RSA workshop on emerging genres

If you're not doing anything this summer, consider this Rhetoric Society of America workshop on genre:

Carolyn R. Miller, English, NC State University, Department of English

Victoria Gallagher, Communication, NC State University, Department of Communication

2011 RSA Institute

Workshop on Emerging Genres

How do we develop shared recognitions and identifications in a changing world? This question lies at the heart of rhetorical theory and practice, and the concept of genre provides a productive way of addressing it. As ways of acting together, genres constrain and enable, constitute and regulate; indeed, genres link together in systems and ecologies that constitute our social identities, institutions, and cultures. While genre has been an active area in rhetorical studies in the past 30 years (with studies of oratorical genres such as presidential inaugurals and apologias, as well as of professional and workplace genres such as scientific research articles, employee performance appraisals, and corporate annual reports), it is also a concept that cuts across disciplines and media: it has been discovered or rediscovered by literary and film studies, television and media studies, information science, anthropology, linguistics, and visual studies. Moreover, the new digital media have created a plethora of new opportunities for symbolic action and thus the potential for many new genres. Thus, we might ask: How do new genres emerge? How do they balance stability with change? How are new genres related to old ones? What are the potentialities and limitations of genre as a concept for understanding material rhetorical practices? Can the same theories that were developed for oral and print genres help us interpret visual and digital genres? This workshop will explore these questions using several cases and examples as well as inviting development of theoretical and critical approaches to new media and practices.

If that sounds interesting, click through to the application form and more information about the workshops.

"Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work"

I've just accepted a slot at South by Southwest Interactive, where I'll be leading a Core Conversation titled "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work." My thanks to all of you who voted.

In the Core Conversation, I'll be doing a bit of talking, some of it about the research I've been doing on loose organizations in Austin. But much more importantly, I'll be leading a conversation with others who work in loose organizations - and posting a set of takeaways here on my blog.

That means I need you to come join the conversation. If you're planning to come to SXSWi2011, and especially if you work in a loose organization, please do come to the session - and be prepared to swap stories and express your thoughts about the future of your work. I'll moderate, but this really will be a core conversation.

Facebook's new trick: it turns friends into direct marketers

What really appeals to me about social media is that it lets people make direct, genuine connections with each other. I'm really taken with the fact that status messages let us pick up a sort of ambient status of our friends, colleagues, and associates. It's good to know what others are thinking, feeling, and concerned about. It's also good to hear their arguments. That's especially important during big events such as election campaigns. For instance, when I watch candidates debating, I now tune into my Twitter stream to see how people on the right and left interpret and react to statements. The reactions of people I know seem more important to me than the scripted reactions of the talking heads that are employed by news organizations. And seeing their points of view helps me to think twice about political statements rather than simply accepting them. It deepens my understanding of the national conversation and helps me to think in terms of compromises, not lines in the sand. That's good for democracy, I think.

And that's a good reason for not unfriending people whose political beliefs you disagree with, by my lights. You get out of a partisan echo chamber and begin to understand how people across the political spectrum might interpret the same statement in different ways, associating it with other statements. Let's not call it the wisdom of crowds; let's call it diversifying the viewpoints to which you listen. It doesn't mean you agree with them, but it means you understand them.

So I'll read the status messages of people across the political spectrum. On Twitter, which I love, that's the only way to share this information. On Facebook, about which I have more mixed feelings, people have other options: they can share stories, they can tag photos, they can comment on anything, and they can even post directly to your wall if they have a personal message for you that they also want to be public. It exemplifies the personal connection between people. Used well, it can deepen the personal understandings across people who hold different views.


But here's the thing about Facebook. Its primary goal is to extract marketing data from users so it can more effectively monetize them. Every Facebook interaction potentially adds to your further definition as a market segment.

What happens when you put these two together?

Alas, we found out this last electoral cycle. A few different Facebook applications rolled out that tried to marry personal connections with direct marketing. That is, they turned trusted friends into direct marketers. Here's one example from an LA Times blog:

The California Democratic Party unveiled a new tool in its kit of get-out-the-vote operations Monday: a first-of-its-kind Facebook application that sifts through a user’s friends list, matches it with the friends’ party registrations and voting histories and pops out a list people who vote Democratic but don’t regularly vote.

It then encourages users to tell their non-voting friends to cast a ballot Nov. 2.

Without a trace of irony, the story explains that "the development of the Facebook app was made possible because of funding from Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, who lost this year’s Democratic primary for state attorney general" (my emphasis). A Democratic spokesman adds, "In the same way that we target voters with direct mail, this is part of the same strategy for us" (my emphasis).

That's not the only Facebook app to do this job. BarackObama.com rolled out its Commit to Vote app, which goes through your friends list and posts a reminder to vote to your friends' wall. Yes, all your friends. Yes, this means that a form of communication that used to indicate a personal connection - posting to someone's wall - becomes the equivalent of direct mail. Worse, if the person using the Commit to Vote app shares many friends with you, your stream is suddenly full of identical direct mail pieces: the message posted to your wall and the messages posted to 33 of your friends' walls. Conservative WSJ blogger James Taranto ridicules this approach (last item): "Wow, so that's the Democrats' secret weapon. ... Facebook spam..." Yes: with Facebook, anyone can now be a direct marketer. Anyone can set up the equivalent of a robocall - for as long as they have Facebook friends, anyway.

I personally don't care who came up with the idea, on whichever part of the political spectrum. It's a very troubling turn for social media because it takes the two contradictory sides - the social features that enable deeper and more expansive personal connections, and the trove of marketing data that enable marketing connections - and fuses them together in exactly the wrong way. In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto urged us to understand markets as conversations. In 2010, conversations have become marketing.

I want the conversation, not the marketing. And that means that if some individual wanted to post to my wall and have an actual conversation, I would be fine with it. But unfortunately they can't. Because of the Commit to Vote app, I have restricted access to my wall, and I don't see lifting those restrictions anytime soon.

Coworking in Austin: Space12

Some coworking spaces in Austin (Conjunctured, Cowork Austin, Cospace, Link, and Brainstorm) are dedicated coworking spaces: they might hold community events and mixers, but day in and day out, their mission is to provide office and collaborative space for coworkers. Those coworkers form their community. Other spaces, however, serve a different community: a preexisting, often spatially defined community. For instance, at Soma Vida, coworking happens alongside yoga and wellness services, and the proprietors see the entire space as a sort of community center serving the area, particularly small entrepreneurs with families who seek a work-life balance.
Space12 takes the community center approach, as I discovered when I talked with its codirectors, Sam Lee and Paul Wang. But its clientele is quite different, and that different approach netted Space12 the Austin Chronicle's 2010 nod for Best New Collaborative Art and Volunteer Space. More on that in a minute.

