Reading :: Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory

Originally posted: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 19:04:06

Basics of Qualitative Research : Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory

by Anselm Strauss, Juliet M. Corbin

The title of this book is somewhat misleading, but it's corrected by the subtitle. This book is a grad-level introduction to grounded theory in particular, not qualitative research in general: competing qualitative research traditions such as participatory action research, ethnography, and case studies are not discussed. Granted, they often have much in common with grounded theory, but there are also a lot of differences. Unfortunately they're often simply lumped together.

That was certainly the case in the research methods courses I took in my PhD program, several years ago. I'm sure that was out of necessity, but I'd like to more strongly differentiate them in the course I'll be teaching this spring -- and to get them straight in my own mind. Similar terminologies, similar methods, and similar aims tend to introduce a lot of slippage into discussions of qualitative research. And I should add that there's sometimes a frustrating lack of detail about exactly how to deploy them, a lack of detail that I think points to the depth of experience and the level of practice it takes to do qualitative research well. Diana Forsythe's last article, on how ethnography is something done by people with PhDs in anthropology (as opposed to something one can learn in a three-day contextual design course), resonates more strongly with me every time I read one of these books.

A little background: Anselm Strauss developed grounded theory along with Barney Glaser. They deployed it in several studies and wrote several books on it. This one is meant for grad students, which probably explains why so much of it involves expressing empathy for the reader's struggles, discusses ways of managing one's emotions about one's project, and dispenses general advice. Unfortunately a lot of that advice seems obvious and not terribly helpful. Here's a sample from the last chapter, on writing up studies:

Our best counsel is to choose if possible a supportive yet critical advisor, and to write as good a manuscript as possible. If you produce solid research you are likely to earn your degree, unless none of the committee members can counternance qualitative research. If that is a possibility, then you should strive to keep the number of such potentially adverse critics on your committee to a minimum. (p.237)

Frustratingly, much of the book is taken up with similar text. (I suddenly realize that this text reminds me of another book I've reviewed.) That's unfortunate, because there's a lot of really good stuff in here -- if you're willing to dig.

What good stuff? Well, the book manages to lay out the basics of grounded theory quite well. We find that grounded theory emphasizes the inductive development of theories, first as substantive (situated in a particular context) and eventually as formal (examined in many such contexts) (p.174). We learn that there are four criteria for judging how well a theory applies to a phenomenon: fit, understanding, generality, and control (p.23). We find that -- just as in participatory design, incidentally -- "the research question in a grounded theory study is a statement that identifies the phenomenon to be studied" (p.38). And over and over we find that grounded theory is all about "integrating detail, procedures, and operational logic" (p.159) -- developing coherent, well integrated, and strongly connected theories through progressive waves of open coding and axial coding.

But then again, we also find that we can't reduce the approach to a set of steps that will necessarily produce a grounded theory study. I don't think this is the fault of the prose; rather, I think Forsythe was right in that these procedures and the judgment behind them must be learned through deep experience. This book outlines the methodological precepts and gives a lot of examples, but ultimately it doesn't seem to pin down the approach with much specificity, and I think that's because the approach doesn't lend itself to that level of operationalization. Which does put us as qualitative researchers in a difficult position: Strauss and Corbin talk often of grounded theory's rigor, but as an inductive method that doesn't and can't provide strong operational guidance, it seems that grounded theory would have difficulty making such a case for itself. I'll have to think about this further as I examine other qualitative methods.

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Reading :: Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices

Originally posted: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:04:34

Opening Spaces : Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices

by Patricia Sullivan, James Porter

Reading Yin's classic on case study research last week led me to dig up my copy of Sullivan and Porter's Opening Spaces, a 1997 book from the Computers and Composition series that is perhaps the only computers and writing book to deal primarily with research methodology. I remember having a love-hate relationship with this book when I first read it. And I'm here to report that this relationship is indeed intact.

Let's talk about the love first. Sullivan and Porter do a good job of demystifying research, starting with the unusual and illuminating example of a basketball game: the game can be observed and described in different ways, using different methods, and from different perspectives. I can imagine grad students, and even undergrads, catching quickly onto the basics of research by the end of this chapter. Clearly, Sullivan and Porter understand research as inquiry rather than as a set of steps that will result in transcendent knowledge. This understanding of research is forefronted all the way through the book, resulting in some valuable insights about the design-research-report cycle. Great. Research as praxis -- one of the central themes of the book -- seems like a valuable theme to develop.

But then we get to the problems. Some of these are due to the series, which has low production values and I think has been edited with a rather light hand. Certainly the chapters are uneven, the prose sometimes gets bogged down (more on that in a moment), and the book as a whole doesn't follow the arc set by that strong first chapter. I expected a book on methodology. I got a book on, well, critical research practices.

So what do they mean by critical research practices? Well, there's a disorienting mix of postmodern uncertainty and foundational certainty.

The foundational certainty is in Sullivan and Porter's embrace of liberation theology's precepts (pp.118-128). In their adoption and amplification of Paolo Freire's work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Sullivan and Porter enthusiastically elaborate on forms of oppression, differentiate between oppression and power, and confidently declare, "Once oppression is identified, there can be only one ethical stance toward it: Oppose it" (p.122). We're not just talking about overt forms of oppression such as genocide in Sudan, but also covert ones such as computer interfaces: "The Macintosh interface may represent a form of oppression (cultural imperialism), but it's certainly better than the old DOS command-line interface" (p.122). They go on to identify the foundational principle, "liberate the poor," and confidently state: "Given conditions of fundamental inequity, or faced with a situation of oppression, this is the only ethical stance to take. It's the chief operational principle in such situations, and it's a principle not present in the U.S. Constitution" (p.123). I find this argument unconvincing because it assumes hierarchical relationships; suggests that conflicts necessarily have a dimension of oppression; and labels oppressors unambiguously as wrong. Do I really need to point out why these factors are problematic?

This litany of absolutist statements is generally confined to Chapter 5, the chapter on politics and ethics. It is sharply contrasted by other parts of the book, in which they give rein to postmodern uncertainty -- the starts and stops, the on-the-other-hands and the that-is-not-to-says -- and this makes for some joyless and tedious reading. This is partially a stylistic problem, I think, as the postmodernists cited by these authors (Foucault; Deleuze & Guattari) tend not to engage in these unending rounds of hedging.

Why they couldn't strike a balance between these two poles is beyond me. But then again, this book really is all about poles. In Chapter 4, they discuss "postmodern mapping," a vague term that essentially involves setting up pairs of binaries in a cartesian grid and eyeballing where different things should be situated in those binaries. As the authors explain in the concluding chapter, multiplying binaries is a way of complicating and questioning them: Western society is so used to binaries that this way is easier than trying to abolish them outright, they say. So we get poles in spades, poles that intersect other poles that intersect others in a grim recursion.

Well, I got a little carried away by the "hate" part of this "love-hate" relationship. Let me conclude with a little more "love": the book really does have some valuable insights and some valuable case studies, and it's a rare methodology book in the subfield of computers and writing. Chapters 1 and 3 are particularly valuable. I'll probably end up copying these chapters for my grad-level qualitative research class next spring.

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Reading :: Case Study Research: Design and Methods

Originally posted: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:49:08

Case Study Research: Design and Methods

by Robert K. Yin

This book is a classic handbook for conducting case studies. I remember reading it in grad school and again when I was preparing to conduct a study at Texas Tech; I particularly remember its impassioned defense of case studies as a legitimate and rigorous approach. So when I began preparing for my qualitative methods class (to be taught in spring 2005), I got a copy of the third edition.

In addition to an impassioned defense of the case study, Yin discusses what case studies are and are not. Case studies, he says, are not strictly qualitative; they can be quantitative as well. They are best performed in pairs or in greater sets, since this allows comparisons. They should have several types of validity. They can draw on six sources of evidence. You get the idea: the book catalogues the basic moves of conducting a case study with exhaustive taxonomies.

Yin illustrates each of these points with brief descriptions of classic or exemplary studies. None of these descriptions is especially captivating, to my mind, and neither is the book -- a workmanlike affair that makes its points, gets to where it needs to go, and gets out. Perhaps that is best for its genre -- a research handbook -- but I can see that I'll need to pair it with other, more interesting books if I use it in the class, which I probably will.

Case Study Research is not an exciting book. It does what it needs to do, though; there's a reason it's a classic.

