Reading:: Activity, Consciousness, and Personality

Originally posted: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 22:33:42
Activity, Consciousness, and Personality
by Aleksie Nikolaevich Leont'ev
I usually link to Amazon.com's listing for each book I read, but this book has been out of print for a long time. Fortunately, it's available online in two versions: the HTML version at marxists.org and the PDF scans at the MCA website (complete with someone's notes in the margin). That's a very good thing, because this book is a synopsis of much of the "second stage" development of activity theory.
As with most Soviet texts of this era (1978), the book contains many glowing references to the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. -- especially in the first chapter and near the beginning of each chapter, where the censors would look. In works such as Mikhail Bakhtin's, these sorts of references tended to be subterfuges meant to smuggle in the non-Marxist or anti-Marxist ideas he wanted to talk about; here, Leont'ev is clearly a Marxist and has based his work squarely on Marxist insights. (So did Vygotsky, but his books were banned in a later era because they took Marx's work as a starting point rather than as the final word.) Starting with familiar ground such as historical materialism, mediation, and division of labor, and building on Vygotsky's pioneering work in the field, Leont'ev fleshes out the theory of activity in ways that scale it up from individual to organizational activity. Here, for the first time, we see most of the familiar components of activity theory: the levels of activity; the structure of an activity system; the separation of activity from motive, action from goal, operation from conditions. We see the famous (well, famous in AT circles) illustration of shifting gears as an example of actions becoming operations. Chapters 3 and 4 are the pivotal ones here, and they shed quite a bit of light on these important elements. No, Leont'ev doesn't use a lot of triangles -- the archetypical AT triangle was an innovation by Engestrom -- but you can see how Leont'ev's work inspired those triangles.
The book isn't perfect. For one thing, it's a summary of years and years of research, so you don't see the detailed empirical cases upon which Leont'ev bases his conclusions. Unlike his book Problems of the Development of Mind, which details several imaginative and fascinating experiments along with statistical tables, this one speaks in generalities. The many references to the superiority of Soviet psychology in Ch. 1 get tiresome. The references to essential differences between simians and humans are dated and not borne out by contemporary research. And in many cases the text is fairly dry. But those drawbacks shouldn't keep us from treasuring this important and insightful book and blessing those good folks who put it online. Thanks.

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Reading:: Voices of Collective Remembering

Originally posted: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 19:13:44

Voices of Collective Remembering

by James V. Wertsch

I recently reviewed Wertsch's Mind as Action and that caused me to look his work up on Amazon. When I saw he had a new book out, I picked it up and read it fairly quickly. That turned out to be a good move, because the last chapter of Mind in Action turns out to be a great lead-in to the new book. Voices of Collective Remembering deals -- as the title suggests -- with how we publicly construct and maintain memories within societies, and in particular how official histories are both written and resisted.

Most of the work in the book comes from interviews, surveys, and textual analyses the author conducted in Russia, where the Soviet obsession with controlling history has consequences over a decade after the USSR itself collapsed. You would expect some of the findings, such as the tendency for Soviet history books to valorize whoever was in control of the Soviet Union at the time they were written. (One interesting fact: across the entire Soviet Union, all students in a given grade would read the same pages of the same textbook on the same day.) Like Big Brother in 1984, the Soviets would indeed change parts of the official recorded history to suit their ends. But unlike 1984, Wertsch finds, the Soviets rarely made up facts out of whole cloth. Rather, they deleted parts. In one striking illustration, Wertsch describes how pictures of Stalin would be periodically airbrushed to remove people who had later fallen out of favor, leaving uncomfortable and obvious gaps -- and sometimes eventually leading to pictures of Stalin alone.

But the book is about more than Soviet stage-managing of history. Wertsch identifies a prototypical Russian narrative that is applied time and time again to historical events -- in particular, World War II -- and that both predates the USSR and persists after it. The Soviets leveraged this narrative, to be sure, but that leveraging doesn't seem to have been conscious. What's more, though the official history predictably was resisted through clandestine oral accounts and samizdat texts, these accounts and texts also show traces of the narrative. Wertsch takes these insights and, importantly, points to how they can be applied to history in the West as well.

Memory is really not my research interest, so I'm not sure how useful this book will be to me. But it's a fascinating book and, I think, important for understanding history and memory dialogically.

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Reading:: The Body Multiple

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 11:17:06

The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice

by Annemarie Mol

Annemarie Mol, a Dutch ethnographer, has written and worked with John Law and has helped to develop the brand of post-ANT amodernism that we see in his later work. The hordes of people who read this blog undoubtedly are thinking of the review I wrote of Law's Aircraft Stories, which I think tried a bit too hard and lost its grip on the materialist pragmatism (if I can characterize it that way) of ANT. As I began reading this book, I was worried it would turn out the same way. After all, she spends a lot of time in the first chapter being rather introspective -- talking about her positioning as a Dutch researcher who must write in English if she is to be read by a large number of colleagues; examining her own pre-med background; talking about disease as being "more than one, less than many." (When I mentioned that phrase a few days ago, someone shot back: "That would be ... two?") Most bothersome was Mol's choice to have two running sets of texts, meaning that on nearly every page, the top half and the bottom half constitute different takes on the chapter. That probably seems clever and dialogic to most people, but I found it to be annoying and discouraging: I'd finish a chapter, then go back to the beginning to read the same pages over again.

Yet the book, as a whole, is tremendously interesting. Either it makes John Law's point from Aircraft Stories far, far better than he did, or I'm going to have to read Law's book over again. Because what Mol does here is to persuasively argue that the things we take as settled, scientifically quantifiable and observable phenomena are not really just objects-in-the-world; rather, they always multiple. Reality, she says, multiplies when we focus on artifacts or practices.

