Reading :: The Shield and the Cloak

The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons
By Gary Hart

The Shield and the Cloak was cited in Arquilla's Worst Enemy, which I recently reviewed, and I was intrigued enough to pick up a copy. Like Worst Enemy, this book, written by longtime Democratic senator and onetime Presidential candidate Gary Hart, focuses on how we might go about achieving security in the 21st century. And it provided an interesting contrast with Robb's Brave New War, which I had just finished reading when I picked up Hart's book. So I was initially very optimistic about this book.

Hart argues that there are two kinds of security: the shield and the cloak. In the past we have focused on the shield: "The narrow definition of security is the prevention of physical harm by creating a protective shield" (p.17). But, he says, we also need to provide the cloak: "The broader definition of security includes the opportunity for a stable livelihood, the chance to be productive, the comfort of community in a healthy environment, and confidence in the integrity of government - all representing a cloak of protection. Genuine security requires a cloak of economic security, environmental security, health security, energy security, and educational security" (p.17).

Hart continues:

To a degree, the difference in these definitions flows from a difference in outlook on life. If one believes that life is dangerous, that each of us is pretty much alone, that each must make his own way, that our moral duty is to ourselves alone, and that the government's job is to protect us and otherwise leave us alone, then the leaner definition of security as a shield will probably suffice.

If however, one senses that we are all members of a community, that we have a responsibility to look out for each other, that we are all in this together, and that our moral duty is to help to create a general sense of well-being, then one is necessarily drawn to the richer definition of security as a cloak and collective obligation. From the difference in these philosophical dispositions flows political parties and, ultimately, national policies. (pp.17-18, my emphasis)

Yes, go ahead and read it again. Hart has sketched out a Manichean understanding of security, built on a similarly Manichean reading of the US' political parties, essentially claiming that Republicans are by philosophy extreme Libertarians or Objectivists, while Democrats are people who genuinely care for other people. It's an extremely unrealistic depiction of the parties. It assumes a degree of party unity that is simply not present in either party. It assumes that community-building is either a governmental function or no function at all - something that is hinted at in this quote and clarified in the remainder of the text, and that ignores how people in both parties have worked with nongovernmental social sector institutions. It's an unnecessarily partisan text, and Hart's political enemies are made to seem dull, venal, and wrongheaded throughout.

Those enemies are not just on the Right: Hart grumbles that Pres. Clinton did not act on his idea to "appoint a commission of elders to consider where America was to go following the end of the Cold War" (p.35), but did eventually act on Newt Gingrich's "similar, but considerably more limited, version of the same idea" (p.36). The way Hart tells it, if people had just listened to him earlier, things would be much better: indeed, he even claims that had he been elected President in 1988, the Cold War would have ended sooner (p.35).

But, frankly, his analysis does not inspire confidence in me. Hart sees some of the same threats that Robb sees: fourth-generation warfare, private security companies, the loss of the state's ability to extend protection and a safety net. But whereas Robb was willing to go out on a limb with radically decentralized solutions, Hart's impulse is to double down: centralize Homeland Security, extend the social safety net further, increase governmental services, eliminate hunger worldwide, increase economic interdependence between states. These measures must be paid through the US' boundless funds and political will, Hart argues (an argument that probably sounded more plausible in 2006 than it does today). Hart's doubling down on the centralized benevolence of the state leaves the state open, in Robb's analysis, to the inevitable weakening of the state's legitimacy through systematic disruption - and Hart, unfortunately, does not articulate any legitimate countermeasure to such disruptions. In short, Hart's argument is (small-c) conservative, repackaging Great Society solutions to counter an emergent threat for which they were not designed.

Hart ends the book by arguing that "When every child in America is secure, then America will be secure" (p.180) - a bait-and-switch, since the two securities he describes are of different categories. From my view, Hart has simply failed to grapple with the question of fourth-generation warfare, and his conclusions constitute a faulty causal argument. I don't recommend this book.

Reading :: Brave New War

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
By John Robb

I've been reading several books on warfare and terrorism lately because I'm interested in the network organizational structure used by some terrorist organizations and advocated for components of our own military. Networks, as I've noted in other reviews, are also being adopted in knowledge work (my current focus), and looking at conflict as a parallel case helps me to think through implications for knowledge work. And vice versa - as John Robb demonstrates in his book Brave New War, which characterizes the organizational structure of the Iraqi insurgency as "an open-source community network" (p.4). Brave New War lays out, lucidly and in terms that the general readership can understand, what such organizational changes mean to the future of security, focusing primarily on the Iraqi insurgency up to the publication date (2007). Although it's repetitive at times, and although it doesn't predict the post-Surge (relative) calm in Iraq, this book does a great job laying out the changes in the security landscape and their implications for national security.

In a nutshell, Robb argues that "we have entered the age of the faceless, agile enemy" (p.3). Our military is still tuned to fight state-to-state wars (p.7), but our most next-generation enemies are now stateless, without a recognized center of gravity, and thus nearly immune to conventional military force (p.4). Such enemies have organized in innovative and agile ways that promote much faster decision-making cycles and much more distributed decision-making, similar to software companies (p.4). And rather than turning to conventional weapons and targets, they turn to

systems disruption, a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens (p.5)

He predicts "the rise of global virtual states" that "will rapidly undermine confidence in our national-security systems" (p.6). New conflicts, he says, will be substate, fought by "superempowered groups" who can leverage technological advances and pinpoint systemic weaknesses of states (p.8).

In subsequent chapters, Robb details how such groups work. He argues that this new method of warfare focuses on delegitimizing the state, leading to weakened or failed states, by "derail[ing] the key drivers of economic globalization: the flow of resources, investment, people, and security" (p.14). Such groups look for high return on investment for their attacks. Such "global guerillas have atomized into loose, decentralized networks that are more robust and learn more quickly than traditional hierarchies" (p.15). These networks form a "bazaar of violence" (p.15) in which loosely affiliated or unaffiliated groups, often with differing ideologies, can share information and resources and "coordinate their actions to swarm vulnerable targets" (p.16). Such networks want failed states (p.17): the feudal vision of the Caliphate is "the hollowing out and failure of the nation-state" (p.18). Again, he points to the Iraqi insurgency, in which Baathists, al-Qaeda, and criminals all wanted a weakened state for their own purposes (p.18).

Such networks are vanishingly small. Of course, the apparatus of the state is also vanishingly small, although it claims the entire territory. "This new organization," Robb warns, "once established, is now in competition with the states as an equal and not as a successor" (p.21). And it is at an advantage in that no one expects such networks to provide services, stability, or protection in the same way that a state does.

Most of the United States' recent "wars," Robb points out, were actually interventions in failed states: Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo (p.26). Indeed, conventional warfare has been almost eliminated due to Mutually Assured Destruction on one hand and global economic and social integration on the other (p.25). Under these pressures, as the Cold War wound down, proxy guerilla war became the primary means of wars between states (p.27). Such fourth-generation warfare (4GW) "was seen as a way to waste the strength of the strong - to bleed the target state dry morally and economically. The result is an eternal war that typically ends with the target state's inevitable defeat" (p.27). 4GW turns states' strengths into weaknesses (p.28). And the latest development has been that "guerilla and terrorist movements, which were once the proxy puppets of nation-states, became autonomous" (p.30).

