poll: is ethnography completely different than other kinds of research?

Click on all answers that apply.

Although I have published an ethnography article and a book of interviews and historical research, I do not have the habitus of the typical qualitative sociologist. In talking to ethnographers and other qualitative researchers, I often get the feeling that they are openly hostile or critical to the ideas that motivate quantitative research. Samples, inferences, and general conclusions are anathema. Is this just a posture? Or do qualitative researchers think that they are doing something completely different? If they aren’t looking for applicable lessons, are they just looking for well documented “just so” stories? Or is it merely an exercise in distinction, where ethnographers and other qualitative scholars use a different rhetoric to bolster their academic standing?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

book spotlight: the org by ray fisman and tim sullivan

Last week, Teppo commented “The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office,” a book by CBS prof Ray Fisman and editor/writer Tim Sullivan  that brings organization theory to a popular audience. This week, I’ll add a few of my own comments to the discussion. Later, Ray and Tim will be contributing to the blog.

In summary, The Org brings to the educated reader an argument about why organizations are important and how they work. It’s about coordination and routinization. Modern life simply requires big tasks that can’t efficiently be done with managers, bosses, and CEOs. It’s the sort of book that you might give someone who is just starting to think about why the social world is the way it is.

The book covers a lot of basic territory in a crisp and easy to grasp way. The book gives great examples of principal agent problems, superstar markets, and the problems of vertical integration. The examples range from the for-profit world, to the military, to churches.

In particular, I enjoyed the chapter on innovation. The issue is that innovation and organization are at odds with each other. Organizations thrive because they can exploit scale and produce the same product over and over. That requires people to obey. In contrast, innovation requires that people diverge from established routine. Rather than give in to a feel good approach to innovation, Fisman and Sullivan sensible point out that the tension between organization and innovation is natural and that it will be solved in different ways. They give good examples that show the range of solutions. McDonald’s demands conformity from franchisees and innovates in a lab, while Lockheed Martin famously created a separate entity that encourage wildly creative innovation  Yes, that is old school contingency theory, but it remains a good insight.

A few nit picks. Rhetorically, I wish the book had been a little more cognizant of the interdisciplinary nature of organization studies. The book begins with the typical “an economist looks at …” discussion that is in vogue in the post-Levitt era of popular economics writing. But the book itself covers a lot of great material from managerial economics, business school scholarship, sociology, history, and even concludes with a quote with the old man himself, Max Weber. Also, I wish the book had said a little more in the conclusion about the social consequences of management. The world we have today is shaped by management philosophy and management itself has given rise to a new class of people. That deserves some discussion. But overall, these are quibbles, though. The book’s a winner and I’m sure it’ll start appearing in organization studies syllabi.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

review of a durkheim biography

The Irish Times reviews ”Émile Durkheim: A Biography,” By Marcel Fournier. A few key clips:

Marcel Fournier’s exegesis of Durkheim’s life and work is much more than a biography of a French academic in fin-de-siecle Europe. It offers the reader an intellectual history of ideas, alongside an insight into the process of knowledge production and the craft and method of empirical analysis. The logic of Durkheim’s argumentation is meticulously (and exhaustively) dissected. Fournier’s forensic examination goes further, though, drawing on a wealth of archival documentation, including correspondence, manuscripts and reports, to re-create the energy, excitement and politically charged atmosphere in which academic sociology in France began to take shape.

and

Durkheim believed that sociology should concern itself with social facts, the external and objective nature of social reality that exists beyond the individual. Social facts are “the substratum of collective life”, he observed in his Rules of Sociological Method (1895), an early attempt to outline a modus operandi for the discipline of sociology. Social facts have a specific character and are discernible in systems of religious, moral and juridical belief. For Durkheim, man (sic) is both an individual and a social being. Ways of thinking and acting are not simply the work of the individual but are invested in a moral power above him.

Check it out.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

the argo win easily explained

Quick reaction: The Academy loves well crafted films that are about actors or acting, especially when actors save the day. These films often beat other films. Example: Shakespeare in Love beats Saving Private Ryan; the Kings Speech beats Black Swan, Inception and Social Network. Bonus: Argo had old Hollywood guys saving the day. I still liked it.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

grad skool rulz #26: what should I do during the grad school visit?

