Reading :: The New Work Order

Originally posted: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:10:04

The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism

by James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, Colin Lankshear

I've seen many cites to this book, and at least a couple of colleagues have recommended it to me. And in fact it was useful, though not as useful as I had hoped. Gee et al. have attempted an analysis of the language of "fast capitalism," both in the popular literature and in workplace settings. What results is often a stinging indictment of "fast capitalism," comparing its claims to its implementations. However, as in much of the literature I've seen criticizing capitalism (or other large-scale phenomena), there's a tendency to compress the phenomenon into a single mode so that it can be nailed down, characterized, and criticized. And -- as I'll point out in a moment -- the authors sometimes use easy equivalencies to get the job done, equivalencies that are not especially convincing or generalizable. Nevertheless, the book provides some real insights into how "fast capitalism" is narrated and characterized.

Before we begin, let's draw a distinction. The authors specifically use the term "fast capitalism" (or "new capitalism") to describe an enterprise-oriented view that emphasizes an enterprise's adaptability, dynamism, flattened hierarchy, and continual reskilling/learning; the term applies to an entire enterprise, from manufacturing to service to management. I've been writing recently about "knowledge economy" work, which is specifically focused on what Reich calls symbolic-analytic work. Knowledge workers can be embedded in a "fast capitalism" enterprise, but they don't have to be; and a "fast capitalism" enterprise necessarily includes workers other than knowledge workers. If we lose the distinction, we commit a category error, and we lose a lot of analytic power.

With that caveat, let's start with some of the really valuable work in this book. In the first couple of chapters, the authors examine the "fast capitalism" literature on learning and knowledge. They argue that

The bottom line is this: the focus of education, we argue, should be on social practices and their connections across various social and cultural sites and institutions. Learners should be viewed as lifelong trajectories through these sites and institutions, as stories with multiple twists and turns. What we say about their beginnings should be shaped by what we intend to say about their middles and ends, and vice versa. As their stories are rapidly and radically changing, we need to change our stories about skills, learning, and knowledge. Our focus, as well, should be on multiple learning sites and their rich and complex interconnections. We will see below and in other chapters that this focus on social practices brings us squarely up against the growing concern in the new capitalism with sociotechnical practices -- that is, with the design of technology and social relations within the workplace to facilitate productivity and commitment, sometimes in highly 'indoctrinating' ways. (p.6)

With this stake in the ground, the authors situate themselves within a generally Vygotskian tradition in which learning is seen as more or less continuous social-cultural-historical development of individuals (even as they acknowledge that the new capitalism coopts the Vygotskian notion of the zone of proximal development, p.62). In contrast, the new capitalism tends toward a systems view, and the authors specifically finger distributed cognition (in which learning is seen as the function of a system, not the trajectory of an individual, and in which individuality is seen as emergent) as a result of the new capitalism -- or at least as its enabler (p.59).

But at the same time, they claim that Discourses (roughly, social languages) create people: "The Discourse of law school creates kinds of people who (overtly or tacitly) define themselves as different from -- often better than -- other kinds of people" (p.11). Those subscribing to a systems view, such as distributed cognitionists and especially actor-network theorists, would make such a claim, but would actually mean it in an ontological sense: in the systems view, actants are constantly emerging, being defined by their emergent relations with other actants. These authors, on the other hand, seem to be working with a weaker version that takes as its bedrock the notion that "people are people," and sees Discourse as providing a classificatory function rather than an ontological one. And consequently they don't quite reach the conclusion that Deleuze does when he talks about the control society being populated by "dividuals" rather than individuals, multiplicity rather than singularity. They conclude that

learning works best -- it is most enculturating, but (alas) also more indoctrinating -- when it is done inside the social practices of a Discourse. Such 'deep' learning always involves the formation of new identities and thus possible conflicts with old ones. We will see in this book that new-capitalist businesses want such 'deep' learning, with its concomitant identity and value formations. (p.15)

With this basis, the authors forge on to Chapter 2, which is devoted to the theory and practice of fast capitalism. Throughout this chapter, their working assumption is that fast capitalist texts do not describe current changes, but a vision of the future order, a world view. The fast capitalist texts describe and map out such changes, and the authors thus limit their critical engagement to examining the morality and ethics of this world view. And I think this is an error: I would have liked to see more critical engagement with -- or at least acknowledgement of -- the actual economic and organizational changes that have often precipitated these texts. Assuming that these texts were the cause of the phenomena they attempt to describe leads the authors to equate description with prescription in these texts. For instance, the authors indict the fast capitalist texts for their treatment of networks:

The fast capitalist world is one that celebrates temporary and fast-changing networks, whether of co-workers or different businesses. The networks come together for a given project and disperse into other configurations as products, projects, and services change in the hypercompetitive and fast-paced environment of the new capitalism. The fast capitalist literature is silent about the implications of these ephemeral networks for stable communities of people with shared histories and long-term commitments (other than to the vision and core values of the organization). (p.40)

But those networks are actual economic and organizational phenomena, described not just by the fast capitalist texts but also by Manuel Castells, whom the authors cite approvingly. Castells certainly does talk about the implications of these networks in his critically acclaimed and widely cited book, but he doesn't provide any solutions to their shortcomings either. (Neither do the authors of this book, as we'll see in a moment.) Perhaps the difference is tone, and the authors would be more accepting of fast capitalist texts if only those texts would stop making silk purses out of sows' ears!

It's worth noting that the authors correctly link new economy texts to postmodernist theory, although I'm not convinced that the correct term is "coopting" (p.68). But at this point, the authors begin to make some easy equivalencies that, on closer examination, look like square pegs forced into round holes. On p.69, for instance, they claim that Bakhtin's discussion of carnival (which they label "postmodernist," a questionable designation) is paralleled closely by Tom Peters' fast capitalist text using the metaphor of carnival. The parallel is quite incomplete: not only do the authors acknowledge that the fast capitalist author had probably never heard of Bakhtin, the two conceptions of carnival differ in marked ways. (Most obviously, Bakhtin's version is centrifugal, while Peters' is not.) So two authors who had never heard of each other used the same metaphor to describe two very different phenomena -- not a very strong foundation to build the case that fast capitalist texts have coopted postmodernist language!

This problem of equivalency, unfortunately, makes its way into the two empirical studies as well. In Chapter 4, the authors study a training session for manufacturing workers at a "fast capitalist" organization, noting that the (untrained) teacher followed an IRE pattern (inquiry, response, evaluation; see p.97), and making the case that these training sessions served to reinscribe the hierarchy that they were ostensibly supposed to flatten. The claim is convincing, but the authors attempt to indict fast capitalist corporate training in general by pointing out that the curriculum came partially from larger organizations -- again, too big a claim to be supported by the evidence (p.101). Similarly, in Chapter 6, the authors attempt to portray a cooperative in Nicuragua as a peripheral "fast capitalist" company -- despite the fact that the cooperative didn't meet some of the criteria for such a company (e.g., a highly educated workforce) and marginally met others (such as "vision"). They provide no evidence that the cooperative conceived of itself along "fast capitalist" lines or organized itself in alignment with the "fast capitalist" literature (highly doubtful since the members were marginally literate). They do not engage at all with the question of work organization or the crosslinking of disciplines. Yet they confidently declare that "we can construe them as a 'textbook case' of fast capitalist methods" (p.145).

It's almost ironic, then, that the authors urgently tell us that

a sociocultural approach to literacy takes the view that language must always be understood in its social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. We are arguing here that in one of these contexts, crucial in our 'new times,' is the context of the new work order in all its ramifications. Language, indeed our very humanity, is in danger of losing meaning if we do not carefully reflect on this context and its attempts to make us into new kinds of people: for example, people who are 'smart' because they buy the highest 'quality' brushes -- but do not care about, or even see, the legacies of their greed and ignorance writ large on the world. (pp.150-151).

By those criteria, humanity has already lost its humanity -- indeed, has rarely if ever had it!

If you want to engage in the authors' solution, by the way, why don't you nip over to Starbucks and get some fair trade coffee (p.150). Yes, that's pretty much the solution they propose.

