orgtheory.net

Last week, we had a great discussion about papers that were clear and insightful empirical pieces. “Sweet.” Now, let me ask a related question – what papers have you found to be inspirational? My own is probably the Padgett and Ansell (1993) paper about networks and Florentine politics. I had only begun to study networks and I hadn’t yet seen a paper that really revealed a social structure that was otherwise opaque to me. It made me want to do nitty gritty historical/quant work.

What paper have you found to be especially inspirational?

Jeremy has explained the main statistics apps in terms of the sorts of phone they would be. In that vein, here are the main programmer’s text editors, as they appear as locations in The Lord of the Rings.

A friend writes:

[For a seminar I'm teaching,] I am trying to collect a top 20 list of social science articles—in any subfield—that are particularly good and compelling examples of creative, parsimonious scholarship. A piece of research where the puzzle was set up well and the argument, methods and interpretation are clean and convincing. Please nominate a favorite piece of scholarship.

So, not necessarily the most influential, or most cited, or deepest but—compelling. A sweet piece of work. What’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Essential reading for organizational scholars headed to this year’s ASA?

I’d say this.

OK, while we’re in luminary mode around here, here’s a keynote address that Dick Scott recently gave at a health care conference.  I think orgs scholars will also enjoy the talk.  It definitely has some theoretical punch.

The first ten minutes offer a nice primer — one that will be very familiar to most orgheads — of macro organizational sociology, key concepts and levels of analysis (fields, logics, actors, etc).

Thereafter it gets meta-theoretical.  At 18:52 (through 24:55) Dick outlines a half dozen+ “advantages of a field level conception for multi-level approaches.”  An interesting discussion and a nice defense of field-level approaches.

(I’m admittedly not a “fields” guy — at all — but can certainly still appreciate this.  Dick’s orgs bible/book was what first got me hopelessly fascinated with org theory.  Plus, this is Dick Scott in HD, what more can you want!)

The subsequent discussion focuses on applying the key concepts and fields notion to health care, which obviously has been the context for much of Scott’s work during the last decades.

I was recently asked about research that addresses the issues government agency coordination. What stands out on this topic?

The 2011 Academy of Management conference (in San Antonio) is in a couple weeks.  Miguel Unzueta (UCLA) and Sekou Bermiss (Texas) have put together a helpful Academy of Management parties and receptions twitter account, @AoMParties.  Thanks guys!  Very helpful.  Here’s the google calendar of the events.

I like this clip: some nice background and historical context by John Meyer on the idea of decoupling.  (Note that the video quality is rather poor – gives it a vintage feel: the video and audio are decoupled, the echoes/skipping audio make it a bit surreal).

In advising grad students or colleagues seeking promotion, I have often run into the issue of edited volumes. In general, I don’t dismiss them. In fact, I think edited volumes can be enormously valuable. Org studies has been massively influenced by edited volumes such as the Handbook of Organizations and the Orange Bible (the DiMaggio and Powell neo-institutional theory volume). So, frankly, it would be hypocritical to claim that they are not important scholarly contributions.

However, the hiring and promotion process in sociology and management does not accord much value to edited volume chapters. And I will admit there are good reasons. Edited volumes vary widely in their quality. Some are strongly edited and peer reviewed, while others not so much. Some scholars use edited volumes as dumping grounds for unpublishable low-quality work, while others use edited volumes for work that can’t be published because it’s too far out from the mainstream. Also, many chapters are summaries of existing research or reviews of the literature. Since many people won’t read job applications in detail, they adopt the rule of thumb that edited volume contributions get no credit, even if there’s a significant population of chapter contributions that are better than the modal journal article.

Personally, I tell people “do edited volume chapters for the right reason.” The right reason is that you have a good idea that doesn’t quite fit into the journal system. And you are willing to put effort into making it a good article. For example, I recently wrote a volume chapter summarizing social science research on the rise of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies. I wrote it because there is no current review and I thought the editors would do a great job with the rest of the volume. Good work appearing next to other good work. The wrong reasons are jobs and promotion. If anything, edited volumes detract from “legitimate” academic work.” If you are early career, then too many edited volume contributions can be held against you. A midterm review where you have 2 chapters and 1 article can end badly.

Ultimately, we publish not for promotion, but to advance knowledge. And if we think we have an important message, we should have the courage to publish our work, even if it doesn’t have an immediate reward.

Use the comments as an open thread on edited volume chapters.

Other than financial measures (like ROA) I can’t think of another firm-level variable that is more commonly used in organizational studies than patent activity. Patents are used to track everything from innovation to technological niches to social networks among scientists.  Patents are an all-purpose measure because we think they are tightly linked to creativity and knowledge production, the engine that drives both science and capitalist enterprise. But what if this is increasingly not true? What if patent use is becoming decoupled from creativity?

