An appreciation of social context: one legacy of Gerald Salancik

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1996  by Karl E. Weick

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The first sentence of Jerry Salancik's very first professional publication (co-authored with Eugene Webb), written while he was completing his master's degree in journalism, is an epigram: "The contest is readily recognizable as a recurrent theme in the sociology of knowledge; it is David versus Goliath; the pink-cheeked country lad against the city slicker; it is reason and common sense in opposition to sophism and scholasticism in their contemporary guise (Schubert, 1950, p. 550)." (publication 1, p. 591)(1)

It would be stunning to argue that these words foreshadow the major themes in Salancik's work. That's an exaggeration. But there are some tantalizing hints. For example, the "contest" is a prominent setting throughout Salancik's work, since he focuses on conflicts over scarce resources (40), conflicts that become intensified by environmental uncertainty (43), interdependence (57), gaps in institutional frameworks (63), and domination by powerful players (58). The contests in this epigram are focused on the "sociology of knowledge," which foreshadows Salancik's interest in separating fact from fiction in attitude survey statements (59), in resource allocation among disciplines with differential paradigm development (12), in resource allocations at universities (10) and by national funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (11, 22, 33), and in how science itself is socially constructed (44). Salancik himself, a first-generation academic and an outsider, was (despite his big-city background) more like the "pink-cheeked country lad" puzzled by "sophism and scholasticism" in the university than like the jaded city slicker. Nevertheless, he wrote like a pink-cheeked skeptic who suspects that behind scholastic euphemism lies the gritty world of power, the socially acceptable, uncertainty, resources, dependencies, justification, and consequences. This was the terrain of "reason and common sense" as he knew it. And it was to become the terrain of reason for many students of organizations. What made Salancik's "common sense" common among organized individuals themselves were social contexts that shaped individual behavior toward similarity through operations of priming, salience, the taken-for-granted, norms, expectations, and control of resources. Even the reference to a "David versus Goliath" story line foreshadows a subtext in much of Salancik's writing. He repeatedly tried to unmask subtle influences that constrain options (e.g., 51) so that people could gain more breathing room and more control over their own actions in order to mitigate alienating effects (e.g., 35, p. 249).

If we dig into Salancik's first article itself, and into Salancik's beginnings in journalism, we can foreshadow even more of his subsequent work. The article highlights the growth in rigor of research reported in Journalism Quarterly between 1955 and 1964. This form of growth, a move toward more rigor in both the way data are gathered and the way they are analyzed, was to become a hallmark of Salancik's style (4, 17, 47, 52, 60) when he moved to organizational studies by way of experimental social psychology. Among the quirky findings turned up in the journalism study was the discovery that alternative rival hypotheses were almost three times as likely to be cited in multi-author studies as in single-author studies. Already there are hints that social context affects epistemology (27). The article focuses on gatekeeper studies (pp. 594-595), gatekeepers in this case being people who edit wire copy and select what gets into the newspaper, onto breakfast tables, into conversations, and into minds. These editing judgments are portrayed as sensitive to social context, specifically, the editor's perception of his or her own values, the values of the newsroom, and the values of the audience. The focus in this article on central figures who control critical contingencies (31), on the deployment of their attention as a key factor in organizational decisions (30), and on the social context as an influence on this attention (37) recurs in Salancik's subsequent work.

Equally fascinating is the possibility that Salancik's early training in the substance and method of journalism shaped his subsequent work. There is the obvious fact that he was one of the best writers and editors in the field, as was mentioned repeatedly in the memorial service for him at Carnegie Mellon University. A good example of Salancik's writing is one of his own favorite pieces, the introduction to the New Directions volume he co-edited with Barry Staw (68). Salancik also is one of a handful of people whose most original and influential scholarly work is available in three accessible Organizational Dynamics articles (23, 24, 26). These three are by no means "watered down" for general consumption, and they have been cited as major contributions by both researchers and practitioners. Because of the broad audience to which Organizational Dynamics appeals, these presentations can be thought of as "David" from the country, speaking to other pink-cheeked Davids about what city-slicker Goliaths are really up to. The typical Salancik article is dense with details and facts, the arguments are concise and pointed, and there is the venerable touching of the bases - who, what, when, where, why, how - that journalists favor. There is aggressive probing (field stimulation [38]) to test hunches, as when former Nixon voters are quizzed in the Illinois Union as impeachment fever intensifies (48, pp. 6870). Teaching assistants are quizzed about their job satisfaction (59), department chairmen are prodded (10, 30) to discuss their dealings with other departments, recommendations for good classes are solicited (48, pp. 58-60), and government contractors are contacted to see how enthusiastically they are pursuing government-mandated affirmative action (37). Salancik's work sometimes has the flavor of investigative reporting, as in his descriptions of social and organizational factors that affect the decision to use cesarean childbirth procedures (63) or the decision to allocate research funds in low paradigm fields (22) or the decision to revise the criteria for death to align them more closely with the interests of the transplant industry (61). The journalist in Salancik was always on the lookout for images that shock, as in his famous true story of raw power on the battlefields of Vietnam: