Reading :: The Division of Labor in Society

The Division of Labor in Society
By Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim's dissertation became a classic work and a founding text of sociology. It's easy to see why. The book has a vast sweep and grapples with basic questions of how societies divide labor and responsibility. Although in retrospect it has its limitations, the book provides some compelling distinctions that have deeply influenced how we understand labor division and organization.

Durkheim sets out three tasks for the book:

• to "investigate the function of the division of labour, that is, the social need to which it corresponds";
• to "determine the causes and conditions upon which it depends"; and
• to "classify the principal abnormal forms that it assumes" (pp.6-7)

Durkheim is investigating the division of labor at a societal scale, not the scale of organizations or specific groups. Much of his work focuses on social solidarity (p.26 et passim), which he divides into two general types: mechanical solidarity, or solidarity by similarities (Ch.2), and organic solidarity, or solidarity arising from the division of labor (Ch.3). 

Mechanical solidarity is solidarity based on identity or resemblance (p.60). This form of social solidarity  "arises because a certain number of states of consciousness are common to all members of the same society" (p.64). Such societies include those of "more primitive peoples," societies that "are made up of elementary aggregates, almost of a family nature, which may be designated clans" (p.48). And "it is this solidarity that repressive law materially embodies" (p.64). Mechanical solidarity is the original type of solidarity.

Organic solidarity arises from the nascent division of labor. Its biological metaphor, the organs of the body, is meant to evoke this kind of interdependence among specialized divisions: 

Whereas the other [mechanical] solidarity implies that individuals resemble each other, the latter [organic solidarity] assumes that they are different from each other. The former type is only possible in so far as the individual personality is absorbed into the collective personality; the latter is only possible if each one of us has a sphere of action that is peculiarly our own, and consequently a personality. (p.85). 

 Organic solidarity is increasingly prevalent, Durkheim argues, based partially on his examination of legal codes (Ch.5). Indeed, the more that labor is divided, the harder it is to separate (p.103). He adds: "Not only does mechanical solidarity generally bind men together less strongly than does organic solidarity, but, as we mount the scale of social evolution, it becomes increasingly looser" (p.105). The strength of social bonds in mechanical solidarity vary based on:

• common vs. individual consciousness
• intensity of collective consciousness
• the "determinativeness" of the above states: how clear-cut they are (p.105)

As mechanical solidarity wanes, Durkheim argues, either social life must diminish or a new form of solidarity must replace it. This new form of solidarity, organic solidarity is based on the division of labor (p.122) and is "increasingly fulfilling the role that once fell to the common consciousness" in "the higher types of society" (p.123). 

Consequently, we see new social forms (Ch.6). In particular, in a society that is held together solely through mechanical solidarity, 

we would have to conceive of it as consisting of an absolutely homogeneous mass whose parts would not be distinguishable from one another and consequently not be arranged in any order or relation to each other. This would be the real social protoplasm, the germ from which all social types would have emerged. The aggregate we have characterised in this way we propose to call a horde. (p.126)

Durkheim concedes that we have not yet observed a pure society of this type (p.126), but cites some close examples, including the Iroquois (p.127):

We shall give the term 'clan' to a horde that has ceased to be independent and has become an element in a more extensive group, and that of segmentary societies based on clans to those peoples that have been constituted from an association of clans. We term such societies 'segmentary' to denote that they are formed of the replication of aggregates that are like one another, analogous to the rings of annelida worms. We also term this elementary aggregate a clan because this word aptly expresses its mixed nature, relating both to the family and the body politic. It is a family in the sense that all the members who go to make it up consider themselves kin to one another, and indeed it is true that for the most part they share a blood relationship. The affinities produced by sharing a blood kinship are mainly what keeps them united. What is more, they sustain mutual relationships that might be termed domestic, since these are to be found elsewhere in societies whose family character is undisputed: I mean collective revenge, collective responsibility and, as soon as individual property makes an appearance, mutual heredity. Yet on the other hand it is not a family in the true sense of the word, for in order to form part of it, there is no need to have a clear-cut blood relationship with the other clan members. It is enough to exhibit some external criterion, which usually consists in bearing the same name. (pp.127-128)

The fact that the clan's kinship can be fictive (cf. Sahlins) means that it can scale much larger than an actual family, allowing it to function as a basic political unit (p.128).

But, Durkheim argues, the clan, like the horde, "plainly does not possess any other solidarity save that which derives from similarities. This is because the society is made up of similar segments and these in turn comprise only homogeneous elements. ... For a segmentary organisation to be possible, the segments must resemble each other (or else they would not be united) and yet be different from one another" (p.128).

Mechanical solidarity, Durkheim concludes, is a system of homogeneous segments (p.131). In contrast, organic solidarity is like a set of differentiated organs. Rather than a group of segments linked by affinities, we find organs that perform different, interdependent functions (p.132-133; cf. I Cor. 12:12). The transformation from one to the other is gradual: for instance, the clan's blood divisions give way to territorial divisions (p.135). Organic solidarity first took root in self-sufficient towns, then (around the 14th Century in Europe) across regions (p.137).

