Amir Goldberg

The Stanford GSB is hiring in macro & micro OB! If you do sociology, psychology, OB, strategy, management, computational social science, please apply.

On the macro side, mid-career folks are especially invited to apply.

See here👇
www.gsb.stanford.edu/jobs/faculty...

Yes--Germany invented the modern university. In the 1930s its universities were the best in the world until the Nazis destroyed them. German universities have never recovered their preeminence. We risk repeating this history here in the US.

Eva Illouz is a world class sociologist. She is a giant of cultural sociology, and I learned immensely from her work. That the corrupt and authoritarian Israeli government denied her this well-deserved prize is testament to her quality and intellectual integrity.

You might be underestimating how many Jewish academics are secretly cheering with schadenfreude.
Thank you for reading.

You can create an account and read it in full for free

@drbjrisman.bsky.social and I are both Jewish sociologists. We think that campus antisemitism is real, but refuse to be used as a cudgel by an authoritarian administration hellbent on retribution and destroying academia, indeed, America.

So we write about it:
www.chronicle.com/article/trum...

I enjoyed reading it, and learned a lot!

With Lara Yang, Sarayu Anshuman and Sameer Srivastava.

Do our findings extend beyond organizations? We speculate they do. The effects of global reach on identification are highest for those in very clustered networks. Identification with an "imagined community" requires a combination of local cohesion and global integration.

The problem with word embeddings is they assume all text was generated by the same model. Mittens allows us to fit models at the person-time level.
Such an approach is very useful for understanding interpretative heterogeneity across people or time!

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

We look at two network measures (inferred from email exchange): local clustering (how tight knit one's ego network is) and a new measure, global reach (how distributed one's ego network is across multiple communities).
Both predict identification, even within person over time.

To measure identification, we use Mittens, an extension of GloVe, to fit person embeddings (from email) across 3 orgs. We measure the similarity between "I" and "we" as each person's identification strength at a given time unit.

github.com/roamanalytic...

New paper from the computational culture lab, forthcoming @amjsoc.bsky.social!
Building on (largely untested) sociological intuitions, we show how positions in the organizational network relate to identification with the organization, using a language model:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

After five years of pioneering research into the abuse of social platforms, the Stanford Internet Observatory is winding down. Its founding director, Alex Stamos, left his position in November. Renee DiResta, its research director, left last week after her contract was not renewed. One other staff member's contract expired this month, while others have been told to look for jobs elsewhere, sources say. Some members of the eight-person team might find other jobs at Stanford, and it’s possible that the university will retain the Stanford Internet Observatory branding, according to sources familiar with the matter. But the lab will not conduct research into the 2024 election or other elections in the future.

NEWS: After sustained attacks from House Republicans, the Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled. A huge blow to academic freedom and our ability to understand platforms and influence operations www.platformer.news/stanford-int...

My friend @jeffkopstein.bsky.social , one of the most prominent researchers on contemporary antisemitism active today (and someone whose rigorous *empirical* work on the phenomenon is sorely needed), shared a photo of a "Wanted" poster targeting him on the UC-Irvine campus.

Despicable.

More fun applications in the article. You can find a pre-print here:

osf.io/preprints/so...

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What about schemas, you ask? Somewhat heretically (at least for cultural sociologists), we find this too expansive an analytical concept. We hope that thinking about categorization and semantic association, sociologists can be more precise when they talk about schemas. >>

Thinking about interpretation, and especially interpretative heterogeneity, is important, because the links between people’s beliefs and their actions are often mediated by interpretation. You and I might both believe in diversity, but disagree on what this ideal means. >>

Framing, for example, affects recipients’ categorization and semantic association, both through verbal (by labeling and analogizing) and non-verbal (relationally and through co-occurrence) channels. >>

To interpret something is to associate it with a cognitive concept (categorization), invoking a set of associated concepts (semantic association). This enables us to conceptualize shared interpretation, and the process by which interpretations are coordinated across people. >>

What do we mean when we study “meaning”? In a 🚨new ARS article🚨, Madison Singell and I suggest thinking of meaning as an actor interpreting something. Integrating sociological literature, we propose the Categorization-Association Model of Interpretation. >>
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Excited to share that the Organizational Behavior area at the Stanford GSB is inviting applications for a postdoc in Macro OB for AY 2024/5.

Sociologists, organizational, management & strategy scholars, and computational social scientists, please apply!

👇

www.gsb.stanford.edu/jobs/postdoc...

Co-authored with the wonderful Abraham Oshotse and Yael Berda

Why is Macklemore often criticized for cultural appropriation, but Eminem mostly gets a pass? In a new paper, forthcoming
at ASR, we argue, and demonstrate, that people are allowed to borrow from other cultures if they incurred a cost. We call that “cultural tariffing.”

osf.io/preprints/so...

Thank you. Given that I adopt technological trends past their peak, I worry if this means bad things for bluesky....