A Ph.D. in activity theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sign up for ATTW's Research Methods Workshop

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

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

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

This year, ATTW is sponsoring two Research Methods Workshops: 

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

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

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

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

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

Complete descriptions of these workshops can be found at: 

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

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

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

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

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

SXSWi Panel: Bizarre User Behavior and How to Explain It

For the last couple of years, I've presented at South by Southwest Interactive on aspects of loosely organized work. This year, I'm going to try something different. I've proposed a panel with Mark Zachry (University of Washington) and Bill Hart-Davidson and Liza Potts (both now at Michigan State).

The panel is called "Bizarre User Behavior and How to Explain It." In a nutshell, we'll be talking about various examples of user behavior that, at first glance, seems completely counterintuitive to interaction designers. Why does it happen? How can designers anticipate it, understand it, and work with users to better address their needs?

The four of us have some truly bizarre stories to share, and, I think, some very useful advice for designers as well. Please consider clicking through and voting for the panel!

Reading :: The Savage Mind

The Savage Mind
By Claude Levi-Strauss

This summer I've been reading some of the classics of anthropology, especially ethnographies. Since I don't have a background in anthropology, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to unravel these books in theoretical or analytical terms. I'm just enjoying them.

But I confess I didn't enjoy this one as much. Partly that's because, rather than a coherent ethnography, it pulls from many published ethnographies to discuss the question of the supposed lack of abstract thinking in primitive cultures. Levi-Strauss attacks this notion, arguing that like science, "the thought we call primitive is founded on the demand for order" - and "sacred items ... contribute to the maintenance of order in the universe by occupying the places allocated for them" (p.10). Magic and science are parallel and independent forms of gaining knowledge (p.13).

Levi-Strauss famously introduces the notion of the bricoleur here, the craftsman or jack-of-all-trades whose "heterogeneous repertoire, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited" (p.17). According to Levi-Strauss, mythical thought is bricolage: it "builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using the remains and debris of events" (pp.21-22).

Through the rest of the book, Levi-Strauss extends this thesis by drawing from a wide array of existing ethnographies. These examples are often interesting, but we can understand his fervent wish for a computer in the far future that can disentangle these many connections by examining the raw transcripts of field notes (on punchcards!) (p.89). Yes, I'd like that too.

I've only scratched the surface of this book, and I think that someone with an anthropology background could probably articulate its value much more than I can. But perhaps not: the reviews on the back claim that "no precis is possible" and "no outline is possible." So that lets me off the hook. I'll end by simply recommending the book - at least the first chapter if you're mildly interested, and all of it if you have intense interest in anthropology.

Reading :: The Nuer

The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people
By E.E. Evans-Pritchard

The link above goes to Archive.org, where you can download this book in PDF, Kindle, text, and other formats. It's OCR'd from the 1940 book, and you'll find some scan errors, but the book is generally intact and generally quite interesting. The first in a trilogy on the Nuer, an African people living in the Sudan and Ethiopia, this book is also a classic of structural-functionalism.

Unfortunately, I'm not an anthropologist and can't provide a good discussion of structural-functionalism or evaluate Evans-Pritchard's work in those terms. But I can recommend The Nuer as an intriguing and at times amusing book. Evans-Pritchard's self-deprecating discussion of methodology, for instance, reads like the trials of Job: "an adequate sociological study of the Nuer was impossible in the circumstances in which most of my work was done," he allows, professing to be amazed that the book has appeared at all.

When he visited Tribe A, they stole the game he shot to feed himself and only spoke to him to demand tobacco. Moving to Tribe B, he began to gain their confidence, only to be stymied by a Government raid. At this point he had only done three and a half months' work among the Nuer.

Later, he visited Tribe C, discovering that "Nuer are expert at sabotaging inquiry": they would visit his tent, demand tobacco, and give him the runaround when he asked questions. He dubbed the resulting condition "Nuerosis." Giving up, he moved to Tribe D, began making progress - then had to be evacuated due to malaria.

On a third trip, he had planned to study another people, but "as delay was caused by diplomatic chicanery I spent two and a half months" near the Nuer; an imminent invasion compelled him to give up on these studies and join the Nuer for another seven weeks. "My total residence among the Nuer was thus about a year," he tells us, admitting that this timespan was inadequate.

Inadequate or not, Evans-Pritchard manages to paint an intriguing portrait of the Nuer, herdsmen who love cattle more than themselves, subsist primarily on milk, millet and meat, and "strut about like lords of the Earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be." They "tend to define all social processes and relationships in terms of cattle. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom," he argues. This fact impacts their social structure: "since milk is considered essential, the economic unit must be larger than the simple family group." They consider it repulsive to eat most reptiles, all birds, and all eggs. (We in turn would most likely not want to sample their cheese.) Their devotion to cattle also impacts their estimation of value: a man without cattle is not considered a man, something that probably affected Evans-Pritchard's earlier inquiries since he acquired his own cattle only later.

As "lords of the earth," the Nuer do not serve each other or order each other around; their societal structure is generally decentralized and based on lineage. ("By structure we mean relations between groups of persons within a system of groups.") The tribe is segmentary, based on "complementary tendencies toward fission and fusion."

Overall, the book is fascinating. Without a stronger background in structural-functionalism, I'm certain I missed many implications of this work. But as a standalone work, it is insightful and well worth reading.

Reading :: The Great Reset

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
By Richard Florida

I'll make this a quick review. Florida's The Great Reset tackles the question of what's going to happen to our economy post-crash. He presents his argument in a series of very short chapters, often as short as four pages, in which he grounds his points in interesting stories and statistics. It's like visiting a tapas bar.

Essentially, Florida presents a wave version of economic development in which economic crises function as "resets" that broadly and fundamentally transform the economic order. Previous resets were the Great Depression of 1929 and the Long Depression of 1873, both of which remade the US economy through technical innovations, systems of innovations, upgrades in education, and changes in the way we live. Florida argues that before a crash, innovation slows down because the system doesn't reward them properly; a Reset changes the incentives and releases innovation.

Florida looks at a number of indices to understand what might be at the other end of this Reset, and he comes out hopeful. He believes that cities will be bigger than ever, that trends such as collaborative consumption will intensify, that fewer people will buy their homes (since home ownership makes less sense without lifelong employment), and that innovations will generate new kinds of prosperity. I hope he's right.

