orgtheory.net

The New York Times recently carried a story that highlights the importance of scientific skepticism, even in the face of strong evidence. The author, Dr. Danielle Ofri, was seeing a patient, Mr. S, who had been diagnosed with HIV years prior while incarcerated. Apparently, not only did the medical test offer a positive diagnosis, but Mr. S’s social experiences were thought to be consistent with many of the risk factors associated with HIV. He was an inmate on Rikers Island, one of the most notorious jails in the country. For a variety of reasons, inmate populations in our nation’s jails and prisons have, on average, higher rates of HIV, hepatitis, TB and other communicable diseases than the rest of the population.  The man was also a former IV drug user, and using unsterilized needles is a leading mode of HIV transmission.  In fact, whenever Mr. S went to visit his doctor, nurses struggled to find healthy veins to draw blood to test his T-cell counts and viral loads, markers of HIV progression in the body. After years of taking HIV medications and doing annual blood work (as the routine blood tests that most HIV-positive individuals have every 3-6 months were deemed impossible given the condition of his veins), a nurse practitioner approached the situation with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism and asked for a new HIV test.

Turns out, Mr. S was never HIV positive.

Rather, the first test was a false positive.  Dr. Ofri wondered, “how the misdiagnosis could have persisted for so long — why we chose to explain his vigorous T-cells by classifying him as a nonprogressor, rather than considering that his initial H.I.V. test might have been incorrect.”

Mr. S likely wasn’t retested after the positive test result, Dr. Ofri hypothesizes, partly because his social experiences confirmed a positive HIV diagnosis. In short, he fit the profile due to his drug and incarceration history.  Years and thousands of dollars in HIV drugs later, it is discovered that he’s not HIV positive after all. The “profile” didn’t fit the man.

False positives are rare in HIV testing, but they do happen. As a result, many of the respondents in my HIV research describe being tested and retested to make sure that the results are accurate.

I guess the moral of the story is…. respect the science, but test and evaluate again. This applies of course to medicine, in which biological markers and social factors are interpreted together by health professionals to offer a diagnosis. But this also applies to social scientists, so that we can catch those unexpected instances in our data when 2+2 does not in fact equal 4.

I really like what companies like kickstarter are doing — they provide a “crowdfunding”-type platform for artists.  Artists and budding entrepreneurs can post project ideas and needs onto the web site and readers can pledge funds to help realize these projects (based on a threshold funding system).  The projects range from hundreds of thousands of dollars to much smaller ones. (Warning: thumbing through the various projects is pretty addicting.)  The wikipedia site for “crowdfunding” lists other such companies (e.g., kiva.org, sponsume, pledgemusic).

As NSF funding for the social sciences appears to be under threat, it would be great to see a crowdfunding model for academic research as well.  There seem to be lots of potential benefits: a new source of funds could be tapped, researchers wouldn’t have to chase funds as funders might find them instead, new populations would be introduced to research, etc, etc.  Lots of benefits, downsides of course too.

Here’s someone who has thought about some of these issues.

From Business Insider, via @bduckles.

Following up on my earlier post about the inability of courts to create social change, I discovered that Frank Dobbin makes a similar argument in his 2009 book, Inventing Equal Opportunity. Dobbin’s general point is that the U.S. state is weak and fragmented, which creates opportunities for professionals and other entrepreneurial actors to design their own institutional responses to legal mandates. His case is based around the development of equal opportunity measures created by networks of personnel experts. The experts were hired by corporations to protect them from violating civil rights laws, but the laws themselves were not clear in specifying how they expected companies to implement non-discrimination programs or even about what discrimination really was. This ambiguity created a space in which personnel professionals could engineer their own equal opportunity programs and define the appearance of discrimination.

Rather than being a strong arm of enforcement that coerced firms into adopting equal opportunity programs, the courts actually picked up cues from the corporations about how civil rights laws should be interpreted.

[O]ur fascination with judicial decisions led to a misreading of the role of the courts. Seeing that may companies have sexual harassment policies and procedures that are in line with Supreme Court guidelines, for instance, many conclude that the Court’s rulings were successful. In fact, human resources experts devised guidelines for corporations, and then the court vetted them. It was corporations that guided the judiciary, no the other way around. Congress and federal bureaucrats also took their cues from employers, approving some innovations and overturning others. For the most part, they went along with what leading employers wee doing, though they rarely ruled that any one innovation, or any concoction, would fully protect employers. This was the case in part because, while the courts were the final arbiter, they did not have the authority to make law (12).

