Reading :: The Science of Qualitative Research

The Science of Qualitative Research
By Martin Packer

This is a significant book that digs into the history and development of qualitative research, providing a sustained critique of current research approaches informed by philosophy. It appears to be solidly researched, solidly argued, and based on a remarkably broad base of knowledge in qualitative research methodology and history as well as philosophy.

On the other hand, I didn't love it. Part of the reason had to do with the fact that Packer is dealing with such broad trends in qualitative research that it's hard to characterize them well, so he ends up characterizing localized implementations as universal ones. For instance, in Chapter 3, he critiques grounded theory's approach to coding as a process of decontextualizing statements and thus denying the interpretive context that make those statements meaningful. His extended example is Auerbach & Silverstein's introduction to GT coding, Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis. But I looked up this book and it's hardly an exemplar - Auerbach & Silverstein had just discovered qualitative research, having come from a quantitative tradition, and this book decribes a coding approach that is frankly underthought and quite undercontextualized. When Packer uses this book rather than one by experienced qualitative researchers, I lose some faith in the argument he's making.

But then again, in rhetoric and writing studies, we made the interpretive turn in the mid 1990s. The interpretive approach to which Packer turns in the later chapters characterized qualitative research as it was introduced to me in my graduate classes. I wonder if the book might be a greater revelation to those who have not yet made the interpretive turn.

In any case, I think the key contribution of the book is how Packer traces qualitative traditions' roots to basic movements in philosophy. If that's your interest, this book is certainly for you.

Reading :: Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea
By Bronislaw Malinowski

I've been taking some time this summer for pleasure reading, getting to some of the classic ethnographies and case studies that have influenced contemporary qualitative research. This book is one of the great classics, written by one of the giants of anthropology. It covers Malinowski's 1914-1918 work on the islands off the coast of New Guinea, particularly the Trobriand Islands. And although it's a bit thick in places - his writing style reminds me of Jules Verne's in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - the account is fascinating.

Malinowski still uses terms such as "savages." But he also tends to be even-handed and sensitive about comparing the cultures (for the most part). For instance, he spends much time describing the Kula, a massive exchange of valuable necklaces and armbands that takes place across the islands of New Guinea in a giant, continuous circle. We Westerners might look at the valuables and think that they aren't impressive - "greasy" is the word he uses - but he says we need to get some perspective: when natives opened oysters and found pearls, they would either throw them away or give them to the children to play with. They viewed Westerners' obsession with pearls in exactly the same way that Malinowski's readers might view the islanders' obsession with necklaces. It's not the intrinsic value that makes these things so valuable, he reminds us, but the value that a society attributes to them.

Malinowski applies this even-handedness - mostly with success - to the islanders' religion, magic, rituals, and views on sex, all of which are very different from those of his readers. For instance, Malinowski notes that the islanders don't realize that men are involved in reproduction. Thus the society's organization is matrilinear and their views on marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and sex are quite different from those of his readers.

The principles of ethnography set out in this book have become foundational principles for ethnographic research. But we might get some perspective on these principles by reading some of the expedition's background on Malinowski's Wikipedia page:

On his most famous trip to the area, he became stranded owing to the outbreak of World War I. Malinowski was not allowed to return to Europe from the British-controlled region because he was a Pole from Austria-Hungary. Australian authorities gave him two options: to be exiled to the Trobriand islands, or to face internment for the duration of the war. Malinowski chose the Trobriand islands. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on the Kula ring and advanced the practice of participant observation, which remains the hallmark of ethnographic research today.

If he had not been forced to stay in the islands for the duration of World War I, would Malinowski have developed participant observation in the same way, or conducted fieldwork to the degree that he did, or develop the insights that he did? I wonder. But Malinowski did what qualitative researchers must often do, making a virtue of the uncontrollable misfortunes in his circumstances, and that long irritation developed this remarkable pearl of a book. Read it when you get a chance.

Reading :: Action Research for Management

Action Research for Management
By William Foote Whyte and Edith Lentz Hamilton

I've provided a link to UT's library because this book is apparently no longer in print and isn't listed on Amazon (except in a couple of miscellaneous used book listings). In fact, the library copy I read has a blank stamp sheet - it hasn't been checked out since they moved from the card system to the stamp system. (We're now on the barcode system.)

I stumbled onto the book while looking for Whyte's classic Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, which was checked out. But I greatly enjoyed this book anyway, even though it's certainly not a classic. The book, published in 1965, describes a participatory action research study that Whyte supervised and Lentz and Meredith Wiley conducted in 1945; Lentz wrote the core of the book as a monograph, then Whyte added chapters to the front and back to connect the project to PAR developments. They delayed publication 20 years because the hotel they studied and the participants they quoted, though pseudonymous, were still identifiable to those in the hotel community. (I suspect they waited until some of the principals died, actually.)

The study was of a hotel (the "Tremont") with high turnover and poor labor relations. After hearing Whyte talk about his previous study of the restaurant industry, the Tremont's VP and General Manager asked Whyte to conduct a study of the troubled hotel and recommend changes. Soon, Wiley took over the Personnel Manager position and Lentz was attached to his office, and both conducted PAR. As we read their account, we get to move through different parts of the hotel, examining different sorts of dysfunctions (including some sexual harassment that would result in firing or worse today), and seeing how these dysfunctions resulted from systemic issues rather than simply individual behavior. As you can imagine, I very much enjoyed this account.

On the other hand, reading the book felt like reading a Hardy Boys mystery. It's not just the style, which made me think that we were soon to meet the boys' portly chum Chet, or the dialogue, which is full of interjections like "Why" and "My." It's also that the researchers are portrayed as protagonists who, sometimes through making suggestions and sometimes through confrontations, unravel the mysteries of the hotel and set things right. In this PAR study, the researchers always know best and learn how to nudge management and workers to repeat the researchers' solutions - and believe that those solutions originated with themselves instead of the researchers!

I'm not sure that I gained many methodological insights from the book, but I enjoyed it immensely. If you like PAR or the Hardy Boys, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Action Research for Management

Action Research for Management
By William Foote Whyte and Edith Lentz Hamilton

I've provided a link to UT's library because this book is apparently no longer in print and isn't listed on Amazon (except in a couple of miscellaneous used book listings). In fact, the library copy I read has a blank stamp sheet - it hasn't been checked out since they moved from the card system to the stamp system. (We're now on the barcode system.)

I stumbled onto the book while looking for Whyte's classic Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, which was checked out. But I greatly enjoyed this book anyway, even though it's certainly not a classic. The book, published in 1965, describes a participatory action research study that Whyte supervised and Lentz and Meredith Wiley conducted in 1945; Lentz wrote the core of the book as a monograph, then Whyte added chapters to the front and back to connect the project to PAR developments. They delayed publication 20 years because the hotel they studied and the participants they quoted, though pseudonymous, were still identifiable to those in the hotel community. (I suspect they waited until some of the principals died, actually.)

