Although my post last week on citation counts was meant to be fun, it raised an important issue that deserves some thought. Here’s the comment from Eric Schwartz:

The hold of Chomskyan theory over the field of linguistics, and the strength of its exportation to other fields like philosophy of language and evolutionary psychology, is substantial.

Indeed. In some areas, Chomsky has played the role of a founding figure who articulated some pretty deep principles. Probably the most important is his argument is that people (and I suppose most organisms) are born with some hard wired architecture that helps them interpret and communicate about the world. We all are born with some type of rules that allow us to process information and communicate. It’s a powerful insight. It explains, for example, why children can pick up and generate language, which can be extremely complicated.

Now, here’s my question: where is Chomsky in the more macro social sciences? Sure, he’s a founding figure in linguistics and evolutionary psychology, and has a following in related areas. But he’s rarely a figure in fields where culture and decisions are important. You don’t see many soc of culture syllabi with Chomsky in it (except his political works). He’s non-existent in economics and political science, and barely shows up in anthro. There are occasional articles using “generative approaches” (see Farraro and Butts or Cederman) in sociology, but it’s not hard core Chomsky. Noam – where are you?

Citation count craziness:

Talcott Parsons has a bigger google scholar citation count than Albert Einstein. So does Gary Becker. And Noam Chomsky. According to gs, Parson’s biggest hit is The Social System (8500 cites). Becker’s is The Treatise on the Family (7800 hits). Chomsky’s Theory of Syntax: 12000! Einstein? A 1935 article on quantum mechanics garners a measily 5400 hits. Loser. So, by the Transitive Law of Citation Impact Scores, I declare Chomsky the most important academic of the 20th century and twice as important as Albert Einstein.

I’d like to take a moment to thank our other October guest blogger – Leslie Hinkson. Thank you!

Maureen Dowd went populist in her column yesterday.  Picking up on on Matt Tabai’s slimy imagery, she refers to “Goldmine” Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”…

The name calling tries too hard to foment middle and working class anger where, frankly, I don’t really see protests forming in the streets.  But what I find interesting is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s rebuttal to the claim.

We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital… Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.

So here’s a question…  Clearly, banks are brokers; they are intermediaries engaged in managing the two sided market of investors and investees.  But, what kind of broker are they?

Ron Burt’s work shows convincingly that brokers realize economic benefits from connecting disconnected actors.  For Ron, brokers are  tertius gaudens: the third who benefits by exploiting asymmetric resource flows and contests for control. Isabel Fernandez-Mateo built on this to ask the following question: do brokers’ profits come from making transactions more efficient or do they come from the fact that, where two parties lack full information, the left hand doesn’t really know what the right hand is doing?  She shows that brokers can pass on greater rewards to partners with which they have a closer relationship and that the pound of flesh is extracted from the other partner to the transaction.  One interpretation of this is that the latter mechanism prevails.

Yet, by emphasizing banks’ socially beneficial role, Blankfein is channeling what David Obstfeld refers to as the “tertius iungens” form of brokerage.  The intuition behind the iungens idea is that more value is created by connecting disconnected actors than if they weren’t connected.  Everyone benefits: the parties to the transaction, the broker and society at large.

So which is it?  Are investment banks iungens or are they gaudens?  In Fernandez and Gould’s formulation, are they honest brokers or… not?

Of course, the answer is “both” because it’s a false choice.  Iungens and gaudens do not have to be mutually exclusive.   A broker can both increase value overall and extract profits as a result of superior or obscured information.  And banks clearly fit that bill: they both extract rents as a result of their institutionalized and legitimate brokerage role (all the more so as they have recently engaged in ever more complex feats of financial engineering) while at the same time creating efficiencies that foster economic growth (and are therefore worthy of massive bailouts).

That ambiguity is what makes them robust actors.  Observers believe them to be iungens, but can never really be sure to what degree they are behaving as gaudens.

Is this ambiguity between the two simply the nature of any broker?  It seems necessary for parties (or sides of the market) to believe the broker is acting as an iungens for them to engage in the relationship. Indeed, one interpretation of the regulator’s role is to preserve the iungens fiction by ensuring that brokers do not go so far down the road as gaudens as to upset the apple cart.

But how far is too far?  And how is that limit determined?  Is it simply a question of how much profit brokers wrench from transactions (and how much moral outrage from people like MoDo and Tabai is tolerable)?  Or, should there be (could there be) a standard of value creation — a minimum degree of social benefit — for which parties and society at large can legitimately hold brokers accountable?

Let me begin by offering my thanks to the OrgTheory team for inviting me to guest blog!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the growth of practices, found among a variety of types of organizations, in facilitating stakeholder participation and also in encouraging the adoption of participatory (or what some call “new”)  governance structures. It seems clear that this is linked to the rise of neoliberalism (and, indeed, institutional analysis itself). While there’s much that’s appealing about facilitating participation – more accountability in organizational processes, the potential for consensual deliberative processes, devolving decision-making to the bottom in order to overcome (some of) the rigidity of bureaucracies, and the potential for more meaningful engagement – there are also serious trade-offs to consider.

