Reading :: Cognitive Development

Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations
By A.R. Luria

As I recently mentioned, I'm reading (and in most cases rereading) early works in the lineage of activity theory. Since AT grew out of the milieu of the Soviet Union, that means reading Soviet psychology and philosophy.

This book, Luria's Cognitive Development, is an interesting example. As Luria explains in the preface,

All of its observational material was collected in 1931-32, during the Soviet Union's most radical restructuring: the elimination of illiteracy, the transition to a collectivist economy, and the readjustment of life to new socialist principles. This period offered a unique opportunity to observe how decisively all these reforms effected not only a broadening of outlook but also radical changes in the structure of cognitive processes. (p.v)

The specific research was conducted in Uzbekistan and "Kirghizia" (p.v), which Luria characterized in this way:

the masses had lived for centuries in economic stagnation and illiteracy, their development hindered among other things by the religion of Islam. Only the radical restructuring of the economy, the rapid elimination of illiteracy, and the removal of the Moslem influence could achieve, over and above the expansion in world view, a genuine revolution in cognitive activity.

Our data indicate the decisive change that can occur in going from graphic and functional—concrete and practical—methods of thinking to much more theoretical and abstract modes brought about by fundamental changes in social conditions, in this instance by the socialist transformation of an entire culture. Thus the experimental observations shed light on one aspect of human cognitive activity that has received little scientific study but that corroborates the dialectics of social development. (p.vi)

In his foreword, Michael Cole contextualizes the book further. Luria met Lev Vygotsky at a conference in 1923, and began collaborating with him in 1924, where they worked toward developing a psychology along Marxist lines. Vygotsky's focus was on mediation in individuals' psychology (xii), but the two psychologists later published a monograph suggesting that the principles could be applied to sociocultural development too (p.xiii). They saw the opportunity to study this question in places where enormous social changes were taking place—specifically, places that were being collectivized (p.xiv). They could not only develop sociocultural theory but also (ideally) find "evidence of the intellectual benefits of the new socialist order" (p.xiv). Unfortunately for Luria, "critics pointed out that his data could be read as an insult to the people with whom he had been working" (p.xiv), and that this sensitive time in the USSR's formation, that could not be allowed. The book was left unpublished for 40 years, until 1974.

I think we can understand why. When I first read this book, in graduate school, I was fascinated by the data but disturbed by the Soviet program—Luria spoke so casually of denying people their way of life and religion. I'm still disturbed by it, especially reading it alongside The Gulag Archipelago and its accounts of forced exile of entire populations. (For context, Luria's expedition started the year after Stalin gained power.) Let's keep this in mind as we go through the rest of the book.

Luria explains:

Before the revolution, the people of Uzbekistan lived in a backward economy based mainly on the raising of cotton. The kishiak (village) dwellers displayed remnants of a once-high culture together with virtually complete illiteracy, and also showed the pronounced influence of the Islamic religion. 

When the socialist revolution eliminated dominance and submission as class relations, people oppressed one day enjoyed a free existence the next. And for the first time, they experienced responsibility for their own future. Uzbekistan became a republic with collective agricultural production; industry also began to develop. The appearance of a new economic system brought with it new forms of social activity: the collective evaluation of work plans, the recognition and correction of shortcomings, and the allocation of economic functions. Naturally the socioeconomic life of these regions underwent a complete transformation. The radical changes in social class structure were accompanied by new cultural shifts. 

The extensive network of schools opened up in outlying areas that had been virtually 100 percent illiterate for centuries. Despite their short-term nature, the literacy programs familiarized large numbers of adults with the elements of modern technology. Adults in school took time-out from their everyday activities and began to master elements of simple but “theoretical” pursuits. In acquiring the rudiments of reading and writing, people had to break down spoken language into its constituents and encode it in a system of symbols. They mastered the concept of number, which had been used only in practical activities, but now became an abstract entity to be learned for its own sake. As a result, people became acquainted not only with new fields of knowledge but also with new motives for action. (p.13) 

Luria and his people "selected remote villages of Uzbekistan and also a few in the mountainous regions of Kirghizia" (p.14). The society was feudal, generally illiterate, and dependent on agriculture, mostly cotton. Islam was prevalent. Yet the region was transitioning, with "the beginnings of collectivization and other radical socioeconomic changes as well as the emancipation of women" as well as rudimentary education (p.14). Luria's team compared illiterate people with people of very modest literacy (p.15).

In Ch. 2, Luria details experiments on perception in which he showed cards with various geometric figures and asked participants to group them. Interestingly, illiterate participants did not seem to perceive based on Gestalt principles: for instance, they would not group a triangle made of lines with a triangle made of dots—but literates did (p.33). Similarly, Luria found that perceptual illusions can depend on cultural development, with literates seeing illusions that illiterates did not (p.41). "Optical illusions are not universal. ... the data clearly show that optical illusions are linked to complex psychological processes that vary in accordance with sociohistorical development" (p.43).

Ch.3 moves to the question of generalization and abstraction. Luria presented pictures of objects and asked which ones went together. Examples:

• glass - saucepan - spectacles - bottle
• hammer - saw - log - hatchet
• dagger - bird - rifle - bullet (p.75)

Illiterate participants did not group these into categories, but related them in practical activity:

The main group of subjects classified objects not according to verbal or logical principles, but according to practical schemes. Nonetheless, such concrete thinking is neither innate nor genetically determined. It results from illiteracy and rudimentary types of activity that have prevailed in these subjects' daily experience. When the pattern of their lives changes and the range of their experience broadens, when they learn to read and write, to become part of a more advanced culture, the greater complexity of their activity stimulates new ideas. These changes, in turn, bring about a radical reorganization of their habits of thinking, so that they learn to use and appreciate the value of theoretical procedures that formerly seemed irrelevant. (p.79)

 In Ch.4, "Deduction and Inference," Luria discusses conceptual thinking as advanced and providing the ability to "abstract the essential features of objects and thus assign these objects to general categories [and thus] leads to the formation of a more complex logical apparatus" (p.100). He tested deduction and inference by asking participants to repeat syllogisms such as this one:

White bears exist only where it is very cold and there is snow. Silk cocoons exist only where it is very hot. Are there places that have both white bears and cocoons? (p.105)

Participants did not literally repeat these syllogisms, instead producing utterances such as these:

"There is a country where there are white bears and white snow. Can there be such a thing? Can white silk grow there?"

"Where it is cold, there are white bears. Where it is hot are there cocoons? Are there such places on earth?" (p.105)

Later, Luria asks other participants to draw inferences based on syllogisms. For instance, he asks:

In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there? (p.108)

Participants either can't infer or simply refuse to infer. For instance, after being pressed, one replies:

Well, it's like this: our tsar isn't like yours, and yours isn't like ours. Your words can be answered only by someone who was there, and if a person wasn't there he can't say anything on the basis of your words. (p.109)

(Do you think Luria is correct in believing that this person is unable to draw inference because he is unable to escape the frame of concrete experiential thinking? Or do you think it's possible that this person is staying within the bounds of cultural politeness or even resistant to Luria's game?)

We see similar things in the next chapter, "Reasoning and Problem Solving," in which Luria gives people word problems, deliberately making them different from reality. Here's an example:

It is twenty versts from here to Uch-Kurgan, while Shakhimardan is four times closer. [In actuality, the reverse is true.] How many versts is it to Shakhimardan? (p.127)

Participants don't want to play this game:

"What! Shakhimardan four times closer?! But it's farther away!"

"Yes, we know. But I gave out this problem as an exercise." (p.127)

[...]

"How should I know how long it would take? If I had gone, I could say, but I wouldn't want to lie to no purpose, you know." (p.128)

(Does this last line sound like a veiled accusation to you?)

Let's skip to Ch.7, "Self-Analysis and Self-Awareness." "This chapter attempts to determine the extent to which our subjects were able to treat their own inner life in a generalized fashion, to single out particular psychological traits in themselves, to analyze their interior world, and to evaluate their intrinsic qualities" (p.144). In the introduction to this chapter, Luria says,

There is every reason to think that self-awareness is a product of sociohistorical development and that reflection of external natural and social reality arises first; only later, through its mediating influence, do we find self-awareness in its more complex forms. Accordingly, we should approach self-awareness as a product of consciousness of the external world and of other people, and should seek its social roots and traits in the stages through which it is shaped in society.

