Reading :: Knowing in Organizations

Originally posted: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:46:30

Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based Approach

Ed. Davide Nicolini, Silvia Gherardi, Dvora Yanow

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, but just haven't had the time to blog it until now. It's certainly bloggable, though, particularly since it represents another instance of the intersection between activity theory and actor-network theory (my current focus).

Knowing in Organizations was published in 2003, growing from papers presented at the 1998 Academy of Management meeting. Its focus, of course, is "knowing in organizations," a broad focus that draws in papers from four literatures: knowing as culture and aesthetic understanding; communities of practice; activity theory; and actor-network theory/heterogeneous engineering. The latter two have traditionally worked in different areas, but are beginning to run into each other more frequently. Activity theory is primarily a theory of distributed cognition, and focuses on issues of labor, learning, and concept formation; it?s primarily used in fields such as educational, cognitive, and cultural psychology, although it?s also making inroads in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, communication, and anthropology. Actor-network theory is primarily an ontology ? an account of existence ? and focuses on issues of science, politics, rhetoric, production of facts, agreements, and knowledge; it?s primarily used in science and technology studies, philosophy, and sociology. But recently the edges of these projects have begun to meet and contend with each other. Activity theory, in its ?third generation," is attempting to move from the study of individuals and focused activities to the study of interrelated sets of activities, and thus into work organization. Actor-network theory is expanding from studies of scientific knowledge into popular science and technology, and from there into work organization as well. So it?s not surprising that advocates of the two approaches are beginning to grapple with each others? approaches, particularly in the pages of this book.

Niccolini, D., Gherardi, S., and Yanow, D. "Introduction: Toward a practice-based view of knowing and learning in organizations."

In the introduction, the editors discuss "the centrality and strategic importance of knowledge in postindustrial organizations" (p.4). An emerging "knowledge-centered" discourse has resulted in increased interest in "the issue of organizational learning and knowledge creation and management" (p.5). At the same time, there's widespread disagreement about what actually constitutes a useful understanding of knowing and learning; these categories and their vocabularies must be rethought, and "the main assertion of this book is that a practice-based vocabulary is a promising candidate for such rethinking" (p.7). The authors identify and discuss three main trends of thought on practice that undergird the work in this book: "Marx's work, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, and Wittgenstein's legacy" (p.7). Then they go on to identify the "four practice-based ways to talk about knowing and learning" (p.12). (I disagree in that actor-network theory may talk about knowing, but it doesn't really attempt an account of learning.)

I won't review each chapter here, but I'll discuss highlights of the ones most relevant to my current work:

Wenger, E. "Communities of practice and social learning systems."

Wenger builds on his earlier CoP work here, providing detailed taxonomies of boundary workers, boundary objects, and boundary interactions. His detail stems from the fact that he sees knowledge work as becoming more distributed. "In a knowledge economy, sustained success for any organization will depend not only on effective participation in economic markets, but just as importantly and with many of the same players, on knowing how to participate in broader social learning systems" (p.98). The more distributed knowledge work becomes, and the more central knowledge work becomes to the economy, the more important it will be to understand and describe how workers interact across increasingly porous boundaries. Wenger sees these interactions in terms of learning.

Blackler, F., Crump, N., and McDonald, S. (2003). "Organizing processes in complex activity networks."

Unlike Wenger, Blackler et al. work within activity theory to conceptualize this sort of boundary work. In particular, they are working within AT's "third generation," in which activity networks are conceptualized and explored through boundary spanning, dialogue, and polycontextuality, and their changes and interactions explained largely through contradictions. Activity networks are typically pictured in two ways: either as modular, with each activity providing an "output" that functions as the "input" for another activity, or as overlapping, in which several activity systems might interpenetrate. Blackler et al. portray their activity network in the latter way (which I tend to think is more sensible). In this case study, Blackler et al. study a high-tech defense contractor with a special eye toward perspective making, perspective taking, and perspective shaping (p.127).

Blackler et al. introduce the notion of activity networks in an interesting way:

The question arises of how activity theory can be adapted for organizational analysis. One approach might be to analyze particular organizations as activity systems in their own right. However, partly as a result of the complex division of labor that exists in work organizations, participants' understanding of the links between their actions and the overall activity system of which they are a part can become obscured. While a level of internal differentiation between individuals and groups is inevitable in activity systems (of any size), complex organizations can easily become segmented and fragmented. (p.129)

So "second generation" activity theory is not enough for dealing with complex organizations. I would add that complex organizations such as the one Blackler et al. describe tend to be multidisciplinary, meaning that very different activities are "spliced" together. Accountants at the high tech firm, I suspect, have much more in common with accountants at other companies than they do with engineers or custodians or executives at their own firm. Furthermore, these activities have their own social languages, their own chronotopic senses (ideas of space and time), their own genres.

Rather than analyzing organizations as single activity systems, it is more satisfactory, therefore, to analyze them as networks of overlapping activity systems or, for simplicity of expression, as activity networks. The units that make up such networks can be labeled "communities of activity"; such communities can be loosely defined in terms of the extent to which members recognize shared work priorities, work with a common cognitive and technological infrastruture, and support each others' activity. Relations betweeen activity systems bring the (sometimes difficult) issues associated with multidisciplinary work into sharp focus. Collaboration across different systems of activity raises issues concerning priorities, identities, and operational methods as well as questions about relative authority and influence. (p.131)

The authors provide a modified activity system triangle meant to represent the entire activity network -- a very different diagram than, say, Bodker or Miettinen, or Engestrom would produce, one that emphasizes the activity network as thoroughly interpenetrated activities (p.132). Blackler et al. make the following substitutions around the triangle:

- subject -> community of activity

- community -> related communities of activity

- object -> emerging collective object of activity

- mediating artifacts -> contextual innovations (perspective shaping)

- rules -> boundary innovations (perspective taking)

- division of labor -> domain innovations (perspective making)

The terms in parentheses above are defined as follows:

- perspective shaping: "How the community of activity understands current priorities and imagines the future."

- perspective taking: "Relations with other communities of activity"

- perspective making: "The contribution of each community of activity"

I find this formulation to be quite interesting, particularly the thought that Blackler et al. have put into naming and theorizing the interpenetrations among activity systems. They have avoided depicting the activity network as modular, and consequently they have had to confront how these activity systems overlap at every point. The substitutions above are clearly ways to describe such overlaps or interfaces, highlighting the innovation work in which people are inevitably engaged as they negotiate these interfaces. Localizing the perspective work on the triangle also makes a lot of sense to me, and it delivers on what is too often a vague discussion of perspectives in activity theory. Perspective work is mediatory: "Cooperative relations between communities of activity are mediated by the processes of 'perspective making,' 'perspective taking,' and 'perspective shaping'" (p.134, their emphasis). Furthermore, the discussion leads to a principled understanding of expertise, which is not always easy when you mash together several different activities. "Through the concept of 'activity system,' expertise can be studied as a collective, heterogeneous phenomenon" (p.133, their emphasis). By the end of the case, we can see why the authors believe that 'perspective making,' 'perspective taking,' and 'perspective shaping' are "the core organizing processes" within activity networks (p.143).

In the footnotes, the authors provide a useful three-paragraph overview of the development of activity theory (p.147). They also repeat Miettinen's criticism of actor-network theory as emphasizing "fixed patterns of power and domination" (p.148).

Engeström, Y., Puonti, A., and Seppänen, L. (2003). "Spatial and temporal expansion of the object as a challenge for reorganizing work."

This chapter provides an introduction of the notion of object in work, based on Engestrom's developmental work research, before overviewing three cases. (One is Seppanen's dissertation work; I reviewed the dissertation elsewhere on this blog.) Objects of work are important here because activities are oriented toward objects; "there is no such thing as objectless activity" (p.152). Indeed,

We argue that a new, more interesting insight into the developmental dynamics of timing and spacing in work organizations can indeed be gained if we shift the focus of analysis onto the objects of work. We suggest that the ongoing historical transformations in objects of work are best conceptualized as expansion rather than compression. (p.152)

And

Objects are constructed and invested with meaning by means of cultural tools. Such mediating tools operate not separately but in complex constellation we call instrumentalities. Emerging new objects call for and generate new instrumentalities. (p.152)

The authors then turn to Victor and Boynton, whose book has been showing up a lot in Engestrom's work lately. Victor and Boynton

suggest that we can examine the evolution of work in capitalism as a succession of five major types: craft, mass production, process enhancement, mass customization, and co-configuration. The last one of the five, co-configuration, is particularly interesting from the point of view of the spatio-temporal expansion of the object. (p.153)

Co-configuration involves building both a continually adaptable product and an ongoing relationship with the company. (Engestrom et al. make co-configuration sound much more concrete and reified than it is; Victor and Boynton present it as a speculation on where work is going next, and do not confidently present a case study of it, as they do with the other forms of work.)

Engestrom et al. follow up with the case studies, which are worthwhile examples of object construction.

Suchman, L. Organizing alignment: The case of bridge-building.

Lucy Suchman's case study of bridge building is categorized within the sociology of translation, although I usually don't think of her as an activity theorist. But in this case study she grapples with the issue of multiplicity that inheres in large projects:

This story of bridge-building points as well to the multiplicity of perspectives involved in such large modern projects. A view of artifact construction as heterogeneous engineering emphasizes issues of stabilization of human and nonhuman networks as central. Along with the contingencies of this process as seen by engineers, however, one can catch glimpses of other perspectives, colllected generally under the heading of "residents" or "citizens." In a real sense there are at least two different artifacts at issue, with associated networks of stabilization, that must somehow be aligned. Project engineers are immersed in a history and daily order of professional practice and practical exigencies. Their orientation is to moving the project forward accoording to the order of phases and timetables, toward the production of an artifact within budget and with appropriate projections of maintainability and durability. Residents, on the other hand, are working on a different order of stabilization: that of their daily lives. ... These two different 'stabilizations' -- of artifact, careers, professional networks, on the one hand, and of daily life, property, and so forth on the other -- comprise different, only partially intersecting fields of knowing and acting. (p.200)

Very nice. Suchman's characterization of "stabilizations" and multiplicity are indeed in line with a sociology of translations, and they highlight what translation has to offer to organizational studies.