How could that be? Mol manages to take a very mystical-sounding concept and -- unlike Law -- ground it through material, pragmatically gathered and analyzed data. She asks: What is the disease called atherosclerosis? And the best illustration comes from one of her informants, who shows her a slide under the microscope and demonstrates how the veins have calcified and narrowed, restricting blood flow and causing great pain in the legs of the person who had the disease. This calcification, he tells her, is atherosclerosis. And after a pause, he qualifies: under the microscope.

It's an important qualification. The pathologist can only make these slides after the leg has been amputated (since the veins are otherwise occupied until that point, you see), so his version of atherosclerosis comes rather late in the game. Other people's versions of atherosclerosis are enacted differently (and Mol selects the term enacted carefully, to indicate the complex practices in which they are embedded). To the patient, atherosclerosis is great pain in the legs; to the general practicioner, one possible explanation for that pain and for the weak pulse in the legs; to the radiologist, a cloudy smear in the X-rays after a radioactive dye has been injected; to a surgeon, "pipes" that have to be cleaned; to an occupational therapist, a malady that can be abated with exercise. Mol points out that usually these multiple enactments of the disease cohere -- that is, there's enough correspondence among them that people can be said to be talking about the same object, the same disease. But, interestingly, sometimes these enactments don't cohere. Mol spends much time trying to figure out when that happens and why.

The book is in general engagingly written (although, like Law, Mol can sometimes be too self-indulgent) and thought-provoking. What interests me is how this line of research impacts activity theory. In amodernist, ANT and post-ANT approaches, we always operate at the level of lived experience and we use tools such as representations to change the scale of things to fit that lived activity. To examine calcified veins, for instance, we use a microscope to make the veins "larger"; to examine galaxies, we map them in photos; and we don't marvel that we can place photos of microscopic veins and macroscopic galaxies next to each other. Sociologically speaking, there is no macroscopic or microscopic, there is only the lived experience with its many tools for expanding or shrinking phenomena appropriately. But in AT, there is a definite belief in different scales of sociocultural phenomena. We look for the elements of an activity system, including the actions that sustain it and the operations with which those actions are enacted. And at the macro level, activity theorists look for contradictions among or within activities. Engestrom, for instance -- following Marx a bit too closely -- argues that the primary contradiction in capitalist society is the one between use value and exchange value. For a materialist theory, AT sounds very abstract sometimes! What Mol's work does is to clearly call into question these sorts of macro-level abstractions, pulling us back from dialectic and into a more dialogic understanding of activity that is always grounded at the level of the individual. Yes, I'm still processing this notion.

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Reading:: Mind As Action

Originally posted: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 08:05:57

Mind As Action

by James V. Wertsch

When I was just starting to look into activity theory, in 1995, one of the first books I picked up was J.V. Wertsch's Voices of the Mind. In that book, Wertsch attempts to synthesize the Vygotskian cultural-historical tradition with Bakhtin's dialogism. I was really fascinated by it, but didn't understand why Wertsch wasn't using triangle diagrams or extensively citing Engestrom, Leontiev, and others in that vein. As I studied more deeply, I began to realize that Soviet psychology had forked after Vygotsky, and that the activity theory tradition with which I was familiar tended to trace its lineage to Vygotsky's colleague Leontiev, while Wertsch's CHAT tradition took a somewhat different path.

Nevertheless, the two schools have much in common both in terms of thought and sources. So when Mind as Action came out, I read it eagerly and took much away from it. Parts of it were key to helping me understand and develop my own ideas about mediation. (Mediation is the main focus of both books.) And some of Wertsch's cases in this book helped me to think about CHAT in more political-ethical terms than I had before. Although parts of Mind as Action were hotly contested on the mailing list xmca, as a whole the book is solid, interesting, and useful.

In his attempt to further understand mediated activity, Wertsch turns to Kenneth Burke's Pentad. Burke, like Bakhtin, is hard to characterize but can be called a language philosopher and literary critic. His Pentad, a heuristic for analyzing human action in terms of Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose, is here applied to mediated action in general.

And what interesting examples Wertsch tends to give us. Being an educational psychologist, Wertsch tends to draw his cases from pedagogy -- not really my main interest. Wertsch looks at how education is intertwined with issues of power, how power is often taught through narrative, and -- surprisingly -- how citizens of Soviet Estonia, taught a heavily fictionalized and regulated history of their country, managed to develop a far more critical and nuanced understanding of the country's history than students in the U.S. (The last case I don't find altogether convincing because Wertsch's methods drew on a very small sample of citizens and it's unclear how he chose them -- but the narratives are fascinating nonetheless.)

All in all, a provocative book and one I'm sure I'll read yet again.

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Reading:: Writing Power

Originally posted: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 07:53:57

Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center (Suny Series, Studies in Scientific and Technical Communications)

by Dorothy A. Winsor

When I was a PhD student at Iowa State University, word reached me that Dorothy Winsor was going to be joining the faculty. Winsor's work was well known -- required reading, in fact -- and her sociocultural orientation made her a good fit. I was busy assembling my dissertation committee at the time, so with the chair's permission, I wrote her and persuaded her to join. It was a good move: besides being extremely smart and well read, Dorothy is a warm, witty, and considerate person. And she's intellectually curious, reading and writing about activity theory, distributed cognition, and actor-network theory, among other things. Her first book, Writing Like an Engineer, is already a classic.

