Organizations and their Effectiveness (2019)



This is a page to collect resources, links, and supplementary information related to the Summer Institute on Organizations and their Effectiveness (2019) held at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.

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Workshop Information

 * The workshop website has more detailed information about (note that a login is required to access some resources).
 * Zotero group: Repository with the full text of everything. Participants should all be invited already but Mako or Clark can add you if you're not on it.

Previous sessions
There are pages in this wiki created in previous sessions:


 * Organizations and their Effectiveness (2016)
 * Organizations and their Effectiveness (2017)

Papers and Links
Some papers, links, concepts, that were mentioned in our discussions include...

Visit from Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (Tuesday July 9)

 * From Doctrine to Safeguards in American Constitutional Democracy - Forthcoming UCLA Law Review paper by Cuéllar that we "might be interested in their picks up on some of yesterday’s themes."

Other potentially useful links:


 * Tino Cuéllar's website
 * Partnership for Public Service is the non-profit organization arguing for increased civil service that Cuéllar thought did not do enough to emphasize the benefits that come from political appointments coming in

Bob's Round 2 (Wednesday July 10)

 * Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes — OB book with the "three lenses:" (1) organizations as machines' (2) organizations as politics; and (3) organizations as culture

Organizational Ethnography (Thursday July 11)
Things that came up:


 * Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics Mental Illness in Rural Ireland: A founding book in medical anthropology. Includes an afterward of the way that the book brought shame to village and led to the rejection of the anthropologist.
 * Banana Time: Job satisfaction and informal interaction: Another classic by Roy that it was suggested might be seen as "more ethnographic."
 * Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France: paper by Angèle Christin described in depth by Woody
 * [Down and Out in the New Economy]: Ethnography of how job seekers look for work and "self brand" as businesses in the new economy

Rethinking Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Thursday July 11)

 * Examples of the "the very best company culture decks"
 * Formal and Real Authority in Organizations by Philippe Aghion and Jean Tirole in the Journal of Political Economy
 * The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 by Michael Schudson [Book]
 * The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification by Michael Power [Book]



Sara Singer Debrief (Friday July 12)

 * A Medium article about medical data portability startups including [https://www.ciitizen.com/ Ciitizen (the startup that User:JohnA mentioned) and Citizen Health (a different startup doing the same thing!).

Papers about Emotions (Friday July 12):


 * Sigal Barsade, Emotional Contagion
 * Hilary Elfenbein, 7 Emotions in Organization
 * Mandy O'Neil, Creating Emotional Cultures

Bob on Culture (Friday July 12)

 * Amy Edmondson's done a bunch of work on psychological safety. Places to start might include:
 * "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" paper in ASQ
 * "Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace is a transcript of an interview with Edmondson on psychological safety published in HBR
 * "Google considers this to be the most critical trait of successful teams" is a Business Insider piece on psychological safety
 * "Cultural Change: An Integration of Three Different Views by Debra Meyerson and Joanne Martin: paper on three views of culture and cultural change
 * Culture and Leadership: book by Ed Schein that was invoked repeatedly (really, throughout the week)

Legitimacy (Friday July 12)

 * Johnson et al. 2006: Legitimacy as a Social Process. Review of (mostly) the Soc literature on legitimacy up to 2006.
 * Subbady et al. 2017: Legitimacy. Review of a broader swath of organizations work on legitimacy and the development of a useful meta-theoretical framework.
 * Tost 2011: An Integrative Model of Legitimacy Judgements. Review of social psych on legitimacy and development of an integrated process model of how legitimacy cognitive judgments work.

Maria Guadalupe Session #1 (Monday July 15)

 * West Side Story which includes a good plot summary and a list of characters which might be helpful in following the different stories in the presentation.
 * Identity Formation: Discovery or Creation? by Alan S. Waterman (1984): this piece (from psychology)

Maria Guadalupe Session #2 (Tuesday July 16)

 * Ambient Belonging: How Stereotypical Cues Impact Gender Participation in Computer Science by Sapna Cheryan, Victoria C. Plaut, Paul G. Davies, and Claude M. Steele: paper on stereotype threat

Hahrie Han #1 (Tuesday July 16)

 * Hahrie Han's website
 * Crossroads Church: Cincinnati church that runs The Superbowl of Preaching
 * Summary of Steven Lukes' theory/book of the three faces of power

Hahrie Han #2 (Wednesday July 17)

 * Alfred P. Sloan's My Years in General Motors (although it's also come up at a bunch of different points)
 * Betrand and Schoar's Managing with Style: The Effect of Managers on Firm Policies (paper on the effects of individual managers published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics)
 * Brendan Nyhan and Jacob M. Montgomery's 2015 paper on “Connecting the Candidates: Consultant Networks and the Diffusion of Campaign Strategy in American Congressional Elections” in the American Journal of Political Science.

