(Reading Roundup: Engestrom on co-configuration work)

Originally posted: Mon, 16 May 2005 19:22:33

Last week I read a few more articles meant to help me understand the relationships between activity theory and actor-network theory. Things have bogged down a bit as I've been trying to digest these many articles as well as well as rereading Latour's Pandora's Hope, one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. I'll have to post supplemental notes on it soon, since the first review really doesn't do it justice. But in any case, let's look at the article in today's reading roundup:

Engestrom, Y. "New forms of learning in co-configuration work."

This isn't really an article -- it's a paper that Engestrom presented at a seminar in 2004. Although it's only ten pages long, it's full of insights.

Engestrom starts with Victor and Boynton's "historical framework for the reintegration of organization, work, and learning" in which they "identify five types of work in the history of industrial production: craft, mass production, process enhancement, mass customization, and co-configuration" (p.1). (I haven't read Victor and Boynton's book, but it sounds of a piece with Zuboff and Maxmin's.) Engestrom's Figure 1 helpfully depicts these types of work, along with descriptions of each. Under co-configuration, the description is "Dialogical configuration knowledge."

The question, then, is one that Engestrom has become increasingly interested in addressing: how do we account for work-based learning in what some gloss as the "new economy" or the "knowledge economy" or "distributed capitalism" -- or if you prefer, the "control society" or the "informatics of domination"? Engestrom is clearly positioning third-generation activity theory for the challenge, and the term "dialogical" signals that he sees Bakhtin's dialogism as continuing to be a key part of adapting this third-generation AT appropriately.

What is co-configuration work? Engestrom quotes Victor and Boynton:

The work of co-configuration involves building and sustaining a fully integrated system that can sense, respond, and adapt to the individual experience of the customer. When a firm does co-configuration work, it creates a product that can learn and adapt, but it also builds an ongoing relationship between each customer-product pair and the company. ... a living, growing network develops between customer, product, and company. (Victor & Boynton 1998, p.195)

So the customer becomes a "real partner" with the producer; producers form "a strategic alliance, supplier network, or other such pattern of partnership" (p.2). And here Engestrom firmly pegs this work to knotworking. (I'm starting to see not just a trend but also a strategy on Engestrom's part, a strategy to reposition developmental work activity as a player in the new economy. I'm also starting to see why Engestrom wants to pick off actor-network theory as a potential rival in this area.) And Engestrom adds:

A precondition of successful co-configuration work is dialogue in which the parties rely on real-time feedback information on their activity. The interpretation, negotiation, and synthesizing of such information between the parties requires new, dialogical and reflective knowledge tools as well as collaboratively constructed functional rules and infrastructures. (p.3)

That reflective work happens across as well as within activities (p.4), meaning that the next generation of expansive learning "puts the horizontal and inter-organizational dimension of learning in the center" (p.4). Yet expansive learning is still taken as "a sequence of learning actions ascending from the initial abstract 'germ cell' to the concrete whole of the system to be mastered" (p.4) -- what Engestrom has often called "ascending from the abstract to the concrete." The notion of a germ cell is a bit questionable in my mind given the apparent reliance on linearity of development (common to dialectic), but I need to do much more thinking on the subject.

In any case,

learning in co-configuration settings is typically distributed over long, discontinuous periods of time. It is accomplished in and between multiple loosely interconnected activity systems and organizations operating in divided local and global terrains and representing different traditions, domains of expertise, and social languages. Learning is crucially dependent on the contribution of the clients or users. Learning is embedded in major transformations, upheavals, innovations, implementations, and movements. It takes place in heterogeneous patchworks and textures of small and large, unnoticeable and spectacular actions, objectifications, trajectories, and trails. (p.5)

Engestrom proposes that "the expansive learning required and generated by co-configuration work" has three features: It is transformative (broadening the shared objects of work with new and adapted tools); horizontal and dialogical ("crossing boundaries and tying knots between activity systems operating in divided multi-organizational terrains" (p.5)); and subterranean (blazing "cognitive trails" that constitute the "invisible, rhizomatic infrastructure of new forms of expansive learning at work" (p.5)). The last one is a bit puzzling, since "rhizomatic infrastructure" seems to be a contradiction in terms, but it's interesting to see how Engestrom is pullling other perspectives into activity theory. Engestrom is a great synthesizer, and sometimes I think his reach exceeds his grasp, but he certainly has developed activity theory quite a bit through this synthesis.

Brilliant stuff here, but then Engestrom has to follow up with a blatantly incorrect critique of actor-network theory: "there is a risk in focusing exclusively on actors. The professionals and their discursive interactions may appear as somewhat omnipotent constructors of their activities and social worlds. From the point of view of activity theory, this would mean that the material grounding and stubborn system dynamics of practical activities are lost or ignored, the resistance of objects is forgotten" (p.6). But this is a description of constructivism, not actor-network theory, and Latour makes a nearly identical argument against constructivism in Pandora's Hope! How often Latour and his colleagues have made this same point, clarifying that "actors" are not just humans or professionals, but also nonhumans or objects that continually resist! How often actor-network theorists argue that we are not omnipotent constructors, not by a long shot! Not to mince words: This is just a sloppy critique, not up to the quality of the rest of the piece.

So let's get back to the rest of the piece. Engestrom argues that rather than following the actors, we should follow the objects of work activity. Professional work is socio-spatially distributed, "forming long chains of interconnected practical and discursive actions" (p.6). The objects of work are "heterogeneous and internally contradictory," enduring, and constantly reproduced (p.6). The object is the key to understanding change and learning, and "expansive learning is above all stepwise explanation of the object" (p.6). so Engestrom suggests that we

(1) follow the objects of co-configuration work in their temporal and socio-spatial trajectories, (2) give the objects a voice by involving the clients or users in dialogues where the object is negotiated, (3) expand the objects by organizing intervention sessions where the producers and clients construct new shared models, concepts and tools to master their objects. (p.7)

All right, although "give the objects a voice" sounds more like giving the participants a voice; I wish Engestrom would be more careful to delineate what he's doing from ANT's related project.

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Learning Challenges in Organic Vegetable Farming

Originally posted: Mon, 16 May 2005 18:13:01

Learning Challenges in Organic Vegetable Farming: An Activity Theoretical Study of On-Farm Practices

by Laura Seppanen

A while back I planned to read a set of dissertations that had come out of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at the University of Helsinki, starting with Mervi Hasu's. Other readings intervened, so I've only now come to the second. Like Hasu's, Seppanen's dissertation is a "wrapper" that contextualizes and pulls together several published single-author and multi-author articles. The text itself is only 74 pages, but it refers to the six other articles, indicating an impressive amount of work.

I confess that I skimmed quickly through the dissertation. Much of it involved simply applying activity theory to the activity of organic farming -- a worthwhile exercise, but not one that generated many new insights into activity theory itself. The insight that "learning in organic vegetable farming is a continuous, dynamic process" (p.5) doesn't seem to be terribly surprising (although I thought it was a bit broad of a claim given the scope of the study).

On the other hand, there were some surprises in the way the activity was visualized. For instance, on p.13, Seppanen provides a diagram that visualizes the levels of activity in organic farming. Levels of activity are typically represented textually or in tables, but here Seppanen depicts the levels of activity, action, and operation in what looks like a hierarchical or "tree" graphic; each element on one level is decomposed into many elements on the next level. In addition, she provides an intermediary step between activity and action: "Practices (groups of actions) such as onion planting." The activity of the particular farm is depicted as "embedded" in the general activity. I think that this diagram is useful for thinking about the relationships among these different elements, but it's also misleading in a few key ways.

First, activities are not simply embedded as depicted here, they interpenetrate other activities simultaneously. This is a key tenet of the "third-generation" activity theory being developed at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, and it's also reflected in Seppanen's discussion of the particular organic farmers she studied -- who entered the activity of organic farming late and brought in tools and practices from other activities.

Second, the intermediary step of practices may or may not make sense, but it's really not orthodox activity theory and Seppanen doesn't provide a discussion or cites to justify this change. Perhaps this notion of practice has been picked up by others at CATDWR, but I don't see much evidence of that. I'm not sure how grounded this intermediary step is in that research, but it seems like trying to leverage a notion that is often discussed in related literatures (e.g., Lave and Wenger).

