As projects surpass one million lines of code, there’s a direct correlation between size and quality for proprietary projects, and an inverse correlation for open source projects. Proprietary code analyzed had an average defect density of .98 for projects between 500,000 – 1,000,000 lines of code. For projects with more than one million lines of code, defect density decreased to .66, which suggests that proprietary projects generally experience an increase in software quality as they exceed that size.

In other words, open source works for small projects, but proprietary big projects have better quality. Why? A few hypotheses:

• Incentives – maybe the joy of fixing code is simply washed out for big projects. You would only bother if there was a pay off.
• Teams & management – maybe large projects simply require large teams of dedicated people, which is hard to do in the open source world.
• Selection – maybe for-profits only will support a project if it is easy to maintain and thus reduce costs.

Other guesses?

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Babb noted that at larger institutions, IRB boards often involve nonprofessionals – that is, those who don’t have appropriate professional expertise – in the decision-making processes about proposals. Moreover, qualitative research don’t fit well into the one-size-fits-all medical template often used to vet research proposals. Compounding these challenges is the lack of accountability in terms of IRB review boards’ responsibilities to PIs. Only 20% of IRBs that Babb examined had an appeals procedure that would allow PIs to contest decisions.

Not surprisingly, this talk evoked spirited discussion of the myriad problems encountered by researchers going through the IRB process at their institutions, as well as the unintended consequences of a review process ostensibly intended to protect human subjects. The audience noted the following unintended and undesired consequences: (1) normalized deviance,* (2) chilling effect upon the types of research undertaken, and (3) mission creep in which IRB review boards critique the suitability or worth of the research design, rather than evaluating risk to human subjects. In particular, senior researchers worried that tenure-track faculty and graduate students face great uncertainty about whether their project proposals will successfully navigate the IRB process in a timely fashion.

Audience members asked whether the sociologists’ professional association, the American Sociological Association (ASA), had taken an official position on IRB guidelines. None present were aware of any such activities (if you know of anything brewing from this or other associations, do write them in the comments). Attendees noted that because a tenured faculty member may be more able to surmount IRB issues on his/her own (or not need to go through the IRB process because of the type of research conducted), fashioning IRB standards that are more appropriate for a wider variety of research methods is a collective action problem.

I opined that these identified problems need to be considered a commons issue. Those with more power should consider it a professional responsibility to help budding researchers – undergraduate students, graduate students, junior faculty – go through an IRB process that is appropriate to their research methods and questions, especially if researchers hope to have future generations of audiences and colleagues. Unfortunately, dark humor may not be sufficient to get the point across – when a psychology colleague sent his IRB board a proposal to reproduce the Stanley Milgram experiment on April Fool’s Day, an IRB staffer called to inquire if the proposal was serious.

* One of my past posts discussing the IRB draws a steady stream of traffic from those searching for the answer to one of the quiz questions on the online Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI), a certification program mandatory for researchers and students at some institiutions.

Brendan Nyhan has a nice post on the sociology of scandal. He summarizes his research on presidential scandal in this way:

My research suggests that the structural conditions are strongly favorable for a major media scandal to emerge. First, I found that new scandals are likely to emerge when the president is unpopular among opposition party identifiers. Obama’s approval ratings are quite low among Republicans (10-18% in recent Gallup surveys), which creates pressure on GOP leaders to pursue scandal allegations as well as audience demand for scandal coverage. Along those lines, John Boehner is reportedly “obsessed” with Benghazi and working closely with Darrell Issa, the House committee chair leading the investigation. You can expect even stronger pressure from the GOP base to pursue the IRS investigations given the explosive nature of the allegations and the way that they reinforce previous suspicions about Obama politicizing the federal government.

In addition, I found that media scandals are less likely to emerge as pressure from other news stories increases. Now that the Boston Marathon bombings have faded from the headlines, there are few major stories in the news, especially with gun control and immigration legislation stalled in Congress. The press is therefore likely to devote more resources and airtime/print to covering the IRS and Benghazi stories than they would in a more cluttered news environment.

