Coworking in Austin: Cospace 2.0

Cospace is one of Austin's coworking success stories. When I first talked to founders Kirtus and Andrew in November 2009, they had just put out some feelers about opening a space. But they had already started to articulate the principles of their space: mutual mentorship, collaboration, face-to-face relationships, flexibility, freedom. By January 2010, they had added a third founder, Pat Ramsey, and were about to close on a lease. They opened the doors on February 17, 2010. It was fantastic to see a coworking space develop from an initial dream to a successful implementation.

Of course, the story doesn't stop there. In the last year, Cospace has expanded its membership roles considerably (now around 43 members); upgraded its furniture (from Craigslist purchases to Turnstone); and developed its vision further. So when Kirtus suggested we get together to talk about the changes in the space last week, I was happy to do so. So on Friday, I sat down in Cospace's glass lounge with Kirtus and Pat to discuss what they call "Cospace 2.0."

Cospace 2.0

What's Cospace 2.0? Really, it's an extension and refinement of the original vision that was already evident in those early days, sharpened and customized through continual feedback. As Kirtus explains it, through 2010, Cospace just focused on serving people in the coworking space. That meant always listening, always engaging, and always being willing to try out new things. Serving meant learning: about users, about their needs, and about the niches Cospace could best serve. And by October 2010, they had realized that Cospace filled three niches, three use cases (reflected on Cospace's website):

• Meet. One segment was interested in Cospace for its potential as a professional meeting space or a group space. In response, Cospace began renting out its two conference rooms and making its open space available for after-hours meetups.
• Work. Another segment simply wanted to cowork - to grab a desk space and work alongside unaffiliated members during business hours. After trying out different configurations, Cospace developed a simplified $100/$200/$300 rating system, with the $300 rate available to teams.
• Build. The teams aspect points to the third segment. Member pricing was too rigid for certain teams, particularly teams assembled by entrepreneurs who were trying to build products. How could Cospace set the right conditions for those teams to develop and evolve? Here, Cospace focused on flexibility, customization, fit - and productivity.

Cospace's 43 members are almost evenly divided between teams and individuals. But, Kirtus says, all of these members are focused on being productive: "getting [things] done." They're not just looking for socializing and networking opportunities; they want to build products and grow companies. And this is what distinguishes Cospace from many other coworking spaces, Pat adds.

Manufacturing, Leading, Learning

Coworking space proprietors tend to take one of three roles, Pat and Kirtus told me:

• Manufacture: In this role, proprietors "make" the space: they set meetings, recruit people, and otherwise define the coworking space.
• Lead: In this role, proprietors function as community managers, shepherding the flock, attempting to make connections and pointing the way for the coworkers.
• Learn: In this role, proprietors seek to serve, to gather continual feedback, and to effect continuous iteration. This is Cospace's model, and according to Kirtus, "it's the only reason we survived."

It's partly for this reason that Cospace, which was originally envisioned as a coworking space for general small business organizations, has become increasingly more tech-centric. "That's Austin," Pat says. Although many traditional businesses could easily work out of and benefit from coworking spaces, people in the tech community seem to adapt most easily: they tend to be more mobile and have already adapted to working anywhere. So although Cospace continues to pull people from other sectors, the tech sector is heavily represented here - both in individual members and in teams.

Keep it Pushin'

In its teams focus, Cospace has concentrated on attracting teams that want to grow. As Kirtus says, they "keep it pushin'": they try to juxtapose teams that are productive, that have a good-to-great mentality, and that will continue to challenge and inspire each other. They focus on inspiring cross-learning in which elite team members can share information with each other, from tech concerns to business tips.

Does this make Cospace look more like an incubator? I ask. Kirtus responds that Cospace is "incubator-agnostic." They're not picking winners and losers, and they're not investing money (although they're personally invested in the success of teams at Cospace). Rather, they simply want to make sure that these teams can make the connections they need in order to grow.

Managing the Community

This brings us to the question of community management. How does Cospace 2.0 ensure that teams can make connections, that members can build trust, and that its operations can proceed regularly. Cospace's new answer - as of this month - is its new operations manager, Sarah Cox.

Many coworking spaces think about hiring a community manager "someday." But in Sarah, Cospace gains someone with expertise in project management, account management, and office management. Sarah has taken on aspects of all these roles at Cospace: giving space tours for potential members, interviewing potential members, taking over the events calendar, revamping the membership agreement, developing a packet for new members, and developing internal process documents to make sure that the Cospace model is consistent (and reproducible). She's the go-to person for members, and she's also building on Kirtus' and Pat's structure, gathering continuous feedback by dropping by and chatting with coworkers.

Beyond those duties, Sarah is also taking over Cospace's social media presence. She'll be promoting Cospace on blogs and Twitter, reaching out to meetup groups, and planning educational and social events. Over the next six months, Sarah will continue bringing in new events and increasing awareness (especially among freelancers). She'll also be thinking through the spatial organization at Cospace, looking for little tweaks that can make a big difference.

As Sarah points out, a flexible workforce implies flexible space. So Cospace will also look for opportunities to serve the Meet and Work niches for flexible work. For instance, one group worked at Cospace for a month while their own office was renovated. Another company, which typically works as a distributed virtual team, officed together here during South by Southwest. Cospace's month-to-month contracts allow that flexibility, and Sarah plans to continue supplying those opportunities.

The Next Phase

So what's next for Cospace?

The headline news is the change in roles.

• Kirtus is still an active cofounder, but is pulling away from day-to-day operations to concentrate on his CEO position at startup GroupCharger. He'll still perform outreach and visioning for Cospace.
• Pat is now performing oversight for Cospace. He'll be in the space, gathering feedback, making connections, and performing outreach (sometimes of a quite unconventional sort). He'll be the public face of Cospace.
• Sarah, as operations manager, will continue building the Cospace community and building Cospace's structure through continual feedback.

In addition, Cospace is thinking about branching out to other cities, specifically Cedar Park and Round Rock. As Sarah develops Cospace's operational documents, the Cospace model should be easier to package and export to new locations.

Let me end on a personal note. I have nothing but admiration for entrepreneurs who take a chance on opening a new coworking space. For me, it's been extraordinary to see how Cospace started. In a little more than a year, I saw a couple of enthusiastic guys turn their dream into a flourishing, sustainable coworking space. May Cospace's second year be even more successful and inspiring than its first.

Reading :: Cadence & Slang

Cadence & Slang
By Nick Disabato

I have mixed feelings about Cadence & Slang, a small self-published book that its author intends to serve as a style guide for interaction design. The book is beautifully designed and well written, with lots of nice moments in it. As a style guide, it reminds me of Joseph Williams' book, which treats writing style with such grace and reverence. Like Williams, Disabato is clearly in love with his art, and it shows: in his writing, in his examples, and in the care with which he has designed this little book. The book covers a lot, from patterns to writing style to interviewing stakeholders to usability testing, and does it with quiet confidence.

Maybe too much confidence: on the other hand, Cadence & Slang also has the same drawback as other style guides: In trying to summarize the wisdom of an entire field, it tends to gloss over issues. And unlike Williams' book on writing style, this one doesn't acknowledge that it's glossing. For instance, we are told that Jakob Nielsen was the first to perform usability tests on sketched prototypes (p.64) and that you can catch 95% of usability problems with only three participants (p.65). We're also told that contextual inquiry is "the process of informally interviewing users while they're completing a real-world task" (p.109). All of these statements are kinda-sorta correct but hide a great many assumptions and background. (For instance, Nielsen very well might have been the first to apply formal usability testing methodology to paper prototypes in the early 1990s, but paper prototypes emerged as rich participant feedback mechanisms in the UTOPIA project of the early 1980s.)

And don't get me started on his gloss of ethnographic research (p.58).

Disabato repeatedly tells us to sweat the details, but his book produces a 50,000 foot view of interaction design that elides most details. In doing so, it glosses over rather than addressing some of the latent tensions in interaction design. For instance, he tells us to attend to web accessibility (p.42), but the book itself is not accessible for the visually impaired, and as late as October of last year Disabato resisted making an electronic version available because that would cause problems for the book's visual design. (You can now buy a PDF version, but I'm unclear on how accessible the PDF is.) This experience nicely illustrates the push-pull between different design principles, but in the book itself, Disabato doesn't acknowledge or wrestle with such types of hard choices between the design principles he advocates.