Third, the portrayal of activities decomposing into practices which in turn decompose into actions, etc. is one that, although more or less consistent with activity theory since Leont'ev, overmodularizes the relationships and underestimates the interconnectedness of these relationships. For instance, the same action (say, planting an onion) could help to move along several activities simultaneously; the same operation (say, lifting an onion sack) could intersect more than one action; and so on. I'm reminded of the family farmers in Iowa who often take up other jobs so that they can support the family farm, which remains unprofitable in itself. Each corn seed that is planted is supposed to eventually bring a monetary yield, but it also allows the farmer to continue participating in the family farm, to continue being a farmer in her community of family farmers, to figuratively put her thumb in Monsanto's eye, to (perhaps) draw farming subsidies, to feel closer to the land. These are not only significances but social-material activities, and the modular relations depicted in this figure don't really do them justice.

As you can tell, the dissertation is thought-provoking. My sense is that it was written just as much for agricultural readers as for activity theorists, so it's not surprising that the dissertation doesn't go to heroic lengths to generate new theory; it is primarily meant to recontextualize organic farming with the help of activity theory. That it tends to do quite well, providing another example of how learning-by-expanding can provide insights into developmental work activity.

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Thomas, Wilde on Marx and Engels)

Originally posted: Thu, 05 May 2005 19:03:29

Following up on my examination of some of the roots of activity theory, I recently read selections from The Cambridge Companion to Marx. In particular, I was interested in the relations among Marx, Engels, dialectic, and contradiction. Just a few notes on these:

Thomas, Paul. "Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now"

Thomas argues that much of what we ascribe to Marx is actually the work of Marx's sometime collaborator and posthumous popularizer, Engels. "In considerable measure Engels invented what has come down to us as Marxism," Thomas charges (p.36), particularly the understanding of Marxist thought as "a coherent system of materialist metaphysics" or a universal system that extended into the natural as well as the social world (p.36). "Augmented by his Dialectics of Nature, Engels' works were given a new lease on life by the Russian Revolution"; they, not Marx's works, underpinned dialectical and historical materialism (p.40). "Engels' doctrines owed little or nothing to Marx, the man he called his mentor, yet this went along with the assertion of a joint identity: Engels referred self-consciously to 'our doctrine'" (p.41). Engels' version of Marxism, Thomas says, "had an improperly scientistic aspect that is at variance with what we can now identify as Marx's approach, method, and subject matter" (p.41; he cites Carver 1981 here). Thomas credits this variance not to "mandacity and perfidy" but rather to Engels' misunderstanding; Engels was "the last of the true believers" (p.42). (Latour would say that Engels translated Marx's work.)

Wilde, Lawrence. "Logic: Dialectic and Contradiction"

Wilde also has uncomplimentary things to say about Engels. In his chapter on dialectic, Wilde describes how Marx adapted Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist method, particularly examining how Hegel and Marx handled the notion of contradiction in opposition to formal logic (p.277). He examines Marx's work sympathetically. Engels not so much. "In writings published after Marx's death in 1883, Engels extended the dialectical method to encompass nature and in doing so transformed dialectic into a set of three 'laws.' This work had nothing to do with Marx's own dialectic, which, as we have seen, was quintessentially a social scientific method. Nevertheless, Engels claimed that Marx had approved his work before he died" -- I wonder how that transpired -- "and the dialectic came to be associated with the confident certainty of positive science" (p.291, and again the author credits Carver 1983). Marx didn't explicitly articulate dialectic, so Engels' Dialectics of Nature fit the bill, presenting a simplified, universalized dialectic that was easy to follow (p.291).

Some Soviets did reread Marx and raise questions about Engels: "it was not until 1923 that the first suggestions came from the Marxist movement that the dialectical methods of Marx and Engels were incompatible" (p.292). But "there was an almost hysterical reaction to these works in the official international Communist movement" and the scholars Lukacs and Korsch were not terribly popular around the Marxist water cooler by the end of the 1920s. (Notice that Lukacs raised his objections about the time that Vygotsky's writings were being assembled for publication. Vygotsky's books, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, have Engels' fingerprints all over them.)

These two readings emphasize the difficulty of critiquing Marx -- but also how easy it is to critique Engels! The problem is that Marx is hard to read and Engels is easy, so we are tempted to either read Marx through Engels (leading to misguided critiques) or scapegoat Engels (leading to a pass for Marx).

>

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Saarelma, Miettinen, Witte on Activity Theory)

Originally posted: Thu, 05 May 2005 09:39:38

Although I have a shelf full of books to read, I've put them on hold for a bit so I can read some really interesting articles on activity theory. Here are three:

Saarelma, Osmo. "Descriptions of Subjective Networks as a Mediator of Developmental Dialogue."

This short article appeared in the Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition in 1993, and is frequently cited as an early example of activity networks -- linked activity systems. The case itself isn't terribly illuminating -- a description of different fields that intersect in health care --- but we can see both the roots of current "third-generation" AT theorizing here and some of the problems that the "third generation" is running into. Insightfully, Saarelma says that "the meaning of the links may be multiple" (p.103) -- the contacts of the different activities may be seen quite differently. So Saarelma's picture of the "idealized network of activity systems" (courtesy Engestrom 1987) is followed by several diagrams depicting the network as it is described by workers in the different fields (pp.107-108). Most of the activities depicted are the same, but the descriptions vary widely, with different links and different types of links. It's a fairly interesting comparison, and Saarelma resists the urge to collapse the perspectives into a unified diagram (although Saarelma does end with the standard AT move of mapping out contradictions). Multiplicity is allowed to remain in the analysis.

In all, this is a nicely methodical way of handling networks. It still assumes that activities = fields and that fields = nodes, but that simplifying assumption seems worthwhile in the interest of exploring these different perceptions. I can see why later AT work still cites it.

Miettinen, Reijo. "Object Construction and Networks in Research Work: The Case of Research on Cellulose-Degrading Enzymes."

Miettinen's work also deals with activity networks, but it comes a few years later, in 1998 (Social Studies of Science 28.3). Miettinen's study is broader too: it examines the work of a research community, which is to say a network of activities formed around a shared research object: cellulose-degrading enzymes. And it covers a much longer time, 1972-1998. Miettinen is apparently trying to position AT as a superior contender to actor-network theory as a way to understand science, technology, and society (STS), as he has done elsewhere.

Unfortunately, he's hampered by the clunky language of AT. Take this sentence: "The concept of object transcends the duality between subject and object" (p.424). Or this one: "An object ... can be either a means or an object in research activity" (p.431). In both cases, Miettinen is using the word "object" in two different ways -- as a "thing" vs. the object(ive) of an activity -- and this confusion obscures the more interesting implications of his work. Miettinen is studying "object formation," which is to say, what a network of activities is working on, how it construes the object of its work, what it is trying to understand and produce.

When Miettinen speaks of networks of activity, he delineates an activity as "an object-oriented, culturally and socially mediated system, with division of labour and rules that regulate interaction between the participating individuals. A work community, or a community of practitioners with a common object, can be viewed as an activity system" (p.424). Scientific research is one such community. And it "depends on other societal activities that provide it with problems, tools and funds, and utilizes its results" (p.424). That is to say, Miettinen is portraying an activity network as a set of activities that provide inputs (problems, tools, funds) or receive outputs (utilizes results). Unlike Saarelma, Miettinen isn't so concerned with multiplicity and seems uninterested in examining closely overlapping activities and boundary work.

It is perhaps for this reason that he levels his critique against ANT: "an analysis of network formation in terms of interests, goals, persuasion and enrolment is not enough. I propose that, if we are to understand the content of collaboration and the motives of participants, we need an analysis of the historically formed objects of participating activity systems, and also of the objects constructed together by them" (p.426). That is to say, Miettinen wants an account of network formation that allows for cultural-historical development, which is not surprising given his AT grounding. But the problem, I think, has to do with AT's handling of activity systems. As Witte argues (see below), the level of activity is an abstraction without clear empirical grounding for determining and circumscribing an activity. ANT gets around the question in a way that is perhaps a bit facile, but nonetheless fairly clear: rather than assuming stable social structures (such as activity systems), assume that actors are defined and locked in through a process of translation in which interests, goals, persuasion, and enrollment play key parts. That is, AT assumes stable social formations that develop over time and have distinct, unitary identities; ANT assumes that actants are all made on the fly and have to be persuaded to hang together, not just to each other, but in themselves. (See my upcoming TCQ piece for more on this.)

With this in mind, Miettinen's critique is somewhat tautological. Miettinen gets around the problem by assuming that networks are composed of persistent activities linked through culturally and historically developing relationships that are primarily characterizable as inputs and outputs (i.e., border work that does not touch the basic structure of the component activity systems). When he says that interests, etc. are not enough, actor-network theorists might turn around and say: persistent social structures such as activity systems are not enough, and that's why we have pursued a relationist sociology in which the pursuit of interests becomes a central explanation in the first place!

