My article "Toward a Typology of Activities: Understanding Internal Contradictions in Multiperspectival Activities" was recently named 2016 Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication. That's the old news.
The new news: To celebrate, the Journal of Business and Technical Communication has made it a free download for the next six months.
Grab it!
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Reading: Contemporary Field Research
Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings
By Robert M. Emerson
Just a quick review of this book, which is an older edition. The editor presents a series of classic readings on fieldwork, grouped in these sections:
By Robert M. Emerson
Just a quick review of this book, which is an older edition. The editor presents a series of classic readings on fieldwork, grouped in these sections:
- "Ethnography and understanding members' worlds"
- "Theory and evidence in field research"
- "Relational and personal processes in fieldwork"
- "Ethical and political issues in field research"
The authors are the usual suspects. The first chapter is that same piece by Geertz that you have undoubtedly read; Kathy Charmaz, Michael Bloor, Rosalie Wax, and John Van Maanen also make appearances. But the book deftly puts their pieces into dialogue, thanks especially to the editor's introductions to each section. The result is a valuable set of meditations on different aspects of fieldwork.
Although my review of this book is pretty thin, if you are interested in the details and complications of fieldwork, check it out.
Reading :: The Mind of a Mnemonist
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory
By A.R. Luria
As mentioned in the previous review, A.R. Luria began publishing quite a bit after Stalin's death. Beyond his scholarly work, he also wrote two popular books that became internationally known: The Man with a Shattered World and this one, The Mind of a Mnemonist.
A mnemonist, of course, is someone who remembers things—and the subject of this book becomes well known as a performer who is asked to memorize tables of numbers, details, and nonsense syllables. But we meet him when he is a humble journalist whose editor sends him to see Vygotsky and Luria. The editor noticed that this journalist would never write down the details of his assignments, but always seemed to remember them. And the journalist was puzzled that this should be so remarkable.
Luria recounts testing the man's memory with tables of numbers, growing more astonished as he repeated the numbers back effortlessly—not just right to left, but also left to right, down to up, and diagonally. What's even more remarkable is that decades later the man could call back the same tables from those initial tests; his memories did not seem to decay.
What made this man's memory so different? Based on extended testing and interviews, Luria surmises that it's partly due to the man's pronounced synesthesia and partly to the fact that he processes memories as detailed visual images. He also developed techniques that leveraged these unique natural abilities.
But, Luria adds, this ability also shaped the man's life and personality. He was "disheveled," often "disorganized," and had trouble relating to other people.
Like The Man with a Shattered World, this book provides a sympathetic portrait of an extraordinary person and allows us to better understand the individual as a developed personality. It's a fun, fast read that will make you think differently about memory and thought.
By A.R. Luria
As mentioned in the previous review, A.R. Luria began publishing quite a bit after Stalin's death. Beyond his scholarly work, he also wrote two popular books that became internationally known: The Man with a Shattered World and this one, The Mind of a Mnemonist.
A mnemonist, of course, is someone who remembers things—and the subject of this book becomes well known as a performer who is asked to memorize tables of numbers, details, and nonsense syllables. But we meet him when he is a humble journalist whose editor sends him to see Vygotsky and Luria. The editor noticed that this journalist would never write down the details of his assignments, but always seemed to remember them. And the journalist was puzzled that this should be so remarkable.
Luria recounts testing the man's memory with tables of numbers, growing more astonished as he repeated the numbers back effortlessly—not just right to left, but also left to right, down to up, and diagonally. What's even more remarkable is that decades later the man could call back the same tables from those initial tests; his memories did not seem to decay.
What made this man's memory so different? Based on extended testing and interviews, Luria surmises that it's partly due to the man's pronounced synesthesia and partly to the fact that he processes memories as detailed visual images. He also developed techniques that leveraged these unique natural abilities.
But, Luria adds, this ability also shaped the man's life and personality. He was "disheveled," often "disorganized," and had trouble relating to other people.
Like The Man with a Shattered World, this book provides a sympathetic portrait of an extraordinary person and allows us to better understand the individual as a developed personality. It's a fun, fast read that will make you think differently about memory and thought.
Reading: The Man with a Shattered World
The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound
By A.R. Luria
A.R. Luria led an interesting life: he was an early member of the Vygotsky Circle, conducted an early cross-cultural psychology study, invented an early version of the lie detector, and became a leader in neuropsychology. Like many in psychology, he published relatively little during the Stalin years, then became prolific once Stalin died. Among his works is this one, written for an international lay audience.
I won't go deeply into this story, which is of a Russian army officer who sustained a gunshot to his head while fighting the Nazis. The resulting wound to the posterior parieto-occipital regions of the brain meant that he had extreme trouble combining his sensory impressions into a coherent whole: "He is aware of his own body and senses both his arms and his legs, though he cannot tell his right from his left" (p.31). He loses the ability to read, to write, to locate parts of his own body, to recognize his own hometown.
Much of the book details his struggle to rehabilitate—in his own words. One day, the officer discovered that if he looked away from the paper and just attempted to write a word—rather than spell it out—he often could. As Luria says, "For adults, writing is an automatic skill, a series of built-in movements which I call 'kinetic melodies'"—that is, operations in the parlance of activity theory (p.72). The officer still had those "kinetic melodies" and could invoke them. And over the rest of his life, the officer wrote over a thousand pages: rarely more than a page a day, and in a script that he himself was almost unable to read.
Luria expresses admiration for this officer and his attempts at self-rehabilitiation, which paid off enough for him to tell his story. But he also uses the case to lucidly explain the effects of such a brain injury. If you're interested in neuropsychology, or if you're just interested in how complex our perception is and how easily it can be shattered, take a look.
By A.R. Luria
A.R. Luria led an interesting life: he was an early member of the Vygotsky Circle, conducted an early cross-cultural psychology study, invented an early version of the lie detector, and became a leader in neuropsychology. Like many in psychology, he published relatively little during the Stalin years, then became prolific once Stalin died. Among his works is this one, written for an international lay audience.
I won't go deeply into this story, which is of a Russian army officer who sustained a gunshot to his head while fighting the Nazis. The resulting wound to the posterior parieto-occipital regions of the brain meant that he had extreme trouble combining his sensory impressions into a coherent whole: "He is aware of his own body and senses both his arms and his legs, though he cannot tell his right from his left" (p.31). He loses the ability to read, to write, to locate parts of his own body, to recognize his own hometown.
Much of the book details his struggle to rehabilitate—in his own words. One day, the officer discovered that if he looked away from the paper and just attempted to write a word—rather than spell it out—he often could. As Luria says, "For adults, writing is an automatic skill, a series of built-in movements which I call 'kinetic melodies'"—that is, operations in the parlance of activity theory (p.72). The officer still had those "kinetic melodies" and could invoke them. And over the rest of his life, the officer wrote over a thousand pages: rarely more than a page a day, and in a script that he himself was almost unable to read.
Luria expresses admiration for this officer and his attempts at self-rehabilitiation, which paid off enough for him to tell his story. But he also uses the case to lucidly explain the effects of such a brain injury. If you're interested in neuropsychology, or if you're just interested in how complex our perception is and how easily it can be shattered, take a look.
Reading :: Studies on the History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child
Studies on the History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child
By L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria
I first picked this book up at Iowa State as a graduate student, but I quickly put it down: although I had been fascinated by Vygotsky's other books, this book's focus on apes did not appeal to me much. But twenty years makes a big difference: now, with a better grounding in the work of the Vygotsky Circle, I see great value in the book.
To be sure, that value overlaps with those of Vygotsky's and Luria's other writings. But in some ways, this book is more clearly written and more concisely argued than those more widely-read sources. In fact, the book's structure helps us to better understand the essential Vygotskian argument that human cognition is essentially social; it explains the cultural-historical approach in terms of a progression. At the same time, for 21st-century readers, this claimed progression has blind spots that suggest an important critique of Vygotskian thought.
First, the progression. The book consists of a thin author's introduction and three thick chapters:
Readers will note that the account of labor is linked to Engels' account of evolution in Dialectics of Nature, which later became the cornerstone of Leontyev's activity theory. This account became an article of faith in the USSR. But Vygotsky and Luria handle this basic account with perhaps more nuance than Engels does.
In Chapter 1, the authors review Kohler's work in detail, then interpret it from the view of Marx and Engels. First, they claim that although apes can use tools, they have not yet developed labor: "Use of tools in the absence of labor is what draws the behavior of man and ape closer and at the same time separates them" (p.74; as a side note, compare Gen. 3:17-19, which also portrays labor as a uniquely human pursuit, but with a more negative valence). The authors, as good Marxists, argue that "quantitative differences may transform into qualitative ones," and tools thus change the very nature of man—although they don't do this for apes or other animals (p.74). Here, the authors cite Engels' account of human development through labor, adding that labor is an "adaption to nature, foreign to apes" (p.75).
Apes use tools to manipulate conditions, the authors say, but man uses signs to control his own behavior—and "this constitutes the essence of the cultural development of man's behavior" (p.77).
This brings us to the second chapter, in which the authors draw on what we might consider sketchy anthropology to argue that (a) current "primitive" people can serve as a proxy for the people in our past development and (b) these "primitives" are at a lower level of development (p.82). They appeal to the aforementioned work by Levy-Bruhl for these points. But they also treat "primitives" more sympathetically than one might expect, understanding these people as fully equal agents, but whose cultural tools have not provided the structure to perform certain actions. Specifically, the authors claim that nonliterate peoples tend to develop better eidetic memory (e.g., p.99), while literate peoples tend to rely more heavily on artificial signs to do this work and thus allow their eidetic abilities to atrophy (p.101). They argue that in the absence of artificial signs, nonliterate peoples' "language loads thought down with endless details and particulars and does not process the data of experiences"; the examples from Wertheimer and Thurnwald (p.111) sound quite similar to those Luria later reported from his Uzbekistan trip. Some of the later work in this chapter deals with the development of word usage in associations and complexes, similar to the discussion in Vygotsky's Thought and Language.
As interesting is the discussion of numeric operations: the authors claim (sensibly, I think) that "our system of calculation counts for us" (p.130)—that is, our cultural tools provide a system that changes the task and shares the load, an idea that has been developed considerably. Similarly, the authors quote Bucher's description of Borneo digging sticks, which are composed of a big stick (for digging) and a little stick (which clicks with each stroke): the authors say, "This sound, being something like a work cry or a command, has the purpose of rhythmically organizing work" (p.138).
And this brings us to the third chapter and the authors' own work. The authors revisit Engels' story of evolution through labor (p.170), then move to the question of memory—mediated and unmediated. In their experiments, children past a certain age were first tested in terms of natural memory, then given mediators and tested again. They tended to do better in mediated tasks, not because their natural memory improved, but because they could substitute the mediator for their own memory (p.180). "Developing culturally, a child gains the opportunity to create himself those stimuli that in the future will influence him, organize his behavior, and attract his attention" (p.189).
Yet, as the authors demonstrate with a discussion of the famous forbidden colors experiment (pp.190-192), these mediators can be internalized—an analogue to the numeric system that "counts for us" in Chapter 2. "Upon closer examination we are convined that the process of attention still remained indirect; although instead of externally indirect, it became internally indirect" (p.192). That is, children's natural memory did not improve; instead, they internalized psychological tools that changed and systematized the task.
The authors also discuss the so-called Vygotsky blocks (pp.193-199) as a way to explore how children developed abstraction.
Ultimately, the authors conclude that the difference between natural and cultural ability was crucial. They argue for a better understanding of cultural giftedness:
In conclusion, the book is fascinating and valuable. It is in some ways not as developed as other work by the authors, and the discussion of primitives did not endear it to me, but it explains some of the Vygostky Circle's work more clearly than other texts I have read. If you're interested in cultural-historical psychology, definitely pick it up.
