Reading :: The Control Revolution

Originally posted: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:43:56

The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society

by James Beniger

This 1986 book provides an interesting perspective on the "control revolution," the startling uptick in technologies and procedures meant to provide economic and political control in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Beniger sees the world as a sort of computational system, one that dialectically reorders itself:

the Control Revolution also represented the beginning of a restoration -- although with increasing centralization -- of the economic and political control that was lost at more local levels of society during the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, control of government and markets had depended on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via the new mass media. (p.7)

As he explains in the next paragraph, Beniger means control rather broadly: "purposive influence toward a predetermined goal" (p.7). (This definition is so important that he later uses it to distinguish between the organic and inorganic, p.35.) And Beniger becomes quite excited about one development in control technnologies: rationalization -- or, as Beniger prefers to call it, preprocessing, or decreasing the amount of information to be processed. "Rationalization may be defined as the destruction or ignoring of information in order to facilitate its processing" (p.15). For instance, in having people compress their experiences into the confines of standardized forms, bureaucracies reduce information processing (p.16). And bureaucracy has taken off in a big way, due partially to this sort of control through preprocessing: in one extraordinary graph, Beniger demonstrates how the information sector grew from 0.2% of the US civilian labor force in 1800 to 46.6% in 1980 (p.23).

More intriguingly, Beniger claims that digitalization transforms diverse forms of information into "a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as, centuries ago, the institution of common currencies and exchange rates began to transform local markets into a single world economy" (pp.25-26). (Later, in fact, he demonstrates how information such as waybills, elevator and storage receipts became negotiable paper: p.252.) The analogy between currencies and information comes up frequently: Beniger sees both as material flows, and states that the proper subject matter of social and behavioral sciences is to study these material information flows (p.38) -- the essence of human society, after all, is the processing of physical throughputs (p.37).

Those who have read Malone, Zuboff & Maxmin, or Reynolds will find some of the subsequent discussion to be familiar. Beniger insists that larger organizations generally necessitate more centralized control, but like Malone, uses markets as an example of efficient decentralized control brought about by new information and communication technologies (p.147). (Beniger, however, has detailed evidence.) He notes how in the mid 19th century, the social processing of material flows threatened to exceed the system's capacity to contain them (p.219). And in that vein, he provides a sympathetic account of increasingly centralized bureaucracies (p.229) and scientific management (p.231). However, he insists that although such technologies sometimes appear to deskill, they teach new skills and more complex tasks (p.424).

Intriguingly, he also investigated how information technologies hybridized across different activities. One story he tells is of Hollerith's inspiration for the punch cards that he used to tabulate the US census: rather than drawing from calculating and adding mechanisms, Hollerith drew from the "punch photographs" or punchcards used by railroads to confirm passengers' identities. Hollerith's first cards were even the same size and shape as these punch photos, and he punched the first of them with a conductor's punch! (p.412)

Writing in 1986, Beniger insists that information technologies will continue to be applied at higher and higher levels of control (p.434). I'm interested in how the outlook has changed in the last 20 years: Malone, Reynolds, and others claim that with the sharp increase in communication avenues, centralized control is no longer necessary and communication-intensive decentralized control mechanisms such as markets are viable at larger scales.

Would I recommend this book? I have to give a qualified yes. On the one hand, Beniger presents a compelling and well researched account of control over the last couple of centuries, and his treatment of society as a computational system foreshadows work by Hutchins and others. And his discussion of control mechanisms certainly puts bureaucracies and scientific management into a new light. On the other hand, Beniger has a tendency to overreach -- making his subject the dividing line between organic and inorganic, for instance -- and I often found myself wondering about how a strong consideration of multiplicities, polycontextuality, and ambiguity would affect his theses. That being said, this book is good background for anyone who is interested in the knowledge economy and how it came to be.

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Reading :: Reassembling the Social

Originally posted: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 20:40:04

Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

by Bruno Latour

To understand Latour's latest book, the key passage is a footnote on p.207 referring to a discussion in which he uses the Internet as a metaphor, he says:

I often find that my reader would complain a lot less about my writings if they could download ANT version 6.5 instead of sticking with the beta.

So is he saying that the work he has done over the last 30 years has evolved and matured? Yes -- but he implies repeatedly that the changes have mostly been in its presentation. ANT 6.5 has an updated interface -- Latour has dropped some terms and replaced or rearticulated others -- but he spends a lot of time arguing that the underlying protocol hasn't changed at all. In his discussions of networks (p.129), symmetry (p.76), and social construction (p.92), among many others, the story is the same: we used this term, poor as it was, to mean x; others thought we meant y; so we'll either change the term for those thick people or we'll stick with it and explain it just one more time

This is a story we might have read in Science in Action or Aramis. In Science in Action, scientists maintained apparent coherence in their research projects through a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes coordination that continually constructed, changed, and strengthened their experiments. In Aramis, engineers made several changes to a public transportation system, but ultimately the project's definition never changed, vital compromises were never struck, and the enterprise died.

So which is Reassembling the Social? A work that brings coherence to ANT by developing and reconciling it, even though Latour frames the work as consistent? Or is it a bullheaded attempt to simply say the same thing again, in different terms, hoping that this time people will understand?

I'm inclined to believe it's the former. Latour has provided a lot of review here, but he has genuinely addressed issues such as multiplicity, and he has also started to discuss new concepts such as plasma, "that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, submerged, mobilized, or subjectified" (p.244). That is, the reality, the "missing masses" that are not (yet) associated in a given actor-network.

Latour is also more inclined to pay respect to his opponents -- although only after characteristically sharp and often hyperbolic attacks.

One example is how he portrays conventional sociology (a theme familiar to readers of Aramis). He says that it ignores its informants' explanations and instead posits invisible, unverifiable "social forces" that supposedly pulls the strings -- even if, especially if the informants disagree with this notion. "This is conspiracy theory, not social theory," Latour says sharply -- and sensibly (p.53). And Latour, who has been frequently attacked for anthropomorphising nonhumans, turns the tables by pointing out how sociologists have used figurations in constructing sociological explanations, rather than attributing phenomena to people:

To endow an agency with anonymity gives it exactly as much a figure as when it's endowed with a name, a nose, a voice, a face. It's just making it ideo- instead of anthropo-morphic. Statistical aggregates obtained from a questionnaire and given a label -- like A and B types in the search for heart disease -- are as concrete as 'my red-faced sanguine neighbor who died last Saturday from a stroke while planting his turnips because he ate too much fat'. To say 'culture forbids having kids out of wedlock'' requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying 'my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter'. To be sure the first figuration (anonymous) is different from the second one (my mother-in-law), but they both give a figure, a form, a cloth, a flesh to an agency forbidding me or forcing me to do things. (pp.53-54)

He even says that if such social forces actually existed, politics would not be possible (p.250). Latour gave up on such "social forces" and figurations long ago, and he tells us his road-to-Damascus story:

After a week in Roger Guillemin's laboratory thirty years ago, I remember how inescapable I found the conclusion: the social cannot be substituted for the tiniest peptide, the smallest rock, the most innocuous electron, the tamest baboon. Objects of science may explain the social, not the other way around. No experience was more striking than what I saw with my own eyes: the social explanation had vanished into thin air. (p.99)

But - after this ringing condemnation, Latour admits that we must pay respect to formal sociology, for it has its place, albeit a specific place that comes only after the work of association and composition at which ANT excels (p.227). Latour even works up some respect for studies of cognition (p.209 fn 279).

So this book mends fences, Latour style. Latour's aim here is to redefine sociology as the tracing of associations (p.5), and to rehabilitate ANT as a sort of "laboratory" whose experiments can fail:

Would you qualify as 'scientific' a discipline that puts to one side the precise information offered by fieldwork and replaces it by instances of other things that are invisible and those things people have not said and have vocally denied?

(p.50)

ANT is "experimental metaphysics" (p.51). (And, yes, after repudiating the name "actor-network theory" a few years ago, Latour is again embracing it -- see p.9). So what does this experimental metaphysics look like? Latour likens it to drawing a coastline, bit by bit, based on many reported points (p.24).

Latour urges us to study controversies, since these tend to expose productive differences. (cf. Activity theory's contradictions.) He also sideswipes dialectics again (p.169), making a bit of a clearer case than he has earlier. Or is that just me?