This is one of the questions posed made by last week’s This American Life, my favorite NPR show and one of the most consistently interesting programs of journalism out there. The show talked about patent trolls – companies or individuals who acquire patents for the primary purpose of suing other actors who might use technology that potentially infringes on that patent.  The show focused on the firm, Intellectual Ventures, and its founder Nathan Myhrvoid. Through a couple of interesting vignettes and sly investigations, they showed how the company uses lawsuits, brought by a number of shell companies, to get large settlements out of technology companies, some of which are struggling enterpreneurial groups.  The show demonstrates how, rather than protect and promote innovation, increasingly patents are being used to stifle innovation by wiping out or financially weakening companies that are actually trying to bring innovation to the marketplace. Meanwhile, patent trolls sit on those patents and do nothing to advance the innovations.

This must have some implications for our current understanding of patents as indicators of creativity and innovation. One of the startling revelations in the program was just how much redundancy there is in the patent system. The number of patents issued that cover the same basic function is often in the thousands, especially in the software industry. Patents may be more indicative of turf wars than they are of real innovation.

Even if you’re not a technology scholar, I highly recommend that you listen to the podcast of the show.

From Information is Beautiful. Larger circles indicate popular supplements. Y-axis indicates clinical evidence of evidence. Higher is better.

After my talk at GMU on Friday, I was lucky enough to have dinner with a fun group of policy folks and economists. The discussion ranged over a lot of great topics, but here’s one question I’d like to share: Are there really any conservative economists?

This question may surprise you because economics is considered the most conservative branch of the social sciences. To get the discussion, let me explain the definitions. First, by “economist,” they clearly meant a professional PhD holding economist. Not the policy wonks you’ll find around DC. Second, by “conservative,” they mean someone who is socially conservative – anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-drug legalization, a Bill Bennett style culture warrior, pro-life, evangelical Christian, etc.

The observation was that economists range from liberal (e.g., Paul Krugman) to libertarian (e.g., Milton Friedman). And this is backed up by survey evidence. On social issues, economists tend to be fairly liberal, even in comparison with other social scientists. They are conservative when it comes to economic policy such as minimum wages and price controls. It was argued that economists are rarely socially conservative, while many are economically conservative.

Do you buy this observation? Can you think of prominent economists who are socially conservative?

In my previous post I raised the puzzle of why US gambling law liberalized so dramatically over the past 30 years.  Here I’d like to highlight an interesting empirical finding about the workforce in a typical Las Vegas casino.  It goes a little something like this.

* If you were to have walked into a Vegas “Strip” casino in the late 1960s or early 1970s, you would have seen that the casino dealers were male and white.

* If you are able to attend this year’s ASA, look at the dealers as you walk from the hotel check-in to your room.  The first thing you’ll see is that dealers are no longer exclusively white.  They are diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender, though be aware that relative to the composition of the local labor market, the dealing workforce in Las Vegas is disproportionately female and asian.

So the question is: how did the Vegas dealing labor force go from white/male to asian/female?  This can be translated into a more general case of how it is that a position in an organization goes from being dominated by “majority” to “minority” group members (in the lingo of Kanter).

Here’s some background info: A) Dealing historically was considered a top status  profession for non-managerial personnel; it still is today, as dealers earn the most money (mainly through tips) of any group in the casino .  B) Contrary to the predictions of “deskilling” theory (which says that as jobs are Taylorized and wages cheapened, men will flee the profession and minority groups will enter the job), dealing remains very “craft-like” and the wages are still the best in the business. C) Even though Vegas is a “union town,” casino owners/managers refuse to let dealers unionize.  Cocktail waitresses, hotel maids, cooks…they’re all union in Vegas.  But not dealers; not a one of them.  D) During the 1960s and 1970s, there was mass mobilization on the part of civil society to “integrate” Nevada’s casino dealers.  Marches were held on the Las Vegas Strip to protest the fact that there were no Black dealers in Las Vegas, to the point that the US Justice Department and EEOC stepped in to negotiate a “consent decree” between the Casinos and the state’s NAACP.

My book dedicated several chapters to this question of how, why and with what consequence Nevada’s labor market was so rapidly transformed.

Happy punting!

The introduction of Google + has generated a lot of discussion generally and in orgtheory.net.  I thought I would provide a technology management perspective to what is going on competitively.  Technology scholars label social media applications platforms (see Tom Eisenman’s work on this), meaning that they provide a technology that mediates interactions within a community.  These interactions may be between different groups – think of the buyers and sellers within eBay –  or within a single group – this is at least how Facebook started.  Platforms consist of both the technology that enables these interactions and the rules of participation.  For example, eBay has certain rules that buyers and sellers must abide by in order to participate.  The combination of the rules/technology both enable and constrain how the platform is used as well as its growth and evolution.  Rules are also what makes these kinds of technology sociologically more interesting.

