Reading :: Sensemaking in Organizations

Sensemaking in Organizations
By Karl E. Weick

Weick's Sensemaking in Organizations is often cited by people working in (or on the edges of) organizational science, org comm, and related areas. Sensemaking is "literally, the making of sense" in an organization (p.4), something that is distinct from interpretation.

That's awfully vague, isn't it? Forgive me for being vague, but Weick tends to define by discussing what sensemaking is not, or by describing others' conflicting definitions, or by giving examples (pp.4-5). At least that's what I found when I looked up "sensemaking: definition" in the index. But we can learn something about sensemaking from these moves as well.

First, sensemaking is not interpretation. It's "grounded in both individual and social activity" (p.6). It's "about such things as placement of items into frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning, interacting in pursuit of mutual understanding, and patterning" (p.6). In contrast to interpretation, it addresses "how the text is constructed as well as how it is read. Sensemaking is about authoring as well as reading" (p.7). Drawing on Garfinkel, Weick argues that in sensemaking, the clarification of human situations "often works in reverse. It is less often the case that an outcome fulfills some prior definition of the situation, and more often the case that an outcome develops that prior definition" (p.11). It is less about discovery than invention (p.13).

Weick identifies seven properties of sensemaking:

1. Grounded in identity construction
2. Retrospective
3. Enactive of sensible environments
4. Social
5. Ongoing
6. Focused on and by extracted cues
7. Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (p.17)

Let's just pull one of these out for further discussion. Sensemaking is "enactive of sensible environments," and Weick emphasizes that rather than being separated from a "monolithic, singular, fixed environment," the "people are very much part of their own environments," enacting as well as working within the environment (cf. Cynefin). 

Let's jump ahead to the chapter on occasions for sensemaking. Sensemaking is triggered when a situation doesn't fit what we already know—think in terms of unexpected reactions, unexplained correlations, paradoxes. So sensemaking occurs in ambiguous, changing situations, which have these characteristics:

• Nature of problem is itself in question
• Information (amount and reliability) is problematical
• Multiple, conflicting interpretations
• Different value orienttions, political/emotional clashes
• Goals are unclear, or multiple and conflicting
• Time, money, or attention are lacking
• Contradictions and paradoxes appear
• Roles are vague, responsibilities are unclear
• Success measures are lacking
• Poor understanding of cause-effect relationships
• Symbols and metaphors used
• Participation in decision-making fluid (p.93)

Sensemaking, naturally, involves making sense in these situations—not just individually but as a group. And that means occasions for meeting to create sense. For that reason, Weick strongly supports one activity that is often denigrated in organizations: meetings. Meetings, he says, "create the infrastructure that creates sense" (p.144). Indeed, "arguing is a crucial source of sensemaking" (p.145), and meetings provide a venue for arguments. 

So should you read the book? I confess that I got more out of the book when I summarized it for this review than when I read it. I'm not sure what made the book uninteresting to me—perhaps it was just due to Weick's writing style; perhaps it was because much of what Weick discusses has been covered in rhetorical, sociological, and anthropological texts. But it's still worth reading and citing. If you do research in organizations, take a look.

Writing :: Integrated Writers, Integrated Writing, and the Integration of Distributed Work

Spinuzzi, C., & Jakobs, E.-M. (2013). Integrated writers, integrated writing, and the integration of distributed work. Connexions: International Professional Communication Journal/Revista de Comunicação Profissional Internacional 1(1). Available: http://connexionsj.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/spinuzzi-jakobs.pdf

This is another in my series on writing texts. Whereas the previous post in this series was on a single-author book, this one is on a coauthored position paper barely longer than an extended abstract. My coauthor is Eva-Maria Jakobs, a brilliant professor at RWTH Aachen.

So what is there to say about this short piece?

First, this piece is a nice example of taking an opportunity when it comes up. Eva and I met at Writing Research Across Borders in February 2011 (David R. Russell introduced us). She and a coeditor were attempting to generate interest in an international collection on writing research, the Handbook of Writing and Text Production (to appear in de Gruyter's Handbooks of Applied Linguistics series). the idea was to have coauthors from different continents collaborate to provide global perspectives on research. Eva was gracious enough to invite me to collaborate on a chapter with her on our shared interest, writing in professional domains.

We have written that chapter, which is now in production, and in the process we found that we are well suited to be collaborators. As we developed ideas for that chapter, we focused on three trends that we had seen in our separate research projects. I think Eva is the one that named these: integrated writers, integrated writing, and the integration of distributed work.

