What's so bad about Pandora's Box?

Kimberle Crenshaw's "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" from 1989 is sometimes identified as the ur-text of Critical Race Theory. Obviously people writing critically about race goes back further, but a classmate this winter made the point that one should read this.  The core idea, there in the title, is intersectionality.  Crenshaw's a legal scholar, which gives her a particular focus on how discrimination is defined when the chips are down in a legal proceeding.  And there she saw a consistent pattern of one-dimensional analysis in which one could make a claim of race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both. Which had the effect of emphasizing the experience of the most privileged group within the discriminated group--white women and black men.  She argues that justice requires that you start from the least privileged subgroup, and build up law and social practice from there.  

A lot of analysis and problem-solving involves simplifying things, reducing the dimensions.  In my current project, developed a conceptual framework on a three dimensions, but then focused on two dimensions, making the case that these are the key dimensional relationships we want to address in this context in this project.  But the third dimension of the context remains, and truth be told, it influences how you really want to think about the two dimensions I focused on.  Crenshaw pushes against that simplification and seeks to "embrace the complexities of compoundedness" (p 166). 

One of the decisions she cites (DeGraffenreid v General Motors) explicitly raises the specter of this compoundedness: "'The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box'" (p 142). Pandora's Box. It is always a problem. It is an instant end to an argument.  Too much complexity, or just too much period.  What if you turn the tables.  Pandora's Box is just fine.  It represents the richness of experience.  What if the task is to live in a world overfilling with all that is released.  Well, actually not released.  It's always there.  My two-dimensional and three-dimensional axes just tame it momentarily. 

Obviously, one needs these simplifications in order to even have coherent language, let alone make a decision or take an action.  But what if one's attitude is that the fine axial dimensions of analysis are a temporary step out of the flurry of Pandoran reality, into which you need to step back in, to experience more and learn more. As I've started thinking about CRT, as you deal with the issues of justice and restoration that it entails, the exciting part is how it blows open the rigidity of any categorization and universalization.  The compounds keep permutating. 

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:1, 139-167

   

Harvey on Neo-Liberalism

Neo-liberalism is a term that kept coming up last year.  Often it seemed like an overly simple explanation or accusation.  The AAUP criticized PSU administrative actions as driven by neo-liberal ideology, which didn't seem like a particularly accurate explanation (some of the issues had to do with very rigid embedded financial arrangements for administration that were decidedly non-responsive to anything like a market signal), and didn't help much in identifying what should be done. I've pretty well lived through neo-liberalism, watching market-based approaches to government come in during the Carter years in the Washington bureaucracy where my father and neighbors worked, and then living through each step of its progress. Still, I figured I should spend some time to think about some more, hence a run through David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).  

The fundamental idea is that market mechanisms are better than planning, therefore the government should turn over everything it can to the private sector, relax regulation on capital, businesses, and resource exploitation, permit frictionless capital flows between nations, and promote the freest trade possible. Its leading figures were Thatcher and Reagan, followed by many others in the US, UK and elsewhere. 

All of my working career has occurred during this period, so I take much of it for granted as just representing the system we live in. My job is typically to help institutions figure out how to do the best for themselves and their stakeholders under these conditions.  I don't see great opportunities for a single institution to decide it is going to play by different rules, although this is precisely why I want to come up with models that are not premised on resource growth. 

I have to admit, I'm soft on markets.  I think they have their place--and not a small place--and they have been with us a very long time.  The alternatives in history--say a feudal system of mutual economic obligations--are not better. 

The last 40 years have unquestionably seen government force services into market-based mechanisms where they don't work .  For example, by and large we don't set up markets for the armed forces, but where we've moved towards private contractors it moves quickly into criminality. We haven't had great success with market systems for a road system--even in the Seattle area, surge pricing for highway tolls has been a huge flop. Few of the conditions for a competitive market could be met in these area.  Healthcare sucks as market-based as we are--consumers/citizens can't effectively shop.  

Garbage pickup may work OK under a market.  When I was a kid, the sanitation crews were full-time government jobs, and you recognized the guys on the trucks jumping off to empty the cans into the truck.  Now garbage service is outsourced to private contractors with much more capital intensive operations--specialized trucks with long arms pick up standardized receptacles, humans rarely touch the cans. Let's assume it is cheaper.  While the loss of solid government jobs is harmful to the community, I'm not sure it makes sense for society to dedicate more resources than necessary to this function. 

With universities, there is a market.  No one really is interested in monolithic government provision of education--we have lots of diversity, even within the public university sector, and a valuable private non-profit sector exists and is still seen as having value. So greater market emphasis in public sector higher ed creates new challenges, but doesn't result in pure dysfunction the way it does say in prisons.  