Here we return to Iraq, the centerpiece of Robb's argument. After the Gulf War, Robb argues, Saddam Hussein knew that Iraq could not win a conventional war with the US. So his planning team decided to plan a 4GW, establishing the irregular Feyadeen Saddam in 1995, stashing weapons in the countryside, and selecting an urban swarming strategy that focused on systemic disruptions (something they learned from the pinpoint infrastructure bombing carried out during the Gulf War) (p.44). When Gulf War II started, the forces simply melted away and began their 4GW: a 4GW that grew to include hundreds of small groups (p.73) that "range from a small family group to large ideologically motivated groups measuring in the thousands" (p.74). The groups are united by a common enemy and more or less by tactical approaches, but not by a common strategic objective.

In this emerging landscape, Robb argues, the state is stretched to the breaking point - not just the US, but also China, where rapid economic growth has outstripped the government's ability to control it (p.86). In such conditions, paramilitary forces and ad hoc militias develop; Robb points to China here (p.86), but also mentions the proliferation of SWAT teams and the rise of the Minutemen in the US (p.87). He expects private military companies to gain ground (p.91).

Robb turns to the analogy of open-source warfare, arguing that in OSW, a spectacular attack functions as an alpha release. Other networks can take the basic architecture of the attack, tweak it, fork it, and release their own versions (p.116). The promise of the attack draws people with differing motives but the same objective, the attack (p.116). In such an environment, coordination consists not of centrally directed activity, but of stigmergy:

Stigmergic systems use simple environmental systems to coordinate the actions of independent agents (each with their own decision-making process). These signals are used to coordinate scalable, robust, and dynamic activity. This activity is usually much more intelligent than the actions capable by the individual actors ... (p.124)

Based on the analysis above, Robb argues that we must turn away from solutions that rely on the nation-state as the primary actor (p.162). Security, he argues, must be affordable, efficiently allocated, broad-based and participatory; the state cannot deliver this sort of security well in the face of 4GW, he says (p.163). Instead, he says, "the only way to ensure security in the future will be through survival and decentralized resilience" (p.164). Let's rethink the state, he says, transitioning from a nation-state to a market-state (p.165); that would entail moving the legitimacy of the state from a provider of its people's welfare to "maximal 'opportunity' through the use of market mechanisms" (p.166). (To some, I note here, this might sound like destroying the state in order to save it.)

Since I've been reading a lot of this literature lately, Brave New War doesn't seem as fresh or radical as it might to many. But it's a well written book, lucid, smart even when it goes where few will want to follow. As I said earlier, it's a bit repetitive and perhaps a bit alarmist. But it is such a daring book that transcends these weaknesses, and it made me think about things differently even when I disagreed with it. Especially if you haven't read about netwar before, take a look at this book.

Reading :: Fanatical Schemes

Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus
By Patricia Roberts-Miller

I've been meaning to pick this book up ever since it came out. That's not because of its subject matter, which is outside my research area or expertise, but because Trish is a colleague, and I like to read my colleagues' books. And Trish does crank out the books: this is her third, and she's currently working on her fourth.

Maybe I should call her "Roberts-Miller" for the purposes of this review.

Fanatical Schemes is Roberts-Miller's examination of proslavery rhetoric of the 1830s. She's arguing with other scholars of this period: the common understanding is that proslavery rhetoric became more strident in response to increased stridency of abolitionists, but Roberts-Miller argues that this causal argument is incorrect. Ratheer, she argues that the inflammatory aspect of proslavery rhetoric preceded abolitionist rhetoric; it was, she says, inherent to proslavery rhetoric. Roberts-Miller sees this as a crucial point because it has definite implications: when "civility" is the yardstick, the only permitted criticism is from superiors to inferiors; substantive social change is impossible because "under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts"(p.6).

Indeed, she argues, the South – despite the education in rhetoric afforded its citizens – actually silenced deliberation in routine ways; it made certain topics off-limits. And consequently it could not deliberate properly with Northern politicians, nor could it deliberate internally, making war all but inevitable (p.31). Prudence was considered mildly dishonorable (p.65); proslavery public discourse was dominated by the epideictic (p.64); discourse was framed by in-groups vs. out-groups (Ch.2); and hyperbole characterized the discourse (p.42). Roberts-Miller describes this discourse as yielding self-referential absurdity that demanded loyalty to the group rather than the logic (p.41). That situation leads to "cunning projection," in which the same behavior is considered a virtue in the ingroup but a vice in the outgroup (p.106).

Roberts-Miller concludes the book by discussing cunning projection in terms of Orwell's "doublethink" (p.219). Personally, I would have liked to see an actual rather than a fictional phenomenon here, such as double consciousness or dialogism, both of which are grounded in actual cases that involve believing contradictory ideas, both of which are well theorized and may have gotten to the layers of argumentation in a less modernist way. But Trish (let's call her Trish again now) indicated to me in a hallway conversation that neither quite get to the group loyalty aspect she was trying to express. See what you think – and I do recommend the book.

Reading :: Supersizing the Mind

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
By Andy Clark

Someone in my Twitter stream recommended this book, and it sounded interesting enough that I picked it up and read it on the plane from PA the other week. Essentially, it's an apologia for Clark's assertion that the human mind is best understood as extended beyond the skull, not "brainbound" as his critics suggest. He begins the book with the illustration of Richard Feynman's writing, which Feynman insisted was not simply a representation of his thinking but actually part of his thinking. Clark characterizes this extension of thinking across artifacts as "the outward loop as a functional part of an extended cognitive machine" (p.xxvi). Although the brain is certainly an essential, perhaps the only essential, part of this loop, the extended perspective is needed to understand the full range of cognition. Environmental engineering, he says, is self-engineering (p.xxviii).

In my case, as you might imagine, Clark could be characterized as preaching to the choir. But his "sermon" is more exigetical than hortatory: in answering his critics from cognitive science, he marshalls illustrations and evidence touching on aspects of cognition that are not familiar to lay audiences. For instance, he reports work in sensory substitution conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, in which blind subjects were fitted with grids of "nails" on their backs, nails that gently stimulated the skin based on input from a head-mounted camera. Incredibly, after a short while, the subjects began to interpret the stimulation as "quasi-visual experiences of objects looming and so forth," even ducking balls thrown at them (p.35). They interpreted these experiences visually. Similarly, in a 2003 study, patients with leprosy were fitted with sensor gloves that stimulated sensation at a forehead-mounted disk; they quickly began to interpret the forehead stimulation as occurring at the fingertips (p.36). Based on these and other cases, Clark argues that three grades of embodiment exist: mere, basic, and profound (p.42).

In a profoundly embodied organism – I.e., us – language functions as "a form of mind-transforming cognitive scaffolding" (p.44). Clark takes us from material symbols stripped of cues, which result in "fast-and-frugal subroutines" (p.45), to the use of "spatial proximity [e.g., stacks, piles] to reduce descriptive complexity" (p.46), to mathematics and language. "Our mature mental routines," he concludes, "are not merely self-engineered: they are massively, overwhelmingly, almost unimaginably self-engineered" (p.60).

Clark argues that embodiment seems to matter in three ways. First, it spreads the load of cognition, making problem-solving and adaptive response more fluid and efficient. Second, it allows the organism to self-structure information. Third, it supports extended cognition, co-opting "bioexternal resources into extended but deeply integrated cognitive and computational resources" (pp.196-197).

I'm skipping over a lot here, in part because Clark's book is actually a conversation with many critics and I'm neither fully privy to that conversation nor expert enough to recapitulate it well. If you are, you may find this book to be more enlightening. I found it to be both intriguing and difficult in the same sense that A.N. Leontiev's experiments with lights and gels were; I saw many examples of counterintuitive function, but I don't have enough grounding in the subject to evaluate them. So in the end, my takeaway from Clark's book was not as rich as I would have liked. If you are grounded in Vygotsky, Hutchins, Bateson, and similar scholars, you'll get the gist as I did – but I will personally hesitate to lean too heavily on this book when making my own arguments.

