Macro-level Patterns Research Articles

Alignment between universities and their affiliated professional schools: organizational segmentation and institutional logics in the USA

Universities are classically understood as segmented organizations. In the USA, ties between the university and law and medical schools may be particularly loose because these units have powerful ties to communities of practice and are linked to particular resource streams. Because of these ties to different social fields, medical and law schools may invoke different institutional logics that differentiate their communications from those of the parent university. Latent class analysis identified three distinct categories of university, medical, and law school mission statements in the USA. Logistic regression then predicted the circumstances under which a university and its affiliated professional school were likely to espouse mission statements that fell within the same category. Results indicate that agreement is likely when professional school and university share similar resource bases, suggesting that relationships between universities and their constituent units likely vary as local context moderates macro level patterns.

From Hybrid Entrepreneurs to Entrepreneurial Billionaires: Observations on the Socioeconomic Heterogeneity of Self-employment

Conventional discourses about self-employment are unsatisfactory since there is no clear acknowledgment of its heterogeneity. Interpretations tend to refer to an average type that does not exist in practice, and there are problems of coherence, demarcations, and overlap. Examining macro-level patterns of self-employment, a number of patterns emerge. First, self-employment includes both marginal and privileged positions, within individual countries and also in international comparisons. It can put people at risk of precariousness and poverty or it can be a vehicle to bring wealth to individuals and enterprises, contributing jobs and economic growth to society. Second, people increasingly switch between wage- or salary-dependent labor and self-employment and hybrid forms of employment, as forms of micro entrepreneurship are combined with dependent labor. Third, internationally, the ratio of women in solo self-employment is higher than that of men. Fourth, remarkable differences exist at the level of solo self-employment.

Dissecting income segregation: Impacts of concentrated affluence on segregation of poverty

ABSTRACTThis article investigates how income inequality shapes residential segregation by income. Using agent-based modeling, it develops a residential preferences model that is capable of generating results mimicking empirical income segregation patterns. Simulation analysis shows how varying income inequality produces differential residential mobility outcomes that alter income segregation profiles. The model is used to capture the distinct impacts of households’ moves into richer or poorer neighborhoods, and how these impacts are further differentiated with respect to the moving household’s income. The article demonstrates how aggregating such diverse outcomes of micro-level interactions at a meso-level can help us to better understand the changes in macro-level income segregation patterns. Analyzing residential mobility patterns carefully, the article suggests that i) segregation of affluence and of poverty can trigger each other via initiating cascades of residential mobility and housing prices, and ii) increasing income inequality can disrupt housing market and lead to shortages in affordable housing, which can yield high residential instability and eviction rates among the poorest stratum.

The geography of money and politics: Population density, social networks, and political contributions

We examine the social antecedents of contributing to campaigns, with a particular focus on the role of population density and social networking opportunities. Using 10 years of US campaign contribution data from the Federal Election Commission and a national survey of party leaders, we find that recruiting contributors is easier in a densely populated region, where the daily opportunity of individuals being exposed to the same information via their social networks is high. Furthermore, the effect of population density is heterogeneous with respect to mobility: if a region has substantial commuting outflow, the chance of being mobilized from the place of residence decreases, but the chance of mobilization in their place of work increases. This analysis also reveals differences between political parties. Democrats are more dependent on social networking in population dense areas. This difference in the importance of social networking opportunities present in geographical space helps explain macro-level patterns in party fundraising.

Cascading Resilience: Leverage Points in Promoting Parent and Child Well‐Being

AbstractWhile negative cascades have been well studied, little has been written on the promotion of upward spirals. We propose a conceptual model that situates parenting interventions as a leverage point in promoting positive cascades. We integrate broaden‐and‐build theory and social capital theory into the model to explain micro‐ and macro‐level patterns of change in longitudinal prevention studies, acknowledging that when socioeconomic resources are scarce, investment in parenting may be challenging. Parenting prevention programs provide evidence of improvements in effective parenting behaviors, promote increased confidence and a belief in parenting abilities, and over time may activate positive cascades that affect other domains in parents' lives, such as health and peer support. Resulting positive emotions are hypothesized to broaden coping and build long‐term resources that promote resilience. Social resources may then spill over to benefit individual, family, and community systems. Research methods for testing developmental cascades and practical applications are also considered.

