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 :: Critical Perspectives on Activity

Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work, and Everyday Life
Edited by Peter H. Sawchuck, Newton Duarte, and Mohamed Elhammoumi

I went on an activity theory reading binge recently, reading three newish collections (a fourth is in the queue). Unlike the others I've reviewed so far, this one is not explicitly centered around Engestromian third-generation activity theory. Rather, it's part of the broader CHAT tradition anchored in Vygotsky, Luria, Leont'ev, and later Russian psychologists, and it's oriented more toward issues of education than it is toward working. So it's not as intrinsically interesting to me as the last two collections, but it still had some bright moments.

In their introduction, Sawchuk, Duarte, and Elhammoumi call activity theory "the most comprehensive analytic framework for analyzing human practice and learning currently available" (p.2) and discuss how this framework can be made more comprehensive by applying it to various issues and problems. One is, of course, the "broader societal debate over the nature of 'knowledge economies' and, by now, one of the most frequently discussed policy issues of all, 'lifelong learning'" (p.2). This is the third of the three AT books I've read that focus explicitly on addressing knowledge work, as my own recent book Network has done, so I'm glad to see the trend. At the same time, the editors want "to express a type of 'critical' perspective on activity and to recover, express, and press forward many of the original Marxist elements of the Cultural Historical tradition" (p.4). After all, they say, "Marxist dialectics is not a generic theory of change. It is a theory of change that is rooted in actualities of particular historical epochs. In our current historical context, it is a theory of change within and beyond capitalism specifically" (p.8).

Marxism plays a big role in many of the contributions. In Elhammoumi's "Is there a Marxist psychology," for instance, he argues that Vygotsky is more like psychology's Feuerbach than its Marx: Vygotsky and his successors were not able to move to radical categories beyond the pre-Marxist ones (p.24). In particular, activity theory should be based on a Marxist concept of spatio-temporality (p.31) and move beyond the individual as a starting point, starting instead with the "individual-form" (p.33).

Lompscher's "The Cultural-Historical Activity Theory" reviews the three stages of CHAT, then suggests that CHAT needs a fourth stage (p.35). The chapter provides a dense account of the three stages (the third of which is Engestromian AT; p.47). Then he argues that the computer has not been sufficiently theorized in any of the stages. In particular, third-generation AT characterizes the computer as a tool (p.49).

However, over the last few decades, the computer has become the new leading productive power (Haug, 2003: 38), penetrating and transforming all aspects and domains of production, including management, distribution, consumption, scientific research, and so on, and producing a new stage and mode of capitalist production - the transnational high-tech capitalism (the title of Haug's book) with the Internet as its medium. National and international economic processes have changed and continue to change dramatically with serious and far-reaching political consequences across the globe. As a result, human activity is changing in all spheres, including the borders between men's and women's work, between outside and self-regulation, and between work and learning, as well as between work and leisure time. (p.49)

That is, the knowledge society/information society/knowledge work/high-tech capitalism poses challenges to AT, challenges that AT has not addressed well because AT has still not theorized digital technologies beyond labeling them as tools. Not surprisingly, Lompscher cites Ruckreim (p.50; not Ruckreim's recent piece in Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory, but apparently a similar piece). He ends by expressing hope that AT can be found to be compatible with systems theory and media theory (p.50).

Ray McDermott and Jean Lave take up the question of another knowledge society characteristic, lifelong learning, in their chapter "Estranged Labor Learning." Yes, "Labor" is struck out; McDermott and Lave steal a page from Marx here, rewriting his essay "Estranged Labor" with learning in mind (p.92). As they explain in their framing, Marx argued that the more wealth the worker produces, the poorer he becomes - and that labor produces itself and the laborer as commodities (p.90). Similarly, they argue, school children are alienated from their own learning because learning can be measured only relatively to others (p.91).

Skipping ahead, in the chapter "Contradictory Class Relations in Work and Learning," Livingstone focuses on learning organizations in the knowledge society (p.149). "Dominant claims for the emergence of a knowledge-based economy remain suspect in terms of the restricted power most workers have to develop their knowledge and skill in capitalist workplaces, but most potential workers appear to be making concerted efforts to develop them nonetheless" (p.149). Yet "The socialization of the forces of knowledge production" is "a continual challenge to private capitalist efforts ... to control the social relations of knowledge production" (p.150). He argues that "This opposition between socialized forces and private relations of knowledge production is the fundamental contradiction of knowledge development and learning in advanced capitalist societies" (p.150). In response, he says that unions "continue to represent the most sustainable organizational sites for collective development of independent working-class consciousness" (p.158).

Paul Adler's "From Labor Process to Activity Theory" compares the two theories, using a case involving the rationalization of software development. Labor theory, based on Braverman, has recently lost ground to postmodernist theories (p.160), and Adler argues that one reason is that whereas LPT predicted mass deskilling, capitalist development has involved upskilling (p.160). Adler promises a more dialectical reading of Marx to explain this development.

Engestrom contributes the chapter "Values, Rubbish, and Workplace Learning," in which he draws on rubbish theory - which follows the nature, paths, and steps of movement that transform objects from products to rubbish to durables (pp.194-195). After all, Engestrom says, in AT "values at work are embedded in the object of the activity" and "being embedded in multiple activities simultaneously, objects have lives of their own and resist goal-rational attempts at control and prediction. Negotiations of objects are always also negotiations of values and motives - not just of 'what' but also of 'why,' 'for whom,' and 'where to'" (p.194). So Engestrom draws on rubbish theory, interprets it in third-generation AT terms, and applies lessons back to AT.

As a whole, the collection is solid, but I had a hard time getting enthusiastic about it. For me, the most interesting parts were the ones that focused on developing activity theory to address knowledge society challenges. But much of the book looked back to the past, burrowing deeper into Marx's original work, grounded in early industrialism, rather than aggressively adapting AT for the present.

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.

Reading :: Creating a New Civilization

Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Okay, let's talk about the most striking part of this book's cover first. Under the authors' name, the cover tells us: "FOREWORD BY NEWT GINGRICH." The word "GINGRICH" is in exactly the same type and size as the authors' last name.

Does this mean that Creating a New Civilization, published in the same year that Gingrich's Contract With America swept in a Republican majority, (1994) is a Republican text? No. The Tofflers hurriedly deny that they are Republicans, produce their bona fides of the day (they're pro-choice and against school prayer, p.9), and argue that today Left and Right have less meaning; political power is being transferred "away from our formal political structures - the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties - to electronically linked grassroots groups and to the media" (p.8). Gingrich, they say, gets this point (p.10). And in this, the slimmest of all the Tofflers' books, they try to make sure that we get it too. They essentially take the concepts from their 1980 book The Third Wave, review them, and apply them to politics with updated examples.

Some of these examples are startling. Recall that First Wave civilizations are based on agriculture; Second Wave civilizations are based on industrialism; and Third Wave civilizations are based on knowledge. Third Wave civilizations to grow and make things, but they do them so efficiently that the output is greater and the number of people involved in those activities is smaller. (For instance, US farmers are a vanishingly small part of the economy, yet are much more productive than their predecessors.) The real growth is in knowledge and services. Fresh from the first Gulf War, the authors argue that "One of those services might well turn out to be military protection based on [US] command of superior Third Wave forces" (p.31).