The study was of a hotel (the "Tremont") with high turnover and poor labor relations. After hearing Whyte talk about his previous study of the restaurant industry, the Tremont's VP and General Manager asked Whyte to conduct a study of the troubled hotel and recommend changes. Soon, Wiley took over the Personnel Manager position and Lentz was attached to his office, and both conducted PAR. As we read their account, we get to move through different parts of the hotel, examining different sorts of dysfunctions (including some sexual harassment that would result in firing or worse today), and seeing how these dysfunctions resulted from systemic issues rather than simply individual behavior. As you can imagine, I very much enjoyed this account.

On the other hand, reading the book felt like reading a Hardy Boys mystery. It's not just the style, which made me think that we were soon to meet the boys' portly chum Chet, or the dialogue, which is full of interjections like "Why" and "My." It's also that the researchers are portrayed as protagonists who, sometimes through making suggestions and sometimes through confrontations, unravel the mysteries of the hotel and set things right. In this PAR study, the researchers always know best and learn how to nudge management and workers to repeat the researchers' solutions - and believe that those solutions originated with themselves instead of the researchers!

I'm not sure that I gained many methodological insights from the book, but I enjoyed it immensely. If you like PAR or the Hardy Boys, definitely pick it up.

Writing :: Losing by Expanding

Spinuzzi, C. (2011). Losing by Expanding: Corralling the Runaway Object. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 25(4).

Okay, this is the first 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? Okay, let's talk about how I put this thing together. This was a comparatively pain-free publication, but that's partially because I've figured out how to avoid the pain points.

The Gist
As the abstract says, this article critically examines the notion of the object in third-generation activity theory (3GAT), particularly how that notion - the linchpin of an activity theory analysis - has expanded theoretically and methodologically over the last 30 years. For those of you who are not terribly interested in activity theory, this may not seem too riveting. But for those of us who are, it's a critical question. If the object is not being used consistently, then we really don't have a consistent unit of analysis, and it becomes very difficult to perform strong analyses.

3GAT, by the way, refers to the work that follows Yrjo Engestrom's articulation of activity theory. "First-generation activity theory" is the work of Vygotsky and his followers, focusing on social cognition and mediation in individuals; "second-generation activity theory" is the next stage, in which Vygotsky's followers such as Leont'ev and Luria expanded activity theory to apply to larger social groups. Engestrom developed third-generation activity theory (in part) to account for systemic contradictions and to provide a more systematic understanding of how multiple activities operated. Engestrom is the one who articulated these generations; it's worth noting that some activity theorists don't buy the notion of generations at all. But 3GAT is the version that has really caught on in writing studies, so that's what I focused on in this paper.

The Genesis
I first started having concerns about the 3GAT articulation of the object when writing Network. In particular, I began to wonder how to identify a common object when people from different activities tended to see very different things. For instance, Annemarie Mol's excellent book The Body Multiple does a nice job of showing the phenomenon of multiplicity: different specialists look at the same phenomenon and see very different things, not even agreeing on the bounds of the phenomenon. As I got deeper into the activity theory literature, I began to realize that 3GAT had also tried to deal with this issue in terms of polycontextuality and boundary crossing in activity networks (points where two or more activities intersected). In such cases, the object tended to expand and become more abstract in order to encompass broader aspects of the phenomenon.

This tendency really became clear as Network was in press, because that's when Engestrom published From Teams to Knots. Here, Engestrom tried to deal with polycontextuality and border crossing by postulating mychorrhizae and by further expanding the object. Whereas in his earlier work, Engestrom focused on very concrete objects, here he named enormous objects such as global warming!

This point nagged at me. Also nagging at me was the fact that I sometimes had a lot of difficulty explaining the object to my undergraduate students. And my reading suggested that polycontextuality and boundary crossing were increasing due to the rise of knowledge work, in which teams of specialists from different backgrounds had to come together to work on the same object (whatever it was).

So the question of the object was in the back of my mind, but I planned to get to it sometime in the future. What put it on the front burner was a set of disappointing blind reviews for another article I had submitted for review. Late in that article, I had mentioned in a throwaway line that the object was facing a crisis. The editor suggested that at some point I write an article on the subject. So I did.

The Composition
I decided to set very specific boundaries for the paper. The activity theory literature is vast, so I decided to focus on 3GAT (which, as I said, is the version most used in writing studies). 3GAT originated with Engestrom, who still closely follows the literature and sometimes steps in to head off variations, so I made his work the backbone of the piece. Engestrom's work itself is vast - I swear he must publish something every week - so I focused on his books and other well-cited publications. All of this helped make the project manageable.

Although my reviews on this blog helped me to sort through the major movements of Engestrom's work, I also went back and closely reread large chunks of his work as well as related articles and commentaries. Much of this had to do with testing and refining my emerging hypothesis: that the object had expanded over time, causing a methodological issue.

I had to juggle an enormous number of sources, though, and I felt completely overwhelmed. So one day I sat at my kitchen table with a large roll of manila paper and some sharpies, and shortly I had drawn something that looked like the top half of Figure 4. I labeled each movement with some of the cites that demonstrated it. Then I looked at my other cites and realized that more was going on. A while later, I drew the bottom half of Figure 4.

At this point, I remember feeling incredible relief as well as a sense of disturbance. Could it be that easy? Once that figure had been drawn, I was able to outline and rough out the rest of the article in a hurry.

Side note: Like most of my academic work these days, the paper was drafted entirely in Google Docs, with tables in Google Spreadsheets, figures in Google Draw, and citations in Mendeley. That way, I didn't have to worry about what computer I was using or whether I had backed up recently. My Google Docs, Spreadsheet, and Draw account is backed up daily by SpanningSync, while copies of my citations reside on my Mendeley Desktop.

At this point, I sent the draft to someone whose judgement I trust. (Every academic should have a few trusted, friendly readers to whom they can send half-baked manuscripts.)

My reader liked the direction, but suggested that I work on framing the article more for writing studies. That's not what I wanted to hear, because I hate framing. But he was right.

The Framing and Implications
Honestly, I have a consistent problem with framing my studies for writing journals. For instance, the article I published in last year's Written Communication originally didn't focus on writing at all. Ridiculous, right? But I had reasoned that these workers communicated constantly, primarily through writing, so what else do you want? The reviewers were right, though, and once I put my mind to it, I was able to clarify the framing for that paper.

For "Losing by Expanding," I worried that things would be tougher. For me, the question of the object was intrinsically interesting, and the hook was that we use activity theory in writing studies. But my reader pointed out that that wasn't enough and suggested that I discuss some recent writing studies articles that used AT. Brilliant suggestion, and with the later guidance of the journal editor, I was able to use these studies to connect each transformation of the object back to writing studies.

Initially, I thought very seriously about undertaking a meta-analysis of all recent AT-based work in writing studies. But that would have taken much longer, and frankly, it didn't sound very interesting to me. (Although if you're looking for a dissertation topic...) In the end, I gambled that listing and briefly analyzing a handful of recent papers would give me enough traction, and fortunately, the gamble paid off.