From Coworking in Austin: Space12

Space12 is located deep in East Austin, at East 12th and Airport, and aims first and foremost to serve the local, spatial community in which it is located. “It's kind of the opposite of a typical community center,” Codirector Sam Lee explained to me. “We host and we kind of create a space so that people could use it to do their own community initiatives.” After all, he added, “There's a lot of great community efforts already in Austin. Why create another thing, another program that offer services? So, instead of offering services, we're offering space. It's almost like an open canvas where people can come in and kind of realize their own community efforts.”
As Sam and Paul Wang, Space12’s codirectors, explained, Space12 is not a for-profit business. Rather, it’s an outreach of Vox Veniae, an Austin church. Paul explained: “I know most churches expect to sort of, ‘Listen to us, and then you'll get the service.’ We're really trying to bring it back to the original roots I think of Christianity where we share and live together. … . So there's no presentation, there's no process, there's no ‘you have to listen to a ten minute gospel presentation before you come cowork.’” Rather, Vox Veniae sought a multipurpose space that wouldn’t remain empty six days a week, one that would help them meet their mission of serving local communities. They leased this space, which was once a notorious nightclub, and put it to work: as a space for nonprofits, as a community space, as a rec room, as a sanctuary, as a concert venue.

Communities

So what community is being served here? Space12 serves three coworking groups.
First, people from the neighborhood, including students. Some of these people are in great need. “Of the schools in this area,” Paul pointed out, “eighty percent of the parents are unemployed in three schools.” So Space12 finds ways to serve them. “We get guys walking in off the street, and they're like, ‘Hey, I don't know how to put a resume together’ … ‘Hey, can you show me what this thing called Craigslist is? How do I find landscaping work through that?’” At the same time, the neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying, filling with professionals “who do work out of homes, accountants, graphic designers, web designers.” How to get them to connect? “In the same way,” Paul continued, ”I think that we want them to cowork out of here, but still kind of give back.” Whereas at other coworking spaces, coworkers might take breaks and socialize with each other, at Space12 coworkers can volunteer to help neighbors and nonprofits – whether it’s helping someone understand Craigslist, helping neighborhood students use the computer lab, or shelving books for the Inside Books Project.

From Coworking in Austin: Space12

Second, Space12 does short-term space rentals for events. For instance, two months ago they rented space to a film crew. Film crews tend to come together for a short time, perform casting calls, meet funders or donors, and have planning sessions – and it’s hard to do that in someone’s apartment. At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to enter a lease for short-term events like these. So Space12 is well positioned to serve these sorts of short-term coworking groups. (Notice that Cowork Austin also serves the film industry in a similar capacity.)
Third, the church staff themselves work here at Space12. Coworking here allows them to work in proximity, but also to work alongside and serve community members.
Beyond these groups, Space12 provides space to other nonprofit initiatives. For instance, about a quarter of the space is now dedicated to the Inside Books project, which gathers books and ships them to prison inmates. They also house Cipher, a group that performs spoken word and hip-hop. An artists’ collective also uses the space. (See their list of partners for more.)

From Coworking in Austin: Space12

Thoughts

This interview with Space12 came at an exciting time for me. The fact is, lots of organizations have space that is paid for, but that remains empty through much of the work week. Those organizations include clubs such as the Kiwanis and Shriners, but especially churches, whose buildings are practically empty except for a few hours on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. When, I had wondered, will these organizations see the potential for supporting their members’ activities during those unoccupied hours?
Space12 turns that paradigm on its head. Rather than using a traditional church building for other purposes, it took a building and used it for as many things as possible: church, concerts, coworking, outreach, nonprofits, etc. “There is just a lot of wasted real estate that churches sit on,” Paul emphasized. His message to churches is: “Your building campaign is done. God doesn't just live in the building.”
To that end, Paul and Sam see Vox Veniae opening more Austin spaces for community development, working through their nonprofit Austin City Spaces.
When I thought about existing institutions using their excess capacity, I imagined them serving their own constituents: Shriners officing out of the Shriner Hall, Baptists working with other Baptists. But Space12 turns that capacity into outreach, more truly fulfilling the church’s mission. It’s an exciting development in coworking, and I expect we’ll see other organizations exploring similar forms of outreach as they work to connect to their communities.

Coworking in Austin - Update

Austin now has eight coworking spaces. How did that happen? Stay tuned for more profiles, or click the "coworking" tag to the right to see the ones I've written so far.

View Coworking spaces in Austin in a larger map

Qualitative Research Network deadline extended to October 29

If you're planning to go to CCCC, consider the Qualitative Network Forum:

This year’s QRN is scheduled for Wednesday, April 6 from 1:30 – 5:00 at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Atlanta, GA. Proposals may focus on specific concerns and/or broader issues related to qualitative research, and we encourage submissions from those at any stage of the research process (e.g., planning, data collecting, data analyzing, publishing).

This year, speaker Beth Daniell will give an address titled “The Questions that Need Answers” and lead a discussion about the issues qualitative researchers face and strategies for sustaining researchers, research projects, and even the field of qualitative research itself. Following Beth’s talk, the rest of the QRN workshop will be devoted to research roundtables where novice and experienced researchers will present their work-in-progress and experienced qualitative researchers will lead discussions designed to provide helpful feedback and suggestions.

Guidelines for submissions are outlined in the revised cfp. If you have any questions, any questions at all, please feel free to email Gwen Gorzelsky (g.gorzelsky@wayne.edu) and/or Kevin Roozen (roozekr@auburn.edu), the Co-Chairs of the Qualitative Research Network.

And here's the CFP:

Call for Proposals: Individual Research Presentations for the Qualitative Research Network to be held Wednesday, April 6, from 1:30 – 5:00 at the 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication in Atlanta.

The Qualitative Research Network, which occurs annually at the CCCC, is offered for new and

experienced qualitative researchers. As a pre-conference research network, the Qualitative Research Network is open to everyone, including those who are already presenting at the conference in other venues.

EXTENDED DUE DATE for proposals: October 29, 2010.

Keynote Speaker & Research Roundtables:

During the first hour of the workshop, Beth Daniell will give a keynote address titled “The Questions that Need Answers” and lead a discussion about issues that qualitative researchers face and strategies for sustaining researchers, research projects, and even the field of qualitative research itself (see abstract and speaker biography below).

The rest of the Qualitative Research Network will be organized in research roundtables where novice and experienced researchers will present work-in-progress for feedback. Experienced qualitative researchers will be on hand to offer suggestions and to lead the roundtable discussions. The goal of this annual workshop is to offer mentoring and support to qualitative researchers at all levels of experience and working in diverse areas of study within the college composition and communication community.

Presenters at the research roundtables may focus on specific concerns and/or broader issues related to qualitative research, and we encourage submissions from those at any stage of the research process (e.g., planning, data collecting, data analyzing, publishing). Each presenter will have twenty to thirty minutes for both presentation and feedback, which will necessitate that presenters offer concise and accessible summaries of their studies. After all submissions have been collected, the planning committee will provide presenters specific details about the format of the workshop.

Proposal Information:

Please send via email a brief description (approximately 500 words) of your research proposal by October 29, 2010 to both Gwen Gorzelsky (g.gorzelsky@wayne.edu) and Kevin Roozen (roozekr@auburn.edu), Co-Chairs, Qualitative Research Network.