I’d also add that “events” have properties. It is easier to scandalize, say, the IRS investigation issue because it is simple. In contrast, the issue of whether the attack in Libya should have been labeled terrorism is probably to esoteric for most folks. If you buy that argument, you get a nice story about the “scandal triangle.” The likelihood of scandal increases when partisan opposition, bored media, and clearly norm-broaching events come together.

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Deadspin provides this illustration of the highest paid state employees. It says something when a public institutions gives more support for collegiate sports than other functions. That’s why I advocate a separation of sport and school.

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One of the most widely misinterpreted (or, in an interpretation less generous to Ray and me, let’s just say “confusing”) chapters of The Org is our third, which focuses on the motivation of Methodist ministers. We use research done by Chris Parsons and Jay Hartzell together with David Yermack on the Methodists of Oklahoma as a way of talking about incentives and organizational design. Some have interpreted the chapter to mean that we think Methodists should be paid more or less, or that we’re somehow finding fault with the denomination; others have been offended that we’ve compared the Methodists to Proctor & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods company; others have been shocked (shocked!) that we “accuse” some ministers of sheep-stealing.

Let me try a slightly different tack, placing the research in the context of intrinsic motivation. 

There’s a wide-ranging literature in business about the importance of having a self-motivated workforce, from the popular and serious (Dan Pink’s Drive) to the popular and slightly less serious (articles with headlines like “Let Your Employees Decide What to Do”). And, of course, Ray and I would agree that having employees whose own motivations fit well with what the business is trying to accomplish is really important — vitally important, in fact. Actually, as a result of having written The Org, I’m even more convinced about the importance of “soft” skills and qualities like employee fit, talent management, and leadership.

But by itself, intrinsic motivation is not enough. Most businesses have to use incentives to help direct even the most well-intentioned, appropriately skilled employees who really believe in the business and want to do well by their employers and customers.

That’s where the research into the Methodists of Oklahoma comes in. No one could possibly argue that Methodist ministers don’t have intrinsic motivation a-plenty. They aren’t paid very well, they don’t have very high social status, they can have tremendously stressful working conditions, they have to manage a direct democracy, often with limited resources, and so on. They have no other reason to become ministers other than a strong avocation. We should all be so lucky in finding the right people to work with and for us.

But relying on their desire to do a good job is not enough. There are competing interests in the Methodist church, as there are in any organization, and as a result the definition of doing a “good job” can be murky. So the Methodists use some subtle incentives to encourage certain kinds of behaviors – even those that might not appeal to individual ministers.

Consider the issue of growth: the growth opportunities of local parishes may not exactly align with those of the statewide church, yet the responsibility for increasing both falls on pastors. No matter how intrinsically motivated they might be, they have to make choices. 

Here’s the potential conflict. Local churches can grow by adding two different kinds of new parishioners: new converts or Methodists from other parishes. The former contributes to the growth of both the local parish and the statewide church; the latter does not. But the latter is, for some ministers, is far easier. 

The bishop delegates the setting a pastor’s pay to a local Pastor-Parish Relations Committees. Again, this makes sense, since a local committee can closely observe a pastor and make sure he or she is doing well by the parish. But these committees tend to like it—for whatever reason—when their pastor steals sheep. Basically, Parsons and Hartzell found that PPRCs give pastors on average about $17 for converting someone new to Methodism but a whopping $35 for attracting a Methodist from a different parish.

Why would the central church allow the PPRC to reward sheep stealing? Because the bishop has another carrot: promotion. The bishop decides on who gets to move to a new, bigger church. By these lights, converting someone to Methodism averages as about a $200 gain, comparing the old salary to the new one; attracting a Methodist, only about $40. 

This isn’t to say that these incentives and structures have been all carefully thought out and deliberately put into action. Far from it: it’s more likely that the Methodists in Oklahoma stumbled into this arrangement, but it suits their purposes and, more to the point, it helps direct the behavior of well-meaning, intrinsically motivated ministers who need a little directional nudge to help them figure out how to spend their time.

