Everyone Asking Why Everyone Bowls Alone, Research Time, 04/05/2015

I like sociology. I’m not a sociologist, but I have some good friends among the sociologist community. I’ve been to a few conferences, read articles and books, even presented at a couple of conferences and gotten some sociology-researched work published in an interdisciplinary journal.

Yet there was one moment reading Charles Kadushin that reminded me of one aspect of sociology that will probably always annoy me. In his chapter on the concept of social capital, Kadushin discusses Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Frankly, if you’re writing a book that introduces fundamental concepts of modern sociological network theory, you have to discuss Bowling Alone for at least a little bit. 

The book set a lot of the fundamental frameworks through which sociologists still understand, discuss, and research social capital and the networked connections that constitute it. An enormous amount of research on social networks, civil society and volunteering organizations, and work developing the social network mapping software you need to make sense of it all was done in Putnam's wake to answer the questions that held on at the end of his book, or to critique and disprove his answers.

But you see, man, we're never really alone, because
we have still kept our friends. Mark an 8, Dude.

Whether you followed Putnam or you wanted to prove him wrong, after Bowling Alone, Putnam was a figure in your sociological universe. A main reason why was simply that Bowling Alone was popular. 

Its concern was mapping the decline of American civil society organizations, and interpreting this trend as contributing to a decline in democratic participation and political engagement. Americans since 1950 had become more socially isolated from each other, and their social networks became smaller simply because they weren’t interacting with other people.*

* I have a completely anecdotal, non-scientific, and entirely personal perspective on why people have, on the aggregate, lost social connections since 1950. Suburbanization and the model of the sprawling city made commutes of an hour or two each way ordinary, ubiquitous, and socially acceptable. Having spent the last two years with one or both members of my partnership commuting Hamilton-Toronto, Hamilton-Oakville, or Toronto-Oakville, I experienced how tired and generally shagged out we were at the end of a workday. We couldn’t bring ourselves to so anything else.

That concern, and the credibility of concern that Putnam’s institutional pedigree and empirical research gave him, spoke to perennial anxieties in the culture of the United States, especially in the post-suburban era. It’s especially critical of our technology isolating us socially, as entertainment designed for individual consumption dominated our lives. 

Fear of new technologies is likewise a perennial American anxiety. As one of the critiques of Putnam's work said, there were concerns in the 1920s that individual-focussed technologies like radio were similarly eroding social capital. Kadushin himself isn't interested in the particular case, at least not in the book I read, but only how Putnam's studies used existing social network theory and contributed to its development.

Nonetheless, Understanding Social Networks does have some criticisms of Putnam’s work, which in turn open my opportunity to criticize some aspects of sociology that annoy me a little. Kadushin is mainly concerned that Putnam’s writing style, so suited as it was for popular consumption, was obscure and vague. The precise meanings of his concepts were difficult to define. He praises many of the sociologists who followed Putnam for giving more clarity to his fundamental ideas, yet he also laments that these improved studies didn’t catch popular consciousness as Bowling Alone did.

Kadushin praises the styles of extremely technical writers for their precision, since they brought the ideas of Bowling Alone to a level of detail that Putnam's own book didn't reach. This secondary literature that surrounds Bowling Alone refines and completes its conceptual machinery so future sociologists can build properly from Putnam's work and ideas. 

But as far as goes the popular reception of sociology, the public image of its ideas and research methods, Putnam is still the face of the idea of social capital despite its technical limitations. And it was precisely his prose, which Kadushin criticizes as more popular than precise, by changing how the public, who sociology ostensibly serves, understands social science itself. 

Hey Who’s in Charge Around Here? Research Time, 13/04/2015

My communications program’s instructors will sometimes talk about the importance of a company’s CEO not only in representing the company to the wider public, but in actually managing it. It’s a pretty intuitive idea, that the boss would manage the company. But sociological research into organizations since the 1930s has revealed that the boss, despite being the boss, doesn’t always know what’s going on at his own company.

What makes technology CEOs and the actors who play
them in movies such good bosses is the open,
collaborative work environment through which their
firms operate.