Be sure to include a brief overview of the research project, the stage of its development, and the questions/issues you wish to discuss with other researchers. Place your proposal in the body of the email and attach a file (.doc, .docx, .rtf, or .pdf). Descriptions need not be exhaustive; we ask that you provide a general overview of your study as well as a statement about the kinds of feedback you would like to receive. If you have any questions or would like further information, please contact us.

***Presenters for research roundtables will be notified of their acceptance by November 11. ***

Keynote Speaker Biography:

At Kennesaw State University Beth Daniell is Professor of English, Director of Composition, and Coordinator of General Education in the English Department and Director of the WAC Program in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has served as writing program administrator at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Clemson University, and University of Alabama. She teaches—or has taught—courses in literacy studies, rhetoric, writing, composition research, composition theory, literature, and women’s studies. She has published articles and essays in journals and collections in our field. Beth is author of A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, and editor, along with Peter Mortensen, of Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century.

Keynote Address Abstract:

If research is the attempt to make sense of not only what is around us, but also who we are, then we need to treat the questions we need answers to as both professionally and personally important. Dismissing neither the pragmatics of nor the obstacles to research, we are called to answer questions emerging from issues that touch our lives. When questions matter personally, we find the motivation to gather data, analyze, write, revise. Questions arising from our felt needs produce sometimes troubling, conflicting, or surprising data for which there is no ready-made theory. Such questions engender projects where results can be messy, where theory and data sometimes argue fiercely. These questions sometimes yield manuscripts about which a reviewer may say, “This reads as if writer did the research first and then tried to find a theoretical perspective.” We should nonetheless go where our questions lead—so that when we are old, we know we’ve accomplished something of value.

Coworking in Austin: Link Coworking

Just over a year ago, I saw an email on the coworking Google group announcing a planned coworking site in Austin: Link Coworking. A week or two later, I interviewed the proprietor, Liz Elam, at a local coffee shop. She had a specific vision of a coworking space, one that she had begun during her previous stint as global account manager at Dell.

Liz, I discovered, is an aggressive researcher. Over the next year, whenever I heard about a new coworking space, I would show up to see it - and almost always, the proprietor would mention that Liz had just visited or was about to visit. She's also visited coworking sites across the country. When I had an opportunity to add a fourth person to my SXSWi 2010 panel, I thought Liz was a natural.

So I've been hearing for over a year about Liz's ideas for a coworking space - ideas that have gone through multiple iterations, but always have certain principles at the core. Liz argues that coworking spaces can use different models, orient to different professions and segments, while still adhering to the precepts of community and collaboration that seem to inhere in all coworking spaces.

Liz told me, "I think what makes Link different is I actually worked out of my home for nine years. I worked in corporate America and I was isolated. I was trying to hold meetings in Starbucks and what I figured out was I wanted a place like this to work. So this is really built exactly like I've envisioned it the whole time, because this is where I wanted to go work. And when I look at other coworking spaces - and I visited over 15 from New York to L.A. - what I found were a lot of them weren't really environments I felt energized by and I really was comfortable in." Many of the coworking spaces, Liz found, just had the wrong vibe for some professionals in their 30s and 40s:

Some kind of felt more like a dorm style, and some were just a little bit more casual than I like. And I think that's great and there are people that love that and good for them. It's not what I am energized by and like and expect in the place where I want to work. So I created the space that I'm most drawn to, anticipating that other professionals in their maybe 30s and 40s are going to want to work from here too.

Coworking has typically skewed younger, toward the "webbie/techie crowd." Liz fully supports these spaces, but believes that "we've been ignoring a very significant, well funded part of the market." Link Coworking focuses on this niche, attracting independent workers that won't be comfortable working in a more casual environment. One profile might be:

somebody that works in high tech ... they probably already have a home office and in that home office they have a beautiful monitor and maybe mahogany walls and they have two kids and a barking dog and a spouse. It's not ideal for them, and they're running around town or going to the airport and they need a place where, a few times a week - maybe two, maybe three - they come in here and get work done in a better environment, and bring in customers to meet in the meeting rooms like we're sitting in, because it's not professional to go and sit in a Starbucks and talk about a $10 million deal. ... This is a place where you can bring your client and be proud to bring them.

Link caters to other independent professionals as well: entrepreneurs, small business owners, independent workers. Current members, for instance, include an entrepreneur, a life coach, a realtor, and an interior designer. Liz says that she is aggressively pursuing independent workers who are women in particular.

At the same time, Liz emphasizes that Link is still a coworking site: it's still a place for professionals to meet, form community, collaborate, bond, and bounce ideas off of each other. "I’m looking to build a community that will collaborate, share and help each other and greater community around them," she told me later. Link is not an executive suite, it's a full-fledged coworking space.

For a coworking space to work, they really require a catalyst. That is somebody that's within the space that manages it, that introduces people that has speaker sessions, really helps form a community. And those don't really happen in executive suites. But there are lots of people who come in here and say, "Hey, I'm on the phone all day, I'm a lawyer and I have to have a closed door," and I recommend that they go look at a Business Suites or a Regis, because I'm not selling closed door offices.

Liz has put different measures in place to make sure that coworking happens. For instance, the website (built in Drupal) shows basic outward-facing information on the members; but if you're a member, you can log in and "go behind the curtain and you can see more information about the people that you're working around." The space, featuring mixed seating arrangements in an open configuration, facilitates interaction and collaboration. Community presentations and events are hosted in the space, open to members. When I visited, Link had only been open two days, and Liz already had stories of how the coworkers had collaborated. And she already sees the patterns emerging: "people tend to go to the same spot, but people also go to where the people are. They only isolate if they need to get something done. But the rest of the time, people want to sit at the same table where the other people are. There are 40 places to sit. They're sitting next to each other."

At moments like this, Liz gets an extra sparkle in her eye. She makes no bones about Link being a for-profit business, but she's also very obviously excited about being a connector and cultivating Link as a space for genuine connections and interactions, all within a beautiful place to work. "I want people to network, support each other, employ each other and possibly start a venture out of Link," she told me later.

Link differentiates itself in other ways. For instance, it provides concierge services: "we take things off your hands so you can focus on work," Liz emphasized. Link also provides a space that has been custom-renovated for coworking - and furnished by Turnstone with furniture designed for this sort of environment. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a lot of natural light. Power outlets and ethernet plugs are installed in the floor, within reach of each station. Of course, Link also offers wifi, and Liz insisted on a T1 line to ensure high capacity. Finally, Link offers a red phone booth for private conversations (although you of course must bring your own phone.)

From Coworking in Austin: Link Coworking

How did Liz get to this particular location? She had five tenets for choosing a site, and finding a place that matched those five tenets was a struggle:

1. It had to be less than a mile from a major thoroughfare.
2. It had to have abundant surface parking.
3. It had to have outdoor seating.
4. It needed to be on the first floor.
5. And it needed to be within walking distance of retail and restaurants.

Liz looked all over Austin for the right spot, and finally found it in the Anderson Lane Shopping Center: A few steps from Madam Mam's, Korea House, the Alamo Drafthouse North Village, Office Depot, San Francisco Bakery, and other spots. As I observed, someone could drop by a nearby coffee shop on the way to Link, then literally park their car for the rest of the day as they worked, lunched, worked out at the gym, dined, then caught a movie.

