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Donate to “The Activists,” the movie about the antiwar movement, and no one gets hurt!

The original National Lampoon cover.

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Here are some links about free software as a social movement:

• Richard Stallman’s book (pdf, with forward by Lessig) Free Software, Free Society
• An interview with Richard Stallman, Free software as a social movement
• Wiki entry for the free software movement
• Richard Stallman youtube lecture from earlier this year
• Stallman writing about Anonymous
• Stallman a few weeks ago on Facebook and social networks, etc.  His advice: don’t use them.

Update:  Jenn Lena adds a link in the comments, a 9000+ word rider on Stallman’s speaking contract.

Part 1 & 2.

In the last installment of this book forum, I argued that Debt could be read as an attack on the functionalist view of money, which in turn, I think, is an indirect argument on the current state of economics. In this installment, I’ll delve into the middle section of the book, which can be read as another critique of contemporary economic history and theory.

The crux of Debt is a historical review of the origins of money and credit. The big empirical claim is that barter does not exist in most societies, so money can’t be seen as a naturally evolved institution that solves the problem of barter. The next claim that Graeber makes in the middle of Debt is that there is a very important difference between monetized economies and what he called “human economies,”  and that very bad things happen when the two mix. Money is the catalyst for these bad things.

Let’s move on the key distinction in the middle of the book. Graeber views “human economies” as social institutions where people (and objects) are unique and strongly embedded in a web of social relations. Even when money is used, it’s more as a symbol of an obligation or relationship that can’t be payed. It’s not a literal exchange. In contrast, commercial economies are based on using money to exchange impersonal goods that are interchangeable.

In reviewing historical accounts of servitude, slavery, and other forms of domination, Graeber describes how people in human economies become dominated when the come into contact with commercial economies. Essentially what happens is that people participate in spiraling debt traps, which often end up with people pawning themselves and their families in order to seek status, or to pay off “debts” created through violence. Money is what allows people to willingly subjugate themselves to others. Graeber describes this in detail for the Atlantic slave trade and suggests that a similar processes occur in other regions where symbolic debt economies mix up with monetized economies (e.g., Southeast Asian hill people contacting monetized Asian kingdoms).

As you can imagine, Graber (p. 210) makes a striking claim at the end of this section of the book where he claims that modern life is essentially willful subjugation based on a hidden system of violence:

Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate your liberty, at least temporarily, endures. In fact, it determines what most of us have to do for most of our waking hours, except, usually, on weekends. The violence has been largely pushed out of sight. But this is largely because we’re no longer able to imagine what a world based on social arrangements that did not require the continual threat of tasers and surveillance cameras would even look like.

If one were to accept Graeber’s thesis, then one must abandon the view that money is a functional requirement of the economy. Instead, it is a system of illusions that mask the violence that converted pre-modern people into docile modern subjects. Norbert Elias minus the salad fork, but with a credit card, if you will.

After the New Year: societies and debt cycles.

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It’s that time of the year. Yes, that’s right, it’s the season of hand wringing Kwanzaa articles. The Grio, for example, has a yearly tradition of publishing articles claiming it is actually cool and people really do celebrate it. The issue with Kwanzaa isn’t that the holiday was invented by a black nationalist in 1966. A lot of holidays were invented out of thin air and do pretty well. The real issue is that Kwanzaa is complicated. First, it’s too long. Dec 26 to Jan 1 is the official period. Then, it uses a language (Swahili) that isn’t in use in this country. To top it all off, the rituals are complicated. You have to get these candles and foods and so forth. Even though black educational and cultural movements are one of my research specialties, I still can’t remember all the Kwanzaa rituals. Yes, Christmas and Hanukkah are complicated, but, dude, they had, like, over two thousand years to develop. People need time to grow into a new holiday.

My humble suggestion is that Kwanzaa be  drastically simplified:

• Make it one day. December 26 isn’t bad. People are still around for Christmas and it is unclaimed by other holidays.
• Cut it down from seven themes to one or two themes. I suggest “legacy” and “community.”
• Stick to English. If you must use Swahili, just make the two themes Ujima and Kuumba. Don’t use other non-English terms.
• Have one meaningful, but easy to implement, ceremony. My suggestion is that people gather in a circle and testify to either “legacy” or “community.” An elder may give a short recollection of a struggle (“legacy”). A young person may promise to help others in the coming year (“community”). There are other ways to interpret your testimonial.
• Drop the gear, but keep the candles. A nice touch would be to have the candles sit on a cloth made of fabric or pattern associated with the African Diaspora, a practice that is already common among adherents.

If you really love the week long Kwanzaaganza, then, hey, go for it. But I really think a simplified holiday might get a lot more followers.

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In Spring 2012, I will be teaching a course on social movements. The audience is composed of seniors. It is a capstone course.

The first four weeks will be a series of case studies on the following movements:

• The Civil Rights movement
• Women’s rights in America
• The Bolshevik revolution
• The Tea Party

I’m dealing with young folks who won’t have a lot of first hand knowledge of movements. So I am spending one week for each of these four movements. We’ll read the wiki for each, watch some documentaries, etc. The second part of the course will be the traditional social science approach to movements (e.g. theories of grievances, recruitment, etc.).

But I still want people to read a good “here’s the facts” summary for each case. For example: What’s a Bolshevik? What did they want? Who were the Bolshevik leaders? What were the big outcomes of the communist movement? Academic articles rarely do this basic factual description. Before we get to theory, I want people to actually know some cases.

So what short texts are good descriptions of these movements? I don’t want long books, but essays, encyclopedia entries, journalistic summaries, Contexts articles, etc. I need a lot of facts, but I am trying to keep the reading reasonable and the total book costs low.

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The status of books is complicated in sociology. The discipline is heterogeneous in that journal articles and books are both considered valid forms of publication, but the weight given to them varies. For example, I have noticed that book contracts  often get you little notice in the job market. There are some good reasons for this.

For example, many presses will give “advance contracts” that do not promise publication. Rather, they only promise that the book will be reviewed by the press once it is written. Presses need such documents so they know an author has committed to them, but job search/tenure committees are justified in giving them little weight. Advance contracts are written, but many books are never produced. However, books do often make it through the review process and then there is the final contract that is an agreement for publication. That usually happens after peer review. The final contract is approved by the press’ board of directors.

Assuming that the text is original research and not an edited volume, books at this stage (final contract/forthcoming/accepted) usually count for tenure. But my informal observation is that they don’t count much for hiring. In sociology, book oriented scholars usually have an article or two done before the book. Personally, I have known only one scholar whose only “publication” pre-PhD was a book contract and managed to get a decent job. More recently, people whose only publication is the contract have told me that they’ve had a tough time on the job market.

Is my observation accurate? If so, do book contracts deserve their low status? I’ve only been faculty at one soc program that leans heavily in favor of articles, so I’d be interested in the views of faculty at other soc programs and related fields like management, education, and social work.

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Come on, people. Sing along!

Another version, by John Coltrane.

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Previous Ron Paul coverage on orgtheory.

Here’s a an idea. Let’s say that Ron Paul has perfect timing and wins the Iowa caucus, which is on January 3, 2012. It can happen. He’s got good organization, which matters in a small caucus state like Iowa, and a strong brand name. People hate the opposition. After Romney, Paul is the only presidential contender with a remotely decent track record. In 2008, he was getting somewhere between 5% and 15% in various primaries and caucuses. He even came in second place in a few states, like Nevada.

Then Paul hits the “Jesse Jackson ceiling.” Where Jackson could only go so far on the civil rights coalition in the Democratic party, Paul can only go so far on an ideologically pure libertarian platform in the GOP. Fox news hates Paul, as does the GOP establishment which is firmly against Paul. In a best case scenario, Paul wins some more libertarian leaning small states before Romney gets the Northeast, the West and the Mountain states in some sort of Super Tuesday landslide.