>

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Reading :: Writing Machines

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:16:08

Writing Machines

By N. Katherine Hayles

Writing Machines was recommended to me by a colleague, who sees Hayles as an extremely important theorist in computers and English studies. Many do; I've seen Hayles cited many times and in many different bodies of literature. And this particular book has the virtue of being relatively recent (2002) and quite thin.

Unfortunately, I was not impressed by it. I wasn't impressed by the design, which seemed to be ripped off from Wired circa 2000. I wasn't impressed by the autobiographical elements, which Hayles inexplicably seemed to think would be rendered less rather than more pretentious if she recounted them in the third person with another person's name attached; I wasn't impressed with the analysis, which tended toward close textual readings of artifacts with very short shelf lives and little intrinsic interest for me. I certainly wasn't impressed with Hayles' narrative style, which attempts to approximate strong affective writing by piling on adjectives.

But I'm not sure if I can render a good evaluation of the book. It's clearly a work of literary criticism, describing Hayles' "long-standing interests in technology from a literary point of view" (p.7), and literary criticism doesn't have any intrinsic interest for me. I respect it as a field, like anthropology, economics, or materials engineering, but it's less applicable to my work than the other three. I think that the orientation of Writing Machines toward close reading of texts has a lot to do with the discipline it's in, and I'm not sure I'm well qualified to judge the work within that discipline. Perhaps it's the norm to laboriously explain the most obvious puns, which Hayles does throughout Chapter 4, for instance.

On the other hand, Hayles does broaden the notion of text in productive ways. Sounding a bit like Latour, she describes inscription technologies:

In print books words are obviously inscriptions because they take the form of ink marks impressed on paper. The computer also counts as an inscription technology, because it changes electric polarities and correlates these changes with binary code, higher-level languages such as C++ and Java, and the phosphor gleams of the cathode ray tube. To count as an inscription technology, a device must initiate material changes that can be read as marks. Telegraphy thus counts; it sends structured electronic pulses through a wire (material changes that can be read as marks) and connects these pulses with acoustic sound (or some other analogue signal) associated with marks on paper. Additional examples include film, video, and the images produced by medical devices such as X-rays, CAT scans, and MRI. Even nanotechnology slouched its way toward inscription when scientists arranged molecules to form their company's logo, IBM.

It would be easy to read this passage as a sort of land rush, a move to claim even more texts under the aegis of literary criticism (and a move with which we rhetoricians are familiar). But I think Hayles deserves credit here for seriously considering what Bakhtin called "low genres" and what Latour maintains are vital ways to transform assemblages. (In fact, I can now see why their names are sometimes linked.) By taking these multiple inscriptions seriously -- and by resisting the urge to make "interpretation" a central part of the definition of inscriptions -- Hayles deserves a lot of credit.

>

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Reading :: An Army of Davids

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:11:56

An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

by Glenn Reynolds

Glenn Reynolds is the University of Tennessee law professor behind the wildly popular libertarian-leaning blog Instapundit. For years now, his blog has been a sort of central clearinghouse of information, particularly serving the right half of the blogosphere. And now he has written a popular book -- not about the website or even the phenomenon of blogs, but the greater shifts he is seeing in how work, lives, and culture are being distributed, shifted, remixed, rearticulated, and reauthorized. The overall theme of An Army of Davids is that the "Davids" -- individuals with limited resources but access to networked information technologies -- are able to take on the "Goliaths," the massive corporations and governments that used to have a lock on production and coordination work. Reynolds draws on the sorts of examples you might expect, such as the Rathergate incident, but also discusses manufacturing, music production and distribution, publishing, and the service economy.

The book is, I emphasize, a popular book, and consequently there's not a lot new here for people who have been assiduously following knowledge economy developments. In fact, there's a lot of simplification and glossing. Reynolds, for instance, rearticulates the thesis that Thomas W. Malone pushes in his popular book, that organizations are changing primarily because the cost of communication has decreased dramatically. He draws on examples that Hugh Hewitt used in Blog, such as Rathergate and the Trent Lott incident. And he touches on themes of individual empowerment that have been a staple of new economy/knowledge economy literature, while eliding the sorts of criticisms that occur in more critical, scholarly works. An Army of Davids tends to give a positive, enthusiastic view of the possibilities generated by widespread, inexpensive access to networked technologies, and it is clearly influenced by its author's libertarian views.

But what's wrong with that? The book doesn't pretend to be scholarship, and it accomplishes its mission of laying out -- in clear terms, with well told narratives -- the promises and possibilities of networked technologies. It gives plentiful examples of how things are changing the way we work and think today, concretely, and speculates about how those changes might be carried forward in the next five, ten, or twenty years. Few people have thought as much about the cultural impact of these technologies, and few people have absorbed and written about so many instances of them. An Army of Davids is not critical scholarship, but it doesn't aim to be and it doesn't have to be. I would recommend it over Blog, The Cluetrain Manifesto, or any other popular book I've read about the subject. But read it in close proximity with Castells.

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Reading :: Qualitative Data Analysis

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:42:16

Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (2ed)

by Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman

I read this book about two weeks ago, but everyone in my family has been sick, so I haven't gotten a chance to blog it until now.

Qualitative Data Analysis is a classic sourcebook on principled, rigorous analysis of qualitative data, and if someone ever accuses qualitative research of being entirely subjective or anecdotal, you should show this book to them. Miles and Huberman have correctly identified analysis as the Achilles' heel of much qualitative research and have set out to provide a variety of methods for analyzing it. "You know what you display," they say (sounding positively Latourean), so they also provide guidance on reducing data and displaying it (p.11).

I read this book in 2001, but had forgotten how comprehensive and how valuable it is. Even though the book primarily focuses on analysis, Miles and Huberman provide an overview of the entire process, from design to data collection to analysis and reporting. They discuss how to link qualitative and quantitative data in all phases. And they don't get mired in abstract theoretical discussions (as Creswell and others tend to do). In fact, much of the book consists of concrete, practical techniques such as systems to collect, store, and reconcile data. Think of it as GTD for research.

But where the book really shines is in its discussions of coding and displays. Miles and Huberman tend toward case studies and grounded theory because those two approaches are more apt to be systematic, and their coding discussion owes a lot to grounded theory's approach, which has been lucidly described in many places -- but never more so than here, where Miles and Huberman give plentiful examples from actual studies. Displays such as matrices and diagrams, similarly, are described in great detail and with enough examples that we can develop our own ideas based on them, and have confidence that we know what we are doing.

Every thick book like this has to have common threads to keep it together. Miles and Huberman produce a number of studies that are used to illustrate concepts and techniques throughout the book. These provide coherence and allow us to see a range of different situations to which we can adapt.

The only drawback to the book is that it's copyright 1994, so its discussion of computer-aided qualitative data analysis, though impressively comprehensive, is twelve years out of date. Nevertheless, the principles and comparative points they provide are still very useful.

Research, as I tell my grad students, involves constructing a complex argument. And Miles and Huberman do a great job of showing you how to collect and evaluate evidence, compile it, use it to summarize reasons, and use those reasons to support a claim. If you do any sort of qualitative research at all, you need this book. I only wish I had read it in grad school!>

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(Reading Roundup: Bodker and Andersen, Bodker and Christiansen, Bansler and Havn)

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 09:55:00

In the early 1980s, Scandinavian researchers teamed up with unions to develop a design methodology called "participatory design" (see my recent articles in TCQ and Technical Communication). Based on Marxist theory, participatory design was meant to empower laborers in their struggle with management by giving them a means to guide software development. In particular, innovations such as future workshops, organizational games, and prototyping allowed the workers to envision systems that would preserve their tacit craft skills. The goal, ultimately, was to extend and develop workers' skills rather than deskilling them. In a cluster of countries with de facto lifetime employment, a fine balance between capitalism and socialism, and unprecedented union leverage, this goal seemed reachable.

Today, everyone seems to have pretty much given up on that goal. Susanne Bodker, who did significant early work in participatory design, and Jorgen Bansler, who provided smart critiques of early PD, are now conducting projects based in new economy/fast capitalism environments. The question is no longer how to preserve a fading set of craft skills, it is now how to hold things together so that workers can preserve some sort of developmental movement and some sort of shared community in the face of increasing work fragmentation and distribution. The three articles below, from 2005-2006, really underscore the enormous shift that has taken place in Scandinavia over the last 25 years.

