Reading :: Educational Review 61(2)

Educational Review 61(2), May 2009
Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Activity Theory
Ed. Deirdre Martin and Nick Peim
I usually review books here, but occasionally I'll review sets of articles or special issues, if they're interesting or valuable enough. This special issue meets both criteria. In these articles, just over a year old, various authors provide some criticisms of activity theory - sharp criticisms, in both senses of the word. Below, I'll review the editorial and five articles; the sixth rereads the Zone of Proximal Development in terms of Derridean deconstruction, and unfortunately I just can't work up the enthusiasm to read it. Nothing personal, Derrida.

So let's turn to the other articles.

Martin, D. and Peim, N. "Editorial: Critical perspectives on activity theory."

In this editors' introduction, Martin and Peim set up the issue for us. Activity theory is usually discussed in terms of sociocultural theory or cultural-historical theory (as sociocultural activity theory, or SCAT, and cultural-historical activity theory, or CHAT). But, the editors echo Daniels and Edwards, SCAT has "two areas of philosophical uncertainty" (p.131). First, sociocultural theory is rooted in anthropology, but AT is focused on transformative potential. Second, AT is ambivalent about "conceptualizations of agentic action" (p.131). Martin and Peim explore those tensions further, specifically in Engestrom's version of AT (or EAT).

As Martin and Peim tell us, five of the papers question EAT's relationship to the Vygotskian thought on which it is based - an important criticism, since "activity theory claims its authority in its allegiance to and development of Vygotsky" (p.131). So let's EAT, CHAT, and SCAT across the special issue and see what happens.

Avis, J. "Transformation or transformism: Engeström’s version of activity theory?"

If you've followed Engeström’s more recent work on AT, particularly his latest book, you're familiar with the notions of co-configuration and knotworking - Engeström’s attempts to address loose work (for want of a better term). In this article, James Avis "seeks to locate [EAT] within the socio-economic and theoretical context in which notions of co-configuration and knotworking are set" (p.151). He notes that Engeström’s AT analyses and his Developmental Work Research (DWR) approach have become popular in part because it

offers progressive possibilities by enabling movement from current practices deemed problematic, to those that are more effective and qualitatively different – in other words the facilitation of transformative change. (p.152)

Unlike other contemporary Marxist analyses, DWR "offer a politics of hope" - but one that "stops short of wider societal engagement" (p.152). Indeed, the DWR vision has its attractions for "progressively oriented educators" but also for "capitalist firms operating in competitive market places, as well as those managing public sector organizations seeking to enhance efficiency" (p.152), particularly those working within the conceptualizations of the knowledge society or information society (p.153). Indeed, "questions of dominance and power are sidelined" in case studies such as Engeström’s studies of co-configuration in health care (p.153). Avis charges:

The rhetoric would suggest that organizations have become increasingly fluid, open and amoeba like and that the logic of capitalist accumulation orientated towards the extraction of surplus value has been transmogrified. It should however be noted that this organizational vision refers to pre-figurative firms which are apparently at the cutting edge, serving an important ideological function. (p.154)

Avis is not happy with this representation, which (in his view) overemphasizes the messiness of divisions between organization/environment, customer/product developer, public/private sector, and the openness of systems (p.154). He detects, and is suspicious of, a narrative of progressive pluralism and democracy in this account (p.154). And he adds:

Such descriptions draw upon stakeholder analyses and participatory and pluralist processes to imply a democratization of social relations. However, such an image is misleading as it neglects the terrain on which such activities operate, that is to say the capitalist accumulation process together with those who have the power to set institutional agendas. The salience of the preceding argument is that not only can it readily align with understandings of capitalism as a dynamic system but also with those that suggest the qualitative changes undergone have rendered former social antagonisms muted and of lesser significance. However the current credit crisis is salutary as it reminds us of the rapaciousness of capitalism. (p.155)

I think Avis really reaches with that last sentence, and also that he imputes many of the popular ideas of the knowledge society to Engeström without a lot of evidence. At the same time, Avis definitely has a point when he argues that Engeström doesn't provide a consistent power-oriented critique of capitalism along the lines of canonical Marxism (p.155). Although Engeström acknowledges larger social structures,

This insight fails to be translated into broader political engagement as the focus of his interventions are upon practices within a particular activity system or those adjacent to it, as is the case with third generation AT. Consequently the wider social structure within which these processes arise tends to be ignored. This leads to analysis that leaves these wider relations in place and fails to interrogate the manner in which they shape the terrain on which an activity system or cluster is set. It is this limitation that in part results in analyses and change strategies that effectively secure the interests of capital. (p.156).

So, Avis complains, DWR focuses on peripheral contradictions rather than primary ones (p.157). Engestromg, he says, uses Marxist categories "heuristically, as part of an analytic technique that serves to distance their mobilization from Marx’s underpinning philosophical and political position" (p.157). In the next section, Avis examines the heuristic of the AT triangle and the principles that Engestrom says underlie AT (p.158). In these principles, Avis says, Engeström "plays down managerial relations of power" (p.158), accepts capitalist relations (p.159), and treats development-through-contradictions "as a somewhat straightforward process that serves the interests of all participants" (p.159). By focusing on peripheral contradictions, "Engeström’s AT veers towards becoming a form of comfort radicalism, its transformative rhetoric has a progressive appeal but ultimately it readily lends itself to becoming no more than a management technique" (p.161). Avis concludes that "There is a tension in Engeström’s AT that readily lends itself to appropriation by capital, and is a consequence of its failure to seriously acknowledge social antagonism and wider patterns of social relations in which activity systems are located" (p.162). Yet Avis hopes for approaches that "re-politicize and re-vitalize AT" (p.162).

In short, Avis sees Engeström as one of those guys who wears his Che t-shirt to Starbucks.

Hartley, D. "Education policy, distributed leadership and socio-cultural theory"

I was a little surprised here to see that Hartley begins his literature review by discussing Graeme Thompson's typology of hierarchy, market, and network (p.140; see my recent review of one of Thompson's books on the subject). Hartley is interested in the implications for public governance, particularly distributed leadership in the public sector. To explore these, he examines studies by Spillaine and colleagues that are grounded in sociocultural theories such as structuration theory, AT, and distributed cognition. Like Avis, Hartley raises criticisms of how power, boundedness, and mediation are handled in sociocultural theory, but he is neither as critical nor as focused on AT in particular as Avis was.

Peim, N. "Activity theory and ontology."

On the other hand, Peim is quite critical, perhaps moreso than Avis. Here, Peim criticizes EAT as "a technology of knowledge designed to enable positive transformations of specific practices," one that seeks to ground itself in Vygotsky but "is restricted by a commitment to a progressive, apolitical ideology of improvement" and "defined in terms of its expression of a will-to-power." Peim charges that EAT is disengaged from its supposed philosophical tradition and that it has misappropriated Vygotsky's legacy. And that's all just in the abstract (p.167). Peim further states in his introduction that EAT's "will-to-power arises from its desire to unmoor itself from any awkward political affiliations and to represent itself as a universal system of description," allowing EAT to function as "a thoroughly positivist technology of improvement" (p.167). And he continues: "Needless to say, the logic of improvement invoked by EAT lacks political contextualization. It is an odd feature of this socio-cultural historical theory that it reduces all of those dimensions – the social, the cultural, the historical – to apolitical abstractions" (p.167).

Peim hopes "to raise questions specifically about the political ontology of EAT" (p.168). And here, we get to a highly interesting passage which I'll quote in full:

EAT, then, has become a widely accepted technology of transformation harnessed to an ethic of improvement. This ethic has beset education as a whole with an overriding logic of performativity. One aspect of this marriage is the insistence, strongly emphasized by Engeström, on the local nature of activity systems. The avowal of a “radical localism” in EAT means that questions about social systems – and about the relations between local practices and larger social systems – are not, and cannot be, addressed (Engeström 2003, 36). As a result, what is sometimes known as sociocultural historical activity theory gives scant attention to any socially differentiated theory of culture or of history! Only thus can it offer itself as a universal technology of improvement. (p.168)

Avis made a similar charge. And, honestly, it has some sympatico with my criticisms of AT in Network. Let me just insert the observation that Engeström has lately turned to "runaway objects," which are objects too big for any given activity system. One example he frequently uses is that of global warming - hardly a radically localized object. My sense is that as he has continued theorizing, Engeström has begun to try to account for public discourse using the locally grounded theoretical tools of AT.

Okay, back to Peim. Peim draws on Heidegger to examine EAT's ontology, concluding that EAT is "metaphysical" and "essentially phenomenological," yet without explicit references to the phenomenological tradition (p.169). He detects a de facto break with Vygotsky (p.169), despite a narrative of direct-line development from Vygotskian thought (pp.169-171), and charges that although EAT claims concern for key Marxist terms, "Absorption in the multiplicity and specificity of activity here begins to sound uncannily like a form of post-modernism that has abandoned all meta-narratival delusions" (p.171). In the EAT account, Peim charges, the Heideggerian idea of world is lost, and all structures break down to a radical localism. But how can an activity system be studied without a notion of world, he asks?

