Symmetry as a methodological move, part III

I've been discussing the principle of symmetry in actor-network theory on the blog. In previous posts, I've tried to use commonplace examples to demonstrate how, rather than being a form of pantheism or an antihumanist sociology, symmetry is simply a way of getting at certain relationships that are often overlooked or even buried in other approaches. When we examine these relationships in fairly restricted ways—weight requirements in elevators or falling bodies—symmetry makes a great deal of sense. But when we move to more complex phenomena, symmetry seems like a dicier proposition. 

For instance, let's consider cognition.

Latour famously proposed in Science in Action that we institute a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology. (Hakkarainen criticized this moratorium in a 2003 Science and Education issue, complaining that Latour mentions this moratorium every so often, always extending it for ten years.) This moratorium came out of Latour's observations of scientific work, in which he noticed that scientists would assemble a large array of nonhumans and humans—instruments, procedures, lab techs, etc.—to perform science, then attribute the results to cognition. Without all of these nonhuman and human intermediaries, Latour argued, cognition could not have provided an adequate explanation.

Let's use an analogy. Suppose that as you walk home, you spot your neighbor on the roof. Do you think to yourself, "I am amazed that my neighbor can jump so high!" Or do you look for a ladder? Analogically speaking, Latour always looks for the ladder. He sees the alternate explanation—based entirely on human ability—as rather implausible. Yes, it's always a possibility, but (Latour might say) let's look for the ladder first.


This does not mean that actor-network theory is anti-cognition, as Hakkarainen and others have interpreted it to be. ANT is no more anti-cognition than a fork is anti-soup. 


No better demonstration of this point exists than Latour's positive review of Edwin Hutchins' 1995 book Cognition in the Wild. Latour declares: 

The results of Hutchins' inquiry are as devastating for psychology as the results of sociology were for epistemology or those of Shirley Strum for primatology. Everything that was crammed inside the mind of individuals is deployed outside and shared collectively with the culture, through the social connections and with the many cognitive artifacts the group has been able to devise. (p.55)

To put it another way: Hutchins, like Latour, looks for the ladder. 


But more than that, Hutchins refuses to separate cognition from mediating artifacts. In Hutchins' account, "cognition" is not confined to what happens inside the skull, but is instead distributed across a given environment. Latour summarizes the central claim of the book this way: 

cognition has nothing to do with the minds nor with individuals but with the propagation of representations through various media, which are coordinated by a very lightly equipped human subject working in a group, inside a culture, with many artifacts and who might have internalized some parts of the process. (p.56, Latour's italics).

To understand what's happening here, let's dive into Hutchins' book itself. Here's what he says about cognition in Chapter 2:

Having taken ship navigation as it is performed by a team on the bridge of a ship as the unit of cognitive analysis, I will attempt to apply the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation—to the operation of this system. In so doing I do not make any special commitment to the nature of the computations that are going on inside individuals except to say that whatever happens there is part of a larger computational system. But I do believe that the computation observed in the activity of the larger system can be described in the way cognition has been traditionally described—that is, as computation realized through the creation, transformation, and propagation of representational states. (Hutchins, 1995, p. 49)

So Hutchins approaches the notion of cognition by defining it narrowly, as computation. In committing to this computational account, Hutchins takes a radically symmetrical perspective. Rather than drawing lines between what transpires inside and outside one's head, Hutchins examines computation—and thus propagation of representational states—wherever it happens. He brilliantly demonstrates that much of what we might have assumed was expertise or intelligence is instead attributable to how these representational states propagate. For instance, he argues that by all rights the sailors he studied should not have had the depth of experience needed to perform the navigational feats they performed; but these feats were attributable to the entire system of sailors plus other computational media. 


(As a side note, this book had a deep impact on me as I was planning the study for my doctoral dissertation. For instance, as I was developing the notion of the genre ecology in my own work, I ran across Freedman and Smart's 1997 article "Navigating the current of economic policy," in which they coined the term "genre ecology" and modeled it after Hutchins' concept of "tool ecology" in this book. After reading their article, I picked up Hutchins' book, and its influence was key to my understanding of genres as co-mediating each other.) 


To get at what Hutchins is trying to say, let's leave the ship for a moment and look at what he says late in the book about Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine, he says, a room in which John Searle sits. Outside the room, people bring slips of paper on which they have written questions in Chinese. One by one, each person passes her or his slip of paper through a slot in the door; a few moments later, the person receives a reply, also written in Chinese. 


