Spinuzzi

Seminar: Writing Persuasive Business Proposals

2012-01-13T12:11:00.002-06:00

I've been teaching proposal writing courses to undergraduates since the mid-90s - in fact, I'm teaching one this semester. But this year, as part of my work with UT's Human Dimensions of Organizations program, I'll also be presenting a one-day seminar on proposal writing.

From the description:

In this seminar, attendees will examine business proposals as persuasive arguments: they will take these proposals apart, examine their underlying components, and learn how to put them back together in ways that make them more effective. Using a proven methodology for developing these types of documents, attendees will generate basic proposal arguments to address a case study. This case study will allow students, working in small groups, to identify the problem presented in the case study; generate components of the proposal; analyze stakeholder dynamics; tie these complex elements together into a coherent, easily comprehensible argument; and outline a proposal based on this groundwork. Finally, the class will workshop applications to actual cases that attendees bring in.
After this seminar, attendees will be able to:
Understand basic proposal structure and logic.
Identify basic proposal sections and understand how they work together.
Clarify and identify objectives.
Develop a methodology for reaching the objective.
Perform audience analysis by identifying stakeholders, investigating their concerns, and weighting criteria accordingly.
Connect your team’s qualifications with the specific requirements implied in the situation and methodology.
Develop structured benefits that address the situation.
Tie these complex elements into a coherent argument.
Learn how to rework an ill-defined problem into an effective proposal.
Pour all this information into a basic proposal format.
The proposal-writing methodology used in this seminar was developed for large consulting agencies, but it can also apply to other sorts of proposals and reports in a variety of organizations.

If you need to write, evaluate, or consider proposals in your work, and if you're in the central Texas area, please consider joining me. And if proposals aren't your focus, consider one of the other spring seminars that HDO will be offering.

Questions? Contact me at clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu.

Transparency in Commenting: An Unintended Experiment with Google Docs

2011-12-01T17:12:00.001-06:00

I've been requiring students to turn projects in via Google Docs for a couple of years now, for at least three reasons:

It's online, so students don't have to worry about forgetting their homework at home and I don't have to worry about carrying around a stack of papers when I grade.
Docs are private by default, but easy to share with specific collaborators. So students can post online without having to worry that their papers will be seen by unintended readers.
It has a lot of collaborative functions, so students can easily collaborate and peer-review.

GDocs isn't the only tool that will do these things - I could have students use a closed wiki, Zoho Write, or various other tools. But GDocs is easy to use, imports MS Word fairly well, and looks enough like Word that I don't have to provide much of a tutorial. And now that UT has gone with Google Apps for students, the barrier for entry has been lowered.

Finally, Google also keeps improving GDocs' functionality, so I find new capabilities in the suite each semester.

But I have traditionally used GDocs as a read-only platform when I grade: I typically read the project, then type up comments in a separate window. That way there's no danger that students will see my comments before I post the grades. (The grades, of course, are posted in the university's secure system, never in a form stored on an outside server such as GDocs or email.)

Here was my reasoning for not embedding comments in the document:

Students might log in, see the comments, and get paranoid.
Students might actually try to edit the document while I'm working on it.
I might make a comment that I later realize is based on a poor reading of the paper. Sure, I could delete it later, but students would still see some of the backstage work that I prefer to keep hidden.

But in one of my courses this semester - Principles of Technical Writing - I decided to go ahead and comment inside the documents as I went. The rewards seemed too high not to do so. GDocs' new commenting system allowed me to highlight individual characters or phrases, then comment easily in the margins, and it also allowed me to post replies to my own comments. I had seen my students use this system well in their peer reviews, and I saw the real benefits for the fine-grained commenting I needed to do on their proposals.

But there was a little thing I forgot about the new commenting system until halfway through the first paper. Every time you make a comment, by default, it emails the document's owner. Not only was there a chance that students would see my comments in practice, it was assured. When I realized that, I had a moment of panic, then realized the damage was done. I shrugged, put a comment at the top of the page to the effect of "I'll fill in overall comments once I'm done grading," then graded the others in the same way.

Students loved it.

I was quite surprised, actually. I thought that the many emailed comments, some positive, some critical, would make students paranoid. But they reported - both at the time and today, at the end of the semester - that they appreciated seeing the grading work going on. From their perspective, here are some of the advantages:

They knew when I had gotten to their paper.
They had a good idea of how their paper was shaping up, just by looking at the comments.
Many were busy enough with other classes - apparently they take other classes too - that they deferred reading the emailed comments until they had time. So they weren't becoming more tense with each email.
By the time I wrote up the overall comments, they had a good idea what I was going to say.

Later in the semester, when I was having them turn in minor revisions every class period, they were also impressed by how quickly I got to their papers and how quickly I could comment them (an unexpected boost to my ethos).

Talking over this experience with the students, I realized that more than anything, they appreciated the transparency. They are used to professors black-boxing the commenting process, but that doesn't mean they can't handle a more transparent process. They actually prefer it. And that makes total sense: They're used to seeing short messages (think texting, Twitter, Facebook) and they're mature enough to understand that the overall comment and grade are inductively realized through this process that I accidentally made transparent.

In the end, my students recommended that I continue commenting this way. And I believe I will.

Join me at SIGDOC 2012

2011-11-28T09:57:00.001-06:00

Consider joining me at the 2012 ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication conference, which will be held in Seattle, Washington, October 3-5, 2012.

We're looking for research and technical papers, experience reports, and posters. Deadline for submission is June 1, so get started now! Don't hesitate to contact me with questions, and please do get the word out to colleagues and grad students.

Reading :: The Sling and the Stone

2011-11-26T13:15:00.001-06:00

The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century
By Col. Thomas X. Hammes

If you're looking for an overview of fourth-generation warfare - networked, dispersed, focused on persuading decision-makers, essentially politics (and rhetoric) through other means - this 2006 book is a very good start. It has flaws, which I'll discuss in a moment, but these are overshadowed by the insights Hammes brings to the table.

Those who have been reading my blog over the last few years may be familiar with the term "fourth-generation warfare" (4GW) primarily through the works of John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (although they tend not to use the term for reasons I'll discuss in a moment). Hammes describes 4GW in this way:

Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) uses all available networks - political, economic, social and military - to convince the enemy's political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency. Still rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power, 4GW makes use of society's networks to carry on its fight. Unlike previous generations of warfare, it does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy's military forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy's political will. Fourth-generation wars are lengthy - measured in decades rather than months or years. (p.2)

And a page later:

There is nothing mysterious about 4GW. Like all wars, it seeks to change the enemy's political position. Like all wars, it uses available weapons systems to achieve that end. Like all wars, it reflects the society it is part of. Like all previous generations of war, it has evolved in consonance with society as a whole. It evolves because practical people solved specific problems related to their fights against much more powerful enemies. ... Mao started this form of war ... (p.3)

Fourth-generation warfare is grounded in Alvin and Heidi Toffler's book War and Anti-War, which applies their wave theory of history to war (see Hammes p.10). In this theory, different innovations (agriculture, industry, information) led to fundamental changes in social organization, and each form corresponded to a form (or generation) of warfare. (For more fine-grained examinations of the relationship between societal organization and warfare, see Bobbitt's books The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent and Max Boot's War Made New.) In Hammes' reckoning, the generations of warfare looked like this:

1GW: From the invention of gunpowder in the feudal era, through the transition to nation-states, peaking during the Napoleonic wars. (Ch.2)
2GW: From Waterloo to World War I, enabled by more taxes, more wealth to tax, more industrialization, better transportation systems, and more patriotism. (Ch.2)
3GW: From the end of World War I, when the social contract had been dramatically altered; maturing in 1940 with the Blitzkrieg, which became the prototype for later doctrines such as the US' AirLand Battle (Ch.3). 3G warfare continues to guide the strategy and doctrine of nation-state warfare, although it is giving way to other approaches.

But, Hammes argues in Chapter 4, society has changed considerably since World War II. Changes include:

International organizations that infringe on national sovereignty, e.g., the UN (p.33)
The rise of regional organizations that infringe on national sovereignty, e.g., the WTO (p.34)
An increase in the number and diversity of nations (p.34)
The number of stateless actors, including transnational actors (Greenpeace, al Qaeda) and subnational actors (the Kurds, the IRA) (p.35)
International financial markets (p.35)
The sharp growth of the information sector, which produces "wealth-generating assets [that] are easily moved - and are often part of geographically distributed networks in their day-to-day operations" (p.38)

Hammes summarizes: "Warfare is coming to parallel this model" (p.38). And he notes that this warfare often involves unrest, leading to "the severe breakdown of order within many ... postcolonial 'nations'" - the scare quotes denote how artificial the nations' boundaries are - resulting in "much earlier social organizations - tribal, clan, or gang" (pp.41-42). (Note the parallel with Ronfeldt's TIMN concept, also based on the Tofflers' wave theory of history, in which different organizational forms are concatenated but can decompose over time.) In sum, Hammes says, the Industrial-Age hierarchy is giving way to the Information-Age network, not just in societal and economic organization, but also in warfare (p.42).

Over the next few chapters, Hammes identifies 4GW's birth in Mao's insurgency (Ch.5), then examines its development in Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap's model in Vietnam (Ch.6), then via Nicuragua's Sandanistas (Ch.7) and the Palestinian Intifada (Ch.8). Hammes examines each of these in detail, making his admiration clear for how the leaders of each phase developed 4GW (strategically, tactically, and operationally - he doesn't evaluate their objectives themselves). A critical turning point is in Chapter 9, when hardline Palestinians led by Arafat "squandered" the gains of the Intifada and turned to clumsy conventional warfare. This clumsy move was exploited by hardline Israelis, who themselves began to expertly use 4GW tactics to provoke Palestinians to open defiance and violence (p.119). These tactics gave the Israeli hardliners the upper hand in the public relations battle - and as Hammes points out, 4GW is about messaging (p.128). Israel learned to excel at 4GW, using its insurgency-derived tactics in the service of the nation-state.

In Chapter 20, Hammes begins to discuss al Qaeda, particularly its focus on messaging. For instance, one "critical aspect of al-Qaeda's image among Muslims" is that "he [bin Laden] is careful to fulfill the requirement to declare his intent before attacking" (p.146), ensuring that AQ doesn't just appear to be appropriating others' attacks. From there, Hammes moves to Afghanistan in Ch.11, particularly examining the conglomeration of anti-governmental forces (AGFs), including AQ, the Taliban, smugglers, drug dealers, foreign powers, Pashtuns, and other tribal leaders. "The AGF is a true networked, 4GW enemy and will display all the resilience characteristics of such enemies" (p.166). He doesn't use the term interessement, but that's what came to mind for me.

Chapter 12 brings us to Iraq's anti-coalition forces (ACFs), which represents a similarly interessed group of different associations. "Each [member of the ACF] fights for its own goals. The goals of each group may be at odds with others," he says (p.179), sounding much like Ronfeldt's description of the networked organizations that supported the Zapatistas.

These different cases bring us to Ch.13, where Hammes discusses the disadvantages that the US faces due to changes in technology. Although we are accustomed to thinking in terms of the advantages we gain in warfare, Hammes (sounding like Robb) argues that IT has actually eroded our lead because 4GW enemies can match and exceed our capabilities more easily, using continuous innovation with off-the-shelf tools and commercial networks. "New technology favors a new generation of war," he warns (p.192). Although the US' "systems are the most powerful, most capable, most technically advanced in the world," those systems don't give us an inherent advantage because of "our current organization and the changing threat we face" (p.192). The US military's organization is outdated and hierarchical, he says (p.192), while our assets are outclassed by the commercial assets available to enemies (p.194). Indeed, enemies "are free to exploit the full range of commercially available information technology" (p.195). More importantly, "today's terrorists are organized as networks rather than hierarchies" (p.196).

In the next few chapters, Hammes attempts to answer the question: What do we do about it? "The future is flexibility," he argues in Ch.17, the final chapter. Among other things, he suggests using network theory to better examine 4GW networks and identify key leaders (who won't be major nodes, but will communicate with them). (Notice that network theory is different from networked organizations, although the two are often confused.)

Okay, that's the summary. Now a brief critique. Although Hammes does an excellent job describing 4GW, the wave theory of history - at least in this implementation - is a bit too deterministic and rigid. John Arquilla speaks out about this general tendency in his recent book Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits, in which he argues that "The generational concept is simply inaccurate": irregular, networked, decentralized warfare has been around a long time and has often been synthesized with dominant forms of warfare. Similarly, Arquilla's longtime writing partner David Ronfeldt - although he certainly subscribes to the Tofflers' wave theory of history - emphasizes that the organizational form of the network is the "first and forever form," perhaps newly emergent, but not representative of a historical stage. [correction 12.5.2011 - Ronfeldt writes to correct me: he called Tribes the "first and forever form." Mea culpa.] Ronfeldt similarly describes other organizational forms as being synthesized together (Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks = TIMN) rather than each form giving way to the next.

That criticism is more important in terms of theory than in practice, however, Although I disagree with Hammes about the notion of emergent historical stages leading to generations of warfare, I admire the depth and breadth of his examination of 4GW. It's an excellent book, informative, gripping, and well worth your time. Those of you who study rhetoric, as I do, may also find ways to apply it to other domains. Take a look.

Reading :: On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

2011-11-25T18:51:00.001-06:00

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods
By Bruno Latour

I really enjoy most of Latour's work, but I strongly prefer his case study-based work, which seems more grounded and richly illustrative, to his more philosophical work. Alas, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods is in the latter category. What's more, two of its three chapters represent extended but essentially warmed-over versions of work that Latour has already discussed in Pandora's Hope and Iconoclash. Latour has done some work to pull these chapters together, partly by overlaying religious references throughout (for instance, he says that his second chapter is about the Second Commandment and his third chapter is written as a sermon). But I wanted more out of the book.

One thing that Latour does do here, though, is to examine and defend religion in a more vigorous way. Specifically, he wants to stop seeing religion as contending with, or indeed even speaking about, the same things that science does. Here's a passage from his sermon in Chapter 3:

I have to note at the beginning that I am not trying to produce a critique of religion. That truth is in question in science and religion is not, for me, in question. Contrary to what some of you, who might know my work on science (mostly by hearsay), might be led to believe, I am interested mainly in the practical conditions of truth-telling and not in debunking religion, after having disputed the claims of science (so it is said). If it were already necessary to take science seriously, without giving it some sort of "social explanation," such a stand is even more necessary for religion: debunkers and iconoclasts simply would miss the point. Rather, my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of "truth-generators." (p.100)

That is, he wants to examine religion just as he has examined science: not in terms of how it reveals Reality but in terms of how it makes truth-claims. He attempts to do this not by talking about religion but rather by talking "religiously," that is, "by demonstrating it in vivo" through his sermonic argument (p.101). Unfortunately, although I am sympathetic to Latour's general argument, the sermon left me cold; it seemed quite similar to Latour's other arguments.

As a side note, I should note that Latour takes a few sideswipes at Durkheim throughout, most specifically leveling the same critique that I did in my recent review, the critique that Durkheim has overgeneralized the experiences of specific tribes as a developmental stage for all religion. This is vintage Latour.

If you're very interested in a Latourean take on religion, this book might be a good read for you, specifically because it draws together some of his previous work in a religious context. But although I find religion endlessly fascinating, I felt underwhelmed. See what you think.

Reading :: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

2011-11-25T18:00:00.001-06:00

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
By Emile Durkheim

(The above link goes to a different version of the book: mine is the 1915 version, reprinted by Free Press in 1965.)

Partly through this book, I tweeted that I wish I had read this book first, before Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind. There, Levi-Strauss criticizes the notion of totem, which is Durkheim's starting point in his study of religion. In fact, I should have probably read Frazer's The Golden Bough before Durkheim, since Durkheim's book is in great part a critique of Frazer's position that totemism is magic, not religion.

In any case, Durkheim provides a meticulous and detailed discussion of elementary religion - that is to say, totemism as practiced in Australian and North American tribes - and argues that religion started with these elementary forms before developing into the more structured, personified forms we know today. He asserts that

before all, rites are means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically. From this, we may be able to reconstruct hypothetically the way in which the totemic cult should have arisen originally. Men who find themselves united, partially by bonds of blood, but still more by a community of interest and tradition, assemble and become conscious of their moral unity. For the reasons we have set forth, they are led to represent this unity in the form of a very special kind of consubstantiality: they think of themselves as participating in the nature of some determined animal. Under these circumstances, there is only one way for them to affirm their collective existence: this is to affirm that they are like the animals of this species, and to do so not only in the silence of their own thoughts, but by material acts. ... the imitative rites appear as the first form of the cult. (p.432)

Durkheim makes this argument while maintaining respect for all forms of religious life. But I wonder about his argument, which rests on the assumption that tribal peoples represent a universal stage of development and thus their beliefs are a snapshot of the beliefs at that stage of development. Did the peoples living in, say, Crete or Okinawa or Ireland also go through these selfsame levels of development and evolve their own religions in the same way? Unfortunately, Durkheim provides only a few examples of how Western religions may have developed from cults.

Nevertheless, the book is a tour de force in examining totemism in Australian tribes specifically. Durkheim carefully and sedulously examines each aspect of totemism, relating all of them to his central thesis. If religion or tribal dynamics are interesting to you, certainly take a look at this classic.

Reading :: Innovation and Entrepeneurship

2011-11-25T17:19:00.001-06:00

Innovation and Entrepreneurship
By Peter F. Drucker

This book is one of Drucker's classics. Unfortunately, I had a hard time maintaining interest - perhaps because I'm not an entrepeneur, but also perhaps because it's not sparkling prose. Nevertheless, it's a classic for a reason - Drucker packs a lot of information in here.

For instance, here's Drucker's pithy explanation of what an entrepeneur does: "the entrepeneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity" (p.28). Indeed, "entrepeneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield" (p.28). Entrepeneurs must innovate systematically, and that means "monitoring seven sources for innovative opportunity" (p.35). The first four are symptoms of change within the enterprise:

the unexpected
the incongruity
innovation based on process need
changes in industry structure or market structure (p.35)

The last three "involve changes outside the enterprise or industry":

demographics
changes in perception, mood, and meaning
new knowledge (p.35)

In the rest of the book, Drucker examines each of these points in turn, in great detail. He cautions us to always expect and look for change so that we can get ahead of it. Specifically, he says that every three years, we should put everything on trial - "every single product, process, technology, market, distributive channel, not to mention every single internal staff activity" (p.151). Essentially, he says, don't become comfortable in routine. Don't ossify.

And this is an important point. Although Drucker is talking to the enterprise, he says that

'Planning' as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepeneurial society and economy. Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepeneurship has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and micro-economic. It had better start small, tentative, flexible. (p.255)

Sage words. If you're interested in innovation and entrepeneurship, read this book.

Reading :: The Lean Startup

2011-11-25T17:05:00.001-06:00

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
By Eric Ries

Eric Ries had a problem. As cofounder and CTO of IMVU, a Silicon Valley startup, he knew what his customers wanted: to connect instant messaging with virtual reality avatars.

Initially, the idea was to create avatars you could use to interact virtually with your friends. Your friends might be on different IM networks such as AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or iChat – which might sit on your desktop like separate spigots at a soda fountain. But IMVU would interoperate with all of them, serving as a sort of universal service for connecting your friends across all of these networks.

Users hated it. Adoption at first was incredibly low.

In fact, in IMVU’s in-house tests, users enjoyed creating avatars and using them to chat with strangers. They enjoyed meeting new people anonymously. But they did NOT want to tie together their IM networks, and they certainly did not want to allow these strangers in their AIM buddy lists. They were strangers!

Ries says that he and the others at IMVU had a hard time accepting this. He kept dismissing what the test users were saying, assuming that they simply didn’t represent IMVU’s market. But every new batch of test users said the same thing. Meanwhile, IMVU’s usage stats remained essentially flat.

Ries had seen his product as a way to help old friends interact in new ways in the same place. That’s what would make the service sticky. But the test users consistently told him they didn’t want that. They wanted a way to create virtual identities and use them to meet new friends who also had virtual identities. In essence, he wanted a clubhouse and they wanted a costume party. The two objectives implied different products, different services, different marketing strategies – in fact, they implied that IMVU would have to pivot.

As Ries makes clear, they could very well have ignored this issues and consequently failed in the marketplace, chasing after nonexistent users. But instead they decided to pivot. They wrote off the sunk costs in the first option, including a considerable amount of interoperability code that Ries had written himself. And they reformed their strategy.

But they didn’t capitulate – they synthesized their vision with what the customers would accept. That synthesis involved changing the product, of course, but also the process and internal structure of the company. Ries instituted a set of continual feedback metrics to better regulate this synthesis, building a product and service that helped users discover needs they didn’t know they had. As Ries put it:

We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn’t to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want. (Reis 2011, p.50)

It worked. The flat growth became steep growth. And Ries developed a set of techniques for establishing continuous feedback and improvement in startups. These include qualitative and quantitative measures, but also guidance on when and how to pivot. It's a fascinating book: fascinating as in well written and interesting to read, but also fascinating as in sparking ideas for innovating quickly and interpreting feedback on a fast cycle. If you're involved in startups, software development, or other fast-paced innovation, read it.

Reading :: What Technology Wants

2011-11-25T16:33:00.001-06:00

What Technology Wants
By Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired, wrote this 2010 book as a meditation on how technology has developed and how it might develop autonomously. He coins the term technium to delineate what he's examining:

The technium exists beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections. (pp.11-12)

"Technium" is thus a very broad term, essentially covering civilization from the first use of language onward. That breadth allows Kelly to argue that

after 10,000 years of slow evolution and 200 years of incredible intricate exfoliation, the technium is maturing into its own thing. Its sustaining network of self-reinforcing processes and parts have given it a noticeable measure of autonomy. It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges. (pp.12-13)

The Latour fans out there may warm to the notion that Kelly is embracing a form of symmetry, seeing nonhumans in the same way that he sees humans. But that's not Kelly's viewpoint. This is not an ontological text.

Rather, Kelly is actually arguing that the technium - in which we are important but minority partners - is evolving as an organism (not as an actor-network). He makes his argument by starting with homo sapiens's discovery of language (Ch.2) and moving on through various stages of technology. Based on this discussion, he proposes that evolution's triad of vectors - functional (adaptive), structural (inevitable), and historical (contingent) (p.123) - is matched by a triad of vectors for technological evolution: intentional (open), structural (inevitable), and historical (contingent) (p.183). Indeed, he strongly argues that inventions seem to be inevitable at certain periods, and selects a number of examples of inventions that appeared at different points on the globe at roughly the same time. (The examples don't include what I would consider to be the most important and germane one, writing, which was invented only three times in the world's history, at very different times.)

Kelly, then, makes a very insistent argument for a teleological understanding of technological change, one in which we will be surpassed by and (Kelly hopes) integrated with our technological creations. It strongly reminds me of Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Unfortunately, I don't think the book's argument holds together well. At many points - such as Kelly's argument that technological inventions pop up at roughly the same time across the globe - evidence is thin and seems cherry-picked. We don't get to see many counterarguments or concessions. Since Kelly's claim is extraordinary, we might expect some extraordinary proof, including a better explanation of why technological change could occur similarly in very different places under very different conditions - and neither the strong proof nor the strong explanation are forthcoming. Due to these issues, I can recommend What Technology Wants as an interesting, engaging, and thought-provoking read, but I can't say that it lives up to its claims.

(someday I will blog again)

2011-11-21T08:55:00.001-06:00

I see that it's been over a month since I blogged last, and even longer since I blogged a book review. This makes me sad. But I've fallen behind because (a) I've been reading books that don't relate as deeply into my core scholarship, so I haven't felt so compelled to write about them and (b) I've been even busier than usual.

As a result, I have about 5-6 books that I need to review. (That's not all I've read, just all I plan to review.) Those include a book I finished this summer. Hopefully I'll get to these over the break.

MA in activity theory

2011-11-21T08:53:00.001-06:00

A remarkable opportunity. From Yrjo Engestrom:

Dear Colleagues,
The next round of selection of students for our Master's Degree Program in Adult Education and Developmental Work Research (entirely conducted in English) starts today, the 21st of November. The application period will end on the 31st of January, 2012. For those who are not familiar with the Finnish education system, we would like to emphasize that high quality university training in this country is free of charge (there are no tuitions) for all students, including those coming from abroad.

The Master's Degree Program in Adult Education and Developmental Work Research is based on cultural-historical activity theory and trains competent developers and interventionists in workplaces, organizations and other communities. The program selects 12 students every second year to ensure close individual supervision and collaboration in a compact academic community.

The program was launced in 2006 and is based on the 20-year tradition of developmental work research conducted in the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning CRADLE at the Institute of Behavioural Sciences (IBS) of University of Helsinki. This is an interventionist research approach rooted in the legacy of Vygotsky and Leont'ev and internationally recognized as an innovative framework to study work and learning. During their studies students are typically involved in research and development projects conducted in the CRADLE and in its partner organizations.

Please circulate this call and encourage students to apply.

For more information, see:
http://www.helsinki.fi/atmo/brochure_2011.pdf andhttp://www.helsinki.fi/atmo/

With kind regards,

Yrjö Engeström Reijo Miettinen Annalisa Sannino Anne Vierros

CFP: Connexions Issue 1

2011-10-18T09:17:00.000-05:00

If you're an academic interested in professional communication, especially in an international context, I encourage you to consider this CFP for Connexions.

Excerpt:

The first issue of connexions • international professional communication journal | revista de comunicação profissional internacional aims at examining the field from your point of view on
the past, present, and foreseeable future of the practice, research, and teaching of international professional communication, in local, national, international, and global contexts,
and/or
how the practice, research, and teaching of international professional communication has reacted to changes in context, and acted upon its contexts, in different parts of the world.

Reading :: Street Corner Society

2011-09-25T20:36:00.003-05:00

Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian SlumBy William Foote Whyte

My family has been considered white since before I was born - probably since about 1960. But it was not always so. When my parents decided to get married in the mid-1950s, my father's family called my mother "the white woman" (she is of Northern European extract). Her family similarly didn't consider an Italian-American to be white.

I thought about this bit of family history when I read the classic ethnography Street Corner Society, set in the Italian slum of "Cornerville" (in reality a neighborhood in Boston) in 1937-1938. These Italian-Americans were decidedly not considered "white" by others or by themselves. Furthermore, they formed more fine-grained strata within the community. As Whyte describes it, this slum was populated by an older generation of Italian immigrants ("greasers") and their American-born children, who are "strongly attached to their parents, and yet they look down on them" (p.xviii). These immigrant families came from various regions in Italy, with the lowest-rank region being Sicily. (The name Spinuzzi is Sicilian.)

