Reading :: Cognitive Capitalism

Cognitive Capitalism
By Yann Moulier Boutang

David Guile suggested I read this book, and I owe him a debt for discussing its salient points with me. Moulier Boutang originally published it in 2007; this translation was published in 2011. In it, the author argues that we are undergoing a transition, not to socialism (as Marx and his successors have hoped) but to a new type of capitalism, corresponding with globalism.

In the Introduction, the author characterizes capitalism in three stages: "Marx in Manchester," "Marx in Detroit," and "Marx in California" (p.8). The third stage, AKA "cognitive capitalism," began around 1975 and has "little similarity to industrial capitalism, which at its birth between 1750 and 1820, broke with mercantilist capitalism and slavery" (p.9). He emphasizes: "We are not living in a period of socialist transition" but rather a transition into this new form of capitalism (p.9).

He continues this argument in Chapter 1, where he argues that "From 1975 onwards the pace of economic growth in the developed countries slowed considerably. ... Unemployment became omnipresent and structural." The previous model, which relied on "rapid salarisation of an originally agricultural population, an abundant supply of family dependants and a demand that was driven first by postwar reconstruction, and then by wars taking place in the Third World ... finally ran out of steam" (p.11). Yet there was no collapse. World trade rose and new trans-state organizations were created (p.12). Bases of capital changed repeatedly (see table 1.1, p.18). In the process, "Capitalism has set negative externalities at the centre of its functioning as positives, and they make one of the characteristics of complex systems within which organised human intervention must evolve" (p.20). These negative externalities include our air, water, and other aspects of our ecological system. And they are now interfering with transaction costs (p.30). This fact has an impact on immaterial labor, which characterizes the new production model.

By immaterial labour, the author means that "the essential point" for understanding the economy is "no longer the expenditure of human labour power" as Marx would have it, but rather "invention-power," or "the living know-how that cannot be reduced to machines and the opinions shared in common by the greatest number of human beings" (p.32). For example, the price of a pair of trainers (that's athletic shoes for those of us in the US) relies not just on the manufacturing and transport costs but also on "the value of the brand," which itself results from labor from designers, stylists, and lawyers (p.32). The capacity for innovation becomes a key part of the stock price (p.32). "If the economy is becoming increasingly flexible (a transition that many industries are finding it very hard to make), it is because the central core of value rests now on immaterialities" (p.33). Here, "immaterial labour" is not idealist, but rather an update of Marx's "abstract labour" (p.33). Capitalism now seeks to prioritize "collective intelligence, creativity distributed through the entirety of the population" (p.34).

Capitalism must mutate to survive, partly due to human change: the social accumulation of knowledge, expanded memory, and collective intelligence, due to information technologies (p.36). Thus he calls the new capitalism "'cognitive capitalism', because it has to deal with collective cognitive labour power, living labour, and not simply with muscle-power consumed by machines driven by 'fossil-fuel' energy" (p.37).

In Chapter 2, the author contrasts cognitive capitalism (hereafter CC) with other characterizations, such as the knowledge-based society, the information society, technological capitalism, and the new economy. Chapter 3 defines CC in detail as a coherent system and a dynamic process. The author argues that cognitive capitalism involves "a remarkable return ... to use-value and to the world of human relations" (p.49). CC has 15 markers:

1. The virtualization of the economy, i.e., the "growing role of the immaterial" (p.50)
2. "The weight of the immaterial is an outcome of the new computer technologies" (p.50)
3. The capture of innovation "present in the interactive cognitive processes of social cooperation and of tacit knowledge" (p.51)
4. Thus technological process "takes the form of a socio-technical system" and the critical variables are "the appropriation of knowledge" and "the use of technology" (p.51)
5. The division of labor model has been brought into question; "As for innovation that requires not only the coordination of complex processes but also the active cooperation of agents, it is hampered, indeed blocked, by the division of labour" and thus "productivity gains ... derive from economies in learning"  (pp.51-52)
6. "The growing complexity of markets" is increasingly managed via "learning economies" (p.52)
7. Sequences of production are reversed: "Now deep innovation involves 'flexible production' and 'just-in-time' production" and relies on "the productive nature of consumption"—users become co-producers of innovation (pp.52-53).
8. Traditional dividing lines "between capital and labour and between skilled and unskilled labour" are dissolving (p.53)
9. The digital network yields the network society (p.53)
10. The "hegemony of the paradigm of industrial labour and manual labour power" is coming to an end (p.53)
11. Whereas "dead labour" is crystallized in machines, in CC, living labour "is not consumed and not reduced to dead labour in machinism" (p.54)
12. "Concepts of individual performance within the workplace"are declining, while innovation is no longer solely located within the company (p.54)
13. CC produces immaterial goods (information-goods, knowledge-goods), yielding tensions over intellectual property rights (pp.54-55)
14. Externalities are no longer marginal: "capturing positive externalities becomes the number one problem of value," i.e., "work done outside working hours, and implicit knowledge, and capacities for contextualisation" (p.55)
15. "Whereas industrial capitalism could be characterised as the production of commodities by means of commodities, cognitive capitalism produces knowledge by means of knowledge and produces the living by means of the living. It is immediately production of life, and thus it is bio-production" that can only "take place on the basis of collective brain activity mobilised in interconnected digital networks." This is "bio-production" and its control is "biopower" (pp.55-56). 

