In the pipeline

The end of the semester is a terrible time for blogging book reviews, but I will be blogging these two soon:

• Spilka, Digital Literacy for Technical Communication
• Hughes & Hayhoe, A Research Primer for Technical Communication

And I plan on reading these books soon:

• Reich, The Work of Nations
• (possibly) Reich, The Future of Success
• Losh, Virtualpolitik

That is, if I can get through this semester. Keep your fingers crossed and watch this space.

David Lee visits RHE 330c

Today, David Lee, who designs user experiences for FG Squared, visited my Designing Text Ecologies class. I'm glad he did: He covered the UX process in general, describing client meetings, persona development, user stories, user interaction diagrams, card sorting, paper prototyping, wireframes, and user interface flows.

David was my student in a previous RHE 330c, which at that time was a course on contextual design. I didn't know this, but apparently my class was a turning point for him: he came in as a Flash programmer, and exited as a budding UX designer. The new line of work was more interesting to him, but it also boosted his salary by 20%. UX is a big deal now, he told us, and he was kind enough to describe a case study.

I was especially interested in how he moves from paper prototyping to wireframes, then to rapid prototypes (clickable wireframes). He also interacts with graphic designers at this point, handing the wireframes off for visual refining.

David gave me permission to post his slide deck here. It's a nice introduction to the UX process with several of its techniques.

David Lee's UX presentation for my RHE 330c class

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

Designing Text Ecologies, Summer 2010

Are you a student at UT, looking for a summer course? I'm teaching one. Here's a very brief description:

Organizations use all sorts of texts. They don’t always go together. But somehow they usually work together anyway, in complex ecologies.

Sometimes they don’t.

If you go into an organization, watch people work, talk to them, and take pictures, you can find out why. Model the problems. And then fix them.

That’s what my summer class is about.

RHE 330c: Designing Text Ecologies (Unique ID 87500)

Summer 2010

M-F 10-11:30

I'm always enthusiastic about the classes I teach, but that's especially true for this one. Students learn to design and conduct basic field research, use powerful analytical techniques to systematically study how organizations circulate texts and knowledge, and intervene to fine-tune or at least improve the system. I've been teaching variations of this course since 2001. If you're a UT undergrad looking for a summer course, and this description seems even remotely interesting, drop me a line and I'll be happy to discuss it.

For a more detailed idea of what we'll do there, see my spring class and the course's resource site. And don't hesitate to email me with questions.

Outsourcing grading

Just a quick post to link to a Chronicle of Higher Education article about outsourcing grading.

Some may remember a similarly controversial topic from 2006, based on a Chronicle article on how Texas Tech's writing program handled online grading.

Online grading like TTU's - and distance education classes, for that matter - have prepared people to be more receptive to the idea of outsourcing or offshoring grading. (To a lesser extent, so has the practice of accepting first-year composition credits from community colleges.) Slowly, education follows the lead of other industries, segmenting specializations and seeking to maximize self-programmable labor while automating or outsourcing generic labor.

Higher education has been insulated to some degree from this trend. But radical tuition increases, budget crunches, and the looming crisis in underfunded pensions will tend to lead stakeholders to consider less expensive solutions. Nobody will think these solutions are perfect, but I expect a lot more "satisficing" than we're used to seeing. Especially in expensive-to-run classes such as those with small class sizes.

The obvious counterargument, of course, is that grading in writing classes is not generic labor: it's problem-solving, it's grounded in particular contexts, it's sensitive to particular students' needs and developments. Sure, of course, I agree. But as a field, we're going to have to start articulating clearly, for outside audiences, what the vital contribution of instructor grading is. Not the preferred contribution, not the best-practices contribution, but the contribution that can't be made otherwise and that is critical to the university's mission. We need to argue that grading can't be made generic.

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society

I've just been alerted to Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. It sounds interesting:

Present Tense is currently seeking submissions for its inaugural issue. We are a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens.

Seeking to address current or presently unfolding issues, we publish short articles of no more than 2,000 words, the length of a conference paper. We also encourage conference-length multimedia submissions such as short documentaries, flash videos, interviews and podcasts, as well as reviews that are thematically related to the goals of the journal.

If you're sitting on a manuscript along these lines, take a look and see what you think.

Coworking in Round Rock: A Conversation with Will Hampton, Director of Communication, City of Round Rock

After my SXSWi2010 panel "What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work," Will Hampton approached me and suggested we chat sometime about the City of Round Rock's efforts in this direction. I had heard something about these efforts, and was especially interested in looking at a coworking model in which local government was involved, so I was happy to take Will up on the offer.

So, on Monday, I drove up quite early to beat the traffic, parking near City Hall. Since I was early, I grabbed a coffee and some breakfast tacos at Star Co, which has a great location on E. Main Street and turns out to be a nice place to get some work done. (More on this later.) At the appointed time, I walked across the street and met Will at City Hall.

City Hall is one street over from E. Main Street, but it backs up to a building directly on E. Main. This building was purchased by the City a year ago and has just been renovated, Will told me, and much of it will go toward expanding the City's offices, housing the Visitors' Bureau, and hosting an art space. But some of the building has not been programmed yet -- and Will sees a potential for a coworking space.

Why a coworking space here? Will saw a presentation on coworking at SXSWi2009, moderated by Tony Bacigalupo and featuring site owners from Caroline Collective (Houston), Indy Hall (Philadelphia), Office Nomads (Seattle), and Souk (Portland). And he saw the potential for a coworking space to attract the Creative Class to Main Street, helping to revitalize the core of Round Rock. After all, he thought in 2009, "we have this building we just bought." And a coworking community has already started in Round Rock - a Jelly, which has been held at Star Co for just over a year. The Jelly draws an eclectic mix of people, heavy on the tech crowd, particularly people who have been recently laid off by large tech companies. But the community also includes a freelance photographer and a writer. (He quotes one Jelly member as saying that Jelly changed his life by helping him to focus and to network.)

Others have also seen the potential. For instance, he says that the Williamson County Entrepreneurs Network has also shown interest.

So right now, Will has identified two options for opening a Round Rock coworking space. Both would be initiatives in which the City would attract and facilitate a coworking facility -- but the City is not itself going to go into the coworking business. The two options are (1) to open a coworking space in the City's new building, in currently unprogrammed rooms, and (2) to open a space in a nearby building for lease.

Option 1: Coworking in the City's Building

As I mentioned above, Will says that two open-plan rooms have not yet been programmed, and he sees them as potential coworking spaces. Both are on the second floor, and both have lots of natural light from windows facing E. Main Street. The first is a 1600 square foot space, a large rectangle:

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

The second is approximately 1200 square feet and is a more irregular shape, with windows facing a public green:

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

Both are just a short flight of stairs from a potential 800 square foot conference room, suitable for client meetings and presentations, with windows overlooking the green:

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

From Coworking: City of Round Rock

This conference room is just across the hall from the arts space, which will feature local artists and juried competitions, with receptions planned on the green. The green, Will says, would also be a great place for the farmer's market -- which currently meets nearby in the parking garage. The arts space will open in early May.

In considering this option, the City sees the potential of leasing coworking space to an established operator at a reasonable rate. The idea is to pull the Creative Class to downtown Round Rock, keeping local businesspeople who currently commute to Austin or work out of their houses. "I'm interested in activating downtown," Will told me more than once.

On the other hand, Will tells me, the City might need the extra space as flex space. So that brings us to Option 2.

Option 2: Coworking on Main Street

Option 2 is a building for lease just two blocks from the city building. The space is very different from Option 1: It hasn't been renovated yet, the building is older, and the space is essentially a long hallway with a succession of small rooms. Rather than trying to photograph each of these, I took a video with my phone. Apologies for the quality.

