Posts filed under ‘– Klein –’
Visual Presentation Tips
| Peter Klein |
Funny examples from an anonymous comedian (via Cliff). (Warning: some coarse language.) Not as clever as the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint but amusing nonetheless. Cliff and I both liked the pie chart on procrastination. I also liked the chart on states with squiggly borders, which relates to a serious point discussed here.
Call for Papers: Generation and Use of Academic Knowledge about Organizations
| Peter Klein |
Organization Studies, one of our favorite journals, is soliciting papers for a special issue edited by Paula Jarzabkowski, Susan Mohrman, and Andreas Georg Scherer, “Organization Studies as Applied Science: The Generation and Use of Academic Knowledge about Organizations.” Submission deadline is 30 November 2007. Here is the call for papers: (more…)
More on Social Capital, Historically Considered
| Peter Klein |
For more on social capital in history see Rowena Olegario’s history of credit reporting firms, A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business (Harvard University Press, 2006). Here is an EH.Net review. Here is Dan Klein’s earlier work on credit bureaus.
Fighting Illini
| Peter Klein |
Big things are happening at the University of Illinois. Former O&M guest blogger and longtime Illinois professor Joe Mahoney has been named Investors in Business Education Professor of Strategy in the College of Business. And O&M friend and regular commenter Randy Westgren has been appointed Head of the Department of Business Administration. Congratulations to Joe and Randy!
Berle and Means Were Partly Right
| Peter Klein |
Check out Kenneth Lipartito and Yumiko Morii’s revisionist account of The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) — what they call the “ur-text of managerial capitalism” — and its influence on the academic and policy literatures. Well known interpretations of the Berle-Means thesis from Robert Gordon, James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others were far different from the original. Berle and Means cared little about efficiency, argue Lipartito and Mori, but were more interested in problems of power and social responsibility. They were wrong about dispersed ownership — stockholdings were actually more concentrated in the US than in other Western economies — but right that particular agents could exercise disproportionate control over corporate assets through family control and pyramid structures. Berle and Means’s main concern, in other words, was entrenchment more generally, not simply entrenched managers taking advantage of passive shareholders.
The paper is provocative but doesn’t cite the best modern work on corporate structure prior to the 1930s such as Holderness, Kroszner, and Sheehan (1999), which worries me. Worth a look in any case.
The Nature of the (Nonprofit) Firm
| Peter Klein |
Organizational economists are learning more about family firms and cooperatives but still know relatively little about nonprofits. What is their objective function? How are they organized, managed, and governed? Jill Horwitz and Austin Nichols’s NBER paper, “What Do Nonprofits Maximize? Nonprofit Hospital Service Provision and Market Ownership Mix,” looks at the behavior of nonprofit, government, and for-profit hospitals to address these questions. Key finding is that nonprofit and government-owned hospitals respond to competiton; the more local-market competition they face from for-profit hospitals, the more likely they will offer profitable services and the less likely they will offer unprofitable services. For-profit hospitals, however, tend to offer the same mix of services regardless of what competing for-profit hospitals are offering. Overall, Horwitz and Nichols find the Newhouse (1970) model, in which nonprofits maximize their own output, more plausible than the Hirth (1999) model in which nonprofits are “for-profits in disguise.” (HT: De Gustibus)
Vapor-Articles
| Peter Klein |
Like most academics I list unpublished papers and projects on my CV. I distinguish between “Completed Working Papers” that can be downloaded and circulated and earlier-stage “Research in Progress.” I try to maintain a narrow definition of the latter, including only papers that are at least partially written or analysis that is at least partially complete. Some colleagues list even earlier-stage projects better described as “wishes and dreams.”
Someone recently asked why I list research in progress. Are these papers the academic equivalent of vaporware — attempts to discourage others from working on these topics by signalling that I have the market cornered?
I don’t think so. Most academics list these papers and projects not to deter entry, but to signal to colleagues — potential collaborators, not potential competitors — what they are working on and interested in. Naming the coauthors can also have a certification effect (like the role played by VCs and banks for startup firms). It is also important to communicate, credibly, to current (and potential) employers that one has a good set of projects in the pipeline. In short, the motives are probably benign
Is Social Capital Path Dependent?
| Peter Klein |
Recent work by Robert Putnam, Douglass North, Ed Glaeser, and others has highlighted the role of social capital — membership in organizations, participation in civic activities, social trust — plays in economic development. Empirically, social capital has typically been measured with survey data, making historical comparisons difficult. It is important to know, however, how social capital changes over time. If social capital is largely path dependent, then there is little that can be done to improve the stock or productivity of social capital at a particular time.