By L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria
I first picked this book up at Iowa State as a graduate student, but I quickly put it down: although I had been fascinated by Vygotsky's other books, this book's focus on apes did not appeal to me much. But twenty years makes a big difference: now, with a better grounding in the work of the Vygotsky Circle, I see great value in the book.
To be sure, that value overlaps with those of Vygotsky's and Luria's other writings. But in some ways, this book is more clearly written and more concisely argued than those more widely-read sources. In fact, the book's structure helps us to better understand the essential Vygotskian argument that human cognition is essentially social; it explains the cultural-historical approach in terms of a progression. At the same time, for 21st-century readers, this claimed progression has blind spots that suggest an important critique of Vygotskian thought.
First, the progression. The book consists of a thin author's introduction and three thick chapters:
- Chapter 1: Behavior of the Anthropoid Ape
- Chapter 2: Primitive and His Behavior
- Chapter 3: The Child and Its Behavior
The first two chapters are based respectively on the works of the primatologist Kohler and the "ethnic psychology" of Levy-Bruhl and others. The third is based on the authors' own work.
As the authors state in the introduction,
All three essays are united by one idea, that is, the idea of development. Their aim is to schematically present the path of psychological evolution from the ape to the cultural man. (p.36, their emphasis)Each essay deals with
only one dominating feature or aspect of behavior, namely the one that, like a compass arrow, points from a certain starting point to a new direction and path in the development of behavior. Our task was to portray three main lines in the development of behavior—evolutionary, historical, and ontogenetic—and to show that the behavior of cultural man is the product of the three lines of development and may be understood and explained only by analyzing the three different paths that make up the history of human behavior. (p.36, their emphasis)The authors argue that behavioral development was initially evolutionary—in the sense of the physical evolution of an organism—but when anthropoid apes invented tools, they took a new path, "creating thereby the main psychological prerequisite of historical development of behavior" (p.37, their emphasis). This historical development was labor, which involved "the development of human speech and other psychological signs used by primitive man to gain control over behavior" (p.37, my bold emphasis). And in child development, they saw a third line of development: "the cultural development of behavior based on the acquisition of skills and modes of cultural behavior and thinking" (p.37). "Thus we have concentrated on the turning points, the critical stages in the development of behavior," the authors add: first tools, then "labor and the use of psychological signs," then the child's cultural-psychological development as opposed to natural development (p.37). Each "process of development dialectically prepares for the next one, transforming and changing into a new type of development" (p.38).
Readers will note that the account of labor is linked to Engels' account of evolution in Dialectics of Nature, which later became the cornerstone of Leontyev's activity theory. This account became an article of faith in the USSR. But Vygotsky and Luria handle this basic account with perhaps more nuance than Engels does.
In Chapter 1, the authors review Kohler's work in detail, then interpret it from the view of Marx and Engels. First, they claim that although apes can use tools, they have not yet developed labor: "Use of tools in the absence of labor is what draws the behavior of man and ape closer and at the same time separates them" (p.74; as a side note, compare Gen. 3:17-19, which also portrays labor as a uniquely human pursuit, but with a more negative valence). The authors, as good Marxists, argue that "quantitative differences may transform into qualitative ones," and tools thus change the very nature of man—although they don't do this for apes or other animals (p.74). Here, the authors cite Engels' account of human development through labor, adding that labor is an "adaption to nature, foreign to apes" (p.75).
Apes use tools to manipulate conditions, the authors say, but man uses signs to control his own behavior—and "this constitutes the essence of the cultural development of man's behavior" (p.77).
This brings us to the second chapter, in which the authors draw on what we might consider sketchy anthropology to argue that (a) current "primitive" people can serve as a proxy for the people in our past development and (b) these "primitives" are at a lower level of development (p.82). They appeal to the aforementioned work by Levy-Bruhl for these points. But they also treat "primitives" more sympathetically than one might expect, understanding these people as fully equal agents, but whose cultural tools have not provided the structure to perform certain actions. Specifically, the authors claim that nonliterate peoples tend to develop better eidetic memory (e.g., p.99), while literate peoples tend to rely more heavily on artificial signs to do this work and thus allow their eidetic abilities to atrophy (p.101). They argue that in the absence of artificial signs, nonliterate peoples' "language loads thought down with endless details and particulars and does not process the data of experiences"; the examples from Wertheimer and Thurnwald (p.111) sound quite similar to those Luria later reported from his Uzbekistan trip. Some of the later work in this chapter deals with the development of word usage in associations and complexes, similar to the discussion in Vygotsky's Thought and Language.
As interesting is the discussion of numeric operations: the authors claim (sensibly, I think) that "our system of calculation counts for us" (p.130)—that is, our cultural tools provide a system that changes the task and shares the load, an idea that has been developed considerably. Similarly, the authors quote Bucher's description of Borneo digging sticks, which are composed of a big stick (for digging) and a little stick (which clicks with each stroke): the authors say, "This sound, being something like a work cry or a command, has the purpose of rhythmically organizing work" (p.138).
And this brings us to the third chapter and the authors' own work. The authors revisit Engels' story of evolution through labor (p.170), then move to the question of memory—mediated and unmediated. In their experiments, children past a certain age were first tested in terms of natural memory, then given mediators and tested again. They tended to do better in mediated tasks, not because their natural memory improved, but because they could substitute the mediator for their own memory (p.180). "Developing culturally, a child gains the opportunity to create himself those stimuli that in the future will influence him, organize his behavior, and attract his attention" (p.189).
Yet, as the authors demonstrate with a discussion of the famous forbidden colors experiment (pp.190-192), these mediators can be internalized—an analogue to the numeric system that "counts for us" in Chapter 2. "Upon closer examination we are convined that the process of attention still remained indirect; although instead of externally indirect, it became internally indirect" (p.192). That is, children's natural memory did not improve; instead, they internalized psychological tools that changed and systematized the task.
The authors also discuss the so-called Vygotsky blocks (pp.193-199) as a way to explore how children developed abstraction.
Ultimately, the authors conclude that the difference between natural and cultural ability was crucial. They argue for a better understanding of cultural giftedness:
Cultural giftedness means first of all to rationally use one's endowed capabilities, be they average or poor, to achieve the kind of results that a culturally undeveloped person can achieve only with the help of considerably stronger natural abilities.
Cultural giftedness, in essence, means the ability to control one's own natural resources; it means the creation and application of the best devices for using these resources. (p.230)This advice would be right at home at Lifehacker.
In conclusion, the book is fascinating and valuable. It is in some ways not as developed as other work by the authors, and the discussion of primitives did not endear it to me, but it explains some of the Vygostky Circle's work more clearly than other texts I have read. If you're interested in cultural-historical psychology, definitely pick it up.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
(A lot of presentations)
I've been busy this year giving different presentations. Rather than a post for each, I decided to put together a megapost pointing to my Slideshare account.
Being an academic:
Being an academic:
- Publishing for students and faculty (for UT's Undergraduate Writing Center)
- Time management for academics (for UT's Undergraduate Writing Center)
Research methodology:
- Workshop: Modeling qualitative data (for ATTW 2016 and Syracuse University)
- What's wrong with CHAT? (for CCCC 2016)
- Three networks walk into a bar... (for Syracuse University)
Thursday, March 31, 2016
(Time management for academics)
Here's a presentation I gave today for our Undergraduate Writing Center.
How can you be more productive as an academic? You probably won't get smarter. But you can use texts to work more effectively. In this presentation, I discuss different levels of productivity and how to integrate them to organize and plan time and projects.
How can you be more productive as an academic? You probably won't get smarter. But you can use texts to work more effectively. In this presentation, I discuss different levels of productivity and how to integrate them to organize and plan time and projects.
Monday, February 22, 2016
Writing :: A good idea is not enough
Spinuzzi, Clay/Jakobs, Eva-Maria/Pogue, Gregory (2016): A Good Idea Is Not Enough: Understanding the Challenges of Entrepreneurship Communication. In: International Conference on Competitive Engineering - Resource Efficiency for Global Competitiveness (Coma 2016), 27.1. bis 29.1.2016. Stellenbosch University (ZA), Proceedings, 547-552
This is another in my series on writing articles. In this case, it's an article that my colleague Eva Jakobs was kind enough to present at COMA 2016 in South Africa. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it.
But writing the article was really useful for us. It's an overview article that pulls together the research we have done at IC2 over the last few years, studying entrepreneurship communication across several related research studies. The individual studies allowed us to draw specific conclusions about cases; the overview paper let us step back and develop broader conclusions.
Although I'm lead author, the other authors were quite active, writing portions and critiquing others. We collaborated by emailing Word attachments (not my favorite way to collaborate—I prefer Google Docs, but not everyone did). To keep things straight, we used Track Changes. And we had to struggle to shrink the paper down to the requisite six pages.
In fact, I should say something here about page limits. They frustrate me, but they typically result in better, clearer writing. I find myself paying far more attention to clarity, brevity, and word choice than I would normally; I prune citations that aren't doing enough work; I ask whether this figure is really needed; and I cut block quotes. In fact, I'm starting to think that I should force myself to follow an arbitrary page count for the final version of my publications, just to push my writing to be better and clearer. (But not for my initial submissions, where I'm more concerned about expressing the broad sweep of the argument and probing what the reviewers think of it.)
Is this paper clearer because of those limits? Click through and see what you think!
Thursday, February 18, 2016
CFP: Written Communication special issue on narrative
From Written Communication:
Call For Papers
Call For Papers
Written Communication
Special Issue on Narrative and Writing Research
in Honor of Carol Berkenkotter
http://wcx.sagepub.com/
The Editor and Editorial Board of Written Communication
invite article submissions for Narrative and Writing Research:
A Special Issue in Honor of Carol Berkenkotter, tentatively
scheduled for publication in January 2017. Submissions from
established and new scholars of writing theory and research
are welcome.
Over the past thirty years, Carol Berkenkotter has substantially shaped the ground of two major areas of study. Much of her work, including particularly her 1995 book with Thomas Huckin, Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication, has been foundational for studies of genre. More recently she has extended her work to investigate narrative in psychiatric discourse in her book, Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Use of Narrative in Psychiatry (2008), as well as many other chapters and articles. In Patient Tales, Berkenkotter examines patient case histories and positions narrative in a tension with the expository logico-scientific mode of writing, a mode that undergirds the biomedical paradigm in psychiatric medicine.
Over the past thirty years, Carol Berkenkotter has substantially shaped the ground of two major areas of study. Much of her work, including particularly her 1995 book with Thomas Huckin, Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication, has been foundational for studies of genre. More recently she has extended her work to investigate narrative in psychiatric discourse in her book, Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Use of Narrative in Psychiatry (2008), as well as many other chapters and articles. In Patient Tales, Berkenkotter examines patient case histories and positions narrative in a tension with the expository logico-scientific mode of writing, a mode that undergirds the biomedical paradigm in psychiatric medicine.
We believe Berkenkotter’s work is representative of a broader interest in narrative as a concept and research tool in studies of writing. Narrative accounts, genres and methods have been woven through writing research for decades. Indeed, articles published in the very first issue of Written Communication drew from narrative as a concept or accounting technique in their research and discussions (Flower & Hayes, 1984; Haas Dyson, 1984; Lunsford & Ede, 1984).
In this special issue, we honor Carol Berkenkotter by taking up her interest in the nature and affordances of narrative, not only in contexts of psychiatry genres, but in other realms of interest to writing studies scholars. While submissions need not draw directly from Berkenkotter’s work, we imagine that many may do so. Submissions might also elaborate, respond to, or revise existing theories and accounts of narrative, including those of Berkenkotter and of other scholars.