The notion that self-awareness is a secondary and socially shaped phenomenon was formulated by Marx: "At first, man looked at himself as if in a mirror, except that it is another person. Only relating to Paul as one like himself can Peter begin to relate to himself as a person." Despite the fact that the notion of the social origin of self-awareness arose more than a century ago in materialistic philosophy, there have not yet been adequate attempts in psychological research to show that this view is correct or to follow the specific stages through which this phenomenon is shaped socially. (p.145, my emphasis)

The italicized portion again makes me cautious about Luria. Is Luria relying on Marx—a brilliant philosopher, but not a psychologist—to provide a psychological explanation that Soviet psychologists now only need to validate? Or is this the sort of cliche that Luria had to employ in order to be published in the Soviet Union?

As you should be able to tell, I'm ambivalent about the book. On one hand, it opens up intriguing speculation and some interesting data about cross-cultural psychology and psychological development. On the other hand, I don't like some of the premises and the methodology often seems questionable. But as a classic in the lineage of activity theory, it's an important read.

Reading :: The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago
By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I first read this book the summer after my 16th birthday. It details the author's experience in the Stalinist work camps, but it also details the experience of many others who communicated with the author in the work camps or, after his release, in secret conversations and letters. Taken all together, the book recounts the history of the work camps from 1918 (before they were officially formed under Stalin in 1930) to 1956 (after Stalin's death in 1953). And it is horrifying.

There's no way I can adequately summarize the book. But I picked it up again after two things happened.

First, a fellow researcher, who had been born in the Eastern Bloc, remembered its propagandic education and asked me whether this propaganda constituted the Soviet roots of activity theory.

Second, to better understand the roots of the notion of contradiction in activity theory, I read one of Evald Ilyenkov's books, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital, which was published in 1960—four years after the timespan covered in the Gulag Archipelago, two years before Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ilyenkov's book, like others during the time, quotes Marx, Engels and Lenin fervently and describes opposing viewpoints contemptuously. Was he a true believer, the kind that ascribes to this trio the sort of infallability a fundamentalist Christian does to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Was he trying to make sure that his books would pass the censors, as Bakhtin allegedly tried to do? Or was he — frightened?

I'm going to be reading and reviewing several Soviet-era books over the next few weeks, including some that were written during Stalin's time in power, so I wanted to ground myself in the historical background. I don't want to forget that these researchers had ample reasons to quote Marx et al often, reasons that did not necessarily have to do with free inquiry. And I wanted to remember how much of the infrastructure they enjoyed, how many of the programs in which they were involved, benefited indirectly from the unfree labor in these horrid labor camps. And that's why I decided to read The Gulag Archipelago a second time.

The book deserves far more attention, but here I'll just pull out a few quotes relevant to my particular investigation.

On p.29, Solzhenitsyn discusses how no one was safe from arrest by the secret police, who had to fulfill their quotas, and who were under no obligation to provide a trial. "Just as the intelligentsia had never been overlooked in previous waves, it was not neglected in this one. A student's denunciation that a certain lecturer in a higher educational institution kept citing Lenin and Marx frequently but Stalin not at all was all that was needed for the lecturer not to show up for lectures any more. And what if he cited no one?" (p.29)

In discussing the Gulag's "'discovery' that the personal confession of an accused person was more important than any other kind of proof or facts" (p.42), Solzhenitsyn describes how Vyshinsky, "availing himself of the most flexible dialectics ... pointed out in a report which became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only. ... Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain sense, that we are punishing a guilty person." The solution was, rather than seeking absolute evidence (it's all relative) or witnesses (these are changeable), the interrogator could find such relative proof without even leaving his office, just by making the prisoner confess. (p.43). "In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner's bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute ..." (p.43)

On p.215: "Engels discovered that the human being had arisen not through the perception of a moral idea and not through the process of thought, but out of happenstance and meaningless work (an ape picked up a stone—and with this everything began. Marx, concerning himself with a less remote time ('Critique of the Gotha Program'), declared with equal conviction that the one and only means of correcting offenders ... was not solitary contemplation, not moral soul-searching, nor repentance, and not languishing (for all that was superstructure!)—but productive labor." (p.215) Solzhenitsyn cites this claim as the rationale for the work camps—and he also says that Marx never had to work!

On p.325: He argues that the lie has become the form of existence. "There exists a collection of ready-made phrases, of labels, a selection of ready-made lies. And not one single speech nor one single essay or article nor one single book—be it scientific, journalistic, critical, or 'literary,' so-called—can exist without the use of these primary cliches."

Read it? Definitely. I'm glad I did at 16, and I'm glad I did again, to remind myself to look for those cliches in the next few weeks.

Reading :: Science, Strategy and War

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd
By Frans P.B. Osinga

A few days ago, I reviewed Daniel Ford's slim book on John Boyd, A Vision So Noble, which grew out of his MA work. It referenced this book, which was evidently Osinga's dissertation. Osinga was an F-16 pilot and served in the Royal Netherlands Air Force.

Osinga's focus is on another former pilot, John Boyd. As discussed in the earlier review, Boyd was a pilot who went back to school to become an engineer, then became an autodidact military theorist whose readings included Tzu and Clausewitz but also Maturana, Bateson, Polanyi, Kuhn, and Popper. "Some regard Boyd as the most important strategist of the twentieth century, or even since Sun Tzu," Osinga tells us (p.3), although "on the other hand, his work has invited dismissive critique" (p.1). Complicating this legacy is the fact that Boyd's body of theoretical work is made up of "four briefings and an essay"; the briefings are slide decks that Boyd revised throughout his life. (You can see the originals at the John Boyd Compendium.) The slide decks are meant to be presented rather than read as standalone documents, and thus pose a problem for those who want to better understand Boyd's thought.

To preserve Boyd's thought, Osinga takes on the task of contextualizing these primary texts: he contextualizes the challenges that Boyd addressed; digs into archives such as interviews with Boyd; and uses the archives to identify some of Boyd's sources (Boyd was not meticulous about citing) so he could read those sources himself. It's a lot of work, and the result is—based on my limited understanding of the subject—a strong account of the major claims Boyd made and an argument for taking these claims seriously.

Osinga starts by orienting us to terms of art in military theory: military theory itself ("the aggregate of theories, doctrines, and beliefs belonging to a particular individual, community or period," pp.8-9); operational art ("the body of knowledge dealing with the use and behavior of military forces in a military campaign aimed to achieve strategic or operational level military objectives," p.9); doctrine ("the aggregate of fundamental methods of fighting, often tacit or implied," p.9); and strategy (referencing Clausewitz, "the use of tacit and explicit threats, as well as of actual battles and campaigns, to advance political purposes," which "provides the conceptual link between action and effect and between instrument and objective," p.9).

Strategy, he adds, "concerns both organization and environment"; "affects overall welfare of the organization"; "involves issues of both content and process"; exists on different levels (e.g., corporate strategy and business strategy in the same firm); and "involves conceptual as well as analytical exercises" (p.10). And "Strategy abhors a vacuum; if the strategic function is lacking, strategic effect will be generated by the causal, if perhaps unguided and unwanted accumulation of tactical and operational outcomes" (p.10). Strategic theory involves four levels:

• "a level that transcends time, environment, political and social conditions and technology"
• "a level that explains how the geographic and functional complexities of war and strategy interact and complement each other"
• "a level that explains how a particular kind of use of military power strategically affeects the course of conflict as a whole"
• "a level that explains the character of war in a particular period" (p.12)

With that background established, Osinga argues that "Boyd's work comprises a specific intellectual response to the military problems of the US armed forces in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War and his arguments are colored by this predicament in the sense that he aimed to change a specific mindset and a doctrine that, in his view, was dysfunctional" (p.16). 

In Ch.2, Osinga overviews Boyd's military life to trace how his thoughts about strategy emerged. Boyd was drafted into the US Army in 1946, attended USAF pilot training in 1952, flew 22 combat sorties in the F-86 Sabre during the Korean War (1953), attended and became instructor at the Fighter Weapons School (1954), and published a manual on fighter maneuvers, Aerial Attack Study, in 1960. 