These three trends, we agreed, should be discussed more widely. And we decided that when the opportunity presented itself, we should put together a standalone piece to describe it.

Coincidentally, in October 2011, Rosario Durao asked me to join the editorial board of her new journal, Connexions, which focuses on international professional communication. She also sent out a call for papers for the first issue. The CFP asked for a "400-500 word position paper"—which seemed ideal for breaking out the three trends that Eva and I had wanted to discuss.

Eva and I quickly developed a position paper that outlined these three trends along with some literature supporting the work. The work was equal, and I ended up being listed as lead author mainly because I handled submitting the paper and receiving feedback.

It's a short publication, and it's free, so please take a look and see what you think. Eva and I are intrigued by the three trends we describe here, and we plan to continue examining this area. If you're interested in the trends, I commend the extended discussion in our forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Writing and Text Production.

Topsight > Topsight in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Marc Bousquet interviewed me a while back about my reasons for self-publishing Topsight. Today, his story came out, and it provides a nice nuanced picture of the choices and stakes for academics. Rather than excerpt it, I recommend you read the whole thing, which is a nice meditation on the increasingly diverse ecosystem of publishing outlets for academics.

Topsight > Discussing Topsight at Austin STC

I've spoken to the Austin Society for Technical Communication many times since I moved to Austin—they're a terrific crowd, interested in new perspectives and concerned about how to better understand information flow in organizations. So I'm very happy that I'll be speaking to Austin STC next week about my book Topsight.

If you're in Austin, please do join us. We'll be meeting at the Microsoft Store in the Domain. Light refreshments and networking are at 6:30; my presentation's at 7:00.

(slogging, not blogging)

It's the end of the semester, so everything is due at once. And that means that once again I'm sitting on a backlog of books and blog posts. Books include:

• Charles Heckscher's The Collaborative Enterprise
• Karl Weick's Sensemaking in Organizations

Non-review blog posts are also piling up. I'll see if I can break the logjam in a couple of weeks, once final grades are in. Until then, there might not be much action in this space.

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way."

My standard description of my research is now a presentation — which I gave at Utah State last week. Take a look.

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way": Applying genre and sociocultural theory to net work from Clay Spinuzzi

Topsight > Getting to topsight in your organization

Earlier this week I wrote a guest column on topsight for Life and Letters, a magazine published by UT's College of Liberal Arts. In particular, I discussed how organizations develop incompatible solutions that exacerbate systemic problems:

People are constantly “hacking” their work, grabbing unofficial solutions from other parts of their lives in order to solve their problems, increase their capabilities and lessen their work. When they do this, they inject some much-needed flexibility into the system—they find ways to route around the limitations and improve the capabilities of what could otherwise be an inflexible, one-size-fits-all system. That sticky note or list is sometimes the hidden linchpin of their work—the thing that allows them to productively use the database, coordinate with coworkers or track their tasks. 

That’s the good news. But the bad news is that these ad hoc solutions can block information flow, precisely because they are so customized.

Beyond that bad news, there's good news too. You can achieve topsight into the organization, figuring out how to identify ad hoc solutions—and understand what they're trying to solve. If you're trying to figure out how to apply topsight, or how to explain it to others in your organization, take a look.

Topsight > How Fredrik is using Topsight

We're wrapping up our discussion of Topsight on Inkwell, and Fredrik Matheson was kind enough to discuss how his team is using Topsight at Bekk Consulting. Click through to see the whole comment, but here's a part that I wanted to pull out:

That's why we bake Topsight into our process and use it in the right context. We're lucky – most of our teams work at the clients' locations for months or years, so getting access to the right people isn't *too* hard. Our interviews are aimed at the micro- and meso-level details of the work, not the work culture itself. We're looking for disruptions and breakdowns – stuff *we* can fix – and if we uncover a problem that has more to do with how things are organized, what kinds of people are hired, the incentive structures and so on, we hand that over to our clients. 

Topsight also lends itself well to people-and-process-intensive projects like intranets, collaboration tools and case management.
...
I hope *everyone* working on tools for sharing and collaborating and in Enterprise 2.0/social business projects will read Topsight. We can't make things work better if we don't understand how they work. 

