Reading :: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
By Emile Durkheim

(The above link goes to a different version of the book: mine is the 1915 version, reprinted by Free Press in 1965.)

Partly through this book, I tweeted that I wish I had read this book first, before Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind. There, Levi-Strauss criticizes the notion of totem, which is Durkheim's starting point in his study of religion. In fact, I should have probably read Frazer's The Golden Bough before Durkheim, since Durkheim's book is in great part a critique of Frazer's position that totemism is magic, not religion.

In any case, Durkheim provides a meticulous and detailed discussion of elementary religion - that is to say, totemism as practiced in Australian and North American tribes - and argues that religion started with these elementary forms before developing into the more structured, personified forms we know today. He asserts that

before all, rites are means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically. From this, we may be able to reconstruct hypothetically the way in which the totemic cult should have arisen originally. Men who find themselves united, partially by bonds of blood, but still more by a community of interest and tradition, assemble and become conscious of their moral unity. For the reasons we have set forth, they are led to represent this unity in the form of a very special kind of consubstantiality: they think of themselves as participating in the nature of some determined animal. Under these circumstances, there is only one way for them to affirm their collective existence: this is to affirm that they are like the animals of this species, and to do so not only in the silence of their own thoughts, but by material acts. ... the imitative rites appear as the first form of the cult. (p.432)

Durkheim makes this argument while maintaining respect for all forms of religious life. But I wonder about his argument, which rests on the assumption that tribal peoples represent a universal stage of development and thus their beliefs are a snapshot of the beliefs at that stage of development. Did the peoples living in, say, Crete or Okinawa or Ireland also go through these selfsame levels of development and evolve their own religions in the same way? Unfortunately, Durkheim provides only a few examples of how Western religions may have developed from cults.

Nevertheless, the book is a tour de force in examining totemism in Australian tribes specifically. Durkheim carefully and sedulously examines each aspect of totemism, relating all of them to his central thesis. If religion or tribal dynamics are interesting to you, certainly take a look at this classic.

Reading :: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation and Entrepreneurship
By Peter F. Drucker

This book is one of Drucker's classics. Unfortunately, I had a hard time maintaining interest - perhaps because I'm not an entrepreneur, but also perhaps because it's not sparkling prose. Nevertheless, it's a classic for a reason - Drucker packs a lot of information in here.

For instance, here's Drucker's pithy explanation of what an entrepreneur does: "the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity" (p.28). Indeed, "entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield" (p.28). Entrepreneurs must innovate systematically, and that means "monitoring seven sources for innovative opportunity" (p.35). The first four are symptoms of change within the enterprise:

• the unexpected
• the incongruity
• innovation based on process need
• changes in industry structure or market structure (p.35)

The last three "involve changes outside the enterprise or industry":

• demographics
• changes in perception, mood, and meaning
• new knowledge (p.35)

In the rest of the book, Drucker examines each of these points in turn, in great detail. He cautions us to always expect and look for change so that we can get ahead of it. Specifically, he says that every three years, we should put everything on trial - "every single product, process, technology, market, distributive channel, not to mention every single internal staff activity" (p.151). Essentially, he says, don't become comfortable in routine. Don't ossify. 

And this is an important point. Although Drucker is talking to the enterprise, he says that 

'Planning' as the term is commonly understood is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Innovation does indeed need to be purposeful and entrepreneurship has to be managed. But innovation, almost by definition, has to be decentralized, ad hoc, autonomous, specific, and micro-economic. It had better start small, tentative, flexible. (p.255)

 Sage words. If you're interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, read this book.

Reading :: The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
By Eric Ries

Eric Ries had a problem. As cofounder and CTO of IMVU, a Silicon Valley startup, he knew what his customers wanted: to connect instant messaging with virtual reality avatars.

Initially, the idea was to create avatars you could use to interact virtually with your friends. Your friends might be on different IM networks such as AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or iChat – which might sit on your desktop like separate spigots at a soda fountain. But IMVU would interoperate with all of them, serving as a sort of universal service for connecting your friends across all of these networks.

