Reading :: Dance of the Dialectic

Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method
By Bertell Ollman

This spring, I was Zooming with several colleagues. One of them mentioned this book, and another recommended it as well. “It’s so good,” Colleague 1 remarked. “Soooo good,” Colleague 2 affirmed.

I ordered the book immediately, because I really needed an explainer on dialectics. I mean, yes, I have read a lot about dialectics, and I’ve recently tried my hand at differentiating among different applications of dialectics, but the term’s used in at least two senses, with considerable slippage among them.  

On one hand, dialectic is sometimes understood as the now common-sensical notion that:

• Things change over time and relative to each other; change is the only constant.

• Elements in a given system mutually adjust. In a relatively stable system, elements are held in tension and constantly work out these tensions. The result might be a new equilibrium, but not a permanently stable system, as new tensions develop.

• Systems sometimes reach tipping points, points at which small differences add up and precipitate larger systemic change.

• Dialectic is thus a description of how elements, and more importantly the relations among elements, change in a system.

This understanding of dialectic yields an open field of possibilities. Here, systemic constraints are hard to predict, confounding the older and simpler idea of stability and clear monocausal relations. To provide one example, evolutionary theory challenged the older understanding of fixed species reproducing, instead arguing that species evolve to address changes in the environment, and in evolving, they change the environment for other species around them. Evolution isn’t a fixed linear path (contra how it is often depicted in science fiction) but rather a dispersion of various mutations, some of which might succeed in the changed environment. 

On the other hand, dialectic is sometimes – especially in Engels, Lenin, and Stalin – understood in a much more closed way:

• The essential logic of nature, one that underlies all processes, and ultimately teleological (Engels).

• Since it’s teleological, dialectic is a process that inevitably leads to specific outcomes, especially communism (Stalin).

• Dialectic is thus a prescription or prediction, telling us how a system – specifically an economic system – will change as it resolves its tensions.

This understanding of dialectic yields a closed field of possibilities. It lays out imperatives. For Stalin, it justified extending the dictatorship of the proletariat from a short transitional period to an “entire historical era.” 

There’s (ahem) a tension between these two senses. Marxists have emphasized the former, but have tried legitimizing the latter. This is true of Marx, but especially Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.

How does this relate to Ollmann’s book? On page 1, he argues that “Marxism … offers us a tale of two cities: one that claims to have freedom but doesn’t, and another that possesses bountiful freedom for all, but few know where it is or how to get it. The first city is called ‘capitalism’ … The other city is called ‘communism.’” (p.1).

For those who might object that communist regimes have so far not really been associated with freedom for all, Olmann hastily adds:

This city [communism] can’t be found on a map, because until now it only exists in the shadows of the first city. … The capitalists have managed to keep communism a well-guarded secret by using their power over the mike [microphone] … to ensure that no one learns that communism is really about freedom, while endlessly repeating the cannard [sic] that something called ‘communism’ was already tried in a few underdeveloped countries and that it didn’t work. (p.1; cf. p.155 for an explicit denial of “what happened in the Soviet Union and China”)

In other words: if you say that communism hasn’t worked, Olmann says that’s because it has never actually been tried. Just as Christ’s Second Coming us always on the horizon, or Dippin’ Dots is always characterized as the ice cream of the future, communism hasn’t come into its own yet, but it is an inevitability – according to this line of thought.

Olmann adds that Marx’s focus isn’t capitalism or communism, but rather their internal relations, and “how communism evolves as a still-unrealized potential within capitalism and the history of this evolution, stretching from earliest times to a future that is still far in front of us” (pp.1-2). That is, Marx’s focus is dialectic, which, when he applied it to capitalism, allowed him to contemplate how this capitalist system could (would) eventually evolve into communism.

Here on p.2, I had an epiphany due to my recent readings. 

The first is Latour’s Aramis, which I grow to appreciate more each time I read it. In Aramis, Latour investigates the failure of a cutting-edge autonomous train system in France, and he discovers that the system failed in part because its stakeholders each had a different, ideal notion of the train system. None of them were willing to compromise on this system, and their desires were incompatible, so the system could not come into being. They all loved the idea of Aramis, but only if it fit their ideal versions – and thus they loved it to death. 

The second is Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. I’ll just quote from my review of that book:

Boltanski and Chiapello agree with Weber's basic thesis but argue that capitalism continues to reinvent itself. They argue that the "spirit of capitalism" is the "ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism" (p.8) and that this ideology has periodically had to change in order to address and incorporate critiques (p.19). In fact, the authors identify three "spirits" of capitalism at different periods—familial, bureaucratic, and globalized—each of which were in tune with their time periods (p.19). The third spirit, which is what we are living through today (or at least were in 1999), must restore meaning to the accumulation process, combined with social justice (p.19).

More broadly, they say, critiques function as a motor for capitalism, which must align with other values to survive. Capitalism relies on its enemies' critiques to identify moral supports, which it then incorporates (p.27). (For a quick example, think in terms of social entrepreneurship.) In rhetorical terms, capitalism concedes critiques and adjusts its argument to address them. Paradoxically, this means that capitalism is the most fragile when it is triumphant (p.27)—when it doesn't have a critique to incorporate.

