Blog posts

  • Student Assessment of Their Experience, Not Their Learning - Educational methodologies often emphasize the value of self-reflection and assessment among learners. However, when it comes to evaluating their own academic progress, college students might not be the most dependable judges. In his 2005 book, Self-insight:  Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself, David Dunning noted that individuals…
  • Improve Students’ Learning by Surprising Them - Incorporating surprises into college classrooms can significantly enhance students’ learning experiences by capitalizing on the brain's release of dopamine. By employing thought-provoking experiments and demonstrations, unexpected questions and discussion prompts, and guest speakers and field trips, you can harness the power of surprises to cultivate active engagement, critical thinking, deeper…
  • The History Project: bringing historical understanding to the study of entrepreneurship - With my students & co-authors, I have embarked on a long-term project to bring concepts from historiography into research & writing on entrepreneurship. Papers are now available via Research Gate. Stephen Lippmann and Howard E. Aldrich.  2003.  “The Rationalization of Everything?  Using Ritzer’s McDonaldization Thesis to Teach Weber.”  Teaching Sociology,…
  • Use Bold Topic Sentences to Build Better Outlines for Your Articles - Crafting topic sentences and follow-on sentences, rather than just content labels, economizes on your writing time. Instead of having to rethink what it was that you intended to write, you’ll have your intentions embedded in the topic sentences and they will pull you into the writing process, giving you the…
  • Why an Impatient Person Cannot Teach - Hillel the Sage is quoted as having taught, “A quick, impatient person cannot teach.” Why might that be? In this essay I offer five reasons, having to do with benefiting from thoughtful pacing, the calming effects of silence, and the insights allowed through taking time for reflection. Rocks keeping silent…
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once - In the sociology course I am redesigning on teaching, I have a limited amount of time to get my story across. But I consider myself fortunate because unlike Hollywood producers, I’m not limited to around 120 minutes. I have the students for two and a half hours per week for…
  • Writing an academic article? Do your best, but its fate lies in the hands of others - Donald T Campbell once told me, “Academic life is the struggle for citations.” More prosaically, the person who dies with the most citations wins! But is it sensible to set your writing goal as achieving fame through citations reaped? I think it is an unrealistic and distracting goal, and in…
  • Powerful Tools for Mapping a Research Literature - Professor Courtney Page Tan has compiled a list of powerful literature mapping tools. You can use these tools to increase the scale and scope of the literature for your projects. Many provide stunning graphical displays of search results (Edward Tufte would approve).
  • An in-class exercise for our post-pandemic world: learning about the role of luck in generating social inequality - Here is an in-class exercise for our post-pandemic world. It illustrates how sociological concepts can increase a student's understanding of the social world and supplement individual explanations.
  • What I learned about virtual conferences from AoM 2020 (click on title to read full post) - [Excerpt] As a first-time experience, I would have to admit that there was much about the virtual AOM that I enjoyed. Regarding the issues I raised in my introduction, I would say that my education was enhanced. I was reminded of ideas that had lain dormant and I was introduced…
  • Don’t Mind the Gap, Leap Over It! - [Excerpt] Anne Vorre Hansen and Sabine Madsen have published a book summarizing their interviews with eight leading scholars in the organization studies’ field on how to make contributions to the field. Based on their interviews, they identified two common threads: whether it truly was possible to expect that an author…
  • Cameras and Masks: Sustaining Emotional Connections with Your Students in an Age of COVID19 - The COVID 19 pandemic has transformed the teaching and learning environment. We are still discovering the many ways in which student and faculty interactions are affected by being mediated through facial coverings and spatial distance. Although faculty and students are now moving back into the classroom, they have lost a…
  • Keeping Discussions Real: Use Genuine Examples, Not Simulated Ones - Simulated examples don’t force people to face the pain and regret involved in making life-altering decisions. Instead, we need to tackle real cases in which we must make decisions with tangible consequences.
  • How Makerspaces in the United States Are Responding to the COVID19 Crisis - This blog lists a small sample of the makerspaces contributing their community’s time, energy, and resources to making products that help health care workers in their attempt to contain the COVID19 virus.