Let's pause there. In Korea, "What intrigued him was that despite flying in F-86 aircraft with a lower ceiling, a wider turn radius and slower maximum speed than its rival, the Russian Mig-15, the kill ratio was 10:1 in favor of the F-86 during the Korean War" (p.22). One explanation might have been training, but that didn't explain everything, especially since the North Korean pilots often had numerical superiority. Boyd realized that the "bubble canopy ... provided a distinct advantage over the constrained view" of the Mig-15, but he believed there was an additional element (p.22). 

At his next post, the USAF Fighter Weapons School, he focused on air combat tactics. He acquired the name "40 second Boyd" because he routinely "bet that he could beat any pilot within 40 seconds in a 1 versus 1 air combat set-up, a bet that he usually won" (p.22). He also wrote Aerial Attack Study, "an encyclopedia on air-to-air combat" that is still being used (p.22). 

In 1960, Boyd went to Georgia Tech to pursue a degree in industrial engineering. While studying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, "he discovered that he could explain air-to-air combat in terms of energy relationships, in which altitude is potential energy to be traded for speed—kinetic energy—and vice versa. Turns became energy-consuming maneuvers ... and engine power an energy provider ..." (p.23). He could express these relationships with equations and plot the outcomes with graphs. "By overlaying and comparing such graphs of different fighters the speed/altitude areas of relative advantage became immediately obvious" (p.23). Yet these calculations required substantial computer time, so once Boyd graduated in 1962, he got a post at Eglin Air Force Base and proceeded to covertly use the USAF Systems Command computers to finish his research. The result was EM theory, which "revolutionized fighter design" (p.23). This work landed him at the Pentagon, where he helped to develop the next generation of fighters (p.23). 

At the Pentagon, Boyd saw that the win-to-loss ratios for fighters had plummeted from the 10:1 in Korea to ratios as low as 1:1 in Vietnam (p.24). Boyd, along with others, argued strongly for dedicated tactical fighters that could transition between maneuvers quickly (p.25), leading to the development of the F-16 (which Osinga flew) and the F-18. 

It also resulted in the A-10, which was not a tactical fighter but a tank killer; Boyd researched the A-10's needs by interviewing German WW2 experts on the subject, and that led him to study strategy and tactics in general (p.26) and setting him on the path as a military theorist.

At the same time, Boyd was working on A New Conception for Air to Air Combat, in which he addressed the fact that in a fly-off, the YF-16 (which would become the F-16) and YF-17 (which would become the F-18) had been predicted to be a close match based on EM theory, yet the YF-16 clearly outperformed the 17 in actual tests. The YF-16 could perform tighter turns, allowing them to slip inside the YF-17's turn circle while still gaining energy and maintaining high turn rates (p.26). Critically, Boyd argued that "we should operate at a faster tempo than our adversaries or inside our adversaries [sic] time scales ... such activity will make us appear ambiguous (non predictable)..." (p.27, my emphasis). This insight was the kernel that led to later elaboration of the OODA loop. What's important to note here is why higher tempo is better: not because one can outpace the adversary, but because one can appear ambiguous and confuse and disorder the adversary. 

Let's skip a bit. Boyd drew eclectically from a range of theorists as he developed his new understanding of warfare. "Boyd argued for non-linear tactics, avoiding and bypassing enemy positions, venturing deep into enemy territory without too much concern for one's flanks. The prize was not territory but time, surprise and shock. Such tactics would force the enemy to react. They would create the impression US troops were everywhere and could strike anytime anyplace" (p.45). "Boyd's ideas were translated after a decade of lectures, briefings and debates in Marine Corps doctrine" (p.47). 

These ideas relate to the OODA Loop. Osinga quotes the explanation of "a young captain" who attended Boyd's briefings:

Colonel Boyd observed that in any conflict all combatants go through repeated cycles of an observation – orientation – decision –action (OODA) loop […]The potentially victorious combatant is the one with the OODA loop which is consistently quicker than his opponent (including the time required to transition from one cycle to another). As this opponent repeatedly cycles faster than his opponent, the opponent finds he is losing control of the situation […] his countermeasures are overcome by the rapidly unfolding events and become ineffective in coping with each other. He finds himself increasingly unable to react. Suddenly, he realizes there is nothing else he can do to control the situation or turn it to his advantage. At this point he has lost. In essence his command circuits have been overloaded, thereby making his decisions too slow for the developing situation […] all that remain are uncoordinated smaller units incapable of coordinated action. The enemy’s defeat in detail is the eventual outcome. (qtd on p.49; my emphasis)

The method requires "continuous high-tempo operations, a focus on creating and exposing flanks and rears, and on weaknesses instead of enemy's strengths ... [and] mission tactics of Aufragstatik, for the party which can consistently operate the longest without new orders will inevitably have the greater advantage over an opponent awaiting orders after every action" (p.49). (cf. Alberts and Hayes.)

In Ch.3, Osinga tackles "Science," specifically examining OODA's roots in Polanyi, Kuhn, Popper, Godel, Weiner, Skinner, Heisenberg, Prigogine, and Piaget. Osinga notes the move away from Cartesianism and toward systems thinking.

Ch.4, "Completing the Shift," overviews Boyd's move to a new worldview, drawing a contrast between "traditional" and "emerging" views (see table on p.88, or if you don't have a copy, p.124 of Osinga's dissertation). Essentially, Boyd moved from a modernist to a postmodernist viewpoint, examining self-organization and non-linear interconnectedness (p.88). Boyd is influenced by Prigogine here, and later—deeply—by Maturana and Vela (p.92), particularly their discussions of autopoeisis and structural coupling (p.94).  Boyd writes: "Orientation is the schwerpunkt. It shapes the way we interact with the environment. ... Orientation shapes the character of present observations-orientation-decision-action loops —while those present loops shape the character of future orientation" (p.94).

Halfway through this chapter, Osinga draws the threads together, arguing that Boyd presented a unifying vision.

• At the grand strategic level, it presented a unifying vision, a coherent paradigm, and an "agreeable ideology which fosters internal unity and offers a 'moral high ground' for creating alliances. It favors cooperation" (p.100). 
• At the next level, the strategic aim is to "Diminish adversary's capacity while improving our capacity to adapt as an organic whole, so that our adversary cannot cope while we can cope with events/efforts as they unfold" (Boyd qtd in Osinga p.101). 
• At the grand tactical level, Boyd argued for operating inside the adversary's OODA loops, creating mismatches between the adversary's observations and the conditions to which it must react. Doing so makes one appear unpredictable, keeping the adversary from adapting or coping with the unfolding strategic design (p.101). 
• At the tactical level, Boyd said that units should "OODA more inconspicuously, more quickly, and with more irregularity" and "repeatedly and unexpectedly penetrate vulnerabilities and weaknesses exposed by that effort" (qtd in Osinga p.101). 

Now Osinga gets to Ch.5, where he overviews Boyd's "Core Arguments." Here, he follows the structure of the slide decks in Boyd's A Discourse on Winning and Losing. Essentially, he tries "to provide the content of his slides in reasonable prose" with little commentary (pp.128-129). As a side note, I sometimes had a hard time distinguishing between Boyd's original text from the slides and Osinga's interpretation throughout; I would have liked to see these set off visually. Rather than march lockstep through this section, let me pick out some of the more important things.

In Patterns of Conflict, Boyd synthesizes principles of guerrilla warfare and Blitzkrieg, arguing that one should avoid battles, instead focusing on shattering cohesion, generating surprise and shock, and paralyzing effort (p.164). Forces must be able to maintain internal harmony, operating in "a directed yet more indistinct, more irregular and quicker manner than one's adversaries," concentrating and dispersing inconspicuously and/or quickly (p.164).

Boyd also emphasizes moral conflict, arguing that a force must "create, exploit, and magnify" menace, uncertainty, and mistrust in the enemy, generating "many non-cooperative centers of gravity" and magnifying internal friction (p.171). Simultaneously, he argues that the force should set up internal "counterweights" of initiative, adaptability, and harmony (p.172). Adversaries must be isolated from allies and each other, morally, mentally, and physically (pp.178-179).

In Ch.6, "Exploration and Refinement," Osinga presents the other five briefings, again presenting rather than commenting on these briefings. As in the last chapter, I'll hit what I thought were the highlights.

