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:

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."

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

Link title=== 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
[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 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 Debrief (Friday July 12th)

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 12th):

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

Bob on Culture (Friday July 13th)

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

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.?
Emotions and/in 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 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
Grey: shared understanding (→culture)`

Round 3:

Pink: Building an equilibrium