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Richard “Pete” Peterson, one of the original founders of the ASA section on Culture died yesterday.  It is a strange feeling, since I actually never knew him very well, yet it seems like somebody I actually was close to is now gone.  Two great culture scholars who actually did know him closely have more personal reflections here and here.  My only major interaction with him was at Boston ASA were I actually felt useful for once:  he needed to go to an ASA session that was way across one of those weird tubes that connect the various buildings and I was going to that same session (Paul DiMaggio was presenting a paper).  When we got there, Pete said to Paul: “Hey Paul, Lizardo helped me get here.” Score!

Peterson (1979) wrote one of the two–the other one being of course Swidler (1986)–key theoretical articles that helped shake the study of culture in sociology out its Parsonian hangover.  Peterson was clear that they key was to get away from culture and values and towards the empirical study of culture as “expressive symbols.”  Although a healthy return to studying values empirically has been enacted of late, a lot of us wouldn’t be making a living without this reorientation of the field.  One of Peterson’s major contributions was in taking a good dose of Columbia style organizational sociology (via Gouldner) and some non-negligible industrial economics to bring empirical specificity to the study of what Hirsch referred to as culture industry systems.  This came packaged as the “production” approach to the study of culture.  His famous distillation of the production approach as “6-step” model is still one of the greatest things to teach undergrads (Peterson 1985; see also Peterson 1990 on Rock and Roll).

Today, after hundreds of articles and enough books to fill out a couple of shelves, we have learned more about the production side of culture than seemed possible a mere 30 years ago (see Peterson and Anand 2004 for the latest review, and see DiMaggio 2000 for a retrospective). It is important to underscore however, that for Peterson the production perspective was a general perspective on the study of all forms of culture, including, science and religion in addition to the arts (the classic ABS special issue that he edited in 1976 is still a must read).

Yet, it was in studying the consumption side (it should be noted that very few scholars, this side of Pierre Bourdieu have actually been able to make theoretical contributions on both sides of the production/consumption divide), that Peterson would make what may in the end be remembered as his most enduring contribution.  First, in re-defining measures of cultural behavior away from the loaded terms inherited from mass culture approaches as “patterns of cultural choice” (Peterson 1983). Then in a series of now classic papers in the early and mid-1990s (Peterson 1992; Peterson and Simkus 1993; Peterson and Kern 1996) revolutionizing the study of arts participation with his proposal that the best way to describe the cultural stratification system of the United States was not as an “elite-mass” division but one premised on the division between omnivores and univores. We are still digesting and exploring the wide-ranging implications of this Kuhnian gestalt shift, as omnivores and univores appear to show up everywhere we look (Peterson 2005).

So maybe that’s why I feel like I knew Pete so well even if I really didn’t: those citations (Peterson 1992, Peterson and Kern 1996, Peterson 2005) roll out of my keyboard and into almost every paper that I write almost automatically.  I think they will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Last week I started reading Matthew Desmond’s On the Fireline, a fascinating ethnography of wildland firefighting in Arizona that explores the nature of this highly unpredictable work and the organizational setting that facilitates risk-taking among firefighters. Desmond, who wrote this book as a PhD student in sociology (wow!), was an experienced firefighter before he began the official study and so the ethnography is unusually detailed and nuanced. What surprised me about the book was how organizational the analysis was. Although the book is written from the theoretical perspective of a symbolic interactionist and cultural sociologist – Goffman meets Bourdieu – the organizational setting figures prominently. Desmond could just as easily have written this book as a contribution to organizational theory, especially to the literature on work, routines, and bureaucratic rules. He investigates how firefighters engage with the rules of firefighting. On the one hand, they are extremely diligent in emphasizing safety rules and response routines (e.g., the regional leader regularly drills the fighters on “The Ten Standard Fire Orders and the Eighteen Situations that Shout ‘Watch Out!’”, making them perform push-ups if they forget one), but on the other hand, rules and routines are often stretched or discarded in particular firefighting situations. When reacting to a fire, rather than follow rules precisely, the firefighters rely on their intuitive know-how, which Desmond refers to as their “organizational common sense.”

By organizational common sense, I mean the set of unquestioned assumptions beneath organizational behavior and dialogue, tacitly agreed on by members of the organization, that buttresses organizational orthodoxy and ensures consensus among members of the organization. The degree to which people comply with the practices and doctrines of an organization depends, above all, on the degree to which they accept the elementary set of givens, the unspoken common code, that makes organizational thinking and behavior possible. When individuals accept the common sense of the organization – when they begin to think as the organization thinks (without thinking about it), to develop a professional disposition constituted by the culture of the organization, and to accept systems of classification it assigns – they are able to function within it as ‘productive members’ whose productivity, of course, contributes to the reproduction of the organization’s common sense (emphasis mine; 117-118).

Desmond isn’t saying that organizational members just replace one set of formal routines or rules for another more informal set of prescribed behaviors. It becomes clear throughout the ethnography that the common sense he refers to actually enables members of the organization to solve problems, deal with uncertainty, and react to danger. Organizational common sense is the unspoken code that coworkers share that gives them flexibility in applying formal rules, routines, etc. For firefighters, this common sense cannot simply be acquired by experience but is a part of their cultural DNA, or habitus, which he calls “country masculinity.” People who don’t acquire the country masculine habitus growing up in a rural area are unlikely to pick it up later. Thus, the organization of wildland firefighting relies heavily on recruiting from areas of the country where people are trained and socialized with this particular cultural toolkit.

Although Desmond doesn’t make this connection (mainly because he’s writing to a different audience), his study helps bridge the gap between micro and macro-explanations of how routines and culture gets translated into organizational practices. People who are critical of an overly-top-down view of organizational learning and routine-building ought to pay attention to Desmond’s interesting study. Do you hear me Teppo?

Jason’s last post brought up some good issues about research on higher ed. But I side with the skeptics a bit. We actually know a bit about higher ed, even if it’s not recognized as a formal specialty in sociology or management. Consider the following:

• Access and outcomes: We know a lot about who gets into higher ed and why. We also know who graduates.
• Life course: We know quite a bit about life course – how going to college allows you to get into better segments of the labor market and how it affects long term well being such as health.
• Org population: We know a fair amount about the organizational population, especially the liberal arts and research sectors.
• Sociology of science: We know a lot about the work inside higher ed. It’s called the sociology of science. We know about citations, pay, career patterns, & productivity of scholars.
• Global diffusion: We know a fair amount about the international growth of higher ed.

Here’s the big gaps in higher ed research:

• Dark matter: There are 7,000+ institutions of higher ed. A small fraction are research schools or liberal arts schools. There’s an ocean of community colleges, vocational schools, and biblical colleges. In sociology, researchers know very little about this sector. In higher ed programs, there’s actually some knowledge about the community colleges.
• Boundary zones: As Jason eloquently pointed out, higher ed is close to every major institution. Jason’s own research on bio-tech and the academy is about one such border zone, which may explain why he thinks higher ed is  understudied. These zones *are* understudied.
• Organizational Forms: We know very little about the organizational forms of higher ed. For example, are business schools always found with medical schools? Structurally, how are the biblical colleges different than other liberal arts colleges?  The “blue print” issue is pretty much unexplored. This may be a variant of the dark matter problem.
• Professorial and student politics: Here we have a lot of empirical facts and research, but no great theory to tie it all together. My work is one attempt to get at this.
• Organizational culture: There’s a whole area in higher ed called “Student affairs” and deals with how people get through the university. There isn’t any grand theory of how students experience the university that would satisfy a hard core sociologist. It’s practitioner oriented.
• Deans and other administrators: Aside from the occasional study of university presidents, social scientists are almost silent on deans and provosts, who weild real power in universities. This is similar to soc of ed: tons on teachers, almost nothing on principals.
• State-college relations: Once again, most social scientists are silent governance.
• Learning: What do people retain from college? Does any of it help aside from the professions?
• Graduate education: Except for Burris’ piece on the academic job market in sociology, there’s a pitiful amount of sociological research on graduate education.

A related issue is that higher ed research is often seen as “navel gazing.” I was told that by some prominent  folks in grad school. This struck me as bizarre. Higher ed is probably the third or fourth largest industry in America and you need to go through to get anywhere. Also, a lot of great classical and modern sociologists have studied higher ed. Among my contemporaries, I count Kieran (philosophers), Jason (bio-tech), Neil Gross (professor politics), Marion Fourcade (the economics profession), Elizabeth Armstrong (college sex cultures), Michael Sauder (status/law schools), Michele Lamont (culture and judgment among profs) and Mitchell Stevens (admissions). Classical sociologists  include Durkheim, Parsons, Weber, and Bourdieu. Maybe people don’t realize this and think higher ed research is trivial. But it’s really important.

Anyway, I say the glass is half full. In a lot of areas, we have the answers. But there are some pretty massive gaps, and that’s a good thing for all the grad students out there.

I. Mark Chiang’s book, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University, is an addition to the growing literature on ethnic studies and multiculturalism in the academy. It discusses an issue that, suprisingly, has not recieved much attention in the literature: what’s the deal with Asian American Studies? Is it a discipline? Is there really an “Asian America” that you can study in the same way that there’s a Black America?

Chiang’s approach draws heavily on Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic capital. His goal is to understand the academic object that Asian Americanists have developed and how that relates to different audiences inside and outside of the academy – the “cultural capital of the field.” In true Bourdieu-ian fashion, Chiang tries to explain how the object of Asian American Studies enabled the creation of the field. Perhaps Chiang’s biggest insight is that this ultimately required a form of “nonrepresentative representation.” In more plain language, you can’t act as a political advocate in your scholarship for Asian Americans. Instead, you must abstractly study their culture.

Long time readers of this blog know that the evolution of Black Studies has been a central focus of my research. Thus, I am very  interested in how a Bourdieu-ian analysis differs from my very anti-Bourdieu-ian take on things. Chiang and I both agree on the basic dilemma for ethnic studies. The ethnic studies movement was very community oriented, but exists in an institutional framework that imposes a Mertionian universalism. You must strive to be value free and non-political in your work. Chiang and I also agree that ethnic studies has experienced a corresponding shift to professionalism. Community members and activists do not define later generations of ethnic studies. De-radicalization is required for acceptance into the field. Very Bourdieu.

Here’s where we depart. Chiang, I think, views Asian American Studies as a field that has shifted to a professional mode where value is determined through technical skill. For example, he relies on this view when describing a highly contentious dispute in 1999 over a book award (more below). He thinks the conflict revolved around those who valued the book in question on its technical features, while opponents focused more on negative representations of characters from specific ethnic groups. Thus, a focus on the technical analysis of Asian American culture, rather than representation of Asian American people, is the “cultural capital” of the field.

In contrast, I would suggest that Asian American Studies, like Black Studies, might be in a sort of intermediate position that allows for both highly technocratic discourse and political advocacy, which in turn affects the rest of the university. This is the position I took in Chapter 7 of From Black Power. In other words, ethnic studies retains an oppositional stance because it is situated within a mainstream institution while being highly reflexive. Very un-Bourdieu.