Reading :: The Rise of the Creative Class

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
By Richard Florida

Last week, I tweeted that I had picked up this book and that it was thicker than I had expected. My favorite response was: "It's thin on the inside."

True? More or less. The book is 404 pages, including appendices and index, and it is not all unique material. I actually shook my head in amazement when Florida explained on p.150 et passim that the Creative Class suffer from a "time famine" and have little patience for slow, low-yield activities – a point that Florida makes after recycling various other statements about the Creative Class repeatedly. What person suffering from such a time famine has time to read a 404-page book, one that could have been slimmed down considerably while making the same points? (Me, apparently.)

So what are those points? I'll attempt to summarize first, then critique.

Florida argues that the Creative Class is an emerging class, the dominant class of our day, comprising 30% of the workforce (p.ix). Creativity has become "the driving force of our economic growth" (p.ix) and is "the key factor in our economy and society" (p.4). Others, he says, have characterized our economy a "knowledge economy" or "information economy," but the key factor is creativity – which he defines, quoting Webster's dictionary, as "the ability to create new forms" (pp.4-5). Creativity, he says, is technological, economic, artistic, and cultural, and all these forms reinforce each other (p.5). Once-fringe groups, viewed in the past as "bizarre mavericks," are now "at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth" (p.6).

Such creative people may be everywhere, but they tend to congregate in specific places: "Place has become the central organizing unit of our time, taking on many of the functions that used to be played by firms and other organizations" (p.6). And those places are tolerant places, he says: the Creative Class seeks places and organizations that are diverse and tolerant, particularly in terms of same-sex partners, but also in terms of "odd personal habits or extreme styles of dress," because "many highly creative people" fit that bill (p.79). Florida acknowledges that such tolerant places and organizations seem to be short on one particular aspect of diversity – African-Americans – but pins this shortfall on the digital divide (p.80, for instance). Tolerance, he says, is a core and necessary value for the Creative Class, since creativity is so highly valued that employers can't turn it away: "we are more tolerant and liberal both because our material conditions allow it and because the new Creative Age tells us to be so" (p.82).

Tolerance, Florida says, is epitomized by a place's or organization's attitude toward gay people. He notes a remarkable, statistically significant correlation between high-tech centers and the Gay Index – an index based on US Census data that connects unmarried partners data and data on same-sex roommates (p.255). (I should point out here that, based on the methodology, this index is more of an "Out" index.) The Gay Index, Florida says, is "a reasonable proxy for an area's openness to different kinds of people and ideas" (pp.244-245).

Creativity, Florida says, provides a more precise definition than "existing, more amorphous definitions of knowledge workers, symbolic analysts, or professional and technical workers" (p.9). At the same time, he takes pains to say that creativity can be a factor in any job, including factory work (p.10), the tacit creativity of copy machine repair (p.70), and the increasingly coordinative work of the secretary (p.70). But the Creative Class proper includes a "Super-Creative Core" of "scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects, as well as the thought leadership of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers" (p.69). They produce "new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely usable" (p.69). The Creative Class also includes "creative professionals" who serve in "high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and health care professions, and business management." "These people engage in creative problem solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems" (p.69).

The Creative Class are, as a class, financially well-off but time-poor. So, Florida says, the Service Class increases to support the increase in the Creative Class, performing functions that were once performed in the family (p.76). But although they tend to be financially well-off, the Creative Class are not motivated by money: IT workers, for instance, prefer "challenge and responsibility, the ability to work a flexible schedule and a secure and stable work environment" to financial rewards (p.10). And those characteristics are needed, because, Florida tells us, creativity isn't like factory or service work. "It is not something that can be kept in a box and trotted out when one arrives at the office" (p.22).

Florida's book isn't just description, it's advocacy: he ends by imploring the Creative Class to develop a class consciousness that can support mass action (p.317). He also uses the word "we" a lot, clearly indicating that he sees himself as part of this nascent movement.

So what does a Creative Class member look like? Richard Florida has provided a ready, well-drawn example: Richard Florida. Florida repeatedly uses himself as an example of the Creative Class, so much so that by the end of the book I knew his birth year, his upbringing, his employment history, his kitchen setup, his eating habits, his preferred exercise, his usual casual clothing, and his many issues with his adopted home of Pittsburgh. After a while I felt as if Florida had invited me over to watch home movies or to read his autobiography, Florida on Florida. (As you may have guessed, Florida is a Baby Boomer.)

I suppose I have moved into the critique phase of this review, so let me bottom-line it for you. Florida has a kernel of a good insight here, but he makes several missteps in order to inflate his thesis.

First, he never really nails down the term "creativity" in which he invests so much importance. At the end of the book, I'm still not sure how to distinguish Creative Class jobs from service and working class jobs. I tried simply thinking of the Creative Class as a renaming of knowledge work, but Florida makes clear that some managers – the epitome of Drucker's knowledge work – did not qualify as creative (see p.308 in his case study on Pittsburgh, for instance). Without a solid definition, the Creative Class – despite its name – tends to be somewhat orthogonal to the other classes, with Florida even implying that service and working class jobs are increasingly creative (see above). The distinction is unclear. Compare that to Drucker's discussion of knowledge work, in which he paints a picture of knowledge work as becoming an increasingly larger factor in other forms of work. This is a crucial point: without a concrete, definable concept, the book is not terribly useful, even though I think Florida is genuinely detecting something in his comparative statistics.

Second, Florida cuts a lot of corners. He tends to play heavily on stereotypes of creativity: creativity is inspired, creativity is signified by outlandish dress, creativity is eclectic, creativity comes from everywhere. Bluntly, Florida seems to think of creativity as a personal attribute rather than a process anchored in culture. He tends to see the markers of creativity as continuous across times and cultures: "Artists, musicians, professors and scientists have always set their own hours, dressed in relaxed and casual clothes and worked in stimulating environments," he states (pp.12-13), seemingly unaware of how, say, 19th-century professors or 20th-century orchestra musicians dressed. But Florida also cuts corners in his citations: for instance, he name-checks Castells' The Power of Identity as illustrating how important individual identity is (p.229). That's like saying that Bakhtin emphasized the importance of storytelling. With examples like these, I quickly grew wary of Florida's other statements.

Third, Florida has tended to remake creativity in his own image. He's played what I think is a dangerous game, equating specific kinds of tolerance (particularly but not exclusively tolerance of gays) with tolerance in general, and pegging creativity to that liberal tolerance. Yet some of the most creative organizational thinking of this young century has been performed by the Islamic fundamentalists of Al Qaeda, and the aftermath of Prop 8 has of course problematized the notion of general, universal tolerance.

It was at this point that I realized what The Rise of the Creative Class resembles: Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. Fukuyama's book enthralled neoconservatives with its claim that capitalism and democracy had won – we had reached the end of history, the point at which the free market was systemically inevitable – and all we had to do was wait for its realization. And Florida's book makes similar promises to social liberals, telling them that they have won: tolerance and openness are inevitable, part of the systemic change brought by the Creative Class, and that we only have to wait for the class to develop its class consciousness; the Creative Class only needs to realize that it's in the driver's seat. Like Fukuyama's argument, Florida's argument is so attractive that it's hard to step back and gain the distance necessary to critique it. But once I did, the argument fell apart. We haven't reached the end of history yet.

I recommend the book – it has a kernel of an idea – but read it critically.

What if I had called them "genre networks"?