The Implications was difficult too, but I had been thinking recently of a publication that Mark Zachry, Bill Hart-Davidson, and I had written a few years ago. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I took this previous concept and refined it to provide a set of countermovements that would produce a focused, qualified 3GAT object. If you look carefully at this section, you might also see the Toulmin influence.

The Style
Honestly, I had a lot of fun writing this paper, and part of the fun was in adding allusions and puns that a very small number of activity theorists would get, and even fewer would find funny. The most obvious one was the title, "Losing by Expanding," which is a reference to Engestrom's Learning by Expanding. (I picked this one out early.) Other references to titles of major AT works are scattered throughout the manuscript, and I had to rescue a few from mangling during the copyediting process.

I wrote the article in a breezy, bloggish style. Part of that style was ramped back in revision (the editor, whose judgment I trust absolutely, made some specific suggestions that restricted the style but improved the manuscript quality). More of the style had to fall due to the journal's style restrictions: for instance, the contractions disappeared, and some of the rhythm and emphasis in the sentences conflicted with the journal's preference for active voice and putting citations at the first mention.

The Revision Process
In the Acknowledgements, I thank "two anonymous reviewers for providing what is perhaps the most substantive feedback I have received on a manuscript." True. If you're reading this, I meant it. The reviewers were excellent: both read the article critically and offered suggestions that strengthened the piece, but both also managed to be encouraging and to discuss how the piece might impact the field.

A side note: reviewers really are gatekeepers, and they are generally invested in having you do your best work. Sometimes they say harsh things - I've gotten quite a few of these sorts of reviews. Never take it personally. Think of the reviews as a set of restrictions that guide you as you refine the piece for publication. Remember that these reviewers represent the actual readers, and if they don't buy your argument, it's likely that the broader set of readers won't either. 

Anyway, the reviewers generously provided further texts for me to read and incorporate, which I did in a timely manner. The editor also made several expert suggestions that improved the argument considerably. Relatively speaking, the revision process was pain-free - a rarity.

The Results
You may have gotten the sense that I become improbably excited about scholarship. That sense is correct. In this case, I am really very excited about this particular argument - partly because I think it could have an impact, but partly because I just like the structure and symmetry of the piece. I'm glad it's out there, and not just because of the puns.

But that's my perspective. See what you think, and feel free to tell me in the comments.

Writing ::

Earlier this month, I celebrated my 8th year of blogging. Most of that time I've been reviewing the books I read, and I always start those reviews with "Reading ::" - the prefix was to indicate that the entry was a review.

But as I enter this next year of blogging, I want to try something different. For at least the next year, I'll be starting some posts with "Writing ::" -- posts that talk about the background, reasoning, and struggles behind my just-published publications.

Beyond narcissism and self-promotion, why do I want to do this? Here are some reasons:

Traditional academic publishing conceals the real work of writing. As a graduate student, I remember thinking that published articles were the result of brilliant thinkers. In fact, I dimly remember being intimidated when I read that Stanley Fish simply sat down and wrote articles in longhand, then sent the first draft to journals. Certainly I didn't - and don't - write that way. But in academic journals, we only see the product, and that gives us a misleading understanding of the process. We don't see how reviewers and the journal editor have considerably shaped the process, or how reviews of one article influence the methodology of the next one, or how an article can develop new framing as it goes. And we - especially graduate students and new assistant professors - do need to see that.

Just a quick example. A few years ago, one of my articles was rejected by two journals and received a split review at the third journal. The editor published it anyway, and it went on to win two awards. But if I hadn't committed to extensive revisions based on the rejections and the (deserved) negative reviews, it wouldn't have seen the light of day.

Traditional academic publishing tends to restrict sources. I draw from a lot of different sources for inspiration, including blog posts, tweets, industry reports, and popular business books. I carefully follow up these sources of inspiration with more scholarly sources. But then the less scholarly sources fall by the wayside; reviewers don't want to see you citing popular business books in your scholarly articles, for instance, even if you back them up with other sources. This series should allow me to discuss some of these hidden sources and therefore expose the research and writing process.

Traditional academic publishing has very little space for discussion. Academic publishing provides the following avenues for discussing the work they publish: blind reviews and editors' feedback (one-on-one, private); letters to the editor (only in some journals, public, and structured so that the original author has the last word); and citations (slow-motion, indirect). Meanwhile, scholars are conducting faster-moving, free-wheeling discussions in social media. I see this series as a way to provide more rapid academic discussion, particularly the sort of emergent back-and-forth that isn't supported at all in traditional academic publishing.

The double blind review is no more. Well, that may be overstating things. But the traditional way of guaranteeing impartiality in journal reviews, the double blind review (in which the reviewers don't know who the author is and vice versa), has been made extremely problematic by search engines and social media. For instance, if you are even casually acquainted with my blog, you will probably recognize themes, topics, and references in my manuscripts whether my name is on them or not. Similarly, although as a rule I don't Google the titles of manuscripts I review, I know that if I did, I could identify most authors without much trouble.

So what does that mean? My sense is that it means that submitting a manuscript is a higher-stakes activity than it used to be, at the same time that academics are facing increased pressure to publish. Authors must either severely restrict what they put online about their ongoing research - which would impair their work as public intellectuals and their ability to share their work with others - or find ways to produce higher quality work out of the gate. This series, I hope, can provide a place for discussing strategies of doing the latter.

Okay, so that's what the "Writing ::" series should do. Here's what I won't do, because they would be completely unprofessional as well as beside the point:

• I won't post reviewer comments or identifiable summaries.
• I won't post editor comments.
• I won't question the judgment of reviewers or editors.
• I won't air grievances.
• I won't supply negative examples from other people's work.

Also, I won't revisit old publications or discuss publications that are still in press. I'll only discuss publications that have just become available to academics, and I'll provide links so you can follow along if you like.

Questions or comments? Do you think the series is a good idea? What would you like to see from this series? What else do you think I should avoid? Let me know in the comments, and/or tweet me (@spinuzzi).

Commemorative post - 8 years at spinuzzi.blogspot.com

Earlier this year I realized that I've been blogging for almost eight years. In fact, the first extant post is from June 5, 2003 - my review of Latour's Pandora's Hope. (I've lost a couple of previous non-book-review blog posts when I moved from Blogger to the CWRL's Drupal platform and back again.)

In that time, I've posted 428 reviews, 1044 short items about net work, 39 items on coworking, and miscellaneous others. The blog has changed a lot over the years - for instance, most of the short items I once posted to the blog are now fodder for my Twitter feed - but the backbone has always been the book reviews. In fact, the blog solved two interrelated problems that I had noted back in my grad school days:

1. Keeping track of my insights. Beginning with grad school, I've always annotated the books I read - but I've always been too cheap to buy the majority of those books. So my preferred method - sticking post-it notes in the margins - didn't work too well when I returned books to the library. At the same time, I had a hard time keeping detailed notes in a notebook or on a file. It seemed like a lot of work to get these notes in a format that would make enough contextual sense, and I had a hard time disciplining myself to take such notes. There wasn't enough external pressure to do it.
2. Sharing insights with others. Also in grad school, I became interested in sharing insights with others and getting their insights from them. The big factor here was the reading list for our qualifying exams: what seemed like an endless number of books and articles we had to read and know. I thought: how can we share our insights and comment on each other's thoughts? Let's start a conversation about these items! (Maybe I had too much time on my hands.) The problem was that in the mid-1990s not many collaborative writing formats existed. I actually tried to get people to construct a hypertext in Windows Help format, but as you can imagine, it never went anywhere. 

