My column in University Affairs has finally been published. In it, I argue that social scientists have both practical and moral reasons to seek out work in the business world:

Social scientists can improve business outcomes by doing what they’ve been trained to do: examine the social practices around the product or service. We are studying the social practices first, and the product’s role in those social practices second.

Read the entire post…

Copernicus Consulting is pleased to announce that its founder and Principle, Dr. Sam Ladner, will be conducting research with Dr. Catherine Middleton at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management. Dr. Ladner will lead the research on the social effects of mobile phones and work/life balance.

“I’m thrilled be working with Catherine on this project,” Dr. Ladner said. “It’s been my personal academic interest for a long time. I’m very excited to collaborate with her.” Dr. Middleton is the Canada Research Chair in Communication Technologies in the Information Society.

The project is in its early stages (see the placeholder mobileworklife.ca or @mobileworklife for more information). Currently, Dr. Middleton and Dr. Ladner are sketching out the specific research activities, but the general approach will be ethnographic in nature.

“From my previous research, I discovered that mobile devices have a distinct impact on how private lives are separated from work lives,” said Dr. Ladner. “I plan to uncover how and in what ways these tools live with us in our homes and in our offices.”

The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The research team is currently interested in recruiting companies and individuals to participate.

Dr. Ladner will continue at the helm of Copernicus as she leads the mobile work life research effort. “We do so many mobile-related projects, that this was a perfect fit,” she explained.

Social media today can take some wisdom from past research into social networks. Mark Granovetter’s famous sociological study of how people hear about job opportunities found that “weak ties” to friends and acquaintances are actually more beneficial than “strong ties” to family and close friends. Social media marketers need to consider who has weak ties and strong ties before designing a social media strategy.

The Individual and The Network: Courtesy of Wikipedia

Weak ties are a product of social and psychological factors. Whether you’re designing an interaction, an experience, a marketing campaign or even an organizational itself, you should know what makes a “weak tie.” Weak ties are the source of precious information, like who’s hiring someone with your exact qualifications, where you can get the best deal on tires, or how good that new movie really is. Weak ties are the source of influence marketing, organizational innovation, and economic growth. In short, weak ties are the ties that matter.

What kind of person develops many weak ties? In his famous study, Granovetter did not measure certain psychological or sociological variables to determine if there was a systematic difference between those with weak ties and those with strong ties. But there are reasons to believe that there is such a systematic difference.

I come from a small town full of people with thick, strong ties have held that community together for generations. Originally a prosperous West Coast Salish Community, Sechelt continues to be archetypical of strong ties. There is economic development there, yet there is little innovation, dynamism or rapid change that occurs in cities.

I came to Toronto, where I knew exactly two people, both of whom were “weak ties” or friends I had known from school. Granovetter’s analysis would show that these were exactly the right kinds of people to help me find economic opportunities. And indeed, he was right; one friend graciously opened her home to me as I started my new job in this new city. 13 years later, I still live in this city (minus a two-year sojourn back home for my Master’s degree and to rack up even more weak ties), and here I am.

I now run this research company by developing and honing my weak ties. Weak ties have brought Copernicus new colleagues, new business, and new ideas. I have many weak ties throughout the city and the continent. What kind of person am I? What are the missing variables from Granovetter’s study?

• I am well educated, with four degrees and armloads of weak ties from each university experience. Did this help me develop a wide social network?
• I have cultural capital, having been trained which fork to use and when by my etiquette conscious mother. Did this help me develop a *quality* social network?
• I am an extrovert, who is comfortable meeting strangers and talking to acquaintances. Did this pre-ordain me to have many weak ties?
• I am a woman, who has been trained to consider social events part of my “gender job.” Does this encourage me to develop weak ties?
• I am white, and have been given white privileges like walking into office buildings, record shops, and convenience stores with nary a blink from a security guard. Has this helped me make new weak ties?

Sociologically speaking, weak ties are likely the result of a combination of social structures like race, gender, and social class. Psychologically speaking, weak ties are likely the result of constitutional personality traits, such as neuroticism or introversion/extroversion. Using both lenses, one can see that social capital is not built without a context; people are born into a personality, a body, and a social location which may — or may not — encourage the development of weak ties.