But the elements of the system cannot belong entirely or solely to the system. The division of labour, for instance, must be an entity that exists between systems, founded in their very difference from one another, and certainly not a positive property of a single system. When we consider how EAT defines the constituent components of any particular system, we must always be left asking: How can any of these items have identity except as they exist both inside and outside the system? What is the nature of this inside/outside relation? What is outside the activity system? Only another interlocking activity system? Not a “world” in the Heidegger sense? ... The effect in EAT is to abstract the activity system from its wider social context, hence the insistence of “radical localism” (Engeström 2003, 36). (p.173)

Peim goes on to ontologically problematize Engestrom's "five fundamental principles" (p.174). Later, he says, "In the foregoing analysis of the five principles of EAT, it can be seen that serious questions arise concerning the fundamental ontology of EAT. Given that, EAT aspires to be a 'theory of everything,' these questions carry considerable significance" (p.176). Yes, that's the problem with theories of everything. I suppose that's why I've been underwhelmed by Peim's and Avis' arguments here: I haven't taken AT to be a theory of everything, just a theory that is good for some things (cf. Network). The trick is to figure out which things it's good for.

Not that I am dismissive of Peim's claims. Peim is correct, I think, in charging that EAT has not deeply delved into the ontological or philosophical implications of its influences (see esp. pp.177-178), and has often drawn from traditions that are ontologically and philosophically at odds. This has led to some theoretical, philosophical, and methodological lack of coherence.

Peim last raises the issue that Engeström has styled himself as the authority and guardian of AT, and points his finger at "a hint of idealism and more than the trace of a will-to-power" (p.179). My reading of his position: EAT is mostly about the E.

Hardcastle, J. "Vygotsky's Enlightenment precursors"

I regret giving short shrift to Hardcastle's article, which argues that we can better understand Vygotsky's statements about thought and language by reviewing Vygotsky's Enlightenment precursors - particularly Locke and Condillac - "to shed further light on these early influences and to suggest both the scale and complexity of the ideas about language, signs and symbolization that Vygotsky inherited" (p.193). It's an intriguing historicization. Or rather, I feel that it should be intriguing to me, but lately I have been more interested in critiques of Engeströmian AT. For those who are interested in the development of Vygotsky's thought, particularly the relatively underexplored non-Marxist roots, I recommend the article.

Bakhurst, D. "Reflections on activity theory"

Rounding out the articles reviewed here (and recall that I skipped one) is this incisive critique of how Engeström interpreted Ilyenkov's work. As you may know, Engeström lifted Ilyenkov's treatment of contradictions and applied it to Leont'ev's notion of activity systems - a pivotal moment in the development of activity theory, since it made possible many things, including critiques that would have been unwise in the Soviet milieu; an account of macrolevel development; and the notion of interlocking (chained) and overlapping (interpenetrating) activity systems. (Not to sound like a broken record, but see my book Network for more on this pivotal development.) Bakhurst is well versed in Ilyenkov's work and has been cited frequently by Engeström, so I was highly interested in his take. And his take is not entirely complimentary.

Bakhurst declares that although many suggest that "activity theory represents the most important legacy of Soviet philosophy and psychology," Engeström’s canonical account of EAT as a third-generation development of AT is troubled because EAT is at tension with the concerns of AT's Russian founders. In particular, the Soviet tradition of AT "saw the concept of activity as a fundamental category to address profound philosophical questions about the possibility of mind," but "activity theory in the West has principally become an empirical method for modeling activity systems" (p.197).

Bakhurst begins by noting that in the Soviet tradition, activity is taken as "a fundamental explanatory category in philosophy and psychology" (p.197). Yet "The concept of activity, in contrast, had, and continues to have, no place whatsoever on the Anglo-American philosophical scene" (p.198) - and for very good reason, since human activity is such a broad, general notion as to be useless. How could one have a theory of activity that can simultaneously cover all human activity and yet be specific enough to be useful? "This is a question to which activity theorists must have an answer," he declares firmly (p.198).
Alas, Bakhurst has no neat answer to the question, and he laments that there is not so much agreement on what activity actually is (p.198). Indeed, he argues,

In its heyday in Soviet thought, the concept of activity was a vehicle for the articulation of a critical and creative species of Marxism that stood in a tense relation to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy of the Soviet establishment. As a result, the activity approach was a means for the ventriloquation of all kinds of views. So now, when one steps back and reflects on the tradition, many of those views appear rather difficult to render coherent. (p.199)

Now isn't that fascinating? Personally, I am used to reading Bakhtin in terms of veiled allusions and ambiguities, but not AT's Soviet writers. Reading this explanation, I felt a little stab of regret at my past harsh readings of Ilyenkov.

Back to the development of AT. Bakhurst praises Engeström’s Learning by Expanding for offering "a very detailed account of the diverse sources, philosophical and psychological, that inform activity theory"; but he deplores that "a simplified picture has emerged out of his work that has become part of the self-consciousness of those in the West who work in the tradition" (p.199). In particular, he means the idea that "there are three principal stages or generations of activity theory" (p.199; Bakhurst is too polite to say here that Engeström himself has been one of the chief advocates of this view, although he gets around to pointing the finger on p.200).

Bakhurst is not satisfied with the three-generation account. First, contra the linearity of this story, "within Russian philosophy and psychology, the concept of activity was always seen as problematic and open to multiple interpretations" (p.200). Bakhurst argues that, to rescue Vygotsky's work from the politically-inspired charge of idealism, "the concept of activity was brought to prominence by Vygotsky’s students as part of an attempt to defend the general Vygotskian framework against this objection" (p.202). This development "pulled the Vygotskian approach towards the tradition of Marx’s philosophical anthropology" and arguably away from Vygotsky's original conceptions (p.202).

Second, Bakhurst argues, Engeström’s account of AT yields "a theory of activity, in the form of a model of activity systems" (p.202). But "the Russian founders of the tradition" rather "deploy[ed] the concept of activity to explain something else – broadly speaking, our place in the world, the nature of consciousness, or personality. Their idea was that activity is the fundamental explanatory concept in philosophy and psychology because it is the central notion in any viable philosophical anthropology" (p.202). For instance, Bakhurst summarizes Ilyenkov's position thus: "Human beings are thus essentially social creatures because they owe their very status as minded beings, as persons, to their appropriation of culture" (p.203). Here, the concept of activity

is the key concept that explains both the emergence of the world as a possible object of thought through the objectification of significance and the emergence of our mental powers, which consist in a certain mode of active engagement with reality (responsiveness to reasons) and which develop in each individual through her appropriation of the specific modes of activity of her community, through initiation into a form of life. It is very typical of Russian philosophers of this tradition to look for such a root or core concept, the evolution of which encapsulates the logic of the system under scrutiny. (p.203)

Bakhurst does not read Ilyenkov's account as empirical but as purely philosophical - not to mention "deeply anthropocentric" (p.204). Bakhurst is critical of, but respectful toward, Ilyenkov throughout.

This Soviet notion of activity was

designed to form the basis of a viable psychology, a psychology of the kind Leontiev sought to develop. Out of Leontiev’s work then evolves the second strand, which is principally a method for modelling activity systems with a view to facilitating not just understanding, but practice. Activity theory in the second sense is, among other things, a way of modelling organizational change. (p.205)

Here, Bakhurst points us to a 2005 Kaptelinin article, "The object of activity: Making sense of the sense-maker" (p.205). Bakhurst says that he does not choose sides here, but his "main concern is that we do not lose sight of what the first strand of activity theory was all about. I do not want the first strand to be simply taken up into the second and to survive in people’s imaginations only as the precursor of the second" - especially since the two strands involve different styles (p.206).
So let's talk about the second strand. Bakhurst suspects that many who use AT "want to look at a particular phenomenon" but "recognize that the phenomenon is not easy to capture using the standard techniques of standard social science" because "the phenomenon is part of a complex system" and "because it involves a rich human texture." So they seek an empirical approach with an appropriate theoretical framework (p.206). But Bakhurst suspects Ilyenkov would raise objections:

First, it is not clear that what we have here is a theory at all. What we have is a model or a schema that has minimal predictive power. If activity theory is a theory, it warrants the name because it is a theoretical representation of the general structure of activity systems. (p.206)

But "It is pretty much impossible to find something recognizable as an activity that does not fit the model," he objects (p.206); " This implies that what we have here is a universal, but generally vacuous schema, that turns out to be a useful heuristic in reference to certain kinds of activity" - and that schema "vastly underdetermines the description of the 'activity system'under scrutiny" (p.207). The links are unclear, and "In terms of understanding the dynamics of the activity system, a fair load is carried by the idea of a contradiction, but this notion is conspicuously vague" (p.207).
Succinctly, Bakhurst says, "The moral is that you must be very cautious about given, stable, structural representations where you aspire to understand dynamism, flux, reflexivity, and transformation" (p.207).
Bakhurst reminds us that he sees this second strand as empirical rather than philosophical. But he is not convinced that the second strand needs more theory: "It might be better off with less," he argues, taking as an example the debate about the notion of "object" (p.208). Bakhurst notes that much ink has been spilled attempting to reconcile the two notions of object - what someone is trying to achieve vs. what they are working on - when he simply thinks the term is ill-formed and ambiguous. "I think recent discussions about the object of activity are a case where the second strand in the activity-theoretical tradition makes it seem as if there is a deep theoretical problem to be solved, when in fact there is not, and that turning to the first strand to address this pseudo-problem only promises to make matters worse," he staes (p.208).
Bakhurst ends with a bit of feather-smoothing that doesn't do much to take the sting out of his critique. It's a good critique, and I think the most valuable article in the issue.
Overall, should you read this issue? If you're interested in AT and have a solid background, I think you should. It has some smart critiques, and certainly some passionate ones. I don't agree with them all, and I think some have to do with differences in how AT is interpreted, but all are thought-provoking and deserve to be considered.