Well. Despite the irritation I felt at some portions of the book, it was valuable, particularly the first couple of chapters. I can see why it has been cited so broadly, and I intend to do so myself. >

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Reading :: The Essential Drucker

Originally posted: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:34:31
The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management
by Peter F. Drucker
"When Karl Marx was beginning work on Das Kapital in the 1850s," this book begins, "the phenomenon of management was unknown" (p.3). Almost offhandedly, Drucker -- originally writing this passage in his 1988 book The New Realities -- declares Marx's work to be out of date, unable to deal with an institution -- management -- that "has transformed the social and economic fabric of the world's developed countries" (p.3; cf. p.295) and that "has become the new social function" (p.8, his emphasis). Throughout this book, which is a sort of "greatest hits" of Drucker's work from 1954-1999, this theme of management as transformative social institution is developed. And despite some level of disjointedness and a paucity of citations, probably due to the distilled nature of the text, Drucker manages to be relatively coherent and consistent throughout the book.
So what is the book about? Drucker attempts to lay out a vision of what management entails, casting it as a "liberal art" that is less concerned with profits and margins than it is with social impacts, problems, and responsibilities. The vision of management here is broad and developed over a very long career, so it's hard to summarize here, but I'll try.
First, whereas people such as Malone and Beniger claim that the information society came about due to a radical drop in the cost of disseminating information, Drucker argues that "management has been the main agent in this transformation. Management explains why, for the first time in human history, we can employ large numbers of knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work" (p.4). Management "has converted knowledge ... into the true capital of any economy" (p.5). And this enormous transformation has taken place over the last century or so:

Not many business leaders could have predicted this development back in 1870, when large enterprises were first beginning to take shape. The reason was not so much lack of foresight as lack of precedent. At that time, the only large permanent organization around was the army. Not surprisingly, therefore, its command-and-control structure became the model for the men who were putting together transcontinental railroads, steel mills, modern banks, and department stores. The command model, with a very few at the top giving orders and a great many at the bottom obeying them, remained the norm for nearly one hundred years. But it was never as static as its longevity might suggest. On the contrary, it began to change almost at once, as specialized knowledge of all sorts poured into enterprise. (p.5)

As large agencies began immediately to transform themselves through the incorporation of specialized knowledge, Drucker argues, management had to coordinate this transformation, "to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant" (p.10); to establish "common goals and shared values" (p.11); to "enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change" because "every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution" and "Training and development must be built into it at all levels -- training and development that never stop" (p.11). Drucker sees management's work as social and ethical, not primarily focused on profit (p.18), but on human potential and needs. In fact, he devotes a chapter (Ch.4) to nonprofits, and another (Ch.5) on social impacts and social problems.
Drucker has been closely associated with the move to flatten organizations, and in Chapter 6, he discusses the question. He acknowledges that there is no one correct organization, just organizations with strengths and weaknesses related to specific kinds of tasks. And in terms of the supposed end of hierarchy, he terms such claims "blatant nonsense" (p.73). Rather, he says, a flatter organizational structure means that

Individuals will have to be able to work at one and the same time in different organization structures. For one task they will work in a team. But for another tasks they will have to work -- and at the same time -- in a command-and-control structure. The same person who is a "boss" within his or her own organization is a "partner" in an alliance, a minority participation, a joint venture, and so on. (pp.75-76)

That is, workers are not free from hierarchy, they have to occupy different hierarchical niches in different structures simultaneously. (I sense some resonance here in Deleuze's discussion of "dividuals.") Increasingly, such workers function not as subordinates but as associates (p.78).
Let's skip ahead to Chapter 15, where Drucker traces some of the implications of workers functioning as associates. He declares:

More and more people in the workforce?and most knowledge workers?will have to manage themselves. They will have to place themselves where they can make the greatest contribution; they will have to learn to develop themselves. They will have to learn to stay young and mentally alive during a fifty-year working life. They will have to learn how and when to change what they do, how they do it and when they do it. (p.217)

This means that workers have to continually educate and develop themselves. Since "knowledge workers are likely to outlive their employing organization" (p.217), they must prepare for multiple careers. Drucker has advice on this, mainly in terms of logging and analyzing one's own work patterns. But he also emphasizes education, saying that

The knowledge society must have at its core the concept of the educated person. It will have to be a universal concept, precisely because the knowledge society is a society of knowledges and because it is global - in its money, its economics, its careers, its technology, its central issues, and above all, in its information. Post-capitalist society requires a unifying force. It requires a leadership group, which can focus local, particular, separate traditions onto a common and shared commitment to values, a common concept of excellence, and on mutual respect. (p.289)

Drucker calls for "a universally educated person." That doesn't mean a polymath, and "in fact, we will probably become even more specialized. But what we do need -- and what will define the educated person in the knowledge society -- is the ability to understand the various knowledges" (p.294). In the knowledge society, "the new jobs require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. They require a different approach to work and a different mind-set. Above all, they require a habit of continual learning" (p.305). Whereas their predecessors could count on an end to learning and a steady career path, knowledge workers must be entrepreneurial about developing and determining their own careers, largely through self-directed learning and relearning (p.326). As specialists, they also require an organization to provide essential continuity: "It is only the organization that can convert the specialized knowledge of the knowledge worker into performance" (p.308).
Reading over the quotes I just transcribed, I'm struck by the fact that Drucker's work has become so foundational to the knowledge economy literature. Many of the assertions that Drucker makes here, particularly in terms of continual learning, seem to have been transmitted with relatively little transformation in Zuboff and Maxmin, Malone, and many others. Remarkable!
Yet I found myself wanting much more. Drucker has a real wealth of experience, but the book was thin on case studies and citations, reading more like a series of homilies than anything else. I suspect that that has to do with the fact that the book is a collection of excerpts. As a statement of principles and assumptions, then, this book is fascinating. As an argument based on evidence, it's less convincing. >

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Reading :: Seasons of the Italian Kitchen

Originally posted: Mon, 22 May 2006 23:46:47
The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen
by Diane Darrow, Tom Maresca
Never have I reviewed a cookbook on this blog, but never have I loved a cookbook as much as this one. It's out of print, which is too bad, because it's just a joy to read. Here's the authors discussing the issue of frying in olive oil:

Well-fried food is not greasy or heavy; in fact, properly fried food usually creates a palatial impression of lightness and purity, as if the food's natural flavor has been heightened, not obscured. The olive oil component of the flavor is like the harmony line that makes the melody more interesting. And foods cooked in olive oil are not unhealthy unless that's all you ever eat -- but you could say the same of water. In the Italian diet, fried foods are balanced out by fresh fruits and vegetables, by pasta and rice and wine. Some fat is essential for human nutrition, and olive oil is the best there is. (p.129)

Yes, most of the book is like this. The recipes are arranged by season, then by course (primi, secondo, etc.). Each one -- not each meal, but each recipe in each course -- has extensive and well thought out wine recommendations.

Although the book isn't vegetarian, there are plenty of vegetarian and even some vegan dishes here, and they're all fantastic. When we first came to Austin, I made a meal of capri salad, pasta with uncooked sauce (fresh tomatoes, parsley, onions, olive oil, wine vinegar), zucchini marinated with mint, and I believe granita. Wonderful, and that's not because of the cook -- the recipes are simple enough even for me to make.

If you see this one for sale somewhere, pick it up. Even if you think you hate "Italian food" (or that stuff that goes by the name, covered with horridly processed tomato sauce sweetened with corn syrup). Make the pasta with uncooked sauce (salsa cruda), the fusilli vesuvius, the eggplant parmesan, the zucchini marinated with mint, the capri salad ... And do what I do: buy your olive oil in three-gallon containers. It's worth it!

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Update 2011.09.05: Amazon now has this book, new, in paperback!

Reading :: Power to the Edge

Originally posted: Mon, 22 May 2006 23:19:31

Power to the Edge

By David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes

Power to the Edge, like The Agile Organization, is an electronically published book that focuses mainly on information-age transformations in warfare. As the subtitle suggests, the authors are concerned with how military organizations will have to adapt as they move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

As I've remarked elsewhere, this body of literature is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the transformations that Donald Rumsfeld is trying to implement, how they have led to a particular type of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how these transformations have led to worry among senior military leadership. The so-called Generals' Revolt appears to be in large part an outgrowth of resistance to these transformations, using Iraq as an example of how they might be leading the military down the wrong path. That path leads to a smaller military footprint and a heavier reliance on information technologies, but it also leads to less hierarchy and more peer-to-peer interactions, or as Alberts and Hayes call it, "power to the edge":

Power to the edge is about changing the way individuals, organizations, and systems relate to one another and work. Power to the edge involves the empowerment of individuals at the edge of an organization (where the organization interacts with its operating environment to have an impact or effect on that environment) or, in the case of systems, edge devices. Empowerment involves expanding access to information and the elimination of unnecessary constraints. For example, empowerment involves providing access to available information and expertise and the elimination of procedural constraints previously needed to deconflict elements of the force in the absence of quality information. (p.5)

In such an organization, command and control are separated: "commanders become responsible for creating initial conditions that make success more likely" and exercise control in ways that allow for agile self-organization and relative autonomy; they command, but control is assumed by the personnel on the "edge," who are closest to the action (p.5). This sort of arrangement requires "shared situation awareness, congruent command intent, professional competence, and trust" (p.6).

