Reading :: Hermes

Originally posted: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:43:15

Hermes : Literature, Science, Philosophy

by Michel Serres

Michel Serres' work is often praised (or condemned) as "poetic," beautiful in the French, and almost impossible to translate because of the high quality of the prose. That's probably true. Although the stories and metaphors that Serres uses seem to translate fairly well, the prose in this translated version tends to be dense and not terribly enjoyable. And unfortunately the high density of metaphor and allegory tends to obscure rather than productively illustrate Serres' points.

Nevertheless, the book is interesting and, with patience, rewarding.

I came to Serres because he was so influential to Bruno Latour (whose prose, unlike Serres', tends to be translated in ways that retain his style) and Michel Callon. Callon is said to have borrowed the notion of translation from Serres' Hermes volume 2, which sadly does not appear to be translated into English in its entirety. Nevertheless, this collection gives us an idea of what we are missing. Most interesting is Serres' discussion in Chapter 2 of Aesop's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb". Serres detects an arborescence: a genealogical tree or ordered structure. The wolf is upstream from the lamb and more powerful than it; but he pretends to be downstream, wronged by it (p.19). The structure organizes the game-space: "Without a set provided with an ordering relation, there would be no game" (p.20). And this game is called dialectic: "Stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable" (p.21). Dialectic assumes and provides the structure. It imposes order under the guise of explaining it. So should we stick with the dialectic or attack the ordered structure? (p.22).

(Alert readers will detect some of the same thought here that guided Deleuze & Guattari -- absolute limits, flows, and arborescence.)

In the next chapter, Serres discusses Jules Michelet's La Mer (1861), in which Michelet proposes a chain of beings, an ontogeny, a phylogeny (p.29). It sounds half-baked the way Serres describes it. But it interests Serres because of these accounts. For instance, Michelet describes the Carnot cycles, the cycles in the northern and southern hemispheres flowing from warm to cold spots. The Carnot cycles are named, of course, after Sadi Carnot, who labored to develop a theorem that became the second law of thermodynamics -- a theorem that, as Engels says, summarizes the work of a steam engine and on which subsequent steam engines were based. The world, then, is a steam engine by this reckoning. But it is also many other sorts of machines. "The world is a static machine, a compression engine, an electrical engine, a chemical machine, a steam engine; the world is an organism -- all without contradiction" (p.35). Serres uses this text to make his own argument, not about the world, but about method:

It is not necessary to introduce methods to read this text: the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application. This is not a special case; it is one that is perfectly generalizable. Why should there be a dichotomy between texts, between the ones that operate and the ones that are operated upon? There are texts, and that is all. (p.38)

This does sound quite structuralist (and in the book I borrowed from the library, someone penciled in the word "structuralist" next to this passage).

Well, let's skip a bit, because much of what Serres discusses is not relevant to my projects (and this blog, ultimately, is all about me). I mentioned that Serres was one of Latour's biggest influences and that he provided the origin for what actor-network theorists call translation. Translation is touched upon late in the book (p.132), but not really explicated. Black boxes are discussed but not explicated (p.80). The reversibility of time is discussed but not explicated (p.71). On the whole, alas, I see a lot of seeds but not much fruit for my project here. Nevertheless, as I said at the beginning of this review, the book can be rewarding with patience. Not everything has to be fruit.

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Reading :: Thoughts of a Statesman

Originally posted: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:08:03

Thoughts of a Statesman

by Niccolo Machiavelli

The link above is to a great online library in which older works have been scanned and turned into PDFs along with the embedded machine-readable text. So, for instance, you can read the scanned page from this 1882 book, then highlight lines and copy them. Or you can use the find-as-you-type feature in MacOS X's Preview to find relevant passages. What a time saver.

The book itself is "a compilation of some of Machiavelli?s most famous thoughts arranged by the editor of the 1882 edition of his works," originally appearing in vol. 2 of The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. Let's call it a book anyway. It's a 32-page "collection of maxims, extracted from the works of Machiavelli ... to show the injustice of the charges against the writings of Machiavelli, resulting from an unfair prejudice and imperfect understanding of his sentiments" (from the prefatory note, p.435). It even comes with a fake-but-accurate letter purportedly written to Machiavelli to his son, sounding for all the world like the last chapter of Latour's Pandora's Hope:

I know that some one has poured out his venom against my writings because he has formed his judgment upon each one separately, instead of all together, and has looked more to the words than the spirit; as if one could judge correctly of a work or a science or art from a single part, and not the whole together, or could judge of the colors without regard to the drawing. (p.435)

Poor Machiavelli!

The maxims which follow are decontextualized, but they do point to the fact that Machiavelli was not simply a schemer. When reading The Prince, sometimes it's easy to forget that Machiavelli believed "That government alone is durable which rests upon the free will of the governed" (p.439). Other bon mots:

Whoever is harsh and cruel in commanding is badly obeyed by his subjects; but whoever is kind and humane meets with ready obedience. (p.440)

To command a multitude it is better to be humane than proud, and merciful rather than cruel. (p.440)

We ought to attach little value to living in a city where the laws are less powerful than men. That country only is desirable where you can enjoy your substance and your friends in security, and not that where your property can be easily taken away from you, and where your friends, for fear of their own property, abandon you in your greatest need. (p.444)

It is the laws that make men good. (p.444)

A good prince must preserve perfect justice in his states, and in giving audiences he must be affable and gracious. (p.446)

Those provinces where there is money and order are the nerve and sinews of the state. (p.450)

Those only deserve to be free who apply themselves to good works, and not to evil ones; for liberty badly employed injures itself and others. (p.452)

And so forth. The great thing about lists of maxims is that they have already done the hard work of pulling out great quotes. The problem is that these quotes become detached from the overall argument. In this case, the editor has selected many, many quotes in which Machiavelli agrees with common wisdom and morality. But that means that Machiavelli's most interesting moments -- and his method -- become lost, and his observations become banal. When they are reintegrated into the overall arguments that Machiavelli advances, they again become vital and original.

Take the statement that "It is the laws that make men good" (p.444). In itself, it seems a fairly banal observation, in consonance with the church of Machiavelli's day (though contrasted to the book of Hebrews, which states that the Law was given in order to expose and multiply sin). But integrated into Machiavelli's overall political philosophy, it becomes a pragmatic statement: one must establish a law to which men can relationally calibrate themselves. It is the difference that makes a difference, to paraphrase Bateson.

In all, it's an interesting document. I've not flinched from recommending Machiavelli, but I'll recommend this one with a caveat: read it after reading Machiavelli's major works.

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(Reading Roundup: Engestrom's umpires and Latour's cosmos)

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 18:55:55

We have two very different articles today, with no theme binding them together save that they are both responses to articles I have not yet read.

Engeström, Y. (2000). Activity theory and the social construction of knowledge: A story of four umpires. Organization, 7:301?310.

In this response to an article by Blackler et al. on activity systems, Engestrom uses the illustration of four baseball umpires to illustrate epistemological and methodological issues of activity theory. Engestrom's trying to clear the way for moving AT from a psychological theory to "an original and potentially powerful approach to the social construction of knowledge" that "may prove useful for practice-based attempts to reconceptualize knowledge in organizations" (p.301).

The four umpires represent the epistemological stances of traditional realism, constructivism, constructionism, and activity theory. From Karl Weick:

The story goes that three umpires disagreed about the task of calling balls and strikes. The first one said, 'I calls them as they is.' The second one said, 'I calls them as I sees them.' The third and cleverest umpire said, 'They ain't nothin' till I calls them.' (quoted on p.301)

Engestrom methodically goes through these three stances, arguing that the shared problem is individualism: "the assumption that he or she as an individual is the center of construction of knowledge and reality" (p.302). But in the fourth, activity-theoretical perspective, the umpire can be "the center of activity" at moments, but not throughout. "In the next action, someone else takes the position of the subject" (p.304). In this activity system, the activity can be disturbed and dealt with by various actors occupying the subject position. Engestrom gives the example of an umpire who, observing the reactions of the crowds during foul balls and reviewing the stats afterwards, works with her colleagues to uncover a betting scandal. Engestrom's point is that the activity is collective and works through contradictions; "the fourth umpire crosses the boundaries of her given role and becomes involved in the initiation of a historical reorganization of the entire game of baseball in Finland" (p.305).

The contradiction is identified as the primary contradiction of capitalism, use-value vs. exchange-value, here featured as the conflicting outcomes of winning vs. profit. Organized betting has tipped the scales here, leading to a secondary contradiction between the game's rules and its object.

