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My posts over the last couple of weeks have tried to identify and elaborate some of the central themes in Philip Selznick’s work (e.g., the need for normative theory, the centrality of values and ideals, and the critical role that institutions play in their realization).  I have also tried to draw attention to the work of some other scholars who have more recently sounded similar themes.

My personal attraction to this peculiar way of thinking is largely the result of my preoccupation with higher education institutions.  (These being the organizations that I’ve spent much of my career studying and the only ones from which I have ever drawn a real paycheck).  Despite being 49% cynical, I am still inclined to follow Selznick in seeing colleges and universities primarily as “vehicles” for the realization of genuine human ideals.  Like March, I am also troubled by the contemporary tendency for universities to overlook their “essential” purposes as they pursue more “incidental” market-oriented goals.  I am not so naïve as to think that more “institutional thinking” and Selznickian institutional leadership could solve universities’ many structural and systemic problems.  But, I do think that it could make a difference.   I also think that it does make a difference.  I’m pretty sure that things would be much worse if we didn’t have a lot of committed institutional thinkers out there right now “fighting the good fight.”  This makes me want to tell theoretical stories which emphasize that there is indeed a good fight to be fought.

While I think that Selznick’s basic message is also relevant to the management and governance of business organizations, I lack the space and the expertise to elaborate this connection.  So, I’d like to close my post – and my stint as a guest blogger – by drawing attention to the work of one person who has made some important strides in that direction (Joshua Margolis).  Margolis, a business ethicist, has written a number of papers which make a strong case for bringing social scientific and philosophical inquiry together toward the end of developing normative theory.  He has argued that ethical conduct can be promoted in business organizations by “normatively justifying vivid aims worthy of pursuit alongside economic objectives,” and has called for empirical work that identifies the “conditions and practices” which both advance and undermine these aims.  He has also emphasized the need to “put human agency in charge of causal forces” thereby “rescuing the moment of dignity” and preserving the intelligibility of ethical discussions.

“Organizational actors cannot be mere pawns of larger forces – billiard balls – if we wish to make them culpable or put them on notice … Ethical questions are worthy of consideration only if we believe human beings capable of responding deliberately to them even amid the [social and psychological] forces bearing down upon them.  In order to be held responsible, human beings must be capable of responding.”

These arguments clearly resonate with Selznick’s call for a ‘humanist science’; with his emphasis on leadership, responsibility, and integrity; and with his lifelong focus on “the conditions and processes which frustrate ideals or instead give them life and hope”).  (I should note that the similarities between Margolis’ arguments and Selznick’s appear to be due to the fact that both have been strongly influenced by Dewey and Kant, rather than to Selznick’s direct influence on Margolis).

Margolis’ work is exemplary in that it is remarkably well-grounded in both moral philosophy and social science.  He possesses a combination of competencies that is hard to imitate (and frankly daunting, IMHO).  Nevertheless, his work points a way toward a place wherein social science and philosophy can meet —  with good effects for both and any number of positive externalities, as well.  Selznick clearly thinks that organizational theorists – and institutionalists in particular – should also be pushing toward this place.

I am inclined to agree.

I thought the results of our previous, unscientific survey were very interesting: 59% of people (139 took the survey) googled paper titles either before or after reviewing them for a journal.  (That obviously creates problems for the double-blind peer review process.)

So, here’s another, unscientific survey.  As academics most of us pursue research and thus ideas are our currency.  I’ve heard discussions of late about “ideas being stolen” and wondered about how prevalent that is.  So, what are your thoughts — have your research ideas been stolen?

“A university is only incidentally a market.  It is more essentially a temple – a temple dedicated to knowledge and a human spirit of inquiry.  It is a place where learning and scholarship are revered, not primarily for what they contribute to personal or social well-being but for the vision of humanity that they symbolize, sustain, and pass on… Higher education is a vision, not a calculation.  It is a commitment, not a choice.  Students are not customers, they are acolytes.  Teaching is not a job, it is a sacrament.  Research is not an investment, it is a testament.”

-Jim March

One of my favorite examples of the sort of “institutional thinking” that I discussed in my last post is found in Jim March’s short essay, “A Scholar’s Quest,” from which the preceding quote is taken.  In the essay, March notes the pervasiveness of consequentialist reasoning in academia and elsewhere.  He contrasts consequentialism with a “second grand tradition for understanding, motivating, and justifying action.”  He observes that the latter tradition:

“…sees action as based not on anticipations of consequences but on attempts to fulfill obligations of personal and social identities and senses of self, particularly as those obligations and senses are informed by the ethos and practices of great human institutions.” “ It is a tradition,” he continues, “that speaks of self-conceptions, identities and proper behavior, rather than expectations,  incentives, and desires.”

March has explained this latter view (which he has labeled as the “logic of appropriateness”) in a number of other places (including this unappreciated little book about leadership).  However, this essay is unique in that it turns the logic of appropriateness backward upon the university itself (and more specifically upon the business school).  It is also unique in that it makes a strong normative case for the embrace of this logic.

“In order to sustain the temple of education, we probably need to rescue it from those deans, donors, faculty, and students who respond to incentives and calculate consequences, and return it to those who respond to senses of themselves and their callings…”

I like March’s essay partly because it provides a good example of the empirical phenomenon of institutional thinking, partly because it boldly advocates for this way of thinking, and partly because it makes me feel personally connected to a “great human institution.”  Other people may like it for different reasons – or dislike it altogether.   It is worth reading and reflecting upon in any event.

Eric Abrahamson will be joining us as one of two guest bloggers for the month of November.  Eric is Professor of Management at Columbia Business School.  His work on diffusion — particularly connected to the concept of “management fads” — is widely cited.  He has two books out currently: Change Without Pain and A Perfect Mess, The Hidden Benefits of Disorder.  He’s been spotted recently discussing A Perfect Mess for the great and good at Google.  As you’ll see from the video, Eric lacks not for dry humor.  We’re looking forward to hearing more.

So, there’s another journal in the mix: Global Strategy Journal.  While the journal enters an extremely crowded space (I can’t keep track of all the management/international journals out there these days), my prediction is that Global Strategy Journal will quickly become a top outlet in the area of international business and strategy.   Why?

First, the journal is associated with the Strategic Management Society (SMS), which owns one of the top strategy journals in the field, Strategic Management Journal (SMJ).  Not only is SMJ a fantastic journal outlet, but SMS has also recently (successfully) launched a sister entrepreneurship journal, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, which appears to be attracting fantastic work (I’m perhaps biased on that point).  Second, the new journal has selected two fantastic editors: Steve Tallman and Torben Pedersen (along with excellent associate editors).  My guess is that within several years this journal will become a preferred outlet for scholars doing international management research (along with such journals as the Journal of International Business Studies, JIBS).

