Archive for November, 2012
Permeable Boundaries
| Dick Langlois |
The new table-of-contents alert from Industrial and Corporate Change carries an interesting new paper by Carliss Baldwin and her coauthors called “The Architecture of Transaction Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Hierarchy in Two Sectors.” Here’s the abstract:
Many products are manufactured in networks of firms linked by transactions, but comparatively little is known about how or why such transaction networks differ. This article investigates the transaction networks of two large sectors in Japan at a single point in time. In characterizing these networks, our primary measure is “hierarchy,” defined as the degree to which transactions flow in one direction, from “upstream” to “downstream.” Our empirical results show that the electronics sector exhibits a much lower degree of hierarchy than the automotive sector because of the presence of numerous inter-firm transaction cycles. These cycles, in turn, reveal that a significant group of firms have two-way “vertically permeable boundaries”: (i) they participate in multiple stages of an industry’s value chain, hence are vertically integrated, but also (ii) they allow both downstream units to purchase intermediate inputs from and upstream units to sell intermediate goods to other sector firms. We demonstrate that the 10 largest electronics firms had two-way vertically permeable boundaries while almost no firms in the automotive sector had adopted that practice.
As I was downloading the article from the ICC website, a link to the Best Twenty ICC Articles from First Twenty Years of Publication (1992-2011) caught my eye. Definitely some interesting and important articles on this list, which was chosen by the editors. But I was struck that there is no overlap at all between this list and the list of 20 most cited articles in ICC. On a quick and sloppy count, there is an overlap of only 3 with the top 50 most cited. (Similar story for most read, where there is one overlap with the top 20.) Given my interest in this odd fact, perhaps you can guess on which lists my own articles lie.
Business and Poetry
| Peter Klein |
Wallace Stevens was one of America’s greatest poets. The author of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 and offered a prestigious faculty position at Harvard University. Stevens turned it down. He didn’t want to give up his position as Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.
This lyrically inclined insurance executive was far from alone in occupying the intersect of business and poetry. Dana Gioia, a poet, Stanford Business School grad, and former General Foods executive, notes that T.S. Eliot spent a decade at Lloyd’s Bank of London; and many other poets including James Dickey, A.R. Ammons, and Edmund Clarence Stedman navigated stints in business.
Sure, quants rule, but literary types have a role to play in business too. And some of the great literary and artistic figures, such as Dickens, Rubens, and even Shakespeare, were successful business managers. The quoted passage is from John Coleman’s “The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals” in the HBR blog.
Call for Proposals: Austrian Economics Research Conference
| Peter Klein |
Below and here are the details about the 2013 Austrian Economics Research Conference. Submissions are due December 31, 2012. For an example of the high-quality keynotes speeches, see this one from 2012!
Austrian Economics Research Conference
March 21–23, 2013
Ludwig von Mises Institute
Auburn, AlabamaThe Austrian Economics Research Conference (formerly the Austrian Scholars Conference) is the international, interdisciplinary meeting of the Austrian School, bringing together leading scholars doing research in this vibrant and influential intellectual tradition. The conference is hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute at its campus in Auburn, Alabama.
Proposals for individual papers, complete paper sessions or symposia, and interactive workshops are encouraged. Papers should be well developed, but at a stage where they can still benefit from the group’s discussion. Preference will be given to recent papers that have not been presented at major conferences. All topics related to Austrian economics, broadly conceived, and related social-science disciplines and business disciplines including management, strategy, and entrepreneurship are appropriate for the conference. Proposals from junior faculty and PhD students are especially encouraged.
This year’s conference features a keynote lecture from Dominick Armentano and a themed symposium on competition theory and policy to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Armentano’s landmark book Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure. A lecture from Brendan Brown, author of The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s classic America’s Great Depression. Nikolay Gertchev of the European Commission and Robert Wenzel of Economic Policy Journal will also give keynote speeches. (more…)
Dilbert on Multitasking
| Peter Klein |
Speaking of agency theory, today’s Dilbert deals with multitasking and, as usual, gets the problem exactly right:
Behavioral Agency Theory
| Nicolai Foss |
Kathleen Eisenhardt’s 1989 Academy of Management Review paper is likely still the first, but hopefully not the last, exposure many management scholars have to agency theory. The paper is somewhat imprecise, and it shows its age, but as an introduction to the theory, one can do worse. However, much has in fact happened in agency theory since 1989 in terms of extensions and refinements of the theory, and also in terms of critical reactions, some of which have been partly aligned with the theory.
