I presented Monday at a department seminar, mostly focusing on the "Combining Calculation and Culture" paper I submitted to AOM in January. Instead of the usual format of my posts on seminars--a non-VC presentation, followed by my VC reactions--I'll focus here on some of the questions and comments that I recall.
1) Semi-technical issues as to the model of Majority Tyranny and Minority Tyranny: How do the assumptions about the preference intensities of members of the groups work? The presentation wasn't technical, and my response (intensity is normalized on a 0 to 1 scale, with the two groups adding up to 1) was about to lead me into the deeper waters of how the optimality result depends on analyzing the tie case, which I then pulled back from at the cost of making my initially correct if hard to understand response incoherent. I did manage, I believe, to get out the point that the elections referred to in the model are important not in themselves but because victory for the side that has the greater aggregate preference in a hypothetical election will motivate self-interested agents to act in a way aligned with the firm, society, or another principal.
2) How does the approach deal with leadership (a friendly question, considering that the paper discusses Jack Welch and Herb Kelleher's combination of calculative and cultural management) and with a firm like Intel that has a detailed, programmatic approach to doing things the Intel way (Intel with Andy Grove and Gordon Moore also had/has a strong cultural leadership component, I speculated).
3) What does the approach say about whether to provide continued subsidies to GM? I said that the approach may not have determinate consequences in a particular case; my own impression was that the GM situation was not salvageable, but that I thought it was possible to use the approach to argue the opposite. Given that the presentation was venturing into the terrain of managerial relevance, I question my retreat into an "indeterminacy of theory" line in response to the question; better would have been including in my response a short and sweet calculation-culture line on the intractability of GM's turf problems under its current set-up.
4) A comment/question focused on the issue of cooperation among different firms or entities, citing the issue of providing retroviral meds to AIDS patients in Africa and noting the benefits of having production facilities located closer to patients, along with the resistance of pharms in North America, Europe, and Asia to doing that. My response suggested that that scenario was probably a better showcase for ilustrating the centrality of altruistic and egoistic values than the production facility-warehouse facility one I'd focused on in the talk; I claimed that along with altruistic values of concern for the situation in Africa, egoistic values needed to be involved if the situation was to work out for the better.
5) A comment/question focused on the issue of whether the approach adequately accounted for the value of conflict in its concern for mitigating conflict. I suggested that the model was pro-conflict in the sense that it assumed that divisions such as those between the production and warehouse facility and the majority and minority were functional, and then analyzed how certain negative consequences of that generally functional division could be alleviated through creating additional cross-cutting divisions that multiplied the number of conflicts while reducing its destructiveness.
6) There was interest in the trolley/footpath Greene results on utilitarian versus non-utilitarian parts of the brain. In the main presentation, I discussed the empirical work more than making an argument about its connection to the calculation-culture approach; talking afterwards, I got a comment about System 1 and System 2 as related to marketing, which led me to make a point that my approach differs from Greene's or System 1 and 2 in that I assume a calc-cult division within reason, rather than a division between reason and emotion.
7) Afterwards, there was a comment/question about AIG and its failure to develop a reserve for its CDS bets; I treated the point as a basis to note that an RC approach that explains AIG in calculative terms is a strong alternative to the mixed calculation and culture approach I'm arguing for; here again, a more assertive approach with a short and sweet AIG calc-cult line would be good if the approach is to be usable from a practitioner perspective. (E.g., for all the Greenberg problems, he had a sense of responsibility to the entity that successors lacked--not sure at all that that one fits the facts, though, since I supect the seeds of AIG's CDS doom were sown while Greenberg still ran the show).
I enjoyed the chance to present; in particular, it was highly useful to try to take the VC approach in the direction of managerial relevance. Thanks to my faculty and student colleagues for being there and for giving me the reactions I've just described!