September 13, 2006: One More Loss

I have to confess that, since I received all of my "serious" education at MIT, I never learned anything about Max Weber before I received my Ph.D. As a matter of fact, I remained in a state of naive ignorance until, late in my life, I finally decided to tackle Jürgen Habermas' monumental Theory of Communicative Action. What seems to have influenced me the most was a section Habermas wrote on "Weber's Diagnosis of the Times." Here is how Habermas introduced the diagnosis:

In his diagnosis of the times Weber keeps closer than usual to the theoretical perspective in which modernization is represented as a continuation of the world-historical process of disenchantment. The differentiation of independent cultural value spheres that is important for the phase of capitalism's emergence, and the growing autonomy of subsystems of purposive-rational action that is characteristic of the development of capitalist society since the late eighteenth century, are the two trends that Weber combines into an existential-individualistic critique of the present age. The first component is represented in the thesis of a loss of meaning, the second in the thesis of a loss of freedom.

This is pretty heavy stuff, even heavier when you think about how things have changed since Weber developed those theses: Under the impact of new technologies, we can hardly say they have changed for the better.

As a matter of fact, having just read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the new recent 9/11 films, I would say that we can now add a third "thesis of loss" to the list: loss of reality. This cuts deeper than the assault on meaning brought about by the Enlightenment ideals of a world united around universal truth, ideal that Isaiah Berlin attacked so eloquently. Rather, it has to do with the extent to which media have now impacted what we want reality to be. Here are two paragraphs in which Mendelsohn takes on the United 93 film:

The problem with all this realness is that the film itself—like reality—has no structure and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning [reflecting, probably unintentionally, back on the Weber thesis]. When United 93 first came out, I was struck by one enthusiastic critic's glowing comment, in a review entitled "Brilliant, Brutal and Utterly Real," that Greengrass's movie was "gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading …." But what makes Greek tragedy significant as art is precisely the way in which the foreordained trajectory of the events that take place on stage is made to seem part of a larger moral scheme; when (for instance) we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled kind at the end of Persians, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos).

All that United 93 can tell us, by contrast, is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. (Well, many American people are brave: we're treated to a scene in which one of the passengers, who has a Central European accent of some kind, urges the others to cooperate with the hijackers.) If United 93 brings to mind any genre, it's not Greek tragedy, with its artfully wrought moral conundrums, but something much tinier: the innumerable made-for-television programs available on cable TV that are dedicated to reenactments of real-life crimes, complete with phony "realism." The stylistic hallmark of these shows is the same jittery hand-held camerawork that Greengrass uses to represent the violence in the cabin of Flight 93.

Unfortunately, phony realism sells soap (and cars and cereal and drugs for everything from allergies to sexual enhancement, not to mention political candidates); so reality has now been consigned to the same ash-heap as freedom and meaning (which, without reality, is even more lost than in Weber's time). So Isaiah Berlin, towards the end of his life, declared the twentieth century to be "the most terrible century in Western history." Perhaps it is just as well that he never had the opportunity to observe its successor.

August 25, 2006: Another Lesson from Isaiah Berlin

It looks like it is again necessary to revisit what Isaiah Berlin had tried to say in his study of the history of ideas. This time the occasion is a comment about the current situation in the Middle East that appeared on The Blotter, a Web site maintained by ABC News. The comment was posted by Adrian Reyes. Here are the first three sentences:

It's a good thing that Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have nothing to do with each other. Once again, terrorists are bad people. They can not be reasoned with and want nothing more than the destruction of Israel and the collapse of the West.

Now I have found the comments on this site to be a bit more reasoned than those I have encountered elsewhere (which may be either damning with faint praise or feinting with damned praise); but, given my interests in text analysis, I was fascinated with the way in which the third of these sentences appears to refute the first! Perhaps that is why so many (all?) attempts at discourse about the Middle East seem to come to an impasse. What Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have to do with each other is a shared animosity towards the state of Israel, which they perceive as a colonial imposition of Western values on Islamic cultures. If we do not recognize that this is, at the very least, a point of view that needs to be tested by validity claims (in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas' noble, if idealistic, attempts to characterize the processes by which differing parties can arrive at a mutual understanding), then the bloodshed will continue and, in the language of another comment on The Blotter, enough will never be enough! More than ever we need to honor the teachings of Isaiah Berlin, who passionately (if verbosely) argued that the "Western intellectual tradition" was not the only source of ideas or values. As John Gray put it in a recent review, "In opposition to this view Berlin maintained that conflicts of values are real and inescapable, with some of them having no satisfactory solution. He advanced this view not as a form of skepticism but as a universal truth: conflicts of value go with being human." If Berlin never prescribed how, as humans, we could live with these conflicts of value, then Habermas has tried to pick up that gauntlet; and we should all put our best efforts towards translating his idealistic theories into practices for a better world.

