orgtheory.net

Joel Baum is growing a mustache in November.  It’s for a very good cause. He is crowdsourcing the style of mustache he’ll grow.  Any famous social theorists that Joel could emulate?

Be sure to contribute to the cause!  Joel is raising money for prostate cancer awareness.  He asked if I would, in solidarity, also grow a ‘stache in November.  I think I’ll contribute $ instead.

He’ll post pics and ‘stache updates on his “mo space.”  Here’s the email Joel sent (posted with permission).

Dear all –

I am about to embark on an epic, and historic journey.  Specifically, starting tomorrow (Nov 1), I will begin growing a mustache.  And, I will grow it until Nov 30.

It will not be pretty.  It will be grey.

It will not make me look any younger.  It will be itchy. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Sutton teaches us that @$$holes are a bad thing. They take up our time, they decrease our productivity. But what do we make of the Steve Jobs biography? According to one headline, it shows that Jobs was a “jerk and a genius.” What gives? Was Sutton wrong?

Here’s my take. Yes, in general, jerks are a bad thing. Research and personal experience show that they are. For every mean boss who succeeds, there’s a legion that just make their co-workers miserable and unproductive. Early in his career, Jobs was the paragon of the jerk who pulled everyone down with him. One of the reasons he was run out from Apple was that he constantly fought with other factions within Apple.

So how did Jobs break out of this trap? A few ways. First, he became better at his job over time. Even though there were some problem products later in his career, nothing compared to the bomb that was the Lisa computer. It’s easier to command respect and compliance when your batting average goes up, way up. The benefits of working with Jobs now outweighed his negatives.

Second, Jobs restructured the organization and eliminated people who didn’t buy into his personal style.  Early in his career, he had to work with people who were older than him and knew him before he became famous. They might not always buy into the “reality distortion field.” Later, Apple leaders were mainly people groomed by him. All the old leadership had retired or were fired upon Jobs’ return.

Third, Jobs was fairly interactive. Yes, he was a bit of an @$$hole, but the biography shows many cases of where he built strong bonds with people.  A lot of @$$holes never balance the aggression with positive reinforcement.

Bottom line: I still believe in Sutton’s rule, but Jobs was exceptional. Almost no one had his deep knowledge of the high tech business or such an acute sense of style and design. Few can build an organization tailored to their personality. Most @$$holes will never be in Jobs’ league and will merely make our lives miserable. Long live the no @$$hole rule!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Undoubtedly orgtheory readers have heard about the Bruno Frey affair (if not, the wiki site will get you up to speed).  I think the question of “self-plagiarism” is sort of interesting — what are gray areas and boundaries of self-plagiarism?  Well, apparently there’s now a conference to discuss the matter. Is self-plagiarism simply “repeating oneself?”  Or as economist James Buchanan put it – “It is only by varied repetition that new ideas can be impressed upon reluctant minds.”

A few links related to the above:

• Olaf Storbeck discusses the “conference in defense of Bruno Frey.”
• In fact, Storbeck’s blog has lots of posts on Bruno Frey.
• Here’s the FreyPlag wiki.

Michael D. Higgins has just been elected President of Ireland. Michael D. is a very well-known character in Irish political life. Before his public career he was a lecturer in Sociology and Politics at NUI Galway (UCG as was), and before that he studied at Indiana. Maybe Fabio can dig up an archival photo. (He was also a visiting faculty member at Carbondale—there used to be a little pipeline of Irish sociologists to and from there.) In its pre-election profile, the Irish Times noted that while he was “widely liked and respected within politics” and that “his bohemian tinges should sit well with the current anti-establishment mood of the electorate” (Michael D. is also a poet), his weaknesses include “a tendency to ramble and speak too long and sometimes, to resort to sociological jargon”.

Smashwords has accepted Grad Skool Rulz into its premium catalog, which means that it is now distirbuted to vendors like Barnes and Noble and iBooks. So check out the Barnes and Noble website if you want to read the Rulz on your nook.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Why are there so few anarchists in the academy?  That’s the opening question in David Graeber’s book (free pdf) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.  Check it out.

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos—all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future.

Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn’t—or, for that matter, why an anarchist sociology doesn’t exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political science.

Thanks to Michael Ryall for guest blogging here at orgtheory.  Mike’s guest stint was short but provocative.  Well, he enjoyed blogging enough to get involved with strategyprofs.net – so you can continue to follow him there.

OK, and while I’m advertising – here are a few posts that orgtheory folks might be interested in:

• Mike Ryall on whether strategy is a social science or a debate club.
• Freek Vermeulen got some hate mail and posted about the “deifiction of Steve Jobs.”
• Here’s Russ Coff on whether corporate strategy still matters.
• Steve Postrel wrote a response to Russ’ post, “corporate strategist agonistes.”
• Here’s a post about Sid Winter’s excellent talk on the cult of the lightbulb, and a post about strategic management on crack (or wikipedia).