Does Searle know Chinese? Perhaps. Let's suppose that in one scenario, Searle knows how to read and write Chinese and is composing answers on the fly. In a second scenario, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but has several baskets of Chinese characters plus a rulebook that tells him how to combine them to respond to certain strings of characters. (The second scenario is very similar to that of Fred Saberhagen's first Berserker story, "Without a Thought.") In the second scenario, Hutchins argues, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but (for our purposes) the room does. Or to put it another way, the "cognitive properties of the sociocultural system" are different from "the cognitive properties of a person who is manipulating the elements of that system" (p.362). Cognition—in the narrowly defined sense that Hutchins uses the term—is stretched across the human agent and the environment, resulting in accomplishments that could not have resulted from the human agent alone. Searle has a ladder.


And with that, we can see why Latour does something that critics such as Hakkarainen haven't caught. He lifts the moratorium on cognitive explanations:

When I published Science in Action in 1987, I proposed a "moratorium" on cognitive explanations, which had been so freely and cheaply entertained by epistemologists. ... I did not know that I would be able to safely lift the ban, less than 10 years later, since in the meantime, cognitive explanations would have been dissolved past recognition [by Hutchins]." (p.62)

Genre 2012: Are automated genres still genres?

I just finished my Genre 2012 presentation on genre development in partially automated environments. As promised, here it is. Let me know what you think!

Genre 2012 are automated genres still genres

View more presentations from spinuzzi.

"Working Alone Together" is free for a limited time

A little while ago I was excited to announce that my study of coworking in Austin, "Working Alone Together," was available. Now I'm even more excited to announce that the Journal of Business and Technical Communication has made the article free for a limited time. If you're interested in coworking, please do click through and grab the PDF. And let me know what you think in the comments.

Reading :: The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy

The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy
By David Guile

David Guile, who teaches at the Institute of Education at the University of London, takes on the question of how the knowledge economy challenges education. Grounding his arguments in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and related thought, Guile carefully examines the assumptions behind the knowledge economy literature, particularly assumptions about scientific and tacit knowledge, then develops an account of CHAT that both challenges these assumptions and provides a firmer basis for education going forward.

At the heart of Guile's critique of the knowledge economy literature is its tendency to see knowledge as relatively unproblematic "information generation, processing and transmission" (p.13), a tendency that Guile detects in Bell, Castells, and other knowledge economy writers, rather than as emerging through human interpretation, comprehension, and competence (p.24). Indeed, "Castells, like Bell, treats knowledge and information as though they are malleable, serve utilitarian functions in society, and their meaning is quite transparent" (p.43).

This tendency leads such thinkers to focus on tacit knowledge, which they discuss by citing Polanyi without quite getting Polanyi's more nuanced concept. That is, tacit knowledge is seen as a "tricky kind of knowledge to put to work in the economy ... because it is embodied in people and embedded in networks" (p.24). Yet, Guile argues, Polanyi lays out tacit and explicit knowledge as interdependent dimensions of knowledge, not separated; mediated, not binary (p.39).

To provide an alternate account, Guile turns to CHAT work, including Ilyenkov, Roth, and Engestrom. In particular, Guile is interested in Engestrom's understanding of coconfiguration and knotworking (pp.118-119). Engestrom's contribution, Guile argues, is a reconceptualization of the relationship between theory and practice (p.123). Yet Guile also argues that Engestrom tends to (a) underplay the challenge of eliminating sources of friction in activity systems and activity networks, and (b) overstate the necessity and suitability of his interventionalist methodology (p.124).

Overall, I found this book to be an illuminating read. It goes farther into learning theory than I generally care to go, but then again, the book is founded on educational theory. If that's your focus, the book is definitely worth it. But even if your focus is more along the lines of workplace studies, as mine is, the book will provide valuable insights. Take a look.

Reading :: The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism

The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism
By Ami Pedahzur

According to Pedahzur, counterterrorism is usually pursued under three models—"the war model, the criminal-justice model, and the reconciliatory model" (p.1). Each suggests a different set of responders—the military, the police and state legal system, and the politicians and diplomats. And "standing in the background is the defensive model, which does not deal directly with the terrorists or their grievances but rather protects the targets of terrorism" (p.1).