  • Some Random Memories from My Years with Chick Perrow. On the occasion of a memorial service, spring, 2020. - I met Chick when he presented a seminar at the University of Michigan back in the mid-1960s. I kept in touch with him through occasional letters and meetings at regional, national, and international conferences over the next six decades. How does one encapsulate all those years with just a few…
  • The Humpty Dumpty term paper exercise: helping your students recognize shortcomings in their narratives - When I discuss a term paper assignment with my students, I explain that readers need to understand  a paper’ s purpose and the logic of its organizational structure. To prepare them for writing a rough draft, I ask them to write a detailed outline, with section headings, introductory paragraphs, and…
  • Should We Assign Professional Journal Articles to Undergraduates? - My syllabi for undergraduate students almost never include any professional journal articles. In contrast, many of my colleagues choose many of their readings from journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, or the American Journal of Sociology. When I challenge my colleagues about their choice of reading material…
  • Blackboards and Whiteboards: How to Enhance Working Memory While Running Class Discussions - Instructors and students face much heavier cognitive demands in discussion-based class sessions than in more straightforward lecture or structured discussion classes. They face the problem of managing their working memory: being able to hold multiple elements in their minds while actively processing them. In this post, I offer some strategies…
  • How Much Do Students Have To Know? - To be clear: the reason for asking instructors to reveal the structural principles of the course is that it explicitly acknowledges the role that students’ comprehension of the design will play in their performance.
  • Teaching: It’s Not About You, It’s About Them - In reviewing a performance of the Dorrance Dance Company, a New York Times critic praised Michelle Dorrance, the company’s founder and lead choreographer. The critic commented on their excellent collective work as well as the virtuosity of their solo performances. After noting that Michelle was the most prominent and ubiquitous…
  • What To Do When Lesson Plans Blow Up - To show the students in my first-year seminar that nonhuman technologies are used to control humans everywhere on our campus, I constructed a lesson plan that included having students go on a scavenger hunt. I gave each team a sheet of paper on which to list every example they found…
  • Highly-Skilled Craft Workers Who Make Guitars Face the Same “Winner-Take-All” Competitive Market As Other Creative Professions - In her ethnographic study of guitar makers in North America over the past century, Guitar Makers: the Endurance of Artisanal Values in North America (University of Chicago press, 2014) Kathryn Marie Dudley provides a penetrating analysis of the dilemma facing high-end guitar makers. After World War II, it appeared that…
  • Talk Less, Teach More. But How? - “Talk less, teach more” sums up the mantra of the active learning approach to pedagogy. But how can you do that? I have four suggestions. First, if you ask students a question, listen to their answers. We all know the research showing that most instructors wait two seconds or less…
  • Not “the muddiest point” but “the clearest point” - Several books on college teaching recommend using a classroom assessment technique (CAT) in which instructors ask students to reflect on what they’ve done that day and then write about something that still puzzles them – – the so-called “muddiest point.” For example, Angelo and Cross, in their classic book on…
  • Ask, Don’t Tell - During a recent class, after hearing presentations by my students, I considered doing a summary evaluation myself. I had made notes on what I’d observed, organized them, and had a few points I wanted to make. I rose to go to the whiteboard, prepared to jot them down and then…
  • Papers into PowerPoint: Help Your Students Turn Their Papers into PowerPoint Slides - Academic papers are not good candidates for PowerPoint slides. Instructors, conference organizers, and seminar conveners expect submitted assignments and papers to have all the trappings of academic legitimacy, which means a literature review, justification for hypotheses, extensive description of methods used, and evidence used to support empirical conclusions. I have…
  • Derek Lidow’s Terrific New Book on Entrepreneurship - Derek Lidow’s book, Building on Bedrock: What Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and Other Great Self-Made Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Building Valuable Companies, is a welcome corrective to the overhyped promotion these days of high capitalization, high-technology, and high-risk businesses. Bedazzled by the wild hype surrounding gazelles and unicorns, entrepreneurship…
  • Setting Assignment Due Dates: Early, Late, or In-Between? - Students often complain that they can’t get enough sleep because they have too much work to do (Hershner and Chervin 2014). My first response has been to suggest that they are just not managing their time well. I seemed to have found evidence for my view when I taught a…
