Metatheoretical Perspectives Paper a Top 10 Download Again

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Joel Gehman

This week I received an email from SSRN informing me that my paper with Raghu Garud entitled “Metatheoretical Perspectives on Sustainability Journeys: Evolutionary, Relational and Durational“ was a top ten download for a third time. The paper should be available on the Research Policy Articles in Press website soon.

This time the paper was ranked in 14 different categories:

Some Early Marcellus Completions

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Joel Gehman

As part of my ongoing research into hydraulic fracturing I have been reading about the history of oil and gas exploration and development in Pennsylvania.

Recently, I encountered this interesting tidbit in Douglas Patchen, et al., Oil and Gas Developments in Mid-Eastern States in 1983, AAPG Bulletin, October 1984, 68: 1383-1399:

Upper and Middle Devonian black shale activity picked up at a near furious pace in 1983, with 85 wells reported during the year. These wells are primarily domestic wells, less than 1,500 ft deep, and drilled within 5 mi of the Lake Erie shoreline in Erie County. Most wells produce from the Upper Devonian Huron and Rhinestreet shales, but a few were drilled to and produced from the Middle Devonian Marcellus formation as well. Four new-pool discoveries, including 3 in the Ohio Shale of Erie County and 1 in the Marcellus Formation of Washington County, were reported in 1983. The Washington County discovery, Garrett Hill pool in Buffalo field, was not a large one. The discovery well, Gary Schodorf 1 Anna Johnson, was originally drilled to the Huntersville Chert, but was unresponsive to stimulation. After restimulation in the Marcellus, the well flowed only 15 MCFGD, but was put on line. Two other Marcellus wells drilled in the vicinty provided somewhat larger open flows, but the potential for economical Marcellus production does not appear to be encouraging.

Two questions immediately come to mind: First, are these wells also subject to the recent unconventional well impact fee? As I understand Act 13 of 2012, these and any similar wells may in fact be subject to the impact fee, even though they were drilled nearly 30 years ago.

CHAPTER 23 § 2302. Unconventional gas well fee. (b) Components.–The fee adopted under subsection (a), (a.1) or (a.4) is imposed on every producer and shall apply to unconventional gas wells spud in this Commonwealth regardless of when spudding occurred. Unconventional gas wells spud before the fee is imposed shall be considered to be spud in the calendar year prior to the imposition of the fee for purposes of determining the fee under this subsection.

The language above seems quite unambiguous, regardless of when spudding occurred, an impact fee is to be imposed on every producer of unconventional gas wells, which Act 13 defines as wells targeting “a geological shale formation existing below the base of the Elk Sandstone or its geologic equivalent stratigraphic interval where natural gas generally cannot be produced at economic flow rates or in economic volumes except by vertical or horizontal well bores stimulated by hydraulic fracture treatments or by using multilateral well bores or other techniques to expose more of the formation to the well bore.”

Second, in that case, just how many wells have met these criteria over time? Given the many known data quality problems with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s information technology systems, this is a non-trivial question. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that a significant number of previously completed wells meet the definition of an unconventional well stipulated by Act 13. For instance, according to a recent report, more than 275,000 wells have been drilled within the area of the Marcellus formation, though just how many of them penetrated the Marcellus is not known. However, at least 16,894 wells had log curve data sufficient to map the area and thickness of the Marcellus. The number of these wells located in Pennsylvania was not reported, but appears to be significant.

In short, it appears that the wells drilled in 1983 (and presumably others before and after this date) meet the criteria specified by Act 13 and should therefore be liable for the unconventional well impact fee. Moreover, even a cursory inspection of the issue suggests that the number of past wells subject to the fee may potentially number in the thousands.

Values Work Paper Accepted

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Joel Gehman

I’m pleased to report that my paper with Linda Treviño and Raghu Garud on Values Work: A Process Study of the Emergence and Performance of Organizational Values Practices has been formally accepted for publication at the Academy of Management Journal. The paper has been a long time in the making and I couldn’t be more pleased with the final outcome.