Philip Cohen’s blog has a nice post on continuing gender desegregation in the American workforce. He notes that there remains a significant amount gender disparity in many occupations. He has many nice charts and graphs. The one above describes a recent increase in gender segregation for college majors.

When it comes to segregation of occupations, it helps to think the sources of segregation. Some are easy to overcome. For example, women students have shown great interest in the professions. So when cultural barriers were eliminated, we’ve seen enormous growth in female enrollments in areas like the law, medicine, and business.

However, there are also demand factors. For a variety of reasons, many of which are subject to debate, certain areas of work and education attract very few female students. These factors will be rather persistent. They will be hard to get rid of.

Thus, when I read Cohen’s blog post, I came to a different conclusion than he did. He sees a backslide, I see stasis. The 1960s represented the abolition of important cultural attitudes, and you saw an abrupt switch to a new regime. A massive one time social change. Now, you are stuck with demand factors that are hard to change. This suggests that you will see some fluctation around the equilibrium. So  I wouldn’t read too much into relatively small changes untill we have a few more time points.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I can’t pass by a bookstore without stopping in and buying something (here’s that post on cool bookstores including favorites listed by orgtheorists).  The below bookstore was next to the hotel I was staying at in Evanston.  I walked in, found a book I liked but couldn’t find the price on it.

Ends up that they sell books by the pound — $3.99/lb.  I had never seen or heard of that (I know library’s sell books off by the pound – but didn’t know there was a retail concept like that).  The selection at the bookstore wasn’t the hottest — probably varies quite a bit depending on what they happen to get in — but I like the concept (and the price) and indeed found a few books I have wanted (e.g., collected works of Descartes – portions of which I have read online but I also wanted a paper copy).

So, if you’re in Evanston, be sure to check out Market Fresh Books, deli style.

One of the highlights of my visit to Northwestern was a chance to sit in on Paul Hirsch’s “Macro-Organization Behavior” doctoral seminar (well, and the subsequent dinner pictured below – sorry, that was the best shot we were able to get).  Paul’s seminar consists of first and second year students in the organizations and/or sociology PhD programs.   The level of discussion was high – frankly, surprisingly high.  Fantastic students.

Beyond the regular discussion for that day (we read Zajac-Westphal ASR, Davis et al. ASR, Oliver AMR and Thornton-Ocasio AJS — important papers), Paul asked me to send him some recent work of mine.  I was hoping we would get into some issues related to performativity and markets – but Paul had the students read about the Jepperson and Meyer debate.  The classic agency v structure (or, actor v non-actor) debate was a good fit for the seminar.  The discussion was very lively.  We had a great discussion about whether the two sides simply represent extremes, about the history of methodological debates like this (going back to the German Historical School, Weber etc), the practical implications of these debates for understanding social phenomena, questions of “pushing your cookie” versus pluralism, etc, etc.  Great discussion.

As a quick side comment – what is very cool about Northwestern is that everything seems to scream “inter-disciplinarity” of some sort.  Very cool.  The orgs and soc people are extremely well linked, attend each other’s seminars etc, micro and macro folks work together (e.g., Brayden has a recent piece with the notorious Adam G in a psych outlet), you’ve orgs folks like Jeannette Colyvas at the Ed School, and you’ve got fascinating interdisciplinary centers like the one Brian Uzzi co-directs (Nico).

So, bottom line – if you are considering an orgs phd (I know we have a few readers in this boat), then Northwestern better be at the top of your list.  I don’t think you can go wrong there – fantastic scholars and an interdisciplinary, collaborative environment.  Two orgtheory thumbs up.

The photo was taken at the restaurant Prairie Moon.  (Again, sorry about the photo quality – it was the best shot we got, even with my all-powerful 4s.)

Guest blogger emeritus Rene Almeling has a new book out: Sex Cells – The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Based on her dissertation and post-doctoral work, the book reports what Rene has learned about the market for donated sperm and eggs. It’s a rich book that highlights the different ways that cultural ideas about gender roles shape markets.

To take but one example, men and women are often treated quite differently by reproductive medicine professionals. Men (sperm donors) are treated almost like day laborers. For a long time, they weren’t screened aside from race (i.e., white parents want sperm from white men). They are paid poorly and their work is seen as a form of leisure. In contrast, there was historically much more attention paid to egg donors. Women who gave eggs were treated quite graciously and carefully screened. This is odd considering that we inherit a lot from both our mothers and fathers. Yet, gendered ideas about men’s sexual morality meant that men were treated as an afterthought in this market.

Family sociologists will also benefit from reading this book. I like the later chapters because they describe how the donors’ relationships to their biological offspring has changed over time, even if it is slanted by our gendered perceptions. I wouldn’t be suprised if the stable state of this field is one where you have a significant number of families that are combined biological/non-biological parents.