So far so familiar. But here we get to the methodological issues.

The first issue: "Blackler et al. (this issue) state that, rather than analyzing an organization as a single activity system, they deem it more satisfactory to analyze the organization as a network of nested and overlapping activity systems" (p.307). "But I favor carefully grounded analyses and worry about shortcuts. From Blackler et al.'s article we learn little about the 'internal systemic connections' of the three Strategy Development Groups, and even less about their concrete actions" (p.308).

The second issue: Engestrom applauds the concept of multiple perspectives, but these perspectives can be discussed under multivoicedness (Bakhtin) and is "inherent in the speech, thought, and action of every individual" (p.308). That is, perspectives should be empirically demonstrable through speech rather than inferred, second-order constructs.

The third issue: Learning. "Activity theory is at its best in analyzing such poorly understood processes of developmental transformations over time. Expansive learning is energized by historically accumulated developmental contradictions within and between activity systems, and it is triggered by disturbances and concrete innovative actions" (pp.308-309).

Latour, B. (2004). Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? Comments on the peace terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge, 10(3):450?462.

In this response, Latour goes over the argument he developed in War of the Worlds, that the separation of nature and culture serves as a way to underpin ethnocentrism/multiculturalism (two sides of the same coin). He starts out with a great illustration:

famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was under way, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools. Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls?that much seemed obvious?but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. (p.451)

Were the Europeans spiritual entities, or human beings?

The Amerindians? experiment was as scientific as the Europeans?. Conquistador prisoners were taken as guinea pigs and immersed in water to see, first, if they drowned and, second, if their flesh would eventually rot. (p.452)

So the Europeans looked for social proof while the Amerindians used a naturalistic methodology. The point?

The relevance of this anecdote should be apparent: at no point in the Valladolid controversy did the protagonists consider, even in passing, that the confrontation of European Christians and Amerindian animists might be framed differently from the way in which Christian clerics understood it in the sixteenth century. At no point were the Amerindians asked what issue they took to be in dispute, nor is Beck asking now. (p.452).

The Europeans and Amerindians both assumed that there is a univeral baseline for the negotiation of a dispute (p.453) -- a limiting factor to the disputes, a universal stasis that all parties can reach. Latour says no, and draws on Isabelle Stengers' work for backing. And that's the basis of his critique of Beck:

For Beck, as for most sociologists and all political scientists, wars rage because human cultures have (and defend) differing views of the same world. If those views could be reconciled or shown to differ only superficially, peace would follow automatically. This way of understanding cosmos and cosmopolitics is limited in that it puts a limit to the number of entities on the negotiating table. But if cosmosis to mean anything, it must embrace, literally, everything?including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act. (p.454)

This view is not satisfactory: "If this be peace, I must say I prefer war. By war I mean a conflict for which there is no agreed-upon arbiter, a conflict in which what is at stake is precisely what is common in the common world to be built" (p.455). Open war is preferable to cold war, in which one side indulgently allows "multicultural" interpretations of the one nature, i.e., separates nature and culture with the implicit understanding that one culture really does understand nature better than the others. Nature becomes an absolute arbiter, the voice of God. We might as well have open war leading to open negotiations than this cold war in which resentments fester! And they do, not just in the "other cultures": "anyone who holds that fabricated means untrue, and made means fake, tends toward fundamentalism" (p.460). "And when one fundamentalism butts heads with another, no peace talks are possible because there is nothing to discuss: pedagogical wars are waged to the bitter end" (p.461). And here's the knockout: "My main objection, then, to the peace terms of Ulrich Beck is that he has not put the West?s own native fundamentalism up for discussion. Our naturalism has failed: it was a war plan disguised as a peace plan, and those against whom we directed it are no longer fooled. Naturalism, like any fundamentalist ideology, amounts to a prejudice against fabrication" (p.461, my emphasis).

Reading :: Organizing Modernity

Originally posted: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:37:02

Organizing Modernity

by John Law

Q: What did the informant say to the postmodern ethnographer?

A: "But enough about you, let's talk about me for a while."

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Reading :: Dialogues

Originally posted: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:49:16

Dialogues

by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet

This book belongs to a series of conventional interviews with philosophers, but since Deleuze refused to perform a traditional interview, it turned into a coauthored book between Deleuze and his interviewer, Claire Parnet. This move keeps Deleuze from being interrogated, something he and Parnet both agree is not desirable. But it also means that Deleuze is not asked to communicate in a different mode; we don't get the different perspective that we typically get in interviews (which is why we read them in the first place). Instead, Parnet starts to write like Deleuze, so much so that I had a hard time figuring out who was who. This was a stated goal, presented as a struggle against the interview genre, but it seemed like flat-out colonization to me. And as a result, I saw nothing here that was not covered in greater length in A Thousand Plateaus. Go read that book instead -- or better yet, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.

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iCal hack to print events

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:13:47

NOTE: This hack is no longer available due to subsequent changes in how iCal stores files -- I never got around to recoding the script, and now the original files are lost in the mists of time.

One reason I've been trying out different pieces of software for time management is that iCal doesn't have a way to print a list of events. You can print out calendars by day, week, and month, but you can't print out the tabular list that you get from doing an incremental search. That's too bad -- it's not a hard piece of functionality to implement, and it's tremendously useful.

When I ran across an article on how to use Ruby to print iCal events, then, I was interested. Especially since the hack allows a lot of latitude in formatting. The original hack prints out today's and tomorrow's events from all calendars to text columns on the terminal. I'm more interested in multiday projects in a nicer format. So I spent a few hours teaching myself Ruby and came up with this:

The HTML file gets generated through a modified Ruby script (attached: projects.rb) whose output is piped into an HTML file (attached: printprojects.sh). The HTML file (attached: projects.html) is formatted with some basic CSS (attached: projects.css).

To try this out:

1. Download Ruby and install it.

2. Download all the files below. Save them to the Desktop or whatever folder you like, as long as they're in the same folder.

3. Open the Terminal and navigate to the folder.

4. Type: "chmod +x printprojects.sh"

5. Open iCal, create a calendar called "projects", and enter some events. Close iCal.

6. From the Terminal, type "./printprojects.sh".

7. In your web browser, navigate to the directory and open "projects.html". Your events should be in there.

The Ruby code is ugly as can be, and large chunks don't do anything. And it's hard-coded to produce exactly the output I want. If anyone wants to undertake some cleanup and revision, please be my guest!

>

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(Upcoming features)

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:38:03

I just finished re-skimming John Law's Aircraft Stories, which connects actor-network theory (or at least this postvariant) pretty firmly to Deleuze and Guattari's work. Based on that reading, I picked up Deleuze and Parnet's Dialogues, which weighs in at only about a hundred pages. Maybe I can finish it this weekend. First, though, I have to finish Law's Organizing Modernity; this one has some bright spots, though Law spends an awful lot of time talking about himself rather than his research site. (This is legitimized by invoking "reflexivity.") I've also picked up Marc Berg's Rationalizing Medical Work, which should be interesting given Berg's involvement in the CHAT community. >

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(Reading Roundup: The Lightning Round)

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:10:47

I've read so many articles in the last few days that I don't have time to review them as thoroughly as usual. So here's a list of the articles and a couple of points on each.

Sheller, M. (2004). Mobile publics: beyond the network perspective. Environment and Planning, 22:39?52.

Embraces ANT's relationist materialism, but suggests that its metaphor of network is too limiting: "this metaphor of social networks is now being outmoded by the very processes of mobilisation of people, objects, and information enabled by the new communication technologies" (p.46). Instead, nominates the term "gel": "whereas a network implies clean nodes and ties, then, a gel is suggestive of the softer, more blurred boundaries of social interaction" (p.47). As in mainstream ANT, actors are network effects: "new 'persons' and 'places' are constantly emerging out of the social gel itself" (p.50). Has a terrific example of how phone networks enable new connections (p.49), which leads to a linking between ANT and new economy thought.

Callon, M. and Rabeharisoa (2003). Research "in the wild" and the shaping of social identities. Technology in Society, 25:193?204.

More linking on ANT and new economy:

Briefly, even if there are multiple markets and they are organized in different ways, all now share a common feature: users or consumers who take an ever greater role in defining demand, that is, in the conception of the products being offered to them" (p.194)

And a rare discussion of expertise in ANT:

As Harry Collins put it in a recent review, it is a mistake to jump from a critique of Western science to arguing for the abolition of the notion of expertise [20]. We would add that it is also a mistake to deny the existence of lay knowledge.

