Carol A. Heimer, Professor, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University

This seminar is being re-scheduled for the fall 

Joint WTO seminar, 12:00 noon, Terman 217

Jerry Davis, Professor of Management, University of Michigan

How Finance Reshaped America

ABSTRACT

Large corporations were a dominant force in American society for generations through their employment practices, expansion choices, and community connections. As the United States has shifted to a postindustrial economy, however, finance has increasingly taken center stage. This article documents shifts in corporate employment, institutional investment, corporate organization, financial services, governments, and household ties to financial markets over the past three decades. I argue that all these shifts can be seen as part of an interconnected movement toward a finance-centered economy, and that the recent economic downturn can be viewed as one outcome of this broader movement. 

Joint WTO seminar, 12:00 noon, Hartley Conference Room, Mitchell Bldg

Mark Mizruchi, Professor of Sociology and Business Administration, University of Michigan

CEO Ideology and Corporate Political Action: A Theoretical and Historical Account

ABSTRACT

The events surrounding the financial crisis of 2008 are well-known, and subject to a broad level of agreement. Less accepted are theories regarding the larger context within which this crisis was able to unfold. Much has been made of the financialization of the American economy and the lax regulation of new financial instruments, both of which stem from the trend toward a laissez-faire economic policy that has characterized the United States since the late-1970s. I do not take issue with these claims. Instead, I argue that these developments have an earlier and deeper source: a breakdown in the ability of large American corporations to provide collective solutions to economic and social problems, a phenomenon that I term "the decline of the American corporate elite." From a group with a relatively moderate political perspective and a pragmatic strategic orientation, this elite, through a series of historical developments, became a fragmented, largely ineffectual group, with a high degree of societal legitimacy but a paradoxical lack of power. I trace the history of this group, from its origins in the early-1900s, through its heyday in the post World War II period, to its decline beginning in the 1970s and escalating in the 1980s. I argue that the lack of coordination within the American business community created the conditions for the crises of the post-1980 period- including the massive breakdown of 2008-to occur. 

John-Paul Ferguson, Asst Prof. of Organizational Behavior, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

Space Invaders? Social Valuation and the Diversification of Union Organizing Drives, 1961 - 1999

ABSTRACT

Theories of social classification in organizational sociology lack mechanisms to explain how audiences who prefer specialist organizations would come to prefer generalist ones. This study builds on propositions about categories as a step in social valuation to develop and identify how changes to audiences’ “lay theories of value” can produce changes in the dimensions along which organizational specialization is valued. Such a shift is demonstrated empirically in the trend of trade-union organizing in the United States away from exclusive industrial jurisdictions and toward diverse organizing. Changes to the union roles and structures that supported industrial jurisdiction allowed unions that adopted those changes to benefit rather than suffer from “violating” the older jurisdictional system, by positing organizing skill rather than contract-bargaining ability as a basis for value. Data on organizing drives filed with the National Labor Relations Board between 1961 and 1999 support the theory. 

Joint STS and WTO seminar, 12:00 noon, Terman, room 217

Eric Klinenberg, Professor of Sociology, New York University

Of Risk and Pork: Urban Security and the Politics of Calculation

Andrew Lakoff, UC San Diego, and Eric Klinenberg
Forthcoming in Theory and Society

ABSTRACT:

This paper focuses on the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) controversy as a case study in the politics of risk assessment. It examines struggles among diverse actors – think tank experts, journalists, politicians, and government officials – engaged in the contentious process of establishing a legitimate definition of risk. In the field of homeland security, the means of conducting rational risk assessment have not yet been settled, and entrepreneurial officials from urban and regional governments use different techniques to identify local risks and vulnerabilities. In this contentious process, federal bureaucrats are responsible for determining how to fairly and rationally allocate resources to different cities and metropolitan regions, given that local officials have clear incentives to request funds and little cause to refrain. Although “rationality” is supposed to replace “politics” in making bureaucratic decisions over the allocation of resources, what we find instead is a political struggle over how to define, measure, and manage risk. For political actors, victory in debates over urban security comes from codifying one’s interests within the technical practice of risk assessment. 