One of my favorite books of the last year is On Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo, a political scientist at George Mason University.  Heclo’s short book tries to describe a particular orientation toward social institutions and to advocate for this general way of thinking (and acting).  Taking a stance that he recognizes to be “unfashionable,” Heclo argues that institutions are basic fonts of human values and vital sources of personal identity.  He suggests that (many) institutions deserve respect and admiration and require stewardship from their leaders.  He also notes that this sense of institutional obligation and responsibility is often lacking, and elaborates many of the negative consequences which stem from institutional neglect.

Heclo’s book duly notes institutions’ checkered history and spells out their many oppressive potentialities.  It also provides a very long list of good reasons for the widespread contemporary distrust of governmental, business, and not-for-profit institutions.  Nevertheless, Heclo stresses that:

“…it is possible to imagine being both thoroughly modern and more deeply committed to institutional values.”  “By thoroughly modern,” he continues, “ I mean that we will have to continue to be distrustful of institutions and to guard against their power over us.  However, I also think that we can achieve a saner way of life by more self-consciously learning how to think and act institutionally.”

Heclo‘s book elaborates his core concept of “institutional thinking” and provides some good examples of it.  It also effectively contrasts its preferred stance (i.e., “to distrust but value”) with the prevailing social-scientific view which “expects the worst because it has already reached the conclusion that institutions and their leaders are generally oppressive and self-serving.”  (For one interesting explanation of this latter view, see James Stever’s book The Path to Organizational Skepticism).

I like Heclo’s book for a number of reasons.  First, anyone who read my earlier posts will likely note its strong familial relationship to Selznick’s “Hobbesian Idealism.”  Heclo, like Selznick, emphasizes the essential duality of institutions.  While he acknowledges that they frequently frustrate ideals, he also follows Selznick in viewing institutions as these ideals’ best and only real friend (i.e., as the very things that serve to give our ideals “life and hope”).  Second, Heclo’s perspective also stresses that it is possible – and often desirable– for people to willfully commit to particular institutions and the values which they embody.  In this sense, his perspective is substantially at odds with much contemporary institutionalism.  In that literature, there is a tendency to view institutions as mere control structures (which induce “conformity”), and to see agency as something that happens “against” or “outside of” institutions’ otherwise constraining influence.  Third, Heclo’s perspective provides a viable platform for criticizing the many institutional failures that seem to be continually occurring around us.   Heclo articulates a normative vision even as he acknowledges the darker, persistent, and often more obvious realities of institutional life.   Finally, I like Heclo’s book because it points out the difference between “thinking about institutions” and “thinking institutionally.”  He argues that much of the academic theory and research on institutions is, in fact, “anti-institutional” in nature.  His book encourages scholars to see institutions from “within,” and to embrace an actor-centric viewpoint.  While this viewpoint is, of course, partial and limiting, I think that  it provides an opportunity to see some important things that we are otherwise apt to miss.

I will be interested to hear what you think about this book and my summary of it.    In future posts, I will also try to identify some other contemporary scholars who are, in different ways, “taking values seriously” and thus building on Selznick’s legacy.

Two years ago a Washington, DC woman was arrested and charged with murdering her four daughters, ages 5 to 16. Their bodies had been decomposing in the home for about four months and may have done so for longer if deputy federal marshals had not arrived to serve the family with an eviction notice. I could go on about the ironies of a system that seems to remember the existence of vulnerable children only when the time comes to take away some benefit as opposed to when they should have been receiving services but that would be a purely political and emotional argument. The point here is to remind us all that not all bureaucracies are created equally. Specifically, some are much more mired in routinization and extreme divisions of labor than others.

Across the country, local and state agencies responsible for the well-being of children and families have been under scrutiny, generally as a result of the tragic loss of a child or children in a home that was under the supervision of these households but somehow slips through the administrative cracks. The tragedy is then not simply due to the often horrific nature in which these children die but also because of a sense that their deaths could have been prevented IF ONLY these agencies were fulfilling their roles. After the public outrage comes the creation of a task force to investigate these agencies, the public firings of a few officials, and the report that points to a lack of coordination among the various governmental agencies and employees responsible for tracking these families. I haven’t conducted the analysis as yet but I’ll bet my mint condition X-Men #1 that in every one of these public cases that lack of coordination and communication across job titles and across agencies are given as primary factors for the “failure” of these systems to protect these children until it is too late.

This leads me to two questions. The first is why do some bureaucracies more closely resemble this organizational type than others? That is, is there a specific historical trajectory an organization follows to take it down this path? Second, if we can assume that I am correct in my observations regarding the lack of coordination and communication in these cases, what can be done about it? If we can assume away any ‘friction” such as costs, is there a way to institute organizational change such that these problems might actually be resolved?

“Pragmatism asks its usual question:  ‘Grant an idea to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?’… What, in short, is the truth’s cash value in experiential terms?”

William James, Pragmatism, 1907:92.

My last post tried to expose some of the philosophical foundations of Selznick’s theory.  Specifically, I tried to show how his perspective on organizational values is rooted in John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism.  The post generated very little discussion (at least until just recently).  Maybe this was just because I posted it on a Friday.  But, I also suspect that I tried to say too much.   Sometimes trying to “get to the bottom” of a theory is a mistake — particularly if we do it too quickly.  People can agree or disagree with a theory’s core premises and concepts once they are laid out, but there may not be too much left to talk about afterwards.

In any case, a different way in which to approach Selznick’s theory is to take a forward-looking view and subject it to William James’ “pragmatist question.”  This approach would seem particularly appropriate in Selznick’s case, given his avowed commitment to pragmatism and to “normative theory,” more specifically.  I have spent a long time thinking about what “concrete differences” might result if we were to take values more seriously and treat them as if they were real.  I have also thought quite a bit about what might happen if we followed Selznick and conceptualized organizations primarily as “vehicles” for the realization of various values (i.e., as social “means” that exist in order to facilitate the achievement of larger “ends”).

