The new issue of Present Tense, including an interview with me

Brian McNely was kind enough to interview me last year at SIGDOC, and this interview has recently been published at Present Tense. Brian does a great job pulling together our conversation while retaining my enthusiasm about methods and methodology. If you're interested, please take a look! And also see the other stories—it looks like a really interesting issue!

Official announcement below:

The editors of Present Tense are pleased to announce the publication of Vol. 3.1. This issue is our most multimodal collection to date, including our first slidecast essay (“The Quiet Country Closet”) and our first full audio essay (“Voices in Egypt”), as well as a number of other essays that incorporate images, video, and additional modes beyond alphabetic text. 

Volume 3.1 includes:

The Quiet Country Closet: Reconstructing a Discourse for Closeted Rural Experiences: Garrett Nichols examines the rhetorical and communal practices of rural LGBTQ dwellers “who have no desire to flee their supposedly oppressive communities.”

Voices in Egypt: Sound and Revolution: Abigail Lambke explores the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 as a “recorded revolution”—one in which oral utterances of the uprising have been preserved through technology to document the struggle of Egyptians in protest.

From GUI to NUI: Microsoft’s Kinect and the Politics of the (Body as) Interface: David M. Rieder interrogates the role of reflection and critique in immersive natural-user interface (NUI) environments, such as Microsoft Kinect, in which users themselves effectively become the interface.

Rhetorical Empathy in Dustin Lance Black’s 8: A Play on (Marriage) Words: Lisa Blankenship describes how the concept of rhetorical empathy functions in arguments about gay marriage in the play 8.

Louis C.K.’s ‘Weird Ethic’: Kairos and Rhetoric in the Network: James J. Brown, Jr. argues that comedian Louis C.K. opens himself to kairotic moments of vulnerability and unpredictability, in contrast to the snark that constitutes “the dominant mode of networked rhetorical situations.”

Why So Hostile?: The Relationships among Popularity, “Masses,” and Rhetorical Commonplaces: Mark D. Pepper addresses arguments against popular texts by invoking and questioning the rhetorical commonplaces that denigrate mass culture.

“That Light-Bulb Feeling”: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi: Brian McNely sits down with Clay Spinuzzi at the 2012 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design of Communication Conference to ascertain Spinuzzi’s ideas about genre, research methodologies, and much more.

Instructive Commodities: The Rhetorical Regulation of American Health and Gender Norms in Bodies…The Exhibition: Tara Pauliny looks to the popular Bodies…The Exhibition as an example of “how regulation and commodification are networked” to inscribe bodies as metaphors for international commercial practices.

Residual Nations and Cyber Yugoslavia: Speech Acts and Nationality in the Internet Age: Mary Hedengren discusses the “residual nation” of Cyber Yugoslavia to demonstrate how technology can transform and transgress notions of nationhood in contemporary political discourse.

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy. Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles ranging from 2,000 to 2,500 words, the length of a conference paper.

Reading :: Interaction Ritual

Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
By Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman is a giant in sociology, and I always feel guilty that I don't enjoy his work more than I do. The work always seems to be promising, but the system weighs heavily on me and the illustrations are light touches, brief stories from others' works, not long enough to feel that the system has been well grounded. It's like reading Aristotle.

Nevertheless, the system itself is valuable and, like Aristotle, Goffman provides a vocabulary and set of concepts that can be productively applied to various instances. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle opposes rhetoric to dialectic and explains appeals such as logos, pathos, ethos; in Interaction Ritual, Goffman describes face-work and explains the various moves that people use to maintain it.

"The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes—albeit an image that others may share, such as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself" (p.5). People must maintain their face (i.e., keep the line internally consistent; p.6). They can be "in wrong face when information is brought forth in some way about his social worth which cannot be integrated, even with effort, into the line that is being sustained for him" (p.8). And they can be "out of face when he participates in a contact with others when he participates in a contact with others without having ready a line of the kind participants in such situations are ready to take" (p.8). They can be shamefaced (perceived as flustered) and can have poise (the ability to suppress or conceal shamefacedness) (pp.8-9). Throughout their interactions, people build a line—and are often stuck with it; switching one's line can be confusing because one is abandoning a line to which one had previously been committed (p.12; Goffman does not go on to discuss common ways of changing one's line, such as confession, repentance, and conversion).

On this basis, Goffman goes on to examine interaction rituals, i.e., "acts through whose symbolic component the actor shows how worthy he is of respect or how worthy he feels others are of it" (p.19).

The rest of the book, though it consists of separate essays, builds on this vocabulary of face-work. In one chapter, Goffman uses a study at two mental wards to examine the nature of deference and demeanor, concluding that the self is in part a ceremonial thing (p.91). Goffman also examines alienation, public order, and the notion of "action." In each, he carefully and systematically examines rituals of interactions.

Again, this book is a classic. But take it in small doses, like Aristotle.