Reading :: The Laws of the Markets

Laws of the Markets
Ed. Michel Callon

Reading Thompson's Between Hierarchies and Markets reminded me of this book, which Thompson uses as his primary source for actor-network theory. I think I tried reading it a few years ago, but was put off by the fact that most of the contributions are not ANT-oriented. This time, with considerably more background in social network analysis and related areas, I rallied and finished it.

The Laws of the Markets takes on how markets are made concrete and stabilized; contributors come from socioeconomics. As you may know, I am not a socioeconomist, so take my reading with a grain of salt.

The book starts with a lengthy introduction by Michel Callon, who asks: Why does economics have so little to say about the market? (p.1). His assertion is that "economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes, and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions" (p.2). And "the aim of the present book is to contribute to the analysis and understanding of the subtle relationships between economics and the economy; not within an historical perspective, although some chapters do include historical material, but within a deliberately anthropological one" (p.2). And in that anthropological perspective, he overviews the book's chapters, interspersed with thoughts about economics, markets, and networks - and rhetoric.

About the latter, Callon cites McCloskey's book on the rhetoric of economics, "although its definition of rhetoric remains so classical that it is obviously limited" (p.31). "Rhetoric, defined as the art of building alliances to establish a favorable balance of power whether in science or politics, cannot be reduced to an excess of mathematization of generalizing abstraction intended to terrorize the opponent" (p.31), Callon chides, dividing rhetoric from brute calculation.

Let's skip a bit, because many of these chapters were interesting to me, but not connected enough to my own research to describe in detail. For instance, Vivianna Zelizer's "The proliferation of social currencies" has a fascinating discussion of earmarking, wallet systems, and other domestic and social currencies. Mitchel Abolafia's "Markets as cultures: An ethnographic approach" has a terrific discussion of how he gained access to a firm in order to conduct his ethnography; I'm thinking about using it next time I teach a qualitative research class.

Interesting in a deeper way was David Stark's "Recombinant property in East European capitalism." Stark has a fascinating take on how Eastern Europe's informal interfirm networks, developed to make the command economy of the USSR work, survived the collapse of the Soviet regime to become a partial substrate of the new capitalist regime. "In short, in place of disorientation, we find the metamorphosis of sub-rose organizational forms and the activation of pre-existing networks of affiliation" (p.117). "Thus, we examine how actors in the post-socialist context are rebuilding organizations and institutions not on the ruins but with the ruins of communism as they redeploy available resources in response to their immediate practical dilemma" (p.117). So in Hungary, for instance, we see new property forms under the heading of recombinant property (p.119). One feature of recombinant property is inter-enterprise ownership, with the State buying substantial stakes in many companies, and enterprises buying each other's stocks (p.122). Stark has a name for this: a "recombinet," or network of recombinant property (p.128). State paternalism continues to exist in a big way, but whereas under the Soviets state paternalism manifested as managing assets, in the post-socialist regime, state paternalism manifested as managing liabilities (p.132). Recombinant property, Stark concludes, is "an attempt to have a resource that can be justified or assessed by more than one standard of measure" (p.134) - e.g., profitability and eligibility - with different strategies for each measure.

At the end of the book, Callon supplies a final essay: "An essay on framing and overflowing." Here, he argues that the market is not simply expanding, it's emerging and reemerging (p.245). Callon takes the economic notions of externalities and overflows, puts them in contact with Goffman's notion of framing, and playfully uses them to discuss an ANT understanding of markets. The conventional approach, he says, is to see framing as normal and overflows as rare leaks (p.250). But from ANT's perspective, it's overflows that are the norm, and framing is rare and costly (p.252). All framing, he says, amounts to an effort to extricate agents from the network; overflows, in contrast, have many sources and flow in many directions (p.253). He points to intermediaries, which "secretly cross the frame's boundaries" (p.256), and insists that "no externalities can exist without relationships" instantiated through these intermediaries (p.257). Overflows, he continues, define groups (p.258). This discussion leads directly to one of hybrid forums (p.260; see also his Acting in an Uncertain World).

In all, the collection is a little uneven, but it has some standout essays, particularly Callon's. If you're interested in ANT, check it out.

Reading :: Acting in an Uncertain World

Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy
By Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe

While looking up another of Callon's books recently, I ran across this 2010 publication and bought it immediately. Callon has not been as well read as Latour, at least on this side of the Atlantic, but I've found his insights into actor-network theory to be extremely valuable - particularly the question of how groups form around controversies. That, in fact, is what this book is about.

In Acting in an Uncertain World, Callon and his coauthors tackle the question of how to make democracy work in an increasingly technical, specialized world. "Science and technology cannot be managed by the political institutions currently available to us," the authors charge (p.9), because scientific and technical controversies are becoming increasingly specialized while impacting more people. The general public don't have the expertise to make decisions about highly technical issues, but we also can't leave high-impact decisions up to specialists in a democracy. Such decisions include "GMOs, BSE [a.k.a. "mad cow disease"], nuclear waste, mobile phones, the treatment of household waste, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, genetic diagnosis" (p.9) - and we could also throw in anthropogenic global warming, a controversy that is the current Ground Zero of the problem Callon et al. discuss. Examine the discourse around that issue and you'll see the same dilemma: the public is impacted by any decisions made about global warming (particularly the rapidly industrializing Third World, which is only now realizing the basic economic benefits of industrialization, including food security and lengthening lifespans), but only specialists are deemed to have the deep expertise to make informed decisions. This skew, this disjuncture between expertise and democratic decision-making, has resulted in (among other things) hard and sometimes unfair questions about the nature and motivation of that expertise (see Climategate).

(Side note: Climate change is one of Yrjo Engestrom's examples of a "runaway object," an object(ive) of multiple activity systems that transcends and can't be contained by any particular activity system. Reading Callon's book helped me to rethink Engestrom's argument - and to wonder whether a "runaway object" is actually an attempt to introduce a notion of the public into an analytical theory that has no other mechanism for dealing with the public. More on this later, I'm sure.)

But Callon et al. don't want to replace our democratic institutions. Rather, these institutions "must be enriched, expanded, extended, and improved so as to bring about what some would call technical democracy, or more precisely in order to make our democracies more able to absorb the debates and controversies aroused by science and technology" (p.9).

In particular, Callon et al. are interested in

hybrid forums - forums because they are open spaces where groups can come together to discuss technical options involving the collective, hybrid because the groups involved and the spokespersons claiming to represent them are heterogeneous, including experts, politicians, technicians, and laypersons who consider themselves involved. They are also hybrid because the questions and problems taken up are addressed at different levels in a variety of domains, from ethics to economic and including physiology, nuclear physics, and electromagnetism. (p.18)

Callon et al. take some pains to distinguish the key issue here, uncertainty, from the "false friend" risk (p.19). In a nutshell, risk is "a well-identifiable danger associated with a perfectly describable event or series of events" (p.19). We know what might happen, and we can usually estimate or calculate its probability and develop contingency plans for dealing with it. Risk implies certainty about conditions (p.20). But uncertainty involves, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, the "unknown unknowns": or, "we cannot anticipate the consequences of the decisions that are likely to be made; we do not have a sufficiently precise knowledge of the conceivable options, the description of the constitution of the possible worlds comes up against resistant cores of ignorance, and the behavior and interactions of the entities making them up remain enigmatic" (p.21). Or, "We know that we do not know, but that is almost all we know; there is no better definition of uncertainty" (p.21). And in these cases, "the only option is questioning and debate, notably on the investigations to be launched. What do we know? What do we want to know? Hybrid forums help to bring some elements of an answer to these pressing questions" (p.21).

Callon et al. take the position that "controversies enrich democracy" (p.28); but for that to happen, we must use controversies as a mode of exploration. They allow us to see overflows, places where proposed solutions jump their defined parameters, "give rise to unexpected problems by giving prominence to unexpected effects" (p.28). "Each decision-making process requires a work of opening out, of diffusion, if only because of the need to mobilize the actors who will enable the project to be brought to a successful conclusion" - and "deciding is opening Pandora's Box by permitting actors previously held at arm's length to take part in a dynamic to which they quickly contribute" (p.30). Such sociotechnical controversies reveal the stakes and makes the network of problems visible and debatable (p.31).