As you can see, this space is quite different, and the warren of small rooms is less conducive to the open-plan sort of coworking I've seen at Cospace and Conjunctured. Also, it strikes me as I watch the video that there are no windows. But the space could be suitable for an incubator, and I suggested that Star Co (just across the street) could serve as an extension of the space for open-plan coworking.

In this case, the City's role would be more as a facilitator or connector. The City doesn't plan to buy or lease the space or to compete with the private sector. But it does want to engage in "placemaking," in creating a "third space" that would be attractive to Creative Class workers.

At this point we moved to Star Co, which is, as I said, a very nice place to work. The back room was already starting to fill with people, working singly on laptops or clustered in twos and threes, getting business done. We grabbed a table and chatted about the community's long-term vision for Main Street. As project manager for the Downtown Master Plan, Will is invested in making this vision a reality.

That vision, Will told me, was of a denser urban space that was more attractive to the Creative Class. Along with other plans (creating a larger town green, reconfiguring a busy street), coworking could support a downtown with a "more organic feel," a downtown that is more "funky" and vital. Coworking could be a differentiator for Round Rock, separating it from Cedar Park and Pflugerville, and make "good business sense for the city."

Thoughts

I've seen several different models of coworking, some in Austin, some on the Coworking Google Group: as a loss leader, as a nonprofit or not-for-profit, as a for-profit business, as a way for existing businesses to recover excess building capacity, as a service provided by incubators, as a center supported by business development grants. When I first heard of Round Rock's efforts, I thought they would fit that last model. But I was impressed by the community's vision and the fact that it involved public-private partnerships that are heavy on private initiative: The City isn't trying to shoulder the burden of starting a coworking space, it's trying to attract a space that will support itself while supporting the City's vision.

The question that occurred to me as I toured the spaces, though, was: Are these the right spaces? Do they offer the right mix of open-plan, conference, and private spaces? Can people make phone calls, conduct presentations, isolate themselves when needed, but still network and bat around ideas when needed? Right now, without furniture and without renovation of Option 2, it's hard to tell.

On the other hand, as I remarked to Will at Star Co, Main Street could function as a larger ecosystem that could make up for the limitations of the individual spaces. For instance, I could imagine coworkers working in Option 2 when they needed to place phone calls, collaborate closely on a project, or take a client meeting; trip over to Star Co when they wanted to do some open-plan coworking; and take a break on the Green or in the art space. Similarly, I could see coworkers doing open-plan coworking in Option 1 and conducting meetings downstairs - although I'm not sure where they could take private phone calls. (Maybe in booths.)

In any case, I see a lot of potential in this effort. If you're thinking about starting a coworking space, do think about sending Will an email.

Reading :: Building Web Reputation Systems

Building Web Reputation Systems
By F. Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass

Some time ago, an acquaintance in the Austin tech industry, Ian Strain-Seymour (@ifss on Twitter) suggested I begin Twitter-following a fellow he knew in graduate school, Bryce Glass (@soldierant), who was then working for Yahoo. So I did, based on that recommendation. Soon I realized that Bryce knew my frequent collaborator Bill Hart-Davidson (@billhd). At some point I mentioned to Bryce that I knew both of these guys, and he followed me back. Like me, Bryce doesn't follow that many people, but we both made the decision to follow each other based on what our trusted friends thought - that is, on each others' reputations.

Reputation is a critical factor in making web services worthwhile, since it allows us to make decisions we wouldn't otherwise be able to make and to accrue social capital we wouldn't otherwise be able to accrue - whether we're talking about goods (think Amazon.com's reviews), services (Yelp), or social networking (Twitter). And in the absence of more durable connections, when we need to develop swift trust, we look for different ways to judge the authority and ethos of the people with whom we connect. Bryce and his coauthor, F. Randall Farmer, tell us how to do this systematically.

I've blogged before about how Farmer and Glass handle reputation in terms of ethos claims, so I won't repeat that work here. Suffice it to say that although the authors are not rhetoricians, rhetoricians should read this book. Rhetoricians will recognize a claims structure that looks a lot like Toulmin's (see Ch.2), but is fitted for digital literacy and its many ephemeral, distributed connections. They'll learn a lot from the book's descriptions and case studies about what ethos looks like in digital environments -- and how to fine-tune reputation systems to keep them healthy, productive, accurate, and aligned with the purpose of the community.

The book not only covers vital ground, it also covers that ground gracefully: the book is highly readable and is full of useful examples and diagrams. Although some parts assume some basic knowledge of system design, readers shouldn't have trouble getting through the rest of the book or gathering the core messages.

Disclosure: I reviewed this book in manuscript form. And yes, I was smitten with it then too.

If you're a rhetorician who is trying to understand claims and ethos in digital literacy, this book is a must. If you're a rhetorician of any stripe, you still might want to pick it up. Highly recommended.

The Coworking Book

Alex Hillman of IndyHall has begun a book (really, a curated project in the form of a wiki) about coworking. It only has one short chapter right now, so if you're in the coworking community, feel free to contribute.

Reading :: Traditions of Writing Research

Traditions of Writing Research
Edited by Charles Bazerman, Robert Krut, Karen Lunsford, Susan McLeod, Suzie Null, Paul Rogers, and Amanda Stansell

In 2008, I attended the Writing Research Across Borders conference in Santa Barbara. It's an international conference, and I was very happy to make it and to see presentations from colleagues across the world. (I'll be going to WRAB 2011 in February.) The research was of high quality, the perspectives were many, and I gained insights into writing research in many different milieux.

This book features some of the best papers of that conference. Mine isn't in it - I presented on themes from my second book, which was in press, so I didn't submit the paper - but the book is full of short but solid pieces. It reminds me of some of the best conference proceedings I've seen in other fields (and made me wish that we had more conferences with proceedings in our own field). Like good conference proceedings, this book's short chapters hold well-developed and methodologically sound cases. Like good scholarly collections, the book relates these chapters well in thematic sections. It's like a scholarly tapas bar.

In this collection, you'll find studies on writing from China, France, Norway, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Armenia, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Australia, Canada, and the US. One chapter even examines how Chinese and Moroccan immigrants learn a Romance language in Catalan. US contributions are a large minority, but still a minority here. Studies ranged in methodology from ethnography to case study to discourse and text analysis to surveys, and involved both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

With a range that large, it's hard to pick out some standouts, but I'll try.

I really enjoyed the first chapter, Huijun's "Modern 'Writingology' in China," which chronicles how the Chinese approach to writing developed from the vernacular movement in the 1910s, through the Revolution and its Soviet-influenced approaches, to the more recent approaches influenced by the emerging market economy.

Speaking of the Soviets, I was touched by Cezar Ornatowski's "Writing, From Stalinism to Democracy: Literacy Education and Politics in Poland, 1945-1999." Ornatowski notes how ideologically centralized writing instruction was, including how it taught the genre of the "life story" as an ideological confession that students repeatedly had to write. Ornatowski takes us through the later transitions, showing how political changes were reflected in changes in writing instruction.

Maria Silvia Cintra's "The continuum illiterate-literate and the contrast between different ethnicities" describes a Brazilian ethnography about literacy. In the course of the ethnography, she examines the relationship between Bakhtin's discourse genres and Voloshinov's social psychology and ideology - two constructs that, she says, must be considered together (p.114).

Doreen Starke-Meyerring also takes up the topic of genres in "Between Peer Review and Peer Production," comparing academic peer review with wikis in terms of genre. Genres' dynamic structures are produced, she says, by internal conflicts between the residual cultural logic of their origins and the situations they must address (p.342).