To make their argument, the authors first lead us through a discussion of the different military philosophies found in successful 20th-century military organizations, focusing particularly on the degree of centralization in each (pp.19-26). Next, they describe the characteristics of industrial age command and control, characteristics that are just as relevant to commercial enterprises: decomposition, specialization, hierarchical organizations, optimization, deconfliction, centralized planning, and decentralized execution (Chapter 2). These characterisics, the authors claim, developed systems that were inherently cyclical, a result of the limits of Industrial Age communications technologies (p.49; cf. p.175).

But, the authors argue, Industrial Age assumptions are not adequate for Information Age organizations; the latter should be optimized for interoperability and adaptability, and should allow the organization to better bring its information, assets, and expertise to bear (p.56). "Centralized planning," they say, "is antithetical to agility because it (1) is relatively slow to recognize and respond to changes in the situation, (2) results in ill-informed participants, and (3) places many constraints on behavior" (p.63).

One problem that arises is that the "stovepipes" or hierarchically separate branches of an organization result in "seams" that "create gaps in roles and responsibilities that lead to a lack of accountability for interoperability, information sharing, and collaboration, all of which are necessary for a transformed military" (p.64).

Stovepipes, then, must be gotten rid of, because different branches and units must be interoperable; a "super star" commander is not enough (p.88), so "rather than rely on individual genius, Information Age processes tap collective knowledge and collaboration" (p.89). Furthermore, military organizations must be able to forge "a coalition that will in all likelihood include nonmilitary and/or nonstate actors" (p.103), an assertion that brings to mind Castells' networks or Zuboff and Maxmin's federations as well as the networks described in Arquilla and Ronfeldt.

Such networks, the authors claim, "are inherently more resilient than the hierarchical and stovepipe systems that characterized Industrial Age military organizations. Because there are multiple links available, the loss of a single node or link is absorbed by a robustly networked force" (pp.135-136). In such an organization, "control is not a function of command but an emergent property that is a function of the initial conditions, the environment, and the adversaries. Loyalty is not to a local entity, but to the overall enterprises" (p.217).

This resilience of networks, in fact, is one of the characteristics of an agile organization: robustness, resilience, responsiveness, flexibility, innovation, and adaptation.

Compare this vision of the military to the "Powell Doctrine" used in Gulf War I: win through overwhelming force and numbers. This doctrine is most easily carried out through a massive Industrial Age structure, and despite its strengths, it is not especially agile. (If the US had used the Powell Doctrine in Afghanistan, the war would have probably been far longer and bloodier.)

Alberts and Hayes' book is interesting reading for anyone who wants to know how organizations are adapting, and could adapt, to the Information Age. >

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Reading :: The History of Florence

Originally posted: Mon, 22 May 2006 23:34:59

The history of Florence, and other selections

By Niccolo Machiavelli

This version of Machiavelli's great history of Florence is incomplete, including only Books II-IV, VII, and VIII. Nevertheless, it's fascinating and highly entertaining for the most part. When describing a great statesman, Machiavelli sometimes gets caught up in cataloguing the man's best zingers -- Machiavelli did love the insults -- but most of the time he provides a dispassionate account cataloguing both the virtues and the flaws of the actors. We can see many of the lessons from the Prince here in historical form, including concrete illustrations of the shifts in government (republic, aristocracy, dictatorship) and detailed analyses of how these came about in Florence time after time.

These history lessons also remind us that reading The Prince is not enough to understand Machiavelli's political analysis. Of one contemptable Duke, who lost his sovereignty in a revolt, Machiavelli says, "he wanted men's service, not his goodwill, and therefore he preferred to be feared rather than loved" (p.110) -- clarifying the advice he famously delivers in his more popular book. As in The Discourses, his many discussions of conspiracies remind us that "in these affairs the number small enough to keep the secret is not sufficient to put it into effect" (p.44) and that long-term conspiracies are always discovered (p.95). He amusingly notes that Florence's government prosecuted fewer wars once a law was passed applying taxes to nobles as well as the popliani. and in passing, he notes that one Pope "had shown himself a wolf and not a shepherd" (p.279). Later, the Pope signed a peace agreement, and died five days later; Machiavelli suggests that it was because "the sorrow of having to make peace killed him" (p.302).

Machiavelli also has lessons for project managers. Here's a story about Niccolo Soderini, who became Gonfalioniere of Justice and manages to screw things up:

Messer Tommaso and Niccolo Soderini were brothers; Niccolo was the more spirited and enterprising of the two, and Tommaso the more sagacious. The latter being a great friend of Piero de? Medici, and knowing at the same time his brother?s disposition, and that he had no other object but the liberty of the city and to establish the government firmly and without injustice to any one, advised him to have no ballotings made, so that the election purses might be filled with the names of citizens devoted to their free institutions; which being done, he would see the government established and confirmed without disturbance or harm to any one. Niccolo readily adopted his brother?s advice, and thus wasted the period of his magistracy in vain efforts, which his friends the conspirators allowed him to do from jealousy, being unwilling that the reform of the government should be effected through the authority of Niccolo, and in the belief that they would yet be in time under another Gonfaloniere. When Niccolo?s magistracy came to an end, it became apparent that he had begun many things, but accomplished none; and thus he left his office with much less honor than he had entered upon it. (pp.233-234).

You gotta manage your projects, Niccolo.

All in all, this book is not just interesting but insightful and easy to read. I had worried that it would be a long slog, but by the end I was disappointed there wasn't more. Maybe I'll pick up the complete version soon.

>

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Reading :: The Wealth of Networks

Originally posted: Tue, 09 May 2006 19:24:54

The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

by Yochai Benkler

I ran across this book via a BoingBoing post that pointed to Benkler's wiki on the book and a link to the book's PDF. In fact, the PDF is what I read. I was somewhat hesitant to do so, given BoingBoing's tendency to recommend texts primarily on whether those texts agree with the bloggers' conclusions, but I was interested in the subject and assumed that Yale wouldn't be publishing anything half-baked, so I gave it a try. (I'm not sure what it means that I'm reviewing it here rather than on Benkler's wiki, as he intended.)

Benkler is a professor of law at Yale. He appears to be a fast tracker, having received his JD from Harvard in 1994 and clerked for Stephen Breyer the following year, then spending three years as assistant professor and two as associate professor at NYU. In this book, he's primarily concerned with how the widespread availability of information technology is introducing, and will continue to introduce, new modes of production. "In the networked information economy," he says, "the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed through society" (p.6). The cost for distributing information drops to near zero, and the cost for producing it drops rapidly as well. Consequently, we see more distributed production strategies and production aimed at enacting public and liberal (small L) commitments rather than at recouping investment. He believes that this development toward "an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium" (p.22) will

lead to a substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications -- like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications service giants -- to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made. (p.23)

This argument should sound familiar, since variations of it have become popular with BoingBoing and other outposts of the open source/free software movement, remix culture, and affiliated lines of thought. Benkler's version of the argument is not parsimonious, but it is far better supported and qualified than the usual versions. Drawing on authors such as Castells and Beniger, Benkler makes familiar points in more careful ways.

Let's take the assertion that markets are conversations. This point was made ad nauseam in The Cluetrain Manifesto and is alluded to in a number of other works (Carter; Beniger; Castells; Malone; Reynolds). Here, Benkler makes the argument with some empirical backing (p.56), pointing to the role of aggregation (p.69) and emphasizing the vital role that trust plays in sustaining these market conversations (pp.105-106). He adds that the distributed costs of infrastructure allow sharing to come back from the periphery, and argues that social sharing -- such as in open source communities -- is unlike markets or hierarchies (p.121). The lower cost of information production results in a radical increase in producers and less focus on marketability or filtering (p.166).

When anyone can talk to anyone, we worry that such conversations will turn into Babel: information overload. Benkler addresses this "Babel objection" by describing mechanisms that people are currently using to collaboratively filter information (p.169). What interests Benkler here is that such mechanisms provide a competing model for constructing the public sphere, a far more participatory model than that afforded by broadcast media (p.215), with a more participatory model of accreditation, linking (p.219). Benkler offers a number of case studies, such as the Stolen Honor incident in the 2004 election and a case study of the Diebold voting machine scandal (ch.7). In fact, Chapter 7 appears to be the Left counterpoint to the cases described by Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds (and shares at least one of these cases, the Trent Lott scandal). What Benkler brings to the cases is some principled analysis: he tells the same sorts of stories that Hewitt and Reynolds tell, but ties in a discussion of power law, network topology, stock price, and similar topics to offer a more methodologically oriented explanation.