The rest of the book makes arguments that are familiar if you've read Castells (although Castells wouldn't be caught dead talking to Gingrich, I suspect) or Drucker. For instance, just as Castells argues that any work that can be routinized (generic labor) will be either outsourced or programmed, Toffler and Toffler argue that "any task that is so repetitive and simple that it can be done without thought is, eventually, a candidate for robotization" (p.57). They argue that therefore the feared practice of "deskilling" is actually trailing-edge, an application of obsolete Second Wave thinking. Like Drucker, they point out that service workers are not well respected, and we must find a way to give them the same respect as we have given to those in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors - and we must get them to increase production (p.53). Also like Drucker, they point out that the rise of knowledge work means heterogeneity and difficulty in finding people with the right skills - "a gynecologist can't do brain surgery" (p.44) - and on the next page they emphasize the role of innovation in the knowledge economy as Castells does (p.45). Finally, like Drucker, they believe that the argument between capitalism and socialism is obsolete (p.67). Although the global economy is unstable, state enterprises are too bureaucratic and slow to adapt, and their performance undermines the legitimacy of the state (p.67). This is a point that seems very fresh just days after the latest failure of our enormous Homeland Security bureaucracy.

And that gets us to politics. In Chapter 7, the authors argue that the Left-Right divide is also obsolete, and the real news is Second vs. Third Wave politics, and both political parties have elements of both: Second Wave politics emphasize "preserving the core institutions of industrial mass society - the nuclear family, the mass education system, the giant corporation, the mass trade union, the centralized nation-state and the politics of pseudorepresentative government" (p.73). In contrast, Third Wave politics recognize that the most urgent problems "can no longer be solved within the framework of an industrial civilization" (p.73). They particularly single out "the Democrats' reflexive reliance on bureaucratic and centralist solutions to problems like the health insurance crisis" (p.75) and they praise the Republican efforts to deregulate, to privatize governmental operations, and to embrace market economics (p.76). Yet the Republicans have their own problems. Both parties are mainlining nostalgia (p.77).

So, in the next chapter, the Tofflers lay out principles for a Third Wave agenda. First, questions for distinguishing Second from Third Wave proposals:

1. Does it resemble a factory?
2. Does it massify society?
3. How many eggs are in the basket?
4. Is it vertical or virtual?
5. Does it empower the home?

And in the next chapter after that, the Tofflers provide suggestions for reconstituting democracy in Third Wave terms. In a demassified society, they say, we are all in a minority and our feedback systems (voting, polls) are consequently too crude. We need to rethink and reconfigure them, the Tofflers argue (p.95). We also need to find ways to represent ourselves - to institute semidirect democracy (p.96). Third, "we need to divide up the decisions and reallocate them - sharing them more widely and switching the site of decision-making as the problems themselves require" (p.100). This recommendation reflects other calls to push power to the edge - say, empowering CIA representatives who talk to a terror suspect's father to communicate directly with counterparts at the TSA. This distribution of power and decision-making is vital, since the decision load is now too high for the elites to handle (p.102). The Tofflers, in fact, believe that democracy becomes an "evolutionary necessity" in a highly complex society because the decision load must be distributed enough to be bearable (p.103).

In sum, this is a highly readable and skimmable book, and unlike the Tofflers' other books, it's only 112 pages. You might think of it as Cliff's Notes for The Third Wave. And the Tofflers restrain themselves from speculating too much about the future. Like the Tofflers' other books, it also sketches an overall vision for the social and organizational changes our globe is facing. On the other hand - again like the Tofflers' other books - some of these concepts are underdeveloped and undertested, and particularly in the sections on politics, I would have liked to see more detail and less glossing. But if you're interested in this line of inquiry, I highly recommend the book.

Reading :: Rules for Radicals

Rules for Radicals
By Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky tells this story about organizing the African-American community against Kodak, which at that time dominated Rochester, NY. What tactics could they use?

I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet. The hundred blacks who would be given the tickets would first be treated to a pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; then the people would go to the symphony hall - with obvious consequences. Imagine the scene when the action began! The concert would be over before the first movement! (If this be a Freudian slip - so be it!) (p.139)

Alinsky reasoned that (a) the protest would ridicule the "prize cultural jewel" of the establishment; (b) it would be entirely legal, so "the law would be completely paralyzed" (p.139); (c) the protesters would enjoy the tactic (p.140).

But he also reasoned that the tactic was proof against the protesters getting cold feet: "But we knew that the baked beans would compel them physically to go through with the tactic regardless of how they felt" (p.141). And here's the striking contradiction in Alinsky's book: yes, its advice involves manipulating the establishment and public opinion, but it also involves manipulating the communities Alinsky organizes. It's a rather pragmatic book, ostensibly bent toward empowering the "Have-Nots," but in implementation it involves empowering the community organizer the most, leading eventually to his or her relinquishment of the reins to the movement leaders.

Rules for Radicals has been in the news a bit lately. Alinsky has been credited as an influence on Barack Obama, who served as a community organizer himself and later wrote a chapter in the edited collection After Alinsky. More recently, freelance investigators on the right have adopted Alinsky's tactics, bringing heat on the organization ACORN. So my interest was piqued, apparently along with everyone else's: I had to wait a while for UT's library to free up a copy.

The book is interesting and provocative, beginning with the dedication: "an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical ... Lucifer." Later, Alinsky compares the book to Machiavelli's The Prince, arguing that while that book was written for those in power, this book "is written for the Have-Nots on how to take [power] away" (p.3). Specifically, the problem is

how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life. (p.3)

This is not an ideological book, he argues (p.4) (and perhaps Breitbart's Big Government is a testament to how the book's tactics can be applied by different ideologies). Indeed, Alinsky seems to assume that transferring power to the Haves is a context-free plus, and he frames the struggle as a simple contest between Haves (and their allies, the Have-a-Little-Want-Mores) and the Have-Nots. In this way, Alinsky is a more limited thinker than Machiavelli, who addressed multiple power centers with competing interests and alliances. Alinsky also sweeps under the rug the obvious next question, which is what to do when the Have-Nots are successful in taking power away - becoming the Haves - or when evenly matched groups take each other on.

In fact, Alinsky's musings on the nature of power itself are unfocused, making a hash out of the term, eventually exclaiming that "life without power is death; a world without power would be a ghostly wasteland, a dead planet!" (p.53). These musings are hardly great philosophy, but that's all right: Alinsky's genius is not in philosophy nor in ideology, but in amoral bare-knuckle political tactics.

Although the "rules" that have been popularly cited reside in the chapter "Tactics," let's start with the earlier rules of Means and Ends in the chapter "Means and Ends." These rules purport to be descriptive of all conflict rather than prescriptive, and they include the following:

1. "one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue" and "varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of the conflict" (p.26)
2. "the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment" (p.26)
3. "in war the end justifies almost any means" (p.29)
4. "judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point" (p.30)
5. "concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa" (p.32). Side note: here, he tells a story in which he had the chance to "out" a gay opponent, and he refused to do so - but he declares that if that had been the only tactic he could have used, he would have done so "unreservedly" (p.33)
6. "the less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means" (p.34)
7. "generally success and failure is a mighty determinant of ethics" (p.34)
8. "the morality of a means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory (p.34; Alinsky points to dropping the A-Bomb on Japan)
9. "any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical" (p.35)
10. "do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments" (p.36; he argues that Machiavelli's greatest weakness is his blindness to the necessity of moral garments, p.43)

Given these rules, which are taken as givens that all parties will follow and rationalize, Alinsky wants to put aside any pretense of strict ethics or morality and build strong organizations that will win. The name of the game is building a large organization - and here, Alinsky's approach is more like Maoist guerilla warfare than asymmetrical warfare. It shows its roots in the 1960s and 1970s (the book was written in 1973 and is sprinkled with slang of the time: "Who's the cat?" "What's his bag?" (p.98)). Alinsky argues strongly that single-issue organizations are by their nature small and transient, too small and transient to do much good; rather, community organizers should concentrate on building multi-issue organizations in which people support each others' goals (p.77). So the emphasis is on establishing the organizer as a feared adversary of the establishment (p.100), then crystallizing a core group that accumulates members through defining grievances and mutually supporting redress of those grievances (p.105). The only issue at the beginning of the movement is to bring in more recruits (p.113).

