Boye-Dohle, Passion and Neuroentrepreneurship

Today I’m juggling some notes from last week’s Summer School in Entrepreneurship at the Max Planck Institute of Economics. Among the interesting presentations, Melissa Cardon was speaking about entrepreneurial passion, Arvids Ziedonis held an in-depth discussion about the development of University-Industry relationships in the United States and in particular the role of innovations and patents following the Baye-Dohle act in 1980. Norris Krueger talked about the emerging research strand of “neuroeconomics” and “neuroentrepreneurship” (is it the future or simply a fad? – I remain undecided). In all, it was a splendid week with lots of interesting conversations, good food, and inspiring speakers.

The demography of organizational culture and organizational (un)innovativeness

I have been reading Harrisson and Carroll’s excellent book “Demography and culture of organizations“.  There are many accounts of roganizational culture (see for example the works of O´Reilly, Schein,  or Alvesson) but Harrisson and Carroll’s perspective is unique in that they emphasise how the demographics of organizational members affects culture.  The book’s perspective highlights the composition, turnover, and socialization of an organization’s workforce as the predominant factors shaping organizational culture.  The  surprising durability of organizations’ culture across members and time is incorporated in this model through the socialization of new organizational members into the existing culture, examplified by a quote from Alphonse Karr (1849): “the more things change the more the remain the same”. In other words: Culture is not easily malleable by leaders through new slogans, training sessions, or other “quick fixes”.

The rigorous yet simple models in Harrisson and Carroll should be seen in the light that “Organizational culture” is often deemed a “mushy” area for organizational research and consulting work. In a summer issue of Sweden’s chief business tabloid Dagens Industry (June 21st), the CEO of the merging Swedish and Danish postal services dismissed the need for “cultural integration” of the two former monopolies with the comments “We have the right experiences and competencies on both side”. From an organizational demographic perspective, this statement could not be more misstaken: it is not the formal competencies among organizational members, nor their nationality as in Hofstedes’ work on national culture, but precisely their systematic differences in experiences that are explanations for the divergent organizational cultures between two distinct organizations such as those of the Swedish and Danish postal services. Yet, Olsson is probably right in his conclusions: deep-rooted systematic differences in experiences are unlikely to be bridged by consulting-type workshops or training sessions.

A constrasting case was given to me by a friend working for a massive public organization that has decreased numerically and geographically during latter years: the Swedish Armed Forces. Today, this organization employees the equivalent of 17,000 middle managers (senior officers) but only 2000 low-level managers (junior officers). It is often depicted as an organization in crisis. In addition, the military training systems with its recruitment of young officers after graduation from conscription ensures strong pressures for socialization . And since officers commonly socialize with each other off-duty, the internal networks and trust fostered during their training (intended, indeed, to maintain order and save lives during times of crisis) turns increasingly to what the social network literature characterize as “closed” networks with strong intra-organizational ties and “full closure” .  In such an organization, it is easy to understand that external pressure for increases in efficency and decreases in personell makes organizational members wary of outsiders and resistent to change. Adding to this picture of a conservative and very internally oriented organizational culture in the armed forces, from an demographic perspective the Swedish tenure-based employment system makes average age in organizations high, increasingly so during times of personnel cutbacks when the strict labor laws strongly favors keeping long-tenured employees and prohibits the sacking of excess personnel instead of rotating them from one part of the organization to another. The officers’ union is one of the strongest labor unions in Sweden, meaning that if a division is suspended, senior officers will almost always be transferred to some other duties at the military headquarters in Stockholm, regardless of the value that the organization puts on their skills and experience.

The goverment new strategy ro rewamp this infested system is to simply disband the current legal unit that comprise the armed forces and setting up a new one, necessitating military personnel to apply for new positions in a quasi-new organization. This would ensure that applicants can be selected based on merits rather than tenure. I wonder how the union will respond to that one?

In stark contrast is the story Sweden’s “super-telecom-company” Ericsson, internationally a quite ordinary blue-chip tech firm but historically the home to a multitude of innovations and parent of numerous spin-off firms. After its near-bankruptcy and turnaround in 2002 Ericsson shrank in size from about 110,000 employees world-wide to less than 60,000. A hiring freeze in 2001-2003, dismissal of consultants and many of the younger employees (due to the  tenure-based employment system) meant that the mean age and company tenure of employees in the surviving organization was very high. It was apparent that the firm needed to reinvent itself to continue to develop innovativions and to attract talented employees.

What happened is pretty straightforward from an HRM perspective but quite remarkably compared to the prior case of the military forces: Ericsson issued a generous retirement scheme that allowed all employees above the age of 40 (!) to retire with 12-18 months of salary and benefits. The firm thereby reinvented themselves by loosing many 50+ and hiring young graduates after prior years of severe financial cutbacks.

It is interesting that among all of these 3 organizational events, a cross-country merger of two recently deregulated public monopolies (the postal services of Sweden-Denmark), an increasingly aging and resource-stripped organization (the military forces), and a rapidly changing high-tech corporation operating globally, the demographic composition and types of internal socialization seems like a key strategic issue for their future sucess. This lends credibility to the book by Carroll and Harrisson. Highly recommended reading.

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…

 

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.