This book, which has just been published, is good too. Winsor has boiled five summers' worth of observations into a discussion of what it means to communicate in an engineering center. I suppose that probably sounds boring to some of my vast army of readers, but Winsor manages to make it interesting with her strong narrative style and her keen choice of anecdotes. At issue here is the question of how power is constructed, distributed, and maintained through communicative genres. Power is not really an interest of mine -- I find that it's usually underdefined and, as Latour argues, it tends to be seen as a cause when in fact it's more of a consequence -- but Winsor does manage to theorize it in ways that help us examine how genres help to enact it.

I also found reading this book to be helpful because in many ways the study is similar to the one I'm trying to turn into a book -- although Winsor shoots for depth while I aimed for breadth in the data collection and analysis process.

Well, obviously I admire the writer and enjoy the book. But I want to also do a bit of a critique. Winsor touches on a lot of theorists and theoretical schools here: Hutchins (distributed cognition), Latour (actor-network theory), Vygotsky (CHAT), Miller, Bazerman, Berkenkotter & Huchin, Orlikowski & Yates (genre), Bordieu, Foucault (postmodernism, I guess). But, perhaps because it would have disrupted the flow, she didn't do much work in connecting these different schools or synthesizing them. For instance, her discussion of distributed cognition often sounds more like run-of-the-mill division of labor rather than the more radical notion that cognition is computation distributed across humans and nonhumans in the environment. Similarly, when she describes how an engineer asserts that a machine is "communicating" with him, she dismisses the notion by asserting that he really doesn't believe this -- even though a thoroughgoing distributed cognitionist or actor-network theorist would accept the claim and argue that it was indeed true! Symmetrical theories such as DC and ANT have often been criticized because they appear to elide agency (indeed, often by CHAT and postmodernists), and agency is at the heart of much that Winsor has written here, so I wanted to see a discussion of that discrepancy.

In any case, the book is interesting, well written, and useful for folks like me who are interested in how texts and people interact through organizations. Pick it up and take a look.

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Reading:: Tracing Genres Through Organizations

Originally posted: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 07:58:55

Tracing Genres Through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting With Technology)

by Clay Spinuzzi

No, I'm not going to review my own book. I just wanted to note that on Monday I was informed that it had just been printed. I'm supposed to get my copies later this week. If you want to see some endorsements, why, here are some.

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Reading:: Telewars in the States

Originally posted: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 09:29:15

Telewars in the States: Telecommunications Issues in a New Era of Competition

by Thomas W. Bonnett

Most readers of this blog (assuming there are any readers) probably haven't been scouring the used bookstores for this book. Most of the books I review here have to do with cultural-historical activity theory and related topics and tend to be theoretical or empirical. Telewars is, to perhaps oversimplify a bit, a Cliff's Notes version of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It was published by the Council of Governor's Policy Advisors and is meant for "CGPA members and others who advise state Governors." In fact, it was published in 1996, which means that Tom Bonnett must have thrown this slim, wonkish volume together very quickly.

One might think that with those qualifications, reading Telewars would be like reading Al Gore's diary -- plodding, uninspired, heavy on the minutiae, and with a very short shelf life. Well, that's how I imagine that experience would be.

But it turns out that Telewars is readable as well as informative. Its shelf life has indeed passed, and I would be surprised if governors' advisors were using it almost ten years later, but it does provide some real insight into how our messy telecommunications system works and how legislation affects it. Explanations are readable and successfully thread their way between the Scylla of wonkishness and the Charybdis of techno-geekiness. (How's that for a tortured metaphor?) A timeline, a glossary, and a two-page summary of the book's chapters all help to make things more readable. And the minutiae are banished to the footnotes.

I ended up reading the book during three bus trips. It's that easy to read and that fast of a read. And it'll stay on my shelf for a while, since I need to figure out many of these issues for my current book project. If you really are interested in the differences between inter-LATA and intra-LATA, or wondering what a CLEC is, or if you're surprised that your cable company is suddenly offering phone service, check out this book.

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Reading:: Future Workshops

Originally posted: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 19:38:00

Future Workshops: How to Create Desirable Futures
Robert Jungk, Norbert Mullert

I had to get this book through interlibrary loan, and when it came time to link to it, I had to go to amazon.co.uk rather than amazon.com. This book has not had a wide circulation within the U.S. And that's understandable. The book reads like a breathless political tract, or even a religious tract, in which we're urged to resist the evil forces that seek to take control of our lives. Here's a sample:

"What is a future workshop all about? Well, the man in the street has practically no say when it comes to jobs, the environment or the way the future is shaped. All of these aspects of our lives are in the hands of the politicians, the industrialists and the experts. To remedy this non-democratic state of affairs and to show that things can be done better, Robert Jungk and his co-workers, over a decade ago, developed the future workshop method. The idea behind it is that the silent majority actually has plenty to say about what our towns and neighbourhoods should be like, about jobs and industry [and] energy and all their other needs." (pp.51-52)

And so forth. It has the sort of fervor mixed with simple hope that one would expect from a Green Party rally or a self-help book. And it's easy to dismiss the book and its bifurcated view of powerful/powerless. But one has to remember that this book was written by a German who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and attempted to alert the European media to the menace -- and it was written a couple of years before the Berlin Wall came down. Jungk and Mullert specifically cite Lech Walesa as an influence. Jungk's Future Workshops approach is clearly an attempt to encourage workers to take control of their lives in the face of nascent totalitarian regimes.

One can see why this idealistic, vaguely socialist approach was adopted wholesale by the Scandinavians as they developed participatory design. Even though the book wasn't published until 1987, the FW approach has been around since the 1960s and clearly influenced the Scandinavians deeply. The powerful/powerless dichotomy became mapped onto the capital/labor dichotomy that drove PD at the outset. What really interested me about reading this book, though, was that Jungk saw entrenched union leaders as the powerful! He suggests that future workshops should involve, not elected union leaders or their representatives, but rank-and-file workers who have volunteered in response to direct appeals by the FW organizers (p.79). What an about-face this approach took in the hands of the Scandinavians, where the oppressors became the oppressed. The more I look into this line of research, the more fascinating it gets.