Here’s the twist: a semi-successful Paul 2012 run means that there is now a whole network of party activists who love the Paul brand and know the ropes. They’re ready to go if Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – Ron’s son – wants to run. He’s also a fairly pure libertarian in many ways and could easily pick up that wing of the party. If the social conservatives burn out in 2012 and 2016, by running against Democrats during the peak of the business cycle, then the GOP may be ready to let Rand Paul run in 2020 and he might win. The real legacy of Paul’s 2012 primary run may be laying the groundwork for Rand Paul presidency.

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Katherine C. Chen is a loyal reader and guest blogger emeritus. It turns out that she’s an award winning author! Her book, Enabling Creative Chaos, won the 2011 Best Book Prize for the Outstanding Book in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. Required reading for folks interested in volunteers and non-profit organizations. Way to go!!

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We all have gripes about the publishing process.  Scholastica is a cool initiative by set of grad students at the University of Chicago to take the pain out of academic publishing.  Specifically, “Scholastica makes it easy to create and manage peer reviewed journals online by streamlining administrative tasks and helping you find enthusiastic, qualified reviewers.”

Definitely a worthy cause!  Be sure to check Scholastica out.

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As far as I can understand it, the neoconservative view of foreign policy is that the United States should use its military force to promote democracy in other countries. It isn’t too far from the truth to summarize the theory as “democracy by bomb.” There are many critiques of this view. Here, I’d like to offer a new one based on recent events.

One must ask, why do we want to support or create democracies through military force? The main reason is that we want to defend our selves. Democracies have not been hostile toward the United States.

If we accept this answer, then we should ask: what can the US do to promote democracy in other countries? We’ve now had a long time to think about these questions. We have historical evidence. There’s been a few cases where military force has lead to something we’d recognize as democracy. The two examples trotted out are post-war Germany and Japan. It does happen, if the nation of completely subjugated and its institutions demolished.

One must then consider all the nations where force was used and democracy did not appear, or took a generation or more to appear, or where democracies disappeared: Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon, Korea in the 1950s (rule by an autocratic president), the Philippines (colonial era, then Japanese occupation, then short term democracy, followed by dictatorship), Panama (US intervention 1903, then a democracy, then a dictatorship). Afghanistan is a work in progress, at best. When you take a long term view, you realize that the *average* military intervention is dicey at best.

In fact, according to political scientists, democracy seems to be preceded by some economic development and cultural preconditions. Some have argued, like Muller and Seligson, that democracy depends on a culture of gradual reform. In other words, hot heads don’t make for good democrats. Seymour and Lipset, and many others, have claimed that a country needs some level of economic development. Beth Simmons and collaborators have argued that there is strong evidence that international institutions help promote the diffusion of democracy. Few authors have found evidence that being invaded or attacked by other countries leads to democracy.

Then there is the role of social movements. There were anti-colonial revolts in the late 18th/early 19th century; the decolonization of the 1960s which birthed a number of short lived democracies; the anti-communist revolts of the 1980s; anti-authoritarian revolts of the 1990s; and now the Arab Spring. While foreign powers have often intervened, it is often the indigenously developed resources that have made these democratic moments possible.

So if we *really* wanted to increase the community of democracy, if for no other reason than self-protection, we have good reason to follow a mellow, low key approach. Whenever possible, encourage non-violence and gradualism. Then, encourage all nations to participate in international conventions that encourage openness and respect for human rights. Don’t embargo any country except for weapons. Allow economic development and encourage the consumption of cultural goods that depict democratic tolerance. Modestly support democracy movements, but don’t co-opt them. This may not be as satisfying as bombing tryants, who deserve it, but it’s a recipe for long term peace that has a good track record and might actually work.

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It’s folk wisdom among movement scholars that protest doesn’t track very closely with business cycles. The common examples are the 1960s. There are more recent examples (the WTO protest happened in 1999, before the next recession in 2000; Occupy is happening during a recovery).

Question: What citations do we have the document the folk wisdom or refute it?

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According to an NPR story, it’s in a redwood forest in Northern California.

