Mark Granovetter

This blog post is part of a series on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on how social activism during the Civil Rights era is categorically different from activism using social media. Malcolm Gladwell’s controversial piece in this week’s New Yorker is shaking things up, as he’s advocating that social media doesn’t lend itself well to social activism. He cites examples of how social media only fosters surface-level, low-commitment actions based on weak ties and that social movements, like those pushing for civil rights, require hierarchies. I disagree. Others have, as well, as John Hudson has compiled over on The Atlantic. I’ll focus on Gladwell’s take on weak ties in this post, which I find problematic due to his sweeping generalizations of ties and their potential in guiding everyday life. The Nature of Ties Gladwell claims that social media fosters weak ties::

“There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”

Others have critiqued this by stating that social media tools {like Twitter and Facebook} can foster more than weak ties. Network structures are combinations of both weak and strong ties. The organizational research of Brian Uzzi at Northwestern {see image above} found that there are dangers of being overembedded {too many strong ties leading to insularity} and being underembedded {too many weak  or arms-length ties leading to a lacking of social structure}. Gladwell’s critique on this front hinges upon characterizing all networks as underembedded networks. There’s another issue here, which is the content of the tie. Ties can be characterized as strong or weak, but they can also be multiplex, i.e., representing a complex relationship that has more than one channel. For example, a tie can be characterized by flows of different types of capital, e.g., social, economic, political, etc., with varying degrees of strength. Social media campaigns can and do tap into networks and use people’s multiplex ties to increase engagement. Hearing about an issue through someone in your network is often more persuasive than from media and advertising, so there’s great potential here, but going from a social media campaign to action, let alone social change, is far from automatic.

My next post will address the issue of motivation and social media. Gladwell doesn’t think social media motivates people, but drives participation. I question this puzzling sweeping generalization.

Should higher education be thought of as a public infrastructure?

While in many European countries, higher education was often treated as a public good, a market ideology is increasingly being allowed to allocate access to it. The rationale is that higher education is well-suited to market mechanisms. It’s scarce, not everyone wants it, and is often available at a price. Recent trends towards market capitalism and neoliberal economics have globally hastened the transition towards a market-based view of education. Is this a good thing? Are there market failures?

First, there are political pressures in many countries to reduce public expenditures in higher education. Exploring configurations of public-private funding makes sense. In terms of market failures, or potential failures, one big issue with respect to higher education is the uncertainty of outputs. Higher education offers no express guarantees or warranties. One of its characteristics is that it has “credence qualities”, i.e., those which are hard to gauge even after purchase. Many services have credence qualities, such as consulting or legal or medical advice.

While assessment tries to address this quality issue, Mark Granovetter’s work on embeddedness shows that auditing functions are often subject to social and political forces. In a sense, assessment is really only as good as the localized culture.

Impacting the quality issue are market forces. Higher education institutions compete for students and there is a upward limit on price. The “business” of higher education tries to increase efficiencies to lower costs, by increasing “productivity” {e.g., larger class sizes} or utilizing part-time labour, graduate students, or lower-wage online instructors. The Nordic experience is one where national quality assurance agencies allow universities to develop their own quality initiatives, factoring in the multidimensional nature of quality and institutional contexts. The result is a diversity of approaches that allows flexibility, but also has sanctions for non-compliance.

I think one of the worst places for higher education to be is having an identity crisis with factions supporting radically different views. Teaching versus research can be a dichotomy, but I’ve also seen institutions struggle over going from having regional status versus national status, i.e., “we want to be great.”

Twitterversion:: Higher education & regulation.Does market ideology & the “business model” clash w/quality & accountability?#ThickCulture http://url.ie/5o75 @Prof_K

Song:: Bishop Allen-‘Charm School’

This is the second installment of a series on business schools.  The first was Are Business Schools to Blame (4/7)?

Does the business school need saving?  Its “soul”?  Is there a crisis brewing where there is no faith in business knowledge or are the current economic times the result of periodic blips or a few rogue players who aren’t following the “rules”?  It depends on who you talk to.  I believe the business school is here to stay, but the challenges for competing business schools will be ones of legitimacy in the eyes of the public and relevance in an increasingly global higher education market.  

