Reading :: Discovering Qualitative Methods, Second Edition

Discovering Qualitative Methods: Field Research, Interviews, and Analysis
By Carol A.B. Warren and Tracy Xavier Karner

I really enjoy reading texts on qualitative methodology, even those that, like this one, are pitched to upper-level undergrads and incoming graduate students. They're easy to read through and compare, and sometimes they highlight differences in fields, disciplines, and research programs more clearly than looking at the literature itself. That's especially true for Discovering Qualitative Methods, which is aimed at sociologists in training. Reading it, I was intrigued by the clues about sociology that it conveyed through its assertions.

The book follows a basic approach of introducing qualitative methods and giving background on law, politics, and ethics before diving into the practical issues of gaining entrance to a site, collecting various data (observations, interviews, artifacts), and analyzing the data. The first two chapters would seem familiar to anyone performing or reading about workplace writing in my field - although the examples tend to come from settings that are unfamiliar to most college students and academics, such as nursing homes, biker gangs, cults, and the radical environmental movement. (Other examples, such as a lesbian community, would perhaps have seemed more exotic to students in the past. Still others, such as drug dealers, represent activities that we hope are exotic to them.) Indeed, as the book unfolds, the authors pull out still more examples along these lines, and ask students to use caution when investigating them. For me, these example sites seemed quite odd - almost like sightseeing for academics - compared to the workplace and organization sites to which I send my students.

As I read further, other differences emerge. For instance, in the chapter on fieldnotes, readers are cautioned not to take observational notes while observing, because "it is virtually impossible to continue to observe closely while looking downward taking notes" (p.112). Instead, readers are told to observe for a half hour or more, then find a quiet place to write a thick description (p.118) - one that includes sights, sounds, smells, textures, and anything else they can record. The examples are heavy with adjectives and adverbs: they read like the work of nonfiction creative writers. A finished field note "resembles an essay or narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end" (p.120). The authors advocate using quotation marks to identify quotes, even when the exact quotation is not available and the researcher is conveying only the gist (p.120). This strategy of writing field notes, presumably, works well over the long period of time that it takes to write an ethnography - but it would be difficult to execute faithfully when examining microlevel details in shorter case study research.

Again, these different methodological choices represent different research objectives and orientations. I'm just startled at how different these turn out to be. And the theme continues when we get to analysis. The first page of the analysis chapter actually made me laugh out loud: the authors grimly tell us that analysis will involve physical and emotional exhaustion (p.215). But I can see why: analysis involves open coding, which leads to themes, which are then linked into analytical descriptions (p.237). Other than that, the authors provide examples but not much guidance. This sort of analysis is quite inductive, involving multiple passes over thick field notes and interviews, and the authors assume that these documents will all be separate rather than in a database or analysis software. How to organize all of these data? "Some sociologists use visual diagrams, process flow charts, or organizational structure charts. Others have drawn maps of their settings .... we find ourselves using the tried-and-true format of an outline" (p.238). For an example, the authors provide a half-page outline. I can understand why, since the authors are expecting longer ethnographies in which researchers seek to generate coherencies from the data rather than examine it with a preexisting framework. But still, the analytical tools - and their process - are much less specified than I expected.

As you may have picked up, I spent a lot of time comparing this book to how I teach my qualitative methods classes. Based on my field's assumptions and goals, I don't think I would use this book - but at the same time, I can see how it would be a better fit for sociology than the methods I use. It's an intriguing read, and I recommend a look for anyone who is teaching qualitative research methods.

Reading :: Apprenticeship in Thinking

Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context
By Barbara Rogoff

If you read my review of Rogoff's The Cultural Nature of Human Development, you have the gist of this earlier one. The Cultural Nature of Human Development summarized Apprenticeship in Thinking and related research in a popular version. This book is the original, which means that it's less polished but more obviously an academic argument, with appropriate cites and a bit more involved with debates on cognitive development.

Here, Rogoff defines her subject matter:

For the purposes of this book, cognition and thinking are defined broadly as problem solving. I assume that thinking is functional, active, and grounded in goal-directed action. Problem solving involves interpersonal and practical goals, addressed deliberately (not necessarily consciously or rationally). It is purposeful, involving flexible improvisation toward goals as diverse as planning a meal, writing an essay, convincing or entertaining others, exploring the properties of an idea or unfamiliar terrain of objects, or remembering or inferring the location of one's keys. (pp.8-9)

But, Rogoff adds, "Problem solving is not 'cold' cognition, but inherently involves emotion, social relations, and social structure" (p.10). Indeed, as in The Cultural Nature of Human Development, Rogoff emphasizes problem solving within the sociohistorical milieu in which people develop and participate. To get there, she relies on work grounded in Vygotsky and Piaget. Reasonably, she reminds us that

my work, like that of anyone else, involves the appropriation of concepts that I have found useful in the works of others. The use that I make of their ideas undoubtedly involves some transformation from the ideas they offered. This is in the nature of dialogue. The transformation is liable to be greater the more distinct the backgrounds of the speaker and listener, or the author and the reader. The refraction of Vygotsky's ideas, like those of Piaget, through a foreign lens - through differences in time and place, language and intellectual climate - contributes to the listener's making something new of the speaker's words, for better or worse. My purpose in this book is not to explain Vygotsky or Piaget or others, but to build from what I make of them. (p.14)

This is a nice move, since it lets us get past the issue of fidelity to a theory and pushes us toward Rogoff's observations and inferences. Again, you get the gist of these from my review of The Cultural Nature of Human Development, so I won't repeat them here except to say that you'll quickly see why this book is a classic. If you're a casual reader, I'd read The Cultural Nature of Human Development first; if you're publishing in this area, read Apprenticeship in Thinking.

Our lockdown experience at UT

People have been asking me about what happened during the University of Texas lockdown today. It was really quite uneventful. Here's what happened from my point of view.

First, the blow-by-blow is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spinuzzi

Two students and I camped out in our computer classroom, which is a converted bomb shelter. We felt perfectly safe and kept up to date via Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging. Among other things, I communicated with other professors and admin staff in lockdown along the hall.

At one point, a SWAT team showed up, touched base with us, and asked us to remain there until we got the all-clear.

We were in Parlin, and we received updates from social media suggesting that a second shooter was barricaded in Calhoun, the building immediately south of us. However, we saw no shooter.

Honestly, the situation was quite surreal. The classroom has only one window, in the door. The door's about three inches thick. So we felt completely safe. At the same time, we watched an update that a San Antonio TV station had put on the web. The students had okay mobile phone coverage; my phone wouldn't call out, but the classroom had a corded phone so I was able to call loved ones.