Users hated it. Adoption at first was incredibly low.

In fact, in IMVU’s in-house tests, users enjoyed creating avatars and using them to chat with strangers. They enjoyed meeting new people anonymously. But they did NOT want to tie together their IM networks, and they certainly did not want to allow these strangers in their AIM buddy lists. They were strangers!

Ries says that he and the others at IMVU had a hard time accepting this. He kept dismissing what the test users were saying, assuming that they simply didn’t represent IMVU’s market. But every new batch of test users said the same thing. Meanwhile, IMVU’s usage stats remained essentially flat.


Ries had seen his product as a way to help old friends interact in new ways in the same place. That’s what would make the service sticky. But the test users consistently told him they didn’t want that. They wanted a way to create virtual identities and use them to meet new friends who also had virtual identities. In essence, he wanted a clubhouse and they wanted a costume party. The two objectives implied different products, different services, different marketing strategies – in fact, they implied that IMVU would have to pivot.

As Ries makes clear, they could very well have ignored this issues and consequently failed in the marketplace, chasing after nonexistent users. But instead they decided to pivot. They wrote off the sunk costs in the first option, including a considerable amount of interoperability code that Ries had written himself. And they reformed their strategy.

But they didn’t capitulate – they synthesized their vision with what the customers would accept. That synthesis involved changing the product, of course, but also the process and internal structure of the company. Ries instituted a set of continual feedback metrics to better regulate this synthesis, building a product and service that helped users discover needs they didn’t know they had. As Ries put it:

We adopted the view that our job was to find a synthesis between our vision and what customers would accept; it wasn’t to capitulate to what customers thought they wanted or to tell customers what they ought to want. (Reis 2011, p.50)

It worked. The flat growth became steep growth. And Ries developed a set of techniques for establishing continuous feedback and improvement in startups. These include qualitative and quantitative measures, but also guidance on when and how to pivot. It's a fascinating book: fascinating as in well written and interesting to read, but also fascinating as in sparking ideas for innovating quickly and interpreting feedback on a fast cycle. If you're involved in startups, software development, or other fast-paced innovation, read it.

Reading :: What Technology Wants

What Technology Wants
By Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired, wrote this 2010 book as a meditation on how technology has developed and how it might develop autonomously. He coins the term technium to delineate what he's examining:

The technium exists beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections. (pp.11-12) 

"Technium" is thus a very broad term, essentially covering civilization from the first use of language onward. That breadth allows Kelly to argue that

after 10,000 years of slow evolution and 200 years of incredible intricate exfoliation, the technium is maturing into its own thing. Its sustaining network of self-reinforcing processes and parts have given it a noticeable measure of autonomy. It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges. (pp.12-13)

The Latour fans out there may warm to the notion that Kelly is embracing a form of symmetry, seeing nonhumans in the same way that he sees humans. But that's not Kelly's viewpoint. This is not an ontological text.

Rather, Kelly is actually arguing that the technium - in which we are important but minority partners - is evolving as an organism (not as an actor-network). He makes his argument by starting with homo sapiens's discovery of language (Ch.2) and moving on through various stages of technology. Based on this discussion, he proposes that evolution's triad of vectors - functional (adaptive), structural (inevitable), and historical (contingent) (p.123) - is matched by a triad of vectors for technological evolution: intentional (open), structural (inevitable), and historical (contingent) (p.183). Indeed, he strongly argues that inventions seem to be inevitable at certain periods, and selects a number of examples of inventions that appeared at different points on the globe at roughly the same time. (The examples don't include what I would consider to be the most important and germane one, writing, which was invented only three times in the world's history, at very different times.)