Just thinking aloud here: What if, instead of calling them genre ecologies, I had called them genre networks?

First, some background. When I was researching software development for Schlumberger Well Services during a summer internship in 1997, I cast around for ways to describe the clusters of information resources that the developers strung together in localized and often idiosyncratic ways. The information resources themselves were easy to characterize - I had been studying genre theory, so it was natural to characterize them as genres. But as the developers used these genres in conjunction, often in nonlinear ways such as juxtaposition and annotation, the clusters yielded sums greater than their parts. And the existing ways of talking about these - genre sets, systems, and repertoires - seemed to assume different things about such linkages, generally more linear things, without the interesting substitutions I had seen there.

I hit on the term "genre ecology" and it stuck. Independently, others had hit on the term at the same time, including Tom Erickson as well as Aviva Freedman and Graham Smart. The ecology metaphor did the work I was hoping it would do, describing the emergent clusters of genre resources as dynamic, localized systems whose components might have developed in other environments before interacting in their current systems. It also emphasized the point that such systems didn't necessarily have to be that way - that these systems were emergent, not following predetermined paths.

The notion of the genre ecology helped me immensely as I began my dissertation research, which I reworked in my first book Tracing Genres through Organizations. In one instance, for example - which became so key that I used it to open the book - a police officer had introduced an improvised, unofficial genre into the ecology, using it to mediate between two official genres that embodied different representational systems and logics. The improvised genre actually substituted for one of the official genres - a map - so much so that she didn't even bother using the map. She actually avoided it. And as I looked at the other incidents in which participants had improvised genres, I could see that these generally introduced more flexibility into the system. The police officer had substituted the unofficial genre for the more cumbersome official one - but she still had both resources. She had built flexibility into the system, but she had not simply traded the old genre for the new; she had redundancy in case she needed it. Yet since each genre has its own "logic," that redundancy isn't simple substitution, it's a redundancy in "logics" as well. The more genres you introduce into the ecology, the more complex the task of managing genres becomes.

By the time I was visiting campuses for job talks in 1999, I was able to talk coherently about how I was mapping these genre relationships via genre ecology diagrams. At one campus visit, I tried to explain these diagrams to a professor from another department. "Oh," he said. "Network diagrams."

I was hesitant to say yes, because I had only a lay understanding of networks at that point. But, yes, the genre ecology diagram is a form of network diagram. It maps out linked relationships among nodes. And a genre ecology diagram, like a network diagram, can show which node is most densely linked and to which others.

So that idea rattled in the back of my mind as I continued developing my scholarship. My next study was a larger one, of a telecommunications company, and although I used an activity theory framework to plan it out, I kept seeing incidents that didn't fit neatly into activity theory. I turned to other frameworks, most importantly actor-network theory, in a detour that took several years and produced my second book - titled Network. Here, I brought together ideas from activity theory, genre theory, actor-network theory, distributed cognition, netwar, and knowledge work, among others. I'm happy with the result, but ever since, I have been wondering: what if I had characterized genre ecologies as genre networks?

This question occurred to me again yesterday, as I read Arquilla and Ronfeldt's collection In Athena's Camp. In netwar analysis - as opposed to actor-network theory - networks are conceived as composed of interlinked nodes that provide alternate arrangements and resources to accomplish a purpose. Netwar is mostly concerned with organization, so these nodes tend to be seen as military units or troops. Such networks can be interconnected in various ways, but the most yield comes from an all-channel network, in which every node is connected to every other. The more interconnections, the easier it is to reroute around a node; to achieve localized efficiencies; to minimize steps in communication; to push power to the edge, which is to say, delegate discretion to more localized levels, resulting in faster reaction time. But this interconnection comes at a price: more connections and more communication yield a higher information processing load, so nodes must be able to adapt to that load. Although the networked form of organization has arguably been with us for millenia, it can scale appreciably only with information technologies that have lowered the cost of communication transactions - and allowed us to aggregate the flood of information in useful ways.

I'm intensely interested in work organization, but when I conceived of genre ecologies, I was looking at how people used textual resources individually and in small groups. Yet the analogy can take us some distance. Like organizational networks, genre ecologies provide alternate resources to accomplish the same thing, resulting in easy rerouting and potentially localized efficiencies. Depending on the organization, unoffical genres can introduce ways to localize the work rapidly, allowing more discretion. The more genres, the more potential interconnections, yielding more flexibility and exploration - but also more instability, incompatibility, and information load. That last problem is compounded by the fact that genres tend to come from different activities and reflect different "logics"; their users must either learn and handle each of these logics - soaking up genre knowledge from the genres' originating activities - or work around them. Related is the fact that the network nodes - the genres - don't produce clean outputs; they're not conduits, they're alternate problem-solving approaches with different assumptions or warrants. Different logics and outputs spell big trouble when the cost of communicating and transforming information is high; so in more hierarchical organizations, unofficial genres are either coopted or squeezed out, reducing flexibility and local discretion, reducing information load, boosting regularity and centralizing "topsight" over the activity. (This is the kernel of my critique of Contextual Design in my first book.)

But in knowledge work - and more specifically, in net work - more flexibility is needed because more discretion is needed. As Drucker argued, knowledge workers must manage themselves and must be given enough flexibility to solve their problems. That is to say, discretion over one's work is pushed to the edge (organizationally), resulting in more idiosyncratic work arrangements and thus more unofficial, localized genres. Even when knowledge work is implemented in a more hierarchical organization, individuals will tend to route around hierarchical constraints because those constraints can hinder the localizations they need to enact in order to handle unique problems. That's part of what I began to see in my studies, from Schlumberger to the Iowa DOT to Telecorp to my current studies in progress, all of which can be characterized as knowledge work environments.

Let's bring this back to genre ecology models, because although it's tempting to stop there, the classic network concept is not a perfect fit. For one thing, these nodes (genres) are unique, so routing around a particular node means changing the character of the network. For another, genres aren't atomistic: they are more rhizomatic, trailing lines of association into other activities. And of course when we talk about genres, we aren't talking about concrete things: genres are "text types," or logics or traditions that we might use when composing or using particular text instances, so a given text could be perceived as belonging to different genres or a hybrid genre. Finally, like actor-networks, genres can be unpacked to reveal other genres - see my discussion of the PC-ALAS interface and its interface elements in Tracing Genres through Organizations - and that unpacking goes beyond simple decomposition because these other genres each trail associational linkages as well.

So the metaphor of network, like the metaphor of ecology, only gets us so far. But it does point us toward some interesting analytical approaches. For instance,

• What if we see genre ecology models as network diagrams that help us to identify possible points of information overload?
• What if we see communicative event models as records of how individuals traverse the nodes of the genre ecology/network?
• What if we see sociotechnical graphs as ways to map alternate nodes and connections in a network, as well as to monitor the creation of new nodes?

Maybe these will constitute a good starting place for my next book. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear your comments.

Reading :: The Concept of the Corporation

Concept of the Corporation
By Peter F. Drucker

This is actually Peter Drucker's second book, but it's the classic study of GM that began his long string of management publications. I read the 1964 edition, with a 20-year retrospective - the original 18-month study was completed in early 1945, and the manuscript was completed just days after Germany surrendered. The 1964 edition - written three years before The Effective Executive, which revisits many of the concepts of the earlier book - has an introduction and epilogue wrapped around the 1946 text, making it - from my perspective - a time capsule wrapped in a second time capsule. Personally, I found it disorienting to read about the successes of 1945 GM as the GM of 2009 headed into bankruptcy.