The paper itself does not settle the issue. The purpose of the paper is merely to document this striking correlation. Given that qualification, let me explain the argument from both sides and my priors.

• Correlation: Twitter is a passive record of how excited people are. If a candidate somehow garners the attention of the public, they get excited and start talking about it, which translates into a higher twitter presence.
• Causal: The unusual attention that a candidate attracts in social media sways undecided or weakly committed voters. In a sense, highly active twitter users are the “opinion leaders” of modern society.

My prior: 75% correlation, 25% cause. How would tease out these arguments? For example, what variable could instrument the district level tweet counts? Interesting to find out.

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Business and public partnerships in socially responsible behavior have become a central pillar of global governance, but one that is unevenly developed in different countries. Despite the transnational character of business operations, national context is of theoretical as well as policy significance. To explain crosscountry variation in corporate commitment to social responsibility we investigate the political conditions that encourage firms to participate in the United Nations Global Compact. Drawing on a theory of corporate social responsibility as motivated by self-interest and external pressure, we examine the influence of external actors and the locally specific mobilization of bias. Analyzing participation levels in 145 countries, we find that a democratic regime and Global Compact participation by countervailing groups are associated with higher levels of business participation in the program. Contrary to earlier studies relying on smaller numbers of countries, we find no evidence that a country’s relationship with the UN or the domestic political strength of environmental interests account for cross-national variation in corporate engagement with the Global Compact.

Check it out.

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Several processes are occurring simultaneously. Departments are being lumped together to form new constellations of schools and faculties. (In Australian academic parlance, schools are a bureaucratic unit composed of disciplines or programs. A faculty consists of a collection of schools.) But, my newly met colleagues insisted, restructuring is not about encouraging interdisciplinarity or intellectual cross-fertilization by increasing the administrative proximity of related fields of inquiry.

Rather, I was told, central administrators have been combining units as universities pare down the number of schools and faculties they harbor to extirpate unnecessary courses, eliminate “redundant” workers, and increase what the Aussies, like the British, call “casualization” and Americans term “contingent labor.” As in the United States, such practices are more likely to be applied to the arts, humanities and social sciences rather than to the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — which supposedly promise to raise needed income through contracts, grants, and inventions and to goose the region’s and the nation’s ability to succeed in international economic competition.

Our willingness to buy garments sewn under dangerous conditions, chocolate made from cocoa picked by captive children, or cellphones and laptops containing “conflict minerals” from Congo create the demand that underwrites these tragedies….If we want to see fewer tragedies like the one in Bangladesh, we as consumers need to reward the companies that make the effort to verify their supply chains and shun those that do not. Make it unprofitable to be unsafe.

While I agree with Jerry, in principle, that consumers’ demand for low-cost items will inevitably lead to these sorts of problems, consumers are actually very inertial creatures. If we put all our hopes in changing the global marketplace in the wallets of people like Joe Schmoe from Brownsburg, Indiana, we’re not likely to see much change. Most changes in supply chain management begin with a few committed activists who are willing to go out and pressure the company through “naming and shaming” tactics.  Public humiliation still seems to work.

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

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• Frances Fox Piven on organization
• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen on the use of social media
• Richard Flacks discusses the future of OWS.

Required reading for movement scholars.

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• My review
• Teppo’s review
• Tim and Ray discuss Netflix
• Tim and Ray respond to me on management
• Tim Sullivan responds to Henry Farrell

Check it out.

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In sociology, we have no such argument, but it is worth thinking about. We are resistant to great leader stories and for good reason. Great man stories often devolve into hero worship, or they rely on “Whig” history. But that doesn’t mean Great people scholarship is not without use. For example, what did Steve Jobs understand about markets that management scholars should learn? Or, a more sociological example, what does a great religious leader understand about religion that sociologists of religion should know? Taking a turn from Bourdieu, we could look at any social field, identify the “masters,” and then use them as research sites where we can understand how the field is put together.