So we can compare Google + and Facebook in terms of the differences in their technology/rules.  One area that has received a lot of attention is Google + use of circles – a means to create smaller groups which gives you some control over who can read what you post. Now, I am told that Facebook has something similar, but it is far less intuitive and it is less central to the platform.  I believe this feature has significant implications for how Google + will be used and its growth potential.  Why would Google use circles?  One reason is that Facebook has a significantly large network of users already.  This should be a good thing – potential users will value Facebook the more potential friends they have to connect with.  However, the positive aspects of network effects can taper off (something I might add that we not well understood during the Internet bubble).  This is exactly the point of fabiorojas funny post on the video about Facebook hatred.  It is getting big enough such that you are connected to people that you do not really care about and this is getting in the way of connecting to the people you do care about.  The network is becoming congested.  Circles help address this problem by segmenting the friend population into distinct groups.   In a way, circles can be thought of as a small world (Watts).  So, one thing to consider is how the circle feature impacts the growth and the structure of friends network in Google +.  My prediction is that it will be structured much differently than Facebook.  One potentially interesting thing to monitor is the recruitment patterns of getting people to join Google +, will it be different than Facebook?

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Here’s a piece by Yochai Benkler that discusses wikileaks as a Rooseveltian muckraker and the emergence of the ‘networked fourth estate’ — (pdf) A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Souls of the Networked Fourth Estate.

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

Like all sociologists I love me a good puzzle.  This one here I’ve pondered for some time.

* In 1931, casino gambling was legal in one state (NV).

* In 1981, casino gambling was legal in one state (NV) and one city (Atlantic City).

* In 2011, casinos operate in approximately 38 states.

What happened over the past 30 years to so rapidly transform gambling law?  One oft-cited explanation is what I call the liberalization hypothesis.  It basically says that the US public became more tolerant after the 1960s, leading states to loosen long-standing (dating back to the Progressive Era) prohibitions on gambling (such reasoning seems to inform Steven Levitt’s anger over the current crackdown on internet poker).  For a number of reasons I don’t find the “public sentiment” explanation convincing.  For instance, survey data show that public opinion has become slightly more accepting of gambling, but nothing to justify so radical a shift.  A second explanation I call the predatory state hypothesis. This story goes that the various anti-tax movements of the 1970s and 1980s led city and state governments to use casinos (and lottos too) as a “hidden tax.”  There’s obviously something to this, but I think it misses the question of why, if publics are so easily duped and states so often face budget shortfalls, it took so long for states to “discover” this solution!

But what if we approach this as a question of legitimate organizational forms?  As I mentioned in an earlier post, to be able to “sell” gambling was historically a privilege granted to non-profit organizations.  If you wanted to wager money (legally), you went to church bingo night, played cards with friends, or entered a raffle sponsored by a civic group.  That was about it.  Today, the casino industry is dominated by two sorts of organizations.  On one hand, you have a huge casino industry on Native American lands.  This is essentially an extension of the existing “non-profit” frame.  (According to federal legislation, revenues from tribal casinos are earmarked for social services).  Besides Tribes, publicly traded corporations operate most other casinos in the US.  In short, let’s transform the question from a binary—“Why did gambling suddenly go from proscribed to legal?”—to a more nuanced one: Why did governments suddenly change their minds regarding the sorts of organizations that are allowed to sell gambling?   How did Tribes and firms displace churches and charities?

A well known fact about CEO pay is that it has increased in absolute and relative terms.  Provided by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, the chart shows that CEO pay has exploded relative to the earnings of average workers in manufacturing or production.

There’s been a lot of debate about why, but less discussion of what that says about our theories of income. My view is that this is evidence against a straight up Becker/human capital view and evidence for the segmented labor market/political view on income. According to the human capital view, personal income, roughly speaking, is a return on the investment in your skills. So if your skills are in high demand, your income goes up. If that’s true, in a relative view, demand for CEO has gone up astronomically in comparison to the typical worker. It’s easy to see why worker income has not gone up – globalization of the labor market, for example – it’s hard to see why CEO pay went through the roof. Is it really true that CEO skills became extremely scarce? Or that their marginal product shot up, and remained high, over the last few decades? Maybe…

The alternate view is that income is set by politics. The aggregate income generated by an industry may be set by consumer emand, but the way it’s distributed within firms and industries is political. As multiple folks have noted, like Jerry Davis, Neil Fligstien, and Greta Krippner, firms began to rely more and more on finance for income, which is the result not only of financial technology, but also policy. There was a lot more money in firms, but very little way to distribute it down the chain.

