orgtheory.net

A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article asks: Do we have too many research universities? Based on an interview by Berkeley’s former Chancellor, Robert Berdahl, the article raises some interesting points:

The nation may need “fewer but better” when it comes to top research universities, Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, said in an interview with The Chronicle. “It’s a very serious question that the nation needs to ask itself.”

Why? The article only lists the recession as a reason, but it is important to ask: how much research do we need? I can think of a few measures – research that is cited; research that is funded; research consumed by the public (e.g., medical advances); research designated as important by experts. Given such measures, it is not obvious to me that we have too many or too few universities. One could easily argue that some institutions could be merged (e.g., schools in states with small populations – would life be so different if we merged the flagships of Wyoming and Idaho?). We could also argue that we need more research in some areas.

The article also mentions proposals in California to cut loose universities and let them set enrollment and tuition policies. So the state may have fewer research schools to support, but they loose control over how the institution serves the state. There’s a great story to be written about the push and pull California has had with its colleges.

Here’s the bottom line: modern academia is about publishing. Even if you intend on working at a teaching institution, most respectable programs will require that you publish and maintain your active involvement in the scholarly community. Furthermore, if you wish to compete for a research oriented job or top liberal arts college, you must demonstrate an ability to publish in well regarded journals.

So let’s start with an easy question: Who has to publish?

• If you want a good job in most disciplines, you will need to publish something while in grad school.
• Exception 1: Some technical fields have a short time to degree and it is impossible to do anything except complete coursework and write a job market paper. Econ and engineering fit into this mold. It’s all in the unpublished job market paper and sponsorship by disciplinary elites.
• Exception 2: In some qualitative areas, books are the norm, so hiring committees are a little less obsessed about early publications.
• Caveat: Even if you are in a field that is an exception, you will benefit if you can get a good publication.

The harder question – what counts as publishable?

• Learn by reading books and journals in  your area.
• Read what your adviser and professors publishes.
• Usually, it has to be a contribution to knowledge. In other words, it has to tell us something that we didn’t know before.

Next question: where should I publish?

• Every discipline has an informal, but well known, ranking of journals.
• Every field has around 2-5 top journals (In soc: ASR/AJS and many people see SF and Soc Problems as close behind).
• Every field has journals that serve specific specialties. (Org Studies: ASQ. Education: Soc of Education).
• There are well regarded “regional journals” run by professional associations (Soc Quarterly, Soc Perspectives).
• If you want a good job, you will sooner or later have to publish in one or more of these journals. People who get fly outs for good programs usually have one or two pubs in these venues.
• It’s also cool to publish in the journals in related fields – but only if you can persuasively argue that it’s appropriate. E.g., an applied stats person might try to land a piece in JASA. A population studies person might try Demography.
• If you are in a book intensive field, you might try to get a contract in your last year or so of grad school.
• In general, I’d avoid smaller more specialized journals until you get at least one or two higher profile hits in top tier, specialty or good regional journals.

How do I actually get published?

• What counts as publishable is a topic that deserves its own post. But suffice to say that it varies from area to area. Read a lot and talk a lot to figure it out.
• Once that you’ve produced a manuscript, go to the journal website. Now, you can submit through the web site or just mail it to the editor. A few “old school” journals will require paper copies.
• In general, start with more prestigious journals and work your way down. Why? High prestige journals will draw more attention to your work and they have more resources for fast review. They also tend to have better reviewers.  I don’t necessarily mean start with journal #1, but start with a journal that most people consider to be highly regarded and bounce around. Then move to smaller journals after that.
• Get a thick skin. Every academic has piles and piles of rejection letters.

Should I work solo? With a team? What about authorship?

• Working with a team: Pros – teams produce things faster and benefit from a division of labor. Team members (older faculty) may have the connections and knowledge to make the project get published. Also, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s a lot less risk. Cons – easy to lose your identity and not get credit. Remember, there’s little reward for being author #8 on four articles.
• Working solo/small team: Pros – more freedom to design your own research. You get the lion’s share of the credit. Cons: Since you’re charting unknown waters, there’s a lot more risk.
• In general, the higher the author’s name in the list, the more credit. After three or four authors, no one notices your name and people may assume your an RA on the project, rather than a contributor. If you are working with faculty or on a team, have a discussion with the team leader/faculty member about how you can get the proper recognition for your contribution.