August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!

July 26, 2006: Husserl's "Crisis" Revisited

In light of the focus of scienticism on controlling the world, this might be a good time to review some of the basic ideas behind Edmund Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences. A good summary of Husserl's critique of scientific thinking was provided by Habermas in his "Knowledge and Human Interests" lecture. Habermas breaks down Husserl's argument into three stages:

1. “It is directed in the first place against the objectivism of the sciences, for which the world appears objectively as a universe of facts whose lawlike connection can be grasped descriptively. In truth, however, knowledge of the apparently objective world of facts has its transcendental basis in the prescientific world. The possible objects of scientific analysis are constituted a priori in the self-evidence of our primary life-world. In this layer phenomenology discloses the products of a meaning-generative subjectivity.”
2. “Second, Husserl would like to show that this productive subjectivity disappears under the cover of an objectivistic self-understanding, because the sciences have not radically freed themselves from interests rooted in the primary life-world. Only phenomenology breaks with the naive attitude in favor of a rigorously contemplative one and definitively frees knowledge from interest.”
3. “Third, Husserl identifies transcendental self-reflection, to which he accords the name of phenomenological description, with theory in the traditional sense. The philosopher owes the theoretical attitude to a transposition that liberates him from the fabric of empirical interests. In this regard theory is ‘unpractical.’ But this does not cut it off from practical life. For, according to the traditional concept, it is precisely the consistent abstinence of theory that produces action-orienting culture.”

He then makes the astute observation that Husserl worked on this book in the early Thirties, at a time when the rise of the Nazis in Germany brought along an increased attention to scienticism in the name of "rising barbarism" (to use Habermas' phrase). With such a context I can only wonder if, once again, science is not being enslaved by another period of "rising barbarism," when the power of the government purse is ultimately determining what scientists can and cannot think and then lauding the virtues of their "objective thinking." The cover of my 1986 paperback printing of Husserl's book had a series of time-lapse photographs of the detonation of an atomic (or hydrogen) bomb. The cover of the current printing (shown in the poster above) is much more neutral. Is there a message here about how we ought to think about interpreting Husserl's message today?

July 19, 2006: Two Cheers for Google (or Peter Norvig)!

Candace Lombardi provided a nice account of the exchange between Tim Berners-Lee and Peter Norvig (Google Director of Search) in today's CNET News.com. This is a case where I have to side with the Google supporters' comments. Here is my elaboration on one of those comments, edited to include a hyperlink, which CNET would not let me include:

What we are really talking about here is human nature; but that is still only part of the story. What most of the techno-centric community does not understand is that every technology artifact is based in three "worlds:" the objective, the subjective, and the social. (This is a generalization of Habermas' observation that all personal interactions take place in those three worlds simultaneously.) Berners-Lee would really like the World Wide Web to be strictly an artifact of the objective world, which may be all right if you are trying to write a doctoral thesis in artificial intelligence but does not wash if the Web lies at the heart of your business model. Norvig's rebuttal addressed issues in both the subjective and social worlds, and I doubt that anyone would dispute the fact that Google's success has as much to do with their successful management (even if intuitive) of the social world as with their efforts to build the best artifacts according to criteria of the objective world.

However, beyond the subjective and social flaws that Norvig identified, the fact is that the "semantic" infrastructure of the "Semantic Web" is equally flawed. As I have tried to argue, you cannot have an ontology that is not grounded in phenomenology. In Semantic Web language, this means that the objective nature of the RDF (Resource Description Framework) will always fall short of the demands of the subjective and social worlds.

So isn't history just repeating itself? Ten years ago we had the SGML advocates who were trying to push for the formal structuring of all content. The limited amount of support for that vision was quickly blown away by the advent of HTML, and the resulting rush to search engine technology demonstrated that structure was not as important as the SGML folks wanted to believe. Guess what? NOW it is not as important as the Semantic Web advocates want to believe!

June 26, 2006: Alienation Today

Writing in 1963, Habermas considered the hypothesis that the primary motivation behind the Marx-Engels Communist Manifesto has virtually dissolved in the face of contemporary capitalism:

Furthermore, in advanced capitalist countries the standard of living has, in any case, risen to such an extent, at least among broad strata of the population, that the interest in the emancipation of society can no longer be articulated directly in economic terms.

