My World, circa now

There is much to do in the next month. Classes to plan, jobs to apply for, papers to write. Through all of this, I am focused on how to define my scholarly trajectory. The Spanish word is “rumbo” meaning the bearing a ship follows while navigating.

In the revising stage I have a paper on brokerage and closure. I would like to revise this so it more accurately reflects the most current research including Burt’s 2006 book by the same title. I also have some additional data to collect if I can that is domain experts being asked to rate ideas on a radical-incremental scale so I can test reliability. I need to find a study that does that as well.

In the drafting stage, I have “Innovation^Social.” (the title has social as the exponent). This is a poster/paper for the Organization Science winter conference. I went two years ago and it was a great conference for meeting people and seeing how ideas come about. (Capped off by a mock trial for the paradigm wars with Bill McKelvey and Ralph Stablein squaring off and Stewart Clegg as the judge. I should revisit that event). To do this paper, I will immerse myself in SIENA, the cool longitudinal network statistics package. If I get it, this will allow me to take longitudinal data of networks and node attributes and tease out direct and interaction effects for multiple dependent variables.

Of course, there is my dissertation. I am waiting to see if it needs more revision. Also, moving forward there is this fundamental trade off between trying to extract more publications or material from that data, which may prove futile, versus starting newer projects which, for the same amount of effort, may lead to more concrete success. Ha! It’s an exploitation versus exploration problem!
A third paper possibility that is kicking around in my head is to take the core ideas from the introduction about how to integrate OL and networks and develop that into a theory paper for AOM, a conference (Europe?) and maybe AMR or some other venue down the road. This would involve revising, looking more a literature to see if someone else is not already doing this, and fleshing out what networks would do to each stage of OL (creating, retaining, and transferring). Finally reading Argote’s book that develops the C,R,T model is probably also a good idea. D’oh!

Then there are new possibilities. I feel like I have to be careful because I tend to be seduced by the glint of novelty. Nonetheless, several factors come together to induce me to ponder new possibilities. One, I just savor the feeling of new vistas now that I pulled myself up to a new plateau with the dissertation. Two, I am sick of the Mg 101 data. Three, the organizational change class I taught this semester gave me a real hunger to be close to ground truth; to practitioners, to tangible value creation. So, I would love to develop some scholarship that gets me closer to OD or change efforts. I use scholarship pointedly because I mean research but also more practical efforts. I have flirted with the ideas of action science, praxis, or my own consulting practice before. Being scholarly, then, is about developing this way as well. Fourth, I am interested in how to take my new network knowledge and skills and link them up with other fields including organizational development and consulting. Synthesizing networks and other research domains extends to networks and innovation, networks and social entrepreneurs, networks and public management, networks and power, and networks and social movements. Fifth, I am more and more interested in social entrepreneurship, social innovation as they like to say at Stanford. Its optimistic nature fans my own idealism and its practicality feeds the hunger for practical action.

Immediate possibilities that grow out of this convergence of inducement factors:

☼ The IBM grant program through its business of government program. My kernel of an idea is about local government using social capital strategies to encourage business innovation or to solve sticky problems like regional planning.

☼ The NSF grant program for http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5378. Maybe there is something with Keystone Innovation Zones and Regional planning and land use.

☼ Exploring Food and Green innovations in terms of longitudinal networks and developing local trust-based economies. This is Dreamcatcher, Sweet Meriam’s, and maybe others.

☼ Looking an network coaching for organizations and companies. This would be the Cross and Parker approach in terms of using fairly straight forward approaches to networks to help companies improve innovation, knowledge flows, adaptiveness, and positive sense of community. I am not sure how much off the shelf software there is to do for this.

☼ An idea Mark Ciavarella and I kicked around awhile ago was to look at leadership and networks over time. This would use similar methodology to the InnovationSocial paper for OSWC13. We could have MG 101 companies answer network surveys at two or three point sin time, as well as some standard leadership trait questions. We could combine this with advocacy and adoption info to test whether network position or leadership or both mattered more for formal leadership roles (won through elections).

