Reading :: Interactive Qualitative Analysis

Originally posted: Sat, 04 Nov 2006 10:02:30

Interactive Qualitative Analysis: A Systems Method for Qualitative Research

by Norvell Northcutt, Danny McCoy

We've seen a lot of research methods and methodologies recently that involve collecting and analyzing data along with research participants. Participatory design, action research, and contextual design are three examples. The latter, in fact, borrows much from TQM methods such as the K-J Method and affinity diagrams. Interactive Qualitative Analysis draws from the same well, outlining a systematic qualitative approach to collaborative data analysis that leverages those TQM methods and strives for true mutual participation in data analysis.

Written by two researchers associated with the School of Education here at the University of Texas, the book describes Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) in detail. IQA is based in systems theory and dialectics (p.xxii). In fact, they approvingly quote Engels' laws of dialectics in their description of IQA (p.14). In fact, they get quite carried away with dialectics throughout, making the same sorts of overreaching claims about is that Engels likes to make: "This ebb and flow is the result of the dialectical nature of both history and reality itself" (p.102). (They also use the dialectical ground to take some potshots at postmodernists, although they make conciliatory noises as well.)

Essentially, IQA is a phenomenological approach in which focus groups produce affinity diagrams describing a shared phenomenon, an affinity that involves both open and axial coding. This coding leads to interview protocols, which in turn guide individual interviews. The interviews and affinities then lead to mindmaps, or systems diagrams that describe the phenomenon.

The authors illustrate IQA by applying it to an IQA course -- an extremely confusing example, because it's very difficult to tell when the authors are talking about IQA and when they are describing what students said about IQA. Really, this was a bad move for the authors to make, and they compound the problem with too many stories, transcripts, and lists. They also compound it with distracting and generally unsuccessful attempts at humor. (One footnote reads: "The interviewer was, of course, one of the authors, but he could easily have been the other one" (p.423).)

That's really too bad, because IQA is in many ways an intriguing approach that complements the other approaches I mention above. Although it does not appear to support observational work (being primarily phenomenological), it does pose some interesting possibilities for those who do phenomenological work, particularly in its adoption of TQM techniques and its stance in favor of co-analysis with participants. The use of mindmaps is also intriguing, although the authors appear to overrely on them and equate them with mental models (always dicey when you're talking about more than one person).

In summary, IQA is a really interesting and potentially useful method for qualitative analysis carried out with the participants. It's more focused on rigor than contextual design is, but it's also far less modest in its claims and far less observational. If I were to use it, it would be either for strictly defined phenomenological work or as a component of a more integrated study, and my claims would be considerably more hedged than the ones the authors present in their examples.

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Reading :: Free Culture

Originally posted: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:59:23

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity

by Lawrence Lessig

In 2002, Lawrence Lessig argued before the US Supreme Court that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act should be declared unconstitutional. He lost the legal argument. This book, essentially, is his response: a policy argument that attempts to rectify his loss of the legal argument.

So what's the argument? Lessig describes the problem: Copyright, which originated as a strongly limited right to one's own work over a relatively short period, has been progressively extended in a number of ways. Most obviously, Congress has enacted a series of rolling extensions that, as long as they continue, will result in de facto permanent copyright. But copyright has also been extended in other dimensions, due to changes in distribution systems (video, radio, electronic). Additional restrictions have been built into software, and the act of circumventing copyright protection itself has been made illegal. Lessig argues that these changes, in total, mean that an increasing amount of our cultural heritage is being taken off the table and commoditized -- and worse, works that cannot be commoditized, that will not pay for themselves (e.g., less popular Laurel and Hardy films), are decaying for lack of funds to covert them to more permanent media. One big problem is that there's no central registry for copyright holders, so it's sometimes impossible to determine who holds the copyright and thus impossible to get permission to use their work.

Lessig responds with a suggestion for a compromise: make copyright a fixed 50-year term, then extend it via a nominal fee (say, $1 a year) that involves registering the copyright holder.

I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. But as a policy issue, several things occur to me. I'm no legal scholar or policy expert, but I suspect copyright has not evolved enough to keep up with various sorts of changes in how works are designed and produced, and I further suspect that Lessig's proposal only exacerbates these problems:

• When copyright was conceived, works were primarily authored by individuals. Now they're authored by teams, and important parts of what make them unique or salable are not added by the copyright holder at all. For instance, acts like Def Leppard and the Cars would not have been nearly as attractive without producer Mutt Lange, who strongly contributed to their sound. Lange is not the copyright holder, but he strongly impacted their work.
• Similarly, individual works often enact larger properties. The obvious example is Mickey Mouse: a new Mickey Mouse property is in a sense just a brick in a larger edifice that stretches back to Steamboat Willie. (Jason Craft describes these edifices as "fiction networks," using comic books and the Star Wars universe as examples.) An enormous amount of work goes into building and maintaining these edifices, with later works impacting the interpretation of earlier ones. That work is distributed across time, space, and disciplines, and frequently functions as an organic whole. So: if Mickey Mouse is still being developed, can he go out of copyright? If you make your own Mickey Mouse T-shirt, are we talking about the character (who is under continual development), or just screen grabs from out-of-copyright works?
• Works enjoy much broader distribution across a much larger set of media.
• Two related operating assumptions of the book are that our cultural heritage is precious and that reuse is an essential creative act. I wonder about both of these. We have, to put it bluntly, created an enormous amount of garbage in the last century, and I'm not sure that it's a bad thing that those Laurel and Hardy films are moldering in their cans. Nor am I convinced that reuse is so essential to further creativity.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Lessig's solution to the copyright problem is not especially workable. Copyright is a bureaucratic problem, and creating another layer of bureaucracy in the form of a massive centralized database is not an especially elegant solution.

Anyway, the book is fascinating and, as you can tell, thought-provoking.

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Reading :: The Search

Originally posted: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:10:24

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

by John Battelle

This book is pretty light reading, but also quite interesting. Although the book is mainly about Google, Battelle starts far pre-Google to discuss search algorithms, Internet startups, and ad pricing structures, and he manages to do all of this quite compellingly. If you've wondered just how Google gets those results, this book provides a pretty good lay introduction. And if you are not quite sure how Google makes money off of a free service, you should definitely take a look.

On the other hand, this sort of book has a very short shelf life. Battelle's speculative chapter about the future of search seems alternately dated and oversold, and his afterword barely mentions the groundwork that Google had already laid for moving into office software for small businesses. But what he does discuss gives us an idea of how Google will continue to strategize, particularly in the small business market. Check it out if you'd like to get a quick understanding of search and what it means.

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(Reading Roundup: Nardi, Engestrom, Sun)

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:51:21

Coming off of a very busy couple of months, and with the Net Work manuscript complete and being reviewed by a couple of good friends, I've finally been able to get back to my readings.

They start with the latest TCQ, which is quite a good issue.

Zachry, M. (2006). An interview with Bonnie A. Nardi. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4):483?503.

Mark Zachry's interview with Bonnie Nardi is really interesting to me, not just in terms of her research trajectory and her development of activity theory, but also in terms of her thoughts on methodology -- something that is fresh in my mind, since I taught a qualitative research seminar this spring and have been developing methods sections for various grant proposals over the summer.

In terms of qualitative research, Bonnie says:

Qualitative analysis for me is a very open-ended

kind of enterprise. So, what I usually like to do is get my interview text and my field notes in front of me in some reasonable form where I can kind of read through them, like a novel. And I don?t look for metaphors or anything else. I just read them and hope that things are starting to work in my unconscious. And then I go back and do something much more systematic where I look for themes, or metaphors, or whatever kinds of constructs that I think are really important.

And a moment later:

No, I am not that systematic. I am a very old school anthropologist. I don?t use computer-based analytical tools. I don?t count very much. Sometimes I count things, but mostly I am looking for the themes and the sensibilities that I find in the transcripts, or in my field notes, or on the websites.

This is indeed old-school anthropology, the sort of intuitive work that hearkens back to ethnography's roots in travel writing, and that has been critiqued by later methodologies that focus on analytical rigor through strict analytical tools and procedures (e.g., grounded theory). Nevertheless, Bonnie's work has considerable analytical rigor -- as we'll see in a moment -- that is perhaps intuited and perhaps guided by her theoretical rigor.

Bonnie's rigor comes partially through immersion, and at the time of the article she was immersed in World of Warcraft, which she characterizes as an introductory step to global collaboration:

And, although it is only a game, certainly, I am interested in the fact that people are learning to interact with people that they don?t know, and that they are never going to see. It is interesting that they learn how to get along with these other players and organize themselves and do things together. I think this is really going to be important in the future because I think we are going to be doing a lot more of that. All the problems we?ve created, many of which come from technology, are global in nature, and we can?t solve them in our own little neighborhoods and our own backyards. We have to collaborate with other people.