Bødker, S. and Christiansen, E. (2006, in press). Computer support for social awareness in flexible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Bodker and Christiansen pick up this thread in their first paragraph:

People are increasingly working in mobile, or flexible settings. Work has become a moving target with respect to content and obligations. It is subject to constant change; in goals, in qualifications, and in partnerships. New people join groups, projects, and companies. Companies hire, fire, or close, or are taken over by others. The instability this turmoil creates in our social networks puts people under pressure, causing what Sennett calls a "corrosion

of character" (Sennett, 1998).

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to detect nostalgia for the original PD project, mingled with resignation to the new economy and resolution to blunt its worst effects. In particular, the authors are interested in developing a sense of co-presence for workers, who increasingly find themselves working from elsewhere. That's a significant problem:

In order to stay socially aware, it seems necessary to have people within reach ? not always, but at least occasionally. This tension between the ephemerality and continuity of social encounters, and likewise the need to construct identity through relationships by means of social encounters, is not generally part of the definition of social awareness in CSCW.

The authors describe "artefact-driven explorations" (prototypes) for dealing with the issue of "hot-desking." The most intriguing thing, I think, is that these prototypes are not electronic -- sometimes they are as simple as putting a soccer ball or bicycle helmet on the desk of someone who is in the office. The idea is to find ways to develop the material traces that workers use to develop a shared, unfolding history. And here we see the influence again of the original PD project, with its concern for development, history, and humane work environments.

Bødker, S. and Andersen, P. B. (2005). Complex mediation. Human-Computer Interaction, 20:353?402.

Development is a perennial concern of activity theory, whose third generation was significantly impacted by Bodker's work. In this article, Bodker and Andersen tackle a problem that I have attempted elsewhere: the problem of mediation by multiple tools and symbols. Whereas I drew on Bakhtin, they draw on Peircean semiotics. "Activity theory makes rather unclear distinctions between the role of instrumental mediation and that of communicative mediation (except as analytical perspectives determined by identifying whether we are dealing with a Subject-Object relationship or a Subject-Subject one)," they argue (p.360). In a move reminiscent of Latour's hybrids, they argue that the distinction between tools and symbols is artificial, and most mediators lie between the two (p.361).

The authors argue for two related types of complex mediation:

we summarize the preceding by suggesting that one should design for multi-mediation, that is, recognize that more than one mediator normally is used in an activity, and that individual mediators should be designed as a part of an assemblage of mediators, either co-occurring, organized in levels, or connected in chains. (p.356)

"Co-occurring" mediation happens at the same point in time; I've been terming this "ecological." "Chained" mediation involves a chain of activities:

artifacts in a web of technologies in the plant are part of a chain of artifacts and objects that together help regulate the plant and ultimately fulfill the overall purpose of wastewater processing: to turn wastewater into purified water. (p.391)

Chained mediation sounds a lot like activity networks.

Bodker and Andersen have developed a complex system for relating these two perspectives, along with "levels" (which sound like a way of extending chained activity networks to the meso level). But it seems too orderly to me; Bodker and Andersen seem to be attempting to preserve and strengthen distinctions among activities, and in doing so, they chop these into smaller and smaller pieces.

Bansler, J. P. and Havn, E. (2006, in press). Sensemaking in technology-use mediation: Adapting groupware technology in organizations. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Bansler and Havn argue that groupware is successful in large part because local workers do the hard work of adapting it: "users often use groupware in ways not intended or expected by the designers of the technology and that users tend to re-invent the technology when they adapt and incorporate it into their working practices." But "relatively little is known about the actual process of tailoring or adaptation, i.e. about the way in which groupware technologies are appropriated and modified by users." They set out to investigate this question, terming these local workers "mediators." (These mediators sound a lot like Nardi and O'Day's "gardeners.")

Mediators, the authors argue, make sense of technology in relation to context; they convert abstract technology into "technology-in-practice." By promoting technology use, helping and supporting users, and establishing conventions of use, these mediators can make or break the new groupware. Additionally, mediators help to create and spread workarounds and often suggest changes and modifications to the developers. Mediators are by their nature boundary-spanners, people who interface between two different activities (e.g., design and use).

Reading :: Machiavelli, Marketing and Management

Originally posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:13:31

Machiavelli, Marketing and Management

by Phil Harris, Patricia Rees, Andrew Lock

"This book resulted from the Machiavelli at 500 conference held in Manchester in May 1998," the editors explain in the introduction. This edited collection has some of the advantages and many of the disadvantages of other books resulting from such conferences. The advantages include a wide variety of disciplinary and field perspectives and a tendency toward dialogue among chapters. The disadvantages include a tendency of some of these chapters to talk past each other; to disagree on even the most simple of premises (was Machiavelli chiefly concerned with power or the republic? was he totally amoral or extremely moral? did he believe in the divine right of kings, or was that notion foreign to the Florentine republican?); and to go over the same ground in poorly coordinated ways. Again, these disadvantages are common in such collections, but they are exacerbated here because the chapters are focused on Machiavelli's impact, and that impact is hard to gauge when the contributors don't seem to agree on who Machiavelli was.

The collection is at its most schizophrenic in Beatrice Rangoni Machiavelli's chapter, in which she approvingly lists several positive interpretations of her distant relative's work, not acknowledging that these interpretations are mutually contradictory -- they can't all be true.

Some insights do emerge in the reading, particularly contextual insights about Machiavelli's time; a discussion of whether Machiavelli was poststructuralist; an examination of Machiavelli from within different ethical systems; and a contrast between Machiavelli and Marx (Machiavelli took human nature to be essentially fixed, Marx didn't). But those insights take some work to uncover. >

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Reading :: The Art of Project Management

Originally posted: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:14:23

The Art of Project Management

by Scott Berkun

I'm looking at Amazon.com's listing for Berkun's The Art of Project Management right now, and the page recommends that I buy the book along with David Allen's Getting Things Done. It's hardly a coincidence. Project management and time management both deal with work fragmentation, an increasingly pervasive phenomenon. Both are vital skills for knowledge economy jobs, especially software development. And although they deal with different levels -- collaborative vs. personal -- they share many similarities.

Not coincidentally, they both represent skills that I need to develop as well as scholarly interests that I am pursuing. So I've been reading several project management and time management texts (and studies) lately. Berkun's book interested me because it had gotten a very positive mention from Slashdot.

Berkun was a project manager at Microsoft for several years before striking out on his own. Not surprisingly, his book trades on this fact, offering scads of anecdotes and illustrations from his Microsoft years. These stories really are illustrations: They illustrate specific, well grounded principles under the headings of plans, skills, and management. Berkun is methodical in exploring these different headings, and his writing style is clear (although he sometimes tries too much to be clever).

The projects that Berkun is talking about managing tend to be software development projects, and much of his advice is specific to that industry. But much more of it is easily translated to other sorts of projects. In particular, I was interested in the last chapter, "Power and Politics." Berkun tends to oversimplify things a bit here, but he discusses several concrete techniques for negotiating, persuading, and influencing decisions.

The book is a quick read, but it's also solid (392 pages) and a bit intimidating. Fortunately, it's written so that you can skim it and/or focus on specific chapters. If you're interested in complex project management, take a look.

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Reading :: Where the Action Is

Originally posted: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 20:19:28

Where the Action Is : The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

by Paul Dourish

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time. Paul Dourish's work has interested me ever since grad school, when I read the article on "technomethodology" that he published with Graham Button. And of course Bill Hart-Davidson discusses this work frequently.

It's not what I expected. I had expected an empirical case or series of cases that were investigated by or analyzed through a theoretical, analytical, or methodological framework ? which is the usual mode for books in this series. But Dourish's project is to develop a theory of interaction, based on phenomenology, that is suitable for investigating, developing, and understanding embodied interaction: "interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us" (p.3).

This project involves defining and attending to embodiment: "a form of participative status. Embodiment is about the fact that things are embedded in the world, and the ways in which their reality depends on being embedded" (p.18). Increasing attention to embodiment, he says, results in new sensitivity to settings; describing and analyzing work activities and artifacts in concrete terms; and an understanding that artifacts can play different terms (p.19). Dourish gets to these concerns by discussing phenomenology's origins, concerns, and applications.