At Texas Tech (1999-2001) I started keeping notes in text files and even putting my marginal post-it notes in folders. These efforts were okay, but didn't work out well. After moving to the University of Texas in 2001 and finishing up the manuscript for my first book the year after that, I returned to the problem of recording my thoughts about my readings. At the same time, people at our Computer Writing and Research Lab began writing blogs. So I decided to start one too. It had three simple principles:

1. I blog a review of every book I read.
2. My reviews should be helpful to external audiences. 
3. My reviews should be detailed enough that I can slot them into background sections in my future papers.

Since I'm a little OCD, these principles really helped me to stay on track. The public nature of the blog meant that I had to live up to principle #2, and principles #1 and #2 got me started enough that I could follow through on principle #3.

Although I confess that I don't always follow principle #1 anymore - some nonacademic reading I've decided to keep personal - the vast majority of the books I've read have been reviewed on the site. Some are very short reviews and others are very long ones, but all have helped me develop a memory and an understanding of these sources that I couldn't before.

Re principle #2, I've also been surprised by how helpful these reviews have occasionally been to readers. One person told me that "Clay Spinuzzi saved my life" because she had trouble absorbing Bakhtin's work, and reading my reviews helped. People occasionally weigh in with their comments too, which I appreciate.

And principle #3 has paid off in spades. Nearly every paper I write has sentences in the literature review that I've copied and pasted from the blog. (It's okay if I do it  - but I don't encourage you to do this, of course.)

In 2008, I found another use for the blog. Intrigued by what seemed like a mysterious blog post, I met with a couple of guys at a "co-company" called Conjunctured. Soon afterwards, Conjunctured started the first coworking space in Austin, and I started interviewing space proprietors and tracking the fascinating emergent phenomenon of coworking. It's the first research project I've blogged, and for these posts, I always conducted member checks, running the text past the proprietors before I posted the profiles. Doing so gave me a sort of member check that helped me to deepen my understanding of these spaces and this phenomenon.

In any case, I can't believe it's been eight years. Hopefully the blog has been helpful to you too - it's certainly been a game-changer for me.

Android allows rich text editing in its Blogger application ...

... so why doesn't Google support it in their Google Docs app?

Reading :: Terror and Consent

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century
By Philip Bobbitt

I've been meaning to review this book for months, but have been very busy - and the book is so thick that it needs some time to review. You may remember that I reviewed Bobbitt's impressive book The Shield of Achilles a while back. Terror and Consent is his follow-up effort, in which he attempts to examine terrorism in terms of the constitutional change he described in his previous book. That is, he sees present-day terrorism and its practitioners as a reaction to the ongoing shift from the nation-state to the market-state.

I'm far from being an expert on terrorism or fourth-generation warfare, so you may want to see some thoughts on Bobbitt's work by people who are: David Ronfeldt and John Robb (link goes to Robb's two-star review). Go read those, then come back.

Are you back? Okay, great. My short take is that this book is not as solid or groundbreaking as The Shield of Achilles, but it is still well worth reading if you're interested in how that previous book's thesis plays out when extended to terrorism. Ronfeldt disputes one aspect of that thesis (that we are currently in the transition to a market-state) and Robb disputes at least two others (that the market-state is a constitutional order and that terrorism is an illegitimate reaction to that order). Keep these fundamental objections in mind as you read the book; I'm going to start out by playing by Bobbitt's rules, then circle around to discuss the objections toward the end of this review.

Bobbitt begins by arguing that "the objective of these wars [against terror] is not the conquest of territory or the silencing of any particular ideology but rather to secure the environment necessary for states of consent and to make it impossible for our enemies to impose or induce states of terror. The source of these wars is not Islam but rather a fundamental change in the nature of the State and its evolving relationship to the new methods, purposes, and technologies of warfare" (p.3). As Bobbitt says elsewhere in the book, the "war on terror" is not a misplaced metaphor - it's not a metaphor at all (p.173). These wars against terrorism, he argues, must involve three efforts: preempting attacks by global terrorist networks; preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and protecting civilians against "natural catastrophes and nonnatural assaults" (p.3). That last item may seem odd, but as Bobbitt argues, we're entering an age in which we may not be able to distinguish between natural catastrophes and terrorism (think in terms of biological warfare) and natural disasters may be used as multipliers for the effects of terrorism. In any case, "relieving the suffering and devastation that would be caused by such disasters [genocide, earthquakes, pandemics, tidal waves, hurricanes] calls on many of the same resources as the efforts against terrorism and proliferation" (p.3). Furthermore, he says, the most important feature of terrorist attacks is that "we often will not know their authors and must act in a condition of great uncertainty" (p.4).

This book, Bobbitt says, isn't about the root causes of terrorism but rather about whether the current change in the constitutional order "will result in the triumph of states of consent or states of terror" (p.4). Terror is a crucial test of the market-state, he says, because terrorism challenges the very basis of that constitutional order (p.12). To develop that argument, in Chapter 1, Bobbitt reviews the history of constitutional orders that he discussed in The Shield of Achilles, matching each order with the corresponding form of terrorism: Crusaders, buccaneers, pirates, anarchists, and national liberation movements all make an appearance here as counters to their corresponding constitutional orders. And in the advent of the market-state, based on the principle of maximizing opportunities for the individual, we also see the advent of a terrorism that uses market-state methods to negate individual choice (p.44). "Market state terrorism will be just as global, networked, decentralized, and devolved and rely on just as much outsourcing and incentivizing as the market state," Bobbitt argues (p.45), sounding a bit like Robb. al Qaeda, which Bobbitt sees as a transitional response, is better financed than its predecessors (p.49), quick to outsource local operations (p.50), and structured in a way that represents VISA or Mastercard organizational charts (p.51). (In fact, Bobbitt argues, Osama bin Laden's lasting legacy will be his organizational innovations (p.52)). One major differentiator is that market-state terrorism is no longer a technique, but an end in itself (p.62).

Bobbitt concludes that al Qaeda can be regarded as either a market-state terrorist group or a virtual market-state (p.65). It's "like a mutant nongovernmental organization" (p.84). AQ's strategic goal is constitutional, he says, and thus a counterterror approach must tightly coordinate strategy and law (p.70).