II. Let me now change subjects by discussing the concluding chapter that focsuses on the dispute over the 1999 Association for Asian American Studies book award. The essence of the dispute was that Filipino activists and academics believed that Lois-ann’s Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging relied heavily on negative stereotypes of Filipino characters. This is a very sensitive issue because Filipinos and other Pacific islanders are low status in Hawaii. Not surprisingly, Yamanaka’s texts had generated intense feelings before, during, and after the award. Here’t the Atlantic Monthly on the controversy. In covering this part of the book, let me disclose that I am married to a person who strongly opposed the award, so I’ll tread lightly here. It’s also important to note that Chiang admits that he voted to revoke the book award.

Chiang’s explanation of the conflict was that it reflected unresolved tensions about the field’s basic object of study – Asian America.  By engaging in nonrepresentative representation, the AAAS book award committee engaged in a highly technical analyis that viewed the negatively portrayed Filipino characters as a literary tool. The opponents thought that was disingenuous, in the same way that whites sometimes exonerate themselves from racist utterances by insisting that it was ironic or humorous.  Chiang casts this episode as a fight between those with the right kinds of capital (AAAS insiders) and those who don’t (Filipino academics and writers).  It was a fight, ultimately, between those who worked with the idea of Asian American Studies as the study of culture against those who promoted Asian American Studies as the representation of the community.

Now, it is likely true that the book award committee saw themselves as rewarding a book on technical grounds. It seemed to me, at the time and now ten years later, that the conflict was about something much larger and it wasn’t cultural nationalism in ethnic studies. The ultimate root of the conflict was about ethnic hierarchy. Yamanaka’s books had already attracted considerable critique, but what really triggered outrage was that a professional association that was rewarding someone who benefited from racial inequalities that the association was supposed to be against. In other words, Asian American Studies had built an egalitarian identity around this idea of studying a pan-ethnic community. Yet, this same community was rewarding an author for exploiting some very real inequalities. The book award signalled to a marginalized group that their inferior position could be used to win awards.

To be fair to Chiang, he does address this issue from time to time in the text. For example, he notes that Yamanaka is highly dismissive of protesters and tells them to write their own novels. Chiang correctly notes that some groups don’t have regular access to publishers, so they are reduced to complaining about other people’s books. Chiang is clearly sympathetic. Chiang also notes that protestors pushed their own policy proposal to minimize ethnic inequality within Asian American Studies. However, these issues are subverted to a narrative about nonrepresentative representation.

It might have more useful to describe two parallel problems for Asian American Studies. First, the field has to contend with an institutional system that demands value free inquiry. The solution to the problem is “nonrepresentative representation.” Second, the field is egalitarian in its ethos, but its members are stratified by nationality and have unequal access to the academic system. This problem is unsolved. These are distinct, but interrelated, issues and recognizing them more clearly I think could have improved the analysis of the book award incident.

III. Even though I critique Chiang a bit, I feel that this is an important book for anyone interested in the dynamics of ethnic studies. It expands on issues in my book, Amy Binder’s book Contentious Curricula, Small’s article on Black Studies, Boxer’s work on women’s studies, and Yamane’s book on multiculturalism. It’s also useful because it’s both an insider’s account and uses analytic tools from the social sciences and humanities. Recommended.

I very much enjoyed Market Rebels by Huggy Rao. Here’s a clip from my review in Contemporary Sociology:

Rao’s account touches on a deep issue in sociology, the wide spread adoption of social movement theory. Scholars in multiple areas have employed concepts such as resource mobilization and framing to understand how actors promote their interests in contentious ways. This research has been successful in showing that contention appears in fields as diverse as product innovation, higher education, culture, and public policy (e.g., Van Dyke, Soule, and Taylor 2004; Rojas 2007). An important finding is that movements do not limit themselves to states, nor is contentious behavior limited to marginal groups. The investor who rallies fellow stockholders in a public dispute with management is not much different from the student activist conducting a campus sit-in.

This conceptual development mirrors Bourdieu’s field and habitus theories. Just as every social domain has symbolic resources that can be used to acquire status and position, every domain has its own version of mobilization and contentious change. It is not surprising that Rao’s work coincides with recent scholarship promoting a “field centered” theory of social movements (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). In this research, movements are best described as responses to conditions within specific domains, not as inherently state-oriented behaviors. Rao’s work only reinforces this view.

The question for sociology, and social science more generally, is whether one might accept the field-centered view. Not only does the work of Bourdieu and the organizational institutionalists depend on it, but so does the work of Rao and nearly every other scholar who depicts social change as driven by mobilized actors and the framings they use. For these reasons, books like Market Rebels push the frontiers of sociology by raising fundamental questions: how far can field theory go, and how do the assumptions of field theory affect sociological analysis and research on specific processes within fields (e.g., contention within markets)? Market Rebels is the beginning of the answer and sociology is much better for it.

Read Brayden’s take here and here.

I was rereading him a bit over the weekend, though. Ian Craib once remarked that Talcott Parsons’ approach to social theory put him in mind of an office clerk who was too intelligent for his job, and so passed the time by devising ever more complicated ways to file the very dull paperwork he was assigned. Luhmann, of course, felt that Parsons was not nearly abstract enough. I was struck by Luhmann’s opening remarks, “Instead of a Preface to the English Edition”, of Social Systems:

This is not an easy book. It does not accommodate those who prefer a quick and easy read, yet do not want to die without a taste of systems theory. This holds for the German text, too. If one seriously undertakes to work out a comprehensive theory of the social and strives for sufficient conceptual precision, abstraction and complexity in the conceptual architecture are unavoidable. Among the classical authors, Parsons included, one finds a regrettable carelessness in conceptual questions—as if ordinary language were all that is needed to create ideas or even texts. … Translating the book into English multiplies the difficulties, because English, unlike German, does not permit one to transform unclarities into clarities by combining them in a single word. Instead, they must be spread out into phrases. From the perspective of English, German appears unclear, ambiguous, and confusing. But when the highest imperative is rigor and precision, it makes good sense to allow ambiguities to stand, even deliberately to create them, in order to indicate that in the present context further distinctions or specifications are not important.

Where have I heard this sort of attitude before? Here is the “Preface to the English-Language Edition” of Distinction*:

In its form, too, this book is “very French”. This will be understood if the reader accepts that, as I try to show, the mode of expression characteristic of a cultural production always depends on the laws of the market in which it is offered … [T]he style of the book, whose long, complex sentences may offend—constructed as they are with a view to reconstituting the complexity of the social world in a language capable of holding together the most diverse things while setting them in rigorous perspective—stems partly from the endeavour to mobilize all the resources of the traditional modes of expression, literary, philosophical, or scientific, so as to say things that were de facto or de jure excluded from them, and to prevent the reading from slipping back into the simplicities of the smart essay or the political polemic.

If you are like me, this sort of thing makes you want to find the nearest Grand Theorist and beat them to death with a copy of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Confessing such irritation, of course, forces one to play the role either of positivist philistine or plain-speaking old blowhard — an unpleasant choice of critical positions which, I daresay, was just what Bourdieu had in mind when he had the barefaced cheek to type the passage above. Luhmann plays the same game. But I wonder whether an unwillingness to accommodate the simple-minded is a wise strategy for someone who cares have his work remembered at all. Even Hume took the trouble to condense and then rewrite his Treatise after it fell dead-born from the press.

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* Which did make it onto the syllabus. Draw your own conclusions.

It seems like everyone wants to talk about social mechanisms these days.  As Neil Gross points out in his paper, “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms,” no fewer than five different sociological views on social mechanisms have popped up in the last decade. Why the sudden interest in mechanisms? One reason, I think, is that macro-sociological theories have lacked preciseness as causal explanations. Focusing on mechanisms draws attention to the underlying causal pathways in our macro models of society. The same impetus has spurred the call for more research on micro-foundations (you might even say that microfoundations = social mechanisms).

Gross enters this fray and tries to introduce some order with an encompassing definition of social mechanisms:

A social mechanism is a more or less general sequence or set of social events or processes analyzed at a lower order of complexity or aggregation by which—in certain circumstances—some cause X tends to bring about some effect Y in the realm of human social relations. This sequence or set may or may not be analytically reducible to the actions of individuals who enact it, may underwrite formal or substantive causal processes, and may be observed, unobserved, or in principle unobservable (364).

The first part of the definition is pretty standard, I think. Going to a lower level of explanation helps us understand how properties at the focal level of analysis come to be. So, for example, if you want to explain how organizations set strategy, you need to understand how individuals within the organization interact and how their individual beliefs, knowledge, etc. combine to shape strategic choices. Simple enough, right? Gross’s definition departs from previous definitions, however, in recognizing there is a great deal of variation in the kinds of mechanisms that people may impute in a causal process. Some are observable, some are not. Some are formal (i.e., they are universal and appear in almost every setting), while others are specific to the domain of interest.  This last sentence introduces a lot of variability into the study of mechanisms. Rather than searching for a fixed set of causal mechanisms that govern the universe of human relations (e.g., networks in everything or markets in everything), Gross wants to give scholars the leeway to identify a rich index of mechanisms that work quite differently across time and space. Gross’s aim here is to make mechanisms-oriented research more historically and culturally relative.

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Crooked Timber has a guest blogger – Michele Lamont! Very cool. Read her first post, which is about whether philosophers do things that preclude them from engaging with other disciplines. Here’s my take on the topic (e.g., yes, philosophers like formality, and other humanities types don’t), which was written in response to Kieran’s Michigan talk on status within the philosophy profession (scroll down here to get the recording of the lecture). At orgtheory, we’ve discussed Lamont’s recent work on evaluation and her super cool deconstruction article. Also read this new Crooked Timber  post on Lamont’s view of the philosophy profession.

In this post, I want your opinion on the following social theory conjecture: Bourdieu’s sociology is successful because it draws on three of the four main streams of modern sociology. To see why I might say this, consider the following summary of Bourdieu’s main concepts:

• There are “social fields” – socially constructed domains defined by a type of  action (e.g., the state, the arts, the market).
• These domains of action have their own “capital” – resources that can be used to further one’s position and create more resources (see Sean’s post).
• These domains also have hierarchies based on the creation and destruction of field specific capital, and even “doxa,” the range of what can be expressed within a social field. In other words, a field is a whole bunch of things.
• Habitus – the deeply help dispositions that reflect an individual’s internalization of the rules and values associated with that domain.
• All of this is terribly endogenous (“self-structuring structrues… yada yada“).

If you buy this thumbnail sketch – and it omits much – then you can easily see that Bourdieu’s theory is highly constructionist. It’s also fairly obvious that he draws on critical theory – Marxian class analysis is obviously one inspiration for how he views capital and habitus (think of “class culture” in Distinction).

The more controversial claim is that Bourdieu draws on a very basic form of rational choice theory. If you read Introduction to Reflexive Sociology, Bourdieu is asked whether this is true and he just says the comparison is off base. I think Bourdieu is sort of wrong, but not totally. Specifically, he responds to Becker’s rational choice theory and I think Bourdieu is correct in drawing the distinction. The homo economicus is very different than the mood driven habitus. Explicit calculation is simply not the main variable of Bourdieu’s theory.

On the other hand, striving for status and attention is an implicit, ecological view of strategic behavior. Field based actors do strategically try to defend their turf using their resources, even if they ways they do it are not always conscious or well articulated. I call this “ecological” competition because biological and social ecology theories depict actors who must compete over space/resources with inherited traits/strategies that do emerge from conscious calculation.