Karl Wennberg, Research Fellow, Innovation Studies Centre, Imperial College London Business School

(with Erkko Autio, Imperial College London Business School)

You think, therefore, I become: Social Attitudes and the Transition to Entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the role of informal institutions and social interaction for economic action. Drawing upon identity theory and the interdisciplinary work on peer effects, we develop and test multi-level model incorporating the effect of peer group attitudes and behavioral norms on entrepreneurial behavior. Our model is based on the presumption that prevailing social attitudes and behaviors influence individual-level economic behavior. Using refined data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor we find that the norms of salient social groups can have up to three times as much impact on the probability of entry into entrepreneurship as compared with the individual’s own attitudes. In addition, we find that nearly half of the variance in individual-level entrepreneurship behaviors resides in between groups and cannot be accounted for by individual-level characteristics. Our analysis extends previous within-country analyses of social interaction to an international setting and complements prior research on the effect of formal institutions on entrepreneurial activity by explicitly modeling the role of informal institutions on entrepreneurship. 

Linus Dahlander, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

(with Dan McFarland, Stanford University)

Collaborations in Elite Academic Careers

ABSTRACT

New faculty members enter academe and build a research career - one that often steps out from isolated work and their local departments, into collaborative grants and publications that require a division of labor and complementary skills. As scholars build their career, they increase the range and type of contacts until an expanded, original research effort is formed. We use unique longitudinal data covering a period of 15 years at Stanford University of how newly hired untenured professors build their own work and collaborations with their colleagues. Our findings have broader implications by analyzing the sequences and conditions under which different collaborations form with colleagues from the same department or from more distant realms. 

Haldor Byrkjeflot, Project Manager, Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies

Bureaucracy; an idea whose time has come (again)

(with Paul du Gay, IOA, Copenhagen Business School)

ABSTRACT

Even now, in the aftermath of a remarkable economic and regime crisis, whose anti-bureaucratic roots are not too difficult to discern or trace, bureaucracy is still a word that appears to be unnameable to positive political coding. Bureaucracy has been treated as an anachronism. This comes partly as a consequence of the success of the New Public Management Movement, and its association with an epochalist frame of thinking, leading to organizational amnesia and an emphasis on learning fast and forgetting even faster. We focus attention upon the stabilizing functions of public bureaux, and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them more ‘flexible’ and ‘transparent’, in the name of various epochal imperatives of ‘change’ or ‘modernization’. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in government may actually provide political life with particular required ‘constituting’ qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as ‘conservative’, we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply ‘responsive’) government. Finally, through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, specifically ‘flexibility’ and ‘transparency’, we indicate how these programs are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and transparent way.  

Silviya Svejenova, Associate Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Business Policy Department, ESADE Business School

An Individual Business Model in the Making: A Chef’s Quest for Creative Freedom

(with Marcel Planellas and Luis Vives ESADE Business School)

ABSTRACT

This article extends the study of business models by exploring a type rarely considered – the individual business model – and investigates the set of activities, organizing, and strategic resources individuals employ to create and capture value while pursuing their interests and motivations. Insights are drawn from an in-depth longitudinal inductive case study to examine the triggers, mechanisms and changes in the evolving individual business model developed by chef and gastronomic innovator Ferran Adrià. His quest for creative freedom is identified as the main trigger across four periods of business model evolution, and creative responses as the principal mechanism driving business model changes. Period-specific triggers – such as the quest for authenticity, recognition and influence - and mechanisms including alertness, intent, codification, decoupling and balancing core and periphery - are specified as business model changes are outlined. Distinction is made between the creation, capture, sharing and slippage of value, and implications are proposed for the development of individual business models by professionals and other ‘creatives’.  

