Reading :: The Republic of Korea

The Republic of Korea: Economic Transformation and Social Change
By David I. Steinberg

Writing in 1989, David Steinberg describes the history and economic transformation of the Korean peninsula, focusing on the Republic of Korea (also known as South Korea). Bear in mind that the book is written before the pivotal year of 1997, when an economic crisis set in motion far-reaching changes in how the Republic governs itself and manages its economy.

It's no easy task to summarize the history of a culture that spans 4000BC to the present day, but Steinberg does a credible job. After some introductory work, he covers early history (Chapter 3), traditional Korea from 1392-1904 (Chapter 4), the Japanese colonial period of 1904-1945 (Chapter 5), and the six Korean republics from 1945-1989 (Chapter 6). The remainder of the book describes Korean history and culture (Chapter 7), its politics and administration (Chapter 8), the role of the military (Chapter 9), its economic development from 1953-1986 (Chapter 10), its external relations (Chapter 11), and its future (Chapter 12).

Steinberg obviously has great affection for Korea—which I appreciated—but he doesn't minimize its difficulties. Nevertheless, the book ends on a positive note, one that foresaw some of the extraordinarily positive developments that the ROK has achieved since 1989.

Let's pick out some highlights. Korean culture seems to have taken "the clan as the basic element of social organization" since the late Neolithic (p.20). Although the Korean peoples appear to have descended from Siberians (p.19), Korea was strongly influenced and often dominated by China from 194 BC onward (p.21). The Han Dynasty conquered Korea in 108 BC, establishing the Lolang (or Nangnang) period, which "lasted several hundred years" (p.21). And "During this period, there developed a set of tribally organized states or groupings that eventually fused into what has become Korea. These were Puyo in the north and Mahan, Chinhan, and Pyonhan in the south" (p.21). Korea developed three city-states: Koguryo (founded 37 BC), Paekche (founded 18 BC), and Silla (founded 57 BC). Once "Koguryo ousted the Chinese in 313" (p.21), these city-states developed into the "three kingdoms," eventually uniting under Silla (p.22).

Korea, located near China and Siberia on one side and Japan on the other, acted as "a transmission belt, receiving and exporting culture and technology in the region" (p.22). Japan received much of its early culture, including Buddhism and art, through Paechke (p.22).

Steinberg says:

All three kingdoms showed a strong tendency toward patrilinial and hierarchical power. All were centralized, aristocratic states, with a very strong tradition, perhaps best known in Silla but apparently common in the area, of rank based on hereditary principles. In Silla, this was called "bone rank," and it influenced all forms of social and political behavior. The Silla aristocracy was organized into gradations of seventeen ranks, with only the top rankings allowed to have effective power. (p.25)

Indeed, as Steinberg later explains in the chapter on politics and administration, "Hierarchy is integral to the Confucian tradition and exceptionally pervasive. ... This sense of hierarchy is reflected in the Korean language itself, which like Japanese (but unlike Chinese) requires a complex system of grammatic and lexographic honorifics that expressly designate the relative status of each person referred to or involved in a conversation" (p.93). But hierarchy goes beyond the Confucian tradition:

The pre-Confucian social order was, in fact, more hierarchical than the Confucian ideal. Early Korean states were organized along rigid class differentiations based on "bone rank," or a hereditary system that eventually evolved into the yangban system. In this class of both civilian and military gentry, the civilians dominated. The yangban—the backbone of the political, governmental, moral, and social order—originally claimed status on the basis of aristocratic lineage, and then on their scholastic, and thus bureaucratic, standing. (p.93)

In fact, only the yangban could take the examinations that would allow them entry into the bureaucracy, resulting in a self-perpetuating upper class.

Steinberg saw this strong bureaucratic tradition as influencing Korea up to his day. In fact, he says, "The existence of an autonomous private sector in Korea, whether it be in education or in business, is arguable; nongovernmental or quasi-governmental might be a more accurate description of this sector. Public-private collaboration, with government in the lead, is the most usual form of action" (p.96). Furthermore, "power is generally considered finite," making power a zero-sum game: "to share power is to diminish one's power and one's position; to delegate it is to lose it" (p.98).

Understanding that tendency helps us to understand the chaebol, the clan-based conglomerates (e.g.,  Samsung, LG, Hyundai, SK) that developed during the Park regime of 1961-1979. "Because the chaebol were in debt to government-sponsored or approved institutions for more than four times the value of their equity assets (much higher than the debt of average Korean concerns and far higher than that of most compatible firms in other countries), state direction and intervention, culturally reinforced by traditional Korean and Confucian concepts of state power, were pronounced" (p.135).

Steinberg discusses a great deal more, including the sometimes rocky internal relations of the ROK and the similarly strained relations with the US and Japan. But let's leave the book here. It's a solid, sympathetic book that crams an improbable amount of information into its 218 pages. If you're interested in the history and culture of the ROK—up to 1989—this is a good place to start.

Topsight > How Chris is using Topsight

Last week I asked how people were using my new book Topsight. Recently I heard from Chris McCracken at Kent State. He was gracious enough to allow me to post some excerpts.

First, Chris is using parts of Topsight for his undergraduate business and professional writing class:

I have them work in groups to conduct sort of mini-studies of workplaces where they're required to design a study that involves interviewing a person who works there at least twice, observing him or her at work at least once, and collecting some artifacts.  They have to put all that together in an analysis of how information circulates in that organization and what their participant's role is in that process of circulation.  Sadly, Topsight came out just a little late in the semester for me to assign it to them, but I've been highlighting certain especially useful heuristics from the book to help them along. 

