My Research: Social Dynamics and Social Order
My research is essentially about social dynamics and social order. I try to understand how and why social structures evolve and persist. Sociology makes us aware that humans are the products of the structures they grow up and live in. But how does this social fabric unfold? Why do some social structures grow and evolve, while others stagnate and freeze in place? Questions along these lines have fascinated social philosophers and classical sociologists such as Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Luhmann, and Giddens. Although many ideas of the classics are very inspiring and powerful (some have influenced and started academic disciplines, political systems, social movements, and wars), they tend to be rather ambiguous, and sometimes have turned into dogma. Meanwhile, new research has appeared in the area of organization studies (including the areas of Organization Theory, Organization Science, Management Science, Strategy Science, Organization Studies, Sociology of Organizations) that offers new, deeper, and more precise insights (often articulated as mathematical models) into the evolution and persistence of social and organizational structures. At the same time, new, powerful research methodologies have emerged that facilitate the quantitative analysis of social dynamics. One of the pioneers (and my teacher) -- Nancy Tuma -- explains how her methodology relates to the study of social dynamics in her article in Encyclopedia of Sociology (archived at Archive version of article at Encyclopedia of Sociology).
![[PICTURE]](Competency_Trap4.jpg) I explore social dynamics and social order in the context of organizations (though I started out in life course research, dynamics of family systems, and demographic models). Organizations are very powerful social systems, and there are many powerful theories of organizations, in particular about their change. Research on organizations has produced very powerful models that can explain how structures evolve and persist in organizations and society. That is why I am in that area.
Social dynamics and social order are not opposites. Social order is essentially a state with zero or little social dynamics. It is often a self-stabilizing situation. For example, take competency traps, a powerful idea from the organizational learning literature, articulated by James G. March (my teacher and mentor at Stanford). “A competency trap can occur when favorable performance with an inferior procedure leads an organization to accumulate more experience with it, thus keeping experience with a superior procedure inadequate to make it rewarding to use.” (Levitt and March 1988: 322). It is a situation where a dynamic process -- developing competencies with the existing procedure -- impedes exploration of alternatives and thereby stabilizes and strengthens the use of the existing procedure. The example suggests that theories of social dynamics -- if they are powerful -- can also explain the emergence of order. Learning theories in particular are powerful, and I have drawn on them in many of my research projects. In one of my talks (Remembering Jim March at CSOL 2019), I take a poetic view (inspired by Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities") on the connection between social order and organizational learning. You can download the slides of the talk here (in PDF format). It portrays social order as an "inferno". One way of escaping the inferno is agency (and its capabilities such as free will, initiative, intentions, attention). So, if we want to develop a deeper understanding of social dynamics and social order, we need to understand the role of human agents -- whether they are pre-programmed meatpuppets or agents of change. Let me explain.
Theories of social dynamics (and order) highlight the duality of structure and agency. Agents (humans) with free will, initiative, and innovativeness -- but enabled and constrained by social structures -- can reinforce (re-enact) the existing social order -- but they can also transform social structures and thereby a produce a new order. That means if we want to understand social dynamics (and order), we need to understand the underlying mechanism that shape agency and structure and their interactions. That is clearly a very large question (with many facets). With my research, I try to bring that question down to a more concrete and manageable level. I focus on a core element of social structure -- rules, and a core element of agency -- attention, and study how they change over time. I believe that if we understand the dynamics of rules and the dynamics of attention, we can understand a good part of how structure and agency shape the evolution of the social world. (I explain the background on my work on the dynamics of rules and attention in a video at CSOL).
![[PICTURE]](Structure_Agency.jpg) To study the dynamics of rules and the dynamics of attention empirically, I use organizational archives -- collections of data that organizations build for their own purposes, such as back-up data of rule systems. I extract from these archives (sometimes by hand, but usually with computer programs that I develop) information about change processes in organizations. One of the challenges of archival research is that the empirical data reflect organizational purposes and meaning and sometimes are not easily connected to theoretical concepts that we would like to empirically test. So, we often use proxies of theoretical variables in our analysis, which can weaken results. On the other hand, using real organizational data (usually longitudinal) means that our analysis focuses on real processes happening in real organizations, not some artificial setting of a lab.
Research Program 1: The Dynamics of Rules and Rule Networks
I believe that research on rules and rule change holds the key for unlocking the mysteries of structural evolution. Rules occupy a central space in all societies and organizations. They exist in many different forms, such as bureaucracies, legal institutions, industry standards, job descriptions, technologies, rituals, scripts, routines, taboos, habits, and traditions. Rules are at the core of all social and organizational structures. It is hard to imagine a social setting in which rules do not play a role. Indeed, the recent expansion of regulation in all spheres of society (e.g., banking, transportation, education, intellectual property, natural resources, and healthcare) seems to indicate that rules will play an even more important role in the future. Understanding and predicting the evolution of rules and rule systems will become increasingly relevant in a world that is constructed from and shaped by rules.
Although rules define and construct stable structures, they also change. New rules arise, and old ones are modified or abandoned. The rules of Hammurabi were carved in stone, but today they are merely relicts in a museum. Laws change, and so do bureaucratic rules, organizational routines, and individual habits. As kernels of social order, rules are naturally persistent (rules and rule systems tend to change slower than things around them) but they do change over time, and so do the social and organizational structures that rest on them. This means that research on rule change can lead to a deeper understanding of the evolution of social, organizational, and behavioral structures. Observing rules and studying how they change over time can lead us to new insights about the underlying processes that construct and transform the worlds we live in.
So, what drives change and persistence of rules? There is no single simple answer, but theories of organizations -- especially dynamic theories -- highlight several mechanisms that contribute to the dynamics of rules. Take Max Weber's idea of rationalization -- it is a process that is fuelled by a protestant mindset focused on managing innerworldly matters that leads to a profusion of bureaucratic rules and the rise of powerful bureaucratic hierarchies in society (Weber: Protestant Ethics). Deeper and more detailed explanations of the dynamics of rules can be developed from theories of organizational learning which see rules as repositories of lessons drawn from experience (e.g., Levitt & March 1988, or March et. al 2000, ). One is "negative density dependence of rule birth rates": Rules that encode lessons drawn from experiences with problems can absorb those problems, leaving less problems available for further rule making (e.g., Schulz 1998a). Another is "rule obsolescence": Learning processes encode lessons into invariant rule versions based on the state of conditions prevailing at that time, and this can make rules subject to obsolescence (Schulz 1998b, or Schulz 1991). Over time, knowledge not yet encoded accumulates, and this can generate momentum for change and produce positive duration dependence of rule changes (and interesting exceptions such as impermanent institutionalization, Schulz 2003).
I consider routines as special cases of rules, essentially informal rules. Without a codified skeleton of a rule, how then do routines persist? Why do people follow routines, and why don't they drift away from them? And how do we even know if they follow the routine if it is not explicitly articulated in a formalized rule? I have explored these questions in a paper in the Organizational Handbook of Routines (Editor: Markus Becker). The talk related to it is on my website Staying on Track.
Rules become especially powerful if they connect with other rules to form rule networks which steer action on complex paths (such as a knee surgery or a corporate merger). Rule networks not only produce coordinated actions, they also affect the change of rules that are connected to them. Rule networks are powerful structures -- but how do they evolve? One answer is "learning-by-connecting", the formation of connections between different lessons in a dispersed knowledge environment (Schulz & Zhu 2022). It is driven by relevance discovery which increases with the availability of opportunities to discover relevance of rules to other rules and decreases due to sorting of the opportunities in time.
My involvement in organizational learning theories inspired my research projects on organizational knowledge flows. Organizational learning is essentially a knowledge-producing process (you can find more about this in my review paper on organizational learning Schulz 2017 (orig 2002)). Learning from (own or others) experiences produces interpretations and lessons that can be encoded in rules, but it also produces knowledge that is held in the minds of individuals and shared and processed by them. Researchers and practitioners have recognized the importance of knowledge for organizational functioning and performance, and recognized its increasing strategic implications, in particular for businesses, industries, and economies. Knowledge travels within and between organizations. Some of these flows are desirable (e.g., for coordination, collaboration, innovation), but within organizations, knowledge sharing can become a burden and overload members (e.g., with irrelevant documents, unnecessary meetings), and sometimes there is involuntary transfer of knowledge (e.g., to competitors). In my research on knowledge flows, I explore the knowledge flows between subunits and supervising units of multinational corporations. Codification of knowledge intensifies knowledge flows, but it also facilitates involuntary transfer and thereby creates strategic trade-offs (and curvilinear effects) (Schulz & Jobe 2001). New (non-routine) knowledge tends to flow vertically upwards as organizations aim to understand its relevance (discovery of relevance Schulz 2001), while routine knowledge tends to flow horizontally between collaborating units. The relevance of knowledge is a main driver of the direction of knowledge flows (Schulz 2003).
Research Program 2: The Dynamics of Attention
Attention is a key component of agency. Agency without attention would be lost and powerless. But what is attention? Attention is often perceived as a self-evident experience, manifesting in acts like listening to a speaker, solving a puzzle, or taking a look at the traffic in the rear-view mirror. Deeper reflection on the phenomenon reveals that it involves a directing of the mind (and its senses) on selected objects. “Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects” (James 1890). Attention is selective. Its key feature is that it has a limited focus (Simon 1967, 1986, 1994). Thinking processes of humans “that require attention can only go on one at a time or a few at a time” (Simon 1986: 105). The limitation serves an underlying (evolutionary) function – without the restrictions of an attention focus, an “organism would be buffeted by irrelevancies and behavior would go off in all directions at once” (Simon 1986: 106). The focus of attention gives direction, but limits what can be attended to at a given moment. These limitations have deep consequences -- they are the root cause of bounded rationality. Actions of agents are shaped by attention processes that are selective. Their actions reflect the selectivity of these attention processes. But how do these attention processes select targets, and how do they shift between them? Answers to such questions can lead us to a deeper understanding of human agency, how it reproduces social order and how it can contribute to transforming it.
Attention plays an essential role in many organizational processes, including search, decision making, learning (in particular, rule-based learning), problem-solving. Research and theory on these processes clearly recognizes the importance of attention (in particular, scholars in the Carnegie School and the Attention-Based-View). That work highlights attention as shaped by organizational structures (decision-making structures, organizational designs, attention structures). I draw on that work to explore the dynamics of attention; how organizational decision makers shift attention between focal objects and concentrate on them. I believe that understanding the dynamics of attention of organizational processes can contribute to more effectively manage those processes, improve them, and avoid pitfalls.
For example, take search processes. How is attention concentrated during search processes? Does it fatigue? Does it intensify or plateau? How is it relaxed? How does search type (e.g., exploration-related vs exploitation-related search) affect the dynamics of attention during search? Search processes can produce very powerful results, but search can also go wrong (e.g., when important results are missed or search lingers on too long). Understanding the dynamics of attention during search processes can help to improve them and produce new impulses for theories of search.
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Martin Schulz is an Associate Professor at the
University of British Columbia,
located in Vancouver,
British Columbia,
Canada,
Planet Earth.
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