Seminar: Integrative reviews of literature

Saul Carliner, editor of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, is offering a free online seminar on how to write integrative reviews of literature. If you're interested, this sounds like a great opportunity, especially for graduate students. Saul's message is below:

As you might have heard, the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication is actively recruiting integrative reviews of the literature. 

• In a recent poll, readers of the Transactions identified these among the top three types of articles in which they have an interest. Yet a content analysis of our journal indicated that we do not publish any.
• Furthermore, integrative reviews of the literature substantially differ from literature reviews that have been published in the past because, among their many distinguishing characteristics, integrative reviews of the literature fully disclose their research methodology. 

For many, then, integrative reviews of the literature represent a new type of research article with which many scholars in technical and professional communication might not have much experience. 

To raise the level of familiarity—and help authors with the process of preparing their first such reviews for the Transactions—I have scheduled a 6-part web-based seminar to introduce this type of article. 

The seminar is intended for faculty and graduate students (especially Ph.D and advanced master’s students). It can be integrated into other course work for regularly scheduled classes. 

There is no cost to participate but participants must register in advance.

For more information, contact tpc.editorial@gmail.com. They can send you an outline of the seminar and answer questions.

Three Days of the Chromebook

For the last three days, I've been trying out the Samsung Chromebook, thanks to a friend who received one at Google I/O. I've been posting reviews on Google Plus, but thought I'd pull them all together here.

Day 1
I've been meaning to try out a Chromebook for a while. The idea of everything-in-a-browser seems intriguing - I pretty much do everything in the browser anyway - and I have also been interested in other features, such as

• Eight-second boot time
• Instant wake from sleep
• 3G connectivity (with data caps, of course)
• Incredible battery life
• Elegance - I don't have to worry about installations, managing software, etc.
• Hardware optimized for browsing
• Relatively light, small footprint
• Low cost (though not as low as many netbooks)

Unfortunately, the bricks-and-mortar vendor that carries them, Best Buy, doesn't have any displayed at my local store. But a friend generously loaned me the Samsung Chromebook he picked up at Google I/O.

After perhaps an hour and a half, here were my first impressions.

ChromeOS
ChromeOS is pretty much what you expect - the browser is the interface. If you're a heavy consumer of cloud-based software, you'll be fine. Personally, I only use a few desktop applications on a regular basis - including a SQL front end, Notational Velocity (for tricky passwords), and the Mendeley desktop app (which syncs to the cloud; Mendeley has a web interface too). I also have a large number of PDFs that haven't been pushed into the cloud.

For me, then, things are pretty seamless. Once I set up the Chrome apps I usually use - Tweetdeck, Pandora - I got back into the swing of things. In particular, Google Docs - where I spend a great deal of my time - works well and responsively. Basically, the experience is just like my Macbook Pro, except the screen is much smaller.

As a side note, Google Docs is one of the main reasons I'm not interested in an iPad. The GDocs iPad implementation is entirely inadequate for my needs. So is the Android implementation. The ChromeOS "implementation" is just the web app with which you're already familiar.

The other thing about ChromeOS is booting. Eight seconds is pretty short! And accounts are handled elegantly.

Hardware
The hardware is adequate but nothing to write home about.

I know that people have complained about the trackpad, the lack of a delete key (it has a backspace key instead), and various other things. None of this bothers me.

What does bother me is that the machine is a bit clunky. The Chromebook is much smaller than the 15" MBP, which seems like a behemoth now. But it's bigger than the Air in nearly all dimensions. That means a bigger screen - but the screen is not as sharp. It doesn't mean a bigger keyboard (the Air's keyboard is better designed), but it does mean greater width, length, and depth. And weight - the Chromebook is surprisingly heavy.

As many have complained, the hardware feels a bit cheap. Not as cheap as my old Toshiba netbook, but certainly not to par with either Apple device. Of course, it costs only half as much as the Air. The cheapness itself has some appeal to me, since in comparison to the Air it's a disposable device - sort of like my Kindle.

First Impressions
So what did I think at this point? I was expecting to either love or hate the Chromebook, but at this point, the jury was still out. It definitely has some potential, but I worry that the hardware will hold that potential back. At this point I liked the Air's form factor much better - but of course the Air is twice as expensive.

Day 2
During this second day, the Chromebook began to grow on me. The battery life is remarkable - after 27 hours, the battery had dropped from 97% to 19% charge. I hadn't plugged it in at all.

Granted, I hadn’t been using it nonstop, but I had been doing a lot with it: surfing, editing a paper, moving around citations on Mendeley. For the most part, the experience was almost exactly like my Macbook Pro, with a few exceptions. That’s partly because I moved most of my workflow to web applications a while ago: word processing, diagrams, spreadsheets, email, calendar, tweeting, music, etc. etc.

But some additional issues cropped up.

• One is that I’ve discovered Mendeley, my citations manager, doesn’t appear to generate works cited pages online. In the OSX desktop app, I can highlight relevant citations, copy, then paste them in APA format into GDocs. With the web app, I can’t. Although that’s not a huge deal - I can do that when I switch back to the MBP - it’s still disappointing.
• Another is the trackpad. People have complained online about it, and I’m beginning to see why. I’m finding that some horizontal gestures aren’t registering the first time I try them, especially when I click-and-hold (such as when I highlight a text selection).
• Scrollbars are rather small, making them hard to grab. I might be able to make them thicker, but for now I’m using the two-finger gesture to scroll. It works okay.
• Speakers are tinny, but I don’t really care about that.
• I miss TextExpander on OSX.
• Finally, I still haven’t tried setting up cloud print yet. I’m not sufficiently motivated; I’ll just print from the MBP for now. I also don’t have the dongle to connect to an external monitor.

But let’s look at some of the positives.

• The guest login is great. You log in as a guest, so you’re not logged into your Google account and Chrome runs in private mode.
• The file manager (Control-M) is minimal - just enough to view files. I assume you can also launch and delete them, but I haven’t tried.
• Installing Chrome web apps is exactly the same as it is in Chrome on my MBP. Very easy. I installed Pandora and Tweetdeck with no issues.
• Waking from sleep takes exactly the same amount of time as the Macbook Air - nearly instantaneous.
• Although some have complained online about the Chromebook’s screen - they say it’s not visible at different angles - it seems fine to me.

Now some interesting differences.