CC, he concludes, is "a mode of accumulation in which the object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value, as well as the principal location of the process of valorisation" (p.57). Its strategies "are determined by the quest for a spatial, institutional and organisational positioning likely to increase its capacity for engaging in creative processes and for capturing their benefits" (p.57). Its mode of production "is based on the cooperative labour of human brains joined together in networks by means of computers" (p.57). Therefore the new wealth of nations is "the important place of research, of technological advancement, of education (the quality of the population), of information flow, of communication systems, of innovation, of organisational learning and of management organisational strategies" (p.57). "A capitalist society of this kind aims to place at the centre of the sphere of production and to integrate fully into the economic sphere (both market and non-market) resources that had previously been external to them" (p.58). 

CC requires a new division of labor as well. The author provides a table (p.62) demonstrating a shift from industrial to cognitivist DOL in terms of various aspects: function, evolution variables, organizational model, etc. In a nutshell, CC characteristics seem similar to those of Adler and Hecksher's collaborative communities, focusing on cooperation in networks (not markets or hierarchies). Importantly, CC relies on educated, intellectual members, in contrast to the deliberately limited worker requirements of Tayloris, (pp.66-67). 

Yet, as the author argues in Chapter 4, cognitive capitalism is also unstable: it involves omnipresent exploitation and antagonistic social relations and relations of production (p.92). First CC splits living labor into consumed (crystallized) and continuing (skill, know-how). It produces living labor by means of living labor (i.e., knowledge by means of knowledge). Thus re get living capital, a seeming paradox (p.93). CC draws its legitimacy from the nature of its accumulation, mainly exploiting invention-power and ideally maximizing that exploitation (p.94). The author provides a helpful typology, showing different cases in terms of exploitation of labour-power, invention-power, and freedom: on one end is the slave or serf, who is solely exploited in terms of labour-power and has no freedom; at the other end, the creative, who is exploited solely in terms of invention-power and does have freedom (p.96). 

The production of knowledge goods has two problems: First, they are not scarce, and second, they are too public to be produced through a market system—hierarchy and market are inadequate (pp.103-104). The dot-com entrepreneur, he says, can only find a business model by staying on top of the wave of social innovation; we're no longer in the era of Schumpeter and Knight, when entrepreneurs identify the needs of a passive society (p.109). 

In Chapter 5, the author examines the question of social class. CC involves worsening inequalities and precarity (p.122). The latter does not mean poverty but rather vulnerability to poverty: the safety net has holes (p.129). Precarity involves intermittent workers; to exploit invention-power, trades must "develop multi-level capabilities, so that their pollination and nomadic activity may be recaptured" (p.132). "The regime of widespread intermittency is becoming the real form of work," he says, adding that a guaranteed universal income will be needed to underpin CC—people need to eat in order to do cognitive work (p.134). 

In Chapter 6, the author argues that finance is the only way to govern the inherent instability of CC (p.136). Accounting rules are currently inadequate for companies that accumulate and retain immaterial (intangible) capital (p.141). 

In Chapter 7, he presents a manifesto, gathering up the policy recommendations made throughout the book (universal basic income, financial governance, etc.).

And let's stop there. This was a rewarding book, allowing me to draw together some of my previous readings and writings to rethink what is going on with work. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: The New Spirit of Capitalism

The New Spirit of Capitalism
By Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello

In his influential 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that capitalism works because of an ethos—labor must be performed as a calling, pursued with virtue and proficiency rather than for enjoyment and enrichment. It is this selfless performance of capitalism that makes it work as a system. And Weber laments:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the "saint like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p.181)

Writing at the other end of the century, in 1999 (the original, French publication date), Boltanski and Chiapello agree with Weber's basic thesis but argue that capitalism continues to reinvent itself. They argue that the "spirit of capitalism" is the "ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism" (p.8) and that this ideology has periodically had to change in order to address and incorporate critiques (p.19). In fact, the authors identify three "spirits" of capitalism at different periods—familial, bureaucratic, and globalized—each of which were in tune with their time periods (p.19). The third spirit, which is what we are living through today (or at least were in 1999), must restore meaning to the accumulation process, combined with social justice (p.19).

More broadly, they say, critiques function as a motor for capitalism, which must align with other values to survive. Capitalism relies on its enemies' critiques to identify moral supports, which it then incorporates (p.27). (For a quick example, think in terms of social entrepreneurship.) In rhetorical terms, capitalism concedes critiques and adjusts its argument to address them. Paradoxically, this means that capitalism is the most fragile when it is triumphant (p.27)—when it doesn't have a critique to incorporate.

To substantiate this analysis, the authors turn to a corpus of management books read in France in the 1990s. (They limit their claims to the French management context, but acknowledge that these claims may be more broadly applied as well.) These management texts emphasize ideas that may be familiar to readers of this blog: networked organizational structure, distributed leadership, projectification, self-direction, trust (Part I, Ch.I). These lead to workers managing themselves and pursuing personal development, autonomy, freedom, and fulfillment (p.90)—the ethical critiques of bureaucratic capitalism being incorporated into globalist capitalism.

One might object here that the corpus is biased toward growth areas: familial and bureaucratic capitalism have their places and do specific jobs well, but since their principles are more established, we won't see a lot of new management books focused on them. In contrast, new information and communication technologies enable new organizational approaches to emergent objects, and thus we see a glut of new management books addressing them. The authors do not address this objection head-on, but they do acknowledge in the next chapter that successive organizational and technical innovations and managerial modes gradually transformed mechanisms, and that the corpus reflects an attempt to unify these mechanisms into a coherent vision (p. 103). The term "network" is frequently used in the corpus to impose coherence on these highly disparate elements (p.103). They charge that the notion of network absolves us from positing or addressing the idea of justice: in a networked world, low-status people are simply excluded (p.106). The authors do discuss network analysis and Latourean and Deleuzian sociotechnical networks—unfortunately conflating these (p.150; see also p.356).