At the height of the Depression, these young Italian-Americans had trouble finding work, so they spent much time hanging around on corners - in gangs at younger ages, but as they grew older, in informal groups or more formal societies.

Whyte took advantage of a fellowship by living in Cornerville and spending most of his waking time with these men, who were in their late 20s. The result is a classic sociological ethnography that, despite its flaws, holds great insights.

First, the insights. Whyte, a careful student of human interactions, begins to detect patterns of status and mutual obligations in the groups, clubs, and societies he frequents. For instance, Doc, his main informant was the leader of The Nortons. As leader, he had to meet heavier obligations than lower-rank, less capable members. In fact, Doc, though he had no job, often spent his free money on helping lower-status members.

But leadership does have its privileges. To his surprise, Whyte realizes that the men's bowling scores closely track the men's current rank in the group - to the extent that a low-ranking member who is an excellent bowler in other contexts would bowl poorly against higher-ranking members, apparently despite himself. Furthermore, someone who loses status bowls progressively worse against lower-ranking members.

Whyte studies a drama club, a social club, a local political club, and (from a distance) racketeering, and sees these sorts of rank relations throughout. But in each context he gains fresh insights. For instance, in racketeering, he realizes that in Cornerville, "the primary function of the police department is not the enforcement of the law but the regulation of illegal activities" (p.138).

In politics, Whyte draws out some of the ethnic tensions in Cornerville's relations with the rest of the city. For instance, one Cornerville man tries to persuade another to vote for his preferred candidate, who is also Italian-American: "Why not give a Wop a chance?" (p.161). Elsewhere, an Irish-American politician complains to Whyte that "the Italians will always vote for one of their own," even if they claim they will vote for another candidate: "The Italian people are very undependable," and hard to hold to account because "You can't tell one Italian from another" (p.195). Indeed, Whyte concludes elsewhere that "the Italians are looked upon by upper-class people as among the least desirable of the immigrant peoples" (p.273).

No wonder that, as Whyte relates in his retrospective appendix, Saul Alinsky loved the book (p.358).

This version of the book, the 50th anniversary version, has three appendices. The first is a retrospective in which Whyte discusses the book's reception and impact, its criticisms, and a bit of his methodology. He also reveals the real name of the community he studied and the names of his informants, who had all passed away by that point, and he describes discussions he had had with them about the book. These are all interesting, but raise some important questions about Whyte's work.

Recall that Whyte studied Cornerville as a junior fellow at Harvard, before beginning his PhD work. He quickly fell in with his main informant, Doc, the 29-year-old leader of the Nortons. Doc was by his accounts upright and honest, but also very savvy about maintaining leadership. Doc also, Whyte reveals, read and commented on every line of Whyte's manuscript.

Doc doesn't come off as a completely strong leader in the manuscript, which frankly describes some of his failures and loss of rank. But he generally comes off better than, say, Chick, an aspiring politician who is his main rival. Revealingly, Whyte describes a talk he had with Chick years after the book's publication. Chick is unhappy with his portrayal, and tells Whyte that Doc vocally agreed with him the last time the two had talked. Whyte is startled at first, but realizes that of course Doc would say that: he has to deal with Chick and probably doesn't want to admit that he knew about the portrayal beforehand.

A less charitable interpretation is that Doc steered Whyte's account to damage his rival, while maintaining deniability.

Nevertheless, Whyte's book is really exceptional. The references are very thin - something that apparently caused controversy on Whyte's dissertation committee - but the study is well told and well textured. Despite my less charitable interpretation, no one really comes off very badly in the story, even the racketeers. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: The Penguin and the Leviathan

2011-09-25T19:37:00.001-05:00

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-InterestBy Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler's previous book, The Wealth of Networks, was an academic book about how peer production works. This one is a popular book that explores the related question of how peer production and similar cooperative enterprises can work, since they seem to contradict the seemingly natural impulse of self-interest. As Benkler points out, this assumption of rational self-interest underpins so many things that we take for granted: in economics, rational choice theory; in law, harsh punishments; in business, top-down hierarchies; in government, the Leviathan. Yet, Benkler argues, cooperation is deeply ingrained in us and can serve to revolutionize all of these areas.

Benkler's examples are familiar to anyone who has read others' books in this vein, such as The Starfish and the Spider and What's Mine is Yours. (I confess that I thought: again with Linux, Zipcar, and Toyota? Surely there are other examples.) But Benkler covers new ground by delving into the nature/culture debate, describing evolutionary as well as cultural roots of cooperation; psychological and social influences; empathy; fairness; and morals. That is, Benkler follows themes of cooperation through several disciplines.

The result is a fine popular contribution. But in covering so many disciplines, Benkler spreads his argument too thin. For instance, he touches on the nature-nurture debate that stretched through the entire 20th century, but doesn't engage in it deeply except to summarily conclude that both are influences. Similarly, his discussion of psychological and social influences hinge on the notion of Goffman's work with frame, but he doesn't do much with that notion besides demonstrating that when people see the same task within competing frames, they perceive it differently. In these, and in the other chapters, Benkler takes relatively narrow conversations happening within a given discipline and characterizes these conversations as what those disciplines have discovered about cooperation. Obviously he has to gloss if he's going to apply all of these disciplines to one topic in one book - but that's a very thin gloss. I would have preferred much more hedging and, well, framing.

However, Benkler does manage to counteract so many of the obvious yet flawed objections to peer production, objections predicated on a view of humanity as simply selfish or self-interested. If you deal with people who roll their eyes at the notion of open source software or who caution you not to look at Wikipedia because "anyone could write anything there," this might be the right book to give them.

Reading :: Patterns of Culture

2011-09-25T17:37:00.000-05:00

Patterns of Culture
By Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict's 1934 classic Patterns of Culture deserves a more detailed review than this one, but unfortunately I don't have that review in me right now. It's an interesting book, strongly taking the side of culture in the nature-vs.-culture debate that raged throughout the 1930s: "Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex," she argues (p.14), particularly for human beings, who are marvelously plastic. But cultures do have larger tendencies, larger patterns, that show up in individual actions and gestures (p.79).

Indeed, Benedict argues, we can think of cultures as broadly Dionysian (seeking to annihilate bounds and limits and "break through into another order of experience" through excess, pp.78-79) and Apollonian (seeking to reinforce and follow bounds, p.79). She illustrates these two sorts of cultures with extended discussions of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Dobu of New Guinea, and the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island. All of these accounts are fascinating.

"The three cultures ... are not merely heterogeneous assortments of acts and beliefs," she asserts in Chapter VII. "They have each certain goals toward which their behaviour is directed and which their institutions further" (p.223). She adds that these cultures are essentially incommensurable (p.223).

But, she adds, "it would be absurd to cut every culture down to the Procrustean bed of some catchword characterization" (p.228). "Facile generalizations about the integration of culture are most dangerous in field-work. ... None of the people we have discussed in this volume were studied in the field with any preconception of a consistent type of behaviour which that culture illustrated" (p.229). Indeed, the discussed characterizations are not types, she says, but rather "each one is an empirical characterization, and probably is not duplicated in its entirety anywhere else in the world" (p.238).

Benedict goes on at some length in this vein in Ch. VII. That's a relief, since that's what I took her project to be up to this point in the book. But the number of times she goes over this point makes me wonder if that's the reaction she originally received when she shopped around the manuscript. I would have liked it better if she had been able to integrate this clear point much more thoroughly earlier in the book, especially in pp.78-79 and throughout the three cases, so that we didn't receive this impression at the outset.

In any case, the book is certainly worth reading as an anthropological classic. But in terms of careful explication and analysis, I was not entirely impressed.

Reading :: Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom

2011-09-25T16:31:00.002-05:00

Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases
By Mary Lay Schuster and Amy D. Propen

Over the last few years, the two authors have written some important articles on domestic violence and child protection cases in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. These articles are really quite strong, describing the cloud of different advocates, volunteers, and texts that surround the courtroom in these chaotic, emotionally charged cases. And in this book, the authors summarize their three-year study of Victim Impact Statements, including interviews with judges and advocates, analysis of models and sample VISes, and courtroom observations.

The book builds on and amplifies the work of the previously published articles. Here, the authors take us on a tour of these difficult cases, introducing us to the judges, advocates, victims, and defendants; the many genres that accompany each stage of the process; the competing interests; the tangled practices; and the standards of proof used to make decisions. We feel sympathy for the victims and their families, but - and here I think the authors are to be commended - we begin to feel some sympathy even for the defendants, who may have given in to poor impulse control and now face the possibility of losing their kids forever. We also become to understand the difficult, conflicted jobs of the judge and the court-appointed special advocates, who must determine the best course of action from what are sometimes a set of unappealing alternatives. After reading this book, I began to understand how difficult and complicated such work is, how genres and practices help to structure and guide it, and how families are affected by it. If you're interested in the court system or genre studies, take a look.

Reading :: Tristes Tropiques

2011-09-25T16:16:00.001-05:00

Tristes Tropiques
By Claude Levi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques is Claude Levi-Strauss' memoir. It's a remarkable book for a number of reasons, not least because Levi-Strauss sees the humor and vanity in every human connection. At many points, the book made me laugh out loud - remarkable, since the book begins with Levi-Strauss fleeing Nazi-occupied France and attempting to make it through US bureaucracy with his ethnographic materials. From this scene, Levi-Strauss' previous journeys to South America are told in flashbacks, flashbacks that unfortunately never quite bring us back to the original scene. The book lacks closure, both in this large sense and in the smaller encounters he describes with Brazilian aristocrats, South American missionaries, various Native American tribes, and informants in India.

The encounters with the Native American tribes were the most interesting ones for me. Levi-Strauss describes himself as a once-idealistic, but eventually cynical and crafty, ethnologist who must use his wiles to extract information and avoid being exploited by his informants. At one point, he makes a gift of bolts of red flannel to a nomadic tribe; when he wakes up the next day, they are all covered from head to foot in flannel, men, women, children, even pets. By midday they tire of the flannel and leave it on the ground. This inspires a hatred of red flannel in him, and he trades away the rest of the bolts as soon as possible. At another point, the chief of another tribe admires his aluminum pot and offers to trade it for a large supply of (loosely speaking) beer. After Levi-Strauss refuses, the chief smiles and simply takes the pot. After encounters like these, Levi-Strauss begins using his own tricks: in one tribe, it is forbidden for outsiders to know members' names, but he realizes that he can get children to tell him each others' names by provoking fights between them.

More interesting to me was what Levi-Strauss did not cover. Levi-Strauss conducted many of these visits with his wife, but she rates only one mention in his book - when she had to be evacuated due to an injury. Up to this point, Levi-Strauss had described his visits with the tribes as if he were the only anthropologist on the expedition!

Levi-Strauss is a marvelous writer, but there's something a little too neat about his interpretations. For instance, he notes that the face tattoos in one tribe are similar to the arrangement of huts in another tribe, and he postulates that the tattoos are a subconscious yearning for the other tribe's arrangements. At other points, he makes similar leaps.

Toward the end of the book, rather than returning to the opening scene, Levi-Strauss compares and discusses religions. At one point, which is perhaps more shocking in 2011 than it was in 1955, Levi-Strauss claims that religions have devolved into more and more controlling forms, with their early pinnacle being Buddhism and their late nadir being Islam. The book ends with the sort of contemplation about the future of mankind that was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s.

Overall, the book was highly interesting and entertaining. It gave me new insights into Levi-Strauss, provided more context into his anthropological work, but didn't necessarily give me a lot of faith in his methods. Nevertheless, it's a terrific read. Pick it up and take a look.

Reading :: Linked

2011-09-25T15:47:00.000-05:00

Linked
By Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

A while back, Mark Zachry, who knew of my interest in networks, recommended that I read this book. It's a popular book that overviews "the new science of networks," which is to say, network analysis. Needless to say, it's fascinating.

Network analysis shouldn't be confused with networked organizations (e.g., Castells; Arquilla & Ronfeldt) or sociotechnical networks (e.g., Engestrom; Miettinen; Latour; Callon; see my second book). Rather, it's a way of examining how any particular type of node connects with other nodes. It has a strong mathematical component. And although it can be applied to people (as in social network analysis), it can also be applied to atoms, bits, citations, bus terminals - anything that can be conceived as a class or type, then connected to others of the same class/type.

Barabasi does a terrific job of describing how network analysis has developed as it is applied in different fields and to different problems. Along the way, he discusses concepts such as emerging clusters, hubs and connectors, small worlds, and power laws. Due to his clarity and examples, he illuminated several things for me about network analysis - and particularly its differences with, and strengths and weaknesses in comparison with, networked organizations and social network analysis.

If you're interested in networks under any of these headings, I strongly recommend this readable book.

Present Tense 2.1 is out

2011-09-19T08:55:00.003-05:00

Present Tense 2.1 is out. Essays look pretty interesting, especially Brian McNely's essay on sociotechnical notemaking.

Come see me at Lavacon

2011-09-14T13:16:00.002-05:00

All, but especially business types: I'll be presenting soon at The LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies, which is November 13–16, 2011 in beautiful Austin, Texas.

And I mean beautiful: highs are usually in the 70s F in November. Great conference weather.

But Lavacon looks like a thing of beauty too. My session is "What Makes Nimble Organizations Work?" I'll be drawing from my recent case studies on nimble organizations, including a search marketing company, independent contractors, and coworkers, and discussing six characteristics that make these nimble organizations work so well.

When you register, use the referral code “spinuzzi” to receive $100 off. Hope to see you there.

So far behind...

2011-09-09T10:56:00.005-05:00

I have at least six books on the shelf waiting to be reviewed. They'll have to wait a while longer as I clear out the projects to which I have (over)committed. That's too bad, because some of these books are terrific. Look for reviews in October.

2012 Qualitative Research Network

2011-09-09T10:54:00.002-05:00

If you're planning to go to the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, consider checking out the Qualitative Research Network:

QRN 2012 will be held Wednesday, March 21 from 1:30 to 5:00 at the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, Missouri.

The QRN provides mentoring and support to qualitative researchers at all levels of experience and working in diverse areas of study within the college composition and communication community. As a pre-conference research network, the QRN is open to everyone, including those who are already presenting at the conference in other venues.

The first hour of QRN 2012 will feature a keynote address by Paul Prior titled “Refining theory and methods through qualitative research: Tales from the field." The rest of the workshop will feature research roundtables where novice and experienced researchers will have twenty to thirty minutes to present their work-in-progress for feedback and discussion. Experienced qualitative researchers will be on hand at each table to offer suggestions and facilitate discussion.

In the CFP, they say:

We encourage submissions from those at any stage of the research process (e.g., planning,
data collecting, data analyzing, publishing).

Please send via email a brief description (approximately 500 words) of your research proposal by October 11 to both Gwen Gorzelsky (g.gorzelsky@wayne.edu) and Kevin Roozen (roozekr@auburn.edu), Co-Chairs, Qualitative Research Network.

TCQ special issue - Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical Communication

2011-09-04T13:22:00.000-05:00

All you long-range planners in technical communication, please consider writing a proposal for the TCQ special issue that Brian McNely, Christa Teston and I are putting together.

Proposals are due by February 15th, 2013; scheduled publication date is January, 2015.

That's a long lead time - but it means that you can start thinking about ideas now. And you can encourage your graduate students to do the same.

Questions? Please email Brian McNely (bjmcnely@bsu.edu).

Update: Bad link fixed.

A Ph.D. in activity theory

2011-09-02T11:46:00.001-05:00

I just received email from Yrjo Engestrom about the Doctoral Program on Developmental Work Research and Adult Education (DWRAE) offered in Finland. If you're passionate about AT and thinking about doctoral work, it could be a fantastic opportunity.

One other thing: "Note also that our doctoral program is free of charge."

I would like to inform you about our Doctoral Program on Developmental Work Research and Adult Education (DWRAE) which is now open for applications for the class of 2012. I am asking you to spread the word about this program, especially among students who might be interested to study activity theory in a focused, ambitious and supportive context.

This is an interdisciplinary four-year doctoral program based on cultural-historical activity theory and developmental work research methodology. Located in the Institute of Behavioural Sciences at University of Helsinki, Finland, the program has functioned since 1995 and we have produced 31 PhDs in this period. The application period for our program has started on the 22nd of August and will end on the 7th of October. Please check the web pages of the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Education and Learning (FiDPEL) for the details of the application procedure:http://www.edu.utu.fi/sivustot/kasva/en/call/

Within the FiDPEL pages, you will also find the pages devoted to our own sub-program:http://edu.utu.fi/sivustot/kasva/en/subprogrammes/dwrae/

In these pages, you will also find a document titled “How we work in the doctoral program”. This document will give you quite detailed information about the pedagogical principles and practical arrangements of our program. The program in entirely conducted in English. The first two years are structured around four semester-long seminars, focused on foundations of activity theory, research design and methodology, data analysis, and discussion with relevant alternative theories, respectively. Our program puts a strong emphasis on community building and collaborative work in research groups. Acivity systems and their transformations are often studied by means of formative interventions, such as the Change Laboratory.

Please visit also the web pages of our Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE):http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/index.htm

The CRADLE is responsible for the design and running of the Doctoral Program on Developmental Work Research and Adult Education. Therefore, it may be useful for you to read about the ongoing research in the CRADLE.

Note also that our doctoral program is free of charge. A limited number of fully funded four-year positions are available. In addition, we regularly admit a significant number of doctoral students who obtain funding form various other sources, e.g., in the form of grants, research assistantships, or partial salary from their employers. An important Finnish source of this kind of funding is CIMO; please see the web pages on their scholarships:http://www.cimo.fi/programmes/cimo_scholarships

Sign up for ATTW's Research Methods Workshop

2011-08-22T14:05:00.000-05:00

This looks like a great opportunity if you're planning a research project on writing - and you want the advice of some of the best in the field.

ATTW 2012 Research Methods WorkshopsMarch 20, 2012 12:30-4:00Scholarships Available!

The Research Methods Workshops are an initiative of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) aimed at providing an opportunity for those entering the profession and those less trained in research to develop more sophisticated research skills.

This year, ATTW is sponsoring two Research Methods Workshops:

Ellen Barton, Wayne State University, on Analyzing Data from Complex Institutional Contexts, and

Jason Swarts, North Carolina State University, on Tracing Networks of Discourse.

These two half-day workshops will be held in St Louis on Tuesday afternoon, March 20, 12:30-4:30. This is the day preceding the ATTW conference (March 21) and the CCCC conference (March 21-24).

Each workshop focuses on a methodology for data analysis and is designed to help researchers with data devise and try out an analytic approach.

Analyzing Data from Complex Institutional Contexts with Ellen Barton focuses on using research questions to select appropriate samples and develop coding schemes for data from institutions such as hospitals, universities, R&D labs, and government agencies.

Tracing Networks of Discourse with Jason Swarts focuses on analyzing discursive activity in distributed networked settings using Actor Network Theory.

Complete descriptions of these workshops can be found at:

Barton: http://www.attw.org/?q=node/193

Swarts: http://www.attw.org/?q=node/194

Registration for each workshop is $100. Ten scholarships of $200 each are available to graduate students to defray the cost of the workshop and hotel.

Participation in these workshops is awarded on a competitive basis and constitutes a place on the ATTW program.

To apply for a place in one of these workshops, complete the application form found at http://www.attw.org/?q=node/195 and send it along with a 1-page description of your project to cgeisler@sfu.ca. Applications are due October 15, 2011 and acceptances will emailed to you by Dec 1.

Questions about these workshops can be directed to Cheryl Geisler (cgeisler@sfu.ca), Chair of the ATTW Committee on Research.

SXSWi Panel: Bizarre User Behavior and How to Explain It

2011-08-15T14:25:00.000-05:00

For the last couple of years, I've presented at South by Southwest Interactive on aspects of loosely organized work. This year, I'm going to try something different. I've proposed a panel with Mark Zachry (University of Washington) and Bill Hart-Davidson and Liza Potts (both now at Michigan State).

The panel is called "Bizarre User Behavior and How to Explain It." In a nutshell, we'll be talking about various examples of user behavior that, at first glance, seems completely counterintuitive to interaction designers. Why does it happen? How can designers anticipate it, understand it, and work with users to better address their needs?

The four of us have some truly bizarre stories to share, and, I think, some very useful advice for designers as well. Please consider clicking through and voting for the panel!

Reading :: The Savage Mind

2011-08-10T16:04:00.000-05:00

The Savage Mind
By Claude Levi-Strauss

This summer I've been reading some of the classics of anthropology, especially ethnographies. Since I don't have a background in anthropology, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to unravel these books in theoretical or analytical terms. I'm just enjoying them.

But I confess I didn't enjoy this one as much. Partly that's because, rather than a coherent ethnography, it pulls from many published ethnographies to discuss the question of the supposed lack of abstract thinking in primitive cultures. Levi-Strauss attacks this notion, arguing that like science, "the thought we call primitive is founded on the demand for order" - and "sacred items ... contribute to the maintenance of order in the universe by occupying the places allocated for them" (p.10). Magic and science are parallel and independent forms of gaining knowledge (p.13).

Levi-Strauss famously introduces the notion of the bricoleur here, the craftsman or jack-of-all-trades whose "heterogeneous repertoire, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited" (p.17). According to Levi-Strauss, mythical thought is bricolage: it "builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events" (pp.21-22).

Through the rest of the book, Levi-Strauss extends this thesis by drawing from a wide array of existing ethnographies. These examples are often interesting, but we can understand his fervent wish for a computer in the far future that can disentangle these many connections by examining the raw transcripts of field notes (on punchcards!) (p.89). Yes, I'd like that too.

I've only scratched the surface of this book, and I think that someone with an anthropology background could probably articulate its value much more than I can. But perhaps not: the reviews on the back claim that "no precis is possible" and "no outline is possible." So that lets me off the hook. I'll end by simply recommending the book - at least the first chapter if you're mildly interested, and all of it if you have intense interest in anthropology.

Reading :: The Nuer

2011-08-10T15:43:00.000-05:00

The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people
By E.E. Evans-Pritchard

The link above goes to Archive.org, where you can download this book in PDF, Kindle, text, and other formats. It's OCR'd from the 1940 book, and you'll find some scan errors, but the book is generally intact and generally quite interesting. The first in a trilogy on the Nuer, an African people living in the Sudan and Ethiopia, this book is also a classic of structural-functionalism.

Unfortunately, I'm not an anthropologist and can't provide a good discussion of structural-functionalism or evaluate Evans-Pritchard's work in those terms. But I can recommend The Nuer as an intriguing and at times amusing book. Evans-Pritchard's self-deprecating discussion of methodology, for instance, reads like the trials of Job: "an adequate sociological study of the Nuer was impossible in the circumstances in which most of my work was done," he allows, professing to be amazed that the book has appeared at all.

When he visited Tribe A, they stole the game he shot to feed himself and only spoke to him to demand tobacco. Moving to Tribe B, he began to gain their confidence, only to be stymied by a Government raid. At this point he had only done three and a half months' work among the Nuer.

Later, he visited Tribe C, discovering that "Nuer are expert at sabotaging inquiry": they would visit his tent, demand tobacco, and give him the runaround when he asked questions. He dubbed the resulting condition "Nuerosis." Giving up, he moved to Tribe D, began making progress - then had to be evacuated due to malaria.

On a third trip, he had planned to study another people, but "as delay was caused by diplomatic chicanery I spent two and a half months" near the Nuer; an imminent invasion compelled him to give up on these studies and join the Nuer for another seven weeks. "My total residence among the Nuer was thus about a year," he tells us, admitting that this timespan was inadequate.

Inadequate or not, Evans-Pritchard manages to paint an intriguing portrait of the Nuer, herdsmen who love cattle more than themselves, subsist primarily on milk, millet and meat, and "strut about like lords of the Earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be." They "tend to define all social processes and relationships in terms of cattle. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom," he argues. This fact impacts their social structure: "since milk is considered essential, the economic unit must be larger than the simple family group." They consider it repulsive to eat most reptiles, all birds, and all eggs. (We in turn would most likely not want to sample their cheese.) Their devotion to cattle also impacts their estimation of value: a man without cattle is not considered a man, something that probably affected Evans-Pritchard's earlier inquiries since he acquired his own cattle only later.

As "lords of the earth," the Nuer do not serve each other or order each other around; their societal structure is generally decentralized and based on lineage. ("By structure we mean relations between groups of persons within a system of groups.") The tribe is segmentary, based on "complementary tendencies toward fission and fusion."

Overall, the book is fascinating. Without a stronger background in structural-functionalism, I'm certain I missed many implications of this work. But as a standalone work, it is insightful and well worth reading.

Reading :: The Great Reset

2011-08-10T15:05:00.000-05:00

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
By Richard Florida

I'll make this a quick review. Florida's The Great Reset tackles the question of what's going to happen to our economy post-crash. He presents his argument in a series of very short chapters, often as short as four pages, in which he grounds his points in interesting stories and statistics. It's like visiting a tapas bar.

Essentially, Florida presents a wave version of economic development in which economic crises function as "resets" that broadly and fundamentally transform the economic order. Previous resets were the Great Depression of 1929 and the Long Depression of 1873, both of which remade the US economy through technical innovations, systems of innovations, upgrades in education, and changes in the way we live. Florida argues that before a crash, innovation slows down because the system doesn't reward them properly; a Reset changes the incentives and releases innovation.

Florida looks at a number of indices to understand what might be at the other end of this Reset, and he comes out hopeful. He believes that cities will be bigger than ever, that trends such as collaborative consumption will intensify, that fewer people will buy their homes (since home ownership makes less sense without lifelong employment), and that innovations will generate new kinds of prosperity. I hope he's right.

Seminar: Integrative reviews of literature

2011-08-03T11:01:00.000-05:00

Saul Carliner, editor of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, is offering a free online seminar on how to write integrative reviews of literature. If you're interested, this sounds like a great opportunity, especially for graduate students. Saul's message is below:

As you might have heard, the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication is actively recruiting integrative reviews of the literature.

• In a recent poll, readers of the Transactions identified these among the top three types of articles in which they have an interest. Yet a content analysis of our journal indicated that we do not publish any.
• Furthermore, integrative reviews of the literature substantially differ from literature reviews that have been published in the past because, among their many distinguishing characteristics, integrative reviews of the literature fully disclose their research methodology.

For many, then, integrative reviews of the literature represent a new type of research article with which many scholars in technical and professional communication might not have much experience.

