(Responsivity)

I'm a featured speaker at the upcoming Watson Conference. This year the conference's them is "responsivity," or "what it means for teacher/scholars of rhetoric and composition to be responsive to communities both within and beyond the academy." As a featured speaker, I was asked to make a short video about the theme. That video has just been posted along with other speakers' videos.

The video is below—but make sure to click through to the other speakers' videos as well!



Responsivity - Clay Spinuzzi from Watson Conference on Vimeo.

Reading :: Learning from the Field

Learning from the Field: A Guide from Experience
By William Foote Whyte

Willliam Foote Whyte wrote several landmark pieces in sociological fieldwork, including the 1943 classic Street Corner Society. In this 1984 book, he put together a guide for conducting such fieldwork, a "guide from experience," as the subtitle explains. This experiential guide, like Van Maanen's Tales of the Field or Becker's Tricks of the Trade, is liberally illustrated with the author's own fieldwork; it amounts to a series of points plus dos-and-don'ts plus extended examples. I found it fascinating.

In the early chapters of the book, Whyte tackles subjects such as participant observation (Ch.2), planning the project and entering the field (Ch.3), field relations (Ch.4), observational methods (Ch.5), and interviewing strategies and tactics (Ch.6), all of which draw on the author's great experience and wiles to make the field research a success. For instance, in Chapter 3 he discusses how to decide whether you need to change your research design midstream - and how to commit to it. In Chapter 4, he discusses how to determine when to ask questions, what questions to ask, and how to present one's research to participants. In Chapter 6, he discusses how to subtly direct interviews. Whyte clearly has a deep bag of tricks.

He also has a broad understanding of the field. Street Corner Society was published in 1943, based on fieldwork in the late 1930s. But in Learning from the Field, published over 40 years after his first, groundbreaking study, Whyte addresses then-contemporary developments such as participatory action research (p.168) and network analysis (p.248). By addressing these developments, he situates the book more broadly and makes it more contemporary than it otherwise might have been.

All in all, this is a fascinating and valuable book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of fieldwork, perhaps over Van Maanen or Becker.

Reading :: The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution
By Steven Shapin

Steven Shapin's name is familiar to me because he coauthored Leviathan and the Air-Pump with Simon Schaeffer. That book, a history of the development of the experimental method in the conflicts between Hobbes and Boyle, was extensively discussed in Latour's We Have Never Been Modern. So when I saw this book at the used bookstore, I had to pick it up—especially after I opened the front cover and saw that it had been previously owned by Maxine Hairston.

Unlike Leviathan and the Air-Pump, The Scientific Revolution is a history meant for a lay audience. It describes a period that only gained an identity in retrospect: as Shapin says in his first sentence, "There was no such think as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it" (p.1). The phrase "the Scientific Revolution" was coined in the early to mid 20th century (p.2) and used in retrospect to draw together "four interrelated aspects of changes in knowledge about the natural world and changes in means of securing that knowledge" (p.13): the mechanization of nature (i.e., using mechanical metaphors to understand natural phenomena); the depersonalization of natural knowledge (i.e., separating what we subjectively sense from what objectively occurs); the attempted mechanization of knowledge-making (i.e., using rules or methods to lead us to objective understandings); and "the aspiration to use the resulting reformed natural knowledge to achieve moral, social, and political ends" (p.13).

These were indeed big changes. As Shapin explains in Ch.1, one of the most revolutionary things about Galileo's work was that he described sunspots. In Aristotelian thinking, the earth was imperfect and the heavens were perfect and unchanging, so imperfect phenomena such as sunspots (as well as irregularly moving phenomena such as comets) were construed as either in the atmosphere or below the moon (p.17). That is, the doctrine came before the observation (p.18). "Pre-Copernican cosmology was literally anthropocentric," Shapin explains, but not in a way that connoted special virtue: the perfect rose to the heavens, the imperfect sank to the earth, and the real center of the cosmos was under the earth - in Hell (p.24).

Furthermore, for Aristotle, "all natural motion had a developmental character" (p.29): bodies moved to where they should naturally be. "Aristotelian physics was in that sense modeled on biology and employed explanatory categories similar to those used to comprehend living things" (p.29). But for the modern philosophers, a more attractive metaphor was that of the machine (p.30), especially the clock (p.32). Applying this metaphor led them to this analogic thinking:

clock : clockmaker :: nature : intelligence

The clock metaphor led philosophers to think of matter, not as active (as in the biological metaphor), but as inert (p.44). They began distinguishing between primary qualities, which belonged to the object (size, shape, motion), and secondary qualities, which were derived from primary quantities (e.g., color, sweetness, warmth) (p.53). This separation is better known as objective vs. subjective: a wedge between philosophical legitimacy and common sense, one that disallowed sensory experience as a reliable guide (p.53). Boyle went on to say that forms were figments of the human mind (p.54).