Kelly, then, makes a very insistent argument for a teleological understanding of technological change, one in which we will be surpassed by and (Kelly hopes) integrated with our technological creations. It strongly reminds me of Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Unfortunately, I don't think the book's argument holds together well. At many points - such as Kelly's argument that technological inventions pop up at roughly the same time across the globe - evidence is thin and seems cherry-picked. We don't get to see many counterarguments or concessions. Since Kelly's claim is extraordinary, we might expect some extraordinary proof, including a better explanation of why technological change could occur similarly in very different places under very different conditions - and neither the strong proof nor the strong explanation are forthcoming. Due to these issues, I can recommend What Technology Wants as an interesting, engaging, and thought-provoking read, but I can't say that it lives up to its claims.

(someday I will blog again)

I see that it's been over a month since I blogged last, and even longer since I blogged a book review. This makes me sad. But I've fallen behind because (a) I've been reading books that don't relate as deeply into my core scholarship, so I haven't felt so compelled to write about them and (b) I've been even busier than usual.

As a result, I have about 5-6 books that I need to review. (That's not all I've read, just all I plan to review.)  Those include a book I finished this summer. Hopefully I'll get to these over the break.

MA in activity theory

A remarkable opportunity. From Yrjo Engestrom:

Dear Colleagues,
The next round of selection of students for our Master's Degree Program in Adult Education and Developmental Work Research (entirely conducted in English) starts today, the 21st of November. The application period will end on the 31st of January, 2012. For those who are not familiar with the Finnish education system, we would like to emphasize that high quality university training in this country is free of charge (there are no tuitions) for all students, including those coming from abroad. 

The Master's Degree Program in Adult Education and Developmental Work Research is based on cultural-historical activity theory and trains competent developers and interventionists in workplaces, organizations and other communities. The program selects 12 students every second year to ensure close individual supervision and collaboration in a compact academic community. 

The program was launced in 2006 and is based on the 20-year tradition of developmental work research conducted in the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning CRADLE at the Institute of  Behavioural Sciences (IBS) of University of Helsinki. This is an interventionist research approach rooted in the legacy of Vygotsky and Leont'ev and internationally recognized as an innovative framework to study work and learning. During their studies students are typically involved in research and development projects conducted in the CRADLE and in its partner organizations. 

Please circulate this call and encourage students to apply. 

For more information, see:
http://www.helsinki.fi/atmo/brochure_2011.pdf andhttp://www.helsinki.fi/atmo/ 

With kind regards, 

Yrjö Engeström      Reijo Miettinen     Annalisa Sannino     Anne Vierros

CFP: Connexions Issue 1

If you're an academic interested in professional communication, especially in an international context, I encourage you to consider this CFP for Connexions.

Excerpt:

The first issue of connexions • international professional communication journal | revista de comunicação profissional internacional aims at examining the field from your point of view on

• the past, present, and foreseeable future of the practice, research, and teaching of international professional communication, in local, national, international, and global contexts,

• and/or

• how the practice, research, and teaching of international professional communication has reacted to changes in context, and acted upon its contexts, in different parts of the world.

Reading :: Street Corner Society

Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian SlumBy William Foote Whyte

My family has been considered white since before I was born - probably since about 1960. But it was not always so. When my parents decided to get married in the mid-1950s, my father's family called my mother "the white woman" (she is of Northern European extract). Her family similarly didn't consider an Italian-American to be white.

I thought about this bit of family history when I read the classic ethnography Street Corner Society, set in the Italian slum of "Cornerville" (in reality a neighborhood in Boston) in 1937-1938. These Italian-Americans were decidedly not considered "white" by others or by themselves. Furthermore, they formed more fine-grained strata within the community. As Whyte describes it, this slum was populated by an older generation of Italian immigrants ("greasers") and their American-born children, who are "strongly attached to their parents, and yet they look down on them" (p.xviii). These immigrant families came from various regions in Italy, with the lowest-rank region being Sicily. (The name Spinuzzi is Sicilian.)

At the height of the Depression, these young Italian-Americans had trouble finding work, so they spent much time hanging around on corners - in gangs at younger ages, but as they grew older, in informal groups or more formal societies.