To raise the level of familiarity—and help authors with the process of preparing their first such reviews for the Transactions—I have scheduled a 6-part web-based seminar to introduce this type of article.

The seminar is intended for faculty and graduate students (especially Ph.D and advanced master’s students). It can be integrated into other course work for regularly scheduled classes.

There is no cost to participate but participants must register in advance.

For more information, contact tpc.editorial@gmail.com. They can send you an outline of the seminar and answer questions.

Three Days of the Chromebook

2011-07-30T12:38:00.000-05:00

For the last three days, I've been trying out the Samsung Chromebook, thanks to a friend who received one at Google I/O. I've been posting reviews on Google Plus, but thought I'd pull them all together here.

Day 1
I've been meaning to try out a Chromebook for a while. The idea of everything-in-a-browser seems intriguing - I pretty much do everything in the browser anyway - and I have also been interested in other features, such as

Eight-second boot time
Instant wake from sleep
3G connectivity (with data caps, of course)
Incredible battery life
Elegance - I don't have to worry about installations, managing software, etc.
Hardware optimized for browsing
Relatively light, small footprint
Low cost (though not as low as many netbooks)

Unfortunately, the bricks-and-mortar vendor that carries them, Best Buy, doesn't have any displayed at my local store. But a friend generously loaned me the Samsung Chromebook he picked up at Google I/O.

After perhaps an hour and a half, here were my first impressions.

ChromeOS
ChromeOS is pretty much what you expect - the browser is the interface. If you're a heavy consumer of cloud-based software, you'll be fine. Personally, I only use a few desktop applications on a regular basis - including a SQL front end, Notational Velocity (for tricky passwords), and the Mendeley desktop app (which syncs to the cloud; Mendeley has a web interface too). I also have a large number of PDFs that haven't been pushed into the cloud.

For me, then, things are pretty seamless. Once I set up the Chrome apps I usually use - Tweetdeck, Pandora - I got back into the swing of things. In particular, Google Docs - where I spend a great deal of my time - works well and responsively. Basically, the experience is just like my Macbook Pro, except the screen is much smaller.

As a side note, Google Docs is one of the main reasons I'm not interested in an iPad. The GDocs iPad implementation is entirely inadequate for my needs. So is the Android implementation. The ChromeOS "implementation" is just the web app with which you're already familiar.

The other thing about ChromeOS is booting. Eight seconds is pretty short! And accounts are handled elegantly.

Hardware
The hardware is adequate but nothing to write home about.

I know that people have complained about the trackpad, the lack of a delete key (it has a backspace key instead), and various other things. None of this bothers me.

What does bother me is that the machine is a bit clunky. The Chromebook is much smaller than the 15" MBP, which seems like a behemoth now. But it's bigger than the Air in nearly all dimensions. That means a bigger screen - but the screen is not as sharp. It doesn't mean a bigger keyboard (the Air's keyboard is better designed), but it does mean greater width, length, and depth. And weight - the Chromebook is surprisingly heavy.

As many have complained, the hardware feels a bit cheap. Not as cheap as my old Toshiba netbook, but certainly not to par with either Apple device. Of course, it costs only half as much as the Air. The cheapness itself has some appeal to me, since in comparison to the Air it's a disposable device - sort of like my Kindle.

First Impressions
So what did I think at this point? I was expecting to either love or hate the Chromebook, but at this point, the jury was still out. It definitely has some potential, but I worry that the hardware will hold that potential back. At this point I liked the Air's form factor much better - but of course the Air is twice as expensive.

Day 2
During this second day, the Chromebook began to grow on me. The battery life is remarkable - after 27 hours, the battery had dropped from 97% to 19% charge. I hadn't plugged it in at all.

Granted, I hadn’t been using it nonstop, but I had been doing a lot with it: surfing, editing a paper, moving around citations on Mendeley. For the most part, the experience was almost exactly like my Macbook Pro, with a few exceptions. That’s partly because I moved most of my workflow to web applications a while ago: word processing, diagrams, spreadsheets, email, calendar, tweeting, music, etc. etc.

But some additional issues cropped up.

One is that I’ve discovered Mendeley, my citations manager, doesn’t appear to generate works cited pages online. In the OSX desktop app, I can highlight relevant citations, copy, then paste them in APA format into GDocs. With the web app, I can’t. Although that’s not a huge deal - I can do that when I switch back to the MBP - it’s still disappointing.
Another is the trackpad. People have complained online about it, and I’m beginning to see why. I’m finding that some horizontal gestures aren’t registering the first time I try them, especially when I click-and-hold (such as when I highlight a text selection).
Scrollbars are rather small, making them hard to grab. I might be able to make them thicker, but for now I’m using the two-finger gesture to scroll. It works okay.
Speakers are tinny, but I don’t really care about that.
I miss TextExpander on OSX.
Finally, I still haven’t tried setting up cloud print yet. I’m not sufficiently motivated; I’ll just print from the MBP for now. I also don’t have the dongle to connect to an external monitor.

But let’s look at some of the positives.

The guest login is great. You log in as a guest, so you’re not logged into your Google account and Chrome runs in private mode.
The file manager (Control-M) is minimal - just enough to view files. I assume you can also launch and delete them, but I haven’t tried.
Installing Chrome web apps is exactly the same as it is in Chrome on my MBP. Very easy. I installed Pandora and Tweetdeck with no issues.
Waking from sleep takes exactly the same amount of time as the Macbook Air - nearly instantaneous.
Although some have complained online about the Chromebook’s screen - they say it’s not visible at different angles - it seems fine to me.

Now some interesting differences.

On the MBP, I defrag the disk, clear the cache and trash, and do a full backup every other day. This takes a while. On the Chromebook I’ll never have to do that.
On the MBP, I get an alert at least once a week telling me that I need to upgrade something - printer support, some part of the OSX system that I never use, etc. On the Chromebook I’ll never have to do that either.

Bottom line, so far I’d found the Chromebook to be almost entirely workable for what I’m doing. I don’t think I could use it as my only computer - at least not until Mendeley allows me to generate works cited pages in the web application - but for most uses I honestly can’t tell the difference.

Day 3

The third day of the Chromebook test hasn’t yielded a lot of news. It continues to be a good lightweight computer that allows me to access most of my services. In fact, I’ve only opened the MBP a couple of times - once because the Chromebook was charging.

I had expected to feel a little claustrophobic because the Chromebook only gives you the browser. Where’s the shell, the desktop, the widgets? But so far I haven’t had that feeling at all. In fact, I like not having all the cruft that comes with a full desktop. It makes for a cleaner, more focused experience. In this way, ChromeOS seems almost Apple-like - it takes away some of the choices that we have come to expect, and it does this for the sake of guiding the experience and guarding the machine’s performance.

Speaking of Apple, I’ve been comparing the Chromebook to the Macbook Air in this series of reviews, but in terms of price, it’s in the same league as the iPad. Why not compare it to the iPad? Bottom line, I don’t think they’re the same class of device at all.

Yes, they both restrict your user experience sharply, and in doing so, wring better performance out of hardware that would choke on a fuller-featured OS.

But with the iPad, you mainly interact with apps whose interfaces are simplified and focused. Web browsing is also simplified, and you get the less-featured mobile apps rather than the full-featured web apps you would access on the deskop. For instance, if you try to use Google Docs on the iPad, by default you get the mobile app, which is quite underfeatured. You can click through to the full app, but it works poorly in my experience.

The iPad has a rap for being a consumption rather than a production device. I think that oversimplifies things, but there’s some truth to it: the iPad is not well set up for text production, which is the majority of what I do. The soft keyboard is not tactile and takes up valuable screen real estate (just as Android tablets do). I haven’t tried the iPad with a keyboard, but I don’t think it would solve all of the issues I worry about.

The Chromebook, on the other hand, is all about the web. So you get no local apps to speak of, but full-featured web apps. For instance, Google Docs works on the Chromebook in all its glory, as do the other web apps. Between that and the keyboard, the Chromebook is just fine for text production and serves as a substitute for desktop browsing.

This brings me to a question that seems to plague a lot of commenters, but has a very obvious answer. Why has Google produced both Android and ChromeOS? Android follows the iOS pattern, assuming low levels of text production and restricting default interaction to apps and the mobile web. ChromeOS is for accessing the full web, and therefore substituting for desktop apps. Perhaps the two sets of OSes (iOS and OSX, Android and ChromeOS) will merge at some point, but for now, the two sets are meant to cover different sorts of devices and different patterns of consumption.

So: Can the Chromebook substitute as a primary computing device? I think that even for me, it would be a bit of a stretch - although it’s close. That’s primarily because I can’t generate citations with the Mendeley web app. But I could see it working in computer labs, offices, and other settings that don’t involve complex applications.

On the other hand, it would make a great travel device. It’s lightweight, the battery life is fantastic, and the 3G option means that you wouldn’t have to rely on the vagaries of WiFi. It does everything I need in a travel or personal device. And, importantly, it’s cheap enough that I wouldn’t be devastated if it were lost or stolen. I could almost see myself buying it as a secondary, personal device for home and coffee shop use.

That “almost” is key. Although I enjoy the device, I haven’t fallen in love with it. And I am cheap enough that I don’t want to buy a mid-level computing device whose main function would be to fill in between my Macbook Pro (where I write my papers) and my Android phone (where I consume the majority of my web content). I’m not on the road enough to make another device desirable at present. But if I were, I would give a hard look at the Chromebook.

Reading :: Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits

2011-07-28T16:49:00.000-05:00

Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World
By John Arquilla

John Arquilla has long studied and theorized irregular warfare, often in fairly technical terms. But in this book, he provides a readable, popular, but still thought-provoking discussion of how it has evolved over the centuries. He primarily does this by offering chronological chapter portraits of outstanding strategists and tacticians of irregular warfare over the years, starting with Robert Rogers (in the French and Indian War) and concluding with Aslan Maskhadov (in the Chechnyan insurgency). (I was surprised by the absence of Mao here.)

Arquilla defines irregular warfare as warfare in which sides are unequal. This might involve small units in conventional conflicts; guerilla warfare; or terrorism. Irregular warfare, he emphasizes, is not a recent phenomenon - he takes issue with the notion that warfare advances in "generations," with irregular warfare being symptomatic of the "fourth generation warfare" (4GW) that arose in the 20th century. "The generational concept is simply inaccurate," he charges in the Introduction.

This argument is implicitly made throughout the many chapter portraits, in which Arquilla examines each strategist's or tactician's innovations, where they went right or wrong, how they contributed to the evolution of irregular warfare, and how they drew on their predecessors. These chapters are all fascinating, although they tend to the Great Man view of history by emphasizing single pivotal figures. I learned a lot of basic history of irregular warfare through them, as well as becoming sensitive to how the developments occurred and why.

"If there is a common theme that runs through the stories of the masters of irregular warfare," Arquilla argues in the conclusion, "it is their resilience in the face of defeat and other adversity." Their lessons, he tells us, are more important now than ever: "the landscape of battle is bereft of traditional foes waiting to be outflanked and overrun. Instead of being massed, they are dispersed and must be found before they can be fought." So what lessons can we carry forward? He notes five:

Transformation and integration
Narratives and nation-building
Deep strikes and infrastructure attacks
Networks and swarming
Cooptation and infiltration

In particular, he notes that "in an organizational sense (as opposed to its electronic or social connotations), a network is characterized by the dominance of lateral linkages among many small nodes, cells, or units." And "swarming is the way networks fight - their many small formations tend to attack enemy troops and other targets simultaneously in several directions."

Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely. Although it's more of a popular book, it wrestles with many of the same themes Arquilla has covered in more academic work. If you're interested in irregular warfare, military history, or (in my case) networks and swarming, take a look.

Reading :: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

2011-07-22T13:41:00.000-05:00

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
By Erving Goffman

I haven't read this book for years. It was assigned to one of my MA classes, long ago, but I think I either gave it away or lost it in a move at the end of my Ph.D. work. In any case, I picked up another copy and took a look. And although it's not fieldwork per se, it's full of interesting things. I won't attempt to justice to it in this short review, but I'll point out some of the interesting parts - particularly in terms of team performances, which interest me the most.

Using a dramaturgical metaphor, Goffman argues that people are constantly tailoring the images that they project to others around them. Although individuals constantly do this sort of performance management, so do teams: “any set of individuals who co-operate in staging a single routine” (p.79).

Goffman’s examples are as disparate as family dinners, filling stations, and prostitution syndicates, but across all these team performances, Goffman identifies two basic components of the team relationship. First, “while a team-performance is in progress, any member of the team has the power to give the show away or disrupt it by inappropriate conduct” and consequently there is “a bond of reciprocal dependence linking teammates to each other” (p.82). Second, “if members of a team must co-operate to maintain a given definition of the situation before their audience, they will hardly be in a position to maintain that particular impression before one another” (pp.82-83). That is, teammates develop both a reciprocal dependence and a reciprocal familiarity with each other (p.83).

Team members engage in defensive practices to allow them to “save their own show” by maintaining their team performance. Goffman identifies three defensive attributes and practices.

Dramaturgical loyalty, in which teammates “act as if they have accepted certain moral obligations” such as not betraying team secrets (p.212), not trying to steal the show (p.214), and not forming attachments with the audience that will compromise team performance (p.214).
Dramaturgical discipline, in which each teammate “remembers his part and does not commit unmeant gestures or faux pas in performing it” (p.216). The disciplined team member avoids unintentionally giving away team secrets and covers up the inappropriate or disruptive behavior of teammates (p.216).
Dramaturgical circumspection, in which teammates “exercise prudence and circumspection in staging the show, preparing in advance for likely contingencies and exploiting the opportunities that remain” (p.218). One technique for assembling such a team is to “choose members who are loyal and disciplined”; another is to determine “how much loyalty and discipline [the team] can rely on from the membership as a whole” (p.218); a third is to “select the kind of audience that will give a minimum of trouble in terms of the show the performer wants to put on” (pp.218-219).

Goffman recognizes that team performances are difficult since they rely on a high degree of coordinated improvisation in the face of contingencies as well as a high degree of trust among team members. He lists several ways to limit the risk of disruptions in team performances, including getting the team’s story straight ahead of time (p.88); punishing teammates for mistakes after the performance (p.89); excluding teammates who cannot perform properly (p.91); controlling the information to which the audience has access (p.141); and limiting team size (p.220).

Goffman also notes another tactic. “In those interactions where the individual presents a product to others, he will tend to show them only the end product, and they will be led into judging him on the basis of something that has been finished, polished, and packaged. In some cases, if very little effort was actually required to complete the object, this fact will be concealed. In other cases, it will be the long, tedious hours of lonely labor that will be hidden” (p.44).

There's much, much more to the book. In fact, one disappointment is that although Goffman alludes to and occasionally uses examples from fieldwork he did on Shetland Island, he doesn't focus the book on that project or even discuss it enough for us to understand the project. Rather, he casts widely - and frequently draws on the unpublished dissertations of U-Chicago doctoral candidates as well as works of fiction - to illustrate the different dramaturgical moves he identifies. Although that choice gives Goffman a wide range of illustrations and serves to emphasize how broadly this phenomenon is distributed, it also makes the framework seem too generally grounded and universalized.

Nevertheless, it's a solid book, and its examples generally stand, even more than 50 years later. And it's a fast read. If you haven't taken a look, do.

Reading :: Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

2011-07-22T13:26:00.000-05:00

Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco
By Paul Rabinow

In 1968, a young graduate student set out from the University of Chicago under the direction of Clifford Geertz to do ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco. He saw fieldwork as an extremely important transformational event; certainly that's what his professors had indicated. "In the graduate anthropology department at the University of Chicago," he explained, "the world was divided into two categories of people: those who had done fieldwork, and those who had not; the latter were not 'really' anthropologists, regardless of what they knew about anthropological topics" (p.3). Indeed,

I was told that my papers did not really count because once I had done fieldwork they would be radically different. Knowing smiles greeted the acerbic remarks which graduate students made about the lack of theory in certain of the classics we studied; never mind, we were told, the authors were great fieldworkers. At the time, this intrigued me. The promise of initiation into the clan secrets was seductive. I fully accepted the dogma. (p.3)

Yet, he notes, anthropology presents a double bind.

As graduate students we are told that 'anthropology equals experience'; you are not an anthropologist until you have the experience of doing it. But when one returns from the field, the opposite immediately applies: anthropology is not the experiences which made you an initiate, but only the objective data you have brought back. (p.4)

Rabinow's book tries to break that double bind. In his previous book, he presented a standard ethnography based on his time in Morocco. But in this book, he tells us his experiences in trying to do fieldwork, warts and all. The result is poignant and frequently hilarious. Rabinow bungles along, trying to find informants, trying to learn the language, trying not to alienate people or burn bridges. As he works his way into the situation, he finds that some informants, though eager for attention, are too peripheral to be useful; that most informants see him as a means to their ends as well, and have no problem taking advantage of him or shutting him off from people in other factions; and that if he doesn't take advantage of power differentials, he can't get any sort of cooperation at all. For instance, he befriends an excellent informant, only to learn later that (a) the man is marginalized because he's a pimp and (b) the man, like others, plays domination games with him.

"I had to clarify where I stood," he realizes at one point. "If the informant was always right, then by implication the anthropologist had to become a sort of non-person, or more accurately a total persona. ... This was the position my professors had advocated: one simply endured whatever inconveniences and annoyances came along. One had to completely subordinate one's code of ethics, conduct, and world view, to 'suspend belief,' as another colleague was proud of putting it, and sympathetically and accurately record events" (p.46). But Rabinow soon realized that this meant being dominated, walked over, and in his situation it meant performing ethnography poorly. "As confidence is built up, the informant judges and interacts with the anthropologist in his own habitual style" (p.47) - and that means that he will test the anthropologist. Who can respect someone who lets himself or herself be bullied and dominated?

Rabinow gradually realizes that anthropology must mean participating in a culture on the terms of the informants. But it also means cultivating informants, helping them to see things differently as well so that they can explain them. Informants necessarily have to have that critical distance, so frequently the best informants are on the fringe of their culture. "Culture is interpretation," he tells us in the conclusion (p.150). In the conclusion, he discusses and evaluates all of his informants, examining why they behaved as they did and discussing how they could and couldn't help him.

Overall, this book is Rabinow's account of learning to understand fieldwork - and learning to understand his informants as real people who are changed by, and who change, the ethnographer who comes to study them. It's thoughtful and highly entertaining. If you're interested in fieldwork, and especially if you haven't done fieldwork yet, take a look.

Reading :: Naven

2011-07-13T11:08:00.000-05:00

Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View
By Gregory Bateson

Two men of the Iatmul hobble about their village, dressed in filthy women's clothes, smeared with ashes, carrying a fowl. They act utterly decrepit, supporting themselves with walking sticks and frequently falling, legs splayed in an exaggerated manner. In the voices of crones, they call for their laua (essentially, their sister's son, although the lineage is a bit more complicated). They want to congratulate their laua for making a large canoe for the first time in his life. But he has hidden, ashamed of his wau (his maternal uncles). Who can blame him? "If the wau can find the boy he will further demean himself by rubbing the cleft of his buttocks down the length of the laua's leg, a sort of sexual salute which is said to have the effect of causing the laua to make haste to get valuables which he may present to his wau to 'make him all right'" (p.13). But they can't find him, so instead they take his canoe for a short ride - paddling seated, like women, rather than standing, like men (p.13). After the ride, they wash themselves, put on men's clothing, and - now that it's safe - the laua is found and presented with the fowl.

In another instance, the laua's achievements are celebrated by his maternal uncles' wives. They dress in men's garb - but in "the smartest of men's attire." (If the Iatmul men wore their transvestite garb like Benny Hill, the women wore theirs like Annie Lennox.) They celebrate by beating the laua with sticks.

Both these events are instances of the naven, a ceremony that celebrates the acts and achievements of a sister's child. Such achievements include homicide - the Iatmul were headhunters in recent memory, and although the colonial government has made them give it up, homicide is an important rite of manhood, often carried out by young boys against captives with the help of the wau (p.6). "Another act contributory to killing which may be honoured is the enticing of foreigners into the village so that others might kill them" (p.6; my marginal note here says RUN!!!). But other achievements might include making a canoe, spearing an eel, planting coconuts, and sundry other parts of Iatmul life.

Why do these fierce headhunters, who scorn women and weakness, dress as women to celebrate such achievements? This is the question that nagged at Gregory Bateson, then conducting an ethnography off the coast of New Guinea to fulfill his MA. By Bateson's account, he didn't make much headway in the field - he apologizes frequently for the inadequacy of his data, and dismisses his work as the unfocused product of "a few months"(p.257; he spent 1929-1930 with them). After returning to England, he developed a tripartite analysis (structure, sociology, ethos) to examine the naven, developing the notion of schismogenesis: "a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals" (p.175).

Based on this notion, he argues that the naven actually makes celebration of young men's deeds possible - it provides a mechanism that is otherwise lacking. The Iatmul men generally celebrate only their own achievements: "Anger and scorn they can express with a good deal of over-compensation; and joy and sorrow they can express when it is their own pride which is enhanced or abased; but to express joy in the achievements of another is outside the norms of their behavior" (p.201). Conversely, the Iatmul women can express joy and sorrow unselfishly, but they have no public ceremony role (p.201). For both sexes to publicly celebrate a young man's achievement, they must take on part of the role of the other. Hence the transvestitism (p.202).

It's a good story, made more concrete by the photos Bateson took of the Iatmul. (In one, a man looks directly at the camera with seeming murder in his eyes. RUN!!!) More than that, the analysis is intricate. As Bateson admits, it is perhaps too detailed to be supported by the ethnography itself, but it still provides important background into Bateson's thinking. In this way, Bateson's Naven seems the opposite of the early ethnographies of Margaret Mead, whom he met after concluding the ethnography and married six years later. Where Mead writes confidently and shows not a trace of doubt, Bateson writes with hesitations and caution. Where Mead believes that six months of fieldwork is more than adequate for understanding a culture, Bateson emphasizes how inadequate his year with the Iatmul was. Where Mead offers easy lessons, Bateson laboriously develops an analytical approach and a theoretical concept. Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed Bateson's book, even though I agree with the author (in both of his epilogues) that the book is flawed. If you're interested in ethnographies, Bateson's work, headhunters, or transvestitism, I highly recommend this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book

Reading :: Growing Up in New Guinea

2011-07-13T10:26:00.000-05:00

Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education
By Margaret Mead

I recently reviewed Mead's first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, and enjoyed Mead's storytelling while harboring grave reservations about her methodology. Mead's second book, describing the six-month New Guinea ethnography that Mead and her new husband Reo Fortune conducted as her first book went to press. This second book has many of the virtues and vices of the first.

In this ethnography, Mead lives in the Manus village of Peri, where she conducts "six months' concentrated and uninterrupted field work" in which she focuses on how Manus children grew up (p.12). The village is situated in a shallow lagoon, with houses on piles and people circulating via canoes that they learn to pilot at a young age. Mead studied the children through observation, but also by collecting their spontaneous drawings, asking them to interpret ink blots, collecting interpretations of events, and posing problem questions (p.210). Although six months may seem quite short for an ethnography of children's education, Mead explains that it is adequate: Whereas "our own society is so complex, so elaborate, that the most serious student can, at best, only hope to examine a part of the education process," she assures us that "in a simple society, without division of labour, without written records, without a large population ... it is possible for the investigator to master in a few months most of the tradition which it takes the natives years to learn" (p.8). I have my doubts.

But nevertheless it's clear that Mead learned a great deal, enough to produce a vivid cultural sketch that makes this book very readable. Mead describes how the Manus teach their children basic safety early (swimming, canoeing, fire, hygiene), then spoil them endlessly (especially the fathers) while leaving them largely to their own devices. This constant indulgence, she says, produces the predictable result: the children regard their parents with contempt and expect them to make sacrifices with no return. Consequently, Mead says, the Manus are a society of self-reliant individuals, materialistic and acquisitive, and with middling respect for their ancestors.

One might suspect that Mead's conclusions, based on six months of fieldwork, are overdrawn. Those concerns are not assuaged in Mead's last four chapters, in which she draws equivalences between the Manus society and that of the United States. The Manus are acquisitive, constantly thinking about how to acquire dogs' teeth, which serve as their currency; people in the US are acquisitive too! The Manus spoil their children; so do we! And she also provides less flattering contrasts, arguing that the Manus do a better job of teaching respect for property than parents in the US do: they don't treat different kinds of property differently, like "American parents who let the child tear the almanac and the telephone book and then wonder at its grieved astonishment when it is slapped for tearing up the family Bible" (p.28). When Mead makes such rough generalizations about her own culture, not even considering its considerable class and region differences, I begin to suspect rough generalizations about the Manus too.

Nevertheless, the book is absolutely fascinating and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Mead has managed to pack in a lot of detail about Manus culture, from marriage to birth to childhood and adolescence. As with her previous book, I wouldn't take this one as a model in terms of methodology, but I'd still recommend it.

Genre 2012

2011-07-07T10:17:00.000-05:00

Please consider attending the upcoming conference on genre at Carleton University:

Genre 2012--Rethinking Genre Twenty Years Later: An
International Conference on Genre Studies
Location: Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Date: June 26-29, 2012
Website:www.carleton.ca/genre2012

Call for Proposals: http://www3.carleton.ca/genre2012/call-for-proposals.html

Contact:genre2012@carleton.ca

I've already agreed to be there. Deadline for your proposal is October 15. Thanks very much to the conference co-organizers for putting this on: Natasha Artemeva, Jaffer Sheyholislami, and Graham Smart (Carleton University).

Reading :: The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead

2011-07-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research
By Derek Freeman

Shortly after Margaret Mead's death in 1978, Australian ethnographer Derek Freeman stirred up a controversy over her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, in his 1983 book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. This book generated an enormous backlash, described in the Afterword of Freeman's 1999 book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. I didn't entirely trust Freeman's account of the controversy, but I do trust Bonnie Nardi, who wrote a 1984 review of Freeman's earlier book that she based partially on her own fieldwork in Samoa.

The present book seems very much a reaction to that 1983 controversy. After retiring, Freeman went through Mead's vast archives of correspondence and manuscripts, reviewed court cases from the time that Mead stayed in Samoa, and visited with people who were alive during that time. He also repeats some of the quotes from his previous book, in which one of Mead's original informants claims that she and a companion had joked about Samoan sexual practices, not realizing that Mead would take their claims at face value and characterize the adolescence of Samoan girls based on them. Although I'm not an anthropologist, I think there's some gold in this account - but also much dross, because Freeman seemed to have lost his sense of proportion as he wrote the book.