That being said, it really is quite a good book. I'd assign it to students who are taking a survey course in interaction design - as long as I was sure they'd be delving into the details in other classes.

An inspiring post about Network and networks

While I was at SXSW, Bill Hart-Davidson tweeted me the link to this fantastic blog post by Michael Wojcik: {n1,n2,n3,…}. If you have any interest in networks - or in Network, my second book, which figures prominently in the post - you should go read it. As I tweeted back to Bill, I agree with about 90% of the post, but I respect all of it.

What's really extraordinary is that this post is not a formal book review or essay - it's a reading response in a graduate class. Bravo.

I love that Wojcik gets my general project, that he finds the strong parts, and that he doesn't pull punches when he finds the simplifications and glosses in my book. That's the mark of someone who is actually engaged with the text. It's flattering: it makes me think that I wrote something worth reading closely. (I also like that he lays into Deleuze and Guattari, but that's another story.)

What's the 10% that I don't agree with? For now, let me just leave you with one clue.

Wojcik's post comes at a good time, since I am thinking about writing an essay on networks anyway. More on that as it evolves. But until then, really, do click through and read his post. And then go write stuff like this.

"Hold on Loosely": The summary and some thoughts

Last week I held two conversations with two very different audiences about loose organizations. On Monday, I presented at Austin's RISE conference to perhaps a dozen local entrepreneurs. On Friday, I held a conversation with dozens and dozens - I have no idea how many, I'm terrible at crowd estimates - at South by Southwest Interactive. What struck me was how very different the conversations were.

RISE

At the RISE session, I gave a brief slideshow to introduce the notion of loose organizations - an umbrella term meant to describe ways in which people are working in less hierarchical, more agile ways that orient to common projects rather than job descriptions or departments. Then I asked several questions about the attendees' experiences with loose organizations. The results tracked fairly closely with the sorts of case studies I've been doing (e.g., independent contractors and coworking spaces in the Austin area). People named loose organizations such as

• independent contractor relationships
• coordinated relationships among nonprofits
• small, locally based virtual organizations (8-10 employees)

These people noted several challenges:

• Maintaining enough transparency to develop trust with team members, while maintaining enough opaqueness to keep clients unaware of the details they shouldn't know about.
• Coordinating projects (using Basecamp, Mavenlink, or other collaborative planning and communication tools).
• Figuring out what to keep in-house (either in skill or in capacity) and what to subcontract or outsource.
• Finding ways to support data infrastructure for loose organizations. Members emphasized cloud-based solutions.
• Finding ways to backchannel latest knowledge about projects and general knowledge for a given field.
• Being able to give up control to other specialists with whom you work.
• Being able to maintain strategy when coordinating transient project-oriented teams.

Hearing these points was gratifying, since they reinforced the sorts of things I had seen and read.

Then I got to Friday.

SXSW

The crowd at SXSW was much more diverse. Participants included:

• A coordinator for a major open source projects
• A representative of a company that produced software by coordinating software development contests
• A manager at a large construction company
• Owners of virtual organizations with employees based across the world
• Coworking space owners
• Members of companies using independent contractors

This crowd was largely not Austin-based - but more importantly, their organizations were generally not local in any sense, and they were generally much larger than the ones I have studied in Austin. Consequently, some of the challenges they mentioned were very different.

Members of geographically distributed organizations focused on challenges such as these:

• How do we attract and interest the right people to work with our organization?
• How do we vet these people and establish trust with them? How do we establish and track a reputation for them?
• How do we make sure we can command them (give them specific enough assignments) without controlling them (micromanaging them)? (This issue is particularly important in some states, such as California, where state regulations say that the amount of management can cause an independent contractor to be reclassified as an employee.)
• How do we keep multiperson teams coordinated, both synchronously and asynchronously?
• How do we make sure that people working in different time zones have times that they can communicate synchronously?

As you can see, compared to the concerns at RISE, these questions are much more heavily focused on long-term coordination and collaboration among people who are not geographically colocated. Part of the reason is that the RISE session participants were generally independent contractors and small businesses - but the SXSW session participants were generally owners and managers of larger, more distributed organizations.

So the SXSW crowd suggested several ways to handle these issues:

• Attracting and interesting the right people: Participants focused on having, sharing, and projecting a clear reason for working in their organization. They expressed this reason as cause, ideology, vision, or mission. They generally agreed that when you devolve decision-making across an organization, especially a geographically distributed one, you have to attract people to work with you. Team members had to look forward to more than a paycheck: perhaps a challenge, a chance to do good, a chance to change the world or participate in something bigger than themselves.
• Vetting and establishing trust: So how do you determine which team members will work out best? Participants had different mechanisms. On one end, one company attracts team members by posting challenges and holding competitions, competitions that represented stages in the software development process. In this case, as with most market transactions, trust is minimal but transaction costs are low; through multiple competitions, team members can prove themselves and improve their standing. On the other end, some companies focused on communicating their mission clearly during the hiring process; people who couldn't get on board with that mission would remove themselves from the process. Larger organizations leaned toward metrics and reputation systems, even rating systems, while smaller ones still went with the gut - but even then, the "gut" was informed by many, many different channels of interaction.
• Commanding without controlling: Here, people generally agreed that they had to simply be clear about specifications and deadlines. One organization had a three strikes policy: you could deliver projects late twice, but the third time, you would be cut out. Many organizations didn't even dictate a common tool set to their teams beyond specific, easily obtained communication software and a narrow set of tools used in their industry.
• Keeping teams coordinated: Again, responses ran the gamut here. One surprise for me was that people did not seem enthusiastic about project management software: one person complained that either you sank the time into it, in which case it became cluttered, or you didn't, in which case it became inaccurate. Instead, people focused on tools that could be used synchronously or with a short lag time. For instance, one reported that his virtual team simply kept Skype on all day so that they could see each other working and have conversations whenever they needed to. Others reported that all team members used IRC or IM.
• Coordinating synchronously. Many insisted that nothing could replace team meetings and synchronous conversations, although these didn't have to take place in the same room. But these opportunities can be difficult to achieve when people work in different time zones or on their own schedules. To open these opportunities, many reported posting availability schedules for team members and making sure that all were available during some part of the day.

My takeaways?

• Challenges look different on different levels of scale.
• Challenges look different on different sides of the table.
• People are finding their own uses for communication technologies.
• Teams are continuing to figure out trust, and they're beginning to apply reputation systems to team interactions.

And perhaps most importantly: Sometime soon I'm going to have to study a large, geographically distributed virtual organization.

Thanks to all who participated, and don't hesitate to leave your own thoughts in the comments.

"Hold on Loosely" - a quick thanks

So my SXSWi core conversation "Hold On Loosely" was held today. I just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who attended and contributed. It was surprisingly rewarding, and my big takeway is that my next research project may have to push beyond local independent contractors and coworking spaces toward distributed teams.

Just a few links before I go back into SXSWi mode:

• If you wondered what the session would have looked like if I had used slides, see my RISE presentation.
• To read more about coworking, see my ongoing profiles of coworking spaces.
• If you want to know more about some of the research I've done in Austin, my TILTS presentation is up too - 50 slides, 15 minutes.
• Oh, and here's my SXSWi2010 slide deck on coworking.

I'll plan to sum up the core conversation sometime next week. Til then, if you're at SXSW this year and want to touch base, tweet me @spinuzzi. Thanks, everyone.

Reading :: Genre: An Introduction

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy
By Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff

Since I bought my Kindle, I've been looking for books available as free PDF downloads. It's just so convenient, and frankly, I expect to be reading a lot more PDFs than Kindle books on this thing. In any case, one good source of such PDF books is The WAC Clearinghouse. Some of the books were published by presses, then discontinued and their rights reverted to the authors; others were commissioned for the series in conjunction with Parlor Press.