In keeping with Written Communication’s mission, we are primarily interested in reports of
original research. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Fine-grained narrative accounts of in situ literacy practice
- The ways narrative resists or coexists with other discourse genres or research
- The role of narrative in qualitative research
- Potential uses, strengths, and weaknesses of narrative methods
- Longitudinal studies of writing practices that make use of narrative
- Contested narratives in writing research paradigms
- The relationships between narrative and studies of genre
- Issues of narrative and power: whose narratives count?
- The role of narrative in changing global and digital contexts
Authors submitting manuscripts should indicate in a cover letter that they wish the
submission to be considered for the Special Issue on Narrative and Writing Research.
Authors should submit manuscripts electronically as .doc or .docx file attachments to writcomm@umn.edu. Please send (a) a manuscript that is free from references to the author or authors (“blind”); (b) an abstract of 100–150 words; (c) five to seven keywords (which do not appear in the title) to facilitate electronic search; (d) a cover page that includes the title of the submission, author names, institutional affiliations, mailing addresses, office telephone numbers, fax numbers, and e-mail addresses; and (e) a three- to four-sentence biographical statement for each author. Author names should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript. Submissions should generally not exceed 9,000 words. Please see the Written Communication Submission Guidelines for further requirements.
Please note: Prospective authors are strongly urged to acquaint themselves with previously published issues of the journal and to strictly follow the Guidelines for Submission (in the print journal and on the website), as well as conform to the guidelines for publication of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). Failure to do so will result in a delay in the processing of your submission.
Submitting a manuscript indicates that the work reported has not been previously published, that the article—in present or revised form—is not being considered for publication in other journals or in edited volumes, and that the authors will not allow it to be so considered before notification in writing of an editorial decision by WC. Consideration for this special issue will begin April 15, 2016, and continue through June 20, 2016, or until a suitable number of publishable manuscripts have been identified. Submissions for this special issue will follow the normal, peer-review practices of WC.
Authors should submit manuscripts electronically as .doc or .docx file attachments to writcomm@umn.edu. Please send (a) a manuscript that is free from references to the author or authors (“blind”); (b) an abstract of 100–150 words; (c) five to seven keywords (which do not appear in the title) to facilitate electronic search; (d) a cover page that includes the title of the submission, author names, institutional affiliations, mailing addresses, office telephone numbers, fax numbers, and e-mail addresses; and (e) a three- to four-sentence biographical statement for each author. Author names should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript. Submissions should generally not exceed 9,000 words. Please see the Written Communication Submission Guidelines for further requirements.
Please note: Prospective authors are strongly urged to acquaint themselves with previously published issues of the journal and to strictly follow the Guidelines for Submission (in the print journal and on the website), as well as conform to the guidelines for publication of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). Failure to do so will result in a delay in the processing of your submission.
Submitting a manuscript indicates that the work reported has not been previously published, that the article—in present or revised form—is not being considered for publication in other journals or in edited volumes, and that the authors will not allow it to be so considered before notification in writing of an editorial decision by WC. Consideration for this special issue will begin April 15, 2016, and continue through June 20, 2016, or until a suitable number of publishable manuscripts have been identified. Submissions for this special issue will follow the normal, peer-review practices of WC.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Reading :: The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2ed
The Social Psychology of Organizing
By Karl E. Weick
I finished this book about a year ago, and ever since, I've been dragging my feet about reviewing it. Since I read a lot of books, I always seem to have another one that I could review instead, and they tend to be (a) easier or (b) more directly related to what I'm doing. But today I've decided to buckle down and knock this one out.
It's not that Weick's book is especially long: It's 294pp with the index. But it's dense. It's also very Weickian, which means that the author tends to back into his dense points.
For instance, in the first sentence, the author tells us that "This book is about organizational appreciation" (p.1). We must wait a couple of pages to find out what organizing is: "a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors. To organize is to assemble ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes" (p.3). Understanding these two sentences takes considerable unpacking.
One part of that unpacking has to do with plans. Weick takes the same position that Lucy Suchman did in Plans and Situated Actions (and perhaps this is where she got it—I don't have my copy of Suchman with me—or perhaps she got it from Cohen and March, whom Weick cites here). Plans, in his reckoning, "are important for organizations, but not for the reasons people think" (p.10): they are symbols that "negotiate a portion of the reality that then comes back and rearranges the organization"; they are advertisements that persuade externally; they are games that test a person's commitment to a goal; and they are excuses for interaction, putting people in contact about current rather than future circumstances (pp.10-11). "Plans are a pretext under which several valuable activities take place in organizations, but one of these activities is not forecasting" (p.11). And this point leads into a second thing about organizations: "there is not an underlying 'reality' waiting to be discovered. Rather, organizations are viewed as the inventions of people, inventions superimposed on flows of experience and momentarily imposing some order on these streams" (pp.11-12). Like plans, organizations are fictions that allow us to conceptualize reality, not independent phenomena—according to Weick.
But calling plans fictional doesn't mean that causality is fictional. Rather, causality and interdependence are major themes. Weick distrusts ethnographic thick description, the upswing of which he attributes to Watergate (p.38; recall that this 2ed was published in 1979) and the effect of which he believes to be volume of description rather than understanding. Rather, Weick wants readers to evoke and test minitheories about interdependent relationships. For instance, he suggests that readers go to a college campus, count the statues and busts of famous people, and determine how many are donors vs. national heroes. "On the basis of this observation alone, predict the answer to each of the following questions:
By Karl E. Weick
I finished this book about a year ago, and ever since, I've been dragging my feet about reviewing it. Since I read a lot of books, I always seem to have another one that I could review instead, and they tend to be (a) easier or (b) more directly related to what I'm doing. But today I've decided to buckle down and knock this one out.
It's not that Weick's book is especially long: It's 294pp with the index. But it's dense. It's also very Weickian, which means that the author tends to back into his dense points.
For instance, in the first sentence, the author tells us that "This book is about organizational appreciation" (p.1). We must wait a couple of pages to find out what organizing is: "a consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviors. To organize is to assemble ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes" (p.3). Understanding these two sentences takes considerable unpacking.
One part of that unpacking has to do with plans. Weick takes the same position that Lucy Suchman did in Plans and Situated Actions (and perhaps this is where she got it—I don't have my copy of Suchman with me—or perhaps she got it from Cohen and March, whom Weick cites here). Plans, in his reckoning, "are important for organizations, but not for the reasons people think" (p.10): they are symbols that "negotiate a portion of the reality that then comes back and rearranges the organization"; they are advertisements that persuade externally; they are games that test a person's commitment to a goal; and they are excuses for interaction, putting people in contact about current rather than future circumstances (pp.10-11). "Plans are a pretext under which several valuable activities take place in organizations, but one of these activities is not forecasting" (p.11). And this point leads into a second thing about organizations: "there is not an underlying 'reality' waiting to be discovered. Rather, organizations are viewed as the inventions of people, inventions superimposed on flows of experience and momentarily imposing some order on these streams" (pp.11-12). Like plans, organizations are fictions that allow us to conceptualize reality, not independent phenomena—according to Weick.
But calling plans fictional doesn't mean that causality is fictional. Rather, causality and interdependence are major themes. Weick distrusts ethnographic thick description, the upswing of which he attributes to Watergate (p.38; recall that this 2ed was published in 1979) and the effect of which he believes to be volume of description rather than understanding. Rather, Weick wants readers to evoke and test minitheories about interdependent relationships. For instance, he suggests that readers go to a college campus, count the statues and busts of famous people, and determine how many are donors vs. national heroes. "On the basis of this observation alone, predict the answer to each of the following questions:
- Will the college have open or closed library stacks for undergraduates?
- Will the faculty be listed by rank or alphabetically in the college catalog?
- Will more space in the alumni magazine be devoted to necrology or to current activities of living alumni?
- ..." (pp.60-61)
He lists ten questions. The point isn't just to test relationships, but also to test the implicit theories that the guesser has about interrelationships (p.61). "What is found is secondary to the incipient reasons for expecting to find it. It is the reasons that are important to uncover, because they may supply the grit for a better set of ideas about organizations" (p.62).
Those better ideas tend to involve interdependence, which can be mutual or sequential (p.68). Weick demonstrates how one might draw causal loops, and he argues that "any causal loop that has an odd number of negative signs counteracts deviations" (p.74). (It is not clear to me how one conceptualizes the units that make up these diagrams.)
Moving on. Weick argues that organizational structure is equal to interlocking behaviors (p.90). Social structure is created, not through common ends, but through common means (p.92). "Once the members converge on interlocked behaviors as the means to pursue diverse ends, there occurs a subtle shift away from diverse to common ends. The diverse ends remain, but they become subordinated to an emerging set of shared ends. This shift is one of the most striking that occurs in group life and it is exceedingly complex" (p.92).
Later, Weick draws an analogy between organizing and natural selection. He argues that organizing has four elements:
- Ecological change: "Ecological changes provide the enactable environment, the raw materials for sense-making" (p.130).
- Enactment: Enactment is variation, and can include bracketing as well as producing ecological change (p.130).
- Selection: We impose maps of past structures on new situations in order to impose order (p.131).
- Retention: We store "the products of successful sense-making, products that we call enacted environments" (p.131).
Beliefs, he adds, "are cause maps that people impose on the world after which they 'see' what they have already imposed. One of the aims of this book is to equip you with lots of beliefs so that you'll see some of what is talked about here, or at least you'll see enough that you'll be able to amend the mistakes that inevitably must litter any attempt to understand human beings" (p.135).
And perhaps that's a good place to stop. The book is challenging and interesting, but as the above paragraph suggests, it provides a way of thinking about organizations that continually questions its own interpretations. In a sense, the book is attempting to teach a methodology—sense-making—and at the same time apply the criticality of sense-making to itself. The principles of the methodology are somewhat clear, but the application isn't, because Weick refuses to lock down interpretations and thus denies us the hard-and-fast rules that tend to underpin methodologies. Consequently, to me, the book seems more allusional than methodological; it's thought-provoking, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure what one can do with it beyond critique. And that, I suppose, is why I have been sitting on this review for so long.
However, I know that many use (or at least refer to) Weick's sense-making approach, so they have been able to (or at least seem confident that they can) apply it more effectively than I have here.
In any case, although I am unsure how to apply the book methodologically, it's certainly thought-provoking. If you're interested in organizations, or just in a substantial social psychology-based challenge to ethnographic approaches, take a look.
Tuesday, January 05, 2016
Reading :: Common Knowledge?
Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
By Dariusz Jemielniak
How does Wikipedia work? I don't mean the software, which seems simple enough, but the social system that produces a seemingly inexhaustible body of knowledge. I've poked around the back end and seen the revision history and chats; I've read some scholarship on dispute resolution and collaboration; but I haven't really looked into the emergent social system that makes the whole thing tick.
Dariusz Jemielniak has. He's a professor of management, an ethnographer, and an active Wikipedian. Drawing on that background, he combines first-person narrative and careful study (including an appendix on his methodology) to provide an inside look at Wikipedia as a social system. In this social system, Wikipedians nominally work within an egalitarian, meritocratic system enforced by rules embedded in software; yet Wikipedia has evolved mechanisms of social control and status that create tensions with this overarching goal (Ch.2). Jemielniak carefully chronicles these mechanisms, noting how Wikipedia's consensus-driven process sometimes leads to intractable conflicts and at least four kinds of conflict trajectories (Ch.3).
Wikipedia's social controls Jemielniak argues in Ch.5, include liquid surveillance: all actions on Wikipedia are recorded and can be used in later disputes, and thus "although Wikipedia is a free and egalitarian community, its members are closely controlled, in some aspects to an unprecedented extent" (p.86). "Wikipedia resembles a Panopticon (Foucault, 1977) or an open-space office: everybody is watched by everybody else, and all actions remain on the record, forever" (p.91). He adds that "Common sense outweighs procedures, and users are expected to do what they believe is good for Wikipedia, using their best judgment, rather than following the letter of the law" (p.96)—but that freedom entails permanent ambiguity, which itself can be a coercive element.