I began by having each group draft a research design matrix to understand why we're using the methods I'm requiring them to use--what they can expect to get out of conducting interviews and observations and collecting artifacts.  I'm meeting with each group individually over the coming week, and I plan on discussing coding with them and providing them with the analytical models for mapping resources and looking for handoff chains so they can get a better idea of how they might make sense of the data they're collecting.  Once they've all gathered their data, we're going to spend some time working with triangulation tables. 

Outstanding. One of the reasons I developed this book was to provide heuristics that would help people conduct hands-on audience analysis in a structured way. For a full semester study, the entire book is useful. But for mini-studies like these, it makes a lot of sense to pull out basic heuristics such as the research design matrix, resource maps, handoff chains, and triangulation tables. In fact, these are the same heuristics I highlight in my chapter in Solving Problems in Technical Communication.

Second, Chris is using Topsight as a guide in developing his own dissertation research:

I find the diagrams and flowcharts you've included in Topsight really helpful for stepping back and getting some perspective on where I'm at in my research, what questions need answering, and where I need to go next. It's kind of given me a sense of topsight for my own research process.  

In a follow-up email, he added:

One more thing: I forgot to mention how useful I found the section on pitching a study to stakeholders. A couple of interviews have not gone as well as they could have simply because I wasn't able to assuage their skepticism toward me and my study. Some of the biologists I've interviewed seemed to think that I--some guy from the English department who doesn't know a falcon tube from a pipette--was either there to criticize the way they do things or call their authority into question. If I'd been able to give them a clear and concise elevator-pitch right at the get-go, I think they would've opened up about their work a little easier, and my data would've been a little richer.

Yes. As I told Chris, the pitch process I describe in Topsight was based on my own (sometimes painful) trial and error. In fact, I don't recall seeing other field research texts describing how to pitch studies to stakeholders—mostly they tend to assume that you'll work it out. But as I've discovered, and as many of my students have discovered, people are often reluctant to take part in studies unless you can give them a clear idea of how they'll benefit. Topsight helps you formulate that pitch ahead of time. It's actually one of my favorite things about the book.

Anyway, thanks to Chris for writing.

Are you using Topsight? If so, shoot me an email. I'd love to hear what your experiences are.

“You know how in L.A. everyone has a movie script? In Austin, everyone has a startup."

That's the lead quote from my story on coworking that was just published by Shareable. Check it out. And if you're interested in coworking, consider joining us at GCGC2013.

Reading :: Net-Works

Net-Works: Workplace Change in the Global Economy: A Critical and Practical GuideBy Marvin S. Finkelstein

I ran across this book at UT's library while looking up a book on a related topic. It's written to introduce undergraduates and other nonspecialists to a sociological take on the global economy—chapters are named with declarative sentences such as "The Workplace is Socially Constructed" and "Teamwork Trumps Individualism at Work"—but I thought it might offer some concepts that weren't familiar to me.

Did it? Sort of. But it raised more questions than it answered.

On the plus side, the book provides some good overviews of sociological arguments that bear on the global economy. For instance, in Ch.1, the author discusses bureaucracy, putting it in a Weberian context. In other places, the author discusses the differences between groups and teams (p.66) and the concept of boundary management (p.72).

On the minus side, the book tends to advocate quite strongly for "flatter, less hierarchical social structures [that] can help make workplace arrangements more participatory, flexible, and able to cope with rapid change" (p.29); it contrasts participatory workplaces with authoritarian ones, claiming that the former "help create a more successful workplace" (p.39). Although I quite like the idea of such workplaces, different organizational structures and excel at different sorts of things. I agree with the author that flatter organization is usually associated with "creativity and innovation" (p.39), but it's also associated with higher transaction costs, lower efficiency, and lower ability to produce predictable outcomes. A participatory workplace might be "a more successful workplace" if you're talking about a creative shop that provides unique, innovative solutions, but it might be dramatically less successful if you're trying to ensure water quality or manufacture a million identical widgets.

I'm also skeptical about the author's claims that an authoritative workplace means that "we can't be ourselves" (p.42), while in a participatory workplace, "core inner feelings can be expressed through social roles in conscious ways" (p.43)—at best, an oversimplification. Even when working in small, flat organizations, people still perform.

The simplified contrast between authoritarian and participatory workplaces shows up in other ways. For instance, the author later argues that "individuals rely on the shared values, beliefs, and common goals of others to create informal social relationships that foster information feedback and rapid communication" (p.49)—something that is true of some, typically stable, organizations, but that doesn't fit well with the thin trust of collaborative communities, temporary alliances among organizations that share a goal, or people working within overlapping relations. Not to mention coopetition. Indeed, the author later mentions that some net-works are composed of temporary contractors, and worries that these net-works will reduce mutual obligation and trust (pp.108-109); he never quite squares this circle.

Ultimately, I was dissatisfied with the book. Although it does explore issues in the global economy, in my reading, it mistakes fundamental changes in work structure for voluntary changes in workplace relations. Consequently, it portrays globalized net-work as an aggregation of work, globalization, and new technologies rather than a qualitative change in work.

Reading :: Doing Pragmatics

Doing Pragmatics
By Peter Grundy

When I picked up this book—the 1995 edition, not the later one you'll find at the link—I thought, "Oh yes, pragmatics. Why did I not enjoy this in grad school?" Somewhere around Chapter 7, I remembered: It's all so very detailed.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm certainly glad that linguists are interested in studying and explicating the details. And Grundy provides a gentle-but-thorough introduction to several aspects of pragmatics, including indexicality, relevance, presupposition, and intentionality, using common (and very British) examples to demonstrate these aspects. The writing style is easy and casual, managing to illuminate concepts that may be difficult to the lay reader.

If you're planning to study pragmatics, or even if you just want a refresher, this book is a solid pick. Personally, I don't plan to do much with pragmatics—but now I know enough about it that I can have an intelligent conversation about the subject.

Topsight > How are you using Topsight?

