Reading :: The Fifth Age of Work

The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy
By Andrew M. Jones

Drew Jones was one of the first people I met when I began investigating the coworking scene in Austin in 2008. An anthropologist by training, Drew began looking into coworking in 2007 and cowrote one of the first books (perhaps the first?) on coworking: I'm Outta Here. But Drew's focus was always broader than coworking: he was interested in how work would change in the near future due to a number of factors, such as millenials entering the workforce; the information revolution, which has obviated copresence in a lot of work; the question of how to nurture and sustain innovation in companies; the environmental and financial impacts of moving people back and forth; and the sheer waste of office buildings that are empty two-thirds of the time. Drew outlined many of these themes in forums such as the Future of Work salon and SXSW 2010, as well as his book on innovation. And now he's developed them in this book, which comes out in November. I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy.

The Fifth Age of Work examines coworking and other work trends against this backdrop. This book, aimed at popular audiences, lucidly and engagingly discusses the challenges that organizations face as we move toward "the fifth age of work":

The Fifth Age of Work is an emerging world of work broadly defined by the rise of cloud-based technology such as remote computing, file storage and retrieval (e.g., Evernote, Dropbox), and communication channels (e.g., Skype, Google Hangout), as well as the decentralization and de-localization of work characterized by distributed teams, remote work, flex work and telecommuting, contract and project-based work, and the rapid growth of the coworking movement. But the Fifth Age is also much more than this.  These myriad arrangements are manifestations of more fundamental, evolutionary changes in our economy. The Great Recession in 2008, in fact, was an inflection point that marked the arrival of this new epoch, where we are now witnessing culture and technology colliding to disrupt and redefine the what, when, where, how, and even the why of work. (p. 10).

Jones contrasts the Fifth Age with the previous four:

• First: hunting and gathering
• Second: agriculture 
• Third: merchantilism
• Fourth: the Information Revolution (pp.11-12)

He sees the Fifth Age as the occasion for a new social contract, one that addresses workers' need for "more independence, trust, and honesty in their working lives" (p.15). 

Based on this vision, Jones discusses coworking, work innovation, corporate culture shifts, workplace design, and other aspects of work that are changing or under pressure. He concludes that in the Fifth Age of Work, leadership must look different—perhaps "anthropological." And he includes a workbook near the end of the book to help leaders think through experiments and innovations in their own workplaces.

Personally, I enjoyed the broad sweep and the way Jones connected different trends in this short but thought-provoking book. If you're interested in the future of work, coworking, or similar aspects, take a look. 

If you're not working on your PhD, maybe you should be. Here's an opportunity.

Thinking about pursuing a PhD? Interested in workplace studies? There's a fantastic opportunity in Austin. Two, actually.

UT's School of Information has two fantastic opportunities in their Information Work Research Group: 

We invite applications for two fully funded PhD positions, starting in August 2014, available for incoming doctoral students to join our study of information work in the Information Work Research Group, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin. 

Applications are due November 15, 2013 (see below). The faculty and students in the IWRG undertake empirical and analytical studies of information workers in their workplaces, exploring how work and occupations are changing. We draw primarily on ethnography, participant observation, interviews, historical analysis and archival analysis to explore occupations such as records managers, remote financial professions, digital humanists, data analysts, open source software developers and online community managers.

The School of Information is full of sharp, talented people who, honestly, have much better offices than mine. They're right across from the Clay Pit and the Dog & Duck. And their research is really interesting. If you fit the bill, do consider this opportunity! 

My book Tracing Genres through Organizations is ten years old this month

Ten years ago, my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations, was published by MIT Press. It's hard to believe that it's been that long—until I look at the ancient Windows screenshots.

Just a few reminiscences:

• TGTO is still my most widely cited publication. But when it first came out, I noticed that most of the cites came from the first chapter. MIT Press had put that chapter online for free to publicize the book. Coincidence?
• I didn't expect TGTO to be accepted by MIT Press. My original plan was to approach the most prestigious press first. Then, along with the rejection letter, I would get some solid reviews that would help me revise it for the next press. To my complete surprise, MIT Press accepted the book and sent me a contract.
• I signed the contract on September 10, 2001. Needless to say, I didn't get to celebrate much the next day.
• TGTO was my tenure book. During the tenure process, I sometimes referred to it as Trudging Grimly through Obligations. But despite that, I really enjoyed writing it.
• TGTO was based on my dissertation. But it represents a complete rethinking. That's because, days after my defense, I read Beyer and Holtzblatt's Contextual Design and realized that I had to step up my game. The next 18 months were spent researching interaction design methodologies, a period that resulted in several side publications in methodology and especially participatory design. In the end, I replaced three chapters entirely and reworked the cases in the remaining chapters.
• I told someone the other day that I study how people use sticky notes. That's not the whole truth, but it's close enough.

Presentation : Toward a typology of activities

Last month, I was honored to present a paper (via Skype) to the Helsinki Summer School on Activity Theory and Formative Interventions. The presentation was based on an article that hadn't been accepted yet, so I've been sitting on it, but I've just been informed that the paper has been accepted with minor revisions. So here it is.

Bottom line, I've been trying to characterize different sorts of activities and particularly how hybrids of those types lead to internal contradictions. This is my attempt at a typology. See what you think!

Reading :: The Rules of Sociological Method

Rules of Sociological Method
By Emile Durkheim

In this book, Durkheim explains his approach to sociology, describing his emphasis on "social facts" rather than subjective meaning. "A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals" (p.56). "A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint," he says, and adds: "which is general over the whole of a given society, whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations" (p.59).

Like other phenomena, Durkheim says, "social phenomena are things and should be treated as such. ... they are the sole datum afforded by the sociologist" (p.69). And the sociologist must be, if anything, driven by such data: "The conventional character of a practice or an institution should never be assumed in advance" (p.70). Indeed, since "social facts tend to form outside the consciousness of individuals" (p.72), to study them, we must:

• "Systematically discard all preconceptions" (p.72)
• Include in the subject matter of research only "a group of phenomena defined beforehand by certain common external characteristics and all phenomena which correspond to this definition must be so included" (p.75)
• "investigate any order of social facts ... from a viewpoint where they present themselves in isolation from their individual manifestations" (pp.82-83)

When conducting such studies, it's sometimes hard to differentiate the normal from the pathological, Durkheim says (Ch.3). He suggests the following rules:

1. "A social fact is normal for a given social type, viewed at a given phase of its development, when it occurs in the average society of that species, considered at the corresponding phase of its evolution."
2. "The results of the preceding method can be verified by demonstrating that the general character of the phenomenon is related to the general conditions of collective life in the social type under consideration."
3. "This verification is necessary with this fact relates to a social species which has not yet gone through its complete evolution" (p.97)

In Chapter 4, Durkheim goes on to consider rules for the constitution of social types—what he calls social morphology (p.111). He sees societies as forming from combinations of simpler societies (p.112), and in this chapter, he recaps the argument from The Division of Labor in Society, claiming that simple, nonsegmented societies (made up of hordes) evolved into more complex ones (pp.112-117). Durkheim locates social facts firmly within these social types and groups: "The determining cause of a social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness" (p.134). 

Overall, the book is a fascinating read. It lays out the assumptions that guide Durkheim's research. Many of these assumptions have been called into question in subsequent sociological work, but since Durkheim does us the service of describing them explicitly, we can understand his reasoning even if we don't hold to it. If you're interested in sociological method—or Durkheim—take a look. 

Reading :: Rejoicing

Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech
By Bruno Latour

In one scene of the 2011 film Thor, the character—Marvel Comics' version of the Norse god of thunder—blithely explains his godhood to a human being: "Your ancestors called it magic... but you call it science. I come from a land where they are one and the same."And with that throwaway reference to Arthur C. Clarke, the movie roughly reconciles religion and science, then hurriedly turns to other matters.