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In the clip below, David Graeber discusses the role of the scholar in movements (etc etc) – in conjunction with a seminar on the book The Human Economy (Polity Press).

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Here’s part 2 of the above talk.  Here’s Keith Hart introducing the edited book (and part 2).

A nice video from Vaclav Havel on the process of becoming a dissident. He will be missed.

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From now until midnight, December 31, 2011:

• You get a free copy of the Grad Skool Rulz if you give $10 or more to the Kickstarter for “The Activists,” a documentary about the antiwar movement. A signed copy of my book, From Black Power to Black Studies, if you give the movie $80. One hour of grad skool advice to any grad student you want for $50.
• Two for one deal on the Rulz: buy one copy and I’ll email a second copy to a buddy for free.

To redeem, send me a receipt of donation or Rulz purchase. Of course, you can stop the begging if you give enough for them to just friggin’ finish their movie!

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Another reason for professors to take back the night. As I was getting an article ready for final publication through the journal publisher website, I was given the option of offering the article as “Open Access”:

I acknowledge that publishing my article with open access costs € 2000 / US $3000 and that this choice is final and cannot be cancelled later.

Whoa. First, any normal publishing industry pays the authors! Second, as the person who authored the work (and is giving it away for free) I am quite frankly appalled by the fact that I would be paying a large sum for free distribution. Sure, I have no beef with a for-profit firm providing a service for a fee, but the crazy price indicates that they are exploiting a monopoly that we have voluntarily given them. In a world with cheap self-publishing alternatives, this is not tolerable. Until we actively come up with an alternative, publishers will continue these extreme pricing practices.

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In an interesting twist, Time’s Person of the Year is not a single person, but a political type – the protester. However, this selection did not make the cover of the US edition according to the Washington Post. Below is the Shepherd Fairey cover. Is that available at the news stand? If nothing else, I hope this will be a boost to movement scholars.

UPDATE: As commenters noted, the Shepher Fairey cover will be on all editions. Thanks for the correction.

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Suppose we are interested in the effects of some social psychological construct that we are theoretically devoted to (let’s say “symbolic racism”) on support (or lack thereof) for (generous) social welfare policies.  In quantitative social science we would spend a lot of money surveying people, collect some data, and ultimately specify a regression model of the form:

Y=a+bW+cX+e      (1)

Where Y is some sort of scale or that lines up individuals in terms of their support for social welfare policies, W is some sort of scale that lines up individuals in terms of their “symbolic racism” is a matrix of other “socio-demographic” stuff and e is a random disturbance.  Suppose further that the model provides support for our theory; b is substantively and statistically significant and its sign goes in the right direction: the more symbolic racism the less support for social welfare policies.  We would then write a paper arguing that individuals who are high in symbolic racism are less likely to support social welfare policies, and this is a likely source of support for the Republican party in the South, we might even insinuate in the conclusion that trends in income inequality would be much less steep if it wasn’t for these darn racists, etc.

I would bet you 10,000 dollars*, however that in actually presenting their results and their implications the authors would say things that are in fact not supported by their statistical model.  In fact we all say or imply these things, especially when W is an attitude (or some other “intra-individual” attribute) and Y is a behavior, and we desire to conclude from a model such as (1) that attitude is a cause of the behavior (the same thing would apply if  the unit of analysis are organizations, and W is some organizational attribute–like the implementation of a “strategy”–and Y is an organizational outcome).

Now suppose even further that W passes all of the (usual) hurdles for something to constitute a cause: it precedes Y, the model is correctly specified on the observables, etc.  My point here is that even if that were true, it is not true that from the fact of observing a large and statistically significant effect of b we can conclude that at the individual level there is some sort of psychological (intra-organizational) process with the same structure as our W  called “symbolic racism” that causes the individual’s support for this or that policy.

