Reading :: The "Virtual Corporation" and Army Organization

The "Virtual Corporation" and Army Organization
By Francis Fukuyama and Abram N. Shulsky

This 1997 RAND research report examines the trend toward flat, virtualized organizations in business and asks how that trend might be applied to Army organization. As the authors describe it, “the economy is moving from an industrial-age model, in which machines and natural resources are used to produce material product, to the 'information-based organization' that produces goods or services through the use of human capital”(p.x). They point out the consequences for commercial organization: the need for faster information exchange leads to smaller organizations; flatter hierarchies and/or networks of agile firms; the continued devaluing of low-skilled labor; more self-organized teams replacing individual effort; and more flexibility, learning, and adaptability to address the more chaotic environment (p.x).

Yet centralization has its advantages as well. Centralized organizations can often move more quickly and decisively and can leverage scales of economy. “A military organization seeking to accomplish a specific goal in the near future needs centralized command authority; a military seeking to adapt to a fast-changing and uncertain external environment needs a higher degree of decentralization in order to adapt adequately” (pp. X-xi). The authors argue that the US Army is in the latter situation.

So they anticipate several organizational changes for the Army. They anticipate a smaller number of echelons (p.xiii); smaller size, yielding easier logistics (p.xiv); more innovation in procurement (p.xiv); and working to keep experience distributed throughout the argument rather than pooling, so that soldiers can be better prepared to take initiative and responsibility (p.xiv).

The authors walk us through the established ground here, distinguishing among hierarchical organizations, virtual or “flat” organizations, and networks (p.5). The latter two are distinguished in that the flat organization still has a hierarchy, but the network doesn't. Consequently, the network really isn't applicable to an army with a focused objective. “Successful networked organizations ... constitute a framework within which their individual members can operate” (p.19).

The authors claim that armies are actually leaders in flat organizations due to the critical problem of operating in the face of inadequate information (p.28). Flat organizations, due to their nimbleness, often result in tactical successes that spark strategic overextension (p.39) – examples of which include Napoleon and the Wehrmacht. But flat organizations also pose another danger, the “CNN Effect,” in which pushing discretion and decision-making to lower levels results in newsworthy incidents; a “zero-defects” mentality reinforces a strict, and slow, centralized hierarchical structure (p.49). “It is impossible to routinize error-free flat organizations; when errors occur in a politically sensitive environment, there is a tendency to recentralize authority” (p.50). The authors urge instituting a “freedom to fail” (p.77), recalling the Web 2.0-era mantra to “fail faster,” although they don't delve into how much failure can be tolerated when failure is measured in, for instance, civilian casualties.

Overall, this report is a well developed treatise that identifies different organizational structures and thinks through how they can be applied to the Army. It's thought-provoking and really complicates some of the simplified distinctions from, say, The Starfish and the Spider.

Reading :: The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

The Starfish and the Spider has gotten a lot of press and attention since it was published in 2006. As the subtitle states, it's about leaderless organizations and how they function. It's a quick read – I finished it in two sittings – and turns out to be a good entry-level text for understanding the difference between hierarchical and networked organizations. Like most such popularizations, it loses a little in the translation, and those who have read more complex texts on networks (such as Castells or Arquilla & Ronfeldt or, ahem, Spinuzzi) may feel like they're playing in the shallow end of the pool. But for those who are just getting into the literature or who want to get the concept and apply it rapidly, the book is definitely a good place to start.

The metaphor in the title refers to two organisms that are superficially similar, but organized differently. If you destroy a spider's head, you get a dead spider; if you cut up a starfish, you get two starfish. Since starfish are decentralized, they are more resilient and better able to recover from shocks that would kill more centralized organisms.

The authors apply this metaphor in a number of comparative cases – the Aztecs vs. the Apache, Napster vs. eDonkey, and classifieds vs. Craigslist, for instance – and abstract a number of principles that describe decentralized organizations:

1. “When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized.” (p.21)

2. “It's easy to mistake starfish for spiders” (p.36) – i.e., decentralized for centralized organizations.