Law, J. and Singleton, V. "Allegory and its others."

This last essay is about the same vintage as Law's After Method, and covers some of the same ground. Law and Singleton draw on a case study of "typical patients" at a medical center (and they use the term "typical" ruefully, recognizing that there is no such thing). Although the piece is written in Law's start-stop style, which I find grating, the piece itself is worth it particularly for the criticism of the notion of object. Although they don't use the term "object" quite as Engestrom et al. do, the shoe still fits:

Perhaps there is simply something diffuse about the object itself, the compartment of alcoholic liver disease, alcoholism, alcohol abuse. Perhaps it simply slips, slides, and displaces itself. Perhaps its boundaries move about from one location to another, and do not stay still. Perhaps they ebb and flow. But if this is the case, then something similar goes on, too, for the patients, clients, citizens who experience this condition (or set of conditions). (p.240)

Despite Law's tendency to use "perhaps" when he obviously means "certainly," this passage is useful. Law and Singleton are discussing multiplicity here, and you may recall that multiplicity escapes dialectic. If the object and subjects both have uncertain, fluxing boundaries -- something that is implied by a sociology of translation -- it becomes hard to confidently stabilize either one enough to talk about spatial and temporal expansion of the object or development of the subject. Again, although activity theory and actor-network theory are increasingly being brought to bear on the same problems, we can see why ANT is unsuitable for providing a developmental account -- and why AT is having to work so hard to provide an account of polycontextuality! (AT seems to be having more success at its end, though.)

(My own personal paradigm shift, part 4)

Originally posted: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 08:56:31

As you may remember, I've been looking for some sort of task/project management software for a while. Basically I wanted something that would allow me to enter a description, a range of dates between which the task could be done, and a notes field where I could delegate tasks or write additional notes. Oh, and I wanted something that would allow me to find-as-you-type.

An appropriate piece of software was surprisingly hard to find. The closest I could find was Merlin, but Merlin provided too many constraints for the work I wanted to do; it slowed me down. So I stuck with my Excel tables and kept an eye out for something better.

I think I found it this week -- by totally misusing a piece of software. iBiz is a time-billing and invoicing application. You set up a list of clients, a set of projects attached to each client, and a set of events for each project. You record how much time you put into each event, then generate invoices. Very simple. And it provides a find-as-you-type search for projects.

Here's what I did with it:

Here, I've set up "Clients" which are really categories; "Projects" which are really tasks; and no events under each project. (The search won't look through events, so they're useless to me.) You can sort by any column and find by client (category), project (task), or project notes (notes). I've used the notes field for delegation as well as for other info.

So far it's worked quite well. The only problem is that there's no way to get a decent printout. I can jury-rig a printout with project names (tasks) and due dates, but not ranges, and I can't sort the report. So I'll probably end up taking screen captures -- not a good solution, but the other advantages outweigh this problem. >

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Invented Here

Originally posted: Tue, 31 May 2005 09:47:56

Invented Here: Maximizing Your Organization's Internal Growth and Profitability

by Bart Victor, Andrew C. Boynton

My Tuesday oil change turned into a seven-hour ordeal, since the mechanic discovered that my Subaru's rear bearings were wearing out. (Apparently the Foresters have a problem with this.) The upside was that I was able to race through this book in addition to other work.

I wanted to go through the book primarily because Yrjo Engestrom has been citing it a lot lately. It's similar to Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy in many ways, although it's less scholarly and attempts more of a taxonomy of work structures. This taxonomy and its implied progression, I think, is what intrigued Engestrom. On the whole, it's not a remarkable "new economy" book, but it does have some insights.

Let's start with that taxonomy. The authors posit that work ideally takes what they simply call "the right path" (you can imagine the associations that occurred to me). This "right path" has several steps or capabilities:

• Craft: "Craft work is the application of personal know-how, or 'tacit knowledge,' to create value" (p.19).
• Mass Production: "Reuse of articulated knowledge. Large-scale production. Effective use of lower-cost, less experienced workers" (p.48).
• Process Enhancement: "Process enhancers share the conviction that every process must contribute to satisfying the customer by constantly achieving higher quality. Process enhancers equip workers with tools and techniques to help them apply their practical knowledge to improve tasks and processes" (p.74).
• Mass Customization: "Efficiently make precisely what the customer wants, no less, no more. ... The concept of customization has its roots in important research into flexible, efficient, and innovative capabilities" (p.91).
• Co-Configuration: "With co-configuration, we can imagine creating products that are not only made to order for you, but continuously remake themselves as your needs change. ... They customize themselves, not just once, but constantly, in response to your need and want. We call this value customer-intelligent products and services" (p.196).

To their credit, the authors demonstrate in detailed case studies that a particular business might be suited for a particular step; there is no universal progression. (The "right path" metaphor appears to be misleading.) Some work has to be craft work; some work is best constructed as mass production; and so forth. Knowledge work, however, fits best as co-configuration work:

Co-configuration work occurs at the interface of the firm, the customer, and the products or services. It requires constant interaction among the firm, the customer, and the product. The result is that the product continuously adjusts to what the customer wants. Co-configuration creates customer-intelligent value in products or services, where the lines between product and customer knowledge become blurred and interwoven. (p.14)

Co-configuration is kept out of the taxonomy until the last chapter in the book, partially because according to the authors, it's not achievable in most industries. Let's set it aside for a moment. The others are discussed in some detail, including their advantages and disadvantages. Most interesting is Chapter 6, "Transformation Pathways," in which the authors envision these four steps/capabilities as a loop:

• Craftwork transforms into mass production through development: "the articulated knowledge generated under craft is identified and solidified by development into an organizational machine" (p.126).
• Mass production transforms into process enhancement through linking: "Linking creates a system for overlapping processes that managers can continuously improve" (p.126).
• Process enhancement transforms into mass customization through modularization: it "transforms work by creating a network of modular processes that can respond to market demands, enabling a company to customize a product or service to meet ever-shifting market needs" (p.127).
• And mass customization transforms back into craftwork through renewal: "bringing insights on the firm's capability limits and using them to direct a process of invention. These insights can arise under any of the other forms of work" (p.127).

The authors are clearly quite excited about co-configuration, although they include so many hedges about it that it almost appears illusory. Their example of a company that might achieve this sort of work is Microsoft, but I think a better choice would have been Google or Amazon, both of which have embraced an open systems approach (yes, co-configuration sounds a lot like what I was shooting for in Chapter 6 of Tracing Genres through Organizations).

Overall, I didn't see a lot here that I haven't gotten from The Support Economy or similar books. But the taxonomy is useful and the linkages among the types of work are interesting. I'll keep it on the shelf for a while.

Blogged with Flock

(CFP: Special Issue of TCQ on Distributed Work)

Originally posted: Mon, 30 May 2005 17:42:07

I'll be editing a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly on distributed work to be published in summer 2007. "Distributed work" is shorthand for much of what has been discussed on this blog over the last year and a half: the distribution of work across geographic, disciplinary, and organizational boundaries; the attenuation and coordination of different perspectives at work; the increasing fragmentation and tensions of work activity. I hope you'll consider sending me a proposal.

If you think you have something that might fit, please check out the call for papers and feel free to email me with questions. Looking forward to your submissions.

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Inherit the Stars

Originally posted: Mon, 30 May 2005 19:48:40

Inherit the Stars

by James P. Hogan

I mentioned the science fiction books of my childhood several posts back. One book that stood out early on, because of the creepy cover art, was James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars. Who wouldn't want to read a book in which two astronauts excavate a 50,000 year old corpse in a spacesuit? I distinctly remember being intrigued by my older brother's copy when I was in third or fourth grade, and later I got my own copy (long since sold or given away). So when I saw this copy in the used book store for a dollar, I had to buy it.

I mostly wanted to scan the book cover to provide a new icon for my AIM. But since we visited family this weekend, I went ahead and brought the book for those in-between times. It's a surprisingly quick read, and illustrates both what's right and what's wrong about "hard" science fiction.

What's wrong is quickly apparent. In the first chapter, Hogan spends three pages detailing a transaction in which one character, on an intercontinental flight, places an order for a rental vehicle. Yes, three pages in which the character opens up his briefcase to reveal a screen in its lid, talks to the Avis rep on the videophone, runs his license and credit card through special slots in the briefcase, and enters his password: "Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed in the display." Bear in mind that the book was published in 1977; the author got a lot of the details right, but not enough, and I just kept thinking how much easier it would be to use the Avis website. I can see why writers like William Gibson elide most of these details. But Hogan is all about such details, and the book consequently has a short shelf life.

What goes right, though, is that the book provides a sampling of several different scientific fields. What would happen if we discovered a 50,000 year old corpse on the moon? Hogan realistically portrays the coordination that would have to go on among different scientific communities (although I think he provides a two-dimensional portrayal of the controversies that would arise). We get to learn a little bit about evolutionary biology, astrophysics, chemistry, cryptography, and so forth. And we get the pleasure of watching this cross-disciplinary community solve a complex puzzle. The solution is pretty improbable, but what do you want. Hard science fiction is still science fiction, after all.

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Callon on Translation)

Originally posted: Mon, 23 May 2005 22:19:22

Although Bruno Latour is most often associated with actor-network theory, Michel Callon's work predates him. Callon's work with the sociology of translation tends to focus on economics more than Latour's does, but it's the same basic idea: examining how actants are changed so that they can forge alliances, work with one another, and circulate. Translation itself has undergone several conceptual changes since it was first derived from Michel Serres' 1974 work, so I'll focus on differences in accounts within these four articles and compared to other ANT writings.

Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay. In Law, J., editor, Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge? , pages 196?233. Routledge, Boston.

