I've argued often for the idea that social science and historical explanations need to be "actor-centered" -- we need to ground our hypotheses about social and historical causation in theories of the pathways through which actors embody those causal processes. Actors in relation to each other constitute the "substrate" of social causation. Actors make up …
Trust and organizational effectiveness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2GFGFs32EI It is fairly well agreed that organizations require a degree of trust among the participants in order for the organization to function at all. But what does this mean? How much trust is needed? How is trust cultivated among participants? And what are the mechanisms through which trust enhances organizational effectiveness? The minimal requirements …
The culture of an organization
Large partitioned office, overview (B&W) It is often held that the behavior of a particular organization is affected by its culture. Two banks may have very similar organizational structures but show rather different patterns of behavior, and those differences are ascribed to differences in culture. What does this mean? Clifford Geertz is one of the …
Is public opinion part of a complex system?
The worrisome likelihood that Russians and other malevolent actors are tinkering with public opinion in Western Europe and the United States through social media creates various kinds of anxiety. Are our democratic values so fragile that a few thousand Facebook or Twitter memes could put us on a different plane about important questions like anti-Muslim …
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Varieties of organizational dysfunction
Several earlier posts have made the point that important technology failures often include organizational faults in their causal background. It is certainly true that most important accidents have multiple causes, and it is crucial to have as good an understanding as possible of the range of causal pathways that have led to air crashes, chemical …
Organizational dysfunction
What is a dysfunction when it comes to the normal workings of an organization? In order to identify dysfunctions we need to have a prior conception of the "purpose" or "agreed upon goals" of an organization. Fiscal agencies collect taxes; child protection services work to ensure that foster children are placed in safe and nurturing …
Corruption and institutional design
Robert Klitgaard is an insightful expert on the institutional causes of corruption in various social arrangements. His 1988 book, Controlling Corruption, laid out several case studies in detail, demonstrating specific features of institutional design that either encouraged or discouraged corrupt behavior by social and political actors. More recently Klitgaard prepared a major report for the …
How to think about social identities
What is involved in having a national or racial or sexual identity? What do we mean when we say that a person has a Canadian or a Haitian identity? How can we best think about the mental frameworks and models that serve as lenses through which people understand themselves and their places in history? Most …
Social consciousness and critical realism
Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt …
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A new model of organization?
In Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World General Stanley McChrystal (with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell) describes a new, 21st-century conception of organization for large, complex activities involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of major sub-tasks. His concept is grounded in his experience in counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq. Rather than being …
Understanding Society 