Of these models, the defensive model tends to be quite effective, and the war model tends not to be very effective at all. Yet, Pedahzur argues, the war model has been most readily used during Israel's history—not because it is effective at stopping terrorism, but because it is effective at making citizens feel protected, therefore winning elections.

Pedahzur makes his case by reviewing the entire security history of the state of Israel, discussing different operations with their successes and failures, the inter-agency rivalries that have made coordination so hard, and the political circumstances that led politicians to focus on the war model with its targeted killings, commando actions, and reprisals. He argues that terrorism is not a threat to the state itself, and treating it as such means undermining civil liberties while drawing the security establishment's attention away from more credible threats.

In all, a well written and gripping book.

Writing :: Working Alone, Together

Spinuzzi, C. (2012). Working alone, together: Coworking as emergent collaborative activity. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 26(4).

Okay, this is the second in my ongoing series on writing publications.  The cite and link above are to the OnlineFirst version of the article, both of which will likely change as the article gets closer to publication. But for now, there they are. If you or your institution have a subscription, please do click through and take a look at it.

Done reading? Let's talk about how I put this thing together. As in the rest of this blog series, here I'll focus on my writing process and choices. The hope is that this "behind the scenes" look will help other scholars to see what went into producing this piece.

The Gist
This article is the result of a research study I started a while back focused on coworking in Austin. Click that link and you'll see a series of blog posts dating back to April 2008. If you have the time and inclination, you can go back to that point and see how my understanding of coworking evolved over time, and in fact you might see parts of these blog posts migrating into the article itself. More on that in a moment.

My analysis was heavily influenced by some of the same issues I discussed in "Losing by Expanding"—in fact, although that piece was published first, it developed from the analytical issues that developed during this and other recent case studies. In a nutshell, the analytical framework I typically use for examining workplace interactions, third-generation activity theory (3GAT), assumes some things that don't hold true in the sort of loosely organized, digitally mediated work that we find in coworking spaces. "Losing by Expanding" articulated that problem and outlines an fourth-generation activity theory (4GAT) approach; "Working Alone, Together" applies that approach.

As you'll see in the article, the 4GAT approach helps us to better understand some of the contradictions we tend to see in coworking spaces.

The Genesis
If you want to know about the exact moment I first heard of coworking, I blogged it. The principals at Conjunctured had just signed a lease for what would become Austin's first coworking space, and Cesar and John Erik were kind enough to sit down with me separately to discuss it. As you'll see in that blog post, I was busily trying to connect their description with the analysis I had just completed for my 2008 book Network and my subsequent thoughts about how to manage projects in distributed workspaces.

I decided to study how Conjunctured worked, so I developed and submitted an IRB proposal, then waited for it to cycle through as I conducted my Semoptco study (heavily influenced by the same themes). By the time I was able to formally interview the Conjunctured principals in early 2009, another space had begun offering coworking (Soma Vida). And by the time I interviewed them, other spaces had announced their intention to open. Eventually, in early 2011, I had to stop visiting coworking spaces and just write the article.

If you're interested in the different spaces, see the coworking tag, where I profiled each space. More on that below.

The Research Methodology
At the time I began my coworking study, I had just finished my chapter in Amy Kimme Hea's collection Going Wireless, in which I argued that researchers must bring participants more consciously into the research process as a matter of self-protection. Traditional qualitative research approaches assume that the researcher is the only one with publishing power, so s/he has traditionally been encouraged to conduct member checks to give some measure of power and self-representation back to the participants. But this is 2012, and many of my participants have publishing power too—they have far more social media followers than I have readers. In this environment, fairly representing participants isn't just a matter of being nice, it's critical.

So as I began investigating coworking spaces, I used several avenues to make sure that I represented coworking proprietors fairly, starting with the space profiles I posted to my blog (which functioned as a trust-building measure in addition to a preliminary examination of each site). I also conducted member checks. Additionally, I leveraged their public social media, such as their spaces' Facebook pages and Yelp profiles—a lifesaver, since coworkers, with their irregular schedules, are difficult to consistently observe.

Given that this study was mostly based on proprietors' and coworkers' statements (in interviews, in collateral, in social media) rather than observations, I had to frame my claims carefully. Throughout the article, I emphasize: this is what coworkers and proprietors say about their work.