As Shapin points out, mechanical philosophy did not explain as much as it claimed to; adherents were convinced that the mechanical explanation was superior to alternatives (p.57) and began to see God as a master mathematician (p.66).

In Chapter 2, Shapin asks: How was it known? At the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, the existing philosophical traditions rested on human textual authority—such as the works of Aristotle—rather than on evidence of natural reality (p.68). By the end, they were looking at a different "book"—the "book of nature" (p.69; notice the metaphor). The transition was eased because although people were convinced at the beginning of the period that the ancients knew more than moderns ever would, the extant texts were clearly corrupted and two copies of the same text would diverge. Which corrupted source was the most accurate? They began comparing the texts to direct observations to find out (p.76). As the Protestant Reformation went on, laypeople could read the Scripture for themselves; analogically, they decided that they could also read God's other book, the Book of Nature (p.78). Yet people sometimes saw different things in that "book." Eventually, Boyle and the Royal Society developed the experimental method to discern causes from effects—a development that was violently opposed by philosophers such as Hobbes (p.110).

In Chapter 3, Shapin asks: What was the knowledge for? Eventually, reading the Book of Nature began to be understood as a contribution equal to that of the theologian (p.138). This chapter traces that development, examining how it changed the dynamics of the period.


If you're interested in the development of scientific thought, definitely pick up this interesting and readable book.

Reading :: The Interpretation of Cultures

The Interpretation Of Cultures
By Clifford Geertz

Confession: I am really not a fan of Geertz. I recognize that I only have that luxury because his work was groundbreaking enough that it can seem obvious in retrospect. But I would still rather read derivative work, which tends to show more economy of writing that Geertz's.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's focus on the most often cited essay in this book: "Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture." Here, Geertz discusses the notion of thick description, borrowed from Ryle (p.6) and elaborated. Geertz distinguishes between thin description (what is someone doing?) and thick description (what does that action mean in terms of cultural categories?) (p.7). The example here is that of a man rapidly contracting his eyelid (thin description) as a burlesque wink (thin description). Thick description, Geertz argues, distinguishes good ethnography from bad (p.16).

That's a very (ahem) thin description of the essay, but it's the gist of what—I concede—you probably should read for yourself. Although I find Geertz's prose to be a chore, he does provide a thorough, example-laden argument for understanding description as an interpretive move that ethnographers have to embrace and practice. If you're interested in doing field research, ethnography or not, this essay should help you to understand and sift through some of the layers of meaning you'll need to describe. For that reason, yes, read Geertz.

Reading :: Strategy as Practice

Strategy as Practice: An Activity Based Approach
By Paula Jarzabkowski

Management studies have not drawn much on activity theory -- in fact, from what I can tell, there's not much beyond Blackler's articles and Jarzabkowski's work. And Jarzabkowski's work is best summed up by the author herself: "This framework is informed by activity theory ... but it is not a faithful representation of activity theory in its entirety. Rather, it draws on activity theory principles of mediated interaction between actors and their social community in the production of shared activity" (p.35). For me, it was an interestingly heterodox take on activity theory, one that taught me a lot about how the field of management sees strategy-as-practice.

First, let's talk about the triangle diagram that Jarzabkowski deploys throughout. Activity theorists are well acquainted with triangles, which in AT typically represent the following points: subjects, TOOLS, objects, RULES, community, and DIVISION OF LABOR. In a typical AT triangle, the all-caps words are the corners, essentially mediating among the other terms. For instance, a subject uses a TOOL to realize the object; a subject uses RULES to mediate between herself and the community; the community uses the DIVISION OF LABOR to mediate between itself and the object.

In Jarzabkowski's triangles, there are only three terms, and they're on the corners: subject, community, and goal-directed activity. In the middle, symbolizing what they produce together, is "Situated practices of mediation" (p.35).

This triangle and Jarzabkowski's take on activity theory both seem heterodox. Why change things so much? Jarzabkowski is interested in understanding business strategy, which she defines as "a pattern in a stream of goal-directed activity over time" (p.43). So she's specifically interested in how top managers (subjects) work with an organizational community to develop strategy over time, strategy that yields the outcome of realized strategy content. To put it another way, she wants to look at a specific type of activity (strategy), not as a planned phenomenon but as an emergent one. That is, Jarzabkowski wants to understand strategy-as-practice in terms that would perhaps be more familiar to readers of Suchman or Weick. Activity theory, at least in this incarnation, gives her the conceptual vocabulary to discuss and describe this understanding of strategy-as-practice.