  • Strategies for Managing Team-Based Research (co-authored with Akram Al-turk) - The scientific community celebrates individual achievements by conferring prestige and honors on scientists who win out in the competitive game of being the first to publish innovative research. Paradoxically, however, modern scientific expertise rests heavily upon work carried out by teams, rather than scholars working on their own. Tensions between…
  • Guidelines for Reducing Implicit Bias in Your Grading - When asked what they most dislike about teaching, many instructors put grading at the top of the list. They find the process time consuming and stressful, topped off by demands from students that their assessments be logically justified. Of course, this feeling is the same for the students themselves. Although…
  • Will Trade Associations Exacerbate Growing Economic Inequality in the United States? - An essay prepared for a special section of the Journal of Management Inquiry gave me an opportunity to reflect on potential social changes in the US resulting from major political changes over the past three decades. I believe a long-term decline in class consensus within the American business elite (Mizruchi,…
  • The Sound of Silence Can Be Deafening & the Questions You Ask Your Students Can Provoke It - A colleague recently visited my office with a problem. He said the students in his undergraduate class “didn’t want to talk.” He and I had previously talked about how to get students more engaged, and I had suggested to him that he ask questions. I probed, “what kinds of questions…
  • Why Students Need Milestones & Small Wins - In my first year honors seminar, 5% of the grade is earned by making five posts on a webpage Forum. I added this to the course because I was searching for a way to keep the students engaged between class meetings. I invited students to comment on the readings, posts…
  • Teaching a class? Be the 1st to arrive - When I leave my office and head for class, I've noticed that my step quickens noticeably. I feel excited about the class I'm about to teach and eager to share with the students what I've learned about the day's topic. However, I also walk briskly because I want to arrive…
  • Professional meetings: act like you’ve been there before - Many professional associations have their annual meetings this time of year, and thousands of attendees will mingle in the corridors of super cooled hotels, many for the first time. When newbies ask me for my advice on what to do at these meetings, I’m reminded of a quote variously attributed…
  • If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over? - One of my favorite expressions is “if you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” I believe that the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden was the first to use this expression. How does this apply to academic writing? After a…
  • What To Do After the Reviews Arrive - Over the past decades, I have responded to more than 100 revise and resubmit requests from editors, served about 10 years as Associate Editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly, and reviewed hundreds of papers for dozens of journals. Closer to home, I’ve had the experience in the past year of…
  • The Impossible Necessity of History - Some book titles are so compelling that you'd feel guilty if you didn't at least pick the book up and skim it. Such is the case with Ged Martin's book, Past Futures: the Impossible Necessity of History (University of Toronto Press, 2004), based on the 1996 Joanne Goodman lectures at…
  • Organize literature reviews by ideas, not authors - A few days ago I received a draft manuscript from some friends who asked for comments. The manuscript was prepared for a handbook meant to summarize the state-of-the-art in an emerging field and thus was intentionally focused on reviewing the literature and identifying trends. I first checked the references and…
  • Use the norm of reciprocity to get constructive feedback on your work - In popular fiction, authors are often portrayed as isolated and tortured souls, locked away in a garret apartment or in a cabin in the forest, producing their great works without benefit of human companionship. In reality, writing is an extremely social activity, highly dependent upon an individual’s network of family…
  • Message to graduate students: The way you practice is the way you will play - In sports, coaches tell their players that they should treat practices the same way they would treat actually playing in games. They say this because sloughing off in practice, rather than following best practices, can carry over into the game. When a game situation arises, when decisions must be made…
  • Can you live up to the titles you choose for your papers? - Which of these two papers, on the same theme, would you read first: “Patterns of Vandalism during Civil Disorders as an Indicator of Target Selection” or “Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and Realities of the 2011 Riots”? The former is wordy and boring, not reflecting the passion and chaos that…