The AFM experience takes us even further in the adoption of a symmetrical point of view. It shows, first, that these types of knowledge are not contradictory but complementary, for ?when science is applied without taking local knowledge into account, it is often the poorer for it,>

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Reading :: Knowing in Organizations

Originally posted: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:46:30

Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based Approach

Ed. Davide Nicolini, Silvia Gherardi, Dvora Yanow

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, but just haven't had the time to blog it until now. It's certainly bloggable, though, particularly since it represents another instance of the intersection between activity theory and actor-network theory (my current focus).

Knowing in Organizations was published in 2003, growing from papers presented at the 1998 Academy of Management meeting. Its focus, of course, is "knowing in organizations," a broad focus that draws in papers from four literatures: knowing as culture and aesthetic understanding; communities of practice; activity theory; and actor-network theory/heterogeneous engineering. The latter two have traditionally worked in different areas, but are beginning to run into each other more frequently. Activity theory is primarily a theory of distributed cognition, and focuses on issues of labor, learning, and concept formation; it?s primarily used in fields such as educational, cognitive, and cultural psychology, although it?s also making inroads in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, communication, and anthropology. Actor-network theory is primarily an ontology ? an account of existence ? and focuses on issues of science, politics, rhetoric, production of facts, agreements, and knowledge; it?s primarily used in science and technology studies, philosophy, and sociology. But recently the edges of these projects have begun to meet and contend with each other. Activity theory, in its ?third generation," is attempting to move from the study of individuals and focused activities to the study of interrelated sets of activities, and thus into work organization. Actor-network theory is expanding from studies of scientific knowledge into popular science and technology, and from there into work organization as well. So it?s not surprising that advocates of the two approaches are beginning to grapple with each others? approaches, particularly in the pages of this book.

Niccolini, D., Gherardi, S., and Yanow, D. "Introduction: Toward a practice-based view of knowing and learning in organizations."

In the introduction, the editors discuss "the centrality and strategic importance of knowledge in postindustrial organizations" (p.4). An emerging "knowledge-centered" discourse has resulted in increased interest in "the issue of organizational learning and knowledge creation and management" (p.5). At the same time, there's widespread disagreement about what actually constitutes a useful understanding of knowing and learning; these categories and their vocabularies must be rethought, and "the main assertion of this book is that a practice-based vocabulary is a promising candidate for such rethinking" (p.7). The authors identify and discuss three main trends of thought on practice that undergird the work in this book: "Marx's work, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, and Wittgenstein's legacy" (p.7). Then they go on to identify the "four practice-based ways to talk about knowing and learning" (p.12). (I disagree in that actor-network theory may talk about knowing, but it doesn't really attempt an account of learning.)

I won't review each chapter here, but I'll discuss highlights of the ones most relevant to my current work:

Wenger, E. "Communities of practice and social learning systems."

Wenger builds on his earlier CoP work here, providing detailed taxonomies of boundary workers, boundary objects, and boundary interactions. His detail stems from the fact that he sees knowledge work as becoming more distributed. "In a knowledge economy, sustained success for any organization will depend not only on effective participation in economic markets, but just as importantly and with many of the same players, on knowing how to participate in broader social learning systems" (p.98). The more distributed knowledge work becomes, and the more central knowledge work becomes to the economy, the more important it will be to understand and describe how workers interact across increasingly porous boundaries. Wenger sees these interactions in terms of learning.

Blackler, F., Crump, N., and McDonald, S. (2003). "Organizing processes in complex activity networks."

Unlike Wenger, Blackler et al. work within activity theory to conceptualize this sort of boundary work. In particular, they are working within AT's "third generation," in which activity networks are conceptualized and explored through boundary spanning, dialogue, and polycontextuality, and their changes and interactions explained largely through contradictions. Activity networks are typically pictured in two ways: either as modular, with each activity providing an "output" that functions as the "input" for another activity, or as overlapping, in which several activity systems might interpenetrate. Blackler et al. portray their activity network in the latter way (which I tend to think is more sensible). In this case study, Blackler et al. study a high-tech defense contractor with a special eye toward perspective making, perspective taking, and perspective shaping (p.127).

Blackler et al. introduce the notion of activity networks in an interesting way:

The question arises of how activity theory can be adapted for organizational analysis. One approach might be to analyze particular organizations as activity systems in their own right. However, partly as a result of the complex division of labor that exists in work organizations, participants' understanding of the links between their actions and the overall activity system of which they are a part can become obscured. While a level of internal differentiation between individuals and groups is inevitable in activity systems (of any size), complex organizations can easily become segmented and fragmented. (p.129)

So "second generation" activity theory is not enough for dealing with complex organizations. I would add that complex organizations such as the one Blackler et al. describe tend to be multidisciplinary, meaning that very different activities are "spliced" together. Accountants at the high tech firm, I suspect, have much more in common with accountants at other companies than they do with engineers or custodians or executives at their own firm. Furthermore, these activities have their own social languages, their own chronotopic senses (ideas of space and time), their own genres.

Rather than analyzing organizations as single activity systems, it is more satisfactory, therefore, to analyze them as networks of overlapping activity systems or, for simplicity of expression, as activity networks. The units that make up such networks can be labeled "communities of activity"; such communities can be loosely defined in terms of the extent to which members recognize shared work priorities, work with a common cognitive and technological infrastruture, and support each others' activity. Relations betweeen activity systems bring the (sometimes difficult) issues associated with multidisciplinary work into sharp focus. Collaboration across different systems of activity raises issues concerning priorities, identities, and operational methods as well as questions about relative authority and influence. (p.131)

The authors provide a modified activity system triangle meant to represent the entire activity network -- a very different diagram than, say, Bodker or Miettinen, or Engestrom would produce, one that emphasizes the activity network as thoroughly interpenetrated activities (p.132). Blackler et al. make the following substitutions around the triangle:

- subject -> community of activity

- community -> related communities of activity

- object -> emerging collective object of activity

- mediating artifacts -> contextual innovations (perspective shaping)

- rules -> boundary innovations (perspective taking)

- division of labor -> domain innovations (perspective making)

The terms in parentheses above are defined as follows:

- perspective shaping: "How the community of activity understands current priorities and imagines the future."

- perspective taking: "Relations with other communities of activity"

- perspective making: "The contribution of each community of activity"

I find this formulation to be quite interesting, particularly the thought that Blackler et al. have put into naming and theorizing the interpenetrations among activity systems. They have avoided depicting the activity network as modular, and consequently they have had to confront how these activity systems overlap at every point. The substitutions above are clearly ways to describe such overlaps or interfaces, highlighting the innovation work in which people are inevitably engaged as they negotiate these interfaces. Localizing the perspective work on the triangle also makes a lot of sense to me, and it delivers on what is too often a vague discussion of perspectives in activity theory. Perspective work is mediatory: "Cooperative relations between communities of activity are mediated by the processes of 'perspective making,' 'perspective taking,' and 'perspective shaping'" (p.134, their emphasis). Furthermore, the discussion leads to a principled understanding of expertise, which is not always easy when you mash together several different activities. "Through the concept of 'activity system,' expertise can be studied as a collective, heterogeneous phenomenon" (p.133, their emphasis). By the end of the case, we can see why the authors believe that 'perspective making,' 'perspective taking,' and 'perspective shaping' are "the core organizing processes" within activity networks (p.143).

In the footnotes, the authors provide a useful three-paragraph overview of the development of activity theory (p.147). They also repeat Miettinen's criticism of actor-network theory as emphasizing "fixed patterns of power and domination" (p.148).

Engeström, Y., Puonti, A., and Seppänen, L. (2003). "Spatial and temporal expansion of the object as a challenge for reorganizing work."

