Reading :: Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Second Reading)

Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Second Reading)

By Jaan Valsiner

A couple of months ago, I ran into a reference to this book when reading about the history of activity theory. After checking my bookshelf to verify that I didn't own it, I bought it used on Amazon. It was only later that I realized I had already reviewed it!

But that's fine. We get different things from a book on the second or third reading. This time, I got a few things, which I'll pull out and briefly discuss here.

First, Valsiner situates his discussion in reference to Kuhn, whose work on scientific paradigms has helped us to understand how science is framed and practiced in the West: specifically, scientific arguments appeal to evidence, not to heads of state or the populace (p.10). But "as will be seen in this book, not all social groups of scientists in cultural conditions other than those of Western Europe and North America have followed this rule in a stringent way. ... groups of in-fighting Soviet philosophers and psychologists of the 1930s did indicate their interest in using extra-scientific authorities as arbiters in their relationships" (p.11). Throughout the book, he demonstrates this dynamic in Soviet developmental psychology. This is a major theme of the book, but its import eluded me on first reading. At the same time, I wonder what Valsiner's 1988 analysis would have looked like if he had grounded it in Latour's (1987) Science in Action or his 1988 The Pasteurization of France, both of which suggest that Western scientists often do appeal to extra-scientific authorities, but in ways that cover their tracks.

Second, Valsiner writes at length about Mikhail Basov, whose work was cited by Vygotsky. Like Vygotsky, Basov made substantial contributions to Soviet developmental psychology, and like Vygotsky, he was associated with pedology, which was effectively and suddenly banned at the beginning of the Great Terror in 1936. "Unlike Vygotsky, however, Basov left behind no substantial group of followers to rise to positions allowing them to restate his relevance to developmental psychology once social circumstances after 1956 made this possible" (p.167). Vygotsky's associates had risen to leading administrative positions after 1956; Basov's associates "were located in relatively peripheral positions." Yet "the substantial role that Basov [played] in emerging Soviet psychology is in many ways comparable to that of Vygotsky in the theoretical realm, and may be considered to surpass him in the careful emphasis on empirical detail" (p.167). Contrasting the two is instructive, since it helps us to see science in general and psychology in particular not as the product of Great Men but as a set of collective achievements that are often attributed to Great Men—that is, it points toward a Latourean reading.

This brings us to the third thing that didn't make it into my first review, but that really struck me on rereading. Valsiner argues that when Vygotsky made one of his more famous arguments—that analysis should be conducted by analyzing into units rather than elements—that argument was based on a misreading of Basov. "Vygotsky reiterates that idea in different contexts in his writings, not always taking care to add a reference to Basov. ... [but] he claims to follow Basov in the emphasis on the analysis into units—the 'minimal gestalts' that preserve the systemic functioning nature of the whole from which the unit is derived, while abstracting from many concrete aspects of the original phenomenon" (pp.173-174). 

Vygotsky argued by analogy that water is H2O: two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. To analyze water, then, we should examine H2O as our unit of analysis: it's the smallest particle that retains the characteristics of the whole (p.174). If you examine hydrogen or oxygen atoms by themselves, they have radically different properties from water, which is formed through their relationship. H2O is "an objective real element of water" (quoting Vygotsky on p.174). Vygotsky cites Basov as making this argument. (And let's note that this common analogy was also used by Engels in Dialectics of Nature to illustrate the nature of dialectics.)

But Valsiner says that Vygotsky gets this distinction wrong. "Basov, following Wolfgang Köhler, distinguished two kinds of 'structural elements' that can be observed in physical or psychological phenomena": (1) real, objective elements ("self-existent primary phenomena") and differential elements ("caused by purely quantitative modifications of a given phenomenon") (p.174; quotes in parentheses are quotations of Basov). By this differentiation, Basov says, H2 and O are the "objective" and "real" elements, while H2o is the "differential element" (p.175, quoting Basov). Valsiner concludes: "Vygotsky overlooked the structural-qualitative nature of Basov's separation of (and preference for) the 'real, objective elements' (components) of psychological processes" and instead considered the differential elements to be the real elements. Valsiner emphasizes: 

it is very evident that Basov emphasized the use of exactly the opposite kinds of unit—those of qualitatively different sub-components like oxygen and hydrogen which make up molecules of water as a qualitatively new structure. These are the 'real' or 'objective' units whose relationship gives rise to new quality. The relevance of 'differential' elements of the structure—the 'minimal qualities' of the substance (as a single molecule would be, relative to quantities of water that contain many similarly structured molecules)—was limited in Basov's view, as the above quote illustrates. (p.175, his emphasis)

Valsiner goes on to trace Basov's argument back to Köhler (p.175). He emphasizes that Basov and Vygotsky agree "in their emphasis on the holistic nature of phenomena" but they "differ greatly in the ways in which they conceptualize the analysis of the holistic phenomena" (p.176). Whereas Basov wanted to reduce the phenomenon into the minimal Gestalt state, then analyze the minimal Gestalt into its components or elements (p.179), Vygotsky wanted to avoid analyzing those elements for fear of losing the characterof the holistic system (p.178). 

Is this a significant drawback? On one hand, it would seem to be so if one is actually committed to a developmental analysis. From a developmental perspective, it seems pretty important to understand that H2O is produced by burning hydrogen—or that verbal thought is produced by the dialectic between thought and speech, as Vygotsky argued in Thought and Language. On the other hand, Vygotsky did make that argument—his focus on analysis into units did not keep him from analyzing pre-verbal thought and pre-rational speech. 

In sum, I'm glad that I forgot I had read this book—actually buying it and rereading it has helped me immensely as I continue to think through the legacy of Soviet psychology. It's one of the most rewarding books I've read in this vein, and if that subject appeals to you, you should definitely pick up a copy.

Reading :: A Billion Little Pieces

A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification
by Jordan Frith

I've been meaning to get to this book for a while. Here, Jordan Frith describes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags as an instance of "object communication, which I define as the ability of objects that have either no or little computing power to wirelessly communicate identifying data with infrastructure" (p.5). He argues that "with the growth of communicative objects—we need to pay more attention to infrastructure," understanding it as "that which communicates," and "Consequently, I position RFID as an infrastructure of identification that works simultaneously as an infrastructure of communication" (p.5). 

In the rest of the book, Frith places RFID among infrastructures of identification, which include bar codes; describes different types of RFID tags and their uses; debunks some of the more conspiratorial takes on RFID while acknowledging actual privacy concerns; and discusses the future of identification infrastructures. I learned a lot about RFID.

Frith's writing style is overall clear and enjoyable—sometimes I felt like I was reading a series of Scientific American articles instead of a book. I could easily see myself using this book in an undergraduate class on information and communication technologies. For a graduate class, I could possibly use it in conjunction with the science and technology studies (STS) that Frith sometimes cites, e.g., reading Chapter 1 alongside Bowker & Star and Haraway.

But the flip side is that I didn't think the book got very deeply into theory or methodology, and consequently it was hard to see the implications for either. Frith does draw on STS and STS-adjacent work, but doesn't get deeply into these sources, doesn't spend much time exploring their theoretical frameworks, and doesn't extend them significantly. 

But that's fine! The book had a clear mission and it achieved it. It's a great introduction to RFID, how it's affecting our lives, and how communication infrastructures change how we live and work. If you're interested in RFID, or in information and communication infrastructures, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology

S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology
By T.R. Payne

I've often read that Leontiev's activity theory borrows heavily from the theory of S.L. Rubinshtein, whose work loomed large in Soviet psychology. But not much of Rubinshtein's work has been translated into English, and I continue to be monolingual, so I have not been able to investigate these claims directly. Fortunately, I ran across a citation to this 1968 book—which predates the Vygotsky boom as well as much of Leontiev's and Luria's English translations. It's a fascinating time capsule and helped me to get a broader understanding of Rubinshtein's context and influence.

Vygotsky (here, "Vygotskij") is mentioned, especially in relation to psychic development (p.47). The mention is brief, but Payne notes that despite Soviet criticism of Vygotsky, "the principle of historical development has remained one of the fundamental principles of Soviet psychology" (p.47). 

Like Vygotsky, Rubinshtein also addressed a crisis in psychology: "a crisis of the philosophic basis of the science," which had fragmented into schools including introspectivism and behaviorism; "the task facing psychology is the re-establishment of a unified object," which "can only be achieved by the transformation of the concepts of behavior on the basis of the Marxian concept of human activity," conceived as "a dialectic of subject and object" (p.50). 

Rubinshtein developed these ideas in:

• Fundamentals of Psychology (1935), which was the basis for 
• Fundamentals of General Psychology (1940; second edition, 1946) (p.51) (Note: Payne is not clear about the timeline on p.51, but clarifies it on p.71)

In 1947, FGP was criticized for borrowing too heavily from bourgeois sources, but it remained a classic in the USSR (p.51).

In 1940, Rubinshtein laid out four principles governing Soviet psychology:

1. "the principle of psycho-physical unity"
2. "the principle of psychic development"
3. "the principle of historicity"
4. "the principle of the unity of theory and practice" (p.52)

"Rubinstejn sees these four principles as the expression of the one basic principle of Soviet psychology, i.e., the principle of the unity of consciousness and behavior" (p.52).