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Reading :: Science on the Run

Originally posted: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 22:51:12

Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940

by Geoffrey C. Bowker

I have some nostalgia for this book. In 1997, while a PhD candidate at Iowa State University, I obtained a summer internship at Schlumberger Well Services in Austin. By the end of the summer, I was sure that I wanted to continue with the sort of research I had done there -- qualitative studies of knowledge work -- and I was also sure I wanted to end up in Austin. (It took a few years, but I reached both goals.)

When I returned to Ames, I ran across Bowker's book Science on the Run, an examination of how Schlumberger began and how it carved out a place as a technological innovator. At the time, I wasn't familiar with Bowker's work; I was just interested in Schlumberger and in the insights that this study of early research practice might inform my more recent study of software development practice. I quite clearly remember reading the book while waiting outside Rebecca Burnett's office to talk about the dissertation project.

Returning to it now, I find that I'm better equipped to appreciate it. Science on the Run is a study of the copious Schlumberger archives; it attempts to answer how Schlumberger developed its applied science while fighting for market share in a relatively new market. That market was logging oil wells; the question was whether advanced and innovative methods could provide better insight than simply drilling by guesswork. And Schlumberger's answer was to form electrical currents in the shafts, record the results, and use them to describe the strata through which the shaft extended. This was a fairly straightforward method except for the fact that, strictly speaking, it didn't work.

Let's qualify that, because the really important thing about this book is its discussion of how a locally contingent method became "bootstrapped" into a universal one. The electronic logging performed by Schlumberger worked quite well in the localized environments in which it was developed. However, geological features vary quite a bit from place to place, and consequently methods were not universally applicable: methods that worked wonderfully well in the lab (in a bathtub at the Ecole des Mines in Paris) or in one field (the played-out Pechelbronn, located near the Schlumberger family home) did not work as well in different geological areas (such as the southern US in the 1920s). Rival methods, such as seismic methods, carried the day in that arena because oil in those US fields was often bound up in salt domes, located easily by seismic methods but poorly by electrical ones. Schlumberger's methods were localized and contingent -- as all are -- but they had to be made to appear universal and able to reveal nature. Bowker engagingly discusses how that work was done: by cultivating successes in post-revolutionary Russia, where western technologies and electrical methods had positive associations, and where Schlumberger could act as a broker for other methods; in Venezuela, where oil companies would construct their own road, electrical, and pipeline networks to route around the local and turn the world into a suitable laboratory; and finally back to the United States, when seismic methods had failed to work in particular terrains and electrical methods had improved enough to function in a broader range of formations. Bowker also covers the patent battles, secrecy, deception, and espionage that attends such high-stakes, cutting-edge research. In this account, nature, society, science, and politics are reunited and demonstrated as part of the same activity.

A few points that are most relevant to my current work here. I was surprised and happy to find a precedent for the way I've been using a particular term:

From the point of view of the network builders themselves -- and from the point of view of a formal description of their networks -- there was no distinction between the act of organizing humans and that of organizing nonhumans; both sets of entities had to be aligned within the same network. I call this process of alignment convergence. (p.46)

Yes, "convergence" is a good term for describing how heterogeneous elements are spliced together in often unusual juxtapositions. And examining these heterogeneous, converged networks leads Bowker to what I have elsewhere called integrated scope:

In short, we should expect to find the same regularities at each level of granularity of the network -- from the micro level of individual operators, electrodes, and drillers' mud to the macro level of the oil industry as a whole and the social organization of campsites. The strategies are the same because in network terms almost exactly the same sort of thing is being done. (p.47)

In a previous review, I've already discussed Bowker's insights into the building of networks in Venezuela: pipelines, roads, electricity grids, and air networks were built to effectively route around local conditions, obviating them in terms of Schlumberger's operation (p.77). Bowker expands on that theme here, though this chapter is largely the same as that earlier article.

One other thing. In my investigation of telecommunication in the US, I've become really interested in the notion of universal service, a concept that has shifted quite a bit and that was originally developed by AT&T to ensure their monopoly status. Similarly, following Bijker and Pinch, Bowker discusses "trajectories," "something that can only exist after the fact, as a historical construction" (p.18). For instance, in the 1930s, the inelastic demand for oil (greater supplies did not lead to greater consumption) meant that big oil companies had to coordinate "to manage prices and output," without falling afoul of the Sherman Antitrust laws. The result was an interest in conservation of "a dwindling, precious natural resource" (p.71). In today's market, with ever-rising levels of consumption, the construct is no longer needed to manage production -- but now it has taken on a life and a meaning of its own. Another example is that of the State of California, whose legislature became convinced of the efficacy of electrical logging and made it obligatory. "Schlumberger had finally succeeded in laying down a natural law, so the legislature laid down a social law to back it up" (p.103). The clarity with which Bowker discusses this point is characteristic of the entire book.

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Game :: Metroid Prime

Originally posted: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 07:38:41

Metroid Prime

Every once in a while I review a GameCube game I've been playing. Previous games have included The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Eternal Darkness. Reading the reviews led me to believe that Metroid Prime would be similar. It, the reviews said, had a similar mix between action and puzzles; it had a similarly strong plot; it had visuals and audio to rival the other games.

Well, sort of. Metroid Prime, like Zelda, is the 3D heir of a traditionally 2D franchise. But whereas Zelda takes a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, Metroid Prime is a first-person shooter game. And what I quickly learned was that although FPSes are fine for a quick game of Quake 3, I really don't like them for extended periods. I can't figure out where my feet are supposed to be. More than that, I don't get a sense of the character's personality. Watching Link in Zelda, or any of the characters in Eternal Darkness, enhances the narrative considerably for me -- to my surprise -- because I see them as characters. If I'm watching the character, even if I control their actions, I get a sense of their reactions and I develop an understanding of them as a character; I develop affection or respect or contempt or whatever for that character. But if I see everything in the first person, there isn't any separation between that character and me; and if I'm myself, where's the story? I'm just sitting in the living room blasting things.

That's not the only obstacle to the game's narrative, of course. Other problems exist, and I don't think they are just my own idiosyncracies. Although some reviews have claimed that Metroid Prime has an exceptionally strong story, it seemed paper thin in practice. Want me to boil it down for you? You have to pick up tools, kill anything that moves, solve puzzles, and collect artifacts. Oh, the ultimate goal is to defeat space pirates. Where's the complexity? I simply didn't find the narrative interesting enough. Yes, I think we've all enjoyed fiction with paper-thin plots, but the difference is typically made up with compelling characters. Here, there literally are no other sentient characters except you and a subset of your adversaries, and none of you are in a talking mood.

The final nail in the coffin is Metroid Prime's byzantine save system. In Zelda, you could save at any time; if you saved in the middle of a battle, you'd start again near the site of the battle, otherwise you'd start exactly where you left off. In Eternal Darkness, you could save as long as no active enemies were in the room with you. But in Metroid Prime, you must seek out far-flung "save stations." What's more, you must move through the sprawling, difficult-to-navigate terrain wherever your signals lead you, even if you've already been there several times before. I'm told this design is to help you become familiar with the terrain. Well, the terrain is tedious, and so is the gameplay. I gave up a third of the way through.

Next up? Probably Second Sight.

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Reading :: Competition and Deregulation in Telecommunications

Originally posted: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 19:17:45

Competition and Deregulation in Telecommunications: The Case for a New Paradigm

by Thomas Duesterberg, Kenneth Gordon

This 95-page monograph was coauthored by two members of the Hudson Institute, a not-for-profit research organization that makes recommendations on public policy. Duesterberg served as Assistant Secretary for International Economic Policy at the US Department of Commerce during the first Bush administration and, before that, as Administrative Assistant to Sen. Dan Quayle. Gordon served as Chairman of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities and of the Maine Public Utilities Commission. With that kind of pedigree, it's not surprising that the book is both knowledgeable about the subject and enthusiastic about telecommunications deregulation. In fact, its central thesis appears to be that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TCA96), though it contains some deregulatory impulses and language, is not deregulatory enough and preserves managed competition rather than moving toward a free market. With this point in mind, the book provides a valuable critique of TCA96 paired with a really interesting historical perspective.