The final claim of this post is that Bourdieu pretty much circumvents a fourth type of sociology – the values/institutions/social structure stream associated with the old & new institutionalists, Parsons, and network analysts. It’s pretty obvious that he’s not a big fan of functionalism or of any theory focusing on the links between values and orgs/networks/institutions. For him, the hierarchy is the principal model of social organization and hierarchies are just visible manifestations of who has the capital. Sociology is about explaining who’s making and breaking these hierarchies and using the capital. If you really believe that, there’s not much point in talking about networks, decoupling, logics, or any other stuff associated with the values & structures branch of sociology, even though Bourdieu gets many “respect citations” from that crowd.

So, orgheads, a fair assessment of Bourdieu? Post your reactions in the comments!

The rap against sociology is that it’s an incoherent discipline. There’s definitely an element of truth in that view, but the case is overstated. I think the right way to say it is that sociology has a handful of major traditions and none of them has stamped out the others. What are they? I count four major traditions in soc world:

1. Hard core interactionism/social constructionism: Social reality is defined mainly by how it’s enacted in specific situations and these vary quite a bit.  Moreover, interactions aren’t necessarily reducible to the broader social order. The more radical elements of this tradition run into post-modernism – there is no coherent social reality because it’s created differently in different contexts (i.e., no coherent self). You see it also pop up in the strong sociology of knowledge (construction of ideas may have little to do with “reality”).
2. Critical social theory: The basis of social reality is power. This can be defined in economic terms (Marx), race (DuBois), or gender (feminists). Or it can be generically defined (Bourdieu). Most of social life boils down to struggle over the stuff that gives your power, or resisting the power.
3. Values, institutions, and relations: This is the broad trend stemming from Weber and Durkheim. The basic elements of VI&R are that human communities have values, which are translated into order via rules, organizations, and institutions. This basic set up motivates everyone from Parsons, to Selznick, to Sumner, to Luhmann, to the world polity crowd. The flavors may be different, but they’re all about the push and pull between values and structure.
4. Resources and Action: This strand represents what might be called the “economic view” on things. Psychology and values are strongly de-emphasized and you just work on strategic action. The old version was called “social exchange.” Now we call it rational choice. But the R&A tent is big enough to catch some other types of sociology. Organizational ecology – psychology thin and focusing on competition – fits here as well. So might lightly theoretical stratification research.

This scheme won’t catch everything. For example, demography rarely focuses on institutions and interactions, so it doesn’t fit here. A-theoretical areas of sociology, like network analysis, or applied statistics, don’t fit either. But when you think about it, each box in the typology offers an object of study, a vocabulary for studying society, and a set of preferred explanations.

N+1 magazine has a lengthy response by Gideon-Lewis Kraus to Neil Gross’ book on Rorty.  Here’s the previous orgtheory review of Gross. Choice clips – Kraus’ thinks Gross’ focus on self-concept is lame:

Gross ends up trying to turn Bourdieu on his head. He has replaced a story about obedience to an all-encompassing environmental force with a story about the dictates of an adamantine inner one. What he has taken over from Rorty is the idea that a teleology of social status may say more about the self-importance of sociologists than it does about the behavior of actual people. But Gross cannot untether himself from teleology.

Kraus trashes Rorty (and Gross) for too much introspection and professional “knowingness”:

In the late sixties, Rorty began to refashion himself as a participant in wider communities because American philosophy was, even to the most casual observer, irrelevant to the rest of American cultural life. But it was a moment where sociology had yet to succumb to the pressure to professionalize. (Gross’s book is fine on the causes of disciplinary professionalization: vast increases in postwar university enrollment due to the GI Bill and a general rise in affluence, coupled with Cold War interest in university science and a new, post-Hiroshima admiration for the structure of scientific inquiry, among other factors, led to a need for bureaucratic entrenchment designed to credential more efficiently the growing middle class and to gain funding by aping the guys over in the physics building.) While philosophers were writing articles in Zapf Dingbats for a select conspiracy of moon-men, sociologists were still happy to write books like The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and The Triumph of the Therapeutic.

In light of what has happened to sociology since then, I suspect it is no accident that Gross has written a book in which attentive fidelity to disciplinary objectives is characterized as “strategic,” and in which a thinker becomes interesting and broadly relevant once he’s decided to inquire, in a mood of expansiveness and curiosity, about what other thinkers see as the centers of human life. I’d like to imagine, then, that the secret furious wish of Gross’s book is the idea that he might, in unsettling the reliance on ideas of status and strategy by gesturing toward a more robust way to talk about academic decision-making, assist in the rehabilitation of his field. He might help his colleagues in sociology withdraw from the suicidal intoxication of professional knowingness. Even if he only succeeded in part—if he clings to an obverted relic of the old piety—he has still chosen a subject notorious enough to get his book read by people outside his department, and even outside of the academy. And he has chosen a model whose own career might encourage his colleagues within the department to embark upon more variegated exchanges with odder partners.

But Rorty is instructive if you want to leave a discipline, not if you want to save one. Rorty’s last year in the Princeton philosophy department was 1981. For the next sixteen years he was University Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia. He retired out of Stanford’s Comparative Literature department, though his initial hope in moving west was that he might be named Transitory Professor of Trendy Studies. Philosophy, for its part, is less relevant than ever; its graduate programs continue to attract students drawn to haughty ascetic ideals of purification rather than aspirations to the enlargement of the self. Rorty, from time to time, seemed genuinely sad about this. The publication of Richard Rorty got Gross tenure. With the strategic portion of his career thus concluded, one wonders what Gross’s own intellectual self-concept might do for the sociological project.

Check it out.

A little while ago at the Michigan orgtheory seminar, Michele Lamont spoke about her research on how professors evaluate things. Her big theoretical goal was to argue against the Bourdieu/Collins view, which is that academics are competing with each other for position (Bourdieu) or attention (Collins). She argues that her analysis of how people make judgments in fellowship competitions shows that there’s more to academic life than competition. Overall, I agree. Academia is about more than jockeying for power.

At the same time, I was skeptical and asked a question. I asked if her case – fellowship and grant evaluation panels – was idiosyncratic. Lamont’s answer (rephrased): No, this is is not idiosyncratic. Academia is built on evaluation panels – graduate admissions, hiring, tenure and promotions. This happens all the time.

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I’d never read “Fast Capitalism” before, but I was lucky to find this essay by social theorist Charles Lemert. In it, Lemert asks why Mills is still remembered while Gouldner fades. A few key clips:

Yet, when men (and I mean men) are remembered or ignored, the cause must be sought in the work, which in these two instances is symptomatic of their personal styles. Yet, today, Mills is very well remembered, if mostly for his famous slogan that revived a sociology which, in 1959, was ill-prepared for the revolutionary decade already brewing. The Sociological Imagination comes to mind even among those who would never think of reading Mills seriously. The concept, as distinct from the book, was the acknowledged inspiration of an American New Left of mostly white northern students who took from the slogan a sufficient justification for demanding and proposing the outlines of a better world, as only the more serious among them studied the corpus as source books for, as Dick Flacks put it, making history.

An honest admission of the limits of Mills’ work:

Still, it is hard to imagine how anyone would today begin a project on power with primary reference to Mills. The work of advancing his conception of power as having economic, political, and cultural expressions was already been done by Pierre Bourdieu among many others, just as Bill Domhoff and others have fleshed out the idea of elites working in a community of interest, if not a conspiracy. Then, there is the Foucault-problem for even so subtle a top-down theory of power as Mills’s—power is culture/culture is power; both arise as much from the bottom as from above. Whatever we eventually determine globalization to be about, it is at least about the requirement that now we must think about power with respect to its many articulations, including those by which it colonizes the culture that colonizes everyday life. Elites remain, of course, but the metaphoric lesson of 9/11 is that the lesser powers resist and confound the global elite even the higher circles work their will down upon the nameless masses.

This pithy summary of Gouldner gets it right. Even when you get beyond the tedious style of Gouldner (one book was called “The Anti-Minotaur”!), you aren’t left with much to work with if you are a revolutionary wannabe:

Gouldner had no illusions about the potency of sociology in particular or of enlightened knowledge in general. For him critical theory was rooted in an insight that even the younger Habermas of Knowledge and Human Interests grasped only partially and passingly. Knowledge of all kinds is interested, to be sure; and the interest in emancipation is indisputably foundational to a critical theory. But does it follow thence that emancipated reason liberates us from the varieties of bondages that afflict the human condition? Certainly not.

Bottom line: Pessimism doesn’t sell, but nifty clean concepts do. I can buy that. Read the whole essay, definitely worth the read for theory heads.

I’ve been blessed with critical, yet sympathetic, readers (see here, here and here). Example: former guest blogger Mario Small recently published a review of From Black Power to Black Studies in the Journal of Black Studies. It’s a thoughtful and detailed commentary that raises some excellent questions.

To start with, I really appreciate the fact that Mario picked up on a crucial subtext of the book. My approach to movement-organization interactions tries to balance individual agency with broader social forces. Picking up a few moves from Bourdieu’s practice theory and Neil Fligstein’s social skill writings, I viewed the organization as a malleable social field. Institutional forces merely create options, but it’s up to individuals to accept, reject or exploit them:

Rojas believes that this organizational condition was crucial, because it offered “a space where movement participants creatively refashion[ed] existing institutional practices” (p. 59). It is an interesting argument: While giving proper due to the agency of student activists, it nonetheless provides a structural account as to why their actions produced institutional results so quickly and so effectively. The Experimental College provided a space within the bureaucracy of SFSC for the relatively easy introduction of early forms of Black studies thought and pedagogy.

While writing the dissertation, and then the book, I moved away from the “old” new institutional approach to orgs and tried to articulate an approach that viewed organizations existing in turbulent environments, which causes people within them to push for change. Environments don’t always imprint the organization, they may stoke future conflict.

The review raises an issue that Mario thought deserved a better treatment. In a nutshell, Mario notices that I focus heavily on organizational structures and less on intellectual content. For example, how does afrocentrism fit into this whole story? Since it’s downplayed, doesn’t that mean that you are side stepping the formation of the discipline?

Mario is correct: afrocentrism is downplayed, for a variety of reasons. One is that Mario wrote an excellent article on the Temple dept, the flagship program among afrocentric scholars. I felt little need to duplicate his work, which is cited and discussed in the book. A rare case of an author blaming the critic for shaping the book!

Another reason is that the book was about the shift from radical politics to mainstream academia. In that context, “mainstream” meant interdisciplinary teaching and research. As I argued in the conclusion, it’s not that afrocentrism had no place. Instead, the modal academic program is non-afrocentric. That’s why afrocentrism, and other heterodox views, received relatively little attention. The book is about the arguments over typical africana programs, not attempts to create new forms thought. Minimizing the cognitive diversity of the field allows me to concentrate on the discipline’s basic structural features, such as demography, institutional status, distribution of programs, etc.

So what are some questions to be asked about afrocentrism and related schools of thought?

• Get some descriptive statistics on afrocentrism. Aside from Temple, where do self-identified afrocentric scholars teach? Where do the authors in The Afrocentric Scholar journal teach? My hypothesis: a majority do not teach in degree granting africana studies programs. Hypothesis 2: a substantial minority are independent scholars.
• What do people (aside from Molefi Asante) believe afrocentrism actually is?
• Biographies and trajectories: Is there a specific profile of a scholar who adopts afrocentrism?
• Content analysis: What topics are picked up by afrocentrism?
• Classroom reception: How do students respond to afrocentrism? Who teaches it?
• Careers: Does being afrocentric impede or help scholarly careers?
• Boundaries: How do interdisciplinary scholars “box in” or otherwise respond to afrocentrism?