Alinsky warns that community organization is always preceded by community disorganization: attacking the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community (p.116). The function of the community organizer is to compel negotiation. "In the beginning the organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems," Alinsky tells us, clarifying that everyone has a plight, but "what the organizer does is to convert the plight into a problem," which is "something you can do something about" (p.119). And he acknowledges here that "in a highly mobile, urbanized society the word 'community' means community of interests, not physical community" (p.120). So the community organizer creates a problem, identifies or creates a community that shares it, crystallizes and organizes that community by disorganizing the current patterns governing the actors' relations, then grows the organization in a way that it learns - because "without the learning process, the building of an organization becomes simply the substitution of one power group for another" (p.125). In other words, Alinsky is describing something that sounds a lot like interessement.

A side note. Alinsky valorizes the community organizer considerably, and himself in particular. He tells a number of stories that follow this pattern: Alinsky meets with representatives of a community that are suspicious of him (Mexican-Americans in California, First Nation in Canada); he gratuitously insults them; they respect him because they believe he is treating them as equals rather than patronizing them. He exhorts would-be community organizers to do the same. And here's a key similarity that Rules for Radicals shares with The Prince: so much of this advice boils down to "it depends." How do you gratuitously insult your hosts while conveying that you are doing it because they are your equals? How do you apply tactics in a particular situation? Like Machiavelli, Alinsky puts forth a number of working principles, but doesn't - can't - provide hard guidance on how to implement them (see p.138).

And that brings us to the famous chapter on Tactics. "Tactics means doing what you can with what you have," Alinsky declares (p.127), and lists the now-famous rules:

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have" (p.128)
2. "Never go outside the experience of your people" (p.128)
3. "Whenever possible go outside of the experience of your enemy" (p.128)
4. "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules" (p.128)
5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon" (p.128)
6. "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy" (p.128)
7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag" (p.128)
8. "Keep the pressure on" (p.128)
9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself" (p.129)
10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition" (p.129)
11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside" (p.129; example: passive resistance)
12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative" (p.130)
13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it" (p.130)

Here, sounding like George W. Bush, he quotes Christ: "He that is not with me is against me" (p.134). And he offers these points:

• "The real action is in the enemy's reaction." (p.136)
• "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength" (p.136)
• "Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with the action" (p.136)

The chapter winds down with miscellaneous advice. For instance, he advises that the organization should always have two or three stool pigeons for controlled leaks (p.147) and he encourages organizers to induce cannibalism among the Haves, since they will fight for power among themselves when the status quo is destabilized (p.149). He also encourages every organizer to do a stint in jail so that they can engage in reflection, synthesis, and philosophy - like a prophet in the wilderness (p.156). He confesses here that without such periods of isolation, he would not have been able to write a book.

Moving on, Alinsky comes to a new tactic about which he is rather excited. In "The Genesis of Tactic Proxy," he describes how he "[asked] Eastman Kodak stockholders to assign their proxies to the Rochester black organization or come to the stockholders' meeting and vote in favor of FIGHT [a relevant community organization]" (p.172). This tactic snowballed and became successful, not just for community organizations, but because it

showed a way for the middle class to organize. These people, the vast majority of Americans, who feel helpless in the corporate economy, who don't know which way to turn, have begun to turn away from America, to abdicate as citizens. They rationalize their action by saying that, after all, the experts and the government will take care of it all. They are like the Have-Nots who, when unorganized and powerless, simply resign themselves to a sad scene. Proxies can be the mechanism by which these people can organize, and once they are organized they will re-enter the life of politics. (p.178)

And Alinsky looks ahead to making this tactic work. "What will be required is a computerized operation that will quickly give (1) a breakdown of the holdings of any corporation, (2) a breakdown of holdings of other corporations that own shares in the target corporation, and (3) a breakdown of individual stock proxies in the target corporation and in the corporations" (p.180).

In sum, the book was fascinating. It has a lot of flaws, of course. For instance, its means-justifies-the-ends approach assumes a bipolar world in which the Have-Nots should always triumph - and it doesn't describe how to wind down a conflict or call a truce, how to compromise outside the organization, or how to develop a lasting settlement among competing organizations. Finally, its assumption that organizations must be big and multi-issue to make a difference is dated: the Zapatista netwar is one example of how many single-issue organizations can be temporarily networked to have a much bigger impact than they could have individually, but that didn't involve creating an umbrella organization, it involved leveraging communication technologies. Yet, like The Prince, this book provides a set of (take your pick: nasty, underhanded, effective pragmatic) tactics that I imagine will work.

Practicing UX in Austin

If you're in Austin and working in interaction design or user experience design, a former student of mine is starting a group for practicing your skills. First meeting is at Genuine Joe Coffeehouse this Monday. It sounds like a great opportunity to practice, to network, and to develop ideas.

The RPG jiahdi

Here's the question being debated by talking heads last Sunday, due to Umar Mutallab's Christmas Day suicide bombing attempt. Was this really an al-Qaeda plot, they asked, or was this a peripheral, self-radicalized actor? One panelist compared the incident to Nidal Hasan's shooting spree at Fort Hood. Were these "real" AQ members or loners who were play-acting at jihad?

The question, I think, is a false choice. In a networked organization such as al-Qaeda, working to maneuver around slowly changing hierarchies with tremendous electronic surveillance abilities, weak ties are at a premium. AQ doesn't need to recruit members and have them move up and mature in the organization in order for them to become useful. They don't necessarily even have to meet them (although meeting could help with indoctrination). Really, they just need to provide a framework or story in which such actors see an affinity between their own deeply felt plights and AQ. Such stories can be disposable in the same sense that suicide bombers are disposable.

In fact, suicide bombers tend to be recruited from the peripheries rather than the centers of social networks.

That fact means that a given loner who wants to play-act jihad, putting himself or herself in the position of hero in a story she or he writes, can find others (AQ) willing to reinforce that story in exchange for credit. AQ provides a story in search of actors. In taking on the role of actor, the loner achieves heroism and affiliation. Think of it as a role-playing game in which you become the hero - as long as you accept your destiny and the constraints that go along with it, the role you need to play.

The affiliation is largely virtual, though, making it very difficult to determine which individuals might become AQ agents until after their attacks. Pursue them too aggressively and you get a lot of false positives. You also get perpetual uncertainty: Who could choose to affiliate with AQ? Where could AQ attack next? And that uncertainty translates into elevated hierarchical responses, increasing the sclerosis in air travel regulation and other infrastructure.

The good news, as Andrew Samwick points out, is that apparently such loners are not easy to recruit. We've had very few attacks, even on airliners, and no one has blown themselves up in Starbucks or under bridges. Possible factors: (a) AQ is not yet effective at detecting and recruiting potential jihadists; (b) the mix of social isolation and fervent Islamism is fairly rare here in the US; (c) political-religious grievances are not as raw here in the US as in, say, Palestine.

Reading :: The New Global Economy in the Information Age

The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Reflections on Our Changing World
Edited by Martin Carnoy, Manuel Castells, Stephen S. Cohen, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso

In 1992, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, and the new Yeltsin government invited the authors to come to Moscow to advise it on political economic policy. A year later, their analyses were published in this book, which is an interesting time capsule of the period. It's also a place where Castells sounded themes that he developed in his later work.