Interestingly, Durkheim makes an argument reminiscent to Vygotskians: in segmented societies, he says, individual personality did not exist (p.142); it is, he believed, a product of the private sphere that emerged with the rise of organic solidarity (cf. p.220, 235, 239, 242).

Durkheim sees societies evolving from decentralized tribes to centralized ones to cities, feudal societies, and finally the present day (p.168; see also pp.201-202). In fact, his biological metaphor becomes rather too controlling in places.

A few thoughts. Those who have been following TIMN will recognize much that is familiar here, particularly the evolution of societies and the characterization of early societies as segmented. Those who have been reading Heckscher and Adler will find the discussion of solidarity familiar too. And as one of the founders of sociology, Durkheim had a deep impact on how we understood societies throughout the 20th century.

Yes, this book certainly has its limitations. It sometimes overgeneralizes and speculates based on fairly limited data, it overrelies on the biological metaphor, and sometimes that metaphor seems to reject Mendelian inheritance (e.g., p.264). But overall, it's a rewarding and fascinating read. In fact, after reading this book and Weber, I may have to revisit a lot of my earlier readings in this new light. Definitely, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
By Max Weber

I regret having taken so long to get to this fascinating book, which introduced the notion of the Protestant work ethic. Weber is recognized as one of the three founders of sociology (alongside Marx and Durkheim), and in this influential book, we can see why.

Weber wrote the book after visiting, and becoming fascinated with, the United States. In fact, in Chapter 2, he quotes several of Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms—along the lines of "time is money" (p.48) and "The good paymaster is lord of another man's purse" (p.49)—and warns us not to simply interpret these statements as avarice. Rather, he says, through Franklin speaks "the spirit of capitalism," and his words describe not astuteness but an ethos (p.51):

The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is preached here is not simply a means of making one's way in the world, but a particular ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. This is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality that interests us. (p.51)

Weber sees this particular ethic as uniquely Western European and North American (p.52). This ethic is summed up in this way: "the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of any spontaneous enjoyment of life" (53). When pressed, even that "colorless deist" Franklin justifies the ethic with Scripture (p.53); making money, to Franklin, is the result and expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling (p.54). And it is this ethic, Weber says, that is a condition of capitalism, shaping the system and its conditions for success (p.54).

To those who have not become capitalist, it seems like mere avarice (p.56), and Weber claims that capitalism's development is retarded in countries where workers pursue money unscrupulously, without this ethic (p.57). In part, that's because labor must be performed as a calling if wage incentives are to work (p.62). And that characteristic of a calling shows up elsewhere: for instance, "The ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur" is "distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency"; "He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well" (p.71).

Where does this "irrational sense" come from? Weber traces the concept of the calling back to Martin Luther (Ch.3), defining the calling as "a life-task, a definite field in which to work"—a concept, he says, that was foreign to both Catholic peoples and those of classical antiquity (p.79). In Protestantism, everyday activity took on a religious significance (p.80). For Luther, the monks' renunciation of worldly obligations seemed selfish; "In contrast, labor in a calling appears to him as the outward expression of brotherly love" (p.81).

Weber traces the history of the Protestant church forward to see how this concept of the calling led to the Protestant ethic. He fingers the doctrine of predestination as a key moment, since it imparted "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual" (p.104). Priests, sacraments, the church, and even God could not help the individual (p.104). Hence the individual was torn away from his closed ties; everything, even social activity, was pursued solely for God's glory—and that included labor, conceived as "a calling which serves the mundane life of the community" (p.108). In the Calvinist reading,

The community of the elect with their God could only take place and be perceptible to them in that God worked (operatur) through them and that they were conscious of it. That is, their action originated from the faith caused by God's grace, and this faith in turn justified itself by the quality of that action. (p.113). 

To put it more colloquially, people wanted to be assured of whether they were the elect. They did not believe that their works would save them, but they did believe that works were the result and evidence of a saving faith. "Thus the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put, himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it. But this creation cannot, as in Catholicism, consist in a gradual accumulation of individual good works to one's credit, but rather in a systematic self-control which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned" (p.115).

So Calvinism demanded, "not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system" (p.117). The average man's moral conduct couldn't be planless and unsystematic (p.117). This systematization developed through the Puritans, who saw God as sort of a shopkeeper who constantly took measures (p.124); then the Methodists; then the Baptists, whose anti-state and anti-aristrocacy leanings pushed them into economic occupations (p.150).

Other developments suited the Protestant ethic for capitalism. For instance, "the emphasis on the ascetic importance of a fixed calling provided an ethical justification of the modern specialized division of labor. In a similar way the providential interpretation of profit-making justified the activities of the business man" (p.163).

Weber concludes by lamenting,

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the "saint like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p.181)

In all, a fascinating book. Don't wait as long as I did before reading it.

Reading :: The Uses of Argument

The Uses of Argument
By Stephen Toulmin

A few days ago, I remarked on Twitter that I was reading through The Uses of Argument, and it was like listening to a Flock of Seagulls album—I had a hard time enjoying it because I was waiting for the Top 10 hit. That may not be fair to Toulmin, a careful logician with a well-earned reputation. But the Toulmin Structure was his Top 10 hit in rhetoric and composition, becoming a major tool for teaching argumentation structure in first-year composition handbooks such as Everything's an Argument. That's the section in which I was the most interested.