On June 3, 2011, I said that I was ending the grad skool rulz. Totally wrong. People keep asking me about things I hadn’t thought of before, so I kept on writing! This week’s question: What should I get from the campus visit after I have been accepted to a PhD program?

Usually, the campus visit is a brief one or two day trip where you show up to campus and with current graduate students and faculty. The visits vary a great deal in quality. For example, when I visited Chicago, I had to pay my own way and it was very hard to make appointments to meet people. During one appointment, I asked about graduation rates and this senior professor simply said that such statistics weren’t important. Now you understand the genesis of the Rulz. In contrast, Indiana has one of the most highly organized graduate programs around. Students who visit meet with professors, grad students, and they go to seminars. And of course, we have a great record of placement and publication with students that we freely talk about.

So what should you expect or demand from your visit?

• Ask for money. A lot of graduate programs will provide funds for air fare and the like.
• Accommodations – Don’t pay for hotels, most programs will have a current student host you.
•  It is normal for faculty to meet with potential students. If no one is around to meet you, it is a bad sign.
• Meet with the graduate chair. At the very least, you can get some information on the mechanics of the program. Also, ask for placement and graduation rates.
• Meet with current graduate students. Often there is  a lunch attended only by students. The idea is that students can candidly talk about their experiences.
• Attend a class or seminar.
• Meet with senior faculty, the folks who mentor most graduate students. Ask them about current research and current students.

Now, how should you evaluate your visit? A few rules of thumb:

• You can safely ignore about 90% of what people say. The faculty all say that their program is the best, even if students fail to get jobs. It’s rare that graduate students openly admit how much they hate life and how their friends in older cohorts are being weeded out and failing to get jobs.
• You should closely pay attention to what people actually do. Did the faculty take the time to meet with graduate students, many of whom will not matriculate? If so, it shows commitment. Can your graduate student host point to a master’s paper or dissertation chapter that was promptly read? Or a paper that the faculty helped him/her publish?
• Pay very close attention to the total number of people that the program places in an average year. My rule of thumb is that a program is effective if # of tenure track jobs = 50% of incoming cohort size. The reason is that 50% of people won’t graduate for a variety of reasons. The issue is what happens to the 50% who manage to finish.
• It is a bad sign if the faculty will only talk about the one guy who made it to an Ivy league position. It is a good sign if they can point to multiple students who made it to R1′s, Liberal arts, and good regional universities. Don’t look at a biased sample.

Consider this an open thread on grad school visits. And of course – buy the GRAD SKOOL RULZ!!!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

mr. rogers goes to congress

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

linear vs. combinatoric social science

In mathematics, there’s a very rough distinction between “linear” things and “combinatoric” things. We are all familiar with linear science, but combinatorics is more subtle. Combinatorics simply means the math you need in order to count different combinations of things. For example, you may ask, “if I have ten red balls and twenty green balls, and I randomly draw three balls, how many different combinations of red and green do I get?” That’s a combinatoric question – counting discrete things.

Social science has lots of tools that exploit linear models: utility maximization, regression analysis, scale construction, etc. But we don’t have a lot of tools that address the combinatoric side of social life. To see what I mean, consider the issue of policy formation – why does government make some policies and not others?

• The linear answer (taken from the Median Voter Theorem in economics): Politicians offer policies designed to attract the median voter. Thus, the utility of a policy is approximated by how popular it is.
• The combinatoric answer (taken from Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies): Nature produces a stream of political issues and actors. Think of nature as drawing them from a big box of issues and people. If nature happens to simultaneously choose an issue and actor that “match,” then a policy gets made.

These are not inconsistent views, but they require very different toolkits. The first is about studying distributions of voters. The second is an arrival process. Metaphorically, the first model is a world of smoothness with thresholds. The second is chunky. Over the last hundred years or so of quantitative social science, we have lots of tools for smooth things. We have a few tools for chunky discrete things, like network analysis, but not enough. Ambitious quantitative social science PhD students should carefully think about that last sentence.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

measuring the post-racist society: the eclipse of racist words

The original post-racist society discussion, Eric Grollman responds,Tressie McMillan responds, my response to Eric, McMillan part deux, Eric responds again. 