Have you gotten your copy of Topsight yet? If so, I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an email and let me know how you're using it. Are you

• considering it for an undergraduate or graduate class?
• using it for your own organization?
• using it as a guide for your graduate field research?
• using it for consulting?
• [some other use here]?

I'd love to hear what you're using it for, and what you think of it. CS

GCUC 2013

Coworking has fascinated me since 2008, inspiring a series of blog posts, a research study, and most recently, an article about coworking in Austin.

Like the rest of the world, Austin has seen an explosion in coworking spaces, and with it, a thriving and rapidly diversifying coworking ecosystem. Among other things, Austin is now hosting the Global Coworking Uncoworking Conference for the second year in a row. It's an exciting event, and I'm happy to be part of it.

This year, I'll be moderating a panel on Specialization in Coworking at GCUC on March 5. Come join us and see what kinds of coworking spaces are popping up.

(upcoming)

I've been quiet on the reading front lately, but that's not because I haven't been reading. Here are some of the books I'll be reviewing soon:

• Grundy. Doing Pragmatics
• Finkelstein. Net-works: Workplace Change in the Global Economy
• Steinberg. The Republic of Korea: Economic Transformation and Social Change
• Suh and Chen. Korea as a Knowledge Economy
• Kim. Crisis and Change: South Korea in a Post-1997 New Era

Topsight > Topsight on Good Day Austin

I just finished a segment on Good Day Austin about my new book, Topsight. Thanks to Keri and everyone else at Fox 7!

(Practical ethnography)

A recent tweet let me to a site for a book-in-progress called Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in The Private Sector. It looks interesting. Although it covers some of the same ground as my own book Topsight, it's an ethnographic approach (as opposed to Topsight's case study approach).

The author, Sam Ladner, is a Senior User Researcher at Microsoft and a sociologist by training. And partof what I like about the book description is that you can see her practical bent: the book will cover "How to manage clients and corporate stakeholders while doing ethnography" and "How to get buy-in for ethnographic findings."

The book's site has two sample chapters for download. The writing is engaging, the concepts are well explained. If you're interested in applying ethnography to the private sector, take a look.

Reading :: Writing the Economy

Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre And Technology in the World of Banking
By Graham Smart

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I hadn't gotten to this book until recently. To be honest, I kept thinking I must have read it at some point—partly because I've read other of Smart's publications about this same two-decade ethnography set at the Bank of Canada. But when I picked up the book itself, the sheer scope of the project became clear.

The book is ambitious, covering how policymakers at the Bank developed policy, using texts, software, models, and other strategically deployed information resources. Smart uses activity theory, genre theory, and a number of other related frameworks to examine this work, not just in terms of how these information resources conveyed information or explicitly persuaded people, but also in how they worked together to implicitly persuade stakeholders, how they embedded assumptions and warrants, and how they functioned differently in different contexts.

The book relies heavily on long ethnographic interviews, and block quotes are frequently interspersed with interpretation in the central chapters. Smart also uses close readings and examinations of texts, including representative documents in the appendix. In fact, Smart works hard to make this book a true ethnography, both citing and using the methods of critical ethnography.

Writing the Economy makes several contributions in terms of advancing theory, applying ethnography to the study of work, and examining relationships among texts. It's a solid book, and one that I expect I'll read again.

Topsight > Come to ATTW/CCCC and talk to me about Topsight

Planning to be at ATTW or CCCC in March? Interested in using my book Topsight for a course?

If so, contact me. I'll be in Las Vegas from Wednesday evening through Saturday morning (speaking in sessions on Thursday and Saturday), and I'll be happy to meet with you and share my experience teaching an undergraduate field methods course with the book. I won't try to give you the hard sell, just discuss the book and whether it will fit into your program. And I'll bring a couple of copies so you can take a look for yourself.

See you at the Cs!

Topsight > Get a sample

If you're thinking about buying Topsight, but you're not sure, don't forget:

• Amazon will let you search inside the book. 
• You can also download the front matter and first chapter on Kindle, which should give you a good idea of how the book is structured.
• The book's website provides downloads and extras, including figures and a sample lesson plan.

I expect to continue adding downloadable materials as time goes on—and I'm taking suggestions. What extras would you like to see on the website and/or in the next edition?

(Getting the Nexus 10)

Usually I blog about reading and writing, but occasionally I talk about tech. Today's tech topic is something that I actually did not want to buy: a tablet.

I've long resisted buying a tablet for myself. Tablets occupy a space between laptops (such as my Macbook Air) and smartphones (such as my Galaxy Nexus), and frankly, I didn't think that space was big enough to fill. The biggest reason would be to read Kindle books and PDFs, and I had something that would do that: A Kindle Touch (which I similarly resented when I bought it).

In fact, I like my Kindle Touch very much. No, I can't practically surf the Web on it, nor can I easily listen to music, nor can I watch movies. But I don't particularly care to do any of these things in a tablet form factor. I can read, and the e-ink screen is great for that function. Battery life lasts forever. And it's portable.

But the Kindle Touch is too small. I can read some PDFs on it, but not all, because the screen doesn't have enough real estate. I can't mark up PDFs. And the larger Kindle, the Kindle DX, is no longer sold. As I faced the prospect of spring classes with heavy PDF readings, as well as the prospect of traveling with either printed PDFs or PDFs on the Kindle that I could barely decipher, I sighed and decided that I had to buy a tablet.

Which one? The iPad was an obvious choice, and I'm quite familiar with it. I just don't like it. I don't like iOS.

So I made the hard decision to buy the Nexus 10. Not the Nexus 7, which is a good deal cheaper and more portable—I didn't think it would be big enough to display some PDFs—but the 10, which is roughly the size of the iPad. And once I bought it, I decided to use it for everything I could, not because I particularly wanted to, but because I wanted to get as much out of it as I could.