• On the MBP, I defrag the disk, clear the cache and trash, and do a full backup every other day. This takes a while. On the Chromebook I’ll never have to do that.
• On the MBP, I get an alert at least once a week telling me that I need to upgrade something - printer support, some part of the OSX system that I never use, etc. On the Chromebook I’ll never have to do that either.

Bottom line, so far I’d found the Chromebook to be almost entirely workable for what I’m doing. I don’t think I could use it as my only computer - at least not until Mendeley allows me to generate works cited pages in the web application - but for most uses I honestly can’t tell the difference.

Day 3

The third day of the Chromebook test hasn’t yielded a lot of news. It continues to be a good lightweight computer that allows me to access most of my services. In fact, I’ve only opened the MBP a couple of times - once because the Chromebook was charging.

I had expected to feel a little claustrophobic because the Chromebook only gives you the browser. Where’s the shell, the desktop, the widgets? But so far I haven’t had that feeling at all. In fact, I like not having all the cruft that comes with a full desktop. It makes for a cleaner, more focused experience. In this way, ChromeOS seems almost Apple-like - it takes away some of the choices that we have come to expect, and it does this for the sake of guiding the experience and guarding the machine’s performance.

Speaking of Apple, I’ve been comparing the Chromebook to the Macbook Air in this series of reviews, but in terms of price, it’s in the same league as the iPad. Why not compare it to the iPad? Bottom line, I don’t think they’re the same class of device at all.

Yes, they both restrict your user experience sharply, and in doing so, wring better performance out of hardware that would choke on a fuller-featured OS.

But with the iPad, you mainly interact with apps whose interfaces are simplified and focused. Web browsing is also simplified, and you get the less-featured mobile apps rather than the full-featured web apps you would access on the deskop. For instance, if you try to use Google Docs on the iPad, by default you get the mobile app, which is quite underfeatured. You can click through to the full app, but it works poorly in my experience.

The iPad has a rap for being a consumption rather than a production device. I think that oversimplifies things, but there’s some truth to it: the iPad is not well set up for text production, which is the majority of what I do. The soft keyboard is not tactile and takes up valuable screen real estate (just as Android tablets do). I haven’t tried the iPad with a keyboard, but I don’t think it would solve all of the issues I worry about.

The Chromebook, on the other hand, is all about the web. So you get no local apps to speak of, but full-featured web apps. For instance, Google Docs works on the Chromebook in all its glory, as do the other web apps. Between that and the keyboard, the Chromebook is just fine for text production and serves as a substitute for desktop browsing.

This brings me to a question that seems to plague a lot of commenters, but has a very obvious answer. Why has Google produced both Android and ChromeOS? Android follows the iOS pattern, assuming low levels of text production and restricting default interaction to apps and the mobile web. ChromeOS is for accessing the full web, and therefore substituting for desktop apps. Perhaps the two sets of OSes (iOS and OSX, Android and ChromeOS) will merge at some point, but for now, the two sets are meant to cover different sorts of devices and different patterns of consumption.

So: Can the Chromebook substitute as a primary computing device? I think that even for me, it would be a bit of a stretch - although it’s close. That’s primarily because I can’t generate citations with the Mendeley web app. But I could see it working in computer labs, offices, and other settings that don’t involve complex applications.

On the other hand, it would make a great travel device. It’s lightweight, the battery life is fantastic, and the 3G option means that you wouldn’t have to rely on the vagaries of WiFi. It does everything I need in a travel or personal device. And, importantly, it’s cheap enough that I wouldn’t be devastated if it were lost or stolen. I could almost see myself buying it as a secondary, personal device for home and coffee shop use.

That “almost” is key. Although I enjoy the device, I haven’t fallen in love with it. And I am cheap enough that I don’t want to buy a mid-level computing device whose main function would be to fill in between my Macbook Pro (where I write my papers) and my Android phone (where I consume the majority of my web content). I’m not on the road enough to make another device desirable at present. But if I were, I would give a hard look at the Chromebook.

Reading :: Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits

Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World
By John Arquilla

John Arquilla has long studied and theorized irregular warfare, often in fairly technical terms. But in this book, he provides a readable, popular, but still thought-provoking discussion of how it has evolved over the centuries. He primarily does this by offering chronological chapter portraits of outstanding strategists and tacticians of irregular warfare over the years, starting with Robert Rogers (in the French and Indian War) and concluding with Aslan Maskhadov (in the Chechnyan insurgency). (I was surprised by the absence of Mao here.)

Arquilla defines irregular warfare as warfare in which sides are unequal. This might involve small units in conventional conflicts; guerilla warfare; or terrorism. Irregular warfare, he emphasizes, is not a recent phenomenon - he takes issue with the notion that warfare advances in "generations," with irregular warfare being symptomatic of the "fourth generation warfare" (4GW) that arose in the 20th century. "The generational concept is simply inaccurate," he charges in the Introduction.

This argument is implicitly made throughout the many chapter portraits, in which Arquilla examines each strategist's or tactician's innovations, where they went right or wrong, how they contributed to the evolution of irregular warfare, and how they drew on their predecessors. These chapters are all fascinating, although they tend to the Great Man view of history by emphasizing single pivotal figures. I learned a lot of basic history of irregular warfare through them, as well as becoming sensitive to how the developments occurred and why.

"If there is a common theme that runs through the stories of the masters of irregular warfare," Arquilla argues in the conclusion, "it is their resilience in the face of defeat and other adversity." Their lessons, he tells us, are more important now than ever: "the landscape of battle is bereft of traditional foes waiting to be outflanked and overrun. Instead of being massed, they are dispersed and must be found before they can be fought." So what lessons can we carry forward? He notes five:

• Transformation and integration
• Narratives and nation-building
• Deep strikes and infrastructure attacks
• Networks and swarming
• Cooptation and infiltration

In particular, he notes that "in an organizational sense (as opposed to its electronic or social connotations), a network is characterized by the dominance of lateral linkages among many small nodes, cells, or units." And "swarming is the way networks fight - their many small formations tend to attack enemy troops and other targets simultaneously in several directions."

Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely. Although it's more of a popular book, it wrestles with many of the same themes Arquilla has covered in more academic work. If you're interested in irregular warfare, military history, or (in my case) networks and swarming, take a look.