However—to continue the analogy—The Uses of Argument is really an album rather than a collection of songs; its chapters, although they still work as standalone essays, build on each other to develop a larger argument about language. Since Toulmin is a logician rather than a rhetorician, that larger argument is oriented toward logic and (like most logic texts) attends to levels of detail in which I am uninterested.

The argument is that we need to answer the question "what sort of a science is logic?" (p.6). And after describing several possible answers—logic as individual psychological phenomenon, logic as group sociological phenomenon, logic as technological craft, logic as mathematics (pp.3-5). He suggests that we consider a new analogy:

Logic is concerned with the soundness of the claims we make—with the solidity of the grounds we produce to support them, the firmness of the backing we provide for them—or to change the metaphor, with the sort of case we present in defence of our claims. The legal analogy implied in this last way of putting the point can for once be a real help. So let us forget about psychology, sociology, technology and mathematics, ignore the echoes of structural engineering and collage in the words 'grounds' and 'backing', and take as our model the discipline of jurisprudence. Logic (we may say) is generalised jurisprudence. ... A main task of jurisprudence is to characterise the essentials of the legal process: the procedures by which claims-at-law are put forward, disputed and determined, and the categories in terms of which this is done. Our own inquiry is a parallel one: we shall aim, in a similar way, to characterise what may be called 'the rational process,' the procedures and categories by using which claims-in-general can be argued and settled. (p.7)

This jurisprudence analogy should be familiar to rhetoricians—after all, systematic rhetoric began with law—and sets the tone for the rest of the book. It also brings us to Chapter III, "The Layout of Arguments," which is the Top 10 hit I mentioned.

"An argument is like an organism," Toulmin states at the beginning of Chapter III. "It has both a gross, anatomical structure and a finer, as-it-were physiological one" (p.94). The gross structure might include introduction, background, proposition, conclusion, etc.—although Toulmin doesn't use the term, we might think of the genre of the argument, including the different "chief anatomical units" that distinguish a sermon from a proposal from a recommendation report from a Yelp review. But Toulmin is more interested in the finer structure: "within each paragraph, when one gets down to the level of individual sentences, a finer structure can be recognised, and this is the structure with which logicians have mainly concerned themselves" (p.94).

In regarding this finer structure, Toulmin contrasts two models: the mathematical and the jurisprudential. Is a formally valid argument in proper form or geometrical form? "Or does the notion of logical form somehow combine both of these aspects, so that to lay an argument out in proper form necessarily requires the adoption of a particular geometrical layout?" (p.95).

To attack the problem, Toulmin proposes an elementary distinction: between the claim (C) "or conclusion whose merits we are seeking to establish" and the data (D), or "the facts we appeal to as the foundation for the claim" (p.97). The two are connected by warrants (W), or general, hypothetical statements that bridge the two. So we have a pattern like this:

(p.99)

Data (D) are explicitly stated; warrants are generally implicit or assumed (p.100). 

But an argument can be more complex, and usually is. For instance, claims are often modified by qualifiers (Q), "indicating the strength conferred by the warrant on this step," and sometimes indicate conditions of rebuttal (R), or "circumstances in which the general authority of that warrant would have to be set aside" (p.101). So the form now becomes:

(p.101)

And here's an extended example:

(p.102)

Sometimes the warrant itself needs some data behind it, and Toulmin terms this backing (B) (p.103). Although warrants are hypothetical and bridgelike, backing can be expressed in form of categorical statements of fact. So here's the structure with B included:

(p.104)

And here's the extended example:

(p.105)

The advantage of the Toulmin structure is that it is very generally applicable. It's also recursive: since any statement can be considered a claim, we can select one statement in the structure (say, D), treat it as disputable, and unpack it as a separate argument. (If we treat "Harry was born in Bermuda" as a claim, we might offer data: here's Harry's birth certificate. If we treat "here's Harry's birth certificate" as a claim, we might offer data for that claim: here's the signature of Harry's attending doctor and here's an affadavit by the same doctor.)

But—this is important—when I say this is an advantage of the Toulmin structure, notice that the advantage is both in terms of analyzing arguments and in producing them. Toulmin is most interested in the analysis. But what made the Toulmin structure a Top 10 hit for rhetoric and composition was that it provided a simple framework for students to think through how to compose their arguments as well.

Let me end with a few general remarks. The Toulmin structure does seem to fit well with Western rationalist argumentation patterns. For that reason, I think it has real potential as a training tool for rationalist discourse aimed at audiences in bureaucracies (e.g., the judiciary, to take Toulmin's example) and markets (e.g., expressing a value-proposition). Certainly it's made a big impact on how I analyze and teach my functionalist-oriented writing classes.

But I'm not sure to what extent the Toulmin structure is universally applicable. That is, although it provides a solid heuristic given certain assumptions, I'm not sure to what extent it applies to different cultures and forms of organization.

In any case, if you're interested in argumentation, this book is well worth your time. I've mostly reviewed the Top 10 hit, but to better understand it, you really should hear the whole album.