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Reading:: Systems Design For, With, and By the User

Originally posted: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 09:44:56

Systems Design For, With, and by the Users: Proceedings of the Ifip Wg 9.1 Working Conference on Systems Design For, With, and by the Users
Ed. by U. Briefs, C. Ciborra, L. Schneider

I've been trying to get into the roots of participatory design lately, so I picked up this volume to see an addendum on the UTOPIA project. What a fun read. Back in 1983, people across Western Europe were concerned about automation and its impact on work and saw participatory approaches as a key counterbalance to management's attempts at total Taylorist control over the work process. So, even though "participatory design" hadn't been coined yet (papers mostly refer to "participative system design"), we see the same sort of rationale and arguments that we later see in Ehn's Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts (1990) and the classic coedited volume Computers and Democracy: A Scandinavian Challenge (1987). But the thoughts are newer, the papers are more spread out geographically, and the excitement is more palpable.

You can almost smell the revolutionary fervor, for instance, as Ulrich Briefs explains that the eventual goals for "participatory steps towards a workers production policy in systems design" include "guaranteeing the right to work for everyone" and "changing the internal structures in organizations," goals that he says question the "basic structures of the capitalist society" (p.315). I personally find this idealism charming. And informative. Among the many papers are discussions of the legislative environment for "edp" (electronic data processing?) in Scandinavia, a comparison of participative design across the world, a discussion of representation of users, working reports on DUE, DEMOS, and UTOPIA, and many many many Marxist interpretations of work organization. It's especially sobering to read in the working report on UTOPIA that "the project must result in a 'technical success'" for it to be considered an overall success (p.447). Of course that didn't happen, and in later reports the blame is laid on a subcontractor! (See Ehn 1990; Bodker 1991.)

Reading these reports reminds me of something that Langdon Winner wrote in Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems some years later. Examining the results of the UTOPIA project, he points out that technically the resulting system was very similar to that of PageMaker on the Macintosh -- yet, he said, PageMaker and MacOS were developed by capitalists in the US without worker participation. So what is the concrete contribution of participatory design? We can easily come up with partial answers, of course -- including a discussion of how PD focuses on workflow as well as narrow technical aspects -- but that would be to miss Winner's larger point. The technical results of PD do not reflect the radical ideology, partially because PD itself is more evolutionary than revolutionary. For all the revolutionary fervor evident in these essays, we know that 20 years later the real revolutions -- globalization, work decentralization, the service economy -- had nothing to do with it, pushed things in a very different direction, and forced PD itself to go in a different direction.

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Reading:: Cognition and Communication at Work

Originally posted: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 19:02:09

Cognition and Communication at Work
by Yrjv Engeström (Editor), David Middleton (Editor)

This book is a strong collection of essays reporting on work research, mostly using ethnographic and ethnomethodological approaches and informed by sociocultural approaches such as activity theory, symbolic interactionism, situated and distributed cognition. Work is studied "as mindful practice," as the title of the introduction puts it; throughout, work is valorized as a complex, interconnected, intellectual task with a strong communication component.

Given the lead editor, it's no surprise that activity theory shows up frequently in the book. That's fine with me. And unlike the chapters in Perspectives on Activity Theory (which I reviewed about a month ago), these studies tend to be accessible to those without much background in AT. The book isn't quite introductory material for an AT class -- which is what I was evaluating the book for -- but several are suitable for that purpose and may find their way into my course packets in the future.

Several standout essays are in here. But I should point out that I tend to get bored with the ones using an ethnomethodological approach. Sure, that's a failing of mine, I guess, but I just become dismayed when I see pages of closely set quotations followed by pages that dissect those quotations line by line. So the studies that caught my attention tended to be in the ethnographic, philosophical, or PD categories instead.

For instance, I enjoyed reading the Bodker and Gronbaek piece. The afterword claims that this is a reworking of the essay they published in IJMMS in 1991, and indeed some of the framing is the same, but the empirical case is actually different and B&G end up bringing out different insights here. Star's comparison of symbolic interactionism, AT, and information systems was highly interesting, especially in that she reviews some really fascinating SI studies from the mid-20th century. Engestrom's "The tensions of judging" is a nice example of the developmental work approach and allowed me to see some of the similarities between it and PD. And of course the other usual suspects show up -- Hutchins and Klausen, Suchman, Heath and Luff -- all with strong work. The book ends with an essay by the late Arne Raeithel in which he discusses his excitement at how ethnography is making its way into the German milieu.

On a side note, I notice that there's been an exodus of top-flight work researchers from industry to academia. Lucy Suchman is now at Lancaster University; Bonnie Nardi is at UC-Irvine; Steve Whittaker is now at Sheffield. Bad days for Silicon Valley.

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Reading:: Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

Originally posted: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 01:43:33

Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 12 (2000)
Special issue on Information Technology in Human Activity
Eds. Olav W. Bertelsen and Susanne Bodker

Occasionally I review a special issue of a journal as if it were an edited collection, if the articles are interesting enough and the issue as a whole has a strong enough theme. Both are true with this issue. SJIS is a really interesting journal to begin with, so interesting that I've ordered several articles from it via interlibrary loan. SJIS is one of the last bastions of the serious Scandinavian-style participatory design work that flourished in the 1980s and early 1990s, before globalism and US-style user-centered design approaches overshadowed it. At the same time that PD flourished, activity theory began to flourish and develop -- primarily through Yrjo Engestrom's efforts, of course, but also through those whom he influenced. There was -- and is -- quite a bit of cross-fertilization between the two camps, particularly with Susanne Bodker's groundbreaking work connecting AT and PD. And much of what is going on between the covers of any given issue of SJIS reflects that cross-fertilization.