To put it back into Latourean terms, capitalists generally haven’t loved capitalism to death: they haven’t insisted on it being pure, perfect, or ideal. They have kept evolving it, reinventing it, by incorporating critiques. You might be able to find some capitalist idealists who will conclude that real capitalism hasn’t been tried yet, but they are considered marginal. People criticize systems as not being purely capitalist (ex: welfare! Social security!) but no one makes excuses by saying capitalism has never been tried. 

Putting these two texts together gives us a new insight into Ollman’s two cities. Perhaps, as Boltanski and Chiapello suggest, capitalism succeeds because it incorporates critiques. And perhaps communism remains understood as some future accomplishment because the previous attempts at communism have not incorporated critiques; instead, they are dismissed as not really communism because they do not meet the ideal that communists have in mind. 

But without trying versions and incorporating critiques, how could communism emerge? So here we are, 175 years after the Communist Manifesto was published, with a string of communist efforts that real people fought and died over, all of which have been denied because they turned out not to be perfect. Real communism has never been tried! But the price of success is a string of previous failures, and denying those failures makes success impossible. Communism is meant to somehow spring inevitably from the failures of capitalism, rather than emerging from trial and error, adaptation and maladaptation – that is, from dialectic in the first sense (description). The only way to get to this inevitable, ideal version of capitalism is dialectic in the second sense (prescription, prediction). 

As we get into Ch.2, Olmann adds (?) that dialectics is not “a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history,” but “Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world” (p.12). That is, he specifies the first meaning of dialectics above (description). He says,

Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common-sense notion of “thing” (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of “process” (which contains its history and possible futures) and “relation” (which contains a part of its ties with other relations). … it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is ‘abstracts’) in which to think about the world. (p.14)

Olmann says that dialectical relations include

• identity/difference

• interpenetration of opposites

• quantity/quality

• contradiction (p.15)

Of these, contradiction is the most important, since it focuses on the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation (p.17). Here, Olmann swerves back to the second meaning of dialectics above (prediction): “Capitalism’s fate, in other words, is sealed by its own problems, problems that are internal manifestations of what it is and how it works and are often parts of the very achievements of capitalism, worsening as the achievements grow and spread” (p.18). In contrast to (unnamed) nondialectical thinkers, who only think in terms of serial causality, dialecticians can (like Marx) understand how mutual dependence among elements will unfold: “for Marx … tracing how capitalist connections unfold is also a way of discovering the main causes of coming disruption and coming conflict” (p.18).  

(Olmann continues to dance across this line – for instance, later he claims that capitalism “was not only a possible development out of class society, but it was made likely by the character of the latter, by the very dynamics inherent in the division of labor once it got underway” (p.98, in which I would characterize as the first meaning of dialectics). And later still, he claims that Marx’s historical examinations aren’t teleological – Marx simply looks at today’s conditions and then asks: what past conditions led here (p.118)? Yet Marx looks at the capitalism of his day and concludes that “capitalism cannot go on much longer” (p.123)). 

Olmann makes a few concessions here:

1. Dialectical thinkers may play down details in the process of generalizing.

2. Dialectical thinkers sometimes move too quickly “to push the germ of an idea to its finished form.”

3. Dialectical thinkers sometimes “overestimate the speed of change.” (p.19)

Moving on. In Chapter 3, Olmann turns to social relations. Rather than examining “facets” of a single thing, dialectics focus on relations or interdependencies (p.25). In Chapter 4, he turns to internal relations, where he argues that in discussing interrelations, we are describing the system in which things exist (p.41). And in Chapter 5, he discusses abstraction, which Marx uses in four distinct ways:

1. The mental act of subdividing the world (p.61)

2. The result of this process (parts) (p.62)

3. “A suborder of particularly ill-fitting mental constructs” (p.62)

4. “A particular organization of elements in the real world – having to do with the functioning of capitalism – that provides the objective underpinnings for most of the ideological abstractions mentioned above” (p.62)

Olmann sounds a theme here that shows up elsewhere in the book – the theme that critics just haven’t put the time into really understanding Marx (see also p.109). He acknowledges that Marx uses terms with considerable slippage (like “abstraction”) and switches between levels of analysis without much signaling, and consequently non-Marxists have trouble reading Marx properly (p.94). Similarly, he explains Engels’ reductive presentation of dialectics in his Dialectics of Nature by claiming that Engels is writing about dialectics at a broad level, Marx at a human level (p.97). 

Moving on, we get to Chapter 9, “Why Dialectics? Why Now?” And here we return to the theme of impending communism that was begun in Chapter 1. Olmann acknowledges the collapse of the USSR, but warns (like Marx) that capitalism can’t go on much longer (pp.158-159) and assures us that communism still lays concealed inside capitalism (p.159). Capitalism is “becoming impossible,” creating the conditions for communism (p.159). And here we begin to see the real differences between this dialectics, the second sense of dialectics, and Latour’s Aramis and Boltanski & Chiapello. For dialectics, the conditions create an inevitable progression: the principle of quantitative change yielding qualitative change means that the system will collapse into a new equilibrium rather than being negotiated and evolving in unpredictable ways. Every knee will bend, every tongue will confess.  

