occupy everything

Some more occupy movement links:

• occupy writers
• occupy philosophy
• occupy colleges
• and indeed an occupy everything site that has been around since 2009 (tried to find links to #ows)
• Zizek is in the mix.

I was reading up on ‘occupy colleges’ at the Huffington Post and who do they quote but orgtheory’s very own Brayden King (as well as Fabio’s co-author Michael Heaney and other movement scholars).

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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.

a sociology of Steve Jobs

Hosted over on my own blog, mostly because it’s a little long, here’s A Sociology of Steve Jobs.

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.

steve jobs 1955-2011

You’ve undoubtedly seen the announcements.  But an orgtheory tribute seems warranted for this legend.  Here’s the Stanford address Kieran linked to, a classic.

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.

occupy wall street

So, what are the specific demands and aims of the Occupy Wall Street protest?  Here are some sources of information on the protest -

• An active twitter presence, @OccupyWallSt.
• A very active #occupywallstreet twitter hashtag (as well as #ows).
• A relatively detailed wikipedia site.
• A live stream of the ‘global revolution.’
• Or, see globalrevolution.tv.
• A New York Times piece and short video on “Wall Street Occupiers, Protesting Till Whenever”
• There is OccupyTogether.org.
• Adbusters is involved.
• As is Anonymous.

@nyc – philosophical foundations of economics and the good economy

Here’s an interesting, upcoming conference that I only recently found out about: “Philosophical Foundations of Economics and The Good Economy: Individual Values, Human Pursuits, Self-Realization and Becoming.”  That’s a long title.

The conference is hosted by the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, set for September 23-24.  No registration is required.  Here’s the program (pdf).   Some of the sessions look interesting.  I’m going to try to attend.  With any luck, additional rain delays may even give me a chance to catch a US Open match.  (If any orgtheorists in New York perchance want to meet up, I’d love it.  Send me a note.)

Should we pay Little Leaguers?

Did you watch the Little League World Series last month? It’s possible you missed it in the wake of other news stories, like Hurricane Irene.  But this year’s winners (a team from Huntingdon Beach, California) were also overshadowed by coverage of their own game, as the state of competitive youth baseball and whether or not these “unpaid adolescents” were being exploited became the media’s focus.

Sportswriter Dan Wetzel made his case for compensating Little Leaguers in “Pay the Little League World Series Players.”  Wetzel writes: “Not every Little Leaguer, just the ones who play on television, where their innocence is packaged into a commodity. And, no, they shouldn’t make millions or even hundreds of thousands.  They should get something, maybe several hundred per television appearance. If it made people more comfortable that the money went to a college savings fund or maybe into a trust that becomes available when they’re 18 or 21, so be it.”

Any self-respecting economic sociologist, or sociologist of childhood, will immediately think of Viviana Zelizer’s classic Pricing the Priceless Child after reading this quote.  And you will also know that childhood innocence and compensation do not always mix so well.

I’ve written about how we should think of children’s participation in afterschool activities as a form of children’s work.  Afterschool activities can qualify as “work” both because of prizes won and because of the acquisition of cultural capital that will have a pay-off in the longer run.  I’ve also written about child performers, particularly children on reality television shows, and how they are compensated.  Child performers have always occupied a complicated space in child labor debates, partly because their “work” is often constructed as being “educational.” But I’m not aware of any serious scholarship (sociological, economic, or legal) on compensation of child athletes.

In my opinion compensating child athletes may sound logical on some level, but it is a complicated issue that poses a few problems that are likely insurmountable in today’s commodified world.  The most obvious practical complication has to do with NCAA regulations. If we compensate kids they almost certainly lose their NCAA eligibility.  Of course many of these kids won’t go on to play NCAA baseball, but they may play another NCAA sport.  Compensating them without proper protections in place jeopardizes those future opportunities. (Paying NCAA athletes is another issue that has been batted around for some time, though it also has been talked about a lot more in the past few months).

