orgtheory.net

It’s my pleasure to announce that Hilary Levey Friedman will be guest blogging with us. Hilary is a sociologist who focuses on childhood, health, and education. In addition to writing academic articles in Childhood and Qualitative Sociology, Hilary is also an accomplished public intellectual whose work appears in the Huffington Post, USA Today, and Education Next. Welcome!

Here’s a recent piece that might interest some orgtheory readers (pdf): Boyer & Petersen, 2011. “The naturalness of (many) social institutions: evolved cognition as their foundation.” Journal of Institutional Economics.

Abstract: Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become ‘natural’, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What are required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.

About two weeks ago, I asked readers to describe their experiences with the journal system. I provided a list of journals and asked people to indicate how long it takes for them to get decisions. You can still vote if you want to.

Here’s what I take away from the exercise. Since people only tended to vote for the top journals, there isn’t enough data to say much about the smaller regional & specialty journals. This only applies to the most visible journals:

• The good news: Many journals seem to be doing a good job. The modal and mean answers for many journals seem to be “0-3 months” or “4-6 months.” We aren’t yet at the biomedical sciences model where most papers are judged in 8 weeks or less, but we definitely aren’t in economics hell, where the editors at top econ journals will routinely hold papers for a year or more.
• The bad news: There is important variation between journals and within journals. The worst offender seems to be Theory and Society. Almost nothing comes back quick.  No one reported getting back anything in 3 months and most take at half a year. The AJS has enormous variance. Some papers come back quick, while others can take a year or more. Also, AJS was singled out by at least two commenters.

I’d also recommend Jenn Lena’s and Omar’s comments. Jenn pointed out that journals depend on editors. True. When I started doing sociology, Social Forces was notorious for keeping articles for a year or more, as was Gender and Society. Now, these journals seem to be doing well, even though a few people reported 1 year + (!) for Social Forces. Omar focused on journal status. Top journals have more resources and competent editors.

I give our journals get a B+ rating: doing good but there’s room for improvement. Here’s what I recommend to editors at slow journals. I speak from experience as the student associate editor at AJS, managing editor of Sociological Methodology, and an author:

• If you haven’t done so, switch to online submission. Online submission sites handle a lot of the nitty gritty and reduce clerical errors.
• Desk rejections: About 10-20% papers are not even competent or simply don’t fit. Get rid of these papers ASAP. If you need to justify the desk rejection, have your associate editors/editorial board write a short note.
• Choose editorial board members wisely. Yes, put a few stars on the mast head for prestige, but most of the editorial board should be chosen for professionalism. Same goes for reviewers – don’t pick famous people. Pick well behaved people.
• Slow papers: If people refuse to review a paper, then simply tell the author that you are having problems getting reviews. Don’t sit on it for months and months and make the author angry. Communication is a good thing. Then give the author an option – we can try again or you can honorably take the paper to a new journal.
• Reasonable reviews: Don’t wait for five reviews. Most papers can reasonably be judged with 2-3 reviews. If the reviews are ambiguous, be the decider. As an editor, you’re the expert. Only solicit extra reviews if it is really, really outside your area of knowledge and the reviews are really split.
• Bug reviewers – a lot!
• The author’s right of retraction: A more radical policy. A journal that can’t produce a judgment in 6 months or so has surrendered its right to an article. The author should be able to take it to another venue and have it be considered as “submitted to only one journal.”

If you use these rules, most of your submissions should be complete in 6 months or less.

Classes started today.  Somehow I still have first-day jitters.  The problem could be that I am overly cognizant of the importance of first impressions, you know, those first two (!) seconds of teaching.  I think the received wisdom is that one should aggressively wave one’s hands around (as modeled by Dwight) and, well, look good.   That finding of course was popularized by Gladwell.  Here’s Ambady’s original JPSP (pdf) piece on “predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of non-verbal behavior and physical attractiveness.”  Here are the cliff notes on the six second teacher evaluation.

And, how much do students remember after the semester?  Research says, not a ton.  So there’s the five minute approach.

A lot of recent studies have shown that the media matters to organizational outcomes, including Mark Kennedy’s research showing that media coverage helps establish nascent market categories by making links between new firms or my own work that demonstrates that the threat of anti-corporate activism is mediated by media coverage.  Firms and activists both need the media on their side as they try to manage public and investor opinion. You can’t get what you want unless people know who you are and what your message is. Effective impression management relies on the media as the main conduit for messages and claims.