Yes. Yes. Topsight is not a substitute for usability testing, prototyping, or other well-used approaches, but it does pull together details that those other approaches don't. It represents another tool in the toolkit, one that UX teams can use in the right situation. More thoughts at the link.

Topsight > Upcoming seminars in Austin

I've been excited about opportunities to discuss my new book Topsight, which describes how to get a big-picture view of an organization so that you can diagnose and fix information flow issues. These issues plague just about every kind of organization.

Reading the book will help you get your head around the approach I use. But you can get much more hands-on practice if you come take my seminars. I'm offering two this summer through the Information Institute:

• TOPSIGHT PART 1: Discovering how information flows in your organization. This May 25 seminar will introduce you to the basics of designing and conducting a field study at your organization, then organizing your data.
• TOPSIGHT PART 2: Analyzing and fixing how information flows in your organization. This June 22 seminar will help you make sense of the field data, modeling it so that you can better understand systemic issues in your organization.

Both seminars are going to be a lot of fun. For more, click through, and don't hesitate to contact me with questions.

(the social layers)

Recently I argued that college students are learning and writing in a mind-boggling range of genres, including electronic genres, and that these include "an increasing number of social layers on top of their work, leisure, and family genres." True. But let's drill deeper into this notion of social layers.

What social layers? Consider this experience, which I reported to someone earlier today in an email:

When I was working on my PhD (1994-1999), we knew almost nothing about grad students in other programs. We would see them once a year, at CCCC, and we would eye them like the Jets eyed the Sharks. They were competitors. Now, grad students in different programs are all Facebook and Twitter friends. 

The difference is that social networking made it a lot easier for people to network with each other—networking became cheaper, easier, and more quotidian. Collaborative writing software such as Google Docs has similarly lowered the barrier to scholarly collaboration across time and distance. And mobile phones have meant a terminal in your pocket—collaboration can happen anywhere. So we see a shift from closed, institutional structures to open, networked ones. This change is happening in academia, of course (we’re prime candidates for using these technologies), but also in most other aspects of our society.

Social networking provides a social layer that connects today's grad students, both within their own institution and across institutions. Other publicly available online services such as Google Docs, Basecamp, and Facebook allow teams to collaborate, coordinate, and communicate easily—once again, both within an organization and across organizational barriers. In fact, we're seeing an increasing number of studies examining how these additional layers affect work. These change how we work, but also how we intuit each other's moods and availability, how we see each other's contextual activity, and how we manage collaborative complexity. They even change how we structure our organizations, making it feasible to make them smaller, nimbler, flatter, and more distributed. They provide an always-on switchboard for working groups.

That doesn't mean that this social layer is unproblematic. It can be very problematic. But it's pervasive, and it's going to continue to have a big impact on how we do business.

Reading :: The Invention of Primitive Society

The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion
By Adam Kuper

"This book is a history of the ways in which anthropologists have thought about primitive society," Adam Kuper declares on p.1 of this book. Kuper argues that, although the study of primitive society in the late 19th century and beyond tended to invoke Darwin, it was actually Lamarckian in its interpretation: Darwinism doesn't imply any sort of progress, but Lamarckian ideas of evolution do. And early anthropologists seized on the notion that societies were progressing, more or less universally, from one state to another (p.2).

Indeed, Kuper argues, Europeans looked around at their society in the late 19th century and saw fundamental transformations from the familiar "traditional society" to the "new world" (industrialism, capitalism, bureaucracy). And "behind this 'traditional society' they discerned a primitive or primeval society," Kuper tells us (p.4). But

in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in a distorting mirror. For them modern society was defined above all by the territorial state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society therefore must have been nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist. There also had been a progression in mentality. Primitive man was illogical and given to magic. In time he had developed more sophisticated religious ideas. Modern man, however, had invented science. Like their most reflective contemporaries, in short, the pioneer anthropologists believed that their own was an age of massive transition. They looked back in order to understand the nature of the present, on the assumption that modern society had evolved from its antithesis. (p.5)

By the end of the 1800s, most anthropologists believed that

1. "The most primitive societies were ordered on the basis of kinship relations." (p.6)
2. "Their kinship organization was based on descent groups." (p.6)
3. "These descent groups were exogamous and were related by a series of marriage exchanges." (p.6)
4. "These primeval institutions were preserved in fossil form," i.e., if one were to find a relatively untouched society in a remote place, their society could be taken to represent ancient societies that predated the state. (p.7)
5. "with the development of private property, the descent groups withered away and a territorial state emerged." (p.7)