3. “An open system doesn't have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system” (pp.39-40)

4. “Open systems can easily mutate” (p.40)

5. “The decentralized organization sneaks up on you.” (p.41)

6. “As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.” (p.45)

7. “Put people in an open system and they'll automatically want to contribute.” (p.74)

Some readers will recognize many of these principles from different sources, but they're well summarized here. On the other hand, the summaries tend to be a bit uncomplicated – networked organizations are sometimes decentralized operationally but very centralized doctrinally, such as Aum Shinrikyo, for instance – but the principles are a good overall sketch.

The authors spend most of their time describing such organizations and discussing how to make them work better. But they also offer advice for combating decentralized organizations:

1. Change their ideology (p.144)

2. Centralize them by centralizing key resources (p.151)

3. Decentralize yourself (p.155)

In a later chapter, the authors discuss hybrid organizations, organizations that are either “a centralized company that decentralizes the user experience,” such as eBay (p.164) or “a centralized company that decentralizes the internal parts of the business” (p.175). This is a good move, although it does not exhaust the dimensions along which companies can be centralized or decentralized. I was left wanting more of these dimensions and deeper discussion of them.

Finally, the authors outline the “new rules of the game.” I won't list the many rules here except to say that they follow naturally from what the authors discuss earlier; the chapter has the feel of a summary for those who have skimmed the book.

So would I recommend the book? I already have to at least one person, and I will to others. The book is a nice introduction to those who want to work up to more complex texts, but it also works well for its intended audience – C-level execs – and for undergraduates. Check it out.

Smart Mobs, seven years on

Speaking in Amsterdam, Howard Rheingold discusses his book Smart Mobs and how it's held up after seven years. If you haven't read it yet, here's the link to Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Internet access for the homeless

Castells discussed the danger of "black holes" in our urban areas, places that are outside the major flows of capital and information and that do not allow people to escape. But those who are determined to escape have begun to find ways to recapture the flows of information:

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

The homeless in San Francisco, accordingly, spend some of their meager resources on Internet access, picking up netbooks or older laptops and using free wifi.

This story reminds me of one I linked to a while back, on homeless people relying on mobile phones in lieu of fixed addresses. As wifi-enabled smartphones become more common, perhaps we'll see pay-as-you-go, peripheral-ready smartphones that can better serve the needs of low-income and homeless people, bringing some light to these black holes.

Reading :: Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing

Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The Next-Generation Internet's Impact on Business, Governance and Social Interaction
By J.D. Lasica

So here I am at the coffee shop, typing away on my new netbook, still trying to decide whether this particular machine will work for me. But I'm doing all my work using the same tools that I use on my Mac laptop: GMail, GCalendar, GDocs, and of course Blogger. To a great extent, cloud computing has already been widely adopted and has enabled greater device independence, greater portability, and greater opportunities for interconnection and collaboration.

We don't need a report to tell us that - but this report looks ahead to the implications of cloud computing for "business, governance, and social interaction," as the title states. The report reflects the conversations of a roundtable convened in 2008 at the Aspen Institute of "28 leaders from the ICT, financial, government, academic, and public policy sectors" (p.vii). The principals see cloud computing as an important shift: "Like the migration of electricity in the early 1900s from local generation to an electrical grid with metered service, the cloud signals the movement of hard and soft functions such as storage, software applications and services to an off-premises service industry" (p.vii). And in light of that shift, "What control do we have over our identities, security, and privacy? How will it change economic and business models? What are the implications for governance and cyber-security?" (p.vii). The report reecommends "that a user-centric open identity network system is the right approach at this point" since it could allow people to manage their own identities, customize them, and make identity scalable across the Internet (p.viii).

The report starts by asserting that "digital natives" increasingly see no gap between online and offline lives, asserting that "I am whatever I say I am" (p.1). It was not always thus, Lasica reminds us: not that long ago, it was common to assert that on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. But now identities are much more articulated, defined, and tied to each other as well as offline presence. The roundtable sees this trend continuing and deepening in the future (p.2).

One consequence of increasing cloud computing is that capacity can be distributed. When corporations run their own server farms, costs are unsustainable, "with server resources often idle eighty-five percent of the time" (p.11). Not surprisingly, companies are moving toward "virtualization -- using someone else's computer to do the heavy lifting for you" (p.7). One example is Animoto, "which scaled very quickly from 50 to 3,500 servers" (p.11), and was able to rent appropriate server space as needed. And this nimble approach means that "when companies adopt virtualization technologies and thus lower on-site energy consumption, IT's footprint should go down dramatically" (p.12).