Thor's treatment of religion is about what you would expect from a movie based on a comic book—that is, a movie that focuses on mashing up characters from very different situations and arguably irreconcilable worldviews, ignoring the inconsistencies in favor of putting together epic spectacles. But in Rejoicing, Latour argues that religion in the modern age has taken this tack as well, attempting to measure itself against science on science's terms, using science's logic, and hiding itself in the areas that science can't explain. Suddenly—according to Latour—religion is about belief, and the world is separated into believers and nonbelievers. Both sides share a belief in belief (p.3). Yet, he says, once believers and nonbelievers did not exist; what existed was a common fabrication or social frame (p.5). This is how Latour describes himself, as a true agnostic who does not believe in belief (p.3). What is important in Latour's understanding of religion is not belief but practice.

If you've read much Latour, you'll find much that is familiar in this argument. Although Latour seems to be imitating a religious genre with which I am not familiar—a sermon, a prayer book?—he still talks about transformation-through-translation (p.18), he indicts the tendency to believe in transportation-without-transformation (p.22, here personified as the devil Double-Click Communication), and he touches on other concepts such as factishes and iconoclasm throughout. That is, Latour is trying to understand religion using many of the same concepts that he has used with such success to understand science, technology, politics, law, and art.

And where does this lead? Latour argues that religion is not meant to lift us higher but to transform us here (p.35); to focus on practice rather than belief; to result in the reformation of a unity, identity, union,  or people (p.55). Rather than rationalizing the old stories, such as Noah's Ark, religion (in Latour's reading) should treat them as parables, asking: "what would correspond for us now to what they were trying to represent by the flood?" (p.87). (Latour does this all the time in his writings.) This approach removes the shame that Latour has felt when having to overlook "unfathomable whoppers" such as the virgin birth and eternal life (p.58). Rather than trying to transfer information from the past to the present, Latour argues, the religious should transform themselves from present to past.

Latour uses a running example of a woman asking her husband, "Do you love me?" The question isn't a request for information; if the husband impatiently points to a calendar showing the last time he answered the question, if he cites his previous response, if he plays a recording of that response, he has missed the point and turned his "yes" into a lie. The answer is not information, it's renewal; if he answers "yes," it's a new answer each time, one that transforms him and renews their relationship.

In this understanding of religion, Latour says, we read the sacred texts not longitudinally but vertically. Think of the narrative as scrolling left to right. Rather than following it as it scrolls, we cut from top to bottom, finding tags, ruptures, reactions, incomprehensions, cautions, recognitions, and envoys (p.113)—the renewal events that we then apply to our own lives, renewing our own applications and our own relationships with others. God is love; love depends on the lovers' speech (p.140).

Rejoicing is an earnest book. Latour deplores what his generation did to religion and wants to restore it as a way to unite and renew the relationships in which we find ourselves. And as I think about it, the vision of religion that he sketches seems akin to that of the corn-religions described in The Golden Bough, with their focus on seasonal renewal and concomitant social renewal.

But Latour has inserted a little twist in here that you may have caught—I caught it early on.

In Latour's other work, he describes how people practice science, technology, law, politics, and so forth. He watches people, follows the transformations, and compares those to the stories that people tell about what they did. This careful descriptive work underpins the theoretical explanations that he provides.

But in Rejoicing, he prescribes how people should practice religion. He describes sacred texts to some extent, but according to his narrative, religion has been captured by Double-Click Communication. Its practice is wrong—according to Latour. From where does he get his description, and how is it authoritative? Can he do something similar to what he did in Laboratory Life, following the practice of renewal and then examining how the religious describe it in contrasting terms? Perhaps—but he doesn't. Does Rejoicing tell us something new about the practice of religion—or does it just tell us the liturgy that Latour recommends?

Looking for a job?

If you're a scholar doing work in rhetoric, writing, and digital communication, consider applying for our job. The department is outstanding, colleagues are sharp (in a good way), and it's in beautiful Austin, Texas. Any questions, shoot me an email.

The University of Texas at Austin, MLA, Rhetoric & Writing
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing
Closes: Oct 27, 2013

---

The Department of Rhetoric and Writing (DRW) at The University of Texas at Austin seeks applicants for a tenure track position in digital rhetorics and emerging communications technologies with an emphasis on production; preference being given to those individuals at an advanced Assistant Professor level. The successful candidate should hold a PhD in rhetoric and writing or related field and demonstrate excellence in scholarship and teaching with a focus on the intersections of rhetoric, writing, and digital technologies. Additional interests could include technical and professional communication, new media studies, digital humanities, visual rhetorics, sound/audio studies, video or film production, or any historical or theoretical area in rhetoric or composition studies. 

The successful candidate will be expected to publish actively; teach at all levels of our curriculum; direct dissertations, MA reports, and honors theses; and offer service to the Department, the College, and the University. The selected candidate will have the opportunity to design and teach an array of courses that contribute to the undergraduate major in Rhetoric and Writing and the graduate concentrations in Rhetoric and Digital Literacies and Literatures -- all with the support of our nationally renowned Digital Writing and Research Lab (DWRL), which operates state of the art computer classrooms. 

The DRW boasts a dynamic, collegial, nationally and internationally recognized faculty with interests in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric; composition theory and pedagogy; digital writing and rhetorics; visual rhetorics; empirical research; writing in the disciplines and professions; and rhetoric and poetics. Sub-units of the DRW include the Undergraduate Writing Center and the Digital Writing and Research Lab. 

The deadline for applications is October 27, 2013; review will begin immediately. Submit a letter of application, a curriculum vita, three letters of recommendation, a dissertation abstract or book prospectus, a sample chapter or a recent publication, and a statement of teaching philosophy (no longer than one page) 

Position funding is pending budgetary approval. A background check will be conducted on the successful candidate. The University of Texas at Austin is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Reading :: Suicide

Suicide: A Study in Sociology
By Emile Durkheim

Durkheim's book Suicide is, as the editor's introduction tells us, an early use of statistics in sociology. The editor, George Simpson, seems to tiptoe around the implication that this treatment of statistics is not very sophisticated by today's standards, "yet Durkheim establishes relationships between series of data by methodological persistence and inference" (p.10).

But beyond the early use of statistics, this book, according to the editor, is significant because it takes what appears to be an individual decision—suicide—and establishes sociological relationships. Each person decides whether to take her or his own life, yes, yet suicides were more frequent among certain populations, in certain conditions, than others. Durkheim plows through an enormous amount of data to develop a sociological account to explain these patterns.

Durkheim describes three types of suicide:

• Egoistic suicide, in which an individual feels apathy (Chapters 2-3). He connects this type to religion: Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics or Jews, he says, and he theorizes that this is so because Protestants must deal with "the free inquiry that animates this religion," free inquiry which lowers social solidarity. In contrast, Catholics don't engage in free inquiry, and though Jews do, they maintain social solidarity (pp.158 et passim). (We can see how this thesis directly relates to his previous work, although I am not comfortable with the simplicity of the conclusion.)
• Altruistic suicide, which is related to passion or will (Chapter 4). Whereas egoistic suicide happens when social solidarity is too low, altrustic suicide happens when it is too high. Suicide is duty (p.219). 
• Anomic suicide, which is related to irritation or disgust (Chapter 5). In this type of suicide, disturbances of equilibrium—from financial crashes to divorces—result in suicide because these disturbances weaken society's controlling influence (p.252). 

There's plenty to be cautious about here. For instance, Durkheim blandly asserts that women don't commit anomic suicide as often because "generally speaking, her mental life is less developed" (p.272); they don't commit egoistic suicide as often because they are not nearly as social as men (p.216). To put it mildly, I don't think these claims hold up to scrutiny. 

At the same time, Suicide is an interesting book: we get to see a scholar gamely applying an analytical approach that few people at the time had attempted, studying a seemingly individual phenomenon in a way that few if any others had accomplished. As a historical artifact, it's a fascinating book and I recommend it highly. 