In particular, (some) economists and (more) management scholars (e.g., Wiseman and Gomez-Mejia) have tried to bring behavioral perspectives into agency theory. In a new paper (forthcoming in the Journal of Management), Alexander Pepper of the LSE and Julie Gore of the University of Surrey provide a useful overview of “behavioral agency theory,” somewhat in the style of Eisenhardt’s earlier review (i.e., with propositions that summarize the earlier literature). They include, for example, prospect theory, work on inequity aversion and even self-determination theory under the behavioral hat, and thus bring both cognitive and motivational issues into the orbit of behavioral agency theory.
A few mildly critical comments.
- There is no claim in the paper that the various behavioral ideas are consistent and “add up,” but this is something that should perhaps have been discussed. Standard theory may make extreme assumptions but it is a highly consistent and neat theory. In contrast, behavioral agency theory is a bouillabaise of very different ingredients that are linked to the standard theory in a somewhat ad hoc manner.
- The authors position and motivate the paper in terms of gaining more insight into executive compensation, but of course the scope of behavioral agency theory is much broader.
- The authors, like Eisenhardt, repeats Michael Jensen’s distinction between “positive agency theory” and “principal-agent theory,” which makes as little sense today as it did in 1983 ;-)
Still, Pepper and Gore’s paper is definitely worth a read and I highly recommend it.
Miscellaneous
| Nicolai Foss |
A few interesting links, Tyler-style:
- Too ephemeral, even for the Pomo Periscope, but fun nonetheless: Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sarte.
- Yes, blogging and tweeting (and FB’ing?) research is worth it.
- Vitorino Ramos’ blog. Interesting thoughts on self-organization, complexity, bounded rationality …
- Very interesting 1997 study on what matters most when it comes to explaining scientific “eminence” — quantity, quality or depth of research.
Book Seminar: Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange: The Theory and Policy of Contractual Registries
| Lasse Lien |
Very shortly O&M will host a Virtual Seminar on former guest blogger Benito Arruñada’s important new book, Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange: The Theory and Policy of Contractual Registries (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The blurb:
Governments and development agencies spend considerable resources building property and company registries to protect property rights. When these efforts succeed, owners feel secure enough to invest in their property and banks are able use it as collateral for credit. Similarly, firms prosper when entrepreneurs can transform their firms into legal entities and thus contract more safely. Unfortunately, developing registries is harder than it may seem to observers, especially in developed countries, where registries are often taken for granted. As a result, policies in this area usually disappoint.
So stay tuned for this. While we are finalizing the last details of the virtual seminar, you may want to attend one of Benito’s presentations:
- November 26: University of Maryland, Seminar on Trade, Institutions and Politics, November 26, 2012. (Rm. 4103, Tydings Hall; 15:30-17:00). (https://www.econ.umd.edu/about/events/752).
- November 27: Millennium Challenge Corporation, Washington DC, (875 15th St., NW; 12:00-13:00).
- November 28: George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, Public Choice Seminar Series (http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/wed%20seminars/wedsem_fall12.html), (Carow Hall, 16:00-15:15).
- November 30: Cato Institute, Washington DC. Lunchtime Discussion (by invitation only). Discussant: Klaus Deininger, World Bank (1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW Washington, DC).
- December 3: Harvard Law School, Private Law Workshop (http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k84712), (13:00-15:00).
- December 4: Harvard University, Law and Economics Seminar (http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k84712), 2012 (17:00-19:00).
- December 5: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA, (Lincoln House, 113 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA; 12:00-14:00). (https://www.lincolninst.edu/education/education-coursedetail.asp?id=867).
Pomo Periscope XXIV: Sartre on Ownership
| Nicolai Foss |
Proto-pomo Jean-Paul Sartre was a certified commie. I was therefore baffled to read about Sarte’s views on ownership (here). In Being and Nothingness Sarte argues that “to have” is one of the three fundamental categories of human existence (along with “to do” and “to be”), and notes that the “totality of my possesions reflects the totality of my being … I am what I have … what is mine is myself.” More broadly, there is a highly interesting literature on “psychological ownership,” informed mainly by philosophy and psychology, but with interesting linkages to evolutionary anthropology. The “endowment effect” in behavioral economics may be seen as part of this. Although the main applications of psychological ownership theory so far seems to have been to organizational behavior (e.g., this paper), there seem to me to be potentially interesting applications to the political philosophy, particularly for those who find the Lockean theory of ownership a bit lacking in the psychological dimension.
