Reading :: Counterproductive

Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy
by Melissa Gregg

Full disclosure: For some years now, I've been conducting a one-day workshop on time management, based in part on my own empirical studies over the last 25 years, and in part on sources in management, psychology, neuropsychology, sociology, and anthropology. The goal is to give people a broad view of why their time is more fragmented now than ever before, to provide some basic theory about how people mediate their own actions via texts and other representations, and to discuss how they might develop their own mediatory strategies at the individual, small group, and organizational levels. I've presented shorter versions of this workshop to academics, medical doctors, research groups, and various others. People who take the workshop generally find it rewarding. They single out aspects such as taking a step back to figure out their overall goals; exploring different approaches and strategies; learning how and when to say no to obligations; and understanding how their work and text systems interact with those of others.  More than that, they express relief: they come away from the workshop with a better understanding of why they feel pressures from work and home life, and they have a better sense of how to deal with these pressures beyond simply reacting to them. 

So I'm hardly a disinterested party when it comes to reading this book. That being said, I was disappointed in Counterproductive, which "explores how productivity emerged as a way to think about workplace performance at the turn of the twentieth century and its ongoing consequences for the administration of labor today" (p.3). "Counterproductive shows how time mastery became a defining quality of professionals over an extended historical period, remaining constant through successive waves of managerial discourse" (p.4). Gregg (correctly) notes that the focus on time management is related to increasing worker precarity (p.6) — although in my view she does not quite get the connection, as I'll discuss below. Gregg ultimately considers the focus on productivity to be pointless due to the weakness of labor organization (p.8). 

Let's review Gregg's argument first, then I'll discuss the problems I have with it. Ultimately, I found the book valuable, not for its insights per se so much as how it forced me to articulate things about time management for myself.

First, Gregg's argument. Gregg presents it in three parts. 

In part I, she "tackles the legacy of time-management methods introduced by turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressivists to optimize work in the office and factory," beginning with Lilian Gilbreth's time-and-motion studies. She calls out Gilbreth and others for their "covert reliance on delegated labor both in and outside the home" (p.12 -- Lilian Gibreth had servants). Also in Part I, Gregg notes the "gendered dynamics" in early management theory and productivity literature (p.12). 

In part II, she analyzes contemporary time management books and productivity apps, arguing that productivity became "a way of life for knowledge professionals seeking affective security amid job volatility" (p.13). She adds, "My reading reinforces how time-management instruction and adherence have become a necessary form of immaterial labor in an information economy, training workers to embrace their flexibility" (p.15). 

In part III, she examines "the infatuation with mindfulness taking hold in technology and corporate cultures in recent years" (p.15). She argues that "the turn to mindfulness can be seen as a response to the decline in collective opportunities to experience ritual in the workplace" (p.15). 

She concludes with "a set of recommendations for post-work productivity" (p.17). One specific example is that of coworking spaces, which "demarcate the move away from company life to something more playful and free" (p.133). 

Where to start?

Let's start with a methodological note. To grossly oversimplify, I tend to think of research in the social sciences as belonging to one of two basic stances. In Stance 1, we ask people what they think. In Stance 2, we tell them what they think. 

Personally, I do most of my research in Stance 1: I interview people to get their perspectives and have them articulate their motivations, I observe them as they do things, I pick up the specific texts and other artifacts they use, and I turn these into an integrated understanding of their work. Usually I conduct some form of member check—that is, I bring my conclusions back to them and see if what I've produced fairly represents what they are experiencing. 

Gregg is doing her research in Stance 2: She reads texts and analyzes apps, then characterizes these as having a coherent message that represents the ideas, concepts, and concerns of the people who read and use them. She does not ask these people whether her conclusions match their lived experience. Stance 2 is in many ways more satisfactory for the individual researcher, since it allows them to avoid collecting feedback and therefore to avoid having to deal with any pushback that might complicate their conclusions. But the limitations are obvious.

I think we see some of those limitations throughout the book. For instance, Gregg draws a straight line from time-and-motion studies (in which consultants observed manual workers, then reconstructed their motions to make them more efficient) to productivity texts (in which managers are given advice on self-structuring their time to make themselves more effective). These are two very different things: in time-and-motion studies, workers are micromanaged by someone else; in productivity texts, managers are given tools to structure their own time and work. 

Equating these two functions allows Gregg to claim a direct lineage between the two. But the 20th century is a story of great change in how work was organized, due in part to information and communication technologies, which drove organizational changes, as well as an explosion in education and increasing automation. Consequently, work became more fragmented (and, yes, more precarious), and more importantly, people began to own their own work—that is, we saw fewer jobs that could be micromanaged through time-and-motion studies, and more jobs that required self-structuring. The vanguards included executive management, of course, but also ... housewives, a group that Gregg notes without catching the import (p.23). We can add traveling salespeople and independent contractors, who similarly are given work objectives but are allowed wide latitude in how to achieve these (i.e., command, but not control). They have high discretion over how they conduct their time, and they consequently carry more responsibility. And although I have listed four specific groups here, due to work trends such as projectification and outsourcing (and the precarity that comes with these), this trend continues. This is why Drucker's classic The Effective Executive continues to enjoy readership, and a much broader readership than just executives. In a sense, even those of us who are not in an executive position are functioning as executives—that is, no one is going to structure our time for us, and we have to figure it out for ourselves. 

Incidentally, this point also suggests the solution to a mystery that Gregg brings up several times: why time management is so often compared to athletics. Gregg maintains that athletics is inherently competitive, and this competition orientation is reflected in time management, in which people assert their status by delegating difficult parts of their jobs to others. She warrants this reading with a reference to Sloterdijk (p.138). But athleticism is not inherently competitive (at least I hope not—every morning I run an exceedingly slow two miles, and I don't compare my times with others). Athletics, however, is one of the most common experiences in self-discipline in the US school system. (Is this how people read the athletics analogy in the time management literature? I don't know, I haven't asked them—but to be fair, this is a blog review, not a book in which I confidently ascribe views to people.)

One strategy for self-structuring is to figure out how to delegate. Gregg bristles at this trend, which she sees as judging value of tasks based on status. But one of the sources discussing delegation is The Effective Executive, in which Drucker (reasonably, I think) argues that the executive must figure out what they alone can do, excel at that, and delegate the rest. Just as most of us don't grow our own food or make our own shoes, most of us identify tasks that don't fit in our wheelhouse and delegate them to a specialist—or automate. When I ask an electrician to rewire a faulty outlet, it's not because the task is beneath me, it's because I know they can do a better job, keep the wiring up to code, and avoid getting electrocuted. The electrician will be more effective. And if I can delegate this work to the electrician, I can turn back to the tasks that only I can do, such as teaching my classes or writing my research articles. I'll be more effective too. This is not "elite" (pp.95-96) but commonplace—and, I would contend, common sense.

Gregg goes on to argue that time management is a recursive distraction from identifying a worthwhile basis of work as a source for spiritual fulfillment (p.96), and argues that time management is "an epistemology without an ontology," a way of life, "religious devotion" (p.98) with "spiritual valences" when taken to its "logical extreme" (p.99). Here is where I think she could have really benefited from interviews with actual people, who (at least in my experience and in my field studies over the past 25 years) are just trying to get through the day, be effective in their jobs, and save more time for their home life. Yes, they are grappling with precarity, but I don't see these knowledge workers as becoming devotees to a new religion or even considering time management to be an epistemology.

In the conclusion, as noted, Gregg sees coworking as a hope for the future. Unlike Gregg, I have actually interviewed coworkers and coworking space proprietors, and I keep up with the research literature on coworking — much of which emphasizes the inherent precarity in coworking spaces. Coworkers have not checked out of time management. They tend to be independent contractors, dependent contractors, small business owners, remote workers, and others for whom it is critical to structure their own work and manage their own time. Although the coworking movement has often claimed that it is changing work, coworkers are hardly saying goodbye to time management—quite the opposite. 

To sum up: I was not a fan of this book's argument or methodology. The book did, however, allow me to really think through  and articulate some of the things I have seen in the time management literature, so I still found it valuable. You might as well. 

Reading :: Carbon Democracy

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
By Timothy Mitchell

Just a brief review for this book. The author notes that oil is often blamed for destabilizing democracies. However,  he says, the relationship is more complicated: mass democracy, he argues, emerged due to fossil fuels. That is, when England transitioned to coal, coal's properties (including where it was found and how it was extracted and transported) allowed coal miners to create chokepoints that they could control, thus exercising political power. The history of coal and oil extraction in the years since has been characterized by a struggle over who would control the extraction and flow of fossil fuels. 

Mitchell characterizes his analysis as Latourean and symmetrical. Although he does make some attempts to carry out a symmetrical analysis, it is not—at least, it doesn't seem to me—Latourean or symmetrical overall. Rather, it reads like a straight history in which individual and collective human actors are attributed with agency and nonhuman actors are typically acted upon. Furthermore, the story is simplified. For instance, I think Mitchell makes a plausible case that controlling chokepoints could allow miners to exercise political power—but that doesn't explain why this power took the form of mass democracy in particular. What other trends, causes, etc. contributed to this particular form of government over others? Why did parliamentary democracy do well in comparison to fascism and communism in the 20th century? Laying the origin and success of democracy at the feet of fossil fuel deposits seems oversimplified. 

I still recommend the book as a fascinating history of fossil fuel development, but only as part of the story. 

Reading :: The Constitution of Algorithms

The Constitution of Algorithms
By Florian Jaton

In this book, Jaton uses a Latourean approach to examine how algorithms are constituted. I found the introduction to be really interesting -- the case studies less so.

Let me set the scene, since it may be affecting how I read the book. I actually read this book a few months ago, in PDF format, and added comments to it in Google Drive. Since then, UT has announced that we no longer have unlimited storage space on GDrive, and it turns out that I was far over the new quota. So I have moved all of my PDFs to my UT space on Box.com, which is unlimited—for now. Unfortunately, although the comments transferred over to Box, I can only see them by mousing over the page—there's no visual indicator that the page has a comment until I happen to mouse over it. That makes writing this review more difficult.

Fortunately, most of the comments are in Chapter 1, which—to my mind at least—is more valuable than the case studies that support it. In Chapter 1, Jaton considers the question of algorithms. From a Deleuzian standpoint, they have fluidity, swiftness, and distributivity, and can be characterized as devices: They circulate and link up sparse actants quickly (p.6). STS scholars have examined algorithms' workings and agency, but Jaton is more interested in how "unrelated entities (e.g., documents, people desires) ... come into contact to form, in the end, devices we may call 'algorithms'" (p.8). Jaton sees algorithms as durable, mobile, and carrying characteristics of other actants, just as Goody's graphical objects, Latour and Woolgar's inscriptions, and Dorothy Smith's documents (p.13). 

Jaton proposes to study these in terms of constitution rather than construction. The term constitution evokes a political settlement, and constitutions can be amended (p.17). To explore the question, Jaton introduces his ethnography of a computer science laboratory. 

Although I usually enjoy ethnographies, I confess that I was not that interested in this one. It reads a bit like Laboratory Life, but whereas LL provided momentously new insights to me, this ethnography mainly seemed to transfer those insights to a new activity. I did learn a lot about how algorithms are developed, but the insights felt small and incremental. As the author notes in the conclusion, "these empirical elements [from the case studies] might seem quite tenuous when compared with the ogre to  whom this book is explicitly addressed: algorithms and their growing contribution to the shaping of the collective world" (p.283). I agree. Although Chapter 1 is well worth reading, I don't think the case chapters measure up to it. 

Should you read this book? If you're interested in understanding where algorithms come from, or exploring them from an STS standpoint, definitely—but spend most of your time in Chapter 1.

Reading :: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
By Peter F. Drucker

I picked up this thick (839pp.) book in a thrift store. Although I have plenty of sticky notes in the margins, I'll write a short review. 

If you've read much Drucker, there aren't too many surprises here. Drucker draws on scholarship, but also many, many case studies, to illustrate his thoughts on the tasks of management, the manager, and top management. Here, I'll just skip around, picking out some quotable principles. 

Early in the book, Drucker argues that management is practice and performance, not science or knowledge (p.17); it is a social function, socially accountable and culturally embedded (p.18). 

Drucker alleges that "Productivity means that balance between all factors of production will give the greatest output for the smallest effort"—not productivity per worker, not productivity per hour of work. Those measures are still grounded in manual labor and "still express the mechanistic fallacy—of which Marx, to the permanent disability of Marxian economics, is the last important dupe—that all human achievement could eventually be measured in units of muscle effort" (p.68). Instead, Drucker argues, greater productivity is achieved by doing away with muscle effort: via "capital equipment, that is, mechanical energy" or via knowledge (p.68).

Skipping forward, Drucker discusses the shift to knowledge work: "A larger and larger proportion of the labor force in all developed countries does not work with its hands, whether as skilled or unskilled workers, but with ideas, concepts, theories. ... The tool of the file clerk is not hammer or sickle, but the alphabet, that is, a high-level abstraction and a symbol rather than a thing" (p.170). Importantly, knowledge workers are only productive via "self-motivation and self-direction" (p.176; cf. p.279). Indeed, he considers the alphabet to be "the most advanced, most perfect example of scientific management" (p.182). 

Of course, there's plenty not to like about this book as well. Drucker, writing in the early 1970s, seems uninterested in the Civil Rights movement except to the extent that it affects management and the labor pool—resulting in many jolts as, for instance, Drucker characterizes "pre-industrial people, whether peasants in developing countries, the former craftsmen in the mills of England in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, or Blacks from the ghettos of the American city today" (p.192). This is, to put it mildly, not a very nuanced understanding of the respective situations and cultural development of the three groups mentioned. 

Should you pick up this book? I mean, if you can get it for a dollar at a thrift store, or if you're a Drucker completist, or if you want to learn a lot about how management was understood in the 1970s, sure. But if you have already read the more popular Drucker books, I think this one won't provide many new insights. 

Reading :: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
By Oliver Sacks

Like Cheaper by the Dozen, this book came out of the Little Free Library down the street. Amazon lists this version at $46 new, $20 used, so free is quite the bargain.

Sacks was inspired by the work of A.R. Luria, a member of the Vygotsky-Luria Circle and pioneer in neuropsychology, and no stranger to readers of this blog. Sacks calls Luria's works "the greatest neurological treasure of our time" (p.235). So, when Luria actually asked Sacks to write detailed cases about his right-hemisphere brain damage cases, just as Luria had written cases about left-hemisphere cases (p.5), he did. Like Luria's The Man with a Shattered World, these cases, are detailed, poignant, and good representatives of Luria's "romantic science" approach. And I was personally delighted to see so many of Luria's works being referenced, including his twin study. Leontiev and Zaporozhets' book Rehabilitation of Hand Function also gets a mention.

The stories in the book are all fascinating. I'll just mention one. In Ch.7, Sacks reports treating an elderly patient with Parkinson's disease whose vestibular system had been affected. He consequently walked with an unconscious tilt. When he was shown a film of himself walking, he was astounded, but quickly developed a solution: a pair of glasses with a spirit level (or bubble level) built into the frame. The level gave him instant feedback to help him compensate for his vestibular difficulties. Although it was distracting at first, in a couple of weeks this feedback soon became integrated into his actions "like keeping an eye on the instrument panel of one's car" (p.76). What a great example of how people can compensate with external mediation, and how that mediator can become integrated into a new system.

Reading :: Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen
By Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

 Just a quick acknowledgement here that I read this book recently. I read this classic a few times in my childhood, and when I saw it in the Little Free Library down the street, I decided to pick it up and enjoy it again. 

But I didn't just pick it up out of nostalgia. This book was mentioned in another reading that I had recently completed, a book on time management -- which I'll review soon.

Reading :: Knowledge Assets

Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy
By Max Boisot

Recently I reviewed Boisot's 1987 Information and Organizations, which—despite some really interesting ideas—borrowed a bit indiscriminately from various disciplines and used a style I found off-putting. But in 1998's Knowledge Assets, Boisot really hits his stride, producing a better structured, more coherent, and more stylistically confident book. It won the 2000 Igor Ansoff Strategy Prize, and it appears to be Boisot's most heavily cited work. 

Don't get me wrong — Boisot's work still rests on Shannon's communication theory, still thinks about information in terms of Newtonian physics, and thus still has a very thin concept of audience characterized vaguely as "populations." It still doesn't have an account of how analytic-systemic representations develop. It still seems to have no place for polysemy. It still is presented as a conceptual frame, avoiding the messiness and challenges that come from applying a framework to empirical cases. For someone who reads a lot of sociocultural theory, who thinks a lot about development and ambiguity and interpretation, and who attempts to apply theory to qualitative cases—like me—Boisot's work leaves a lot to be desired. Still, within his assumptions, he has done a great deal of work here and has produced an internally coherent, instructive account of information (and to some extent knowledge). I admire it in the same way that I might admire the theological reasoning produced by someone from a different religion: he may start from different precepts than mine, but the work he based on those precepts is internally sound and perhaps some of it can be analogically applied to mine.

So with that preface, let's get into the book. The blurb on the back of the book sums it up:

... Max Boisot provides a conceptual framework for managers and students that will help them explore and understand how knowledge and information assets differ from physical assets, and how to deal with them at a strategic level within their organizations.