As the authors argue in the collaboratively written introduction, "The first political casualty of the information age is the communist state system, based on a 1920s-model hierarchical industrial organization and incapable of incorporating new, flexible management of rapidly changing technology" (p.2). But they argue that it may not be the last casualty: Capitalist states are similarly vulnerable to the transformations that are underfoot, including a new international division of labor "based less on the location of natural resources, cheap and abundant labor, or even capital stock and more on the capacity to create new knowledge and apply it rapidly, via information processing and telecommunications, to a wide array of human activities in ever-broadening space and time" (p.6). The authors interpret the Reagan administration's response to the changing world thus: "The Reagan administration's 'solution' to increased international competition and informationalization was to deregulate such critical sectors as telecommunications, air transport, and financial services, to break unions and lower real wages, to decrease federal tax rates, and to redistribute income to the top 1 percent of income earners. The idea was to make U.S. industry more competitive through cheaper labor and to legitimize such action politically through lower tax rates. ... the emphasis is on cheap inputs, not higher productivity" (p.11).

The authors are not enchanted with this strategy. What was striking to me in the subsequent chapters, however, was that Exhibit A was the lack of US success and productivity compared to the Japanese, whose model was perceived as far superior, especially in Cohen's chapter "Geo-Economics." I remember the widespread fear that the Japanese were going to own the US - but looking back, the Japanese "lost decade" began in 1991, and they lost ground economically throughout the 1990s - falling prey to a bubble somewhat similar to the one we have just experienced in the US. Realizing that fact helped me to put the authors' assessments and arguments in a historical context.

In Castells' chapter "The Informational Economy," he analyzes the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in the global economy, arguing that "the increasingly important role of applied knowledge and information is a characteristic of advanced economic systems, transcending the historical characteristics of their modes of production" (p.16). He argues that

(1) "the greater the complexity and productivity of an economy, the greater its informational component and the greater the role played by new knowledge and new applications of knowledge" (pp.16-17);

(2) one strong trend is "the shift, in advanced capitalist societies, from material production to information-processing activities, both in terms of proportion of GNP and in the proportion of the population employed in such activities" (p.17). The "real transformation" is the information economy "wherein an ever-growing role is played by the manipulation of symbols in the organization of production and the enhancement of productivity" (p.17);

(3) another trend is "a profound transformation in the organization of production and of economic activity in general," a change that "can be described as a shift from standardized mass production to flexible customized production and from vertically integrated, large-scale organizations to vertical disintegration and horizontal networks between business units" (p.18). That doesn't mean the decline of the large corporation, but rather their organizational transformation leading to more flexibility and adaptability (p.18);

(4) a fourth trend is "a global economy, in which capital, production, production, management, markets, labor, information, and technology are organized across national boundaries" (p.18), meaning that "the national economy now works as a unit at the world level in real time" (p.19);

(5) and these all take place within a significant technological revolution, based in advances in information technologies. Telecommunications in particular create "the material infrastructure needed for the formation of a global economy" (p.19). Information technology is a critical factor allowing for flexibility and decentralization (p.20).

One result of these transformations, Castells argues, is the end of the Third World as a relatively homogeneous economic region (p.27). It gives way to a Fourth World of marginalized economies (p.37) - an idea that Castells later developed in terms of "black holes." Another, he hopes, is that of "leaner, smaller, more effective, high-tech-equipped, and information-oriented military forces" that would be "at the disposal of all major nations" for peacekeeping (p.42).

In the next chapter, "Multinationals in a Changing World Economy," Martin Carnoy considers the question of large multinational enterprises (MNEs). These MNEs are "attractive and usually necessary additions to any country's economy," but are also "footloose," without allegiance to a nation's development goals - and, in fact, frequently willing to shape national development goals to their own needs (p.46). MNEs, he says, are concentrated in four sectors: oil, autos, electronics and high tech, and banking (p.48). Carnoy notes that US and British MSEs tend to be antistate and more "footloose" than other MSEs, which frequently have some sort of nationalist association (p.86).

The fourth chapter, "Geo-Economics," is Stephen Cohen's assessment of "America's mistakes" and Europe's chance to avoid making them (p.97). The US, Cohen asserts, is not transitioning well to the new realities: it has "set out in the wrong direction," creating a less generous, just, and secure society (p.97). Cohen points to new international competition, particularly from Japan's "developmental state" (pp.98-100) with its answer to Fordism: "Toyotaism," with its measures for high-volume flexible production (p.111). The results are not good: a large trade deficit and an enormous national debt of ... $600 billion! (Ah, the good old days, when we only owned $600B. Currently it's $12,097,698,782,543.93.)

Let's skip to the epilogue. The authors, like so many authors, see hope for real change in a new President. "Bill Clinton's election signals the exhaustion of the laissez-faire economic model whose profoundly negative effects on American productivity and competitiveness we have documented and analyzed in this book" (p.161). Doesn't this passage remind you of Castells' pronouncements about Obama in his 2009 book?

Reading :: Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory

Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory
Edited by Annalisa Sannino, Harry Daniels, and Kris D. Gutierrez<

This book is in a sense a tribute to Yrjo Engestrom, whose landmark book Learning by Expanding (1987) was so influential to developing - and popularizing - activity theory. In the introductory chapter, the editors chronicle "four main phases of Engestrom's work as an activity theorist" (p.11). These included 1) the discovery of AT; 2) the turn from student learning to workplace learning; 3) developmental work research (DWR) and expansive learning; and 4) "the formation of activity-theoretical communities aimed at changing social practices" (p.11). The authors in this collection were influenced by all of these phases, particularly the latter three, and they discuss how Engestrom's work has filtered into various disciplines and fields.

For instance, Frank Blackler describes how Engestrom has impacted organizational studies, particularly in more recent discussions of nonhierarchical work involving horizontal learning, mycorrhizae, and knotworking (p.23). Blackler also lauds Engestrom's "powerful" critique of actor-network theory (p.23; I don't agree with this assessment - see my book Network if you like). Blackler does allow that he thinks Engestrom's later work has been steered more by Engestrom's desire to explore exciting new forms of human agency rather than to seriously "chart the changing nature of work and organizations" (p.30). But he very much admires Engestrom's approach to intervention in organizations (p.34).

In rhetoric and writing studies, David R. Russell (n.b., my dissertation director) discusses what he calls "writing, activity and genre research" (WAGR) (p.40). I quite like this acronym, which I think David developed just for this chapter and which I mentally pronounce as "WAGeR." Russell argues that cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) is a welcome framework for writing studies, since it integrates writing and activity; allows for mesolevel analysis; allows for a unit of analysis broader than the dyad; eschews the Cartesian split; and doesn't privilege one medium over another (p.41).

Russell goes on to examine the role of genre in activity systems at the macro, meso, and micro levels. At the micro level, he argues that "genre helps account for social-psychological stability, identity, and predictability in organizations or, indeed, broader social formations as unconscious operationalized actions" (p.45). But at the meso level, he states that "genres are also central to object formation, transformation, and maintenance of activity systems" as well as "deeply involved in the construction of motives. Genres are, in a sense, classifications of artifacts-plus-intentions" (p.45). Third-generation activity theory emphasizes interlocking activity systems; Russell argues convincingly that genre systems or ecologies provide one crucial avenue for mediating these interlocking activity systems through the boundary objects of genres (p.48). This chapter does a great job of both summarizing WAGR development and linking it to 3GAT in ways that those outside of writing studies can understand. As far as I'm concerned, it's a standout piece that should be cited broadly in writing research (and of course I'll be citing it soon).