Rubinshtein saw the crisis in psychology as "the equation of the psychic with the phenomena of consciousness" (p.79), and his resolution was to understand consciousness as interconnected with the material world—reconstructing psychology on the philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism (p.82). In this understanding, activity is the dialectic between subject and object (p.84). When the human psyche emerged, we entered a qualitatively new stage of the evolutionary process, "brought about by the changing conditions of the organism which demanded a new form of activity—work activity—which in its turn demanded a new corresponding form of psychic regulation" (p.89). Interestingly, Rubinshtein went directly to the same source that had been cited by Vygotsky & Luria and that would later be cited by Leontiev: Engels' story in the Dialectics of Nature of how humanity emerged through labor (p.90). In this story, the division of labor emerges because "man's activity is no longer directed to the immediate satisfaction of his own personal needs but to the satisfaction of those of the community" (p.91). Among the implications: human activity is the material object of psychology (p.125). So, for Rubinshtein, psychology is the generalized science of human activity (p.125). 

Let's pause here to note a couple of things:

• In claiming that psychology is the generalized science of human activity, Rubinshtein opens the door for either making psychology an interdisciplinary science or for reallocating responsibilities from other disciplines to psychology. Keep in mind that during this period, the USSR had banned sociology, so that's one big competitor out of the way. This impulse of uniting all studies of human activity under a single framework is still active in CHAT circles.
• The paragraph above sounds a lot like Leontiev's activity theory. (Recall that Rubinshtein was on Leontiev's dissertation committee in 1940.) But notice that Rubinshtein has not discussed a few key things that we associate with activity theory. One is tool mediation, which Leontiev appears to have retained from his time in the Vygotsky-Luria Circle. The other is levels of activity; I'm not clear on whether these were Leontiev's own invention or whether he synthesized them from another contributor.

Overall, this was a fascinating book. The first two sections overview psychology's development in the USSR and will be interesting to anyone who is concerned with this period. The remaining two sections deal more specifically with Rubinshtein. If you're interested in either of these, definitely pick this book up. 

Reading :: Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?

Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?
Edited by Aaro Toomela and Jaan Valsiner

This edited collection results from a challenge the editors posed to the contributors: Has psychology gone astray over the past 60 years? (For a frame of reference, this book was published in 2010, so the "60 years" = 1950 to 2010.) In the preface, the editors argue that after World War II, North American psychology became mainstream globally, displacing the German-Austrian tradition. They asked the contributors:

1. "Which of the historical or new principles should be introduced to the modern psychology?"
2. "How would mainstream psychology benefit from utilizing the principles you propose to introduce into methodological thinking of modern psychology?" (p.ix)

Readers of this blog might additionally ask, "Why is Clay reading about methodological thinking in psychology?" And the answer, predictably, is in the collection's connection to Vygotskian theory and activity theory. Valsiner has written quite a bit on the history of both, while Toomela has written several articles exploring elements of Vygotskian theory and lambasting activity theory. This collection has a few pieces that get into the history and theory, so I decided to pick it up. Because of my narrow interest, I'll only touch on a couple.

One is Nikolai Veresov's "Forgotten Methodology: Vygotsky's Case" (pp.267-295), in which Veresov notes a 1978 declaration that psychology was in crisis (p.267). "Yet it is very comfortable crisis," he adds: "experimental psychologists feel free from mind-crashing puzzles of how to interpret theoretically the data they obtain; as for psychological theoreticians—they are free to mix various concepts and principles in order to create 'the theory' they like to create, as if they are building a house out of Lego blocks" (p.268). Veresov argues that instead, psychology should consider "Vygotsky's case," in which he addressed his own time's crisis in psychology. Veresov highlights these aspects of Vygotsky's theory:

1. "Claim against empiricism and descriptive methods" (p.269). Veresov argues that "For Vygotsky, the descriptive explanatory models and principles based on empirical methods of investigation should be replaced by explanatory models and principles" (p.270).
2. "Claim of developmental analysis and qualitative research methods" (p.270). Veresov argues that "Instead of merely describing the stages of development, psychological theory should find the ways of how to explain development (including its sources, laws, conditions, moving forces, contradictions, and underlying mechanisms)" (p.270).

Veresov goes on to propose that Vygotsky's genetic method should be considered a two-step process in which a "dramatical collision" leads to "tool (sign) creation," leading to "use of sign" (p.277). He then bemoans the fact that the West mainly encounter Vygotsky through Mind in Society, in which "non-classical Vygotsky was adapted and incorporated into classical traditional psychological theoretical stream. The price for this was its methodological simplification and theoretical fragmentation" (p.279). He gives these examples:

1. "First example: General genetic law as a victim of simplification" (p.280). He argues that Mind in Society oversimplified Vygotsky's genetic law, and specifically removed the concept of dramatical collision. He specifically calls out Engestromian CHAT for providing "no place at all for dramatical collision" (p.282). 
2. "Second example: Zone of proximal development as a victim of fragmentation" (p.282). He argues that ZPD has become the "visit card" [calling card] of Vygotsky—but ZPD is not a central part of the theory (p.282).

Another chapter is Holbrook Mahn's "Vygotsky's Methodological Approach: A Blueprint for the Future of Psychology" (p.297). Here, Mahn focuses on Vygotsky's manuscript on the crisis in psychology. Again, Mahn derides how Mind in Society presented Vygotsky's works. He focuses on Vygotsky's method, including analysis into units, word meaning as a unit of analysis (better translated as "meaning through language use" or "meaning through the sign operation"; p.315), and the relationship between tools and signs (p.318). 

In all, I thought parts of this book were relevant to my project of understanding CHAT. But the book is a giant "I told you so" in which the authors hold the faith, waiting for the rest of the world to return to the German-Austrian tradition of psychology, while hectoring those who have followed different methodological traditions. I doubt these jeremiads will change the minds of psychologists, who may well feel that their own methodological and theoretical traditions have been given short shrift. But if you're interested in how Vygotskians understand Vygotsky's methodological approach, Veresov's and Mahn's chapters may be of interest.

Reading :: The Mentality of Apes

The Mentality of Apes
By Wolfgang Köhler

Vygotsky and Luria cite this 1924 book repeatedly in their 1930 book Studies on the History of Behavior. I can see why. Köhler, a Gestaltist, conducted several studies on chimpanzee problem-solving, providing them with tools such as sticks to see whether they could figure out how to get fruit from various locations. In the process, he identified some of the limits to chimpanzee problem-solving, specifically a difficulty in using tools that are not in their visual field at the same time as their objective.

The studies themselves are fascinating, but Köhler is also an entertaining writer. He evidently developed a great deal of affection for the chimpanzees, who he introduces to us by name and temperament, and he provides not just results but also entertaining and illuminating stories about how their temperaments interacted with their problem-solving skills. In one example, a chimp was trying to get a piece of fruit that had been suspended high over his head. Rather than stacking some boxes to stand on top of them, he tried to convince Köhler to stand under the fruit so he could stand on Köhler's shoulders. Failing that, he led other chimps under the fruit and tried to stand on them. Soon the others caught on and chimps competed to stand on each other—thus failing to retrieve the fruit.

Maybe I'm wired differently, but I found this to be an immensely entertaining read. Take a look!

Reading :: Knowledge, Organization, and Management

Knowledge, Organization, and Management: Building on the Work of Max Boisot
Edited by John Child and Martin Ihrig

I've reviewed Boisot's books elsewhere on this blog. This edited collection was put together shortly after Boisot's death, containing both Boisot's work and additional work by his collaborators, situated by his framework. Four of the chapters have been published elsewhere: three in prominent journals, one in a book chapter. 

The book is in seven sections:

1. Setting the stage
2. Analyses of the Chinese system
3. Organizational complexity
4. The strategic management of knowledge
5. Knowledge in big science
6. Innovations in education
7. Concluding reflections

and they highlight Boisot's contributions across these different spaces. These contributions include his depiction of I-Space (a cube with the axes of abstraction, codification, diffusion) and resulting implications for complexity, culture, learning, and organization. I-Space is built on Claude Shannon's theory of information, and I view it to be a weak foundation for understanding how people actually circulate and use information, but it is the alpha and omega of his theorizing throughout.

With that introduction, let's get to the chapters.