Does this mean that courts are completely lacking influence? No, obviously companies listened to their HR professionals because they didn’t want to be punished for violating the new civil rights laws, and it was this general fear of being punished that spurred the spread of equal opportunity programs. But the court were also not active in promoting a particular interpretation of the law from the beginning. They figured out what the right response to the law was by watching the emerging consensus of best practices among the companies themselves. The courts validated equal opportunity law, rather than prescribing it.

From Scatter:

The analogy in my mind is that Stata is to the iPhone as R is to Android, as far as social science data analysis goes. I guess SAS would be BlackBerry, insofar as it’s dated and propped up by a strong lock-in among government employees. And SPSS is a Nokia phone that has a slick interface for dialing your friends but requires you to push dozens of extra buttons in a non-intuitive sequence if you want to call anyone new.

Any other tips on seizing up available software?

Mark Bevir was kind enough to include me in his recent Encyclopedia of Political Theory, the new massive 3 volume reference. The task was to write an entry for political theorists on the subject of organization theory and behavior. It covers standard topics – Carnegie School, open vs. closed systems, etc. – but does so in a way that, I hope, philosophers and political theorists would find engaging. It’s short.

Pressure seems to be mounting as other disciplines are setting up online “TV stations.”  Philosophy TV (philostv.org) features very engaging discussions between philosophers,  similar in format to bloggingheads.tv (also a favorite).   econstoriestv is a Russ Roberts venture — the site seems to largely be dedicated to the Keynes-Hayek rap videos (perhaps there is a part III to come).  I really like the fact that academic content/discussion is now available in this type of format.  What’s next?  orgtheorytv?

Roger Ebert tweets a post from Tale of Odienary Madness, a film blog. The Tree of Life challenges the ontology of its American viewers too much. A theater now issues a warning letter to viewers:

Read the whole post.

NSF funding for the social sciences is under threat.  Hillary Anger Elfenbein, orgs scholar at WashU, testified before Congress on this matter, but she needs some help (orgheads might have answers to her questions).  Here’s an email that she sent around on the OB listserv (posted with permission).

Dear Colleagues,

As many of you may know, there have been recent suggestions by Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate to eliminate NSF funding of the entire slate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic (“SBE”) sciences—which includes organizational behavior and related disciplinary research in psychology, sociology, and economics.

This is chilling for our field.

I recently testified before Congress on this topic as the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing with the goal to educate members about the value to the US taxpayer of the social and behavioral sciences.  This kind of hearing sets a tone and provides Congressional members with talking points for later discussions of financial appropriations.

(In case anyone is interested, you can see a webcast of the hearing below.  The transcript and written statements will be posted there in about two weeks:
http://science.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-research-and-science-education-hearing-social-bahavioral-and-economic-science
My written and oral statements are online at:
http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/faculty/elfenbeinh/)

The reason for this note is that, after the hearing, I was asked two more questions by the committee chair with a request for responses to be submitted in writing for the record.  In preparing my responses, I have two requests for colleagues. The deadline is July 5th, and realistically it would be possible to incorporate anything received by the end of the week.
A. Any suggestions that you might have for me in answering these questions.
B. Brief notes from anyone interested, which I can append to my written responses (no more than a paragraph, please).  This is a chance for your input to go into the Congressional record.

Okay, so here are their questions, and these are BIG questions:

1. NSF is essentially the only federal agency that historically does not receive earmarks.  It prides itself on the merit-review process which, while not perfect, is currently the best we have.  Given its imperfections and the reality that some less than stellar grants are funded in ALL scientific disciplines, how would you recommend that it be improved?

2. In your testimony, you state that “Agencies like the NSF are in the best position to prioritize federal funding for SBE research…”  Besides highlighting “transformative” research, how else can NSF prioritize research?  Are there other elements that you would suggest focusing on to guide prioritization?

Big picture thoughts and tactical details are equally welcome.