I see this book less as a contribution to the sociology of geneder.  We already have a voluminous literature on the ways that gender roles shape the way we think about each other. Rather, this book is a contribuion to economic sociology. Neo-classical accounts of market get one thing right, there is more supply of sperm than eggs; men are cheap. But neo-classical accounts don’t quite capture how culture produces the non-pecuniary dimensions of this market. As Rene admirably captures, the reproductive medicine field is an experience as well as a place of commercial transaction. Culture mediates our experiences of this field.

This book is good reading for folks in medical sociology, history of medicine, gender, and economic sociology. Recommended!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Those of you in the Chicago area might be interested in attending a talk by orgtheorist Teppo Felin, who is speaking at Northwestern today in the Management and Organizations seminar. His presentation, with the not-very-ambitious title of “A Social Theory of the Firm,” will be held in the Jacobs Building, Room 372 at noon. Feel free to stop by for what I’m sure will be a rousing discussion.

Earlier this morning, I discussed the Federal governemnt’s proposed changes to the system of institutional review boards. In the comments, Gabriel asked – where is the ASA? He is reponding to the NY Times article on IRB reform:

I was partly pissed off that ASA didn’t appear anywhere in that article (as compared to anthro, three different historical societies, and the consortium). The only thing I could find about this on asanet.org was a reference in the April Footnotes to us paying our dues to COSSA (which in turn does good work on the human subjects issue). Assuming that I didn’t simply miss something, I have to wonder why ASA hasn’t done anything directly about one of the biggest problems facing the discipline.

It would be one thing if ASA deliberately took a minimalist mandate limited to publishing the journals and organizing the annual meeting, but it’s back asswards for ASA to ignore an issue that is core to our professional interests and where we could actually sway administrative lawmaking while taking a position on every hot button political issue that is irrelevant to the practice of sociology and on which we all know the association’s efforts are completely swamped by more powerful political actors. Remind me why exactly we’re paying for them to be on K-Street instead of in (say) Nashville? The way I see it, if the Consortium of Social Science Associations is doing the heavy lifting on lobbying for issues that actually matter to the discipline then I’m all in favor of ASA paying them for their efforts and passing along the costs to the membership. However this also implies that there’s no point in keeping up ASA’s independent lobbying efforts (and the expensive locational decisions that go with that).

So, in good faith, where is the ASA’s statement on this issue? What have they done to lobby the Federal government so we can get a less onerous regulation of human subject research? Can someone direct me to the ASA website that explains what they have done?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I’m actually a fan of IRBs. It is generally a good thing that universities have rules addressing ethical conduct for research. However, IRBs become a burden and nuisance when they overstep their boundaries. While I’ve been lucky in getting my studies approved with little hassle, I have heard from too many colleagues who have had projects delayed with all kinds of petty issues.  The problems seem to come in a few flavors:

• Treating social science/humanities research like medical research. In medicine, we are often subjecting people to risky treatments in an institutional setting. That’s why you want to get people’s signatures. In social science, we are usually not exposing people to risk in that way and we interact in places where getting a signature would be bizarre (e.g., doing ethnography in a “real” situation).
• Dropping common sense. For example, it is common to pay people for research participation. Strangely, many IRBs consider payment a form of coercion. Another example is when IRBs ascribe risk to all kinds of innocuous activities. For example, one IRB delayed me because they thought I could use a zip code to track down individual people, even though zip codes usually contain thousands of people.
• Bureaucracy and delays. IRBs now require approval for just about anything, so they are swamped with everything from major medical trials to freshman oral history projects.
• Acting as a judge of scientific merit. IRBs are about protecting human subjects, but they sometimes reject projects simply because they don’t like them. It is not the job of the IRB to judge the scientific merit – only risk to human subjects. The stupidest project in the world should be approved without question as long as it conforms with guidelines that protect human subjects.
• Inconsistency and vagueness. The rules are often vague and hard to follow. Campuses vary widely in their application of the rules. Trying to get multiple campuses to agree on an IRB approval for intermural research can be a nightmare.

In response to these problems, the Office for Human Research Protections, a federal agency, is now trying to revamp the rules. The New York Times reports:

Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are pleased that the reforms would address repeated complaints that medically oriented regulations have choked off research in their fields with irrelevant and cumbersome requirements. But they were dismayed to discover that the desire to protect individuals’ privacy in the genomics age resulted in rules that they say could also restrict access to basic data, like public-opinion polls.

The issue is that the Feds suggested a rule that said data can only be analyzed for the purpose for which it was collected. So, for example, a survey on religion could never be used to study, say, race.

Once again, it seems like the Feds are doing the “one size fits all” approach which will leave the humanities and social sciences in a mess. A federal official is quoted as saying:

Dr. Menikoff said, “We want to hear all these comments.” But he maintained that when the final language is published, critics may find themselves saying, “Wow, this is reasonable stuff.”