The Composition
In previous studies, I've tried focusing on one workplace or a small set of workplaces. But with coworking, I had to examine a whole range of them. It turned out to be a complex management issue. How could I analyze these very different workspaces in a way that would make sense?

To attack the problem, I decided to go back to three basic elements of activity theory: the subject, the object, and the outcome. In the paper, these turned into research questions: Who coworks? What is coworking? Why do people cowork? And once I sorted these out, I was able to connect them quite easily with my coding scheme.

Of course, people open and work at coworking sites for very different reasons. In the first version I submitted to JBTC, I had trouble articulating how these divergent reasons added up to an activity theory analysis; one reviewer thought that the results seemed incoherent and wondered whether coworking was anything more than a label. In my revision, I was able to articulate how these apparent contradictions in the subject, object, and outcome represented two separate configurations of coworking: the "good neighbors" configuration and the "good partners" configuration. It was at this point that the work in "Learning by Expanding" really began to pay off and the theoretical contribution became useful.

The Result
So I'm pretty happy with the result. Coworking is an endlessly fascinating topic, but also somewhat amorphous and a constantly moving target. In this article, I think I've been able to sketch the phenomenon fairly well—although coworkers in places other than Austin might see key differences, and even Austinites might feel that this snapshot doesn't adequately reflect coworking in 2012. But it provides a starting place for understanding coworking as part of a larger movement toward distributed work and perhaps a way to examine and predict further work trends. It develops activity theory to better account for this sort of work. And it moves the ball on leveraging social media in qualitative research. I'm pretty happy with it, and I hope you will be too.

Was this "behind-the-scenes" account useful? Let me know in the comments.

Reading :: Flow

Flow
By Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi thinks that you're not reading enough—specifically, not reading enough poetry, which is like using a Nautilus for the mind. Neither are you memorizing enough things. Perhaps you should consider moving to a large city, since "the density of human contacts that great cities afford is like a soothing balm; people in such centers relish it even when the interactions it provides may be unpleasant or dangerous. ... Everyone feels more alive when surrounded by other people." That being said, perhaps you should be like Dorothy, who moved from the big city to an island in northern Minnesota and enjoys being alone for months on end.

In any case, you really should be playing sports instead of watching athletes in stadiums; making music rather than listening to "platinum records cut by millionaire musicians," making art rather than buying it; and act on your beliefs rather than watching actors.

Certainly you should not spend your time in saloons after work, socializing with work friends. Rather, you should be at home building an intricate rock garden, like Joe. Joe is having fun the right way.

Perhaps I come across too harshly here, but I've pulled out actual examples from this perplexing book to make a point.

In this popularization of his research, Csikszentmihalyi attempts to define what leads to lasting happiness in people's lives. He argues that people are happy when they achieve flow. "The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's powers," he argues, learning to "enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself." That is, we should become autotelic, i.e., internally rather than externally motivated. That involves focus. Most of us, Csikszentmihalyi says, tend to diffuse our attention in "desultory, random movements."

To achieve flow, Csikszentmihalyi says, we must look for experiences in which the challenges are at or slightly beyond our skills. If that balance isn't achieved, we become bored (if skills exceed challenges) or anxious (if challenges exceed skills). We can achieve flow through seeking the right challenges and jobs, or even simply by gamifying routine tasks.

Csikszentmihalyi goes further, arguing that flow is the solution to the problems of cultural relativism. Is one culture better than another? Certainly: "If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience [i.e., flow] is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society." The more a society promotes flow, the better it is—according to Csikszentmihalyi.

As the alert reader has intuited, this move pushes the question back rather than answering it. Is the city more conducive to flow than the remote island in Minnesota? Is the POW camp more conducive than the factory? Should we pity Joe's coworkers, who think they are having fun socializing, when they really should be toiling on their own plots after work assembling rock gardens? And given that Csikszentmihalyi's interviewees found flow experiences in even the harshest conditions, how much guidance can we take from Csikszentmihalyi's many bromides, seemingly ripped from the pages of Reader's Digest? Is the key to flow, as Csikszentmihalyi sometimes seems to say, really based on living in the city, memorizing Homer, learning a musical instrument, reading poetry, and watching less TV? Is the notion of flow really reducible to this stream of moralistic finger-wagging? If so, aren't there more comprehensive books out there?

