Posts filed under ‘Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science’
The Methods of Management History
| Peter Klein |
Thomas Hobbes (1660/1994:32) observed that “Out of our conception of the past, we make a future.” It behooves us then, as managers and management scholars, to be satisfied that our conceptions of the past are developed in ways that, as far as possible, avoid the problems that would make them less than useful in creating that future.
Despite the importance of this subject, little attention has been given to the question of method/methodology in management history. A recent Google Scholar search found that, while the term “management history” produced 194,000 hits and “method in history” resulted in 674 hits, the terms “methodology in management history,” “method in management history,” “management history methodology,” and”management history method” produced no hits at all.
To address this deficiency the Journal of Management History is seeking contributions for a special issue on “Scholarship in Management History: The Importance of Methodology.” (I assume they know the difference between method and methodology.) Here is the call for papers.
Can readers suggest good books or papers on the methods of management history?
Would You Publish Your Dissertation Drafts on the Web?
| Peter Klein |
Academic researchers have long circulated unpublished working papers, first on paper (remember those little yellow NBER working papers?) and now on the web. Of course, opinions differ on when papers should be circulated. Some scholars share their early drafts, hoping to solicit constructive feedback; others prefer to wait for a more mature product, worrying about unpolished writings that live forever in the Google cache.
But would you circulate rough drafts of dissertation chapters online? Advisers, would you encourage your students to do this? (more…)
Goals or Preferences?
| Nicolai Foss |
My two favorite sociologists are Peter Abell and Sigwart Lindenberg. Both stress rationality (and rationalism), micro-foundations for social science research, and are (not surprisingly) sympathetic to, even admiring of, economics. However, neither is an uncritical admirer of economics.
In “Why the Microfoundations of the Social Sciences Should be Based on Goals Rather than Preferences” (you can find it on this page), Lindenberg argues that economists tend to conflate preferences and goals, or at least leaves open or trivializes the relationship between the two. (more…)
More Robbins
| Peter Klein |
Further commemorations of the 75th anniversary of Lionel Robbins’s Nature and Significance of Economic Science. Next week’s History of Economics Society annual meeting in Fairfax, Virginia includes a Robbins session with papers by Steve Medema and Roger Backhouse, Dave Colander, and Alain Marciano.
Rival Hypotheses in the Same Paper?
| Nicolai Foss |
Apparently, having rival hypotheses in the same paper is becoming a don’t do! — at least in management! My colleagues who are more empirically minded than I am tell me of rejections that are motivated solely by having rival hypotheses in the same paper. Big guys in the relevant field (e.g., strategic management, organization, international business) also argue against rival hypotheses-in-the-same-paper in doctoral consortia, professional development workshops, etc.
Instead, what is recommended is this:
1) concentrate on developing one set of non-rival hypotheses and deliberately neglect contraditory hypotheses
or
2) allow for hypotheses that may seem rival, but really aren’t, because they are special cases of a more over-arching framework. In the latter case, the theory development exercises become a matter of identifying the conditions under which H1 is true (and H2 is false) and the conditions under which H1 is false (but H2 is true) etc. (more…)
The Religion of Economists
| Peter Klein |
The relationship between economics and religion has attracted increasing attention in recent years. There is the positivist approach, represented by Larry Iannaccone and ERel, which applies standard economic analysis to religious activity and institutions; there are groups like the Acton Institute that try to improve economic literacy among the clergy; and some have even attempted to analyze economics itself as a kind of secular religion.
A new paper by Dan Hammond takes a more straightforward approach, analyzing the religious views of John Nef, Frank Knight, and Milton Friedman, placing this in context of the twentieth century’s general move toward embracing the secular over the sacred. (more…)
The Legacy of Max Weber
| Peter Klein |
Ludwig Lachmann’s influential Legacy of Max Weber (1971) is now available free online, courtesy of the Mises Institute’s e-book collection.
Weakly Informative Priors
| Peter Klein |
I clearly remember an incident from my first week of graduate school. I asked Professor X if he thought I should take Professor Y’s econometrics course. “Well, Y is a good teacher,” X replied. “Of course,” he added quietly, with a conspiratorial glance, “you know he’s a Bayesian, right?”
