Reading :: Knowledge Capitalism

Knowledge Capitalism
By Alan Burton-Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also warns:

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

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

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

RISE, SXSW

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Networks and States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we can identify four ways in which the network organizations and associative clusters formed around the Internet might lead to institutional change:

1. By formalizing and institutionalizing the network relations themselves

2. By states' attempts to impose hierarchical regulation upon networked forms

3. By states' utilization and adoption of networked forms

4. By changing the polity; namely, by realigning and expanding the associative clusters around governance institutions (p.46)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you here for ISAWR?

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

• My curriculum vitae.
• My first book (2003)
• My second book (2008)

Thanks for considering me. CS

Reading :: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

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

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

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

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

Jenkins et al. begin by defining participatory culture:

For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one with

1. relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,

2. strong support for creating and sharing creations with others,

3. some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices,

4. members who believe that their contributions matter, and

5. members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created). (pp.5-6)

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

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

Reading in the Future, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Unanticipated Gains

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

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

Here's what Small argues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Reputation

Reputation: A Network Interpretation
By Kenneth H. Craik

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

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

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

• Person knows other
• Other knows person

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

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

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

Craik develops three themes for reputation:

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

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

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

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

Reading :: What's Mine is Yours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What is the role of writing within the new realities of global context?

• What does it mean to be a writer in global context?

• What is literacy in global context?

• How do new global relationships constrain, reflect, or anticipate written genres? And how do genres shape global realities?

• What is the role of writing technologies in global communication? How can technologies bridge, undermine, or complicate writing in global context?

• How do issues of trust and ethos play out in writing in global context?

• How do regulatory environments and legal constraints impact global writers?

• How are problems and potentialities of global writing rhetorically constructed?

• How is writing implicated in technology transfer and technology diffusion, especially between the global north and the global south?

• What kinds of language questions complicate and inform writing (and the study of writing) in global context?

• What new research methods, or objects of study, does the study of writing in global context call out?

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

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

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

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

Special issues of Written Communication follow these guidelines:

1. A CFP will be published and distributed widely at least 6 months before the proposed publication date of the SI.

2. Submitted mss will be accompanied by a letter, addressed to the Editor, noting that the submission is meant for the SI and explaining how the ms addresses the topic of the SI.

3. Members of the journal’s Editorial Board will be used as reviewers, but the editor will also solicit names of other appropriate reviewers on the topic of the SI from EB members and others.

4. Scholars submitting articles for review for the SI may not serve as reviewers for that SI.

5. Published articles will report original research on writing, with explicit attention to methodology.

6. Editorial control of the review process and the selection of published articles rest with the journal editor.

7. Manuscripts not accepted for the SI may be considered for another issue of the journal.

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

Reading :: The Mismanagement of Talent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Swarm Creativity

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

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

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

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

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

Coworking in Austin: FG Squared

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming appearances

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Before Writing, Volume I

Before Writing: Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Last month, I reviewed Denise Schmandt-Besserat's How Writing Came About, a popularization of her research on the origins of writing in the Western world. More specifically, that book was a popularization of Before Writing, Volume I, in which Schmandt-Besserat methodically lays out her argument. That argument, in a nutshell, is that writing emerged from a quirky Sumerian accounting system involving clay tokens. See my review of How Writing Came About for a more in-depth discussion of the argument and timeline. Here, I'm going to concentrate on the additional points that Schmandt-Besserat makes in this more elaborated volume.

Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat tells us, were the earliest uses of clay - predating pottery and architecture (p.29). (Occasionally, they were also made of stone, ocher, or plaster; p.30). She notes that when the token system was being developed, it started with simple tokens, then developed additional complex tokens. We know that these tokens comprised the same system because they "were found together in the same sites and the same hoards and were enclosed in the same envelopes"; they became perforated at the same time; and they are "the prototypes of pictographs representing basic commodities in the Sumerian script" (p.29). And whereas in the popular book Schmandt-Besserat described how the token system led to writing, here she also points out that once writing emerged, the token system dwindled, reverting to a few basic shapes (p.29).