Having stepped into the second meaning of dialectics, Ohlmann must end by hopping back into the first meaning, conceding that “the projections of the future obtained through the use of the method outlined here are only highly probable” and noting that Marx himself conceded that an unlikely alternative outcome would be “barbarism” (p.168). (Surely many, many other possibilities exist in a highly complex system, but most of that complexity can be waved away through Abstraction.) Olmann finally provides us with a figure of dance steps that he terms the “dance of the dialectic”: 

1. Analyze

2. Historicize

3. Visionize

4. And organize! (p.169)

But as implied in this review, the dance of the dialectic seems to also include two other steps interspersed throughout the dance: first a leap to Describe, then gathering strength for the powerful leap to Predict, followed by a hasty conciliatory hop back to Describe, and repeat as opportune.

I’ll stop here. The remaining chapters are useful, but not (in my judgment) core to the book, and this review is long enough.

So what did I think of the book? Although I think readers can recognize my frustration with dialectics, this book was indeed “soooo good,” as my colleague promised, because it helped me to think through dialectics as a method, and specifically this duality between description and prescription – admittedly, probably too simple a characterization, but it was enough to help me understand what has always put me off about dialectics. If you’re similarly struggling with what is meant by this method, or how to apply it, or how to better understand the works of Soviet psychologists (as I am), definitely pick it up.

20 years of Tracing Genres through Organizations

Just a quick note that my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations (MIT Press), was published 20 years ago today. 

I honestly can't believe it's been 20 years -- it feels like maybe 10. TGTO was in turn based on my 1999 dissertation, directed by the amazing David R. Russell, whose gentle prodding and extensive readings pushed me to think through what I was seeing. Through that project, and other research I was doing at the time, I developed a consistent admiration for my participants: I could see how people developed their own workarounds and practices to address their own consistent practices. As I learned how to model these practices, I was able to see how these workarounds sometimes revolutionized people's activities, often without them realizing it. That admiration for people's problem-solving abilities still animates my studies and teaching. 

I'm forever grateful to everyone who helped make this book a reality: first and foremost my participants, who generously hosted me; David Russell and the rest of the dissertation committee, who guided me; faculty at Texas Tech and the University of Texas, who were willing to discuss it with me; and the editors of the Acting with Technology series at MIT Press, who were willing to give this book a shot. 

Reading :: Entrepreneurship in the Wild

Entrepreneurship in the Wild

By Felipe G. Massa

I’m always on the lookout for a textbook that suits my upper-division class, Writing for Entrepreneurs. So when I saw this book, I went ahead and ordered it. I’m glad I did. Although it doesn’t quite hit the target for that class, it’s a good explanation of how to move from an idea to launching a startup. 

The book draws from Lean Startup methodology, Design Thinking techniques, the Jobs to be Done framework, Moore’s positioning statement, personas, customer journeys, and other familiar bits and pieces that have been adopted by entrepreneurs. And, importantly, it provides worksheets and guided exercises so that readers — whether students or budding entrepreneurs — can follow along, building their own entrepreneurial ideas step by step.

The process starts with generating ideas, and progresses from there. The chapters are:

1. Ideas with legs
2. Finding your first customer
3. Validating the opportunity
4. Designing customer journeys
5. Modeling your business
6. Positioning your solution
7. Validating your solution
8. Projecting financials
9. Pitching your startup
10. Launching your startup

And the book demystifies financials, which are a weak point for me.

So the book has a lot going for it. However, I’m not sold on it for my specific class, for the following reasons:

There’s no overarching concept. Like most entrepreneurship books, it doesn’t offer a unified framework so much as a grab bag of different bits-and-pieces solutions (listed above). These components are all useful, but they are also disjointed: they don’t have an overarching theory or theme that pulls them together. I don’t think this is a problem with the book so much as it is a symptom of entrepreneurship as a practice. These components work in practice, but I want them to work together, fitting into an overall thesis / argument / concept. 

It’s about entrepreneurship, not entrepreneurship communication. The book focuses on the broader process of entrepreneurship, while my class is really more focused on entrepreneurship communication. So, for my purposes, it doesn’t focus enough on developing the value proposition as a claim or using a minimal viable product (MVP) to communicate with potential customers about expectations. 

It’s about success, not failure. Entrepreneurship is inherently risky, and even when the entrepreneur does everything right, they might fail for reasons beyond their control. I discuss failure a lot in my Writing for Entrepreneurs course, but it’s not discussed here. 

It presents entrepreneurship as linear, not iterative. Related to the above, entrepreneurship is about finding a viable pathway to sustainable success, and that pathway rarely follows a straight line. I wanted the book to cover iterating, pivoting, and questing more than it did.

It’s anchored in business cases, not in empirical research. Look, business books usually draw on business cases, and these are usually retrospective stories told by successful founders. These can be very useful, but they tend to skew our ideas because we end up hearing edited stories from winners about how they won. These retrospective stories leave out a lot, and winners often overestimate how much they had to do with the win. To learn about entrepreneurship, we need to hear more about losing and how to handle it, and we need a more systematic account of what entrepreneurs do. 

But keep in mind that I’m providing a wish list for the book I want, not the book that entrepreneurs necessarily need or the one that this author wanted to write. Although I stand by all of the above, at the end of the day, this is a good solid book for entrepreneurs, one that gives them vital tools and maps out a journey for them. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, but don’t know where to start, this is a really good place.

Reading :: The Social System

 The Social System

By Talcott Parsons

The link goes to Amazon as usual, but I got this book as a PDF. It’s a classic sociological text, copyright 1951 (my version is the 1964 paperback), and does a lot to lay out the basic idea of solidarity that does so much work in sociology. I’m sure all of the sociologists out there are wondering why it took me so long to get to it – but I was trained in rhetoric and professional communication, and am consequently forever playing catch-up in sociology, anthropology, psychology, management, and the other disciplines and fields from which I draw. 