Let’s talk about some myths:

• Do I need a million publications to get a job? Not really. If you have one or two good ones, that’s enough.
• Is it all an insider’s game? Academia, like any job, has its fair share of gaming the system. All older academics will regale you with stories of “such and such got published because the editor was a friend.” So what? That’s life. But academia is also remarkably open. In soc, we have our four lead general journals, about 5-10 high quality specialty journals, some excellent regional journals, and many more respected journals that don’t fit the mold (i.e., Theory & Society, Poetics, etc.) If you try really heard and put out your best work, I promise you’ll get good results

If you have more ideas about publishing as a grad student, please put them in the comments.

Previous installments: strat/work, education, org studies,  culture, urban, soc psych.

Last week, Guillermo asked about good demography doctoral programs. A few words. First, demography exists in multiple disciplines and it also exists as its own distinct research ares. At Berkeley, for example, there is a demography degree program that exists separate from sociology. You can also study demography in public policy programs, econ programs, and even in anthro.

Second, demography is a remarkably fuzzy term. People with wildly differing research agendas all call themselves demographers. So in this post, I’ll limit my self to programs where people study core demography topics: population measurement/ statistics/ models; mortality/morbidity/fertility/immigration at a macro level; health at a macro level; population policy; family formation/social demography.

Two programs come to mind: Penn and Princeton. Penn is knee deep in top class demographers: Linda Aiken, Irma Elo, Hans Kohler, Kristen Harknett, Ross Koppel, Hyunjoon Park, Emilio Parrado, Sam Preston, Herb Smith, Tukufu Zuberi. Princeton has a highly regarded population studies PhD as well. Rather than recite the entire faculty list, click here.

Use the comments to talk up other programs that are strong in demography.

MSNBC.com has undertaken an ongoing – multi-story – examination of how the current economic crisis is affecting one struggling manufacturing city: Elkhart, Indiana.  I am quoted in today’s story which looks at Youngstown’s decline as a cautionary tale for what can happen when a city loses its major employer (it also briefly makes reference to Allentown’s recovery as a benchmark for how to make it through a crisis of this kind).

It’s nice to get the publicity.  But it also strikes me as a very smart approach to journalism; one that reaches back to the best traditions of the Chicago School of Sociology and, of course, to the Lynds whose Middletown studies of Muncie, IN, in 1920 and 1935 were among the first (and best) community ethnographic studies spanning the city’s salad days and then on into the depression years.

I’m glad to see a major news outlet keeping at least some of the tradition alive and undertaking this kind of in-depth reporting.  But its too bad that we don’t encourage students (or junior faculty for that matter) to undertake these kinds of studies in a way that would contribute to theory and general understanding of social phenomena (major exceptions of course exist, particularly in the work of Sudhir Venkatesh and Mario Small among others). One of the things that made the ethnographic approach of the Chicago School so successful (at least in its day) was that it was a “school”; i.e., body of scholars working both in physical and intellectual proximity.  As any blogger or academic knows, its a largely solitary path we’ve taken for ourselves.  Its difficult to achieve the kind of critical mass that Chicago did in the early 20th century.  Then again, with the advent of the web, maybe than kind of thing is more possible that it has been in a while.  Here’s to hoping at least.

(Photo credit: from Sean Posey’s photo essay on Pittsburgh Steel)

Previous editions: strat/work, education, org studies,  culture, urban.

I’ll start with where I work, which has one of the deepest programs in this area: Indiana. It’s got a long tradition of pyschology led by Shel Stryker, one of the pioneers of modern soc psych & identity research. We’ve hired an experimentalist (Steve Bernard) and we’ve got great folks doing mental health (Peggy Thoits, Bernice Pescosolido, Eliza Pavalko, Pam Jackson, Jane McLeod). If you count networks as rooted in social psych, you might count folks like Stan Wasserman. We’ve also got folks doing soc psych from interesting perspectives perspectives, like Tim Hallett (soc psych in orgs),  Brian Powell (family/education) and Marty Weinberg (sexuality). Definitely a leader!