In other words, to invoke the famous metaphor of the Manifesto, the rising standard of living was breaking those chains that worker of the world had nothing to lose. The defense of this claim makes interesting reading forty years on from when it was made, particularly now that Europe is no longer the front line of the Cold War.

The crux of Habermas' argument is the claim that:

"Alienation" has been deprived of its palpable economic form of misery.

He then examines two aspect of this alienation: deprivation and domination.

On the deprivation side he claims that "the pauperism of alienated labor finds its remote reflection in a poverty of alienated leisure." This seems to be based on the assumption that the major source of alienation is among the employed. The view from 1963 could not possibly anticipate the unemployment crisis of the following century and factors such as homelessness that followed in its wake. As the very concept of "job security" evaporated in the "new economy" of Internet-based globalization, deprivation has become palpable again. If, to use Habermas' words, we no longer worry about "scurvy and rickets," we certainly worry about substance abuse. (This morning the BBC has been running a story that, on their Web site, has the headline, "Alarm at Europe cocaine use rise." The European Union now accounts for 25% of users worldwide. Just for the sake of comparison, though, the United States covers more that 40% of those users.) Thus, "palpable" deprivation is still with us and with a vengeance!

Meanwhile that "poverty of alienated leisure" is there, too. Yahoo! News today ran a story from Reuters that began with the claim:

Americans are more socially isolated than they were 20 years ago, separated by work, commuting and the single life, researchers reported on Friday.

So, even if our personal economics allow us to have leisure, it is as much an experience of alienation as it was when Habermas developed his argument forty years ago.

Where do we stand with respect to domination? Here Habermas claims that domination "has divested itself of its undisguised expression, as a relation of power embodied in the wage labor contract." In other words domination no longer hides behind the terms of that contract, but today the question of whether there is a contract at all trumps the extent to which a contact conceals a hidden agenda of oppression. Domination now exercises itself through the channels of part-time commitments that are frequently outsourced to sites where there is less likely to be arguments over contract terms. Habermas wanted to believe that the concept of a "wage slave" was, for practical purposes dead and buried; but it turned out that the concept was only sleeping. Can we argue today that the Internet is responsible for its awakening?

I had better stop here; with my recent writing about nostalgia, I should avoid trying to argue that things looked pretty good forty years ago!

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!

June 23, 2006: Hegel Puts Philosophy in its Place

While reading Habermas' Theory and Practice I came upon his summary of an observation that Hegel made in the preface to the Philosophy of Right: "Philosophy cannot instruct the world about what it ought to be; it is solely reality which is reflected in its concepts, reality as it is."

June 08, 2006: Habermas 101

As I promised yesterday, I shall try to provide a relatively concise outline of the framework Jurgen Habermas developed in his Theory of Communicative Action. There are basically two parts to the framework. The first is his model of the process of reaching understanding. Then, because reaching understanding is an action, the framework also deals with the "four sociological concepts of action.

The model of the process of reaching understanding is based on four interrelated perspectives:

1. Personal interactions that take place with regard to three "worlds;" the objective, the social, and the subjective.
2. Validity claims that may be applied to the "transactions" of those interactions; these validity claims may be based on propositional truth (objective), acceptability determined by social norms (social), and the sincerity or authenticity of the individual (subjective).
3. The agreement to negotiate by recognizing and criticizing validity claims.
4. The grounding of negotiation on "common definitions of the situation," i.e. the recognition that negotiation can only be based on a foundation of shared concepts.

This model grew out of work Habermas initially published in his essay "What is universal pragmatics?," which is the first chapter in the collection Communication and the Evolution of Society. As many social theorists have observed, this model presumes an “ideal speech situation,” meaning that the parties involved want to reach understanding. We are all familiar with (too many?) cases where this is not the case; but Habermas’ model is still a useful way to identify four concepts that provide a grounding for the nature of understanding.

The three-worlds concept surfaces again in the classification of actions into “four sociological groups:”

