Guest Post: “Why Everyone Younger Than You is Spoiled” Advanced Edition

Way back in June, UCSD sociology graduate student Jeff Lundy provided two excellent guest posts on perceptions of consumption across generations. Inspired by some of the comments on those posts, Jeff has written a follow-up piece for your enjoyment.

Why Everyone Younger Than You is Spoiled: Advanced Edition
By Jeff Lundy

Because of the interest in my earlier posts, I’ve decided a quick follow up is in order. In particular, one of the comments to the posts hit upon an argument that I definitely ignored: generations don’t tend to stay in the same economic position (at least they try not to).

Why is this an issue? Well, each of the four factors I listed earlier covered accounting mistakes that trip you up when comparing your life to a younger person following a similar trajectory to your own.

For instance, imagine that there is a young man out in the world today, who by some miraculous coincidence happens to be living an economic life that is nearly identical to my father’s. He went to college in the same way that my father did; he started his first job at the exact same age as my father, working for the same organization, and making the same inflation-adjusted income; he’s bought modern-day equivalents of the cars, houses, etc. that my father bought, on the exact same timetable, and he’s paid the exact same price for these objects when you adjust for inflation.

Even though my father’s economic counterpart has led a nearly equivalent life to my dad, the accounting errors I listed earlier (inflation, substitution, etc.) could lead my father to think that his doppelganger was spoiled!

This hypothetical misjudging of equals is interesting from an academic perspective. However, in the real world, most children aren’t striving to exactly match their parents – and most parents don’t want their children to live the same life they’ve lived, they want them to live a better life. When children aspire to have more than their parents, this is where the foibles of amateur comparisons really get tricky. And they get tricky for two main reasons: social mobility, and increasing resource inequality.

So Long, Mariann (Or, Stinchcombe Was Right)

On Saturday afternoon, I attended a funeral service for Mariann Hoag. It was my second funeral in a week*, and the longest I’d ever attended – over two hours. Mariann was a legend, you see, at my grade school – a K-12, independent school, founded by two refugees from the Holocaust with a particular humanist philosophy, and named Roeper. Mariann worked at Roeper from 1948 to 2009. 61 years – more than twice as long as the founders, after whom the school is named. Mariann was not a teacher, but rather she was everything – secretary, bus route planner, fundraiser, and above all in recent years, the guardian of financial aid (and thus guardian angel for many families). More specifically, Mariann was the guts of the institution.

Let me explain a bit what I mean by guts of the institution, and then a bit more about Roeper as an institution. In organizational theory (within sociology), two overarching groups of work take on the label
“institutionalist” – the so-called “old institutionalism” most associated with Selznick, and the “new institutionalism” associated with folks like DiMaggio and Powell. The old institutionalists focused more on how particular organizations and practices came to take on powerful meanings and value beyond their original, rational purpose. The new institutionalists focus more on the question D&P opened with in 1983 – why do organizations look so similar? That is, how do certain practices and forms become dominant, the way things work. New institutionalist explanations emphasize culture and cognition (often at the expense of power – cf. Mizruchi and Fein 1999), but focus much less on individuals or individual organizations.

In 1997, more than a decade after the new institutionalism picked up, and 6 years after the publication of the agenda setting Orange Book, Arthur Stinchcombe wrote a fascinating and contentious review article, On the Virtues of the Old Institutionalism. Stinchcombe criticizes the new institutionalism for focusing too much on representations and legitimacy and ignoring the everyday work, and the everyday workers, that make organizations possible. He concludes the essay eloquently:

In short, the trouble with the new institutionalism is that it does not have the guts of institutions in it. The guts of institutions is that somebody somewhere really cares to hold an organization to the standards and is often paid to do that. Sometimes that somebody is inside the organization, maintaining its competence. Sometimes it is in an accrediting body, sending out volunteers to see if there is really any algebra in the algebra course. And sometimes that somebody, or his or her commitment, is lacking, in which case the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

As I sat and listened to students, teachers, administrators and parents talk about Mariann’s life, which in turn was the history of the Roeper School, I could not but think of this quote. The Roeper School was founded on a very specific philosophy, one that embraces interdependence and empathy, and rejects nationalistic pride and naive self-interest. For many years, the school was entirely non-graded, and even in my time there were no class ranks, GPAs were not calculated or discussed, and students were given written evaluations for each class (in addition to letter grades to appease college admissions boards – coercive isomorphism much?). Students call teachers by their first name, and after 8th grade are allowed to leave campus on their own simply by signing out. These are just a few examples that come to mind – it’s hard to pin down exactly how Roeper works, and why it feels so different from other places. Anyway, the school’s philosophy was articulated and re-articulated by its founders – George, an educator, and Annemarie, a child psychologist***. But the philosophy was just a series of documents and ideas, the Roeper School was a living, breathing institution staffed by devoted people, and Mariann was first among equals.