Post your comments about other great soc psych programs.

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.

Marion Fourcade’s new book, Economists and Societies, is a fascinating comparative study of the economics discipline in three countries, the U.S., Britain, and France. The richness of the book’s historical details guarantees that every reader will learn something new about the countries’ systems of higher education. It’s remarkable how different they are. For example, the British university system is highly concentrated, replicating the British society’s larger class system, which leads to a great deal of tolerance for within-class preferential treatment. Here’s an example of that tolerance that really surprised me:

In contrast to the United States, where elevation to a professorship has been part of the normal development of academic careers, in England few people ever achieved such status. Even today, many remain in inferior grades their entire lives or receive this surpreme academic honor late in their career, someitmes only as they near retirement and rarely ever outside of LSE/Oxbridge. Joan Robinson, for instance, did not become a professor until the ripe age of sixty-two. And such a well-respected economist as Roy Harrod never rose higher than a readership at Nuffield College.

How academic appointments was decided was often mysterious. The absence (or great scarcity) of higher degree diplomas meant that appointments occurred very early in people’s careers, sometimes immediately after college…..This informality partly reflected the generally intimate nature of the British college system – the very small worlds within which students were groomed and careers were made. Appointments rested frequently on personal contacts and recommendations, and an informally shared sense of who was promising and brilliant…To some extent, the job selection process today is still much more casual than in the United States and especially France….William Baumol (from the United States) and Kevin Lancaster (from Australia), who had come to study at the LSE, were appointed to the school’s faculty barely a few weeks into their postgraduate degree. Formal requirements mattered less than personal connections to the university (especially at Oxford and Cambridge, which tended to recruit their own) and signs of academic brilliance such as first-class honors (even when obtained in subjects other than economics) (143-144).

It’s hard to imagine how so much trust could be given to the judgment of a few professors at prestigious universities without the cultural acceptance of Britian’s peculiar class structure.  One outcome of this culural elitism in higher education is that the U.K.’s business elite puts much less trust in the profession of economics than is true in the U.S.

I’ve got planned the remaining grad skool rulz installments:

• getting published as a grad student
• conferences/networking
• how you know you are done
• the job market
• the job interview
• filing your dissertation and the defense
• a few words on starting your career

What other topics should be in the rulz? Here is the list of previous rulz. Please put your suggestions in the comments. Thanks.

Few weeks ago, I dedicated an edition of the grad skool rulz to the subject of when to quit. The comments were good and a number of questions were raised. Fellow blogger and awesome culture researcher Jenn Lena wrote:

1. Econ Journal Watch is out – and here’s “Intellectual Hazards,” a list of interesting quotes comparing old and new ideas in economics.

2. Back at Gabe’s house, Code and Culture, Pierre is a new blogger and has two posts on R vs. Stata and how to make R behave. Meanwhile, the Rossman does a hazard analysis of how people unsubrsribe to email lists. As usual, Code and Culture is the place to beat if you like your cultural sociology mixed in with detailed discussions of stata output.

3. A colleague drew my attention to “Letters to Our Daughters Project,” where women academics explore their careers and lives. Valuable reading for anyone interested in gender and the academy.

I’m always searching for excellent analysis of academic life, and I found a wonderful blog post called “Journeyman Again,” which is about a historian – Alex Pang – who moved to the corporate sector. It’s a wonderful essay on life outside the academy. I recommend that you read it, especially if you are contemplating the private sector after years in grad school.

I’d also recommend some of Alex’s other posts. Many are personal, so it’ll be of most interest to his friends. But others are quite useful and fun: a link to Milton Glaser ten things I have learned, about going to grad school, cool protest sign.