TIMN in 20 minutes

I've been intrigued by David Ronfeldt's formulation of Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks (TIMN) for a while. See my reviews of his work:

• "In search of how societies work"
• The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico
• In Athena's Camp
• Networks and Netwars
• "Swarming and the Future of Conflict"

And see some posts that I've written referring to Ronfeldt's work on TIMN and networks:

• About those health care bill town halls
• TIMN and Bobbitt's market-state
• Some tentative thoughts about a networked rhetoric
• "Does TIMN imply developing the so-far least favored (+N?) option: networked non-profit cooperatives?"

Ronfeldt has now put together a 20-minute video in which he introduces, discusses, and applies the TIMN framework. It's fascinating, and I highly recommend it. If you're interested in examining organizational forms and social evolution, especially if you've been influenced by people such as Manuel Castells, take a look. 

Genre 2012...

... is approaching fast. It's June 26-29 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

It should be a great conference full of cutting edge genre research. I'll be presenting a paper and participating in a roundtable. If you're there, swing by and see me.

Reading :: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term
By Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski was a Polish ethnographer who visited New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918, writing several classics, such as the fascinating Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In my review of that book, I praised Argonauts for being even-handed, generally examining the islanders' customs without condemnation or condescension.

During these trips, Malinowski kept a polyglot diary, mostly in Polish, in which he recorded his doubts, obsessions, hypochondria, paranoia, and bigotry. This diary was meant to be private, but when Malinowski died of a heart attack in 1942, his private papers were gathered and sent to his widow Valetta.  She discovered the diaries in 1949, discussed publication in 1960, and finally had it published in 1966.

How to put this? The diary underlines how large an accomplishment Malinowski's even-handedness actually was. Malinowski describes his hatred and contempt for the islanders, repeatedly using a racial slur that we in the 21st century find painful to read. Early on, he tells his diary, "On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes'" (p.69), and these feelings are repeated throughout the rest of the diary. Malinowski's hatred and contempt are contradicted—or, perhaps, exacerbated—by his shameful lust for the native women. Not that Malinowski's lust is discriminate: he obsessively details it and its many objects.

Malinowski also details his own obsessive suspicions of others. He suspects many of his native informants of lying; he alternately adores, then reviles other ethnographers; he excoriates the missionaries.

When I began noticing these patterns, I thought, perhaps this is just the result of a very young man making his way through the world. But then I checked the dates: At the beginning of the diary, Malinowski is 30!

This obsessive hypochondriac, pouring his bigotry and shame onto the page of his private diary, was able to work through these issues to produce a sympathetic and evenhanded portrayal of the Trobriand Islanders. Remarkable!

If you're interested in the inner life of ethnographers, I'm not sure I would recommend this book first; perhaps Rabinow would be a better place to start. But if you want to learn more about Malinowski in particular, this diary is an interesting read.

SIGDOC 2012 is now accepting papers!

I hope you've been working on your SIGDOC 2012 research papers, experience reports, and posters, because the submission system is now open.

Remember, papers must be in ACM format. See the call for papers for more information on each type, along with downloadable templates.

Questions? Contact me. I hope to see your submission soon!

Reading :: The Transformation of Learning

The Transformation of Learning: Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
Edited by Bert van Oers, Wim Wardekker, Ed Elbers, and René van der Veer 

Our library got this book a while back, but unfortunately it's in that awful electronic format that you can only read in a full-fledged desktop browser. So I went ahead and bought the Kindle version. It was a good purchase - even though it's a collection (and I usually don't like collections that much), even though it's focused on education (not a research subject that typically appeals to me).

So what's good about it?

For me, the standout essay was Rene van der Veer's "Multiple Readings of Vygotsky." Here, van der Veer cautions us to see the limitations of Vygotsky's work as well as ways to contextualize it with later work. In particular, van der Veer recreates Leont'ev's famous experiment known as the Forbidden Colors Task (performed as part of Leont'ev's dissertation work under Vygotsky's supervision). In this experiment, people of various ages were asked to play a game in which they answered several questions with names of colors. They could use each color name only once, and two colors were forbidden outright. In one round, Leont'ev had them play the game without help; in another, he gave them a set of colored cards. Famously, Leont'ev noted that older children and adults used the cards as mediational means: they tended to flip the cards over to remind them which colors were no longer permitted. Individuals who used cards as mediational means tended to do better at the game.