Sincerely,
Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Last week, Jose Antonia Vargas revealed he was an undocumented immigrant. Not surprisingly, many were shocked and, as expected, many called for deportation. This seems harsh to me. Inspired by these comments, I offer a strong argument: deportation is an immoral act because the punishment exceeds the crime. Compared to other criminal punishments, deportation is prima facia a cruel and unusual punishment.

I consider the following cases:

1. The accused is was a minor at the time of immigration: In America, we treat minors with extreme leniency. Youth who steal, do drugs, or commit violence routinely have their records expunged they turn 18. This principle suggests we should be equally lenient with undocumented minors, whose infraction is way less serious than stabbing someone or stealing a car.

Furthermore, in the case of undocumented migration, the responsible person was the parent, not the child.  For individuals who have assimilated into American society as adults, it is absurd to deprive them of their individual freedom and deport them because of a crime that their parents committed when they were children.

2. Undocumented immigration by adults:  Deportation means that you deprive a person of their individual freedom and ship them to a different country. That has serious economic and social costs. It’s hard to put a price on your life in America, but we can certainly estimate lost income.

Let’s say that a migrant worker works in a restaurant. Food service workers in America make about $12,000 a year. The average Mexican makes about $6,000 gross per year. That means if you deport someone to Mexico, they are losing $6,000 per year. Current immigration rules insist that undocumented people who return to the native country have to wait 10 years (!) before applying again. That person is losing $60,000.

Compare the$60,000 deportation penalty to other crimes. Felony assault in California carries a penalty of $10,000. Most forms of sexual assault in California carry with them a maximum $10,000 fine. In other words, the financial penalty for deporting food service workers, not including legal fees, exceeds what we make thugs and rapists pay. If we include lost income for convicts, then the price of an assault equals the price of crossing the borders without paperwork. I wonder what kind of ethical system would accept such an equivalency.

Of course, I underestimated the cost of deportation because my example assumes that an undocumented migrant works in a restaurant. Many migrants are college educated, have businesses, and make much more that $12,000 a year. The lost income associated with deportation and the ten year wait would then easily exceed the 2-4 years of imprisonment for assault in California. An average American makes about $30k, so lost wages are much more than $6,00 a year, especially if they have to give up a successful business or profession. This analysis does not even include the pain of separation from family and friends.

The bottom line is that deportation is a massive financial and social burden that exceeds the penalty we impose on thugs and rapists. That, by itself, shows how cruel the punishment is.

Good stuff: Timur Kuran talks to Douglass North about efficient institutions and political economy.

From Marginal Revolution:

Every now and then I give informal talks on how the economics job market operates.  I tell the listeners that they are like an “unwrapped saltine cracker.”  They are wasting assets, to borrow a phrase from options pricing theory.  If a day goes by and they did not accomplish something important, they decline in value.  For most candidates, holding steady is not a viable strategy.  You need either publications or some stellar letters from credible writers, preferably both.  (At the very top level, publications at the job market stage are less important because it is expected they will come and the recommendations are trusted more.)

Unwrap a saltine cracker, let it sit for months, and then try to eat it.  Will you even try?

I did a similar talk for some graduate students at a good, but not high ranked program, and they asked about what students in their position should do. My new response: read this paragraph – and get back to work!

Shamus, I accept your challenge. We shall race to see who gets banned from China first. The rules:

• Goal: The winner is to be the first website that, according to The Great Firewall of China, cannot be reached from servers in the five areas of Beijing, Shenzen, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, and Yunnan. We’ll use these url’s: “orgtheory.wordpress.com” and “scatter.wordpress.com.” At present, the orgtheory URL is still accessible from all monitoring stations.
• Rules: You can’t directly ask to be banned or have a friend alert the censors. You can’t just rename your site “facebook.com” or otherwise pretend to be an already banned website. The spirit of the game is to be banned for the ideas found on orgtheory and scatterplot.
• Starting time: We start at midnight (EST) on a day that we agree on. We’ll be on the honor code We’ll take the word of  the first blogger or commenter who finds that the site can’t be reached via The Great Firewall website.
• The stakes: If orgtheory wins, Shamus Khan donates $50 to the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. I will make a similar donation to a charity of his (or Scatterplot’s) choice.

You in?

