Reading :: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Place-Based Transformations and Transitions

Ed. By Allan O’Connor, Erik Steam, Fiona Sussan, and David B. Audretsch

I read this collection a very long time ago, probably in mid to late 2022, but it got buried in all of the other stuff I was trying to do at the time. That’s too bad because this edited collection gave me a lot of insight into entrepreneurial ecosystems and the research surrounding them.

What’s an entrepreneurial ecosystem? In the chapter “Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: The Foundations of Place-Based Renewal,” the editors explain: “In abstract terms, central to the definition of entrepreneurial ecosystems are (entrepreneurial) agency and (human made) context (I.e., the ecosystem), especially the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction (I.e. rules of the game, institutions) that shape the presence and form of important entrepreneurial ecosystem elements such as capital, labour and knowledge” (p.3). They understand the ecosystem as undergoing transformations and transitions (p.3), and thus they say understanding entrepreneurial ecosystems requires systems thinking (p.4). They add, “entrepreneurial ecosystems are an inherently geographic perspective” because they “focus on the cultures, institutions, and networks that build up within a region over time rather than the emergence of order within global markets” (p.5). In this perspective, the focus is the entrepreneur, not the firm (p.5); the entrepreneur is considered a central player or leader in creating and maintaining the entrepreneurial system (p.8). The authors overview differences between entrepreneurial ecosystems and the related concepts of innovation ecosystems and innovation systems (industrial districts, clusters, triple helixes) (p.8). 

The other contributions to the book flesh out this vision. For instance, in “Deconstructing the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept,” Daniel et al. review contributions to the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept, including business networks and systems thinking, and overview other concepts related to strategic innovation. In “Institutional dynamism in entrepreneurial ecosystems,” Fuentelsaz et al. incorporate institutional theory and business life cycle theory into the analysis of ecosystems. And in “Measuring entrepreneurial ecosystems,” Stam takes a systems view, reviewing the systemic conditions that are at the heart of such an ecosystem (p.175) and identifying some possible measures for those conditions (table 1, p.179). 

I found this collection to be a good introduction to the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems, although not entirely accessible for someone (like me) who is not steeped in the economics and business literature. If you’re looking for an introduction to EE concepts, it’s a good place to start.

Reading :: A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt

A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt: Gramsci, Vygotsky, and the Egyptian Revolution

By Brecht de Smet

In this book, de Smet uses Gramsci’s political theory and Vygotsky’s cultural psychology to analyze the 2011 Egyptian revolution. 

De Smet’s thesis is that we should see social movements as developmental, as forms of human activity and as sites of learning (p.5). He argues that to understand mass agency of an emancipatory movement, we must understand how that movement is constructed as an actor (p.26). And that in turn requires challenging the lines that have been drawn between individual and collective forms of subjectivity: between mind and body, between subject (“the agent of cognition”) and object (“the external world of things”) (pp.28-29). In Chapter 2, de Smet brings us through the thought of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Voloshinov, Gramsci, Ilyenkov, and Vygotsky, arguing that the individual subject is also an effect of collective subjects (p.34). The conclusion is that “the dichotomy between the individual and the collective has been revealed as an opposition between modes of subjectness, which share the same substance: human activity” (p.37).

This line of thought brings us to the concept of the subject (Ch.3), which de Smet traces through Goethe,, Hegel, and Marx and on to figures in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Specifically, he argues that in an uprising (such as the Egyptian uprising under consideration), activities are determined and rendered meaningful via continual reference to the collective (p.39). That is, “a subject is not an undifferentiated thing, but an ensemble of different parts that function as a whole” — various individuals “were determined and rendered meaningful not by their own, particular position, but by their continuous reference to the whole, I.e., the people” (p.39). De Smet also stipulates that “a subject is something that emerges, grows, develops, and dies” and “an understanding of the formation and development of a subject such as the people requires a degree of abstraction that should not lapse into simplistic reductions or empty generalizations” (p.39 — he gives the example of statistical analyses of demographics). 

In Chapter 4, he turns to CHAT, noting that Vygotsky studied “the behavior and consciousness of the individual subject,” approached as a gestalt (p.48) — but this gestalt was rooted in Goethe, Hegel, and Marx, and thus “the complex behavior and consciousness of the individual subject could not be grasped directly as a totality — the unfolding of its understanding had to be mediated by an archetype” (p.49). He quotes Vygotsky, who argues that the unit of analysis must reflect the basic characteristics of the whole (p.49 — but see Valsiner’s claim that Vygotsky misinterpreted Brasov in making this argument). 

De Smet’s argument here creates problems in the analysis. We can stipulate with Vygotsky that an individual is always already social, and thus individual qualities will reflect (and constitute) cultural ones. But that does not mean that cultural and individual qualities are identical — otherwise individuals would be identical as well. Vygotsky actually discusses this question in a very underdeveloped way under the heading of perezhivanie, noting in one example how three brothers might develop differently based on the same issue. Thus, to explore cultural qualities through individual ones, we need a mechanism for ungrinding the hamburger: to reconstruct common cultural qualities from the individual’s qualities, or (to approach the question another way) to understand how individuals’ interactions continuously construct the cultural gestalt. This issue will become important in Ch.6.

Here, de Smet draws on Blunden’s work on the unit of analysis, arguing that the collaborative project is a collective subject (p.55). He concludes that “human subjects are nothing more than collaborative projects engaged in a developmental process, and emancipatory movements are but the politicized form of this ontology” (p.57).

In Chapter 5, “Class as Subject,” de Smet turns to the titular subject, arguing that “the main challenge for human emancipation is class society and its contemporary form of the capital relation and its state” (p.75). 