Much of this discussion is well established.  Most are familiar with Fung and Wright’s (2001) argument for the benefits of thick participatory governance, which provides examples of a number of reforms: local governance councils in Chicago, participatory budgets in Brazil (see also Baiocchi 2003), and the devolution of development decisions in India. They describe these as instances of Empowered Deliberative Democracy (EDD).

Consider also that nonprofits have been picking up what’s been left behind by a number of state agencies. Non-membership organizations like think tanks, institutes, policy centers, etc. often collaborate with member-based civic groups in order to make up for what they inherently lack in grassroots participation.  Disclosure and transparent governance continue to be hot buzzwords.  Increased stakeholder participation is encouraged on both the right and the left, although for quite different reasons. And it’s not just a question of voluntary compliance for organizations, but often one of mandated public participation (especially in the public sector through environmental review boards, zoning hearings, planning commissions, etc.).

What I find most interesting about the “new governance” and the augmented stakeholder focus of organizations is not just how it spans sectors (and encourages diffusion of practices between for- and non-profit organizations and public sector agencies), or even the somewhat surprising political coalitions that tend to advocate for these practices.  Instead, what stands out for me is something often overlooked: how participation is employed strategically from the top-down, and often channels participation in directions that suit elite agendas (even if done with progressivist aims in mind). Although others have already raised concerns about the role of power in empowerment and the democratic limitations of governance beyond the state, there’s another side to it.

There are, for example, now whole industries devoted to facilitating public participation, and their clients span sectors (although individual firms and industry associations make up the majority).  I’ve written about how the massive growth of civic organizations in the late 1970s and early 80s, in combination with increasing mobilization of industry associations, influenced the founding patterns of professional grassroots lobbying firms; these are groups that, for a fee, help to mobilize public participation on behalf of a corporation, industry group, government agency, or public interest group.  (Consider the websites of a few such organizations here, here, and here.)  The growth of this organizational population, as I see it, serves as a case in which outside organizing helped to facilitate the emergence of a new organizational form. These groups have been quite active in the recent health reform debate (a topic I’ll post about later), and have had their own legitimacy called into question quite prominently lately.  Although they focus most heavily, but not exclusively, on promoting forms of “thin” participation like form e-mailing, patch-through calls, advocacy advertising, and the like, there are also other formal organizations out there that attempt to facilitate “thicker” forms of participation and deliberation for clients (Caroline Lee has been doing great work on groups like the latter).

I find this important for org theory in getting us to think not only about how participation shapes organizational legitimacy, but also how elite organizations shape social movements and civil society. Thinking about the latter, the opposite has received a lot of much-deserved attention (movements shaping organizations), but we also need to think about how organizations are reshaping their civic and political environments through facilitating participation.  Organizations often take strategic action in response to institutional pressures and, although influenced by stakeholders, also engage in efforts to mobilize them from the top down.  Whether they can do so effectively, of course, depends on whether key stakeholders are already aligned (or can be brought into line) with an organization’s agenda.  Consumers of a particular pharmaceutical who depend on it for their survival may not be too difficult to mobilize in response to legislation that, the producer says, could threaten their product or its distribution (especially when participating “costs” so little).  Employees involved in a labor dispute, when asked to write letters on behalf of the firm’s broader political interests, on the other hand… notsomuch.  And there’s still the concern that organizational political activity often comes with costs, whether in contradicting a firm’s corporate social responsibility program or in threatening a nonprofit’s tax exemption.

I’m curious to hear what others make of the trend toward facilitating participation in organizations.

We’d like to welcome Ed Walker as our newest guest blogger at orgtheory. Ed is a sociologist at the University of Vermont and is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow at the University of Michigan. Examining emerging organizational forms that individuals and businesses use to construct institutional change, his research has relevance for organizational theory, social movements, and political sociology and has appeared in journals like the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology.  Glad to have you here Ed!

We really appreciate Matt Kraatz for writing a thoughtful set of posts about institutions, values, and leadership. You can find all of Matt’s posts here. As a big Selznick fan, I’ve appreciated seeing the relevance of this particular brand of institutionalism. Thanks again for taking the time out to contribute Matt!

I have always wondered about the label “Organizational Theory” or “Organization Theory.” I know that this label is sacrosanct, and that bringing it into question challenges even this blog’s URL. I focus on it not to be cute or counterintuitive, or out of lack of respect, but rather because labeling theory indicates that labels matter in many ways. I focus on it out of a genuine interest in why the label “Organizational Theory” remains so institutionalized (or is it?), even though there seems to exist some interesting, more descriptive, and maybe more beneficial labels in the battle for gaining disciplinary market share: terms like “Organizational Sociology” or, better , “Organizational Science” (who would challenge science?)

So, my question is: is the label “organizational theory” the right one for organizational theory?

I think the label mystifies me for at least four reasons.

First, and rather obviously, the work done under the banner of “Organizational Theory” is not only theoretical (although this may be one of its strengths), but more predominantly empirical. So why not rename the field “Organizational Studies” or “Organizational Research” or even “Organizational Theory and Research” though the later is a little clunky?