(Special issues of Connexions)

If you're interested in international professional communication, consider applying as a guest editor for Connexions: International Professional Communication Journal. From the special issue page:

connexions • international professional communication journal places great emphasis on Special Issues as a unique means of promoting high-quality research in thematic areas related to international professional communication.
The journal is accepting proposals from Guest Editors for:

• Special Issue 2(2): June 2014

• Special Issue 3(1): February 2015

• Special Issue 3(2): June 2015

• Special Issue 3(3): December 2015

• Special Issue 4(1): February 2016

• Special Issue 4(2): June 2016

• Special Issue 4(3): December 2016

• Special Issue 5(2): June 2017

• Special Issue 5(3): December 2017

Please send your proposals for Special Issues to Rosário Durão at   editor@connexionsjournal.org.

Reading :: The Rule of the Clan

The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom
By Mark S. Weiner

I've been reading a lot on social organization lately, and I've been especially interested in better understanding Ronfeldt's TIMN framework. The T part—tribes—has been the least familiar to me, and is also the most likely part of the framework to be contested by anthropology, since anthropologists in general have questioned the notion of tribe, have moved away from the notion of a single originating form of organization, have become skeptical of older anthropological work along these lines, and have problematized kinship, which has been understood as a key part of tribal organization.

And yet, as Ronfeldt argues, this critical work still seems to indicate a measure of organization that is quite different from institutions, markets, and networks. In particular, even the critical work seems to argue for small, strongly affiliated, relatively segmented "simple egalitarian societies" in our past, societies that took on the more familiar characteristics of "tribes" as they came into contact with more complexly organized societies.

It was with that discussion in mind that I read Weiner's The Rule of the Clan, a book aimed at the popular market. Weiner is an expert in constitutional law and legal history, and his book examines the shift from kin-based societies to the rule of law:

In a modern liberal society the state... is vigorous and effective, clearly demarcating and defining the community it surrounds. The discrete individuals living under the authority of the state... are in turn equally vital and independent. An essential aim of the liberal legal tradition, as important as its goal of limiting state power... has been to build state capacities to ensure such vitality and independence. [This is the Kindle version, so I don't include page numbers.]

In contrast,

in the absence of the state, or when states are weak, the individual becomes engulfed within the collective groups on which people must rely to advance their goals and vindicate their interests. Without the authority of the state, a host of discrete communal associations rush to fill the vacuum of power. And for most of human history, the primary such group has been the extended family, the clan.

 Weiner warns that since the clan is such an ancient form, "Left to our own devices, we humans naturally build legal structures based on real or fictive kin ties or social networks that behave much like ancient clans." The rule of the clan, he says, encompasses three phenomena:

• "the legal structures and cultural values of societies organized primarily on the basis of kinship"
• "the political arrangements governed by what the Arab Human Development Report 2004 calls 'clannism'"
• "the antiliberal social and legal organizations that tend to grow in the absence of state authority or when the state is weak" (e.g., criminal networks)

"In the presence of a weak state, the individual is weakened and submerged in the more muscular corporate associations—kin groups—that maintain the society's political order." 

One of Weiner's main sources is "the founding father of legal history and legal anthropology, Henry Sumner Maine," whose work came under sustained attack by Kupfer in The Invention of Primitive Society. In a nutshell, Kupfer was not impressed with Maine's generalizations of primitive society, which he considered both poorly founded and a specimen of social Lamarckianism. Let's keep that in mind as we proceed through the rest of the book.

In Part II, Weiner describes "the highly decentralized constitutional structure of the rule of the clan, in which legal and political power reside not in a public authority but rather in numerous kinship groups." He illustrates this argument with three examples: E.E. Pritchard's account of the Nuer, medieval Iceland, and the contemporary Palestinian Authority. 

In Part III, Weiner discusses clans in cultural terms, examining its "distinctive network of informal legal institutions" across "a range of contemporary societies"—and how its benefits have been undermined by the availability of modern weaponry.

In Part IV, he examines how we might modernize clans by looking at how two medieval societies (England and Arabia) constructed public identities and public life that transcended clans. "Liberals should encourage the spread of information and social media technologies in clan societies" to induce this shift, he argues.

In Part V, Weiner argues that "the normative order of the clan" still plays a role in modern liberal societies—in fact, clan affiliations can provide a basis for personal identity, and affirming clan ties (one example is a Scottish pub that is branded by a family's traditional crest and symbols). This use of clans actually reinforces liberal society rather than threatening it. (Compare with Ronfeldt's argument that the Tribe persists as the organizational form for culture.)

Yet clans still represent a "postmodern threat" since they are considered the default position, the one to which people will return if the state erodes. 

So there's the summary. Now here's the critique.

The Rule of the Clan is an interesting, well-written book that examines the legal substrate and cultural assumptions makes liberal society work. Its examples are clear, its discussion is lucid, and in consequence I learned a lot about how legal frameworks make societies possible.

Yet, as implied above, the book has two issues. These issues may be simply artifacts of the popularization that this work has undergone, or they may represent deeper disagreements.