In the introduction, Boisot lays the foundation by defining 

• technology: "sociotechnical systems configured so as to produce certain specific types of physical effects"
• competence: "the organizational and technical skills involved in achieving a certain level of performance in the production of such effects"
• capability: "a strategic skill in the application and integration of competences"
• complexity:  "the number of elements in interaction and the number of different states that those interactions can give rise to" (p.5)

He adds: "Clearly, the number and nature of technologies that have to be integrated into competences, and the number and variety of these that have to be mobilized to achieve a capability, will determine the level of complexity that a firm has to deal with" (p.5). That's important because complexity is increasing in firms (p.5), leading managers to cope with complexity "by developing abstract models that help them to make sense of the complexity and reduce it to manageable proportions" (p.6). At the time Boisot is writing, in the late 1990s, rising complexity has precipitated a crisis: "We are entering the information economy still firmly strapped to the paradigms of the energy economy," and managers need to move to a new paradigm to manage adequately (p.7). Specifically, the energy economy assumes linear processes, but the world is nonlinear, requiring an understanding of complexity (p.9). 

To gain that understanding, he distinguishes among three things that are often confused:

• data: "a discrimination between physical states ... that may or may not convey information to an agent"—depending on the agent's "stock of knowledge"
• information: "that subset of the data residing in things that activates an agent — it is filtered from the data by the agent's perceptual or conceptual apparatus .... [it] establishes a relationship between things and agents"
• knowledge "can be conceptualized as a set of probability distributions held by an agent and orienting his or her actions. These either consolidate or undergo modification with the arrival of new information. In contrast to information, knowledge cannot be directly observed. Its existence can only be inferred from the action of agents. It follows from this that knowledge assets cannot be directly observed either; they therefore have to be apprehended indirectly" (p.12)

Knowledge "economizes on the use of physical resources" (p.12):

• "by in-forming them—i.e., by embedding itself in physical artefacts and structures"; ex: standardized bricks (p.12)
• "by organizing them—i.e., by embedding itself as information in documents and symbolic support systems used to coordinate the creation or functioning of artefacts"; ex: house plans, read in conjunction with detailed specs and a budget (p.13)
• "by enhancing the understanding of intelligent agents that interact with physical resources—i.e., by embedding itself in the brains of individuals or organizations"; ex: the "architect draws on an accumulated stock of knowledge which reflects a collective understanding of human behavior in space" etc. etc. (p.13).

He adds:

In short, knowledge held by agents builds up the information structures latent in physical things, in documents, or in individual brains. Knowledge assets are those accumulations that yield a stream of useful services over time while economizing on the consumption of physical resources—i.e., minimizing the rate of entropy production. (p.13)

He argues that we can classify knowledge assets along two dimensions: 

• How far can they be given form, i.e., codified? (ex: mass-produced artifacts vs. discursive remarks) (p.13)
• How much can they be abstracted, i.e.,  applying to many situations? 

Codification and abstraction are two interrelated ways to economize on information processing, lowering the cost of converting usable knowledge to knowledge assets (p.14). 

In the next chapter, Boisot says, "we shall propose a way of integrating physical and information phenomena in a single unified representation," using the production function from neoclassical economics (p.19). To do so, he reiterates the differences among data, information, and knowledge:

• Data: "a discernable difference between alternative states of a system" (p.19)
• Information: "Data that modifies the expectations or the conditional readiness of an observer" (p.20)
• Knowledge: "the set of expectations that an observer holds with respect to an event" (p.20). 

So knowledge assets are "that subset of dispositions to act that is embedded in individuals, groups, or artefacts that have value-adding potential" (p.20). 

Boisot charges that Marx thought of capital as congealed labor; he "held a strictly energy-based view of economic processes" (p.21). But, he says, in industrial societies we rely more on information—and that means that we must "economize on the consumption of data as well as that of physical resources. How do we do this? By extracting information from data and then junking the latter" (p.29, his emphasis). We abstract patterns from the data, then focus on the patterns.

This tendency allows us to do more, but it also involves complexity reduction, and that carries dangers. "[A]bove a certain level of complexity, we face chaos" as we cannot "effectively process the amount of data we are confronted with at the speed it requires" (p.37). At the lower bound, we are faced with "excessive order—characterized by an undersupply of data" (p.37). Effective learning happens in between these, at "the edge of chaos," which is "a region that complex systems are drawn to in their quest for dynamic stability" (p.37).

This brings us to the third chapter, on the I-Space. Boisot refreshes us on codification, which "can usefully be thought of as a process of giving form to phenomena or to experience" (p.41, his emphasis), and on abstraction, "the process of discerning the structures that underlie the forms" (p.41). Working together, these reduce an agent's "data-processing load" and "facilitate communication processes and hence the diffusion of information" (p.41 — my emphasis this time). 

Codification, he says, "constitutes a selection from competing perceptual and conceptual alternatives," and this selection "is often conflict-laden" (p.44). Higher codification economizes on data-processing resources, but it also results in lost flexibility and options (p.47). It fossilizes hard-won skills, and thus also deskills skilled craftspeople (p.47). 

Whereas codification gives form to phenomena, abstraction gives them structure (p.48). Abstraction saves on data-processing resources by "minimizing the number of categories that we need to draw on for a given task. Abstraction then works by teasing out the underlying structure of phenomena relevant to our purpose" (p.49). "Abstraction, in effect, is a form of reductionism: it works by letting the one stand for the many" (p.50). 

Diffusion is the availability of data and information. It's different from deliberate uptake: information can be diffused (made available more broadly), but not taken up by agents (not adopted) (p.52). Citing Shannon and Weaver, Boisot notes three problems that can threaten diffusion:

1. "Is the message received the same as the message sent?" (technical level)
2. "Is the message received understood?" (semantic level) 
3. "Is the message received acted upon as intended?" (pragmatic level) (p.53)

We then get to the I-Space, the cube diagram with the axes of codification, abstraction, and diffusion (p.56). Boisot contrasts it with Nonaka and Takeuchi, with one differentiator being that I-Space posits three types of tacit knowledge: things that are not said because

• everybody understands them
• nobody understands them
• some people understand them but cannot articulate them without cost (p.57)

He draws on the example of military technologies that a French firm transferred to the Iraqi military, assuming that the knowledge explicit in specifications and diagrams was adequate. They were incorrect (p.57). Reading this example, I thought of the ANT studies on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump and the gazogene—and I wondered where the "outside" of the I-Space cube was. In other words, what bounds the cube and the analysis? Who is sharing knowledge assets? Clearly not all agents have the same knowledge stock (we'll use that loose term since Boisot does), so the same information asset will not occupy the same space for all of them. Unfortunately, Boisot only addresses this (critical) bounding question in an offhand way—mentioning "individuals" and "public knowledge" here, and "populations" elsewhere. This becomes a real problem here, because he posits a "social learning cycle" (pp.58-66) without specifying the bounds of the social. 

The social learning cycle posits six movements:

1. Scanning for patterns
2. Problem-Solving by giving structure and coherence to the insights from scanning
3. Abstraction or "generalizing the application of newly codified insights to a wider range of situations"
4. Diffusion or "sharing the newly created insights with a target population" (notice that the assumption seems to be that an individual agent is performing these steps — not necessarily an individual person, perhaps an individual organization)
5. Absorption or "applying the newly codified insights to different situations in a 'learning-by-doing' or a 'learning-by-using' fashion," eventually acquiring uncodified "context" around it
6. Impacting, in which abstract knowledge is embedded in concrete practices (pp.59-61)

Boisot adds that these steps can run concurrently (p.61). And as mentioned, he characterizes the I-Space as applying to a "population" (p.62), acknowleging that sometimes "data can enter the I-Space from the outside." A few quick notes of caution here:

• The social learning cycle is portrayed as individual (although that individual can be a collective agent); we don't get a sense of how social or cultural knowledge might weigh across boundaries.
• The social learning cycle is also portrayed as intentional, in which problems lead to problem-solving and deliberate steps to improve the situation. We don't get a good account of, for instance, genre evolution in which small, collective, largely undirected changes result in the emergence of a more coherent problem space—cf. Bazerman's Shaping Written Knowledge. This point is striking in light of Boisot's many appeals to complexity theory!
• The social learning cycle is depicted as occurring "within" I-Space, specifically the I-Space of a given "population." That population is not discussed further, but I don't view it as nearly enough of a qualifier. My field (writing studies) made a similar handwaving generalization in the early 1990s, talking about "discourse communities" or populations that shared the same discourse. But the fact that people talk similarly or share similar characteristics is not enough to bind them together—to be meaningful in terms of social learning, they have to cross-reference each other. Social theories provide various ways to do this: for instance, activity theory bounds the case by identifying a shared object that people are laboring to transform, while qualitative case studies bound their cases by looking for formal organizations or identifiable types of interactions. This appeal to "populations" does not do that, instead waving the hard problem away. Without solving this problem of bounding, the I-Space really can't address social learning effectively.

