Avoiding the olympic torch to get home from work?

 Tomorrow I am as usual going to the State of California office in downtown San Fransisco to continue teaching court officials how to use statistics to catch criminals (well, we actually more often discuss how to evaluate court procedures and rehabilitation programs – but that does not sound as cool). It actually is a very cool and interesting group of researchers there.

Despite the coolness I am feeling somewhat nervous, my wife is in Europe on a job interview and I just HAVE to get back to Palo Alto in time, two different babysitters are lined up – one to tend to my daughter and another one to pick my son up from schools. The kids are usually very cool on these occassions. But last time I taught in SF we had to evacuate the building since there was a ‘anniversary anti-War march’ about to surround. What if this happens again?

I am of course talking about the controversies surrounding the Olympic Torch that you might have seen in new coverage across the globe. San Fransisco is the only North American town to host the Torch and the city’s combination of a pro-Tibetan activitism and one of the largest Chinese communities in North America, we are bound to see a lot of people taking to their pens, megaphones, and to the streets.

The Chronicle has been covering this issue for quite some time with a remarkably in-depth (starting with the cultural bases of Tibetan and Han Chinese culture and the historical development between the regions) and balanced coverage of the issue.  Did you know that by far the largest Tibetan diaspora on the North American continent lives in Toronto (3,300) while only 1,100 first- or second-generation  refugess from Tibet lives in Northern California?

Nevertheless, I just have to get home in time tomorrow not to risk the wrath of the babysitter(s). Despite my pathos for the Tibetan cause, I rather read the kids bed time stories than get bogged down in a demonstration…

Viva Montréal!

I finally got the acceptance letter for this year’s McGill-Cornell Conference on Institutions and Entrepreneurship, held at McGill University in Montréal. This will be a summer treat!  (and fortunately it is after the Swedish party de rigueur - midsummer). I wonder what running/hiking opportunities there are in Quebec – too bad they did not think to match up with the ski season…

I regrettfully missed last year’s conference which included highlights such as Shon Hiatt and Wesley Sine’s paper on entrepreneurship in dangeous places (Colombia) and Martin Ruef’s investigation of why the post-Civil War American South suppressed entrepreneurship.

I am set to present my preliminary work on entrepreneurship in the emerging sector of Swedish Voucher Schools – an organizational population that has grown from a politically endangered trickle in the mid-1980s to a vibrant body of schools ranging from parent-organized rural schools with a collective action flavor to a number of increasingly profitable (and contestable) multi-unit organizations noted on the Stock Exchange. The cause for this explosion of independent (voucher) schools is a radical and interesting educational experiment that is internationally unique - except for attempts in Chile, Colombia and some U.S. States like Ohio to introduce vouchers, traditionally welfare-oriented Sweden was the first country to introduce a national voucher scheme in 1992. And except for the research by economist and educational scienctists on educational outcomes of the vocher – very little research has actually been done on this phenomenon. More news will follow…

 

Being Metternich

I have recently been reading the brilliant book “Vienna 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War and Peace at the Congress of Vienna” by David King. A wonderful account of the actual days and nights during which 19th century Europe was created, the book gives a chance to get an insight into the actual thoughts, discussions and dealings by historical giants such as Klemens von Metternich. King writes engaged, lively and colorful and manage to weave together an intricate web where the lives and actions of political delegates seem to logically connect to Vienna contemporaries such as Ludwig van Beethoven in a grand narrative that is fascinatingly complex yet great fun and comprehensible for the average history nerd.

For anyone interested in diplomacy, history, or international politics this book is a must: it provides in-depth and intriguing insights into the actual stories and life worlds of what was to define the emerging field of diplomacy. Metternich’s importance can be gauged by the fact that he is still a controversial figure who for long, especially by the liberal democrats of late 19th and early 20th century - was depicted as a reactionary oppressor. For others he is seen as a forebearer of modern diplomacy – especially in regards to him leveraging Montesquieu’s balance of powers to an international framework. Apparently, Henry Kissinger (also a controversial figure these days) wrote his Harvard PhD on Metternich.

No love in a safe school?

In a book, Youth Conflict: Culture and Control in a Multiethnic Urban High School, forthcoming at University of Chicago Press and discussed at a seminar this week at Scancor, Calvin Morrill at UC Irvine and Michael Musheno of S.F. State/UC Berkeley investigate how processes of conflict resolution are created (and disrupted) in contemporary America.