The first is that clans and liberal society are placed in opposition. Weiner portrays societies as moving from clan-based law to state-based law, with the constant threat of decay back to clan-based law if the state is not adequately maintained. Yet clan and state are not the only two games in town: there are at least a couple of other forms of organization (market, network), and states themselves have undergone significant changes as well. In narrowing the account to state and clan, Weiner creates a binary: evolve to the future or devolve to the past. That account loses a great deal of subtlety.

And that brings us to the second issue. Weiner, following Maine, describes the shift from clan to state as social evolution and warns that if we don't maintain the state, it will decay or devolve. As noted above in Kupfer's book, anthropologists have generally repudiated this Lamarckian view of social evolution, arguing that the evolutionary metaphor is not adequate for understanding social change. To put it another way, rather than understanding society as evolving (going forward to the state) or devolving (going backward to clans), contemporary anthropologists see it as always going forward (adapting to changing circumstances). That is, the contemporary anthropologist's account looks less like Lamarckian evolution and arguably more like Darwinian evolution—although anthropologists now tend to avoid evolutionary metaphors altogether.

That being said, I'm glad I read this book. It gave me a broader understanding of how clans have worked, focusing on the laws that underpin societies, and helped me to think through aspects of organization. Even though I have reservations about some of his themes, Weiner really seems to know his stuff and he writes so lucidly that even a tyro like me can follow along. If you're interested in societies and law, pick up this book and take a look.

Reading :: Sensemaking in Organizations

Sensemaking in Organizations
By Karl E. Weick

Weick's Sensemaking in Organizations is often cited by people working in (or on the edges of) organizational science, org comm, and related areas. Sensemaking is "literally, the making of sense" in an organization (p.4), something that is distinct from interpretation.

That's awfully vague, isn't it? Forgive me for being vague, but Weick tends to define by discussing what sensemaking is not, or by describing others' conflicting definitions, or by giving examples (pp.4-5). At least that's what I found when I looked up "sensemaking: definition" in the index. But we can learn something about sensemaking from these moves as well.

First, sensemaking is not interpretation. It's "grounded in both individual and social activity" (p.6). It's "about such things as placement of items into frameworks, comprehending, redressing surprise, constructing meaning, interacting in pursuit of mutual understanding, and patterning" (p.6). In contrast to interpretation, it addresses "how the text is constructed as well as how it is read. Sensemaking is about authoring as well as reading" (p.7). Drawing on Garfinkel, Weick argues that in sensemaking, the clarification of human situations "often works in reverse. It is less often the case that an outcome fulfills some prior definition of the situation, and more often the case that an outcome develops that prior definition" (p.11). It is less about discovery than invention (p.13).

Weick identifies seven properties of sensemaking:

1. Grounded in identity construction
2. Retrospective
3. Enactive of sensible environments
4. Social
5. Ongoing
6. Focused on and by extracted cues
7. Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (p.17)

Let's just pull one of these out for further discussion. Sensemaking is "enactive of sensible environments," and Weick emphasizes that rather than being separated from a "monolithic, singular, fixed environment," the "people are very much part of their own environments," enacting as well as working within the environment (cf. Cynefin). 

Let's jump ahead to the chapter on occasions for sensemaking. Sensemaking is triggered when a situation doesn't fit what we already know—think in terms of unexpected reactions, unexplained correlations, paradoxes. So sensemaking occurs in ambiguous, changing situations, which have these characteristics:

• Nature of problem is itself in question
• Information (amount and reliability) is problematical
• Multiple, conflicting interpretations
• Different value orienttions, political/emotional clashes
• Goals are unclear, or multiple and conflicting
• Time, money, or attention are lacking
• Contradictions and paradoxes appear
• Roles are vague, responsibilities are unclear
• Success measures are lacking
• Poor understanding of cause-effect relationships
• Symbols and metaphors used
• Participation in decision-making fluid (p.93)

Sensemaking, naturally, involves making sense in these situations—not just individually but as a group. And that means occasions for meeting to create sense. For that reason, Weick strongly supports one activity that is often denigrated in organizations: meetings. Meetings, he says, "create the infrastructure that creates sense" (p.144). Indeed, "arguing is a crucial source of sensemaking" (p.145), and meetings provide a venue for arguments. 

So should you read the book? I confess that I got more out of the book when I summarized it for this review than when I read it. I'm not sure what made the book uninteresting to me—perhaps it was just due to Weick's writing style; perhaps it was because much of what Weick discusses has been covered in rhetorical, sociological, and anthropological texts. But it's still worth reading and citing. If you do research in organizations, take a look.

Writing :: Integrated Writers, Integrated Writing, and the Integration of Distributed Work

Spinuzzi, C., & Jakobs, E.-M. (2013). Integrated writers, integrated writing, and the integration of distributed work. Connexions: International Professional Communication Journal/Revista de Comunicação Profissional Internacional 1(1). Available: http://connexionsj.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/spinuzzi-jakobs.pdf

This is another in my series on writing texts. Whereas the previous post in this series was on a single-author book, this one is on a coauthored position paper barely longer than an extended abstract. My coauthor is Eva-Maria Jakobs, a brilliant professor at RWTH Aachen.

So what is there to say about this short piece?