I will be visiting the Washington DC area this week. And I will stop by George Mason University and give a talk on a book on social theory that I’ve been working on, called “All of Sociology in Four E-Z Steps: Social Theory After Parsons.” If that’s your bag, here’s the info: Friday, July 22 at the Buchanan House from 10:30-11:45 AM. Open to the public. If you want to hang out Thu-Sat, email me separately and we’ll see if we can make it happen.

Hi org-theory-ers, and thanks for the invite to guest-blog.  As Brayden mentioned, I’m Jeff Sallaz, a sociologist at the U of Arizona.  I’m actually hoping this may prove curative for my current case of reverse culture-shock.  I returned last weekend from a half-year stint as a Fulbright scholar in the Philippines.  My grant was to study how the country has displaced India to become “back office to the world,” that is, the global leader in voice-based BPO services.  But like the call center workers I studied, in my personal life I quickly learned to think of “the internet” as a precious resource.  Given frequent power outages, crowded internet cafes, and home service that made one yearn for dial-up, I had to become strategic about my internet use.  Email mom or peruse ESPN.com?  Respond to my chair or catch up on Kieran’s blog?  Well I’m back now to an embarrassment of bandwidth, and look forward to blogging to my heart’s content.

I have a lot to say about BPO, but I know that Nadeem recently guest-blogged on the subject.  So instead I’ll discuss my research stream on the gambling industry.  (Plus, what better way to get stoked for the inaugural ASAs in Las Vegas, AKA Lost Wages!)  A brief background.  When I was in grad school at Berkeley, I discovered that Erving Goffman had done fieldwork in Nevada casinos.  For various reasons, this work didn’t become as well-known as his asylum studies.  But I used it as a taking-off point from which to do an ethnography of the global casino business.  At various points I  dealt craps in Vegas, designed casino adverts in South Africa, and pit bossed a Tribal casino in California.

What’s my general take?  Well, on one hand, we can view casinos (and other gambling enterprises) as ordinary organizations.  You need capital to start one; you must employ people to run it; you compete with other producers for market share; and so on.  But on the other hand, casinos belong to a special subset of organizations, insofar as they sell a good/service that is considered problematic by significant segments of society.  Gambling exists in what I call a liminal zone—neither completely proscribed nor accepted (cannabis and kidneys are other entities to have recently entered this zone).   Historically in fact, gambling charters were reserved for “non-profit” institutions (the Catholic Church; Harvard; the Seminole Nation, etc); only recently has it become accepted for private parties, let along PTCs, to sell gambling.  Much as Goffman documented how “stigmatized” people go about their everyday lives, I want to know how stigmatized organizations go about theirs.

Here are some of the questions I’ve addressed in my writings, and that I’d like to explore further at org-theory.

The labor of luck.  What is the precise nature of gambling as a commodity?  How is it produced and exchanged in practice?

Labor markets and modernity.  Up until the 1970, you pretty much saw only Italian-American men working in Las Vegas casinos.  At ASA, you’ll see a much more diverse workforce.  How and why did this change?

Market-making.  Since the late 1980s, the gambling business has boomed worldwide.  Why?  Who were the actors involved in this project and what exactly were they up to?

Gambling and governmentality.  Related to the above, how are we to understand the underlying logics by which states regulate gambling?  Is there an organizational story here?

The Gambler.  The field of gambling studies is dominated by a psychological discourse (those who gamble too much are addicts, they need to be analyzed and/or medicated).  How could we do a proper sociology of gambling, and especially heavy gambling.

Martin Ruef’s The Entrepreneurial Group won this year’s Max Weber award as the best book in the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the ASA. (Notably, the books of two former orgtheory guest bloggers, Katherine Chen and Celeste Watkins-Hayes, received honorable mentions.)  Diane Burton also reviewed Ruef’s book in the most recent issue of ASQ. The review, while generally positive about Martin’s conceptualization of entrepreneurship as a product of collective action and group formation, has some pointed criticisms of Martin’s approach.

On the book jacket, Arthur Stinchcombe, a distinguished organizational sociologist, describes this book as a “drop of sanity in an ocean of fraud about entrepreneurship, especially in teaching positions financed by corporations.” In describing what is distinctive about his approach, Ruef makes a similar— although less polemically charged—claim in chapter 2 when he contrasts “business management” studies of  entrepreneurship and “social science” studies of entrepreneurship. According to Ruef, “Scholars in the business field tend to focus on group performance in high-growth and high-capitalization enterprises. This sampling approach may appeal to an audience of practitioners and business school students, but limits the external and internal validity of empirical conclusions” (p. 36). But by dismissing the related work that has been done by others, Ruef risks alienating the largest audience for his work, some of whom have done valuable research on “enterprises” that are not necessarily highgrowth or high capitalization, and others who  have a clear theoretical rationale for studying a non-representative sample.