"That light-bulb feeling"

Last October at SIGDOC, Brian McNely was kind enough to interview me about my projects and my modest contributions to rhetoric and professional communication. We waxed enthusiastic about an obscure paper of mine, we talked about my previous books, and I told him about two books that I had on the front burner: Topsight and another project tentatively titled All Edge.

That interview is now available. Brian did a great job of turning our wide-ranging discussion into something coherent and (I think) interesting, while still capturing my enthusiasm about this ongoing work. I hope you'll check it out!

Coworking in Austin: Station Coworking

My previous "Coworking in Austin" posts have been in-depth looks at coworking spaces. But this one is about a space I haven't yet been able to visit.

Station Coworking is planning to open around September 1. It's run by Thomas Knight, who was one of my students a couple of years ago, when I was in the thick of studying coworking. Thomas has been thinking for a while about how people work in organizations, how organizations sometimes limit the potential for collaboration and autonomy, and how to try out different models.

Last year I met with Thomas, and he shared his vision of a new Austin coworking space. So it's exciting to see that vision becoming a reality. If you're in Austin and interested in coworking, drop on by. And tell Thomas I sent you!

SXSU.edu panel: The Liberal Arts Matter in a STEM World

It's time to pick panels for SXSW again this year. This time, I'm on a proposed SXSW.edu panel with others involved with our Human Dimensions of Organizations program.

The topic: "The Liberal Arts Matter in a STEM World."

Can you do me a favor? Click through to the description and consider voting up the panel. We have a strong slate of speakers and I think the panel could be useful for SXSW.edu attendees.

Reading :: The Innovator's Way

The Innovator's Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation
By Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham

"Innovation means the adoption of an idea or technology into new practices that produce new outcomes," say Denning and Dunham in this book on innovation, meant for entrepreneurs (p.xxiv). They identify an innovation pattern: "The innovator becomes bothered by a disharmony, puzzles over it for a long time, discovers limitations of the current common sense that produce it, proposes a new common sense that generates a solution, and commits to making it happen. We call this the 'prime innovation pattern'" (p.xxv).

But how do you execute this prime innovation pattern? The authors draw from a deep well of experience to describe eight practices: Sensing, Envisioning, Offering, Adopting, Sustaining, Executing, Leading, and Embodying (Ch.5-12). But they also emphasize how to build these practices into the DNA of one's organization by building a culture of innovation and networking (Ch.13-16). Along the way, they draw from sources as diverse as Latour and Weick as well as examples from entrepreneurial organizations.

I'm not planning to start an enterprise. But as someone who's interested in how entrepreneurs work, I found this book useful and illuminating. Denning and Dunham clearly know what they're talking about, and they convey it in a book that is readable without being reductive, detailed without being inaccessible. If you're interested in entrepreneurship, either as a practitioner or as an interested party, I recommend this book.

Reading :: The Evolution of the Book

The Evolution of the Book
By Frederick G. Kilgour

I happened to pick up this book at a used bookstore in Austin. Opening the cover, I saw the name of the previous author written neatly on the front page: Maxine Hairston.

Of course I had to pick it up. After all, it was just a dollar.

It might have been the best dollar I've spent.

The book is as solid as you might expect from a book published at Oxford. Kilgour, a professor of library and information science, has undertaken a complete history not just of the book but of writing, defining "book" broadly as "a storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination in the form of an artifact that is portable—or at least transportable—and that contains arrangements of signs that convey information" (p.3). He identifies four transformations of the book over the last 5000 years:

• the clay tablet (2500 BC-AD 100)
• the papyrus roll (2000 BC-AD 700)
• the codex (AD 100)
• the electronic book ("currently in the process of innovation"—Kilgour published in 1998) (p.4). 

Along with these transformations, Kilgour identifies "three major transformations in method and power application in reproducing the codex":

• "machine printing from cast type, powered by human muscle (1455-1814)"
• "nonhuman power driving both presses and typecasting machines (1814-1970)"
• "computer-driven photocomposition combined with offset printing (1970- )" (p.4)

Kilgour describes a "historical pattern of the book, in which long periods of stability in format alternate with periods of radical change" (p.4). For each of the seven punctuation of equilibria (clay tablet, papyrus roll, codex, printing, steam power, offset printing, and electronic book), he says, "five concurrent elements were necessary: (1) societal need for information; (2) technological knowledge and experience; (3) organizational experience and capability; (4) the capability of integrating a new form into existing information systems; and (5) economic viability" (pp.5-6). In the subsequent chapters, Kilgour examines each of these punctuations in terms of the five elements, providing an unusually comprehensive examination of the different conditions around each punctuation. For instance, he doesn't just look at production tools, he looks at the impact of eyeglasses, the development of silent reading, and the impacts of abbeys and the Protestant Revolution. 

Those who have studied the history of writing will find plenty of familiar work here, including Schmandt-Besserat's scholarship on Sumerian writing and Eisenstein's scholarship on the printing press. But readers will also find broader discussions of inventions, social systems, and economics across the eras. I was intrigued by Kilgour's discussion of the electronic book in Chapter 12, in which he argues that an "e-book device" will be successful when it meets certain conditions—conditions that sound quite similar to the Kindle!

Before closing, let me go on a little side journey regarding annotation. It turns out that Maxine Hairston annotated her books quite closely. Here's one example from the book. Hairston's annotations are written directly on the page, in pencil; mine are in sticky notes in the margins (a habit I picked up from reading books out of the university library).

Hairston's strokes are bold and her underlining is perfectly straight—she probably used a ruler. And she annotated a lot, not just underlining but also summarizing points with terse phrases in the margins. I found it a bit distracting, and had to resist annotating things just because she had annotated them. But it was also useful to see how a master academic annotated her books.

I can't loan everyone my marked-up version of The Evolution of the Book. But I can recommend that everyone buy and read their own copy. It's a well-written, intriguing text full of information and analysis. Pick it up.

Reading :: Resilience

Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back
By Andrew Zolli with Ann Marie Healy

This book will be familiar reading to those who have read similar trade books such as The Tipping Point or The Wisdom of Crowds. We get a set of characteristics, a set of stories illustrating each along with colorful interviews from experts, and a larger story woven through. Writing a book like this is a special skill, I think, and the second author's background as a "playwright, screenwriter, and journalist" positions her well for providing the punch that makes the book read well. Meanwhile, the first author's background as director of PopTech gives him the vision and connections to underpin the book's argument.

That argument, in a nutshell, is that the world is increasingly complex and interconnected, too often through brittle systems that can't handle disruption well. Consequently, we face the prospect of systemic failure, in which small failures cascade and crash the system. In this case, we're talking about large interconnected systems: the environment, the economy, the social order. To resist these shocks, we have to work on resilience.

Resilience is "the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances" (p.7, their italics). In their quest to describe resilience, the authors talk about related concepts such as scaling and swarming (Ch.2), clusters (Ch.3), cooperation (Ch.5), and the new demands of leadership (Ch.8). In the last chapter, Chapter 9, they revive the term "adhocracy" to describe how distributed, resilient organizations work. (It's this term that brought the book onto my radar, although I think the authors don't differentiate enough between the single-organization adhocracy that Mintzberg was describing and the temporary project-oriented adhocracies that the authors are trying to describe.)

The book is highly readable. But I was left wanting more—and I think that has more to do with the genre of the book than the authors themselves. Books of this genre gain their force by skipping from one expert to another, one story to another, like flat rocks sent skipping across the surface of a pond. The skipping is what makes the book interesting to lay readers, but it means that we spend all our time on the surface rather than sinking into the subject and deeply exploring it. So I would recommend Resilience as a way to get a big-picture understanding of the changes and dangers of large-scale systems—but at some point the rock has to stop skipping and you have to sink into a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the issues, and at that point, I would suggest reading up on some of the source materials that the authors have cited, such as Mintzberg and Arquilla.