First, this piece is a nice example of taking an opportunity when it comes up. Eva and I met at Writing Research Across Borders in February 2011 (David R. Russell introduced us). She and a coeditor were attempting to generate interest in an international collection on writing research, the Handbook of Writing and Text Production (to appear in de Gruyter's Handbooks of Applied Linguistics series). the idea was to have coauthors from different continents collaborate to provide global perspectives on research. Eva was gracious enough to invite me to collaborate on a chapter with her on our shared interest, writing in professional domains.

We have written that chapter, which is now in production, and in the process we found that we are well suited to be collaborators. As we developed ideas for that chapter, we focused on three trends that we had seen in our separate research projects. I think Eva is the one that named these: integrated writers, integrated writing, and the integration of distributed work.

These three trends, we agreed, should be discussed more widely. And we decided that when the opportunity presented itself, we should put together a standalone piece to describe it.

Coincidentally, in October 2011, Rosario Durao asked me to join the editorial board of her new journal, Connexions, which focuses on international professional communication. She also sent out a call for papers for the first issue. The CFP asked for a "400-500 word position paper"—which seemed ideal for breaking out the three trends that Eva and I had wanted to discuss.

Eva and I quickly developed a position paper that outlined these three trends along with some literature supporting the work. The work was equal, and I ended up being listed as lead author mainly because I handled submitting the paper and receiving feedback.

It's a short publication, and it's free, so please take a look and see what you think. Eva and I are intrigued by the three trends we describe here, and we plan to continue examining this area. If you're interested in the trends, I commend the extended discussion in our forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Writing and Text Production.

Topsight > Topsight in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Marc Bousquet interviewed me a while back about my reasons for self-publishing Topsight. Today, his story came out, and it provides a nice nuanced picture of the choices and stakes for academics. Rather than excerpt it, I recommend you read the whole thing, which is a nice meditation on the increasingly diverse ecosystem of publishing outlets for academics.

Topsight > Discussing Topsight at Austin STC

I've spoken to the Austin Society for Technical Communication many times since I moved to Austin—they're a terrific crowd, interested in new perspectives and concerned about how to better understand information flow in organizations. So I'm very happy that I'll be speaking to Austin STC next week about my book Topsight.

If you're in Austin, please do join us. We'll be meeting at the Microsoft Store in the Domain. Light refreshments and networking are at 6:30; my presentation's at 7:00.

(slogging, not blogging)

It's the end of the semester, so everything is due at once. And that means that once again I'm sitting on a backlog of books and blog posts. Books include:

• Charles Heckscher's The Collaborative Enterprise
• Karl Weick's Sensemaking in Organizations

Non-review blog posts are also piling up. I'll see if I can break the logjam in a couple of weeks, once final grades are in. Until then, there might not be much action in this space.

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way."

My standard description of my research is now a presentation — which I gave at Utah State last week. Take a look.

"I watch people work—in a non-creepy way": Applying genre and sociocultural theory to net work from Clay Spinuzzi

Topsight > Getting to topsight in your organization

Earlier this week I wrote a guest column on topsight for Life and Letters, a magazine published by UT's College of Liberal Arts. In particular, I discussed how organizations develop incompatible solutions that exacerbate systemic problems:

People are constantly “hacking” their work, grabbing unofficial solutions from other parts of their lives in order to solve their problems, increase their capabilities and lessen their work. When they do this, they inject some much-needed flexibility into the system—they find ways to route around the limitations and improve the capabilities of what could otherwise be an inflexible, one-size-fits-all system. That sticky note or list is sometimes the hidden linchpin of their work—the thing that allows them to productively use the database, coordinate with coworkers or track their tasks. 

That’s the good news. But the bad news is that these ad hoc solutions can block information flow, precisely because they are so customized.

Beyond that bad news, there's good news too. You can achieve topsight into the organization, figuring out how to identify ad hoc solutions—and understand what they're trying to solve. If you're trying to figure out how to apply topsight, or how to explain it to others in your organization, take a look.

Topsight > How Fredrik is using Topsight

We're wrapping up our discussion of Topsight on Inkwell, and Fredrik Matheson was kind enough to discuss how his team is using Topsight at Bekk Consulting. Click through to see the whole comment, but here's a part that I wanted to pull out:

That's why we bake Topsight into our process and use it in the right context. We're lucky – most of our teams work at the clients' locations for months or years, so getting access to the right people isn't *too* hard. Our interviews are aimed at the micro- and meso-level details of the work, not the work culture itself. We're looking for disruptions and breakdowns – stuff *we* can fix – and if we uncover a problem that has more to do with how things are organized, what kinds of people are hired, the incentive structures and so on, we hand that over to our clients. 

Topsight also lends itself well to people-and-process-intensive projects like intranets, collaboration tools and case management.
...
I hope *everyone* working on tools for sharing and collaborating and in Enterprise 2.0/social business projects will read Topsight. We can't make things work better if we don't understand how they work. 

Yes. Yes. Topsight is not a substitute for usability testing, prototyping, or other well-used approaches, but it does pull together details that those other approaches don't. It represents another tool in the toolkit, one that UX teams can use in the right situation. More thoughts at the link.

Topsight > Upcoming seminars in Austin

I've been excited about opportunities to discuss my new book Topsight, which describes how to get a big-picture view of an organization so that you can diagnose and fix information flow issues. These issues plague just about every kind of organization.