Reading :: The Fifth Age of Work

The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy
By Andrew M. Jones

Drew Jones was one of the first people I met when I began investigating the coworking scene in Austin in 2008. An anthropologist by training, Drew began looking into coworking in 2007 and cowrote one of the first books (perhaps the first?) on coworking: I'm Outta Here. But Drew's focus was always broader than coworking: he was interested in how work would change in the near future due to a number of factors, such as millenials entering the workforce; the information revolution, which has obviated copresence in a lot of work; the question of how to nurture and sustain innovation in companies; the environmental and financial impacts of moving people back and forth; and the sheer waste of office buildings that are empty two-thirds of the time. Drew outlined many of these themes in forums such as the Future of Work salon and SXSW 2010, as well as his book on innovation. And now he's developed them in this book, which comes out in November. I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy.

The Fifth Age of Work examines coworking and other work trends against this backdrop. This book, aimed at popular audiences, lucidly and engagingly discusses the challenges that organizations face as we move toward "the fifth age of work":

The Fifth Age of Work is an emerging world of work broadly defined by the rise of cloud-based technology such as remote computing, file storage and retrieval (e.g., Evernote, Dropbox), and communication channels (e.g., Skype, Google Hangout), as well as the decentralization and de-localization of work characterized by distributed teams, remote work, flex work and telecommuting, contract and project-based work, and the rapid growth of the coworking movement. But the Fifth Age is also much more than this.  These myriad arrangements are manifestations of more fundamental, evolutionary changes in our economy. The Great Recession in 2008, in fact, was an inflection point that marked the arrival of this new epoch, where we are now witnessing culture and technology colliding to disrupt and redefine the what, when, where, how, and even the why of work. (p. 10).

Jones contrasts the Fifth Age with the previous four:

• First: hunting and gathering
• Second: agriculture 
• Third: merchantilism
• Fourth: the Information Revolution (pp.11-12)

He sees the Fifth Age as the occasion for a new social contract, one that addresses workers' need for "more independence, trust, and honesty in their working lives" (p.15). 

Based on this vision, Jones discusses coworking, work innovation, corporate culture shifts, workplace design, and other aspects of work that are changing or under pressure. He concludes that in the Fifth Age of Work, leadership must look different—perhaps "anthropological." And he includes a workbook near the end of the book to help leaders think through experiments and innovations in their own workplaces.

Personally, I enjoyed the broad sweep and the way Jones connected different trends in this short but thought-provoking book. If you're interested in the future of work, coworking, or similar aspects, take a look. 

If you're not working on your PhD, maybe you should be. Here's an opportunity.

Thinking about pursuing a PhD? Interested in workplace studies? There's a fantastic opportunity in Austin. Two, actually.

UT's School of Information has two fantastic opportunities in their Information Work Research Group: 

We invite applications for two fully funded PhD positions, starting in August 2014, available for incoming doctoral students to join our study of information work in the Information Work Research Group, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin. 

Applications are due November 15, 2013 (see below). The faculty and students in the IWRG undertake empirical and analytical studies of information workers in their workplaces, exploring how work and occupations are changing. We draw primarily on ethnography, participant observation, interviews, historical analysis and archival analysis to explore occupations such as records managers, remote financial professions, digital humanists, data analysts, open source software developers and online community managers.

The School of Information is full of sharp, talented people who, honestly, have much better offices than mine. They're right across from the Clay Pit and the Dog & Duck. And their research is really interesting. If you fit the bill, do consider this opportunity! 

My book Tracing Genres through Organizations is ten years old this month

Ten years ago, my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations, was published by MIT Press. It's hard to believe that it's been that long—until I look at the ancient Windows screenshots.

Just a few reminiscences:

• TGTO is still my most widely cited publication. But when it first came out, I noticed that most of the cites came from the first chapter. MIT Press had put that chapter online for free to publicize the book. Coincidence?
• I didn't expect TGTO to be accepted by MIT Press. My original plan was to approach the most prestigious press first. Then, along with the rejection letter, I would get some solid reviews that would help me revise it for the next press. To my complete surprise, MIT Press accepted the book and sent me a contract.
• I signed the contract on September 10, 2001. Needless to say, I didn't get to celebrate much the next day.
• TGTO was my tenure book. During the tenure process, I sometimes referred to it as Trudging Grimly through Obligations. But despite that, I really enjoyed writing it.
• TGTO was based on my dissertation. But it represents a complete rethinking. That's because, days after my defense, I read Beyer and Holtzblatt's Contextual Design and realized that I had to step up my game. The next 18 months were spent researching interaction design methodologies, a period that resulted in several side publications in methodology and especially participatory design. In the end, I replaced three chapters entirely and reworked the cases in the remaining chapters.
• I told someone the other day that I study how people use sticky notes. That's not the whole truth, but it's close enough.

Presentation : Toward a typology of activities

Last month, I was honored to present a paper (via Skype) to the Helsinki Summer School on Activity Theory and Formative Interventions. The presentation was based on an article that hadn't been accepted yet, so I've been sitting on it, but I've just been informed that the paper has been accepted with minor revisions. So here it is.