Around 11:40, they surrounded the all-clear, and we went home.

Coworking in Austin: Link Coworking (part 1)

Today's opening day for Link Coworking. Liz Elam has been working like a demon to get this space open, and it's finally paid off. I'll interview her soon for the blog, but in the meantime, drop in. And if you can't, you can take a look at some of the (amateur) photos I shot today. They don't do it justice - it's a beautiful space.

Coworking in Austin: Cowork Austin

Cowork Austin is on the third floor of the Hannig Row Building on 6th Street, just across from the Driskill Hotel. In other words, it's about as close to the center of downtown Austin as you can get: a few blocks north of the river, east of Congress, and northwest of the convention center.

If that sounds familiar, it's because this space has been recently rebranded. It originally opened in January as Texas Coworking, but one of the partners recently left the organization and the other, Blake Freeberg, rebranded the space in August.

So how does Cowork Austin fit into the suddenly crowded set of Austin coworking spaces? Blake describes a spectrum of coworking spaces. On one end are businesses with excess square footage: "Oh, we have an extra desk in our office. We'll lease it out." On the other extreme are incubators such as TechRanch: "coworking with an intention to model and develop your business and mentor you." Somewhere in the mix are communally based models.

But Cowork Austin is more about enabling small businesses: it's "both a place where we can meet and help people or build a platform for them to do their business on. See these things grow. It's kind of an enabling thing." He adds, "I approach coworking from a slightly different angle, not what coworking is, per se, but what it enables. ... it's kind of a low cost business platform with shared knowledge that amplifies your business opportunities at the beginning." That amplification comes from abundant networking opportunities. Cowork Austin summarizes this idea in their tagline, "the un-office office."

Not that everyone at Cowork Austin has to come seeking networking: although those opportunities are there, Blake says, many come because "I don't have to put the deposit down. I don't have to sign a two year lease," and the space is relatively cheap. Coworkers prepay month to month.

What do coworkers get other than a space to work and the opportunity to network: "If you're a member, you have access to our address, you have a keycard to come in here 24x7, and you have rights to use the printer. We have a black and white and color ones coming up. You have the kitchen and you have everything. We do Internet but we don't do phone. That's twentieth century." Blake explained that Cowork Austin expects everyone to have a mobile phone or to use Skype; Cowork Austin has no landline phone. But it does offer parking for $15 more per month.

At the beginning of the month, Cowork Austin was growing: it had 12-14 coworkers, generally working in the tech industry, but also including a book publisher, a movie director, a wildlife conservation group, and a music festival planner. "These are industries that I have not seen in other coworking spaces," I told him. "And they kind of characterize Austin, you know? Film, music, artists..." Nodding, Blake emphasized that "work encompasses people's, not just computing stuff, not just pure business stuff but the art and the music that is Austin. I want to be a kind of holistic place."

That holism has led Blake to open Cowork Austin to different opportunities. For instance, art from local artists is displayed on the walls. They recently hosted a tequila tasting. They host interface design meetings, Women in Tech meetings, a Cassandra hackathon, and they plan to host an all-girl, all-night hackathon. "We have space for [a 20-person] group. Can't do the 50s to 100s. Not yet," he added.

Blake is optimistic that coworking is going to be around for a while. "I certainly don't think it's going to shrink," he told me, "And I think, fundamentally, it derives from professionalism and the tax code." On the one hand, "It doesn't take an army to build out a idea that monetizes things that you can live off of. So, that gives freedom. And on the other side, the tax code fundamentally says that if you hire a consultant you can write them off." So he sees corporations "moving to optimize their core business and hire consultants for everything else." And that means more need for coworking spaces, as those consultants seek offices - and as they seek more cohesive, more networked environments to match they sort of work they have to do.

Present Tense just published its inaugural issue

A few months ago, I blogged a CFP for Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. Now the inaugural issue is out. Take a look: the issue has a wide set of topics.

Info below:

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is proud to announce its inaugural issue: http://www.presenttensejournal.org The articles in volume 1, issue 1 include a divesity of current topics, ranging from John Schilb’s essay on disciplinarity and power, to Jill Parrott’s discussion of search engines and the rhetorical canons, to Vershawn Ashanti Young’s analysis of race and the new equality. We hope you find the articles as engaging as we do and we encourage you to continue to the conversation by commenting online.

Volume 1, Issue 1 includes:

Turning Composition toward Sovereignty

- John Schilb

Momma’s Memories and the New Equality

- Vershawn Ashanti Young

I’ll Google It!: How Collective Wisdom in Search Engines Alters the Rhetorical

Canons

- Jill M. Parrott

Making Rhetoric Visible: Re-visioning a Capstone Civic Writing Seminar

- Heather Lettner-Rust

Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices

- Elizabeth Fleitz

Program Review: The Land-Grant Way – Connected Knowing and the Call of Service

- James M. Dubinsky

Book Review: Scott’s Dangerous Writing

- Sheri Rysdam

Present Tense is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens. In addition to examining these subjects as found in written, oral and visual texts, we wish to provide a forum for calls to action in academia, education and national policy. Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles of no more than 2,000 words, the length of a conference paper.

Reading :: Ghost in the Machine

The Ghost in the Machine
By Arthur Koestler

A couple of years ago, J.P. Rangaswami visited Austin for the summer and graciously invited me to breakfast, where we discussed a number of things, including his recent acquisition of Ribbit for BT. We also discussed the increasingly open way of doing business in organizations and industries, and I mentioned the networked organization of the telecomm company I had described in Network. "Oh yes," he said, "we used to call them holons."

At that point I realized that I would have to look up holons and see how they squared with networked organizations. I have been sidetracked by many things, both large (getting some projects finished) and small (the UT library failed to list a book as missing). But I eventually used the researcher's best friend - Wikipedia - to track down the origination of the term "holon": Arthur Koestler's 1967 classic The Ghost in the Machine.

If that name rings a bell, yes, the book's title was borrowed by the Police for their 1981 album. According to Wikipedia, Koestler did not seem impressed by this borrowing. Maybe Sting had missed the references that Koestler had made to pop music in this book: "Even from the aesthetic point of view we have managed to contaminate the luminiferous ether as we have contaminated our air, rivers, and seashores; you fiddle with the dials of your radio and from all over the world, instead of celestial harmonies, the ether disgorges its musical latrine slush" (p.321), he argued. (Recall that the publication year, 1967, was the Summer of Love.)