An obscure segment of the statistical and psychometrics literature tells us why this is the case (see in particular Borsboom et al 2003):  in order to jump from information that is obtained from a comparison between persons to statements about the data generating process within persons, we must make what is called the local homogeneity assumption.  This assumption is just that; an assumption.  And for the most part it is a shaky one to make.  For b in (1) only gives us information about the conditional distribution of Y responses among the population of subjects as we move across levels of W; it says nothing about causal processes at the individual level. In fact the model that produces responses at the individual level could be wildly different from (1) above and yet it could generate the between-persons result that we observe.  In this respect, the statements:

1a. Our results provide support for the conclusion that in the contemporary United States a person with a high degree of symbolic racism is less likely to support social welfare policies than another person with a lower degree of symbolic racism.

1b. Our results provide support for the conclusion that a person’s support for punitive welfare policies would decrease if their propensity towards symbolic racism were to decrease.

Are empirically and logically independent.  Model (1) only supports 1a, but it says nothing about 1b (or would only say something about 1b under the weight of a host of unsupportable assumptions).  However, whenever we write up results obtained from models such as (1), we sometimes present them as if (or insinuate that) they provide support for 1b.

Startlingly, this lack of (necessary or logical) correspondence between a between-subjects result and the DGP (data-generating process) at the individual level implies that most statistical models are useless for the sort of thing that people think that they are good for (draw conclusions about mechanisms at the level of the person/organization).   Not only that, it implies that a model that provides a good explanatory fit for within individual variation (let’s say a growth curve model of the factors that account for individual support for social welfare across the life course) might be radically different from the  one that provides the best fit in the between-persons context.  Finally, it implies a “rule” of sociological method: “whenever a within-subject explanation is extracted from a between subjects analysis we can be sure that this explanation is (probably) false (at least for most non-trivial outcomes in social science).”

*I don’t actually have 10,000 dollars.

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. From NPR, a summary of his career:

In his student days, he was a leftist, opposed to the Vietnam War; he later wrote for the New Statesman before coming to the U.S. in the early 1980s to write for The Nation magazine. His anti-American writings, informed by his socialism, yielded over time to a muscular defense of Western and particularly American values. During another of his frequent NPR appearances, Hitchens said he sought to counteract people he considered apologists for Islamo-fascism

More than any particular position, I always admired Hitchins for a strong, blunt writing style. He embodies the best in polemical essay writing. A great writer who will be sorely missed.

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From a recent Slate article: According to recent Census data analysis, 48% of the American population lives near or below the poverty line.

Based on some new designations the Census Bureau created to better reflect the distribution of poverty in the US, the AP explains that 97.3 million Americans are “low income,” which means earning at or just over the poverty line. Added to the 49.1 million Americans living in poverty, that’s 146.4 million, or about 48 percent, of the U.S. population. The new account of poverty in the U.S. considers medical, taxes and transportation costs.

Once can argue around the margins, but the overall picture is clear. It’s not just income differences that have changed, buying power has stagnated as well.

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Part 1.

I.

I often teach the graduate course that introduces students to major themes of macro-sociology. I start off with rational choice theory, which, as you can imagine, triggers teeth grinding rage. I then ask students: “If people aren’t following their preferences, then what are they doing?” Answer: silence.

Of course, there are good answers to this question. Most economists, especially behavioral economists, would probably argue for a model that is close to rational choice, but includes biases. Sociologists often take this a step further and argue that people respond to social conventions, follow norms, heuristics, or employ cultural tool kits. The difference between the textbook rational choice model and what many sociologists believe lies not in the maximizing part of the model but in how individuals construct the options and judge alternatives.

I bring up this pedagogical example because contemporary economics is built on a number of simple assumptions that appear obvious and incontrovertible but can actually be successfully critiqued. The surface plausibility of standard economics is hard to argue with by novices, which is why first year graduate students often get stumped by the question I asked.

One important difference between economists and other social scientists lies in their willingness to entertain serious alternatives to the rational choice model. Psychologists are  so used to thinking about different models of decision making that they find the insistence on the rational choice model a bit puzzling.

The problem, however, is that for many routine social science questions, it is hard to articulate a simple alternative model that is easy to understand and can easily be the foundation for normal science. The rational choice model has handful of simple axioms, it’s easy to formalize, and easy to tweak.