Miettinen goes further as he gets into the analysis, arguing that the concept of "interest" in ANT begs the question of where goals and interests come from in the first place. Miettinen, of course, points back to the developmental view: "an explanation of the motives for participating in a network presupposes an analysis of the history and dilemmas associated with the participating activity systems" (p.446). The ANT account lacks the stability required of a developmental account. "The motive for participating in the construction of an object can be understood in reference to the participating activity system's attempts to expand, redirect or transform its historically formed basic activity. The emerging new motive can be characterized as an attempt to solve dilemmas and problems in its basic activity, or to find a new possibility for extending that activity" (pp.445-446). That is, activities are transformed and develop new motives by working out contradictions. "These new motives can be characterized as transformative interests, because they are related to the transformation of a collective activity system. Consequently, they cannot be analyzed in terms of the goals of individuals" (p.446). Here, Miettinen is assuming and ascribing the view of extreme asymmetry that he has previously accused ANT of holding; this is based on his understanding of Machiavelli (p.453). ANT scholars have typically argued for symmetry, in which humans, nonhumans, and collectives of these can be understood as actants; interests are not necessarily related to individuals, but can be applied and have been applied to organizations, scallops, variable-reluctance motors, and various other actants (and not just as "a rhetorical resource used by human actors in their controversies," as Miettinen says (p.453)!).

But the symmetrical, interest-based analysis provided by ANT simply doesn't allow the developmental perspective that interests Miettinen. "These networks are important arenas of learning, boundary-crossing and the creation of new ideas and artifacts. They are also a central mechanism for connecting research work to other societal activities -- an unavoidable issue in studying the relationship of science to society" (p.451). And:

To understand the motives of the participants of these innovation networks, one needs to analyze each participating activity system and its relation to the object to be constructed in the network. Participation in the construction can be understood as an attempt to extend, redirect or transform the participants' historically formed activity systems. Interests may be characterized as an attempt to solve emerging problems and contradictions of the activity, to extend that activity. (p.451)

Whereas ANT is totally unconcerned with learning and cognition, AT is quite concerned with both. So Miettinen takes it as a given that any proper account of science take into account learning, cognition, development, etc.

I've concentrated mostly on Miettinen's critique of ANT, which frustrates me because Miettinen is obviously smart and well read in the ANT literature, but doesn't quite seem to get what the project is about, and therefore ends up criticizing ANT in AT's terms. Of course ANT will not compare well with AT when AT serves as its own exemplar! But Miettinen's analysis itself is quite sharp and displays some of the real advantages of an AT approach. Miettinen persuasively argues that the scientific work in the case passes through several models of artifacts: from "where-to" to "why" to "where-to," in Wartofsky's terms. Whatever the merits of the ANT critique, the AT work is interesting and valuable.

Witte, Stephen. "Research in Activity: An Analysis of Speed Bumps as Mediational Means"

Several days ago, I described Bracewell & Witte's article critiquing activity theory. Witte recently passed away, so some of the work he produced in his last days has been edited and published; this piece, like the Bracewell & Witte piece, appears in Written Communication, of which he was co-editor. Based on an invited lecture, this piece lays out Witte's sympathetic critique of activity theory in broad terms. Witte was one of the most gifted thinkers in rhetoric, and he has some very interesting things to say here; I wish we were able to have a conversation about this piece, which is both perceptive and sometimes a little dismissive.

Witte frames his claims as tentative:

The analysis I present in this article should be seen as preliminary and exploratory; it is not (yet) an argument but rather an argument in the making. However, should an argument eventually be developed from this preliminary analysis, it would include at least these three tentative claims:(a) literacy cannot be understood by focusing on literacy directly because that approach inevitably turns literacy into its own explanation; (b) literacy cannot be understood as activity because that procedure yields a fusion of part and whole such that activity becomes its own explanation; and (c) the unit-of-analysis problems that underlie accounts that explain literacy in terms of literacy or which explain literacy as activity will require the development of new units of analysis for studying literacy from an activity theoretic point of view. (p.128)

This seems like false modesty, since Witte then tears into AT with a vengeance. Or at least he strongly critiques its usefulness for questions of literacy, and intends to locate "some of the weaknesses in the thinking of those whose uses of activity theory resemble the antics of a kitten that has just discovered that a ball of twine can be a plaything" (p.130). (I can't help but feel implicated.)

As in the Bracewell and Witte piece, he argues that a disjuncture between Vygotskian-Lurian and Leontev'an strands of thought has muddied the waters considerably. In particular, Leont'ev's contribution of the activity system, further developed by Engestrom, really problematized things because activity systems are nearly impossible to apply as anything other than a theoretical concept. The activity system as unit of analysis has both focus and boundary problems, especially in research design. Witte asserts that the criteria for focus and boundary questions seem to come from outside the model rather than within it (p.140).

The boundary problem is particularly vexing at the level of actions "because in the context of overlapping activities, one can find no principled way of aligning a given action unambiguously with a given activity" (p.141). But the problem exists at all levels. Take for instance -- and this is my example here, not Witte's -- a customer service representative at a telephone company who is being shadowed by a new employee. When she uses her tools and talks to customers, is she training the employee or serving customers? And since she knows that the new employee may be asked about his training experience, is she thinking about a third activity involving self-promotion? If she speeds up her pace near the end of her shift, is it because she is thinking about her home activities and trying to get out the door in time? Each operation and action could potentially be multivalent, and there's no methodologically sound way to firmly separate them.

The unit-of-analysis problem is similarly vexing:

If every human engagement with the social or material world is part of an activity or an activity system(and all such engagements may well be), as a researcher I amleft with two equally unsatisfactory research strategies, given the two writers? theoretical models. Either I can offer a description of some activity around which I?ve drawn some arbitrary boundaries, knowing that my description is not in and of itself an explanation, or I can explain activity in terms of activity, in which case the object of analysis becomes indistinguishable from the analysis itself. What is missing in Engeström?s and Leont?ev?s theories of activity is, in effect, the specification of a unit or units of analysis that would allow me to account for or to explain activity in terms of something other than itself. Tautology is not just a problem in logic and in formal definition; it is also a problem when one tries to transform activity theory into a program of research. (p.141)

Activity, he charges, cannot function as a unit of analysis; it can be known only through observed effects or consequences, like gravity (p.142).

At this point, Witte goes into the example of the speed bump. This is familiar territory if you've read your Latour, who talks about the "sleeping policeman" as mediator. The examination is a good one, but didn't shed a lot of new light for me. But at the end of this discussion, he does get to the point that "any given activity never exists independently of other activities" and says that Edwin Hutchins' and Christina Haas'

analyses of mediational tools, technologies, and / or artifacts similarly discover a range of activities and activity systems informing, circulating about, and penetrating the mediational means they explore. This interdependence among activities may?if I can be so bold to reach beyond the boundaries of my own data and theirs?provide the objective basis for what might be termed the continuity of mental life and the continuity of social life. (p.154)

Yes, yes. Witte wants to press forward into the realm of networks -- we could even say activity networks -- and Witte certainly wants to explore them in terms of Vygotskian mediation (which he finds to be a much more congenial way to talk about activity than levels). He does not cite any of the "third generation" work on activity networks in particular, though I assume he was familiar with the relevant literature. My take is that he simply rejected it because he saw too much of the input/output school (see Miettinen above) and not enough consideration of the dialogic, multivalent nature of these linkages. Witte's main concern was literacy, and I find his work here to be congenial with Callon's discussions of texts as circulators as well as Star's discussions of texts as boundary objects.

Reading :: After the Breakup

Originally posted: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 09:46:04

After the Breakup : U.S. Telecommunications in a More Competitive Era

by Robert W. Crandall

It's difficult to emphasize exactly how important the breakup of AT&T was for the US telecommunications industry. The US had something that turns out to be quite rare -- a private telecommunications infrastructure -- and AT&T held a virtual monopoly on it until the Department of Justice brought an antitrust suit and AT&T was forced to settle it with a consent decree in 1982. This book, written in 1991, asks: how has the telecommunications system fared in the intervening years?

Robert Crandall, to his credit, doesn't try to give us a simple answer. The telephone equipment and services sector has turned into a set of increasingly competitive markets (p.1); phone bills are more detailed and complex (p.1); regulators have overlapping jurisdictions (p.2). And the peculiar economy of telecommunications, in which every subscriber represents a separate service, means that the economy is not intuitive: "the cost of connecting any subscriber to a switch increases with distance to the switch," so economies of density do not translate into economies of scale (p.3). The latter point contributes to the fact that it's tremendously expensive to service rural customers. If you're running a virtual monopoly (80% of the local exchange market going into the 1960s - p.8), you can subsidize the rural customers from profits drawn from urban areas (p.13) -- as well as from long distance profits, which subsidized all local service anyway. But once the market is vertically fragmented (p.41), this arrangement becomes harder to sustain.

