Posts filed under ‘Ephemera’
Happy Birthday to Us
| Peter Klein |
April 25, 2007 marks the one-year anniversary of Organizations and Markets. Thanks to our readers and to guest bloggers Joe Mahoney, Dick Langlois, Lasse Lien, David Gordon, Cliff Grammich, Steve Postrel, and Chihmao Hsieh for making the past year so much fun and challenging. We look forward — if Nicolai will forgive the pomo phrase — to “continuing the conversation.”
Contronymns
| Peter Klein |
Re Chihmao’s post: English also has quite a few contronyms, words that are their own antonyms. Here is a list, including these that appear often in business administration and social-science research:
- consult — ask for advice, give advice
- custom — usual, special
- discursive — proceeding coherently from topic to topic, moving aimlessly from topic to topic
- enjoin — prescribe, prohibit
- first degree — most severe (e.g., murder), least severe (e.g., burn)
- handicap — advantage, disadvantage
- mean — average, excellent (e.g., “plays a mean game”)
- oversight — error, care
- rent — buy use of, sell use of
- transparent — invisible, obvious
HT: LRC.
Things You Shouldn’t Say at Your Dissertation Defense
| Peter Klein |
Kerry Soper’s classic from the July 7, 2000 Chronicle of Higher Education (click the image for the whole thing). Sent to me by Matt Elliott.
And of course there’s Matt Groening’s classic “Grad School” edition of his “Life in Hell” series.
Org Bloggers Peace Summit
| Peter Klein |
Helsinki, 1969. Camp David, 1978. Oslo, 1993. To this list of historic summits we can add “Columbia, Missouri, 2007.” That’s the year my home institution, the University of Missouri, hosted orgtheory.net bloggers Brayden King, Fabio Rojas, and Teppo Felin, as well as my co-blogger Nicolai Foss. Well, not all at the same time. But still: Brayden presented his paper on “Contracts as Organizations” at last week’s CORI seminar series, and today Fabio discussed his work on Black Studies programs in a seminar jointly sponsored by the Division of Applied Social Sciences and McCEL. Teppo will visit McCEL in May to present his paper “The Political Economy of Entrepreneuring.” And Nicolai will be here in May as well. Who says economists and sociologists can’t work together for a better world?
Life After Death By PowerPoint
| Peter Klein |
Comedian Don McMillan demonstrates how not to use PowerPoint (via Volokh).
Conceptual and Theoretical
| Nicolai Foss |
A few days ago Peter drew attention to the misuse in many academic papers of the word “methodology” (which is too often used when authors really mean “method”).
My personal pet peeve is the misuse of the word “conceptual,” particularly by management scholars. What is usually meant is “theoretical” (in fact, the word is often used in a derogatory manner — “Ah, Prof. NN, well, he mainly [meaning ‘merely’] does conceptual work” — something I once overheard being said of myself (in spite of several recent empirical papers — grrrr …. )).
Of course, management scholars are sometimes taken up with analyzing concepts per se — such as discussing alternative notions of competitive advantage — but usually conceptul analysis is the business of philosophers, and few management scholars publish in Metaphysica and similar places. (However, those management scholars who in fact do wish to undertake “conceptual work” may be interested in this newly started journal).
Mel Gibson and Social Category Bias
| Peter Klein |
Back to cognitive biases and heuristics. One interesting and common example is a sort of stereotype or social category bias. To make sense out of complex information about people we often think in terms of clusters of attributes, assuming that individuals possessing one trait in the cluster possess the other traits as well. Economics professors, for example, tend to be logical, systematic, nerdy, and socially awkward. If we meet someone who is logical, systematic, and nerdy, we assume he is also socially awkward, even without knowing anything specific about his social skills.
This came to my mind last fall when when reading about Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto. Gibson’s Passion of the Christ made him a hero among conservative Christians. In promoting Apocalypto, an action-adventure set during the twilight of the Mayan empire, Gibson was harshly critical of the Bush White House, likening the US invasion and occupation of Iraq to Mayan imperialism and the death of US soldiers to Mayan human sacrifice. In response, the conservative film critic Michael Medved accused Gibson of selling out to “Hollywood liberals.” (more…)
Citation Metrics Using Google Scholar
| Nicolai Foss |
Are you in the process of preparing for tenure, promotion or for applying for a new job? Do you, as is increasingly the norm, wish to include your citatation data? Are you concerned that some or perhaps many of the journals in which your work is cited are not ISI listed?
Then you may benefit from checking out Anne-Wil Harzing’s new software for analyzing Google Scholar citation data, Publish or Perish.