One interesting thing this year is that we did not talk or read much about class.  Harvey talks about class, and the need for "a rejuvenated class politics," but his concept of class seems more positional than functional--he makes reference to multiple classes, who seem defined by where they fall in an income distribution.  There are also references to the "ruling class" but I did not see a definition of that.  I see class as being defined by a specific relationship to political power and the means of production and wealth generation.  In this case, the ruling class would be those people who by virtue of wealth and other factors are in a position to wield power and control the economy, and there would be a small number of other classes defined by their relationship to those factors and to the ruling class--one formulation is working class, subsumed class (or classes), and perhaps an utterly dispossessed group. One of my assignments for myself for this summer is to get to a book that has been on my shelf a long time, Resnick and Wolff's Knowledge and Class (1987), which I've always understood addresses just these sort of definitions.   

Harvey talks about Neoliberalism being a departure from Embedded Liberalism, but I don't see him treating the period pre-1976 as a golden era. These regimes were the ones that brought you nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, and were the object of Marcuse's critique.  In my sector, higher education, there does seem to be some interest in going back to an old way, in which most of the costs of public education were picked up by state appropriations, and public institutions were assigned defined geographic and programmatic areas, insulated from competition.  Some movement towards de-privatizing public higher ed funding might be possible--Biden seems to want to go there, but I'm not sure he will get anything past Congress. It doesn't seem like a clock you can turn back. So I think you go forward with competition and markets, but perhaps different configurations of the entities in the market and different regulation of the markets. 

The 2005 pub date of the book comes out a few ways.  Some of his predictions about the weakness of the neo-liberal order don't seem to have some to pass--China for one continues to be able to adapt and stay one step ahead of its structural issues.  But what is the timeline required? The problem of tech monopolies was not as visible then.  Today, in these hugely important sectors, more competition not less would be good.  And I don't think I want to see government confiscation of social networks--you could argue you've seen that in China. He actually does a good job of identifying the inclination of neo-liberalism towards authoritarianism--the tendency was visible enough in Bush and Cheney and the doctrine of the unitary executive--but now that has emerged full-formed, and like any authoritarian regime it is not married to a specific ideology or economic program. 

My biggest question about neo-liberalism is the extent to which it represents a break from what preceded.  It can represent a continuation of a strongly free-market polity that goes back a 100 years or more.  But there was a change in the regime of consumption--to use Regulation school terminology--from the Fordist period dedicated to increasing the wealth and consumption power of workers in the West, to the end of that and a regime more geared towards diminishing the living standards of workers. In terms of Skowronek's political time, there is a regime change with Reagan, raising the question of the extent to which we are dealing with political or economic changes.  Yes, they are connected, but they are different.  

Organizational Miasma

I couldn't resist an article in organization studies that has "miasma" in the title: "Organizations in a State of Darkness: Towards a Theory of Organizational Miasma" by Yiannis Gabriel, who is affiliated with the University of Bath School of Management, which also has Andrew Brown on faculty.  I wonder if I can find a way to hang out there at some point.    

Miasma is used here in terms of psychoanalysis, in which it describes "a contagious state of pollution – material, psychological and spiritual."  Gabriel's organizational miasma infects all those who work in an organization.  He bases the development of this idea on a case study of an organization that has gone through a sudden and disruptive transformation that threw out an established organization narrative, culture and people in favor of something meant to modernize the organization and make it more competitive. One thing I like about Gabriel's stated approach is that he wants to use trauma to develop observations about what might be considered more normal conditions, in tune with an approach to psychoanalysis in which normal behavior contains within it elements shared with psychotic behavior, and studying extreme behavior provides insights on understanding everyday behavior.  I believe the issues of depression and dispossession are very common, and not limited to organizations that have engaged in spectacular attacks on the previous order, or which have particularly mismanaged changes. 

It is also the case that a cult of change controls much management thinking.  Management and organization theory seem to presuppose the need for transformation of organizations, and elevate "transformative" leadership to the highest rank. I've lived with this most of my career in management, having entered business school in years dominated by anxiety over competition from Japan.  That anxiety has led to successor anxieties reliably. 

The characteristics of miasma are devaluing and objectifying the individual (employees and customers), absence of will to resist, self-criticism, devaluing the past, absence of stories and narratives about the past, feelings of inadequacy and uncleanness. (Gabriel p 1142).  He describes it as a disease that  "undermines people’s faith in their gods, their institutions and their identity" (p 1148).

Why is this happening--at the crux Gabriel draws from the work of the next person I need to add to my list to check out, Howard Stein, one of whose books is Nothing personal, just business: A guided journey into organizational darkness (Quorum 2001). He fingers the problem as misplaced faith in organizations as source of immortality, and people sacrifice themselves psychically.  "But the gods of the bottom line are implacable. They demand human sacrifices...the religion of the bottom line acknowledges no permanent authority, no human is too important to be dispensed with when his or her usefulness is over. This creates an ethos of survivalism – a constant anxiety over each individual’s and each organization’s ability to survive in what is construed as an environment of endless terrors and turbulence" (Gabriel 1143). 