She goes on to discuss the implications for networks, and particularly for "placeless organizations," which are "organizations that have a transformative object and which do work in shifting multiple sites." And "what really grabbed my attention was the fact that people are trying to create either national or global change through these placeless organizations, and they are placeless because the world is a big place and if you only pick one place, you can?t effect the kind of change necessarily that you want to."

Which brings us to the next reading:

Nardi, B. A. (In press). Placeless organizations: Collaborating for transformation. Mind, Culture, and Activity.

Bonnie was kind enough to share this manuscript with me; it'll be published in early 2007. Here, she elaborates on the concept of placeless organizations, which are characterized as "sites and generators of learning at a large scale." The concept here -- which goes a long way toward studying transformative global net work -- hinges on starting with the object (in the activity theoretical sense) rather than with organizational boundaries. The notion is somewhat similar to actor-network theory's dictum to "follow the actors," but more focused in that objects are a bit better defined in the activity-theoretical sense (although Bonnie acknowledges that the term still has a lot of slippage). One important deliverable in this article is a detailed taxonomy of different types of organizations, including placeless organizations, distributed teams, virtual organizations, corporate hierarchies, knots, communities of practice, and social movements.

I don't want to say too much about an unpublished article, but I look forward to reading and citing the final version when it comes out.

Engestrom, Y. Current State and Future Strategy of the Center

Speaking of these sorts of organizations, I was interested to see what's happening at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research in Helsinki, where researchers have been developing third- and fourth-generation activity theory to deal with the sorts of distributed organizations Bonnie talks about above. This PowerPoint presentation outlines the Center's recent strategic focus and its possible foci through 2011, and may provide an interesting glimpse into what's coming next. What strikes me is that these issues primarily deal with how to develop activity theory to address a globally networked world in which traditional organizational boundaries are insufficient to characterize human activity. In particular, the Center will be studying issues such as

• Hybrid and amoeba-like activity systems, including the global organizations, hybrids, and high-discontinuity organizations that are increasingly characterizing a globally networked world. This research strand is subtitled "Toward a 4th Generation Unit of Analysis."
• Gigantic objects, universal tools, which focuses on large-scale crossdisciplinary objects such as global warming. This strand is subtitled "Toward a New Relationship Between Humans and Nature."
• Object-oriented interagency, which is primarily concerned with how we understand human agency in the face of the collaboration (coordination, cooperation, communication) that happens within and across activity systems.

These themes complement the work recently coming out of the Center, focusing on horizontal learning.

Engestrom, Y. "The horizontal dimension of expansive learning: Weaving a texture of cognitive trails in the terrain of health care in Finland."

Horizontal learning has become a really interesting focus in recent "third-generation" activity theory, primarily because work organization is changing: "the world of work is is increasingly organized in ways that require horizontal movement and boundary crossing." No longer is the focus on learning exclusively vertical, that is, a progression within the bounds of a single activity or discipline. Increasingly, we learn across overlapping activities. To explore this issue, Engestrom turns -- as he so often does -- to a comparison with another construct, examining how it handles the issue theoretically and methodologically, then discussing how it can inform activity theory. Talk about "learning by expanding." Engestrom sees cognitive trails as an empirically useful construct, in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari's construct of "rhizomes," which he critiques for being too metaphorical to be applied in empirical research.

Sun, H. (2006). The triumph of users: Achieving cultural usability goals. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4):483?504.

And that brings us back to the issue of TCQ that I have been reading. Based on Huatong Sun's award-winning dissertation, this article uses activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies to examine how Chinese and US phone users enact text messaging. (British cultural studies -- particularly articulation theory -- owe a debt to Deleuze and Guattari and their notion of rhizomes.) If you've read her dissertation, this article won't be news to you -- but if you haven't, start with the article first, because it provides a cogent summary of the dissertation's themes and underscores how far ahead Huatong is in terms of understanding how intercultural communication issues interact with usability and technology.

>

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Reading :: Extreme Democracy

Originally posted: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:15:09

Extreme Democracy

by Jon Lebkowsky, Mitch Ratcliffe

I've been delaying blogging this book review because a decent review would take more time than I think the book is worth -- and because my colleague Mark Longaker has already written an incisive review that will appear in Technical Communication Quarterly in a few issues. But I'll summarize my impressions here.

This collection, written just before and just after Howard Dean's implosion in the 2004 primaries, varies in quality even more than a normal collection does. Some chapters, like Clay Shirky's, are really smart and insightful. Others, like James F. Moore's "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head," are just awful in their reductionism and naivete. Still others present interesting case studies of community-based technologies, especially Drupal, which was used to power many of Dean's community sites.

The book itself is essentially a print version of a collection of online documents, and that leads to some charming formatting and copyediting mistakes. Often block quotes are not set off from the rest of the text, so we have to guess who's actually speaking at any point. Hyperlinks are formatted as underlined, but of course without the actual links, leading to sentences such as "See this about Allbritton's breakthrough."

Overall, the collection is so situated in its originating time period that it is dated; only a few pieces manage to escape that situating and become more widely useful.

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Reading :: The Hydrogen Economy

Originally posted: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:40:46

The Hydrogen Economy

by Jeremy Rifkin

After a particularly full and difficult summer, I was in the mood for some light summer reading, and Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy fit the bill: it's well written, gripping, and impossible to take seriously.

Yes, impossible to take seriously! The Hydrogen Economy suffers from the same problem that so many dissertations and theses do: the author has identified a genuine problem, but has made it so central that it becomes all-encompassing. Just as Beniger identifies "control" as an overarching explanation for the workings of all organisms in general and human society in particular, and just as Malone explains the shape of all organizations based almost solely on the cost of conveying information, Rifkin provides the grand narrative of thermodynamics to explain Everything. He even refers to historians as being squarely within the "thermodynamics" camp. Rifkin's thesis is that civilizations thrive when they have access to relatively low-cost energy, and decline when they no longer have that access. It's a compelling thesis, just as the theses of control and information cost are, and just as the thesis of "moral decline" has been for certain segments. But these overarching, monocausal explanations seem far too simple to me.

But that appears to be how Rifkin operates. In succeeding chapters, he identifies several threats posed by the petrochemical regime, and blows each one up into what seems like an insurmountable problem. So for instance, we find that we are near the point of peak oil, and that at any moment we might find that the world's economy has collapsed. And that our reliance on oil might quickly result in a worldwide Caliphate. And that since we are totally reliant on petrochemical energy for raising food, global famine is around the corner. And that we may have already passed the point of no return on global warming, and may face a seven-meter rise in sea level in a few decades. These warnings take about two-thirds of the book, and by the time you finish reading them -- if you take the author's arguments seriously -- it appears that our civilization's fate is absolutely sealed. Really, it's like reading an over-the-top comic book series, in which the Earth is constantly threatened with imminent destruction by a series of intergalactic superbeings.

But like any good summer thriller, this one supplies an easy solution that makes everything right with the world. Rifkin not only presents hydrogen power as an easy solution but as a fait accompli. We find out that GM, Toyota, and Daimler-Chrysler are all going to be rolling out hydrogen-powered cars by 2010; that companies like Ballard are going to be providing hydrogen-powered generators for residences by that time, and that these will enable individuals to sell power back to the grid; that a distributed hydrogen infrastructure will obviate the need for a centralized distribution system; and that these innovations will solve each of the problems discussed in the first two-thirds of the book, just as the Silver Surfer will rescue the Earth each time that it is threatened by Galactus.

As summer reading, it's very satisfying. As a guide for policy, it's iffy. >

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Reading :: Communities of Practice

Originally posted: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 20:18:14

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

by Etienne Wenger

This is my second time to read Etienne Wenger's book Communities of Practice, a well cited study of claims processing at an insurance company. Wenger's after a better understanding of how people form communities in work, how they learn and teach each other, and how they cope with changing organizations and practices. As he puts it in the introduction:

If we proceed without reflecting on our fundamental assumptions about the nature of learning, we run an increasing risk that our conceptions will have misleading ramifications. In a world that is changing and becoming more complexly interconnected at an accelerating pace, concerns about learning are certainly justified. But perhaps more than learning itself, it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention when we choose to meddle with it on the scale on which we do today. ... As we become more ambitious in attempts to organize our lives and our environment, the implications of our perspectives, theories and beliefs extend further.