The events of 1945 weighed heavily on Drucker's mind, and he repeatedly discusses GM's wartime production as well as those of Nazi Germany and the USSR. He is quite concerned about democracy and capitalism, which, he emphasizes, are certainly not the same thing. But he argues that since the US has cast its lot with the free-enterprise system, "The central questions of American statesmanship must thus be: how does the free-enterprise system function and what are its problems; what can it do, what can it not do; and what are the questions yet to be answered?" (p.15). So he brings the tools of political science to bear on the corporation, the linchpin of the US free enterprise system (at the time). In particular, he attempts a three-level political analysis of GM: (1) the institution as autonomous, "judged in terms of its own purpose"; (2) the institution in terms of how it relates to "the beliefs and promises of the society which it serves"; and (3) "the institution in its relationship to the functional requirements of the society of which the institution is a part" (p.24). He argues against elevating one level over the others, because that's what the Nazis did (p.29); rather, "both our statesmen and our business leaders have to find solutions to the problems of the industrial society which serve at the same time equally the functional efficiency of the corporation, the functional efficiency of society, and our basic political beliefs and promises" (p.29).

So Drucker begins his work of understanding the corporation in political, particularly organizational, terms: the corporation is not raw materials or gadgets, but organization, and even its technical problems are primarily problems of human organization (p.31). And as he was to argue in The Effective Executive, Drucker emphasized that "no institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it" (p.35). The organization, he says, must make average or even under-average people succeed by leveraging their talents, capacities, and initiative (p.36). It must develop independent leaders and balance power and responsibility between central management and local leadership (p.37). In fact, modern industrial enterprises need many more leaders than institutions normally do, he argues (p.37).

GM, he says, achieves this aim partially through decentralization. But Drucker is not talking about the sort of radical decentralization we might see in, for instance, terrorist networks. Rather, he means that GM's divisions were organized as autonomous units (p.47), in a sort of federalist arrangement (p.49) in which division heads "work through and with two closely coordinated committees, one on policy, one on administration" (p.48). This form of decentralization works out to be a set of smaller hierarchies comprising a larger one. Indeed, decentralization "can be applied only where there is at least a rudiment of genuine executive functions" (p.149). Decentralization at GM was not part of a master plan, but it didn't represent muddling through either; it developed through some basic principles and practices (pp.69-70). It resulted in efficiencies at each level (p.109) as well as developing more leaders in each division (p.110). He goes on to argue that decentralization reaches its potential only in a decentralized big business: these have the flexibility to develop, but also more opportunities and resources than small businesses (p.189).

Drucker becomes very interested in meaning as well, meaning as an aspect of autonomy. He retells the experiments in the late 1920s at Western Electric that led to the concept of the "Hawthorne Effect" - but whereas qualitative researchers think of the Hawthorne Effect as demonstrating that any observation can change the work, Drucker argues that the real moral is that productivity and satisfaction increase as long as the worker believes her or his work was receiving attention and recognition. He argues that mass production has largely leached away the positive recognition that workers seek: mass production leads to no completed product (from the worker's perspective), therefore no meaning, no satisfaction, and no "citizenship" (p.135). And, he adds, solutions such as company paternalism and unionism are superficial (p.136). Higher pay doesn't translate into higher satisfaction or lower absenteeism - only reinjecting meaning into work can do that, he suggests.

Drucker goes on to take on Marx, arguing that the contradiction of use-value and profit-value makes no sense (p.190). I'm not sure I grasp the argument he makes here, frankly. But in this discussion, he makes a claim that arrested me simply because it's far less true now than it was: "competition is usually severely limited by geography and communication" (p.204).

In his 1964 epilogue, Drucker amplifies some of his themes. He adds that decentralization, in the sense he uses in the book, makes sense only if the units are distinct businesses within a company; it makes no sense for materials businesses, such as a paper company, to decentralize. He also notes that the book didn't address knowledge workers, which in the intervening 20 years had become the most important group: "the 'knowledge workers' of the professional middle class are doubling in number about every eight years or so. They are rapidly becoming the representative and most important group both in business and in our society" (p.241). He argues that GM was the first large-scale knowledge organization and that "the modern corporation is a knowledge organization" (p.241). And he says that knowledge work has a broad impact: "Automation, for instance, is the substitution of knowledge work for manual work and of perceptual skills for manual skills" (p.242).

Would I recommend this book? Certainly not as your first Drucker book. The concepts are too unformed, the marks of the Second World War are too deep, and the corporation is too new to Drucker at this point. But if you've read some of his other books, this one provides a fascinating view into the study that began forming some of Drucker's most important contributions.

Upcoming

I'm way behind on my book blogging, but once this semester is put to bed, I'll be reviewing these books:

• Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes
• Clark, Supersizing the Mind
• Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation
• Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (second reading)

I'll probably also work through several RAND publications, including Arquilla and Ronfeldt's collection In Athena's Camp. Great stuff to read in preparation for my summer study on coworking.

Back from RSA

For the last few days, I have been at the Rhetoric Society of America conference, conducting a workshop on visualizing activities in digital workplaces with Bill Hart-Davidson (Michigan State) and Mark Zachry (University of Washington). These are two of the smartest people I know, and it was a real pleasure to present and workshop with them, explaining our visualization models to the participants, and seeing the participants develop their own applications.

Now I'm back, just in time to conduct the workshop again - this time, for my undergrads. My Summer I class has just finished data collection on their field studies, and now they're absorbing these models to make sense of the data. I really can't wait to see what they come up with.

Mark and Bill will be conducting a similar workshop at SIGDOC 2009 this fall. I won't be able to make it, but they're going to do a fantastic job - if you're at all interested in this sort of work, please do join them.

Street texts

I've been telling students in my field methods class that we're so surrounded by texts, we don't even notice them. I've suggested that they take a walk around their neighborhood and notice the texts - and think about how different the neighborhood would be without them. Normally I think of street signs, street numbers, and other permanent texts.

But the other day I was walking in my own neighborhood and saw these temporary texts spray painted on the street. One looks like it has something to do with a telecomm company; another seems to delineate property lines and/or water meters; the third, I'm not sure. They're not meant for the general public; they help some service workers navigate the streets to do their work. I'm constantly intrigued by little traces like these, little traces that indicate other overlapping activities of which we know little.

From Austin snapshots

From Austin snapshots

From Austin snapshots

Reading :: Worst Enemy

Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military
By John Arquilla

“For David Ronfeldt,” reads the inscription on this book, “visionary, colleague, friend.” Arquilla and Ronfeldt worked together for many years at RAND, and many of the themes they developed during that time made their way into this book, which is all about transforming the US military to meet future demands. Arquilla, who went on to teach at the Naval Postgraduate School, has thought a great deal about the challenges and implications in such an undertaking.

His analysis is even-handed and complex, as he demonstrates beginning in the Preface. “In this book the reader will find [former SecDef Donald] Rumsfeld an elusive, complex character, right on the big issues about military innovation, tragically wrong about both the idea of invading Iraq and the manner in which the campaign there was conducted” (p.xi). Rumsfeld's vision of a more nimble, more networked, more agile military contrasts with the vision of a political rival who usually comes off better in such accounts: “our adherence to a military philosophy of overwhelming force – the so-called Powell Doctrine – seems exceptionally ill-suited to our time, guaranteeing staggering expenditures, major collateral damage inflicted upon innocents, and growing global resentment of the United States”(p.xi).

