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 that came up in our discussions include....

Visit from Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (Tuesday July, 9th)

 * 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, 10th)

 * 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 11th)
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

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

 * 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 Visit (Thursday July 11th)

 * 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!).

Ideas for Monday Morning White Space (Monday July 15th)

 * Woody and Bob's intellectual journey as scholars
 * Our biggest research "failure"
 * Stigmergy
 * How should we conceptualize approach organizational "openness"?
 * Under what conditions might delegation might work? In absence of resources, in high stress, etc.?

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 innovatoin?
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