This chapter provides an introduction of the notion of object in work, based on Engestrom's developmental work research, before overviewing three cases. (One is Seppanen's dissertation work; I reviewed the dissertation elsewhere on this blog.) Objects of work are important here because activities are oriented toward objects; "there is no such thing as objectless activity" (p.152). Indeed,

We argue that a new, more interesting insight into the developmental dynamics of timing and spacing in work organizations can indeed be gained if we shift the focus of analysis onto the objects of work. We suggest that the ongoing historical transformations in objects of work are best conceptualized as expansion rather than compression. (p.152)

And

Objects are constructed and invested with meaning by means of cultural tools. Such mediating tools operate not separately but in complex constellation we call instrumentalities. Emerging new objects call for and generate new instrumentalities. (p.152)

The authors then turn to Victor and Boynton, whose book has been showing up a lot in Engestrom's work lately. Victor and Boynton

suggest that we can examine the evolution of work in capitalism as a succession of five major types: craft, mass production, process enhancement, mass customization, and co-configuration. The last one of the five, co-configuration, is particularly interesting from the point of view of the spatio-temporal expansion of the object. (p.153)

Co-configuration involves building both a continually adaptable product and an ongoing relationship with the company. (Engestrom et al. make co-configuration sound much more concrete and reified than it is; Victor and Boynton present it as a speculation on where work is going next, and do not confidently present a case study of it, as they do with the other forms of work.)

Engestrom et al. follow up with the case studies, which are worthwhile examples of object construction.

Suchman, L. Organizing alignment: The case of bridge-building.

Lucy Suchman's case study of bridge building is categorized within the sociology of translation, although I usually don't think of her as an activity theorist. But in this case study she grapples with the issue of multiplicity that inheres in large projects:

This story of bridge-building points as well to the multiplicity of perspectives involved in such large modern projects. A view of artifact construction as heterogeneous engineering emphasizes issues of stabilization of human and nonhuman networks as central. Along with the contingencies of this process as seen by engineers, however, one can catch glimpses of other perspectives, colllected generally under the heading of "residents" or "citizens." In a real sense there are at least two different artifacts at issue, with associated networks of stabilization, that must somehow be aligned. Project engineers are immersed in a history and daily order of professional practice and practical exigencies. Their orientation is to moving the project forward accoording to the order of phases and timetables, toward the production of an artifact within budget and with appropriate projections of maintainability and durability. Residents, on the other hand, are working on a different order of stabilization: that of their daily lives. ... These two different 'stabilizations' -- of artifact, careers, professional networks, on the one hand, and of daily life, property, and so forth on the other -- comprise different, only partially intersecting fields of knowing and acting. (p.200)

Very nice. Suchman's characterization of "stabilizations" and multiplicity are indeed in line with a sociology of translations, and they highlight what translation has to offer to organizational studies.

Law, J. and Singleton, V. "Allegory and its others."

This last essay is about the same vintage as Law's After Method, and covers some of the same ground. Law and Singleton draw on a case study of "typical patients" at a medical center (and they use the term "typical" ruefully, recognizing that there is no such thing). Although the piece is written in Law's start-stop style, which I find grating, the piece itself is worth it particularly for the criticism of the notion of object. Although they don't use the term "object" quite as Engestrom et al. do, the shoe still fits:

Perhaps there is simply something diffuse about the object itself, the compartment of alcoholic liver disease, alcoholism, alcohol abuse. Perhaps it simply slips, slides, and displaces itself. Perhaps its boundaries move about from one location to another, and do not stay still. Perhaps they ebb and flow. But if this is the case, then something similar goes on, too, for the patients, clients, citizens who experience this condition (or set of conditions). (p.240)

Despite Law's tendency to use "perhaps" when he obviously means "certainly," this passage is useful. Law and Singleton are discussing multiplicity here, and you may recall that multiplicity escapes dialectic. If the object and subjects both have uncertain, fluxing boundaries -- something that is implied by a sociology of translation -- it becomes hard to confidently stabilize either one enough to talk about spatial and temporal expansion of the object or development of the subject. Again, although activity theory and actor-network theory are increasingly being brought to bear on the same problems, we can see why ANT is unsuitable for providing a developmental account -- and why AT is having to work so hard to provide an account of polycontextuality! (AT seems to be having more success at its end, though.)

(My own personal paradigm shift, part 4)

Originally posted: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 08:56:31

As you may remember, I've been looking for some sort of task/project management software for a while. Basically I wanted something that would allow me to enter a description, a range of dates between which the task could be done, and a notes field where I could delegate tasks or write additional notes. Oh, and I wanted something that would allow me to find-as-you-type.

An appropriate piece of software was surprisingly hard to find. The closest I could find was Merlin, but Merlin provided too many constraints for the work I wanted to do; it slowed me down. So I stuck with my Excel tables and kept an eye out for something better.

I think I found it this week -- by totally misusing a piece of software. iBiz is a time-billing and invoicing application. You set up a list of clients, a set of projects attached to each client, and a set of events for each project. You record how much time you put into each event, then generate invoices. Very simple. And it provides a find-as-you-type search for projects.

Here's what I did with it:

Here, I've set up "Clients" which are really categories; "Projects" which are really tasks; and no events under each project. (The search won't look through events, so they're useless to me.) You can sort by any column and find by client (category), project (task), or project notes (notes). I've used the notes field for delegation as well as for other info.

So far it's worked quite well. The only problem is that there's no way to get a decent printout. I can jury-rig a printout with project names (tasks) and due dates, but not ranges, and I can't sort the report. So I'll probably end up taking screen captures -- not a good solution, but the other advantages outweigh this problem. >

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Reading :: Invented Here

Originally posted: Tue, 31 May 2005 09:47:56

Invented Here: Maximizing Your Organization's Internal Growth and Profitability

by Bart Victor, Andrew C. Boynton

My Tuesday oil change turned into a seven-hour ordeal, since the mechanic discovered that my Subaru's rear bearings were wearing out. (Apparently the Foresters have a problem with this.) The upside was that I was able to race through this book in addition to other work.

I wanted to go through the book primarily because Yrjo Engestrom has been citing it a lot lately. It's similar to Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy in many ways, although it's less scholarly and attempts more of a taxonomy of work structures. This taxonomy and its implied progression, I think, is what intrigued Engestrom. On the whole, it's not a remarkable "new economy" book, but it does have some insights.

Let's start with that taxonomy. The authors posit that work ideally takes what they simply call "the right path" (you can imagine the associations that occurred to me). This "right path" has several steps or capabilities:

• Craft: "Craft work is the application of personal know-how, or 'tacit knowledge,' to create value" (p.19).
• Mass Production: "Reuse of articulated knowledge. Large-scale production. Effective use of lower-cost, less experienced workers" (p.48).
• Process Enhancement: "Process enhancers share the conviction that every process must contribute to satisfying the customer by constantly achieving higher quality. Process enhancers equip workers with tools and techniques to help them apply their practical knowledge to improve tasks and processes" (p.74).
• Mass Customization: "Efficiently make precisely what the customer wants, no less, no more. ... The concept of customization has its roots in important research into flexible, efficient, and innovative capabilities" (p.91).
• Co-Configuration: "With co-configuration, we can imagine creating products that are not only made to order for you, but continuously remake themselves as your needs change. ... They customize themselves, not just once, but constantly, in response to your need and want. We call this value customer-intelligent products and services" (p.196).

To their credit, the authors demonstrate in detailed case studies that a particular business might be suited for a particular step; there is no universal progression. (The "right path" metaphor appears to be misleading.) Some work has to be craft work; some work is best constructed as mass production; and so forth. Knowledge work, however, fits best as co-configuration work:

Co-configuration work occurs at the interface of the firm, the customer, and the products or services. It requires constant interaction among the firm, the customer, and the product. The result is that the product continuously adjusts to what the customer wants. Co-configuration creates customer-intelligent value in products or services, where the lines between product and customer knowledge become blurred and interwoven. (p.14)

Co-configuration is kept out of the taxonomy until the last chapter in the book, partially because according to the authors, it's not achievable in most industries. Let's set it aside for a moment. The others are discussed in some detail, including their advantages and disadvantages. Most interesting is Chapter 6, "Transformation Pathways," in which the authors envision these four steps/capabilities as a loop:

• Craftwork transforms into mass production through development: "the articulated knowledge generated under craft is identified and solidified by development into an organizational machine" (p.126).
• Mass production transforms into process enhancement through linking: "Linking creates a system for overlapping processes that managers can continuously improve" (p.126).
• Process enhancement transforms into mass customization through modularization: it "transforms work by creating a network of modular processes that can respond to market demands, enabling a company to customize a product or service to meet ever-shifting market needs" (p.127).
• And mass customization transforms back into craftwork through renewal: "bringing insights on the firm's capability limits and using them to direct a process of invention. These insights can arise under any of the other forms of work" (p.127).