In Organic Design for Command and Control, Boyd argues (in Osinga's paraphrase) that "interactions in various forms are the glue that binds the various nodes of a social system together" (p.192). In Boyd's own words, "interactions represent a many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection" (qtd in Osinga p.192). Osinga argues that "this insight into the nature of interactions is the first step toward a definition of orientation" (p.193). Boyd again: "Orientation, seen as a result, represents images, views, or impressions of the world shaped by
genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances." (qtd in Osinga p.193).

Boyd then synthesizes the two statements: "Orientation is an interactive process of many sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections that is shaped by and shapes the interplay of genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences and unfolding circumstances." (qtd in Osinga p. 193).

Orientation, as Boyd says elsewhere, is the Schwerpunkt or center of gravity. He argues that if a force can "create many non-cooperative centers of gravity" in the adversary, that force can magnify friction because the adversary must focus inward, thereby creating confusion and disorder (qtd in Osinga p.195). Thus, as Boyd argues in Strategic Game of ? and ?, "The Strategic Game is one of Interaction and Isolation" (qtd in Osinga p.209, Boyd's emphasis).

Yet, just as Engestrom argues that contradictions are engines of change, Boyd argues that "The presence and production of mismatches are what sustain and nourish the enterprise of science, engineering, and technology, hence keep it alive and ongoing — otherwise there would be no basis for it to continue. (qtd in Osinga p.225).

Orientation, clearly, is a critical part of the OODA loop. And since this chapter is called "Exploration and Refinement," we can see a refined version of the OODA loop on p.231 (or see the dissertation p.270). Unlike the simplified OODA loop that we usually see in secondary literature—a loop that seems to simply focus on tempo as it cycles in lockstep—this one elaborates feedback loops at each state and details subcomponents of Orientation. The entire loop is a "cross-referencing process" (Boyd, qtd in Osinga p.232).

In Chapter 7, "Completing the Loop," Osinga provides the commentary that he withheld from Ch.5-6. The OODA loop, he argues,

represents and means more than a decision process, and the model contains more for victory than information superiority and speed. The OODA loop is much less a model for decision-making than a model of individual and organizational learning and adaptation in which the element of orientation—made up of genetics, experience, culture—plays the dominant role in the game of hypothesis and test, of analysis and synthesis, of destruction and creation. (p.235, my emphasis)

He goes on to address misconceptions. First, yes, one usually wants to get "inside" the adversary's OODA loop; but this doesn't just mean "out-looping," it also means "altering the tempo" (p.235) because "Changing OODA speed becomes part of denying a pattern to be recognized" (p.236).

Second, focusing on speed misses the critical interrelationship between "physical action and the mental and moral component": if one has access to more timely information, but cannot react as quickly, the advantage is lost. (e.g., imagine an army with up-to-the-minute intelligence but a bureaucracy that makes operational decisions hourly or daily). (p.236)

Third, tempo is not the only control dimension. (p.236).

Beyond that, Osinga argues, narrow interpretations of OODA miss the critical issue of "developing, maintaining and reshaping one's orientation" (p.236). Osinga argues that "it is essential to have a repertoire of orientation patterns and the ability to select the correct one according to the situation at hand while denying the opponent the latter capability. Moreover, Boyd emphasizes the capabilityy to validate the schemata before and during operations and the capability to devise and incorporate new ones, if one is to survive in a rapidly changing environment" (p.236, Osinga's emphasis).

(Related note: I've noted in recent studies that participants sometimes relate to rapidly changing environments by developing relatively stable patterns and stable sets of transformations.)

The remainder of Ch.7 discusses Boyd's legacy in fourth-generation warfare (Hammes, Lind, Arquilla and Ronfeldt). 

Okay, so what can we take from this? As I mentioned in the previous review, I'm interested in the question of how Boyd has developed this systemic "model of individual and organizational learning and adaptation" to increase what activity theorists would call internal contradictions. Activity theory comes from a lineage of educational psychology, and it has traditionally focused on decreasing rather than increasing contradictions, ideally resulting in more harmonious work and positive learning outcomes. Yet AT has moved into workplace research, IS research, UX research, and other areas that are not specifically focused on education—and that often encompass competitive relationships. Surely some of these linkages between activity systems aim at disruption, but to my knowledge, AT has not been applied to examining them. 

Along these lines, ever since Engestrom introduced the idea of the activity network in third-generation activity theory (3GAT), we have been examining interactions between activity systems. We have even discussed how different activity systems have to match cycles. (For instance, in my undergraduate field methods class, we regularly discuss how student organizations have synchronized their transformation cycle to the school year.) But I can't think of many AT studies that discuss the question of interfering cycles, let alone deliberately interfering ones. 

Can OODA be applied productively to AT? If so, would the application be a synthesis? Or would it be more fruitful as an analogical application? 

In any case, if you're interested in Boyd's work, Osinga's book is probably the best and most comprehensive overview. I recommend it.

Reading :: A Vision So Noble

A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror
By Daniel Ford

This fall, I became very interested in John Boyd, the autodidact military thinker who developed the OODA loop, served as a key individual in the development of the F-16, and provided some of the planning of the 1991 Gulf War. Boyd produced very few pieces of written work; his main form of delivery was slide decks, which he presented and iterated repeatedly. Scholarly work on Boyd has been thin.

This present book is one of the few out there. It was written by John Ford, who pulled it together from two essays and a short dissertation he wrote while taking an online master's program at King's College London. It's self-published.

Despite these unusual origins, the book does a good job of overviewing Boyd's life and the basics of his thought. I'll soon review Osinga's much more substantial dissertation-turned-book on Boyd's strategic theory, so in this review, I'll just hit some of the highlights.

Ford says, "The goal of all human behavior, Boyd begins, is to increase our capacity for independent action. We join with others so that we can cooperate—and compete—toward that goal. Since the resources available to us are finite, we thereby begin a struggle that can never end" (p.17). So action and decision become critical:

Each of our mental concepts represents both a domain and its constituent elements, and we can approach them in two ways, either analytically or deductively. Through analysis, we separate the elements from the domain, an activity that Boyd calls deductive destruction. We can then synthesize these disparate elements into 'something new and different from what previously existed.' Boyd calls this process constructive induction. His favorite example of the dual process of destruction and creation is to have his listeners build a mental 'snowmobile' by taking elements from the domains of skiing (using only the skis), boating (using the two-cycle outboard engine), motorcycling (the handlebars), and a child's toy tank or earthmover (the treads). ... 'Over and over again,' Boyd writes, 'this cycle of Destruction and Creation is repeated until we demonstrate internal consistency and match-up with reality.' (pp.17-18).

Of course, perfect "match-up" or correspondence is not possible, and Boyd "suggests that the closer we get to the underlying reality, the larger our uncertainty becomes" (p.18); Boyd claims that "'the process of Structure, Unstructure, and Restructure ... is repeated endlessly in moving to higher and broader levels of elaboration' and argues that this "'Dialectic Engine'" may help us to better understand how people cope with their environment to increase their capacity for independent action (p.18). Boyd later developed this insight into the OODA loop.

OODA stands for Orient, Observe, Decide, and Act. In developing this model, Boyd sought to explain the cycle of destruction and creation, or structure/unstructure/restructure, through which entities passed as they interacted with their environment. (This organism/environment distinction was influenced by Boyd's reading of Maturana, among others.) Orientation was the decisive point or schwerpunkt of the loop (p.22), shaping how the organism observes, decides, and acts. That orientation involved not just the immediate situation but also the organism's past experiences, cultural tradition and genetic heritage (p.22). And each stage of the cycle involves feedback as well; the cycle is not just sequential (p.23).

Boyd's acolytes, such as Lind and Hammes, applied these insights to fourth-generation warfare (4GW). But "arguably, the first real-world application of the OODA Loop came in the 1991 Gulf War," when the US forces used multiple deceptive thrusts and feints to keep the Iraqi forces off balance, getting inside their decision loop (pp.23-24).