Network theory has become the main analytic tool in understanding how organizations actually work on a daily basis. That early research into organizations discovered that the standard hierarchy of a company (chiefs at the top, then executives, division heads, managers, team leads, workers, and support staff) didn’t tell the whole story of how people communicate in organizations and who was responsible for what. The official hierarchies still determined how much people were each paid, though.

If a company’s organizational hierarchy is its formal network, then its informal networks are the relationships and communications links that actually get the work done. Network analysis describes how each informal network grows, specifically to the case.

Charles Kadushin’s book has some really clear explanations of how these work. Formally, each worker in a hierarchy reports to the next person up the organization’s formal pyramid. A team lead reports to a manager, who reports on all his teams’ activities to a division head, who reports the summarized activities of his division to the executives and company chiefs. The CEO and associates then make leadership decisions for the company based on the collected information from all the divisions.

Real organizations have so much more going on than this, and the sociological sub-discipline of organization theory which informs Kadushin’s chapter where this example comes from produced the empirical studies that showed it. Members of multiple teams within and across divisions talk to each other at all levels of the corporate hierarchy. 

They discuss how their division runs and the details of different projects. They figure out how their projects are related and collaborate. All of this may go on without any of this knowledge sharing ever ending up in an official report or otherwise travelling to a nominal superior. Workers act autonomously simply because the orders of their nominal superiors can’t account for the collaborative activity of which they never learn.

And if those superiors ever do learn of such knowledge, and disapprove of it, they quite likely won’t be able to stop it. Another empirical discovery of the organization sociologists over the last century or so was that the authority of the boss to direct the activity of the workers doesn’t rest with the boss himself.

A BBC Capital article named Dov Charney of American
Apparel one of the world's worst CEOs of 2014 for a
long and horrible narrative of immoral and abusive
behaviour in his own company.

It sounds self-contradictory, doesn’t it. The boss gives orders and employees follow them. That’s why he’s the boss. But workers can and do rebel against a CEO’s authority. We see it all the time. A chief executive might be so authoritarian as to forbid collaboration, or so insecure as to attempt to micromanage different divisions. He might treat employees with contempt. And workers will disregard the orders of such a person, put up with him when he's in sight, and return to business as usual when he's gone.

In fairness, such executives are all rather bad at their jobs. One of the hallmarks of a good CEO is that she maintains the trust of employees at all levels. What is necessary to maintain that trust will vary depending on the culture of the workplace. 

Accustomed as we are today to the flat hierarchies of the internet, I’d venture that such trust rests in fostering a collaborative work environment where employees are empowered to speak frankly about their company’s conduct and projects, and where it’s clear that the higher-ranking executives care about what they say.

Collaboration is at the heart of a sensible, sane workplace. But collaboration can result in unethical or counter-productive practices too. Kadushin talks about insider trading as an example. Brokers working in the same physical or online trading halls getting to know each other and sharing knowledge for mutual productivity. One day, that knowledge sharing reaches a certain threshold and becomes an unfair advantage, a corruption.

Michelle Bachelet is a hero of modern democracy, but
is also mired in allegations of familial political corruption.

Corruption occurs anywhere. I was reading this morning about the son of Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile. Bachelet is a heroic figure in Chile, a woman who was tortured in prison under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, but who became the president after re-democratization. But her son is being prosecuted for using his family’s political connections to acquire a $10-million property and flip it within months for an enormous profit. It didn’t help his or President Bachelet’s case for innocence that he’s also in his mother’s government. 

So I wonder, given the importance of unofficial social networking for the health of companies and the wealth of individuals in the system, how does collaboration for mutual profit become intolerable corruption?

We’re taught at every stage of our life to use our social connections to get what we want. Some of my student colleagues in the communications program are choosing to focus their search for internships and jobs on what they can find through their own networks. And that’s fine. It isn’t an advantage I can take part in because I don’t really have that many personal connections in Toronto anymore.

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to use them anyway. It’s nice if you can get them, but I prefer to put forward the best case for myself that I possibly can in a field and see if I can win a position with a firm on merit. That’s how I got my internship. If I were to use a personal connection to skip past an application process, I’d always feel illegitimate in a position, as if questions would always follow me of whether I deserved to be there.