Wenger is talking in part about the move toward knowledge work, although I don't think he ever uses that term. Work is "becoming more complexly interconnected" indeed, as Wenger illustrates in his study, and conceptions of learning and apprenticeship have not kept up. We constantly read exhortations for knowledge workers to engage in "lifelong learning," but few have actually attempted to figure out exactly how lifelong learning is supposed to work -- and how the different pace and character of interconnected work affects traditional learning. Wenger really rolls up his sleeves and gets to work on this problem, and that's what makes this book so valuable.

In particular, Wenger highlights the differences between formal training and the constant contingencies that workers encounter in his study (p.36). "Living," he suggests, "is a constant process of negotiating meaning" (p.53). And most of the book involves developing the concepts and terms that allow us to understand this negotiation.

The conceptual apparatus becomes fairly interesting in Chapter 4, in which Wenger leverages the notion of boundary objects and uses it as a starting point for an extended discussion of boundaries, overlaps, peripheries, boundary practices, and boundary encounters. I can see how this work has influenced third-generation activity theory in particular. It's certainly important as we begin studying more networked, interpenetrated organizations.

In the coda that comes between chapters 5 and 6, Wenger discusses "regimes of competence": "a community of practice acts as a locally negotiated regime of competence," he argues, referring to the mutuality of engagement, the accountability to the enterprise, and the negotiability of the repertoire in a given community of practice (p.137). Such regimes are important to conceptualize and study in knowledge work, where different standards of competence clash and merge.

So there's a lot of good in this book. The subject matter is gripping. Unfortunately, the style is not. In particular, the narrative sections attempt to tell stories from this workplace in an engaging style modeled after fiction -- but this style is hard to carry off, and the sections read like a "young adult" novel. In these segments, Wenger throws in superfluous details, speculates about the thoughts of his informants without much basis, and uses adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors with abandon. Here's the end of a long, impossibly and unnecessarily detailed account of one informant's workday.

The freeway is already a bit slow. Toward the city, Ariel looks at the brownish haze of smog hanging over the hills: the sky looks like it has dragged the hem of its bright evening gown in the dust. The thing is, it only seems to be getting worse. Pollution really worries her. What about cancer? There was that old lady whose husband was dying of cancer and who called her three times to ask the same question about hospital deductibles. What is going to happen? Ariel would even pay a bit more for gas if she knew it would help. But it would probably go into someone's pocket. As she turns on the radio and starts tapping the beat on her steering wheel, she thinks of the computer system she uses, of the new one to be installed soon that is supposed to do so much more, of the elevator that talks to you. Pollution? "Well, I'm sure they'll figure out something."

Brrr. Apart from the style, it's impossible to determine how much of this is wholly fictionalized and how much actually came out of an interview. But the overall portrayal is not complementary to Ariel, who comes off as thinking very shallowly about an issue that concerns her. This portrayal may or may not be accurate, but I doubt that an informant's depth of thinking about an issue can be measured through interviews and observations regarding an entirely different phenomenon.

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(our apologies for the delay)

Originally posted: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 01:52:04

It's been almost two months since my last post and, unfortunately, it's not because I'm way behind on my blogging. I've only completed one book in that time (which I'll blog Tuesday). The rest of the time has been spent working on my own book, some grant applications, a proceedings paper, my fall class schedules, and of course the CWRL. It's too bad vacation is over now and the busy season is just around the corner!>

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Reading :: The New Work Order

Originally posted: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:10:04

The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism

by James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, Colin Lankshear

I've seen many cites to this book, and at least a couple of colleagues have recommended it to me. And in fact it was useful, though not as useful as I had hoped. Gee et al. have attempted an analysis of the language of "fast capitalism," both in the popular literature and in workplace settings. What results is often a stinging indictment of "fast capitalism," comparing its claims to its implementations. However, as in much of the literature I've seen criticizing capitalism (or other large-scale phenomena), there's a tendency to compress the phenomenon into a single mode so that it can be nailed down, characterized, and criticized. And -- as I'll point out in a moment -- the authors sometimes use easy equivalencies to get the job done, equivalencies that are not especially convincing or generalizable. Nevertheless, the book provides some real insights into how "fast capitalism" is narrated and characterized.

Before we begin, let's draw a distinction. The authors specifically use the term "fast capitalism" (or "new capitalism") to describe an enterprise-oriented view that emphasizes an enterprise's adaptability, dynamism, flattened hierarchy, and continual reskilling/learning; the term applies to an entire enterprise, from manufacturing to service to management. I've been writing recently about "knowledge economy" work, which is specifically focused on what Reich calls symbolic-analytic work. Knowledge workers can be embedded in a "fast capitalism" enterprise, but they don't have to be; and a "fast capitalism" enterprise necessarily includes workers other than knowledge workers. If we lose the distinction, we commit a category error, and we lose a lot of analytic power.

With that caveat, let's start with some of the really valuable work in this book. In the first couple of chapters, the authors examine the "fast capitalism" literature on learning and knowledge. They argue that

The bottom line is this: the focus of education, we argue, should be on social practices and their connections across various social and cultural sites and institutions. Learners should be viewed as lifelong trajectories through these sites and institutions, as stories with multiple twists and turns. What we say about their beginnings should be shaped by what we intend to say about their middles and ends, and vice versa. As their stories are rapidly and radically changing, we need to change our stories about skills, learning, and knowledge. Our focus, as well, should be on multiple learning sites and their rich and complex interconnections. We will see below and in other chapters that this focus on social practices brings us squarely up against the growing concern in the new capitalism with sociotechnical practices -- that is, with the design of technology and social relations within the workplace to facilitate productivity and commitment, sometimes in highly 'indoctrinating' ways. (p.6)

With this stake in the ground, the authors situate themselves within a generally Vygotskian tradition in which learning is seen as more or less continuous social-cultural-historical development of individuals (even as they acknowledge that the new capitalism coopts the Vygotskian notion of the zone of proximal development, p.62). In contrast, the new capitalism tends toward a systems view, and the authors specifically finger distributed cognition (in which learning is seen as the function of a system, not the trajectory of an individual, and in which individuality is seen as emergent) as a result of the new capitalism -- or at least as its enabler (p.59).

But at the same time, they claim that Discourses (roughly, social languages) create people: "The Discourse of law school creates kinds of people who (overtly or tacitly) define themselves as different from -- often better than -- other kinds of people" (p.11). Those subscribing to a systems view, such as distributed cognitionists and especially actor-network theorists, would make such a claim, but would actually mean it in an ontological sense: in the systems view, actants are constantly emerging, being defined by their emergent relations with other actants. These authors, on the other hand, seem to be working with a weaker version that takes as its bedrock the notion that "people are people," and sees Discourse as providing a classificatory function rather than an ontological one. And consequently they don't quite reach the conclusion that Deleuze does when he talks about the control society being populated by "dividuals" rather than individuals, multiplicity rather than singularity. They conclude that

learning works best -- it is most enculturating, but (alas) also more indoctrinating -- when it is done inside the social practices of a Discourse. Such 'deep' learning always involves the formation of new identities and thus possible conflicts with old ones. We will see in this book that new-capitalist businesses want such 'deep' learning, with its concomitant identity and value formations. (p.15)

With this basis, the authors forge on to Chapter 2, which is devoted to the theory and practice of fast capitalism. Throughout this chapter, their working assumption is that fast capitalist texts do not describe current changes, but a vision of the future order, a world view. The fast capitalist texts describe and map out such changes, and the authors thus limit their critical engagement to examining the morality and ethics of this world view. And I think this is an error: I would have liked to see more critical engagement with -- or at least acknowledgement of -- the actual economic and organizational changes that have often precipitated these texts. Assuming that these texts were the cause of the phenomena they attempt to describe leads the authors to equate description with prescription in these texts. For instance, the authors indict the fast capitalist texts for their treatment of networks:

The fast capitalist world is one that celebrates temporary and fast-changing networks, whether of co-workers or different businesses. The networks come together for a given project and disperse into other configurations as products, projects, and services change in the hypercompetitive and fast-paced environment of the new capitalism. The fast capitalist literature is silent about the implications of these ephemeral networks for stable communities of people with shared histories and long-term commitments (other than to the vision and core values of the organization). (p.40)

But those networks are actual economic and organizational phenomena, described not just by the fast capitalist texts but also by Manuel Castells, whom the authors cite approvingly. Castells certainly does talk about the implications of these networks in his critically acclaimed and widely cited book, but he doesn't provide any solutions to their shortcomings either. (Neither do the authors of this book, as we'll see in a moment.) Perhaps the difference is tone, and the authors would be more accepting of fast capitalist texts if only those texts would stop making silk purses out of sows' ears!

