Reading :: Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture

Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework
By Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn

I found this book as I was reviewing the literature on adhocracies, and was intrigued by some similarities with the TIMN framework. The book is based on many years of research conducted by Quinn and his colleagues, research that characterizes organizational culture.

The book itself, however, is not a research text but more of a how-to: How do organizations characterize their own internal culture, and how do they use that characterization to better understand how to change it? As the authors state, "The current challenge ... is not to determine whether to change but how to change to increase organizational effectiveness."

To help these organizations characterize their org culture, the authors present a heuristic and various instruments for filling it out. This heuristic, the Competing Values Framework (CVF), is described as "now the most dominant framework in the world for assessing organizational culture." It's a grid with two axes. The horizontal axis "differentiates effectiveness criteria that emphasize flexibility, discretion, and dynamism from criteria that emphasize stability, order, control" (cf. my Genre 2012 presentation). The vertical axis "differentiates effectiveness criteria that emphasize an internal orientation, integration, and unity from criteria that emphasize an external organization, differentiation, and rivalry." So:

• Horizontal: control v flexibility
• Vertical: internal v external

Laying down those axes, you get four quadrants. Clockwise from the top, these are:

• Clan (collaborate)
• Adhocracy (create)
• Market (compete)
• Hierarchy (control)

If you've been following my discussions of Ronfeldt's TIMN framework, you may notice at least a superficial resemblance to his Tribes (Clan), Institutions (Hierarchy), Markets (Market), and Networks (Adhocracy). Ronfeldt has thoughts on the resemblance that are well worth reading.

The authors note that "different organizational values have become associated with different forms of organization." These organizational forms are described in the modern era, not across the sweep of history, and the discussion focuses on workings internal to the organization rather than crossing organizations.

• Hierarchy. This discussion is based on Weber and describes the Hierarchy form as involving 
• a formalized, structured place of work
• stability, predictability, efficiency
• formal rules and policies
• Market. This discussion is based on Williamson and Ouchi and describes the Market form as involving
• transaction costs
• orientation toward the external environment
• economic market mechanisms, competitive dynamics, monetary exchange
• Clan. This discussion is based on Ouchi; the Clan form is specifically traced back to the success of Japanese firms. The Clan form involves
• shared values and goals, cohesion, participativeness, individuality, and "we-ness"
• the organization as an extended family
• teamwork, employee involvement programs, corporate commitment
• semiautonomous work teams; team accomplishment
• Adhocracy. This discussion is not extensively sourced, but seems loosely based on Mintzberg. The Adhocracy form involves
• responsiveness to the information age and its "hyperturbulent, ever-accelerating conditions"
• innovativeness and pioneering initiatives
• fostering of entrepreneurship, creativity, and activity on the cutting edge
• temporary, specialized, dynamic work
• fostering of adaptivity, creativity, and flexibility
• the disintegration of the structure at the end of the project

These organizational forms have competing values and criteria of effectiveness. Yet organizations tend to be a hybrid of such organizational forms, sometimes a hybrid of all four. Furthermore, Cameron and Quinn argue, organizations tend to develop through forms in a particular order:

1. Adhocracy
2. Clan
3. Hierarchy
4. Market

(Note that this order not only contradicts Ronfeldt's TIMN framework (which postulates four basic organizational forms developing in the order Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks over the span of human existence) but also Mintzberg's more complex order in The Structuring of Organizations, in which adhocracy emerges last but shares the principle of mutual adjustment with the earliest form. [Update: I withdraw this statement with regard to Mintzberg; I misread Mintzberg's order. CS 11/2/12] The CVF is simpler, with fewer factors, than Mintzberg's scheme.)

Furthermore, the authors argue, "mature ... organizations tend to develop subunits or segments that represent each of these four culture types." One example is Apple's "pirates" on the Macintosh development team during Steve Jobs' first term, which functioned as a clan.) And "the organization must develop the capability to shift emphases when the demands of the competitive environment require it." Indeed, the authors say, culture change is much less predictable in mature organizations.

The CVF is a powerful heuristic for assessing organizational culture. Yet it is powerful in part because it is reductive and that reductiveness poses limitations. For instance, the developmental account isn't strong, and since it focuses on developments in the modern era, it doesn't give us a good tool for analyzing organizations historically or for analyzing long change. CVF provides a way to see competing values, but not to analyze them in terms of their contradictions, again particularly in terms of how those contradictions lead to developments in the long term. The spatial metaphor leads us to think of increments or decrements in each dimension rather than examining how they overlap or interact and can become points of innovation. And the CVF focuses on culture within an organization, not on how cultural dimensions can stretch across organizations. I'm particularly interested in how the notion of adhocracy can be applied to federations of activities, for instance, but the CVF is not geared to that sort of analysis.

But it doesn't pretend to be. The CVF seems to be very helpful for getting one's arms around the competing values in an organization along these specific dimensions. If you're interested in that sort of analysis, either directly or in terms of how it can interact with other sorts of analyses, definitely check it out.

Reading :: The Craft of Research

The Craft of Research, Third Edition
By Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams

A quick review for a quick read. This book is not weighty, but it does a great job of describing how to think through research arguments as claims that must be supported by reasons and evidence—a formulation that I regularly use in my undergraduate classes. For that reason, this is a good resource for those who are new to research, particularly undergraduates.

Reading :: Mirror Worlds

Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
By David Gelernter

I've discussed David Gelernter before on this blog, in the context of his work on lifestreaming. In this book, Gelernter touches on lifestreaming, but in the context of a larger discussion of where software development is going. Specifically, writing in 1993, Gelernter imagines a world in the not-too-distant future in which complex systems—such as cities, states, and nations—can be modeled in "mirror worlds," providing up-to-the-minute overviews of the changes in those complex systems, giving us the ability to understand those systems better, and thus positively impacting public discourse. Imagine playing SimCity with a real city.

The book is not large, but it does a lot of things. Let me see if I can disentangle these.


Gelernter argues that we often have trouble getting to the big picture, understanding the entire system. Instead, he says, we get mired in the details, something that he calls ant-vision. “Ant-vision is humanity’s usual fate; but seeing the whole is every thinking person’s aspiration. If you accomplish it, you have acquired something I call topsight.” Topsight—the overall understanding of the big picture—is something that we must "pursue avidly and continuously, and achieve gradually." It's a systemic understanding, a way of seeing the whole (see p.11; 30; 42; 51). Mirror worlds are a way to assist in achieving topsight by modeling the complex interactions in an entire system, interactions that are continuously updated via sensors. But topsight, like insight, comes gradually; don't confuse it with the model itself, understand it as something that the model make it possible to achieve.

Gelernter doesn't see mirror worlds as a way to control these complex systems so much as a way to understand them by achieving topsight. And he sees this achievement as not just technical but also public: a way to help people better understand the public information with which they are concerned, a way to "convert the theoretically public into the actually public," and in the process, a way to help the public become better consumers of information who can make better decisions.

As Gelernter describes mirror worlds, he delves into programming concepts: simple ones such as procedures, variables, and recursion, then more complex ones such as tuples. His casual, talky style makes these concepts seem completely commonsensical—in fact, I would have really enjoyed reading this book when I was pursuing my computer science degree.

Overall, the book is really intriguing. Although I think Gelernter ultimately misjudged how achievable mirror worlds would be, I was impressed by the book's scope and by how well Gelernter connected the public sphere, programming, and complexity in a popular book.

Writing :: Activity Streams: Building Context to Coordinate Writing Activity in Collaborative Teams

Hart-Davidson, W., Zachry, M., & Spinuzzi, C. (2012).  Activity streams: Building context to coordinate writing activity in collaborative teams. SIGDOC ‘12: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. New York: ACM.

This is the fourth in my ongoing series on writing publications. Unlike the first three, it's coauthored—in fact, I'm only the third author. Bill and Mark have to take credit for the heavy lifting.

The paper doesn't have a link yet because it hasn't been uploaded to the ACM Digital Library, but it will be soon. (Update: it's linked now—10/10/12.) And if you attended SIGDOC 2012 (which just wrapped), you have the paper on a USB drive.

So: What's interesting about this particular paper? It follows a line of development that Mark, Bill, and I started in the mid-2000s, when we really became interested in the question of how people in knowledge work environments might use social media to communicate. In particular, we had studied proposal writing in three organizations and we had become interested in the possibilities. I had written a literature review on lifestreaming and workstreaming for SIGDOC 2007 (which was rejected), and in the process, we became interested in the notion of activity streams.

In the intervening years, we pursued separate projects. Bill and his research team at WIDE began the project that eventually became Eli. Mark and his research groups began investigating social media and editing history in a remarkable string of papers. I continued studying how people in small, transient teams used various channels to communicate with each other. But the three of us continued to communicate about our projects and their similarities.

This year, Mark served as conference chair for SIGDOC and I served as program chair. Since Bill expressed interest in coming, one of us (I forget who) suggested that we put together a paper that pulled together what we knew about activity streams from our ongoing research. The collaboration worked well, as usual. I pulled the lit review from the rejected 2007 paper, freshened it, and plugged it in; Bill wrote a section on activity streams and recapitulated our earlier research; the three of us contributed summaries of our cases; and we collectively edited the document. I think it turned out pretty well.

What lessons can you learn from this paper? One is that when a paper is rejected, sometimes that's because it doesn't yet serve a purpose. My 2007 workstreaming paper was an okay review, but it didn't have a "so what" beyond the fact that the phenomenon was interesting; I had to think through why workstreaming was important, something that the intervening cases helped me to do.

And it's worth pointing out that this year, SIGDOC's reviewers rejected two of my papers. That's fine: I'm already starting to think through how they could be made useful in other publications.

Reading :: The Tacit Dimension

The Tacit Dimension
By Michael Polanyi

The Tacit Dimension is an oft-cited book, so often cited that I have often felt guilty for not reading it earlier. But when I finally ordered it, I was surprised at how thin it was. The book is a compilation of three lectures, of which the first seems to be the most cited.

Polanyi is concerned about the difference between the over-emphasized role of explicit, expressed knowledge and the less-expressed tacit knowledge—as he puts it on p.4, "I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell" (p.4, his emphasis). How does tacit knowledge work, he asks?

To answer the question, he moves methodically. First, he posits that "the basic structure of tacit knowledge ... always involves two things," one known and the other unknown. "It combines two kinds of knowing." His example is that of unconscious associations learned from administering shocks (p.9). That is, there's a functional relationship between two "terms," in which "we know the first term only by relying on our awareness of it for attending to the second" (p.10). "In an act of tacit knowing we attend from something for attending to something else; namely,  from the first term to the second term of the tacit relation" (p.10).

But there's also a phenomenal relationship between the two terms: "We are aware of that from which we are attending to another thing, in the appearance of that thing."

Together, the functional and phenomenal aspects yield meaning: "When the sight of certain syllables makes us expect an electric shock, we might say that they signify the approach of a shock. That is their meaning to us" (p.11).

Polanyi goes on like this for a bit, reasoning in a stepwise fashion through semantic and ontological meanings (p.13), then discussing why an explicit integration can't fully replace its tacit counterpart (p.20). Honestly, although I appreciated the careful work here, it also seemed quite limiting in the way that these abstract discussions so often do. I began to see why Polanyi's book is so often cited but so rarely described in any detail: the people I have read seem to very much like the notion of tacit knowledge, on knowing more than we can tell, but aren't especially invested in the actual philosophical dissection that interests Polanyi.

Me, I appreciate and respect his effort, even though it's not a discussion that I relish following in detail.

Reading :: Adhocracy

Adhocracy
By Robert H. Waterman, Jr.

Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock coined the term "ad-hocracy" to describe "the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals" (Toffler 1970, p.144). Such adhocracies (let's drop the hyphen), Toffler said, would be composed of experts from different fields who came together to swarm a project objective, rotated leadership during different phases, then dispersed at the end of the project.

Toffler's observation, and especially his term, really took off in the literature. For instance, Mintzberg's The Structuring of Organizations theorized adhocracies within a larger framework of organizational structures and characteristics. Robert Quinn and associates wrote both articles and books (such as Cameron and Quinn's Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework) describing adhocracies as one quadrant of a larger framework of organizational cultures. Others similarly took up the term.

Twenty years after Future Shock, Waterman published this thin volume, simply named Adhocracy. It's not an academic study, it's a business book, and its definition of adhocracy is right on the front cover: "Any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results." Similarly, on p.16, he defines it "broadly" as "any organizational form that challenges the bureaucracy in order to embrace the new." That is, in Waterman's view, an adhocracy functions within the setting of an established bureaucracy. In fact, he says, "I've focused on the most common, sturdy, and visible ad hoc form: the project team, or task force" (p.17).

Startlingly, Waterman says that although Toffler introduced the idea of the adhocracy in Future Shock (and he also cites Warren Bennis' 1960s work as a precursor), "nobody ever really fleshed out the idea, applied it to the business world, sought out success stories, or outlined their common themes" (p.19). This is the task that Waterman takes up—and the results, I think, tell us a lot about Waterman's time and place.

Drawing on interviews and stories from managers, Waterman states that adhocracies need "clear and visible executive support" to thrive (p.28). Since adhocratic work is unstructured and untied to the bureaucratic position (particularly compensation), he says, it requires a managerial perspective and frequent management interaction (p.31). Teams, he says, must represent all parts of the bureaucracy, both horizontally (across the departments in the org chart) and vertically (down the levels of hierarchy in the org chart) (p.36)—and one way to ensure this representation is to use the "diagonal slice" method, slicing diagonally across the org chart to select the appropriate diversity of team members (p.37). To summarize, in Waterman's view, adhocracy is a construct of the existing bureaucracy rather than a different kind of organization.

Indeed, Waterman cautions against measures that threaten the existing bureaucracy, since these measures will also destroy the viability of adhocracies. Writing in 1990, he says, "In the rush to downsize and de-layer, most companies don't have the human resources to make adhocracy work as well as it should. If you agree that rapid change is here to stay and that team efforts work only when staffed with good people, then it's hard not to conclude that there is such a thing as being too lean and too mean" (p.45). Later, Waterman argues that "adhocracy can flourish only in an atmosphere that discourages bureaucratic excess and uses the bureaucracy to structure team efforts" (pp.97-98). Compare these statements with Toffler's description of the adhocracy—"the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals" (Toffler 1970, p.144)—and you'll realize how much this vision diverges from Toffler's. For Waterman, the adhocracy is a temporary tactic deployed within, and reliant on, an existing bureaucracy.

