Wes’s dissertation, “Foundations of Global Giving”, examines the recent explosion of globally-oriented philanthropic foundations, as well as their consequences for a variety of outcomes.  He also has a chapter on individual participation in charitable organizations, which turn out to be affected by world society variables (in addition to conventional predictors).

Philanthropy isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, and sometimes it has taken transnational forms (from missionary work to the Ford Foundation).  Yet, Wes argues we are seeing a new kind of liberal/American-style philanthropy emerging and becoming institutionalized in world society.  The argument parallels work by John Meyer and Ho-Kyu Hwang on recent changes in the development regime, where models of progress become increasingly Anglo/liberal, locating the key to progress in individuals and their aggregations (e.g., NGOs) rather than states or other collectivities.  Philanthropy is increasingly organized along global (neo-)liberal lines, generating a distinctive new flavor.  Instead of missionaries or the Ford Foundation, we get lots of INGOs and global philanthropic networks, pushing all sorts of new “social ventures” worldwide.

It goes without saying that the dissertation had some diffusion analyses — in this case models of the global expansion of philanthropic foundations (at least one type of them).  It is sort of a rite of passage — everyone in the world polity/world society tradition has to model diffusion at some point or another.  And, there have to be INGOs.  Lots and lots of INGOs.

Wes also examines the effects of foundations on national-level outcomes using statistical data.  Foundations, it seems, have concrete consequences.  Environmental foundations affect some measures of environmental degradation; medical foundations affect some kinds of medical outcomes (e.g., vaccinations), and so on.  Some of the effects are mediated by the size of the state, with bigger effects where the state is smaller.  In a world frequently typified by loose coupling, these direct consequences of foundations are actually kind of surprising…

Wes’s defense was a nation-wide phenomenon, with Liz (co-chair) and Michael Goldman in Minnesota, me and Ann Skyping in from the West Coast, and Michael Barnett on the East Coast.  The defense was particularly lively, with the Michaels doing a great job of pushing back on the world society perspective, in a manner that was thought-provoking and constructive.  It is always great when people ask the hard questions…  I think of it as a sign of respect.  You don’t push people if you know they can’t hold their own.  Anyhow, it made for a fun defense (especially for those of us, who weren’t actually in the hot seat!).

Congratulations, Wes, on a job well done!!!

p.s. Wes won some serious style-points for dedicating his dissertation to their newborn, who is appallingly cute by all accounts:  “For our beautiful daughter, Harper, whose first smiles came as I put this dissertation to bed — an event I chalk up to correlation, not causation.”

The project examines the causes and consequences of union mergers in the United States over the past century. As I told Jasmine many times, this ambitious project could easily have been two dissertations.  First, she assembles historical data on essentially the entire population of mergers among national labor unions, to understand why and under what conditions unions merge.  Second, she looks at the consequences of mergers for union governance — and in particular, the extent to which unions are internally democratic.

Union mergers are interesting for lots of reasons.  Most of the research on organizational mergers comes from the study of private-sector firms, and so unions provide a fresh arena to test conventional arguments.

But, more interesting and important is the question of how mergers relate to the union movement specifically.  Are mergers a response to external threats and the growing size of corporations which they bargain with?  Changes in the political environment?  Something else?  And, does merging change the character of unions?  No single project could fully address the latter, but Jasmine looks at a key issue:  whether mergers lead to less-democratic governance.  She discusses several reasons why this might occur… and, indeed, she finds that post-merger unions are often less-democratic their pre-merger counterparts (controlling for key factors, such as size). Thus the consolidation of unions has arguably generated some adverse consequences for the labor movement.

The project includes remarkable quantitative data and analyses (building on Judy Stepan-Norris’s unrivaled dataset on American unions), and rich archival research — a real empirical tour de force, with a very compelling case study that unpacks the findings of the quantitative research.

Having known next-to-nothing about unions before meeting Jasmine a few years back, it has been a pleasure to see this project develop, and also to work with Jasmine on various collaborative endeavors.  Judy Stepan-Norris was the chair (Caleb Southworth, Cal Morrill, and David Meyer were also on the committee)…  I was just along for the ride.

Anyhow, congratulations Jasmine!

Karen’s dissertation looks at the rise of choice in university curricula over the past century.  Classically, universities offered rigid “courses of study” — specific sequences of topics, from which students could not deviate.  Or, there were exam-based programs, again affording no options to students.

This, of course, has given way to a world where students choose among myriad elective courses, and even design their own majors to address their highly individualized interests and preferences.