It's worth noting that the authors correctly link new economy texts to postmodernist theory, although I'm not convinced that the correct term is "coopting" (p.68). But at this point, the authors begin to make some easy equivalencies that, on closer examination, look like square pegs forced into round holes. On p.69, for instance, they claim that Bakhtin's discussion of carnival (which they label "postmodernist," a questionable designation) is paralleled closely by Tom Peters' fast capitalist text using the metaphor of carnival. The parallel is quite incomplete: not only do the authors acknowledge that the fast capitalist author had probably never heard of Bakhtin, the two conceptions of carnival differ in marked ways. (Most obviously, Bakhtin's version is centrifugal, while Peters' is not.) So two authors who had never heard of each other used the same metaphor to describe two very different phenomena -- not a very strong foundation to build the case that fast capitalist texts have coopted postmodernist language!

This problem of equivalency, unfortunately, makes its way into the two empirical studies as well. In Chapter 4, the authors study a training session for manufacturing workers at a "fast capitalist" organization, noting that the (untrained) teacher followed an IRE pattern (inquiry, response, evaluation; see p.97), and making the case that these training sessions served to reinscribe the hierarchy that they were ostensibly supposed to flatten. The claim is convincing, but the authors attempt to indict fast capitalist corporate training in general by pointing out that the curriculum came partially from larger organizations -- again, too big a claim to be supported by the evidence (p.101). Similarly, in Chapter 6, the authors attempt to portray a cooperative in Nicuragua as a peripheral "fast capitalist" company -- despite the fact that the cooperative didn't meet some of the criteria for such a company (e.g., a highly educated workforce) and marginally met others (such as "vision"). They provide no evidence that the cooperative conceived of itself along "fast capitalist" lines or organized itself in alignment with the "fast capitalist" literature (highly doubtful since the members were marginally literate). They do not engage at all with the question of work organization or the crosslinking of disciplines. Yet they confidently declare that "we can construe them as a 'textbook case' of fast capitalist methods" (p.145).

It's almost ironic, then, that the authors urgently tell us that

a sociocultural approach to literacy takes the view that language must always be understood in its social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. We are arguing here that in one of these contexts, crucial in our 'new times,' is the context of the new work order in all its ramifications. Language, indeed our very humanity, is in danger of losing meaning if we do not carefully reflect on this context and its attempts to make us into new kinds of people: for example, people who are 'smart' because they buy the highest 'quality' brushes -- but do not care about, or even see, the legacies of their greed and ignorance writ large on the world. (pp.150-151).

By those criteria, humanity has already lost its humanity -- indeed, has rarely if ever had it!

If you want to engage in the authors' solution, by the way, why don't you nip over to Starbucks and get some fair trade coffee (p.150). Yes, that's pretty much the solution they propose.

Well. Despite the irritation I felt at some portions of the book, it was valuable, particularly the first couple of chapters. I can see why it has been cited so broadly, and I intend to do so myself. >

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Reading :: The Essential Drucker

Originally posted: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:34:31
The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management
by Peter F. Drucker
"When Karl Marx was beginning work on Das Kapital in the 1850s," this book begins, "the phenomenon of management was unknown" (p.3). Almost offhandedly, Drucker -- originally writing this passage in his 1988 book The New Realities -- declares Marx's work to be out of date, unable to deal with an institution -- management -- that "has transformed the social and economic fabric of the world's developed countries" (p.3; cf. p.295) and that "has become the new social function" (p.8, his emphasis). Throughout this book, which is a sort of "greatest hits" of Drucker's work from 1954-1999, this theme of management as transformative social institution is developed. And despite some level of disjointedness and a paucity of citations, probably due to the distilled nature of the text, Drucker manages to be relatively coherent and consistent throughout the book.
So what is the book about? Drucker attempts to lay out a vision of what management entails, casting it as a "liberal art" that is less concerned with profits and margins than it is with social impacts, problems, and responsibilities. The vision of management here is broad and developed over a very long career, so it's hard to summarize here, but I'll try.
First, whereas people such as Malone and Beniger claim that the information society came about due to a radical drop in the cost of disseminating information, Drucker argues that "management has been the main agent in this transformation. Management explains why, for the first time in human history, we can employ large numbers of knowledgeable, skilled people in productive work" (p.4). Management "has converted knowledge ... into the true capital of any economy" (p.5). And this enormous transformation has taken place over the last century or so:

Not many business leaders could have predicted this development back in 1870, when large enterprises were first beginning to take shape. The reason was not so much lack of foresight as lack of precedent. At that time, the only large permanent organization around was the army. Not surprisingly, therefore, its command-and-control structure became the model for the men who were putting together transcontinental railroads, steel mills, modern banks, and department stores. The command model, with a very few at the top giving orders and a great many at the bottom obeying them, remained the norm for nearly one hundred years. But it was never as static as its longevity might suggest. On the contrary, it began to change almost at once, as specialized knowledge of all sorts poured into enterprise. (p.5)

As large agencies began immediately to transform themselves through the incorporation of specialized knowledge, Drucker argues, management had to coordinate this transformation, "to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant" (p.10); to establish "common goals and shared values" (p.11); to "enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change" because "every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution" and "Training and development must be built into it at all levels -- training and development that never stop" (p.11). Drucker sees management's work as social and ethical, not primarily focused on profit (p.18), but on human potential and needs. In fact, he devotes a chapter (Ch.4) to nonprofits, and another (Ch.5) on social impacts and social problems.
Drucker has been closely associated with the move to flatten organizations, and in Chapter 6, he discusses the question. He acknowledges that there is no one correct organization, just organizations with strengths and weaknesses related to specific kinds of tasks. And in terms of the supposed end of hierarchy, he terms such claims "blatant nonsense" (p.73). Rather, he says, a flatter organizational structure means that

Individuals will have to be able to work at one and the same time in different organization structures. For one task they will work in a team. But for another tasks they will have to work -- and at the same time -- in a command-and-control structure. The same person who is a "boss" within his or her own organization is a "partner" in an alliance, a minority participation, a joint venture, and so on. (pp.75-76)

That is, workers are not free from hierarchy, they have to occupy different hierarchical niches in different structures simultaneously. (I sense some resonance here in Deleuze's discussion of "dividuals.") Increasingly, such workers function not as subordinates but as associates (p.78).
Let's skip ahead to Chapter 15, where Drucker traces some of the implications of workers functioning as associates. He declares:

More and more people in the workforce?and most knowledge workers?will have to manage themselves. They will have to place themselves where they can make the greatest contribution; they will have to learn to develop themselves. They will have to learn to stay young and mentally alive during a fifty-year working life. They will have to learn how and when to change what they do, how they do it and when they do it. (p.217)

This means that workers have to continually educate and develop themselves. Since "knowledge workers are likely to outlive their employing organization" (p.217), they must prepare for multiple careers. Drucker has advice on this, mainly in terms of logging and analyzing one's own work patterns. But he also emphasizes education, saying that

The knowledge society must have at its core the concept of the educated person. It will have to be a universal concept, precisely because the knowledge society is a society of knowledges and because it is global - in its money, its economics, its careers, its technology, its central issues, and above all, in its information. Post-capitalist society requires a unifying force. It requires a leadership group, which can focus local, particular, separate traditions onto a common and shared commitment to values, a common concept of excellence, and on mutual respect. (p.289)

Drucker calls for "a universally educated person." That doesn't mean a polymath, and "in fact, we will probably become even more specialized. But what we do need -- and what will define the educated person in the knowledge society -- is the ability to understand the various knowledges" (p.294). In the knowledge society, "the new jobs require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. They require a different approach to work and a different mind-set. Above all, they require a habit of continual learning" (p.305). Whereas their predecessors could count on an end to learning and a steady career path, knowledge workers must be entrepreneurial about developing and determining their own careers, largely through self-directed learning and relearning (p.326). As specialists, they also require an organization to provide essential continuity: "It is only the organization that can convert the specialized knowledge of the knowledge worker into performance" (p.308).
Reading over the quotes I just transcribed, I'm struck by the fact that Drucker's work has become so foundational to the knowledge economy literature. Many of the assertions that Drucker makes here, particularly in terms of continual learning, seem to have been transmitted with relatively little transformation in Zuboff and Maxmin, Malone, and many others. Remarkable!
Yet I found myself wanting much more. Drucker has a real wealth of experience, but the book was thin on case studies and citations, reading more like a series of homilies than anything else. I suspect that that has to do with the fact that the book is a collection of excerpts. As a statement of principles and assumptions, then, this book is fascinating. As an argument based on evidence, it's less convincing. >

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Reading :: Seasons of the Italian Kitchen

Originally posted: Mon, 22 May 2006 23:46:47
The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen
by Diane Darrow, Tom Maresca
Never have I reviewed a cookbook on this blog, but never have I loved a cookbook as much as this one. It's out of print, which is too bad, because it's just a joy to read. Here's the authors discussing the issue of frying in olive oil:

Well-fried food is not greasy or heavy; in fact, properly fried food usually creates a palatial impression of lightness and purity, as if the food's natural flavor has been heightened, not obscured. The olive oil component of the flavor is like the harmony line that makes the melody more interesting. And foods cooked in olive oil are not unhealthy unless that's all you ever eat -- but you could say the same of water. In the Italian diet, fried foods are balanced out by fresh fruits and vegetables, by pasta and rice and wine. Some fat is essential for human nutrition, and olive oil is the best there is. (p.129)

Yes, most of the book is like this. The recipes are arranged by season, then by course (primi, secondo, etc.). Each one -- not each meal, but each recipe in each course -- has extensive and well thought out wine recommendations.