Although this study has often been cited, van der Veer points out, it apparently has never been replicated. So van der Veer replicated it - and got some surprising findings: "more card use does not correlate with higher performance." Van der Veer draws on much more recent developmental research to demonstrate that, contra Leont'ev's assumptions, children learn to use cultural instruments quite early. The double stimulation method is still valuable, van der Veer tells us, but we must be cautious in interpreting its results.

Harmut Geist's chapter "The Formation Experiment in the Age of Hypermedia and Distance Learning" was similarly valuable. Geist distinguishes between the empiric-analytical paradigm common in the sciences and the causal-genetic method used in activity theory, cautioning us that without an understanding of their differences, we might switch between the two, making a hash of theory and analysis. Why? Geist explains:

Looking at the history of science, we find two different roots and basic ideas in scientific thinking: the idea and concept of evolution sensu Darwin, and the idea and concept of activity sensu Marx. The basic difference between the two ideas concerns the relation between human being and environment: Darwin pointed to "adaptation to the environment" as a basic idea, whereas Marx referred to "the adaptation of the environment." Basic to and pioneering for modern thinking was Darwin's idea that the existing living world was not created according to some plan or organized by an idea existing beforehand but evolved as an effect of the interdependence between environment and living beings. The feature that can explain it all is the ability of living beings to bring themselves more or less actively in line with the environment. The fitting into the environment explains the developmental potential of a living being - the survival of the fittest. This idea was fascinating and explained the evolution from the variety of life up to the development of the human being by self-organization. No ideas or principles or order-organizing rules were needed that come from outside. ... it was now possible to investigate humans using the methods of science.

In contrast,

The dialectical analysis of human history, as it was done, for example, by Hegel and particularly by Marx, showed not only that humans adapt to the environment but also that they change it in accordance with their demands (from agriculture, the use of fire, the construction of houses, to the manipulation of genes). Activity is not an active adaptation ot the environment but the transformation of the environment and - in interrelation with it - of humans themselves. 

Geist locates the difference between constructivism and activity theory here:

Activity in the view of constructivism means the humans' active adaptation to the environment. Simply put:  things are such that we cannot change them; therefore we must come to terms with them and adapt to the conditions of nature and society. Activity in the context of activity theory means active adaptation (change due to activity) of the environment to the humans' needs. Or, in simple terms: the environmental conditions are not suitable, so let us change them in order to be able to lead a better life and to cope better with the demands of life.

Geist concludes that researchers working in each tradition will necessarily adapt different research programs and methods, then illustrates by comparing a classical experiment with an investigation based on the causal-genetic method.

Other chapters are similarly solid, but these two stood out to me, and I believe they're worth the price of admission. If you're interested in activity theory, and if you have a fairly solid grounding in how it's been deployed developmentally, take a look.

Reading :: Driving Results through Social Networks

Driving Results Through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for Performance and Growth
By Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas

Rob Cross is well known for his work in organizational network analysis (ONA). In this book, Cross and his coauthor Robert Thomas discuss how ONA can be applied to better understand organizations' information flow, innovation, decision-making, and performance. It's an impressive description of how a careful ONA can turn up what are typically invisible connections, hubs, and gaps in a company. As the authors state, "ONA provides leaders with the means to accomplish what is arguably their most critical function: aligning individual and collective action with strategic objectives." They illustrate this point with multiple examples from extended cases.

As an illustration of the benefits of ONA, the book is successful; executives with no ONA background can see how this approach can translate directly into greater insights, leading to better-guided adaptations. In fact, the book would work well in terms of getting organizations excited about this approach and (more to the point) about taking seminars to learn how to perform an ONA.

Unfortunately, the book is not an ONA how-to. It focuses on benefits and insights, but for information on how to perform the ONA itself, you'll need to read other books. If you've wondered what ONA could contribute to your organization, this book is the place to start; if you want to know how it's conducted, I recommend a more academically oriented book such as a collection Cross coedited earlier, Networks in the Knowledge Economy.

Come hear me speak at Austin STC next week

In Austin? Tired of going to outstanding restaurants, hearing live music, visiting vintage stores, and walking around Ladybird Lake? Try something a little different: Come hear me speak at next week's Austin STC meeting.