In a network world, the authors say, our focus is no longer on saving money as in Weberian (familial) capitalism, but rather on saving time: it must be spent on the best connections and reinvested immediately (p.152).

In Part II, the authors examine the history of labor in the second half of the 20th century in France, specifically the negotiations between trade unions and employers. In this telling, the trade unions in 1968 saw compromise as an exit lane from capitalism (p.182), but management addressed critiques by accommodating demands for social justice (p.183), providing profit-sharing in lieu of control/power (p.184), improving working conditions to quell rebellion (p.185), and replacing autonomy with security (p.190).

There is much more to the book, but let's skip to the conclusion, which presents these axioms:

1. "Capitalism needs a spirit in order to engage the people required for production and the functioning of business." (p.485)
2. "To be capable of mobilizing people, the spirit of capitalism must include a moral dimension." (p.486)
3. "If it is to survive, capitalism needs simultaneously to stimulate and to curb instability." (p.487)
4. "The spirit of capitalism cannot be reduced to an ideology in the sense of an illusion with no impacts on the world." (p.488)
5. "Capitalism has a constant tendency to transform itself." (p.489)
6. "The principal operator of creation and transformation of the spirit of capitalism is critique (voice)." (p.489)
7. "In certain conditions, critique can itself be one of the factors of a change in capitalism (and not merely in its spirit)." (p.490)
8. "Critique derives its energy from sources of indignation." (p.491)

It would be a little facile to say that capitalism succeeds because it listens to critique and addresses it. Boltanski and Chiapello, I think, rather argue that capitalism identifies damaging critiques and incorporates changes to defang those critiques so that it can retain and legitimize its essential focus on the accumulation process. It is more nimble, more flexible, and more supple in argumentation than its competitors. 

Overall, I think the book is a solid piece of work, although the authors have staked a lot on their reading of the management corpus, and I agree that they may not be able to generalize their conclusions beyond France. I am also not thrilled with how they have conflated different uses of "network," which I think muddies the analysis. Like other books in this vein, this one also endorses a grand narrative in which changes can be traced to a single actor (capitalism) rather than multiple factors in tension (ex: information and communication technologies, changes in transportation, the broadening of infrastructure, etc.). Nevertheless, it provides a much-needed rethinking of Weber's original thesis and provides a smart critique of the management literature. I wish I had read it before writing All Edge, although I think I would have—er—incorporated the critique rather than fundamentally changing my argument. If you're interested in capitalism, the so-called new economy, or Weber, take a look.

Presentation - All Edge: Exploring the New Workplace Networks

I just got back from speaking at the Austin Chamber of Commerce about how work is changing due to new information and communication technologies. Here's my presentation:

All Edge: Understanding the New Workplace Networks from Clay Spinuzzi

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way."

My standard description of my research is now a presentation — which I gave at Utah State last week. Take a look.

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way": Applying genre and sociocultural theory to net work from Clay Spinuzzi

(writers love txt)

Every once in a while, I have a conversation that goes something like this:

Acquaintance: So you've been teaching college students for a while, huh? 

Me: Sure have. (Checks math in head.) Almost ... twenty years. That can't be right! (Checks math again on fingers, feels old.) Yeah, almost twenty.

Acquaintance:  I have a question for you. 

Me: I bet I know what it is. 

Acquaintance: Have you noticed—(dramatic pause)—over the time that you've been teaching—(dramatic pause)—that students are getting worse and worse at writing? 

Me: No, not really. 

Acquaintance: Really? I mean—(dramatic pause)—have you noticed lately that—(dramatic pause)—they are using text speak in their papers?

The acquaintance might use different terms, such as "textspeak" or "text talk" or "SMS language," or perhaps concrete examples (such as "l8r" instead of "later"). In any case, the fear is the same: That our incoming students are becoming more illiterate, communicating through bastardized language, while losing the far superior art of—take your pick—letter writing, journaling, poetry.

Let's untangle this question a bit, because it touches on a lot of different issues.

Writing isn't a unitary phenomenon. Writing is perhaps our most useful and flexible tool, making its way into nearly every aspect of our lives—saturating our lives to a degree that it has never done before. Nearly universal literacy means that the overwhelming majority of elementary school students learn a basic level of reading, writing, and textual problem solving.

Let that sink in. In 1870, 20% of people at or above the age of 14 were illiterate—unable to read or write in any language. By 1979, that number dropped to only 0.6%.

Furthermore, in 1870, the degree ratio for high school was 0.02%—only 2 of every 100 students graduated from high school. In 1970, the degree ratio was 77%. (By 2000 it was a relatively anemic 70%.)

That's something that we often forget. We sometimes look at schoolbooks from the mid-1800s and are tempted to marvel at how much more proficient children were at reading back then. Yes, of the 80% who were not completely illiterate, a substantial percentage learned how to write at remarkable levels. But many of them did not aspire to high levels of competence in writing. Nor did they need to. Even those with high literacy levels mastered a relatively small number of genres (text types) that were useful to social engagements and the lifelong employment they obtained after school.

Even so, writing, which (as you may remember) began as a hacked-together accounting system, developed many more uses as the population became more literate. The dropping costs of writing technology—including pencils, pens, and paper—made writing easier to spread, as did the burgeoning postal system. Writing became incorporated into more and more trades, fields, and disciplines.