In the paper we argue that existing cognitive and cultural perspectives on values have under-theorized the processes whereby values come to be practiced in organizations. We then address this gap by studying the emergence and performance of what we call values practices, defined as sayings and doings in organizations to articulate and accomplish what is normatively right or wrong, good or bad, for its own sake.

In other words, we conceive of values practices as ends in themselves, and thus, analytically distinct from organizational practices driven by technical or efficiency considerations. Examples of values practices include efforts to address normative concerns in areas such as ethics, diversity and sustainability, among others.

To understand values practices, we draw inspiration from scholars who have combined a practice perspective with insights from actor-network theory as a way of generating new theoretical insights. This approach enables us to move from cognitive understandings of values as abstract principles and cultural understandings of values as symbolic artifacts to a performative understanding of values as situated in networks of practices.

We apply this perspective to study the development of an honor code within a large business school over a 10-year period. Based on our analysis, we offer the concept of values work comprising four key interrelated processes – dealing with pockets of concern, knotting local concerns into action networks, performing values practices, and circulating values discourse. These processes are depicted in the figure below.

Taken together, these insights contribute to an understanding of the work involved in the emergence and performance of organizational values practices as well as the work that values practices perform and provoke in organizations. We conclude the paper by discussing some of the opportunities and challenges that values work implies for future organizational scholarship.

Wine Consumption Circa 1934

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Joel Gehman

Fortune has re-published an article on “The Wines of the U.S.” originally written in 1934, shortly after the December 1933 repeal of prohibition.

Source: http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/25/american-wine-fortune-1934/

The article reported that:

In 1918 U.S. wine consumption was 51,000,000 gallons. During prohibition it trebled. Mr. Garrett was one of the few people who realized that amazing fact — that by 1928 the annual consumption of wine had become about 160,000,000 gallons a year. During those years liquor consumption increased only 50 percent — by gallons, 60,000,000. Yet the liquor business was organized and aggressive, and the wine industry had been disrupted.

The statistics told Mr. Garrett more. In 1918 some 3,000,000 gallons of wine were imported to fill the slippers of chorus girls and the gullets of the rich. Most of the 51,000,000 gallons produced domestically was sold in bulk and drunk by the foreign-born people of the cities. Of the 159,000,000 gallons consumed in 1928 only a few thousand were imported and only 5,000,000 produced legally and domestically for refreshment while communing with the Lord.

That left 154,000,000 gallons which were made illegally in cellars and legally in homes. Since the foreign-born population has not increased since 1918, it seems logical to conclude that much of the 100,000,000-gallon increase in those years was due to new habits contracted by the rank and file of the population. In other words, prohibition has done something very startling to the taste of this nation.

What a potentially fascinating setting for exploring organizational processes. In particular, the distributed, interactive and sociomaterial organization of (il)legal practices, and the role of such practices in (re)shaping the regulatory landscape.

One potentially sympathetic jumping off point that comes to mind: Lauren B. Edelman, Christopher Uggen and Howard S. Erlanger, 1999, The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 2, pp. 406-454.

Gmail Tricks — Find Big Mail

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Joel Gehman

I converted to Gmail full-time several years ago. As of today, I’m still only using 4201 MB of my 7693 MB, meaning my Gmail account is only about 54% full. Still, as I prepare to transition from Penn State to Alberta, it seemed like a good time for a little inbox analysis.

The first application I tried, Find Big Mail, is pretty much a one trick pony. But it appears to execute that one trick pretty flawlessly.

Step 1. Go to Find Big Mail and enter your Google Username.

Step 2. Let Find Big Mail run in the background.

Step 3. In my case, nine minutes later the results were back:

Some 96.5% of my messages were “small,” in this case, meaning less than 1 megabyte. Conversely, 3.5% of my messages were greater than 1mb.