Still, I found much of The Social System to be strangely familiar. 

Parsons attempts to describe a scheme for analyzing “the structure and process of social systems” (p.vii), building on Pareto’s orientation toward social systems, but using a structural-functional level of analysis. He uses an “action frame of reference,” examining the orientation of actors (biological organisms) to a situation, including other actors. This frame of reference is thus relational, and the approach analyzes the structure and processes of systems built up by the relations of such units (p.9). He is not interested in internal structure so much as the bearing on the relational system (p.9). A “situation” is oriented toward some sort of object:

• social objects include actors: alter, ego, collectivity

• physical objects are empirical, do not respond to ego, and can be means or conditions

• cultural objects are symbolic elements, including ideas, beliefs, expressive symbols, and value actions (p.4)

Here, “‘Action’ is a process in the actor-situation system which has motivational significance to the individual actor, or, in the case of a collectivity, its component individuals” (p.4). It is only treated in the analysis when it’s considered motivationally relevant (p.4). 

Actions take place in a social system, which involves

• plural individual actors

• interacting with each other

• in a situation with a physical/environmental aspect

• who are motivated to optimize gratification

• whose relations are mediated by a system of culturally structured and shared symbols (p.5)

At this point, I thought, “this sounds a lot like Engestromian activity theory.” The insistence on concrete (material) analysis, the term object and object orientation, the systemic analysis within a specific frame of reference, the attention to actors, motivation, and mediation — the components are in many ways parallel. Bear in mind that while activity theory was a psychological framework in Russia, when Engestrom and others in the West took it up, they began to emphasize sociological elements: Leontiev’s notion of activity was formalized into the activity system, investigations began to expand beyond individuals or dyads, etc. In applying activity theory to political economy, Engestrom ended up applying a lot of social concepts to AT. I wouldn’t be surprised if Parsons’ foundational work in sociology influenced some of the social concepts, although he only mentions Parsons twice in Learning by Expanding (among a pantheon of classical sociologists such as Weber, Lukacs, Adorno, Mead, Durkheim, and Marx). 

Whether or not Parsons laid down the tracks for Engestromian AT, it seems to do a lot of the same work — but unlike AT, Parsons is (a) interested in power and (b) uninterested in boiling everything down to economic relations.  Social systems are an aspect of “a completely concrete system of social action” (p.6), but they share the stage with two other aspects, personality systems (of individual actors) and cultural systems (built into their actions) (p.6). Parson sees an actor's need-disposition system as itself having two aspects:

• Gratificational aspect: what the actor gets out of interaction with world (content)

• Orientational aspect: how the actor’s relation to the object world is organized (patterns) (p.7)

The system’s “Orientation to the situation is structured, that is, with reference to its developmental patterns” (p.8). Again sounding like an activity theorist, Parsons adds, “The goal-directedness of action is … a fundamental property of all action-systems” (p.8). And sounding like Vygotsky, he says, we must distinguish this orientation from stimulus-response, which “does not make the orientation to the future development of the situation explicit” (p.8). 

A bit farther down, Parsons discusses value-orientation, which involves

• cognitive standards

• appreciative standards

• moral standards (p.13)

And he sees moral standards as most directly important to the sociologist (p.14).

On p.15, he addresses culture, which he says is 

• transmitted

• learned

• shared

And thus is both product and determinant (p.15). 

Regarding the relationship between culture and social system, he says:

The crucial point for the present is that the "learning" and the "living" of a system of cultural patterns by the actors in a social system, cannot be understood without the analysis of motivation in relation to concrete situations, not only on the level of personality theory, but on the level of the mechanisms of the social system. (p.17)

He defines personality as “the relational system of a living organism interacting with a situation” (p.17) and society as an empirically self-subsistent social system that persists long-term from within its own resources (p.19). Any system that doesn’t meet the definition of society is considered a “partial” social system (p.19). He declares his primary concern as categorizing the structure of social systems, modes of structural differentiation, and ranges of variability with reference to each structural category between systems (p.21). 

In a social system, he says, the most elementary unit is the act (p.25), but a better higher-order unit is the status-role; the system is a network of relationships among actors involved in the interactive process (p.25). A bit later, he adds: “A concrete action system is an integrated structure of action elements in relation to a situation. This means essentially integration of motivational and cultural or symbolic elements,brought together in a certain kind of ordered system” (p.36). 

“An institution will be said to be a complex of institutionalized role integrates which is of strategic structural significance in the social system in question. The institution should be considered to bea higher order unit of social structure than the role, and indeed it is made up of a plurality of interdependent role-patterns or components of them. … An institution in this sense should be clearly distinguished from a collectivity. A collectivity is a system of concretely interactive specific roles.” (p.39).

As you can tell, this first chapter is all about definitions and relations. It’s not easy to follow because the systemic analysis Parsons is proposing is fairly intricate. (Again I’m reminded of AT – one complaint about AT is that it has so many components and is hard to get into.) Parsons eventually provides us with an outline of his main categories (pp.57-58) — which is considerate, but not as considerate as it would have been if he had presented this at the very beginning!

Let’s pause here to sum up what we have so far. 

