Organizations and their Effectiveness (2019)

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Inspiration from Picasso Banksy

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.

The edit button is in the top corner! Click the button, Be bold', and add/organize/discuss as you see fit by hitting the edit button. Please create an account! Once you do so, Mako will make your administrator so you won't have to solve CAPTCHAs anymore.

If you need help with wiki-markup or anything else, check out the help documentation or feel free to contact Mako or email email him for fundamental concerns about the wiki.

If you'd like to create your own etherpad for collaborative note-taking, simply create a new pad and share the URL: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org and feel free to add the link to this page.

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:

Papers and Links

Some papers that came up in our discussions include....

Visit from Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar

Other potentially useful links:

Bob's Round 2 (Wednesday, 7/10th)

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.

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