Bottom line, I've been trying to characterize different sorts of activities and particularly how hybrids of those types lead to internal contradictions. This is my attempt at a typology. See what you think!

Reading :: The Rules of Sociological Method

Rules of Sociological Method
By Emile Durkheim

In this book, Durkheim explains his approach to sociology, describing his emphasis on "social facts" rather than subjective meaning. "A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals" (p.56). "A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint," he says, and adds: "which is general over the whole of a given society, whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations" (p.59).

Like other phenomena, Durkheim says, "social phenomena are things and should be treated as such. ... they are the sole datum afforded by the sociologist" (p.69). And the sociologist must be, if anything, driven by such data: "The conventional character of a practice or an institution should never be assumed in advance" (p.70). Indeed, since "social facts tend to form outside the consciousness of individuals" (p.72), to study them, we must:

• "Systematically discard all preconceptions" (p.72)
• Include in the subject matter of research only "a group of phenomena defined beforehand by certain common external characteristics and all phenomena which correspond to this definition must be so included" (p.75)
• "investigate any order of social facts ... from a viewpoint where they present themselves in isolation from their individual manifestations" (pp.82-83)

When conducting such studies, it's sometimes hard to differentiate the normal from the pathological, Durkheim says (Ch.3). He suggests the following rules:

1. "A social fact is normal for a given social type, viewed at a given phase of its development, when it occurs in the average society of that species, considered at the corresponding phase of its evolution."
2. "The results of the preceding method can be verified by demonstrating that the general character of the phenomenon is related to the general conditions of collective life in the social type under consideration."
3. "This verification is necessary with this fact relates to a social species which has not yet gone through its complete evolution" (p.97)

In Chapter 4, Durkheim goes on to consider rules for the constitution of social types—what he calls social morphology (p.111). He sees societies as forming from combinations of simpler societies (p.112), and in this chapter, he recaps the argument from The Division of Labor in Society, claiming that simple, nonsegmented societies (made up of hordes) evolved into more complex ones (pp.112-117). Durkheim locates social facts firmly within these social types and groups: "The determining cause of a social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness" (p.134). 

Overall, the book is a fascinating read. It lays out the assumptions that guide Durkheim's research. Many of these assumptions have been called into question in subsequent sociological work, but since Durkheim does us the service of describing them explicitly, we can understand his reasoning even if we don't hold to it. If you're interested in sociological method—or Durkheim—take a look. 

Reading :: Rejoicing

Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech
By Bruno Latour

In one scene of the 2011 film Thor, the character—Marvel Comics' version of the Norse god of thunder—blithely explains his godhood to a human being: "Your ancestors called it magic... but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same."And with that throwaway reference to Arthur C. Clarke, the movie roughly reconciles religion and science, then hurriedly turns to other matters.

Thor's treatment of religion is about what you would expect from a movie based on a comic book—that is, a movie that focuses on mashing up characters from very different situations and arguably irreconcilable worldviews, ignoring the inconsistencies in favor of putting together epic spectacles. But in Rejoicing, Latour argues that religion in the modern age has taken this tack as well, attempting to measure itself against science on science's terms, using science's logic, and hiding itself in the areas that science can't explain. Suddenly—according to Latour—religion is about belief, and the world is separated into believers and nonbelievers. Both sides share a belief in belief (p.3). Yet, he says, once believers and nonbelievers did not exist; what existed was a common fabrication or social frame (p.5). This is how Latour describes himself, as a true agnostic who does not believe in belief (p.3). What is important in Latour's understanding of religion is not belief but practice.

If you've read much Latour, you'll find much that is familiar in this argument. Although Latour seems to be imitating a religious genre with which I am not familiar—a sermon, a prayer book?—he still talks about transformation-through-translation (p.18), he indicts the tendency to believe in transportation-without-transformation (p.22, here personified as the devil Double-Click Communication), and he touches on other concepts such as factishes and iconoclasm throughout. That is, Latour is trying to understand religion using many of the same concepts that he has used with such success to understand science, technology, politics, law, and art.

And where does this lead? Latour argues that religion is not meant to lift us higher but to transform us here (p.35); to focus on practice rather than belief; to result in the reformation of a unity, identity, union,  or people (p.55). Rather than rationalizing the old stories, such as Noah's Ark, religion (in Latour's reading) should treat them as parables, asking: "what would correspond for us now to what they were trying to represent by the flood?" (p.87). (Latour does this all the time in his writings.) This approach removes the shame that Latour has felt when having to overlook "unfathomable whoppers" such as the virgin birth and eternal life (p.58). Rather than trying to transfer information from the past to the present, Latour argues, the religious should transform themselves from present to past.

Latour uses a running example of a woman asking her husband, "Do you love me?" The question isn't a request for information; if the husband impatiently points to a calendar showing the last time he answered the question, if he cites his previous response, if he plays a recording of that response, he has missed the point and turned his "yes" into a lie. The answer is not information, it's renewal; if he answers "yes," it's a new answer each time, one that transforms him and renews their relationship.