For instance, Jazabkowski examines strategy in a case set in a university context. In this case, the activity is distributed because divergent interests lead to goal ambiguity; thus actors are fragmented in their objectives and do not lend much attention to strategy as a collective organizational activity (p.70). In such cases, organizations experience a tension between institutionalized rules and organizational practices, leading to procedural and interactive strategizing (Ch.4). The latter half of the book addresses how to construct strategies in such an environment, using a strategizing matrix based on the triangle (p.104). This work yields a heuristic for understanding how strategy unfolds under different conditions. The author identifies five patterns through this matrix: "introducing localized activity into mainstream strategy; changing existing strategy; stabilizing activity; unresolved activity; and inertial activity" (p.109). And she uses the matrix to describe changing activity system dynamics: reframing, re-embedding, and chronic restructuring (p.124).

In all, I found it to be a fascinating book. I am not sure how I feel about the application of activity theory here—Jarzabkowski seems to be using it very differently, but then again, she is looking at phenomena that AT has not traditionally examined. But I'm intrigued by how she uses the matrix to identify and describe developing patterns, and I wish I had read it before developing my own typology recently. There's a lot to think through in this book. If you're interested in new and unusual developments in activity theory, it's definitely worth reading.

Reading :: Blue Ocean Strategy

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Blue Ocean Strategy is an international bestseller on strategically developing new market space. The authors invite us to consider a "marketing universe composed of two sorts of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans" (p.4).

Red oceans are existing, known market spaces in which rules are known; in these spaces, products are commodities, competition is fierce, and margins become thinner (p.4). Here, the rule is incremental improvement and the competition makes it a battlespace (p.7).

Blue oceans, in contrast, are untapped market spaces in which rules are in the process of being made, competition is thin, and margins are consequently fat (p.5). Blue oceans are more profitable (p.7). They require value innovation, in which "instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space" (p.12).

The authors include multiple examples of blue ocean strategy, most memorably Cirque de Soleil, which made traditional circuses irrelevant by eliminating, reducing, and raising certain aspects of the traditional circus while creating new value in the experience. Another example is [yellow tail], the Australian wine that was marketed in sharp contrast to other wines in the US market. In these and other examples, the authors use analytical tools to demonstrate how the cases contrasted sharply with existing products, allowing them to create blue oceans.

The notion of creating a new market is not especially revolutionary. But the book provides several linked heuristics that allow readers to analyze the current market, see possibilities, develop strategy, and execute it. That, I think, is what made it such a valuable book. Like most bestsellers, this one is now available very cheaply on the used book market (which is where I got my copy). But it's still valuable if you're planning to market a product, or even if you're thinking about analogous ways to distinguish your work from others. (I can imagine academics using some of these heuristics to identify large research holes and gaps in current theory, for instance.) The book is readable, easy to grasp, and well illustrated with examples. If marketing is interesting to you, I suggest picking it up.

Writing :: Chapters in the Handbook of Writing and Textual Production

Handbook of Writing and Text Production
Ed. Eva-Maria Jakobs and Daniel Perrin

Here's another entry in my series on writing publications.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, in 2011, I met Eva-Maria Jakobs at the Writing Research Across Borders conference in Washington, DC. She and coeditor Daniel Perrin were trying to recruit authors for a visionary collection on writing and textual production, one in which each chapter would be coauthored by two scholars from different continents. My mentor David R. Russell introduced us, and we hit it off immediately—we chatted about the proposed structure, discussed what scholars to approach for some of the chapters, and agreed that I would coauthor one of the chapters (on writing in professional domains) with her.

When we got back to our respective institutions, we began Skyping and sharing drafts, and quickly discovered that we had the same approach to scholarly writing—write quickly, iterate rapidly, read and cite extensively. We coauthored the chapter, but also the introduction to the section in which it appeared:

• Jakobs, E.-M. & Spinuzzi, C. (2014). The domain perspective in text production research. Handbook of Writing and Text Production, ed. Jakobs, E.M. & Perrin, D. De Gruyter: Berlin/New York. 325-332.
• Jakobs, E.-M. & Spinuzzi, C. (2014). Professional domains: Writing as creation of economic value. Handbook of Writing and Text Production, ed. Jakobs, E.M. & Perrin, D. De Gruyter: Berlin/New York. 359-384.