I can’t, of course, predict the full effects of such a shift, and many unintended consequences might arise in the unlikely event of its occurrence.  Nevertheless, I see a number of positives. Organization theory (and institutionalism more specifically) might quickly become more managerially relevant and ethically-consequential if more scholars assumed a Selznickian perspective in their research.  I also think that many organizational researchers might become less “naively cynical” to the extent that they followed Selznick’s lead.   I recognize that concepts like leadership, integrity, and organizational “character” are scientifically problematic.  I am also well-aware of the difficulty involved in theorizing (and empirically discerning) substantive rationality.  However, I am really bothered when I see such concepts reflexively dismissed.  I am equally bothered when I see values routinely being converted into arbitrary social constructions or reduced to the mere shadows of power relationships .  Selznick’s theory provides, at bare minimum, a reason to be suspicious of such treatments.  Espoused ideals may often be bogus, but this is not inevitably the case.

This last caveat points to the thing that I think I like best of all about Selznick’s theory.  Specifically, it allows (even compels) you to be idealistic and cynical, optimistic and pessimistic, and positive and negative — all at the same time.  As Krygier notes, Selznick is a “Hobbesian Idealist.”   His work is concerned both with the conditions and processes that “frustrate ideals” and with those that give them “life and hope.”  My sense is that he is more idealist than Hobbesian, but it seems to be pretty much neck and neck (maybe 51% to 49%).  This is about as much idealism and optimism as I can muster on most days, and definitely as much as I can sustain over any extended period of time.

Thanks for the comments on my first post, and sorry it’s taken a couple of days to get back on task.  The questions that were raised are great ones, and they set the stage for most of what I’d like to accomplish in this post and future ones.  As I said last time, my sense is that most organization theorists have (for better or worse) only seen the tip of the Selznickian iceberg.  As Brayden rightly and helpfully points out, Selznick’s major contributions to OT occurred very early in a remarkably long and prolific career that (for whatever reason) subsequently gravitated in a different direction.  My overarching goal is simply to reveal a little more of “the Selznick we don’t know,” and to explore his potential relevance for contemporary organizational studies.

Teppo and Brayden’s questions about what Selznick means by “authentic” or “genuine” values is an important one that cuts straight to the heart of his thought.   Selznick (believe it or not) really does propose that there are some things that are objectively good and truly valuable.  His entire oeuvre is deeply and explicitly rooted in John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism, a philosophy that sees values as naturally emerging from the existential strivings of the human species.  Consider the following:

Friendship, responsibility, leadership, love, and justice are not elements of an external ethic brought to the world like Promethean fire.  They are generated by mundane needs, practical opportunities, and felt satisfactions.  ‘The loftiest edifices,’ wrote George Santayana, ‘have the deepest foundations….’  These words reflect a long tradition of understanding that authentic human ideals have material foundations  (The Moral Commonwealth, p. 19).

Importantly, Selznick recognizes that there are multiple objective values and further stresses that these values exist in perpetual tension with each other (as with liberty and justice, for instance).  He is an avowed pluralist.  Though Selznick does not explicitly note the connection, I find a very strong affinity between his thinking and that of the pluralist political philosopher Isaiah Berlin – who also espoused an “objective” form of value pluralism.  It is also important to note that while Selznick embraces science, he firmly rejects scientism and its attendant reductionism and determinism.  To say that lofty cultural edifices have material foundations is not to deny the reality, the power, or the loftiness of the edifices themselves.  It is also not to deny that these edifices have been constructed by humans (and are therefore subject to human revision, reconstruction, and improvement).  (Remember Humanist Science).   The following quote elaborates:

Naturalism does not dismiss or deprecate the expressive symbolism of religion, art, or politics; neither does it reduce religion to fantasy, politics to power, or love to attachment.  Indeed, all reductionist strategies are suspect as failing to respect the integrity of the subject matter  (A Humanist Science, P. 30).

Selznick’s invocation of the concept of integrity in the prior quote points (albeit indirectly) to the other way in which values are (or at least can be) authentic.  Specifically, he emphasizes that individual organizations (and persons) can be more or less genuine in their orientation toward the values they espouse.  He stresses the possibility (and desirability) of value-rationality (or ‘substantive rationality’) in the Weberian sense.  Integrity is (thus) a critical concept (arguably the critical concept) in his theory of the organizational institution (which is co-equally a theory of leadership).  While his definition of the integrity concept is characteristically loose and multifaceted, he begins by noting that “to act with integrity is to have values and take them seriously” (The Moral Commonwealth, p. 213). In Leadership in Administration (p. 60), he avers that the leader’s basic imperative is “always to choose key values and to create a social structure that embodies them.” In a footnote to this very sentence he observes that this aspect of leadership work “may be compared with individual moral experience, wherein the individual existentially ‘chooses’ self-defining values and strives to make himself an authentic representative of them, that is, to hold them genuinely rather than superficially” (p. 60).

Those familiar with Selznick’s institutionalism know that he sees the definition of values and the pursuit of integrity as pragmatic concerns, as well as moral ones.  Consider:

The protection of integrity is more than an aesthetic or expressive exercise…  It is a practical concern of the first importance because the defense of integrity is also a defense of the organization’s distinctive competence (Leadership in Administration, p. 139).

Willie’s comments on my first post present a direct (and important) challenge to this thesis — which is at the very core of Selznick’s theory.  Specifically, Willie implies that organizations focused on values are apt to become inert and anti-democratic.  These concerns are worth thinking about and discussing.  I’ll have more to say about them in my next post.  I’ve probably said enough for now.

P.S.  If any of you are looking for a more detailed (but still digestible) explanation of Selznick’s larger social theoory, I strongly recommend Martin Krygier’s introductory chapter in this fabulous book of essays on Selznick’s intellectual legacy.  You can read much of it online, and his essay is not the only good one.  I also recommend reading just the preface and introductory chapter of Selznick’s Moral Commonwealth (also available online).

Michael Roston points out a very interesting tale of two numbers in the news yesterday:

Perhaps you’ve heard that the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached 10,000 today, finally, at long last…

But it turns out that while Mr. Dow Jones believes that our Great Recession is over (that’s a joke), one invisible hand in our market doesn’t know what the other is doing.

That’s right, the Pentagon reported on this day of Dow 10,000 that our strained Armed Forces have beat their recruiting goals for the fiscal year, driven by economic unease. (h/t: the Daily Dish).

Here here! for pointing out the obvious. Seriously.  The man makes a good point.

The AFL-CIO and the Economic Policy Institute make another good point: the current recession is hitting women worse than men, and  minorities worse than non-minorities.

One reason women workers are so adversely affected by manufacturing job loss is that they are concentrated in industries that have been drastically affected by the surge in cheap imports over the past decade, such as textiles, apparel and leather. Women make up more than 50 percent of the total workforce in these industries. Faced with high levels of foreign competition, these jobs have had high levels of trade-related job displacement.

Not good.  So what to do?