Since Wikipedia rejects credential checking in favor of merit based on Wikipedia activity, Jemielniak argues in Ch.5, trust is instead invested in procedures. Those procedures are instantiated in an "astonishing" set of formalized rules: "Apparently, trust or credential control is substituted with precise behavioral scripts and formalization of discussion rules" (p.120). As Jemielniak argues in Ch.6, "Wikimedia communities are chaotic and rely on adhocratic principles," and "Adhocracy in this case is not incompatible with bureaucracy" (p.127).
All in all, Jemielniak provides a meticulous and thought-provoking overview of Wikipedia as a social system. For those of my readers who study rhetoric, he overviews the rules of argumentation and the conditions of persuasion in this system, drawing on contemporary scholarship in digital ethnography as well as management theory. For those not in rhetoric, Jemielniak's insights extend into the social system and provoke thought on how a nominally egalitarian system works in practice. Take a look.
By Dariusz Jemielniak
How does Wikipedia work? I don't mean the software, which seems simple enough, but the social system that produces a seemingly inexhaustible body of knowledge. I've poked around the back end and seen the revision history and chats; I've read some scholarship on dispute resolution and collaboration; but I haven't really looked into the emergent social system that makes the whole thing tick.
Dariusz Jemielniak has. He's a professor of management, an ethnographer, and an active Wikipedian. Drawing on that background, he combines first-person narrative and careful study (including an appendix on his methodology) to provide an inside look at Wikipedia as a social system. In this social system, Wikipedians nominally work within an egalitarian, meritocratic system enforced by rules embedded in software; yet Wikipedia has evolved mechanisms of social control and status that create tensions with this overarching goal (Ch.2). Jemielniak carefully chronicles these mechanisms, noting how Wikipedia's consensus-driven process sometimes leads to intractable conflicts and at least four kinds of conflict trajectories (Ch.3).
Wikipedia's social controls Jemielniak argues in Ch.5, include liquid surveillance: all actions on Wikipedia are recorded and can be used in later disputes, and thus "although Wikipedia is a free and egalitarian community, its members are closely controlled, in some aspects to an unprecedented extent" (p.86). "Wikipedia resembles a Panopticon (Foucault, 1977) or an open-space office: everybody is watched by everybody else, and all actions remain on the record, forever" (p.91). He adds that "Common sense outweighs procedures, and users are expected to do what they believe is good for Wikipedia, using their best judgment, rather than following the letter of the law" (p.96)—but that freedom entails permanent ambiguity, which itself can be a coercive element.
Since Wikipedia rejects credential checking in favor of merit based on Wikipedia activity, Jemielniak argues in Ch.5, trust is instead invested in procedures. Those procedures are instantiated in an "astonishing" set of formalized rules: "Apparently, trust or credential control is substituted with precise behavioral scripts and formalization of discussion rules" (p.120). As Jemielniak argues in Ch.6, "Wikimedia communities are chaotic and rely on adhocratic principles," and "Adhocracy in this case is not incompatible with bureaucracy" (p.127).
All in all, Jemielniak provides a meticulous and thought-provoking overview of Wikipedia as a social system. For those of my readers who study rhetoric, he overviews the rules of argumentation and the conditions of persuasion in this system, drawing on contemporary scholarship in digital ethnography as well as management theory. For those not in rhetoric, Jemielniak's insights extend into the social system and provoke thought on how a nominally egalitarian system works in practice. Take a look.
Reading :: Designing Delivery
Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy
By Jeff Sussna
Jeff Sussna and I follow each other on Twitter via a mutual contact, and I've been impressed by his insights. His 2015 book is even better. Although it's tackling something that I don't do—the development of software as a service (SaaS)—the insights are well aligned with topics I covered in my own 2015 book
. That's because Sussna isn't just talking about development, he's talking about how SaaS makes sense in the context of larger changes in the economy.
Sussna lays down this marker in the Introduction, where he argues that quality in software development must be understood in terms of "how well the service helps its customers accomplish their practical goals and satisfy their emotional needs" and thus "the entire organization must align itself with users' goals. Only when it has a holistic understanding of itself and its relationship with its customers can an organization successfully co-create value with them" (p.xxi). Thus SaaS involves "continual repair" because "Co-creation implies that users contribute to defining solutions through using them. In the process, they generate new problems for designers to solve" (p.xxii).
With this foundation, Chapter 1 examines the turn to post-industrialism, in which the pervasiveness of computerization leads to a shift from products to service; from manual labor to knowledge work; and from stability and continuity to change and innovation (p.3). Sussna systematically examines these transformations, emphasizing co-creation (cf. Lusch and Vargo's 2014 book; he goes on to discuss their concept of service-dominant logic in Ch.6). He also discusses the shift from complicated systems (many moving parts, arranged in navigable and hierarchical structures; p.9) to complex systems (in which simple components have fluid relationships with many other components; p.10) and the issue of emergence that arises from complex systems (that is, characteristics that exist at the system level but not at lower levels; p.10). Complex systems, he notes, are prone to cascading failures (p.11).
Based on this foundation, in Chapter 2, Sussna discusses necessary changes in control due to the shift to post-industrialism. Cybernetics, he says, is a model of control through conversation (p.26); autopoesis, or self-production, provides a way to understand how systems self-produce and self-regulate (pp.30-31). The implication is that "living systems co-create reality through circular influence," via conversation (p.35). One example he gives is that of Lean Startup, in which a minimum viable product is rapidly iterated via continual feedback (p.35).
Given Ch.2's insights, he says in Chapter 3 that IT's new mandate is "serving as a medium for digital conversation" (p.41). He thus argues that post-industrial businesses must "self-steer through empathetic conversations," and he advocates a combination of Agile, DevOps, cloud computing, and design thinking (p.42). The rest of the chapter describes and relates each.
The rest of the book brings in other concepts (such as Jobs to be Done, Service-Dominant Logic, and OODA) to flesh out what post-industrial SaaS development looks like. Since development is focused on self-steering through empathetic conversations, it becomes inseparable from branding and marketing.
All in all, this little book takes a broad scope and pulls eclectically from varying sources in order to pull together a coherent vision of SaaS. Despite its eclecticism, its argument is coherent and well thought out. If you're interested in SaaS, or just what the future of work looks like, I recommend Designing Delivery.
By Jeff Sussna
Jeff Sussna and I follow each other on Twitter via a mutual contact, and I've been impressed by his insights. His 2015 book is even better. Although it's tackling something that I don't do—the development of software as a service (SaaS)—the insights are well aligned with topics I covered in my own 2015 book
. That's because Sussna isn't just talking about development, he's talking about how SaaS makes sense in the context of larger changes in the economy.Sussna lays down this marker in the Introduction, where he argues that quality in software development must be understood in terms of "how well the service helps its customers accomplish their practical goals and satisfy their emotional needs" and thus "the entire organization must align itself with users' goals. Only when it has a holistic understanding of itself and its relationship with its customers can an organization successfully co-create value with them" (p.xxi). Thus SaaS involves "continual repair" because "Co-creation implies that users contribute to defining solutions through using them. In the process, they generate new problems for designers to solve" (p.xxii).
With this foundation, Chapter 1 examines the turn to post-industrialism, in which the pervasiveness of computerization leads to a shift from products to service; from manual labor to knowledge work; and from stability and continuity to change and innovation (p.3). Sussna systematically examines these transformations, emphasizing co-creation (cf. Lusch and Vargo's 2014 book; he goes on to discuss their concept of service-dominant logic in Ch.6). He also discusses the shift from complicated systems (many moving parts, arranged in navigable and hierarchical structures; p.9) to complex systems (in which simple components have fluid relationships with many other components; p.10) and the issue of emergence that arises from complex systems (that is, characteristics that exist at the system level but not at lower levels; p.10). Complex systems, he notes, are prone to cascading failures (p.11).
Based on this foundation, in Chapter 2, Sussna discusses necessary changes in control due to the shift to post-industrialism. Cybernetics, he says, is a model of control through conversation (p.26); autopoesis, or self-production, provides a way to understand how systems self-produce and self-regulate (pp.30-31). The implication is that "living systems co-create reality through circular influence," via conversation (p.35). One example he gives is that of Lean Startup, in which a minimum viable product is rapidly iterated via continual feedback (p.35).
Given Ch.2's insights, he says in Chapter 3 that IT's new mandate is "serving as a medium for digital conversation" (p.41). He thus argues that post-industrial businesses must "self-steer through empathetic conversations," and he advocates a combination of Agile, DevOps, cloud computing, and design thinking (p.42). The rest of the chapter describes and relates each.
The rest of the book brings in other concepts (such as Jobs to be Done, Service-Dominant Logic, and OODA) to flesh out what post-industrial SaaS development looks like. Since development is focused on self-steering through empathetic conversations, it becomes inseparable from branding and marketing.
All in all, this little book takes a broad scope and pulls eclectically from varying sources in order to pull together a coherent vision of SaaS. Despite its eclecticism, its argument is coherent and well thought out. If you're interested in SaaS, or just what the future of work looks like, I recommend Designing Delivery.
Reading :: Get Backed
Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams
By Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis
I wish I had had access to this 2015 book before I taught last fall's Writing for Entrepreneurs course. It's a beautifully produced book that promises to teach you how to "craft your story," "build the perfect pitch deck," and "launch the venture of your dreams." Essentially, it's about how to undertand and craft a pitch deck (Part I) in order to effectively argue for venture funding (Part II).
In Part I, the authors note that example pitch decks are in short supply since entrepreneurs are reluctant to show them; this book presents several and contextualizes them in terms of how long they took to get funded, how much funding they got, and what the sources were. But the authors also discuss the genre at length so we can understand how it fits in the overall argument and how it interacts with other genres (such as the elevator pitch).
Near the beginning of the book, the authors explain that "Pitch decks do three things: they get people to understand, they get people to care, and they get people to take action" (p.10). They say that there are two kinds of pitch decks: one for assisting presentations and one for standalone reading (p.10). Pitch decks are customizable, and in fact the authors encourage us to develop "a whole archive of slides to draw from and sequence for each meeting or presentation" (p.15)—slides that are modular but yet must consistently yield coherent arguments. Their "essential 10" slides include:
By Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis
I wish I had had access to this 2015 book before I taught last fall's Writing for Entrepreneurs course. It's a beautifully produced book that promises to teach you how to "craft your story," "build the perfect pitch deck," and "launch the venture of your dreams." Essentially, it's about how to undertand and craft a pitch deck (Part I) in order to effectively argue for venture funding (Part II).
In Part I, the authors note that example pitch decks are in short supply since entrepreneurs are reluctant to show them; this book presents several and contextualizes them in terms of how long they took to get funded, how much funding they got, and what the sources were. But the authors also discuss the genre at length so we can understand how it fits in the overall argument and how it interacts with other genres (such as the elevator pitch).
Near the beginning of the book, the authors explain that "Pitch decks do three things: they get people to understand, they get people to care, and they get people to take action" (p.10). They say that there are two kinds of pitch decks: one for assisting presentations and one for standalone reading (p.10). Pitch decks are customizable, and in fact the authors encourage us to develop "a whole archive of slides to draw from and sequence for each meeting or presentation" (p.15)—slides that are modular but yet must consistently yield coherent arguments. Their "essential 10" slides include:
- Overview
- Opportunity
- Problem
- Solution
- Traction
- Customer or Market
- Competition
- Business Model
- Team
- Use of Funds (p.15)
These are similar to, but not the same as, Guy Kawasaki's "Only 10 Slides You Need in a Pitch." The authors provide 1-2 pages of detail on each slide, including multiple examples from real pitch decks as well as descriptions and guidelines.