Although the book isn't vegetarian, there are plenty of vegetarian and even some vegan dishes here, and they're all fantastic. When we first came to Austin, I made a meal of capri salad, pasta with uncooked sauce (fresh tomatoes, parsley, onions, olive oil, wine vinegar), zucchini marinated with mint, and I believe granita. Wonderful, and that's not because of the cook -- the recipes are simple enough even for me to make.

If you see this one for sale somewhere, pick it up. Even if you think you hate "Italian food" (or that stuff that goes by the name, covered with horridly processed tomato sauce sweetened with corn syrup). Make the pasta with uncooked sauce (salsa cruda), the fusilli vesuvius, the eggplant parmesan, the zucchini marinated with mint, the capri salad ... And do what I do: buy your olive oil in three-gallon containers. It's worth it!

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Update 2011.09.05: Amazon now has this book, new, in paperback!

Reading :: Power to the Edge

Originally posted: Mon, 22 May 2006 23:19:31

Power to the Edge

By David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes

Power to the Edge, like The Agile Organization, is an electronically published book that focuses mainly on information-age transformations in warfare. As the subtitle suggests, the authors are concerned with how military organizations will have to adapt as they move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

As I've remarked elsewhere, this body of literature is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the transformations that Donald Rumsfeld is trying to implement, how they have led to a particular type of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how these transformations have led to worry among senior military leadership. The so-called Generals' Revolt appears to be in large part an outgrowth of resistance to these transformations, using Iraq as an example of how they might be leading the military down the wrong path. That path leads to a smaller military footprint and a heavier reliance on information technologies, but it also leads to less hierarchy and more peer-to-peer interactions, or as Alberts and Hayes call it, "power to the edge":

Power to the edge is about changing the way individuals, organizations, and systems relate to one another and work. Power to the edge involves the empowerment of individuals at the edge of an organization (where the organization interacts with its operating environment to have an impact or effect on that environment) or, in the case of systems, edge devices. Empowerment involves expanding access to information and the elimination of unnecessary constraints. For example, empowerment involves providing access to available information and expertise and the elimination of procedural constraints previously needed to deconflict elements of the force in the absence of quality information. (p.5)

In such an organization, command and control are separated: "commanders become responsible for creating initial conditions that make success more likely" and exercise control in ways that allow for agile self-organization and relative autonomy; they command, but control is assumed by the personnel on the "edge," who are closest to the action (p.5). This sort of arrangement requires "shared situation awareness, congruent command intent, professional competence, and trust" (p.6).

To make their argument, the authors first lead us through a discussion of the different military philosophies found in successful 20th-century military organizations, focusing particularly on the degree of centralization in each (pp.19-26). Next, they describe the characteristics of industrial age command and control, characteristics that are just as relevant to commercial enterprises: decomposition, specialization, hierarchical organizations, optimization, deconfliction, centralized planning, and decentralized execution (Chapter 2). These characterisics, the authors claim, developed systems that were inherently cyclical, a result of the limits of Industrial Age communications technologies (p.49; cf. p.175).

But, the authors argue, Industrial Age assumptions are not adequate for Information Age organizations; the latter should be optimized for interoperability and adaptability, and should allow the organization to better bring its information, assets, and expertise to bear (p.56). "Centralized planning," they say, "is antithetical to agility because it (1) is relatively slow to recognize and respond to changes in the situation, (2) results in ill-informed participants, and (3) places many constraints on behavior" (p.63).

One problem that arises is that the "stovepipes" or hierarchically separate branches of an organization result in "seams" that "create gaps in roles and responsibilities that lead to a lack of accountability for interoperability, information sharing, and collaboration, all of which are necessary for a transformed military" (p.64).

Stovepipes, then, must be gotten rid of, because different branches and units must be interoperable; a "super star" commander is not enough (p.88), so "rather than rely on individual genius, Information Age processes tap collective knowledge and collaboration" (p.89). Furthermore, military organizations must be able to forge "a coalition that will in all likelihood include nonmilitary and/or nonstate actors" (p.103), an assertion that brings to mind Castells' networks or Zuboff and Maxmin's federations as well as the networks described in Arquilla and Ronfeldt.

Such networks, the authors claim, "are inherently more resilient than the hierarchical and stovepipe systems that characterized Industrial Age military organizations. Because there are multiple links available, the loss of a single node or link is absorbed by a robustly networked force" (pp.135-136). In such an organization, "control is not a function of command but an emergent property that is a function of the initial conditions, the environment, and the adversaries. Loyalty is not to a local entity, but to the overall enterprises" (p.217).

This resilience of networks, in fact, is one of the characteristics of an agile organization: robustness, resilience, responsiveness, flexibility, innovation, and adaptation.

Compare this vision of the military to the "Powell Doctrine" used in Gulf War I: win through overwhelming force and numbers. This doctrine is most easily carried out through a massive Industrial Age structure, and despite its strengths, it is not especially agile. (If the US had used the Powell Doctrine in Afghanistan, the war would have probably been far longer and bloodier.)

Alberts and Hayes' book is interesting reading for anyone who wants to know how organizations are adapting, and could adapt, to the Information Age. >

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Reading :: The History of Florence

Originally posted: Mon, 22 May 2006 23:34:59

The history of Florence, and other selections

By Niccolo Machiavelli

This version of Machiavelli's great history of Florence is incomplete, including only Books II-IV, VII, and VIII. Nevertheless, it's fascinating and highly entertaining for the most part. When describing a great statesman, Machiavelli sometimes gets caught up in cataloguing the man's best zingers -- Machiavelli did love the insults -- but most of the time he provides a dispassionate account cataloguing both the virtues and the flaws of the actors. We can see many of the lessons from the Prince here in historical form, including concrete illustrations of the shifts in government (republic, aristocracy, dictatorship) and detailed analyses of how these came about in Florence time after time.

These history lessons also remind us that reading The Prince is not enough to understand Machiavelli's political analysis. Of one contemptable Duke, who lost his sovereignty in a revolt, Machiavelli says, "he wanted men's service, not his goodwill, and therefore he preferred to be feared rather than loved" (p.110) -- clarifying the advice he famously delivers in his more popular book. As in The Discourses, his many discussions of conspiracies remind us that "in these affairs the number small enough to keep the secret is not sufficient to put it into effect" (p.44) and that long-term conspiracies are always discovered (p.95). He amusingly notes that Florence's government prosecuted fewer wars once a law was passed applying taxes to nobles as well as the popliani. and in passing, he notes that one Pope "had shown himself a wolf and not a shepherd" (p.279). Later, the Pope signed a peace agreement, and died five days later; Machiavelli suggests that it was because "the sorrow of having to make peace killed him" (p.302).

Machiavelli also has lessons for project managers. Here's a story about Niccolo Soderini, who became Gonfalioniere of Justice and manages to screw things up:

Messer Tommaso and Niccolo Soderini were brothers; Niccolo was the more spirited and enterprising of the two, and Tommaso the more sagacious. The latter being a great friend of Piero de? Medici, and knowing at the same time his brother?s disposition, and that he had no other object but the liberty of the city and to establish the government firmly and without injustice to any one, advised him to have no ballotings made, so that the election purses might be filled with the names of citizens devoted to their free institutions; which being done, he would see the government established and confirmed without disturbance or harm to any one. Niccolo readily adopted his brother?s advice, and thus wasted the period of his magistracy in vain efforts, which his friends the conspirators allowed him to do from jealousy, being unwilling that the reform of the government should be effected through the authority of Niccolo, and in the belief that they would yet be in time under another Gonfaloniere. When Niccolo?s magistracy came to an end, it became apparent that he had begun many things, but accomplished none; and thus he left his office with much less honor than he had entered upon it. (pp.233-234).