One idea that has been proposed is to redirect stimulus and TARP funds to smaller regional banks where it is more likely to go to support small businesses where conventional wisdom suggests more jobs will be created in the short term.

That’s not a bad idea, per se.  But it doesn’t solve the larger problem which is that the U.S. economy has been putting off a denouement with itself for decades: the engine that built and sustained the middle-class is broken and we need to figure out what to do about that.   Sometimes its important to take a step back and think about the big picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

The sports pages have been a-buzz with the story of Rush Limbaugh’s bid for part-ownership of the St. Louis Rams and the ensuing flurry of opinion on whether his bid should be considered, let alone accepted. Most of the opinion against Limbaugh is centered on comments he has made in the past, deriding the press’s coverage of quarterback Donovan McNabb’s contribution to the Eagle’s performance on the field as a bit of “social policy.” Limbaugh felt that McNabb’s press coverage was due more to the media wanting a Black quarterback to do well than to his actually doing well. There is a list of statements attributed to Limbaugh that have been added to this one as reason for denying him the opportunity to become a part of the Rams’ franchise in particular and the NFL as a whole.  The rationale behind this seems to be that his comments are “divisive.” Largely absent from these discussions are the role that part-owners play in the day-to-day decision making of a team and what other criteria are used to determine whether someone is or a group of someones are worthy to own part of the franchise.

I personally find that Mr. Limbaugh is a vulgarian and he should be called to task for many of his comments. I’m just not certain whether this is ample reason to say no to his money. Missing from the conversation is an analysis of the potential benefits Limbaugh, his money, his business acumen, his marketing genius, and his connections could bring to the franchise. There also needs to be a more detailed account of the liabilities he could bring beyond potential “divisiveness.”  Could his presence result in a large number of Rams fans changing loyalties (thus negatively affecting ticket sales)?  Could it cause a drop in ad revenue? Might it actually cause divisions within the boardroom that would directly affect the franchise and its players in negative ways? Analyses such as these could possibly put to the rest the murmurings that this is a conspiracy against the Right, that Limbaugh’s freedom of speech is not being respected, and that somehow the media is yet again punishing a White male for speaking “truth” about the shortcomings of minorities.

“Most of my specialized writings in the sociology of organizations and the sociology of law have been preoccupied with the conditions and processes that frustrate ideals or, instead, give them life and hope.”

Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth, 1992:x).

“Here we see … the chief feature of humanist science:  Analytical and empirical study of ideals, understood as at once latent in and threatened by the vagaries of social life.”

Selznick,  A Humanist Science, 2008:5).

Many thanks to Brayden and the other orgtheory.net folks for inviting me to guest blog.  It is a privilege to be asked, and an honor to follow  the many smart, thoughtful, and thoroughly impressive persons who have previously filled this role.

I am a first time blogger and I’m not entirely sure where (or how) this guest stint will end up.   But, I’d like to begin with a discussion of Philip Selznick and his rather unique theoretical (and meta-theoretical) perspective.  Selznick has obviously been an influential figure in the development of organization theory, in general, and institutionalism, in particular.  In more recent years, scholars have also made sustained efforts to recover the lost insights of his “old” institutional theory, thus filling critical gaps in the neo-institutional perspective and  (presumptively ) “ending the family quarrel” between them.  Brayden has also recently has recently sung Selznick’s praises on this very website.  This is all great in my book.

The thing that motivates me to bring up Selznick (yet again) is my nagging (and growing) sense that we’ve failed to do full justice to his larger theoretical perspective.  I have recently spent a good deal of time reading through Selznick’s canon and reflecting upon its meanings (including his most recent book, which he published last year at the age of 89).  In the process, I have become increasingly cognizant of the limitations of much recent organizational scholarship that has invoked Selznick’s name and tried to draw from his theory.  (I should hasten to add that this criticism extends to some of my own prior research).

The particular aspect of Selznick’s perspective that I have recently found most intriguing (and occasionally perplexing) is its preoccupation with “genuine” human ideals and the factors that facilitate or undermine their realization.  As my post’s opening quotes reveal, Selznick sees this focus as the master theme which ties together his life’s work.  He also sees it as the very foundation for his vision of a “humanist science” (which is obviously a rather challenging concept in its own right).

In future posts, I’ll likely have more to say about why Selznick thinks we should take ideals seriously, about what this task appears to entail, and about what might happen if we were to follow his advice in organizational studies.  I’ll also add some of my own thoughts about the benefits, costs, and potential perils of following this course (in so much as I understand it).  In the process, I’ll also try to provide some relevant current examples and to connect Selznick’s ideas with some of the recent topics that have been discussed in these pages (e.g.,  Jerry’s prophesy of the coming post-capitalist utopia and Willie’s call for “normative theory” in response thereto).

In the interim, I’d love to hear any initial reactions from the crowd.  Is the idea of putting values and ideals at the very center of organization studies a goofy one (i.e., an unfortunate suggestion proffered by an otherwise brilliant mind?).   What possible difference (good or bad) might it make if we tried to do this?  Do you have even a general sense of what it means to “take ideals seriously” and do “humanist science?”  Is this interesting, or would you  like to hear me talk about something else instead?

As a first-year assistant professor, I decided to skimp a little on the creativity in terms of syllabus development. But I’ve been toying with the idea of incorporating fiction in my later courses. Why? Well, I think undergrads in particular like a little break from academic texts. I also think that having them engage with something outside of sociology in order to demonstrate an understanding of the sociological concepts I want them to come away with is both a fun and challenging exercise. Plus I love fiction and would like to find the time to read it. (Is that a bad reason?)

Anyway, I’ve been trying to come up with works of fiction that would fit in nicely with my Race course and here are some of the titles I’ve come up with:

Black No More – George Schuyler

Beloved – Toni Morrison

A Mercy – Toni Morrison

The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Kindred – Octavia Butler

The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears – Dinaw Mengestu

Lucy – Jamaica Kincaid

White Dog – Romain Gary

The Plague of Doves – Louise Erdrich

Poor White – Sherwood Anderson

Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed

Flight to Canada – Ishmael Reed

Native Speaker – Chang Rae Lee

Woman Hollering Creek – Sandra Cisneros

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

The Tortilla Curtain – T.C. Boyle

Caucasia – Danzy Senna

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri

I could keep going on. I also think it would be very instructive for my Sociology of Medicine and Sociology of Education classes.

Does anyone else see the benefit of using fiction in sociology courses? Has anyone out there tried it? And if so, what works have you used and for which courses?