In Chapter 6, “The Modern Prince,” he examines the strike as a germ-cell. He appeals to Vygotsky, who examined children’s initial concept formation, and “transpose[s it] to the domain of proletarian sociogenesis” to argue that “at first, proletarian workplace subjectivities are subsumed under other subjectivities and only acquire some stability in the shared space of the labor process” (p.76). This move is warranted by de Smet’s argument in Ch.4 that since the individual is always already social, we can understand the social through the individual — we can, for instance, apply an individual child’s process of concept formation to an entire class of adults (the proletariat), according to de Smet. In recognizing that thought begins as intermental, we can apply children’s states of learning to social collectives — according to de Smet. Readers, I am very skeptical of this claim, which goes beyond analogy (such as the body politic as a Leviathan), instead actually attributing individual learning mechanisms to a social collective. It’s underexplored, it’s assumed rather than proven, and it skips across obvious differences between individual children and collectives of adults. De Smet continues this tack later in the chapter, discussing Vygotsky’s work on complexes: “Transposed to the domain of proletarian sociogenesis, this development needs a new organizational form to structurally connect and unite the various committees” — a trade union (p.80). He similarly “translates” Vygotsky’s insight that two lines of development can mature independently, then influence each other to yield a new line of development, applying this insight “to the domain of proletarian sociogenesis,” asserting that “the challenge for proletarian class formation is to combine and unite the economic and political lines of development” (p.84).

This “translation” (again, not an analogy) is fraught with problems in my view. That’s not just because of perezhivanie, but also because children’s development is not solely social. For instance, children demonstrably develop different capacities as the prefrontal cortex matures. Drawing a direct line (not a mere analogy) between a child’s development and the development of a collective subject seems hasty and requires much more thought, but by Chapter 6 (“Revolution”) the two are treated as equivalent. Here, revolution is not considered the object of the activity, but rather the activity itself, which produces a new collective subject: the people (p.105). By Chapter 22, de Smet is mobilizing the Zone of Proximal Development for describing the developmental trajectory of this collective subject (p.293). Note that Vygotsky used the ZPD to describe how a less developed individual (such as a child) can accomplish things beyond their capabilities with the help of a more developed individual (such as a teacher). But here on p.293, no more-developed subject is mentioned.

So I had concerns about this theoretical equivalence. But I also had concerns about the methodology, which is scattered across the book rather than being laid out in one place. De Smet interviewed many people involved in the uprising, but does not discuss basics of interview research such as triangulation, nor does he do much to explore differences in how these participants saw the uprising. Rather, he mainly focuses on agreement, since these participants function as avatars for the collective subject. We don’t get a good sense of how he selected participants, how or whether he looked for disagreements, how he compared their statements at the time of the interview with documents at other periods, or other measures we might expect from qualitative research. We don’t know how many people he interviewed or how many of these are represented in the quotes and characterizations throughout (or if he covered these basics, I can’t find them). Because these basics aren’t covered, we don’t have a good idea of whether de Smet’s conclusions come from his data — or whether the data were selected to illustrate his conclusions.

In sum, I wanted to like this book, but ultimately I was suspicious of both the theoretical work and the empirical work. If you’re looking for a book that ties CHAT to political consciousness and revolt, pick it up, but use caution. 

(10th anniversary of Topsight)

 I can't believe it's been 10 years since I published my methodology book, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations. (The link now goes to the revised edition, print version. There's also a Kindle version.)

Topsight was a labor of love for me. I had been teaching methodology courses since 2000, and by 2012, I had developed a set of resources and examples for my undergraduate students. These resources structured the process of conducting case studies in organizations so that students could see texts being taken up, used, and coordinated in action. They could then model these interactions in various ways. Over and over, I got to talk with students about the sometimes mundane, sometimes bizarre sites they investigated, and how to turn these observations into positive, beneficial ideas for change. 

By early 2011, I decided to write an accessible methodology textbook along these lines. But -- since I had already published two books with academic presses -- I decided to try self-publishing this one as an experiment. 

I published a set of blog posts about this process, which was pretty interesting in itself. And on January 15, 2013, I pulled the trigger. The book was live. 

What I expected and hoped was that the book would make this process clear and simple, encourage students and practitioners, and empower people to understand what texts do in organizations and how to improve those ecologies of texts. But I didn't expect people to begin citing this book in their methods sections. And they have -- as of today, Google Scholar says that Topsight has been cited 79 times. 

Since publishing Topsight, I've used it in undergraduate and graduate classes as well as professional workshops. But I have also seen it pop up on other professors' syllabi at both grad and undergrad levels. And I always feel blessed when it does. Case study research can be really scary and intimidating at first, but when you have a good method to follow (and improvise over, and improve on), it can be really exhilarating. And helpful to the people participating in your research as well. 

If you haven't checked out Topsight, it's only $7.99 on Kindle, or free with Kindle Unlimited. And if you have, I hope you have found it useful! 

Reading :: Adapting Values

Adapting VALUEs: Tracing the Life of a Rubric through Institutional Ethnography
By Jennifer Grouling

In this book, which is available as a free PDF at the WAC Clearinghouse, Grouling conducts an institutional ethnography to examine how two universities separately adapted Valid Assessment for Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics. These rubrics, designed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), were meant to provide a national assessment tool. Grouling is interested in how the rubrics are taken up locally at each institution, compromised and negotiated in actual practice, and thus create and reflect the social practices at these two different institutions (p.3).

The two institutions are quite different. "Oak University" is a small liberal arts university in a college town, with historical ivy-covered buildings. Its writing committee is chaired by a history professor. "St. Rita's College" is even smaller, an open-access school that serves factory workers and their children in the local community. It's housed in an old BP office building, and its writing program admin is a creative writer. Both WPAs have been tasked with assessment, and both turned to VALUE as a nationally recognized standard on which to base that assessment. 

With these two cases established, in Chapter 2, Grouling reviews the history of writing assessment, asking why rubrics are popular in assessment circles now. She reviews the racialized history of standardization in US education, the emergence of testing, and the development of rubrics in writing assessment. In the 1980s and 1990s, she notes, in composition terms such as "outcomes," "competencies," and "standards" became conflated in practice. With this background in place, she discusses the history of the specific rubrics under discussion, the VALUE rubrics.

In Chapter 3, Grouling turns to institutional ethnography, specifically rooted in scholars such as Dorothy Smith. In Chapter 4, she leverages this vocabulary to term the VALUE rubrics as "boss texts," which "function as a part of the institutional circuit of accountability within higher education" (p.57). Using the orientation of institutional ethnography, she analyzes a representative rubric, examines who has funded VALUE, and looks at how WPAs at the two universities used VALUE to establish legitimacy for themselves. 