Reading :: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
By Erving Goffman


I haven't read this book for years. It was assigned to one of my MA classes, long ago, but I think I either gave it away or lost it in a move at the end of my Ph.D. work. In any case, I picked up another copy and took a look. And although it's not fieldwork per se, it's full of interesting things. I won't attempt to justice to it in this short review, but I'll point out some of the interesting parts - particularly in terms of team performances, which interest me the most.


Using a dramaturgical metaphor, Goffman argues that people are constantly tailoring the images that they project to others around them. Although individuals constantly do this sort of performance management, so do teams: “any set of individuals who co-operate in staging a single routine” (p.79).

Goffman’s examples are as disparate as family dinners, filling stations, and prostitution syndicates, but across all these team performances, Goffman identifies two basic components of the team relationship. First, “while a team-performance is in progress, any member of the team has the power to give the show away or disrupt it by inappropriate conduct” and consequently there is “a bond of reciprocal dependence linking teammates to each other” (p.82). Second, “if members of a team must co-operate to maintain a given definition of the situation before their audience, they will hardly be in a position to maintain that particular impression before one another” (pp.82-83). That is, teammates develop both a reciprocal dependence and a reciprocal familiarity with each other (p.83).

Team members engage in defensive practices to allow them to “save their own show” by maintaining their team performance. Goffman identifies three defensive attributes and practices.

• Dramaturgical loyalty, in which teammates “act as if they have accepted certain moral obligations” such as not betraying team secrets (p.212), not trying to steal the show (p.214), and not forming attachments with the audience that will compromise team performance (p.214). 
• Dramaturgical discipline, in which each teammate “remembers his part and does not commit unmeant gestures or faux pas in performing it” (p.216). The disciplined team member avoids unintentionally giving away team secrets and covers up the inappropriate or disruptive behavior of teammates (p.216). 
• Dramaturgical circumspection, in which teammates “exercise prudence and circumspection in staging the show, preparing in advance for likely contingencies and exploiting the opportunities that remain” (p.218). One technique for assembling such a team is to “choose members who are loyal and disciplined”; another is to determine “how much loyalty and discipline [the team] can rely on from the membership as a whole” (p.218); a third is to “select the kind of audience that will give a minimum of trouble in terms of the show the performer wants to put on” (pp.218-219). 

Goffman recognizes that team performances are difficult since they rely on a high degree of coordinated improvisation in the face of contingencies as well as a high degree of trust among team members. He lists several ways to limit the risk of disruptions in team performances, including getting the team’s story straight ahead of time (p.88); punishing teammates for mistakes after the performance (p.89); excluding teammates who cannot perform properly (p.91); controlling the information to which the audience has access (p.141); and limiting team size (p.220).

Goffman also notes another tactic. “In those interactions where the individual presents a product to others, he will tend to show them only the end product, and they will be led into judging him on the basis of something that has been finished, polished, and packaged. In some cases, if very little effort was actually required to complete the object, this fact will be concealed. In other cases, it will be the long, tedious hours of lonely labor that will be hidden” (p.44).

There's much, much more to the book. In fact, one disappointment is that although Goffman alludes to and occasionally uses examples from fieldwork he did on Shetland Island, he doesn't focus the book on that project or even discuss it enough for us to understand the project. Rather, he casts widely - and frequently draws on the unpublished dissertations of U-Chicago doctoral candidates as well as works of fiction - to illustrate the different dramaturgical moves he identifies. Although that choice gives Goffman a wide range of illustrations and serves to emphasize how broadly this phenomenon is distributed, it also makes the framework seem too generally grounded and universalized.

Nevertheless, it's a solid book, and its examples generally stand, even more than 50 years later. And it's a fast read. If you haven't taken a look, do.

Reading :: Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco

Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco
By Paul Rabinow

In 1968, a young graduate student set out from the University of Chicago under the direction of Clifford Geertz to do ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco. He saw fieldwork as an extremely important transformational event; certainly that's what his professors had indicated. "In the graduate anthropology department at the University of Chicago," he explained, "the world was divided into two categories of people: those who had done fieldwork, and those who had not; the latter were not 'really' anthropologists, regardless of what they knew about anthropological topics" (p.3). Indeed,

I was told that my papers did not really count because once I had done fieldwork they would be radically different. Knowing smiles greeted the acerbic remarks which graduate students made about the lack of theory in certain of the classics we studied; never mind, we were told, the authors were great fieldworkers. At the time, this intrigued me. The promise of initiation into the clan secrets was seductive. I fully accepted the dogma. (p.3)

Yet, he notes, anthropology presents a double bind.

As graduate students we are told that 'anthropology equals experience'; you are not an anthropologist until you have the experience of doing it. But when one returns from the field, the opposite immediately applies: anthropology is not the experiences which made you an initiate, but only the objective data you have brought back. (p.4)

Rabinow's book tries to break that double bind. In his previous book, he presented a standard ethnography based on his time in Morocco. But in this book, he tells us his experiences in trying to do fieldwork, warts and all. The result is poignant and frequently hilarious. Rabinow bungles along, trying to find informants, trying to learn the language, trying not to alienate people or burn bridges. As he works his way into the situation, he finds that some informants, though eager for attention, are too peripheral to be useful; that most informants see him as a means to their ends as well, and have no problem taking advantage of him or shutting him off from people in other factions; and that if he doesn't take advantage of power differentials, he can't get any sort of cooperation at all. For instance, he befriends an excellent informant, only to learn later that (a) the man is marginalized because he's a pimp and (b) the man, like others, plays domination games with him.

"I had to clarify where I stood," he realizes at one point. "If the informant was always right, then by implication the anthropologist had to become a sort of non-person, or more accurately a total persona. ... This was the position my professors had advocated: one simply endured whatever inconveniences and annoyances came along. One had to completely subordinate one's code of ethics, conduct, and world view, to 'suspend belief,' as another colleague was proud of putting it, and sympathetically and accurately record events" (p.46). But Rabinow soon realized that this meant being dominated, walked over, and in his situation it meant performing ethnography poorly. "As confidence is built up, the informant judges and interacts with the anthropologist in his own habitual style" (p.47) - and that means that he will test the anthropologist. Who can respect someone who lets himself or herself be bullied and dominated?