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I think the journal is going to fill an important niche in sociology. I hope that one consequence of the journal will be to pressure other journals to speed up the process and to make publications be more interactive.  It’s still too early to tell how the journal will fare in attracting high quality papers. I sincerely hope that people will send some of their best stuff to the journal. If they do, then I wonder what consequence this will have for the vast set of secondary/specialist journals in our field. Journals like Social Forces and Social Problems will be those most likely to take hits.

The Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture is awarded to Lynette Spillman for Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

The Clifford Geertz Prize for the Best Article in the Sociology of Culture is awarded to Lauren Rivera for “Hiring as Cultural Matching:  The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms,” American Sociological Review 77(6), 2012.

The Richard Peterson prize for Best Student Paper in the Sociology of Culture is awarded to co-winners Charles Seguin, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, for “The Mathematics of Superstars: Two Theories of Cultural Consumption” and Phillipa K. Chong, University of Toronto, for “Legitimate Judgment in Art, The Scientific World Reversed?: Critical Distance in Evaluation.”

Good thing that Doug wasn’t on the Geertz prize committee.

Then, Krippendorf wrote a comment that made me seriously question my claim. I quote the entire comment:

 For Hispanic men, Hispanic women, and African American women, the estimated lifetime earnings of a PhD are greater than the estimated lifetime earnings of professional degree holder. The much-touted professional-to-PhD earnings drop is limited to whites, Asian Americans, and African American men. See here: http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-14.pdf, Table A2

[W]e conducted a systematic analysis of every study that cited External Control in 29 highly regarded management, psychology, and sociology journals between 1978 and 2011. Given the breadth of empirical domains covered by RD, our analysis focused on identifying how, and to what extent, each article used the perspective. Our results indicate that there is merit in Pfeffer’s assertion that RD serves primarily as a  metaphorical statement about organizations. Though External Control continues to be cited at an enviable rate, the vast majority of citations are ceremonial—variously used as a nod toward the environment,  resources, or power. Results also show that beneath an ever growing citation count is a fragmented landscape of scholars whose primary interest is in the specific strategies discussed in External Control —mergers and acquisitions (M&A), joint ventures and strategic alliances, interlocking directorates and executive succession—rather than the underlying perspective….To say that RD has been reduced to a metaphorical statement about organizations, however, belies its considerable impact. Indeed, while RD lacks a coterie of followers and has failed to catalyze a dedicated  research programin the vein of NIT or OE, it has had a uniquely broad influence within management scholarship. Scholars have drawn on RD to derive key hypotheses in the study of M&A’s, joint ventures and  strategic alliances, interlocking directorates, and executive succession, with the hypotheses largely supported (Hillman, Withers, & Collins, 2009).

They also suggest that its time to revive RD theory in organizational analysis. Why should we do that?  Well, because RD theory offers an actual theory about power relations inside and between organizations, a dynamic that is sorely missing from institutional theory.  RD theory might also enrich our understanding of environmental complexity. Whereas institutional theory boils everything down to scripts and logics, RD theory suggests we also ought to consider the power differentials between the carriers of these scripts and logics, which ought shape how practices and cultural stuff gets diffused or implemented at the organization-level.  Thus, RD theory has promise for helping explain sources of institutional complexity.

[W]e believe that RDs influence has far from run its course. Although External Control is remembered primarily for its insights about power and dependence, its most distinctive contribution was arguably to  theorize environmental complexity in an empirically tractable way. That organizations face complex environments is a hallmark of open-systems perspectives (Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967; Thompson, 1967) and once again, theorizing, defining, and measuring environmental complexity has become a burgeoning area of inquiry for organizational scholars using an institutional logics framework (Greenwood et al., 2010;  Pache & Santos, 2010). Problems arise, however, when trying to account for the mechanisms that link logics to imposed external constraint. Thus, studies in this milieu risk misspecifying the complexity that logics create for an organization. In comparison, RD suggests that interests are not simply the result of coalition members’ location in institutional space and that complexity emerges when groups have different interests in a particular issue and also hold power over a focal organization. In short, rather than viewing “competing logics” as the source of complexity, RD helps to account for complexity in terms of  organizationally proximate and empirically measurable power dynamics.