Throughout, Dourish gives examples from embodied computing and suggests ways in which an embodied perspective could change our approach to computing. But I found myself wishing that the book was more like what I had thought it would be: I wanted Dourish to compress the theoretical/methodological discussion and present an extended case study to illustrate how this phenomenological perspective affects the investigative and design work he describes.

Nevertheless, the book is valuable. I'm struck by how similar it is in its presumptions and examples to other work coming out of Xerox PARC and RXRC. If you've read work by Graham Button, Lucy Suchman, Abigail Sellen, or Richard Harper, this book is going to sound at least somewhat familiar, and its exposition of embodied practice is going to bring new insight to those works.

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Reading :: The Future of Work

Originally posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:11:04

The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life

by Thomas W. Malone

Thomas W. Malone, a professor in MIT's Sloan School of Management, has an extensive and interesting publication record with which I only have passing familiarity. This book, however, is written for a lay audience; Malone mentions his research, but not in great detail, instead concentrating on developing a vision of what work might look like in the future.

That vision looks a lot like the one his colleague Shoshana Zuboff has described. Malone believes that work will become more decentralized, democratic, and participative, largely because of the changes introduced by pervasive information technologies:

For the first time in history, technologies allow us to gain the economic benefits of large organizations, like economies of scale and knowledge, without giving up the benefits of small ones, like freedom, creativity, motivation, and flexibility. (p.4)

Malone charts a continuum of (de)centralization, from very centralized hierarchies (ex: military organizations) to loose hierarchies, democracies, and markets (p.6). Hierarchies, he says, are a solution to a particular problem: organizing large numbers of people efficiently in the face of high communication costs (see, e.g., p.22). But with information technologies, the costs of communication drop, making more decentralized structures possible. Malone sees these more decentralized structures as a way to retain efficiency in large organizations while distributing power and freedom more evenly. He makes this argument by first looking at patterns in human societies (Ch.2) and then applying them to business (Ch.3). And although this may be a productive move analogically, it becomes clear in Chapter 3 that he doesn't see it as an analogy; he equates political and organizational structures. In the book itself, this seems to be far too easy. (I can't speak to his other scholarly work.)

Related is this oft-made point about why societies are organized in a particular way:

As usual in human affairs, there were many factors. But one stands out as particularly important: our old friend, communication costs. (p.24)

Again, Malone makes the easy leap to isolate a determinative causal factor. Communication costs are "particularly important" in determining organizational structures. This point may have some merit, but Malone repeatedly papers over other possible factors and never strongly builds the case that communication costs are driving the changes he describes. And again, it's possible that this has something to do with the fact that the book is written for a lay audience. But as is, the point seems too easy and too unsupported.

Let's get farther into the book. Malone goes on to describe the shift from corporate hierarchies to networks, making the same points we've seen in Zuboff and Maxmin and in Castells: organizations are tending to get smaller, interlinking and cooperating with other companies rather than incorporating or assimilating them. Outsourcing is becoming a more prevalent way of expanding capacity. Companies control larger flows of cash, but they exert less control over business activities. Networks of companies, like the Japanese keiretsu, are doing the work that used to be done within monolithic companies (p.31). Malone links this trend to information technologies: "We've found that when an industry makes greater use of information technology, the average size of companies in that industry tends to decrease after a lag of about two years" (p.34).

Malone goes on in Chapter 4 to examine cases of organizations with loose hierarchies: Linux, Wikipedia, MIT, and AES. Chapter 5 looks at cases farther along the continuum toward decentralization: companies run as democracies such as Whole Foods and W.L. Gore. And in Chapter 6, he gets to the most decentralized types of organizations, those run as markets.

Chapter 6 is really the most interesting of these, since it points to the most extreme realignment:

What if ... many tasks currently done by large companies were done instead by temporary combinations of small companies and independent contractors? Taking this idea further, what if most businesses consisted of only a single person? (p.74)

Malone advances the term "e-lancer" to describe this sort of "electronically connected freelancer" (p.74).

In an e-lance economy, the fundamental unit is not the corporation, but the individual. Tasks are not assigned and controlled through a stable chain of management, but rather are carried out autonomously by independent contractors. These freelancers join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done ? after a day, a month, a year ? the network dissolves, and its members become independent agents again, circulating through the economy, seeking the next assignment. (p.75)

Malone gives the example of the film industry, which works in roughly this way. He concedes that e-lancing is not the best structure for projects that must be developed and sustained over long periods (p.76). But for those who e-lance, one attraction is that they can focus on and accommodate their own values (p.76).

In this arrangement, trust becomes extremely important (p.80).

Of course, freelancing involves giving up long-term employment and benefits. Malone acknowledges this problem, and envisions guilds that look after workers' needs, just as the Screen Actors' Guild provides benefits for actors (p.85). These guilds, he speculates, might emerge from existing groups that already support workers in various ways: the Association for Computing Machinery, labor unions, temporary agencies, college alumni associations.

In this new, decentralized arrangement, Malone argues for a new management model: less command-and-control, more "coordinate-and-cultivate" (p.129; compare with Zuboff and Maxmin as well as Arquilla).

What's this book good for? If you're interested in getting up to speed on the new economy literature, this might be a good introduction. It's more readable than works such as Zuboff and Maxmin's, but not nearly as well argued or supported. It is even more optimistic about the economy than they are -- and that's saying quite a bit.

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Reading :: Ashtanga Yoga

Originally posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:43:18

Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual: An Illustrated Guide to Personal Practice

by David Swenson

If you know anything about yoga -- and I did not until late last year -- you may have heard of ashtanga yoga. Maybe you've entered into a practice room for your kundalini or hatha flow class, and wondered why it's so hot. What the heck was the previous class doing? Or perhaps you've actually seen an ashtanga class and been struck by how regimented the movements are, how constant the motion is, and how little time is held in each pose. You may have thought of it as "extreme yoga," and you may even have heard of the variant "power yoga."

I'm just speculating, based on the reactions of others and the remarks of instructors at the place where I've begun ashtanga classes. I only have a hazy idea of what other yoga variants might be like. To me, ashtanga seems like a set of exercises, similar to stretches and calesthenics, but very well planned and integrated. As they should be: yoga has been around for thousands of years, and ashtanga is based on an ancient text.

Yoga originates in spiritual practice, and using yoga primarily for developing strength and flexibility -- which is why I'm taking the class -- would be seen by some as watering down or corrupting the practice. Apparently I'm not the only one: all of my instructors have been inclusive, and at least one has outright claimed that yoga has no necessary spiritual connection. Nevertheless, the language of yoga's spritual roots does make its way into books such as David Swenson's Ashtanga Yoga: The Practice Manual. Swenson, who lives in Austin, is one of the foremost ashtanga instructors in the world. And he doesn't shy away from alluding to the spiritual beliefs that have contributed to the development of yoga: his descriptions of the principles and postures are full of discussions of energy flow, chakras, etc. And although I at first became impatient with these discussions, wanting a more physiologically grounded discussion, I came to appreciate the vocabulary and concepts that are embedded in the discussion. Realistically, I'm not sure that I could understand a physiological discussion, but I can certainly envision energy (metaphorically) flowing through chakras, and that's enough to help me interpret what's happening during the poses.

And I need all the help I can get. I suspect I have below-average spatial intelligence and body awareness, and my exercise for the last several years has consisted of walking to the bus stop. Fortunately, Swenson provides that help. After the short initial discussion, Swenson illustrates each pose in the first and second series, both with photos and textual descriptions. The photos can be pretty scary -- I'm amazed the human body can get into some of them -- but Swenson also illustrates some intermediate poses that almost anyone can do. (One thing I really like about ashtanga is that you systematically perfect your practice; each practice includes some sort of accomplishment.) The textual descriptions are often couched in idioms that sound either translated or 19th-century, but they are generally clear and show flashes of genuine humor. The writing and editing are not terribly strong, but they do what they need to do.

I'm reviewing this book here, but unlike most of the books on the list, I'll probably end up reading it over and over as I continue in my practice. If you're interested in ashtanga, check it out.

