June 25, 2006: Service is a Science, or is it?

Thinking back on yesterday's comments about nostalgia, I have decided that not all of the agonies of Hell involve happy memories. One can also be tortured by unpleasant memories, particularly when you feel you could have taken some action (or just said something) to change them. (You might call these the agonies of "coulda-shoulda-woulda.") I had one of those hauntings this morning, so now I have to get it off my chest.

This is a memory from March 24, 2004 and the Almaden Institute I attended that day. The topic was "Work in the era of the global, extensible enterprise;" but the focus was on work in the service sector. The tone was set by the welcoming remarks, which, as I recall, were delivered by Paul Horn, Senior Vice President of IBM Research. The main thing I remember from those remarks can be roughly paraphrased (if not directly quoted) as follows:

Fifty years ago IBM partnered with Columbia University to invent the academic discipline of computer science; today I am announcing that we are partnering with the University of California at Berkeley to invent the discipline of service science.

This was my first unpleasant experience of the day. I had always felt (courtesy of one of the many citations dug up by Knuth) that the foundations of computer science were laid in a series of lectures in the summer of 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, after their pioneering work in digital computing (the Eniac) for the military during the Second World War. I have to confess to a strong personal bias behind this belief, since the first lecture was delivered on July 8, 1946, which happens to be the day I was born! However, I also remember Edsger Dijkstra's Turing Award speech, in which he talked about those people who can only understand concepts when delivered in their own terminology. The examples he gave were Catholics and Communists; but, when history is involved, I have discovered there are plenty of other examples!

The real memory-agony, however, dealt with the whole idea of their being a science of service, particularly since one of my activities that day involved a break-out session to discuss the curriculum for that new academic discipline. To this day I believe that our session went absolutely nowhere, because we could not think of any area of study that could be excluded from the curriculum; and so it is that I am haunted. Fortunately, I think Hegel has been helping me see some light. My entry about putting philosophy in its place can actually be boiled down to deciding whether the objective of the study of philosophy is descriptive or prescriptive. Hegel came down strongly on the former option, arguing that those descriptions should be as clear as possible, since they depicted "reality as it is." As a result I would extend Hegel and argue that, just as philosophy is a descriptive discipline, science is a prescriptive one, concerned primarily with understanding enough about the natural world to exercise control over it. So, in the tradition of answering one question with another question, before asking if there is a science of service, we might consider the extent to which the study of service can lead to prescriptive results.

Here I would like to cite some of the work of Orion White, a sociologist who was studying service organizations before their operations had been influenced by digital technology. He drew the distinction that a service organization is dialectical, rather than bureaucratic (Public Administration Review, 1969). In more contemporary language we could say that the operations of a service organization cannot be reduced to business processes, which may then be "engineered" for optimal efficiency. Instead, operations are all about recognizing underlying oppositions and resolving them synthetically, rather than coming down on one side or the other as "the way it has to be." I would then argue that, while it may be possible for a bureaucratic organization, one cannot take a prescriptive approach to the operations of a dialectical organization. One can only build up a repertoire of keen descriptive skills, through which one can grasp the reality of the entire situation, and then, with a Habermas-like ambition, apply that grasp to achieving an understanding that is social and subjective, rather than strictly objective. Since science only "plays" in the objective world, the very concept of a service science entails an impoverished view of the world.

What, then, is the primary descriptive goal in the study of service? I would argue that it involves the nature of value and how value is perceived by individuals in their social settings. In this respect one could do worse than begin with the study of the production of value that Marx began to develop at great length in his Grundrisse (even if much of that work went through a major overhaul by the time he was writing Capital). Marx was well aware that the production of value was not strictly a matter of the commodities that enter a production process in one form and leave in another. Much of Marx' attention focused on the consequences of viewing labor, itself, as a commodity; but Habermas expanded his own scope beyond the basic operation and operators of the production line. He presented evidence "that we consider whether the work incorporated in rationalization must not be understood and evaluated as second-order productive labor—as an independent one, because it depends on productive labor of the first order." (In many ways this is Habermas' first recognition of the role that understanding plays in work practices.) Thus, any understanding of the nature of value has to account for the ways in which knowledge contributes to value (an issue that was given lip service during the heady days of the "knowledge movement" but never subjected to the standards of descriptive discipline that Hegel had set for philosophy).

So am I just playing out a pun that the study of service should be grounded in the Grundrisse? Am I trying to send a be-careful-what-you-wish-for message to IBM, because the path to that wish may lead through Marx? No, I am just content to play Hegel's game and do my part towards the depiction of "reality as it is," however, complex that reality may be!