We can take Rumsfeld and Powell as figures for two possible pathways for the US military and armies in general. On the one hand, the Powell Doctrine pushes us towards massed forces, a larger army, more extensive and expensive weapons systems, more aircraft carriers, more command and control, and conflicts that minimize risk to US soldiers – by maximizing risks to civilians. As Arquilla points out, throughout military history, massed forces have had their day, then suffered from nimbler, more innovative forces: the phalanx fell to the legion, the massed infantries fell to the German stormtroopers, and more recently the US has had its hands full dealing with decentralized terrorists (p.11). In the latter example, the Powell Doctrine has led to maximizing troop safety by maximizing civilian risks, most obviously in airstrikes, and the resulting collateral damage has provided arguments for recruiters for terrorist networks.

On the other hand, the approach that Rumsfeld (imperfectly, intermittently) took involved smaller, nimbler forces, a smaller army made of smaller networked units, lighter weapons, more decentralized decision-making and initiative at unit level, less centralized control, fewer if any aircraft carriers and fewer expensive weapons systems. Arquilla approvingly cites Rumsfeld's “A-Teams” of commandoes whose partnerships with tribal Afghanis made Operation Enduring Freedom such a success (pp.40-41; see also p.87). Arquilla says the Army “should become a force of the 'many and small,' not the 'few and the large'” (pp.45-46). Remodel the Army along the lines of the Special Forces, he says, with as few as 100-200 troops per unit (p.46). Realize, as Rumsfeld belatedly did, that conflicts are more likely to be netwar conflicts in the future (p.161), and that we must prepare military leaders to confront networks as well as nation-states (p.166). Arquilla points out that Rumsfeld initially favored an “Afghan approach” to Iraq, but encountered sharp opposition from the Pentagon and compromised, leading to the massive Iraq invasion (p.216) – and he also argues that the more recent success in Iraq had less to do with the surge and more to do with small, dispersed garrisons (p.217).

Indeed, Arquilla argues that better organization and communication could give an advantage to low-tech dispersed solutions. For instance, he argues that proven, inexpensive WWI-era biplanes and distributed one-gun batteries could be deployed to great effect (p.52), as could drone JetSkis (p.78) and surveillance blimps, if the Air Force controls the skies (pp. 102-103). Compare these, he invites us, to the aircraft carrier – a recurrent symbol of what's wrong with the traditionalist military thinking that Arquilla warns “is leading us toward disaster” (p.24). Aircraft carriers are protected by traditionalism and budgetary inertia – “they represent the largest single line items in the defense budget” - and face no clear rivals on the seas (p.59). Yet they are large, relatively slow targets representing a “big, single 'point of failure'” (p.69), the epitome of massed forces. Meanwhile, the Chinese are working on a “sea power without a navy” (p.63), remote warfare based on supercavitating torpedoes, supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, and “brilliant” seagoing mines with limited maneuverability (pp.63-64). The US armed forces have been slow to innovate in the face of such developments, Arquilla points out.

Arquilla also weighs in on nonlethal weapons, an issue that has become more central recently. These include infantry weapons, and he discusses the Intifada in this context, but it also includes electronic warfare; he argues strongly for a move to a strong encryption regime for the military and the government (p.128).

Arquilla's chapter on influence operations, which clearly shows the mark of his work with Ronfeldt on noopolitik, is also valuable. Influence operations are more than propaganda: they are perceptions management (and in that sense, rhetorical) (pp.132-133). And he argues that they must be better integrated with miilitary concepts (p.133). He reviews the existing principles for influence operations: (1) Don't use them on US citizens; (2) Avoid lying; (3) craft the message and repeat it often (pp.134-136). But, he says, two problems mar this concept of influence operations: (1) “it undervalues listening,” and (2) “it rules out the idea of making concessions in order to induce others to change their behavior” (p.136). While our influence operations have been bogged down, he says, al-Qaeda's have been successful because “they are well suited for exploiting our own 'scaling problem.' They can mount just a few operations and yet be able to count on the Americans having to respond in costly, balky ways,” responding in entire divisions geared for conventional, symmetrical warfare (p.151). Arquilla counsels that instead we “go small,” relying on influence operations more and on conventional methods less (p.153).

And that brings us to the concept of netwar. I've reviewed netwar concepts elsewhere on the blog, mostly in Arquilla and Ronfeldt's writings, but Chapter 7 is a good overview for those who are less familiar with the concept. One key sentence: “Netwar has a postmodern quality, one that takes advantage of the tendency in our time to view the actual fighting in any conflict as a backdrop to the more important 'battle of the story' about why the war is being waged in the first place” (p.162). That's partly why influence operations have become so important. As we see the crisis in Teheran unfolding over YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, shortly after the 20^th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, we are seeing an example of netwar in which the regime and citizens battle for control of the story.

So what are the implications for our armed forces? Let's start with a surprising one. Arquilla wants to bring back the draft. The problem with the volunteer army, he says, is that volunteers come disproportionately from specific regions, religious backgrounds, and political affiliations, so the armed forces have come to represent a narrower slice of the citizenry. The results have included instances of overt politicization, undue religious influence, and socioeconomic segregation. Reinstating the draft “would remind all Americans of the implicit social contract that runs from citizen to government, and to one's compatriots” (p.195).

At the same time, Arquilla wants a much smaller armed forces: he wants to reduce active duty forces by three quarters while enlarging the reserves to provide more flexible, scalable forces (p.226). He wants to keep elite forces elite and focus on small, dispersed field units (p.226). Most of all, he wants to see the armed forces phase out the enormous, centralized aircraft carriers in favor of smaller ships, and he wants to see outer space kept for intelligence support rather than advanced weaponry (p.226).

Arquilla's book is a well-written, thought-provoking argument. I'm not qualified to evaluate it as a blueprint for the armed forces, but it has analogical implications for other large organizations. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets

Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation
By Peter F. Cowhey and Jonathan D. Aronsen with Donald Abelson

Drucker wrote at the end of World War II that massive organizations such as the corporation, which had been nearly nonexistent at the beginning of the 20^th century, had become the dominant feature of mid-century life. At about the same time that he made that observation, an information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure had begun to grow, creating the beginnings of today's global information technology (Cowhey et al. p.1). And that new infrastructure involved a “radically different model for competition and public policy for this infrastructure ... that is far sounder than its predecessor” (p.1). In this book – available in hardback or as a free download – the authors examine that model, discussing the “inflection point” (p.3) that we face today, sorting through policies and policy implications, and making what they consider to be generally optimistic predictions about how ICT policy will develop over the next few years.

The authors define “inflection point” by quoting former Intel chairman Andy Grove: it “'occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new'” (qtd. p.7). At this inflection point, “ICT technology is becoming both modular and radically cheaper” and at the same time “ubiquitous wired and wireless broadband can meld these ICT capabilities together” into powerful, placeless applications (p.7). “Modularity and broadband mean that convergence of services and equipment will defy traditional market boundaries,” they explain (p.7). Yet public policy has been slow to adapt to this new reality. “This challenge raises the central question we address in this book: How can national and global policies best fulfill the promise of this inflection point in the global ICT infrastructure?” (p.8).

It's an exceedingly important question since, as the authors demonstrate, public policy can have enormous impacts on technologies and thus on the sorts of commercial, civic, and private possibilities they allow (pp.9-10). (That's what drew me to the book, even though I find public policy discussions to be very tough sledding in places, and this book is no exception.) As the authors note, “in today's world many different private interests back different visions of the public interest” (p.10) – and the way the US in particular balances such visions will be crucial, since “we argue that until about 2025 the United States will be able to lead, but not to dictate, the world's choices about future policies” (p.10).