Despite the importance of media coverage to activist and organizational outcomes, we still don’t have much research looking at the relationships between the media and those they’re covering. Two new papers address this problem by examining methods of interpersonal influence with journalists.  Anyone interested in media and organizations should read these papers. The first paper, written by Jim Westphal and David Deephouse, appears in a recent issue of Organization Science. They look at how CEOs’ relationships with journalists affect their ability to avoid bad press when disclosing low earnings. CEOs try to control media coverage of earnings in two ways. First, they ingratiate themselves with reporters, encouraging them to put a positive spin on the relatively low earnings. If they don’t get that coverage CEOs limit journalists’ access to future information and interactions with the company. Westphal and Deephouse provide some evidence that these interpersonal influence tactics actually work. Ingratiation makes journalists feel personally indebted to the firm, which predisposes them to report favorably even when earnings are low, and retaliation seems to prevent journalists from engaging in negative coverage in the future.

In a paper published in Social Problems, Sarah Sobieraj looks at activists’ attempts to influence media coverage. She finds that activsts, recognizing their dependence on media coverage, have learned the rules of media coverage as experienced in the corporate world, and like their CEO counterparts, have sought to build positive relationships and “bend over backwards to be media-friendly.” Unfortunately, this strategy doesn’t seem to work for them. The more professional they’ve become in managing media relations, the less successful they are at generating it. The reason for this, Sobieraj argues, is that journalists hold activists accountable to a different set of rules. Rather than responding to professionalism and well-honed messages, journalists respond to activists when they perceive their actions are authentic and spontaneous. Her analysis, then, suggests that political outsiders have to play by a different set of rules than elite insiders, like CEOs or politicians.  Becoming too polished is a detriment to getting covered.

Taken together the studies show that how you get helpful media coverage depends greatly on your social position. Influence tactics will vary in their effectiveness depending on how much power you have and on your position in society.

By now I’ll betcha most of us have seen something along the lines of this, Sociologists in Sin City, whereby some sociologists and quite a few non-sociologists debate the reaction of sociologists during their annual conference to the spectacle and experience that is Las Vegas in general and Caesars Palace in particular.

It’s all too meta for me, but what if the Flamingo is the new Hull House.  Stay tuned.

Check out National Geographic’s documentary on North Korea. Self-explanatory.

You, too, can buy a nice drawing of poli sci wonk/end times historian Francis Fukuyama. Drawing by Michael Mulvihill.

Prompted in part by some conversations at the ASA meetings, in part by Gabriel’s discussion of the Social Structures author-meets-critics session, and in part by some gentle prodding from Cosma Shalizi, here’s a current draft of a paper of mine, The Performativity of Networks, that I’ve been sitting on for rather too long. Here’s the abstract:

The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.

The usual disclaimers about work-in-progress apply.

I’ve got some new material in the pipeline and I’m looking to workshop it. If your campus is a day’s drive or less from Bloomington and you need to fill up your seminar schedule, drop me an email. All I ask that you buy me lunch. Topics: a new social theory manuscript; antiwar movement research; how organizations produce scientific knowledge.

Modern social movement theory has made great strides in the last thirty years or so with studies of individual recruitment, framing, and social movement organization. But we’ve collectively failed in one big way – we don’t have a terribly good ability to predict when movements occur.

For example, scholars have long noted that Skocpolian theories of revolution are in need of serious modification. While adequately describing a few of the biggest cases, many have noted that the “dual pressures” theory didn’t quite fit other cases, a point ceded in Skocpol’s later writings. A lot of revolution studies focuses on the role of key domestic actors and how their defection from the regime can make revolutions succeed. But still, I am not sure that we have a good account of when domestic actors will abandon the regime. For example, did these theories predict any of the Arab Spring revolts?

If you are a specialist in revolution studies, do chime in.

We’ve discussed before Revolutionology, a blog written by Berkeley soc grad student Ryan M. Calder. Since we’re near the end of the Gaddafi regime, it’s worth checking in:

• Remembering Anton Hammerl, journalist
• Would people accept a Gaddafi immunity deal?
• Social solidarity in the midst of revolution.

Good work – and stay safe!

Eric Schwartz  gets Vegas.

Princeton University Press promises more installments. This should be fun.

From Geekologie.

Missed this year’s conference? Well, check out the blow by blow coverage on twitter – hashtag #asa2011.

There’s lots that is nutty about the Quantified Self movement.  But I love it nonetheless. Here’s the blog, Quantified Self.

And, here’s an example of someone who carefully tracked social interactions, for years.

A group at MIT has revealed a new drug that might revolutionize treatment of viral infections. The drug selectively causes infected cells to destroy themselves before the virus spreads, thus shutting down and eliminating viruses. Since it’s a generic strategy – cell suicide is triggered by certain chemicals appearing whenever *any* virus shows up – it might be able to cure anything from AIDS to influenza. Certainly, if it pans out, the biggest thing since antibiotics in the 1940s.

Here’s an orgtheory observation. This humongous finding was reported in PLoS One, the innovate online journal. Why is this a big deal? Well, PLos One is an online, open access journal. Another key difference. From the wiki:

PLoS ONE is built on several conceptually different ideas compared to traditional peer-reviewed scientific publishing in that it does not use the perceived importance of a paper as a criterion for acceptance or rejection. The idea is that, instead, PLoS ONE only verifies whether experiments and data analysis were conducted rigorously, and leaves it to the scientific community to ascertain importance, post publication, through debate and comment.

In other words, what might be one of the first major revolutionary discoveries in medical science was reported in a journal that is online, free, and focuses on technical skill while leaving “relevance” to the reader. They didn’t bother with the major basic science or clinical journals. More evidence that the journal system we now use is a dinosaur.

theyrule.net is an online tool where you can map and visualize board interlocks.  You can look up specific people or simply play around and click to see various interlocks.  Or just use the “auto”-mode and watch.   I don’t know how up-to-date the site is, but it is definitely fun/interesting to play around with.

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Of course, there is a long history of research on board interlocks.

Via Rense – a visualization of couchsurfing friendships.

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Here’s the explanation:

Blue ties represent friendships from outside the organization. Red ties represent friendships formed within the CouchSurfing organization. We have no information about grey ties. The width of tie is proportional with the indicated strength of the friendship: i.e., from “acquaintance” to “best friend.”  The movie was done in SoNiA, a highly-recommended free dynamic network visualization tool.

Open thread on the ASA meetings.

Books we’ve discussed on orgtheory in the last year or so:

• The Entrepreneurial Group by Martin Reuf
• Implications and Distinctions by Martine Syms
• Politics and Partnerships by Elisabeth Clemens and Dough Guthrie
• The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
• Inventing Inequality by Frank Dobbins
• The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform by Celeste Watkins-Hayes
• Capitalizing on Crisis by Greta Krippner
• The War Room by Bryan Malessa
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
• Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan
• The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
• Valuing the Unique by Lucien Karpik
• Open source psychology books
• Envisioning Utopias by Erik Olin Wright
• How Professors Think by Michel Lamont
• Social Structures by John Levi Martin
• Economic Lives by Viviana Zelizer
• Between Movement and Establishment by Milbrey McLaughlin, W. Richard Scott, Sarah Deschenes, Katherine Hopkins, and Anne Newman
• Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences by Kristin Luker
• Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes by Erika Summers Effler

Please list other interesting and noteworthy books in the comments.

It’s a rare book that usefully links Bob Sutton and Jar Jar Binks. Well, that’s what Martine Syms manages to do in “Implications and Distinctions: Format, Content and Context in Contemporary Race Film.” Martine is an artist/curator/generally artsy person in Chicago. I met her at the MDW Fair in April (see my write up here) and she told me she was finishing up a book on Black film. I decided to check it out.

Implications and Distinctions is a short text that falls in the realm of cultural criticism. The theme is how Blackness appears in film as a topic, reference, marker, and audience. It touches on a number of fascinating topics, ranging from the history of Black film to the struggles of black owned theaters in Chicago (which I have been to).

The funnest section is a passage discussing the origins of the “ghetto talk” scene in the movie Airplane! The directors were looking for Black actors to satirize the kind of talk found in film Shaft. Norman Gibbs and Alvin White invented their jive talk for the audition to appeal to the director. Now, ironically, a lot of people probably believe that’s the way that people really talk. Another point for performativity theories.

