contested reputations

Via Marginal Revolution – why the Internet lacks reliable reviews of doctors.

[G]etting in the faces of the previously untouchable professional class has inevitably led to legal threats. He says he gets about one each week over negative reviews and receives subpoenas every month or two for information that can help identify reviewers, who believe they are posting anonymously.

Over at Angie’s List, service providers have sued reviewers, whose names are known to the company, “a handful” of times, according to the company. Angie’s List has paid their legal fees in the past, but a co-founder of the site, Angie Hicks, said she could not commit to doing that in every case in the future.

None of the litigants at Angie’s List have been doctors so far, but that doesn’t mean they are thrilled with her health reviews. “They told me that ‘patients aren’t smart enough to figure out whether I’m a good doctor,’ ” she said. “But I told them that these conversations have been happening all along.” The only difference with the site, she pointed out, is that the doctors get to listen in.

Some doctors have silenced patients anyway. Several years ago, a physician reputation management service called Medical Justice developed a sort of liability vaccine. Doctors would ask patients to sign an agreement promising not to post about the doctor online; in exchange, patients would get additional privacy protections.

This struck me as the height of audacity, and when I shared my feelings with the company, I was informed that the agreements had outlived their usefulness. What neither its vice president of marketing, Shane Stadler, nor its founder and chief executive, Jeffrey Segal, told me, however, was that the company had retired the agreements in the wake of a lawsuit related to them and a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission.

Medical Justice has now turned 180 degrees and embraced the review sites. It helpfully supplies its client doctors with iPads that they can give to patients as they are leaving. Patients write a review, and Medical Justice makes sure that the comments are posted on a review site.

Health services industries need to be reviewed. Patients would benefit tremendously by getting more high quality information about how doctor’s offices work (e.g., how long is the wait? do you see a different doctor every time?).  I remember when my family moved to Evanston finding it really difficult to locate a good doctor’s office that met all of our family’s needs. I’m still not completely happy with our doctor, but the switching costs are sufficiently high that behavioral inertia has taken over.

Accountability in the medical field is a problem, especially now that doctors offices have begun to fully embrace the market logic, which means that from the patient’s perspective you’re treated more as a customer and less as an individual. But doctor’s resistance to monitoring, as could be had with anonymous review sites, is completely understandable from their perspective. They want the profits that the market logic/business model brings, but they also want to maintain their professional autonomy and discretion. Once you introduce patient feedback into that process, the profession begins to lose some of its autonomy.

james q. wilson, rip

The political scientist James Q. Wilson passed away this morning.  Wilson was an important public intellectual, but he will be remembered within academia as a social scientist whose interests spanned multiple disciplines. In the very first organizational theory class I ever took we read his book, Bureacracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It.  The book is an evenhanded examination of government organizations, highlighting what they do really well and not so well and offering solutions for how to improve their effectiveness. I remember the book as bringing Weber to life and making bureaucratic theory relevant. Wilson was a political scientist by training but his greatest contributions may have been in criminology. He had a way of writing that grabbed attention and made you want to read more. Take for instance the first paragraph of his 1964 AJS paper:

The Irish cop, like the Irish politician, has long been a legendary figure. And like many legends, this one has been in great part the popular expression of a sound sociological insight-that the big-city police department, like the big-city political machine, has been an important avenue of upward mobility for a sizable American ethnic group. The difficulty with the insight is that it has not kept up with the legend: The police forces of many large cities have continued to be heavily Irish Catholic long after the great wave of Irish  immigration subsided and long after the spread of mass education, the collapse of anti-Irish discriminatory practices, and the growth of the urban middle class should have made police work a career of diminishing value to a group so long in this country.

The paper goes on to propose that an ethnic conception of “Irishness” had become tightly linked with “copness.”  The meaning around ethnicity had become tied to a particular career pathway. Although certainly not groundbreaking, the article highlights Wilson’s versatility as a social scientist. Certainly as his career progressed, Wilson became known for his conservative views, but categorizing Wilson as just another neo-conservative does not do his work justice.

organizational musings

Henrich Greve has a blog!!  We’re happy to welcome Henrich, an ASQ editor and prolific organizational scholar, to the blogosphere. Henrich’s posts discuss the practical implications of papers recently published in organization theory journals. In this post he discusses an ASQ paper by Matthew Bidwell about the performance and pay of external hires versus internal hires. Here he draws on a paper by Elizabeth Boyle and Zur Shapira to assess how organizations manage risks through incentives and monitoring. And in this post he talks about the implications of his own research on corporate deviance and legitimacy loss to assess how Carnival’s CEO handled the recent shipwreck of the Costa Concordia.

If you’re an organizational scholar this is a must-read blog.

the abundance of living alone

Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist who also happens to be a very good writer. Who needs a Malcolm Gladwell to popularize sociology when we already have good writers, like Klinenberg, in the discipline? His book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is an example of his ability to present empirical sociology in an engaging and lucid form.

Eric’s latest book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, expands on a theme of Heat Wave: that living alone is a growing trend, especially in urban areas, that has changed the nature of community and relationships.  In his former book Eric showed that the people most susceptible to the negative consequences of a major environmental disaster, like a heat wave, were those who lived alone and lacked a social safety net to assist them during the crisis. Although in Heat Wave he focused on the deleterious effects of “living and dying alone,” this book takes a broader perspective by first trying to understand why more people are making this life choice and then by examining its consequences on life quality.

One of the interesting insights of Going Solo is that living alone has become easier for people to do because there are so many ways in which people can create and flourish abundant social lives outside the home. Facebook, email, texting, and other social media provide numerous points of contact that shorten the social distance between friends and family. Someone who lived alone 30 years ago might have felt isolated because it was much more costly and difficult to maintain close contact with friends, but now personal communication with friends and family has become so easy to do that it can almost be overwhelming.

One woman we interviewed, an attorney in her early thirties who works in politics, tells me: ‘Of my nine-hour day, I’m spending seven hours responding to emails’ – mostly job related, but many from friends and family too. ‘I also have, like, three hundred fifty people in my cell phone,’ she explains. It buzzes often, she checks it constantly, and she always tries to respond quickly, even if she’s out with friends and the call or message is from work.

This behavior is not unusual. Although we often associate living alone with social isolation, for most adults the reverse is true. In many cases, those who live alone are socially overextended, and hyperactive use of digital media keeps them even busier. The young urban professionals we interviewed reported that they struggle more with avoiding the distraction of always available social activity, from evenings with friends to online chatter, than with being disconnected. ‘Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family’ confirms this. The large-scale study by the market research firm Packaged Facts reports that those who live alone are more likely than others to say that the Internet has changed the way they spend their free time, more likely to be online late at night, and more likely to say that using the Net has cut into their sleep. Not that they are homebodies. According to a Pew Foundation study of social isolation and technology, heavy users of the Internet and social media are actually more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks, visit public places where strangers may interact, and participate in volunteer organizations (pg. 64).