These questions are good starting points for any sociology of afrocentrism, and a good way to start systematically mapping out the cognitive terrain of this field.

Seems like we’ve got a lot of good books on politics and intellectual life coming out these days! Neil Gross’ new book on the philosopher Richard Rorty is an ambitious attempt to recast the sociology of intellectuals. To make his case, Gross covers topics as varied as Erickson’s identity theory, neo-functionalism, habitus, analytic philosophy, biography, and American higher education. This book is not for the meek. Once must really process these diverse materials to get the most from the book, but it’s worth the effort.

Let’s start with a summary of what Gross is trying to fight against:

Many theorists (Bourdieu, Collins) posit that intellectuals struggle to gather attention, status, or symbolic goods. These theories suggest that people shape their intellectual trajectories to maximize these things.

What’s Gross’ project?

Theories of utility maximization in attention space/fields are not enough. To truly understand intellectual trajectories, you have to consider the intellectual narrative of self and how it fits into these attention/status maximizing processes. Identity formation/effects and career maximization are distinct, but interacting, processes.

The case study? Richard Rorty:

Super duper famous philosopher Richard Rorty dumped analytical philosophy for pragmatism. Some people might think this was just an attempt to get attention. It’s not. His trajectory stemmed from ideas he appropriated early in his life course. His whole career is shaped by the tug and pull of his personal identity and the demands of academia.

To get there, Gross goes through an extensive review of the sociology of intellectuals, theories of identity, and, of course, a detailed review of Rorty’s life. This book is a serious contribution to a number of areas.

First, it represents a much needed attempt to integrate biography into the study of intellectual institutions. There have been earlier attempts, like the psycho-analytic biographies of scientists, but this one rings more true and doesn’t require any dubious psychology. Second, this will likely be one of the standard contributions to the study of Rorty. I am not an expert on his ouvre, but I suspect Gross’ book will be the best account for years to come. Third, this sort of book is a healthy antidote to neo-institutional theories that harp on conformity within organizational fields. Yes, I know people talk about change, but you won’t read many accounts of deviance in the orgs lit that measures up to this one.

Criticisms? One is that this sort of theory may describe latent tendencies in most intellectuals and not actual behavior. Why? As Gross himself notes, the average intellectual does not spend a life doing high power theory. They do a little normal science and a lot of teaching. So there won’t be many chances for biographical tendencies to shape intellectual output. They have to wait for a movement (see Gross’ earlier work!) within the profession to come along so they can express their “true” identity (see my work!).

Second, Gross tries to evade a simplistic demographic theory or historical theory that translates social trends/ethnicity/gender into intellectual life. This is a good impulse to follow, but it’s hard to pull off and intellectual self-identity doesn’t quite get you there. If we were to examine a large number of Jewish, of Black, or American, intellectuals, we’d probably observe commonalities in self-identity. So doesn’t that draw back toward the simplistic theory?

Regardless, these are the issues raised by good books. Recommended!

There’s a potentially huge intellectual confrontation coming up between two schools of strat/inequality researchers, if it’s not already happening. It’s about rival explanations of family effects on achievement. Here’s the skinny:

1. According to the Bourdieu/cultural capital crowd, family affects lifecourse by either (a) providing young people with knowledge and behaviors that give them an advantage in school (e.g., taking your kid to the museum) and (b) using class privilige to protect/guide your kids in school. See Annette Lareau’s famous work on this second point.
2. The Heckman/psychometric crowd is starting to congeal around the idea that families affect how people concentrate. The main claim is that socio-emotional skills are a big predictor of how kids do in school. Basically, achievement is IQ + concentration. Then they conjecture that families are a big input into socio-emotional skills. If your family is disruptive, then it undermines your performance because you simply can’t/won’t concentrate.

Now, the question is how to relate these explanations. Personally, my guess is that #2 is probably a stronger explanation of macro trends in acheivement, but #1 is a better explanation of microvariation. For example, position #1 is not able to explain the fact that some low status groups (e.g.,  Asian immigrants) were able to acheive much with little insider knowledge of American schools. The concentration thesis easily explains how Asian immigrants - through just forcing their kids to just pay attention – can get pretty far in the system. It also explains variation in Asian performance – they do well in math, not language. Math ed research indicates that repitition and concentration are the big factors in math skill acquisition, while language and reading is much more culturally based.

In contrast, #2 doesn’t explain differences among groups that put out equal levels of concentration. For example, why are Asians over represented in technical elite education, but not in other areas of the academy, such as the humanities? If they can wing nuclear engineering, why aren’t they over represented in English departments? Part of the reason is that they probably lack the social capital to navigate non-technical areas. There’s more to be said here and I’d be interested in other takes on this issue. 

I’ve something on my mind – something that has preoccupied me ever since starting my ethnography of the Cambridge squad. It is at once a great source of embarrassment and an intellectual challenge. Try as I might, I cannot remember a time when I dreamt as vividly as during my fieldwork. In contrast to most ordinary nights, these dreams were far from innocent.

How can it be that a healthy soul gives, in dreams, the strangest, the most incoherent, the most illogical manifestations, and afterwards, when awake, performs its function again in the most normal way? (Rignano, 1920). I’d frequently wake up feeling parched, pooped, confused – haunted by the ghosts of last night’s dreams and wondering why they’d suddenly become so vivid, so menacing, so wounding? Who were these vengeful shadows from the netherworld floating in and out of my head, and why are they here? Was I not allowed some reprieve from the excessive introspection and worry that enveloped me like candyfloss since joining the squad? Like Philip Larkin’s mum and dad, the squad fuck you up: ‘They may not mean to but they do / They fill you with faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.

This entry is a call for help as much as an attempt to untangle the clutter that are my thoughts. Rather than soliciting names of psychotherapists, however, my invitation is of a scholarly kind. A handful of sociologists to date, including Loic Wacquant (author of Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer), have made inroads into formulating a carnal sociology – or an attempt to describe the subject’s world ‘by immersion’. This approach is, Wacquant argued, a radical departure from conventional ethnography. For it embraces the view that our subjects are first and foremost embodied, carnal beings of blood and flesh who relate to the world in passionate ways. This calls for a manner of ethnography that recognizes and takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life, such as Wacquant’s boxing gym or my rowing squad. (As many of you will know, Wacquant credits the origins of carnal sociology to his mentor Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of ‘participant objectivization’, or entering social worlds that can often only be grasped in practice.) Read the rest of this entry »

Bourdieu is often cited in organizational studies, but references to Bourdieu, as Omar noted, are usually symbolic gestures meant to bring legitimacy to projects. The real Bourdieu, the sociologist interested in power dynamics and culture, is less often found in our American theories of organizations. This point is made strongly by Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson in a recent paper published in Theory and Society, “Bourdieu and organizational analysis.” Emirbayer and Johnson argue that the theorization of Bourdieu’s contribution to organizational theory has been incomplete because it has failed to fully utilize the Bourdieuian concepts – the theoretical triad – of field, capital, and habitus. Since the publication of DiMaggio and Powell (1983) the concept of field has become highly central to organizational theory, particularly in institutional theory, but the authors argue that an understanding of fields is incomplete (and perhaps shallow) without linking it to capital and habitus. Because of this, our theoretical understanding of fields has become detached from Bourdieu’s central insight – that fields are the locations of massive, historical struggles for power.

Emirbayer and Johnson provide a good overview of how Bourdieuian concepts might be more fully utilized in organizational research. The paper is well worth reading. Here are some highlights from the text:

Social network studies, not to mention other approaches often taken to task by Bourdieu, are to be faulted only insofar as they deny that the truth of interactions is to be found always (at least partly) outside those interactions themselves (pg. 10).

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One of my favorite papers ever is Camic’s (1992), “Reputation and Predecessor Selection: Parsons and the Institutionalists” (see here for a previous post on the general subject matter). The paper has two general lines of argumentation, one empirical-historical, the other theoretical.

On the empirical front, Camic tackles the long held notion that the primary reason why Parsons “turned to the Euros” (Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, Marshall) as a way to establish the conceptual credentials of his theory of action was because the American intellectual scene of the period consisted of a an a-theoretical wasteland. Camic shows, that this thesis is simply not tenable. Autochotonous conceptual resources existed in the U.S. (including within the very American institutionalist economics that Parsons imbibed at Amherst) that were sufficient to mount an attack on (marginalist) utilitarianism and behaviorism. Thus, Parsons turn to the European masters cannot solely be explained by the reason that he gave, which was that they and only they had converged on a model of action that allowed sociology to transcend the aporias of psychological and economistic reductionism.

On the theoretical front, Camic uses his case study of Parsons to adjudicate between two models of what he refers to as “predecessor selection.” This is a choice that all intellectual entrepreneurs face when they are in the process of establishing a theoretical perspective. Predecessor selection is not just an optional adjunct to crafting a perspective, but a key component in any intellectual entrepreneurship project. Selecting the “right” predecessors is crucial, because the existence of predecessors provide a fledgling theoretical paradigm with the cognitive legitimacy required to outdo competitors.

What are these two models of the predecessor-selection process? One Camic refers to as the “content-fit” model and the other as the “reputational” model. The content-fit model claims that in scientific fields, intellectual entrepreneurs select predecessors based purely on considerations of conceptual content, and how well that content “fits” with the intellectual perspective that is being developed. The reputational model on the other hand, claims that issues of content are secondary (for one, what “some predecessor said” can–within some limits–always be molded to the focal creative project of the entrepreneur as the case of Parsons clearly shows), so what is primary is the reputation of a given set of predecessors on the intellectual entrepreneur’s local intellectual mileu. Ceteris paribus, high reputation predecessors will be selected over low (or uncertain) reputation ones, regardless of issues of content fit.

Not surprisingly, Camic argues that for the case of Parsons and Structure, the reputational model accounts for the historical facts, while the content-fit model leaves a lot to be desired. Various American theorists existed that could be used to establish Parsons’ charter, yet Parsons ignored them in favor of high reputation (in LSE, Heidelberg and Harvard) Euro-theorists. Furthermore, while Parsons claimed (in a letter to Jeff Alexander) that he had left out Simmel from TSA solely due to issues of content, it can also be argued that Simmel got cut due to his uncertain reputation in Parsons local intellectual environment. Thus the reputational model explains not only the European/American difference, but also processes of selection within the set of available European theorists themselves.

While Parsons is certainly today (as per one of this post’s tags) “obscure sociological theory” it is clear that the process of reputation selection happens all of the time in organizational theory. However, because we are all naive, “content-fit model” believers, we miss the (interesting!) reputational dynamics going on right under our noses.