So here's the results:

• The tablet is indeed good for reading and marking up PDFs. In fact, I now store my PDF library on Google Drive, so I can use the Drive app to find a PDF and touch it to bring it up. If I want to mark up a PDF, though, I have to save it locally.
• In fact, Google Drive turns out to be very good on the tablet. I can make spot changes to documents without much trouble, and I can download them to the tablet for offline reading (but not editing). Drive has really improved the commenting function too.
• The tablet's just okay for reading Kindle books, but I got tired of the glare and the big screen isn't an advantage; I prefer the Kindle Touch for this application. 
• On the other hand, it's very good for scanned Google Play Books. For instance, I read Franz Boas' The Mind of Primitive Man (free from Google Play), a book I had been meaning to finish for a while. Annotations are easy.
• Instagram pictures are way too big on the tablet.
• The big winners are Google Calendar and Astrid (the to-do app where I currently manage my projects). I've managed both via my phone and laptop, but the tablet combines the advantages of both: a more portable form factor than the laptop, but a bigger screen than the phone. 
• Web surfing and email are fine, but suffer from the current limitations of the mobile platform. I find myself turning to the phone first for light use.
• Presentations would be a great application, but the tablet's video out is a micro HDMI, which doesn't seem to play well with VGA. If I can resolve this problem, I'll probably leave my laptop at home when I travel in March—not only is the tablet lighter, it doesn't need to be pulled out of the luggage when I go through security.
• The tablet is okay for bringing up documents in meetings. But I have not tried to take notes on it; the screen can't accommodate fast enough typing.

Overall? I really resent having to have another screen in my life. But I do see definite applications for the tablet in my tech ecosystem, especially for travel. YMMV.

Writing :: Topsight

Spinuzzi, C. (2012). Topsight: A guide to studying, diagnosing, and fixing information flow in organizations. Austin: CreateSpace.

This is the seventh post in my series on writing documents, but it's also another entry on how I wrote and published Topsight. But the main focus is going to be on the writing process.

I've been kicking around the idea of writing a methodology book for a while. In fact, I've been teaching graduate and undergraduate versions of a field methods course since 2001, when I taught a graduate-level course on user-centered design at Texas Tech. Early on, I used Beyer and Holtzblatt's excellent book Contextual Design—even though I didn't agree with some of their recommendations, they did really groundbreaking work in terms of making field methods understandable to lay readers. 

Later, I started using my own Tracing Genres through Organizations in undergraduate classes, although I had to supplement it heavily with lectures and additional texts to make it usable. In particular, I had begun stringing together analytical constructs that had developed after TGTO, such as sociotechnical graphs, and I had to use lectures and extra texts to wedge these into a larger system of analysis. 

The other problem with TGTO is that although it's about methodology, it's not an introductory text; it doesn't teach students how to design a study, discuss research ethics, or describe the tips and tricks that I have developed for eliciting responses or getting people to buy into the study. In fact, few methodology books do this. And that's too bad! I've been conducting field studies since 1997, and in the process I have discovered several ways to ruin studies. I could tell students about these wrong moves in class, but I lacked a text to help them with pitching and conducting a field study—and I began to realize that most methodology books didn't go very far in this direction.

In the meantime, I began conducting some seminars on field methods along with longtime research partners Bill Hart-Davidson and Mark Zachry, as well as a solo seminar early this summer. At the end of the solo seminar, I came away convinced that I needed to write a book that would address all the issues above. This book, I realized, should

• be written in a clear, engaging style
• use common-sense, concrete examples and analogies
• take people step-by-step through the process of designing, conducting, and analyzing a study—and turning it into concrete recommendations
• provide clear terms and figures

The last point—"provide clear terms and figures"—was especially pressing. I was using unwieldy terms such as "Contradiction-Discoordination-Breakdown Tables," then shortening them with three-letter acronyms: CDBs, STGs, GEMs, CEMs, ASDs, ANDs, OTs. And my figures were done by hand in Google Draw. These confused people. And I didn't want them to be confused. So I had to develop clearer terms and figures.

As I've discussed, I decided to publish this book myself—a big decision, but one that allowed me to retain control over the book. That meant that I could set my own conversational style, using the contractions and Scooby Doo and Simpsons references that give the book its friendly tone (and that would likely be scrubbed out by an editor). I took full advantage of this freedom to create a methodology book that I would want to read and that I thought readers (from undergraduates to grad students to consultants) would enjoy. 

Writing in this style was hard at first; I had to keep pretending I was blogging so that I wouldn't drop parenthetical citations everywhere.

This decision also meant that I could work on an accelerated timetable. I worked on the manuscript part-time from July to November, using my existing materials as a starting point and soliciting feedback on the finished manuscript from people who were familiar with the methodology. That feedback loop was critical: self-publishing can mean posting work without review, but I knew it was critical to get knowledgeable people to tell me where I had gone wrong. They did, and they ended up changing the book for the better. 

The rest of the time, from November to yesterday, was production work. 

Perhaps it's because the production cycle was so short, but I am still excited about the book. I keep turning to different pages and getting excited about the information I was able to provide, information that I rarely see in other methodology books. Information such as 

• how to introduce yourself to participants—and how to gently correct mischaracterizations of your study
• how to put together an elevator pitch for your study
• how to design a study at macro, meso, and micro levels, collecting both etic and emic data
• how to systematically develop representations of the data, including activity systems and activity networks
• how to write an interim report and a recommendation report based on the study

So: this writing route allowed me a lot of freedom. I wouldn't choose this route for every book—in fact, I'll soon be looking for a publisher for my next book project—but it was certainly worth doing, and it certainly resulted in a different writing experience from the others I've discussed in this series.

Topsight > Go buy my book!