If people used to seek domestic life in order to avoid social isolation, social technology seems to have weakened some of that need. People, especially those who can afford to stay connected and have a busy social life, may find pairing up and having kids less appealing than ever.

This book is full of fascinating facts and anecdotes about why and how people manage to live alone. This would be a great book for undergraduate courses in urban/community sociology, social networks, social problems, or even an introductory course in sociology.

was the financial crisis caused by corporate psychopaths?

Was the financial crisis caused by corporate psychopaths? Clive Boddy, writing in the Journal of Business Ethics, seems to think so.

These corporate collapses have gathered pace in recent years, especially in the western world, and have culminated in the Global Financial Crisis that we are now in. In watching these events unfold it often appears that the senior directors involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money. Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own continued worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.

Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths. Psychopaths are the 1% of people who have no conscience or empathy and who do not care for anyone other than themselves. Some psychopaths are violent and end up in jail, others forge careers in corporations. The latter group who forge successful corporate careers is called Corporate  Psychopaths.

I have a complaint to make to the editors of the Journal of Business Ethics. Why is the term “Corporate Psychopaths” capitalized every time it appears in the paper? As if that’s not enough, why do we need the to capitalize “Global Financial Crisis” every time it appears in the paper? This combination leads to unattractive sentences like this:

The knowledge that Corporate Psychopaths are to be found at the top of organisations and seem to favour working with other people’s money in large financial organisations has in turn, led to the development of the Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis. The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis is that Corporate Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations…..

Why not just capitalize and put in bold every letter and add blinking animation for emphasis?

creative groups

It’s been a while since we’ve knocked heads with our evil twin blog.  I can’t let this one pass. Peter Klein misrepresents the main point of this Jonah Lehrer New Yorker article, which dissects the myth that brainstorming leads to creativity and greater problem solving. Citing a quote by former orgtheory guest blogger Keith Sawyer – “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas” – Peter implies that groups would be more creative if they’d just let individuals work on their own. This fits nicely with a pure reductionist perspective but it’s not at all what the article is really trying to say.

This is the conclusion that Peter should have drawn from the essay: “[L]ike it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process.”  Lehrer goes on to cite research by my colleagues at Northwestern, Ben Jones and Brian Uzzi, which shows that both scientists and Broadway teams are more successful and creative when bringing together teams made up of diverse individuals. From an article in Science by Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi:

By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, [Jones] has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields; the size of the average team has increased by about twenty per cent each decade. The most frequently cited studies in a field used to be the product of a lone genius, like Einstein or Darwin. Today, regardless of whether researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics, science papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to so-called “home-run papers”—publications with at least a hundred citations. These were more than six times as likely to come from a team of scientists.

And summarizing Uzzi’s and Spiro’s AJS paper on Broadway shows:

Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists that had worked together several times before—a common practice, because Broadway producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky—those musicals would have an extremely high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q…..When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the nineteen-twenties, which he made the focus of a separate study. The decade is remembered for its glittering array of talent—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on—but Uzzi’s data reveals that ninety per cent of musicals produced during the decade were flops, far above the historical norm. “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever,” Uzzi explains. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

In short, Uzzi argues that teams that had intermediate levels of relationship density were more creative and more successful.

It’s not that groups aren’t effective generators of creativity. As these studies show, innovation tends to be produced via group processes. Knowledge production is increasingly a collective outcome. Rather than assume that people work best alone, we should think more carefully about what kinds of groups are optimally designed for producing creativity.  Diverse groups will be more creative than homogeneous groups. Groups that embrace conflict and critical thought will be less susceptible to groupthink than groups that avoid such conflict.  Groups made up of members who have little experience with outsiders will be less creative.  I agree with Peter that brainstorming is ineffectively taught in many classrooms, but rather than throw out the idea altogether, we should try to teach people how to design groups that are good at generating new ideas.

the trouble with garfinkel

John Levi Martin’s new book, The Explanation of Social Action, is a riot, meaning I’m thoroughly entertained and intellectually provoked at the same time. The ultimate aim of the book is to provide a new basis for judging the quality of social theory. I’ll say more later about how well he accomplishes this goal. For now I just want to draw attention to one of my favorite footnotes of all time. It appears early in the book when John is talking about theorists he is going to discuss and those he dismisses by their absence:

I might reasonably also be asked why no use is made here of the work of Garfinkel (e.g., 2002), which had many of the same influences and made many of the same critiques of conventional sociological explanation. The answer is simple: Garfinkel chose to write in gobbledy-gook, and although I do not begrudge him the enjoyment he so obviously received from this activity, I also see no reason to wade through the results to extract arguments that were made previously and more clearly by others. Finally, rather than indicate to his sociological readers that there was a wide range of inspiring and dissenting traditions from which they could draw (the approach of the current work), Garfinkel instead attempted to put his own formalizations in between his students and the phenomenological tradition, acting more like a cult leader than a scholar. Even did I not find this somewhat disappointing on a human level, it would make little scientific sense to reward such behavior.

This gives you a taste for the kind of book he has written. You may not agree with everything John writes in this book, but he certainly knows how to make punchy points.

the different bourdieus

Bourdieu is everywhere in social theory these days. Ranging from practice theory to studies of taste and consumption, you can find Bourdieu lurking in the background and quite often taking center stage. Bourdieu may be the most blogged-about theorist here on orgtheory. He’s so easily transportable because of the generality of his concepts and because he wrote extensively on so many different things during his career. Given the expanse of his theoretical contributions, it can sometimes be hard to pin down Bourdieu as a theorist. The reason for this, suggests my prolific co-blogger Omar Lizardo in this commentary forthcoming in Sociological Forum, is that Bourdieu’s contributions to American sociology have occurred over various stages, creating multiple clusters of Bourdieuian-influenced theorists. Depending on which cluster you’re a part of, you’re getting a slightly different angle on the Bourdieuian perspective.  I highly recommend reading Omar’s commentary for anyone who thinks they know (or would like to get to know) Bourdieu’s work. It helps put Bourdieu in historical context.