I greatly enjoyed this collaboration, and I'm especially happy with the work we did on "Professional Domains," which synthesizes work on professional writing across Europe and North America and suggests future developments. Sometimes collaborations don't go well, and sometimes they are adequate, but this collaboration really worked brilliantly for at least three reasons:

• We both made it a priority. People have lots of demands on their time, and often a collaborative writing project will take a back seat to other priorities. In this case, Eva and I both made these chapters a priority. We had frequent Skype meetings in which we agreed upon writing and research tasks, then faithfully executed those tasks before the next meeting. More than that, we read and commented on each others' writing and we suggested sources and read each others' sources. And we kept a calendar of changes so we always knew where the endpoint was.
• We appreciated each others' work while still providing critical comments. It's sometimes tricky to critique people's work, but in this collaboration, it was easy. We respected each others' expertise and collaboratively developed angles that we wouldn't have been able to provide on our own.
• We read widely. Eva reads English and French; I unfortunately read only English. But Eva was great at providing me with appropriate translations and pointing to English works that I hadn't read yet; I was able to tie in some work in English that she hadn't seen. In our Skype meetings, we worked to integrate all of this scholarship and prune redundant work as appropriate. The result was a pair of chapters that crossconnected a lot of research across two continents.

Overall, it was a great collaboration, and I hope you'll find the resulting chapters to be useful too.

Reading :: Journey to the West

Monkey - Journey to the West
By Wu Cheng'en

Journey to the West is a famous collection of stories about Sun Wukong, a monkey who achieves immortality and then creates chaos in Heaven, only to be sent back to Earth to pay for his crimes. He is imprisoned for 500 years underneath a mountain, then tasked with accompanying a monk on his journey to the West (India) to fetch the Buddhist scriptures. Like any fairy tale, it's full of magic and lots and lots of killing. It also satirizes inept bureaucracy—the version of Heaven described here seems pretty ineffectual.

Journey to the West has been produced many times, in many different versions. (For instance, the Japanese version of the name Sun Wukong is Son Goku, who should sound familiar if you've ever watched Dragon Ball Z.)

In fact, stop reading this review right now and go search YouTube for Journey to the West.

Are you back? Yeah. Whatever video you clicked on, that is exactly what the book was like. Supposedly someone refilms the story in Asia at least once a year. Here's the latest one, with Chow-Yun Fat in the starring role.

The book itself is an odd mixture of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Pilgrim's Progress. But, as I mentioned earlier, it's much more violent. If that appeals to you, check it out—or just watch more of those hallucinogenic YouTube videos.

Reading :: Babylonians and Assyrians: Life and Customs

Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs
By the Rev. A.H. Sayce

I was looking for some pleasure reading a couple of months ago, so I downloaded this public domain book on Kindle. It's what you might expect from a book published in 1899, with phrases such as "Of this there is no proof" and lots of superfluous hyphens. Still, it paints an interesting and entertaining portrait of the Babylonians and Assyrians as they were then understood.

The book covers what was then known about Babylonia and its inhabitants; the family; education and death; slavery and free labor; manners and customs; trades and land; banking; government; law; writing; and religion. I was particularly interested in the last two.

Can I recommend this book? Not as scholarship—it's too dated and too imprecise. Not as entertainment—it's not really a page turner. But if you're the kind of person who becomes curious about a particular topic, such as Babylonian religion, and finds himself spending way too much time reading about it on Wikipedia, this might be a good way to learn a little more about it for free.

Reading :: 76 Fallacies

76 Fallacies
By Michael LaBossiere

Some people like to learn about, name, and examine logical fallacies in detail. I confess that I'm not one of them. Identifying fallacies is a detail-oriented proposition, and although I can focus on details, I tend to look at the big picture first. So, clearly, I needed to read a book like this one. And 76 Fallacies is only 99 cents on Kindle.

I'm glad I did. Although I won't be memorizing the names of all 76 fallacies anytime soon, I enjoyed the spare text and clear examples supplied by the author. In paging through the fallacies, I gained some appreciation for what makes a fallacy a fallacy, how fallacies relate, and how one might use a reference such as this one to spot them.

If you're interested in fallacies—or even, like me, just interested in gaining some appreciation for their pursuit—take a look.

Reading :: Totemism

Totemism
By Claude Levi-Strauss

"Totemism is like hysteria," Levi-Strauss says in the first sentence of this slim book, "in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as diagnostic signs of an illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any identifying interpretation" (p.1). Like hysteria, he says, totemism involves bracketing certain phenomena as outside one's own moral universe (p.1).