Tokens varied in care and manufacturing from site to site. She notes only one possible piece of evidence for a mold; most were clearly made by hand, some even retaining fingerprints (pp.29-30).

Schmandt-Besserat emphasizes that these tokens were found in disturbed contexts: they were used, then discarded. Furthermore, 88.5% of tokens were from sacred precincts (p.62). In fact, tokens were associated with major public buildings decorated with clay cone mosaics (p.70). Complex tokens evolved in tune with the evolution of archaic Eama, she notes (p.73). In comparison, in Susa, "complex tokens do not appear during the fluorescence of the Susa temple but rather after its destruction by fire" (p.84) - a fact that suggests that the complex token system was introduced by conquerors (p.182).

Who were using these tokens? Most were found in storage units and dumps, although a few were found in houses, swept into hearths (p.95). Very occasionally they are found in tombs.

In the early 4th millennium BC, tokens began to be stored using two related methods. One was clay envelopes - basically hollow balls that were baked with the tokens inside. The other was strings that held perforated tokens; these strings were sealed with bullae that closely resembled small clay envelopes, but were solid, with the ends holding the strings (pp.108-109). Generally, envelopes held simple tokens, while strings held more complex ones (p.110). Counters held in envelopes tended to be smaller and more casually made; they crumble more easily and were likely not fired (p.123).

Marked envelopes were quite rare, but fell into at least three types, which I'll list along with the number of examples: sinking counters into the envelope surface (1); impressing counters onto the envelope surface (14); scratching the counter impression after the envelope dried (2); and possibly perforating the envelope to affix a matching string (7) (pp.127-128). The impressions were usually made with the counters themselves, but sometimes with a stick, stylus, or thumbnail. Some of these techniques were dead ends, but direct impressions and stylus markings were the beginning of writing (p.128).

"The first tablets were a decisive step in the invention of writing and amounted to a revolution in communication technology," Schmandt-Besserat argues (p.129), starting a chapter on impressed tablets. Here we start to see many of the tablets, and for me, this was a moving part of the book: actually seeing the markings on one side of a tablet and a cylinder seal on the other (p.132); seeing the impressions, in an emerging hierarchical order likely carried forward from the accountant's table and the string order, with larger units to the right (p.135); seeing the emerging boustophedon order of marks (p.136); and reading the author's speculation about emerging dual-use styluses for creating wedges (p.137). Schmandt-Besserat carefully traces the evolution of tokens to signs here, tracing 17 signs back to their original token prototypes (p.137), then showing the point at which scribes made the leap to creating pictographic representations of tokens rather than simply impressing them (p.139). After all, "the major drawback of the impressed technique was the blurring of the shapes of their token prototypes," meaning that they had to be identified in context (p.142); pictographs helped to address this issue. Schmandt-Besserat offers charts comparing drawings of tokens with later pictographs, making it easy to see how one is represented by the other - but it doesn't have the tremendous impact of the photographs of tablets in which impressions and pictographs are mixed (p.143). (My note on this page reads: "Damn! There they are!")

Remarkably, by the time they began using pictographs, our early scribes had made the leap of abstracting numbers. Whereas counters were repeated in 1:1 correspondence, pictographs never were (p.153).

Now we get to the analysis. Since much of this was covered in my review of her other book, I'll just hit the highlights.

One, Schmandt-Besserat firmly associates developments in writing with developments in civilization. Before agriculture, we have sparse evidence of writing-like activity, mostly notched bones, which carried quantitative data about which we can only speculate (p.160). Agriculture began "a new economy based on sedentariness, new settlement patterns in open air villages, new technologies such as ground and polished stone, and the use of new raw materials such as clay" - and also "generated new symbols," which "were different in form and content from anything used previously": the entirely manmade clay tokens (p.161). Schmandt-Besserat speculates that these tokens were themselves the evolution of a previous system using natural materials (twigs, sticks, grains); but the token system comprised unique shapes "for the unique purpose of record keeping" (p.161). The greatest novelty was that these comprised a system, one that could be expanded (p.161) and that represented both quantitative and qualitative information (ex: three sheep tokens) (p.162).