A few weeks ago, I argued that the era of overt racism is over. One commenter felt that I needed to operationalize the idea. There is no simple way to measure such a complex idea, but we can offer measurements of very specific processes. For example, I could hypothesize that it is no longer to legitimate to use in public words that have a clearly derogatory meaning, such as n—— or sp–.*

We can test that idea with word frequency data. Google has scanned over 4 million books from 1500 to the present and you can search that database. Above, I plotted the appearance of n—– and sp—, two words which are unambiguously slurs for two large American ethnic groups. I did not plot slurs like “bean,” which are homophones for other neutral non-racial words. Then, I plotted the appearance of the more neutral or positive words for those groups. The first graph shows the relative frequencies for African American and Latino slurs vs. other ethnic terms. Since the frequency for Asian American slurs and other words is much lower, they get a separate graph. Thus, we can now test hypotheses about printed text  in the post-racial society:

1. The elimination thesis: Slurs drop drastically in use.
2. The eclipse thesis: Non-slur words now overwhelm racist slurs, but racist slurs remain.
3. Co-evolution: The frequency of neutral and slur words move together. People talk about group X and the haters just use the slur.
4. Escalation: Slurs are increasing.

This rough data indicates that #2 is correct. The dominant racial terms are neutral or positive. Most slurs that I looked up seem to maintain some base level of usage, even in the post-civil rights era. The slur use level is non-zero, but it is small in comparison to other words so it looks as if it is zero. Some slure use may be derogatory, while some of it may be artistic or “reclaiming the term.” I can’t prove it, but I think Quentin Tarantino accounts for for 50% or more of post-civil rights use of the n-word.

Bottom line: Society has changed and we can measure the change. This doesn’t mean that racial status is no longer important, but it does mean that one very important aspect of pre-Civil Rights racist culture has receded in relative importance. Some people just love racial slurs, but that its likely not the modal way of talking about people. Is that progress? I think so.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

* Geez, Fabio, must you censor? Well, it isn’t censoring if it’s voluntary. I just don’t want this blog to be picked up for slurs. Even my book on 1970s Black Power, when people used the n-word a bit, only uses it once, in a footnote when referring to the title of H. Rap Brown’s first book.

is the internet progressive?

Over at the New Republic, Evgeny Morozov reviews Future Perfect:
 The Case for Progress in a Networked Age  by Steven Johnson. The question is whether the Internet has a progressive effect or not. A few quick notes:

• The decentralized Internet seems to be a historical contingency. The Chinese Internet shows that it can be set up in ways that facilitate top down control.
• Movements often exploit new communication technologies (think mimeo’s in the 60s, fax in the 80s, or twitter in 2011) but eventually the Man will catch up.
• Except for some very specialized activism (e.g., Wikileaks), the Internet has not changed the overall structure of “brick and mortar” activism: use some social ties, make some orgs, do some protest, lobby some people.

What is the case for Internet as progressive force?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

give me $3 and i’ll get you your phd

Ok, that’s a bald faced lie. Unless you’re my dissertation student, I can’t give you your PhD. Even then, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way – do some research. But you know what you can get for $3 that will get you your PhD? The Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know About Academia from Admissions to Tenure. And the title is no joke. In 59 short chapters, I cover everything from “Should I go to graduate school?” to assembling your tenure dossier.

Why did I write this book? I think graduate education is a mess. People expect you to just learn through osmosis. Imagine if we ran medical schools the same way. Meh! So I wrote this book to help people know how the system works. For real – from a dude who succeeded (and failed, at time) in graduate school and the tenure track.

The reviews:

• A well explained and written overview of academia that is helpful for anyone in or considering a profession in academia. A great sociological analysis of the process. Well worth one’s time. (JL Howell).
  
• This book is an excellent representation of the mainstream in professional sociology. It’s especially valuable for my advisees, as our department is a historically critical/activist one. I wish I’d had it when I was in graduate school. (JL Shiao).

Check it out.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

it’s official – facebook is a waste of time

Recent research has shown a change in Facebook use. While users tend to retain accounts, people are now reducing their use of the website. The reasons? From a recent NY Times survey of Facebook users:

The main reasons for their social media sabbaticals were not having enough time to dedicate to pruning their profiles, an overall decrease in their interest in the site, and the general sentiment that Facebook was a major waste of time.