Second, and even more complicated, is that if we compensate kids in a way consistent with them being classified as workers or performers (and limiting compensation to those who appear on television makes it more likely they would be classified as performers) that would also limit the number of hours they could “work” and the conditions under which they could labor.  This could impact practice times, length of games, and other parts of the sporting experience.

However, I do believe that kids should be compensated and rewarded for their hard work—particularly when it helps adults benefit financially. One model to look at would be the National Spelling Bee (which, incidentally, is now not only broadcast on ESPN, but also live on ABC in the final rounds).  Finalists receive prizes, like an encyclopedia, along with scholarships, bonds, and cash awards.  Other in-kind gifts like computers and trips are also possible (for example the National Geography Bee winner wins a trip to the Galapagos Islands). Perhaps elite child athletes could receive similar types of awards—like specialized training—that could protect them from NCAA violations.

In the meantime they have to settle for hometown parades and a DVD of their television appearances.  What do you think is fair?

the left’s disenchantment with obama and the antiwar movement

Yesterday, Clancy Sigal, of the Guardian, cited my research (with Michael Heaney) on the antiwar movement as evidence that the left has dropped Obama:

Meanwhile, Obama’s contribution to the left has been to weaken it. From the day of his inauguration, antiwar activity in the US collapsed. In a little noticed study last April, a University of Michigan survey, by professors Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas, concluded that the movement evaporated because its mainstay Democrats, lulled by Obama’s “second coming”, withdrew almost in a body. As Heaney said, “the election of Obama appeared to be a demobilising force … even in the face of his pro-war decisions.”

A few thoughts. The antiwar movement, at various points in history, has often occupied a central place in American politics. My own view is that antiwar issues were dominant in the mid-2000s. Most historians would argue that antiwar sentiment was strong in the late 60s/early 70s, the isolationist era of the 1930s, and other moments. So the antiwar movement can be one indicator of a more general political sentiment. At the same time, antiwar movements are dependent on very specific historical conditions – the length and intensity of war, the legitimacy of war, and so forth. These forces aren’t always related to the general trajectory of the left, or any other faction embracing the antiwar issue. And if I understand recent public opinion polls, self-identified liberals are still fairly supportive of Obama. That suggests to me that Sigal is wrong.  For most liberals, the wars have been successfully decoupled from the rest of the progressive agenda. That may be troubling, but it shows a strong alliance between rank and file liberals and the Obama administration.

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.

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.

SC rules on Wal-Mart vs Dukes

The Supreme Court has sided with Wal-Mart in the class action case. As regular readers of this blog will be well aware, sociologists have been more than usually involved in the case and the debate surrounding it. The slip opinion, written by Scalia, discusses Bill Bielby’s testimony and dismisses it:

The only evidence of a “general policy of discrimination” respondents produced was the testimony of Dr. William Bielby, their sociological expert. Relying on “social framework” analysis, Bielby testified that Wal-Mart has a “strong corporate culture,” that makes it “‘vulnerable’” to “gender bias.” He could not, however, “determine with any specificity how regularly stereotypes play a meaningful role in employment decisions at Wal-Mart. At his deposition . . . Dr. Bielby conceded that he could not calculate whether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking.” The parties dispute whether Bielby’s testimony even met the standards for the admission of expert testimony under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 702 and our Daubert case … The District Court concluded that Daubert did not apply to expert testimony at the certification stage of class-action proceedings. We doubt that is so, but even if properly considered, Bielby’s testimony does nothing to advance respondents’ case. “[W]hether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking” is the essential question on which respondents’ theory of commonality depends. If Bielby admittedly has no answer to that question, we can safely disregard what he has to say. It is worlds away from “significant proof” that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.” … Respondents have not identified a common mode of exercising discretion that pervades the entire company—aside from their reliance on Dr. Bielby’s social frameworks analysis that we have rejected. In a company of Wal-Mart’s size and geographical scope, it is quite unbelievable that all managers would exercise their discretion in a common way without some common direction. Respondents attempt to make that showing by means of statistical and anecdotal evidence, but their evidence falls well short.