“Please do not leave any notes for the cleaning lady, as many do not speak English fluently”: policy, power, and language brokering in a multilingual workplace

This article investigates the covert language policy and micro-language planning practices of one female Brazilian-American entrepreneur, Magda, within her multilingual cleaning company. Because Magda is plurilingual (Spolsky in Language policy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), she is able to draw on her metalinguistic awareness and multicompetence in order to facilitate communication between her working-class migrant employees and her English-speaking clients as well as engage in what we call “inter-employee brokering”. Magda’s position as the company’s primary language broker enhances her authoritative power in both employer-employee and company owner-customer relations. The current study addresses the need to look into language practices and micro language planning within local contexts (Nekvapil and Nekula in Language planning in local contexts. Multilingual Matters, New York, pp 268–287, 2008) as well as blue-collar workplaces (Holmes in Continuum companion to discourse analysis. Continuum, London, pp 185–198, 2011; Lonsmann and Kraft in The Routledge handbook of language in the workplace. Routledge, New York, forthcoming), which in one way reflect macro social structures, class differences and asymmetrical power relations concerning language use, but also emphasize a deviation from these macro-level patterns through the value placed on Portuguese as the lingua franca within the cleaning company.

Bridging Emergent Attributes and Darwinian Principles in Teaching Natural Selection

Students often have misconceptions about natural selection as they misuse a direct causal schema to explain the process. Natural selection is in fact an emergent process where random interactions lead to changes in a population. The misconceptions stem from students' lack of emergent schema for natural selection. In order to help students construct a correct emergent schema: 5 inter-level attributes that explain the relationship between the micro-level interactions and macro-level patterns in emergent processes were used to develop learning materials for evolution. This new set of learning materials focusing on emergent attributes were compared to another set of learning materials focusing on Darwinian principles (the more traditional approach in teaching natural selection). In addition, a third set of learning material prompting relational thinking between Darwinian principles and emergent attributes were created. Results suggested that participants with higher prior knowledge of natural selection benefited more from this third relational approach, as they answered deep transfer questions more successfully than participants who received other materials that only focused on either emergent attributes or Darwinian principles.

Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland ed. by William Baker

Reviewed by: Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland ed. by William Baker James M. Decker (bio) William Baker, ed. Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland. Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015. 362pp. HB $90.00. ISBN 978-1-61147-692-7 A festschrift in honor of John Sutherland, Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature, edited by William Baker, presents twenty-six essays that mirror the eclectic scholar’s wide-ranging interests. While most of the essays in the volume represent original contributions by a host of critics from Rosemary Ashton to René Weis, the editor also includes a reprinted article by novelist David Lodge. Following his introduction, Baker organizes the book into four categories, all dealing either with one of Sutherland’s intellectual interests or with his biography: “The Publishing Dimension,” “Victorians Major and Minor,” “Non-Victorians and Puzzles,” and “John Sutherland’s Life and Work.” By dividing his focus in such a nontraditional way, Baker takes the gamble of alienating an academic audience comfortable with “traditional” distinctions between genres and periods as well as the risk of offering a book that lacks a clear purpose. Because, however, of Sutherland’s own intellectual Catholicism and the various contributors’ concerted efforts to link their own work to the adventurous spirit of their celebrant, the book succeeds presenting a vision that, while diverse in methodology and subject, is uniformly stimulating. Baker’s introduction concisely explains the book’s organizational logic by tracing the trajectory of Sutherland’s career. Remarkably, Sutherland not only pursued his academic curiosity in a number of fields, but he published seminal works in each area. From the magisterial The Longman Companion [End Page 369] to Victorian Fiction and The Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives to Fiction and the Fiction Industry and Is Heathcliff a Murderer: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Sutherland tackles his subjects with aplomb and incisive critical acumen while also maintaining an almost preternatural ability to connect micro-level details from the works under discussion to the macro-level patterns of genre and period. Baker also notes that whatever his topic, Sutherland writes in an accessible and vigorous style that is “idiomatic, down to earth, and eschewing the pretentious or literary terminology” (xiii). Considering such a career—and leaving out such facets of Sutherland’s work as his editing and status as public intellectual—Baker aptly observes that Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature “represent[s] the range of his achievement and importance as a scholar, a critic, and a journalist” (xii). The volume’s first section, “The Publishing Dimension,” contains five essays, the subjects of which deal with both broad issues, such as audience and female literary networks, and narrower author-specific questions, such as Margaret Oliphant’s relationship with Blackwood. Additionally, the methodologies presented in this section employ both biographical approaches and quantitative ones. For instance, in “Reconsidering the Unknown Public: A Puzzle of Literary Gains” Simon Frost contemplates Wilkie Collins’s bemusement over just who, exactly, was purchasing penny journals. Frost, echoing Sutherland’s interest in literary puzzles, follows various leads, most of which contradict Collins’s conclusion and that productively use publishing and audience data to expose the “unknown public” as an ideological device for maintaining exclusivity and denying the heterogeneous reading habits of a broad swath of nineteenth-century readers. Two of the other writers in this section, Linda K. Hughes and Joanne Shattock, draw upon Sutherland’s inspiration in identifying a puzzle (“trace” collaboration in Hughes’s case) or relationship (Margaret Oliphant’s connection to the House of Blackwood in Shattock’s case) that they explore via primary sources. In particular, Hughes’ idea of trace collaboration seems a useful concept for reconstructing the impact that an ostensibly marginal figure—so far as the extant evidence is concerned— has had on a more prominent one. As with the other contributors to the “Publishing Dimension” (Frost, David Finkelstein, and Alexis Weedon), Hughes and Shattock expand our knowledge of the context in which Victorian writers produced their work. [End Page 370] The next section, “Victorians Major and Minor,” represents the heart of the collection and contains ten...