In another intriguing chapter, Vladimir Lektorsky reminds us that Engestrom's version of AT is not the only one. Lektorsky argues that "Engestrom's ideas are essentially original. They contain a nw conception of activity, a new understanding of its structure, and they are used to solve new problems" in contrast with Russian and other variants and with the original Vygotskian project (p.78). In particular, Lektorsky draws contrasts in terms of the subject and mediation (p.79).

In terms of the subject, Lektorsky emphasizes that although some variants of AT don't require a subject, "I cannot agree with this idea. Activity has its bearer. ... The subject is activity itself from a certain point of view" (p.79). (On a side note, this emphasis on a human subject is one of the many fundamental, yet underexplored differences mainstream AT has with actor-network theory.) In terms of mediation, Lektorsky airs some Russian philosophical critiques of internalization, then explores mediation to some extent (p.82).

Interestingly, the next chapter actually mounts a critique of AT precisely because it is overly bound to the notion of a subject. Georg Ruckreim argues that digital technology and mediation pose a twofold challenge to AT: theoretically and methodologically (p.88). He argues that "there is no way to characterize those [global] communication networks adequately in terms of subject, action, or activity, let alone goal or motive": they enable pure contingency in self-weaving communication networks. So, he asks, "Can those automatically and independently functioning technical systems still be called activities or activity systems?" (p.91). He charges that phenomena such as Rheingold's "smart mobs" have been brushed aside by activity theorists such as Engestrom, boxed in with vague descriptors such as "interagency" and considered "rare, bizarre, or difficult to comprehend phenomena"(p.93). "Since activity theory is basically tied up with the concept of a subject of activity, it is more than difficult to combine the above-mentioned 'very temporary organizational forms' [i.e., interagency] ... with a kind of 'collective intentionality'" (p.93).

Ruckreim also criticizes Engestrom's work in terms of mediation:

Engestrom's understanding of the problem of mediation remains within the framework of the classical authors and alternates between Vygotsky's and Leont'ev's version of how to solve the problem of mediation. In consequence, Engestrom refers to collective activity systems embedded in capitalist societal structures as described by historical materialism. His methodology does not allow him to interpret the Internet as a basic transformation factor, let alone as a framework for perceiving our present reality as a qualitatively new emerging social formation. ... he analyzes emerging communication processes in terms of old socioeconomic concepts. ... His intervention strategy does not provide him with an adequate instrument to differentiate between traditional changes and emerging revolutionary transformations and their specific problem structures. (p.95)

These are fighting words. Ruckreim continues:

Engestrom seems to fail to take notice of Leont'ev's explicitly repeated emphasis on the strictly systemic nature of the components of individual activity. Instead, he stresses their hierarchical structure and so turns them into an ontological understanding. The psychological meaning of central concepts such as "subject" and "intentionality" inevitably slips into a sociological understanding of activity. ... There is no theoretical understanding of why and how this complexity has been formed as an independent system and got to be more than an augmentation of the same. (p.109)

(Engestrom is not happy with this critique, and lets Ruckreim have it in his response chapter.)

Skipping ahead, Reijo Miettinen examines "high-technology capitalism," which he describes as "the latest form of capitalism" (p.161). In this phase of capitalism, increasing complexity means that no one masters the activity, and "this is why actions must increasingly be transformed with respect to the changing object and motive of a given activity by the people who participate in that activity. A new kind of activity, learning activity, is needed to accomplish this" (p.161). Drawing on Marx, Miettinen argues that

the institutions of capitalism, such as markets, hierarchy as an organizational form of production, and the systems of intellectual property rights evidently do not satisfactorily support the formation and uses of the general intellect. New nonmarket and nonhierarchical forms of organization are needed that allow the development of individual capabilities and call for trust-based collaboration, and that favor the exchange of knowledge and understanding between the participants in the general intellect. (p.169)

Reading that sentence again, I'm struck by how many nominalizations and how much passive voice Miettinen uses, and how they hide the actors. Ruckreim critiques Engestromian activity theory for its fixation on the subject, but here Miettinen reverts to a subjectless, actorless process of historical development, similar to Adam Smith's dead hand of capitalism - or more to the point, a redescription of the inevitable, universal process of dialectics as portrayed in Engels and Ilyenkov. Nevertheless, I am glad to see Miettinen noting the movement from markets and hierarchies toward networks (in the Castells sense) (p.170). He argues that the network society embeds a primary contradiction between common knowledge and the knowledge society's privatization of knowledge (p.172).

Like Miettinen, Anne Edwards addresses the network society. "We live in risky times," she declares, as boundaries and certainties dissolve at all levels and "the sequential linearity of early modernism ... has been disrupted" (p.197). So "the workplace is therefore now less likely to be the source of a sustained identity, whether we are victims [sic] of short-term contracts (Sennett, 1998), are boundary-breaking creatives (Guile, 2007), or are specialist professionals collaborating on complex tasks (Edwards, 2005)" (p.197). Such changes disrupt the organizations that had emerged to leaven the worst effects of capitalism (p.198). In response, Edwards sees AT's collective subject as "a way of thinking about the risky nature of work that is carried out beyond the safety of established social practices and perhaps a way of countering rampant subjectivity (p.197).

Edwards draws on two case studies to explore these themes. In particular, she examines partnership working, in which partnerships and alliances increase in number, also increasing the tensions and therefore becoming more difficult to sustain and manage (p.203). In such situations, practitioners working in the boundary zone developed configurations of confidence that, Edwards tells us, were not networks in the Castells sense so much as latent mycorrhizae activities in the Engestromian sense (p.204). She points to "how one learns how to know how to know who" (p.205), a catchy but difficult-to-parse way to express personal networking.

Katsuhiro Yamazumi also addresses agency in the knowledge society, more specifically, the shift from mass production to interorganizational collaboration (p.212). Focusing on expansive learning, Yamazumi argues that "new types of agency are collaborations and engagements with a shared object in and for relationships of interaction between multiple activity systems" and describes a "hybrid activity system" (p.213) - I found this last part interesting because Engestrom and others describe such hybrids as activity networks with shared objects.

"The world of human activity is increasingly dominated by longitudinal dialogic relationships of collaboration between multiple activity systems," Yamazumi continues. And

these multiple activity systems are engaged by 'runaway objects,' that is, partially shared large-scale objects in complex, distributed multi-activity fields (Engestrom 2005a, 2005c, 2006b). Although these partnerships and alliances are obviously relevant to rediscovering and expanding use values in the objects of activities, they are extremely difficult to sustain and manage. This is where collaborative learning possibilities and challenges truly become necessary. Such learning can be characterized as interorganizational learning (Engestrom, 2001) engaged in the expansive reforging of shared objects and creating new forms of activity between different activity systems. (pp.214-215)

Thus we need a better account of expansive agency or distributed interagency (p.215). Like David Ronfeldt in his TIMN work, Yamazumi argues that types of agency are associated with organizational forms:

This imperative of a new type of agency principally differs from the historically previous forms: "control and command" for management, "resist and defend" for workers in hierarchy organizations, and "take advantage and maximize gain" in market organizations. The efficacy and valuer of collaboration and reciprocity are missed or limited in both of these forms. (p.216)

Later in the book, Susanne Bodker discusses some personal history and theoretical developments in a subject dear to my heart, participatory design research. (She also cites me briefly, something that made my day.) I think Bodker's book, based on her PhD thesis, was the first book-length treatment of activity theory I had read - and I was surprised to read in this rememberance that she hadn't encountered Engestrom's work until after her thesis was completed, when Kari Kuutti showed her a copy of Engestrom's Learning by Expanding (p.275). Bodker goes on to briefly recount PD's development, compare it to Developmental Work Research (DWR), then lays out some challenges to PD and DWR that, like other chapters in this collection, have to do with knowledge work. These include multiplicity (p.282) and going beyond communities of work to address the entire life context (pp.282-283).