While dismissing the particular body of evidence presented as insufficient to establish the Plaintiff’s central claim, the decision does not make any more general remarks about the relevance of social-scientific evidence. (At least not to my untrained eye. Those with a legal education are welcome to comment.)

The ruling was unanimous with respect to rejecting certification, but Ginsburg wrote a partial dissent (joined by Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) on the question of the scope of the ruling, and did not sign on to the middle section of the decision (where the social science evidence is discussed). She writes, in part,

The plaintiffs’ evidence, including class members’ tales of their own experiences, suggests that gender bias suffused Wal-Mart’s company culture. … the plaintiffs presented an expert’s appraisal to show that the pay and promotions disparities at Wal-Mart “can be explained only by gender discrimination and not by . . . neutral variables.” Using regression analyses, their expert, Richard Drogin, controlled for factors including, inter alia, job performance, length of time with the company, and the store where an employee worked. The results, the District Court found, were sufficient to raise an “inference of discrimination.” … The District Court’s identification of a common question, whether Wal-Mart’s pay and promotions policies gave rise to unlawful discrimination, was hardly infirm. The practice of delegating to supervisors large discretion to make personnel decisions, uncontrolled by formal standards, has long been known to have the potential to produce disparate effects. Managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware. The risk of discrimination is heightened when those managers are predominantly of one sex, and are steeped in a corporate culture that perpetuates gender stereotypes.

In a footnote to that “long been known” sentence, Ginsburg cites Goldin and Rouse’s paper on discrimination in Symphony orchestras (revealed by the comparison of blind with non-blind auditions). The partial dissent does not mention Bielby’s testimony.

I’ll leave it to those more qualified than myself to assess the technical aspects of the ruling (e.g., with respect to Daubert), along with its meaning and likely consequences. It’s worth noting, finally, that even as they dismissed certification for the class, the three women on the court joined the dissent.

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.

What is at stake for Sociology in Walmart?

Much has been discussed about the Walmart case and ASA Amicus Brief in the postings and comments on the orgtheory [with subsequent posts 1, 2] and scatterplot blogs. Little, however, has been said about the literature review in the ASA Amicus Brief, though it spans a little more than half the main body of the Brief. Some have even suggested that the only thing the Brief does is take the position that the methods that Bill uses are those of science and sociology in particular. Clearly it does much more. [In providing the analysis below, I want to be quite clear that I am not making any claims about what people’s motives were in writing and submitting the ASA Brief.  Laura Beth has been quite clear about hers and I believe her.]

Goals and a Few Answers

I spent last night reading through all the comments on orgtheory and scatterplot. My key goal in writing my initial post was to get a discussion going about the role of sociology in the courts and the particular problems involved. I guess I succeeded! My interest in the Walmart case was only secondary and I discussed it, the ASA Amicus Brief, and Bill’s expert report because it was current, was potentially important, and exemplified many of the issues that I thought needed to be discussed. I did not write it to attack the ASA as Sally Hillsman has accused me of in an email to the Council. Truthfully, I do not know enough about what was done to know whether I would believe it to be unproblematic or not. If the Council, the ASA members’ elected representatives, had the time to seriously consider the matter, read the materials involved, appreciated the issues, and voted to submit an Amicus Brief to the Supreme Court, then I think I and others should not complain. Of course the Mitchell et al. paper does attack the ASA brief, but on scientific, not procedural grounds. [I should also note that Sally’s claim that I offered Laura Beth the opportunity to publish her reply to Mitchell et al. in SMR and withdrew that offer is factually incorrect. I withdrew the offer for her to write a quite different paper, for quite defensible reasons. All that said, what will go in the SMR special issue is still evolving.]

In reading through all the comments last night I was amazed by the number times various people said I said particular things (using their words, not mine), and claimed that I thought various things (with no access that I am aware of to my mind). Amy’s post is perhaps the extreme example of this. In an actual court proceeding this may be appropriate. I don’t think it is appropriate for blogging, assuming the goal should be to try to understand each others’ thinking–why they believe what they think is reasonable–and that by hearing what each other thinks, we might improve and deepen our own thinking. Let’s not put words in people’s mouths or thoughts in their heads. If a position someone has taken is important for a point you want to make then quote the person. If you believe someone thinks a particular thing and that is why they are taking the position they do, then ask them whether that is what they think. More generally, as Laura Beth has asked, let’s keep it as diplomatic as possible. In doing so, this will vastly increase the likelihood of having a constructive dialogue.