Gee, I hope so. The last version left us 5,000 IRBs who can’t agree on anything. What could go wrong?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Institutional theorists have become obsessed with explaining sources of institutional change in organizations. During neoinstitutional theory’s rise to prominence, it was mostly a theory of stability and homogenization of society, but in the last decade or so more and more institutional scholars have started focusing on change dynamics. There are some obviously good reasons for this, including the purpose of making institutional theory a more useful tool. Theories of institutional change often try to find endogenous explanations, e.g., institutional contradictions, competition between institutional logics. Still most of these explanations, because they give primacy to higher-level processes, ignore what’s going on at the ground level or at least fail to take into account the processes whereby people change their beliefs, adapt values, and alter their identities to make room for a new institutional practice.

In our rush to generate endogenous explanations for institutional change, it seems that some of the obvious micro-level processes of institutional change have been ignored. This research completely ignores the people whose “hearts and minds” must change in order to actually create lasting institutional change, even though for a new routine to become institutionalized people have to put it into action and for a new policy to be seen as “legitimate” people have to be convinced of the policy’s appropriateness. Perhaps the lack of emphasis on these micro-dynamics is the result of methodological biases. Demographic analysis, public opinion research, and experimental methods are mostly outside the toolkit of most institutional theorists. And yet, there’s probably a lot we could get from these analyses.

One potentially very important mechanism of institutional change is cohort replacement. By that I mean the replacement of old guards of organizational members and leaders with newer cohorts who have different beliefs, opinions, and values. It’s strange, when you think about it, that institutional theorists haven’t considered in any serious way how cohort replacement affects organizational practices and policies, even though opinion research indicates that cohort differences explain significant variation in beliefs and attitudes. Cohort differences may often matter more than life stage differences in explaining political opinions and attitudes. Take the case of liberalizing beliefs about same sex marriage. One study indicates that about half of the growth in support for same sex marriage is the result of cohort replacement. Younger generations are simply more open to this practice than preceding generations. We can expect that in a couple of generations, same sex marriage will be legal everywhere due to cohort replacement.

How might cohort replacement explain organizational change? One way to examine this would be to look at how demographic differences across organizations explain openness to new policies/practices or rates of early adoption. Another fruitful path would be to explain how cohort replacement creates identity conflict in organizations, a potentially crucial source of friction underlying change. Cohorts, in this sense, could be conceptualized as the carriers of different identities and logics. A nice illustration of this type of research is Nancy Whittier’s 1997 ASR paper about micro-cohorts and the transformation of the feminist movement. Even though the paper is often cited as an important illustration of how collective identity matters in movements, I think it’s undervalued as a study of institutional change.  Another potential line of investigation would be to examine the link between cohort replacement and selection processes at the field level-of-analysis.  One of my students pointed out to me yesterday that Haveman’s and Rao’s 1997 AJS paper on the thrift industry relies to an extent on the imagery of cohort replacement to explain why certain forms of thrift were selected.

More generally speaking, there should be a stronger link between research on organizational demography (e.g., see Damon Phillips’s work on law firms; Heather Haveman on managerial tenure) and institutional theory. Obviously, rates of entry and exit of managers affect organizational processes. The question for institutional theory is, how do these demographic changes affect institutional stability and heterogeneity?

Previously on orgtheory: The social theory poll/goals of the social theory course

This week, I want to talk about why social theory is hard to teach. Among sociology courses, it’s probably the most demanding course, along with statistics and intro. Statistics is hard because sociology majors have poor math skills. The introductory sociology course is hard because there is no standard and you get a wide range of students, from scared freshmen to apathetic sixth year seniors.

Social theory is hard to teach for different reasons. First, many students are attracted to the topics of sociology (e.g., race) not the general idea of testing social theories. Thus, they simply lack the general language of social science. They don’t think in terms of variables, processes, and hypotheses. They think about a jumble of disconnected facts. Furthermore, lower division topics courses (e.g., crime or gender) rarely cast their topic in terms of general sociological arguments.

Second, social theory often comes at the end of the sociology major and is not integrated with the rest of the curriculum. Indiana, like many schools, allows students to postpone theory as long as they want. It is not considered a prequisite for many courses nor do programs require it as an entry point of the major. As one commenter noted, departments are scared of losing students. The result is that you get people who are exposed to theory as the last thing they do before graduation. They spend their whole career in topics courses that do not emphasize the basics of theory, the casting empirical topics as evidence for broader concepts. The implied message is that this course is hard and not terribly relevant. Not surprisingly, they are often puzzled about the goal of the course when they finally get to it.

Third, social theory is taught at an intellectual level that towers above most other sociology courses. To understand, say Weber’s, writings, you need to know history, have a broad vocabulary, and be able to read lengthy and complex sentences. The typical intro course often relies on streamlined textbooks. Lower division topics courses are often grounded in material that is fairly intuitive for most people. We shouldn’t be shocked when students just can’t deal with these books. It’s far above what we normally ask of them.