Chapter 5 looks further into local adoption by examining to what extent each university could adapt the rubrics for their own use. Here, Grouling gets elbow-deep into the challenges that each university — and each WPA — face and how the rubrics had to be adapted to address those specifics. Those challenges include not just student preparation and institutional workings, but also quotidian power struggles and differences in how stakeholders understand education. "The AAC&U and higher education, in general, is not often aware of institutional circumstances like the ones these faculty engaged with on a daily basis," she observes (p.97). 

In Chapter 6, Grouling moves from the committee to the classroom, examining how rubrics (not the VALUE rubrics, which are only for assessment, but rather grading rubrics) were used in classrooms. Although she finds little direct connection between assessment and grading rubrics, she does note that the two sets of rubrics both function as "boss texts" (p.102). Interested in how rubrics get picked up and reused in different contexts, she uses rhetorical genre theory to analyze this translation movement. Specifically, she examines where faculty found their rubrics: from books, from peer professors, from departmental leadership, and nominally — but not in observed practice, she points out — from collaborative departmental workshops (p.115). 

In Chapter 7, Grouling explores individualism, racism, and the ecology of the writing rubric. She does this in part by comparing demographics of the two universities (Oak is majority White, St. Rita's is not), by comparing statements of her interlocutors, and by examining deficit assumptions and acculturationist assumptions as they play out in the rubrics themselves. For instance, although the VALUE rubrics are intended by the AAC&U to provide an asset-based model, these rubrics were adapted to the dominant deficit assumptions at St. Rita's. She takes a deep dive into stories that some of her interlocutors told about themselves and their approach to education, noting how those stories also reflected deficit assumptions and reflected committee tensions and power dynamics. 

In Chapter 8, the conclusion, Grouling concludes that rubrics "are boss texts that are inextricable from systems of power" (p.155). She resists providing a heroic or satisfying close to the narrative, but does encourage us to continue interrogating our own institutions and the roles of rubrics and other boss texts within them.

What did I think of the book? Although assessment and rubrics are not the most exciting things in the world, they are very important for higher education, and they hold out the promise of more standard, more fair ways to understand how educational institutions serve their students. Grouling's institutional ethnography underlines how difficult it is to deliver on such a promise. I can imagine productively using excerpts of this book alongside other resources when talking about assessment and grading rubrics—in discussions of assessment as well as in pedagogical discussions. 

At the same time, I didn't find many surprises here. Yes, assessment standards promise to do specific things across institutions, and yes, they fall short on these impossible promises because they are locally implemented. Yes, they get implemented by individuals with their own biases, ways of seeing things, constraints, and power dynamics. Yes, those individuals are often unaware of how systematic racism underpins their own assumptions about education. Education is a much messier and more conflicted enterprise than people like to think, just like so many other pursuits. 

But perhaps I am a little blase due to my long-term readings and recent writings, as well as my participation as what I guess could be called a WPA since 2016. It's worthwhile pointing out these dynamics and exploring them in an academic environment, and Grouling does this ably. If you're involved in writing assessment at any level, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Your Hidden Superpowers

Your Hidden Superpowers: How the Whole Truth of Failure Can Change Our Lives
by Becca North

Becca North teaches courses in our HDO program. Over the holiday break, I saw her book in the Kindle store and decided to pick it up. That was a good move: This engaging book is full of inspirational stories about how people constructively deal with failure. If failure is something you struggle with, definitely consider picking this book up.

To explore failure, North draws on her own interviews with well-known people, biographies of historical figures, and psychological literature on failure. Based on these sources, North argues that failure does not have to be something to be avoided or ashamed of. Rather, it "can be a catalyst for bringing about what we yearn the most—to live a life that is true to ourselves" (pp.236-237). North sees failure as a way to reach authenticity as well as to improve, and she discusses how successful people handle failure in order to yield later successes.

As someone who regularly preaches the value of failure, I approve of the message. More than that, North's writing style is clear and accessible to readers at any level. If you know someone who struggles with accepting and processing failure, consider pointing them to this book. 

Reading :: How to Change Your Mind

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan

Just a quick review of this NYT bestseller. Michael Pollan conducts a "personal investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs" (according to the blurb on the back cover). That is, Pollan examines the history of psychedelic drug use and research, seeks out and interviews contemporary researchers in the area, and also interviews those who clandestinely serve as guides for those who take psychedelics for various reasons. He also describes his guided and unguided trips on LSD, psilocybin, and toad venom. Along the way, he examines how psychedelics use might fundamentally change one's outlook on the world.

The book is engaging enough, although I confess it strengthened my resolve not to use psychedelics. 

Pollan is a popular writer, and as such, he allows himself the freedom to explore and entertain various ideas that his interviewees have. For instance, in examining the history of psychedelics in the mid-20th century, Pollan repeats an idea of one interviewee, which is that psychedelics are sent by Nature to guide us through a period of crisis (p.124). "Could that be why nature has sent us these psychedelic molecules now?" Pollan asks, apparently feeling no obligation to actually answer the question (p.124). To me, Pollan's asides sound strikingly like Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants, in which Kelly posits a teleological argument in which technology is evolving into a self-sustaining system. It's worth noting that Kelly is name-checked in Pollan's book (p.183) as part of the Whole Earth Network, a group formed in Silicon Valley by Stewart Brand after Brand's experiences with LSD. "How much does this idea of cyberspace, an immaterial realm where one can construct a new identity and merge with a community of virtual others, owe to an imagination shaped by the experience of psychedelics?" Pollan asks -- another question that he is content not to answer (p.183).

In all, I found the book to be a bit of a frustrating read. It posed more questions than it answered, it entertained many ideas without trying to reconcile them, and although it told me a great deal about the history of psychedelics, I'm not sure it taught me anything concrete "About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence," as the subtitle promises. But if you're interested in a lay introduction to the history and use of psychedelics, this book is a good place to start.

(Upcoming)

I haven't posted anything here since the middle of 2022. That's not because I stopped reading -- I have just been busy. Very very busy -- with teaching, departmental service, and writing. 

Fortunately I'm on a research leave this spring, which means that you'll see an uptick in activity here as I clear out my backlog of book reviews. 

If you're used to seeing my updates on Twitter, I have bad news for you: After 15 years, I finally decided to delete my Twitter account. That was partly because of the recent changes to Twitter management, but I had also found that -- like Facebook before it -- Twitter had become more of a distraction than a positive place for conversations. For now, I'll be somewhat active on LinkedIn and I'll post announcements about new blog posts there.