☼ Network Fascism. This is an idea inspired by Stephen Barley’s speech at AOM last year. His argument was that lots of organizations that used to be variably arranged in temporary alliances to influence the government have now coalesced into a solid ring mediating all relationships between the “people” and the government in our republican democracy. He had some nice case studies. This is a scientific and normative question. What struck me was the intersection of private and nationalistic interests. This seems to me one of then tenets of fascism. Whereas Italian or German fascism may have had organized fascism, the idea that wide-ranging and flexible networks of organizations could have the emergent effect of merging capitalist and nationalistic agendas struck me as “networked fascism.” This sounds interesting and important, but I am not sure what data to use or where to go from here in terms of theory. For data, military contractors seem obvious, maybe too obvious. Astroturf, oil companies, and energy policy? Pharma and Medicare part D? These seem like just big guy versus under dog stories. I am not sure there is something new there in terms of networked fascism.

Any ideas? Any collabroators out there?

Through the big push

Well, well, well… I pushed through the big push and ended up with a better product. The beast still has a monstrously too long introduction that is like the bastard offspring of a book proposal for an unpublishable book on organizational learning as meta-theory and a dissertation proposal I never wrote.

Sandra and Rafael, my intrepid advisors, told me they were working on bringing in a network expert. There is a professor at IESE, Fabrizio Ferraro, who came in after I was no longer in resident. I read an AMR article he did with Pfeffer. He does organization theory and networks, so that would seem like a great match. Meanwhile, I played catch up on classes and grading and also family time.

Now I am on the cusp of next stage of life as a scholar. I have many goals and half-cooked aspirations. Some new, some leftovers from the last ten years of professional meander. The sense of having passed through a stage has brought this jumble of ideas back. I am excited by new possibilities even as I remind myself to try and build profitably from all that I cooked up in dissertation. And, that particular pie is still in the over, so to speak.

A colleague of mine, Skip McGoun, told me a good joke the other day. I can now add it to my repertoire of economist jokes.

Three economists go hunting for deer. They come to the edge of a meadow and they see a deer. The first economist aims, fires, and misses five yards in front of the animal. Startled, it doesn’t move. The second economist aims, fires, and misses by five yards behind the deer. Poor beast is paralyzed with fear. The third economist throws down hhis rifle and says:
“Damn, we nailed it!”

:<)

Skip then told me he wrote a paper about the other famous economist joke. He emailed it and I need to read it ASAP! I love the idea that he wrote something about a joke!

November push on dissertation

I need to integrate the diffuse ideas that coalesce in my dissertation, but are so far left underwhlemingly disarticulated.

□ There are two dualisms in the heart of my thinking. Dualism of knowing and knowledge and dualism of structure and agency. Integrating these would provide me with the overall theoretical framework.

□ I never articulate the very specific mechanisms or elementals of why networks matter for learning.

Why do networks matter for learning? This is the question I think I have been trying to answer for a while now. The attempt to answer leads me to tackle what is learning? Change in K. Then, what is K? Then, zooming in and out on causal arguments as well as human/org nature questions. This is the stuff that bogs me down for now.

This is also where I tried to start by critiquing the two black boxes. This becomes an argument about how to think about org learning. I talk about how to talk about the phenomenon of interest rather than the phenomenon.

Since March and Cyert, and Leavitt and March, we have been talking about the org as an entity that behaves. From a network perspective, it is a node that is suffused with networks at higher (nations? Orgs?) and lower (groups, individuals) levels. If we define K as socially constructed, and OL as a social process of changes in socially constructed knowledge, than it is clear we should be serious about this social business. We need to know what kinds of differences in what kinds of social contexts will matter (like Watts’ arguments in Six Degrees about madness and delusion of crowds).

To say that K is socially constructed means (this can map to various create, retain, and transfer stories? Also, what about people like Carley and Argote who see whole thing as network and want to talk about flows among people, tasks, and artifacts.):

- people rely on ties to acquire information before creating knowledge

- people accept as legitimate knowledge that is transmitted over different networks and/or ties (threshold models and social influence in Watts)

- the info available is bounded by the cognitive and network horizons of the individual (search problems; Rob Cross and Borgatti’s work).

- risk-taking in knowledge creation is a function of trust.

- creating knowledge creates new ties, or mediates existing ties if the knowledge is created across ties or is communicated across ties.

- variation in knowledge creation is a function of closure to generate knowledge and heterogeneity to cross fertilize knowledge.