As you may have gathered from the above quote, Koestler was a first-class polemicist as well as a pessimist and a bit of a classist. At one point, for instance, he complains that "the more crowded [humans] are in slums, ghettoes and poverty-stricken areas, the faster they breed" (p.330). Hmm. He was also at one point an enthusiastic member of the Communist Party and a Soviet propagandist, a fact we'll come back to later.

The thing about polemicists, of course, is that they are quite entertaining when they are attacking those with whom you disagree. Koestler starts out the book with some terrific broadsides against behavioralist psychology, pointing out its oversimplifications with a polemicist's flair. "Pavlov counted the number of drops which his dogs salivated through their artificial fistulae, and distilled them into a philosophy of man," he summed scornfully (p.10). Soon he moved to the impoverished way that behavioralist psychology treated language, contrasting it unfavorably with Noah Chomsky's work. (Some of you may know Chomsky best for his photo op with Rage Against the Machine, but in 1967, only one member of that band had been born.) Later, he turns his guns on Darwinist evolution, arguing that random mutation was insufficient to explain evolutionary patterns and especially "lietmotivs" such as strong parallels between mammals in Europe and independently evolving marsupials in Australia.

But Koestler is no creationist - and he's no socioculturalist either. To understand his point of view, you have to understand the "holon," literally, the "whole-part": a hierarchically organized unit that can be a part of a more complex unit, and is in turn composed of smaller and simpler holons. These units are hierarchically organized, but they are also interlocking, not necessarily fitting together in one single way. They are Janus-like intermediaries between levels of organization.

Holons apply in biological evolution, of course, and Koestler sees them as the solution to the puzzle of parallel evolution between mammals and marsupials. But Koestler also sees social holons (pp.50-51); developmental holons; language holons; he states that habits are behavioral holons (p.76); he states that "habits and skills are functional holons" (p.207). In fact, holons become a Theory of Everything.

Holons have both integrative tendencies (tendencies to function in a larger whole) and self-assertive tendencies (tendencies to assert their own patterns as a unit) (p.56). The interplay between these is both creative and destructive. Applied to evolution - and as we eventually see, to everything else - this interplay translates to "drawing back to leap," or undoing and redoing (p.167; Here, Koestler applies the principle to evolution, science, and art).

I'll talk more on holons in a minute, but see if they sound familiar to you.

As we get closer to the end of the book, Koestler's themes become more urgent. He postulates that we human beings have an evolutionary flaw, and makes the case that evolutionary flaws occur. For instance, in Chapter 16, "The Three Brains," he describes three brains with significant flaws. Arthopods' brains, for instance, are built around their gullets - something that creates a built-in limit to brain capacity, since greater capacity means less room to swallow (p.268). Marsupials, on the other hand, are generally arboreal animals, but their brains dedicate too much capacity to the relatively useless sense of smell and they lack a corpus callosum to link the evolutionarily "new" areas of the right and left hemispheres of the brain (p.272). The third flawed brain is ours: Koestler argues that we have insufficient coordination between our archicortex and neocortex, and consequently a dichotomy in function (p.273). Our reptilian ("lizard") brain, limbic or paleo-mammalian ("lower mammal") brain, and "late mammal" brain are "relatively autonomous holons" with parallel functions (p.278). Koestler sees this result as due to rapid evolution of the brain, which has "overshot" our immediate needs (p.299). He goes on to detail the results, including our fondness for interspecial violence (p.307).

Let's take a moment to recall what the world was like in 1967. World War II was a recent memory. So was the 1948 Berlin Airlift. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a few years earlier, in 1961. Proxy wars such as Vietnam were raging. Paul Erlich was about to publish The Population Bomb, arguing that overpopulation was inevitable and would bring mass starvation. Indeed, in Chapter 18, The Age of Climax, Koestler warns that we will reach "7 billion people in 2000" - but concurs with a Ford Foundation report that the "four horsemen" would "take over" long before then (p.315). On top of that, Koestler expected nuclear war. To bring it back to Sting, Koestler didn't dare hope that the Russians' love for their children would forestall genosuicide (p.322). To put it simply, the evolutionary flaw was too powerful.

At this point, Koestler only saw one hope: that we could artificially induce change in human behavior through genetic modification (p.327). The old propagandist prescribes the top-down solution of developing, then convincing people to take pharmaceuticals that would help them coordinate their limbic, reptilian, and late-mammal brains. Here, he sounds more like A.E. van Vogt than anything. Today, this prescription seems bizarre.

Okay. So have you thought about holons? If they sound strangely familiar to you, think back to Koestler's Soviet past. Holons sound an awful lot like the universally applicable, totalizing, and ultimately mad dream of Engelsian dialectics. (Koestler, frankly, did not advance the ball very far here.) Thanks for playing!

Reading :: America's Children

America's Children: Resources from Family, Government, and the Economy (Population of the United States in the 1980s: A Census Monograph)
By Donald J. Hernandez

I ran into a reference of this book when reading Rogoff's The Cultural Nature of Human Development, and it sounded so fascinating that I had to pick it up. And I was right: it was fascinating, and I inhaled it within a couple of hours.

Not that I read every word. This book is an analysis of US Census data and relevant data sources from the 1980 census back, focused on what these data can tell us about children: from family size to living arrangements to employment (both parents' and children's). These data are admittedly limited, but the author carefully puts them together in a way that informs us of surprising trends in children's lives. And he carefully hedges when the data are unclear or incomplete. More than that, he goes beyond facts to provide analyses. Honestly, if you simply read the conclusions for each chapter, you'll get the gist, and if you want to carefully examine the data, you can read the chapters and look up the census data.

Personally, I wanted to get the gist, so I spent most of my time with the chapter conclusions and only skimmed the chapters. My particular interest was an issue that Rogoff raised in her book: how family models related to recent economic changes. Hernandez's book discusses this issue quite well.

For instance, Hernandez points out that many factors have appeared to impact family size and fertility (i.e., the number of children a woman expects to have over her lifetime). Both numbers have plummeted over the last several decades. Hernandez points out several reasons. First, rates of childhood mortality have dropped. In 1890, 40% of black children and 20% of white children died before age 15. By 1973, those numbers had dropped to 4% and 2% respectively (p.46). Similarly, family sizes experienced a "revolutionary" drop: "the proportions [of adolescents] living in families with 5-7 and 8+ siblings plummeted from 30 and 46 percent, respectively, [for those born in 1890] to only 14 and 2 percent [for those born in 1973], while the proportions living in families with 1-2 and 3-4 siblings jumped from 7 and 16 percent, respectively, to 40 and 45 percent" (p.51). These differences mean both more and less beneficial consequences: fewer companions; more resources per child; more educational advancement; higher-status occupations (which correlate to more educational advancement) (p.55). Furthermore, Hernandez says, we were midway through this family-size revolution by the end of the Great Depression. Apparently this revolution was due to the Industrial Revolution, which increased the costs of having children while lowering the benefits (p.55). (We'll return to this theme in a moment.)

