bring a quick end to the wars, which he described as “very intractable.”

Check it out.

The NATO intervention in Libya has made people ask: Why now? Of all the crazy, genocidal tyrants, why bother with Gadaffi? Here’s my answer: some countries are just annoying. They cultivate a particularly aggravating stance in the global community that just invites retaliation. They are the mosquito in the ears of the powerful and they get swatted.

Of course, this is not a complete account of war. Nations fights wars for all kinds of reasons – genuine security threats, national pride, humanitarian missions, or just grabbing more territory. But a nation’s charisma is also an important factor. Some nations keep doing things that rile the public. In Gaddafi’s case, he engaged in terrorism, allied himself with Hugo Chavez, and tried to usurp Western nations as a patron in Africa.

Like I said, this is by no means a complete account of war making. Other theories, I think, account for more. But charisma does pop up from time to time and it should not be ignored. For example, charisma is definitely a factor in the Iraq War. Saddam Hussein’s anti-Western stance and terrorism overseas eroded what support he had from the US in the 1980s. By 1990, conservative  think tanks already had Baathist Iraq in their sights.

Similarly, Iran is frequently targeted. The Iranian regime is clearly evil, but there are all kinds of crazy governments that pose threats.  The reason that some Western policy intellectuals focus on Iran is because the regime engages in nasty public displays anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism.

Bottom line: If you are a murderous dictator, we’re more likely to leave you alone if you just keep your mouth shut.

Over the last year, entrepreneur Peter Thiel has been making headlines by slamming college education. I’m sympathetic. I’ve said in the past that we definitely have too much college education. But I am not sure I agree with Peter Thiel on a number of points.

For example, he focuses a lot on the fact that college education is expensive. He’s making a mistake that many people make. They read the NY Times and think that all kids are aiming for Columbia or NYU. And yes, the elite colleges and leading private schools will give you a $250,000 bill after for year. However, most students do not attend these schools. Most public schools and junior colleges charge way less. For a nice description, see Kieran’s “U Shaped Theory of College Education.” Regular college really isn’t expensive, but there is definitely a luxury market.

Perhaps a more fundamental mistake that Thiel makes is that he calls higher education a bubble. I think this is in error. A bubble is when prices go up because of speculation on a commodity, rather than a genuine change in the supply or demand for the product.* Higher education is not a speculative business in the same way that real estate is. You can’t buy a college degree and then “flip” it in a secondary market.

If it’s not a bubble, what is it then? My view is that education has both a labor market component and a consumption component. The labor market requires a college degree for multiple reasons. Often, it’s a test of IQ and conformity. For some fields, like engineering and accounting, it’s human capital. At the same time, higher education is consumption. Rich smart people want to hang out with other rich smart people. If we want a special job (e.g., political leadership), it helps to hang out with these people. So it’s a non-exchangeable  investment and consumption good.

Let me end with why I think college prices are going up, which motivates Thiel’s claim that higher education is a bubble. Prices are going up in the top of the market because college education is actually under priced. Yes, my claim is that the market price for college education is probably much higher than what we have now.

How much do you think people would pay to have their children live in nice housing, eat prepared food, and hang out with the world’s leading scientists for a year? How much would people pay to be part of an elite? Well, we know the answer – at least $2-$3k per month, the price of a private college. The fact that Ivy League still turns away droves suggests that the real number may actually be higher.

In the end, the solution isn’t to complain about high prices. The solution is to use the cheaper alternative. As long as people keep enrolling, nothing will change.

* Yes, we can argue about “genuine” changes in demand. But the term bubble suggests that prices are driven by speculation rather than consumption. Just work with me, people!

Richard Swedberg and Wendelin Reich have written an engaging Theory, Culture & Society piece capturing Georg Simmel’s many aphorisms.  For Simmel fans, definitely worth reading.

Abstract

This article contains an analysis of Georg Simmel’s aphorisms and an appendix with a number of these in translation. An account is given of the production, publication and reception of the around 300 aphorisms that Simmel produced. His close relationship to Gertrud Kantorowicz is discussed, since she was given the legal right to many of Simmel’s aphorisms when he died and also assigned the task of publishing them by Simmel. The main themes in Simmel’s aphorisms are presented: love, Man, philosophy, Lebensphilosophie and art. Two of Simmel’s aphorisms are also given an extended analysis. It is suggested that the skill of writing a good aphorism, both when it comes to style and content, has much to do with what we call the art of compression. It is also suggested that what ultimately attracted Simmel to the form of aphorism was its capacity to hint at something that is richer than the reality we are currently experiencing.

aphorisms ■ Gertrud Kantorowicz ■ Lebensphilosophie ■ Georg Simmel ■ sociology

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee has a nice article on my recent antiwar movement research, co-authored with Michael Heaney. A choice clip  about our focus on the intersection of movements and parties:

Mass movements and political parties are very different animals, at least in the United States. Sociologists and political scientists usually put them in separate cages, and activists and policy wonks would tend to agree. “Party activists may view movements as marginal and unlikely to achieve their goals,” write H&R. “Movement activists may reject parties as too willing to compromise principles and too focused on power as an end in itself.”