Second, one might argue that the purpose of theorizing and research in organizational theory is not only to study organizations (though this should constitute the primary focus), but also to develop organizational prescriptions (though this might be more of a priority in Business Schools). If so, then why not adopt a more neutral label like “Organizational Design” as opposed to the current “Organizational and Management theory” label used in the Academy of Management.

Third, it seems to me that most research and Organizational Theory today is diachronic, rather than synchronic. So why not a term like ”Organizational Dynamics” recognizing full well that, on the downside, the label has a checkered history, but that, on the upside, this history has almost completely been forgotten.

Fourth, it seems to me that most research in Organizational Theory really pertains predominantly to collectivities, fields, or populations of organizations. The focus is more on organizational interrelations and networks, and less on focal organizations and what happens within their boundaries (though this could change).  Here, I think a compound label might be required; something like,”Organizational and Interorganizational Dynamics”, for instance.

One last question perplexes me: where did the label “Organizational Theory” emerge (I am ashamed to confess that I don’t know and can’t find out), was it ever challenged, and if so, why did it prevail?

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.

“World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms” (WWOOF, here’s the wiki primer) is an organization that wraps production, travel, community, social movement and cause into one —- here’s an engaging 2009 documentary by Robin Moore (director) on the day-to-day of “WWOOFers”: Because There are Goats.

Timothy Garton Ash’s piece in the New York Review of Books highlights the differences between the revolutionary styles of 1789 and 1989. The distinctions demonstrate big changes in the dynamics of political conflict.

Painting with a deliberately broad brush, an ideal type of 1989-style revolution, [velvet revolution], might be contrasted with an ideal type of 1789-style revolution, as further developed in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Mao’s Chinese revolution. The 1789 ideal type is violent, utopian, professedly class-based, and characterized by a progressive radicalization, culminating in terror. A revolution is not a dinner party, Mao Zedong famously observed, and he went on:

A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows another…. To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded.

The 1989 ideal type, by contrast, is nonviolent, anti-utopian, based not on a single class but on broad social coalitions, and characterized by the application of mass social pressure—”people power”—to bring the current powerholders to negotiate. It culminates not in terror but in compromise. If the totem of 1789-type revolution is the guillotine, that of 1989 is the round table.

In a way, Ash is pointing out that the tactical repertoire of contentious politics has shifted from violent overthrow to social movement. This claim is central to the work of the late, great Charles Tilly, who argued that the 19th Century introduced mass politics to the world. Rather than social groups organizing in local, patronage systems around very particular issues (as happened in the 18th Century), the centralization of the state and the expansion of industrialism led to a new kind of repertoire in which groups conceived of themselves as civic groups with an active interest in the management of state authority. This shift in repertoire was accompanied by a change in identities. People began to see themselves as citizens. The state belonged to them. If you wanted political change, you just needed to find a way to orchestrate it through institutional means or by mobilizing loud complaints (e.g., drawing in third parties via marches). Revolutions were no longer necessary once the state belonged to everyone and not just a single elite class. By the time “political opportunities” for change emerged in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, those seeking a regime change had the new tools of movement mobilization at their disposal.

In looking around at Tilly stuff tonight I found these Powerpoint slides for his last undergraduate course at Columbia (co-taught by Ernesto Castañeda).  The slides provide a glimpse into his brilliant mind and give a nice introduction to his work.

There should be a name for the widowed and orphaned bits of forgotten articles found at the top and bottom of copies of famous articles.

I think twitter is the bee’s knees, but I haven’t settled on a way to use it. As far as my tweets go, I’m sticking to a once in a while format of shout outs to various people and news blips. But which people should I follow?

1. my friends – just to check up on them
2. experts – there are some academic/wonk types who use tweets to bring attention to papers/websites
3. voyeurism – just follow famous people so see what they’re like (think Gary Becker has a twitter?)
4. random – apparently people I have no connection to have started to follow my tweets, is there a point to such a behavior?

How do you choose people?  Which tweet following strategies do you use?

In graduate school, I had the distinct pleasure of taking cultural theory with Andreas Glaeser. One particularly interesting aspect of the course was that we got to read his then new book Divided In Unity. It’s pretty fascinating stuff. He wanted to understand the evolution of German society after the merging of the East and West German states. He was lucky to find a natural experiment in progress. The East and West Berlin police forces were conducting a post-unification exchange program. The book takes a “life world” perspective (my phrasing, not his) to understand how each culture (the communist East/capitalist West) dealt with the other and what the outcome might be. Not only is it solid ethnography, it’s a conceptually rich book.

It’s exciting to see that Andreas has a new book coming out from Chicago. It’s called Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, The Opposition and the End of East German Socialism. It should be of particular interest to orgheads because of it’s attention paid to the culture and structure of the East German secret police, which, thankfully, is now in the past. Click on the link and you can read some sample chapters. Highly recommended.

The New Republic ran an article by Moshe Halbertal about the Israeli Defense Forces and the problems of policing/fighting in territories such as the Gaza Strip. The article is long, but let me summarize the key points:

• Western style military organizations are designed to fight clearly identified opponents. Our ethical code instructs us to use violence sparingly and do our best to prevent harm to civilians.
• Violent groups in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank blend into the population and use civilians as human shields. Radical groups (Hamas and Hezbollah) want the IDF to kill civilians in order to radicalize the population.