College students’ awareness in organizational strategy use in English writing

Purpose – The purpose of the study is to look at Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ organizational strategy use in English writing at universities in Taiwan. One significant area that has been indicated in contrastive rhetoric studies spins around the notion of culturally constructed organizational patterns. It is claimed that second language (L2) writers may have implicit culturally driven presuppositions and values about academic writing in the first language (L1) that may transfer straightforwardly to academic writing in English. Design/methodology/approach – Data were from 50 high- and 50 low-achieving EFL students’ and 50 native English speakers’ (NESs’) written texts, and semi-structured interviews with EFL students and their teachers. Findings – Based on text analysis, when high-achieving EFL students and NESs were compared, they were similar in location of thesis, existence of introduction, existence of topic sentences, macro-level patterns, existence of conclusion, existence of a concluding sentence and existence of a final comment, but different in existence of background information. Nonetheless, it is noted that low-achieving EFL students were quite different from high-achieving EFL students and NESs in several aspects, such as location of thesis, existence of introduction, existence of topic sentences, macro-level patterns, existence of conclusion, existence of a concluding sentence, and existence of a final comment. In addition, the written texts and interview findings suggest that while cultural differences do, in fact, exist, Chinese writers’ English organizational strategy use were to some extent intertwined with their writing experiences and teachers’ writing instructions. The results also suggest the flexibility of writers and multiplicity of writing experiences within a cultural group. Originality/value – The study makes original recommendations for language pedagogy.

Fertility decline and the changing dynamics of wealth, status and inequality.

In the course of demographic transitions (DTs), two large-scale trends become apparent: (i) the broadly positive association between wealth, status and fertility tends to reverse, and (ii) wealth inequalities increase and then temporarily decrease. We argue that these two broad patterns are linked, through a diversification of reproductive strategies that subsequently converge as populations consume more, become less self-sufficient and increasingly depend on education as a route to socio-economic status. We examine these links using data from 22 mid-transition communities in rural Poland. We identify changing relationships between fertility and multiple measures of wealth, status and inequality. Wealth and status generally have opposing effects on fertility, but these associations vary by community. Where farming remains a viable livelihood, reproductive strategies typical of both pre- and post-DT populations coexist. Fertility is lower and less variable in communities with lower wealth inequality, and macro-level patterns in inequality are generally reproduced at the community level. Our results provide a detailed insight into the changing dynamics of wealth, status and inequality that accompany DTs at the community level where peoples' social and economic interactions typically take place. We find no evidence to suggest that women with the most educational capital gain wealth advantages from reducing fertility, nor that higher educational capital delays the onset of childbearing in this population. Rather, these patterns reflect changing reproductive preferences during a period of profound economic and social change, with implications for our understanding of reproductive and socio-economic inequalities in transitioning populations.