Writing :: How Nonemployer Firms Stage-Manage Ad-Hoc Collaboration

Spinuzzi, C. (2014, in press). How nonemployee firms stage-manage ad-hoc collaboration: An activity theory analysis. Technical Communication Quarterly. 

Here's another entry in my series on writing publications. This particular article hasn't even been typeset yet, but TCQ has posted its accepted author version, so I figure this might be a good time to discuss it. 

The article covers two interrelated studies of nonemployee firms (firms with no employees—such as freelancers and business partnerships) functioning in Austin. What really interested me was how they chose to present themselves to clients, typically as "we" instead of "I"—that is, as larger, more stable organizations. At the same time, on the back end, they had to scramble to assemble a unique set of subcontractors for each project. I use fourth-generation activity theory (4GAT) to analyze why they had to do this and how they accomplished it. It's an interesting story: interesting enough to stick with over the long haul, as I discuss below.

Like many of my publications, this one has a long history—and in fact the piece is definitely a midcareer piece for a few reasons.

I had the luxury of time. First, it's the result of an initial study that I started in July 2007. Yeah, that's five years ago. The length of time that it takes to get tenured. In fact, I originally tried to publish this study in 2010, but received a revise-and-resubmit. The reviewers thought the article was interesting, but that the study involved too few people and drew overbroad conclusions based on that small number. Reluctantly, I agreed. So, rather than trying to revise the paper or try my luck with another journal—which is what I might have done pre-tenure—I decided to be patient and run a second study with additional people. This choice added two more years to the process, since (a) it took a while to set up the study, (b) I began my coworking study at around the same time, and (c) the above was happening at about the same time that I was working through some theoretical issues with activity theory. 

This brings us to the second reason why this article reflects a midcareer orientation.

I followed my research arc. Yes, people at the beginning of their careers have a research arc too. But post-tenure, you have more flexibility to follow an arc across more projects because the pressure to publish has lessened. Before tenure, my research arc was defined mainly by my two book projects, the one I published for tenure and the one I planned to publish after tenure. About the time I sent my second book off to the publisher, I decided to start a series of studies exploring loosely organized, distributed work, along with some theory to better understand this phenomenon. You can see my 2007 introduction to the TCQ special issue on distributed work as a sort of precis. From there, I studied freelancers (in "How nonemployer firms..."), coworking (in "Working alone, together"), and search engine optimization in an internet marketing company (in "Secret sauce and snake oil"). Each of these examined a different setting of distributed work and helped me to develop genre theory and activity theory to address them (in publications such as "Genre and generic labor," "Losing by expanding," "Integrated writers, integrated writing, and the integration of distributed work," and "Starter ecologies"). And each caused me to further develop my methodological toolkit (as in Topsight and "The genie's out of the bottle" and "How can technical communicators study work contexts?") When "How nonemployer firms..." is published in print in 2014, it will reflect the end of a seven-year arc, one that covers a broader stretch of theoretical and methodological work than my previous efforts. 

And that brings us to the third reason why this article reflects a midcareer orientation.

I didn't try to do everything. When I was writing my first article, and later my first book, I really wanted to shove everything I knew into each project. That's common, I think. It's easy to feel that (a) there's no way to cleanly separate parts of each project, (b) everyone needs to know everything about the project, and (c) maybe we'll get just this one shot to get things right.

From a midcareer perspective, things change. It's easier to think in terms of five- or seven-year arcs. And it becomes impossible to shove everything into a single publication (even, I've found, a long publication such as a book). Neither is it desirable. So in this last set of publications, I've been thinking of the separate articles the way you might think of chapters in a book—or pieces in a Tetris game, or bricks in a wall, or episodes in a miniseries, or dungeons in a Zelda game. Individually, they tell different parts of the major story, the five- or seven-year arc. But they don't have to tell the whole story.

So, for instance, if you read "Losing by expanding," you'll see why I put "How nonemployer firms..." on hold so that I could finish it. I needed that piece. If you read "Working alone, together," you'll similarly see how its analysis dovetails with the 4GAT analysis I describe in "Losing by expanding" and perform to some degree in "How nonemployer firms..."—and you may see where I decided not to open a theoretical can of worms by calling it a 4GAT analysis. 

I experimented with sources. Like "Working alone, together," this piece uses sources outside the mainstream of professional communication research, including industry reports, census figures, and business journals. I had to experiment across a few articles to do this gracefully—reviewers will sometimes overfocus on what they consider lightweight sources—but I gave myself the luxury of experimenting and made sure to use reviewers' comments as a feedback loop rather than becoming frustrated by them. (One trick, I found, is to closely pair nonacademic sources with academic ones.)

Until now, I haven't spent a lot of time reflecting on how my publication strategy has changed post-tenure. But looking back on the last several articles, I certainly do seem to have changed it. 

Reading :: How Institutions Think

How Institutions Think 
By Mary Douglas

I picked up this slim (138pp.) book based on its title and description as well as through a stray citation in a recent reading. Although it's good work, unfortunately it didn't do the job that I wanted it to—that is, to discuss how institutions (that is, large hierarchical organizations) think (that is, collectively reason or cogitate). 

Douglas, an anthropologist, builds on Durkheim (whom I've read) and Fleck (whom I haven't) to examine how human thinking is to a degree dependent on the institutions in which we find ourselves—"institutions" in this case meaning organizations or social structures. Along the way, she contrasts different schools of thought in anthropology and related fields, reexamines anthropology's assumptions about simple societies vs. complex ones, and challenges some of our assumptions about institutions. 

For instance, in the last chapter, Douglas airs the "myth" that minor decisions are offloaded so that individuals can think about important matters (p.111). In reality, she says, "The individual tends to leave the important decisions to his institutions while busying himself with tactics and details" (p.111). (Note: Douglas very much likes to use this sort of chiasmus, but I think that it sometimes results in false choices such as this one.) Indeed, she argues, "any institution then starts to control the memory of its members... It provides the categories of their thought, sets the terms for self-knowledge, and fixes identities" (p.112). 

The book is, or should be, provocative. But I confess that I was not captivated by it. Beyond the fact that it didn't address what I had hoped, the book seemed to oversimplify certain questions about how individuals relate to institutions, seemed to minimize differences in kinds of organizations, and tended to focus on anthropological disputes without deeply considering how discussions from parallel fields might productively impact those disputes. Then again, it could be that I'm simply not in the intended audience for this Oxford-trained anthropologist. If you're interested in how institutions think—in Douglas' terms—certainly you should take a look. 

Reading :: The Philosophy of Rhetoric

The Philosophy of Rhetoric
By I. A. Richards

I'm sure I should have read this little classic a long time ago, but I didn't. Earlier this summer, I found it on the shelves of a used bookstore and decided to pick it up. It's only 138pp, based on six lectures, so I read it pretty quickly—I think I finished it in a day. I think.

Sorry to be so vague. The fact is, this book was based on a series of 1936 lectures, but it had such an impact on the field of rhetoric and composition that, today, its arguments seem oddly unremarkable. It's still a good read, with some great quotes, but if you've read widely in rhet-comp, the effect is similar to that of a rock aficionado listening to early Beatles. The material is good but, part of you thinks, it's so familiar as to be banal.

Let's get to the arguments anyway. Richards introduces the book by explaining:

These lectures are an attempt to revive an old subject. I need spend no time, I think, in describing the present state of Rhetoric. Today it is the dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English! So low has Rhetoric sunk that we would do better just to dismiss it to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it—unless we can find reason for believing that it can become a study that will minister successfully to important needs. (p.3)

What needs? Richards continues: "Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies" (p.3). And to carry on that study, he argues that "we have instead to consider much more closely how words work in discourse" (p.5). And "To account for understanding and misunderstanding, to study the efficiency of language and its conditions, we have to renounce, for a while, the view that words just have their meanings and that what a discourse does is to be explained as a composition of these meanings" (p.9), instead accounting for meanings in context (p.10). "Stability in a word's meaning is not something to be assumed, but always something to be explained," he argues (p.11).