“A Bayesian? My goodness, I had no idea!” I exclaimed, not having the faintest idea what a Bayesian was. Professor X said it the way he might have said “wife-beater,” so I was sure I wanted nothing to do with such a character. Later, after studying Bayesian inference, Bayes’s Theorem, the Bayesian approach to games of incomplete information, and the like, I came to regard Bayesians as a bit less dangerous, something like the eccentric uncle at a family reunion that everyone tolerates but tries to avoid. (more…)
Bob Higgs on Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
Robert Higgs, an economic historian with a distinguished record of publication in mainstream journals, puts peer review in perspective:
Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from important, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to a complete farce, where they are not. As a rule, not surprisingly, the process operates somewhere in the middle, being more than a joke but less than the nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny that outsiders imagine it to be. Any journal editor who desires, for whatever reason, to knock down a submission can easily do so by choosing referees he knows full well will knock it down; likewise, he can easily obtain favorable referee reports. As I have always counseled young people whose work was rejected, seemingly on improper or insufficient grounds, the system is a crap shoot. Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes. In no event can peer review ensure that research is correct in its procedures or its conclusions. The history of every science is a chronicle of one mistake after another. In some sciences these mistakes are largely weeded out in the course of time; in others they persist for extended periods; and in some sciences, such as economics, actual scientific retrogression may continue for generations under the misguided belief that it is really progress.
This is from a piece on the role of peer review and scientific consensus in the global-warming debate. Notes Higgs: “Science is an odd undertaking: everybody strives to make the next breakthrough, yet when someone does, he is often greeted as if he were carrying the ebola virus. Too many people have too much invested in the reigning ideas; for those people an acknowledgment of their own idea’s bankruptcy is tantamount to an admission that they have wasted their lives.”
Of course, admitting these problems does not by itself suggest an alternative. As discussed here, the challenge is to design an institution that minimizes both Type I error and Type II error, taking into account the costs of each (presumably the costs of the former — missing an important breakthrough — are higher than the costs of the latter, which are largely wasted trees, electrons, and time, though the lower overall signal-to-noise ratio increases the chance that a published breakthrough will be overlooked).
Econometricians versus Applied Statisticians
| Peter Klein |
Econometricians, the joke goes, are people good with numbers but lacking the personality to be engineers. How about applied statisticians? James Greiner offers this comparison:
[W]hat is the difference between an empirical, data-centered economist and an applied statistician? The stereotypes I’ve internalized from hanging out in an East Coast statistics department are that economists tend to focus more on parameter estimation, asymptotics, unbiasedness, and paper-and-pencil solutions to problems (which can then be implemented via canned software like STATA), whereas applied statisticians are leaning more towards imputation and predictive inference, Bayesian thinking, and computational solutions to problems (which require programming in packages such as R).
I imagine the former characterization would apply, a fortiori, to quantitative researchers in strategic management, marketing, accounting, and the like.
Inside the Economist’s Mind
| Peter Klein |
No, not a dark, scary place, but a book of interviews by Paul Samuelson and William Barnett: Inside the Economist’s Mind: Conversations with Eminent Economists (Blackwell, 2006). The subjects are Wassily Leontief, David Cass, Robert Lucas, János Kornai, Franco Modigliani, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker, Martin Feldstein, Chris Sims, Robert Shiller, Stanley Fishcher, Jacques Drèze, Thomas Sargent, Robert Aumann, James Tobin, and Robert Shiller. Here is the Amazon link. Here is the authors’ blog. Here is a review by Mike Szenberg and Lall Ramrattan.
The Language of Economists (and Sociologists)
| Peter Klein |
From the “news that will shock no one” department come the results of this linguistic analysis of four economics journals, the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology, along with a control group containing the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Microscopy, and Journal of the American Mathematical Society:
The present study aims to add to our knowledge about economic rhetoric by conducting a data-driven analysis of economic academic discourse, both synchronically in its contemporary form, and diachronically over the past four decades. We find (1) that linguistically, economics is clearly an academic genre of its own, (2) that there are at the same time clear differences in vocabulary and style usage across economic journals, and (3) that there have been major developments in economic prose during the past four decades. We argue that there is some, albeit tentative, evidence that the discipline may face an increasing methodological gap.
Here is the paper, “What Do Economists Talk About? A Linguistic Analysis of Published Writing in Economic Journals” by Nils Goldschmidt and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66, no. 2, April 2007). The “gap” is between journals like the AER and EJ that use increasingly formal, empirical (scientistic?) terminology and journals like JEP and AJES that favor broader, social-science terms and concepts (“justice,” “society,” “culture,” “institutions”). Interestingly, use of social-science terminology in the AER, relative to the other journals, dropped between 1965 and 1980 but rose again between 1980 and 1990. Too early to reflect the Freakonomics phenomenon, to be sure, but perhaps a marker for economic imperialism more generally?
