Economic Sociology Seminars

Andrew Schrank, Brown University, The Watson School of International and Public Affairs

Pyramid Schemes:  Culling the Ranks in Hierarchical Organizations

What do political purges, military coups, pension schemes, social safety nets, mandatory retirement programs, tenure and partnership votes, and “golden handshakes” have in common? We argue that they all contribute to "culling" in pyramidal organizations that face at least broad constraints on the size and composition of middle management; develop a “crude functionalist” (Zuckerman 2003) account of their origins, pace, and consequences; and discuss the implications for both organization theory and macro-sociology. Our starting point is a bivariate, ideal-typical portrait of pruning, or culling, that differentiates personnel policies along two dimensions: whether
they’re mandatory or voluntary, on the one hand, and whether they’re proactive or reactive, on the other. When pyramidal organizations have both the foresight and latitude they need to anticipate and address “managerial bloat,” we argue, they impose mandatory exit initiatives on a proactive basis. When they lack both foresight and latitude, however, they take post hoc, discretionary measures to encourage early exit on a voluntary basis, often at great cost. When they have foresight but lack the latitude they’d need to mandate exit from the middle ranks, they tend to embrace or exploit proactive programs that, in effect, buy white-collar workers out of their jobs on a voluntary and systematic basis. And when they lack foresight but have ex post facto latitude, they respond to inefficiencies, imbalances, and conflicts in the middle ranks by carrying out mass layoffs and dismissals, often at the behest of organizational outsiders, insurgents, or heavyweights who justify their efforts by invoking the "mismanagement" or “disloyalty” of their forerunners. We demonstrate the plausibility and generality of the account by reconsidering four major debates—over the East Asian developmental state, Latin American military coups, purges in totalitarian societies, and corporate downsizing in the United States—in organizational perspective.

Philipp Brandt, Sciences Po

Inside Data Science: Hackers and the Making of a New Profession

Data scientists dominated conversations in the big-data era. Industries, disciplines, and public agencies that had done well without coding and math sought new specialists, while many academics looked on with skepticism. Curiously, the new hires had no clear tasks and felt uneasy under the spotlight. How did scattered nerds and hackers turn mostly familiar and partly questionable ideas into a new profession? The analysis draws on the history of quantitative thought, a reflexive data science-of-data science exercise, and three years of observations of semi-public gatherings in New York City’s tech scene in the early 2010s. It shows how participants devised the technical machinery for seeing the world through datasets. Counterintuitively, they also analyzed the social surroundings of their technical work. Going beyond the theoretical divide between expert work as a formal or informal affair, this study reveals relational discipline and reflexive creativity as meso-level mechanisms of professional emergence.

Elizabeth Bruch, University of Michigan

Making Social Structure Visible: How Knowledge Changes the Rules

Our lives unfold within structures we rarely see. Marriage markets, college curricula, and career pathways all follow underlying logics that determine how choices made today shape opportunities tomorrow. Yet for those navigating them, these rules are largely opaque. Each person experiences only a narrow slice of a much larger system—no one sees the whole. 

In this talk, I discuss two projects that experimentally alter what people know about the social systems they inhabit. The first gives dating-app users feedback about the market they participate in and how effective their strategies are within it. The second gives college students a bird’s-eye view of curricular trajectories at their university and how those paths lead to post-graduation careers.

Making social structures visible raises new normative, scientific, and practical challenges—chief among them, unintended consequences. I close by discussing how feedback loops complicate our models of social systems, and how new approaches might help us understand (and perhaps mitigate) the reflexive consequences of social knowledge.

Minjae Kim, Yale School of Management

Reinforced Brokerage

Co-author: Yonghoon Lee (Texas A&M)

Brokerage is often depicted as fragile and thus as a flexible arena where brokers cannot sustain their positions of advantage. We probe whether that is necessarily the case. Our argument is that brokers may lose their position of advantage if they depend on alters for resource access as much as their alters depend on them; but brokers may have enough control over alters and sustain brokerage if their assets are sufficiently exclusive. In the latter case, occupancy of brokerage positions may become reinforced by existing assets. We confirm this using a sudden event in the Korean popular music (K-Pop) industry—a prestigious producer’s health crisis—that eroded the assets that songwriters had accrued through prior sales to his production label. More generally, this implies that brokerage may not necessarily be an exception to the self-reinforcing dynamics driving persistent inequalities.