The nine articles in this issue, fortunately, are online in PDF format -- and they're worth downloading. At this point (2000), researchers are attempting to adapt PD-inspired methods to a globalized world, using AT and similar theoretical frameworks as grounding. That makes sense because the early roots of PD tended to be flat-out Marxism with some Heidegger thrown in; that early framework was good at making class distinctions, arguing for class struggle, and thinking about language games, but it provided too bifurcated an understanding of the workplace to take into account the various constituencies and allegiances at play in the Scandinavian workplace, let alone other workplaces across the globe. It also did not provide a strong enough empirical framework for examining microinteractions or theorizing artifacts well. Activity theory, with its Marxist roots, its empirical focus, its developmental orientation, and (later) its extensions for handling networks of activity, provided a suitable framework while allowing researchers to continue PD's early goal of workplace democracy. So this issue provides insight on how the two traditions have merged and developed.

Activity theory has become one of the most important sociocultural frameworks for human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and information systems, so these articles tend to break new theoretical ground -- they really are pushing to develop AT rather than simply applying received wisdom to a new problem domain. Some of the topics covered in this issue include the nature of an artifact (Bertelsen; Beguin and Rabardel), networks of activity systems (Helle; Fitzpatrick; Spasser; Korpela et al.), and adapting usability methods for AT/PD design work (Bodker and Petersen). Also included is an introduction that nicely lays out the issues involved in studying information design as a human activity. And most of these articles are supported with empirical or illustrative cases.

I wish I had time to review each of the articles. But the standouts include Bertelsen & Bodker's introduction, Helle's study of a newsroom as an activity network (especially interesting in light of the shortcomings of the UTOPIA project, the most famous of the early PD projects), and Beguin and Rabardel's discussion of how the notion of mediation can guide design work.

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Reading:: Information Technology and Changes in Organizational Work

Originally posted: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 19:21:51

Information Technology and Changes in Organizational Work
by J. De Gross, Jones (Editor), Orlikowski (Editor)


Well, things have been crazy around here. I finished this book a few days ago but haven't gotten a chance to post the review until now.

The thing you need to know about this book is that it's the proceedings of a 1999 conference by the same name. So it has a high number of chapters -- 25 -- and some of these chapters are 2-3 page descriptions of panels rather than papers per se. At the same time, the papers are generally solid and intriguing, not the sort of abbreviated arguments you might expect if you've been attending, say, CCCC or ATTW. So even though the papers are short, many are worth reading and citing.

That's especially true if you're interested in the integration of information technology and business from a theoretical or research perspective. The book has sections on new forms of work, business process reengineering (BPR), systems development, inscription (mainly influenced by Latour's and Akrich's work at the time), and learning. Of course I found several essays quite valuable. Shoshanna Zuboff, for instance, argues for dismantling the 20th century managerial hierarchy and critiques BPR from this standpoint. Kari Kuutti contributes yet another thoughtful piece on information systems research, this time discussing new forms of work in terms of post-Fordism. Richard Vidgen and Tom McMaster discuss a design problem in a parking garage in terms of actor-network theory (in what looks to be a companion piece to one published in Kyng and Mathiassen's Computers and Design in Context), along with a critique of ANT that doesn't quite hit the mark. In his piece, Latour finally confesses that one disadvantage of networks is their extreme flexibility: they cannot provide policy, pass judgment, or explain stable features. He goes over ways that he and other ANT people have tried to deal with the problem recently: fluids, modes of coordination, regimes of deregulation. (I remember him talking about these in Pandora's Hope, but I don't remember him admitting that these provided a fix for the earlier incarnation of ANT.) And finally, Eric Monteiro and Ole Hanseth continue a series of ANT-based work by discussing sociotechnical networks; they provide a useful list of drawbacks of ANT studies in technology.

This book isn't what I would consider a landmark book by any means. One of the problems with proceedings is that the arguments are sometimes poorly fleshed out and empirical cases are frequently sketchy, and this book -- although a very good proceedings -- suffers from some of these problems. But it provides a nice broad social perspective on information technology research and some interesting arguments nonetheless.

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Reading:: We Have Never Been Modern

Originally posted: Sat, 02 Aug 2003 12:25:58

We Have Never Been Modern
by Bruno Latour

Okay, a short review this evening. Latour describes postmodernism: "I have not found words ugly enough to designate this intellectual movement -- or rather, this intellectual immobility through which humans and nonhumans are left to drift. I call it 'hyper-incommensurability'" (p.61). He lets postmodernists have it with both barrels in this engaging book, saying that there is always "a hint of the ludicrous" in the postmodernists' pronouncements (p.47) and -- in the unkindest cut -- that postmodernists are more naive than modernists (p.131)! Of course, there's plenty of this to go around. "Dialectics ... feigns to overcome [the divide between nature and society] by loops amd spirals and other complex acrobatic figures" (p.55). Constructivism? Latour says it's impossible to be convinced by a constructivist argument for more than three minutes. Nobody escapes the hit list. I, of course, find this all immensely enjoyable.

This book is a mediation on modernism, what it is, how it came about, and what has happened to it. In typical fashion, Latour conceives of modernism in terms of a political arrangement -- a constitution with checks and balances that allow modernists to separate Nature and Society while surreptitiously joining them with hybrids. But that constitution is falling apart as the poles are forced farther from each other. Latour calls for a new constitution modeled on the modernist one but making up for its defects.

We have never been modern is a good read and a genuinely thought-provoking book. But, like Marc Berg (or was it Mike Lynch?), I long for the empirical work Latour did in The Pasteurization of France or Science in action.