In Chapter 2, Bobbitt continues this argument by reminding us that the constitutional order is the unique grounds upon which the State claims legitimate power. The nation-state gained legitimacy from improving the material conditions of citizens (p.86). The market-state, in turn, says: give us power and we will give you new opportunities (p.88). In a footnote, Bobbitt takes a shot at the belief that terrorism is caused by economic deprivation: that argument, he says, rests on nation-state assumptions and "have nothing to say to al Qaeda or ecoterrorists or animal-rights terrorists or even those antiglobalization terrorists who are aroused more by the threat to cultural identity than by unfair terms of trade" (p.91).

Bobbitt goes on to describe the rise of AQ Khan's network for assembling and selling nuclear bomb-making capabilities, citing Gordon Corera's book. As he tells the story, Khan assembled a market for bombs that overlaid the state but escaped state control. (He doesn't spend much time discussing Khan's nationalistic motivations, which came through so clearly in Corera's book.)

In Chapter 3, Bobbitt returns to the question: is al Qaeda just a terrorist network or is it a virtual market-state? He suggests that it is both, and that states of terror will have different valences just as nation-states did (p.126). If we accept terrorist networks as adversaries in war, the 20th century emphasis on war vs. crime is an artifact of that era's separation of law vs. strategy (p.140). Whereas in earlier wars the objective was to kill the enemy, in the 21st century, the preferred outcome is to temporarily disable the soldier without killing (p.152). (Contrast that statement with the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden earlier this year and the Obama administration's increased use of Predator drones for remotely killing enemies.)  

In Chapter 4, Bobbitt goes on to discuss the question of victory over terror. States of consent don't need to win, he says - they simply need to not lose (p.183) in order to steadily expand the zones of consent (p.213). That means hardening infrastructure, preempting, and preventing (p.213). This, Bobbitt says, is the way to win a preclusive victory, the kind of victory that characterizes the era of the market-state (p.213). In interventions, the mission is not to establish democracy, but to legitimize the rule of law (p.221). One contrast he provides is in how the US handled Hurricane Katrina vs. how it handled the 2004 tsunami in Sumatra (pp.222-226). Later in the book, he suggests several measures to better reconcile law and strategy in governmental responses to threats, including repealing the Posse Comitatus Act and mandating a national ID (pp.417-418).

Anyway, let's stop here; I think that gives the gist of the book, and the rest is details. Bobbitt is very concerned that without careful reforms, emerging market-states will be hamstrung by the nation-state separation between law and strategy, and may damage their own legitimacy by either bending the rules to become more responsive or following the rules and responding inadequately. He outlines several such reforms.

Now to the objections. As I mentioned earlier, Ronfeldt disputes one aspect of that thesis (that we are currently in the transition to a market-state). I think that perhaps the distance between the two is not as wide as it appears here, with Bobbitt seeing networks (such as terrorist networks) as characteristic of the market-state rather than succeeding it. On the other hand, I don't think that Bobbitt has worked out some of the details of the networked form of organization to which Ronfeldt refers. Certainly some of the stronger measures that Bobbitt suggests (such as the national ID) seem like hierarchical reactions to networked organizations rather than what we might expect from a network solution. Again, I commend you to Ronfeldt for more on this question.

From another direction, Robb disputes at least two other assumptions that Bobbitt makes: that the market-state is a constitutional order and that terrorism is an illegitimate reaction to that order. Robb does offer a powerful critique here, providing examples of asymmetrical warfare that seeks to (or claims to seek to) maximize individual choice against states that seek to take it away. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Robb has not been reluctant to point the finger at states that have been hollowed out by a runaway market. I don't think that's quite what Bobbitt had in mind, but nevertheless, the picture is more messy (transitional?) than Bobbitt offers.

Nevertheless, I recommend the book - along with the critiques. Bobbitt has thought deeply about the issues and taken the time to develop cogent critiques and offer concrete proposals. They're well worth reading, if only as a way to sharpen your own thinking on these matters and to develop your own counterproposals. But definitely read The Shield of Achilles first.



(discuss the objections)

Reading :: Wired to the World, Chained to the Home

Wired to the World, Chained to the Home: Telework in Daily Life
By Penny Gurstein

In this 2001 book, Gurstein examines telework through case studies in California and Canada. Gurstein thanks Manuel Castells for his early support of her work (p.ix), and indeed the research is quite Castellian: surveys and interviews, plus dire quotes that reflect alienation and helplessness. The title is a fairly accurate characterization of the book's message.

Gurstein defines teleworking as "work-related substitutions of telecommunications and related information technologies for travel" (p.4). She adds that "it is of interest now to both the private and public sectors because it produces a mobile, flexible labour force and reduces overhead costs" (p.4). And she identifies several contributing conditions, including the internationalization of the economy, the transformation from an industrial economy to a service economy, and advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) that allow outsourcing, offshoring, and automation. These changes lead to "a two-tiered workforce of core and peripheral workers. While a core of full-time salaried workers remains, temporary workers are hired on a contingency basis. For many of these workers, the home becomes their work site" (p.4). Gurstein also notes changes in the family: boundaries between work and family have changed, particularly with "dual-earner or female-headed families becoming the norm" (p.4).

Although working from home has been mythologized in terms of autonomy, freedom, and control, Gurstein charges, for many, "home-based work is a survival strategy and a form of resistance to societal forces beyond their control" (p.8). She notes that the home "is becoming the nexus for a whole range of activities" (work, socialization, entertainment), something that "could atomize and isolate homeworkers from interactions in the larger society" (p.9). In particular, the erosion of work-life boundaries is quite problematic and damaging (p.14).

To ground her discussion, Gurstein presents a typology of home-based workers, including "employed teleworker/homeworker/telecommuter," "independent contractor," "self-employed consultant and home-based entrepreneur/business operator," "moonlighter," and "occasional homeworker" (p.32).

Getting into the results of the study, Gurstein reports that in her California-based study, "home-based work is an escape from the hierarchical organization of the office environment and the managerial control imposed in that environment." Also, "Most teleworkers find that they work very efficiently at home" and Gurstein partially ascribes this increased efficiency to guilt: "They feel guilty about their pleasant work situation" (p.66). Gurstein also points out the fact that telework is associated with a sedentary lifestyle and cites the fact that "most wear sweat clothes when they are working, or even pyjamas and housecoats" (p.70). More worryingly, some report that dressing casually negatively impacted their self-esteem (p.70), something that reflects a broader self-esteem issue for teleworkers, who "have few symbols of their professional identity" (p.71). Teleworkers also report a shrinking network of friends, lower socialization, and more selectivity about interacting with friends (p.71).

(Notice that many of these issues - socialization, self-esteem, physical activity, symbols of professional identity - are directly addressed by coworking.)

Overall, Gurstein does a nice job of reporting statistics and interview results and connecting them with trends. However, I found some of her conclusions to be overly pessimistic. Reading between the lines above, the results from the California study and other studies seem to suggest that telework offers a great many tradeoffs. In any case, the book provides a nice counterbalance to more euphoric discussions of telework.