A new paper by Marta Felis Rota, “Is Social Capital Persistent? Comparative Measurement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” exploits Adelman and Morris’s (1965) database of socio-economic indicators for 23 countries from 1850 to 1914 to construct social capital indicators for the late nineteenth century, which can be compared to similar indicators for the twentieth century. Evidence for path dependence is weak; all countries enjoy long-run increases in social capital but rates of change vary widely. Check it out.
Education Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
F. A. Hayek, writing in The Counter-Revolution of Science (pp. 195-96 of the Liberty Fund edition) on one consequence of the French Revolution:
The Revolution had swept away the old system of colleges and universities, which system was based largely on classical education, and replaced them in 1795 with the new écoles centrales, which became the sole centers of secondary education. In conformity with the ruling spirit and by an overviolent reaction against the older schools, the teaching in the new institutions was for some years confined almost exclusively to the scientific subjects. Not only the ancient languages were reduced to a minimum and in practice almost entirely neglected, even the instruction in literature, grammar, and history was very inferior, and moral and religious instruction, of course, completely absent. . . .
Thus, a whole generation grew up to whom that great storehouse of social wisdom, the only form indeed in which an understanding of the social processes achieved by the greatest minds is transmitted, the great literature of all ages, was a closed book. For the first time in history that new type appeared which as the the product of the German Reaschule and of similar institutions was to become so important and influential in the later nineteenth and the twentieth century: the technical specialist who was regarded as educated because he had passed through difficult schools but who had little or no knowledge of society, its life, growth , problems and values, which only the study of history, literature and languages can give.
In economics especially but also in sociology, political science, psychology, and other social sciences we have trained many generations of such “technical specialists.” Is this wise? Put differently, would a typical PhD student in one of these fields benefit more, on the margin, from taking a course in history or literature or philosophy instead of one more course in quantitative methods?
“As Bad as PowerPoint”
| Peter Klein |
The ubiquitous PowerPoint, discussed frequently on these pages (1, 2, 3), is becoming a metaphor for casual or perfunctory thought, word, and deed. I noticed this passage in a (mostly negative) review of the new Harry Potter movie:
[Screenwriter] Goldenberg has succeeded in condensing the book into the film equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation, bouncing from incident to incident without anything amounting to much, while [director] Yates can’t rise above the material he’s been given, seemingly missing the emotional point of some crucial scenes and just clicking for the next slide to come up.
What a great addition to the urban dictionary! “I’m worried about Bob. He seems so aimless, going through life just clicking for the next slide to come up.”
Are Economists Free-Market Apologists?
| Peter Klein |
This New York Times piece describes contemporary economics as a rigid free-market orthodoxy, challenged by a few courageous iconoclasts who question free trade, support minimum wages, favor tax and spending increases, and the like. To the author: What color is the sky on your planet?
I was to blog a more detailed reaction but Alex Tabarrok, Larry White, and Greg Mankiw, among others, have beaten me to it. Note that Alex and Larry both refer to Dan Klein’s work on the ideological views of economists, which we’ve discussed often here at O&M. The Times piece did not bother to include any data, of course.
Adam Smith and the Corporation
| Peter Klein |
Larry Elliott writes in the Guardian that Adam Smith would oppose the modern shareholder model of the corporation. Smith, he argues, “would have looked askance at an economy gripped by speculative fever, with the emphasis not on making things but on buying and selling, making a turn, churning, taking a punt, sweating an asset.” Leaving aside for the moment that the distinction between “making” and “buying and selling,” as used here, is entirely specious, is this a fair interpretation of Smith? Elliott continues:
Smith, indeed, predicted what might happen in the Wealth of Nations, when he supported the idea of private companies (or copartneries) against joint stock companies, the equivalent of today’s limited liability firm. In the former, Smith said, each partner was “bound for the debts contracted by the company to the whole extent of his fortune”, a potential liability that tended to concentrate the mind. In joint stock companies, Smith said, shareholders tended to know little about the running of the company, raked off a half-yearly dividend and, if things went wrong, stood only to lose the value of their shares.
“This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies who would, upon no account, hazard their own fortunes in any private copartnery. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.” (more…)
Workshop in Economic Methodology
| Peter Klein |
The Stirling Centre for Economic Methodology (SCEME) is soliciting proposals for its 9th workshop on economic methodology, 13 October 2007 at the University of Stirling, UK. This year’s theme is “Knowledge, Information, and the Economy.” Proposals are due 27 July 2007. Here is the call for papers and here is additional information.
Empirical Research in the RBV
| Peter Klein |
Empirical work in transaction cost economics has been examined in several detailed reviews. Joskow (1988), Shelanski and Klein (1995), Klein (2005), and Macher and Richman (2006) are sympathetic to TCE while David and Han (2004) and Carter and Hodgson (2006) find the evidence less convincing. The critics of TCE raise some good points but do not, in my judgment, show that any rival theory has greater explanatory power. How about the resource-based view?