I'm excited to announce that Topsight is available for purchase!

Currently you can buy one of two different versions:

• The Kindle version is available on Amazon right now. Only $9.99. You can search inside the book too.
• The printed version is available via Amazon CreateSpace now, and will soon be available via Amazon.com. $24.99. 

Wow, that means that you can buy both the printed and the Kindle version for less than the list price of Tracing Genres through Organizations. Which you really should also buy. 

When the printed version propagates to Amazon.com, I'll update my Amazon author page. Until then, follow the links. And let me know what you think!

Topsight > The publishing process

It seems like forever since I first announced that I was planning to publish Topsight. But I get my final proof from Amazon CreateSpace in the mail tomorrow, and I've viewed a draft of the Kindle Direct Publishing version already. So I'm hoping that I can pull the trigger midweek—and I'll announce it here when I do.

While we wait, here's some observations about the self-publishing process. I've already talked about why I decided to self-publish this book; here, I'll talk about what the process looks like.

The printed book: Amazon CreateSpace
I chose to use Amazon CreateSpace (ACS) because Amazon has a great distribution network, because I already have an author page, and because self-publishing is simple there. ACS is a print-on-demand platform, which means that each book is individually printed. That means higher per-book printing costs, but I don't have to worry about volume; extra copies won't be sitting in warehouses waiting to be pulped.

ACS prints the book, but technically, I'm the publisher. That means that Amazon takes a percentage of each sale for printing and distribution, and I get the rest. In practical terms, I can set my own royalties. (But I'm setting the price fairly low so that everyone can enjoy Topsight.)

In practical terms, I supply ACS with two files:

• A cover PDF
• An interior PDF

ACS supplies Word templates for the interior, and also supplies design services for an extra fee. However, I opted to hire a graphic designer, copyeditor, and production person out of my own pocket to produce the print-ready PDF. I also rented Adobe InDesign (about $99 a month) to implement final changes by hand. These costs added up.

The designer and production person also developed the cover. ACS provides a specific formula for calculating the width of the spine, based on the paper you choose. 

The range of choices and services is impressive here. You can choose book formats as small as 5"x4" (the size I chose) or select a custom size; you can hire Amazon to design the cover and interior or do it yourself; you can use their Word templates. You can even hire them to do copyediting.

Once the PDFs were ready, I uploaded them and ACS automagically identified potential PDF errors. The cover went though fine, but I had to correct several errors involving headers and text that ran slightly into the margins. Each error was highlighted in the online view—I was impressed with how thoroughly error checking was handled and how easy it was to understand the errors.

After a few tries, I generated an error-free PDF and proceeded to the next step: a human being checked the document. It took less than 24 hours. 

At that point, I had the option to order a proof or just launch the thing. Although I was impatient, I ordered the proof (about $5) and paid a premium (about $25) to deliver it as soon as possible (5 days).

While awaiting the proof, I was guided through the pricing process. ACS gives several options here too, each of which might involve extra fees or affect royalties. Despite the extra cost, I opted for expanded distribution channels so that libraries and bookstores could order it ($25) and also opted to allow printing in different countries (a royalty fee). 

Once that was done, I was guided to Kindle Direct Publishing for the option of creating a Kindle book.

The Kindle book: Kindle Direct Publishing

Clicking a button transfers the cover and interior PDFs and metadata to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). KDP is a different animal. For one thing, you have different, more simplified formatting options. For another, you can't use the same ISBN (and you don't need an ISBN at all.) Third, distribution channels are more flexible because you're not moving paper around, just bits.

Two of these are headaches.

First, the formatting. Kindle books are modified, simplified HTML. That means that an InDesign file doesn't translate directly to Kindle. The easiest thing is to build a Word file, then convert it. In fact, if you read Kindle publishing guides, they claim that you have to convert the final version to HTML; fortunately this is no longer the case.

To handle the conversion, I did the following:

1. Went into InDesign's Story Editor, copied the body, and pasted it into a Word file.
2. Went into the Story Editor again to copy the front matter, then pasted it into the same Word file.
3. Went through the entire InDesign document, identified all materials outside the main story (tables and figures), copied them into Preview, saved them as JPEGs (per the Kindle publishing guide), then placed them each into the Word file.
4. Reformatted as appropriate, including deleting page numbers from the Table of Contents, List of Tables, and List of Figures.
5. Discovered that the procedure for autogenerating TOC hyperlinks doesn't work on Word for Macintosh.
6. Deleted all but the first level of the TOC, then hyperlinked these by hand.

I then uploaded the Word file to KDP. Within minutes, it gave me a preview on a simulated Kindle Fire screen. (You can switch orientation or simulate a Kindle HD, second-generation Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, iPad, or iPhone screen.) I also downloaded a Kindle version to view on my Kindle and my Nexus 10. 

I'm glad I did, since I found some conversion errors. For instance, I discovered that I had to save the graphics at a higher resolution and set them to the proper size. On the whole, though, the process was tedious rather than challenging; I probably spent about six hours on the conversion.

It's worth noting that if I had used the ACS Word template, the conversion would have probably been even less painful. If I do this again, I'll probably go that route.

Once I was satisfied with the Kindle version, I was given the option to take 35% royalties (which would allow me to set any price) or 70% royalties (which limited me to charging $9.99 and was available only in some countries.) I tried various configurations, then set a price.

I'm also not entirely happy with how graphics render in the Kindle version, so I've made some of the graphics available from the book's website; I'll likely add more as I go.

Lessons learned

I'm really impressed with how easy it is to publish in both ACS and KDP. It's not for the faint of heart, and it involves more detail work than I like to do, but it has allowed me to turn out a book at relatively low cost, quickly, while retaining creative control. And that's been tremendously exciting.