It would be a worthwhile change if the only thing that resulted from a revival of RD theory was that organizational scholars became more sensitive to power dynamics. I’m starting to feel like the bad guy reviewer lately who has to point out to authors that organizational politics and power dynamics may be a reasonable alternative interpretation of their findings. I’m surprised at how often authors immediately get sucked into a cultural argument without even considering the possibility that interests and resource dynamics might matter a bit.  It seems odd given that so many of these studies are done in empirical settings where interests, politics, and struggles for resource control are readily apparent.

Click here for the original picture.

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Poorer students remain underrepresented at America’s top colleges, research has shown. And their academic preparation isn’t the only reason, according to Radford’s study of valedictorians, who should be considered well-prepared.

“Less-affluent valedictorians were less likely to know someone who had enrolled in a most selective institution and thus had a harder time envisioning their own attendance,” Radford wrote in a summary of her research.

The theme of the research association’s meeting this year was “Education and Poverty.” And Radford was among many who presented research on class inequity in higher education, which academics say remains deeply problematic at most colleges. Her study comes at a time of increased focus on how, despite plenty of outreach efforts, much of the talent at low-income high schools isn’t getting recruited to top colleges.

Radford worked with data from the High School Valedictorian Project, a survey of 900 class valedictorians who graduated from public high schools between 2003 and 2006. She also drew from 55 in-depth interviews with the students. The University of Chicago Press soon will publish a book by Radford on her findings.

This is probably one of the key findings of recent stratificiation research. Class doesn’t affect life course only through material resources, but by changing the habitus.

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The original poem is here.

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People may sneer at the social sciences, but they hold up as well. Recently, a well known study in economics was found to be in error. People may laugh because it was an Excel error, but there’s a deeper point. There was data, it could be obtained, and it could be replicated. Fixing errors and looking for mistakes is the hallmark of science. In sociology, we often shy away from the mantle of science, but our recent treatment of the Regnerus paper makes me proud. My fellow sociologists obtained the data, analyzed it, and showed that the new data support the long standing finding of no differences between same sex and different sex parents in terms of childhood outcomes.

If you watch the news, the Coburns of the world claim the attention. But when you think about it, the science haters are really standing in the shadow of a much larger enterprise.

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My response: encouraging an expansion of graduate education does not address most aspects of inequality and might make it worse in many cases. For example, there is a large scale gap between whites and blacks in terms of education, income, and wealth. Sending people to graduate school will not address this gap. There are many reasons: lots of people don’t finish the degree; huge opportunity costs; low paid adjunct work after graduation; accumulation of burdensome of debt; and the tenure track pays modestly compared to other professionals with similar qualifications. These trends suppress mobility.

In contrast, there lots of other professions that are much more likely to lead to good income and mobility. If we want to genuinely shrink the income gap between people of color and whites, for example, we are much wiser to encourage engineering and health science careers. You’ll get the degree in a few years and almost immediately jump higher in the income distribution. Way, way, way easier than going for that anthropology  PhD and hoping for a tenure track job 12 years later.

If we want to address inequality within academia (ie., increasing representation on the faculty), we should reserve our efforts for getting people through the PhD pipeline and into jobs. We shouldn’t cram more graduate students into the pipeline. We should actually ask the logical question: What can we do to ensure that students acquire the right skills in academia? How can we make sure that they develop the right networks, that lead to publication in the “right” journals, and thus lead to the “right” jobs?

Sadly, very little effort goes into this side of things. It’s easier to count minorities and women and yell, “not fair! we need more!” It’s much harder to confront tenured faculty (like myself), and say: “Why haven’t you co-authored with women (or minorities) so that they may have a shot at a good tenure track job?” Let’s put the brakes on enrolling more students into doctoral programs and take up the less glamorous, but more important task, of making sure that the ones in the system will actually have the best careers possible.