So what changes are involved in this inflection point? First, ICT changes lead to lower entry costs and more competition over smaller market segments: market leaders are less secure and markets themselves can easily change (pp.11-12). Second, “the inflection point breaks ICT out of geographic and functional boxes”; IT can expand horizontally, out of offices, as well as vertically, up and down organizations (p.12).

ICT infrastructures, the authors argue, are inherently political – and its policies and politics are inherently global (p.13). “There are at least four reasons why the domestic governance of ICT infrastructure depends on global arrangements,” they tell us:

• “network externalities ensure that networks are more valuable when they connect more users” (p.13).

• “economies of scale still apply in similar ways to the engineering and the economics of networks,” so suppliers have influence on infrastructure across borders (pp.13-14).

• Because of the features of network economics, “the pricing for connecting domestic networks internationally often displays unusual characteristics that matter to many political stakeholders” (p.14).

• The public holds government ultimately responsible for the quality of the networked infrastructure, so network performance becomes highly political (p.14).

The US has been and (the authors anticipate) will continue to be pivotal in developing global ICT policy, so in Chapter 2, the authors review the history of ICT in the US. After discussing the development and breakup of Bell, the authors argue that three features of the US political system are relevant to communication policy:

• division of powers

• majoritarian electoral system

• federalism

I won't discuss these in detail, but I'll note that the authors weave these into their analysis as they examine the post-Bell landscape, particularly the delegation of much discretion over telecomm policy to the executive bureaucracy. Some of the resulting choices had real impact. For instance, when the FCC designed the wireless market system, it anticipated 4-6 competitors per market, none dominating a given market; it mandated low wireless-wire interconnection charges. Later, the Democrat-dominated FCC of the Clinton era interpreted the 1996 Telecommunications Act as calling for “strong interconnect obligations for the Bells at long-run incremental costs” (p.37). In an adjacent telecomm industry without a monopoly history, cable television and satellite TV networks fragmented broadcast markets, shrinking mass audiences and leading to a post-2000 restructuring of the content industry (p.40).

Meanwhile, modularity is also impacting ICT development: modular services and modular broadband have led to geographic distribution of infrastructure, services, and sales (p.54). The web browser has become the common interface, while transparent APIs have led to modular, mashed-up content and developer communities (p.60). “Modularity and interoperability of capabilities signal the demise of the utility model that depends on quasi-monopoly or duopoly in major software and service platforms” (p.65). Heterogeneous services mean that service providers agree on interoperability standards, and as a result different services are substitutable – modular – meaning that a market leader can't leverage its lead in neighboring market segments (p.68). The long tail (p.76), the ad-supported “Cheap Revolution” (p.77), and emerging personalized network platforms (p.84) all emerge from these qualities. And the authors argue that “the availability of ample network broadband is indispensible to fulfilling the inflection point's potential” - yet the spread of broadband in the US is “deplorable” (p.89). The authors explore the current situation and the US' leadership in more detail that I care to summarize here – it's good reading, but thick.

Wireless infrastructure is also examined – a tremendously important discussion, since in the US, the number of mobile lines overtook fixed lines in 2002 (p.178), and mobile lines are increasing rapidly across the world. Internet governance also comes in for discussion, with a detailed history and explanation of its current form (Ch.9). And the authors wrap up with a detailed set of summary and conclusions.

My conclusion? The book is thick and jammed with information. As with many policy instructions, it's hard to get through. Yet it's rewarding. If you're interested in ICT policy, or just curious to see how infrastructure might evolve, take a look at the table of contents or index. If you have a serious scholarly or public policy interest in these issues, read it cover to cover.

Upcoming workshop: Visualizing Patterns of Group Communication in Digital Writing

So Mark Zachry, Bill Hart-Davidson and I will be presenting our workshop at Penn State next weekend. Essentially, we'll be working intensely with a small number of participants to teach the visual models I've been teaching my undergraduate students. It's going to be exciting, I think. If you're one of our attendees, I can't wait to see you there.

Reading :: The Logic of Care

The Logic of Care: Health and the problem of patient choice
By Annemarie Mol

A few years ago, I posted a glowing review of The Body Multiple, Annemarie Mol's book about how atherosclerosis is constructed across the multiple perspectives in hospitals. Mol is an engaging writer as well as a sharp ethnographer and theorist. Even though her books are translated from the Dutch (partly by Mol herself), Mol's enjoyable writing style comes through – she often brings up an observation early on without comment, drops it as she develops the piece methodologically and conceptually, then offhandedly recalls the observation – which suddenly is nudged into a more layered, more multidimensional sense. Then she does it again. It's rather like watching someone laminate a picture under many layers.

Mol continues this writing style, but whereas The Body Multiple is a more or less standard ethnography interpreted philosophically, The Logic of Care is a philosophical argument that draws from Mol's ethnographic data as well as her own experience as a patient seeking care for a chronic condition. This argument is about two logics: the logic of choice that dominates the public and administrative discourse about health, and the logic of care that infuses (some of) its (best) practices (p.11).

Simply, the logic of choice takes individual choice as an ideal – yet this ideal often does not lead to the best results. “I do not question choice in general, but rather the generalisation of choice,” Mol insists in a characteristic chiasmus (p.1). This logic of choice, which is embedded deeply in market capitalism, involves presenting health practices as a choice for the consumer; but some scholars have noted that “making people long for choices and invest a lot in making them, is a disciplining technique”(p.4; cf. Devo, “Freedom of Choice”). And in medical decisions, choice can overburden people, leading to poor choices – and extraordinary circumstances, in which people are not equipped to make choices, are not so extraordinary in medicine (p.6). It's not about whether people can choose, she argues, but rather about situations of choice, in which a specific mode of organizing and interpreting can be applied. And she doubts that the resulting, organized world - “infused with what I call the logic of choice” - actually “offers a way of living superior to the life that may be led in a world infused by the alternative that this book seeks to articulate: the logic of care” (p.7). This second logic does not construct patients as passive: “they do not primarily figure as subjects of choice, but as the subjects of all kinds of activities. The logic of care is not preoccupied with our will, and what we may opt for, but concentrates on what we do” (p.7).

Mol draws contrasts between the two logics, starting with one customer contact point: advertisements. In the logic of choice, the market demands a product: “The market requires that some product (device, plus skills training, plus kindness and attention) is delineated as the product on offer” (p.18). But “Care is a process: it does not have clear boundaries. It is open-ended. ... care is not a (small or large) product that changes hands, but a matter of various hands working together (over time) toward a result” (p.18). Care is not a transaction, but an interaction (p.18). So the logic of choice yields products that people can delineate and purchase as solutions; the logic of care sees such products as embedded in evolving practices that involve fine-tuning, tradeoffs, and continuing results. And about those results: in the logic of choice, if someone rejects a product, they are no longer considered part of the target market; in the logic of care, the caregiver keeps trying (p.22).

So that's the market version of the logic of choice. But there's also a civic version, that which casts patients as citizens able to “vote” on their care: “the relationship is moulded in the form of a contract” (p.30). But Mol critiques this analogy because a citizen can control, tame, or escape the body politic, but a patient can't control, tame, or escape her own body (except, I will add, in the colloquial sense that we “escape” our bodies during death, a figure of speech that may not translate from the Dutch) (p.31). Rather, Mol suggests “patientism,” an analog of feminism in which patients-living-with-disease can constitute a standard rather than being seen as diverging from a standard.