This particular book, by Bawarshi and Reiff, is of the latter variety. Published in 2010, it aims to do exactly what the subtitle says: introduce us to the history, theory, research, and pedagogy of genre. And it does a remarkably good job. These two scholars have absorbed a really amazing amount of material, examining genre in literary traditions, systemic functional linguistics, historical/corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, rhetorical and sociological traditions (including the Brazilian Genre Synthesis), and rhetorical genre studies (RGS). That's just Part 1 - and the chapters in this part function as a massive framework essay on the concept of genre.

In Part 2, the authors examine genre research in several different contexts, including academic; workplace and professional; and public and new media contexts. Again, they do a tremendous amount of review here, sensitively discussing the research on each context.

Part 3 goes to school, examining various pedagogical approaches to teaching genres. Rhetorical Genre Studies gets its own chapter here.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the book's sheer scope and treatment of the material. Yes, in a far-ranging survey such as this one, some things get lost - but the authors lose much less than I might have expected. They clearly understand the material from many different angles, and they provide and contextualize a wealth of information; my Kindle notes are almost all along the lines of "get this cite!"

If you're planning to teach a graduate seminar on genre, or if you are just interested in the different genre traditions out there, go download this book. It's a terrific resource.

Reading :: Knowledge Capitalism

Knowledge Capitalism
By Alan Burton-Jones

As new economy books go, this one is a bit long in the tooth. Burton-Jones, who heads an Australia-based consultancy, published it in 1999. That's centuries in Internet time - and yet Burton-Jones does a great job of explaining some of the characteristics of the post-industrial society, identifying some of its trends, and discussing how the firm outsources non-core functions to different markets: flexhire, mediated services, dependent contractors, and independent contractors. Since I have been studying the latter lately, this discussion was especially helpful to me: I see multiple points of contact with coworking. I also appreciated the care in which Burton-Jones documented his evidence for the discussion.

Let's start with the key notion of "knowledge capital." The author starts by distinguishing between goods and services - although he concedes that the distinction is becoming harder to draw. But "as manufacturers outsource non-core functions to specialist service organizations, employment in services increases and employment in manufacturing declines" (p.4). The difference between goods and services has become harder to draw, though, because although the traditional definition of "service" is something that is consumed as it is produced, not all services fit that definition, "particularly those that can be electronically time-shifted" (p.4). So "as both goods and services become more knowledge and information intensive, the distinction between them is becoming both less apparent and in many cases less relevant. Knowledge is becoming the defining characteristic of economic activities" (p.4, my emphasis). So "the central tenet of this book is that knowledge is transforming the nature of production and thus work, jobs, the firm, the market, and every aspect of economic activity" (pp.4-5). He urges us to understand knowledge better (p.5), drawing distinctions such as knowledge-about vs. know-how, explicit vs. tacit, and stickiness vs. absorptive capacity (p.7).

To drive the point home, the author provides statistics: "In 1900, less than 18 per cent of the total workforce in the USA were engaged in data- and information-handling tasks. By 1980 it had risen to over 50 percent. ... On present trends, over 80 percent of the workforce are likely to be involved in information-handling tasks by 2020, of whom a higher proportion than at present are likely to be engaged in knowledge-building and decision-making activities" (pp.8-9; but see Brown and Hekseth for a more skeptical view of such predictions). The author provides a table illustrating give stages of IT from the 1960-2000, with focus changing from centralized file handling to local and global networking (p.9). Along with that focus change has been a change in the economy, and the author identifies three economic trends: symbolic goods, demassification, and boundaryless empire (pp.12-16). And he identifies a significant trend away from job orientation and toward career orientation - that is, industry-wide standardization (e.g., a standard word processing package used by secretaries across all companies) has led to less firm-specific knowledge, leading to more circulation among jobs. "In effect, careers owned by individuals will progressively replace jobs owned by firms. By the same token, firms are becoming less dependent on the idiosyncratic knowledge of particular workers, when the same/similar knowledge can be obtained more cost effectively, either through automation or on the open market" (p.20). (Some readers may be reminded of Castells' notion of generic labor here; Burton-Jones does cite Castells' work, but doesn't specifically draw on Castells' work on generic labor.)

So, the author argues, we're entering an economy based on knowledge (p.20). He identifies four regional variants (p.20), but believes that they will converge (p.22).

In the second chapter, the author explores the question of how the firm will develop in the knowledge economy. During the Industrial Revolution, firms internalized functions to aid efficiency and effectiveness, and transactions within the firm increased (p.25). During the 1970s, digital technologies reversed this trend, and firms began decentralizing operations, saving costs and reducing administrative complexity" (p.25). Through the 1980s, organizations became "leaner and flatter," and "as a result, the commercial firm of the late 1990s is less inhibited by geographic, industry, or technical boundaries, employs fewer people on a full-time permanent basis, and often has fewer tangible assets" (p.25). So: in the knowledge economy, how do transactions changes? Which transactions stay in the firm vs. the market? (p.26).

Knowledge-based theory predicts that economic activities containing high levels of explicit non-firm-specific knowledge ... will move into the market (externalization). Conversely, those with high levels of tacit and specialized knowledge will remain in the firm (internalization). Firm-specific knowledge embodied in routine functions can be expected to reduce, due to automation. Routine firm functions requiring little firm-specific knowledge, such as office cleaning, equipment maintenance, and security, are already commonly outsourced. (p.32)

Again, we can see parallels with Castells here, but Burton-Jones sharpens the distinction a bit. He also notes that firms are moving away from proprietary systems and networks to standard ones (think Google Apps for Your Domain). "These factors tend to imply an overall shift toward proportionately greater market-based coordination" (p.33).

One consequence is that we're now seeing a reconvergence of ownership and control: "Sole proprietorships, small partnerships, and private companies involved in service activities and low-scale production generally have both their ownership and their decision making concentrated in a few key individuals," so "ownership and control are typically united" - in stark contrast with larger firms (p.40).

In the knowledge-based firm, Burton-Jones expects the following:

• The firm's principal functions will be "knowledge coordination, protection, and integration"
• "Transactions involving high levels of specialized and tacit knowledge will be internalized"
• "Transactions involving high levels of explicit knowledge will be externalized"
• "Ownership and control will converge"
• "The links between education, work, and learning will converge" (p.43)

Due to these trends, Burton-Jones argues that "by the year 2000 at least 30 per cent of the American workforce are likely to be working under ... non-standard [non-full-time, non-permanent, non-employee status] arrangements" (p.46). He shows the trend with a table of non-regular employment across countries, 1973-1993 (p.48). And he argues that the nature of employment contracts is changing from relational to transactional contracting:

• output-based performance
• results, not time
• location-independent (p.52)

"For the core knowledge workers in the firm, the focus will increasingly be on team or firm performance," he concludes (p.52). Most employees will be incentivized to maximize personal productivity for personal gain, not corporate goals; relations between employees and firm will be more arm's-length (p.52). He develops a Knowledge Supply Model[TM] - yes, he trademarked it - in which the Firm (a core group surrounded by an associate group surrounded by an affiliate group) is surrounded by the flexhire market, the mediated services market, the dependent contractors market, and the independent contractors market (p.58). These four markets perform different functions. For instance, independent contractors

provide support for functions requiring high levels of tacit and/or explicit knowledge, but low levels of firm-specific knowledge. Such support typically involves technical, professional, and specialty services. The value of the knowledge provided by this group, in terms of its potential impact on firms' operations, is high. The frequency of demand by the firm for such knowledge is typically lower than for that supplied by dependent contractors.

Members of this group include self-employed individuals (both incorporated and non-incorporated), micro firms, and small businesses. They are usually not dependent on any particular firm for their major source of income. Members of this group frequently form independent business networks comprising a mixture of individuals and firms. (pp.60-61).

Burton-Jones expects all types of contracting "to grow at the expense of all forms of direct employment" (p.64). In the subsequent chapters, Burton-Jones explores each of the markets. Although he has interesting things to say about all of them, let's focus on Ch.7, which discusses the independent contractors market.