As we know, Waterman's call to resist downsizing was ignored; by 2000, companies were outsourcing all but their core functions. Yet, I would argue, adhocracies did flourish outside of and between organizations—in great part because they were no longer forcibly layered over bureaucratic organizations. But that's an argument I'll develop elsewhere.

Reading :: Tricks of the Trade

Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It
By Howard S. Becker

Howard Becker, one of the more famous members of the Chicago School of Sociology, published this book in 1998. As the title suggests, it's full of the "tricks" of qualitative research that Becker learned the hard way—first by performing his own studies, later by teaching his students how to do the same. "These tricks," he explains, "... are ways of thinking about what we know or want to know that help us make sense of data and formulate new questions based on what we've found" (p.5).

Becker, that is, gives us ideas and answers that don't appear in standard qualitative research textbooks. And for good or ill, his book isn't written as a textbook either: it's written in a narrative, perhaps even rambling, style that is easy to enjoy but hard to skim. The great advantage to it is that we get a fully fleshed idea of how each "trick" works. So, rather than simply describing the "null hypothesis trick" (p.20), Becker sets up the problem of stereotyping and overgeneralization with several pages of description, then introduces the trick as a way to identify, doubt, and investigate those stereotypes and overgeneralizations.

Becker describes these tricks, not just from his own research, but from other sociologists as well (I was impressed by how he used Latour to make a couple of points). And because his style is the way it is, the reader almost feels as if she or he is having a conversation with Becker—not a lecture, but maybe a conversation over a beer after the lecture. It reminded me a bit of Bateson. If you're looking to pick up some tricks—whether you're an experienced researcher or a student—definitely pick up this book.

Reading :: Tales of the Field

Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, Second Edition
By John Van Maanen

During my Q&A at a recent conference, someone characterized my research (again) as ethnography, and I clarified that I considered it a case study approach. It's not that I'm against ethnography, it's that (a) I'm not trained as an ethnographer and (b) I'm much more interested in bounded activities than in culture per se, which is what ethnography studies.

Still, I'm interested in the perspectives of ethnographers, so I've been working on (a). And for that goal, reading John Van Maanen's Tales of the Field was useful, although not world-changing.

Van Maanen's book describes developments in ethnography by focusing on the styles and narrative conventions that ethnographies use—an approach that is potentially quite interesting for writing scholars. He traces ethnography from its beginning in "realist tales" (based in naive empiricism) to "confessional tales" (in which ethnographers woke up to their ethnocentric and cultural biases) to "impressionist tales" (in which ethnographers sought to delight readers with their impressions of the field, giving up on an objectivist account and rather describing things through the ethnographer's eyes).

These shifts in style, he demonstrates, develop in tandem with ethnographers' theoretical stances. That is, in describing style changes, Van Maanen also describes how ethnography has developed theoretically, methodologically, and ethically from its inception to the present day.

If you're interested in ethnography, certainly give it a look.

Reading :: The Anatomy of Persuasion

The Anatomy of Persuasion
By Norbert Aubuchon

For years, I've been using Rich Freed's book Writing Winning Business Proposals in my proposal writing classes and seminars. But someone recently recommended this book, which is used in UT's MA in Technology Commercialization and elsewhere, so I thought I'd check it out.

How is it? I would compare this book with Freed's, but in some ways it's an apples-and-oranges comparison. Even though both books address proposals, even though the resulting proposals have roughly the same structure, and even though the approaches are both methodical, the results are actually quite different documents.

Freed's book addresses proposals in general, but consulting proposals in particular. And these proposals can be insight, planning, or implementation proposals. For these reasons and others, the proposals tend to be long—the example used throughout the book is perhaps eight pages, and Freed clarifies that such proposals can run into the hundreds of pages. Since Freed's book is written based on his work with a consulting firm, the proposals have a heavy focus on problem-solving: they explain how the proposer will go about solving the unique, often ill-defined problem that the client faces.

Aubuchon's book, on the other hand, describes sales proposals, and specifically what Freed would call implementation proposals: Proposals in which the proposer has a ready-made solution. One of the examples, for instance, is a client who needs a new computer system. The salesperson has a system that can meet that need, and just has to describe it. Although Aubuchon's proposal does involve problem-solving, that problem-solving is in terms of how to write the proposal—not how the proposer will go about solving the client's problem, which in this case is fairly clear-cut. The rhetorical situation may not be any less complex, but Aubuchon's proposals carry less of an explanatory burden, so they wind up being 1-2 pages.

Despite those differences, the two books—Aubuchon's book was originally published in 1997, Freed's in 1995—take a fairly similar approach to examining persuasive factors, defining an objective, structuring the proposal, and "debugging" (Aubuchon) or "reconciling" (Freed) the proposal logic. Reading one against the other is fascinating, and together, they helped me gain a different perspective on the range of proposals one might write.

If you're interested in writing proposals, check it out.

TIMN and the Competing Values Network

For the last few years, I've been thinking about David Ronfeldt's TIMN framework, in which he discusses how four basic forms of human organization—tribes, institutions, markets, and networks—developed and how they are advantaged under different sociotechnical conditions. Lately I've been trying to use TIMN as a way to help me better understand adhocracies, which Toffler introduced as a counterpoint to bureaucracies. To put it loosely, bureaucracies are to institutions as adhocracies are to networks.

Together, these led me to Quinn and Cameron's Competing Values Framework, in which the authors characterize organization culture along the dimensions of stability v. flexibility and internal v external focus. They label the four quadrants Clan, Hierarchy, Market, and Adhocracy—labels that seem very similar to Ronfeldt's Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks.

I emailed Ronfeldt about this, and he courteously revised his 2009 post comparing TIMN with other analysts' tables. This is a resource to which I'll be returning again and again as I develop my own understanding of organizational forms; if you're similarly interested, check it out.

Special issue of Written Communication: Methodologies for the Study of Written Communication II

I've mentioned that I'm coediting a TCQ special issue on research methodologies in technical communication. But it's not the only game in town. Written Communication is also gathering a special issue entitled "Methodologies for the Study of Written Communication II: Inherent methodological tensions and new analytic strategies for the study of writing." It looks terrific. If you're working on research methodologies, check it out.

Apply to our MA in Human Dimensions of Organizations

I've been discussing our nascent MA in HDO for a while, but now the application page is up.

Here's the degree description from the linked page:

A Graduate Degree for the Modern Professional 

The leaders of tomorrow need to be well versed in methods for understanding the people around them.  The core of the HDO Master of Arts degree provides training in identifying and solving organizational problems. This professional graduate degree is designed specifically for local, national, and international leaders in the business and nonprofit sectors. For that reason, all HDO courses emphasize the real-world applications of the humanities, social sciences, and behavioral sciences. Each graduate course provides depth in an area of study as well as practical exercises that demonstrate how to use this knowledge in everyday settings. 