After describing these 10 essential slides, the authors discuss how the pitch deck must tell a story. In fact, they say, there are at least three ways that you will use a story in the pitch deck:
- a narrative arc to create coherence across slides
- an explanation of one or more individual slides
- a reservoir of topics for discussions and Q&A (p.39)
They suggest that you'll typically use four story types:
- the origin story
- the customer story
- the industry story
- the venture growth story (p.40)
Together, these four story types can be layered in the pitch building blocks to create a unified arc (and coherence) (p.52).
In subsequent chapters, the authors give advice on design (Ch.4) and text (Ch.5). By the time we get to the examples of actual pitch decks (Ch.6), we have the tools to interpret and critique them.
That's Part I. In Part II, the authors discuss how to get backed, starting with a primer on startup financing (Ch.8) and an overview of the five funding sources (Ch.9). Although I was less interested in this section, I was impressed by how clearly the authors laid out the basics of financing and sources—that is, the activity and the audience in which the pitch had to be rhetorically successful.
Overall, I was impressed by the book, and I walked away with a much more thorough understanding of how the pitch deck works and what it accomplishes. The book is a good guide, coherently bringing together advice about the pitch deck that up to this point I've had to piece together from websites and other scattered pieces of information. If you're interested in a primer on the pitch deck and funding, I highly recommend it.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Reading :: Team of Teams
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
By General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell
Former Army General Stanley McChrystal became a household name when he was profiled by Rolling Stone. That's also when he lost his job, after one of his aides was quoted denigrating the Vice President. Arguably his resignation had to happen, since the military needs to display respect for its civilian chain of command. But it was also a loss: McChrystal had intelligently reformed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during his tenure of commander.
After his resignation, McChrystal taught courses at Yale and started the McChrystal Group, which is "a leadership and management consultancy composed of a diverse mix of professionals from the military, academic, business, and technology sectors." The group provides consulting services that help these stakeholders to manage complexities using the "team of teams" approach that McChrystal devised for JSOC.
Team of Teams is the McChrystal Group's calling card. It was a NYT bestseller. And it lays out the basics of the approach. McChrystal cites people such as John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, John Boyd, and Henry Mintzberg, people who should be familiar to longtime readers of this blog. Drawing from these sources and from his own experience as JSOC commander, McChrystal describes a flatter organizational structure that emphasizes command without close control; constant mutual adjustment; and cultivated associational links across silos. The lessons of the book are provided along with detailed examples from McChrystal's time in JSOC.
None of the lessons in the book will be much of a surprise to those who have read the source materials. But the book discusses these lessons in a popular narrative mode, drawing us along and summarizing its lessons at the end of each chapter. The book is a lot more readable than Boyd, certainly.
If you've been steeped in the readings above or in other 4GW readings, this book won't have a lot to teach you. But if you're new to the application of organizational networks in complex multidisciplinary environments, and you want a gentle introduction, this book could be it—especially if you're coming from a hierarchical or bureaucratic environment. See what you think.
By General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell
Former Army General Stanley McChrystal became a household name when he was profiled by Rolling Stone. That's also when he lost his job, after one of his aides was quoted denigrating the Vice President. Arguably his resignation had to happen, since the military needs to display respect for its civilian chain of command. But it was also a loss: McChrystal had intelligently reformed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during his tenure of commander.
After his resignation, McChrystal taught courses at Yale and started the McChrystal Group, which is "a leadership and management consultancy composed of a diverse mix of professionals from the military, academic, business, and technology sectors." The group provides consulting services that help these stakeholders to manage complexities using the "team of teams" approach that McChrystal devised for JSOC.
Team of Teams is the McChrystal Group's calling card. It was a NYT bestseller. And it lays out the basics of the approach. McChrystal cites people such as John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, John Boyd, and Henry Mintzberg, people who should be familiar to longtime readers of this blog. Drawing from these sources and from his own experience as JSOC commander, McChrystal describes a flatter organizational structure that emphasizes command without close control; constant mutual adjustment; and cultivated associational links across silos. The lessons of the book are provided along with detailed examples from McChrystal's time in JSOC.
None of the lessons in the book will be much of a surprise to those who have read the source materials. But the book discusses these lessons in a popular narrative mode, drawing us along and summarizing its lessons at the end of each chapter. The book is a lot more readable than Boyd, certainly.
If you've been steeped in the readings above or in other 4GW readings, this book won't have a lot to teach you. But if you're new to the application of organizational networks in complex multidisciplinary environments, and you want a gentle introduction, this book could be it—especially if you're coming from a hierarchical or bureaucratic environment. See what you think.
Reading :: 4th Generation Warfare Handbook
4th Generation Warfare Handbook
By William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele
I've been interested in 4th-generation warfare ever since I began to read the work coming out of RAND on networks. Not for its own sake, specifically, but for what it tells us about a world in which hierarchy is no longer the main organizing principle.
Fourth-generation warfare, as the authors explain, represents an evolution of warfare away from states and toward nonstate actors—that is, away from the Westphalian concept of war as being the monopoly of the state, and toward warfare that can be waged by nonstate actors such as families, clans, tribes, and business enterprises both legal and illegal (Introduction). As the authors point out, nonstate actors regularly waged war before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and now they are beginning to take up that role again, leading away from two-sided wars and back to many-sided wars. The authors argue that this multisided understanding of war has come back due to a crisis of the legitimacy of the state (cf. Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent).
So how does one prepare for, and fight, 4GW? The authors undertake this question, drawing examples from recent 4GW conflicts as well as speculative scenarios from a future war. Their viewpoint is that of a state's armed forces trying to wage war with nonstate actors; the running example is a fictionalized scenario in which the US Army has occupied "Inshallahland." Throughout the book, they argue that the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of warfare should be addressed in terms of physical, mental, and moral aspects; they suggest a grid for planning how these different axes of factors will interrelate. Such a grid is important because things that are productive at one level can be counterproductive at others.
The authors advocate an approach in which light infantry units interact constantly with the occupied population, being exposed but also solving problems, creating ties, and demonstrating that they will bring stability and safety—that is, providing the benefits that a State has to offer. Everything is a PsyOp—that is, every act is understood as having a persuasive component.
These light infantry units also handle the bulk of the fighting. The authors essentially want to see the light infantry units functioning as special forces who can live off the land, move with a light footprint, and out-hunt irregular forces. They even include a sort of 12-week syllabus for training light infantry units for their new roles.
In all, this lightweight book is interesting, but may not be especially helpful for the scholar of organizations, communication, or rhetoric. It distills the lessons of other 4GW texts into a practical guide that works best for leaders of armed forces. Those of us who aren't in this hierarchy, however, can still learn something from the authors' brief history of warfare and their claim that 4GW arises from the crisis of the legitimacy of the state.
By William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele
I've been interested in 4th-generation warfare ever since I began to read the work coming out of RAND on networks. Not for its own sake, specifically, but for what it tells us about a world in which hierarchy is no longer the main organizing principle.
Fourth-generation warfare, as the authors explain, represents an evolution of warfare away from states and toward nonstate actors—that is, away from the Westphalian concept of war as being the monopoly of the state, and toward warfare that can be waged by nonstate actors such as families, clans, tribes, and business enterprises both legal and illegal (Introduction). As the authors point out, nonstate actors regularly waged war before the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and now they are beginning to take up that role again, leading away from two-sided wars and back to many-sided wars. The authors argue that this multisided understanding of war has come back due to a crisis of the legitimacy of the state (cf. Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent).
So how does one prepare for, and fight, 4GW? The authors undertake this question, drawing examples from recent 4GW conflicts as well as speculative scenarios from a future war. Their viewpoint is that of a state's armed forces trying to wage war with nonstate actors; the running example is a fictionalized scenario in which the US Army has occupied "Inshallahland." Throughout the book, they argue that the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of warfare should be addressed in terms of physical, mental, and moral aspects; they suggest a grid for planning how these different axes of factors will interrelate. Such a grid is important because things that are productive at one level can be counterproductive at others.
The authors advocate an approach in which light infantry units interact constantly with the occupied population, being exposed but also solving problems, creating ties, and demonstrating that they will bring stability and safety—that is, providing the benefits that a State has to offer. Everything is a PsyOp—that is, every act is understood as having a persuasive component.
These light infantry units also handle the bulk of the fighting. The authors essentially want to see the light infantry units functioning as special forces who can live off the land, move with a light footprint, and out-hunt irregular forces. They even include a sort of 12-week syllabus for training light infantry units for their new roles.
In all, this lightweight book is interesting, but may not be especially helpful for the scholar of organizations, communication, or rhetoric. It distills the lessons of other 4GW texts into a practical guide that works best for leaders of armed forces. Those of us who aren't in this hierarchy, however, can still learn something from the authors' brief history of warfare and their claim that 4GW arises from the crisis of the legitimacy of the state.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Reading :: Interactive Expertise
Interactive Expertise: Studies in Distributed Working Intelligence
By Yrjö Engeström
I first read this research bulletin in the late 1990s in photocopy form. Fortunately the PDF is now accessible at the URL above and at other places on the web.
This 1992 report consists of a theoretical framework and three case studies, two of which were subsequently published in collections. Its focus is on the nature of expertise. As the abstract argues:
By Yrjö Engeström
I first read this research bulletin in the late 1990s in photocopy form. Fortunately the PDF is now accessible at the URL above and at other places on the web.
This 1992 report consists of a theoretical framework and three case studies, two of which were subsequently published in collections. Its focus is on the nature of expertise. As the abstract argues:
Expertise has been understood as a property of an individual professional or craftsman. On the basis of the cultural-historical theory of activity, a radically different perspective is suggested. Expertise is here seen as an interactive accomplishment, constructed in encounters and exchanges between people and their mediating artifacts.The first chapter, EXPERTISE AS MEDIATED COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITY, explores the question of expertise from an activity theory perspective. Engestrom begins in quintessentially Engestromian fashion by identifying two perspectives on expertise—the algorithmic account, which sees expertise as residing in individuals' heads, and the enculturational account, which sees expertise and thinking as embedded in social situations, practices, and cultures (pp.3-5). Although these schools are presented as rivals, Engestrom asserts that they share three propositions:
- "Expertise is universal and homogeneous"
- "Expertise consists of superior and stable individual mastery of discrete tasks and skills"
- "Expertise is acquired through internalization of experience" (pp.5)
These propositions, Engestrom says, are Cartesian. He discusses how others have questioned Cartesianism in various fields (pp. 6-10), touching on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Bakhtin, and especially Zuboff, who claims that work is moving from action-centered to intellective skills (p.10).
Engestrom then goes further by arguing that expertise is located in activity systems (p.11). He describes "the cultural-historical theory of activity initiated by" Vygotsky and Leont'ev (p.12), then introduces additional concepts of multiple mediations and activity networks (pp.12-13). (Note that he does not distinguish these, which are his own contributions, from the work of Vygotsky and Leont'ev.) "Expertise," he argues, "is learning what is not yet there" (p.14). Through the rest of the chapter, he draws on internalization-externalization and internal contradictions to build his account of expertise.
Late in the chapter, he argues that "expert activity systems are in historical transition" due to changes in work, expecially a shift to multidisciplinary teams (p.23). He presents a matrix with the axes of collectivity and flexibility, using it to show a transition from craft work (with low collectivity and flexibility) to hierarchy, market, and network forms (p.25). These are based on Powell's work, which also influenced Ronfeldt, so the matrix looks a lot like a TIMN matrix.
