Rakesh Khurana's Weblog

Clifford Geertz

The great social anthropologist Clifford Geertz has died. The New York Times has a good, but too brief, obituary, about this intellectual giant. Not only was Geertz a great anthropologist, he was also an insightful sociologist, political scientist and economist. Most famous for his book The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz's writings extended to subjects as diverse as the nature of charismatic leadership, the social structure and culture of markets, auctions and exchange, the meaning of honor and status in the Islamic world, and the anthropology of academic life.

Part of what contributed to Geertz's wide range was his training. Geertz was one of the last of a generation of social scientists whose intellectual foundations were not rooted in a single discipline, but a broad and wide-ranging exposure to all of the social sciences. As a graduate of Harvard's social relations department, an experiment that sought to unify the major social sciences (except economics) and which has since fragmented into conventional specialized disciplines and sub-disciplines, Geertz's education allowed him to explore many subjects and methods. He thought critically about ideas that have become lemmas in most disciplines. He studied facts without an overarching, grand theory.

One of Geertz's main insights, though he never said it in explicit terms, is that despite the steady march of rationalization, humans’ lives continue to operate within a web of significance and search for meaning. Indeed, the intensity for deriving meaning in life has only increased, not decreased, with bureaurcratization. This is key theme of Geertz's work and I believe it is essential to his worldview.

I was pleased to see in the obituary about the similarities between Geertz's and Max Weber's work. Both men understood that the social scientists attempt to comprehend social reality was an act of interpretation, not just the outlining of the structure of relations in a society. The objects of society depend upon the mind's operation. Society is not "given" to the mind, but interpreted through concepts and symbols. While natural science may yield laws, human beings are richer in culture and free not to obey laws. Human beings move with purpose and creative agency.

Geertz, like Weber, also understood the distinction between Zweckrationalitat and Wertrationalitat, as representing two types of rational action. The former is instrumental action taken in respect ot a goal in which the actor calculates the conditions or means to attain a desired end. The latter is value based. It is action taken for the sake of some over-riding principle, such as aesthetics or religion, independently of its probability of chance.

Confidence in U.S. Leaders

U.S. News and World Report will soon release a report showing that Americans have very little confidence in those leading society's most significant institutions. Of the major societal institutions, Americans only expressed moderate confidence in medicine and the military. Other major institutions, like Congress, the executive branch, religion, and business were given low trust scores. The study was conducted using survey with respondents "asked to rate their confidence in the country’s leadership on a scale from 1 to 4, with 4 representing the highest confidence."

Back

Well, I'm back. A draft of the book is pretty much done. For the past two weeks, I've been trying to catch up on a backlog of emails and other administrative stuff that I had neglected for more than 3 months.

Lifting my head up from my notes and books, I see that the world hasn't changed much. It still feels as if we are on the brink of a great change.

As an academic, all this change makes thinking about the world difficult. Our task as researchers and observers is very much complicated by the fact we live in a world of great change, if not disintegration. From a very selfish perspective, I find it hard to describe organizations or develop theory when everything is in flux. I think the reason for the difficulty is that the range of possibilities for the future are infinite. Relatedly, it is not clear whether the present or (near past or immediate future) represents an equilibrium condition. As a result, most of what I confront when I speak to people in organizations is a world of that is only described as changing. It is a world of shattered meanings that I believe is increasingly accompanied by social expressions, such as anomie and alienation and bewilderment.

John McGharen

The great Irish novelist John McGahern has passed away. His stark and spare writing style often led to comparisons with Joyce, but personally I other than the Irish setting, I always found McGahern's writing more compelling and transcendent.  The New York Times writes:

His style was terse. His novels moved deliberately through their agonies of love and misgiving, always with reference to the dominating Catholic culture and the rigors of wresting existence from the fields and the peat bogs.

There were no truly happy endings in his fiction. To the questions he posed about the meaning of life, he gave equivocal answers. Some characters stayed in the country and adjusted; others left. Most were nagged by doubt and guilt, caught between the lure of personal fulfillment in the outside world and the pull of family and home.

Christmas

I have a feeling that I might find this in my stocking next Christmas:

Device tells you if you're boring
MIT Media Lab researchers are building an... "emotional social intelligence prosthetic device" is a camera that clips on eyeglasses and feeds images to a small computer that uses image recognition software to characterize emotions. If the listener doesn't seem to be engaged, the device vibrates to alert the wearer. Progress on the device will be presented at the International Workshop on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks next week at MIT. From New Scientist:

(Researcher Rana El Kaliouby's) program is based on a machine-learning algorithm that she trained by showing it more than 100 8-second video clips of actors expressing particular emotions. The software picks out movements of the eyebrows, lips and nose, and tracks head movements such as tilting, nodding and shaking, which it then associates with the emotion the actor was showing. When presented with fresh video clips, the software gets people's emotions right 90 per cent of the time when the clips are of actors, and 64 per cent of the time on footage of ordinary people...

Getting the software to work is only the first step, (researcher Rosalind) Picard warns. In its existing form it makes heavy demands on computing power, so it may need to be pared down to work on a standard hand-held computer...

Childhood

In last Sunday's New York Times there was a recipe for homemade birthday cake accompanied by a refreshing call to de-industrialize childhood. The author wrote:

home-baked cakes strike a blow against the modern industrialization of children's birthday parties, in which 20 6-year-olds are dragooned to a gym, led around tumbling mats by grim-faced instructors for $45 a head, then sent home with goody bags filled with embarrassingly expensive electronic doodads.