Reading the book will help you get your head around the approach I use. But you can get much more hands-on practice if you come take my seminars. I'm offering two this summer through the Information Institute:

• TOPSIGHT PART 1: Discovering how information flows in your organization. This May 25 seminar will introduce you to the basics of designing and conducting a field study at your organization, then organizing your data.
• TOPSIGHT PART 2: Analyzing and fixing how information flows in your organization. This June 22 seminar will help you make sense of the field data, modeling it so that you can better understand systemic issues in your organization.

Both seminars are going to be a lot of fun. For more, click through, and don't hesitate to contact me with questions.

(the social layers)

Recently I argued that college students are learning and writing in a mind-boggling range of genres, including electronic genres, and that these include "an increasing number of social layers on top of their work, leisure, and family genres." True. But let's drill deeper into this notion of social layers.

What social layers? Consider this experience, which I reported to someone earlier today in an email:

When I was working on my PhD (1994-1999), we knew almost nothing about grad students in other programs. We would see them once a year, at CCCC, and we would eye them like the Jets eyed the Sharks. They were competitors. Now, grad students in different programs are all Facebook and Twitter friends. 

The difference is that social networking made it a lot easier for people to network with each other—networking became cheaper, easier, and more quotidian. Collaborative writing software such as Google Docs has similarly lowered the barrier to scholarly collaboration across time and distance. And mobile phones have meant a terminal in your pocket—collaboration can happen anywhere. So we see a shift from closed, institutional structures to open, networked ones. This change is happening in academia, of course (we’re prime candidates for using these technologies), but also in most other aspects of our society.

Social networking provides a social layer that connects today's grad students, both within their own institution and across institutions. Other publicly available online services such as Google Docs, Basecamp, and Facebook allow teams to collaborate, coordinate, and communicate easily—once again, both within an organization and across organizational barriers. In fact, we're seeing an increasing number of studies examining how these additional layers affect work. These change how we work, but also how we intuit each other's moods and availability, how we see each other's contextual activity, and how we manage collaborative complexity. They even change how we structure our organizations, making it feasible to make them smaller, nimbler, flatter, and more distributed. They provide an always-on switchboard for working groups.

That doesn't mean that this social layer is unproblematic. It can be very problematic. But it's pervasive, and it's going to continue to have a big impact on how we do business.

Reading :: The Invention of Primitive Society

The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion
By Adam Kuper

"This book is a history of the ways in which anthropologists have thought about primitive society," Adam Kuper declares on p.1 of this book. Kuper argues that, although the study of primitive society in the late 19th century and beyond tended to invoke Darwin, it was actually Lamarckian in its interpretation: Darwinism doesn't imply any sort of progress, but Lamarckian ideas of evolution do. And early anthropologists seized on the notion that societies were progressing, more or less universally, from one state to another (p.2).

Indeed, Kuper argues, Europeans looked around at their society in the late 19th century and saw fundamental transformations from the familiar "traditional society" to the "new world" (industrialism, capitalism, bureaucracy). And "behind this 'traditional society' they discerned a primitive or primeval society," Kuper tells us (p.4). But

in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in a distorting mirror. For them modern society was defined above all by the territorial state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society therefore must have been nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist. There also had been a progression in mentality. Primitive man was illogical and given to magic. In time he had developed more sophisticated religious ideas. Modern man, however, had invented science. Like their most reflective contemporaries, in short, the pioneer anthropologists believed that their own was an age of massive transition. They looked back in order to understand the nature of the present, on the assumption that modern society had evolved from its antithesis. (p.5)

By the end of the 1800s, most anthropologists believed that

1. "The most primitive societies were ordered on the basis of kinship relations." (p.6)
2. "Their kinship organization was based on descent groups." (p.6)
3. "These descent groups were exogamous and were related by a series of marriage exchanges." (p.6)
4. "These primeval institutions were preserved in fossil form," i.e., if one were to find a relatively untouched society in a remote place, their society could be taken to represent ancient societies that predated the state. (p.7)
5. "with the development of private property, the descent groups withered away and a territorial state emerged." (p.7)

He adds:

But hardly any anthropologist alive today would accept that this classic account of primitive society could be sustained. On the contrary, the orthodox modern view is that there never was such a thing as "primitive society." Certainly no such thing could be reconstructed now.  ... Human societies cannot be traced back to a single point of origin, and there is no way of reconstituting prehistoric social forms, classifying them, and aligning them to a time series. There are no fossils of social organization. (p.7)

Nor could it be generalized. Even "surviving hunter-gatherers certainly do not conform to a single organizational type" (p.7). He further argues that ecological variations affect social organization, so "there must have been considerable differences in social structure between the earliest human societies" (pp.7-8).

He concludes: "The theory of primitive society is on a par with the history of the theory of aether. The theory of primitive society is about something which does not and never has existed" (p.8).