When you are designing a social media strategy, consider these social and psychological factors. Interaction designers would do well to gather insight around these variables specifically when doing design research, and incorporating them into their personas. Organization designers and HR consultants should consider that innovation does not happen simply because of “social media,” but because of specific social and psychological factors. And marketers should never believe that “if you build it, they will come.” Marketers should instead believe “if you build it, some of these specific types of people will come” to social media applications and campaigns.

Yesterday, I attended Roger Martin’s presentation of his new book, The Design of Business, hosted at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Roger gave a brief overview of his book and then engaged in a dialogue with the host, Michael Dila, and members of the audience.

Roger explained that some organizations are better able to embrace “design thinking,” which he defines as the ability to think both analytically and intuitively. He pointed out in his presentation and in his book that 20^th century corporations have perfected the analytical frame of mind, but fail continuously to embrace the abductive leaps of logic that innovation requires.

Audience members repeatedly asked how to equip their organizations to embrace design thinking. Roger advised designers to “empathize” with their analytical peers, and business managers to “empathize” with their intuitive colleagues.

I can’t help but be reminded of the world’s most ineffective coaching in John Cusak’s movie Better Off Dead. Cusak’s character is attempting to win a ski race to impress his love interest. His hapless friend Booger offers this useless advice, “Try to ski…faster.”

Roger’s advice fell short because he could not explain the social dynamics of organizational change. Just like Booger, he simply described; he failed to explain.

Explaining Organizational Change: Innovative Values

One woman in the audience asked specifically what cultural traits design-thinking organizations exhibit. Roger suggested vague ideas such as a concern for the future. The Value Orientation Model can specifically identify value systems that are, yes, future oriented, but have four other qualities that support innovation. Anthropologist Florence Kluckhohn argued that all cultures can be understood in terms of five major values. I have adapted this model to show the groupings of organizations. Innovative organizations, surprisingly, embrace “static” values, thus allowing the free floating of ideas.

Figure 1: The Value Orientation Model

Adapted from Kluckhohn, F. R. (1953). Dominant and variant value orientations. Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. . J. a. K. Murrayh, F.R. New York, Knopf: 346.

Being future oriented can be conducive to innovation, as Roger indicated. But if an organization obsesses over its future state, it may have difficulty focusing on tasks at hand. This future orientation is not enough, particularly if the organization prizes “doing” over “becoming.”

Take, for example, “the productivity myth,” which Tony Schwartz explores on Harvard Business Review’s blogs. He complains that writing and responding to ever more emails does not add value – yet it appears to be “productive.” Organizations that consider emails “productive” have a “doing” orientation, instead of a “becoming” orientation. An organization must prize both the future and the process of “becoming” in order to be innovative.

Moreover, this organization must trust its employees. If the organization’s culture implicity believes that “man is born bad,” then it will not provide employees with the freedom and autonomy they need to be innovative. Roger argued Taylorist management styles of command and control have outlived their usefulness. I would agree with him. However, I would argue that no company that believes its employees will “steal time” from the company can ever truly forsake Taylorist principles.

Take, for example, WalMart, which was recently named one of Businessweek’s top 50 innovative companies. Its innovation, according to Businessweek, is its razor thin supply chain and cost-conscious green practices. Does this mean WalMart is innovative? No, it means it is cost-conscious. WalMart will never get out of the business of selling cheap goods at the lowest prices because it does not trust its employees to be autonomous. Individual store managers cannot begin selling locally-targeted goods because they are not trusted to experiment. WalMart will never design an iPhone; it will only figure out how to sell it more cheaply than anyone else.

Roger’s book explains design thinking well, but he only describes how it plays out in real organizations. In order to understand how design thinking is adopted, one must have a sociological lens on organizational change – and that means understanding the nature of socially defined values.

Designing Design Thinkers

Organizational change is notoriously difficult to effect. Management consultants have tried it, now designers are trying it. Building on Roger’s description, and offering my explanation of the underlying value system, I now offer an application designing a design-thinking organization.