II.

So what does this have to do with David Graber’s book on this history of debt? Aside from being a radical criticism of debt, Graeber offers one of the few successful attacks on academic economic theory. He doesn’t attack the rational choice model directly. Rather, he, in my view, attacks one of the core ideas of economics that is tied to the rational choice model.

When you read the nitty gritty of economics, you often see the following jump. You start with a description of the rational choice axioms: people have options, rank them, and act upon them in a consistent way. The jump is this: money is the natural way that you should figure out what people prefer. Money is the natural expression of needs and the money economy is the natural resolution of the economic problem of distributing goods. Without money, you’d need to barter to pursue your own personal goals and that’s very inefficient.

The first chunk of Graeber’s book is a anthropological account of barter. Where does it exist?   Is it actually true that the money economy represents a solution to the problem of barter? Graeber claims that barter is actually exceedingly rare. According to him, barter makes little sense at all. Why pile up on specialized goods and wait for other people to pile up on what you want and then trade? That’s bizarre.

Instead, what happens in most non-monetized cultures is that people engage in generalized exchange. If you need X, Fred will give you X, but you (or someone else in the group) has to help Fred sometime later. Thus, most groups engage in a debt economy, not a direct trade (barter) economy. Of course, there are some exceptions, such as trade between hostile groups or prisoners from Western societies. But overall, Graeber claims that the overwhelming theme in economic ethnography is that barter simply doesn’t exist.

The conclusion? Adam Smith was wrong to say that people have a natural tendency to “truck and barter.” Why? It’s a strange, unintuitive form of economic exchange. Therefore, money is not the natural solution to barter, since barter, for the most part, does not exist.

III.

According to Graeber, the anthropology literature, composed of observations of dozens and dozens of societies, undermines the link between self-interest and modern capitalist institutions. Classical economists, as well as their contemporaries, have made a deep error in assuming that a Western economic practice is the natural functional solution to economic issues that arise in all societies. I myself have even promoted this argument in my undergraduate class on economic sociology.

We’ll discuss the next step in Graber’s argument next week, but for now, I’ll conclude on the implications of Graeber’s attack on the barter-money link. If direct exchange of goods (barter) is not the embodiment of rational action, then what is? The answer, I think, is generlized exchange. A true believer in economics text books would correctly point out that generalized exchange can be described in terms of utility functions. Fair enough, but that’s not the point.

The real deep point is that monetary exchange, credit markets, and a whole host of other modern financial institutions are in no way natural. Furthermore, there’s actually an alternative to price theory, which uses money as it’s main variable (e.g., “clearing price”). The anthropologist’s version economics would start with indirect exchange as the main variable, which has a better claim to universality than prices, and then describe all institutions as recorders and shufflers of debt.

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More evidence that our medical priorities are mixed up. Consider the following question. Who will help you live a longer, better life?

1. The surgeon who replaces your lungs at age 55.
2. The therapist who helps you quit smoking at age 25.

Answer #2 is correct, if you assume that decades of emphysema-free life is better than a few extra years with a damaged body. Now, consider the follow up question: Who gets paid more? The surgeon.

This shows a distortion in medical spending priorities. Good health can be obtained through low tech, low cost activities such as diet, moderate exercise, safe driving, not drinking to excess, not smoking, and avoiding drugs. Much of the health improvements in the West are due to improvements in sanitation, immunization, and improved nutrition.

However, the professions behind these improvements rarely command the salaries that surgeons get. This is because we are myopic and pay for hero medicine. Doctors are specialists in procedures aimed at dramatic medical procedures – trauma, cancer treatment, and so forth. We are lucky to have people who can do these things, but in terms of overall health, they are often small potatoes compared to people who immunize us and feed us. But, as humans, we focus on hero medicine because of a bias toward highly visible and short term problems over slower, more long term problems, like diet or smoking cessation. For that reason, the people who help us the most are often paid much less than those who can help us the least.