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Reading:: Perspectives on Activity Theory

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 00:05:28

Perspectives on Activity Theory
by Yrjo Engestrom (Editor), Reijo Miettinen (Editor), Raija-Leena Punamaki (Editor)

Perspectives on Activity Theory is composed largely of selected papers from the Second International Congress for Research on Activity Theory in Lahti, Finland. Consequently, the papers come from all over, tackle a variety of issues, and are generally quite short. The book thus provides a broad international and interdisciplinary set of perspectives on activity theory, its applications, and its parallels with other social, cultural, historical, cognitive, and interpretive perspectives. It is not for those new to activity theory.

I don't consider myself new to activity theory, having written about it since 1996, but I found many of the essays to be tough sledding. Partly that's because so many of the essays hearken back to AT's 19th-century German philosophical roots, with which I am unfamiliar. (I'll make a stab at these soon when I read Marx's Captial Vol. 1.) So I found myself out of my depth in discussions of ideality and so forth. Another factor is the international flavor of the contributions -- not because they represented different perspectives but because so much goes unsaid that I cannot follow or evaluate some of the arguments being advanced. I don't think that this is simply because I'm a provincial American but rather because I don't have the philosophical grounding emphasized in Russia or Finland. That philosophical grounding being what it is -- again, 19th century German philosophy -- I'm not sure how much effort I want to put into it, frankly.

Nevertheless, many of the essays were both accessible and useful. Engestrom and Miettinen's introduction gives a good "big picture" view of AT. Engestrom's "Activity Theory and Individual and Social Transformation" provides a strong argument for paying attention to contributions made by the people, not just elite decision makers (perhaps a dig at ANT?) and criticizes the agency/structure, psychology/sociology distinctions that have traditionally been made in the social sciences. Lektorsky and Hayrynen separately note AT's roots in the totalitarian society of the USSR and discuss the implications that this context had for how AT handled social development and agency-structure relations. Closer to my interests, Kari Kuutti again weighs in with a strong essay that classifies various traditions of human-computer interaction, including participatory design; the essay concludes by suggesting that AT can provide a framework that allows the Information Systems community to account for both individual and organizational viewpoints. Finally, Engestrom's essay "Innovative Learning in Work Teams" discusses expansive learning and provides the barest link to ANT.

I've read this collection before, but in light of my current readings, AT comes off as a good deal more structural than before and I can see some of its drawbacks more clearly. Fascinating. If you're familiar with AT, by all means check out this collection; if you're not, go for a more introductory text such as Nardi's Context and Consciousness.

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Reading:: Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(6), 1996

Originally posted: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 22:47:51

Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(6), 1996.

This special issue of the superlative journal Mind, Culture, and Activity isn't a book, of course. But it provides a unitary set of papers around one main issue, and as such illumnates Latour's thoughts in ways that I have found quite useful. In particular, it highlights the advantages of Latour's approach, its disadvantages, and its relations to other approaches such as activity theory.

I say "Latour's approach" here because at this point Latour is no longer referring to his work as actor-network theory. Like John Law (see previous reviews in this blog), he has made a conscious decision to transition to post-ANT thought. Whatever that means. Despite some changes -- for instance, focusing on mediation rather than translation -- what Latour describes here is certainly part of a continuous trajectory that started with his ANT and "pre-ANT" work rather than a radical break. His critics also examine his work in terms of ANT. So I'll refer to Latour's argument as "ANT" or "post-ANT" throughout with the caveat that there may be important differences that I just don't get at this juncture.

The special issue includes Latour's essay "On Interobjectivity" along with commentaries by Michael Lynch, Marc Berg, and Yrjo Engestrom, and concludes with a response by Latour. (The issue also includes an unrelated article and two book reviews; I won't concern myself with these.) Latour's essay essentially tackles the micro-macro or agency-society or actor-network distinction that has concerned him since almost the beginning of his work. He criticizes attempts to separate the two, particularly as those attempts involve divining a macro-level structure that affords a God's-eye view of social interactions. Macro-level "forces," he says, cannot control us any more than we control our mediators.

For instance, he says, consider puppeteers. "If you talk to a puppeteer, then you will find that he is perpetually surprised by his puppets. He makes the puppet do things that cannot be reduced to his action, and which he does not have the skill to do, even provisionally" (p.237; cf. Bakhtin's discussions of dialogism in Dostoyevsky). "Is this fetishism? No, it is simply a recognition that we are exceeded by what we create" (p.237). Similarly, Latour argues, no macro-level force can be said to completely control us or pull our strings. "One can only associate mediators, no one of which, ever, is exactly the cause or the consequence of its associates" (p.237).

This insight leads Latour to a couple of conclusions. One is that skill cannot be attributed to a particular actor -- a statement that, taken to the extremes that Latour takes it, is anathema to activity theory and any other theory of learning and development. (On the other hand, you can see why Latour admires Hutchins' version of distributed cognition.) Another is that it doesn't make sense to talk in terms of levels or social structures -- action, rather, is shared by dispersed actants with various ontologies. Even the action of "summing up" (for instance, creating macro-level diagrams of activity systems) is a set of localized interactions meant to shrink a macro level down to human scale through inscriptions.

The commentaries are all interesting in different ways, but I want to focus on Engestrom's because it gives a lot of insight into both scholars' views. Engestrom praises Latour's essay for its similarity to activity theory, then criticizes it for its differences. In particular, Engestrom criticizes Latour for abandoning the idea of levels, for abandoning "cognition, volition, and emotion" (in short, learning and development applied to individuals), and for not accounting for a systematic durability beyond objects. In particular, Engestrom makes the argument that he has made elsewhere, that in a capitalist market economy the primary contradiction is between use value and exchange value. In short, while praising Latour, Engestrom disagrees with nearly all of the main claims in Latour's essay.