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(Reassembling the Social)

Originally posted: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:37:02

I haven't read Bruno Latour's newest book yet, but Collin has.

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Reading :: The Rise of the Network Society

Originally posted: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 21:29:31

The Rise of the Network Society

By Manuel Castells

The Rise of the Network Society is the first volume of a three-volume work entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. I first ran across it as a cite in John Arquilla's work on networked warfare, but apparently it's well known in other circles. In fact, two of my colleagues are reading Castells' work.

Colleague A saw me carrying this book a couple of weeks ago. "Oh, you're reading that? I'm reading Volume 2 right now." What do you think, I ask. "He -- seems to have a high opinion of himself," Colleague A said with evident reservation.

Colleague B saw me with the book a few days later. "You're reading that too? So am I. I've been avoiding it for a long time because it's so massive, but it's cited so frequently I figured I had to read it. It's like Das Kapital." Colleague B thinks it's fantastic and has decided to order the other two volumes as well.

And what does Colleague C -- C for Clay -- think about it? C is still deciding. The problem is that Volume 1 deals primarily with economics, which is not my strong suit. And although the author has obviously thought quite a bit about these matters, and has been celebrated for his work, I don't have much of a frame of reference for evaluating most of his economic claims. The parts that I can evaluate are mixed. For instance, much of what he says about changes to work organization seems dead on, based on my observations and readings. On the other hand, his chapter on electronic communication draws heavily on scholars such as Havelock and Postman, neither of whom I find particularly convincing in terms of understanding communication changes.

Let me sketch out Castells' basic argument, which is fairly complex. Writing in 1996, he argues that capitalism has been profoundly restructured as "informational capitalism":

Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterized by greater flexibility in management; decentralization and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms; considerable empowering of capital vis-a-vis labor, with the concomitant decline of influence of the labor movement; increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships; massive incorporation of women into the working force, usually under discriminatory conditions; intervention of the state to deregulate markets selectively, and to undo the welfare state, with different intensity and orientations depending upon the nature of political forces and institutions in each society; stepped-up global economic condition, in a context of increasing geographic and cultural differentiation of settings for capital accumulation and management. (pp.1-2)

So far, this is familiar territory, covered (with considerably more optimism and less macroanalysis) in Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy and similar works. But Castells brings to bear decades of scholarship and reams of economic data to develop these points.

One factor he discusses is of particular interest to me: telecommunications. Castells argues that

what characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation. ... The uses of new telecommunications technologies in the last two decades have gone through three distinct stages: automation of tasks, experimentation of uses, reconfiguration of applications. In the first two stages, technological innovation progressed through learning by using ... In the third stage, the users learned technology by doing, and ended up reconfiguring the networks, and finding new applications. (p.32)

Telecommunications deregulation, in Castells' analysis, was key to the networked society because it reorganized and spurred the growth of telecommunications, leading to "the global integration of financial markets and the segmented articulation of production and trade throughout the world" (p.52).

Networks, Castells says (quoting Mulgan), were created not to communicate but to outcommunicate. They are adaptive, open-ended, and multi-edged (p.65). They are meant to move along the product of the information economy: information itself, which has become the product of the production process (p.67, 172). And even though this is the age of deregulation, Castells says, the role of the state is vital: "it is precisely because of the interdependence and openness of international economy that states must become engaged in fostering development strategies on behalf of their economic constituents" (p.90). States steer policies toward collective competitiveness (p.90).

The circulation of people drives innovation in this economy (p.95). And "the new production system relies on a combination of strategic alliances and ad hoc cooperation projects between corporations, decentralized units of each major corporation, and networks of small and medium enterprises connecting among themselves and/or with large corporations or networks of corporations" (p.96). In the new international division of labor, there is a "variable geometry" that dissolves historical, economic geography (p.106).

Castells identifies several organizational trends or patterns:

• The transition from mass production to flexible production (p.154), characterized in part by "customized, reprogrammable production systems, capturing economies of scope" (p.155). (Think in terms of Victor and Boynton's co-configuration model.)
• "The crisis of the large corporation, and the resilience of small and medium firms as agents of innovation and sources of job creation" (p.155).
• New methods of management (p.157), necessitated by the vertical disintegration of production along a network of firms, substituting for a vertical integration of departments (p.158). (Think of Zuboff and Maxmin's federations.)
• Interfirm networking, or a "multidirectional network model enacted by small and medium businesses and the licensing-subcontracting model of production under an umbrella corporation" (p.160).
• Corporate strategic alliances, involving the intertwining of large corporations (p.162).
• The transition from vertical bureaucracies to horizontal competition, involving seven trends: "organization around process, not task; a flat hierarchy; team management; measuring performance by customer satisfaction; rewards based on team performance; maximization of contacts with suppliers and customers; information, training, and retraining of employees at all levels" (p.164).

"Networks," Castells says, "are the fundamental stuff of which new organizations are and will be made" (p.168).

But technologies and networks don't play a determinist role. "Cultures and institutions continue to shape the organizational requirements of the new economy, in an interaction between the logic of production, the changing technological basis, and the institutional features of the social environment" (p.194).

In response to these macro-level changes, Castells says, work and employment are transformed. The traditional form of work is eroding (p.268). Employment now is characterized by decentralized data entry (p.248); the concentration of higher-level operations in the hands of skilled workers (p.248); multiskilling of jobs (p.251); the individualization of responsibility (p.251) and labor (p.265); and segregation by education (p.251). "The new social and economic organization based on the information technologies aims at decentralizing management, individualizing work, and customizing markets, thereby segmenting work and fragmenting societies" (p.265).

In chapters 6 and 7, Castells that ? at least in social terms ? the network society is reconfiguring space and time. (This argument sounds a bit like the one we encounter in Distributed Work.) Chapter 6 chronicles the growth of information flows (p.382) and argues that information technology leads to the breaking up of spatial patterns into a "fluid network of exchanges" (p.398). "The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows" (p.412). Chapter 7 similarly argues that time is compressed and processed in the network society (p.439); "the network society is characterized by the breaking down of rhythmicity, either biological or social, associated with the notion of a lifecycle" (p.446).

Colleague B is at least right in this: reading The Rise of the Network Society is like reading Capital. It's overwhelming, hard to digest, and full of fascinating ideas that take a lot of background to churn through. I'll be churning through this for some time to come, I think.

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Reading :: Swarming on the Battlefield

Originally posted: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:00:24

Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future

by Sean J. A. Edwards

Recently I've been reading a lot of these RAND reports and other texts on the swarming doctrine ? a way of attacking enemies that is fundamentally different from the massed formations that have typically characterized mechanized warfare. But most of the swarming literature has been frustratingly short on specifics, and consequently there's a lot of slippage in what swarming actually means. People familiar with military strategy have told me that swarming does not seem to be the fundamental shift in doctrine that it purports to be ? "we've been doing this forever," they have said, referring to decentralized decisionmaking and other characteristics. Part of the problem, I think, is that "swarming" has been overused and stretched to mean too many things; it needs a treatment to nail down the concept, explain the characteristics, provide a variety of case studies, and explain its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

Sean Edwards' study goes most of the way in accomplishing that. Edwards, who worked under Arquila and Ronfeldt at RAND, undertakes a quasi-experimental comparison of several historical cases of swarming: Scythians v. Macedonians, Parthians v. Romans, Seljuk Turks v. Byzantines, Turks v. Crusaders, Mongols v. Eastern Europeans, Woodland Indians v. U.S. Army, Napoleonic Corps v. Austrians, Boers v. British, German U-Boats v. British convoys, and Somalis v. U.S. commandos. For each, he carefully examines the case and catalogues both advantages and disadvantages. Then he summarizes some general conclusions with the appropriate caveats:

The cases have highlighted some successful countermeasures to swarm tactics, such as

• pinning a swarm force using either a part of one's own force or a geographic obstacle (Alexander, Crusades)
• eliminating the swarm force's standoff-fire advantage (Byzantines)
• eliminating the swarm force's mobility or elusiveness advantage (U-boats)
• securing the countryside by building a linked network of fortifications (Macedonians)
• separating the swarmer from his logistics base (Macedonians)

Edwards also make the important point that the threat of WMDs leads armies to consider far more dispersed formations, making swarming more attractive than it might be otherwise.

