Thursday, March 06, 2008

I Wonder - Org Theory Edition

Since some of you keep wondering about my work, namely if I'm doing any, here are a few questions I ponder as I run off the bacon:

1. I wonder if organizational over-compliance is due to the diffusion of norms across their organizational environment, a macro-level phenomenon, or if over-compliance is due to some micro-level cognitive phenomenon, e.g. mitigation of risk, branding, or that particular organization's "culture." If the former, that's been said and observed before, even if diffusion is hard to measure/prove. If the latter--what factors go into this micro-level phenomenon, and how much we encourage compliance and over-compliance?

I have no idea, but that is why you collect data and try to operationalize variables.

2. I wonder if organizational theory and contract theory can be integrated in an approach to figure out the problem of the cavernous wage gap between men and women, at least in the salary-negotiation phase.

3. I wonder if social movement theory can be applied to study the "effects" of a scholarly movement, namely CRT, can be measured in terms of 1) laws/regulations (e.g. hate speech codes), 2) favorable dicta or court rulings empirically. This is not a politically popular paper idea though, for either side. Hmm.