Rabinow gradually realizes that anthropology must mean participating in a culture on the terms of the informants. But it also means cultivating informants, helping them to see things differently as well so that they can explain them. Informants necessarily have to have that critical distance, so frequently the best informants are on the fringe of their culture. "Culture is interpretation," he tells us in the conclusion (p.150). In the conclusion, he discusses and evaluates all of his informants, examining why they behaved as they did and discussing how they could and couldn't help him.

Overall, this book is Rabinow's account of learning to understand fieldwork - and learning to understand his informants as real people who are changed by, and who change, the ethnographer who comes to study them. It's thoughtful and highly entertaining. If you're interested in fieldwork, and especially if you haven't done fieldwork yet, take a look.

Reading :: Naven

Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View
By Gregory Bateson

Two men of the Iatmul hobble about their village, dressed in filthy women's clothes, smeared with ashes, carrying a fowl. They act utterly decrepit, supporting themselves with walking sticks and frequently falling, legs splayed in an exaggerated manner. In the voices of crones, they call for their laua (essentially, their sister's son, although the lineage is a bit more complicated). They want to congratulate their laua for making a large canoe for the first time in his life. But he has hidden, ashamed of his wau (his maternal uncles). Who can blame him? "If the wau can find the boy he will further demean himself by rubbing the cleft of his buttocks down the length of the laua's leg, a sort of sexual salute which is said to have the effect of causing the laua to make haste to get valuables which he may present to his wau to 'make him all right'" (p.13). But they can't find him, so instead they take his canoe for a short ride - paddling seated, like women, rather than standing, like men (p.13). After the ride, they wash themselves, put on men's clothing, and - now that it's safe - the laua is found and presented with the fowl.

In another instance, the laua's achievements are celebrated by his maternal uncles' wives. They dress in men's garb - but in "the smartest of men's attire." (If the Iatmul men wore their transvestite garb like Benny Hill, the women wore theirs like Annie Lennox.) They celebrate by beating the laua with sticks.

Both these events are instances of the naven, a ceremony that celebrates the acts and achievements of a sister's child. Such achievements include homicide - the Iatmul were headhunters in recent memory, and although the colonial government has made them give it up, homicide is an important rite of manhood, often carried out by young boys against captives with the help of the wau (p.6). "Another act contributory to killing which may be honoured is the enticing of foreigners into the village so that others might kill them" (p.6; my marginal note here says RUN!!!). But other achievements might include making a canoe, spearing an eel, planting coconuts, and sundry other parts of Iatmul life.

Why do these fierce headhunters, who scorn women and weakness, dress as women to celebrate such achievements? This is the question that nagged at Gregory Bateson, then conducting an ethnography off the coast of New Guinea to fulfill his MA. By Bateson's account, he didn't make much headway in the field - he apologizes frequently for the inadequacy of his data, and dismisses his work as the unfocused product of "a few months"(p.257; he spent 1929-1930 with them). After returning to England, he developed a tripartite analysis (structure, sociology, ethos) to examine the naven, developing the notion of schismogenesis: "a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behavior resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals" (p.175).

Based on this notion, he argues that the naven actually makes celebration of young men's deeds possible - it provides a mechanism that is otherwise lacking. The Iatmul men generally celebrate only their own achievements: "Anger and scorn they can express with a good deal of over-compensation; and joy and sorrow they can express when it is their own pride which is enhanced or abased; but to express joy in the achievements of another is outside the norms of their behavior" (p.201). Conversely, the Iatmul women can express joy and sorrow unselfishly, but they have no public ceremony role (p.201). For both sexes to publicly celebrate a young man's achievement, they must take on part of the role of the other. Hence the transvestitism (p.202).

It's a good story, made more concrete by the photos Bateson took of the Iatmul. (In one, a man looks directly at the camera with seeming murder in his eyes. RUN!!!) More than that, the analysis is intricate. As Bateson admits, it is perhaps too detailed to be supported by the ethnography itself, but it still provides important background into Bateson's thinking. In this way, Bateson's Naven seems the opposite of the early ethnographies of Margaret Mead, whom he met after concluding the ethnography and married six years later. Where Mead writes confidently and shows not a trace of doubt, Bateson writes with hesitations and caution. Where Mead believes that six months of fieldwork is more than adequate for understanding a culture, Bateson emphasizes how inadequate his year with the Iatmul was. Where Mead offers easy lessons, Bateson laboriously develops an analytical approach and a theoretical concept. Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed Bateson's book, even though I agree with the author (in both of his epilogues) that the book is flawed. If you're interested in ethnographies, Bateson's work, headhunters, or transvestitism, I highly recommend this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book

Reading :: Growing Up in New Guinea

Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education
By Margaret Mead

I recently reviewed Mead's first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, and enjoyed Mead's storytelling while harboring grave reservations about her methodology. Mead's second book, describing the six-month New Guinea ethnography that Mead and her new husband Reo Fortune conducted as her first book went to press. This second book has many of the virtues and vices of the first.

In this ethnography, Mead lives in the Manus village of Peri, where she conducts "six months' concentrated and uninterrupted field work" in which she focuses on how Manus children grew up (p.12). The village is situated in a shallow lagoon, with houses on piles and people circulating via canoes that they learn to pilot at a young age. Mead studied the children through observation, but also by collecting their spontaneous drawings, asking them to interpret ink blots, collecting interpretations of events, and posing problem questions (p.210). Although six months may seem quite short for an ethnography of children's education, Mead explains that it is adequate: Whereas "our own society is so complex, so elaborate, that the most serious student can, at best, only hope to examine a part of the education process," she assures us that "in a simple society, without division of labour, without written records, without a large population ... it is possible for the investigator to master in a few months most of the tradition which it takes the natives years to learn" (p.8). I have my doubts.

But nevertheless it's clear that Mead learned a great deal, enough to produce a vivid cultural sketch that makes this book very readable. Mead describes how the Manus teach their children basic safety early (swimming, canoeing, fire, hygiene), then spoil them endlessly (especially the fathers) while leaving them largely to their own devices. This constant indulgence, she says, produces the predictable result: the children regard their parents with contempt and expect them to make sacrifices with no return. Consequently, Mead says, the Manus are a society of self-reliant individuals, materialistic and acquisitive, and with middling respect for their ancestors.