According to Crandall, the telecommunications market's rates were distorted in five ways between 1934-1960:

1) Long distance rates were kept artificially high to subsidize local service.

2) Long distance rates were based on distance -- but distance was not a good measure of actual cost; call density was.

3) Local service had a higher operating cost in rural areas than in urban ones, but the rates were the opposite: Rural customers paid less for their expensive service.

4) Business customers were charged more, although the real cost of the service was the same as for residential customers.

5) Local service was offered as a flat rate, meaning that heavy users paid as much as light users. (p.23)

This uneasy settlement, which had much to do with keeping politicians and their constituents happy, became more difficult to sustain once new technologies were brought into play. Microwave transmission, for instance, has a relatively low economy of scale; satellite and fiber-optic transmissions also allow low economies of scale (p.4). But it was microwave transmission that really changed things. Imagine being AT&T: you've spent an enormous amount of money on your "long lines," your miles and miles of copper wire strung along wooden poles, connecting different parts of the country. If anyone wants to compete, they have to be willing to duplicate your network, an extremely expensive proposition not just to set up but to maintain. Then suddenly MCI comes along with two microwave towers, placed in two different cities on one of your most profitable routes, and sets up an instant long distance connection -- no poles, no lines, no maintenance of miles of copper, no tree pruning or line splicing!

In any case, various changes led the FCC to reprice long-distance and local service in the 1970s: it proposed phasing out "non-traffic-sensitive cost recovery from access charges on long-distance carriers by instituting fixed monthly subscriber-line charges (SLCs) on business and residential customers" (p.31). The full plan was frustrated politically, but the SLCs are right there on your phone bill today.

Another really intriguing development is that private networks are being set up with increasing frequency. Private branch exchanges (PBXes), private microwave transmissions, and local fiber-optic networks are proliferating, as well as cellular telephone networks (p.52, 75). And all have to deal with what I've called the first articulation of universal service, in which different networks must be linked to form a single subscriber universe.

And then there's regulation:

The liberalization of telephone services and equipment markets and the AT&T divestiture have placed enormous pressures on regulators, telephone companies, and labor. The entire telephone rate structure, a reflection of generations of political decisionmaking, is being radically revamped by regulators who are now much more attuned to market forces. Carriers must respond to the changes in regulation and to the rapid growth in competition. These responses, in turn, affect the efficiency of the entire telephone network. (p.106)

Liberalization doesn't mean deregulation, except for terminal equipment (phones, faxes). Currently, the telecommunications industry is regulated by three regulatory bodies with overlapping jurisdictions: the FCC, state public utility commissions, and the US district court for the District of Columbia (a result of a foolish decision Justice Greene made while dealing with the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment) (pp. 12-13). The problem, Crandall worries, is that when you combine heavy regulation and liberalization of entry (competition), you often get cartels: "Regulators are likely to be forced into the role of cartel managers, particularly if one or one carriers find themselves unable to compete. New entrants or even incumbents may use the regulatory process to prevent their rivals from cutting rates, claiming that such rate reductions are 'predatory'" (p.155).

All in all, Crandall's 1991 book pointed out several pressures and disjunctures originating before the breakup and building afterwards. It's instructive to read this book in conjunction with one of the many post-1996 books discussing how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 handled these issues. >

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Situated Learning

Originally posted: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 19:14:24

Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation

by Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger

This short (138pp, including index) monograph packs in a lot about how people learn. I first read it -- oh, probably in grad school, when I noticed it was being cited quite a bit by activity theorists, distributed cognitionists, and people interested in the social aspects of computing. Rereading it has helped me to see the huge impact it had on learning theory -- but also the problems of applying it uncritically.

The idea of the book is to examine learning in all its contexts as a sort of cognitive apprenticeship in which people have to participate in an activity, first peripherally (on the edges, with minor responsibilities), then in ways that increase complexity and responsibility. This participation must be legitimate, that is, sanctioned and validated so that the activity is properly continued. When all three of these are put together, you get "legitimate peripheral participation." That's not as easy as it might sound. Schooling allows learning that is legitimate and peripheral, but not participation. Apprentice meat cutters, in Marshall's 1972 study, engage in learning that is legitimate and participation, but not peripheral -- they start with simple tasks such as wrapping, but are physically separated from the journeymen who actually cut the meat in the back room.

LPP takes its inspiration from traditional apprenticeship, of course, and Lave and Wegner discuss historical apprenticeship at some length (Ch.3). They criticize functionalist and Marxist understandings of apprenticeship, which both treat it "as a historically significant object" that "connotes both outmoded production and obsolete education (p.62). In particular, they take issue with Engestrom's association of apprenticeship with craft production, "emphasizing the individual or small-group nature of production, the use of simple tools and tacit knowledge, a division of labor based on individual adaptation, and the prevalence of traditional protective codes" (p.63). In contrast, Lave and Wenger "emphasize the diversity of historical forms, cultural traditions, and modes of production in which apprenticeship is found" (p.63).

Apprenticeship, they argue, allows people to enter a community of practice. And when conditions "place newcomers in deeply adversarial relations with masters, bosses, or managers; in exhausting overinvolvement with work; or in involuntary servitude rather than participation," these conditions "distort, partially or completely, the prospects for learning in practice." In these cases, "communities of practice may well develop interstitially and informally" (p.64).

After reviewing five cases of apprenticeship -- including, interestingly, participation in Alcoholics Anonymous -- Lave and Wenger spell out other characteristics of LPP. Apprentices often "move backward through the production process" -- beginning their apprenticeship by finishing details on a product, then progressively mastering the previous steps in reverse order (p.96). They develop a "circumferential" perspective by taking part in "partial, peripheral, apparently trivial activities" such as "running errands, delivering messages, or accompanying others," and in doing so, they absorb "a first approximation to an armature of the structure of the community of practice" (p.96). (Formal learning curricula, in contrast, often evolve from a perscriptive understanding of participation (p.97).) In participating in an activity, apprentices also participate in a heritage:

A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive support necessary for making sense of its heritage. Thus, participation in the cultural practice in which any knowledge exists is an epistemological principle of learning. The social structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning (i.e., for legitimate peripheral participation). (p.98)

Heritage is a big theme here, and the idea of apprentices slowly absorbing and becoming part of a community of practice is interesting because it reflects what I've been calling the weaving perspective, in which activities develop slowly and more or less linearly over long periods of time. It doesn't do a good job of examining spliced work in the so-called new economy, and it also doesn't do a good job of exploring the resistances, tensions, and contradictions involved in absorbing new members -- something for which Lave and Wegner have been criticized from a variety of perspectives, including activity theory.

In terms of technology, "understanding the technology of practice is more than learning to use tools; it is a way to connect with the history of the practice and to participate more directly in its cultural life" (p.101).

Lave and Wegner close the book with a discussion of a major contradiction in LPP: between the continuity of the practice over generations vs. the displacement as old-timers are replaced with new participants (p.114). They propose this contradiction in addition to the fundamental contradiction of commodity (use-value vs. production-value) that activity theorists such as Engestrom often cite (p.114). "The continuity-displacement contradiction is present during apprenticeship .... The different ways in which old-timers and newcomers establish and maintain identities conflict and generate competing viewpoints on the practice and its development" (p.115). So there is resistance, there is conflict and contradiction, even though critics of LPP have tended to downplay these and portray it as an unproblematic absorption of new members.

In the conclusion, Lave and Wegner explain that LPP "obtains its meaning ... in its multiple, theoretically generative interconnections with persons, activities, knowing, and world" (p.121). When they say "interconnections," evidently they mean dialectic, since they use the term elsewhere in this monograph. "Legitimate peripheral participation has led us to emphasize the sustained character of developmental cycles of communities of practice, the gradual process of fashioning relations of identity as a full practitioner, and the enduring strains inherent in the continuity-displacement contradiction. This longer and broader conception of what it means to learn, implied by the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, comes closer to embracing the rich significance of learning in human experience" (p.121).

All in all, this is a really thought-provoking book. But I find myself thinking, as I implied earlier, about the sort of work that seems not to lend itself to this model. In particular, I don't see much place for historically new activities; for innovations; for multiplicity (this is perhaps because of Lave and Wegner's reliance on dialectic); in a word, for splicing. I would have difficulty applying LPP, for instance, to a new or substantially changed profession brought about by new legislation, as is often true in the telecommunications industry, or to hybrid organizations brought about by mergers. Looking at Lave and Wegner's examples, I note that meat cutting and tailoring have both undergone radical changes in work organization and automation over the last few decades, changes that were in full swing by the time the book was written, and Lave and Wegner do little to address those changes. Is LPP applicable to distributed capitalism? I'm sure it is, but not as a general explanatory principle.