He adds:

But hardly any anthropologist alive today would accept that this classic account of primitive society could be sustained. On the contrary, the orthodox modern view is that there never was such a thing as "primitive society." Certainly no such thing could be reconstructed now.  ... Human societies cannot be traced back to a single point of origin, and there is no way of reconstituting prehistoric social forms, classifying them, and aligning them to a time series. There are no fossils of social organization. (p.7)

Nor could it be generalized. Even "surviving hunter-gatherers certainly do not conform to a single organizational type" (p.7). He further argues that ecological variations affect social organization, so "there must have been considerable differences in social structure between the earliest human societies" (pp.7-8).

He concludes: "The theory of primitive society is on a par with the history of the theory of aether. The theory of primitive society is about something which does not and never has existed" (p.8).

The rest of the book is Kuper's attempt to examine how the theory of primitive society developed, how it spread, and why it persists (p.8). Throughout the book, he describes the history of this theory in anthropology, examining its persistence through patriarchal theory (Ch.2), Lewis Henry Morgan's notions of ancient society (Ch.3), totemism (Ch.4-5), taboo (Ch.6), the Boasians (Ch.7), Rivers and his critics (Ch.8-9), and descent theory (Ch.10). I'm often interested in these sorts of metatheoretical histories, so I found the discussion riveting, especially since it put many of my anthropological readings in relation to each other and to a shared timeline.

Let's close with one intriguing passage. In Ch.6, "Totemism and Taboo," Kuper examines Durkheim's impact, especially his evolutionism, which "owed much to Spencer and nothing to Darwin." And:

Spencer believed that all societies shared a common point of origin. Moreover, the original institutional forms were never lost, but were simply recombined in various, more complex, new forms. (This was a form of social Lamarckism. ...) Durkheim further concluded from these premises that institutions could be most easily understood in their simplest, original form, and that if they were studied in a primitive state their relations with other institutions would be most readily apparent. (p.114).

 A thought-provoking book, well written and with a broad sweep. I'm still processing it. If you're interested in anthropology, societies, or societal organization, take a look.

Reading :: What Kinship is—and is Not

What Kinship Is—And Is Not
By Marshall Sahlins

Recently I asked an anthropologist friend for some recommendations on anthropology readings about kinship. Among other books, he recommended this one, which I promptly bought and read. And I'm glad I did. Sahlins elegantly argues for an understanding of kinship based not on bloodlines, but on culture.

In the Preface, he summarizes the argument: "The specific quality of kinship, I argue, is 'mutuality of being': kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each others' existence; they are members of one another." And "kinship categories are not representations or metaphorical extensions of birth relations; if anything, birth is a metaphor of kinship relations."

This might be a surprising conclusion for people who have read older anthropological works on kinship. (Newer works have largely turned to other concerns, or so my anthropologist friend tells me.) In the early 20th century, the first thing an anthropologist would do was to conduct a census to understand kinship relations; ethnographies in the 1930s focused on kinship, bloodlines, endogamy and exogamy, tribes and moieties. But Sahlins argues that "kinship is not given at birth as such, since human birth is not a pre-discursive fact. A whole series of persons may be bodily instantiated in the newborn child, including lineage and clan ancestors, while even the woman who gave birth is excluded." And "it is not even inevitable that the kinship of procreation is essentially different from relationships created postnatally. Kinship fashioned sociologically may be the same in substance as kinship figured genealogically, made of the same stuff transmitted in procreation"—and here follows a set of examples from various cultures, including "commensality, sharing food, reincarnation, co-residence, shared memories, working together, blood brotherhood, adoption, friendship, shared suffering, and so on." Such "performative modes of kinship" are "predicated on particular cultural logics of relatedness."

Sahlins draws on a wide range of examples from various studies to illustrate, demonstrating that performative forms of kinship (ex: fictive kinship) are just as much kinship as biological kinship. He believes that "kinship could very well be an inherent human possibility," given our "generic symbolic capacity." "Kinship may be a universal possibility in nature, but by the same symbolic token as codified in language and custom, it is always a cultural particularity."

This book cleared up a lot of question marks about kinship for me. Sahlins elegantly and parsimoniously argues for a definition of kinship that encompasses blood relations, fictive kinship, and other sorts of relations. Most importantly from my perspective, Sahlins' definition encompasses the kinship definitions of the studied cultures themselves: it doesn't draw separations between things that the cultures treat as whole phenomena. To put it bluntly, if Culture A allows someone to be spliced into a family as a full member, why should an anthropologist impose a framework of "fictive kinship"?