In Chapter 2, THE TENSIONS OF JUDGING: HANDLING CASES OF DRIVING UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ALCOHOL IN FINLAND AND CALIFORNIA, Engestrom applies these insights to a study of DUI cases in two courtrooms, focusing on how judges develop and use expertise under different material conditions. By examining transcripts of different trials, Engestrom argues that judges switch among different "dialects." He uses multiple triangle diagrams to demonstrate how the judges shift among different objects and thus activities. The resulting contradictions indicate how this small organization has a complex social organization (p.60).
In Chapter 3, COORDINATION, COOPERATION, AND COMMUNICATION IN COURTS: EXPANSIVE TRANSITIONS IN LEGAL WORK, Engestrom continues the legal theme by examining other cases. He repeats the matrix from Chapter 1, discussing it in terms of a zone of proximal development (p.65). Citing Raeithel and Fichtner, he draws distinctions among
- coordination: "normal scripted flow of interaction" (p.66; he cites Goffman)
- cooperation: "modes of interaction in which the actors ... focus on a shared problem, trying to find mutually acceptable ways to conceptualize and solve it" (pp.66-67)
- communication: "interactions in which the actors focus on reconceptualizing their own organization and interaction in relation to their shared objects" (p.67).
(These are defined differently from how I use the terms in All Edge.)
In this case, he examined transcripts of sidebars in court, looking at examples of each. Essentially, the sidebars functioned as a backstage in which people used cooperation and communication to get back to coordination.
Finally, in Chapter 4, TWISTING THE SCRIPTS: HETEROGENEITY AND SHARED COGNITION IN MULTI-PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL TEAMS, Engestrom examines how such interdisciplinary teams worked. He argues that Bakhtin's speech genres are "implicit constraints or rules rather than tools of interaction," roughly scripts (pp.79-80; I have a different take in Tracing Genres). He argues that medical teams are often "confronted with difficulties that stem from the heavy traditions of craft professionalism and bureaucracy" (p.81) and presents cases, based on transcripts, that involve cooperation and pseudo-cooperation.
In all, this tech report is well worth reading, both as a way to understand expertise in activity theory and as a way to understand the conversations at play when AT hit the scene. Looking back, I can see the niche that AT filled so ably.
Writing :: How Magnets Attract and Repel
Spinuzzi, C., Nelson, S., Thomson, K.S., Lorenzini, F., French, R.A., Pogue, G., & London, N. (2016). How Magnets Attract and Repel: Interessement in a Technology Commercialization Competition. Written Communication 33(1).
This is another in my series on writing articles. The link goes to the online first version, which should convert in January 2016 to the print version.
It's also another in my series of articles on business pitches, researched and published in conjunction with my colleagues at the IC2 Institute. The other articles addressed aspects of the process, focusing more on nuts-and-bolts aspects; this one theorizes the program being analyzed, using Latour's concept of interessement and my own notion of standing sets of transformations. These two concepts help us to understand how the program led innovators through tactical moments of persuasion; ultimately, successful innovators were able to make these tactical moments cohere in strategic arguments. This journey from tactical to strategic persuasion remained steady in a program that had to address extreme variability in other aspects.
Since this series is on writing, let me pull out just a few things about the writing of this piece.
Letting things cook
This article was one of the first pieces I planned, but it's among the last pieces to be published. That's for two reasons.
One, it depended on a lot of analytical work, and much of that work was done piece by piece in the other articles. For instance, our two IEEE TPC articles helped us to take apart and understand how the innovators were making and iterating their arguments, while our summer articles at IEEE Procomm and SIGDOC let us examine the market reports and the pitch training. In promising and writing these articles, we were compelled to reduce the data enough to make analyses practical. For instance, the TPC articles helped us to figure out what argument strategies to look for in the new batch of data, while the SIGDOC pitch paper compelled us to narrow our scope to four main firms; if we had tried to thoroughly analyze the entire range of materials for all firms, we wouldn't have published until 2020.
Two, it depended on some theoretical work as well. Although the standing set of transformations (SST) was pretty well established by the first publication, and although we began thinking in terms of interessement early on, it took a while to understand the relationships between the two, and longer still to try to test them. It was perhaps last spring that we realized the real import of what we were seeing: firms were dealing with wildly different audiences, timeframes, and industries with almost no overlap, but the competition itself provided a reproducible structure that allowed them to navigate these wildly different challenges. Without the time to put two and two together, we wouldn't have been able to develop the paper we did.
Of course, letting a piece cook for 2-3 years is a luxury that the tenured enjoy. Your mileage may vary.
Framing, framing, framing
When the reviewers' comments came back, they pointed to the same problem I always seem to have with these sorts of papers. The methodology and analysis were fine, but the paper read like a sociological study. Where was the connection to writing studies?
The connection was, of course, crystal clear in my head and in my conversations with my collaborators. The firms were awash with texts, texts that articulated and rearticulated their positions! But to the reviewers, these texts were too much in the background. And I had to admit that their concerns were valid—readers of Written Communication needed clear signposts to understand how this paper dealt with concerns about writing and built the basis for further understanding of writing.
In the revisions, therefore, we built in more close analysis of specific texts. We also built more framing and implications connected to writing studies. Finally, we included more methodological and theoretical cites to writing studies pieces.
Concision, concision, concision
The problem with a rich case study like this is that, when you tell the story, everything seems important and interesting. But, as the editor told me in the nicest possible way, the article has to fit within the guidelines. (I suspect she also felt the audience would not be as raptly interested in the details as we were.) So we had to cut 3000 words. This task seemed daunting when we took it on, but in retrospect, it wasn't that hard and it resulted in a much tighter and (hopefully) more interesting piece.
I admit that this may have been the most I have had to cut a piece, but the general problem occurs over and over. It's usually easier to cut than to add, so I let myself go a little long, then cut when I'm told. The danger, of course, is that the piece will get rambly and boring. Rambly is worse than boring—it indicates a lack of underlying framework—and I don't think I usually suffer from it. Boring can be fixed with judicious cuts, and often the editor is the best person to recommend such cuts.
In any case, I hope you enjoy the paper as much as we enjoyed writing it!
This is another in my series on writing articles. The link goes to the online first version, which should convert in January 2016 to the print version.
It's also another in my series of articles on business pitches, researched and published in conjunction with my colleagues at the IC2 Institute. The other articles addressed aspects of the process, focusing more on nuts-and-bolts aspects; this one theorizes the program being analyzed, using Latour's concept of interessement and my own notion of standing sets of transformations. These two concepts help us to understand how the program led innovators through tactical moments of persuasion; ultimately, successful innovators were able to make these tactical moments cohere in strategic arguments. This journey from tactical to strategic persuasion remained steady in a program that had to address extreme variability in other aspects.
Since this series is on writing, let me pull out just a few things about the writing of this piece.
Letting things cook
This article was one of the first pieces I planned, but it's among the last pieces to be published. That's for two reasons.
One, it depended on a lot of analytical work, and much of that work was done piece by piece in the other articles. For instance, our two IEEE TPC articles helped us to take apart and understand how the innovators were making and iterating their arguments, while our summer articles at IEEE Procomm and SIGDOC let us examine the market reports and the pitch training. In promising and writing these articles, we were compelled to reduce the data enough to make analyses practical. For instance, the TPC articles helped us to figure out what argument strategies to look for in the new batch of data, while the SIGDOC pitch paper compelled us to narrow our scope to four main firms; if we had tried to thoroughly analyze the entire range of materials for all firms, we wouldn't have published until 2020.
Two, it depended on some theoretical work as well. Although the standing set of transformations (SST) was pretty well established by the first publication, and although we began thinking in terms of interessement early on, it took a while to understand the relationships between the two, and longer still to try to test them. It was perhaps last spring that we realized the real import of what we were seeing: firms were dealing with wildly different audiences, timeframes, and industries with almost no overlap, but the competition itself provided a reproducible structure that allowed them to navigate these wildly different challenges. Without the time to put two and two together, we wouldn't have been able to develop the paper we did.
Of course, letting a piece cook for 2-3 years is a luxury that the tenured enjoy. Your mileage may vary.
Framing, framing, framing
When the reviewers' comments came back, they pointed to the same problem I always seem to have with these sorts of papers. The methodology and analysis were fine, but the paper read like a sociological study. Where was the connection to writing studies?
The connection was, of course, crystal clear in my head and in my conversations with my collaborators. The firms were awash with texts, texts that articulated and rearticulated their positions! But to the reviewers, these texts were too much in the background. And I had to admit that their concerns were valid—readers of Written Communication needed clear signposts to understand how this paper dealt with concerns about writing and built the basis for further understanding of writing.
In the revisions, therefore, we built in more close analysis of specific texts. We also built more framing and implications connected to writing studies. Finally, we included more methodological and theoretical cites to writing studies pieces.
Concision, concision, concision
The problem with a rich case study like this is that, when you tell the story, everything seems important and interesting. But, as the editor told me in the nicest possible way, the article has to fit within the guidelines. (I suspect she also felt the audience would not be as raptly interested in the details as we were.) So we had to cut 3000 words. This task seemed daunting when we took it on, but in retrospect, it wasn't that hard and it resulted in a much tighter and (hopefully) more interesting piece.
I admit that this may have been the most I have had to cut a piece, but the general problem occurs over and over. It's usually easier to cut than to add, so I let myself go a little long, then cut when I'm told. The danger, of course, is that the piece will get rambly and boring. Rambly is worse than boring—it indicates a lack of underlying framework—and I don't think I usually suffer from it. Boring can be fixed with judicious cuts, and often the editor is the best person to recommend such cuts.
In any case, I hope you enjoy the paper as much as we enjoyed writing it!
Reading :: Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists
Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists
By Anselm Strauss
Anselm Strauss, one of the founders of grounded theory, published this handbook in 1987. I picked it up recently at the used bookstore based on the author's name.
Alas, I don't think it's nearly as useful as Strauss and Corbin's handbook on grounded theory. It explains the basics of GT, including a list of the basic elements (p.23), and it does a nice job of describing what I sometimes call the believing-doubting game: "the experienced analyst learns to play the game of believing everything and believing nothing—at this point—leaving himself or herself as open as the coding itself" (p.29). It also clarifies the relationships among open, axial, selective, and in vivo coding (Ch.1 and 3), although I think these might be explained differently from Strauss and Corbin. (I'll have to check.)
Honestly, the more I read in this explanation of grounded theory, the more I remembered what I don't like about GT. GT aims to develop theory, so the approach is about sifting through codes to find the principles on which the theory will be built, and that requires more single-mindedness than qualitative research based on preexisting theory (let's call that QRPT). QRPT lets you test, complicate, and push back against someone else's theory; GT is more like searching for the key that will unlock this particular case. Perhaps I'm not convinced that such a key exists.
This book also suggests extremely close reading. In one example, the author describes a seminar in which the professor and students begin reading a transcript. They begin with the interviewee's first sentence: "Once I'm in the shower..." Then they spend an hour talking about the first two words, one word at a time (pp.57-58). This is close reading x1000, and I am deeply skeptical of the proposition that exhausting the interpretations of individual words can help us to better understand the utterance as a whole. Certainly such an approach makes it difficult to actually analyze multiple interviews.
The book has useful advice on memos, coding, and visual displays (network diagrams and matrices), all focusing on developing theory. The author also includes a flow diagram summarizing the scholar's reflective process (p.209).
On the other hand, the book could have been much shorter if the author had edited the copious (and I use that word with restraint) examples from the illustrative study and the transcripts in which the author led his graduate class in interpreting these examples.
Overall, yes, this book is useful in explaining the concepts and application of GT. But I recommend the Strauss and Corbin book over this one. It covers much the same ground, but more parsimoniously and engagingly.
By Anselm Strauss
Anselm Strauss, one of the founders of grounded theory, published this handbook in 1987. I picked it up recently at the used bookstore based on the author's name.