During a meeting with one of my students to discuss the topic of her final paper, I was asked, “What’s the difference between statistical discrimination and simple discrimination?” I had to pause on that one. My understanding was that discrimination as it is generally used is “taste-based.” So an employer deciding not to hire you because she would prefer not to work with other women is taste-based discrimination. Even though you may have the most impressive CV, she is willing to pay or incur a penalty (the loss of your productivity) to not have you as an employee based on dislike of women.

How does this differ from statistical discrimination? Your employer has no personal feelings against women – she just “knows” that women are more likely to be the ones to take days off from work because of sick children and although your CV looks great, she believes that your level of productivity will be lower than a slightly less impressive male’s because you have (or may someday have – she isn’t allowed to ask you in the interview) children.

My student then asks, “Well how is it really different if the outcome is the same?” I think that’s a brilliant question! And it prompts another interesting question, again resulting from interactions with students. We discussed Bobo, et.al.’s paper on Laissez Faire Racism in class today. The authors contend that current racial attitudes of White Americans, rather than reflecting a decline in racism point to a shift from what they term Jim Crow racism to laissez faire racism. Jim Crow racism was characterized by overt bigotry, demands for strict segregation in virtually all domains, advocacy of government mandated discrimination, and the adherence of beliefs that Blacks were categorically inferior to Whites. Enter the Civil Rights Movement, the dismantling of Jim Crow, and the shift away from biological interpretations of the disadvantaged status of Blacks in our society. We shift from the age of Jim Crow to that of laissez faire racism in which we have the end of state-enforced inequality, a move towards race-neutral and anti-discriminatory state practices, but a reliance on informal racial bias is pervasive.

Is statistical discrimination then simply the evolution of racism from Jim Crow to laissez faire? From a taste-based discrimination that denoted a dislike or distaste for minorities based on negative stereotypes to statistical or information based discrimination that is stripped of animus or dislike but based on stereotypes as well?

Is there a case for keeping the “statistical” in statistical discrimination and if so, why? Does its inclusion better inform us about inequality within organizations – particularly race, ethnic, and gender inequality?

No, this is not the essay I plan to assign to my students on their midterm. I truly would like a well-reasoned explanation for why this term is helpful.

Just over a decade ago, going through the IRB process seemed relatively new and simple:
While in graduate school, I took the required research methods class, which included discussions of research ethics. For both my qualifying paper and dissertation, I designed my study and submitted my research plans to Human Subjects, Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, or IRB, which reviews research proposals to ensure that the rights and well-being of human subjects are adequately protected. If my memory serves me correctly, a consent forms for interview was not yet standard. However, an anthropology student told me that her book publisher had asked her to get written permission to publish quotes from their interviews. She was having difficulties re-contacting people she had previously interviewed for a study. This made a big enough impression upon me that I developed my own consent form that not only explained my study and interviewees’ rights, but also outlined how the research might be used for future publications. Now, these kinds of forms are standard.

Currently, the IRB process is rationalized, with a “one size fits all” approach:
As a new professor at a state university, I was required to complete and pass multiple-choice quizzes for the on-line course Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). Several of the modules concerned medical research, which is the main “model” for the IRB process.

Because I changed institutions and my original CITI certificate will soon expire, I took a new set of modules and multiple choice quizzes yesterday afternoon. Interestingly, I missed the same trick question that I probably got wrong 3 years ago:

“Where can student researchers and/or student subjects find reliable additional resources regarding the IRB approval process?

A. IRB

B. Student Advisor

C. “Gray’s Anatomy”

D. The Student Union

E. Compliance Office.”

I chose A., but according to CITI, the correct answer is B.

While I have learned a few new esoteric facts (example: educational testing is exempt from review), the main lesson I’ve learned over the years is that IRBs, like many institutions, are demanding more assurances of predictability and rationality. Just like Donald Rumsfeld’s quote about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns,” researchers face an on-going conundrum: anticipate and articulate risk, even before the research has started, and reevaluate and adjust as the research progresses.

Ethnographic research and risk

In their 2004 article “Bureaucracies of Mass Deception: Institutional Review Boards and the Ethics of Ethnographic Research” (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595: 249-263), Charles L. Bosk and Raymond G. De Vries explain how this anticipation of risk is an especially difficult task for ethnographers. Bosk and De Vries also make a number of suggestions, including learning from the example of the Netherlands, which exempts social science research from review, barring “a demonstratable psychological or physical burden” (259).

During my Burning Man research, one of the decisions that I made about risk was (1) whether or not to disguise the Burning Man event, and (2) whether or not to automatically disguise the identities of interviewees. I decided that disguising Burning Man was too difficult given that only one temporary arts event in the desert exists. This decision linked to my next decision: I also decided to give interviewees a choice of whether to have a pseudonym and disguised characteristics. Most chose to use their real names, but a few noted information that they wanted kept confidential or requested that I check with them before using quotes, which I respected. In my writings, I felt that as long as the information conveyed was not potentially harmful to individuals, it was important to use people’s real names in reporting their experiences.

Years later, with the book and articles in print, I revisited that decision. Several follow-up conversations with new volunteers and interviewees reinforced my decision to use real names. One interviewee expressed surprise and delight about reading about creative work that she had forgotten. Another interviewee who no longer volunteers worried that if he returned to the organization, he would be turned away by new volunteers and staffers who were unfamiliar with his previous contributions. A new volunteer recounted to me her realization that an organization would continue, despite her departure, and that no visible trace of her contributions would remain.

A conventional organizational history might reduce these people’s experiences to a few key figures and facts. For new volunteers, the opportunity to read and understand details about their predecessors’ experiences humanizes an otherwise unknowable void. For longtime volunteers and organizers, remembering their own words and experiences provides a much-needed moment to reflect on the past, the present, and the future.

Readers, your comments, please:

(1) Does your institution require you to get a CITI certification or to otherwise demonstrate IRB “competency”?
(2) Your thoughts on the IRB process, particularly in relation to ethnography?
(3) Your or others’ experiences with follow-up or returns to the field?

In this and my upcoming posts, I’ll talk about a few of the many steps that can either advance or stymie a research project.  Since this is my area of specialty, I’ll focus on ethnographic research.  One of the biggest hurdles to ethnographic research is gaining access.  Luckily for my project, the Burning Man organizers immediately gave permission for me to observe their inner workings, including access to meetings that were closed even to insiders.

More researchers have shared how they gained access to their respective field sites, particularly the workplace.  I’ll mention several examples here.

I. Overt observers and participant observers:

In the introductory chapter to Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (2008, Stanford University Press), Amy Hanser briefly recounts how she became an “intern” store clerk in a Chinese department store.  The unexpected media coverage of the “Western researcher” in a Chinese store then facilitated access elsewhere.