In 2023, I have a few big anniversaries coming up: 

• June 5 will be the 20th anniversary of this blog. That's right, I will have been blogging book reviews for 20 years. It seems like yesterday that I drafted the first blog entry while waiting in line for The Matrix Reloaded at the Alamo Drafthouse. The movie was a huge disappointment, but the blog remains one of the most helpful things I have done for myself -- and hopefully it's helped others too.
• September 26 will be the 20th anniversary of my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations. 
• And January 15 will be the 10th anniversary of my methodology book, Topsight. 

Enough looking back. Let's also look forward to a happy and productive 2023. 

Reading :: Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Second Reading)

Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Second Reading)

By Jaan Valsiner

A couple of months ago, I ran into a reference to this book when reading about the history of activity theory. After checking my bookshelf to verify that I didn't own it, I bought it used on Amazon. It was only later that I realized I had already reviewed it!

But that's fine. We get different things from a book on the second or third reading. This time, I got a few things, which I'll pull out and briefly discuss here.

First, Valsiner situates his discussion in reference to Kuhn, whose work on scientific paradigms has helped us to understand how science is framed and practiced in the West: specifically, scientific arguments appeal to evidence, not to heads of state or the populace (p.10). But "as will be seen in this book, not all social groups of scientists in cultural conditions other than those of Western Europe and North America have followed this rule in a stringent way. ... groups of in-fighting Soviet philosophers and psychologists of the 1930s did indicate their interest in using extra-scientific authorities as arbiters in their relationships" (p.11). Throughout the book, he demonstrates this dynamic in Soviet developmental psychology. This is a major theme of the book, but its import eluded me on first reading. At the same time, I wonder what Valsiner's 1988 analysis would have looked like if he had grounded it in Latour's (1987) Science in Action or his 1988 The Pasteurization of France, both of which suggest that Western scientists often do appeal to extra-scientific authorities, but in ways that cover their tracks.

Second, Valsiner writes at length about Mikhail Basov, whose work was cited by Vygotsky. Like Vygotsky, Basov made substantial contributions to Soviet developmental psychology, and like Vygotsky, he was associated with pedology, which was effectively and suddenly banned at the beginning of the Great Terror in 1936. "Unlike Vygotsky, however, Basov left behind no substantial group of followers to rise to positions allowing them to restate his relevance to developmental psychology once social circumstances after 1956 made this possible" (p.167). Vygotsky's associates had risen to leading administrative positions after 1956; Basov's associates "were located in relatively peripheral positions." Yet "the substantial role that Basov [played] in emerging Soviet psychology is in many ways comparable to that of Vygotsky in the theoretical realm, and may be considered to surpass him in the careful emphasis on empirical detail" (p.167). Contrasting the two is instructive, since it helps us to see science in general and psychology in particular not as the product of Great Men but as a set of collective achievements that are often attributed to Great Men—that is, it points toward a Latourean reading.

This brings us to the third thing that didn't make it into my first review, but that really struck me on rereading. Valsiner argues that when Vygotsky made one of his more famous arguments—that analysis should be conducted by analyzing into units rather than elements—that argument was based on a misreading of Basov. "Vygotsky reiterates that idea in different contexts in his writings, not always taking care to add a reference to Basov. ... [but] he claims to follow Basov in the emphasis on the analysis into units—the 'minimal gestalts' that preserve the systemic functioning nature of the whole from which the unit is derived, while abstracting from many concrete aspects of the original phenomenon" (pp.173-174). 

Vygotsky argued by analogy that water is H2O: two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. To analyze water, then, we should examine H2O as our unit of analysis: it's the smallest particle that retains the characteristics of the whole (p.174). If you examine hydrogen or oxygen atoms by themselves, they have radically different properties from water, which is formed through their relationship. H2O is "an objective real element of water" (quoting Vygotsky on p.174). Vygotsky cites Basov as making this argument. (And let's note that this common analogy was also used by Engels in Dialectics of Nature to illustrate the nature of dialectics.)

But Valsiner says that Vygotsky gets this distinction wrong. "Basov, following Wolfgang Köhler, distinguished two kinds of 'structural elements' that can be observed in physical or psychological phenomena": (1) real, objective elements ("self-existent primary phenomena") and differential elements ("caused by purely quantitative modifications of a given phenomenon") (p.174; quotes in parentheses are quotations of Basov). By this differentiation, Basov says, H2 and O are the "objective" and "real" elements, while H2o is the "differential element" (p.175, quoting Basov). Valsiner concludes: "Vygotsky overlooked the structural-qualitative nature of Basov's separation of (and preference for) the 'real, objective elements' (components) of psychological processes" and instead considered the differential elements to be the real elements. Valsiner emphasizes: 

it is very evident that Basov emphasized the use of exactly the opposite kinds of unit—those of qualitatively different sub-components like oxygen and hydrogen which make up molecules of water as a qualitatively new structure. These are the 'real' or 'objective' units whose relationship gives rise to new quality. The relevance of 'differential' elements of the structure—the 'minimal qualities' of the substance (as a single molecule would be, relative to quantities of water that contain many similarly structured molecules)—was limited in Basov's view, as the above quote illustrates. (p.175, his emphasis)

Valsiner goes on to trace Basov's argument back to Köhler (p.175). He emphasizes that Basov and Vygotsky agree "in their emphasis on the holistic nature of phenomena" but they "differ greatly in the ways in which they conceptualize the analysis of the holistic phenomena" (p.176). Whereas Basov wanted to reduce the phenomenon into the minimal Gestalt state, then analyze the minimal Gestalt into its components or elements (p.179), Vygotsky wanted to avoid analyzing those elements for fear of losing the characterof the holistic system (p.178). 

Is this a significant drawback? On one hand, it would seem to be so if one is actually committed to a developmental analysis. From a developmental perspective, it seems pretty important to understand that H2O is produced by burning hydrogen—or that verbal thought is produced by the dialectic between thought and speech, as Vygotsky argued in Thought and Language. On the other hand, Vygotsky did make that argument—his focus on analysis into units did not keep him from analyzing pre-verbal thought and pre-rational speech. 