1. Map your values: understand what values your organization prizes by doing an audit of the “good worker.” What do people say a “good worker” is? Rosabeth Moss Kanter used the “good worker” rubric to explain how women faced subtle discrimination in her classic Men And Women of The Corporation. When you know how your organization thinks, you’ll know what it values.
2. Create value goals collectively: decide as a group what values you would like to embrace. This means more than crowdsourcing. This means hosting open dialogue meetings where the only expected outcome is a discussion. Voting will help, but only after you have face-to-face discussions.
3. Use art: community theatre, interactive installations, and performance art have transformative properties. Encourage members of the organization to describe their experiences through comedic skits at meetings, collaborative and humorous art projects that can displayed in main areas. Art speaks truth. Knowing your organization’s values requires truth telling — and it especially helps if you laugh a lot.
4. Embrace “Static Values” when you can: In her incredibly insightful article on innovation, Carol Steiner argues that innovators reject established ways of thinking, Unfortunately, deeply trained scientists, managers, and social scientists spend so much time learning established ways of thinking, they forget to be open to new ideas. Be open, she argues, but simply BEING.

Roger Martin has a great post on Harvard Business Review that summarizes how ethnographic research differs from quantitative surveys.

Martin writes:

Qualitative, and especially observational or ethnographic, research enables us to delve much more deeply into the relationship between our firm and its product/service and the customer. Because we aren’t obsessed about adding all the responses together for ‘rigorous quantitative analysis’, we can let the customer use his own voice/words/vocabulary.

This sounds a lot like the notion of “verstehen,” which refers to the deep understanding that comes from interpretive, qualitative research.

Quantitative research has its place; how else could we measure improvement if not through counting instances or events? Yet we often forget that quantitative data is primarily designed to summarize findings quickly. This is why it’s so popular but also why it’s inadequate to describe many experiences.

I like to us a football game metaphor to describe the real difference between qualitative and quantitative research. Let’s say that the Steelers beat the Patriots 49-15. What would you know about that game? Simply that the Steelers had won.

Would you really know where the turning point in the game came? Would you know about the significance of a mid-game interception? Or perhaps the critical sacking of the Patriots’ quarterback? No, you’d know nothing of the ebb and flow of the game, critical mistakes and successes, or even how the Patriots might feel about their loss. They might actually feel vindicated if their defensive line held tough against the Steelers for 3 out of 4 quarters.

Statistics are a great way of quickly conveying how a group of events, people, or things are similar and different. Mode, median and mean measure “central tendency,” and standard deviation and inter-quartile range tell you “dispersion.” With these two types of measures, you can tell me how similar people are when they choose orange juice, how different they are when they rent cars or attend movies. But you cannot tell me what “more pulp,” means to people, why a “subcompact” car turns off some people, or what people perceive the word “blockbuster” to actually mean.

In short, ethnographic research can clarify all of these deep, nuanced details that quantitative data skates over or takes for granted. Do you want to know how many people attended a “summer blockbuster?” Then by all means, count them. But if you want to know what kind of movie people believe a “blockbuster” to be, then you need to do in-depth ethnographic work.

Remember “synergy?” AOL Time Warner was designed to save money and make money. But it was not designed to be a true organization. 10 years ago, Time Warner aimed to blast into the 21st century by “synergizing” with America Online.

The New York Times has a fabulous retrospective of the merger.

In their teaser video, Robert Puttnam, former co-COO of the merged entity tells us:

The thing that makes a merger work is culture. These were two mergers of equals And now you’re trying to put two together and if the cultures aren’t somewhat aligned, you’re going to have problems. And we had big problems.

The article traces in historical detail where the merger’s economic logic went awry, but more importantly where it’s cultural integration went awry.

New York Times: Gerald Levin and Stephen Case in happier times

The story provides first-person accounts of key milestones in the negotiations. Key are the recollections of key executives in Time Warner, who had been kept out of the loop until the deal was finalized. They were aghast. Don Logan, the head of Time Inc., said simply “The dumbest idea I had ever heard in my life.”