A Naturalistic Foundation for the Hierarchy?
| Nicolai Foss |
In economics, the hierarchical firm arises for reasons related to economizing with transaction costs, managerial attention allocation, information synthesis and what not. Many organizational economists would argue that absent transaction costs, there would be no hierarchies as there would be no firms. But, what if the existence of hierarchy has a partly genetic basis, that is, humans evolved in such a way that they have come to “like” hierarchies (which may therefore exist even if transaction costs were zero)? After all, those small hunting bands roaming the African savannahs 30, 000 years ago likely had leaders, a division of labor and so on, and evolutionary anthropology suggests that our brains evolved to handle the intricacies of handling this division of labor. Thus, we may be “hardwired for hierarchy.”
OK, speculation to be sure, but in “The Fluency of the Social Hierarchy: The Ease With Which Hierarchical Relationships Are Seen, Remembered, Learned, and Liked,” recently published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Emily Zitek and Larissa Tiedens provide some potentially supportive evidence: In five studies, they show that hierarchies are perceived, understood, remembered and learner faster and more efficiently than other kinds of social relationships.
There may be many reasons for this finding, but one is the simple one that hierarchical superiors have potentially strong influence on our lives. Very apropos, another recent study, “The hierarchical face: higher rankings lead to less cooperative looks,” by four UMichigan psychologists, finds that the “higher ranked an individual’s group is, the less cooperative the facial expression of that person is judged to be.” Interestingly, one of their settings is interaction with deans!
Abstracts below. (more…)
More on Performance Pay and Motivation Crowding Out
| Nicolai Foss |
Observing how economists relate to psychology is interesting. On the one hand, there is considerable fascination: Social psychology research often produces interesting findings about human interaction, and motivational and cognitive psychology yields insight in human behavior and decision-making which is more fine grained than most econ research. On the other hand, there is an often ill-tempered dismissal, too often based on an incomplete understanding of the relevant material, of any psychology findings that may be seen as going against the standard economics model of rationality. “This is entirely consistent with maximization once you take all constraints into consideration,” “This is just another instance of altruistic preferences”, etc. etc. are conventional defensive stratagems that are entirely understandable given the metaphysical status of the standard model in economics.
An area where many economists, at least as seen from my perspective as an outsider, seems to have given in concerns so-called “motivation crowding.” This is the idea that “extrinsic motivators” (such as performance pay) can crowd-out out “intrinsic motivation,” the kind of inner motivation that, many motivational psychologists argue, is the most suitable one for tasks involving creativity, problem-solving and learning. Since this effect was first imported (from self-determination theory in motivational psychology) into economics in the mid-1990s by, first, Bruno Frey, and then David Kreps, it has been rather generally acknowledged by many organizational economists, personnel economists and labor economists as a real and worrying phenomenon. “Worrying” because it suggests that conventional incentive instruments may be counter-productive.
A recent paper by Meiyu Fang and Barry Gerhart (2012), “Does Pay for Performance Diminish Intrinsic Interest?” suggests that economists should perhaps think twice before they embrace the crowding effect, at least in the context of real world organizations.The authors question random assignment experiments on the grounds that in organizations assignment is anything but random. But perhaps more substantively they argue that “perceived competence” and “perceived autonomy” (key constructs in self-determination theory) are positively related to pay for individual performance, rather than negatively as the crowding effect would posit. For example, being exposed to performance-contingent rewards may drive feelings of control and autonomy (“I decide myself how much I wanna make here”, “If I deliver, the Man has to pay” etc.). These ideas are tested on data from a survey of 609 white collar Taiwanese employees, and largely confirmed. A fascinating and recommended read.