Here, let me reproduce a block quote of Boyd that Ford uses to explain how the OODA Loop is applied in warfare:

And it occurred to me ... that if I have an adversary out there, that what I want to do is fold my adversary back inside himself, where he can't really consult the external environment he has to deal with ... Then I can drive him into confusion and disorder and bring about paralysis. ... If I can operate at a tempo or rhythm faster than he can operate at—well, he can't keep up with me, and in effect then I fold him back inside himself. And if I do that—ball game! You saw it in Desert Storm, you see it in basketball games, football games, and a whole bunch of other stuff. (quoted in Ford pp.26-27)

That is, the warrior "gets inside" the adversary's OODA Loop by changing conditions more rapidly than the adversary can react. (My summary is a little oversimplified, but let's build on it.) Doing so allows the warrior to disrupt the tempo of the adversary's loop, ensuring that the adversary is reacting to conditions that no longer obtain, and forcing the adversary into an equilibrium condition—that is, decreasing the adversary's capacity for independent action, shrinking rather than broadening the levels of elaboration.

Okay, let's play with theory a little. Suppose we apply these insights to another theoretical cycle, the cycle of the object in activity theory. In AT, the object of the activity is both objective and projective, representing both the current state and the future, intended state. The activity is structured around (i.e., oriented to) transforming that object. Yet the activity system also encounters contradictions, tensions across the system, and those contradictions require the activity system to either change or be shaken apart. Contradictions are "engines of change," as Engestrom puts it.

In Engestromian third-generation activity theory (3GAT), these activity systems are linked: activities often overlap and even share objectives, which they might collaboratively try to transform (and in which they might be at cross purposes).

To my knowledge, activity theory hasn't been applied to warfare; in fact, I can't think of instances in which AT has been used to examine flatly antagonistic dynamics. But I can imagine using insights from the OODA loop to think through how one entity might deliberately introduce contradictions in the other's cycle—contradictions such as internal disjunctures in the actors, disjunctures between actors and community, or disjunctures between tools and object. Introducing such disjunctures could disrupt that activity system severely, either shaking it apart or bogging it down. Getting inside the OODA Loop involves introducing secondary and tertiary contradictions across the target activity system. Now that I'm typing this, I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen studies that examine such antagonistic actions across activities. (If you've seen some, please send them to me!)

But why not flip it? After all, 3GAT has generally focused on how to improve harmony across activity systems (probably from the orientation of educational psychology, the field from which Engestromian 3GAT emerged). We can just as easily imagine a virtuous cycle in which collaborators rather than antagonists synchronize their OODA Loops/transformation cycles to reinforce each others' integrity. (Again, if you have seen some AT scholarship along these lines, I'd love to see it.)

OODA is still rather underdrawn, in large part because Boyd's archives consist mostly of slide decks, but also because military scholars have generally not been as interested in Boyd's work as practitioners. Ford's book is one of the few that explore and elaborate on OODA; another is that of Osinga. I'll plan on writing my review of that book soon.

Reading :: Author Power

Author Power: Profit Before You Publish
By Lynn Isenberg

Lynn Isenberg reached out to me earlier this month. Although she lives in LA, she is planning on moving to Austin, so she was spending a few weeks here to check out the city, and coincidentally talked to a mutual acquaintance about being an entrepreneurial author. He suggested that she talk to me, and a few days later, we met at Caffe Medici.

Lynn has authored a trilogy of novels about a funeral planner who solves mysteries, but she has also sold nonfiction books on grief and writes scripts in LA. She is friendly, energetic, enthusiastic, hard-charging, and focused. And the problem on which she is focused is this: how do authors make a living? It wasn't that long ago that an author could expect to write novels, sell them to publishers, receive a decent advance, and live on it and royalties while writing the next novel. To be sure, it was an uncertain living, but it could be done.

But that's no longer true, she says. One, the market is flooded with books already, so those advances have steadily shrunk and shelf space—which is vital to selling mass-market books—is both in smaller supply and available during much shorter time windows. Two, the resale market means that authors lose out on sales, and with electronic marketplaces for connecting buyers and sellers, it's easier than ever before to sell used copies to buyers. Three, digital publishing (such as Amazon's Kindle versions) has taken a bite out of profits, since books sell for less. Four, digital publishing in particular has allowed authors to post their novels for little or nothing, meaning that the market is even more flooded and readers are even less willing to pay for books.

Publishing, she is essentially saying, is no longer a way for authors to be fairly recompensed for their labor. And this fact hits fiction authors hard. When she received her BA in Literature and Film Studies at the University of Michigan, Lynn says, she looked back and realized that her education had not given her the tools to be entrepreneurial in her writing; career services were almost nonexistent for creative writers (and she compares this sorry state of affairs to how engineers enjoyed career fairs); and consequently, fiction writers were more or less at the mercy of publishers. This, she says, is not a recipe for author empowerment.

So how does an author become an entrepreneur? Lynn provides one path, which I'll describe and then discuss.

First, Lynn says, "it makes no sense to go with a traditional publisher unless there is a significant advance. This is because with a traditional publisher your backend royalties are in the 10-15% range. Independently or in tandem with a next-generation publisher you're looking at 25%-100% of the royalty depending on third party distribution channel fees and e-book or print book" (p.10). Self-publishing and hybrid publishing models are far easier to use than before, they provide higher royalties, and they allow the author much more control (all things to which I can attest).

Of those three reasons, the third—author control—is the most important for Lynn. She sketches out the "I AM" principle: Impresario, Author, Marketer. For true author power, she says, the author must embrace all three of these roles.

Impresario. As an impresario, the author must create a platform, explore options, embrace innovation, understand transmedia, act as an engine, be a connector, and behave originally and fearlessly (p.22). Specifically, the impresario focuses on building a personal brand in which the books, social media, and one's fan base are the bricks and PR, marketing and distribution are the mortar. "The scope of the book," she says at this point, "is focused on integrated branding opportunities and pre-release income for authors" (p.23). That is, to be liberated from the control of publishing firms, the author must act like a publishing firm, relentlessly tying her or his efforts to those of others who can provide income streams. "With technology stripping off the gatekeepers of distribution, it's now possible to build your own media company and your own ad sales team" (p.32). And "In summary, Impresario means understanding the landscape you're operating in so that you can connect people with ideas" (p.33, her emphasis).

Author. An author, in Lynn's sense, must also be "an architect, creating the blueprint for partnerships and Transmedia content... [and] a proud ambassador of your work." This author must write personal/universal stories, do in-depth research, rewrite with an awareness of your brand and current markets, brand content, and "pave a new path with words, media, technology, and brands" (p.37). She emphasizes that "the premise for this book is all about molding and blending opportunities that fit into what you are creating or have already created. If you start going in the other direction, you risk compromising the integrity of the work" (p.41). But with that caveat, she encourages authors to consider how they can rewrite parts of their work to incorporate product placement—and, as Marketers, to get paid for that product placement even before the book hits the shelves.

Marketer. "To be a successful Author Power author, it takes ... confidence, open-mindedness, flexibility, vision, follow-through, pleasant phone manners, compelling e-mails, sleuthing, and creativity. It takes creativity to see and connect dots of opportunity and then follow through to implement them" (p.49).

Throughout the rest of the book, she provides various strategies to approach authorship in these terms, illustrating them with case studies and providing scripts to help authors through marketing calls. "Adapt or fade away," she tells us crisply (p.78). We learn how to incorporate product placement, how to brand versions of the same book for different audiences, how to use the research for a novel to generate nonfiction companion titles, and how to get industry conventions to buy branded copies of a book. I can't emphasize how impressive this system is.

So there's the summary. Now the evaluation.

We tenured and tenure-track professors are relatively protected from the shocks of the market. (Granted, things are tight in the university right now, and granted, the growing ranks of contingent faculty are far more vulnerable than the shrinking ranks of TT faculty.) Similarly, many of the students in our humanities programs are protected by such shocks due to family support and background. So it's easy for us to feel what some of you may be feeling right now: revulsion. You might be thinking: We are not marketers! We want to write—and teach our students to write—about the human condition, without compromises and certainly without integrated branding opportunities. Imagine the violence that this kind of approach would do to the integrity of the great authors!

True, I think. But Lynn is not talking about training the next Pablo Neruda. She is specifically focused on genre fiction, in which legions of authors write—that is, produce their labor—with the express purpose of making a profit. Those people have traditionally relied on publishing, but the publishing industry has entered a dark cul-de-sac. In publishing's current situation, how do authors secure fair wages for their labor? How do they avoid being systematically exploited, their labor devalued?