Levi-Strauss develops this argument throughout the book, as here: "it is not because they are totemic that such systems must be regarded as irregular; it is because they are irregular that they can only be totemic" (p.53). Through a careful examination of the then-extant work on totemism, Levi-Strauss developed this influential work, calling into question what was up to that point a broadly held assumption about how "savage culture" worked.

I'm not an anthropologist, so although I enjoy Levi-Strauss' works, I can't evaluate the argument directly. But as a scholar of rhetoric and writing, I do recognize the approach—identifying a well known concept, taking it apart, and seeing how well it stands up to scrutiny. Levi-Strauss does this well and methodically, and as a result, the concept of totemism (at least, as a universal phenomenon) declined after this book made its impact. If you're interested in totemism—or in how concepts disintegrate—take a look.

Reading :: The Schlumberger Adventure

The Schlumberger Adventure
By Anne Gruner Schlumberger

Just a brief review here. In 1997, I came to Austin to intern with Schlumberger Well Services at their Austin Product Center—a very rewarding experience, leading to my first qualitative research project and three publications. The APC, alas, has been closed for a while, but I think of it fondly. I reminisced about it when I read Geoff Bowker's Science on the Run, in which he described the history of the company based on its archives and ancillary sources. Although I don't have the book at hand, I'm pretty sure one of them was The Schlumberger Adventure. So when I saw it at a used bookstore, I snapped it up.

The Schlumberger Adventure was written by Anne Gruner Schlumberger, the daughter of one of the brothers who founded the company and (for a while) the wife of Henri Doll, one of the key leaders in the company. It's not a history so much as a memoir of how the company grew from a couple of brothers conducting experiments in a bathtub to a multinational corporation. The author treats everyone evenhandedly, noting both their strengths and their foibles, and focusing more on the difficulties than the triumphs. The book is a collection of moments: driving across Oklahoma in an unreliable car; seeing their Russian partners become more withdrawn and agentless as Stalin took hold, then finally disappearing; trying to avoid the Second World War. It's a fast read and a sensitive portrait. If you're interested in the history of the company, I'd recommend it.

Reading :: Swarmwise

Swarmwise: The Tactical Manual for Changing the World
By Rick Falkvinge

His bio says "Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, which has representation in the European parliament and has spawned Pirate Parties in more than 60 other countries." And in this book, accessible as a free download (PDF) and a printed book, he discusses how he founded it, organized it, grew it, and led it to victory.

Specifically, he discusses how leading a swarm is different from leading other sorts of organizations:

A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available. (p.14).

Swarms, he says, are not leaderless—they need leaders. But that leadership involves articulating and projecting values and then persuading others—anyone who chooses to join the swarm—to take them up in specific projects:

A key aspect of the swarm is that it is open to all people who want to share in the workload. Actually, it is more than open — everybody in the whole world is encouraged to pick work items off a public list, without asking anybody’s permission, and just start doing them. There is no recruitment process. Anybody who wants to contribute to the goal, in his or her own way and according to his or her own capacity, is welcome to do so. (p.19).

Another key aspect is that it is transparent—in values, participation, operation, etc. Falkvinge does a nice job of alternating between describing such principles and telling the story of the Pirate Party, a story that nicely illustrates his points. Throughout the rest of the book, he describes how to launch and organize a swarm, how to control the vision without controlling the message, lead the swarm daily, avoid the traps of too much democracy (getting bogged down in votes) or too much bureaucracy, and managing radical growth. Each chapter is clear, concise, engaging, and well illustrated.

If you've been following this blog, you may see a lot of overlap with Arquilla & Ronfeldt's work, although there are differences as well. Arguably, Falkvinge's is a more radical concept, but I can certainly see productive contact points. Compared to that earlier work, this book is less scholarly, less analytical, and more of a how-to.

It's also very easy to read and engaging. Although the PDF is about 300pp, I read nearly all of it in one sitting. If you're interested in developing and leading swarms, or just in how they might operate, you should too.

Upcoming seminar: Writing persuasive business proposals

If you're in Austin, consider my November seminar on writing persuasive business proposals. It's offered through the Human Dimensions of Organizations program here at UT, and it should give you a solid background for structuring your own proposals.

Questions? Email me!

Topsight > Book Signing

Sorry for the late notice, but if you're at SXSWedu today, please swing by my book signing for Topsight. Here's the details:

Monday, March 3
4:30PM - 4:50PM
Austin Convention Center BR D Pre-Function Area
500 East Cesar Chavez Street

Topsight > A year of Topsight, and thoughts on the second edition

A little over a year ago, I launched my book Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations. In the intervening year, I've been really pleased with how things have unfolded.