Where do you need to look to see this PS dynamics at work in OT? Well, you need to look at the “grand” statements that introduce a “perspective”! For instance, it is clear that DiMaggio and Powell’s (1991) famous “Introduction” to the Orange Bible, can be interpreted as a giant job of predecessor-selection for the perspective (Bourdieu and Giddens). Prima Facie evidence that is consistent with Camic’s contention that this process is driven by intellectual reputation and not content, is Lounsbury and Ventresca’s (2003) brief for the “new structuralism” in organizational theory. Here, Bourdieu shows up as a predecessor of a paradigm in organizational theory that is in many ways opposed to the New Institutionalism of which, if we believe DiMaggio and Powell, he is also a predecessor. Camic’s reputational model of predecessor selection also explains why Giddens pretty much disappears from L & V’s radar: the reputational fortunes of Bourdieu and Giddens have experienced diametrically opposed trajectories in the American academy of late, with Bourdieu’s reputation soaring, and Giddens’s remaining flat (on this last count see Sallaz and Zavisca 2007).

Mikaila Arthur, professor of sociology at Hamilton College, just published a gracious review of my book in this month’s issue of Mobilization.* The review raises an interesting issue, which I’d like to tease out in this post. Arthur notes that an important empirical observation about the spread of black studies programs suggests that the book rejects new institutional theory: protest and contention drove the adoption of programs, little can be attributed to mimetic isomorphism. Basically, politics drives change here, not the desire to show conformity. On the other hand, another message of my book is that reform movements must find some sort of common ground with mainstream culture, or risk whole sale rejection. Black studies programs dumped nationalism and adopted an intedisciplinary posture for survival. So which is it? Does From Black Power support or reject new institutional theory?

Well, first you have to choose a version of new institutional theory to work with. Let’s call the Meyer & Rowan version, which emphasizes ritual and loose coupling, MRNI and the DiMaggio & Powell version Iron Cage theory. My book is shifty in that it adopts a position that falls in between Iron Cage theory and MRNI. I adopt Burton Clark’s view on higher education, as stated in his seminal book, The Higher Education System, and which was adopted from Durkheim’s Evolution of Educational Thought. In a nutshell, Clark argues that universities employ a one size fits all model of loosely coupled subunits. Long as you can cram your academic program into this framework, you have a shot at serious policy change in the university. The crux is that since knowledge production is an inherently vague business, the standard university organization format is intentionally flexible.

Once you buy this perspective, then the argument of the book is a fairly strong rejection of pure Iron Cage. The book pushes a 75% MRNI/25% Iron Cage mix. The Black Studies movement tried to legitimize a nationalist curriculum by appropriating the structural form of the academic department, which made the policy proposal “doxa” in Bourdieu’s term (i.e., the Black Studies proposal could even be debated). Very MRNI. However, mimetic forces seemed to propel Black Studies only within a narrow domain of the American academy - the research universities. At these universities, it was very much the case that if “Harvard had one, we had to have one, too.” In fact, Black Studies supporters in the non-profit world tried to promote the diffusion of Black Studies precisely by promoting the field in elite universities. That’s the Iron Cage part of the argument. At the same time, the Black Studies program often became the institutional response to protest, while the mimetic move only occured later when enough universities had responded to protest to make the move legitimate in the absence of protest. It’s a lot of politics and just a pinch of mimetics.

Outside the research schools, there was a relatively weak Black student movement and non-research schools have little interest in paying for highly focused avant garde academic programs, even if Harvard had one. The adoption of Black Studies programs in elite schools provided no impetus at all for other kinds of universities, a major rejection of the mimetic isomorphism hypothesis. This is an important lesson for theories of institutional isomorphism. Mimetic forces will promulgate change only if there is some latent interest than can be satisfied. Adoption by elite actors, by itself, is a pretty weak motivation for serious organizational change.

Of course, there is one major bit of evidence that could save strong Iron Cage theory, which Arthur refers to, but I didn’t address: Black Studies topics have been adopted in many ways, not just in degree programs. Fair enough, but I think that still shows the weakness of strong Iron Cage theory. Even though most universities have substantial groups that favor Black Studies as a pedagogical practice, there is still a relatively small # of schools that have formal programs. In other words, even when it’s popular among the right audience, the practice has to be imported under disguise. Call it secretive isomorphism. The legitimation of Harvard adopting Black Studies simply isn’t enough for many programs to have free standing Black Studies. A few schools bundle it into broader Ethnic studies, while most are happy with the faculty voluntarily adding the materials in humanities and social science courses, an example of loose coupling, which, of course, leads us back to Meyer and Rowan territory.

A couple of years ago at a dinner party in Chicago, Lis Clemens introduced me as “Fabio Rojas, he’s one of the grad students and a new institutionalist!” Well, Lis had a point. I am explicitly working in an institutionalist vein, but it’s one where contention is the driver and mimesis is in the back seat.

* Sadly, Mobilization is not online. Blue Monster, something we can do about that?

Fabio

What would we think about an astronomer who burst into a conference of chemists and presented a new version of the periodic table that ignored all chemistry from Mendeleev onward? At best, most folks would say that the astronomer was ignorant of basic science. At worst, the astronomer would be considered an arrogant lunatic. Sadly, the equivalent behavior is considered normal within the social sciences, where each discipline often allows its members to re-invent and rehash ideas in other disciplines and proceed as if the other disciplines did not exist. Consider the following comment from Peter to Wednesday’s post:

wild lack of critical thinking that many sociologists evince toward work that claims to show the triumph of some sociology-affirming narrative against some outsider.

Jeremy, I think that’s an insightful thing to say (and here I go a bit off topic). But it sounds so, I don’t know, unreasonable. Why should we give the benefit of the doubt to economic, psych, or biological explanations over sociological ones? Do you imagine economists giving the benefit of the doubt to outsider narratives over market ones? Or psychologists? Or biologists? Really?

I once was at one of those over-and-over sessions on economists-meet-sociologists-meet-economists, and the economist on the panel said he has from time to time read good sociology – in fact there was this really neat study of life insurance and cultural changes in the US!! Of course, he didn’t remember who it was or what the details were, despite the fact that Viviana Zelizer was sitting next to him at the panel. My point is that the baseline in every discpline is to favor one’s own explanations and to be skeptical towards others. Why discount the sociology-affirming narrative so easily?

I know that in an ideal scientific community there would be a deep openness towards other perspectives in the interests of scientific truth. But of course we don’t live in an ideal world, but a scholarly-partisan one (this was why I was thinking that we fall back on more status-ordering games in my previous comment).

The social sciences are embarrasing in this respect. Any self respecting physical scientist knows the basics of chemistry, physics, math, and other subjects. Though there’s a prestige hierarchy in the physical and biological sciences, there isn’t a knowledge hierarchy where chemists, for example, just assume that most biology is simply wrong and redo basic biology.

In the social sciences, it’s routine to find economists who rarely read sociology or anthropology, and there are socioligists who think that the concept of incentive is simply useless. Though there’s a lot of wonderful stuff happening in the social sciences these days, relations between social science disciplines resemble turf war, rather than an attempt to integrate what has been learned from many fields. With respect to Jeremy and Peter’s points, modern sociology should be an attempt to integrate what has been learned from cultural studies, evolution, and economics to build a more thorough theory of social life.  I look forward to the day when economists have a basic familiarity with Bourdieu, sociologists know about marginal analysis, and everybody believes people are the outcome of natural selection.

Omar

I was in the process of reading an old (1944) article by anthropologist David Bidney on various conceptualizations of the concept of “culture” in (now) classical anthropological theory, when I suddenly came upon this passage (p. 36):

It is obvious that if human culture consists primarily of acquired forms of behavior, sentiment and thought, no inventions of culture-objects per se are essentially culture; they are products of human culture which must be included in any description of a given culture but they are not constituent elements thereof. Artificats, social institutions….or the accumulated folk-lore…are, so to speak “cultural capital” or the surplus which results form and facilitates cultural living...(italics added).

I was surprised to see the metaphor of cultural capital used in something fairly close to the modern sense popularized by Pierre Bourdieu in such an old article. That led me to search full length articles on JSTOR that had the phrase cultural capital in it, which confirmed what I suspected: this is the oldest (at least on JSTOR) Mertonian adumbration of the modern Bourdieusian concept in a social science publication (there are some early history and humanities articles that use the term in a geographical sense, as in “Athens is the cultural capital of the West”).

Fabio

As Teppo mentioned, the orgtheory crew spent the weekend at the Comparative Organizations conference, gracefully hosted by BYU’s Marriott School of Management and run by Teppo, Brayden, and their friendly colleague David Whetten. In the last post, Teppo brought up the claim that “organization theory is dead.” He doesn’t literally mean that – there’s been no talk of shutting down business schools, or journals like AMJ or ASQ declaring that it’s all been done and we can now stop. What the death mongers mean is that there’s been a serious attempt to de-emphasize the organization itself as a distinct object of social inquiry. Social scientists have either used organizations as instances of psychological processes (e.g., “worker satisfaction in …”) or as things created by macro processes (e.g., institutionalism & ecology). Between the two, there really isn’t much organization left in organizational sociology.

There’s a second dimension of organization’s theory death: the lack of productive offspring. The major branches of organizational sociology have not created credible successors. It was commonly mentioned that there are now three major approcahes – ecology, institutionalism, & networks – but I couldn’t see what the next step would be from these efforts. It’s now been thirty years since each of these schools got off the ground (Hannan & Freeman 1977, Meyer & Rowan 1977, Laumann et al/Harrison White 1970s), and they haven’t generated a synthesis or a second generation of theories.

Sure, there are still many good articles to be written about these ideas – see the various articles on institutional logics, multiplex networks, or non-monotonic logic in ecology. Yet, this is “clean up work” – it’s what you do while working through the implications of a major advance, not what you do while making the advance. That work was done in the 70s. Other branches of org theory seem to be in a similar position. Sure, you might find another great empirical piece fleshing out resource dependency in some new context, or another discussion of garbage can models or natural systems, but you haven’t seen many truly new insights in quite a while.

I don’t think org theory is alone in being stuck in the 1970s (or earlier). If you look around sociology, you will see that the major paradigms were laid out by 1980 or so – whether it be resource mobilization in movement studies (Mayer & Zald 1977), practice theory in culture (Bourdieu – Outline of a Theory of Practice 1977), neo-Marxists in stratification (Burawoy 1979; Olin-Wright 1970s) or affect control theory in social psychology (Heise 1970s). Some other paradigms were articulated earlier, such as status attainment models of the 1960s. Further, many “new” paradigms appear to be the older stuff just applied to new topics , such as the dominance of world polity theory in globalization studies, which assumes much of the intellectual framework of Meyer, Boli & Ramirez, which builds on the Meyer and Rowan articles of the 1970s.

You might find a few exceptions here and there, but the pattern is clear – the sociology we practice now is the sociology created by a generation of scholars from approximately 1965 to about 1980. That isn’t a bad thing. That’s what academics are supposed to do – create ideas and then build emprical projects around them, leading to a second generation who make careers testing and developing these ideas. And the stuff I just mentioned has been very insightful, very much worth doing. In fact, most of my work is based on these ideas. But science is made great by periodic attempts to look at the past, absorb the best, and move on. In a previous post, I mentioned three areas that show great promise for doing so, which is good news. As we approach the end of the normal science sociology emerging from the 70s, there will be many opportunities for younger scholars to create the next generation of sociology. And if they live up to my expectations, it will be a science that I will barely understand, and that bafflement will make me extremely happy.