Not only do these groups work to destroy the Israeli state and kill civilians, they are doing so by actively trying to change the identity of a Western style military service. In general, we consider attacks upon civilians (e.g., Dresden, Hiroshima) as last resorts and impermissible in normal combat situations. These militant organizations are trying to make the IDF cross an ethical line that Western-style armies are not supposed to cross. A very interesting element of Halbertal’s article is the discussion of IDF tactics that are designed to minimize civilian casualties.

This attempt to draw the IDF into the killing of civilians has, according to Halbertal, a profound effect. Normally, soldiers aren’t responsible for accidentally killing civilians. That’s a political decision for the leadership, whether it be military or civilian. Long as you obey orders, and aim at other soldiers, and you are not obviously trying to kill civilians, you are acting in an ethical manner.

But in a world where the most operations occur in dense urban environments and the enemy is making a concerted effort at hiding behind the population, the typical soldier must frequently decide whether the death of civilians is acceptable. The front line soldier is the locus of ethics. Now, this requires a very important decision. Some might argue that we should lower our tolerance for violence. As long as some people use civilians as human shields, soldiers have a lower bar than in traditional combat situations.

Halbertal, I think, raises a different possibility. Perhaps ethics could become a basic component of soldiering. Of course, all military organizations have ethics: ideas about legitimate authority and chain of command, loyalty to country, the legality of war, etc. But few make a big deal about the loyalty we have to other human beings, especially those who did not ask to be shot at. This is not an argument for letting the crazies take pot-shots without us shooting back, but it is an argument for how and when we shoot back.

Real life situations are complex and there will always be tough decisions, but we can minimize bad decisions by training soldiers in ethics before they go into the battlefield. That may be the most profound idea present in the essay. The choice isn’t between letting the crazies win or dehumanizing civilians, it may be about making ethics as basic to soldiering as cleaning a rifle.

I’ll be at Illinois Urabana-Champaign for a seminar/workshop on November 11 from 11am-1pm. Any orgheads interested in coffee on wednesday after noon (1:30pm or later) email me.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a question: what are the main contributions of mathematical sociology? Although I’ve published a little bit on the topic, I don’t know things deeply enough to provide examples. So I am asking our friends at Permutations (and our readers) to provide examples. In answering this question, I stipulate the following rules:

1. Statistics does not count. That’s not theory building. It’s data analysis.
2. Descriptive math does not count. For example, the definition of centrality doesn’t count. You aren’t deducing things as much as computing things, which is important, but not the point of this post.
3. Let’s leave out simulations. I want theorems.

In other words, start with some assumptions that define a model and then use mathematics to deduce some-new non-obvious conclusion.

To give you a sense of what I mean, let me list some core contributions of mathematical economics. These are all (a) considered central to economics, (b) are examples of deductive math, not stats/descriptions/simulations, and (c) actually require non-trivial mathematics. Each of these is considered a landmark contribution of social science.

1. Debreu’s general equilibrium theorem.
2. Existence of at least one Nash equilibrium in finite games.
3. The solution of Black-Scholes equations using the heat equation.
4. Arrow’s impossibility theorem.

What’s the equivalent in sociology? If there are none, why not? Don’t we have models that you can prove things about?

Permutations is the official blog of the ASA’s Mathematical Sociology Section, and it while it has been in its quiet pre-launch phase for a little while, it now seems to be officially open for business. The lineup looks good and should be somewhat familiar to OrgTheory readers (jimi adams, Michael Bishop, Matt Brashears, Bob Hanneman). As someone who has complained in the past about the general cluelessness of ASA sections when it comes to having a useful and engaging presence online, the MathSoc people seem to be doing it exactly right so far, and I look forward to reading their stuff.

I suck at math, but I’m nevertheless a member of the MathSoc section, mostly in the hope of learning something out of sheer osmosis. So far I have learned a joke about the difference between a combination and a permuation, but there’s hope yet.

“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.

As many of you probably already know, Claude Levi-Strauss, the greath French anthropologist who advocated for the structuralist analysis of culture, passed away this week. I was surprised to hear this since I wasn’t even aware that Levi-Strauss was still alive. His version of anthropology, it seemed to me as a grad student reading his work, was outdated and no longer central to anthropological theories. But I’ve been thinking a little about Levi-Strauss lately while I’ve read John Levi Martin’s new book, Social Structures.  Perhaps structural theories of culture are alive again, but now this kind of work is taking place in sociology departments rather than in anthropology.

As Kieran and Teppo already discovered, Martin’s book is brimming with ideas. The basic premise of the book is that many sorts of individual and group action (and the subsequent meanings generated in that context) can be explained by basic principles of local structure. The premise is rooted in the work of Simmel, but it’s hard to miss Levi-Strauss’s influence throughout. Martin clarified in the beginning of the book how this local structural analysis differs from institutional analysis (he elsewhere distinguishes between structuralism and social network analysis):

The vision of Simmel’s dialectic of institutionalization that inspires this work implies that is is at such a local level that we may see social action being shaped by distinct principles that we would rightly call structural. When things have developed to the extent that regular equivalence guides action – that is, when one may interact with any of a set of for-all-purposes-equivalent actors – then we are looking at institutions, not structures as I here use the term. Thus a structure is a pattern of interaction that links a person to particular others, as opposed to classes of others.