As the item says, I'll be talking about how knowledge work is impacting writing in organizations - particularly how "non-writers" are writing. We'll also talk about agriculture, industry, the recent Texas governor's race, and Disneyland.

In Austin? Sign up for my business proposals seminar.

On June 8, I'll be teaching a daylong seminar on writing persuasive business proposals. This seminar will involve learning a lot, but I'll also be deploying my trademark humor. You probably won't want to leave at the end of it.

Here's the description:

How do business proposals work, and how can they work better?

In this seminar, attendees will examine business proposals as persuasive arguments: they will take these proposals apart, examine their underlying components, and learn how to put them back together in ways that make them more effective. Using a proven methodology for developing these types of documents, attendees will generate basic proposal arguments to address a case study. This case study will allow students, working in small groups, to identify the problem presented in the case study; generate components of the proposal; analyze stakeholder dynamics; tie these complex elements together into a coherent, easily comprehensible argument; and outline a proposal based on this groundwork. Finally, the class will workshop applications to actual cases that attendees bring in.
After this seminar, attendees will be able to:

• Understand basic proposal structure and logic.

• Identify basic proposal sections and understand how they work together.

• Clarify and identify objectives.

• Develop a methodology for reaching the objective.

• Perform audience analysis by identifying stakeholders, investigating their concerns, and weighting criteria accordingly.

• Connect your team’s qualifications with the specific requirements implied in the situation and methodology.

• Develop structured benefits that address the situation.

• Tie these complex elements into a coherent argument.

• Learn how to rework an ill-defined problem into an effective proposal.

• Pour all this information into a basic proposal format.

The proposal-writing methodology used in this seminar was developed for large consulting agencies, but it can also apply to other sorts of proposals and reports in a variety of organizations.

Download "Losing by Expanding" for free

The editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication has just informed me that my October 2011 article "Losing by Expanding" is available for free on the JBTC website through June. I'm really delighted. If you have any interest in activity theory, please do check it out. Here's the abstract:

Losing by Expanding: Corralling the Runaway Object
Clay Spinuzzi 

Abstract
Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linchpin of analysis in the empirical case. Yet the notion of object has expanded methodologically and theoretically over time, making it difficult to reliably bound an empirical case. In response, this article outlines the expansion of the object, diagnoses this expansion, and proposes an alternate approach that constrains the object for case-study research in writing studies.

Take a look and see what you think. And while you're at it, check out JBTC's latest two award-winning articles. Both (by Artemeva & Fox and by Swarts) are fantastic.

SIGDOC 2012 posters

I hope you're strongly considering submitting a paper to SIGDOC 2012. (Paper deadlines are June 1.) But I also hope you'll help us spread the word. One way would be to share this picture with interested colleagues. Post it to Facebook, print it out and put it on your door, anything you can do to let everyone know about this great conference.

Questions? Contact us through the website. Or in the comments here. Hope to see you in Seattle!

Reading :: Net Smart

Net Smart
By Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is known for books investigating how technology changes communities, books such as Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. But his latest book, Net Smart, is not an investigation. Think of it instead as a handbook for being a successful member of such communities.

Net Smart is a light book, and much of it will sound familiar or even obvious to those who have closely followed his previous work. That's okay. Rheingold says that this book is for a range of people, including adults who are online but are having trouble managing their time and attention; intelligent but fearful parents of children who are going online; young people who enjoy being online but want to interact in deeper ways; older people who are puzzled by new media; businesspeople who want their employees to be net smart; and educators who want their students to connect old and new literacies. In other words, if you've been attending South by Southwest Interactive or working on your MA in media theory, this might not be the book for you.

On the other hand, it might. Even though Rheingold writes simply for this broad set of audiences, his long and deep experience with online communities has given him keen insights that others may not have. Rheingold covers several lessons, including:

• Controlling and being mindful of our scarcest resource: our attention.
• Critically examining and testing assertions (a.k.a "crap detection").
• Recognizing and developing participation skills for participatory culture.
• Understanding collective intelligence and crowdsourcing.
• Understanding social networks and social network analysis.

And although the book is for a general audience, it's easy to see that it's based on deep experience. Personally, I found myself highlighting references to more scholarly texts such as texts on social network analysis.

In sum, Net Smart is a well written and timely book. You may find it useful for yourself. But if you already consider yourself "net smart," consider giving a copy to someone who could use it.