Relations of Subordination Are Everywhere, Research Time, 05/04/2015

A short history boy moment before digging into the details of these ideas. I was first introduced to the ‘core-periphery’ relationship in a high school history class, where it was used to describe the economic relations of former colonizing countries to their former colonies. These economic relationships of subordination remain in place today.*

* In retrospect, some of my high school classes were pretty radical compared to a lot of people’s. 

But I had never taken enough sociology courses over the years to have seen how ubiquitous this concept is in the analytic frameworks of social network theory. In the abstract context of social network analysis, the core is simply another word for a hub. One node would have many other nodes directly connected to it, but those connected nodes would have only that connection to the central node and perhaps one or two others.

Occupy Boise in 2011. This was the first (and ongoing) attempt in North America
to overcome elite dominance through social organization. Kadushin writes that a
node in a social network becomes a core because that node is more valuable to
the other nodes in the network, and so connections grow. But moments of
revolution arise when those on the periphery revalue their priorities.

It’s the social structure of the elite and the masses, and it arises in all human group interactions and structures. Some people are especially well-connected to many others through many different relationships and institutions, and the majority of others have more sparse connections, perhaps only through a single group.

As the networks get larger and more complex, the analysis of what constitutes a core and its periphery becomes two-dimensional. When there are multiple core nodes, they connect not only to their periphery nodes, but also to each other. In a typical network, the periphery nodes are connected only to their core nodes, but generally not to each other.

This much about network structure I already knew. The next part (literally the next page in Charles Kadushin’s Understanding Social Networks), was an education for me.

The caucus model of the core-periphery relationship depicts a network where the most heavily connected nodes are mostly only connected with each other. The peripheral nodes here are almost entirely isolated, with no connection either to a hub or to each other. They simply drift around the outside.

Another modified relationship sees the core nodes as densely interconnected and with many peripheral connections too, but the peripheral nodes are isolated from each other. The flow of information along networks is important to distinguishing this model, emphasizing how important dynamism is to networked relations. 

So it looks like an ordinary core-periphery relationship defining the network, but the only two-way information flow is between hubs. Information flows from peripheral nodes to their hubs, but not from the hubs back out to their peripheral nodes. The peripheral nodes don’t belong to the core’s club, but the core sends messages to the periphery.

Sociological theory can sometimes be
delightfully irreverent, like when abstract
social network models are named after film
comedy stars of the 1930s.

“I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member,” goes the mantra of this model. At least that’s how they treat it in the introductory literature. That’s why Kadushin calls this the Groucho Marx model.

The model that Kadushin calls Deference also depends on dynamism to understand it. Hubs connect to each other and their own peripheral nodes, but the peripherals are connected with each other as well, sometimes across the peripheries of multiple cores. What stands out are the flows of information: hubs communicate with each other, but not to their peripheral nodes, while the peripherals send information every which way they can.

For the sake of filling out a summary of abstract possibilities, Kadushin mentions one last model that he says almost never happens in real networks. This is where the hubs not only communicate very little, but are not even well-connected to each other. The peripheral nodes, however, are all connected throughout the network, sending messages back and forth, but largely ignoring the core.

Kadushin doesn’t go into detail about what this would look like, but I imagine the connections among peripheral nodes would be centreless, with few hubs dominating connectivity to forge a new core. Almost rhizomatic. He refers to it through the mainstream American notion, derived from its Christian heritage, that “the meek shall inherit the Earth.”

I’ll call it by a more atheistic name that shows just how radical it is: mass communication among peripheral communities to marginalize the elite. No matter how abstract we may get in our analyses, there’s always a political meaning to all social network relations.

In real networks, there’s rarely such a clear delineation between core and periphery nodes. The distinction changes smoothly as you analyze a network. There are clearly centrally located core nodes with many direct connections, and there are obvious isolated peripheral nodes. 

But there are also nodes that have a few connections of their own, perhaps also to multiple core nodes. There are some core nodes that are connected mostly to other cores, or whose core-periphery networks themselves are fairly isolated from the broader network. 

All these complicating factors can’t always be depicted in the pure conceptual categories of analysis, which are even more abstract than the already abstract network diagrams. Such is the inevitable complication of real life over our models of it. It even complicates the models themselves.