What's next? Liz believes that we'll begin to see coworking segment to address different industries, and we may even see dedicated coworking spaces for employees of single corporations - but still holding true to the principles of coworking. Community-building is critical, she emphasizes, but different space configurations are going to support different sorts of work.

One more thing. If you're in Austin, you really should come by for Link Coworking's Grand Opening Party. It'll include tours by Turnstone and a live DJ. I'm planning to be there, so look for me, and tweet me @spinuzzi if you don't see me.

Reading :: Discovering Qualitative Methods, Second Edition

Discovering Qualitative Methods: Field Research, Interviews, and Analysis
By Carol A.B. Warren and Tracy Xavier Karner

I really enjoy reading texts on qualitative methodology, even those that, like this one, are pitched to upper-level undergrads and incoming graduate students. They're easy to read through and compare, and sometimes they highlight differences in fields, disciplines, and research programs more clearly than looking at the literature itself. That's especially true for Discovering Qualitative Methods, which is aimed at sociologists in training. Reading it, I was intrigued by the clues about sociology that it conveyed through its assertions.

The book follows a basic approach of introducing qualitative methods and giving background on law, politics, and ethics before diving into the practical issues of gaining entrance to a site, collecting various data (observations, interviews, artifacts), and analyzing the data. The first two chapters would seem familiar to anyone performing or reading about workplace writing in my field - although the examples tend to come from settings that are unfamiliar to most college students and academics, such as nursing homes, biker gangs, cults, and the radical environmental movement. (Other examples, such as a lesbian community, would perhaps have seemed more exotic to students in the past. Still others, such as drug dealers, represent activities that we hope are exotic to them.) Indeed, as the book unfolds, the authors pull out still more examples along these lines, and ask students to use caution when investigating them. For me, these example sites seemed quite odd - almost like sightseeing for academics - compared to the workplace and organization sites to which I send my students.

As I read further, other differences emerge. For instance, in the chapter on fieldnotes, readers are cautioned not to take observational notes while observing, because "it is virtually impossible to continue to observe closely while looking downward taking notes" (p.112). Instead, readers are told to observe for a half hour or more, then find a quiet place to write a thick description (p.118) - one that includes sights, sounds, smells, textures, and anything else they can record. The examples are heavy with adjectives and adverbs: they read like the work of nonfiction creative writers. A finished field note "resembles an essay or narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end" (p.120). The authors advocate using quotation marks to identify quotes, even when the exact quotation is not available and the researcher is conveying only the gist (p.120). This strategy of writing field notes, presumably, works well over the long period of time that it takes to write an ethnography - but it would be difficult to execute faithfully when examining microlevel details in shorter case study research.

Again, these different methodological choices represent different research objectives and orientations. I'm just startled at how different these turn out to be. And the theme continues when we get to analysis. The first page of the analysis chapter actually made me laugh out loud: the authors grimly tell us that analysis will involve physical and emotional exhaustion (p.215). But I can see why: analysis involves open coding, which leads to themes, which are then linked into analytical descriptions (p.237). Other than that, the authors provide examples but not much guidance. This sort of analysis is quite inductive, involving multiple passes over thick field notes and interviews, and the authors assume that these documents will all be separate rather than in a database or analysis software. How to organize all of these data? "Some sociologists use visual diagrams, process flow charts, or organizational structure charts. Others have drawn maps of their settings .... we find ourselves using the tried-and-true format of an outline" (p.238). For an example, the authors provide a half-page outline. I can understand why, since the authors are expecting longer ethnographies in which researchers seek to generate coherencies from the data rather than examine it with a preexisting framework. But still, the analytical tools - and their process - are much less specified than I expected.

As you may have picked up, I spent a lot of time comparing this book to how I teach my qualitative methods classes. Based on my field's assumptions and goals, I don't think I would use this book - but at the same time, I can see how it would be a better fit for sociology than the methods I use. It's an intriguing read, and I recommend a look for anyone who is teaching qualitative research methods.

Reading :: Apprenticeship in Thinking

Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context
By Barbara Rogoff

If you read my review of Rogoff's The Cultural Nature of Human Development, you have the gist of this earlier one. The Cultural Nature of Human Development summarized Apprenticeship in Thinking and related research in a popular version. This book is the original, which means that it's less polished but more obviously an academic argument, with appropriate cites and a bit more involved with debates on cognitive development.

Here, Rogoff defines her subject matter:

For the purposes of this book, cognition and thinking are defined broadly as problem solving. I assume that thinking is functional, active, and grounded in goal-directed action. Problem solving involves interpersonal and practical goals, addressed deliberately (not necessarily consciously or rationally). It is purposeful, involving flexible improvisation toward goals as diverse as planning a meal, writing an essay, convincing or entertaining others, exploring the properties of an idea or unfamiliar terrain of objects, or remembering or inferring the location of one's keys. (pp.8-9)

But, Rogoff adds, "Problem solving is not 'cold' cognition, but inherently involves emotion, social relations, and social structure" (p.10). Indeed, as in The Cultural Nature of Human Development, Rogoff emphasizes problem solving within the sociohistorical milieu in which people develop and participate. To get there, she relies on work grounded in Vygotsky and Piaget. Reasonably, she reminds us that

my work, like that of anyone else, involves the appropriation of concepts that I have found useful in the works of others. The use that I make of their ideas undoubtedly involves some transformation from the ideas they offered. This is in the nature of dialogue. The transformation is liable to be greater the more distinct the backgrounds of the speaker and listener, or the author and the reader. The refraction of Vygotsky's ideas, like those of Piaget, through a foreign lens - through differences in time and place, language and intellectual climate - contributes to the listener's making something new of the speaker's words, for better or worse. My purpose in this book is not to explain Vygotsky or Piaget or others, but to build from what I make of them. (p.14)

This is a nice move, since it lets us get past the issue of fidelity to a theory and pushes us toward Rogoff's observations and inferences. Again, you get the gist of these from my review of The Cultural Nature of Human Development, so I won't repeat them here except to say that you'll quickly see why this book is a classic. If you're a casual reader, I'd read The Cultural Nature of Human Development first; if you're publishing in this area, read Apprenticeship in Thinking.

Our lockdown experience at UT

People have been asking me about what happened during the University of Texas lockdown today. It was really quite uneventful. Here's what happened from my point of view.

First, the blow-by-blow is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spinuzzi

Two students and I camped out in our computer classroom, which is a converted bomb shelter. We felt perfectly safe and kept up to date via Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging. Among other things, I communicated with other professors and admin staff in lockdown along the hall.

At one point, a SWAT team showed up, touched base with us, and asked us to remain there until we got the all-clear.

We were in Parlin, and we received updates from social media suggesting that a second shooter was barricaded in Calhoun, the building immediately south of us. However, we saw no shooter.

Honestly, the situation was quite surreal. The classroom has only one window, in the door. The door's about three inches thick. So we felt completely safe. At the same time, we watched an update that a San Antonio TV station had put on the web. The students had okay mobile phone coverage; my phone wouldn't call out, but the classroom had a corded phone so I was able to call loved ones.

Around 11:40, they surrounded the all-clear, and we went home.