The report quotes Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco Systems, as foreseeing three stages of cloud formation: first, companies offload their IT to private clouds; second, common standards enable companies to move information from private to external enterprise clouds; third, a public or semipublic "inter-cloud" where entities can share and mash up data (pp.13-14).

All three articulations of the cloud, particularly the third one, have implications for identity. "When the Web first became a mass phenomenon around 1993, we were all free to take on whatever persona appealed to us" (p.15), but social networks began to change that, and "Facebook became a game-changer, kicking off anyone who refused to use their real names. On Facebook and a new breed of copycat social networks, identity is front and center, grounded by real biographies, real friends and real media" (p.16). But this sort of identity is quite restrictive. The roundtable participants predict a "third incarnation of online identity - call it identity in the cloud" (p.17). And "this new system would recognize that eaqch of us has multiple identities. We will be able to spoon out bits and pieces of our identity, depending on the social or business context we find ourselves in" (p.17). An open identity system might reveal only the parts of the identity necessary to a particular transaction, working as a trusted intermediary in the same way eBay intermediates between buyers and sellers (p.18). Multiple identities become necessary and manageable, with business, health care, singles, and virtual world profiles, for instance (p.18). This "identity layer resides not in a governmental or company database but in the cloud" (p.19).

The roundtable participants contrast this notion of a cloud identity with Microsoft Passport, the abandoned plan to create centralized identities (p.19). "The course correction came about not because of a newfound altruism but because of the companies' recognition of a new kind of ecological capitalism, where their business interests were intertwined with the interests of customers, suppliers, and even competitors. Competition has evolved beyond a multiplayer zero-sum game into a more complex, cooperative exchange where mutually advantageous outcomes depend on a new kind of rationality in a wider ecology of players" (p.20).

The participants also discussed how these changes could result in new concepts of money, with information replacing money for many purposes (p.27). We already see this tendency "as instant global communications make possible bartering not only for tangible goods but also for text minutes, airline miles, virtual world currency and other non-physical assets" (p.27). In China and India, people already use prepaid mobile phone minutes as an alternate currency (p.32). To scale, such systems need better website reputation systems, systems that can't be gamed (p.31).

The roundtable "identified twelve ways the cloud will transform business":

1. Greater global reach
2. Greater customization
3. Reduced barriers to entry
4. The end of scale
5. Easier entry into adjacent markets
6. Greater specialization
7. Greater innovation and experimentation
8. Greater information transparency
9. Greater organizational complexity
10. Faster turnaround times and greater speed to market
11. Greater competitive intensity and disruption of existing markets
12. A shift from marketing push to customer pull (p.34)

Briefly, scale "is no longer an integral pillar of the new economy" (p.38). People's contributions will become more narrow and specialized across a range of markets, since greater connectivity means finding more precise fits rather than turning the employees in one's proximity into generalists; employees will no longer be units of one, but "fractions," hired for specific tasks (p.39). "Companies no longer pay for employees; they pay for solutions, essentially fractionalizing the employee into ever smaller and more productive slices of labor by enabling co-location in a virtual way through technology" (p.40). And "relationships come together based on a particular product or project and then disband at the end" (p.40). (Longtime readers of this blog will recognize this theme, which runs through my second book and my investigations of freelancers and coworking.)

At the same time, the roundtable anticipates scalable learning across the organization (p.42) and greater organizational complexity (p.44). In this environment, "the real impact of cloud computing may be this: in the future, everyone becomes an entrepreneur" (p.71).

The report concludes with a lengthy list of U.S. policy proposals, including formulating an identity agenda, modernizing the national energy grid, and deploying world-class broadband (pp.73-74).

All in all, this report seems like a strong summary of the issues facing identity in the future. I'm not sure I was really surprised by any of the report, but these threads were brought together well and succinctly, and in language that is easily absorbed. I'd recommend this report to C-level execs and academic departments.