What would I do differently next time? I would consider developing the PDF using one of the existing Word templates rather than InDesign. That's not because the product would look better—I think it wouldn't—but it would be quicker, easier, and cheaper to produce, as well as being easier to convert.

Overall, though, I'm very happy with the experience. Looking forward to seeing the proof. 

Reading :: Networked

Networked: The New Social Operating System
By Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman

I have been meaning to review this book for a while—I probably finished it in July—but I have been put off by the sheer amount of work it deserves. Let's see if I can do it justice.

In this book, the authors explore how networks among people have transformed how we connect with each other, both personally and electronically.

Chapter 1 summarizes the book's main argument pretty well. People "have become increasingly networked as individuals, rather than being embedded in groups. In the world of networked individuals, it is the person who is the focus: not the family, not the work unit, not the neighborhood, and not the social group" (p.6). They term networked individualism "an 'operating system' because it describes the ways in which people connect, communicate, and share information" (p.7). Its characteristics are

• personal
• multiuser
• multitasking
• multithreaded (p.7).

It requires new strategies and skills for solving problems (p.9). And it involves a "triple revolution":

• We can reach beyond tight groups (p.11)
• We have new communication power and information-gathering capabilities (pp.11-12)
• Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are a "bodily appendage," always accessible (p.12).

Here, the authors italicize their main points; I'll just bullet them:

• "Many meet their social, emotional, and economic needs by tapping into sparsely knit networks of diverse associates rather than relying on tight connections to a relatively small number of core associates." (p.12)
• "Networked individuals have partial membership in multiple networks and rely less on permanent memberships in settled groups" (p.12)
• "A key reason why these kinds of networks function effectively is that social networks are large and diversified thanks to the way people use technology" (p.13)
• "The new media is the new neighborhood" (p.13)
• "Networked individuals have new powers to create media and project their voices to more extended audiences that become part of their social worlds" (p.13)
• "The lines between information, communication, and action have blurred. Networked individuals use the internet, mobile phones, and social networks to get information at their fingertips and act on it, empowering their claims to expertise (whether valid or not)" (p.14)
• "Moving among relationships and milieus, networked individuals can fashion their own complex identities depending on their passions, beliefs, lifestyles, professional associations, work interests, hobbies, or any number of other professional characteristics" (p.15)
• "At work, less formal, fluctuating, and specialized peer-to-peer relationships are more easily sustained now compared with the past, and the benefits of boss/subordinate hierarchical relationships are less obvious" (p.15)
• "The organization of work is more spatially distributed" (p.16)
• "Home and work hae become more intertwined than at any time since hordes of farmers went out into their fields" (p.16)
• "While ICTs have shattered the work-home dividing line, they have also breached the line between the private and public spheres of life" (p.17)
• "New expectations and realities about the transparency, availability, and privacy of people and institutions are emerging" (p.17)
• "In the less hierarchical and less bounded networked environment—where expertise is more in dispute than in the past and where relationships are more tenuous—there is more uncertainty about whom and what information sources to trust (p.18).

With that summary in mind, the authors dive into the rest of the book.

In Chapter 2, "The Social Network Revolution," the authors discuss social networks (in the sociological sense, that of relationships among individuals) (p.21). They identify several major trends:

• Widespread connectivity (pp.22-27), including more ground and air travel, more telecommunications and computing, and more commercial and social interconnectedness due to trade.
• Weaker group boundaries (pp.27-30), due to changes in family composition, roles, and responsibilities; the rise of ad hoc, informal networks over structured and bounded voluntary organizations; and the fragmenting of media markets.
• Increased personal autonomy (pp.31-34), due to increased work flexibility; falling barriers related to ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation; and the rise of IRAs and the decline of defined benefit pensions.

Although people still think they're in groups, the authors say, they're really in networks (p.35). In networked sociality, boundaries are more permeable, interactions occur with diverse others, hierarchies are flatter and more recursive (p.37). The authors provide a table comparing group-centered society with networked individualism (p.38).

In Chapter 3 and 4, "The Internet Revolution" and "The Mobile Revolution," the authors turn to the rise in Internet and mobile connectivity, discussing how these changes connected us in different ways. In particular, mobile devices make us hyperconnected (p.95) and hypercoordinated (p.99), and norms have not caught up to practice (p.105). For instance, "mobile hyperconnectivity in fuzzily bounded public-private space" can lead to problems such as private conversations overheard in public spaces as well as questions of who should and shouldn't be in the loop.

In the next section, the authors address how networked individualism works. In Chapter 5, "Networked Relationships," they describe communities as fluid personal networks, noting a post-WWII shift from door-to-door to place-to-place communities (p.122). With the triple revolution, we're undergoing another shift, from place-to-place to person-to-person (p.123). "Their networks are sparsely knit, with friends and relatives often loosely linked with each other" (p.124). And the authors suggest thinking in terms of "a networked self: a single self that gets reconfigured in different situations as people reach out, connect, and emphasize different aspects of themselves" (p.126). In their personal networks, communities become sparsely knit—most members aren't directly connected—and specialized—different network members help each other with different types of support (p.135).

In Chapters 6 and 7, "Networked Families" and "Networked Work," the authors note similar changes in the family. Lifelong marriage has gone the way of lifelong employment. Work involves multiple teams and multiple purposes (pp.171-172). Work trends include 

• globalization of work, consumerism, travel (p.172)
• a shift from atom work to bit work (p.172)
• the internet and mobile revolutions (p.173)
• the ability to work at a distance (p.173)
• the resulting trend toward mobile work using primarily laptops and smartphones (p.173)

These trends especially affect workers whose organizations are "permeable"; workers directly connect with each other, and their work structure is "more flexible, laterally coordinated, team based, and boundary spanning" (p.177). Information is the key asset, and its flow is critical for success (p.178). Networked organizations have familiar characteristics:

People often work in multiple projects with different teams. This allows firms to assemble ad hoc teams with diversified talents and perspectives. As workers shift among teams, they can develop cumulatively larger networks of expertise that are "glocal," with both local interactions and global connectivity. Instead of submitting to the traditional hierarchical ode of authority, workers have more discretion about the work they jointly accomplish. Networked organizations have advantages for boundary spanning, as employees work and network between work groups and organizations—and at times, between continents. (p.181)

In these organizations, the structure tends to be flatter, with fewer reporting relationships, and more informal (p.182).