Walmart and the ASA (a guest post by Chris Winship)

Note: Chris is a professor of sociology at Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and, since 1995, he has edited Sociological Methods and Research, which is a peer-reviewed scholarly methodology journal. SMR content is also available on the SMRblog.

The current employment discrimination case against Walmart raises the important question of whether social science, and sociology in particular, can effectively participate in court cases and at the same time maintain its scientific integrity. If the answer is yes, there is then the further question of what criteria need to be met for scientific integrity to be maintained. These are important questions requiring discussion, even debate. But first some history.

By early fall, if not sooner, the Supreme Court will make a key decision in the largest employment discrimination suit in history: Dukes v. Walmart.  Oral arguments in the case were heard on March 29. The suit itself, involving a class of as many as 1.5 million women, alleges that Walmart has systematically discriminated against women in its salary and promotion decisions. Potentially, billions of dollars in damages are at stake. The question before the Court, however, is not whether Walmart in fact discriminated against its employees but rather whether such a large case, involving women working in varied circumstances in thousands of different stores and involving different supervisors can be thought to constitute a single class and thus whether the class should be certified.

the era of public university privatization

Olderwoman has written a fascinating post on Scatterplot about the political conflict brewing (or boiling over perhaps) in Madison as the UW-Madison contemplates separating itself from the larger Wisconsin university system.  The move would allow them to raise tuition and would grant the university some autonomy from the state.  Of course, the change is complicated by the current, messy politics of Wisconsin and is made even messier, as OW describes in her post, by the conflicts of interest that faculty have as citizens who typically support more progressive policies while also being stakeholders in a research institution striving to maintain its elite status. Here’s a highlight from her post:

As I have debated this issue with grad students (who are mostly lined up in opposition to the plan), I have been trying to unravel the threads of interest involved. The students tend to emphasize concerns about tuition. Issues of access and affordability are real ones. They are issues now, as state funding continues to decline. All predictions about how this issue would play out under different structures are entirely hypothetical. One group argues that to change from being a public university is to give up forever on the idea of more tax dollar subsidies for tuition. Another group argues that the only way to increase affordability is to raise tuition simultaneously with raising financial aid — effectively to charge a sliding scale that depends on family income; people who advocate this disagree about which structure is most likely to do this. As that is all hypothetical, that particular debate is solely one of opinions.

But the whole tuition debate — one I am sympathetic to as a progressive — cuts entirely differently from the issue of what is good for an elite research university. If my goal is access to high quality education for youth of modest means, wouldn’t I just stop funding an elite research university entirely? Wouldn’t that access goal be better met with an institution staffed by lower-paid faculty teaching three or four courses a semester than by an institution staffed by higher-paid faculty whose major interest and time commitment is to their research/scholarship? The trend at elite schools is toward inequality: higher and higher salaries for the high-performing research faculty, and more and more teaching done by lower paid adjunct faculty.

One core value question is whether you support the idea of an elite research institution or not. Should there be major public research institutions at all? And if so, what does it take to maintain them? Can an elite research university survive with an egalitarian ethos in the face of competition from the unapologetic elitist private institutions?

Durkheim goes to the Royal Wedding

By way of Stewart Lee in the Guardian:

Once upon a time, royal marriages were political acts that forged links between different nations. Instead, William and Kate’s wedding will bind this nation to itself, and in marrying so very far beneath himself, I believe the young prince has made a heroic and deliberate sacrifice to achieve this end. … The Fisher King must search the devastated terrain for the Holy Grail, and drink from it to heal the land. Broken Britain is that wasted land. William is that Fisher King. Kate Middleton is that lovely grail, full not of the blood of the crucified Christ, but of the blood of the Middletons, who run a children’s partyware business in Berkshire. And Kate’s wedding to wise William is a ritual that may help to fix what David Cameron’s vision of the Big Society so far has not. For in choosing Kate, a simple girl from a school near Swindon, as his bride, William is in fact taking each and every British subject – man, woman, old, young, black, white, Christian and Muslim – into his royal bed, and binding us all to each other in the white heat of his princely passion. … The prince has taken his lowly bride from within this charged landscape, where our ancestors celebrated the union of man and woman in stone and earth, and began the communal processes that forged a nation from their descendents, the broken nation that William the Fisher King must now heal. Our shaman-prince could not have chosen a better receptacle for his magical purposes than Kate Middleton, a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon-shadowed swamplands.

where is power elite theory when you need it?

When I was in grad school, power elite theory seemed antiquated, an explanation founded on paranoid underpinnings. It was an undergrad-ish view of the world. Sure, Domhoff was fun to read in your SOC 101 class, but as an explanation for state behavior it sucked. Skocpol said so. Sociologists weren’t getting jobs selling power elite stories. People on the job market talked about status dynamics, social movements, categories, and other important stuff.

And then the financial crisis happened, and the government bailed out a bunch of firms and through good journalism we learned that a lot of that money directly funded the investment projects of Wall Street executives’ wives. And we learned that Goldman Sachs never rests and never loses. And we figured out that ex-Goldman executives are now basically running our economy (and perhaps the world). And we found out that grass roots movements are covertly being funded by the super wealthy Koch brothers.  It turns out that the power elite has been really busy while sociologists have been off studying other things.

To be fair, not all sociologists stopped engaging with elite theory. The holdout Mark Mizruchi, for example, hasn’t stopped (even though even he thinks that the elite has become fragmented, causing individual firms to pursue  their own business interests more vigorously).  His work and the research of others like him (e.g., Val Burris) makes me feel silly for ever doubting the power of the elite. I encourage you to read Mark’s excellent 2004 article from Theory and Society, “Berle and Means revisited: The governance and power of large U.S. corporations.”  It’s a great scholarly article that will rejuvenate your interest in elite theory while also making the classic work of Berle and Means (written in 1932) seem very contemporary and sexy. Perhaps there will be a resurgence in this area of economic and political sociology in the next few years.

the outcaste elite

Yesterday I was on Radio-Canada’s “Dispatches” to talk about outsourcing to India. Below is the description and a link to the segment. (Last radio plug I promise!)

India’s out-caste achievers take your calls

Outsourcing call centres and tech support shops to India has created an affluent new generation of young Indians.  But other disturbing truths are beginning to emerge.

And they’re in a new book: Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing The Way Indians Understand Themselves (Princeton University Press).

The author is sociologist Shehzad Nadeem, an American, from City University of New York

Shehzad spoke with Rick from New York

For the full program: http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=1846190801

the faceless 50

From NYT: ”A small crew of technicians, braving radiation and fire, became the only people remaining at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Tuesday — and perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.

They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.

They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots…

oh, kudlow

CNBC’s Larry Kudlow on Japan: “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.” (Skip to 0:35 on the video) .

Again, a list of organizations accepting donations for the Japanese recovery effort. And another.

sic semper pecuniae

One of the sideshows that has accompanied the continuing collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya has been the parade of Western intellectuals and chattering-class heroes who, it turns out, were happy to take a nicely-reimbursed trip to Tripoli over the past few years, meet the Great Man, and then, in almost all cases, write a fawning article about the experience afterwards. Often these pieces appeared in quite high-profile locations such as The Guardian, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and so on. Thus, Anthony Giddens embarrassed himself pitching the notion that under the tender guidance of Gaddafi Libya might one day become the “Norway of North Africa”. (Sir Howard Davies has just resigned as Director of the LSE as a result of the the school’s connections to the Gaddafi regime, mostly through the family foundation and Gaddafi’s eldest son.) Benjamin Barber, Joseph Nye, and several others did much the same. Robert Putnam took the bait but spat out the hook just in time, writing of his meeting with Gaddafi:

Was this a serious conversation or an elaborate farce? Naturally, I came away thinking—hoping—that I had managed to sway Col. Gadhafi in some small way, but my wife was skeptical. Two months later I was invited back to a public roundtable in Libya, but by then I had concluded that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt, and I declined.