• Parsons' action theory is in many ways parallel to Engestromian activity theory (at least to my mind).

• But it is more focused on the individual personality and on how people construct each others' roles.

• Since Parsons’ approach rejects a managerial view, conflicts are seen as more neutral and not necessarily something to resolve.

• It also has more focus on personality as a unique refractor (Vygotsky might discuss this in terms of perezhivanie), vs personality emerging from activity.

• Parsons’ system makes a place for individual gratification — much more so than Vygotsky and Leontiev did, perhaps since they sought a normative vision in harmony with the New Soviet Man and emerging Soviet society.  For Vygotsky and Leontiev, individual gratification is at most a developmental step toward the proper orientation (ex: a schoolchild motivated by a good grade).

• On the other hand, Parsons’ system is not primarily concerned with learning and development, as Vygotsky and Leontiev were. 

• Parsons offers a systems view, but these systems are not self-contained. They are at different levels of scale and fundamentally interconnected.

• Engestromian AT probably didn't lift and impose Parsons on Leontiev -- but if it had, it would look pretty similar to the way it does.

Let’s stop here, with the end of a very long Chapter 2. The book has 12 chapters, but they mainly fill in the details of the outline on pp.57-58. Parsons covers topics such as solidarity, cooperation, types of institutions, types of actor-units (he gets positively Aristotelian here in terms of his elaborate taxonomy), equilibrium and deviance in social systems (cf. AT’s contradictions), and role conflicts. It’s all well worth reading, but honestly quite overwhelming. 

Should you pick up this book? 

• If you’re a sociologist, you probably already have a good grasp of the concepts and arguments, and undoubtedly plenty of commentary and critique of it, but it’s always a good idea to look at the source material.

• If you’re an activity theorist, particularly in the Engestromian mold, you should definitely skim it at least and see both the parallels and the distinctions.

• If you’re neither a sociologist nor an activity theorist, but are interested in conducting qualitative research (case studies, ethnographies, other field studies), yes, look at Parsons’ careful accounting for different material factors.

Me, I plan to review this book at least a few more times. This first time, I focused on the parallels with AT. Next time, I may focus on critiques of what seems like an overly articulated and perhaps brittle system. Parsons’ heavy reliance on taxonomies, tables, and especially 4-fields yields an overly dichotomized structure throughout, and I’ll need some time to get my head around the implications. 

   

Reading :: Control through Communication

Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management
By JoAnne Yates 

I read this 1989 book in grad school and still go back to it sometimes. Recently I returned to it again on advice of an anonymous reviewer of a manuscript I had submitted. It's an excellent book and well worth reading, and I'll only touch the surface of it in this brief review.

In a nutshell, Yates examines the revolution in managerial communications between 1850-1920, examining primarily the archives of the Illinois Central Railroad, Scovill Manufacturing Company, and DuPont. 

The book falls into two parts.

In the first part (Ch.1-3), Yates takes a broad view of the era, examining the rise and development of managerial methods and the need for internal communications (Ch.1), the emerging communication technologies that enabled a rise in internal communication (Ch.2), and the explosion of internal communication genres (Ch.3). Importantly, these innovations (technologies, genres) did not stay inside corporations, but made their way to other parts of our lives.

In the second part (Ch.4-8), Yates conducts closer analyses of the three organizations whose archives she studied. These chapters provide necessary detail, but frankly did not hold my attention as well.

In my first read-through in graduate school, I was mainly focused on Chapters 2-3. (For what it's worth, I think this book exerted a stronger influence on my grad school office mate Mark Zachry, who went on to write his dissertation based on the archives of a meatpacking company.) Reading through it again, I focused on those same chapters again, this time with a couple of decades of theory and research to help me understand them. Predictably, I now see new connections: to genre assemblages, to cultural heritage as represented in genres, to Latour's archival research. 

The book is still about 1850-1920, but as we undergo new changes in how we communicate at work, it seems more relevant than ever. I can imagine it being a blueprint for some doctoral student, writing in 2035, examining the profound shifts we have undergone from the introduction of the IBM PC in 1980 to the present. 

If you're interested in workplace communication, and especially in how technologies and genres change how we understand our work and ourselves, definitely pick this book up.

Reading :: Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research

Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research
By David M. Boje

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, but finally scheduled time for it when some collaborators and I began analyzing stories from a community research project. Fortunately, the book is slim (137pp without the bibliography and notes) and pretty direct.

Boje's focus here is on laying out different traditions for analyzing stories and narrative. The two are different:

Narrative requires plot, as well as coherence. To narrative theory, story is folksy, without emplotment, a simple telling of chronology. I propose 'antenarrative.' Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and pre-narrative speculation, a bet. (p.1). 

He connects antenarrative to the crisis of postmodernism and outlines ways to analyze antenarratives (as opposed to narrative in the classic sense): "eight antenarrative analysis options that can deal with the prevalence of fragmented and polyphonic storytelling in complex organizations and to provide teaching examples of these methods that are applicable to organization studies" (p.1). These options are treated in separate chapters:

• Deconstruction analysis
• Grand narrative analysis
• Microstoria analysis
• Story network analysis
• Intertextuality analysis
• Causality analysis 
• Plot analysis
• Theme analysis

Before getting into these options, Boje establishes five dimensions of antenarrative:

• Pre-plot: Antenarrative precedes emplotment (p.3)
• Ambiguity: "Antenarrative is constituted out of the flow of living experience" and is thus speculative, oriented toward meaning-making (p.3)
• Flow as sensemaking: Antenarrative is "a sensemaking to lived experience" (p.4)
• Fragmentary: It precedes closure and thus involves multiple interpretations (p.4)
• Collective before consensual: "It is before the plots have been agreed to" (p.4)

In the subsequent chapters, Boje examines each of the eight options, which are grounded in different sets of literature and different research traditions. He gives considerable attention to each. In this review, I won't: I'll skip to two that I think are most relevant for my work.