Here's the gist of the book. Mead, a brilliant young PhD (and Freeman continually reminds us how young she was, at 24), is sent to study adolescence in a primitive culture by her mentor Franz Boas. Boas wants proof that nurture is more significant than nature - that is, that culture determines more than biology. Boas wanted Mead to study culture among the American Indians, but Mead was enchanted with Polynesia and insisted on conducting the study there. According to Freeman, Boas gave Mead a half-hour lecture on fieldwork before sending her off - and that was the sum total of her fieldwork experience.

Mead was not just enchanted with Polynesia, she was also enchanted with ethnology and wanted to conduct an ethnological study. This sort of study, Freeman argues, was explicitly against Boas' wishes and the terms of her fellowship, but she clandestinely entered into an agreement with the Bishop Museum to conduct an ethnological study and write a monograph. In Hawaii, she met with the director of the Bishop Museum and with its ethnologist, Edward Craighill Handy, who described his fieldwork in western Polynesia. Based on his descriptions, as well as other reports from western Polynesia and even fictional descriptions in Melville's writings, Mead learned that Polynesians generally had a lax attitude toward sex. (According to Freeman, Mead was not aware that western and eastern Polynesia had very different cultural attitudes toward sex.)

Mead went on to the US Naval Station in Pago Pago, where she taught herself basic Samoan and discovered that she hated the taste of boiled taro root, the food staple of the islands. She enjoyed living on the base, with its comforts, but concluded that Pago Pago was too colonized to perform the study of primitives that she had envisioned. So she moved on to the islands of Manu'a, where she lived at the US Naval Dispensary. According to Freeman, she greatly preferred the food and sleeping arrangements of the Dispensary to that of the villages, so she decided to sleep there. Boas, who himself had elected to sleep in hotels when performing fieldwork among the Native Americans, agreed with her decision via letter.

In Manu'a, according to Freeman, Mead tried to serve two masters - her study of adolescents and her ethnological study of Samoa - and in the meantime greatly enjoyed being treated as a visiting dignitary and ceremonial virgin. Freeman also claims that Mead was unaware of the deep tensions between the US Navy and the US-appointed native government, which made trust-building difficult. Essentially, Freeman says, Mead frittered her time away with ceremonies and unsystematic ethnological study, and ran out of time on her study of adolescents. This set the stage for the unintentional hoax. As she traveled with two other ceremonial virgins or taupou (they were ceremonial, but according to Freeman, they were also actually virgins), Mead asked them about their sexual practices (Ch.11). Embarrassed by this line of questioning, the taupou engaged in what is alternately known as ula, tausua, taufa'alili, or taufa'ase'e, depending on the intention. Freeman loosely translates it as "recreational lying" (p.139). They claimed that at night they would slip out to see boys - a claim that, according to Freeman, they thought was too outrageous to be believed. Mead, primed by the literature she had read and her discussions with Handy, and desperate for evidence that would allow her to deliver to Boas the proof he wanted, believed them. She left the islands soon after, a month ahead of schedule, her goal accomplished.

This story is riveting. But just as Mead's book seems in some places marred by hearsay, so does this one. Freeman often characterizes Mead in very negative ways, ways that go well beyond her methodological missteps. He emphasizes how young and idealistic she is, how she idolizes Boas, and how ambitious she is. He betrays her as spoiled, unwilling to tolerate Taro or nights in the village. He goes into detail about extraneous and uncomplimentary information such as how her first marriage failed and her second one began. He uses snatches of her poetry and her favorite parts of others' poetry to characterize her idealism and single-mindedness. He portrays her as dithering, nervous, excitable, unreliable, and treacherous. And he repeats these character attacks throughout the book, often in italics. These attacks made me suspicious of his conclusions. That's the dross.

There's much less gold, but it comes in the close analysis of Mead's correspondence with Boas and her bulletins sent to friends and colleagues as well as the close analysis of contradictions within the book itself. Here, Freeman is on firmer ground, showing that Mead had been presented with, and recorded, claims that directly contradict her thesis that Samoan adolescents were expected to be promiscuous.

Overall, I am glad that I read this book - but I'm also glad that I bought it used. As a popular book, it's gripping and interesting, but also gossipy and rather unfair. As an academic book, it is too black-and-white, brooking no middle ground between Mead's claims of free love among the Samoans and Samoan authorities' claims of rigorous chastity. If you're interested in Mead's works, consider reading it, but with a healthy dose of caution and skepticism.

Reading :: Coming of Age in Samoa

2011-07-06T13:13:00.001-05:00

Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
By Margaret Mead

(Note added 2011.07.07: Page references are to the 1973 paperback edition, not the later edition I linked on Amazon.)

I'm reading some ethnographic classics this summer, and this book has been on my list for a while, so I'm glad I finally got to it. I've never read Mead's classic Coming of Age in Samoa, although I've seen it discussed and cited many times. I'm also aware that this work is controversial, both through general discussions in the literature and through the other book I bought at the same time, Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead (which I'll review soon). But I avoided reading these critiques until I was able to read Mead's book itself, so that I could form my own impressions.

So what were my impressions? First, Mead had a captivating writing style and a real gift for painting scenes. From the first pages, I could almost envision the Samoan village she described based on her study in 1925-1926. Mead introduces us to the scene first, then takes us through the contextual information in subsequent chapters: a typical Samoan day, children's education, the household, how adolescent girls related to their age groups and community, then issues such as sex relations, dance, and personality. In all these chapters, we almost feel like we have entered village life, learning the hierarchy, seeing the interactions, and being privy to the gossip: who is lazy, who is slow, who has poise and maturity beyond her years, who lags behind, who slept with whom. Mead gives many quotes, but far more stories about the happenings in the three villages she studied.

In fact, much of the book does seem like gossip or hearsay. Mead not only recounts many stories that her informants told her - without consistently specifying her sources - she also makes personal judgments that tend to go beyond what we might consider data analysis. For instance, she describes one delinquent in this way:

She was stupid, underhanded, deceitful and she possessed no aptitude for the simplest mechanical tasks. Her ineptness was the laughing stock of the village and her lovers were many and casual, the fathers of illegitimate children, men whose wives were temporarily absent, witless boys bent on a frolic. It was a saying among the girls of the village that Sala was apt at only one art, sex, and that she, who couldn't even sew thatch or weave blinds, would never get a husband. ... She had a sullen furtive manner, lied extravagantly in her assertions of skill and knowledge, and was ever on the alert for slights and possible innuendoes. (p.101)

This description sounds like the sort of thing that two or three teenage girls might say about a rival. Did Mead triangulate this description with others in the village, including children and adults? Did she interview Sala herself about her own impressions? Unfortunately it's impossible to say. Sala does appear in the table of participants in the back, but in my reading, I didn't see any other information about where she got this description beyond "it was a saying among the girls of the village..."

In fact, the methodology was rather spare. Mead characterizes Samoa's adolescent girls on the basis of "six months" spent "in one small locality, in a group numbering only six hundred people" in "three practically contiguous villages" (p.145). (Elsewhere, Mead puts the total time in Samoa at nine months.) That's a very short period for an ethnography, especially given that Mead had to gain the trust of her informants.

Mead ends with a couple of chapters that attempt to apply the lessons of Samoa to childrearing and education in the West. In these chapters, she paints a rather idyllic picture of Samoan life and especially Samoan adolescence, contrasting it sharply with those of the West, and suggesting that much of the difference comes from the fact that Samoan life is much more heterogeneous than life in the West (pp.112-113) and that Samoan children are given more choices, particularly in their sexual experiences.

An aside: modern readers will be taken aback by some of the language used in this 1928 book. For instance, Mead uses the term "savages," a jarring term in 2011. Similarly, Mead allows that adolescents regularly engage in "homosexual" behavior as part of their development and advancement into adulthood, but she draws a bright line between this experimentation and "perversion," i.e., lifelong same-sex orientation (p.82). Again, the terms are jarring, and may be difficult for the reader of 2011 to get past.

Overall, I was suspicious of Mead's conclusions, based on her small amount of time among the Samoans, the idyllic picture she painted of them, and the methodology she used, which seemed to rely heavily on interviewing teen girls and very lightly on triangulating these impressions via observations, artifacts, or interviews with other groups. It's still a fascinating and well written study, but I wouldn't encourage anyone to model their own studies based on it. I would, however, encourage them to read it.

Reading :: The Science of Qualitative Research

2011-07-01T12:54:00.000-05:00

The Science of Qualitative Research
By Martin Packer

This is a significant book that digs into the history and development of qualitative research, providing a sustained critique of current research approaches informed by philosophy. It appears to be solidly researched, solidly argued, and based on a remarkably broad base of knowledge in qualitative research methodology and history as well as philosophy.

On the other hand, I didn't love it. Part of the reason had to do with the fact that Packer is dealing with such broad trends in qualitative research that it's hard to characterize them well, so he ends up characterizing localized implementations as universal ones. For instance, in Chapter 3, he critiques grounded theory's approach to coding as a process of decontextualizing statements and thus denying the interpretive context that make those statements meaningful. His extended example is Auerbach & Silverstein's introduction to GT coding, Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis. But I looked up this book and it's hardly an exemplar - Auerbach & Silverstein had just discovered qualitative research, having come from a quantitative tradition, and this book decribes a coding approach that is frankly underthought and quite undercontextualized. When Packer uses this book rather than one by experienced qualitative researchers, I lose some faith in the argument he's making.

But then again, in rhetoric and writing studies, we made the interpretive turn in the mid 1990s. The interpretive approach to which Packer turns in the later chapters characterized qualitative research as it was introduced to me in my graduate classes. I wonder if the book might be a greater revelation to those who have not yet made the interpretive turn.

In any case, I think the key contribution of the book is how Packer traces qualitative traditions' roots to basic movements in philosophy. If that's your interest, this book is certainly for you.

Reading :: Argonauts of the Western Pacific

2011-07-01T12:16:00.000-05:00

Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea
By Bronislaw Malinowski

I've been taking some time this summer for pleasure reading, getting to some of the classic ethnographies and case studies that have influenced contemporary qualitative research. This book is one of the great classics, written by one of the giants of anthropology. It covers Malinowski's 1914-1918 work on the islands off the coast of New Guinea, particularly the Trobriand Islands. And although it's a bit thick in places - his writing style reminds me of Jules Verne's in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - the account is fascinating.

Malinowski still uses terms such as "savages." But he also tends to be even-handed and sensitive about comparing the cultures (for the most part). For instance, he spends much time describing the Kula, a massive exchange of valuable necklaces and armbands that takes place across the islands of New Guinea in a giant, continuous circle. We Westerners might look at the valuables and think that they aren't impressive - "greasy" is the word he uses - but he says we need to get some perspective: when natives opened oysters and found pearls, they would either throw them away or give them to the children to play with. They viewed Westerners' obsession with pearls in exactly the same way that Malinowski's readers might view the islanders' obsession with necklaces. It's not the intrinsic value that makes these things so valuable, he reminds us, but the value that a society attributes to them.

Malinowski applies this even-handedness - mostly with success - to the islanders' religion, magic, rituals, and views on sex, all of which are very different from those of his readers. For instance, Malinowski notes that the islanders don't realize that men are involved in reproduction. Thus the society's organization is matrilinear and their views on marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and sex are quite different from those of his readers.

The principles of ethnography set out in this book have become foundational principles for ethnographic research. But we might get some perspective on these principles by reading some of the expedition's background on Malinowski's Wikipedia page:

On his most famous trip to the area, he became stranded owing to the outbreak of World War I. Malinowski was not allowed to return to Europe from the British-controlled region because he was a Pole from Austria-Hungary. Australian authorities gave him two options: to be exiled to the Trobriand islands, or to face internment for the duration of the war. Malinowski chose the Trobriand islands. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on the Kula ring and advanced the practice of participant observation, which remains the hallmark of ethnographic research today.

If he had not been forced to stay in the islands for the duration of World War I, would Malinowski have developed participant observation in the same way, or conducted fieldwork to the degree that he did, or develop the insights that he did? I wonder. But Malinowski did what qualitative researchers must often do, making a virtue of the uncontrollable misfortunes in his circumstances, and that long irritation developed this remarkable pearl of a book. Read it when you get a chance.

Reading :: Action Research for Management

2011-07-01T11:51:00.002-05:00

Action Research for Management
By William Foote Whyte and Edith Lentz Hamilton

I've provided a link to UT's library because this book is apparently no longer in print and isn't listed on Amazon (except in a couple of miscellaneous used book listings). In fact, the library copy I read has a blank stamp sheet - it hasn't been checked out since they moved from the card system to the stamp system. (We're now on the barcode system.)

I stumbled onto the book while looking for Whyte's classic Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, which was checked out. But I greatly enjoyed this book anyway, even though it's certainly not a classic. The book, published in 1965, describes a participatory action research study that Whyte supervised and Lentz and Meredith Wiley conducted in 1945; Lentz wrote the core of the book as a monograph, then Whyte added chapters to the front and back to connect the project to PAR developments. They delayed publication 20 years because the hotel they studied and the participants they quoted, though pseudonymous, were still identifiable to those in the hotel community. (I suspect they waited until some of the principals died, actually.)

The study was of a hotel (the "Tremont") with high turnover and poor labor relations. After hearing Whyte talk about his previous study of the restaurant industry, the Tremont's VP and General Manager asked Whyte to conduct a study of the troubled hotel and recommend changes. Soon, Wiley took over the Personnel Manager position and Lentz was attached to his office, and both conducted PAR. As we read their account, we get to move through different parts of the hotel, examining different sorts of dysfunctions (including some sexual harassment that would result in firing or worse today), and seeing how these dysfunctions resulted from systemic issues rather than simply individual behavior. As you can imagine, I very much enjoyed this account.

On the other hand, reading the book felt like reading a Hardy Boys mystery. It's not just the style, which made me think that we were soon to meet the boys' portly chum Chet, or the dialogue, which is full of interjections like "Why" and "My." It's also that the researchers are portrayed as protagonists who, sometimes through making suggestions and sometimes through confrontations, unravel the mysteries of the hotel and set things right. In this PAR study, the researchers always know best and learn how to nudge management and workers to repeat the researchers' solutions - and believe that those solutions originated with themselves instead of the researchers!

I'm not sure that I gained many methodological insights from the book, but I enjoyed it immensely. If you like PAR or the Hardy Boys, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Action Research for Management

2011-07-01T11:50:00.000-05:00

Writing :: Losing by Expanding

2011-06-27T11:37:00.001-05:00

Spinuzzi, C. (2011). Losing by Expanding: Corralling the Runaway Object. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 25(4).

Okay, this is the first in my ongoing series on writing publications. The cite and link above are to the OnlineFirst version of the article, both of which will likely change as the article gets closer to publication. But for now, there they are. If you or your institution have a subscription, please do click through and take a look at it.

Done? Okay, let's talk about how I put this thing together. This was a comparatively pain-free publication, but that's partially because I've figured out how to avoid the pain points.

The Gist
As the abstract says, this article critically examines the notion of the object in third-generation activity theory (3GAT), particularly how that notion - the linchpin of an activity theory analysis - has expanded theoretically and methodologically over the last 30 years. For those of you who are not terribly interested in activity theory, this may not seem too riveting. But for those of us who are, it's a critical question. If the object is not being used consistently, then we really don't have a consistent unit of analysis, and it becomes very difficult to perform strong analyses.

3GAT, by the way, refers to the work that follows Yrjo Engestrom's articulation of activity theory. "First-generation activity theory" is the work of Vygotsky and his followers, focusing on social cognition and mediation in individuals; "second-generation activity theory" is the next stage, in which Vygotsky's followers such as Leont'ev and Luria expanded activity theory to apply to larger social groups. Engestrom developed third-generation activity theory (in part) to account for systemic contradictions and to provide a more systematic understanding of how multiple activities operated. Engestrom is the one who articulated these generations; it's worth noting that some activity theorists don't buy the notion of generations at all. But 3GAT is the version that has really caught on in writing studies, so that's what I focused on in this paper.

The Genesis
I first started having concerns about the 3GAT articulation of the object when writing Network. In particular, I began to wonder how to identify a common object when people from different activities tended to see very different things. For instance, Annemarie Mol's excellent book The Body Multiple does a nice job of showing the phenomenon of multiplicity: different specialists look at the same phenomenon and see very different things, not even agreeing on the bounds of the phenomenon. As I got deeper into the activity theory literature, I began to realize that 3GAT had also tried to deal with this issue in terms of polycontextuality and boundary crossing in activity networks (points where two or more activities intersected). In such cases, the object tended to expand and become more abstract in order to encompass broader aspects of the phenomenon.

This tendency really became clear as Network was in press, because that's when Engestrom published From Teams to Knots. Here, Engestrom tried to deal with polycontextuality and border crossing by postulating mychorrhizae and by further expanding the object. Whereas in his earlier work, Engestrom focused on very concrete objects, here he named enormous objects such as global warming!

This point nagged at me. Also nagging at me was the fact that I sometimes had a lot of difficulty explaining the object to my undergraduate students. And my reading suggested that polycontextuality and boundary crossing were increasing due to the rise of knowledge work, in which teams of specialists from different backgrounds had to come together to work on the same object (whatever it was).

So the question of the object was in the back of my mind, but I planned to get to it sometime in the future. What put it on the front burner was a set of disappointing blind reviews for another article I had submitted for review. Late in that article, I had mentioned in a throwaway line that the object was facing a crisis. The editor suggested that at some point I write an article on the subject. So I did.

The Composition
I decided to set very specific boundaries for the paper. The activity theory literature is vast, so I decided to focus on 3GAT (which, as I said, is the version most used in writing studies). 3GAT originated with Engestrom, who still closely follows the literature and sometimes steps in to head off variations, so I made his work the backbone of the piece. Engestrom's work itself is vast - I swear he must publish something every week - so I focused on his books and other well-cited publications. All of this helped make the project manageable.

Although my reviews on this blog helped me to sort through the major movements of Engestrom's work, I also went back and closely reread large chunks of his work as well as related articles and commentaries. Much of this had to do with testing and refining my emerging hypothesis: that the object had expanded over time, causing a methodological issue.

I had to juggle an enormous number of sources, though, and I felt completely overwhelmed. So one day I sat at my kitchen table with a large roll of manila paper and some sharpies, and shortly I had drawn something that looked like the top half of Figure 4. I labeled each movement with some of the cites that demonstrated it. Then I looked at my other cites and realized that more was going on. A while later, I drew the bottom half of Figure 4.

At this point, I remember feeling incredible relief as well as a sense of disturbance. Could it be that easy? Once that figure had been drawn, I was able to outline and rough out the rest of the article in a hurry.

Side note: Like most of my academic work these days, the paper was drafted entirely in Google Docs, with tables in Google Spreadsheets, figures in Google Draw, and citations in Mendeley. That way, I didn't have to worry about what computer I was using or whether I had backed up recently. My Google Docs, Spreadsheet, and Draw account is backed up daily by SpanningSync, while copies of my citations reside on my Mendeley Desktop.

At this point, I sent the draft to someone whose judgement I trust. (Every academic should have a few trusted, friendly readers to whom they can send half-baked manuscripts.)

My reader liked the direction, but suggested that I work on framing the article more for writing studies. That's not what I wanted to hear, because I hate framing. But he was right.

The Framing and Implications
Honestly, I have a consistent problem with framing my studies for writing journals. For instance, the article I published in last year's Written Communication originally didn't focus on writing at all. Ridiculous, right? But I had reasoned that these workers communicated constantly, primarily through writing, so what else do you want? The reviewers were right, though, and once I put my mind to it, I was able to clarify the framing for that paper.

For "Losing by Expanding," I worried that things would be tougher. For me, the question of the object was intrinsically interesting, and the hook was that we use activity theory in writing studies. But my reader pointed out that that wasn't enough and suggested that I discuss some recent writing studies articles that used AT. Brilliant suggestion, and with the later guidance of the journal editor, I was able to use these studies to connect each transformation of the object back to writing studies.

Initially, I thought very seriously about undertaking a meta-analysis of all recent AT-based work in writing studies. But that would have taken much longer, and frankly, it didn't sound very interesting to me. (Although if you're looking for a dissertation topic...) In the end, I gambled that listing and briefly analyzing a handful of recent papers would give me enough traction, and fortunately, the gamble paid off.

The Implications was difficult too, but I had been thinking recently of a publication that Mark Zachry, Bill Hart-Davidson, and I had written a few years ago. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I took this previous concept and refined it to provide a set of countermovements that would produce a focused, qualified 3GAT object. If you look carefully at this section, you might also see the Toulmin influence.

The Style
Honestly, I had a lot of fun writing this paper, and part of the fun was in adding allusions and puns that a very small number of activity theorists would get, and even fewer would find funny. The most obvious one was the title, "Losing by Expanding," which is a reference to Engestrom's Learning by Expanding. (I picked this one out early.) Other references to titles of major AT works are scattered throughout the manuscript, and I had to rescue a few from mangling during the copyediting process.

I wrote the article in a breezy, bloggish style. Part of that style was ramped back in revision (the editor, whose judgment I trust absolutely, made some specific suggestions that restricted the style but improved the manuscript quality). More of the style had to fall due to the journal's style restrictions: for instance, the contractions disappeared, and some of the rhythm and emphasis in the sentences conflicted with the journal's preference for active voice and putting citations at the first mention.

The Revision Process
In the Acknowledgements, I thank "two anonymous reviewers for providing what is perhaps the most substantive feedback I have received on a manuscript." True. If you're reading this, I meant it. The reviewers were excellent: both read the article critically and offered suggestions that strengthened the piece, but both also managed to be encouraging and to discuss how the piece might impact the field.

A side note: reviewers really are gatekeepers, and they are generally invested in having you do your best work. Sometimes they say harsh things - I've gotten quite a few of these sorts of reviews. Never take it personally. Think of the reviews as a set of restrictions that guide you as you refine the piece for publication. Remember that these reviewers represent the actual readers, and if they don't buy your argument, it's likely that the broader set of readers won't either.

Anyway, the reviewers generously provided further texts for me to read and incorporate, which I did in a timely manner. The editor also made several expert suggestions that improved the argument considerably. Relatively speaking, the revision process was pain-free - a rarity.

The Results
You may have gotten the sense that I become improbably excited about scholarship. That sense is correct. In this case, I am really very excited about this particular argument - partly because I think it could have an impact, but partly because I just like the structure and symmetry of the piece. I'm glad it's out there, and not just because of the puns.

But that's my perspective. See what you think, and feel free to tell me in the comments.

Writing ::

2011-06-23T11:08:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, I celebrated my 8th year of blogging. Most of that time I've been reviewing the books I read, and I always start those reviews with "Reading ::" - the prefix was to indicate that the entry was a review.

But as I enter this next year of blogging, I want to try something different. For at least the next year, I'll be starting some posts with "Writing ::" -- posts that talk about the background, reasoning, and struggles behind my just-published publications.

Beyond narcissism and self-promotion, why do I want to do this? Here are some reasons:

Traditional academic publishing conceals the real work of writing. As a graduate student, I remember thinking that published articles were the result of brilliant thinkers. In fact, I dimly remember being intimidated when I read that Stanley Fish simply sat down and wrote articles in longhand, then sent the first draft to journals. Certainly I didn't - and don't - write that way. But in academic journals, we only see the product, and that gives us a misleading understanding of the process. We don't see how reviewers and the journal editor have considerably shaped the process, or how reviews of one article influence the methodology of the next one, or how an article can develop new framing as it goes. And we - especially graduate students and new assistant professors - do need to see that.

Just a quick example. A few years ago, one of my articles was rejected by two journals and received a split review at the third journal. The editor published it anyway, and it went on to win two awards. But if I hadn't committed to extensive revisions based on the rejections and the (deserved) negative reviews, it wouldn't have seen the light of day.

Traditional academic publishing tends to restrict sources. I draw from a lot of different sources for inspiration, including blog posts, tweets, industry reports, and popular business books. I carefully follow up these sources of inspiration with more scholarly sources. But then the less scholarly sources fall by the wayside; reviewers don't want to see you citing popular business books in your scholarly articles, for instance, even if you back them up with other sources. This series should allow me to discuss some of these hidden sources and therefore expose the research and writing process.

Traditional academic publishing has very little space for discussion. Academic publishing provides the following avenues for discussing the work they publish: blind reviews and editors' feedback (one-on-one, private); letters to the editor (only in some journals, public, and structured so that the original author has the last word); and citations (slow-motion, indirect). Meanwhile, scholars are conducting faster-moving, free-wheeling discussions in social media. I see this series as a way to provide more rapid academic discussion, particularly the sort of emergent back-and-forth that isn't supported at all in traditional academic publishing.

The double blind review is no more. Well, that may be overstating things. But the traditional way of guaranteeing impartiality in journal reviews, the double blind review (in which the reviewers don't know who the author is and vice versa), has been made extremely problematic by search engines and social media. For instance, if you are even casually acquainted with my blog, you will probably recognize themes, topics, and references in my manuscripts whether my name is on them or not. Similarly, although as a rule I don't Google the titles of manuscripts I review, I know that if I did, I could identify most authors without much trouble.

So what does that mean? My sense is that it means that submitting a manuscript is a higher-stakes activity than it used to be, at the same time that academics are facing increased pressure to publish. Authors must either severely restrict what they put online about their ongoing research - which would impair their work as public intellectuals and their ability to share their work with others - or find ways to produce higher quality work out of the gate. This series, I hope, can provide a place for discussing strategies of doing the latter.

Okay, so that's what the "Writing ::" series should do. Here's what I won't do, because they would be completely unprofessional as well as beside the point:

I won't post reviewer comments or identifiable summaries.
I won't post editor comments.
I won't question the judgment of reviewers or editors.
I won't air grievances.
I won't supply negative examples from other people's work.

Also, I won't revisit old publications or discuss publications that are still in press. I'll only discuss publications that have just become available to academics, and I'll provide links so you can follow along if you like.

Questions or comments? Do you think the series is a good idea? What would you like to see from this series? What else do you think I should avoid? Let me know in the comments, and/or tweet me (@spinuzzi).

Commemorative post - 8 years at spinuzzi.blogspot.com

2011-06-03T14:08:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year I realized that I've been blogging for almost eight years. In fact, the first extant post is from June 5, 2003 - my review of Latour's Pandora's Hope. (I've lost a couple of previous non-book-review blog posts when I moved from Blogger to the CWRL's Drupal platform and back again.)