Ryerson University

I'm in the Toronto airport waiting for my flight back to Austin. Toronto's a great city, about the size—and vibe—of Chicago. Downtown, among other things, is Ryerson University, where I spoke yesterday.

Ryerson is a polytechnic university. Among other things, it has a relatively new Master's program in professional communication. It's a one-year terminal MA for fast trackers, and it looks fascinating—and not at all conventional. The standout sight for me was the posters that students produced in a theory course: each poster graphically mapped out relationships among theories, and each was beautifully, professionally produced. Judging from the students' work, and from the students' questions during the presentation, this is a unique program in the best sense.

I've long been a fan of the work of Catherine Schryer, who is now the chair of the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson, so when she invited me to speak at Ryerson, I jumped at the chance. I'm really glad that I did.

Thanks to all the faculty and students who came to hear me talk about genre theory, Castells, Latour, spambots, hipsters, Galileo, SEO, Pokemon, shuttle buses, and cardiologists. (It was a wide-ranging discussion.) And thanks especially to Isabel Pedersen, who served as my liaison throughout the day. I hope the visit was as valuable for you as it was for me!

Symmetry as a methodological move, Part II

We've been discussing the oft-misunderstood principle of symmetry in actor-network theory. Last time I emphasized that symmetry is a methodological stance meant to get at certain things and not others–not wholesale anthropomorphization. Let's pursue that line further by performing a thought experiment. I emphasize that this is just a thought experiment for reasons that will become clear below.

Aristotle believed and taught that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, in direct proportion to their weight. Galileo disagreed, and described a classic experiment in which he stood at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with two balls, dropped them, and they hit the ground at about the same time. (It's unclear whether Galileo actually performed the experiment.)

Suppose you want to perform a similar experiment. Since I'm at the University of Texas campus, let's imagine that you ascend UT's Tower to the observation deck. You bring a one-pound weight and a ten-pound weight.

Photo © 1980 Larry D. Moore (CC-BY-SA), available  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uttower1.jpg

(NOTE: You can only do this as a thought experiment. The observation deck is inaccessible except during guided tours due to a tragic incident. Also, dropping weights from the observation deck is a misdemeanor. Obviously, I do not endorse actually performing this experiment.)

Leaning over the railing, you drop the two weights at the same time. Not surprisingly, you discover that Galileo was right and Aristotle was wrong. The ten-pound weight does not fall ten times faster than the one-pound weight; they hit the ground at roughly the same time.

Interesting, you think. And then you decide to try a second variation of the experiment. You ascend the tower again, this time with a one-pound weight, a ten-pound weight, and a 150-pound hipster.

(NOTE: Again, you can only do this as a thought experiment for obvious legal, moral, and ethical reasons.)

When you reach the observation deck, you repeat the experiment, this time dropping all three objects at the same time. It turns out that no matter how ironically the hipster falls, in terms of gravity, he behaves exactly as the other weights do. For the purposes of the experiment, the hipster is exactly the same as the other two weights; you treat them symmetrically, and so does gravity.

But when you descend the elevator to the bottom of the tower, you discover that what is treated as symmetrical in one network of meaning is not treated as symmetrical in other networks. Dropping the weights is a misdemeanor. Dropping the hipster is a felony. The law of gravity treats them as symmetrical, but state and federal law do not.

When Latour describes humans and nonhumans as symmetrical, he means that differences among actants (both human and nonhuman) are generated within a given actor-network rather than preexisting them; we can't presuppose those differences. Consider Galileo's experiment as well as the previous illustration of elevator capacity: in these narrowly defined situations, humans and nonhumans act in exactly the same way. (If the tower experiment were a physics problem, you wouldn't even specify the materials, you'd just plug in the weight values.) But of course these networks of meaning are always entangled with other networks, as they should be. There are many good reasons why you would never actually perform this experiment, and they go beyond trouble with the law to basic questions of empathy and morality, questions that apply to all people,  few if any artifacts, and to some extent to nonhuman animals. 

But Latour talks about situations in which people are actually interacting: scientists, technologists, the public. Aren't these social rather than technical? And in social situations, don't we have to treat humans and nonhumans differently? 

The answer is: it depends on your methodological aims. Even in terms that we consider very human–cognition and persuasion–it sometimes makes sense to take a symmetrical viewpoint in one's methods. We'll see an example in the next post in this series.