The independent contractors market includes independent contractors, micro firms, and business networks (p.131). "The independent contractor is one whose income is ordinarily derived from multiple sources and is not normally dependent upon the maintenance of a relationship with one or a few specific clients" (p.132). They are involved in "contracts with firms that are 'arm's-length,' explicit, transaction oriented, and measured by outputs or results, rather than inputs" (p.132). Increasingly, they handle work involving a high order of knowledge and skills, but unrelated to day-to-day operations of the firm. "Small businesses are likely to be better qualified to provide such skills than the general market and to compete effectively with larger outsourced specialists, particularly when the independents' lower overhead structures provide a cost advantage" (p.133). Stunningly, "over three-quarters of those in self-employment in the West have no direct employees" (p.133). And this brings us to business networks, in which individuals and small businesses network with each other, forming non-contractual, nonhierarchical relationships (pp.137-138). Such networks involve "trust, informality, redundancy, commitment, and interdependency" (p.138). They involve "horizontal, cooperative relationships" in which "knowledge exchange is frequently ad hoc, informal, and designed to assist with problem solving" (p.141). Indeed,

future knowledge entrepreneurs are likely to grow their businesses through cooperating with other resource owners rather than by seeking to employ them. ... For those in the fast-growing knowledge-intensive industries such as IT and in the professions generally, self-employment is already more prevalent business growth already occurs through loose groupings of associates or partnerships, rather than vertically organized business structures (p.143)

Is there a better description of what I've been seeing at coworking sites?

In Chapter 8, Burton-Jones reminds us that the firm itself is being redefined as well. Non-core functions are externalized, but the core is internalized, refined, and concentrated. This process is redefining the firm: it "is becoming physically smaller, but intellectually larger, as it reorganizes its use of externalized and internalized resources" (p.151). Or if you prefer: all edge. That means: less physical infrastructure; greater use of workers' personal resources; workers as suppliers rather than employers; more financial agility (p.152). Such characteristics imply a limit to the firm's growth (p.154). The firm is becoming a knowledge producer (p.155), an integrator of knowledge (p.156). He predicts a structural convergence between business networks and firms (p.190).

In the last chapter, he emphasizes the "learning imperative": "work and learning are becoming increasingly interrelated and interdependent" (p.199). "Education," he says, must become a global business rather than a public service (p.204).

He also warns:

A fundamental characteristic of the knowledge economy is the way that it will empower and simultaneously isolate the individual. The implications of this 'splendid isolation' need to be taken into account in explaining and promoting ways to handle changing economic conditions. Learning, rather than being educated, for example, will be foreign to many people. Others will find the prospect of an independent workstyle a daunting prospect. For those unaccustomed to operating without supervision, the message has to be one of encouragement and support, both to take control of their own careers and to suggest independent sources of counselling and assistance. For others it will be a case of encouraging and publicly rewarding knowledge entrepreneurship. (p.232)

Again, is there a better description of the support aspect of coworking?

Overall, this book was helpful in at least three aspects. First, Burton-Jones provides a broad, well-grounded discussion of structural changes in work brought on by the increased importance of knowledge work. Second, he provides a well developed taxonomy of externalized markets for talent, and his discussion of independent contractors in particular is helpful, providing remarkable insights into the independent contracting and coworking characteristics I've been studying. Third, his 1999-era sources give me ideas for finding and handling similar but more contemporary sources. Overall, an excellent and insightful read.

RISE, SXSW

So next week is a big week. I'll be speaking twice - and actually, I'll be trying not to speak too much because I'm more interested in what you will say.

RISE. On Monday, I'll appear in a RISE session called "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work." It's at Link Coworking, 10am. There, I'll warm things up with a slide show, then lead a discussion about how people perform work that's very loosely organized: independent contractors, remote workers, specialists in cross-functional teams, and other adhocratic work arrangements. Since Link is a coworking space, it's a fantastic place to discuss these sorts of issues. Bring your stories about working in nonhierarchical arrangements, even if that just means working out of coffee shops.

SXSWi. On Friday, I'll lead a SXSW Interactive Core Conversation, also titled "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work." Isn't that a coincidence? But it will not be the same session. In this context, we'll be drawing people from across the country to drill deeper into this idea of loose organizations. We'll be tackling specific questions about loose organizations, such as their strengths, their challenges, and their best practices. If you saw my presentation on coworking at SXSWi last year, you'll be primed for this discussion. If you didn't, why, take a look at last year's slides. I'll bring the paper and sharpies; you bring best practices from your freelance work, telecommuting, community organizing, startup, or coworking space. (Especially your coworking space, since the Coworking Unconference will be in town.)

Both presentations will generate a lot of feedback, which I'll plan to post on this blog. So come back after SXSW. And don't hesitate to follow me on Twitter at @spinuzzi - I'll announce there when the summary is up.

Reading :: Networks and States

Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance
By Milton L. Mueller

A few years ago, I read Milton Mueller's excellent book Universal Service, which became an important resource in my 2008 book. So when I saw this book, I was intrigued enough to pick it up. I am, of course, glad that I did, because the book is terribly relevant. For instance, as I was reading Mueller's discussion of how countries can exert control over their citizens' Internet access, Mubarak cut Egypt's Internet access.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Mueller is interested in Internet governance, like Cowhey et al (a book he cites), and how it interacts with citizens' freedom, like Benkler (another book he cites). Mueller's a clear-eyed realist with a strong understanding of how governments and regulations function, so he avoids - and critiques - the excesses of some who believe that the Internet will simply cause people to be more free. Rather, he says, he's interested in the question of global Internet governance; "the problem of Internet governance has produced and will continue to produce institutional innovations in the global regulation of information and communications" (p.2). The Internet, he says, puts pressure on the nation-state in a number of ways:

• "it globalizes the scope of communication"; (p.4)
• "it facilitates a quantum jump in the scale of communication"; (p.4)
• "it distributes control" so that control is "no longer closely aligned with political units"; (p.4)
• "it grew new institutions"; (p.4)
• "if changes the polity" because lower costs and higher capabilities of group action mean that "radically new forms of collaboration, discourse, and organization are emerging" (p.5)

Mueller sets about examining how "these factors are transforming national control and sovereignty over communication and information policy" (p.5). He overviews a set of literatures that address these changes:

• Networked governance: "Governance networks are defined as relatively stable articulations of interdependent but operationally autonomous actors," he explains. In this literature, "Networked forms of organization are said to consist of looser affiliations of organizations and individuals that rely on regularized interaction to pursue cooperative goals. The bonds that hold the nodes together, so the theory asserts, are based on the reciprocal benefits that can be achieved by affiliation and cooperation - not on a division of labor defined and enforced from above" (p.6). Mueller sees this literature as speaking to how "networks that combine state and nonstate actors can overcome some of the limitations on government based on territorial sovereignty" (p.7).
• Commons-based peer production: "Peer production describes how producers of open source software or content such as Wikipedia rely on nonhierarchical, largely voluntary collaboration techniques within a nonproprietary legal framework and a ubiquitous networked infrastructure" (p.7). He relates this literature to how ISPs respond to security threats.
• Multistakeholderism: "the opening up of state-based international organizations to participation by 'stakeholders' besides governments" (p.7). He adds: "It might be described as the pluralization of international institutions" (p.8).

Mueller finds these ideas useful, but approaches them critically (p.8), testing each to see what it can contribute to the question of global Internet governance.

Chapters 2 and 3 are some of the most valuable chapters for me, because here Mueller attempts a taxonomy of networks. "Network has become a trendy term," he acknowledges, and asks: "When we talk about 'networks' are we talking about technologies, or societal organizations, or both? Or are we simply projecting the latest metaphor into any and every kind of social relationship we can see?" (p.17). Mueller introduces three cases in Chapter 2, then uses these in Chapter 3 to separate and taxonomize two uses of "network" in the social sciences: a formal analytical technique ("network analysis") and a theory or metaphor of social organization (network as an organizational form) (p.31). These can interact powerfully, he argues (p.31), but "they need to be carefully differentiated and kept distinct" (p.32).

He first describes network analysis (p.32), and cautions us: "Note that this method finds 'networks' anywhere and everywhere. ... The fact that this analytical method can be pplied to anything does not mean that the world is more networked than it used to be, nor does it necessarily herald the existence of some new kind of society or organizational form" (p.33).