That historical perspective isn't of TCA96's repercussions -- the book was written only a year later -- but of the negotiations that led to it. Duesterberg and Gordon discuss a couple of things in detail. One is access charges, which "stem directly from policies designed to keep local-exchange rates low enough to meet political needs" and "to keep local rates low -- that is, to cross-subsidize them" (p.29). This arrangement worked fairly well as long as AT&T was a monopoly: access charges were leveled on long-distance charges (a relatively small fraction of wealthy users) and transferred to the local side of the business, keeping local access cheap, and since all that money stayed in the company regardless, it was a zero-sum game. (I oversimplify here -- an economist would point out that price fluctuations have tremendous effects on demand in what are actually separate markets. See p.33.) This arrangement, of course, works only as long as both services are controlled by the same monopoly (p.31); when other long-distance companies began competing, they could provide more competitive prices, partially because they initially didn't have to pay a local subsidy (p.51). More on this in a minute.

Access charges weren't the only form of cross-subsidy. Another was "the practices of capitalizing nonrecurrent expenses and using depreciation rates that fail to recognize the real rate of decline in the economic value of assets" (p.31). This practice of underdepreciation, the authors charge, resulted in "tomorrow's ratepayers underwriting the consumption of today's ratepayers" as well as underinvestment in facilities. "If competition is introduced ... the very recovery of the as yet underdepreciated amounts may be at risk": competition upsets this logic and destabilizes this second form of cross-subsidy (p.31).

Thus, the authors conclude, "an enormous subsidy burden was building" throughout AT&T's monopoly from the 1930s-1970s, a burden that "would haunt later regulators and enormously complicate their attempts to introduce competition as it became apparent that little or even none of the industry any longer exhibited natural monopoly characteristics" (p.32).

This discussion leads to the notion of universal service, which in some ways got us into this mess. "As currently applied under governmental policy, universal service refers to a system of direct and indirect subsidies that essentially maintains basic residential service at rates deemed affordable by regulatory authorities," the authors state (p.48). But -- despite the arguments of universal service's supporters -- the concept does not date back to the early days of telecommunication. "Instead, the term universal service was coined by the visionary head of AT&T, Theodore Vail, for the altogether mundane purpose of eliminating competition in telephone service and creating a monopoly for his company" (p.48). The term was coined in 1907 (p.49) and meant the need to unify telephone services under regulated local exchange monopolies -- a very different meaning than the contemporary one (p.49). The term doesn't even appear in the Communications Act of 1934 (p.50).

The notion of universal service led to the access charge cross-subsidies of which I spoke earlier. This arrangement worked well until others moved into the long-distance market and the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against AT&T in 1974. At this point, Eugene Rostrow, an AT&T consultant, testified to Congress in 1975 that universal service was tied to the practices of regulated monopoly (p.51). This notion wasn't spelled out in the Communications Act of 1934:

Unable to locate either the term or the concept of universal service in the text of the 1934 act, Rostrow instead appealed to the vague language in the act's statement of purpose, much in the spirit of the 1970s that discovered large concepts in the "penumbra" of founding texts.

Though the authors don't say so explicitly, this sounds like a reference to Roe v. Wade.

The point that leaps out to me here is that we have to be very careful when talking about cultural-historical development. In this case, certainly a concept called "universal service" developed historically; but the contemporary meaning becomes read back into the history, making it seem as if the kernel of the meaning has been there all along. But that contemporary meaning could not have existed in the original -- indeed, we see an interesting example of what I've been calling splicing here, in which contemporary legal trends are read back into the documents that predate them. As the authors say with some regret, "Historical accuracy matters less, unfortunately, than the political reality of universal service as currently understood, for the concept was explicitly enshrined in the Telecommunications Act of 1996" (p.52); the notion of universal service had been stabilized, nailed down, and now it undergirds TCA96.

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Reading :: Communications Policy and the Public Interest

Originally posted: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 19:53:26

Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996

by Patricia Aufderheide

If you were to write a short sociotechnical history of the US telecommunications industry -- and alas, I plan to do just that fairly soon -- there are a few large events you would have to address. One is the establishment of the Bell monopoly, more or less enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934. Another is the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment that broke Bell into AT&T (long distance, competitive) and the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs: local area, regional monopolies). And the third is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which (among other things) opened up local telephone service to competition and mandated that RBOCs share their network infrastructure with competitors until those competitors could build their own facilities.

Facilities are what this fight is all about, of course. Bell established its monopoly in part by building the infrastructure when building infrastructure was relatively cheap. Imagine having to build your own facilities to compete in the local phone market: arranging for right of way, erecting telephone poles, laying cables, setting up a local loop, wiring jacks into people's houses, hiring workers to troubleshoot the physical network (which constantly decays and must be repaired). Ideally competing companies can do all of these -- and indeed they're beginning to do so -- but they couldn't be expected to do all that at once, and even if they did, consumers might have a hard time trusting them. But for a long time the question was moot, because Bell would let nothing -- nothing -- attach to its network. In fact, in the 1950s Bell sued a company that manufactured the "Hush-a-Phone" -- a small plastic cup that you attached to the phone mouthpiece so that you could speak softly (pp.21-22). Bell claimed that even this plastic attachment threatened the integrity of its network; the repercussions of this foolish claim led eventually to our present state, in which RBOCs must let companies attach to their networks. In a way, Bell was right: Hush-a-Phone contaminated and changed the nature of the entire network.

Bigger changes were in the offing, though:

Digital processing has changed the very characteristics of communications networks. Rapidly evolving computing that is based on distributed processing has made it possible to decentralize networks. Many of the decisions once made in large centralized switches are now made at intermediate stops or even within the consumer's telephone. Along with increased flexibility and the potential to reconfigure the very shape of networks and subnetworks, decentralized data processing has dramatically increased the amount of intelligence -- or the ability to respond to input and take action -- in communications networks. This innovation provides a fundamental challenge to the notion of common carriage, or the restriction of network providers to transmission alone, because the clear lines between content and conduit have become muddied. Networks themselves have information, or content, built into them. (pp.10-11)

That's the present state. And it's what allows the snarl of telecommunications infrastructures -- their name is Legion -- to work together coherently and appear to provide unified, uninterrupted service. Not by themselves, of course, but through the negotiated and legislated agreement known as the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The Act is examined and dissected in this book in terms of its history, development, negotiations, and repercussions. Aufderheide is not a sociotechnical theorist, at least not in the terms of the sociology of knowledge, but she does a good job of examining the workings of the Act and providing us with enough information to begin such an analysis.

For instance, she dissects the notion of universal service, a chimeric term that has been reinterpreted throughout the history of US telecommunications. The 1934 Act, for instance, stated its overarching purpose as "to make available, so far as possible to all the people of the United States, a rapid, efficient, nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communications service with adequate facilities and reasonable charges" (qtd. on p.18). AT&T raised long-distance prices to pay for investment in universal service -- "an important claim of social benefit, which could discourage adoption of a competitive model of service provision" (p.18). Of course, once a competitive model was introduced, AT&T's strength became its weakness. "In 1969, MCI won the right to attach to the AT&T network in order to offer what then were merely private network services for corporations" (p.22), and that attachment was free of universal service requirements. "The decision fundamentally challenged the old logic of cross-subsidy. AT&T charged the upstarts with 'cream skimming' -- taking the high-dollar clients and leaving AT&T with the large, expensive network to service" (p.22). Eventually, after the MFJ, universal service became a contribution from long distance service to local service (p.57).

This conflict in part drove the move toward deregulation, an attempt to move from the monopoly model to a competitive one. But how to maintain the commitment to universal service? One deregulative idea was for the government itself to offer "phone stamps," modeled on food stamps, directly to disadvantaged consumers. Imagine. Another, more decentralized version was described in Peter Huber's 1987 study The Geodesic Network: In a decentralized network, "each supplier can independently provide end-to-end service, and yet suppliers as a group can offer universal access. by providing horizontal links among their networks" (qtd. on p.29). Eventually, universal service was operationalized in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as subsidies provided by providers to K-12 schools, libraries, and similar nonprofit parties at discounts of 20% to 90%. The discounts were set based on "poverty level, as measured by school lunch eligibility" (p.100) -- a wonderful illustration of how different sociotechnical networks can be spliced together.

Another interesting case is that of local service. In the MFJ, the RBOCs had been granted limited monopolies in local service. But with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) were allowed to compete. Ideally, as I mentioned earlier, these companies would build their own infrastructure; realistically, the price of entry was far too steep. So the Telecommunications Act mandated that in the short run, RBOCs must provide their services at a discount to the CLECs, which could then repackage that service and resell it to consumers at competitive prices. Eventually, the Act envisioned the CLECs bootstrapping themselves: building their own physical facilities, providing hardware-to-hardware or facilities-based competition (p.44). The Act "leaves to the FCC and to states (in an unclear formulation) the determination of what price is fair for resale"; mandates number portability; disallows mandated access numbers; and sets up payment arrangements for calls that traverse multiple competitors' networks (pp.63-64). Of course, once again the competitors cream-skimmed: By 1998, CLECs controlled 1% of local lines, but those lines represented 3% of local phone revenues, because the CLECs aggressively pursued business rather than residential lines (p.84).