Finally, in "Writing in multiple contexts," David R. Russell puts cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in dialogue with Schutz's phenomonology. This move, he says, lets us take into account a theory of multiple contexts on "both the social-psychological (subjective and intersubjective) plane and the sociological (objective and institutional) plane" (p.353). "The network is the context," he tells us, describing how the neat triangles of activity theory describe messy networks (p.354). He neatly pins this discussion to Schutz's understanding of a tool as a "thing-in-order-to" (p.355), and compares Vygotsky's and Schutz's "shared understandings about thought and action, communication and contexts, and situations" (p.356).

Overall, a really solid collection. If you're interested in examples of writing research from different countries, activities, and contexts, I recommend it.

SXSWi: Interview with Amanda Congdon on coworking

For once, I was the interviewee. Thanks to Amanda and the SometimesDaily crew for this opportunity. They managed to edit my interview into something coherent - although I can't believe I pronounced the country "Bangalesh" :/

If coworking interests you, check out some of my interviews (text, not filmed) of coworking proprietors in the Austin area.

Update: Here's a pic a colleague snapped of me during the interview. Amanda had a two-person team, one with a camera on a tripod (to our left), the other one shooting the primary video on an SLR. I was impressed by how smoothly they worked together.

From Austin snapshots

Reading :: Building Social Web Applications

Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site
By Gavin Bell

Gavin and I have been following each other on Twitter for a while (he's @zzgavin), partially because we both share an interest in social media and activity theory. Since he was in town last week for South by Southwest Interactive, I swung by and picked up a (signed) copy of his new book, an O'Reilly title on designing, building, and maintaining social web apps. It's quite good (and Gavin is a great guy in person).

The book is pitched toward people who are building social apps, who have an idea, but who may not have the experience to execute. So it takes us through topics as varied as building APIs, creating and managing community relationships, managing change, making choices about relationships and privacy, managing identities, understanding social network patterns, and organizing the site. Gavin draws on many examples from familiar sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed among others. These are tremendously useful.

For instance, I was struck by his example on p.72 of how Facebook initially rolled out its Mini-Feed in 2006: they had tested it internally, within a smaller, generally colocated group of coworkers (Facebook mployees), and had assumed that their experience would be identical to that of Facebook's general users. But FB's general users tended to friend people they didn't know - and suddenly the Mini-Feed made them feel exposed to all of these not-really-friends. Interestingly, as I read this story, I realized that I had just heard almost exactly the same story - from the GMail/Google Buzz group at their SXSWi panel. If only they had read this book!

Gavin draws on activity theory and actor-network theory to underpin his ideas on social web applications, although they are explained mostly in a sidebar on pp.94-95. He credits Jyri Engestrom, from whom he borrows the concept of social objects, but also points us to Kaptelinin and Nardi's excellent book. Activity theory isn't discussed in great detail - it's not that kind of book - but Gavin clearly thought about it a great deal as he thought through this book.

If you're thinking about launching a social web app, if you're teaching students about the same, or if you just want to better understand how these sites work, I highly recommend the book.

Reading :: The Shield of Achilles

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History
By Phillip Bobbitt

This morning, after a hard-fought battle in Congress, President Obama signed a health care reform into law. The legislation was hashed out over a year, then passed in the House with just a few votes. No Republicans voted for the bill. And in my Twitter stream and Facebook activity feed, people characterize their opponents in outrageous ways. One set characterizes the new law as impending socialism or fascism, and they hope that it can be struck down or repealed. The other characterizes the law's opponents as racists who hate the poor or dupes who exhibit a Pavlovian response to Republican fear-mongering. I'm left to wonder whether these two sets are aware of each other and whether they see the same status updates that I do. My guess is that they do, since occasionally one will threaten to defriend anyone who disagrees with him. As far as I can tell, no one pays attention to these threats.

Such battles, I think, have been brewing for a while and I think they will continue to intensify. I don't think that's because our representatives are hypocrites, oligarchs, or demagogues (although I'm sure some are) or because our citizens are underinformed, callous, or easily led (although I'm sure some are). I think it has more to do with the question of what the State's obligation to its citizens is - the unspoken assumptions or warrants that underlie the State's authority. And in this delicate post-Cold War period, the “end of history” as Fukuyama optimistically called it, we are in the middle of figuring it out. Again.

What is the role of the State? Phillip Bobbitt, in this award-winning book, doesn’t seek to prescribe it but to chronicle it. In his 827-page book (not including the index), he lays out the case that the State has undergone many transformations, many different constitutional orders and bases of legitimacy, each one corresponding roughly to an epochal war. Bobbitt lays out the following types of state, their approximate (overlapping) spans, and their bases for legitimacy:

• Princely state (1494-1572): “The State confers legitimacy on the dynasty.”
• Kingly state (1567-1651): “The dynasty confers legitimacy on the State.”
• Territorial state (1649-1789): “The State will manage the country efficiently.”
• State-nation (1776-1870): “The State will forge the identity of the nation.”
• Nation-state (1861-1991): “The State will better the welfare of the nation."
• Market-state (1989-present): “The State will maximize the opportunity of its citizens.” (p.347)

Although Bobbitt has sometimes been read as advocating a market state (see the Amazon reviews), he doesn’t appear to be advocating at all, and in fact he is quite forthright about the many drawbacks of the emerging market-state. This isn’t a progressive understanding of history or a view of states as evolving to greater legitimacy or complexity. Indeed, he calls out Fukuyama’s notion of the “end of history,” arguing instead that what Fukuyama saw was only the end of an epochal war. More about this in a moment.

Rather than a progressive evolutionary view of the State, Bobbitt sees states as periodically undergoing constitutional crises in conjunction (or feedback) with other states, periodically redefining legitimacy as they do. (“Every era asks, ‘What is the State supposed to be doing?’” (p.177)). And as their constitutional bases change, so do the underlying assumptions regarding state actions. In one striking example, he argues that the 1995 debate over whether the US should have dropped the A-bombs on Japan in 1945 was “almost unintelligible in light of the struggle of the nation-state and its role in the Long War, but fits nicely within the assumptions and strategies of the market-state” (p.217, footnote).

Let’s get to the notion of the epochal war. Bobbitt argues that when a new constitutional order emerges, it corresponds roughly with epochal wars in which variations of the state battle for supremacy. For instance, he interprets the major wars of 1914-1990 as being parts of a single war – he calls it the Long War, and includes the Cold War among others – and claims that the Long War was about “which of three constitutional forms would replace [the preexisting imperial] system: parliamentary democracy, communism, or fascism” (p.24). That struggle, he says, ended with the end of the Cold War: parliamentary democracy outlasted and outcompeted fascism and communism, best enhancing the welfare of the nations that adopted it (p.62). This triumph yielded Fukuyama’s illusory end of history – and “the end of a way of living” (p.62).

Yet, Bobbitt adds, the nation-state can no longer deliver on its promises. It can’t guarantee the safety of its citizens: states that have no nuclear weapons cannot guarantee security, but those with nuclear weapons make their citizens a target (p.218). It can’t guarantee welfare: the proceeds of the nation-state’s borrowing have been returned as consumption rather than infrastructure or investment, so

a nation-state’s government simply finds itself unable to either balance its budget (because it cannot reduce welfare outlays to all sectors) or redirect the proceeds of its borrowing, because only by borrowing money can it continue plausibly to claim that it is bettering the welfare of its people …. Such policies have an inevitable end, as everyone recognizes. There is no reason a state cannot grow out of its deficit, but to do so, however, it will have to increasingly abandon the objective of the government’s maintaining the ever-improving welfare of its citizens. That is, it will have to change the crucial element of the basis for its legitimacy as a nation-state. (p.222)

Furthermore, the nation-state can no longer protect the nation’s cultural integrity: the nation-state relies on the morale of its own nation (and on crushing the morale of the nations of its enemy states), yet “the globalization of communications … wrests control of this morale from the instrumentality of the nation-state” (p.224). Further, the nation-state typically allies with one ethnic group in its nation, something that works against “the equal treatment of different cultural communities” – and as this problem works itself out, “we will inevitably get a multicultural state when the nation-state loses its legitimacy as the provider and guarantor of equality” (p.225).