Alas, I don't think it's nearly as useful as Strauss and Corbin's handbook on grounded theory. It explains the basics of GT, including a list of the basic elements (p.23), and it does a nice job of describing what I sometimes call the believing-doubting game: "the experienced analyst learns to play the game of believing everything and believing nothing—at this point—leaving himself or herself as open as the coding itself" (p.29). It also clarifies the relationships among open, axial, selective, and in vivo coding (Ch.1 and 3), although I think these might be explained differently from Strauss and Corbin. (I'll have to check.)
Honestly, the more I read in this explanation of grounded theory, the more I remembered what I don't like about GT. GT aims to develop theory, so the approach is about sifting through codes to find the principles on which the theory will be built, and that requires more single-mindedness than qualitative research based on preexisting theory (let's call that QRPT). QRPT lets you test, complicate, and push back against someone else's theory; GT is more like searching for the key that will unlock this particular case. Perhaps I'm not convinced that such a key exists.
This book also suggests extremely close reading. In one example, the author describes a seminar in which the professor and students begin reading a transcript. They begin with the interviewee's first sentence: "Once I'm in the shower..." Then they spend an hour talking about the first two words, one word at a time (pp.57-58). This is close reading x1000, and I am deeply skeptical of the proposition that exhausting the interpretations of individual words can help us to better understand the utterance as a whole. Certainly such an approach makes it difficult to actually analyze multiple interviews.
The book has useful advice on memos, coding, and visual displays (network diagrams and matrices), all focusing on developing theory. The author also includes a flow diagram summarizing the scholar's reflective process (p.209).
On the other hand, the book could have been much shorter if the author had edited the copious (and I use that word with restraint) examples from the illustrative study and the transcripts in which the author led his graduate class in interpreting these examples.
Overall, yes, this book is useful in explaining the concepts and application of GT. But I recommend the Strauss and Corbin book over this one. It covers much the same ground, but more parsimoniously and engagingly.
Reading :: Frame Analysis
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience
By Erving Goffman
I first bought this 1974 book early in my PhD program, having read Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life during my MA studies. It's a thick book, and (between you and me) not that engagingly written, and although I briefly attempted it, I gave up and focused on my assigned readings instead. It was always there on the shelf, I thought; I'll eventually get to it.
But at some point—either in the move to Texas Tech (1999) or to the University of Texas (2001), it was lost along with a box of other books. I was not heartbroken, since my research interests had drifted away from Goffman by that point. But earlier this year I saw a copy at a used bookstore. I had just reread Goffman's Presentation of Self and had read his Interaction Ritual for the first time, so he was fresh in my mind. And the price was right. So I picked it up.
And it stayed on my shelf for a while longer, unread, until I began thinking about frames again. The notion of frames had been brought up in a recent reading on pitching, and I began thinking about it in terms of how teachers present themselves to students, so Frame Analysis suddenly had new currency for me. So I sat down and read it.
Not in just one sitting, mind you. The book is 576pp.
So here's what you need to know about Frame Analysis. Here, even more than in Goffman's other books, it becomes clear that Goffman is a cross between Aristotle and Art Linkletter. Like Aristotle, he likes to exhaustively taxonomize the subject he's describing—in this case, frames. And like Art Linkletter, he is an inveterate gossip, pulling examples of frames and frame ruptures from everywhere he can (odd newspaper stories, magazines, television shows, books on cons and magic, and repeatedly from Dear Abby columns) in addition to published research. The result is overwhelming. There's a definite structure underneath, but it's not consistently signaled, so I sometimes had trouble remembering what the endless examples of grifters, airline accidents, and 1950s sexual peccadillos were meant to illustrate. (Although the book was published in 1974, I think the bulk of the examples came from the 1930s-1960s).
Let's try to strip away these examples, then, and get to what Goffman was trying to frame up. Goffman borrows the term "frame" from Gregory Bateson (p.7), using it to describe the ways that we bracket social situations so we know how to interpret and react to them. His aim is to "try to isolate some of the basic frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of events and to analyze the special vulnerabilities to which these frames of reference are subject" (p.10). He uses frame to describe how people define a situation based on principles of organization that govern events (pp.10-11). Strip refers to "any arbitrary slide or cut from the stream of ongoing activity ... as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them" (p.10). Essentially, we sample the strips available to us and use them to apply frames that can help us interpret further strips. When frames are confirmed, our assumptions "disappear into the smooth flow of activity" (p.39)—that is, once we are pretty sure which frame is operant, we tend to assume that frame and interpret subsequent interactions within that frame.
At this point, one can see why Goffman becomes so interested in his eclectic examples. They are full of instances in which people misapply frames in various ways. Some are deliberate (cons), some are accidental (comedies of error). But he successively deploys concepts and vocabulary to better understand them.
In Chapter 3, he introduces keying, a systematic transformation along schema of interpretation (ex: play fighting, which resembles actual fighting).
In Chapter 4, he discusses fabrications: deliberate attempts to manage activity so that someone will have a false belief about the activity (p.83). Like keyings, fabrication is a transformational vulnerability of the activity; keying is to fabrication as satire is to plagiarism (p.84).
Chapter 5 discusses the theatrical frame (cf. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Here, there is a performer and an audience (p.124).
In Chapter 6, he discusses structural issues in fabrications, including retransformations, recontainment, transformational depth, actor transformations, and fabrication frameworks. Sorry, I'm not going to give you thumbnails on all of these; suffice it to say that these all boil down to tactics that fabricators use to reassert their fabricated frames. These are useful if you're going to fool or con someone (or if you want to avoid being fooled or conned).
Chapter 7 considers out-of-frame activity: overlapping activity that inevitably intrudes on the focus activity.
Chapter 8 describes the anchoring of activity: the way that the frame is related to the world in which the framing occurs (p.248).
Chapter 9 describes "ordinary troubles" in sustaining a frame: innocent troubles that relate to "straight activity" as well as collapses in fabrications.
Chapter 10 is about breaking frame: the extent to which people are engrossed in the activity rather than drifting into other realities (or: becoming engrossed in a competing frame) (p.347).
Chapters 11 and 12 focus on manufacturing negative experience and the vulnerabilities of experience, respectively; the latter explores frame traps, in which people are trapped in a specific interpretation of a frame (p.482). Also in the latter, Goffman protests that his aim is not to compile tips on how to hoodwink people (p.486).
Chapter 13 specifically applies frame analysis to talk.
As you may be able to intuit from the increasingly short descriptions of each chapter, the book was in some respects exhausting. If you are fascinated by endless midcentury news clippings and advice columns, you may find the book easier going than I did. I would have preferred that Goffman make his points more succinctly and with more explicit definitions. Nevertheless, the fact that it was exhausting does not make the book less valuable; there are few keener observers of human nature. If you are interested in how people construe, misconstrue, and correct their readings of situations, pick this book up. You may have to use both hands.
By Erving Goffman
I first bought this 1974 book early in my PhD program, having read Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life during my MA studies. It's a thick book, and (between you and me) not that engagingly written, and although I briefly attempted it, I gave up and focused on my assigned readings instead. It was always there on the shelf, I thought; I'll eventually get to it.
But at some point—either in the move to Texas Tech (1999) or to the University of Texas (2001), it was lost along with a box of other books. I was not heartbroken, since my research interests had drifted away from Goffman by that point. But earlier this year I saw a copy at a used bookstore. I had just reread Goffman's Presentation of Self and had read his Interaction Ritual for the first time, so he was fresh in my mind. And the price was right. So I picked it up.
And it stayed on my shelf for a while longer, unread, until I began thinking about frames again. The notion of frames had been brought up in a recent reading on pitching, and I began thinking about it in terms of how teachers present themselves to students, so Frame Analysis suddenly had new currency for me. So I sat down and read it.
Not in just one sitting, mind you. The book is 576pp.
So here's what you need to know about Frame Analysis. Here, even more than in Goffman's other books, it becomes clear that Goffman is a cross between Aristotle and Art Linkletter. Like Aristotle, he likes to exhaustively taxonomize the subject he's describing—in this case, frames. And like Art Linkletter, he is an inveterate gossip, pulling examples of frames and frame ruptures from everywhere he can (odd newspaper stories, magazines, television shows, books on cons and magic, and repeatedly from Dear Abby columns) in addition to published research. The result is overwhelming. There's a definite structure underneath, but it's not consistently signaled, so I sometimes had trouble remembering what the endless examples of grifters, airline accidents, and 1950s sexual peccadillos were meant to illustrate. (Although the book was published in 1974, I think the bulk of the examples came from the 1930s-1960s).
Let's try to strip away these examples, then, and get to what Goffman was trying to frame up. Goffman borrows the term "frame" from Gregory Bateson (p.7), using it to describe the ways that we bracket social situations so we know how to interpret and react to them. His aim is to "try to isolate some of the basic frameworks of understanding available in our society for making sense out of events and to analyze the special vulnerabilities to which these frames of reference are subject" (p.10). He uses frame to describe how people define a situation based on principles of organization that govern events (pp.10-11). Strip refers to "any arbitrary slide or cut from the stream of ongoing activity ... as seen from the perspective of those subjectively involved in sustaining an interest in them" (p.10). Essentially, we sample the strips available to us and use them to apply frames that can help us interpret further strips. When frames are confirmed, our assumptions "disappear into the smooth flow of activity" (p.39)—that is, once we are pretty sure which frame is operant, we tend to assume that frame and interpret subsequent interactions within that frame.
At this point, one can see why Goffman becomes so interested in his eclectic examples. They are full of instances in which people misapply frames in various ways. Some are deliberate (cons), some are accidental (comedies of error). But he successively deploys concepts and vocabulary to better understand them.
In Chapter 3, he introduces keying, a systematic transformation along schema of interpretation (ex: play fighting, which resembles actual fighting).
In Chapter 4, he discusses fabrications: deliberate attempts to manage activity so that someone will have a false belief about the activity (p.83). Like keyings, fabrication is a transformational vulnerability of the activity; keying is to fabrication as satire is to plagiarism (p.84).
Chapter 5 discusses the theatrical frame (cf. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life). Here, there is a performer and an audience (p.124).
In Chapter 6, he discusses structural issues in fabrications, including retransformations, recontainment, transformational depth, actor transformations, and fabrication frameworks. Sorry, I'm not going to give you thumbnails on all of these; suffice it to say that these all boil down to tactics that fabricators use to reassert their fabricated frames. These are useful if you're going to fool or con someone (or if you want to avoid being fooled or conned).
Chapter 7 considers out-of-frame activity: overlapping activity that inevitably intrudes on the focus activity.
Chapter 8 describes the anchoring of activity: the way that the frame is related to the world in which the framing occurs (p.248).
Chapter 9 describes "ordinary troubles" in sustaining a frame: innocent troubles that relate to "straight activity" as well as collapses in fabrications.
Chapter 10 is about breaking frame: the extent to which people are engrossed in the activity rather than drifting into other realities (or: becoming engrossed in a competing frame) (p.347).
Chapters 11 and 12 focus on manufacturing negative experience and the vulnerabilities of experience, respectively; the latter explores frame traps, in which people are trapped in a specific interpretation of a frame (p.482). Also in the latter, Goffman protests that his aim is not to compile tips on how to hoodwink people (p.486).
Chapter 13 specifically applies frame analysis to talk.
As you may be able to intuit from the increasingly short descriptions of each chapter, the book was in some respects exhausting. If you are fascinated by endless midcentury news clippings and advice columns, you may find the book easier going than I did. I would have preferred that Goffman make his points more succinctly and with more explicit definitions. Nevertheless, the fact that it was exhausting does not make the book less valuable; there are few keener observers of human nature. If you are interested in how people construe, misconstrue, and correct their readings of situations, pick this book up. You may have to use both hands.