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From the Acemoglu tumblr.

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Michael Huemer, a philosopher, boils down the argument with the hypothetical story inspired by the “Starvin’ Marvin” South Park character:

[Marvin] is very hungry and is trying to travel to the marketplace to buy some food. Another person, Sam (Sam has a large number of nephews and nieces, so we’ll call him Uncle Sam), decides to stop Marvin from going to the marketplace using coercion. He goes down there with his M16 and blocks the road. As a result, Marvin can’t trade for food and, as a result, he starves. So then the question is, did Sam kill Marvin? Did he violate his rights? Almost anyone would say yes, Sam acted wrongly. In fact, if Marvin died as a result, then Sam killed him. It wouldn’t be that Sam failed to help Marvin. No, he actively intervened….This is analogous to the U.S. government’s immigration policy. There are people who want to trade in our marketplace, in this case the labor market, and the government effectively prevents them from doing that, through use of force.

I was also cited for discussing open borders strategy:

“Open borders will become a reality when the public stops believing that immigrants are a threat,” sociologist Fabio Rojas recently wrote, comparing the open borders movement to the gay rights movement. “Even if a pro-immigration referendum fails to pass, it will still serve the function of forcing the issue onto the public stage. These actions won’t ­­change the minds of those strongly committed to anti-immigration policy. Instead, they will make immigration seem ‘normal’ to a later generation of people.”

Check it out.

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DiGrazia said the researchers were “kind of surprised” that they saw a correlation without doing sentiment analysis of the Tweets. “We thought we were going to have to look at the sentiment,” he said. He speculated that one reason for the correlation could be a so-called Pollyanna Hypothesis, “that people are more likely to gravitate toward subjects that they are positive about and are more likely to talk about candidates that they support.”

The idea is simply this: the frequency of speech is often a relatively decent approximation of how imporant people think that topic is relative to salient alternatives. If people say “Obama” a little more often than the competition, then it’s not unreasonable to believe that he is more favored. And you don’t need content analysis to suss that out.

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Elite: General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Fourth. Braying, bellowing, incompetent and utterly contemptuous of the lower orders, Melchett would naturally expect to find himself at the top of the pecking order.

Established middle class: Margot and Jerry Leadbetter from The Good Life. As the establishment pillars of comfortable and conservative 1970s suburban society, the couple existed in pointed contrast to their more free-thinking neighbours Tom and Barbara Good.

Technical middle class: David Brent from The Office. Despite his supposedly rock’n'roll past, Ricky Gervais’s fist-gnawingly embarrassing general manager was resolutely middle class.

New affluent workers: Miranda from Miranda. Miranda Hart herself may be established middle class, but the heroine of her eponymous sitcom sits comfortably in a slightly lower category.

Traditional working class: Jim Royle from The Royle Family. Could Ricky Tomlinson’s armchair-bound, TV-addicted patriarch be anything other than proudly working class? My arse!

Emergent service workers: Maurice Moss from the IT Crowd. Young, nerdish and living at home with his mum, Moss could fit the emergent service worker class but probably needs a little work to increase his social and cultural capital levels.

Precariat: Rab C Nesbitt. Gregor Fisher’s much-loved and enduring sitcom creation has assumed the status of folk hero despite his resolutely unglamorous life.

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David Sanchez plays “La Fiesta Va.“

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This study investigates whether the increasingly common trend of working long hours (“overwork”) perpetuates gender segregation in occupations. While overwork is an expected norm in many male-dominated occupations, women, especially mothers, are structurally less able to meet this expectation because their time is subject to family demands more than is men’s time. This study investigates whether the conflicting time demands of work and family increase attrition rates of mothers in male-dominated occupations, thereby reinforcing occupational segregation. Using longitudinal data drawn from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I show that mothers are more likely to leave male-dominated occupations when they work 50 hours or more per week, but the same effect is not found for men or childless women. Results also show that overworking mothers are more likely to exit the labor force entirely, and this pattern is specific to male-dominated occupations. These findings demonstrate that the norm of overwork in male-dominated workplaces and the gender beliefs operating in the family combine to reinforce gender segregation of the labor market.