We attracted the Iranian propaganda people yesterday. So today, I have a new project: get orgtheory banned from China. According to the Great Firewall of China, the billion people of China still have access to orgtheory. That suggests that we aren’t edgy enough at this blog. To correct that:

1. Ai Weiwei was unjustly persecuted. Free him and his friends.
2. Falun Gong is nothing to worry about.
3. Indigenous Tibetan culture should be preserved and celebrated.
4. If Taiwan wants to be independent, that’s ok.
5. Maybe the government should have been nicer to the Tiananmen protesters.

Let’s see how long this takes.

As the national unemployment rate continues to hover around 9.1%, I can’t help wondering how individuals are navigating an organization that is now an important part of their lives: their local unemployment office.

The aim of my book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (Univ of Chicago Press 2009), was not solely to talk about welfare caseworkers. Rather, I was interested in using the case of welfare offices to tell a story about a larger set of organizations. Catch-all bureaucracies, I argue in the book, are government agencies called upon to be the societal arms of “help,” broadly defined. In light of ongoing debates about the remedies for high unemployment, these institutions remain central to our understanding of how those who are economically struggling navigate both macro-level economic and political transformations and micro-level conditions and struggles that shape their financial outlooks.

Michael Lipsky (1980) famously defined street-level bureaucracies as institutions in which government workers interact directly with citizens and exercise substantial discretion in their jobs. However, it would be a mistake to lump all street-level bureaucracies together—harboring the inaccurate assumption that they contain similar levels and kinds of social meaning and subsequently face similar organizational dilemmas. What separates catch-all bureaucracies from other street-level bureaucracies—such as Departments of Motor Vehicles, City Halls, or public services in the most affluent communities—is how the manifestations of personal and group struggles with economic deprivation are readily apparent within their borders. As clients wrestle with unemployment’s causes and consequences, they in turn bring a myriad of concerns and situations into these institutions, placing unique demands on the employees who work in them.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times just ran an autobiographical article by Jose Antonio Vargas,  a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, who has admitted he’s an undocumented immigrant. His parents sent him, at age 12, to live with grandparents. He was not aware of his legal status until later. As a working adult, he hoped that he would eventually obtain legal status.

The bottom line is that people who live in an undocumented status live in terror. Why? If you migrate and you are on the wrong side of the law, such as a minor who came with parents, then it’s nearly impossible to become legal.  As a young man, Vargas, for example, was told by lawyers that his best shot was to return to the Philippines and wait for 10 years and he might be able to come back. Vargas lives in a justified state of anxiety and panic.

There is little need for such restrictive policy that ruins lives. The United States has had extremely liberal immigration rules until the 1920s. The nation made of Russian, German, Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrants turned out just fine. As long as people are not criminals or have contagious disease, we should be open to letting them in. History shows that most immigrants want to assimilate, speak English, get jobs and pay taxes. Denying this obvious fact permits us to indulge cruel fantasies and harsher policies.

A BGS* drew my attention to Felicia Day, actress and star of “The Guild,” a web based comedy about a bunch of online gamers. It’s good, even regular folks would enjoy the humor. I mentioned to my spouse that this definitely makes Felicia Day, who writes and produces the show, the Queen of Nerds. Then my spouse said, “Oh really, a bigger nerd than Danica McKellar?” And I was like, “Yes! Well, maybe… I dunno…. geez… let me think about this…”

Turns out that McKellar and Day are both crazy nerdy. The only way to settle this was to have a rigorous nerd-off, where one compares each contender on a range of nerdly qualities. So let’s start: Read the rest of this entry »

The Wal-Mart case, which has occupied so much discussion on orgtheory of late, is disappointing to many sociologists and organizational scholars because it suggests that courts  cannot take a stand against gender discrimination when discrimination is implicit and covert.  Sure, it would be easy for courts to decide to rule against a defendant that explicitly discriminated against a certain class of people with a formal policy, but Scalia et al.’s decision puts a high bar on the qualifications necessary to identify class discrimination. It’s no wonder that gender scholars, in particular, would be upset by this ruling. In this day and age, the most diffuse forms of discrimination are subtle and implicit. If covert discrimination is going to be overcome, we need courts that are willing to recognize these more subtle forms of influence. But should we have really been surprised by this outcome? Setting aside the political orientation of the current Court, I think that this decision is more or less in line with the history of the Court’s decision-making.

