Introduction to the Demography Volume

[Excerpt] This volume represents another effort by Research in the Sociology of Organizations to focus on a crucial issue in organizational sociology. In some of the previous volumes, we concentrated on organizations and professions (Volume 8, 1991), the structuring of participation in organizations (Volume 7, 1989), and the social psychological processes in organizations (Volume 3, 1984). This volume concentrates on one of the most important emerging issues in organizational sociology—the issue of organizational demography

Power Dependence and Power Paradoxes in Bargaining

[Excerpt] What this article (and our larger program of work) is designed to demonstrate is that these very simple ideas represent a particularly suitable starting point for understanding the power struggle between parties who regularly engage in negotiation. Specifically, in this article we show that the approach contains certain paradoxes regarding the acquisition and use of power in an ongoing bargaining relationship. The dependence framework treats the ongoing relationship as a power struggle in which each party tries to maneuver itself into a favorable power position

ILR Impact Brief – Supervisor Support, Employee Control Help NYC Firefighters Cope with 9/11

Although individuals often work in groups and groups function within a larger environment, researchers have rarely examined the effect of context on employees’ emotions, attitudes, or behaviors. This study uses the World Trade Center attack to generate and test a context theory concerning the impact on first responders of their involvement in a catastrophic event. The model details the way in which the climate (support from supervisors and employee control over the work environment) within discrete engine and ladder companies (work units) moderates the relationship between emergency response to the attack (the stressor) and the resulting emotional strain on the firefighters. Prior studies have shown that people’s exposure to critical incidents is associated with depression, anxiety, and stress that may begin immediately or surface months later. The severity of individual reactions varies and researchers have proposed several explanatory theories, including biological and psychological factors, the way people mentally process their experiences, and the array of physical and social/emotional resources at their disposal. The authors here draw on the latter two theoretical frameworks to formulate and test several hypotheses that help explain why New York City firefighters involved in 9/11 felt more or less emotionally wrought 18 months after the attack

Power Dependence in Individual Bargaining: The Expected Utility of Influence

This study examines the impact of certain dimensions of dependence on the expected effectiveness of an influence attempt in a two-person bargaining situation. Assuming the role of employer, employee, or outside observer, 1,056 college students estimated the utility of an attempt by an employee to influence his employer with respect to a pay raise under various conditions of dependence. The results show that respondents attributed greatest utility to the attempt when the employee had many alternatives (other job possibilities) and valued highly the outcomes at issue (a pay raise) and when the employer had few alternatives (other workers) and ascribed low value to the outcomes. The authors find that the power-capability hypotheses derived from power-dependence theory are supported by the two outcome-alternative dimensions but not by the two outcome-value dimensions. The latter are found to support commitment hypotheses

Team reasoning and intentional cooperation for mutual benefit

This paper proposes a concept of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit. This concept uses a form of team reasoning in which team members aim to achieve common interests, rather than maximising a common utility function, and in which team reasoners can coordinate their behaviour by following pre-existing practices. I argue that a market transaction can express intentions for mutually beneficial cooperation even if, extensionally, participation in the transaction promotes each party’s self-interest

Beyond Individual Choice: Teams and Frames in Game Theory

Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation--most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of "focal points" to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in "prisoner's dilemmas." Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves (or "frame") their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups (or "teams"), each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group's common goal. Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach's long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach's premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole.coordination, cooperation, focal points, prisoner's dilemma, rational actors, decision problems, psychology, evolutionary biology

On David Gauthier’s Theories of Coordination and Cooperation

In 1975, Gauthier discussed Schelling’s pure coordination games and Hodgson’s Hi-Lo game. While developing an original analysis of how rational players coordinate on ‘focal points,’ Gauthier argued, contrary to Schelling and Hodgson, that successful coordination in these games does not depend on deviations from conventional principles of individually rational choice. I argue that Gauthier’s analysis of constrained maximization in Morals by Agreement, which famously deviates from conventional game theory, has significant similarities with Schelling’s and Hodgson’s analyses of coordination. Constrained maximization can be thought of as a pragmatic and contractarian variant of the team-reasoning approach pioneered by Hodgson

Events and the agential perspective

There are systematic and pervasive differences between the ways we think about events in our personal past and future. Roughly speaking, we treat past events as fixed and settled, and future events as open and undetermined. This fact raises questions, first, about the finer structure of this pattern of asymmetry; and, secondly, about its metaphysical status. This thesis aims to address these families of question together, thereby bringing questions in the metaphysics of time into contact with ones in the philosophy of action and decision. The principal aim of the thesis is to articulate a distinctively retrospective perspective that we have on our past actions; and to argue that much of mature practical thinking, in particular the asymmetries of past and future thinking, is structured by this retrospective perspective. This perspective is explained in terms of the special epistemic access we have to particular past events, paradigmatically in episodic memory. This is effectively a novel argument for the familiar idea that actions are events—one based on the structure of practical thought, rather than the logical form of action sentences. An ontology of events motivated in this way has consequences for question in the metaphysics of time. Specifically, I argue that it supports a conception of time as a system of particulars, rather than one on which the tenses are fundamental

Knowing ways of acting

In The Concept of Mind and the earlier Presidential Address, Gilbert Ryle posed the question, What is it for qualities of mind to be displayed in an agent’s overt behaviour? This thesis takes up this Rylean question concerning the relation between the mental and embodied physical action. I understand the question as asking primarily about the psychological explanation of action — what kinds of psychological states causally explain features of an agent’s behaviour in such a way as to justify the characterisation of that behaviour as intelligent. Following a recent proposal by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, I explore and defend the view that intelligent action is action guided by knowledge of ways of acting. However, I depart from Stanley and Williamson in claiming that this knowledge is non essentially propositional. I make a case for an ineliminable role for nonpropositional, acquaintance-like knowledge of ways of acting in psychological explanations of action