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Aramis or the Love of Technology (supplemental notes)

Originally posted: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:37:20

Aramis or the Love of Technology

by Bruno Latour

I reviewed Aramis earlier, but since I have just finished rereading it along with my grad students, the time seems opportune for some follow-up observations.

First, I think Aramis can be read as a treatise on research methodology: much of it is about how qualitative researchers conduct their research, how they represent their participants, and what it means to "do research." Latour's comparison of traditional and relational sociology in particular cuts to some really interesting divisions with broad methodological repercussions.

Second -- and this is in conjunction with some other readings I've been doing recently -- Latour's text has to be carefully parsed when we read his declarations about power relationships and alliances. One of my grad students declared halfway through the book that Latour was really talking about manipulation: the many actors attempt to enact their programs by convincing others to do their will. But I tend to think that manipulation entails negotiations in which one party makes all the compromises -- and I don't think that happens in Aramis. All parties find themselves compromising, yet in the end, none of them compromise enough to save the project. And this leads us to the often-leveled accusation that Latour and other actor-network theorists are Machiavellian. There is some basis to these accusations, so it's surprising to find Latour's characters accusing each other of being Machiavellian (as if it were a bad thing) and Latour's protagonist dismissing such charges. Parse the book carefully, though, and you'll see that Latour is denouncing the caricature of Machiavelli, the amoral opportunist and manipulator; his methodology is still grounded in the historical Machiavelli, the pragmatic observer who constantly examines, tests, and forges alliances through open and covert negotiations. Latour gives us what I take to be sly, uncited references to that Machiavelli. For instance, Latour's protagonist says:

"That's exactly why military types have learned to draw up strategies and hierarchies, why they've invented uniforms and epaulets, why they've created the maps, why Gribeauval perfected the general staff, why military orchestras were signed up quite purposefully -- precisely so that a strategy could become possible no matter what." (p.177)

The topic is one that Machiavelli takes up in The Art of War.

Other points also surface on my third reading of this book. For instance, I have noted that Latour ends up blaming everyone -- even himself -- for Aramis' "death." So how do we interpret this passage from halfway through the book? "An accusation that's so watered down it blames the whole wide world is even more futile than one that picks a scapegoat" (p.198). I suppose Latour is contrasting the blame of everyone involved in the project (the network) with the blame of culture or society.

On the next page, Latour contrasts classical and relativist (relationist) sociology. Classical sociology presumes a social structure that functions as an explanatory device; it "can comment on what the patients say because it possesses metalanguage, while they have only language" (p.199). But his relationist sociology doesn't use this explanatory device: it "has no fixed reference frames, and consequently no metalanguage. It expects the actors to understand what they are and what it is" (p.200). Again, this relativist sociology should sound familiar. Here's a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince to drive things home:

But since my intention is to say something that will prove of practical use to the inquirer, I have thought it proper to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined. Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves toward self-destruction rather than self-preservation. (p.50)

Is it a coincidence that the social structure described in Latour's quote sounds a lot like an activity system? Or that activity systems have been notoriously hard to nail down, as some have recently discussed?

In the end, I was glad to take another crack at this book. It doesn't read as well as a novel, but it does represent an audacious piece of work.

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Dune

Originally posted: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 09:12:25

Dune

by Frank Herbert

In class today, we were finishing up our discussion of Aramis and my grad students were complaining that although it was an interesting study, it was not an especially good novel. Yes, I agreed, it had the form of a novel but was still ensconced in the genre of ethnography, making it an uncomfortable and at times incoherent hybrid -- sort of like certain theme albums. Shortly after this exchange, one grad student pointed out that the glossary at the end, which defined a seemingly endless series of acronyms and participants, seemed a lot like the similarly endless back matter in Frank Herbert's Dune.

Oh yes, I agreed. How interesting that you should mention that. I'm reading that book right now.

He lifted his eyebrows and said something like: "Dune and Rush? We're getting some really scary insights into your personality." Ouch.

Why am I reading Dune? The truth is that my wife and I were cleaning out the garage the other day, opened a box, and discovered all of these books from our childhood. Correction: most were hers; I had cleaned house a while back and gotten rid of most of my collections. Now I have only a handful of books. But I just couldn't get rid of Dune.

That's not because it's a good book, although it is. It's because this book, this very copy, represented an entire youth spent reading countless paperbacks countless times. My older brother gave me Dune for Christmas one year, and I must have been quite young. Maybe fifth grade. I know that I read Tony Rothman's The World is Round in fifth or sixth grade -- I remember paging through it in Mr. Long's class -- and I'm quite sure I had read Dune before that. A few hundred pages' worth of assassinations, breeding programs, slavery, and apocalyptic imagery is probably not the ideal gift for a fifth-grader, but it did set the bar fairly high for science fiction; I remember being distinctly underwhelmed by Foundation in comparison.

How did it set the bar high? Like other disturbingly intricate works of fiction, Dune managed to describe an entire reality in detail. Herbert clearly had far more stories in his head than made it onto the page. So each section of each chapter starts with a quote from a book or religious text from this universe; characters made constant references to other happenings and to historical events outside the present story; and a string of appendices gave the most intrepid reader still more insight. Like Lord of the Rings or The Matrix, it created a universe with enough hinted detail that it could become the nexus of what Jason Craft calls a fiction network: an ever expanding set of stories told by other authors and fans. You can imagine.

Dune also has an interesting take on the future. It avoids becoming outdated by keeping the technology to a minimum (the plot device here is that humans had destroyed and banned all thinking machines centuries earlier, after being enslaved by them) and by using feudalism to underpin the social structure. The one thing that really dates the book is that the fanatical Fremen (who at one point are identified as descendants of Sunni) stun onlookers by being willing to sacrifice their own lives. In one scene, a battle-hardened observer sees a Fremen pilot a stolen airship right into a troop carrier, killing hundreds of enemy soldiers along with himself. "What kind of men are these?" he wonders. After 9/11, the act seems unremarkable.

Dune is Machiavellian in the crude sense: amoral rulers and elaborate treacheries abound, but we detect none of the enthusiasm for republican government that the historical Machiavelli showed. Indeed, the message seems to be that the strong were meant to rule over the weak, and the strongest of all is also one who has the divine right of rule. It is also sociological in the crude sense, postulating a complex set of social structures and a broader fate of the species that ultimately controls them. In this sense, it suffers in comparison with Aramis which (written by a sociologist) is much more sophisticated and much more Machiavellian: Aramis has the same republican urge and the same determination to follow the actors that old Machiavelli had. Dune, in contrast, is essentially the sociological landscape seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy. When we first meet Paul Atriedes, he's fourteen, and already amazingly intelligent, a proficient fighter, a man who has total control over his emotions and actions -- the kind of person a young male reader of science fiction would want to be -- and his world is tailor made for him, full of people who are alternately trying to kill him and amazed by his abilities and wisdom.

It's not surprising, then, that Paul Atriedes doesn't seem to change much as he matures into an eighteen-year-old emperor of the galaxy. Character development in Dune is about the same as in Stephen R. Donaldson's earlier works, which is to say, imperceptible. The characters all start out grim and with "terrible purpose," and Herbert tries to steadily ramp up this grim terrible-purposedness. When Paul Atriedes' mother is frightened near the end by his very grim grimness and his terribly terrible purpose, we have a hard time seeing why: Herbert stacks the adjectives like cordwood, but we don't see a whole lot of concrete change beyond that.

Unfortunately, Herbert's later work in this universe suffers from the same malaise as Donaldson's. The dramatic thread tapered off in the books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, then falls off a cliff in works such as God Emperor of Dune, which I charitably like to believe was ghostwritten by Herbert's son Brian. Brian Herbert has subsequently written an enormous number of Dune-themed books, none of which I have read.

Dune is a guilty pleasure, and reading through it this last time, I wonder if its style and detail helped to prepare me for my current reading diet, which mostly consists of ethnographies constructed from similarly detailed fragments. It also reminds me of the many, many hours I spent reading similar fiction. I thought of Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, which led me to Ringworld and Childhood's End; Inherit the Stars, with its sublimely creepy cover art and wooden prose; The Starchild Trilogy, whose exploding collars were appropriated by The Running Man; and so many others. Childhood's end indeed.