In sum, I'm glad that I forgot I had read this book—actually buying it and rereading it has helped me immensely as I continue to think through the legacy of Soviet psychology. It's one of the most rewarding books I've read in this vein, and if that subject appeals to you, you should definitely pick up a copy.

Reading :: A Billion Little Pieces

A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification
by Jordan Frith

I've been meaning to get to this book for a while. Here, Jordan Frith describes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags as an instance of "object communication, which I define as the ability of objects that have either no or little computing power to wirelessly communicate identifying data with infrastructure" (p.5). He argues that "with the growth of communicative objects—we need to pay more attention to infrastructure," understanding it as "that which communicates," and "Consequently, I position RFID as an infrastructure of identification that works simultaneously as an infrastructure of communication" (p.5). 

In the rest of the book, Frith places RFID among infrastructures of identification, which include bar codes; describes different types of RFID tags and their uses; debunks some of the more conspiratorial takes on RFID while acknowledging actual privacy concerns; and discusses the future of identification infrastructures. I learned a lot about RFID.

Frith's writing style is overall clear and enjoyable—sometimes I felt like I was reading a series of Scientific American articles instead of a book. I could easily see myself using this book in an undergraduate class on information and communication technologies. For a graduate class, I could possibly use it in conjunction with the science and technology studies (STS) that Frith sometimes cites, e.g., reading Chapter 1 alongside Bowker & Star and Haraway.

But the flip side is that I didn't think the book got very deeply into theory or methodology, and consequently it was hard to see the implications for either. Frith does draw on STS and STS-adjacent work, but doesn't get deeply into these sources, doesn't spend much time exploring their theoretical frameworks, and doesn't extend them significantly. 

But that's fine! The book had a clear mission and it achieved it. It's a great introduction to RFID, how it's affecting our lives, and how communication infrastructures change how we live and work. If you're interested in RFID, or in information and communication infrastructures, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology

S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology
By T.R. Payne

I've often read that Leontiev's activity theory borrows heavily from the theory of S.L. Rubinshtein, whose work loomed large in Soviet psychology. But not much of Rubinshtein's work has been translated into English, and I continue to be monolingual, so I have not been able to investigate these claims directly. Fortunately, I ran across a citation to this 1968 book—which predates the Vygotsky boom as well as much of Leontiev's and Luria's English translations. It's a fascinating time capsule and helped me to get a broader understanding of Rubinshtein's context and influence.

Vygotsky (here, "Vygotskij") is mentioned, especially in relation to psychic development (p.47). The mention is brief, but Payne notes that despite Soviet criticism of Vygotsky, "the principle of historical development has remained one of the fundamental principles of Soviet psychology" (p.47). 

Like Vygotsky, Rubinshtein also addressed a crisis in psychology: "a crisis of the philosophic basis of the science," which had fragmented into schools including introspectivism and behaviorism; "the task facing psychology is the re-establishment of a unified object," which "can only be achieved by the transformation of the concepts of behavior on the basis of the Marxian concept of human activity," conceived as "a dialectic of subject and object" (p.50). 

Rubinshtein developed these ideas in:

• Fundamentals of Psychology (1935), which was the basis for 
• Fundamentals of General Psychology (1940; second edition, 1946) (p.51) (Note: Payne is not clear about the timeline on p.51, but clarifies it on p.71)

In 1947, FGP was criticized for borrowing too heavily from bourgeois sources, but it remained a classic in the USSR (p.51).

In 1940, Rubinshtein laid out four principles governing Soviet psychology:

1. "the principle of psycho-physical unity"
2. "the principle of psychic development"
3. "the principle of historicity"
4. "the principle of the unity of theory and practice" (p.52)

"Rubinstejn sees these four principles as the expression of the one basic principle of Soviet psychology, i.e., the principle of the unity of consciousness and behavior" (p.52).

Rubinshtein saw the crisis in psychology as "the equation of the psychic with the phenomena of consciousness" (p.79), and his resolution was to understand consciousness as interconnected with the material world—reconstructing psychology on the philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism (p.82). In this understanding, activity is the dialectic between subject and object (p.84). When the human psyche emerged, we entered a qualitatively new stage of the evolutionary process, "brought about by the changing conditions of the organism which demanded a new form of activity—work activity—which in its turn demanded a new corresponding form of psychic regulation" (p.89). Interestingly, Rubinshtein went directly to the same source that had been cited by Vygotsky & Luria and that would later be cited by Leontiev: Engels' story in the Dialectics of Nature of how humanity emerged through labor (p.90). In this story, the division of labor emerges because "man's activity is no longer directed to the immediate satisfaction of his own personal needs but to the satisfaction of those of the community" (p.91). Among the implications: human activity is the material object of psychology (p.125). So, for Rubinshtein, psychology is the generalized science of human activity (p.125). 

Let's pause here to note a couple of things:

• In claiming that psychology is the generalized science of human activity, Rubinshtein opens the door for either making psychology an interdisciplinary science or for reallocating responsibilities from other disciplines to psychology. Keep in mind that during this period, the USSR had banned sociology, so that's one big competitor out of the way. This impulse of uniting all studies of human activity under a single framework is still active in CHAT circles.
• The paragraph above sounds a lot like Leontiev's activity theory. (Recall that Rubinshtein was on Leontiev's dissertation committee in 1940.) But notice that Rubinshtein has not discussed a few key things that we associate with activity theory. One is tool mediation, which Leontiev appears to have retained from his time in the Vygotsky-Luria Circle. The other is levels of activity; I'm not clear on whether these were Leontiev's own invention or whether he synthesized them from another contributor.

Overall, this was a fascinating book. The first two sections overview psychology's development in the USSR and will be interesting to anyone who is concerned with this period. The remaining two sections deal more specifically with Rubinshtein. If you're interested in either of these, definitely pick this book up. 

Reading :: Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?

Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?
Edited by Aaro Toomela and Jaan Valsiner

This edited collection results from a challenge the editors posed to the contributors: Has psychology gone astray over the past 60 years? (For a frame of reference, this book was published in 2010, so the "60 years" = 1950 to 2010.) In the preface, the editors argue that after World War II, North American psychology became mainstream globally, displacing the German-Austrian tradition. They asked the contributors:

1. "Which of the historical or new principles should be introduced to the modern psychology?"
2. "How would mainstream psychology benefit from utilizing the principles you propose to introduce into methodological thinking of modern psychology?" (p.ix)

Readers of this blog might additionally ask, "Why is Clay reading about methodological thinking in psychology?" And the answer, predictably, is in the collection's connection to Vygotskian theory and activity theory. Valsiner has written quite a bit on the history of both, while Toomela has written several articles exploring elements of Vygotskian theory and lambasting activity theory. This collection has a few pieces that get into the history and theory, so I decided to pick it up. Because of my narrow interest, I'll only touch on a couple.

One is Nikolai Veresov's "Forgotten Methodology: Vygotsky's Case" (pp.267-295), in which Veresov notes a 1978 declaration that psychology was in crisis (p.267). "Yet it is very comfortable crisis," he adds: "experimental psychologists feel free from mind-crashing puzzles of how to interpret theoretically the data they obtain; as for psychological theoreticians—they are free to mix various concepts and principles in order to create 'the theory' they like to create, as if they are building a house out of Lego blocks" (p.268). Veresov argues that instead, psychology should consider "Vygotsky's case," in which he addressed his own time's crisis in psychology. Veresov highlights these aspects of Vygotsky's theory:

1. "Claim against empiricism and descriptive methods" (p.269). Veresov argues that "For Vygotsky, the descriptive explanatory models and principles based on empirical methods of investigation should be replaced by explanatory models and principles" (p.270).
2. "Claim of developmental analysis and qualitative research methods" (p.270). Veresov argues that "Instead of merely describing the stages of development, psychological theory should find the ways of how to explain development (including its sources, laws, conditions, moving forces, contradictions, and underlying mechanisms)" (p.270).

Veresov goes on to propose that Vygotsky's genetic method should be considered a two-step process in which a "dramatical collision" leads to "tool (sign) creation," leading to "use of sign" (p.277). He then bemoans the fact that the West mainly encounter Vygotsky through Mind in Society, in which "non-classical Vygotsky was adapted and incorporated into classical traditional psychological theoretical stream. The price for this was its methodological simplification and theoretical fragmentation" (p.279). He gives these examples:

1. "First example: General genetic law as a victim of simplification" (p.280). He argues that Mind in Society oversimplified Vygotsky's genetic law, and specifically removed the concept of dramatical collision. He specifically calls out Engestromian CHAT for providing "no place at all for dramatical collision" (p.282). 
2. "Second example: Zone of proximal development as a victim of fragmentation" (p.282). He argues that ZPD has become the "visit card" [calling card] of Vygotsky—but ZPD is not a central part of the theory (p.282).

Another chapter is Holbrook Mahn's "Vygotsky's Methodological Approach: A Blueprint for the Future of Psychology" (p.297). Here, Mahn focuses on Vygotsky's manuscript on the crisis in psychology. Again, Mahn derides how Mind in Society presented Vygotsky's works. He focuses on Vygotsky's method, including analysis into units, word meaning as a unit of analysis (better translated as "meaning through language use" or "meaning through the sign operation"; p.315), and the relationship between tools and signs (p.318). 

In all, I thought parts of this book were relevant to my project of understanding CHAT. But the book is a giant "I told you so" in which the authors hold the faith, waiting for the rest of the world to return to the German-Austrian tradition of psychology, while hectoring those who have followed different methodological traditions. I doubt these jeremiads will change the minds of psychologists, who may well feel that their own methodological and theoretical traditions have been given short shrift. But if you're interested in how Vygotskians understand Vygotsky's methodological approach, Veresov's and Mahn's chapters may be of interest.

Reading :: The Mentality of Apes

The Mentality of Apes
By Wolfgang Köhler

Vygotsky and Luria cite this 1924 book repeatedly in their 1930 book Studies on the History of Behavior. I can see why. Köhler, a Gestaltist, conducted several studies on chimpanzee problem-solving, providing them with tools such as sticks to see whether they could figure out how to get fruit from various locations. In the process, he identified some of the limits to chimpanzee problem-solving, specifically a difficulty in using tools that are not in their visual field at the same time as their objective.

The studies themselves are fascinating, but Köhler is also an entertaining writer. He evidently developed a great deal of affection for the chimpanzees, who he introduces to us by name and temperament, and he provides not just results but also entertaining and illuminating stories about how their temperaments interacted with their problem-solving skills. In one example, a chimp was trying to get a piece of fruit that had been suspended high over his head. Rather than stacking some boxes to stand on top of them, he tried to convince Köhler to stand under the fruit so he could stand on Köhler's shoulders. Failing that, he led other chimps under the fruit and tried to stand on them. Soon the others caught on and chimps competed to stand on each other—thus failing to retrieve the fruit.

Maybe I'm wired differently, but I found this to be an immensely entertaining read. Take a look!

Reading :: Knowledge, Organization, and Management

Knowledge, Organization, and Management: Building on the Work of Max Boisot
Edited by John Child and Martin Ihrig

I've reviewed Boisot's books elsewhere on this blog. This edited collection was put together shortly after Boisot's death, containing both Boisot's work and additional work by his collaborators, situated by his framework. Four of the chapters have been published elsewhere: three in prominent journals, one in a book chapter. 

The book is in seven sections:

1. Setting the stage
2. Analyses of the Chinese system
3. Organizational complexity
4. The strategic management of knowledge
5. Knowledge in big science
6. Innovations in education
7. Concluding reflections

and they highlight Boisot's contributions across these different spaces. These contributions include his depiction of I-Space (a cube with the axes of abstraction, codification, diffusion) and resulting implications for complexity, culture, learning, and organization. I-Space is built on Claude Shannon's theory of information, and I view it to be a weak foundation for understanding how people actually circulate and use information, but it is the alpha and omega of his theorizing throughout.

With that introduction, let's get to the chapters.