The logic of care, then, might cast patients as customers or as citizens. But in both variations, choice is seen as a matter of balancing values based on fact (p.42). Mol critiques that stance. For instance, suppose that a patient is trying to keep her blood sugar levels below 10 mmol/l. In the logic of choice, patients attempt to achieve that normative fact, keeping their levels around 10mmol/l and often feeling failure when they cannot. But “within the logic of care, identifying a suitable target value is not a condition for, but a part of, treatment. Instead of establishing it before you engage in action, you keep on searching for it while you act” (p.46). And “what follows is that for the logic of care gathering knowledge is not a matter of providing better maps of reality, but of crafting more bearable ways of living with, or in reality” (p.46).

Another difference is in how the two logics handle collectives. The logic of choice understands collectives as markets or as voting, both of which involve the aggregation of individual choices. But the logic of care starts with the collective, recognizing that we can't separate the patient from her or his collective – family, friends, other support systems, all of which have to conform a bit in order to make care work. The logic of choice involves value-laden judgments, but “In the logic of care, the crucial moral act is not making value judgments, but engaging in practical activities” (p.75).

As I said, I like Mol's work very much, and I really like how she plays with different frames or articulations here. Much of her work in this book has direct applications to rhetoric. At the same time, I think she sometimes assumes remarkably credulous consumers (p.28), weak-willed patients (p.48), and professionals whose self-evaluations amount to simple self-praise (p.87). Consequently, the contrast tends to be a bit overdrawn in places. Yet the book overall is solid and thought-provoking. Definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The "Virtual Corporation" and Army Organization

The "Virtual Corporation" and Army Organization
By Francis Fukuyama and Abram N. Shulsky

This 1997 RAND research report examines the trend toward flat, virtualized organizations in business and asks how that trend might be applied to Army organization. As the authors describe it, “the economy is moving from an industrial-age model, in which machines and natural resources are used to produce material product, to the 'information-based organization' that produces goods or services through the use of human capital”(p.x). They point out the consequences for commercial organization: the need for faster information exchange leads to smaller organizations; flatter hierarchies and/or networks of agile firms; the continued devaluing of low-skilled labor; more self-organized teams replacing individual effort; and more flexibility, learning, and adaptability to address the more chaotic environment (p.x).

Yet centralization has its advantages as well. Centralized organizations can often move more quickly and decisively and can leverage scales of economy. “A military organization seeking to accomplish a specific goal in the near future needs centralized command authority; a military seeking to adapt to a fast-changing and uncertain external environment needs a higher degree of decentralization in order to adapt adequately” (pp. X-xi). The authors argue that the US Army is in the latter situation.

So they anticipate several organizational changes for the Army. They anticipate a smaller number of echelons (p.xiii); smaller size, yielding easier logistics (p.xiv); more innovation in procurement (p.xiv); and working to keep experience distributed throughout the argument rather than pooling, so that soldiers can be better prepared to take initiative and responsibility (p.xiv).

The authors walk us through the established ground here, distinguishing among hierarchical organizations, virtual or “flat” organizations, and networks (p.5). The latter two are distinguished in that the flat organization still has a hierarchy, but the network doesn't. Consequently, the network really isn't applicable to an army with a focused objective. “Successful networked organizations ... constitute a framework within which their individual members can operate” (p.19).

The authors claim that armies are actually leaders in flat organizations due to the critical problem of operating in the face of inadequate information (p.28). Flat organizations, due to their nimbleness, often result in tactical successes that spark strategic overextension (p.39) – examples of which include Napoleon and the Wehrmacht. But flat organizations also pose another danger, the “CNN Effect,” in which pushing discretion and decision-making to lower levels results in newsworthy incidents; a “zero-defects” mentality reinforces a strict, and slow, centralized hierarchical structure (p.49). “It is impossible to routinize error-free flat organizations; when errors occur in a politically sensitive environment, there is a tendency to recentralize authority” (p.50). The authors urge instituting a “freedom to fail” (p.77), recalling the Web 2.0-era mantra to “fail faster,” although they don't delve into how much failure can be tolerated when failure is measured in, for instance, civilian casualties.

Overall, this report is a well developed treatise that identifies different organizational structures and thinks through how they can be applied to the Army. It's thought-provoking and really complicates some of the simplified distinctions from, say, The Starfish and the Spider.

Reading :: The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

The Starfish and the Spider has gotten a lot of press and attention since it was published in 2006. As the subtitle states, it's about leaderless organizations and how they function. It's a quick read – I finished it in two sittings – and turns out to be a good entry-level text for understanding the difference between hierarchical and networked organizations. Like most such popularizations, it loses a little in the translation, and those who have read more complex texts on networks (such as Castells or Arquilla & Ronfeldt or, ahem, Spinuzzi) may feel like they're playing in the shallow end of the pool. But for those who are just getting into the literature or who want to get the concept and apply it rapidly, the book is definitely a good place to start.

The metaphor in the title refers to two organisms that are superficially similar, but organized differently. If you destroy a spider's head, you get a dead spider; if you cut up a starfish, you get two starfish. Since starfish are decentralized, they are more resilient and better able to recover from shocks that would kill more centralized organisms.

The authors apply this metaphor in a number of comparative cases – the Aztecs vs. the Apache, Napster vs. eDonkey, and classifieds vs. Craigslist, for instance – and abstract a number of principles that describe decentralized organizations:

1. “When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized.” (p.21)

2. “It's easy to mistake starfish for spiders” (p.36) – i.e., decentralized for centralized organizations.

3. “An open system doesn't have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system” (pp.39-40)

4. “Open systems can easily mutate” (p.40)

5. “The decentralized organization sneaks up on you.” (p.41)

6. “As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.” (p.45)

7. “Put people in an open system and they'll automatically want to contribute.” (p.74)

Some readers will recognize many of these principles from different sources, but they're well summarized here. On the other hand, the summaries tend to be a bit uncomplicated – networked organizations are sometimes decentralized operationally but very centralized doctrinally, such as Aum Shinrikyo, for instance – but the principles are a good overall sketch.

The authors spend most of their time describing such organizations and discussing how to make them work better. But they also offer advice for combating decentralized organizations:

1. Change their ideology (p.144)

2. Centralize them by centralizing key resources (p.151)

3. Decentralize yourself (p.155)

In a later chapter, the authors discuss hybrid organizations, organizations that are either “a centralized company that decentralizes the user experience,” such as eBay (p.164) or “a centralized company that decentralizes the internal parts of the business” (p.175). This is a good move, although it does not exhaust the dimensions along which companies can be centralized or decentralized. I was left wanting more of these dimensions and deeper discussion of them.

Finally, the authors outline the “new rules of the game.” I won't list the many rules here except to say that they follow naturally from what the authors discuss earlier; the chapter has the feel of a summary for those who have skimmed the book.

So would I recommend the book? I already have to at least one person, and I will to others. The book is a nice introduction to those who want to work up to more complex texts, but it also works well for its intended audience – C-level execs – and for undergraduates. Check it out.

Smart Mobs, seven years on

Speaking in Amsterdam, Howard Rheingold discusses his book Smart Mobs and how it's held up after seven years. If you haven't read it yet, here's the link to Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Internet access for the homeless

Castells discussed the danger of "black holes" in our urban areas, places that are outside the major flows of capital and information and that do not allow people to escape. But those who are determined to escape have begun to find ways to recapture the flows of information:

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

The homeless in San Francisco, accordingly, spend some of their meager resources on Internet access, picking up netbooks or older laptops and using free wifi.

This story reminds me of one I linked to a while back, on homeless people relying on mobile phones in lieu of fixed addresses. As wifi-enabled smartphones become more common, perhaps we'll see pay-as-you-go, peripheral-ready smartphones that can better serve the needs of low-income and homeless people, bringing some light to these black holes.