One is causality analysis (Ch.6), in which antenarratives advance tentative causal links. Boje quotes Nietzsche's question of whether causes lead to effects or whether effects lead to a search for causes. In antenarratives, people nominate causes for the effects they see around them. Examples include origin stories and stories of praise or blame. To explore these, Boje catalogs different processes:

• identifying temporal language in antenarratives
• the relation between microstories and macrostories
• tracing intertextual linkages of assertions across stories
• developing a narrative mapping of causal assertions (p.102)

The second chapter I focus on is the one on thematic analysis (Ch.8), which (Boje notes) is not strictly associated with stories (p.122). In fact, whereas "taxonomy cells in narrative theory are little theme cages to entrap stories," Boje emphasizes how antenarratives move in between and outside taxonomic classification (p.122). In an antenarrative approach, then, Boje exhorts us to ask: 

• What gets left out of themes?
• What goes on between the cells of themes? (p.125)

I found this book helpful in terms of thinking through how to analyze antenarratives (perhaps not narratives, although that is what the title implies). Chapter 6 was especially helpful along these lines, cataloging different approaches to causality analysis and providing methodological cites so we can study them further. 

On the other hand, I was not a fan of the prose, which is a little too pomo for me. That is, sometimes things that I think are fairly banal and unsurprising (e.g., people try to make sense through stories, those stories aren't necessarily internally coherent and are usually not coherent with others', a lot of causal links are post-hoc rationalizations) are presented as being shockingly revealed, often through highly figurative language. That figurative language could, in many places, be replaced by simple illustrations from concrete studies. In fact, doing so would have really helped me to understand how to apply these techniques in my own work -- techniques that seem to get lost in the shuffle sometimes.

Despite this drawback, I found the book helpful both in its advice and its bibliography. If you do qualitative research and have been thinking about analyzing narratives or antenarratives, definitely take a look.

(20 years of blogging)

Today marks my 20th year of blogging. 

I really can't believe it: It seems like just a few years ago that I started this blog. But then again, "blog" seems so 2000s, doesn't it? Throughout the years, I have thought about moving this blog to Facebook (when I was on it), to Medium (when that platform was hot), and to other platforms that had more traction and active development. But I've held steady here at Blogger, and it's nice to have accumulated a huge archive of book reviews on one platform.

That's always been the raison d'etre of this blog: to capture my insights from the books I read. As a new assistant professor in 1999, I found that I would read a book, be excited about its insights, return the book to the library -- and a few months later, I couldn't remember the insights, or I would remember them but not where they came from. This was no way to live. So I started keeping notes on my readings, and in 2003, I began posting them to the blog. 

My very first review was mainly written as I was waiting in line for tickets to The Matrix: Reloaded at the Alamo Drafthouse. That movie was a real disappointment, but the blog wasn't. After compiling a few reviews, I found that I could

• capture insights adequately
• search the blog for insights ("Where did Latour say X? Who talks about topic Y?")
• capture quotes that I know I want to use in papers, so I don't have to retype them
• capture thoughts that I might use in literature reviews later (I regularly copy-paste from my blog to my lit reviews)
• share book summaries with students and colleagues so that they can quickly decide whether to read the book or not

The blog, in other words, has really supercharged my writing and scholarship by allowing me to capture my efforts. But I can also see my growth as a scholar as I read across these reviews. Every once in a while, I review a book a second or third time, highlighting different insights -- and sometimes reviewing a book more fairly than the first time.

Apparently it's been helpful to others as well. One friend of my wife's reported that she was trying to get her head around Bakhtin, googled his books, and found my blog. "Clay Spinuzzi saved my life!" she said in what I'm pretty sure is an exaggeration. Similarly, some of our HDO students read Deleuze & Guatarri in another class, looked for an explainer, and found my review. I didn't anticipate the blog working in that way, but I'm glad it does.

One downside is that I am always behind on blogging. I'm about six books behind right now, mainly because I have been having to prioritize other writing commitments. But those books are sitting on a specific shelf at home, so I won't forget them, and I promise I'll get to them. Soon.

In any case, I am thankful for the decision that I made 20 years ago. I plan to retire around 2035, so hopefully we'll make it to a 30th-year anniversary too.

Reading :: The Pitch Deck Book

The Pitch Deck Book
By Tim Cooley

I saw this book on Amazon and it was inexpensive enough that I went ahead and grabbed the Kindle version. I'm glad I did, even though I don't think I will end up reading it over and over. 

Cooley nails the point of the pitch deck, which is not to sell, but to start a conversation. So what is the best way to start a conversation? Cooley goes over various lengths of arguments: an elevator pitch, a one-pager (sort of like a resume for your startup), a one-paragraph, a one-liner, and of course the standard pitch deck.