Drawing upon an array of ethnographic data from a longitudinal study of a multiethnic high school in Arizona, Morrill, Musheno and their colleagues describe formal and informal mechanisms for conflict resolution and how they are practiced at an urban school in Arizona. At the seminar, Morrill described how, tradigically, just after what was believed to be the final data collection had ended, a violent incident erupted at the school with several severe injuries. This led the researchers to go back to the school and continue their studies of violence and violence prevention. Morrill told how the reserach team was emotionally distressed by the incident and that the team, in part, referred to it among themselves as “failure of their own ethnography”.  They therefore decided to continue their investigation. Morrill, Musheno, and colleagues found the noticeable pattern that while intra-racial tensions (especially among Mexican-born and U.S.-born Chicano students) persisted at the school, they rarely, if ever, reached the level of collective violence at the school throughout the 1990s.  However, after the introduction of “safe school techniques of control” spurred by the ‘Safe Schools Movements’ at the end of the century, ethnic boundaries were heightened through intensified control and surveillance of students on campus whereupon the conditions for intra- and interethnic conflict increased, and the incident of collective violence alluded to above occurred. 

The U.S. Safe Schools Movements emerged out of the victims rights, mediation, and various school (anti-gang) reform movements of the 1970s and 1980s.  Spurred by the federal funding provided by the Safe Schools Act of 1994 and the intensification of collective fear in the aftermath of the Columbine student massacre in Colorado in 1999 and the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Safe Schools evolved into a mass movement aimed at transforming the physical and social control architectures in U.S. Schools, and in turn, created a large market for services and hardware.  By the early 2000s, the schools security market had grown to over 5 billion dollars and had attracted U.S. military defense corporations, such as Lockheed Martin (better known for its manufacture of missles), as key providers of hardware (e.g., electronic surveillance equipment), training, and “secure” designs for schools.

Schools adopt “Safe” programs – including so-called ‘Zero Tolerance programs’ – as part of a standardized set of activities sponsored by school districts, states, and the federal government to prevent violent incidents in troubled schools.  Such “safe facilities techniques” includes the setting up of “ring perimeter” fencing around schools (similar to what is used for prisons) and posting armed guards in visible places, the removal of trees, shrubs etc. from school yards and confining students to on campus facilities during breaks and in a small open area call “the quad”. This sounds awfully lot like a prison, right? I am certainly not the first to draw on the analogy, but Morrill ’s pictures and photographs from the high school sparked an interesting discussion in the seminar on how the physical boundaries of a school affects the interaction and specifically the conflict-reducing possibilities in a multi-ethnic schools.

An engineering professor at the seminar noticed that the the literature on ‘prison design’ tells that it is well known that spatial proximity and the amount of physical space alloted to prisoners is strongly related to violent incidents among prisoners and between prisoners and guards. Specifically, conflicts tend to escalate and move from dyadic conflicts (Bill mocks Gonzales) towards etnic conflicts (the whities are fighting the mehicanos) when prisoners interact in barren ‘free’ areas without facilities. At this point a sociology professor replied that it seems that restructuring the formal structure of the organization (school) disrupted the informal mechanisms for conflict resolution that had evolved, with the result of heightneded racial tensions. Interestingly, these patterns are similar to Morrill’s earlier ethnographic work on how matrix-style organizations and the pervasive threath of hostile takeovers affected conflict management among American executives. This should have implications for organization research in general and research on organizational redesign/change in particular: If attempts at organizational restructuring (or so called ‘re-engineering’ as was popular in the 90s) fail to account for the informal ways of dealing with conflicts that develop in workplaces and organizations, the new organizational structure will at best lead to some type of decoupling between formal structure and informal behavior,  at worst leading to the opposite outcome as envisioned by heightening conflicts, such as in the Arizona high school.

According to Morrill, informal conflict resolution evolve through the interaction of social structures with symbolic systems that are rooted in behavioral patterns. For example, the social structure of efficient yet concensus-oriented meetings common in Sweden would never work without the symbolic of everyone turning up at the 9-a clock coffee break – where conflicts and delicate issues can be (sometimes) informally discussed and negotiated.

Discussing the Scancor seminar with some friends, I came to think of the good old rat experiments we had to digest as undergrad students in psychology where manipulating the physical structure of mouse cages led to more(less) fights among the mice and less(more) small micelings being born if their physical space was decreased(increased).

Conclusion: No love in a safe school?   Comments are welcome.

In any case, this will be a great book for anyone interested in the politics of power, education, and system justification theory.