Moving on, Boisot proposes to use the I-Space to represent knowledge assets. He states that "assets are stocks rather than flows and we have seen that knowledge assets can be stocked in people's heads, in documents, or in artefacts" (p.63). He provides a scaling guide (a table) to help us understand what high, medium, or low codification, abstraction, and diffusion might look like (p.65). He ends the chapter by noting that organizations seek minimum entropy, but they can't stay in that state (p.67).

The next chapter is on the paradox of value. Here, he doubles down on his previous assertion, arguing that information goods are naturally scarce only when "they are deeply embedded in some physical substrate that is limited in space and time," such as "individual brains and certain physical products" (p.71). This understanding of brains as a substrate for information is quite problematic from a sociocultural standpoint. Among other things, he sees knowledge as assets —something people have and save in "stocks"—rather than something we collectively do.  

In any case, he uses the I-Space cube to map maximum and minimum value. The minimal value is concrete, uncodified, and highly diffused—it's broadly known, but can't really be put into words or applied beyond a single concrete domain. Think in terms of lore. The max value is abstract, codified, and undiffused (p.79)—think of a formula that is a trade secret. But consider an issue that Boisot isn't mapping here, which is that any conceivable I-Space—let's take a company, since companies have trade secrets—will necessarily have multiple information or knowledge assets at different levels of codification, abstraction, and diffusion, and these will necessarily interact with each other (a point he makes earlier in the book when talking about reference documents), and that different agents in the same space will have different uptakes. Companies have both trade secrets and lore, and everything in between, and value can (and I'd argue, usually does) emerge from the relationships among them rather than from one specific asset. Boisot has earlier conceded that different levels of abstraction and codification yield different benefits, but seems to see social learning as a series of transformations of one piece of information rather than creating connections across several different representations oriented to different aspects of a problem space. Again, he's hindered by the vague understanding of what makes up the cube depicted in the I-Space.

He goes on to use the I-Space cube to describe base, key, and emergent technologies (p.85). Truthfully, Boisot ends up using this cube for everything: the social learning cycle, value, technology, governance, etc. The cube is so flexible partly because the axes are abstract, the points of reference are unspecified, and the space is vaguely bounded by 'populations." 

In the next chapter, he contrasts Newtonian learning (an equilibriating process with change coming from the outside) with Schumpterian learning (which explores the potential of nonlinear phenomena). He provides the example of an "industry-level SLC with a handful of players" (p.105), underscoring (in my opinion) the unit-of-analysis problem that he has fallen into. This is the weakest chapter in the book, in my view.

The next chapter addresses culture as a knowledge asset. Boisot argues that "only a small part of what we call cultural knowledge gets itself embedded in technologies and artefacts. A large part is embodied in social processes, institutional practices, and traditions, many of which are carried around in people's heads. For this reason most cultural knowledge has tended to be taken for granted rather than treated as an asset to be prized and exploited" (p.117). He characterizes culture as "a kind of collective memory" (p.120) and cautions that all substrates are subject to entropy, including the substrate of a human brain, which can go senile (p.120). Fortunately the I-Space — I'm sure you didn't see this coming, dear reader — lends itself well to the study of cultural transmission in Boisot's view (p.122). He suggests different I-Spaces for different subcultures (p.123). For cultural action, he suggests taking transactions as our unit of analysis (p.124). And that gets us to what he characterizes as types of transactions but what others have characterized as organization types or institutional logics: fiefs, clans, bureaucracies, and markets (pp.126-127). 

Later, he returns to the question of population raised earlier, arguing that one population is the environment for another, and that the larger a population is, the more abstract is the level that binds them together (p.136). He goes on to map natural cultures in the I-Space (p.142). 

Moving on, in the next chapter, he discusses products, technologies, and organizations. Here, he says that although we can "choose to treat firms as data-processing agents for I-Space purposes, but this is a convenient fiction that should not blind us to the fact that human agents are where the action is" (p.155). Ultimately, agents are either individual humans or aggregations of individual humans, possessing knowledge in the same way. For aggregations, knowledge assets are located in substrates including physical objects, data in documents, and human heads (p.155); this assertion is illustrated on p.156, fig.7.1, where one knowledge substrate is labeled "Heads." Later, Boisot pictures the migration of knowledge assets from head to documents and objects over time (p.165). 

Skipping a bit: In Chapter 10, Boisot asserts that the conceptual framework of the I-Space has been "tested in the field by users" and is undergoing "laboratory-like tests" (p.231). The field testing appears to be done in two-day workshops in which managers use the I-Space to map out knowledge assets (p.231). In a sense, then, these are like Engestrom's Change Labs, in which the conceptual framework is used to spark conversations and collective problem-solving — although Engestrom typically tries to involve a cross-section of stakeholders rather than just managers. 

In sum, this was a fascinating book, though as my notes suggest, it is heterodox to a sociocultural understanding of knowledge and information. I-Space has great potential for strategically mapping assets, but I'm not sure its fundamental understanding of information can allow it to reach that potential.

Let's illustrate with a simple case: a recipe you find online, connected to a homespun narrative about making the food, and illustrated with a simple video. Specifically, I see these problems:

• Frame of reference. What's the bound case in which information and knowledge are at play? Are we examining how end consumers will experience the assets, or are we looking at how the recipe genre, the HTML, the ASCII, and the MOV encodings are decoded by the computer? Is the video considered highly codified (MOV format) or relatively uncodified (conveying gestures)?
• Audience. "Population" isn't enough because any agent can be a member of multiple overlapping populations. Consider the COO of a family business. How is the I-Space bounded?
• Knowledge. It's externalized, putting off interpretation as outside the system. Even "uptake" is only mentioned briefly and offhandedly at the beginning.
• Knowledge is treated as a noun, an asset, rather than a verb, a practice.
• Knowledge is additionally treated as embedded in substrates, with one of those substrates being people's heads. This characterization is hugely problematic for cultural psychologists, sociologists, and others.
• Learning is treated as movement from one point in the I-Space to another. But these assets coexist and relate to each other,
• Information is treated as anchored within the I-Space, but in empirical studies, we often see information artifacts that share associations across multiple frames of reference (ex: a worker learns a calendaring system at her university, then continues using it in her first job even though that job's environment has different assumptions and constraints). We don't get an account of such associations or how they conflict. 
• Information is treated as distinct within the I-Space, but in empirical studies, we typically see people relating different information sources together. Knowledge doesn't just come from transforming individual representations but also from relating multiple representations.

Still, I find the I-Space to be incredibly interesting and potentially very fecund. I'll keep thinking about it and seeing if I can find ways to productively transform these insights.

Reading :: Information & Organizations

Information and Organizations: The Manager as Anthropologist
By Max Boisot

The link goes to a reseller, since this 1987 book is out of print. I bought my own copy used from Amazon, and to my delight, within its pages was a Visa carbon from 1989 and a few Esso Tiger Tokens. 

Boisot is really interesting to me: an architect turned management theorist who has contributed substantially to theories of knowledge. He has an annual award named after him. Nevertheless, I had not heard of him until I searched the literature for adhocracies in 2013 and found his book on ATLAS. There, he discusses the I-Space, a three-dimensional cube representing the codification, abstraction, and diffusion of information. Fascinating, but also heterodox from my understanding of information in a way that I had a hard time putting my finger on. I made a mental note to go back to this work later and figure out what was going on.

Well, now is later, so I picked up two more of Boisot's books as well as a collection put together in tribute to him after he passed away. This 1987 book is the earliest of the group. It did clear some things up, but it is not as sophisticated or well thought out as his later work, and parts of it I flatly disliked. 

Why? Well, let's recenter on what the book is and what it's trying to do. The book is pitched to a general business audience and according to the back cover, "Max Boisot demonstrates that organization culture is perhaps best understood when examined with some of the tools used by the anthropologist." The book is largely written in a style that may have appealed to a general business audience in 1987 but that introduces real difficulties for an academic audience in 2022. It wedges in a lot of strained whimsy like this one:

Would some knowledge of managerial anthropology help a practical, no-nonsense manager of, say, a packaging firm to manage? This is a tall order, particularly as by 'no-nonsense manager' we usually mean someone who, when he hears 'culture,' reaches for his gun. Can he be persuaded to wait a little while longer before shooting the piano player? (p.13)

The second issue comes just before this passage, as Boisot is explaining that we should apply the basics of cultural anthropology, not to our "exotic" and "scantily clad brethren" of West Africa or the Hopi, but rather to "the British suburban stockholder, the American marketing executive" (p.13). Skipping past the ethnocentrism, there's a point to be made, sure: we can apply cultural anthropology's toolkit to organizations in our own culture. Okay. Which tools? It turns out Boisot doesn't really have any toolkit in mind -- he simply means that we can think about our culture. He even asks: is it possible that in thinking about our information society, we have been doing cultural anthropology all this time without even knowing it? (p.17; he doesn't answer this question, which I think any anthropologist would answer with a resounding no). He summarizes by proffering the concepts in this book, which he says bear "more than a passing resemblance to those used by anthropologists to describe culture" (p.19). He doesn't name these anthropologists—and I suspect that he is referring to the tradition of structural anthropology, although I don't think the conceptual framework he is using, C-space (culture space), closely resembles that work. Maybe a structural anthropologist can weigh in. Later in the book, Boisot describes the famous psychologist Kurt Lewin as a sociologist (p.107)—so I'm not inclined to be charitable about how he's characterizing his antecedents in the social sciences.