Reading :: Emergence of Noopolitik

The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy
By John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt

This RAND report is an earlier, longer version of Arquilla and Ronfeldt's FirstMonday article "The Promise of Noopolitik." Like that later article, this report argues that strategists need to shift the US' grand strategy away from realpolitik and toward noopolitik: "the form of statecraft that we argue will come to be associated with the noosphere, the broadest informational realm of the mind" (p.x). "Noopolitik is foreign-policy behavior for the information age that emphasizes the primacy of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics - it would work through 'soft power' rather than 'hard power.' Noopolitik is guided more by a conviction that right makes might than the obverse" (p.x). And noopolitik involves more than state actors: "While realpolitik tends to empower states, noopolitik will likely empower networks of state and nonstate actors. Realpolitik pits one state against another, but noopolitik encourages states to cooperate in coalitions and other mutual frameworks" (p.x).

Arquilla and Ronfeldt go on to carefully discuss these ideas, acknowledging that realpolitik and noopolitik will coexist for decades (p.5), but also pointing out that "realpolitik, which stresses the hard, material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of world order," makes less sense in a world in which states are not dominant (p.29). The US is actually well positioned to lead in the noosphere, they argue, since "the new organizational ecology is richest in the United States" (p.7). That's important, since the growth of the noosphere depends not only on increased flows of ideas and ideals, but also growth in the stocks of ideas and ideals to which people subscribe" (p.23), and therefore open systems are essential for a global noosphere (p.23). And as systems increasingly become more open, and as these flows and stocks increase, states decline in relationship to nongovernmental agencies, complex transactional interconnections, and global issues (pp.30-31).

In fact, realpolitik is at odds with five trends: global interconnection, growing strength of global civil society, the rise of soft power, the importance of cooperative advantages, and the formation of a global noosphere (pp.35-44). The authors review these in detail, then summarize: "Realpolitik is typically about whose military or economy wins. Noopolitik may ultimately be about whose story wins" (p.53). Noopolitik, that is, is thoroughly rhetorical.

This text, as usual, is full of insights that won't be a surprise to Arquilla and Ronfeldt readers (or Castells readers, for that matter). But the authors carefully develop these ideas, yielding intriguing insights and predictions. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: The Innovation Acid Test

The Innovation Acid Test: Growth Through Design and Differentiation
By Andrew M. Jones

Drew Jones is one of the coauthors of I'm Outta Here!, a book on coworking. When he mentioned he had written another book, I asked him for the name so I could look it up. Not long after that, this book showed up in my inbox gratis. Thanks, Drew.

In any case, it's an interesting book. Like many such books, it discusses case studies from several companies (in this case: Southwest Airlines, Google, Whole Foods, SAS Institute, Starbucks, Innocent Drinks and Shanghai Tang) (p.12). But Jones goes on to examine innovation in those companies, arguing that the "emerging disciplines of innovation" include ethnography, architecture, and design (p.14). (Jones is an anthropologist by training.) These disciplines, centered around design, focus on building the unknown; they contrast with the dominant troika of mathematics, economics, and psychology, which focus on managing the known (p.20). And he argues that shifting from the old to the new paradigm will be crucial to attracting GenX and especially GenY employees (p.23). These new employees should be "T-shaped," that is, empathetic enough to reach across disciplines (p.24; search my blog for "boundary crossing" for some similar thoughts).

In the following chapters, Jones explores the three new disciplines with case studies, then concludes with thoughts about moving toward the new paradigm. The case studies are very business school-ish, relying mostly on C-level interviews and public company data; ironically, they're not ethnographic.

The book, I think, is valuable for thinking through what organizational innovation means. I really prefer ethnographic investigation to interview-based cases, but I see the value in these cases as well, and I certainly see value in thinking through the paradigm Jones outlines here. I expect I'll return to this book frequently as I continue to develop my own ideas about changes in work.

Reading :: The Myth of Leadership

The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations
By Jeffrey S. Nielsen

On Amazon.com, Jeffrey Nielsen's The Myth of Leadership currently has ten five-star reviews and one one-star review. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to go with the one-star review.