Latour understands this immediately and highlights it in his response. "How am I supposed to deal with this matter-of-fact rendering of everything I reject in my paper? ... Surely, all the differences in scale, timing, agencies that I pointed out in my paper cannot be put on the Procrustean bed of Yrjo's 'embeddedness'!" (p.268). Latour says that he is explicitly shifting away from the Marxist notion of dead labor, the notion of "a human in command, or more exactly, laborers who are empowered again by what has been taken away from them by fetishism and naturalization" (p.267). In short, Latour disagrees with the Marxist (and more generally modernist) tack of backgrounding the world of artifacts so as to foreground human ingenuity. Again, Latour is trying to draw our attention to a symmetrical understanding of the world, one in which humans and nonhumans alike are actants. "I am not trying to naturalize or mechanize humans by turning them into what are held by objects, I try to modify as much the humans who are no longer in command as its associates who are no longer objects, nor means, nor tools" (p.267).

The dialogue is fascinating for what it tells us about ANT (or I guess post-ANT) and AT. Reading Engestrom's other work through this lens, I discover a persistent reference to social structures, to the essential contradiction between use and exchange value as sort of a foundational contradiction in Western society, and to dead labor (although not usually expressed as such). And hand in hand with those is the persistent valorization of individual humans -- something I have done myself and that I make no apologies for, since I believe it was a necessary counterweight to the prevailing managerial models of human-computer interaction against which I was arguing. Latour's argument makes me pause and want to reevaluate AT, which is so rooted in 19th-century German philosophy and so focused on individual and group development. On the other hand, it makes me suspicious of Latour's account that he uses the interconnectedness of networks as an excuse not to account for individual and group development. Surely the sorts of everyday innovations we witness are not simply to be dismissed because of their interconnectedness!

And this gets me, again, to one of the chief complaints I have with ANT. I admire the persistent critique of abstract structures and the undertaking of integrating levels of analysis. I admire Latour's willingness to praise ethnomethodology. But ethnomethodology studies second-by-second interactions (what we might call micro-level interactions) and attempts to connect them to larger trends (what we might call macro-level interactions). ANT appears to do the latter but not the former. Does ANT use the flattening of levels as an excuse not to examine the routine, moment-by-moment interactions that by its own account make up the fabric of actor-networks? If not, then where are these accounts? Until they appear, I don't see why frameworks that do account for these interactions should pull up stakes.

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Reading:: The Telecommunications Industry

Originally posted: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:07:17

The Telecommunications Industry
by Susan E. McMaster

This is not a book to read for pleasure, but it's a solid introductory history of telecomm in the US. I was fortunately able to skim it because my teaching assistant, the diligent Bill Wolff, had already produced a timeline based on this book for a project we're working on. I took a break this week from actor-network theory and read this account of the telecomm industry instead, to help me make sense of the Telecorp data I'm analyzing. The book, frankly, was not fun to read -- its style is not honed -- but the subject matter is fascinating. In the US, the story of telecommunications is essentially the story of AT&T, and this book does a good job of describing the complex strategies and often bareknunckle tactics employed by that company and (later) its descendants, the so-called Baby Bells. Technology, legislation, market pressure, and other factors all figure into the story in a Machiavellian (or of you prefer, Latourean) mix.

The last two chapters were the most interesting for me. Once competition was let in -- first in the long distance sector, then in the local markets -- things get really interesting. AT&T is forced to allow other companies to hook to its network, a necessary step because that network was essentially the only national infrastructure and it simply wasn't possible for other companies to duplicate it, run wires alongside it, and compete with redundant infrastructure. Once the companies were allowed access, they could use the AT&T network as a base for growing their own networks; now we're seeing those networks spread at both national and local levels. Legislation meant that telecomm service could be black-boxed: the consumer could make the initial decision on CLEC and LD carriers, then these choices should fade away and just become "the telephone company" -- same area codes, prefixes, services, etc. Part of AT&T's strategy is to open that black box, create ruptures, so that people's experiences are significantly different from the familiar AT&T experience.

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Reading:: The Pasteurization of France

Originally posted: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:48:48

The Pasteurization of France
by Bruno Latour

The first time I read The Pasteurization of France was in early 1999. I was finishing up my dissertation and decided to take a break from reading about activity theory to examine ANT. As it happened, I was called in to jury duty; I read most of the book while waiting for the proceedings to finish. (I ended up being called to serve on the jury, an interesting but frustrating experience that took up the rest of the day and could have taken longer.)

I think this book was the first I had read by Latour. In revisiting it, I find that I'm not quite as impressed by it as I had been previously. Don't get me wrong -- it's a strong book, it outlines key elements of Latour's argument (particularly translation, the key concept in the book), and it's an interesting read. But it doesn't have the breadth of most of his other books. At some point near the end of the first chapter, we concede his point, but he keeps hammering away at it, and that hammering tends to get in the way of the fascinating story he tells.

What struck me most about the book this time around was the prevalence of the war metaphor. Latour starts off by quoting Tolstoy's description of the battle of Tarutino in War and Peace, then uses it as a metaphor for Pasteur's battle against the microbes. That sets the tone for the rest of the book: the "cordon sanitaire" erected by the hygenists is compared many times to the Maginot Line; Pasteurians are described as enlisting allies; microbes, colonists, and physicians in turn "invade" others' space. No wonder people have tended to read Latour as being ruled by the narrative of war.