Throughout the book, Ruef drives home his distinctive perspective. In doing so, he avoids in-depth engagement with the extant literature. Rather than relying on existing scholarship, he invents constructs and  measures and redefines terms to suit his purposes. Readers steeped in the entrepreneurship and management literatures are likely to be surprised by this approach. For example, Ruef describes his theoretical framework as “relational demography” but does not connect it to the extensive literature on this topic. His group-level approach is inconsistent with both the traditional dyadic approach (Tsui and O’Reilly, 1989)  and the emerging multilevel approach (Riordan and Wayne, 2007). While his expositional style highlights his own theoretical creativity and empirical ingenuity, its disconnection from related work may limit its potential to influence the broader community of entrepreneurship scholars. This is unfortunate, because there are many valuable insights and ideas in this book.

Princeton University Press categorizes the subject areas of the book as sociology, economics, and finance. Although the topic of entrepreneurial groups is clearly relevant to each of these fields, this is a sociology  book written by a sociologist for other sociologists.

This is a nice review that is not afraid to speak to the bigger intellectual issues circulating around the book, not unlike a recent review published in ASQ by Martin Ruef.  Having recently finished the book myself, I agree with Diane that The Entrepreneurial Group is quite original. But I would argue that the book is able to push boundaries precisely because it extracts itself from the literature on entrepreneurship. If Ruef had tried to rely on current measures/operationalizations and had spent more time engaging with existing scholarship, the book would have lost some of its freedom of thought and would have been less original, I think. Positioning himself as the outsider frees Ruef from constraining conventions. Rather than reading the book as a (mere) sociological account of entrepreneurship, I would hope entrepreneurship scholars would read it as a unique theoretical perspective with lots of seeds for future research in the entrepreneurship field.

We’d like to welcome a new guest blogger to orgtheory, Jeff Sallaz.  Jeff is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. His work is at the intersection of a number of subfields, including economic and organizational sociology, political sociology, and the sociology of work. Jeff has published in numerous academic journals, and he’s well known for his fascinating book about working in the gambling industry, The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Africa.  I couldn’t think of a better guest blogger as many of us prepare to enter the heart of the gambling world next month for ASA’s annual meeting in Las Vegas. Jeff, it’s great to have you here!

From Happy Place. (HT: @bduckles)

I’m blessed in that my friends and colleagues are talented and hard working folks. Here at Indiana, Steve Bernard won the AoM  award for best paper in organizational behavior. Written with Emilio Castilla, it’s called “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations.” The abstract:

In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the company’s core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.

My friend, Trevon Logan, an economist at Ohio State wrote a very nice paper analyzing sex markets using data scraped from male escort sites. It showed up in ASR and won the ASA award for paper on sexuality. It’s called “Personal Characteristics, Sexual Behaviors, and Male Sex Work: A Quantitative
Approach”.” Abstract:

Male sex workers serve multiple groups (i.e., gay-identified men, heterosexually-identified men, and their own sexual partners), making them a unique source to test theories of gender, masculinity, and sexuality. To date, most scholarship on this topic has been qualitative. I assembled a dataset from the largest online male sex worker website to conduct the first quantitative analysis of male escorts in the United States. I find the geographic distribution of male sex workers is more strongly correlated with the general population than with the gay male population. In addition, I estimate the value of sexual behaviors and personal characteristics in this market to test sociological theories of gender and masculinity. Consistent with hegemonic masculinity, I find that male escorts who advertise masculine behavior charge higher prices for their services, whereas escorts who advertise less masculine behavior charge significantly less, a differential on the order of 17 percent. Results show that race and sexual behavior interactions exert a strong influence on prices charged by male sex workers, confirming aspects of intersectionality theory.

Outstanding!

We’ve often discussed the sources of professors’ political beliefs. I’ve argued multiple times that the evidence points to a story of self-selection. Political scientist Steve Teles wrote me the following note, which he has given me permission to cite:

What about selection due to anticipation of discrimination? That is, I would like to be a social scientist, but I believe that the field has pervasive discrimination, either directly (“we don’t like conservatives”) or indirectly (“we think those topics are not the kinds of things that elite members of our discipline look at”). If that belief came to be common among conservatives, it would be very powerful in leading to the ideological reproduction of a discipline–even if the belief was factually incorrect. I would note that conservatives only deepen that belief by saying there is a lot of discrimination (just as their statements that litigation is out of control lead to overcompliance with regulation by firms–see epp’s excellent making rights real, which you must

Good point.

There are at least three plausible theories of political beliefs in the academy. (a) Discrimination – liberal professors refuse to admit/hire/promote/cooperate with conservatives. (b) Self-selection – people who are conservative do not try to go into academia for financial or personal reasons (e.g., lower pay). Steve raises: (c) Conservatives anticipate discrimination so the self-select.