I enjoy reading histories because they give interesting insights into how our world became the way it is, and this one was in general engagingly written. Aufderheide injects occasional flashes of humor that keeps the book lively. More importantly, the book keeps track of stakeholders, their influences, and their negotiations as the book moves inexorably to the passing of the Act and its repercussions.

>

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Reading :: The Wisdom of Crowds

Originally posted: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 19:24:20

The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki

I picked up this book partially because it touches on some themes that are common in the books I've been reading lately -- distributed cognition, the sociology of scientific knowledge, etc. -- and partially because Dan Drezner recommended it. (My wife tells me it was also discussed on NPR.) And indeed it does provide some interesting insight into the issue of group decision-making. But not quite in the vein I expected.

To understand why, here's the money quote -- which I lifted from the book's website but which echoes the message of the book:

Crowds are best when there's a right answer to a problem or a question. (I call these "cognition" problems.) If you have, for instance, a factual question, the best way to get a consistently good answer is to ask a group.

This focus on problems with "right answers" is what separates Surowiecki's book from folks like Latour and Machiavelli, and even distributed cognitionists such as Hutchins. Like Latour and Machiavelli, Surowiecki argues that "crowds" can often make better decisions than individuals, even if the individuals are not terribly well informed or intelligent; as long as their input is aggregated well, decision-making turns out to be far more accurate even than the experts'.

Now, to my mind, this thesis is severely flawed in that it is explicated by reference to problems whose answers can be retrospectively verified, typically with quantitative measures. Examples include guessing a heifer's weight, the coordinates of a lost submarine, or a political candidate's margin of victory. Surowiecki explicitly disallows the question of deliberation (though he sneaks it in through the back door) -- the focus is on aggregations of guesses, the closing in on an objective solution, not the forging of open-ended political settlements. "Choosing candidates and making policy in a democracy are not, in that sense, cognition problems and so we should not expect them to yield themselves to the wisdom of the crowd" (p.270). It's not surprising to find that Surowiecki was led to research this book through his examination of market behavior. But this is an entirely different kind of "crowd wisdom" than, say, Machiavelli's discussion of republican deliberation. In Machiavelli's view, a "crowd" in a republic will almost always make better decisions than a prince, not because more people are working on a cognitive problem, but because they introduce deliberation and moderation -- exactly what Surowiecki disallows. Even Hutchins' discussion of distributed cognition is less closed and less goal-oriented than Surowiecki's.

This book is valuable for discussing market economics and probability, as well as for providing an opening for discussions of distributed cognition. But given my particular research interests, I don't anticipate cracking it often.

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(Books for this political season)

Originally posted: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 09:06:13

As we gear up for the Republican convention and a fall campaign that will quite possibly be close and brutal, I've assembled a "top ten" list of books for this political season. These are in no particular order, and they include plenty of books that don't seem obvious. They also exclude some obvious picks, such as Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War. And no, they don't include Joe Trippi's recent book or Extreme Democracy, neither of which I've been able to read yet. But these selected books all have direct bearing on aspects of this year's presidential election.

So here they are:

1. Kaufer and Butler. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design.

Kaufer and Butler's discussion of rhetoric as a design art is quite valuable, especially when applied to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The authors provide a really useful taxonomy for structurally analyzing those debates -- and I find myself applying it to the current candidates' speeches as well. Although Douglas was eventually declared the winner of his debates with Lincoln, Kaufer and Butler successfully argue that he overrelied on tactics, underinvested in a persistent rhetorical strategy, and underestimated the impact of print media on the campaign. Look for parallels in the upcoming debates.

2. Machiavelli. The Discourses.

While Kaufer and Butler provide a close analysis, Machiavelli's analysis of the Roman republic has a much larger sweep. Machiavelli, an ardent republican (small R, of course), discusses in detail what makes a republic work and what kills it. This book has plenty of advice that is pertinent to this political season. President Bush could have benefited from his advice not to trust exiles, for instance. Most interesting to me is Machiavelli's contention that republics almost always make better decisions than princes.

3. Latour. Pandora's Hope.

Latour was heavily influenced by Machiavelli, so it's no surprise that he draws a similar conclusion. In two consecutive chapters in Pandora's Hope, he analyzes the debate between Socrates and Callicles from The Gorgias. Too often, he says, we want to take sides in the debate: Might (Callicles) or Right (Socrates), power or knowledge, earth or heaven. One leads to tyranny, the other leads to the philosopher-kings lauded in Plato's Republic. But even as Socrates and Callicles were hashing out this choice, the democratic Athenians were enacting their own solution: negotiating, haggling, bargaining, and compromising to yield a workable solution. The debate between Might and Right, Latour charges, is at its core antidemocratic -- and foolish in its tunnel vision.

4. Surowiecki. The Wisdom of Crowds.

Latour and Machiavelli agree that crowds make better decisions than princes or kings. So does James Surowiecki, in this book -- which I'm still finishing up. I picked up Surowiecki's book after reading the recommendation on Dan Drezner's site, but my wife also heard a blurb about it on NPR. Like Latour and Machiavelli, Surowiecki argues that "crowds" can often make better decisions than individuals, even if the individuals are not terribly well informed or intelligent; as long as their input is aggregated well, decision-making turns out to be far more accurate even than the experts'.

Now, to my mind, this thesis is severely flawed in that it is explicated by reference to problems whose answers can be retrospectively verified, typically with quantitative measures. Examples include guessing a heifer's weight, the coordinates of a lost submarine, or a political candidate's margin of victory. Surowiecki explicitly disallows the question of deliberation (though he sneaks it in through the back door) -- the focus is on aggregations of guesses, the closing in on an objective solution, not the forging of open-ended political settlements. So the real value of The Wisdom of Crowds this political season, I think, will be in the examination of polls and voter data.

5. Zuboff and Maxmin. The Support Economy.

Voters have changed considerably over the years, of course, and Zuboff and Maxmin suggest that this can be explained partially through a paradigm shift in the economy. Citizens, they say, are looking for more individualized choices. That's true in the market, their primary focus, but they suggest that the shift can also be seen in how citizens have left large political organizations in favor of smaller a la carte movements. Whereas our parents might have been willing to subsume their political will to an organization, letting (for instance) a union leader speak for them, we are more apt to want to represent ourselves. Witness the success of Howard Dean's online fundraising -- and, I would argue, its swift collapse. And notice also the proliferation of blogs representing constituencies that can't be catalogued using the traditional left/right dichotomy. This phenomenon led to bloggers at this year's conventions as well as the rapid fact-checking of older media.

6. Bakhtin - The Dialogic Imagination.

Of course, the explosion of political blogs reminds us of something we too often forget, which is that the Republican and Democratic parties are themselves fragile and contentious coalitions. Discussing what the "typical" Democrat or Republican thinks leads to straw person arguments because the discussion rests on the notion that each party has core principles to which all members subscribe -- typically something you can put on a bumper sticker. Bakhtin's most read book provides a valuable corrective to that notion by reminding us that different dialogues are always going on, combining and coexisting perhaps, but not necessarily synthesizing in the sense that dialectic would have us imagine. What a timely message as both candidates begin their attempts to chip away at the constituencies of the other party.

7. Wertsch. Voices of Collective Remembering.

Bakhtin, of course, labored in obscurity in the Soviet Union -- served often by his ability to hide his un-Soviet theorizing in Marxist language. He invoked the dialectic as a sort of trope for dialogism. That protective reframing was, of course, widespread practice in the Soviet Union. In Voices of Collective Remembering, Wertsch helps us to examine the false histories, the double consciousness, and the clandestine discussions that would occur in the USSR. Furthermore, he suggests that in some cases these harsh conditions actually resulted in more critical examinations of history than here in the US. This book reminds us of what is at stake in telling history, and suggests to me that the current wild diversity in the blogosphere could help us to become more critical consumers of news and history.