May I make a confession? I only skimmed the second half of the book, "Irreductions," which is laid out as a series of philisophical propositions. Parts of this section are striking, such as Latour's pseudoautobiographical account of his revelation that nothing can be reduced to anything else (pp.162-163) -- a revelation that occurs on the road from Dijon to Gray, just as Saul of Tarsus' conversion happened on the road to Damascus. Many of the propositions serve to clarify and define points of actor-network theory, so those were helpful too. But I tired of the seemingly endless list of propositions, most of which are better argued and illustrated elsewhere in Latour's writings.

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(MIA)

Originally posted: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 09:43:21

MIA. Yes, I haven't read much lately. I've been busy switching my laptop over to Red Hat Linux, vacationing, and trying to catch up on some writing. But I'm working on three books and a few articles, so I'll be able to post some more reviews RSN.

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Reading:: Aramis or the Love of Technology

Originally posted: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 08:32:55

Aramis or the Love of Technology
by Bruno Latour

When I first read this book, about three years ago, I agreed with many of the reviewers that it was not one of his best works. Unlike Latour's previous work, Aramis is an experimental novel based on a real research study the author conducted -- a study of a massive R&D project meant to develop a revolutionary new public transportation system. The study is recast as a sort of mystery novel told from many different viewpoints: a fictional researcher named Norbert who resembles Latour; a research assistant trained as an engineer; administrators involved in various parts of the project (through interview transcripts); and even Aramis itself, cast as a sort of Frankenstein's monster who only wants to be made real. On my first reading I was quite skeptical of the premise and the execution. Now I think it's an outstanding book.

What happened? Well, in relation to the rest of Latour's writings, the book provides an extended and enlightening illustration. Latour's major themes up to this point (symmetry and asymmetry, diffusion and translation, syntagms and paradigms, black boxes, networks, traitors, etc.) all make appearances and all are discussed clearly and simply. If you have some familiarity with them, that is. If you don't -- and I really didn't three years ago -- things get muddled very quickly.

So the book is a partial success. I assume that Latour's aims are the same that Norbert describes at the end of the book, when he talks about writing his own experimental novel based on the project:

"And I'd actually like to do a book in which there's no metalanguage, no master discourse, where you wouldn't know which is strongest, the sociological theory or the documents or the interviews or the literature or the fiction, where all the genres and regimes would be at the same level, each one interpreting the others without anybody being able to say which is judging what." (p.298)

That doesn't quite happen, of course. Readers -- or at least this reader -- believe that Norbert the sociologist has a handle on things the whole time, just like Hercule Poirot, to whom he refers frequently. We believe that at some point the researchers will discover the "hidden staircase," the surprise that makes sense of the investigation. But, as in a standard murder mystery, the fun is in trying to figure out the mystery before the protagonists do. I wasn't able to, but that's partially because I couldn't get a good grasp on what I should be looking for. Three years ago, the "hidden staircase," when it was revealed, was a disappointment. This time it was a revelation.

Aramis is also an attempt to write a book that is accessible and interesting to general readers. I don't think it succeeded in that respect. But as an illustration of actor-network theory in progress -- and as an illustration of qualitative research in general -- it is interesting and valuable.

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Reading:: Make It Bigger

Originally posted: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 11:21:24

Make It Bigger
by Paula Scher

"A friend at CBS Records in the seventies," writes graphic designer Paula Scher in this career retrospective, "predicted that when I die, my epitaph will read, 'Art director of the original Boston album.' The thought has always horrified me."

Scher indeed art-directed the iconic cover, which shows several domed cities blasting off into space just in time to escape the explosion of the planet Earth. It takes a second glance to realize that the domes are really at the butt end of very large guitars. Any science fiction aficionado can pin the reference to James Blish's Cities in Flight, but Scher claims that she and the artists made it up themselves. Possible, I guess.

In any case, the anecdote is one example of the real value of the book. At every stage of her professional career, Scher meditates on what it means to be a graphic designer and how designers navigate various minefields to get their work done. She writes pages worth of advice about how to navigate various client relationships in order to preserve the designer's vision while making the necessary compromises. She talks about building negotiation points into comps so that she can appear to compromise with the client while protecting the most important points of her design. She describes how to identify strong actors in an organization and find ways to make them their allies, noting that once you have convinced a strong ally, the weaker people in the organization will fall into line. And she recounts her mistakes, noting that you learn much from your mistakes and nothing from your successes. Fascinating, rather Machiavellian in spots (and I mean that in a good way), and a great read if you're a designer or someone who might want to hire a designer.

As it happens, my wife is a designer and she insisted that I read this book. I'm glad she did, since design fascinates me. It would be very interesting to have a class read this book in conjunction with Karen Schriver's Dynamics in Document Design, a rather rationalist take on document design that leaves out politics, alliances, and negotiations altogether and pigeonholes designers like Scher as unresponsive to the client. Schriver is a very smart person, and my interactions with her have always been positive, but she tends to portray design as simply a matter of empirically determining the best, most functional way to design an item. In Schriver's world, varying goals and conflicting cultures are just noise. In Scher's, they are genuine interlocutors that must be brought into alignment with the designer's own goals.

Scher's book is not only interesting and well designed, it's reasonably short. Unlike most of the books I read, this one can be read in one sitting. I wasn't quite able to do so, primarily because my daughter kept urging me to read other texts to her.

A final poseur note. I actually met Paula Scher (I keep wanting to type "Pauly Shore") in 2001 at Design Ranch, an annual event put on by the Austin AIGA. My wife Gail was participating in the sessions and I was mostly hanging out and reading articles. Scher seemed to be a very approachable, down-to-earth person, in contrast to some of the more extreme personalities that seem to populate the field of graphic design. That intelligent, down-to-earth tone permeates the book and makes it a real page-turner. Pick it up and take a look.

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