Omar

At orgtheory most of us (Teppo and Fabio to be exact) are fascinated by arts and aesthetics (in fact, now that I notice, I am surprised that we have a category for “ethics” but not one for “aesthetics” even though they are enough posts by Teppo alone to fill it; a Kantian prejudice?).  In any case, the May 2007 issue of my favorite cognitive science cheat-sheet, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, has a fascinating article by David Freedberg and (the always thought-provoking) Vittorio Gallese, on a new approach to the neuroscience of art (“neuroaesthetics”) based on Gallese’s work (along with other members of the Italian group:  Giacommo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and  Marco Iacoboni, and many others) on “mirror neurons.”

The argument?  Formalist aesthetics, which postulates a purely “cognitive” connection between the art object and the receiver, and which emphasizes exclusively formal considerations is incomplete.  Instead, aesthetic experience may be bodily in a very real sense, or more exactly in a variety of very literal senses.  First, when looking at figurative paintings feature human bodies and persons engaging in action, the receiver engages in a covert process of embodied simulation of the actions, sensations and even emotions portrayed (the example is a painful Goya painting with a poor guy getting struck by a blade where it counts) allowing the person to empathize at a bodily level with the art object, second for non-figurative pieces, it can be shown that the implied sense of movement in the piece (as in a Pollock) also activates the neural correlates of locomotion and bodily movement.  Finally (from research based on the processing of written marks) the authors argue that the experience of a painting (figurative or abstract) may activate the same neural centers in charge of producing the movements that resulted in the markings on the canvas (this also implies to me the straightforward Bourdieusian point that if you practice art you’d be a better “appreciator” of art, but that’s a different story).  The conclusion:  we experience art with our bodies (and the neural networks in charge of motor schemes) as much as we do it by way of higher centers concerned with abstract cognition.

Fabio

A few days ago in my post about public sociology, socio-blogger Rachel S. wrote the following comment in the context of a discussion about the paucity of prominent socio-bloggers:

And as far as the last point, I really agree with you. There is no way around it, sociology has done a really **** job at promoting itself to the public.

I could not agree more. I am always shocked at our profession’s poor public image. Basically, the educated public barely knows that sociology is actually a real social science, and among those that do, sociology has a fluffy image. [Don't believe me? Just watch the reaction when a kid tells mom and dad he's switching from pre-med to sociology. It's priceless.]

This is frustrating because we study important questions and we actually come up with some good answers. So here are some hypotheses about why we have such poor PR:

1. Politics: As a group, we simply are too far from the average person in political outlook. People write us off as kooks.
2. Great Books: At the undergraduate level, we teach too much from old, musty texts. It gives the impression that sociology is like English lit class – a tedious exercise in decoding the writings of dead guys. Not real science.
3. No science: Although sociology is taught as an empirical social science at the graduate level, many undergraduates don’t get this at all. We should turn intro soc into a version of intro econ (core theories + exercises in analytical reasoning).
4. We hate math: I’m not talking about statistics, I’m talking about the near absence of formal theory building in sociology. It’s relegated to various small pockets like formal soc psych, math soc, networks, rational choice, etc. The average sociologist doesn’t acquire formal theory as a tool. At a deep level, most insight in social science is not mathematical, but by completely tossing math, we throw out something that is quite useful and brings credibility.
5. No Levitts: For some reason, we fail to produce people who act as the spokesperson of sociology. We have no Levitts, Krugmans, Friedmans, etc. Why are economists so friggin’ good at producing prominent public intellectuals, while sociology goes for *years* between NY Times op-eds? What do we do to suprress the production of PR savvy sociologists? Of course, we occasionally make the news with a clever article or book, but we fail to gain a permanent slot in public discussion. Why?
6. The problem is social problems (not the journal!): By emphasizing social dysfunction, we become associated with dysfunction. A basic finding in the study of the professions is that the prestige of your clients is a big predictor of your prestige. Also, if that’s what the average college student takes away from sociology – that it’s the field of social problems – then that’s the image they’ll have about us for the rest of our lives.
7. Post-modernism: This one isn’t our fault, but a lot of people make the link “hard French guys= sociology.” And yes, we all owe much to Bourdieu, but the overwhelming bulk of modern sociology is regular scientific hypothesis testing and thick description. The public thinks that we just sit around and play word games.
8. Bad recruits: Let’s admit it – the kids who scores a perfect SAT score doesn’t immediately rush to sociology. We just don’t get the best recruits. This point was made in Halliday and Janowitz’ Sociology and Its Publics in the chapter on recruitment into sociology. We spend too much time trying to fill large lecture halls of intro soc and not enough time going for totally high caliber students. The result – the field suffers as a whole.

So, orgheads, which of these has any empirical validity? And the harder question, what do we have the power to change?

Kieran 

Tyler Cowen is soliciting nominations for the most underrated books, beginning with mystery novels. But a free market for books makes it impossible ipso facto for something to be underrated or overrated. Arguing otherwise is either an effort to override the decision of the market with one’s own preferences — and thus of a piece with Stalinism — or a Bourdieuian exercise in symbolic violence by means of invidious distinction.

Fabio

Kieran asked for it…

1. Philosophy of Money by George Simmel. Gosh – it’s hard for me to even begin, it’s got so much interesting stuff, but so few people have read it. I like it for it’s nuanced understanding of how capitalist institutions can both support and undermine individual autonomy. Sadly, only “theory” people read this book.

2. Evolution of Educational Thought by Emile Durkheim. Technically, not a broad tome on social theory, but it hits on almost every major topic in contemporary orgs theory through its account of the rise of European universities. It seems to be read only Durkheim specialists and super hard core sociology of education folks. Sadly, the book is usually out of print and it is only available as a $160 special reprint.

3. On Social Evolution by Herbert Spencer. People sit around and slam utilitarianism, especially Spencer, but he hit on a lot ideas that we would find interesting today. For example, he was a big proponent of differentiation theory, which dovetails nicely with modern notions of social complexity.

4. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky. I know a few folks like Fararo and Skvoretz have offered us their own generative social theory, but most sociologists have completely by passed the insights of the early Chomsky program.

5.  The Ritual Process: Structure and anti-Structure by Victor Turner. You really can’t go wrong with my man Victor, but if you really need an alternative to Bourdieu-ian thinking, go straight to the discussion of liminality. Soc of culture folks recognize its importance, but few people have extended the work.

BONUS ROUND: Gayle Rubin – her essay on gender and power in early socities is a home run. Brilliant combination of feminist power-relation sensibilities and Straussian structural analysis. A book called Deviations: Essays in Sex, Gender, and Politics is “forthcoming,” but it’s hard to find.

Omar

Kudos should certainly go to Fabio for attempting to bring some order to the chaos that is managing to get through grad school (if you haven’t check out Grad School Rulz soon to be compiled into an edited volume by Blackwell). Academic success in scientific fields is certainly a mysterious thing. We all have seen equally talented (in comparison to ourselves) friends flounder while some less than talented friends go on to becoming fairly prominent members of academia. Certainly one thing that appears to be the case when it comes to predicting success out of grad school is that raw “brains” is not the explanation (this leads some of us to head scratching fits of “what’s going on here then?”). Instead, successful academics appear to have a certain je ne se quois, an “attitude” or “aptitude” that makes academia their “calling.” Others don’t seem to have this required ethos, and those are the really bright people that end up dropping out after their third year.

I propose that one important component of success in science is the ability to not be serious about the “right” things and to be serious about seemingly unimportant things. This ability is not equally distributed: some people seem unable to not be serious about serious things. Other people are almost constitutively incapable of being serious about non-serious things; they are the ones who “don’t get” the scientific game and who think that getting into a (serious) shouting match over whether Simmel’s contributions have been justifiably neglected or whether Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism is incoherent is the weirdest spectacle on the planet. My sense is that if you are one of those latter people and you are still in grad school, if you are “too cool” to take mere ideas seriously, you probably should be thinking about another day job.

This idea, like all ideas in academia is not original:

We should take Plato’s reflections on skhole seriously and even his famous expression, so often commented upon…”to play seriously.” The scholastic point of view is inseparable from the scholastic situation, a socially instituted situation in which one can defy or ignore the common alternative between playing…joking, and being serious…by playing seriously and taking ludic things seriously, busying oneself with problems that serious, and truly busy people ignore–actively or passively. Homo scholasticus or homo academicus is someone who can play seriously because his or her state…assures her the means to do so, that is, the free time, outside the urgency of a practical situation…and, finally but most importantly the disposition….to invest and invest oneself in the futile stakes, at least in the eyes of serious people, which are generated in scholastic worlds. (Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. “The Scholastic Point of View.” Pp. 127-140 in Practical Reason. Stanford: University of Stanford Press).

This is no joke, and it may have some serious consequences, including explaining the inability of (seriously) politically committed scholars to crack the scientific field as well as the loss of minority scholars in the upper-echelons of the discipline (something we talked about before). Because the social conditions of production of the disposition to play seriously are not equally distributed in social space, academia may, against its best intentions, continue to reproduce certain forms of privilege.

Can you play seriously?

Fabio

Given our recent discussion of Weber’s ethnic preferences and his critique of experimentalism, it seems a good opportunity to draw your attention to Michael Lounsbury and Edward Carberry’s recent Organization Studies article: From King to Court Jester? Weber’s Fall From Grace in Organizational Theory. The title says it all – Weber’s has been cited less often and in a ritualistic manner. What accounts for this?

Lounsbury and Carberry say the culprit is the shift from classical studies of individual bureaucracies to environmental-resource dependency processes. As organizational scholars focus more and more on resource dependence effects, they have needed less the sophisticated historical-critical framework offered by Weber. As a result, articles in leading org journals cite Weber less and these citations are references to earlier work, not incorporations of argument. L&C estimate that 80% of all Weber quotes are ritualistic.

Should we care? L&C think so. They argue that current neo-institutional theory has drifted away from resource dependency to a conisderation of culture, which has Weberian overtones. But one must ask: is the theory of culture used in current org theory really Weberian? L&C note that the very latest neo-I work uses a Bourdieuian language to articulate the importance of positions in fields. I am not enough of an intellectual historian to know how deeply Bourdieu’s ideas of field and practice derive from Weber, but the German theorist seems to be more interested in issues of social organization rather than the social construction of ideas and belief’s a la Durkheim. Even when Weber is strongest on culture, such as the protestant ethic argument, or his writings on religion, they seem more about the effects of culture on social organization than culture itself.

L&C are stronger when they note that Weber speaks directly to changing nature of the capitalist economy. Weber, perhaps more than any other classical theorist and many contemporary writers, was right to point out that organizations are systems that co-evolve with other aspects of social organization. Here, we might really learn amuch by considering Weber’s arguments about how ideological, economic and administrative systems fit together in different historical eras. A similar analysis of organizations in the current climate could be useful. We hear calls for scholars to think about how scholars are embedded with other legal or political systems, but we too often retreat into a comfortable study of a single field. If more folks took L&C’s demand to reconsider Weber more seriously, we might obtain the insights gained from a meticulous study of how modern organizations are highly integrated with other aspects of post-modern society.