When I judge these theories, I think they should be able to account for the following facts:

1. Overall, the median professor is liberal.
2. The median professor is liberal even in areas that are a-political, like math or chemistry.
3. Conservatives have done very well in some disciplines, like business, economics, and the law.

(a)-(c) all explain #1. However, they do not equally explain#2 or #3. For example, the standard discrimination hypotheses does not explain #3. The economics profession, for a long time – from the 1930s to the 1970s or so – was strongly dominated by Keynesians. Even today, the median economist is a liberal Democrat. Yet, economics has notable free market proponents who teach at leading schools. Same for law – many of the leading conservative jurists have had teaching positions at top law schools. These empirical observations are strong evidence against the basic discrimination hypothesis. Anticipated discrimination also explains #1, but fails at #2. For example, are we to believe that young math students avoid research mathematics because liberal professors can spot their politics?

To be fair, we should approach this as a decomposition of variance issue. Self-selection, I believe, probably accounts for the lion’s share of the variance. Anticipatory discrimination probably has some explanatory power in some social sciences and humanities. Between self-selection and anticipation, there probably isn’t a whole lot of room left for outright anti-conservative discrimination.

Via Chris Bertram on Twitter comes an Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist by Joan Robinson, and “Zombie Marx“, an essay by Mike Beggs. There is much to argue with that’s of general interest, but they also appeal to be because I’m going to be teaching social theory in the Fall and would like to think of that subject as at least plausibly a live intellectual project as opposed to either amateur-hour antiquarianism or a cram for the worst cocktail party ever. Here is Robinson, writing in 1953:

I was a student at a time when vulgar economics was in a particularly vulgar state. … There was Great Britain with never less than a million workers unemployed, and there was I with my supervisor teaching me that it is logically impossible to have unemployment because of Say’s Law. Now comes Keynes and proves that Say’s Law is nonsense (so did Marx, of course, but my supervisor never drew my attention to Marx’s views on the subject). … The thing I am going to say that will make you too numb or too hot (according to temperament) to understand the rest of my letter is this: I understand Marx far and away better than you do. (I shall give you an interesting historical explanation of why this is so in a minute, if you are not completely frozen stiff or boiling over before you get to that bit.) When I say I understand Marx better than you, I don’t mean to say that I know the text better than you do. If you start throwing quotations at me you will have me baffled in no time. In fact, I refuse to play before you begin. What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouth. … suppose we each want to recall some tricky point in Capital, for instance the schema at the end of Volume II. What do you do? You take down the volume and look it up. What do I do? I take the back of an envelope and work it out.

And here is Beggs:

There are generations of economists who would call themselves Marxists, or admit Marx as a major influence, who have … engaged with other strands of economic thought and folded them into their worldview, have worried little about dropping from their analyses those aspects of Marx’s argument they believed to be wrong or unhelpful, and have felt no need to pepper their writing with appeals to authority in the form of biblical quotations. But in each generation, there are others who have defended an “orthodox” Marxian economics as a separate and superior paradigm, which can only be contaminated by absorbing ideas from elsewhere. … If we are to engage in these ways with modern economics, what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is the two-fold project behind Capital as a critique of political economy: first to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy, and especially their dependence on class relationships; and second, to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal. These two strands of Marx’s thought are as valid as ever. The way to apply them today is … is to deal not only, not even mainly, with economic high theory, but also with the applied economics produced every day in the reports and statements of central banks, Treasuries, the IMF, etc., and ask, what are the implicit class relations here? Why are these the driving issues at this point in history? What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them? The pursuit of a separate system of economics as something wholly other from mainstream economics isolates us from the political and ideological space where these things take place: better, instead, to fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories. A side effect is that we learn to think for ourselves again about how capitalism works, to be able to answer the kinds of question DeLong raised against Harvey, no longer lost without the appropriate quotation.

This is a question for Jenn and Gabriel, but I’d welcome any response. I found this discussion of high art purchasing patterns on the Ed Winkleman blog:

Murat and I had a very interesting conversation with an art dealer in Berlin when we were there. Unlike many Americans, who tend to only buy art once they’ve run out of other things to spend their disposable income on, many middle-class Europeans, he said, will make a point of saving up to purchase a good piece of original artwork for their home. It’s a similar priority to how many middle-class Americans buy a sports car. A status symbol, for sure, but one that usually only gets purchased after life’s necessities are taken care of (a home, the children’s college fund, a solid nest egg, etc.).

Still buying original art is a priority in those middle-class Europeans’ lives. Unlike in the US where buying original art is generally seen as a rich person’s game.

Is this true? I can vouch for the American side. Original art purchasing, for Americans, is done by Wall Street suits who toss six digit figures at unadorned lumps of charcoal pushed by cryptic dealers in Chelsea. But is it really true that there a larger art buying public in Europe? Curious what the empirical evidence says (if any).