The NYTimes is reviving a 2006 article by Matthew Stewart in the Atlantic which contributes to the anti-MBA drumbeat. It has some rhetorical zingers, but there isn’t a whole lot here that Mintzberg didn’t say five or fifteen years ago. In fact, the whole screed is well trodden territory, beginning with an attack on F.W. Taylor and moving on to the dichotomy of Theory X and Theory Y. Yawn. Stewart’s main contribution is the claim that management theory is simply watered down philosophy. Given that his point is that management is as useless as philosophy, I’m not sure which discipline that statement is more insulting to. Perhaps there should be a PDW at the Academy on Wittgenstein?

It does raise a question of where the line between management theory and organization theory lays. Read the rest of this entry »

I had been planning to go a little less grandiose in this post, but two events in the last 24 hours have gotten me to thinking (again) about the org theory’s relationship to the big picture. I promise to try to bring it down to earth a little next go.

The first event was a talk Jerry Davis gave here yesterday. Jerry’s new book argues that between about 1980 and 2008 we shifted away from industrial society built around organizations and toward a post-industrial society. So far, so already said by Daniel Bell, Piore and Sabel and others.  The twist Jerry offers is that this post-industrial society was not built so much around “networks”, “core competencies”  or “value chains”.  Instead all of this can be explained by the ascendancy of financial markets and the ‘gravitational pull’ they exerted on all aspects of society.  That pull tugged not just on the decisions of companies, but also the way the governments operate, as well as the identities and political orientations of individuals and families (we became investors rather than citizens). Read the rest of this entry »

Sean remarks below that

… these writers … are condemned for applying rigorous ideas in a careless manner. (Some of my colleagues here in the rigor-fixated halls of the University of Chicago have a particularly snide way of referring to this kind of work: this is the kind of work they do at Harvard.)

With no connections to either Harvard or Chicago, I don’t have a dog in this fight. But key flaws in my personality leave me unable to resist formulating the obvious rejoinder from Cambridge, viz, that as the intellectual home of pragmatism in its many forms, Chicago is where they apply careless ideas in a rigorous manner.

I’ll get my coat.

I am coordinating the University of Chicago, Organizations and Markets Workshop this quarter.  We have Jerry Davis in today discussing his new book.  The workshop website typically posts papers of our speakers and it is a good way to keep up with work in progress from leading folks in the field.  It struck me that it might be useful to folks to have a ready list of the major org theory and econ soc seminars around the country.  Here is the list that I consult regularly.  I’d be interested the one’s I’ve missed and should be keeping up on.

University of Chicago, Booth, Organizations and Markets Workshop

Harvard-MIT, Economic Sociology Seminar

University of Michigan, Interdisciplinary Committee on Organization Studies Series

Stanford, SCANCOR Seminar

Princeton, Economics and Sociology Workshop (via Gabriel)

Northwestern, Kellogg, Management and Organizations Colloquium (via Brayden)

There are some interesting advances in how some journals and online media are broadening the scientific conversation — here are a few of my favorite examples:

• I absolutely love the format that the über-cross-disciplinary journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences uses by inviting a dozen+ responses to articles —- here’s a fantastic example: Henrich et al., “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28.  So, in total the article is 62 pages long, but see the brilliant (and wildly cross-disciplinary) discussion and exchange that ensues on pages 21-62.
• Seed Magazine is doing some great things to foster dialogue online and in print.
• The time has come —- open access to journals! Surely there is a sensible model to make it work.
• contexts.
• iTunesU is a daily must.
• ePrint archives obviously are huge (SSRN, arXiv, etc).
• The Economist’s Voice is interesting, and the Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) more generally seems to be aggressively growing (up to some 39 journals now) and relevant.  BEPRESS was only started ten years ago.
• Some journals, like the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy, are podcasting. I briefly listened to one of their short podcasts — essentially the podcast covered the latest journal issue, the main findings of each piece and featured some additional discussion.  (Here’s the podcast site for the Journal of Law, Economics and Policy.)
• The journals Nature and Science do a great job of packaging things online and also allowing for various formats.

OK, so, most folks in academia are probably familiar with the above.  But, it’ll be interesting to see how “scientific conversation” evolves more generally, and how organization theory-related journals adapt and innovate given some of the above.