  • Using the literature in your writing: interpretive notes, not summaries - At the beginning of my doctoral workshops on academic writing, I start with a simple question: “when you sit down to compose your draft paper, what does the space look like around you? Is it covered with books and journals? Photocopies of papers and articles?” Most students confirm this description,…
  • Journal submissions: Playing up (or down) to the competition - Every fall I look forward to the opening of the college sports season: football, soccer, field hockey, volleyball, and so forth. People get so into it they go and look at the FanDuel betting odds to see how they could do if they participated in a bet. In particular, I…
  • Imagination, interrupted: creative writing requires a lot of control - How often has this happened to you? You sit down to work on a piece of writing for which the deadline is fast approaching. You feel energized and optimistic. Shortly after you begin, the notification alert on your smart phone goes off. Or, a colleague pokes her head in your…
  • Write As If You Don’t Have the Data - At a conference, when you ask somebody to tell you about their current project, what do they typically say? I often get a puzzling response: instead of beginning by telling me about an idea, the person starts by describing their data. They tell me they are using survey data they…
  • Why start early on your projects? - A few days ago, I was sitting in my car at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change, when a thought suddenly popped into my head. In a flash, I recognized the relevance of a paper I’d read several decades ago for a current project on which I was…
  • Pitching Papers as if You Worked in Nashville - For the past decade or so, I have made presentations to groups of graduate students and junior faculty on how to write more effectively. I'm always on the lookout for new ideas that I can inject into my presentation. Thus, I was delighted to come across an essay by C.…
  • Family Businesses as Boundary Objects - Boundary objects are arrangements that permit people to work together without needing to achieve consensus, as Susan Leigh Star explained. The figure below displays a collection of small dots that represent different manifestations of some phenomenon of interest, with three of them labeled with capital letters. Object A is clearly…
  • Assignments: better late than never? - A few days ago, a colleague came to me for teaching advice. On his syllabus, he had written that he did not accept late assignments. One of the students, a young woman who was struggling in the class, had turned in a paper that was woefully incomplete and he told…
  • Lecturing & daydreaming: what happens when students have no decisions to make? - A few weeks ago, I spent several days at a conference on a topic that holds great intrinsic interest for me. I signed up for the conference, eagerly anticipating meeting new people and being challenged with novel ideas. I had never attended the conference before and had few preconceived notions…
  • Memories of Clark Terry at Jazz Land in Vienna, Austria - The death of Clark Terry (1920-2015) this past week brought back memories of watching him in concerts when I was teaching in Vienna several decades ago. He appeared at a small jazz venue called Jazz Land, run by Axel Melhardt, an Austrian man who clearly has a great love for…
  • My Evening with Talcott Parsons - Between 1970 and 1973, Anant Negandhi held a series of conferences at Kent State University, sponsored by the Comparative Administration Research Institute. The conference focus was on “the various conceptual problems encountered in studying the functioning of complex social organizations.” I took part in several of these, including one that…
  • Outsmarted by a largemouth bass twice in the same day - Do largemouth bass learn from experience or are they just naturally cleverer than us? Discussions with other anglers have confirmed that the experience I describe in this post is a common occurrence, but no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation. I invite your speculations. My unplanned experiment in…
  • What Sustains a Belief in Success Among the Unsuccessful? - I’ve been haunted by the question of what sustains belief in success among the unsuccessful ever since I read Reinhard Bendix’ magisterial book, Work and Authority in Industry. Bendix wrote about the economic ideology that kept millions of people in England, the United States, and other Western capitalist societies working…
  • My 4 weight rod versus Vinnie the LMB - "My 4wt rod is not up to the job!" That's the conclusion I came to after another losing battle with my tormentor, Vinnie, the LMB. Down at my lake at night, I usually start up with a confidence builder -- using either my 4wt or 5wt to fish for bream &…
  • Stand Up & Be Counted: Why I Don’t Like the Labels “qualitative/quantitative” - Stand Up and Be Counted: Why Social Science Should Stop Using the Quantitative/Qualitative Label
  • 30 tips for successful academic research and writing - 30 tips for successful academic research and writing.
  • Welcome to My Website! - I've divided the site into 5 sections, but this whole enterprise is a work in progress. The banner photographs at the top of each page were chosen to give visitors a glimpse into the diverse facets of my personal & professional life. Please give me feedback on what you like…