HDO’s degree program leverages the core knowledge within the Liberal Arts to instill in students a thorough understanding of the people they interact with everyday, be that interaction face-to-face, virtual, or through outreach and marketing. This cutting-edge degree will improve its students’ abilities to lead, manage, and innovate.

This is an exciting MA designed around the needs of the working professional:

We expect that most HDO graduate students will be employed full time. In fact, the ideal student is one with 5 to 10 years of professional experience. Because of the high demands placed on employed students, HDO organizes its coursework to allow students to balance work and education. 

This 18-month (4-semester) degree is offered as a weekend program. Each semester will begin with an intensive week on campus followed by biweekly Friday and Saturday course meetings. We will also offer distance education by way of videoconferencing for those unable to commute to UT Austin. 

As students graduate from HDO, they will join the ranks of the esteemed alumni of The University of Texas at Austin. The program promises a high-quality alumni network only available through one of the largest, finest universities in the United States. 

Take a look. And if this sounds like you, I hope you can join us!

Proposal writing seminar, part deux

Early this summer, I offered a daylong seminar on proposal writing. It was based on Freed, Freed, and Romano's Writing Winning Business Proposals, Third Edition and materials I've developed over the last fifteen years of teaching this proposal methodology.

People liked the seminar. A lot. So I'll be offering it again on November 30. It'll be a great way to shake off the tryptophan after Thanksgiving.

Interested? Sign up here: http://sites.la.utexas.edu/hdo/seminars/writing-persuasive-business-proposals/

Coworking in Austin: One Year Later

I stopped collecting data on my coworking research project in February 2011, and published my article on it earlier this year. But coworking is still going strong in Austin. The following spaces have opened since I stopped data collection:

• CapitalFactory (which has been active as a startup incubator since 2009 but is now managing a coworking space/tech startup campus)
• Center61
• HubAustin
• Make + Shift
• Plug & Play
• Vuka Co-op

And Cospace has expanded to Cedar Park and Steiner Ranch.

More at the Austin coworking spaces map.

Remember the call for papers, TCQ special issue on contemporary research methodologies in technical communication

A while back I mentioned that Brian McNely, Christa Teston and I will be editing a TCQ special issue on research methodology. Here's the CFP.

Now, I know you're all going to want to submit something. If you have questions, Brian's our main contact. He's expecting your paper proposal by February 15, 2013, so don't be late!

The Dinkey

Just a little reminiscing:


In the first semester of my Ph.D. at Iowa State University, I noticed something very odd. The morning classes started right on the hour, as you would expect them to. For instance, Monday classes ran at 9, 10, and 11. But at noon, classes shifted to 10 minutes past the hour: 12:10, 1:10, 2:10, and so forth. I had never seen this sort of schedule before, and I’ve never seen it since.

Of course, the undergraduates at Iowa State thought that this schedule was completely normal—just the way things were done. But many of the other graduate students, like me, had done our undergraduate work somewhere else. We knew that this was weird.

Finally, a few semesters in, I found out why. One of my fellow graduate students had worked in the university archives, and had turned up the answer.

“Oh,” he told me offhandedly, “It’s because of the Dinkey.”

I had never heard of it. “What on earth is the Dinkey?”

The Dinkey, he told me, was a small steam train that had connected the Iowa State campus with downtown Ames. For a nominal fare, students and faculty could ride the Dinkey to and from town. It ran about every two hours, arriving on campus right about the top of the hour. So, he explained, faculty and students would sometimes catch the Dinkey, ride into town for lunch, then come back for afternoon classes. The extra 10 minutes were just enough time for these riders to jump off the train and hurry to class.

“But Scott,” I pointed out, “there’s no more Dinkey.”

“Nope,” he replied. “They decommissioned it during World War II.” It had been over fifty years since the Dinkey had made its last run, and Iowa State’s schedule was still built around it.

Writing :: Genre and generic labor

Spinuzzi, C. (2012). Genre and generic labor. In C. Bazerman, C. Dean, J. Early, K. Lunsford, S. Null, P. Rogers, and A. Stansell (Eds.), International Advances in Writing Research: Cultures, Places, Measures. Perspectives on Writing. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/wrab2011/

This is the third in my ongoing series on writing publications. Unlike the first two, this one is in an open-access publication. So if you like, you can download the PDF right now, skim the publication, and come back.

All right? This is a somewhat unusual piece for me in that it's based on a previously published study, my 2010 Written Communication piece. As I was preparing for the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders conference, I had been thinking through several issues: (a) the readings I had recently done by Castells and others about labor and organization; (b) how those readings might interact with genre theory; and (c) how to deal with automated texts. To help me with these, I used an existing case rather than starting a new study. The exercise turned out to be fairly rewarding.

In fact, I ended up revamping and extending this presentation for the Genre 2012 conference. There, I told the audience that I was still flogging this study, published in 2010, for the same reason that many of us end up eating turkey sandwiches for a week after Christmas.

Anyway. Let's talk a bit about the argument and what's behind it.

The Gist and Development
The chapter, as I indicate above, is a think piece. As I looked back over my previous attempts to characterize genre, I notice that I tended to place them on a continuum, which might be characterized as official-unofficial or stable-flexible or etc. Others working within the tradition of North American genre theory have tended to do the same thing, largely because we're all drawing on Bakhtin.

But the problem with a continuum is that it only represents a single dimension. As I began reading works such as Castells' The Internet Galaxy, I began to realize that it addressed issues I had noticed in my studies but hadn't described well—specifically, issues involving handing off processes to texts. For instance, in my first book, I wrote quite a bit about how the traffic accident database ALAS automated texts and tasks that had previously been generated manually. But there and elsewhere, I had lumped in automation with the official-unofficial distinction. Castells' work—especially his distinction between self-programmable and generic labor—seemed to handle the issue more precisely.

So the next step was to figure out how to put these two insights into dialogue. To do this, I drew on the recent study as a thought experiment:

• Could I synthesize them, layering the self-programmable/generic distinction over the unofficial/official one? Not really: they were getting at different things. 
• Could I substitute one for the other? Again, not really. As I compared them, I realized that each provided different insights.
• Could I treat them as two different distinctions, two "dimensions" along which I could characterize given genres? Why, yes, I could.

The result was Table 5 on p.500, which really helped me to figure out these distinctions and narrow down exactly what I was trying to say. Although this table comes late in the paper, it was really the germ from which the rest of the argument grew.

The Cycles

But I soon realized that characterizing genres along two dimensions, although a contribution, wasn't enough to anchor an argument. Theoretically, it didn't do enough. Practically—well, to be blunt, it didn't fill the pages. And let's face it, length is a motivating factor. (Although most of the time I feel  pressure in the opposite direction, having to edit down my work.) So, I thought, what can I do to fill this argument out a bit?

Fortunately, Bakhtin and Castells are both concerned with development, which is also a strong theme in my own work. So, once I disentangled these two dimensions of analysis, I began thinking through how they developed. And these became figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1, the official-unofficial piece, was easy. After all, I had written about the issue of genre development in my dissertation, although not with such brevity. So it didn't take too long to sketch a reasonable figure on butcher paper in my kitchen. (Lately I've found that when doing conceptual work, I tend to get more traction with big pieces of paper.)