Intriguingly, this new reckoning technology did not seem to have anything to do with the exchange of goods, but rather for administration in the newly hierarchical context of agriculture (pp.167-168). Indeed, social organization determined the function of writing: egalitarian (tribal) societies only needed to tally, while rank (institutional) societies had to develop accounting to support "an elite overseeing a redistributionist economy" (p.170). (Compare this to David Ronfeldt's thesis about forms of organization.) Evidence suggests that counting developed as a status symbol: "writing, therefore, bestowed on the ruler the full control over the input, as well as the output, of the community properties" (p.172). With the rise of the State, complex tokens emerged (along with temples, "monumental architecture, the monopoly of force, and bureaucracy, which point to new strategies in pooling communal resources," p.178). In this context, envelopes and bullae were used to represent unpaid taxes (p.181). In this reading, complex tokens in distant countries represented tribute; recall that in Susa, "complex tokens, envelopes, and impressed tablets appear after the destruction of the temple, when the monumental buildings were replaced by modest structures" (p.182).

Schmandt-Besserat then discusses counting and the emergence of writing. Counting, she points out, is not innate but learned (p.184); in some groups, in fact, counting does not involve "finding out how many items there were in a set" so much as "comparing or verifying a collection" (p.185). If you represent five sheep with five tokens, and you verify your collection by matching each sheep with a token, that's comparing, not counting as we might think of it. The token system, then, didn't initially provide for abstract counting: it didn't separate the item from the count. Bear in mind that "the human brain has not evolved since the appearance of Homo sapiens-sapiens about seventy thousand years ago"; they had the same capacity we do, but the hunting-and-gathering way of life did not challenge them to develop abstract counting (p.189). That changed with tokens, which introduced cardinality tied to object specificity (pp.189-190). Tokens did not express abstract numbers; they were the numbers. But at some point, the increasing complexity of the system led to abstract numbers, which appear on the first pictographic tablets (p.191). Abstract numbers, she speculates, were invented by one nameless individual (p.192), but spread rapidly.

The first abstract numerals were impressed signs, formerly representing quantities of commodities, but now abstracted. They retained a dual meaning for a while, until the concrete meaning was replaced with other symbols (p.193). True pictography, Schmandt-Besserat argues, resulted from abstract counting. Eventually, pictographs began to be used phonetically - a change that, Schmandt-Besserat says, was not socioeconomically triggered as the others were (p.194).

Like her other book, this one really impressed me (pun intended) with the scope of history, the pressures that led to the invention of writing, and the fact that it could have gone so much differently (and in other parts of the world, did, of course).

This book is a bit longer and more technical than How Writing Came About, but it's still very readable and gripping. If you're thinking about picking up one of these books, I'd suggest this one just because it's more complete. But definitely pick one of them up - the story they tell is absolutely fascinating.

Reading :: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One)
By Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

I've been putting off writing this review for a while because I knew it would take time to write. Eisenstein's book is a classic, and is widely cited, particularly among scholars who want to draw a parallel between the printing revolution and our current explosion of digital texts and genres. It's also a very large book: 708pp, excluding bibliography and back matter. The size is daunting, but the material is interesting and often gripping. And although I'm not a historian, Eisenstein seems to be careful about the claims she makes, taking time to answer critics of her earlier publications.

At least one critic wasn't convinced: the anonymous critic who wrote notes in the margins of this library book. According to this critic, "she spends too much time proving that all of her predecessors are wrong, & too little time saying anything." But without impugning the anonymous critic, I found much that was worthwhile in this book.