This may indicate that we’ve hit “peak Facebook,” in terms of the site’s popularity level. It’s now a standard tool for networking, but the novelty has worn off. People don’t feel the obligation to use it. Now, the main users will be people who really enjoy networking – young people, businesses/orgs and extroverted people. Still, a huge market, but far short of the all encompassing vision of some. Probably the time to dig deep into that “platform” strategy we were talking about.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

still too much college, again

In the past, I have argued that it is erroneous to assume that all people must go to college. Some people don’t have the academic or emotional capacity for higher education. Many don’t learn much when they do go to college. Still others spend years getting degrees as a labor market signal. Individually rational, but not efficient. College is definitely good for *some* people, but not everyone.

Now, Paul Campos, a Colorado law prof, gives a succinct economic argument against the over-investment in college. I quote at length from his discussion of legal education:

we’ll miss you, donald byrd

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

spring book forum 2013

This April we will be reading Richard Biernacki’s Reinventing Evidence. Prior book forums:

• Andreas Glaeser’s Political Epistemics.
• Jenn Lena’s Banding Together.
• David Graeber’s Debt.
• Greta Krippner’s Capitalizing on Crisis.
• John Levi-Martin’s Social Structures.

Check out the archives here.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

response to eric grollman on race

A few days ago, Eric Grollman was outraged by my post on “post-racist” society. In the original post, I argued that it is disingenuous to say that race doesn’t matter. At the same time, it would be equally misleading to say that things haven’t drastically changed. Here is what Eric wrote:

Ironically, even he suggests that “at least we can talk about [it].”  When I first saw this post, I was outraged.  A tenured sociology professor, who has written a book about the Black power movement and the development of Black studies, and who is LATINO, said to the world that the days of old-fashioned racism are gone.

And:

Yes, “polite” white people no longer intentionally discriminate, at least in terms of saying “we won’t hire her because she’s Black!”  But, that does not deny the everyday reality of subtle exclusion thinly disguised as something other than race (“she doesn’t have good people skills”).  He underestimates the persistence of racial prejudice in America, and just how easy it is to talk about race (e.g., without whites being accused of being racist or fearing such accusations, without people of color being dismissed as hypervigilant or overly sensitive).  The biggest flaw of his argument is missing the continued reality of racism within institutional practices: redlining and mortgage discrimination, the overrepresentation of Black and Latino men in prisons, “standardized” testing in schools, and so on.

Eric raises some good points, and I thank him for plugging my book. Now, a few responses:

• Recognizing progress is not logically equivalent to saying that racism is absent in our society.
• It is important to recognize the drastic reduction in racist practices in American society for political and scientific reasons. Politically, we should reward good behavior. We should praise people when they stop engaging in overtly racist actions or passing race based law and policy. If we say “nothing has changed,” then people may say  “why should I change? Nothing will make people happy.” Sociologically, it is simply erroneous to equate the era of Jim Crow with the era of Obama. African Americans and other minorities have changed in many remarkable ways. People of color make more money, get better jobs, get more education, are healthier, and have benefited enormously because of the Civil Rights movement. To deny that is folly.
• Before you get outraged again, I do not deny relative differences remain, which are often substantial. But once again, we must still recognize progress in absolute terms. And I’ll take large absolute improvements over changes in relative differences any day.
• Eric raises the issue of racial privilege and subtle forms of discrimination. I completely agree! Nowhere did I deny that these remain. But that comment itself shows how much things have changes. The cost of outright racism is now so high that it must go “underground.” That’s an improvement!
• On one point, I would agree with the skeptics who believe that racism is just as bad, possibly worse, than it was at the end of the Civil Rights era. People of color are subject to mass incarceration (again). In many ways, being stuck under the thumbs of an oppressive White majority in the South in 1920 isn’t so much different than being put in jail for non-violent drug charges. I’d also add that we should consider immigration law as one massive attempt to keep out ethnic outsiders as well. And of course, I haven’t mentioned the harassment that many people of Arabic descent have experienced post 9/11.
• Finally, I stand by my comment that it is good that we can talk about race. This is a *massive* cultural change. Remember, if you can name it, you can own it.

Thank for raising these points, Eric. I look forward to reading your blog.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

the emergence of organizations and markets, part 2: a guest post by john padgett and woody powell

A guest post by John Padgett and Woody Powell about their new book The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. Read post #1 here:

Single autocatalytic networks generate life, but they do not generate novel forms of life. There is nothing outside of a single decontextualized network to bring in to recombine with what is already there. Self-organizing out of randomness into an equilibrium of reproducing transformations, the origin of life, was a nontrivial accomplishment, to be sure. But this is not quite speciation, which is emergence of one form of life out of another.