One way, the I AM approach, is for the author to take on the functions of the publisher, but more nimbly and ruthlessly, with fewer restrictions and less institutional propriety. The author, to quote Schumpeter, must carry out new combinations, ones that make an end run around the calcified publishing system. The I AM approach is not for everyone, but reading about it tells us volumes about the publishing system to which it reacts. 

And understanding that system can help authors to sketch out alternate approaches, ones that address the same system but in ways that may be more palatable to authors who do not want to employ the I AM strategies.

And for that reason, authors, even if you find the idea of product placement unbearable, I recommend that you take a look at Author Power.

(updated 2/1/15 to clarify one sentence in paragraph 13)

Reading :: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
By Joseph Schumpeter

Like the last review, in this one, I'll focus on summarizing the argument and defining terms. I'm not enmeshed enough in the economics literature to form a strong critique or evaluation. But, when possible, I'll draw connections to the entrepreneurship literature I've been reading lately.

The version I read is the Kindle version of the second edition. In the second preface, Schumpeter explains that this second edition doesn't involve any changes to the original text, just an additional chapter to rebut critics of the first edition.

The book is about the future of capitalism. In the first part, Schumpeter "sums up, in a non-technical manner, what I have to say ... on the subject of the Marxian doctrine." Specifically, he's interested in what Marx says about socialism. Schumpeter is (to put it mildly) not socialist, but he wants "to bear witness to this non-Marxist's belief in the unique importance of that message, an importance that is completely independent of acceptance or rejection." In the second part, he asks: "Can Capitalism Survive?" And, as he states in the first preface, he concludes "that a socialist form of society will inevitably emerge from an equally inevitable decomposition of capitalist society." He concludes that "capitalism is being killed by its achievements." This conclusion leads him to the third part: "Can Socialism Work?" Here, he surveys the various challenges that socialism faces. In the fourth part, "Socialism and Democracy," he examines how the economic and political systems interact. Finally, in "A Historical Sketch of Socialist Parties," he provides what he emphasizes is just a sketch of the question "from personal observation and from some very fragmentary research."

So let's see what we can mine from each part.

In Part I, Schumpeter examines "The Marxian Doctrine" from a non-Marxian perspective, giving Marx his due as a "prophet," although sometimes denigrating Marxists in the process: "Marx was personally much too civilized to fall in with those vulgar professors of socialism who do not recognize a temple when they see it." Rather than treating Marx as a prophet, Schumpeter says, we should "do a thing which is very objectionable to the faithful" and treat Marx as a sociologist whose work can be examined as independent parts. And Schumpeter argues that, contra many of Marx's interpreters, "The economic interpretation of history does not mean that men are, consciously or unconsciously, wholly or primarily, actuated by economic motives. ... He only tried to unveil the economic conditions which shape [religions, metaphysics, schools of art, ethical ideas and political volitions] and which account for their rise or fall. The whole of Max Weber's facts and arguments fits perfectly into Marx's system."

Schumpeter also argues that "Marx's philosophy is no more materialistic than Hegel's, and his theory of history is not more materialistic than any other attempt to account for the historic process by the means at the command of empirical science." Hmm.

"What the theory really says," Schumpeter summarizes, "may be put into two propositions: (1) The forms or conditions of production are the fundamental determinant of social structures which in turn breed attitudes, actions and civilizations," and "(2) The forms of production themselves have a logic of their own; that is to say, they change according to necessities inherent in them so as to produce their successors merely by their own working." He adds that both propositions contain some truth and some working hypotheses. But he raises some objections. For instance, "Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behavior more or less depart from what we might expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive process."

Later in the section, Schumpeter summarizes: "it is as reasonable to make ... ownership the defining element [of class divisions in social structure] as it would be to define a soldier as a man who happens to have a gun." Schumpeter asserts that the Marxian analysis "misses the salient point about social classes—the incessant rise  and fall of individual families into and out of the upper strata. The facts I am alluding to are all obvious and indisputable. If they do not show on the Marxian canvas, the reason can only be in their non-Marxian implications."

In the third chapter of this section, Schumpeter evaluates Marx as an economist. He states:

The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for them have always told them that they were, without necessarily meaning by it anything precise. Marx could not have done without the phrase even if he had wanted to. His merit and achievement were that he perceived the weakness of the various arguments by which the tutors of the mass mind before him had tried to show how exploitation came about and which even today supply the stock in trade of the ordinary radical. None of the usual slogans about bargaining power and cheating satisfied him. What he wanted to prove was that exploitation did not arise from individual situations occasionally and accidentally; but that it resulted from the very logic of the capitalist system, unavoidably and quite independently of any individual intention. This is how he did it. The brain, muscles and nerves of a laborer constitute, as it were, a fund or stock of potential labor (Arbeitskraft, usually translated not very satisfactorily by labor power). This fund or stock Marx looks upon as a sort of substance that exists in a definite quantity and in capitalist society is a commodity like any other. (my emphasis)

Schumpeter admires the "pedagogics" of this argument, but raises objections: (1) Marx's theory assumes that "workmen, like machines, are being produced according to rational cost calculations," which Schumpeter believes is obviously incorrect; (2) "perfectly competitive equilibrium cannot exist in a situation in which all capitalist-employers make exploitation gains" because all would try to expand production unsustainably; (3) Schumpeter asserts that the theory of surplus value assumes equilibrium, yet Marx says this equilibrium cannot be achieved in a capitalist system, which undergoes incessant change. And this third point, Schumpeter asserts, is pivotally important:

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment. Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil. And, as we shall see in the next part, in this turmoil competition works in a manner completely different from the way it would work in a stationary process, however perfectly competitive. Possibilities of gains to be reaped by producing new things or by producing old things more cheaply are constantly materializing and calling for new investments. These new products and new methods compete with the old products and old methods not on equal terms but at a decisive advantage that may mean death to the latter. This is how “progress” comes about in capitalist society. In order to escape being undersold, every firm is in the end compelled to follow suit, to invest in its turn and, in order to be able to do so, to plow back part of its profits, i.e., to accumulate. Thus, everyone else accumulates. (my emphasis)

Marx, Schumpeter argues, misses the boat here: "He had no adequate theory of enterprise and his failure to distinguish the entrepreneur from the capitalist, together with a faulty theoretical technique, accounts for many cases of non sequitur and mistakes." Among other things, Schumpeter says, Marx "had no simple theory of business cycles," although, granted, "he understood much of its mechanism."

(As an aside: Schumpeter largely focuses on Marx rather than Engels. In footnote 25, Schumpeter makes the reason clear: "I observe that the few comments on Engels that are contained in this sketch are of a derogatory nature. This is unfortunate and not due to any intention to belittle the merits of that eminent man. I do think however that it should be frankly admitted that intellectually and especially as a theorist he stood far below Marx. We cannot even be sure that he always got the latter’s meaning. His interpretations must therefore be used with care.")

But—and here's the gateway to the rest of the book—Schumpeter says: "However, even though Marx's facts and reasoning were still more at fault than they are, his result might nevertheless be true so far as it simply avers that capitalist evolution will destroy the foundations of capitalist society. I believe it is."

In Part II, "Can Capitalism Survive?", Schumpeter bluntly answers the question in the first paragraph: "No, I do not think that it can."

Capitalism tends to spread goods at ever-lower prices: "The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort." Revolutions in economic activity "periodically reshape the existing structure of industry by introducing new means of production." And as these revolutions are assimilated, we get cycles of groundswells followed by depression as "antiquated elements of the industrial structure" are eliminated. Through this cycle, "the capitalist process ... progressively raises the standard of life of the masses," although not steadily but in cycles. "Capitalist reality is first and last a process of change. In appraising the performance of competitive enterprise, the question whether it would or would not tend to maximize production in a perfectly equilibrated stationary condition of the economic process is hence almost, though not quite, irrelevant."

This brings us to Schumpeter's famous notion of creative destruction. First, he asserts that competition is vital: "As soon as we go into details and inquire into the individual items in which progress was most conspicuous, the trail leads not to the doors of those firms that work under conditions of comparatively free competition but precisely to the doors of the large concerns— which, as in the case of agricultural machinery, also account for much of the progress in the competitive sector— and a shocking suspicion dawns upon us that big business may have had more to do with creating that standard of life than with keeping it down."