And as information and communication technologies (ICTs) came online, and as work changed, the number of genres multiplied. For instance, the business memo evolved from business letters which were deployed within an organization. Email evolved from business memos (and you can still see the traces of the older genre in email headers: to, from, date, subject). And so on.

Here's the thing. Each of these genres is deployed in different situations. Each has carved out its own niche in a larger set of genres. Increasingly, each has to cross borders, as work becomes more intertwined. And since people no longer expect lifelong employment, they often must learn new genres throughout their lives—and they bring some genres from one job to another, piling on even more texts.

But that's not just happening in our work lives. Social networking is growing and diversifying. Last December there were 6.7 billion active mobile subscriptions; these reach 4.3 billion unique human beings, 61% of the planet's population; and 5.6 billion of these subscriptions use texting—more than use voice calls.

Social media and texting are both dominated by writing. When you see a college student walking across campus while staring at her iPhone, rather than wondering why she doesn't look up, think: she, like the rest of her generation, is reading and writing constantly. As she goes through school, graduates, gets a job, then switches careers throughout her life, she is going to constantly learn, use, invent, and convey an enormous number of genres. Rather than writing less, and being less competent in writing, she's writing more, in more venues, in more situations, and in situations that involve more varied audience analysis.

So much for the quantity of writing. But, my acquaintance might ask, how about the quality? Do my students write in text speak?

They don't. To understand why, take a look at a study that Christina Haas and her collaborators published in 2011. The research team analyzed a 32000-word corpus of instant messaging exchanges among 103 college students. Along the way, they noted plenty of inventive spelling and other unusual conventions. Their conclusion?

The understanding that emerged for us was one of young people who have a true mastery of written language: the IM transcripts we studied were funny, clever, innovative, sometimes moving, and almost always delightful. We believe this picture emerged partly because of our inductive approach—to the best of our abilities, we let the language of participants speak to us and speak it did. Our study has revealed that literacy—at once innovative and playful, systematic and purposeful—is alive and well on the Internet and in the lives of the young people who use it. (p.399)

Moreover, the invented spelling and other features of IM didn't bleed into the school writing that students did. Their compositions didn't, for instance, tell professors that they would do something "l8r" or justify something "cuz" or evaluate something as "saweeet." They kept the register of IM separate from the register they use for schoolwork. As do my students. When they use texting, they aren't ruining the language, they're just adapting it to fit the space limitations of 160 characters and the time limitations of near-immediate communication.

If you want to understand how this works, here's a simple experiment you can try. Next time you go to a restaurant, right after you place your order, ask the server if you can see what he or she wrote on the pad. I can almost guarantee you it won't be the item on the menu ("Brick Chicken with Garlic Mashed Potatoes"). Instead, it will probably be an abbreviation that the waitstaff and kitchen staff both understand ("bchx").

And it's not because your waiter can't spell "chicken."

So, no, in my experience students are not writing more badly than they did in 1993. They are, however, writing more frequently, in more situations, involving more audiences, in connection with more additional genres, in anticipation of learning and adapting even more genres during a lifetime of learning. They're preparing for near-constant textual contact, including an increasing number of social layers on top of their work, leisure, and family genres. My students, I admit, don't write and are usually not prepared to write essays similar to those in the McGuffey Readers. But they do write in a mind-boggling range of genres and situations that didn't exist back in the 1800s. That's the challenge for which they're preparing.

(mobility beyond the laptop)

So I'll be appearing in Las Vegas next week at the CCCC conference. The most notable thing about the trip is that, for the first time in over a decade, I won't be bringing a laptop.

Here's the problem with laptops: Flying. Every time I go through airport security, I have to pull my laptop out of my luggage, place it in a separate container, and run it through the X-ray machine. Then I have to retrieve it afterwards. Meanwhile, I'm trying to juggle my shoes, my other luggage, my personal effects, and who knows what else. It's stressful, but I have dealt with it because I need to be able to work on papers, browse, etc. when I travel.

But when I flew back from Germany last November, re-entering domestic security, I heard one of the TSA employees tell the crowd: you can leave your iPads in your luggage. Only laptops need to be separated.

Huh.

Shortly afterwards, I bought a Nexus 10. It was mostly for reading and annotating PDFs, but it does most of what I need for travel purposes as well. It's lighter even than my Macbook Air. It allows me to edit and comment on Google Docs. And it turns out to be a great tool for scheduling and project management—functions that I have traditionally performed on planes anyway.

So, for this upcoming trip, I have decided to leave the Air at home and use smaller, always-on devices: my Galaxy Nexus, my Nexus 10, and—because I prefer to read e-ink and because it's not very heavy—my Kindle Touch. No laptop. No physical keyboard. And, I hope, no stress when going through airport security.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Network > Implications for workers

I ran into a discussion on Twitter yesterday about lean education. At one point, Fredrik Matheson tells his interlocutors that my book Network provides a way to talk about its dilemmas.

True—and although I rarely discuss education per se, the concept of net work is an exception because it's so critical to understanding some of the shifting changes in work and the consequent challenges to education.

In the book, I use the term network to mean a heterogeneous assemblage of materials that make up a sustained, relatively coherent set of activities (p.16). These materials include technologies, texts, people, communications, and so on. "All are material, all are linked in complex and shifting ways, and all are brought to bear on the business of extending and developing the network, that is, bringing more elements into the assemblage and relating them in different ways" (p.16).