And once I set up Figure 1, I had an easier time putting together Figure 2, based on Castells' work. Figure 2 is modeled after Figure 1, which limits its format and focuses the insights that it might provide. At the same time, it is based on all the sources in Table 4; I didn't just shoehorn my impressions into a ready, compatible format. At least, I don't think I did. See what you think.

The Process

As you might imagine, writing a theoretical piece like this one is different from writing up a study. The theoretical piece has to be

• internally consistent, following consistent internal logic with consistent premises.
• consistent with the literature, accountable to everything cited in the piece.
• consistent with the examples, in this case, the Written Communication piece.

Putting it that way makes a theory piece seem very complex and difficult to manage. But in practice,  these different sorts of consistencies make a theoretical piece much easier to write. That's because they cross-check each other: they provide different sorts of limitations or boundaries that, together, describe the shape of the theoretical contribution. 

For that reason, this argument turned out to be very easy to put together. But that's because 

• I consciously tried to establish consistencies across the different parts of the argument. 
• I had a thorough knowledge of both sets of the literature—and I was also diligent about looking up and providing cites to establish the major points.
• I had a well-suited extended example that I could use to double-check the results.

The Result

So that's the story with this piece. I'm fairly happy with it, although it's still a bit new and exploratory, and the line of thinking will undoubtedly develop further. But see what you think, and feel free to talk back in the comments.

Symmetry as a methodological move, part III

I've been discussing the principle of symmetry in actor-network theory on the blog. In previous posts, I've tried to use commonplace examples to demonstrate how, rather than being a form of pantheism or an antihumanist sociology, symmetry is simply a way of getting at certain relationships that are often overlooked or even buried in other approaches. When we examine these relationships in fairly restricted ways—weight requirements in elevators or falling bodies—symmetry makes a great deal of sense. But when we move to more complex phenomena, symmetry seems like a dicier proposition. 

For instance, let's consider cognition.

Latour famously proposed in Science in Action that we institute a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology. (Hakkarainen criticized this moratorium in a 2003 Science and Education issue, complaining that Latour mentions this moratorium every so often, always extending it for ten years.) This moratorium came out of Latour's observations of scientific work, in which he noticed that scientists would assemble a large array of nonhumans and humans—instruments, procedures, lab techs, etc.—to perform science, then attribute the results to cognition. Without all of these nonhuman and human intermediaries, Latour argued, cognition could not have provided an adequate explanation.

Let's use an analogy. Suppose that as you walk home, you spot your neighbor on the roof. Do you think to yourself, "I am amazed that my neighbor can jump so high!" Or do you look for a ladder? Analogically speaking, Latour always looks for the ladder. He sees the alternate explanation—based entirely on human ability—as rather implausible. Yes, it's always a possibility, but (Latour might say) let's look for the ladder first.


This does not mean that actor-network theory is anti-cognition, as Hakkarainen and others have interpreted it to be. ANT is no more anti-cognition than a fork is anti-soup. 


No better demonstration of this point exists than Latour's positive review of Edwin Hutchins' 1995 book Cognition in the Wild. Latour declares: 

The results of Hutchins' inquiry are as devastating for psychology as the results of sociology were for epistemology or those of Shirley Strum for primatology. Everything that was crammed inside the mind of individuals is deployed outside and shared collectively with the culture, through the social connections and with the many cognitive artifacts the group has been able to devise. (p.55)

To put it another way: Hutchins, like Latour, looks for the ladder. 


But more than that, Hutchins refuses to separate cognition from mediating artifacts. In Hutchins' account, "cognition" is not confined to what happens inside the skull, but is instead distributed across a given environment. Latour summarizes the central claim of the book this way: 

cognition has nothing to do with the minds nor with individuals but with the propagation of representations through various media, which are coordinated by a very lightly equipped human subject working in a group, inside a culture, with many artifacts and who might have internalized some parts of the process. (p.56, Latour's italics).

To understand what's happening here, let's dive into Hutchins' book itself. Here's what he says about cognition in Chapter 2:

Having taken ship navigation as it is performed by a team on the bridge of a ship as the unit of cognitive analysis, I will attempt to apply the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation—to the operation of this system. In so doing I do not make any special commitment to the nature of the computations that are going on inside individuals except to say that whatever happens there is part of a larger computational system. But I do believe that the computation observed in the activity of the larger system can be described in the way cognition has been traditionally described—that is, as computation realized through the creation, transformation, and propagation of representational states. (Hutchins, 1995, p. 49)

So Hutchins approaches the notion of cognition by defining it narrowly, as computation. In committing to this computational account, Hutchins takes a radically symmetrical perspective. Rather than drawing lines between what transpires inside and outside one's head, Hutchins examines computation—and thus propagation of representational states—wherever it happens. He brilliantly demonstrates that much of what we might have assumed was expertise or intelligence is instead attributable to how these representational states propagate. For instance, he argues that by all rights the sailors he studied should not have had the depth of experience needed to perform the navigational feats they performed; but these feats were attributable to the entire system of sailors plus other computational media. 


(As a side note, this book had a deep impact on me as I was planning the study for my doctoral dissertation. For instance, as I was developing the notion of the genre ecology in my own work, I ran across Freedman and Smart's 1997 article "Navigating the current of economic policy," in which they coined the term "genre ecology" and modeled it after Hutchins' concept of "tool ecology" in this book. After reading their article, I picked up Hutchins' book, and its influence was key to my understanding of genres as co-mediating each other.) 


To get at what Hutchins is trying to say, let's leave the ship for a moment and look at what he says late in the book about Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine, he says, a room in which John Searle sits. Outside the room, people bring slips of paper on which they have written questions in Chinese. One by one, each person passes her or his slip of paper through a slot in the door; a few moments later, the person receives a reply, also written in Chinese. 


Does Searle know Chinese? Perhaps. Let's suppose that in one scenario, Searle knows how to read and write Chinese and is composing answers on the fly. In a second scenario, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but has several baskets of Chinese characters plus a rulebook that tells him how to combine them to respond to certain strings of characters. (The second scenario is very similar to that of Fred Saberhagen's first Berserker story, "Without a Thought.") In the second scenario, Hutchins argues, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but (for our purposes) the room does. Or to put it another way, the "cognitive properties of the sociocultural system" are different from "the cognitive properties of a person who is manipulating the elements of that system" (p.362). Cognition—in the narrowly defined sense that Hutchins uses the term—is stretched across the human agent and the environment, resulting in accomplishments that could not have resulted from the human agent alone. Searle has a ladder.


And with that, we can see why Latour does something that critics such as Hakkarainen haven't caught. He lifts the moratorium on cognitive explanations:

When I published Science in Action in 1987, I proposed a "moratorium" on cognitive explanations, which had been so freely and cheaply entertained by epistemologists. ... I did not know that I would be able to safely lift the ban, less than 10 years later, since in the meantime, cognitive explanations would have been dissolved past recognition [by Hutchins]." (p.62)

Genre 2012: Are automated genres still genres?

I just finished my Genre 2012 presentation on genre development in partially automated environments. As promised, here it is. Let me know what you think!