The importance of such local or particular structures has been downgraded by a sociology that arose in the context of European political economy, which presupposed the division of persons into functionally equivalent classes. Sociology (exceptions such as Simmel aside), far from challenging the preexisting tendency of social though to ignore the particular elements of social life, associated itself with the strong theoretical claim that such particularism was doomed to extinction anyway (“modernization” theory). Certainly, from a functional perspective, great parsimony is gained by treating sets of persons and indeed whole social structures..as functionally equivalent. That is, it does not matter that one officer has a relationship over here with an enlisted man, and another officer has a relationship over there with a different enlisted man. All that matters is the overall relationship between officers and enlisted. But the parsimony of considering persons interchangeable representatives of categories comes at a cost: we are likely to be left with a misleading picture of the generation and stabilization of actually existing social structures and institutions by ignoring the importance of ties that connect specific persons (14).

Martin’s embrace of Simmel’s structuralist approach is refreshing in that he points to a real alternative to the institutional analysis (and I don’t mean just neoinstitutional theory from organizational research) that dominates much macro-social scholarship. He offers an intriguing way to link micro-macro without relinquishing all of the explanatory power to one level over the other. In a way, I suppose this is what Levi-Strauss was about as well. His agenda was to explain the particularities of local structures. Rather than jump right to institutions and history as an explanation, the origin of an explanation was to analyze how the interactions within that structure worked and how/why individuals continued to reproduce those relationships over time.

Martin’s book is really fascinating and sure to be a classic in sociological theory.

Congratulations to my colleagues Tim Hallett and Donna Eder and IU grad Brent Harger! Their research on gossip in the workplace was reported in the New York Times:

“In my Findings column, I discuss a field report on gossip published in The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. The lead author, Timothy Hallett, a sociologist at Indiana University, spent two years studying the institutional politics at an elementary school in a Midwestern city. During that time, Dr. Hallett videotaped formal meetings among a group of teachers (one representative of the teachers from each grade level) who convened regularly to discuss problems and policies.

The teachers would occasionally start to deviate from the official agenda and discuss their feelings about the administrators, particularly the principal, who was disliked for her style and her effort to impose more “accountability” on the teachers. These “gossip episodes” are analyzed by Dr. Hallett and his co-authors, Donna Eder, a colleague at Indiana, and Brent Harger of Albright College. The researchers conclude that gossip in these formal work meetings is more subtle than the gossip that had been previously recorded in informal settings, like a housing project in Germany and at the lunch tables of American middle-school students.

In the article, the elementary school is called Costen — an invented name, like the names used to identify the principal (Kox) and the teachers (like Brenda). The administrators and staff agreed to Dr. Hallett’s presence on condition of anonymity. Here are some excerpts from the article:

In the broader ethnography, the meeting gossip was an important string in a larger chord of interactions through which [Principal] Kox was constructed as disrespectful, authoritarian, cold, “unfriendly,” “condescending” and “nasty.” … The meeting gossip is especially interesting because the evaluations happened in a public, formal context and were in a sense “certified” by teacher representatives from across grade levels. Morrill, Zald and Rao (2003) argue that gossip can be a symbolic trial in absentia, and Hodson (1991) and Roscigno and Hodson (2004) argue that gossip can be a form of sabotage through which workers undermine managers. This article adds rich empirical and analytical substance to these evocative arguments. Gossip was a “weapon of the weak” (Scott 1990): during a time in which teachers were disenfranchised, gossip empowered them and served to stigmatize Kox.

Teachers feared Kox but did not respect her, and the gossip affected Kox’s capacity to lead. Burdened with a bad reputation, Kox’s efforts were met with increasing resistance, even in simple matters (Hallett 2007). In the ensuing turmoil, all parties suffered. Kox felt, justifiably, that teachers were “out to get” her. Over a quarter of the faculty left Costen, including a main participant in the gossip: Brenda. Brenda was a highly respected language arts teacher, and teachers saw her as a leader. Brenda never confronted Kox directly, but Kox sensed (correctly) that Brenda was a critic. A year after Hallett left the field, Kox reviewed Brenda’s teaching, and the official report was negative. Brenda was offended and took a job elsewhere. This may have been the outcome Kox wanted, but this type of action further diminished her reputation. When the teachers’ union surveyed teachers from over 500 schools citywide to create a “Principal’s Report Card,” Kox scored in the bottom 10 percent.

Does any of this sound familiar? Have you seen gossip used as a weapon in your office? Have the effects been positive or negative? Do you enjoy gossip, or do you try to discourage it? In my column, I discuss some tactics that Dr. Hallett recommends for tamping gossip. Do you have any tactics that you recommend?”

The summer issue of the Hedgehog Review is dedicated to the “moral life” of corporations. Definitely worth checking out:

• Interview with economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer.
• Case study of corporations and the debate over the environment. by Ted Steinberg.
• A nice article by David Franz on different views of the corporation’s role in society.