An aside here: In Network I claimed that ANT doesn't really have an account of learning. But here, we (sort of) have an ANT book on learning and development - which is to say, a book on setting up dialogical spaces of hybrid forums in which controversies are defined and clarified so that participants can explore and learn (p.35). This learning "leads to the discovery of mutual, developing, and malleable identities that are led to take each other into account and thereby transform themselves" (p.35). Hybrid forums bring together specialists and laypersons, citizens and representatives (p.35).

Hybrid forums, in fact, sound a bit like Robert Jungk's future workshops, which partially inspired participatory design. These themes are familiar, but applied to scientific and technical controversies (rather than existential threats, as Jungk's work was) across societal scale (unlike PD).

To better understand hybrid forums, Callon et al. take us through the ANT concept of translation. In this context of scientific and technical development, translation involves three phases:

1. From the macrocosm to the microcosm: specialists reduce the world to the microcosm of the laboratory so that they can simplify, prune, and reconfigure it for study (pp.48-49).
2. In the small world of the lab: specialists turn the phenomenon into its traces and signatures (inscriptions), a chain of equivalences that can be manipulated and studied (pp.51-59).
3. From the microcosm to the macrocosm: specialists return the laboratory results back to the wide world (pp.59-68).

These three movements, which can be called (small-"t") translations 1, 2, and 3, together constitute (big-"T") Translation, a Translation of the macrocosm, taking the world from one state to another (p.69). And of course the problem emerges here. For specialists to enact Translation, they must seclude themselves and work in isolation on the phenomenon. But that means that when they return to the world in translation 3, they are enacting far-reaching changes about which the general public has not been consulted. "How can we fail to see that this political choice in favor of one collective or another is carried out without any real debate or consultation, that is to say, according to procedures that are not those we usually associate with political life in our democracies?" (p.69).

Certainly this is a huge issue. The last several decades have worn out public faith that scientific and technical change will be universally good, and that faith has been replaced by the wary question: how will this affect us? As Callon et al. put it in the next chapter: "There is nothing ... more rigorous than a group of non-specialists who want to know why they endure unbearable misfortune" (p.80 - in the context of a community enduring unusually high rates of cancer). So we begin to see the public, or public groups, engaging in all phases of Translation: from translation 1 ("taking part in the formulation of problems," p.76) to translation 2 ("taking part in the research collective in order to broaden and organize it," p.83) to translation 3 ("turning back to the world," p.89). In each translation, we see citizens engaging dialogically with the scientific process. Take the question of whether sheep in England are being affected by the fallout from Chernobyl.

Despite the scientists' fine self-assurance, and maybe even because of it, the shepherds remain skeptical. First, because the specialists have already been wrong once and it does not seem unreasonable to think they could be wrong again. The sequel proves moreover that their fears were well founded: some months later the experts recognize that the observed radioactivity is half due to Chernobyl and half to what are discreetly called "other sources." Later because a serious analysis would have required data from before 1986. Now, despite the farmers' and their representatives' repeated demands, these data were never supplied, the administration finally acknowledging that they did not exist, implicitly admitting that it had not done its work. The cocktail of arrogant certainty, a background of secrecy, and poor work could only arouse the non-specialists' mistrust. In fact, in the farmers' opinion, the most serious thing is not so much that the experts made mistakes, or even that they botched their work, but clearly that they hid all this behind a self-assurance deriving from their status as scientists or experts. (p.92)

In this story from 1986, we might find ourselves cheering the shepherds, who stood up for their way of life, demanded accountability, and exposed scientists' secrecy, sometimes-shoddy work, and overreliance on authority. But change the date to 2009, change the issue from Chernobyl to global warming, change garden-variety stonewalling to failure to comply with FOIA requests, and change the botches to shoddy data-keeping practices, and you get last year's so-called Climategate controversy. You may or may not be cheering at this point, and you may find yourself listing the ways in which this more recent, "hot" controversy is different - but the basic issue is still the same, whether we are talking about "GMOs, BSE [a.k.a. "mad cow disease"], nuclear waste, mobile phones, the treatment of household waste, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, genetic diagnosis" (p.9). In all of these, "science says" is no longer enough when people's livelihoods are at stake or when people no longer trust the gatekeepers. In all of these, political decisions are being made, not democratically and publicly, but in seclusion by specialists. "If translation 1 does not reconstitute the networks of interests, translation 3 will end in failure," Callon et al. conclude dolefully (p.103).

So how do we get past this impasse? Callon et al. discuss various forms of cooperation between secluded research and research in the wild (p.125), and between the aggregation of individuals and the composition of the collective (p.131). These hybrid forums aim for some mix of delegative democracy (conducted by scientific specialists or specialized political representatives) and dialogic democracy (conducted collaboratively, by all interested parties) (p.135). Chapter 4 describes the basic ideas behind the hybrid forum, while Chapter 5 discusses how to organize them, including criteria and comparisons with similar efforts.

In all, this book was extremely valuable. It moves toward a macrodevelopmental, proactive approach to ANT that has too often been missing. It hints at an ANT account of learning. It moves in the same general direction as some of Latour's later work, but in more concrete ways. It provides a methodology for developing hybrid forums, and in doing so, helped me to connect ANT with some of the more politically oriented work in other literatures. It provides a possible point of connection with Developmental Work Research and with participatory design. And it's written in a riveting way. If you have interest in any of these aspects, please do pick up the book.

Reading :: Building the Trident Network

Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines
By Maggie Mort

If I were Randy on American Idol, my review would be an inarticulate "I don't know, man, it was just all right for me." It's hard to put my finger on exactly why I couldn't get excited about this book. The framing is actor-network theory; the question is the underexplored issue of "disenrollment," in which actor-networks divest actors; the study is of a large-scale sociotechnical network bent to building Trident submarines in Britain, and the problems and issues that surround that vexed network.

And yet I had a hard time maintaining interest. Partly, I think, it was because the ANT framing was too thinly applied. Partly it was because "disenrollment" is a thin concept on which to hang a book. Partly it was because the author seemed too invested in labor's side of the controversy, and too interested in describing failures rather than successes. Maybe it was the writing style. In any case, I found myself flipping and skimming and looking for something I could use. In the end, I felt that some buried treasure must have remained in the pages, but I wasn't up to uncovering it. Perhaps after some time has passed, I'll dig up some reviews and find out what others got from it. But for now, I would suggest some of the many other, more theoretically rewarding ANT books out there.

Reading :: Between Hierarchies and Markets

Between Hierarchies and Markets: The Logic and Limits of Network Forms of Organization
By Grahame F. Thompson

I was quite excited to read Between Hierarchies and Markets, which compares three different approaches to networks - social network analysis (SNA), transaction-cost analysis (TCA), and actor-network theory (ANT) - in an attempt to situate the notion of networks in relation to hierarchies and markets. Given my readings in the last three years, I found myself wishing that I had discovered this book before finishing my own Network. But after Chapter 3, I changed my mind. That's because, although Thompson does a nice job discussing SNA and TCA, and especially their relationship with hierarchies and markets, he tends to reduce ANT too much for comparison's sake. It's still a worthwhile book, but I think it would have confused me about ANT.

Let's start at the beginning to see how this works out. In the first chapter, Thompson lays out the problem: the term "network" is used without clear conceptual underpinnings. It has become a catchall metaphor and lost analytical precision. Thompson wants to rescue the term's analytical use, particularly so that he can contrast it with other coordination/governing mechanisms with their own logics, mechanisms such as hierarchies and markets (p.2). He characterizes his work here as an interrogation into the term "network" and a commentary on how it's used (p.4).

Since Thompson is writing in the field of organizational communication, he's very interested in how the term "network" can be applied to particular forms of organizations. This leads us into the second chapter, in which he does a nice job of trying to disentangle networks, markets, and hierarchies. His chief concern, which surfaces in Chapter 3, is how to define networks in a way that doesn't make them a superset of markets and/or hierarchies (p.54). Of course, SNA and TCA are amenable to this sort of work, since they attempt to describe empirical organizational relations among human actors. ANT doesn't fit into this mold for a variety of reasons - including its symmetrical treatment of humans and nonhumans and its ontological bent - but in trying to compare it with the other two frameworks, Thompson extracts primarily the comparable elements, and the result is an unfortunate hash.

Although Thompson makes a good faith effort to portray ANT, when he tries to relate it to the market, he focuses necessarily, and too heavily, on Callon's essays in his 1998 collection Laws of the Markets. Here, Callon tried to apply a broader, more general ontological theory (ANT) to a particular coordinative mechanism (the market). Thompson, since he sees the network as a coordinative mechanism rivaling the market, has trouble making sense of or bounding ANT's project. He argues that ANT's problems include its inability to establish boundaries, particularly its inability to distinguish anything social that is not made up of actor-networks (p.78). He complains that ANT tries to explain everything, and therefore ends up explaining nothing (p.79). He compares it unfavorably with the other network approaches, in which "network" demarcates a more limited domain (p.79). And he wants to see ANT's networks as discrete systems (p.80). Thompson struggles here as he tries to make sense of what ANT would portray as a form of organization, concluding that ANT's networks are not intermediate forms of organization so much as sets of relations between actors and techniques (p.86); in contrast, I would say that actor-networks are not forms of organization at all, at least not in the sense that SNAs or TCAs are.