In contrast, the notion of network-as-organizational-form is "more complicated," developing out of many disciplines. Mueller further taxonomizes this understanding of network:

• Production networks. "In economics and economic sociology, network has come to mean a mode of governance that differs from managerial hierarchies and markets" (p.34). He explains how "In the 1980s, theorists began to observe looser affiliations among multiple firms - outsourcing, franchising, research alliances, and other semi-autonomous relations - and to discuss how this phenomenon fit into the market-hierarchy dichotomy" (p.31). Although "the initial tendency was to describe them as hybrid organizational forms somewhere 'between markets and hierarchies,'" sociologist Walter Powell argued that they constituted a distinctive organizational form "based on the relationship rather than the transaction" (p.34).
• Peer production. In contrast, the peer-production view of networks is of "networks as a form of organization for production," in which an infrastructure of "ubiquitous, powerful networked information technology ... dramatically reduces the cost and magnifies the scope of establishing relationships based on the reciprocal benefits of association" (p.35). Mueller cites names that are familiar to readers of this blog: Adler, Benkler, Raymond, Rheingold, Shirky. Although "Benkler's concept of peer production sounds very similar to Powell's network organization," Mueller argues, the two are distinct: "the linkages between participants are usually not based on what Powell calls the relationship; in other words, interpersonal familiarity and trust. The relationship can be relatively autonomous and automated" (p.36). Mueller says that "one can think of peer-to-peer networks as a massively scaled-up, technologically driven version of the network organizational form - Powell on steroids" (p.36) and concludes that "peer-to-peer networks occupy an extreme space in any typology of network organizations. They might be considered a pure form or ideal type that reflects the full capabilities of the Internet" (p.37).
• Political networks. Here Mueller turns to network literature in political science. In this literature, "Originally, policy networks were conceived as relatively small and stable sets of corporate actors drawn into regularized interaction around a set of laws and regulations in a specific sector" (p.38). Such networks were seen as "an unconsciously formed clustering pattern" (p.38). Later, the concept was "broadened to include looser kinds of relationships, known as issue networks," and later "transnational advocacy networks (TANs)" (p.39).

In later literatures, networked forms of organization and policy networks were melded (p.40; cf. Ronfeldt et al. on the Zapatista netwar).

So, Mueller concludes, we see two distinct meanings of network in the social sciences: as "a loose but bounded and consciously constructed organization based mainly on leveraging the benefits of reciprocity" (i.e., "network organization"), and as "an unbounded and decentered cluster of actors around repeated patterns of exchange or contact" (i.e., "associative cluster") (p.41). Mueller describes two dividing lines between these: "Network organizations have a well-defined point of access and must explicitly decide on criteria for including and excluding participants. Associative clusters lack both features" (p.42). Network organizations are designed; associative clusters are de facto and relatively stable. Importantly, Mueller says, associative clusters have no agency: any "governance is a byproduct of many unilateral and bilateral decisions by its members to exchange or negotiate with other members" (p.42). To understand Internet governance, Mueller says, "we need both concepts of networks as a form of organization, but we must not confuse them" (p.43).

Mueller provides a nice table describing his taxonomy of networks and comparing them by specific features (p.44). He also examines how associational clusters might move toward network organization and then to hierarchies: conflict or negotiation over the distribution of benefits (p.46). He argues that

we can identify four ways in which the network organizations and associative clusters formed around the Internet might lead to institutional change:

1. By formalizing and institutionalizing the network relations themselves

2. By states' attempts to impose hierarchical regulation upon networked forms

3. By states' utilization and adoption of networked forms

4. By changing the polity; namely, by realigning and expanding the associative clusters around governance institutions (p.46)

Moving on. In Chapter 4, Mueller deploys this network taxonomy to examine the UN's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which represents "a clash between two models of global governance: one based on agreements among sovereign, territorial states; the other based on private contracting among transnational nonstate actors, but relying in some respects on the global hegemony of a single state" (p.55). In Chapter 5, he describes how WSIS "experimented with efforts to make international organizations more open and democratic by facilitating the participation of nonstate actors," leading to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) (p.81). In Chapter 6, he examines the IGF in more detail, particularly its embrace of multistakeholderism (p.107). And in Chapter 7, he examines the clash between two "IPs": intellectual property and Internet protocol (p.129).

Chapter 7 leads naturally into Chapter 8, about security governance. And although we may associate security with hierarchies, he argues, "the residues of hierarchy are becoming entirely dependent upon the network relationships of peer production to have any effect": Hierarchical actors must integrate into the "looser transjurisdictional, multistakeholder networks of operators" to do any work (p.173). And that gets us to Chapter 9, Content Regulation. Here, Mueller argues that the Internet "took the libertarian principle of 'absence of prior restraint' and globalized it" (p.185). A critical challenge, he says, is "a concept of freedom better suited to the system of large-scale, automated content generation, interconnected autonomous systems, and highly differentiated layers of access characteristic of the global Internet" (p.189).

Let's skip a bit. In Chapter 11, Mueller provides quadrants for understanding Internet polity. The axes are Transnational/National and Networking/Hierarchy; the quadrants are Denationalized Liberalism, Networked Nationalism, Global Governmentality, and Cyber-Reactionaries (p.256). And he argues that these quadrants can help us to understand what's going on right now. For instance, he says, "The nature of the political spectrum is profoundly changed when we are forced to make the territorial state a variable rather than a constant. ... The standard right-left spectrum does not provide reliable guidance on some of the basic institutional questions" (p.259). He provides various examples, then argues that we can't do without some form of "cyber-libertarianism," because cyber-libertarianism flags two problems:

• who should be sovereign, the people accessing the internet or the territorial states to which they belong?
• to what degree do "classical liberal precepts of freedom get translated into the context of converged media, ubiquitous networks, and automated information processing"? (p.268).

He argues that a territorial, democratic nation-state "doesn't scale to global proportions" (p.268), and "the answer to that dilemma may lie in the upper-left quadrant of the political space - a denationalized liberalism" (p.269). (Dedicated readers of this blog - if there are any - may detect some resonance with Phillip Bobbitt's work.)

Overall, the book was fascinating. I've spent a disproportionate amount of time on Mueller's frameworking on networks, since I thought he did a stellar job here and I'm quite interested in that aspect right now. But if you're more interested in Internet governance or global institutions or public policy, you'll find valuable things here as well. And if you're interested in how nation-states are being challenged by global communications, certainly the book is directly applicable. Definitely pick it up.

Are you here for ISAWR?

If you're here because you're considering voting for me for the ISAWR Steering Committee, welcome. Here's more about me:

• My curriculum vitae.
• My first book (2003)
• My second book (2008)

Thanks for considering me. CS

Reading :: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century
By Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison

I probably shouldn't admit this, but this book-length report is the first thing I've read by Henry Jenkins. But between the fact that I know his coauthor Alice Robison and the fact that the book's link (free PDF download) was tweeted by Howard Rheingold, I decided that I really ought to read it. I'm glad I did. This report provides a good overview of the changes we face in media literacy and how we might respond to those changes.

What's the issue? As the report argues, "more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced." These teens are often involved in participatory culture: "a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal men- torship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices" (p.xi). Participatory culture includes affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem solving, and circulations (pp.xi-xii). Jenkins et al. see the mastery of these as "key skills and competencies" (p.xii), but they are concerned with three issues that need interventions: the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge (pp.xii-xiii). So the authors urge that we teach the following skills: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation (p.xiv).

That's the overview from the Executive Summary. Let's dive into some of the more interesting parts of the report.

Jenkins et al. begin by defining participatory culture:

For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one with

1. relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,

2. strong support for creating and sharing creations with others,

3. some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices,

4. members who believe that their contributions matter, and

5. members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created). (pp.5-6)

They continue: "Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate" (p.10). For instance, "We suspect that young people who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greater comfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navigating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions about the quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with people from diverse cultural backgrounds" (p.13). The flip side, of course, is that many will not have access to such environments and therefore will not be able to develop such skills. The authors add:

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?
• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?
• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities? (p.27)

To address these concerns, the authors lay out "a framework for thinking about the type of learning that should occur if we are to address the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenges" (p.27). That framework includes the core media literacy skills mentioned above: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. They address each of these, using examples to demonstrate what they involve and how they can be developed.