Coworking in Austin: Link Coworking (part 1)

Today's opening day for Link Coworking. Liz Elam has been working like a demon to get this space open, and it's finally paid off. I'll interview her soon for the blog, but in the meantime, drop in. And if you can't, you can take a look at some of the (amateur) photos I shot today. They don't do it justice - it's a beautiful space.

Coworking in Austin: Cowork Austin

Cowork Austin is on the third floor of the Hannig Row Building on 6th Street, just across from the Driskill Hotel. In other words, it's about as close to the center of downtown Austin as you can get: a few blocks north of the river, east of Congress, and northwest of the convention center.

If that sounds familiar, it's because this space has been recently rebranded. It originally opened in January as Texas Coworking, but one of the partners recently left the organization and the other, Blake Freeberg, rebranded the space in August.

So how does Cowork Austin fit into the suddenly crowded set of Austin coworking spaces? Blake describes a spectrum of coworking spaces. On one end are businesses with excess square footage: "Oh, we have an extra desk in our office. We'll lease it out." On the other extreme are incubators such as TechRanch: "coworking with an intention to model and develop your business and mentor you." Somewhere in the mix are communally based models.

But Cowork Austin is more about enabling small businesses: it's "both a place where we can meet and help people or build a platform for them to do their business on. See these things grow. It's kind of an enabling thing." He adds, "I approach coworking from a slightly different angle, not what coworking is, per se, but what it enables. ... it's kind of a low cost business platform with shared knowledge that amplifies your business opportunities at the beginning." That amplification comes from abundant networking opportunities. Cowork Austin summarizes this idea in their tagline, "the un-office office."

Not that everyone at Cowork Austin has to come seeking networking: although those opportunities are there, Blake says, many come because "I don't have to put the deposit down. I don't have to sign a two year lease," and the space is relatively cheap. Coworkers prepay month to month.

What do coworkers get other than a space to work and the opportunity to network: "If you're a member, you have access to our address, you have a keycard to come in here 24x7, and you have rights to use the printer. We have a black and white and color ones coming up. You have the kitchen and you have everything. We do Internet but we don't do phone. That's twentieth century." Blake explained that Cowork Austin expects everyone to have a mobile phone or to use Skype; Cowork Austin has no landline phone. But it does offer parking for $15 more per month.

At the beginning of the month, Cowork Austin was growing: it had 12-14 coworkers, generally working in the tech industry, but also including a book publisher, a movie director, a wildlife conservation group, and a music festival planner. "These are industries that I have not seen in other coworking spaces," I told him. "And they kind of characterize Austin, you know? Film, music, artists..." Nodding, Blake emphasized that "work encompasses people's, not just computing stuff, not just pure business stuff but the art and the music that is Austin. I want to be a kind of holistic place."

That holism has led Blake to open Cowork Austin to different opportunities. For instance, art from local artists is displayed on the walls. They recently hosted a tequila tasting. They host interface design meetings, Women in Tech meetings, a Cassandra hackathon, and they plan to host an all-girl, all-night hackathon. "We have space for [a 20-person] group. Can't do the 50s to 100s. Not yet," he added.

Blake is optimistic that coworking is going to be around for a while. "I certainly don't think it's going to shrink," he told me, "And I think, fundamentally, it derives from professionalism and the tax code." On the one hand, "It doesn't take an army to build out a idea that monetizes things that you can live off of. So, that gives freedom. And on the other side, the tax code fundamentally says that if you hire a consultant you can write them off." So he sees corporations "moving to optimize their core business and hire consultants for everything else." And that means more need for coworking spaces, as those consultants seek offices - and as they seek more cohesive, more networked environments to match they sort of work they have to do.

Present Tense just published its inaugural issue

A few months ago, I blogged a CFP for Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. Now the inaugural issue is out. Take a look: the issue has a wide set of topics.

Info below:

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is proud to announce its inaugural issue: http://www.presenttensejournal.org The articles in volume 1, issue 1 include a divesity of current topics, ranging from John Schilb’s essay on disciplinarity and power, to Jill Parrott’s discussion of search engines and the rhetorical canons, to Vershawn Ashanti Young’s analysis of race and the new equality. We hope you find the articles as engaging as we do and we encourage you to continue to the conversation by commenting online.

Volume 1, Issue 1 includes:

Turning Composition toward Sovereignty

- John Schilb

Momma’s Memories and the New Equality

- Vershawn Ashanti Young

I’ll Google It!: How Collective Wisdom in Search Engines Alters the Rhetorical

Canons

- Jill M. Parrott

Making Rhetoric Visible: Re-visioning a Capstone Civic Writing Seminar

- Heather Lettner-Rust

Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices

- Elizabeth Fleitz

Program Review: The Land-Grant Way – Connected Knowing and the Call of Service

- James M. Dubinsky

Book Review: Scott’s Dangerous Writing

- Sheri Rysdam

Present Tense is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy. Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles of no more than 2,000 words, the length of a conference paper.

Reading :: Ghost in the Machine

The Ghost in the Machine
By Arthur Koestler

A couple of years ago, J.P. Rangaswami visited Austin for the summer and graciously invited me to breakfast, where we discussed a number of things, including his recent acquisition of Ribbit for BT. We also discussed the increasingly open way of doing business in organizations and industries, and I mentioned the networked organization of the telecomm company I had described in Network. "Oh yes," he said, "we used to call them holons."

At that point I realized that I would have to look up holons and see how they squared with networked organizations. I have been sidetracked by many things, both large (getting some projects finished) and small (the UT library failed to list a book as missing). But I eventually used the researcher's best friend - Wikipedia - to track down the origination of the term "holon": Arthur Koestler's 1967 classic The Ghost in the Machine.

If that name rings a bell, yes, the book's title was borrowed by the Police for their 1981 album. According to Wikipedia, Koestler did not seem impressed by this borrowing. Maybe Sting had missed the references that Koestler had made to pop music in this book: "Even from the aesthetic point of view we have managed to contaminate the luminiferous ether as we have contaminated our air, rivers, and seashores; you fiddle with the dials of your radio and from all over the world, instead of celestial harmonies, the ether disgorges its musical latrine slush" (p.321), he argued. (Recall that the publication year, 1967, was the Summer of Love.)

As you may have gathered from the above quote, Koestler was a first-class polemicist as well as a pessimist and a bit of a classist. At one point, for instance, he complains that "the more crowded [humans] are in slums, ghettoes and poverty-stricken areas, the faster they breed" (p.330). Hmm. He was also at one point an enthusiastic member of the Communist Party and a Soviet propagandist, a fact we'll come back to later.

The thing about polemicists, of course, is that they are quite entertaining when they are attacking those with whom you disagree. Koestler starts out the book with some terrific broadsides against behavioralist psychology, pointing out its oversimplifications with a polemicist's flair. "Pavlov counted the number of drops which his dogs salivated through their artificial fistulae, and distilled them into a philosophy of man," he summed scornfully (p.10). Soon he moved to the impoverished way that behavioralist psychology treated language, contrasting it unfavorably with Noah Chomsky's work. (Some of you may know Chomsky best for his photo op with Rage Against the Machine, but in 1967, only one member of that band had been born.) Later, he turns his guns on Darwinist evolution, arguing that random mutation was insufficient to explain evolutionary patterns and especially "lietmotivs" such as strong parallels between mammals in Europe and independently evolving marsupials in Australia.