In that time, I've posted 428 reviews, 1044 short items about net work, 39 items on coworking, and miscellaneous others. The blog has changed a lot over the years - for instance, most of the short items I once posted to the blog are now fodder for my Twitter feed - but the backbone has always been the book reviews. In fact, the blog solved two interrelated problems that I had noted back in my grad school days:

Keeping track of my insights. Beginning with grad school, I've always annotated the books I read - but I've always been too cheap to buy the majority of those books. So my preferred method - sticking post-it notes in the margins - didn't work too well when I returned books to the library. At the same time, I had a hard time keeping detailed notes in a notebook or on a file. It seemed like a lot of work to get these notes in a format that would make enough contextual sense, and I had a hard time disciplining myself to take such notes. There wasn't enough external pressure to do it.
Sharing insights with others. Also in grad school, I became interested in sharing insights with others and getting their insights from them. The big factor here was the reading list for our qualifying exams: what seemed like an endless number of books and articles we had to read and know. I thought: how can we share our insights and comment on each other's thoughts? Let's start a conversation about these items! (Maybe I had too much time on my hands.) The problem was that in the mid-1990s not many collaborative writing formats existed. I actually tried to get people to construct a hypertext in Windows Help format, but as you can imagine, it never went anywhere.

At Texas Tech (1999-2001) I started keeping notes in text files and even putting my marginal post-it notes in folders. These efforts were okay, but didn't work out well. After moving to the University of Texas in 2001 and finishing up the manuscript for my first book the year after that, I returned to the problem of recording my thoughts about my readings. At the same time, people at our Computer Writing and Research Lab began writing blogs. So I decided to start one too. It had three simple principles:

I blog a review of every book I read.
My reviews should be helpful to external audiences.
My reviews should be detailed enough that I can slot them into background sections in my future papers.

Since I'm a little OCD, these principles really helped me to stay on track. The public nature of the blog meant that I had to live up to principle #2, and principles #1 and #2 got me started enough that I could follow through on principle #3.

Although I confess that I don't always follow principle #1 anymore - some nonacademic reading I've decided to keep personal - the vast majority of the books I've read have been reviewed on the site. Some are very short reviews and others are very long ones, but all have helped me develop a memory and an understanding of these sources that I couldn't before.

Re principle #2, I've also been surprised by how helpful these reviews have occasionally been to readers. One person told me that "Clay Spinuzzi saved my life" because she had trouble absorbing Bakhtin's work, and reading my reviews helped. People occasionally weigh in with their comments too, which I appreciate.

And principle #3 has paid off in spades. Nearly every paper I write has sentences in the literature review that I've copied and pasted from the blog. (It's okay if I do it - but I don't encourage you to do this, of course.)

In 2008, I found another use for the blog. Intrigued by what seemed like a mysterious blog post, I met with a couple of guys at a "co-company" called Conjunctured. Soon afterwards, Conjunctured started the first coworking space in Austin, and I started interviewing space proprietors and tracking the fascinating emergent phenomenon of coworking. It's the first research project I've blogged, and for these posts, I always conducted member checks, running the text past the proprietors before I posted the profiles. Doing so gave me a sort of member check that helped me to deepen my understanding of these spaces and this phenomenon.

In any case, I can't believe it's been eight years. Hopefully the blog has been helpful to you too - it's certainly been a game-changer for me.

Android allows rich text editing in its Blogger application ...

2011-05-31T19:59:00.001-05:00

... so why doesn't Google support it in their Google Docs app?

Reading :: Terror and Consent

2011-05-31T17:59:00.000-05:00

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century
By Philip Bobbitt

I've been meaning to review this book for months, but have been very busy - and the book is so thick that it needs some time to review. You may remember that I reviewed Bobbitt's impressive book The Shield of Achilles a while back. Terror and Consent is his follow-up effort, in which he attempts to examine terrorism in terms of the constitutional change he described in his previous book. That is, he sees present-day terrorism and its practitioners as a reaction to the ongoing shift from the nation-state to the market-state.

I'm far from being an expert on terrorism or fourth-generation warfare, so you may want to see some thoughts on Bobbitt's work by people who are: David Ronfeldt and John Robb (link goes to Robb's two-star review). Go read those, then come back.

Are you back? Okay, great. My short take is that this book is not as solid or groundbreaking as The Shield of Achilles, but it is still well worth reading if you're interested in how that previous book's thesis plays out when extended to terrorism. Ronfeldt disputes one aspect of that thesis (that we are currently in the transition to a market-state) and Robb disputes at least two others (that the market-state is a constitutional order and that terrorism is an illegitimate reaction to that order). Keep these fundamental objections in mind as you read the book; I'm going to start out by playing by Bobbitt's rules, then circle around to discuss the objections toward the end of this review.

Bobbitt begins by arguing that "the objective of these wars [against terror] is not the conquest of territory or the silencing of any particular ideology but rather to secure the environment necessary for states of consent and to make it impossible for our enemies to impose or induce states of terror. The source of these wars is not Islam but rather a fundamental change in the nature of the State and its evolving relationship to the new methods, purposes, and technologies of warfare" (p.3). As Bobbitt says elsewhere in the book, the "war on terror" is not a misplaced metaphor - it's not a metaphor at all (p.173). These wars against terrorism, he argues, must involve three efforts: preempting attacks by global terrorist networks; preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and protecting civilians against "natural catastrophes and nonnatural assaults" (p.3). That last item may seem odd, but as Bobbitt argues, we're entering an age in which we may not be able to distinguish between natural catastrophes and terrorism (think in terms of biological warfare) and natural disasters may be used as multipliers for the effects of terrorism. In any case, "relieving the suffering and devastation that would be caused by such disasters [genocide, earthquakes, pandemics, tidal waves, hurricanes] calls on many of the same resources as the efforts against terrorism and proliferation" (p.3). Furthermore, he says, the most important feature of terrorist attacks is that "we often will not know their authors and must act in a condition of great uncertainty" (p.4).

This book, Bobbitt says, isn't about the root causes of terrorism but rather about whether the current change in the constitutional order "will result in the triumph of states of consent or states of terror" (p.4). Terror is a crucial test of the market-state, he says, because terrorism challenges the very basis of that constitutional order (p.12). To develop that argument, in Chapter 1, Bobbitt reviews the history of constitutional orders that he discussed in The Shield of Achilles, matching each order with the corresponding form of terrorism: Crusaders, buccaneers, pirates, anarchists, and national liberation movements all make an appearance here as counters to their corresponding constitutional orders. And in the advent of the market-state, based on the principle of maximizing opportunities for the individual, we also see the advent of a terrorism that uses market-state methods to negate individual choice (p.44). "Market state terrorism will be just as global, networked, decentralized, and devolved and rely on just as much outsourcing and incentivizing as the market state," Bobbitt argues (p.45), sounding a bit like Robb. al Qaeda, which Bobbitt sees as a transitional response, is better financed than its predecessors (p.49), quick to outsource local operations (p.50), and structured in a way that represents VISA or Mastercard organizational charts (p.51). (In fact, Bobbitt argues, Osama bin Laden's lasting legacy will be his organizational innovations (p.52)). One major differentiator is that market-state terrorism is no longer a technique, but an end in itself (p.62).

Bobbitt concludes that al Qaeda can be regarded as either a market-state terrorist group or a virtual market-state (p.65). It's "like a mutant nongovernmental organization" (p.84). AQ's strategic goal is constitutional, he says, and thus a counterterror approach must tightly coordinate strategy and law (p.70).

In Chapter 2, Bobbitt continues this argument by reminding us that the constitutional order is the unique grounds upon which the State claims legitimate power. The nation-state gained legitimacy from improving the material conditions of citizens (p.86). The market-state, in turn, says: give us power and we will give you new opportunities (p.88). In a footnote, Bobbitt takes a shot at the belief that terrorism is caused by economic deprivation: that argument, he says, rests on nation-state assumptions and "have nothing to say to al Qaeda or ecoterrorists or animal-rights terrorists or even those antiglobalization terrorists who are aroused more by the threat to cultural identity than by unfair terms of trade" (p.91).

Bobbitt goes on to describe the rise of AQ Khan's network for assembling and selling nuclear bomb-making capabilities, citing Gordon Corera's book. As he tells the story, Khan assembled a market for bombs that overlaid the state but escaped state control. (He doesn't spend much time discussing Khan's nationalistic motivations, which came through so clearly in Corera's book.)

In Chapter 3, Bobbitt returns to the question: is al Qaeda just a terrorist network or is it a virtual market-state? He suggests that it is both, and that states of terror will have different valences just as nation-states did (p.126). If we accept terrorist networks as adversaries in war, the 20th century emphasis on war vs. crime is an artifact of that era's separation of law vs. strategy (p.140). Whereas in earlier wars the objective was to kill the enemy, in the 21st century, the preferred outcome is to temporarily disable the soldier without killing (p.152). (Contrast that statement with the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden earlier this year and the Obama administration's increased use of Predator drones for remotely killing enemies.)

In Chapter 4, Bobbitt goes on to discuss the question of victory over terror. States of consent don't need to win, he says - they simply need to not lose (p.183) in order to steadily expand the zones of consent (p.213). That means hardening infrastructure, preempting, and preventing (p.213). This, Bobbitt says, is the way to win a preclusive victory, the kind of victory that characterizes the era of the market-state (p.213). In interventions, the mission is not to establish democracy, but to legitimize the rule of law (p.221). One contrast he provides is in how the US handled Hurricane Katrina vs. how it handled the 2004 tsunami in Sumatra (pp.222-226). Later in the book, he suggests several measures to better reconcile law and strategy in governmental responses to threats, including repealing the Posse Comitatus Act and mandating a national ID (pp.417-418).

Anyway, let's stop here; I think that gives the gist of the book, and the rest is details. Bobbitt is very concerned that without careful reforms, emerging market-states will be hamstrung by the nation-state separation between law and strategy, and may damage their own legitimacy by either bending the rules to become more responsive or following the rules and responding inadequately. He outlines several such reforms.

Now to the objections. As I mentioned earlier, Ronfeldt disputes one aspect of that thesis (that we are currently in the transition to a market-state). I think that perhaps the distance between the two is not as wide as it appears here, with Bobbitt seeing networks (such as terrorist networks) as characteristic of the market-state rather than succeeding it. On the other hand, I don't think that Bobbitt has worked out some of the details of the networked form of organization to which Ronfeldt refers. Certainly some of the stronger measures that Bobbitt suggests (such as the national ID) seem like hierarchical reactions to networked organizations rather than what we might expect from a network solution. Again, I commend you to Ronfeldt for more on this question.

From another direction, Robb disputes at least two other assumptions that Bobbitt makes: that the market-state is a constitutional order and that terrorism is an illegitimate reaction to that order. Robb does offer a powerful critique here, providing examples of asymmetrical warfare that seeks to (or claims to seek to) maximize individual choice against states that seek to take it away. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Robb has not been reluctant to point the finger at states that have been hollowed out by a runaway market. I don't think that's quite what Bobbitt had in mind, but nevertheless, the picture is more messy (transitional?) than Bobbitt offers.

Nevertheless, I recommend the book - along with the critiques. Bobbitt has thought deeply about the issues and taken the time to develop cogent critiques and offer concrete proposals. They're well worth reading, if only as a way to sharpen your own thinking on these matters and to develop your own counterproposals. But definitely read The Shield of Achilles first.

(discuss the objections)

Reading :: Wired to the World, Chained to the Home

2011-05-30T14:22:00.000-05:00

Wired to the World, Chained to the Home: Telework in Daily Life
By Penny Gurstein

In this 2001 book, Gurstein examines telework through case studies in California and Canada. Gurstein thanks Manuel Castells for his early support of her work (p.ix), and indeed the research is quite Castellian: surveys and interviews, plus dire quotes that reflect alienation and helplessness. The title is a fairly accurate characterization of the book's message.

Gurstein defines teleworking as "work-related substitutions of telecommunications and related information technologies for travel" (p.4). She adds that "it is of interest now to both the private and public sectors because it produces a mobile, flexible labour force and reduces overhead costs" (p.4). And she identifies several contributing conditions, including the internationalization of the economy, the transformation from an industrial economy to a service economy, and advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) that allow outsourcing, offshoring, and automation. These changes lead to "a two-tiered workforce of core and peripheral workers. While a core of full-time salaried workers remains, temporary workers are hired on a contingency basis. For many of these workers, the home becomes their work site" (p.4). Gurstein also notes changes in the family: boundaries between work and family have changed, particularly with "dual-earner or female-headed families becoming the norm" (p.4).

Although working from home has been mythologized in terms of autonomy, freedom, and control, Gurstein charges, for many, "home-based work is a survival strategy and a form of resistance to societal forces beyond their control" (p.8). She notes that the home "is becoming the nexus for a whole range of activities" (work, socialization, entertainment), something that "could atomize and isolate homeworkers from interactions in the larger society" (p.9). In particular, the erosion of work-life boundaries is quite problematic and damaging (p.14).

To ground her discussion, Gurstein presents a typology of home-based workers, including "employed teleworker/homeworker/telecommuter," "independent contractor," "self-employed consultant and home-based entrepeneur/business operator," "moonlighter," and "occasional homeworker" (p.32).

Getting into the results of the study, Gurstein reports that in her California-based study, "home-based work is an escape from the hierarchical organization of the office environment and the managerial control imposed in that environment." Also, "Most teleworkers find that they work very efficiently at home" and Gurstein partially ascribes this increased efficiency to guilt: "They feel guilty about their pleasant work situation" (p.66). Gurstein also points out the fact that telework is associated with a sedentary lifestyle and cites the fact that "most wear sweat clothes when they are working, or even pyjamas and housecoats" (p.70). More worryingly, some report that dressing casually negatively impacted their self-esteem (p.70), something that reflects a broader self-esteem issue for teleworkers, who "have few symbols of their professional identity" (p.71). Teleworkers also report a shrinking network of friends, lower socialization, and more selectivity about interacting with friends (p.71).

(Notice that many of these issues - socialization, self-esteem, physical activity, symbols of professional identity - are directly addressed by coworking.)

Overall, Gurstein does a nice job of reporting statistics and interview results and connecting them with trends. However, I found some of her conclusions to be overly pessimistic. Reading between the lines above, the results from the California study and other studies seem to suggest that telework offers a great many tradeoffs. In any case, the book provides a nice counterbalance to more euphoric discussions of telework.

Reading :: Telework and Social Change

2011-05-30T13:42:00.000-05:00

Telework and Social Change: How Technology Is Reshaping the Boundaries between Home and Work
By Nicole B. Ellison

In this 2004 book, the author examines how geographically flexible workers managed their relative independence in telework. Ellison argues that we're in the middle of a shift in which work is something you do, not somewhere you go; the organization is a network rather than an office (p.3). To explore telework, Ellison conducted case studies of two organizations over 22 months in 1998-1999 (p.15).

Some of the takeaways from these case studies included the following:

First, Ellison found that telecommuting meant becoming a generalist. For mobile workers, being "empowered" meant having to do the sorts of things that sales secretaries once did (p.67).

Second, she found that, in contrast to some of the earlier research on telework, teleworkers in her case studies did not feel isolated; they "expressed a sense of relief at not having to socialize with coworkers as they would in a traditional office" (p.95).

Third, she found that teleworkers had to set boundaries when working in their houses (Ch.6).

Although the results were interesting, I'm afraid the book is sometimes a bit repetitive. Ellison has a habit of providing a block quote from an interview, then restating that quote in her own words. My sense is that the book could be much shorter. Still, if you're interested in telework/telecommuting, it's worth a read.

Reading :: Teleworking in the Countryside

2011-05-30T13:26:00.000-05:00

Teleworking in the Countryside: Home-Based Working in the Information Society
By Michael Antony Clark

This 2000 book studies telework in rural Britain. Clark defines teleworkers "by the nature of their work, in that it involves the production and communication of information from home" (p.5). Citing Toffler's prediction of the "electronic cottage" and later concerns that such home-based work is isolating, (p.17), Clark designed a study with two parts: (1) a survey of how telecottages facilitated telework and (2) interview-based case studies of teleworkers.

A word about telecottages. This book was the first source I've read on telecottages, which were typically funded by local development groups and furnished internet connections, computer labs, and training for those who wanted to learn about information and communication technologies (ICT). These were not what later became known as coworking spaces: spaces where teleworkers and others could come to work in each others' presence. In fact, Clark found that telecottages were quite underused, and at the end of the book he recommended "the establishment of a register of teleworkers and the promotion of small business clubs, maybe via telecottages, which could be integrated into a larger European network of teleworkers" (p.173). That is, Clark recognized that teleworkers didn't need ICT access and training so much as they needed places where they could network and work alongside each other. Remarkably, his recommendation predated the coworking movement by about five years.

Back to the study. Clark found that organizations hired teleworkers as part of the general desire to subcontract work (p.94). Teleworkers themselves gave several reasons for wanting to telework: their workstyle, lifestyle, access to childcare, the threat of unemployment, forced unemployment, and being economically active in-migrants (i.e., moving to a rural area but still wanting to work at an old job) (pp.116-127). They appreciated their autonomy, particularly their control over workflows, work tasks, leisure time, and client sectors served (p.148). Such teleworkers knew about telecottages, but "none had used the telecottage as a workspace" (p.143).

"Social isolation was only mentioned by a few respondents as a significant problem," Clark reports (p.155). Local networks reduced isolation for most respondents (p.156), but professional isolation was a problem for all; one complains that "'I've never had it really, the ability to bounce ideas off of somebody else, and this is a common problem'" (p.157).

Although Clark's book was published in 2000, much of Clark's discussion is still quite fresh and relevant to people working from home. If you're interested in the effects of telework, certainly pick it up.

Reading :: Internet and Change

2011-05-30T13:04:00.000-05:00

Internet and Change: An Ethnography of Knowledge and Flexible Work
By Jens Kjaerulff

Although this book was published in 2010, it reports on a study the author conducted in 1999 after seeing a 1998 Danish television broadcast about teleworkers meeting for weekly get-togethers. As Kjaerulff describes it, the broadcast claimed that these teleworkers got together to help each other's work - to provide feedback over lunch (pp.15-19). One teleworker was quoted as saying that "we need colleagues" (p.18). Intriguingly, this weekly lunch sounds a lot like a phenomenon that arose later in the US and came to be known as Jelly.

But when Kjaerulff arrived to study these teleworker luncheons, he found that they were not as advertised. He attended these weekly lunches for 16 months as well as visiting participants' houses. But "My fieldwork gradually revealed the apparent collegial engagement among the groups' members to be considerably exaggerated" (p.29). The Wednesday Lunch Group did indeed meet, and did indeed value its meetings, but they rarely if ever worked or discussed work during the lunches (p.31). Rather, they connected (p.30).

Given this revelation, Kjaerulff began studying how people from the lunch group worked in their homes. Using surveys, semistructured and unstructured interviews, focus groups, and participant-observation, Kjaerulff examined a handful of families and found some of the issues familiar to the telework literature: people wanted flexibility so that they could spend more time with their family, so they could work extended hours away from the office, and occasionally so they could hide how efficiently they worked (a la Tim Ferriss).

Overall, I'm afraid the book was not very illuminating. One disturbing sign was that although the book was published in 2010, most of his sources were contemporaneous with the study (around 2000). At one point - my apologies, I didn't record the page number - Kjaerulff cites several studies on telework that stop right at 2000. To me, this suggests that the author wrote the study some time back, then lightly revised it ten years later for publication. Another issue is that even though the author studied several families, the book focuses on just three of them, and we don't get a good sense of how generally their results hold. However, if you're studying telework or Jellies or coworking, the book may provide some useful background information.

Reading :: Handbook of Research on Writing

2011-05-30T12:34:00.000-05:00

Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text
Edited by Charles Bazerman

This behemoth of a book (652pp. including index) covers several strands of research on writing under the headings of "history of writing," "writing in society," "writing in schooling," and "writing as text." It's a strong collection, well integrated and edited, with broad coverage. Given the strength of the collection as a whole, I had a hard time picking standout pieces, but here I focus on a couple of the chapters on writing history.

First, Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Michael Erard's "Origins and Forms of Writing" summarizes and extends Schmandt-Besserat's groundbreaking work on the origins of writing in Mesopotamia. Although the discussion of writing's Mesopotamian origins (circa 3200 BCE) are familiar to those who have read Schmandt-Besserat's books, the authors also point out that writing appears to have arisen independently in two other places: China (about 1250 BCE) and Mesoamerica (650 BCE). As the authors emphasize, writing is neither intuitive nor common: "the cognitive steps that led from logography to numerals and phonograms occurred only once in Mesopotamia" (pp.13-15), and similarly the alphabet was invented only once (p.15).

In contrast to the many changes in the lineage of Mesopotamian writing, Chinese writing "has an unbroken record of use in the last three millenia leading up to the modern time" (p.15). The earliest Chinese writing was engraved on "turtle shell and cow bone, used in divination practices" (p.16).

Mesoamerican writing is much harder to reconstruct since Europeans destroyed many codices and others, hidden from the Europeans, decomposed (p.17). But Mesoamericans developed "as many as 13 different writing systems" whose glyphs were written on stone stellae, ceramics, and bark paper books (codices) (p.17). "If writing in Mesoamerica is associated with economic functions, then in Mesoamerica writing is associated with calendrical calculations and the actions of kingly dynasties" (p.17).

Graham Smart's contribution, "Writing and the Social Formation of Economy," picks up on the thread of Mesopotamian writing, arguing that "Writing has, over the millenia, supported the development of increasingly complex and geographically far-reaching forms of economic activity. Throughout this history, newly invented texts and functions for writing have facilitated innovative economic practices. In turn, the use of particular kinds of texts in economic activity led to their early and widespread development, ahead of other forms of writing" (p.103). Smart points out that "new forms and functions for writing allowed for increased complexity in economic affairs," thus "enabling commerce to transcend the constraints of human memory, social trust, and geography" (p.104).

I've only scratched the surface of a thick book full of standout chapters. If you're interested in research on writing, by all means, pick up this volume.

Present Tense CFP

2011-05-23T08:02:00.002-05:00

Once again, Present Tense is calling for submissions:

http://www.presenttensejournal.org/news/call-for-submissions/

Reading :: The 4-Hour Work Week

2011-05-10T14:08:00.000-05:00

The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content
By Tim Ferris

I've heard a lot about this book, not all good. But I read it for the Link Coworking book club, and in general, I'm glad that I did. Yes, Ferris is a bit of a braggart. Yes, his tips don't always translate to lines of work beyond product sales. Yes, he comes off in places as a bit amoral. Get past all that, though, and you'll find some solid principles that you might apply to your life.

Ferris' thesis is that "Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility." He argues that the old mentality of working long hours, saving your money, and deferring vacations and relaxation has let us down: people end up working for the sake of it, waiting to take retirement until they're not fit enough to enjoy it, and hoping that their hard work will pay off. They also end up filling the hours of the work week with things that they don't really need to do. (One example: Email. Ferris recommends reading it at most twice a day.)

The alternative, Ferris tells us, is to take on another mentality: to reconfigure our lives so that we can get more done with less effort and use the saved time to enjoy ourselves. He prescribes that we DEAL:

Definition: Understand "the rules and objectives of the new game," i.e., the rules of the New Rich.
Elimination: Save time by ignoring the unimportant and developing a "low-information diet" that avoids distractions and overload.
Automation: "puts cash flow on autopilot" via "geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of nondecision."
Liberation: Enable total mobility by establishing remote control of work. Take mini-retirements (i.e., months-long vacations).

Ferris provides copious examples from his own life throughout. The consistent message is autonomy: "Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W's you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it." Ferris advocates achieving autonomy by negotiating what is essentially a results-only work environment - i.e., negotiating work off-site, then fine-tuning your tools and processes so that you can deliver the same or better results in far fewer hours. Working remotely is essential here since you need to avoid the pressure to look busy as well as the distractions that come with working on-site. "Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions," he tells us. Later, he suggests we ask ourselves: "Am I being productive or just active?"

Related, Ferris strongly argues for doing work that you find meaningful - and either refusing or outsourcing the rest. Like Drucker, he argues for working with your strengths rather than fixing your weaknesses. Instead of working on weaknesses, he suggests, just outsource them to someone who can do those tasks more quickly and effectively. Oursourcing has other benefits: "Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultrarefined set of rules that will cut the remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them."

Ferris also has other advice, some of which just feels like cheating but is (I imagine) highly effective.

Here's Ferris' advice on how to become a recognized expert. It's simple: Join some organizations; read the three top-selling books in the category; give a free 1-3 hour seminar at a university and have someone video it; do the same at some well-known local corporations; write 1-2 articles for trade magazines (or interview an expert and write up the interview); join ProfNet so that journalists will quote you as an expert). This is a three-week process. It's not quite the same as getting your PhD, but it's not meant to be.

Ferris also describes how to pull a disappearing act from your office. It's also simple: Increase the company's investment in you via training; call in sick two days (he suggests Tuesday and Wednesday) and demonstrate increased output offsite by working remotely; suggest a revocable trial period for working offsite one day a week, citing your increased output; expand remote time by making sure that your offsite days yield higher output than your onsite days. This is a longer process, but it gets results: Ferris gives an example of a reader who tried this technique and managed to take a 30-day vacation in China without his employer realizing. Critically, this won't work unless you really are keeping your output high.

If you read only one part of the book, though, I would suggest the part on automation. Ferris makes a compelling case for figuring out how to either automate or outsource routine tasks. Those who are hackers at heart may be familiar with automation (e.g., the folks who set elaborate GMail filters), but outsourcing is also a powerful technique. Ferris discusses at length how to leverage it.

Bottom line: This is a book for people who hate aspects of their job and who can perform a large portion of their work electronically. It's not going to work for people who work locally (barbers, realtors), who are required to be on-site at specific times (cashiers, professors), or who must spend a great deal of time processing knowledge (software developers, analysts, and again professors). It probably won't work well for people who collaborate frequently. But parts of this book should be applicable to nearly anyone. Get past the braggadocio and at least skim it; think of it as a toolkit for making yourself more productive.

Reading :: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

2011-05-03T19:53:00.000-05:00

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
By Cory Doctorow

A short review for this one. I almost never read fiction anymore, but four things compelled me to read this book.

First, I had heard a lot of good things about it, and I'm a fan of Doctorow's writing on BoingBoing.

Second, because Jenkins and others have mentioned this book's use of the term ad-hocracy, a term that has fascinated me since I read Toffler's Future Shock.

Third, Tara Hunt and others have mentioned borrowing the term "whuffie" (roughly, social capital) from it.

Fourth - well, it was free.