Whyte took advantage of a fellowship by living in Cornerville and spending most of his waking time with these men, who were in their late 20s. The result is a classic sociological ethnography that, despite its flaws, holds great insights.

First, the insights. Whyte, a careful student of human interactions, begins to detect patterns of status and mutual obligations in the groups, clubs, and societies he frequents. For instance, Doc, his main informant was the leader of The Nortons. As leader, he had to meet heavier obligations than lower-rank, less capable members. In fact, Doc, though he had no job, often spent his free money on helping lower-status members.

But leadership does have its privileges. To his surprise, Whyte realizes that the men's bowling scores closely track the men's current rank in the group - to the extent that a low-ranking member who is an excellent bowler in other contexts would bowl poorly against higher-ranking members, apparently despite himself. Furthermore, someone who loses status bowls progressively worse against lower-ranking members.

Whyte studies a drama club, a social club, a local political club, and (from a distance) racketeering, and sees these sorts of rank relations throughout. But in each context he gains fresh insights. For instance, in racketeering, he realizes that in Cornerville, "the primary function of the police department is not the enforcement of the law but the regulation of illegal activities" (p.138).

In politics, Whyte draws out some of the ethnic tensions in Cornerville's relations with the rest of the city. For instance, one Cornerville man tries to persuade another to vote for his preferred candidate, who is also Italian-American: "Why not give a Wop a chance?" (p.161). Elsewhere, an Irish-American politician complains to Whyte that "the Italians will always vote for one of their own," even if they claim they will vote for another candidate: "The Italian people are very undependable," and hard to hold to account because "You can't tell one Italian from another" (p.195). Indeed, Whyte concludes elsewhere that "the Italians are looked upon by upper-class people as among the least desirable of the immigrant peoples" (p.273).

No wonder that, as Whyte relates in his retrospective appendix, Saul Alinsky loved the book (p.358).

This version of the book, the 50th anniversary version, has three appendices. The first is a retrospective in which Whyte discusses the book's reception and impact, its criticisms, and a bit of his methodology. He also reveals the real name of the community he studied and the names of his informants, who had all passed away by that point, and he describes discussions he had had with them about the book. These are all interesting, but raise some important questions about Whyte's work.

Recall that Whyte studied Cornerville as a junior fellow at Harvard, before beginning his PhD work. He quickly fell in with his main informant, Doc, the 29-year-old leader of the Nortons. Doc was by his accounts upright and honest, but also very savvy about maintaining leadership. Doc also, Whyte reveals, read and commented on every line of Whyte's manuscript.

Doc doesn't come off as a completely strong leader in the manuscript, which frankly describes some of his failures and loss of rank. But he generally comes off better than, say, Chick, an aspiring politician who is his main rival. Revealingly, Whyte describes a talk he had with Chick years after the book's publication. Chick is unhappy with his portrayal, and tells Whyte that Doc vocally agreed with him the last time the two had talked. Whyte is startled at first, but realizes that of course Doc would say that: he has to deal with Chick and probably doesn't want to admit that he knew about the portrayal beforehand.

A less charitable interpretation is that Doc steered Whyte's account to damage his rival, while maintaining deniability.

Nevertheless, Whyte's book is really exceptional. The references are very thin - something that apparently caused controversy on Whyte's dissertation committee - but the study is well told and well textured. Despite my less charitable interpretation, no one really comes off very badly in the story, even the racketeers. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: The Penguin and the Leviathan

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-InterestBy Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler's previous book, The Wealth of Networks, was an academic book about how peer production works. This one is a popular book that explores the related question of how peer production and similar cooperative enterprises can work, since they seem to contradict the seemingly natural impulse of self-interest. As Benkler points out, this assumption of rational self-interest underpins so many things that we take for granted: in economics, rational choice theory; in law, harsh punishments; in business, top-down hierarchies; in government, the Leviathan. Yet, Benkler argues, cooperation is deeply ingrained in us and can serve to revolutionize all of these areas.