Mariann was committed to the school for itself, and she demanded that the school stay true to itself. The new head of the school mentioned in his speech at the services how, when he first started, he had a few ideas about how to reform financial aid. The other administrators nervously told him that he’d have to ask Mariann. Financial aid at Roeper was more than just a tool for recruiting talented students, rather, it was how the school managed to maintain an eclectic mix and not simply educate the smartest children of the richest parents. More than half the school had some sort of financial aid, last I looked, and in each grade something like 10-20% (of 40-50 students) were on full scholarship. The new head, with his new ideas, dutifully went to Mariann to ask her opinions of his changes. She thought about it for a moment, and said, “I don’t like it… but we’ll try it, and see how it works.” And so it went with many other changes. Mariann was the guts of the institution – not the power center, but a force that made it work and that kept it on course.

I have more to say – about how the death of institutions in the contemporary world (at least some institutions, cf. Jerry Davis’ take on the death of the firm-as-organization) means that we no longer have powerful, stable communities to buffer us from the winds of the perennial gale of creative destruction (cf. Schumpeter), and that gale has grown ever quicker such that the rate of change may overtake many of us, especially if the government fails to meet the challenge (cf. Polanyi). But that’s for another time, another post perhaps. This post is about Mariann, and others like her, who hold us accountable to our beliefs and help make our communities real and long-lasting. She devoted her life to her institution, to her community, and to its beliefs. With her gone, many others will have to step up if Roeper is going to stay the same sort of community it has been for the last 61 years****.

So long, Mariann. And thanks.

* The first was for my grandfather. He was 87**, and I thought about including more about him in this post, but I’m not ready yet. I’ll just say that he was an amazing man, and I miss him, and I think his life too has hidden wisdom about organizations, but the opposite of Mariann’s, so I’m not going to present it here.
** Or maybe 88. It’s not clear when in August he was actually born, as the doctor did not visit for several weeks.
*** Annemarie published some of her work in a book, here. George never did, as far as I know, though there is a scholarly publication, The Roeper Review dedicated to gifted education.
**** Which is not to say that Roeper was in any way perfect, or stable. Rather, it was and is a process, a continual movement to understand itself and its goals and implement them better, and that process has had plenty of bumpy moments. But it’s hard not to romanticize a bit, at a time like this.

The Performative and the Political (Or, SSF Meets Technopolitics)

The Politics of Markets workshop at UC Berkeley, held immediately before ASA, was both a blast and the most academically exciting event of this year’s con season for me. The panels and presentations were discussed throughout the rest of ASA. Fabio has a quick recap here. On that OrgTheory post, Brayden is a bit critical:

Sounds like a great conference. I wonder though how much any of this, except for the research involving state regulation, is about the “politics of markets.”

Where are the politics here?

In a discussion with Daniel Beunza*, about possible ideas for next year’s conference, I brought up this comment, because I think it might be a mistake to read politics too narrowly when trying to add a more explicit analysis of politics to the performativity agenda. If “the politics of markets” becomes simply a venue for talking about state action – laws and regulations and the like – I think SSF/Performativity will miss out on its potential greatest contribution to “markets and politics”: technopolitics, or the way that the technical and the political interact in non-obvious ways. Gabrielle Hecht, a historian of science here at Michigan who studies nuclear power and uranium production in France and Africa, draws on this concept to discuss how technical decisions are political but with a particular flavor (apologies for the short summary!). I’ve been thinking about how I can use the idea in my own work, which is influenced very strongly by Callonian performativity on one hand and Polanyian economic sociology on the other. Long story short: we need to look at the guts of technical decision-making as consequential, political decisions. Categorizing and counting the world are power-laden. Etc.