Topsight is an introductory text for field researchers who are interested in how information flows through an organization, where it gets stuck, and how to get it unstuck. It's based on my own research approach, but also on years of teaching field research to writing majors. One of the things I have really liked about writing Topsight, and teaching from it, is that I have been able to express what's fun and intriguing about field research. Sure, not every part is fun—I don't enjoy putting together consent forms, for instance—but most of it is. And it gets more fun when you have enough guidance to get you through the rough spots: pitching your project to a site, getting stakeholders on board, writing a research proposal that will pass the IRB but still be flexible enough to address unexpected contingencies, and coding the mountain of data you gather, for instance.

Since I launched Topsight in January 2013, I've used it for four courses (three undergraduate, one MA). I've Skyped with two graduate courses at different universities about it. I've received emails from several graduate students whose advisors suggest they read Topsight. And I've been really happy with the response.

At the same time, a book can always be improved. I've been keeping a running list of things I want to revise for the (eventual) second edition. Some improvements include:

• Streamlining the research proposal, consent form, and protocol examples.
• Revising the interim report example to better illustrate the principles in the chapter.
• Revising the coding chapter to emphasize process, provide more grounding on coding, and refer to solid coding resources such as Saldana's Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers.
• Discussing organization types and organizational lifecycles in a dedicated chapter.
• Framing the analytical models within the larger qualitative research tradition of analytical models, e.g., in Miles, Huberman, & Saldana's Qualitative Data Analysis 3ed.
• Developing an overview of participatory design techniques for testing recommendations.
• Addressing miscellaneous typos and formatting issues.
• Perhaps going to larger book dimensions.

If you've used Topsight, I'm sure you also have suggestions. Please don't hesitate to send me your suggestions or comments!

Reading :: Digital Detroit

Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network
By Jeff Rice

First, a confession: When I read Jeff Rice's first book, I don't think I really got his project. Rice was patient enough to explain it a bit in the comments. I suspect that I wasn't the first person he had to wearily correct.

Over the intervening years, I've become better acquainted with Rice's trajectory and his writing style (which Cynthia Haynes describes as "a cross between Rod Serling and Bob Dylan") and am perhaps in a better position to get what he's doing. In this book, he's interested in applying the concept of network to Detroit—network in the sense of associational links—to analyze how implicit and explicit arguments can resonate across these associations. As he says in the introduction, after name-checking chora:

I am... networking Detroit by tracing its accounts. Despite the possible readerly discomfort, I find this method advantageous for how it allows me new kinds of opportunities to explore a space; by using a network to examine Detroit as a digital concept, I am made aware of connections I would not have discovered otherwise. The disadvantage of this method, however, is that it can, at times, feel confusing. (p.13)

At times, yes. In fact, Rice's writing style is sometimes arresting, relying sometimes on repeating the same noun at the end of subsequent sentences, putting the emphasis on old rather than new information, sometimes sounding weary. Haynes hears Rod Serling in this voice; I hear Andy Rooney. Either way, it's a very different style, one that often seems to circle around to (or build slowly to) the point. This style is sometimes disrupted by uncharacteristic, heavy forecasting and other metadiscourse—I suspect that these are due to reviewers' comments rather than being organic to Rice's style. Too bad. Although I'm a big fan of clear signaling and forecasting, there's something to be said for following along at the pace the author sets.

And that style and pace are well suited for what Rice is trying to do here. Rather than describing a phenomenon out there, a shared social phenomenon, he is describing an idiosyncratic understanding based on associations:

All of my information is a network. All of my information I gather and assemble is internal to that network. These previous references—a contemporary op-ed, a 1940s historical book, a kitschy song, a novelist's travel memoirs, a car commercial—are database items within that network. Everything I produce, therefore, is a network as well. ... This book is an exploration and creation of that network. It attempts to be an information system. (p.24)

Readers might naturally wonder why the idiosyncratic network of associations that Rice describes could be useful to them. What's intrinsically more interesting about the network of associations that Rice pieces together about a specific time and place, versus, say, our own associations? Essentially this is the question that I asked about the year 1963 when I reviewed The Rhetoric of Cool. The answer that I was too task-oriented to see back then, but that I think I see now, is this: What's interesting is not the topic around how the network forms, nor the person who has assembled the network, but how such networks work, both for individuals and communities. In particular, how they function rhetorically, persuading and shaping perceptions. "Indeed, as I will argue throughout each chapter of this book," Rice adds halfway through, "networks move and are moved; they transform and translate experiences and ideas as they form and break connections. They do things" (p.70).