Finally, Engestrom responds to the pieces, partially laying out what he'd like third-generation activity theory (3GAT) to address. "Third-generation activity theory still treats activity systems as reasonably well-bounded, although interlocking and networked, structured units. What goes on between activity systems is processes, such as the flow of rules from management to workers ..." but "In social production and peer production, the boundaries and structures of activity systems seem to fade away. Processes become simultaneous, multidirectional, and often reciprocal. The density and crisscrossing of processes makes the distinction between processes and structure somewhat obsolete. The movements of information create textures that are constantly changing but not arbitrary or momentary" (p.309). But, he argues, this phenomenon can still be analyzed within the bounds of activity theory (pp. 309-310). Like literal mycorrhizae, "social production requires and generates bounded hubs of concentrated coordination efforts" and "activity system models are very appropriate for the analysis of such hubs" (p.310). He speculates that perhaps we need a 4GAT to better model trails and mycorrhizae (p.310).

At the end of the volume, I was encouraged by the number of authors who took on knowledge work and knowledge society issues, although I still would like to see much more development along these lines. If you're interested in activity theory and particularly how it's developing to address new forms of organization, this is certainly a strong collection. Take a look.

Reading :: Activity theory in practice

Activity Theory in Practice: Promoting learning across boundaries and agencies
Edited By Harry Daniels, Anne Edwards, Yrjo Engestrom, and Sten R. Ludvigsen

Here's a joke I heard some time ago. What's the difference between a Star Trek fan, a Trekkie, and a Trekker?

A Star Trek fan dresses as a character and goes to a Halloween party.

A Trekkie dresses as a character and goes to Star Trek conventions.

But a Trekker dresses as a character and goes to ... the Renaissance festival.

If there's a similar division among activity theorists, call me an AT fan. I see activity theory as a useful framework with great explanatory power for certain situations, particularly situations involving cultural-historical development in and among organizations. But I don't see it as a theory of everything (see my book Network). The authors of this collection, however, are more like AT-ers: they closely follow the Helsinki school of activity theory as developed by Yrjo Engestrom (p.1) and implemented in research centers in England, Finland, Northern Ireland, and Norway (p.2).

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Trekkers spend a lot of time developing ways to reconcile incoherencies in the Star Trek universe (called "retroactive continuity" or "retconning"), and similarly these AT-ers are putting much effort into the relatively new issue of "how to capture the generation and mobilisation of knowledge in practices that span different settings. This problem arises from the changing world of work where complex problems call for multifaceted responses that can be in tension with the long-established social practices of settled work settings" (p.1). That is, they are attempting to develop third-generation activity theory, which grapples with the issue of internetworked systems of activity: "the development of practices across organisational boundaries" (p.1). Following Engestrom, they are developing activity theory to address the complexities of knowledge work, which tends to involve a high degree of interdisciplinarity, boundary crossing, mobility, customization, and change. Indeed, the theme of knowledge work comes up again and again in these papers, most of which employ variations of Engestrom's Developmental Work Research (DWR) (p.6).

For instance, in "From Diagnosis to Clients," Virkkunen et al. discuss how physiotherapy educators and workplaces co-construct the object of collaborative development. Right out of the gate, they note new developments that have been characterized as the "information society" and the "knowledge society" (p.9). And "the trend is from the production of standardised basic commodities to the production of specialised, unique or custom products" (p.11). But "Globalisation and the information-technology revolution have brought somewhat contradictory challenges to professional education" (p.12), challenges that, in true Helsinki School fashion, the authors display on a matrix with two dimensions: special v. basic and general v. dedicated (p.13). Using the Change Laboratory method of intervention (p.15), the authors worked with the educators to develop and reorganize teaching (p.22). It's a textbook example of using the Change Laboratory to address boundary-crossing issues.

In "The Meaning of Physical Presence," Kallio describes how pulp mills that implemented new software would ask engineers from a software company (Metso) to introduce the software on site - a role that the engineer could theoretically perform remotely. Kallio asks: Why did they insist the engineers come on site? Intriguingly, Kallio argues that the engineer had to help construct a joint object of activity, an object toward which the pulp mill and Metso were both oriented (p.39-41; see diagram p.41). Furthermore, the engineer had to provide a joint language with which the two entities could examine and transform the object (p.40). Not surprisingly, Kallio describes this work as co-configuration (p.41), and demonstrates that it extends into long-term cooperation. Kallio provides the usual 2D matrix (p.45) to describe the different types of logic at work.

Home care of the elderly is the subject of the next chapter, Nummijoki and Engestrom's "Toward Co-Configuration in Home Care of the Elderly." Here, the authors argue that

Co-configuration requires new kinds of agency from both the client and the provider of the service. The client must continually assess his or her own needs and experiences and take initiatives to shape the service accordingly. The service provider must be willing to change the shape of the service and experiment with new patterns of service when a need arises. (p.49)

The authors are intrigued by this idea of new agency and explore it in this study. Specifically, they look at home care of the elderly in the City of Helsinki as it worked before and after a Mobility Agreement (p.50). They begin by illustrating the contradiction in the object of current home care: the home care service sees the object in terms of duties, while the client sees it in terms of their own life (p.51). After discussing the problems with the current situation, they explain how they used the DWR cycle to design the Mobility Agreement (p.54). The authors then examine transcripts from pre- and post-agreement visits, noting layered development in home care.

In the next chapter, "Expansive Learning, Expansive Labour," Warmington and Leadbetter examine multi-agency children's services, using Marx's notion of "labour-power": "the constellation of skills, knowledge and dispositions that constitutes the capacity of individuals and collectives for productive labouring action" (p.72). Arguably, the authors say, labour-power is part of the object of organizations (p.72) - particularly in learning organizations (p.76). In fact, in learning organizations, "workplace activities are as much about the production of the unstable and unfinished commodity of labour-power as they are about marshalling concrete labour to produce general commodities" (p.76). After examining the case, the authors conclude that "thus there is a cyclical, or spiralling, relationship between learning to do multiagency working and the social production of labour-power," and they urge us to understand activity systems in these terms (p.87).

The other chapters in this collection are similar in many ways. Most deal with the issue of newly interconnected work and the boundary-crossing that goes along with it. For instance, in their study of software development, Morch et al. describe co-configuration in terms of adaptation (p.189). In their discussion of joint design in wikis, Lund et al. discuss polycontextuality (p.207) and connect co-design to participatory design (p.189). But in each case, they grapple with multi-activity networks and the sort of repair and reconciliation work that this level of analysis involves, frequently in terms of developmental cycles. It's a valuable collection, and I'm very glad to see AT being stretched to address the vexed issues involved in complex interconnected activities, especially in terms of the knowledge economy and learning organizations. At the same time, the similarities across studies concerned me: these authors use the same tools, approaches, and concepts, but I wanted to see some productive differences. Less retconning, more tension.

Nevertheless, if you're interested in applying third-generation activity theory to complex interconnected activities, this book is a milestone. Pick it up.

