tips for teaching business undergraduates

I occasionally teach a course aimed at business undergraduates. It’s a work/occupations/orgs course that uses various economic examples to discuss sociological ideas. The issue for me is that I often get torched in the evaluations. In my other classes, my evaluations range from the department average to very high. But hitting the department average is real accomplishment for this course. I’ve heard the same from some other instructors in the department. They do well with sociology students, but the identical course will get much lower scores when it is taught to business students.

So I ask my brothers and sisters in management: What would you advise the instructor of business students? In the past, I’ve added discussion, taken it away, added/subtracted readings, added/taken away group projects, provided my slides online, etc. How else can I experiment with this course?

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what are business schools for? a follow up with santiago iniguez

A while ago, we asked: what are b-schools for? We covered discussions by various b-school deans. One of those deans, Santiago Iniguez of the IE business school, has drawn my attention to an interview where he discusses his new book, The Learning Curve, which focuses on management education. Click here and scroll down. Relevant to readers who are interested in b-schools and their mission.

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business schools: a problem in organizational design

Rakesh Khurana and former orgtheory guester JC Spender have written a provocative, forthcoming piece titled: Herbert A. Simon on What Ails Business Schools: More than ‘A Problem in Organizational Design, Journal of Management Studies.   (Here is Simon’s original 1967 Journal of Management Studies essay: The Business School, A Problem in Organizational Design.)

Rakesh and JC’s piece essentially traces the history of business school education, links it with the Carnegie tradition and then reflects on Simon’s essay about business schools and highlights some of the extant problems.  I enjoyed their historical discussion though I disagree with the end-conclusions about an “intellectual stasis” – along with the associated rigor-relevance issues.  I’ll post about that beef later on.  But the essay is most definitely worth reading!  It raises all kinds of interesting issues.

Here’s the abstract:

We critically examine Herbert Simon’s 1967 essay, ‘The business school: a problem in organizational design’. We consider this essay within the context of Simon’s key ideas about organizations, particularly those closely associated with the ‘Carnegie perspective’ on organizations and how they influenced the reinvention of American business schools in the post-Second World War era, and were deeply influenced by the post War context and also were appropriated by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations to reform business school teaching and research. We argue that management educators misappropriated Simon’s concept of an intellectually robust and relevant research and educational agenda for business schools that has in part contributed to the intellectual stasis that now characterizes business education research and its capacity to inform management practice.

meet me in pittsburgh!!!

I will be giving a talk at CMU in the Tepper School this coming Friday. The topic is “Hybridity in Organizational Fields: Evidence from the Anti-Iraq War Movement.” I’ll be giving a talk about a series of studies that my co-author and I have conducted on the topic of the anti-Iraq War movement and its impact on allied social movements. Movements. Organizations. Cross-over and hybrids. Good times, I promise. Email me if you want to meet me on Thu or Fri.

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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.

conference for orgtheory in developing regions

Writing from the home office in Switzerland, Tim draws my attention to a conference for management PhD scholars interested in development. From the call for papers for the UNDP Development Academy:

The oikos UNDP Young Scholars Development Academy 2012 provides PhD students and young scholars working on poverty, sustainable development, and the informal economy from an Organisation and Management Theory perspective a platform to present and discuss their on-going research projects with fellow students and senior faculty.

Research on inclusive business models, market development and sustainability between the informal and formal economy is a promising and challenging field for young researchers and PhD students. It calls for a multitude of methods, combination of disciplines in strategy, organisation studies, sociology, anthropology and economics, and new research designs, e.g. market ethnography in organisation studies.

Great opportunity for orgtheory PhD students and tenure track/post docs. Check it out.

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podolny interviews jim march on leadership

I don’t usually read the Academy of Management Learning & Education but the most recent issue has some interesting articles on “leadership.”  The term of course is and can be highly problematic — macro scholars in particular are very skeptical — but part of the effort in the special issue is to delineate the scope of leadership, particularly as it relates to teaching leadership.