None of these ideas are new, but I think they all militate for an expressly political soc of fianance/performativity agenda that does not narrow politics to the state. How stock analysts decide to understand firms, and how credit rating agencies include (implicitly or explicitly) race in their calculations are both consequential and, broadly understood, political. SSF and performativists should highlight the politics – the contestations and consequences – without needing to bring in the state except when it makes sense. Sometimes the state is not the most important political story**. Yes, SSF should mean politics, but politics should not be restricted to macro outcomes!***

So, let me cast my vote for “The Politics of Markets II: Electric Boogaloo! Now with more explicit, but still subtle, politics!” Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue…

See you all in Atlanta!

*Thanks Daniel B for suggesting I turn our email exchange into a blog post!
** See the last 40 pages of Berle and Means (1932) for an excellent discussion of how large corporations ought to be understood precisely as political rather than (or in addition to) economic organizations!
*** Nor should those things be off the agenda, of course! My own work is very much about the state, or its statistical agencies anyway, and the overall shaping of national economic policy.

Quotes* from Blogger Baseball

“The designated hitter debate is like baseball’s version of structure vs. agency.”

“Arguing about whether or not something counts as sociology is like arguing about whether the cookie stand is part of the food court.”

Happy end of ASA everyone! Next year in Atlanta!

* All quotes approximate.

The Sociology of THAC0

At ASA this year I’ve had the opportunity to hear two amazing discussants (in addition to many amazing papers): Mark Granovetter and Howard Becker. Granovetter gave a great talk about Weber and Parsons and their relationship to the papers and many other things I don’t remember. Becker was a bit less on point, but he told some great stories, and he also made an interesting comment on a paper about business groups that got me thinking. The paper argued that business groups were as much about creating communities as gaining any kind of economic advantage, either for the industry as a whole or their members. Business groups gave out awards, sold esoteric merchandise, and in short helped create and propagate a shared language for members of various occupations. Becker focused on the shared language bit, arguing that it was a more general feature of communities and organizations that help create community.

This discussion of the community-reinforcing powers of language got me thinking about the community I identified most strongly with from age 10 to 18 or so: gamers. One of the strongest features of the gamer community, I would argue, is a shared vocabulary. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever played Paranoia, but it helps to know that “The Computer is Your Friend”*. Etc.

Some of my favorite examples of community-building gamer discourse involve convoluted technical terms for what are, at their core, relatively simple concepts. By far the most classic of these terms is THAC0 (pronounced “tha-ko” with that midwestern eh sound), or “To Hit Armor Class Zero”. In D&D, Armor Class (“AC”) ranged from 10 (unarmored) to -10 (some sort of elder demon) and for whatever reason, the game based it’s calculations on what it took for you hit to something with an AC of 0. The system was counterintuitive – if you had a THAC0 of 19 and were trying to hit a monster with an AC of 3 you’d need a 16, arrived at by *subtracting* the AC from your THAC0. So, in 3rd edition (and now 4th) they replaced it with a much more rational (but mathematically equivalent) “Base Attack Bonus” – a number you added to your roll and compared against AC to see if you hit.

Ok, that’s way more explanation than was needed to get to this point: I think D&D might have been less successful at building community without all the clunky language to decipher. And the kids these days with their streamlined, World of Warcraft inspired D&D… well, who knows. But for me, I’m sticking with THAC0.

* Trust the Computer!

The Old New Economic Sociology

There’s an old joke about psychology that a graduate student in clinical psych friend of mine once told me. Well, it’s more of a humorous definition of the disciplines than a joke. This friend would say, “Psychology is the study of 19 year-old female college undergraduates.” Since most psych research used subjects from the research pools of undergraduate psychology students, most psychological findings were tested and re-tested on basically the same group – college aged, educated, mostly female, etc. Oops.

The new economic sociology of the 1980s had a little bit of the same flavor. Specifically, if someone asked me what the new econ soc was, I might humorously say, “Economic Sociology is the study of the boards of directors of Fortune 500 Firms.” Ok, not so funny.

And also, seemingly untrue these days. After three days of an excellent ASA, and after listening to one or two dozen econ soc papers, it feels like we’ve really moved beyond the Fortune 500 in the US. One paper even went so far as to use the S&P 1500! But seriously, it’s nice to see how much of the field has moved beyond looking at the world of the biggest US firms. Maybe my view of the old new economic sociology is a bit biased (maybe I read one too many interlock papers during prelims or something), but the new new economic sociology* is pretty great, and delightfully international, historical, multi-method and multi-level.

* I really hope no one ever publishes a real paper that dichotomizes the field into the “old new” and “new new” economic sociology.