The final stage of Bourdieuian influence, which is an emerging trend Omar admits, is focused on embodiment, cognition, and action. Although he doesn’t mention it in the essay, I have noticed that a strong community in institutional theory has really grabbed on to this this aspect of Bourdieu. Institutional theory in the late 80s through the mid-90s was heavily influenced by Bourdieu’s field theory (Omar’s stage 2 of Bourdieuian influence), but in recent years institutional theorists have become less interested in the constraining aspects of field forces and more interested in how institutional change bubbles up from below, which places more emphasis on agency and reflexive cognition. Scholars interested in institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work (for example, read Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca), in particular, seem to be drawing more and more from Bourdieu’s theory of practice.  The attractiveness of practice theory is that you don’t have to completely shed your structural view of institutions and fields to develop an endogenous explanations for how people create local worlds of resistance and novelty. Although I think it’s fair to question how well executed many of these studies are, I’ve noticed that a large portion of institutional theory has moved from stage 2 in Omar’s depiction of Bourdieu to stage 3.

Perhaps this is the reason why I’ve heard so many grumblings from people in the institutional theory world about Fligstein’s and McAdam’s work on “strategic action fields.” The F&M conceptualization of institutions and change is still very stage 2 in its understanding of how actors are situated in a field and how fields evolve over time. But this no longer resonates with many institutional theorists, who have already moved beyond this conceptualization of institutions to a stage 3 model in which actors are embedded in multiple fields and possess more agency than the actors of a fixed field world. While the former view is more structural and deterministic, the latter view is more cognitive and stochastic. F&M do very little to bridge stage 2 with stage 3 Bourdieu (although one could argue, but they don’t, that the concept of “social skill” derives from practice theory).

For more orgtheory commentary on Fligstein’s and McAdam’s SAF, see here and here.

where your iphone comes from

The latest episode of This American Life is a breathtaking first-person account of a Mac aficionado’s visit to an electronics manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, China. Here he meets some of the workers who put iPhones together and discovers that the entire manufacturing process is done by hand! He learns of the incredible toll this process of constructing little electronics goods has on their health and lives. The account, partly due to Mike Daisey’s engaging monologue style, is really unforgettable and disturbing. One of my favorite lines from Daisy’s account:

How often do we wish more things were hand-made? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don’t we? I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch. But that’s not true. There are more hand-made things now than there have ever been in the history of the world. Everything is hand-made. I know, I have been there. I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair, one after another after another. Everything is hand-made.

In typical TAL style, they try to get the other side of the story and the last ten minutes of the episode really grapple with the effects of sweatshop labor on economic mobility. Still, the voices that will remain in your head after the podcast are those of the mistreated workers whose bodies are souls are slowly being sacrificed on the factory line.

the diffusion of….whatever

I just can’t stop chuckling about the graph in this cartoon.

From Pictures for Sad Children (HT: Tastefully Offensive)

mobilizing ideas

Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Social Movements has a blog, a “a hub for stimulating conversation between activists and scholars about important issues in social movements and social change.” One of the interesting features of the blog is a monthly exchange of essays by social movement scholars about a particular issue/topic. The blog already has some interesting content, e.g., Francesca Polletta on Internet mobilization and collective identity; Jeff Larson on the diversity issues within the Occupy movement. I’ll be a regular reader!

jobs

Tis the season of the academic job market. I stopped by this morning to see that the sociology job market rumor mill is up and running. Read at your own risk. I can never tell how accurate this information is or if trying to gauge the information/noise ratio is worth the effort. Still, it’s there to read (either as a tool or as a setting of ethnographic research). I’m not sure if there is an equivalent board exclusively for the management market, but if anyone knows about such a board please post it in comments.

I’m sure many of you have seen the announcement already, but in case you haven’t, my department at Northwestern is hiring.  This is a multidisciplinary search. We’re looking for qualified candidates who have PhDs in “organizational behavior, management, strategy, sociology, psychology, and related fields.”  So, that includes just about every PhD in our readership. Here’s the official announcement. The application deadline is Nov. 15.

cohort replacement and institutional change

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

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

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

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

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

linkedin network bleg

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

ows op-ed

For those of you who can’t get enough commentary on the Occupy Wall Street movement, I’ve written an op-ed for The Hill about the movement.

Here are a few additional orgtheory posts about the OWS.

reverend fred shuttlesworth, rip

A great leader of the civil rights movement passed away yesterday. Fred Shuttlesworth, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and one of the most courageous leaders of the movement, died in Birmingham, the same city where he served as a pastor  and famously challenged the city’s Jim Crow laws. One of his legacies was that he could not be intimidated by violence, as he showed during his head-to-head tactical engagements with the city’s bigoted public safety commissioner, Bull Connor. At one point a planted bomb literally blew out the floor of his house from underneath him while he was sleeping, causing him to fall into his basement.  Shuttlesworth told a white police officer after the attack, “Go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God can keep me through this, the war is on. I’m here for the duration.”  His courageous example encouraged other civil rights leaders,  including Martin Luther King, to act boldly and decisively. Shuttlesworth may have been the best tactical mind of those early civil rights leaders. He was also humble. Recognizing his place in history he said, “God used [Martin Luther King] and me and others to move the country forward.”

Here are a couple of obituaries that are worth reading. I also recommend this excellent profile of Shuttlesworth that was published in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001.

occupy wall street and change

The Occupy Wall Street protests are fascinating.  For a social movement scholar, these protests are like gold. We get a seemingly spontaneously organized protest that quickly captures the nation’s attention, replete with vivid imagery of protestors being harassed and arrested by police and a sudden diffusion of the protests to other large urban centers. And because the movement is evolving over time, we get a unique view into the dynamics of collective action and social change. Amazing stuff.

Jenn Lena’s photos on her blog tell a really interesting story about the internal dynamics of the protest. Looking at this organizing board, you can’t help but be impressed by the enormous effort of coordinating a protest of this scale.  Forget the coordination issues inherent in keeping an ideologically diverse group such as this together and marching in the same (roughly) direction or the incredible public relations job the activists are doing, some of the biggest and most problematic organizing issues are  more mundane (e.g. where do we get food and latrines for all these folks?). Organizing a protest of this size requires a massive amount of coordinating and organizing, and so the fact that this group is making it up on the spot is really impressive.

The movement has gained momentum to the point that now everyone is asking, what’s next? Where do we go with all of this energy? The resources are in place, the nation is watching, but does the movement have any objectives? I think that at a very abstract level, there is some agreement about what the objectives should be. For example, this video (again, thanks to Jenn for the link) points to an outcome of changing the process of community decision-making based on participation and consensus-building around a general assembly. Scholars of the 60s movements will recognize a lot of similarities in the philosophy behind the general assembly idea and the notion of participatory democracy practiced by groups like SDS. So one clear objective is to get more people involved in participatory democracy and form linkages between like-minded people who might form the base of a broader change-oriented movement. I think this is inspiring, and restoring this organizational know-how could be the most important product of these protests.