In "Max Boisot and the Dynamic Evolution of Knowledge" (pp.3-16), Martin Ihrig and John Child say that "while Peter Drucker in the 1960s first drew attention to the fact that increasingly we are living in knowledge societies, Boisot provided a conceptual framework that enables us to appreciate the significance of that trend. His framework offers an understanding of how the ways we choose to express, communicate, and share knowledge are intrinsic to how we relate to one another in organizations and societies" (p.3). The framework started with Boisot's doctoral thesis in 1987, in which he described the codification-diffusion framework known as C-Space (p.3); later he added the third dimension of abstraction to yield I-Space (p.4). The authors describe I-Space this way:

The I-Space is a conceptual framework that facilitates the study of knowledge flows in diverse populations of "agents"—individuals, groups, firms, industries, alliances, governments, and nations. As one of Boisot's most fundamental innovations, it enabled him, and the many other researchers he inspired, to study and advance understanding of the emerging knowledge-based society and the implications of the information revolution. (p.4)

 As an architect, the authors say, Boisot thought in terms of spaces (p.7). He applied his insights to other areas in concert with collaborators:

Once Boisot had identified an opportunity for an interesting project, he would try to bring people and organizations together, set up a framework, and then start to research and develop. Typically his collaborators were less well read and less theoretically versed than he was. On the other hand they often brought specialized empirical knowledge and a questioning perspective to the process, which helped to put Boisot's abstractions to the test of validity. (p.10)

In "From Fiefs to Clans and Network Capitalism: Explaining China's Emerging Economic Order" (pp.19-48), Boisot and Child use the C-Space (a four-field with axes of codification and diffusion; p.22) to conceptualize four types of transactional environments: bureaucracies, fiefs, markets, and clans. Boisot defines codification as "the selection and compression of data into stable structures" (p.21, citing Claude Shannon), and argues that "the codification and diffusion of information create a transactional environment that conditions the institutional possibilities to be found in different regions of the C-Space and endows them with some quite specific features" (p.21). For instance, when information is codified but undiffused, you tend to get bureaucracies, in which the diffusion of information is centrally controlled and relationships are impersonal; when information is both codified and diffused, you get markets, in which the diffusion of information is virtually unlimited and relationships are again impersonal (p.22). Obviously, this four-field diagram gives us ideal types and various configurations might exist. Critically, this is a conceptual framework, not an empirical one, so Boisot and Child do not give us guidance on where the boundaries are: at what point can we say that information is codified rather than uncodified? Diffused rather than undiffused? Those of us who conduct case studies can imagine a lot of situations in which the same text behaves differently depending on the frame and the other texts at play—but those issues are unexplored here.

We are, however, told that 

abstraction is a prerequisite for the creation of robust codifications and the construction of a rational-legal order. If codification seeks to economize on data processing by assigning the data or experience to categories, abstraction seeks to economize on the number of categories used in the act of codifying. (p.25)

In "Analyses of the Chinese System" (pp.49-58), Child reflects that Boisot developed C-Space into I-Space in order to make sense of China's economic reform and the business systems emerging from it. Boisot based C-Space in part on a 1952 publication by Kroeber & Kluckhorn, in which they conclude that culture "described the ways that people structure and share information" (p.50). The 2x2 of C-Space naturally results in "four transactional or organizational modes" (p.50): one for each resulting quadrant. Later in this chapter, Child notes that Boisot collaborated with Guo Liang Xing, who closely observed "the activities of six enterprise directors, each for a period of six weeks in 1987" (p.56)—I'm not clear on the methodology, but this sounds like an empirical study I'll have to follow up on. 

Child adds that Boisot's reliance on his root paradigm did pose some limitations. One was that 

Max generally treated information as a cultural phenomenon, regarding the way it was articulated and shaped reflecting cultural norms. He called his original framework the "culture" space. When he depicted institutional or organizational arrangements in terms of different configurations of informational dimensions, he was implicitly regarding them as cultural constructions. This tended to overlook another factor that influences the shaping of institutions and organizations, namely power. (p.57)

Child goes on to allege that Boisot recognized this issue, but "put the issue to one side because it would unduly detract from the elegance of his framework. Yet three of the quadrants of the C-Space are structures of asymmetric power" (p.57; the exception is markets). Child notes that whereas Boisot overlooked power, the Chinese Communist Party did not, and the CCP's consolidation of power explains why China is not moving toward a market configuration (p.58)!

In "Extreme outcomes, connectivity, and power laws: Toward an econophysics of organization" (pp.61-92), Boisot and Bill McKelvey argue that organizational science is built to be nomothetic (i.e., to expect predictability via regularities), but this approach has let us down. After some discussion that I will skip over for lack of interest, they map three ontological regimes (ordered, complex, chaotic) onto the axes of Variety of Stimuli and Variety of Responses, forming "Ashby Space" (p.76). These are associated with strategies: routinizing, adaptive, and "headless chicken," respectively (p.78). 

In "The creation and shaping of knowledge" (pp.109-128), Boisot argues that knowledge management is old in science, new in management (p.110). (Side note: Here and elsewhere, Boisot tends to portray science as ahead of the rest of the culture. This might be why he was so interested in collaborating with CERN.) He asks: why have we been so slow to knowledge management? And he argues that it's because

1. knowledge isn't observable or measurable
2. information and communication technologies have "led to the 'dematerialization' of economic activity -- the substitution of data and information for physical resources" in many areas
3. "one cannot manage a knowledge resource as if it were a physical resource" (p.111)

He outlines three problems:

1. What is being managed?
2. Is knowledge a social phenomenon?
3. How does knowledge relate to power? (p.112)

Although he says he doesn't have the space to deal with these problems in detail, he proffers the I-space as a conceptual framework to help address them (p.113). 

What is knowledge, and how does it differ from data and information? Boisot asserts that "data can be viewed as a discernible difference between different energy states" and draws on Bateson to define information as the data that make a difference to someone, i.e., data that "will modify an agent's expectations and dispositions to act in particular ways," i.e., its "knowledge base" (p.113). For that agent to be knowledgeable, "its internal dispositions to act can be modified upon receipt of data that has some information value"—and here, inexplicably, he cites Latour and Woolgar (1979) (p.113).

Just a side note: it seems jolting to me that Boisot would ground his theory of information in Claude Shannon's work, then cite Bateson and Latour, whose understanding of information seems to be radically different. But such is the danger of an eclectic mind.

Thus, Boisot argues, knowledge doesn't flow; data does (p.114). Thus when he discusses "knowledge sharing," he "will actually be referring to some degree of resonance being achieved between the knowledge states of two or more agents following some sharing of data among them" (p.114). Knowledge is not dispositional and thus it doesn't have solid contours: perhaps two agents' understandings will loosely "resonate," but they will not be identical (p.114). "People are concerned with saving time and resources required to articulate and transmit knowledge. They are thus more likely to share knowledge that is clear and umambiguous than knowledge of a more tacit and elusive nature" —he gives the example of sharing stock market figures by fax as opposed to describing a Pollack painting over the phone (p.114). And "the articulation of knowledge, in effect, calls for two kinds of cognitive efforts: abstraction and codification" (p.114): 

• "Abtraction either invokes or creates the minimum number of cognitive categories through which an agent makes sense of events": the fewer the number of categories, the more abstract its "apprehension of events" is (p.114). 
• "Codification, by contrast, refines the categories that the agent invokes or creates so that it can use them efficiently and in discriminating ways. The fewer data an agent has to process to distinguish between categories, the more codified the categories that it has to draw upon" (p.115). 

"Abstraction and codification are mutually reinforcing" and "the agent that is able to economize on its data processing resources through successive acts of codification and abstraction will be able to transact with other agents more economically and hence more extensively than will the agent that cannot" (p.115). Boisot adds that 

A problem arises, however, when much of the knowledge that is of potential value to other agents is of a more tacit nature and hence not readily available to trading. Much of an organization's technological know-how, for example, may be of this kind. It is the fruit of a slow accumulation of idiosyncratic experience, and it resides in the heads or the behaviors of employees, working singly or in groups. (p.115)

Here and elsewhere, Boisot often refers to knowledge as residing in heads—which, honestly, makes his earlier reference to Latour even more baffling. On the next page, he says: "From an intellectual capital perspective, knowledge management is about the capture, storage, and retrieval of knowledge located either in the heads of employees, in the heads of outside collaborators, or in documents" (p.116). He concedes that 

by their very nature, abstraction and codification are highly selective processes. Only a small part of a tacit knowledge base can ever be subject to articulation and structuring if genuine data processing economies are to be achieved. Thus, much tacit knowledge inevitably stays with its possessors whatever efforts at codifying and abstracting it have been subjected to—and much of this tacit knowledge will be valuable. (p.117)

 Next, he gets to the question of "social learning," which "occurs when changes in the stocks of knowledge held by one or more agents in a given population trigger coordinate changes in the stocks of knowledge that are held by other agents in the population" (p.118). He briefly cites Piaget and Weick (p.122), then describes the social learning cycle as following an S-curve in I-space (p.123). The six steps are:

• scanning
• problem solving
• abstraction
• diffusion
• absorption
• impacting (p.124). 

In their commentary on this piece, "The strategic management of knowledge" (pp.129-139), Martin Ihrig and Ian MacMillan note that after 2006, Boisot "focused on two areas: mapping critical knowledge assets, cultural and organizational structures, and associated learning paths; and simulating strategic knowledge management processes, in particular knowledge flows derived from knowledge-based agent interactions" (p.130). Mapping in I-Space "allows us to represent an agent's knowledge as a portfolio of knowledge assets, as a network of nodes and their links to other nodes" (p.136). Mapping these nodes  in a network allows us "to consider its dynamic behavior" (p.136). 

Skipping ahead, in "Knowledge in big science" (pp.155-166), Agusti Canals asserts something that I found key to understanding Boisot's theorizing: Boisot claimed that he had an "inability" to deal with mathematics (pp.155-156), and this inability kept him from a career in the natural sciences. So—and this is my commentary—Boisot repeatedly frames science as a vanguard for the rest of us to follow, and he prefers to model interactions in terms that resemble those of physics.