Hernandez also points out other changes in family composition. The proportion of children who were not in intact two-person families was 30-35% in 1940-1960; by 1988, the proportion was 50% (p.57). We see a rise in mother-only families (p.57). At the same time, we see a decline in the presence of grandparents (p.72). These changes are generally not positive: children in one-parent families tend to have lower incomes; lower levels of attention from parents; greater personal and parental stress; greater school-related, health, and behavioral problems; fewer total years of education; lower-status occupations in adulthood; and lower incomes in adulthood (p.93).

Families are also impacted by changes in parents' work and the family economy (Ch.4) - and this is where I was most interested. Hernandez notes two transformations in the parents' work: (1) from agricultural to industrial work, when families moved from the two-parent farm family to the father-as-breadwinner model, and (2) from the father-as-breadwinner model to dual-earner and single-parent nonfarm families (p.98). These three models have different familiar relationships; the shift in work leads to shifts in family models and roles (p.99). The heart of this chapter is a stunning graph showing the percentage of families under each model (p.103), the same graph that Rogoff reproduces. In 1790, over 70% of families were two-parent farm families, while only about 10% were dual-earner nonfarm and one-parent families; by 1980, the percentages had reversed and then some. And Hernandex emphasizes that the rapid rise of the latter category is due to the dual-earner families, not the one-parent families (p.104).

The parents' employment isn't the whole story. Adolescent work has been dramatically transformed as well. In agricultural work, work and education are merged, and even for occupations off the farm, the rule was apprenticeships. Invested adults would directly supervise adolescents. Youth labor was considered essential for the survival of the family and community (p.129). In comparison, in industrial work, a smaller number of males aged 14-19 worked when school was in session (the dip was much slighter for females the same age) (p.129). Industrial work required stronger, more experienced workers; involved trade unions; and saw the introduction of child labor and compulsory education laws (p.132). Critically, greater affluence meant that youth labor was no longer essential for survival. At the same time, the nonfarm economy required greater levels of education for workers (p.132).

So by 1940, 60% of employed 16-17 year olds worked in "old" workplace settings (farms, factories); by 1980, this number dropped to 14%, with 56% in "new" workplaces (sales, services) (p.133). In these new settings, youth workers don't require the skills needed by adult workers; adult supervisors were less invested in youths' socialization and development; and according to Hernandez, these factors promoted a peer culture that fostered delinquent behavior and cynicism about the value of productive labor. Adolescent work had moved from on-the-job training for an adult career to a relatively disconnected set of skills oriented toward personal consumption (not family support) (pp.133-134). Children enter the workforce to support their own lifestyle (p.136) and are expected to live in a household where both parents work away from home (p.136).

Related, children agees 5-17 attended school only 11% of the days of the year in 1870; by 1988, they attended 43% of days. School enrollment during the same period shot up from 50 to 98%. Days per enrolled student shot from 78 to 162 (p.146).

Break down the data by parents' educational attainment and more interesting trends show up. In the 1920s, 43.5% of children were born to fathers with less than 7 years of elementary school; 39.4% were born to mothers with this level of education. By the 1980s, 85.4% of children were born to fathers with 4+ years of high school, and 80.9% to mothers with that level of education. The percentage for parents with some years of college? 47.4% and 37.9% respectively. (p.197) Hernandez speculates that factors in that last figure include the GI Bill and the Vietnam draft (p.198). (Recall that Drucker pegs the shift to the knowledge society to the GI Bill.)

I've only scratched the surface of the insights in this book, which are considerable, and I'm still trying to absorb them as I think about the implications for how we work and how we culturally understand our work. It's fascinating. If you have any interest in this topic, I suggest checking the book out.

Reading :: The Whuffie Factor

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business
By Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt is an online marketing professional, one of the most influential women in technology, and a founding member of San Francisco-based coworking site CitizenSpace. It's the coworking connection that caught my eye and convinced me to read the book. And although Hunt speaks of coworking very briefly, she makes clear how it grows out of the larger theme of the book: social capital, or "whuffie."

Whuffie is a term that comes from science fiction writer (and BoingBoing creator) Cory Doctorow, from his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Hunt p.4). In Doctorow's novel, monetary capital had been replaced by social capital, which could be built by being nice, networked, or notable (p.4). A social capitalist builds and nurtures community, increasing whuffie; and whuffie leads to monetary capital (rather than the other way round) (p.2). This concept of whuffie, Hunt says, is increasingly important: when everyone is connected, everyone is an influencer, and Gladwell's The Tipping Point is out of date.

Case in point: Coworking. Hunt argues that coworking is a great example of whuffie in action. She credits Brad Neuberg with coming up with the idea: "he decided to rent a space in a community center in the Mission area of San Francisco for two days a week and advertise to other independent workers to come by and pay $15 to have a collaborative work experience" (p.23). At the time, Hunt was working with Chris Messina. "Chris Messina, my business partner, had the idea that a more permanent space would help develop more interest and asked Brad if he would mind if we used his coworking idea to describe our concept. Brad agreed" (p.23). Hunt credits online connections, including connections on Meetup, Flickr, a Google group, and PBWiki, for the spread of the coworking movement. "Even before we found a space, an odd phenomenon occurred. People from across the United States started to join the Google group and post their interest in setting up their own coworking space in their local community. ... They would take our lessons and use them in their own pursuits" (p.24). Hunt and Messina went on to cofound two coworking spaces, The Hat Factory and Citizen Space (p.24). Hunt concludes: "Spaces like ours existed well before the Internet. But the movement was only possible because of the Internet and the plethora of amazing collaborative and community tools" (p.25).

The rest of the book has simple, but important and (to many) counterintuitive lessons about whuffie. Hunt offers these lessons with several clear examples from Internet-based startups, services, and marketing campaigns. As in books of this genre, some of these examples go out of date quickly - but the lessons they illustrate are still valuable and still being learned. For instance, Hunt emphasizes that when you pay for whuffie, you extinguish it (p.48); that building whuffie requires "turning the bullhorn around" and having conversations with customers (Ch.3); that you must be able to not just listen, but also integrate feedback (Ch.4); that "whuffie only grows when you participate genuinely in a community, listening and integrating feedback" (p.118).