Analyzing Language Policy and Social Identification Across Heterogeneous Scales

ABSTRACTAttempts to improve education often change how language is used in schools. Many such efforts aim to include minoritized students by more fully including their languages. These are often met with resistance not so much about language but more about identity. Thus processes of social identification are implicated in efforts to change language in education. If we are to understand how identity and language policy interconnect, we must analyze how stability and change are produced in each. This requires attention to macro-level patterns and to micro-level practices. But a two-scale account—micro instantiation of macro categories and micro changes shaping macro structures—does not adequately explain identity and language policy. This article focuses on educational language policy implementation, how language use and social identification change in an evolving policy context. We argue that change and stability in language policy implementation must be explained with reference to heterogeneous resources from multiple timescales—beyond micro and macro—as these resources establish and change social identities. We review recent research using multiple timescales to understand social processes like identification and policy implementation, and we illustrate the use of such a scalar account to describe the social identification of one student in a sixth grade classroom in Paraguay in the midst of a major national educational language policy change. We show how a person's identification as a new kind of minority language speaker involved heterogeneous resources from various spatiotemporal scales. We argue that analysis of the heterogeneous resources involved in social identification is essential to understanding the role that these processes play in cultural, pedagogical, and language change.

Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era

How has the recent shift toward multidisciplinary research affected intellectual cohesion in academia? We answer this question through an examination of collaborations and knowledge flows among researchers. We examine the relevant case of Stanford University during a period of intense investment in multidisciplinary research, using a novel measure of knowledge flows in the short-cycled movement of published references from one researcher to another. We describe intellectual cohesion and its trajectory among 1,007 faculty members between 1997 and 2006, and then examine the social-structural antecedents of dyadic knowledge flows that help explain macro-level patterns. Results show that university collaborations have grown denser and more integrated across faculty members and their institutional divisions. However, this integration is led by “star” researchers and is accompanied by a greater centralization of knowledge flows around these individuals. Results illustrate important shifts in the nature of academic research, and contribute to a dynamic view of intellectual cohesion.

Thermodynamic behavior-rules for a bacterial individual-based model to study the denitrification process

The individual's adaptive behavior to environmental conditions through different behavior- rules is one of the strongest aspects of an individual-based model (IBM). Microbial IBMs consider individuals as discrete entities that follow behavior-rules that dictate how microorganisms interact with their surrounding environment and other microbes, so that the microorganisms and the environment can change their characteristics. This makes it possible to explore connections between micro-level microorganism behaviors and macro-level patterns that emerge from their interactions. INDISIM- Paracoccus is a bacterial IBM used to model the growth and development of the bacteria Paracoccus denitrificans in batch and continuous cultures under aerobic and anaerobic conditions. It embeds thermodynamic properties in individual cells, which can simulate the behavior of the cell population more realistically and mechanistically than other approaches. The IBM's development and application with some intracellular detail and complexity constitute a key advantage in the investigation and understanding of the different steps of denitrification carried out by a denitrifying bacterium.

Heuristics, Interactions, and Status Hierarchies

Since Merton’s classical analysis of cumulative advantage in science, it has been observed that status hierarchies display a sizable disconnect between actors’ quality and rank and that they become increasingly asymmetric over time, without, however, turning into winner-take-all structures. In recent years, formal models of status hierarchies tried to account for these facts by combining two micro-level, counterbalancing mechanisms: “social influence” (supposedly driving inequality) and the desire for “reciprocation in deferential gestures” (supposedly limiting inequality). In the article, we adopt as empirical benchmark basic features that are common to most distributions of status indicators (e.g., income, academic prestige, wealth, social ties) and argue that previous formal models were only partially able to reproduce such macro-level patterns. We then introduce a novel agent-based computational model of deferential gestures that improves on the realism of previous models by introducing heuristic-based decision making, actors’ heterogeneity, and status homophily in social interactions. We systematically and extensively study the model’s parameter space and consider a few variants to determine under which conditions the macroscopic patterns of interest are more likely to appear. We find that specific forms of status-based heterogeneity in actors’ propensity to interact with status-dissimilar others are needed to generate status hierarchies that best approximate these macroscopic features.

Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do “technologies of rebellion” impact a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civilian victimization and tend to be won by incumbents, while conventional ones are more likely to end in rebel victories. Substantively, these findings help us make sense of how civil wars are changing: they are becoming shorter, deadlier on the battlefield, and more challenging for existing governments—but also more likely to end with some kind of settlement between governments and armed opposition. Theoretically, our findings support the idea of taking into account technologies of rebellion (capturing characteristics of conflicts that tend to be visible mostly at the micro level) when studying macro-level patterns of conflicts such as the severity, duration, and outcomes of civil wars; they also point to the specific contribution of irregular war to both state building and social change.