Toward the end of the book, Benkler offers some more claims that are familiar to members of open source and free software movements. For instance, he claims that the networked information society improves justice (p.305) and that a networked information economy will lead to improvements in the public sphere (p.465). More interesting to me are some brief claims he makes about the nature of the individual:

What is emerging in the work of sociologists is a framework that sees the networked society or the networked individual as entailing an abundance of social connections and more effectively deployed attention. The concern with the decline of community conceives of a scarcity of forms of stable, nurturing, embedding relations, which are mostly fixed over the life of an individual and depend on long-standing and interdependent relations in stable groups, often with hierarchical relations. What we now see emerging is a diversity of forms of attachment and an abundance of connections that enable individuals to attain discrete components of the package of desiderata that ?community? has come to stand for in sociology.

As Wellman puts it: ?Communities and societies have been changing towards networked societies where boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive....Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries.? In this context, the range and diversity of network connections beyond the traditional family, friends, stable coworkers, or village becomes a source of dynamic stability, rather than tension and disconnect. (p.366)

He offers the example of mobile phone users in Japan: teenagers can fill a traditional role in their homes, while using SMS to construct new roles with their friends.

They continue to spend time in their home, with their family. They continue to show respect and play the role of child at home and at school. However, they interpolate that role and those relations with a sub-rosa network of connections that fulfill otherwise suppressed emotional needs and ties. (p.367)

Whenever I began feeling that Benkler wasn't going anywhere, that he was simply deepening the very familiar arguments made by the open source community and related communities, I would run across an observation such as this one. And that's why I have such mixed feelings about this book. About 80% of it is a rehashing of the sorts of things I read on BoingBoing, Buzzmachine, Instapundit, or Slashdot, deepened with a bit of analysis and copious references to Castells. But about 20% (let's be generous) is really interesting news. I think the 20% is probably worth it.

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Reading :: The Control Revolution

Originally posted: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:43:56

The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society

by James Beniger

This 1986 book provides an interesting perspective on the "control revolution," the startling uptick in technologies and procedures meant to provide economic and political control in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Beniger sees the world as a sort of computational system, one that dialectically reorders itself:

the Control Revolution also represented the beginning of a restoration -- although with increasing centralization -- of the economic and political control that was lost at more local levels of society during the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, control of government and markets had depended on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via the new mass media. (p.7)

As he explains in the next paragraph, Beniger means control rather broadly: "purposive influence toward a predetermined goal" (p.7). (This definition is so important that he later uses it to distinguish between the organic and inorganic, p.35.) And Beniger becomes quite excited about one development in control technnologies: rationalization -- or, as Beniger prefers to call it, preprocessing, or decreasing the amount of information to be processed. "Rationalization may be defined as the destruction or ignoring of information in order to facilitate its processing" (p.15). For instance, in having people compress their experiences into the confines of standardized forms, bureaucracies reduce information processing (p.16). And bureaucracy has taken off in a big way, due partially to this sort of control through preprocessing: in one extraordinary graph, Beniger demonstrates how the information sector grew from 0.2% of the US civilian labor force in 1800 to 46.6% in 1980 (p.23).

More intriguingly, Beniger claims that digitalization transforms diverse forms of information into "a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as, centuries ago, the institution of common currencies and exchange rates began to transform local markets into a single world economy" (pp.25-26). (Later, in fact, he demonstrates how information such as waybills, elevator and storage receipts became negotiable paper: p.252.) The analogy between currencies and information comes up frequently: Beniger sees both as material flows, and states that the proper subject matter of social and behavioral sciences is to study these material information flows (p.38) -- the essence of human society, after all, is the processing of physical throughputs (p.37).

Those who have read Malone, Zuboff & Maxmin, or Reynolds will find some of the subsequent discussion to be familiar. Beniger insists that larger organizations generally necessitate more centralized control, but like Malone, uses markets as an example of efficient decentralized control brought about by new information and communication technologies (p.147). (Beniger, however, has detailed evidence.) He notes how in the mid 19th century, the social processing of material flows threatened to exceed the system's capacity to contain them (p.219). And in that vein, he provides a sympathetic account of increasingly centralized bureaucracies (p.229) and scientific management (p.231). However, he insists that although such technologies sometimes appear to deskill, they teach new skills and more complex tasks (p.424).

Intriguingly, he also investigated how information technologies hybridized across different activities. One story he tells is of Hollerith's inspiration for the punch cards that he used to tabulate the US census: rather than drawing from calculating and adding mechanisms, Hollerith drew from the "punch photographs" or punchcards used by railroads to confirm passengers' identities. Hollerith's first cards were even the same size and shape as these punch photos, and he punched the first of them with a conductor's punch! (p.412)

Writing in 1986, Beniger insists that information technologies will continue to be applied at higher and higher levels of control (p.434). I'm interested in how the outlook has changed in the last 20 years: Malone, Reynolds, and others claim that with the sharp increase in communication avenues, centralized control is no longer necessary and communication-intensive decentralized control mechanisms such as markets are viable at larger scales.

Would I recommend this book? I have to give a qualified yes. On the one hand, Beniger presents a compelling and well researched account of control over the last couple of centuries, and his treatment of society as a computational system foreshadows work by Hutchins and others. And his discussion of control mechanisms certainly puts bureaucracies and scientific management into a new light. On the other hand, Beniger has a tendency to overreach -- making his subject the dividing line between organic and inorganic, for instance -- and I often found myself wondering about how a strong consideration of multiplicities, polycontextuality, and ambiguity would affect his theses. That being said, this book is good background for anyone who is interested in the knowledge economy and how it came to be.

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Reading :: Reassembling the Social

Originally posted: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 20:40:04

Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

by Bruno Latour

To understand Latour's latest book, the key passage is a footnote on p.207 referring to a discussion in which he uses the Internet as a metaphor, he says:

I often find that my reader would complain a lot less about my writings if they could download ANT version 6.5 instead of sticking with the beta.

So is he saying that the work he has done over the last 30 years has evolved and matured? Yes -- but he implies repeatedly that the changes have mostly been in its presentation. ANT 6.5 has an updated interface -- Latour has dropped some terms and replaced or rearticulated others -- but he spends a lot of time arguing that the underlying protocol hasn't changed at all. In his discussions of networks (p.129), symmetry (p.76), and social construction (p.92), among many others, the story is the same: we used this term, poor as it was, to mean x; others thought we meant y; so we'll either change the term for those thick people or we'll stick with it and explain it just one more time

This is a story we might have read in Science in Action or Aramis. In Science in Action, scientists maintained apparent coherence in their research projects through a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes coordination that continually constructed, changed, and strengthened their experiments. In Aramis, engineers made several changes to a public transportation system, but ultimately the project's definition never changed, vital compromises were never struck, and the enterprise died.

So which is Reassembling the Social? A work that brings coherence to ANT by developing and reconciling it, even though Latour frames the work as consistent? Or is it a bullheaded attempt to simply say the same thing again, in different terms, hoping that this time people will understand?

I'm inclined to believe it's the former. Latour has provided a lot of review here, but he has genuinely addressed issues such as multiplicity, and he has also started to discuss new concepts such as plasma, "that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, submerged, mobilized, or subjectified" (p.244). That is, the reality, the "missing masses" that are not (yet) associated in a given actor-network.

Latour is also more inclined to pay respect to his opponents -- although only after characteristically sharp and often hyperbolic attacks.

One example is how he portrays conventional sociology (a theme familiar to readers of Aramis). He says that it ignores its informants' explanations and instead posits invisible, unverifiable "social forces" that supposedly pulls the strings -- even if, especially if the informants disagree with this notion. "This is conspiracy theory, not social theory," Latour says sharply -- and sensibly (p.53). And Latour, who has been frequently attacked for anthropomorphising nonhumans, turns the tables by pointing out how sociologists have used figurations in constructing sociological explanations, rather than attributing phenomena to people:

To endow an agency with anonymity gives it exactly as much a figure as when it's endowed with a name, a nose, a voice, a face. It's just making it ideo- instead of anthropo-morphic. Statistical aggregates obtained from a questionnaire and given a label -- like A and B types in the search for heart disease -- are as concrete as 'my red-faced sanguine neighbor who died last Saturday from a stroke while planting his turnips because he ate too much fat'. To say 'culture forbids having kids out of wedlock'' requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying 'my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter'. To be sure the first figuration (anonymous) is different from the second one (my mother-in-law), but they both give a figure, a form, a cloth, a flesh to an agency forbidding me or forcing me to do things. (pp.53-54)

He even says that if such social forces actually existed, politics would not be possible (p.250). Latour gave up on such "social forces" and figurations long ago, and he tells us his road-to-Damascus story:

After a week in Roger Guillemin's laboratory thirty years ago, I remember how inescapable I found the conclusion: the social cannot be substituted for the tiniest peptide, the smallest rock, the most innocuous electron, the tamest baboon. Objects of science may explain the social, not the other way around. No experience was more striking than what I saw with my own eyes: the social explanation had vanished into thin air. (p.99)

But - after this ringing condemnation, Latour admits that we must pay respect to formal sociology, for it has its place, albeit a specific place that comes only after the work of association and composition at which ANT excels (p.227). Latour even works up some respect for studies of cognition (p.209 fn 279).