As a window into the nascent coworking movement, this book is quite valuable. The lessons on whuffie will probably not be terribly novel for those who read BoingBoing or who have read The Cluetrain Manifesto (which Hunt cites), but she summarizes and illustrates these ideas quite well. All in all, it's an interesting and engaging book as well as a fast read.

Reading :: The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology

The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, Actors, and Contexts
Edited by Chrisanthi Avgerou, Claudio Ciborra, and Frank Land

I read this 2004 book a couple of months back, but haven't had the chance to blog it until now due to other commitments. It's an interesting collection, "the result of a collective effort of the Department of Information Systems of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)" (p.v) with a couple of outsiders thrown into the mix. Essentially, the authors are taking the social approach that characterizes social studies of science and technology (think Latour, Weick, Bijker, Woolgar) and applying it to information and communication technologies (ICT).

With that kind of application, the collection should be riveting to me. Alas, it's not. The collection is short on cases, long on critiques of formal methodologies that ignore the social, and generally short on thoroughgoing analysis and critique of theory.

Even Latour's chapter, "On Using ANT for Studying Information Systems: A (Somewhat) Socratic Dialogue," felt a bit worn, although it did have its moments. Latour stages a Socratic dialogue between a professor and a graduate student in which they discuss actor-network theory (ANT). Latour's stand-in, the professor, explains to the frustrated graduate student that ANT is a method, not a framework (p.63); that ANT is a negative argument, good for new topics rather than established ones (p.63); that a case study that requires a theoretical frame is a poorly chosen case study (p.64); and that only a badly described case needs an explanation (p.67). And the dialogue produces one great quote, which I'm sure I'll use: "As a rule, context stinks. It's simply a way of stopping the description when you are too tired or too lazy to go on" (p.68). Unfortunately, the rest of the dialogue seems exhausted and doesn't really seem to go very far.

However, the collection did feature a couple of other chapters worth a look. For instance, Ole Hanseth's "Knowledge as Infrastructure" takes an ANT approach, characterizing knowledge as an actor-network (p.104), but going beyond to characterize knowledge as a network with network externalities, increasing returns, path dependencies and lock-ins (pp.104-106).

Another good chapter is Richard Boland's "An Ecology of Distributed Knowledge Work," which attempts to "[explore] digital knowledge work as an ecology of knowledge workers, mediations, knowledge objects, documents, and data repositories" (p.119). Drawing on the ANT literature, Boland attempts to map and characterize this ecology through diagrams (ex: p.120), diagrams that remind me of those in Peg Syverson's book. "There are many other important elements that are not in this simple diagram, such as culture, history, and status," Boland adds (p.121; see the Latour quote about context above). Boland points to tensions between global and local logics (p.121), arguing that sometimes these tensions lead to "unblackboxing" in which an element of global logic no longer applies to local practice (p.125).

Eric Montiero's "Actor Network Theory and Cultural Aspects of Interpretative Studies" examines what ANT can do for Information Systems (IS). Montiero argues that "a key challenge [for IS] is to cultivate analytical notions in tandem or co-evolution with a nuanced grasp of the constantly changing nature of IS" (p.129). Indeed, Montiero wants to push back against the very thing the student in Latour's chapter was trying to do: apply a pre-existing frame to a case. (In an aside here, Montiero calls out "'social constructions,' 'activity systems,' 'inscriptions,' 'bricolage,' and 'organizational politics,'" p.130.) "However," he argues, "merely decorating empirical instances with analytical notions is neither very illuminating nor intellectually stimulating. To make an analysis interesting, elements of an empirical case need to be moulded with the analytical notions that go well beyond labelling exercises" (p.130). That's especially true since "the technology keeps on changing, resulting in new patterns of use" - it resists a monolithic framework (p.130). Although Montiero sees potential in ANT, he also charges that it tends to be overly goal-oriented (p.131) and biased toward strategic behavior (p.132). He urges that we learn from studies of mundane everyday technology and that we realize how much we mingle rather than simply use technologies (p.134).

If you're in the field of IS, this collection might be quite useful to you. If, like me, you're more interested in workplace studies/socioculturally informed CSCW, you may have to dig a little harder. But as I've noted above, you can still find some good insights in this collection. See what you think.

Reading :: The Making of Law

The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat
By Bruno Latour

A while back, Jeff Rice mentioned on Facebook that he was reading this book. I had heard about the French version, but hadn't realized it had been translated. I ordered it immediately - I'm a big Latour fan, you know - and read it over the next week. But I've dragged my feet on reviewing it because I suspected the review would be a long one.

So what is The Making of Law about? As with most ethnographies, there are at least a few answers.

Most obviously, this book is an ethnography of "the Council of State which plays the role of Supreme Court for this branch of law," as Latour explains in the preface to this, the English edition (p.vii). The Council of State judges cases of administrative law, which in the French system is handled by the executive branch rather than the judiciary. We English-speakers are lucky enough to receive something else in this preface: an actual discussion of data collection methods (p.xi). Latour explains that the participants were quite wary, particularly since their discussions could not be privy to plaintiffs, and they also didn't want their decisions to appear to be merely the result of talking. Latour collected data via field notes (voice recordings were forbidden); scrambled details of cases so that they would be unrecognizable; and submitted the manuscript to the counsellors (a sort of member check) (p.xi). Latour confesses that although the book was a success in France, critics thought it was "too favorable - not to say complacent. And it's quite true, not only is this book context-free, it's also critique-free" (p.xi). Latour isn't after context or critique; he wants instead to see how the counsellors made their arguments and how they converted these arguments into legal facts, the last word.

And that brings us to the second purpose. Obviously, this setting is quite different from Latour's earlier ethnographies, which have focused on science and (to a lesser extent) technology. But just as those earlier books examined how scientists constructed arguments and brought them through various trials to harden them into scientific facts, this book examines how the counsellors constructed their arguments and brought them through various trials to harden them into legal facts. Law has the same confidence in validity as science (p.x). Indeed, "it seems that humanity has found no better way of having the last word, nothing firmer, more modern, more reasoned, more grandiose or more majestic" (p.69). Latour rejects the reductionist notions that (a) law is a mere wrapping for power relations (p.141) or that (b) legal enunciations are reducible "to the mere expression of a form, to the application of a rule or to the classification of cases in general categories" (p.142). The court's work is neither fancy dress nor formalism (p.142). Latour, characteristically, doesn't like either of these notions, which both suggest that we must understand them by ignoring practice and postulating some true reality we can't see (p.142)! Instead,

we are quite deliberately going to remain on the surface of things, stubbornly following the hesitant course of judgment, in which judges quite clearly admit their prejudices while asserting at the same time that they alone cannot determine the solution, or in which they attach themselves quite passionately to legal forms while constantly rejecting the dangers of what they call 'legalism' or 'formalism.' (p.143)

Let's follow blind Justice as she feels her way forward, Latour urges us (p.151). Like Science, Law does its work through referential chains (p.149), and Latour spends Chapter 2 demonstrating how these referential chains work, starting with complexly bound cases that are reviewed and presented by counsellors. (This chapter is especially interesting to those interested in writing and rhetoric, of course.) The referential chains lead to surprising places, sometimes, and also to new facts. In Law, as in Science, these referential chains allow humans "to utter truths that exceed and escape them on all sides" (p.197).