Reading :: A Theory of Discourse
A Theory of Discourse: The Aims of Discourse
By James L. Kinneavy
James Kinneavy was a professor at UT—I think his office is now Diane Davis'—and founded the English PhD's concentration in rhetoric. A Theory of Discourse (1971) is his most broadly read book, and today I learned that "The Texas Education Agency adopted his theory of discourse as the foundation of its English program, as did the State of Wisconsin." Certainly it was frequently cited in the Iowa State program during my PhD work (1994-1999). However, by that time, A Theory of Discourse had become received knowledge. We didn't read it in the program, instead reading later articles that critiqued its central organizing principle, the aims of discourse, and the results of those aims, the modes of discourse.
The modes of discourse were so important to the book that Kinneavy promised in this book that he would write a second volume focusing on them. Unfortunately that volume never came to pass. In 1981, Robert J. Connors published his "The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse" (which we did read in ISU's program), in which he critiqued the concept and traced its eventual abandonment.
But Kinneavy's book is more than the modes of discourse. It's an attempt to make rhetoric a scholarly field of study. As Kinneavy argued in 1971, "Composition is so clearly the stepchild of the English department that it is not a legitimate area of concern in graduate studies, is not even recognized as a subdivision of English in a recent manifesto put out by the major professional association (MLA) of college English teachers ... , in some universities is not a valid area of scholarship for advancement in rank, and is generally the teaching province of graduate assistants or fringe members of the department" (p.1). Composition classes were "chaotic," and "the agenda of freshman composition vary from nothing to everything" (p.1). "There is no definite concept of what the basic foundations of composition are" (p.2). Yet, Kinneavy argued, "it is the thesis of this work that the field of composition—or discourse as it will presently be termed—is a rich and fertile discipline with a worthy past that should be consulted before being consigned to oblivion, an exciting present, and a future that seems as limitless as either linguistics or literature" (p.2).
Kinneavy argued that composition was in its Kuhnian preparadigm period (p.2), without common foundations or systematic commitments (p.3). Kinneavy proposed to provide such a foundation.
To begin, he discussed four rival terms for what he wanted to accomplish: rhetoric, composition, communication, and discourse. After some discussion, he chose "discourse" because it could be directed at any aim of language and any text (pp.3-4). (Today, the term "rhetoric" has taken this position and is used roughly in the way Kinneavy attempted to use "discourse"; offhand, I suspect that this term rose to the top because it could claim classical lineage. Kinneavy's understanding of discourse roughly parallels the Bakhtin Circle's notion of the utterance; compare p.22.) Kinneavy grounded his exploration of discourse in the communication triangle: the points are the encoder, decoder, and reality, while the area of the resulting triangle is the signal (p.19). This communication triangle has often been critiqued in subsequent literature, for good reason, but it gave Kinneavy a systematic way to analyze and discuss different aims of discourse. Kinneavy traces the triangle structure back to Aristotle, and he liberally uses it to diagram the study of language as a whole (p.25), the field of English (p.31), the aims of discourse (p.61), and Aristotle's Rhetoric (p.226). Side note: I have often wondered whether activity theory's rapid inroads in writing studies had to do with the fact that it also uses triangle diagrams to represent contextualized aims.
Based on this work, Kinneavy separates out four aims of discourse, centered on corresponding "classes of kind of referents" (p.36). These aims are expressive, referential, literary, and persuasive (p.61). To help you orient: the referential includes scientific, informative, and exploratory discourse (p.63); reports are considered referential rather than persuasive (p.61). Having established the different aims and the modes that serve them, Kinneavy seeks to establish their norms (p.63).
The rest of the book examines each aim of discourse in turn, one aim per chapter. These chapters are subdivided into introduction and terminology; nature; logic; organization; and style. Throughout each chapter, Kinneavy dives deeply into each aim, connecting it to vast literature and systematically explaining it as it relates to a part of the communicative triangle.
For instance, in his chapter on persuasion, Kinneavy locates persuasion as being focused on the decoder (p.211). He argues that rhetoric has three traditions, the stylistic (attending to ornamentation), the Aristotelian (a distinct way of thinking), and the communicative (grounded in Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, with a modern representative in I.A. Richards) (pp.214-215). Kinneavy argues strongly that "persuasive discourse is generally different from reference discourse (and literary and expressive discourse as well). Otherwise everything is rhetoric" (p.217). (Compare this claim with the central claim in the popular first-year composition Everything's an Argument
, coauthored by UT professor John Ruszkiewicz, whose term overlapped Kinneavy's.) English departments distrust persuasion, Kinneavy argues (p.222), yet rhetoric "is necessary as long as man is a being with a body, with emotions, and with persistent character judgments. It would, indeed, be a cold and forbidding cosmos in which rhetoric did not exist" (p.224).
And here we get to the nub of the problem with A Theory of Discourse. I strongly sympathize with Kinneavy's central project, which is to systematize study of discourse so that we can appreciate, value, and research all of its facets. But discourse doesn't really have "facets," nor can it be well represented in a triangle with separated corners, nor does it typically have analytically separate aims. As facile as it might seem to declare that "everything's an argument," that statement seems more defensible than the claim that discourse has practically separable aims. As much scholarship has repeatedly shown since 1971, for instance, "referential" documents such as scientific papers and reports have persuasive aims, often nakedly persuasive ones (consider recommendation reports, for instance, or read Latour). Similarly, as Kinneavy alludes, "literature and love" could not exist in a world without rhetoric (p.224). I think Kinneavy recognizes that these separations are really analytical, but in proposing separate structures and modes to serve these analytically separate aims, he implies different approaches; there's not a good way to recognize and analyze the layering, melding, and tensions that inevitably result from contradictory aims (if such aims indeed contradict each other in the first place). I think these issues spring from the communicative triangle itself, which posits an analytic separation that is qualitatively untenable.
Not to say that this book isn't an achievement or isn't worthy of reading. In fact, if you study rhetoric, you really ought to read it. I regret that it took me so long to do so! But understand it as a part of a larger arc that the field of rhetoric has traversed.
By James L. Kinneavy
James Kinneavy was a professor at UT—I think his office is now Diane Davis'—and founded the English PhD's concentration in rhetoric. A Theory of Discourse (1971) is his most broadly read book, and today I learned that "The Texas Education Agency adopted his theory of discourse as the foundation of its English program, as did the State of Wisconsin." Certainly it was frequently cited in the Iowa State program during my PhD work (1994-1999). However, by that time, A Theory of Discourse had become received knowledge. We didn't read it in the program, instead reading later articles that critiqued its central organizing principle, the aims of discourse, and the results of those aims, the modes of discourse.
The modes of discourse were so important to the book that Kinneavy promised in this book that he would write a second volume focusing on them. Unfortunately that volume never came to pass. In 1981, Robert J. Connors published his "The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse" (which we did read in ISU's program), in which he critiqued the concept and traced its eventual abandonment.
But Kinneavy's book is more than the modes of discourse. It's an attempt to make rhetoric a scholarly field of study. As Kinneavy argued in 1971, "Composition is so clearly the stepchild of the English department that it is not a legitimate area of concern in graduate studies, is not even recognized as a subdivision of English in a recent manifesto put out by the major professional association (MLA) of college English teachers ... , in some universities is not a valid area of scholarship for advancement in rank, and is generally the teaching province of graduate assistants or fringe members of the department" (p.1). Composition classes were "chaotic," and "the agenda of freshman composition vary from nothing to everything" (p.1). "There is no definite concept of what the basic foundations of composition are" (p.2). Yet, Kinneavy argued, "it is the thesis of this work that the field of composition—or discourse as it will presently be termed—is a rich and fertile discipline with a worthy past that should be consulted before being consigned to oblivion, an exciting present, and a future that seems as limitless as either linguistics or literature" (p.2).
Kinneavy argued that composition was in its Kuhnian preparadigm period (p.2), without common foundations or systematic commitments (p.3). Kinneavy proposed to provide such a foundation.
To begin, he discussed four rival terms for what he wanted to accomplish: rhetoric, composition, communication, and discourse. After some discussion, he chose "discourse" because it could be directed at any aim of language and any text (pp.3-4). (Today, the term "rhetoric" has taken this position and is used roughly in the way Kinneavy attempted to use "discourse"; offhand, I suspect that this term rose to the top because it could claim classical lineage. Kinneavy's understanding of discourse roughly parallels the Bakhtin Circle's notion of the utterance; compare p.22.) Kinneavy grounded his exploration of discourse in the communication triangle: the points are the encoder, decoder, and reality, while the area of the resulting triangle is the signal (p.19). This communication triangle has often been critiqued in subsequent literature, for good reason, but it gave Kinneavy a systematic way to analyze and discuss different aims of discourse. Kinneavy traces the triangle structure back to Aristotle, and he liberally uses it to diagram the study of language as a whole (p.25), the field of English (p.31), the aims of discourse (p.61), and Aristotle's Rhetoric (p.226). Side note: I have often wondered whether activity theory's rapid inroads in writing studies had to do with the fact that it also uses triangle diagrams to represent contextualized aims.
Based on this work, Kinneavy separates out four aims of discourse, centered on corresponding "classes of kind of referents" (p.36). These aims are expressive, referential, literary, and persuasive (p.61). To help you orient: the referential includes scientific, informative, and exploratory discourse (p.63); reports are considered referential rather than persuasive (p.61). Having established the different aims and the modes that serve them, Kinneavy seeks to establish their norms (p.63).
The rest of the book examines each aim of discourse in turn, one aim per chapter. These chapters are subdivided into introduction and terminology; nature; logic; organization; and style. Throughout each chapter, Kinneavy dives deeply into each aim, connecting it to vast literature and systematically explaining it as it relates to a part of the communicative triangle.
For instance, in his chapter on persuasion, Kinneavy locates persuasion as being focused on the decoder (p.211). He argues that rhetoric has three traditions, the stylistic (attending to ornamentation), the Aristotelian (a distinct way of thinking), and the communicative (grounded in Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian, with a modern representative in I.A. Richards) (pp.214-215). Kinneavy argues strongly that "persuasive discourse is generally different from reference discourse (and literary and expressive discourse as well). Otherwise everything is rhetoric" (p.217). (Compare this claim with the central claim in the popular first-year composition Everything's an Argument
, coauthored by UT professor John Ruszkiewicz, whose term overlapped Kinneavy's.) English departments distrust persuasion, Kinneavy argues (p.222), yet rhetoric "is necessary as long as man is a being with a body, with emotions, and with persistent character judgments. It would, indeed, be a cold and forbidding cosmos in which rhetoric did not exist" (p.224).And here we get to the nub of the problem with A Theory of Discourse. I strongly sympathize with Kinneavy's central project, which is to systematize study of discourse so that we can appreciate, value, and research all of its facets. But discourse doesn't really have "facets," nor can it be well represented in a triangle with separated corners, nor does it typically have analytically separate aims. As facile as it might seem to declare that "everything's an argument," that statement seems more defensible than the claim that discourse has practically separable aims. As much scholarship has repeatedly shown since 1971, for instance, "referential" documents such as scientific papers and reports have persuasive aims, often nakedly persuasive ones (consider recommendation reports, for instance, or read Latour). Similarly, as Kinneavy alludes, "literature and love" could not exist in a world without rhetoric (p.224). I think Kinneavy recognizes that these separations are really analytical, but in proposing separate structures and modes to serve these analytically separate aims, he implies different approaches; there's not a good way to recognize and analyze the layering, melding, and tensions that inevitably result from contradictory aims (if such aims indeed contradict each other in the first place). I think these issues spring from the communicative triangle itself, which posits an analytic separation that is qualitatively untenable.
Not to say that this book isn't an achievement or isn't worthy of reading. In fact, if you study rhetoric, you really ought to read it. I regret that it took me so long to do so! But understand it as a part of a larger arc that the field of rhetoric has traversed.
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