In "The three phases of Max Boisot's theorizing" (pp.205-211), John-Christopher Spender characterizes I-Space as suggesting "a complex economics of information, an information-based approach to political economy" (p.206). Spender notes that Boisot characterized information in energy terms (there's the physics influence again) and because I-Space was "self-contained" in energy terms, 

the flow around the Social Learning Cycle ... 'worked' because the unit of information flowing could not be at all places in the cycle at the same time—it is trading-off the contrasting energy natures and values of the different types of information itemized in the Keio paper. There was a corresponding change in entropy as information moved around the cycle because in the real world, as opposed to the abstractions of neoclassical or "Newtonian economics," generating, transforming, codifying and deploying information is entropy-raising work. (p.206)

My commentary: This passage was tremendously illuminating to me because it emphasizes how Boisot's guiding metaphor of Newtonian physics (economics?) captured his theorizing and resulted in what seem to me to be very odd claims. Boisot uses I-Space to track transformations in information: how is "a unit of information" abstracted, diffused, etc.? But consider a study that Boisot briefly cited earlier, Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life. In that study, Latour describes cascades of rerepresentations, in which (for instance) the result of cutting off a rat's toes is represented in a column of numbers, then in a graph, then in other representations leading up to published papers and finally assertions that can be made in textbooks. Yet such representations are not just transformations in a single stream, they are yielded by combining previous representations, and they are themselves combined and compared to yield insights. They also don't disappear—scientists at the Pasteur Lab and elsewhere keep these representations so that they can unwind their arguments at any point, producing evidence at each point in the chain. In actual studies conducted by an ethnographer of science, we don't see a serial set of transformations but a tangled web, and information must continue to exist in different parts of the cycle at the same time. It is not the unit of information (whatever it might be—Boisot is vague about what constitutes information in the SLC) but the relations among different representations that makes science, and arguably other endeavors using complex information, work. 

Let's leave it there. As always, I find Boisot's work to be fascinating but heterodox, and I look forward to continuing to think through its wrinkles. If the question of information interests you as well, definitely take a look. 

Reading :: Belles on Their Toes

Belles on Their Toes
By Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I'm just noting that I read this sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen. In this book, the authors chronicle the Gilbreth family's life after their father Frank Gilbreth died and their mother, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, had to carry on the family's consultancy in motion studies. This was quite a task in the 1920s, as many did not believe women had the capacity, expertise, or right to run a consultancy. Although the authors describe their lives growing up in a large household, we still get a sense of what Dr. Gilbreth went through. It's a quick read (I think I finished it in one sitting) and I recommend it if you enjoyed the first book.

Reading :: Counterproductive

Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy
by Melissa Gregg

Full disclosure: For some years now, I've been conducting a one-day workshop on time management, based in part on my own empirical studies over the last 25 years, and in part on sources in management, psychology, neuropsychology, sociology, and anthropology. The goal is to give people a broad view of why their time is more fragmented now than ever before, to provide some basic theory about how people mediate their own actions via texts and other representations, and to discuss how they might develop their own mediatory strategies at the individual, small group, and organizational levels. I've presented shorter versions of this workshop to academics, medical doctors, research groups, and various others. People who take the workshop generally find it rewarding. They single out aspects such as taking a step back to figure out their overall goals; exploring different approaches and strategies; learning how and when to say no to obligations; and understanding how their work and text systems interact with those of others.  More than that, they express relief: they come away from the workshop with a better understanding of why they feel pressures from work and home life, and they have a better sense of how to deal with these pressures beyond simply reacting to them. 

So I'm hardly a disinterested party when it comes to reading this book. That being said, I was disappointed in Counterproductive, which "explores how productivity emerged as a way to think about workplace performance at the turn of the twentieth century and its ongoing consequences for the administration of labor today" (p.3). "Counterproductive shows how time mastery became a defining quality of professionals over an extended historical period, remaining constant through successive waves of managerial discourse" (p.4). Gregg (correctly) notes that the focus on time management is related to increasing worker precarity (p.6) — although in my view she does not quite get the connection, as I'll discuss below. Gregg ultimately considers the focus on productivity to be pointless due to the weakness of labor organization (p.8). 

Let's review Gregg's argument first, then I'll discuss the problems I have with it. Ultimately, I found the book valuable, not for its insights per se so much as how it forced me to articulate things about time management for myself.

First, Gregg's argument. Gregg presents it in three parts. 

In part I, she "tackles the legacy of time-management methods introduced by turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressivists to optimize work in the office and factory," beginning with Lilian Gilbreth's time-and-motion studies. She calls out Gilbreth and others for their "covert reliance on delegated labor both in and outside the home" (p.12 -- Lilian Gibreth had servants). Also in Part I, Gregg notes the "gendered dynamics" in early management theory and productivity literature (p.12). 

In part II, she analyzes contemporary time management books and productivity apps, arguing that productivity became "a way of life for knowledge professionals seeking affective security amid job volatility" (p.13). She adds, "My reading reinforces how time-management instruction and adherence have become a necessary form of immaterial labor in an information economy, training workers to embrace their flexibility" (p.15). 

In part III, she examines "the infatuation with mindfulness taking hold in technology and corporate cultures in recent years" (p.15). She argues that "the turn to mindfulness can be seen as a response to the decline in collective opportunities to experience ritual in the workplace" (p.15). 

She concludes with "a set of recommendations for post-work productivity" (p.17). One specific example is that of coworking spaces, which "demarcate the move away from company life to something more playful and free" (p.133). 

Where to start?

Let's start with a methodological note. To grossly oversimplify, I tend to think of research in the social sciences as belonging to one of two basic stances. In Stance 1, we ask people what they think. In Stance 2, we tell them what they think. 

Personally, I do most of my research in Stance 1: I interview people to get their perspectives and have them articulate their motivations, I observe them as they do things, I pick up the specific texts and other artifacts they use, and I turn these into an integrated understanding of their work. Usually I conduct some form of member check—that is, I bring my conclusions back to them and see if what I've produced fairly represents what they are experiencing. 

Gregg is doing her research in Stance 2: She reads texts and analyzes apps, then characterizes these as having a coherent message that represents the ideas, concepts, and concerns of the people who read and use them. She does not ask these people whether her conclusions match their lived experience. Stance 2 is in many ways more satisfactory for the individual researcher, since it allows them to avoid collecting feedback and therefore to avoid having to deal with any pushback that might complicate their conclusions. But the limitations are obvious.

I think we see some of those limitations throughout the book. For instance, Gregg draws a straight line from time-and-motion studies (in which consultants observed manual workers, then reconstructed their motions to make them more efficient) to productivity texts (in which managers are given advice on self-structuring their time to make themselves more effective). These are two very different things: in time-and-motion studies, workers are micromanaged by someone else; in productivity texts, managers are given tools to structure their own time and work. 

Equating these two functions allows Gregg to claim a direct lineage between the two. But the 20th century is a story of great change in how work was organized, due in part to information and communication technologies, which drove organizational changes, as well as an explosion in education and increasing automation. Consequently, work became more fragmented (and, yes, more precarious), and more importantly, people began to own their own work—that is, we saw fewer jobs that could be micromanaged through time-and-motion studies, and more jobs that required self-structuring. The vanguards included executive management, of course, but also ... housewives, a group that Gregg notes without catching the import (p.23). We can add traveling salespeople and independent contractors, who similarly are given work objectives but are allowed wide latitude in how to achieve these (i.e., command, but not control). They have high discretion over how they conduct their time, and they consequently carry more responsibility. And although I have listed four specific groups here, due to work trends such as projectification and outsourcing (and the precarity that comes with these), this trend continues. This is why Drucker's classic The Effective Executive continues to enjoy readership, and a much broader readership than just executives. In a sense, even those of us who are not in an executive position are functioning as executives—that is, no one is going to structure our time for us, and we have to figure it out for ourselves. 

Incidentally, this point also suggests the solution to a mystery that Gregg brings up several times: why time management is so often compared to athletics. Gregg maintains that athletics is inherently competitive, and this competition orientation is reflected in time management, in which people assert their status by delegating difficult parts of their jobs to others. She warrants this reading with a reference to Sloterdijk (p.138). But athleticism is not inherently competitive (at least I hope not—every morning I run an exceedingly slow two miles, and I don't compare my times with others). Athletics, however, is one of the most common experiences in self-discipline in the US school system. (Is this how people read the athletics analogy in the time management literature? I don't know, I haven't asked them—but to be fair, this is a blog review, not a book in which I confidently ascribe views to people.)

One strategy for self-structuring is to figure out how to delegate. Gregg bristles at this trend, which she sees as judging value of tasks based on status. But one of the sources discussing delegation is The Effective Executive, in which Drucker (reasonably, I think) argues that the executive must figure out what they alone can do, excel at that, and delegate the rest. Just as most of us don't grow our own food or make our own shoes, most of us identify tasks that don't fit in our wheelhouse and delegate them to a specialist—or automate. When I ask an electrician to rewire a faulty outlet, it's not because the task is beneath me, it's because I know they can do a better job, keep the wiring up to code, and avoid getting electrocuted. The electrician will be more effective. And if I can delegate this work to the electrician, I can turn back to the tasks that only I can do, such as teaching my classes or writing my research articles. I'll be more effective too. This is not "elite" (pp.95-96) but commonplace—and, I would contend, common sense.