Implications and Distinctions is a good read for anyone interested in film and race. It’s also a great example of what socially engaged humanities should be. Serious, yet accessible. Finally, in case you were wondering, Sutton is mentioned because of his writing on swearing in the workplace.

Here’s another game for you: can anyone guess the identities of these sociology indie rockers?  Three members of the band are now on the faculty of sociology departments. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’re probably familiar with at least one of them. You get a) one point for naming each sociologist in the band, b) a point if you know the name of the band, and c) a point each for the title of the song and album.

To keep you company as you pack your bags, I’ve made a Spotify playlist for you Vegas-bound sociologists. See you in Vegas!

The ASA‘s Annual Conference is this weekend. I’m flying in from Sydney, so if I see you there and don’t recognize you, or fall asleep at your talk, or forget my own name, then please accept my apologies in advance. This year it’s being held at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, which may be the most exciting thing to happen to professional sociology since Ulysses G. Weatherly took Edward A. Ross out to a disastrous surprise birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant in 1899. As the conference website says, “Some of the world’s most exciting and versatile entertainers perform here including Celine Dion, Barry Manilow, Jerry Seinfeld, and so many more.” Sadly, we are going to miss Cher, Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart by a week or so on either side. It’s worth noting that all of these exciting and versatile entertainers are about the same age as ASA headliner Randy Collins, give or take three or four years. Unlike them, Randy writes all his own material.

Here, then, is your card. You can click for a larger version. Feel free to toot your Bingo progress on the Twitter using this custom-made #ASA2011 hashtag. Remember, there are BIG PRIZES to be won, especially if you shout out “BINGO!” in the middle of a plenary session.*

*There are no big prizes to be won. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any professional or personal consequences stemming from shouting out “BINGO” in the middle of a plenary session.

It’s often thought that social science is a tool for progress and democracy. Overall, I agree. However, there’s a sense in which social science is anti-democratic:

• Social scientists may discover that popular behaviors have bad outcomes.
• Social scientists may discover that popular government policies have bad outcomes.
• Social scientists privilege experts over the “person in the street.”
• Social scientists may find that policies favoring certain political, social or corporate actors may be bad.

You might think of this as the Ibsen view of politics and social science. And you see this already. It’s now a ritual among some politicians to trash social scientists. I’m comfortable in this position, but it does put us in tension with our sponsors and funders.

I once had a manuscript held for 24 months by a journal, only to be handed a one sentence rejection letter. Another journal lost my paper three times. Last year, I got a rejection letter for a paper submitted about 14 months before hand. While I (grudgingly) respect an editor’s decision to reject my paper, I definitely think it’s bad when they hold it for years. To be blunt, they’re wasting my time. Long times usually have negative professional consequences.

I am trying to get a sense of how bad review times are. So please answer the following questions. For each journal, indicate how long it typically takes for your paper to be returned with a decision. Only answer if you have actually submitted an article to the journal. Also, if you have had an unusually bad experience with a journal, please use the comments section. Anonymous comments encouraged.

UPDATE: Just added some more management journals at the end. And please scroll through the whole list. I don’t want this to be biased toward the first few journals that came to mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

Props to Katherine Chen for pointing out that Zappos is based in Las Vegas.  And they offer free tours of their main “factory” in Vegas!

It’s an interesting company.  On the one hand, it is quite forward-looking.  To paraphrase John Cusack, it doesn’t make anything.  It simply sells things that are bought and processed elsewhere.  Like WalMart it excels as an organization that expertly manages supply chains.  It does a wonderful job at delivering things, mainly shoes, to US consumers from faraway places, mainly China.

But on the other, it has a very un-WalMartian  HR model.  It exists solely (pun intended) as an online company, and  one that treats its employees well.  Famously, all employees upon finishing training are offered two thousand dollars to quit the company, yet very very few do.  This may not seem a big deal with the current labor market being so slack, but Zappos has been doing this for quite some time now.

Is the Zappos org-model generalizable?  It is one of those tech firms like Facebook that has not yet gone public, so one could argue that the logic of shareholder value has not yet permeated the organizational sinews.  In five or ten years, will they still be paying Americans eleven dollars an hour to answer basic customer service calls and emails?  Or will they go the way of PayPal, Orbitz, and Amazon, by paying a young Filipino, Indian, or South African twenty dollars a day to do the same?

