International Relations

Why is it so difficult for leaders in various industries and sectors to seriously address the existential threats that sometimes arise? Planning for marginal changes in the business environment is fairly simple; problems can be solved, costs can be cut, and the firm can stay in the black. But how about more radical but distant threats? What about the grocery sector when confronted by Amazon's radical steps in food selling? What about Polaroid or Kodak when confronted by the rise of digital photography in the 1990s? What about the US steel industry in the 1960s when confronted with rising Asian competition and declining manufacturing facilities? From the outside these companies and sectors seem like dodos incapable of confronting the threats that imperil them. They seem to be ignoring oncoming train wrecks simply because these catastrophes are still in the distant future. And yet the leaders in these companies were generally speaking talented, motivated men and women. So what are th...

Organizations always involve numerous staff members whose behavior has the potential for creating significant risk for individuals and the organization but who are only loosely supervised. This situation unavoidably raises principal-agent problems. Let's assume that the great majority of staff members are motivated by good intentions and ethical standards. That means that there are a small number of individuals whose behavior is not ethical and well intentioned. What arrangements can an organization put in place to prevent bad behavior and protect individuals and the integrity of the organization? For certain kinds of bad behavior there are well understood institutional arrangements that work well to detect and deter the wrong actions. This is especially true for business transactions, purchasing, control of cash, expense reporting and reimbursement, and other financial processes within the organization. The audit and accounting functions within almost every sophisticated organiza...

I've argued often for the idea that social science and historical explanations need to be "actor-centered" -- we need to ground our hypotheses about social and historical causation in theories of the pathways through which actors embody those causal processes. Actors in relation to each other constitute the "substrate" of social causation. Actors make up the microfoundations of social causes and processes. Actors constitute the causal necessity of social mechanisms. In its abstract formulation this is little more than an expression of ontological individualism ( link ). But in application it represents a highly substantive research challenge. In order to provide concrete accounts of social processes in various cultural and historical settings, we need to have fairly specific theories of the actor in those settings ( link ): what motivates actors, what knowledge do they have of their environment, what cognitive and practical frameworks do they bring to their expe...

The first American Revolution broke the bonds of control exercised by a colonial power over the actions and aspirations of a relatively small number of people in North America in 1776 -- about 2.5 million people. The second American Revolution promises to affect vastly larger numbers of Americans and their freedom, and it is not yet complete. (There were about 19 million African-Americans in the United States in 1960.) This is the Civil Rights revolution, which has been underway since 1865 (the end of the Civil War); which took increased urgency in the 1930s through the 1950s (the period of Jim Crow laws and a coercive, violent form of white supremacy); and which came to fruition in the 1960s with collective action by thousands of ordinary people and the courageous, wise leadership of men and women like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When we celebrate the life and legacy of MLK, it is this second American revolution that is the most important piece of his legacy. And this is indeed a revo...

Steve Bannon may have lost his perch in the White House and Breitbart; but the themes of white supremacy, intolerance, bigotry, and anti-government extremism that drive radical nationalist populism survive his fall. In The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality Justin Gest attempts to explain how this movement has been able to draw support from white working class men and women -- often in support of policies that are objectively harmful to them. Here is how he describes his central concern: In this book, I suggest that these trends [towards polarization] intensify an underlying demographic phenomenon: the communities of white working class people who once occupied the political middle have decreased in size and moved to the fringes, and American and European societies are scrambling to recalibrate how they might rebuild the centrist coalitions that engender progress. The book makes use of both ethnographic and survey research to attempt to ...

It is fairly well agreed that organizations require a degree of trust among the participants in order for the organization to function at all. But what does this mean? How much trust is needed? How is trust cultivated among participants? And what are the mechanisms through which trust enhances organizational effectiveness? The minimal requirements of cooperation presuppose a certain level of trust. As A plans and undertakes a sequence of actions designed to bring about Y, his or her efforts must rely upon the coordination promised by other actors. If A does not have a sufficiently high level of confidence in B's assurances and compliance, then he will be rationally compelled to choose another series of actions. If Larry Bird didn't have trust in his teammate Dennis Johnson, the famous steal would not have happened. First, what do we mean by trust in the current context? Each actor in an organization or group has intentions, engages in behavior, and communicates with other actor...