In "Max Boisot and the Dynamic Evolution of Knowledge" (pp.3-16), Martin Ihrig and John Child say that "while Peter Drucker in the 1960s first drew attention to the fact that increasingly we are living in knowledge societies, Boisot provided a conceptual framework that enables us to appreciate the significance of that trend. His framework offers an understanding of how the ways we choose to express, communicate, and share knowledge are intrinsic to how we relate to one another in organizations and societies" (p.3). The framework started with Boisot's doctoral thesis in 1987, in which he described the codification-diffusion framework known as C-Space (p.3); later he added the third dimension of abstraction to yield I-Space (p.4). The authors describe I-Space this way:

The I-Space is a conceptual framework that facilitates the study of knowledge flows in diverse populations of "agents"—individuals, groups, firms, industries, alliances, governments, and nations. As one of Boisot's most fundamental innovations, it enabled him, and the many other researchers he inspired, to study and advance understanding of the emerging knowledge-based society and the implications of the information revolution. (p.4)

 As an architect, the authors say, Boisot thought in terms of spaces (p.7). He applied his insights to other areas in concert with collaborators:

Once Boisot had identified an opportunity for an interesting project, he would try to bring people and organizations together, set up a framework, and then start to research and develop. Typically his collaborators were less well read and less theoretically versed than he was. On the other hand they often brought specialized empirical knowledge and a questioning perspective to the process, which helped to put Boisot's abstractions to the test of validity. (p.10)

In "From Fiefs to Clans and Network Capitalism: Explaining China's Emerging Economic Order" (pp.19-48), Boisot and Child use the C-Space (a four-field with axes of codification and diffusion; p.22) to conceptualize four types of transactional environments: bureaucracies, fiefs, markets, and clans. Boisot defines codification as "the selection and compression of data into stable structures" (p.21, citing Claude Shannon), and argues that "the codification and diffusion of information create a transactional environment that conditions the institutional possibilities to be found in different regions of the C-Space and endows them with some quite specific features" (p.21). For instance, when information is codified but undiffused, you tend to get bureaucracies, in which the diffusion of information is centrally controlled and relationships are impersonal; when information is both codified and diffused, you get markets, in which the diffusion of information is virtually unlimited and relationships are again impersonal (p.22). Obviously, this four-field diagram gives us ideal types and various configurations might exist. Critically, this is a conceptual framework, not an empirical one, so Boisot and Child do not give us guidance on where the boundaries are: at what point can we say that information is codified rather than uncodified? Diffused rather than undiffused? Those of us who conduct case studies can imagine a lot of situations in which the same text behaves differently depending on the frame and the other texts at play—but those issues are unexplored here.

We are, however, told that 

abstraction is a prerequisite for the creation of robust codifications and the construction of a rational-legal order. If codification seeks to economize on data processing by assigning the data or experience to categories, abstraction seeks to economize on the number of categories used in the act of codifying. (p.25)

In "Analyses of the Chinese System" (pp.49-58), Child reflects that Boisot developed C-Space into I-Space in order to make sense of China's economic reform and the business systems emerging from it. Boisot based C-Space in part on a 1952 publication by Kroeber & Kluckhorn, in which they conclude that culture "described the ways that people structure and share information" (p.50). The 2x2 of C-Space naturally results in "four transactional or organizational modes" (p.50): one for each resulting quadrant. Later in this chapter, Child notes that Boisot collaborated with Guo Liang Xing, who closely observed "the activities of six enterprise directors, each for a period of six weeks in 1987" (p.56)—I'm not clear on the methodology, but this sounds like an empirical study I'll have to follow up on. 

Child adds that Boisot's reliance on his root paradigm did pose some limitations. One was that 

Max generally treated information as a cultural phenomenon, regarding the way it was articulated and shaped reflecting cultural norms. He called his original framework the "culture" space. When he depicted institutional or organizational arrangements in terms of different configurations of informational dimensions, he was implicitly regarding them as cultural constructions. This tended to overlook another factor that influences the shaping of institutions and organizations, namely power. (p.57)

Child goes on to allege that Boisot recognized this issue, but "put the issue to one side because it would unduly detract from the elegance of his framework. Yet three of the quadrants of the C-Space are structures of asymmetric power" (p.57; the exception is markets). Child notes that whereas Boisot overlooked power, the Chinese Communist Party did not, and the CCP's consolidation of power explains why China is not moving toward a market configuration (p.58)!

In "Extreme outcomes, connectivity, and power laws: Toward an econophysics of organization" (pp.61-92), Boisot and Bill McKelvey argue that organizational science is built to be nomothetic (i.e., to expect predictability via regularities), but this approach has let us down. After some discussion that I will skip over for lack of interest, they map three ontological regimes (ordered, complex, chaotic) onto the axes of Variety of Stimuli and Variety of Responses, forming "Ashby Space" (p.76). These are associated with strategies: routinizing, adaptive, and "headless chicken," respectively (p.78). 

In "The creation and shaping of knowledge" (pp.109-128), Boisot argues that knowledge management is old in science, new in management (p.110). (Side note: Here and elsewhere, Boisot tends to portray science as ahead of the rest of the culture. This might be why he was so interested in collaborating with CERN.) He asks: why have we been so slow to knowledge management? And he argues that it's because

1. knowledge isn't observable or measurable
2. information and communication technologies have "led to the 'dematerialization' of economic activity -- the substitution of data and information for physical resources" in many areas
3. "one cannot manage a knowledge resource as if it were a physical resource" (p.111)

He outlines three problems:

1. What is being managed?
2. Is knowledge a social phenomenon?
3. How does knowledge relate to power? (p.112)

Although he says he doesn't have the space to deal with these problems in detail, he proffers the I-space as a conceptual framework to help address them (p.113). 

What is knowledge, and how does it differ from data and information? Boisot asserts that "data can be viewed as a discernible difference between different energy states" and draws on Bateson to define information as the data that make a difference to someone, i.e., data that "will modify an agent's expectations and dispositions to act in particular ways," i.e., its "knowledge base" (p.113). For that agent to be knowledgeable, "its internal dispositions to act can be modified upon receipt of data that has some information value"—and here, inexplicably, he cites Latour and Woolgar (1979) (p.113).

Just a side note: it seems jolting to me that Boisot would ground his theory of information in Claude Shannon's work, then cite Bateson and Latour, whose understanding of information seems to be radically different. But such is the danger of an eclectic mind.