As the editorial intro mentions, leadership is a very common term used in how most business school describe and sell themselves (the editors point to the “leadership” language in the mission statements of top schools: Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Duke, etc., etc). Perhap’s its a normative or symbolic thing.

Well – the article that might interest orgtheory readers is Joel Podolny’s short interview with Jim March: “A conversation with James G. March on learning about leadership” (sorry that link is gated – I could not find a free version anywhere).  Any Blue Devil fans may also be interested in Sitkin and Hackman’s interview with Coach K: Developing Team Leadership.

academy of management 2011, receptions and parties

The 2011 Academy of Management conference (in San Antonio) is in a couple weeks.  Miguel Unzueta (UCLA) and Sekou Bermiss (Texas) have put together a helpful Academy of Management parties and receptions twitter account, @AoMParties.  Thanks guys!  Very helpful.  Here’s the google calendar of the events.

joel baum: article effects > journal effects

Joel Baum has written a provocative article which argues and shows that, essentially, article effects are larger than journal effects.

In other words, impact factors and associated journal rankings give the impression of within-journal article homogeneity.  But top journals of course have significant variance in article-level citations, and thus journals and less-cited articles essentially “free-ride” on the citations of a few, highly-cited pieces.  A few articles get lots of citations, most get far less — and the former provide a halo for the latter.  And, “lesser” journals also publish articles that become hits (take Jay Barney’s 1991 Journal of Management article, with 17,000+ google scholar citations), hits that are more cited than average articles in “top” journals.

The whole journal rankings obsession (and associated labels: “A” etc journal) can be a little nutty, and I think Joel’s piece nicely reminds us that, well, article content matters.  There’s a bit of a “count” culture in some places, where ideas and content get subverted by “how many A pubs” someone has published.  Counts trump ideas.  At times, high stakes decisions — hiring, tenure, rewards — also get made based on counts, and thus Joel’s piece on article-effects is a welcome reminder.

Having said that, I do think that journal effects certainly remain important (a limited number of journals are analyzed in the paper), no question. And citations of course are not the only (nor perfect) measure of impact.

But definitely a fascinating piece.

Here’s the abstract:

The simplicity and apparent objectivity of the Institute for Scientific Information’s Impact Factor has resulted in its widespread use to assess the quality of organization studies journals and by extension the impact of the articles they publish and the achievements of their authors.  After describing how such uses of the Impact Factor can distort both researcher and editorial behavior to the detriment of the field, I show how extreme variability in article citedness permits the vast majority of articles – and journals themselves – to free-ride on a small number of highly-cited articles.  I conclude that the Impact Factor has little credibility as a proxy for the quality of either organization studies journals or the articles they publish, resulting in attributions of journal or article quality that are incorrect as much or more than half the time.  The clear implication is that we need to cease our reliance on such a non-scientific, quantitative characterization to evaluate the quality of our work.

Here’s the paper (posted with permission from Joel):  “Free-riding on power laws: Questioning the validity of the impact factor as a measure of research quality in organization studies.” The paper is forthcoming in Organization.

The article has some great links to the Bill Starbuck piece that Brayden discussed. Here’s Bill’s OMT blog post.

business school research and teaching

There’s an engaging debate on the pages of the Financial Times’s Business Education section.

London Business School’s Freek Vermeulen argues that there is a big gap between business school research and teaching, essentially, popular fads replace relevant teaching.   Timothy Devinney responds and argues that research already subtly influences teaching.

mba rankings, crowdsourced

An effort to crowdsource MBA program rankings.

Rank here: http://www.allourideas.org/mbarankings

[With big apologies to those with rankings fatigue.  This one's, largely, targeted toward a different population.  Actually, sort of an interesting self-selection that occurs with these rankings --- more on that later.]

Happy New Year going forward

A seasonal message from Jamie Targett, our Director of Corporate Affairs

Soon it will be time to remove all traces of the officially authorised low-key festive accessories that have decorated our offices during the festive season. Time also to turn our faces towards the future that is to come. Time to evaluate our personal strategic objectives and our intended goal outcomes. Time to contemplate our game plan, examine core competencies, reinforce best practices, break out of silos, exert maximum leverage, evolve new synergies and maximise our skill sets.