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Engestrom and Engestrom, Engestrom, & Karkkainen on the third generation of activity theory)

Originally posted: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:42:44

My reading of Between School and Work yielded several cites that seemed directly relevant to my recent interests: (1) the relationship between dialogism and activity theory and (2) work fragmentation. So I looked up a couple of the cites, both by Yrjo Engestrom and coauthors. They provided some insight into how Engestrom and other activity theorists have been handling these questions, but raised other questions.

Engestrom, Yrjo. "Developmental work research as educational research."

This is apparently an introductory essay for a special issue of Nordisk Pedagogik on developmental work research, which is the project that Engestrom and his collaborators have been developing for some time. This project has its roots in Engestrom's Learning by Expanding.

As the name implies, developmental work research uses a developmental perspective of work, even in increasingly fragmented work. The way to follow developments, Engestrom says, is by examining the contradictions or double binds that build within and between activity systems.

The concept of activity took the paradigm a huge step forward in that it turned the focus on complex interrelations between the individual subject and his or her community. In the Soviet Union, the societal activity systems studied concretely by activity theorists were largely limited to play and learning among children, and contradictions in activity remained an extremely touchy issue. (p.132).

But in the 1970s, researchers in the West picked up the concept and began applying it to different domains, such as work (p.132). Engestrom credits Ilyenkov with conceptualizing "the idea of internal contradictions as the driving force of change and development in activity systems" (p.133), but modestly avoids discussing his own considerable role in elaborating and popularizing the idea. This work led to the "third generation" of activity theory, which has begun to examine connections and contradictions between activity systems as well as within them. "The third generation of activity theory needs to develop conceptual tools in order to understand dialogue, multiple perspectives, and networks of interacting activity systems" (p.133). Engestrom discusses some of the work on developing each of these, including James Wertsch's and Ritva Engestrom's separate work on dialogue; Holland & Reeves' work on perspective; and the question of activity networks, which has been developed by Saarelma as well as Engestrom and his collaborators. A "discussion" between "Bruno Latour's" actor-network theory and activity theory "has been initiated" and Engestrom points to boundary-crossing as another "tool." In this third generation of activity theory, "the basic model is expanded to include minimally two interacting activities" (p.133).

Now Engestrom gets to the question of changes in work -- "radical changes," over "the last ten years," he says (p.133), changes that Engestrom examines in terms of flexibility and collectivity (p.134). He sees activity theory and developmental work research as playing a special role in the range of research approaches and theories brought to bear on work (p.134).

What special role?

Developmental work research is a multidisciplinary approach. However, it is also a distinctively educational approach. The educational quality of the approach is threefold. For the first, developmental work research studies processes of learning and development as its central objects. Secondly, the methodology of developmental work research is based on educational interventions. And thirdly, developmental work research also studies education as work and educational institutions as workplaces. (p.134)

Yes, developmental work research is educational in nature, hence the enduring focus on development. The notion of contradictions, as Engestrom hinted earlier, takes a major role here as the source of change and development; an activity system must continue to change so that it can loosen the double binds and reconcile the contradictions that dog it. A "third generation" analysis recognizes the contradictions set up across multiple activity systems, some of which become visible as the result of "boundary crossing" -- such as the boundary crossing individuals undergo as they move from school to work, or from job to job.

On the other hand, some organizations such as state monopolies "have multiple mechanisms to muffle and buffer the contradictions so that they do not take the form of mounting experienced disturbances in everyday work," "postponing a double bind inside the workplace while the situation may be approaching a crisis when observed from the outside" (p.136).

Engestrom goes on to describe a "change laboratory," which sounds very much like a participatory design activity to me (p.138).

So what do we get out of this overview? First, we get the general program Engestrom and his collaborators have set for a "third generation" of activity theory. Second, we get an idea of how changes in work, including what I'm loosely calling work fragmentation, have precipitated this third generation and developmental work research in particular. Third, we get the centrality of education and the importance of contradictions within that framework.

Remember that Latour looks askance at the notion of contradictions. I'll have to review these sections. But I doubt that it's a coincidence that Latour also avoids a developmental, educational perspective in his work. Latour's language of change is translations, which emphasize contingencies; Engestrom's language of change is contradictions, which emphasize orderly tensions and progressive development.

Engestrom, Yrjo, Engestrom, Ritva, and Karkkainen, Merja. "Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in expert cognition: Learning and problem solving in complex work activities."

This article is a bit more directly related to the themes of Between School and Work. It tackles the question of expertise. What is it? Engestrom et al. charge that expertise has been traditionally defined vertically, in terms of the stages a person passes as she becomes more expert in a specific domain: an expert chessmaster, an expert ditch digger, etc. But the authors argue that there is also a horizontal dimension to expertise:

In their work, experts operate in and move between multiple parallel activity contexts. These multiple contexts demand and afford different, complementary but also conflicting cognitive tools, rules, and patterns of social interaction. The criteria of expert knowledge and skill are different in the various contexts. Experts face the challenge of negotiating and combining ingredients from different contexts to achieve hybrid solutions. The vertical master-novice relationship, and with it, in some cases, the professional monopoly on expertise, is problematized as demands for dialogical problem solving increase. (p.319)

Yes, yes. I agree here: activity theory has had to evolve to take into account the increasing interpenetration of work activities. As Engestrom said in the previous article, this increasing interpenetration yields increasing potential for contradictions among the activities, and at the same time these activities are too massive and too interconnected with other activities to simply synthesize. Those separate "contexts" and separate dialogues aren't going to go away. So Engestrom et al. are positioning activity theory/developmental work research to address work multidimensionally.

To do so, they address "two central features of this newly emerging landscape": polycontextuality and boundary crossing (pp. 319-320). Polycontextuality involves working on tasks from different activities or frames of work simultaneously. And on the level of activity -- here's the authors' contribution -- polycontextuality "means that experts are engaged not only in multiple simultaneous tasks and task-specific participation frameworks within one and the same activity. They are also increasingly involved in multiple communities of practice" (p.320).

Polycontextuality leads to boundary crossing. When two different activities are linked together -- such as two organizations that must collaborate to provide a service, or two workplaces that have emerged separately but have been acquired by the same company and must now work together -- "the two contexts" in linked activities must "be iteratively connected." The tools, relationships, social languages, and so forth may be very different; the linked activities need "boundary crossers" who can mediate between them (p.321). The authors refer to Suchman's 1994 article in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, which I should read soon, along with a string of other cites which suggest that boundary crossing is becoming the hallmark of knowledge work.

The authors then turn to Susan Leigh Star's valuable work with boundary objects, which they characterize as "a useful attempt at identifying mediating artifacts that may help overcome 'groupthink' and fragmentation" (p.322). I don't think this was Star's original intent, but this is the potential Engestrom et al. see for it. (Latour talks about boundary objects approvingly as well, though I don't think he would agree with this characterization.)

The authors then go into three case studies that illustrate various aspects of boundary crossing. These are valuable, but not as valuable as the position-staking that goes on earlier in the chapter, which is really quite interesting. I come back to the point that the authors are trying to adapt activity theory in the face of increasing work interpenetration and fragmentation. The question I keep coming back to is the question of whether a developmental perspective buys us much in the face of increasingly interpenetrated work. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the level of activity is a very abstract thing, extrapolated and inferred rather than observed, and I am not sure how many abstract activity systems can be inferred with fidelity once we reach a certain threshold of interpenetration.

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Originally posted: Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:55:32

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

by Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer

This book is referenced frequently in the STS literature, particularly in Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and Haraway's Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse. After reading it (mostly on the plane back from San Francisco), I can see why. Shapin and Schaeffer have produced a painstaking examination of the battle between Hobbes and Boyle to create a discourse and a social contract that would legitimize scientific knowledge.

Not to give away the ending of the book, but here's the last sentence: "Hobbes was right" (p. 344). What was he right about? Shapin and Shaffer argue -- well, forcefully, and with considerable evidence -- that knowledge is the product of human actions, just as much as the state is. And this is the key disagreement between Hobbes and Boyle -- although the surface agreement was about whether Boyle could actually produce a vacuum with his air-pump. Boyle insisted that he was actually evacuating air from the chamber, while Hobbes argued (improbably, from our view) that the chamber was actually filled with an undetectable supple fluid or ether to which the chamber's glass was permeable.