Morning Recap (Thursday July 18)

 * Donald Mackenzie's "An Engine Not a Camera" performativity and how models shape markets
 * Brubaker and Cooper "Beyond Identity" (paper attempt to "clean up the house" within the discussion of identity within sociology mentioned by User:Clarkest)

Adam Reich Session 1/2 (Thursday July 18)

 * Private Government How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson
 * WHAT DO BOSSES DO?: The Origins and Functions of Capitalist Hierarchy Production by Stephen A. Marglin
 * Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century by Harry Braverman
 * Dev's comment on precolonial state centralization
 * THE SMILE FACTORY: WORK AT DISNEYLAND by John Van Manaan
 * Hoschild on emotional labor Managed Heart

Adam Reich Session 2/2 (Friday July 19)

 * On the hack -- "high-stakes battle between Uber executives and drivers in California": https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18682002/uber-lyft-drivers-california-ab5-bill
 * Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification and It's Consequences
 * Evgeny Morozov's Capitalism’s New Clothes, a Baffler review of Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
 * The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other by Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker
 * Harvard Business Review on shutting down Uber: Uber Can’t Be Fixed — It’s Time for Regulators to Shut It Down by Benjamin Edelman

Fred Turner (Thursday July 18)

 * Fred Turner on the Raw Data podcaston Soundcloud

Stealing (Friday July 19)

 * Optimal distinctiveness theory

Scheduled Lunch Discussions in Week 2

 * Monday 12:10ish-1:10 How should we conceptualize organizational "openness"?
 * Tuesday 12:40-1:15 Stigmergy🐜🐜🐜 and autocatalysis
 * Initial discussion
 * Thursday: Two sessions:
 * State Capacities
 * Theorizing about location
 * Friday 12:40-1:15 Centralized-decentralization, emergent coordination, and materialized coordination (so we have time to visit Adam too)

Further Ideas for Friday discussion

 * How to ask good questions that open a conversation
 * That a theory may change but social mechansims stay the same
 * Woody and Bob's intellectual journey as scholars (e..g, how do you refine you ideas about networks; how do navigating going in w/ an idea in your head, modifying it over time)
 * Our biggest research "failure"
 * Under what conditions might delegation work? In absence of resources, in high stress, etc.?
 * Emotions and/in organizations (see links above)
 * Technology & organizations

Questions and Answers
If you have a question, add one below. If you've got an answer to a question that's been asked, you should add it too!

What's the Weberian bureaucracy?
There's a section on the section on Weber's theory in the Wikipedia article about bureaucracy. According to that summary, key features include:


 * hierarchical organization
 * formal lines of authority (chain of command)
 * fixed area of activity
 * rigid division of labor
 * regular and continuous execution of assigned tasks
 * all decisions and powers specified and restricted by regulations
 * officials with expert training in their fields
 * career advancement dependent on technical qualifications
 * qualifications evaluated by organizational rules, not individuals

Autocatalysis, stigmergy, and multiple-networks, oh my!
Jon, Clark, and Bob had a brief conversation trying to unpack the autocatalysis argument and draw on Jon's expertise with modeling autocatalytic cycles. Clark's thrown together a strawman sketch of his understanding of the argument for correction, critique, and additional questions.

How are people OK with the IP transfer issue in an NASA-style open innovation?
This Innocentive FAQ provides the firms answers. Here's an interview with the CEO of Innocentive that discusses this in some depth. There's a great HBS case by Karim Lakhani that goes into quite a lot of detail on this.

Key for colors in Bob's slides
Round 1 (SpPs/UpPs):


 * Orange : Unsolved political problems (UpPs) — invisible hand not working
 * Purple : "there is a boss"; e.g., firms, formal organizations
 * Green : organized (but not an organization) — communities, etc.
 * Black (sometimes): Solved political Problems (SpP) — solved by a market

Round 2 (formal/informal governance):


 * Blue : formal governance instruments (contracts, algorithms)
 * Red : informal governance
 * Grey : shared understanding (→culture)`

Round 3:


 * Magenta : Building an equilibrium