In all, if you're genuinely interested in swarming as military doctrine, Edwards' study is a really important one to read. But the application appears to be quite strictly military. Edwards does a good job nailing down the term, and in the process, squeezes out the more metaphoric applications (such as Hugh Hewitt's application of the term to blogging). In my book, that's not a bad thing. >

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<< Hell freezes over >>

Originally posted: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 03:54:57

I'm tenured.

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Reading :: The Agile Organization

Originally posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 01:28:07

The Agile Organization: From Informal Networks to Complex Effects and Agility

by Simon Reay Atkinson and James Moffat

The Agile Organization is primarily interested in applying insights of postmodernism and complexity theory to military organizations, and secondarily to applying the same insights to other organizations. "Postmodernism" here is used a bit differently than what we often see in rhetoric:

In this regard, too, the philosophy of Post-Modernism?that denies any single truth or belief?may also be reflected in our understanding of organizations and how they form and aggregate. The networks we consider are held together by certain trusts in which individuals believe. These trusts and beliefs are often different from those that define others and it is these that make the group or organization ?different.? Where these different organizations come into contact and/or overlap, certain rules of conduct are necessary to define how they work together if conflict is to be avoided. These rules need to reflect the underlying beliefs and truths by which the different organizations exist. (p.9)

This is a fairly good summary of the book's themes. The problem the authors face is that organizations are not as tightly structured or delineated as they were in the past because interconnections have become much easier to make. So organizations form and aggregate in different ways. And the common thread is "trusts and beliefs" and how they are negotiated. This is the turf of rhetoric ? the study of argumentation ? and the authors indicate throughout that after a long era of work rationalization, the centralized hierarchical structures that have often hedged in negotiations are breaking down. They list key properties of complexity that are emblematic of the "agile" organizations they study:

1. Nonlinear Interaction. The interaction between neighboring entities is nonlinear. Small changes can have large effects.

2. Decentralized control. The natural systems we have considered, such as the coevolution of an ecosystem, are not controlled centrally. The emergent behavior is generated through local interactions.

3. Self-Organization. We have seen how such natural systems with a large number of degrees of freedom can produce extended ordered structure, without the need for guidance from outside the system.

4. Non-Equilibrium Order. The order (for example the space and time correlations) inherent in an open, dissipative system existing far from equilibrium.

5. Coevolution. We have seen how such systems are constantly coevolving. Clusters or avalanches of local interaction are constantly being created across the system. These correspond to dispersed correlation effects in space and time, rather than a central imposition of large-scale coincidences in space and time.

6. Collectivist Dynamics. The cascades of local interaction that ripple through the system. (pp.36-37)

For all that, the authors lightly touch on what they see as the central way to understand complexity in organizations: mathematical analysis (p.43). This strikes me as counterproductive since such an analysis seems to assume stable nodes, and a truly "agile" organization's nodes would seem to be continually changing and defining one another. (See actor-network theory's work on defining actors.) Nevertheless, the authors have some really interesting insights. Take this section on work organization in industry, which sounds as if it has been taken from Victor and Boynton:

The linear production line in the car industry is a clear example of a series of bounded and unchanging specializations that form part of a management by detail (micromanagement). This works wonderfully well provided that everyone wants a black Model T Ford. However, in today?s and tomorrow?s market environment, demand is more likely to include small batches of complex products, each with varied characteristics. In this much more variable and dynamic environment, the response has been to abandon the production line in some cases in favor of a number of very specialized cells that can self-organize in different ways through a process of mutual negotiation. (p.92)

The authors go on to discuss how small organizations are initially bound by trust and kinship; as they scale larger, these bonds of trust tend to become formalized to allow scaling, and eventually "The network ceases to be self-organizing and scale free, and changes to being a network of formally defined locally clustered cells with longer range links between them: a Small World" (pp.110-111). This account of scaling is more structured than actor-network theory's, but perhaps less so than activity theory's. The problem, of course, is the ontological problem I mentioned earlier.

The authors also propose a proportional relationship between the system and the management process: the more agile one is, the more agile the other must be. "Each person in the chain was rigidly controlled within a tightly applied stovepipe and delivered an output as required by the input. There was little or no lateral movement?each function could be undertaken within the guidelines provided" (p.156). In the industrial age, neither management nor process were agile, and the result was "stovepiping," the partitioning of the organization into noncommunicative sectors (p.127). The Information Age model is decentralized, emergent management (p.130); the authors relate this model to the complexity concepts mentioned earlier through a succinct table (p.132). A little later, the authors provide an interesting analysis of British and US military agility that indicates a mixed bag. Agility will require changes for these organizations: "For both countries, it will require controlling less and commanding more" (p.167). They argue for "concessive" decision-making, which is

about trust: trusting in individual staffs and commands to do the right thing and so enabling one or another to lead, as guided by other involved and so pre-connected parties. Ultimately, it should allow command to exercise authority, seamlessly, across services, staffs, and nations. (p.181)

And that brings us again to trust. The authors argue that trust must be established and exchanged within one''s organization but also across organizations (p.188). And although the authors are particularly talking about military organizations, the lesson seems to be applicable to other sorts of organizations as well.

Overall, this was an interesting read, although a little light on the scholarly side.

Update: Simon Reay Atkinson emails:

Thanks for your positive review of our work - we appear to be scoring a few goals! You are right to conclude that we may be scholarly light but our intent was to take a few non-specialist horses to water and get them to drink a little at the well. We also hoped to raise questions particularly regarding Command and Control: to paraphrase President Clinton, 'It's Command and Control, Stupid'. That leads into some interesting questions and dilemmas - how, for example, does an organisation become more networkable. Back to Command and Control.

Yes, I thought this was a really intriguing point: the military can't get away from command, but it can rethink how command is accomplished. The Agile Organization argues that organizations need to concentrate on "controlling less and commanding more," devolving decision-making while retaining the overall command. That is, overly hierarchical organizations tend to micromanage through strict and often inflexible rules and command chains; flexible organizations set goals, but allow considerable discretion in terms of how the goals are accomplished. Atkinson and Moffat do a great job of demonstrating concrete ways in which this realignment works. And although they focus on military organizations, I can't overemphasize the intriguing connections with new economy/distributed work literature.

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Reading :: Rapid Problem-Solving with Post-It Notes

Originally posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:10:45

Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes

by David Straker

I wanted to like this book more than I did. In fact, I ordered it through interlibrary loan because it sounded so intriguing. In my research, I've been consistently impressed by how people invent solutions using post-its, and I've also studied how Contextual Design uses post-its in its affinity diagrams (a variation on the KJ quality method originated in Japan). So I had high hopes that the book would provide some broader insights along these lines, particularly insights that might help students think through issues of work fragmentation and/or through affinity diagrams.

And, yes, there is a lot of value in it: David Straker has put together a set of (generally) useful and easy to absorb tools for brainstorming, sorting and comparing, examining relationships, understanding affinities and grounded categories, and charting and planning actions. But the book has two problems.

One is that it's barely more substantial than a series of blog posts; the amateurish typesetting (it looks like it was composed in WordPerfect), spacious cartoons, and oversized headings seem like they're just trying to fill space, and compressing them to a reasonable size could have turned this book into a pamphlet or a modest website. The case study in the third section, and the three pages spent discussing the proper way to peel a post-it note, contributed to this impression.

The other is that post-its turn out to be the hammer that makes every problem look like a nail. The best fits for post-its were the sorting and affinity diagram/KJ tools. Other early tools seemed fine too. But later, the book goes very wrong by suggesting uses such as creating task timelines ? a use that really is much better done with a calendar or project management software.

Still, if the book is handy and if you're as interested in post-it notes as I am, you should take a look.

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Reading :: Robert's Rules of Order

Originally posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:52:52

Robert's Rules of Order (Newly Revised, 10th Edition)

by Henry M. Robert III, William J. Evans, Daniel H. Honemann, Thomas J. Balch (Editor)

Yes, you've heard of this one even if you haven't read it. Nearly every organization uses (or sorta-kinda uses) these rules to govern their deliberations. We certainly do in my department. And after four years of listening to our chair and parliamentarian making motions and correcting ? well ? mine, I decided that I really should become conversant with them.

