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ganz on organizing
Marshall Ganz is a legendary labor organizer who gained experience in the civil rights movement as a recruit to Freedom Summer and later joined Cesar Chavez’s farm worker movement. Ganz, in his second...
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cocky bastards
John Gruber mentions a report in the New Scientist about some research showing that people prefer cockiness to expertise: The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,...
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ganz’s why david sometimes wins
Cesar Chavez and Marshall Ganz A lot of research on social movement outcomes tries to explain under what conditions movements are likely to experience success. Weight is given to the movement context...
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why women in congress outperform men
From a working paper by political scientists Sarah Anzia and Christopher Berry: We argue that the process of selection into political office is different for women than it is for men, which results in...
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organizing music
I’ve used various conducting/conductor-related clips in my teaching, here’s a smattering of interesting ones: A very engaging Itay Talgam TED presentation on conducting (with links to leadership,...
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did obama cross the johnson line?
On Tuesday night, President Obama announced that he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to continue the fight against al-Qaeda. This is not surprising to anyone who has followed Obama. Even...
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orgtheory quiz #3: andorran politics
This one goes out to “Jerry” in Ann Arbor, a very special orgtheorist… What form of executive leadership does Andorra have? Who is the head of state? Andorra is a parliamentary democracy with a...
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jim march’s passion and discipline
OK, I did not know that Jim March’s movie on Don Quixote’s Lessons for Leadership, Passion and Discipline, is posted online. If you haven’t seen the movie yet — highly recommended: the movie has some...
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obama as state builder, not foreign policy leader
The essence of Obama is that he’s a master of rules, possesses extreme patience, and is all about big picture thinking. If you look at his greatest moments, they stem from these traits. Obama’s first...
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exalted professional syndrome: on expert driven dysfunction
A few days ago, we got into a good discussion about the organizational culture of hospitals. The professional identity of many doctors is tied up with a need to assert authority and treat subordinates...
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party political broadcast
I’m running for a position on the Publications Committee in this year’s ASA Elections, and voting has just opened. So, naturally, I am hereby soliciting your vote. This may seem like an impersonal...
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leading through failure
Erika Summers Effler’s new book, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups, delves deeply into the inner lives of social movement organizations. One of the...
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“lab in the field” experiments, behavioral games and real life outcomes.
Lab in the field setting... (Uganda, summer 2009) Behavioral games are abstract situations in which individuals have to allocate resources between themselves and other players and allow to study...
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great (untested) propositions from org. theory
Today I ran across this beautiful paragraph from an American Political Science Review article (1963) by Peter Blau: In general, a situation of collective dependence is fertile soil for the development...
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institutionalism and public policy
Two weeks ago, I reviewed Between Movement and Establishment, an institutional analysis of youth advocacy groups. My big complaint was that institutional scholars needed to get up to speed and work on...
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what happened to apple university?
A while back, we reported that Yale b-school dean and network sociologist Joel Podolny was hired to head the new “Apple University.” Anyone know the status of that project? Or even what Apple U is...
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amj is orgtheorytastic!!!
If you love organization theory and institutional analysis, you’ll find the most recent edition of the Academy of Management Journal very interesting. December 2010 is dedicated to exploring new...
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a sociology of Steve Jobs
Hosted over on my own blog, mostly because it’s a little long, here’s A Sociology of Steve Jobs.
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steve jobs and the no @$$hole rule
Bob Sutton teaches us that @$$holes are a bad thing. They take up our time, they decrease our productivity. But what do we make of the Steve Jobs biography? According to one headline, it shows that...
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podolny interviews jim march on leadership
I don’t usually read the Academy of Management Learning & Education but the most recent issue has some interesting articles on “leadership.” The term of course is and can be highly problematic —...
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organizations and credibility
In a conversation with guest blogger emeritus Tim Bartley, we got into a discussion of when organizations join associations and when they are expelled. E.g., a firm being expelled from a “fair trade”...
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Enter the Vortex of Vibrating TEDnergy
The next time your Dean starts giving you a hard time because you’ve never given a TEDx talk, just have them watch this. To be honest, I think this talk justifies and redeems the entire TED brand.
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it hits the fan in virignia
Last week, Brayden asked about the firing of Teresa Sullivan, the former president of the University of Virginia. Brayden wondered if it was about an argument about the pace of change at Virignia. I...
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beauty queen politicians
Guest blogger emerita Hilary Levey Friedman has a nice article in Slate today about beauty contest winners who go into politics. The take home point? The pageants now focus on scholarship, which...
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routine charisma in organizations
Guest blogger emeritus and burning lady Katherine Chen has a new article out in Qualitative Sociology on the issue of charisma in organizations: “Charismatizing the Routine: Storytelling for Meaning...
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J. Richard Hackman and his legacy
Over a week ago, a colleague called to let me know that our advisor, Harvard Prof. J. Richard Hackman, had passed. For months, I knew that this news would eventually come, but it’s still painful to...
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theories of great social actors
When I visited Millsaps College a few weeks ago, I got into a discussion about international relations theory with my host, political scientist Michael Reinhard. I asked him why we (social scientists)...
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lifting the crimson curtain: Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in...
As a grad student, I always found crossing the bridge over the Charles River from Harvard University to the Harvard Business School (HBS) to be a bit like approaching Emerald (or more appropriately,...
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dumping your organizational identity
Dissertation topic for up and coming orgheads: Facebook’s complete dominance over the field of friendship based social networking creates an interesting opportunity for the study of organizational...
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mentors vs. sponsors in labor markets
A lot of sociologists buy into the theory of “sponsored mobility,” which means that elites pick who gets the mobility. So I think there should be a lot of sympathy for recent research showing that...
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gender quotas and boards of directors
Siri Ann Terjesen is an assistant professor of management and international business at Indiana University. She is an entreprenuership researcher and she also does work on supply chains and related...
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higher education and the “new economy”
Wired recently produced a nifty graphic that showed were the major tech firms recruit their employees. The messages are obvious: Physical proximity – this is West Coast/Canada intensive. Engineering....
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book announcement: party in the street – the antiwar movement and the...
It is my pleasure to announce the forthcoming publication of a book by Michael Heaney and myself. It is called Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11. It will be...
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soviet deep battle doctrine: policy so bad it’s good
A while back, I got into reading about Soviet “Deep Battle” doctrine. Here’s the Wiki summary: Deep battle encompassed manoeuvre by multiple Soviet Army front-size formations simultaneously. It was not...
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organizing, mobilizing, and the people’s climate march – a guest post by...
Hahrie Han (@hahriehan) is an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College. She is a leading expert on political organizations, activism, and civic engagement. Her first book is Moved...
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computational sociology: from industry’s side
We discussed the tools computational sociologists should know and what soc departments should do. Now, we discuss what industry might do profitably engage with the field: Hire sociologists: Seriously....
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party in the street: the main idea
For the last eleven years, my friend Michael Heaney and I have conducted a longitudinal study of the American antiwar movement. Starting at the 2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York...
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firing an entire university
The legislature of South Carolina has allowed a budget to pass that will shut down South Carolina State University for a single year. According to news reports, the legislature tabled debate on a...
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orgtheory puzzle: steve jobs 1 vs. steve jobs 2
There is one part of the Apple story that has always puzzled me: what was the difference between Steve Jobs pre-NeXT and post-NeXT? For those who aren’t Appleologists, Steve Jobs was booted from Apple...
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Appetite for Innovation: Creativity & Change at elBulli (To be published by...
How is it possible for an organization to systematically enact changes in the larger system of which it is part? Using Ferran Adria’s iconic restaurant “elBulli” as an example of organizational...
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