Reading :: Telework and Social Change

Telework and Social Change: How Technology Is Reshaping the Boundaries between Home and Work
By Nicole B. Ellison

In this 2004 book, the author examines how geographically flexible workers managed their relative independence in telework. Ellison argues that we're in the middle of a shift in which work is something you do, not somewhere you go; the organization is a network rather than an office (p.3). To explore telework, Ellison conducted case studies of two organizations over 22 months in 1998-1999 (p.15).

Some of the takeaways from these case studies included the following:

First, Ellison found that telecommuting meant becoming a generalist. For mobile workers, being "empowered" meant having to do the sorts of things that sales secretaries once did (p.67).

Second, she found that, in contrast to some of the earlier research on telework, teleworkers in her case studies did not feel isolated; they "expressed a sense of relief at not having to socialize with coworkers as they would in a traditional office" (p.95).

Third, she found that teleworkers had to set boundaries when working in their houses (Ch.6).

Although the results were interesting, I'm afraid the book is sometimes a bit repetitive. Ellison has a habit of providing a block quote from an interview, then restating that quote in her own words. My sense is that the book could be much shorter. Still, if you're interested in telework/telecommuting, it's worth a read.

Reading :: Teleworking in the Countryside

Teleworking in the Countryside: Home-Based Working in the Information Society
By Michael Antony Clark

This 2000 book studies telework in rural Britain. Clark defines teleworkers "by the nature of their work, in that it involves the production and communication of information from home" (p.5). Citing Toffler's prediction of the "electronic cottage" and later concerns that such home-based work is isolating, (p.17), Clark designed a study with two parts: (1) a survey of how telecottages facilitated telework and (2) interview-based case studies of teleworkers.

A word about telecottages. This book was the first source I've read on telecottages, which were typically funded by local development groups and furnished internet connections, computer labs, and training for those who wanted to learn about information and communication technologies (ICT). These were not what later became known as coworking spaces: spaces where teleworkers and others could come to work in each others' presence. In fact, Clark found that telecottages were quite underused, and at the end of the book he recommended "the establishment of a register of teleworkers and the promotion of small business clubs, maybe via telecottages, which could be integrated into a larger European network of teleworkers" (p.173). That is, Clark recognized that teleworkers didn't need ICT access and training so much as they needed places where they could network and work alongside each other. Remarkably, his recommendation predated the coworking movement by about five years.

Back to the study. Clark found that organizations hired teleworkers as part of the general desire to subcontract work (p.94). Teleworkers themselves gave several reasons for wanting to telework: their workstyle, lifestyle, access to childcare, the threat of unemployment, forced unemployment, and being economically active in-migrants (i.e., moving to a rural area but still wanting to work at an old job) (pp.116-127). They appreciated their autonomy, particularly their control over workflows, work tasks, leisure time, and client sectors served (p.148). Such teleworkers knew about telecottages, but "none had used the telecottage as a workspace" (p.143).

"Social isolation was only mentioned by a few respondents as a significant problem," Clark reports (p.155). Local networks reduced isolation for most respondents (p.156), but professional isolation was a problem for all; one complains that "'I've never had it really, the ability to bounce ideas off of somebody else, and this is a common problem'" (p.157).

Although Clark's book was published in 2000, much of Clark's discussion is still quite fresh and relevant to people working from home. If you're interested in the effects of telework, certainly pick it up.

Reading :: Internet and Change

Internet and Change: An Ethnography of Knowledge and Flexible Work
By Jens Kjaerulff

Although this book was published in 2010, it reports on a study the author conducted in 1999 after seeing a 1998 Danish television broadcast about teleworkers meeting for weekly get-togethers. As Kjaerulff describes it, the broadcast claimed that these teleworkers got together to help each other's work - to provide feedback over lunch (pp.15-19). One teleworker was quoted as saying that "we need colleagues" (p.18). Intriguingly, this weekly lunch sounds a lot like a phenomenon that arose later in the US and came to be known as Jelly.

But when Kjaerulff arrived to study these teleworker luncheons,  he found that they were not as advertised. He attended these weekly lunches for 16 months as well as visiting participants' houses. But "My fieldwork gradually revealed the apparent collegial engagement among the groups' members to be considerably exaggerated" (p.29). The Wednesday Lunch Group did indeed meet, and did indeed value its meetings, but they rarely if ever worked or discussed work during the lunches (p.31). Rather, they connected (p.30).

Given this revelation, Kjaerulff began studying how people from the lunch group worked in their homes. Using surveys, semistructured and unstructured interviews, focus groups, and participant-observation, Kjaerulff examined a handful of families and found some of the issues familiar to the telework literature: people wanted flexibility so that they could spend more time with their family, so they could work extended hours away from the office, and occasionally so they could hide how efficiently they worked (a la Tim Ferriss).

Overall, I'm afraid the book was not very illuminating. One disturbing sign was that although the book was published in 2010, most of his sources were contemporaneous with the study (around 2000). At one point - my apologies, I didn't record the page number - Kjaerulff cites several studies on telework that stop right at 2000. To me, this suggests that the author wrote the study some time back, then lightly revised it ten years later for publication. Another issue is that even though the author studied several families, the book focuses on just three of them, and we don't get a good sense of how generally their results hold. However, if you're studying telework or Jellies or coworking, the book may provide some useful background information.

Reading :: Handbook of Research on Writing

Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text
Edited by Charles Bazerman

This behemoth of a book (652pp. including index) covers several strands of research on writing under the headings of "history of writing," "writing in society," "writing in schooling," and "writing as text." It's a strong collection, well integrated and edited, with broad coverage. Given the strength of the collection as a whole, I had a hard time picking standout pieces, but here I focus on a couple of the chapters on writing history.

First, Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Michael Erard's "Origins and Forms of Writing" summarizes and extends Schmandt-Besserat's groundbreaking work on the origins of writing in Mesopotamia. Although the discussion of writing's Mesopotamian origins (circa 3200 BCE) are familiar to those who have read Schmandt-Besserat's books, the authors also point out that writing appears to have arisen independently in two other places: China (about 1250 BCE) and Mesoamerica (650 BCE). As the authors emphasize, writing is neither intuitive nor common: "the cognitive steps that led from logography to numerals and phonograms occurred only once in Mesopotamia" (pp.13-15), and similarly the alphabet was invented only once (p.15).

In contrast to the many changes in the lineage of Mesopotamian writing, Chinese writing "has an unbroken record of use in the last three millenia leading up to the modern time" (p.15). The earliest Chinese writing was engraved on "turtle shell and cow bone, used in divination practices" (p.16).

Mesoamerican writing is much harder to reconstruct since Europeans destroyed many codices and others, hidden from the Europeans, decomposed (p.17). But Mesoamericans developed "as many as 13 different writing systems" whose glyphs were written on stone stellae, ceramics, and bark paper books (codices) (p.17). "If writing in Mesoamerica is associated with economic functions, then in Mesoamerica writing is associated with calendrical calculations and the actions of kingly dynasties" (p.17).