Transpositions and feedbacks among multiple networks are the sources of organizational novelty. In a multiple-network architecture, networks are the contexts of each other. Studying organizational novelty places a premium on measuring multiple social networks in interaction because that is the raw material for innovation. Subsequent cascades of death and reconstruction may or may not turn initial transpositions (innovations) across networks into system-wide invention.

Through fifteen empirical case chapters, Padgett and Powell extracted eight multiple-network mechanisms of organizational genesis:

michael cohen’s last research

Like most of us in the world of organization studies, I was saddened to hear of Michael Cohen’s passing. I only met him once and he was very gracious. In the spirit of his work, let me me draw your attention to his last research project – an analysis of “handoffs.” The issue is that doctors can’t continuously watch patients. Whenever a doctor leaves to go home, a new doctor comes in and there is a “handoff.” Cohen wrote a nice summary for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website:

1. To be effective, a handoff has to happen.

It may seem incredibly commonplace, but all too often preventable injuries or even deaths trace back to handoffs that were abbreviated, conducted in awkward conditions, or downright skipped.  The easy cases to identify are things like leaving before handoff is done, or rushing the handoff in order to get out the door.

Unfortunately, many other causes are also in play. Some major examples derive from schedule or workload incompatibilities.  If patients are sent from the PACU (post-anesthesia care unit) to a floor unit during its nursing report, the nurses accepting the patients will necessarily miss out on the handoff of existing patients. If a patient is moved from the Emergency Department (ED) before her doctor or nurse has time to complete phone calls to the destination unit, the patient endures some period of having been transferred without benefit of handoff. If there is a shift change in the ED just before a patient moves, the handoff is conducted by a doctor or nurse who has only second-hand familiarity with the events. To improve handoffs, we may need to teach participants to think about the organizational structures that make it hard to do them well.

the africana boycott of amy gutmann at penn

Last week, a group of Africana faculty at Penn wrote a column called “Guess Who’s (Not) Coming to Dinner?” The issue is that Penn’s administration has not appointed a person of color to an administrative position in a long time. They will no longer attend diversity events sponsored by Penn President Amy Gutmann:

With the term for the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences soon ending and the newly appointed provost on hand, President Gutmann was asked during a heated exchange why she has never appointed a person of color to the position of dean during her long tenure at Penn.

Her response was that she would not just bring in someone who is not qualified, a comment implying that none of the people in the room were qualified to serve in these positions, even though many of them serve in administrative capacities in departments and centers. In her closing remarks, President Gutmann reiterated her dedication to diversity within Penn’s administration, admitting that “a show beats a tell.”

A few comments: I think the Penn Africana faculty have a good point. Leadership is built on networks. If you know anything about academia, most folks reach positions of leadership because they have been helped by colleagues. The fact that either (a) people of color did not apply for deanships or (b) people of color do not have the track record speaks to the fact that people around Penn have simply not reached out to faculty of color.  People need to know that will be seriously considered if they apply. Similarly, people need to be considered for “starter” administrative jobs, like center director positions or department chairs. These don’t just appear and they often aren’t announced. You need the networks to make it happen. The fact that Penn has let this slide for this long speaks for itself.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

emergence of organizations and markets, part I by padgett & powell

A guest post by John Padgett and Woody Powell about their new book The Emergence of Organizations and Markets:

Innovation in the sense of product design is a popular research topic today, because there is a lot of money in that. Innovation, however, in the deeper sense of new actors—new types of people, new organizational forms—is not even much on the research radar screen of contemporary social scientists, even though “speciation” (to use the biologists’ term for this) lies at the heart of historical change over the longue durée, both in biological evolution and in human history. Social science—meaning mostly economics, political science and sociology—is very good at understanding selection, both at the micro level of individual choice and at the macro level of institutional regulation and lock-in. But novelty, especially of actors but also of alternatives, has first to enter from off the stage of our collective imaginary for our existing theories to be able to go to work. Our analytical shears for trimming are sharp, but the life forces that push up novelty to be trimmed tend to escape our attention, much less our understanding. If this book accomplishes anything, we at least hope to put the research topic of speciation—the emergence of new organizational forms and people—on our collective agenda.