This analysis brings us to the book's third purpose, which is to contrast the approaches of Science and Law. The two are ways to establish facts using referential chains, but they establish these facts in rather different ways. For instance, they have a different relation between public and private: the public can sit in on scientific experiments, if they request it, but they can't attend judicial deliberations (p.201). The Council depends on "the homogeneity of the world of files that are kept, ordered, archived, and processed, and upon the homogeneity of a staff that is renewed, maintained, and disciplined"; the laboratory depends on the heterogeneity of equipment and staff (p.203). But more than these, Law and Science rely on two regimes of enunciation. While Science relies on reference chains, Law relies on a chain of obligations (see the table on p.235). This chain of obligations involves modifying value objects such as authority, progress, organization, interest, weight, quality control, hesitation, means/arguments, coherence, and limits (pp.194-195).

Crucially, then, Latour is saying that the tools and concepts that he has developed in his investigations of science can be useful in the study of Law and other domains - but that we can't turn them into a universal framework for characterizing different kinds of work, different kinds of fact-making. Law is like Science in that it must methodically transform things into facts, but the logic - and the rhetoric - differs and so the mechanisms also do.

I've left a lot out here, since the book is in some ways too dense in detail and analysis to summarize neatly. Bottom line, although I got halfway through the book before I could see its unique value, that value did surface in a big way. If you're interested in Latour or ANT, or for that matter, the rhetoric and conduct of law, I strongly recommend this book.

Using my books? Let me know.

A personal plea. If you're using one of my books in your class, or it's on your graduate program's reading list, could you send me a link?

A brief presentation on coworking

These slides are for my presentation tomorrow at Cospace at the Austin Entreprenerial Scene meeting. They're based on my SXSW2010 slides, but have been modified a bit for length and argument.

Spinuzzi austin-entrepeneur-meeting2010

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

Reading :: The Cultural Nature of Human Development

The Cultural Nature of Human Development
By Barbara Rogoff

Okay, to get the message of this book, just turn to page 6, figure 1.2. Actually, you can click through to the book on Amazon, search inside the book, and see what I mean. The figure's caption: "An Efe baby of 11 months skillfully cuts a fruit with a machete, under the watchful eye of a relative (in the Ituri forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo)."

And yes, the photo shows a baby holding a machete.

No, Rogoff has not written an installment of Ripley's Believe It or Not. Her message is that human development is heavily cultural and that we fail to understand our potentials when we postulate fixed, universal developmental stages. As she states in italics on pp.1-2: "people develop as participants in cultural communities. Their development can be understood only in light of the cultural practices and circumstances of their communities - which also change."

Once you get this - and although the photo surprised me, I did - nothing else in the book will really shock you. Rogoff argues that to understand our own culture, we must look at others', "separating understanding of the patterns [of different cultural communities] from judgments of their value" (p.14). If we impose our own values, we may be caught up in judgments of how other cultures raise their kids (sure, babies with machetes can and do cut themselves) and not see the larger patterns that lead people to their cultural childraising practices (you have to be able to handle yourself well and survive independently at an early age if you're going to be living in the Ituri forest). That is, Rogoff warns us:

Ethnocentrism involves making judgments that another cultural community's ways are immoral, unwise, or inappropriate based on one's cultural background without taking into account the meaning and circumstances of events in that community. (p.15)

Once you get this, the book can begin to feel a bit like a lecture with many, many examples. For instance, Rogoff gets a lot of mileage out of emphasizing that for the majority of people on the planet, the American tendency to make infants sleep in a separate room seems unimaginably cruel. She also points out that the Western tendency to group schoolchildren into cohorts based on birth year is neither universal nor entirely positive, and is based more on the demands of bureaucracy than on rational decisions about children's learning (p.125). So I won't go through the book in detail, but let me point out some highlights.

One is her discussion of US children in farm families, father-as-breadwinner families, and dual-earner families from 1790-1989 (based on Hernandez 1993). The graph on p.187 is fascinating, showing the sharp decline of family farming (in which husband and wife worked side by side), the rise and decline of father-as-breadwinner families (in which the father worked, and the rest of the family both depended on him and had only a foggy idea of what he did), and the recent sharp increase in dual-earner nonfarm and one-parent families (in which mothers turned to wage work, mother-only families increased, and children were sent to school, having very little exposure to the work of any parent). This shift corresponds to a decrease in family size and a sharp loss of potential for children to contribute meaningfully to family economics. In 1790, nearly 75% of families worked together on the farm and the costs of raising large families were managed primarily through the farm. By 1989, that arrangement was down to the low single digits, while nearly 70% of households were dual-earner nonfarm and one-parent families. This intrigues me because it maps the shift from agricultural to manufacturing to service and knowledge work and relates it to a definite cultural shift in how children were regarded and raised. Essentially, the shift to different forms of work led to different cultural understandings of what is a parent, a child, a family, and an education.

A bit later, Rogoff presents this paragraph, which is a nice encapsulation of what North American genre theorists say about genre:

Artifacts such as books, orthographies, computers, languages, and hammers are essentially social, historical objects, transforming with the ideas of both their designers and their later users. They form and are formed by the practices of their use and by related practices, in historical and anticipated communities .... Artifacts serve to amplify as well as constrain the possibilities of human activity as the artifacts participate in the practices in which they are employed.... They are representatives of earlier solutions to similar problems by other people, which later generations modify and apply to new problems, extending and transforming their use. (p.276)

In her conclusion, Rogoff leaves us with these principles, repeated from her first chapter:

• "Culture isn't just what other people do."
• "Understanding one's own cultural heritage, as well as other cultural communities, requires taking the perspective of people of contrasting backgrounds."
• "Cultural practices fit together and are connected."
• "Cultural communities continue to change, as do individuals."
• "There is not likely to be One Best Way." (p.368)

Overall, this is a readable, interesting book. I'd especially recommend it for someone who is interested in the issue, but who hasn't read deeply in the sociocultural literature.