Such sociotechnical networks grow and change through net work: "the ways in which the assemblage is enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed; the ways in which knowledge work is strategically and tactically performed in a heavily networked organization" (p.16). In knowledge work organizations (such as the telecommunications company I studied in that book), it's relatively easy to extend these networks in formal and informal ways. That's because, although these organizations also do physical work, most of their work involves circulating, analyzing, and synthesizing information. And information is increasingly inexpensive to circulate (a fact that is beginning to disrupt manufacturing industries and the laws based on their material limitations). So we get a workforce that is increasingly mobile,  increasingly incentivized to work remotely, with increasing opportunities to work in looser arrangements. We get a workforce that is increasingly distributed, increasingly able (and incentivized) to work independently. One which increasingly works in virtual environments and collaborates in virtual teams. One which involves organizations shedding non-core jobs, farming them out to contractors instead. One in which work is more loosely organized.

In knowledge work, strength comes from combining sets of expertise in unique ways. That means crossing borders—borders between fields/disciplines/trades, borders between organizations, borders between countries and agendas. Net workers must be able to learn at least a little bit about each others' work. Furthermore, cross-organizational work often means less leverage over aspects of the work—you can command, but not control, people in different organizations. Temporary, project-based, cross-networked organizations multiply, and they work differently, often tactically rather than strategically.

So what?

The upshot is that successful knowledge work organizations require different things from their employees. As I argue in the last chapter of Network, those with specific characteristics will tend to thrive in these environments:

• Rhetoric. When work reaches across unstable borders, when workers don't have strong leverage over each other, they must "understand how to make arguments, how to persuade, how to build trust and stable alliances, how to negotiate and bargain and horse-trade across boundaries" (p.201). In particular, trust-building can be a hard nut to crack, but it's essential to smoothly functioning collaborative communities. 
• Time management. Net work often involves work fragmentation too. At Telecorp, the telecommunications company I studied, people could interrupt each others' work at any time—and that tendency has only strengthened in the studies I've conducted since then. Put a phone in everyone's pocket and you get the potential to form ad hoc teams at the drop of a hat. So "Workers must be able to adopt or adapt ways to deal with work fragmentation, including genres and rules that allow them to create their own stable transformations ... for prioritizing, organizing, and achieving work" (p.201). The more work becomes networked, the more individuals tend to take on the burden of managing their own time—and the more they need essential time management skills.
• Project management. Similarly, net work involves project management. In fact, "projectification" is an essential characteristic of cross-functional and cross-organizational work. And cross-functional or cross-organizational teams, which tend to be oriented around projects, tend to require rotating leadership in which people from different specializations take the lead during different phases. That means that the essentials of project management become vital.
• Adaptability. Finally, and implied by the other points, people have to be adaptable. As work becomes more projectified, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational, it requires more adaptability from its workers—workers who must be adaptable enough to learn about each others' work, organize around different projects, and adapt new technologies and practices and genres. 

What does this mean for education? 

I hesitate to recommend full-bore changes such as scrapping college completely, moving hastily to MOOCs, or throwing up new programs quickly. These approaches all have problems, foremost of which is the fact that none of them get at the cross-disciplinary, cross-organizational skills I describe above. MOOCs in particular seem optimized for conveying codified knowledge, but not for building the skills above—which is to say that they currently lack the give-and-take interaction that tends to characterize innovative organizations. Certainly they haven't (yet) been generally articulated in a way that encourages cross-disciplinary work, project-oriented virtual teams, or the rhetorical engagement and strategies that can make knowledge work effective. 

At the same time, university education does tend to be balkanized, with some disciplines barely interacting with others. Classes are often treated as silos. And even classes in rhetoric often focus their projects on civic engagement (read: op-ed columns) to the exclusion of essential cross-organizational skills. 

That's partly why I am so excited about our Human Dimensions of Organizations program at UT, in which working professionals learn and apply the liberal arts to wicked problems in their own organizations. As a cross-disciplinary program, HDO promises to connect the insights of different disciplines, with a heavy emphasis on understanding how people think and operate—and how decision-makers can be convinced of solid, ethical arguments for change. As a program for working professionals, HDO is ultimately application-focused; by drawing on their own deep experience with organizations, these students keep us honest and, I expect, will challenge our preconceptions as much as we will challenge theirs. And as a program ending with a capstone course, HDO will provide a concrete takeaway—a demonstration project that allows students to synthesize their work throughout the curriculum to solve an actual problem and yield actual gains.

HDO isn't a template for the future of education writ large. But it's one measured response to the deep changes we've seen in work over the last forty-odd years, changes to which education must be responsive. 

Network > New slide decks for each chapter

I've been posting a lot about my new book Topsight and pointing to the downloadable content I've been adding to the page as I count down the days until the book is available. But I have other books too—books that lay down the theoretical and empirical background behind Topsight. And I'll be adding downloadable content to their pages as well.

In fact, I put together a set of slide decks last year that discuss my 2008 book Network chapter by chapter, reviewing and amplifying on each chapter's content and adding examples to make the book more relevant to social media and information design. Today I uploaded them.

If you're interested, go to the page for Network and take a look—they're in the Download section. And let me know what you think in the comments!

TIMN and the Competing Values Network

For the last few years, I've been thinking about David Ronfeldt's TIMN framework, in which he discusses how four basic forms of human organization—tribes, institutions, markets, and networks—developed and how they are advantaged under different sociotechnical conditions. Lately I've been trying to use TIMN as a way to help me better understand adhocracies, which Toffler introduced as a counterpoint to bureaucracies. To put it loosely, bureaucracies are to institutions as adhocracies are to networks.