Gregg goes on to argue that time management is a recursive distraction from identifying a worthwhile basis of work as a source for spiritual fulfillment (p.96), and argues that time management is "an epistemology without an ontology," a way of life, "religious devotion" (p.98) with "spiritual valences" when taken to its "logical extreme" (p.99). Here is where I think she could have really benefited from interviews with actual people, who (at least in my experience and in my field studies over the past 25 years) are just trying to get through the day, be effective in their jobs, and save more time for their home life. Yes, they are grappling with precarity, but I don't see these knowledge workers as becoming devotees to a new religion or even considering time management to be an epistemology.

In the conclusion, as noted, Gregg sees coworking as a hope for the future. Unlike Gregg, I have actually interviewed coworkers and coworking space proprietors, and I keep up with the research literature on coworking — much of which emphasizes the inherent precarity in coworking spaces. Coworkers have not checked out of time management. They tend to be independent contractors, dependent contractors, small business owners, remote workers, and others for whom it is critical to structure their own work and manage their own time. Although the coworking movement has often claimed that it is changing work, coworkers are hardly saying goodbye to time management—quite the opposite. 

To sum up: I was not a fan of this book's argument or methodology. The book did, however, allow me to really think through  and articulate some of the things I have seen in the time management literature, so I still found it valuable. You might as well. 

Reading :: Carbon Democracy

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
By Timothy Mitchell

Just a brief review for this book. The author notes that oil is often blamed for destabilizing democracies. However,  he says, the relationship is more complicated: mass democracy, he argues, emerged due to fossil fuels. That is, when England transitioned to coal, coal's properties (including where it was found and how it was extracted and transported) allowed coal miners to create chokepoints that they could control, thus exercising political power. The history of coal and oil extraction in the years since has been characterized by a struggle over who would control the extraction and flow of fossil fuels. 

Mitchell characterizes his analysis as Latourean and symmetrical. Although he does make some attempts to carry out a symmetrical analysis, it is not—at least, it doesn't seem to me—Latourean or symmetrical overall. Rather, it reads like a straight history in which individual and collective human actors are attributed with agency and nonhuman actors are typically acted upon. Furthermore, the story is simplified. For instance, I think Mitchell makes a plausible case that controlling chokepoints could allow miners to exercise political power—but that doesn't explain why this power took the form of mass democracy in particular. What other trends, causes, etc. contributed to this particular form of government over others? Why did parliamentary democracy do well in comparison to fascism and communism in the 20th century? Laying the origin and success of democracy at the feet of fossil fuel deposits seems oversimplified. 

I still recommend the book as a fascinating history of fossil fuel development, but only as part of the story. 

Reading :: The Constitution of Algorithms

The Constitution of Algorithms
By Florian Jaton

In this book, Jaton uses a Latourean approach to examine how algorithms are constituted. I found the introduction to be really interesting -- the case studies less so.

Let me set the scene, since it may be affecting how I read the book. I actually read this book a few months ago, in PDF format, and added comments to it in Google Drive. Since then, UT has announced that we no longer have unlimited storage space on GDrive, and it turns out that I was far over the new quota. So I have moved all of my PDFs to my UT space on Box.com, which is unlimited—for now. Unfortunately, although the comments transferred over to Box, I can only see them by mousing over the page—there's no visual indicator that the page has a comment until I happen to mouse over it. That makes writing this review more difficult.

Fortunately, most of the comments are in Chapter 1, which—to my mind at least—is more valuable than the case studies that support it. In Chapter 1, Jaton considers the question of algorithms. From a Deleuzian standpoint, they have fluidity, swiftness, and distributivity, and can be characterized as devices: They circulate and link up sparse actants quickly (p.6). STS scholars have examined algorithms' workings and agency, but Jaton is more interested in how "unrelated entities (e.g., documents, people desires) ... come into contact to form, in the end, devices we may call 'algorithms'" (p.8). Jaton sees algorithms as durable, mobile, and carrying characteristics of other actants, just as Goody's graphical objects, Latour and Woolgar's inscriptions, and Dorothy Smith's documents (p.13). 

Jaton proposes to study these in terms of constitution rather than construction. The term constitution evokes a political settlement, and constitutions can be amended (p.17). To explore the question, Jaton introduces his ethnography of a computer science laboratory. 

Although I usually enjoy ethnographies, I confess that I was not that interested in this one. It reads a bit like Laboratory Life, but whereas LL provided momentously new insights to me, this ethnography mainly seemed to transfer those insights to a new activity. I did learn a lot about how algorithms are developed, but the insights felt small and incremental. As the author notes in the conclusion, "these empirical elements [from the case studies] might seem quite tenuous when compared with the ogre to  whom this book is explicitly addressed: algorithms and their growing contribution to the shaping of the collective world" (p.283). I agree. Although Chapter 1 is well worth reading, I don't think the case chapters measure up to it. 

Should you read this book? If you're interested in understanding where algorithms come from, or exploring them from an STS standpoint, definitely—but spend most of your time in Chapter 1.

Reading :: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
By Peter F. Drucker

I picked up this thick (839pp.) book in a thrift store. Although I have plenty of sticky notes in the margins, I'll write a short review. 

If you've read much Drucker, there aren't too many surprises here. Drucker draws on scholarship, but also many, many case studies, to illustrate his thoughts on the tasks of management, the manager, and top management. Here, I'll just skip around, picking out some quotable principles. 

Early in the book, Drucker argues that management is practice and performance, not science or knowledge (p.17); it is a social function, socially accountable and culturally embedded (p.18). 

Drucker alleges that "Productivity means that balance between all factors of production will give the greatest output for the smallest effort"—not productivity per worker, not productivity per hour of work. Those measures are still grounded in manual labor and "still express the mechanistic fallacy—of which Marx, to the permanent disability of Marxian economics, is the last important dupe—that all human achievement could eventually be measured in units of muscle effort" (p.68). Instead, Drucker argues, greater productivity is achieved by doing away with muscle effort: via "capital equipment, that is, mechanical energy" or via knowledge (p.68).

Skipping forward, Drucker discusses the shift to knowledge work: "A larger and larger proportion of the labor force in all developed countries does not work with its hands, whether as skilled or unskilled workers, but with ideas, concepts, theories. ... The tool of the file clerk is not hammer or sickle, but the alphabet, that is, a high-level abstraction and a symbol rather than a thing" (p.170). Importantly, knowledge workers are only productive via "self-motivation and self-direction" (p.176; cf. p.279). Indeed, he considers the alphabet to be "the most advanced, most perfect example of scientific management" (p.182). 

Of course, there's plenty not to like about this book as well. Drucker, writing in the early 1970s, seems uninterested in the Civil Rights movement except to the extent that it affects management and the labor pool—resulting in many jolts as, for instance, Drucker characterizes "pre-industrial people, whether peasants in developing countries, the former craftsmen in the mills of England in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, or Blacks from the ghettos of the American city today" (p.192). This is, to put it mildly, not a very nuanced understanding of the respective situations and cultural development of the three groups mentioned. 

Should you pick up this book? I mean, if you can get it for a dollar at a thrift store, or if you're a Drucker completist, or if you want to learn a lot about how management was understood in the 1970s, sure. But if you have already read the more popular Drucker books, I think this one won't provide many new insights. 

Reading :: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
By Oliver Sacks

Like Cheaper by the Dozen, this book came out of the Little Free Library down the street. Amazon lists this version at $46 new, $20 used, so free is quite the bargain.

Sacks was inspired by the work of A.R. Luria, a member of the Vygotsky-Luria Circle and pioneer in neuropsychology, and no stranger to readers of this blog. Sacks calls Luria's works "the greatest neurological treasure of our time" (p.235). So, when Luria actually asked Sacks to write detailed cases about his right-hemisphere brain damage cases, just as Luria had written cases about left-hemisphere cases (p.5), he did. Like Luria's The Man with a Shattered World, these cases, are detailed, poignant, and good representatives of Luria's "romantic science" approach. And I was personally delighted to see so many of Luria's works being referenced, including his twin study. Leontiev and Zaporozhets' book Rehabilitation of Hand Function also gets a mention.

The stories in the book are all fascinating. I'll just mention one. In Ch.7, Sacks reports treating an elderly patient with Parkinson's disease whose vestibular system had been affected. He consequently walked with an unconscious tilt. When he was shown a film of himself walking, he was astounded, but quickly developed a solution: a pair of glasses with a spirit level (or bubble level) built into the frame. The level gave him instant feedback to help him compensate for his vestibular difficulties. Although it was distracting at first, in a couple of weeks this feedback soon became integrated into his actions "like keeping an eye on the instrument panel of one's car" (p.76). What a great example of how people can compensate with external mediation, and how that mediator can become integrated into a new system.

Reading :: Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen
By Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

 Just a quick acknowledgement here that I read this book recently. I read this classic a few times in my childhood, and when I saw it in the Little Free Library down the street, I decided to pick it up and enjoy it again. 

But I didn't just pick it up out of nostalgia. This book was mentioned in another reading that I had recently completed, a book on time management -- which I'll review soon.

Reading :: Knowledge Assets

Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy
By Max Boisot

Recently I reviewed Boisot's 1987 Information and Organizations, which—despite some really interesting ideas—borrowed a bit indiscriminately from various disciplines and used a style I found off-putting. But in 1998's Knowledge Assets, Boisot really hits his stride, producing a better structured, more coherent, and more stylistically confident book. It won the 2000 Igor Ansoff Strategy Prize, and it appears to be Boisot's most heavily cited work. 