Benkler's examples are familiar to anyone who has read others' books in this vein, such as The Starfish and the Spider and What's Mine is Yours. (I confess that I thought: again with Linux, Zipcar, and Toyota? Surely there are other examples.) But Benkler covers new ground by delving into the nature/culture debate, describing evolutionary as well as cultural roots of cooperation; psychological and social influences; empathy; fairness; and morals. That is, Benkler follows themes of cooperation through several disciplines.

The result is a fine popular contribution. But in covering so many disciplines, Benkler spreads his argument too thin. For instance, he touches on the nature-nurture debate that stretched through the entire 20th century, but doesn't engage in it deeply except to summarily conclude that both are influences. Similarly, his discussion of psychological and social influences hinge on the notion of Goffman's work with frame, but he doesn't do much with that notion besides demonstrating that when people see the same task within competing frames, they perceive it differently. In these, and in the other chapters, Benkler takes relatively narrow conversations happening within a given discipline and characterizes these conversations as what those disciplines have discovered about cooperation. Obviously he has to gloss if he's going to apply all of these disciplines to one topic in one book - but that's a very thin gloss. I would have preferred much more hedging and, well, framing.

However, Benkler does manage to counteract so many of the obvious yet flawed objections to peer production, objections predicated on a view of humanity as simply selfish or self-interested. If you deal with people who roll their eyes at the notion of open source software or who caution you not to look at Wikipedia because "anyone could write anything there," this might be the right book to give them.

Reading :: Patterns of Culture

Patterns of Culture
By Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict's 1934 classic Patterns of Culture deserves a more detailed review than this one, but unfortunately I don't have that review in me right now. It's an interesting book, strongly taking the side of culture in the nature-vs.-culture debate that raged throughout the 1930s: "Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex," she argues (p.14), particularly for human beings, who are marvelously plastic. But cultures do have larger tendencies, larger patterns, that show up in individual actions and gestures (p.79).

Indeed, Benedict argues, we can think of cultures as broadly Dionysian (seeking to annihilate bounds and limits and "break through into another order of experience" through excess, pp.78-79) and Apollonian (seeking to reinforce and follow bounds, p.79). She illustrates these two sorts of cultures with extended discussions of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Dobu of New Guinea, and the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island. All of these accounts are fascinating.

"The three cultures ... are not merely heterogeneous assortments of acts and beliefs," she asserts in Chapter VII. "They have each certain goals toward which their behaviour is directed and which their institutions further" (p.223). She adds that these cultures are essentially incommensurable (p.223).

But, she adds, "it would be absurd to cut every culture down to the Procrustean bed of some catchword characterization" (p.228). "Facile generalizations about the integration of culture are most dangerous in field-work. ... None of the people we have discussed in this volume were studied in the field with any preconception of a consistent type of behaviour which that culture illustrated" (p.229). Indeed, the discussed characterizations are not types, she says, but rather "each one is an empirical characterization, and probably is not duplicated in its entirety anywhere else in the world" (p.238).

Benedict goes on at some length in this vein in Ch. VII. That's a relief, since that's what I took her project to be up to this point in the book. But the number of times she goes over this point makes me wonder if that's the reaction she originally received when she shopped around the manuscript. I would have liked it better if she had been able to integrate this clear point much more thoroughly earlier in the book, especially in pp.78-79 and throughout the three cases, so that we didn't receive this impression at the outset.

In any case, the book is certainly worth reading as an anthropological classic. But in terms of careful explication and analysis, I was not entirely impressed.

Reading :: Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom

Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases
By Mary Lay Schuster and Amy D. Propen

Over the last few years, the two authors have written some important articles on domestic violence and child protection cases in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. These articles are really quite strong, describing the cloud of different advocates, volunteers, and texts that surround the courtroom in these chaotic, emotionally charged cases. And in this book, the authors summarize their three-year study of Victim Impact Statements, including interviews with judges and advocates, analysis of models and sample VISes, and courtroom observations.

