| John Mohr Dept
of Sociology Email: mohr@soc.ucsb.edu |
Some Examples of my Work
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| On Organizational Theory: | ||||||||||||
The Duality of Niche and Form: (w/ Francesca Guerra-Pearson) ...We begin from the assumption that institutions are fundamentally meaningful constructs and that organizational scholars cannot advance an effective explanatory science if they fail to give meaning its due. As formalists we also believe that meanings themselves (and not simply their effects, their residues or their second order associations) are directly amenable to quantitative analysis. We take this perspective and we put it to work in this chapter, showing how institutional space can be modeled in such a way that the meaningfulness of organizational activities becomes the starting place (not the after thought) for an empirical investigation of ecological dynamics. Our main substantive contribution is to demonstrate a procedure for locating organizations within a semiotically defined relational space. Having defined the space, various measurement strategies are available to us. In this paper we borrow the analytic logic of Miller McPherson (1983) to construct a metric for assessing the location of niche boundaries within the discursive field. We apply these procedures to map the institutional ecology of social welfare organizations in New York City between 1888 and 1917.<continue> |
John W. Mohr and Francesca Guerra-Pearson.
2005. "The Duality
of Niche and Form: The Differentiation of Institutional Space in New
York City, 1888-1917." Forthcoming
in Walter Powell and Dan Jones (ed) How Institutions Change.
University of Chicago Press. |
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Implicit Terrains: The interpretation of meaning is a critical problem for the study of markets and industries for two reasons. First, in a fundamental sense that I hope to make clear in this chapter, to understand and to explain the processes that drive markets and industries requires that we interpret the meanings that are in play there because meanings are embodied in social actions (and thus in social structures). But the pursuit of those meanings quickly leads us into unfamiliar terrain and thus into a second kind of problem. Meanings are notoriously difficult to manage within the frameworks of quantitative social science. Ethnographic field researchers can tell us a great deal about the “webs of significance” that are spun by their informants but those of us who study markets and industries from a less intimate vantage point are in a quandary. We can either approach meanings indirectly, relying on something rather like peripheral vision (this is mostly what we do now), or we can resolve to change how we study markets and industries. In this chapter I argue for a change...<continue> |
John W. Mohr. 2005.
"Implicit Terrains: Meaning, Measurement, and Spatial Metaphors
in Organizational Theory." Forthcoming
in Constructing Industries and Markets, Joseph Porac and Marc
Ventresca (eds). NY: Elsevier.
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| Archival Research Methods (w/ Marc Ventresca): ...A new archival approach in organization science has emerged over the last decade. Like the ecological strategy before it, this “new archivalism” is steeped in the ethos and methods of formal social science. However, its practitioners dissent variously (at times, vigorously) from the methodological conventions of ecological research. Indeed, the new archivalists tend to share key sensibilities with the historiographic approach, including the concerns for exploring the meaning-laden, action-oriented foundations of organizational processes...<continue> |
Marc Ventresca and John W. Mohr. 2002. “Archival
Research Methods.” Pages
805-828 in The Blackwell Companion to Organizations, edited
by Joel A. C. Baum. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers. |
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| On Cultural Theory: | ||||||||||||
The Discourses of Welfare and Welfare Reform: The study of social welfare has undergone a shift over the last 20 years from a strongly realist to a decidedly constructionist orientation. The move is largely the result of the impact of feminist scholars such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon whose attention to the construction of gender categories called into question key analytic assumptions of earlier research agendas. The cultural turn that took place in this arena depended on the analysis of discourse. In this chapter I explain how the concept of discourse came into and subsequently transformed the sociological study of welfare institutions. I then highlight two key features of institutional discourse that I believe need to be taken into account in future research — that it is: (1) organized within semiotic systems, and (2) constructed through mutually constitutive (dually ordered) institutional structures...<continue> |
John W.
Mohr. 2005. “The Discourses
of Welfare and Welfare Reform.”
Forthcoming in the The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture,
edited by Mark Jacobs and Nancy Hanrahan. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers.