But Koestler is no creationist - and he's no socioculturalist either. To understand his point of view, you have to understand the "holon," literally, the "whole-part": a hierarchically organized unit that can be a part of a more complex unit, and is in turn composed of smaller and simpler holons. These units are hierarchically organized, but they are also interlocking, not necessarily fitting together in one single way. They are Janus-like intermediaries between levels of organization.

Holons apply in biological evolution, of course, and Koestler sees them as the solution to the puzzle of parallel evolution between mammals and marsupials. But Koestler also sees social holons (pp.50-51); developmental holons; language holons; he states that habits are behavioral holons (p.76); he states that "habits and skills are functional holons" (p.207). In fact, holons become a Theory of Everything.

Holons have both integrative tendencies (tendencies to function in a larger whole) and self-assertive tendencies (tendencies to assert their own patterns as a unit) (p.56). The interplay between these is both creative and destructive. Applied to evolution - and as we eventually see, to everything else - this interplay translates to "drawing back to leap," or undoing and redoing (p.167; Here, Koestler applies the principle to evolution, science, and art).

I'll talk more on holons in a minute, but see if they sound familiar to you.

As we get closer to the end of the book, Koestler's themes become more urgent. He postulates that we human beings have an evolutionary flaw, and makes the case that evolutionary flaws occur. For instance, in Chapter 16, "The Three Brains," he describes three brains with significant flaws. Arthopods' brains, for instance, are built around their gullets - something that creates a built-in limit to brain capacity, since greater capacity means less room to swallow (p.268). Marsupials, on the other hand, are generally arboreal animals, but their brains dedicate too much capacity to the relatively useless sense of smell and they lack a corpus callosum to link the evolutionarily "new" areas of the right and left hemispheres of the brain (p.272). The third flawed brain is ours: Koestler argues that we have insufficient coordination between our archicortex and neocortex, and consequently a dichotomy in function (p.273). Our reptilian ("lizard") brain, limbic or paleo-mammalian ("lower mammal") brain, and "late mammal" brain are "relatively autonomous holons" with parallel functions (p.278). Koestler sees this result as due to rapid evolution of the brain, which has "overshot" our immediate needs (p.299). He goes on to detail the results, including our fondness for interspecial violence (p.307).

Let's take a moment to recall what the world was like in 1967. World War II was a recent memory. So was the 1948 Berlin Airlift. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a few years earlier, in 1961. Proxy wars such as Vietnam were raging. Paul Erlich was about to publish The Population Bomb, arguing that overpopulation was inevitable and would bring mass starvation. Indeed, in Chapter 18, The Age of Climax, Koestler warns that we will reach "7 billion people in 2000" - but concurs with a Ford Foundation report that the "four horsemen" would "take over" long before then (p.315). On top of that, Koestler expected nuclear war. To bring it back to Sting, Koestler didn't dare hope that the Russians' love for their children would forestall genosuicide (p.322). To put it simply, the evolutionary flaw was too powerful.

At this point, Koestler only saw one hope: that we could artificially induce change in human behavior through genetic modification (p.327). The old propagandist prescribes the top-down solution of developing, then convincing people to take pharmaceuticals that would help them coordinate their limbic, reptilian, and late-mammal brains. Here, he sounds more like A.E. van Vogt than anything. Today, this prescription seems bizarre.

Okay. So have you thought about holons? If they sound strangely familiar to you, think back to Koestler's Soviet past. Holons sound an awful lot like the universally applicable, totalizing, and ultimately mad dream of Engelsian dialectics. (Koestler, frankly, did not advance the ball very far here.) Thanks for playing!

Reading :: America's Children

America's Children: Resources from Family, Government, and the Economy (Population of the United States in the 1980s: A Census Monograph)
By Donald J. Hernandez

I ran into a reference of this book when reading Rogoff's The Cultural Nature of Human Development, and it sounded so fascinating that I had to pick it up. And I was right: it was fascinating, and I inhaled it within a couple of hours.

Not that I read every word. This book is an analysis of US Census data and relevant data sources from the 1980 census back, focused on what these data can tell us about children: from family size to living arrangements to employment (both parents' and children's). These data are admittedly limited, but the author carefully puts them together in a way that informs us of surprising trends in children's lives. And he carefully hedges when the data are unclear or incomplete. More than that, he goes beyond facts to provide analyses. Honestly, if you simply read the conclusions for each chapter, you'll get the gist, and if you want to carefully examine the data, you can read the chapters and look up the census data.

Personally, I wanted to get the gist, so I spent most of my time with the chapter conclusions and only skimmed the chapters. My particular interest was an issue that Rogoff raised in her book: how family models related to recent economic changes. Hernandez's book discusses this issue quite well.

For instance, Hernandez points out that many factors have appeared to impact family size and fertility (i.e., the number of children a woman expects to have over her lifetime). Both numbers have plummeted over the last several decades. Hernandez points out several reasons. First, rates of childhood mortality have dropped. In 1890, 40% of black children and 20% of white children died before age 15. By 1973, those numbers had dropped to 4% and 2% respectively (p.46). Similarly, family sizes experienced a "revolutionary" drop: "the proportions [of adolescents] living in families with 5-7 and 8+ siblings plummeted from 30 and 46 percent, respectively, [for those born in 1890] to only 14 and 2 percent [for those born in 1973], while the proportions living in families with 1-2 and 3-4 siblings jumped from 7 and 16 percent, respectively, to 40 and 45 percent" (p.51). These differences mean both more and less beneficial consequences: fewer companions; more resources per child; more educational advancement; higher-status occupations (which correlate to more educational advancement) (p.55). Furthermore, Hernandez says, we were midway through this family-size revolution by the end of the Great Depression. Apparently this revolution was due to the Industrial Revolution, which increased the costs of having children while lowering the benefits (p.55). (We'll return to this theme in a moment.)

Hernandez also points out other changes in family composition. The proportion of children who were not in intact two-person families was 30-35% in 1940-1960; by 1988, the proportion was 50% (p.57). We see a rise in mother-only families (p.57). At the same time, we see a decline in the presence of grandparents (p.72). These changes are generally not positive: children in one-parent families tend to have lower incomes; lower levels of attention from parents; greater personal and parental stress; greater school-related, health, and behavioral problems; fewer total years of education; lower-status occupations in adulthood; and lower incomes in adulthood (p.93).

Families are also impacted by changes in parents' work and the family economy (Ch.4) - and this is where I was most interested. Hernandez notes two transformations in the parents' work: (1) from agricultural to industrial work, when families moved from the two-parent farm family to the father-as-breadwinner model, and (2) from the father-as-breadwinner model to dual-earner and single-parent nonfarm families (p.98). These three models have different familiar relationships; the shift in work leads to shifts in family models and roles (p.99). The heart of this chapter is a stunning graph showing the percentage of families under each model (p.103), the same graph that Rogoff reproduces. In 1790, over 70% of families were two-parent farm families, while only about 10% were dual-earner nonfarm and one-parent families; by 1980, the percentages had reversed and then some. And Hernandex emphasizes that the rapid rise of the latter category is due to the dual-earner families, not the one-parent families (p.104).