This is a famous and often-quoted study of how scientists studied scallops in St. Brieuc Bay, and more generally, "a new approach to power, that of the sociology of translation" (p.196). Translation has

three principles, those of agnosticism (impartiality between actors engaged in controversy), generalised symmetry (the commitment to explain conflicting viewpoints in the same terms) and free association (the abandonment of all a priori distinctions between the natural and the social) (p.196)

In this article, translation has four moments. Notice these, because although this article is frequently used to define translation -- it gets a cite in Latour's Pandora's Hope, for instance -- it's described differently from place to place. In Pandora's Hope, for instance, some of these moments get shifted away from translation and are made equal components in "mediation." (See my recent review.) But here, translation is described thus:

Four ?moments? of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their definition of the situation on others: (a) problematisation: the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by defining the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the ?obligatory passage point? of the researchers? programme of investigation; (b) interessement: a series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that programme; (c) enrolment: a set of strategies in which the researchers sought to define and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; (d) mobilisation: a set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. (p.196)

Using these four moments, Callon goes on to systematically study the empirical case, in which researchers try to determine ways to conserve and cultivate scallops. In Callon's symmetrical reading, the actants included the researchers, the fishermen (who, based on public demand, were tempted to overharvest the scallops), and of course the scallops themselves. The vocabulary of translation allowed Callon to study these actants in the same terms. Scallops "voted," for instance, in that counting the number of larvaethat anchored themselves to collectors was no different from counting the number of fishermen who voted to take part in the project themselves. In both cases, "A series of intermediaries and equivalences are put into place which lead to the designation of the spokesman" (p.216), and "To speak for others is to first silence those in whose name we speak" (p.216).

Callon describes a temporarily stabilized settlement here, in which all actants are interested and invested in the outcome. If successful, the researchers turn themselves into an obligatory passage point that all actants must pass on the way to their own objectives. "But this consensus and the alliances which it implies can be contested at any moment. Translation becomes treason" (pp.218-219). For instance, scallops initially attach themselves, but in subsequent years, they refuse to do so; fishermen initially restrain themselves from overfishing, but give in to temptation one Christmas eve (p.220).

This essay does a great job of laying out translation in four moments and describing how a sociology of translation works. But translation is itself translated in later iterations.

Callon, M. (1986). The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric vehicle. In Callon, M., Law, J., and Rip, A., editors, Mapping the dynamics of science and technology: Sociology of science in the real world, pages 19?34. Macmillan, London.

The same year that Callon contributed the scallops study to John Law's edited collection, he coedited another collection with Law. That collection included this essay on electric vehicles. Here, Callon comes up with some terms that apparently didn't survive in later ANT, such as the "actor-world," which Callon tries to conceptually separate from an actor-network without much success (p.22 et passim). In this essay, Callon says that translation has three components: the translator-spokesman; the obligatory passage point; and displacement (p.24).

At first glance these seem rather different from the four moments of translation described in the scallops article, but on closer examination Callon is talking about the same things. It's just that in the scallops article he focuses on moments (points or processes in the translation), while here he focuses on components (elements or entities that must be involved). The new focus is confusing in that components are used in multiple moments and the moments themselves are cyclic rather than linear, so reading through this explanation, it's easy to detect very different moments than the ones we saw in the scallops article! But careful tracing suggests that these two articles are indeed talking about the same thing. In this case, Callon discusses the development of an electric vehicle, but the principle is the same as with the scallops.

Callon elaborates again on translation: "Translation is a definition of roles, a distribution of roles and the delineation of a scenario. It speaks for others but in its own language. It is an initial definition. But ... no translation can be taken for granted for it does not occur without resistance" (p.26).

So, then, we're getting a coherent picture of translation. And this brings us to the next article.

Callon, M. (1991). Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. In Law, J., editor, A sociology of monsters? Essays on power, technology and domination, pages 132?161. Routledge, London.

Five years later, Callon introduces the concept of techno-economic networks: "a coordinated set of heterogeneous actors which interact more or less successfully to develop, produce, distribute, and diffuse methods for generating goods and services" (p.133). These seem to be essentially actor-networks, but specifically ones that relate to economics. I'll treat them as actor-networks here, recognizing that there may be some differences because of focus.

In any case, what Callon says about TENs applies to actor-networks more broadly. First, actors are drawn into relationships through intermediaries; "an intermediary is anything passing between actors which defines the relationship between them" (p.134). They include inscriptions ("relatively immutable media that resist transport"); technical artefacts; human beings (with "the skills, the knowledge, and the know-how that they incorporate"); and money (p.135). These intermediaries "describe their networks in the literary sense of the term. And they compose them by giving them form" (p.135).

A few notes on these. Callon addresses apprenticeship briefly here -- an unusual move in the ANT literature, which tends not to concern itself with learning, development, education, or competence in detailed terms. In apprenticeship,

the instructor describes the operation of an object: the network 'inscribed' on it is set out and inspected. What are the links between technical objects? And what are the roles that humans play? ... In this way the machine is interpreted, deconstructed, and inserted back into its context -- though possibly not the way intended by the designer. The written traces of such efforts to put objects into words are to be found everywhere, as are the controversies to which they lead. Codes, checklists, maintenance manuals and user handbooks, all of these escort objects on their travels. (p.137)

Furthermore, skills can be regarded as networks. A description of skills involves reconstituting the network in which they are "expressed and put to work" (p.138). Again, this is remarkable in that Callon is actually discussing human competence and learning. He goes on to discuss what activity theorists would call mediation: Consider Mr. Smith, who wants to go on vacation. He uses a travel package provided by Club Med, "a mixture of humans and non-humans, texts, and financial products that have been put together in a precisely co-ordinated sequence" (p.139). These actants include "computers, alloys, jet engines, research departments, market studies, advertisements, welcoming hostesses, natives who have suppressed their desire for independence and learned to smile as they carry luggage, bank loans and currency exchanges" (p.139). This TEN might be complex, "but in principle it works just like any other intermediary. If Mr. Martin uses a fork to mash potatoes this is just another (albeit simpler) intermediary" (p.139). Notice that unlike activity theory's version of mediation, Callon's intermediaries can be people as well as artifacts.

An actor is just another intermediary in this reckoning (p.140). Just as the hostess or smiling native serves as an intermediary for Mr. Smith, he serves as an intermediary for them. "Actors define one another by means of the intermediaries which they put into circulation," Callon says in the italics that he liberally uses to emphasize his key points, and "the social can be read in the inscriptions that mark the intermediaries" (p.140). Is a given thing an actor or intermediary? It depends on "where the buck stops" -- what you're trying to study -- because all actors are intermediaries (p.142).

Here, Callon begins to talk about networks in more detail, drawing on Deleuze to make some of his points (p.142). He describes a triangle of translation, again similar to the triangle used to describe mediation in activity theory. The triangle is of the translator, translated, and the medium in which the translation is inscribed (p.143).

Callon then elaborates by discussing convergence and irreversibility. "Convergence measures the extent to which the process of translation and its circulation of intermediaries leads to agreement" (p.144). It involves alignment, or the extent to which translation "generates a shared space, equivalence and commensurability" (p.145). "A translation that is generally accepted tends to shed its history. It becomes self-evident, a matter on which everyone can agree" (p.145). Of course, translation must "rarefy the universe of possible actors by organising imputation and limiting the number of translations that can be easily stabilised" -- that is, you want to limit the extent to which translations can occur so that you can strengthen and build on the network -- so actor-networks generate "conventions" or "codifying regulations" that Callon calls "co-ordination or translation regimes" (p.147).

This leads Callon to argue that one can make a relative judgment about the boundaries of a network based on its level of convergence (p.149). He has a brief methodological discussion here, without much substance, I'm afraid.

Then he gets to irreversibility, which I find to be quite interesting. Irreversibility is

(a) the extent to which it is subsequently impossible to go back to a point where the translation was only one amongst others; and

(b) the extent to which it shapes and determines subsequent translations. (p.150)

"All translations, however apparently secure, are in principle reversible," Callon declares (p.150). No matter how widely it is accepted that the Earth is flat, or that spontaneous generation occurs, or that mankind is only 6,000 years old -- and no matter how many other things are built on these beliefs -- they are reversible. And so are the things that replace them. Facts can be walked back. But some facts are harder to walk back than others: the longer a network is, the stronger it is, because the more depends on its translations being stable (p.151). Irreversible translation is normalization (p.152).

Callon briefly discusses apprenticeship in this context:

Apprenticeship is a case in point. In this the elements involved in a translation become dependent on one another in a process of mutual adaptation. A skilled machinist cannot work without his machine. The development of a technology depends on engineers with a specialist training. The practice of this trade puts specific objects into circulation. And so on. In this way decisions become more and more dependent on past translations. (p.151).

Callon, M., Larédo, P., and Mustar, P. (1997). Techno-economic networks and the analysis of structural effects. In The strategic management of research and technology, pages 385?429. Economica International, Paris.

This final chapter postdates the others by quite a bit, and comes before his chapter in Complexities. Callon and his colleagues go into technico-economic networks in much more detail than I find useful here. But let's get the 50,000 foot version. Again, Callon discusses TENs as actor-networks particularly within the context of economics (that's my take, not a specific quote of his). Here, Callon is particularly interested in innovations stabilizing within the network (pp.386-387). Again, he discusses actors as circulating intermediaries (p.389). He then goes into an elaborate taxonomy of TENs based on several axes: networks can be lacunary or chained; dispersed or convergent; short or long; polarized or non-polarized. These axes all cover different aspects of a network, but Callon's objective in detailing them, again, seems to be in terms of how stable and powerful they are. The axes provide a more detailed analysis -- certainly more detailed than I particularly wanted to get into. I'm not sure how helpful they are.

In sum, these four articles represent a line of thought parallel to Latour's, and they certainly cite Latour a lot. But the notion of translation is a little undercooked in places, and the term seems to disappear in the last article. On the other hand, the principles of translation seem to be intact in here as well as in Latour's work; the basic idea is the same, though it gets chopped up in different ways.