Together, these led me to Quinn and Cameron's Competing Values Framework, in which the authors characterize organization culture along the dimensions of stability v. flexibility and internal v external focus. They label the four quadrants Clan, Hierarchy, Market, and Adhocracy—labels that seem very similar to Ronfeldt's Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks.

I emailed Ronfeldt about this, and he courteously revised his 2009 post comparing TIMN with other analysts' tables. This is a resource to which I'll be returning again and again as I develop my own understanding of organizational forms; if you're similarly interested, check it out.

Reading :: Linked

Linked
By Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

A while back, Mark Zachry, who knew of my interest in networks, recommended that I read this book. It's a popular book that overviews "the new science of networks," which is to say, network analysis. Needless to say, it's fascinating.

Network analysis shouldn't be confused with networked organizations (e.g., Castells; Arquilla & Ronfeldt) or sociotechnical networks (e.g., Engestrom; Miettinen; Latour; Callon; see my second book). Rather, it's a way of examining how any particular type of node connects with other nodes. It has a strong mathematical component. And although it can be applied to people (as in social network analysis), it can also be applied to atoms, bits, citations, bus terminals - anything that can be conceived as a class or type, then connected to others of the same class/type.

Barabasi does a terrific job of describing how network analysis has developed as it is applied in different fields and to different problems. Along the way, he discusses concepts such as emerging clusters, hubs and connectors, small worlds, and power laws. Due to his clarity and examples, he illuminated several things for me about network analysis - and particularly its differences with, and strengths and weaknesses in comparison with, networked organizations and social network analysis.

If you're interested in networks under any of these headings, I strongly recommend this readable book.

An inspiring post about Network and networks

While I was at SXSW, Bill Hart-Davidson tweeted me the link to this fantastic blog post by Michael Wojcik: {n1,n2,n3,…}. If you have any interest in networks - or in Network, my second book, which figures prominently in the post - you should go read it. As I tweeted back to Bill, I agree with about 90% of the post, but I respect all of it.

What's really extraordinary is that this post is not a formal book review or essay - it's a reading response in a graduate class. Bravo.

I love that Wojcik gets my general project, that he finds the strong parts, and that he doesn't pull punches when he finds the simplifications and glosses in my book. That's the mark of someone who is actually engaged with the text. It's flattering: it makes me think that I wrote something worth reading closely. (I also like that he lays into Deleuze and Guattari, but that's another story.)

What's the 10% that I don't agree with? For now, let me just leave you with one clue.

Wojcik's post comes at a good time, since I am thinking about writing an essay on networks anyway. More on that as it evolves. But until then, really, do click through and read his post. And then go write stuff like this.

Facebook's new trick: it turns friends into direct marketers

What really appeals to me about social media is that it lets people make direct, genuine connections with each other. I'm really taken with the fact that status messages let us pick up a sort of ambient status of our friends, colleagues, and associates. It's good to know what others are thinking, feeling, and concerned about. It's also good to hear their arguments. That's especially important during big events such as election campaigns. For instance, when I watch candidates debating, I now tune into my Twitter stream to see how people on the right and left interpret and react to statements. The reactions of people I know seem more important to me than the scripted reactions of the talking heads that are employed by news organizations. And seeing their points of view helps me to think twice about political statements rather than simply accepting them. It deepens my understanding of the national conversation and helps me to think in terms of compromises, not lines in the sand. That's good for democracy, I think.

And that's a good reason for not unfriending people whose political beliefs you disagree with, by my lights. You get out of a partisan echo chamber and begin to understand how people across the political spectrum might interpret the same statement in different ways, associating it with other statements. Let's not call it the wisdom of crowds; let's call it diversifying the viewpoints to which you listen. It doesn't mean you agree with them, but it means you understand them.

So I'll read the status messages of people across the political spectrum. On Twitter, which I love, that's the only way to share this information. On Facebook, about which I have more mixed feelings, people have other options: they can share stories, they can tag photos, they can comment on anything, and they can even post directly to your wall if they have a personal message for you that they also want to be public. It exemplifies the personal connection between people. Used well, it can deepen the personal understandings across people who hold different views.


But here's the thing about Facebook. Its primary goal is to extract marketing data from users so it can more effectively monetize them. Every Facebook interaction potentially adds to your further definition as a market segment.

What happens when you put these two together?

Alas, we found out this last electoral cycle. A few different Facebook applications rolled out that tried to marry personal connections with direct marketing. That is, they turned trusted friends into direct marketers. Here's one example from an LA Times blog:

The California Democratic Party unveiled a new tool in its kit of get-out-the-vote operations Monday: a first-of-its-kind Facebook application that sifts through a user’s friends list, matches it with the friends’ party registrations and voting histories and pops out a list people who vote Democratic but don’t regularly vote.

It then encourages users to tell their non-voting friends to cast a ballot Nov. 2.

Without a trace of irony, the story explains that "the development of the Facebook app was made possible because of funding from Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, who lost this year’s Democratic primary for state attorney general" (my emphasis). A Democratic spokesman adds, "In the same way that we target voters with direct mail, this is part of the same strategy for us" (my emphasis).

That's not the only Facebook app to do this job. BarackObama.com rolled out its Commit to Vote app, which goes through your friends list and posts a reminder to vote to your friends' wall. Yes, all your friends. Yes, this means that a form of communication that used to indicate a personal connection - posting to someone's wall - becomes the equivalent of direct mail. Worse, if the person using the Commit to Vote app shares many friends with you, your stream is suddenly full of identical direct mail pieces: the message posted to your wall and the messages posted to 33 of your friends' walls. Conservative WSJ blogger James Taranto ridicules this approach (last item): "Wow, so that's the Democrats' secret weapon. ... Facebook spam..." Yes: with Facebook, anyone can now be a direct marketer. Anyone can set up the equivalent of a robocall - for as long as they have Facebook friends, anyway.