Let's pause so I can emphasize that this book is early in his career. I don't think he makes similar mistakes in his later books. And these issues, as maddening as they are, shouldn't obscure the actual contributions of the book, which are in terms of thinking through and representing different types of information in organizations.

That work really starts in the next chapter, when he draws on the idea that all information is coded (Claude Shannon's work is not cited here, but his model of information transmission shows up uncredited on p.38). He claims that we are all "communicating in a code and implicitly assuming that the context in which we interact is sufficiently clear" (p.23). "Only a few of these codes involve speech and writing"—he includes the examples of shaking hands and smiling, or the impropriety of tap-dancing at a board meeting (p.24). When we choose the form in which to communicate, we must choose from a repertoire of codes available to us, and we tend to use the least effortful code (p.25). Codes both structure our experience and communicate it (p.25). And to select is to code (p.28). He argues that we can imagine codes on a scale from direct experience to compression into symbols — that is, from uncodified to codified (pp.29-30). The less codified something is, the more ambiguous and interpretive it is (p.35). 

This brings us to the "simple communication model" on p.38 (the Shannon model) and a brief discussion of "coauthors" Shannon and Weaver (p.40; this is a common misapprehension—Weaver popularized Shannon's model, but they didn't coauthor anything). Following Shannon, Boisot notes three problems:

• The technical problem: "Is the message received the same as the message sent?" (p.40)
• The semantic problem: "Is the message received understood?" (p.41)
• The effectiveness problem: "Does the message lead to the desired behaviour?" (p.41)

So what we're seeing here is a quite structural understanding of communication and information, one that I suppose goes with the structural anthropology from which Boisot seems to have drawn some inspiration. I won't rehearse the issues with such a view at this point; if you'd like a critique, I commend Clifford Geertz' work as a starting place.

Here, Boisot introduces a second graduated scale: diffusion, i.e., how broadly the communication reaches potential recipients (p.45). Are we talking about a private wink between two people, or a broadcast that reaches a whole nation? Critically, he discusses "the diffusion of knowledge" (p.48), and in this early work, he slips between "information" and "knowledge" as if the two are the same. (In later books, he makes a sharp distinction between the two.) He also notes that codification is "the structuring and sharing of information [that] is the collective experience through which culture is built up" and in the private case, "when the experience being structured is to be found in one mind alone," we would only then use the term "coding" (p.49). 

He even provides a formula, D=f(C), 

where D is the rate of diffusion per unit of time measured along the horizontal scale and C is the level of codification measured along the vertical scale. f is some function that describes the specific shape of the diffusion curve for a given distribution of the population, communication technology, and so on. We shall not be concerned with elaborating this function... (p.56)

In the tribute collection published after Boisot's death, one author notes that Boisot was not good at math. Although he may have been inspired by Shannon, a mathematician, I don't think that this formula does much work for us. Boisot repeatedly says here and elsewhere that the C-space and later I-space models are conceptual, not empirical, and he does not attempt to make them correspond to empirical measurements. So it's difficult to imagine how one might validate such a formula: how do you meaningfully measure the rate of diffusion or the level of codification? 

Nevertheless, this work lays the ground for the C-space, which has the two dimensions of codification and diffusion. (Those who are familiar with I-space will wonder where Abstraction went to. In this early work, abstraction is understood as a function or component of codification—see p.109. Only later does he separate the two.) And with these two dimensions, Boisot sets out a number of 2x2 grids. On p.67, he maps the quadrants to personal knowledge, common sense, proprietary knowledge, and public knowledge (discussed further on p.73). On p.78, he puts "minimum entropy" in the codified/undiffused corner and "maximum entropy" in the uncodified/diffused corner. On p.100, he puts types of transactions—fiefs, clans, bureaucracies, and markets—in the four corners. On 116, he maps different org units: the R&D department, the board, the production department, and the sales department. And on p.171. he puts capitalism in the codified/diffused corner and feudalism in the uncodified/undiffused corner. This hammer gets put to work driving in a lot of nails. (Boisot continues this tendency of universally applying his models to the end.)

 Let's back up to see what he's doing with this conceptual framework. In Ch.4, "Knowledge Cycles," he says "it is not knowledge that flows in the C-space but the information on which it feeds" (p.75—yes,  here he is trying to distinguish between the two). He argues that "a number of forces are at work which can be resolved into four vectors"—basically toward each of the corners of the C-space (p.75). These movements "irrigate the C-space with information" (p.77). Yet people forget codes ("who today can read cuneiform script?") and thus "the knowledge that builds up in the different parts of the C-space is subject to the action of forgetting, that gradual process of erosion that in physics goes under the name of entropy (p.77). He argues that entropy is at its maximum in the uncodified/diffused corner, and at its minimum in the codified/undiffused corner (p.78). He also argues that new knowledge has a cyclical flow in the C-space, involving scanning, problem-solving, diffusion, and absorption (p.80). 

Skipping ahead, he divides the codification scale in three: the most uncodified are words and gestures, more codified is writing, and even more codified are numbers (p.109). Similarly, he divides the diffusion scale: least diffuse is "knowledge available only to the firm itself," followed by "Knowledge available to the firm and its competitors" and finally "Knowledge available to the firm, its competitors and its customers" (p.110). He cautions that these can't be translated into a single, universal empirical scale (p.110). And he adds that the "line of least resistance for information flows" is on a diagonal line from uncodified/undiffuse to codified/diffuse. "A more vivid way of restating the proposition would be to say that it is easier to get certain types of data by diffing in the files than by opening up someone's cranium and rummaging around" (p.111). (In his later work, Boisot continues to regard "craniums" or "heads" as substrates that can contain information and knowledge.)

Moving on, he asserts later that organizational growth can be represented as "an internalization of transactions" (p.140). These transactions can be internal and external. Those who have read Boisot's later work and learned about his 3D I-space may be surprised to see a different 3D representation here: the axes are codification, diffusion, and internal/external (p.143). I'm not sure why he dropped this axis unless (a) he really wanted to reclaim that third dimension for Abstraction or (b) he didn't think internal/external was doing a lot of work for him. 

At the end of the book, he tells us that he had three objectives for this book, which he did not state at the beginning:

1. "to sketch out in a simple and accessible outline a political economy of information consistent with its new role as the key resource in a modern competitive economy" (p.196)
2. "to show that a political economy of information and a theory of cultural processes were in fact one and the same thing" (p.196)
3. "to spell out in a tentative way some of the applications that the concepts presented might find in [a manager's] work" (p.196)

He acknowledges that his presentation of C-space included "simplifying assumptions" and did not include "the many qualifications that would weigh down a more academic work" (p.197). 

So how well does Boisot do? 

Understanding his audience, I was willing to cut Boisot a lot of slack in terms of simplifying assumptions and qualifications. But looking at his objectives, I find myself understanding his project much better—and I am thus more confident in how to evaluate it.

Objective 1: a political economy of information. I know very little about political economy. But for a political economy of information, the book does not sharply define "information" or adequately differentiate it from data or knowledge. Boisot does this in his later work, and he does it by extending the C-space rather than starting over. So I'll evaluate this first objective as a partial success.

Objective 2: show that a political economy of information and a theory of cultural processes are the same thing. Boisot does present his political economy of information as a theory of cultural processes. But I find this attempt to be unsatisfactory. His founding assumptions about information seem to be at odds with what we know about cultural knowledge and processes. He draws heavily on Shannon, but Shannon's work was mathematical rather than cultural, and reduces interpretation to decoding. He doesn't draw on other fields that could have really troubled and developed this account, including semiotics, interpretivist anthropology, or sociology. Tellingly, Boisot never gets to the level of examining fine-grained qualitative data in this book (and I don't think he does in his later work either). 