A very happy management-oriented New Year to you all.

the coming wave of csr research in organizational theory

Yesterday and today I attended a conference at the University of Michigan about corporate social responsibility in a global world.  Kiyoteru Tsutsui of Michigan sociology put the conference together with the help of the Japan Foundation. One of the unique aspects of this conference was the diversity of scholars who presented. Most of the participants had a strong disciplinary focus (either from sociology, political science, or economics). Few had a traditional management focus. As one of the discussants (an esteemed management scholar himself) noted, this was a big shift from past conferences on CSR he’s participated in. Research on social performance, ethics, and corporate responsibility grew in the business schools, in part as a reaction to the growing interest in these issues among actual managers.  Members of the Academy of Management who were interested in social responsibility issues were not in the mainstream, however, and had to huddle together in their own division (Social Issues in Management), creating their own conferences and journals. The disciplines stayed away from CSR studies like they were the plague.

It looks like that is beginning to change. Based on the scholarship I’ve seen at this conference, work on CSR by organizational theorists from the disciplines is  suddenly in vogue.  Phd students in sociology, for example, are suddenly making CSR the focus of their dissertations. Political scientists, economists, and sociologists are bringing their own theoretical toolkits to the table, giving CSR studies a new flavor and level of rigor. Could this mean that CSR research will suddenly start appearing in journals like ASR and ASQ?  Will the Social Issues scholars be included in these new conversations? Another potential concern is that as sociologists and political scientists move into CSR territory, the object of analysis shifts from a focus on performance and consequences to an examination of the origins of CSR. Sociologists, of course, see CSR as an interesting social and organizational phenomenon in its own right. Thus, the old guard, with their links to practice and implementation, may become lab rats in the studies of the new guard, as scholarship begins to focus more on adoption, diffusion, and variation in use.

the dreary lives of middle managers

Quy Nguyen Huy reviews Paul Osterman’s book, The Truth about Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter, in the latest issue of ASQ. Huy and Osterman both believe that middle managers are understudied contributors to the business world, given their closeness to the actual work, innovation, and productive efforts in our economy. Huy’s own work suggests that middle managers play an important role in sustaining the emotional energy of an organization. Their ability to cultivate positive emotional states has a big impact on an organization’s ability to facilitate successful change. When middle managers resist change and fail to attend to the emotional states of employees, organizational change tends to produce resistance and a lack of commitment. When middle managers attend to the emotional states of their employees, radical change is embraced and is more likely to produce positive outcomes for the organization.

So research indicates that middle managers are critical components to some of the most important organizational outcomes, like innovation and change. This intuition makes it all the more surprising that most organizations have tended to de-prioritize their investment in middle management. Businesses increasingly see middle managers as expendable. The result is that managers have become less committed to and less emotionally invested in their companies. Huy summarizes Osterman on this point:

Osterman suggests that middle managers in U.S. corporations live in a “small world” that has limited horizons. Beyond focusing on their day-to-day jobs and committing to their colleagues, the middle managers he studied saw no larger purpose in what they were doing. This suggests, among other things, that middle managers are neither truly committed to their employers nor fully engaged in executing the firm’s
strategy. This fi nding is supported by Osterman’s survey of recent M.B.A. graduates, who hold a deeply cynical view of their employers.

This finding resonates with my own experience in teaching MBA students, who have already internalized the degraded image of middle managers in the corporate world. At the beginning of each quarter I ask the students to tell me where they see themselves working in 5 and 10 years after graduation. Most students see themselves working up the corporate ladder after five years, presumably in some middle management position. But after 10 years their visions change pretty dramatically.  A few say they hope to be promoted to some executive position. But a surprisingly large number of students say they’d like to be running a nonprofit or charity, starting their own business, or working for an independent investment fund. Few, if any, see themselves as corporate managers. Why is that? I think it’s because, as Osterman and Huy point out, the role of middle manager has become so degraded that it can no longer be equated with success. It’s too bad. Organizations, by making middle management expendable and by paying more and more money to top executives while not giving equivalent income increases to middle management, has unintentionally devalued one of their most important assets. It’s no wonder that new talent sees middle management as small and trivial work.