It produces a number of useful statistics, such as, obviously, total number of papers and citations, average citations, etc., but also, and less trivially, the important metrics for measuring an academic’s impact, such as Hirsch’s h-index (and its updated version that gives more weight to more recent papers).
The New Nordic Cuisine
| Peter Klein |
Because we have an above-average number of Nordic readers I’ll mention that the current issue of Food and Wine magazine profiles Danish super chef Claus Meyer, described as “Scandinavia’s answer to James Beard and Alice Waters.” Recommended Copenhagen restaurants include Meyer’s Noma along with MR Restaurant, The Paul, and Restaurant Paustian. Stop by on your next trip to Copenhagen and tell ’em O&M sent you.
Method versus Methodology
| Peter Klein |
Speaking of pet peeves, here’s another of mine: the regular misuse of the word “methodology” in academic papers. Methodology is the study of scientific methods, a branch of epistemology. Econometric techniques, strategies for gathering data, means of testing hypotheses, etc. are methods, not methodologies. Yet how many empirical papers include a section titled “Methodology” or “Data and Methodology”? It makes me cringe. “We use an instrumental-variables methodology,” or “our methodology employs case studies and structured interviews.” No, those are your methods. Unless you’re citing Popper or Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend or Blaug or Mäki you probably don’t have a methodology section.
This passage from the American Heritage Dictionary (1992 edition) makes the point well:
In recent years . . . “methodology” has been increasingly used as a pretentious substitute for “method” in scientific and technical contexts, as in “The oil company has not yet decided on a methodology for restoring the beaches.” This usage may have been fostered in part by the tendency to use the adjective “methodological” to mean “pertaining to methods,” inasmuch as the regularly formed adjective “methodical” has been preempted to mean “orderly, systematic.” But the misuse of methodology obscures an important conceptual distinction between the tools of scientific investigation (properly “methods”) and the principles that determine how such tools are deployed and interpreted — a distinction that the scientific and scholarly communities, if not the wider public, should be expected to maintain.
Super Top Secret Crazy Maps
| Peter Klein |
In the early days of World War II a map showing Hitler’s plans for dividing up South America after a German invasion began circulating in Washington. The map turned out to be a hoax created by British intelligence, part of a massive covert operation to persuade US officials to enter the war. (This is all documented in Thomas Mahl’s fascinating Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944, one of the most interesting foreign-policy books no one has read.)
Now Strange Maps reveals a recently declassified Soviet memo from 1973 showing how the world would look without the North American continent, a result “which may happen as a result of correction of gravity field of the Earth by the A-241/BIS device.” A hoax, to be sure, but whose? I’m guessing the CIA or a US defense intelligence agency. Why waste time explaining bomber gaps and missile gaps to appropriations committee members when you can simply show them a map like this?
Update: The Brits are at it again, using a fake map showing a nonexistent Iran-Iraq maritime border to prove the HMS Cornwall was seized in Iraqi waters. Craig Murray reports here and here.
Breaking News
| Peter Klein |
Several important announcements for today, April 1:
Foss, Klein, Postrel Join Harvard Faculty
Nicolai, Steve, and I are pleased to announce that we have accepted chaired positions at Harvard University:
Cambridge, Mass., April 1, 2007 — World-renowned scholars Nicolai J. Foss, Peter G. Klein, and Steven R. Postrel will join the Harvard faculty as University Distinguished Professors and co-directors of the newly formed Long Tail Institute for the Global Economy. Says incoming President Drew Faust: “I am delighted that Professors Foss, Klein, and Postrel are joining our team. I have always admired Foss and Klein’s work on judgment-based entrepreneurship, and I enjoyed Postrel’s columns in the New York Times before he changed his name to ‘Steve.’ After reading their blog I knew they were the ones to lead Harvard into the global information age.”
Announcing Guest Bloggers Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton
We’re delighted to welcome Stanford University professors Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton as our newest guest bloggers. Sutton writes: “Jeff and I have recently come out of what we call our ‘Blue Period,’ characterized by moodiness and irritability toward toward economists. We now realize that economic analysis is vital to the proper understanding of organizations. What better way to flaunt our new perspective than by joining the outstanding bloggers at Organizations and Markets? We’ll also be working on our new book, Not Ready to Make Nice in the Workplace.” Welcome, Jeff and Bob!
Google Acquires O&M
This hit the news wires today:
Mountain View, April 1, 2007 — Google Corporation announced today it has acquired a majority stake in the weblog Organizations and Markets, a leading provider of news and information on organizations, strategy, entrepreneurship, and anti-postmodernism. Google CEO Larry Schmidt noted that Google is seeking to expand beyond the search-engine business. “Let’s face it, search is yesterday’s technology. There’s too much junk out there. Instead of using computers to sort our information with confusing page-ranking algorithms, the time has come to hire experts to tell us what the world is really like. The authors of Organizations and Markets are just the experts we’ve been looking for.” Google shares dropped 42% in heavy trading upon the announcement.