The parents' employment isn't the whole story. Adolescent work has been dramatically transformed as well. In agricultural work, work and education are merged, and even for occupations off the farm, the rule was apprenticeships. Invested adults would directly supervise adolescents. Youth labor was considered essential for the survival of the family and community (p.129). In comparison, in industrial work, a smaller number of males aged 14-19 worked when school was in session (the dip was much slighter for females the same age) (p.129). Industrial work required stronger, more experienced workers; involved trade unions; and saw the introduction of child labor and compulsory education laws (p.132). Critically, greater affluence meant that youth labor was no longer essential for survival. At the same time, the nonfarm economy required greater levels of education for workers (p.132).

So by 1940, 60% of employed 16-17 year olds worked in "old" workplace settings (farms, factories); by 1980, this number dropped to 14%, with 56% in "new" workplaces (sales, services) (p.133). In these new settings, youth workers don't require the skills needed by adult workers; adult supervisors were less invested in youths' socialization and development; and according to Hernandez, these factors promoted a peer culture that fostered delinquent behavior and cynicism about the value of productive labor. Adolescent work had moved from on-the-job training for an adult career to a relatively disconnected set of skills oriented toward personal consumption (not family support) (pp.133-134). Children enter the workforce to support their own lifestyle (p.136) and are expected to live in a household where both parents work away from home (p.136).

Related, children agees 5-17 attended school only 11% of the days of the year in 1870; by 1988, they attended 43% of days. School enrollment during the same period shot up from 50 to 98%. Days per enrolled student shot from 78 to 162 (p.146).

Break down the data by parents' educational attainment and more interesting trends show up. In the 1920s, 43.5% of children were born to fathers with less than 7 years of elementary school; 39.4% were born to mothers with this level of education. By the 1980s, 85.4% of children were born to fathers with 4+ years of high school, and 80.9% to mothers with that level of education. The percentage for parents with some years of college? 47.4% and 37.9% respectively. (p.197) Hernandez speculates that factors in that last figure include the GI Bill and the Vietnam draft (p.198). (Recall that Drucker pegs the shift to the knowledge society to the GI Bill.)

I've only scratched the surface of the insights in this book, which are considerable, and I'm still trying to absorb them as I think about the implications for how we work and how we culturally understand our work. It's fascinating. If you have any interest in this topic, I suggest checking the book out.

Reading :: The Whuffie Factor

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business
By Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt is an online marketing professional, one of the most influential women in technology, and a founding member of San Francisco-based coworking site CitizenSpace. It's the coworking connection that caught my eye and convinced me to read the book. And although Hunt speaks of coworking very briefly, she makes clear how it grows out of the larger theme of the book: social capital, or "whuffie."

Whuffie is a term that comes from science fiction writer (and BoingBoing creator) Cory Doctorow, from his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Hunt p.4). In Doctorow's novel, monetary capital had been replaced by social capital, which could be built by being nice, networked, or notable (p.4). A social capitalist builds and nurtures community, increasing whuffie; and whuffie leads to monetary capital (rather than the other way round) (p.2). This concept of whuffie, Hunt says, is increasingly important: when everyone is connected, everyone is an influencer, and Gladwell's The Tipping Point is out of date.

Case in point: Coworking. Hunt argues that coworking is a great example of whuffie in action. She credits Brad Neuberg with coming up with the idea: "he decided to rent a space in a community center in the Mission area of San Francisco for two days a week and advertise to other independent workers to come by and pay $15 to have a collaborative work experience" (p.23). At the time, Hunt was working with Chris Messina. "Chris Messina, my business partner, had the idea that a more permanent space would help develop more interest and asked Brad if he would mind if we used his coworking idea to describe our concept. Brad agreed" (p.23). Hunt credits online connections, including connections on Meetup, Flickr, a Google group, and PBWiki, for the spread of the coworking movement. "Even before we found a space, an odd phenomenon occurred. People from across the United States started to join the Google group and post their interest in setting up their own coworking space in their local community. ... They would take our lessons and use them in their own pursuits" (p.24). Hunt and Messina went on to cofound two coworking spaces, The Hat Factory and Citizen Space (p.24). Hunt concludes: "Spaces like ours existed well before the Internet. But the movement was only possible because of the Internet and the plethora of amazing collaborative and community tools" (p.25).

The rest of the book has simple, but important and (to many) counterintuitive lessons about whuffie. Hunt offers these lessons with several clear examples from Internet-based startups, services, and marketing campaigns. As in books of this genre, some of these examples go out of date quickly - but the lessons they illustrate are still valuable and still being learned. For instance, Hunt emphasizes that when you pay for whuffie, you extinguish it (p.48); that building whuffie requires "turning the bullhorn around" and having conversations with customers (Ch.3); that you must be able to not just listen, but also integrate feedback (Ch.4); that "whuffie only grows when you participate genuinely in a community, listening and integrating feedback" (p.118).

As a window into the nascent coworking movement, this book is quite valuable. The lessons on whuffie will probably not be terribly novel for those who read BoingBoing or who have read The Cluetrain Manifesto (which Hunt cites), but she summarizes and illustrates these ideas quite well. All in all, it's an interesting and engaging book as well as a fast read.

Reading :: The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology

The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, Actors, and Contexts
Edited by Chrisanthi Avgerou, Claudio Ciborra, and Frank Land

I read this 2004 book a couple of months back, but haven't had the chance to blog it until now due to other commitments. It's an interesting collection, "the result of a collective effort of the Department of Information Systems of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)" (p.v) with a couple of outsiders thrown into the mix. Essentially, the authors are taking the social approach that characterizes social studies of science and technology (think Latour, Weick, Bijker, Woolgar) and applying it to information and communication technologies (ICT).

With that kind of application, the collection should be riveting to me. Alas, it's not. The collection is short on cases, long on critiques of formal methodologies that ignore the social, and generally short on thoroughgoing analysis and critique of theory.

Even Latour's chapter, "On Using ANT for Studying Information Systems: A (Somewhat) Socratic Dialogue," felt a bit worn, although it did have its moments. Latour stages a Socratic dialogue between a professor and a graduate student in which they discuss actor-network theory (ANT). Latour's stand-in, the professor, explains to the frustrated graduate student that ANT is a method, not a framework (p.63); that ANT is a negative argument, good for new topics rather than established ones (p.63); that a case study that requires a theoretical frame is a poorly chosen case study (p.64); and that only a badly described case needs an explanation (p.67). And the dialogue produces one great quote, which I'm sure I'll use: "As a rule, context stinks. It's simply a way of stopping the description when you are too tired or too lazy to go on" (p.68). Unfortunately, the rest of the dialogue seems exhausted and doesn't really seem to go very far.

However, the collection did feature a couple of other chapters worth a look. For instance, Ole Hanseth's "Knowledge as Infrastructure" takes an ANT approach, characterizing knowledge as an actor-network (p.104), but going beyond to characterize knowledge as a network with network externalities, increasing returns, path dependencies and lock-ins (pp.104-106).