Here are the 2009 rankings of Sociology programs from U.S. News & World Report. As before, Berkeley and Madison are #1 and #2 (actually I think they were tied for #1 last time round). But Princeton is now #3 alongside Michigan; Harvard, Stanford, Chicago and UNC tie at #5. Northwestern and UCLA are tied, rounding out the top 10. It’s been interesting to watch Princeton move way, way up the list over the past few rounds.

Insert the usual disclaimer here about how rankings are of course an imprecise and indeed crass measure of something as intangible and diaphanous as intellectual quality and academic excellence, that we have little time and less respect for such quantified anti-intellectual crudities put out by cheap news magazines on the basis of dubious methods, and that that prospective graduate students should instead rely multiple sources of advice to best judge the fit of a program with their interests before they hey look our Department moved up from last time but the other guys are still totally overrated.

After John Hope Franklin died, there was a discussion on H-Afro of his role in the field of Black Studies. I noted that he was a skeptic, even though his books influenced a generation of Black Studies scholars. In an essay on the Root, Henry Louis Gates wrote that Franklin even tried to persuade scholars not to join the Afro-Am program at Harvard.

In an insightful note, list moderator and Black Studies scholar Abdul Alkalimat wrote about his discussion with Franklin in the 60s at the University of Chicago:

I was a grad student at the U of Chicago when Prof. Franklin arrived.  I was elated but headed for a sobering realization that we were in different generations.  He was from those kept out trying to get inside of the system, while I was inside trying to get out!

When I advised him of my desire to leave grad school to join SNCC he said don’t do it, you’ll waste your career.  He indicated that he had been asked to go to Mississippi and head up the Freedom school curriculum, but instead he was going to be the first Black scholar to teach southern white grad students at Maryland about the Reconstruction.  We disagreed.  I went to Mississippi, and had the career I choose.

This insightful comment raises an important issue for scholars of color. One career model was defined by people who were fighting against exclusion. A minority intellectual was supposed to be excellent so that they might find entry into the mainstream. Another model came out of nationalist politics. Intellectuals embodied what was distinctive about the historical conditions that shaped the community and would work in institutions that supported the community (such as the Freedom School mentioned above).

But what about today? The “pioneer” and the activist-scholar don’t quite capture the range of possibilities. Minority scholars aren’t fighting segragation and nationalist institutions no longer have the pull they once had, though there is still room for activist intellectuals. Perhaps the answer is what one might call “minority scholar 3.0.” These scholars embody the professionalism that one would expect, but produce scholarship that walks a fine line between speaking to the mainstream and addressing community concerns.

In sociology, DuBois epitomized this model. While he certainly would have enjoyed breaking barriers in the academy, his greatest contribution was in being  a highly original academic who could combine mainstream social science with insights drawn from the historical experience of African Americans. It’s interesting that decades after his death that we’re still mining that model and it still holds promise.

Kieran’s talk, as expected, was very good. In a few weeks, ICOS will put the audio up on the Internet. But for now, I’d like to articulate a point that was raised in post-talk cookies and coffee session: why is it that some topics are low prestige in philosophy but high prestige in other fields? My question was motivated by continental philosophy – considered piña colada by mainstream philosophy, but high status in literary studies and such.

My answer: Start with Abbott’s observation that occupational status is boosted when the group has exclusive access to knowledge and skills (e.g., only certified MD’s can practice medicine). Then, you notice that academic disciplines and specialties boost their status in the same way, like being math based (e.g., econ). By my count, there are three forms of intellectual capital in the academy:

• Academic Connoisseurship: Knowing a lot about an area, and knowing the academic way of writing and talking. Basically, all disciplines have this.
• Demanding jargon: Developing terminology and ways of talking that’s inscrutable to outsiders.
• Math/technology: Turning everything into math, or you require the use of technology and experiments.

The flip side is a selection process. People are attracted to certain disciplines because they seek specific kinds of knowledge. The people in a history program, for example, have bought narrative as the way to convey knowledge.