Karen does a wonderful job of telling an intertwined story — that the rise of individualism writ large is bound up with celebration of individualism and choice in university curricula.  On one hand, the university is a fantastic site to interrogate the nature of modern individualism (she has some amazing qualitative material). On the other hand, Karen argues that the university, itself, is a primary locus for the institutionalization and promulgation of individualism in modern societies.  Obviously, this historical shift is related to the rise of students as consumers, but she resists a simple story that student “demand” drives the expansion of choice.  Rather, Karen compellingly argues that the imagery of demand is just one facet of a sweeping cultural shift toward greater individualism in society.

David Frank chaired the committee, and you can see his influence in the massive data collection that Karen undertook.  (David is rather zealous — some would say crazy — when it comes to data.)  She examined university course catalogs over an entire century, focusing mostly on American universities (including elite, land-grant, religious, and historically black universities and colleges).  She also has a comparative chapter that examines diverse cases across the world — and shows that the rise of individualism and choice in university curricula is a global phenomenon.

Congratulations, Karen!

You can get a flavor of the project from Karen’s solo-authored paper in Sociological Forum, which came out in the September issue:  “The Rise of Choice in the U.S. University and College: 1910–2005“.  Congrats on that, too!

It is John’s most refined, clear statement about institutional theory to date.  A definite “must-read.”

The review draws a contrast between cultural/phenomenological institutionalisms — which treat actors as socially constructed — versus “realist” institutionalisms which tend not to.  In John’s imagery, one might think of individuals or organizations as “stage actors” (who enact scripts) as opposed to a more conventional social-scientific or economistic view of actors with a priori preferences.

As a student in the 1990s, I can remember wading through “Ontology and Rationalization in the Modern Western Cultural Account”.  I spent quite a long time puzzling through that sweeping, profound, and sometimes cryptic chapter.  Reading this new review, I can’t help but be amazed at how much John’s vision has grown and become more clear.  The core ideas were already there in the 1987 chapter, but there was much fleshing-out to be done.

An excerpt from the 2010 review:

The Modern Social Order

“Under the cultural and associational conditions outlined above, the outlines of modern society become clear.  The scriptwriting Others of the world prescribe agentic actorhood for individual persons.  And they prescribed very agentic actorhood for the organizations and nation-states built by these persons.  Actorhood means the enhanced standing of the entities involved and their empowered comprehension of the scientized and rationalized environment in which they are to act.” p. 9

I included this excerpt partly because it is impressive to have see anyone try to sum up the entire modern social system in a paragraph.  Also, it shows that John still has the ability to be simultaneously sweeping, profound, and cryptic. 

Anyhow, the papers take on a really important issue:  the conditions under which global institutions actually have meaningful consequences, versus being loosely coupled.  It is a really important direction for world society research.  (Ann and I have a paper in Social Forces that looks at environmental outcomes… and are thinking about doing more research along these lines.)

The AJS paper is entitled “Human Rights as Myth and Ceremony?  Reevaluating the Effectiveness of Human Rights Treaties.”  The paper addresses recent work, including a widely cited AJS paper by Emilie Hafner-Burton and Kiyo Tsutsui, showing that treaty signing is negatively associated with subsequent practices.  The literature concludes that treaties are “just talk”, or that treaties only matter in highly specific contexts.

Wade’s paper improves on the literature in two ways:  1) He delves much more into the substance of the treaties, looking at specific amendments and optional provisions that nations might sign — which might affect specific kinds of human rights outcomes; and 2) He addresses the possibility that treaty signing itself may be endogenous, via an instrumental variables model.

The AJS paper shows that nations making stronger treaty commitments tend to improve on various measures of human rights.  So, HR treaties do matter after all, it seems…  Go world polity!

The second paper, “Decoupling Reconsidered: Accounting for the Implementation Gap in Human Rights Treaties” looks at the state-level factors associated with loose coupling.  The paper is really terrific and deserves a close read.  But, in a nutshell, stable regimes are more likely to successfully implement treaties.  This fits really well with Ann’s prior work on weak states…  which often commit huge atrocities in the context of extreme disorder or civil conflict.  In other words, loose coupling probably isn’t “strategic” window dressing, but rather reflects the very limited state capacities of many countries.

Wade is looking for feedback as he revises the paper, so check it out:  Wade Cole Decoupling Reconsidered.pdf  Actually, knowing him, you’d better hurry with comments… I’m sure it will be in print soon! 

Utah has a long history of strength in global/international issues going back to people like Ed Kick (of Snyder and Kick).  Michael Timberlake and Jeffrey Kentor are there, along with more recent hires like Andrew Jorgenson.  And, with Wade and Tricia there, the place keeps building.  They really have critical mass…

Wade has also been cranking out a bunch of great papers, which I’ll take up in a later post…

Tricia (Martin) Bromley landed a job at the University of Utah in the Political Science Department.  Congrats Tricia!