Four Debates for the Price of One: Structure vs. Agency

I’ve talked before at some length about my issues with the terms structure and agency. I think they often shed more heat than light, and often represent philosophical positions about how to interpret the world more than empirical alternatives. Recently, I had the opportunity to read Sewell’s classic piece, A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation. Reading through his discussions of the structure vs. agency debate clarified my own thinking a great deal, and his own version (a slightly critical combination of Giddens and Bourdieu) is one of the least bothersome I’ve yet seen*. For example, Sewell does a nice job of laying out one debate often subsumed under the heading of structure vs. agency, but really orthogonal to the debate many sociologists want to have: the material vs. the cultural. In thinking through that issue, I came up with a list of 4 debates that sometimes fall under the heading of structure vs. agency:

The material or economic vs. the cultural or ideational.

Determinism vs. Free-will.

Stability vs. change.

Intentionality or purposivity vs. unanticipated consequence or accident.

The first and the last are a bit stranger than the middle two. The material vs. the cultural is often, as Sewell notes, an issue about what counts as a structure. For Anthropologists, culture is the structure of most interest. For some sociologists culture opposes the material as an alternative to deterministic theories like some kinds of Marxism.

Intentionality vs. accident is, on the other side, about what counts as agency. Does agency refer simply to the capacity of individual action to alter future circumstances (i.e. structures)? If so, then intentionality is irrelevant. In Foucault’s excellent phrase, “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” (quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow). Sewell, on the other hand, wants to restrict agency to the capacity for intentional action to intentionally change structures (as I read him – in particular, he’s interested in how actors take schemas and apply them to new situations or apply them in new ways to old ones, thus generating new structures).

The middle two are more self-explanatory, I think. Determinism vs. free-will goes back at least as far as Durkheim (in Sociology, that is). It’s pretty clear in the early parts of The Rules of the Sociological Method where, if I recall correctly, Durkheim directly opposes social facts (which exist outside of individuals and constrain their actions) to free will, thus setting this variant of the structure vs. agency debate at the center of the discipline.

Stability vs. change can be seen nicely in Bourdieu’s work, and Sewell’s criticism of it. Bourdieu creates an elaborate and useful way of thinking about stability – posit a field with a certain logic, a set of positions, a set of actors who possess certain kinds of resources, and the capacity to use those resources more or less effectively for the given field, and you can see what kinds of outcomes are stable. His framework is a little trickier when it comes to understanding change – as Sewell notes, change comes from exogenous shocks to the system rather than being produced endogenously by agents. The habitus is a reproductive concept – it’s about how the system stays the same rather than how it changes. Or, as a I said a few days ago, Bourdieu turns agents into structures (indeed, structured structures that are also structuring structures…). Sewell wants to add back in some ability for individual (purposive) action to alter structures without any exogenous shocks.

So, in sum, another reason I hate the whole structure vs. agency debate is that it’s not one debate. It’s several debates, nested into one big dichotomy. But perhaps if we parse out what those underlying debates are we can get somewhere a bit more productive.

Thoughts? Am I missing any other debates that fly under the banner of structure vs. agency?

* I know, damning with faint praise. But I do mean it – most of the time these debates give me headaches, at best.

ASA San Francisco Salutations

This blog now has 99 subscribers on Google Reader! I know it’s not a lot by the standards of the big boys over at OrgTheory or Scatterplot, but I’m extremely grateful to all of you for bothering to read my ramblings and offering your feedback. I’m betting a lot of you will be at ASA this year, so if we haven’t met in person, please say hello!

You can find me at the following places:
The PEWs pre-conference on Friday morning, as a discussant on a panel on Finance and Financialization (the papers so far are excellent!).
The Politics of Markets pre-conference at UC Berkeley in the afternoon on Friday, basking in the econ soc glow.
Presenting at a roundtable on Saturday, 10:30 am at the Parc 55 Hotel.
Attending the sure-to-be glorious 6th annual sociology blogger party on Sunday at 6pm at Johnny Foley’s Irish House.
And enjoying the joint Economic Sociology and Organizations, Occupations and Work section party and awards ceremony on Monday at 6:30pm at the Hilton.

Whew. ASA is going to be busy! But hopefully I’ll see you all at some of these events, or in the various panels and whatnot. I especially recommend the blogger party – commenters and lurkers welcome, but no trolls! The best part of the blogger party is the norm that faculty are each supposed to buy a grad student a drink. I recommend enforcing this norm with vim and vigor.

See you there!