Genre 2012 are automated genres still genres

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

"Working Alone Together" is free for a limited time

A little while ago I was excited to announce that my study of coworking in Austin, "Working Alone Together," was available. Now I'm even more excited to announce that the Journal of Business and Technical Communication has made the article free for a limited time. If you're interested in coworking, please do click through and grab the PDF. And let me know what you think in the comments.

Reading :: The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy

The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy
By David Guile

David Guile, who teaches at the Institute of Education at the University of London, takes on the question of how the knowledge economy challenges education. Grounding his arguments in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and related thought, Guile carefully examines the assumptions behind the knowledge economy literature, particularly assumptions about scientific and tacit knowledge, then develops an account of CHAT that both challenges these assumptions and provides a firmer basis for education going forward.

At the heart of Guile's critique of the knowledge economy literature is its tendency to see knowledge as relatively unproblematic "information generation, processing and transmission" (p.13), a tendency that Guile detects in Bell, Castells, and other knowledge economy writers, rather than as emerging through human interpretation, comprehension, and competence (p.24). Indeed, "Castells, like Bell, treats knowledge and information as though they are malleable, serve utilitarian functions in society, and their meaning is quite transparent" (p.43).

This tendency leads such thinkers to focus on tacit knowledge, which they discuss by citing Polanyi without quite getting Polanyi's more nuanced concept. That is, tacit knowledge is seen as a "tricky kind of knowledge to put to work in the economy ... because it is embodied in people and embedded in networks" (p.24). Yet, Guile argues, Polanyi lays out tacit and explicit knowledge as interdependent dimensions of knowledge, not separated; mediated, not binary (p.39).

To provide an alternate account, Guile turns to CHAT work, including Ilyenkov, Roth, and Engestrom. In particular, Guile is interested in Engestrom's understanding of coconfiguration and knotworking (pp.118-119). Engestrom's contribution, Guile argues, is a reconceptualization of the relationship between theory and practice (p.123). Yet Guile also argues that Engestrom tends to (a) underplay the challenge of eliminating sources of friction in activity systems and activity networks, and (b) overstate the necessity and suitability of his interventionalist methodology (p.124).

Overall, I found this book to be an illuminating read. It goes farther into learning theory than I generally care to go, but then again, the book is founded on educational theory. If that's your focus, the book is definitely worth it. But even if your focus is more along the lines of workplace studies, as mine is, the book will provide valuable insights. Take a look.

Reading :: The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism

The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism
By Ami Pedahzur

According to Pedahzur, counterterrorism is usually pursued under three models—"the war model, the criminal-justice model, and the reconciliatory model" (p.1). Each suggests a different set of responders—the military, the police and state legal system, and the politicians and diplomats. And "standing in the background is the defensive model, which does not deal directly with the terrorists or their grievances but rather protects the targets of terrorism" (p.1).

Of these models, the defensive model tends to be quite effective, and the war model tends not to be very effective at all. Yet, Pedahzur argues, the war model has been most readily used during Israel's history—not because it is effective at stopping terrorism, but because it is effective at making citizens feel protected, therefore winning elections.

Pedahzur makes his case by reviewing the entire security history of the state of Israel, discussing different operations with their successes and failures, the inter-agency rivalries that have made coordination so hard, and the political circumstances that led politicians to focus on the war model with its targeted killings, commando actions, and reprisals. He argues that terrorism is not a threat to the state itself, and treating it as such means undermining civil liberties while drawing the security establishment's attention away from more credible threats.

In all, a well written and gripping book.

Writing :: Working Alone, Together

Spinuzzi, C. (2012). Working alone, together: Coworking as emergent collaborative activity. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 26(4).

Okay, this is the second in my ongoing series on writing publications.  The cite and link above are to the OnlineFirst version of the article, both of which will likely change as the article gets closer to publication. But for now, there they are. If you or your institution have a subscription, please do click through and take a look at it.

Done reading? Let's talk about how I put this thing together. As in the rest of this blog series, here I'll focus on my writing process and choices. The hope is that this "behind the scenes" look will help other scholars to see what went into producing this piece.

The Gist
This article is the result of a research study I started a while back focused on coworking in Austin. Click that link and you'll see a series of blog posts dating back to April 2008. If you have the time and inclination, you can go back to that point and see how my understanding of coworking evolved over time, and in fact you might see parts of these blog posts migrating into the article itself. More on that in a moment.

My analysis was heavily influenced by some of the same issues I discussed in "Losing by Expanding"—in fact, although that piece was published first, it developed from the analytical issues that developed during this and other recent case studies. In a nutshell, the analytical framework I typically use for examining workplace interactions, third-generation activity theory (3GAT), assumes some things that don't hold true in the sort of loosely organized, digitally mediated work that we find in coworking spaces. "Losing by Expanding" articulated that problem and outlines an fourth-generation activity theory (4GAT) approach; "Working Alone, Together" applies that approach.

As you'll see in the article, the 4GAT approach helps us to better understand some of the contradictions we tend to see in coworking spaces.

The Genesis
If you want to know about the exact moment I first heard of coworking, I blogged it. The principals at Conjunctured had just signed a lease for what would become Austin's first coworking space, and Cesar and John Erik were kind enough to sit down with me separately to discuss it. As you'll see in that blog post, I was busily trying to connect their description with the analysis I had just completed for my 2008 book Network and my subsequent thoughts about how to manage projects in distributed workspaces.

I decided to study how Conjunctured worked, so I developed and submitted an IRB proposal, then waited for it to cycle through as I conducted my Semoptco study (heavily influenced by the same themes). By the time I was able to formally interview the Conjunctured principals in early 2009, another space had begun offering coworking (Soma Vida). And by the time I interviewed them, other spaces had announced their intention to open. Eventually, in early 2011, I had to stop visiting coworking spaces and just write the article.

If you're interested in the different spaces, see the coworking tag, where I profiled each space. More on that below.

The Research Methodology
At the time I began my coworking study, I had just finished my chapter in Amy Kimme Hea's collection Going Wireless, in which I argued that researchers must bring participants more consciously into the research process as a matter of self-protection. Traditional qualitative research approaches assume that the researcher is the only one with publishing power, so s/he has traditionally been encouraged to conduct member checks to give some measure of power and self-representation back to the participants. But this is 2012, and many of my participants have publishing power too—they have far more social media followers than I have readers. In this environment, fairly representing participants isn't just a matter of being nice, it's critical.

So as I began investigating coworking spaces, I used several avenues to make sure that I represented coworking proprietors fairly, starting with the space profiles I posted to my blog (which functioned as a trust-building measure in addition to a preliminary examination of each site). I also conducted member checks. Additionally, I leveraged their public social media, such as their spaces' Facebook pages and Yelp profiles—a lifesaver, since coworkers, with their irregular schedules, are difficult to consistently observe.

Given that this study was mostly based on proprietors' and coworkers' statements (in interviews, in collateral, in social media) rather than observations, I had to frame my claims carefully. Throughout the article, I emphasize: this is what coworkers and proprietors say about their work.

The Composition
In previous studies, I've tried focusing on one workplace or a small set of workplaces. But with coworking, I had to examine a whole range of them. It turned out to be a complex management issue. How could I analyze these very different workspaces in a way that would make sense?