In this understanding of religion, Latour says, we read the sacred texts not longitudinally but vertically. Think of the narrative as scrolling left to right. Rather than following it as it scrolls, we cut from top to bottom, finding tags, ruptures, reactions, incomprehensions, cautions, recognitions, and envoys (p.113)—the renewal events that we then apply to our own lives, renewing our own applications and our own relationships with others. God is love; love depends on the lovers' speech (p.140).

Rejoicing is an earnest book. Latour deplores what his generation did to religion and wants to restore it as a way to unite and renew the relationships in which we find ourselves. And as I think about it, the vision of religion that he sketches seems akin to that of the corn-religions described in The Golden Bough, with their focus on seasonal renewal and concomitant social renewal.

But Latour has inserted a little twist in here that you may have caught—I caught it early on.

In Latour's other work, he describes how people practice science, technology, law, politics, and so forth. He watches people, follows the transformations, and compares those to the stories that people tell about what they did. This careful descriptive work underpins the theoretical explanations that he provides.

But in Rejoicing, he prescribes how people should practice religion. He describes sacred texts to some extent, but according to his narrative, religion has been captured by Double-Click Communication. Its practice is wrong—according to Latour. From where does he get his description, and how is it authoritative? Can he do something similar to what he did in Laboratory Life, following the practice of renewal and then examining how the religious describe it in contrasting terms? Perhaps—but he doesn't. Does Rejoicing tell us something new about the practice of religion—or does it just tell us the liturgy that Latour recommends?

Looking for a job?

If you're a scholar doing work in rhetoric, writing, and digital communication, consider applying for our job. The department is outstanding, colleagues are sharp (in a good way), and it's in beautiful Austin, Texas. Any questions, shoot me an email.

The University of Texas at Austin, MLA, Rhetoric & Writing
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing
Closes: Oct 27, 2013

---

The Department of Rhetoric and Writing (DRW) at The University of Texas at Austin seeks applicants for a tenure track position in digital rhetorics and emerging communications technologies with an emphasis on production; preference being given to those individuals at an advanced Assistant Professor level. The successful candidate should hold a PhD in rhetoric and writing or related field and demonstrate excellence in scholarship and teaching with a focus on the intersections of rhetoric, writing, and digital technologies. Additional interests could include technical and professional communication, new media studies, digital humanities, visual rhetorics, sound/audio studies, video or film production, or any historical or theoretical area in rhetoric or composition studies. 

The successful candidate will be expected to publish actively; teach at all levels of our curriculum; direct dissertations, MA reports, and honors theses; and offer service to the Department, the College, and the University. The selected candidate will have the opportunity to design and teach an array of courses that contribute to the undergraduate major in Rhetoric and Writing and the graduate concentrations in Rhetoric and Digital Literacies and Literatures -- all with the support of our nationally renowned Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL), which operates state of the art computer classrooms. 

The DRW boasts a dynamic, collegial, nationally and internationally recognized faculty with interests in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric; composition theory and pedagogy; digital writing and rhetorics; visual rhetorics; empirical research; writing in the disciplines and professions; and rhetoric and poetics. Sub-units of the DRW include the Undergraduate Writing Center and the Digital Writing and Research Lab. 

The deadline for applications is October 27, 2013; review will begin immediately. Submit a letter of application, a curriculum vita, three letters of recommendation, a dissertation abstract or book prospectus, a sample chapter or a recent publication, and a statement of teaching philosophy (no longer than one page) 

Position funding is pending budgetary approval. A background check will be conducted on the successful candidate. The University of Texas at Austin is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Reading :: Suicide

Suicide: A Study in Sociology
By Emile Durkheim

Durkheim's book Suicide is, as the editor's introduction tells us, an early use of statistics in sociology. The editor, George Simpson, seems to tiptoe around the implication that this treatment of statistics is not very sophisticated by today's standards, "yet Durkheim establishes relationships between series of data by methodological persistence and inference" (p.10).

But beyond the early use of statistics, this book, according to the editor, is significant because it takes what appears to be an individual decision—suicide—and establishes sociological relationships. Each person decides whether to take her or his own life, yes, yet suicides were more frequent among certain populations, in certain conditions, than others. Durkheim plows through an enormous amount of data to develop a sociological account to explain these patterns.

Durkheim describes three types of suicide:

• Egoistic suicide, in which an individual feels apathy (Chapters 2-3). He connects this type to religion: Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics or Jews, he says, and he theorizes that this is so because Protestants must deal with "the free inquiry that animates this religion," free inquiry which lowers social solidarity. In contrast, Catholics don't engage in free inquiry, and though Jews do, they maintain social solidarity (pp.158 et passim). (We can see how this thesis directly relates to his previous work, although I am not comfortable with the simplicity of the conclusion.)
• Altruistic suicide, which is related to passion or will (Chapter 4). Whereas egoistic suicide happens when social solidarity is too low, altrustic suicide happens when it is too high. Suicide is duty (p.219). 
• Anomic suicide, which is related to irritation or disgust (Chapter 5). In this type of suicide, disturbances of equilibrium—from financial crashes to divorces—result in suicide because these disturbances weaken society's controlling influence (p.252). 