The book builds on and amplifies the work of the previously published articles. Here, the authors take us on a tour of these difficult cases, introducing us to the judges, advocates, victims, and defendants; the many genres that accompany each stage of the process; the competing interests; the tangled practices; and the standards of proof used to make decisions. We feel sympathy for the victims and their families, but - and here I think the authors are to be commended - we begin to feel some sympathy even for the defendants, who may have given in to poor impulse control and now face the possibility of losing their kids forever. We also become to understand the difficult, conflicted jobs of the judge and the court-appointed special advocates, who must determine the best course of action from what are sometimes a set of unappealing alternatives. After reading this book, I began to understand how difficult and complicated such work is, how genres and practices help to structure and guide it, and how families are affected by it. If you're interested in the court system or genre studies, take a look.

Reading :: Tristes Tropiques

Tristes Tropiques
By Claude Levi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques is Claude Levi-Strauss' memoir. It's a remarkable book for a number of reasons, not least because Levi-Strauss sees the humor and vanity in every human connection. At many points, the book made me laugh out loud - remarkable, since the book begins with Levi-Strauss fleeing Nazi-occupied France and attempting to make it through US bureaucracy with his ethnographic materials. From this scene, Levi-Strauss' previous journeys to South America are told in flashbacks, flashbacks that unfortunately never quite bring us back to the original scene. The book lacks closure, both in this large sense and in the smaller encounters he describes with Brazilian aristocrats, South American missionaries, various Native American tribes, and informants in India.

The encounters with the Native American tribes were the most interesting ones for me. Levi-Strauss describes himself as a once-idealistic, but eventually cynical and crafty, ethnologist who must use his wiles to extract information and avoid being exploited by his informants. At one point, he makes a gift of bolts of red flannel to a nomadic tribe; when he wakes up the next day, they are all covered from head to foot in flannel, men, women, children, even pets. By midday they tire of the flannel and leave it on the ground. This inspires a hatred of red flannel in him, and he trades away the rest of the bolts as soon as possible. At another point, the chief of another tribe admires his aluminum pot and offers to trade it for a large supply of (loosely speaking) beer. After Levi-Strauss refuses, the chief smiles and simply takes the pot. After encounters like these, Levi-Strauss begins using his own tricks: in one tribe, it is forbidden for outsiders to know members' names, but he realizes that he can get children to tell him each others' names by provoking fights between them.

More interesting to me was what Levi-Strauss did not cover. Levi-Strauss conducted many of these visits with his wife, but she rates only one mention in his book - when she had to be evacuated due to an injury. Up to this point, Levi-Strauss had described his visits with the tribes as if he were the only anthropologist on the expedition!

Levi-Strauss is a marvelous writer, but there's something a little too neat about his interpretations. For instance, he notes that the face tattoos in one tribe are similar to the arrangement of huts in another tribe, and he postulates that the tattoos are a subconscious yearning for the other tribe's arrangements. At other points, he makes similar leaps.

Toward the end of the book, rather than returning to the opening scene, Levi-Strauss compares and discusses religions. At one point, which is perhaps more shocking in 2011 than it was in 1955, Levi-Strauss claims that religions have devolved into more and more controlling forms, with their early pinnacle being Buddhism and their late nadir being Islam. The book ends with the sort of contemplation about the future of mankind that was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s.

Overall, the book was highly interesting and entertaining. It gave me new insights into Levi-Strauss, provided more context into his anthropological work, but didn't necessarily give me a lot of faith in his methods. Nevertheless, it's a terrific read. Pick it up and take a look.

Reading :: Linked

Linked
By Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

A while back, Mark Zachry, who knew of my interest in networks, recommended that I read this book. It's a popular book that overviews "the new science of networks," which is to say, network analysis. Needless to say, it's fascinating.