One might suspect that Mead's conclusions, based on six months of fieldwork, are overdrawn. Those concerns are not assuaged in Mead's last four chapters, in which she draws equivalences between the Manus society and that of the United States. The Manus are acquisitive, constantly thinking about how to acquire dogs' teeth, which serve as their currency; people in the US are acquisitive too! The Manus spoil their children; so do we! And she also provides less flattering contrasts, arguing that the Manus do a better job of teaching respect for property than parents in the US do: they don't treat different kinds of property differently, like "American parents who let the child tear the almanac and the telephone book and then wonder at its grieved astonishment when it is slapped for tearing up the family Bible" (p.28). When Mead makes such rough generalizations about her own culture, not even considering its considerable class and region differences, I begin to suspect rough generalizations about the Manus too.

Nevertheless, the book is absolutely fascinating and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Mead has managed to pack in a lot of detail about Manus culture, from marriage to birth to childhood and adolescence. As with her previous book, I wouldn't take this one as a model in terms of methodology, but I'd still recommend it.

Genre 2012

Please consider attending the upcoming conference on genre at Carleton University:

Genre 2012--Rethinking Genre Twenty Years Later: An
 International Conference on Genre Studies
 Location: Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
 Date: June 26-29, 2012
 Website:www.carleton.ca/genre2012

 Call for Proposals: http://www3.carleton.ca/genre2012/call-for-proposals.html

 Contact:genre2012@carleton.ca  

I've already agreed to be there. Deadline for your proposal is October 15. Thanks very much to the conference co-organizers for putting this on: Natasha Artemeva, Jaffer Sheyholislami, and Graham Smart (Carleton University).

Reading :: The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead

The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research
By Derek Freeman

Shortly after Margaret Mead's death in 1978, Australian ethnographer Derek Freeman stirred up a controversy over her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, in his 1983 book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. This book generated an enormous backlash, described in the Afterword of Freeman's 1999 book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. I didn't entirely trust Freeman's account of the controversy, but I do trust Bonnie Nardi, who wrote a 1984 review of Freeman's earlier book that she based partially on her own fieldwork in Samoa.

The present book seems very much a reaction to that 1983 controversy. After retiring, Freeman went through Mead's vast archives of correspondence and manuscripts, reviewed court cases from the time that Mead stayed in Samoa, and visited with people who were alive during that time. He also repeats some of the quotes from his previous book, in which one of Mead's original informants claims that she and a companion had joked about Samoan sexual practices, not realizing that Mead would take their claims at face value and characterize the adolescence of Samoan girls based on them. Although I'm not an anthropologist, I think there's some gold in this account - but also much dross, because Freeman seemed to have lost his sense of proportion as he wrote the book.

Here's the gist of the book. Mead, a brilliant young PhD (and Freeman continually reminds us how young she was, at 24), is sent to study adolescence in a primitive culture by her mentor Franz Boas. Boas wants proof that nurture is more significant than nature - that is, that culture determines more than biology. Boas wanted Mead to study culture among the American Indians, but Mead was enchanted with Polynesia and insisted on conducting the study there. According to Freeman, Boas gave Mead a half-hour lecture on fieldwork before sending her off - and that was the sum total of her fieldwork experience.

Mead was not just enchanted with Polynesia, she was also enchanted with ethnology and wanted to conduct an ethnological study. This sort of study, Freeman argues, was explicitly against Boas' wishes and the terms of her fellowship, but she clandestinely entered into an agreement with the Bishop Museum to conduct an ethnological study and write a monograph. In Hawaii, she met with the director of the Bishop Museum and with its ethnologist, Edward Craighill Handy, who described his fieldwork in western Polynesia. Based on his descriptions, as well as other reports from western Polynesia and even fictional descriptions in Melville's writings, Mead learned that Polynesians generally had a lax attitude toward sex. (According to Freeman, Mead was not aware that western and eastern Polynesia had very different cultural attitudes toward sex.)

Mead went on to the US Naval Station in Pago Pago, where she taught herself basic Samoan and discovered that she hated the taste of boiled taro root, the food staple of the islands. She enjoyed living on the base, with its comforts, but concluded that Pago Pago was too colonized to perform the study of primitives that she had envisioned. So she moved on to the islands of Manu'a, where she lived at the US Naval Dispensary. According to Freeman, she greatly preferred the food and sleeping arrangements of the Dispensary to that of the villages, so she decided to sleep there. Boas, who himself had elected to sleep in hotels when performing fieldwork among the Native Americans, agreed with her decision via letter.

In Manu'a, according to Freeman, Mead tried to serve two masters - her study of adolescents and her ethnological study of Samoa - and in the meantime greatly enjoyed being treated as a visiting dignitary and ceremonial virgin. Freeman also claims that Mead was unaware of the deep tensions between the US Navy and the US-appointed native government, which made trust-building difficult. Essentially, Freeman says, Mead frittered her time away with ceremonies and unsystematic ethnological study, and ran out of time on her study of adolescents. This set the stage for the unintentional hoax. As she traveled with two other ceremonial virgins or taupou (they were ceremonial, but according to Freeman, they were also actually virgins), Mead asked them about their sexual practices (Ch.11). Embarrassed by this line of questioning, the taupou engaged in what is alternately known as ula, tausua, taufa'alili, or taufa'ase'e, depending on the intention. Freeman loosely translates it as "recreational lying" (p.139). They claimed that at night they would slip out to see boys - a claim that, according to Freeman, they thought was too outrageous to be believed. Mead, primed by the literature she had read and her discussions with Handy, and desperate for evidence that would allow her to deliver to Boas the proof he wanted, believed them. She left the islands soon after, a month ahead of schedule, her goal accomplished.

This story is riveting. But just as Mead's book seems in some places marred by hearsay, so does this one. Freeman often characterizes Mead in very negative ways, ways that go well beyond her methodological missteps. He emphasizes how young and idealistic she is, how she idolizes Boas, and how ambitious she is. He betrays her as spoiled, unwilling to tolerate Taro or nights in the village. He goes into detail about extraneous and uncomplimentary information such as how her first marriage failed and her second one began. He uses snatches of her poetry and her favorite parts of others' poetry to characterize her idealism and single-mindedness. He portrays her as dithering, nervous, excitable, unreliable, and treacherous. And he repeats these character attacks throughout the book, often in italics. These attacks made me suspicious of his conclusions. That's the dross.