Courts are rarely, if ever, engines of social change. After reading this post by Yglesias, I was reminded of a really interesting book I read back in my grad school days that makes a case for why courts are not usually instigators of social reform. Gerald Rosenberg‘s The Hollow Hope argues that courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, have constraints placed on them that keep them from promoting social reform, and that we should only expect the Court to take a more change-oriented approach when certain conditions are met. The constraints are:.

• Courts are bounded by constitutional rights that prevent that from hearing many reform-oriented cases.
• The judicial branch is not sufficiently independent from other governmental branches to promote reform.
• Courts lack the capacity and the tools to actually implement social reform (and therefore it is pointless for them to pursue a reformist agenda).

Read the rest of this entry »

Say I have rank data over time in an Excel spreadsheet. E.g., the Hoosiers were ranked #1 in basketball in 1977, #6 in 1978 etc. How do I make a figure where the line declines over times? In other words, how do I flip the Y axis so small numbers are the top?

Bloomington area folks:  Tomorrow, I will be giving an hour long talk for the “Mini-University” at Indiana University. The Mini-U is a series of seminars for alumni who wish to learn about cutting edge research from the faculty. My talk is called “Politics in the Streets: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11.” June 23 (Thursday) at 2:30pm in the Persimmon Room at the IMU.

It is often said that war spending can bring an economy out of recession. I call this the Right Wing Keynesian Thesis. I’m usually skeptical. Spending on defense does not satisfy consumer demand, even if it does mean that some more people are employed in the short term.

In 2011, we have a new test of the theory – the post 9/11 security state. We have ten years of astronomical spending on two wars, homeland security and a vastly expanded intelligence apparatus. This spending has occurred as the economy recovered in the early 2000s, boomed in the mid-2000s and then tanked in 2007.

Collectively, we have spent about two trillion on defense and anti-terrorism beyond what was projected in the 1990s. The wars have cost $1.2 T. Homeland Security has cost about $50b a year, so add another $.5T to the total over last ten years. I have no idea about the cost of expanded intelligence, but the CIA alone costs about $27B – back in 1997. I’m sure it’s a bit more now. So let’s be conservative and say that it costs $50b a year since 2001. It’s probably way more.

Basically, the US economy, in the last ten years, has been stimulated to the tune of $2T. That’s about $200B+ a year. In other words, every single year, the US government, though defense, security and intelligence, has added on an extra “stimulus package” about 1/3 the size of the Obama stimulus, which was around $700b.

All this extra money, massive and likely underestimated, seems to have done nothing to tamper the business cycle. Furthermore, there’s a lot of evidence that wages have stagnated. Given that, the Right Wing Keynesians get a failing grade.

By Plectro Trio – the composition is a medley of different themes found in Colombian folk music.

Can someone give me a knowledgeable up date about the Green Revolution in Iran? It’s been 24 months. Since then, it’s been overshadowed by the Arab Spring. Was the movement repressed? Is it in a dormant phase? How did it effect the state?

The Supreme Court has sided with Wal-Mart in the class action case. As regular readers of this blog will be well aware, sociologists have been more than usually involved in the case and the debate surrounding it. The slip opinion, written by Scalia, discusses Bill Bielby’s testimony and dismisses it:

The only evidence of a “general policy of discrimination” respondents produced was the testimony of Dr. William Bielby, their sociological expert. Relying on “social framework” analysis, Bielby testified that Wal-Mart has a “strong corporate culture,” that makes it “‘vulnerable’” to “gender bias.” He could not, however, “determine with any specificity how regularly stereotypes play a meaningful role in employment decisions at Wal-Mart. At his deposition . . . Dr. Bielby conceded that he could not calculate whether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking.” The parties dispute whether Bielby’s testimony even met the standards for the admission of expert testimony under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 702 and our Daubert case … The District Court concluded that Daubert did not apply to expert testimony at the certification stage of class-action proceedings. We doubt that is so, but even if properly considered, Bielby’s testimony does nothing to advance respondents’ case. “[W]hether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking” is the essential question on which respondents’ theory of commonality depends. If Bielby admittedly has no answer to that question, we can safely disregard what he has to say. It is worlds away from “significant proof” that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.” … Respondents have not identified a common mode of exercising discretion that pervades the entire company—aside from their reliance on Dr. Bielby’s social frameworks analysis that we have rejected. In a company of Wal-Mart’s size and geographical scope, it is quite unbelievable that all managers would exercise their discretion in a common way without some common direction. Respondents attempt to make that showing by means of statistical and anecdotal evidence, but their evidence falls well short.