Great book. And short. Give it a read if you're interested in the phenomenon of kinship.

Reading :: Collaboration

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results
By Morten Hansen

Collaboration is a business book based on Hansen's scholarly work in reaching and understanding teams, conducted during his Ph.D. (Stanford) and his professorship (Harvard Business School). His question: "What is the difference between good and bad collaboration?"

Bad collaboration, he tells us in Chapter 1, is "collaboration characterized by high friction and a poor focus on results." In contrast, he focuses on effective, disciplined companywide collaboration (not, he hastens to add, collaboration outside a company). And "disciplined collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: the leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required." Furthermore, disciplined collaboration makes it possible to "have it both ways—performance from decentralized work and performance from collaborative work."

Throughout the book, Hansen walks through the dos and don'ts of collaboration, pitched to leaders in large companies. It's a solid book, full of not just advice but also matrices and structured worksheets. I imagine it would be very helpful for those readers.

Topsight > Discussing Topsight on The WELL

Jon Lebkowsky has been kind enough to set up an author's discussion of my book Topsight on The WELL.  It's a chance for people to lob some questions at me—and a chance for you, dear reader, to get more insight about the book and the approach.

We've also lined up some respondents, who should be weighing in soon. The discussion will be going on through April 4. Swing by anytime. I expect to get some tough questions!

Topsight > Topsight and lifehacking

Financial Times has just posted an article on lifehacking for which I was interviewed. Take a look. Long story short, I discuss how I see lifehacking as a part of a larger system of activity—a part that can potentially lead to disruptions if people's lifehacks cause inconsistencies in the system.

How do we resolve such inconsistencies? I think you know the answer.

Cynefin and TIMN and I-space and CVF and ...

I've been elbow-deep in examining different frameworks for understanding organizations, including TIMN, CVF, I-Space, and Cynefin. To this point, I've considered Cynefin the odd one out, since it (a) focuses on the environment rather than work organization itself, and (b) consequently doesn't use variants of tribes/clans, institutions/bureaucracies, markets/exchanges, and networks/adhocracies.

But today a stray tweet from Harold Jarche brought my attention to the blogwork he and others have done in relating TIMN and Cynefin. I haven't been able to absorb this work yet, so I'm not ready to endorse it, but it certainly looks interesting:

• "First structure the work system" - Jarche
• "Working together" - Jarche
• "Combined models for pattern recognition" - Tom Haskins (Tom, I think I saw this earlier but lost the thread!)
• "Networks thrive in complexity" - Jarche

As so often happens, people are approaching some of the same problems from different directions—and in some cases, via different measures. As Dave Snowden points out elsewhere, one reason that so many of these frameworks are quadriform is that they emerge from 2x2 matrices. (For instance, in its early days, Cynefin was built on two axes: restricted/open and learning/training.) 

And here I want to inject a note of caution. It's easy to start thinking on the basis of these multiple quadriform frameworks that there's simply four forms—to mistake the map for the territory, so to speak. And once you make that assumption, it's tempting to make straightforward equivalences among the frameworks. 

I don't think any of the authors linked above are doing that, but at the beginning of my investigations, that was my impulse. Now I'm taking a second look at them, reining in that impulse and trying to discern the differences among the frameworks. There are some important lessons here, but also pitfalls. 

Finally, let me bring this back to my home discipline, rhetoric. As I argued a few years ago, understanding the complexities of such models can help rhetoricians, I think. And that's because what is persuasive can change in different sociocultural environments—but we often examine persuasion as if it is founded on eternal principles. We expect arguments to be coherent, well-structured in terms of logos, supplemented appropriately by pathos and ethos. And those characteristics do describe a well-formed argument—for an early-institutional society such as ancient Greece. Do they describe a well-formed argument for a TIMN society? For a company working in the Complex environment described in Cynefin? For an adhocracy in I-space? 

CCCC 2013 presentation

Here's my presentation for CCCC 2013, describing how I used social media to supplement more traditional qualitative research data in two recent projects.

Reading :: The Evolution of Political Society

The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political AnthropologyBy Morton H. Fried

In this 1967 book, Morton Fried examines what was then known about how politics evolved in societies. He follows societal development through simple egalitarian societies, rank societies, stratified societies, and finally the state.