Reading :: Pandora's Hope (Supplemental Notes)

Originally posted: Fri, 20 May 2005 09:22:28

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies

by Bruno Latour

Pandora's Hope was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. It's a fairly short review, partially because I was still trying to absorb the basics of actor-network theory at the time. This second reading comes after several other books and articles on ANT. So I'll be a bit more detailed in my comments this time.

Latour begins with the question of what science actually is, framing it with the story of an encounter with a scientist who nervously asks him if he believes in reality. Of course he does, Latour says. The rest of the book is a discussion of what that means -- a difficult proposition, Latour maintains, because of the way the world has been divided between subjects and objects. This modernist settlement has led us away from commonsensical statements and to a point at which we must discuss whether we believe in reality in the first place!

To illuminate, Latour takes us in Chapter 2 to Brasil, where he follows an interdisciplinary set of scientists who are examining the dividing line between a savannah and a forest. How is their work done? Through a set of circulating references, Latour says: representations that themselves become represented by other representatives. "A word replaces a thing," he notes, "while conserving a trait that defines it" (p.63). The inscriptions that science mobilizes together constitute long chains of representation that typically converge into something about the size of a tabletop -- whether the thing that is represented is a galaxy, a microbe, or the soil underneath a savannah. And this chain renders the subject-object distinction useless -- and a bit ridiculous, in Latour's view. "Knowlendge, it seems, does not reside in the face-to-face confrontation of a mind with an object, any more than the reference designates a thing by means of a sentence verified by that thing." Rather, it resides in the long cascade of re-representations.

An essential property of this chain is that it must remain reversible. The succession of changes must be traceable, allowing for travel in both directions. If the chain is interrupted at any point, it ceases to transport truth -- ceases, that is, to produce, to construct, to trace, and to conduct it. The word "reference" designates the quality of the chain in its entirety, and no longer adequatio rei et intellectus. (p.69)

The principle is nicely illustrated on p.71, in which "the transformation at each stage of the reference ... may be pictured as a trade-off between what is gained (amplification) and what is lost (reduction) at each information-producing step." In the diagram, successive steps lead to narrower locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity, but greater compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality -- that is, the transformation leads us to representations that are less rich but more calculable and transportable. Transformations lose some properties but gain others. Conducting a phenomenon in this way, in successive layers, makes it more real (p.76). It is the erasure of these intermediate steps that causes us to believe in the subject-object distinction.

With that in mind, we go to Chapter 3, in which Latour discusses translation by using the historical case of Joliot attempting to develop an artificial nuclear chain reaction. Such a feat required a long set of translations: "when their goals are frustrated, actors take detours through the goals of others, resulting in a general drift, the language of one actor being substituted for the language of another" (p.89). Dautry's goal, national independence, can be reached only by taking a detour through Joliot's goal, being the first to master a chain reaction. Joliot's goal can only be reached by building a laboratory that can help to reach both goals. These detours link together very different sorts of enterprises, resulting in an interesting drift as the chain of translations expands, a drift from the exoteric to the esoteric. Some of the actors are humans, like Dautry and Joliot, but others are nonhumans, such as neutrons that must be persuaded to slow enough to hit a uranium atom. "For Joliot, it wasn't very difficult. In the morning he dealt with the neutrons and in the afternoon he dealt with the minister. The more time passed, the more these two problems became one" (p.90).

Based on this work, Latour proposes that scientific facts are created and maintained through a "circulatory system" with five loops: mobilization, autonomization, alliances, public representations -- and the loops that knot them all together, the "links and knots" that are typically considered the scientific concept. In the modernist subject-object understanding, this last loop is conceived as an inner core surrounded by context; in the amodernist understanding being promoted here, it is one loop among others, moving and changing rather than transcendant and static. "A concept does not become scientific because it is farther removed from the rest of what it holds, but because it is more intensely connected to a much larger repertoire of resources" (p.108).

This leads us to Chapter 4, where Latour returns to Louis Pasteur's work to suggest that we stop worrying about whether facts are constructed or real. Of course they are both -- and the shifting out of one plane of reference to another is what makes this doable (p.130). Latour suggests that instead of thinking of the world in terms of statements that allow words to correspond to the world (i.e., bridge the subject-object divide), we turn to a model of propositions in which we examine which propositions are articulated with one another (p.142).

Chapter 5 takes up a common criticism of ANT, which is its lack of historicity. Following his standard pattern, Latour outlines two understandings of historicity, using the illustration of the microbe. "Did ferments exist before Pasteur made them up?" (p.145). If the question is in terms of representations, the answer is no: the notion of the microbe didn't come into being until Pasteur. If the question is in terms of evolution, the answer is yes: microbes were really there, but hadn't been named or theorized. But this is the words-and-world, subject-and-object distinction all over again: "the divide between what pertains to human history and what to natural history would not have been bridged in the slightest" (p.146). To overcome the distinction, Latour turns back to the notion of circulating reference from Chapter 2. Every change in the series of transformations makes a difference (p.150); "Associations of entities have a history if at least one of the articles making them up changes" (p.152). So an amodern account of historicity is grounded in changes in associations. And such a historicity is reversible; no inertia is enough to keep up the reality that has been so difficult to produce" (p.155). Settlements can unravel. Scientific facts have relative existence (p.156), an existence that takes hard work to keep up. Victories always require further actions (p.168). And now we get to another of Latour's diagrams (p.171), this one illustrating an amodernist historicity of Pasteur's work. The X axis is the "linear succession of time," while the Y axis is the "sedimentary succession of time" -- the year 1864 as it is represented in subsequent years. The 1864 of 1864 was not the same as the 1864 of 2005: in the earlier sedimentation, spontaneous generation was a serious theory that had to be addressed with careful methodology, whereas in the later sedimentation, we don't consider spontaneous generation seriously. The concepts become rearticulated and reread in later history. (From my own research: the concept of universal service became rearticulated in the 1970s, then was read back into Theodore Vail's 1907 statement on universal service as well as the Communications Act of 1934, neither of which originally shared the 1970s-era understanding of universal service.)

Now for Chapter 6, in which Latour talks about mediation. How do we deal with technical mediation and the questions it poses for agency? Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Latour sees the subject-object dichotomy in this question as well, and characteristically proposes a middle ground through his account of technical mediation. Mediation, he says, involves mutual transformation of the assemblage (in this case, the gun-human), and this transformation has four parts:

First, translation: "we can portray the relation between two agents as a translation of their goals which results in a composite goal that is different from the two original goals" (p.179).

Second: Composition. "Action is simply not a property of humans but of an association of actants" (p.182). This composition of different agents in an assemblage is enacted through a series of "subprograms" that together achieve the composite goal of the assemblage.

Third: Reversible blackboxing. An assemblage (composition) of agents can be "blackboxed" or regarded as a single entity. But if the settlement breaks down, the black box can open; the composition can unravel as easily as it was raveled. In Aramis, for instance, Latour demonstrates how engineers labor to turn a field, a set of motors, a set of citizens, and innumerable other humans and nonhumans into a public transportation system. If blackboxing works, you can say, "I'm taking the train to the meeting." If the black box is opened, you might say, "the drivers are on strike" or "there's something wrong with the engine." Technical and scientific settlements need to be renegotiated and supported as much as political ones do. (pp.183-185).

Fourth: Delegation. The illustration here is the "sleeping policeman" or speed bump. "The driver's goal is translated, by means of the speed bump, from 'slow down as not to endanger students' into 'slow down and protect your car's suspension.' ... The driver's first version appeals to morality, enlightened interest, and reflection, whereas the second appeals to pure selfishness and reflex action. ... But from an observer's view it does not matter through which channel a given behavior is attained" (p.186). The nature of "meaning" is itself modified through delegation (p.187). "The speed bump is a meaningful articulation within a gamut of propositions" (p.187).

Given these four meanings or aspects of mediation, Latour attempts to trace "how a collective of one given definition can modify its makeup by articulating different associations": through translation, then crossover (i.e., humans and nonhumans exchange properties), then enrollment, mobilization, and finally displacement ("the direction the collective takes once its shape, extent, and composition has been altered by the enrollment and mobilization of new actants" (p.194). This part confuses me because according to one of Michel Callon's most quoted articles, translation occurs in four moments: problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilization. Is Latour using a more narrow meaning for translation here? Or different meanings for the other terms? I really wish he had traced the genealogy of the term here and related it more strongly throughout the chapter, since Callon's piece is much more established.

In any case, we now get to Latour's two-chapter discussion of the Gorgias, Plato's famous Socratic dialogue in which Socrates gets to beat up on rhetoric. As a rhetorician, I am not very happy with the two-dimensional portrayal of rhetoric. Neither is Latour. In the dialogue, Socrates represents Right: the lone man with knowledge and virtue on his side, who invokes absolute truth and declares that he will be vindicated in the afterlife. Callicles represents Might: the strongman who commands the dumb masses through force of personality, ruthlessness, and deception. Callicles is the very image of the Prince, at least the Prince that we have come to expect from the many slanders leveled against Machiavelli. But Latour scorns both Socrates and Callicles. If they just looked out the window, he says, these two would-be rulers would see the real rulers of Athens: the citizens in the marketplace, bargaining, negotiating, persuading, and trading.

It's worth noting that just as he did in Aramis, Latour takes a little time here to distance himself from Machiavelli. He warns against accepting "the Machiavellian definition of politics as being unconcerned with morality" and disapproves of "what Machiavelli will later esteem as a positive definition of political cleverness --- although Machiavelli's position is, of course, not a wholly immoral one" (p.253). Later, he says that "Machiavelli fell into Socrates' trap and defined politics as a cleverness entirely freed from scientific virtue" (p.263). Notice two things here, though. One is that Latour is not repudiating Machiavelli entirely, just Machiavelli's acceptance of the Socrates-Callicles settlement -- and in that way Machiavelli is no different from any modernist. The other is that Latour is talking about Machiavelli in the context of the Socrates-Callicles debate after emphasizing that the Callicles in this dialogue is a straw Callicles, distinct from the historical Callicles, who would have surely said something different. Is this a clever way to get across the difference between a straw Machiavelli and the actual Machiavelli, as he did in Aramis? Or am I trying too hard here?