A new chart by Omar.

Brayden wrote a very perceptive post about institutional theory’s displacement of resource dependency theory. That post inspired me to think about the history of institutional theory as it is practiced in soc, o.b., and management:

1. Paleo or “old” institutionalism: I think this was hatched by various folks like Sumner, Selznick, Merton, and others. Idea was simple. Communities have social practices or mores that shape social change. Selznick famously worked on the co-optation side of the story.
2. Proto institutionalism: Somewhere between Parsons, definitely in the old or “paleo” camp, and the DiMaggio/Powell/Meyer/Rowan spectrum, were people shifting from local social processes to global forces. Stinchcombe definitely fits, as does the work that grapples with org structrures and resource flows, even when it is not overtly focused on environments.
3. The New Institutionalism: The institutionalism we all know and love. Probably the big dispute was over the sources of structure – rational response to task completion or legitimacy signal? This move completed the switch from local community to polity/field/sector as the source of legitimacy. Rather quickly, this became the “go to” theory for a generation of sociologists who needed to justify their own studies of the social sources of org behavior.
4. Disputed Institutionalism: Starting in the late 1990s, perhaps with Davis and Thompson’s work on shareholder revolts or Clemens’ book on lobbying, people started linking conflict with institutions. This blew up with the work of Soule, Schneiberg, and Bartley. I’d also put myself in this camp because I view institutions and new org forms as long term consequences of political mobilization. The focus is still on non-local environments, but conflict revolves around cultural scripts, which is then filtered through statute and custom.
5. The New Micro-institutionalism: For a while, I thought that institutionalism was played out. Once you admit people could argue with institutions, there wasn’t much left to say. But then I read the stuff on institutional work by Suddaby & Lawrence. A simple point, we need a better account of the things that are done to create/defend/destroy institutions. My most very recent work employs these ideas.

So what’s next for institutional theory? Every time you think we’re done, some pushes it in a new direction.

Like many of our readers who belong to the Academy of Management, I’m headed to San Antonio tomorrow for the annual meetings. Tex-Mex awaits, yum.

Here is a list of events sponsored by the Organization and Management Theory division. It looks like we’ll have at least two chances to socialize – tomorrow at the OMT reception and Monday evening at the OMT social hour. If you see me at the reception be sure to say hello.

We can always count on Sekou to tell us where the parties are. If you’re looking for a soundtrack for your San Antonio experience, I’ve put together a Spotify playlist just for you. All of the songs are about Texas or by an artist from Texas.

Feel free to post interesting sessions or panels in the comments section.

While in graduate school, I had a very interesting discussion with one of my advisers, Terry Clark. Before he became an active figure in urban sociology, Terry was a fairly accomplished org theory guy with a taste for the sociology of science. For example, he wrote a nice book called Prophets and Patrons, which compared the development of sociology in different higher education systems.

So anyways, we were chatting one day and I said that the sociology of science is kind of depressing because there are so many studies showing that scientists are conformists. Because we need the recognition of older colleagues and the right journals, it is very hard for scientist to be risk takers. How can science progress if it is so hierarchical?

Terry had a very wise answer, in my view. Science is a decentralized order. Yes, within specific laboratories, or disciplines, the hierarchy is very strong. However, there is a sort of competition between scientific communities. New ideas may pop up in other disciplines, or a new laboratory may be set up that doesn’t fit into the rest of the system.  Even though specific research communities gravitate toward normal science and stasis, the overall structure of science is enriched by ideas popping up in unexpected places.

Here, Matt Yglesias wonders why states often permit casinos to have slot machines but not table games, even though the latter create some visible jobs (dealers).  Policy-wise, it does seem pretty stupid.

It’s interesting, because historically casinos were synonymous with table games.  Gambling for stakes was a male activity and to be a macho guy was to go to a gambling parlor and play craps, poker, or most especially faro-bank (the most popular game in the US for most of the 19th century).  After WWII, several Nevada casinos (most notably Reno’s Harolds Club) innovated to create a new business model.  They experimented by putting in a few slot machines and found that they brought women patrons through the doors.  Soon the spittoons where gone, carpets were installed, and something like the modern casino was born.