But clearly that’s not the only goal that participants in the movement would like to see accomplished. For one, restoring a process of participatory democracy in a relatively small social movement will have a limited impact on society unless they come up with other clearly articulated goals. In other words, while participatory democracy will certainly make a difference in the lives of those involved, at some point new demands have to be set if the movement is hoping to influence real social and political change. Those demands will probably come, even if it means losing many supporters who don’t see to eye-t0-eye on concrete reforms, but will it come soon enough? I think the time to strike is when the iron is hot, and right now the iron is HOT.

organizational life in popular nonfiction

One of  my reading habits that changed significantly after leaving grad school was that I started reading more popular nonfiction. In grad school my reading time was completely soaked with accumulating a knowledge of the Literature. If I ever wanted a break, I’d pick up a novel and have a few moments of respite before diving into the next treatise on decoupling and organizational routines. But recently I’ve started reading more popular nonfiction. I still like escapist reading, and good nonfiction can be as absorbing as any novel. I’m also constantly on the search for good observational details about organizational life that I can pull into the classroom. Students in my undergrad classes at BYU got pretty sick of every organizational example I’d use being about church or school. Second hand stories from a friend of a friend who works at an investment bank don’t carry the same punch. But there are plenty of great examples of organizational intrigue in compelling nonfiction. MBA students also thrive on real life illustrations. Another reason is that good nonfiction writing often comes with its own ethnographic analysis that can be readily adapted to the concept or idea we’re trying to explain in class. There are some obvious examples that often get picked up (e.g., Liar’s Poker; Moneyball; Team of Rivals), but here are some books that you might not have thought of as having good organizational analysis in them.  I’ve used (or will use) all of them in class.

• Our Band Could be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. The chapters of the book are a series of vignettes about indie rock bands formed in the 80s and 90s and their attempts to build a fan base with very little organizational infrastructure or label support.  Azerrad captures a number of dynamics in the music industry – collective identity and genre creation, entrepreneurship, anti-corporate movements, team building – that would make great fodder for class discussions.
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. This was a popular press book that launched Bourdain’s career as the Travel Channel’s official tour guide to the world. People familiar with the show will recognize his schtick, but what will surprise you are all of the gritty details Bourdain reveals about life in the kitchens of New York. It’s a great case study of how a partially underground labor market works, the dynamics around organizational loyalty and commitment, and a solid memoir of work.
• These Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. I’m still finishing this one, but I can already tell you that it’s a rich source of details about the power and politics inside a well-functioning organization, the cable sports network ESPN. I read a review of the book that said there were too many details in this book about the mundane details of business and not enough about the personalities behind the show. I think that’s exactly the reason I love the book! Miller and Shales, by collecting a bunch of oral histories of current and past employees of ESPN, tell a super engaging story about how a small business gets started and becomes a dominant player in the television industry.  Much of the focus of the book is about the behind-the-scenes interactions of people creating an entirely new industry and about the business acumen and political savvy needed to survive that kind of launch.
• King of the Club by Charles Gasparino. This book follows the rise and fall of Richard Grasso, the former chair of the NYSE who was notoriously ousted from his position after the public discovered he was due a compensation worth over $100 million. The details about the eventual compensation scandal were intriguing, of course, but what makes this book great is its demonstration of how Grasso climbed the corporate ladder, starting off on the lowest rung on the totem pole and ending up the most powerful man on Wall Street.  I use this book in my MBA class to talk about the importance of the “rules of the game.” Grasso was adept early on at learning and mastering those rules, but at some point he become detached from the broader cultural expectations of equity and fairness, which led him to make some poor political calculations.
• The Beatles by Bob Spitz. Yep, this is the greatest book about teamwork and the deterioration of a team that I’ve ever read. One of my favorite parts of the book is the telling of them learning how to be the Beatles during their time in Hamburg.

is sociology a conservative discipline?

Yeah, I know, the answer to this question is no. In numerous ways, sociology has evolved into a discipline with a strong liberal tendency, especially inasmuch as much sociological research is about inequality, its causes, and potential solutions. Our emphasis on inequality, economic and social, is perhaps the distinctive feature of a contemporary sociological perspective. You can’t get any more liberal than that, right?

But a couple of things happened at the last ASA that made me rethink this fairly simplistic take on sociology. Both of these issues have been discussed on other blogs and so I’ll refer you to those blogs to get more information. The first issue was the pointedly negative reaction that a number of sociologists had to Vegas as a host city. It was actually surprising to me that many sociologists’ reactions to Vegas were so condemning and prudish. It wasn’t just they disliked the Vegas aesthetic – in my conversations with some of my colleagues, whose opinions I greatly respect, there seemed to be a condemnation of the very idea of Vegas as something morally reprehensible. This made me think twice about my long-held view that sociology is morally relativistic.  That’s not to say that I thought sociologists didn’t have morals, but I just like to imagine that the discipline itself is more-or-less value neutral. Maybe that’s a bad assumption. Deep inside the sociological imagination, I think there are a strong set of values that guide sociologists’ work (e.g.,  an aversion to exploitation). Vegas seemed to provoke that moral center.

The second issue was the award given to David Brooks for “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues.” Now I’m not a huge Brooks fan, and I think a lot of sociologists share this view. In fact, enough sociologists have a distaste for Brooks that the reception of his award was apparently accompanied by some jeers and boos. I wasn’t there to see this, but it’s not surprising to me. It is disappointing though. Despite my reservations about the quality of Brooksian analysis, I do think that it’s wise to cultivate relationships with journalists who read and translate sociology to the masses. Brooks is definitely in that camp. But Doug Hartmann thinks there is another reason we shouldn’t exclude people like Brooks from our discipline’s outreach efforts. It is because he believes there is a genuine conservative perspective within sociology. Here’s Hartmann:

But even to the extent he does represent particular ideological points of view (and who doesn’t?), we will step up and defend Brooks’s right to read, interpret, and mobilize our work. Anything less would be both elitist and a failure to appreciate our discipline’s genuinely conservative (not Republican) impulses and insights with respect to norms, solidarity, and the high ideals that support and sustain social order and democracy in the contemporary world.