MBA NDA Q&A

An anonymous correspondent newly-enrolled in an Executive MBA program writes:

Does your B-school allow students to sign NDAs when working on projects or disclosing non-public company information in the classroom? They may just use an honor system. But I’m interested to know.

So what’s standard practice at your school? Inquiring minds want to know.

economics and deconstruction

So, last week, I presented at the Oliver Williamson seminar on institutional analysis, based in the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley.  (This week, I presented for Labor Studies here at IU.  How’s that for variety?)  It was a great experience and a smart crowd–predominantly made up of economists, and playing by economists’ rules for talks.  I was glad to make it through the bulk of the material I wanted to share, and thankful that the intellectual sparring (which I even mildly enjoyed) wasn’t hostile.  I heard “we don’t usually get sociologists” several times.  I was actually surprised that the worlds of “business and public policy” (primarily economists) and “management of organizations” (more psychologists and sociologists) don’t overlap so much, at least in this particular setting.

One side reflection….

…Economists are pretty damn quick and agile when it comes to using notions about signaling and agency theory to undercut arguments about cultural categories in markets.

Here, that occurred when I talked about Love and Kraatz’s interesting finding that corporate downsizing in the 1980s had negative effects on firms’ reputations (relative to their competitors).  Love and Kraatz show that these effects are robust to controls for financial and market performance and argue that they represent an evaluation of firms’ “character” and trustworthiness.  It’s a nice paper and interesting argument, which differs from neo-institutionalist lines about conformity with the dominant institutional logic (in this case, of shareholder value).  The economist counter-argument was that downsizing is really a signal that the firm knows it will be in trouble in the future–and therefore provides valuable information about the firm’s market value.  This isn’t picked up in measures of market performance because it’s really a forecast of performance to come, not a reflection of curent performance. 

In a discussion a few years ago, something similar happened when I used Zuckerman’s ”categorical imperative” findings to demonstrate the effects of legitimacy.  Then, the counter-argument, if I remember correctly, was that the real problem with firms that don’t fit the expected categories is that they are scattered in such a way that generates agency problems that ultimately devalue them.

My goal is not to argue about which interpretation is right.  In my view, these two papers are super-high quality and go to great lengths to establish their findings.  The point is that it’s amazing how quick one can be to undermine a rigorously developed argument with a wave of the hand.  From one perspective, this could be an indication of the power of a strong paradigm.  But I think it also reflects a tendency toward deconstruction in that paradigm…and I mean this in something not too terribly far from the Derrida/Foucault sense.  All that is solid melts into thin air.  Arguments become increasingly hard to operationalize, models become impossible to properly specify, and therefore more falls back on the paradigmatic assumptions.  My sense is that sociologists are more pragmatist in their orientation:  Build with what you have; talk, talk, talk  to sort it out.

Just a scattered thought, which maybe has implications for Mark’s earlier post about org theory and institutional economics.

Next step, coming soon…a more substantive post….no more mentions of Williamson, I promise.

b-schools don’t make managers anymore

New Republic has an interesting article on the shift in b-schools from management to consulting:

But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.” 

And:

The new managerial class tended to neglect process innovation because it was hard to justify in a quarterly earnings report, where metrics like “return on investment” reigned supreme…

The country’s business schools tended to reflect and reinforce these trends. By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to be overachiever types motivated primarily by salary rather than some lifelong ambition to run a steel mill. And there was a lot more money to be made in finance than  manufacturing. A recent paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef shows that compensation in the finance sector began a sharp, upward trajectory around 1980.