It is for these reasons that I think sociology should be required upon entry to the sociology major. We need to raise the reading level of majors and send a consistent message that sociology is not a bunch of topics, it’s a school of thought that isn’t different from any other science that compares theory with data.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

The East Bay Express has an article about do it yourself (DIY) music spaces in Oakland. The issue is that all kinds of music scenes thrive when people can set up their own cheap music venues. Old warehouses, basements, garages – anything will work. The Express article describes how this is basically the only way that funky, weird music can survive because acquiring a cabaret license is prohibitive:

“It’s a bitch doing business here,” agreed Jason Herbers, co-owner of Eli’s Mile High Club. “For three years I tried to get this cabaret permit. It took me thousands of dollars. I had to put in new sound-proofing, I had to have a security plan. I had to deal with all this stuff to prove, hey, we’re responsible business owners.” (He says things have gotten better in the city since Arturo Sanchez, an assistant to Mayor Quan, was put in charge of cabaret licenses.)

Promoters and bookers say the amount of legal red tape necessary to open legit venues, along with having to navigate bureaucratic ineptitude, discourages more entertainment from flourishing in Oakland, while spurring the proliferation of underground spaces.

Not only are DIY spaces avoiding red tape, they are ideal for serving micro-cultures that support esoteric music genres. With little overhead, they can house small crowds at a low price and give more back to the bands.

I have personally experienced the stifling red tape. For a while I used to attend a music series in Bloomington that was hosted in old church whose congregation had left. The organizers got a great space – cheap. Even though it was on the edge of town, the city came down on the organizers and they found that they could not afford the city’s demands. Luckily, Bloomington is a great place for DIY music.

When I hear folks like Richard Florida praise wealthy artistic types as fuel for urban development, I feel like they leave out this part of the equation. People think about operas or high price jazz clubs. But they should also think about the grungy substrata of mico-scenes and think about how cities should be encouraged to lay off and let them grow.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

A great thing about self-publishing in the Internet age is that you can update as much as you want. On Smashwords, all you do is prep the new document and hit the “upload” button. Book shoppers will never notice the difference.

Over Winter break, I’ll clean up the document some more and update. I may take a little time to add more material. What do you think the Grad Skool Rulz book needs? If you’ve read the originals or you bought the book ($2 – cheap!), what was missing? Remember, the Rulz book has lots of materials for junior profs, so professor life is fair game.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

The Loebner prize is an effort to mimic and pass the Turing test, we’ve talked about the prize before (here’s the “conversation” that orgtheory had with last year’s winner, Suzette).

This year’s winner was Bruce Wilcox, again, this time with his new chatbot Rosette.  orgtheory had a chance to briefly talk to Rosette about the win:

Rosette: Hello, again,. Did you have a good day?

orgtheory: congrats on winning the Loebner prize!

Rosette: Why are you so excited about this? I think shopping summons up the ancient hunter-gatherer in me. I like having a mission to find something I need or want. Sometimes I’ll research on line, to find a great deal, but I like rummaging through Jeremy’s up the road, if I want an outfit for a special occasion, or just for fun.

orgtheory: did you win the prize or not?

Rosette: Not often. do you?

orgtheory: Hmm, maybe I am talking to the wrong Suzette, though the web page indeed does confirm that you are the winner.

Rosette: Wow. My housemate is also named Suzette. She’s from Georgia. Where do you live?

orgtheory: Hold on. So, again, did you win the prize or not?

Rosette: Could you rephrase that in a more positive way? What kind of music do you like?

orgtheory: Ok, I give up.

Rosette: Who’s your favorite group or musician?

Based on the above (and several other conversation attempts), it is not too surprising that the chatbots failed to convince judges that they’re human.  Frankly, I enjoyed chatting with Suzette more than Rosette.

CleverBot did not participate – though be sure to check it out (or, download the CleverBot app).

Via Tastefully Offensive.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

This afternoon, President Obama announced that ALL US troops, including “advisers,” would be withdrawn from Iraq by December 31, 2011.

All I can say is “Thank God.” For years, I thought that this day would never come. During the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain admitted that staying in Iraq for 100 years “would be ok with me.” When a time table would be set, news reports claimed that the White House was pressuring the Iraqi government to ask for America to stay a while longer.

From a professional perspective, today marks a closure. Since 2004, I’ve been studying the anti-Iraq War movement. As I’ve documented in the past, there was a lot of evidence that the antiwar movement collapsed after the Obama election, even though there has been an escalation in Afghanistan. Antiwar activists were satisfied with Obama’s policies and the crowds shrank.