Nielsen's book is ostensibly about how to break away from hierarchical, leader-heavy organizations and instead create peer-based leaderless organizations. Unfortunately, he never actually defines "leadership" except in terms of formal rank, assuming that flattening rank is equivalent to removing leadership. Of course, this approach is really not tenable, so after railing against leadership for 141 pages, on p.142 he introduces the "strategy of rotational leadership" (p.142).

That's an emblematic example of how problematic the book is. But it's not the only example. Frankly, the book's cartoonish depiction of hierarchies troubles me. Nielsen argues that "genuine communication occurs only between equals" (p.4) because "you tell those above you only what you think they want to hear, and you tell those beneath you only what you think they need to know" (p.5) - a statement that is not borne out in my research, certainly, and that I suspect doesn't describe the general workforce. Nielsen builds on this false premise - for starters - by arguing that "secrecy frequently breeds corruption and abuse of power" (p.4). In fact, in the next few pages, he makes incredible, irresponsible leaps:

• "If the rank-based context of leadership is a primary cause of unhealthy and joyless business organizations..." (p.6);
• "Whenever we think in terms of 'leadership,' we create a dichotomy: (1) leaders, a select and privileged few, and (2) followers, the vast majority" (p.6);
• the term leadership "produces a privileged elite who, no matter how sincere they are, will eventually be seduced by their position" (p.6);
• peer-based organizations involve "no thought of leadership because there is no thought of ranking" (p.7).

These are oversimplifications, but they are also - particularly the last one - empirically wrong across organizations. Nielsen backs up this last point with an anecdote about a pickup game of football that completely undercuts his point. Although we do see where he gets his claim about people becoming sychophants in organizations, since he describes himself becoming a sychophant in a pickup game with an assertive leader (pp.7-8).

Nielsen name-checks Foucault, Gladwell, Castells, and of course chaos theory, without much indication that he understands any of them. He barely touches on some organizational forms (tribal, institutional, networked), but he barely touches on their historical development and he doesn't mention one of the most important factors - the plummeting cost of communication - as a key factor except as an afterthought at the end of the book (p.163). Instead, he portrays hierarchical organizational structure as an inexplicable accident that brings out the worst in people.

In the latter half of the book, Nielsen attempts to articulate some principles and practices for leaderless organizations (including the aforementioned "rotational leadership"). But by then, I had lost faith that he (a) knew what he was talking about and (b) would give a fair shake to criticisms of his ideas. By the time Nielsen lurched to a stop, with the claim that democracy is inevitable (p.165), I had given up on insights and simply decided to finish the book.

I can't recommend this book.

Reading :: Beware the Hubris Nemesis Complex

Beware the Hubris Nemesis Complex: A Concept for Leadership Analysis
By David F. Ronfeldt

I've been really enjoying reading David Ronfeldt's work, which mostly comes to me by way of RAND research reports. Ronfeldt is intellectually curious and roving, rushing ahead at high speed across disciplinary boundaries in order to collect new insights. In this way he seems a bit like Yrjo Engestrom. And like Engestrom, Ronfeldt is working on a grand social theory. For Engestrom, it's activity theory. For Ronfeldt, it's his TIMN framework and his Space-Time-Activity (STA) analysis, about which I have previously blogged.

Ronfeldt is currently retired from RAND, but in this 1994 publication, he was very much involved in thinking through national security problems. One problem is as fresh today as it was in 1994: what personality characteristics are shared by many of the dictators who deliberately and consistently provoke the United States in order to benefit domestically? Ronfeldt has Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein in mind, but we could update it by adding Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Dipping into Jungian psychology, Ronfeldt argues that such leaders represent an "extraordinary dynamic," the fusing of hubris ("a pretention toward an arrogant form of godliness") and nemesis ("a vengeful desire to confront, defeat, humiliate, and punish an adversary that may itself be accused of hubris") (p.5). Put succinctly, for people who hold the hubris-nemesis complex, their hubris involves becoming a nemesis to some other entity's hubris.

In a unipolar world, that other entity is usually the United States. And in setting out to punish that entity's hubris, the actor takes the mantle of "high ideals and a moralization of violence" (p.7). Such leaders tend to become maximalist and pragmatic, Ronfeldt says (p.13), picking their battles in order to strengthen their domestic and global positions.