The rest of the book is Kuper's attempt to examine how the theory of primitive society developed, how it spread, and why it persists (p.8). Throughout the book, he describes the history of this theory in anthropology, examining its persistence through patriarchal theory (Ch.2), Lewis Henry Morgan's notions of ancient society (Ch.3), totemism (Ch.4-5), taboo (Ch.6), the Boasians (Ch.7), Rivers and his critics (Ch.8-9), and descent theory (Ch.10). I'm often interested in these sorts of metatheoretical histories, so I found the discussion riveting, especially since it put many of my anthropological readings in relation to each other and to a shared timeline.

Let's close with one intriguing passage. In Ch.6, "Totemism and Taboo," Kuper examines Durkheim's impact, especially his evolutionism, which "owed much to Spencer and nothing to Darwin." And:

Spencer believed that all societies shared a common point of origin. Moreover, the original institutional forms were never lost, but were simply recombined in various, more complex, new forms. (This was a form of social Lamarckism. ...) Durkheim further concluded from these premises that institutions could be most easily understood in their simplest, original form, and that if they were studied in a primitive state their relations with other institutions would be most readily apparent. (p.114).

 A thought-provoking book, well written and with a broad sweep. I'm still processing it. If you're interested in anthropology, societies, or societal organization, take a look.

Reading :: What Kinship is—and is Not

What Kinship Is—And Is Not
By Marshall Sahlins

Recently I asked an anthropologist friend for some recommendations on anthropology readings about kinship. Among other books, he recommended this one, which I promptly bought and read. And I'm glad I did. Sahlins elegantly argues for an understanding of kinship based not on bloodlines, but on culture.

In the Preface, he summarizes the argument: "The specific quality of kinship, I argue, is 'mutuality of being': kinfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each others' existence; they are members of one another." And "kinship categories are not representations or metaphorical extensions of birth relations; if anything, birth is a metaphor of kinship relations."

This might be a surprising conclusion for people who have read older anthropological works on kinship. (Newer works have largely turned to other concerns, or so my anthropologist friend tells me.) In the early 20th century, the first thing an anthropologist would do was to conduct a census to understand kinship relations; ethnographies in the 1930s focused on kinship, bloodlines, endogamy and exogamy, tribes and moieties. But Sahlins argues that "kinship is not given at birth as such, since human birth is not a pre-discursive fact. A whole series of persons may be bodily instantiated in the newborn child, including lineage and clan ancestors, while even the woman who gave birth is excluded." And "it is not even inevitable that the kinship of procreation is essentially different from relationships created postnatally. Kinship fashioned sociologically may be the same in substance as kinship figured genealogically, made of the same stuff transmitted in procreation"—and here follows a set of examples from various cultures, including "commensality, sharing food, reincarnation, co-residence, shared memories, working together, blood brotherhood, adoption, friendship, shared suffering, and so on." Such "performative modes of kinship" are "predicated on particular cultural logics of relatedness."

Sahlins draws on a wide range of examples from various studies to illustrate, demonstrating that performative forms of kinship (ex: fictive kinship) are just as much kinship as biological kinship. He believes that "kinship could very well be an inherent human possibility," given our "generic symbolic capacity." "Kinship may be a universal possibility in nature, but by the same symbolic token as codified in language and custom, it is always a cultural particularity."

This book cleared up a lot of question marks about kinship for me. Sahlins elegantly and parsimoniously argues for a definition of kinship that encompasses blood relations, fictive kinship, and other sorts of relations. Most importantly from my perspective, Sahlins' definition encompasses the kinship definitions of the studied cultures themselves: it doesn't draw separations between things that the cultures treat as whole phenomena. To put it bluntly, if Culture A allows someone to be spliced into a family as a full member, why should an anthropologist impose a framework of "fictive kinship"?

Great book. And short. Give it a read if you're interested in the phenomenon of kinship.

Reading :: Collaboration

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results
By Morten Hansen

Collaboration is a business book based on Hansen's scholarly work in reaching and understanding teams, conducted during his Ph.D. (Stanford) and his professorship (Harvard Business School). His question: "What is the difference between good and bad collaboration?"

Bad collaboration, he tells us in Chapter 1, is "collaboration characterized by high friction and a poor focus on results." In contrast, he focuses on effective, disciplined companywide collaboration (not, he hastens to add, collaboration outside a company). And "disciplined collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: the leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required." Furthermore, disciplined collaboration makes it possible to "have it both ways—performance from decentralized work and performance from collaborative work."

Throughout the book, Hansen walks through the dos and don'ts of collaboration, pitched to leaders in large companies. It's a solid book, full of not just advice but also matrices and structured worksheets. I imagine it would be very helpful for those readers.

Topsight > Discussing Topsight on The WELL

Jon Lebkowsky has been kind enough to set up an author's discussion of my book Topsight on The WELL.  It's a chance for people to lob some questions at me—and a chance for you, dear reader, to get more insight about the book and the approach.

We've also lined up some respondents, who should be weighing in soon. The discussion will be going on through April 4. Swing by anytime. I expect to get some tough questions!

Topsight > Topsight and lifehacking

Financial Times has just posted an article on lifehacking for which I was interviewed. Take a look. Long story short, I discuss how I see lifehacking as a part of a larger system of activity—a part that can potentially lead to disruptions if people's lifehacks cause inconsistencies in the system.

How do we resolve such inconsistencies? I think you know the answer.