tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33273315.post2185219043871581697..comments2023-07-16T04:38:04.407-05:00Comments on Spinuzzi: Reading :: Good to Great and the Social SectorsClay Spinuzzihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13356273383001825508noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33273315.post-55158689490478739352007-04-27T09:58:00.000-05:002007-04-27T09:58:00.000-05:00In Science in Action, Latour unpacks the communal,...In Science in Action, Latour unpacks the communal, multivalent and material semiotic production of black boxed phenomena in science. Collins' neologism, "social sectors", is not a black box by these lights. It is, at best, a categori-cal assertion that the institutions he places in the realm of "social sectors" are more homogenous than differentiated, that they share a sufficiently similar set of management structures to be treated as effectively the same.<BR/><BR/>I am all for the abstraction of categories based on empirical similarities. However, and again this is from what you reported, Collins uncritically extends the traditional public-private dualism into an account that I find empirically wrong and does so by applying private sector standards -- like underperforming employees -- in a manner directly parallel to the efforts of neoliberal university and mainstream NGO managers... a practice which itself indicates that the public-private divide is less coherent than his foundational assumption demands.<BR/><BR/>Mainstream, usually Weberian, organizational sociology does a far better job generating empirically useful abstractions of the far more than two kinds of management within and across the public-private divide. This can be seen quite easily in the arguments made by the Triple Helix crowd, folks who argue (too strongly) that globalization, etc., has generated a condition wherein there is ever more public-private-university collaboration than ever before... and that this is a good thing.<BR/><BR/>As always, thanks for helping me better understand clarify where I stand on things I think I know as they apply to issues outside the center of my work.Alan Rudyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05814965319203398069noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33273315.post-52278699118273213142007-04-27T06:26:00.000-05:002007-04-27T06:26:00.000-05:00Sure, I agree that like many management texts, thi...Sure, I agree that like many management texts, this monograph really does present an overly simple picture of complex institutions. That's especially true in the nonprofit world, where operationally it's often difficult to tell the boundaries between nonprofits in terms of mission, activities, and personnel. Collins has also been criticized for paying too much attention to leaders (a charge that he addresses in GTG, but that I think still sticks).<BR/><BR/>On the other hand, as I remind my grad students, sometimes more complex doesn't mean better. Collins isn't conducting a poststructuralist analysis here, he's constructing a narrative that appears to hold across multiple organizations and in which he is fairly open about what constitutes success conditions. This sort of analysis allows him to gain a lot of traction across multiple organizations, traction that is often lost in the details of more complex analyses, and traction that moves readers along the way to those success conditions. In Latourean terms, he's black-boxing. <BR/><BR/>This black-boxing is absolutely necessary at some point, but black boxes can always be opened. In this review, I've focused on examining how well the black box works rather than how it is constructed -- or to switch metaphors, I'm critiquing the road rather than the destination, the method rather than the methodology.Clay Spinuzzihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13356273383001825508noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33273315.post-41171958939521614372007-04-25T23:18:00.000-05:002007-04-25T23:18:00.000-05:00Many complaints come to mind given my leftishness....Many complaints come to mind given my leftishness. However, it seems to me that the key issue w/r/t universities is that Collins -- by your account -- assumes universities have a singular core mission... they do not and have not since at least the time that Clark Kerr developed the neologism, multiversity. <BR/><BR/>In fact, the reduction of multiplex - socionatural, technonatural, political ecological, cyborg movements/institutions - into single issue/mission organizations may make management more efficient -- whether in the business or social sector -- but it also has deeply contradictory results. One instance of this would be the destruction of the grass roots energy within the Friends of the Earth when they drove out David Brower and moved from SF to DC. An other set of which Brian Wynne and others have provided in their work on the construction of risk... where analyses focus on the differences between the complex and multiform concerns about ecotechnical risk relative to the singular, reductionist or, at best, stochastic take by risk scientists embedded in gov't agecies and businesses. Take GMOs, where the public is equally concerned with ecological, scientific, health, technical and cultural "risks" of their promulgation -- issues further complexified in university settings by issue of public mission, privatized knowledge, teaching excellence, patented technologies and beyond -- whereas biotechnologists invariably insist on objective measures grounded in risk science.Alan Rudyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05814965319203398069noreply@blogger.com