quentin tarantino’s real problem

We got into a bit of an argument about Django. I agree that Quentin Tarantino has issues, though I stand by Django, but I am surprised that no one has pointed out that Quentin’s in a rut. Think about Quentin’s films and their underlying themes. And I ain’t talking about trash talk and pulp novel violence. I mean Themes, like you used to talk about in English class:

• Reservoir Dogs – betrayal
• Pulp Fiction – redemption
• Jackie Brown – aging/redemption
• Kill Bill Vols. 1-2: revenge
• Death Proof – revenge
• Inglorious Basterds – revenge
• Django Unchained – revenge

Of course, these aren’t the only themes. Some are obvious, like love – which is a big deal in Pulp Fiction and Django. Some themes are quite subtle. Every QT film has involved people faking their identity in some way. But when you think about dominant themes, QT’s definitely stuck in revenge territory. I think it got stale for me, and QT needs to move on. There’s a lot more in that video store clerk and we need to see it.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

february guest bloggers: john padgett and woody powell

It is my pleasure to announce our February guest bloggers: Woody Powell and John Padgett. Professor Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, Communication, and Public Policy at Stanford University. Professor Padgett is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Woody and John are both leading figures in the study of organizations and networks. Professor Powell is co-author, with Paul DiMaggio, of the groundbreaking “iron cage” article and then went on to publish a series of highly influential papers in social network analysis. John Padgett is one of political science’s leading formal modellers, having written seminal papers on budgeting & garbage can processes, the courts, and state formation. His most well known work is likely the “Medici paper,” which used network analysis to describe the cultivation of political power in early modern Italy and introduced the idea of “robust action” into modern social theory.

They will be discussing their new book: The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. Here’s a summary:

The social sciences are rich with ideas about how choice occurs among alternatives, but have little to say about the invention of new alternatives in the first place.  These authors directly address the question of emergence, both of what we choose and who we are.  With the use of sophisticated deductive models building on the concept of autocatalysis from biochemistry and rich historical cases studies spanning seven centuries, Padgett and Powell develop a theory of the co-evolution of social networks.  Novelty in new persons and new organizational forms emerges from spillovers across multiple, intertwined networks.  To be sure, actors make relations; but the mantra of this book is that in the long run relations make actors.  Through case studies of early capitalism and state formation, communist economic reforms and transition, and technologically advanced capitalism and science, the authors analyze speciation in the context of organizational novelty.  Drawing on ideas from both the physical sciences and the social sciences, and incorporating novel computational, historical, and network analyses, this book offers a genuinely new approach to the question of emergence.

This week and next week, I’ll post some thoughts that John and Woody have shared with me. This is *required* reading for sociologists, management scholars, political scientists, and economists. And yes, there, will be a quiz!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

challenge for cultural sociologists who are interested in political sociology

Are you a cultural sociologist who needs a dissertation idea? Here’s one emerging from our discussion of movements and “mainstream culture”:

A big issue in cultural sociology is boundary work – the effort people expend in sorting people and things into classificatory schema. See Mary Douglas and Michel Lamont. Here’s the question: how do movements fit into the political schema of their society? How would you measure the boundary of “legitimate” political actions? How can you tell if a movement is accepting or rejecting the schema? How is that acceptance or rejection related to the movement’s history and identity?

Discuss.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

the tax bill idea – more comments

A few months ago, I wondered if it would be better for people to pay a tax bill instead of an income tax. In that scheme, the state tallies up the cost of gov’t and divides by the size of the population. Call that number your “tax bill.” You discount for poverty and surcharge for wealth.

Two points. First, Tax Historian, a commenter, thought that I was arguing that each person get an individualized bill. E.g., if I drove more, I might pay more taxes for roads. That is not what I suggested and I agree it would be impractical. Rather, my suggestion is simple. At the end of each year, the state looks at its expenditures and divides by the population size. So if the federal budget was $300,000,000,000 (33o billion) and our population was 300,000,000, then each person pays $100. The rich might pay a multiple to account for lower income people who can’t pay at all or pay the full price.

Second, I was a little surprised by the hostility in the comments. Here’s the intuition so you can see where I am coming from. Currently, most tax schemes just assume that the state vacuums up a certain chunk of your income, or transactions, or assets. If you believe that the state just owns part of you, or that you just owe a chunk of your wealth to someone else, then sales taxes or income taxes or value added taxes seem normal.