Let's drill down to some of the more relevant bits. Some readers of the blog might find this quote interesting:

This focus on teamwork and collaboration is also, not coincidentally, how the modern workplace is structured—around ad hoc configurations of employees, brought together because their diverse skills and knowledge are needed to confront a specific challenge and then dispersed into different clusters of workers when new needs arise. Cory Doctorow has called such systems ad­hocracies, suggesting that they contrast in every possible way with prior hierarchies and bureaucracies. Our schools do an excellent job, consciously or unconsciously, of teaching youths how to function within bureaucracies. They do almost nothing to help youths learn how to operate within an ad-hocracy. (pp.74-75)

The report cites a 2005 blog post of Doctorow's, which is unfortunately no longer there. But you may remember that the term dates back at least to 1970's Future Shock. Nice to see it getting some play; since Doctorow's blog post is gone, I can't tell whether he took the term from Toffler's book or invented it independently, although it sounds like the same usage. In any case, nice to see that it still has some currency.

In any case, Jenkins et al. develop this thought: Whereas school attempts to develop generalists, "The ideal of a collective intelligence is a community that knows everything, with individuals who know how to tap the community to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis" (p.77). Among other things, this point leads the authors to conclude that "In a world in which knowledge production is collective and communication occurs across an array of different media, the capacity to network emerges as a core social skill and cultural competency" (p.91). And

Learning in a networked society involves understanding how networks work and how to deploy them to achieve particular ends. It involves understanding the social and cultural contexts within which different information emerges, when to trust and when not to trust others to filter and prioritize relevant data, and how to use networks to get individual work out into the world and in front of a relevant and, with hope, appreciative public. (p.96)

So: lots of gold in this report. There is also some dross. For instance, the authors cite the notion of distributed cognition but don't seem to really come to grips with what that notion entails - they see distributed cognition as being a sort of skill rather than a way of understanding cognition as a whole (pp.65-71). But overall, the report pushes us to think through what a participatory-culture classroom might look like. Definitely find some time to read it.

Reading :: Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond

Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond
Ed. Natasha Artemeva and Aviva Freedman

At a recent conference, one presenter was having trouble getting the projector to work. After a few minutes, to keep us from shifting uncomfortably, the session's chair brightly said that if we in the audience had any questions about genre studies, this was the time to ask. After all, the room was loaded with excellent genre scholars, she explained, then pointed to and listed several. It was an interesting moment, because the list was a partial roll call of scholars working in Rhetorical Genre Studies, a strand of North American genre theory. In RGS, genres are seen as texts-in-use; these scholars conduct empirical (generally observational) investigations, drawing from ethnographic and case study methods, rather than structural (i.e., focusing on a close examination of the texts themselves).

Alas, I can't offer you a room full of RGS scholars. But I can point you to this book, now available as a free PDF. You can get it by clicking on the link above. And if you're interested in genre studies, particularly in the North American (Bakhtinian, interpretive, text-in-use) tradition, you really should. It's a good strong introduction to RGS, answering questions such as: What does RGS tell us about how people learn genres? What are RGS' potentials and limits? In what areas does RGS need further development? How do you conduct a study in the RGS tradition?

The chapters are well done, and I especially liked Artemeva's bibliographic essay assessing the state of RGS. The studies - in settings such as classrooms, healthcare, engineering, and various workplaces - do a nice job of illustrating how RGS can frame methodologies and guide interpretation. And, like most well-done studies, they're entertaining.

Bottom line: Definitely download the book if you have more than a fleeting interest in genre theory or genre studies.

Reading in the Future, Part 2

Last Christmas Eve, I blogged about the new skills we might need as we migrate to electronic texts. Based on my experience reading Kindle books on my phone, I worried that these skills would be hard to attain. I still think it's an issue, but I've - very reluctantly - broken down and bought a Kindle.

The Kindle's advantages are many, particularly the outstanding display. But what sold me wasn't the Kindle-format books - it was the PDF reader. I have amassed nearly 500 PDFs of journal articles, white papers, book chapters, and whole books, and being able to carry and review them in one place is a game-changer. No more printouts, no more filling the precious space in my carry-on bags with heavy books. Yes, so that's all very nice.

Of course, I still have to go through some gymnastics to make sure I can actually read the PDFs on the Kindle's small screen, such as turning some PDFs sideways. (I could have bought an oversized Kindle DX, but didn't even consider the option - too big to carry.)

But here's what is tasking me now. Now that I can make all these PDFs portable, can I automatically pull PDFs of whole journals so that I can easily drop them on the Kindle?

Let's take an example. Every month, I sweep through my library's electronic subscriptions to certain journals such as Written Communication and JBTC. Both allow you to authenticate through the library, then click through to current or back issues, selecting and downloading PDFs of individual articles. Of course, I just download a few at a time, because the process is labor intensive. Sure, I don't have to walk to the library and photocopy them, but at (say) 30 seconds per article, I have to be pretty motivated to download all the PDFs before getting to the next journal.

Can I automate the downloading? That would be ideal. I'd love to be able to drop in a list of journals, then have my machine

1. scan the journals' sites for new issues
2. download all PDFs associated with the new issue
3. rename the PDFs according to a set scheme (say, author + title + journal)
4. inform me when new issues have been downloaded
5. automatically copy them to the Kindle when it's plugged in

Wouldn't you? What a huge time saver this would be. But this turns out to be a hard problem:

• Journals are owned by different publishers, and each requires that you authenticate with them (via the library, in my case).
• Even if you can get them to authenticate, the easy mass-download solutions I've found (e.g., DownThemAll, wget) may not be smart enough to traverse the two levels of links that Written Communication puts between the Current Issue page and the actual PDFs.

Has anyone put together a workable solution for this situation? If so, I'd love to hear it.

Reading :: Unanticipated Gains

Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life
By Mario Luis Small

Many studies that use social network analysis are a bit bloodless: They connect actors through reported relationships, they create interesting network diagrams, but they don't delve deeply into the qualitative data that explain why people connect. Unanticipated Gains is not one of those studies. Small does a really exceptional job here of both conducting a multimodal study and leveraging the different modes to provide a nicely contextualized analysis.

Here's what Small argues:

This book argues that people's social capital depends fundamentally on the organizations in which they participate routinely, and that, through multiple mechanisms, organizations can create and reproduce network advantages in ways their members may not expect or even have to work for. ... Understanding people's connections - and how much connections generate social inequality - requires understanding the organizations in which those connections are embedded. It requires conceiving of people as organizationally embedded actors, as actors whose social and organizational ties - and the resources both available and mobilized through them - respond to institutional constraints, imperatives, and opportunities. (pp.5-6)

To develop this argument, Small describes a study of parents whose children are in childcare centers. In such centers, parents who may not have other ties come together, develop relationships, and are connected to various other institutions - even if they have a "hi-and-bye" relationship with other parents in which they simply drop off and pick up their kids!

Small argues that this study helps us to answer a question that social network analysis (SNA) often ignores: How do people make social ties? (p.8). After all, "How a person forms and sustains a tie can affect the social capital to which she has access" (p.10). So Small draws on qualitative and quantitative data at individual and organizational levels, including a well-being study, a survey, 67 in-depth interviews of parents (mostly mothers), and 23 center case studies (p.23).

The results are fascinating. In Ch.2, Small demonstrates that childcare centers act as effective brokers: most mothers made new friends, and these new friends led to lower mental and material hardships. That's very good news, given the precipitous rise in clientele for daycares (p.29). Even mothers who didn't make friends in daycares found that their hardship was eased (p.43); those who made friends reported less depression (p.46). In Ch.3, Small demonstrates that the childcare centers actually made it much easier for mothers to make friends, since these centers offer multiple opportunities and inducements for parents to interact (p.51). These opportunities and inducements take the form of activities such as holiday productions, field trips, and fundraising - activities that Small explores nicely through case studies. It's not just motivation, it's opportunity that causes these friendships to develop (p.62) - something that really struck me as I continue to review my own data on coworking spaces.