You gotta manage your projects, Niccolo.

All in all, this book is not just interesting but insightful and easy to read. I had worried that it would be a long slog, but by the end I was disappointed there wasn't more. Maybe I'll pick up the complete version soon.

>

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Reading :: The Wealth of Networks

Originally posted: Tue, 09 May 2006 19:24:54

The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

by Yochai Benkler

I ran across this book via a BoingBoing post that pointed to Benkler's wiki on the book and a link to the book's PDF. In fact, the PDF is what I read. I was somewhat hesitant to do so, given BoingBoing's tendency to recommend texts primarily on whether those texts agree with the bloggers' conclusions, but I was interested in the subject and assumed that Yale wouldn't be publishing anything half-baked, so I gave it a try. (I'm not sure what it means that I'm reviewing it here rather than on Benkler's wiki, as he intended.)

Benkler is a professor of law at Yale. He appears to be a fast tracker, having received his JD from Harvard in 1994 and clerked for Stephen Breyer the following year, then spending three years as assistant professor and two as associate professor at NYU. In this book, he's primarily concerned with how the widespread availability of information technology is introducing, and will continue to introduce, new modes of production. "In the networked information economy," he says, "the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed through society" (p.6). The cost for distributing information drops to near zero, and the cost for producing it drops rapidly as well. Consequently, we see more distributed production strategies and production aimed at enacting public and liberal (small L) commitments rather than at recouping investment. He believes that this development toward "an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium" (p.22) will

lead to a substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications -- like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications service giants -- to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made. (p.23)

This argument should sound familiar, since variations of it have become popular with BoingBoing and other outposts of the open source/free software movement, remix culture, and affiliated lines of thought. Benkler's version of the argument is not parsimonious, but it is far better supported and qualified than the usual versions. Drawing on authors such as Castells and Beniger, Benkler makes familiar points in more careful ways.

Let's take the assertion that markets are conversations. This point was made ad nauseam in The Cluetrain Manifesto and is alluded to in a number of other works (Carter; Beniger; Castells; Malone; Reynolds). Here, Benkler makes the argument with some empirical backing (p.56), pointing to the role of aggregation (p.69) and emphasizing the vital role that trust plays in sustaining these market conversations (pp.105-106). He adds that the distributed costs of infrastructure allow sharing to come back from the periphery, and argues that social sharing -- such as in open source communities -- is unlike markets or hierarchies (p.121). The lower cost of information production results in a radical increase in producers and less focus on marketability or filtering (p.166).

When anyone can talk to anyone, we worry that such conversations will turn into Babel: information overload. Benkler addresses this "Babel objection" by describing mechanisms that people are currently using to collaboratively filter information (p.169). What interests Benkler here is that such mechanisms provide a competing model for constructing the public sphere, a far more participatory model than that afforded by broadcast media (p.215), with a more participatory model of accreditation, linking (p.219). Benkler offers a number of case studies, such as the Stolen Honor incident in the 2004 election and a case study of the Diebold voting machine scandal (ch.7). In fact, Chapter 7 appears to be the Left counterpoint to the cases described by Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds (and shares at least one of these cases, the Trent Lott scandal). What Benkler brings to the cases is some principled analysis: he tells the same sorts of stories that Hewitt and Reynolds tell, but ties in a discussion of power law, network topology, stock price, and similar topics to offer a more methodologically oriented explanation.

Toward the end of the book, Benkler offers some more claims that are familiar to members of open source and free software movements. For instance, he claims that the networked information society improves justice (p.305) and that a networked information economy will lead to improvements in the public sphere (p.465). More interesting to me are some brief claims he makes about the nature of the individual:

What is emerging in the work of sociologists is a framework that sees the networked society or the networked individual as entailing an abundance of social connections and more effectively deployed attention. The concern with the decline of community conceives of a scarcity of forms of stable, nurturing, embedding relations, which are mostly fixed over the life of an individual and depend on long-standing and interdependent relations in stable groups, often with hierarchical relations. What we now see emerging is a diversity of forms of attachment and an abundance of connections that enable individuals to attain discrete components of the package of desiderata that ?community? has come to stand for in sociology.

As Wellman puts it: ?Communities and societies have been changing towards networked societies where boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive....Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries.? In this context, the range and diversity of network connections beyond the traditional family, friends, stable coworkers, or village becomes a source of dynamic stability, rather than tension and disconnect. (p.366)

He offers the example of mobile phone users in Japan: teenagers can fill a traditional role in their homes, while using SMS to construct new roles with their friends.

They continue to spend time in their home, with their family. They continue to show respect and play the role of child at home and at school. However, they interpolate that role and those relations with a sub-rosa network of connections that fulfill otherwise suppressed emotional needs and ties. (p.367)

Whenever I began feeling that Benkler wasn't going anywhere, that he was simply deepening the very familiar arguments made by the open source community and related communities, I would run across an observation such as this one. And that's why I have such mixed feelings about this book. About 80% of it is a rehashing of the sorts of things I read on BoingBoing, Buzzmachine, Instapundit, or Slashdot, deepened with a bit of analysis and copious references to Castells. But about 20% (let's be generous) is really interesting news. I think the 20% is probably worth it.

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Reading :: The Control Revolution

Originally posted: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:43:56

The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society

by James Beniger

This 1986 book provides an interesting perspective on the "control revolution," the startling uptick in technologies and procedures meant to provide economic and political control in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Beniger sees the world as a sort of computational system, one that dialectically reorders itself:

the Control Revolution also represented the beginning of a restoration -- although with increasing centralization -- of the economic and political control that was lost at more local levels of society during the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, control of government and markets had depended on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via the new mass media. (p.7)

As he explains in the next paragraph, Beniger means control rather broadly: "purposive influence toward a predetermined goal" (p.7). (This definition is so important that he later uses it to distinguish between the organic and inorganic, p.35.) And Beniger becomes quite excited about one development in control technnologies: rationalization -- or, as Beniger prefers to call it, preprocessing, or decreasing the amount of information to be processed. "Rationalization may be defined as the destruction or ignoring of information in order to facilitate its processing" (p.15). For instance, in having people compress their experiences into the confines of standardized forms, bureaucracies reduce information processing (p.16). And bureaucracy has taken off in a big way, due partially to this sort of control through preprocessing: in one extraordinary graph, Beniger demonstrates how the information sector grew from 0.2% of the US civilian labor force in 1800 to 46.6% in 1980 (p.23).

More intriguingly, Beniger claims that digitalization transforms diverse forms of information into "a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as, centuries ago, the institution of common currencies and exchange rates began to transform local markets into a single world economy" (pp.25-26). (Later, in fact, he demonstrates how information such as waybills, elevator and storage receipts became negotiable paper: p.252.) The analogy between currencies and information comes up frequently: Beniger sees both as material flows, and states that the proper subject matter of social and behavioral sciences is to study these material information flows (p.38) -- the essence of human society, after all, is the processing of physical throughputs (p.37).

Those who have read Malone, Zuboff & Maxmin, or Reynolds will find some of the subsequent discussion to be familiar. Beniger insists that larger organizations generally necessitate more centralized control, but like Malone, uses markets as an example of efficient decentralized control brought about by new information and communication technologies (p.147). (Beniger, however, has detailed evidence.) He notes how in the mid 19th century, the social processing of material flows threatened to exceed the system's capacity to contain them (p.219). And in that vein, he provides a sympathetic account of increasingly centralized bureaucracies (p.229) and scientific management (p.231). However, he insists that although such technologies sometimes appear to deskill, they teach new skills and more complex tasks (p.424).

Intriguingly, he also investigated how information technologies hybridized across different activities. One story he tells is of Hollerith's inspiration for the punch cards that he used to tabulate the US census: rather than drawing from calculating and adding mechanisms, Hollerith drew from the "punch photographs" or punchcards used by railroads to confirm passengers' identities. Hollerith's first cards were even the same size and shape as these punch photos, and he punched the first of them with a conductor's punch! (p.412)

Writing in 1986, Beniger insists that information technologies will continue to be applied at higher and higher levels of control (p.434). I'm interested in how the outlook has changed in the last 20 years: Malone, Reynolds, and others claim that with the sharp increase in communication avenues, centralized control is no longer necessary and communication-intensive decentralized control mechanisms such as markets are viable at larger scales.

Would I recommend this book? I have to give a qualified yes. On the one hand, Beniger presents a compelling and well researched account of control over the last couple of centuries, and his treatment of society as a computational system foreshadows work by Hutchins and others. And his discussion of control mechanisms certainly puts bureaucracies and scientific management into a new light. On the other hand, Beniger has a tendency to overreach -- making his subject the dividing line between organic and inorganic, for instance -- and I often found myself wondering about how a strong consideration of multiplicities, polycontextuality, and ambiguity would affect his theses. That being said, this book is good background for anyone who is interested in the knowledge economy and how it came to be.