In his earlier book, Rice discussed such associations via the notion of chora. In this one, he draws on Latour, particularly Reassembling the Social. But whereas others in writing studies have applied Latour to empirical studies, Rice applies Latour to circulating rerepresentations in much broader, more idiosyncratic ways. As he does so, he opens the possibilities for applying such associational insights to rhetoric, demonstrating how they can help us to understand why these associations can be so persuasive in shaping our understanding of identities. Detroit is the case, but the real contribution of the book is the approach. I hope I've done justice to it—and if you're interested in networked rhetoric, I recommend you read the book.

Reading :: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns
By Bruno Latour

I've cited Latour quite a bit in my scholarship and reviewed his works on this blog, so when I found out this book was being published, I bought it immediately, along with Rejoicing. The book is respectably thick, 486 pages—which is actually much shorter than it could have been, since Latour omitted parenthetical citations and did not include a bibliography. You can see the citations at the book's website, which also hosts the book's glossary, visual materials, notes, and articles, as well as a column for readers' commentary and critiques. (If you want an index, too bad, use the online search function.) It's an interesting, though quite centralized and controlled, experiment.

For now, though, I'll keep my critique decentralized on this blog. But what a daunting challenge it is to critique a thick book by a world-renowned scholar. Especially when the scholar draws on such a broad set of significant works. Especially when the scholar writes in ways that often seem oblique and metaphorical, And especially when the resulting book seems like a capstone, one that reviews practically all of the author's scholarly output. That's essentially what the book is, from what I can tell: an attempt to tie all of this previous scholarship together into a single broad-based inquiry.

So what is this inquiry? Essentially, it's a taxonomy of different processes that yield different, yet internally coherent, contexts or meanings. Throughout his career, Latour has studied how meaning and knowledge are produced in the sciences, in technology, in law, in religion, in economics, and in politics. Here, he argues that these represent separate processes for developing meaning, processes that are internally consistent but that appear at odds when they come into contact. Those processes are all ways for making meanings and truth—ways with different logics, aims, and standards of proof. But it's difficult to get these modes of existence to interact well for two reasons.

First, it's easy to make category mistakes, mixing up their separate felicity conditions.

Second, and related, it's easy to assume that the different modes of existence are essentially compatible, boiling down to the same mode of existence and ideally following the same logics, aims, and standards of proof (something that Latour describes using the figure of "double click"). For instance, when someone tries to apply the felicity conditions of science to politics, or those of technology to religion, s/he is invoking the "double click," assuming that there can be transportation without transformation.

With that in mind, Latour patiently discusses each mode of existence, then how those modes interact. Patiently, but not economically, because Latour is not an economical writer. Fortunately for us, he lists the modes of existence in the back of the book:

• reproduction
• metamorphosis
• habit
• technology
• fiction
• reference
• politics
• law
• religion
• attachment
• organization
• morality
• network
• preposition
• double-click

Each has its own hiatus (loosely speaking, a disruptive condition), trajectory (i.e., results of transformations), felicity/infelicity conditions (when they thrive vs. when they crash), beings to institute (i.e., objectives to produce), and alteration (i.e., the way in which they are transformed). (I'm not sure how happy Latour would be with my parenthetical explanations, but since he has not provided an index, I'm going to stick with these.) 

You'll notice that some of these modes are tied to fields (e.g., politics, law, religion) while others are not (e.g., habit, organization, network). Activity theorists will note that habit, which AT would associate with the operational level of activity, is presented as a separate mode. Yes, these modes are entangled in practice, and I'm not always clear on why a field-oriented mode (e.g., science) is on the same footing as a mode that is inevitably going to be instantiated in every other mode (e.g., habit). But Latour is not simply attempting to examine these modes as separate, but as inevitably crossing and producing hybrids. For instance, he talks about the crossings between networks and prepositions (p.63), reproduction and reference (p.106), reference and politics (p.128), reproduction and metamorphosis (p.202), technology and networks (p.212), and so forth. In defining each mode along basic canonical questions (hiatus, trajectory, felicity/infelicity, beings to institute, alteration), Latour has presented a way to systematically investigate each mode and how each mode interacts with the others. 

To describe the project in an overgeneralized way, the book is an attempt to get at polycontextuality via a taxonomy of processes that yield different, coherent contexts/meanings. Once the taxonomy is laid out, we can use it to systematically investigate how these processes interact. Along the way, Latour draws on his vast set of publications, discussing Latourean concepts from networks to black boxes to quasi-objects and quasi-subjects to factishes, and on and on. If you haven't read Latour yet, this is probably not the book to start with. The number of concepts is overwhelming, as is the overall scope of the project, and Latour's often elliptical, often metaphorical writing style makes it difficult to keep the concepts and scope straight. 