Don't get me wrong — Boisot's work still rests on Shannon's communication theory, still thinks about information in terms of Newtonian physics, and thus still has a very thin concept of audience characterized vaguely as "populations." It still doesn't have an account of how analytic-systemic representations develop. It still seems to have no place for polysemy. It still is presented as a conceptual frame, avoiding the messiness and challenges that come from applying a framework to empirical cases. For someone who reads a lot of sociocultural theory, who thinks a lot about development and ambiguity and interpretation, and who attempts to apply theory to qualitative cases—like me—Boisot's work leaves a lot to be desired. Still, within his assumptions, he has done a great deal of work here and has produced an internally coherent, instructive account of information (and to some extent knowledge). I admire it in the same way that I might admire the theological reasoning produced by someone from a different religion: he may start from different precepts than mine, but the work he based on those precepts is internally sound and perhaps some of it can be analogically applied to mine.

So with that preface, let's get into the book. The blurb on the back of the book sums it up:

... Max Boisot provides a conceptual framework for managers and students that will help them explore and understand how knowledge and information assets differ from physical assets, and how to deal with them at a strategic level within their organizations.

In the introduction, Boisot lays the foundation by defining 

• technology: "sociotechnical systems configured so as to produce certain specific types of physical effects"
• competence: "the organizational and technical skills involved in achieving a certain level of performance in the production of such effects"
• capability: "a strategic skill in the application and integration of competences"
• complexity:  "the number of elements in interaction and the number of different states that those interactions can give rise to" (p.5)

He adds: "Clearly, the number and nature of technologies that have to be integrated into competences, and the number and variety of these that have to be mobilized to achieve a capability, will determine the level of complexity that a firm has to deal with" (p.5). That's important because complexity is increasing in firms (p.5), leading managers to cope with complexity "by developing abstract models that help them to make sense of the complexity and reduce it to manageable proportions" (p.6). At the time Boisot is writing, in the late 1990s, rising complexity has precipitated a crisis: "We are entering the information economy still firmly strapped to the paradigms of the energy economy," and managers need to move to a new paradigm to manage adequately (p.7). Specifically, the energy economy assumes linear processes, but the world is nonlinear, requiring an understanding of complexity (p.9). 

To gain that understanding, he distinguishes among three things that are often confused:

• data: "a discrimination between physical states ... that may or may not convey information to an agent"—depending on the agent's "stock of knowledge"
• information: "that subset of the data residing in things that activates an agent — it is filtered from the data by the agent's perceptual or conceptual apparatus .... [it] establishes a relationship between things and agents"
• knowledge "can be conceptualized as a set of probability distributions held by an agent and orienting his or her actions. These either consolidate or undergo modification with the arrival of new information. In contrast to information, knowledge cannot be directly observed. Its existence can only be inferred from the action of agents. It follows from this that knowledge assets cannot be directly observed either; they therefore have to be apprehended indirectly" (p.12)

Knowledge "economizes on the use of physical resources" (p.12):

• "by in-forming them—i.e., by embedding itself in physical artefacts and structures"; ex: standardized bricks (p.12)
• "by organizing them—i.e., by embedding itself as information in documents and symbolic support systems used to coordinate the creation or functioning of artefacts"; ex: house plans, read in conjunction with detailed specs and a budget (p.13)
• "by enhancing the understanding of intelligent agents that interact with physical resources—i.e., by embedding itself in the brains of individuals or organizations"; ex: the "architect draws on an accumulated stock of knowledge which reflects a collective understanding of human behavior in space" etc. etc. (p.13).

He adds:

In short, knowledge held by agents builds up the information structures latent in physical things, in documents, or in individual brains. Knowledge assets are those accumulations that yield a stream of useful services over time while economizing on the consumption of physical resources—i.e., minimizing the rate of entropy production. (p.13)

He argues that we can classify knowledge assets along two dimensions: 

• How far can they be given form, i.e., codified? (ex: mass-produced artifacts vs. discursive remarks) (p.13)
• How much can they be abstracted, i.e.,  applying to many situations? 

Codification and abstraction are two interrelated ways to economize on information processing, lowering the cost of converting usable knowledge to knowledge assets (p.14). 

In the next chapter, Boisot says, "we shall propose a way of integrating physical and information phenomena in a single unified representation," using the production function from neoclassical economics (p.19). To do so, he reiterates the differences among data, information, and knowledge:

• Data: "a discernable difference between alternative states of a system" (p.19)
• Information: "Data that modifies the expectations or the conditional readiness of an observer" (p.20)
• Knowledge: "the set of expectations that an observer holds with respect to an event" (p.20). 

So knowledge assets are "that subset of dispositions to act that is embedded in individuals, groups, or artefacts that have value-adding potential" (p.20). 

Boisot charges that Marx thought of capital as congealed labor; he "held a strictly energy-based view of economic processes" (p.21). But, he says, in industrial societies we rely more on information—and that means that we must "economize on the consumption of data as well as that of physical resources. How do we do this? By extracting information from data and then junking the latter" (p.29, his emphasis). We abstract patterns from the data, then focus on the patterns.

This tendency allows us to do more, but it also involves complexity reduction, and that carries dangers. "[A]bove a certain level of complexity, we face chaos" as we cannot "effectively process the amount of data we are confronted with at the speed it requires" (p.37). At the lower bound, we are faced with "excessive order—characterized by an undersupply of data" (p.37). Effective learning happens in between these, at "the edge of chaos," which is "a region that complex systems are drawn to in their quest for dynamic stability" (p.37).

This brings us to the third chapter, on the I-Space. Boisot refreshes us on codification, which "can usefully be thought of as a process of giving form to phenomena or to experience" (p.41, his emphasis), and on abstraction, "the process of discerning the structures that underlie the forms" (p.41). Working together, these reduce an agent's "data-processing load" and "facilitate communication processes and hence the diffusion of information" (p.41 — my emphasis this time). 

Codification, he says, "constitutes a selection from competing perceptual and conceptual alternatives," and this selection "is often conflict-laden" (p.44). Higher codification economizes on data-processing resources, but it also results in lost flexibility and options (p.47). It fossilizes hard-won skills, and thus also deskills skilled craftspeople (p.47). 

Whereas codification gives form to phenomena, abstraction gives them structure (p.48). Abstraction saves on data-processing resources by "minimizing the number of categories that we need to draw on for a given task. Abstraction then works by teasing out the underlying structure of phenomena relevant to our purpose" (p.49). "Abstraction, in effect, is a form of reductionism: it works by letting the one stand for the many" (p.50). 

Diffusion is the availability of data and information. It's different from deliberate uptake: information can be diffused (made available more broadly), but not taken up by agents (not adopted) (p.52). Citing Shannon and Weaver, Boisot notes three problems that can threaten diffusion:

1. "Is the message received the same as the message sent?" (technical level)
2. "Is the message received understood?" (semantic level) 
3. "Is the message received acted upon as intended?" (pragmatic level) (p.53)

We then get to the I-Space, the cube diagram with the axes of codification, abstraction, and diffusion (p.56). Boisot contrasts it with Nonaka and Takeuchi, with one differentiator being that I-Space posits three types of tacit knowledge: things that are not said because

• everybody understands them
• nobody understands them
• some people understand them but cannot articulate them without cost (p.57)

He draws on the example of military technologies that a French firm transferred to the Iraqi military, assuming that the knowledge explicit in specifications and diagrams was adequate. They were incorrect (p.57). Reading this example, I thought of the ANT studies on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump and the gazogene—and I wondered where the "outside" of the I-Space cube was. In other words, what bounds the cube and the analysis? Who is sharing knowledge assets? Clearly not all agents have the same knowledge stock (we'll use that loose term since Boisot does), so the same information asset will not occupy the same space for all of them. Unfortunately, Boisot only addresses this (critical) bounding question in an offhand way—mentioning "individuals" and "public knowledge" here, and "populations" elsewhere. This becomes a real problem here, because he posits a "social learning cycle" (pp.58-66) without specifying the bounds of the social. 

The social learning cycle posits six movements:

1. Scanning for patterns
2. Problem-Solving by giving structure and coherence to the insights from scanning
3. Abstraction or "generalizing the application of newly codified insights to a wider range of situations"
4. Diffusion or "sharing the newly created insights with a target population" (notice that the assumption seems to be that an individual agent is performing these steps — not necessarily an individual person, perhaps an individual organization)
5. Absorption or "applying the newly codified insights to different situations in a 'learning-by-doing' or a 'learning-by-using' fashion," eventually acquiring uncodified "context" around it
6. Impacting, in which abstract knowledge is embedded in concrete practices (pp.59-61)

Boisot adds that these steps can run concurrently (p.61). And as mentioned, he characterizes the I-Space as applying to a "population" (p.62), acknowleging that sometimes "data can enter the I-Space from the outside." A few quick notes of caution here:

• The social learning cycle is portrayed as individual (although that individual can be a collective agent); we don't get a sense of how social or cultural knowledge might weigh across boundaries.
• The social learning cycle is also portrayed as intentional, in which problems lead to problem-solving and deliberate steps to improve the situation. We don't get a good account of, for instance, genre evolution in which small, collective, largely undirected changes result in the emergence of a more coherent problem space—cf. Bazerman's Shaping Written Knowledge. This point is striking in light of Boisot's many appeals to complexity theory!
• The social learning cycle is depicted as occurring "within" I-Space, specifically the I-Space of a given "population." That population is not discussed further, but I don't view it as nearly enough of a qualifier. My field (writing studies) made a similar handwaving generalization in the early 1990s, talking about "discourse communities" or populations that shared the same discourse. But the fact that people talk similarly or share similar characteristics is not enough to bind them together—to be meaningful in terms of social learning, they have to cross-reference each other. Social theories provide various ways to do this: for instance, activity theory bounds the case by identifying a shared object that people are laboring to transform, while qualitative case studies bound their cases by looking for formal organizations or identifiable types of interactions. This appeal to "populations" does not do that, instead waving the hard problem away. Without solving this problem of bounding, the I-Space really can't address social learning effectively.