Number of Messages By Size

Collectively, however, the largest 3.5% of my messages consumed a whopping 74.5% of my Gmail space — more lopsided than even the Pareto Principle would have guessed. Or stated another way, I could keep the smallest 96.5% of my messages and use only 25.5% of the Gmail space currently required for all my messages.

Space By Size

Pretty slick — and painless.

Assessing Scholarly Impact

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Joel Gehman

My good friend and former colleague, Andrea Michalek, and her co-founder, Mike Buschman, have recently launched Plum Analytics, with the aim of “making scholarly research more assessable and accessible.” Think of it as Publish or Perish meets Peer Index or Klout. In short, Plum hopes to provide reputation and influence ratings for academic researchers.

The two co-founders met while leading the development of Summon, an online search engine for libraries. “I oversaw tech and Mike oversaw product,” said Michalek. “In about three-and-a-half years we went from the business plan to a $15 million business.”

At this point the service is in Alpha, meaning demonstrations are by appointment only. But already Plum Analytics is generating buzz and lining up university customers on the heals of its demo at Philly Tech Meetup. Initally, Plum Analytics does two things…

First, it aggregates all the content a researcher has published, such as papers indexed at Google Scholar and SSRN, slideshows, and blog posts. According to Michalek, ”We gather from fourteen different sources, including Facebook, CiteULike, LinkedIn and Wikipedia.”

Source: http://technicallyphilly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Plum-Analytics-By-Type1.png

Second, it visualizes the impact of all that content, by analyzing how many responses or link backs each particular content item has received.

Source: http://technicallyphilly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Plum-Analytics-by-Impact.png

What’s Your Company’s Fracking Strategy?

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Joel Gehman

$dilbertfracking$

Source: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-03-02/

Of Markets, Regulated and Deregulated

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Joel Gehman

I’ve been studying the history of nuclear power for some time now. With that in mind, I found Fortune’s November story on “Southern’s Big Nuke Bet,” in which Geoff Colvin interviewed Tom Fanning, CEO of Southern Company, to be quite interesting. In the article, Fanning responds to the following question from Colvin:

[Geoff Colvin:] A couple of other utilities have decided to get out of nuclear. Constellation got out of plant development earlier this year, and NRG pulled out of its nuclear project in Texas. Is this just a case of differing business judgments, or is there something else?

[Tom Fanning:] It goes back to scale, credit quality, and credibility. When you think about the challenges that a small company will face building a $14 billion deal, that gets rather daunting.

The U.S. really is divided into two electricity markets. Some years ago many states deregulated, and they have what’s called merchant markets, where the price for electricity is largely set a day ahead or week ahead or month ahead. Remember this is going to take 10 years to build, and it’s going to be the largest capital asset in your portfolio, and you’re going to need to run it 30 to 50 years to earn that money back. Putting that magnitude of capital in a deregulated merchant market is exceedingly risky. Thankfully, Georgia Power operates in a vertically integrated regulated market where legislation and regulation are stable and constructive and will support this over time.

In other words, the major reason Southern Power is able to undertake the construction of a new nuclear power plant is because it operates in what looks a lot like a planned market. This is a point that some in the U.S. seem to ignore. For instance, in an article for the Heritage Foundation, Jack Spencer claimed that federal loan guarantees were not essential to the continued development of nuclear power in the United States, but that instead, free markets could be counted on to intervene in the government’s place.

But rather than being driven by “market” forces, history reveals time and again that the construction of nuclear power plants depends almost exclusively on state intervention. For instance, in recent years, EDF, Rosatom and China have been three of the most active developers of nuclear power projects worldwide. All are essentially state entities. As of January 2010, the French government owned 84.48% of EDF. While Rosatom and the Chinese nuclear industry are entirely owned by their respective governments.