Eisenstein is specifically concerned with the printing revolution in early-modern Europe, beginning in the late 15th century. She argues that this revolution is an "unacknowledged revolution," that is, that printing had a far broader paradigmatic impact than has previously been acknowledged. "Far from being integrated into other works," she complains, "studies dealing with the history of printing are isolated and artificially sealed off from the rest of historical literature" (pp.5-6). Yet "neither political, constitutional, ecclesiastical, and economic events nor sociological, philosophical, and literary movements can be fully understood without taking into account the influence the printing press has exerted upon them" (p.7). Printed materials are so common now that we take for granted how much they have impacted and changed our lives:

Indeed the more abundant [quotidian printed materials] have become, the more frequently they are used, the more profound and widespread their impact. Typography is thus still indispensable to the transmission of the most sophisticated technological skills. It underlies the present knowledge explosion and much of modern art. In my view, at least, it accounts for much that is singled out as peculiarly characteristic of mid-twentieth century culture. But, I repeat, the more printed materials accumulate, the more we are inclined to overlook them in favor of more recent, less familiar media. (p.17).

If you're familiar with my work, you can imagine how compelling this thesis would be to me. You may also see a parallel to Denise Schmandt-Besserat's argument on how writing came about, which attributes similarly sweeping changes to that earlier revolution.

Eisenstein argues that beyond printing itself, the printing press led a new coordination of intellectual labor, in which the printer became a boundary-crosser who wore many hats (p.56). Printing also allowed easier comparisons and cross-references (p.72). Suddenly, for instance, Montaigne "could see more books [in] a few months ... than earlier scholars had seen after a lifetime of travel," and consequently conflict, diversity, and contradictions became more visible to him than to his predecessors (p.74). But the printing press didn't just enable new enlightenment, it also enabled new mystification: one working thesis was that various ancient philosophical and mystical texts were fragments of an ancient ur-text penned by Adam, encapsulating secrets revealed to him before the Fall (pp.77-78). Similarly, another initial effect was to widely disseminate "seemingly authoritative, actually fraudulent esoteric writings" (p.78). Tools that were useful in one domain, such as astronomical tables, were applied in other domains, resulting in "the fixing of precise dates for the Creation or for the Second Coming" (p.79).

Print culture also generated new genres and components. For instance, there was no equivalent in scribal culture for the new how-to books (p.88). Print leveraged the power of identical copies, so indexes became practical and desirable (p.91). Indexes and cross-references, though based on previous forms, were newly systematized (p.93).

At the same time, the more accessible ancient texts became, the less mystical and less relevant they became: in the case of the Corpus Juris, for example, printing led to access, which led to demystification (pp.103-104). New forms of classification became possible, and publishers established the lasting, seemingly fundamental division between sciences and humanities in order to divide their catalogs more easily (p.107).

The sciences developed under print culture. In particular, data (tables, charts, indexes) had often been garbled by scribes, and ignorant printers tended to garble them more quickly; but strong printers corrected them more quickly, and through sometimes innovative methods: "They created vast networks of correspondents, solicited criticism in each edition, sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted the errors which would be weeded out" (p.109). Related, print culture resulted in a new ethos for guarding data: Thomas Jefferson exemplifies this new ethos, arguing that valuable data were best preserved by making them public - and printing them frequently (p.116).

Printing affected law in similarly fundamental ways. "Much as M. Jourdain learned that he was speaking prose, monarchs learned from political theorists that they were 'making' laws. But members of parliaments and assemblies also learned from jurists and printers about ancient rights wrongfully usurped. Struggles over the right to establish precedents became more intense, as each precedent became more permanent and hence more difficult to break" (p.119).