Quite interesting.

A hello from Eric Abrahamson,

Thanks Sean for introducing me, hello everyone, and thanks all of you for allowing me to be a guest blogger.

I thought I would start with something that I am having trouble thinking through, the question of agentic behavior in social scientific disciplines, like Organizational Theory. So I am looking for your help as I have kind of painted myself into a corner.

I am not religious, but I vaguely remember St. Augustine’s response, in City of  God, to the question: if God is good and all powerful, then why does he allow evil in the world he created. St. Augustine responds, only if God gives humans free will to be good or evil, can they choose whether or not to sin, and can God judge them fairly (let’s assume that sinners retain free will, because they do not act or think of acting to try and game God’s paradise, purgatory, hell incentive scheme, knowing full well that and all-knowing God would detect them immediately). In light of this argument, there is no causal factor, even a divine one, determining human free will to act for good or for evil.

So, it seems that “free will”, or “agentic behavior” as we now call it, is an unmoved mover. Agentic behavior is a uniquely human impulse towards making unfettered choices, including choices to alter, remove, or avoid forces limiting such unfettered freedom. Note, already, that part of any secular notion of agentic behavior includes agentic behavior to reach a value consensus, among scholars, concerning what constitutes value-driven science (be it the value to have no or divergent values).

Putting theology, philosophy, and ethics aside, let’s consider scientific research. I am interested by Psychological research indicating that higher measures of human “self efficacy” tend to cause more “agentic behavior”. But I am interested in such research, in part, because it could help overcome the paucity of research investigating why, when, or how agentic behavior has a greater likelihood of coming to light in order to heighten “self efficacy”.

In direct parallel, I think that social science generally, and Organizational Theory specifically, should continue to develop and test Organizational Theories of deterministic forces bearing on organizations and the agents who run them. However, Organizational Theory scholars could also spend more time on theory and research investigating why, how, and when organizations agentic behavior has a greater likelihood of surfacing or overcoming deterministic forces blocking further agentic behavior.

Why a focus on agentic behavior? There are many answers, but I will give only one personal one, as this post is getting long. I came back from Tanzania, this summer, having witnessed instances of abject poverty. It’s not the first time, but this time, it seemed obscene to return to Columbia and just engage in more scholarly activity that would exemplify and reinforce the what determines the (fill in something like “poverty” or “prosperity”) variety of scientific research. This, though this type of research was what Tanzanian scholars were supposed to produce in order to be promoted. I couldn’t help but think that what was needed was value-driven, scientific, and agentic Organizational Theory designed to provide more effective and efficient policy advice.

I recall a short but striking conversation with the formidable Piero Sraffa at the Economics Faculty cocktail party after Dennis Robertson’s Marshall Lectures. I well knew that it was Sraffa whom Wittgenstein had described as his mentor during the gestation of the Philosophical Investigations, but I still ventured a rather simple-minded remark about the obvious importance of the fact-value distinction to the social sciences. He turned on me his charming smile and glittering eyes. Did I really suppose that one could switch from fact to value as if simply moving a handle? His voice rose and his Italian accent grew sharper. “Fact, value! Value, fact! Fact, value! Value, Fact! FACT, VALUE! VALUE, FACT!” I beat a swift and chastened retreat. — W.G. Runciman, Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist, 18.

In sociology, it’s common to talk about value-neutral research.  It’s an intuitive alternative to value laden research. We have more credibility if our results aren’t hopelessly biased by our personal or political motivations. I think it’s a useful concept. Even if our choice of research problem is value driven, I would hope that our research tools aren’t contaminated. Some thing like statistical analysis of survey data had better be close to that value-neutral idea.

It was recently argued to me that value-neutral vs. value driven isn’t the only alternative. Good research may come from a conflict of values. In other words, rather than demand that research be performed as if researcher values don’t matter, we should ask that values be made explicit and forced to confront other values via our research.

The conflict of values approach has appeal. The “null” in this conversation can be hard to define, and it may not yield enough guidance about what is important and worth researching. By making our values speak and compete with each other, we have ample opportunities to reflect on what our research is missing, or how it might be mistaken. There is also a chance that our values may change or grow by incorporating insights from other values.  Of course, this assume a minimal level of openness. This isn’t going to work for your local doctrinaire Maoists, but it can be a useful alternative to the value-neutral paradigm.

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.

No disrespect to cowboys, twins, or people who like to wear red christmas clothes, but combining all three cracks me up.

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).

Daniel Schneider of the Princeton sociology department was nice enough to share his research on the sociology labor market. He has graciously given me permission to reprint his email here:

As the sociology job market gets going each year, there’s always a fair amount of anecdotal evidence swirling around about which departments’ students fair best.  Posters to this blog have discussed how this sort of “graduate student perspective” on sociology program rankings isn’t necessarily reflected in the US News or NRC rankings.  Some insight into how the departments stack up in terms of graduate student placement is offered in Burris’ (2004) ASR article.  But, the data he uses is now 15 years old.