1. The teleological concept is based on the formalist principle than an action effects a state transition. We thus understand actions in terms of the states they are intended to achieve, either directly or as part of a more extensive plan; and actions are described through rules that map a state and an action to a resulting state. For Habermas this concept has its origins in the pioneering work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern on a theory of strategic games, although von Neumann had already been exploring theories of states and transitions in his early work on computer design. Note, however, that, because the focus of this concept is on state, it resides more in the domain of the static objects of lexis, rather than praxis. Put another way, it is more concerned with the results of action than with the dynamic nature of action, itself.
2. The normative concept assumes that actions are regulated by socially determined norms. In other words the “goal state” of an action is less important than whether or not that action is acceptable in the social setting in which it is taken. Because that setting is rarely (if ever) static, this concept is more firmly grounded in the dynamics of praxis than is the teleological concept.
3. The dramaturgical concept views the acting subject as “playing a role” in a social setting that provides an “audience.” It is perhaps best captured by the title of Erving Goffman’s pioneering analysis, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This concept, again, is grounded in the dynamics of praxis.
4. The communicative concept refers to the interpersonal relations (based on both lexis and praxis) of at least two subject who seek a shared understanding of a given situation “in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement.” These are precisely the personal interactions that take place over the coordinated work practices of office work. It should therefore be no surprise that Habermas identifies origins of this concept in the ethnomethodological techniques of Harold Garfinkel, as well as George Herbert Mead’s earlier pioneering research in communicative action.

The connection to the three worlds has to do with the fact that teleological action takes place in the objective world, normative action in the social world, dramaturgical action in the subjective world, and communicative action in the integration of all three worlds.

June 07, 2006: The Road to Lexis and Praxis

I figure I probably ought to offer some justification as to why I invoked Greek terminology from Plato and the general plan of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in yesterday's entry. Accounting for Kant is definitely the taller order, particularly since I feel I am just getting beyond the Cliff Notes stage in my ability to read him. So I may end up postponing that question until I have given the Critique a second reading (which will definitely be more thorough than my first reading, meaning that this postponement is likely to take some time). On the other hand I feel I can address the justification of my invoking the lexis-praxis terminology at the present.

I suppose I can begin that justification by repeating yesterday's citation to the paper by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid ("Organizational learning and communities-of-practice"). I first read this paper when John was running Xerox PARC and I was involved with knowledge research at the Palo Alto laboratory that Fuji Xerox had established (which was on the same campus as PARC). The most influential passage in this paper for me was in its second paragraph:

Formal descriptions of work (e.g., "office procedures") and of learning (e.g., "subject matter") are abstracted from actual practice. They inevitably and intentionally omit the details. In a society that attaches particular value to "abstract knowledge," the details of practice have come to be seen as nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once the relevant abstractions have been grasped. Thus education, training, and technology design generally focus on abstract representations to the detriment, if not exclusion of actual practice. We, by contrast, suggest that practice is central to understanding work. Abstractions detached from practice distort or obscure intricacies of that practice. Without a clear understanding of those intricacies and the role they play, the practice itself cannot be well understood, engendered (through training), or enhanced (through innovation).

This was a pretty radical position for a representative of "The Document Company," since the primary medium for those formal descriptions was the document! So I saw in this paper the invocation of a fundamental opposition between the document-based and the practice-based. In my own research (which, at that time, was focused primarily on the frustrating problem of organizational memory) I tried to generalize this to an opposition between the noun-based and the verb-based, because, while documents certainly used verbs, the document itself was an artifact; so both the documents themselves and the formal descriptions that were often the content of documents resided firmly in the world of nouns. They were, indeed, "abstractions detached from practice." (For a while I was even using the phrase "communication artifact" instead of "document.")

I was quite happy with pursuing the opposition between nouns and verbs until I got involved with reading Kenneth Burke's Grammar of Motives. There I discovered that Spinoza had also been interested in such oppositions. Burke cited three variations, all of which I felt could be relevant: passive-active, object-subject, and product-producing (which resonated nicely with my interest in the term "communication artifact"). With this as background, along with a natural desire to seek out generalizing categories, I was primed for the opposition of lexis and praxis that Jurgen Habermas invoked in the first chapter of his Theory and Practice. This led me to explore the specific definitions of both of these words in the Perseus online dictionary of classic Greek. The nice thing about the entries is that they invoke citations from classical sources; and that is how I discovered the citation of lexis and practice in Plato's "Republic" (along with a context-based translation of those words)!

Now Plato's context is concerned with giving faithful accounts. More specifically, he is addressing relating "some word or act of a good man" to others; and this is where the words lexis and praxis appear in the original Greek. However, this takes us back to the original theme of the Brown-Duguid paper. At the end of the day, work is all about both words and acts. Our training in information technology has served us well with formal descriptions in the domain of words; so, like the drunk under the lamp-post who looks for his keys because the light is better there, we try to assume that only the words that matter, because they are what we know how to describe. In so doing we invoke abstractions that distort our understanding of acts.

What is to be done? Clearly, we need a better handle for describing and talking about acts that can stand up to the formal descriptions we invoke for words. The first volume of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action proposes such a framework for talking about acts. However, an account of this framework is very much another story; and I shall postpone it to another entry (which I can probably write before I get around to Kant)!