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I hadn’t read this before – an autobiographical essay by Clifford Geertz: A Life of Learning (pdf).   If you want a quick afternoon reprieve, it’s well worth reading.

Over the last year, I have been asked this question at least three times:

What advice do you have for graduate students at low status programs? I’m publishing, I’m working with faculty who are publishing, but I feel like I’m at  a disadvantage. What should I do?

A few responses:

1. You have to come to grips with the fact that academia is status oriented. People from more prestigious schools will get breaks that you won’t get. Once you have accepted that fact, move on with your life and stop thinking about it.

2. Overcompensate. Fortunately, there are a lot of good journals. In soc, we have 2 (or 4) lead journals, a number of specialty journals, and good journals in related fields that will be acceptable within sociology. Submit enough times and you will succeed.

3. Choose your mentors wisely. Lower ranked schools have heterogeneous faculty. Some professors are just as accomplished as those at elite schools, while others have not kept up. Choose advisers who remain active. Hang out with the winners.

4. Think long term. In a low information environment, people rely in status. In a high information environment, people rely less on status. As you progress in you career, you will find that people who are quality researchers and teachers are rare. And if you can bring in grant money, even better. Thus, there are chances to rise to the top if you are consistently good. Check the directories of leading programs and you’ll always see some graduates of non-elite programs.

5. Don’t do anything to reinforce negative impressions. Don’t settle for book chapters or publications in obscure journals until you have at least one or two publications in more highly regarded places.

Overall, there is an uphill battle to be fought, but there is a plausible long-term strategy that you can execute and it has a reasonable chance of success. Now get back to work – and buy the grad skool rulz book!

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How can I send an old tweet to myself as an email? In other words, if I see a tweet from last year from a buddy, how can I send it to my email account?

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Sally Hillsman, executive officer of the ASA, gave me permission to post this email:

I just read your October 26, 2011 posting on OrgTheory. I wanted to assure you that the ASA has been working extremely hard for a number of years on federal human subjects regulations in close collaboration with COSSA (the executive committee of which I chair) and other social science organizations, as well as AAAS. Most recently, we collaborated with a group of social science associations to submit a very detailed response to the HHS regarding their proposed directions for change in the Common Rule.  It is on the ASA home page http://www.asanet.org/ .  Footnotes has covered it as well; the forthcoming issue will have an editorial on the issue.

This is only the latest in a long series of substantive work ASA staff and members have done on these issues with HHS and Congress, including beating back the last Congressional move to make research more difficult without improving the protection of human subjects. We will continue. I hope you will have time to review the ASA joint submmission to HHS on our website. If you have anything to contribute to our thinking on these matters, I would be very interested in hearing from you. Please do keep in touch.

Please read the document (link here) and use the comments section. IRB reform is very important.

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Here’s a web page listing and linking to dozens of manifestos (some famous ones and some I’ve never heard of): manifestos.net.

Public radio Bloomington (WFIU) did a study of the academic units at Indiana and Purdue that gave the most and least A’s. Sociology? The 1oth toughest department in terms of giving A’s!

SOURCE: IU & Purdue Registrar grade distribution data, Spring 2011. Excludes courses with three or fewer students, for which grad

Social theory students, you’re getting coal in the stockings this year.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Attention comic book fans: the complete Elfquest (6500+ pages) is online and free. Family friendly and truly addictive for those with a taste for fantasy comics.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

My post on writing your dissertation has been republished by Inside Higher Education Check it out!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Over at that other blog I’ve been linking to some free online courses that start January 2012.  I’ll add the links here as well:

• Chuck Eesley (Stanford) is teaching a course on technology entrepreneurship. (I exchanged emails with Chuck – he has a mere 33,000 people signed up for the class so far.)
• Scott Page (Michigan) is teaching a course on model thinking.
• Matthew Jackson and Yoav Shoham (Stanford) are teaching a course on game theory.

Exciting to see courses taught like this on a massive scale, online and free!

Now – when will the first online organization theory courses show up?  What about strategy?  Hopefully soon.