So this book mends fences, Latour style. Latour's aim here is to redefine sociology as the tracing of associations (p.5), and to rehabilitate ANT as a sort of "laboratory" whose experiments can fail:

Would you qualify as 'scientific' a discipline that puts to one side the precise information offered by fieldwork and replaces it by instances of other things that are invisible and those things people have not said and have vocally denied?

(p.50)

ANT is "experimental metaphysics" (p.51). (And, yes, after repudiating the name "actor-network theory" a few years ago, Latour is again embracing it -- see p.9). So what does this experimental metaphysics look like? Latour likens it to drawing a coastline, bit by bit, based on many reported points (p.24).

Latour urges us to study controversies, since these tend to expose productive differences. (cf. Activity theory's contradictions.) He also sideswipes dialectics again (p.169), making a bit of a clearer case than he has earlier. Or is that just me?

>

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Reading :: Writing Machines

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:16:08

Writing Machines

By N. Katherine Hayles

Writing Machines was recommended to me by a colleague, who sees Hayles as an extremely important theorist in computers and English studies. Many do; I've seen Hayles cited many times and in many different bodies of literature. And this particular book has the virtue of being relatively recent (2002) and quite thin.

Unfortunately, I was not impressed by it. I wasn't impressed by the design, which seemed to be ripped off from Wired circa 2000. I wasn't impressed by the autobiographical elements, which Hayles inexplicably seemed to think would be rendered less rather than more pretentious if she recounted them in the third person with another person's name attached; I wasn't impressed with the analysis, which tended toward close textual readings of artifacts with very short shelf lives and little intrinsic interest for me. I certainly wasn't impressed with Hayles' narrative style, which attempts to approximate strong affective writing by piling on adjectives.

But I'm not sure if I can render a good evaluation of the book. It's clearly a work of literary criticism, describing Hayles' "long-standing interests in technology from a literary point of view" (p.7), and literary criticism doesn't have any intrinsic interest for me. I respect it as a field, like anthropology, economics, or materials engineering, but it's less applicable to my work than the other three. I think that the orientation of Writing Machines toward close reading of texts has a lot to do with the discipline it's in, and I'm not sure I'm well qualified to judge the work within that discipline. Perhaps it's the norm to laboriously explain the most obvious puns, which Hayles does throughout Chapter 4, for instance.

On the other hand, Hayles does broaden the notion of text in productive ways. Sounding a bit like Latour, she describes inscription technologies:

In print books words are obviously inscriptions because they take the form of ink marks impressed on paper. The computer also counts as an inscription technology, because it changes electric polarities and correlates these changes with binary code, higher-level languages such as C++ and Java, and the phosphor gleams of the cathode ray tube. To count as an inscription technology, a device must initiate material changes that can be read as marks. Telegraphy thus counts; it sends structured electronic pulses through a wire (material changes that can be read as marks) and connects these pulses with acoustic sound (or some other analogue signal) associated with marks on paper. Additional examples include film, video, and the images produced by medical devices such as X-rays, CAT scans, and MRI. Even nanotechnology slouched its way toward inscription when scientists arranged molecules to form their company's logo, IBM.

It would be easy to read this passage as a sort of land rush, a move to claim even more texts under the aegis of literary criticism (and a move with which we rhetoricians are familiar). But I think Hayles deserves credit here for seriously considering what Bakhtin called "low genres" and what Latour maintains are vital ways to transform assemblages. (In fact, I can now see why their names are sometimes linked.) By taking these multiple inscriptions seriously -- and by resisting the urge to make "interpretation" a central part of the definition of inscriptions -- Hayles deserves a lot of credit.

>

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Reading :: An Army of Davids

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:11:56

An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

by Glenn Reynolds

Glenn Reynolds is the University of Tennessee law professor behind the wildly popular libertarian-leaning blog Instapundit. For years now, his blog has been a sort of central clearinghouse of information, particularly serving the right half of the blogosphere. And now he has written a popular book -- not about the website or even the phenomenon of blogs, but the greater shifts he is seeing in how work, lives, and culture are being distributed, shifted, remixed, rearticulated, and reauthorized. The overall theme of An Army of Davids is that the "Davids" -- individuals with limited resources but access to networked information technologies -- are able to take on the "Goliaths," the massive corporations and governments that used to have a lock on production and coordination work. Reynolds draws on the sorts of examples you might expect, such as the Rathergate incident, but also discusses manufacturing, music production and distribution, publishing, and the service economy.

The book is, I emphasize, a popular book, and consequently there's not a lot new here for people who have been assiduously following knowledge economy developments. In fact, there's a lot of simplification and glossing. Reynolds, for instance, rearticulates the thesis that Thomas W. Malone pushes in his popular book, that organizations are changing primarily because the cost of communication has decreased dramatically. He draws on examples that Hugh Hewitt used in Blog, such as Rathergate and the Trent Lott incident. And he touches on themes of individual empowerment that have been a staple of new economy/knowledge economy literature, while eliding the sorts of criticisms that occur in more critical, scholarly works. An Army of Davids tends to give a positive, enthusiastic view of the possibilities generated by widespread, inexpensive access to networked technologies, and it is clearly influenced by its author's libertarian views.

But what's wrong with that? The book doesn't pretend to be scholarship, and it accomplishes its mission of laying out -- in clear terms, with well told narratives -- the promises and possibilities of networked technologies. It gives plentiful examples of how things are changing the way we work and think today, concretely, and speculates about how those changes might be carried forward in the next five, ten, or twenty years. Few people have thought as much about the cultural impact of these technologies, and few people have absorbed and written about so many instances of them. An Army of Davids is not critical scholarship, but it doesn't aim to be and it doesn't have to be. I would recommend it over Blog, The Cluetrain Manifesto, or any other popular book I've read about the subject. But read it in close proximity with Castells.

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Reading :: Qualitative Data Analysis

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:42:16

Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (2ed)

by Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman

I read this book about two weeks ago, but everyone in my family has been sick, so I haven't gotten a chance to blog it until now.

Qualitative Data Analysis is a classic sourcebook on principled, rigorous analysis of qualitative data, and if someone ever accuses qualitative research of being entirely subjective or anecdotal, you should show this book to them. Miles and Huberman have correctly identified analysis as the Achilles' heel of much qualitative research and have set out to provide a variety of methods for analyzing it. "You know what you display," they say (sounding positively Latourean), so they also provide guidance on reducing data and displaying it (p.11).

I read this book in 2001, but had forgotten how comprehensive and how valuable it is. Even though the book primarily focuses on analysis, Miles and Huberman provide an overview of the entire process, from design to data collection to analysis and reporting. They discuss how to link qualitative and quantitative data in all phases. And they don't get mired in abstract theoretical discussions (as Creswell and others tend to do). In fact, much of the book consists of concrete, practical techniques such as systems to collect, store, and reconcile data. Think of it as GTD for research.

But where the book really shines is in its discussions of coding and displays. Miles and Huberman tend toward case studies and grounded theory because those two approaches are more apt to be systematic, and their coding discussion owes a lot to grounded theory's approach, which has been lucidly described in many places -- but never more so than here, where Miles and Huberman give plentiful examples from actual studies. Displays such as matrices and diagrams, similarly, are described in great detail and with enough examples that we can develop our own ideas based on them, and have confidence that we know what we are doing.

Every thick book like this has to have common threads to keep it together. Miles and Huberman produce a number of studies that are used to illustrate concepts and techniques throughout the book. These provide coherence and allow us to see a range of different situations to which we can adapt.

The only drawback to the book is that it's copyright 1994, so its discussion of computer-aided qualitative data analysis, though impressively comprehensive, is twelve years out of date. Nevertheless, the principles and comparative points they provide are still very useful.

Research, as I tell my grad students, involves constructing a complex argument. And Miles and Huberman do a great job of showing you how to collect and evaluate evidence, compile it, use it to summarize reasons, and use those reasons to support a claim. If you do any sort of qualitative research at all, you need this book. I only wish I had read it in grad school!>

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(Reading Roundup: Bodker and Andersen, Bodker and Christiansen, Bansler and Havn)

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:55:00

In the early 1980s, Scandinavian researchers teamed up with unions to develop a design methodology called "participatory design" (see my recent articles in TCQ and Technical Communication). Based on Marxist theory, participatory design was meant to empower laborers in their struggle with management by giving them a means to guide software development. In particular, innovations such as future workshops, organizational games, and prototyping allowed the workers to envision systems that would preserve their tacit craft skills. The goal, ultimately, was to extend and develop workers' skills rather than deskilling them. In a cluster of countries with de facto lifetime employment, a fine balance between capitalism and socialism, and unprecedented union leverage, this goal seemed reachable.

Today, everyone seems to have pretty much given up on that goal. Susanne Bodker, who did significant early work in participatory design, and Jorgen Bansler, who provided smart critiques of early PD, are now conducting projects based in new economy/fast capitalism environments. The question is no longer how to preserve a fading set of craft skills, it is now how to hold things together so that workers can preserve some sort of developmental movement and some sort of shared community in the face of increasing work fragmentation and distribution. The three articles below, from 2005-2006, really underscore the enormous shift that has taken place in Scandinavia over the last 25 years.

Bødker, S. and Christiansen, E. (2006, in press). Computer support for social awareness in flexible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Bodker and Christiansen pick up this thread in their first paragraph:

People are increasingly working in mobile, or flexible settings. Work has become a moving target with respect to content and obligations. It is subject to constant change; in goals, in qualifications, and in partnerships. New people join groups, projects, and companies. Companies hire, fire, or close, or are taken over by others. The instability this turmoil creates in our social networks puts people under pressure, causing what Sennett calls a "corrosion

of character" (Sennett, 1998).

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to detect nostalgia for the original PD project, mingled with resignation to the new economy and resolution to blunt its worst effects. In particular, the authors are interested in developing a sense of co-presence for workers, who increasingly find themselves working from elsewhere. That's a significant problem:

In order to stay socially aware, it seems necessary to have people within reach ? not always, but at least occasionally. This tension between the ephemerality and continuity of social encounters, and likewise the need to construct identity through relationships by means of social encounters, is not generally part of the definition of social awareness in CSCW.

The authors describe "artefact-driven explorations" (prototypes) for dealing with the issue of "hot-desking." The most intriguing thing, I think, is that these prototypes are not electronic -- sometimes they are as simple as putting a soccer ball or bicycle helmet on the desk of someone who is in the office. The idea is to find ways to develop the material traces that workers use to develop a shared, unfolding history. And here we see the influence again of the original PD project, with its concern for development, history, and humane work environments.

Bødker, S. and Andersen, P. B. (2005). Complex mediation. Human-Computer Interaction, 20:353?402.

Development is a perennial concern of activity theory, whose third generation was significantly impacted by Bodker's work. In this article, Bodker and Andersen tackle a problem that I have attempted elsewhere: the problem of mediation by multiple tools and symbols. Whereas I drew on Bakhtin, they draw on Peircean semiotics. "Activity theory makes rather unclear distinctions between the role of instrumental mediation and that of communicative mediation (except as analytical perspectives determined by identifying whether we are dealing with a Subject-Object relationship or a Subject-Subject one)," they argue (p.360). In a move reminiscent of Latour's hybrids, they argue that the distinction between tools and symbols is artificial, and most mediators lie between the two (p.361).

The authors argue for two related types of complex mediation:

we summarize the preceding by suggesting that one should design for multi-mediation, that is, recognize that more than one mediator normally is used in an activity, and that individual mediators should be designed as a part of an assemblage of mediators, either co-occurring, organized in levels, or connected in chains. (p.356)

"Co-occurring" mediation happens at the same point in time; I've been terming this "ecological." "Chained" mediation involves a chain of activities:

artifacts in a web of technologies in the plant are part of a chain of artifacts and objects that together help regulate the plant and ultimately fulfill the overall purpose of wastewater processing: to turn wastewater into purified water. (p.391)

Chained mediation sounds a lot like activity networks.

Bodker and Andersen have developed a complex system for relating these two perspectives, along with "levels" (which sound like a way of extending chained activity networks to the meso level). But it seems too orderly to me; Bodker and Andersen seem to be attempting to preserve and strengthen distinctions among activities, and in doing so, they chop these into smaller and smaller pieces.

Bansler, J. P. and Havn, E. (2006, in press). Sensemaking in technology-use mediation: Adapting groupware technology in organizations. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Bansler and Havn argue that groupware is successful in large part because local workers do the hard work of adapting it: "users often use groupware in ways not intended or expected by the designers of the technology and that users tend to re-invent the technology when they adapt and incorporate it into their working practices." But "relatively little is known about the actual process of tailoring or adaptation, i.e. about the way in which groupware technologies are appropriated and modified by users." They set out to investigate this question, terming these local workers "mediators." (These mediators sound a lot like Nardi and O'Day's "gardeners.")

Mediators, the authors argue, make sense of technology in relation to context; they convert abstract technology into "technology-in-practice." By promoting technology use, helping and supporting users, and establishing conventions of use, these mediators can make or break the new groupware. Additionally, mediators help to create and spread workarounds and often suggest changes and modifications to the developers. Mediators are by their nature boundary-spanners, people who interface between two different activities (e.g., design and use).

Reading :: Machiavelli, Marketing and Management

Originally posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:13:31

Machiavelli, Marketing and Management

by Phil Harris, Patricia Rees, Andrew Lock

"This book resulted from the Machiavelli at 500 conference held in Manchester in May 1998," the editors explain in the introduction. This edited collection has some of the advantages and many of the disadvantages of other books resulting from such conferences. The advantages include a wide variety of disciplinary and field perspectives and a tendency toward dialogue among chapters. The disadvantages include a tendency of some of these chapters to talk past each other; to disagree on even the most simple of premises (was Machiavelli chiefly concerned with power or the republic? was he totally amoral or extremely moral? did he believe in the divine right of kings, or was that notion foreign to the Florentine republican?); and to go over the same ground in poorly coordinated ways. Again, these disadvantages are common in such collections, but they are exacerbated here because the chapters are focused on Machiavelli's impact, and that impact is hard to gauge when the contributors don't seem to agree on who Machiavelli was.

The collection is at its most schizophrenic in Beatrice Rangoni Machiavelli's chapter, in which she approvingly lists several positive interpretations of her distant relative's work, not acknowledging that these interpretations are mutually contradictory -- they can't all be true.

Some insights do emerge in the reading, particularly contextual insights about Machiavelli's time; a discussion of whether Machiavelli was poststructuralist; an examination of Machiavelli from within different ethical systems; and a contrast between Machiavelli and Marx (Machiavelli took human nature to be essentially fixed, Marx didn't). But those insights take some work to uncover. >

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Reading :: The Art of Project Management

Originally posted: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:14:23

The Art of Project Management

by Scott Berkun

I'm looking at Amazon.com's listing for Berkun's The Art of Project Management right now, and the page recommends that I buy the book along with David Allen's Getting Things Done. It's hardly a coincidence. Project management and time management both deal with work fragmentation, an increasingly pervasive phenomenon. Both are vital skills for knowledge economy jobs, especially software development. And although they deal with different levels -- collaborative vs. personal -- they share many similarities.

Not coincidentally, they both represent skills that I need to develop as well as scholarly interests that I am pursuing. So I've been reading several project management and time management texts (and studies) lately. Berkun's book interested me because it had gotten a very positive mention from Slashdot.

Berkun was a project manager at Microsoft for several years before striking out on his own. Not surprisingly, his book trades on this fact, offering scads of anecdotes and illustrations from his Microsoft years. These stories really are illustrations: They illustrate specific, well grounded principles under the headings of plans, skills, and management. Berkun is methodical in exploring these different headings, and his writing style is clear (although he sometimes tries too much to be clever).

The projects that Berkun is talking about managing tend to be software development projects, and much of his advice is specific to that industry. But much more of it is easily translated to other sorts of projects. In particular, I was interested in the last chapter, "Power and Politics." Berkun tends to oversimplify things a bit here, but he discusses several concrete techniques for negotiating, persuading, and influencing decisions.

The book is a quick read, but it's also solid (392 pages) and a bit intimidating. Fortunately, it's written so that you can skim it and/or focus on specific chapters. If you're interested in complex project management, take a look.

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Reading :: Where the Action Is

Originally posted: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 20:19:28

Where the Action Is : The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

by Paul Dourish

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time. Paul Dourish's work has interested me ever since grad school, when I read the article on "technomethodology" that he published with Graham Button. And of course Bill Hart-Davidson discusses this work frequently.