Let's put aside ANT for a moment, then, since actor-networks can be rather confusing in the first place, and compare apples to apples. In later chapters, Thompson has a great deal to say about organizational networks in terms of economic organizational structures. For instance, p.114 starts a strong section on cooperation, trust, and firm organization, drawing on the scholarly literature on the information economy: contractor-subcontractor networks, held together by informal and cooperative relationships, relying on trust, requiring flexibility, and working against vertically hierarchical structures (pp.114-115). He explores the shift from mass production to flexible specialization, something that Engestrom discusses under the heading co-customization, and emphasizes the role of trust in this new sort of organization, as Adler and Heckscher do (p.116).

Later, he discusses political and policy networks in the same terms, exploring the politics of networks in a way that reminds me slightly of the Tofflers' later work and a bit more of David Ronfeldt's policy discussions (p.150). Of particular interest to me was his discussion of "NGO networks of dissent," something that reminds me of Ronfeldt's Zapatista book (p.157).

On the other hand, Castells enthusiasts will be less enamored of Thompson's assessment of his work: "the thesis remains an exaggerated one" and "in the case of the 'network society' the argument is that it is just plain wrong" (p.193). Thompson doesn't like the loose way in which Castells uses the term "network" (p.193), he believes Castells is a bit of a technological determinist (p.192), and contra Castells, Thompson believes that recent time reduction in communication "makes possible different volumes of activity, and has speeded things up" but has not constitutes "a 'new global network order'" (p.224).

Ultimately, I found parts of this book to be very useful, once I moved past the ANT discussion. I wouldn't rely on this book for a critique of Callon et al., but I would use it to examine a more methodologically oriented, theoretically tight understanding of networks. If that's what you're after, check it out.

Reading :: My Life as a Night Elf Priest

My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft
By Bonnie A. Nardi

Bonnie Nardi is well known for her hard-core explication and development of activity theory. For instance, her 1996 edited collection Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction remains an important landmark in introducing, discussing, and theorizing AT for HCI. Her more recent Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design (with Victor Kaptelinin) further pushes the boundaries of the theory, developing it for understanding knowledge work. But Bonnie is also known for her accessible writing, her excellent storytelling, and her compassionate portrayals of those she discusses in her ethnographies.

Her latest book, My Life as a Night Elf Priest, is light on the former and heavy on the latter. Bonnie uses activity theory as a framework here, but her focus isn't on developing the theory or testing its bounds so much as it is on developing, as the subtitle suggests, "an anthropological account of World of Warcraft." This massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) has millions of users, but it's widely misunderstood. As Bonnie confesses, she also began with a negative impression of WoW and gaming in general, but students kept bringing MMORPGs up, so she decided to try it. Trying out the game led to playing, which led to an honest-to-goodness ethnography that spanned three years, two continents, and various groupings.

In this ethnography, Bonnie recounts starting off as a n00b and learning the terms and mores of WoW. She dispels some of the pernicious stereotypes about WoW players here, describing players' backgrounds in her guilds, then discussing issues such as aesthetics, media, the work/play distinction, addiction, modding, gender, and intercultural play. Throughout, she writes engagingly, pulling us into the story as well: I haven't played a MMORPG myself, but by the end of the book, I could understand why people do, how they interact, how they develop norms, and how they enforce behavior. I could also see how changes in the WoW environment, such as new modules that favor smaller groupings, can have macrosocial effects on the entire population of players.

I particularly appreciated Bonnie's discussion of US vs. Chinese takes on WoW. Bonnie and her research team gathered Chinese data by visiting Chinese cybercafes, observing users, and interviewing them. The differences were sometimes startling, and had partly to do with the Chinese government's heavy-handed editing of game representations: skeletons, for instance, were replaced by graves. (Bonnie attempts to draw an equivalence with conservative Christian monitoring of WoW in North America, although she doesn't provide examples of how or whether WoW has been modified for Christian sensibilities.) Other differences had to do with where WoW was played (Chinese cybercafes, with co-players close by, vs. American offices and bedrooms) and with ideas about cooperation.

The book is a fast read, a page turner. For someone like me, with some console RPG experience but no MMORPG experience, it explained WoW well, especially the cultural dimension and constructs that come from closely sharing and cooperating in the game with other players. But - and this is my only criticism - the specialized terms were hard to track. Bonnie defined each one immediately, but for a n00b like me, it was hard to keep track of terms such as "debuff," "ninja-ing," and "facerolling," and I began to wish for a glossary rather than tracking down the definitions in the index.

Still, overall, a great book. It's entertaining, it's a nice example of an online ethnography, and it advances the ball in terms of applying activity theory to online gaming. If you have the remotest interest in any of these, pick it up.

CFP: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Communication for Sustainable Communities

If you're doing work in sustainable communities, please consider this upcoming workshop. It happens during SIGDOC, which is in Brazil this September. Information below:

The first Interdisciplinary Workshop on Communication for Sustainable Communities
http://iwcsc.com

will be jointly held with the 28th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC'10), to be held in São Carlos-São Paulo, Brazil on September 27-29, 2010.
http://sigdoc.org/2010/

============
CALL FOR PAPERS
============

Sustainable communities are defined by being active, inclusive and safe, fair for everyone, environmentally sensitive, well served, accessible and with a flourishing and diverse local economy. The development of virtual and real sustainable communities can be supported by communication technology. In this sense, the first Interdisciplinary Workshop on Communication for Sustainable Communities intends to discuss how communication aspects may support ecological, socio-cultural and economical issues within the sustainable development of these communities. Moreover, the workshop will discuss sustainable aspects in the design, development and use of communication technologies and the creation of the built environment.

IWCSC will address the intersections between technological, sociological and aesthetic issues pertinent to communication as generator of sustainable community development. The workshop will be an interdisciplinary forum to discuss innovative communication solutions and paradigms that can enhance sustainable community development.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Theories and approaches for designing, developing and using communication tools to promote sustainability in communities.
* Semantic and Social media in sustainable community development.
* New sustainable communication channels (haptic, spatial, aural).
* Cultural and cross-cultural approaches to communication.
* Equitable and accessible approaches to communication.
* Ecological, socio-economic and political aspects of communication for communities development.
* Adaptable and adaptive communication for sustainable communities.
* Models for sustainable urban community development.
* Communication technologies and geolocated communities (nomad, collocated and dislocated).
* Communication aspects for encouraging participation and collaboration in sustainable practices.
* Measurements and characteristics for the success of sustainable community communication.
* The workshop will be accepting submissions of papers exposing technical solutions, mature artistic explorations or sociological studies exploring new approaches to communication as foundation for sustainable community development.

Participants should register for SIGDOC 2010. One-day registration is available on the SIGDOC'10 website at http://sigdoc.org/2010.

==========
SUBMISSIONS
==========

We invite practical approaches, empirical findings, proposals and research results that address aspects of communication for sustainable communities. Position and theoretically grounded discussions about the topics of interest, as well as mature aesthetic explorations, are also welcome.
Papers must be full format (6-8 pages), in the ACM SIG format. Submissions must contain original contributions and include unpublished results. The submission instructions will be available in the workshop website at http://iwcsc.com. Selected papers will be published in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/).

Contact by e-mail: organizers@iwcsc.com

==========
DATES
==========

Submission deadline: August 12th, 2010

Notification to Authors: August 30th, 2010

Camera-ready: September 4th, 2010

SIGDOC'10 September 26th-29th

==========
COMMITTEES
==========

Organizing Committee

* Roberto Calderon - University of British Columbia, CA
* Vânia Paula de Almeida Neris - Federal University of São Carlos, BR
* Junia Coutinho Anacleto - Federal University of São Carlos, BR

Program Committee (being updated)

*Brian S. Butler - University of Pittsburgh, USA
*Clay Spinuzzi - University of Texas at Austin, USA
*Eli Blevis - Indiana University, USA
*Hans Liesemberg - University of Campinas, BR
*José Armando Valente - University of Campinas, BR
*Michael Gurstein- Technical University of British Columbia, CA
*Sean Zdenek - Texas Tech University, USA
*Sidney Fels - University of British Columbia, CA

"Everything you need to start your own coworking group"

That's the title of an article at onlineuniversities.com that was just sent to me. It's concise, but worth a look if you're considering opening a space.

Catch me in San Antonio...

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

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

1:00pm - 2:30pm

C4 WorkSpace at 108 King William, San Antonio

Interested? Register at Eventbrite.

Slow going, upcoming

So I'm up to my elbows in revising an article, but I'm also planning to review the following books soon:

I'm about halfway through the new Callon, then will jump to Nardi's book before reading Laws of the Markets. Hopefully I can push out some reviews in a couple of weeks.

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

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

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

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

Reading :: Material Markets

Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed
By Donald MacKenzie

"Financial derivatives" is not a term in good odor these days. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, financial derivatives have been characterized by some as a "scam," a way to create money out of thin air via abstract models. In Material Markets, Donald MacKenzie applies actor-network theory (ANT) to a study of finance - including financial derivatives and arbitrage - to examine these apparently abstract, ethereal products as material. The book doesn't break much ground theoretically, but it does provide a solid application of ANT to finances.