The question of whether the chamber is evacuated is an empirical one -- and this book does much to examine to what extent an empirical question is constructed through social relations. Boyle, the authors argue, developed not just a research program but a language game with rules that practitioners had to follow if their experiments were to be accepted as scientific knowledge (p.22). This language game shifted agency to nature and required multiple witnesses (p.25). Importantly, it also used three technologies: material (in Boyle's case, the air-pump); literary (the textual conventions used to disseminate the results to those who could not be direct witnesses); and social (the conventions for dealing with each other and for considering truth-claims) (p.25). In Boyle's new program, questions that could not be settled experimentally ceased to be legitimate questions (p.45). "The language-game that Boyle was teaching the experimental philosopher to play rested upon implicit acts of boundary-drawing" (p.51), and those acts involved managing dissensus by focusing on findings rathr than persons -- no ad hominem attacks allowed (p.72). In this new settlement, a new set of social relationships were enacted through such boundaries, bringing a sort of order to experimental philosophy (p.80).

But Hobbes didn't buy it. This settlement, he contended, would lead to disorder; the boundaries, in Hobbes' measure, were not effective. Hobbes was interested in and worried about the question of political power. His worry about men's divided loyalty between church and state led him to theorize the Leviathan, a monist, materialist philosophy that collapsed hierarchical divisions between matter and spirit (p.98). Under this philosophy, there could be no private judgment in religious matters -- that led to too much fragmentation of authority (p.103). At the same time, there could and must be individual beliefs. The sovereign (as represented by the church) could exercise control over behavior but not belief (p.104).

And here's the nub of the disagreement. Boyle's knowledge was founded in consensus of freely, independently developed belief. Hobbes separated belief and profession: profession could be controlled, and had to be if one were to form a social order (p.105). So "for Hobbes, the rejection of vacuum was the elimination of a space within which dissention could take place" (p.109).

In Chapter 5, the authors discuss how this confrontation plays out. Boyle, they say, had constructed a particular language game, and did many things to continue and reinforce that game: he praised those who played it well (p.163), gave instructions in how to play it properly (p.165), and recast Hobbes' objections as a poorly played instantiation of the game (p.174). His reply to Hobbes was an opportunity to reinforce that game further (p.176).

Hobbes wasn't entirely defenseless in this argument, though. He countered by displaying the intense labor required to make a fact under Boyle's regime: the replication of equipment, observations, and witnesses (p.225). "In principle, Hobbes' argument is correct," the authors tell us. "Establishing matters of fact did require immense amounts of labor." And they assert further that "a fact is a constitutively social category: it is an item of public knowledge" (p.225). Replication was Boyle's way to produce it: "Replication is the set of technologies which transforms what counts as belief into what counts as knowledge" (p.225). Hobbes found this stance to be dangerous: The real fight was over whether politics had to depend on assent, which translated into the question of what separated common belief and reason. "Hobbes alleged that if the experimental form of life were adopted, this difference would be lost, and the result would be political disaster" (p.331).

Political disaster? You be the judge. But as the authors point out, Hobbes had a point: in his questioning of Boyle's air-pump, he established the difference between Hobbes' public (everyone) and Boyle's public (qualified witnesses: professionals) (pp.333-334), and he questioned the separation of nature and politics. And after leading the experimental life for centuries, we're beginning to reconsider Hobbes' interpretation.

Blogged with Flock

(My own personal paradigm shift, part 3)

Originally posted: Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:55:16

I mentioned a while back that I had settled on Excel for my project management work. In case you've been wondering how this works, I've attached a sample (cleaned up) example. By default, it sorts by date completed, then by date due, then by start date; I typically hide the completed tasks. You can also sort by project. Color denotes project in the CWRL and Research tabs. In the Tenure tab, I show all tasks and use green to denote completed tasks. That's not consistent, but it's not like I share it with others.

I've been using this system for about a year now, and I'm continually surprised by how well it works. One important feature is that I can print out the entire workbook, which I keep in a folder that goes everywhere I go. I can then make additions, add sticky notes for longer notes, and set hard deadlines using my PDA's calendar. (I had originally planned to manage the spreadsheet on my PDA, but the screen is just too small for viewing the sweep of the activity -- which is of course what the spreadsheet does best.)

Typically, I also add notes pointing to other documents: "In NV" means that I've entered related text into Notational Velocity. "In steering committee minutes 2005.03.01" means that more information is in the committee minutes, which are posted on the CWRL's Drupal installation. The key isn't to bundle everything in one place, but to know where to get your information when you need it while making it accessible to others as well. >

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Bazerman & Little, Tardy, Miller, Bracewell & Witte)

Originally posted: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 02:35:37

I'm going through a backlog of PDFs that I've downloaded over the last several months, trying to catch up on my article readings in my spare time. The following articles had some interesting things to say about genre and/or mediated activity.

Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, and Teri Chavkin. "The Production of Information for Genred Activity Spaces"

Bazerman et al. are interested in genre as linking and regulating activities as well as shaping the texts that are used in such activities. As they say near the beginning of the article,

genre provides a middle space for approaching production and understanding of text -- between the immediate local knowledge of specific conditions of production and reception and an abstract world of symbols existing apart from any use and apart from any organized relation to readers. Texts mediate human activity at a distance and help enlist and align people to larger social institutions and practices, and text genres provide means of recognizing social relations, obligations, and interactions embodied within communications. Because they can create joint attention and alignment, genres are one of the key mechanisms that people have used to create and to maintain larger forms of social organization. But genres also shape the substantive material that is represented within the bounded space of the text -- the meanings, information, and knowledge. (p.456)

To explore this understanding further, they examine environmental impact statements (EIS) and how a perceived social need for information creates the genre. "This genre creates a space that prompts the production of certain kinds of information to populate that space and creates a place for the display of that information" (p.457). Genre, they add, "crystallizes motives and compulsions to create a local habitation for the information to be lodged and recognized within" (p.460). Of course, the EIS doesn't function alone; it is situated within a system of genres and the system collectively helps to bind together the activity -- or, frequently, the set of activities. The EIS, for instance, is an information-gathering genre that provides one way to link together different entities. And that brings us to our next article:

Christine M. Tardy - "A Genre System View of the Funding of Academic Research."

Here, the genre is that of grant proposals, "a high-stakes genre" that "does not exist in isolation but as part of a complex reticulation of genres that interact to form a genre system" (p.7). Like Bazerman et al., Tardy emphasizes the function of this genre as part of a larger set of genres, and one that in turn comprises several genres. "Knowledge of a genre system may differ in important ways from knowledge of an isolated genre" (p.7).

Tardy also takes a stab at discussing genres as linkages across activities -- although she uses "social groupings" and "discourse communities" (p.10, 23), which really don't do as satisfactory a job of describing or emphasizing the directedness of activity. At any rate, she sees "grant proposals as social actions situated within multiple social groupings" (p.10) and reminds us that "Not only do genres operate within multiple communities, but they often coexist with other genres that operate within different communities" (p.10). The genres of proposal writing connect different activities (p.12). And although the PI works through the grant-writing process, he or she interacts with several individuals at local and national levels" (p.23).

Overall, this article was really useful for understanding grant writing, particularly for the NSF.

Carolyn Miller - "Expertise and agency: Transformations of ethos in human-computer interaction."

Miller's article is a very different animal. Miller applies the classic rhetorical term "ethos" to two models of human-computer interaction, and in doing so, teases out differences between two sorts of ethos: Aristotelian and Ciceronian. First a general definition: Ethos is "an accustomed place, haunt, or abode; the sense of variation by location would thus seem more fundamental than any normative virtue" (p.198). Miller wants to use ethos descriptively to explore community and communal character. So, interestingly, she applies it to two modes of human-computer interaction: "the rhetoric of machine control and the rhetoric of computational subjectivity"; her examples are

expert systems and intelligent agents, two technologies in which the role of ethos is foregrounded. Both expert systems and intelligent agents blur the boundaries between human and machine, creating 'hybrids' (in Latour's term) or 'cyborgs' (in Haraway's). Such human-computer hybrids transfer to the computer some aspects of human character and require some adaptation by a human interactant, creating a 'system,' or dwelling place, where both must abide. The question whether ethos belongs to the computational system or to the humans who design, use, and value it becomes a strategic ambiguity. (p.199)

"The two cases," she argues, "illustrate a fundamental instability in the concept of ethos itself, as in the first case it allies itself strongly with logos and in the second with pathos" (p.199).

In Aristotelian rhetoric, ethos stands in for expertise; it is essentially rational. Expert systems appropriate this Aristotelian ethos, incorporating and demonstrating expertise (p.204).

Intelligent agents incorporate a Ciceronian ethos: "Ethos needs its association with pathos, more in some situations than in others, just as it needs its association with logos, in order that goodwill not be dismissed as foolish and trustworthiness as naive." And "Intelligent agents, then, have adopted an ethos of sympathy, an ethos strongly allied for pathos, and it is for this reason that we can understand their rhetoric as a form of 'cyborg discourse'" (p.211).