The entire article is a testament to “the power of the people,” in the sense that senior leaders can make all the change they want, but if they do not enrol the organization, change will never happen . Culture is indeed the wild card in mergers. 45% of executives say their mergers are failures. 45%! That failure rate is astoundingly high, considering that improving success can be as simple as adding sociological inquiry to the pre and post-merger cultures.

I recently completed a sociological study of a merger for the express purposes of designing a new, cohesive, innovative organization. The key lesson I learned in that process is that truth telling about the organization’s true values is difficult but necessary. Cultures try to reproduce themselves, even if it means lying about their true values. Maybe an organization doesn’t actually value diversity. That truth needs to be told.

It was the conflict in values that brought down the merger. As one Time Warner executive told the NY Times:

I knew and I loved Time Warner. I saw it as a company with a vision and a set of values, and I saw AOL in a much less favorable light, much more opportunistic, made up of folks who were really trying to merely exploit the market they were in as opposed to developing something that was enduring, and I was very leery about this deal.

In the case of AOL Time Warner, AOL’s truth was that it set out to make money, not to actually “revolutionize” the media landscape. Telling this truth would have made the AOL culture much more authentic to the Time Warner culture, and may have actually saved the merger.

“But how many people did you talk to?” If you’ve ever done qualitative research, you’ve heard that question at least once. And the first time? You were flummoxed. In 3 short minutes, you can be assured that will never happen again.

Folks, qualitative research does not worry about numbers of people; it worries about deep understanding. Weber called this “verstehen.” (Come to think of it, most German people call it that too. Coincidence?). Geertz called it “thick description.” It’s about knowing — really knowing — the phenomenon you’re researching. You’ve lived, breathed, and slept this thing, this social occurrence, this…this…part of everyday life. You know it inside and out.

Courtesy of daniel_blue on Flickr

You know when it’s typical, when it’s unusual, what kinds of people� do this thing, and how. You know why someone would never do this thing, and when they would but just lie about it. In short, you’ve transcended merely noticing this phenomenon. Now, you’re ready to give a 1-hour lecture on it, complete with illustrative examples.

Now if that thing is, say, kitchen use, then stand back! You’re not an Iron Chef, you are a Platinum Chef! You have spent hours inside kitchens of all shapes and sizes. You know how people love them, how they hate them, when they’re ashamed of them and when (very rarely) they destroy them. You can tell casual observers it is “simplistic” to think of how many people have gas stoves. No, you tell them, it’s not about how many people, it’s about WHY they have gas stoves! It’s about what happens when you finally buy a gas stove! It’s about….so much more than how many.

Welcome to the world of verstehen. When you have verstehen, you can perhaps count how many people have gas stoves. Sure, you could determine that more men than women have them. Maybe you could find out that more of them were built between 1970 and 80 than 1990 and 2000. But what good is that number? What does it even mean?

When you’re designing, you must know what the gas stove means. You must know what it means to transform your kitchen into one that can and should host a gas stove. You must know why a person would be “ashamed” to have a gas stove (are they ashamed of their new wealth? do they come from a long line of safety-conscious firefighters?). You must know more than “how many.”

So the next time someone asks you, “how many people did you talk to?”, you can answer them with an hour-long treatise about why that doesn’t matter. You can tell them you are going to blow them away with the thick description of what this thing means to people. You are going to tell them you know more about this thing than anyone who ever lived, and then, dammit, you’re gonna design something so fantastic, so amazing that they too will be screaming in German. You have verstehen!

See my discussion about sampling methods in qual and quant research for more insight into the reasons why “how many” is irrelevant in qualitative research.

Social media “gurus” abound these days. Which ones are worth listening to and which ones are bullshitters?

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt exposed bullshitters in his famous essay “On Bullshit.” The liar knows what the truth is and cares very much about concealing it. The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care what the truth is and has no compunction in stretching it.

The same goes for social media “gurus.” Those that care what about rigourous examination of the social may be wrong, but at least they take great pains to analyze the phenomenon. Those that don’t care about systematic, theoretically informed social inquiry are interested only in stretching or shaping their own agendas.

How can you tell the difference?

Here are a few signs you’re dealing with a social media bullshitter.

