Archive for January, 2007
Virtual Veneration
| Cliff Grammich |
Earlier this week, Peter asked about “the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations.” Yesterday, Liz Birge had a story in the Newark Star-Ledger on “virtual veneration,” including “how houses of worship use the Web to reach old members and attract new ones.”
12 January 2007 at 2:54 pm Clifford Grammich Leave a comment
Kids Have Good Intuition
| Peter Klein |
My older son figured out, this Christmas, that Santa isn’t real. As with many kids, it was the physics of the thing that troubled him. However, the alternative explanation posed problems as well. “Dad, remember the desk I got last year? There’s no way YOU could have assembled that.” Even at a tender age he knows the difference between a tough, manly Dad who can build stuff and a nerdy, bookish Dad who can’t (Kevin Murphy notwithstanding).
But it could be worse: He could have a chemistry professor for a Dad. (Thanks to Craig Newmark for the link.)
It’s Built to Last, But Is It Made to Stick?
| Peter Klein |
Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, 2007) is being touted as the Next Big Thing in the popular management literature. Here is the Amazon link. Here is Guy Kawasaki’s interview with the authors. Here are words of praise from Bob Sutton. And yes, of course, the authors have a blog.
How Does Management Affect Capabilities?
| Steven Postrel |
What contribution does management make toward producing output? If you watch Federal Express commercials, or read Dilbert, or listen to many technical workers when they talk to each other, the answer is “nothing.” Management is seen as purely an obstruction to the accomplishment of useful work.
If we take “management” as a sociological category, denoting a set of pointy-haired individuals disconnected from actual technical problem solving, then one could perhaps defend this position. But if we think of “management” as a collection of activities and practices, those practices seem essential, and many people, from computer programmers to chemists to special effects wizards, engage in them. But just how does management increase output? (more…)
Nature Gives Up on Open-Source Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
The open-source, wiki model does not, apparently, work well for scientific publishing. Nature had placed a selection of submitted manuscripts online and invited feedback from researchers around the world, promising to take the feedback into consideration as part of the formal review process. But the scientific community showed little interest. Few authors were willing to participate in the experiement, and the online papers didn’t get much feedback.
During Nature’s trial, only 5 percent of 1,369 papers ranging from astronomy to neuroscience that were selected for traditional peer review were also posted on the Internet for open commentary. Of those, 33 papers received no comments. The rest received a total of 92 technical comments.
The journal concluded that many researchers were either too busy or had no real incentive in evaluating their colleagues’ work publicly. In addition, none of the editors found the posted comments influenced their decision whether a paper gets published.
I’m a little surprised by this. According to Lerner and Tirole, the open-source model should work in settings with strong reputation effects. One would think that in small, close-knit, specialized scientific communities the incentives to provide useful feedback — assuming it’s not anonymous — would be fairly high. On the other hand, there are opportunities to do so at conferences, seminars, workshops, the faculty lounge — and even blogs! — and the opportunity costs of doing it via Nature’s setup may have been too high.
Call for Papers: Putting Social Capital to Work
| Peter Klein |
Those of you studying networks, clusters, and social capital may find this Call for Papers of interest:
Doing business is a profoundly social process. Social capital and its dynamics, therefore, are inescapable components of every interaction. Among other things, they affect group cohesiveness and functionality, and they give advantages or disadvantages to some individuals and groups relative to others. This special issue of Business History will explore the research and analytical opportunities in putting social capital to work.
Full details: (more…)
Macroscope
| Steven Postrel |
Peter’s recent post about macroeconomics and macro vs. micro approaches in organization theory stirs up not-so-fond memories. From my first exposure to Samuelson’s version of the Keynesian synthesis, I found the whole thing off-putting. This feeling was a mixture of impatience with the aggregation assumptions and frustration with the seemingly backward causality of the Keynesian worldview, where production is a trivial matter and the only problem is making sure there is enough effective demand. The latter frustration was somewhat alleviated by learning about adaptive and then rational expectations, aggregate supply, sunspot and other coordination theories, and the host of microfoundation arguments that either got rid of the Keynesian assumptions or at least made some of them plausible. The impatience about aggregation never really went away. (more…)
Do Multinationals Restrain the State?
| Peter Klein |
I referred early to Ralph Raico’s essay on the European Miracle, the unprecedented, long-term rise in living standards that began in late-medieval Europe. As discussed there, the consensus of mainstream scholars such as Rosenberg and Birdzell, Mokyr, North, Landes, and Weingast is that Europe grew rich because unlike more centralized Eastern civilizations, European political and social life was controlled by a complex, decentralized mosaic of institutions and organizations, each of which placed limits on the other.
