Massy's latest

William Massy, long-time Stanford professor and administrator, has been writing and talking about the specifics of university budgeting in specific, detailed ways for my whole career.  There are just not that many scholars who talk about how budgeting is really done and what can be done with it as clearly.  He has gone at this program in innovative ways, at one point even developing a financial planning and strategy game, Virtual U.  A consulting client was talking about his latest book, Resource Management for Colleges & Universities (Hopkins 2020), so I read it over the last couple of days. 

His major argument is for building a financial and decision-support model based on Academic Resource modeling, which starts with a focus on the detailed inputs and outputs from academic activity--classes and programs.  At its core is a contribution margin analysis of courses and programs built from very detailed information on classes, students, instructional salaries, and direct instructional costs. Information on facilities and faculty activity allow the models to identify areas where more activity could occur.  I've done models like this in the past, but always in fairly clumsy Excel form. Massy has identified and worked with vendors like Gray Associates and an Australian outfit called Pilbara who have built more sophisticated tools for this.  EAB and Grant Thornton may have done some too.  

I'm familiar with Gray Associates for their work on the markets for programs, which concrete in a way I haven't seen before, although I also think places are just starting to figure out ways to work it into planning and decision processes.  One aspect of that is marrying the external view they are known for with an internal view of the program's economics--what does it take for the institution to deliver it, and what are they seeing in the form of returns from their particular revenue sources.  To that end, they've built a program economics model, but I haven't seen a presentation or demo of that yet. Still, institutions have to figure out how to absorb this information into their planning.  Certainly, it's not as simple as simply saying here's the demand, let's move resources there, we look weak here, let's cut back on that. In any university with reasonably strong shared governance, administrators have to come to an understanding with their faculty of what they want to do with information like this. There's a lot of different ways you can react. 

When I've built these kinds of models, it was as a discrete decision-support tool for provosts to support questions like where to put adjunct faculty resources.  It was not within the context of the overall budget-building process, but I think that would be the goal, and that's where Massy is heading. But I don't think he gets there.  He offers one model for rank ordering and picking between budget investments opportunities, but I found it unrealistic and unconvincing.  It doesn't line up with how most budgets are built, which have programmatic and continuous qualities, not a list of discrete binary options. And a point I keep returning to, the budget process is all about building processes for exchange between people at the institution that allows them to express and share their understandings of the environment, needs, and actions, and identify a pathway towards choosing between the options. 

He argues for a process that is driven by the academic side of the house, which I strongly support, but he does not offer much on why faculty would see this model as a tool to achieve their goals. In one critical passage he writes "This means academic officers and faculty must take ownership of the quality-cost balance.  But how? The answer lies in providing better access to data that are manifestly helpful for decisions they are making already, and that will lead them logically and inexorably in the direction of cost consciousness" (p. 25).  Massy is a much more experienced higher ed hand than me, but the phrase "logically and inexorably" is a warning flag for me. 

There needs to be a strong general sense of what the institution is trying to achieve with the Academic Resource modeling discipline he describes--is it budget cutting? This will engender nothing but resistance. Enrollment and revenue growth?  Introduced the wrong way, this just seems like exploitation. Something subtler would be necessary. 

There are other missing pieces.  He talks about the need to factor in academic quality, and says that it is purely a matter of academic judgment, but doesn't try here to factor in measures of student success like retention and graduation rates, as imperfect as they may be.  There is no discussion of diversity and equity, although these can be factored in the models he's describing.  He doesn't try to address administrative costs--maybe 40% of an institution's total cost--"the ideas are less developed in this arena. The priorities are clearly on the academic side, but success there surely will lead to nonacademic solutions in a relatively short time" (xi).  Seems unlikely--these areas work differently, with varying degrees of relationship to academic activity, and their costs have been notoriously difficult to constrain. They will require their own approach.  

Many institutions could do with revisiting the relationship between the administrative and the academic domains.  In one model, they are treated as separate, governed separately with separate somewhat dedicated pools of funds.  In others, especially in full Responsibility Center Budgeting models, the administrative side is seen as a kind of supplicant for the academic enterprise's resources.  And in many places, those tables are turned, and academic units feel like the administration parsimoniously grants allowances to the unruly children of the academic departments, while the adults on the board and in the administration make real-world decisions.  

I like seeing Massy focus attention on this kind of academic modeling.  Some version of it is needed, which is why different groups in higher education keep coming back to it. I wish I had read this book a couple of weeks ago so I could have mentioned it in my NACUBO webinar, where it fits in well with the alternatives to Responsibility Center Management we were discussing . 

One jarring thing is that this book functions to a great extent as a pitch for Gray and Pilbara--Pilbara features it on their website as marketing material. It's easy to recoil at that, but I think it's worth giving Massy the benefit of the doubt and thinking about why he has done that.  Massy is arguing that higher education needs to quickly embrace this sort of thinking about academic resources, and I don't think it is just a scholarly interest for him.  He's an advocate.  In thinking about what it will take for these ideas to take root, one way that will happen is to create communities who are developing and pursuing these tools, and vendors like these can be a powerful force in driving an idea like that.  Their profit motives add to their sense of urgency.  It is arguably the case that Huron has had a big impact on the diffusion of Responsibility Center models. 

In organizations collective action is everything, and higher ed is probably ready for new ways of engaging the community as a collective. These sorts of tools, developed even further to reflect student outcomes of all sorts, center diversity, and value contributions to the community, could help give academic communities additional common material for discussion. But the community has to arrive at these tools, not have them imposed. They have to be part of compelling and convincing vision of how this understanding this information contributes to an organization that provides more.  To me, piecing together how to lay these kinds of tools into a community-building process that would govern budget-building is the key.      

Pacified Existence

This phrase--Pacified Existence--is the major arrival point for Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man.  When this phrase first shows up in the book, it seems like it had to be a preliminary step in the argument as a demonstration of another form of false consciousness that Marcuse will eventually go past.  Given that the book was from 1964, "Pacified Existence" made me picture Robert McNamara standing around a work table with a bunch of analysts in close-cropped hair and dark frame glasses. But no, this is the arrival point, for Marcuse vision of freedom from pervasive, administrative repression of freedom, a state where existence is no longer a matter of pain and struggle. 

I'm re-reading Marcuse after many years, and reading it much more closely than before.  The first time through, years ago, I remember being alternately frustrated by it and seeing it as sort of obvious.  So many of his ideas seem to have been absorbed into the counter-culture of the 60s, that by the time I was reading, it seemed old hat.  It is also idealistic, and while it comes on hard (and on point) with its critique of modern societies, it seemed detached from concrete alternatives. I also find myself argumentatively backsliding, asking if I'm sure modern society isn't delivering benefits of comfort and ease on a wide-enough scale to convert the criticisms into idle whining.  It also has dense analyses of technical philosophy in its middle section that are not exactly my strong suit. 

But at the end, the idea is there.  That one should resist the one-dimensionality that does not allow for reason to critique the current order, and the unquestioned assumptions of the modern order that great levels of pain and fear are part of a necessary exchange for the benefits of modern technology and society.  This results in the unreason Marcuse fingered in phenomena like a complex social and political order premised on the imminent threat of global devastation through mutual nuclear annihilation, rather than applying resources to make that impossible. Utopian thinkers in ages past envisioned advanced technology allowing for a huge expansion of leisure.  The opposite has occurred, but the universal speed-up required to achieve ever higher levels of per capita productivity is established ideologically as inevitable--the lack of critique is the one-dimensionality in question.    

I still look for specifics of what form this resistance takes.  To some extent, much of the later 60s demonstrated it.  Marcuse himself stresses the goal of providing for solitude and privacy, for unmanaged time that allows consciousness to pursue its own devices.  Die Gedanken sind frei. But rolling the clock ahead 50 years to today, social media makes this much more problematic.  The continuous, pervasive signaling of social media, reflecting a cacophony of voices striving for control and influence, have the effect of polluting free thought.  Can you even trust those thoughts in private time not to reflect ideas and sentiments planted there?  Even more perniciously, for so many people the moment of solitude now leads to a reach for the cell phone and a dive into streams of messages from Twitter, Tik-Tok or the New York Times.  Or this blog post.   

One pathway to finding instances of this self-possessed thinking, of "practical freedom," might be through the idea of "self-determined incentives" which he mentions one time late in the book (page 236).  This is the sort of thing that one might be able to identify through research on Identity Work.  One can ask interview subjects to describe their incentives and look for cases that seem to depart from management and organizational demands, and from socially imposed expectations.  Alvesson and Willmott (2002) offered the idea of "micro-liberation" in the workplace.  While I did not feel like they were able to give it as concrete form as I wanted, the phrase resonates for me. In discussions of alternate identities in the Organizational Identity research I am looking for cases that really deviate from the predominant repressive consciousness--in many cases in workplace studies, resistance is in the service of another way of serving the same ideology with different means.  To put it in the words of an article by Sandberg and Catlaw (2018) that I will be getting to, "We can see these efforts to forge a personal space—a space within which living becomes a phenomenon to be experienced and, in a sense, savored rather than merely a sequence of one anonymous, ephemeral moment after another."

At the end of the day, it may be the case that in the socially constructed characteristics of consciousness, we'll find no pure freedom.  I doubt purity is necessary to validate Marcuse's logic, but I want to find cases that deviate from the one-dimensional order, and consider what gets you more of this.    

Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2002). Identity Regulation as Organizational Control: Producing the Appropriate Individual. Journal of Management Studies, 39(5), 619-644

Thomas J. Catlaw & Billie Sandberg (2018) The Quantified Self and the Evolution of Neoliberal Self-Government: An Exploratory Qualitative Study, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 40:1, 3-22, DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2017.1420743

Marcuse, Herbert. (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Beacon.

Community and instiutions

This weekend David Dark preached at Downtown Presbyterian Church.  It is a pleasure for everyone to have him there, but we do this very rarely.  That needs to change.

At one point in the sermon, David distinguished between community and institutions, and made a nice comparison--a community sacrifices for people, an institution sacrifices people.  It seemed like a good solid distinction, consistent with values many of us cherish. I can picture governments as war-making and incarcerating institutions demanding people to sacrifice as cannon fodder in war and objects of punishment.  This distinction feels like it comes from good intellectual stock, reminding me of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the distinction between community and society.  Society as captured by Gesellschaft implies rules and obligations, and bureaucracies and large organizations.  The word Gesellschaft can also refer to a company, and so it is definitely freighted with the implication of economic rationality and predominance. David is pitching into this tension, making the case for the human humane path. 

But this seemingly unassailable position brought me back to some of the more challenging and in ways mystifying ideas I encountered this year which to some extent turn the tables in the moral balance between community and institution. There is an argument that any community contains at its core an act of violence.  Here's Nidesh Lawtoo discussing this in his book (New) Fascism (2019):

"For Bataille, then, community finds in sacred experiences that generate ecstatic horror the affective source of a contradictory double movement that both unites and divides the social body: death, sacrifice, tragedy are but the most prominent sacred experiences that constitute the palpitating heart or “central core” (noyau central) of community."  Lawtoo 2019, p. 80. 

When I first read this, I thought about DPC as a community.  At first glance, this kind of violence and sacrifice seem far away.  David invited the congregation to think of themselves as a community of inquiry.  The fact is this church was built by slaves for a local ruling class with wealth built on slavery, and on ground taken over from indigenous people.  One of the things DPC sometimes does is trace its origins to its founding as a separate congregation in 1956.  This has the convenient effect of eliding the early history, of slavery and of the original encounter between Europeans and indigenous people.  (Of course DPC itself has in its shortened history managed to be on the wrong side of history during the lunch counter sit ins.)  But if you let the historical frame flow between re-organizations, you can see the original acts of violence.  What is less clear is how under this schema of community they are re-enacted to renew the community.

Leaving aside DPC, I don't know I see this same noyau central in every community.  Jean-Luc Nancy made a distinction between Operative and Inoperative Communities, with operative ones being those that depend on contagion and these Bataillian dynamics.  I'm part way through some of his writing on this. 

Then on the other side of the equation, political science defines "institutions" as basically rule sets.  From Azari and Smith : "Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, for example, characterize institutions as 'formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity.' Douglass North, adopting the view of rational-choice rather than historical institutionalism, defines institutions as 'humanly devised constraints that shape human intersction,' a scoiety's 'rules of the game.'" From this perspective, institutions are more accommodating of the individual than a community.  They provide a clean set of rules within which an individual can claim agency and legitimacy, and don't demand much else. 

For me, the more important tension is between the individual and any manifestation of collective human experience.  I still believe in the absolute value and beauty of that collective experience. But I see a set of intrinsic, potentially unavoidable problems within it.  One of my jobs for this summer is going deeper into some of this work, and try to see what I can do with some of this stuff that is out there in Bataille and Foucault, and Jean-Luc Nancy.    

The job demands what the job demands

Last quarter I figured out that some of the questions that interest me fall under the category of Identity Work, the process through which people define their sense of self.  A lot of it resides in the stories people tell about themselves.  Or at least that's where researchers can find the material to study. The thoughts people have about themselves are not visible until something is done to bring them to the surface. So you get people to tell stories. One distinct possibility is that those stories involve a pretty significant level of mediation between what lies beneath.  But the stories are rich, as we'll see. 

A few weeks ago Billie Sandberg forwarded me the current issue of Organization Studies and pointed out that there were a couple of articles there to add to pile of research on Identity Work.  A point she's making to all of us is that we should figure out what journals cover the kind of work that engages us and start paying attention to that.  

One of the articles in this issue was lead authored by Andrew Brown from the University of Bath, who wrote a couple of articles I worked with last term in my first pass along Identity Work research.  This one, co-authored with Michael Lewis and Nick Oliver has the title "Identity Work, Loss and Preferred Identities: A Study of UK Business School Deans."  The thing that interests them is how much the deans define themselves in their role as deans in terms of loss--of status as a scholar, of integrity, and of sense of well-being.  This is a group you would think would identify themselves in terms of successes.  

The truly remarkable thing for me was one point in particular--the stories of the loss of integrity.  One of the common identity themes Brown et al found was that the deans agonize over the ways the job requires them to be less than completely honest.  In many cases they find that they can't share all of the information behind a situation.  Also, that the institution uses them and forces them into positions they are not comfortable with. 

A quote from one of the interviews: "It’s necessary to justify decisions without being able to tell the whole story…sometimes I’m clutching at logic…I think that’s been one of the most difficult parts of the role is standing up and justifying the position without being able to justify… [it]…"

It seems to me like the research team passes over this material too easily.  It's one of three common threads they see in these interviews, but to me this is remarkable and drives at one of the biggest challenges to organizational life, the ways in which it compromises its participants.  Try as you might, when you start to take on managerial authority, you increasingly find yourself boxed in by the organization.  Some mysterious convergence of factors produces decisions and dictates courses of action seemingly out of the control of the humans taking the action and voicing the words.  This is precise testimony of this specific effect, and its fundamentally morally compromising character. For me, this single shared aspect of these stories can provide the entry point into the problem of structural moral compromise and of the collective as the effective agent.    

Discussing their findings with this survey of UK deans, they suggest North American business deans might not have the same issues--the UK deans face a great deal of institutional ambivalence in institutions that treat business education as a sort of necessary evil but not a legitimate academic program.  I'm not sure American deans experience quite that level of disregard from colleagues,  But they do mention some evidence of health problems with business deans in the U.S.  The citation they have is from the Nashville Business Journal--an article on Marty Geisel's death.  

Marty was dean at Vanderbilt when I was there.  He was very encouraging to me.  He liked that we shared connection with the University of Chicago.  I never felt as connected to Owen after his death.  Marty was perfectly capable of being frustrated with the administration at Vanderbilt, but I don't think he would have described his identity in terms of loss.  It seemed to me that he rather relished being dean.  I'm not sure his end supports the points that Brown, Lewis and Oliver want to make.  I wish they had had a chance to interview him. 

Brown, A. D., Lewis, M. A., & Oliver, N. (2021). Identity Work, Loss and Preferred Identities: A Study of UK Business School Deans. Organization Studies, 42(6), 823–844.

Organizations as Interpretation Systems

When I was in business school, I took a number of Human Resource Management classes, and one of the primary faculty there was Dick Daft, an organization theorist.  His class gave me my first exposure to classics/basics of organization theory, and Vanderbilt's MBA program is small so I felt like I knew him at the time.   He did one article on the relationship between information richness and the use of media that I found very useful and would copy for people later, and I used the syllabus from one of his higher level classes on org theory to guide my post-MBA reading. 

Move the clock forward--God help me--30 years.  I'm back in an org theory class, and my new org theory guru Billie Sandberg points me to Karl Weick's work on sensemaking.  And Weick co-authored several things with Daft and cites him a bunch.  A circle closes.  

There is a big random element to academic life.  Most people pick schools early on in their academic career based on pretty minimal information.  I went to Vanderbilt because of circumstances of my personal life, not in search of a particular scholar.  Daft's work did register with me, and some of his observations about the complexities of communication made sense to me with my humanities background engaged with complicated texts and interpretations. It does make sense that years later I gravitate back into this area. 

The article I'm looking at today is one by Daft and Weick called "Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation Systems."  Often, maybe too often, a title itself will catch my eye and get my mind running before I've even read a word.  In this case the idea of an organization as an interpretation system intrigues me.  I've referred to organizations as information processing systems, and used that idea as the basis for some of my consulting.  An interpretation system grabs me because of the connection with the hermeneutical work of the humanities, and to my seemingly disconnected art writing, where I interpreted visual art or music.       

In this 1984 article Daft and Weick built a 2x2 matrix of interpretation modes depending on assumptions about the environment (unanalyzable or analyzable) and the role of the organization--passive or active in shaping its environment.  So that first dimension is all about whether the organization operates in an environment it considers stable, "concrete," and predictable, or in an environment that is none of those things.  There are many org theory constructs that depend on differentiating environments, or periods, of stability from those with higher uncertainty.  Every time I run across one of those, it occurs to me that we are in a period where stability is gone--the only environment is a changeable, difficult to predict one.  When I got to business school in the 1989, we were starting to see that unravel.  We had come off the oil shocks and inflation of the 70s, the economic retrenchment of the 80s, and the emergence of global competition that put everything up for grabs.  Change and crisis seemed the order of the day, and in a business school we were scrambling to catch up with the Japanese.  Things never let up after that.  Soon it was the dot.com bubble, the WTC attacks, a huge recession, and whatever it is we have today. 

What's more, I am very suspicious of the notion of periods of stability.  Something is always in motion.  If you read enough history, you will find someone making the case for any decade you name as a period of great transformation and critical turning points.  Also, stability in the West (or maybe it was only the US) was built on power that bore down on other parts of the world.  I think any stability has been bought by violence. 

So I'm prepared to collapse Daft and Weick's 2x2 matrix in a 1x2 row.  The other dimension is whether the organization itself acts upon the environment or responds to it more passively.  Since the rise of a technology-based economy, all the attention goes to businesses and groups that act on the environment.   That "disrupt" markets.   The idea that you can sit in the environment passively, scan it and respond seems foolish.  Every market (and field of endeavor) is open to organizations who would shape it, and they will own it.    

In the current business environment, which to a great extent drags along other sectors, an analytical black hole forms and this analytical structure collapses in on itself to the point where there is only on relevant mode for these organizational interpretive systems.   Daft and Weick describe the exploratory activities of the quadrant containing active firms operating in an uncertain environment: "They gather information by trying new behaviors and seeing what happens.  They experiment, test, stimulate, and they ignore precedent, rules and traditional expectation." They "may leap before they look, perform trials in order to learn what an error is, and discover what is feasible by testing presumed constraints."  Sounds like A-B testing, Agile development, and "move fast and break things."  We seem well on the way to this being all there is.    

Restart and reintroduction

I'm returning to this blog for now as I try to embark on somewhat consistent writing.  When I started this blog, most of my writing was art criticism and a little music writing.  Fun, and something I care about a lot, but actually not that connected to the core of what I spend my time thinking about and working on.  For years I've been working with organizations in very close ways on decision-making and basic management structures, especially around resource allocation.  Money yes.  People and politics too.  And the more time I spent with it, the more I understood it tied up with fundamental questions.  Of how people experience and understand the world--phenomenology and epistemology. And of what happens when you mix those together in increasing large groups of people--organization theory. 

I have tried to work on this on my own over the years, intermittently and incompletely.  Finally last year about this time of year I got the idea to revisit the possibility of starting a doctoral program.  I was on staff at Portland State University at the time, which had promising programs and very nice employee tuition benefits.  Thanks to encouragement from Sy Adler, the interim Dean of PSU's College of Urban and Public Affairs and a person of great wisdom and generous counsel, I enrolled in the doctoral program in Public Affairs and Policy.  There are so many reasons to do this.  It simply guides you on the things you need to understand to have a comprehensive view.  It forces you to define objectives and refine them all the time.  It gives you a relationship with faculty who have mastery, and a cohort of people working on ideas that are more or less similar. 

One goal is to push my methods of organizational and resource work much further.  I have large ambitions there, I would claim radicalness for them.  I also want to get a jump start on writing about the material that I work with, where I arguably actually know something and have developed some craft. 

This summer I have a break from classes and am preparing a reading program for myself.  One thing I probably knew, but which was firmly reinforced in classes this year, is that you need a discipline of writing to go along with your reading.  So I'll do that here until I decide there is a better platform for what I'm doing.