In the November 2010 issue of AJS, Harrison White (together with Matt Bothner and Edward Bishop Smith) published a paper called A Model of Robust Positions in Social Networks. The paper works through “a network model that pictures occupants of robust positions as recipients of diversified support from durably located others and portrays occupants of fragile positions as dependents on tenuously situated others”. The paper applies the model to Newcomb’s fraternity data, amongst other cases. White’s first article in AJS is called “Management Conflict and Sociometric Structure“. It applies “a procedure for inferring the structure of interpersonal relations from sociometric choices” to the case of a group of managers at the “Forthright Corporation”, finding that the managers were split into cliques and constantly fighting for autonomy, and that “relations with the president [of the company] are the single most important set of choices in determining the texture of social relations”. It appeared in the September issue of the journal in 1961.

That’s a remarkable span. Naturally, I found myself wondering if this was, as they say, some sort of record. Has anyone else published papers in AJS or ASR fifty years apart or more? The obvious candidate is Robert K. Merton, and indeed his first major paper, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action”, appeared in the first volume of the American Sociological Review in 1936, while his article “The Fallacy of the Latest Word: The Case of ‘Pietism and Science’” came out in AJS in 1984. (As it happens, that paper reaches back to Merton’s beginnings, too, as it is a defense of aspects of his 1935 dissertation on Puritanism and modern Science. It’s written in that barely tolerable style—showily fastidious, self-consciously meticulous—so characteristic of Merton’s prose.) So White edges him by a year on that one—though if you count Social Forces, Merton also publishes “Recent French Sociology” in 1935. Are there other cases of scholars with such long spans, not just in years but in activity in their field’s leading journals?

With the increasing interest in the cognitive structures that underlie organizational and market activity, I think it is important to take a step back and think more carefully about the constructs and how they are used.  A quick glance at the literature reveals a long inventory of cognitive structures used in research – categories, frames, schemas, logics, scripts, recipes, etc …  Currently within organizational theory there is much emphasis on categories and how they constrain and enable market behavior.  While there certainly is good reason why categories should matter, we should ask ourselves if categories are the right unit of analysis.

Let me propose that a more tractable way of thinking about cognition is to treat categories as embedded within a broader network of other categories through a series of relationships – essentially what is called a schema.  Empirically, this means capturing the nouns/phrases as categories and the verbs as relations that connect them.  See Kathleen Carley and colleagues efforts to draw such cognitive maps.  In my own work, with Christopher Bingham, we have applied this technique to analyze how the insurance industry conceptualized the early business computer.  But, what do we gain by looking at the network as opposed to the individual categories?

One reason why considering the conceptual network is important is that cognitive mechanisms, such as analogies, leverage the relational structure and not the category structure.  Gentner and colleagues have characterized analogies as mapping a relational structure between something familiar and the new concept.  Something new is familiar because of the shared relational structure as opposed to sharing the same category. In fact, in our work with the computer, we observe two distinct analogies – one comparing the computer to existing office machinery and the other, to the human brain.   Just focusing on categories would miss this powerful mechanism to expand and develop new categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Random fact: Here’s the list of the top ten web sites that refer people to orgtheory. I’ve removed portals, like Google or Twitter, and self-referrals, people clicking around inside orgtheory:

1. Marginal Revolution
2. Scatter Plot
3. Jeremy Freese
4. Organizations and Markets
5. Crooked Timber
6. Chris Uggen
7. The Sociological Imagination
8. Andrew Sullivan
9. Econ Job Rumors
10. Inside Higher Education

I should remove Crooked Timber, because that’s mainly Kieran. #11 is The Grad Cafe, which links to grad skool rulz. The break down: Sociology (5/10), economists (3/10), general academia (1/10), mass media (1/10). I counted Crooked as sociology because it’s Kieran. Interesting that even though the blog is run by 3 b-school profs and 2 org sociologists and a dude named Omar, the only management related blog is Orgs and Markets. Going down to the top twenty or thirty referrers, you get some more sociology (A Budding Sociologist/Dan Hirschman), economics (Econjeff, Econlog), and political science/theory (Jacob Levy/Monkey Cage).

Love or hate ‘em (and, see the discussion about article effects trumping journal effects), here is a selective smattering of 2010 management, orgs and sociology journal impact factors (2010 reported first, then sorted by 5-year impact factor).

By posting these I’m probably just adding legitimacy to a measure that I just don’t think matters a whole lot – but oh well.