I like the distinction Hartmann makes between conservatism and Republicanism. The two shouldn’t be equated. I think what he means is that many sociologists do ultimately care about designing institutions that promote ideals and values. We may not always agree on what those values are (although we have a general consensus that exploitation and inequality are bad!), but sociology should be open to a conversation about what those values are. Anyway, if nothing else, the Vegas-ASA experience has made me aware of the need for greater disciplinary self-reflexivity about the values that motivate our work.

making friends with the media

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

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

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

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

San Antonio bound

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

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

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

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

deunionization and growth in inequality

Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld published an important paper in the American Sociological Review that shows that deunionization has significantly contributed to increases in economic inequality. They make the case that the effect of deunionization on inequality growth is partly the result of a change in norms surrounding equity. Unions “contribute to a moral economy that institutionalizes norms for fair pay, even for nonunion workers.” When unions are less powerful and as those norms fade, even the the wages of nonunion workers decline.

A variance decomposition analysis estimated the effect of union membership decline and the effect of declining industry-region unionization rates. When individual union membership is considered, union decline accounts for a fifth of the growth in men’s earnings inequality. Adding normative and threat effects of unions on nonunion pay increases the effect of union decline on wage inequality from a fifth to a third. By this measure, the decline of the U.S. labor movement has added as much to men’s wage inequality as has the relative increase in pay for college graduates. Among women, union decline and inequality are only related through the link between industry- region unionization and nonunion wage dispersion. Union decline contributes just half as much as education to the overall rise in women’s wage inequality. These results suggest unions are a normative presence that help sustain the labor market as a social institution, in which norms of equity shape the allocation of wages outside the union sector (532-33).

An interesting comparison is the paper by DiPrete et al. (2010), who showed that increases in CEO pay are the result of firms “leapfrogging” their compensation benchmarks. Firms first identify peer groups, and they then try to match or exceed what their peers pay their executives. Continual leapfrogging of peers leads to an escalation in CEO compensation. The same kind of benchmarking was happening with union wages, but the pattern was moving in the opposite direction. Nonunion firms essentially pegged their wages to those of union firms. As unions lost negotiating power, they no longer had the ability to set wage targets, and nonunion firms were not forced to raise their employees’ wages at the same pace they had in prior years.  This lack of normative pressure to keep up with the Joneses gradually eroded notions of fair pay.

what happened to resource dependence theory?

The three main sociological theories about organizations to arise in the late 1970s/early 1980s were institutional theory, population ecology, and resource dependence theory. Of the three, I think it’s fair to say that resource dependence has had the least amount of staying power. Institutional theory has become a dynasty. Population ecology is influential even beyond those who self-identify with the theory (e.g., see the prevalence of event history analysis and density dependence models). But resource dependence, although ritually cited, failed to carry forward as a vibrant research agenda among the current generation of scholars.  Why is that?*

This wasn’t always the case. You could argue that in the early 1980s, resource dependence theory had the greatest potential for developing a coherent research community. Looking at this Ngram graph, you can see that by 1982 Pfeffer and Salancik (1978) was getting cited far more often than Meyer and Rowan or Hannan and Freeman. It appeared to be the dominant theory. But something happened in 1983 that caused a sudden reversal of that trend. It’s pretty clear from the graph that in 1983 the influence of Pfeffer and Salancik began to decline while the influence of DiMaggio and Powell began to accelerate at an even greater rate.  Ecology continued to rise in influence during this same time period, peaking in citations in the mid-1990s.

The decline of resource dependence theory has a number of causes. I don’t think that the problem was that resource dependence was not a good theory. If you were able to transport your academic self back to 1983, I think you’d find that resource dependence had as much potential for building an expansive theoretical program as institutional theory did. You could imagine that resource dependence could have expanded its conceptual artillery to embrace resource dependencies of various types (e.g., cultural resources, symbolic resources) and across different sources of dependence (e.g., state, professions, consumers).  Resource dependence could have co-opted the burgeoning literature on interorganizational networks and provided it with a theoretical lens with which its fancy methods could be put to use.  (It’s always seemed strange to me that Ron Burt’s structural holes concept was not more tightly associated with resource dependence theory given that one of the central concepts in his theory, structural constraint, is all about dependence.) The theory could have branched out to explain phenomena as varied as firms’ symbolic responses to shareholder activism or the influence of  corporate board networks on patterns of diffusion. These studies happened and some were informed by Pfeffer and Salancik, but they were not closely associated with resource dependence theory. Instead, many of these studies ran to institutional theory for cover.

I think there are a number of reasons resource dependence theory failed to cohere into a community of scholars. Here are a few:

patent trolls and innovation

Other than financial measures (like ROA) I can’t think of another firm-level variable that is more commonly used in organizational studies than patent activity. Patents are used to track everything from innovation to technological niches to social networks among scientists.  Patents are an all-purpose measure because we think they are tightly linked to creativity and knowledge production, the engine that drives both science and capitalist enterprise. But what if this is increasingly not true? What if patent use is becoming decoupled from creativity?

This is one of the questions posed made by last week’s This American Life, my favorite NPR show and one of the most consistently interesting programs of journalism out there. The show talked about patent trolls – companies or individuals who acquire patents for the primary purpose of suing other actors who might use technology that potentially infringes on that patent.  The show focused on the firm, Intellectual Ventures, and its founder Nathan Myhrvoid. Through a couple of interesting vignettes and sly investigations, they showed how the company uses lawsuits, brought by a number of shell companies, to get large settlements out of technology companies, some of which are struggling enterpreneurial groups.  The show demonstrates how, rather than protect and promote innovation, increasingly patents are being used to stifle innovation by wiping out or financially weakening companies that are actually trying to bring innovation to the marketplace. Meanwhile, patent trolls sit on those patents and do nothing to advance the innovations.

This must have some implications for our current understanding of patents as indicators of creativity and innovation. One of the startling revelations in the program was just how much redundancy there is in the patent system. The number of patents issued that cover the same basic function is often in the thousands, especially in the software industry. Patents may be more indicative of turf wars than they are of real innovation.

Even if you’re not a technology scholar, I highly recommend that you listen to the podcast of the show.

the entrepreneurial group

Martin Ruef’s The Entrepreneurial Group won this year’s Max Weber award as the best book in the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the ASA. (Notably, the books of two former orgtheory guest bloggers, Katherine Chen and Celeste Watkins-Hayes, received honorable mentions.)  Diane Burton also reviewed Ruef’s book in the most recent issue of ASQ. The review, while generally positive about Martin’s conceptualization of entrepreneurship as a product of collective action and group formation, has some pointed criticisms of Martin’s approach.