Puzzles and Problems Redux
| Peter Klein |
In an earlier post, “Economics: Puzzles or Problems?”, I noted the tendency of talented young economists to focus on clever, yet ultimately unimportant, puzzles rather than the traditional “big problems” of economics (inflation, unemployment, poverty, economic growth, regulation, political economy, etc.). Steve Levitt, and the brand of “Freakonomics” he inspired, is usually singled out as the main culprit here. A recent piece in The New Republic, “Freaks and Geeks,” takes Levitt and company to task not only for wasting their time and talent, but also for being dilettantes who get key facts wrong (a point raised by Steve Sailer). Here are responses from Levitt (very unhappy), Joshua Angrist (also unhappy, though not for personal reasons), Josh Wright (mildly unhappy), and Greg Mankiw (neutral). Sadly, no one has picked up my (very clever) reference to the relationship between Wittgenstein and Popper.
Frank Knight and the Chicago School
| Peter Klein |
Frank Knight is generally regarded, along with Jacob Viner, as the founder of the Chicago school of economics. But Knight’s relationship to the later Chicago school of Friedman, Stigler, and Director is ambiguous. Knight’s theories of capital and competition were incorporated into the mainstream Chicago (and contemporary neoclassical) tradition but his account of profit and entrepreneurship, his quasi-Austrian methodology (inherited from his teacher Herbert J. Davenport), and his eclectic social and political theories were largely ignored or forgotten.
Ross Emmett has a new paper, “Did the Chicago School Reject Frank Knight? Assessing Frank Knight’s Place in the Chicago Economics Tradition,” exploring this in detail. The conclusion: “Without [Knight’s] initiation of eaching price theory and persistence in defending it, there ould be no Chicago tradition. Yet the methodological approach and research infrastructure which propelled the Chicago School to a central position in the economics profession owe little or nothing to him.”
(Incidentally, critics of economics often target a stylized version of Chicago economics circa 1970 (see here), but these critics often seem unaware that the Chicago school of economics no longer exists. While there is still a (top-notch) economics department at the University of Chicago, there is no longer a distinct Chicago approach. The economics taught at Chicago is the same as the economics taught at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or any other top mainstream department.)
The As-Is Journal Review Process
| Peter Klein |
Eric Tsang and Bruno Frey urge editors to dump the revise-and-resubmit option, using “as-is” reviews instead. (Published version here, SSRN version here.)
[A] manuscript should be reviewed on an “as is” basis. Similar to developmental review, the process is double-blind and referees are encouraged to provide constructive comments on a manuscript. In contrast with developmental review, referees are given only two options when advising the editor regarding whether the manuscript should be published: accept or reject. The option of (minor or major) revision and resubmission is ruled out. Based on the referees’ recommendations, and his or her own reading of the manuscript, the editor makes the decision to accept or reject the manuscript. If the editor accepts the manuscript (subject to normal copy editing), he or she will inform the authors accordingly, enclosing the editorial comments and comments made by the referees. It is up to the authors to decide whether, and to what extent, they would like to incorporate these comments when they work on their revision for eventual publication. As a condition of acceptance, the authors are required to write a point-by-point response to the comments. If they refuse to accept a comment, they have to clearly state the reasons. The editor will pass on the response to the referees. In sum, the fate of a submitted manuscript is determined by one round of review, and authors of an accepted manuscript are required to make one round of revision.
Tsang and Frey identify four potential advantages to as-is reviewing: (1) authors don’t have to incorporate silly reviewer suggestions; (2) published papers reflect more closely the views of their authors, reducing “intellectual prostitution”; (3) the review process proceeds more quickly; and (4) authors are more likely to provide frank feedback to reviewers, improving the quality of the dialogue between peers. (Certainly this would eliminate the gratuitous “Thank you so much for your insightful comments” that begins every author response to referees.) There are drawbacks too, of course, but Tsang and Frey make a strong argument that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. What do readers think?
Lionel Robbins at 75
| Peter Klein |
This year’s Austrian Scholars Conference featured a panel on the 75th anniversary of Lionel Robbins’s influential Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. (Both the first and second editions of the book are available online at mises.org.) Robbins’s definition of economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between scarce means which have alternative uses” is sometimes considered so pedestrian, so completely subsumed into the mainstream of economic theory, that the book itself gets little attention today. However, as explained by the panelists at the Robbins session mentioned above, the book’s argument is sophisticated and nuanced, and definitely still worth reading.