Moving on, Boisot proposes to use the I-Space to represent knowledge assets. He states that "assets are stocks rather than flows and we have seen that knowledge assets can be stocked in people's heads, in documents, or in artefacts" (p.63). He provides a scaling guide (a table) to help us understand what high, medium, or low codification, abstraction, and diffusion might look like (p.65). He ends the chapter by noting that organizations seek minimum entropy, but they can't stay in that state (p.67).

The next chapter is on the paradox of value. Here, he doubles down on his previous assertion, arguing that information goods are naturally scarce only when "they are deeply embedded in some physical substrate that is limited in space and time," such as "individual brains and certain physical products" (p.71). This understanding of brains as a substrate for information is quite problematic from a sociocultural standpoint. Among other things, he sees knowledge as assets —something people have and save in "stocks"—rather than something we collectively do.  

In any case, he uses the I-Space cube to map maximum and minimum value. The minimal value is concrete, uncodified, and highly diffused—it's broadly known, but can't really be put into words or applied beyond a single concrete domain. Think in terms of lore. The max value is abstract, codified, and undiffused (p.79)—think of a formula that is a trade secret. But consider an issue that Boisot isn't mapping here, which is that any conceivable I-Space—let's take a company, since companies have trade secrets—will necessarily have multiple information or knowledge assets at different levels of codification, abstraction, and diffusion, and these will necessarily interact with each other (a point he makes earlier in the book when talking about reference documents), and that different agents in the same space will have different uptakes. Companies have both trade secrets and lore, and everything in between, and value can (and I'd argue, usually does) emerge from the relationships among them rather than from one specific asset. Boisot has earlier conceded that different levels of abstraction and codification yield different benefits, but seems to see social learning as a series of transformations of one piece of information rather than creating connections across several different representations oriented to different aspects of a problem space. Again, he's hindered by the vague understanding of what makes up the cube depicted in the I-Space.

He goes on to use the I-Space cube to describe base, key, and emergent technologies (p.85). Truthfully, Boisot ends up using this cube for everything: the social learning cycle, value, technology, governance, etc. The cube is so flexible partly because the axes are abstract, the points of reference are unspecified, and the space is vaguely bounded by 'populations." 

In the next chapter, he contrasts Newtonian learning (an equilibriating process with change coming from the outside) with Schumpterian learning (which explores the potential of nonlinear phenomena). He provides the example of an "industry-level SLC with a handful of players" (p.105), underscoring (in my opinion) the unit-of-analysis problem that he has fallen into. This is the weakest chapter in the book, in my view.

The next chapter addresses culture as a knowledge asset. Boisot argues that "only a small part of what we call cultural knowledge gets itself embedded in technologies and artefacts. A large part is embodied in social processes, institutional practices, and traditions, many of which are carried around in people's heads. For this reason most cultural knowledge has tended to be taken for granted rather than treated as an asset to be prized and exploited" (p.117). He characterizes culture as "a kind of collective memory" (p.120) and cautions that all substrates are subject to entropy, including the substrate of a human brain, which can go senile (p.120). Fortunately the I-Space — I'm sure you didn't see this coming, dear reader — lends itself well to the study of cultural transmission in Boisot's view (p.122). He suggests different I-Spaces for different subcultures (p.123). For cultural action, he suggests taking transactions as our unit of analysis (p.124). And that gets us to what he characterizes as types of transactions but what others have characterized as organization types or institutional logics: fiefs, clans, bureaucracies, and markets (pp.126-127). 

Later, he returns to the question of population raised earlier, arguing that one population is the environment for another, and that the larger a population is, the more abstract is the level that binds them together (p.136). He goes on to map natural cultures in the I-Space (p.142). 

Moving on, in the next chapter, he discusses products, technologies, and organizations. Here, he says that although we can "choose to treat firms as data-processing agents for I-Space purposes, but this is a convenient fiction that should not blind us to the fact that human agents are where the action is" (p.155). Ultimately, agents are either individual humans or aggregations of individual humans, possessing knowledge in the same way. For aggregations, knowledge assets are located in substrates including physical objects, data in documents, and human heads (p.155); this assertion is illustrated on p.156, fig.7.1, where one knowledge substrate is labeled "Heads." Later, Boisot pictures the migration of knowledge assets from head to documents and objects over time (p.165). 

Skipping a bit: In Chapter 10, Boisot asserts that the conceptual framework of the I-Space has been "tested in the field by users" and is undergoing "laboratory-like tests" (p.231). The field testing appears to be done in two-day workshops in which managers use the I-Space to map out knowledge assets (p.231). In a sense, then, these are like Engestrom's Change Labs, in which the conceptual framework is used to spark conversations and collective problem-solving — although Engestrom typically tries to involve a cross-section of stakeholders rather than just managers. 

In sum, this was a fascinating book, though as my notes suggest, it is heterodox to a sociocultural understanding of knowledge and information. I-Space has great potential for strategically mapping assets, but I'm not sure its fundamental understanding of information can allow it to reach that potential.

Let's illustrate with a simple case: a recipe you find online, connected to a homespun narrative about making the food, and illustrated with a simple video. Specifically, I see these problems:

• Frame of reference. What's the bound case in which information and knowledge are at play? Are we examining how end consumers will experience the assets, or are we looking at how the recipe genre, the HTML, the ASCII, and the MOV encodings are decoded by the computer? Is the video considered highly codified (MOV format) or relatively uncodified (conveying gestures)?
• Audience. "Population" isn't enough because any agent can be a member of multiple overlapping populations. Consider the COO of a family business. How is the I-Space bounded?
• Knowledge. It's externalized, putting off interpretation as outside the system. Even "uptake" is only mentioned briefly and offhandedly at the beginning.
• Knowledge is treated as a noun, an asset, rather than a verb, a practice.
• Knowledge is additionally treated as embedded in substrates, with one of those substrates being people's heads. This characterization is hugely problematic for cultural psychologists, sociologists, and others.
• Learning is treated as movement from one point in the I-Space to another. But these assets coexist and relate to each other,
• Information is treated as anchored within the I-Space, but in empirical studies, we often see information artifacts that share associations across multiple frames of reference (ex: a worker learns a calendaring system at her university, then continues using it in her first job even though that job's environment has different assumptions and constraints). We don't get an account of such associations or how they conflict. 
• Information is treated as distinct within the I-Space, but in empirical studies, we typically see people relating different information sources together. Knowledge doesn't just come from transforming individual representations but also from relating multiple representations.

Still, I find the I-Space to be incredibly interesting and potentially very fecund. I'll keep thinking about it and seeing if I can find ways to productively transform these insights.

Reading :: Information & Organizations

Information and Organizations: The Manager as Anthropologist
By Max Boisot

The link goes to a reseller, since this 1987 book is out of print. I bought my own copy used from Amazon, and to my delight, within its pages was a Visa carbon from 1989 and a few Esso Tiger Tokens. 

Boisot is really interesting to me: an architect turned management theorist who has contributed substantially to theories of knowledge. He has an annual award named after him. Nevertheless, I had not heard of him until I searched the literature for adhocracies in 2013 and found his book on ATLAS. There, he discusses the I-Space, a three-dimensional cube representing the codification, abstraction, and diffusion of information. Fascinating, but also heterodox from my understanding of information in a way that I had a hard time putting my finger on. I made a mental note to go back to this work later and figure out what was going on.

Well, now is later, so I picked up two more of Boisot's books as well as a collection put together in tribute to him after he passed away. This 1987 book is the earliest of the group. It did clear some things up, but it is not as sophisticated or well thought out as his later work, and parts of it I flatly disliked. 

Why? Well, let's recenter on what the book is and what it's trying to do. The book is pitched to a general business audience and according to the back cover, "Max Boisot demonstrates that organization culture is perhaps best understood when examined with some of the tools used by the anthropologist." The book is largely written in a style that may have appealed to a general business audience in 1987 but that introduces real difficulties for an academic audience in 2022. It wedges in a lot of strained whimsy like this one:

Would some knowledge of managerial anthropology help a practical, no-nonsense manager of, say, a packaging firm to manage? This is a tall order, particularly as by 'no-nonsense manager' we usually mean someone who, when he hears 'culture,' reaches for his gun. Can he be persuaded to wait a little while longer before shooting the piano player? (p.13)

The second issue comes just before this passage, as Boisot is explaining that we should apply the basics of cultural anthropology, not to our "exotic" and "scantily clad brethren" of West Africa or the Hopi, but rather to "the British suburban stockholder, the American marketing executive" (p.13). Skipping past the ethnocentrism, there's a point to be made, sure: we can apply cultural anthropology's toolkit to organizations in our own culture. Okay. Which tools? It turns out Boisot doesn't really have any toolkit in mind -- he simply means that we can think about our culture. He even asks: is it possible that in thinking about our information society, we have been doing cultural anthropology all this time without even knowing it? (p.17; he doesn't answer this question, which I think any anthropologist would answer with a resounding no). He summarizes by proffering the concepts in this book, which he says bear "more than a passing resemblance to those used by anthropologists to describe culture" (p.19). He doesn't name these anthropologists—and I suspect that he is referring to the tradition of structural anthropology, although I don't think the conceptual framework he is using, C-space (culture space), closely resembles that work. Maybe a structural anthropologist can weigh in. Later in the book, Boisot describes the famous psychologist Kurt Lewin as a sociologist (p.107)—so I'm not inclined to be charitable about how he's characterizing his antecedents in the social sciences.