Printing also affected public life, particularly through journals, gazettes, and newsletters. By the 18th century, "Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellow men"; by the 19th, "gossiping churchgoers could often learn about local affairs by scanning columns of newsprint in silence as well." Eisenstein forwards print as an explanation for the weakening of community ties during that time (p.131). "To read a printed report encourages individuals to draw apart," she argues, and "the shift in communications may have changed the sense of what it meant to participate in public affairs. The wide distribution of identical bits of information provided an impersonal link between people who were unknown to each other" (p.132). Communal solidarity was diminished, but "vicarious participation in more distant events was also enhanced" and "new forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties" (p.132). Similarly, private life began to change, with progressively differentiated groups of readers (men, women, children); age-grades in schools; peer groups; and an emerging youth culture (p.134; cf. Hernandez). Eisenstein also hints at the impact of printing on the emergence of the modern State (pp.134-135; cf. Bobbitt).

The above summary, I'm afraid, is only of Part I of the book. In subsequent chapters, Eisenstein examines a number of topics in greater detail. First, she examines the Renaissance and the Reformation. In particular, she argues that in Italy, the advent of printing helps to explain "a shift in human consciousness and a concurrent revolution in communications" (p.226). Print enabled greater border-crossing (p.249). It enabled a classical revival, initially involving a flood of mysticism, but giving way to less mysterious, more systematic study (p.279).

During the Reformation, Eisenstein argues, Protestantism was the first movement to exploit print's potential as mass medium and for propaganda (p.304). Luther believed that printing was "'God's highest and extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward'" - and also as "'the last flame before the extinction of the world'" (p.304). (It's worth noting that last semester, as I was reading this book, someone at the edge of campus handed me a tract that made a similar claim based on the penetration of digital media.) Luther was nevertheless take aback when his 95 Theses, which he had expected to circulate locally among academics, were reprinted and disseminated widely (p.306). "If we stay at the Wittenberg church with Luther we will miss seeing the historical significance of the event," Eisenstein states, sounding like Latour (p.310). Part of that significance was that Bible printing had changed the church. Eisenstein quotes Eugene Rice as arguing that the medieval church was more ecumenical and compromising, with more room for doctrinal disagreements; during the Reformation, doctrinal disagreements polarized into Protestantism and Catholicism (p.325). Eisenstein suggests that print precipitated this change (p.325). Indeed, when the Catholic church began to ban books, it created what publishers considered to be an irresistable untapped niche with built-in appeal (p.416).

Print also allowed people to compare religious texts, to examine them in different languages, and to study them independently. Calvin, for instance, represented "a new kind of theologian, one who had taken no degree in theology and had never been ordained priest" (p.402). "On the desirability of lay literacy, doctrinaire Calvinists and more tolerant Erasmians, ambitious men of letters, and profit-seeking printers were all in accord" while Anglicans "objected, in 1543, to Bible-reading among 'women, apprentices, husbandmen'" (p.421). For Puritans, Bible-reading was "the most vital principle of [their] creed" (p.421). Protestantism, Eisenstein argues, was a "book religion," and she outlines the cycle that encouraged and established this culture (p.422). This print culture resulted in books of coded behavior, "internalized by silent and solitary readers" and manifesting in a "voice of individual conscience"; but it also created a collective morality - including "a 'middle class' morality which harked back to Xenophon and the Bible [and] was fixed in a seemingly permanent mold" (p.429).

Print's effects on religion were sometimes much darker: Eisenstein attributes the witch craze as a byproduct of printing - as well as literal fundamentalism, which became more widely possible as more people became conversant with the literal Bible (p.439). "The many changes introduced by the new technology, far from synchronizing smoothly or pointing in one direction, contributed to disjunctions, worked at cross-purposes and operated out of phase with each other" (p.440).

In science, "the shift from script to print preceded a transformation of world views" (p.459). Before print, knowledge degraded with copies. For instance, Ptolemaic world maps were copied by hand, degrading rather than evolving, with no established process of feedback (p.479). Printing, on the other hand, expanded the number of possible contributors, contributors who were not "educated"and so could make original contributions rather than recapitulating the contributions of the past (p.486).