There's plenty to be cautious about here. For instance, Durkheim blandly asserts that women don't commit anomic suicide as often because "generally speaking, her mental life is less developed" (p.272); they don't commit egoistic suicide as often because they are not nearly as social as men (p.216). To put it mildly, I don't think these claims hold up to scrutiny. 

At the same time, Suicide is an interesting book: we get to see a scholar gamely applying an analytical approach that few people at the time had attempted, studying a seemingly individual phenomenon in a way that few if any others had accomplished. As a historical artifact, it's a fascinating book and I recommend it highly. 

"That light-bulb feeling"

Last October at SIGDOC, Brian McNely was kind enough to interview me about my projects and my modest contributions to rhetoric and professional communication. We waxed enthusiastic about an obscure paper of mine, we talked about my previous books, and I told him about two books that I had on the front burner: Topsight and another project tentatively titled All Edge.

That interview is now available. Brian did a great job of turning our wide-ranging discussion into something coherent and (I think) interesting, while still capturing my enthusiasm about this ongoing work. I hope you'll check it out!

Coworking in Austin: Station Coworking

My previous "Coworking in Austin" posts have been in-depth looks at coworking spaces. But this one is about a space I haven't yet been able to visit.

Station Coworking is planning to open around September 1. It's run by Thomas Knight, who was one of my students a couple of years ago, when I was in the thick of studying coworking. Thomas has been thinking for a while about how people work in organizations, how organizations sometimes limit the potential for collaboration and autonomy, and how to try out different models.

Last year I met with Thomas, and he shared his vision of a new Austin coworking space. So it's exciting to see that vision becoming a reality. If you're in Austin and interested in coworking, drop on by. And tell Thomas I sent you!

SXSU.edu panel: The Liberal Arts Matter in a STEM World

It's time to pick panels for SXSW again this year. This time, I'm on a proposed SXSW.edu panel with others involved with our Human Dimensions of Organizations program.

The topic: "The Liberal Arts Matter in a STEM World."

Can you do me a favor? Click through to the description and consider voting up the panel. We have a strong slate of speakers and I think the panel could be useful for SXSW.edu attendees.

Reading :: The Innovator's Way

The Innovator's Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation
By Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham

"Innovation means the adoption of an idea or technology into new practices that produce new outcomes," say Denning and Dunham in this book on innovation, meant for entrepreneurs (p.xxiv). They identify an innovation pattern: "The innovator becomes bothered by a disharmony, puzzles over it for a long time, discovers limitations of the current common sense that produce it, proposes a new common sense that generates a solution, and commits to making it happen. We call this the 'prime innovation pattern'" (p.xxv).

But how do you execute this prime innovation pattern? The authors draw from a deep well of experience to describe eight practices: Sensing, Envisioning, Offering, Adopting, Sustaining, Executing, Leading, and Embodying (Ch.5-12). But they also emphasize how to build these practices into the DNA of one's organization by building a culture of innovation and networking (Ch.13-16). Along the way, they draw from sources as diverse as Latour and Weick as well as examples from entrepreneurial organizations.

I'm not planning to start an enterprise. But as someone who's interested in how entrepreneurs work, I found this book useful and illuminating. Denning and Dunham clearly know what they're talking about, and they convey it in a book that is readable without being reductive, detailed without being inaccessible. If you're interested in entrepreneurship, either as a practitioner or as an interested party, I recommend this book.

Reading :: The Evolution of the Book

The Evolution of the Book
By Frederick G. Kilgour

I happened to pick up this book at a used bookstore in Austin. Opening the cover, I saw the name of the previous author written neatly on the front page: Maxine Hairston.

Of course I had to pick it up. After all, it was just a dollar.

It might have been the best dollar I've spent.

The book is as solid as you might expect from a book published at Oxford. Kilgour, a professor of library and information science, has undertaken a complete history not just of the book but of writing, defining "book" broadly as "a storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination in the form of an artifact that is portable—or at least transportable—and that contains arrangements of signs that convey information" (p.3). He identifies four transformations of the book over the last 5000 years:

• the clay tablet (2500 BC-AD 100)
• the papyrus roll (2000 BC-AD 700)
• the codex (AD 100)
• the electronic book ("currently in the process of innovation"—Kilgour published in 1998) (p.4). 

Along with these transformations, Kilgour identifies "three major transformations in method and power application in reproducing the codex":

• "machine printing from cast type, powered by human muscle (1455-1814)"
• "nonhuman power driving both presses and typecasting machines (1814-1970)"
• "computer-driven photocomposition combined with offset printing (1970- )" (p.4)

Kilgour describes a "historical pattern of the book, in which long periods of stability in format alternate with periods of radical change" (p.4). For each of the seven punctuation of equilibria (clay tablet, papyrus roll, codex, printing, steam power, offset printing, and electronic book), he says, "five concurrent elements were necessary: (1) societal need for information; (2) technological knowledge and experience; (3) organizational experience and capability; (4) the capability of integrating a new form into existing information systems; and (5) economic viability" (pp.5-6). In the subsequent chapters, Kilgour examines each of these punctuations in terms of the five elements, providing an unusually comprehensive examination of the different conditions around each punctuation. For instance, he doesn't just look at production tools, he looks at the impact of eyeglasses, the development of silent reading, and the impacts of abbeys and the Protestant Revolution. 