Next, he links competition to the dynamic nature of capitalism:

The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process. It may seem strange that anyone can fail to see so obvious a fact which moreover was long ago emphasized by Karl Marx. Yet that fragmentary analysis which yields the bulk of our propositions about the functioning of modern capitalism persistently neglects it. Let us restate the point and see how it bears upon our problem. Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers. Nor is this evolutionary character due to a quasi-automatic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems of which exactly the same thing holds true. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. (my emphasis)

That is, capitalist enterprise changes, not just due to external conditions, but internally:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U. S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation— if I may use that biological term— that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. 

He adds: "Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process and within the situation created by it. It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood irrespective of it or, in fact, on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull." That creative destruction goes well beyond price competition: "Economists are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they saw. As soon as quality competition and sales effort are admitted into the sacred precincts of theory, the price variable is ousted from its dominant position."

Given that internal impulse to change (creative destruction), restrictive practices such as monopolies "may do much to steady the ship and to alleviate temporary difficulties."

As Schumpeter looks ahead, in his chapter "Crumbling Walls," he essentially sees capitalism as inevitably making itself obsolete:

In our discussion of the theory of vanishing investment opportunity, a reservation was made in favor of the possibility that the economic wants of humanity might some day be so completely satisfied that little motive would be left to push productive effort still further ahead. Such a state of satiety is no doubt very far off even if we keep within the present scheme of wants; and if we take account of the fact that, as higher standards of life are attained, these wants automatically expand and new wants emerge or are created, satiety becomes a flying goal, particularly if we include leisure among consumers’ goods. However, let us glance at that possibility, assuming, still more unrealistically, that methods of production have reached a state of perfection which does not admit of further improvement.  

A more or less stationary state would ensue. Capitalism, being essentially an evolutionary process, would become atrophic. There would be nothing left for entrepreneurs to do. They would find themselves in much the same situation as generals would in a society perfectly sure of permanent peace. Profits and along with profits the rate of interest would converge toward zero. The bourgeois strata that live on profits and interest would tend to disappear. The management of industry and trade would become a matter of current administration, and the personnel would unavoidably acquire the characteristics of a bureaucracy. Socialism of a very sober type would almost automatically come into being. Human energy would turn away from business. Other than economic pursuits would attract the brains and provide the adventure. (my emphasis)

And later in the chapter:

if capitalist evolution— “progress”— either ceases or becomes completely automatic, the economic basis of the industrial bourgeoisie will be reduced eventually to wages such as are paid for current administrative work excepting remnants of quasirents and monopoloid gains that may be expected to linger on for some time. Since capitalist enterprise, by its very achievements, tends to automatize progress, we conclude that it tends to make itself superfluous— to break to pieces under the pressure of its own success. 

Schumpeter sees this eventuality itself in the terms of creative destruction, and like Marx, sees economic and sociological conditions as two parts of the same whole:

The capitalist process not only destroys its own institutional framework but it also creates the conditions for another. Destruction may not be the right word after all. Perhaps I should have spoken of transformation. The outcome of the process is not simply a void that could be filled by whatever might happen to turn up; things and souls are transformed in such a way as to become increasingly amenable to the socialist form of life.

This brings us to the next section: "Can Socialism Work?" Short answer: Yes, but it requires certain social conditions. 

Let's speed past this argument and get to get to Part IV: "Socialism and Democracy." Can socialism and democracy coexist? Schumpeter says yes and no:

Between socialism as we defined it and democracy as we defined it there is no necessary relation: the one can exist without the other. At the same time there is no incompatibility: in appropriate states of the social environment the socialist engine can be run on democratic principles. But observe that these simple statements depend upon our view about what socialism and democracy are. Therefore they mean not only less than, but also something different from, what either party to the contest has in mind.

After some analysis, he concludes:

I. In setting forth our conclusions we had better begin with the relation between democracy and the capitalist order of things.  

The ideology of democracy as reflected by the classical doctrine rests on a rationalist scheme of human action and of the values of life. By virtue of a previous argument (Chapter XI) this fact would in itself suffice to suggest that it is of bourgeois origin. History clearly confirms this suggestion: historically, the modern democracy rose along with capitalism, and in causal connection with it. But the same holds true for democratic practice: democracy in the sense of our theory of competitive leadership presided over the process of political and institutional change by which the bourgeoisie reshaped, and from its own point of view rationalized, the social and political structure that preceded its ascendancy: the democratic method was the political tool of that reconstruction. We have seen that the democratic method works, particularly well, also in certain extra- and pre-capitalist societies. But modern democracy is a product of the capitalist process.  

Whether or not democracy is one of those products of capitalism which are to die out with it is of course another question. And still another is how well or ill capitalist society qualifies for the task of working the democratic method it evolved. (my emphasis)

And let's leave it there, not covering the final section, "A Historical Sketch of Socialist Parties."

Like Marx, Schumpeter takes up economics, but within a sociological framework. He's interested in the questions of how societies evolve and how different economic frameworks work within those sociological conditions. Although he's certainly not Marxist in the economic sense, he sees definite insights in Marx's thought and seeks to understand what the Marxian framework can and can't do. And his notion of creative destruction attempts to address the question of dynamism that he believes Marx doesn't account for. I don't pretend to do justice to this book, but I do suggest picking it up—it's interesting in its own right, but it's also enormously influential for entrepreneurs and tells us a lot about how they see their worth. 

Reading :: The Theory of Economic Development

The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle
By Joseph A. Schumpeter

In my last few reviews, I've felt compelled to say that I'm not an ethnographer, nor am I an entrepreneur. At the risk of sounding like Dr. McCoy, I'm not an economist either. But I wanted to read this book because it's a classic for entrepreneurs. In this review, I'll focus mainly on the terms and concepts that have made their way into the entrepreneur lexicon. Since I'm reading the Kindle version, I won't use page numbers.

Schumpeter defines economic development as "only such changes in economic life as are not forced upon it from without but arise by its own initiative, from within," and argues that "Development in our sense is then defined by the carrying out of new combinations." He continues, "This concept covers the following five cases: (1) The introduction of a new good ... (2) The introduction of a new method of production ... (3) The opening of a new market ... (4) The conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials or half-manufactured goods ... (5) The carrying out of the new organization of any industry." These all will sound familiar to entrepreneurs today: they are potential component claims in the complex argument of the entrepreneur's pitch.

Combining "new combinations of the means of production" and credit, Schumpeter says, yields "the fundamental phenomenon of economic development. The carrying out of new combinations we call 'enterprise'; the individuals whose function it is to carry them out we call 'entrepreneurs.'" He adds that "we call entrepreneurs not only those 'independent' businessmen in an exchange economy who are usually so designated, but all who actually fulfil the function by which we define the concept, even if they are, as is becoming the rule, 'dependent' employees of the company, like managers, members of the boards of directors, and so forth, or even if their actual power to perform an entrepreneurial function has other foundations, such as the control of a majority of shares."

Yet "our concept is narrower than the traditional one in that it does not include all heads of firms or managers or industrialists who merely may operate an established business, bur only those who actually perform that function." And a few pages later: "whatever the type, everyone is an entrepreneur only when he actually 'carries out new combinations,' and loses that character as soon as he has built up his business, when he settles down to running it as other people run their businesses." The functions are different: "Carrying out a new plan and acting according to a customary one are things as different as making a road and walking along it."

Critically, entrepreneurs are not the same as inventors. "As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant. And to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it, and a task, moreover, requiring entirely different aptitudes. Although entrepreneurs of course may be inventors just as they may be capitalists, they are inventors not by nature of their function but by coincidence and vice versa."

"Capital," Schumpeter says, "is nothing but the lever by which the entrepreneur subjects to his control the concrete goods which he needs, nothing but a means of diverting the factors of production to new uses, or dictating a new direction to production. This is the only function of capital" (His emphasis).

Once the new combinations have been carried out, Schumpeter says, "the new process of production will be repeated. And for this entrepreneurial activity is no longer necessary." Entrepreneurship in his sense is fleeting, an innovative stage that leads to stable production, and an entrepreneur who is not engaged in this stage is no longer an entrepreneur.