How strong are the ties between parents? In Ch.4, Small examines strong vs. weak ties among mothers, and finds that strong ties are associated with support, while weak ties are associated with resources (p.85). But he also found, surprisingly, that some strong ties were both intimate and domain-specific - that is, some ties were "compartmentally intimate" (p.87). (Standard SNA assumes that strong ties are intimate, but weak ties are domain-specific.) He continues this theme in Ch.5, exploring how some mothers' support networks were larger than their friendship networks: Childcare centers both "facilitated trust among parents" and "established obligations that mothers felt compelled to follow, thereby creating a network of support" (p.108).

Childcare centers also brokered relationships with other organizations (Ch.6), allowing parents to access information, services, and material goods (p.135). Interestingly, Small says (Ch.7), this brokering meant that "childcare centers may either contribute to or buffer against the negative consequences of neighborhood poverty," depending on their lack or possession of appropriate links to other organizations (p.158).

In a nicely supported conclusion, Small argues that "the brokerage of organizational ties arises from the highly bureaucratic nature of contemporary society, where exchanging goods and resources constitutes much of of what business, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations do" (p.185).

Overall, this was a fascinating book for me. Small does a great job of arguing for and demonstrating his multimodal methodology; his case studies are rich and illustrative; his conclusions are intriguing and well supported. And of course the whole thing is fascinating. If you're even a little interested in SNA, social capital, or ties, take a look.

Reading :: Reputation

Reputation: A Network Interpretation
By Kenneth H. Craik

I've been reading a lot of social network analysis lately, mostly in sociology and related disciplines. But other disciplines have picked up elements of network analysis, including psychology. Kenneth Craik is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Berkeley, and Reputation involves a networked understanding of reputation from a psychological viewpoint.

Such an understanding isn't new - but, Craik tells us, the study of reputation has suffered "an interrupted mode of development": although Mark May and Phillip Vernon "advocated the study of person's reputation as centrally informative regarding an individual's personality" in the 1930s, that line of inquiry was dismissed in the late 1930s (p.126).

Craik aims to make up for lost time with a great deal of framework-building. He begins the book by defining reputation: "Reputation is not located on or in a person, like a left elbow or a knack for languages. Reputation is a dispersed phenomenon that is to be found in the beliefs and assertions of an extensive number of other individuals. ... Reputation is part of the social environment but uniquely referenced to a certain person" (p.xvii). Given the above, Craik defines the reputational network as made of two dimensions:

• Person knows other
• Other knows person

and these dimensions form a matrix of people in an individual's reputation network:

• Social network members (Person knows other; other knows person)
• Local and public figures (Person knows other; other does not know person)
• Unseen audience (Person does not know other; other knows person)
• Everybody else (Person does not know other; other does not know person) (p.xviii)

The reputation network is the focus for Part I of the book - not what's actually true, not how it affects the individual, but how a reputation network develops and works. Part II turns to the individual whose reputation is under discussion, examining how the network interacts with her or him. For my readers who study rhetoric, think of this understanding of reputation as an extended systematic exploration of ethos.

Craik develops three themes for reputation:

• "the membership of a person's reputation network" (Ch.1)
• "the ongoing social communication process through which news, observations, and impresions about an individual circulate along that person's reputation network" (Ch.2)
• "the ways in which each member of a person's reputation network gathers and accumulates impressions, beliefs, and evaluations about that specifically identifiable person" (Ch.3; see p.xix).

These elements "generate two major aspects of reputation: the discursive facet, dealing with actively flowing information, and the distributive facet, dealing with latent stored information about the person" (p.xix). In Part I, Craik devotes himself to analyzing these, including how to measure the accuracy and validity of information flowing through a reputation network (p.77).

So that's an overview of Part I, in which Craik manages to "keep the person as agent out of our conceptual analysis for as long as possible" (p.71). In Part II, he turns to the person as agent, examining how that individual is affected by her or his reputation network. He develops a model in which the personality system and social system interact (Ch.7). He also leverages a couple of case studies, including defamation law and an examination of posthumous reputation, to further explore how these systems interact.

The book is far-ranging and develops a strong framework, which Craik details in the Conclusion. However, I found myself skimming through the second half of the book. I don't think this has to do with Craik's writing or analysis so much as the fact that I had trouble applying it to my research or background. I'll likely revisit the book if I become more involved in studying representation. But if that's your interest, I recommend the book.

Reading :: What's Mine is Yours

What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
By Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers

[n.b., I'm reviewing the Kindle version, so I don't cite page numbers.]

"There is now an unbounded marketplace for efficient peer-to-peer exchanges between producer and consumer, seller and buyer, lender and borrower, and neighbor and neighbor," Botsman and Rogers tell us in the key statement of this book. "Online exchanges mimic the close ties once formed through face-to-face exchanges in villages, but on a much larger and unconfined scale. In other words, technology is reinventing old forms of trust." In their telling, social technologies have allowed more networked connections, and these connections point to "an emerging socioeconomic groundswell; the old stigmatized C's associated with coming together and "sharing" - cooperatives, collectives, and communes - are being refreshed and reinvented into appealing and valuable forms of collaboration and community. We call this groundswell Collaborative Consumption." Examples include services such as airbnb.com and, of course, coworking (which is what prompted me to pick up the book).

What distinguishes Collaborative Consumption from the other C's are scale and reach. The authors categorize their examples into "three systems - product service systems, redistribution markets, and collaborative lifestyles." These work through four principles: "critical mass, idling capacity, belief in the commons, and trust between strangers." The authors use many, many examples ranging from selling (craigslist, eBay) to connecting people with excess capacity (ZipCar, Freecycle, airbnb, coworking) to "dematerializing" formerly physical media into services (iTunes, Netflix).

In fact, it's this avalanche of examples that makes What's Mine is Yours so richly illustrative, and at the same time so embedded in a popular subgenre that includes works such as The Whuffie Factor and Wikinomics. Like those other books, this one skims lightly across the surface of a lot of different examples - and like those books, this one is necessarily going to have a relatively short shelf life because it relies so heavily on current examples in a fast-moving set of fields without doing a lot to deeply analyze those examples to produce principles. The range of examples makes us want to believe that the authors have discovered some basic principles. On the other hand, the authors often make causal arguments with very little proof - for instance, claiming that the Obamas' White House vegetable garden "evidently" inspired people to start their own gardens across the country. I noticed enough of these that I became quite suspicious of the authors' claims. Although I'm generally sympathetic to the authors' arguments about new ways of connecting, I'm also inclined to test propositions, and the authors don't seem to test them rigorously enough.

The authors can also be hectoring at times. When they tell me to "Think about your own credit card statement for a second (that is if you are not the one in four who has never looked at his or her own statement)," I roll my eyes because I cut up my credit cards years ago. When they tell me that "moving unused goods from nonuse to reuse is now practical," I think about how I've been moving my unused goods to thrift stores for years. And when they begin talking about a system for "banking" reputation - "In the same way that we can move our credit rating from one credit card to the next, our repository of trust will carry from one community to another" - I wonder what happened to decentralized and contextualized forms of trust.

Overall, What's Mine is Yours has some strong points, including a nice overview of coworking. I'd read it for a panoramic view of what constitutes collaboration in social media, as well as for some provocative thinking about the principles of collaborative consumption. But I'd supplement it with more rigorous research.

CFP: Special issue of Written Communication on Writing in Global Context

If you're conducting writing research in global contexts, please consider this CFP:

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Written Communication - Writing in Global Context

The Editor and Editorial Board of Written Communication invite article submissions for a special issue on Writing in Global Context, tentatively scheduled for publication in October 2011. Submissions from established and new scholars of writing theory and research are welcome.

With continuing political, economic, cultural, and technological change, the world is becoming a smaller place. In many ways, contemporary life is, or is rapidly becoming, global. Questions about global context are no longer just about doing business internationally, but are increasingly about learning to live in a complex and connected global world. And, of course, one of the ways that we live and work globally is through written communication.