Most of the book focuses on the pitch deck, examining its anatomy and common mistakes that people make when putting them together. He contextualizes these within pre-pitch and post-pitch activities as well. At the end of the book, he shows us several slide decks with speaker notes -- and his own commentary on what does and doesn't work for each slide. 

The book sometimes tends to fragmentary advice rather than a strong overview. But since the book is also pretty short, this approach works well enough. It really feels as if an experienced pitcher is taking us through the dos and don'ts. 

If you're interested in developing a pitch for a startup, I'd definitely take a look at this book. 

Reading :: Mapping Experiences

Mapping Experiences
By Jim Kalbach

This short review is for the first edition of this O'Reilly book, which a colleague recommended to me. It's focused on how people map value in organizations and markets. Think in terms of Design Thinking's customer journey maps -- which are referenced several times -- as well as business model canvases and strategy maps. If you've been intrigued by Design Thinking or other workshop approaches that help groups of people visualize an experience, this book is definitely worth picking up.

I confess that is not the value I was hoping to take away from the book. Instead, I was thinking more generally about different types of visualizations and how they help us to explore different aspects. And although Kalbach does touch on this question -- he mentions that visualizations fall into four buckets, chronological, hierarchical, spatial, and network -- his main focus is on the specific question of value. As he mentions, these diagrams really aren't the objective. The objective is to engage others in conversations.

Still, it's a well-developed book, nicely illustrated, with a lot of thought put into how these visualizations are presented and used. If you're interested in mapping value in organizations, or even just interested in how visualizations work, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Culture and Inference

Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study
By Edwin Hutchins

"This book is an attempt to make culture the object rather than the instrument of analysis" (p.128). This sentence, at the very end of Hutchins' 1980 book, sums up his project. As he explains, "More of our knowledge of the world than we probably realize is arrived at through inference" (p.119), and much of that inference runs through our cultural understanding. 

Hutchins is interested here in cognition in field settings. The examples are taken from his naturalistic observation in the Trobriand Islands, specifically legal disputes over land. Although he observed and analyzed several such disputes, for illustration purposes, he zeroes in on one specific dispute and examines the arguments and evidence used by each claimant as well as how these were received by the court. The Trobriand land tenure system is complex, so Hutchins has to cover quite a bit of ground to get here. But it's well worth getting through because it gives us a better job of how inference works.

I'll quickly note that Hutchins cites Luria's Uzbek expedition in Chapter 1 (pp.8-9), focusing on how Luria presented syllogisms.

The book is brief, but probably merits more than this short review. If you're interested in cross-cultural cognition research, definitely pick it up!

Reading :: Sorting Things Out

Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences
By Geoffrey C. Barker and Susan Leigh Star

I was surprised to discover that although I once referenced this book on my blog, I never reviewed it. It came out in 2000 and I started reviewing books in 2003, so I must have originally read it shortly after it came out.

The book is (obviously) about classification: What it is, why we do it, what's involved. It begins with a definition of classification: "a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world" (p.10, their emphasis). In a classification system,

1. "There are consistent, unique classificatory principles in operation"
2. "The categories are mutually exclusive"
3. "The system is complete" (pp.10-11)

Yet "no real-world classification system that we have looked at meets these simple requirements" (p.11). They pragmatically broaden the definition to things that are treated like classification systems — of which there are many — and they examine these as a central part of modern life. 

One interesting note toward the end of Chapter 1 is that actor-network theory drew attention to the importance of the development of standards, but not to classification systems. If we follow the actors, we don't get to see what was excluded (p.48). Specifically, the authors later argue, that includes infrastructure (p.266).

In subsequent chapters, the authors explore classification through various cases, including tuberculosis, race classifications in South Africa, and nursing. Through this work, they develop claims about classification, but also infrastructure. It's a densely argued book to which this short review can't do justice.

Should you pick it up? Yes -- if you're interested in classification, infrastructure, or just how the modern world works, it's important and compelling reading. 

Reading :: Vygotsky and Literacy Research

Vygotsky and Literacy Research
By Peter Smagorinsky

Here, Peter Smagorinsky thinks through the question of literacy, applying Vygotsky's understanding of human development as culturally mediated. It's a solid book. But before we get into it, I do want to highlight a gripe, one that is not really about Smagorinsky per se.

Early on, Smagorinsky highlights the problems of interpreting Vygotsky when one does not speak Russian. Like me, Smagorinsky only speaks English, and he is very aware of the limitations. In fact, he ramps these up a bit, noting that Michael Cole, "who has spoken Russian for many decades, who lived in the Soviet Union during his internship with A.R. Luria, who..." -- and I'll spare you the lengthy list of qualifications -- that Michael Cole now insists on coauthoring papers with a native Russian speaker so he can better understand the "relevant context" of Vygotsky's words. 

To which I say: put down the hair shirt. I mean, Cole has now spoken Russian for longer than Vygotsky did. (Vygotsky died at 38.) Additionally, Cole certainly is more fluent in English than Vygotsky or Luria were, but this did not stop Vygotsky or Luria from reading, quoting, or criticizing scholars writing in English (and French, and German). Vygotsky never considered finding a native English writing partner to help him understand the writings of American behaviorists. Beyond that, Luria even taught himself  basic Uzbek before his Uzbek expedition — and he used Russian translators to conduct his studies there. 