Finally, the nation-state relies on controlling its self-portrayal. Yet the press and the electronic media have disrupted the history and self-portrayal of the state, delegitimizing it. At the same time, computer technology has “breached the security of the State and ever more widely disseminated the information government once claimed to possess solely”; the bureaucracy controls information, but the photocopier disperses it (p.227). (We might add, with Castells, the effects of the Internet, texting, YouTube, and Twitter – and we might marvel that China recently conducted censorship negotiations with Google as if Google were more than a company.)

So, Bobbitt says, the nation-state can no longer deliver on its promise to better the welfare of the nation: the system of entitlements has topped out, national security is only relative when other nations have nuclear weapons, and the idea of the nation itself is crumbling as national narratives are disrupted and nations themselves turn from “melting pots” to multicultural collections. Yet Bobbitt does not see the end of the State itself, as some have predicted. Rather, he argues that we are in the transition to a new sort of state, the market-state (p.228), which focuses on maximizing the opportunities (not the welfare) of individuals. The market-state has these characteristics:

• It depends on international capital markets to create stability.
• Its political institutions are less representative, more democratic.
• It “assesses its economic success or failure by its society’s ability to secure more and better goods and services, but in contrast to the nation-state it does not see the State as more than a minimal provider or redistributor” (p.229)
• It “exists to maximize the opportunities enjoyed by all members of society” (p.229). Personal autonomy is more valued and prevalent (p.668).
• It sees currency and jobs as simple commodities.
• It is “classless and indifferent to race and ethnicity and gender” (p.230)
• It is not characterized by the rule of law, as the nation-state was, but by a level playing field.
• It often chooses to restrain government in order to reduce transaction costs.
• The marketplace replaces the factory as the economic arena; people are consumers rather than producers. (p.230)
• Teamwork and harmony become better indicators of an organization’s long-term prospects than other indices (p.232) (cf. Heckscher & Adler, Castells, Drucker, Toffler)

Whereas the parliamentary nation-state’s motto was to “make the world safe for democracy,” Bobbitt says, the market-state’s motto would perhaps be “make the world available.” (p.233)

Let me interrupt the recap here. If you’re reading this and thinking that the market-state sounds like a Libertarian fantasy that corresponds closely to the Republicans who are resisting health care, that’s completely understandable. But I should point out that Bobbitt sees several possible forms for the market-state, only one of which is consonant to any significant degree with libertarianism. “Because the market-state secures political legitimacy through the active pursuit of opportunity for its citizens but declines to specify the goals for which opportunity is to be used, there will be different models whose advocates can plausibly maintain that their constitutional strategy best maximizes opportunity” (p.669). Bobbitt sees three models of the market-state, models that will compete just as the nation-state’s models of parliamentary democracy, fascism, and communism competed during the Long War. These models include:

• The entrepreneurial market-state, which involves little protectionism, relies on immigrant labor, keeps wages low, grows hardy and agile local industries, tends to have high income disparity, and emphasizes autonomy and personal achievement (p.670). He proffers China as a model (p.670), which may be a surprise to some, because this is the most libertarian of the models (p.671). His metaphor for this form: the “Meadow” (p.721).
• The merchantile market-state, which “relies on a strong central government to protect national industries, stabilize crucial research and development, and steer certain important enterprises toward success” (p.671). This state relies on artificial pricing and interest rates, coordinates capital flows, and sees long-term societal interests as outweighing consumer interests. Income disparities are suppressed and pay is rationalized (p.671). The objective is social stability, and success comes not through efficiency but through mobilizing all labor and encouraging high capital accumulation (p.672). Models include Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan (p.671). His metaphor for this form: the “Park” (p.721).
• The managerial market-state, which “consists of three basic elements: free and open markets within a regional trading network, a government that provides a social safety net and manages a stringent monetary policy, and a socially cohesive society” (pp.672-673). Its main objective is to achieve social equality (p.673). It relies on “stakeholder companies” that seek to “reflect the priorities of workers, managers, communities, vendors, and environmentalists on something like parity with the interests of shareholders” (p.673). It’s highly regulated (p.674). Models include Europe and possibly India. His metaphor for this form: the “Garden” (p.721).

Each model has its own strengths and vulnerabilities. In Ch. 25, he conducts some thought experiments, imagining how worlds dominated by each model might handle similar scenarios. In Ch. 26, he discusses how threats will be manifested in a world dominated by the market-state, emphasizing that different forms of the market-state have different views of sovereignty (p.779). Throughout, he is brutal about and discussing the pros and cons of each model as well as the market-state as a whole; no cheerleading here. Moreover, Bobbitt doesn’t see the end of history here: he expects these three emerging forms of the market-state not just to compete but to war, just as parliamentary democracy, fascism, and communism did.

I’ve skipped a lot in this book, including Bobbitt’s lengthy discussion of each historical form of the State, and I hope that I’ve done justice to the discussion that I’ve reviewed here. Because I think this epochal view is an important one, and Bobbitt’s is more finely textured than some, such as Toffler’s three waves, and does a nice job of articulating some of the baseline assumptions about the legitimacy of the state. And I like his speculative work, although I am not ready to endorse that speculation or Bobbitt’s overall view of history. It’s an epochal view that’s worth examining, just as Toffler’s three waves or Ronfeldt’s TIMN or (to a lesser extent) Heckscher and Adler’s taxonomy of organizations. If you’re like me, you might try it on to see how it fits.

To bring things back to the beginning, Bobbitt’s discussion of states also provides a starting point for discussing current issues such as the healthcare battle discussed above. I think this battle has more to do with an underlying, but still quite inchoate, disagreement over the State’s function and legitimacy. And that doesn’t mean that we have market-state Republicans squaring off against nation-state Democrats – it means that people are still sorting things out on both sides of the aisle, still figuring out the shifting warrants, and in some cases still retreating to the nostalgia of bygone days as they grope for solutions to current issues (cf. the Tofflers' Creating a New Civilization).

In any case, the sweep of this book is really quite remarkable, and I found it to be thought-provoking. If you have a solid chunk of time and the inclination, I highly recommend you take it for a spin.

Reading :: Neighbor Networks

Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal
By Ronald S. Burt

I admit it: The math associated with social network analysis (SNA) confuses me. I don't have the background to follow it. But at the same time, I'm glad that someone does. SNA may lose some details and textures compared to qualitative research, but it scales more easily and provides better points of comparison. So, although I picked up Burt's Neighbor Networks with trepidation and skipped through some of the more involved analysis (even when "the math involved is modest," as Burt assures us at one point (p.227)), I'm still glad I read it.

Burt asks a simple question: "Is there advantage to affiliation with the well connected?" (p.1). Or in other words: do your neighbors and their networks matter? "The common-sense answer is yes," Burt says (p.1), but he wants to study the issue systematically. He begins the task by defining "structural holes," which are "mission relations that inhibit information flow between people" (p.4) - holes that happen when explicit knowledge is converted into local, tacit knowledge (p.3). These holes serve as "boundary markers in the division of labor" (p.4). (Longtime readers of this blog might think in terms of horizontal learning.)

Burt distinguishes between two sources of advantage in networks: brokerage and closure. "Closure is about staying on your side of the structural hole," while "Brokerage is about the benefits and exposure to variation in opinion and behavior provided by building connections across structural holes" (p.4). And in this book, Burt focuses on "network brokerage, measured in terms of opportunities to coordinate across structural holes" (p.4). After undertaking various studies, Burt concludes that "Despite technological advance, social capital remains a phenomenon local and personal" (p.14).