Consequently, he says, "a revived Rhetoric ... must itself undertake its own inquiry into the modes of meaning—not only, as with the old Rhetoric, on a macroscopic scale, discussing the effects of different disposals of large parts of a discourse—but also on a microscopic scale by using theorems about the structure of the fundamental conjectural units of meaning and the conditions through which they, and their interconnections, arise" (pp.23-24).

This is the project Richards takes on. Along the way, he defines context (a cluster of events that recur together, p.34), states that the business of rhetoric is to compare meanings of words (p.37), assert the multiplicity of meanings in discourse (p.39), and lauds ambiguity as something inevitable and indispensable (p.40). He disparages the focus on usage in old rhetoric (p.51), arguing that correctness is a social marker and declaring that the new rhetoric must question the "social or snob control" of languge (p.78). He gives special attention to metaphor, which, he says, is essentially comparative and functions as a transaction between contexts (p.94). In the last lecture, he argues that "Words are not a medium in which to copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order" (p.134).

In all, this is a landmark treatise from someone who thought deeply about rhetoric, prescribed a new course for it, and deeply impacted it in ways that reverberate even today.

Reading :: Networks of Innovation

Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995
By Louis Galambos with Jane Eliot Sewell

I picked this book up at a used bookstore—it was $1—because it sounded interesting and because I'm interested in both networks and innovation. It's a historical account of how a research unit—first at Mulford, then acquired by Sharp & Dohme, then acquired by Merck—innovated in developing vaccines over a century.

The book is an interesting read. But, at least for me, it didn't fulfill its potential. That's for three reasons.

First, it doesn't make a case for the "so what." I understand that the historical account may be intrinsically interesting, but beyond that, the book doesn't offer any larger lessons for us in the introduction or throughout. Finally, in the conclusion (Chapter 10), the authors draw some lessons: "it enables us to see more clearly the pattern of long cycles that characterizes this process" of innovation; "the development of organizational capabilities followed a similar pattern"; and "New research leadership... was usually needed to break existing patterns and develop new network-related capabilities" (pp. 241-243). No big surprises here, I'm afraid. The term "network" itself was underdefined and underanalyzed.

Second, it explicitly follows a "great man" view of history. The book is direct and honest about this approach, acknowledging that histories have lately avoided focusing on individual contributions in favor of broad social analysis. But the approach seems to leave out a lot about how the networks of innovation functioned. And I can't help but notice that some of the "great men" discussed in the book, such as former CEO P. Roy Vagelos and former research director Maurice R. Hilleman, are also prominently thanked in the Acknowledgements. Hilleman's "notes, oral history, and scientific publications were indispensable to our research" (p.253). I believe this, but I also wonder how the book might have turned out if other sources had been relied upon more heavily.

Third, as alluded above, the book acknowledges the "networks of innovation" but does not characterize these networks in much detail or with a specific theoretical or conceptual framework. I was left with the impression that "networks" is being used in a highly colloquial sense, the sense that different organizations in an industry shared information and expertise with each other. That's an insight, but not a surprising one, and the authors don't do much to contrast this form of sharing with other forms or to demonstrate how it uniquely contributed to innovation.

It might be that I'm wanting this book to provide things that it's simply not meant to provide, so I hope the review doesn't sound harsh. Bottom line, it's still an interesting book, but may not be very useful for people who are interested in science and technology studies (STS) or related fields.

Reading :: Designing Together

Designing Together: The collaboration and conflict management handbook for creative professionals
By Dan Brown

Dan Brown was kind enough to send me a review copy of this book, which is a hands-on guide to managing collaboration in creative teams or design teams (the terms are used synonymously). Whereas "most books on team dynamics are directed to the leader of design teams," this one

focuses on the contributing designer, the person responsible for a portion of the project, but not necessarily the lead or the manager or the central stakeholder. It's for anyone working no a design project, because every person on the project team is ultimately responsible for its success and failure. (pp.xxii-xxiii) 

In other words, it is meant to distribute the expertise of collaboration across the entire team. That's an astute thing to do, I think, since creatives are increasingly working in self-directed groups with rotating leadership.

The book is easy to read, clearly laid out, and full of bullets and headings. I like bullets and headings, especially in a book like this one—you can quickly and easily absorb the main points, then dive into the details when you're interested. Brown also provides a summary at the end of the chapter, engagingly titled "TL;DR," that pulls together the chapter's lessons. Since the chapters are also well organized, you can quickly get the lessons in a variety of ways. Those features can make the book a little repetitive if you read it serially and thoroughly, but they make the book rewarding even for skimmers—and easy to reference when you have specific collaboration problems to diagnose.

Brown argues that design depends on collaboration—and conflict, which is a healthy component of collaboration. Throughout the book, he elaborates on five central ideas—behavior, mindset, self-reflection, empathy, and design success—and elaborates on how teams can enact these ideas in healthy ways that yield high-quality collaboration.

Brown's audience is mainly designers, especially interaction designers. But the lessons can apply to other creatives, including writers, marketers, and others who work on developing unique, creative solutions. If you're working with other creatives, you really ought to read this book.

Topsight > Join me at the August UXPA Austin meeting

In Austin? Come to the August UXPA Austin meeting on Tuesday, August 6. I'll be discussing how to get to topsight via—of course—my book Topsight. 

Here's the event description, courtesy of the Austin UXPA Facebook page:

Getting to Topsight

Topsight — the overall understanding of the big picture — is hard to achieve in organizations. There’s too much going on, too many moving pieces. But without topsight, we have a hard time figuring out how information circulates, where it gets stuck, and how we can get it unstuck.

Topsight is hard to get — but you can get it. I know: I’ve been instilling topsight into various organizations for the past 15 years. Along the way, I’ve developed an approach in which I gather clues, confirm details, model social interactions and use all of these to systematically achieve topsight.

In this presentation, I'll overview the Topsight approach and discuss how UX practitioners can use it to better understand user requirements. 

Clay has written three books on the subject. His latest is Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations (Amazon CreateSpace, 2013), which distills 15 years' worth of insights into a methodology for understanding how organizations circulate information.

Reading :: Economy and Society

Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 volume set)
By Max Weber

I've been putting off this review for a while because I suspect it will be long. Here's the two-volume set with my notes:

The set is 1469pp. To provide some perspective, that's still fewer pages than two Harry Potter books. But then again, I have never attempted to read two Harry Potter books. They don't sound nearly as interesting as Weber.

What interested me about Weber was that, beyond being counted as one of the founders of sociology, he is also known for his writings on bureaucracy. That's particularly true in Adler and Heckscher's work, which draws on Weber and Tonnies to theorize collaborative community. And since I'm working on characterizing different types of organizations, I knew that at some point I'd have to work my way through Weber.

Weber discusses far more than bureaucracies, of course. Economy and Society covers basic sociological terms and concepts; describes relationships between the economy and normative and de facto powers; describes relationships between economy and law; discusses types of political communities; and outlines different kinds of domination. That's a lot to cover, and Weber covers it ably, drawing on a remarkable array of fields to make his case.

Volume 1
According to the editors, Weber actually wrote Volume 1 second. But he puts it first to define terms and concepts. Volume 1 doesn't have much of a plot, but it establishes the foundation for Volume 2.

Weber starts by carefully laying out some of his basic terms, such as sociology ("a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences," p.4) and meaning (not as something objectively correct or metaphysically true, but as either "the actual existing meaning in the given concrete case of a particular actor, or to the average or approximate meaning attributable to a given plurality of actors" or a pure type thereof, p.4). Weber describes his approach as a comparative methodology which compares the pure type of rational action and deviations from it (p.6). Social action he defines as action oriented to others' behavior (p.22); it can be oriented in four ways: instrumentally rational, value-rational, affectual, and traditional (pp.24-25). Typically social action is multiply oriented (p.26). Social relationship is "the behavior of a plurality of actors insofar as, in its meaningful context, the action of each takes account of that of the others and is oriented in these terms" (p.26).