My take: It’s not clear to me that this is such a bad thing. It really depends on what you think about the modern American economy. If, like Jerry Davis, you think that transition to securitized virtual firms is bad, then this is just another symptom of the problem. If you think that the economy is now different and America’s advantage is in financial machinery, then maybe it’s ok. Either way: who *is* training the managers? Our products have been getting better over time – who’d doing that? Is it all foriegn firms?

getting a Wharton MBA, as seen from the sharp end

These are interesting times to be in an MBA program. Here at orgtheory we get glimpses of the faculty view, but what about the students? Gareth Keane is a student at Wharton, and since he started there — he’s now a second year — he’s been writing a column for the Irish Times about life in the program. Given the constraints on what someone in his position can politely say in print, you get a pretty good picture of the challenges, rewards and stresses of the program. (His most recent contribution mentions that he’ll be leading a group of first- and second-year MBAs to Antarctica over Christmas, which should make a nice change from a Philly winter. Gareth is of course too polite to say this.)

The general topic has been on my mind recently. My brother runs the customer service and operations divisions of a large financial services company. He’s getting ready to do a part-time MBA himself, and is wondering how much he’ll get out of it. Meanwhile (much to the brother’s amusement, it must be said) I’ll be teaching Organizations & Management next semester to Duke undergrads enrolled in our Markets & Management Program. M&M is a really interesting beast. It’s effectively an undergrad business concentration, the largest certificate program on campus, and it’s run by the Sociology department (Lisa Keister is the Director) with contributions from Economics and other units, together with. In some ways it’s like an Econ Soc undergrad program that got institutionalized about 15 or 20 years ahead of its time. While I’ve taught straight Soc of Orgs to sociology majors before, the audience here is a bit different so the course will be, too. I’ll probably post the syllabus here at some point. If you have any recommendations for relevant books or articles that have worked well with undergrad audiences, I’d be interested to hear them.

Incidentally, like me Gareth is an Irish expat. We’re from different parts of the country, went to different universities, and we have never met. It is a well-established theorem of mathematical sociology that we must therefore be no more than two degrees of separation apart. And indeed it turns out that I knew his wife when I was in college. You can see why social network analysis did not originate in Ireland, much as oceanography did not originate amongst schools of fish in the Pacific Ocean.

fad and fashion in organizational theory

I could use any opinions (even venomous, acerbic, and anonymous insults), as well as leads to theories, data, examples, personal experiences, and references bearing on the question:

Are there fads or fashions in particular branches of the Social Sciences generally, or in Organizational Theory, in this particular instance?

Note that I assume that current theories of fads and fashions differ substantively, as they draw from very different theoretical traditions in Sociology (ASQ, Abrahamson and Eisenman, 2008).

Why this question about scientific fads or fashions in science? First, addressing it could suggest how helpful or harmful fads or fashions in science influence its evolution or progress.  Second, I hope that this question will trigger a heated, pointed and thought-provoking debate on this blog. Third, the question matters greatly to the development of the study of fads or fashions.

Why? A recent study examines fashions in capital punishment; the sequence of fashion waves in techniques ranging from hanging, to electrocuting, to gassing, and to injecting human beings with deadly chemicals (Denver, Best, and Haas, 2008). This study, and a growing number of studies of fads or fashions in social techniques over the last decade, stand out in the history of sociological studies of fads or fashions over the last century.

How? Since the turn of century, social scientists have mostly studied fads or fashions in aesthetic forms, which they considered, therefore, relatively unimportant social entities; fads in streaking or in toys, to site some examples, or fashions in women’s dress or men’s hirsuteness, to site others. They have made passing references to fads or fashions in social techniques, which they considered much more important. But they have rarely pursued these lines of inquiry developing specific theories and research on fads or fashions in these social techniques.

In my dissertation, I employed theories of fads or fashion in aesthetic forms to study fads or fashions in business techniques. For example, I developed a market theory of fashionable business techniques (AMR, Abrahamson, 1996). This market theory, in particular, brought me a steady stream of reasoned and ad hominem insults, particularly from management consultants peddling business techniques in that market. Delighted, for over twenty years now, I have studied fads, fashions or bandwagons in business techniques.