Management Journals

• Academy of Management Review (6.72, 11.66)
• Academy of Management Journal (5.25, 10.8)
• Administrative Science Quarterly (3.68, 7.54)
• Strategic Management Journal (3.58, 6.82)
• Journal of Management (3.75, 6.21)
• Organization Science (3.80, 5.84)
• Academy of Management Annals (5.44, 5.34)
• Research in Organizational Behavior (4.83, 5.17)
• Journal of Management Studies (3.82, 4.68)
• Management Science (2.22, 3.97)
• Organization Studies (2.34, 3.59)
• Strategic Organization (2.73, -)

Sociology Journals

• American Sociological Review (3.69, 5.84)
• American Journal of Sociology (3.36, 5.11)
• Annual Review of Sociology (3.59, 5.03)
• Social Problems (1.62, 2.57)
• Social Forces (1.23, 2.51)
• Social Psychology Quarterly (1.11, 2.51)
• Sociological Methodology (0.88, 2.00)
• Sociological Theory (1.58, 1.84)

ISI also reports a bundle of other stats: article influence scores, eigenfactor score etc.  Obviously, lots of journals missing from the above – but you can easily look up and compare stats yourself at ISI Web of Knowledge (though, you’ll have to have an institutional subscription).

From Digital Music News. Via @KDragonfinger.

With all of the talk and debate about nonprofits, it seems like an opportune time to share a book review I’ve written about Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present by Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie.

Voluntary associations play a vital, although sometimes not very visible, role in American society as engines of innovation in political and civic life. Associations create much of the fabric that weaves social life together, whether through generating social capital by linking people to others in their community or by constructing identities around which people organize and find meaning. Yet, for all their importance, voluntary associations often receive the short end of the stick in organization theory. Perhaps because they are seen as so different from firms as to need their own theories or because organizational scholars increasingly reside in business schools where there is more interest in for-profit organizations, voluntary associations have taken a backseat to firms as the focal unit in organizational theory. A negative side effect of ignoring associations in organizational theory, of course, is that we fail to fully understand the integrative role they play in society, linking the domains of market and state and serving as key nodes in civil society. The editors of this volume, Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie, have gathered a diverse and interdisciplinary set of scholarly voices to provide a rich overview of the organized nature of American voluntarism. The contributors emphasize that voluntary associations have historically been central players in the U.S. business and political worlds, and although the nature of voluntary associations has changed in recent years, their centrality has not waned.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, I’ll address a question about The Order of Things (Toot) and Foucault more generally. How do we evaluate such books? As I noted week, Foucault does not operate in the American sociology way. What Foucault does in many of his texts, including Toot, is a highly philosophical reading of intellectual history. Furthermore, most of the text is Foucault – he’ll drop one snippet from a text and then offer his own lengthy interpretation. Honestly, it’s hard to tell if he’s being selective or faithful. That’s a criticism that’s always being lobbed his way, a fast and loose way of handling primary sources. Unless one had a really, really deep knowledge, of say Renaissance botany, it would be hard to judge the accuracy of his interpretations.

But let’s say that I believe Foucault’s readings. Should I believe the bigger shift? And, should I care? Well, I think the second question is probably the easiest. A core concern in sociology is “culture,” which, roughly, means the ways that we collectively define the world and attach meaning to our actions. Foucault’s claim, that the modern self is emaciated  do to the relationship between the self and the system of signs is important. It’s a fundamental statement about how we constitute ourselves in the structure of meaning that we employ. Clearly important. Toot, if we believe it, also offers a way of understanding the evolution of sciences, which is also an important sociological issue.

Now, do I actually believe it? Well, Foucault’s evidence in Toot (though not in all other texts) is from intellectual elites. It’s an argument about how they way they put their intellectual system together. It’s important, but as presented, I don’t see any reason to immediately jump to a broader conclusion about Western culture, as many Foucauldians might insist. At best, this suggests something about elite Western intellectual traditions, and not all of them. For example, American intellectual culture is notoriously pragamatist and has resisted the slide toward phenomonoloy described by Foucault at the end of Toot. Also, I wonder if Foucault is relying on a canon that was retrospectively created by us, rather than a wide reading of what everyone was doing at the time. I.e., when we rely on Adam Smith as a representative of classical economics, is he really the central figure? What about the mercantilists? How do they fit in to the story of the classical episteme?

Second, Foucault relies on a number of structuralist arguments that have never quite sat well with me. The entire first half of Toot relies on an explanation of how people interpreted signs. Does he assume that the symbolic systems of the classical era have more order or structure than is warranted? As a network oriented person, I tend to believe that semantic systems are more sedimented and ecological than orderly. Also, just because the system of signs in classical and post-classical Western cultures was more decentered, it doesn’t mean that the subject is gone. I think Giddens made a similar point in his book against the post-modernists, people are still able to hash out their subjectivities in a post-modern world.

Overall, I remain intrigued by Foucault’s ability to pinpoint the common threads of Western intellectual culture and it’s instabilities. And the idea of episteme is clearly valuable. My gut sense is that if I immersed myself in textual readings, I’d probably agree that that shift in episteme is real, but I’d probably disagree on the difference.