8. Jungck. Future Workshops.

As we consider new computer-mediated opportunities to expand our political participation (what some are calling "extreme democracy"), we might recall an older, more time-consuming aproach meant to route around accreted political-bureaucratic structures. Robert Jungck's approach, future workshops, involved recruiting interested citizens for intensive brainstorming, problem solving, and consensus building. The point was to avoid the groupthink and blind allegiance that characterized the Nazi regime as well as the mindset of the early Cold War. The H-bomb horrified Jungck; he believed that if he could get ordinary citizens to invest themselves in decision-making, real change could occur. Future workshops later became integral to the participatory design approach, in which workers strove for political and technological change in their workplaces.

9. Latour. War of the Worlds.

And that brings us to this slim pamphlet, the second entry of Latour's on this list. Based on lectures Latour has given over the last several years, and framed by the events of 9/11, War of the Worlds suggests

that these events should spur a reexamination of how we think about other cultures. For too long, Latour says, we have approached other cultures through either ethnocentrism or multiculturalism -- two sides of the same coin, he argues. Our mistake, he says, is to posit that there are several cultures but only one nature. So we may "respect" other points of view, but deep down we believe there's only one correct one -- ours, since we are expert at apprehending nature as it really is. Nonsense, Latour says. There are just as many natures as cultures: in a later book, he uses the term "natureculture" to drive home the point that any separation is artificial. And if that's so, we should earnestly negotiate settlements with others to agree on a world we can coinhabit. That doesn't mean giving up on our cherished values and beliefs, but it does involve understanding that theirs may be just as cherished and valued.

10. Law. Aircraft Stories.

Finally, along the same lines, we get to a book to which I gave an uncharitable review a while back. I don't regret that review -- but let's give credit where it is due. Politics become instantiated in the material environment, and not just in the obvious ways discussed by so many cultural theorists. In his study of how aircraft were designed and built for the British military, Law demonstrates quite well that a variety of constraints guided this complex work. Among those constraints were the representations of the Soviet Union, its strategies and tactics, its technologies and pilots. These were just as important and concrete as wind shear and other "natural," "objective" constraints. Examining Law's argument here helps us to reexamine the supposed split between politics and technology, politics and nature, politics and work.

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Reading :: The Mangle of Practice

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 19:49:58

The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science

by Andrew Pickering

Some time back, I was busy buying books at Amazon.com. I had gone on a grant-funded spending spree that involved several science and technology studies (STS) books: Latour, Law, Mol, etc. After a few purchases, Amazon began making suggestions, and the foremost suggestion was always Andrew Pickering's The Mangle of Practice.

Not long afterward, I presented some of my research to the School of Information here at UT, and one of the audience members suggested that a problem I had raised had been solved by Pickering in the same book.

Since all of the signs seemed to point in the same direction, I ordered the thing. What I found was, indeed, an important book -- but, I think, more important in its critique of STS and in its general solution than in the specifics. This review will be long because I think it's vital to understand what this important book does.

Let's start with the critique. Although I don't think Pickering explicitly says this, the book is constantly in dialogue with actor-network theory (or "the actor-network," as Pickering calls it, perhaps to justify his habit of calling his theoretical-methodological approach "the mangle"). Pickering repeatedly makes clear that he owes a debt to ANT (see, e.g., footnote 9 on p.7; p.11). He agrees with its critique of traditional STS and, to some extent, its critique of sociology in general. But he finds that it has its own troubles. The mangle is an attempt to deal with those troubles via a performative understanding (achieved through practice) rather than a representational understanding. Latour and other actor-network theorists, he charges, tend to shift between the two modes -- drawing on the performative understanding for much of their analysis, but shifting to a representational (semiotic) mode whenever they are called on it! (See pp.9-20, esp. p.13, footnote 20.) Indeed, Pickering says,

From my point of view, the most attractive feature of the actor-network approach is precisely that its acknowledgement of material agency can help us to escape from the spell of representation. It points to a thoroughgoing shift into the performative idiom. And from this perspective, the appeal to semiotics in the face of [criticism] looks like a kind of retreat, a return to the world of texts and representations that one does not wish to make. (p.13)

Pickering charges in a footnote that in actor-network theory -- particularly in Latour's work -- semiotics "seems invariably to be invoked under pressure" (p.13, footnote 20). He prefers John Law's approach of avoiding semiotics entirely -- and in fact the whole notion of appealing to performance sounds a lot like Law's later work (e.g., Aircraft Stories) as well as Mol's (e.g., The Body Multiple). In fact, Pickering's critique leads him to a difficulty I've discussed elsewhere, which is that ANT doesn't have a good account of cultural-historical development -- or, as Pickering expresses it, temporally emergent agency (p.14). Pickering's counter-account is that scientific practice involves a process of "tuning" or "delicate material positioning" in which material agency emerges through an interaction or dialectic among parts of the material environment -- some of which are human (p.14). More on this in a minute.

The second and related problem with ANT, according to Pickering, is that it implies interchangeability between human and material realms: "Semiotically, as the actor-network insists, there is no difference between human and nonhuman actors" (p.15). But clearly, Pickering argues, there are significant differences among various actors -- partial proof being that humans delegate tasks to nonhumans, but never the other way round. (I disagree with this point and tend to think that the notion of tuning is itself an example -- but let's leave that for now.) Yet

actor-network theory is onto something in its extended symmetry, actually two things. One is that there exist important parallels between human and material agency, concerning both their repetitive quality and their temporal emergence; the other is that a constitutive intertwining exists between material and human agency. (p.15)

Pickering goes on to discuss his own vision, in which fields of machines are "enveloped by human practices" and around which we humans tend to act like machines (p.16). We do indeed have our own agency, our own intentionality with specific plans and goals, but we tune that agency with our material environment. "Disciplined human agency and captured material agency are, as I say, constitutively intertwined; they are interactively stabilized" (p.17). This interactive stabilization is later figured as a "dance of agency" (p.21). (Personally, I don't like dance metaphors very much; I can trace my dislike to Tom Kent's discussion of communication as a "hermeneutic dance" -- apparently "interpretive dance" was already in use.) And this leads us to what Pickering calls the "mangle":

The dance of agency, seen asymmetrically from the human end, thus takes the form of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of response to resistance, which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it.

The practical, goal-oriented and goal-revising dialectic of resistance and accommodation is, as far as I can make out, a general feature of scientific practice. And it is, in the first instance, what I call the mangle of practice, or just the mangle. (pp.24-25)

If you had trouble understanding that explanation, don't worry -- Pickering repeats it in more or less the same level of detail and volume of words throughout the book. n.b.: A mangle, apparently, is an "old-fashioned device ... used to squeeze the water out of the washing" (p.25).

Readers who have made it this far may note that Pickering's "dance of agency" is like Kent's "hermeneutic dance" in more than nomenclature. This "dialectic of resistance and accommodation" sounds very familiar to me, pragmatist in fact, and Pickering makes the pragmatist connection clear in Ch. 6 -- although I think he drops the ball by criticizing Donald Davidson's take on incommensurability without understanding that Davidson, whose work underpins Kent's, wrestled with the same basic problem and came up with the same basic answer. So do the actor-network theorists in much of their work, and Lucy Suchman, and others -- as Pickering acknowledges. So what is the ground-breaking significance of the mangle? I'm really not sure, and I confess that I'm not sure whether this is because I'm being thick or because Pickering is overselling his work. I lean toward the second interpretation, though, especially when Pickering explicitly tries to turn the mangle into a "theory of everything" in the last chapter. My note on p.203 reads: "Gee, the mangle does everything."

Although I'm critical of the totalizing claims of the mangle, I respect the degree to which Pickering has theorized and categorized the "dialectic of resistance and accommodation." All in all, this book is really valuable -- which is why I spent so much time reviewing it, of course -- although that value tends to be more in the critique than in the general solution.

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(New online book: Extreme Democracy)

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:47:26

Those who are interested in politics and technology might be interested in the new online, er, book Extreme Democracy. The book, which is still being put together, has a foreword by former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi -- which should tell you what you need to know about the enthusiasm and attitude in the collection. I'll try to review it soon.

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Reading :: Building Accessible Websites

Originally posted: Fri, 06 Aug 2004 17:25:59

Building Accessible Websites

by Joe Clark

The first book on web accessibility I ever read, Slatin and Rush's Maximum Accessibility, was a life-changing experience. It knocked me out of my comfort zone and made me realize that even my Spartan, text-only, fast-loading pages were a nightmare for people with visual disabilities or repetitive stress injuries. In fact, I'll be using that book in the fall, so I'm sure I'll review it soon.