Omar

From Pierre Bourdieu’s “Men and Machines” (Pp. 304-317 in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V. Cicourel (Ed.) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward and Integration of Micro-and Macro Sociologies. Boston: Kegan and Paul, 1981):

Thus, when there is a fairly close correspondence between ‘vocation’ and ‘mission’, between the ‘demand’ that is, for the most part, implicitly, tacitly, even secretly inscribed in agents’ positions and the ’supply’ contained in their dispositions, it would be futile to seek to distinguish those aspects of their practice which derive from their positions and those which derive from the dispositions they bring into those positions. The dispositions tend to govern their perception and appreciation of their position, their behavior within it, and consequently the ‘reality’ of the position. This dialectic is, paradoxically most clearly seen in the case of positions situated in ‘grey’ areas of social space and in occupations that have not yet been greatly ‘professionalized’, i.e. which remain ill-defined as regards entry to and performance of the job. These positions, which are there to be made and are what the agents make of them, are made for those who feel made to make their jobs, and who opt…for the ‘open’ rather than the ‘closed’. The definition of the these ill-defined, unguaranteed positions lies, paradoxically, in the freedom they allow to their holders to define and delimit them by freely bringing into them their own limits and their own definition, all the embodied necessities that constitute the habitus. These jobs become what their occupants are, or, at least, those occupants who, in the struggles within the ‘profession’ and in confrontations with neighboring and rival professions, suceed in imposing the definition of the profession that is most favorable to what they are (311, italics mine).

Translated from Bourdieuese to “simple” American social science terms:

Hypothesis 2: Position creators will have lower turnover rates than position successors.

Hypothesis 3: Position successors with prior experiences that are different from position creators will have higher turnover rate than position successors with prior experiences that are similar to the position creators.

Hypothesis 4: Position successors who follow atypical position creators will have higher turnover rates than position successors who follow typical position creators.

And that is precisely what we find. In a very sharp, interesting and very well written article (free earlier pre-print here; final ASR print here) by Diane Burton (currently at MIT b-school) and Christine Beckman (Irvine b-school), in the April issue of the American Sociological Review (in full technicolor, Pepto-Bismol pink!), which contains three articles of possible interests to orgheads, the authors find support for all three hypotheses above (and even some other ones).

The context is a study of (what has become a goldmine for b-school sociology) high-tech firms in Silicon valley. The authors draw on institutionalist and processual symbolic interactionist theories of “role-making” (but as can be seen from the quote above, they should have really drawn from practice theory), to offer a middle range theory of “position construction” and “role imprints.” According to Burton and Beckman, in nascent fields populated by emergent, small organizations, functional positions in organizations will lack the normative “sedimentation” of positions in more established, professionalized fields, which means that “position creators” (i.e. the first CEO of a high-tech startup) will have ample opportunities to “mold” the requirements of the job to suit his or her own competences and preferences.

The authors reason that this lack of standardization and “rationalization” of the position induced by the role-making capacities of the position creator will have consequences for future position incumbents. As noted in the H1, H3 and H4 above, the primary consequences are connected to the chances of successors being able to last long in a job that was strongly molded to the idiosyncractic strengths of an “atypical” position creator (see the article for the specific operationalization of this last construct, which pretty much boils down to how the training experience of the focal actor compares to the average training experience of other actors in similar positions). Atypical creators are theorized as being more likely to established strong “role imprints” on a position, which then negatively affect the tenure chances of future incumbents, who are more likely to bring in an institutionalized set of competences to the position.

A very insightful piece indeed!

Kieran

Articles from this year’s Annual Review of Sociology are starting to appear online in advance of their hardcopy publication, and in a tasty new layout, too. It’s a good year for people interested in social organization, economic sociology and culture. The essays include:

The Consequences of Economic Globalization for Affluent Democracies by David Brady, Jason Beckfield and Wei Zhao.

Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence, by Lis Clemens.

The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition, or Learning?, by Frank Dobbin, Beth Simmons and Geoff Garrett.

The Sociology of Markets, by Neil Fligstein and Luke Dauter.

Moral Views of Market Society, by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy.

Embeddedness and the Intellectual Projects of Economic Sociology, by Greta Krippner and Anthony Alvarez.

The Niche as a Theoretical Tool, by Pam Popielarz and Zachary Neal.

Bourdieu in American Sociology, 1980–2004, by Jeff Sallaz and Jane Zavisca.

That should keep you going for a while.

Brayden

Tom Bozzo drew my attention to a new AER paper by George Akerlof with the provocative title, “The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics.” (An earlier version of the paper can be found here.) In the paper Akerlof argues that macroeconomics lacks good micro-theoretical foundations for understanding variation in people’s behavior. Neoclassical macroeconomics is based on very narrow assumptions about individuals’ utility functions. Akerlof says that this view of behavior isn’t very “realistic,” however, because in most observable situations people do not make decisions according to some simple utility function. Rather than making excuses for empirical observations, Akerlof says that economists need better theories about what drives human interest. The answer: sociology, of course.

But as early as the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Vilfredo Pareto pointed out that such characterizations of utility missed important aspects of motivation. According to Pareto people typically have opinions as to how they should, or how they should not, behave. They also have views regarding how others should, or should not, behave. Such views are called norms, and they may be individual as well as social. The role of norms can be easily represented in peoples’ preferences by modifying the utility function to include losses in utility insofar as they, or others, fail to live up to their standards.

Sociology has a further concept that gives an easy and natural way to add those norms to the utility function. Sociologists say that people have an ideal for how they should or should not behave. Furthermore that ideal is often conceptualized in terms of the behavior of someone they know, or some exemplar who they do not know. The standard utility function is then modified by adding a loss in utility dependent on the distance of behavior from that ideal.

Akerlof goes on to review a substantial (for an economics journal) amount of sociology that deals with how norms influence what people see as appropriate or desirable behavior. Included in his review is Randy Hodson’s research on how norms affect employee satisfaction, Bourdieu’s conception of class distinctions as a motivator of consumption, and Weber’s classic take on Protestants’ desire to save rather than spend. The paper’s main objective is to show economists that “norms” (which he sees as the unifying concept of sociology) fundamentally shape people’s interests and thereby determine spending and saving patterns.

Akerlof is speaking to economists and so the conceptual nuances of sociology are not that important to him. For example, most sociologists, especially contemporary cultural sociologists, would probably not use the concept of “norms” to explain behavior as loosely as Akerlof does here. Inasmuch as certain social prescriptions are internalized, they function more like scripts or cultural rules. Other sociologists conceive of norms as situational. Their effectiveness really depends on the relationship of the exchanging actors. Alternatively, some sociologists now espouse that norms are just one kind of cultural resource that can be accessed to help accomplish other goals (e.g. achieving a higher social status). The logic of this argument, somewhat ironically, is much closer to that of rational choice theorists who see interests as inherent and norms/rules/cultural repertoires as serving those interests.

Instead, what Akerlof seems to be doing here is returning to a more elegant version of Parsonian sociology, in which norms shape social action and prescribe certain behaviors. But rather than try to build up a wall or division of labor between economists and sociologists, as did Parsons, Akerlof is calling for a melding of the two disciplines, helping economists to see that sociologists have identified a theoretical mechanism that can feed directly into economists’ view of utility.

Omar

In a recent Sociological Theory article, Andrew Abbott develops a theoretical framework for the study and analysis of what he referred to as “linked ecologies.” For Abbott, an ecology is,

…best understood in terms of interactions between multiple elements that are neither fully constrained nor fully independent.We thus contrast ecology with mechanism and organism on the one hand and with atomism and reductionism on the other. The latter contrast is straightforward and general: ecology involves some kind of relation between units whereas atomism and reductionism involve only qualities of units themselves or of their aggregates. With mechanism and organism, the contrast is more specific. When we encounter complete and routine integration in the social world, we employ the metaphor of mechanics, as in the ‘‘rule-governed systems’’ of role theory, for example. When we encounter systems whose elements move together in flexible homeostasis, we use the metaphor of organism, as in structural functionalism. By contrast with these two, in ecological thinking the elements are not thought to move together at all; rather, they constrain or contest each other. ‘‘Ecology’’ thus names a social structure that is less unified than a machine or an organism, but that is considerably more unified than is a social world made up of the autonomous, atomic beings of classical liberalism or the probabilistically interacting rational actors of microeconomics (249).

The meat of the article consists of an extended analysis of various empirical cases in which the mesolevel mechanisms and processes by which different ecologies become “linked” are described. This paper is very thought provoking and innovative, in particular due to the use of various self-consciously metaphorical neologisms, which in contrast to the similar use of vernacular words to refer to theoretically rich but counter-intuitive processes made by Harrison White in Identity and Control (arenas, disciplines, councils, etc.) actually make sense most of the time and in fact provide the reader with additional understanding rather than head-scratching perplexity. For Abbott the marked terms in his article are arena, audience, avatar, bundle, hinge, jurisdiction, linkage, ligation, location, position, setting, and settlement.

One of the new metaphors that I find fascinating in this paper is the idea of an “avatar.” But before we get to that I want to address what for some of the readers of the quote above might be the looming elephant in the room. Abbott’s concept of ecology is fairly close to Bourdieu’s notion of a field. In fact for me they are virtually identical. That does not mean that Abbott’s exposition of the various processes and mechanisms that serve to link fields can be found in Bourdieu (most of them cannot to my knowledge), but that there’s a “family resemblance” in the Wittgensteinian sense between the two frameworks.

Abbott disagrees. In an addendum to the published ST article posted on his website, Abbott discusses the similarities and differences between the linked ecologies approach and field theory. I agree with most of the points that he makes (in particular with the difference between “economic” and “political” metaphors), but I also think that he overstates the differences between two approaches. In fact, it took me a while to read the original article, because I kept retranslating a lot of his terminology to field theory terms in my head.

That said, Abbott’s approach certainly goes beyond many of the limitations of field theory as Bourdieu stated it. In particular Abbott is more concerned with processes of field genesis and field structuration (the weaknesses of Bourdieu’s approach) but I think field theory can definitely complement Abbott’s approach, especially when it comes to comparative statics (the strength of the field approach). The linked ecologies framework is also very strong when it comes to questions of history and process, which is not surprising considering the source. In my description of the idea of avatars therefore I will mix up field theory terms with the linked ecologies terminology that Abbott uses. Those who have no patience for Bourdieuese can just read the original thing (:- p).

What then are avatars? For Abbott fields can be linked in many ways. One of the most interesting ways happens when a field produces a representative of the original field which is then inserted into another field. Consider the academic field and the field of the professions for instance. These two fields interact a lot and one of the ways that they become linked is via avatars: thus, the professions produce avatars in the academic field which become new disciplines (usually first subject to serious lack of specifically academic legitimacy). Thus, managers ensconced in the field of for profit corporations were able to link to the academic field via the creation of management. Management has experienced status mobility through its scientific accomplishments, but initially as wrily noted by Herbert Simon, it was a fairly low status endeavor. Avatars can go the other way of course: from academia to the professions. Abbott discusses the case of academic economics creating an avatar in the for-profit arena through the creation of consultants. The distinction between messy applied econometrics and pure mathematical economics within the academic economic field is partially the consequence of this process; with mathematical economics occupying the higher status position in the specifically academic portion of the field (although as Fabio points out in his comments to this post, this might be an outdated picture).