In sum,

The ethos of rational reliability and the ethos of sympathy are not only rhetorical strategies but also rhetorical modes of being, each with its own limitations. Each in its own way attempts to create a version of the closed world in which we might dwell by modeling a character who belongs there -- a set of judgments, a way of feeling, a mode of interacton. (p.213)

Smart! This seems to be a valuable and interesting way to apply the classical rhetorical tradition to computer-mediated activity. The last article, on the other hand, examines and critiques how more recent developments have been applied to workplace writing.

Robert J. Bracewell and Stephen P. Witte. "Tasks, ensembles, and activity: Linkages between text producton and situation of use in the workplace."

Bracewell and Witte launch a sharp critique of activity theory. They announce that they want to draw on constructs such as activity systems, ensemble activities, literacy events, and work events to elaborate "a more integrated and potentially generative framework to account for workplace literacy and its functions in professional settings" (p.512). They start with Vygotsky's "construct of practical, objective human activity," but they charge that "current elaborations of the activity triangle ... are insufficient to account adequately, from a psychological perspective, for much practical human activity in contemporary workplaces" (p.512).

To explore this problem, they begin by discussing activity theory. The expansion from sign-mediated actions to activity systems, they point out, yields a greater range of applicability. And the addition of contradiction to the activity system yields a dimension of dynamism. But the tradeoff is an "increased gap between the abstract characterization of these components and the appropriate application of these components to the material, situated, and time-bound specifics of activity" (p.516). In particular, they think the application of the activity triangle to all three levels of activity is problematic -- a "quick fix." (p.518). This quick fix ignores that there are two major differences between activity on one hand and action and operation on the other hand. (1) operations and actions entail "physiological and neurophysiological dimensions" that make them objective in one sense. (2) "Goals and conditions are manifested by people in material/symbolic representations which can be identified by others (including researchers) and are thus objective" in another sense. But activity is not objective in either sense; activity is inferred and thus runs the risk of being subjective. "Activity is, we think, perhaps better understood as something like a theoretical construct rather than as a phenomenological and, hence, objective category" (p.521).

In other words, activity is like gravity or intelligence -- theoretical abstractions that have accrued explanatory power and whose "existence is posited or hypothesized not because of their objective natures but because of their objective effects." "Activity might thus be viewed as a theoretical construct that functions to explain or account for in some way a collocation of human behaviors and behavior outcomes centered around some set of performance parameters." They claim that this distinction maps well to Vygotsky's differentiation of parts in a theory: general explanatory principle and objects of study (p.522).

(This seems similar to Latour's critique of Marxist theories in general and AT in particular as having to invent sociocultural structures to explain human activity.)

The authors propose a resolution:

First, the activity/motive construct should be viewed as one that elaborates the general explanatory principle of practical human activity which serves to define the domain of psychological theory. Second, the action/goal and operation/condition constructs should be viewed as objects of study which serve to realize the explanatory principle in the complexity and detail required to account for the range and specificity of practical human activity. (p.522)

So they dicuss two new constructs: the task and the ensemble. "We define the task as the set of goals and actions that implement these goals, which are developed in order to achieve a solution to a complex problem within a specific work context. And "We define the work ensemble as the smallest group of people who collectively use sign systems in conjunction with other tools and technologies to realize an appropriate solution to a complex problem within a specific work context" (p.528).

But then they get to their inspirations, which include Vygotsky and activity theory, but also task analysis (Newell and Simon), distributed cognition (Hutchins), and studies of scientific knowledge (Bijker), among others. What a mishmash. Sure, they all deal with "the interplay of the individual, material, and cultural" (p.529), but they conceive of these in rather different ways that are not easily reconciled. That's fine, I've done similar things -- but the fact that they don't mark or discuss the differences is surprising given the rigorous theoretical critique they executed earlier in the paper.

Back to these constructs:

The work ensemble has at least two advantages for investigating workplace literacy. One is objectivity. Ensembles form, evolve, and disband around activities that their purpose (and subsidiary tasks) mandate, organize, and terminate. Rather than being defined by the researcher, the ensemble is defined by the participants, their coordinate actions, and the mediational means used to represent the content with which the ensemble deals. The actions and representations are particularly identifiable through the discourse of the participants and actions that attend the discourse. Such discourse and actions specify both the tasks of the ensemble and the means of doing these tasks. (p.547).

And "A second and related advantage is the degree of theoretical saturation ... that can be achieved" (p.547).

Overall: the criticism of the activity system/level of activity scores, but I'm not convinced by the alternative constructs, nor by the objectivity test that they use. The interviews, observations, etc. are much easier to nail down at the operation and action levels, yes, but activity-level analysis relies on the same empirical data. Why do these stories give us adequate information about motives and goals but not objects?

>

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Mind and Nature

Originally posted: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 11:52:05

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

by Gregory Bateson

Shortly after I posted my lengthy review of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Kristie Fleckenstein told me she appreciated it because she had had trouble sustaining interest in the book. Whenever she read it, she would think of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature, which seemed to go over similar ground with greater clarity.

I had read Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind some time ago (before the blog), so I had some idea what she was talking about. And I had noticed a few Bateson cites here and there in Deleuze and Guattari's book. But I really wasn't prepared for reading Mind and Nature. Because I quickly realized that A Thousand Plateaus is in great part a response to and elaboration of this book.

So much of it is there: a discussion of bilateral vs. radial symmetry, the notion of assemblages ("aggregates"), the comparison of rhythms to music and the linking with stochastic processes, the illustration of the crab, the question of segmenting, the comparison of map and territory, the illustration of the tick, the distinction of number and quantity, and of course the double bind. But where Deleuze and Guattari are deliberately opaque, Bateson is deliberately and surprisingly clear. Every one of these topics takes a paragraph, a page, or (in the case of stochastic processes) a chapter, whereas in Deleuze and Guattari the same topics take at least a chapter to elaborate. And with Bateson, there's no question about how metaphorical the application is supposed to be or what his overall project looks like.

I fervently wish I had read this book before A Thousand Plateaus. And if you haven't read either one, you really should read this one first -- although I still recommend A Thousand Plateaus for some interesting elaborations and articulations that Bateson doesn't get to go into.

Bateson dictated this book while bedridden at the end of his life. (He managed to finish this book and start another one before he passed away.) And I detect here a strong sense of wanting to get it all down before he passed, a desire to communicate his experience and understanding before it was lost forever. Bateson didn't believe in an afterlife and takes a few potshots at organized religion here (which is not uncommon for people on their deathbeds). But mostly he stays focused on articulating this understanding.

So what is this understanding? Bateson is looking for a monist understanding in which mind and nature could be talked about in the same terms. And he is quite open-minded about what constitutes mind, sounding more philosophical and less restrictive than distributed cognitionists while being clearer and more principled than Deleuze & Guattari or actor-network theorists. "A mind," he says, "is an aggregate of interacting parts or components"; "the interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference"; "mental processes require collateral energy"; "mental processes require circular (or more complex) chains of determination"; "in mental processes, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions) of events which proceeded them"; "the description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena" (p.102). Bateson goes on to methodically elaborate each criterion, using them to build an argument that places "mind" in the interactions of a material assemblage rather than bracketing it off in someone's head. Bateson did this fairly well in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, but he makes a more methodical case here.

And he combines this argument with one on stochastic processes. In short, he says that evolutionary and somatic change, though of different types, are both stochastic; they can only change by incorporating randomness to inject productive difference. "The task of this chapter," he says in Chapter 6, "is to show how these two stochastic systems, working at different levels of logical typing, fit together into a single ongoing biosphere that could not endure if either somatic or genetic change were fundamentally different from what it is" (p.165). In fact, he strongly criticizes the invoking of mind as an explanatory principle for either change. In the rest of the chapter, he develops a really insightful critique of evolution as it is commonly understood, linked to a critique of mind as it is commonly understood.

What I like so much about Bateson is that he makes his points with incredible parsimony, strongly organized and capable elaboration, and interesting and understandable examples. The examples are drawn from biology, mathematics, literature, human perceptual studies, and a variety of other areas.

On the other hand, I think Bateson really overreaches at a couple of points. His Socratic dialogue with his daughter at the end of the book really brings this out, as when he describes the "world of mental processes" (and remember, this means any assemblage that meets the six criteria above) as a "slowly self-healing tautology" (p.228). Or when he summarizes this book as an attempt by one lemming to tell the others "I told you so" as they rush into the sea (p.231). You see, thinking that one lemming could actually stop this race to the sea would be arrogant.

All in all, though, a great book. >

Blogged with Flock