To make his case, Burt leads us through a number of analyses, methodically building a case for how brokerage works in different cases: with network spillover, in balkanized and in highly connected networks, in industry networks and financial services.

Overall, I'm glad I read Neighbor Networks. I have a better handle on SNA concepts now, and I also have a better idea of how SNA argument works. The math is still beyond me, I'm afraid, but the careful argument development was a pleasure to read.

Reading :: Web Campaigning

Web Campaigning
By Kirsten A. Foot and Steven M. Schneider

Reading this 2006 book is really a fascinating exercise in 2010. Foot and Schneider aim to understand technology adoption and deployment patterns by viewing campaigns as sociotechnical networks (p.14) - specifically the "web spheres," the "dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple Web sites deemed relevant or related to a central event, concept, or theme" (p.20). They examine campaigns' web spheres in 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004, and they find that these web spheres performed at least four functions: informing, involving, connecting, and mobilizing (chapters 3-6 respectively). Each function is broken down into different components, so we can see how web spheres have tended to develop each component and function over time (see p.158).

Despite the many changes we've seen since 2004, this fourfold heuristic seems really useful for understanding how web presences have developed over time. What really intrigued me was that the changes were so deep between 2004 and 2008, when two of the most innovative and intriguing presidential campaigns used social media in radically expanded ways. Yes, Obama was one, but Ron Paul's minimal-core, social-media-heavy campaign was the other. Another development: we've seen the permanent campaign develop its own continuous-process "voting" mechanism, the money bomb, enacted partially through social media. I'm wondering how these changes will register in Foot and Schneider's follow-up work: will they be able to fit them into existing categories or will they develop additional ones? Will they continue to be able to trace web spheres in the way they could in the relatively limited campaigns of 2004?

In any case, Foot and Schneider have come up with a strong analytical framework for understanding web presences. The examples are now dated, but the framework should be able to bear more recent analyses. If you're interested in web campaigning, certainly pick this one up.

Reading :: The Firm as a Collaborative Community

The Firm as a Collaborative Community: The Reconstruction of Trust in the Knowledge Economy
Edited by Charles Heckscher and Paul S. Adler

I was dismayed last month to discover that I hadn't already written a review for this book, partially because it's so full of insights, and partially because it's such a behemoth that reviewing it will take some time. To give you an idea of what I mean: this 13-chapter collection starts off with a 95-page chapter by Adler and Heckscher, an introduction that is just a hair too short to be a monograph.

As Heckscher and Adler explain in the Introduction, the collection itself tackles a tension in social analysis: "community and trust seem increasingly necessary in a complex interdependent world, but they are also less available" (p.1). That's true in the public sphere, but also in the corporate sphere, because "complex knowledge-based production requires high levels of diffuse cooperation resting on a strong foundation of trust" - and, the authors argue, markets and hierarchies have not been enough to coordinate in the absence of trust (p.1). This collection's contributors share the sense that "a distinctively new form of community is being developed in the womb of the most advanced business organizations today" (p.2), a much more collaborative and open community where trust can be built. The authors suggest three pillars of "this emergent collaborative community":

1. "a shared ethic of interdependent collaboration";
2. "a formalized set of norms of interdependent process management";
3. "an interactive social character ... that grounds an interdependent social identity" (pp.2-3).

Adler and Heckscher also contribute the first chapter, "Towards Collaborative Community," in which they examine sociological views of community. They describe three sociological camps, then plant themselves in the third camp, which "has explored the possibility that a new and possibly higher form of community might emerge, offering a framework for trust in dynamic and diverse relationships, and reconciling greater degrees of both solidarity and autonomy" (p.12). They develop this idea by first discussing "thick" trust (Gemeinschaft) and "thin" trust (Gesellschaft) (p.13), then suggesting that in the new form of the collaborative community, these two sorts of trust are brought together in a dialectical synthesis (p.15).

To move this argument forward, the authors define three principles of social organization - hierarchy, market, and community - and use a number of tables to compare these principles in terms of coordinating mechanisms, primary benefits, resources produced, tasks, values, organization, and identities (pp.15-17). This discussion reminded me strongly of Ronfeldt's TIMN structure (see Ronfeldt's commentary on Adler & Heckscher). It also helps to clarify what Adler & Heckscher mean when they discuss the emerging collaborative community: one that exhibits high levels of adaptiveness and complex interdependence, one in which trust is both vital and difficult (p.20). And we get an activity theory connection:

In a collaborative community, values are not individual beliefs, but the object of shared activity; they have to be discussed and understood in similar ways by everyone. The basis of trust is the degree to which members of the community believe that others have contributions to make towards this shared creation. Adler's chapter [later in the book] invokes this idea under the label 'object': a collaborative community emerges when a collectivity engages cooperative, interdependent activity towards a common object. (pp.20-21)

Adler's later chapter is an activity-theoretical analysis, and the authors make clear that they mean "object" in activity-theoretical terms. In that light, I think the authors gain a vital insight: In a collaborative community, in which different specialists from different disciplines (and often organizations) come together to achieve a project, the object of the activity is not the project itself (which is ephemeral) so much as the emerging values that help to define the collaborative community. This is Adler and Heckscher's answer to activity theory's current crisis in defining shared objects in knowledge work. (For a concrete example, see p.48, in which the authors describe a "values jam" at IBM.)

After some theory, Adler and Heckscher turn back to comparing bureaucracies, markets, and collaborative communities in terms of knowledge. Bureaucracy, they assert, is good at "organizing routinized production," but not at "complex interactive tasks involving responsiveness and innovation" (p.28). And although markets seem to be a good substitute, the market "fails to optimize the production and distribution of knowledge" (p.29). So neither of these "can simultaneously optimize incentives to produce knowledge and to disseminate it" (p.29). They believe that community can, since it reduces transaction costs, reduces agency risks, and allows tacit knowledge transfer (p.30). But the traditional form of community in corporations has been that of a community of loyalty - a community that (a) is founded on long-term employment and (b) tends to involve personal relations that are "linked to the hierarchy, rather than cutting across it" (p.33). In contrast, a knowledge-intensive economy needs teamwork based on principles, teamwork that involves "swift trust," not blind trust (p.34).

This isn't simple: "In a collaborative order people may be working on multiple tasks and initiatives with multiple accountabilities, and they frequently find themselves in situations where they are pulled in several directions at once. The ability to manage these tensions is one of the key capabilities required of individuals" (p.52). Further, people must understand the functions, contributions, and values of their partners in other parts of the organization (p.53). That is, workers must become more interdependent, and that new ethic is creating strains just as the emergence of the industrial revolution did: "it demands the ability to interact in multiple communities and to adapt to competing demands of interdependence" (p.54).

Adler & Heckscher here differentiate collaborative communities from "network relations," the term under which this phenomenon is often treated (p.59). They argue that although networks/communities are often treated as opposed to organizational hierarchies, this simple opposition is not adequate (p.59). Examples include corporations but also the open source movement.

This first chapter is worth the price of admission. But other chapters also make solid contributions.

In Chapter 2, Charles Sabel reviews the recent changes in organizations. "After roughly 1980, the canonical organization is federated and open," he says (p.107), "networked" - and "Network organizations manifestly outperform hierarchies in volatile environments, where goals change so quickly that reducing them to a seamless set of task specifications is highly risky, if it is possible at all" (p.108). Sabel goes on to discuss some variations of the networked organization and its challenges.

In Chapter 3, Michael Maccoby theorizes changes in selfhood as we transition from bureaucratic to interactive mode of social production. He argues that new organizations produce new selves with new ideology and ideals, new social character, and new socioeconomic bases (p.161).