On the book jacket, Arthur Stinchcombe, a distinguished organizational sociologist, describes this book as a “drop of sanity in an ocean of fraud about entrepreneurship, especially in teaching positions financed by corporations.” In describing what is distinctive about his approach, Ruef makes a similar— although less polemically charged—claim in chapter 2 when he contrasts “business management” studies of  entrepreneurship and “social science” studies of entrepreneurship. According to Ruef, “Scholars in the business field tend to focus on group performance in high-growth and high-capitalization enterprises. This sampling approach may appeal to an audience of practitioners and business school students, but limits the external and internal validity of empirical conclusions” (p. 36). But by dismissing the related work that has been done by others, Ruef risks alienating the largest audience for his work, some of whom have done valuable research on “enterprises” that are not necessarily highgrowth or high capitalization, and others who  have a clear theoretical rationale for studying a non-representative sample.

Throughout the book, Ruef drives home his distinctive perspective. In doing so, he avoids in-depth engagement with the extant literature. Rather than relying on existing scholarship, he invents constructs and  measures and redefines terms to suit his purposes. Readers steeped in the entrepreneurship and management literatures are likely to be surprised by this approach. For example, Ruef describes his theoretical framework as “relational demography” but does not connect it to the extensive literature on this topic. His group-level approach is inconsistent with both the traditional dyadic approach (Tsui and O’Reilly, 1989)  and the emerging multilevel approach (Riordan and Wayne, 2007). While his expositional style highlights his own theoretical creativity and empirical ingenuity, its disconnection from related work may limit its potential to influence the broader community of entrepreneurship scholars. This is unfortunate, because there are many valuable insights and ideas in this book.

Princeton University Press categorizes the subject areas of the book as sociology, economics, and finance. Although the topic of entrepreneurial groups is clearly relevant to each of these fields, this is a sociology  book written by a sociologist for other sociologists.

This is a nice review that is not afraid to speak to the bigger intellectual issues circulating around the book, not unlike a recent review published in ASQ by Martin Ruef.  Having recently finished the book myself, I agree with Diane that The Entrepreneurial Group is quite original. But I would argue that the book is able to push boundaries precisely because it extracts itself from the literature on entrepreneurship. If Ruef had tried to rely on current measures/operationalizations and had spent more time engaging with existing scholarship, the book would have lost some of its freedom of thought and would have been less original, I think. Positioning himself as the outsider frees Ruef from constraining conventions. Rather than reading the book as a (mere) sociological account of entrepreneurship, I would hope entrepreneurship scholars would read it as a unique theoretical perspective with lots of seeds for future research in the entrepreneurship field.

voluntary associations in the U.S.

With all of the talk and debate about nonprofits, it seems like an opportune time to share a book review I’ve written about Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present by Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie.

Voluntary associations play a vital, although sometimes not very visible, role in American society as engines of innovation in political and civic life. Associations create much of the fabric that weaves social life together, whether through generating social capital by linking people to others in their community or by constructing identities around which people organize and find meaning. Yet, for all their importance, voluntary associations often receive the short end of the stick in organization theory. Perhaps because they are seen as so different from firms as to need their own theories or because organizational scholars increasingly reside in business schools where there is more interest in for-profit organizations, voluntary associations have taken a backseat to firms as the focal unit in organizational theory. A negative side effect of ignoring associations in organizational theory, of course, is that we fail to fully understand the integrative role they play in society, linking the domains of market and state and serving as key nodes in civil society. The editors of this volume, Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie, have gathered a diverse and interdisciplinary set of scholarly voices to provide a rich overview of the organized nature of American voluntarism. The contributors emphasize that voluntary associations have historically been central players in the U.S. business and political worlds, and although the nature of voluntary associations has changed in recent years, their centrality has not waned.

baseball umpiring and racial bias

Happy Independence day to all of our American readers!  In honor of the holiday, I thought I’d post a paper that focuses on two aspects of our American legacy: baseball and racial bias.  The paper, “Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation,” was published in the most recent issue of the American Economic Review. The authors show that Major League Baseball umpires are less likely to call strikes for pitchers who are of a different race. So, white umpires call fewer strikes when the pitcher is black and vice versa. Interestingly, the authors also show that racial bias dissipated after MLB instituted computer technology that allowed third parties to evaluate the accuracy of umpires’ strike calling, suggesting that close scrutiny may help alleviate this type of bias (at least in employment settings). Here’s the abstract:

Major League Baseball umpires express their racial/ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers. Strikes are called less often if the  umpire and pitcher do not match race/ethnicity, but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires. Pitchers understand the incentives
and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment (e.g., fastballs over home plate) when they anticipate bias. These direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward. The results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups’ behavior generally. They imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage  discrimination.

This study is similar, of course, to the Price and Wolfers paper on racial bias in NBA officiating, which we’ve talked about before.

Dobbin on the weakness of courts

Following up on my earlier post about the inability of courts to create social change, I discovered that Frank Dobbin makes a similar argument in his 2009 book, Inventing Equal Opportunity. Dobbin’s general point is that the U.S. state is weak and fragmented, which creates opportunities for professionals and other entrepreneurial actors to design their own institutional responses to legal mandates. His case is based around the development of equal opportunity measures created by networks of personnel experts. The experts were hired by corporations to protect them from violating civil rights laws, but the laws themselves were not clear in specifying how they expected companies to implement non-discrimination programs or even about what discrimination really was. This ambiguity created a space in which personnel professionals could engineer their own equal opportunity programs and define the appearance of discrimination.

Rather than being a strong arm of enforcement that coerced firms into adopting equal opportunity programs, the courts actually picked up cues from the corporations about how civil rights laws should be interpreted.

[O]ur fascination with judicial decisions led to a misreading of the role of the courts. Seeing that may companies have sexual harassment policies and procedures that are in line with Supreme Court guidelines, for instance, many conclude that the Court’s rulings were successful. In fact, human resources experts devised guidelines for corporations, and then the court vetted them. It was corporations that guided the judiciary, no the other way around. Congress and federal bureaucrats also took their cues from employers, approving some innovations and overturning others. For the most part, they went along with what leading employers wee doing, though they rarely ruled that any one innovation, or any concoction, would fully protect employers. This was the case in part because, while the courts were the final arbiter, they did not have the authority to make law (12).

Does this mean that courts are completely lacking influence? No, obviously companies listened to their HR professionals because they didn’t want to be punished for violating the new civil rights laws, and it was this general fear of being punished that spurred the spread of equal opportunity programs. But the court were also not active in promoting a particular interpretation of the law from the beginning. They figured out what the right response to the law was by watching the emerging consensus of best practices among the companies themselves. The courts validated equal opportunity law, rather than prescribing it.

why we shouldn’t expect the court to bring about social change

The Wal-Mart case, which has occupied so much discussion on orgtheory of late, is disappointing to many sociologists and organizational scholars because it suggests that courts  cannot take a stand against gender discrimination when discrimination is implicit and covert.  Sure, it would be easy for courts to decide to rule against a defendant that explicitly discriminated against a certain class of people with a formal policy, but Scalia et al.’s decision puts a high bar on the qualifications necessary to identify class discrimination. It’s no wonder that gender scholars, in particular, would be upset by this ruling. In this day and age, the most diffuse forms of discrimination are subtle and implicit. If covert discrimination is going to be overcome, we need courts that are willing to recognize these more subtle forms of influence. But should we have really been surprised by this outcome? Setting aside the political orientation of the current Court, I think that this decision is more or less in line with the history of the Court’s decision-making.