That lightning bolt moment typically happens only once. So when I read Clark's book, which was recommended by a CWRL staffer, it was with some existing awareness of accessibility challenges. Building Accessible Websites didn't change my life, but it did help me to think about accessibility in different ways. Like Maximum Accessibility, it explains the reasoning behind Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 guidelines and shows how to conform to them. But unlike that book, Building Accessible Websites takes a very critical stance toward the authors of these standards, a stance that I'm sure Clark characterizes as "irreverent" but that I would call "frequently vicious." Clark is quite free in pointing out what he considers to be the stupidities and shortsightedness of the existing guidelines and tools. Although this attitude can be wearing, it does highlight the divergences between principles and execution, and helped me to critically review the results of the accessibility checkers I've been using.

This book would perform a helpful but limited service if its main function were just to criticize standards. But Clark goes farther, showing other ways to ease compliance. The most helpful section for me was on navigation: Clark discusses how web designers can take advantage of different layouts, different HTML tags, and different CSS features to ensure that those with visual or motor disabilities can still navigate one's pages easily. This practical advice was given with clear caveats related to different browsers and their different levels of support for the current HTML and CSS standards. In fact, this realist back-and-forth between HTML standards and actual browser capabilities is something that shows up throughout the book and that makes the book especially valuable.

The book comes with a CD-ROM for those who want to access exercises, examples, or (more to the point) the text in an electronic, screen-readable form. It could have benefited quite a bit from heavy editing -- Clark has the habit of making indefensibly strong statements, then qualifying them in a flurry of metadiscourse, and I get the impression that the book was written during a manic phase -- but it reads quickly. Check it out.

Clarification (2007.01.10): "Manic phase" is an overstatement, as Joe points out in the comments. The writing is exuberant, moves quickly, and ranges far.

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(John Fund on Trippi and Hewitt)

Originally posted: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 03:28:23

A few days ago, I reviewed Convio's white paper on Howard Dean's website. It turns out that Joe Trippi, Dean's onetime campaign manager, has written a book about the campaign's use of the Internet. So has Hugh Hewitt, a radio show host and blogger who is a bit to the right of Dean. I haven't read either book, but the Wall Street Journal's John Fund reviews them both.

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Reading :: The Companion Species Manifesto

Originally posted: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 07:45:04

The Companion Species Manifesto

By Donna Haraway

If you're like me, as you examine the literature of technoscience, sometimes you pause in your office or library carrel and ask yourself questions.

Questions such as "Are there any scholarly treatises in the humanities that include lengthy descriptions of dogs engaging in oral sex?"

And after a moment's thought, you probably concluded: no, I suppose not.

Well, my friend, you would be wrong.

You would be wrong because Donna Haraway, that iconoclast, has authored another manifesto. Her Cyborg Manifesto was a brilliantly iconoclastic piece of work in which Haraway ruthlessly interrogated allies as well as enemies, relentlessly probing Marxists, feminists, and socialists as well as taking shots at capitalists, paternalists, and the Right. That manifesto presented a figure or trope that could be used to describe the mixed, intertwined, inseparable relationships among people, nature, and technology.

Haraway takes up this agenda again in The Companion Species Manifesto, a slim pamphlet published by Prickly Paradigm Press. Here, she turns away from the figure of the cyborg to that of the dog, using this new feature to address the issue of "natureculture" discussed in more depth by Latour in his latest book. The dog, she concludes, is the right figure for this: they aren't "furry children," they're actually companions and partners with their own talents, agendas, and places in the family. Dogs become part of vital natural-cultural ecosystems, no more and no less important than human beings.

Well, now you don't have to read the pamphlet. In fact, I can't recommend it. Like Haraway's last book, it's terrifically self-indulgent in style, pacing, and subject. I tired quickly of the uninspired wordplay, with words like "dogmatic" and phrases like "going to the dogs" repeated too often to seem clever. And like Latour's entry in this series, the argument is edited with a light hand, so it tends to be undisciplined and flabby. If you want the sense of the argument without the flab, take a look at Haraway's chapter in Chasing Technoscience.

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Reading:: The Discourses

Originally posted: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:14:11

The Discourses

By Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli, as I've noted earlier in this blog, is a major inspiration for actor-network theorists. Latour cites him in his earlier works, and Callon, Law, and Rip make him the central figure in their introduction. This has led critics to accuse ANT of double dealing, of claiming that power is distributed while positing Machiavellian princes who actually control the political landscape. That criticism is suspect even when reading The Prince, and dissolves when considering Machiavelli's text on the workings of republics, The Discourses.

The Discourses are, in fact, discourses on how republics work, just as The Prince provides a discourse on how principates work. Machiavelli underpins his discussion of republics with Titus Livy's history of Rome, his ideal republic. By closely reading Livy, Machiavelli develops a set of principles that he argues govern republics; he confirms his principles by testing them with recent and contemporary events. It's evident that Machiavelli relishes this work, partially because he believes republics to be superior to principates. At several places, he argues that even though the populance often chooses leaders by gossip, reputation, and prejudice (p.496), nevertheless the populance makes fewer mistakes than do princes (p.500). The populance is more reliable than are princes (pp. 252-257). Freedom results in better conditions across the board (p.280). Defenses should be distributed rather than centralized, the populance should be armed (p.359). Contrary to popular opinion, Machiavelli evidently believed that one can distribute decision making and power and come up with a better republic.

The key, of course, is that we are talking about republics here. Machiavelli argues early on that republics, aristocracies, and tyrannies tend to follow each other in an inevitable cycle. The Prince gives us "best practices" in a tyranny, while The Discourses gives us "best practices" in a republic. Nevertheless, many of these "best practices" are the same. And, I think, Machiavelli's response to the charge leveled against ANT would be that, yes, there are great men and women who have disproportionate impact on a society -- but their impact is in how they are able to coordinate and persuade others, not in their will alone. Machiavelli talks quite a bit, for instance, about how a good general leads by drill, preparation, and example before the battle so that the army can take care of itself during the battle (pp.491-492).

Let's discuss Machiavelli's investigation for a moment. After reading this book, I was better able to understand why Callon, Law, and Rip praised Machiavelli as an ethnographer (of sorts) who did not let anything get in the way of his investigation. Machiavelli plainly admires Livy, but is free in disagreeing with Livy when the evidence supports a different interpretation. Similarly, he clearly despises particular actions, but still tells us how the actions are accomplished and what "best practices" underpin even them. He generally does not hold with conspiracies, for instance, and says that they almost always fail, but then he carefully discusses how they might succeed (pp. 398-432). By being able to become detached enough to analyze, Machiavelli produces a generally clear-eyed and measured analysis of the principles he's laid out. It's worth examining in methodological terms, and it's worth remembering as we continue to read the ANT work drawing from Machiavelli.

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Reading:: "The Power and Politics of Blogs">

Originally posted: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 09:07:36

The Power and Politics of Blogs

By Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell

Blogs are coming under increased scholarly scrutiny. A collection on blogs and rhetoric, Into the Blogosphere, just went online. Our very own white papers series at the CWRL has a paper on blogs and pedagogy. Of course, Drezner and Farrell's paper is a bit different from these. For one thing, both authors are political science professors; for another, they both produce well-trafficked blogs. These two factors give them a somewhat unique view of the blogosphere as they try to answer the question: "Why do blogs have any influence at all" in politics?

Good question. Drezner and Farrell provide statistics that suggest exactly how few people read blogs for information and opinions (only 4% of online Americans). Yet blogs demonstrably affected media coverage in everything from the Trent Lott scandal to the current scandals involving Sandy Berger and Joseph Wilson. Why? Among other factors, Drezner and Farrell argue that

blogs have the comparative advantage of speedy publication -- they have a first-mover advantage in socially constructing interpretive frames for understanding current events. As a result, political commentators will rely on blogs as sources of interpretive frames for polticial developments. Under a specific set of circumstances -- when elite blogs concentrate their attention on a breaking story or an underreported story -- the agenda-setting power of blogs may create focal points for general interest intermediaries. (pp. 4-5)

The authors go on to offer up a network analysis of the blogosphere -- not the Latourean kind with which I'm familiar, but the kind that takes statistics. I barely passed statistics, so let's skip a bit and home in on a point that's more interesting to me. Specifically, the blogs that are most influential to politics are those that influence the mainstream media -- and those blogs are often written by people who are (socially) networked with the mainstream media. Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, James Taranto, and others come to mind here. And just as politicians have learned to deal with the mainstream media through tactics such as leaks, they are beginning to learn how to limit blogosphere damage by watching for indicators and moving quickly to deploy their own frames of reference in the mainstream media first. Politicians can't get in front of the blogs, but they can beat the blogs to the mainstream media.

