Siobhan O'Mahony

"Nexus Work: Managing Integration Work on Creative Projects"

Siobhán O'Mahony studies how communities and new ventures in nascent industries organize and new forms of cooperation that emerge to create shared platforms for innovation. A pervasive objective is to understand how competing interests shape the design of new organizations. An additional focus is to understand how individuals lead and communities organize to achieve collective outcomes when operating outside the confines of traditional authority structures. Her work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Research Policy, Research in Organizational Behavior, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Industry and Innovation, the Journal of Management and Governance among other edited volumes. She has presented her research at numerous industry and academic conferences throughout North America and Europe. Assistant Professor O'Mahony serves on the editorial board of Administrative Science Quarterly, is currently a special issue editor for Academy of Management Journal, reviews grants for the European Science Foundation, and is an ad hoc reviewer for several other journals. Before joining the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in the fall 2007, Assistant Professor O'Mahony received her Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, an M.P.A from the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs, and a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell University.

Much research shows that brokers are more likely to have good ideas and benefit from them. However, to bring a creative project to fruition, brokers must not just have good ideas, but must elicit and integrate the ideas of others. With an ethnographic study of music producers, we studied how those central to a project integrate the ideas of project contributors without losing individuals¹ engagement in the project. We show the conditions that triggered three types of ambiguity and the relational practices producers used to respond to each type. Our process model complements structural conceptions of brokerage and suggests that, when integration work is required, relational nexus work is more likely than the opportunistic arbitrage often associated with brokerage.

Marion Fourcade

"Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and Conceptions of Nature in France and the United States."

Marion Fourcade (PhD Harvard University) is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. A comparative sociologist, she is interested primarily in investigating and theorizing about how individuals in different countries think about the world and act in it, where these differences come from, and what their macro-social consequences might be. She has worked comparatively on the formation of knowledge, disciplines and professions; the making of economic policies; the forms of political organization; and international processes and dynamics. Her first book, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009, just out this month), explores the institutions and cultural forces that have shaped the professional identities, practical activities and disciplinary projects of economists in the United States, Britain, and France in the twentieth century. The place of economic expertise and measurement technologies across cultures is also at the core of her next book project on the roots and consequences of social classifications, tentatively titled Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification. Professor Fourcade’s work has appeared in numerous professional outlets, such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Theory and Society.

In the paper she will present on April 3rd, Professor Fourcade compares the legal treatment of two large-scale maritime oil spills [the Amoco Cadiz (Brittany (France), 1978) and Exxon Valdez (Alaska, 1989)], investigating in particular how French and American plaintiffs sought to obtain monetary compensation for injuries to the natural environment. She shows that the significant national differences in claims and outcomes may be partly explained by the valuation technologies used by the parties, which in turn are inextricably linked to varying cultural assumptions about the concept of nature, the broader social legitimacy of monetary exchange, and institutional legacies about the prerogatives of different types of scientific experts (economists and others) and political actors in the legal process.

Bruce Carruthers

"The Economy of Promises: Credit Institutions in 19th-century America"

Bruce Carruthers earned a Ph.D.from the University of Chicago in 1991. Areas of interest include historical and comparative sociology, economic sociology, sociology of law and sociology of organizations. Carruthers has written three books, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton University, 1996), Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States (Oxford, 1998), and Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000). His current research projects are on the evolution of credit decision-making as a problem in the sociology of trust, and worldwide changes in bankruptcy law in the era of a globalized world economy. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/quantitative distinction is worth fighting over. Northwestern is Carruthers' first teaching position.

Sten Nyberg

"Norms of Mediocrity - Tall Poppies and the Law of Jante"

Sten Nyberg is Professor of Economics at Stockholm University and holds a PhD from Stockholm School of Economics. He is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His main research interest includes social norms and economic incentives, public economics and industrial organization. He has published in journals such as Economica, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Public Economics and Quarterly Journal of Economics. Sten Nyberg has also served as economic expert for the Stockholm City Court in competition law trials, and was subsequently a member of the Swedish Market Court for several years. He is on leave from a position as chief economist for the Swedish Competition Authority.

Mitchel Abolafia

"Fine-Tuning the Signal: Constructing 'Spin' at the Federal Reserve"

Mitchel Abolafia is a professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at SUNY Albany. His research interests focus on the application of organization theory to the study of monetary policy, financial markets, and bureaucratic politics. He has written articles on economic competition, hyper-rationality, and market culture. His book, Making Markets (Harvard University Press, 1997), is a comparative study of the trading floor in the bond, stock and futures markets. His current research examines policy making at the Federal Reserve Board.

The Federal Reserve transmits signals to a diverse audience of investors, consumers, and firms in an effort to influence their perceptions and behavior. This paper examines the process through which the Federal Reserve fine-tunes those signals. It identifies two major strategies: transparency and misdirection, as well as the signal enhancement and credibility filtering practices associated with each. The iterative and recursive fine-tuning process is illustrated with examples from verbatim transcripts of meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, the chief policy making unit of the Federal Reserve.

Siegwart Lindenberg

"The Future of Choice-Theoretic Sociology: Norms, Cognition, and Behavior - How Do Norms Really Work and What Are Smart Norms?"

Siegwart (M.) Lindenberg (PhD Harvard 1971) is professor of cognitive sociology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is one of the board members of the Interuniversity Center for Social science theory and methodology (ICS) and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 he was knighted (order of the Netherlands Lion) for his scientific work by the queen of the Netherlands. For his publications, see his website:www.ppsw.rug.nl/~lindenb

Norms, cognition, and behavior. How do norms really work and what are smart norms? Norm conformity used to be seen as a matter of internalizing norms. Why is this view wrong? What makes norm conformity so precarious? What happens when norms become more abstract? What different microfoundations do we need to deal with norm-guided behavior? These are some of the central questions that are covered in this lecture.

Messenger Series Lecturer James March

James G. March is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, best known for his research on organizations and organizational decision making. March is highly respected for his broad theoretical perspective which combined theories from psychology and other behavioural sciences. As a core member of the Carnegie School, he collaborated with the cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon on several works on organization theory. March is also known for his seminal work on the behavioural perspective on the theory of the firm along with Richard Cyert (1963). In 1972, March worked together with Olsen and Cohen on the systemic-anarchic perspective of organizational decision making known as the Garbage Can Model. Since 1953, he has served on the faculties of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the University of California, Irvine, and (since 1970) Stanford University. He has been elected to the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Education, and has been a member of the National Science Board.

Lecture 3: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 4:30 PM
Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
"The Generation of Novelty"

Lecture 2: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 4:30 PM
253 Mallott Hall
"The Replication of Success"

Lecture 1: Monday, October 27, 2008, 4:30 PM
Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
"The Pursuit of Adaptive Intelligence"

Friday, October 3, 2008, 3:00 PM
Room 302 Uris Hall