Seminar joint with STS and WTO, Terman 217, 12:00 noon

David Stark, Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology & International Affairs, and Chair, Dept of Sociology, Columbia University

Backing out, Locking in: Financial Models and the Social Dynamics of Arbitrage Disasters

(with Daniel Beunza, Dept of Management, London School of Economics)

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the opportunities and dangers created by financial models. Through ethnographic observations in the derivatives trading room of a major investment bank, we found that traders use models in reverse to look out for possible errors in their financial estimates. We refer to this practice as reflexive modeling. The strength of reflexive modeling resides in leveraging the cognitive independence among dispersed, anonymous actors. But as our analysis demonstrates, it can also give rise to cognitive interdependence. When enough traders overlook a key issue, their positions send the wrong message to the rest of the market. The resulting lock-in leads to arbitrage disasters. Our analysis challenges behavioral finance by locating the root of systemic risk in the calculative tools used by the actors, rather than in their individual biases and limitations. 

Michael Dahl, Associate Professor, Department of Business Studies, Aalborg University

Organizational Change and Employee Stress

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the relationship between core organizational change and the health of employees involved to illuminate the potential negative outcomes of change. It relates to the ongoing debate on how employees react and respond to organization change. I hypothesize that change increases the risk of stress of employees and test this using unusually comprehensive panel data on all stress-related medicine prescriptions for 92,952 employees in 1,588 organizations. I find that the risk of stress increases significantly for employees in organizations that change, especially for broad changes of core organizational structures. This illustrates that organizational changes are associated with significant risks of organizational destabilization and employee health problems. 

Seminar joint with STS, 12:00 noon, Encina East 207, CISAC's conference room

Daniel Kleinman, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin
(with Jacob Habinek, University of Wisconsin)

Codes of Commerce: The Uses of Business Rhetoric in the American Academy, 1960-2000

ABSTRACT

The commercialization of university research has provoked sharp debate over the implications of university-industry relationships (UIRs) for core academic ideals. In the absence of careful historical analysis, however, this debate has has often rested on unexamined assumptions concerning the actual trajectory of corporate influence over higher education. Seeking to place the debate over UIRs on a firmer historical footing, this paper makes a first pass at understanding change and continuity in the incursion of the world of industry into American academia. Examining trends in the discursive patterns found within two nationally prominent, administratively-oriented periodicals during the years 1960-2000, the paper yields several important conclusions. First, contrary to commonly held assumptions, commercially oriented talk has never been entirely absent from academic concerns, but was instead clearly manifest as early as the 1960s and 1970s. Second, the 1980s were characterized not by the emergence of commercial talk, but by the consolidation of commercial discourse, which became increasingly distinct from purely administrative concerns. Third, by the 1990s, commercial talk within the academy had become more fully doxic, or institutionalized, despite sporadic challenges. This analysis suggests that commercial discourse has been more trenchant or deeply rooted than previous analysis has presumed.  

Seminar joint with STS and WTO, 3:00 pm CERAS 527

James Evans, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago

The Google Effect on Knowledge and Culture : By broadening individual reach, the Internet narrows global understanding

ABSTRACT

Internet optimists and evangelists laud the Internet’s power to extend knowledge and culture globally, but how does it influence the ideas it unleashes? And is the promise of expanding knowledge and culture the same for individuals and for society or are the two mutually exclusive? I argue that the relationship between individual Internet search, collaborative practices and their combination into global patterns holds the key to an essential irony: As the Internet broadens individual reach it diminishes the global pool of knowledge and culture from which individuals draw. I demonstrate this with the case of global science and scholarship using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005). Even as the Internet influences scientists and humanists to become more interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan, they converge on the same central hubs of research, which narrows the global span of knowledge and culture considered in subsequent generations. 

Joint STS seminar, Scancor, Room 527, CERAS, 3:00 pm

Wendy Espeland, Associate Professor, Northwestern University
with Michael Sauder, University of Iowa
(Under contract to the Russell Sage Foundation)