Network analysis shouldn't be confused with networked organizations (e.g., Castells; Arquilla & Ronfeldt) or sociotechnical networks (e.g., Engestrom; Miettinen; Latour; Callon; see my second book). Rather, it's a way of examining how any particular type of node connects with other nodes. It has a strong mathematical component. And although it can be applied to people (as in social network analysis), it can also be applied to atoms, bits, citations, bus terminals - anything that can be conceived as a class or type, then connected to others of the same class/type.

Barabasi does a terrific job of describing how network analysis has developed as it is applied in different fields and to different problems. Along the way, he discusses concepts such as emerging clusters, hubs and connectors, small worlds, and power laws. Due to his clarity and examples, he illuminated several things for me about network analysis - and particularly its differences with, and strengths and weaknesses in comparison with, networked organizations and social network analysis.

If you're interested in networks under any of these headings, I strongly recommend this readable book.

Present Tense 2.1 is out

Present Tense 2.1 is out. Essays look pretty interesting, especially Brian McNely's essay on sociotechnical notemaking.

Come see me at Lavacon

All, but especially business types: I'll be presenting soon at The LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies, which is November 13–16, 2011 in beautiful Austin, Texas.

And I mean beautiful: highs are usually in the 70s F in November. Great conference weather.

But Lavacon looks like a thing of beauty too. My session is "What Makes Nimble Organizations Work?" I'll be drawing from my recent case studies on nimble organizations, including a search marketing company, independent contractors, and coworkers, and discussing six characteristics that make these nimble organizations work so well.

When you register, use the referral code “spinuzzi” to receive $100 off. Hope to see you there.

So far behind...

I have at least six books on the shelf waiting to be reviewed. They'll have to wait a while longer as I clear out the projects to which I have (over)committed. That's too bad, because some of these books are terrific. Look for reviews in October.

2012 Qualitative Research Network

 If you're planning to go to the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, consider checking out the Qualitative Research Network:

QRN 2012 will be held Wednesday, March 21 from 1:30 to 5:00 at the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, Missouri.  

The QRN provides mentoring and support to qualitative researchers at all levels of experience and working in diverse areas of study within the college composition and communication community. As a pre-conference research network, the QRN is open to everyone, including those who are already presenting at the conference in other venues. 

The first hour of QRN 2012 will feature a keynote address by Paul Prior titled “Refining theory and methods through qualitative research: Tales from the field." The rest of the workshop will feature research roundtables where novice and experienced researchers will have twenty to thirty minutes to present their work-in-progress for feedback and discussion. Experienced qualitative researchers will be on hand at each table to offer suggestions and facilitate discussion.

In the CFP, they say:

We encourage submissions from those at any stage of the research process (e.g., planning,
data collecting, data analyzing, publishing). 

Please send via email a brief description (approximately 500 words) of your research proposal by October 11 to both Gwen Gorzelsky (g.gorzelsky@wayne.edu) and Kevin Roozen (roozekr@auburn.edu), Co-Chairs, Qualitative Research Network.

TCQ special issue - Contemporary Research Methodologies in Technical Communication

All you long-range planners in technical communication, please consider writing a proposal for the TCQ special issue that Brian McNely, Christa Teston and I are putting together.

Proposals are due by February 15th, 2013; scheduled publication date is January, 2015.

That's a long lead time - but it means that you can start thinking about ideas now. And you can encourage your graduate students to do the same.

Questions? Please email Brian McNely (bjmcnely@bsu.edu).

Update: Bad link fixed.

A Ph.D. in activity theory

I just received email from Yrjo Engestrom about the Doctoral Program on Developmental Work Research and Adult Education (DWRAE) offered in Finland. If you're passionate about AT and thinking about doctoral work, it could be a fantastic opportunity.

One other thing: "Note also that our doctoral program is free of charge."