Objective 3: spell out applications for managers. Boisot did well enough that people are still talking about him, so I think his framework is appealing. Although I'm not writing as a manager, I personally am intrigued by the conceptual space of codification and diffusion (and I'll also throw in abstraction) as ways to think through how specific information artifacts are constructed and transported—although I understand "information" quite differently from how Boisot did in 1987.

I've written a lot in this review, and much has been critical. So I want to end by emphasizing that this book's concepts are intriguing enough for me to spend all of this time writing about it. The question isn't whether the book is good or bad—it's what job the book can do for me (and perhaps for you). What is the framework good for? What can't it do? In what ways can it inspire us to think about communication and culture differently? As you've seen, for me this book has been quite generative. And for that reason, if you're interested in exploring similar issues, I recommend it too—after you read Boisot's later stuff.

Reading :: Models

Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding
By Marx Warftofsky

I've been meaning to read this book forever. I think I first saw it cited in one of Yrjo Engestrom's early pieces (Learning by Expanding?) and was intrigued enough to see if the university library had it (it didn't). That was at Iowa State, and the same thing happened at Texas Tech and again at UT. Finally, after seeing it quoted again (this time by David Guile), I ordered the book.

The part of the book being quoted by Engestrom, Guile, and others is the chapter "Perception, Representation, and Action," which provides a taxonomy of types of artifacts. We'll get to it in a minute, but first, let's set up the book. It's in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, and it's composed of philosophical essays that Wartofsky published between 1953 and 1978. ("Perception, Representation, and Action" comes to us from 1973, the same year that Led Zeppelin released Houses of the Holy.)

In his introduction, Wartofsky explains that the pieces were written separately, but pulled together as a result of a series of four invited lectures he gave at MIT, in which he argued that "human knowledge itself has a history" — "that the nature of knowing, of cognitive acquisition itself, changes historically" (p.xviii). He traced these changes to human artifacts, including "tools and weapons" but also "language, forms of social organization and interaction, techniques of production, skills." And "the production of such artifacts for use ... was at the same time the production of representations" (p.xviii). These representations "are the precondition of so-called internal representations, that is, for the reflective activities of imagination, thought, conscious purpose" (p.xiv). Thus "human beings create the means of their own cognition" (p.xv). One can see why this line of argument would be interesting to Vygotskians such as Engestrom, Guile, and me.

Wartofsky further argues that "the cognitive artifacts we create are models: representations to ourselves of what we do, of what we want, and what we hope for. The model is not, therefore, simply a reflection or a copy of some state of affairs, but beyond this, a putative model of action, a representation of prospective practice, or of acquired modes of action" (p.xv). 

Thus we must consider two systematic issues. Analytically, what is the nature and function of a representation? Genetically, how did we generate the activity of representing itself, i.e., creating cognitive artifacts in the first place? (p.xvi). In these essays, Wartofsky says, he barely touches on the genetic question (p.xvi). 

Wartofsky goes on to argue that not all representation is linguistic: "representation is already involved in the very character of non-linguistic artifacts, insofar as they are themselves symbols, or are parts of systems of symbols, in which the artifacts themselves present meanings, intentions, relations, and come to represent to us the modes of practice involved in their production and use" (p.xvii). And "models are proffered truths. To proffer truth is the human means of acquiring knowledge. In this sense, cognitive acquisition, human learning is essentially mediated by representation. It is what makes theory possible" (p.xviii). Wartofsky adds this conclusion: "Strictly speaking, one may say that there is no human knowledge without representation; or more radically still, that there is no knowledge without representation" (p.xviii). 

With this argument in mind, let's turn to the aforementioned chapter "Perception, Representation, and Action," which most directly addresses this line of argument.

In this chapter, Wartofsky argues that "We do not perceive, and then act; perception is itself one of the instrumentalities or modes of action" (p.195). Thinking in these terms, we can understand historical human praxis as 

the fundamental activity of producing and reproducing the conditions of species existence, or survival. What is distinctly human about this activity ... is that human beings do this by means of the creation of artifacts. Their production, as distinct from the foraging, scavenging or hunting activity of other animals, proceeds by a transformation of part of the environment into an extension of the animal organs— as, e.g., tools are. But, in more generic terms, the 'tool' may be any artifact created for the purpose of successful production and reproduction of the means of existence. Therefore, the use of language for communication in this enterprise makes language itself such an artifact, or 'tool'; so too is the mode of social organisation, or of division of labor which is instrumental in the successful satisfaction of existence needs, or of the needs to reproduce the existence of the species. Extending the notion of 'artifact' or 'tool' still further, the acquisition of skills, in the processes of production (even at the level of foraging, scavenging or hunting, and prior to the introduction of agriculture or the domestication of animals) creates such skills as themselves 'artifacts', even where these skills do not entail the use of tools in the ordinary sense, but only the mastery of natural organs of the body, and of perceptual skills in pattern-or-cue-recognition, for the purposes of satisfying productive or reproductive needs. The crucial character of the human artifact is that its production, its use, and the attainment of skill in these, can be transmitted, and thus preserved within a social group, and through time, from one generation to the next. The symbolic communication of such skills in the production, reproduction and use of artifacts— i.e. the teaching or transmission of such skills is the context in which mimicry or the imitation of an action becomes a characteristic human mode of activity. It is, in effect, this ability to represent an action by symbolic means which generates a distinctive class of artifacts, which we may call representations. (pp.200-201, his emphasis)

Here, Wartofsky runs in parallel with Vygotskian ideas of mediation, and also emphasizes the cultural reproduction in which artifacts are enacted. He goes on to offer a typology of artifacts:

Primary artifacts: "those directly used" in "the production of the means of existence and in the reproduction of the species" (p.202), such as "axes, clubs, needles, bowls, etc." (p.201).

Secondary artifacts: "those used in the preservation and transmission of the acquired skills or modes of action or praxis by which the production is carried out. Secondary artifacts are therefore representations of such modes of action, and in this sense are mimetic, not simply of the objects of an environment which are of interest or use in this production, but of these objects as they are acted on, or upon the mode of operation or action involving such objects" (p.202). 

Through these representations, "nature becomes transformed, not only in the direct practical way of becoming cultivated, or shaped into objects of use ... it becomes transformed as an object or arena of action... nature itself has become historicized and socialized, and has come to be a representation of a certain mode of praxis or human action" (p.206).

Tertiary artifacts: Artifacts that are "abstracted from their direct representational function" (p.209); they "can come to constitute a relatively autonomous 'world', in which the rules, conventions and outcomes no longer appear directly practical," especially "when the conventions of representation ... become transparent" (p.208). He gives the example of a mimetic reenactment of a hunt or rehearsal for a hunt (p.207). These are "alternative imaginative perceptual modes, freed from the direct representation of ongoing forms of action, and relatively autonomous in this sense," but still they feed "back into actual praxis, as a representation of possibilities which go beyond present actualities" (p.209). While Wartofsky gives the example of reenacting a hunt, I think tertiary artifacts may cover examples such as formal logic that is abstracted from the actual problems it is trying to represent, or algorithms, or abstract formulas that can be applied to codified data (f=ma). 

Were these insights worth the price of admission? Maybe. The discussion above has been pretty well summarized by the people I've read who have drawn on Wartofsky's argument. But reading it myself, especially in close proximity to my recent readings on Boisot (who deals a lot with codification and abstraction) and the bio of Shannon (who was all about abstraction), has helped me to think a little differently about this typology. And what I think is that although this typology is a good starting place, providing a solid vocabulary for (for instance) critiquing Leontiev's treatment of tools, it is only a starting place for thinking through more complex issues such as how texts rerepresent our activities to ourselves. 

Still, it's important and challenging work. If you're interested in issues of artifacts and representations, check it out. 

Reading :: Complexity and Postmodernism

Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
By Paul Cilliers

In this 1998 book, Paul Cilliers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, explores postmodern theory through the lens of complexity theory. Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned this book a while ago, saying that it helped him to really understand postmodernist theory in a way he hadn't before, so I picked it up.

Full disclosure: I generally don't like reading philosophy. I'm not sure whether this is because I am too applied, or too concrete a thinker, or not well prepared, or whether the style of philosophy texts tends to be unfamiliar or obtuse to me. The philosophy texts that have worked best for me have been texts such as Latour's, which are usually well illustrated with concrete examples gathered from qualitative research or based on descriptions of social systems.  

Cilliers does not write in the Latour vein, and complexity theory, like postmodern theory, is often presented in abstract terms. So I found myself skimming through the book as I often do with philosophical texts. But I did gather some interesting points.