The authors are clearly quite excited about co-configuration, although they include so many hedges about it that it almost appears illusory. Their example of a company that might achieve this sort of work is Microsoft, but I think a better choice would have been Google or Amazon, both of which have embraced an open systems approach (yes, co-configuration sounds a lot like what I was shooting for in Chapter 6 of Tracing Genres through Organizations).

Overall, I didn't see a lot here that I haven't gotten from The Support Economy or similar books. But the taxonomy is useful and the linkages among the types of work are interesting. I'll keep it on the shelf for a while.

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(CFP: Special Issue of TCQ on Distributed Work)

Originally posted: Mon, 30 May 2005 17:42:07

I'll be editing a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly on distributed work to be published in summer 2007. "Distributed work" is shorthand for much of what has been discussed on this blog over the last year and a half: the distribution of work across geographic, disciplinary, and organizational boundaries; the attenuation and coordination of different perspectives at work; the increasing fragmentation and tensions of work activity. I hope you'll consider sending me a proposal.

If you think you have something that might fit, please check out the call for papers and feel free to email me with questions. Looking forward to your submissions.

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Reading :: Inherit the Stars

Originally posted: Mon, 30 May 2005 19:48:40

Inherit the Stars

by James P. Hogan

I mentioned the science fiction books of my childhood several posts back. One book that stood out early on, because of the creepy cover art, was James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars. Who wouldn't want to read a book in which two astronauts excavate a 50,000 year old corpse in a spacesuit? I distinctly remember being intrigued by my older brother's copy when I was in third or fourth grade, and later I got my own copy (long since sold or given away). So when I saw this copy in the used book store for a dollar, I had to buy it.

I mostly wanted to scan the book cover to provide a new icon for my AIM. But since we visited family this weekend, I went ahead and brought the book for those in-between times. It's a surprisingly quick read, and illustrates both what's right and what's wrong about "hard" science fiction.

What's wrong is quickly apparent. In the first chapter, Hogan spends three pages detailing a transaction in which one character, on an intercontinental flight, places an order for a rental vehicle. Yes, three pages in which the character opens up his briefcase to reveal a screen in its lid, talks to the Avis rep on the videophone, runs his license and credit card through special slots in the briefcase, and enters his password: "Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed in the display." Bear in mind that the book was published in 1977; the author got a lot of the details right, but not enough, and I just kept thinking how much easier it would be to use the Avis website. I can see why writers like William Gibson elide most of these details. But Hogan is all about such details, and the book consequently has a short shelf life.

What goes right, though, is that the book provides a sampling of several different scientific fields. What would happen if we discovered a 50,000 year old corpse on the moon? Hogan realistically portrays the coordination that would have to go on among different scientific communities (although I think he provides a two-dimensional portrayal of the controversies that would arise). We get to learn a little bit about evolutionary biology, astrophysics, chemistry, cryptography, and so forth. And we get the pleasure of watching this cross-disciplinary community solve a complex puzzle. The solution is pretty improbable, but what do you want. Hard science fiction is still science fiction, after all.

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(Reading Roundup: Callon on Translation)

Originally posted: Mon, 23 May 2005 22:19:22

Although Bruno Latour is most often associated with actor-network theory, Michel Callon's work predates him. Callon's work with the sociology of translation tends to focus on economics more than Latour's does, but it's the same basic idea: examining how actants are changed so that they can forge alliances, work with one another, and circulate. Translation itself has undergone several conceptual changes since it was first derived from Michel Serres' 1974 work, so I'll focus on differences in accounts within these four articles and compared to other ANT writings.

Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay. In Law, J., editor, Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? , pages 196?233. Routledge, Boston.

This is a famous and often-quoted study of how scientists studied scallops in St. Brieuc Bay, and more generally, "a new approach to power, that of the sociology of translation" (p.196). Translation has

three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social) (p.196)

In this article, translation has four moments. Notice these, because although this article is frequently used to define translation -- it gets a cite in Latour's Pandora's Hope, for instance -- it's described differently from place to place. In Pandora's Hope, for instance, some of these moments get shifted away from translation and are made equal components in "mediation." (See my recent review.) But here, translation is described thus:

Four ?moments? of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by defining the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ?obligatory passage point? of the researchers? programme of investigation; (b) interessement: a series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that programme; (c) enrolment: a set of strategies in which the researchers sought to define and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; (d) mobilisation: a set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. (p.196)

Using these four moments, Callon goes on to systematically study the empirical case, in which researchers try to determine ways to conserve and cultivate scallops. In Callon's symmetrical reading, the actants included the researchers, the fishermen (who, based on public demand, were tempted to overharvest the scallops), and of course the scallops themselves. The vocabulary of translation allowed Callon to study these actants in the same terms. Scallops "voted," for instance, in that counting the number of larvaethat anchored themselves to collectors was no different from counting the number of fishermen who voted to take part in the project themselves. In both cases, "A series of intermediaries and equivalences are put into place which lead to the designation of the spokesman" (p.216), and "To speak for others is to first silence those in whose name we speak" (p.216).

Callon describes a temporarily stabilized settlement here, in which all actants are interested and invested in the outcome. If successful, the researchers turn themselves into an obligatory passage point that all actants must pass on the way to their own objectives. "But this consensus and the alliances which it implies can be contested at any moment. Translation becomes treason" (pp.218-219). For instance, scallops initially attach themselves, but in subsequent years, they refuse to do so; fishermen initially restrain themselves from overfishing, but give in to temptation one Christmas eve (p.220).

This essay does a great job of laying out translation in four moments and describing how a sociology of translation works. But translation is itself translated in later iterations.

Callon, M. (1986). The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric vehicle. In Callon, M., Law, J., and Rip, A., editors, Mapping the dynamics of science and technology: Sociology of science in the real world, pages 19?34. Macmillan, London.

The same year that Callon contributed the scallops study to John Law's edited collection, he coedited another collection with Law. That collection included this essay on electric vehicles. Here, Callon comes up with some terms that apparently didn't survive in later ANT, such as the "actor-world," which Callon tries to conceptually separate from an actor-network without much success (p.22 et passim). In this essay, Callon says that translation has three components: the translator-spokesman; the obligatory passage point; and displacement (p.24).

At first glance these seem rather different from the four moments of translation described in the scallops article, but on closer examination Callon is talking about the same things. It's just that in the scallops article he focuses on moments (points or processes in the translation), while here he focuses on components (elements or entities that must be involved). The new focus is confusing in that components are used in multiple moments and the moments themselves are cyclic rather than linear, so reading through this explanation, it's easy to detect very different moments than the ones we saw in the scallops article! But careful tracing suggests that these two articles are indeed talking about the same thing. In this case, Callon discusses the development of an electric vehicle, but the principle is the same as with the scallops.

Callon elaborates again on translation: "Translation is a definition of roles, a distribution of roles and the delineation of a scenario. It speaks for others but in its own language. It is an initial definition. But ... no translation can be taken for granted for it does not occur without resistance" (p.26).

So, then, we're getting a coherent picture of translation. And this brings us to the next article.

Callon, M. (1991). Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. In Law, J., editor, A sociology of monsters? Essays on power, technology and domination, pages 132?161. Routledge, London.

Five years later, Callon introduces the concept of techno-economic networks: "a coordinated set of heterogeneous actors which interact more or less successfully to develop, produce, distribute, and diffuse methods for generating goods and services" (p.133). These seem to be essentially actor-networks, but specifically ones that relate to economics. I'll treat them as actor-networks here, recognizing that there may be some differences because of focus.

In any case, what Callon says about TENs applies to actor-networks more broadly. First, actors are drawn into relationships through intermediaries; "an intermediary is anything passing between actors which defines the relationship between them" (p.134). They include inscriptions ("relatively immutable media that resist transport"); technical artefacts; human beings (with "the skills, the knowledge, and the know-how that they incorporate"); and money (p.135). These intermediaries "describe their networks in the literary sense of the term. And they compose them by giving them form" (p.135).