While dismissing the particular body of evidence presented as insufficient to establish the Plaintiff’s central claim, the decision does not make any more general remarks about the relevance of social-scientific evidence. (At least not to my untrained eye. Those with a legal education are welcome to comment.)

The ruling was unanimous with respect to rejecting certification, but Ginsburg wrote a partial dissent (joined by Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) on the question of the scope of the ruling, and did not sign on to the middle section of the decision (where the social science evidence is discussed). She writes, in part,

The plaintiffs’ evidence, including class members’ tales of their own experiences, suggests that gender bias suffused Wal-Mart’s company culture. … the plaintiffs presented an expert’s appraisal to show that the pay and promotions disparities at Wal-Mart “can be explained only by gender discrimination and not by . . . neutral variables.” Using regression analyses, their expert, Richard Drogin, controlled for factors including, inter alia, job performance, length of time with the company, and the store where an employee worked. The results, the District Court found, were sufficient to raise an “inference of discrimination.” … The District Court’s identification of a common question, whether Wal-Mart’s pay and promotions policies gave rise to unlawful discrimination, was hardly infirm. The practice of delegating to supervisors large discretion to make personnel decisions, uncontrolled by formal standards, has long been known to have the potential to produce disparate effects. Managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware. The risk of discrimination is heightened when those managers are predominantly of one sex, and are steeped in a corporate culture that perpetuates gender stereotypes.

In a footnote to that “long been known” sentence, Ginsburg cites Goldin and Rouse’s paper on discrimination in Symphony orchestras (revealed by the comparison of blind with non-blind auditions). The partial dissent does not mention Bielby’s testimony.

I’ll leave it to those more qualified than myself to assess the technical aspects of the ruling (e.g., with respect to Daubert), along with its meaning and likely consequences. It’s worth noting, finally, that even as they dismissed certification for the class, the three women on the court joined the dissent.

The resent issue of Social Science History has a special section devoted to the overlap of economics and history. The issue is that (a) historians have failed to absorb economic thought and (b) economists have dropped the ball on economic history. The articles touch on the following topics:

1. The increasingly mathematical nature of economic research. Colelho and McClure show that signals of math, words like “lemma” and “theorem,” have markedly increased in economics. Only one other discipline, political science, shows a similar upsurge in technical jargon.
2. The persistence of the issues that drove the methodenstreit in the 19th century. Historians wants thick descriptions of specific episodes, while economists seek and apply universal laws.
3. One article, by David Mitch, focuses on the fate of economic history at Chicago. Up until the 1980s or so, there were a number of highly esteemed economic historians who produced a lot of PhD students. But a combination of factors – hires that never quite panned out, shifts about what exactly counted as economic history – precipitated a decline in economic history.

So it seems that the heralded cliometrics revolution never quite took off, or it retreated from history departments and seems content as a not so prestigious economics specialty. The Mitch articles notes that Time on the Cross was not even peer reviewed because Fogel didn’t want people to get in the way of how he did history. To this day,  historians still have a tough time absorbing economics. Sometimes for poor reasons, historians aren’t good at math. Sometime for good reasons, economists (like Fogel) can be notoriously sloppy with historical materials. There are deeper reasons as well. Modern economists often want to dispense will all culture and meaning, making technology and policy the catalysts of history.

A couple of weeks ago I saw Battle for Brooklyn, a new documentary by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley,* at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.  The documentary tells the story of Brooklyn activists who fought against a real estate development planned in the the old Atlantic Yards site that ceased hundreds of homes through eminent domain in order to build a business complex and a new arena for the New Jersey Nets. Told from the perspective Daniel Goldstein, one of the community organizers leading the protests, the film provides a rare and in-depth look at the internal workings of a social movement, chronicling the emotional highs and lows as well as the process of tactical decision-making.  It’s a fascinating film for a number of reasons, and I can’t recommend it enough.