Those who have studied the history of writing will find plenty of familiar work here, including Schmandt-Besserat's scholarship on Sumerian writing and Eisenstein's scholarship on the printing press. But readers will also find broader discussions of inventions, social systems, and economics across the eras. I was intrigued by Kilgour's discussion of the electronic book in Chapter 12, in which he argues that an "e-book device" will be successful when it meets certain conditions—conditions that sound quite similar to the Kindle!

Before closing, let me go on a little side journey regarding annotation. It turns out that Maxine Hairston annotated her books quite closely. Here's one example from the book. Hairston's annotations are written directly on the page, in pencil; mine are in sticky notes in the margins (a habit I picked up from reading books out of the university library).

Hairston's strokes are bold and her underlining is perfectly straight—she probably used a ruler. And she annotated a lot, not just underlining but also summarizing points with terse phrases in the margins. I found it a bit distracting, and had to resist annotating things just because she had annotated them. But it was also useful to see how a master academic annotated her books.

I can't loan everyone my marked-up version of The Evolution of the Book. But I can recommend that everyone buy and read their own copy. It's a well-written, intriguing text full of information and analysis. Pick it up.

Reading :: Resilience

Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
By Andrew Zolli with Ann Marie Healy

This book will be familiar reading to those who have read similar trade books such as The Tipping Point or The Wisdom of Crowds. We get a set of characteristics, a set of stories illustrating each along with colorful interviews from experts, and a larger story woven through. Writing a book like this is a special skill, I think, and the second author's background as a "playwright, screenwriter, and journalist" positions her well for providing the punch that makes the book read well. Meanwhile, the first author's background as director of PopTech gives him the vision and connections to underpin the book's argument.

That argument, in a nutshell, is that the world is increasingly complex and interconnected, too often through brittle systems that can't handle disruption well. Consequently, we face the prospect of systemic failure, in which small failures cascade and crash the system. In this case, we're talking about large interconnected systems: the environment, the economy, the social order. To resist these shocks, we have to work on resilience.

Resilience is "the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances" (p.7, their italics). In their quest to describe resilience, the authors talk about related concepts such as scaling and swarming (Ch.2), clusters (Ch.3), cooperation (Ch.5), and the new demands of leadership (Ch.8). In the last chapter, Chapter 9, they revive the term "adhocracy" to describe how distributed, resilient organizations work. (It's this term that brought the book onto my radar, although I think the authors don't differentiate enough between the single-organization adhocracy that Mintzberg was describing and the temporary project-oriented adhocracies that the authors are trying to describe.)

The book is highly readable. But I was left wanting more—and I think that has more to do with the genre of the book than the authors themselves. Books of this genre gain their force by skipping from one expert to another, one story to another, like flat rocks sent skipping across the surface of a pond. The skipping is what makes the book interesting to lay readers, but it means that we spend all our time on the surface rather than sinking into the subject and deeply exploring it. So I would recommend Resilience as a way to get a big-picture understanding of the changes and dangers of large-scale systems—but at some point the rock has to stop skipping and you have to sink into a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the issues, and at that point, I would suggest reading up on some of the source materials that the authors have cited, such as Mintzberg and Arquilla.

Writing :: How Nonemployer Firms Stage-Manage Ad-Hoc Collaboration

Spinuzzi, C. (2014, in press). How nonemployee firms stage-manage ad-hoc collaboration: An activity theory analysis. Technical Communication Quarterly. 

Here's another entry in my series on writing publications. This particular article hasn't even been typeset yet, but TCQ has posted its accepted author version, so I figure this might be a good time to discuss it. 

The article covers two interrelated studies of nonemployee firms (firms with no employees—such as freelancers and business partnerships) functioning in Austin. What really interested me was how they chose to present themselves to clients, typically as "we" instead of "I"—that is, as larger, more stable organizations. At the same time, on the back end, they had to scramble to assemble a unique set of subcontractors for each project. I use fourth-generation activity theory (4GAT) to analyze why they had to do this and how they accomplished it. It's an interesting story: interesting enough to stick with over the long haul, as I discuss below.

Like many of my publications, this one has a long history—and in fact the piece is definitely a midcareer piece for a few reasons.

I had the luxury of time. First, it's the result of an initial study that I started in July 2007. Yeah, that's five years ago. The length of time that it takes to get tenured. In fact, I originally tried to publish this study in 2010, but received a revise-and-resubmit. The reviewers thought the article was interesting, but that the study involved too few people and drew overbroad conclusions based on that small number. Reluctantly, I agreed. So, rather than trying to revise the paper or try my luck with another journal—which is what I might have done pre-tenure—I decided to be patient and run a second study with additional people. This choice added two more years to the process, since (a) it took a while to set up the study, (b) I began my coworking study at around the same time, and (c) the above was happening at about the same time that I was working through some theoretical issues with activity theory. 