The LSE, Robbins’s professional home, is hosting a conference on the book in December 2007, sponsored by the LSE and the journal Economica. “The purpose of this conference is both to renew the considerations of Robbins’s theme and reflect on the current nature and significance of economic science as well as examine Robbins’s own position from a historical perspective.” Details below the fold (courtesy of SSRN).
NB: Israel Kirzner’s first book, The Economic Point of View (1960), about the history of the definition of economics, is also now available online. (more…)
More on Prematurity
| Peter Klein |
We noted before some work on prematurity, the phenomenon in which scientific discoveries are initially resisted because they lie too far outside the mainstream consensus.
Here is a paper — appropriately enough, not yet published — listing discoveries resisted, and scientific papers rejected, even though their authors would go on to win Nobel prizes for these same discoveries. (HT: Bayesian Heresy.) All the examples are from the hard sciences, but I was reminded of Joshua Gans and George Shepherd’s “How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists” (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter, 1994). Akerlof’s “Market for Lemons” was rejected by three journals before the QJE agreed to publish it in 1970. Robert Lucas’s “Expecations and the Neutrality of Money” (1972) was dismissed by the AER as too technical. William Sharpe’s 1964 paper introducing the CAPM model was rejected by the Journal of Finance because of its “preposterous” assumption that investors share common beliefs (a new set of editors subsequently accepted a revised version). There are many other examples.
These stories are interesting, but I’m not sure they tell us much about the journal publication process, or scientific discovery, more generally. After all, there are surely many more examples of Type II error than these examples of Type I error — pick up the current issue of your favorite academic journal if you don’t believe me! Would a different system of peer review, or an alternative sociology of science, produce a better overall result?
See, We Can Study Religion Too
| Peter Klein |
Dan Hammond shows how economists approach religion with this cheeky summary of Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison’s Marketplace of Christianity (MIT, 2006).
The Roman Catholic Church had an enviable monopoly for centuries, so powerful that it was able to engage in first degree price discrimination. Like all monopolists, though, it struggled with technical inefficiency and potential entry. The former manifested itself in excess capital investment in beautiful cathedrals and paintings. To forestall entry it practiced usual monopolistic techniques such as limit pricing, but also tortured and killed competitors. By the end of the fifteenth century the Vatican’s pursuit of ever larger monopoly rents against the background of technological progress (the printing press) set the stage for successful entry by an entrepreneurial monk named Martin Luther. Once Luther’s firm got a foothold, all hell broke loose. Actually, it was not all hell; it was all heaven. For as every student of economics learns, when monopoly gives way to competition consumer surplus expands. There were direct gains for consumers as the price fell from the breakup of the Catholic monopoly and, in addition, the entrants lowered real production costs.
The latter welfare gains warrant explanation. What happened is that the entry of Protestant firms reduced the real cost of itch relief by doing away with ornate churches, daily masses, pilgrimages, sacraments, and middlemen confessors. This is a classic case of efficiency gains from entrepreneurial innovation, not unlike the more recent case of Wal-Mart.
And you wonder why people worry about economic imperialism?
Process Explanation: What Is It, Really?
| Nicolai Foss |
As I have recounted on an earlier occasion (here), my interest in economics was, after about 1.5 years of a somewhat unsuccessful economics study, finally stimulated by discovering what may broadly be called “process approaches” to economics, particularly the work of Axel Leijonhufvud, and Austrian and evolutionary approaches. I was captivated by the claims inherent in these approaches of studying “real” market “processes” in “time,” taking account of “genuine uncertainty,” “surprises,” “ignorance,” etc. — all in contrast to the (I then thought) mindless neoclassical obsession with equilibrium states.
Clearly, the Austrian marketing effort seemed much superior to the mainstream one, much less dull and much more concerned with reality. (more…)
Galileo in Popular Culture
| Peter Klein |
Brief follow-up to our earlier post on the Galileo Legend. Happened to catch on the radio today “Galileo” by the Indigo Girls, from their 1992 album Rites of Passage. The song opens thusly:
Galileo’s head was on the block
the crime was looking up for truth
and as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth
The chorus, a fortiori, makes Galileo into a sort of secular saint:
How long till my soul gets it right
can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of Galileo
king of night vision, king of insight
I’ll buy the “king of night vision” part — Galileo’s greatest achievement, after all, was his improvements to the telescope — but “king of insight” seems a little extreme. (It’s a catchy tune, however.)
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