Another good chapter is Richard Boland's "An Ecology of Distributed Knowledge Work," which attempts to "[explore] digital knowledge work as an ecology of knowledge workers, mediations, knowledge objects, documents, and data repositories" (p.119). Drawing on the ANT literature, Boland attempts to map and characterize this ecology through diagrams (ex: p.120), diagrams that remind me of those in Peg Syverson's book. "There are many other important elements that are not in this simple diagram, such as culture, history, and status," Boland adds (p.121; see the Latour quote about context above). Boland points to tensions between global and local logics (p.121), arguing that sometimes these tensions lead to "unblackboxing" in which an element of global logic no longer applies to local practice (p.125).

Eric Montiero's "Actor Network Theory and Cultural Aspects of Interpretative Studies" examines what ANT can do for Information Systems (IS). Montiero argues that "a key challenge [for IS] is to cultivate analytical notions in tandem or co-evolution with a nuanced grasp of the constantly changing nature of IS" (p.129). Indeed, Montiero wants to push back against the very thing the student in Latour's chapter was trying to do: apply a pre-existing frame to a case. (In an aside here, Montiero calls out "'social constructions,' 'activity systems,' 'inscriptions,' 'bricolage,' and 'organizational politics,'" p.130.) "However," he argues, "merely decorating empirical instances with analytical notions is neither very illuminating nor intellectually stimulating. To make an analysis interesting, elements of an empirical case need to be moulded with the analytical notions that go well beyond labelling exercises" (p.130). That's especially true since "the technology keeps on changing, resulting in new patterns of use" - it resists a monolithic framework (p.130). Although Montiero sees potential in ANT, he also charges that it tends to be overly goal-oriented (p.131) and biased toward strategic behavior (p.132). He urges that we learn from studies of mundane everyday technology and that we realize how much we mingle rather than simply use technologies (p.134).

If you're in the field of IS, this collection might be quite useful to you. If, like me, you're more interested in workplace studies/socioculturally informed CSCW, you may have to dig a little harder. But as I've noted above, you can still find some good insights in this collection. See what you think.

Reading :: The Making of Law

The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat
By Bruno Latour

A while back, Jeff Rice mentioned on Facebook that he was reading this book. I had heard about the French version, but hadn't realized it had been translated. I ordered it immediately - I'm a big Latour fan, you know - and read it over the next week. But I've dragged my feet on reviewing it because I suspected the review would be a long one.

So what is The Making of Law about? As with most ethnographies, there are at least a few answers.

Most obviously, this book is an ethnography of "the Council of State which plays the role of Supreme Court for this branch of law," as Latour explains in the preface to this, the English edition (p.vii). The Council of State judges cases of administrative law, which in the French system is handled by the executive branch rather than the judiciary. We English-speakers are lucky enough to receive something else in this preface: an actual discussion of data collection methods (p.xi). Latour explains that the participants were quite wary, particularly since their discussions could not be privy to plaintiffs, and they also didn't want their decisions to appear to be merely the result of talking. Latour collected data via field notes (voice recordings were forbidden); scrambled details of cases so that they would be unrecognizable; and submitted the manuscript to the counsellors (a sort of member check) (p.xi). Latour confesses that although the book was a success in France, critics thought it was "too favorable - not to say complacent. And it's quite true, not only is this book context-free, it's also critique-free" (p.xi). Latour isn't after context or critique; he wants instead to see how the counsellors made their arguments and how they converted these arguments into legal facts, the last word.

And that brings us to the second purpose. Obviously, this setting is quite different from Latour's earlier ethnographies, which have focused on science and (to a lesser extent) technology. But just as those earlier books examined how scientists constructed arguments and brought them through various trials to harden them into scientific facts, this book examines how the counsellors constructed their arguments and brought them through various trials to harden them into legal facts. Law has the same confidence in validity as science (p.x). Indeed, "it seems that humanity has found no better way of having the last word, nothing firmer, more modern, more reasoned, more grandiose or more majestic" (p.69). Latour rejects the reductionist notions that (a) law is a mere wrapping for power relations (p.141) or that (b) legal enunciations are reducible "to the mere expression of a form, to the application of a rule or to the classification of cases in general categories" (p.142). The court's work is neither fancy dress nor formalism (p.142). Latour, characteristically, doesn't like either of these notions, which both suggest that we must understand them by ignoring practice and postulating some true reality we can't see (p.142)! Instead,

we are quite deliberately going to remain on the surface of things, stubbornly following the hesitant course of judgment, in which judges quite clearly admit their prejudices while asserting at the same time that they alone cannot determine the solution, or in which they attach themselves quite passionately to legal forms while constantly rejecting the dangers of what they call 'legalism' or 'formalism.' (p.143)

Let's follow blind Justice as she feels her way forward, Latour urges us (p.151). Like Science, Law does its work through referential chains (p.149), and Latour spends Chapter 2 demonstrating how these referential chains work, starting with complexly bound cases that are reviewed and presented by counsellors. (This chapter is especially interesting to those interested in writing and rhetoric, of course.) The referential chains lead to surprising places, sometimes, and also to new facts. In Law, as in Science, these referential chains allow humans "to utter truths that exceed and escape them on all sides" (p.197).

This analysis brings us to the book's third purpose, which is to contrast the approaches of Science and Law. The two are ways to establish facts using referential chains, but they establish these facts in rather different ways. For instance, they have a different relation between public and private: the public can sit in on scientific experiments, if they request it, but they can't attend judicial deliberations (p.201). The Council depends on "the homogeneity of the world of files that are kept, ordered, archived, and processed, and upon the homogeneity of a staff that is renewed, maintained, and disciplined"; the laboratory depends on the heterogeneity of equipment and staff (p.203). But more than these, Law and Science rely on two regimes of enunciation. While Science relies on reference chains, Law relies on a chain of obligations (see the table on p.235). This chain of obligations involves modifying value objects such as authority, progress, organization, interest, weight, quality control, hesitation, means/arguments, coherence, and limits (pp.194-195).

Crucially, then, Latour is saying that the tools and concepts that he has developed in his investigations of science can be useful in the study of Law and other domains - but that we can't turn them into a universal framework for characterizing different kinds of work, different kinds of fact-making. Law is like Science in that it must methodically transform things into facts, but the logic - and the rhetoric - differs and so the mechanisms also do.

I've left a lot out here, since the book is in some ways too dense in detail and analysis to summarize neatly. Bottom line, although I got halfway through the book before I could see its unique value, that value did surface in a big way. If you're interested in Latour or ANT, or for that matter, the rhetoric and conduct of law, I strongly recommend this book.

Using my books? Let me know.

A personal plea. If you're using one of my books in your class, or it's on your graduate program's reading list, could you send me a link?

A brief presentation on coworking

These slides are for my presentation tomorrow at Cospace at the Austin Entreprenerial Scene meeting. They're based on my SXSW2010 slides, but have been modified a bit for length and argument.

Spinuzzi austin-entrepeneur-meeting2010

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