For those who have read most of Latour's major works, this book is worthwhile. But it's not a walk in the park for those folks either: after all, the book is attempting to reframe key parts of Latour's work, often by re-presenting some of the original material within the newly expanded scheme. In practice, this means that it's easy to begin skimming a chapter ("ah, this is his basic argument from that chapter in Pandora's Hope") only to realize near the end of the chapter that Latour has added a new term, concept, or connection. This problem is compounded by the fact that the printed book has removed some of the key signals that help readers to detect updated arguments: citations and footnotes. Nevertheless, the book synthesizes a vast body of work into a more coherent understanding of what's at stake. Those who have seen Latour primarily as a sociologist of science because of his earlier books should now be able to see how those early projects connect with his overarching ontological project.

At least in outline. As Latour says apologetically on p.478, "I am well aware that I passed over each mode too quickly, and that each crossing would require volumes of erudition, even if the modes and crossings are more fully developed in the digital environment that accompanies this text" (p.478). Latour's hope, I think, is that the digital environment will allow others to work out these ideas more fully, connect the modes more firmly, and examine the crossings more fully. Latour has provided this vast infrastructure, so won't you build on it?

Will I? Probably not. I expect that I'll return to this book over and over—as a sourcebook. But as a work of scholarship, it was too exhausting, too unwieldy, and too sprawling for me to take in. (Longtime readers may note that this review is shorter than those I've written for similarly massive books.) The scope itself was not the only problem. Latour's writing style, which can be immensely enjoyable in 150pp books, wore on me in this longer format, and I began to fervently wish that some editor had been licensed to ruthlessly edit for concision. Frankly, I think this book could have been sweated down to 200 lean, well-organized pages, and the result would have been much easier to absorb and navigate.

Nevertheless, if you have a few Latour books on your shelf, I encourage you to pick it up. In fact—although I obviously didn't try this—you might consider blocking off six months to read the book in concert with Latour's major works. For instance, when the present book mentions religion, you could bookmark it and read On Rejoicing. When it mentions law, you could bookmark that passage and read The Making of Law. When it discusses factishes, you could read Pandora's Hope and On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. If you do this, let me know how it goes.

Reading :: Innovation, Human Capabilities, and Democracy

Innovation, Human Capabilities, and Democracy: Towards an Enabling Welfare State
By Reijo Miettinen

Reijo Miettinen is a professor of adult education at the University of Helsinki, where he works alongside and often collaborates with several other activity theorists (such as Engestrom and Sannino). His work has typically involved case studies of scientific and technical innovations, case studies in which he has applied activity theory. In this book, however, he's less interested in contextualized case studies, instead focusing on the question of why Finland has excelled at innovation in educational and business contexts. That is, this book is focused on policy, using activity theory as a framework for understanding how Finland's educational policies have worked.

Interestingly, in Chapter 2, Miettinen applies rhetoric to the question of policy making, drawing on Burke and Perelman. This move allows him to examine policy and its drivers, setting the stage for an historical analysis of stakeholders and shifts in how those stakeholders have interpreted policy terms and concepts. He also examines the educational system, innnovation and technology policy, and capability-cultivating services. The result is a deeply textured examination of the unique mix at play in Finland.

I'll be honest: I'm not terribly interested in policy. But Miettinen conducts a solid, detailed analysis and does his best to enliven what is inherently a dry topic. I am interested in activity theory, but it is applied here rather than extended; you won't see new insights into AT here, just a model application of it.

If you're interested in policies, innovation, and education, or an application of AT to these topics, pick up this book. If you're not, consider picking it up anyway, but take it slow.

Reading:: Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work

Qualitative Research: Studying How Things Work
By Robert E. Stake 

Whenever I pick up an article on qualitative research, it seems, I see Stake referenced in the methodology section. So when I bought several methodology texts recently, I tossed Stake on the heap.

That was a worthwhile decision: Stake provides a clear, understandable, and (in some places) passionate discussion of qualitative research and its applications. As an introductory text, it works well, covering basic concepts and stages such as the researcher-as-instrument, data collection, literature review, analysis, action research, and reporting.

But at the same time, as with Charmaz's book, this one is pitched as an introductory text. Consequently, I found myself skimming a lot and sometimes skipping chapters. If you're interested in an introduction—for yourself or your students—this might be a good book to use. But if you've conducted a few studies already, I'd look for something a little more advanced.