Gabriel sees some origins in the neo-liberal shift of the 80s, but I think it goes back further--like Sandberg and Catlaw, I'll point to the secularization of religious values as an effective but problematic underpinning of capitalism as per Weber. I'm working on Harvey's book on neo-liberalism and will write on that soon.  I think that from a British perspective, the 80s are more clearly a watershed than in the US, where the move towards more social responsibility is something of a departure from old norms. 

One thing that is interesting is that if you are in fact a dinosaur and still engaged with traditional religion, you hardly see your organization as representing immortality.  In a denomination like Presbyterian, the existential threat is just over the horizon.  It is hard to imagine the denomination existing in 50 years, and one wonders what will happen to its values and ideas for what they are worth. Instead, it engages you a project of resistance, and asks that you commit yourself to actively build identity and institutions, and a place for God--physically, organizationally, socially, and politically. 

The description above about an environment of "endless terrors and turbulence"--that's the starting point for Marcuse, but now cast not in terms of nuclear annihilation, but a more pervasive and pernicious terror that is nearly the explicit content of the generally understood employment contract. 

The Quantified Self

In her work, my professor Billie Sandberg often raises issues around quantification and measurement in organizational context as an ideological act that merits critique, one of the key markers of a neo-liberal regime.  I need to spend some more time with her writing on it, and with theories of neo-liberalism that she draws on, because I hesitate on the points on quantification.  I think of quantification as being useful, worth doing in all sorts of contexts, and that quantification per se is ideologically neutral.  Even a radical or revolutionary initiative would want to draw on quantifiable measures for analysis, forecasting, and assessment. Knowing that I need to spend some time with this, an article she did with Thomas Catlaw on the Quantified Self rose high on my reading list.

In my experience, the most common form of this movement is in health and wellness data.  Think Fitbits, mindfulness apps like Headspace, or the Noom weight loss app. They all collect data about you, shoot it to the cloud, and repackage it in ways designed to help you achieve some goal—fitness, mindfulness, etc.  In many cases, the apps incorporate gamification—prizes and awards for achieving milestones—and a social dimension.  I tend to think of this movement as being a cult limited to coastal tech communities, but I have to admit I’ve been using an app called Strava to measure my walks and runs, and I’m connected on it with a few friends in California.  I’m not immune.

Sandberg and Catlaw analyze this movement in terms of “practices of the self, which constitute the modalities by which the self acts on the self” and as a contemporary form of historical practices of “self-care” designed to prepare elites for governing. The collection and use of information about the self to manage the self reflects a pervasive value of entrepreneurship—the individual takes themselves on a product to be developed, optimized and improved. Their research involves analyzing a number of video logs posted on the Quantified Self website (Homepage - Quantified Self) to identify the goal of the self-government activity, the ethical substance (the target of their efforts),  the means through which that subjectification occurs, and the methods.  One significant observation is that while the tools collect physical data, the purpose of the contributors is generally to gain greater control over their minds.  The vlogs also bring out that this is a very solitary pursuit, directed towards control of the self, for the self.

Sandberg and Catlaw are interested in public administration and governance, and come to this work as part of their study of the influence and ideology of technology and use of influence in government, but one of the really interesting things about the paper is that they are identifying precursors to a potential direction in governance.  “Though these highly personalized practices do not (yet) purposefully crowd-source data back into the cloud for state-driven big-data analytics, we see subjects who are beginning the process of self-governing suitable for precisely such governmental practice.”  At this stage in their work they leave open the possibility that these practices may provide opportunities for liberation, for “wresting our own mundane, biological beings from the relentlessness of the neoliberal market,” but the skepticism is apparent, and there’s some earlier work they did on the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive that I haven’t read yet that may provide more evidence of current or imminent use of these tools.  When I think of the Trump Administration, it seems more likely that that group would have delegated this work of information-control and manipulating self regulation to private sector ancillaries.  Which is consistent with privatizing trends that Billie addresses in her work.

One section of the paper makes a fascinating aside to Weber and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One of Weber’s major arguments was that religious asceticism provided a foundation for a secular, utilitarian value that elevated labor and self-sacrifice, through which a person developed themselves into an effective economic subject.  I found it very useful to see the line drawn between that concept and Foucault’s ideas about creation of the subject and self-discipline, and then for Catlaw and Sandberg to show how these contemporary practices continue and extend these foundational Western practices. Technology it would seem keeps making our society capable of becoming more intensely what it already is.

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

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.

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.