Good for a laugh in Soc 101.

Now, there are several orgtheory related points here. First and most obvious is the fact that there’s already an interesting literature on the dynamics of competitive racecar driving, as many of you will be aware. But, second, the social organization of this particular sort of Folk Rallying seems fascinating. For one thing, Finnish egalitarianism is evident in the composition of the field in the clip. For another, it seems that there is a terrific rule that keeps resource competition—the temptation to gussy up your car to give yourself an advantage—from getting out of hand. Rules such as this exist in NASCAR and other professional racing sports, of course, but they require a bunch of administrative monitoring systems which presumably would just be way too much hassle for a sport that’s not just amateur but also very informal, and meant to be fun. The solution? Every entrant’s car has a designated nominal value (1,000 Euro or whatever). At the end of the race, if another racer comes up to you and asks to buy your car for that much money, you have to sell it to them.

But enough trolling. Beyond the problem of vague concepts lies the question of vague argument. On the plane home this Sunday I read Jon Elster’s new book on De Tocqueville. It’s typical Elster: incisive, clever, restless, and weirdly dissatisfying. At one point he remarks that too many writers are not clear enough to be wrong. And then, in passing,

Tocqueville here relies on what I called the first law of pseudo-science, “Everything is a little bit like everything else.”

He immediately follows this up with the second law of pseudo-science: “Everything is causally related to everything else”. The latter law is, I think, a besetting vice in much of sociology, where one reaction to monocausal explanation (on the one hand) or empirical murkiness (on the other) is to emphasize the irreducible complexity of the explanation, to the point where there is really no prospect of finding any disconfirming evidence. But while Elster’s second law leads directly to disaster, the first law seems more ambiguous in its effects. For one thing, any number of innovations in social theory (or I daresay the sciences more broadly) spring from applying this law as a heuristic. Drawing on a post from almost six* years ago, the strategy is as follows:

Take a few basic kinds of institutions, structures or practices that can be identified across many different social contexts. There are markets, say, and there is politics. There is ritual. There are hierarchies. There are networks. There is culture. And so on. (Not all of these are the same sort of thing; that doesn’t matter at the moment.) Identify the basic features of each. Now, pick one of these and show it underpinning a setting usually taken as governed by one the others.

For example, you can say Politics is really Markets. This is Public Choice Theory. Because the market form is such a dominant feature of contemporary societies and of talk about them, applying the “x is really a market” trick to any given x is by now ubiquitous not just in theory but also often as a matter of common interpretation and even public policy, facts on the ground notwithstanding.

Markets are really Politics. This is one wing of economic sociology—Neil Fligstein’s work for instance—but also a line of left-wing economics.

Markets are really Culture. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money takes the world of apparently cold-blooded economic exchange and shows how the ritual creation of social ties between people is fundamental to the nature of money. Alternatively, for a comparative approach read Frank Dobbin’s Forging Industrial Policy to see how 19th-century economic policy about Railroads took as its model different conceptions of the polity in each of France, Britain and the United States.

Organizations are really Ritual. Meyer and Rowan’s “Institutional organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony” makes the case.

Markets are really Hierarchies. Sounds like a tough one, but Art Stinchcombe has a go at the theory in “Contracts as Hierarchical Documents.”, and the AEA junior job “market” instantiates the practice.

Ritual is really Markets. Rational Choice theory of Religion.

Markets are really Networks. Mark Granovetter; Harrison White. Production markets are really self-reproducing interfaces created by the mutual monitoring of firms trying to find a sustainable niche in a production system.

And so on and so forth.

*Jesus Christ.

… these writers … are condemned for applying rigorous ideas in a careless manner. (Some of my colleagues here in the rigor-fixated halls of the University of Chicago have a particularly snide way of referring to this kind of work: this is the kind of work they do at Harvard.)

With no connections to either Harvard or Chicago, I don’t have a dog in this fight. But key flaws in my personality leave me unable to resist formulating the obvious rejoinder from Cambridge, viz, that as the intellectual home of pragmatism in its many forms, Chicago is where they apply careless ideas in a rigorous manner.

I’ll get my coat.

The graph clumps into several connected subgroups. There’s family in Ireland, sociology types, philosophy types, and blogger types—these categories aren’t necessarily exclusive. An imaginary prize to the first commenter who can guess the identity of the node colored in green, who seems to be at the center of everything.

The Cupertino, Calif., computer maker said Joel Podolny, the dean of the Yale School of Management, will join Apple as vice president and dean of Apple University. The company declined to provide details about the university or the position. Mr. Podolny will be stepping down as dean on Nov. 1, but will stay at Yale until year end, a spokeswoman for Yale said. She said Mr. Podolny will take up his new position in early 2009.