As Celeste Watkins-Hayes describes in The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (2009, University of Chicago Press), a respected senior scholar and public figure can facilitate initial introductions.

In the appendix to Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics (1996, University of Chicago Press), Daniel Chambliss details how he first gained the trust of informants via informal conversations, typically held over lunch, as a prelude to gaining official access to an organization.

II.  Covert participant observers

A few researchers find that gaining access as an overt observer is too difficult or problematic for their field sites.  Therefore, Laurie Graham worked on the assembly line without revealing her research agenda for On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese Model and the American Worker (1995, ILR Press).  Similarly, Yuko Ogasawara signed up with temp agencies to gain access to Japanese corporations; however, she notes that when asked, she told her colleagues that she was interested in knowing more about work in corporations.  See Office Ladies and Salaried Men: Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies (1998, University of California Press).

Do you have any recommendations for how you or another researcher gained access to an organization or organizations?  Please put them in the comments.

The metaphor that labels education as an “investment in human capital” and friendship as an “investment in social capital” has gone from an academic provocation to a corrosive b-school cliche. But there is one case where “human capital” is exactly the right term: corporate-owned life insurance, a.k.a. “dead peasants insurance” or “dead janitors insurance.” “Through so-called janitors insurance, hundreds of companies have taken out life-insurance policies on millions of workers of all kinds — with the companies as the beneficiaries. Employers take out the coverage because the policies provide tax-free investment buildup for the companies and provide tax-free death benefits when the workers, former employees and retirees die.”

Wal-Mart was the biggest user of COLI in the 1990s, taking out insurance on 350,000 of its workers, and received some negative attention for it a few years ago. But bankers now appear to have taken the lead in perfecting this innovation, using death benefits on current and former workers as a tax-free means to fund executive bonuses and retirement income. “The insurance policies essentially are informal pension funds for executives: Companies deposit money into the contracts, which are like big, nondeductible IRAs, and allocate the cash among investments that grow tax-free. Over time, employers receive tax-free death benefits when employees, former employees and retirees die.”

Insurers had a strong interest in building this business, of course, and those interested in “institutional entrepreneurship” might find a great tale in how insurance companies managed to persuade state regulators that companies had an “insurable interest” not only in current employees but in those they had fired years ago. (The Wall Street Journal describes one bank that bought life insurance on a credit risk manager who had already survived two brain surgeries; fired him four months later; and subsequently collected $1.6 million when he died.)

The financial services industry is regarded as a wellspring of American innovation. Many of the fruits of this innovation have been enjoyed around the world in the past two years. But insurance rarely gets its due. Yet from Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens to AIG’s Hank Greenberg, the insurance business has nurtured artistic genius, in music, poetry, and legal legerdemain.

For several years I have been harping about the declining significance of the organizations that organization theorists write about in the US.  Much of the field seems to imagine a society comprised of countable organizations, like an urn filled with balls of different colors, even as the organizations we encounter turn out to be Potemkin Village facades. (Fabio recently addressed the conundrum of sampling organizations.)  I’ve described instances of this in previous posts about OEM medical research, pet food, blood thinner, and CIA assassinations.

On occasion, real organizations with actual employees disappear, but like the aroma of an adolescent male who’s been gulled by Axe commercials, their scent lingers on in the form of “brand equity.”  This morning’s New York Times Magazine gives an example of such a ghost organization: Linens ‘n Things, a large US retail chain that was recently liquidated and all its 589 outlets shuttered. As is often the case, the brand name itself was auctioned off in the liquidation, and is now attached to an online retail site operated by a generic e-commerce contractor.  According to the article, “Linens ‘n Things itself now has few direct employees, or even a full-time chief executive.”  (Something similar happened to Circuit City, which went from good to great to liquidation last fall, shedding 34,000 employees. Its brand was purchased by Systemax Inc. and now graces another website.)

We might think of this as the hermit crab approach to organizations.  There are several examples of well-known manufacturers that have effectively disappeared but left behind familiar brand names that were profitably re-purposed (cobbled together? recombinated? bricolaged?).  Memorex had a memorable ad campaign for blank audiotapes in the 1970s (“Is it live, or is it Memorex?”), and enough consumers remembered it that it was worth attaching the name to blank CDs and USB drives.  Polaroid’s dormant label was also floating out there for re-use in electronic products unrelated to instant photography, like portable DVD players.  And Westinghouse, founded in 1886 in Pittsburgh and long the major American rival of GE in businesses such as power generation, morphed into CBS in the 1990s, losing its industrial businesses along the way. (It was subsequently acquired by Viacom, then spun off again.)  You can now buy a “Westinghouse” LCD television at an online “Circuit City” store, although the product bears no relation whatsoever to the old Westinghouse Electric company.

The generic infrastructure for producing and distributing goods has become so well-articulated that creating a firm is now a lot like snapping together an Ikea project.  As Meyer and Rowan (1977: 345) put it, “the building blocks for organizations come to be littered around the societal landscape; it takes only a little entrepreneurial energy to assemble them into a structure.”  My favorite example is Vizio, which is one of the three largest flat-panel television “producers” in the US.  It was created a few years ago by a Taiwanese-born entrepreneur in Irvine who recognized that flat-panel TVs are largely built from commodity parts, so he pitched Costco on a low-priced product to be built by a Taiwanese contract manufacturer that one of his friends had founded.  Vizio is now distributed through several chains, including Costco and Sam’s Club.  It turns out that a half-dozen employees can be enough to build a major business that competes with Sony and Samsung. 

 There are still some brand names floating free out there.  It might be a fun class project for orgtheory to buy the Pontiac brand, work out a distribution deal with AutoNation or Penske, and find an up-and-coming Chinese maker of electric autos to supply product.  It won’t bring any jobs back to Detroit, but it might show a practical application of new institutional theory.

Here’s a facebook post that I ran into on an orgtheory fan’s wall:

I love orgtheory.net in a totally unhealthy way.

Comments

Anonymous 1: ugh!

Anonymous 2: Yeah, ugh.

Anonymous 3: I think that site [orgtheory.net] sums up why I dropped out of grad school.

The revelation that hundreds of articles published in medical research journals were actually written by contractors in the employ of pharmaceutial companies, and fronted by high-status “authors” at fancy universities, seems to be part of a broader movement toward an OEM (“original equipment manufacturer”) format among organizations.  Pet food laced with melamine was sold under over 100 brand names but produced by the same vendor in Ontario, poisoning thousands of pets in the US.  Baxter Health’s blood thinner heparin, manfactured by a Chinese contractor, killed 81 and injured hundreds of others due to toxins in its supply chain (which reaches back to rural pig farmers).  The dream of financial economists, in which the corporation is nothing but a nexus-of-contracts, seems to have come true.