Bottom line, it was a pretty good book. Doctorow is interested in how social dynamics change when people are given effective immortality, their basic needs are taken care of, and they're perpetually wired into a social information layer. In this future, money has been replaced by whuffie, social capital that is automatically tabulated through the social information layer. Make people happy and you get more whuffie; rock the boat or irritate people and you lose it.

Although whuffie sounds great - and people who have adopted the term have enthusiastically used it as a metaphor for social capital, describing its pluses - the story is in large part about its downside.

The protagonist must solve his own murder after being restored from his last backup. Being murdered really bothers him, and it also bothers him that no one else seems to care much about solving the crime: in a world in which people casually destroy their bodies and restore their memories in clones (sometimes just to avoid a bad cold), being murdered is not a big deal; it's more of a faux pas. But the protagonist has a pretty good idea of who murdered him and why. In fact, he suspects a plot. But as he struggles to prove this plot, he behaves badly, makes mistakes, and eventually becomes a pariah with whuffie so low that even small children look away in horror when he passes them. Whuffie, Doctorow shows us, functions as a way to normalize behavior, rewarding safe, conservative behavior and penalizing struggles and conflict.

Ad-hocracies don't come out well either. In the Magic Kingdom - the story is set in Disney World - the sections are run by consensually governed, leaderless collectives. Generally, these collectives turn out to be good at maintaining sections of the park (and group consensus), but bad at innovating or reacting. The exception is an organization that is de facto led by an outsized personality. They're a far cry from the agile specialists that Toffler describes.

In all, it's an engaging and quick read. If you're into science fiction with social commentary, give it a look.

Reading :: The Future of Nonprofits

2011-05-03T17:11:00.000-05:00

The Future of Nonprofits: Innovate and Thrive in the Digital Age
By David Neff and Randal Moss

Full disclosure: I know David Neff. Actually, I'm pretty sure that at least 60% of Austin knows David Neff, who is one of the most gregarious people I've met. He's constantly on social media, he was named the 2009 AMA/AMAF Social Media Marketer of the Year, and he is famous for his annual Mustache and Bad Sweater Party. He's spoken to my classes once or twice. And he's very passionate about nonprofits.

So I was happy to hear that David had teamed up with Randal Moss, with whom he had worked at the American Cancer Society, to write a book on the future of nonprofits. The book wasn't quite ready by SXSW, but when David and Randal presented readings from the book, they demonstrated that they were thinking through how the nonprofit sector had to change considerably to address the rapid changes wrought by social media, demographic shifts, and other factors. They demonstrated some quick adaptation themselves: Knowing that the book wouldn't be ready, they managed to supply a leave-behind that would keep us thinking about it.

From Austin snapshots

If you missed SXSW, don't worry, the comic book is also printed in the back of The Future of Nonprofits. I hope you'll get a chance to read it along with the rest of the book, because The Future of Nonprofits is certainly worth it - not just for those in the nonprofit sector, but for anyone who is interested in opening their organization's culture up to innovation. Neff and Moss take a strategic approach, illustrated with cases from their own work and interviews with innovation leaders at nonprofits.

So what does a strategic approach entail? More than simply becoming more agile. From the first chapter, the authors emphasize that innovative organizations have to not just anticipate change, but actively look for it. Their first example: for much of the 20th century, nonprofits in the US relied heavily on direct solicitation; donors, especially housewives, reached through their personal networks to gather donations from their neighborhoods. This arrangement worked so well that nonprofits began to overrely on it - even when social changes in the 1970s (e.g., women entering the workforce en masse, the rise of apartment dwelling) caused neighborhoods to unravel (pp.10-11). "So, slowly and without major fanfare, the definition of community had changed and it changed right under the noses of the nonprofit community" (p.12). The authors argue that such shifts can be detected much earlier - but people in nonprofits are often so focused on working that they don't see these shifts. So the critical change must be to "embrace innovation as a valuable tool," first at the level of leadership, but then (critically) as part of the organization's culture (p.20).

How do you know when you're being innovative? In Chapter 2, the authors discuss what innovation is and what it isn't. "Really the ultimate goal of innovation is to bring about change to add value to and improve upon a process, product, or experience," they tell us, while "things are not innovative when they do not leverage new ideas, new uses for old ideas and technologies, and/or fail to deliver value to the end user or constituent" (p.22). That is, it's not innovative to simply adopt a new technology or business process. It's not innovative to simply hire someone to tweet for your company, for instance - not unless you have a concrete idea of how doing that will help advance your objectives and those of the people you serve. Without that, the "innovation" might actually be an unnovation "because [it delivers] little if any durable value" (p.23). The authors' many examples are invaluable here, as is one of their lessons: you can measure innovation. It's not just a vague concept, it's something you can examine with metrics. Of those metrics, the most important one for nonprofits is engagement (p.52).

In Chapter 3, the authors differentiate their strategy from "preeminent programs for driving organizational efficiency": Lean Management, Six Sigma Management, and Total Quality Management. All have their strengths, but none are right for nonprofits, particularly since they tend to focus on efficiency over innovation.

Given the authors' considerable experience in social media, it's not surprising that Chapter 4 focuses on leveraging technology for nonprofits. Here, the case studies become extremely valuable, as the authors discuss some of the traditional frictions between nonprofits and IT staff; interview key figures in nonprofits who have thought about new ways to engage donors with technology; and describe case studies. For instance, the authors discuss how the Brooklyn Museum used Foursquare to crowdsource tips about the museum and its surroundings - and to provide incentives to become the Mayor of the museum (pp.66-67).

Part II of the book discusses "the three pillars of innovation": awareness (Ch.5), structure (Ch.6), and staffing (Ch.7). Here's where the book really becomes interesting, because the authors begin to deliver on their promise of a culture of innovation. It's not just about external engagement, it's about structurally changing the organization, changing incentives within the organization, developing new job descriptions and responsibilities, and getting the right people on your team. I won't go into all the details here except to say that they cover the bases - defining positions, interviewing, calling references - in ways that emphasize developing an innovative culture. (Appendix 1 includes some sample job descriptions to get you started.) They don't talk about stealing promising employees from other sections - at least, not until Chapter 8.

In Part III, the authors move into the question of implementation. "To get started, take a look at your staff, find the rule breakers, and begin to initiate a Skunkworks effort," they tell us in Ch.8. "Why do organizations do this? Because the typical way of doing things produces typical work and a Skunkworks program is charged with producing atypical work - innovative and leading-edge work that can only be done in an unencumbered working environment" (p.149). They walk through the steps of setting up a Skunkworks, including stealing promising staffers from other sections, and they discuss some rules and processes that will help you get started.

Chapter 9 is about fundraising: "new money from new donors in new ways" (p.169). This chapter is about the future, so they list five major changes for the next five years:

Social gaming with rewards
Donating with ease
Fun local events/individual fundraisers
The socially conscious partnership
The shift in donor attitudes (i.e., donors who "do their research online and make confident choices," p.186)

They discuss each change with plenty of examples. For instance, when they discuss fun local events, they describe David's annual November campaign for men's cancer issues, Movember - when men not only donate but grow mustaches for the month. Movember ends, of course, with the Mustache and Bad Sweater Party.

Chapter 10 moves on to "the future of communications," and here the authors generate another top five list:

Geolocation
Monitoring technology (e.g., Twitter hashtags)
Data segmentation
Advertising beyond "Where's the Beef?"
The total loss of privacy

And again, the authors do a great job of discussing how they spotted these trends, what they are, and what they mean to donor engagement.

With lists that predict trends of the next five years, obviously parts of this book will have a short shelf life. That just means you should buy it quickly. The other parts will age more gracefully, I think, and the book as a whole should be useful to nonprofits - but also to other organizations that prize high constituent engagement. In fact, higher education could probably learn a few tricks from it. If you're in the position to hire, innovate, or engage in your organization, consider picking it up.

(I'm still reading)

2011-04-19T16:38:00.000-05:00

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might be asking: What happened to the book reviews?

Answer: I'm just behind on them.

No, I haven't been posting book reviews here for a while, but that doesn't mean I've stopped reading - I'm just buried in other commitments. I have 5 books to blog, including:

Phillip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent
Timothy Ferris' The Four-Hour Work Week
Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Charles Bazerman et al.'s Genre in a Changing World
Bollier's report entitled The Future of Work

In addition, I'll be reading David Neff and Randal Moss' The Future of Nonprofits when it comes out in early May.

When will I get to these? Not sure - I really have overloaded myself with projects over the next few months, but I hope to fire off a few reviews the second week of May. Until then, hang tight. And thanks for reading.

Present Tense issue 2 is out

2011-04-04T09:30:00.000-05:00

Present Tense issue 2 is out. From the About page:

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy. Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles ranging from 2,000 to 2,500 words, the length of a conference paper. For sample topics please see our submission guidelines.

The articles look pretty interesting. If this is the sort of thing you like to read, definitely take a look.

Coworking in Austin: Cospace 2.0

2011-03-28T09:08:00.004-05:00

Cospace is one of Austin's coworking success stories. When I first talked to founders Kirtus and Andrew in November 2009, they had just put out some feelers about opening a space. But they had already started to articulate the principles of their space: mutual mentorship, collaboration, face-to-face relationships, flexibility, freedom. By January 2010, they had added a third founder, Pat Ramsey, and were about to close on a lease. They opened the doors on February 17, 2010. It was fantastic to see a coworking space develop from an initial dream to a successful implementation.

Of course, the story doesn't stop there. In the last year, Cospace has expanded its membership roles considerably (now around 43 members); upgraded its furniture (from Craigslist purchases to Turnstone); and developed its vision further. So when Kirtus suggested we get together to talk about the changes in the space last week, I was happy to do so. So on Friday, I sat down in Cospace's glass lounge with Kirtus and Pat to discuss what they call "Cospace 2.0."

Cospace 2.0

What's Cospace 2.0? Really, it's an extension and refinement of the original vision that was already evident in those early days, sharpened and customized through continual feedback. As Kirtus explains it, through 2010, Cospace just focused on serving people in the coworking space. That meant always listening, always engaging, and always being willing to try out new things. Serving meant learning: about users, about their needs, and about the niches Cospace could best serve. And by October 2010, they had realized that Cospace filled three niches, three use cases (reflected on Cospace's website):

Meet. One segment was interested in Cospace for its potential as a professional meeting space or a group space. In response, Cospace began renting out its two conference rooms and making its open space available for after-hours meetups.
Work. Another segment simply wanted to cowork - to grab a desk space and work alongside unaffiliated members during business hours. After trying out different configurations, Cospace developed a simplified $100/$200/$300 rating system, with the $300 rate available to teams.
Build. The teams aspect points to the third segment. Member pricing was too rigid for certain teams, particularly teams assembled by entrepeneurs who were trying to build products. How could Cospace set the right conditions for those teams to develop and evolve? Here, Cospace focused on flexibility, customization, fit - and productivity.

Cospace's 43 members are almost evenly divided between teams and individuals. But, Kirtus says, all of these members are focused on being productive: "getting [things] done." They're not just looking for socializing and networking opportunities; they want to build products and grow companies. And this is what distinguishes Cospace from many other coworking spaces, Pat adds.

Manufacturing, Leading, Learning

Coworking space proprietors tend to take one of three roles, Pat and Kirtus told me:

Manufacture: In this role, proprietors "make" the space: they set meetings, recruit people, and otherwise define the coworking space.
Lead: In this role, proprietors function as community managers, shepherding the flock, attempting to make connections and pointing the way for the coworkers.
Learn: In this role, proprietors seek to serve, to gather continual feedback, and to effect continuous iteration. This is Cospace's model, and according to Kirtus, "it's the only reason we survived."

It's partly for this reason that Cospace, which was originally envisioned as a coworking space for general small business organizations, has become increasingly more tech-centric. "That's Austin," Pat says. Although many traditional businesses could easily work out of and benefit from coworking spaces, people in the tech community seem to adapt most easily: they tend to be more mobile and have already adapted to working anywhere. So although Cospace continues to pull people from other sectors, the tech sector is heavily represented here - both in individual members and in teams.

Keep it Pushin'

In its teams focus, Cospace has concentrated on attracting teams that want to grow. As Kirtus says, they "keep it pushin'": they try to juxtapose teams that are productive, that have a good-to-great mentality, and that will continue to challenge and inspire each other. They focus on inspiring cross-learning in which elite team members can share information with each other, from tech concerns to business tips.

Does this make Cospace look more like an incubator? I ask. Kirtus responds that Cospace is "incubator-agnostic." They're not picking winners and losers, and they're not investing money (although they're personally invested in the success of teams at Cospace). Rather, they simply want to make sure that these teams can make the connections they need in order to grow.

Managing the Community

This brings us to the question of community management. How does Cospace 2.0 ensure that teams can make connections, that members can build trust, and that its operations can proceed regularly. Cospace's new answer - as of this month - is its new operations manager, Sarah Cox.

Many coworking spaces think about hiring a community manager "someday." But in Sarah, Cospace gains someone with expertise in project management, account management, and office management. Sarah has taken on aspects of all these roles at Cospace: giving space tours for potential members, interviewing potential members, taking over the events calendar, revamping the membership agreement, developing a packet for new members, and developing internal process documents to make sure that the Cospace model is consistent (and reproducible). She's the go-to person for members, and she's also building on Kirtus' and Pat's structure, gathering continuous feedback by dropping by and chatting with coworkers.

Beyond those duties, Sarah is also taking over Cospace's social media presence. She'll be promoting Cospace on blogs and Twitter, reaching out to meetup groups, and planning educational and social events. Over the next six months, Sarah will continue bringing in new events and increasing awareness (especially among freelancers). She'll also be thinking through the spatial organization at Cospace, looking for little tweaks that can make a big difference.

As Sarah points out, a flexible workforce implies flexible space. So Cospace will also look for opportunities to serve the Meet and Work niches for flexible work. For instance, one group worked at Cospace for a month while their own office was renovated. Another company, which typically works as a distributed virtual team, officed together here during South by Southwest. Cospace's month-to-month contracts allow that flexibility, and Sarah plans to continue supplying those opportunities.

The Next Phase

So what's next for Cospace?

The headline news is the change in roles.

Kirtus is still an active cofounder, but is pulling away from day-to-day operations to concentrate on his CEO position at startup GroupCharger. He'll still perform outreach and visioning for Cospace.
Pat is now performing oversight for Cospace. He'll be in the space, gathering feedback, making connections, and performing outreach (sometimes of a quite unconventional sort). He'll be the public face of Cospace.
Sarah, as operations manager, will continue building the Cospace community and building Cospace's structure through continual feedback.

In addition, Cospace is thinking about branching out to other cities, specifically Cedar Park and Round Rock. As Sarah develops Cospace's operational documents, the Cospace model should be easier to package and export to new locations.

Let me end on a personal note. I have nothing but admiration for entrepeneurs who take a chance on opening a new coworking space. For me, it's been extraordinary to see how Cospace started. In a little more than a year, I saw a couple of enthusiastic guys turn their dream into a flourishing, sustainable coworking space. May Cospace's second year be even more successful and inspiring than its first.

Reading :: Cadence & Slang

2011-03-21T09:27:00.002-05:00

Cadence & Slang
By Nick Disabato

I have mixed feelings about Cadence & Slang, a small self-published book that its author intends to serve as a style guide for interaction design. The book is beautifully designed and well written, with lots of nice moments in it. As a style guide, it reminds me of Joseph Williams' book, which treats writing style with such grace and reverence. Like Williams, Disabato is clearly in love with his art, and it shows: in his writing, in his examples, and in the care with which he has designed this little book. The book covers a lot, from patterns to writing style to interviewing stakeholders to usability testing, and does it with quiet confidence.

Maybe too much confidence: on the other hand, Cadence & Slang also has the same drawback as other style guides: In trying to summarize the wisdom of an entire field, it tends to gloss over issues. And unlike Williams' book on writing style, this one doesn't acknowledge that it's glossing. For instance, we are told that Jakob Nielsen was the first to perform usability tests on sketched prototypes (p.64) and that you can catch 95% of usability problems with only three participants (p.65). We're also told that contextual inquiry is "the process of informally interviewing users while they're completing a real-world task" (p.109). All of these statements are kinda-sorta correct but hide a great many assumptions and background. (For instance, Nielsen very well might have been the first to apply formal usability testing methodology to paper prototypes in the early 1990s, but paper prototypes emerged as rich participant feedback mechanisms in the UTOPIA project of the early 1980s.)

And don't get me started on his gloss of ethnographic research (p.58).

Disabato repeatedly tells us to sweat the details, but his book produces a 50,000 foot view of interaction design that elides most details. In doing so, it glosses over rather than addressing some of the latent tensions in interaction design. For instance, he tells us to attend to web accessibility (p.42), but the book itself is not accessible for the visually impaired, and as late as October of last year Disabato resisted making an electronic version available because that would cause problems for the book's visual design. (You can now buy a PDF version, but I'm unclear on how accessible the PDF is.) This experience nicely illustrates the push-pull between different design principles, but in the book itself, Disabato doesn't acknowledge or wrestle with such types of hard choices between the design principles he advocates.

That being said, it really is quite a good book. I'd assign it to students who are taking a survey course in interaction design - as long as I was sure they'd be delving into the details in other classes.

An inspiring post about Network and networks

2011-03-15T16:32:00.004-05:00

While I was at SXSW, Bill Hart-Davidson tweeted me the link to this fantastic blog post by Michael Wojcik: {n1,n2,n3,…}. If you have any interest in networks - or in Network, my second book, which figures prominently in the post - you should go read it. As I tweeted back to Bill, I agree with about 90% of the post, but I respect all of it.

What's really extraordinary is that this post is not a formal book review or essay - it's a reading response in a graduate class. Bravo.

I love that Wojcik gets my general project, that he finds the strong parts, and that he doesn't pull punches when he finds the simplifications and glosses in my book. That's the mark of someone who is actually engaged with the text. It's flattering: it makes me think that I wrote something worth reading closely. (I also like that he lays into Deleuze and Guattari, but that's another story.)

What's the 10% that I don't agree with? For now, let me just leave you with one clue.

Wojcik's post comes at a good time, since I am thinking about writing an essay on networks anyway. More on that as it evolves. But until then, really, do click through and read his post. And then go write stuff like this.

"Hold on Loosely": The summary and some thoughts

2011-03-15T15:31:00.002-05:00

Last week I held two conversations with two very different audiences about loose organizations. On Monday, I presented at Austin's RISE conference to perhaps a dozen local entrepeneurs. On Friday, I held a conversation with dozens and dozens - I have no idea how many, I'm terrible at crowd estimates - at South by Southwest Interactive. What struck me was how very different the conversations were.

RISE

At the RISE session, I gave a brief slideshow to introduce the notion of loose organizations - an umbrella term meant to describe ways in which people are working in less hierarchical, more agile ways that orient to common projects rather than job descriptions or departments. Then I asked several questions about the attendees' experiences with loose organizations. The results tracked fairly closely with the sorts of case studies I've been doing (e.g., independent contractors and coworking spaces in the Austin area). People named loose organizations such as

independent contractor relationships
coordinated relationships among nonprofits
small, locally based virtual organizations (8-10 employees)

These people noted several challenges:

Maintaining enough transparency to develop trust with team members, while maintaining enough opaqueness to keep clients unaware of the details they shouldn't know about.
Coordinating projects (using Basecamp, Mavenlink, or other collaborative planning and communication tools).
Figuring out what to keep in-house (either in skill or in capacity) and what to subcontract or outsource.
Finding ways to support data infrastructure for loose organizations. Members emphasized cloud-based solutions.
Finding ways to backchannel latest knowledge about projects and general knowledge for a given field.
Being able to give up control to other specialists with whom you work.
Being able to maintain strategy when coordinating transient project-oriented teams.

Hearing these points was gratifying, since they reinforced the sorts of things I had seen and read.

Then I got to Friday.

SXSW

The crowd at SXSW was much more diverse. Participants included:

A coordinator for a major open source projects
A representative of a company that produced software by coordinating software development contests
A manager at a large construction company
Owners of virtual organizations with employees based across the world
Coworking space owners
Members of companies using independent contractors

This crowd was largely not Austin-based - but more importantly, their organizations were generally not local in any sense, and they were generally much larger than the ones I have studied in Austin. Consequently, some of the challenges they mentioned were very different.

Members of geographically distributed organizations focused on challenges such as these:

How do we attract and interest the right people to work with our organization?
How do we vet these people and establish trust with them? How do we establish and track a reputation for them?
How do we make sure we can command them (give them specific enough assignments) without controlling them (micromanaging them)? (This issue is particularly important in some states, such as California, where state regulations say that the amount of management can cause an independent contractor to be reclassified as an employee.)
How do we keep multiperson teams coordinated, both synchronously and asynchronously?
How do we make sure that people working in different time zones have times that they can communicate synchronously?

As you can see, compared to the concerns at RISE, these questions are much more heavily focused on long-term coordination and collaboration among people who are not geographically colocated. Part of the reason is that the RISE session participants were generally independent contractors and small businesses - but the SXSW session participants were generally owners and managers of larger, more distributed organizations.

So the SXSW crowd suggested several ways to handle these issues:

Attracting and interesting the right people: Participants focused on having, sharing, and projecting a clear reason for working in their organization. They expressed this reason as cause, ideology, vision, or mission. They generally agreed that when you devolve decision-making across an organization, especially a geographically distributed one, you have to attract people to work with you. Team members had to look forward to more than a paycheck: perhaps a challenge, a chance to do good, a chance to change the world or participate in something bigger than themselves.
Vetting and establishing trust: So how do you determine which team members will work out best? Participants had different mechanisms. On one end, one company attracts team members by posting challenges and holding competitions, competitions that represented stages in the software development process. In this case, as with most market transactions, trust is minimal but transaction costs are low; through multiple competitions, team members can prove themselves and improve their standing. On the other end, some companies focused on communicating their mission clearly during the hiring process; people who couldn't get on board with that mission would remove themselves from the process. Larger organizations leaned toward metrics and reputation systems, even rating systems, while smaller ones still went with the gut - but even then, the "gut" was informed by many, many different channels of interaction.
Commanding without controlling: Here, people generally agreed that they had to simply be clear about specifications and deadlines. One organization had a three strikes policy: you could deliver projects late twice, but the third time, you would be cut out. Many organizations didn't even dictate a common tool set to their teams beyond specific, easily obtained communication software and a narrow set of tools used in their industry.
Keeping teams coordinated: Again, responses ran the gamut here. One surprise for me was that people did not seem enthusiastic about project management software: one person complained that either you sank the time into it, in which case it became cluttered, or you didn't, in which case it became inaccurate. Instead, people focused on tools that could be used synchronously or with a short lag time. For instance, one reported that his virtual team simply kept Skype on all day so that they could see each other working and have conversations whenever they needed to. Others reported that all team members used IRC or IM.
Coordinating synchronously. Many insisted that nothing could replace team meetings and synchronous conversations, although these didn't have to take place in the same room. But these opportunities can be difficult to achieve when people work in different time zones or on their own schedules. To open these opportunities, many reported posting availability schedules for team members and making sure that all were available during some part of the day.

My takeaways?

Challenges look different on different levels of scale.
Challenges look different on different sides of the table.
People are finding their own uses for communication technologies.
Teams are continuing to figure out trust, and they're beginning to apply reputation systems to team interactions.

And perhaps most importantly: Sometime soon I'm going to have to study a large, geographically distributed virtual organization.

Thanks to all who participated, and don't hesitate to leave your own thoughts in the comments.

"Hold on Loosely" - a quick thanks

2011-03-11T21:27:00.003-06:00

So my SXSWi core conversation "Hold On Loosely" was held today. I just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who attended and contributed. It was surprisingly rewarding, and my big takeway is that my next research project may have to push beyond local independent contractors and coworking spaces toward distributed teams.

Just a few links before I go back into SXSWi mode:

If you wondered what the session would have looked like if I had used slides, see my RISE presentation.
To read more about coworking, see my ongoing profiles of coworking spaces.
If you want to know more about some of the research I've done in Austin, my TILTS presentation is up too - 50 slides, 15 minutes.
Oh, and here's my SXSWi2010 slide deck on coworking.

I'll plan to sum up the core conversation sometime next week. Til then, if you're at SXSW this year and want to touch base, tweet me @spinuzzi. Thanks, everyone.

Reading :: Genre: An Introduction

2011-03-06T21:08:00.002-06:00

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy
By Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff

Since I bought my Kindle, I've been looking for books available as free PDF downloads. It's just so convenient, and frankly, I expect to be reading a lot more PDFs than Kindle books on this thing. In any case, one good source of such PDF books is The WAC Clearinghouse. Some of the books were published by presses, then discontinued and their rights reverted to the authors; others were commissioned for the series in conjunction with Parlor Press.

This particular book, by Bawarshi and Reiff, is of the latter variety. Published in 2010, it aims to do exactly what the subtitle says: introduce us to the history, theory, research, and pedagogy of genre. And it does a remarkably good job. These two scholars have absorbed a really amazing amount of material, examining genre in literary traditions, systemic functional linguistics, historical/corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, rhetorical and sociological traditions (including the Brazilian Genre Synthesis), and rhetorical genre studies (RGS). That's just Part 1 - and the chapters in this part function as a massive framework essay on the concept of genre.

In Part 2, the authors examine genre research in several different contexts, including academic; workplace and professional; and public and new media contexts. Again, they do a tremendous amount of review here, sensitively discussing the research on each context.

Part 3 goes to school, examining various pedagogical approaches to teaching genres. Rhetorical Genre Studies gets its own chapter here.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the book's sheer scope and treatment of the material. Yes, in a far-ranging survey such as this one, some things get lost - but the authors lose much less than I might have expected. They clearly understand the material from many different angles, and they provide and contextualize a wealth of information; my Kindle notes are almost all along the lines of "get this cite!"

If you're planning to teach a graduate seminar on genre, or if you are just interested in the different genre traditions out there, go download this book. It's a terrific resource.

Reading :: Knowledge Capitalism

2011-03-05T15:37:00.003-06:00

Knowledge Capitalism
By Alan Burton-Jones

As new economy books go, this one is a bit long in the tooth. Burton-Jones, who heads an Australia-based consultancy, published it in 1999. That's centuries in Internet time - and yet Burton-Jones does a great job of explaining some of the characteristics of the post-industrial society, identifying some of its trends, and discussing how the firm outsources non-core functions to different markets: flexhire, mediated services, dependent contractors, and independent contractors. Since I have been studying the latter lately, this discussion was especially helpful to me: I see multiple points of contact with coworking. I also appreciated the care in which Burton-Jones documented his evidence for the discussion.