To say that learn is a social process means: that a person learns when they change they are either creating or absorbing knowledge; in the case of creating knowledge, what they “know” is partly a function of the previous knowledge acquired through links. In the case of absorbing knowledge, they are also of course using links in their immediate social space. Furthermore, the cementing of individual learning as knowledge that can reasonably be kept, transferred, and used for future action, comes about as actions are assessed and reflected upon. This is true for both creating and absorbing knowledge. The means for assessing and reflecting upon knowledge-based action, who one is connected to, how the norms of that organization are embedded in ties, and how the social context will effect legitimation processes all come into play. These all have a network component.

Another possibility is to adapt lave and Lave and Wegner’s social learning theory. You learn by acquiring recognized expertise. Legitimate peripheral participation. Well, your peripheral position is network observable. As is the core. Also, the competence in the core is socially stored, constantly reinterpreted, and socially recognized.

Part of the puzzle is knowledge search through networks.

Part of the puzzle is power and norms and institutional stuff that is embedded in ties and emerges from network dynamics.

Part of the puzzle is how knowledge/learning activity shape networks.

□ Take the three processes, the Argotean definition, and for each discuss how networks matter. Problem is it don’t line up with my paper hypos all that well.

	Net effects
Creating	- Variation will be result of brokerage-closure balance. - Inter-org bridges will be important
Retaining	- Power and influence will matter for which ideas -
Transferring	- Network cohesion will matter for transfer of explicit knowledge -

□ Just acknowledge that each chapter is in discussion with a different author working out of a different tradition.

Ch 2 is Burt- working out of social capital as a mechanism for advantage.

Ch3-4 is March- working out of behavioral view fo firm as adaptive entity.

This maps on to Argote:

Ch 2 is about how network structure will affect creation.

Ch 3 is about how nets will affect creation and retention because by looking at explor-exploit it is looking at type of knowledge created AND retained in round 1

Ch 4 is about how networks will affect all three because it is looking at how knowledge is created, retained, and transferred as org deal with adaptive pressures… (Ok, do Mg 101 really deal with adaptive pressures?)

Also, about self organization.

Recent discovery- a new information storage and retrieval devise- portable, flexible, cheap! Its paper!

I decided to finish up my notebooks. I had this silly habit of keeping them until half fill and then getting caught up in worrying about fill them up. Would then I have to transfer everything over to the old one? I have some from Europe with this heavy, grid-lined A4 paper that I love. I’ve used it since my comprehensive PhD exams. Now I will fill it out and then get a new one as needed.

I have been under posting on blog because I was worried about exposing ideas too early and risking them being “stolen.” I was also worried about them seeming too rough and reflecting poorly on my academic reputation (not much of one really, so why the worry?). Well, the solution is so gob-smackingly obvious. I will just keep a word file journal and cut and paste selectively onto the blog. Worth a try.

Teaching change as teaching human nature?

I am into second week of organizational change. I was thrilled to find Breaking the Code of Change edited by Michael Beer and Nitin Nutria because it takes major themes (leadership, systems or culture, consultants, etc) and presents two strong advocates for differing viewpoints in each topic followed by a third person’s commentary and/or synthesis.

What I got out of readings for next class was a reminder of how clearly I see organizations as complex systems of multiple feedback loops that, as the system dynamics people would say, are fundamentally non-predictive. The same organization, with the same technology and people, making the same decision, may arrive at tow wildly different outcomes because of the turbulence of the environment and the nonpredictive dynamics of all those components’ interacting.

The puzzle for me in teaching this idea is how to convey the visceral sense I have of complex organizations as described above. I want the students to discover this view of reality, but I worry that such an approach will leave them either a) feeling like I am hiding something from them or b) missing the point about complex orgs.

The two chapters for Monday, by Jensen and Senge, also bring up the question of the purpose of organizations and businesses (maximize value or expand learning ability) which parallels the classic stockholder-stakeholder debate: Milton Freidman-esque (only business of business is business) stockholders first vs. Robert Freemanesque (many others have a say and are affected) negotiate among stakeholders. I can see how this debate, in turn, tends to turn on questions of human nature. Do I bring this up, or does that tend to collapse other debates and limit conversation?

Roger says...

ROger, from my writing/French philosophy group says I should carry around a little card with all my publishing goals on it. He does one, and ritualistically retypes, prints, and cuts it to size once a month or so. You have to carry it in your wallet, like an ID card or something. He swears by it, and he did just go on a tear through tenure review year (publishing ro submitting about 5 dozen things).

I just always turn up my nose at "gimmicks." But, hell, why not? What can it hurt?