It's not what I expected. I had expected an empirical case or series of cases that were investigated by or analyzed through a theoretical, analytical, or methodological framework ? which is the usual mode for books in this series. But Dourish's project is to develop a theory of interaction, based on phenomenology, that is suitable for investigating, developing, and understanding embodied interaction: "interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us" (p.3).

This project involves defining and attending to embodiment: "a form of participative status. Embodiment is about the fact that things are embedded in the world, and the ways in which their reality depends on being embedded" (p.18). Increasing attention to embodiment, he says, results in new sensitivity to settings; describing and analyzing work activities and artifacts in concrete terms; and an understanding that artifacts can play different terms (p.19). Dourish gets to these concerns by discussing phenomenology's origins, concerns, and applications.

Throughout, Dourish gives examples from embodied computing and suggests ways in which an embodied perspective could change our approach to computing. But I found myself wishing that the book was more like what I had thought it would be: I wanted Dourish to compress the theoretical/methodological discussion and present an extended case study to illustrate how this phenomenological perspective affects the investigative and design work he describes.

Nevertheless, the book is valuable. I'm struck by how similar it is in its presumptions and examples to other work coming out of Xerox PARC and RXRC. If you've read work by Graham Button, Lucy Suchman, Abigail Sellen, or Richard Harper, this book is going to sound at least somewhat familiar, and its exposition of embodied practice is going to bring new insight to those works.

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Reading :: The Future of Work

Originally posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:11:04

The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life

by Thomas W. Malone

Thomas W. Malone, a professor in MIT's Sloan School of Management, has an extensive and interesting publication record with which I only have passing familiarity. This book, however, is written for a lay audience; Malone mentions his research, but not in great detail, instead concentrating on developing a vision of what work might look like in the future.

That vision looks a lot like the one his colleague Shoshana Zuboff has described. Malone believes that work will become more decentralized, democratic, and participative, largely because of the changes introduced by pervasive information technologies:

For the first time in history, technologies allow us to gain the economic benefits of large organizations, like economies of scale and knowledge, without giving up the benefits of small ones, like freedom, creativity, motivation, and flexibility. (p.4)

Malone charts a continuum of (de)centralization, from very centralized hierarchies (ex: military organizations) to loose hierarchies, democracies, and markets (p.6). Hierarchies, he says, are a solution to a particular problem: organizing large numbers of people efficiently in the face of high communication costs (see, e.g., p.22). But with information technologies, the costs of communication drop, making more decentralized structures possible. Malone sees these more decentralized structures as a way to retain efficiency in large organizations while distributing power and freedom more evenly. He makes this argument by first looking at patterns in human societies (Ch.2) and then applying them to business (Ch.3). And although this may be a productive move analogically, it becomes clear in Chapter 3 that he doesn't see it as an analogy; he equates political and organizational structures. In the book itself, this seems to be far too easy. (I can't speak to his other scholarly work.)

Related is this oft-made point about why societies are organized in a particular way:

As usual in human affairs, there were many factors. But one stands out as particularly important: our old friend, communication costs. (p.24)

Again, Malone makes the easy leap to isolate a determinative causal factor. Communication costs are "particularly important" in determining organizational structures. This point may have some merit, but Malone repeatedly papers over other possible factors and never strongly builds the case that communication costs are driving the changes he describes. And again, it's possible that this has something to do with the fact that the book is written for a lay audience. But as is, the point seems too easy and too unsupported.

Let's get farther into the book. Malone goes on to describe the shift from corporate hierarchies to networks, making the same points we've seen in Zuboff and Maxmin and in Castells: organizations are tending to get smaller, interlinking and cooperating with other companies rather than incorporating or assimilating them. Outsourcing is becoming a more prevalent way of expanding capacity. Companies control larger flows of cash, but they exert less control over business activities. Networks of companies, like the Japanese keiretsu, are doing the work that used to be done within monolithic companies (p.31). Malone links this trend to information technologies: "We've found that when an industry makes greater use of information technology, the average size of companies in that industry tends to decrease after a lag of about two years" (p.34).

Malone goes on in Chapter 4 to examine cases of organizations with loose hierarchies: Linux, Wikipedia, MIT, and AES. Chapter 5 looks at cases farther along the continuum toward decentralization: companies run as democracies such as Whole Foods and W.L. Gore. And in Chapter 6, he gets to the most decentralized types of organizations, those run as markets.

Chapter 6 is really the most interesting of these, since it points to the most extreme realignment:

What if ... many tasks currently done by large companies were done instead by temporary combinations of small companies and independent contractors? Taking this idea further, what if most businesses consisted of only a single person? (p.74)

Malone advances the term "e-lancer" to describe this sort of "electronically connected freelancer" (p.74).

In an e-lance economy, the fundamental unit is not the corporation, but the individual. Tasks are not assigned and controlled through a stable chain of management, but rather are carried out autonomously by independent contractors. These freelancers join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done ? after a day, a month, a year ? the network dissolves, and its members become independent agents again, circulating through the economy, seeking the next assignment. (p.75)

Malone gives the example of the film industry, which works in roughly this way. He concedes that e-lancing is not the best structure for projects that must be developed and sustained over long periods (p.76). But for those who e-lance, one attraction is that they can focus on and accommodate their own values (p.76).

In this arrangement, trust becomes extremely important (p.80).

Of course, freelancing involves giving up long-term employment and benefits. Malone acknowledges this problem, and envisions guilds that look after workers' needs, just as the Screen Actors' Guild provides benefits for actors (p.85). These guilds, he speculates, might emerge from existing groups that already support workers in various ways: the Association for Computing Machinery, labor unions, temporary agencies, college alumni associations.

In this new, decentralized arrangement, Malone argues for a new management model: less command-and-control, more "coordinate-and-cultivate" (p.129; compare with Zuboff and Maxmin as well as Arquilla).

What's this book good for? If you're interested in getting up to speed on the new economy literature, this might be a good introduction. It's more readable than works such as Zuboff and Maxmin's, but not nearly as well argued or supported. It is even more optimistic about the economy than they are -- and that's saying quite a bit.

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Reading :: Ashtanga Yoga

Originally posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:43:18

Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual: An Illustrated Guide to Personal Practice

by David Swenson

If you know anything about yoga -- and I did not until late last year -- you may have heard of ashtanga yoga. Maybe you've entered into a practice room for your kundalini or hatha flow class, and wondered why it's so hot. What the heck was the previous class doing? Or perhaps you've actually seen an ashtanga class and been struck by how regimented the movements are, how constant the motion is, and how little time is held in each pose. You may have thought of it as "extreme yoga," and you may even have heard of the variant "power yoga."

I'm just speculating, based on the reactions of others and the remarks of instructors at the place where I've begun ashtanga classes. I only have a hazy idea of what other yoga variants might be like. To me, ashtanga seems like a set of exercises, similar to stretches and calesthenics, but very well planned and integrated. As they should be: yoga has been around for thousands of years, and ashtanga is based on an ancient text.

Yoga originates in spiritual practice, and using yoga primarily for developing strength and flexibility -- which is why I'm taking the class -- would be seen by some as watering down or corrupting the practice. Apparently I'm not the only one: all of my instructors have been inclusive, and at least one has outright claimed that yoga has no necessary spiritual connection. Nevertheless, the language of yoga's spritual roots does make its way into books such as David Swenson's Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual. Swenson, who lives in Austin, is one of the foremost ashtanga instructors in the world. And he doesn't shy away from alluding to the spiritual beliefs that have contributed to the development of yoga: his descriptions of the principles and postures are full of discussions of energy flow, chakras, etc. And although I at first became impatient with these discussions, wanting a more physiologically grounded discussion, I came to appreciate the vocabulary and concepts that are embedded in the discussion. Realistically, I'm not sure that I could understand a physiological discussion, but I can certainly envision energy (metaphorically) flowing through chakras, and that's enough to help me interpret what's happening during the poses.

And I need all the help I can get. I suspect I have below-average spatial intelligence and body awareness, and my exercise for the last several years has consisted of walking to the bus stop. Fortunately, Swenson provides that help. After the short initial discussion, Swenson illustrates each pose in the first and second series, both with photos and textual descriptions. The photos can be pretty scary -- I'm amazed the human body can get into some of them -- but Swenson also illustrates some intermediate poses that almost anyone can do. (One thing I really like about ashtanga is that you systematically perfect your practice; each practice includes some sort of accomplishment.) The textual descriptions are often couched in idioms that sound either translated or 19th-century, but they are generally clear and show flashes of genuine humor. The writing and editing are not terribly strong, but they do what they need to do.

I'm reviewing this book here, but unlike most of the books on the list, I'll probably end up reading it over and over as I continue in my practice. If you're interested in ashtanga, check it out.