Fear of Falling: The Influence of Media Rankings on Legal Education in America

ABSTRACT

For many law school deans, March is the cruelest month. Every March, U.S.News and World Reports, formerly a weekly, now biweekly, news magazine, releases its annual rankings of American law schools. Law school rankings are objects of intense scrutiny and consternation. One reporter described their publication as “…the legal profession’s version of March madness” (Parloff 1998). After U.S.News [hereafter USN] published its first ranking issue in 1990, Guido Calabresi, dean of Yale Law School (ranked first) called them “an idiot poll;” Harvard’s Dean Robert Clark (ranked fifth) pronounced them “Mickey Mouse,” “just plain wacky,” and “totally bonkers” (cited in Parloff 1998; Webster 1992a.) Eight years later, Carl Monk, executive director of the Association of American Law Schools [AALS], the main professional organization for law schools, called them “dangerous and misleading”(Cotts 1998, A13). Since then, rankings have been denounced by virtually every professional association of legal educators and administrators, including the American Bar Association, Law School Admissions Council, Society of American Law School Teachers, and National Association of Law Placement. In 2007, the AALS hosted a daylong workshop at its annual meeting dedicated to "confront[ing] the #@%$&**@ U. S. News and World Report rankings system."[1] Why have USN rankings generated such sustained fuss among law schools? Why do some deans claim rankings have “changed everything” about legal education? And why should we care? 

Jeannette Colyvas, Assistant Professor of Org. Learning and Human Development, Northwestern University

Academic Laboratories and the Reproduction of Proprietary Science: Modeling Organizational Rules through Autocatalytic Networks

ABSTRACT

We examine the emergence of proprietary science in the academy, specifically as a set of rules that came to define how university research findings should be commercialized. Drawing on detailed archives of life scientists’ early invention disclosures we demonstrate how patenting practices originated in labs, rather than legal definitions or policy incentives, and developed in a manner that cannot be separated from the actual production of science. Our investigation also suggests several mechanisms that contribute to the emergence of proprietary science: 1.) a population-level mode of learning through natural selection and lab replication, reflecting how scientific labs produce both knowledge and scientists; 2.) a lab-level, experiential form of adaptation through participation in a chain of knowledge production; and 3.) a lab-level preemptive form of adaptation through anticipation of others' actions. We operationalize these insights into a computational, agent-based model that demonstrates how an institutional regime conducive to patenting can develop and persist without top-down coordination or centralized control. Moreover, experimentation with the model suggests that emergence of such a regime is more likely to occur when lab replication is coupled with a preemptive, forward-looking lab adaptation mechanism, than when it coincides with a participatory, backward-looking form of lab adaptation.  

Mitchell L Stevens, Associate Professor, Stanford University
Michael Sauder, Assistant Professor, University of Iowa
Arik Lifschitz, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota

Football: Field Formation and Status Production in U.S. Higher Education

ABSTRACT

How should we explain the origin and enduring popularity of intercollegiate football? While previous accounts emphasize the manifest functions of the game (development of character and spirit, financial benefits, and increased visibility), we theorize that a latent function of intercollegiate football provides a more convincing explanation: intercollegiate football is a status system, institutionalized through conference associations and processes of social closure. We develop this idea by tracing the historical development of college football. Drawing on a data set constructed from conference affiliations over time, university characteristics, and reputational measures, we provide evidence of processes we would expect to see if our theory were true: status clustering and status hoarding through conference affiliation. Overall our work suggests that organizational status can be defined by several sets of evaluative criteria simultaneously. 

Neil Gross, Associate Professor of Sociology,University of British Columbia with Ethan Fosse, Graduate Student in Sociology, Harvard University

Why Are Professors Liberal?

 

Jan Löwstedt , Professor of Business Administration, Stockholm University

Knowledge production in management research: a messy practice

ABSTRACT

There has been an impressive development in the range of issues managers deal with and the knowledge needed by managers over the past 50 years. Organizations have become larger in size, much more complex in their structures and affairs, and more far-reaching in time and space. This widening of scope has been accompanied by a more specialized and deeper knowledge base. Many companies of our times can be described as knowledge-intensive firms acting in an era of globalization. Some management researchers have suggested that this development is occurring less in the character of the today’s organizations, and more in the perspectives taken in our attempts to analyse and understand the modern organization. Management ideas also tend to infuse many other aspects of modern society, such as schools, health care, art and religion, to mention only a few. Charles Perrow (1972) has described this tendency as the emerging organization society.  