Moving on, Weber discusses types of legitimate order, divided into two types: convention and law (p.33). The legitimacy of an order may be guaranteed, he says, in two ways. One is "purely subjective": affectual, value-rational, or religious. The other is "by the expectation of specific, external effects, that is, by interest situations" (p.33), including convention and law. Convention denotes an order whose "validity is externally guaranteed by the probability that deviation from it within a given social group will result in a relatively general and practically significant reaction of disapproval," while law denotes an order that is "externally guaranteed by the probability that physical or psychological coercion will be applied by a staff of people in order to bring about compliance or avenge violation" (p.34). This distinction becomes important later on.

Social relationships can be characterized as conflict (carrying out one's will against the resistance of others), competition (a formally peaceful attempt to gain control over opportunities and advantages that others also want), or selection (an often-latent struggle for advantage or survival, but without a mutual orientation) (p.38).

Social relationships can also be characterized as communal (when individuals' social orientation is based on the feeling that they belong together) or associative (when the social alliance is based on a "rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement" (pp.40-41). For instance, market relationships are associative; so are relationships based on a shared belief in certain absolute values (p.41). But religious brotherhoods, erotic relationships, personal loyalty, and esprit de corps are associative (p.41). Of course, these are ideal types; as Weber points out, even merchants often like their customers (p.41).

Social relationships can be characterized as open to outsiders (if "its system of order does not deny participation to anyone who wishes to join and is actually in a position to do so") or closed to them (if "participation of certain persons is excluded, limited, or subjected to conditions") (p.43).

An organization is "A social relationship which is either closed or limits the admission of outsiders ... [and] its regulations are enforced by specific individuals: a chief and, possibly, an administrative staff, which normally also have representative powers" (p.48). Organizations are autonomous (governed by an order the members themselves established) or heteronomous (governed by an order imposed from outside), autocephalous (with chief and staff selected by the autonomous order) or heterocephalous (with chief and staff appointed by outsiders) (pp.49-50). Weber draws several other distinctions to characterize organizations; we'll skip a bit.

Weber now defines power ("the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests", p.53) and domination ("the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons," p.53). He distinguishes between political organizations (safeguarding an order in territory via physical force), the state (which enjoys a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force), and hierocratic organizations (which safeguard order via psychic coercion), including the church (which enjoys a monopoly on hierocratic coercion) (p.54).

With this groundwork out of the way, Weber goes on to discuss the division of labor, providing a discussion that is encyclopedic, although not as broadly applied as Durkheim's, and then discusses occupations.

In chapter 3, Weber gets to the types of legitimate domination. Every genuine form of dominance, he argues, implies an interest in obedience (i.e., voluntary compliance) (p.212). Dominance via purely material interests tends to be unstable, he says, so that dominance is typically supplemented by "other elements, affectual and ideal" (p.213). Every system of domination cultivates belief in its legitimacy (p.213).

Weber names three types of legitimate domination—and these three types show up frequently in the rest of the two volumes of Economy and Society. (This discussion reminded me of Machiavelli's Discourses in its careful delineation and description of types, though Machiavelli was talking about governments and Weber is talking about broader issues of legitimacy.) Claims of legitimacy can be based on:

• Rational grounds (legal authority). This type underpins bureaucracies.
• Traditional grounds (traditional authority). 
• Charismatic grounds (charismatic authority). (p.215). 

Rational grounds

Legal authority, based on rational grounds, organizes its offices via hierarchy (p.218). It especially uses that most unambiguous structure of domination, the bureaucracy (p.219). Bureaucrats are appointed, not elected (p.221). The monocratic bureaucracy 

is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and from those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks. (p.223)

 (Compare Mintzberg on the advantages of bureaucracy.)

Bureaucracy, Weber adds, is supported by "extremely important conditions in the fields of communication and transportation. The precision of its functioning requires the services of the railway, the telegraph, and the telephone, and becomes increasingly dependent on them" (p.224). That is, communication and transportation technologies create the conditions under which bureaucracies can flourish. After all, "Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge," including both "technical knowledge" and "knowledge growing out of experience in the service" (p.225).

Bureaucratic domination results in (1) "'leveling' in the interest of the broadest possible basis of recruitment in terms of technical competence"; (2) "the tendency to plutocracy growing out of the interest in the greatest possible length of technical training"; and (3) "the dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality," in which "the dominant norms are concepts of straightforward duty without regard to personal considerations" (p.225). Bureaucracy leads to social leveling, Weber says, so "everywhere bureaucratization foreshadows mass democracy" (p.226). In sum, bureaucratic authority has the characteristics of (1) formalism and (2) utilitarianism "in the interest of the welfare of those under their authority" (p.226).

Traditional grounds
"Authority will be called traditional if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers" (p.226). Rules are obeyed due to their traditional status. In the simplest case, it can be based in personal loyalty from a common upbringing. Obedience is owed to the person, not the rules (p.227). Commands are legitimized in terms of "action which is bound to specific traditions" and by "action which is free of specific rules," falling within a sphere of discretion (p.227). Pure traditional authority lacks things that we associate with bureaucracy: "a rationally established hierarchy," "a regular system of appointment on the basis of free contract," "technical training as a regular requirement," and "fixed salaries" (p.229).

Charismatic grounds
"The term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities" (p.241). "There is no hierarchy; the leader merely intervenes in general or in individual cases when he considers the members of his staff lacking in charismatic qualification for a given task" (p.243). Charismatic authority, of course, cannot remain stable (p.246). In being routinized, it can easily turn into a "clan state," in which "a political body is organized strictly and completely in terms of this principle of hereditary charisma. ... The heads of families, which are traditional geronotocrats or patriarchs without personal charismatic legitimacy, regulate the exercise of these powers which cannot be taken away from their family" (p.250).

Combinations
But of course these pure types are rare. In most cases, legitimization comes from combinations of different types of authority (p.262). Weber reminds us that "at the basis of every authority, and correspondingly of every kinds of willingness to obey, is a belief, a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige" (p.263).

For instance, Weber argues that "when the charismatic organization undergoes progressive rationalization ... it is treated as the basis of legitimacy: democratic legitimacy. ... The personally legitimated charismatic leader becomes leader by the grace of those who follow him since the latter are formally free to elect and even to depose him—just as the loss of charisma and its efficacy had involved the loss of genuine legitimacy. Now he is the freely elected leader" (p.267).

Legal and economic order
Skipping a bit, we get to Weber's famous observation that "today legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state. All other groups applying legal coercion by violence are today considered as heteronomous and mostly as heterocephalous" (p.314).

In the latter half of Volume 1, Weber discusses the economy and the arena of normative and de facto powers. Let's skip this discussion and get to Volume 2.

Volume 2
Volume 2 covers economy and law; political communities; domination and legitimacy; bureaucracy; patriarchalism and patrimonialism; feudalism; charisma and its transformation; political and hierocratic domination; and the city.

Let's skip to political communities.

Political communities
"The term 'political community' shall apply to a community whose social action is aimed at subordinating to orderly domination by the participants a 'territory' and the conduct of the persons within it, through readiness to resort to physical force, including normally force of arms" (p.901). "A separate 'political' community is constituted where we find (1) a 'territory'; (2) the availability of physical force for its domination; and (3) social action which is not restricted exclusively to the satisfaction of common economic needs in the frame of a communal economy" (p.902). The belief in political legitimacy leads to the aforementioned principle that only states can legitimately exercise physical coercion (p.904). This monopoly of violence is a product of evolution. Basic state functions are lacking or irrational under primitive conditions, Weber argues; instead, they are performed by ad hoc groups or distributed across a variety of groups (p.905).

Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy has the following characteristics:

• Regular activities are assigned as official duties.
• The authority to give the commands is distributed in a stable way and strictly delimited.
• Only persons who qualify under general rules can be employed to fulfill regular duties and exercise the corresponding rights. (p.956)

An office hierarchy involves a system of super- and subordination, a possibility of appeal, and a monocratic organization. It's based on written documents (p.957). Offices are specialized and "when fully developed, official activity demands the full working capacity of the official, irrespective of the fact that the length of his obligatory working hours in the bureau may be limited" (p.958). "The management of the office follows general rules, which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which are learned. Knowledge of these rules represents a special technical expertise which the officials possess" (p.958). And "The reduction of modern office management to rules is deeply embedded in its very nature" (p.958). 

Office holding is a vocation with a "prescribed course of training, which demands the entire working capacity for a long period of time, and in generally prescribed special examinations and prerequisites of employment" (pp. 958-959). The official's position is considered a "duty" (p.959). "Entrance into an office, including one in the private economy, is considered an acceptance of a specific duty of fealty to the purpose of the office" (p.959). The office doesn't establish a relation to a person but to impersonal and functional purposes (p.959). 

Office holding also involves fixed career lines: the official moves from lower, less well paid levels of the hierarchy to higher, more well paid ones. A lifelong career is assumed, and promotion is based on seniority (p.963), itself corresponding (theoretically) to expertise. 

Bureaucracy is tied to the presupposition of continuous revenues to maintain it (p.968). 

Modern communications, Weber argues, are the "pacemakers of bureaucratization": he lists "public roads and water-ways, railroads, the telegraph, etc.,"which "can only be administered publicly" (p.973). These also sustain and grow the bureaucracy: Egypt's early bureaucracy, he argues, could not have developed were it not for the Nile (p.973). 

Bureaucracies are technically superior to administration by notables:

The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and particularly in the monocratic form. (p.973)

 And that's why

today, it is primarily the capitalist market economy which demands that the official business of public administration be discharged precisely, unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible. Normally, the very large modern capitalist interprises are themselves unequalled models of strict bureaucratic organization. Business management throughout rests on increasing precision, steadiness, and above all, speed of operations. This, in turn, is determined by the peculiar nature of the modern means of communication, including, among other things, the news service of the press. The extraordinary increase in the speed by which public announcements, as well as economic and political facts, are transmitted exerts a steady and sharp pressure in the direction of speeding up the tempo of administrative reaction towards various situations. The optimum of such reaction time is normally attained only by a strictly bureaucratic organization. (p.974). 

The most important element for the modern bureaucracy, he says, is calculable rules (p.975). (Compare Boisot on abstraction, codification, and diffusion.)  Indeed, he says, "bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized'" (p.975).

Bureaucracy also implies centralization: "the bureaucratic structure goes hand in hand with the concentration of the material means of management in the hands of the master" (p.980).

Bureaucracy, as Weber raised earlier, accompanies modern mass democracy (p.983). It is hard to destroy because it provides the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action; indeed, "when administration has been completely bureaucratized, the resulting system of domination is practically indestructible" (p.987). Through that system, the bureaucrat is chained to his activity (p.988). "Increasingly, all order in public and private organizations is dependent on the system of files and the discipline of officialdom, that means, its habit of painstaking obedience within its wonted sphere of action" (p.988). And Weber saw new forms of communication technology as making new formations of authority more impossible (p.989).

Bureaucracies also compartmentalize. In bureaucracies, people tend to keep knowledge and intentions secret, making the insider superior (p.992).

Weber says that the bureaucracy has destroyed structures of domination which were not rational (p.1003).

Patriarchalism and Patrimonialism
One of those structures was patriarchalism and its offshoot, patrimonialism. Patriarchal domination is based on strictly personal loyalty through tradition. It can be dominated by honoratiores, in which social honor (prestige) becomes the basis for domination, and in its pure form, patriarchal domination has no legal limits (p.1009). In this case, the master's security and maintenance depend on the basic attitudes and morale of subjects (p.1011).

Patrimonial domination is a special case of patriarchal domination: "domestic authority decentralized through assignment of land and sometimes equipment to sons of the house or other dependents" (p.1011). Patrimonial office lacks the bureaucratic separation of private and official spheres (p.1028).

Feudalism
The patrimonial estate led to the contractual allegiance of feudatory relationships (p.1070). Here, the personal duty of fealty has been isolated from household loyalties (p.1070). Indeed, the vassal could later take a fief from several lords, making his support precarious during a given conflict (p.1085).

Charisma and its transformation
Bureaucracy and patriarchalism, Weber says, share one important characteristic despite their differences: continuity. Indeed, bureaucracy is considered the rational counterpart of patriarchalism, with its permanent structure and satisfaction of calculated needs. But charisma is different: it addresses extraordinary needs that "transcend the sphere of everyday economic routines" (p.1111). Under these conditions, "the 'charisma of rhetoric' gains great influence" (p.1129).

But as noted earlier, charismatic domination is unstable. Eventually parties form, dominated by bureaucracy, which as we saw is associated with mass democracy. So charisma is "castrated" by party organization (p.1132), leveraged in mass democracy but under the control of party bureaucracy and dependent for its effectiveness on the nonpartisan bureaucracy that keeps the government working.

But that happens over a length of time. Before that, charisma can be transformed by being depersonalized and transferred (p.1135). "The charisma of the ruler attaches to his house," leading to the "clan state" in which "the rights of the individual lineage groups to their functions are legitimated by the charisma inherent in their houses, not by any personal fealty" (pp.1136-1137).

Let's stop there. Weber's work is much more far-reaching than this summary can address, and as I intimated earlier, it doesn't have the linear plot that, say, a Harry Potter novel might. But I've attempted to pull out some of the most interesting and salient details for thinking through how organizations work—and how communication technologies influence them. Think of the review as a warm-up for when you read these two volumes yourself—as you really should.

Reading :: The Division of Labor in Society

The Division of Labor in Society
By Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim's dissertation became a classic work and a founding text of sociology. It's easy to see why. The book has a vast sweep and grapples with basic questions of how societies divide labor and responsibility. Although in retrospect it has its limitations, the book provides some compelling distinctions that have deeply influenced how we understand labor division and organization.

Durkheim sets out three tasks for the book:

• to "investigate the function of the division of labour, that is, the social need to which it corresponds";
• to "determine the causes and conditions upon which it depends"; and
• to "classify the principal abnormal forms that it assumes" (pp.6-7)

Durkheim is investigating the division of labor at a societal scale, not the scale of organizations or specific groups. Much of his work focuses on social solidarity (p.26 et passim), which he divides into two general types: mechanical solidarity, or solidarity by similarities (Ch.2), and organic solidarity, or solidarity arising from the division of labor (Ch.3). 

Mechanical solidarity is solidarity based on identity or resemblance (p.60). This form of social solidarity  "arises because a certain number of states of consciousness are common to all members of the same society" (p.64). Such societies include those of "more primitive peoples," societies that "are made up of elementary aggregates, almost of a family nature, which may be designated clans" (p.48). And "it is this solidarity that repressive law materially embodies" (p.64). Mechanical solidarity is the original type of solidarity.

Organic solidarity arises from the nascent division of labor. Its biological metaphor, the organs of the body, is meant to evoke this kind of interdependence among specialized divisions: 

Whereas the other [mechanical] solidarity implies that individuals resemble each other, the latter [organic solidarity] assumes that they are different from each other. The former type is only possible in so far as the individual personality is absorbed into the collective personality; the latter is only possible if each one of us has a sphere of action that is peculiarly our own, and consequently a personality. (p.85). 