The most important of these institutions was the transnational Church. The concept of the sovereign as subordinate not only to a Higher Law, but also to a higher earthly authority, located outside his realm, was unique to European politics. State power was thus restricted by horizontal competition among sovereign states and complex vertical relationships between church and state.
Today, of course, the Catholic Church no longer plays this limiting role. However, there are other multinational and transnational institutions that place powerful limits on state power. These include charitable and relief organizations such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, religious movements and groups, the news media (we bloggers especially!), and other voluntary associations. But the most important of these institutions is the multinational or transnational corporation. What role do multinational firms play in limiting the power of the state? (more…)
Arrow on Microfoundations
| Peter Klein |
Michael Greinecker shares this illuminating comment by Kenneth Arrow, quoted in Colander, Holt, and Rosser, ed., The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists, (University of Michigan Press, 2004):
I’ve never understood [macroeconomics]. What I mean by this is that my idea of understanding is having a model that captures what is going on. In macro we don’t have that; instead we have empirical generalization, and those generalizations tend to break down rather quickly. The question is, can you get some understanding of the empirical evidence from the models? One attempt has been to generate empirical work out of very simplistic models- essentialy they are micro models blown up. I don’t give much credence to those models. One of the things that microeconomics teaches you is that individuals are not alike. There is heterogeneity, and probably the most important heterogeneity here is heterogeneity of expectations. If we didn’t have heterogeneity, there would be no trade. But developing an analytic model with heterogenous agents is difficult.
This sounds a lot like our critiques of “macro”-level explanations in organization theory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Macroeconomics, labor economics, and industrial organization have become increasingly “micro” in the last two or three decades. Will organization theory follow, or is the resistance to economics in some quarters strong enough to block the move?
Another African Entrepreneurship Blog
| Peter Klein |
I’ve previously recommended Timbuktu Chronicles for informed commentary on entrepreneurship and economic development in Africa. Here is another site, Diary of an African Entrepreneur, by an anonymous (you guessed it) African entrepreneur. (HT: PSD Blog)
Physics Envy and All That
| Steven Postrel |
We often hear (sometimes on this blog) that mainstream economics suffers from an excess of mathematical modeling. Supposedly, math is distracting, or misleading, or limits the questions one can study. Occasionally it is asserted that math serves the purpose of disguising the triviality of one’s thoughts, or that it serves as a guild’s protectionist barrier against the worthy but unschooled. In my view, all of the same critiques may apply to any use of technical language (say in philosophy); one can find examples of all of these pathologies even when no math is involved.
Our problems, when they occur, do not lie in our tools but in the quality of our ideas, and our honesty in expressing them. And given the extreme difficulty in thinking clearly or precisely without mathematics about things like supply and demand, or optimal investment, or contingent contracts, or network structure and growth, I’m more than willing to entertain mathematical approaches. At least I can figure out what people’s assumptions are. (Of course, once you have the mathematical intuition down, it’s a good idea to try to translate your new understanding into verbal form, as long as everyone understands that something is always lost in translation.) (more…)
Introducing Guest Blogger Steven Postrel
| Peter Klein |
It takes at least two people to fill Nicolai’s shoes, so Steven Postrel will be joining Cliff and myself while Nicolai’s on holiday this month. Steve is an economist who studies business strategy and organizations at SMU’s Cox School of Business. He has also worked at UCLA, UC-Irvine, and Northwestern. His research focuses on two areas: first, the fundamental meaning and sources of competitive advantage, and second, the mechanisms by which management choices affect firm capabilities, with a particular interest in the costs and benefits of knowledge specialization in different contexts. Welcome, Steve!
Personal Data Assistant for Luddites
| Peter Klein |
Nicolai and Mario, this is for you: the Hipster PDA. (HT: Web Worker Daily)
AEA Papers on Organizations
| Peter Klein |
A selection of papers on firms, contracts, organizations, and institutions from this weekend’s American Economic Association meeting in Chicago.
Incomplete Contracts and Ownership: Some New Thoughts
Hart, Oliver (Harvard University)
Moore, John Hardman (University of Edinburgh)
Diversity of Governance Governance-Organization Architecture Linkage: Complementarities and Human Assets Essentiality
Aoki, Masahiko (Stanford University)
Firms, Nonprofits, and Cooperatives: A Theory of Organizational Choice
Herbst, Patrick (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
Prufer, Jens (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
Firm Boundaries in the New Economy: Theory and Evidence
Subramanian, Krishnamurthy (Emory University)
Queen Bee Syndrome
| Peter Klein |
Everyone knows that males tend to be perceived more favorably for leadership positions than females. But did you know that this perception is stronger among females? A paper by Rocio Garcia-Retamero and Esther López-Zafra in the journal Sex Roles (vol. 55, nos. 1-2, July 2006) provides evidence that women are more prejudiced against women leaders than are men.