Let's start with the key notion of "knowledge capital." The author starts by distinguishing between goods and services - although he concedes that the distinction is becoming harder to draw. But "as manufacturers outsource non-core functions to specialist service organizations, employment in services increases and employment in manufacturing declines" (p.4). The difference between goods and services has become harder to draw, though, because although the traditional definition of "service" is something that is consumed as it is produced, not all services fit that definition, "particularly those that can be electronically time-shifted" (p.4). So "as both goods and services become more knowledge and information intensive, the distinction between them is becoming both less apparent and in many cases less relevant. Knowledge is becoming the defining characteristic of economic activities" (p.4, my emphasis). So "the central tenet of this book is that knowledge is transforming the nature of production and thus work, jobs, the firm, the market, and every aspect of economic activity" (pp.4-5). He urges us to understand knowledge better (p.5), drawing distinctions such as knowledge-about vs. know-how, explicit vs. tacit, and stickiness vs. absorptive capacity (p.7).

To drive the point home, the author provides statistics: "In 1900, less than 18 per cent of the total workforce in the USA were engaged in data- and information-handling tasks. By 1980 it had risen to over 50 percent. ... On present trends, over 80 percent of the workforce are likely to be involved in information-handling tasks by 2020, of whom a higher proportion than at present are likely to be engaged in knowledge-building and decision-making activities" (pp.8-9; but see Brown and Hekseth for a more skeptical view of such predictions). The author provides a table illustrating give stages of IT from the 1960-2000, with focus changing from centralized file handling to local and global networking (p.9). Along with that focus change has been a change in the economy, and the author identifies three economic trends: symbolic goods, demassification, and boundaryless empire (pp.12-16). And he identifies a significant trend away from job orientation and toward career orientation - that is, industry-wide standardization (e.g., a standard word processing package used by secretaries across all companies) has led to less firm-specific knowledge, leading to more circulation among jobs. "In effect, careers owned by individuals will progressively replace jobs owned by firms. By the same token, firms are becoming less dependent on the idiosyncratic knowledge of particular workers, when the same/similar knowledge can be obtained more cost effectively, either through automation or on the open market" (p.20). (Some readers may be reminded of Castells' notion of generic labor here; Burton-Jones does cite Castells' work, but doesn't specifically draw on Castells' work on generic labor.)

So, the author argues, we're entering an economy based on knowledge (p.20). He identifies four regional variants (p.20), but believes that they will converge (p.22).

In the second chapter, the author explores the question of how the firm will develop in the knowledge economy. During the Industrial Revolution, firms internalized functions to aid efficiency and effectiveness, and transactions within the firm increased (p.25). During the 1970s, digital technologies reversed this trend, and firms began decentralizing operations, saving costs and reducing administrative complexity" (p.25). Through the 1980s, organizations became "leaner and flatter," and "as a result, the commercial firm of the late 1990s is less inhibited by geographic, industry, or technical boundaries, employs fewer people on a full-time permanent basis, and often has fewer tangible assets" (p.25). So: in the knowledge economy, how do transactions changes? Which transactions stay in the firm vs. the market? (p.26).

Knowledge-based theory predicts that economic activities containing high levels of explicit non-firm-specific knowledge ... will move into the market (externalization). Conversely, those with high levels of tacit and specialized knowledge will remain in the firm (internalization). Firm-specific knowledge embodied in routine functions can be expected to reduce, due to automation. Routine firm functions requiring little firm-specific knowledge, such as office cleaning, equipment maintenance, and security, are already commonly outsourced. (p.32)

Again, we can see parallels with Castells here, but Burton-Jones sharpens the distinction a bit. He also notes that firms are moving away from proprietary systems and networks to standard ones (think Google Apps for Your Domain). "These factors tend to imply an overall shift toward proportionately greater market-based coordination" (p.33).

One consequence is that we're now seeing a reconvergence of ownership and control: "Sole proprietorships, small partnerships, and private companies involved in service activities and low-scale production generally have both their ownership and their decision making concentrated in a few key individuals," so "ownership and control are typically united" - in stark contrast with larger firms (p.40).

In the knowledge-based firm, Burton-Jones expects the following:

The firm's principal functions will be "knowledge coordination, protection, and integration"
"Transactions involving high levels of specialized and tacit knowledge will be internalized"
"Transactions involving high levels of explicit knowledge will be externalized"
"Ownership and control will converge"
"The links between education, work, and learning will converge" (p.43)

Due to these trends, Burton-Jones argues that "by the year 2000 at least 30 per cent of the American workforce are likely to be working under ... non-standard [non-full-time, non-permanent, non-employee status] arrangements" (p.46). He shows the trend with a table of non-regular employment across countries, 1973-1993 (p.48). And he argues that the nature of employment contracts is changing from relational to transactional contracting:

output-based performance
results, not time
location-independent (p.52)

"For the core knowledge workers in the firm, the focus will increasingly be on team or firm performance," he concludes (p.52). Most employees will be incentivized to maximize personal productivity for personal gain, not corporate goals; relations between employees and firm will be more arm's-length (p.52). He develops a Knowledge Supply Model[TM] - yes, he trademarked it - in which the Firm (a core group surrounded by an associate group surrounded by an affiliate group) is surrounded by the flexhire market, the mediated services market, the dependent contractors market, and the independent contractors market (p.58). These four markets perform different functions. For instance, independent contractors

provide support for functions requiring high levels of tacit and/or explicit knowledge, but low levels of firm-specific knowledge. Such support typically involves technical, professional, and specialty services. The value of the knowledge provided by this group, in terms of its potential impact on firms' operations, is high. The frequency of demand by the firm for such knowledge is typically lower than for that supplied by dependent contractors.

Members of this group include self-employed individuals (both incorporated and non-incorporated), micro firms, and small businesses. They are usually not dependent on any particular firm for their major source of income. Members of this group frequently form independent business networks comprising a mixture of individuals and firms. (pp.60-61).

Burton-Jones expects all types of contracting "to grow at the expense of all forms of direct employment" (p.64). In the subsequent chapters, Burton-Jones explores each of the markets. Although he has interesting things to say about all of them, let's focus on Ch.7, which discusses the independent contractors market.

The independent contractors market includes independent contractors, micro firms, and business networks (p.131). "The independent contractor is one whose income is ordinarily derived from multiple sources and is not normally dependent upon the maintenance of a relationship with one or a few specific clients" (p.132). They are involved in "contracts with firms that are 'arm's-length,' explicit, transaction oriented, and measured by outputs or results, rather than inputs" (p.132). Increasingly, they handle work involving a high order of knowledge and skills, but unrelated to day-to-day operations of the firm. "Small businesses are likely to be better qualified to provide such skills than the general market and to compete effectively with larger outsourced specialists, particularly when the independents' lower overhead structures provide a cost advantage" (p.133). Stunningly, "over three-quarters of those in self-employment in the West have no direct employees" (p.133). And this brings us to business networks, in which individuals and small businesses network with each other, forming non-contractual, nonhierarchical relationships (pp.137-138). Such networks involve "trust, informality, redundancy, commitment, and interdependency" (p.138). They involve "horizontal, cooperative relationships" in which "knowledge exchange is frequently ad hoc, informal, and designed to assist with problem solving" (p.141). Indeed,

future knowledge entrepeneurs are likely to grow their businesses through cooperating with other resource owners rather than by seeking to employ them. ... For those in the fast-growing knowledge-intensive industries such as IT and in the professions generally, self-employment is already more prevalent business growth already occurs through loose groupings of associates or partnerships, rather than vertically organized business structures (p.143)

Is there a better description of what I've been seeing at coworking sites?

In Chapter 8, Burton-Jones reminds us that the firm itself is being redefined as well. Non-core functions are externalized, but the core is internalized, refined, and concentrated. This process is redefining the firm: it "is becoming physically smaller, but intellectually larger, as it reorganizes its use of externalized and internalized resources" (p.151). Or if you prefer: all edge. That means: less physical infrastructure; greater use of workers' personal resources; workers as suppliers rather than employers; more financial agility (p.152). Such characteristics imply a limit to the firm's growth (p.154). The firm is becoming a knowledge producer (p.155), an integrator of knowledge (p.156). He predicts a structural convergence between business networks and firms (p.190).

In the last chapter, he emphasizes the "learning imperative": "work and learning are becoming increasingly interrelated and interdependent" (p.199). "Education," he says, must become a global business rather than a public service (p.204).

He also warns:

A fundamental characteristic of the knowledge economy is the way that it will empower and simultaneously isolate the individual. The implications of this 'splendid isolation' need to be taken into account in explaining and promoting ways to handle changing economic conditions. Learning, rather than being educated, for example, will be foreign to many people. Others will find the prospect of an independent workstyle a daunting prospect. For those unaccustomed to operating without supervision, the message has to be one of encouragement and support, both to take control of their own careers and to suggest independent sources of counselling and assistance. For others it will be a case of encouraging and publicly rewarding knowledge entrepeneurship. (p.232)

Again, is there a better description of the support aspect of coworking?

Overall, this book was helpful in at least three aspects. First, Burton-Jones provides a broad, well-grounded discussion of structural changes in work brought on by the increased importance of knowledge work. Second, he provides a well developed taxonomy of externalized markets for talent, and his discussion of independent contractors in particular is helpful, providing remarkable insights into the independent contracting and coworking characteristics I've been studying. Third, his 1999-era sources give me ideas for finding and handling similar but more contemporary sources. Overall, an excellent and insightful read.

RISE, SXSW

2011-03-04T16:34:00.003-06:00

So next week is a big week. I'll be speaking twice - and actually, I'll be trying not to speak too much because I'm more interested in what you will say.

RISE. On Monday, I'll appear in a RISE session called "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work." It's at Link Coworking, 10am. There, I'll warm things up with a slide show, then lead a discussion about how people perform work that's very loosely organized: independent contractors, remote workers, specialists in cross-functional teams, and other adhocratic work arrangements. Since Link is a coworking space, it's a fantastic place to discuss these sorts of issues. Bring your stories about working in nonhierarchical arrangements, even if that just means working out of coffee shops.

SXSWi. On Friday, I'll lead a SXSW Interactive Core Conversation, also titled "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work." Isn't that a coincidence? But it will not be the same session. In this context, we'll be drawing people from across the country to drill deeper into this idea of loose organizations. We'll be tackling specific questions about loose organizations, such as their strengths, their challenges, and their best practices. If you saw my presentation on coworking at SXSWi last year, you'll be primed for this discussion. If you didn't, why, take a look at last year's slides. I'll bring the paper and sharpies; you bring best practices from your freelance work, telecommuting, community organizing, startup, or coworking space. (Especially your coworking space, since the Coworking Unconference will be in town.)

Both presentations will generate a lot of feedback, which I'll plan to post on this blog. So come back after SXSW. And don't hesitate to follow me on Twitter at @spinuzzi - I'll announce there when the summary is up.

Reading :: Networks and States

2011-03-03T12:11:00.002-06:00

Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance
By Milton L. Mueller

A few years ago, I read Milton Mueller's excellent book Universal Service, which became an important resource in my 2008 book. So when I saw this book, I was intrigued enough to pick it up. I am, of course, glad that I did, because the book is terribly relevant. For instance, as I was reading Mueller's discussion of how countries can exert control over their citizens' Internet access, Mubarak cut Egypt's Internet access.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Mueller is interested in Internet governance, like Cowhey et al (a book he cites), and how it interacts with citizens' freedom, like Benkler (another book he cites). Mueller's a clear-eyed realist with a strong understanding of how governments and regulations function, so he avoids - and critiques - the excesses of some who believe that the Internet will simply cause people to be more free. Rather, he says, he's interested in the question of global Internet governance; "the problem of Internet governance has produced and will continue to produce institutional innovations in the global regulation of information and communications" (p.2). The Internet, he says, puts pressure on the nation-state in a number of ways:

"it globalizes the scope of communication"; (p.4)
"it facilitates a quantum jump in the scale of communication"; (p.4)
"it distributes control" so that control is "no longer closely aligned with political units"; (p.4)
"it grew new institutions"; (p.4)
"if changes the polity" because lower costs and higher capabilities of group action mean that "radically new forms of collaboration, discourse, and organization are emerging" (p.5)

Mueller sets about examining how "these factors are transforming national control and sovereignty over communication and information policy" (p.5). He overviews a set of literatures that address these changes:

Networked governance: "Governance networks are defined as relatively stable articulations of interdependent but operationally autonomous actors," he explains. In this literature, "Networked forms of organization are said to consist of looser affiliations of organizations and individuals that rely on regularized interaction to pursue cooperative goals. The bonds that hold the nodes together, so the theory asserts, are based on the reciprocal benefits that can be achieved by affiliation and cooperation - not on a division of labor defined and enforced from above" (p.6). Mueller sees this literature as speaking to how "networks that combine state and nonstate actors can overcome some of the limitations on government based on territorial sovereignty" (p.7).
Commons-based peer production: "Peer production describes how producers of open source software or content such as Wikipedia rely on nonhierarchical, largely voluntary collaboration techniques within a nonproprietary legal framework and a ubiquitous networked infrastructure" (p.7). He relates this literature to how ISPs respond to security threats.
Multistakeholderism: "the opening up of state-based international organizations to participation by 'stakeholders' besides governments" (p.7). He adds: "It might be described as the pluralization of international institutions" (p.8).

Mueller finds these ideas useful, but approaches them critically (p.8), testing each to see what it can contribute to the question of global Internet governance.

Chapters 2 and 3 are some of the most valuable chapters for me, because here Mueller attempts a taxonomy of networks. "Network has become a trendy term," he acknowledges, and asks: "When we talk about 'networks' are we talking about technologies, or societal organizations, or both? Or are we simply projecting the latest metaphor into any and every kind of social relationship we can see?" (p.17). Mueller introduces three cases in Chapter 2, then uses these in Chapter 3 to separate and taxonomize two uses of "network" in the social sciences: a formal analytical technique ("network analysis") and a theory or metaphor of social organization (network as an organizational form) (p.31). These can interact powerfully, he argues (p.31), but "they need to be carefully differentiated and kept distinct" (p.32).

He first describes network analysis (p.32), and cautions us: "Note that this method finds 'networks' anywhere and everywhere. ... The fact that this analytical method can be pplied to anything does not mean that the world is more networked than it used to be, nor does it necessarily herald the existence of some new kind of society or organizational form" (p.33).

In contrast, the notion of network-as-organizational-form is "more complicated," developing out of many disciplines. Mueller further taxonomizes this understanding of network:

Production networks. "In economics and economic sociology, network has come to mean a mode of governance that differs from managerial hierarchies and markets" (p.34). He explains how "In the 1980s, theorists began to observe looser affiliations among multiple firms - outsourcing, franchising, research alliances, and other semi-autonomous relations - and to discuss how this phenomenon fit into the market-hierarchy dichotomy" (p.31). Although "the initial tendency was to describe them as hybrid organizational forms somewhere 'between markets and hierarchies,'" sociologist Walter Powell argued that they constituted a distinctive organizational form "based on the relationship rather than the transaction" (p.34).
Peer production. In contrast, the peer-production view of networks is of "networks as a form of organization for production," in which an infrastructure of "ubiquitous, powerful networked information technology ... dramatically reduces the cost and magnifies the scope of establishing relationships based on the reciprocal benefits of association" (p.35). Mueller cites names that are familiar to readers of this blog: Adler, Benkler, Raymond, Rheingold, Shirky. Although "Benkler's concept of peer production sounds very similar to Powell's network organization," Mueller argues, the two are distinct: "the linkages between participants are usually not based on what Powell calls the relationship; in other words, interpersonal familiarity and trust. The relationship can be relatively autonomous and automated" (p.36). Mueller says that "one can think of peer-to-peer networks as a massively scaled-up, technologically driven version of the network organizational form - Powell on steroids" (p.36) and concludes that "peer-to-peer networks occupy an extreme space in any typology of network organizations. They might be considered a pure form or ideal type that reflects the full capabilities of the Internet" (p.37).
Political networks. Here Mueller turns to network literature in political science. In this literature, "Originally, policy networks were conceived as relatively small and stable sets of corporate actors drawn into regularized interaction around a set of laws and regulations in a specific sector" (p.38). Such networks were seen as "an unconsciously formed clustering pattern" (p.38). Later, the concept was "broadened to include looser kinds of relationships, known as issue networks," and later "transnational advocacy networks (TANs)" (p.39).

In later literatures, networked forms of organization and policy networks were melded (p.40; cf. Ronfeldt et al. on the Zapatista netwar).

So, Mueller concludes, we see two distinct meanings of network in the social sciences: as "a loose but bounded and consciously constructed organization based mainly on leveraging the benefits of reciprocity" (i.e., "network organization"), and as "an unbounded and decentered cluster of actors around repeated patterns of exchange or contact" (i.e., "associative cluster") (p.41). Mueller describes two dividing lines between these: "Network organizations have a well-defined point of access and must explicitly decide on criteria for including and excluding participants. Associative clusters lack both features" (p.42). Network organizations are designed; associative clusters are de facto and relatively stable. Importantly, Mueller says, associative clusters have no agency: any "governance is a byproduct of many unilateral and bilateral decisions by its members to exchange or negotiate with other members" (p.42). To understand Internet governance, Mueller says, "we need both concepts of networks as a form of organization, but we must not confuse them" (p.43).

Mueller provides a nice table describing his taxonomy of networks and comparing them by specific features (p.44). He also examines how associational clusters might move toward network organization and then to hierarchies: conflict or negotiation over the distribution of benefits (p.46). He argues that

we can identify four ways in which the network organizations and associative clusters formed around the Internet might lead to institutional change:
1. By formalizing and institutionalizing the network relations themselves
2. By states' attempts to impose hierarchical regulation upon networked forms
3. By states' utilization and adoption of networked forms
4. By changing the polity; namely, by realigning and expanding the associative clusters around governance institutions (p.46)

Moving on. In Chapter 4, Mueller deploys this network taxonomy to examine the UN's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which represents "a clash between two models of global governance: one based on agreements among sovereign, territorial states; the other based on private contracting among transnational nonstate actors, but relying in some respects on the global hegemony of a single state" (p.55). In Chapter 5, he describes how WSIS "experimented with efforts to make international organizations more open and democratic by facilitating the participation of nonstate actors," leading to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) (p.81). In Chapter 6, he examines the IGF in more detail, particularly its embrace of multistakeholderism (p.107). And in Chapter 7, he examines the clash between two "IPs": intellectual property and Internet protocol (p.129).

Chapter 7 leads naturally into Chapter 8, about security governance. And although we may associate security with hierarchies, he argues, "the residues of hierarchy are becoming entirely dependent upon the network relationships of peer production to have any effect": Hierarchical actors must integrate into the "looser transjurisdictional, multistakeholder networks of operators" to do any work (p.173). And that gets us to Chapter 9, Content Regulation. Here, Mueller argues that the Internet "took the libertarian principle of 'absence of prior restraint' and globalized it" (p.185). A critical challenge, he says, is "a concept of freedom better suited to the system of large-scale, automated content generation, interconnected autonomous systems, and highly differentiated layers of access characteristic of the global Internet" (p.189).

Let's skip a bit. In Chapter 11, Mueller provides quadrants for understanding Internet polity. The axes are Transnational/National and Networking/Hierarchy; the quadrants are Denationalized Liberalism, Networked Nationalism, Global Governmentality, and Cyber-Reactionaries (p.256). And he argues that these quadrants can help us to understand what's going on right now. For instance, he says, "The nature of the political spectrum is profoundly changed when we are forced to make the territorial state a variable rather than a constant. ... The standard right-left spectrum does not provide reliable guidance on some of the basic institutional questions" (p.259). He provides various examples, then argues that we can't do without some form of "cyber-libertarianism," because cyber-libertarianism flags two problems:

who should be sovereign, the people accessing the internet or the territorial states to which they belong?
to what degree do "classical liberal precepts of freedom get translated into the context of converged media, ubiquitous networks, and automated information processing"? (p.268).

He argues that a territorial, democratic nation-state "doesn't scale to global proportions" (p.268), and "the answer to that dilemma may lie in the upper-left quadrant of the political space - a denationalized liberalism" (p.269). (Dedicated readers of this blog - if there are any - may detect some resonance with Phillip Bobbitt's work.)

Overall, the book was fascinating. I've spent a disproportionate amount of time on Mueller's frameworking on networks, since I thought he did a stellar job here and I'm quite interested in that aspect right now. But if you're more interested in Internet governance or global institutions or public policy, you'll find valuable things here as well. And if you're interested in how nation-states are being challenged by global communications, certainly the book is directly applicable. Definitely pick it up.

Are you here for ISAWR?

2011-03-02T08:49:00.003-06:00

If you're here because you're considering voting for me for the ISAWR Steering Committee, welcome. Here's more about me:

Thanks for considering me. CS

Reading :: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

2011-02-28T15:41:00.003-06:00

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century
By Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison

I probably shouldn't admit this, but this book-length report is the first thing I've read by Henry Jenkins. But between the fact that I know his coauthor Alice Robison and the fact that the book's link (free PDF download) was tweeted by Howard Rheingold, I decided that I really ought to read it. I'm glad I did. This report provides a good overview of the changes we face in media literacy and how we might respond to those changes.

What's the issue? As the report argues, "more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced." These teens are often involved in participatory culture: "a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal men- torship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices" (p.xi). Participatory culture includes affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving, and circulations (pp.xi-xii). Jenkins et al. see the mastery of these as "key skills and competencies" (p.xii), but they are concerned with three issues that need interventions: the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge (pp.xii-xiii). So the authors urge that we teach the following skills: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation (p.xiv).

That's the overview from the Executive Summary. Let's dive into some of the more interesting parts of the report.

Jenkins et al. begin by defining participatory culture:
For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one with
1. relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,
2. strong support for creating and sharing creations with others,
3. some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices,
4. members who believe that their contributions matter, and
5. members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created). (pp.5-6)

They continue: "Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate" (p.10). For instance, "We suspect that young people who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greater comfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navigating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions about the quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with people from diverse cultural backgrounds" (p.13). The flip side, of course, is that many will not have access to such environments and therefore will not be able to develop such skills. The authors add:

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:
How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?
How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?
How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities? (p.27)

To address these concerns, the authors lay out "a framework for thinking about the type of learning that should occur if we are to address the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenges" (p.27). That framework includes the core media literacy skills mentioned above: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. They address each of these, using examples to demonstrate what they involve and how they can be developed.

Let's drill down to some of the more relevant bits. Some readers of the blog might find this quote interesting:

This focus on teamwork and collaboration is also, not coincidentally, how the modern workplace is structured—around ad hoc configurations of employees, brought together because their diverse skills and knowledge are needed to confront a specific challenge and then dispersed into different clusters of workers when new needs arise. Cory Doctorow has called such systems adhocracies, suggesting that they contrast in every possible way with prior hierarchies and bureaucracies. Our schools do an excellent job, consciously or unconsciously, of teaching youths how to function within bureaucracies. They do almost nothing to help youths learn how to operate within an ad-hocracy. (pp.74-75)

The report cites a 2005 blog post of Doctorow's, which is unfortunately no longer there. But you may remember that the term dates back at least to 1970's Future Shock. Nice to see it getting some play; since Doctorow's blog post is gone, I can't tell whether he took the term from Toffler's book or invented it independently, although it sounds like the same usage. In any case, nice to see that it still has some currency.

In any case, Jenkins et al. develop this thought: Whereas school attempts to develop generalists, "The ideal of a collective intelligence is a community that knows everything, with individuals who know how to tap the community to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis" (p.77). Among other things, this point leads the authors to conclude that "In a world in which knowledge production is collective and communication occurs across an array of different media, the capacity to network emerges as a core social skill and cultural competency" (p.91). And

Learning in a networked society involves understanding how networks work and how to deploy them to achieve particular ends. It involves understanding the social and cultural contexts within which different information emerges, when to trust and when not to trust others to filter and prioritize relevant data, and how to use networks to get individual work out into the world and in front of a relevant and, with hope, appreciative public. (p.96)

So: lots of gold in this report. There is also some dross. For instance, the authors cite the notion of distributed cognition but don't seem to really come to grips with what that notion entails - they see distributed cognition as being a sort of skill rather than a way of understanding cognition as a whole (pp.65-71). But overall, the report pushes us to think through what a participatory-culture classroom might look like. Definitely find some time to read it.

Reading :: Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond

2011-02-25T10:19:00.002-06:00

Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond
Ed. Natasha Artemeva and Aviva Freedman

At a recent conference, one presenter was having trouble getting the projector to work. After a few minutes, to keep us from shifting uncomfortably, the session's chair brightly said that if we in the audience had any questions about genre studies, this was the time to ask. After all, the room was loaded with excellent genre scholars, she explained, then pointed to and listed several. It was an interesting moment, because the list was a partial roll call of scholars working in Rhetorical Genre Studies, a strand of North American genre theory. In RGS, genres are seen as texts-in-use; these scholars conduct empirical (generally observational) investigations, drawing from ethnographic and case study methods, rather than structural (i.e., focusing on a close examination of the texts themselves).

Alas, I can't offer you a room full of RGS scholars. But I can point you to this book, now available as a free PDF. You can get it by clicking on the link above. And if you're interested in genre studies, particularly in the North American (Bakhtinian, interpretive, text-in-use) tradition, you really should. It's a good strong introduction to RGS, answering questions such as: What does RGS tell us about how people learn genres? What are RGS' potentials and limits? In what areas does RGS need further development? How do you conduct a study in the RGS tradition?

The chapters are well done, and I especially liked Artemeva's bibliographic essay assessing the state of RGS. The studies - in settings such as classrooms, healthcare, engineering, and various workplaces - do a nice job of illustrating how RGS can frame methodologies and guide interpretation. And, like most well-done studies, they're entertaining.

Bottom line: Definitely download the book if you have more than a fleeting interest in genre theory or genre studies.

Reading in the Future, Part 2

2011-02-24T14:11:00.002-06:00

Last Christmas Eve, I blogged about the new skills we might need as we migrate to electronic texts. Based on my experience reading Kindle books on my phone, I worried that these skills would be hard to attain. I still think it's an issue, but I've - very reluctantly - broken down and bought a Kindle.

The Kindle's advantages are many, particularly the outstanding display. But what sold me wasn't the Kindle-format books - it was the PDF reader. I have amassed nearly 500 PDFs of journal articles, white papers, book chapters, and whole books, and being able to carry and review them in one place is a game-changer. No more printouts, no more filling the precious space in my carry-on bags with heavy books. Yes, so that's all very nice.