During these two decades, I have been astonished to witness the radiation of careful studies of technical fads or fashions. Studies range across fads or fashions in important techniques belonging to medicine, education, dieting, parenting, national and international government policy, urban design and now capital punishment (as well as many unfounded claims about fads or fashions in these various techniques).

The final frontier in the study of technical fads and fashions, however, seems to be the study of fads or fashions in topics or techniques belonging to the hard and social sciences generally, and to Organizational Theory in this particular instance. A few have touched on the topic very cautiously: Crane (1969), for instance, asks diplomatically “Fashion in science: does it exist?” Others, however, have gone full bore; in those cases, they have been either completely ignored (e.g. Spurber, 1990) or savagely attacked (e.g. Sorokin, 1956).

Sorokin (1956), in particular, had the impudence of entitling his book Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology, triggering and avalanche of vitriolic assaults. To give the flavor, Horton’s (1956: 338-339) review of Sorokin’s book in the American Journal of Sociology states (and it only gets nastier):

The manner is demagogic rather than scholarly… The derogation and ridicule in this book can be interpreted only as an appeal to third parties against sociology as a science and profession… Only the enemies of rational social inquiry can possibly benefit…

Clearly, the attack is unfair because the aim of understanding useful or harmful fads or fashions in science, was and should be, to help its evolution or progress. Yet, discussing fads or fashions in Organizational Theory (or in Cultural studies, Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Psychology or Social Psychology, for that matter) is a bit like teetering at the top of a tall Sequoia’s canopy and shaking the branch you are standing on. Despite this warning, some heated argumentation will result, I fondly hope.

another world is possible, and Stinchcombe is its prophet

The recent and abrupt end of that whole “shareholder capitalism” fad that swept the US indicates that we are at an interesting turning point in the organization of the economy.  Surprisingly, this may be an opportunity for organization theory to have a place in creating a more humane society in the US.

My previous posts (and recent writings) have described developments that undermine the idea of a society of organizations in the US.  One is the disaggregation of production into an OEM model, where the parts needed to create a (temporary) organization are widely available (even to a guy in Irvine with an idea for cheap LCD televisions to compete with Sony and Samsung).  Another is the hegemony, and then the downfall, of the shareholder value model.

Meanwhile, back at organization theory, the dominance of neo-institutionalism has rendered the field largely irrelevant to any practical concerns.  We’ve got a lot of fun exposes of hypocrisy, documentation of diffusion processes dressed up in sociological mumbo-jumbo, and arid discussions of agency-structure dialectics.  But our understanding of organization design – formerly the practical application of organization theory — has languished, and other fields have stepped into the breach (particularly economics and information systems). 

But if the rightful domain of shareholder capitalism has retrenched, as I believe it has, then this might be an opening to rehabilitate organization theory, and even neoinstitutionalism, in the service of creating more participative enterprises.  Institutionalists describe the process by which entrepreneurs draw on the parts available (strewn around the landscape, in Meyer and Rowan’s imagery) to create organizations or projects.  One of the recurring themes of the literature is the role of bricolage (building “with the ruins” available), while another is the pervasive use of analogies and metaphors in creating new forms.  (“It’s like a McDonald’s drive-through for kidney transplants.”)  This kind of thing can be taught, say, to paying customers in b-schools.

If I’m right about the end of the “society of organizations,” or at least the end of the dominance of 20th-century-style encompassing corporations, then we may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of new organizational forms.  This time, however, we may be able to escape the utter dominance of shareholder value.  It’s happened before — consider the explosion of cooperative forms created in response to the first wave of corporatization, documented by the estimable Marc Schneiberg.  We still have a surprising number of such non-corporate forms around, even in the US: State Farm Insurance (a mutual), Land ‘o Lakes (a producer cooperative), REI (a consumer cooperative) and the 8000 non-profit credit unions that enroll an amazing 86 million Americans.  (It turns out the US is already socialist, but doesn’t know it.)  And how about Wikipedia, Linux, and the various social movements that generate spontaneous collective action in the absence of a profit motive (e.g., Iran’s “Twitter revolution”)?