In any case, Latour says that "power and reason are one and the same" -- that Might vs. Right is an illusory dichotomy and that "the Body Politic built by one or by the other is shaped with the same clay" (p. 262).

This brings us to Chapter 9. Latour talks about "factishes." "Fact" and "fetish" come from the same root word but connote opposite meanings, Latour contends, because of this modernist settlement that has split subject and object (p.267). He tries to reunite them as a "factish," something that, if fabricated well, allows reality to be autonomous. The question is not whether facts are real or constructed, "the Procrustean bed in which the modernist settlement wants us all to slumber" (p.275). They are both! And here's where Latour does another one of his hit-and-run jobs against dialectic:

When a fact is fabricated, who is doing the fabrication? The scientist? The thing? If you answer "the thing," then you are an outdated realist. If you answer "the scientist," then you are a constructivist. If you answer "both," then you are doing one of those repair jobs known as the dialectic, which seem to patch up the dichotomy for a while, but only hide it, allowing it to fester at a deeper level by turning it into a contradiction that has to be resolved and overcome. And yet we have to say that it is both, obviously, but without the assurance, certainty, or arrogance that seems to go with the realist or the relativist answer or with a clever oscillation between the two. (p.281)

And:

Am I simply restating the dialectic? No, there is no object, no subject, no contradiction, no Aufhebung, no mastery, no recapitulation, no spirit, no alienation. But there are events. I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do. (p.281)

This is a fairly abbreviated critique of dialectic, isn't it? But at least it's a little more coherent than his previous attempts. On the other hand, Latour's critics have been guilty as well, and that has agitated him:

If I have not answered the science warriors' arguments term for term -- or even cited their names -- it is because the science warriors too often waste their time attacking someone who has the same name as mine, who is said to defend all the absurdities I have disputed for twenty-five years: that science is socially constructed; that all is discourse; that there is no reality out there; that everything goes; that science has no conceptual content; that the more ignorant one is the better; that everything is political anyway; that subjectivity should be mingled with objectivity; that the mightiest, manliest, and hairiest scientist always wins provided he has enough 'allies' in high places; and such nonsense. I don't have to come to the rescue of that homonym! (p.300)

That Latour sounds familiar too. I recognize him from Miettinen's criticisms, and Engestrom's, and others. >

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: de Laet and Mol)

Originally posted: Wed, 18 May 2005 18:05:47

de Laet and Mol's "The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology" represents still another example of how actor-network theory (or, I suppose, one postvariant) has pushed from science studies to studies of technologies. Like Madeleine Akrich's study of the gazogene, this study examines how technologies are not contextualized but actually constituted by their relationships with local conditions, terrains, practices, and so forth. I like it very much. The ZBP, in this account, is articulated with a number of different actants to make it successful. One striking example is that the ZBP's documentation stresses the importance of consulting with local water diviners before siting a water hole (p.234) -- a beautiful illustration of how multiplying associations can produce a more durable and far-reaching settlement than otherwise.

And the ZBP settlement is quite durable. Unlike Akrich's gazogene, the ZBP is a runaway success: "A national standard, the Zimbabwe Bush Pump is a nation-builder that gains strength with each illustration" (p.236). Unlike Engels, who insisted that 100,000 steam engines did not prove Carnot's principle more than the one, de Laet and Mol boldly insist quite the opposite. The more ZBPs, the more real the ZBP is. Whereas Engels thought the steam engine could be reduced to a "germ-cell," a minimal abstract representation of the essential principle behind the steam-engine, de Laet and Mol insist that the ZBP has fuzzy boundaries:

Even if nothing can be taken from it, it is not clear where this pump ends. For what is the Zimbabwe Bush Pump? A water-producing device, defined by the mechanics that make it work as a pump. Or a type of hydraulics that produces water in specific quantities and from particular sources. But then again, maybe it is a sanitation device -- in which case the concrete slab, mould, casing and gravel are also essential parts. And while it may provide water and health, the Pump can do so only with the Vonder Rig -- or some other boring device -- and accompanied by manuals, measurements, and texts. Without these it is nothing, so maybe they belong to it too. And what about the village community? Is it to be included in the Pump --- because a pump has to be set up by the community and cannot be maintained without one? But then again, perhaps the boundaries of the Bush Pump coincide with those of the Zimbabwean nation. For in its modest way this national Bush Pump helps to make Zimbabwe as much as Zimbabwe makes it. (p.237)

If this discussion sounds familiar, perhaps you're thinking of Gregory Bateson's discussion of the blind man with the cane. Engels was searching for a way to generate abstract statements about essences while remaining materialist; de Laet & Mol, Bateson, Deleuze & Guattari, Latour, etc. were looking for a way to define technologies relationally and nonessentially. Partially this is because their different projects demand different tacks. Engels and his activity theory descendants were interested in learning and development, so they were concerned with how to describe concept formation in all its manifestations; they were interested in how abstractions were developed over time and made into mediators that guided further activity. Bateson and his actor-network theory associates were much more concerned with ontology, and found abstract essences to be quite untenable as ways to address that problem.

Back to de Laet and Mol. Although most of the article was quite good, I was disappointed to see that the Machiavellian slur was leveled (or at least entertained) here as well. Critics have argued that in invoking Machiavelli, actor-network theorists have created an incompatibility between the principle of symmetry that they hold and the extreme asymmetry of a Machiavellian viewpoint. de Laet and Mol give those critics comfort here:

For even if Latour's work shifts Pasteur out of the centre by pointing to the network he needs, it also suggests (or has been read as suggesting) that innovation, even if it turns out to be the work of a large army, does need a general in order to spread out. This Machiavellian reading of Latour says that technologies depend on a power-seeking strategist who, given a laboratory, plots to change the world. (p.227)

But neither Latour nor Machiavelli subscribe to this view! With friends like these, who need enemies?

>

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Engestrom on Expansive Learning at Work)

Originally posted: Tue, 17 May 2005 18:49:15

Engestrom's "Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization" (Journal of Education and Work 14.1, 2001) is very similar to some of the other Engestrom articles and chapters I've reviewed recently. In fact, it shares some passages with "Developmental work research as educational research." But it covers some different ground as well.

For instance, in its brief history of activity theory, it acknowledges the "deep-seated insensitivity of the second generation activity theory toward cultural diversity" originally pointed out by Michael Cole (p.135), and says that the internationalization of AT meant that "questions of diversity and dialogue between different traditions or perspectives became increasingly serious challenges" (p.135). Ah. So is this why Bakhtin's dialogism has become so interesting to third-generation activity theorists?

Engestrom then lays out the working of an activity network, including a diagram on p.136 in which the objects of two activity systems form a third object -- a Venn diagram portraying the intersection of the separate objects. He differentiates among

- "object 1" ("an initial state of unreflected, situationally given 'raw material'" such as "a specific patient entering a physician's office")

- "object 2" ("a collecively meaningful object constructed by the activity system" such as "the patient constructed as a specimen of a biomedical disease category and thus as an instantiation of the general object of illness/health")

- "object 3" ("a potentially shared and constructed object" such as "a collaboratively constructed understanding of the patient's life situation and care plan")

"The object of activity," he concludes, "is a moving target, not reducible to conscious short-term goals.

Given the understanding of the object, Engestrom summarizes AT in terms of five principles:

- The activity system "seen in its network relations to other activity systems" becomes the unit of analysis (p.136).

- Activity systems are multivoiced: "the activity system itself carries multiple layers and strands of history engraved in its artifacts, rules, and conventions. The multi-voicedness is multiplied in networks of interacting activity systems. It is a source of trouble and a source of innovation, demanding actions of translation and negotiation" (p.136).

- Activity systems have historicity: they "take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods of time." "History itself needs to be studied as local history of the activity and its objects, and as history of the theoretical ideas and tools that have shaped the activity" (pp.136-137).

- Contradictions are central to change and development. "Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within or between activity systems" (p.137).

- Activity systems undergo expansive transformations in which "the object and motive of the activity are reconceptualized to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity" (p.137). Engestrom links expansive transformations to the zone of proximal development.

Engestrom uses these five principles as the columns in a matrix; the rows are the questions:

- Who are learning?

- Why do they learn?

- What do they learn?

- How do they learn?

The matrix turns out to be a useful heuristic for examining learning, which is AT's main focus, at least as it has tended to be conceptualized by Vygotsky and Engestrom. In fact, the question of learning is so important for Engestrom that he begins to see it everywhere, and assert it with such assurance that I begin to doubt my own memory. Does Engestrom really say that "Latour's (1987, 1996) actor-network theory recommends that we locate learning in a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors"? Why, yes he does, here on p.140. Does Latour ever mention the term "learning" or a related concept? No, not really, not unless you locate learning as central to collective activity. Latour does not. In fact, from what I can tell, Latour remains agnostic about individual learning, and is much more interested in the forming of settlements -- which does not necessarily include learning or subscribe to a theory of learning at all!

To Engestrom, studying knowledge formation or the sociology of scientific knowledge implies a theory of learning; to Latour, it does not. That's because the two have very different projects with very different emphases and origins. For instance, look back at the history of activity theory and you'll see a progressive outgrowth from the study of individual cognition (Vygotsky) to larger structures. As you can see from the matrix mentioned above, the individually oriented concepts have turned into concepts for studying overall activity. Expansive visibilization, for instance, is simply the zone of proximal development applied to activities rather than individuals. Compare that with actor-network theory, which has its roots in political and economic theory and sociology, with an assist from philosophy and rhetoric -- all of which are concerned with group or societal relations rather than individual relations. ANT doesn't build on the notion of an individual to reach its understanding of human activity; it tracks movements, not learning.