 Organic solidarity is increasingly prevalent, Durkheim argues, based partially on his examination of legal codes (Ch.5). Indeed, the more that labor is divided, the harder it is to separate (p.103). He adds: "Not only does mechanical solidarity generally bind men together less strongly than does organic solidarity, but, as we mount the scale of social evolution, it becomes increasingly looser" (p.105). The strength of social bonds in mechanical solidarity vary based on:

• common vs. individual consciousness
• intensity of collective consciousness
• the "determinativeness" of the above states: how clear-cut they are (p.105)

As mechanical solidarity wanes, Durkheim argues, either social life must diminish or a new form of solidarity must replace it. This new form of solidarity, organic solidarity is based on the division of labor (p.122) and is "increasingly fulfilling the role that once fell to the common consciousness" in "the higher types of society" (p.123). 

Consequently, we see new social forms (Ch.6). In particular, in a society that is held together solely through mechanical solidarity, 

we would have to conceive of it as consisting of an absolutely homogeneous mass whose parts would not be distinguishable from one another and consequently not be arranged in any order or relation to each other. This would be the real social protoplasm, the germ from which all social types would have emerged. The aggregate we have characterised in this way we propose to call a horde. (p.126)

Durkheim concedes that we have not yet observed a pure society of this type (p.126), but cites some close examples, including the Iroquois (p.127):

We shall give the term 'clan' to a horde that has ceased to be independent and has become an element in a more extensive group, and that of segmentary societies based on clans to those peoples that have been constituted from an association of clans. We term such societies 'segmentary' to denote that they are formed of the replication of aggregates that are like one another, analogous to the rings of annelida worms. We also term this elementary aggregate a clan because this word aptly expresses its mixed nature, relating both to the family and the body politic. It is a family in the sense that all the members who go to make it up consider themselves kin to one another, and indeed it is true that for the most part they share a blood relationship. The affinities produced by sharing a blood kinship are mainly what keeps them united. What is more, they sustain mutual relationships that might be termed domestic, since these are to be found elsewhere in societies whose family character is undisputed: I mean collective revenge, collective responsibility and, as soon as individual property makes an appearance, mutual heredity. Yet on the other hand it is not a family in the true sense of the word, for in order to form part of it, there is no need to have a clear-cut blood relationship with the other clan members. It is enough to exhibit some external criterion, which usually consists in bearing the same name. (pp.127-128)

The fact that the clan's kinship can be fictive (cf. Sahlins) means that it can scale much larger than an actual family, allowing it to function as a basic political unit (p.128).

But, Durkheim argues, the clan, like the horde, "plainly does not possess any other solidarity save that which derives from similarities. This is because the society is made up of similar segments and these in turn comprise only homogeneous elements. ... For a segmentary organisation to be possible, the segments must resemble each other (or else they would not be united) and yet be different from one another" (p.128).

Mechanical solidarity, Durkheim concludes, is a system of homogeneous segments (p.131). In contrast, organic solidarity is like a set of differentiated organs. Rather than a group of segments linked by affinities, we find organs that perform different, interdependent functions (p.132-133; cf. I Cor. 12:12). The transformation from one to the other is gradual: for instance, the clan's blood divisions give way to territorial divisions (p.135). Organic solidarity first took root in self-sufficient towns, then (around the 14th Century in Europe) across regions (p.137).

Interestingly, Durkheim makes an argument reminiscent to Vygotskians: in segmented societies, he says, individual personality did not exist (p.142); it is, he believed, a product of the private sphere that emerged with the rise of organic solidarity (cf. p.220, 235, 239, 242).

Durkheim sees societies evolving from decentralized tribes to centralized ones to cities, feudal societies, and finally the present day (p.168; see also pp.201-202). In fact, his biological metaphor becomes rather too controlling in places.

A few thoughts. Those who have been following TIMN will recognize much that is familiar here, particularly the evolution of societies and the characterization of early societies as segmented. Those who have been reading Heckscher and Adler will find the discussion of solidarity familiar too. And as one of the founders of sociology, Durkheim had a deep impact on how we understood societies throughout the 20th century.

Yes, this book certainly has its limitations. It sometimes overgeneralizes and speculates based on fairly limited data, it overrelies on the biological metaphor, and sometimes that metaphor seems to reject Mendelian inheritance (e.g., p.264). But overall, it's a rewarding and fascinating read. In fact, after reading this book and Weber, I may have to revisit a lot of my earlier readings in this new light. Definitely, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
By Max Weber

I regret having taken so long to get to this fascinating book, which introduced the notion of the Protestant work ethic. Weber is recognized as one of the three founders of sociology (alongside Marx and Durkheim), and in this influential book, we can see why.

Weber wrote the book after visiting, and becoming fascinated with, the United States. In fact, in Chapter 2, he quotes several of Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms—along the lines of "time is money" (p.48) and "The good paymaster is lord of another man's purse" (p.49)—and warns us not to simply interpret these statements as avarice. Rather, he says, through Franklin speaks "the spirit of capitalism," and his words describe not astuteness but an ethos (p.51):

The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is preached here is not simply a means of making one's way in the world, but a particular ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. This is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality that interests us. (p.51)

Weber sees this particular ethic as uniquely Western European and North American (p.52). This ethic is summed up in this way: "the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of any spontaneous enjoyment of life" (53). When pressed, even that "colorless deist" Franklin justifies the ethic with Scripture (p.53); making money, to Franklin, is the result and expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling (p.54). And it is this ethic, Weber says, that is a condition of capitalism, shaping the system and its conditions for success (p.54).

To those who have not become capitalist, it seems like mere avarice (p.56), and Weber claims that capitalism's development is retarded in countries where workers pursue money unscrupulously, without this ethic (p.57). In part, that's because labor must be performed as a calling if wage incentives are to work (p.62). And that characteristic of a calling shows up elsewhere: for instance, "The ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur" is "distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency"; "He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well" (p.71).

Where does this "irrational sense" come from? Weber traces the concept of the calling back to Martin Luther (Ch.3), defining the calling as "a life-task, a definite field in which to work"—a concept, he says, that was foreign to both Catholic peoples and those of classical antiquity (p.79). In Protestantism, everyday activity took on a religious significance (p.80). For Luther, the monks' renunciation of worldly obligations seemed selfish; "In contrast, labor in a calling appears to him as the outward expression of brotherly love" (p.81).

Weber traces the history of the Protestant church forward to see how this concept of the calling led to the Protestant ethic. He fingers the doctrine of predestination as a key moment, since it imparted "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual" (p.104). Priests, sacraments, the church, and even God could not help the individual (p.104). Hence the individual was torn away from his closed ties; everything, even social activity, was pursued solely for God's glory—and that included labor, conceived as "a calling which serves the mundane life of the community" (p.108). In the Calvinist reading,

The community of the elect with their God could only take place and be perceptible to them in that God worked (operatur) through them and that they were conscious of it. That is, their action originated from the faith caused by God's grace, and this faith in turn justified itself by the quality of that action. (p.113). 

To put it more colloquially, people wanted to be assured of whether they were the elect. They did not believe that their works would save them, but they did believe that works were the result and evidence of a saving faith. "Thus the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put, himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it. But this creation cannot, as in Catholicism, consist in a gradual accumulation of individual good works to one's credit, but rather in a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned" (p.115).

So Calvinism demanded, "not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system" (p.117). The average man's moral conduct couldn't be planless and unsystematic (p.117). This systematization developed through the Puritans, who saw God as sort of a shopkeeper who constantly took measures (p.124); then the Methodists; then the Baptists, whose anti-state and anti-aristrocacy leanings pushed them into economic occupations (p.150).

Other developments suited the Protestant ethic for capitalism. For instance, "the emphasis on the ascetic importance of a fixed calling provided an ethical justification of the modern specialized division of labor. In a similar way the providential interpretation of profit-making justified the activities of the business man" (p.163).

Weber concludes by lamenting,

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the "saint like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p.181)

In all, a fascinating book. Don't wait as long as I did before reading it.