First, in the Preface, Cilliers notes that there's a difference between complex and complicated. "Things like computers and jumbo jets are complicated," he says: they have a large number of components, but can be described in terms of these individual components. But 

In a complex system, on the other hand, the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be understood simply by analysing its components. Moreover, these relationships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organisation. This can result in novel features, usually referred to in terms of emergent properties. (pp.viii-ix)

In the first chapter, Cilliers explores complexity further. He points out that Claude Shannon developed the basis for information theory by using entropy as a measure of information content in a message: "By replacing 'energy' with 'information' in the equations of thermodynamics, he could show that the amount of information in a message is equal to its 'entropy'. The more disorderly a message, the higher is its information content" (p.8). One "problematic implication" is that "if information equals entropy, then the message with the highest information content is the one that is completely random. Obviously there is some tension between the concepts of 'information' and 'randomness'" (p.8). He goes on to discuss Chaitin's insight that randomness should not be defined in terms of unpredictability but rather incompressibility. For instance, imagine 1000 characters, and each character is a 3. (Notice that I was able to describe that set of numbers perfectly in the italicized sentence, using far less than 1000 characters—I could compress it.) (p.9)

Based on this discussion, Cilliers asserts that "A complex system cannot be reduced to a simple one if it wasn't simple (or perhaps merely complicated) to start out with" (p.9). 

Complex systems, Cillers says, have two "indispensable capabilities": the processes of representation and self-organization (p.10). For complex systems, veridical representation isn't adequate: meaning is conferred by "the relationships between the structural components of the system itself" (p.11). And in terms of self-organization, "a complex system, such as a living organism or a growing economy, has to develop its structure and be able to adapt that structure in order to cope with changes in the environment" (p.12). 

This first chapter, frankly, was the most interesting to me because I'm interested in the basics of complexity theory—although I'd prefer to explore it with an extended, well-developed example rather than the quick cuts we get here. The rest of the book turns to post-structuralism and postmodernism, which the author sees as addressing complexity. The gist is that postmodernism is responding to the issues of complexity. Unfortunately I found myself skimming through this part and can't give an adequate review of it. 

Reading :: A Mind at Play

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
By Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman

Just a quick review for this popular biography of Claude Shannon. I have been reading more of Max Boisot's work recently, and since it draws from Shannon, I wanted to learn a little more about him. This biography was inexpensive on Kindle, so I picked it up.

The biography is well-written, discussing Shannon's life chronologically so that we can understand the circumstances and influences surrounding his breakthroughs as well as the ways that one part of his life informed the others. Although I was most interested in these breakthroughs themselves—applying Boolean logic to circuit design, developing the study of cryptoanalysis, laying the foundation for information theory—understanding Shannon's life and the circumstances behind these breakthroughs helped me to understand his breakthroughs as well.

This was an important step. I haven't read Shannon, but I benefited directly from him in my undergraduate work as a computer science major. Later, in my Ph.D program, I heard faculty dismiss the "Shannon and Weaver model of communication" for being arhetorical, but I didn't have a good grounding in what that model was. After this book, I have a better idea, and I can see both the original problem to which he applied it and the problems that come when expanding its application to other problems. 

If you're interested in Shannon—or information theory, or codification, or just in how the information age came to be—consider picking up this book. 

Reading :: Beyond the Brain

Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, Development, and Learning
By Igor Arievitch

This book reminds me of a book by Arievitch's frequent collaborator, Anna Stetsenko: The Transformative Mind. Both books are discussing activity theory and Vygotskian theory in sophisticated ways that would be interesting to readers of Mind, Culture and Activity and similar CHAT journals. But at the same time, both seem to be arguing against the cognitivist paradigm, a paradigm that has already been rejected by those readers. This dichotomy in their anticipated readership really throws me off. For instance, Arievitch critiques "brainism" (Ch.2), the tendency to reduce the mind to brain functions. But anyone who has much grounding in CHAT already knows the argument against brainism—an argument with roots in the Vygotsky collection Mind in Society, which was published in the US in 1978, cementing Vygotsky's reputation as the Mozart of psychology. According to Google Scholar, Mind in Society has over 130,000 citations. So I concluded that Chapter 2 really wasn't for me, and skimmed until I got to Chapter 3.

From Chapter 3 on, we get into more interesting territory. Arievitch, who studied under Leontiev, Luria, and Galperin (!!), draws heavily from Galperin's work—work that has largely not been translated into English. 

In Chapter 3, Arievitch forwards the claim that thinking can only be understood in terms of shared activity, with the mind regulating and orienting the individual as they interact with their ever-changing environment (p.25). Learning is social: it "takes place in shared activity of the child and the adult mediated by cultural tools" (p.25). And this brings us to Galperin's unique contribution: "he was one of the few scholars who explicitly made questions about the origin and function of non-automatic regulation of activity the focal point of his whole theory" (p.34). 

Arievitch argues that Vygotsky did not consistently apply his own developmental approach to cultural mediation (p.55). But such mediators, especially signs, can "restructure and 'amplify' human memory, attention, thinking, and therefore enhance the individual's ability to solve challenging tasks" (p.96). This question of cognitive tools, he says, has been fundamental to Vygotskians (p.115). 

He concludes by arguing that the mind has to be understood as an embodied agent (p.147). Where Vygotsky failed to sufficiently operationalize his approach, the agentive activity perspective attempts to do so. 

This review is only the barest discussion of this book, which has a lot in it. If you're intrigued by CHAT approaches, and especially if you want to contrast them with brainism, definitely take a look at this book.

Reading :: Community

Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality
By Suzanne Keller

I picked this book up to better understand how cultural sociologists understand community, and I'm glad I did. The book starts by examining the scholarship around community, then analyzes the growth of (human) community in a planned community, Twin Rivers, NJ, over 30 years. 

Part I (the first three chapters) mainly examines the scholarship on community, and I found it to be extremely valuable, as it addresses landmark sociology on community (Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber) via a well-integrated review that helped me see the development of the concept over time. 

In Chapter 1, Keller notes that "community is a chameleon term that is used in many, often contradictory ways" (p.4), including two "prevalent perspectives": that of "an organism where the whole is more important than individual members" and the more recent "atomistic/contrarian" model in which free persons are bound together in a voluntary social contract (pp.4-5). Community is often related to the following:

• Place, turf, territory. Nearly every commentator understands community as related to "a bounded, identifiable territory" until recent discussions of "cyberspace" (p.6). 
• Shared ideals and expectations (pp.6-7)
• Network of social ties and allegiances (p.7)
• Collective framework (p.7)

In contrast, community is not interpersonal intimacy, formal organization membership, group affiliation based on identity, or communitarianism, which emphasizes "a set of moral and philosophical principles" (pp.7-8). 

Keller asks: "How can self be linked to community and how can community be linked to society?" (p.9). This question animates the study in Part II -- but before we get there, we will examine each term.

Society "might be thought of as an overarching system of social, political, and cultural arrangements that encompass the totality. Its practices are formalized and abstract; its scale is superpersonal" (p.11). In contrast, community "is tangible, proximate, based on direct contact, mutual awareness, and a sense of empathy with those with whom one shares one's life in a definite place. In community, self and terrain are intertwined" (p.11). Community has been addressed by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, de Toqueville, Marx, and Tonnies, and central questions of community are:

• "How are communities created and maintained over time?"
• "How is a 'spirit of community' generated?"
• "How are human differences bridged for the sake of the common good?" (p.13)

In Chapter 2, Keller discusses four prototypes of community: the Greek polis, the monastic community, the Puritan commonwealth, and 19th-century utopian communities. The tensions among these prototypes are behind the confusion in discussions of community today, since the same term is applied to different conceptions (p.39). In Chapter 3, Keller then turns to sociological work on community, starting with Tonnies' 1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (founded in Hobbes; p.41). Durkheim produced a counterproposal, his division between mechanical and organic solidarity, which are fundamentally different from Tonnies' categories (p.43). (Weber also builds on Tonnies; p.44). Tonnies understood Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as ideal types, but also as historical trends and types of social relations— a fact that introduced some confusion (p.44). Modern societies embrace both types of relations (p.46). 

With this background, we get to Part II: The case of Twin Rivers. Keller argues that leaders played a crucial role in guiding collectivity and creating schemes of behavior (p.202). Initially, leaders were hard to attract, but after three decades, leadership positions became competitive (p.203). Interestingly, Keller found that leaders worked for the community due to different motivations, from ego to power to the challenge of making a difference (p.208). However, almost all leaders cited the principle of giving back to the community, something that was instilled by their families (p.208). 

Based on this study, Keller outlines ten "standard dimensions that form the bedrock of community" (p.266):

1. "A bounded site of territory or turf"
2. "Criteria of membership"
3. "An institutional framework of laws and rules"
4. "A set of values emphasizing cooperation, mutual responsibility, and sharing"
5. "A belief system that validates a particular way of life"
6. "A myth of community embodied in images, ideals, aspirations, and goals"
7. "Shared rituals and celebrations"
8. "Leadership structure"
9. "Social relationships that are personal, direct, responsive, and trusting"
10. "Transcendent purposes and goals" (pp.266-267)

Importantly, and related to #2, "collective identity rests on social exclusion to some degree," with outgroups defining the ingroup. In Twin Rivers, the outgroup was a nearby community that they contrasted with themselves (p.286). 