I visited once and really liked it there — the Rocky Mountains are a stone’s throw away.  More on Utah hires in a future posting…

Tricia continues to crank out terrific papers, including this paper with John and Chiqui on student-centeredness in the curriculum, which is forthcoming in Social Forces (congrats on that, too!):

Bromley et al_Stud Cent_Social Forces_FINAL110411

The paper takes on a big and really important issue:  the dramatic shift toward student centrism in education.  Schooling used to put authoritative knowledge at front-and-center… Shakespeare and Plato are important, students are not.  In contrast, modern pedagogy places the empowered student at the center of things.  Instead of learning Shakespeare, they should write their own poetry.  This is reflected very clearly in textbooks…

The paper does two great things:  First, it brings some really amazing cross-national data to bear on the issue.  The Stanford group has assembled a truly remarkable dataset on textbooks from around the world.  Not only does this allow systematic statistical analysis of the issue, but  the examples (scanned images) really drive the points home.

Second, the paper (along with others coming out of the project) shows how the curriculum  is a powerful site for exploring the culture of modernity — in this case, the nature of “individualism.”  There is less work on the foundational culture of modernity than one might expect.  You’d think that sociologists of culture would be all over this stuff, but there sometimes seems to be a tendency to shy away from the foundational aspects of modern culture (there are notable exceptions, for instance Zelizer’s “Pricing the Priceless Child”).  Anyhow, the article offers fresh insights into the culture of individualism — and the role of the curriculum in institutionalizing that culture.

Good luck getting settled in the new job!

One common view is that associations arise from society itself — from educated, affluent individuals seeking to address various collective issues. We actually find support for this (or at least the point that education encourages association).

We develop two alternatives (each rooted in a long line of sociological work):

1) We argue that the state is an engine of association — and its historical expansion massively drives the growth of association. Our argument is in some ways out of fashion.  It is more common to claim that the state “crowds out” association, and that NGOs flourish in the vacuum produced by shrinking or collapsed governments. We spend a good chunk of the paper discussing why this “conventional wisdom” is off-base, and working out why the expansion of the state (and other features, such as decentralization) encourage the formation of association.  Among other things, the state legitimates issues in the public sphere and provides both resources and incentives to organize.

2) We argue that world society encourages association on a global scale. The international sphere is now filled with thousands of international NGOs, IGOs, “transnational advocacy networks”, and the like. This rich associational and cultural environment provides the legitimation, organizational models, and sometimes direct resources and assistance that encourage the formation of associations around the world — especially in the global south.  In particular, “civil society” is very much in fashion, and international donors — not to mention key players like the World Bank — routinely fund (directly or indirectly) all sorts of local NGOs and community groups.  Of course, this raises some issues.  What does it mean to be a “local” when a great deal of funding and support for associations comes from places like the World Bank?  We reflect on this at the end of the paper…

We explore these arguments using statistical data on voluntary associations for a large sample of countries over the past few decades.

It was a fun paper to work on, and Wes did a great job.  A pre-publication version can be found here:

Schofer Longhofer 2011 Sources of Association AJS.pdf

The highlight was definitely when John Meyer was awarded the Global and Transnational Sociology Distinguished Career Award.

It was just a really nice event.  Roland Robertson, who won the award last year gave an introduction, Liz Boyle presented the award, and then John made some really thoughtful remarks.  Among the funny parts:  John thanked Roland for the kind introduction — and then mused that he felt he ought to disagree.  (Maybe you had to be there…)  I think some people took a video of the speech (maybe Yong Suk?).  I’ll post it if I get hold of it.

A whole bunch of John’s students showed up, which not only drove home the impact John has had on the field but also made it feel like a big family reunion.  Many of his students are now senior scholars in the field themselves — but there were plenty of mid-career people and recent PhDs in the room, too.  It was quite amazing to see the span of people he’s worked with.  And, Maria Meyer was there, adding her own cheerful warmth to the event.  All in all, a very nice evening.

On top of that, David Frank, Sarah Babb, and Cheris Chan won awards, too…  all terrific scholars (and really nice people, too).

The site has cross-national data on both natural and human-caused disasters since 1900.  Apparently, the most costly industrial accident in history was a chemical spill in Spain in 2002.  Didn’t know that…

The dataset will be useful for our papers on environmental associations/policy reform/etc. Our prior work has generally found that environmental degradation variables (e.g., pollution) don’t do a good job of accounting for environmental mobilization or policy reform.  Reviewers have then suggested, on more than one occasion, that people may respond to vivid disasters (Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez, etc), rather than actual degradation.  So, at one time David Frank pulled together a simple measure of disasters… but now someone has assembled a much more systematic dataset.