Courts are rarely, if ever, engines of social change. After reading this post by Yglesias, I was reminded of a really interesting book I read back in my grad school days that makes a case for why courts are not usually instigators of social reform. Gerald Rosenberg‘s The Hollow Hope argues that courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, have constraints placed on them that keep them from promoting social reform, and that we should only expect the Court to take a more change-oriented approach when certain conditions are met. The constraints are:.

• Courts are bounded by constitutional rights that prevent that from hearing many reform-oriented cases.
• The judicial branch is not sufficiently independent from other governmental branches to promote reform.
• Courts lack the capacity and the tools to actually implement social reform (and therefore it is pointless for them to pursue a reformist agenda).

battle for brooklyn: social movements, countermovements, and the urban growth machine

A couple of weeks ago I saw Battle for Brooklyn, a new documentary by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley,* at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.  The documentary tells the story of Brooklyn activists who fought against a real estate development planned in the the old Atlantic Yards site that ceased hundreds of homes through eminent domain in order to build a business complex and a new arena for the New Jersey Nets. Told from the perspective Daniel Goldstein, one of the community organizers leading the protests, the film provides a rare and in-depth look at the internal workings of a social movement, chronicling the emotional highs and lows as well as the process of tactical decision-making.  It’s a fascinating film for a number of reasons, and I can’t recommend it enough.

One of the impressive qualities of the film is how vividly it portrays the structural constraints of mobilizing a successful movement. The anti-development movement was extremely well organized and tactically savvy, and yet you never get the sense that they will win this battle.  The first reason was, despite their own considerable resources – the movement was primarily led by middle class residents – the activists faced a formidable countermovement.  Although the film reveals the countermovement was actually funded by Forest City Ratner – the developer of the project – and was therefore effectively an astroturf organization, the countermovement activists were able to successfully frame the project as a form of employment stimulus and to inject race as a divisive issue. (Very few jobs were ever created from the project despite this persuasive framing.)  A political environment of underemployment and economic uncertainty made this frame especially resonant to Brooklyn residents whose homes would not be touched by the project.

The other reason the movement struggled to achieve their goals is because they were up against a united and powerful elite. One thing that we know  from social movement theory is that movements are much more likely to succeed when they face a divided elite. In this case, NYC business and political elites formed a strong front and pushed through the necessary measures to ensure the real estate could be declared “blighted” and eligible for eminent domain.  The film provides as good an illustration of “growth machine” politics that I’ve ever seen. In fact, this may be the main lesson from the movie. As Galinsky remarked in the post-screening Q&A, the core message of the movie isn’t to declare that eminent domain is a bad policy, but rather to show how webs of power – in this case embodied in a multiplex network linking a city’s politicians, business elite, and media – influence, and potentially stunt, the democratic process.

The film is showing right now in NYC. Don’t miss your chance to see it!

*The filmmakers are actually the brother and sister-in-law of my colleague Adam Galinsky, which is how I came to be at the Chicago premiere.

should academics be paid to publish in top journals?

Like everyone else, academics respond to incentives. If you want to increase the prevalence of a certain behavior, you just need to figure out how to link that behavior to a meaningful incentive. If you want more publications in top academic journals, then reward people who publish in those journals. The tenure review process at some universities has started to look a lot like this. Departments figure out which “top 5″ journals they want their department members to publish in, and they promise to give tenure to people who can publish X number of articles in those journals.  It may be crass, but it’s a pretty powerful incentive. This isn’t the method that my own institution uses, but I’ve heard that it’s becoming more common for universities to specify a number of A journal hits that junior faculty will need to secure tenure.

I’ve also heard that some universities that used to be more teaching oriented and that are striving to enter the field of R1s have started to directly reward faculty members for publishing in top journals. Publish in your field’s top journal, and the administration will give you $10K. You can’t create an incentive any more direct than that.

I’m not sure this is a good idea, but I understand the reasoning. If you’re a department that would like to move up the rankings and the only way this will happen is if your current faculty start publishing more high quality research, then it makes sense to reward faculty for doing that. It makes even more sense if you’re trying to find ways to motivate tenured faculty over whose heads you can’t dangle the threat of termination.  But I also see how this incentive could cause problems. One outcome may simply be to increase political tensions in the department as scholars dive into turf battles about which journals deserve compensation. If faculty haven’t been publishing high quality research, the problem may not be incentives but something more endemic to the department’s culture.  The tendency, then, may be to redefine quality along fairly mediocre lines.

But even if you could prevent a lowering of standards, there’s something about creating lists of “top journals” that I find to be very depressing and anti-intellectual.  If you can boil someone’s intellectual contribution down to a number of A-list hits, what is the real value of our collective scholarly endeavor? Surely, we don’t think that getting published in a top journal is an end in itself. No, even the most jaded scholars will admit that publishing in a journal should be a means to an end. We’re supposed to be creating a body of knowledge. Each publication, no matter which journal it’s published in, is a little part of that greater body. Ultimately, our goal is to create something that will stand long after we leave the field. Can you motivate someone to make real contributions to this collective effort or does this motivation have to be more intrinsic? The question then is, to what extent would paying faculty to publish in top journals facilitate the creation of this body of knowledge?

welcome new guest blogger, Celeste Watkins-Hayes

We’d like to welcome a new guest blogger to orgtheory, Celeste Watkins Hayes. Celeste is an associate professor of sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University where she is also affiliated with the Institute for Policy Research. Her research is at the intersection of urban sociology, inequality, and organizational theory. Her book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform was published in 2009 by University of Chicago Press. We’re very excited to have Celeste blog with us for the next month!

the editors speak: what makes a good review

One of the most important things we do as members of an intellectual community is assist in peer review.  As important as it is, reviewing papers is one of the tasks that receives the least amount of attention in graduate school training.  We certainly learn how to critique in grad school, but, as you’ll see by the editors’ comments below, critiquing is not the same thing as reviewing. Most of us learn how to be reviewers simply by doing it.  While there will never be a definitive how-to manual for reviewing, I thought it would be nice if our field could identify some of the best practices in reviewing. With that idea in mind, I asked a number of current and former editors at journals in organizational theory and sociology to comment about what they think makes a good review.  This post includes their thoughts.