Homemade cakes say, "It is perfectly fine to stuff into my smallish home, play pin the tail on the donkey and leave with a loot bag holding edible bracelets and a plastic puzzle that will break in a week."

Take back childhood, people!

Since becoming a parent, one of the more curious sociological changes that I've seen when comparing my own upbringing to my children's upringing is the standardization and rationalization of childhood. Children are increasingly subject to powerful rational and technical forces--mostly through parents--that segments their lives into a series of continual interractions with formal organizations. This includes a number of activities-- from the organized soccer of Newton Girls Soccer to the formal organization of playdates to the institutionalization of standardized testing that now begins in elementary school.  Parents are increasingly subject to a littany of "best practices" that emerges from magazines and so-called child experts. Terms like information, skills, complexity--which were often associated with rational production systems--are increasingly used to describe the interactions between parents and children in parenting books. One unintended consequence of this rationalization process, I fear,  is the disenchantment of childhood.

Be glad you are not married to Harrison Ford

This is a very funny montage of Harrison Ford's movies.  I never realized the red thread that runs through most of his movies... 

http://bestweekever.blogs.com/best_week_ever_blog/2006/03/harrison_ford_w.html

8th Grade Math

I just took a quiz testing whether my math ability meets the 8th grade level. Thank goodness I passed--my grades are below.

***You Passed 8th Grade Math***

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?
http://www.blogthings.com/couldyoupasseighthgrademathquiz/

Brokeback Mountain

I went to see the movie Brokeback Mountain last night. I don't have much to write except see this movie. It is achingly human. Ang Lee's direction is stark. He exposes the nerve endings that most of us wish would scar and then numb.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhal give  spare, heart-wretching performances. Ledger gets so deep into his character--his pain, loneliness, and vulnerability--that I wondered what the psychological impact of a performance like this will have on him as a person. It is one of the best films I've seen in years.

Thinking about Rankings

I received many emails about the "management" rankings. I have to admit rankings, while personally pleasing, are actually complex social phenomenon.  Americans love to rank things, from scariest movies, to greatest rock songs of all time, to buisness schools and wines. Since I know a little about business schools, let me describe the impact rankings have had.
    There are many who have argued that the ranking business schools has proven to be a significant problem and others who argued that it has taken something in the shadows and cast sunshine on it.  The critics charge that students are no longer being educated and teachers are no longer teaching; instead, they buy and sell rankings. A school ranked in the top five will have a higher yield rate than one ranked in the top ten. As a result, a lot of time and energy is invested into making sure that the ratings’ criteria are being met.
    What explains the prestige, power, and duplication of business school rankings? Not very often, however, are the rankings thought about in the abstract, as an idea about how they impact business education. In a sense, the ranking system devised by BusinessWeek and the other media organizations reflects a kind of conceptual reductionism; a method of evaluation that seems to parallel the “thumbs up or thumbs down” approach used in contemporary movie reviews. Be that as it may, it goes without saying that rankings of all types are crucial to the functioning of market life. For example, in places where prices do not accurately reflect the value of an underlying good, systems of rank have emerged as putatively objective methods of evaluation. Sociologists Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens describe this process of quantification in a professional field or area as “commensuration.” Commensuration, they argue, is “the expression or measurement of characteristics normally represented by different units according to a common metric.” A noteworthy example of how a good can shift from a complex judgment to a more commensurate ranking is the system of Robert Parker’s wine rating and the recent imposition of elementary education exams created by the 200x, No Child Left Behind Act. 
    Rankings are also attractive because they are simplistic and they convey a sense of order. By virtue of quantification, rankings promise comparability and standardization which are partially achieved by forcing those being ranked  to be more judicious in standardizing their own internal processes. The rankings in outlets like U.S. News and World Report and BusinessWeek forced schools to standardize their measures and adopt particular definitions of particular data. Consequently, most schools now share a common definition of starting salary, acceptance rate, and employment, thereby allowing for common metrics which transcend institutional differences.
    By reducing what economists call “search costs,”rankings make accessing and evaluating important information easier. Like the maximizing shareholder price, rankings mechanize the decision making process by, in part, marginalizing the elements that resist quantification while highlighting those that are particularly amenable.
    Yet, rankings provide the illusion of scientific rigor vis-à-vis a process that actually calls for careful judgment and nuanced interpretation. It is one thing to give Wharton, Tuck, or Columbia a rating as a top business school; this leaves some room for interpretation. However, to say that Wharton is number one, Columbia number 3 and Tuck number 2 indicates a level of precision that just cannot be achieved, except on the cover of a newsmagazine and then in the minds of students.
Consider, for purposes of illustration another complex product, wine.  Robert Parker has developed a popular 100-point scale for rating a complex product like wine. I don't know much about wine, but I buy it on ocassion. When one walks into a wine store and looks at the ratings, it is not uncommon to ask oneself is there really a meaningful qualitative difference between a wine rated 90 on the one hand, and a wine rated 91 on the other. Perhaps not? My uncle who owns a wine store tells me that the ratings system helped expand the market for wines in America where people previously felt they had no way to judge it or did not consider themselves experts. The problem he says, is that these newly initiated wine drinkers became score obsessed and willing to buy only those wines Parker rated above some certain score. The result is that producers then trip all over themselves trying to produce those wines that Parker's palate likes ( dark, high alcohol content, earthy, and jammy strong wines). As a result, high quality wines increasingly taste the same.

So, this raises a broader question. What kind of knowledge does ranking management thinkers produce?