I would like to inform you about our Doctoral Program on Developmental Work Research and Adult Education (DWRAE) which is now open for applications for the class of 2012. I am asking you to spread the word about this program, especially among students who might be interested to study activity theory in a focused, ambitious and supportive context. 

This is an interdisciplinary four-year doctoral program based on cultural-historical activity theory and developmental work research methodology. Located in the Institute of Behavioural Sciences at University of Helsinki, Finland, the program has functioned since 1995 and we have produced 31 PhDs in this period. The application period for our program has started on the 22nd of August and will end on the 7th of October. Please check the web pages of the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Education and Learning (FiDPEL) for the details of the application procedure:http://www.edu.utu.fi/sivustot/kasva/en/call/ 

Within the FiDPEL pages, you will also find the pages devoted to our own sub-program:http://edu.utu.fi/sivustot/kasva/en/subprogrammes/dwrae/ 

In these pages, you will also find a document titled “How we work in the doctoral program”. This document will give you quite detailed information about the pedagogical principles and practical arrangements of our program. The program in entirely conducted in English. The first two years are structured around four semester-long seminars, focused on foundations of activity theory, research design and methodology, data analysis, and discussion with relevant alternative theories, respectively. Our program puts a strong emphasis on community building and collaborative work in research groups. Acivity systems and their transformations are often studied by means of formative interventions, such as the Change Laboratory. 

Please visit also the web pages of our Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE):http://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/index.htm 

The CRADLE is responsible for the design and running of the Doctoral Program on Developmental Work Research and Adult Education. Therefore, it may be useful for you to read about the ongoing research in the CRADLE. 

Note also that our doctoral program is free of charge. A limited number of fully funded four-year positions are available. In addition, we regularly admit a significant number of doctoral students who obtain funding form various other sources, e.g., in the form of grants, research assistantships, or partial salary from their employers. An important Finnish source of this kind of funding is CIMO; please see the web pages on their scholarships:http://www.cimo.fi/programmes/cimo_scholarships

Sign up for ATTW's Research Methods Workshop

This looks like a great opportunity if you're planning a research project on writing - and you want the advice of some of the best in the field. 

ATTW 2012 Research Methods WorkshopsMarch 20, 2012 12:30-4:00Scholarships Available!

The Research Methods Workshops are an initiative of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) aimed at providing an opportunity for those entering the profession and those less trained in research to develop more sophisticated research skills.  

This year, ATTW is sponsoring two Research Methods Workshops: 

• Ellen Barton, Wayne State University, on Analyzing Data from Complex Institutional Contexts, and 
• Jason Swarts, North Carolina State University, on Tracing Networks of Discourse.

 These two half-day workshops will be held in St Louis on Tuesday afternoon, March 20, 12:30-4:30.  This is the day preceding the ATTW conference (March 21) and the CCCC conference (March 21-24).

Each workshop focuses on a methodology for data analysis and is designed to help researchers with data devise and try out an analytic approach. 

Analyzing Data from Complex Institutional Contexts with Ellen Barton focuses on using research questions to select appropriate samples and develop coding schemes for data from institutions such as hospitals, universities, R&D labs, and government agencies. 

Tracing Networks of Discourse with Jason Swarts focuses on analyzing discursive activity in distributed networked settings using Actor Network Theory. 

Complete descriptions of these workshops can be found at: 

• Barton: http://www.attw.org/?q=node/193  
• Swarts: http://www.attw.org/?q=node/194  

Registration for each workshop is $100.  Ten scholarships of $200 each are available to graduate students to defray the cost of the workshop and hotel.  

Participation in these workshops is awarded on a competitive basis and constitutes a place on the ATTW program.  

To apply for a place in one of these workshops, complete the application form found at http://www.attw.org/?q=node/195 and send it along with a 1-page description of your project to cgeisler@sfu.ca. Applications are due October 15, 2011 and acceptances will emailed to you by Dec 1. 

Questions about these workshops can be directed to Cheryl Geisler (cgeisler@sfu.ca), Chair of the ATTW Committee on Research.