1. They skate over the tension between structure and agency: The tension between structure and agency is an age-old sociological debate. Social media bullshitters somehow miss this very important point. They often argue that implementing social media or social business design will somehow evaporate decades or even centuries of organizational structures. If your social media guru tells you that adding social media and stirring will create equality, harmony, and profits, begin to question them. If, on the other hand, they tell you that your organization does not live in a vacuum, and that your social media will be integrated in people’s existing lives with their existing economic, technological, and ethnically grounded experience, then they may be onto something.
2. They use the same social research methods every time: A classically trained sociologist is trained in both qualitative and quantitative methods. They are designers in the sense that they have expertise, which they draw upon selectively, according to the research question. Social media bullshitters, on the other hand, likely have a common stock of tools that they use repeatedly, regardless of the nuance of the research question. If their answer is always, “do a focus group,” or always, “do a survey,” then question them.
3. They see no paradoxes. Ever: Sociologists are constantly grappling with paradoxes. Weber’s famous paradoxical finding was that bureaucracies are both efficient and inefficient. They work wonders building and managing railroads, for example, but they result in horrible catastrophes like the Challenger disaster. Weber explained this paradox by arguing that rationality, or the rule of rules, is an “iron cage,” that keeps us safe but enslaved. If your social media guru claims there will be no paradox, nuance, or ambiguity, question them.
4. They don’t know what social capital really is: Social capital is not something one can measure in terms of bank balances. It was the creation of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (come to think of it, the bullshitters wouldn’t know that either). Social capital is something one develops by being in a particular social location. I may go to an exclusive boarding school. My social capital is my network of well-off friends. Social capital is a particularly important concept when thinking about social media. Bourdieu noted that those in lower economic classes explicitly reject items they consider “above their station.” This means that luxury or “top of the line” is not always your best approach.

The bottom line is this: social media bullshitters have no knowledge of social theory or methodology. Trust a person who provides no easy answer, who carefully selects their research method, and who understands complex concepts.

Do you have more signs of being a social media bullshitter? Please share them here!

The technology consulting firm Gartner is predicting that social scientists will be very much in demand by businesses. Eweek summarizes Gartner’s outline of four types of roles for social scientists:

Web User Experience roles that include UI designers, virtual-assistant designers and interaction directors.
Behavior Analysis roles that include Web psychologists, community designers, and Web/social network miners.
Information Specialist roles that include information anthropologists who are expected to play historical Web fact finding and assisting in legal analysis, intellectual property management and where the quality of information is at risk.
Digital Lifestyle Experts roles that include helping senior management understand whats going on and stay aware, and building personal brands and managing online personas for desired online effect

Gartner’s Vice President Kathy Harris appears to have faith in social scientists’ ability to be creative:

Creative, artistic and clever people will develop the early iterations of these new jobs. This will enable businesses and government to take early advantage of new capabilities and develop them into mainstream skills.

I’m in full agreement that social science trains people in the right kinds of skills for the digital age. I was disappointed however to find that sociology had failed to capture Ms. Harris’s specific attention.Interestingly, the report mentions anthropologists and psychologists specifically, but not sociologists.

Sociologists have recently complained that they have not been given a place at Obama’s table. I argue that it’s because they’ve done a poor job of publicizing the great skills they have. Just last night I sat down with two other sociologists, one is a specialist in the sociology of science and the other in the socio-legal implications of changing family forms. Aren’t these the very people we need to help us understand the effects of genetic engineering? Or the potential outcomes of changing same-sex marriage laws?

I personally will continue to proclaim my training as a sociologist, and will convince business people that the “soft stuff” is a differentiator. I will also try to nudge my colleagues into the world of design, where their training in empathy and critical thought is welcome.

I examine the tools and processes I use to do my own work. Like many agency workers, I often bill by the hour. Check out my research on this phenomenon:

This paper is about time regimes that are typical in interactive agencies, as well as law firms, some construction companies and some management consultancies: the so-called �billable hour.� In this paper I ask how such a system is constructed, what tools are used to maintain it, and, most importantly, how do Web workers resist it?

More…

I invite comments to this discussion on my agencytime research blog. I am presenting this research at a conference in Edinburgh and wish to have insights from those who work under such time regimes.