Putnam clearly married well. He was also one of the few who publicly acknowledged that his participation was brokered by the Monitor Group, a consulting firm with a large consulting contract with Libya, and that he was paid his “standard consulting fee”. (Nye also mentioned the connection to Monitor in his TNR piece, but didn’t say he was also being paid as a consultant.) In a report, David Corn and Siddhartha Mahanta follow the money, showing how Monitor recruited and paid a wide range of “thought leaders” to visit Libya and (in most cases) meet with Gaddafi. They link to an internal report, helpfully titled “Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi” detailing the recruitment program and the supportive articles that subsequently emerged from it.

Update: Edited for clarity about who disclosed what.

libya: this is what ‘virtual democracy’ looks like

An interesting article on the relationship between Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and the London School of Economics.  Gaddafi wrote his Ph.D. thesis there on “how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions.”  Later, the LSE “accepted £1.5m from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, an organisation headed by Saif – some of which was to finance “a virtual democracy centre.’” The selfsame Gaddafi, of course, has threatened civil war and to “fight to the last minute, until the last bullet” if the rabble-rousers don’t stop their rabble-rousing. (Human Rights Watch has confirmed 233 dead as of Monday, though other estimates are more than double that figure). Knowledge may be power, but power can always buy knowledge or at least its patina.

angry birds for the thinking person: digitalkoot

The Finnish National Library, in cooperation with the Finnish company Microtask, has set up an effort to digitize Finnish culture by tapping into the crowd.  Specifically, digitized archives have problems due to mistakes that occur in the scanning process (when translating an image to text), and the Library has set up a Lemmings/Whac-A-Mole-type game to catch these mistakes.  Angry birds for the thinking person.  Here’s a youtube clip of the game.  More here.  You can play the digitalkoot game here.

This is sort of in the genre of save-the-world-via-gaming, a la Jane McDonigal, blog here.

BONUS:  If contributing to Finnish culture isn’t your thing, then you might take note of DARPA’s effort to crowdsource combat vehicle design.

BONUS 2:  Or, the band R.E.M. is (sorta) doing a crowdsourcing-type thing with their forthcoming album, specifically by letting fans re-mix a song etc.  Here are a bunch of crowdsourced versions of R.E.M.’s forthcoming song ‘It Happened Today.’

how language shapes thought

Lera Boroditsky on how language shapes thought (video from Long Now Foundation, FORA.tv).

editor sued for running a negative book review

A journal editor has been sued for running a negative book review.  The book’s author, a law professor, says that the review was “defamatory and [asked] for it to be taken down,” specifically because it could “cause harm to her professional reputation and academic promotion.”

More @ mobylives.

the price of davos

Going to Davos is expensive. From the NY Times today:

Just to have the opportunity to be invited to Davos, you must be invited to be a member of the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit that was founded by Klaus Schwab, a German-born academic who managed to build a global conference in the snow.

There are several levels of membership: the basic level, which will get you one invitation to Davos, costs 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $52,000. The ticket itself is another 18,000 Swiss francs ($19,000), plus tax, bringing the total cost of membership and entrance fee to $71,000.

But that fee just gets you in the door with the masses at Davos, with entry to all the general sessions. If you want to be invited behind the velvet rope to participate in private sessions among your industry’s peers, you need to step up to the “Industry Associate” level. That costs $137,000, plus the price of the ticket, bringing the total to about $156,000.

Not surprisingly, like most conferences, you feel like you are being left out:

But all this spending may soon be going out of vogue. As one attendee, the author David Rothkopf, recently wrote on his blog, “The entire endeavor is fading for several reasons, all associated with the inadequacy of Davos as a networking forum.”

He explained, “As Steve Case, founder of AOL, once told me while standing at the bar in the middle of the hubbub of the main conference center: ‘You always feel like you are in the wrong place in Davos, like there is some better meeting going on somewhere in one of the hotels that you really ought to be at. Like the real Davos is happening in secret somewhere.’”