In Chapter 4, Jay R. Galbraith defines networks as "varied relational patterns," and subsumes hierarchies and markets, friendships and value chains, under this heading (p.179). Given that definition, he argues that "business success increasingly depends on the ability to manage all these types of networks appropriately" (p.179). He helpfully presents a diagram of differentiated networks, extending from voluntary and informal groups through e-coordination, formal groups, integrators, matrix organizations, to line organizations, graphing them from low to high network power and authority (p.185).

In Chapter 5, Paul Adler presents his own case study, one of programmers transitioning from a relatively autonomous guild-like organization to a less autonomous collaborative community (p.199). Using activity theory, Adler examines the tensions (contradictions) felt by programmers as they made this transition.

Skipping a bit, in Chapter 7, Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman discuss "hyperconnected net work": "a new form of network organization, in which traditional hierarchical bureaucracies are short-circuited by employees that have direct access to all" (p.282). They use social network analysis to describe exchanges in an information network (p.297), and conclude that the site is "a hybrid organization, what Adler and Borys call an 'enabling bureaucracy,' where rules about work and vertical and horizontal divisions of labor exist along with high levels of trust and community cohesion" (p.315). The organization is "hyperconnected," with computer-mediated communication, face-to-face, and telephone contact creating a situation in which "community members - at work or elsewhere - are always connected to CMC and always available for communication" (p.317). CMC, they found, afforded trust (p.320).

In Chapter 9, Lynda M. Applegate extends the conversation to inter-firm collaborative communities. Like Adler & Heckscher, she develops tables comparing markets, hierarchies, and communities - this time, in terms of operating core, coordination and control, infrastructure and supporting processes, culture and affiliation, and leadership (p.372), using NASDAQ as a case. She further contrasts traditional and next-generation cooperatives (p.377) before applying the market-hierarchy-community comparison to Covisint, an automotive industry cooperative that attempts to provide equal value to suppliers and automakers (p.385). She takes away the key insight that "Community is emerging from the shadow of hierarchy and market to become a dominant form of governance" (p.404).

I've highlighted just a few of the chapters here, but the entire book is filled with really interesting insights. If you're interested in the transformation of work and work organization, as I am, or if you're just interested in how macro changes are affecting rhetoric and values, I highly recommend this book.

SXSWi discussion: Mendeley

During South by Southwest Interactive 2010, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt of Mendeley.com about their project and their plans for it. Both are exciting - if you're an academic, anyway.

First, some background. Mendeley has been described as a sort of iTunes for research papers: its desktop client organizes your citations and accompanying files (PDFs, DOC files, etc.), while its web interface lets you share these citations and files. You can organize citations by project and use them to create bibliographies in a number of common formats. Think of it as EndNote meets iTunes meets Last.fm. (The Last.FM connection reaches deeper, since Last.FM's first investor is also Mendeley's.)

I've been using Mendeley for a while, and switched over to it in earnest last summer, when I realized that I needed a more flexible cloud-based solution. (I've been using a cloud-based system, Google Docs, for drafting papers.) It's been great for organizing citations, but I've never used the sharing function - partially because so few humanities scholars seem to use Mendeley.

When I sat down with Victor and Jan, I was very interested in their model, their plans, and their long-term stability. Here are some of the points they made.

The model. Yes, they want Mendeley to be the Last.FM or iTunes of research. Originally, they created Mendeley because as graduate students, they found that they had to spend a lot of time looking up and organizing citations. Why not organize and also share their citations and PDFs as a small community? So a free account will let users share their citations with everyone, and their files among 10 users.

But they were surprised to find out that institutions, both enterprises and academic departments, were also very interested. In particular, pharma, biotech and petrochemical companies, which are research-intensive, wanted to limit the amount of redundant information by sharing citations and files across their organizations. So they're working on a premium account that will allow institutional subscriptions, larger storage space, and more sharing. They estimate that they'll launch this premium account option in under six months.

Their plans. They also plan to expand the sorts of files that users can share, particularly institutional users. In particular, they'd like users to be able to share raw research data: data tables, audio, video, and so forth. Eventually, they would also like to add version tracking. These additions would particularly cater to institutional users, who must share data in private groups.

However, Mendeley also wants to push in the other direction, enabling more social sharing. Currently, users can create their own RSS feeds for publications, allowing them to feed their public collections into FriendFeed, Cliqset, or the like. And in Mendeley Desktop, when you add a citation, you can add shared notes around it. They anticipate more sharing features very soon, though. For instance, they expect to initiate a Facebook Connect connection in the next two months so that scholars can share recent citations and comments in their Facebook activity stream. (For scholars, it's preferable to FarmVille.) They're also working on an API (to be released in perhaps two months). And they want to introduce more granularity to collaborative PDF annotations, allowing users to choose case-by-case with which groups to share their sticky notes. Their next major release will also allow a browser view in the desktop software for comments and newsfeed.

In the medium term (which means 3-6 months in this business), they want to add other features. One is a recommendation system similar to Last.FM's, something that recommends citations to you based on what your friends are reading. Another is the ability to pull the conversation into the desktop. They'll connect all of the silos on the website. They also want to facilitate communication among relevant others and to display readership of citations.

They also see tremendous potential for enriching the metadata in the database. For instance, a department at Stanford has geocoded research - associating publications with the geospatial coordinates they describe - so Mendeley will incorporate that information. They also see potential for crowdsourcing some metadata, for instance, they are already training Mendeley to recognize PDFs by comparing crowdsourced metadata attached to previously uploaded PDFs. (In this way, Mendeley is more like the Shazam of research.)

They're eager to get more citations in Mendeley. Right now, they can pull in information from Zotero and Endnote, but they can't sync two-way with those formats. (Zotero synching would have to run as a Firefox instance, and Endnote's format is proprietary.) They hope that by developing an API, they can give others the tools to sync these formats.

Long-term stability. Mendeley's founders include founders of Last.FM and Skype as well as a former Warner Music executive. They have expertise in user interface development, they have academics in the driver's seat, and they have investor expertise - three critical ingredients for long-term stability. And they just finished raising second-round funding, funding that well exceeds the first round. Importantly, they also received two research grants from the EU and employ four people for R&D.

Beyond the above, they have a plan for revenue, focusing on the above-mentioned premium accounts plan for institutions.

Summary. I have been impressed by Mendeley as a desktop client, but I walked away even more impressed by the potential of the plans. After all, I'm very curious about what others in my field are reading and what they think of those readings - and I'd love to see these thoughts show up in their activity streams. Further, I can see all sorts of potential for sharing tagged citations or collections within and across professional organizations. The drawback I see for me is that the humanities are not well represented in the Mendeley community - at least not yet.

Little and big Hershey's bars: Android phones at SXSW 2010

Longtime readers know that I'm a big fan of my aging G1. It was the first Android phone, and still has some features that the iPhone can't match (ex: multitasking). On the other hand, it's a bit clunky in other ways, and I'm worried that the sliding keyboard will loosen up well before the contract is up in October.

So I've been casting envious eyes at some of the new Android phones on the horizon. In particular, two:

Google's Nexus One. Although it hasn't been selling all that well, this phone has some fantastic features and is now available for both T-Mobile and AT&T 3G bands. (You can buy it unlocked, which is probably what I'd do.) I saw a few of these at SXSWi, but didn't get a chance to fondle, er, test-drive it. If you'd like to give me that chance, email me or tweet me.

The Dell Mini 5. I did get a chance to test-drive this one, courtesy of Chris Byrd at Dell. It's fantastic. We heard about this one a while back, as an Internet tablet - but recently Dell revealed that it would also serve as a phone. Chris tells me that they haven't announced a carrier or price yet, and I was not sly enough to worm any other details out of him. But he did say he has been using it for the past couple of months and it has been great.