Here are some important April 1 stories from prior years.
Economies of Scope?
| Nicolai Foss |
Yesterday’s WSJ features an article on economists’ consulting jobs with (UC Berkeley Professor — and CBS Honorary Doctor) David Teece playing the main role. The article notes that Teece “… doesn’t dispute estimates that his career earnings from expert consulting amount to at least USD 50 million.” Teece has done important work on the role that economies of scope play in explaining diversification (here and here). Is he living his own theory?
HT to Marginal Revolution.
John McMillan (1951-2007)
| Peter Klein |
For several years I used John McMillan’s book Games, Strategies, and Managers as a supplemental text in my managerial economics courses. I was saddened to learn that McMillan died last Tuesday at the age of 56 after losing a battle with cancer. Here is an obituary. McMillan taught at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, edited the Journal of Economic Literature, and wrote many articles and books, including Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets.
David Warsh says “Give him a couple of paragraphs — on the evolution of folk football into rugby, soccer, and American football; or the various ways to rig an auction; or the reasons China and Vietnam grew so successfully out of their planned economies while Russia did not — and he could make economics jump right off the page and into the mind of his reader.”
Comment Spam
| Peter Klein |
Like most blogs we filter our comments for spam, and lately the spam filter has been picking up a number of false positives. If you leave a comment on the site (and are not pushing Cia!lis or re.fin.ancing) and it does not appear right away, please let us know.
Discover Who Is Citing You in Books
| Nicolai Foss |
We academics are a narcissisic bunch. I know colleagues who check their citations on Google Scholar or the SSCI on a weekly basis. Of course, I myself would never, ever indulge in such egocentric excesses!!! That being said, however, I am still mildly interested in who may think that my modest contributions are good enough to cite.
A constant source of irritation is that while it is rather easy to find out who is citing you in the journals, it is more difficult to find out who is citing you in books (this may not matter to deans and research bureaucrats, but it is still nice to know). Until, that is, I discovered books.google.com — which allows you to do exactly this! Enjoy!
The Long Tail: Extreme Dining Edition
| Peter Klein |
The great thing about the long tail is that every taste, no matter how idiosyncratic, can be accommodated. Literally. Thanks to the web, no one need do without alligator, antelope, bison/buffalo, caribou/reindeer, elk, frog, kangaroo, kobe beef, lamb, llama, rabbit, rattlesnake, snapping turtle, venison, wild boar, yak, duck, goose, guinea fowl, ostrich, pheasant, quail, squab, or wild turkey. All are available from exoticmeats.com. Next best thing to the Gourmet Club! (HT: Jeff Tucker)
Reminds me of one of my favorite billboards:
Preserving Anonymity, Electronically
| Peter Klein |
Heard the one about the sign in the Buddhist public park: “Stay on path”?
Here’s a case where the path can get you in trouble. Nicolai and I were recently discussing the problem of preserving author anonymity when sending electronic referee reports or other documents. As many of you know, word processing programs typically preserve the author’s name and (often) affiliation as part of the document header. When submitting a manuscript or referee report in Word you should click File, Properties, Summary and delete your name and other identifying information before sending. If you convert your file to PDF, however, there is another danger. Acrobat saves the full path of the source file (e.g., the Word document used to create the PDF) under File, Document Properties, Description, Location. So even if the source file contains no identifying information, the PDF file may include something like “C:\Documents and Settings\Peter Klein\My Documents\Referee Reports\Really Bad Papers\” under Document Properties. Windows users should make sure their documents are stored in a generic location like c:\ or c:\temp before converting to PDF. If they want to preserve their anonymity, that is.
Funny Professor Names
| Peter Klein |
Great names for economists: Price Fishback, Thomas Saving, Jim Stock, Eric Bond.
Ernst Fehr specializes in — what else? — fairness (Fehrness?).
All-time best name for a law professor: my friend Bob Lawless.
My colleague Sandra Mortal has a great name for a professor of medicine, but unfortunately she teaches finance.
Your sugestions?
Scandinavian Economists
| Peter Klein |
Frederic Sautet reports on a reception honoring Gordon Tullock at George Mason University Law School. When someone wondered aloud why Tullock didn’t share the 1986 Nobel Prize with James Buchanan, Tullock responded that he blames a remark he made around that time that “there were more good economists in the state of Virginia than in all of Scandinavia.” The sensitive Swedes must not have been familiar with Tullock’s style.
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