Reading :: Future Shock

Future Shock
By Alvin Toffler

Inspired by some of David Ronfeldt's work, I've been reading some of Alvin Toffler's books. Like 1980's The Third Wave, 1970's Future Shock is a fascinating mix of straight-on predictions, near-misses, and way-off guesses that sound like the science fiction being written contemporaneously. Let's put the third category aside for the most part and concentrate on the things that Toffler got right - and what a 1970 perspective might tell us about changes at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Toffler defines "future shock" as "the disease of change" (p.2) and "the human response to overstimulation" (p.326). Like its namesake "culture shock," future shock describes a moment at which an individual's expected social cues no longer mean what s/he thinks they mean (p.11) - but with future shock, such moment occur because one's own culture is changing rapidly; you can't retreat to your own culture, enclave, or ex-pat community. Toffler portrays this accelerated pace of change as a characteristic of "super-industrialism" and points to transience as one symptom (p.17).

Transience manifests, for instance, in our relationship to artifacts: "Instead of being linked with a single object over a relatively long span of time, we are linked for brief periods with the succession of objects that supplant it" (p.55) - and here he gives examples such as disposable cigarette lighters and cardboard milk containers, which were relatively new developments in 1970. (Personally, I thought of increasingly rapid genre formation and hybridization.)

But Toffler also points to other aspects of transience that were stirring in the 1970s: apartments; increasing numbers of travel-related jobs; higher divorce rates; the breakdown of the extended family; the loss of lifetime employment. This last point leads to perhaps the most valuable discussion, the chapter on "ad-hocracy," in which Toffler argues that bureaucracies are doomed because workers are too transient and bureaucracies too inefficient and inflexible to survive the rapid change he was seeing. This is "the organization of the future": in it,

man will find himself [sic] liberated, a stranger in a new free-form world of kinetic organizations. In this alien landscape, his position will be constantly changing, fluid, and varied. And his organizational ties, like his ties with things, places, and people, will turn over at a frenetic and ever-accelerating pace. (p.125)

Since organizations are facing higher turnover, he says, the resulting high change in organizational relations dooms the bureaucracy (p.128) by destroying fixed lines of authority and loyalty. The most dramatic symbol of this trend is project or task-force management, in which "teams are assembled to solve short-term problems" (p.132). Novel problems, such as ones involving innovation or customization, require novel organizational structures (p.135). Such ad-hoc teams don't necessarily replace permanent functional structures, Toffler concedes - but they do change those structures (p.135). Simultaneously, traditional chains of command are breaking or being sidestepped, replaced with horizontal communication, (p.137), because vertical communication requires too many steps to convey information (p.139). Furthermore, specialists don't fit into traditional chains of command. Sounding exactly like Drucker, Toffler argues that these specialists are

in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. ... Such men are assuming a new decision-making function. (p.140)

So "managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making" (p.140).

"Each age," Toffler adds, "produces a form of organization appropriate to its own tempo" (p.143) - a theme that he later develops in The Third Wave and that Ronfeldt takes up in his TIMN work. And in the age that Toffler describes, "Executives and managers will serve as coordinators between the various transient work teams. They will be skilled in understanding the jargon of different groups of specialists, and they will communicate across groups, translating and interpreting the language of one into the language of another" (p.144).

So, he concludes, "this is a picture of the coming Ad-hocracy, the fast-moving, information-rich, kinetic organization of the future, filled with transient cells and extremely mobile individuals. From this sketch, moreover, it is possible to deduce some of the characteristics of the human beings who will populate the new organizations - and who, to some extent, are already to be found in the prototype organizations of today" (p.144). Whereas bureaucracies were characterized by "permanence, hierarchy, and a division of labor," demanding people who could work within those constraints (pp.144-145), the ad-hocracy demands workers who are loyal to their professions rather than the organizations through which they cycle (p.146); able to work in interdisciplinary, cross-functional groups (p.147); oriented to the task or project rather than the job (p.148); entrepreneurial (p.148); risk-seeking and innovative (p.150); moving among slots in the organization (p.150); extremely adaptable in terms of systems, arrangements, locations (p.150); and in sum,

basically uncommitted to any organization. He is willing to employ his skills and creative energies to solve problems with equipment provided by the organization, and within temporary groups established by it. But he does so only as long as the problems interest him. He is committed to his own career, his own self-fulfillment. (p.149).

It's hard for me to express how closely this assessment seems to align with much more recent literature in knowledge work, communication, project management, and fourth-generation warfare, as well as some of the things I've seen in my own studies. Certainly I could pick holes if I wanted to get into the particulars, but the overall direction has been vindicated.

Certainly Toffler isn't as accurate in some of his other predictions. He argues that people will live in underwater colonies well before 2000 AD (p.191) and that we'll genetically tailor the human race to produce "girls with super-mammaries" (p.201 - and here I wonder if all of Toffler's books include predictions about mammaries). He also predicts the death of college degrees, credits, and majors as we know them (p.273).

On the other hand, he predicts that governments will condemn people to death and transplant the condemned's organs into the bodies of more deserving citizens (p.206), a theme that doesn't just show up in Larry Niven's novels but also in transplant ethics discussions. He predicts, though overhypes, the experience economy (p.226). He predicts the reconfiguration of families to include childless couples, single parents, gay couples, and blended families (Ch.11).

All in all, this 39-year-old book is still a fascinating read, and in parts - especially the chapter on ad-hocracies - it's surprisingly current. If you're interested in organizational change in particular, I recommend it.

Reading :: Managing in a Time of Great Change

Managing in a Time of Great Change
By Peter F. Drucker

This book, written in 1993, is largely drawn from previously published pieces in The Atlantic Monthly, the Harvard Business Review, and similar publications. As Drucker explains in the Acknowledgements, “every piece in this volume was written with this book in mind,” but he “prepublished” them in other publications as a “market test” (p.353). Wily, but it means that the chapters present a measure of repetition among themselves and with other publications such as Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society. So, yes, I skimmed, and consequently this review is not terribly substantive. But I’ll attempt to surface some points that are worth exploring further.

One is the notion of an organization’s theory. Drucker argues in the first chapter, “The Theory of the Business,” that each organization has a theory – a set of assumptions about markets, customers, competitors, values, behavior, dynamics, strengths, and weaknesses. “These assumptions are about what a company gets paid for” (p.22). Unfortunately, sometimes these assumptions become invalid, yet organizations don’t revise their theories, and consequently these organizations stumble. Warning signs include: an organization that achieves its original objectives (p.34); an organization that doubles or triples in size (p.35); and unexpected success or failure (p.35). Each of these conditions should prompt an organization to find a new theory.

In Chapter 6, “Managing in the Network Society,” Drucker goes on to assess changes in the organization. This ground is familiar to those who have read Post-Capitalist Society, but Drucker offers some additional discussion here.

In Chapter 20, “The New Superpower: The Overseas Chinese,” Drucker provides a fascinating glimpse into secretive and tightly controlled networks of organizations run by direct relatives of an ethnic Chinese living in the Philippines. “What holds together the multinationals of the overseas Chinese is neither ownership nor legal contract. It is mutual trust and the mutual obligations inherent in clan membership” (p.206). This claim, of course, reminds me of Ronfeldt’s description of TIMN: although these organizations are constituted as networks, their trust is tribal. Yet the organizational forms are in some ways contradictory, and dealing with those contradictions will soon mean developing the networks so that they can scale: sharing information and allowing outsiders in. Honestly, this was the most interesting part of the book for me.