Whatever speculation there is over the relative success of different departments is usually dwarfed by the amount of discussion there is over the quality of the job market in a given year.  A bad job market may make it difficult to get a job in that year, but it may also have lasting effects throughout one’s career.  Oyer (2006) has put together some evidence of how initial job market conditions at the time of PhD affect later career outcomes, but only for economics.

To try to get some current data on which department’s graduates fare best on the sociology job market and how when one goes on the market may shape career outcomes, I used the ASA’s Guide to Graduate Programs in Sociology (2009) to record where and when each faculty member listed by each department received his or her PhD.  I had some help putting together the data, but I still couldn’t face entering the information for all sociology doctoral programs, so I limited it to faculty at the top 25 programs as ranked in 2009 by US News (there are actually 26 programs because of ties).    This approach basically boils down to taking a snapshot of sociology faculty in these 26 departments as of 2009 and recording where and when they received their PhDs.

1.  Where Do Faculty in Top Sociology Departments Come From?

As of 2009, there were 985 regular and affiliated sociology faculty members in the 26 departments I examined.  Of these, about 80% received their PhDs from another one of the same 26 departments, 55% from one of ten departments, and 9% from Chicago alone.  Just 15% received their degree from a university outside of these 26 departments and 5% from a foreign university.

From the graduate student perspective, perhaps a more relevant question to ask is where younger faculty received their degrees.  That might provide a better measure of how departments are currently doing in terms of placement.  Limiting the analysis to the 216 faculty members at these 26 departments who received their PhDs since 2000 (recent faculty) generates a somewhat different ranking than when we look at where all faculty members currently at the leading 26 departments received their degrees.  For instance, the table below reports that Wisconsin leads the way in terms of placement of recent faculty at top departments, but ranks only 4^th in terms of placement when all current faculty members are considered.  Harvard is second by either measure while Princeton is 7^th for all faculty members but 3^rd in terms of recent placements.

2.  When Did Faculty in Top Departments Receive Their PhDs?

Does going on the job market in a “bad year” just make it hard to get your first job, or does that difficulty at the start have lasting consequences?  I calculated the number of faculty members at top 26 departments as of 2009 who received their PhDs in a given year and then divided that number by the total number of PhDs awarded in sociology in that year (using data available from the ASA).  For instance, 600 individuals received PhDs in Sociology in 1980.  As of 2009, 34 of them were employed in top 26 departments, a 5.7% share.  That “placement ratio” should be relatively high for cohorts that are well into their careers.  These folks are well established in the field (unlike the most recent cohorts), but relatively few have died or retired (unlike the oldest cohorts). So, we’d expect the placement ratio, when plotted against year of degree on the x-axis, to be upward sloping, except perhaps for the most recent graduates.   But, if initial job market conditions affected faculty positions years later, we’d expect deviations from that line for cohorts that looked for their first academic positions in tough job markets.  The figure below shows some evidence of that, plotting the three-year moving average of the placement ratio and imposing grey shading for the periods when the NBER recorded a recession.  There are a number of discontinuities in the line, dips that roughly align with past recessions.  It appears that facing poor initial job market conditions can have lasting effects on a cohort’s career trajectories.

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.

I finished reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. It’s a good book, and I’ll blog it later. For now, I’d like to focus on his description of celebrity. The way Martin describes it, celebrity is a two sided thing. Fame does help with money, jobs, and the like. But it also utterly destroys your privacy. Just going to the mall can entail battling paparazzi. Casual conversations are destroyed by autograph requests. You become paranoid about your friend’s ulterior motives. Room service – the pleasure of the tired traveler – is ruined when the waiters repeat your jokes, for the 100th time. Life is a monotonous battle to just be normal.

On this count, academia is a good deal. Academic celebrities can get the good side of celebrity, with none of the downsides. Academic celebrities are respected by their peer group, have relatively easy access to funds, and have some confidence that their work will be enjoyed after they’re gone. A smart academic can leverage their skills into high paying fields like consulting or popular writing and make quite a bit of income.

But there aren’t the down sides – no stalkers; average people treat you normally; etc. There is also a great deal of freedom to experiment. Sure, many academics will repeat themselves until they die, but you won’t lose your job if you start a quirky new line of research, much in the same way a musician or actor could lose an audience.

The Financial Times is posting some ongoing lectures by George Soros on a ‘general theory of reflexivity.’ Most of what is there, so far, will be old news to social science readers: reflexivity of theories (and, actor’s reflexive beliefs vis-a-vis reality), the self-fulfilling and performative nature of expectations, subjectivity/objectivity in natural versus social sciences etc.

And, indeed, the moderator of the lectures, the philosopher Colin McGinn, extensively cites Popper and wikipedia in his discussion of self-fulfilling prophecies, bank runs, expectations, etc.

My two cents?  The problem I have with reflexivity, or the self-fulfilling prophecy argument, is that it often is framed as a seemingly boundaryless argument, as if objective reality doesn’t even exist.  Furthermore, reflexivity doesn’t identify mechanisms, it doesn’t answer upstream “why” questions.  And, reflexivity is often framed in a way that denies all human rationality (the classic bank run example illustrates this), without appropriately accounting for uncertainty.  We’ve hashed some of this already in previous posts (for example, here), so I won’t belabor these points.