Good stuff.

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Hundreds of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have taken similar journeys through a little-known removal system run not by the federal government trying to enforce laws but by hospitals seeking to curb high costs. A recent report compiled by immigrant advocacy groups made a rare attempt to determine how many people are sent home, concluding that at least 600 immigrants were removed over a five-year period, though there were likely many more.

To be sure, very uncommon, but it starkly points to a disturbing issue. Current law allows the state and other entities, hospitals in this case, to grossly violate one’s individual freedom if the aren’t a documented migrant. There’s a healthy debate to be had over the degree to which hospitals should provide care for the uninsured, but that doesn’t imply that somebody can be be shipped to another country because they are a non-citizen and it saves the hospital some money.

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Both Geoff and Thorbjørn are excellent scholars and they’ve done much work in the domain of generalized darwinism – so, following this reading group should be well worthwhile.  Here’s a relatively recent piece of theirs, a “defense” of generalized darwinism, with Howard Aldrich et al.

I have to say (I’ll probably have to defend this in a later post), I struggle with the proposed “generality” of Darwinism (across species and disciplines), particularly the focus on universal, exogenous mechanisms at the expense of endogenous and (ironically) nature-related factors.  And, generalized darwinism is also part of the broader environmental “cosmology” (including population ecology, categories stuff, evolutionary economics) in organizational and social analysis, that I struggle with due to its overwhelmingly external focus.

But, that said, Darwinism and environmental analysis of course represent huge, important swaths of our field that have yielded many insights.  In short, be sure to check out their book club and to follow their work.

Unit of analysis: US House elections in 2010 and 2012. X-Axis: (# of tweets mentioning the GOP candidate)/(# of tweets mentioning either major party candidate). Y-axis: GOP margin of victory.

I have a new working paper with Joe DiGrazia*, Karissa McKelvey and Johan Bollen asking if social media data actually forecasts offline behavior. The abstract:

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composition. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit.

The working paper (short!) is here. I’d appreciate your comments.

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* Yes, he’ll be in the market in the Fall.

In this last post, I’ll discuss why I fundamentally disagree with the argument presented in Reinventing Evidence. There are two reasons. First, I agree with Andrew Perrin that Biernacki wants us to embrace a textual holism. One of Biernacki’s major arguments is that by isolating a single word, or passage, we are losing the entire meaning of the text. Thus, interpretation is the only valid approach to text. Coding and quantification is  invalid. Perrin points out that lots of things be isolated. For example, if I see the n-word, I can say that, on the average, the text is employing racist language.

Second, Biernacki does not seem to consider cultural competence. In other words, human beings are creatures that can often reliably capture the meaning of utterances made by other humans from the same cultural group. Of course, I am talking about things like every day speech or short and simple writings like newspaper articles. More complex texts, like novels, will have networks or dense layering of meaning that go beyond a human’s native capacity for communication. These probably could be coded, but it would require intense training and an elaborate theory of text, which sadly we don’t have in sociology. But my major point remains. There’s a lot of fairly simple text that can be coded. If you believe that people can accurately convey the meaning of a text or label some aspect of it because they are “native speakers” of the culture, then coding is a valid thing to do. To believe otherwise, is to assume a world of solipsistic culture where every act of utterance requires a stupendous level of interpretation on the part of the audience.

So to wrap things up. I give credit to Biernacki for making us think hard about the quality of coding which is lacking. The fact that science is presented in ritual is fair, but doesn’t address whether a particular procedure produces valid measurement or inference. And I think that the view that texts are essentially uncodable is in error.

