Here in South Blogistan, the annual Florida vs. Florida State football game is an institution. Each year, the claims and predictions made by UF and FSU alumni are eclipsed only by the beer and body paint consumed. But as the old joke goes, there's one thing you can count on. No matter which school wins the game or what the score, no matter what was said or done in a drunken stupor in or outside the stadium, on Monday morning the Seminole alum will meet the Gator alum at the office and say the same thing he says every week: "Mornin', Boss."
From Gators over South Blogistan to Ivy Leaguers over D.C. to Jews over Wall Street law firms, conspiracy theorists make silly hay while social network theorists make surprising "Hey!" Sometimes it's less what you know than whom you know, or whom you don't, that matters.
Of course, the stars really do know everyone, so your Kossascopes are as insightful as ever.
More below the fold....
Socializing into Success
This week Morning Feature looks at Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, in the context of the Narrative Fallacy: the human tendency to construct simple, cause-effect stories from complex, partly-random events. Yesterday we looked at streaming, developmental programs that mistake luck for potential and create self-fulfilling prophecies. Today we'll examine how social networks and social skills influence our "opportunity windows," opening or closing off possibilities for success. Tomorrow we'll conclude by exploring whether and how we as a society can make "opportunity windows" less capricious.
Like most humor, the joke about University of Florida and Florida State University alumni is based on a germ of truth. Many of the biggest firms here in South Blogistan do have a disproportionate number of Gator alumni in top positions. Despite some common claims, it's not a matter of higher admission standards, better professors, or a tougher curriculum producing higher quality graduates. Both UF and FSU are among several excellent universities here in South Blogistan, and a diligent student can get a quality education at any of them. So why are so many South Blogistani businesses headed by Gator alumni?
Like Ivy League alumni in the federal government in Washington, the preponderance of Gator alumni in South Blogistan is not a conspiracy theory. It's a social network theory. Although FSU is 55 years older as a university, the UF law school was founded in 1909 while FSU didn't open a law school until 1966. That's 57 years of Gators dominating Florida's legal community, government, and the other opportunities that come with a law degree. It's a classic "insider" social network.
In real life terms, a Gator graduate is more likely to have something in common with the person interviewing him/her for a top job: they went to the same university and probably know some of the same people. Some of those people may have recommended the applicant to the interviewer. The interview may start with shared stories about a professor or some other aspect of Gainesville campus life. A few years later, that applicant may well be the interviewer talking to other applicants, some of them also UF alumni, and the cycle of "insider" social network advantage continues.
But not always.
"Outsider" networks can offer advantages.
Joe Flom was hardly an insider when he began looking for lawyer jobs on Wall Street. The son of Jewish immigrants, Flom's parents worked in the Brooklyn garment industry and barely scraped by. He did two years of night school at City College while working during the day, before joining the army in World War II. After the war, and without a college degree, he applied to Harvard Law School. Harvard Law accepted him, he told Malcolm Gladwell, because "I wrote them a letter on why I was the answer to sliced bread." Being Jewish in 1948, Flom didn't stand a chance with the WASP-dominated "white shoe" corporate firms, but a professor told him about some other lawyers who were starting their own firm. Flom met and liked them, and they he, and he accepted an associate job at a fledgling firm with no clients. Today the firm has nearly 2000 attorneys in 23 offices around the world, and Flom is the last living named partner.
Joe Flom's story seems like a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story, a hardy individual overcoming all odds to succeed by talent and hard work. Flom certainly has the talent and worked hard, but as Gladwell writes, he also had some surprising "outsider" network advantages: like many Wall Street legal scions, Flom was born in the 1930s, is Jewish, and his parents worked in the garment industry. Families didn't have as many children during the depression, so Flom benefited from smaller classes in schools built to accommodate the baby boom of the 1920s, and also fewer applicants to colleges and graduate schools during and just after World War II. Being Jewish, Flom was shut out of the WASP-dominated "white shoe" Wall Street firms, so his firm took whatever work came through the door, including corporate litigation work the established firms thought unseemly and beneath the "gentleman's club" social order of corporate law. When the corporate litigation wave crested in the 1970s and 80s, Flom and other Jewish lawyers had earned reputations as experts in an area of law the "white shoe" firms hadn't wanted to touch.