First, some definitions. Fried defines "culture" as "the totality of conventional behavioral responses acquired primarily by symbolic learning" (p.7). To define "society," he quotes Abrele et al. 1950: "A society is a group of human beings sharing a self-sufficient system of action which is capable of existing longer than the life-span of an individual, the group being recruited at least in part by the sexual reproduction of its members" (p.8).

And a caution. We don't know a lot about political society in pre-state societies, simply because every society we can observe has already been contacted by the state to some extent—and the ones with the least contact live in atypical environments. "Simple extrapolation from observations of Eskimo, Bushman, or other cultures in marginal habitats to paleolithic cultures in the Pleistocene is dangerous" (p.38). But, he says, we can draw some conclusions despite these limitations (p.38).

The earliest known societies were egalitarian—but, Fried tells us, that doesn't mean they were wholly equal: "Equality is a social impossibility" (p.27). Indeed, "all known societies do create status hierarchies" (p.32). Nevertheless, we can call some societies egalitarian: "An egalitarian society is one in which there are as many positions of prestige in any given age-sex grade as there are persons capable of filling them" (p.33).

In simple egalitarian societies (Ch.3), ranking and stratification are unknown. "Ranking exists when there are fewer positions of valued status than persons capable of filling them. A rank society has means of limiting the access of its members to status positions that they would otherwise hold on the basis of sex, age, or personal attributes" (p.52). "Stratification, by contrast, is a term that is preferably limited to status differences based on economic differences. Stratification in this sense is a system by which the adult members of a society enjoy differential rights of access to basic resources"(p.52).

So how does a simple society operate without ranking and stratification? Fried argues that most simple societies developed in less hostile environments (p.53), with very low population density (pp.54-55), with simple means of production (such as tools made from natural materials and common hunting groups; pp.58-59); with a broad division of labor between the sexes, but general competence in all roles within that division of labor (p.62); with distribution relationships based on reciprocity (pp.63-64). The general social structure is of two types: the family (generally nuclear) and the band ("a local group composed of a small number of families," p.67). Leaders can't compel (p.83), and military pursuits demonstrate "a complete absence of command or coordination" (pp.104-105).

In rank societies (Ch.4), "positions of valued status are somehow limited so that not all those of sufficient talent to occupy such statuses actually achieve them" (p.109). The spectrum of such societies is greater than that of simple egalitarian societies (p.110). Interestingly, while egalitarian bands are inevitably hunter-gatherers, rank societies are usually agricultural (p.110). A domestic food supply means a more certain, concentrated food supply, leading to larger, more permanent communities, resulting in a more formalized kinship network (p.116). A major development in such a society is a clearly distinguished descent principle (p.116). And although reciprocity continues to be an important redistributionist principle, "in rank societies, the major process of economic integration is redistribution, in which there is a characteristic flow of goods into and out from a finite center. Invariably that center is the pinnacle of a smaller component network within a larger structure" (p.117).

As noted above, kinship begins to play a more important role in rank society (p.120). Whereas in band society, the ideology is that of coresidence, in rank society, the ideology is that of kinship (p.121). But the specific kinship system can vary considerably across rank societies (p.121). Unilateral descent groups—clans—are taken to be descended from some stipulated common ancestor (p.124); the clan structure tends to be inclusive rather than exclusive, sometimes even incorporating members who are clearly alien but now assimilated, and its key challenge is "to clarify the relative kinship statuses of the members so that they may act properly toward each other" (p.125). In contrast to clans is the lineage, which is structurally similar to the clan but involves demonstrating relationship "to all the other members of the lineage" (p.125).

Again, leadership in the rank society is of the command-not-control variety; the chief cannot force compliance (p.137).

Near the end of his section on rank society, Fried gives us a miniature version of the argument against tribe that he develops more fully in his later book. "If I had to select one word in the vocabulary of anthropology as the single most egregious case of meaninglessness, I would have to pass over 'tribe' in favor of 'race.' I am sure, however, that 'tribe' figures prominently on the list of putative technical terms ranked in order of degree of ambiguity" (p.154). Tribalism, he says, resembles and overlaps racism (p.156).

In stratified societies (Ch.5), "members of the same sex and equivalent age status do not have equal access to the basic resources that sustain life" (p.186). Once a society is stratified, the state is not far behind (p.185).