Domains of Emergent Change: Making Sense of Emerging Patterns in the Midst of Change

This paper explores change leader sensemaking of emerging patterns in the midst of change. Drawing on complex adaptive systems theory, we argue that change leaders are neither prime movers, nor passive recipients of emergent organizational change. They actively co-create emerging macro-level patterns through everything they say and do as they interact with other organizational members. How change leaders make sense about emerging macro-level patterns plays an important role in emergence. Yet, we know little about the content or challenges of that sensemaking from the perspective of change leaders. Using a real- time, multi-level study of an organization and its change leaders in the midst of change, we followed the emerging patterns of change over a particularly dynamic 2-year period, and found that making sense of them is challenging work for change leaders. Although emergent change outcomes cannot be predicted, our identification of ‘domains of emergent organizational change’ (the ‘patterning of events’, ‘changing patterns of relations’, ‘changing patterns of attention’), and a multi-level typology for their classification, may help scholars and change leaders to theoretically anticipate and make sense of emerging organizational patterns.

Exploring the co-evolution of the geographies of air transport aviation and corporate networks

In this paper we aim to contribute to the literature on the empirical parallels between urban hierarchies and the transport networks supporting and/or reflecting these hierarchies. We adopt a stochastic actor-based modeling framework to analyze the co-evolution of the world city hierarchy and global air passenger networks between 2000 and 2010/2011. The data are drawn from an inventory of the location strategies of globalized service firms across world cities and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Major findings include (1) exogenous effects, such as the impact of economic development and regionality; (2) endogenous micro-level effects producing macro-level patterns, such as preferential attachment processes; and (3) the two-way impact of both networks. (i.e., cities that are well connected in the aviation network tend to attract more major offices of globalized service firms, while the co-presence of major offices of globalized service firms in cities in turn stimulates the development of aviation connections between them).

Assessing Walkability in the City of Buffalo: Application of Agent-Based Simulation

Significant research has been conducted on how environmental attributes influence people’s decisions to walk. In much of this research, however, environmental attributes are averaged for neighborhoods or census geographies for sampled populations. Moreover, the effect of an agent’s walking choices on other actors is not adequately represented by either objective or perceived measures in the literature. Macro-level patterns of walkability arise from interactions across actors and urban environments. The agent-based approach allows for modeling individual uses of the environment by treating the populations as objects that can interact with the environment and other people. This study builds on previous research on pedestrian movement and geographic information system (GIS) measures of the built environment using the agent-based approach to explore the dynamics of the built environment and people’s decision-making processes concerning walking. The results show that models that take individual perspective into account and include social interaction can better capture characteristics of the built and social environment that influence people’s walking choices. This method lays out a new framework for assessing macro-level patterns of walkability across a city using micro-level data.

Aggregation in agent-based models of economies

AbstractAgent-based models are often described as bottom-up because macro-level phenomena emerge from the micro-level interactions of agents. These macro-level phenomena include fixed points, cycles, dynamic patterns, and long transients. In this paper, I explore the link between micro-level characteristics—learning rules, diversity, network structure, and externalities—and the macro-level patterns they produce. I focus on why we need agent-level modeling, on how these models produce emergent phenomenon, and on how agent-based models help understand outcomes of social systems in a way that differs from the analytic, equilibrium approach.

Patterns of Evolution in Iranian Tribal Textiles

Ever since the publication of The Origin of Species, anthropologists and archaeologists have been in turns enchanted and repulsed by the idea that cultural diversity can be explained by a Darwinian model of descent with modification. Over the last decade, this debate has intensified following the publication of a number of studies that have sought to reconstruct cultural histories using modern computational methods of phylogenetic analysis imported from biology. In this paper, I focus on evolution of tribal textile assemblages in Iran and Central Asia. Using cladistic phylogenetic analysis, I show that similarities and differences among the assemblages can be largely explained in terms of descent with modification from ancestral assemblages. Interestingly, the phylogenetic signal in design characters is just as strong (if not stronger) than the signal in technical characters. This may seem surprising given that techniques, like genes, are transmitted “vertically” from mothers to daughters whereas designs are frequently transmitted “horizontally” among peers. However, a closer examination reveals that the transmission of designs between weavers mainly occurs within, rather than between groups, and that, as in many cultures past and present, there are important constraints on the latter. This highlights that differences in the ways in which genes and cultural traits are transmitted among individuals should not be assumed to lead to differences in macro-level patterns of evolution, as many archaeologists and anthropologists have supposed.