Another world is possible, and Art Stinchcombe is its prophet. We’ve been dealt a hand of fantastic new technologies for organizing, and are temporarily free of some of the old constraints in which all enterprises have to end up with an IPO.  Organization theorists can midwife a new period of experimentation by compiling our “flea market” of alternative organization types, and mashing them up with new technologies that lower the costs of coordination.   Examples include Kiva (www.kiva.com), which allows people to do individual micro-lending, or sourceforge.org, where you can post or contribute to open-source projects.  (Incidentally, I’d love examples of this, if people have them.) 

So, to the barricades, or the organization design classroom!  I’m waiting to see that iPhone “democracy app” that turns GM into a kibbutz.

let’s talk about b-schools and org theory

I’ve always liked b-schools. My first real social science job was working as Berkeley management scholar Thomas Marschak’s research assistant on a project concerning Hurwicz style mechanism design. He was super nice and I learned quite a bit about social science from him. At Chicago, org theory was seen as naturally interdisciplinary – with representatives in the b-school (Burt, Phillips, Stuart, and others), soc (Laumann), ed (Bidwell, Bryk), political science (Padgett) and many other depts. My own adviser, Rafe Stolzenberg wrote some very interesting papers on orgtheory in the 70s, including this one on the effect of firm size on rate of return to education (jstor link here). Orgtheory was well represented in the world of sociology and in many other fields as well. The disciplines and professional schools could easily co-exist.

However, going on the job market in 2002/2003, I found that this was not a view shared by everyone. During an informal interview, a person from a highly regarded program asked bluntly: “Why should we hire you? Isn’t organization theory moving to the business schools?” I was flabbergasted. I then mumbled something like, “Well, my research shows that social movements have important impacts on universities, and the social movement/orgs area will be important.” History shows that I was correct. The movement/orgs field has been a great area.

But years later, the interaction still leaves me with a lingering question – is there any concrete reason to believe that organization studies (and now economic sociology) can’t flourish in both sociology and strategy/org departments? Personally, I think that we can all get along, but I’ve heard other people say that b-schools (and other professional schools) are killing soc of orgs via brain drain. What do you think?

orgtheorist makes good: kogut on the daily show

Try as I might, I have not been able to figure out how to embed this video: the Daily Show with Jon Stewart takes on the MBA oath and Bruce Kogut plays a staring role.

Having watched it, I am now considering getting some prominent arm tattoos… clearly they generate more respect from MBA students than my current sartorial efforts have achieved to date.

More importantly, kudos to Bruce for playing the straight man with aplomb.  I’d say he does the George Burns thing to John Oliver’s Gracie very well indeed.

business school research and teaching

Matt Symonds at Forbes.com wonders whether funding academic research is a worthy pursuit of business schools. Given the hard economic times (and yes, even the wealthy business schools are having to cut back), it might seem odd that research budgets are one expenditure most top schools are not willing to cut. In the article a number of business school professors and deans speak out, justifying the importance of research to actual MBA training. The usual arguments appear, including the idea that business school training should be more about professionalizing management than providing soft or hard skills. According to this vision research should be tightly linked to the professionalization  process.

Since joining the Academy of Management several years ago, one major difference I’ve noticed between b-school academics and sociologists is the priority Academy members give to integrating research with teaching. Although there are some movements within the ASA to improve teaching and link what goes on in the sections to what goes on in the classroom, this is mostly treated as a low status endeavor.  It doesn’t work in the same way in the Academy. Teaching, perhaps because our constituency is paying so much more for a good education than what you see in most undergrad social science departments and because of the related resource dependence, is an important part of the management scholar’s identity. Because research is also valued and because there is some distance between what we research and what we actually teach, b-school scholars spend a lot of time thinking about how we can integrate the two. It seems especially important for org. theorists because the gap between research and relevance is somewhat bigger (compared to, for example, strategy scholars). As evidence, check out the useful list of teaching resources the OMT Division has made available.

business schools and the economic crisis

The lashing of business schools continues. Here’s a recent BusinessWeek article: MBAs: Public Enemy No. 1? Readers, so far, feel that some MBAs (was it their education?) are at least partially responsible for the economic meltdown — see results on the right. HBR’s online forum on ‘how to fix business schools’ also has a (longer, 11-question) survey on the topic — you can take it here (results apparently will be posted soon).