Yes, I can certainly understand wanting to be careful about the cultural-historical context in archival studies. But I am also highly skeptical of gatekeeping tendencies in CHAT circles, tendencies that seem at odds with the scholarly standards of the Vygotsky Circle itself. After all, the Vygotsky Circle's texts are inevitably going to be taken up and transformed as they are applied to different sociocultural milieu -- or as Smagorinsky might put it, "reading is a constructive act done in conjunction with mediating texts and the social-cultural-historical context in which reading takes place" (p.127). 

Rant over, and back to the book. 

After the introduction, Smagorinsky provides a solid chapter (Chapter 2) discussing key Vygotskian terms and constructs. In Chapter 3, he discusses methodology and data from a Vygotskian perspective (and along the way, criticizes Luria's Uzbek expedition as culturally imperialist, p.70). Chapter 4 examines the culture of school and how it shapes literacy, while Chapter 5 discusses background for current literacy studies. 

Chapter 6 then examines reading as a culturally mediated and mediating practice. He reviews terms such as sign, text, intertext, and intercontext here, making the point that reading involves composing (p.127). He also defines text and culture. Chapter 7 reviews writing as tool and sign, Chapter 8 discusses nonverbal tool and sign systems, and Chapter 9 discusses thinking, speech, and verbal data. (Smagorinsky illustrates these later chapters with studies of high school classrooms.) The final chapter, Chapter 10, is a revision of Smagorinsky's superlative paper on the methods section as epicenter of social science research reports.

If you're interested in learning a lot about Vygotsky's terms and concepts from someone who has thought about them deeply, this is the book for you. Smagorinsky is a methodical thinker with an encyclopedic knowledge of Vygotskian thought, and this book is well worth reviewing for that fact alone. 

Reading :: The Cultural-Historical Development of Verbal Thinking

The Cultural-Historical Development of Verbal Thinking
By Peeter Tulviste

I've seen this book referenced many times, mainly as a replication of Luria's 1930s study of cognition and literacy. Yes, Tulviste does reproduce that study, but there's much more to this book. It turned out to be thought-provoking along a range of issues.

First, I wanted to note an oddity in this particular book. I often buy books used on Amazon, especially in a case like this, when the book has been circulating for years (this one was published in 1991). This one came to me basically pristine -- except that the cover was glued on upside down. 

But what a small price to pay for this book. Tulviste is mainly interested in the question of studying "the so-called 'higher' mental processes": psychologists studying the "lower" processes through experiments with rats have had great success, but that success does not translate well to "higher" processes because they are less tractable to biological and physiological factors (p.2). To give an example, unlike rats, human beings have three types of memory:

• hereditary
• individual
• cultural (p.3)

and cultural memory, though not "seriously considered by psychologists" (p.3), is closely related to what Tulviste calls higher mental processes. Tulviste appeals to Vygotsky and Luria's cultural-historical school here. He adds that if "substantive differences are found in comparative studies of thinking in people of different cultures and cultural groups, then these indicate the significance of the conditions in the establishment and development of verbal thinking in the individual" (p.5). 

To undertake this project, he presents four long chapters:

1. He considers and compares various "theoretical conceptions of the historical development of thinking" (p.8), including those of Spencer, Levy-Bruhl, Vygotsky, Levi-Strauss, Bruner, and Cole.
2. He examines "certain theoretical problems of the historical development of thinking" (p.8), drawing from Vygotsky and Piaget.
3. He presents an empirical case comparing people who did and did not go to school in Kirghizia, contrasting these results with those produced by Luria, Cole, Scribner, and others.
4. He compares differences in thinking due to features of language vs. features of activity.

The book is rich, and I won't be going through every note I have. Here are some important notes:

In chapter 1, Tulviste summarizes Vygotsky's understanding of higher mental processes (p.28). Vygotsky understood these processes as mediated by signs and determined by social factors, and thus turned to culture as a new explanatory principle (p.28). In higher mental processes, cultural signs/sign systems, like tools, reinforce and transform natural processes. Tulviste claims that higher mental processes are subject only to such a cultural-historical explanation (p.30). He goes on to argue that Vygotsky's ideas about the cultural determination of higher mental processes was defined concretely by Leontiev (p.31). Interestingly, at the end of the 1920s, Vygotsky had planned research on the pedology of national minorities (p.35). 

In chapter 2, Tulviste summarizes Rubinshtein and Leontiev's activity approach, in which psyche is understood as being generated via activity to carry it out (p.69). Thinking along these lines, it seems natural and normal that cross-cultural differences and historical changes in verbal thinking will appear (p.71). Taking Vygotsky's view, the spread of schooling yields the spread of conscious reflection and new thinking operations (p.105). 

In chapter 3, Tulviste turns to cross-cultural studies of literacy, including those of Luria, Cole, Scribner, and himself. He characterizes Luria as wanting to study, not the character of thinking, but the transformation of thinking due to cultural changes (p.114). Tulviste also notes Vygotsky's literacy hypothesis: that in learning to write, we make words the objects of activity and cognition, and thus words become extractable from context and manipulable -- and Tulviste finds this hypothesis inadequate (p.159). 

Overall, I found this to be a fascinating book that ranged far wider than the replication study (of which I've said very little here). If you're interested in the relationship between language and cognition, or cross-cultural studies, or verbal thinking, or Vygotskian theory, definitely pick it up.