The OEM format has also found traction in the US federal government.  Vigorous interrogation, extraordinary renditions to allies with different cultural traditions around prisoner treatment, you name it — they often turn out to be done by contractors.  Nowadays, you can’t even trust the label on a CIA assassination, as it might turn out to be Blackwater.  Don’t brand names mean anything any more?

The American OEM state in its current version traces back to the Clinton administration.  As part of his “reinventing government” initiative, Clinton sought to emulate some of the best practices of the corporate world to enhance government efficiency.  A principal way this was accomplished was by the use of contractors.  The Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 (“FAIR Act”) mandated that every Federal agency and department — including the military — identify any activities they do that could in principle be done by contractors, and put them out for bid each year.  Activities that were “inherently governmental” were supposed to be immune from contracting, but the boundaries around that term proved porous.  (What could be more inherently governmental than assassination programs?)

Federal civilian employment declined every year under Clinton from a high of over 3 million at the start of his term to 2.7 million at the end, and it has stayed at almost precisely this number ever since. At the same time, there has been a burgeoning growth of contractors, with annual spending growing from $200 billion to $400 billion under Bush. This sector is far larger than many of us realize, and contract employees evidently outnumber Federal employees by a big margin. “The biggest federal contractor, Lockheed Martin,… gets more federal money each year than the Departments of Justice or Energy.”  Indeed, the three largest remaining US-based manufacturers are all military contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman).

Organization theorists by and large have not caught up with this model of the OEM state. We’re still accustomed to thinking of states as sovereigns, the source of laws and regulations (although recent work by Joel Baum and Anita McGahan on the growth of neo-mercenary corporations is a great start). Of course the OEM state is not entirely new: Italian merchant states of the Renaissance also contracted out for military and tax services. And many states are in effect run as conglomerate businesses (e.g., Singapore, Dubai). But is there more work out there examining the OEM state? If not, why not? (Can we convince any promising grad students to abandon performativity or actor-network theory for a dissertation on the forms of 21st century states?)

First off, thanks to the orgtheory crew for inviting me on as a guest blogger.  I am clearly the oldest one in the room by a couple of decades, which reminds me of that Mos Def concert I attended a couple of years ago. I can only hope that blogging does not lead to Twitter and piercings.

It has recently come to light that major drug companies routinely contract with ghostwriters to draft journal submissions favorable to the drug companies’ products and then shop them around to high-status researchers to serve as their “authors.”  The most recent example is Wyeth, which evidently paid for over two dozen published papers (at $25K a pop) supporting the use of hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women.  Wyeth sold $2 billion per year of such drugs in 2001.  The following year, Wyeth’s sales plummeted when a large Federal study found that hormone replacement drugs increased the risk of cancer, heart disease, and stroke.

Wyeth was far from alone, as apparently ghost-written journal articles are an open secret in the industry, widely used as a marketing device by big pharma companies for drugs ranging from fen-phen (which causes heart damage) to Vioxx (which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke).  In fact, Merck funded the creation of a faux-journal in Australia, the “Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine,” which ran for 3 years to push its pain reliever Vioxx until the drug was removed from the market.

Top medical schools are rife with researchers who have attached their names to articles that, in some cases, they have barely read.  Some journals have adopted policies requiring the disclosure of financial relationships, and Sen. Grassley is attempting to use NIH funding as a lever to stop the practice.  But the prior scientific record, going back at least a dozen years, evidently contains hundreds of articles that are effectively marketing propaganda for drug companies.

I had two divergent reactions to this revelation. Read the rest of this entry »

Please welcome Jerry Davis to orgtheory.net!

We’re excited to have Jerry guest blogging here.  He is the Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.   Jerry has made some foundational contributions to organization theory and sociology — in the areas of networks, social movements, governance etc etc.  Most recently Jerry has published a provocative book, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (Oxford University Press).  The current issue of the Academy of Management Perspectives has an excellent article that summarizes central themes from the book.“The Rise and Fall of Finance and the End of the Society of Organizations.”

You can learn more about Jerry’s research on his web site. Again, great to have you here Jerry!

Here’s another engaging TED talk, this one by Janine Benyus on biomimicry.  And, be sure to also check out her asknature.org project which features a catalogue of functions found in nature along with potential applications for design: the biomimicry taxonomy.

So, if you want to listen to an entertaining podcast this weekend, try this Berkeley School of Information debate from last year between Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid — here’s the associated blog post.  I have to say, Andrew Keen comes off not only as extremely dishonest intellectually (listen to his motivation for writing the ‘polemic,’ along with his response to various mistakes in the book), but also as rather misinformed and frankly just wrong in terms of his thesis.  Keen’s thesis is that “culture” (not defined) is being compromised and killed by blogs, wikipedia, etc — in short, culture (and objectivity) is being killed by the myriad of amateurs that supposedly now produce it.  Here Colbert meets Keen.

In the podcast Paul Duguid does a nice job of highlighting all kinds of problems with Keen’s thesis, specifically his book Cult of the Amateur:How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy.  For example, wikipedia, which Keen attacks, ends up, ironically, getting many more facts correctly than Andrew Keen does in his book “Wikipedia: 8…Andrew Keen: 0″ —- and the Q&A raises many additional issues. Good fun.

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

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

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

…But Were Afraid to Ask, answered in this paper.

Popularizers par excellence Duncan Watts and Malcomb Gladwell go mano a mano in a Fast Company article by Clive Thompson over mechanisms of network diffusion.  Watts attacks Gladwell’s key idea that “influentials” are the drivers of viral diffusion effects:

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend—not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded.

Ed Keller rides in to defend his (and by extension, Gladwell’s) argument:

“They’re fonts of word of mouth,” Keller insists. And ahead of the curve, too: In the 20 years he has been polling them, Keller has found they began using computers, mobile phones, and the Internet years before the mainstream.

I take Keller’s and Gladwell’s points to be that social space is heterogeneous and the identity (not just the structural position, e.g., being a broker) of an individual matters in explaining the effect that individual has on diffusion within the network.  Indeed, I’ve made that argument myself.