Coworking in Austin: Brainstorm Coworking

From Coworking in Austin: Brainstorm Coworking

Brainstorm Coworking, which has been open since May 2010, occupies most of the second story of a 1910 Victorian house (and Austin landmark) on 1000 East Cesar Chavez. (They share it with the building’s owner, Marion Sanchez of Estilo Communications.) It’s a rapidly changing area: directly below them, on the first floor, is LOC Consulting Engineers; across the street is a new public library; a block east is Big Red Sun, a commercial landscape design firm; a block west is I-35; beyond that is the heart of downtown Austin. As Martin pointed out, the building’s walk score is 88, “Very Walkable,” and it’s easily accessible by foot, bike, rail, and bus as well as car.That accessibility is important: Brainstorm Coworking’s owners, architect Martin Barrera and commercial real estate broker John Hernandez, explained that Brainstorm is targeted toward “location-independent creative professionals,” and especially those that Martin and John knew from their business networks.

(Pictures below are mine; for some much better ones, see Brainstorm Coworking's site.)

From Coworking in Austin: Brainstorm Coworking

From Coworking in Austin: Brainstorm Coworking

From Coworking in Austin: Brainstorm Coworking

For instance, Martin recently ran into his neighbor, an interior designer, who recently launched her own design studio. She's been working from home and meeting at coffee shops. Martin suggested she come to Brainstorm instead. Other coworkers and prospective coworkers include two college professors who live in Austin but teach at campuses in other cities; a financial planner; a social media guru for a local non profit, a blogger, an interior designer, a music producer, and a web designer. But Martin and John also see Brainstorm as an ideal place for insurance agents, graphic designers, engineers, and loan officers: professionals who are location-independent, but who still need to network, to collaborate on jobs formally and informally, and to brainstorm with each other. “We want to attract a diverse group of independent professionals who cowork in a mutually beneficial collaborative environment,” Martin told me.
John and Martin cite examples from their own work: “For example,” Martin told me, “John and I are collaborating on a residential development project in Clarksville, and an LOC structural engineer and I are collaborating on a custom home in Westlake Hills.” In fact, real estate development is a great example of the potential for collaboration at Brainstorm Coworking: architects, engineers, interior designers, brokers, loan officers, and others routinely collaborate and draw on each others’ knowledge and networks to solve problems across their fields. But professionals who work on real estate development projects usually don’t have a one-stop place to conduct this sort of necessary collaboration. Now, with Brainstorm Coworking, they do. You can imagine how others in the target audience could collaborate on similar cross-field projects: design and advertising, lending, business incorporation, and other forms of work that draw professionals into temporary federations oriented to a specific project.
Notice that for the most part, these professionals aren’t the tech-savvy entrepreneurs who characterize many other spaces. But when they hear the concept, John says, they get it. And hear is the operative word: although Brainstorm has advertised on Craigslist, as noted above, their coworkers mostly come from their personal networks. For instance, John recently ran into his nephew, an apartment locator, at a coffee shop. His nephew worked at the coffee shop because it was free, but the atmosphere really wasn’t conducive to work. John suggested he come to Brainstorm instead.
Further, these professionals often want coworking without knowing it. John says that like him, many people start off by envisioning a little executive suite: a place to meet clients, an address, and someone to answer the phone. But everyone has their own mobile phone, and fewer and fewer people want a service answering it. And it doesn’t make sense to lease a space that you will hardly use, nor is a Congress Street address as highly prized as it once was. Brainstorm’s space is fine for meeting clients, and coworkers can use its address. Martin says that Brainstorm has set up a Google Calendar to manage use of the conference room.
What makes coworking possible for their target group, John adds, is the combination of laptops, mobile phones, and wifi. John had worked for a large commercial real estate firm sometime back, then struck out on his own. He had tried leasing a couple of spaces, but found that they weren’t cost-efficient: he wasn’t in the office that often, since much of his work involved meeting people for coffee and touring or showing spaces. Then he tried working at home, but he didn’t like it. He likes to leave early in the morning, visit a couple of spaces, and then go to the office - going back home didn’t seem like progress. Going to Brainstorm does. When people ask John to explain coworking, he points them to Martin. He has a hard time explaining it himself - but, he told me, he just knows that it works for him. When he is here, his mindset is different: he feels more mobile and more willing to meet others.
Similarly, Martin worked for two years in a home office, but as business ramped up, he found it more difficult to separate his work and home life. Inspired by coworking spaces such as Launchpad and Conjunctured, he opened Brainstorm with John. Now he does most of his work on his laptop and the phone. Rather than turning to a shelf for paperwork, he scans his documents and keeps them in cloud storage; but he also keeps a three-ring binder system at home and pulls the appropriate binder when he comes to work in the morning.
Like Martin, John does more work on the computer, and that allows him to be more mobile. Today, his work primarily consists of answering email, scanning listings, and making phone calls. With a laptop, wifi, and a mobile phone, he’s not anchored to a particular place. John recalls that not long ago, when you worked in commercial realty, you would need physical plat maps (just as architects like Martin used to need physical plans). No longer. As these bulky representations migrate to laptops, professionals became more mobile. Of course, the mindset is still there. Many of their target profesionals, such as accountants and attorneys, still expect to have a lockable file cabinet full of paper files. I wanted a file cabinet too, John said, but Martin discouraged it so that we could work as peers with our coworking members - and now I understand why. John leaves most of his paper files at home, bringing only the ones he needs for the day. “My nephew,” John added wonderingly, “does all his flyers on his phone.”
For Martin and John, leasing the space is a win-win. It’s perfect for their own use, so they’re not desperate to fill it up. Their target is much more modest than most spaces: 10 monthly members. At other spaces, the rule of thumb seems to be twice as many coworkers as seats, Martin says. “But we don’t want to manage 28 people,” adds John. They’d have to hire someone at that point, and they are not ready to.
So they maintain four levels of membership:

• A full-time membership ($250/month)
• A part-time membership, 10 days in one month ($150/month)
• A weekly membership, 5 days in one month ($75/month)
• A daily rate ($25/day)
• Conference room rental for non-members ($25/hr)