There's much less gold, but it comes in the close analysis of Mead's correspondence with Boas and her bulletins sent to friends and colleagues as well as the close analysis of contradictions within the book itself. Here, Freeman is on firmer ground, showing that Mead had been presented with, and recorded, claims that directly contradict her thesis that Samoan adolescents were expected to be promiscuous.

Overall, I am glad that I read this book - but I'm also glad that I bought it used. As a popular book, it's gripping and interesting, but also gossipy and rather unfair. As an academic book, it is too black-and-white, brooking no middle ground between Mead's claims of free love among the Samoans and Samoan authorities' claims of rigorous chastity. If you're interested in Mead's works, consider reading it, but with a healthy dose of caution and skepticism.

Reading :: Coming of Age in Samoa

Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
By Margaret Mead

(Note added 2011.07.07: Page references are to the 1973 paperback edition, not the later edition I linked on Amazon.)

I'm reading some ethnographic classics this summer, and this book has been on my list for a while, so I'm glad I finally got to it. I've never read Mead's classic Coming of Age in Samoa, although I've seen it discussed and cited many times. I'm also aware that this work is controversial, both through general discussions in the literature and through the other book I bought at the same time, Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead (which I'll review soon). But I avoided reading these critiques until I was able to read Mead's book itself, so that I could form my own impressions.

So what were my impressions? First, Mead had a captivating writing style and a real gift for painting scenes. From the first pages, I could almost envision the Samoan village she described based on her study in 1925-1926. Mead introduces us to the scene first, then takes us through the contextual information in subsequent chapters: a typical Samoan day, children's education, the household, how adolescent girls related to their age groups and community, then issues such as sex relations, dance, and personality. In all these chapters, we almost feel like we have entered village life, learning the hierarchy, seeing the interactions, and being privy to the gossip: who is lazy, who is slow, who has poise and maturity beyond her years, who lags behind, who slept with whom. Mead gives many quotes, but far more stories about the happenings in the three villages she studied.

In fact, much of the book does seem like gossip or hearsay. Mead not only recounts many stories that her informants told her - without consistently specifying her sources - she also makes personal judgments that tend to go beyond what we might consider data analysis. For instance, she describes one delinquent in this way:

She was stupid, underhanded, deceitful and she possessed no aptitude for the simplest mechanical tasks. Her ineptness was the laughing stock of the village and her lovers were many and casual, the fathers of illegitimate children, men whose wives were temporarily absent, witless boys bent on a frolic. It was a saying among the girls of the village that Sala was apt at only one art, sex, and that she, who couldn't even sew thatch or weave blinds, would never get a husband. ... She had a sullen furtive manner, lied extravagantly in her assertions of skill and knowledge, and was ever on the alert for slights and possible innuendoes. (p.101)

This description sounds like the sort of thing that two or three teenage girls might say about a rival. Did Mead triangulate this description with others in the village, including children and adults? Did she interview Sala herself about her own impressions? Unfortunately it's impossible to say. Sala does appear in the table of participants in the back, but in my reading, I didn't see any other information about where she got this description beyond "it was a saying among the girls of the village..."

In fact, the methodology was rather spare. Mead characterizes Samoa's adolescent girls on the basis of "six months" spent "in one small locality, in a group numbering only six hundred people" in "three practically contiguous villages" (p.145). (Elsewhere, Mead puts the total time in Samoa at nine months.) That's a very short period for an ethnography, especially given that Mead had to gain the trust of her informants.

Mead ends with a couple of chapters that attempt to apply the lessons of Samoa to childrearing and education in the West. In these chapters, she paints a rather idyllic picture of Samoan life and especially Samoan adolescence, contrasting it sharply with those of the West, and suggesting that much of the difference comes from the fact that Samoan life is much more heterogeneous than life in the West (pp.112-113) and that Samoan children are given more choices, particularly in their sexual experiences.

An aside: modern readers will be taken aback by some of the language used in this 1928 book. For instance, Mead uses the term "savages," a jarring term in 2011. Similarly, Mead allows that adolescents regularly engage in "homosexual" behavior as part of their development and advancement into adulthood, but she draws a bright line between this experimentation and "perversion," i.e., lifelong same-sex orientation (p.82). Again, the terms are jarring, and may be difficult for the reader of 2011 to get past.

Overall, I was suspicious of Mead's conclusions, based on her small amount of time among the Samoans, the idyllic picture she painted of them, and the methodology she used, which seemed to rely heavily on interviewing teen girls and very lightly on triangulating these impressions via observations, artifacts, or interviews with other groups. It's still a fascinating and well written study, but I wouldn't encourage anyone to model their own studies based on it. I would, however, encourage them to read it.

Reading :: The Science of Qualitative Research

The Science of Qualitative Research
By Martin Packer

This is a significant book that digs into the history and development of qualitative research, providing a sustained critique of current research approaches informed by philosophy. It appears to be solidly researched, solidly argued, and based on a remarkably broad base of knowledge in qualitative research methodology and history as well as philosophy.

On the other hand, I didn't love it. Part of the reason had to do with the fact that Packer is dealing with such broad trends in qualitative research that it's hard to characterize them well, so he ends up characterizing localized implementations as universal ones. For instance, in Chapter 3, he critiques grounded theory's approach to coding as a process of decontextualizing statements and thus denying the interpretive context that make those statements meaningful. His extended example is Auerbach & Silverstein's introduction to GT coding, Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis. But I looked up this book and it's hardly an exemplar - Auerbach & Silverstein had just discovered qualitative research, having come from a quantitative tradition, and this book decribes a coding approach that is frankly underthought and quite undercontextualized. When Packer uses this book rather than one by experienced qualitative researchers, I lose some faith in the argument he's making.

But then again, in rhetoric and writing studies, we made the interpretive turn in the mid 1990s. The interpretive approach to which Packer turns in the later chapters characterized qualitative research as it was introduced to me in my graduate classes. I wonder if the book might be a greater revelation to those who have not yet made the interpretive turn.

In any case, I think the key contribution of the book is how Packer traces qualitative traditions' roots to basic movements in philosophy. If that's your interest, this book is certainly for you.

Reading :: Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea
By Bronislaw Malinowski

I've been taking some time this summer for pleasure reading, getting to some of the classic ethnographies and case studies that have influenced contemporary qualitative research. This book is one of the great classics, written by one of the giants of anthropology. It covers Malinowski's 1914-1918 work on the islands off the coast of New Guinea, particularly the Trobriand Islands. And although it's a bit thick in places - his writing style reminds me of Jules Verne's in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - the account is fascinating.

