Author Archive for audreyl

From Cosma Shalizi, American Scientist

David Easley and Jon Kleinberg’s Networks, Crowds, and Markets is one of the first textbooks on what could reasonably be called network science—the study of networks of semiautonomous but interdependent units and of the way those networks shape both the behavior of individuals and the large-scale patterns that emerge from small-scale interactions. This is, of course, a very broad description, and it’s not at all obvious that a single book should try to explain, within a common framework, information search on the Web, the spread of epidemic diseases, patterns of scientific collaboration, and much else besides. That these topics are grouped together not by rambling paranoiacs (who find connections everywhere), but by sober, mathematically minded scientists, employing a common and coherent set of concepts, testifies to a remarkable change in perception over the past few decades among scientists and the general educated public: We now see networks everywhere.

Studies dealing with what we now recognize to be social networks go back to the years around 1900, when political economists, social reformers and muckraking journalists began looking at interlocking directorates of corporate boards and other institutions through which the ruling classes (as they were then called) coordinated their actions without actually having an executive committee. People spoke of “social circles.” By the 1950s, sociologists had a notion of social networks, a concept that had a small band of enthusiastic devotees but was an esoteric idea even within mathematical social science. Even 25 years ago, the idea of networks as a form of social organization was reasonably avant-garde. (One can trace some of this evolution in Linton C. Freeman’s 2004 book, The Development of Social Network Analysis, but a proper history of the “network” concept has not yet been written.)

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From The Economist

There are few divisions of the book industry with a worse reputation than business publishing. Hundreds if not thousands of business books come out every year, all with glowing press releases and effervescent puffs. Literary editors tend to consign them straight to the bin.

This is understandable. An astonishing number are worthless. Celebrity CEOs blow their trumpets, consultants market miracle cures, self-help gurus promise that you can grow rich by working four hours a week. Wait a few months: the CEOs have been caught with their hands in the till, the miracle cures are poisons, the self-help gurus bankrupt. What remains is a tangle of jargon-ridden prose.

Understandable but wrong. It is silly to dismiss a whole genre just because so many business books are bad. There are some excellent titles in among the dross: CEO biographies that capture something essential about business, useful prescriptions for restoring companies to health, even self-help books that help make sense of the contradictory pressures of modern corporate life. The average employed person in the West spends more waking time in the office than at home, so it makes no sense to be so dismissive of writers who focus on such an important activity.

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From Robert Sutton, Harvard Business Review

Ever have occasion to do an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership? I have — twice in the past five years. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. The second time was for my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.

It is impossible to read it all.

Tens of thousands of books have been written on leadership and there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, including The Leadership Quarterly and The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. Perhaps the most definitive review and integration of the leadership literature was Bass and Stogdill’s 1,200-page Handbook of Leadership, which was published in 1990 (and still does the best job of making sense of the literature, for my money). And if you really want a long book on leadership, you can get the four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership, which at 2,120 pages weighs in at 15 pounds, and costs a whopping $800. Clearly, the task of reviewing the leadership literature — and acting on it as leader — isn’t to understand it all (that is impossible), but to develop a point of view on the few themes that matter most.

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From Irene S. Levine, The Journal Science

The pursuit of a career in science is uber-demanding. Slogging through 6 or 7 years of graduate school, then a postdoc or two, can be exhausting, even for dedicated high achievers. In the current economic climate, prolonged uncertainty about prospects for future employment compounds the stress.

Scores of articles and forum posts on Science Careers (including some previous Mind Matters columns) have described stressors commonly experienced by science trainees: the mismatch between job demands and rewards; lack of support from mentors, supervisors, and employers; the frustrations of scientific setbacks; pressures to compete and excel; the precarious work-life juggle; limited job opportunities — to list a few.

Most trainees are unprepared for what they encounter in graduate school. “For the first time people don’t treat you like the future superstar you always thought you were,” one scientist says. “You don’t make much money, you work extremely long hours, and you begin to worry that you don’t have a future. It’s a bit like being a starving artist but without the personal affirmation you get from those occasional, limited artistic triumphs.”

Why do some succeed while others fail or fade away? Some chalk it up to luck, others to talent. Still others believe that some people are just born to succeed, with immutable innate abilities. However, a growing body of research and practical experience suggest that personal resilience is one reason that some people succeed but others don’t. Two trainees come up against negative research findings, or face a string of rejections from journal editors and grant-review panels. Their challenges are similar, but one feels defeated while the other is inspired to try harder. Guess who wins?

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From John Quiggin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

For at least the past decade, there has been a boom in work on the economics of happiness. But recalling Tolstoy’s famous opening lines in Anna Karenina, I’ve always wondered why we don’t study the economics of unhappiness instead. After all, we have so much more data.

The American tradition is to enshrine economic activity as a central element of “the pursuit of happiness.” In reality, however, economic activity is largely concerned with the relief of unhappiness. At the subsistence level of economic activity that has prevailed through most of human history, people must work to eat and to be clothed and housed, not so that they can enjoy the happiness that these goods can bring but so that they can avoid the pain of hunger, cold, and exposure to the elements.

In developed economies, most of us can assuage these fundamental sources of unhappiness. But whether because of drives inherent in our nature or because of the constant efforts of advertisers and others, we seem destined to remain unhappy with our economic lot.

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