In Chapter 21, “A Century of Social Transformation,” Drucker describes the fall of the blue-collar worker and the rise of the knowledge worker. And in contrasting the two, Drucker made me think about a transition that has always interested me: the birth of the participatory design approach in the UTOPIA project and related projects in the early 1980s. In that project, unionized craft workers (typesetters) were faced with the prospect of losing the benefit of their deep craft knowledge because their organization was planning to move to a digital system. Computer scientists worked to design a digital system that would leverage that craft knowledge. Yet the UTOPIA project never delivered a concrete product, and as I’ve described elsewhere, participatory design techniques were translated considerably as they moved to other contexts. Drucker maintains that manual work is experience-based while knowledge work is learning-based. “Displaced industrial workers thus simply cannot move into knowledge work or services work the way displaced farmers and displaced domestic workers moved into industrial work” (p.227). This summary judgment may not explain what happened with participatory design, but it provides an interesting perspective from which to examine the transition.

Should you read this book? I’d recommend Post-Capitalist Society over it, but if you haven’t read that book and you want a quick overview of his contemporaneous work, this book might be worthwhile.

Reading :: Together with Technology

Together with Technology: Writing Review, Enculturation, and Technological Mediation
By Jason Swarts

Jason Swarts has done some very solid work in technical communication (including a great piece in a TCQ special issue I edited), focusing on genre and writing technologies. This 2008 book describes a study in how writers and subject matter experts at five organizations engaged in writing reviews. But the real news here is a technique, textual replay, that he introduced as part of his study:

A textual replay is closely related to the “instant replay,” although instead of recording and replaying a sports event, textual replays capture and replay online writing activity. Textual replay is a term to describe the product of a screen capture program that takes multiple, successive screen shots of onscreen writing activity and splices them together as a digital movie, played back in a way that approximates the writing performance. (p.61)

Swarts used Camtasia, but makes clear that one could use other technologies to enact the technique and enable

a different kind of writer-reviewer interaction that moves more easily between practice- and artifact-oriented views, while providing perceptual and representational evidence to which review participants can attach their explanations. It will also create a surface on which writers and reviewers can work jointly, so that the reviewer’s experience can guide the writer’s practice at the moment of performance as well as after. (p.61)

In sessions using this technique, writers and reviewers seemed to learn from each other – more so than in sessions that didn’t involve the technique (p.123). In particular, writers were able to exert more control in the textual replay sessions (p.128), the writers and reviewers coordinated more, and their coordination involved more attention to constraining rhetorical circumstances (p.134).

In the last chapter, Swarts tells us that “Textual replay does not exist, at least not yet. … Textual replay is an idea for a technology that would provide useful mediation for writing review by allowing presentation of the text as a particle and stream of writing activity” (p.145).

And at this point, I placed a sticky note in the margin with the word WAVE on it.

Textual replay is a technique waiting on a technology, and technologies such as Google Wave can easily surface how documents evolve while accommodating writers’ and reviewers’ notes on them. The technology has perhaps caught up to the technique.

How hard would it be? A couple of ideas for future Google services

Just a couple of ideas I had for future Google services. I can't imagine these would take long to implement.

• Dictation and transcription service. Leverage Google Voice's voicemail transcriptions for longer messages, either phoned in or submitted in audio files. Compete with CastingWords. For an additional fee, add light human editing.
• Voice appointments. Allow people to speak their appointments into Google Calendar, using the same syntax as Quick Add.
• Video voicemail. Integrate Google Voice with Google Video/YouTube capabilities to allow Seesmic-like messaging. This might take off more easily when Android phones have forward-facing cameras, but it's device-independent.

Have any other ideas that involve leveraging current Google (or other) services? Leave them in the comments.

Peer review, Climategate, qualitative research

At Smart Mobs, Judy Breck points to ClimateGate's implications for peer review. "Regardless of one’s opinion on global warming, the leaked emails now making headlines are interesting for another issue. They are shining light into a growing challenge to scientific publication peer review."

Right: Like her, I don't intend to engage in the question of global warming, but rather in what the incident means for peer review in a networked world.

On the one hand, peer review allows people who specialize in a particular branch of study to bring that specialty to bear. A narrower conversation means a greater chance that everyone shares the same unspoken warrants, knows the same controversies, and works from the same set of theoretical frameworks. Researchers still have disagreements on these, but the disagreements are manageable and allow the researchers to build on previous work rather than rehashing basic issues over and over. When I use activity theory to analyze my workplace studies, for instance, I don't have to write 120 pages describing the basics of that complicated theory or the basics of collecting observational notes; I can just throw in a few cites and know that my readers - and peer reviewers - will get the gist. Without that narrower conversation, it's very difficult to make much progress; you spend all of your time explaining and/or defending base assumptions.

But on the other hand, the problem with a narrower conversation is that those base assumptions don't get challenged much. The narrow conversation becomes too narrow, the assumptions become too assumed, and consequently the conversation becomes vulnerable to outside rebuttals. Notice that I'm not saying the conversation necessarily goes wrong, but that its interlocutors forget how to, or neglect to, consider and preemptively rebut arguments that don't share those warrants. It's a problem with the design of the argument.

One side effect is that data are locked down rather than being made transparent. And that's turned into a major issue with ClimateGate, with allegations that original data haven't been shared with other researchers - and that original analyses can't be reproduced from them. The result, of course, is uncertainty and distrust. (As I've discussed elsewhere, one key element of netwar is introducing uncertainty into the declarations of your enemies.)

The antidote, one would think, is exposure to one's original dataset. In the past, this was difficult to achieve, since the dataset had to be published and distributed, and that incurred expenses that were sometimes significant. Now, however, it's easy to post datasets. The genie is out of the bottle; there's no solid excuse not to publish datasets online and show one's work, preferably by publishing open source code so that others can reproduce your results. It's a basic confidence-building move - especially when your work can substantially drive public policy and expenditures.

But as I discuss in a recent chapter, field researchers are in a bind. On one hand, we can't share our raw data. Unlike temperature data from climate stations, our data are tied directly to human subjects and we can't expose data that would identify them or endanger them (even if the danger involved making them vulnerable to, say, mild reprimands in their jobs). On the other hand, the human subjects are free to comment on our work. In the past, they didn't have an avenue to make such comments unless they were willing to buy their own printing presses; now they can post on blogs or in comments. Like the climate change scientists, field researchers could make a better case by exposing their datasets - but unlike them, we are forbidden to do that by our institutional review boards. Two sets of ethics collide.

So what can we do, as field researchers, to avoid such collisions?

Expose what we can. I am personally very interested in the notion of pushing the bounds of what we can expose. How far can we go in publishing our raw field notes, interviews, and artifacts, and in showing how our coding schemes have been applied to them? Can we set up protocols that anonymize data sufficiently that we can publish lightly modified raw data? I think we need to be prepared to do so, if IRBs approve.

Triangulate with public data. Another alternative would be to triangulate field research with vast corpuses. For instance, this summer I became very interested in the health care town hall protests, which had been characterized by various sides as (a) centrally coordinated astroturfing and as (b) pure, grassroots outrage. I blogged a theoretically informed interpretation, but I would love to see investigations that combine field research (observations of town halls, interviews with those who attended) with principled examinations of the public communications that coordinated the protests (websites, Facebook groups, Twitter hashtags). The field data may not be publishable in raw form, but it could be triangulated with the public communications, which researchers could summarize and code publicly. If both sets point to the same conclusions, readers may have more confidence in the closed field data.

These are just two starter ideas for opening research data and avoiding the insularity that too often comes with specialized research communities. If you have further suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

Irony of the day: Rules for Radicals

A screen shot of the UT library's listing of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Of course real radicals aren't going to return the book!