A few notes on these. Callon addresses apprenticeship briefly here -- an unusual move in the ANT literature, which tends not to concern itself with learning, development, education, or competence in detailed terms. In apprenticeship,

the instructor describes the operation of an object: the network 'inscribed' on it is set out and inspected. What are the links between technical objects? And what are the roles that humans play? ... In this way the machine is interpreted, deconstructed, and inserted back into its context -- though possibly not the way intended by the designer. The written traces of such efforts to put objects into words are to be found everywhere, as are the controversies to which they lead. Codes, checklists, maintenance manuals and user handbooks, all of these escort objects on their travels. (p.137)

Furthermore, skills can be regarded as networks. A description of skills involves reconstituting the network in which they are "expressed and put to work" (p.138). Again, this is remarkable in that Callon is actually discussing human competence and learning. He goes on to discuss what activity theorists would call mediation: Consider Mr. Smith, who wants to go on vacation. He uses a travel package provided by Club Med, "a mixture of humans and non-humans, texts, and financial products that have been put together in a precisely co-ordinated sequence" (p.139). These actants include "computers, alloys, jet engines, research departments, market studies, advertisements, welcoming hostesses, natives who have suppressed their desire for independence and learned to smile as they carry luggage, bank loans and currency exchanges" (p.139). This TEN might be complex, "but in principle it works just like any other intermediary. If Mr. Martin uses a fork to mash potatoes this is just another (albeit simpler) intermediary" (p.139). Notice that unlike activity theory's version of mediation, Callon's intermediaries can be people as well as artifacts.

An actor is just another intermediary in this reckoning (p.140). Just as the hostess or smiling native serves as an intermediary for Mr. Smith, he serves as an intermediary for them. "Actors define one another by means of the intermediaries which they put into circulation," Callon says in the italics that he liberally uses to emphasize his key points, and "the social can be read in the inscriptions that mark the intermediaries" (p.140). Is a given thing an actor or intermediary? It depends on "where the buck stops" -- what you're trying to study -- because all actors are intermediaries (p.142).

Here, Callon begins to talk about networks in more detail, drawing on Deleuze to make some of his points (p.142). He describes a triangle of translation, again similar to the triangle used to describe mediation in activity theory. The triangle is of the translator, translated, and the medium in which the translation is inscribed (p.143).

Callon then elaborates by discussing convergence and irreversibility. "Convergence measures the extent to which the process of translation and its circulation of intermediaries leads to agreement" (p.144). It involves alignment, or the extent to which translation "generates a shared space, equivalence and commensurability" (p.145). "A translation that is generally accepted tends to shed its history. It becomes self-evident, a matter on which everyone can agree" (p.145). Of course, translation must "rarefy the universe of possible actors by organising imputation and limiting the number of translations that can be easily stabilised" -- that is, you want to limit the extent to which translations can occur so that you can strengthen and build on the network -- so actor-networks generate "conventions" or "codifying regulations" that Callon calls "co-ordination or translation regimes" (p.147).

This leads Callon to argue that one can make a relative judgment about the boundaries of a network based on its level of convergence (p.149). He has a brief methodological discussion here, without much substance, I'm afraid.

Then he gets to irreversibility, which I find to be quite interesting. Irreversibility is

(a) the extent to which it is subsequently impossible to go back to a point where the translation was only one amongst others; and

(b) the extent to which it shapes and determines subsequent translations. (p.150)

"All translations, however apparently secure, are in principle reversible," Callon declares (p.150). No matter how widely it is accepted that the Earth is flat, or that spontaneous generation occurs, or that mankind is only 6,000 years old -- and no matter how many other things are built on these beliefs -- they are reversible. And so are the things that replace them. Facts can be walked back. But some facts are harder to walk back than others: the longer a network is, the stronger it is, because the more depends on its translations being stable (p.151). Irreversible translation is normalization (p.152).

Callon briefly discusses apprenticeship in this context:

Apprenticeship is a case in point. In this the elements involved in a translation become dependent on one another in a process of mutual adaptation. A skilled machinist cannot work without his machine. The development of a technology depends on engineers with a specialist training. The practice of this trade puts specific objects into circulation. And so on. In this way decisions become more and more dependent on past translations. (p.151).

Callon, M., Larédo, P., and Mustar, P. (1997). Techno-economic networks and the analysis of structural effects. In The strategic management of research and technology, pages 385?429. Economica International, Paris.

This final chapter postdates the others by quite a bit, and comes before his chapter in Complexities. Callon and his colleagues go into technico-economic networks in much more detail than I find useful here. But let's get the 50,000 foot version. Again, Callon discusses TENs as actor-networks particularly within the context of economics (that's my take, not a specific quote of his). Here, Callon is particularly interested in innovations stabilizing within the network (pp.386-387). Again, he discusses actors as circulating intermediaries (p.389). He then goes into an elaborate taxonomy of TENs based on several axes: networks can be lacunary or chained; dispersed or convergent; short or long; polarized or non-polarized. These axes all cover different aspects of a network, but Callon's objective in detailing them, again, seems to be in terms of how stable and powerful they are. The axes provide a more detailed analysis -- certainly more detailed than I particularly wanted to get into. I'm not sure how helpful they are.

In sum, these four articles represent a line of thought parallel to Latour's, and they certainly cite Latour a lot. But the notion of translation is a little undercooked in places, and the term seems to disappear in the last article. On the other hand, the principles of translation seem to be intact in here as well as in Latour's work; the basic idea is the same, though it gets chopped up in different ways.

Reading :: Pandora's Hope (Supplemental Notes)

Originally posted: Fri, 20 May 2005 09:22:28

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies

by Bruno Latour

Pandora's Hope was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. It's a fairly short review, partially because I was still trying to absorb the basics of actor-network theory at the time. This second reading comes after several other books and articles on ANT. So I'll be a bit more detailed in my comments this time.

Latour begins with the question of what science actually is, framing it with the story of an encounter with a scientist who nervously asks him if he believes in reality. Of course he does, Latour says. The rest of the book is a discussion of what that means -- a difficult proposition, Latour maintains, because of the way the world has been divided between subjects and objects. This modernist settlement has led us away from commonsensical statements and to a point at which we must discuss whether we believe in reality in the first place!

To illuminate, Latour takes us in Chapter 2 to Brasil, where he follows an interdisciplinary set of scientists who are examining the dividing line between a savannah and a forest. How is their work done? Through a set of circulating references, Latour says: representations that themselves become represented by other representatives. "A word replaces a thing," he notes, "while conserving a trait that defines it" (p.63). The inscriptions that science mobilizes together constitute long chains of representation that typically converge into something about the size of a tabletop -- whether the thing that is represented is a galaxy, a microbe, or the soil underneath a savannah. And this chain renders the subject-object distinction useless -- and a bit ridiculous, in Latour's view. "Knowlendge, it seems, does not reside in the face-to-face confrontation of a mind with an object, any more than the reference designates a thing by means of a sentence verified by that thing." Rather, it resides in the long cascade of re-representations.

An essential property of this chain is that it must remain reversible. The succession of changes must be traceable, allowing for travel in both directions. If the chain is interrupted at any point, it ceases to transport truth -- ceases, that is, to produce, to construct, to trace, and to conduct it. The word "reference" designates the quality of the chain in its entirety, and no longer adequatio rei et intellectus. (p.69)

The principle is nicely illustrated on p.71, in which "the transformation at each stage of the reference ... may be pictured as a trade-off between what is gained (amplification) and what is lost (reduction) at each information-producing step." In the diagram, successive steps lead to narrower locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity, but greater compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality -- that is, the transformation leads us to representations that are less rich but more calculable and transportable. Transformations lose some properties but gain others. Conducting a phenomenon in this way, in successive layers, makes it more real (p.76). It is the erasure of these intermediate steps that causes us to believe in the subject-object distinction.

With that in mind, we go to Chapter 3, in which Latour discusses translation by using the historical case of Joliot attempting to develop an artificial nuclear chain reaction. Such a feat required a long set of translations: "when their goals are frustrated, actors take detours through the goals of others, resulting in a general drift, the language of one actor being substituted for the language of another" (p.89). Dautry's goal, national independence, can be reached only by taking a detour through Joliot's goal, being the first to master a chain reaction. Joliot's goal can only be reached by building a laboratory that can help to reach both goals. These detours link together very different sorts of enterprises, resulting in an interesting drift as the chain of translations expands, a drift from the exoteric to the esoteric. Some of the actors are humans, like Dautry and Joliot, but others are nonhumans, such as neutrons that must be persuaded to slow enough to hit a uranium atom. "For Joliot, it wasn't very difficult. In the morning he dealt with the neutrons and in the afternoon he dealt with the minister. The more time passed, the more these two problems became one" (p.90).