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The Cultural Turn in American Sociology (w/ Roger Friedland): American sociology is in the midst of a cultural turn. Where sociologists once spurned culture, associated as it was with the normative premises of Parsonian theory or with other kinds of idealisms, today they embrace it. Problems of meaning, discourse, aesthetics, value, textuality and narrativity, topics traditionally within the humanists’ purview, are now coming to the fore as sociologists increasingly emphasize the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames and cognitive schema in their theorizations of social process and institution. This is happening across the intellectual landscape...<continue> |
Roger Friedland
and John W. Mohr. 2004. “The
Cultural Turn in American Sociology.” Matters
of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice. Cambridge University
Press. <html link to paper> |
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The Cultural Turn in American Sociology — A Report from the Field: ...What would we, as scholars, want to explain to our colleagues about
the virtues of cultural analysis?
What follows is a rather idiosyncratic list of 10
talking points that captures my own sense of how
to respond to such a query. |
John W. Mohr 2003.
“The Cultural Turn in American Sociology — A Report
from the Field.” Culture,
Vol 17, No. 2-3, Spring. <html link to paper> <pdf download version> |
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The Duality of Culture and Practice:(w/ Vincent Duquenne): ...Our analysis relies upon a number of assumptions about the nature of institutional logics and the ways in which they ought to be studied. We begin the article by laying out these assumptions along with our rationales for adopting them. We start with a short discussion of Galois lattices, the methodological technique which we employ to analyze the patterns of linkages between categories and practices. As we will explain, lattices are a particularly appropriate tool because they illuminate the structural dualities which inhere within such a relationship. We then turn to a brief discussion of the nature of institutional logics, focusing in particular on those theorists who argue that there is an inherent duality between culture and practice. This is followed by a more precise account of the nature of structural dualities and a brief discussion of how these types of relationships characterize the history of social welfare institutions. Finally, we will turn to the formal models of the social welfare system in New York City as it existed in 1888 and 1917...<continue> |
John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne. 1997.
"The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief
in New York City, 1888-1917." Theory
and Society, (April/June) Vol. 26/2-3: 305-356.
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| Soldiers, Mothers, Tramps and Others:
Discourse Roles in the 1907 New York City Charity Directory: ...four more specific assumptions. First...enacted social practices. What concerns me about this discursive terrain is the fact that it has implications for the ways in which individuals are regarded and acted upon….Second, I assume that whatever else this moral order consists of, its principal and effective manifestation is to create social distinctions and to fit various social identities into a more or less organized pattern of associations—e.g., soldiers and mothers are worthy objects of state outdoor relief, the unemployed and the sick are not….Third, ... I argue that we can learn the greatest amount ... by looking at the way in which associations among status identities are structured as a totality….Finally, ... I suggest that we look for common patterns of association in the treatment profiles of various social identities...thinking of them as occupants of particular sorts of discursive roles... |
John W. Mohr. 1994.
"Soldiers, Mothers, Tramps and Others: Discourse Roles
in the 1907 New York City Charity Directory." Poetics:
Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media, and the Arts
22: 327-357.
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| On Methods of Cultural Analysis | ||||||||||||
The Logic of Opportunity (with Michael Bourgeois and Vincent Duquenne): ...Organizational fields can be thought of as arenas of social life that are focused upon the enactment of particular kind of institutional activities carried on through the conduct of a set of organizational actors. To implement these activities, organizational personnel within a field share communication with one another and with key organizational agents within their environment, construct systems of taken-for-granted understandings and standardized procedures for producing organizational action, evaluation, and resource allocation. As the new institutionalists have emphasized, the foundation of these institutional systems are repertoires of communicative activities that rely upon the use of empirically observable vocabularies of symbols employed in the service of generating mythical narratives (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Scholars in this tradition have developed methods for tracking the rise and fall of symbolic activities within organizational fields and of showing the impact these communicative activities have upon organizational behavior (Meyer, Scott and Deal, 1983; Dobbin, Edelman, Meyer, Scott and Swidler, 1988; Dobbin, Sutton, Meyer and Scott, 1993). Less attention has been paid to the discourse systems themselves — what they are, how they work, what they mean?...<continue> |
John Mohr, Michael
Bourgeois, and Vincent Duquenne. 2004."The
Logic of Opportunity: A Formal Analysis of the University of California's
Outreach and Diversity Discourse"Center
for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley, Research and Occasional
Papers Series: |
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Institutional Logics from the Aggregation of Organizational Networks (w/ Ronald L. Breiger): ...In this paper we bring together several themes. We posit (in Section 2 and in Section 3.3) a dialectic that unifies, within a common frame of analysis, (a) invariance among organizational actors within structurally equivalent sets and (b) variation in the network ties between those sets. We present operational procedures for quantifying both the invariance and the variation. We apply our aggregation procedures to organizational networks conceived as tables of counts of connections or resources that circulate among actors. We examine a citation network among journals (Section 3; data of Coombs, 1964) and the discourse roles among hundreds of organizational agencies engaged in diversity practices within the University of California following the legal prohibition on affirmative action (Section 4; data of Mohr et al., 2002)...<continue> |
Breiger, Ronald L.