Consultants of all stripes in fact are usually academic avatars inserted into various fields. Thus management consultants are second order avatars, or avatars in the for-profit field of an avatar itself (management). Political consultants are usually avatars of political science in the political field. We have seen from McKenzie’s research how powerful was the role of economic avatars in the field of finance. While external avatars inserted into academic fields are invariable of initial low status (because they are lacking in the specific capital that is recognized in academia), academic avatars inserted into professional fields sometimes are able to gain fairly large amounts of symbolic capital in those fields (even if they are also initially seen as low status peddlers of purely academic knowledge useless for the practical exigencies of the field in question). Thus, economic avatars in finance revolutionized the practice of stock trading. Business consultants have had mixed success in the for-profit arena, although they have been able to create a niche for themselves there (they continue to have legitimacy issues however).

Abbott’s example is that of psychologists in various applied fields. Avatars from the field of scientific psychology have been able to claim important jurisdictional claims in various other professional and practice-oriented fields (education, law, etc.). As the ecology of scientific psychology became linked to other fields through their various avatars, applied psychologists came to dominate the initial professional association (APA) to such an extent that academic psychologists interested in the production of basic knowledge had to flee into their own umbrella association (the APS). Human resource professionals can also be seen as avatars of the juridical field in the field of for-profit corporations and state administration.

Omar

For some reason we have been preoccupied with Eric Leifer of late. From Kieran re-interpreting strong performativity in Leiferian terms, to Brayden dredging up some obscure papers, to a synchronized response by Brayden and Fabio to the effect that the cure to dealing with the subjects that are hard to explain in contemporary social science is “robust action” (the concept of robust action is Padgett and Ansell’s (1993) elaboration of Leifer’s (1988) idea of “local action”).

There is good reason to be preoccupied with Leifer. He offers the closest that there is in network structuralism to a “practice theory.” That is a theoretical account, not derogatory to the lay actor, that tell us how networks are “performed” by skillful social agents (as Fabio and Brayden noted, Fligstein has attempted to do something similar for the institutionalist structuralism). It would be no surprise if accounts similar to Leifer had been “adumbrated” (in the Mertonian sociology of knowledge sense) by other practice theorists. I offer you one such adumbration.

Here is a Leiferian quote from The Logic of Practice which might interest econ soc heads out there:

…the anthropologists…would have been less inclined to use the language of the mechanical model [potshot at Levi-Strauss] if, when considering exchange, they had thought not only of the potlatch or the kula but also of the games they themselves play in social life, which are expressed in the language of tact, skill, dexterity, delicacy or savior-faire, all names for practical sense; and exchanges in which hermeneutic errors are paid for instantly, such as the exchange of blows, discussed by George H. Mead (1962: 42-43), in which each stance of the opponent’s body contains cues which the fighter has to grasp while they are still incipient, reading in the hint of a blow or a sidestep the future that it contains, that is, the blow or a ‘dummy’ [fake].

Returning to polite conversation, a stereotyped linking of stereotypes, they would have discovered the unceasing vigilance that is needed to manage this interlocking of prepared gestures and words; the attention to every sigh that is indispensable, in the use of the most ritual pleasantries, in order to be carried along by the game without getting carried away by the game beyond the game, as happens when simulated combat gets the better of the combatants; the art of playing on the equivocations, innuendos and unspoken implications of gestural verbal symbolism that is required, whenever the right objective distance is in question, in order to produce a refusal, and to maintain uncertainty about intentions that always hesitate between recklessness and distance, eagerness and indifference. One thus only has to go back to one’s own games, one’s own playing of the social game, to realize that the sense of the game is at once the realization of the theory of the game and its negation qua theory (Bourdieu 1990: 81).

Sociology is a contact sport, but the really good sociologists, like all other skillful social actors, don’t really have to make contact (all of the time).

Omar

I just finished reading Andrew Abbott’s Chaos of Disciplines. It was one of those books that I always wanted to read while in grad school but never had time to, so I did that over spring break. The book is of course mind-blowingly brilliant (but you don’t need me to tell you that, just look at the blurbs in the back); the sociology-theory-head’s equivalent of a jimsonweed-induced acid trip. So like a kid on Christmas morning I can’t wait to play with my new toy.

Abbot argues that theoretical distinctions (what he calls fractal distinctions) in the sciences are developed by a process of binary differentiation of extreme positions (agency versus structure, realism versus constructivism, quantitative versus qualitative, critical versus positivist, and so on and so on) as each camp reacts to the other’s excesses in an attempt to “correct” them (Abbott could have infused his description here with a little bit more of the interest analysis typical of the conflict analytic tradition in the sociology of science, but he decided to play the Foucaldian “happy positivist” instead, which is good since it makes his description much more succinct than it otherwise could have been).

This is of course, the standard description of the social sciences as composed of intellectual “tribes” who survive by making distinctions between the inside and the outside and ritually propping up intellectual enemies only to shoot them down. This simple fractal distinction mechanism if left to run its course, would ultimately create horizontally separated communities of scholars united by allegiance to certain “extreme” meta-theoretical principles. The “problem” (or the mechanism responsible for the emergence of more complex self-similar structures) as Abbott convincingly argues, is that each extreme position cannot resist the temptation to attempt to prove that it can handle not only its area of expertise (its “professional jurisdiction” as it were), but also that area that its opponents claim is their area of expertise (i.e. symbolic interactionists claiming that they can handle macro-sociological questions; network structuralists claiming that they can account for the workings and origins of agency).

This is where things get interesting; each fractal lineage in its imperialist attempt to explain everything ends up reproducing within each of the delimited camps (“remapping” as Abbott refers to it) the same overall fractal division that organizes the entire system. Thus, within radical constructivists, we find a splitting between “realist-constructivists” and “constructivist-constructivists.” Among realists, we find some “constructivist-realists” and some “realist-realists” and so on. This reappearance of the the same abstract form of division at different “levels” of organization is where the “chaos” in Chaos of Disciplines come from, as the entire book is organized around the theme of self-similarity.

It is obvious that a lot of the development of organizational theory since the break-out period in the 1970s has occurred in this manner. The organizing fractal distinction in the field, is that between realism and constructivism (roughly organizations as rational systems versus organizations as natural systems in Scott terms), followed closely (by a nose?) by the distinction between levels of analysis: the organizational (or dyadic single organization/environment couplet) versus the population, or institutional field level (“micro” versus “macro” for short; or organizations as either rational or natural systems versus organizations as open systems in Scott’s terms). After the development of those two fractal divisions in organizational theory, that’s when the fun began.

We all trace our ancestry all the way down to our high totem/god (I guess we are monotheistic then) Max Weber. Thus, the original line of common descent was a micro-rational systems theory. The first split in the lineage was therefore a split in the constructivist versus realist line at the “micro” level with the development of the “old institutionalism.” Philip Selznick’s TVA and the Grassroots is the key text here. A spate of research by constructivist-realists of Merton’s Columbia school (early Blau, Gouldner, etc.) set in stone the division between the formal and informal structure of organizations, all taking as a foil Weber’s original ideal type. Within this same school, we get our first fractal division between “realist-constructivists” and “constructivist-constructivists.” This last is inaugurated in the early work of Weick, who introduces systems theory with a constructivist bent (Glassman 1973) while staying at the micro level in his classic 1976 paper.

At about the same time (early 1960s) a cohort of young orgtheory scholars (Thompson, Pfeffer, Salancick, Perrow, Woodward, etc.) were preparing a realist take on the comparative study of organizations (standing on the shoulders of some early giants such as Stinchcombe), that will later develop into contingency theory. This side thus attempted to “tame” the constructivist insight of the early Columbia school regarding the threat of informal social structure (the natural system) on the formal social structure (the rational system) by talking about the manner in which each “side” had its place on the overall organization depending on the location of different subparts in the overall production sequence or their relative proximity to the uncertainty produced by the environment. Thus, the “parts” of the organizations most exposed to environmental vicissitudes and complexity would be more likely to be organized along informal lines, while those which were “shielded” from these disturbances (the “technical core”) would look a lot like the rational system chart (depending on the type of work [i.e. creative versus routine] this technical core itself could be divided into a “subpart” that was organized in a natural way and routinized subpart organized in a rational way; this itself is an instance of self-similarity at the level of social structure of the organization). In this manner, the realist contingency theorists “ingested” the rational/natural division into an overall rational approach. Abbott smiles and retrodicts: hah! that is not going to last! It lasted about ten years. It crumbled in (where else?) California.

The Scott-Meyer “Stanford School” drawing not only on the “Michigan” social psychological constructivsim of Weick (micro-constructivism has a long tradition in Michigan; beginning with Charles Horton Cooley the granddaddy of subjectivist American constructivism), but also on the Durkheimian/Schutzian constructivism of Berger and Luckmann, Goffman and the California ethnomethodologists radicalize the constructivist side even further (making Weick look like a realist) thus creating a division within a division in the constructivist camp (this is called fractionation by Abbott). The Stanford school is critical for inaugurating an entirely separate lineage however: that which will separate micro-from macro (open systems) orgtheory. Armed with these weapons, the Stanford constructivists went “beyond” the early rational system approach, the newer contingency hegemony, and the micro-constructivism of the Michigan school. They did this by employing the double weapon of a radical constructivism coupled by a shift of scale to the “environment” broadly defined. This is the “new institutionalism.” The classic paper is Meyer and Rowan (1977).

At about the same time, in the same geographical area (Berkeley-Stanford) a realist division within the newly inaugurated macro-lineage was developed. This is of course organizational ecology (Hannan and Freeman 1977). Thus the realist constructivist division foundational to the field since the Selznick intervention gets remapped into the new macro-line in a nano-second. A second version of a more tame “constructivist”-realism in the macro-line would then be put forth in the uber-classic paper by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) this one drawing on the “French” constructivist realism of Pierre Bourdieu among other influences. Members of these two camps would then go on to fight one another during the 1980s and 1990s. First, some Michigan micro-constructivist would take shots at the positivist realism of the ecologists and their awkward first attempts to subsume institutional constructivism into the theory (i.e. Zucker 1989), then some of the more constructivist realists would do the same, with replies of “cheap talk,” by the ecological realists, etc. Notice that by this time almost all of the action (diachronic divisions in lineages) is happening at the macro line. The micro line (both comparative and dyadic) is pretty much “sterile” during this period (at least in sociology). Ultimately, of course the ecologists could not ignore the constructivist harassment forever. What did they do? They remapped that division into ecology itself separating between “hard (read “old”) line” ecologists and the new fangled (read young) ecologists who are more attentive to culture, history, context and even micro-dynamics, that is, all of the constructivist concerns of the 1990s (Rao, Ruef, Haveman, etc.).

What has happened recently, is that the battles at the macro-line have pretty much run its course. Throughout this period older realists associated with the comparative study of organizations threw potshots at the Stanford macro-constructivism (and sometimes at the entire California macro-line) without making much of a dent. This began to change in the early to mid-1990s, when a young cohort of scholars centered in Chicago (Northwestern to be precise) began to be critical of both Stanford constructivism and realism (it all began with a gutsy review of the 1995 edition of Scott’s Institutions and Organizations by old hard liner Paul Hirsch at AJS). This begat “the new structuralism” which is an uncertain mixture of the old realism (they are interested in “politics”), the old constructivism (they like Giddens, Bourdieu and structuration theory), and the old micro-comparative approach, in an attempt to revive the dormant micro-line. Thus, as Abbott would wrily note, what was old is new again (and Art Stinchcombe is back to being cool). Vive la crise!

Phew! I’m exhausted.