I've only given an outline of parts of the book that particularly interested me. But if you're interested in community—what it is, how it's defined, how it forms and develops—definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: Regional Advantage

Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128
By Annalee Saxenian

My IC2 colleagues have been recommending this book to me for a while, and I finally got to read it near the end of the fall 2021 semester. Written by a professor of city and regional planning, the book answers the question posed on the back cover: "Why is it that business in Silicon Valley is again flourishing while within Route 128 in Massachusetts it continues to decline?" The answer of 1994—the book's original publishing date—is that "Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations" (again via the back cover). 

Saxenian comes to this conclusion by comparing the regions historically, arguing that Silicon Valley developed "competition and community" (Ch.2), while Route 128 developed "independence and hierarchy" (Ch.3). Saxenian argues that to understand this comparison, we have to think in terms of regions, not cities or individual companies. "It is helpful to think of a region's industrial system as having three dimensions: local institutions and culture, industrial structure, and corporate organization" (p.7). 

In terms of culture, she notes that Silicon Valley's "culture encouraged risk and accepted failure" (p.38), while SV's firms "blurred the boundaries between firms" and eliminated "traditional boundaries between employers and employees and between corporate functions within the firm," replacing them with "independent confederations of project teams that were linked by intense, informal communications and that mirrored the region's decentralized industrial structure" (p.50). Unfortunately, she says, these entrepreneurs lacked the language to "describe this unusual mix of cooperation and competition," instead seeing themselves as rugged individualists: "They attributed their spectacular growth and unchallenged dominance of world markets to individual technical prowess and entrepreneurial risk-taking." And "Assuming that the dynamism of free markets would be self-perpetuating and self-governing, they saw no need to attend to the institutional foundations of their vitality," leading them to make choices that would eventually threaten the region (p.57).

Meanwhile, although Saxenian sees some examples of similar community-oriented networks in MIT's hackers, these were atypical in Massachusetts' Route 128 (p.59). Along Route 128, people were reluctant to take risks; business and personal life were separate; and business associations were merely sources of information, not integrative sources of enduring networks (p.69). Route 128 developed its own "combination of decentralized authority and continuous negotiation," the matrix (p.75), which generated conflict while masking centralization of authority (p.76). Matrix organizations tended to be indecisive (p.117). 

Consequently, Route 128's capabilities "were internalized within large firms and thus not available to start-ups or to other local producers"; they did not develop the combination of competition and collaboration that yielded Silicon Valley's innovation (p.111). 

In her conclusion, Saxenian argues that regions must shake off autarkic mindsets and instead construct more decentralized industrial systems (p.165). She argues that a regional strategy must be tailored to the problems and conditions of particular locations (p.167).

Overall, I found this book to be well worth reading. It helped me to think through units larger than the organization but smaller than overall "culture." If you're interested in doing the same, definitely check it out!

Reading :: Our Towns

Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America
By James Fallows and Deborah Fallows

I confess that I did not read this whole book. It's well and engagingly written, but it's also a popular book, with lots of emphasis on stories, which I found not to be dense enough. So I found myself reading the introduction, then a couple of the chapters, then skipping ahead to the end. 

The setup is that the Fallows spent five years traveling across the US in a single-prop plane, visiting dozens of towns. They present a chapter on each town, grouped by year, yielding a total of 35 chapters. Since the towns ranged from Pittsburgh to the American Prairie Reserve in Montana, they describe quite a range. And each chapter is described in narrative format: We arrived under these conditions, talked to these people, read these things in the town library, learned these things about this town. 

Individually, the chapters were interesting. But I quickly became bored because I was not actually interested in the individual towns -- I was interested in how the insights built into something larger. The Introduction didn't give me a strong idea of where the book was going, so after the sixth chapter, I skipped to the last two: "What We Saw and What We Learned" and "10 1/2 Signs of Civic Success."

In "What We Saw and What We Learned," the Fallows reflect on the imprints of the past and identify three unpredictable elements that "can show us what to anticipate and what to seize on right now": (1) "the national shock that galvanizes effort," such as how we reacted to Sputnik; (2) "the ability of political power to control strictly economic forces," as when the New Deal realigned the relationship between public and economic forces; and "fertile experimentation with new approaches and possibilities," as when the states were conceived as laboratories of democracy (pp.398-399). 

In "10 1/2 Signs of Civic Success," the Fallows say that "these things were true of the cities large or small that were working best":

1. "People work together on practical local possibilities, rather than allowing bitter disagreements about national politics to keep them apart" (p.402)
2. "You can pick out the local patriots" (p.402)
3. "The phrase 'public-private partnership' refers to something real" (p.402)
4. "People know the civic story" (p.403)
5. "They have downtowns" (p.404)
6. "They are near a research university" (p.404)
7. "They have, and care about, a community college" (p.405)
8. "They have distinct, innovative schools" (p.406)
9. "They make themselves open" (p.406)
10. "They have big plans" (p.407)

And the final half-criterion? "A city on the way back will have at least one craft brewery, maybe more, and probably some small distilleries, too" (p.407). They attribute this characteristic to the fact that "A town that has them also has a certain type of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of young (except for me) customers" (p.408; the "me" here is James Fallows). 

That's the book. If you're interested in what makes a town work, but you're not interested in an academic text, this book will give you insights and plenty of stories. Personally, I found myself skimming a little and then skipping to the end -- reading just a few accounts of town visits helped me to contextualize the claims at the end. 

Reading :: The Domestication of the Savage Mind

The Domestication of the Savage Mind
By Jack Goody

I had some concerns about the title of this book, but these were quickly addressed: Goody takes issue with the primitive-advanced dichotomy that anthropologists and sociologists of the past have adopted, a dichotomy that has primed scholars to examine current relations aside from the social system in which they have developed (p.2). Along these lines, he critiques Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind for its ahistorical unity (p.4) and urges us to think in terms of more specific criteria—with one starting point being the acquisition of language (p.9). 

He further charges that sociology and anthropology tend to neglect technical changes: Durkheim steered clear of material culture, while Weber moved emphasis from production to ideology (pp.10-11). Goody, on the other hand, locates differences not in the mind but in the mechanics of communicative acts (p.12). Specifically, he is interested in "non-speech uses of language in writing,"such as "tables, lists, formulae and recipes" (p.17). 

In Chapter 2, Goody takes up intellectual behavior in preliterate societies. For Durkheim, he notes, the highest intellectual activity was social (p.21); Durkheim was interested in "society" and wanted to attribute everything to it (p.22). 

In Chapter 3, Goody turns to literacy. He argues that culture is a series of communicative acts (p.37) and thus writing, specifically alphabetical literacy, give oral communication a more permanent form, allowing it to be scrutinized (p.37). This also allowed orthodoxy to become ascendant. 

Chapters 4 and 5 are about tables and lists, respectively. Unfortunately, we don't get deeply into either, at least in the sense I was expecting. He does argue that writing doesn't just duplicate speech, it changes the nature of language use (p.76). In particular, the list rarely appears in oral discourse (p.80). Goody identifies seven distinct senses of "list, " including retrospective (e.g., kings or events; p.80), plan (e.g., shopping list; p.80), and lexical (e.g., inventory; p.80). Lists are processed differently from oral speech or from other writing (p.81). The list "relies on discontinuity," "depends on physical placement," "can be read in different directions," "has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end," and "encourages the ordering of the items" (p.81). The boundaries in particular make categories more visible and abstract (p.81). Writing allows one to re-sort items by different criteria, and in comparison to highly contextualized oral information, it can be simplified and abstract (p.87). Writing, he says, sharpens categories but also questions the nature of the classes (p.102). 

Chapter 6 shifts to the question of formulas,. As with tables and lists, "the formalisation of writing flouts the flexibility of speech, and it does so in a manner that is both distorting and generative" (p.112). By "formulae," he means "fixed statements of relationships in abstract form" (p.112), and he means them broadly, in the sense of formalized types of communication such as epics. (We might put genre under this category as well; cf. p.120.) Among other things, Goody claims here that rhetoric relies on "the deliberate analysis ... that writing makes possible" (p.114), an argument that aligns with Olson's. Quoting Ong, Goody argues that rhetoric is an art developed by a literate culture to formalize oral communication skills that structure thought (p.116). 

Overall, I found this to be an exciting and generative read. Most of the ideas are not new to me, but Goody does a great job of drawing them together and relating them to anthropological and archaeological insights into writing. If you're interested in writing as it structures how we encounter and make sense of the world, definitely pick this book up.