This brings us to the second reason why this article reflects a midcareer orientation.

I followed my research arc. Yes, people at the beginning of their careers have a research arc too. But post-tenure, you have more flexibility to follow an arc across more projects because the pressure to publish has lessened. Before tenure, my research arc was defined mainly by my two book projects, the one I published for tenure and the one I planned to publish after tenure. About the time I sent my second book off to the publisher, I decided to start a series of studies exploring loosely organized, distributed work, along with some theory to better understand this phenomenon. You can see my 2007 introduction to the TCQ special issue on distributed work as a sort of precis. From there, I studied freelancers (in "How nonemployer firms..."), coworking (in "Working alone, together"), and search engine optimization in an internet marketing company (in "Secret sauce and snake oil"). Each of these examined a different setting of distributed work and helped me to develop genre theory and activity theory to address them (in publications such as "Genre and generic labor," "Losing by expanding," "Integrated writers, integrated writing, and the integration of distributed work," and "Starter ecologies"). And each caused me to further develop my methodological toolkit (as in Topsight and "The genie's out of the bottle" and "How can technical communicators study work contexts?") When "How nonemployer firms..." is published in print in 2014, it will reflect the end of a seven-year arc, one that covers a broader stretch of theoretical and methodological work than my previous efforts. 

And that brings us to the third reason why this article reflects a midcareer orientation.

I didn't try to do everything. When I was writing my first article, and later my first book, I really wanted to shove everything I knew into each project. That's common, I think. It's easy to feel that (a) there's no way to cleanly separate parts of each project, (b) everyone needs to know everything about the project, and (c) maybe we'll get just this one shot to get things right.

From a midcareer perspective, things change. It's easier to think in terms of five- or seven-year arcs. And it becomes impossible to shove everything into a single publication (even, I've found, a long publication such as a book). Neither is it desirable. So in this last set of publications, I've been thinking of the separate articles the way you might think of chapters in a book—or pieces in a Tetris game, or bricks in a wall, or episodes in a miniseries, or dungeons in a Zelda game. Individually, they tell different parts of the major story, the five- or seven-year arc. But they don't have to tell the whole story.

So, for instance, if you read "Losing by expanding," you'll see why I put "How nonemployer firms..." on hold so that I could finish it. I needed that piece. If you read "Working alone, together," you'll similarly see how its analysis dovetails with the 4GAT analysis I describe in "Losing by expanding" and perform to some degree in "How nonemployer firms..."—and you may see where I decided not to open a theoretical can of worms by calling it a 4GAT analysis. 

I experimented with sources. Like "Working alone, together," this piece uses sources outside the mainstream of professional communication research, including industry reports, census figures, and business journals. I had to experiment across a few articles to do this gracefully—reviewers will sometimes overfocus on what they consider lightweight sources—but I gave myself the luxury of experimenting and made sure to use reviewers' comments as a feedback loop rather than becoming frustrated by them. (One trick, I found, is to closely pair nonacademic sources with academic ones.)

Until now, I haven't spent a lot of time reflecting on how my publication strategy has changed post-tenure. But looking back on the last several articles, I certainly do seem to have changed it. 

Reading :: How Institutions Think

How Institutions Think 
By Mary Douglas

I picked up this slim (138pp.) book based on its title and description as well as through a stray citation in a recent reading. Although it's good work, unfortunately it didn't do the job that I wanted it to—that is, to discuss how institutions (that is, large hierarchical organizations) think (that is, collectively reason or cogitate). 

Douglas, an anthropologist, builds on Durkheim (whom I've read) and Fleck (whom I haven't) to examine how human thinking is to a degree dependent on the institutions in which we find ourselves—"institutions" in this case meaning organizations or social structures. Along the way, she contrasts different schools of thought in anthropology and related fields, reexamines anthropology's assumptions about simple societies vs. complex ones, and challenges some of our assumptions about institutions. 

For instance, in the last chapter, Douglas airs the "myth" that minor decisions are offloaded so that individuals can think about important matters (p.111). In reality, she says, "The individual tends to leave the important decisions to his institutions while busying himself with tactics and details" (p.111). (Note: Douglas very much likes to use this sort of chiasmus, but I think that it sometimes results in false choices such as this one.) Indeed, she argues, "any institution then starts to control the memory of its members... It provides the categories of their thought, sets the terms for self-knowledge, and fixes identities" (p.112). 

The book is, or should be, provocative. But I confess that I was not captivated by it. Beyond the fact that it didn't address what I had hoped, the book seemed to oversimplify certain questions about how individuals relate to institutions, seemed to minimize differences in kinds of organizations, and tended to focus on anthropological disputes without deeply considering how discussions from parallel fields might productively impact those disputes. Then again, it could be that I'm simply not in the intended audience for this Oxford-trained anthropologist. If you're interested in how institutions think—in Douglas' terms—certainly you should take a look. 

