Political Holes in the Economy: The Business Network of Partisan Firms in Hungary
When firms reach out to allies in the political field, the logic of partisanship can constrain the choice of business partners in the economy. Balazs Vedres and I interviewed CEOs and politicians in Hungary and constructed a dataset of all senior managers and boards of directors of the largest 1,696 corporations and the complete set of all political officeholders. Firms of either left or right political affiliation exhibit a preference for partnerships with firms in the same political camp while avoiding ties with firms in the opposite camp. Subsequently, firms with politically balanced boards seize a brokerage opportunity to occupy the political holes in the economy opened up by the growing division between left and right.
Structural Folds: Generative Disruption in Overlapping Groups
What is a social group across time in network terms? This is the key sociological question that Balazs Vedres and I address in this paper. We identify a distinctive network position - the structural fold - at the overlap of cohesive group structures. We show that this structure contributes to creative disruption: groups with structural folds show higher performance but are also more unstable. In the final part of the paper we identify lineages of cohesion: across a longer time frame, groups separate and reunite in an ongoing pattern of interweaving.
From Dissonance to Resonance: Cognitive Interdependence in Quantitative Finance
How do traders deal with the fallibility of their models? The answer, Daniel Beunza and I show in this ethnographic study of an arbitrage trading room is to use devices for dissonance that disrupt the taken-for-granted and prompt them to reconsider the assumptions built into their databases. Warning: the same socio-technical networks of reflexive modeling that are a source for correction can also lead to the amplification of error.
What's Valuable?
This essay is the concluding chapter for The Worth of Goods: Valuation and Pricing in the Economy, edited by Patrik Aspers and Jens Beckert (Oxford University Press, 2011). I start with an insight of John Dewey's that the terms price, prize, and praise all share a common Latin root. To this triplicate I add a fourth, perform, using these four concepts as a device to discuss the papers in the volume. In one section, I address the phenemon of Top Ten lists: On-line ratings and rankings by consumers now provide vast sources of data on prizing and appraising - new means to register value judgments in the economy.
Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary.
In this paper, Balazs Vedres and I develop a social sequence analysis to identify distinctive pathways whereby firms use network resources to buffer uncertainty, hide or restructure assets, or gain knowledge and legitimacy. In place of properties of the global network, we focus on variation in local properties. In place of a single system time, we model the processes of social times. Our contribution to a more historical network analysis does not simply include time as a variable but, instead, recognizes time as variable.
Permanently Beta
Researchers in science and technology studies have long-recognized that the design process is not completed when manufacturers ship out a new product. Instead, users complete the design process when they resist some uses inscribed in the product, identify other affordances, and modify the product. All products, and especially new and unfamiliar ones, entail considerable interpretive flexibility. The new user innovation communities make this insight a part of corporate strategy. Instead of a hit or miss approach, they actively foster communities of users and involve their participation at ever-earlier stages of the design process. This is search when you don't know what you're looking for, relying on the users to recognize it when they find it.
Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism
Some years ago, when they were little kids, my children invented a hybrid game. Having left the houses and hotels of their Monopoly set at a friend's house, they started to use Lego building blocks (much preferred to the Monopoly pieces even after returned) to construct ever more elaborate structures in a game whose rules evolved away from bankrupting one's opponents and toward attracting customers to the plastic skyscrapers that towered over the Monopoly plain. This strikes me as a good metaphor for innovation and the process of social change. East European capitalism was not built on the ruins of communism but with the ruins of communism.
PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration
This paper examines the use of PowerPoint to make demonstrations in the public arena. Our first set of demonstrations are the PowerPoint presentations in December 2002 by the seven finalist architectural teams in the Innovative Design competition for rebuilding the World Trade Center. Our second case occurred some blocks away, several months later: Colin Powell's PowerPoint demonstration at the United Nations. We argue that Edward Tufte's denunciation of PowerPoint does not capture the cognitive style made possible by this pervasive new technology.
Socio-technologies of Assembly: Sense-making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan
Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, Monique Girard and I propose that forms of public assemby vary as distinct combinations of social networks, technologies, and protocols. The key technologies of a public hearing, for example, are a microphone and a stopwatch, combined with rules for who can speak and for how long.
Rooted Transnational Publics: Integrating Foreign Ties and Civic Activism
In the literature on globalization there is a widespread belief that civic associations with transnational ties are uprooted from their domestic societies. Laszlo Bruszt, Balazs Vedres, and I contend that there is not a forced choice between foreign ties and domestic integration. In fact, we find that transnational organizations are more domestically integrated than those without such ties. We base our argument on a survey of 1,002 of the largest civic organizations which we conducted in Hungary. We specify several forms of domestic integration and several forms of transnational ties. By demonstrating a systematic relationship between the patterns of foreign ties and the patterns of domestic integration, we chart three emerging forms of transnational publics.
The Organization of Responsiveness: Innovation and Recovery in the Trading Rooms of Lower Manhattan
The September 11th attack on the World Trade Center destroyed the trading room where Daniel Beunza and I had been conducting ethnographic research. The traders invited us to witness their recovery, and so Daniel was with them already during the first week after they resumed trading on September 17th. This paper reports on our observations in their makeshift trading room in New Jersey. The breakdown of technology, we argue, is society made visible.
Resolving Identities:Successive Crises in a Trading Room after 9/11
How do organizations cope with extraordinary crisis? In the second paper about the experiences of our Wall Street traders after September 11th, Daniel Beunza and I report on the process whereby they returned to their restored trading room in the World Financial Center. The trading room did not face one crisis – the immediate aftermath of September 11th – but many: anxiety about additional attacks, questions of professional identity, doubts about the future of the firm, and ambiguities about the future re-location of the trading room. A given crisis was resolved by restoring identities; but identities, once restored, redefined the situation and lead to new crises. That is, the successive waves of crisis were produced by each success in managing crisis.
Crisis, Recovery, Innovation: Responsive Organization after September 11
On December 5, 2001, Columbia's Center on Organizational Innovation organized a roundtable discussion with senior executives and contingency planning specialists from key World Trade Center firms. This paper with John Kelly reports on that meeting and other interviews that our research team conducted in the early weeks after 9/11. It documents the importance of strong personal ties, lateral self-organization, and nonhierarchical relations in the recovery process. As a response to uncertainty, organizational factors that explain recovery are similar to those that generate innovation.