Graham Smart's contribution, "Writing and the Social Formation of Economy," picks up on the thread of Mesopotamian writing, arguing that "Writing has, over the millenia, supported the development of increasingly complex and geographically far-reaching forms of economic activity. Throughout this history, newly invented texts and functions for writing have facilitated innovative economic practices. In turn, the use of particular kinds of texts in economic activity led to their early and widespread development, ahead of other forms of writing" (p.103). Smart points out that "new forms and functions for writing allowed for increased complexity in economic affairs," thus "enabling commerce to transcend the constraints of human memory, social trust, and geography" (p.104).

I've only scratched the surface of a thick book full of standout chapters. If you're interested in research on writing, by all means, pick up this volume.

Present Tense CFP

Once again, Present Tense is calling for submissions:

http://www.presenttensejournal.org/news/call-for-submissions/

Reading :: The 4-Hour Work Week

The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content
By Tim Ferris

I've heard a lot about this book, not all good. But I read it for the Link Coworking book club, and in general, I'm glad that I did. Yes, Ferris is a bit of a braggart. Yes, his tips don't always translate to lines of work beyond product sales. Yes, he comes off in places as a bit amoral. Get past all that, though, and you'll find some solid principles that you might apply to your life.

Ferris' thesis is that "Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility." He argues that the old mentality of working long hours, saving your money, and deferring vacations and relaxation has let us down: people end up working for the sake of it, waiting to take retirement until they're not fit enough to enjoy it, and hoping that their hard work will pay off. They also end up filling the hours of the work week with things that they don't really need to do. (One example: Email. Ferris recommends reading it at most twice a day.)

The alternative, Ferris tells us, is to take on another mentality: to reconfigure our lives so that we can get more done with less effort and use the saved time to enjoy ourselves. He prescribes that we DEAL:

• Definition: Understand "the rules and objectives of the new game," i.e., the rules of the New Rich.
• Elimination: Save time by ignoring the unimportant and developing a "low-information diet" that avoids distractions and overload.
• Automation: "puts cash flow on autopilot" via "geographic arbitrage, outsourcing, and rules of nondecision."
• Liberation: Enable total mobility by establishing remote control of work. Take mini-retirements (i.e., months-long vacations).

Ferris provides copious examples from his own life throughout. The consistent message is autonomy: "Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W's you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it." Ferris advocates achieving autonomy by negotiating what is essentially a results-only work environment - i.e., negotiating work off-site, then fine-tuning your tools and processes so that you can deliver the same or better results in far fewer hours. Working remotely is essential here since you need to avoid the pressure to look busy as well as the distractions that come with working on-site. "Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions," he tells us. Later, he suggests we ask ourselves: "Am I being productive or just active?"

Related, Ferris strongly argues for doing work that you find meaningful - and either refusing or outsourcing the rest. Like Drucker, he argues for working with your strengths rather than fixing your weaknesses. Instead of working on weaknesses, he suggests, just outsource them to someone who can do those tasks more quickly and effectively. Oursourcing has other benefits: "Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultrarefined set of rules that will cut the remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them."

Ferris also has other advice, some of which just feels like cheating but is (I imagine) highly effective.

Here's Ferris' advice on how to become a recognized expert. It's simple: Join some organizations; read the three top-selling books in the category; give a free 1-3 hour seminar at a university and have someone video it; do the same at some well-known local corporations; write 1-2 articles for trade magazines (or interview an expert and write up the interview); join ProfNet so that journalists will quote you as an expert). This is a three-week process. It's not quite the same as getting your PhD, but it's not meant to be.

Ferris also describes how to pull a disappearing act from your office. It's also simple: Increase the company's investment in you via training; call in sick two days (he suggests Tuesday and Wednesday) and demonstrate increased output offsite by working remotely; suggest a revocable trial period for working offsite one day a week, citing your increased output; expand remote time by making sure that your offsite days yield higher output than your onsite days. This is a longer process, but it gets results: Ferris gives an example of a reader who tried this technique and managed to take a 30-day vacation in China without his employer realizing. Critically, this won't work unless you really are keeping your output high.

If you read only one part of the book, though, I would suggest the part on automation. Ferris makes a compelling case for figuring out how to either automate or outsource routine tasks. Those who are hackers at heart may be familiar with automation (e.g., the folks who set elaborate GMail filters), but outsourcing is also a powerful technique. Ferris discusses at length how to leverage it.

Bottom line: This is a book for people who hate aspects of their job and who can perform a large portion of their work electronically. It's not going to work for people who work locally (barbers, realtors), who are required to be on-site at specific times (cashiers, professors), or who must spend a great deal of time processing knowledge (software developers, analysts, and again professors). It probably won't work well for people who collaborate frequently. But parts of this book should be applicable to nearly anyone. Get past the braggadocio and at least skim it; think of it as a toolkit for making yourself more productive.

Reading :: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
By Cory Doctorow


A short review for this one. I almost never read fiction anymore, but four things compelled me to read this book.

First, I had heard a lot of good things about it, and I'm a fan of Doctorow's writing on BoingBoing.

Second, because Jenkins and others have mentioned this book's use of the term ad-hocracy, a term that has fascinated me since I read Toffler's Future Shock.

Third, Tara Hunt and others have mentioned borrowing the term "whuffie" (roughly, social capital) from it.

Fourth - well, it was free.

Bottom line, it was a pretty good book. Doctorow is interested in how social dynamics change when people are given effective immortality, their basic needs are taken care of, and they're perpetually wired into a social information layer. In this future, money has been replaced by whuffie, social capital that is automatically tabulated through the social information layer. Make people happy and you get more whuffie; rock the boat or irritate people and you lose it.

Although whuffie sounds great - and people who have adopted the term have enthusiastically used it as a metaphor for social capital, describing its pluses - the story is in large part about its downside.

The protagonist must solve his own murder after being restored from his last backup. Being murdered really bothers him, and it also bothers him that no one else seems to care much about solving the crime: in a world in which people casually destroy their bodies and restore their memories in clones (sometimes just to avoid a bad cold), being murdered is not a big deal; it's more of a faux pas. But the protagonist has a pretty good idea of who murdered him and why. In fact, he suspects a plot. But as he struggles to prove this plot, he behaves badly, makes mistakes, and eventually becomes a pariah with whuffie so low that even small children look away in horror when he passes them. Whuffie, Doctorow shows us, functions as a way to normalize behavior, rewarding safe, conservative behavior and penalizing struggles and conflict.

Ad-hocracies don't come out well either. In the Magic Kingdom - the story is set in Disney World - the sections are run by consensually governed, leaderless collectives. Generally, these collectives turn out to be good at maintaining sections of the park (and group consensus), but bad at innovating or reacting. The exception is an organization that is de facto led by an outsized personality. They're a far cry from the agile specialists that Toffler describes.

In all, it's an engaging and quick read. If you're into science fiction with social commentary, give it a look.

Reading :: The Future of Nonprofits

The Future of Nonprofits: Innovate and Thrive in the Digital Age
By David Neff and Randal Moss

Full disclosure: I know David Neff. Actually, I'm pretty sure that at least 60% of Austin knows David Neff, who is one of the most gregarious people I've met. He's constantly on social media, he was named the 2009 AMA/AMAF Social Media Marketer of the Year, and he is famous for his annual Mustache and Bad Sweater Party. He's spoken to my classes once or twice. And he's very passionate about nonprofits.