Reading :: The Philosophy of Rhetoric

The Philosophy of Rhetoric
By I. A. Richards

I'm sure I should have read this little classic a long time ago, but I didn't. Earlier this summer, I found it on the shelves of a used bookstore and decided to pick it up. It's only 138pp, based on six lectures, so I read it pretty quickly—I think I finished it in a day. I think.

Sorry to be so vague. The fact is, this book was based on a series of 1936 lectures, but it had such an impact on the field of rhetoric and composition that, today, its arguments seem oddly unremarkable. It's still a good read, with some great quotes, but if you've read widely in rhet-comp, the effect is similar to that of a rock aficionado listening to early Beatles. The material is good but, part of you thinks, it's so familiar as to be banal.

Let's get to the arguments anyway. Richards introduces the book by explaining:

These lectures are an attempt to revive an old subject. I need spend no time, I think, in describing the present state of Rhetoric. Today it is the dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English! So low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it—unless we can find reason for believing that it can become a study that will minister successfully to important needs. (p.3)

What needs? Richards continues: "Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies" (p.3). And to carry on that study, he argues that "we have instead to consider much more closely how words work in discourse" (p.5). And "To account for understanding and misunderstanding, to study the efficiency of language and its conditions, we have to renounce, for a while, the view that words just have their meanings and that what a discourse does is to be explained as a composition of these meanings" (p.9), instead accounting for meanings in context (p.10). "Stability in a word's meaning is not something to be assumed, but always something to be explained," he argues (p.11).

Consequently, he says, "a revived Rhetoric ... must itself undertake its own inquiry into the modes of meaning—not only, as with the old Rhetoric, on a macroscopic scale, discussing the effects of different disposals of large parts of a discourse—but also on a microscopic scale by using theorems about the structure of the fundamental conjectural units of meaning and the conditions through which they, and their interconnections, arise" (pp.23-24).

This is the project Richards takes on. Along the way, he defines context (a cluster of events that recur together, p.34), states that the business of rhetoric is to compare meanings of words (p.37), assert the multiplicity of meanings in discourse (p.39), and lauds ambiguity as something inevitable and indispensable (p.40). He disparages the focus on usage in old rhetoric (p.51), arguing that correctness is a social marker and declaring that the new rhetoric must question the "social or snob control" of languge (p.78). He gives special attention to metaphor, which, he says, is essentially comparative and functions as a transaction between contexts (p.94). In the last lecture, he argues that "Words are not a medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order" (p.134).

In all, this is a landmark treatise from someone who thought deeply about rhetoric, prescribed a new course for it, and deeply impacted it in ways that reverberate even today.

Reading :: Networks of Innovation

Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995
By Louis Galambos with Jane Eliot Sewell

I picked this book up at a used bookstore—it was $1—because it sounded interesting and because I'm interested in both networks and innovation. It's a historical account of how a research unit—first at Mulford, then acquired by Sharp & Dohme, then acquired by Merck—innovated in developing vaccines over a century.

The book is an interesting read. But, at least for me, it didn't fulfill its potential. That's for three reasons.

First, it doesn't make a case for the "so what." I understand that the historical account may be intrinsically interesting, but beyond that, the book doesn't offer any larger lessons for us in the introduction or throughout. Finally, in the conclusion (Chapter 10), the authors draw some lessons: "it enables us to see more clearly the pattern of long cycles that characterizes this process" of innovation; "the development of organizational capabilities followed a similar pattern"; and "New research leadership... was usually needed to break existing patterns and develop new network-related capabilities" (pp. 241-243). No big surprises here, I'm afraid. The term "network" itself was underdefined and underanalyzed.

Second, it explicitly follows a "great man" view of history. The book is direct and honest about this approach, acknowledging that histories have lately avoided focusing on individual contributions in favor of broad social analysis. But the approach seems to leave out a lot about how the networks of innovation functioned. And I can't help but notice that some of the "great men" discussed in the book, such as former CEO P. Roy Vagelos and former research director Maurice R. Hilleman, are also prominently thanked in the Acknowledgements. Hilleman's "notes, oral history, and scientific publications were indispensable to our research" (p.253). I believe this, but I also wonder how the book might have turned out if other sources had been relied upon more heavily.

Third, as alluded above, the book acknowledges the "networks of innovation" but does not characterize these networks in much detail or with a specific theoretical or conceptual framework. I was left with the impression that "networks" is being used in a highly colloquial sense, the sense that different organizations in an industry shared information and expertise with each other. That's an insight, but not a surprising one, and the authors don't do much to contrast this form of sharing with other forms or to demonstrate how it uniquely contributed to innovation.

It might be that I'm wanting this book to provide things that it's simply not meant to provide, so I hope the review doesn't sound harsh. Bottom line, it's still an interesting book, but may not be very useful for people who are interested in science and technology studies (STS) or related fields.