However, if you start with the assumption that government provides services that can’t be provided privately, then it doesn’t follow that the state just owns, say 30% of your income or 8% of your transactions. Instead, you should first (a) figure out what you need and then (b) force people to pay up. That’s the logic of assessments in homeowner associations, for example. Let’s put it this way with an example. How do we shop for food? (a) We just give the grocer 10% of our income and hope he give us enough food or (b) We ask the grocer how much it costs and then pay the market value. There’s a good case to be made for the second option.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

performativity in economic sociology by shreeharsh kelkar

In response to Kieran and Ezra’s posts, Shreeharsh Kelkar of MIT’s Program in History, Anthropology and STS wrote a lengthy post about the nature of performativity arguments. A representative clip:

To put in yet another way, the difference between constructivists and realists is over the issue of prediction, and in particular over the issue of long-term prediction.  Short-term predictions are possible for both the realist and the constructivist.  But long-term predictions, say, about housing prices or computer prices 50 years from now, will be more difficult for constructivists to make than realists.  It is difficult only because even objective factors that determine prices can be changed by long-term cultural work; and this cultural work is impossible to predict.  The more confident you are about prediction, you shift to the realism side of the spectrum.  The less confident about prediction you are, will make you more of a constructivist.

And this explains, finally, some of the arguments that have been happening in the Orgtheory comment threads.  Would you like your regulator to be a realist or a constructivist?  Realists argue that even the existence of regulators is premised on realism; for if there were no objective factors constraining social facts (like prices) then how would one even begin to regulate something in the first place?  I would disagree.  I think it depends on the time-frame that the regulator is supposed to regulate.  A regulator who is thinking about the future 50 years from now is simply deceiving himself or herself.  For a regulator who is thinking 5 or 10 years down the line: it simply doesn’t matter whether he is a realist or a constructivist.

Check it out.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

thank you to rhacel parrenas

A hearty thank you to my friend Rhacel Parrenas of USC who blogged for us in December. She brought our attention to a very serious issue.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

trouble in institutionalist land

Last week, I argued that there was kind of a big problem in modern sociology: one of our dominant macro theories is highly inconsistent with many of our favorite micro theories. If we look at various popular account of individual action in cultural sociology (e.g., toolkit theory), many don’t produce isomorphism.

Here’s the outline of the argument:

• The gist of institutional theories of isomorphism is that people working in org fields experience pressures for conformity. If you don’t follow a pre-existing cultural script, you can’t run your organization. 
• For this argument to work, you need to assume that people respond to their environment in fairly uniform ways.
• In the original D&P ’83 article, in the hypotheses section, they admit variance when status orders are weak. Otherwise, the prediction is when status orders are well established, or when high status actors propagate norms, you get conformity.
• Different authors offer different social psychological mechanisms. D&P ’83 and ’91 (the intro) often appeal to a wide range of scholarship to justify isomorphism. They appeal to Berger and Luckman, as well as Bourdieu. You can also concoct a rational choice version, which is consistent with resource dependency arguments.
• If you actually read the fine print of these social psychology theories, most do not predict isomorphism, except Bourdieu’s habitus theory. For example, Berger and Luckmann’s book describes how people develop a stock of knowledge that defines their social reality. Fair enough. But nowhere do B&L ever say that this social reality is highly uniform, resistant to change, or otherwise offer a mechanism that acts as an iron cage. The slip is that “taken for granted” is interpreted as “hard to challenge.” Look at Griswold’s theory of cultural objects, or Zelizer, and it’s all about local constructions of meaning. Does not imply isomorsphism. Another case is rational choice institutionalism, where you set up a game theory model to predict norm following. Fair enough, but you have lots of hidden assumptions – uniform agents, low enforce costs, etc. Drop these and you get heterogeneity. Indeed, what you get is from the way less popular Meyer and Rowan ’77 institutionalism.

Of course, I am not the only person who noted these issues. DiMaggio’s idea of the inst entrepreneur is one attempt to get around this problem. The Clemens and Cook ’99 note that even iron cage institutionalism only predict stasis if you assume perfect reproduction. Admit imperfect reproduction and the theory breaks down. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to logics, institutional work, and conflict/movements. Substantively, it’s an implicit rejection of earlier institutional. Theoretically, it’s (almost) a complete reworking of the theory. These may not be institutionalist in the sense of the 70s or 80s, or even early 90s, but at least it is consistent with how many sociologists describe motivation and action.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

meet me in ann arbor!