and John W. Mohr. 2004. “Institutional
Logics from the Aggregation of Organizational Networks: Operational
Procedures for the Analysis of Counted Data.” Computational
and Mathematical Organization Theory, 10: 17-43.
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La Dualidad y la Agregación de Categorías Sociales (with Ronald L. Breiger). "Duality” is a conception of micro-macro linkage that implies that elements at each of two different levels of structure (such as persons and groups, or—as in the data we analyze—identities and practices) co-constitute one another. We present an algorithm for the aggregation of social categories that are “dual” to each other. Our algorithm is applicable to the study of data in contingency tables. We apply our algorithm in a study of the joint construction of social identities (including racial and ethnic labels) and educational (outreach) practices in a university context. |
Breiger, Ronald L. and
John W. Mohr. 2004. “La
Dualidad y la Agregación de Categorías Sociales.”
REDES
– Revista Hispana para el Análysis de Redes Sociales,
5 (2004). <pdf download version> |
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Measuring Meaning Structures: ...The cultural turn which has recently swept through much of American sociology has meant that sociologists are ever more frequently focusing on the role of symbols, meanings, texts, cultural frames, and cognitive schemas in their theorizations of social processes and institutions. Although this resurgence of interest in cultural phenomena is often associated with the shift towards more humanistic and interpretative methodologies, an increasing number of quantitatively oriented scholars have also begun to turn their attention to the study of cultural meanings. In the process a new body of research has begun to emerge in which social practices, classificatory distinctions, and cultural artifacts of various sorts are being formally analyzed in order to reveal underlying structures of meaning...<continue> |
John
W. Mohr. 1998. “Measuring
Meaning Structures.” Annual
Review of Sociology. Vol. 24:345-70 |
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Comparison of Dual Orderings in Time (withVincent Duquenne and Annick Le Pape): The aim of the present methodological note is to refine the analysis along three directions. First, to screen thoroughly the source data, through the basic tools of Lattice Analysis (orders on words, treatments, their Galois Lattice...). Second, to make use of some more sophisticated tools like basis of implications...or the canonical splits that express incompatibilities and exclusions between words and treatments...and the Galois lattice un-gluing into regular intervals.... The third direction is to complete these synchronic views by comparing the findings in 1888 and 1917, and to address the question of what was either stable or different over two orderings in time. |
Vincent Duquenne, John W. Mohr and Annick Le
Pape. 1998. “Comparison
of Dual Orderings in Time.” Social
Science Information. Vol. 37:227-253 FIGURE 3 Regular intervals of the Galois lattice (1888) FIGURE 4 Orders on practices and words (1917) FIGURE 6 Regular intervals of the Galois lattice (1917) FIGURE 7 The Galois lattice for the aggregation 1888-1917 FIGURE 8 Regular intervals for the aggregation 1888-1917 FIGURE 9 The Galois lattice for the consensus 1888 & 1917 |
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| On Methods of Historical Analysis: | ||||||||||||
Using a Computer to 'Find Meaning' in Historical Texts Interpretation is a critical dimension of historical research. Though we can never really know how historical subjects understood their situation, their actions, or the actions of others, we continually strive to do so. The work is difficult and complex. It demands careful attention to detail and an immersion in large quantities of primary source material. It is also the part of our work which we are most likely to associate with a more humanistic style of knowing. Increasingly, however, we are advancing on other ways of knowing, ways of using computers and formal methods of investigation to describe and measure the meanings which are embedded within historical texts. Moreover, with the proliferation of fast desktop computers and inexpensive scanners, I believe we are entering a new era of historical research, one in which computer assisted interpretation of textual materials will become a common activity, something that one routinely learns as a graduate student....<continue> |
John
W. Mohr. 1998. “Using
a Computer to 'Find Meaning' in Historical Texts.” Newsletter
of the Comparative & Historical Section of the American Sociological
Association. Vol. 10, No. 4.:1-6 |
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New Directions in Formalization and Historical Analysis ( with Roberto Franzosi): ...All of this then helps to explain how it was that the seemingly unobjectionable movement towards introducing a more rigorous approach to measuring things that happened in the past, became instead, the occasion for a surprisingly heated debate...As historians began to adopt a more social scientific posture, American sociology underwent its own revolution. With the repudiation of Parsonian functionalism, American sociologists jettisoned much of their naiveté about science and, in the process, they drew considerably closer to the sort of epistemological and methodological skepticism that had motivated much of the historians' criticisms...This trend has been especially visible among sociologists engaged in historical research who, over the years, have adopted an increasingly skeptical attitude about the possibilities of large scale trans-historical comparisons, moving much closer in the process towards the historians' position regarding the need to respect the particularities of specific historical contexts...<continue> |
Roberto
Franzosi & John W. Mohr. 1997.
“New Directions in Formalization and Historical Analysis.”
Theory and Society. Vol. 26, No.
2-3:133-160 |
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On Social Theory: |
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Bourdieu's Relational Method in Theory and Practice: A key tenet of Bourdieu's project is his rejection of what he refers to as "substantialist" approaches to social science which he identifies with positivistic formal methodologies. In place of this, Bourdieu makes a compelling case for the use of a relational methodology in analyzing social life. His theorization of relationism is both sophisticated and far-reaching and it provides the foundation for many of his theoretical constructs. In spite of the richness of these theoretical formulations, however, Bourdieu's actual research practice tends to come up short, often reflecting the same sort of linear methodological presuppositions which he has otherwise so eloquently dismissed. Drawing upon an approach to relational analysis that takes inspiration from the American network analytic tradition, I seek to demonstrate in this paper how Bourdieu's research practices are far less relational than his theoretical statements would seem to suggest. |
John W. Mohr. “Bourdieu's
Relational Method in Theory and Practice.”
(pdf. version of Unpublished Manuscript) |
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Structures, Institutions, and Cultural Analysis: Just as there is a certain intellectual homology between traditional (French-style) structuralism and social network analysis, so too is there an isomorphism between Bourdieu's "field theory" and the style of "field theory" that developed among the new institutionalists. Once again, the connections are hardly accidental as there has always been a steady flow of influence moving (at a minimum) from the East to the West. At the risk of seeming too cavalier in my formulation, I would like to suggest that these papers might begin to provide something of a counter-balance to this flow of intellectual capital and...I would emphasize that the greatest contribution of these papers is to be found in their furtherance of a more genuinely structuralist methodology. |
John W. Mohr. 2000. “Structures,
Institutions, and Cultural Analysis.” Poetics:
Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media, and the Arts:
Special Issue on "Relational Analysis and Institutional Meanings:
Formal Models for the Study of Culture" edited by John W. Mohr.
Vol. 27/2-3:57-68. |
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On Diversity in Higher Ed: |
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From Affirmative Action to Outreach (with Helene Lee): This paper investigates recent changes in diversity policies — from a program based on affirmative action to one based on outreach — at the University of California. Using a content analysis of a 1995 directory of UC programs we show that these developments are associated with a shift in institutional logic, from an individualistic emphasis on race to a corporatist discourse of class. The analyses include a new set of procedures for mapping the implicit meanings of a system of identity discourses. Drawing on a semiotic theory of interpretation (emphasizing the duality of culture and practice), we apply multidimensional scaling methods and McPherson's niche measurement techniques to identify and map overlapping regions of discursive space. |
John W. Mohr and Helene K. Lee. 2000. “From Affirmative Action to Outreach: Discourse Shifts at the University of California.” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media, and the Arts. Special Issue on "Culture and Cognition" edited by Karen Cerulo Vol. 28/1:47-71.
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| On Social Welfare: | ||||||||||||
Locating the Origins of America's Two-Channel Welfare State (with Krista Paulsen): Feminist scholars have argued that there are "two channels" in the American welfare state—one directed toward the needs of men, another directed towards women. Recent debates ask whether the differences that have been identified in contemporary practices began during the Progressive Era. We examine the way that relief organizations operating in New York City between 1888 and 1917 classified men and women. We find evidence which supports the contention that there were clearly gendered differences in social welfare practices before and during the Progressive Era, that these differences had a significant impact on the way that men and women were treated, and that the differences in treatment were linked to men and women's perceived services to society. |
John W. Mohr and Krista Paulsen.
“Locating the Origins of America's Two-Channel Welfare
State: Evidence from New York City's Relief Organizations, 1888-1917”.
Unpublished manuscript. |
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The Classificatory Logics of State Welfare Systems: In the process of conferring the rights of citizenship, modern nation states constitute their citizens as subjects within a variety of discursive registers. The English sociologist T.H. Marshall was one of the first commentators to point out that this process included the construction of citizens as the bearers of social rights...In practice, however, social rights do not exist apart from the bureaucracies which implement them. Thus...individuals are compelled to enter into "bureaucratic encounters" wherein they are subjected to the classificatory logics of whichever agencies are charged with the task of evaluating and processing their claims (Hasenfeld, Rafferty, and Zald, 1987). In this encounter, an interpretation is invoked and imposed, a set of meanings are brought to bear, and the individual petitioner is located within a system of discourse. ...Simply put, to claim the rights of citizenship is—in this regard—to enter into a relationship wherein one's subjectivity is specified according to a pre-existing menu of identities possessing the right to make certain types of claims, having diagnosable needs and for whom recognizable solutions embodied within established organizational repertoires of action are deemed to be appropriate. |
John W. Mohr. 1998. “The
Classificatory Logics of State Welfare Systems: Towards a Formal Analysis.”
Pages 207-38 in Public Rights, Public Rules: Constituting Citizens in
the World Polity and National Policy, Connie McNeely (ed.). NY: Garland
Publishing, Inc |
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The Impact of State Intervention in the Nonprofit Sector (with Francesca Guerra-Pearson): Wide-ranging policy initiatives are currently being crafted on the faith that non-profit organizations (NPOs) have been "crowded out" of the field of social welfare by the expansion of federal programs and that a shrinking of federal commitments will usher in a resurgence of voluntary activism and a veritable renaissance of NPOs in the social welfare sector. Other research (Sosin, 1986) has shown that cutbacks during the Reagan administration did not lead to the anticipated expansion of the nonprofit sector. The research presented here suggests why this was the case. Evidence from the New Deal era indicates that NPOs were not "crowded out" by federal intervention and that public/private sector relations are not governed by the logic of a zero-sum game. On the contrary, this research suggests that NPOs do best when federal programs have prospered. It is, as Lester Salamon suggests, as partners in social service that NPOs are most likely to flourish. |
John W. Mohr and Francesca Guerra-Pearson. 1996. “The Impact of State Intervention in the Nonprofit Sector: The Case of the New Deal.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Vol. 25, no. 4., p. 525-539. |
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| On Cultural Capital: | ||||||||||||
The Intergenerational Transmission of Cultural Capital(with Paul DiMaggio): Our task in this paper then is to explore three different models of the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital. First, we will look for factors that are hypothesized to be correlated with parents' own levels of cultural capital. Second, we will be looking for factors that we hypothesize may be associated with parents' likelihood of investing strategically in their children's stock of cultural capital. And, third, we will seek to identify factors that we think are correlated with the exposure that children will receive to cultural capital net of the experience they may have in their own household |
John W. Mohr and
Paul DiMaggio. 1995. "The
Intergenerational Transmission of Cultural Capital." Research
in Social Stratification and Mobility, Volume 14, p. 169-200.
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Cultural Capital, Educational Attainment and Marital Selection (with Paul DiMaggio): Although Weber distinguished sharply between "class" (an individual's market position) and "status" (participation in a collectivity bound together by a shared status culture), only measures of the former have been included in most empirical analyses of the stratification process. In this article a measure of status-culture participation (or cultural capital) is developed from the responses of men and women interviewed in 1960 by Project Talent. Questions tapped a range of high-cultural interests and activities. Analyses of data from a follow-up study 11 years later show significant effects of cultural capital (with appropriate controls) on educational attainment, college attendance, college completion, graduate attendance, and marital selection for both men and women. |
Paul DiMaggio and
John W. Mohr. 1985. "Cultural
Capital, Educational Attainment and Marital Selection."
American Journal of Sociology,
Vol. 90, no. 6:1231-1261. |
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.jpg)
Winner Best Article Award, Culture
Section of American Sociological Association, 1996
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