In January, Tom Ehrlich offered a commentary on business education entitled The Business of Business Education is More than Business.  Ehrlich makes this keen observation::

“The application of critical analysis and good judgment to economic issues is important for all students, but surely it is essential for students majoring in business. Business leaders need to understand the historical, cultural, scientific, organizational, and political contexts of their domain, and these are best gained through liberal education. This need raises for us a question: to what extent are undergraduates majoring in business on campuses across the country gaining these and the other attributes of a strong liberal education?”

I’m all for liberal education infused in the business curriculum, but my vision is less about checkboxes of general education requirements and more about integrating or bridging the liberal arts into the curriculum.  

“One point to consider is that, for the most part, business curricula have not ’embedded’ liberal arts into the student’s program of study, but rather have isolated it, by separating it from the business education process.”

–Chew & McInnis-Bowers (2004), “Blending liberal arts & business education”

I think one of the ways that higher education provides value is helping students connect concepts and synthesize knowledge, but my experience is that it takes quite a bit of work to truly incorporate the liberal arts and social sciences into syllabi, let alone curriculae.  I’m talking about the epistemology of business.  Countering the received-view is no mean feat.  Given my own liberal education {along with 3 business degrees}, I can draw upon Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Some may argue that the received views of business and business education are fine.  There is no crisis at hand, in Kuhnian terms, leading to “revolutionary science”.*  Why fix what ain’t broke?  Well, that’s one way to go.

The fact of the matter is that the problems/issues of the financial sector have been in the news for a decade in mainstream sources like PBS Frontline.

• Betting on the Market (1997) {see clips here}
• Dot Con (2002)
• Bigger than Enron (2002)
• The Wall Street Fix (2003)
• The Secret History of the Credit Card (2004)

These stories can help all students to think critically about the business of business.  {I tell mine to even have a healthy skepticism of the Frontline videos.}  These videos are excellent points of departure for the interdisciplinary integration of liberal learning and business.  One common thread of most of these Frontline stories is an emphasis on the social relations of markets.  Enter Stanford Sociologist, Mark Granovetter, who published a very influential sociology paper on “embeddedness” in 1985.  Embeddedness denotes a situation where economic relations between individuals and/or firms are couched in actual social networks, as opposed to an idealized market of rational behaviors.  Granovetter cites a study of the business practice of auditing that illuminated unpredicted results::

“Audits of parts by the central office were supposed to be conducted on a surprise basis, but warning was typically surreptitiously given. The high level of cooperation shown in these internal audits is suggested by the following account: ‘Notice that a count of parts was to begin provoked a flurry among the executives to hide certain parts and equipment . . . materials not to be counted were moved to: 1) little-known and inaccessible spots; 2) basements and pits that were dirty and therefore unlikely to be examined; 3) departments that had already been inspected and that could be approached circuitously while the counters were en route between official storage areas and 4) places where materials and supplies might be used as a camouflage for parts. . . . As the practice developed, cooperation among the [department] chiefs to use each other’s storage areas and available pits became well organized and smoothly functioning’ (Dalton 1959, pp. 48-49).

Dalton’s work shows brilliantly that cost accounting of all kinds is a highly arbitrary and therefore easily politicized process rather than a technical procedure decided on grounds of efficiency.”  

–Mark Granovetter (1985), “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”

A-ha!  While auditing may serve a rational economic function to increase efficiencies or ensure compliance, the reality is that managers were circumventing this using their social networks.  The same holds true for malfeasance on a larger scale, evident in many of the Frontline videos.

The interfaces of science, the fine arts, architecture, communications, the humanities, and the social sciences with business can provide a “two-way learning street” to use Ehrlich’s term.  Giving students liberal education knowledge truly integrated with applied professional knowledge should encourage more systems thinking.  Students will be familiar with complexity and have a wide array of concepts to draw from to analyze problems.

Moving towards the integration of liberal knowledge with professional education may not change the world, but in my opinion, as business educators, it’s doing our job.