From UNLV Special collections

Even today, the demographics of casino patronage retain something of a frontier flavor.  Table games have a majority of male players; slot machine players are mainly female.  Within the world of the table games themselves, craps and poker (the oldest games) are more “male” than is blackjack (a newer game).  It’s also the case that the average time-per-wager declines along this continuum.  A poker hand takes several minutes to play out; a round of blackjack, a little under a minute; and a slot machine just a few seconds.

Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics has a nice interview with our friend Kieran. The topic is organ markets. A few choice clips:

But what is really wrong with having a market—a system for buying and selling—our own organs? Certainly, there’s little doubt that it would have some unpleasant aspects. There would be many cases where a wealthy individual bought a kidney from someone much poorer. The prospect of the poor literally giving up their bodies to the rich is enough to make many people recoil in disgust.

If such market exchange of organs is exploitative, there are two solutions: you can ban it, or you can try to ensure people aren’t in a position where they feel forced to sell their organs. A ban may consign people to an even worse fate (death) than being exploited. The second solution, meanwhile, raises big questions of social justice that go well beyond a market in kidneys.

Recommended.

A field known as “gambling studies” has really taken off over the past several decades (paralleling the diffusion of legal gambling in the US) .  It has its own association, it hosts conferences, it sponsors research, and so on.   While it labels itself interdisciplinary (see the mission statement of the Journal of Gambling Studies), this emergent field is actually dominated by two approaches: the economic and the psychiatric.

Consider an article in the most recent issue of JOGS: “Gambling Motivation and Passion: A Comparison Study of Recreational and Pathological Gamblers.”  It (and the field as a whole) departs from the assumption that there are two type of gamblers.  First, the vast majority who “purchase” gambling as they would purchase any other service or leisure good.  And second, a small minority who suffer from a psychiatric disorder whereby they crave gambling and cannot stop once they start.  A normal horde and a pathological few

Once you have these assumptions in place, you can do a lot of stuff.  First off, you can devise ever more sophisticated ways to deliver the gambling product to the vast majority who gamble “responsibly” (who among us doesn’t love a Survivor-themed slot machine?)  Next, you create and refine screens to identify the “sick” gamblers.  Then you can measure the incidence of pathological gambling in a given population, and compare rates across groups (men are afflicted more than women, while Australians tends to have the highest incidence rate globally).  You can even postulate what’s going on in the brain of the pathological gambler, and devise treatments to intervene (anti-depressants are currently in vogue, as are Gamblers Anonymous meetings).  So a paradigm is born.

As a sociologist, I am made uncomfortable by this whole endeavor.  But in general, my discipline hasn’t had much to say about gambling.  The last ASR article to have “gambling” in the title was a 1977 piece by Ivan Light on “Numbers Gambling Among Blacks;” for AJS you have to go back to 1951 for Herbert Bloch’s “The Sociology of Gambling.”  Sociologists certainly are underrepresented in the conferences, books and journals that constitute this new “gambling studies” field.

So one of the things I’m trying to figure out is how sociology, and organizational sociology in particular, would study gambling.  I think it would depart from a different set of foundational assumptions.  For instance, I wonder if the individual is the proper unit of analysis for gambling studies.  Don’t people generally gamble in groups?  Think about poker games, a busy craps table, or a bus tour to Atlantic City.  In each case, one gambles not alone but in the company of friends and strangers.  Is it not possible that these groups have a sui generis character whereby the motivations for and passions of the activity are constructed in sutu?  This is what Geertz argued in his classic paper on cockfighting, and Goffman too in his essay “Where the Action Is.”  A-Rod, currently under investigation by MLB for participating in illegal poker games, may want to claim something of this sort.

But then there’s the question of why rates of gambling differ across populations.  Here I suspect that it’s better to not bifurcate people into the normal versus pathological.  But rather, to do something along the lines of what Kieran did in his book on organ donation: i.e., to try to understand the organizations and institutions that facilitate or constrain this particular sort of “exchange.”  Living within a certain travel-distance to a casino, for instance, surely matters, as would having friends who approve or disapprove of gambling.  Are socially isolated people more likely to gamble (this would be gambling as a Durkheimian anomic act)?  Are you more likely to gamble heavily at a corporate-controlled casino, or one operated by a Native Tribe?  Does it matter if there are five casinos in your town, or just one (i.e., if firms have to compete, will they market more aggressively?)

Any other thoughts on how org-theory could inform gambling studies?