Social studies of finance (SSF), MacKenzie tells us, are "inspired by social science research on science and technology" (p.2). And like the research that inspired it, SSF emphasizes "the materiality of markets: their physicality, corporeality, technicality" (p.2). MacKenzie comes up with several fascinating examples of this sort of materiality. For instance, he describes "broker's ear," the ability to fully pay attention to one conversation while simultaneously listening to all the other conversations in a room (p.12). He also emphasizes the role of what is normally translated as "assemblages," but which he insists on calling "agencements" (preserving the French double meaning of arranging/fitting together and of agency; see p.20). He finds "assemblage" to be too passive (p.21). Tracing an agencement, he says, is formally endless; instead, he wants to focus on aspects that are not obvious (p.57). And since he's focusing on finances in particular, he draws more heavily on Callon than on other ANT theorists.

With this grounding, he first turns to derivatives contracts. Contract design, like technological design, is an inherently political problem, requiring balance and compromise so that all participants' interests are represented enough to entice them to trade (p.70). In this chapter, MacKenzie examines the ins and outs of designing, implementing, and using such derivatives, focusing on the material conditions that let them function.

Next, MacKenzie examines how arbitrage is enacted, again taking a materialist standpoint ("a price is a thing," p.92). In the process, he brings in several examples of how this materiality is enacted. Futures traders are encouraged to play video games to increase reaction speeds (p.96). Traders wear platform heels to better their vantage point in the pit, and they jostle and even engage in fistfights in order to gain the best vantage point (p.97). At a desk trades complex, different types of arbitrage correlate to different spatial arrangements and proximities (p.97). Through these and other examples, MacKenzie produces a rich, qualitative understanding of arbitrage, in contrast with the abstract, quantitative understandings that are typically sought by economists (p.107).

MacKenzie turns to other aspects of finance in subsequent chapters: measuring profit, constructing emissions markets. Finally, he concludes by reaffirming that he has attempted to open "the black boxes of finance" (p.177).

Overall, I found this to be a valuable book for examining finance, and a nice proof of concept in terms of applying ANT more broadly. On the other hand, it didn't develop ANT theoretically or present any surprises or development beyond those in the cases themselves. I think these limitations suggest that the book was meant for those interested in finance rather than in ANT more generally. In any case, I'm still glad I read it, and I'd recommend it to those who are interested in applying ANT to other domains.

Reading :: Prince of Networks

Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
By Graham Harman

I came upon Prince of Networks through a reference from Tom Haskins' blog; he credited it as liberating him from some double binds in understanding actor-network theory (ANT). Many thanks to Tom for pointing out this book, which is quite good.

Prince of Networks is a philosopher's understanding of Latour's body of work. Specifically, Harman is trying to introduce Latour as "a key figure in metaphysics" (p.5). And he thinks it's about time:

The central problem of metaphysics is the interplay of objects and relations, and Latour sheds more light on both problems than perhaps any other contemporary thinker. It is odd that no one so far has seemed to realize this - bad luck for Latour, but once-in-a-lifetime good fortune for me, as the author of the first book on his metaphysics. (p.159)

Harman divides this once-in-a-lifetime book into two parts. Part I examines Latour's key works - particularly Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora's Hope, after which he names these chapters - in terms of metaphysics, comparing these key works to parallel work in metaphysics. In Part II, he examines Latour's take on objects and relations more critically, drawing Latour's thought into a more critical dialogue with metaphysics.

Unlike Harman and (evidently) Latour, I don't have a grounding in metaphysics, so the second part was of quite limited value to me. But the first part was useful because I was able to see how Harman explains Latour's thought to himself and fellow metaphysicists, and thus was able to see how ANT's concepts circulated into other disciplinary dialogues.

Harman starts with Irreductions, a relatively short treatise that is typically appended to Latour's The Pasteurization of France. Here, Latour describes a 1972 epiphany on the road from Dijon to Gray, in which he realizes that "nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything must be allied to everything else" (p.13, quoting Latour p.163). This assertion became a "new principle of philosophy" for Latour (p.13), a principle that led to four premises: "the world is made up of actors or actants"; "no object is inherently reducible or irreducible to any other"; "the means of linking one thing to another is translation"; "actants gain in strength only through their alliances" (pp.14-15). Latour also "rejects the rift between an inner substance and its trivial exterior" (p.17). And the concept of alliance, Harman says, doesn't mean that Latour is Machiavellian: he doesn't reduce truth to human power games, he accepts nonhumans as actors and measures reality in terms of how connected an actor is (p.19). Importantly, "any attempt to see actants as the reducible puppets of deeper structures is doomed to fail" in this understanding (p.21).

Harman moves next to Science in Action, which introduces the concepts of black boxes and action at a distance (p.33). Latour, Harman asserts, is not a philosopher of science so much as "a metaphysician working in a philosopher-of-science idiom" (p.36). In this idiom, Latour chooses to open certain "black boxes" - that is, to examine specific objects as performances rather than substances (p.44).

In the next book Harman examines, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour tackles modernism and critiques how it turns quotidian, fragile actants into abstract nominalizations: "capitalism, imperialism, science, technology, domination" (p.62, quoting Latour pp.125-126). Harman becomes very enthusiastic about such critiques, and even proposes that "Although in my view (but not Latour's) Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the past century, there are certainly moments when he deserves to have his tyres slashed" (p.68).

Moving along, Harman next discusses Pandora's Hope. And here he begins to critique Latour more directly, particularly in Latour's handling of Plato's Gorgias. In Latour's reading, although Socrates and Callicles are nominally at odds, they have a common enemy: the crowds (p.86). Harman, however, thinks that although this critique has some merit, Socrates is really the open-minded and questioning fellow that he portrays himself as being, and in this sense Socrates is "the ally of Latourean metaphysics" (p.91). (Although I'm no metaphysician, I don't buy this argument.)

The second part of the book was, frankly, less interesting to me because it deals with a lengthy comparison and critique of Latour with various metaphysicians. I agree with Harman that "Latour ... cannot explain change" (p.130) - more precisely, ANT has no strong account of development (see my book Network). But I disagree with Harman's understanding of Latorean relationships, which he seems to interpret as componentization:

But Latour's philosophy does not even allow for the existence of microparticles due to the infinite regress implied by the principle that black boxes can always be opened. Hence, it is all the more important for Latour that he allow genuine non-relational reality to emerge at each level of the world. And though he never passes the buck of reality downward to an artificial stopping point in the purported final kingdom of quarks, he does pass it upward to the outward effects an actant has on its neighbors. But the buck must never be passed in either direction. The reality of an object belongs to that object - not to its tiny internal constituents, and also not to the larger collectives in which it is immersed. (p.163)

If I'm reading Harman right, he's taking the metaphor of the black box too literally here, as many tend to do. If you imagine yourself opening a literal box, you'll find only things that fit inside that box - smaller things. If you dismantle a machine, you get the components of that machine. But Latour's concept of the black box isn't that of components but the associations from which the black box is composed. If I opened my phone, I'd find components; but if I "opened" it as a Latourean black box, I'd find Google and Taiwan. When Latour does talk of tiny components, it's in the context of comparing them: for instance, in "Drawing Things Together," he emphasizes that whether we examine microparticles or galaxies, we tend to view representations that are physically the same size, about the size of a piece of typing paper. In Latour's conception, the world doesn't have "levels"; the world is flat.

In any case, despite my misgivings over a couple of points in Part II, I thought this book was a keeper. It's certainly worth reading if you're interested in Latour or in metaphysics.

Coworking in Austin: LINK Coworking opens in October

If you've been following this blog or you saw my SXSWi2010 panel, you may remember Liz Elam's project Link Coworking. Liz has been looking for the right spot, under the right conditions, for opening her coworking space. And now she reports that she has found it:

It’s official! I have signed a lease at the Village Shopping Center (Anderson Lane – Home of Cover 3, Alamo, Body Business, Madam Mam’s, Chipotle etc. etc.). Link Coworking will open in the September timeframe with a grand opening bash in October.

The Village Shopping Center is a great space: on the north side of Anderson between Mopac and Burnet, within walking space of great restaurants, a gym, a sports bar, a movie theater, and etc. It's nicely located in north Austin. In fact, it's not too far from Cospace, which is on the east end of Anderson.

Liz says Link Coworking will open in mid-October. Congratulations to Liz, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the doors finally open!

Reading :: A Theory of Power

A Theory of Power
By Jeff Vail

I don't remember exactly how I got to Jeff Vail's blog - probably one of those Google chains that started with Ronfeldt's work on TIMN - but I was intrigued by his use of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome concept to develop ideas about nonhierarchical organization and resilient communities. Based on the blog, I ordered Vail's book A Theory of Power.

This slim (50pp excluding references) monograph is quirky in many ways. For instance, it's written in English Prime (p.1, footnote 1), and thus includes no "be" verbs except in quotations. More broadly, it's iconoclastic enough to be described as "anarchist theory" - and to be endorsed by anarchist theorists. Two endorsement quotes grace the back cover: anarchist philosopher John Zerzan calls it "rich, stimulating, and ambitious," while Noam Chomsky, simply declares it "fascinating."