Analyzing this type through his STA framework, Ronfeldt argues that hubris-nemesis leaders, unlike narcissists, have a keen sense of history (p.27) and have long time horizons - but use crises to "transform the meaning of past, present, and future and break through to a new kind of time" (p.34).

In the last chapter, Ronfeldt acknowledges that his focus on individuals as the kernel for national action "bother[s] social theorists who believe that mankind's history is driven far less by subjective conditions than by objective, material, and structural conditions ... [they] want concepts like the hubris-nemesis complex to be nested in a convincing discussion of the degree to which psychological and other subjective conditions matter in the first place" (p.40). Right, that's a pretty good description of my perspective. But I can also see how Ronfeldt is onto something. As I was reading this report, President Obama had just come in for substantial criticism because he had been photographed smiling and shaking Hugo Chavez' hand. Against this outcry, military historian Max Boot told Obama's critics:

All Obama did was shake the guy’s hand, and offer him a smile. Far from being a disaster, this could actually be a smart strategic move. Chavez, after all, derives much of his demagogic appeal from his claim to be an inveterate enemy of Uncle Sam. He thrives off provoking us and using the resulting reaction to “prove” that we are as bad as he claims.

Obama is a lot harder to demonize than George W. Bush, however, and by shaking hands with Chavez the president may be undercutting his appeal more effectively than anything Bush did. [My emphasis]

In other words, Pres. Obama seems to be in consonance with Ronfeldt's advice on how to handle such personalities. Interesting.

"In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008."

Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon, discusses the implications of user-created content.

Technological Ecologies & Sustainability

Technological Ecologies & Sustainability is the name of a new open-access, on-line scholarly book published by Computers & Composition Digital Press. It's a multiauthored, multimodal composition. I haven't gotten to review it yet, but I wanted to put the link out there.

The newspaper bailout?

Leena Rao of TechCrunch has a thoughtful post on the possibility of a newspaper bailout. (No word on bailouts for the buggy whip industry yet.) In addition to the practical issues, TechCrunch identifies the following ethical issues:

• Under one proposal, newspapers would be prevented from making political endorsements. On the face of it, perhaps this seems like a good idea - after all, newspapers could endorse candidates that had voted for the bailout - but as Rao argues, this measure would constitute an unwelcome First Amendment restriction: "Political endorsements by newspapers and media organizations are a very essence of freedom of speech."
• But of course, this leads us to the second issue. "The second ethical question is whether journalists will be able to deliver unbiased reporting of the very people and institutions that are helping to subsidize their jobs."

Yes, these are the horns of the dilemma. I suspect that a bailout will spell not only ethical problems but also perception problems with newspapers. They need another way out.

Hnadling plagiarism

Things have been busy around here, but I wanted to throw out a link to Stepcase Lifehack's short post on handling plagiarists. Specifically, the article is directed partially to plagiarists, talking about how to handle their discovery and recover with some shred of dignity.

CFP: Writing Research Across Borders 2011

I'm excited to be involved with WRAB 2011 - it's a great conference with an international crowd discussing writing research. Here's the CFP:

Call for Proposals: Writing Research Across Borders II

George Mason University

February 17-20, 2011

Proposal Deadline May 3, 2010

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research Across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years.

Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research.

As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition’s previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims.

Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects.

The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to <writing@education.ucsb.edu>. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker’s individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter.

Conference information will be available at http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/wrconf11/

"Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky ..."

I'm guessing this press release was translated into English:

“Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky to introduce the most innovative robot mobile phone,” understood JK Shin, Executive associate President and supervisor of movable Communication department in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industriousness and our consistent stratagem to support all obtainable in service system, I believe with the intention of Samsung provides the better choices and remuneration to our consumers” he added.

The release also informs us that the phone will give us access to the "gorged" Google Apps.

"An unpopular position"

Jeff Rice weighs in on the controversy of adjuncts being valued less in humanities departments than tenure-line professors. He takes a pragmatic view of adjuncts' choices and concludes with a piece of advice: "Don't take these jobs." And furthermore, he says:

And before you get to the stage where economic realities force you to take a job you don’t want: Pay attention to market forces when you go to graduate school so that you are preparing for a career that exists.