I wonder what the backstory is here. Maybe some of our OrgTheory readers (or contributors, ahem) know more about Apple’s plans. But it’s interesting to see Podolny get hired by a company that knows a great deal about the importance of status in establishing and maintaining a good position in the market. Consider just the back-cover summary of Podolny’s excellent Status Signals in light of Apple’s position in the market:

Why are elite jewelers reluctant to sell turquoise, despite strong demand? Why did leading investment bankers shun junk bonds for years, despite potential profits? Status Signals is the first major sociological examination of how concerns about status affect market competition. Starting from the basic premise that status pervades the ties producers form in the marketplace, Joel Podolny shows how anxieties about status influence whom a producer does (or does not) accept as a partner, the price a producer can charge, the ease with which a producer enters a market, how the producer’s inventions are received, and, ultimately, the market segments the producer can (and should) enter. To achieve desired status, firms must offer more than strong past performance and product quality—they must also send out and manage social and cultural signals. Through detailed analyses of market competition across a broad array of industries—including investment banking, wine, semiconductors, shipping, and venture capital—Podolny demonstrates the pervasive impact of status. Along the way, he shows how corporate strategists, tempted by the profits of a market that would negatively affect their status, consider not only whether to enter the market but also whether they can alter the public’s perception of the market.

Of course, I don’t know what Joel will be doing in his new job, but it’s hard to think of someone better-positioned intellectually to understand what Apple’s strategy in the market is all about. You can’t follow developments in the computer industry at all closely without being surprised by the persistently boneheaded advice that analysts and commentators push about Apple, almost all of which involves recommendations that the company do things that would eliminate its ability to differentiate itself from its competitors or compete in segments of the market that would preclude it from being seen as distinctive in any way.

I was asked at the last minute to participate, after another panelist dropped out, and gave a talk about the place of cultural analysis in economic sociology and economics. I wasn’t too happy with it, because I had to write it too quickly. But as the conversation continued about The Place of Culture, I began to think about the cases of Sociology of Culture (vis a vis Sociology) and Economics (vis a vis Social Science). In a funny way, the explanatory projects of economics and the sociology of culture share some core features. Not in their formal substance, their political bent, or—dare I say—in their relative degree of success and power out in the world. But the two of them remind me of comparisons between the United States and France. Comparisons between the two could easily highlight their differences from one another, and insofar as they come into contact with each other mutual contempt is the order of the day. But this antipathy springs from strong similarities in temperament, pathos and orientation. The U.S. and France are both revolutionary nations, with a strong belief that they are leading where other countries should follow, whose visions of democracy, individualism and republicanism differ sharply but are at the core of the self-image of each.

Similarly, proponents of economic analysis and cultural analysis are each convinced of the fundamental nature of their approach. Every social phenomenon displays an economic or cultural dimension, respectively; both see their chosen focus as revealing the underlying nature of the phenomenon at hand; and both insist that their perspective upends received wisdom about what is happening in any particular setting. And, indeed, in their less attractive aspects, both substitute handwaving about favorite concepts and frameworks when a more detailed analysis might lead to a story that doesn’t fit so well with the overall disciplinary vision.

The analogy extends to their orientation to other fields: as Omar remarked to me at the conference, because of the totalizing tendencies of the approaches, disciplinary Others must be subsumed as special cases, studiously ignored, or cast out as impostors. And we also see it give rise to some oddities—even as it has come to be a central field within sociology, Culture still complains about its allegedly marginal status; and even as it’s the only social science that ever gets in the New York Times, economists are happy to complain about how people cannot be brought to understand truths universally acknowledged such as mutual gains from free trade or the undesirability of minimum wages or rent control or what have you.

A built-in strength of Git and Mercurial is that they are designed to make dispersed, flexibly-organized collaboration very easy. In the open-source world this often happens through publicly available repositories of code for some application or other. I was wondering how I might take advantage of this and came across a post by Mark Kalderon suggesting that BibTeX bibliography files would be a good candidate for sharing in this way. Seeing as Github provides free hosting for git repos, I’ve put up what is effectively my BibTeX bibfile directory as a repository. Anyone can clone it, extend it for their own purposes and, if they wish, propose changes to be pushed back into the main repository. You don’t have to know git to use it, though—you can just download the files or the whole directory if you wish.

Right now, the files (unsurprisingly) reflect my own research projects and interests, and are only really of interest if you use LaTeX to write your papers. But you have to start somewhere.

Either-or intensities and infinitely sharp criteria of membership have been assumed in defining nets and cats. The realities of social structure are more blurred. The most revealing approach to these realities is through analysis of the validation and legitimation structures and processes which settle issues of existence and intensity of ties and attributes in social systems. One special case are the procedures of social research, which to an increasing extent are being built in as an accepted part of the validation and legitimation procedures in current American society, for better or worse.