I’ll briefly be in Ann Arbor this Friday. If you want to hang or chill, please email me.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

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.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

if sports are so popular, then why does it have to be subsidized?

In public policy, we often make the argument that a service should be subsidized if it is important but somehow doesn’t generate enough money to be produced by the market. However, sports seems to fly in the face of that intuition. Sports is a heavily subsidized leisure activity even though it clearly has a viable market.  For example, colleges subsidize sports teams, cable tv subsidizes sports channels, and cities subsidize stadiums. National governments will even subsidize large events, like the Olympics or FIFA events. And in many cases, the money is never recouped. Why?

A few possible answers:

• Sports legitimize organizations.
• The average voter is a sports nut.
• Public choice: administrators approve sports because it helps them, though not other people.

Other explanations? I am not anti-sports, but as a billion dollar industry, it seems as if sports doesn’t need any additional help. sports subsidies seem deeply misguided.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

reader poll, 2013

From time to time, I like to learn about our readers. What’s your background? Please tell us!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

still working on my resolution to listen to more latin jazz

Master trombonist Conrad Herwig plays Charles Mingus‘ “Haitian Fight Song.”

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz 

puzzle for hard core institutiuonalists

Ok, let’s start with the Coleman diagram (or the “bathtub” as they call it in Germany). For institutionlaism, the two “macro” states are culture and isomorphism in an organizational field. That’s what the macro states are in DiMaggio and Powell ’83 or world polity theory.

Now, take your favorite micro sociological theory – maybe you are a Swidlerian toolkit person, or a Goffmanian frame theorist, or a Bourdieu habitus person. Then, complete the Coleman diagram. Except for habitus theory, you’ll notice that a lot of these theories don’t really produce isomorpshism on the macro level.

Discuss.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

i like sports, i like college, but i don’t like college sports

I greatly admire athletes, as I admire anyone who achieves excellence in their field. But I have always felt that sports and college are not a good mix. Consider the following article from Inside Higher Ed about college sports:

According to the report, the growth in per-athlete athletic spending outpaced the growth in per-student academic spending over that time period in all subdivisions of Division I athletics. In general, the report found that Division I universities and colleges tended to spend roughly three to six times as much on athletics per athlete as on academics per student, with the ratio exceeding 12 times in the Southeastern Conference, home of the last seven NCAA national champions in football.

and

The report notes that, during the downturn, while many institutions faced financial pressure and cut academic programs, only a few Division I institutions – including the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of California at Berkeley, and Rutgers University – cut athletic teams or spending to cope with budget cuts. The University of Maryland has since moved to a different conference in hopes of generating more revenue and restoring the cut programs.

Advocates say sports pays for itself. Not so fast:

The report notes — as have many others — that most athletic departments are not self-supporting. Only one in four institutions in the FBS generated more money than it spent in any given year between 2005 and 2010, the report states, with almost none of the FCS or non-football programs generating a profit. Median subsidies for Division I institutions ranged from $7.7 million to $8.5 million, with the largest FBS institutions seeing the smallest subsidies and the smallest FBS institutions seeing the largest.

Check it out.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

bruce lee remains awesome

Just finished watching the documentary I am Bruce Lee and I remain impressed by Lee.

• He was huge child star in Hong Kong cinema.
• He was the 1957 dance champion in Hong Kong. His style – the cha-cha!
• He married his white girlfriend from Seattle – when interracial marriage was still illegal.
• In 1965, Wing Jack Man challenged to a fight. If Lee lost, he would stop teaching martial arts to non-Chinese. Lee did not lose.
• He taught Chuck Norris some moves.
• His martial art style incorporates move from fencing (!).

There’s also interesting sociological insights about Hollywood, how sometimes someone has to make it big on the periphery (Hong Kong) before getting accepted in the mainstream.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

how to buy many, many copies of my book

Once or twice a semester, I am contacted by an instructor who wishes to buy the Grad Skool Rulz for an entire class. People assign it to senior or graduate students who need blun, but good, advice on graduate school. One way to do it is work through the book’s distributor, Smashwords.com. But if that is an issue, there is another way. Simply send me a check for as many copies as you want, then I’ll send you a PDF that you can distribute to your students.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz