December 14, 2006: An Economist for the Age of the Service Economy

As we continue to debate the question of whether or not service is a "science" and what sort of academic curriculum (if any) provides the necessary foundations for study we would do well to check out the resume of Deirdre McCloskey in Alan Ryan's New York Review article about her recent epic volume, The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey is, in Ryan's words, "a professional economist, trained in the Chicago School;" and, back when she was Donald McCloskey, he was one of the key economic advisers to the Reagan administration. (The "pronoun shift" was documented in her book Crossings, briefly cited by Ryan and excellently reviewed by Maxine Kumin in the November 14, 1999 New York Times Book Review.) With both Ronald Reagan and a sex-change operation behind her, McCloskey is now a distinguished professor of economics at both Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a professor of rhetoric and English and has published knowledgeably in the areas of history of ideas, social theory, and philosophy. Given that both the theory and the practice of economics now has to contend with the rise of the service economy (not to mention globalization), I can think of no better combination of academic disciplines to meet this challenge!

October 30, 2006 (2): The Socially Illiterate Society

I realize that my recent attack on Henry Jenkins' Macarthur Report is not so much about "media literacy" as it is about "social literacy." It is bad enough that questions about the nature of social literacy and how it may be achieved are ignored by the media literacy camp, that seems to lose touch with what it is that media are mediating. It is more serious that they should be ignored by champions in the social software camp, such as JP Rangaswami; but what is “social literacy” if not an intuitive awareness of and sensitivity to concepts like “connectedness,” “belonging,” “sharing,” and “bonding,” which seem to figure so fundamentally in JP's rhetoric? Unfortunately, there seems to be no place for social literacy in today’s classrooms (at least in the public school system in the United States), since that is just not part of the accountability equation that the government has forced on those classrooms. Thus, the question of whether or not those classrooms have computers is ultimately a distraction from the real issue, which concerns how the next generation of pupils will be conducive to having relationships at all, whether or not those relationships are mediated by computer technology.

October 27, 2006 (2): Jenkins' List

As a result of my regular reading of Confused of Calcutta, I found myself looking at the Executive Summary of the Macarthur Report, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," written by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The basic thrust seems to be a shift of "the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." In other words it is all about "social skills developed through collaboration and networking;" but what are those skills? Here is the list that the Jenkins group compiled:

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

What fascinates me about this list, however, is how asocial, if not antisocial, it is. I do not see anything in the list that explicitly addresses the ability to engage in intersubjective communicative actions. Put another way, everything on the list (including Negotiation) is basically content-based. (Yes, that also includes the reduction of Play to problem-solving.) After all, if we are going to be talking about "media literacy," we have to remember that the "media" are just that: the channels through which communication, in all of its intersubjective glory, may be allowed to take place. Somehow or another, we need something on the list that honors Isaiah Berlin: Differing opinions should lead to dialog, but dialog does not have to lead to convergence of opinion. The intersubjectivity is a matter of each side reaching enough understanding to acknowledge, if not honor, the other’s point of view. This is the ultimate social skill for which we must all strive in an age of too many trigger-happy people with the power to end it all with a bang (not a whimper)!

September 21, 2006: Marx on Religion

We all know that Marx invoked opium as a metaphor for religion, but how many readers know the context for this metaphor? I recently found it in a review ("critique") of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that Marx had written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Since I still find the Philosophy of Right to be Hegel at his most impenetrable (which is saying something, given all the other Hegel texts out there), I have to confess that I took a great deal of pleasure in observing Marx have a go at the text with one of his most flamboyant rants. I would not say that religion was one of the major topics in Hegel's text; and, to be fair to Hegel, Marx does not seem to lay out what it is that Hegel says about religion that he opposes. The bottom line is that, Hegel or no Hegel, Marx uses this review as an opportunity to launch a rhetorical salvo at the concept of religion that goes way beyond the metaphor we know so well. Here is the heart of it:

The basis of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion, indeed, is the self-consciousness and the self-esteem of the man who has not yet found himself or who has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being crouching outside the world. Man is man’s world, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because state and society are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world. It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions.

August 29, 2006 (2): Back in the Box?

Taking a whack at Web 2.0 has led me to wonder whether there is still any buzz over Web Services. When the book Out of the Box was published, I was working for a boss who wanted to see our laboratory go after the brass ring of Web Services in a big way; and I ended up being the annoying voice that kept saying, "Yes, but ... ." I just went to the Amazon site for this book and found that the last review was written in September of 2003. For me the operative sentence from that review was:

A highly readable work, just about the book's only weakness is that it is indeed based largely on conjecture, and the premise that today's web service protocols will form the foundation of long-term IT development.

I found myself thinking about this book last week when I was reading a 1983 paper from the American Sociological Review by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, entitled "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." What fascinated me about this paper is the argument it provided that, in any given field, such as health care, education, or even politics, the organizations that populate the field tends towards resembling each other rather than towards diversity. Thus, they manifest the phenomenon of the replication of social systems that lies at the heart of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory.

The more I read, the more I realized that, while Hagel had envisioned a world that could thrive on the diversity of software services that could be installed on the Web, the necessary infrastructure required just that kind of homogeneity that DiMaggio and Powell had studied. It is all very well and good to have representation for a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or a mechanism for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), but these representations can only link together different users of those users share some conventions on how those representations are structured. In other words the kinds of connection scenarios that Hagel presented can only work in a context of homogeneity among the beneficiaries in those scenarios. This then led me to ask whether or not, viewed as a population, Web sites are becoming more homogeneous or more diverse? I think we are still in a period of great diversity (which would not be good for Web Services); but it is not out of the question that the processes DiMaggio and Powell claim lead to homogenization, coercive, mimetic, and normative, will not eventually kick into action on the Web. Watch this space for further developments!

August 09, 2006: The Sense of Identity on the Other Side of the Chaos Coin

I prepared the above diagram after reading Plato's "Theaetetus." This dialogue is often invoked by the knowledge management crowd for its definition of knowledge as justified true belief. However, if you go to the source itself, you discover that, in the course of the dialogue, definitions of knowledge are considered (justified true belief being the last of these); and all of them are found wanting. The dialogue concludes by accepting (almost in the Kubler-Ross sense) the fact that Socrates and Theaetetus have failed in their attempt to define knowledge. What Socrates manages to demonstrate, though (although he never says this explicitly), is that the difficulty of defining knowledge may have to do with how tightly coupled it is to at least three other equally fundamental concepts: memory, being, and description (which may be a poor translation of the Greek λόγος).

I raise this summary because I think that the concept of being (along with the related concept of identity) must not be neglected in considering the strategy of embracing chaos that I discussed yesterday. This occurred to me while reading some of the business literature invoking terms such as "network organizations," "boundary-less organizations," and "virtual organizations." I realized that, from the point of view of actually getting the work done, this kind of language can raise some challenging questions of identity, for both individual workers and the "entities" (who knows what we want to call them any more) that, at least nominally, serve as their employers. As I suggested yesterday, this issue of identity is critical, because it is only through our sense of self that we can engage our own subjective skills of perceptual categorization, which are all we have in order to manage ourselves in that chaotic setting that we may be obliged to embrace. To some extent Social Psychology has recognized this with its sub-discipline of Identity Theory and the roots of that sub-discipline in George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism. In that respect it should be no surprise that Habermas' work on his theory of communicative action draws heavily on Mead's symbolic interactionism. However, what matters at the end of the day is how the issue of identity surfaces when each of us faces the prospect of going to work every day or confronts the fate of having lost one's job. Pop psychology has trivialize the phrase "identity crisis;" but it may be that one of the most critical consequences of the Internet has been the cultivation of an identity crisis of global proportions. As I have already suggested, these consequences have economic, social, and political implications, all of which have received little more that gratuitous lip service as a price for the worship of innovation. However, an emerging identity crisis may be an instance of what Malcolm X had called the chickens coming home to roost!

July 23, 2006: "The Irrational Foundation of Rational Knowledge"

I had forgotten that much of my interest in irrationality may have originated in my reading of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge; so I decided to take today's commonplace book entry from that source:

As a rule, human thought is not motivated by a contemplative impulse since it requires a volitional and emotional-unconscious undercurrent to assure the continuous orientation for knowledge in group life. Precisely because knowing is fundamentally collective knowing (the thought of the lone individual is only a special instance and a recent development), it presupposes a community of knowing which grows primarily out of a community of experiencing prepared for in the subconscious. However, once the fact has been perceived that the largest part of thought is erected upon a basis of collective actions, one is impelled to recognize the force of the collective unconscious. The full emergence of the sociological point of view regarding knowledge inevitably carries with it the gradual uncovering of the irrational foundation of rational knowledge.

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 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)!