Yet, Watts is on to something here.  Particularly if you are interested in whether a practice or idea or innovation is incorporated into behavior (and I’d guess that most of us who read orgTheory are), and not simply in whether an idea spreads ephemerally.  It suggests parallels with the concept of political opportunity structures in social movement theory or even to the importance of Stinchomb’s “liability of newness”.  People and organizations are embedded, not just in a set of relationships, but in a set of roles and rules governing those relationships.  So, in order for an idea to spread and take root, the roles and rules implicated by an innovation need to be buttered up (or undermined) first. Very few studies have pulled off the dual challenge of examining structural diffusion along side these broader institutional, cultural and political opportunity structures simultaneously.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Globe’s ideas section has a summary of research looking at the intersection of psychology and social networks.  Bottom line: we read into people more what we want to see than what may actually be there, so even people who are close to us can turn out to be surprising.  Implications for what to make of social referrals are drawn.

But this tidbit toward the end struck me as pertinent as many of us are tromping around recruiting or being recruited this week:

Sandra Murray at the University of Buffalo has found that couples that maintained positive illusions about each other tended to be happier than those that didn’t.

Something similar may be at work in close friendships. And, according to Dunning, a slightly different form of social illusion may also arise. People naturally seek out those they see as most like them, and a falsely inflated sense of similarity may only further cement friendships.

In other words, one of the nicest things a friend can do is let us misunderstand them just a little.

Here’s a question for Emily Post or Ms. Manners: what does one do with blogging on an academic CV?  Should it be on the CV?  Is it not worthy?  Lets make it a poll!

We have a number of guest bloggers lined up in the coming months.  Among them will be Pierre Azoulay.  Pierre is an Assistant Professor at MIT and a Research Fellow with NBER.  He styles himself mainly as an economist, but with his research on networks and diffusion and on the agency of embeddedness (among other sociologically oriented leanings), Pierre has plenty to say to orgTheorists.  But for the most part, Pierre writes and thinks about technology — regardless of disciplinary bent — and I’m sure will have plenty to add to the discussion over the next month or so.  Bienvenue Pierre!

Trade Balance - Medical Equipment, 2008

Matt Yglesias makes the point that the price of new cars has not increased as fast as inflation over time, nor have High Definition TVs which have seen costs come down.  He wonders why the same hasn’t happened for health care technology:

This gets back to some of the perversities of fee-for-service medicine. The current market creates strong incentives for people to develop “better and more expensive” methods of treatment, but almost no incentive to develop “as good but cheaper” methods of treatment. Both kinds of innovation, however, are extremely valuable. The world’s resources are limited, and the development of cheaper methods of treatment would allow for more overall treatment and thus better outcomes.

In short, I’d say the answer comes down to China, or really its relative absence from the health care market.  As an NPR report from a few days ago illustrated nicely, the reason consumer goods like TVs, toasters, shoes and even cars has come down has a lot to do with the unsustainable trading relationship between the U.S. and China.

Key point: consumer goods are transportable.  But health care is fixed in place.  You get sick where you live.  So while capital is free to scurry the globe in search of cheap labor and factor inputs for consumer goods, health care has to contend with the realities of operating in a high-wage, highly-regulated society.

Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of my good friend Kazim Ali who is blogging on poetry at the Kenyon Review, an homage:  The eight limbed path of social science:

1. Positive action:  Argue for something.
2. Restraint:  Keep it real.  Don’t over-claim.
3. Posture:  Invest in a good chair.
4. Learning of breath:  Measured rhythm and pace.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.
5. Stillness of the senses:  Save the incendiary stuff for a blog.
6. One-pointed focus:  ‘nuff said.
7. Stilling of the mind-states:  Chill out.  Luminous ideas may erupt.
8. Understanding:  Social scientists cannot write by numbers alone.

OK, I don’t think we’ve used the handy survey feature here at orgtheory before, so here goes.  So, with reference to the previous post — here’s an unscientific and anonymous poll (don’t worry: it’s anonymous, only the numbers/percentages are reported):

So, I’m reviewing a piece for a journal today.  I wondered: is blind peer review an illusion?  First, the sub-circles that many of us hang out in often are so small that one is likely to have seen the piece presented previously (probably worth sending the editor a note if you know the authors).  Second, with tone, citation patterns and sub-topic one can often pick out, say, a Lizardo from a King.  Third, it can be all-too tempting and easy to google the title of the manuscript, and more often than not one is likely to find the authors. I don’t know how widely “googling” is used by reviewers, it would be interesting to find out via an anonymous survey.

I think journals are doing various things to address the above matter; for example, requesting authors to remove their papers from web sites.  But with SSRN, conference posting of papers, etc, blind review might now be an illusion.  I don’t know how this affects the reviewing process overall, though I am guessing it introduces some bias.  Even Fabio’s proposal for triple blind review does not solve the problem of the potential biases (one way or the other) associated with knowing the author(s) of an article that one is reviewing.

Roger Penske is purchasing Saturn and the implications are possibly far reaching.  If a crisis, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste then the auto industry circa 2009 presents a golden opportunity to see how a crisis opens opportunities to re-write the rules that govern an industry.  Penske’s gambit aims to do that and if he succeeds it could fundamentally change the way cars are designed and manufactured.

Saturn has been cast in the role of change agent before.  The company was conceived in 1982 as a “new kind of car company, making a new kind of car.”  Back then, the rap on the American car industry was that it produced poor quality goods.  That problem, in turn, was blamed on ossified relationships between the car companies and their “stakeholders”: relationships with the unions had become paralyzingly adversarial, relationships with suppliers were dictatorial, the companies’ own designers weren’t cooperating across divisional boundaries and the dealer network were unwieldy.  Saturn was meant to push the reset button on all of these relationships.

Saturn’s new model worked, for a while.  Its quality ratings were high and the brand developed a strong customer base.   But rather than spreading into the rest of GM, the opposite happened: GM re-colonized Saturn.  When Saturn opened a new plant in Wilmington, Delaware in 1996, it was stripped of most of the key organizational innovations of the original plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.  Labor-management cooperation was replaced with a regular pattern contract, the car’s design was outsourced to a GM subsidiary, Saturn’s relationships with suppliers reverted to form, and plant’s managers were brought in through GM’s regular management career channels.  Saturn became just another GM subsidiary.

That is, with one exception: the brand and the dealer network maintained a good deal of independence. And they are essentially what Roger Penske has now purchased: not a company that makes cars (GM will continue to design and manufacture vehicles for the time being after which Penske plans to outsource manufacturing to a global network of manufacturers), but a brand and a distribution channel.

On first inspection, that doesn’t seem to be the stuff of fundamental industry change.  But it could turn out to be just that if Penske is able to capture power in the value chain and use it to influence the way cars are designed and manufactured.  The open question is whether Penske has the wherewithal to pull it off.

Read the rest of this entry »