Personally, I found it fascinating too, but I'm afraid I was not persuaded by it. Vail makes an unusual argument that is made more unusual because it uses the concept of rhizome in a way that I think directly opposes Deleuze and Guattari's intention. If you've read my review of A Thousand Plateaus and my book Network, you might have some inkling of how startling it is to read Vail's declaration that he'll use the rhizome concept to "illuminate the fundamental clockwork of our minds, bodies, and societies, revealing principles of power-relationships that govern all aspects of what we perceive as reality, from the environment and economics to politics and psychology. It will unravel the bonds that hold humanity in slavery to the patterns of history - and ultimately provide the key to our freedom" (p.3). Vail reads A Thousand Plateaus and sees a foundationalist account of reality. This foundationalist account, like Engels' version of dialectics, characterizes the whole of reality: "The same concept of power-relationships that defines sub-atomic structure also seems to define the larger world we live in - ecologies, societies, and economies. It acts like opening a watch to reveal the works inside" (p.5).

Vail contrasts two "fundamental methods of organization," which are "hierarchy and rhizome" (p.7). And in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari's caution that a rhizome is an antigenealogy and an antimemory (see D&G p.11, 21), Vail takes "a developmental, historical approach in the deconstruction of our world" (p.8). His Chapter 3 provides a brief history of the world, drawn primarily from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (which I haven't read). Here, the argument goes something like this: The gene uses organisms to reproduce itself; we organisms are the junior partner in this power relationship, then, controlled by the gene (p.9), evolving in order to ensure the gene's survival. Group entities, or cultures, are meta-individuals - but here, following Dawkins, Vail says that the controlling power is the meme, "the cultural equivalent of the gene" (p.11). And just as genes control organisms to ensure their self-reproduction, memes control cultures to ensure their own replication (p.11). Genes and memes coevolve, but memes are more rapid, flexible, and adaptable; nevertheless, memes interact strongly with genes, triggering genetic functions (p.12). (Although Vail doesn't use the term, the relationship sounds quite dialectic in an Engelsian sense.)

With writing, memes could expand "beyond the linguistic confines of their human host" (p.16). Vail cautions: "We must not, however, forget that memes do not serve humanity - rather, they use us for their propagation" (p.16).

(An aside here: Neal Stephenson brilliantly uses a version of this scenario in his book Snow Crash. But that book is dystopian science fiction.)

In Vail's account, the evolution of memes led to agriculture, which "ended the genetic evolution of humanity as it existed for millions of years, and finally completed the transition of power over human action from the gene to the meme" (p.19). In agriculture, the meme controls food production and therefore the individual (p.20). Under agriculture, evolution switched from individual to group selection, and "the makeup of our genome froze in the Pleistocene era of hunter-gatherers" (p.21). Technologies, as memes, also "follow a hard-wired path" of "selfish interest" (p.30) - and here Vail tries to be radically symmetrical, but comes across as a technological determinist.

At this point, Vail argues: "The understanding that self-awareness exists to serve the meme breaks that bond of servitude - it acts as the realization of enlightenment. Reread that last sentence," he orders. Have you done that? Great. From a theoretical standpoint, I am extremely dubious. But the good news is that this is the turning point of the monograph, because Vail turns from overarching (and arboreal, in the Deleuzean sense) theory to the more practical question of constructing resilient communities via networked organization.

Vail forges on to describe an alternate arrangement: "The path to stability and sustainability in human society lies in the conscious manipulation of memetic control structures" (p.40), and here he turns to the rhizome, which is hierarchy's "opposite" (p.40). According to Vail, "Rhizome acts as a web-like structure of connected but independent nodes, borrowing its name from the structures of bamboo and other grasses" (p.41). It is incompatible with hierarchy (p.41). (And here, when Vail says "rhizome," I hear "network" in the Ronfeldtian sense.) At the same time, Vail declares that "Rhizome structure has no inherent instability, but it will quickly reorder into hierarchy if we do not address the institutions within our society that serve to perpetrate hierarchy" (p.41). He goes on to discuss rhizomes as the basis for what John Robb would call resilient communities.

At this later, less theoretically ambitious portion of the monograph, Vail is actually describing a particular kind of networked organization. And here, if we set aside the Snow Crash style historical narrative, we can realize some gains. Vail draws on diverse examples to describe how a "rhizomatic" (networked) community focused on individual empowerment might look. The result is a cross of John Robb's resilient communities, Bobbitt's entrepreneurial market-state, and vintage Heinlein. Then again, I think Arquilla and Ronfeldt's work does a much better job of examining the same sort of phenomenon in more qualified, better theorized ways.

In sum, I found this to be a very strange monograph. Like Chomsky, I would call it "fascinating," but not in a wholly positive sense. I regret that I can't recommend it to the casual reader, but those who are interested in anarchist theory or resilient communities may want to pick it up.

Reading :: The Work of Nations

The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
By Robert B. Reich

So I've been meaning to read this book for over ten years, ever since Johndan Johnson-Eilola first started referring to it. Published in 1991, this book is written for a general audience and attempts to explain "a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies, at least as we have come to understand that concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation" (p.3). That is, Reich is addressing the issue of globalization, of hollow nation-states (Castells et al), of post-capitalist society (Drucker), of the support economy (Zuboff and Maxmin), of the market-state (Bobbitt), of power shifts (Toffler), of asymmetry (Arquilla and Ronfeldt), of creatives (Florida).

If I had read this book in 1991, it would have been a revelation (although admittedly it would be less of a revelation if I had read Toffler's books up to that point). Reading it now, though, I find few additional insights that haven't been covered by the books above, and the book is more popularly written than even Toffler's books.

On the other hand, Reich's evaluation is different from those of the other authors. Reich concludes that the US' real challenge is "to increase the potential value of what its citizens can add to the global economy, by enhancing their skills and capabilities and by improving their means of linking those skills and capacities to the world market" (p.8). In doing so, Reich wonders less about the US economy than its society, and he wonders, "are we still a society, even if we are no longer an economy?" (p.9). Can we rescue the nation-state?

For Bobbitt, the answer was no, and that was fine because other state configurations wait in the wings. For Reich, the answer is yes, partially (I think) because he doesn't envision a state that's not a nation-state. To answer this question affirmatively, Reich takes us through an accessible history of the 20th century, focusing on the tacit bargain that the US struck with its national champions, the corporations. Yet as corporations became more internationally connected, began outsourcing to take advantage of cheap labor and localized competencies, and began taking advantages of differences in local economic and regulatory conditions, that bargain fell apart; corporations "are ceasing to exist in any form that can meaningfully be distinguished from the rest of the global economy" (p.77); and the standard of living for any country's citizens suddenly depends, not on the success of core corporations and industries, but on "the worldwide demand for [citizens'] skills and insights" (p.77).

Like Castells and Drucker, Reich sees corporations turning to "serving the unique needs of particular customers" (p.82), achieving high-value as well as high-volume production. Such high-value businesses focus on three skills: problem-solving skills, skills to help customers understand needs, and skills that link problem-solvers and problem-identifiers (p.84). The distinction between goods and services means less and less (p.85). And given this shift, bureaucracies make less and less sense (pp.87-88; cf. Toffler's adhocracies). Reich describes the new enterprise as a "web" (looking more like Burt's brokered "neighbor networks" than all-channel networks; p.89). Non-core standardized pieces, including temporary labor, are acquired as needed (p.90; cf. Toffler's adhocracies, but also Castells' generic labor). And because enterprises are arranged in this way, Reich argues, official statistics aree hard to interpret (p.94). For instance, we've seen a rise in self-employment figures, but Reich argues that these self-employed people are generally not taking replacement jobs, they're becoming autonomous nodes in enterprise webs (p.95). "There is no 'inside' or 'outside' the corporation, but only different distances from its strategic center," Reich states, offering the example of a deregulated AT&T (p.96).

Given these changes, Reich argues that "The key assets of high-value enterprise are not tangible things, but the skills involved in linking solutions to particular needs, and the reputations that come from having done so successfully in the past" (p.98). Ownership and power are diffused (p.98). Creatives can't be bought or acquired, only enticed (p.103; cf. Florida).

Globally, high-value enterprises resist top-down control and centralized ownership (p.110). The many digital and telecommunications technologies constitute the "threads" that make up the "global web" and make national control over information flows futile (p.111). Increasingly, the "global web" carries most of what is traded between nations: problem-solving, problem-identifying, brokerage between these, and routine components and services (p.113).

Later in the book, Reich breaks down the "three jobs of the future": routine production services, in-person services, and symbolic-analytic work (p.174). The first are routine, step-by-step, repeatable (p.174); Castells terms these "generic labor." Those who perform these jobs are in competition with workers and automated labor globally; their wages will fall. The second set are marginally more protected, since in-person services can't be outsourced, but their wages are also sinking. The third, according to Reich, are the truly competitive jobs, and their wages will rise. Symbolic-analytic workers work alone or in small teams; teamwork is crucial; they must have frequent and informal conversations; they are partners and associates rather than under bosses or supervisors (pp.178-179). They comprised only 8% of the workforce in the 1950s, but 20% in the 1990s (p.179). In the new economy, their job is not to know things, but to use that knowledge (p.182). Fortunately for us (the US), Reich says, no nation educates its symbolic-analytic workers as well as the US (p.225), and nowhere else is there such an agglomeration of them (p.226).