I'm glad that I did. Robert's rules of order are really fascinating. They provide a procedural framework for governing and regulating deliberations, something that is vital so that organizations don't make decisions rashly, ride roughshod over minority factions, or revisit decisions ad infinitum. The rules are detailed and cover an incredible number of permutations, as you might expect from rules that have been evolving as long as they have.

What really got me interested, though, was when I began thinking of Robert's Rules of Order as a rhetoric text. It sets the ground rules to which interested parties agree so that they can productively deliberate, and the rules themselves also become evidence for meta-arguments about procedure. It would be fascinating to teach a class with this as the text, although I don't anticipate teaching that class.

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Reading :: Swarming and the Future of Conflict

Originally posted: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:49:44

Swarming and the Future of Conflict

by John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt

Whereas the authors' Advent of Netwar focused on the organizational structure of networks, this RAND report focuses on the key doctrine of netwar: swarming. (This doctrine is what interested Hugh Hewitt in his book Blog.) Swarming is

the systematic pulsing of force and/or fire by dispersed, internetted units, so as to strike the adversary from all directions simultaneously. This does not necessitate surrounding the enemy, though swarming may include encirclement in some cases. Rather, emphasis is placed on forces or fires that can strike at will ? wherever they will. (p.9)

The authors concede that swarming has historical precedents, but "swarming could not come into its own as a major way of war, because its organizational and informational requirements are huge. Swarming has had to wait for the current information and communications revolution to unfold as robustly as did the earlier forms of fighting" (p.9).

Those earlier forms of fighting were the melee (every fighter for her/himself); massing ("stacked, geometric formations" (p.13)); and maneuver warfare. In contrast to these, swarming involves autonomous or semi-autonomous units in a convergent assault; amorphous but coordinated "pulsing" or striking from all directions; small, internetted maneuver units; integrated surveillance; and attacks that disrupt the adversary's cohesion (p.21). The authors give several good examples of each, including swarming (e.g., German U-boats, Parthian horsemen, ants, bees, wolf packs). The nature metaphors put me in mind of A Thousand Plateaus, although I doubt the authors have read that work.

Overall, this was an interesting and illuminating report, and I can see how this doctrine has influenced recent changes in the US military. I also think that Hewitt did have it largely right when he applied swarming to recent "blog swarms," although the swarming that Arquilla and Ronfeldt are discussing seems more coordinated and controlled than what Hewitt is discussing. I'm more interested in applying lessons to nonmilitary organizations, of course, and in that vein I see some similarities with pieces such as The Cluetrain Manifesto.

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Reading :: Advent of Netwar

Originally posted: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:31:37

Advent of Netwar

by John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt

This RAND report precedes the authors' Networks and Netwars and outlines much of what the authors discuss in their chapters from that volume, but in greater detail. What they discuss is, again, fascinating. In their estimation, netwar entails the blurring of offense and defense, spatial boundaries, jurisdictions, and all sorts of distinctions (p.13). This blurring has to do with the newness of networks as an organizational design (as opposed to social networks) (p.19). The networked form, they say, follows other forms ? tribal, institutional, and market ? and although it is not completely new, it is newly enabled by pervasive information technologies (p.33).

In networks, members collaborate heterarchically:

Its key principle is heterarchic collaboration among members who may be dispersed among multiple, often small organizations. Network designs have existed throughout history, but multiorganizational designs are now able to gain strength and mature because the new communications technologies allow small, autonomous, dispersed groups to coordinate and act jointly across great distances as never before. (p.33)

The authors follow this up with a nice tabular comparison of tribes, institutions, markets, and networks. This table compares key areas, realms, interests, values, risks, and so forth; one thing that caught my eye was the structural comparison of space, time, and action. The authors argue that power is migrating to actors who are skilled at developing networks (p.43) and that networks may lead nation-states to become leaner and work in concert with nonstate actors (p.45). Think in terms of Rumsfeld's "leaner" military, with its precision strikes, emphasis on communications technologies, and heavy use of non-governmental organizations and subcontractors.

In netwar, the authors argue, the targets should be information-rich components: for instance, don't eradicate smugglers' drug crops, target their electronic bank transfers (p.90). The tactics of netwar are oriented not toward destroying assets but toward disrupting communication and coordination.

The authors conclude that netwar is less like Clausewitz and more like Sun Tzu, less like chess and more like Go. Sun Tzu, they argue, understood the importance of information dominance to victory (p.101). >

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(Reading Roundup: Gonzalez and Mark on Managing Currents of Work)

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:32:14

I blogged recently about scholarship in fragmented work, particularly some recent studies by Gonzalez and Mark. Although I was really taken with this work, one point that bothered me was their use of the term "working sphere," of which I said:

Notice that the working sphere is primarily defined by the material and human concatenation rather than the orientation toward a particular goal -?although "motives" is slipped in there. This sounds much more like distributed cognition's functional units than, say, activity theory's activity systems. And without that strong object-orientation, it seems likely that the unit is going to have trouble being nailed down or explained. On the other hand, downplaying the motive gives the working sphere the same advantages as actor-networks, ontologically speaking.

Victor Gonzalez read the review and was kind enough to forward a new paper that expands on the notion of working spheres:

González, V. and G. Mark (2005): 'Managing currents of work: Multi-tasking among multiple collaborations' in European Conference in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Spring Verlang, September 18-22, Paris, France. pp. 143-162.

(The paper has no page numbers, so I'll refer to the first page as page 1 and so forth.)

In this paper, Gonzalez and Mark continue using ethnography to review how workers switch among working spheres. From the abstract: "We discovered that to multi-task and cope with the resulting fragmentation of their work, individuals constantly renew overviews of their working spheres, they strategize how to manage transitions between contexts and they maintain flexible foci among their different working spheres" (p.1). And in the process, they define working spheres in more detail in respect to other analytical frameworks, particularly activity theory. In the first footnote, they say:

Compared with other types of conceptualizations, a working sphere is closer to the notion of activity as defined by Activity Theory, in the sense of connecting sets of actions toward particular objects (Leont?ev, 1978). However the notion of working sphere lacks an emphasis on high-level motives as the notion of activity does (e.g. becoming a project leader) and focuses instead on practical short-term purposes (e.g. enrolling and attending the training sessions on leadership). (p.4)

Yes, yes. The working sphere is "a unit of work that, from the perspective of the individual, has a unique time frame, involves a particular collaborative structure, and is oriented towards a specific purpose" (p.3). It may last for longer or shorter periods. Working spheres are like topoi or assemblages or (most strikingly to me) contextual design's focus areas.

So perhaps I have to withdraw my complaint that working spheres can be handled within activity theory's activity systems. Those triangles seem to be containing less and less these days, and I think that's partially because they were developed to deal with a different sort of work: stable, cyclical, developing over time. AT lacks a strong vocabulary and set of concepts for describing work fragmentation. And although scholars such as Nardi and Engestrom are working to address that issue with AT, I think it will take some development to get these efforts off the ground ? and common terms for describing this sort of oscillation among activities, terms such as "boundary crossing," evoke journeys across demarcated areas rather than the rapid focus shifts that Gonzalez and Mark describe. In fact, they remind me a bit of Bodker's work with focus shifts (again in an AT tradition), but whereas Bodker saw these focus shifts as resulting from breakdowns, Gonzalez and Marks see them as part of the normal flow of operations. And perhaps that's the way to deal with the question in an AT framework: to emphasize polycontextuality over border crossing, to see interruptions as the new state of things, and thus to imagine activities overlapping each other in a sort of polydimensional scheme.

Back to working spheres. Working spheres seem to be well suited for studying the contextual cues and assemblages of tools and practices that are necessary for polycontextual focus shifts. On the ground, workers perform this work in part through the continual review of overviews (not a surprise to anyone who has read Getting Things Done). These overviews can be local or global and can be reviewed at different levels of aggregation (p.12). And they're necessary for managing transitions from one sphere to another (p.16). Sensibly, the authors call for ways to mark, support, and facilitate interactions among these working spheres:

We argue that technological support should be oriented towards helping individuals maintain both local and global perspectives of their working spheres, providing the ability to represent information in portable devices that can be located on their desks or hung on walls, and be connected and synchronized with other tools such as email, electronic calendars, or other systems. Similarly, those technologies can serve to link and share information about the progress that individuals have in their personal working spheres to the systems used by the organization to manage and coordinate team projects or manage customer requests. (p.18)

Yes, yes. Again, this sounds a lot like contextual design's focus areas, although Gonzalez and Marks' account is less anecdotal and more theoretically founded. The authors see collaborations as the intertwining of multiple working spheres and argue that new resources must be provided to help workers transition among these working spheres. Certainly this makes sense, and again this connective work is not well theorized in activity theory (although again, scholars have recently been attempting to formulate theory in those terms). As I continue my own attempts to develop AT along these lines, I'll be looking at this work often.