Networked work also involves more work from home (p.186).

Let's leave it there. The authors have plenty more to say: about networked creators (Ch.8), networked information (Ch.9), how to thrive as a networked individual (Ch.10), and the future of networked individualism (Ch.11). But I'm most interested in the analysis above, which is so worthwhile that I regret sitting on this review for so long. If you're interested in networked individualism, certainly take a look at this book.

Reading :: Explorations in Information Space

Explorations in Information Space: Knowledge, Actor, and Firms
Edited by Max H. Boisot, Ian C. MacMillan, and Kyeong Seok Han

I just reviewed Boisot et al.'s Collisions and Collaboration, and in that review I discuss Boisot's I-Space in detail. This collection further discusses and applies I-Space.

The book's purpose is "to provide some theoretical perspective on the nature of organizationally relevant knowledge and to indicate the kind of research that might generate empirically testable hypotheses and hence to further the development of a knowledge-based theory of the firm" (p.6). The I-Space is central to that theorizing, meant to provide insight into "the nature of information and knowledge flows in any system" (p.7). The authors assume that "the speed and extent to which information diffuses within a population of agents is a function of how far that information has been structures" and that "information only becomes knowledge if it gets internalized and becomes part of the recipient's expectational structure—that is, if it affects the recipient's belief structure taken as disposition to act" (p.7).

For me, the interesting stuff started in Chapter 4. The authors start by claiming that "How far knowledge gets articulated determines how speedily and extensively it can be shared" (p.109). Although economics has taken the default assumption that markets underlie all other forms (p.109), Boisot et al. argue that "the heterogeneity of organizations, not their homogeneity, had to be taken as a default assumption when analyzing organizational strategies" (p.110). Since organizations are characterized by heterogeneity, articulation and sharing are thus impeded, and so "transaction costs and benefits remain heavily stacked against the kind of articulation of knowledge that would be required to make the choice of markets either ubiquitous or even symmetric with that of organizations" (p.110). So, they conclude, "in the beginning there was the organization" (p.110).

Given this assumption, the authors outline E-Space (epistemic space), with the axes of codification and abstraction. At the most uncodified, concrete corner, we get embodied knowledge; at the opposite corner, we get abstract symbolic knowledge; and in the middle, we get a band of narrative knowledge (p.123). The authors then add the axis of diffusion in order to produce the familiar I-Space—and we now see that embodied knowledge tends to be the least diffused, while abstract symbolic knowledge tends to be the most diffused (p.131). That is, the more well-compacted and abstract knowledge is, the more mobile and fluid it tends to be. Yet at the same time, codification and abstraction involve data losses (p.131).

Boisot et al. claim implications for economics. For our purposes, the most interesting one is that, below a certain threshold of codification and abstraction, a shared context between sender and receiver favors hierarchies rather than markets (p.136).

Chapter 5 continues exploring the nature of organizations. Here, Boisot discusses the evolution of bureaucracies from Gemeinschaft (local, personalized) to Gesellschaft (large, ubiquitous, impersonal) (p.147). Boisot pegs this shift to the printing press, which provided information storage and diffusion (p.148). Similarly, Boisot argues, modern ICTs might favor options other than bureaucratic hierarchies and competitive markets to other options, such as clan-like networks (p.150).

To make this argument, Boisot discusses bureaucracies, markets, fiefs, and clans in the same terms that he discussed them in Collisions and Collaboration. He adds that we can think of three types of complexity:

• Codification: Descriptive complexity
• Abstraction: Computational complexity
• Diffusion: Relational complexity (p.155)

"We hypothesize that building effective institutional structures in market and clan regions widens the complexity region and helps to stabilize it while simultaneously reducing the size of the region in the I-Space from which they chaotic regime can 'attract' transactions—that is, its basin of attraction" (p.159). Furthermore, modern ICTs shift the diffusion curve because of two effects:

• The diffusion effect: "at any given level of codification and abstraction, more information will reach more people per unit along the diffusion scale than hitherto" (p.160)
• The bandwidth effect: "any given proportion of the population located at some point along the diffusion scale can be reached at a lower level of codification and abstraction—that is, at a higher bandwidth—than hitherto" (p.160). 

In fact, "the rightward shift in the diffusion curve appears to privilege both market institutions over bureaucratic ones and clan-like institutions over fiefs" (p.161). Evidence for markets-over-bureaucracies: "the average size of firm in the United States has actually been falling over the past thirty years" due to outsourcing (p.161). Evidence for clans-over-fiefs: "the emergence of interpersonal networks and relational contracting between firms" (p.161). 

I don't think I've sufficiently assimilated Boisot's work to relate it well to other frameworks I've examined. But I am really intrigued by this line of reasoning, particularly Boisot's consideration of how ICTs change the landscape of organizations. If you're similarly intrigued, take a look. 

Reading :: Collisions and Collaboration

Collisions and Collaboration: The Organization of Learning in the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC
Edited by Max Boisot, Markus Nordberg, Said Yami, and Bertrand Nicquevert

I picked this book up primarily because it was one of the few recent books out there to use the term "adhocracy"—a term that I'm currently researching for a project. But it turns out that Boisot is quite well known for his writings on information and strategy (though not so well known in the circles where I typically read and publish, alas). After reading this book, I can understand why: his I-Space framework is useful for thinking through the relationships between organizational characteristics and the circulation of information.