Meanwhile, in the US, the nuclear “renaissance” is now essentially limited to Southern Company’s planned Waynesboro, GA facility. Of the other approximately two dozen applications submitted over the past few years, none are being actively being pursued at this time. By comparison, not only has Southern Company received $8.2 billion in loan guarantees from the federal government, as the interview above makes plain, the economic viability of the project additionally hinges on the fact that Georgia remains a regulated energy market, meaning that the ultimate costs of the project (whether the currently projected $14 billion, or more) will ultimately be borne by Georgia electricity ratepayers. This effectively offers the company a state-level guarantee on top of its federal loan guarantee.

In short, the preponderance of the evidence from both the US and the rest of the world suggests that heavy governmental subsidies, loan guarantees and/or liability exemptions — either explicitly or de facto — are essential to the development of nuclear power. By comparison, all of the literature I have read on the topic suggests that the market has yet to build a single nuclear plant.

Natural Gas and the State of the Union

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Joel Gehman

In his latest State of the Union address, President Obama announced that:

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years… The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And, by the way, it was public research dollars — over the course of 30 years — that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock, reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground… Our experience with shale gas, our experience with natural gas, shows us that the payoffs on these public investments don’t always come right away. Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.

In addition to upsetting those concerned about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, this part of his speech has also provoked criticism for “exaggerating” the role of the federal government in fostering the emergence of the natural gas boom.

For instance, a US News and World Report article entitled “Obama Exaggerates Role of Federal Government in Natural Gas Boom“ by Daniel Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, asserts:

The president’s claim that the federal government helped create the hydraulic fracturing boom is specious at best.

However, even a cursory look at the historical record reveals that the government’s role in oil and gas technologies generally and hydraulic fracturing related technologies specifically is far more involved and complex than acknowledged by Kish’s article. For instance, despite his claims to the contrary, the government played an important role at many points in the last 30 years, including in the case of Mitchell Energy. According to one recent article:

Mitchell Energy’s first horizontal well was subsidized by the federal government, according to former geologist and Vice President for Mitchell. “They did a hell of a lot of work,” said Steward, “and I can’t give them enough credit for that. DOE started it, and other people took the ball and ran with it. You cannot diminish DOE’s involvement.”

Rather than an isolated example, this vignette is indicative of the substantial role played by the government in a variety of oil and gas technologies, many related to hydraulic fracturing as it is now practiced. For instance, during the 1970s the Department of Energy invested more than $92 million in research related to the extraction of natural gas from shale reservoirs.

This is not to say that private organizations have not played an important role as well. My point is not to declare a winner between government agencies and private industry, but simply to note that any thoughtful consideration of the record will show that both private organizations and government agencies were significantly involved in the process over a large period of time. In actor-network terms, innovation implicates heterogeneous social and material actors, and is likely to result in hybrid forms of organizing. As a result, framing the problem up as either private innovation or government support are likely to be dead on arrival as a practical matter.

Further, on top of its direct involvement in technology research (such as through the Department of Energy), a reasonable accounting of the government’s role would also consider the role of tax incentives (without which operators such as Mitchell would have been unlikely to have drilled wells), the role of favorable regulations such as the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (without which operators would not be exempt from the liabilities of hydraulic fracturing), and the important role played by agencies such as the EIA and USGS in quantifying available reserves (without which operators would have difficulty raising the capital necessary for drilling).

In short, consistent with President Obama’s claims, and contrary to the assertions of US News and World Report, it is difficult to conceive of the oil and gas industry as we now know it without significant support and involvement by the US government.

S&P 500 Historical Constituents Revisited

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Joel Gehman

One of my most popular posts over the past year was on S&P 500 Historical Constituents.

Apparently, I am not the only one to have had trouble finding data on the historical constituents of the S&P 500 index. In fact, several readers have even asked me to share a copy of my file with them. Alas, licensing restrictions prevent me from doing so.

Recently, however, one of my readers shared the following website with me: s-p-500.com. It has a list of S&P index changes for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. If you find other useful websites, please let me know so that I can share them with interested readers.

JOELGEHMAN.COM

Ph.D. Candidate, Management & Organization, Pennsylvania State University