That said, it’s fantastic to nonetheless see some public discussion on issues of reflexivity — parts of the Q&A (e.g., here’s part 1)  are also interesting.

Eszter recently had a good post on the role of conferences. Here’s Eszter’s other professional advice columns. I think we’d agree on many points, but not on others. Here’s my take on the conference world. Previous grad skool rulz.

First, you have to figure out how important conferences are in your discipline for publication. For example, conference proceedings are the primary publication venue in computer science. In contrast, most social sciences assign no value to most conference proceedings. Lesson: If conference proceedings matter for your discipline, you had better show up!

Second, find out the informal rules of your discipline. It’s often the case that specialized conferences and department workshops are where work gets vetted. It’s often the case that the people at these venues will be the reviewers at major journals. If you have already responded to their criticisms, it’s more likely that they will help you in the review process. In contrast, panels at national conferences are populated with a random assortment of folks. These people need to hear your ideas, but it’s not likely that it will help with regard to professionalization.

Third, there is no replacement for working hard on your research. Yes, it is good to get feedback, but too many conferences can take time away from data collection, analysis, and writing. There is definitely a trade off. One solid journal hit is more important than attending dozens of conferences.

Fourth, there are important indirect effects of conference attendance. People meet you. They can put a face to a name. You get invited to visit places to speak, even grad students. You might get invited to submit to a journal or edited volume. You might also meet people and make new friends. This is all important.

Fifth, there is conference etiquette. Most conferences have an informal dress code. Nothing fancy, but if you are giving a talk, nice slacks/jacket/dress are good. Also, people expect you to talk about your research.  It’s a conference after all, so people want to hear about your work. So have a 1 sentence summary ready to go. Push your cookie!

Sixth, remember that conferences are business meetings. It’s ok to approach people for business purposes. At ASA, there are job placement services, data sales people, book editors, college deans, and people who give money out for foundations. It’s totally ok to meet these people and start a conversation – it’s the reason they showed up.

Seventh, you can go on the cheap and save money. Drive instead of fly. Student registration fees or one day fees are lower. Double up on hotel rooms. Many colleges and universities have student travel funds. Ask around. Heck, ask your mom for money.

To summarize: Conferences are useful, but not a make or break deal. You should definitely go, but don’t let it crowd out your research or teaching. When you do go, be aware that it’s a business meeting and plan accordingly.

This Friday, 2pm at the Multi-Purpose Room at the Cornell University’s Africana Studies & Research Center. Email me if you are interested in meeting before or after the talk.

I attended a really interesting conference this weekend that brought together some leading economic sociologists and organizational scholars to talk about the financial crisis.  Research in the Sociology of Organizations will publish the conference’s papers. You can download early drafts of the papers here.

The authors were asked to think about what sociological theory has to say about the causes of the financial crisis and to speculate about potential solutions. The conference was mainly focused on the former question, although towards the end discussion drifted to policy.  The papers were very diverse, but one idea came up in several papers. The idea was that the crisis was a kind of normal accident that was made possible by the organizational structure of the financial system. As Charles Perrow theorized, accidents can be thought of as the product of organizational systems that are highly complex and tightly coupled. Decision-makers have a hard time figuring out how the system works as a whole due to its complexity, but when one part of the system breaks down, for whatever reason, the entire system is vulnerable to collapse due to the interdependence of the different parts. The idea comes out most strongly in the papers by Schneiberg and Bartley and Palmer and Maher.

The conference created a lot of lively discussion about the need to make economic sociology more relevant to policy.  Although no single policy solution emerged, it was one of the best conversations I’ve ever been a part of in which economic sociologists strive to make their research relevant and not just theoretically interesting. So it was a good step forward. Still, I wondered what policy experts and regulators would say to the commentary. As Jerry Davis remarked in his concluding comments, “markets on trial” felt a bit like a kangaroo court. No financial economists or fed officials attended. Of course, I don’t think that the ideas need to be validated by an economist to make them good, but if economic sociology is ever going to make a move into the realm of regulation and policymaking, that interaction needs to take place.

The other part of this equation is the political mobilization it would take to make the policy solutions of economic sociologists politically viable.  One only needs to look to law and economics to see an example of how academics mobilized their ideas as part of a political coalition to institutionalize a particular set of policy solutions. As we talked about in a series of posts last year, Steven Teles’s fascinating book about the rise of the conservative legal movement illustrates how this coalition formed and influenced regulatory processes. Making major transformations like some of the scholars propose requires having access to mobilizing resources and a political will that economic sociologists haven’t had in the past.  The workshop was a great opportunity to get something like that started.

I find it interesting that I almost never hear anyone take back a review. Some famous articles have been rejected at one or more journals. Theory of the Firm was rejected, as was the DiMaggio and Powell iron cage article, I believe. There’s a saying in science departments: The history of science is strewn with articles rejected by Nature and Science. Most people don’t like to admit they were wrong, but I would expect at least a few people would fess up and explain why, at the time, they thought their review of a now famous article was (or remains) justified. Any examples?

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?