At the end of the book, Schumpeter responds to critics. Most interesting for me was the criticism: "why is it that economic development in our sense does not proceed evenly as a tree grows, but as it were jerkily; why does it display those characteristic ups and downs?" And he answers: "exclusively because the new combinations are not, as one would expect according to general principles of probability, evenly distributed through time—in such a way that equal intervals of time could be chosen, in each of which the carrying out of one new combination would fall—but appear, if at all, discontinuously in groups or swarms." Schumpeter argues that these swarms are due to three things: (1) "the vast majority of new combinations will not grow out of the old firms or immediately take their place, but appear side by side, and compete, with them." (2) An en masse increase in entrepreneurial demand "signifies a very substantial increase in purchasing power all over the business sphere." (3) trying new combinations results in more errors. "Why do entrepreneurs appear, not continuously... but in clusters? Exclusively because the appearance of one or a few entrepreneurs facilitates the appearance of others, and these the appearance of more, in ever-increasing numbers" (his emphasis). One or two entrepreneurs lead, and once they are successful, others rush in.

I found the book interesting, although hard to get through in spots. My real interest is in how entrepreneurs see opportunity and how they argue in ways that help others see it. And for those purposes, Schumpeter's foundational work has been helpful. I wouldn't call this book a page-turner, but if you're interested in entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurs argue, it's a must read.

Reading :: The Startup Owner's Manual

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
By Steve Blank and Bob Dorf

I just reviewed Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany. Blank's coauthor on this book, Bob Dorf, "critiqued the early versions of Steve's Four Steps to the Epiphany mercilessly," according to his bio in the back of The Startup Owner's Manual. They now run a consultancy together.

In this book, they pool their deep expertise to put together a book that should be read in pieces, as entrepreneurs get to different stages in their startups. Drawing on the Business Model Canvas, they walk entrepreneurs through the process of developing a model, including a value proposition, and iterating it properly so that it can speak to the intended customers. They provide steps and heuristics along the way, attending to things as diverse as structuring your organization, assessing your market, developing your business model, articulating your value proposition, deciding when to pivot, and assembling your sales force.

I'm not an entrepreneur, so I'm making this a short review. But the book itself is quite large, and it's full of step by step advice. Again, like Four Steps, this book should be on your desk if you're planning a startup.

Reading :: The Four Steps to the Epiphany

The Four Steps to the Epiphany
By Steve Blank

Just a side note here before I start on the review itself. This book is subtitled "The book that launched the Lean Startup revolution," and indeed Steve Blank taught and supported Eric Reis, whose The Lean Startup made the term famous. The book is cited quite a bit and is de rigeur in the startup world. I read this book in fall 2014, and when I decided to cite it for some research I'm working on, I realized that Blank had self-published it. Based on my own experience with a self-published book that is not nearly as famous I'm sure Blank has turned this and his other book into handsome income-producing assets.

That's what Blank excels at, of course: helping people to identify a hypothesis about a market's need, test and iterate that hypothesis, then execute a plan to fill that need. In this book, Blank argues that customer development—the process of identifying a potential market segment, developing a hypothesis about what it needs, validating and iterating that hypothesis, and executing—occurs in four sequential but iterated stages: (1) customer discovery, (2) customer validation, (3) customer creation, and (4) company building. In steps 1-2 (the “Search” phase), entrepreneurs search for the right business model and test value propositions as hypotheses; in steps 3-4 (the “Execute” phase), entrepreneurs execute based on the business model and the validated value proposition. That is, in rhetorical terms, the essential claim is established in the first two steps, then serves as the foundation for the last two steps.

To develop that hypothesis, Blank advocates calling at least 100 potential customers. He provides scripts and examples to help you figure out how to make such a call, how to extract actual feedback (as opposed to brush-offs), and how to apply it. He discusses when one must pivot and even how to structure one's organization to make it more nimble so that pivots can be executed more swiftly. Throughout, he draws on a deep well of experience, including both successes and failures, and he is quite candid about the latter.

I'm not planning to start a high-tech organization soon, but if I were, this would be a good playbook to follow. If you're interested in becoming an entrepreneur, or studying how entrepreneurs make their arguments, this is an essential read.

Reading :: Practical Ethnography

Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector
By Sam Ladner

I don't remember where I ran across the link to Sam Ladner's page on her upcoming book project, but I was intrigued. A researcher at Microsoft, Ladner wanted to reach two types of people:

• "Social scientists who want to adapt their academic skills to the private sector, either to find a full-time job or to practice as an independent researcher; and

• Designers and researchers already working in the private sector who may not have formal training in ethnography" (see her website)

Now this is a potentially tricky split. The two audiences are working at the same goal from very different starting points, so they have differing ideas about the goal and differing assumptions about what it takes to get there. As Ladner explains in the introduction, "In some ways, explanation [in design research] is doubly hard in private-sector ethnography. Academic ethnographers use social theory and rigorous methods to avoid the 'noticing everything' problem, but they also have the luxury of longer timelines. Private-sector ethnographers must adapt academic theory, method, and timelines to suit their research needs." But, Ladner says, we need to be able to help both sides perform ethnography in the private sector: after all, the "virtual disintegration of the academic job market" means that many of those academics need to enter the private sector, while product managers, designers, and market researchers in the private sector need to "deploy the innovative power of ethnography."

Side note: Ladner really is specifically talking about ethnography here, and she spends time describing what ethnography is, what its assumptions are, and how its methods can be adapted to short-form design-oriented studies. I initially wondered whether this book would overlap with my own book Topsight, but Topsight covers case study research, so the overlap is less than I expected.

To bring these two audiences along, Ladner uses a clear writing style and organizes her book "around the steps of a typical corporate ethnography project." She overviews ethnography, its history, and its intellectual heritage, and she also draws on select social theory, covering "concepts such as social capital, gender, economic class, and the presentation of self as tools for organizing and cohering your ethnographic research." Then she overviews the steps of a corporate ethnography, covering aspects that social science research methods books often don't cover: project management, technology and tools, client management, reporting, and deliverables.

It's that practical bent that makes the book really interesting for me. Yes, the theory section is interesting (although, I think, a little thick for people who want a how-to guide). But the practical tips on managing clients, following ethical guidelines, approaching and gaining trust of participants, gaining and keeping access, and reporting are all very useful. More than that, they're based on hard-won experience, experience that Ladner expertly uses to illustrate different issues throughout.

As an academic (although not an ethnographer), I appreciate how Ladner built a bridge between academic practices and practical corporate investigations, helping me to see how the latter requires us to adapt our skills and learn new ones. However, since I'm not an ethnographer, I am reluctant to evaluate the book as an ethnography text. Based on my readings and on conversations with ethnographers, I suspect that many academic ethnographers will not like the idea that ethnography can be done as rapidly as Ladner suggests. But I'll let them have that family fight without me.

So should you pick up Practical Ethnography? If you're planning to perform research for hire, and especially if you're one of those academically trained people who are considering leaving for the private sector, I highly recommend it. But I also recommend parts of it for qualitative researchers of all stripes who are considering how to approach participants as consumers, how to apply their work to design, and how to report their research in ways that can influence practical change.

CFP: Special issue of Information Systems Journal on Activity Theory in IS Research

This CFP came across my email today. If you're working in IS research and using activity theory, definitely check it out.

As you may know, the Information Systems Journal is a strong journal in this area, and AT has become increasingly important to IS research. The editors

seek relevant and rigorous submissions which address a combination of the following criterion.
1. Apply and develop Activity Theory in IS research, by demonstrating the empirical and theoretical
2. Offer new contributions to Activity Theory, for instance extending Activity Theory or signalling how the IS field can offer a fertile landscape for expanding Activity Theory.
3. Offer in depth comparison of Activity Theory with other contemporary social frameworks (cf.,
4. Blend Activity Theory with complimentary contemporary social theories.
5. Expand research design to include mixed and multi-method studies.
6. Critical studies on Activity Theory and papers that illuminate on the difficulties of applying
7. Consider the origins of Activity Theory and the interpretation and misinterpretations of it in
8. The application of Activity Theory in novel contexts, such as online and digital environments.

The optional extended abstract is due April 30, with full paper due by Sept 1. Looks well worth it!