Based on this work, Latour proposes that scientific facts are created and maintained through a "circulatory system" with five loops: mobilization, autonomization, alliances, public representations -- and the loops that knot them all together, the "links and knots" that are typically considered the scientific concept. In the modernist subject-object understanding, this last loop is conceived as an inner core surrounded by context; in the amodernist understanding being promoted here, it is one loop among others, moving and changing rather than transcendant and static. "A concept does not become scientific because it is farther removed from the rest of what it holds, but because it is more intensely connected to a much larger repertoire of resources" (p.108).

This leads us to Chapter 4, where Latour returns to Louis Pasteur's work to suggest that we stop worrying about whether facts are constructed or real. Of course they are both -- and the shifting out of one plane of reference to another is what makes this doable (p.130). Latour suggests that instead of thinking of the world in terms of statements that allow words to correspond to the world (i.e., bridge the subject-object divide), we turn to a model of propositions in which we examine which propositions are articulated with one another (p.142).

Chapter 5 takes up a common criticism of ANT, which is its lack of historicity. Following his standard pattern, Latour outlines two understandings of historicity, using the illustration of the microbe. "Did ferments exist before Pasteur made them up?" (p.145). If the question is in terms of representations, the answer is no: the notion of the microbe didn't come into being until Pasteur. If the question is in terms of evolution, the answer is yes: microbes were really there, but hadn't been named or theorized. But this is the words-and-world, subject-and-object distinction all over again: "the divide between what pertains to human history and what to natural history would not have been bridged in the slightest" (p.146). To overcome the distinction, Latour turns back to the notion of circulating reference from Chapter 2. Every change in the series of transformations makes a difference (p.150); "Associations of entities have a history if at least one of the articles making them up changes" (p.152). So an amodern account of historicity is grounded in changes in associations. And such a historicity is reversible; no inertia is enough to keep up the reality that has been so difficult to produce" (p.155). Settlements can unravel. Scientific facts have relative existence (p.156), an existence that takes hard work to keep up. Victories always require further actions (p.168). And now we get to another of Latour's diagrams (p.171), this one illustrating an amodernist historicity of Pasteur's work. The X axis is the "linear succession of time," while the Y axis is the "sedimentary succession of time" -- the year 1864 as it is represented in subsequent years. The 1864 of 1864 was not the same as the 1864 of 2005: in the earlier sedimentation, spontaneous generation was a serious theory that had to be addressed with careful methodology, whereas in the later sedimentation, we don't consider spontaneous generation seriously. The concepts become rearticulated and reread in later history. (From my own research: the concept of universal service became rearticulated in the 1970s, then was read back into Theodore Vail's 1907 statement on universal service as well as the Communications Act of 1934, neither of which originally shared the 1970s-era understanding of universal service.)

Now for Chapter 6, in which Latour talks about mediation. How do we deal with technical mediation and the questions it poses for agency? Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Latour sees the subject-object dichotomy in this question as well, and characteristically proposes a middle ground through his account of technical mediation. Mediation, he says, involves mutual transformation of the assemblage (in this case, the gun-human), and this transformation has four parts:

First, translation: "we can portray the relation between two agents as a translation of their goals which results in a composite goal that is different from the two original goals" (p.179).

Second: Composition. "Action is simply not a property of humans but of an association of actants" (p.182). This composition of different agents in an assemblage is enacted through a series of "subprograms" that together achieve the composite goal of the assemblage.

Third: Reversible blackboxing. An assemblage (composition) of agents can be "blackboxed" or regarded as a single entity. But if the settlement breaks down, the black box can open; the composition can unravel as easily as it was raveled. In Aramis, for instance, Latour demonstrates how engineers labor to turn a field, a set of motors, a set of citizens, and innumerable other humans and nonhumans into a public transportation system. If blackboxing works, you can say, "I'm taking the train to the meeting." If the black box is opened, you might say, "the drivers are on strike" or "there's something wrong with the engine." Technical and scientific settlements need to be renegotiated and supported as much as political ones do. (pp.183-185).

Fourth: Delegation. The illustration here is the "sleeping policeman" or speed bump. "The driver's goal is translated, by means of the speed bump, from 'slow down as not to endanger students' into 'slow down and protect your car's suspension.' ... The driver's first version appeals to morality, enlightened interest, and reflection, whereas the second appeals to pure selfishness and reflex action. ... But from an observer's view it does not matter through which channel a given behavior is attained" (p.186). The nature of "meaning" is itself modified through delegation (p.187). "The speed bump is a meaningful articulation within a gamut of propositions" (p.187).

Given these four meanings or aspects of mediation, Latour attempts to trace "how a collective of one given definition can modify its makeup by articulating different associations": through translation, then crossover (i.e., humans and nonhumans exchange properties), then enrollment, mobilization, and finally displacement ("the direction the collective takes once its shape, extent, and composition has been altered by the enrollment and mobilization of new actants" (p.194). This part confuses me because according to one of Michel Callon's most quoted articles, translation occurs in four moments: problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilization. Is Latour using a more narrow meaning for translation here? Or different meanings for the other terms? I really wish he had traced the genealogy of the term here and related it more strongly throughout the chapter, since Callon's piece is much more established.

In any case, we now get to Latour's two-chapter discussion of the Gorgias, Plato's famous Socratic dialogue in which Socrates gets to beat up on rhetoric. As a rhetorician, I am not very happy with the two-dimensional portrayal of rhetoric. Neither is Latour. In the dialogue, Socrates represents Right: the lone man with knowledge and virtue on his side, who invokes absolute truth and declares that he will be vindicated in the afterlife. Callicles represents Might: the strongman who commands the dumb masses through force of personality, ruthlessness, and deception. Callicles is the very image of the Prince, at least the Prince that we have come to expect from the many slanders leveled against Machiavelli. But Latour scorns both Socrates and Callicles. If they just looked out the window, he says, these two would-be rulers would see the real rulers of Athens: the citizens in the marketplace, bargaining, negotiating, persuading, and trading.

It's worth noting that just as he did in Aramis, Latour takes a little time here to distance himself from Machiavelli. He warns against accepting "the Machiavellian definition of politics as being unconcerned with morality" and disapproves of "what Machiavelli will later esteem as a positive definition of political cleverness --- although Machiavelli's position is, of course, not a wholly immoral one" (p.253). Later, he says that "Machiavelli fell into Socrates' trap and defined politics as a cleverness entirely freed from scientific virtue" (p.263). Notice two things here, though. One is that Latour is not repudiating Machiavelli entirely, just Machiavelli's acceptance of the Socrates-Callicles settlement -- and in that way Machiavelli is no different from any modernist. The other is that Latour is talking about Machiavelli in the context of the Socrates-Callicles debate after emphasizing that the Callicles in this dialogue is a straw Callicles, distinct from the historical Callicles, who would have surely said something different. Is this a clever way to get across the difference between a straw Machiavelli and the actual Machiavelli, as he did in Aramis? Or am I trying too hard here?

In any case, Latour says that "power and reason are one and the same" -- that Might vs. Right is an illusory dichotomy and that "the Body Politic built by one or by the other is shaped with the same clay" (p. 262).

This brings us to Chapter 9. Latour talks about "factishes." "Fact" and "fetish" come from the same root word but connote opposite meanings, Latour contends, because of this modernist settlement that has split subject and object (p.267). He tries to reunite them as a "factish," something that, if fabricated well, allows reality to be autonomous. The question is not whether facts are real or constructed, "the Procrustean bed in which the modernist settlement wants us all to slumber" (p.275). They are both! And here's where Latour does another one of his hit-and-run jobs against dialectic:

When a fact is fabricated, who is doing the fabrication? The scientist? The thing? If you answer "the thing," then you are an outdated realist. If you answer "the scientist," then you are a constructivist. If you answer "both," then you are doing one of those repair jobs known as the dialectic, which seem to patch up the dichotomy for a while, but only hide it, allowing it to fester at a deeper level by turning it into a contradiction that has to be resolved and overcome. And yet we have to say that it is both, obviously, but without the assurance, certainty, or arrogance that seems to go with the realist or the relativist answer or with a clever oscillation between the two. (p.281)

And:

Am I simply restating the dialectic? No, there is no object, no subject, no contradiction, no Aufhebung, no mastery, no recapitulation, no spirit, no alienation. But there are events. I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do. (p.281)

This is a fairly abbreviated critique of dialectic, isn't it? But at least it's a little more coherent than his previous attempts. On the other hand, Latour's critics have been guilty as well, and that has agitated him:

If I have not answered the science warriors' arguments term for term -- or even cited their names -- it is because the science warriors too often waste their time attacking someone who has the same name as mine, who is said to defend all the absurdities I have disputed for twenty-five years: that science is socially constructed; that all is discourse; that there is no reality out there; that everything goes; that science has no conceptual content; that the more ignorant one is the better; that everything is political anyway; that subjectivity should be mingled with objectivity; that the mightiest, manliest, and hairiest scientist always wins provided he has enough 'allies' in high places; and such nonsense. I don't have to come to the rescue of that homonym! (p.300)

That Latour sounds familiar too. I recognize him from Miettinen's criticisms, and Engestrom's, and others. >

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(Reading Roundup: de Laet and Mol)

Originally posted: Wed, 18 May 2005 18:05:47

de Laet and Mol's "The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology" represents still another example of how actor-network theory (or, I suppose, one postvariant) has pushed from science studies to studies of technologies. Like Madeleine Akrich's study of the gazogene, this study examines how technologies are not contextualized but actually constituted by their relationships with local conditions, terrains, practices, and so forth. I like it very much. The ZBP, in this account, is articulated with a number of different actants to make it successful. One striking example is that the ZBP's documentation stresses the importance of consulting with local water diviners before siting a water hole (p.234) -- a beautiful illustration of how multiplying associations can produce a more durable and far-reaching settlement than otherwise.

And the ZBP settlement is quite durable. Unlike Akrich's gazogene, the ZBP is a runaway success: "A national standard, the Zimbabwe Bush Pump is a nation-builder that gains strength with each illustration" (p.236). Unlike Engels, who insisted that 100,000 steam engines did not prove Carnot's principle more than the one, de Laet and Mol boldly insist quite the opposite. The more ZBPs, the more real the ZBP is. Whereas Engels thought the steam engine could be reduced to a "germ-cell," a minimal abstract representation of the essential principle behind the steam-engine, de Laet and Mol insist that the ZBP has fuzzy boundaries:

Even if nothing can be taken from it, it is not clear where this pump ends. For what is the Zimbabwe Bush Pump? A water-producing device, defined by the mechanics that make it work as a pump. Or a type of hydraulics that produces water in specific quantities and from particular sources. But then again, maybe it is a sanitation device -- in which case the concrete slab, mould, casing and gravel are also essential parts. And while it may provide water and health, the Pump can do so only with the Vonder Rig -- or some other boring device -- and accompanied by manuals, measurements, and texts. Without these it is nothing, so maybe they belong to it too. And what about the village community? Is it to be included in the Pump --- because a pump has to be set up by the community and cannot be maintained without one? But then again, perhaps the boundaries of the Bush Pump coincide with those of the Zimbabwean nation. For in its modest way this national Bush Pump helps to make Zimbabwe as much as Zimbabwe makes it. (p.237)

If this discussion sounds familiar, perhaps you're thinking of Gregory Bateson's discussion of the blind man with the cane. Engels was searching for a way to generate abstract statements about essences while remaining materialist; de Laet & Mol, Bateson, Deleuze & Guattari, Latour, etc. were looking for a way to define technologies relationally and nonessentially. Partially this is because their different projects demand different tacks. Engels and his activity theory descendants were interested in learning and development, so they were concerned with how to describe concept formation in all its manifestations; they were interested in how abstractions were developed over time and made into mediators that guided further activity. Bateson and his actor-network theory associates were much more concerned with ontology, and found abstract essences to be quite untenable as ways to address that problem.

Back to de Laet and Mol. Although most of the article was quite good, I was disappointed to see that the Machiavellian slur was leveled (or at least entertained) here as well. Critics have argued that in invoking Machiavelli, actor-network theorists have created an incompatibility between the principle of symmetry that they hold and the extreme asymmetry of a Machiavellian viewpoint. de Laet and Mol give those critics comfort here:

For even if Latour's work shifts Pasteur out of the centre by pointing to the network he needs, it also suggests (or has been read as suggesting) that innovation, even if it turns out to be the work of a large army, does need a general in order to spread out. This Machiavellian reading of Latour says that technologies depend on a power-seeking strategist who, given a laboratory, plots to change the world. (p.227)

But neither Latour nor Machiavelli subscribe to this view! With friends like these, who need enemies?

>

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(Reading Roundup: Engestrom on Expansive Learning at Work)

Originally posted: Tue, 17 May 2005 18:49:15

Engestrom's "Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization" (Journal of Education and Work 14.1, 2001) is very similar to some of the other Engestrom articles and chapters I've reviewed recently. In fact, it shares some passages with "Developmental work research as educational research." But it covers some different ground as well.

For instance, in its brief history of activity theory, it acknowledges the "deep-seated insensitivity of the second generation activity theory toward cultural diversity" originally pointed out by Michael Cole (p.135), and says that the internationalization of AT meant that "questions of diversity and dialogue between different traditions or perspectives became increasingly serious challenges" (p.135). Ah. So is this why Bakhtin's dialogism has become so interesting to third-generation activity theorists?

Engestrom then lays out the working of an activity network, including a diagram on p.136 in which the objects of two activity systems form a third object -- a Venn diagram portraying the intersection of the separate objects. He differentiates among

- "object 1" ("an initial state of unreflected, situationally given 'raw material'" such as "a specific patient entering a physician's office")

- "object 2" ("a collecively meaningful object constructed by the activity system" such as "the patient constructed as a specimen of a biomedical disease category and thus as an instantiation of the general object of illness/health")

- "object 3" ("a potentially shared and constructed object" such as "a collaboratively constructed understanding of the patient's life situation and care plan")

"The object of activity," he concludes, "is a moving target, not reducible to conscious short-term goals.

Given the understanding of the object, Engestrom summarizes AT in terms of five principles:

- The activity system "seen in its network relations to other activity systems" becomes the unit of analysis (p.136).

- Activity systems are multivoiced: "the activity system itself carries multiple layers and strands of history engraved in its artifacts, rules, and conventions. The multi-voicedness is multiplied in networks of interacting activity systems. It is a source of trouble and a source of innovation, demanding actions of translation and negotiation" (p.136).

- Activity systems have historicity: they "take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods of time." "History itself needs to be studied as local history of the activity and its objects, and as history of the theoretical ideas and tools that have shaped the activity" (pp.136-137).

- Contradictions are central to change and development. "Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within or between activity systems" (p.137).

- Activity systems undergo expansive transformations in which "the object and motive of the activity are reconceptualized to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity" (p.137). Engestrom links expansive transformations to the zone of proximal development.

Engestrom uses these five principles as the columns in a matrix; the rows are the questions:

- Who are learning?

- Why do they learn?

- What do they learn?

- How do they learn?

The matrix turns out to be a useful heuristic for examining learning, which is AT's main focus, at least as it has tended to be conceptualized by Vygotsky and Engestrom. In fact, the question of learning is so important for Engestrom that he begins to see it everywhere, and assert it with such assurance that I begin to doubt my own memory. Does Engestrom really say that "Latour's (1987, 1996) actor-network theory recommends that we locate learning in a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors"? Why, yes he does, here on p.140. Does Latour ever mention the term "learning" or a related concept? No, not really, not unless you locate learning as central to collective activity. Latour does not. In fact, from what I can tell, Latour remains agnostic about individual learning, and is much more interested in the forming of settlements -- which does not necessarily include learning or subscribe to a theory of learning at all!

To Engestrom, studying knowledge formation or the sociology of scientific knowledge implies a theory of learning; to Latour, it does not. That's because the two have very different projects with very different emphases and origins. For instance, look back at the history of activity theory and you'll see a progressive outgrowth from the study of individual cognition (Vygotsky) to larger structures. As you can see from the matrix mentioned above, the individually oriented concepts have turned into concepts for studying overall activity. Expansive visibilization, for instance, is simply the zone of proximal development applied to activities rather than individuals. Compare that with actor-network theory, which has its roots in political and economic theory and sociology, with an assist from philosophy and rhetoric -- all of which are concerned with group or societal relations rather than individual relations. ANT doesn't build on the notion of an individual to reach its understanding of human activity; it tracks movements, not learning.

Let's end with something that has been interesting me quite a bit lately: The concept of the germ-cell. In Learning, Working, and Imagining, Engestrom discusses Frederich Engels' example of Carnot's theorization of the steam engine. From Engels' Dialectics of nature, p.229: "the steam engine provided the most striking proof that one can impart heat and obtain mechanical motion. 100,000 steam engines did not prove this any more than the one?>

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