One of the impressive qualities of the film is how vividly it portrays the structural constraints of mobilizing a successful movement. The anti-development movement was extremely well organized and tactically savvy, and yet you never get the sense that they will win this battle.  The first reason was, despite their own considerable resources – the movement was primarily led by middle class residents – the activists faced a formidable countermovement.  Although the film reveals the countermovement was actually funded by Forest City Ratner – the developer of the project – and was therefore effectively an astroturf organization, the countermovement activists were able to successfully frame the project as a form of employment stimulus and to inject race as a divisive issue. (Very few jobs were ever created from the project despite this persuasive framing.)  A political environment of underemployment and economic uncertainty made this frame especially resonant to Brooklyn residents whose homes would not be touched by the project.

The other reason the movement struggled to achieve their goals is because they were up against a united and powerful elite. One thing that we know  from social movement theory is that movements are much more likely to succeed when they face a divided elite. In this case, NYC business and political elites formed a strong front and pushed through the necessary measures to ensure the real estate could be declared “blighted” and eligible for eminent domain.  The film provides as good an illustration of “growth machine” politics that I’ve ever seen. In fact, this may be the main lesson from the movie. As Galinsky remarked in the post-screening Q&A, the core message of the movie isn’t to declare that eminent domain is a bad policy, but rather to show how webs of power – in this case embodied in a multiplex network linking a city’s politicians, business elite, and media – influence, and potentially stunt, the democratic process.

The film is showing right now in NYC. Don’t miss your chance to see it!

*The filmmakers are actually the brother and sister-in-law of my colleague Adam Galinsky, which is how I came to be at the Chicago premiere.

There’s a ton of graduate syllabi that drag students through Wasserman and Faust + a lot of AJS/ASR articles. I am putting together a syllabus for undergrads. I’ll have them do some of the easier stuff in W&F, but I want to supplement with accessible articles. Especially interested in articles at the Contexts level, if it has some real data in it. Or Science/Nature style articles if it’s not too technical. Audience: senior level soc majors, with one or two nerds in the mix.

Did you know that while blacks comprised 10.9 percent of the total labor force in 2006, they constituted one-fourth of the workers determining eligibility for individuals applying for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, unemployment benefits, social security, public housing, and other state assistance (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2007)?

I have written extensively on the increased racial diversity within the employee ranks of street-level bureaucracies. This focus gives us a window into the lives of public workers (a group that has gotten a lot of attention in light of the efforts to reduce their collective bargaining power); and research in this area also encourages us to think about the elements of professional identities.  In the abstracts that follow, I point you to articles written by yours truly that take up the questions, “How are professional identities of workers within organizations informed by their racial, class, and gender identities, and how do these intersecting social and professional identities shape events on the ground?”

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve had a lively spring here at orgtheory thanks in large part to our two guest bloggers, David Meyer and Chris Winship.  We want to thank them for their contributions. You can continue to follow David on his blog, Politics Outdoors, and Chris on the SMRblog. You can find all of David’s posts here and Chris’s posts here.

A few days ago, I tweeted that one should not underestimate Michele Bachmann. My bet is that Romney will be the 2012 GOP nominee. The GOP tends to nominate second time candidates (Reagan, Bush I, McCain, Dole, Nixon ’68). Romney also has a strong track record. He’s a conservative who won in a liberal state and in 2008 he won 11 states with 22% of the GOP primary electorate. He’s got the money and organization so far. It’s his game to lose.

But if I were to pick someone who will beat expectations, it’s Michele Bachmann. Yes, she represents the hard core social conservative fringe. She’ll never, thankfully, be President. But she is the type of person who will surprise people. She’s currently enjoying a bump in the GOP primary polls, taking the place of flash in the pans like Trump or Cain. So why won’t she be another one hit wonder?

My argument is based on biography. Not the touchy “feel good” stories pushed by campaigns, but the accomplishments that indicate how a person operates. Check out her wiki and you’ll see what I mean. First, she is social conservative to the core. Graduate of Oral Roberts and has years of pro-life activism under her belt. Second, she has a stronger grasp on the media than most flame throwers and doesn’t seem to devolve into self-caricaturing Gingrich territory. Third, by all accounts, she treats politics as a serious job and craft. She understands messaging, networking and organization building.

To sum it up, Bachmann has impeccable conservative movement credentials, strong political skills, and campaign discipline. She’s the kind of person who could snag a few early states, like Hucakbee ’08 or Forbes ’96.