And they have free parking. That turns out to be a big deal, since Brainstorm is located so close to downtown. Although clients are “location-independent creative professionals,” they still need access to the city, especially for meeting clients and collaborators and for showing spaces. Brainstorm is just a block east of I-35 and on one of downtown’s major east-west streets.
Brainstorm is not only about getting work done, though. Like other coworking spaces, Brainstorm also opens itself up to community events. “For example,” Martin said, “Brainstorm Coworking and Estilo Communications co-hosted an Imagine Austin meeting-in-a-box at Brainstorm, to give Austinites a voice in the comprehensive master plan currently underway in our city. It was a great success and we plan to co-host more community based outreach at Brainstorm in the future.” Martin describes Marion Sanchez, who bought and refurbished the building 15 years ago, as “a huge proponent of our startup” and “a huge part of what makes us great.”
For me, the most striking thing about Brainstorm Coworking is that it represents a shift toward earnestly supporting more traditional information-oriented work, work that has been around for a while but that has typically been tied to location because workers need access to physical representations and fixed phone lines. With those constraints lifted, people such as attorneys, architects, real estate brokers, financial consultants, and interior designers don’t actually need their own offices - but they still need to enact separation between their work and home life, they still need to network, and they need a space with close access to the people they must physically visit. Frankly, before visiting Brainstorm, I had not thought of people in these occupations as being ripe for coworking; now I do. In that context, Brainstorm’s location in a century-old restored Victorian house makes perfect sense.

Some SXSWi panels for your consideration

I'm planning to attend South by Southwest Interactive 2011, which is a terrific cross-disciplinary tech conference. Last year I organized a panel on coworking - a panel that made partially because people like you went to the PanelPicker and supported the panel.

This year, I hope you'll go back to the PanelPicker and consider putting your thumbs-up on three offerings:

"Understanding Humans: New Psychology and the Social Web"

Gavin Bell, Nature Publishing Group

Gavin Bell works for Nature, but readers of this blog might recognize his book, Building Social Web Applications. In this panel, Bell and his panelists will discuss how to apply social psychology - particularly activity theory - to understand and design social web applications. It's a very timely panel organized by someone who knows both sides of the equation.

"The Evolving Workplace: Environments, Methods, Trends and Management"

Liz Elam, LINK Coworking

Liz Elam owns LINK Coworking, which will be opening next month in North Austin. She knows a lot about coworking and about general workplace trends, and she and her panel will examine different aspects of these trends. If you're looking for insight into work environments, work tools, and work relationships, this panel should fit the bill.

"Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work"

Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin

This is my core conversation offering. Instead of speaking at people, I'll lead a small-room discussion on loose organizations, how they work, and how they can scale up to meet challenges. If you're involved in a coworking space, a startup, a network of freelancers or subcontractors, or other professions that involve temporary, loosely affiliated professionals (think: real estate development, graphic design, event planning, financial planning), then think about voting this up and coming to the discussion.

Take a look and see what you think. And if you have other panels you'd like to nominate, leave them in the comments!

Reading :: The Power of Pull

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
By John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

In the last section of this book, "Further Reading," the authors cite several books I've reviewed on this blog: books by Benkler, Florida, Malone, and Shirky. Take all of these books. Add the complete works of Alvin Toffler, the later texts of Drucker, Gladwell's Tipping Point, and maybe a few pages from Senge. You have some Charlene Li or some Don Tapscott? Bring that too. Put those texts into an immense blender, sprinkle some contemporary examples from BoingBoing, and puree for 7-10 minutes. The slurry that results will look a lot like The Power of Pull. It goes down easily, but there's not much texture.

I'm sure this book makes some unique contribution that synthesizes the above books, but for the life of me, I couldn't find it.

Reading :: A Better Pencil

A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution
By Dennis Baron

Do you doubt that the pencil is a writing technology, or harbor the idea that handwriting is inherently more thoughtful than keyboarding? If not - and I imagine few readers of this blog do - then this book will be of quite restricted interest to you. I skimmed a lot.

The book looks at the development of various technologies of writing and at nostalgic attitudes surrounding them. Told in a breezy style that is half Life in these United States, half Connections, the book breaks down the target audience's assumptions about literacy technologies. Think of it as a helpful, accessible tract for the Baby Boomers in your life.

Reading :: "The method section as conceptual epicenter in constructing social science research reports"

Smagorinsky, P. (2008). "The method section as conceptual epicenter in constructing social science research reports." Written Communication 25(3), 389-411.

When this article came out, I read it and thought, "This is an excellent article. Everyone should read it, preferably first in a qualitative research course, then every time they write a research article." Then I put it on the shelf.

Just under two years later, I received comments on a qualitative research article I had submitted to a journal. And among the editor's comments was an exhortation to revise and deepen my methods section along the lines of the Smagorinsky article. How embarrassing - but the revision turned out to be extremely rewarding as I applied the comments to the draft article, producing a much more solid, responsible, and well-argued piece.

So what is the article - Smagorinsky's article - about? Smagorinsky, who coedited RTE for seven years, notes something about the research reports he has had to evaluate as an editor and as a reviewer. Specifically, their method sections are vague: they "often lack sufficient detail to make any results that follow from the analytic method trustworthy" (p.389). And that's a disaster, since "If I don't know pretty clearly how the researcher is conducting the study, then it doesn't matter much to me what the results are because I have no idea how they were produced" (p.393). Smagorinsky likens the situation to

reading of a wonderful dish and being told how to prepare it as follows:

First, select all ingredients that could conceivably go in the dish. Review them carefully, then pick the ones you want to use and put the rest back in the pantry, perhaps saving them for another meal that you will prepare later. Then reconsider the ingredients you’ve selected and decide which are most important. Do this again just to make sure. Then mix the important ones together and give it a taste, adding other ingredients as necessary. Put them in cookware, heat, and serve. (p.393)

The first time I read this passage, I laughed out loud. The second time, I smiled sheepishly, because I knew that I had done exactly what Smagorinsky had complained about. It's not that readers have to be able to replicate the study in terms of "conducting an identical study with identical results" - but they should have a decent idea of what the researcher did (p.394). The researcher should be able to show her work.

Based on this principle, Smagorinsky describes the basics: data collection, data reduction, data analysis, data coding, the context of the investigation. In all of these, Smagorinsky helps us to better understand how to develop arguments. He's not trying to reduce methodological pluralism here, but he is trying to help us develop a strong argument by connecting methods to evidence in principled ways. Most importantly, perhaps, is the issue of how the methods section can serve as the conceptual epicenter - the place where the articles major sections become aligned in terms of theory, methods, results, and analysis (p.405). His critical advice: write the methods section first.

Reading the article the first time was valuable. Applying it during the second read? Fantastic. See what you think of it: My revised article will be published in Written Communication in October.