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(Reassembling the Social)

Originally posted: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:37:02

I haven't read Bruno Latour's newest book yet, but Collin has.

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Reading :: The Rise of the Network Society

Originally posted: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 21:29:31

The Rise of the Network Society

By Manuel Castells

The Rise of the Network Society is the first volume of a three-volume work entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. I first ran across it as a cite in John Arquilla's work on networked warfare, but apparently it's well known in other circles. In fact, two of my colleagues are reading Castells' work.

Colleague A saw me carrying this book a couple of weeks ago. "Oh, you're reading that? I'm reading Volume 2 right now." What do you think, I ask. "He -- seems to have a high opinion of himself," Colleague A said with evident reservation.

Colleague B saw me with the book a few days later. "You're reading that too? So am I. I've been avoiding it for a long time because it's so massive, but it's cited so frequently I figured I had to read it. It's like Das Kapital." Colleague B thinks it's fantastic and has decided to order the other two volumes as well.

And what does Colleague C -- C for Clay -- think about it? C is still deciding. The problem is that Volume 1 deals primarily with economics, which is not my strong suit. And although the author has obviously thought quite a bit about these matters, and has been celebrated for his work, I don't have much of a frame of reference for evaluating most of his economic claims. The parts that I can evaluate are mixed. For instance, much of what he says about changes to work organization seems dead on, based on my observations and readings. On the other hand, his chapter on electronic communication draws heavily on scholars such as Havelock and Postman, neither of whom I find particularly convincing in terms of understanding communication changes.

Let me sketch out Castells' basic argument, which is fairly complex. Writing in 1996, he argues that capitalism has been profoundly restructured as "informational capitalism":

Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterized by greater flexibility in management; decentralization and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms; considerable empowering of capital vis-a-vis labor, with the concomitant decline of influence of the labor movement; increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships; massive incorporation of women into the working force, usually under discriminatory conditions; intervention of the state to deregulate markets selectively, and to undo the welfare state, with different intensity and orientations depending upon the nature of political forces and institutions in each society; stepped-up global economic condition, in a context of increasing geographic and cultural differentiation of settings for capital accumulation and management. (pp.1-2)

So far, this is familiar territory, covered (with considerably more optimism and less macroanalysis) in Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy and similar works. But Castells brings to bear decades of scholarship and reams of economic data to develop these points.

One factor he discusses is of particular interest to me: telecommunications. Castells argues that

what characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation. ... The uses of new telecommunications technologies in the last two decades have gone through three distinct stages: automation of tasks, experimentation of uses, reconfiguration of applications. In the first two stages, technological innovation progressed through learning by using ... In the third stage, the users learned technology by doing, and ended up reconfiguring the networks, and finding new applications. (p.32)

Telecommunications deregulation, in Castells' analysis, was key to the networked society because it reorganized and spurred the growth of telecommunications, leading to "the global integration of financial markets and the segmented articulation of production and trade throughout the world" (p.52).

Networks, Castells says (quoting Mulgan), were created not to communicate but to outcommunicate. They are adaptive, open-ended, and multi-edged (p.65). They are meant to move along the product of the information economy: information itself, which has become the product of the production process (p.67, 172). And even though this is the age of deregulation, Castells says, the role of the state is vital: "it is precisely because of the interdependence and openness of international economy that states must become engaged in fostering development strategies on behalf of their economic constituents" (p.90). States steer policies toward collective competitiveness (p.90).

The circulation of people drives innovation in this economy (p.95). And "the new production system relies on a combination of strategic alliances and ad hoc cooperation projects between corporations, decentralized units of each major corporation, and networks of small and medium enterprises connecting among themselves and/or with large corporations or networks of corporations" (p.96). In the new international division of labor, there is a "variable geometry" that dissolves historical, economic geography (p.106).

Castells identifies several organizational trends or patterns:

• The transition from mass production to flexible production (p.154), characterized in part by "customized, reprogrammable production systems, capturing economies of scope" (p.155). (Think in terms of Victor and Boynton's co-configuration model.)
• "The crisis of the large corporation, and the resilience of small and medium firms as agents of innovation and sources of job creation" (p.155).
• New methods of management (p.157), necessitated by the vertical disintegration of production along a network of firms, substituting for a vertical integration of departments (p.158). (Think of Zuboff and Maxmin's federations.)
• Interfirm networking, or a "multidirectional network model enacted by small and medium businesses and the licensing-subcontracting model of production under an umbrella corporation" (p.160).
• Corporate strategic alliances, involving the intertwining of large corporations (p.162).
• The transition from vertical bureaucracies to horizontal competition, involving seven trends: "organization around process, not task; a flat hierarchy; team management; measuring performance by customer satisfaction; rewards based on team performance; maximization of contacts with suppliers and customers; information, training, and retraining of employees at all levels" (p.164).

"Networks," Castells says, "are the fundamental stuff of which new organizations are and will be made" (p.168).

But technologies and networks don't play a determinist role. "Cultures and institutions continue to shape the organizational requirements of the new economy, in an interaction between the logic of production, the changing technological basis, and the institutional features of the social environment" (p.194).

In response to these macro-level changes, Castells says, work and employment are transformed. The traditional form of work is eroding (p.268). Employment now is characterized by decentralized data entry (p.248); the concentration of higher-level operations in the hands of skilled workers (p.248); multiskilling of jobs (p.251); the individualization of responsibility (p.251) and labor (p.265); and segregation by education (p.251). "The new social and economic organization based on the information technologies aims at decentralizing management, individualizing work, and customizing markets, thereby segmenting work and fragmenting societies" (p.265).

In chapters 6 and 7, Castells that ? at least in social terms ? the network society is reconfiguring space and time. (This argument sounds a bit like the one we encounter in Distributed Work.) Chapter 6 chronicles the growth of information flows (p.382) and argues that information technology leads to the breaking up of spatial patterns into a "fluid network of exchanges" (p.398). "The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows" (p.412). Chapter 7 similarly argues that time is compressed and processed in the network society (p.439); "the network society is characterized by the breaking down of rhythmicity, either biological or social, associated with the notion of a lifecycle" (p.446).

Colleague B is at least right in this: reading The Rise of the Network Society is like reading Capital. It's overwhelming, hard to digest, and full of fascinating ideas that take a lot of background to churn through. I'll be churning through this for some time to come, I think.

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Reading :: Swarming on the Battlefield

Originally posted: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:00:24

Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future

by Sean J. A. Edwards

Recently I've been reading a lot of these RAND reports and other texts on the swarming doctrine ? a way of attacking enemies that is fundamentally different from the massed formations that have typically characterized mechanized warfare. But most of the swarming literature has been frustratingly short on specifics, and consequently there's a lot of slippage in what swarming actually means. People familiar with military strategy have told me that swarming does not seem to be the fundamental shift in doctrine that it purports to be ? "we've been doing this forever," they have said, referring to decentralized decisionmaking and other characteristics. Part of the problem, I think, is that "swarming" has been overused and stretched to mean too many things; it needs a treatment to nail down the concept, explain the characteristics, provide a variety of case studies, and explain its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

Sean Edwards' study goes most of the way in accomplishing that. Edwards, who worked under Arquila and Ronfeldt at RAND, undertakes a quasi-experimental comparison of several historical cases of swarming: Scythians v. Macedonians, Parthians v. Romans, Seljuk Turks v. Byzantines, Turks v. Crusaders, Mongols v. Eastern Europeans, Woodland Indians v. U.S. Army, Napoleonic Corps v. Austrians, Boers v. British, German U-Boats v. British convoys, and Somalis v. U.S. commandos. For each, he carefully examines the case and catalogues both advantages and disadvantages. Then he summarizes some general conclusions with the appropriate caveats:

The cases have highlighted some successful countermeasures to swarm tactics, such as

• pinning a swarm force using either a part of one's own force or a geographic obstacle (Alexander, Crusades)
• eliminating the swarm force's standoff-fire advantage (Byzantines)
• eliminating the swarm force's mobility or elusiveness advantage (U-boats)
• securing the countryside by building a linked network of fortifications (Macedonians)
• separating the swarmer from his logistics base (Macedonians)

Edwards also make the important point that the threat of WMDs leads armies to consider far more dispersed formations, making swarming more attractive than it might be otherwise.

In all, if you're genuinely interested in swarming as military doctrine, Edwards' study is a really important one to read. But the application appears to be quite strictly military. Edwards does a good job nailing down the term, and in the process, squeezes out the more metaphoric applications (such as Hugh Hewitt's application of the term to blogging). In my book, that's not a bad thing. >

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<< Hell freezes over >>

Originally posted: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 03:54:57

I'm tenured.

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