Participants evaluated a male or a female candidate for a leadership position in an industry that was congruent or incongruent with the candidate’s gender role. Participants showed prejudice against the female candidate, especially when she worked in an industry incongruent with her gender role. Female and older participants showed more prejudice against the female leader than did male and younger participants.
The London Times, reporting on the paper, calls this “queen bee syndrome.” Says businesswoman Nicola Horlick: “I have seen women in managerial positions discriminating against other women, possibly because they like to be the only female manager or woman in the workplace.” (HT: A&L Daily)
This evidence squares with a basic truth about stereotyping, or “statistical discrimination,” as economists call it. Under such discrimination, the strongest conflicts tend to result from within-group, rather than between-group, conflicts of interest. See Bryan Caplan’s illuminating discussion here.
Expedited Reviews: Act Now, Offer Expires Soon!
| Peter Klein |
The Atlantic Economic Journal is trying a new tactic to attract high-quality submissions: expedited reviews for all papers received within a designated window. Received this by email (emphasis in original):
Just a reminder that the deadline to submit papers to the Atlantic Economic Journal’s “ER” program is January 31, 2007. The “ER” program grants your manuscript special attention and guarantees a quick response. You will no longer spend months waiting around to hear a decision on your submission. Notice of the first level of review is made within 30 days of submission. The paper is then rushed to the second level of review, with a final decision made within the next 60 days.
This program is only being offered for a limited time and will expire on January 31, 2007.
For further information or to submit online, please go to: http://www.iaes.org/publications/aej/er_program.htm
Not the usual sales pitch from a scholarly publication, but in an increasingly competitive academic labor market, the promise of a quick turnaround may be attractive, especially to junior faculty. (The typical turnaround for an economics journal is around six months.)
As the academic journal space becomes increasingly crowded, with online publications like the BE Press journals competing with the established (and new) print journals, such aggressive tactics may become increasingly common. (A more effective tactic might be differential submission fees — one fee for regular turnarounds, a higher fee for expedited reviews, and so on. After all, shouldn’t an economics journal be using the price mechanism to allocate a scarce resource?)
The Virtual Church
| Cliff Grammich |
Peter asks below about research “on the impact of technology on the existence, boundaries, an internal structure of religious organizations.” This is, to my knowledge, a nascent field, but there are some resources on this, listed below, of greater and lesser relevance to Peter’s question. (more…)
Gladwell on Enron
| Cliff Grammich |
Something more germane, perhaps: Malcolm Gladwell on Enron in the January 8th issue of The New Yorker. (more…)
The Religious Marketplace
| Cliff Grammich |
Many thanks to Peter for the kind invitation and introduction. A political science student whose dissertation research focused on ethnography of sectarian Baptists (good and, I confess, flattering summary here of its revision for those interested) is, I know, a bit out of place in blogging on “organizations and markets.” Nevertheless, given how much recent research on American religion has used the language of organizations and markets — indeed, one of the most influential works in sociology of religion of the past decade focuses on “winners and losers in our religious economy” — I’ve some reason to hope I can contribute something to the conversation here. I know I’ve learned plenty here, and am grateful for this opportunity to learn still more.
As Peter notes, one of my main interests is a decennial county-level enumeration of religious congregations and memberships in the United States. The most recent version of this work included 149 religious bodies. The data are generally self-reported by participants, and therefore vary from year-to-year. At present, one of my pet projects is cleaning and matching data by county for the 48 bodies with comparable data in 1980, 1990, and 2000. Multiplying that by the 3,000+ counties in the United States yields quite a few data points on religious “competitors” in literally thousands of local “markets” over time, often featuring organizational adaptations to reflect these.
What “marketplace” explanations have been offered for religious change, and what do recent data say about them? I’ve a broader discussion of this here, but offer some abbreviated insights below. (more…)
The Golden Decade
| Peter Klein |
Our friends at orgtheory.net are discussing the year 1977, in which several classic works in organization theory were published. I can’t be that precise, but I can vouch for the 1970s — a “golden decade” for organizational economics research. Coase’s “Nature of the Firm” appeared in 1937, of course, but it remained — in Coase’s words — “much cited, little used.” It was only in the 1970s that the modern theory of the firm, or the new economics of organization, emerged. Consider this list: (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
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