So let’s get back to continental theory. In philosophy, you have people who are willing and able to adopt symbolic logic – so math stuff wins, continental theory is seen as garbage. In the rest of the humanities, people prefer thick description and narrative, and many don’t have symbolic skills, so various math invasions lose to continental theory (e.g., cliometrics, stilometry). In soc, I think we’re between “jargon” and “high tech,” since we like thick description and statistics.

There’s an interesting podcast by Russ Roberts. He interviews Robin Hanson, the author of the Overcoming Bias blog. Roberts asks: how do economists deal with their personal biases? He offers a simple example: He’s a free market economist, so he thinks minimum wage is a bad policy. On the other hand, some other smart people think it’s a good idea.  People praise the minimum wage study that suits their biases. How does he know that his free market preferences aren’t steering him away from the truth about minimum wage laws? In general, are scientists trapped in bias?

Around minute 14, Hanson has an interesting answer. Here’s a paraphrase:

You might believe that all scientific theory is tainted by our personal biases, or that scientists are bias free. But there’s a third alternative: bias affects us the most when we have the strongest personal interests. On non-political issues, you can expect more honest discussion and consensus among scientists, which likely represents the best they can do on an issue and the public is likely to believe them. But when it’s a hot button issue, all bets are off.

Hanson then offers a nice example. People trust physicists when they explain quarks, but people distrust them on global warming.

That brings me to sociology. I think it’s to our collective credit that we analyze topics that might be called “social problems.” Stuff like racism and crime. If you believe the theory cited above, we’re setting ourselves up for problems. We base our identity on issues that naturally work against scientific consensus and public acceptance of our results.

Personally, I’m ok with that. There’s always a division of labor and sociology, as a profession, has done well to settle on social problems, even if the public is a bit skeptical. But I’m also thinking about how the problems of ideological interest might be mitigated. One approach is hyper professionalization – we become rigidly academic as a way to question our own biases. Maybe we might have a more confessional approach – we have frequent public discussion of our political beliefs and how that affects the sociology we produce. A third approach is competition – we ask people of different political views to analyze the same problems and judge the results. We’ll believe X even if person with a prior against X admits it might be true. What are other ways to address our biases?

Joshua Gamson – sociologist of culture – won a 2009 Guggenheim fellowship. In grad school, I enjoyed Freaks Talk Back. Here is his faculty web page list of books. Very cool!

Also, close to my own heart, avant garde jazz musician Wadada Leo Smith won an award. My favorite album: The Reflactivity Recordings. Yo Miles! is also worth repeated listenings, especially for fusionistas.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out that Susan Watkin of Penn’s soc dept also won! And Robert Smith of CUNY! Right on!

Scatter had a nice discussion of the literature review last week. Ideally, an article doesn’t need an exhaustive lit review. Instead, the author should cite the most important papers and extract the issue to be addressed in the paper. But, as comments noted, this ideal isn’t what always happens.

So what is the “real” lit review for? Here’s a theory of what actually happens in lit reviews:

• The lit review ideal: Sometimes, you actually get a succinct summary of the issues that serve the main argument.
• The pay-off: You do a lit review to build a coalition for the paper. Reviewers are more likely to approve if they see their own stuff cited.
• The signal of group membership: You do a lit review to show you care about the field. For example, the economist Oliver Williamson once published an AJS piece on transaction cost economics. The lit review was all soc of orgs, though it had little to do with the paper. I suspect he only did it to make reviewers happy so it could get through a soc journal.
• The ritual: Some reviewers do actually expect an exhaustive list of all articles in the area and some journals do actually expect a “lit review” section. It’s not common in soc, but I’ve seen it in other fields.
• Fighting Conventional Wisdom: Sometimes there is a commonly held belief about what is proved in the literature and you need the exhaustive lit review to prove otherwise, even if it’s not conceptually important.
• Signal of expertise: If the reviewers are new to you and your work, or you are pushing an unusual idea, you might do a fancy lit review to show competence.

I am agnostic about all of this, since you could make a cogent argument for each. Perhaps papers are so varied that we shound’t have a single “ideal” for a lit review. Your opinions?