Surprisingly, while the RBV is central to much recent empirical work in strategy and organization, its empirical track record has not been scrutinized systematically as has TCE’s. Strategic Organization published a paper last year, “Tests of the Resource-Based View: Do the Empirics Have Any Clothes?” by Richard Arend, that begins to fill this gap. (more…)
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis: Web Design Edition
| Peter Klein |
A few years back, web designer Matt Jones coined the term lazyweb — the notion that there are so many other smart people out there working on the web alongside you, and that if you wait long enough, someone else will write, build, or design that cool thing you were thinking about, and save you the bother of doing the actual work.
This is from Mike Gunderloy, who obviously does not subscribe to the Kirznerian or Knightian versions of the efficient sidewalk theory. To be fair, he’s not talking about final goods (Why bother to make and sell something when someone else will have already made and sold it?) but intermediate goods (Why make something myself when I can free ride on the efforts of others?). Naturally we fully endorse such free riding.
Francis Hutcheson’s Classic Text on Natural Law
| Peter Klein |
O&M readers interested in the Scottish Enlightenment (and who isn’t?) may enjoy this new volume from Liberty Fund, Francis Hutcheson’s Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson, of course, was Adam Smith’s teacher at the University of Glasgow. Writes General Editor Knud Haakonssen:
Hutcheson’s Institutio was written as a textbook for university students and it therefore covers a curriculum which has an institutional background in his own university, Glasgow. This was a curriculum crucially influenced by Hutcheson’s predecessor Gershom Carmichael, and at its center was modern natural jurisprudence as systematized by Grotius, Pufendorf, and others. . . . The Institutio is the first major [published] attempt by Hutcheson to deal with natural law on his own terms. . . . It therefore encapsulates the axis of natural law and Scottish Enlightenment ideas, which so many other thinkers, including Adam Smith, worked with in their different ways.
The book includes both the Latin original and an English translation, so you can brush up on your Latin as you work through the text (an added bonus!).
The Strategic Advantage of Bad Writing
| Peter Klein |
Murray Rothbard’s concise and typically witty explanation for the triumph of Keynesian macroeconomics:
How was the Keynesian Revolution accomplished? How was this mare’s nest of discredited Mercantilist fallacies put over? In the first place, by intellectual intimidation. The old fallacies were dressed up by Keynes in such a wilderness of unclear writing and pretentious jargon, in such a bewildering morass of strange concepts, that the Keynesian disciples claimed to be the only ones able to understand the Master.
From a 1959 article included as the introduction to a new edition of Henry Hazlitt’s Failure of the “New Economics”. I feel better now about my bad writing. If I only had disciples. . . .
A World Without Supermarkets
| Peter Klein |
It might be like Detroit, now the only major US city without a national chain supermarket. (Thanks to Cliff for the link.)
I’m sure these guys will produce a study soon showing how Detroit residents are better off without the big retailers.
History of Organizations Bleg from J.C. Spender
| Peter Klein |
Our friend J.C. Spender seeks help from the O&M readership:
I’m desperately searching for a history of organizations — not the history of corporations, nor of corporate law, nor of combinations, nor of Guilds, nor of military organizations, nor of religious ones either.
My problems are (1) to find literature about the history of organizations — are there some good books, papers, etc.? Now that I focus my mind on this I cannot come up with much other than the history of corporations and markets, rather than organizations and markets. My one discovery is the history of the Jesuit movement which, one might argue, was the first modernist “organization.”
(2) Barbara Czarniawska told me that the actual term “organization” only came into general use with the rise in “systems theory” — Henderson, Barnard, and Co. I find this unbelievable but I’m hard pressed to refute or in any other way resist her.
My intuition is that there is something here awaiting discovery about the decline of religion and the emergence of strictly secular and profit-oriented organizations — something beyond the Protestant Ethic therefore and entailing or legitimating a set of objectives which are not in the service of the public — quite to the contrary.
Any suggestions? Please share them below.
One (Electronic) User at a Time, Please
| Peter Klein |
Remember the old days when you’d go the library for a book or journal and find it checked out? (Student readers: the “library” was a large building with books and print journals — hardcopies, basically — that users could borrow and return. Ask your parents or grandparents about this.) Now that most journals are available electronically, on the web, you can get the article you need regardless of who else is using the same item. Or can you?
I clicked today for an article from the American Journal of Sociology (don’t ask) and got the following error:
The institutional subscription you are using to access this protected content allows for only one user at a time. Someone at your organization is currently using this subscription. Please try again later. Otherwise, after 30 minutes of inactivity by the first user, this subscription will be available to you.
Now, how do I find this other user and pester him or her to quit?
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