If Jeff's stance is unpopular, I suppose I will be taking an unpopular position by agreeing with it. Adjuncts, he argues, are tasked primarily with teaching, while tenure-line professors also shoulder research and service responsibilities - especially research, which is a critical part of the mission of a research university and is just as much the university's "real work" as teaching. Jeff lays this out quite well, and I would only add that we who train the next generation of PhDs need to be really conscious about emphasizing the choices these grad students will have as they prepare for their careers. Those choices are far more varied than adjunct/tenure line.

Participants can respond. Uh-oh.

This article about Jared Diamond being sued for libel should serve as a warning for qualitative researchers:

Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit claiming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond wrote a New Yorker magazine article that falsely accused them of murder and other crimes.

Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp say in a single-page filing in Manhattan's state Supreme Court that Diamond's article published April 21, 2008, accused them "of serious criminal activity ... including murder."

The article was titled, "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"

This incident is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the scenario I described in my chapter "The Genie’s Out of the Bottle: Leveraging Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Qualitative Research," published this year in Amy Kimme Hea's collection. There, I argued that although institutional research boards have historically been conceived as a way to protect participants from researchers' representations, social media mean that the danger is now bidirectional - participants can represent the researcher in damaging ways as well, and those representations could easily circulate more broadly than the researcher's. The nightmare scenario I described in that chapter was one in which the participants could openly contest (and ridicule) the researcher's representation, publishing their own competing accounts and evidence.

The obvious implication is that researchers must think seriously about confidence-building measures such as member checks, and even about bringing participants into the analysis, not as a matter of noblesse oblige but as a matter of self-protection.

Based on the linked article, Jared Diamond's situation sounds a bit different. He essentially accuses an interviewee of murder, and he uses the interviewee's real name - clearly not something that would be sanctioned by an institutional review board, since it could cause damage to the participant (and to the institution). Yet in other ways, the case carries a huge warning even for qualitative researchers following institutional guidelines. Diamond apparently didn't expect the participant to respond. And now the participant is not only responding in court, he is garnering considerable attention online.

The implications for methodology:

• Institutional review boards are your friends. Human subjects protocols are a contract between you and your institution; stand by those protocols and the institution will stand behind you.
  
• Methodology should include confidence-building measures, not as a matter of politeness or nicety, but as a matter of self-protection. You don't have to give away the farm by trying to achieve consensus, but you should be able to provide feedback loops and demonstrate how you'll take that feedback into account. That's especially true if you'll be using real names - a practice that is frowned upon by IRBs, but occasionally necessary.
  

Near UT? Contact me about having your workplace communication evaluated this summer.

Do you want a thorough evaluation of how people work and communicate in your organization, and a list of recommendations for improving it?

This summer, I'm teaching a class in which students will work in teams to do just that: enter organizations, observe people at work, interview them, and analyze the results in order to make solid, data-driven recommendations. Deliverables will include an interim report, a recommendation report, and prototype solutions.

So I'm looking for organizations (in the loose sense) that are

• near the UT campus
• relatively coherent (someone at the site can authorize the study)
• amenable to having small teams visit, observe, and conduct interviews
  

If this sounds interesting, drop me an email and we can chat further.

"I, for one, would relish the opportunity to delete my Facebook account and go all-in with Google."

At FastCompany, Chris Dannen thinks the improvement to Google Profiles might make it a Facebook killer. Possibly - but wasn't Jaiku supposed to be a Twitter killer?

"My advice to anyone who finds Blackberry or laptop use during meetings rude or distracting: have fewer meetings or get to the point faster."

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch reacts to a survey on whether people think that PDAs and laptops contribute to a decline of workplace etiquette. The last sentence in this quote nails it:

One thing Baby Boomers apparently really hate is when the rest of us are not paying attention during meetings and instead checking our e-mail or Twitter accounts on our mobile phones and laptops. A full 69 percent of Baby Boomers surveyed agree that “PDAs and mobile phones contribute to the decline of proper workplace etiquette,” while only 47 percent of Gen Y workers see what is the big deal. (By the way, who says “PDA” anymore? I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that it must have been a Baby Boomer who put together the survey).