Thus, Boisot argues, knowledge doesn't flow; data does (p.114). Thus when he discusses "knowledge sharing," he "will actually be referring to some degree of resonance being achieved between the knowledge states of two or more agents following some sharing of data among them" (p.114). Knowledge is not dispositional and thus it doesn't have solid contours: perhaps two agents' understandings will loosely "resonate," but they will not be identical (p.114). "People are concerned with saving time and resources required to articulate and transmit knowledge. They are thus more likely to share knowledge that is clear and umambiguous than knowledge of a more tacit and elusive nature" —he gives the example of sharing stock market figures by fax as opposed to describing a Pollack painting over the phone (p.114). And "the articulation of knowledge, in effect, calls for two kinds of cognitive efforts: abstraction and codification" (p.114): 

• "Abtraction either invokes or creates the minimum number of cognitive categories through which an agent makes sense of events": the fewer the number of categories, the more abstract its "apprehension of events" is (p.114). 
• "Codification, by contrast, refines the categories that the agent invokes or creates so that it can use them efficiently and in discriminating ways. The fewer data an agent has to process to distinguish between categories, the more codified the categories that it has to draw upon" (p.115). 

"Abstraction and codification are mutually reinforcing" and "the agent that is able to economize on its data processing resources through successive acts of codification and abstraction will be able to transact with other agents more economically and hence more extensively than will the agent that cannot" (p.115). Boisot adds that 

A problem arises, however, when much of the knowledge that is of potential value to other agents is of a more tacit nature and hence not readily available to trading. Much of an organization's technological know-how, for example, may be of this kind. It is the fruit of a slow accumulation of idiosyncratic experience, and it resides in the heads or the behaviors of employees, working singly or in groups. (p.115)

Here and elsewhere, Boisot often refers to knowledge as residing in heads—which, honestly, makes his earlier reference to Latour even more baffling. On the next page, he says: "From an intellectual capital perspective, knowledge management is about the capture, storage, and retrieval of knowledge located either in the heads of employees, in the heads of outside collaborators, or in documents" (p.116). He concedes that 

by their very nature, abstraction and codification are highly selective processes. Only a small part of a tacit knowledge base can ever be subject to articulation and structuring if genuine data processing economies are to be achieved. Thus, much tacit knowledge inevitably stays with its possessors whatever efforts at codifying and abstracting it have been subjected to—and much of this tacit knowledge will be valuable. (p.117)

 Next, he gets to the question of "social learning," which "occurs when changes in the stocks of knowledge held by one or more agents in a given population trigger coordinate changes in the stocks of knowledge that are held by other agents in the population" (p.118). He briefly cites Piaget and Weick (p.122), then describes the social learning cycle as following an S-curve in I-space (p.123). The six steps are:

• scanning
• problem solving
• abstraction
• diffusion
• absorption
• impacting (p.124). 

In their commentary on this piece, "The strategic management of knowledge" (pp.129-139), Martin Ihrig and Ian MacMillan note that after 2006, Boisot "focused on two areas: mapping critical knowledge assets, cultural and organizational structures, and associated learning paths; and simulating strategic knowledge management processes, in particular knowledge flows derived from knowledge-based agent interactions" (p.130). Mapping in I-Space "allows us to represent an agent's knowledge as a portfolio of knowledge assets, as a network of nodes and their links to other nodes" (p.136). Mapping these nodes  in a network allows us "to consider its dynamic behavior" (p.136). 

Skipping ahead, in "Knowledge in big science" (pp.155-166), Agusti Canals asserts something that I found key to understanding Boisot's theorizing: Boisot claimed that he had an "inability" to deal with mathematics (pp.155-156), and this inability kept him from a career in the natural sciences. So—and this is my commentary—Boisot repeatedly frames science as a vanguard for the rest of us to follow, and he prefers to model interactions in terms that resemble those of physics.

In "The three phases of Max Boisot's theorizing" (pp.205-211), John-Christopher Spender characterizes I-Space as suggesting "a complex economics of information, an information-based approach to political economy" (p.206). Spender notes that Boisot characterized information in energy terms (there's the physics influence again) and because I-Space was "self-contained" in energy terms, 

the flow around the Social Learning Cycle ... 'worked' because the unit of information flowing could not be at all places in the cycle at the same time—it is trading-off the contrasting energy natures and values of the different types of information itemized in the Keio paper. There was a corresponding change in entropy as information moved around the cycle because in the real world, as opposed to the abstractions of neoclassical or "Newtonian economics," generating, transforming, codifying and deploying information is entropy-raising work. (p.206)

My commentary: This passage was tremendously illuminating to me because it emphasizes how Boisot's guiding metaphor of Newtonian physics (economics?) captured his theorizing and resulted in what seem to me to be very odd claims. Boisot uses I-Space to track transformations in information: how is "a unit of information" abstracted, diffused, etc.? But consider a study that Boisot briefly cited earlier, Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life. In that study, Latour describes cascades of rerepresentations, in which (for instance) the result of cutting off a rat's toes is represented in a column of numbers, then in a graph, then in other representations leading up to published papers and finally assertions that can be made in textbooks. Yet such representations are not just transformations in a single stream, they are yielded by combining previous representations, and they are themselves combined and compared to yield insights. They also don't disappear—scientists at the Pasteur Lab and elsewhere keep these representations so that they can unwind their arguments at any point, producing evidence at each point in the chain. In actual studies conducted by an ethnographer of science, we don't see a serial set of transformations but a tangled web, and information must continue to exist in different parts of the cycle at the same time. It is not the unit of information (whatever it might be—Boisot is vague about what constitutes information in the SLC) but the relations among different representations that makes science, and arguably other endeavors using complex information, work. 

Let's leave it there. As always, I find Boisot's work to be fascinating but heterodox, and I look forward to continuing to think through its wrinkles. If the question of information interests you as well, definitely take a look. 

Reading :: Belles on Their Toes

Belles on Their Toes
By Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

I'm just noting that I read this sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen. In this book, the authors chronicle the Gilbreth family's life after their father Frank Gilbreth died and their mother, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, had to carry on the family's consultancy in motion studies. This was quite a task in the 1920s, as many did not believe women had the capacity, expertise, or right to run a consultancy. Although the authors describe their lives growing up in a large household, we still get a sense of what Dr. Gilbreth went through. It's a quick read (I think I finished it in one sitting) and I recommend it if you enjoyed the first book.

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.