But, and this brings us back to Reich's question at the beginning of the book, can we save US society? After all, he says, symbolic-analytic workers are seceding from society (Ch.20-21). Alas, Reich ends with hope of a solution rather than an actual solution.

So was The Work of Nations worth it for me? I think it was. Although other readings cover almost all of this ground, and in frequently more sophisticated ways, Reich's piece is relatively early and provides a panoramic view of the shift toward a knowledge society. If that sounds interesting to you, pick it up.

n.b., When I refer to other books I've reviewed on this blog, I usually insert links. Today, that seems like too much work. But don't hesitate to search for any of the names above if the books sound intriguing.

Reading :: Digital Literacy for Technical Communication

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice
Edited by Rachel Spilka

When I was in high school, I'd spend some of my yard work money on classic rock albums. But I wasn't exactly swimming in money, so I'd try to buy albums strategically. After all, plenty of albums have one or two hit songs, but the rest of the tracks were unremarkable at best and filler at worst. So as an austerity measure, I limited myself to albums that had at least three songs I recognized and liked. Led Zeppelin IV?Dark Side of the Moon? Sure, buy. American Pie? Nope.

I have more money now, but less time, so I find myself doing similar calculations. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I prefer single-author books to edited collections: they tend to be more coherent and vary less in quality. But then again, sometimes a good author and a good topic make it worth picking up the collection. That's the case with Rachel Spilka's new collection, Digital Literacy for Technical Communication - at least if you're interested in technical communication. This book addresses the question of how the field of technical communication is changing due to the influx of new digital technologies and how our theories and practices must continue developing to keep up. And I'm happy to report that it has some solid chapters.

Let's look at some of these. First up is Saul Carliner's "Computers and Technical Communication in the 21st Century." Carliner traces changes in technical communicators' work at a large (unnamed) computer manufacturer that has traditionally employed large numbers of technical communicators (p.22). And although Carliner discusses these changes in detail, you'll want to keep your finger on p.22 and turn to pp.24-25, where Carliner examines four stages - late 1970s, mid-to-late 1980s, late 1990s-early 2000s, and early 2000s-now - in terms of primary products, titles, qualifications, primary job responsibilities, and primary means of production. The bottom line is that technical communication has changed radically across all these dimensions. Carliner concludes that in this latest stage, "those who develop and produce content have been facing dwindling work opportunities" due partly to offshoring and content management systems (p.44). Carliner smartly draws implications for work processes, information reuse, and academic programs (pp.45-47).

Along the same lines, R. Stanley Dicks' chapter "The Effects of Digital Literacy on the Nature of Technical Communication Work" describes "the rapid and intense increase in digital literacy" as pushing causing a "seismic shift" in technical communication (p.51). Dicks emphasizes corresponding changes in management philosophy, related to economics, management, and methodologies (p.52). In terms of economics, Dicks reviews the shift toward knowledge work, drawing on Reich (and Johnson-Eilola's work referencing Reich) (p.53), then moving to a summary of Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy (p.55-59). In terms of management, Dicks identifies ways for communicators to show management how they add value: through cost reduction, cost avoidance, revenue enhancement, and intangible contributions (p.61). Finally, in terms of methodologies, Dicks discusses relatively new practices such as single-sourcing, agile development methods, user-centered design, iterative design, extreme programming, scrum, distributed work, and web 2.0 (pp.68-75). Dicks wraps up by discussing education that can address these emerging aspects of technical communication.

Dave Clark's "Shaped and Shaping Tools" examines technical communication technologies in rhetorical terms. As Clark points out, the rhetoric of technology is ill-defined, and we need a solid definition in order to better understand how technical communicators work with their tools rhetorically. Arguing strongly that the rhetoric of technology is not the rhetoric of science (pp.89-90), he draws on Dorothy Winsor's work to make that case, then proceeds to examine how tech comm scholars have conducted rhetoric-of-technology studies (pp.91-92). Clark tackles these under four (nonexhaustive) headings: rhetorical analysis; technology transfer and diffusion; genre theory; and activity theory. Clark concludes by emphasizing what the approaches share: "Understanding [technologies'] contexts is critical to developing a deeper understanding of technologies that can lead to their more effective use" (p.100).

William Hart-Davidson's "Content Management: Beyond Single-Sourcing" focuses on a specific area that Carliner and Dicks both mentioned (and that Clark has addressed in other publications). The chapter is well done, but turn to the table on p.136 for an overview of "technical communicators' expanding roles and responsibilities in the context of an organization's content strategy" (p.136). Think of this table as an exploded view of the last column in Carliner's table, a detailed view of aspects of Dicks' chapter, and to some extent a rhetorical understanding of technology along the lines introduced in Clark's chapter. Nice work here.

Other chapters are also worthwhile. Just to name-check two: Bernadette Longo's "Human + Machine Culture" attempts to draw connections between activity theory and cultural theory, while Barry Thatcher's "Understanding Digital Literacy Across Cultures" examines how digital technologies complicate intercultural communication.

Bottom line? I'm not sure Digital Literacy for Technical Communication is a Led Zeppelin IV, but it's no one-hit wonder either. It has some solid and surprisingly integrated pieces that represent smart thinking about how technical communication is developing. If you're interested in tech comm, I'd definitely recommend picking it up.

Reading :: A Research Primer for Technical Communication

A Research Primer for Technical Communication: Methods, Exemplars, and Analyses
By Michael A. Hughes and George F. Hayhoe

Just a quick review today. This book is pretty slim for a research primer - 216pp, a chunk of which represent reprinted articles from Technical Communication, the journal of the STC - and is written for technical communication students and practitioners who are new to empirical research. Although the book doesn't specify what level of student, I could see my juniors and seniors mowing through the book with no difficulty.

The book is consistently clear throughout, carefully classifying different types of research goals and their foci (p.7) as well as research methods and their descriptions (p.11), then elaborating on each. For most sections, the authors include exercises, such as the exercise on p.12 that has readers match methods with descriptions of specific cases. I'm actually quite impressed with how the authors describe many concepts, such as triangulation and informed consent, lucidly yet with considerable economy.

The book is fairly elementary, probably too elementary for most graduate students in technical communication programs. But I could see it being used in undergraduate courses, perhaps even down to the sophomore level, and certainly by practitioners. If you're looking for a general research methods book at that level, take a look.

TIMN and Bobbitt's Market-State

I recently blogged a review of Phillip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles, an impressive discussion of how the State has changed over time and how it might change in the future. This book reminded me a lot of David Ronfeldt's TIMN framework, and I think there's a lot of overlap in terms of how we've experienced changes in organization, in logics, and in assumptions or warrants that underpin our understanding of how we interact with the State and each other.

There are, of course, differences as well. Ronfeldt recently blogged thoughts on how TIMN and Bobbitt's market-state compare. (He intends to also write on Phillip Blond’s "civic state" and Michel Bauwens’s "partner state.") As always, Ronfeldt's post is thoughtful and showcases Ronfeldt's much, much deeper understanding of the issues involved with these sorts of frameworks. If you're interested in political ideology, or if my discussions of TIMN or Bobbitt (or netwar or John Robb or Castells or the health care town halls or loose work organization or ...) have piqued your interest, I highly recommend clicking through.

In the pipeline

The end of the semester is a terrible time for blogging book reviews, but I will be blogging these two soon:

• Spilka, Digital Literacy for Technical Communication
• Hughes & Hayhoe, A Research Primer for Technical Communication

And I plan on reading these books soon:

• Reich, The Work of Nations
• (possibly) Reich, The Future of Success
• Losh, Virtualpolitik

That is, if I can get through this semester. Keep your fingers crossed and watch this space.

David Lee visits RHE 330c

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

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

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

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

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

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

Designing Text Ecologies, Summer 2010

Are you a student at UT, looking for a summer course? I'm teaching one. Here's a very brief description:

Organizations use all sorts of texts. They don’t always go together. But somehow they usually work together anyway, in complex ecologies.

Sometimes they don’t.

If you go into an organization, watch people work, talk to them, and take pictures, you can find out why. Model the problems. And then fix them.

That’s what my summer class is about.

RHE 330c: Designing Text Ecologies (Unique ID 87500)

Summer 2010

M-F 10-11:30

I'm always enthusiastic about the classes I teach, but that's especially true for this one. Students learn to design and conduct basic field research, use powerful analytical techniques to systematically study how organizations circulate texts and knowledge, and intervene to fine-tune or at least improve the system. I've been teaching variations of this course since 2001. If you're a UT undergrad looking for a summer course, and this description seems even remotely interesting, drop me a line and I'll be happy to discuss it.

For a more detailed idea of what we'll do there, see my spring class and the course's resource site. And don't hesitate to email me with questions.

Outsourcing grading

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

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

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

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

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