Here’s a Rakesh Khurana interview, published two days ago, on the future of the business school.

a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do

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.

orgtheory and econ sociology seminars

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)

ft business education

The Financial Times‘ Business Education section has some interesting content — blogs by MBA students, info about faculty mobility/hiring (though they did miss Brayden’s move to Kellogg), the FT business school rankings of course, the deans blog, video lectures, etc, etc.

Here’s a few, quick things I just noted:

• UCLA has asked MBA applicants to submit their essays in audio form. 70 % did so.  Here are the questions that the students were asked to respond to:  What does entrepreneurial spirit mean to you?  What global issue matters most to you and why?  What is something people will find surprising about you?
• A video by Mauro Guillen on the financial crisis.
• Nick Epley video on managerial decision-making.
• Pankaj Ghemawat on the age of semi-globalization.
• MBA Gym Workouts (requires registration — though it appears to be free).

ranking scholarship

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.

ruef on khurana

One of the books that orgtheory gave a lot of attention in the last year was Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. The book is part history and part theoretical investigation of the educational problems associated with the modern business school. One of Khurana’s main points is that the slanted focus towards economics that is given in MBA training has damaged the professional values and authority of management.  Armed with only the tools of financial/economic analysis, the modern manager is incapable of guiding his organization with any kind of moral authority. Agency theory, in particular, takes quite a few knocks in the book.

In the most recent issue of ASQ, Martin Ruef has written a thoughtful and somewhat critical review of Khurana’s book. Ruef offers an alternative interpretation to Khurana’s thesis, suggesting that the transformation of the business school is a function of resource dependence on a market for ideas and training that managers will find appealling. The dependence of business schools on support from the business community, expressed today in revenue flowing from executive education, shapes how/what the schools teach in in the classroom (and perhaps even what we study). Ruef calls on readers of Khurana’s book to think more about how this market logic prevents business schools from promoting a professionalizing curriculum.

This section of the book leaves the reader with an indelible image of a few neoclassical economists, perhaps aided by an institutional economist or two, standing over the body of the once-mighty general manager. But if words could kill, then other social scientists may well have served as accomplices to the purported crime. After all, anti-managerialism has had a firm foothold in organizational sociology since the 1970s, portraying managers who seem to be shackled by inertia, resource dependencies, or myth and ceremony (Donaldson, 1995). And other disciplines have hardly been immune to similar predispositions, lest we forget that an influential account of organized anarchy (Cohen, March, and Olsen, 1972) was coauthored by two scholars with political science Ph.D.s. It is more likely, of course, that we flatter ourselves by thinking that intellectual perceptions of organizations could matter so much. My alternative history of the “rise” of a market logic in business education takes a different tack—by returning, full circle, to the origins of American business education in the nineteenth century. To quote singer David Byrne, it’s the “same as it ever was.”…

The view on business schools and management science appears more ambivalent in the twenty-first century. Educators try to produce business “leaders” as a vague substitute for business managers; contemporary research on organizations tends to offer contributions to the anti-managerial paradigms that first appeared thirty years ago. If an ethos of professionalism in business schools is the only victim of these developments, then I suspect that many of us will not be attending the funeral. In America, business education was born from a market logic that touted commercial credentials in the nineteenth century and, in many respects, so it remains today. But if the majority of our scholarship on organizations is now conducted in business schools, then another, perhaps more innocent victim may be organizational theory itself. Sidelined by the vocational requirements of teaching MBAs how to find jobs, negotiate salaries, start up companies, form social networks, and be “leaders,” business school faculty may yet lose the ability to conduct critical inquiries into the nature of organizations and the policy implications of organizational activities.