Let's end with something that has been interesting me quite a bit lately: The concept of the germ-cell. In Learning, Working, and Imagining, Engestrom discusses Frederich Engels' example of Carnot's theorization of the steam engine. From Engels' Dialectics of nature, p.229: "the steam engine provided the most striking proof that one can impart heat and obtain mechanical motion. 100,000 steam engines did not prove this any more than the one?>

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Engestrom on co-configuration work)

Originally posted: Mon, 16 May 2005 19:22:33

Last week I read a few more articles meant to help me understand the relationships between activity theory and actor-network theory. Things have bogged down a bit as I've been trying to digest these many articles as well as well as rereading Latour's Pandora's Hope, one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. I'll have to post supplemental notes on it soon, since the first review really doesn't do it justice. But in any case, let's look at the article in today's reading roundup:

Engestrom, Y. "New forms of learning in co-configuration work."

This isn't really an article -- it's a paper that Engestrom presented at a seminar in 2004. Although it's only ten pages long, it's full of insights.

Engestrom starts with Victor and Boynton's "historical framework for the reintegration of organization, work, and learning" in which they "identify five types of work in the history of industrial production: craft, mass production, process enhancement, mass customization, and co-configuration" (p.1). (I haven't read Victor and Boynton's book, but it sounds of a piece with Zuboff and Maxmin's.) Engestrom's Figure 1 helpfully depicts these types of work, along with descriptions of each. Under co-configuration, the description is "Dialogical configuration knowledge."

The question, then, is one that Engestrom has become increasingly interested in addressing: how do we account for work-based learning in what some gloss as the "new economy" or the "knowledge economy" or "distributed capitalism" -- or if you prefer, the "control society" or the "informatics of domination"? Engestrom is clearly positioning third-generation activity theory for the challenge, and the term "dialogical" signals that he sees Bakhtin's dialogism as continuing to be a key part of adapting this third-generation AT appropriately.

What is co-configuration work? Engestrom quotes Victor and Boynton:

The work of co-configuration involves building and sustaining a fully integrated system that can sense, respond, and adapt to the individual experience of the customer. When a firm does co-configuration work, it creates a product that can learn and adapt, but it also builds an ongoing relationship between each customer-product pair and the company. ... a living, growing network develops between customer, product, and company. (Victor & Boynton 1998, p.195)

So the customer becomes a "real partner" with the producer; producers form "a strategic alliance, supplier network, or other such pattern of partnership" (p.2). And here Engestrom firmly pegs this work to knotworking. (I'm starting to see not just a trend but also a strategy on Engestrom's part, a strategy to reposition developmental work activity as a player in the new economy. I'm also starting to see why Engestrom wants to pick off actor-network theory as a potential rival in this area.) And Engestrom adds:

A precondition of successful co-configuration work is dialogue in which the parties rely on real-time feedback information on their activity. The interpretation, negotiation, and synthesizing of such information between the parties requires new, dialogical and reflective knowledge tools as well as collaboratively constructed functional rules and infrastructures. (p.3)

That reflective work happens across as well as within activities (p.4), meaning that the next generation of expansive learning "puts the horizontal and inter-organizational dimension of learning in the center" (p.4). Yet expansive learning is still taken as "a sequence of learning actions ascending from the initial abstract 'germ cell' to the concrete whole of the system to be mastered" (p.4) -- what Engestrom has often called "ascending from the abstract to the concrete." The notion of a germ cell is a bit questionable in my mind given the apparent reliance on linearity of development (common to dialectic), but I need to do much more thinking on the subject.

In any case,

learning in co-configuration settings is typically distributed over long, discontinuous periods of time. It is accomplished in and between multiple loosely interconnected activity systems and organizations operating in divided local and global terrains and representing different traditions, domains of expertise, and social languages. Learning is crucially dependent on the contribution of the clients or users. Learning is embedded in major transformations, upheavals, innovations, implementations, and movements. It takes place in heterogeneous patchworks and textures of small and large, unnoticeable and spectacular actions, objectifications, trajectories, and trails. (p.5)

Engestrom proposes that "the expansive learning required and generated by co-configuration work" has three features: It is transformative (broadening the shared objects of work with new and adapted tools); horizontal and dialogical ("crossing boundaries and tying knots between activity systems operating in divided multi-organizational terrains" (p.5)); and subterranean (blazing "cognitive trails" that constitute the "invisible, rhizomatic infrastructure of new forms of expansive learning at work" (p.5)). The last one is a bit puzzling, since "rhizomatic infrastructure" seems to be a contradiction in terms, but it's interesting to see how Engestrom is pullling other perspectives into activity theory. Engestrom is a great synthesizer, and sometimes I think his reach exceeds his grasp, but he certainly has developed activity theory quite a bit through this synthesis.

Brilliant stuff here, but then Engestrom has to follow up with a blatantly incorrect critique of actor-network theory: "there is a risk in focusing exclusively on actors. The professionals and their discursive interactions may appear as somewhat omnipotent constructors of their activities and social worlds. From the point of view of activity theory, this would mean that the material grounding and stubborn system dynamics of practical activities are lost or ignored, the resistance of objects is forgotten" (p.6). But this is a description of constructivism, not actor-network theory, and Latour makes a nearly identical argument against constructivism in Pandora's Hope! How often Latour and his colleagues have made this same point, clarifying that "actors" are not just humans or professionals, but also nonhumans or objects that continually resist! How often actor-network theorists argue that we are not omnipotent constructors, not by a long shot! Not to mince words: This is just a sloppy critique, not up to the quality of the rest of the piece.

So let's get back to the rest of the piece. Engestrom argues that rather than following the actors, we should follow the objects of work activity. Professional work is socio-spatially distributed, "forming long chains of interconnected practical and discursive actions" (p.6). The objects of work are "heterogeneous and internally contradictory," enduring, and constantly reproduced (p.6). The object is the key to understanding change and learning, and "expansive learning is above all stepwise explanation of the object" (p.6). so Engestrom suggests that we

(1) follow the objects of co-configuration work in their temporal and socio-spatial trajectories, (2) give the objects a voice by involving the clients or users in dialogues where the object is negotiated, (3) expand the objects by organizing intervention sessions where the producers and clients construct new shared models, concepts and tools to master their objects. (p.7)

All right, although "give the objects a voice" sounds more like giving the participants a voice; I wish Engestrom would be more careful to delineate what he's doing from ANT's related project.

Blogged with Flock

Reading :: Learning Challenges in Organic Vegetable Farming

Originally posted: Mon, 16 May 2005 18:13:01

Learning Challenges in Organic Vegetable Farming: An Activity Theoretical Study of On-Farm Practices

by Laura Seppanen

A while back I planned to read a set of dissertations that had come out of the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at the University of Helsinki, starting with Mervi Hasu's. Other readings intervened, so I've only now come to the second. Like Hasu's, Seppanen's dissertation is a "wrapper" that contextualizes and pulls together several published single-author and multi-author articles. The text itself is only 74 pages, but it refers to the six other articles, indicating an impressive amount of work.

I confess that I skimmed quickly through the dissertation. Much of it involved simply applying activity theory to the activity of organic farming -- a worthwhile exercise, but not one that generated many new insights into activity theory itself. The insight that "learning in organic vegetable farming is a continuous, dynamic process" (p.5) doesn't seem to be terribly surprising (although I thought it was a bit broad of a claim given the scope of the study).

On the other hand, there were some surprises in the way the activity was visualized. For instance, on p.13, Seppanen provides a diagram that visualizes the levels of activity in organic farming. Levels of activity are typically represented textually or in tables, but here Seppanen depicts the levels of activity, action, and operation in what looks like a hierarchical or "tree" graphic; each element on one level is decomposed into many elements on the next level. In addition, she provides an intermediary step between activity and action: "Practices (groups of actions) such as onion planting." The activity of the particular farm is depicted as "embedded" in the general activity. I think that this diagram is useful for thinking about the relationships among these different elements, but it's also misleading in a few key ways.

First, activities are not simply embedded as depicted here, they interpenetrate other activities simultaneously. This is a key tenet of the "third-generation" activity theory being developed at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, and it's also reflected in Seppanen's discussion of the particular organic farmers she studied -- who entered the activity of organic farming late and brought in tools and practices from other activities.

Second, the intermediary step of practices may or may not make sense, but it's really not orthodox activity theory and Seppanen doesn't provide a discussion or cites to justify this change. Perhaps this notion of practice has been picked up by others at CATDWR, but I don't see much evidence of that. I'm not sure how grounded this intermediary step is in that research, but it seems like trying to leverage a notion that is often discussed in related literatures (e.g., Lave and Wenger).

Third, the portrayal of activities decomposing into practices which in turn decompose into actions, etc. is one that, although more or less consistent with activity theory since Leont'ev, overmodularizes the relationships and underestimates the interconnectedness of these relationships. For instance, the same action (say, planting an onion) could help to move along several activities simultaneously; the same operation (say, lifting an onion sack) could intersect more than one action; and so on. I'm reminded of the family farmers in Iowa who often take up other jobs so that they can support the family farm, which remains unprofitable in itself. Each corn seed that is planted is supposed to eventually bring a monetary yield, but it also allows the farmer to continue participating in the family farm, to continue being a farmer in her community of family farmers, to figuratively put her thumb in Monsanto's eye, to (perhaps) draw farming subsidies, to feel closer to the land. These are not only significances but social-material activities, and the modular relations depicted in this figure don't really do them justice.

As you can tell, the dissertation is thought-provoking. My sense is that it was written just as much for agricultural readers as for activity theorists, so it's not surprising that the dissertation doesn't go to heroic lengths to generate new theory; it is primarily meant to recontextualize organic farming with the help of activity theory. That it tends to do quite well, providing another example of how learning-by-expanding can provide insights into developmental work activity.