Mark Casson Conference
| Nicolai Foss |
Mark Casson is one of the most influential scholars in the international business and entrepreneurship fields. He is also living proof that huge influence can be won and held, not by regularly cranking out papers in the “A journals,” but by writing solid monographs. Although Casson has certainly written his share of high-level papers, he is arguably best known for two books, namely his slim 1976 monograph with Peter Buckley, The Future of the Multinational Enterprise, and his 1982 (single-authored) book, The Entrepreneur: an Economic Theory. While the former is one of the founding contributions to the theory of the multinational corporation (some say, the founding contribution), the latter was, at the time it was published, the perhaps most sophisticated economics-based treatment of entrepreneurship theory. I reread it about a year ago, and was struck by how up-to-date and fresh it still is. (Here is a brief popular statement of Casson’s views on entrepreneurship).
Professor Andrew Godley of the Henley Business School has put together an exciting conference (15-16. Dec., University of Reading) to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Casson’s book. The program includes luminaries such as Mike Wright, Saras Sarasvathy, Ram Mudambi and my former PhD student and colleague, Jacob Lyngsie. Unfortunately, I am not able to participate myself, but the conference should be of interest to the O&M readership. Here is the program.
Pet Peeve: “Normative Theory”
| Nicolai Foss |
I have seldom attended a meeting or conference on management research where the notion of “normative theory” hasn’t been brought up. A couple of decades ago when transaction cost economics was making its influence felt in management research, it was frequently dismissed as “just another normative contingency theory.” Discussants may quiz presenters on whether they are “doing positive or normative theory,” and gravely tell them that they must heed the difference between the two.
While I am all for being upfront about one’s (normative) premises, I am not sure the notion of “normative theory” makes a lot of sense. (There is ethical theory which may be partly falsifiable, but this is usually not what is meant by “normative theory”). There are theoretically informed statements about what ought to be the case — but these are simply derived from positive theories with the addition of an “ought” clause. To be sure, one can build theory that is designed to help remedy some state in the real world that one considers undesirable. Theorizing (i.e., the construction of theory) is, of course, shot through with normative considerations, as Gunnar Myrdal famously argued. But, that doesn’t make the theory a “normative theory” per se. A theory can be (should be) 100% wertfrei although its emergence is entirely explainable in terms of moral, political, etc. considerations.
Theory can be (should be?) used as an instrument, to be sure. Thus, the proponent of a theory may tell decision-makers that if they want to achieve X, they should do Y. That is still not “normative theory,” because the proponent doesn’t tell decision-makers that X is something they ought to pursue. Fairly simple stuff, to be sure. But, many management scholars apparently haven’t fully absorbed the basic implications of what Hume, Menger, and Weber said on these issues. And in today’s method-obsessed graduate programs, they likely won’t.
Coase on the Economists
| Peter Klein |
Ronald Coase has a short piece in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review, “Saving Economics from the Economists” (thanks to Geoff Manne for the tip). Not bad for a fellow about to turn 102! I always learn from Coase, even when I don’t fully agree. Here Coase decries the irrelevance of contemporary economic theory, condemning economics for “giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter.” He also provides a killer quote: “Economics thus becomes a convenient instrument the state uses to manage the economy, rather than a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how the economy operates.”
I’m sure that’s true for many economists and for some branches of the field, such as Keynesian macroeconomics. But Coase seems to reject economic theorizing altogether, even the “causal-realist” approach popular in these parts. To be useful, he argues, economics should provide practical guidance for the businessperson. However, “[s]ince economics offers little in the way of practical insight, managers and entrepreneurs depend on their own business acumen, personal judgment, and rules of thumb in making decisions.”
Well, that sounds about right to me. Economics provides general principles, or laws, about human action and interaction, mostly stated as “if-then” propositions. Applying the principles to concrete, historical cases requires Verstehen, and is the task of economic historians (as analysts) and entrepreneurs (as actors), not economic theorists. Deductive theory does not replace judgment. Without deductive theory, however, we’d have no principles to apply, and nothing to contribute to our understanding of the economy except — to quote Coase’s own critique of the Old Institutionalists — “a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire.” To be sure, Coase’s own inductive method has led to several brilliant insights. Coase himself has a knack for intuiting general principles from concrete cases (e.g., theorizing about transaction costs from observing automobile plants, or about property rights from studying the history of spectrum allocation), though not perfectly. But, as I noted before, Coase himself is probably the exception that proves the rule — namely that induction is a mess.