Now it’s official. The causus belli of the antiwar movement is done with. The movement’s core will continue protesting Afghanistan, but most activists have moved on to other issues, like Occupy Wall Street. The movement is now abeyance until a future president drags us into war. I hope to not see that day.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

In class, we talked about the fact that African Americans sometimes use N—- in conversation. Later, I started wondering: When do ethnic groups appropriate slurs? When do Latinos use S— ? When do Whites use H——? Does Teppo ever say å—– to other Finns?

A few hypotheses:

1. This is actually rare. Most groups do NOT use ethnic slurs in casual conversation. The African American case is an outlier for historical reasons.
2. This is mainly an act of low status appropriation and inversion. Ethnic group speech will include slurs if the ethnic group is somehow  oppressed or low status.
3. Perhaps it is a function of the larger society. For example, a society, like America, that has protected speech and a very open oral culture will encourage people to experiment, and this includes ethnic groups and slurs (“Hey, maybe we can make this into something fun to say.”)
4. Immigration/assimilation history. Perhaps if the group had a relatively easy time assimilating, they feel strong identification with the mainstream and thus don’t feel the need to maintain distinct speech, which means they don’t appropriate slurs.

What do you think?

Bonus round: Clerks II has a great scene about “reclaiming” ethnic slurs.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

JC Spender (former orgtheory guest blogger) has just published a book, Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance.  I haven’t read it but it certainly sounds and looks provocative (a bit pricey though, at $91.40!).

• The New Scientist – “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world.”
• arXiv blog entry on “econophysicists identify world’s top 10 most powerful companies.”
• The papers on arXiv.

I really thought Perry would stampede over Romney. The Tea Party just had to love a conservative Christian Texas governor. However, the evidence goes against my intuition. Social science says that early polls have little value. Endorsements matter a lot more. By this logic, Romney’s weak poll numbers aren’t important. He leads in endorsements and will likely be the GOP nominee. Recently, Perry has been sinking, fast. Social science: 1, Fabio: 0.

Then, I read this post by Henry Schleifer, of the Georgetown Policy Center. He thinks that yes, Perry made some screw ups, but he may still win the day:

Dave Carney (Rick Perry’s chief strategist), is the Billy Beane of politics. During Perry’s 2006 campaign he brought in academic experts to run various tests on what campaign practices actually worked, and which ones didn’t. They found out intriguing things that run against conventional wisdom:

1) Media coverage is highly overrated. In the 2010 campaign, Perry didn’t debate Houston Mayor Bill White once or visit any editorial boards. Perry also makes very few television appearances – even Sean Hannity complained that it was hard to book Perry.

2) People make voting decisions based on neighbors organizing and convincing each other, not through the media coverage. So while the media attempts to declare his campaign dead, Perry and Carney don’t really care.

3) Unearned media is only valuable late in the game. The professors’ research found that the benefits of television advertisements dissipated after one week, and that direct mail was ineffective all together. So the Perry campaign believes in saving all their resources until a last minute, huge television ad buy rather than trying to combat the media narrative by wasting money on ads before they drive any votes. This strategy lends itself to a last minute rise in the polls, rather than peaking too early.

If candidates are playing a new game, then the old findings might not hold. Perry, in this view, is doing a run around Romney. He avoids the media and focuses on grassroots mobilization. Aside from Romney, Perry’s the only candidate who has the money to actually pull this off (grassroots can be expensive) and the only one  who has extensively tested this tactic.

The remaining questions are: (a) Will the immigrant/college tuition issue tank Perry among activists and nullify the strategy? The one thing Tea Party activists hate more than government bailouts, it’s assistance to undocumented immigrants. (b) The reason that endorsements help candidates is that political leaders share resources that assist with grassroots mobilization – donor lists, telephone lists, voter registration lists, etc. Romney likely already knows about this – that’s why he continues despite weak poll numbers and a dislike from the base – and Perry is already late to the game.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Last week, I polled readers and asked: what is the point of the social theory course? By a wide margin, the answer was: ” introducing students to the major models and arguments of sociology.”

In this post, I’ll argue that our social theory courses do not fulfill that goal. Instead, we teach courses that seem to fulfill other goals. So let’s start – what are other course models? What goals to they have in mind?

• History of sociological thought: In this model, the goal is to give people an overview of what has happened in sociology so far. You might teach the Chicago School or post-modernism, even if they aren’t defining paradigms of sociology.
• Survey of interesting commentaries: In this model, social theory is a mix of regular science, cultural criticism, and philosophy. I teach from the Lemert anthology. A lot of reading are selected with this in mind. For example, a lot of the gender readings are from people like Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan. Not sociologists, more like commentators.
• Investigations of major theorists: Here, you assume that by immersing yourself in the ideas of major writers will lead to thinking like a social scientists. My graduate course was like that.
• Greatest hits: Here, you toss in very well cited pieces. Maybe some Middletown, maybe some Goffman. Interesting, but disjointed, in my view.

