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 …
New perspectives on Chinese authoritarianism
The question of China's political future is an important one and a difficult one. Will China evolve towards a political system that embodies real legal protections for the rights of its citizens and some version of democratic institutions of government? Or will it remain an authoritarian single-party state in which government and the party decide …
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Collapse of Eastern European communisms
An earlier post commented on Tony Judt's magnificent book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. There I focused on the story he tells of the brutality of the creation of Communist Party dictatorships across Eastern Europe (link). Equally fascinating is his narrative of the abrupt collapse of those states in 1989. In short order …
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 …
China today
There are a lot of opinions about China today in the United States -- authoritarian, farsighted, effective at economic progress, overly committed to Party authority, challenged by the environmental effects of rapid economic growth, burdened by a corrupt and aging party elite. Some believe China is on the path to becoming a dominant super power, …
A localist approach to Chinese politics
How do the domestic politics of China work, from 1949 to the present? This question covers many issues: Why does the Chinese state act as it does? Why does it choose the policies it has pursued over time? How does the Chinese Communist Party work? What are the mechanisms of policy formulation and adoption in …
Ten years of Understanding Society
This month marks the tenth anniversary of Understanding Society. The blog now includes 1,176 posts on topics in the philosophy of social science, the heterogeneity of the social world, current thinking about social problems, and occasional contributions on how we can envision a better future. Thanks to all of the readers who have visited during …
Understanding Society 