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Reading :: Reassembling the Social

Originally posted: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 20:40:04

Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

by Bruno Latour

To understand Latour's latest book, the key passage is a footnote on p.207 referring to a discussion in which he uses the Internet as a metaphor, he says:

I often find that my reader would complain a lot less about my writings if they could download ANT version 6.5 instead of sticking with the beta.

So is he saying that the work he has done over the last 30 years has evolved and matured? Yes -- but he implies repeatedly that the changes have mostly been in its presentation. ANT 6.5 has an updated interface -- Latour has dropped some terms and replaced or rearticulated others -- but he spends a lot of time arguing that the underlying protocol hasn't changed at all. In his discussions of networks (p.129), symmetry (p.76), and social construction (p.92), among many others, the story is the same: we used this term, poor as it was, to mean x; others thought we meant y; so we'll either change the term for those thick people or we'll stick with it and explain it just one more time

This is a story we might have read in Science in Action or Aramis. In Science in Action, scientists maintained apparent coherence in their research projects through a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes coordination that continually constructed, changed, and strengthened their experiments. In Aramis, engineers made several changes to a public transportation system, but ultimately the project's definition never changed, vital compromises were never struck, and the enterprise died.

So which is Reassembling the Social? A work that brings coherence to ANT by developing and reconciling it, even though Latour frames the work as consistent? Or is it a bullheaded attempt to simply say the same thing again, in different terms, hoping that this time people will understand?

I'm inclined to believe it's the former. Latour has provided a lot of review here, but he has genuinely addressed issues such as multiplicity, and he has also started to discuss new concepts such as plasma, "that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, submerged, mobilized, or subjectified" (p.244). That is, the reality, the "missing masses" that are not (yet) associated in a given actor-network.

Latour is also more inclined to pay respect to his opponents -- although only after characteristically sharp and often hyperbolic attacks.

One example is how he portrays conventional sociology (a theme familiar to readers of Aramis). He says that it ignores its informants' explanations and instead posits invisible, unverifiable "social forces" that supposedly pulls the strings -- even if, especially if the informants disagree with this notion. "This is conspiracy theory, not social theory," Latour says sharply -- and sensibly (p.53). And Latour, who has been frequently attacked for anthropomorphising nonhumans, turns the tables by pointing out how sociologists have used figurations in constructing sociological explanations, rather than attributing phenomena to people:

To endow an agency with anonymity gives it exactly as much a figure as when it's endowed with a name, a nose, a voice, a face. It's just making it ideo- instead of anthropo-morphic. Statistical aggregates obtained from a questionnaire and given a label -- like A and B types in the search for heart disease -- are as concrete as 'my red-faced sanguine neighbor who died last Saturday from a stroke while planting his turnips because he ate too much fat'. To say 'culture forbids having kids out of wedlock'' requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying 'my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter'. To be sure the first figuration (anonymous) is different from the second one (my mother-in-law), but they both give a figure, a form, a cloth, a flesh to an agency forbidding me or forcing me to do things. (pp.53-54)

He even says that if such social forces actually existed, politics would not be possible (p.250). Latour gave up on such "social forces" and figurations long ago, and he tells us his road-to-Damascus story:

After a week in Roger Guillemin's laboratory thirty years ago, I remember how inescapable I found the conclusion: the social cannot be substituted for the tiniest peptide, the smallest rock, the most innocuous electron, the tamest baboon. Objects of science may explain the social, not the other way around. No experience was more striking than what I saw with my own eyes: the social explanation had vanished into thin air. (p.99)

But - after this ringing condemnation, Latour admits that we must pay respect to formal sociology, for it has its place, albeit a specific place that comes only after the work of association and composition at which ANT excels (p.227). Latour even works up some respect for studies of cognition (p.209 fn 279).

So this book mends fences, Latour style. Latour's aim here is to redefine sociology as the tracing of associations (p.5), and to rehabilitate ANT as a sort of "laboratory" whose experiments can fail:

Would you qualify as 'scientific' a discipline that puts to one side the precise information offered by fieldwork and replaces it by instances of other things that are invisible and those things people have not said and have vocally denied?

(p.50)

ANT is "experimental metaphysics" (p.51). (And, yes, after repudiating the name "actor-network theory" a few years ago, Latour is again embracing it -- see p.9). So what does this experimental metaphysics look like? Latour likens it to drawing a coastline, bit by bit, based on many reported points (p.24).

Latour urges us to study controversies, since these tend to expose productive differences. (cf. Activity theory's contradictions.) He also sideswipes dialectics again (p.169), making a bit of a clearer case than he has earlier. Or is that just me?

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Reading :: Writing Machines

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:16:08

Writing Machines

By N. Katherine Hayles

Writing Machines was recommended to me by a colleague, who sees Hayles as an extremely important theorist in computers and English studies. Many do; I've seen Hayles cited many times and in many different bodies of literature. And this particular book has the virtue of being relatively recent (2002) and quite thin.

Unfortunately, I was not impressed by it. I wasn't impressed by the design, which seemed to be ripped off from Wired circa 2000. I wasn't impressed by the autobiographical elements, which Hayles inexplicably seemed to think would be rendered less rather than more pretentious if she recounted them in the third person with another person's name attached; I wasn't impressed with the analysis, which tended toward close textual readings of artifacts with very short shelf lives and little intrinsic interest for me. I certainly wasn't impressed with Hayles' narrative style, which attempts to approximate strong affective writing by piling on adjectives.

But I'm not sure if I can render a good evaluation of the book. It's clearly a work of literary criticism, describing Hayles' "long-standing interests in technology from a literary point of view" (p.7), and literary criticism doesn't have any intrinsic interest for me. I respect it as a field, like anthropology, economics, or materials engineering, but it's less applicable to my work than the other three. I think that the orientation of Writing Machines toward close reading of texts has a lot to do with the discipline it's in, and I'm not sure I'm well qualified to judge the work within that discipline. Perhaps it's the norm to laboriously explain the most obvious puns, which Hayles does throughout Chapter 4, for instance.

On the other hand, Hayles does broaden the notion of text in productive ways. Sounding a bit like Latour, she describes inscription technologies:

In print books words are obviously inscriptions because they take the form of ink marks impressed on paper. The computer also counts as an inscription technology, because it changes electric polarities and correlates these changes with binary code, higher-level languages such as C++ and Java, and the phosphor gleams of the cathode ray tube. To count as an inscription technology, a device must initiate material changes that can be read as marks. Telegraphy thus counts; it sends structured electronic pulses through a wire (material changes that can be read as marks) and connects these pulses with acoustic sound (or some other analogue signal) associated with marks on paper. Additional examples include film, video, and the images produced by medical devices such as X-rays, CAT scans, and MRI. Even nanotechnology slouched its way toward inscription when scientists arranged molecules to form their company's logo, IBM.

It would be easy to read this passage as a sort of land rush, a move to claim even more texts under the aegis of literary criticism (and a move with which we rhetoricians are familiar). But I think Hayles deserves credit here for seriously considering what Bakhtin called "low genres" and what Latour maintains are vital ways to transform assemblages. (In fact, I can now see why their names are sometimes linked.) By taking these multiple inscriptions seriously -- and by resisting the urge to make "interpretation" a central part of the definition of inscriptions -- Hayles deserves a lot of credit.

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Reading :: An Army of Davids

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:11:56

An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

by Glenn Reynolds

Glenn Reynolds is the University of Tennessee law professor behind the wildly popular libertarian-leaning blog Instapundit. For years now, his blog has been a sort of central clearinghouse of information, particularly serving the right half of the blogosphere. And now he has written a popular book -- not about the website or even the phenomenon of blogs, but the greater shifts he is seeing in how work, lives, and culture are being distributed, shifted, remixed, rearticulated, and reauthorized. The overall theme of An Army of Davids is that the "Davids" -- individuals with limited resources but access to networked information technologies -- are able to take on the "Goliaths," the massive corporations and governments that used to have a lock on production and coordination work. Reynolds draws on the sorts of examples you might expect, such as the Rathergate incident, but also discusses manufacturing, music production and distribution, publishing, and the service economy.