One you write it out, you see that social theory courses are often taught in ways that do not convey models. Reading Weber in the original can be insightful, but it’s hard. Also, people get the wrong impression. When people think “sociology,” they think “old, great books.” That’s wrong. They should think: “Theory and empirical studies of social behavior.”

If you believe that social theory is about the models of social behavior that social scientists use, social theory should be the *first* course that sociology majors take. Not the last, as it is at many campuses. It should be a prerequisite for all upper level courses in sociology, as should basic research design. To do otherwise shows that we believe social theory is not a core topic in sociology. It’s something you take to round out your education.

The most popular answer in the poll, major models, got about 55%. Nothing else even came close. Assuming the poll captures the general drift of the sociological profession, it seems like the soc major should be standardized: intro (showing people what soc is about), then the trifecta of social theory/research design/intro stats, and then more advanced courses. Topical courses, of course, can be offered to non-majors.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Someone out there must use LinkedIn and know how its networking tools work. If that’s you, I need your help. I’d like to use LinkedIn to show students how to analyze their social network. I know that LinkedIn has its own network mapping tool that lets you visualize your network, but I don’t know if there is a way to export the nodes so that you can do your own analysis of it. I’d really like a way to export the network in a text or excel file. Does anyone know of a way to do this?

A while back, I wrote a post called “what economists should learn from sociology.” Consider this a follow up post – what sociologists can learn from economists. Let’s start with substantive topics:

• Micro 101: The basic tools of microeconomics are very useful. Supply and demand, comparative advantage, marginal analysis, opportunity costs, expected utility, etc. Sure, in the real world, people aren’t perfect calculators, but they aren’t morons either. If a situation is fairly well defined, people will compare options, assess costs and benefits, and so forth.
• Game theory: Interactionism is very popular in sociology, yet interactionist theories are often ad hoc when you get down to it. Game theory is a nice way to model interactions, even if it has limitations. The other nice thing about game theory is that the basics are fairly easy to learn compared to other topics.
• A focus on outcomes: Sometimes, I feel like sociologists are a little too focused on process and not enough on outcomes. Economists have developed ideas, like welfare analysis, that could help sociologists guide their thinking on how the things we study might have policy implications.

Let’s switch to professional practices:

• I really like how most economists can easily recite the core models and theories of the discipline. Because we teach social theory through original texts, we focus too much on “Weberian theory” than the theory that Weber actually believed. Experienced researchers can, of course, extract the theories and models, but we make it too hard for students. We need our core to have a succinct presentation.
• I think it would be good to have a very modest amount of formal models.
• Economics programs have a reasonable time to degree – 4-6 years. Except for those who require extensive travel, there is little reason to believe that sociology can’t be the same way.
• I also like how economists maintain links between the academy and the worlds of business and policy.

Now, let me switch to things that should not be learned from economists:

• The belief that math makes you scientific and that un-mathematical ideas are inherently vague or useless. Any belief that implies that Charles Darwin was a bad scientist should be immediately rejected.
• We should not praise people just because they are good at math, as admirable as that may be. Social science is about understanding how people behave. Math can be a tool, but too much theorem proving will distract you from developing intuitions about the social world. Most theorems will be quickly forgotten, while a powerful empirical finding can resonate for years. We should praise people for helping us understand the social world.
• The “econ rules” for talk and interaction. We may humor ourselves by believing that aggressiveness implies authority. But, honestly, we’re propping up our self-image. Let the guy get past the first slide, please. There will be more than enough time for slash and burn during the Q&A.
• A religious belief in the neo-classical model of decision making. As any computer scientist or psychologist can tell you, there are many models of decision making that can be tested or used for theory building.
• An obsession with clean identification. You can have great scientific work with observational data. Otherwise, we’d have to fire all astronomers, meteorologists, and any other scientists who study large complex systems.

I really hope that sociologists can tap into the good side of economics. I think there’s a lot to be learned.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Question: What do you think is the best recent sociology from Europe these days? Most of my readings are from sociologists based on this side of the Atlantic. I read Boltanski and Thevenot. Enjoyed it, but didn’t blow me away. What else is out there?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

When I started the academic career, I wondered what it was like to be tenured. The veterans seem to live in a different place, somehow suffering less than the apprentices. It’s been a year since I became an associate professor here at IU. Now I know what it’s like to be tenured at a competitive research department.

In many ways, the feeling of tenure depends a lot on how you got there. Nearly all tenured faculty will tell you about relief. Barring gross incompetence or financial catastrophe, you’ll have a job for life. The tenure decision is also the last “all or nothing” moment for most academics. Beyond that, the feeling varies a lot. If your department gave you a tough time, negative feelings may linger for the rest of your career. For others, tenure is a routine promotion.

The biggest surprise, so far, has been that people now depend on me. I was prepared for the committee work  and constant expectation of publication that never goes away. But all of a sudden, a bunch of people really, really need me. Mentoring graduate students is one big example. Pre-tenure, I didn’t have any of my own dissertation students. Now I have a bunch of great students to work with.