Let's put this on the table: The DM5 is enormous. Its home mode is landscape rather than portrait, like a PSP rather than a standard candy bar phone. And speaking of candy bars, it reminds me of nothing more than an enormous vintage Hershey's bar next to the diminuitive modern Hershey's that is the iPhone or Nexus One. It will fit in a shirt pocket, but sticks up about 3/4". It has forward and backward-facing cameras (for videoconferencing, when the carriers support that). It has a docking station that allows you to port the phenomenal video to a big screen. And yes, I covet it.

The DM5, Chris tells me, will be out in the first half of this year - so, by June 30. If it rolls out to AT&T, they will have a real competitor that sits between the iPhone and the iPad, combining features of both - as well as an unlocked Nexus One.

You may have figured this out already, but the DM5 looks like a strong contender for the next-gen Spinuzzi phone. If I have to get a phone without a physical keyboard, the DM5's native orientation and screen size should help to make up for the lack. And it's tailored to what I actually do with my phone - roughly 50% browsing, 25% tweeting and texting, 20% email, 5% talking. But the Nexus One also looks like an excellent phone. It's nice to have these alternatives out as my G1 takes its final lap around the track.

SXSWi: What Coworking Tells Us about the Future of Work

Here are my slides for this talk. The first three are for the panel as a whole, and the rest are my own remarks. Photo credits are at the end.

By the way, someone tweeted that I had too many words on slides and went through them quickly. Here, you can read them as slowly as you want.

Update March 20, 2010: LifeSize posts a link to video of the panel in the comments. My presentation isn't included, but two panelists and the Q&A are here.

Spinuzzi - The Past Future of Work

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

Reading :: Revolutionary Wealth

Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
By Alvin and Heidi Toffler

Alvin Toffler has been open, particularly in the preface to Powershift, about the fact that his wife Heidi is his coauthor even on the books that bear only his name. For whatever reason, after Powershift, her name started appearing on spines as well as in prefaces. The line of reasoning, however, is still the same - their 2006 book Revolutionary Wealth works within the framework established in previous books dating all the way back to 1970's Future Shock. But, like the other books, it extends that framework to new areas - here, to the question of wealth creation in the 21st century.

The Tofflers acknowledge that new technologies will continue to produce wealth. But they argue that "to forecast the future of wealth, we also need to look not just at the work we do for money but at the unpaid work we all do as 'prosumers'" - that is, work we do as we consume. This blog is one example - but others include Amazon and YouTube reviews, amateur astronomy, and tweeting about speed traps (my examples, not theirs). "Because prosuming is set to explode, the future of the money economy can no longer be understood, let alone forecast, apart from that of the prosumer economy. The two, in fact, are inseparable. Together they form a wealth system" (p.5). So far the Tofflers sound a lot like others who have written about open source, wikis, and other aspects of the new economy. They further postulate that since the US is in the forefront of this shift to a new economy, perhaps that change is at the root of rising anti-Americanism (p.6). (Side note: Phillip Bobbitt argues in The Shield of Achilles, which I will soon review, that the US is leading a move from nation-states to market-states. The argument is somewhat related, but not the same.) They invoke Robert Reich in noting the changes afoot: redefined disciplines, loss of work/life boundaries, porous organizations, transdisciplinarity, and mashups (p.8).

So what do they mean by wealth? “Wealth, in its most general sense, is anything that fulfills needs or wants. And a wealth system is the way wealth is created, whether as money or not” (p.19). They relate wealth to the “waves” described in The Third Wave: The first wealth system was agriculture (p.20; glossed as “growing things” on p.23), the second was industrialism (p.21; glossed as “making things” on p.23), and the third, emerging one is knowledge (p.22; glossed as “serving, thinking, knowing, and experiencing” on p.23). A wealth system, they argue, needs a host society and culture – but these are shaken when two wealth systems collide (p.23).

What goes into a wealth system? The Tofflers propose that there are many “fundamentals,” but only a few “deep fundamentals,” that is, “some fundamentals [that] are so vital to wealth creation that they matter in all economies, at all stages of development, in all cultures and every civilization, past or present” (p.26). These include work (not the same as a job) (p.27) and division of labor (p.27). They also include time, space, and knowledge; these three are covered in their own sections later in the book.

Time, for instance, is covered in Ch.5-8. The Tofflers argue that industrial-age bureaucracies are slowing the move to the new wealth system (p.31). In an open system, it’s impossible to totally synchronize all parts. So what happens when one institution leaves the others behind? Using the analogy of cars on the road, the Tofflers evaluate business (100 mph), civil society (including NGOs) (90 mph), the family (60 mph), labor unions (30 mph), government bureaucratic and regulatory agencies (25 mph), schools (10 mph), global governance (5 mph), political structure in rich countries (3 mph), and law (1 mph) (pp.32-39). We must, they conclude, invent new-style institutions that can keep up and synchronize better (p.40).

Part of that shift involves thinking of labor in new ways. The measure of labor productivity as output per hour, they argue, is a Second Wave measure (p.53). But in a Third Wave economy, each interval of time is worth more than the last (p.55). We’re moving toward customized, personalized time (p.56): a shift to continuous-flow operations that enable individualized consumption schedules, leading in turn to irregular time, demassified time (p.59). (Think about the choice of, say, recording American Idol on Tivo, then tuning in 45 minutes late so that you can fast forward through Kara’s comments.) The interrelated shifts of “acceleration, irregularization, and continuous flow” are changing the landscape of wealth creation, they argue, and “push us farther toward ad-hocracy – the shift away from permanent or long-lasting organizational structures in business to one-shot, short-term organizational formats” (pp.59-60).

Enough on time; let’s talk about space. The Tofflers argue that “wealth, as never before, is on the move” (p.63). Digitalization, for instance, doesn’t transcend space, but it does speed up and facilitate wealth creation (p.66). Partially for that reason, when outsourcing happens, it tends to go to places with political stability and infrastructure as well as labor costs (p.69).

Knowledge is the third deep fundamental. Unlike agriculture and industry, knowledge can be used by many simultaneously (p.99). Knowledge is non-rival; intangible; nonlinear; relational; mates with other knowledge; more profitable than any other product; compressible into symbols or abstractions; storable in smaller and smaller spaces; explicit or implicit; and hard to bottle up (pp.100-101). Increasingly, knowledge becomes part of every job. Learning becomes continual-flow and knowledge has a limited shelf life (p.111). Unfortunately, the Tofflers don’t say much on learning; more unfortunately, they detour into a fairly thin attack on postmodernism in Ch.20, apparently not having read much Latour.

In the next section, the Tofflers tackle prosuming, the invisible economy (p.152). One example is that of the patient who comes to the doctor armed with Internet research, influenced by pop culture and commercials, and full of “take charge” attitude (p.165). But prosuming also gives us a competitive advantage in hypercompetition, which has fueled a shift from sequential to simultaneous activity (p.168). Prosuming increases “producivity,” that is, it increases the growth of the money economy (p.194). Their example is that of the PC gurus who informally help new users get up to speed. Prosumers perform unpaid work; buy capital goods; lend their tools and capital to users in the money economy; improve the housing stock; “marketize” products, services, skills; “demarketize” the same; create value as volunteers; provide valuable free information to for-profit companies; increase the power of consumers; accelerate innovation; create and disseminate knowledge rapidly; and raise children to work in the labor force (pp.199-201). Personally, I think the Tofflers are trying to commoditize everything here, including child-rearing, but I suppose they are trying to look at all factors of wealth creation.

Let’s skip a bit. The Tofflers tread ground that should be familiar to readers of this blog, arguing that capitalism’s assumption of limited supply is challenged by endlessly reproducible intangibles (p.256); suggesting, like Alinsky and Drucker, that stockholders are the realization of the people owning the means of production (pp.259-260); arguing that customized products result in customized prices (p.268); and reviewing the many forms of para-money that are springing up as alternatives to money (p.278). They predict pay-by-the-minute work (see www.odesk.com) (p.281).