So I was happy to hear that David had teamed up with Randal Moss, with whom he had worked at the American Cancer Society,  to write a book on the future of nonprofits. The book wasn't quite ready by SXSW, but when David and Randal presented readings from the book, they demonstrated that they were thinking through how the nonprofit sector had to change considerably to address the rapid changes wrought by social media, demographic shifts, and other factors. They demonstrated some quick adaptation themselves: Knowing that the book wouldn't be ready, they managed to supply a leave-behind that would keep us thinking about it.

From Austin snapshots

If you missed SXSW, don't worry, the comic book is also printed in the back of The Future of Nonprofits. I hope you'll get a chance to read it along with the rest of the book, because The Future of Nonprofits is certainly worth it - not just for those in the nonprofit sector, but for anyone who is interested in opening their organization's culture up to innovation. Neff and Moss take a strategic approach, illustrated with cases from their own work and interviews with innovation leaders at nonprofits.

So what does a strategic approach entail? More than simply becoming more agile. From the first chapter, the authors emphasize that innovative organizations have to not just anticipate change, but actively look for it. Their first example: for much of the 20th century, nonprofits in the US relied heavily on direct solicitation; donors, especially housewives, reached through their personal networks to gather donations from their neighborhoods. This arrangement worked so well that nonprofits began to overrely on it - even when social changes in the 1970s (e.g., women entering the workforce en masse, the rise of apartment dwelling) caused neighborhoods to unravel (pp.10-11). "So, slowly and without major fanfare, the definition of community had changed and it changed right under the noses of the nonprofit community" (p.12). The authors argue that such shifts can be detected much earlier - but people in nonprofits are often so focused on working that they don't see these shifts. So the critical change must be to "embrace innovation as a valuable tool," first at the level of leadership, but then (critically) as part of the organization's culture (p.20). 

How do you know when you're being innovative? In Chapter 2, the authors discuss what innovation is and what it isn't. "Really the ultimate goal of innovation is to bring about change to add value to and improve upon a process, product, or experience," they tell us, while "things are not innovative when they do not leverage new ideas, new uses for old ideas and technologies, and/or fail to deliver value to the end user or constituent" (p.22). That is, it's not innovative to simply adopt a new technology or business process. It's not innovative to simply hire someone to tweet for your company, for instance - not unless you have a concrete idea of how doing that will help advance your objectives and those of the people you serve. Without that, the "innovation" might actually be an unnovation "because [it delivers] little if any durable value" (p.23). The authors' many examples are invaluable here, as is one of their lessons: you can measure innovation. It's not just a vague concept, it's something you can examine with metrics. Of those metrics, the most important one for nonprofits is engagement (p.52).

In Chapter 3, the authors differentiate their strategy from "preeminent programs for driving organizational efficiency": Lean Management, Six Sigma Management, and Total Quality Management. All have their strengths, but none are right for nonprofits, particularly since they tend to focus on efficiency over innovation. 

Given the authors' considerable experience in social media, it's not surprising that Chapter 4 focuses on leveraging technology for nonprofits. Here, the case studies become extremely valuable, as the authors discuss some of the traditional frictions between nonprofits and IT staff; interview key figures in nonprofits who have thought about new ways to engage donors with technology; and describe case studies. For instance, the authors discuss how the Brooklyn Museum used Foursquare to crowdsource tips about the museum and its surroundings - and to provide incentives to become the Mayor of the museum (pp.66-67). 

Part II of the book discusses "the three pillars of innovation": awareness (Ch.5), structure (Ch.6), and staffing (Ch.7). Here's where the book really becomes interesting, because the authors begin to deliver on their promise of a culture of innovation. It's not just about external engagement, it's about structurally changing the organization, changing incentives within the organization, developing new job descriptions and responsibilities, and getting the right people on your team. I won't go into all the details here except to say that they cover the bases - defining positions, interviewing, calling references - in ways that emphasize developing an innovative culture. (Appendix 1 includes some sample job descriptions to get you started.) They don't talk about stealing promising employees from other sections - at least, not until Chapter 8.

In Part III, the authors move into the question of implementation. "To get started, take a look at your staff, find the rule breakers, and begin to initiate a Skunkworks effort," they tell us in Ch.8. "Why do organizations do this? Because the typical way of doing things produces typical work and a Skunkworks program is charged with producing atypical work - innovative and leading-edge work that can only be done in an unencumbered working environment" (p.149). They walk through the steps of setting up a Skunkworks, including stealing promising staffers from other sections, and they discuss some rules and processes that will help you get started. 

Chapter 9 is about fundraising: "new money from new donors in new ways" (p.169). This chapter is about the future, so they list five major changes for the next five years:

• Social gaming with rewards
• Donating with ease
• Fun local events/individual fundraisers 
• The socially conscious partnership
• The shift in donor attitudes (i.e., donors who "do their research online and make confident choices," p.186)

They discuss each change with plenty of examples. For instance, when they discuss fun local events, they describe David's annual November campaign for men's cancer issues, Movember - when men not only donate but grow mustaches for the month. Movember ends, of course, with the Mustache and Bad Sweater Party. 

Chapter 10 moves on to "the future of communications," and here the authors generate another top five list:

• Geolocation
• Monitoring technology (e.g., Twitter hashtags)
• Data segmentation
• Advertising beyond "Where's the Beef?"
• The total loss of privacy

And again, the authors do a great job of discussing how they spotted these trends, what they are, and what they mean to donor engagement.

With lists that predict trends of the next five years, obviously parts of this book will have a short shelf life. That just means you should buy it quickly. The other parts will age more gracefully, I think, and the book as a whole should be useful to nonprofits - but also to other organizations that prize high constituent engagement. In fact, higher education could probably learn a few tricks from it. If you're in the position to hire, innovate, or engage in your organization, consider picking it up.

(I'm still reading)

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might be asking: What happened to the book reviews?

Answer: I'm just behind on them.

No, I haven't been posting book reviews here for a while, but that doesn't mean I've stopped reading - I'm just buried in other commitments. I have 5 books to blog, including:

• Phillip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent
• Timothy Ferris' The Four-Hour Work Week
• Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• Charles Bazerman et al.'s Genre in a Changing World
• Bollier's report entitled The Future of Work

In addition, I'll be reading David Neff and Randal Moss' The Future of Nonprofits when it comes out in early May.

When will I get to these? Not sure - I really have overloaded myself with projects over the next few months, but I hope to fire off a few reviews the second week of May. Until then, hang tight. And thanks for reading.

Present Tense issue 2 is out

Present Tense issue 2 is out. From the About page:

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy. Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles ranging from 2,000 to 2,500 words, the length of a conference paper. For sample topics please see our submission guidelines.

The articles look pretty interesting. If this is the sort of thing you like to read, definitely take a look.