But Flom's story also required a lot of hard work, and there again his background provided an advantage. Unlike many other immigrant groups who came from rural areas of Europe, Jewish immigrants came from cities, and thus landed at Ellis Island with marketable urban job skills, during an urban economic boom. Jewish tailors and seamstresses could buy a sewing machine for just a few dollars, and open a home business. It wasn't a license to print money, but owning a small business did bring "autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward," which Gladwell offers as the three ingredients of "meaningful work." Children growing up in those families saw both the practice and benefits of meaningful work, and learned the attitudes and habits that enabled their success. Most also learned something else....
The first networking skill: Asking for help.
With fewer children born in the late 1920s and 30s, and so many men having gone off to war, Harvard Law School needed students in 1946. But that alone didn't guarantee Joe Flom admission. He didn't, after all, have a college degree. Yet he still "wrote them a letter on why I was the answer to sliced bread." Somewhere early in his life, Flom learned how to ask for help as if he were entitled to ask. And research shows that is the first and most important social networking skill.
Most of us learn that skill in childhood, or we don't, and whether we learn it is often a function of social class. University of Maryland sociologist Annette Lareau studied a group of third-graders: whites and blacks from a wide range of economic backgrounds. She spent over 100 hours with each family, following them to daily activities, silently taking notes. She expected to find a wide variety of parenting styles. Instead she found just two, and the two were almost uniformly divided by class. Wealthier parents used what Lareau calls "concerted cultivation," with extensive involvement in their children's activities. Poorer parents practiced "accomplishment of natural growth," caring for their children while leaving them to grow and develop on their own. As Gladwell writes:
Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau's words, the middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement."
- Outliers at pp.104-105, itals added.
That social skill - how to ask for help when you need it - is often the difference between building a social network that yields opportunities and a solitary struggle to find opportunity on your own. Most successful people build those networks, first by asking for help from mentors and peers, then (usually) later by providing it as mentors themselves.
The Gator applicant at that job interview probably didn't get plucked off the graduation list at random; he/she told classmates, professors, and other contacts that he/she was looking for a job, what kind of job he/she wanted, and asked if they knew anyone who was hiring. That's how he/she showed up at that interview with recommendations from other UF alumni. Neither that "insider" network nor the "outsider" network that benefited Joe Flom happens automatically; it happens because the person knows how and feels entitled to ask for help.
Plucky, individualistic Horatio Alger stories may inspire us, but they're rarely how successful people find opportunities. We find those through social networks, and those networks shape our "opportunity windows." As we'll see tomorrow, there are ways to make those windows less arbitrary, and as progressives who believe each person should have the chance to pursue his/her talent and dreams, we should advocate for changes that make "opportunity windows" less capricious.
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Or we can rely on the stars....
Leo - The people who know you know people who like you. And some who don't.
Virgo - Your network consists of three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can't.
Libra - You're a network aficionado, but MSNBC isn't really what we meant.
Scorpio - Your network includes other people who don't like networking either.
Sagittarius - You are surrounded by people. Just ask Glenn Beck.
Capricorn - You have "people skills" in the way a pootie has "litterbox skills."
Aquarius - You "know where the bodies are buried," because you know the Capricorns.
Pisces - You think of networking like a school of fish. Watch out for that bait.
Aries - You imagine yourself the kind of leader others want to follow. At least you're imaginative.
Taurus - You're strong, independent, and opinionated. Good luck with that combination.
Gemini - You have two networks: people who help you, and people you refer to Capricorns.
Cancer - You genuinely enjoy people, so long as they're not total idiots. Oops.
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Happy Friday!