In the New York Times, Stanley Fish claims that Ward Churchill did not deserve to be fired (though he doesn’t defend Churchill). Click here for a summary of the controversy around Churchill. A few clips from Fish’s column:

Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.

The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that fill its pages are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him. Which is good, because if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs.

Fish asks why Churchill was actually fired and provides this answer:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re unconvinced that academic rankings matter to organizational outcomes, you’ve never been associated with a professional school. I used to joke with Teppo about the size of the poster that hung in the glass doors of the Marriott School building announcing BYU’s ranking in BusinessWeek’s top 10 undergraduate business programs. (I can only imagine what calamity of modesty hangs from the doors now that BusinessWeek ranked BYU 22nd among MBA programs!) Business, law, and medical schools care greatly about where they’re ranked because ranking is tightly connected to revenue streams. The relevance of rankings changes the schools’ administrative practices and policies; they adapt what they do to excel according to the criteria of the ranking systems. This behavioral transformation is one of the main points made by Michael Sauder and Wendy Espeland in their research on rankings and reactivity (see these past posts about their work).

Is there a similar kind of reactivity influencing the kind of scholarship academics do? Do we care so much about which journals are ranked highly that we choose research topics, theories, and methods that would help us get published in those journals? These are questions that came to mind when skimming this interesting exchange in the recent issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education – the Academy journal that publishes essays about the practices of business education and scholarship. The lead article by Nancy Adler and Anne-Wil Harzing presumes that the current ranking system does not provide incentives to management scholars to do research about “questions that matter most to society.” The leading organizational and management journals (e.g., Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science), they argue, do not promote research that benefits the public good. And because business schools tend to reward scholars for publishing in these journals, our literature lacks the public impact it might otherwise have. They quote the former president of the Academy of Management, Steven Kerr, who said that we have mistakenly embraced the practice of “of rewarding A [publications in a narrow set of top-listed journals] while hoping for B [scholarship that addresses the questions that matter most to society].”  Adler and Harzing (somewhat ironically) use institutional theory to support the idea that the norms of the field pressure schools to become isomorphic in their estimation of journal quality and to reward scholars accordingly.

A number of scholars, including the dean of the Kellogg School, respond to Adler and Harzing and based on a quick skim, the responses are cautionary when engaging with A&H’s idea that we should put an immediate moratorium on all rankings. One of my first responses to A&H’s argument is that, unlike professional school rankings, scholarly output rankings don’t really exist in a formal sense. There may be lists of top journals (e.g., ISI’s Web of Knowledge) but journals are not formally ranked in the same way that schools are. I suspect that schools would actively resist such a ranking. There’s a benefit to having some ambiguity about what is a top journal. It allows local elites (i.e., those who are dominant in any one school) to assert their own definition of status (which itself revolves around the field’s definition of status). Thus, at school X, the status hierarchy of journals will have a more disciplinary feel, while at school Z the hierarchy is more firmly rooted in the management journals. Having a slippery, informal, and local status system allows departments to make tenure decisions based on its particular personality rather than on a strict count of publications (granted, some schools have formalized their review process to the point that counting publications is the most important way of assessing scholarly quality).  The fuzziness of the status hierarchy also gives more weight to outside letter writers, who can provide a quality assessment from the point of view of the scholar’s audience and peers.

There is a more general point of disagreement I have with the claim that current management scholarship matters little to society. This claim, which has been made by many others (see, for example, Teppo’s post about our “theory fetish”), typically privileges one world view over another and is asserted when one theory or one topic of interest is not getting as much attention as the claimant would like. I cringe when I hear management scholars argue that we need to become more relevant because what they often mean is that our scholarship should have a greater impact on the way business is done. While I can’t disagree with the idea that I’d like the business community to read and care about my research, there is a lot of research out there that I’d prefer the business community never heard of at all. Further, my idea of improving the public good is probably somewhat different than views held by other scholars. Rather than getting in a shouting match about which values our top journals should promote, I think the academic community (and the nonacademic community) is better off if we leave it to journals to figure out what is high quality scholarship and then let the market of ideas take over to sort the relevance of those ideas.