Of course, I still have to go through some gymnastics to make sure I can actually read the PDFs on the Kindle's small screen, such as turning some PDFs sideways. (I could have bought an oversized Kindle DX, but didn't even consider the option - too big to carry.)

But here's what is tasking me now. Now that I can make all these PDFs portable, can I automatically pull PDFs of whole journals so that I can easily drop them on the Kindle?

Let's take an example. Every month, I sweep through my library's electronic subscriptions to certain journals such as Written Communication and JBTC. Both allow you to authenticate through the library, then click through to current or back issues, selecting and downloading PDFs of individual articles. Of course, I just download a few at a time, because the process is labor intensive. Sure, I don't have to walk to the library and photocopy them, but at (say) 30 seconds per article, I have to be pretty motivated to download all the PDFs before getting to the next journal.

Can I automate the downloading? That would be ideal. I'd love to be able to drop in a list of journals, then have my machine

scan the journals' sites for new issues
download all PDFs associated with the new issue
rename the PDFs according to a set scheme (say, author + title + journal)
inform me when new issues have been downloaded
automatically copy them to the Kindle when it's plugged in

Wouldn't you? What a huge time saver this would be. But this turns out to be a hard problem:

Journals are owned by different publishers, and each requires that you authenticate with them (via the library, in my case).
Even if you can get them to authenticate, the easy mass-download solutions I've found (e.g., DownThemAll, wget) may not be smart enough to traverse the two levels of links that Written Communication puts between the Current Issue page and the actual PDFs.

Has anyone put together a workable solution for this situation? If so, I'd love to hear it.

Reading :: Unanticipated Gains

2011-02-09T10:40:00.002-06:00

Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life
By Mario Luis Small

Many studies that use social network analysis are a bit bloodless: They connect actors through reported relationships, they create interesting network diagrams, but they don't delve deeply into the qualitative data that explain why people connect. Unanticipated Gains is not one of those studies. Small does a really exceptional job here of both conducting a multimodal study and leveraging the different modes to provide a nicely contextualized analysis.

Here's what Small argues:

This book argues that people's social capital depends fundamentally on the organizations in which they participate routinely, and that, through multiple mechanisms, organizations can create and reproduce network advantages in ways their members may not expect or even have to work for. ... Understanding people's connections - and how much connections generate social inequality - requires understanding the organizations in which those connections are embedded. It requires conceiving of people as organizationally embedded actors, as actors whose social and organizational ties - and the resources both available and mobilized through them - respond to institutional constraints, imperatives, and opportunities. (pp.5-6)

To develop this argument, Small describes a study of parents whose children are in childcare centers. In such centers, parents who may not have other ties come together, develop relationships, and are connected to various other institutions - even if they have a "hi-and-bye" relationship with other parents in which they simply drop off and pick up their kids!

Small argues that this study helps us to answer a question that social network analysis (SNA) often ignores: How do people make social ties? (p.8). After all, "How a person forms and sustains a tie can affect the social capital to which she has access" (p.10). So Small draws on qualitative and quantitative data at individual and organizational levels, including a well-being study, a survey, 67 in-depth interviews of parents (mostly mothers), and 23 center case studies (p.23).

The results are fascinating. In Ch.2, Small demonstrates that childcare centers act as effective brokers: most mothers made new friends, and these new friends led to lower mental and material hardships. That's very good news, given the precipitous rise in clientele for daycares (p.29). Even mothers who didn't make friends in daycares found that their hardship was eased (p.43); those who made friends reported less depression (p.46). In Ch.3, Small demonstrates that the childcare centers actually made it much easier for mothers to make friends, since these centers offer multiple opportunities and inducements for parents to interact (p.51). These opportunities and inducements take the form of activities such as holiday productions, field trips, and fundraising - activities that Small explores nicely through case studies. It's not just motivation, it's opportunity that causes these friendships to develop (p.62) - something that really struck me as I continue to review my own data on coworking spaces.

How strong are the ties between parents? In Ch.4, Small examines strong vs. weak ties among mothers, and finds that strong ties are associated with support, while weak ties are associated with resources (p.85). But he also found, surprisingly, that some strong ties were both intimate and domain-specific - that is, some ties were "compartmentally intimate" (p.87). (Standard SNA assumes that strong ties are intimate, but weak ties are domain-specific.) He continues this theme in Ch.5, exploring how some mothers' support networks were larger than their friendship networks: Childcare centers both "facilitated trust among parents" and "established obligations that mothers felt compelled to follow, thereby creating a network of support" (p.108).

Childcare centers also brokered relationships with other organizations (Ch.6), allowing parents to access information, services, and material goods (p.135). Interestingly, Small says (Ch.7), this brokering meant that "childcare centers may either contribute to or buffer against the negative consequences of neighborhood poverty," depending on their lack or possession of appropriate links to other organizations (p.158).

In a nicely supported conclusion, Small argues that "the brokerage of organizational ties arises from the highly bureaucratic nature of contemporary society, where exchanging goods and resources constitutes much of of what business, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations do" (p.185).

Overall, this was a fascinating book for me. Small does a great job of arguing for and demonstrating his multimodal methodology; his case studies are rich and illustrative; his conclusions are intriguing and well supported. And of course the whole thing is fascinating. If you're even a little interested in SNA, social capital, or ties, take a look.

Reading :: Reputation

2011-02-09T10:03:00.002-06:00

Reputation: A Network Interpretation
By Kenneth H. Craik

I've been reading a lot of social network analysis lately, mostly in sociology and related disciplines. But other disciplines have picked up elements of network analysis, including psychology. Kenneth Craik is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Berkeley, and Reputation involves a networked understanding of reputation from a psychological viewpoint.

Such an understanding isn't new - but, Craik tells us, the study of reputation has suffered "an interrupted mode of development": although Mark May and Phillip Vernon "advocated the study of person's reputation as centrally informative regarding an individual's personality" in the 1930s, that line of inquiry was dismissed in the late 1930s (p.126).

Craik aims to make up for lost time with a great deal of framework-building. He begins the book by defining reputation: "Reputation is not located on or in a person, like a left elbow or a knack for languages. Reputation is a dispersed phenomenon that is to be found in the beliefs and assertions of an extensive number of other individuals. ... Reputation is part of the social environment but uniquely referenced to a certain person" (p.xvii). Given the above, Craik defines the reputational network as made of two dimensions:

Person knows other
Other knows person

and these dimensions form a matrix of people in an individual's reputation network:

Social network members (Person knows other; other knows person)
Local and public figures (Person knows other; other does not know person)
Unseen audience (Person does not know other; other knows person)
Everybody else (Person does not know other; other does not know person) (p.xviii)

The reputation network is the focus for Part I of the book - not what's actually true, not how it affects the individual, but how a reputation network develops and works. Part II turns to the individual whose reputation is under discussion, examining how the network interacts with her or him. For my readers who study rhetoric, think of this understanding of reputation as an extended systematic exploration of ethos.

Craik develops three themes for reputation:

"the membership of a person's reputation network" (Ch.1)
"the ongoing social communication process through which news, observations, and impresions about an individual circulate along that person's reputation network" (Ch.2)
"the ways in which each member of a person's reputation network gathers and accumulates impressions, beliefs, and evaluations about that specifically identifiable person" (Ch.3; see p.xix).

These elements "generate two major aspects of reputation: the discursive facet, dealing with actively flowing information, and the distributive facet, dealing with latent stored information about the person" (p.xix). In Part I, Craik devotes himself to analyzing these, including how to measure the accuracy and validity of information flowing through a reputation network (p.77).

So that's an overview of Part I, in which Craik manages to "keep the person as agent out of our conceptual analysis for as long as possible" (p.71). In Part II, he turns to the person as agent, examining how that individual is affected by her or his reputation network. He develops a model in which the personality system and social system interact (Ch.7). He also leverages a couple of case studies, including defamation law and an examination of posthumous reputation, to further explore how these systems interact.

The book is far-ranging and develops a strong framework, which Craik details in the Conclusion. However, I found myself skimming through the second half of the book. I don't think this has to do with Craik's writing or analysis so much as the fact that I had trouble applying it to my research or background. I'll likely revisit the book if I become more involved in studying representation. But if that's your interest, I recommend the book.

Reading :: What's Mine is Yours

2011-02-06T16:20:00.003-06:00

What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
By Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers

[n.b., I'm reviewing the Kindle version, so I don't cite page numbers.]

"There is now an unbounded marketplace for efficient peer-to-peer exchanges between producer and consumer, seller and buyer, lender and borrower, and neighbor and neighbor," Botsman and Rogers tell us in the key statement of this book. "Online exchanges mimic the close ties once formed through face-to-face exchanges in villages, but on a much larger and unconfined scale. In other words, technology is reinventing old forms of trust." In their telling, social technologies have allowed more networked connections, and these connections point to "an emerging socioeconomic groundswell; the old stigmatized C's associated with coming together and "sharing" - cooperatives, collectives, and communes - are being refreshed and reinvented into appealing and valuable forms of collaboration and community. We call this groundswell Collaborative Consumption." Examples include services such as airbnb.com and, of course, coworking (which is what prompted me to pick up the book).

What distinguishes Collaborative Consumption from the other C's are scale and reach. The authors categorize their examples into "three systems - product service systems, redistribution markets, and collaborative lifestyles." These work through four principles: "critical mass, idling capacity, belief in the commons, and trust between strangers." The authors use many, many examples ranging from selling (craigslist, eBay) to connecting people with excess capacity (ZipCar, Freecycle, airbnb, coworking) to "dematerializing" formerly physical media into services (iTunes, Netflix).

In fact, it's this avalanche of examples that makes What's Mine is Yours so richly illustrative, and at the same time so embedded in a popular subgenre that includes works such as The Whuffie Factor and Wikinomics. Like those other books, this one skims lightly across the surface of a lot of different examples - and like those books, this one is necessarily going to have a relatively short shelf life because it relies so heavily on current examples in a fast-moving set of fields without doing a lot to deeply analyze those examples to produce principles. The range of examples makes us want to believe that the authors have discovered some basic principles. On the other hand, the authors often make causal arguments with very little proof - for instance, claiming that the Obamas' White House vegetable garden "evidently" inspired people to start their own gardens across the country. I noticed enough of these that I became quite suspicious of the authors' claims. Although I'm generally sympathetic to the authors' arguments about new ways of connecting, I'm also inclined to test propositions, and the authors don't seem to test them rigorously enough.

The authors can also be hectoring at times. When they tell me to "Think about your own credit card statement for a second (that is if you are not the one in four who has never looked at his or her own statement)," I roll my eyes because I cut up my credit cards years ago. When they tell me that "moving unused goods from nonuse to reuse is now practical," I think about how I've been moving my unused goods to thrift stores for years. And when they begin talking about a system for "banking" reputation - "In the same way that we can move our credit rating from one credit card to the next, our repository of trust will carry from one community to another" - I wonder what happened to decentralized and contextualized forms of trust.

Overall, What's Mine is Yours has some strong points, including a nice overview of coworking. I'd read it for a panoramic view of what constitutes collaboration in social media, as well as for some provocative thinking about the principles of collaborative consumption. But I'd supplement it with more rigorous research.

CFP: Special issue of Written Communication on Writing in Global Context

2011-02-03T18:39:00.002-06:00

If you're conducting writing research in global contexts, please consider this CFP:

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Written Communication - Writing in Global Context

The Editor and Editorial Board of Written Communication invite article submissions for a special issue on Writing in Global Context, tentatively scheduled for publication in October 2011. Submissions from established and new scholars of writing theory and research are welcome.

With continuing political, economic, cultural, and technological change, the world is becoming a smaller place. In many ways, contemporary life is, or is rapidly becoming, global. Questions about global context are no longer just about doing business internationally, but are increasingly about learning to live in a complex and connected global world. And, of course, one of the ways that we live and work globally is through written communication.

Assumptions about knowledge making, rhetorical action, identity and subjectivity, purpose and agency; about what counts as writing, what it means to a writer, or a teacher of writing -- all these assumptions are problematized and hence must to be reconceived in global context.

In this Special Issue on Writing in Global Context we invite authors to take up and extend ongoing discussions that situate, and interrogate, writing globally. Over the last four years, over a quarter of the manuscripts in WC have come from researchers outside North America. We hope this Special Issue will also draw contributions from around the world.

This special issue of Written Communication will publish original research on issues of writing in global context. Contributions might include, but are not limited to, methodologically rigorous studies that examine questions such as:

• What is the role of writing within the new realities of global context?
• What does it mean to be a writer in global context?
• What is literacy in global context?
• How do new global relationships constrain, reflect, or anticipate written genres? And how do genres shape global realities?
• What is the role of writing technologies in global communication? How can technologies bridge, undermine, or complicate writing in global context?
• How do issues of trust and ethos play out in writing in global context?
• How do regulatory environments and legal constraints impact global writers?
• How are problems and potentialities of global writing rhetorically constructed?
• How is writing implicated in technology transfer and technology diffusion, especially between the global north and the global south?
• What kinds of language questions complicate and inform writing (and the study of writing) in global context?
• What new research methods, or objects of study, does the study of writing in global context call out?

Ultimately, the articles published in this Special Issue will present new research findings and advance theoretical understandings about what writing is and can be in global context.

Consideration of mss for this special issue will begin January 1, 2011 and continue until April 1, 2011, or until a suitable number of publishable mss has been identified. Submissions for this special issue will follow the normal, peer-reviewed practice of WC.

Written Communication is the premier international multidisciplinary journal of research on writing. The scope of the journal is broad and encompasses writing in its myriad contemporary forms, both within and outside the academy. Theoretical and applied contributions of articles in Written Communication are made explicit and will be relevant to researchers, theorists, teachers, and policy makers from a range of scholarly disciplines. Published articles will collectively represent a wide range of methodologies, but the methodology of each study must be handled expertly and described explicitly.

Guidelines for submission: Please follow the regular guidelines for submission, published in each issue of the journal and on the WC page of the Sage website. Please confirm in a cover letter that the piece has not been previously published and that it is not under review elsewhere. Also indicate that you wish the ms submission to be considered for the Special Issue on Writing in Global Context.

Special issues of Written Communication follow these guidelines:
1. A CFP will be published and distributed widely at least 6 months before the proposed publication date of the SI.
2. Submitted mss will be accompanied by a letter, addressed to the Editor, noting that the submission is meant for the SI and explaining how the ms addresses the topic of the SI.
3. Members of the journal’s Editorial Board will be used as reviewers, but the editor will also solicit names of other appropriate reviewers on the topic of the SI from EB members and others.
4. Scholars submitting articles for review for the SI may not serve as reviewers for that SI.
5. Published articles will report original research on writing, with explicit attention to methodology.
6. Editorial control of the review process and the selection of published articles rest with the journal editor.
7. Manuscripts not accepted for the SI may be considered for another issue of the journal.

Questions should be directed to Professor Christina Haas, Editor, at writtencomm@umn.edu.

Reading :: The Mismanagement of Talent

2011-02-01T16:57:00.002-06:00

The Mismanagement of Talent: Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy
By Phillip Brown and Anthony Hesketh

In some quarters, it's become popular to talk about a higher education bubble that is about to burst. Brown and Hesketh don't quite make that argument. But they do ask: "Does a KBE [knowledge-based economy] lead to a significant increase in demand for highly educated 'knowledge' workers? ... Is the problem of employability one of developing the appropriate attitudes and skills or does it reflect a mismatch between the aspirations of university graduates and labour market realities?" (p.2). More colloquially: if we educate more people at the college level, preparing them for knowledge work, does this help to transform the economy, creating jobs for them? Can that segment of the labor market absorb them?

To investigate the question, Brown and Hesketh interviewed "fifteen leading edge private and public sector organizations" as well as ten "policy stakeholders." They conducted case studies of six of the organizations, specifically in their assessment centers. That is, they examined the job interview process at these centers, including aptitude tests and post-job-interview discussions. They also interviewed 60 graduates applying for jobs (p.5). All aspects of data collection were in Britain, and the authors cautiously suggest that these data can provide insight into other developed countries' understanding of graduate employability as well (p.6).

To be clear: the authors are interested in what constitutes employability (from the point of view of those hiring and those being hired) rather than in analyzing the knowledge economy as a whole. Although they have some valuable and trenchant observations about the knowledge work literature, the real value is in how they examine their rich data on how people prepare for, conduct, and evaluate job interviews.

Job interviews, they argue, is a bit of a different game than it was. Credential inflation has meant that more people have college degrees and even advanced degrees such as MBAs (p.30). Consequently, employers extend recruiting criteria to include "personal capital" (p.31). When a larger pool of potential hires can demonstrate individual achievement, employers turn to social and personal considerations (p.32). Does the person get along with others? Does s/he have leadership potential? Is the applicant self-directed and able to work on tight deadline? "This has led employers to extend the range of managerial competence to include interpersonal sensitivity, good communication skills, persuasiveness, drive, resilience, adaptability, self-confidence, good judgement and problem-solving skills, together with creativity and business awareness. The model of managerial leadership has shifted from the bureaucratic to charismatic personality" (p.33; cf. Gloor). And they go on to argue that "these charismatic qualities ... represent the essence of knowledge work itself" (pp.33-34).

Personal capital, the authors argue, represent a combination of hard currencies ("credentials, work experience, sporting or music achievements, etc.") and soft currencies ("interpersonal skills, charisma, appearance, and accent") (p.35). Together, these skills are elements in a narrative of employability, told first by the applicant and later elaborated by potential employers (p.36).

Let's skip through Chapter 3, "What Knowledge Economy?," which summarizes and questions various claims made by knowledge economy proponents. They make some good points, but rely a bit heavily on the fact that the knowledge work literature is not very coherent. The really interesting things start in later chapters, where the authors present and interpret their data.

For instance, the authors discuss their 60 interviews with job seekers. These job seekers fall into two basic categories, "players" (who see job-seeking as a sort of game that involves positioning themselves to maximize their market options) and "purists" (who see job-seeking as meritocratic, as puzzle-solving, and as involving maintaining their career integrity) (p.125). The authors take what could have been a rather reductive binary and illustrate its nuances, drawing nicely on quotes from their interviews.

On the other side of the table, they also discuss how potential employers interview and evaluate candidates. "We argue that the public rhetoric of competence obscures the realities of what employers are looking for," they state: employers are actually looking for suitability, proactivity, and acceptability (p.148). Selection criteria, they argue have changed from the 1990s to the 2000s (p.150) due to various organizational changes. Importantly, candidates can't just rely on their resumes; they must "construct a narrative of employability which conveys their proactivity" (p.156).

The authors go farther, using their observations and interviews to develop a typology of categories in which employers tend to place candidates. This typology is illustrated nicely in a graph with axes representing hard and soft currencies (p.162), and demonstrated through interviews with employers. You want to be a Star, but not a Razor; a Geek but not a Nerd; a Safe Bet but not a Freezer. Such categorizations happen very quickly and via discussions rather than systematic examinations of evidence.

In their conclusion, the authors make clear that they don't consider the current system to be effective or humane. Evaluating people at the beginning of their career, the authors argue, is "inefficient and unfair"; productivity "depends on work context" rather than the abilities on display (p.198).

Overall, I found this book to be very interesting. The authors have developed what I think turned out to be a clever and insightful study. As a pragmatist, I filed away many tips that I can teach to my students to prepare them for interviews; as a rhetorician, I found the idea of a narrative of employability both plausible and intriguing; as a researcher interested in knowledge work, I found that the book deepened my understanding of how knowledge work has been understood, operationalized, and applied as well as how labor markets have changed. And as an educator, of course, I thought quite a bit about its implications for preparing students. If you fit one of these categories, pick this book up.

Reading :: Swarm Creativity

2011-02-01T16:11:00.003-06:00

Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks
By Peter A. Gloor

Swarm Creativity introduces the notion of "Collaborative Innovation Networks" (COINs; p.3) in which "knowledge workers collaborate and share in internal transparency" (p.4). The basic concept should sound familiar if you've read much of the popular business literature on knowledge work: COINS "communicate directly rather than through hierarchies"; "innovate and work toward common goals in self-organization"; and they are "the most productive engines of innovation ever" (p.4, author's italics). Gloor argues strongly that these COINs "Innovate through massive collaborative creativity"; "Collaborate under a strict ethical code"; and "Communicate in direct-contact networks" (p.12). And Gloor lists a variety of benefits that COINs deliver to organizations: agility; external knowledge; hidden opportunities; synergies; reduced costs and time; experts and hidden contributors; more secure organizations (pp.12-14).

But if you're familiar with this literature, you may be wondering what benefits this book delivers that go beyond others you've read. That's a hard question to answer. Gloor draws from familiar literature (Granovetter, Gladwell, Malone) and familiar examples (Linux, Wikipedia), but his COIN construct is a bit more specialized than the networks implied by the literature he cites. In particular, he specifies that COINs form around "charismatic, inspirational and creative thought leaders" (p.37) surrounded by "motivated disciples" (p.40), providing Leonardo da Vinci's circle as one historical example (Ch.2, 3). Strikingly, this sort of network, which is ideologically centralized around a charismatic leader but is operationally distributed, is described as one type of network in Castells' The Power of Identity; the exemplar there is Aum Shinrikyo. But Castells is careful to offer other examples that are not concentrated ideologically. See also the work of Granovetter and Burt, who focus on concrete links among actors rather than ideological ones. And especially see the work of RAND analysts who have been studying swarming: they've developed concrete examples of associational networks that do not center on a particular charismatic leader or ideology, yet innovate in striking ways. By focusing on "thought leaders," Gloor seems to imply that other sorts of networks simply don't deliver the benefits of COINs - and I was left wondering if he was even aware of networks that didn't fit the template he laid out. Indeed, I have strong reservations about COINs' ability to account for loose multidimensional organizations.

That worry was stoked by Gloor's reading of history. At the beginning of Ch.3, he states flatly that "Homo Sapiens beat out Neanderthals because of learning networks": homo sapiens migrated, cooperated, and innovated, and this "flurry of innovations ... led to the extinction of the Neanderthals" (p.49). I'm no anthropologist, but this appears to be a variation of just one of many hypotheses of Neanderthal extinction. I wouldn't hang my hat on it, nor would I put too much stock in Gloor's reading of European history later in the chapter, all of which seems to focus on brilliant individual leaders rather than systemic sociocultural and technical changes.

It's this push-pull between a Great Man view of leadership and a newly distributed, adhocratic labor force that seems to be the central contradiction of the book. Gloor hasn't been able to resolve this contradiction, and consequently I'm reluctant to recommend the book.

Coworking in Austin: FG Squared

2011-01-25T08:38:00.002-06:00

A few days ago, Steve Golab of FG Squared contacted me, wanting to talk coworking. “FG Squared has created a co-working space inside of our business,” he said, and invited me to take a look.

I met Steve a couple of years ago, through a former student, and later worked with FG Squared to develop the program for Interactive Austin 2009. But I hadn’t dropped by FG Squared in a while, so I was eager to see what they were up to - and particularly how they were developing a coworking space. After all, the majority of coworking spaces in Austin are standalone, not housed in an existing business - although I could imagine the advantages.

FG Squared, Steve explained, started 17 years ago by bartering web design services in exchange for office space. Later, as they grew, they leased their own space. But at this point - especially as more FG Squared employees have begun working from home - the leased space has become too large for the company’s current size. More, because some FG Squared employees work at home part of the time and on premises at other times, the capacity fluxes. At first, the company saw the excess space as a liability. But - remembering the company’s roots, and cognizant of the success of coworking in Austin - Steve decided to turn the extra space into an asset by opening the space to coworking.

Yes, that asset is partially financial: coworking helps to pay the lease. But as importantly, the coworking increases social capital in the tight-knit Austin interactive media scene. Steve facilitates interactions among coworkers; he introduces FG Squared visitors to coworkers and vice versa; he encourages networking. When FG Squared is approached by a client who needs something FG Squared can’t provide, he refers them to an able coworker who works in that specialty or at that scale. He even lets competitors use the conference room, he says.

FG Squared benefits directly in another way: “The office doesn’t feel empty,” Steve added. In fact, as a company, FG Squared realizes the same benefits that individual coworkers do: less isolation, more socializing, more contact with people working on different projects.

Coworkers get several things from this arrangement. One is coffee that, Steve emphasized, is “free and strong.” Another is wifi: FG Squared strengthened wifi throughout the building to accommodate its coworkers. Just as importantly, Steve has instituted an application process to ensure that new coworkers fit into the space: he wants a respectful, safe environment that revolves around interactive design. Currently, he’s developing a membership application and handbook to spell out the coworking space’s ground rules.

So who’s working in the coworking space? One full room is devoted to FeedMagnet, which includes three full-timers and a part-timer. Sometimes they spill out into the rest of the space, which is fine. Individuals also have desks, including an SEO specialist and the manager of a set of bars. A conference room is shared by the coworkers and FG Squared, and a few other rooms are on the list to be converted into coworking rooms.

As I’ve discussed in other coworking blog posts, coworking is partly driven by the trend of outsourcing noncore functions, partly by the rise of mobile technologies, partly by a glut of unused office space. Steve recognizes all of these trends, and he’s looking for a way to genuinely engage with them to provide a win-win situation for coworkers and FG Squared. His goal is to create a space that nurtures entrepeneurs (like Conjunctured or Cospace) within the bounds of another organization (somewhat like Soma Vida or Space12). It would be easy to see FG Squared’s approach as a simple “retail play” to help it make rent, but Steve sees it as genuine, actual community building. I expect this model to become more common as coworking continues to spread.

Upcoming appearances

2011-01-17T16:44:00.002-06:00

So I decided a while back to sharply limit the number of conferences I went to, since I dislike travel. Naturally, that means that I suddenly realize I have committed to 5-6 speaking engagements over the next three months. At least most of them are in Austin.

If you're interested and able, please do come see me at one of the following appearances:

C4 Workspace Lunchtime Learning: Future of Work, January 25, San Antonio. I'll be Skyping in to talk about "How Adhocracies fit into the Future of Work."
TILTS 2011, Symposium One: Access, Authority, and Identity, February 3-5, Austin. I'll be delivering the presentation "Loose Stories about Loose Organizations."
Writing Research Across Borders, February 17-20, Washington, DC. I'll be delivering a talk titled "Genre and Generic Labor."
South by Southwest Interactive, March 11-15, Austin. I'll be leading the core conversation "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work."

I may also be doing something for RISE on March 7. Stay tuned!