Reading :: Expanding the Scope of Localization

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:50:26

Expanding the Scope of Localization: A Cultural Usability Perspective on Mobile Text Messaging Use in American and Chinese Contexts

by Huatong Sun

Huatong Sun's dissertation won the 2005 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication. It's easy to see why. This dissertation examines a spreading form of textual communication ? text messaging on mobile phones ? and uses it to provide considerable insight into usability and localization. In fact, this is exactly the sort of work I'd like to see more frequently in computers and writing studies: careful, systematic, empirical work that examines new forms of textuality, develops systematic ways to understand and study it, and unfolds its implications for written communication. And what new textuality is more widespread and more suddenly used than SMS? By breaking away from the big screen and the hoary textualities that are the staple of computers and writing studies ? MOOs, MUDs, online chats used in classrooms ? Sun demonstrates how to make computers and writing studies newly relevant, applicable, and ? dare I say it? ? useful.

Using a combination of activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies, Sun examines texting in China and in upper New York state, and of course finds cultural differences. But she also finds similarities. One striking similarity is that text messaging is so difficult. In Chinese and in English, each character often takes more than one press on the phone's keyboard (although, as she points out, there are some ways such as predictive typing that can lessen that burden). Texting is far more difficult than it needs to be. Yet texting has taken off at an incredible rate due to its advantages and the degree to which people can customize it. So we find that the Chinese tend to perceive and write text messages as a form of ci, a classic poetic genre "used for expressing feelings of the common people and portraying mundane life details" (p.164), while U.S. users tend to use text messages to perform small talk. And particularly in her case studies of U.S. users, Sun investigates how text messaging interacts with other communication technologies such as IM and voice; one couple, for instance, texted each other until peak hours were over and they could talk more cheaply (p.182). "Affordances of each technology are used here to arrange a stronger rhetoric," Sun argues, then proves it (p.183).

Just a note: Sun is one of a string of smart, innovative graduate students that Bill Hart-Davidson mentored during his stay at Rensselaer. I'm envious of Bill's obvious talents as a dissertation director, and I continue to be impressed with his students' work, especially Sun's.

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Reading :: Networks and Netwars

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:19:13

Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

by John Arquilla, David F. Ronfeldt

Although I was not that impressed with Hugh Hewitt's Blog, I was intrigued by his references to John Arquilla. Arquilla works (or worked?) for RAND, where he developed the concept of "netwar," a type of low-intensity conflict made practical by new information technologies:

To be precise, the term netwar refers to an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age. These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed organizations, small groups, and individuals who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often without a precise central command. Thus, netwar differs from modes of conflict and crime in which the protagonists prefer to develop formal, stand-alone, hierarchical organizations, doctrines, and strategies as in past effots, for example, to build centralized movements along Leninist lines. Thus, for example, netwar is about the Zapatistas more than the Fidelistas, Hamas more than the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the American Christian Patriot movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, and the Asian Triads more than the Cosa Nostra. (p.6).

And, it might be added, about al Qaeda. In fact, bin Laden makes several appearances in this volume, which was written before September 11 but published shortly afterwards; the editors include an afterword discussing the attacks. And reading this volume has helped me to understand both al Qaeda and the US military response much better. The netwar strategy places a premium on decentralizing control, capability, and decision-making, and that decentralization is made possible by pervasive "internetting" or intercommunication among nodes. Think in terms of Afghanistan, where US special forces were authorized to infiltrate in small bands, keeping constant communication with air cover and authorized to negotiate with locals. Or think in terms of how the Iraqi army immediately dissolved when US forces reached Baghdad, leaving the invading forces with the problem of building security forces from the ground up while insurgents conducted irregular, improvised attacks. "Many ? if not most ? netwar actors will be nonstate, even stateless. Some may be agents of a state, but others will try to turn states into their agents. Also, a netwar actor may be both subnational and transnational in scope" (p.7).

In their introduction, the editors describe various network topologies. Smugglers may arrange themselves in a chain; a franchise or cartel might arrange itself in a hub with actors tied to a central node or actor; and militant peace groups may arrange themselves in an all-channel network in which every node is connected to every other (pp.7-8). The third is the most difficult to organize and sustain, but also the most powerful, as it offers "no precise head or heart that can be targeted" (p.9). In addition, organizations may form hybrids of these basic types. And, the editors caution, hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks (p.15). They helpfully outline prominent cases of netwar, from the Zapatistas to Chechnya to the Battle for Seattle (p.17); most of these are examined in subsequent chapters.

The rest of the book consists of case studies with interesting implications. In "The Networking of Terror in the Information Age" (pp.29-60), Michele Zanini and Sean J.A. Edwards argue that combating terror networks must involve monitoring changes in IT use (p.52) and targeting information flows (p.53). In "Transitional Criminal Networks" (pp.61-97), Phil Williams likens criminal networks to "boundary spanners" (p.77) that cross borders and markets. He identifies several different business roles, including organizers, insulators, communicators, guardians, extenders, monitors, and crossovers (pp.82-83). In "The Emergence and Influence of the Zapatista Social Netwar" (pp.171-199), David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla examine the Zapatista insurgency in Mexico, leading with the intriguing thesis that "social newar is more effective the more democratic the setting" (p.171); they demonstrate that the Zapatista insurgency's success rested on its ability to network with sympathetic NGOs that helped to turn the public's sympathy their way. They also call the Zapatistas the world's first "postmodern" insurgency.

Perhaps the most intriguing case study is of the "Battle for Seattle," the protests that occurred in that city in conjunction with the WTO summit in 1999. In "Netwar in the Emerald City: WTO Protest Strategy and Tactics" (pp.201-235), Paul de Armond dissects the conflict in detail, demonstrating how an all-channel network organized itself, constructed a strategy and tactics, and outflanked the Seattle response at every turn.

One of the most interesting overview chapters is Luther P. Gerlach's "The Structure of Social Movements: Environmental Activism and its Opponents" (pp.289-310), in which the author argues that networks are segmentary (composed of diverse groups), polycentric (having multiple, often competing leaders), networked (with mutiple linkages) (pp.289-290). Part of what makes these organizations so effective is that leaders may be charismatic and compelling, but they do not carry a movement on their own; movements are loosely affiliated but split and divide based on affinities, leading them to spread like kudzu (or, if you prefer, rhizomes). Interestingly, groups are interlinked through personal relationships and sustained by "living links" such as "traveling evangelists" (p.296) ? something that I certainly have seen in large organizations. The looseness and leaderlessness of these organizations lead to system reliability: organizations can both learn from and disavow failures, leading to relatively low-risk, high-yield development of the organization as long as the narrative is skillfully managed. Disavowal and emulation result in a sort of trial-and-error learning (p.305).

Let's sum up. What strikes me is that the all-channel communication model, the confusion of boundaries and peripheries, the headless/leaderless organization, and the devolution and distribution of authority and control, sounds a lot like some of the more ambitious new economy work. If you read Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy, for instance, they push the idea of small, flexible federations that come together temporarily to serve one customer's need, then disperse. Some of the "new economy" work in activity theory goes in this direction too. That wouldn't surprise Arquilla, who thinks that netwar is a precursor of larger changes.

Something to watch out for, though, is that the nodes of these networks don't seem to be well theorized. One problem that actor-network theorists have encountered is that their work is read as if "nodes" = human beings; their idea was that nodes were actors, which could be humans, nonhumans, or combinations; the idea was to leave the unit open in an ontological sense. I don't think that's how Arquilla and Ronfeldt are using the term; I think their nodes really are humans and/or aggregations of humans. And that means that the nodes are relatively fixed, closer to an activity network than an actor-network. Yes, it makes a big difference theoretically. >

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