Micro-foundations All Over the Place …
| Nicolai Foss |
In a SOapBox Essay in 2005, Teppo Felin and I called for “micro-foundations” for macro management theory, specifically the dominant routines and capabilities (etc.) stream in strategic management. (check Teppo’s site for the paper, commentaries by Jay Barney and Bruce Kogut, and various other Felin & Foss papers on the subject). We thought our argument was fairly simple, not really that novel (economists have been talking about micro-foundations for decades), and “obviously true.” Yet, the argument was apparently provocative (or, perhaps more correctly, our formulation of it was…), and it met with considerable hostility. For example, the DRUID 2008 conference in Copenhagen featured a panel on micro-foundations with opposing sides represented by Sidney Winter and Thorbjørn Knudsen, and Peter Abell and yours truly, respectively. I remember seeing several (extremely) prominent management scholars shaking their heads in disbelief about the folly of micro-foundations. (The debate, though not the head-shaking, can be accessed through the DRUID site).
And yet, 7 years later the micro-foundations project appears to have met with general acceptance, although it is sometimes referred to as the “Foss Fuss,” by at least one very prominent contributor to our field. In fact, some of the head-shaking persons from DRUID 2008 now themselves talk about micro-foundations. Both Sid Winter and Thorbjørn Knudsen (not headshakers) now embrace micro-foundations–albeit of the “right” kind (e.g., behavioralist and informed by neuroscience and experiments). Papers in leading journals have “micro-foundations” in the title. Specific examples: :
- The Journal of Management Studies just published a special issue on “Micro-origins of Routines and Capabilities,” edited by Teppo, me, Koen Heimeriks, and Tammy Madsen, and featuring contributions by various luminaries.
- The European Management Review’s December issue (not yet online) will feature a transcribed exchange between Sid Winter, me and Maurizio Zollo on micro-foundations.
- A leading association in our field will adopt “micro-foundations” as the theme of one its conferences (to be held in 2014). Details to be disclosed (soon).
Micro-foundations are “everywhere.” List der Vernunft, I reckon.
UPDATE: The Academy of Management Perspectives will feature a paper symposium next year on micro-foundations. Contributors: Jay Barney, Teppo Felin, Henrich Greve, Siegwart Lindenberg, Andrew van de Ven, Sid Winter, and me.
More Genghis Revisionism
| Peter Klein |
You’ve probably heard the expression, “X is so extreme, he’s to the Right of Genghis Khan.” This basically means, “I don’t like X but have nothing intelligent to say about X or his ideas.” Mostly because we don’t know much about Genghis Khan, and what we do know presents a pretty complex picture. I mentioned before Jack Weatherford’s revisionist portrayal of the Great Khan as a somewhat progressive ruler, by the standards of his time. Now I learn, from Joe Salerno, about a paper by Andrius Valevicius “arguing that Genghis Khan’s successful empire building lay in his introduction of low taxes, stamping out of torture, and promotion of religious toleration and diversity and free scholarly inquiry in the conquered territories. The Great Khan also restricted his plundering to the wealth and property of the vanquished ruling elites while leaving their subjects generally unmolested in their persons and property and even distributing some of the plunder among them.”
Pomo Periscope XXIII: Becker on Foucault on Becker
| Nicolai Foss |
Given the importance they usually ascribe to the sinister forces of “neo-liberalism,” it is — perhaps– surprising that prominent pomo writers seldom engage with the major economists with more or less strong classical liberal/libertarian leanings, such as Nobel Prize Winners Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. However, most of these write very clearly; for example, it is hard to imagine a stronger contrast to the murky prose of pomo than Nobelist Gary Becker’s refreshingly direct and clear writing.
And yet, pomo demi-god and arguably the clearest writer among the pomo social critics and philosophers, Michel Foucault critically dealt with Gary Becker in his 1979 “Birth of Biopolitics” lectures. In a recent UChicago WP, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker’: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures,” Foucault’s assistant at the time of these lectures, Francois Ewald, debate Foucault’s Becker-reading with Bernard Harcourt, and–the scoop of this transcribed dialogue–Becker himself.