To attack the problem, I decided to go back to three basic elements of activity theory: the subject, the object, and the outcome. In the paper, these turned into research questions: Who coworks? What is coworking? Why do people cowork? And once I sorted these out, I was able to connect them quite easily with my coding scheme.

Of course, people open and work at coworking sites for very different reasons. In the first version I submitted to JBTC, I had trouble articulating how these divergent reasons added up to an activity theory analysis; one reviewer thought that the results seemed incoherent and wondered whether coworking was anything more than a label. In my revision, I was able to articulate how these apparent contradictions in the subject, object, and outcome represented two separate configurations of coworking: the "good neighbors" configuration and the "good partners" configuration. It was at this point that the work in "Learning by Expanding" really began to pay off and the theoretical contribution became useful.

The Result
So I'm pretty happy with the result. Coworking is an endlessly fascinating topic, but also somewhat amorphous and a constantly moving target. In this article, I think I've been able to sketch the phenomenon fairly well—although coworkers in places other than Austin might see key differences, and even Austinites might feel that this snapshot doesn't adequately reflect coworking in 2012. But it provides a starting place for understanding coworking as part of a larger movement toward distributed work and perhaps a way to examine and predict further work trends. It develops activity theory to better account for this sort of work. And it moves the ball on leveraging social media in qualitative research. I'm pretty happy with it, and I hope you will be too.

Was this "behind-the-scenes" account useful? Let me know in the comments.

Reading :: Flow

Flow
By Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi thinks that you're not reading enough—specifically, not reading enough poetry, which is like using a Nautilus for the mind. Neither are you memorizing enough things. Perhaps you should consider moving to a large city, since "the density of human contacts that great cities afford is like a soothing balm; people in such centers relish it even when the interactions it provides may be unpleasant or dangerous. ... Everyone feels more alive when surrounded by other people." That being said, perhaps you should be like Dorothy, who moved from the big city to an island in northern Minnesota and enjoys being alone for months on end.

In any case, you really should be playing sports instead of watching athletes in stadiums; making music rather than listening to "platinum records cut by millionaire musicians," making art rather than buying it; and act on your beliefs rather than watching actors.

Certainly you should not spend your time in saloons after work, socializing with work friends. Rather, you should be at home building an intricate rock garden, like Joe. Joe is having fun the right way.

Perhaps I come across too harshly here, but I've pulled out actual examples from this perplexing book to make a point.

In this popularization of his research, Csikszentmihalyi attempts to define what leads to lasting happiness in people's lives. He argues that people are happy when they achieve flow. "The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's powers," he argues, learning to "enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself." That is, we should become autotelic, i.e., internally rather than externally motivated. That involves focus. Most of us, Csikszentmihalyi says, tend to diffuse our attention in "desultory, random movements."

To achieve flow, Csikszentmihalyi says, we must look for experiences in which the challenges are at or slightly beyond our skills. If that balance isn't achieved, we become bored (if skills exceed challenges) or anxious (if challenges exceed skills). We can achieve flow through seeking the right challenges and jobs, or even simply by gamifying routine tasks.

Csikszentmihalyi goes further, arguing that flow is the solution to the problems of cultural relativism. Is one culture better than another? Certainly: "If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience [i.e., flow] is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society." The more a society promotes flow, the better it is—according to Csikszentmihalyi.

As the alert reader has intuited, this move pushes the question back rather than answering it. Is the city more conducive to flow than the remote island in Minnesota? Is the POW camp more conducive than the factory? Should we pity Joe's coworkers, who think they are having fun socializing, when they really should be toiling on their own plots after work assembling rock gardens? And given that Csikszentmihalyi's interviewees found flow experiences in even the harshest conditions, how much guidance can we take from Csikszentmihalyi's many bromides, seemingly ripped from the pages of Reader's Digest? Is the key to flow, as Csikszentmihalyi sometimes seems to say, really based on living in the city, memorizing Homer, learning a musical instrument, reading poetry, and watching less TV? Is the notion of flow really reducible to this stream of moralistic finger-wagging? If so, aren't there more comprehensive books out there?

TIMN in 20 minutes

I've been intrigued by David Ronfeldt's formulation of Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks (TIMN) for a while. See my reviews of his work:

• "In search of how societies work"
• The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico
• In Athena's Camp
• Networks and Netwars
• "Swarming and the Future of Conflict"

And see some posts that I've written referring to Ronfeldt's work on TIMN and networks:

• About those health care bill town halls
• TIMN and Bobbitt's market-state
• Some tentative thoughts about a networked rhetoric
• "Does TIMN imply developing the so-far least favored (+N?) option: networked non-profit cooperatives?"

Ronfeldt has now put together a 20-minute video in which he introduces, discusses, and applies the TIMN framework. It's fascinating, and I highly recommend it. If you're interested in examining organizational forms and social evolution, especially if you've been influenced by people such as Manuel Castells, take a look. 

Genre 2012...

... is approaching fast. It's June 26-29 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

It should be a great conference full of cutting edge genre research. I'll be presenting a paper and participating in a roundtable. If you're there, swing by and see me.

Reading :: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term
By Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski was a Polish ethnographer who visited New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918, writing several classics, such as the fascinating Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In my review of that book, I praised Argonauts for being even-handed, generally examining the islanders' customs without condemnation or condescension.

During these trips, Malinowski kept a polyglot diary, mostly in Polish, in which he recorded his doubts, obsessions, hypochondria, paranoia, and bigotry. This diary was meant to be private, but when Malinowski died of a heart attack in 1942, his private papers were gathered and sent to his widow Valetta.  She discovered the diaries in 1949, discussed publication in 1960, and finally had it published in 1966.

How to put this? The diary underlines how large an accomplishment Malinowski's even-handedness actually was. Malinowski describes his hatred and contempt for the islanders, repeatedly using a racial slur that we in the 21st century find painful to read. Early on, he tells his diary, "On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes'" (p.69), and these feelings are repeated throughout the rest of the diary. Malinowski's hatred and contempt are contradicted—or, perhaps, exacerbated—by his shameful lust for the native women. Not that Malinowski's lust is discriminate: he obsessively details it and its many objects.

Malinowski also details his own obsessive suspicions of others. He suspects many of his native informants of lying; he alternately adores, then reviles other ethnographers; he excoriates the missionaries.

When I began noticing these patterns, I thought, perhaps this is just the result of a very young man making his way through the world. But then I checked the dates: At the beginning of the diary, Malinowski is 30!

This obsessive hypochondriac, pouring his bigotry and shame onto the page of his private diary, was able to work through these issues to produce a sympathetic and evenhanded portrayal of the Trobriand Islanders. Remarkable!

If you're interested in the inner life of ethnographers, I'm not sure I would recommend this book first; perhaps Rabinow would be a better place to start. But if you want to learn more about Malinowski in particular, this diary is an interesting read.

SIGDOC 2012 is now accepting papers!

I hope you've been working on your SIGDOC 2012 research papers, experience reports, and posters, because the submission system is now open.

Remember, papers must be in ACM format. See the call for papers for more information on each type, along with downloadable templates.