Toward the end of the book, in Ch.44-48, they look at the prospects and dangers for various parts of the globe (China, Japan, Europe, US, misc.). The picture is mixed. They end with an epilogue in which they question the notion of counting jobs – a notion that seems meaningless given the prosumer work, shared jobs, and other changes in work (p.383). They also have other very Toffleresque thoughts about the future, most of which you can imagine if you’ve read their other work. I don’t mean to sound dismissive – the Tofflers’ work is of such scope and within such an established framework that they have been able to make some solid arguments and predictions. But by the same coin, these arguments and predictions are in themselves relatively predictable.

So what’s the takeaway? The book is solid, and provides some characteristically systematic thinking about what various changes mean for wealth creation in the future. I’m not sure I’d put it at the top of my reading list, but it’s worth reading.

Reading :: Powershift

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century
By Alvin Toffler

Powershift is the 1990 followup to 1970's Future Shock and 1980's The Third Wave. As Toffler tells us in the preface, whereas Future Shock looked at the process of change and The Third Wave took up the directions of change, "Powershift deals with the control of changes still to come" (p.xix). The three books form a trilogy that attempts to outline what was then the future: the impending 21st century.

And like the other parts of this trilogy, Powershift sometimes seems quite prescient about this future. For instance, Toffler argues that "closely held specialists' knowledge is slipping out of control and reaching ordinary citizens. Similarly, inside major corporations, employees are winning access to knowledge once monopolized by management. And as knowledge is redistributed, so, too, is the power based on it" (p.8). We might think of several 21st century examples here: Rathergate comes to mind, but so does WebMD; the Iranian protests coordinated in part via Twitter and Facebook; and Climategate. If some of these examples make you want to object that specialists' knowledge is sometimes twisted and misconstrued, yes, you're beginning to see a problem with what Toffler is describing: when knowledge escapes its customary boundaries, it's not simply a wayward package, it's interpreted. Multiply the number of interpreters and the number of backgrounds from which they draw, and you don't just get redistributed power, you also get ambiguities and distrust. In any case, it's certainly a "powershift."

In The Third Wave, Toffler argued that the world had undergone three major waves of change based on three objects of human work: agriculture, industry, and knowledge. Here, he argues that each of these waves is associated with a type of power: violence (force), wealth (cash), and knowledge (culture) (p.12). These are additive: the first-wave source of power, violence, has never gone out of style, but it's now layered under the other two sources (p.16). Toffler specifies the definition of power for purposes of future discussion: "purposeful power over people. ... the use of violence, wealth, and knowledge (in the broadest sense) to make people perform in a given way" (p.14). Unlike the other two sources, though, knowledge is more flexible, not finite, and simultaneously usable by many; therefore, knowledge is the most "democratic" source of power (p.19). It's also the highest quality source of power, he argues, compared to violence (low-quality) and wealth (medium-quality) (p.41). Indeed, wealth in particular is undergoing a transformation due to knowledge: the investor (capitalist) is alienated from the source of her wealth (p.59; cf. Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society). And the finite character of capital, he says, is over: something that explodes classical and Marxist assumptions about capital (p.59; cf. Zuboff & Maxmin in The Support Economy).

Toffler also makes the now-familiar argument that "skills are now so varied and fast-changing that workers can't be interchanged as easily or cheaply as in the past" (p.71). All work now has knowledge work and service work components (p.73).

Later, Toffler notes that once, the manufacturer stood between the retailer and consumer, controlling information to both (p.93). But the UPC shifted information control to the retailer by allowing them to examine the many dynamics of retail (from shelf space to placement) at great speed and scale (p.95). More recently, customers have begun paying partially in data (think loyalty cards), data that further accrues to the retailers (p.97). As Toffler says a little later in the book - sounding exactly like Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society - "it is knowledge about knowledge that counts the most" (p.124).

Let's skip ahead a little. Toffler [was "Drucker", fixed 2010.03.10] argues that superior organization is a strategic weapon, the most important weapon in a Third Wave world (p.161). And this "is what today's attack on bureaucracy is all about" (p.161). He characterizes bureaucracies as having two key features, two routine controls: cubbyholes (held by specialists) and channels (held by managers) (p.162). Cubbyholes are places where "specialized information and personal experience are stored"; and with demassification, organizations have become more complex, meaning that more information is trapped in cubbyholes (p.163). Channels are places where information is interpreted and shared: "in every bureaucracy, information is broken apart horizontally and put back together vertically" (p.168). But a faster pace, with more information, means that these channels are choked (p.168). These two features of the bureaucracy are bottlenecks, and in Toffler's view, they are leading to a crash.

So how might an organization develop if it develops away from a bureaucratic organization? One way is the "flex-firm" of small family businesses based at home (p.176). Toffler argues that "huge firms will become more dependent than in the past on a vast substructure of tiny but high-powered and flexible suppliers" such as flex-firms (p.178). Toffler associates flex-firms with "networks" (p.182) but cautions that many other forms are available.

This brings us to those other organizational forms. Toffler identifies several.

• "The pulsating organization": organizations such as the US Census Bureau, which "expands and contracts in a regular rhythm" (p.187). He sees ad-hocracies (such as taskforces or project teams) as one-pulse organizations (p.187).
• "The two-faced organization": a unit that can shift from hierarchical to nonhierarchical command to meet demand (p.188).
• "The checkerboard organization": Alternating categories of people at each level of a hierarchy, as when a Japanese bank in California "alternates Japanese and Americans at each level of the hierarchy" (p.190).
• "The commissar organization": Ensuring that each level of a hierarchy has two or more information channels. Toffler likens these to Soviet Army units with political officers, and suggests that they represent CEOs' desparate bids to keep control in a bureaucracy (pp.190-191).
• "The buro-baronial organization": Feudal organization in large hierarchies (e.g., universities, and to some extent accounting houses and the military). The "barons" feud with each other and form alliances (p.191).
• "The skunkworks organization": "Here a team is handed a loosely specified problem or goal, given resources, and allowed to operate outside the normal company rules" (p.192). "The skunkwork format is inherently and militantly antibureaucratic" (p.193).
• "The self-start team": These emerge without formal sanction or organization and "can function only in an atmosphere that gives individuals considerable autonomy" (p.194). Toffler links these to electronic media.

Toffler argues that this high level of diversity requires new styles of leadership (p.194).

Toffler also cautions that the term "networks" has been overused, becoming a panacea (p.195). He sees flex-form as a broader concept that includes networks. And he foresees the atomization of the company into a consortium of independent contractors and free entrepreneurs (p.198).

This new form of work, he argues, involves new organizations and new discipline (p.205). A heavier load of information requires that the knowledge load be distributed through the managerial ranks. Workers have to continually learn, unlearn, and relearn (p.206). And, as Toffler intimated earlier, it becomes harder to replace the individual: training takes longer, and individuals work in teams that must reach some measure of trust and cohesion (p.208). Along these lines, he predicts that the trend of offshoring labor will reverse because speed will become more important than the low expense (p.392) - a prediction that does not seem to have panned out widely.

Given all that, Toffler makes various policy suggestions, most notably an aggressive buildout of national digital infrastructure (p.400).

My thoughts? It's fascinating to read Toffler's books to see how we've developed differently. As in his other books, he's gotten several things right in Powershift. I'm particularly interested in how he's attempted to build a taxonomy of emerging organizational types, although I'm not sure how useful this taxonomy is. I'm also interested in how closely this text sometimes parallels Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, which was published a few years later. On the other hand, I think Drucker actually underestimates some of the complications of more pervasive digital information, particularly in undermining (in some cases, further undermining) public trust in political, scientific, corporate, and academic institutions. Nevertheless, a fascinating read.