I personally don't care who came up with the idea, on whichever part of the political spectrum. It's a very troubling turn for social media because it takes the two contradictory sides - the social features that enable deeper and more expansive personal connections, and the trove of marketing data that enable marketing connections - and fuses them together in exactly the wrong way. In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto urged us to understand markets as conversations. In 2010, conversations have become marketing.

I want the conversation, not the marketing. And that means that if some individual wanted to post to my wall and have an actual conversation, I would be fine with it. But unfortunately they can't. Because of the Commit to Vote app, I have restricted access to my wall, and I don't see lifting those restrictions anytime soon.

Catch me in San Antonio...

... this Wednesday. I'll be speaking on the Future of Work - a longer, amplified version of my South by Southwest presentation:

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

1:00pm - 2:30pm

C4 WorkSpace at 108 King William, San Antonio

Interested? Register at Eventbrite.

M.I.A. can respond. Uh-oh.

Just over a year ago, I blogged about Jared Diamond being sued for libel by a research participant, and I pointed out my chapter in Amy Kimme Hea's collection predicting that participants would exercise increasing power to "talk back." As I said in that chapter, current human subjects guidelines assume that the researcher enjoys an asymmetrical power relationship to the participant since the researcher has a publication avenue - a way of representing the participant - and the participant doesn't have a reciprocal way to represent themselves or the researcher. That assumption, I argued, is now false because everyone has access to publication avenues, and therefore researchers need to protect themselves by using measures that keep participants on board - such as member checks.

So over the last few days, we've seen another example (thanks to my flagger for spotting this one). Recording artist M.I.A. didn't like how the New York Times reported its interview with her, so she's done exactly what I predicted participants might do: she has disputed particular points, posting her own recording of the interview as evidence. It's fascinating, and it opens the black box of reporting in ways that were unthinkable a few years ago. She's also tweeted the cell phone number of the reporter - which seems like burning her bridges, but M.I.A. is comfortable doing this (I assume) because she realizes the NYT needs her more than she needs it.

This incident might be amusing, but it should also be a wake-up call for qualitative researchers. At the very least, use member checks. Think defensively, but also cooperatively. Don't think of these people as subjects but as gracious hosts. Be true to your evidence and give them a chance to present their own framing for that evidence. Find ways to reach detente. Oh, and read my chapter!

David Lee visits RHE 330c

Today, David Lee, who designs user experiences for FG Squared, visited my Designing Text Ecologies class. I'm glad he did: He covered the UX process in general, describing client meetings, persona development, user stories, user interaction diagrams, card sorting, paper prototyping, wireframes, and user interface flows.

David was my student in a previous RHE 330c, which at that time was a course on contextual design. I didn't know this, but apparently my class was a turning point for him: he came in as a Flash programmer, and exited as a budding UX designer. The new line of work was more interesting to him, but it also boosted his salary by 20%. UX is a big deal now, he told us, and he was kind enough to describe a case study.

I was especially interested in how he moves from paper prototyping to wireframes, then to rapid prototypes (clickable wireframes). He also interacts with graphic designers at this point, handing the wireframes off for visual refining.

David gave me permission to post his slide deck here. It's a nice introduction to the UX process with several of its techniques.

David Lee's UX presentation for my RHE 330c class

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

Outsourcing grading

Just a quick post to link to a Chronicle of Higher Education article about outsourcing grading.

Some may remember a similarly controversial topic from 2006, based on a Chronicle article on how Texas Tech's writing program handled online grading.

Online grading like TTU's - and distance education classes, for that matter - have prepared people to be more receptive to the idea of outsourcing or offshoring grading. (To a lesser extent, so has the practice of accepting first-year composition credits from community colleges.) Slowly, education follows the lead of other industries, segmenting specializations and seeking to maximize self-programmable labor while automating or outsourcing generic labor.

Higher education has been insulated to some degree from this trend. But radical tuition increases, budget crunches, and the looming crisis in underfunded pensions will tend to lead stakeholders to consider less expensive solutions. Nobody will think these solutions are perfect, but I expect a lot more "satisficing" than we're used to seeing. Especially in expensive-to-run classes such as those with small class sizes.

The obvious counterargument, of course, is that grading in writing classes is not generic labor: it's problem-solving, it's grounded in particular contexts, it's sensitive to particular students' needs and developments. Sure, of course, I agree. But as a field, we're going to have to start articulating clearly, for outside audiences, what the vital contribution of instructor grading is. Not the preferred contribution, not the best-practices contribution, but the contribution that can't be made otherwise and that is critical to the university's mission. We need to argue that grading can't be made generic.

Global Guerillas, Tea Parties

"The Tea Party movement in the US is an open source political protest," John Robb declares today on his Global Guerillas blog. Robb, author of Brave New War and analyst of fourth-generation warfare, sees the Tea Party movement as very similar to fourth-generation warfare, particularly in terms of "systems disruption" and swarming. Furthermore, Robb argues that although the Tea Party has been portrayed as a Republican proxy or at least a Republican gain, it's not:

Traditionally, a failure by the government would result in a gain by the opposition party. However, the peculiar dynamics of the two party system in the US works against this. The two parties have converged into a single dominant party with roughly similar agendas. Further, these parties have rigged the system to prevent third party formation. As a result, there isn't a structured process to absorb this movement into the political system.