Assumptions about knowledge making, rhetorical action, identity and subjectivity, purpose and agency; about what counts as writing, what it means to a writer, or a teacher of writing -- all these assumptions are problematized and hence must to be reconceived in global context.

In this Special Issue on Writing in Global Context we invite authors to take up and extend ongoing discussions that situate, and interrogate, writing globally. Over the last four years, over a quarter of the manuscripts in WC have come from researchers outside North America. We hope this Special Issue will also draw contributions from around the world.

This special issue of Written Communication will publish original research on issues of writing in global context. Contributions might include, but are not limited to, methodologically rigorous studies that examine questions such as:

• What is the role of writing within the new realities of global context?

• What does it mean to be a writer in global context?

• What is literacy in global context?

• How do new global relationships constrain, reflect, or anticipate written genres? And how do genres shape global realities?

• What is the role of writing technologies in global communication? How can technologies bridge, undermine, or complicate writing in global context?

• How do issues of trust and ethos play out in writing in global context?

• How do regulatory environments and legal constraints impact global writers?

• How are problems and potentialities of global writing rhetorically constructed?

• How is writing implicated in technology transfer and technology diffusion, especially between the global north and the global south?

• What kinds of language questions complicate and inform writing (and the study of writing) in global context?

• What new research methods, or objects of study, does the study of writing in global context call out?

Ultimately, the articles published in this Special Issue will present new research findings and advance theoretical understandings about what writing is and can be in global context.

Consideration of mss for this special issue will begin January 1, 2011 and continue until April 1, 2011, or until a suitable number of publishable mss has been identified. Submissions for this special issue will follow the normal, peer-reviewed practice of WC.

Written Communication is the premier international multidisciplinary journal of research on writing. The scope of the journal is broad and encompasses writing in its myriad contemporary forms, both within and outside the academy. Theoretical and applied contributions of articles in Written Communication are made explicit and will be relevant to researchers, theorists, teachers, and policy makers from a range of scholarly disciplines. Published articles will collectively represent a wide range of methodologies, but the methodology of each study must be handled expertly and described explicitly.

Guidelines for submission: Please follow the regular guidelines for submission, published in each issue of the journal and on the WC page of the Sage website. Please confirm in a cover letter that the piece has not been previously published and that it is not under review elsewhere. Also indicate that you wish the ms submission to be considered for the Special Issue on Writing in Global Context.

Special issues of Written Communication follow these guidelines:

1. A CFP will be published and distributed widely at least 6 months before the proposed publication date of the SI.

2. Submitted mss will be accompanied by a letter, addressed to the Editor, noting that the submission is meant for the SI and explaining how the ms addresses the topic of the SI.

3. Members of the journal’s Editorial Board will be used as reviewers, but the editor will also solicit names of other appropriate reviewers on the topic of the SI from EB members and others.

4. Scholars submitting articles for review for the SI may not serve as reviewers for that SI.

5. Published articles will report original research on writing, with explicit attention to methodology.

6. Editorial control of the review process and the selection of published articles rest with the journal editor.

7. Manuscripts not accepted for the SI may be considered for another issue of the journal.

Questions should be directed to Professor Christina Haas, Editor, at writtencomm@umn.edu.

Reading :: The Mismanagement of Talent

The Mismanagement of Talent: Employability and Jobs in the Knowledge Economy
By Phillip Brown and Anthony Hesketh

In some quarters, it's become popular to talk about a higher education bubble that is about to burst. Brown and Hesketh don't quite make that argument. But they do ask: "Does a KBE [knowledge-based economy] lead to a significant increase in demand for highly educated 'knowledge' workers? ... Is the problem of employability one of developing the appropriate attitudes and skills or does it reflect a mismatch between the aspirations of university graduates and labour market realities?" (p.2). More colloquially: if we educate more people at the college level, preparing them for knowledge work, does this help to transform the economy, creating jobs for them? Can that segment of the labor market absorb them?

To investigate the question, Brown and Hesketh interviewed "fifteen leading edge private and public sector organizations" as well as ten "policy stakeholders." They conducted case studies of six of the organizations, specifically in their assessment centers. That is, they examined the job interview process at these centers, including aptitude tests and post-job-interview discussions. They also interviewed 60 graduates applying for jobs (p.5). All aspects of data collection were in Britain, and the authors cautiously suggest that these data can provide insight into other developed countries' understanding of graduate employability as well (p.6).

To be clear: the authors are interested in what constitutes employability (from the point of view of those hiring and those being hired) rather than in analyzing the knowledge economy as a whole. Although they have some valuable and trenchant observations about the knowledge work literature, the real value is in how they examine their rich data on how people prepare for, conduct, and evaluate job interviews.

Job interviews, they argue, is a bit of a different game than it was. Credential inflation has meant that more people have college degrees and even advanced degrees such as MBAs (p.30). Consequently, employers extend recruiting criteria to include "personal capital" (p.31). When a larger pool of potential hires can demonstrate individual achievement, employers turn to social and personal considerations (p.32). Does the person get along with others? Does s/he have leadership potential? Is the applicant self-directed and able to work on tight deadline? "This has led employers to extend the range of managerial competence to include interpersonal sensitivity, good communication skills, persuasiveness, drive, resilience, adaptability, self-confidence, good judgement and problem-solving skills, together with creativity and business awareness. The model of managerial leadership has shifted from the bureaucratic to charismatic personality" (p.33; cf. Gloor). And they go on to argue that "these charismatic qualities ... represent the essence of knowledge work itself" (pp.33-34).

Personal capital, the authors argue, represent a combination of hard currencies ("credentials, work experience, sporting or music achievements, etc.") and soft currencies ("interpersonal skills, charisma, appearance, and accent") (p.35). Together, these skills are elements in a narrative of employability, told first by the applicant and later elaborated by potential employers (p.36).

Let's skip through Chapter 3, "What Knowledge Economy?," which summarizes and questions various claims made by knowledge economy proponents. They make some good points, but rely a bit heavily on the fact that the knowledge work literature is not very coherent. The really interesting things start in later chapters, where the authors present and interpret their data.

For instance, the authors discuss their 60 interviews with job seekers. These job seekers fall into two basic categories, "players" (who see job-seeking as a sort of game that involves positioning themselves to maximize their market options) and "purists" (who see job-seeking as meritocratic, as puzzle-solving, and as involving maintaining their career integrity) (p.125). The authors take what could have been a rather reductive binary and illustrate its nuances, drawing nicely on quotes from their interviews.

On the other side of the table, they also discuss how potential employers interview and evaluate candidates. "We argue that the public rhetoric of competence obscures the realities of what employers are looking for," they state: employers are actually looking for suitability, proactivity, and acceptability (p.148). Selection criteria, they argue have changed from the 1990s to the 2000s (p.150) due to various organizational changes. Importantly, candidates can't just rely on their resumes; they must "construct a narrative of employability which conveys their proactivity" (p.156).

The authors go farther, using their observations and interviews to develop a typology of categories in which employers tend to place candidates. This typology is illustrated nicely in a graph with axes representing hard and soft currencies (p.162), and demonstrated through interviews with employers. You want to be a Star, but not a Razor; a Geek but not a Nerd; a Safe Bet but not a Freezer. Such categorizations happen very quickly and via discussions rather than systematic examinations of evidence.

In their conclusion, the authors make clear that they don't consider the current system to be effective or humane. Evaluating people at the beginning of their career, the authors argue, is "inefficient and unfair"; productivity "depends on work context" rather than the abilities on display (p.198).

Overall, I found this book to be very interesting. The authors have developed what I think turned out to be a clever and insightful study. As a pragmatist, I filed away many tips that I can teach to my students to prepare them for interviews; as a rhetorician, I found the idea of a narrative of employability both plausible and intriguing; as a researcher interested in knowledge work, I found that the book deepened my understanding of how knowledge work has been understood, operationalized, and applied as well as how labor markets have changed. And as an educator, of course, I thought quite a bit about its implications for preparing students. If you fit one of these categories, pick this book up.