Previous grad skool rulz.

I strongly believe that most people who enter graduate school can successfully complete the program. However, it is also important to know that academia is not the right choice for everyone – even among those who possess the talent to complete the PhD degree. Think of this post as a guide for answering the question: “how do I know this is really the best choice for me?”

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been away from orgtheory for the last week and see that I missed a lot of interesting posts.

At the ESS annual meeting in Baltimore, organizations scholars showed their enthusiasm and dedication for orgs research by showing up at the Networks and Organizations session at 8:30 AM(!) on Sunday morning. Not only was turnout impressive, but the papers were great too! I’m looking forward to seeing these papers in journals a few years from now. (I also attended a great mini-conference on family and work. More on that in a future blog.)

As I was preparing to attend the conference, a friend and colleague pointed out that it seems like women are disproportionately involved in organizing sociology conferences. I haven’t done any analysis of conference organizing committees, but the committee thank-yous prior to the ESS presidential address certainly suggested that this might be true. If this is the case, I can think of a few possible reasons: 1) Women dominate paid and unpaid administrative work in many organizations; 2) Conference organizing and committee work can be pretty thankless, and some high status folks (a majority of whom are men) may be uninterested; 3) Although conference organizing may be thankless, it potentially exposes the organizers to new people in the profession. Some may use this as an opportunity to expand their networks, and research on career advancement strategies suggest that developing diverse networks (and mentors) may be particularly important for women and racial/ethnic minorities.

Does anyone have evidence on whether women are overrepresented in conference organizing? Other conjectures about why this might be the case?

David Pennock wrote down some thoughts about the output of the scientific community, noting that the large majority of research publications has very little impact. A few publications not only dominate the attention of the relevant discipline but an equally few seem to be the most profound in their practical application. What does this mean about the scientific program? How much waste is there in science? Pennock offers several different views on the “(very) long tail” of science, one of which is more or less similar to my own view.

Is the tail…

Good?

Is the tail actually crucial to the scientific process? Are some breakthroughs the result of ideas that percolate through long chains — person to person, paper to paper — from the bottom up? Is science less dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants than giants standing on the shoulders of dwarfs? I published a fairly straightforward paper that applies results in social choice theory to collaborative filtering. Then a smarter scientist wrote a better paper on a more widely applicable subject, apparently partially inspired by our approach. Could such virtuous chains actually lead, eventually, to the truly revolutionary discoveries? Is the tail wagging the dog?

Bad?

Are the papers in the tail a waste of time, energy, and taxpayer dollars? Do they have virtually no impact, at least compared to their cost? Should we try hard to find objective measures that identify good science and good scientists and target our funding to them, starving out the rest?

Ugly?

Is the tail simply a messy but necessary byproduct (I can’t resist: a “messessity”) of the scientific process? Under this scenario, breakthroughs are fundamentally rare and unpredictable hits among an enormous sea of misses. To get more and better breakthroughs, we need more people trying and mostly failing — more monkeys at typewriters trying to bang out Shakespeare. Every social system, indeed almost every natural system, has a long tail. Maybe it’s simply unavoidable, even if it isn’t pretty. Was the dog simply born with its (long and scraggly) tail attached?

Discuss.

Via Scatterplot – a visual representation of the relationships between the sciences (the article is here).

You know the rules: list phd programs in the designated area. Must have at least 3 active faculty members in the area. Sociology of culture: Northwestern – Fine, Espeland, Griswold. Add other culture strong programs in the comments.

So, we’ve talked before about the challenges associated with academic presentations.  I still struggle with the form—-15 minutes to try to squeeze in a whole research paper! Now I try to do much less.  But, I am still looking for brilliant examples of strong academic presentations. (If you know any examples online, drop a link into the comments.)  I just got a copy of Nancy Duarte’s book Slideology and must say that that the book has much that even a die-hard, Dad’s tie and powerpoint-using, 100 words per slide-cramming, directly-from-the-slide-reading academic might learn from.  And, here’s the slideology blog with lots of helpful tips.