The whole debate is (unlike the Pomo Periscope) highly civilized; in fact, Becker notes that “I was very happy to read these two lectures, which impressed me in a number of directions. They are very clear, I thought. He had a good understanding of what human capital consisted of.” However, in spite of his politeness Becker offers a direct refutation of the Foucauldian critique that economics in general, and human capital theory in particular, dehumanize people and portray them stimulus-response puppets:
Instead of saying that the vision of man is poor, I would say the vision of man is rich in this approach, because you enrich both what people do as consumers—that’s why I think Foucault says this was an interesting theory of consumption—and you enrich what they do in terms of a lot of their other life decisions that would go beyond consumption, in terms of their education, how they might invest to respond to different government laws, how they might evade bad laws.
A fun read!! HT to Henrik Lando.
Don’t Fear the Reaper
| Peter Klein |
An important contribution to the history of technology and the relationship between technology, organization, and strategy:
Gordon Winder’s The American Reaper is a solid and significant contribution to the history of American grain harvesting implements. Winder offers several revisionist challenges to standard accounts, both those that have treated Cyrus McCormick as a heroic inventor, as well as those that have touted the International Harvester Corporation (IHC, formed in 1902) as a path-breaking model of a vertically integrated and internationally dominant firm. . . . Reaper manufacturers forged licensing agreements, subcontracted with suppliers and branch factories, shared expert personnel and innovations, hired widely dispersed sales agents, and formed alliances to protect patent advantages in order to remain competitive.
Read the rest of the EH.Net review here.
A Response to Reviewer 3
| Peter Klein |
Via Christos Kolympiris, a useful model for dealing with Reviewer 3 — and responding to journal editors and referees more generally. Sample:
We hope you will be pleased with this revision and will ®nally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process, and to express our appreciation for your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to this journal.
Tom McCraw
| Dick Langlois |
I was saddened to hear today of the passing of Tom McCraw at the young age of 72. I didn’t always agree with him: he was a strong admirer of the Progressives, and even tried implausibly to suggest in Prophet of Innovation, his great biography of Schumpeter, that Schumpeter would have agreed with Progressive policies had he been alive today. But McCraw was a gentleman, a fine writer, and an important figure in business history. Prophet of Innovation is a terrific book. I wish I had written it.
Remembering the Ostroms
| Peter Klein |
Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis has a memorial section for the Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, both of whom passed away this year. Here’s my colleague David O’Brien:
I was a graduate student in Sociology at Indiana University in the late 1960s when I was looking for some courses in Political Science to fulfill the requirements for a minor. I had signed up for a course but the professor left for another university and somehow, by default, I took Lin’s course on “Political Calculus.” Like so many others in my discipline at the time I saw the world from a zero-sum conflict perspective. At the beginning of the semester I felt like I was in intermediate Chinese and had not taken the basic course. Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions and Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent were among the many readings that baffled me. What I remember most about Lin’s teaching was her enthusiasm and the fun she was having in doing her work. There were a lot of serious, somewhat dour, professors around in the late 1960s and not many women in teaching positions in the social sciences. So Lin stood out by her demeanor as well as her intellectual gifts. She had genuine concern for other human beings, including someone like me who did not have a clue as to what was going on and she persistently nudged me to keep an open mind about how I would approach the world as a social scientist. She did something very unusual in those days, which was to suggest that the boundaries between disciplines were artificial.
I did not fully appreciate Lin Ostrom’s influence on my scholarly life until many years after I left IU. Her encouragement to look beyond the disciplinary walls led me to use Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, one of the books assisgned in the Political Calculus course, as the theoretical foundation of my first work on urban neighborhood organization. Her encouragement for working across disciplines encouraged me to work in partnership with psychologists, political scientists and economists on a variety of research projects find a comfortable home in a Division of Applied Social Sciences.
I thoroughly enjoyed my conversations with Vincent, who became a member of my dissertation committee. He helped me to understand how collective action challenges that we face in our day are analytically similar to those faced centuries ago. I am especially grateful to Vincent for introducing me to the importance of constitutions and federalism, but also to Tocqueville’s observations of the relationship between “association” and “habits of the heart.” Vincent’s insightful observations on the complex relationships between formal and informal institutions have had a significant impact on my approach to household and village adaptations to post-command economy transitions in the former Soviet Union and East Africa.
Most important, Lin and Vincent led by example. They were genuinely kind human beings who were always willing to listen to others and encourage them, engage in spirited debate and thoroughly enjoyed doing applied scholarship.
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