The book is, I emphasize, a popular book, and consequently there's not a lot new here for people who have been assiduously following knowledge economy developments. In fact, there's a lot of simplification and glossing. Reynolds, for instance, rearticulates the thesis that Thomas W. Malone pushes in his popular book, that organizations are changing primarily because the cost of communication has decreased dramatically. He draws on examples that Hugh Hewitt used in Blog, such as Rathergate and the Trent Lott incident. And he touches on themes of individual empowerment that have been a staple of new economy/knowledge economy literature, while eliding the sorts of criticisms that occur in more critical, scholarly works. An Army of Davids tends to give a positive, enthusiastic view of the possibilities generated by widespread, inexpensive access to networked technologies, and it is clearly influenced by its author's libertarian views.

But what's wrong with that? The book doesn't pretend to be scholarship, and it accomplishes its mission of laying out -- in clear terms, with well told narratives -- the promises and possibilities of networked technologies. It gives plentiful examples of how things are changing the way we work and think today, concretely, and speculates about how those changes might be carried forward in the next five, ten, or twenty years. Few people have thought as much about the cultural impact of these technologies, and few people have absorbed and written about so many instances of them. An Army of Davids is not critical scholarship, but it doesn't aim to be and it doesn't have to be. I would recommend it over Blog, The Cluetrain Manifesto, or any other popular book I've read about the subject. But read it in close proximity with Castells.

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Reading :: Qualitative Data Analysis

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:42:16

Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (2ed)

by Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman

I read this book about two weeks ago, but everyone in my family has been sick, so I haven't gotten a chance to blog it until now.

Qualitative Data Analysis is a classic sourcebook on principled, rigorous analysis of qualitative data, and if someone ever accuses qualitative research of being entirely subjective or anecdotal, you should show this book to them. Miles and Huberman have correctly identified analysis as the Achilles' heel of much qualitative research and have set out to provide a variety of methods for analyzing it. "You know what you display," they say (sounding positively Latourean), so they also provide guidance on reducing data and displaying it (p.11).

I read this book in 2001, but had forgotten how comprehensive and how valuable it is. Even though the book primarily focuses on analysis, Miles and Huberman provide an overview of the entire process, from design to data collection to analysis and reporting. They discuss how to link qualitative and quantitative data in all phases. And they don't get mired in abstract theoretical discussions (as Creswell and others tend to do). In fact, much of the book consists of concrete, practical techniques such as systems to collect, store, and reconcile data. Think of it as GTD for research.

But where the book really shines is in its discussions of coding and displays. Miles and Huberman tend toward case studies and grounded theory because those two approaches are more apt to be systematic, and their coding discussion owes a lot to grounded theory's approach, which has been lucidly described in many places -- but never more so than here, where Miles and Huberman give plentiful examples from actual studies. Displays such as matrices and diagrams, similarly, are described in great detail and with enough examples that we can develop our own ideas based on them, and have confidence that we know what we are doing.

Every thick book like this has to have common threads to keep it together. Miles and Huberman produce a number of studies that are used to illustrate concepts and techniques throughout the book. These provide coherence and allow us to see a range of different situations to which we can adapt.

The only drawback to the book is that it's copyright 1994, so its discussion of computer-aided qualitative data analysis, though impressively comprehensive, is twelve years out of date. Nevertheless, the principles and comparative points they provide are still very useful.

Research, as I tell my grad students, involves constructing a complex argument. And Miles and Huberman do a great job of showing you how to collect and evaluate evidence, compile it, use it to summarize reasons, and use those reasons to support a claim. If you do any sort of qualitative research at all, you need this book. I only wish I had read it in grad school!>

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(Reading Roundup: Bodker and Andersen, Bodker and Christiansen, Bansler and Havn)

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:55:00

In the early 1980s, Scandinavian researchers teamed up with unions to develop a design methodology called "participatory design" (see my recent articles in TCQ and Technical Communication). Based on Marxist theory, participatory design was meant to empower laborers in their struggle with management by giving them a means to guide software development. In particular, innovations such as future workshops, organizational games, and prototyping allowed the workers to envision systems that would preserve their tacit craft skills. The goal, ultimately, was to extend and develop workers' skills rather than deskilling them. In a cluster of countries with de facto lifetime employment, a fine balance between capitalism and socialism, and unprecedented union leverage, this goal seemed reachable.

Today, everyone seems to have pretty much given up on that goal. Susanne Bodker, who did significant early work in participatory design, and Jorgen Bansler, who provided smart critiques of early PD, are now conducting projects based in new economy/fast capitalism environments. The question is no longer how to preserve a fading set of craft skills, it is now how to hold things together so that workers can preserve some sort of developmental movement and some sort of shared community in the face of increasing work fragmentation and distribution. The three articles below, from 2005-2006, really underscore the enormous shift that has taken place in Scandinavia over the last 25 years.

Bødker, S. and Christiansen, E. (2006, in press). Computer support for social awareness in flexible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Bodker and Christiansen pick up this thread in their first paragraph:

People are increasingly working in mobile, or flexible settings. Work has become a moving target with respect to content and obligations. It is subject to constant change; in goals, in qualifications, and in partnerships. New people join groups, projects, and companies. Companies hire, fire, or close, or are taken over by others. The instability this turmoil creates in our social networks puts people under pressure, causing what Sennett calls a "corrosion

of character" (Sennett, 1998).

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to detect nostalgia for the original PD project, mingled with resignation to the new economy and resolution to blunt its worst effects. In particular, the authors are interested in developing a sense of co-presence for workers, who increasingly find themselves working from elsewhere. That's a significant problem:

In order to stay socially aware, it seems necessary to have people within reach ? not always, but at least occasionally. This tension between the ephemerality and continuity of social encounters, and likewise the need to construct identity through relationships by means of social encounters, is not generally part of the definition of social awareness in CSCW.

The authors describe "artefact-driven explorations" (prototypes) for dealing with the issue of "hot-desking." The most intriguing thing, I think, is that these prototypes are not electronic -- sometimes they are as simple as putting a soccer ball or bicycle helmet on the desk of someone who is in the office. The idea is to find ways to develop the material traces that workers use to develop a shared, unfolding history. And here we see the influence again of the original PD project, with its concern for development, history, and humane work environments.

Bødker, S. and Andersen, P. B. (2005). Complex mediation. Human-Computer Interaction, 20:353?402.

Development is a perennial concern of activity theory, whose third generation was significantly impacted by Bodker's work. In this article, Bodker and Andersen tackle a problem that I have attempted elsewhere: the problem of mediation by multiple tools and symbols. Whereas I drew on Bakhtin, they draw on Peircean semiotics. "Activity theory makes rather unclear distinctions between the role of instrumental mediation and that of communicative mediation (except as analytical perspectives determined by identifying whether we are dealing with a Subject-Object relationship or a Subject-Subject one)," they argue (p.360). In a move reminiscent of Latour's hybrids, they argue that the distinction between tools and symbols is artificial, and most mediators lie between the two (p.361).

The authors argue for two related types of complex mediation:

we summarize the preceding by suggesting that one should design for multi-mediation, that is, recognize that more than one mediator normally is used in an activity, and that individual mediators should be designed as a part of an assemblage of mediators, either co-occurring, organized in levels, or connected in chains. (p.356)

"Co-occurring" mediation happens at the same point in time; I've been terming this "ecological." "Chained" mediation involves a chain of activities:

artifacts in a web of technologies in the plant are part of a chain of artifacts and objects that together help regulate the plant and ultimately fulfill the overall purpose of wastewater processing: to turn wastewater into purified water. (p.391)

Chained mediation sounds a lot like activity networks.

Bodker and Andersen have developed a complex system for relating these two perspectives, along with "levels" (which sound like a way of extending chained activity networks to the meso level). But it seems too orderly to me; Bodker and Andersen seem to be attempting to preserve and strengthen distinctions among activities, and in doing so, they chop these into smaller and smaller pieces.

Bansler, J. P. and Havn, E. (2006, in press). Sensemaking in technology-use mediation: Adapting groupware technology in organizations. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Bansler and Havn argue that groupware is successful in large part because local workers do the hard work of adapting it: "users often use groupware in ways not intended or expected by the designers of the technology and that users tend to re-invent the technology when they adapt and incorporate it into their working practices." But "relatively little is known about the actual process of tailoring or adaptation, i.e. about the way in which groupware technologies are appropriated and modified by users." They set out to investigate this question, terming these local workers "mediators." (These mediators sound a lot like Nardi and O'Day's "gardeners.")

Mediators, the authors argue, make sense of technology in relation to context; they convert abstract technology into "technology-in-practice." By promoting technology use, helping and supporting users, and establishing conventions of use, these mediators can make or break the new groupware. Additionally, mediators help to create and spread workarounds and often suggest changes and modifications to the developers. Mediators are by their nature boundary-spanners, people who interface between two different activities (e.g., design and use).