American politics has provided some updates on our concerns about the courts and social movements (see: “You can’t count on the courts”).  Be sure that activists will be disappointed–and that they are extremely unlikely to give up.

In Wisconsin, the State Supreme Court overturned the ruling of a lower court judge who struck down the anti-union provisions of the dramatic state budget.  She had ruled that the budget process, which included the flight across state lines of all the Democrats in the State Senate, violated Wisconsin’s open meetings law.  The State Supreme Court divided 4-3 on the question, and the majority included David T. Prosser, Jr., who has only recently survived an unusually contested re-election campaign.  Often uncontested, Prosser’s re-election was the first chance for disgruntled Democrats–and others–to voice their opposition to Governor Scott Walker and the budget bill at the polls.

It won’t be the last. 

Democrats and organized labor have launched recall campaigns for eight Republican state senators–all those eligible for recall.  If they win three, the Democrats will gain control of the body.  Clearly, the recall campaigns will consume both activist attention and a great deal of money from organized labor in Wisconsin–and across the nation.  Expect conservative and Republican money to flow into the state at the same time.  It will be like a mini-economic stimulus plan focused on media and political consultants.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, Federal Judge James Ware upheld Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike down a ballot measure prohibiting same sex marriage in California.  Now retired, Judge Walker has acknowledged a long-term intimate relationship with another man, and supporters of the marriage ban argued that Walker’s sexual orientation compromised his objectivity in the case.

Disappointed by the decision they were, nonetheless, undaunted, and plan to continue appeals which could ultimately end in the Supreme Court of the United States.  Of course, this isn’t all of it; they’ll also be engaged in ongoing battles with advocates of same sex marriage across the states.

I don’t claim to be expert on reading the courts–on the same sex marriage issue, all the experts seem to fixate on Justice Kennedy as decisive.  By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court we’ll be reading dispatches on the movies he watches, his exercise regime, and what he has for breakfast each day.

On same sex marriage, the tides of history are somewhat easier to read, and they favor the advocates of marriage equality.  Although same sex marriage is available in only a few states, public opinion has changed quickly, and continues to move toward acceptance of extending the institution.  Most notably, the polls suggest a deep generational divide, with young people overwhelmingly in support of same sex marriage.

I have a harder time reading the tides on labor in Wisconsin–and across the country.  The mobilization against the budget was dramatic and invigorating for Labor and the left.  But organized labor has just lost similar battles in Indiana and Ohio.  Wisconsin has become a test case for assessing whether new Republican majorities have overstretched their mandate–and if their opponents can take advantage of it.

Much rides on the outcome.  And the answer won’t come from the courts.

A few days ago, we discussed Philip Cohen’s analysis of gender ratios in sociology. The take home message is that women now make up a majority of recent PhDs, but they aren’t as common on elite journal editorial boards. Like a lot of fields, women make up many recruits, but are under represented at other points.

As Kim Weeden noted in the comments, research on doctoral completion shows that funding helps. That is something that can be addressed by chairs and deans who develop financial aid packages. But issues of graduate student funding don’t address professional development past the doctoral degree. So that’s my question: what can be done to make sure that people successfully navigate all parts of the pipeline?

It’s certainly the outgrowth of partisan politics, but this is a welcome development. The House leadership is actually trying to enforce the War Powers Act, which states that Presidents may initiate and manage combat, but that it has to be approved by Congress after 90 days. The White House has complied with the law by notifying Congress of our forces acting in Libya, but there has been no attempt at securing a formal Congressional approval for continued action.

Even though the Qadaffi regime is clearly violent and dangerous, I am against most wars. Even if you disagree with me on that point, at the very least, waging war should be done within the framework of our laws, especially waging an action against a regime that is not a direct threat to the United States. That means that the executive branch should provide a logical justification for this action and seek public approval.

I think the nexus of law and organization is a fascinating area.  While doing some searches in this space, I ran into former guest blogger Jerry Davis’s recent, provocative article on the matter – arguing that the public corporation has reached its twilight:

Um, dudes, can you check your copy of Wasserman and Faust (1994) for me? Yeah, go to the subject index (p. 811) and check the first few entries for the letter “B.” Does your copy have “beast” listed in it? What page number is listed for that topic? Thanks, dudes.

Update: Omar used Holy Water and gloves made from the Shroud of Turin to find this link.