You’ll notice that the editors seem to agree on several important points (e.g., be constructive!), but there is some variation as well.  Some of the editors make very specific and useful points about what reviewers should and should not be recommending in their reviews. Rather than summarize, I’ll just let you read it for yourself. I’ve put their responses in no particular order.

krippner book forum: how Ralph Nader contributed to financialization

As Fabio described, Greta Krippner’s book seeks to explain how our economy came to increasingly rely on finance as a source of profit.  For Krippner most of the important action takes place in the state. By the 1970s the common view was that there was only so much money to go around.  Legislators had taken on the role of allocating scarce capital to various divisions in society.  The question for them became how to distribute capital so as to avoid being blamed for negative outcomes. Political expedience – specifically, seeking to avoid the “unpalatable task” of giving credit access to particular groups – ultimately drove legislators to embrace deregulation as a political solution to the problem of growing discontent with America’s economy. The real source of the deregulation movement in Krippner’s story is the masses that politicians seek approval from to get reelected. At its core, Krippner’s account is about the unintended economic consequences of political pluralism.

Two important historical factors shape Krippner’s political analysis.  The first was that politicians wanted to avoid major social conflicts that put them at risk of being blamed for bad economic outcomes. Politicians need their constituents’ approval to stay in office.  When the economy was booming, legislators were lauded for their “management” of the economy, but when the economy faltered they were suddenly vulnerable to criticism. The second factor was that capital had become scarce (or at least legislators believed it had become scarce) in the 1960s. When economic times were booming in the post-war years and economic growth appeared limitless, the masses were happy because the supply of capital was abundant. However, post-war growth inevitably dissipated, and citizens could no longer sustain the affluent lifestyle they associated with the American dream. Buying an affordable house, sending the kids to college, and other costly ventures would become out of reach for many Americans if credit was not available. Americans were not passive in their discontent. During the early 1970s consumer movements sprung up throughout the country. One of the leaders of that movement, Ralph Nader, actively campaigned to repeal Regulation Q, which put limits on credit availability and restrained many consumers from getting access to credit. The answer, believed many in the consumer movement, was to allow for variable interest rates and give the consumer the freedom to choose the terms of their loans while also generating better returns on savings. On its surface this seemed like a win-win for everyone. Deregulating interest rates would expand credit availability, while also allowing banks to get more creative in their offerings to potential borrowers. In retrospect we  know that this deregulation also accelerated inflation and suppressed production. This had the effect of pushing more of the economy into financial markets and fueling asset price bubbles.

how do we know that an organizational culture is discriminatory?

Underlying the debate about the ASA amicus brief is a fascinating theoretical question about the link between organizational culture and discrimination. I don’t want to wade into the specifics of the WalMart case – I’m much less informed about the case and the brief than are many of the commenters – but I think it’s worthwhile to think more generally about how one could establish empirically that an organizational culture leads to discrimination. What is the theoretical link between culture and discrimination and what kind of empirical evidence would you need to show this link? I’m also going to steer away from the legal interpretation of discrimination. My reason for writing this post isn’t to discuss employment law; rather I’m just interested in what we think about this from a social science perspective.

Organizational culture is a broad term that identifies differences between organizations in practices, beliefs, values, and symbols. Organizational culture consists of the unwritten rules of the game that organizational members rely on to get stuff done, make decisions, etc.  Culture shouldn’t be equated with the formal structure or demographic composition of the organization, although the two may co-vary. For example, a formal hiring policy isn’t part of an organization’s culture.  Organizational culture is also distinct from the broader set of institutional forces – norms, logics, etc. – that shape all organizations in a field.  We often imagine that organizational culture consists of distinguishing features of organizations.  I don’t think this is a necessary feature of organizational culture, but identifying the distinguishing features of a culture may be necessary from an empirical perspective if you want to demonstrate a causal link between culture and discrimination.

So what are the possible mechanisms that link culture to discrimination? Here are just a few possible mechanisms:

• Informal selection criteria – what are the informal, shared criteria that members of the organization use to hire and retain employees (e.g., see Lauren Rivera’s work on hiring in professional firms)? Do these criteria favor some classes of individuals over others?
• Values – Does the organization have a value system (e.g., collectivist or individualist) that promotes the development of in-group biases? Do these biases lead to unfavorable evaluations of people who are not a part of the in-group?
• Selection practices  and settings – irrespective of job performance, how and where are decisions about hiring and retention made? Are those decisions made in places or using activities that vary in their appeal to certain classes of people? For example, if retention depends on your liking of golf, the organization would naturally favor retaining or hiring people who play a lot of golf.
• Beliefs or personality traits – does the organization favor beliefs or personality traits that are disproportionately found among a certain class of people (e.g., beliefs about working overtime)? For example, if the organization favors aggressive behavior, then the organization would tend to hire and retain people who have this personality trait.

Once you’ve identified theoretical mechanisms, I think there are three parts to empirically verifying a link between culture and discrimination.*  You first want to show that these elements of culture actually vary across organizations. If your claim is that a particular kind of culture is especially discriminatory, then you want to be able to show how that kind of culture varies.  If you can’t show variance across organizations, then you really can’t establish that any single cultural element leads to more bias than another. Second, you want to show that individuals with the same characteristics receive differential treatment in hiring and retention in different organizational cultures. Ideally, you’d like some sort of natural experiment where you took the same individual and had them apply for a job at organizations that varied along the different cultural dimensions. Alternatively, you’d show how roughly equivalent individuals are treated differently in hiring and retention, depending on the type of culture. Finally, you need to be able to make the case that cultural bias in hiring/retention decisions is independent of job performance.  It may be that individuals who have certain beliefs are going to perform better in that organization than individuals who do not share those beliefs. If this is the case, than cultural competence may be the cause of outcome differences rather than superficial preferences.

I imagine this last empirical criterion is the most controversial because of feedback processes within the organization. It may be that individuals differ in performance because an organization’s culture inhibits the employees’ development. For example, if women are given fewer leadership training opportunities because they are not given access to the same socialization settings as men, then you could still show that the culture indirectly shapes discrimination.  This would essentially require a fourth step of empirical verification. Does culture mediate discrimination by constraining the kinds of opportunities that employees of a certain class have for advancement? If you can show that this is the case, then you can still empirically demonstrate a causal link between culture and discrimination.

* Demonstrating causality in social science is notoriously difficult to do. At best we can show that X is one of the causes of Y. Usually we are only capable of showing that we have good reasons to think that  X might be one of the causes of Y.