Let's pause so I can emphasize that this book is early in his career. I don't think he makes similar mistakes in his later books. And these issues, as maddening as they are, shouldn't obscure the actual contributions of the book, which are in terms of thinking through and representing different types of information in organizations.

That work really starts in the next chapter, when he draws on the idea that all information is coded (Claude Shannon's work is not cited here, but his model of information transmission shows up uncredited on p.38). He claims that we are all "communicating in a code and implicitly assuming that the context in which we interact is sufficiently clear" (p.23). "Only a few of these codes involve speech and writing"—he includes the examples of shaking hands and smiling, or the impropriety of tap-dancing at a board meeting (p.24). When we choose the form in which to communicate, we must choose from a repertoire of codes available to us, and we tend to use the least effortful code (p.25). Codes both structure our experience and communicate it (p.25). And to select is to code (p.28). He argues that we can imagine codes on a scale from direct experience to compression into symbols — that is, from uncodified to codified (pp.29-30). The less codified something is, the more ambiguous and interpretive it is (p.35). 

This brings us to the "simple communication model" on p.38 (the Shannon model) and a brief discussion of "coauthors" Shannon and Weaver (p.40; this is a common misapprehension—Weaver popularized Shannon's model, but they didn't coauthor anything). Following Shannon, Boisot notes three problems:

• The technical problem: "Is the message received the same as the message sent?" (p.40)
• The semantic problem: "Is the message received understood?" (p.41)
• The effectiveness problem: "Does the message lead to the desired behaviour?" (p.41)

So what we're seeing here is a quite structural understanding of communication and information, one that I suppose goes with the structural anthropology from which Boisot seems to have drawn some inspiration. I won't rehearse the issues with such a view at this point; if you'd like a critique, I commend Clifford Geertz' work as a starting place.

Here, Boisot introduces a second graduated scale: diffusion, i.e., how broadly the communication reaches potential recipients (p.45). Are we talking about a private wink between two people, or a broadcast that reaches a whole nation? Critically, he discusses "the diffusion of knowledge" (p.48), and in this early work, he slips between "information" and "knowledge" as if the two are the same. (In later books, he makes a sharp distinction between the two.) He also notes that codification is "the structuring and sharing of information [that] is the collective experience through which culture is built up" and in the private case, "when the experience being structured is to be found in one mind alone," we would only then use the term "coding" (p.49). 

He even provides a formula, D=f(C), 

where D is the rate of diffusion per unit of time measured along the horizontal scale and C is the level of codification measured along the vertical scale. f is some function that describes the specific shape of the diffusion curve for a given distribution of the population, communication technology, and so on. We shall not be concerned with elaborating this function... (p.56)

In the tribute collection published after Boisot's death, one author notes that Boisot was not good at math. Although he may have been inspired by Shannon, a mathematician, I don't think that this formula does much work for us. Boisot repeatedly says here and elsewhere that the C-space and later I-space models are conceptual, not empirical, and he does not attempt to make them correspond to empirical measurements. So it's difficult to imagine how one might validate such a formula: how do you meaningfully measure the rate of diffusion or the level of codification? 

Nevertheless, this work lays the ground for the C-space, which has the two dimensions of codification and diffusion. (Those who are familiar with I-space will wonder where Abstraction went to. In this early work, abstraction is understood as a function or component of codification—see p.109. Only later does he separate the two.) And with these two dimensions, Boisot sets out a number of 2x2 grids. On p.67, he maps the quadrants to personal knowledge, common sense, proprietary knowledge, and public knowledge (discussed further on p.73). On p.78, he puts "minimum entropy" in the codified/undiffused corner and "maximum entropy" in the uncodified/diffused corner. On p.100, he puts types of transactions—fiefs, clans, bureaucracies, and markets—in the four corners. On 116, he maps different org units: the R&D department, the board, the production department, and the sales department. And on p.171. he puts capitalism in the codified/diffused corner and feudalism in the uncodified/undiffused corner. This hammer gets put to work driving in a lot of nails. (Boisot continues this tendency of universally applying his models to the end.)

 Let's back up to see what he's doing with this conceptual framework. In Ch.4, "Knowledge Cycles," he says "it is not knowledge that flows in the C-space but the information on which it feeds" (p.75—yes,  here he is trying to distinguish between the two). He argues that "a number of forces are at work which can be resolved into four vectors"—basically toward each of the corners of the C-space (p.75). These movements "irrigate the C-space with information" (p.77). Yet people forget codes ("who today can read cuneiform script?") and thus "the knowledge that builds up in the different parts of the C-space is subject to the action of forgetting, that gradual process of erosion that in physics goes under the name of entropy (p.77). He argues that entropy is at its maximum in the uncodified/diffused corner, and at its minimum in the codified/undiffused corner (p.78). He also argues that new knowledge has a cyclical flow in the C-space, involving scanning, problem-solving, diffusion, and absorption (p.80). 

Skipping ahead, he divides the codification scale in three: the most uncodified are words and gestures, more codified is writing, and even more codified are numbers (p.109). Similarly, he divides the diffusion scale: least diffuse is "knowledge available only to the firm itself," followed by "Knowledge available to the firm and its competitors" and finally "Knowledge available to the firm, its competitors and its customers" (p.110). He cautions that these can't be translated into a single, universal empirical scale (p.110). And he adds that the "line of least resistance for information flows" is on a diagonal line from uncodified/undiffuse to codified/diffuse. "A more vivid way of restating the proposition would be to say that it is easier to get certain types of data by diffing in the files than by opening up someone's cranium and rummaging around" (p.111). (In his later work, Boisot continues to regard "craniums" or "heads" as substrates that can contain information and knowledge.)

Moving on, he asserts later that organizational growth can be represented as "an internalization of transactions" (p.140). These transactions can be internal and external. Those who have read Boisot's later work and learned about his 3D I-space may be surprised to see a different 3D representation here: the axes are codification, diffusion, and internal/external (p.143). I'm not sure why he dropped this axis unless (a) he really wanted to reclaim that third dimension for Abstraction or (b) he didn't think internal/external was doing a lot of work for him. 

At the end of the book, he tells us that he had three objectives for this book, which he did not state at the beginning:

1. "to sketch out in a simple and accessible outline a political economy of information consistent with its new role as the key resource in a modern competitive economy" (p.196)
2. "to show that a political economy of information and a theory of cultural processes were in fact one and the same thing" (p.196)
3. "to spell out in a tentative way some of the applications that the concepts presented might find in [a manager's] work" (p.196)

He acknowledges that his presentation of C-space included "simplifying assumptions" and did not include "the many qualifications that would weigh down a more academic work" (p.197). 

So how well does Boisot do? 

Understanding his audience, I was willing to cut Boisot a lot of slack in terms of simplifying assumptions and qualifications. But looking at his objectives, I find myself understanding his project much better—and I am thus more confident in how to evaluate it.

Objective 1: a political economy of information. I know very little about political economy. But for a political economy of information, the book does not sharply define "information" or adequately differentiate it from data or knowledge. Boisot does this in his later work, and he does it by extending the C-space rather than starting over. So I'll evaluate this first objective as a partial success.

Objective 2: show that a political economy of information and a theory of cultural processes are the same thing. Boisot does present his political economy of information as a theory of cultural processes. But I find this attempt to be unsatisfactory. His founding assumptions about information seem to be at odds with what we know about cultural knowledge and processes. He draws heavily on Shannon, but Shannon's work was mathematical rather than cultural, and reduces interpretation to decoding. He doesn't draw on other fields that could have really troubled and developed this account, including semiotics, interpretivist anthropology, or sociology. Tellingly, Boisot never gets to the level of examining fine-grained qualitative data in this book (and I don't think he does in his later work either). 

Objective 3: spell out applications for managers. Boisot did well enough that people are still talking about him, so I think his framework is appealing. Although I'm not writing as a manager, I personally am intrigued by the conceptual space of codification and diffusion (and I'll also throw in abstraction) as ways to think through how specific information artifacts are constructed and transported—although I understand "information" quite differently from how Boisot did in 1987.

I've written a lot in this review, and much has been critical. So I want to end by emphasizing that this book's concepts are intriguing enough for me to spend all of this time writing about it. The question isn't whether the book is good or bad—it's what job the book can do for me (and perhaps for you). What is the framework good for? What can't it do? In what ways can it inspire us to think about communication and culture differently? As you've seen, for me this book has been quite generative. And for that reason, if you're interested in exploring similar issues, I recommend it too—after you read Boisot's later stuff.