You can buy a lot, but you can’t buy respect.

immortal fame in science and culturomics

Interesting discussion at Science magazine on how to gain immortal fame in science, based on the analysis of Google books.  Here are the immortal superstars.  Here’s the associated article, by Jean-Baptiste Michel et al, on ‘culturomics.’

tunisia: another data point on revolutions

Given the events in Tunisia, I thought it would be worth pointing toward two (lengthy) Org Theory posts written during the “Green Revolution” in Iran last year.

The first is my post “Fisking” Andrew Miller and Gideon Rachman’s dialogue on the factors that lead some revolutions to succeed while others fail.  Events have moved so quickly in Tunisia, that I don’t really have much of a read on what just happened.  But as we learn more about how this revolution unfolded, it will add yet another data point.  For instance, current news reports mention relatively little about internal divisions among the elite, but if previous revolutions have anything to teach us, it would suggest that this must be part of the story.

In addition, I am interested in the government’s violent response to initial protests.  In Tunisia, this spurred further protests.  In Iran, violently putting down protests helped to squelch the movement.  Why?  This points to what I think is probably the most important open question in the social movement literature: why do some cycles of protest catch fire while others peter out?

On this, the evidence so far suggests that new social media played a role and so, I will also point toward Brayden’s post on the role that social media (i.e., Twitter and Facebook) might have played in Iran.  Brayden’s argument, if I can paraphrase, was that Twitter and Facebook may be more important in conveying the voice of movement participants to the outside world — becoming an “audience generation machine” in his words — but that they were not as effective as a coordinating mechanism.  In Tunisia, it does seem that social media helped to coordinate.  The difference, it seems, has to do with how the two regimes regulated social media, but it seems like there is more of a story to be told here.

Indeed, reports are that the role of social network media was to bring outside information in that changed the political opportunity structure: information unveiled by Wikileaks laid bare the corruption of the regime, this spread through social media, and helped to drive people to the street.

denis dutton

So, I did not know him personally and I’m late on this one — but, given that I linked to (and read) Arts & Letters Daily frequently, I think a quick orgtheory bow to Denis Dutton is appropriate.  He passed away earlier this week.

The Chronicle has a nice tribute to him.  New York Times here.  Los Angeles Times here.

ronald coase @ 100

Ronald Coase turns 100 years old tomorrow.  Organizations and Markets has the scoop, though 100 years is definitely worth celebrating here at orgtheory.net as well.

(Peter’s post also points out how The Economist gets some of the Coasean story wrong, for example by reinforcing an artificial dichotomy between the resource-based view and transaction cost economics and the matter of “organizational advantages” versus transactions costs.)

ernst & young-lehman brothers: fraud?

I haven’t been following this story, Fraudbytes offers a summary of links:

Going Concern recently interviewed us about E&Y and Lehman–check it out here.  The accounting news source also has a great roundup of other thoughts and opinions on the case from around the blogosphere.  I would also encourage readers to check out David Zaring’s thoughts on the matter over at The Conglomerate.

what are we? we’re not an organization, we’re not a group, we’re a “gathering”

Yesterday “Anonymous” put out an official press release (pdf here).  It’s interesting how the group is wrestling with it’s collective self-definition, external framing, etc:

Anonymous is not a group, but rather an Internet gathering.

Then the group (sorry) gathering openly alludes to some internal issues and its structure (spelling mistake not mine):

Both Anonymous and the media that is covering it are aware of the percieved dissent between individuals in the gathering. This does not, however, mean that the command structure of Anonymous is failing for a simple reason: Anonymous has a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives.

Then some movement-ish language, physics metaphor and some claims about the novelty of the form:

We do not believe that a similar movement exists in the world today and as such we have to learn by trial and error. We are now in the process of better communicating some core values to the individual atoms that comprise Anonymous – we also want to take this opportunity to communicate a message to the media, so that the average Internet Citizen can get to know who we are and what we represent.

Good stuff!