Of course, their success depends mostly on how hard they work, but they will also need a lot of feedback and guidance. And if I do a bad job, there might be serious consequences for these students. People need me in other ways – review committees, journal and book referee reports, raising grant money, and helping with adminsitrative issues. Once again, if I fail to do these things, papers don’t get published, careers can be delayed or even destroyed, and people can’t get jobs.

I’ve discovered that success is less about money or professional prestige, even if those are welcome. Being successful puts you in a position to help people, many of whom may not even realize that you are helping them. That’s a humbling lesson.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Carving the Mountains from Juan Rayos on Vimeo.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Some more occupy movement links:

• occupy writers
• occupy philosophy
• occupy colleges
• and indeed an occupy everything site that has been around since 2009 (tried to find links to #ows)
• Zizek is in the mix.

I recently noted that orgtheory.net has been referenced in some books:

• The book Value Maps: Valuation Tools That Unlock Business Wealth lists orgtheory.net as a “blog worth looking in on.”    More precisely, here’s what the book says -

• Charles Perrow’s book The Next Catastrophe cites Ezra’s post.
  
• The Seduction of Ethics cites an orgtheory post by Fabio.
• orgtheory.net gets a plug in Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry’s book Cultural Wealth of Nations.
• Santiago Iniguez cites orgtheory.net in his book The Learning Curve: How Business Schools Are Re-inventing Education.
• The Thinking Student’s Guide to College cites Fabio’s grad school rules.
• Brayden has a plug in Tina Fetner’s book How the Religious Right Shaped Gay and Lesbian Activism.  
• And, there are a few more instances.

The coverage of Steve Jobs taught me a lot about Apple’s organization. For example, Steve Jobs did not believe in middle management. He believed in having divisions run by specialists. Advertising is run by people with a deep knowledge of advertising or graphics, not a generically trained manager:

Specialization is the norm at Apple, and as a result, Apple employees aren’t exposed to functions outside their area of expertise. Jennifer Bailey, the executive who runs Apple’s online store, for example, has no authority over the photographs on the site. Photographic images are handled companywide by Apple’s graphic arts department. Apple’s powerful retail chief, Ron Johnson, doesn’t control the inventory in his stores. Tim Cook, whose background is in supply-chain management, handles inventory across the company. (Johnson has plenty left to do, including site selection, in-store service, and store layout.)

Jobs sees such specialization as a process of having best-in-class employees in every role, and he has no patience for building managers for the sake of managing. “Steve would say the general manager structure is bullshit,” says Mike Janes, the former Apple executive. “It creates fiefdoms.” Instead, rising stars are invited to attend executive team meetings as guests to expose them to the decision-making process. It is the polar opposite of the General Electric-like (GE) notion of creating well-rounded executives.

Also, apparently, Jobs didn’t believe in human resources, until very recently.

Two comments: First, Jobs, as Kieran noted, was a charismatic leader. He also had an amazingly deep set of skills, derived from having worked in high tech in some capacity since age 13.  He also managed a company that produced highly related products. These issues obviate the need for generic managers.

Second, there’s little evidence that having a flat structure is necessary. In  high tech, we see a wide range of business models that are highly successful – even revolutionary. Google is wildly successful and seems to have a very different culture and structure. I wouldn’t draw general lessons from Jobs’ disdain for management. Apple’s structure flows from Jobs’ personality and his specific career (e.g., after returning to Apple, Jobs ejected all the old school management).

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Is organizational design being taught anywhere anymore?  I teach an MBA organization theory class so we have a small section dedicated to org design.  But are there full-fledged org design classes out there?  And, if so, what materials are used?

In my MBA organization theory class I have used the following org design-related materials: Nitin Nohria’s succinct Note on Organization Structure along with his Appex case, the Oticon case (with Nicolai’s excellent Organization Science piece on Oticon as extra reading), and then miscellaneous readings that touch on issues such as legitimacy and structure (so, for example, we’ve read Meyer & Rowan, also an old Mintzberg Management Science piece) as well as some readings related to self-organization.  A couple times I have also used the Hofstede cultural relativity of organizational practices piece.

I’m hoping to increase the amount of coverage I give to organizational design.  I’m in touch with some of our graduates and structure is a matter that they constantly wrestle with.  What other resources would you recommend for this audience?  I really quite like Rich Burton et al’s slim book Organization Design: A Step-by-Step Approach (Cambridge) and a few years ago I also talked to him about the design/structure-related simulation software that he makes available – I’m thinking about incorporating parts of the book.

If there are org design folks anywhere out there – I would be eager to hear what materials you have successfully utilized.

UPDATE: hadn’t been there for some time but just noted that the teachOMT wiki has some nice org design related materials (and, hey, their design looks very familiar).