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Thomas, Wilde on Marx and Engels)

Originally posted: Thu, 05 May 2005 19:03:29

Following up on my examination of some of the roots of activity theory, I recently read selections from The Cambridge Companion to Marx. In particular, I was interested in the relations among Marx, Engels, dialectic, and contradiction. Just a few notes on these:

Thomas, Paul. "Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now"

Thomas argues that much of what we ascribe to Marx is actually the work of Marx's sometime collaborator and posthumous popularizer, Engels. "In considerable measure Engels invented what has come down to us as Marxism," Thomas charges (p.36), particularly the understanding of Marxist thought as "a coherent system of materialist metaphysics" or a universal system that extended into the natural as well as the social world (p.36). "Augmented by his Dialectics of Nature, Engels' works were given a new lease on life by the Russian Revolution"; they, not Marx's works, underpinned dialectical and historical materialism (p.40). "Engels' doctrines owed little or nothing to Marx, the man he called his mentor, yet this went along with the assertion of a joint identity: Engels referred self-consciously to 'our doctrine'" (p.41). Engels' version of Marxism, Thomas says, "had an improperly scientistic aspect that is at variance with what we can now identify as Marx's approach, method, and subject matter" (p.41; he cites Carver 1981 here). Thomas credits this variance not to "mandacity and perfidy" but rather to Engels' misunderstanding; Engels was "the last of the true believers" (p.42). (Latour would say that Engels translated Marx's work.)

Wilde, Lawrence. "Logic: Dialectic and Contradiction"

Wilde also has uncomplimentary things to say about Engels. In his chapter on dialectic, Wilde describes how Marx adapted Hegel's idealist dialectic into a materialist method, particularly examining how Hegel and Marx handled the notion of contradiction in opposition to formal logic (p.277). He examines Marx's work sympathetically. Engels not so much. "In writings published after Marx's death in 1883, Engels extended the dialectical method to encompass nature and in doing so transformed dialectic into a set of three 'laws.' This work had nothing to do with Marx's own dialectic, which, as we have seen, was quintessentially a social scientific method. Nevertheless, Engels claimed that Marx had approved his work before he died" -- I wonder how that transpired -- "and the dialectic came to be associated with the confident certainty of positive science" (p.291, and again the author credits Carver 1983). Marx didn't explicitly articulate dialectic, so Engels' Dialectics of Nature fit the bill, presenting a simplified, universalized dialectic that was easy to follow (p.291).

Some Soviets did reread Marx and raise questions about Engels: "it was not until 1923 that the first suggestions came from the Marxist movement that the dialectical methods of Marx and Engels were incompatible" (p.292). But "there was an almost hysterical reaction to these works in the official international Communist movement" and the scholars Lukacs and Korsch were not terribly popular around the Marxist water cooler by the end of the 1920s. (Notice that Lukacs raised his objections about the time that Vygotsky's writings were being assembled for publication. Vygotsky's books, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, have Engels' fingerprints all over them.)

These two readings emphasize the difficulty of critiquing Marx -- but also how easy it is to critique Engels! The problem is that Marx is hard to read and Engels is easy, so we are tempted to either read Marx through Engels (leading to misguided critiques) or scapegoat Engels (leading to a pass for Marx).

>

Blogged with Flock

(Reading Roundup: Saarelma, Miettinen, Witte on Activity Theory)

Originally posted: Thu, 05 May 2005 09:39:38

Although I have a shelf full of books to read, I've put them on hold for a bit so I can read some really interesting articles on activity theory. Here are three:

Saarelma, Osmo. "Descriptions of Subjective Networks as a Mediator of Developmental Dialogue."

This short article appeared in the Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition in 1993, and is frequently cited as an early example of activity networks -- linked activity systems. The case itself isn't terribly illuminating -- a description of different fields that intersect in health care --- but we can see both the roots of current "third-generation" AT theorizing here and some of the problems that the "third generation" is running into. Insightfully, Saarelma says that "the meaning of the links may be multiple" (p.103) -- the contacts of the different activities may be seen quite differently. So Saarelma's picture of the "idealized network of activity systems" (courtesy Engestrom 1987) is followed by several diagrams depicting the network as it is described by workers in the different fields (pp.107-108). Most of the activities depicted are the same, but the descriptions vary widely, with different links and different types of links. It's a fairly interesting comparison, and Saarelma resists the urge to collapse the perspectives into a unified diagram (although Saarelma does end with the standard AT move of mapping out contradictions). Multiplicity is allowed to remain in the analysis.

In all, this is a nicely methodical way of handling networks. It still assumes that activities = fields and that fields = nodes, but that simplifying assumption seems worthwhile in the interest of exploring these different perceptions. I can see why later AT work still cites it.

Miettinen, Reijo. "Object Construction and Networks in Research Work: The Case of Research on Cellulose-Degrading Enzymes."

Miettinen's work also deals with activity networks, but it comes a few years later, in 1998 (Social Studies of Science 28.3). Miettinen's study is broader too: it examines the work of a research community, which is to say a network of activities formed around a shared research object: cellulose-degrading enzymes. And it covers a much longer time, 1972-1998. Miettinen is apparently trying to position AT as a superior contender to actor-network theory as a way to understand science, technology, and society (STS), as he has done elsewhere.

Unfortunately, he's hampered by the clunky language of AT. Take this sentence: "The concept of object transcends the duality between subject and object" (p.424). Or this one: "An object ... can be either a means or an object in research activity" (p.431). In both cases, Miettinen is using the word "object" in two different ways -- as a "thing" vs. the object(ive) of an activity -- and this confusion obscures the more interesting implications of his work. Miettinen is studying "object formation," which is to say, what a network of activities is working on, how it construes the object of its work, what it is trying to understand and produce.

When Miettinen speaks of networks of activity, he delineates an activity as "an object-oriented, culturally and socially mediated system, with division of labour and rules that regulate interaction between the participating individuals. A work community, or a community of practitioners with a common object, can be viewed as an activity system" (p.424). Scientific research is one such community. And it "depends on other societal activities that provide it with problems, tools and funds, and utilizes its results" (p.424). That is to say, Miettinen is portraying an activity network as a set of activities that provide inputs (problems, tools, funds) or receive outputs (utilizes results). Unlike Saarelma, Miettinen isn't so concerned with multiplicity and seems uninterested in examining closely overlapping activities and boundary work.

It is perhaps for this reason that he levels his critique against ANT: "an analysis of network formation in terms of interests, goals, persuasion and enrolment is not enough. I propose that, if we are to understand the content of collaboration and the motives of participants, we need an analysis of the historically formed objects of participating activity systems, and also of the objects constructed together by them" (p.426). That is to say, Miettinen wants an account of network formation that allows for cultural-historical development, which is not surprising given his AT grounding. But the problem, I think, has to do with AT's handling of activity systems. As Witte argues (see below), the level of activity is an abstraction without clear empirical grounding for determining and circumscribing an activity. ANT gets around the question in a way that is perhaps a bit facile, but nonetheless fairly clear: rather than assuming stable social structures (such as activity systems), assume that actors are defined and locked in through a process of translation in which interests, goals, persuasion, and enrollment play key parts. That is, AT assumes stable social formations that develop over time and have distinct, unitary identities; ANT assumes that actants are all made on the fly and have to be persuaded to hang together, not just to each other, but in themselves. (See my upcoming TCQ piece for more on this.)

With this in mind, Miettinen's critique is somewhat tautological. Miettinen gets around the problem by assuming that networks are composed of persistent activities linked through culturally and historically developing relationships that are primarily characterizable as inputs and outputs (i.e., border work that does not touch the basic structure of the component activity systems). When he says that interests, etc. are not enough, actor-network theorists might turn around and say: persistent social structures such as activity systems are not enough, and that's why we have pursued a relationist sociology in which the pursuit of interests becomes a central explanation in the first place!

Miettinen goes further as he gets into the analysis, arguing that the concept of "interest" in ANT begs the question of where goals and interests come from in the first place. Miettinen, of course, points back to the developmental view: "an explanation of the motives for participating in a network presupposes an analysis of the history and dilemmas associated with the participating activity systems" (p.446). The ANT account lacks the stability required of a developmental account. "The motive for participating in the construction of an object can be understood in reference to the participating activity system's attempts to expand, redirect or transform its historically formed basic activity. The emerging new motive can be characterized as an attempt to solve dilemmas and problems in its basic activity, or to find a new possibility for extending that activity" (pp.445-446). That is, activities are transformed and develop new motives by working out contradictions. "These new motives can be characterized as transformative interests, because they are related to the transformation of a collective activity system. Consequently, they cannot be analyzed in terms of the goals of individuals" (p.446). Here, Miettinen is assuming and ascribing the view of extreme asymmetry that he has previously accused ANT of holding; this is based on his understanding of Machiavelli (p.453). ANT scholars have typically argued for symmetry, in which humans, nonhumans, and collectives of these can be understood as actants; interests are not necessarily related to individuals, but can be applied and have been applied to organizations, scallops, variable-reluctance motors, and various other actants (and not just as "a rhetorical resource used by human actors in their controversies," as Miettinen says (p.453)!).

But the symmetrical, interest-based analysis provided by ANT simply doesn't allow the developmental perspective that interests Miettinen. "These networks are important arenas of learning, boundary-crossing and the creation of new ideas and artifacts. They are also a central mechanism for connecting research work to other societal activities -- an unavoidable issue in studying the relationship of science to society" (p.451). And:

To understand the motives of the participants of these innovation networks, one needs to analyze each participating activity system and its relation to the object to be constructed in the network. Participation in the construction can be understood as an attempt to extend, redirect or transform the participants' historically formed activity systems. Interests may be characterized as an attempt to solve emerging problems and contradictions of the activity, to extend that activity. (p.451)

Whereas ANT is totally unconcerned with learning and cognition, AT is quite concerned with both. So Miettinen takes it as a given that any proper account of science take into account learning, cognition, development, etc.