Science was also directly impacted by religion. For instance, Christians had a challenge in locating Easter both on a repeating calendar and in proximity with the season. This complex problem spurred developments in calendars, astronomy, and chronology (p.610); "By a seeming paradox, their most sacred festival kept Christians bent toward puzzle-solving of a purely scientific kind" (p.611). Similarly, "The Koran did not provide the same incentive that the Vulgate did to master strange tongues or dig up ancient scrolls" (p.612). Print enabled the expansion of techniques that resulted from these religiously grounded complex puzzles.

In her conclusion, Eisenstein links the print revolution to the emergent digital texts she saw (in 1979, when the book was published). She points out that "the process that began in the mid-fifteenth century has not ceased to gather momentum in the age of the computer print-out and the television guide. Indeed the later phases of an on-going communications revolution seem altogether relevant to what is happening within our homes, universities, or cities at present. In particular, they are relevant to apocalyptic pronouncements about contemporary Western culture delivered by modern intellectuals and literati" (p.704).

Overall, this book was fascinating, and it provides a good starting point for examining and theorizing the enormous changes that the print revolution abetted. I particularly appreciated the focus on more quotidian texts in addition to great texts such as the Bible, law, and scientific treatises: it's often in the quotidian texts that fundamental changes develop and spread. The book also provides a model for examining contemporary changes in digital texts - changes that surely won't be parallel, but may result in similarly fundamental cultural and paradigmatic changes. If you're interested in writing, and you have a solid chunk of time to devote to reading a book, try this one out.

Coworking in Austin: Perch Coworking

Like many other Austin coworking spaces (Conjunctured, Soma Vida, Brainstorm, Space12), Perch Coworking is in East Austin. But its space is very different. Located "on the ground floor corner of a mixed-use development," Perch has a clean modern design that fits in with the rapidly gentrifying area - and the young independent professionals who are living and working here.

Those two themes - design and local independents - surfaced frequently in my talk with Perch's owner, Lisa McTiernan. Lisa, who does homeowner association management for condominiums, opened Perch in late October. Like many independents, Lisa is often on the move, but still needs somewhere to land and to have occasional meetings. Since her HOA client base is in the central/east Austin area, she began looking for "interesting, affordable, workable workspace in central or east Austin." But she also had other requirements in mind: a beautiful space with a modern design aesthetic ("minimalistic, clean, uncluttered"), natural light, and ground floor access.

Lisa had heard of coworking when she lived in Los Angeles, so she began researching area coworking spaces in downtown Austin. But none quite fit her criteria. And then the space on East 6th opened up. After discussing the opportunity with friends, Lisa decided to open the space as a coworking space that would serve as

a community work space for folks who either are freelancers, entrepreneurs, work from home, whatever the case may be. ... they need a non traditional or part time flex office space where they can truly get some serious work done, network with others, have ... a different environment in which to be productive. And also ... a really affordable office space that's low commitment. Just something really flexible and easy.

Perch is not a large coworking space: It consists of an open-plan room and a conference room. But its aesthetic is clean and modern, with thoughtfully placed tables and a beautiful view to the street. (Its furniture and design remind me of Link Coworking more than any other Austin coworking space.) As Lisa says, it's a pleasant environment to work, "flexible and easy," and Lisa is continually thinking about how to tweak the arrangement so that people feel comfortable in the space.

The furniture rolls away - which is useful since Perch also hosts occasional yoga classes. Perch also recently hosted part of the East Austin Studio Tour, displaying local artists' work. Lisa wants that function to be a regular feature, regularly rotating artwork to keep the space fresh.

These features and Perch's ground floor location mean that Lisa gets a fair amount of foot traffic. They also mean that Perch's members are proud to meet their clients in the space.

All in all, Lisa is excited about coworking in general and Perch's role in particular. She believes that "coworking will move in to ... more and more well designed spaces" and one of its key challenges is to ensure that as coworking spaces grow, they don't become cramped. In that sense, Perch is Lisa's manifesto of what a coworking space should be.