Malinowski still uses terms such as "savages." But he also tends to be even-handed and sensitive about comparing the cultures (for the most part). For instance, he spends much time describing the Kula, a massive exchange of valuable necklaces and armbands that takes place across the islands of New Guinea in a giant, continuous circle. We Westerners might look at the valuables and think that they aren't impressive - "greasy" is the word he uses - but he says we need to get some perspective: when natives opened oysters and found pearls, they would either throw them away or give them to the children to play with. They viewed Westerners' obsession with pearls in exactly the same way that Malinowski's readers might view the islanders' obsession with necklaces. It's not the intrinsic value that makes these things so valuable, he reminds us, but the value that a society attributes to them.

Malinowski applies this even-handedness - mostly with success - to the islanders' religion, magic, rituals, and views on sex, all of which are very different from those of his readers. For instance, Malinowski notes that the islanders don't realize that men are involved in reproduction. Thus the society's organization is matrilinear and their views on marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and sex are quite different from those of his readers.

The principles of ethnography set out in this book have become foundational principles for ethnographic research. But we might get some perspective on these principles by reading some of the expedition's background on Malinowski's Wikipedia page:

On his most famous trip to the area, he became stranded owing to the outbreak of World War I. Malinowski was not allowed to return to Europe from the British-controlled region because he was a Pole from Austria-Hungary. Australian authorities gave him two options: to be exiled to the Trobriand islands, or to face internment for the duration of the war. Malinowski chose the Trobriand islands. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on the Kula ring and advanced the practice of participant observation, which remains the hallmark of ethnographic research today.

If he had not been forced to stay in the islands for the duration of World War I, would Malinowski have developed participant observation in the same way, or conducted fieldwork to the degree that he did, or develop the insights that he did? I wonder. But Malinowski did what qualitative researchers must often do, making a virtue of the uncontrollable misfortunes in his circumstances, and that long irritation developed this remarkable pearl of a book. Read it when you get a chance.

Reading :: Action Research for Management

Action Research for Management
By William Foote Whyte and Edith Lentz Hamilton

I've provided a link to UT's library because this book is apparently no longer in print and isn't listed on Amazon (except in a couple of miscellaneous used book listings). In fact, the library copy I read has a blank stamp sheet - it hasn't been checked out since they moved from the card system to the stamp system. (We're now on the barcode system.)

I stumbled onto the book while looking for Whyte's classic Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, which was checked out. But I greatly enjoyed this book anyway, even though it's certainly not a classic. The book, published in 1965, describes a participatory action research study that Whyte supervised and Lentz and Meredith Wiley conducted in 1945; Lentz wrote the core of the book as a monograph, then Whyte added chapters to the front and back to connect the project to PAR developments. They delayed publication 20 years because the hotel they studied and the participants they quoted, though pseudonymous, were still identifiable to those in the hotel community. (I suspect they waited until some of the principals died, actually.)

The study was of a hotel (the "Tremont") with high turnover and poor labor relations. After hearing Whyte talk about his previous study of the restaurant industry, the Tremont's VP and General Manager asked Whyte to conduct a study of the troubled hotel and recommend changes. Soon, Wiley took over the Personnel Manager position and Lentz was attached to his office, and both conducted PAR. As we read their account, we get to move through different parts of the hotel, examining different sorts of dysfunctions (including some sexual harassment that would result in firing or worse today), and seeing how these dysfunctions resulted from systemic issues rather than simply individual behavior. As you can imagine, I very much enjoyed this account.

On the other hand, reading the book felt like reading a Hardy Boys mystery. It's not just the style, which made me think that we were soon to meet the boys' portly chum Chet, or the dialogue, which is full of interjections like "Why" and "My." It's also that the researchers are portrayed as protagonists who, sometimes through making suggestions and sometimes through confrontations, unravel the mysteries of the hotel and set things right. In this PAR study, the researchers always know best and learn how to nudge management and workers to repeat the researchers' solutions - and believe that those solutions originated with themselves instead of the researchers!

I'm not sure that I gained many methodological insights from the book, but I enjoyed it immensely. If you like PAR or the Hardy Boys, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Action Research for Management

Action Research for Management
By William Foote Whyte and Edith Lentz Hamilton

I've provided a link to UT's library because this book is apparently no longer in print and isn't listed on Amazon (except in a couple of miscellaneous used book listings). In fact, the library copy I read has a blank stamp sheet - it hasn't been checked out since they moved from the card system to the stamp system. (We're now on the barcode system.)

I stumbled onto the book while looking for Whyte's classic Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, which was checked out. But I greatly enjoyed this book anyway, even though it's certainly not a classic. The book, published in 1965, describes a participatory action research study that Whyte supervised and Lentz and Meredith Wiley conducted in 1945; Lentz wrote the core of the book as a monograph, then Whyte added chapters to the front and back to connect the project to PAR developments. They delayed publication 20 years because the hotel they studied and the participants they quoted, though pseudonymous, were still identifiable to those in the hotel community. (I suspect they waited until some of the principals died, actually.)

The study was of a hotel (the "Tremont") with high turnover and poor labor relations. After hearing Whyte talk about his previous study of the restaurant industry, the Tremont's VP and General Manager asked Whyte to conduct a study of the troubled hotel and recommend changes. Soon, Wiley took over the Personnel Manager position and Lentz was attached to his office, and both conducted PAR. As we read their account, we get to move through different parts of the hotel, examining different sorts of dysfunctions (including some sexual harassment that would result in firing or worse today), and seeing how these dysfunctions resulted from systemic issues rather than simply individual behavior. As you can imagine, I very much enjoyed this account.

On the other hand, reading the book felt like reading a Hardy Boys mystery. It's not just the style, which made me think that we were soon to meet the boys' portly chum Chet, or the dialogue, which is full of interjections like "Why" and "My." It's also that the researchers are portrayed as protagonists who, sometimes through making suggestions and sometimes through confrontations, unravel the mysteries of the hotel and set things right. In this PAR study, the researchers always know best and learn how to nudge management and workers to repeat the researchers' solutions - and believe that those solutions originated with themselves instead of the researchers!

I'm not sure that I gained many methodological insights from the book, but I enjoyed it immensely. If you like PAR or the Hardy Boys, definitely pick it up.