Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This project contributes to a recent thread in sociological theorizing that conceptualizes gender as a social structure. Responding to the need to analyze the ways in which gender is embedded in institutional dimensions of society, this paper begins to map out the connections among the ideologies of individualism, conformism, and gender. Read through the lens of gender, the language of individualism is rife with the agentic characteristics typically coded as masculine—independence, autonomy, and success orientation. Individualism’s alleged polar opposite, conformism, can be read as feminine—dependence, passivity, and other-orientation. But neither individualism nor conformism, as traits or central values of societies, typically has been studied with an attention to gender.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Do a country's political structures impact its NGO landscape? Or have various aspects of globalization made these arrangements less significant? Much has been made in comparative politics generally and in environmental politics literature in particular of the importance of differing constitutional arrangements in the various industrialized democracies. This literature, as well as Political Opportunity Structure (POS) and Eckstein?s congruence theorizing suggests that the NGO landscape within specific countries would reflect these differences. This paper examines this question with reference to the structure of the structure of the environmental NGO community in three Western Democracies: the United States and Norway. It deliberately targets advocacy groups rather than the traditional interest groups that are the basis of the distinction between corporatist and pluralist arrangements. The paper first deduces the ideal-typical models that should fit the distinctive constitutional arrangements for each country and then measure them against the reality on the ground today. The following features of the NGO landscape form the core of the paper: the number and size of organizations, their relationship with each other, their relationship with the state and the source of their funding.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Background and Aims: A growing body of behavioral results (Gomez & Gerken, 1999; Marcus et al. 1999; Gomez 2002 etc.) shows that young infants might be able to extract basic syntax-like structures in artificial grammar learning experiments. Another line of research, behavioral and neurophysiological (Bijeljac-Babic et al. 1993; Shi et al. 1999; Ramus et al. 1999; Pena et al. 2003), suggests that neonates exhibit discriminatory and perceptual abilities that appear to be instrumental (though not sufficient) for the emergence of language. As a synthesis of these two fields, we investigate just how early the precursors of syntax acquisition appear.
Methods: The brain activity of 2-4-day-old neonates to two different kinds of artificial grammars was measured using a 24-channel optical topography device. Both streams were made up of the same syllabic repertoire (containing 30 different Consonant-Vowel syllables), but had different structures. In the first stream, the syllables appeared in trisyllabic sequences exhibiting no internal structure (e.g., ABC, DEF etc., where capitals indicate syllables). In the second stream, syllables were arranged into trisyllabic sequences containing an immediate repetition (AAB, a la Marcus et al. 1999). The frequency of the individual syllable tokens was matched in the streams, which were synthesized using the MBROLA es1 voice with constant phoneme length (120ms) and pitch (100Hz). The two streams were played to the infants in two separate conditions of 7min. Each contained 15-second-long blocks, in which the trisyllabic sequences were separated by silences of varying length (as in Pena et al. 2003). The blocks were themselves separated by silences of varying length. Brain activity was measured in the left hemisphere in both conditions.
Main Predictions: Measurements are still under way, but on the basis of the literature and previous results from our lab, we expect to find larger activity in the immediate repetition condition, in which the stream is structured, than in the random condition (Marcus et al. 1999; Endress et al. in press), in which it is not.
Conclusions: If the expected results are confirmed, this study will provide the first indications that neonates come equipped with mechanisms for the detection of (local) language structure. Crucially, this will constitute previously unavailable evidence about a precursor that enables the neonates’ mind to discover structure in auditory signals, which has so far been studied in older infants only.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I attempt to address several enduring problems in the formulation and deployment of the notion of structure in contemporary sociological theory. I proceed by revisiting the question of the fidelity of Giddens’ own appropriation of the idea of structure vis a vis the original Levi-Straussian formulation. I show how Giddens own highly selective exegesis of Levi-Strauss, ended up obscuring the latter’s most valuable contribution to structural analysis, which I label his methodological structuralism. I show how this approach is in many ways strictly antithetical to Giddens’ own “ontological” approach, and avoids many of the logical pitfalls of the structuration account. Second, I review what I consider the most successful attempt to recover the legacy of methodological structuralism: Bourdieu’s critique of Levi-Strauss’ “objectivism” in The Logic of Practice. I show that rather than being an undiscriminating broadside against “positivism,” Bourdieu’s critique of Levi-Strauss centers on a specific slippage whereby the latter fails to live up to his own methodological prescriptions regarding the appropriate use of the notion of structure and falls in an ontological trap very similar to that of Giddens. I further argue that Sewell’s reconstruction of structuration theory, in its sole focus in fixing Giddens’ various logical and conceptual errors, and thus taking as given Giddens’ ontological interpretation of Levi-Strauss, ends up with a notion of structure that is at its very core “anti-structuralist” or only structuralist in a weak sense. I close by considering some consequences of adopting a methodological structuralist strategy for current theory building efforts from a relational perspective.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper we suggest an extension of power dependence theory that yields a different mechanism explaining the performance difference between central and peripheral actors. We argue that central actors will be better off not only because the network structure allows them to receive greater share of rewards than peripheral actors, but also because they can be more selective in terms of the resources they share with others. The inequality mechanism we propose is complementary to the embeddedness and the power dependence explanation of the performance difference between central and peripheral actor. However, this mechanism yields a distinct hypothesis, which we test using data on venture capital investments in the U.S. Using the time a start-up reaches the initial public offering as the measure of venture quality, we find support for the embeddedness and the power dependence explanations of inequality between central and peripheral venture capitalists. However, consistent with the mechanism proposed here, we also find that central venture capitalists keep the best deals to themselves. Start-ups with one central investor have the shortest time to IPO, while start-ups financed by only one peripheral investor take the longest the go public. We discuss the significance of this finding for our understanding of the role of networks in generating inequality between actors.