Questions? Contact me. I hope to see your submission soon!

Reading :: The Transformation of Learning

The Transformation of Learning: Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
Edited by Bert van Oers, Wim Wardekker, Ed Elbers, and René van der Veer 

Our library got this book a while back, but unfortunately it's in that awful electronic format that you can only read in a full-fledged desktop browser. So I went ahead and bought the Kindle version. It was a good purchase - even though it's a collection (and I usually don't like collections that much), even though it's focused on education (not a research subject that typically appeals to me).

So what's good about it?

For me, the standout essay was Rene van der Veer's "Multiple Readings of Vygotsky." Here, van der Veer cautions us to see the limitations of Vygotsky's work as well as ways to contextualize it with later work. In particular, van der Veer recreates Leont'ev's famous experiment known as the Forbidden Colors Task (performed as part of Leont'ev's dissertation work under Vygotsky's supervision). In this experiment, people of various ages were asked to play a game in which they answered several questions with names of colors. They could use each color name only once, and two colors were forbidden outright. In one round, Leont'ev had them play the game without help; in another, he gave them a set of colored cards. Famously, Leont'ev noted that older children and adults used the cards as mediational means: they tended to flip the cards over to remind them which colors were no longer permitted. Individuals who used cards as mediational means tended to do better at the game.

Although this study has often been cited, van der Veer points out, it apparently has never been replicated. So van der Veer replicated it - and got some surprising findings: "more card use does not correlate with higher performance." Van der Veer draws on much more recent developmental research to demonstrate that, contra Leont'ev's assumptions, children learn to use cultural instruments quite early. The double stimulation method is still valuable, van der Veer tells us, but we must be cautious in interpreting its results.

Harmut Geist's chapter "The Formation Experiment in the Age of Hypermedia and Distance Learning" was similarly valuable. Geist distinguishes between the empiric-analytical paradigm common in the sciences and the causal-genetic method used in activity theory, cautioning us that without an understanding of their differences, we might switch between the two, making a hash of theory and analysis. Why? Geist explains:

Looking at the history of science, we find two different roots and basic ideas in scientific thinking: the idea and concept of evolution sensu Darwin, and the idea and concept of activity sensu Marx. The basic difference between the two ideas concerns the relation between human being and environment: Darwin pointed to "adaptation to the environment" as a basic idea, whereas Marx referred to "the adaptation of the environment." Basic to and pioneering for modern thinking was Darwin's idea that the existing living world was not created according to some plan or organized by an idea existing beforehand but evolved as an effect of the interdependence between environment and living beings. The feature that can explain it all is the ability of living beings to bring themselves more or less actively in line with the environment. The fitting into the environment explains the developmental potential of a living being - the survival of the fittest. This idea was fascinating and explained the evolution from the variety of life up to the development of the human being by self-organization. No ideas or principles or order-organizing rules were needed that come from outside. ... it was now possible to investigate humans using the methods of science.

In contrast,

The dialectical analysis of human history, as it was done, for example, by Hegel and particularly by Marx, showed not only that humans adapt to the environment but also that they change it in accordance with their demands (from agriculture, the use of fire, the construction of houses, to the manipulation of genes). Activity is not an active adaptation ot the environment but the transformation of the environment and - in interrelation with it - of humans themselves. 

Geist locates the difference between constructivism and activity theory here:

Activity in the view of constructivism means the humans' active adaptation to the environment. Simply put:  things are such that we cannot change them; therefore we must come to terms with them and adapt to the conditions of nature and society. Activity in the context of activity theory means active adaptation (change due to activity) of the environment to the humans' needs. Or, in simple terms: the environmental conditions are not suitable, so let us change them in order to be able to lead a better life and to cope better with the demands of life.

Geist concludes that researchers working in each tradition will necessarily adapt different research programs and methods, then illustrates by comparing a classical experiment with an investigation based on the causal-genetic method.

Other chapters are similarly solid, but these two stood out to me, and I believe they're worth the price of admission. If you're interested in activity theory, and if you have a fairly solid grounding in how it's been deployed developmentally, take a look.

Reading :: Driving Results through Social Networks

Driving Results Through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for Performance and Growth
By Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas

Rob Cross is well known for his work in organizational network analysis (ONA). In this book, Cross and his coauthor Robert Thomas discuss how ONA can be applied to better understand organizations' information flow, innovation, decision-making, and performance. It's an impressive description of how a careful ONA can turn up what are typically invisible connections, hubs, and gaps in a company. As the authors state, "ONA provides leaders with the means to accomplish what is arguably their most critical function: aligning individual and collective action with strategic objectives." They illustrate this point with multiple examples from extended cases.

As an illustration of the benefits of ONA, the book is successful; executives with no ONA background can see how this approach can translate directly into greater insights, leading to better-guided adaptations. In fact, the book would work well in terms of getting organizations excited about this approach and (more to the point) about taking seminars to learn how to perform an ONA.

Unfortunately, the book is not an ONA how-to. It focuses on benefits and insights, but for information on how to perform the ONA itself, you'll need to read other books. If you've wondered what ONA could contribute to your organization, this book is the place to start; if you want to know how it's conducted, I recommend a more academically oriented book such as a collection Cross coedited earlier, Networks in the Knowledge Economy.

Come hear me speak at Austin STC next week

In Austin? Tired of going to outstanding restaurants, hearing live music, visiting vintage stores, and walking around Ladybird Lake? Try something a little different: Come hear me speak at next week's Austin STC meeting.

As the item says, I'll be talking about how knowledge work is impacting writing in organizations - particularly how "non-writers" are writing. We'll also talk about agriculture, industry, the recent Texas governor's race, and Disneyland.

In Austin? Sign up for my business proposals seminar.

On June 8, I'll be teaching a daylong seminar on writing persuasive business proposals. This seminar will involve learning a lot, but I'll also be deploying my trademark humor. You probably won't want to leave at the end of it.

Here's the description:

How do business proposals work, and how can they work better?

In this seminar, attendees will examine business proposals as persuasive arguments: they will take these proposals apart, examine their underlying components, and learn how to put them back together in ways that make them more effective. Using a proven methodology for developing these types of documents, attendees will generate basic proposal arguments to address a case study. This case study will allow students, working in small groups, to identify the problem presented in the case study; generate components of the proposal; analyze stakeholder dynamics; tie these complex elements together into a coherent, easily comprehensible argument; and outline a proposal based on this groundwork. Finally, the class will workshop applications to actual cases that attendees bring in.
After this seminar, attendees will be able to:

• Understand basic proposal structure and logic.

• Identify basic proposal sections and understand how they work together.

• Clarify and identify objectives.

• Develop a methodology for reaching the objective.

• Perform audience analysis by identifying stakeholders, investigating their concerns, and weighting criteria accordingly.

• Connect your team’s qualifications with the specific requirements implied in the situation and methodology.

• Develop structured benefits that address the situation.

• Tie these complex elements into a coherent argument.

• Learn how to rework an ill-defined problem into an effective proposal.

• Pour all this information into a basic proposal format.

The proposal-writing methodology used in this seminar was developed for large consulting agencies, but it can also apply to other sorts of proposals and reports in a variety of organizations.