Amy J. Binder, Associate Professor, University of California San Diego, (co-author Kate Wood, University of California San Diego)

“Civil” or “Provocative”? Varieties of Conservative Student Style and Discourse in American Universities

ABSTRACT

College plays a critical role in establishing and maintaining both the worldviews and public performances of political actors. But while scholars know a good deal about progressive politics on campus, they know considerably less about college student conservatism. This paper compares the political styles of conservative students in two university systems—Eastern Elite University and Western Public University—and finds them to be markedly different.We locate the experiences of politically active college students in a number of nested organizational structures, each of which provides additional layers of meaning to students’ unfolding political ideologies. We find that students are active agents in their cultivation of political styles, but that they are also enabled and constrained in their individual proclivities by the organizational resources and schemas differentially available to them on their campuses. We argue that styles of campus conservatism are much less the result of “natural inclinations” that students simply bring with them to campus—a simple mirror of students’ social class origins or early political beliefs. Rather, we argue that these dispositions are developed on campus—they are organizational products, built up through multiple networks of shared culture. Marshaling rich data from these campuses, we extend theory on institutional scripts, cultural capital, the reproduction of elite status in higher education, group styles, and the origins of political discourse. 

Indre Maurer, Assistant Professor, University of Cologne

Organizational Antecedents of Tie Formation, Knowledge Transfer and Innovation

ABSTRACT

Tie strength ranges among the most important network characteristics when explaining inter-organizational knowledge transfer and innovation. This paper identifies organizational conditions that impact the formation of strong inter-organizational ties, knowledge transfer and innovation. An empirical study of 218 engineering projects reveals (1) that, in fact, strong inter-organizational ties facilitate the transfer of external knowledge leading to product innovation and (2) that certain elements of the organization’s structure (decentralization of authority) and HR practices (stable pool of project team members) promote the formation of strong inter-organizational ties. In sum, the study highlights the importance of organization level attributes for the explanation of inter-organization level effects. 

Stephan Jooste, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University and Dick Scott, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, Stanford University

Organizations that enable and govern Public Private Partnerships: An Organizational Field Approach

ABSTRACT

The use of Public Private partnerships (PPPS) for infrastructure development is now a major part of the global solution to infrastructure development. However, ensuring these projects deliver on the promise of benefits that accrue from combining private initiative and public oversight has been particularly challenging. We argue that a variety of both public and provate organizations have emerged and are being used in varying combinations in efforts to ensure the successful development and operation of PPPs. This paper employs the concept of the organization field to illustrate various constellations and organizations that initiate, develop, and govern infrastructure PPPs. We begin by describing the challenges confronting PPP governance and the need for networks of organizations, and then add the concept of organizational fields as a theoretical lens that helps us to understand the various forces that shape and surround these networks. After reviewing a small number of examples of specific national/provincial fields, we identify several dimensions affecting the field-level characteristics that distinguish different countries. 

Juha Mattsson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University and Helsinki University of Technology

Specialize? Diversify? Or Both? - Multidimensional Scope and Organizational Survival

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate how organizations’ scope affects their competitive viability. While existing research finds inconsistent results for the diversification and performance link, we base our conceptualization on the premise that organizational environments, selection mechanisms, and organizational fit are important determinants in the way scope affects competitive outcomes. Importantly, organizations and environments have multiple core dimensions, such as product markets and technology, along which an organization may adopt different scope strategies simultaneously. We argue that in certain settings, competitive viability may actually be optimal for those organizations that are relatively diverse in one dimension but approach specialism in another. Taking an evolutionary approach, we formulate hypotheses on the effects of market and technology scope on organizational survival in emerging, technology-based industries. Our analysis of the modern biotechnology industry in Finland in 1978-2006 supports the hypotheses and thus backs up our conceptualization of the scope-survival link – possibly generalizable to other contexts and organizational dimensions. 

Peer Hull Kristensen, Professor, International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School

Globalization and the Nordic Model: Towards enabling welfare states and experimental systems of economic organization? Findings from the EU FP6 Project: Translearn

Deriving the Core Lesson from the Nordic Welfare states

While the emergence of the new economy – the global, networked, projective economy – has been problematic for a number of countries belonging both to the liberal market economies/welfare states and to coordinated market economies/conservative welfare states, its merger with the Nordic welfare states/coordinated market economies has been surprisingly successful – at least for a period.