Robb sketches out some possible repercussions, none of which are solidly positive for Republicans.

I generally agree with this assessment, although clearly Republicans are trying to use the Tea Party to short-term advantage. It's not like Republicans are solid fiscal conservatives either. Ideologically, there's a mismatch, but the mismatch is much stronger at the level of organization. The networked character of the Tea Party, as Robb suggests, is very interesting, more interesting to me than the specific politics.

Last August, I wrote about the related protests at the health care town halls, using Castells, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, and others to theorize the movement's organization and to tie it into previous protests from other ideological quarters. See that post for more on how the movement appears to be organized. And if you're looking for a dissertation topic, I can't think of one that is more fascinating or timely.

In the Pipeline

Here's what's coming up:

• Looking through my recent blog posts, I was surprised to discover that I haven't blogged a review of Heckscher and Adler's The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy, which I read a month or so back. I'll try to post a review soon.
• I'm finishing Toffler and Toffler's Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives and will blog it soon.
• I'll also read Toffler's Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, which I believe will complete their oeuvre.
  
• Finally, I'm planning to review a fourth activity theory collection, van Oers et al.'s The Transformation of Learning: Perspectives from Activity Theory.
  

After that? We'll see.

Reading :: War and Anti-War

War and Anti-War: Making Sense of Today's Global Chaos
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Reading through the network warfare literature some time ago, I was a little startled to see that Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote the foreword to Arquilla and Ronfeldt's In Athena's Camp and that their own book on war, War and Anti-War, was mentioned. I had heard of their other books, but not this one. But as I subsequently learned, David Ronfeldt was influenced by the Tofflers' work early on. I soon picked up this book and read it over Christmas break - and spotted some familiar themes.

Just as their later book Creating a New Civilization focused on applying Third Wave concepts to politics, this book applied those concepts to warfare. That is, the Tofflers have latched hold on a big idea and have explored various permutations in their later books. In this particular instance, they were inspired to write the book after learning that "a group of American generals were busy reading our 1980 book, The Third Wave" (p.8). They argue that the shift from second- to third-wave civilizations means a shift to a new kind of economy and a new kind of warfare (p.3, 9). Indeed, they say, we get a military revolution only when a new civilization challenges the old and changes occur at every level simultaneously (p.34).

They develop these themes, postulating that "Throughout history, the way men and women make war has reflected the way they work" (p.35). First Wave warfare was about agriculture: annexing more land and labor, or else devastate the agriculture of the enemy (p.38). Second Wave warfare involved standardizing everything - military training, organizational doctrine, weapons, people - and massing for the counterpart of mass production: mass destruction (p.43). But third-wave warfare is about knowledge. That means de-massification, heterogeneity, speed. More specifically, it means activating the entire battlefield instead of sweeping linearly, and it means closely integrating air and ground forces (p.60). Exhibit A is the Gulf War, in which the US used both Second-Wave and Third-Wave actions to defeat a Second-Wave force. For instance, the US used both Second-Wave attrition bombing and Third-Wave pinpoint bombing (smart bombs) (p.76). The US deepened the battlefield in all dimensions: distance, altitude, time (p.78). The emphasis was not on hitting the "front" but on hitting command and communication points, sidelining backups so that they couldn't get to the point of battle, synchronizing the US' combined operations, and establishing total battlefield awareness (p.78). (For a discussion of how the Iraqis learned from this encounter, see John Robb's Brave New War.)

The Tofflers emphasize that Third Wave warfare resembles its work: the workforce and war force change in tandem (p.87). For instance, decision authority gets pushed to lower levels, which in the Gulf War meant field commanders. (See John Arquilla's argument in Worst Enemy that command could be pushed even lower.) But they also expect a radical diversification of kinds of wars (p.95) and niche threats, just as we have niche products (p.104). For instance, they mention terrorists and narco-warlords, against which a country cannot massively retaliate (p.122); spoofing satellite information to make it impossible for Third Wave forces to distinguish between friends and enemies (p.121); and robot wars that automate the battlefield just as they have the factory (p.125), leaving human soldiers as the "varsity squad" of war (p.128). All these scenarios have either come true or are in the works.

Third Wave armies, like Third Wave workers, must emphasize de-learning and re-learning as well as using knowledge to substitute for other resources (p.172). "Spin" or propaganda becomes incredibly important (p.194; see Arquilla's Worst Enemy again, as well as Bullets & Blogs). In particular, they foresee decentralized media (which are realized today in blogs and tweets) and "telecomputers" (which are realized in today's smart phones) could vastly multiply a Rodney King moment (p.199; see Bullets & Blogs for a concrete example).

And like Castells, Drucker, Arquilla & Ronfeldt, and others, the Tofflers caution that the state will not be the only player in Third-Wave security. Althoughe the UN is a club of nation-states, world events will be influenced by non-national players (p.250). The nation-state has lost its monopoly on violence (p.270), so the kinds of conflicts multiply, and military forces must be tailored - and must partner with nonstate actors such as non-governmental organizations (p.271; 291).

Overall, like many of the Tofflers' books, this one concentrates on the grand sweep rather than the details. At points it is quite speculative. But it syncs surprisingly well with the networked warfare literature of the time and of the present. If you've developed an interest in how warfare is practiced, especially beyond nation-states, check this book out.

I'll be speaking at UT's iSchool on January 26

If you're in Austin, please consider coming to see me speak at UT's School of Information on January 26. I'll be discussing some of my more recent research.