Let's talk about I-Space first, then get back to the book project.

I-Space is depicted as a three-dimensional space, a cube with three axes:

• Codification: from very uncodified to very codified information. "Codification is indexed by the amount of data-processing required to distinguish between categories and to assign events to these" (p.33).
• Abstraction: from very concrete to very abstract information. "Abstraction is indexed by the number of categories required to perform a given categorical assignment." (p.33)
• Diffusion: from very concentrated to very diffuse. Here, we're talking about the degree to which information can be diffused over time. "The greater the degree of codification and abstraction achieved for a given message, the larger the population of agents that can be reached by diffusion  per unit of time." (p.34)

Within this three-dimensional space, Boisot et al. say, we can map a social learning cycle. This cycle follows six phases:

1. Scanning
2. Codification
3. Abstraction
4. Diffusion
5. Absorption
6. Impacting (p.39)

Mapped in I-Space, the social learning cycle typically looks like an S-curve. But it looks different for each organization, since each organization's I-Space tends to be different—that is, different organizations have different characteristics of codification, abstraction, and diffusion. Indeed, "to the extent that individual agents can each belong to several groups, each locatable in its own I-Space, they will participate in several SLCs that interact to form eddies and currents" (p.38).  

In fact, if we map parts of the I-Space to cultures and institutional structures, we find that different structures have different "homes" in the I-Space:

Fiefs. These thrive in situations with concrete, undiffused, uncodified information. Characteristics:

• "Information diffusion limited by lack of codification to face-to-face relationship." 
• "Relationships personal and hierarchical"
• "Submission to superordinate goals"
• "Hierarchical coordination"
• "Necessity to share values and beliefs"

Bureaucracies. These thrive in situations with abstract, undiffused, codified information. Characteristics:

• "Information diffusion limited and under central control"
• "Relationships impersonal and hierarchical"
• "Submission to superordinate goals"
• "Hierarchical coordination"
• "No necessity to share values and beliefs"

Markets. These thrive in situations with abstract, diffused, codified information. Characteristics:

• "Information widely diffused, no control"
• "Relationships impersonal and competitive"
• "No superordinate goals—each one for himself"
• "Horizontal coordination through self-regulation"
• "No necessity to share values and beliefs"

Clans. These thrive in situations with concrete, diffused, uncodified information. Characteristics:

• "Information is diffused but still limited by lack of codification to face-to-face relationship." 
• "Relationships personal but non-hierarchical"
• "Goals are shared through a process of negotiation"
• "Horizontal coordination through negotiation"
• "Necessity to share values and beliefs" (p.49)

These different institutional types are similar to those of Ronfeldt's TIMN, Cameron and Quinn's Competing Values Framework, and Mintzberg's categories of structures, but they're defined via the three axes in the I-Space. Essentially, Boisot et al. are arguing that certain institutional structures thrive because they best adapt to specific conditions in a given I-Space. 

Yet they also posit that modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) are shifting the curve, making it easier to diffuse messages and thus to reach more people at a lower level of codification and abstraction (pp.50-51). This shift is a big deal. Up to this point, to be widely diffused, knowledge had to be highly codified and abstracted—something that naturally favored bureaucracies and markets, which are set up for those conditions. But due to ICTs, the shift in the curve might favor clans as well as markets, to the comparative detriment of bureaucracies (p.51). "Over time, this is likely to favor clan-like network cultures that have a tendency to closure ... rather than the more open market processes" (p.51).

So there's the I-Space framework. In this collection, Boisot (who is listed as an author on every chapter) and his coauthors apply this framework to the ATLAS collaboration, a complex multunational scientific organization that uses ATLAS, a high-energy physics detector at CERN; it forms part of the Large Hadrion Collider (LHC) (p.8). This organization coordinates without central managerial authority (p.55). 

In Chapter 3, the authors examine the ATLAS collaboration as an adhocracy, drawing from Mintzberg to identify the structure and then locating it "to the right of the region in the I-Space labeled 'clans'" (pp.74-75)—that is, further diffused than clans are. "As a geographically dispersed, loosely coupled adhocracy, the ATLAS Collaboration extends beyond the bounds of clan cultures as conventionally understood. Yet ... it remains driven in large part by clan values and practices" (p.74). Later, in Chapter 4, the authors add: 

As a loosely coupled adhocracy, ATLAS operates to the right of clans along the diffusion scale of the I-Space, in the region where, on account of the lack of structure of the knowledge being exchanged and the large number of interacting players, things could quickly become chaotic. The collaboration remains culturally cohesive, however, held together by shared commitments, norms, and a common focus on an infrastructure of boundary objects that over time deliver a clan totem: the detector itself. (p.114).

Boisot et al. credit modern ICTs for the success of ATLAS' adhocracy: "It is mainly the bandwidth effect [in which more people can be reached per unit of time] that makes giant adhocracies like the ATLAS Collaboration possible, and that is likely to give birth to a new scientific culture" (p.257). For instance, such adhocracies can involve "a re-personalization of science, a move away from the impersonality of anonymous peer reviewing and journal publications as the only way to get on and towards the building-up and exploitation of personal networks" (p.263). Via ICTs, "the culture of clans can be extended to more loosely coupled and geographically scattered adhocracies" (p.264).

Let's inject a bit of caution here. Many of the authors are involved in ATLAS or other aspects of CERN; this collection is not (exclusively) an outsider's account and shouldn't be considered a set of studies per se. In tone, the contributions are often a bit congratulatory.

But on the other hand, the collection does a great job of explaining and illustrating I-Space. If you're interested in how organizations work, or how I-Space works, this book is a good solid introduction with some intriguing analysis.