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Despite the wide reach of the New Family Structures Study, much about the process by which it was peer-reviewed and published by the journal Social Science Research remains unknown. We know that the timetable was extraordinarily compressed — according to data from the University of Texas and SSR, Regnerus submitted his paper 20 days before the end of the data collection period and 23 days before the data file was delivered to the university. Sounds fishy, doesn’t it? And the entire process, including the paper’s initial submission, review, revision, and acceptance, took place within six weeks. But why? What are the reasons for moving so quickly? Did Regnerus just catch a lucky break, or is there more to the story? We already know that his funders had an anti-gay agenda and the study itself was plagued by troubling conflicts of interest; were the peer review and publication processes similarly compromised?

Last month, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the University of Central Florida, which houses Social Science Research, seeking public records relating to the peer review and publication of the New Family Structures Study. My goal is simply to discover the truth: whether everything was above board and best practices and ethical standards were followed, or whether something more sinister occurred. The documents I requested from UCF may help to answer these important questions.

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First of all, the paper explores crucial editorial mistakes in the production of the earliest version of original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D). These are cases where some passages in OD&D are inconsistent with the remainder of the text in a way that hints at what early drafts of OD&D must have looked like. Previously, these have been curiosities to scholars of OD&D. Why does the elemental monster text refer to elemental controlling devices as “medallions, gems, stones or bracelets” instead of the names in the magical item list? Why does the languages passage refer to alignment languages as “divisional” languages? How did the percentage range for the “Ring of Delusion” end up broken? With the Dalluhn Manuscript in hand, we can find answers to all of these questions: each inconsistency points to the content of an earlier draft, a pre-publication system which is preserved in the Dalluhn Manuscript. For “divisional languages,” for example, we learn that “dvision” was the name for “alignment” in Dalluhn.

Required for nerds.

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A few choice excerpts that might resonate with our readers and thread commenters regarding graduate training and professionalization:

On training for teaching-oriented vs. research-oriented institutions:

“To be sure, opportunities still exist for graduate students to become good teachers and to land faculty jobs that focus primarily on undergraduate teaching. Yet a highly ranked sociology department geared toward producing successful academic researchers is not the kind of place where graduate students are likely to acquire informal knowledge about how to tap these opportunities. One such piece of crucial knowledge is that regional networks seem to matter in landing teaching-oriented jobs in a manner that is not comparably true for research jobs.”

On work/life balance:

“While the academic world of graduate school can be an oasis of ideas and intellectual excitement, that oasis also can be a dark place. Graduate school can seem like a treadmill in which no matter how fast you run, you will not get where you are desperate to go. Graduate school cannot consume your life. Life goes on even here — you are an adult even while you are an apprentice. People get married, have kids, and take on outside projects and interests. Do not lose sight of your own life — these are the young years for many of us. Bitter Graduate Student Syndrome is to be avoided if possible. There is an outside world beyond your studies. But don’t spend too much of your time away, either. When graduate school voluntarily becomes purely a distant second fiddle to outside world pursuits, you can expect to add more years to your Ph.D. timetable, potentially unhappy ones.”

On “The Institutional Reluctance to See Sociology as a Business”:

“…some faculty may believe that informal socialization into the profession is to be earned only by virtue of a graduate student’s high talent level. There are at least two tiers of distributing informal professional knowledge: one in which students go through the program oblivious to the subterranean world of tips, and another where some students, anointed by their perceived ability, motivation, and a professor’s discretion, advance forward armed with crucial insights and connections. Thus, failing to openly distribute professional socialization can be an invisible and unstated form of hierarchical gatekeeping, meritocratic-based inequality in the midst of the appearance of egalitarian training.”

Keep track of updates at Reuters and the Boston Globe.  Gawker also has an updated thread.

• Mark Pingle and Tigran Melkonyan on “To believe or not believe…or not decide: A decision-theoretic model of agnosticism“
• David Pate on “Concealing to reveal: The informational role of Islamic dress“
• Douglas Savitski on “Is plea bargaining a rational choice? Plea bargaining as an engine of racial stratification and overcrowding in the United States prison system“
• Anthony Paik and Vernon Woodley on Symbols and investments as signals: Courtship behaviors in adolescent sexual relationships 
• Louis Corriveau  Game Theory and the Kula

Check it out.

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