In Chapter 6, we finally get to the state. All contemporary states, he says, are secondary; no pristine states remain (p.231), that is, no states that developed directly from stratified societies. "The state... is a collection of specialized institutions and agencies, some formal and others informal, that maintains an order of stratification. Usually its point of concentration is on the basic principles of organization: hierarchy, differential degrees of access to basic resources, obedience to officials, and defense of the area"(p.235).

Let's leave it there. Many books examine the development of the state, but Fried provides a survey that compares societal arrangements across different points of development. (Granted, the survey is 45 years old.) I found the book to be interesting, though dry in spots, and well worth the time if you're looking for an introduction to the evolution of political society.

Reading :: The Notion of Tribe

The notion of tribe
By Morton H. Fried

This text was published in 1975 (with a groovy 1975 cover, I should add). It's a slim text, but slim in a good way: concise, focused on its thesis:

Although we are accustomed to think about the most ancient forms of human society in terms of tribes, firmly defined and bounded units of this sort actually grew out of the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations by more complexly organized societies. The invention of the state, a tight, class-structured political and economic organization, began a process whereby vaguely defined and grossly overlapping populations were provided with the minimal organization required for their manipulation, even though they had little or no internal organization of their own other than that based on conceptions of kinship. The resultant form was that of the tribe. (Preface, unnumbered page). 

That is, although we often think of tribes as representing a sort of organization that precedes the State, Fried argues that tribes actually result from the contact between states and less complexly organized societies. Indeed, "tribes, as conventionally conceived, are not closely bounded populations in either territorial or demographic senses. They are not economically and politically integrated and display political organization under hierarchical leaders only as a result of contact with already existing states, although such contact may be quite indirect" (Preface, unnumbered page).

Fried goes on to trace the roots of the term—and concept—of tribe (Chapter 1), demonstrating that in its roots in the Latin tribus and the Greek phyle, it was consistently applied by states to groups outside the state.

The rest of the chapters then address different applications of the concept. For instance, in Chapter 2, Fried examines how "tribe" has been applied to breeding populations, laying out the evidence that (for instance) supposedly endogamous tribes aren't strictly endogamous (p.14). In Chapter 5, Fried attacks the notion of tribe as economic system, demonstrating that "there was no tribal mode of production in pre-state societies" (p.47). In Chapter 9, he questions the understanding of tribes as ideological groups, arguing that "all self-declared tribes are secondary tribes"—tribes that are named and delineated after "contact with state-organized societies" (p.74). Indeed, Fried argues that "pre-state social structures were more frequently open than closed, and generally looser knit rather than tightly woven (so much so, in terms of economic and political organization, as to lack clear-cut boundaries, except in unusual circumstances)" (p.76).

Although it's a slim book, Fried marshalls a broad array of evidence for this thesis. Importantly, Fried doesn't see himself as convincing cultural anthropologists—who had long ago abandoned the idea of tribe (p.11)—but rather physical anthropologists and the general public.

If you're interested in the concept of tribe, this slim book is well worth your time—if you can find a copy. The UT library had one, but I see that copies go for $99 on Amazon. That's about 73 cents per page!

Topsight > Discussing Topsight with Gregory Zobel

This Thursday, March 14 at about 3pm Mountain Time, Greg Zobel will be interviewing me about Topsight. You can watch us live on UStream. Better yet, you can ask questions, which we'll answer in the second half of the show. Interactive video, my friends.

The Society for Technical Communication's practitioner magazine, Intercom, is pleased to sponsor this 45 minute interview with Dr. Clay Spinuzzi. Spinuzzi is a professor of rhetoric and writing at The University of Texas at Austin. After publishing two successful texts--one with MIT Press and the other with Cambridge--Spinuzzi has just self-published his new book, Topsight. 

Topsight is practitioner-oriented and accessibly written. Knowledge and information workers will draw useful theory and actionable tools to support their efforts in complex information systems. Academics will find methods and protocols they can use in graduate and undergraduate classes. Technical Communication and Rhetoric academics will find chapters for use in their classes as well as an effective modeling of how academic research can transition into practitioner, and possibly popular selling, texts. 

The first half of the interview will center on Spinuzzi's approach to understanding and adapting complex information environments, like high-tech start-ups, while the second half of the interview will be driven by user and participant questions. The interview will be conducted live at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

The interview will be broadcast live on uStream at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tc-ed-tech-and-accessibility-with-gz