But dichotomizing things so sharply means overlooking a third cohort: what H&R call the “movement-partisans” or, a bit more trenchantly, “the party in the streets.” These are people who identify themselves as belonging to an electoral party but consider mass protest to be as valid as the more routine sorts of political action. They might march on Washington, if strongly enough motivated — but will also make it a point, while there, to visit their Congressional representatives for a quick round of citizen-lobbying.

To movement-partisans, each approach seems a potentially effective way to express their concerns and try to change things. In deciding which one to use at a given moment — or whether to combine them — ideological consistency usually counts less an their ad hoc estimate of the respective costs and benefits.

Check it out.

If you read/speak German, then you can find a wealth of free, classic (and more obscure) sociology-related books online.  Here’s a sample of books that you can download for free from google ebooks:

Heinrich Rickert, 1904.  Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. (Rickert was an influence on Max Weber.)

Gustav Ratzenhofer, 1907.  Soziologie. (OK, I hadn’t heard of him either.  Omar has.  It appears Ratzenhofer was an Austrian General and Sociologist.  Hey, it’s a free book, people.)

Georg Simmel, 1892. Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, (Genau.)

Georg Simmel, 1906.  Kant.  (Simmel’s lectures from the University of Berlin.)

Georg Simmel, 1908. Soziologie: Untersuchungen ueber die Formen der Vergellschaftung. (Classic.)

Ferdinand Tönnies, 1887.  Gemeinshaft und Gesellschaft.

Max Weber. 1921.  Gesammelte Politische Schriften.

From Berkeley economist Brad DeLong:

The problems with the undergraduate curriculum qua curriculum seem to me to be largely problems with the history and context of the discipline–rather, the absence of same. Otherwise, the trot through market equilibrium, market optimality, market failure, and simple macroeconomics seems to work well. I might wish for more behavioral psychology in the market equilibrium part and a much better look at government failure in the market failure part, but those may come. I do think that warning labels should inform right-wing students that economics will encourage their bad intellectual habits just as labels should inform left-wing students that sociology will encourage theirs (emphasis mine)…..

Rethinking, I conclude that there is something subtle wrong with the undergraduate curriculum after all. What is taught in the classroom seems, largely, not bad. But what is retained after college seems to me, at least, to be horrible. What fraction of college-educated Americans have taken Econ 1? And what do they remember from it well enough to use? Tracking little–much less than I would hope or expect.

Reactions?

The hallmark of “Indiana institutionalism” is an emphasis on struggle and conflict. Rather than assume the influence of macro-social processes, the scholars around here tend to focus on social movements, legal challenge, and contention. I’d like to draw your attention to a nice paper by my friend and colleague Tim Hallett. The Myth Incarnate is all about coupling processes in organizations, and brings an brings an important psychological dimension to institutional theory.

His question is simple: What happens to an organization when  somebody tries to make you actually do the mission statement? In institutional lingo, this is “recoupling.” His example is accountability standards in schools. He has a nice ethnographic study of school where a new principle tried to enforce new accountability procedures. The result? People freaked out:

Turmoil is foremost a state of epistemic distress, but it has another social-psychological component. Epistemic distress involves a collapse of meaning, but eventually teachers responded by reconstructing meanings in ways that defined emergent battle lines. When teachers talked to each other and to me about the past, they were not just describing their experience; they were infusing it withmeaning. ‘‘Turmoil’’was their term, and it is not a neutral one. Talk is a basic element in the politics of signification (Benford and Snow 2000; Hall 1972), and teachers’ ‘‘turmoil talk’’ had political aspects (Emerson and Messinger 1977). Teachers had no formal authority to fight recoupling, but they did have the informal symbolic power (Hallett 2003) to shape meanings. Turmoil has a negative connotation, and teachers used their version of events to construct the recoupling negatively.

I liked this study as an example of where macro-political processes hit the ground and institutions create conflict, rather than resolve them. “Must read” for folks interested in institutional work and organizational conflict.