Disasters might also be an interesting issue to analyze as a dependent variable.  For instance, one wonders if strong environmental/health/safety laws, strong unions, or other factors reduce industrial accidents…  Maybe INGOs help, too… they do everything.  (kidding…)

I saw this map on boingboing — an early look at global communication networks, including undersea cables. No idea of the quality of the data. But, it is a reminder that there was interesting structuration of world society well back into the 19th century… which is something we haven’t studied very much. (Actually, I was just talking with Marc Ventresca about this very issue… this map is apropos.)

Original link here.

Wes Longhofer landed a terrific job!  Starting next year, Wes will be an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

They have a great orgs group there — Anand, Giacomo, Peter, Chris, and a bunch of other terrific people.  Of course, this continues a trend of B-schools pulling many of the best and brightest from sociology…

Congrats Wes!!!

p.s. now I know what to get Wes as a graduation present:  a sociology-to-MBA dictionary, so he can communicate with the MBAs…  for instance, his dissertation on “global philanthropy” roughly translates as “social ventures in emerging markets”.

p.p.s. I’ll try to hold off on the MBA jokes, but it is hard to resist…

http://www.nsd.uib.no/macrodataguide/index.html

It is maintained by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (apparently a branch of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research) to organize “contextual” variables for use with the European Social Survey.

It is a nice, clean, website with descriptive information on lots of country-level datasets.  It has all the big ones, and a few that are new to me.

The site provides a wealth of summary information:  topics covered by the dataset, the number of countries and time period covered, relevant references, and mundane-but-useful information such as the file format(s) available, cost, and links to documentation and (usually) the actual dataset.  There is also commentary on data quality, which is rare to see.

Definitely worth a look.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=413281

The book taps into a number of recurrent themes about the imminent demise of conventional higher education — especially the idea that technology (in this case the internet) renders traditional universities obsolete.  Who needs to pay 40K a year to go to Stanford, since everyone can watch Kahn Academy videos on Youtube for free?

Chiqui provides a gentle rejoinder, reminding us that universities are deeply institutionalized certification systems that may not easily be supplanted:

“The future, Kamenetz knows for sure, belongs to personal networks, not to the certifying dinosaurs.But therein lies the rub. To truly undercut universities, one must undermine their certification clout. Kamenetz imagines this will happen because technology allows us to peer into universities and classrooms and see results. We indeed can see results with respect to a narrow domain of skills. But as regards a broader range of more complex qualities – what she calls the “pearl inside the oyster” – results are murky. And it is precisely this uncertainty that will continue to give universities and their diplomas the edge over personal learning networks and their portfolios.”

Anyhow, it is definitely worth thinking about the role of technology in transforming higher education. But, Chiqui’s review reminds us not to forget about the institutional centrality of universities in the process.

Congratulations!  It is a great paper.  Moreover, I’ve seen first hand the incredible amount of labor that David has put into this project.  David usually goes for ambitious data collection efforts, but this project was just insane.  (Really, really insane.)  It is great to see all the hard work paying off.

And, it is great news for Bayliss Camp and Steve Boutcher.  Steve is just starting a new position at UMass, Amherst.  How auspicious to hit ASR shortly after starting a tenure track job!

The paper looks at global trends in the criminal regulation of sexuality — specifically, laws regarding adultery, sodomy, rape, and incest — from 1945 to 2005.  How does David know about legal changes in every country for 60 years?  Well, that’s the insane data collection…

The empirical story is very clear:  The scope of adultery and sodomy laws tends to shrink over time, while the scope of rape and incest laws greatly expands.  The paper masterfully explains these dual trends as deriving from a global cultural shift toward individualism.  Here’s an over-simplified version:  Traditional familial/corporatist societies (think Feudalism) organize law in terms of crimes against the family (or patriarch).  In that kind of system adultery is considered really bad.  Wives were viewed as property, and adultery was essentially a crime against the family.  But, that culture is increasingly displaced by a modern “individualistic” culture… wives are no longer property, but independent individuals.  Modern laws are now oriented to protect individuals, not the family.  In the newer framework, adultery isn’t so bad — but other things, like rape, very much are.  (David — correct me if I’m simplifying too much.)

Anyhow, the actual argument is better and more sophisticated than my brief summary.  If you haven’t seen it, check out the paper:

Frank Camp Boutcher World Trends Regulation of Sex 8.27.2010.doc