I've concentrated mostly on Miettinen's critique of ANT, which frustrates me because Miettinen is obviously smart and well read in the ANT literature, but doesn't quite seem to get what the project is about, and therefore ends up criticizing ANT in AT's terms. Of course ANT will not compare well with AT when AT serves as its own exemplar! But Miettinen's analysis itself is quite sharp and displays some of the real advantages of an AT approach. Miettinen persuasively argues that the scientific work in the case passes through several models of artifacts: from "where-to" to "why" to "where-to," in Wartofsky's terms. Whatever the merits of the ANT critique, the AT work is interesting and valuable.

Witte, Stephen. "Research in Activity: An Analysis of Speed Bumps as Mediational Means"

Several days ago, I described Bracewell & Witte's article critiquing activity theory. Witte recently passed away, so some of the work he produced in his last days has been edited and published; this piece, like the Bracewell & Witte piece, appears in Written Communication, of which he was co-editor. Based on an invited lecture, this piece lays out Witte's sympathetic critique of activity theory in broad terms. Witte was one of the most gifted thinkers in rhetoric, and he has some very interesting things to say here; I wish we were able to have a conversation about this piece, which is both perceptive and sometimes a little dismissive.

Witte frames his claims as tentative:

The analysis I present in this article should be seen as preliminary and exploratory; it is not (yet) an argument but rather an argument in the making. However, should an argument eventually be developed from this preliminary analysis, it would include at least these three tentative claims:(a) literacy cannot be understood by focusing on literacy directly because that approach inevitably turns literacy into its own explanation; (b) literacy cannot be understood as activity because that procedure yields a fusion of part and whole such that activity becomes its own explanation; and (c) the unit-of-analysis problems that underlie accounts that explain literacy in terms of literacy or which explain literacy as activity will require the development of new units of analysis for studying literacy from an activity theoretic point of view. (p.128)

This seems like false modesty, since Witte then tears into AT with a vengeance. Or at least he strongly critiques its usefulness for questions of literacy, and intends to locate "some of the weaknesses in the thinking of those whose uses of activity theory resemble the antics of a kitten that has just discovered that a ball of twine can be a plaything" (p.130). (I can't help but feel implicated.)

As in the Bracewell and Witte piece, he argues that a disjuncture between Vygotskian-Lurian and Leontev'an strands of thought has muddied the waters considerably. In particular, Leont'ev's contribution of the activity system, further developed by Engestrom, really problematized things because activity systems are nearly impossible to apply as anything other than a theoretical concept. The activity system as unit of analysis has both focus and boundary problems, especially in research design. Witte asserts that the criteria for focus and boundary questions seem to come from outside the model rather than within it (p.140).

The boundary problem is particularly vexing at the level of actions "because in the context of overlapping activities, one can find no principled way of aligning a given action unambiguously with a given activity" (p.141). But the problem exists at all levels. Take for instance -- and this is my example here, not Witte's -- a customer service representative at a telephone company who is being shadowed by a new employee. When she uses her tools and talks to customers, is she training the employee or serving customers? And since she knows that the new employee may be asked about his training experience, is she thinking about a third activity involving self-promotion? If she speeds up her pace near the end of her shift, is it because she is thinking about her home activities and trying to get out the door in time? Each operation and action could potentially be multivalent, and there's no methodologically sound way to firmly separate them.

The unit-of-analysis problem is similarly vexing:

If every human engagement with the social or material world is part of an activity or an activity system(and all such engagements may well be), as a researcher I amleft with two equally unsatisfactory research strategies, given the two writers? theoretical models. Either I can offer a description of some activity around which I?ve drawn some arbitrary boundaries, knowing that my description is not in and of itself an explanation, or I can explain activity in terms of activity, in which case the object of analysis becomes indistinguishable from the analysis itself. What is missing in Engeström?s and Leont?ev?s theories of activity is, in effect, the specification of a unit or units of analysis that would allow me to account for or to explain activity in terms of something other than itself. Tautology is not just a problem in logic and in formal definition; it is also a problem when one tries to transform activity theory into a program of research. (p.141)

Activity, he charges, cannot function as a unit of analysis; it can be known only through observed effects or consequences, like gravity (p.142).

At this point, Witte goes into the example of the speed bump. This is familiar territory if you've read your Latour, who talks about the "sleeping policeman" as mediator. The examination is a good one, but didn't shed a lot of new light for me. But at the end of this discussion, he does get to the point that "any given activity never exists independently of other activities" and says that Edwin Hutchins' and Christina Haas'

analyses of mediational tools, technologies, and / or artifacts similarly discover a range of activities and activity systems informing, circulating about, and penetrating the mediational means they explore. This interdependence among activities may?if I can be so bold to reach beyond the boundaries of my own data and theirs?provide the objective basis for what might be termed the continuity of mental life and the continuity of social life. (p.154)

Yes, yes. Witte wants to press forward into the realm of networks -- we could even say activity networks -- and Witte certainly wants to explore them in terms of Vygotskian mediation (which he finds to be a much more congenial way to talk about activity than levels). He does not cite any of the "third generation" work on activity networks in particular, though I assume he was familiar with the relevant literature. My take is that he simply rejected it because he saw too much of the input/output school (see Miettinen above) and not enough consideration of the dialogic, multivalent nature of these linkages. Witte's main concern was literacy, and I find his work here to be congenial with Callon's discussions of texts as circulators as well as Star's discussions of texts as boundary objects.

Reading :: After the Breakup

Originally posted: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 09:46:04

After the Breakup : U.S. Telecommunications in a More Competitive Era

by Robert W. Crandall

It's difficult to emphasize exactly how important the breakup of AT&T was for the US telecommunications industry. The US had something that turns out to be quite rare -- a private telecommunications infrastructure -- and AT&T held a virtual monopoly on it until the Department of Justice brought an antitrust suit and AT&T was forced to settle it with a consent decree in 1982. This book, written in 1991, asks: how has the telecommunications system fared in the intervening years?

Robert Crandall, to his credit, doesn't try to give us a simple answer. The telephone equipment and services sector has turned into a set of increasingly competitive markets (p.1); phone bills are more detailed and complex (p.1); regulators have overlapping jurisdictions (p.2). And the peculiar economy of telecommunications, in which every subscriber represents a separate service, means that the economy is not intuitive: "the cost of connecting any subscriber to a switch increases with distance to the switch," so economies of density do not translate into economies of scale (p.3). The latter point contributes to the fact that it's tremendously expensive to service rural customers. If you're running a virtual monopoly (80% of the local exchange market going into the 1960s - p.8), you can subsidize the rural customers from profits drawn from urban areas (p.13) -- as well as from long distance profits, which subsidized all local service anyway. But once the market is vertically fragmented (p.41), this arrangement becomes harder to sustain.

According to Crandall, the telecommunications market's rates were distorted in five ways between 1934-1960:

1) Long distance rates were kept artificially high to subsidize local service.

2) Long distance rates were based on distance -- but distance was not a good measure of actual cost; call density was.

3) Local service had a higher operating cost in rural areas than in urban ones, but the rates were the opposite: Rural customers paid less for their expensive service.

4) Business customers were charged more, although the real cost of the service was the same as for residential customers.

5) Local service was offered as a flat rate, meaning that heavy users paid as much as light users. (p.23)

This uneasy settlement, which had much to do with keeping politicians and their constituents happy, became more difficult to sustain once new technologies were brought into play. Microwave transmission, for instance, has a relatively low economy of scale; satellite and fiber-optic transmissions also allow low economies of scale (p.4). But it was microwave transmission that really changed things. Imagine being AT&T: you've spent an enormous amount of money on your "long lines," your miles and miles of copper wire strung along wooden poles, connecting different parts of the country. If anyone wants to compete, they have to be willing to duplicate your network, an extremely expensive proposition not just to set up but to maintain. Then suddenly MCI comes along with two microwave towers, placed in two different cities on one of your most profitable routes, and sets up an instant long distance connection -- no poles, no lines, no maintenance of miles of copper, no tree pruning or line splicing!

In any case, various changes led the FCC to reprice long-distance and local service in the 1970s: it proposed phasing out "non-traffic-sensitive cost recovery from access charges on long-distance carriers by instituting fixed monthly subscriber-line charges (SLCs) on business and residential customers" (p.31). The full plan was frustrated politically, but the SLCs are right there on your phone bill today.

Another really intriguing development is that private networks are being set up with increasing frequency. Private branch exchanges (PBXes), private microwave transmissions, and local fiber-optic networks are proliferating, as well as cellular telephone networks (p.52, 75). And all have to deal with what I've called the first articulation of universal service, in which different networks must be linked to form a single subscriber universe.

And then there's regulation:

The liberalization of telephone services and equipment markets and the AT&T divestiture have placed enormous pressures on regulators, telephone companies, and labor. The entire telephone rate structure, a reflection of generations of political decisionmaking, is being radically revamped by regulators who are now much more attuned to market forces. Carriers must respond to the changes in regulation and to the rapid growth in competition. These responses, in turn, affect the efficiency of the entire telephone network. (p.106)

Liberalization doesn't mean deregulation, except for terminal equipment (phones, faxes). Currently, the telecommunications industry is regulated by three regulatory bodies with overlapping jurisdictions: the FCC, state public utility commissions, and the US district court for the District of Columbia (a result of a foolish decision Justice Greene made while dealing with the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment) (pp. 12-13). The problem, Crandall worries, is that when you combine heavy regulation and liberalization of entry (competition), you often get cartels: "Regulators are likely to be forced into the role of cartel managers, particularly if one or one carriers find themselves unable to compete. New entrants or even incumbents may use the regulatory process to prevent their rivals from cutting rates, claiming that such rate reductions are 'predatory'" (p.155).

All in all, Crandall's 1991 book pointed out several pressures and disjunctures originating before the breakup and building afterwards. It's instructive to read this book in conjunction with one of the many post-1996 books discussing how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 handled these issues. >

Blogged with Flock