All in all, an interesting read.

Caveat: Drezner says this is a "first draft," although the name of the PDF is "blogpaperfinal."

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Reading:: Using the Internet to Raise Funds and Mobilize Supporters

Originally posted: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 07:52:00

Using the Internet to Raise Funds and Mobilize Supporters: Lessons Nonprofits can Learn from the Dean For America Campaign

By Convio

My wife went to a talk on this topic yesterday and sent me the link afterwards. As some of you might remember, Howard Dean did surprisingly well in opinion polls leading up to the Democratic primaries. After a surprise third-place finish in Iowa, though, he made a fatal misstep in front of the TV cameras that led people to doubt his ability to be president.

This white paper, written in December 2003 -- in the halcyon days of the Dean campaign, before that fatal misstep -- discusses why the Dean campaign was so successful in fundraising, grass-roots organizing, and getting the message out. There were various reasons, but this paper points to the role Convio played.

A largely unreported story is how the organization is using Internet software and online marketing tactics to democratize American politics -- enabling "average" people to participate as never before. This approach, based on "viral" marketing or the "ripple effect," allows the campaign to provide supporters with the motivation and online tools to touch the people they know, and on and on for a continuously growing support base. (p.2)

As you might expect, this is partially hype and partially the line taken by the Dean campaign at that point: the theme that average people are locked out of political participation was central to the campaign, and Convio integrated that theme fully into its materials. But there really is a phenomenon at work here, one that Zuboff and Maxmin hinted about in their book , although they didn't do it justice either. Essentially, the Dean campaign was able to form an online community in which people could make personal contacts, share information and opinions, and build support networks. When you get a fundraising letter from your local politician, you may cut her a check because you believe in the cause. When a Dean supporter got an email requesting donations, though, s/he cut a check because s/he had made friends online, had become part of the movement, and had even contributed to the online materials through reports and threaded messages. They had actual investment.

Sort of. To put it another way, the Dean campaign discovered that the key to fundraising was to make sure people could participate in the campaign while sitting in their own chairs at home, drinking Mountain Dew and scratching themselves in their underwear. That is, the allure of the Dean campaign is the same allure that causes people to write book reviews on Amazon or swap tips on customizing their cars. Yes, you believe in your candidate and cause, but you also have a ready-made community you can access anytime, a community to which you can make visible contributions. No wonder the white paper suggests that other nonprofits do what the Dean campaign did:

Dean created an ongoing dialogue with constituents through online surveys, polls and petitions, as well as online forums (Web logs, also known as blogs) to allow constituents to voice their opinions, make suggestions and communicate with other supporters. (p.5)

Dean and Convio did Field of Dreams one better: they understood that if you give them tools, they will build it.

Ironically, the same viral, participatory environment hastened Dean's collapse. Hours after the Iowa concession speech, through the magic of apple's GarageBand, parodies began making their way into people's email boxes and bloggers picked up on the story. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

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Reading:: Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

Originally posted: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:25:00

Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

by David S. Kaufer, Brian S. Butler

I first read Rhetoric and the Arts of Design in fall 1999, and was inspired to do so again after talking with Dave Kaufer at this spring's RSA conference. Particularly after Dave pointed out parallels between it and my own book.

What has always interested me about this book is that it puts together such a careful, ordered model of rhetoric. The book takes the Lincoln-Douglas debates as an extended example, dissecting them in terms of the different components in each speaker's arguments. These arguments, Kaufer and Butler assert, are actually designed, and that's important:

The public would like, collectively and as individuals, to live with sturdier bridges, safer buildings, more reliable computer programs, and easier to read manuals.

Rhetorical design should be no exception.

You can see why I'd be intrigued. Kaufer and Butler likens rhetoric's relationship with literature to graphic design's relationship with the fine arts: in both cases, the former is practical and oriented to action. And in this book, they argue at length for seeing rhetoric as a design art that, once understood in that way, can be examined and taught more systematically. Their system is rooted in blackboard architectures, "a well-known cognitive science paradigm" that is

especially robust for modeling systems, like design, that where a task requires the opportunistic application of many heterogeneous "experts" all looking at the same problem (represented ina common workplace called a "blackboard") but with each expert looking at the problem from a specialized set of competencies and goal priorities. (p.267)

In Kaufer and Butler's scheme, these "experts" are "modules," particular rhetorical strategies mobilized in service of the emerging argument design. The most relevant modules are plans, tactics, and events. Kaufer and Butler tend to anthropomorphize these modules as experts in some places. For instance, this (initially) disconcerting passage appears on p.151:

Douglas' dilemma was skillfully crafted to make Lincoln say something that would force an inconsistency in his Plans. The Plans module, knowing nothing about the rhetorical situation, would have no awareness of the tactical threat against it. Indeed, if the Plans module were able to understand Douglas' questions, it would have no idea how to respond, for it knows only how to tell what is predictably true and false about the social world. It is left to Lincoln's Tactics to deal with the dilemma, and the Tactics module understood there is pressure to answer a question even if the answer causes further problems down the road. Lincoln's answer, because it shares the same structure as plans, throws a wrench into the Plans module. When Lincoln's Plans module next sampled the design structure, it finds a structure like "I do not pledge to the Republican platform at Springfield" in the midst of its public module, seeming to disenable Lincoln's organizational authority. Plans had no idea where this type of structure comes from but it does understand that the structures create personal inconsistencies in the public model, and that the inconsistencies need to be reconciled if the rhetor is to continue to tell predictable truths and falsehoods about the social world. (pp.151-152)

Kaufer and Butler admit to "partial anthropomorphizing" (p.263) like this, but they do it in service to the blackboard architectures approach they're pursuing. And although this sort of anthropomorphizing sounds suspect -- reminding me of Hutchins' critique of cognitive psychology in Cognition in the Wild -- it begins to make a lot of sense if understood analogically. In short, Kaufer and Butler aren't proposing homunculi, they're proposing a heuristic model, and that distinction is vital to understand if the book is going to make sense. Once I got that distinction, Kaufer and Butler's modules turned into powerful categories for examining public debate; I found myself applying them with great success to the current political debates in this current, superheated primary season.

What Kaufer and Butler are after, essentially, is a model of public rhetoric as conscious design. At times I found myself thinking of similarities with Latour's sociotechnical graphs, which also attempt to model statements -- and Freed, Freed, and Romano's Writing Winning Business Proposals, which continues to be one of my favorite heuristic approaches to argumentation. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design takes its place next to these as an enormously useful resource for understanding and modeling public rhetoric. But what struck me as I read this book was that it doesn't address the sorts of things I've tried to address: the materiality of rhetoric, its ad hoc and convergent nature in private and semipublic practice, and particularly its use outside of argumentation and debate. Which is to say that Kaufer and Butler have set themselves a task that is separate from mine. But they've provided tools and an example of modeling that will be enormously useful to me as I proceed.

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(Moving to Drupal)

Originally posted: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:28:46

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I have been disappointed by MovableType in many ways: the fact that SixApart has begun charging for it, the slowness, the limitations that come with using a stripped-down content management system (which is what a blog is). What's been holding me back until now has been the difficulty in migrating. Moving a year's worth of book reviews is not something one does through cutting and pasting.

Drupal provides several ways to migrate, but they all involve hacks, and they present multiple other problems. Finally, I did this:

1. I set my old blog's RSS feed to show all my archives in their entirety.
2. I pulled the feed into Drupal's aggregator.
3. I fired up mysql, figured out what table held the aggregator data and the blog data, and dumped the aggregator table into a SQL file.
4. I then hand-edited the SQL file to move the data into the blog table.
5. Finally, I edited the blog module (written in PHP, I think, with added SQL statements) so the blog would display in reverse chronological order rather than in order of nodes (don't ask).

Drupal people: It shouldn't be that hard to write a decent converter. Come on.

Anyway, this is the third blogger package I've used. (The original blog was on BlogSpot). Hopefully I won't have to migrate again.

Finally, an update. I have ordered a horrendous number of books from Amazon, so expect a flood of reviews soon. Currently I'm working through Kaufer and Butler's Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, to be followed by Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Machiavelli's Discourses.

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Reading :: The Variables of Composition

Originally posted: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 02:45:20

The Variables of Composition: Process and Product in a Business Setting

by Glenn J. Broadhead, Richard C. Freed

When I began my studies at Iowa State, one of the first classes I took was a proposal writing class with Rich Freed. (I got a B.) Freed's book Writing Winning Business Proposals, which I've raised often enough, was in draft form at that point. That book was (and is) full of insights and heuristics, and remains one of the more valuable practical aproaches to argumentation I know. Later, I found out that the book had been preceded by a scholarly monograph Freed had written with his then-office mate Glenn Broadhead. That monograph, of course, was The Variables of Composition.

Reading this monograph nearly twenty years later, I find myself taking a trip down Memory Lane. The Variables of Composition is a product of the mid-1980s interest in process and in close textual analysis. So we get to read a lot about T-units and incremental changes to drafts, all in the context of the "seven variables of composition." Broadhead and Freed allow that their method of exhaustively coding every word in multiple drafts of long documents is somewhat time consuming. No kidding.

What really interested me here wasn't the intricate coding scheme, nor the seven variables, but the discussion of the organization and contexts in which the authors wrote. This is the part that seems the most consequential for me and the most far-reaching in its implications -- and coincidentally the part that later became the foundation of Freed's Writing Winning Business Proposals.

But I was also interested in the computer analysis of texts. Their technique -- transcribe the text into a text file, assign a long code to each line, and run the whole mess through a series of scripts -- is actually still viable, even though a variety of qualitative research packages have been developed to make things easier. We've come a long way, but perhaps not as far as we could have.

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Reading:: The Support Economy

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:55:29

The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin

Shoshana Zuboff's last book was In the Age of the Smart Machine, a really remarkable text that drew on several studies of workplaces to discuss essential shifts in work introduced by the computer. The point, despite the title, was not that "the computer changes everything" -- an overreaching claim that is sometimes made by more wild-eyed technology theorists -- but that automation has wrought some key changes in management and labor. Smart Machine is practically required reading for anyone interested in computers in the workplace.

Then there was a long, long hiatus. Zuboff, by her own account, held off on writing a second book until she could coherently discuss some phenomena that weren't adequately addressed by her first one. Now, she says, she can. Hence The Support Economy, written with her husband James Maxmin.

Zuboff is a professor of business administration at Harvard and Maxmin is a CEO, so it's not surprising that the book is very business-oriented and very concerned with the shape of business in the near future. It's also not surprising that this book is part of a larger effort that involves speaking engagements and consulting. What is surprising is the sheer scope and vision of the book, which attempts to predict and define a fundamentally new stage in capitalism.

Really. Zuboff and Maxmin claim that we are on the cusp of a genuine paradigm shift, a true realignment of thought that takes place at most once a century. The last time this happened was the birth of managerial capitalism at the turn of the 20th century, when Henry Ford realized that you could satisfy consumers by making lots and lots of the same thing, as long as you made it very very cheap. The essential enterprise logic led to the split between ownership and control: ownership was distributed across many shareholders, while control was concentrated tightly in the hands of CEOs. This led to what Zuboff and Maxmin describe as a "solar system" in which the company is at the center of everything; suppliers are in orbits farther out; and at the outermost reaches of the solar system are the customers. Customers might be given lip service, but ultimately they are forced to "contort themselves" and conform to the company's demands because, under this enterprise logic, the only way for the company to get ahead is to give everyone the same experience and to continue reducing the costs associated with that experience.

Zuboff and Maxmin, however, see the beginnings of a "Copernican revolution" that will reorient this solar system, placing the customers at the center. They envision a distributed capitalism in which control will be just as distributed as ownership -- distributed across the customers, that is. Digital technologies are a necessary but not sufficient condition for this Copernican revolution; other conditions include the individuation of consumption (i.e., the desire for unique identities and unique experiences), the consequent rise in relationship value, and the desire for deep support (i.e., stable beneficial relationships among consumers and producers that support these individual experiences). In this support economy, the existing enterprise logic is inoperative; supply chains are dismantled; professional relationship workers called "advocates" assemble temporary "federations" of suppliers for each individual transaction; and nobody gets paid until the customer pays. The last point is especially important because it is what ensures that control is distributed across the system and the customer remains the center of the new "solar system."

That summary doesn't do justice to this complex and well developed vision, and I encourage anyone to read through this book and see what you think. Especially the last three chapters, where the vision is clearly laid out. Bottom line, I had very mixed feelings when reading The Support Economy. On one hand, it does a remarkable job of pulling together and coherently discussing things that others have been discussing piecemeal: the individuation of consumption (Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, some of David Sless' work in Australia); Internet technologies meant to foster civic engagement (Spinuzzi, Bowie, Rodgers, and Li; Zappen); open systems meant to allow people to expand information systems (Spinuzzi and Zachry; Spinuzzi, Tracing Genre through Organizations); complex problem solving (Barbara Mirel's work, including her book); the question of how workers from different organizations form relationships and alliances (Nardi et al.; Engestrom et al.). Or just look at the rise of content management systems and other ways of customizing experiences and distributing control; the proliferation of ATMs; the tendency for large churches to place recordings of sermons online. Something is happening here, something big, and Zuboff and Maxmin give us an explanation of what it might be.

But on the other hand, their description of the support economy sounded like science fiction. In fact, it sounds a lot like a Bruce Sterling novel I read a while back. The underpinnings, the moorings of this new economy, seemed curiously two-dimensional. Maybe that's because, although Zuboff and Maxmin may be describing their ideal new economy, it doesn't sound very attractive to me. Consider the following:

1. The death of privacy. Our privacy, in tatters as it is, would disintegrate completely in this new economy. The thing about being at the outer reaches of the "universe" is that you can hide; in the support economy, everyone wants, needs, and shares your information.
2. The death of small business. Remember the cardinal rule that nobody in the federation of service providers gets paid until the customer releases the payment. Larger companies can get away with this because they have large budgets. Small businesses, which often ask for money up front and mark up the services of others in the supply chain, will get squeezed out. In fact, although the book provides numerous examples of small businesses finding niches that presage the support economy, they are absent from the description of the realized support economy and the illustrative examples of it. That's sort of a big deal in the U.S.
3. Smothering customers with kindness. A key member of the support economy is the "advocate," the person who forms and maintains long-lasting relationships with customers and who coordinates these ad hoc "federations" of suppliers. In one of the unintentionally disturbing passages of the book, Zuboff and Maxmin point to a real-life advocate, a woman who worked for an airline company and who was well known for going above and beyond the call of duty -- and was repeatedly disciplined for it. She would stand in the rain with tickets for customers who were running late; she would page customers with information about changes in their flights; she even visited a customer in the hospital during his cancer treatments. She, Zuboff and Maxmin tell us, is a forerunner of the advocates they envision being a key to the new economy. Am I the only one who finds this to be creepy? To me, this person came off as a bit unhinged and more than a little needy, and I shudder to think of an economy filled with them. Zuboff and Maxmin, by the way, tell us that people often prefer to deal with ATMs and e-commerce rather than human beings because they have been treated poorly by the managerial economy. That seems too pat. My pharmacist is a great guy who always remembers my name and my wife's, makes sure to have our prescriptions ready for us, and even tells me when he'll need to renew the prescription with the doctor. The service is really remarkable, and he's not needy at all. But I would replace him with a vending machine in a second if I could; I'd rather my transactions be quick, impersonal, and entirely controlled by me.
4. The centralization of functions. The federation model means that companies essentially split into modular units that concentrate on what they do best. Such a thing would be unthinkable in the managerial economy because it would require each group to have its own apparatus for accounting, payroll, and other managerial functions. But in the envisioned support economy, companies would outsource those services to other companies. In other words, functions that are now integrated within each enterprise would be consolidated and offered as services to each enterprise. That would squeeze a lot of redundancy and waste out of the system -- but paradoxically, it would mean more centralization rather than decentralization for those sectors. In the wake of Arthur Anderson's recent troubles with Enron, I worry.

I'm sure that Zuboff and Maxmin have answers to all of these objections, but in too many spots the future vision seems like handwaving. And in too many spots, the case against the old economy seems overmade. For instance, at one point, Zuboff and Maxmin make the point that women have been disadvantaged in the managerial economy. That seems pretty obvious. So why follow it up with page after page of statistics? Slimming these down might have shaved 30% off of this behemoth.

Enough. I've spent a lot of time on this review and discussed many objections simply because I think that this book is too important to ignore. You really ought to read it and see what you think. Whether you totally agree with it or not, you'll find a lot that sounds familiar, and you'll get used to that "a-ha" moment happening over and over again.

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