JOELGEHMAN.COM

One trend I’ve been paying attention to lately is the growing tendency for organizations to provide an account of their sustainability. In fact, thousands of companies now voluntarily report on environmental, social and governance issues (ESG). Of course, some organizations prefer not to be so transparent, either on principle, or because they’d rather keep their dirty laundry private. But in those cases where organizations are unwilling to voluntarily offer their own sustainability accounts, detailed ratings and evaluations are increasingly available through ASSET4, Goldman Sachs SUSTAIN, KLD and others. And in August 2009, Bloomberg’s 250,000 customers gained access to ESG data on more than 3,000 public companies at no extra charge.

Synthesizing these trends has led me to postulate what might be termed the “inevitable sustainability accounts” thesis. Love them or hate them, whether by choice or compulsion, over the past 10 years or so sustainability accounts have become a virtual requirement for large, complex organizations.

With that general thesis in mind, I was intrigued by news of the 2010 College Sustainability Report Card . In much the same way KLD rates some 4,000+ global public companies across more than 200 sustainability indicators, the Sustainability Report Card graded the sustainability efforts of more than 300 public and private colleges and universities with the largest endowments, from Harvard University ($26 billion endowment) to West Los Angeles College ($0 endowment). In other words, my “inevitable sustainability accounts” thesis seems to not only cover the realm of public companies, but also the realm of another sector of large, complex organizations: higher eduction.

Grades were determined by assessing performance across 43 indicators in nine main categories, including:

1. Administration
2. Climate Change & Energy
3. Food & Recycling
4. Green Building
5. Student Involvement
6. Transportation
7. Endowment Transparency
8. Investment Priorities
9. Shareholder Engagement

Among the 332 schools evaluated this year, 8% of schools earned cumulative “A” level grades, 45% earned “B” level grades, 34% earned “C” level grades, and 13% earned “D” level grades.

Of local interest, Penn State received a B grade as announced on the PSIEE website. A detailed summary is available at GreenReportCard.org. As a point of comparison, Cornell University, my undergraduate Alma Mater, also received a B grade. However, while a B grade put Penn State in the top half of the Big 10 conference, a B grade left Cornell in the bottom third of the Ivy League conference.

Given these apparent systematic differences between the two conferences, an interesting exercise might be to think about possible explanations for “grade” variations across the larger sample. In short, can we “predict” the grades these colleges received? And if so, on what basis? Just off the top of my head: location (blue state v. red state, urban v. rural, single campus v. multi-campus), average SAT scores, admission selectivity rates, endowment size, state funding, research grants, governance structure (centralized, decentralized, federated, etc), athletic program revenue, responsiveness to ESG past issues (e.g., recycling, South African investments, sweat shop labor, etc), characteristics of the top management team (”TMT”; e.g., age, gender, educational and functional background, level of discretion, etc), values of the TMT (egoistic, altruistic, biospheric, etc.), participation in the UN Global Compact.

Although this might seem like a relatively undisciplined list, behind each factor are theoretical reasons why variations might play a contributing role in explaining a college’s sustainability grade. No doubt reasonable people could come up with even more possible explanations if they spent more than 5 minutes thinking about it.

What factors would you use to predict grades? Add a comment or send me an email with your ideas.

Among the books I read this summer was Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Overall, I found this book to be both intellectually dense and spiritually sobering.  Below I attempt to highlight just a few of the book’s many insights.

In broad terms, Foucault uses the birth of the prison in particular, and the history of punishment more generally as a way of understanding society.  In some sense, the book is Foucault’s attempt to solve a puzzle, how in “less than a century… the entire economy of punishment was redistributed” (p. 7).  How the “penal style” of spectacle and torture came to be replaced by one centering on surveillance and the prison. Thus, the book centers on tracing the relatively abrupt emergence of “a new theory of law and crime, a new moral or political justification of the right to punish” (p. 7). But more provocatively, Foucault concludes that these changes in the “right to punish” have implications which extend far beyond the penal system. In short, the birth of the prison marks the birth of the “disciplinary society” (p. 216).

Again and again Foucault’s analysis links discipline and individualization.  ”Discipline ‘makes’ individuals” (p. 170). “The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals” (p. 211).  By discipline, Foucault is referring to an anatomy of power, a technology of power (p. 215), a unitary technique which maximizes the body’s useful force while reducing its “political” force at the least cost (p. 221).

Not only is the disciplinary society about individualizing, it is also about textualizing.  At the center of the disciplinary society is an “uninterrupted work of writing,” “an immense police text,” “a complex documentary organization” (p. 197, 214). “This turning of real lives into writing is… a procedure of objectification and subjection” (p. 192).  Thus, to understand the disciplinary, we must understand the individual, and the textual, and vice versa.  If I am reading him correctly, Foucault is suggesting that the disciplinary, the individual and the textual are all linked.

Speaking specifically of prisons, Foucault concludes that 1) prisons do not diminish crime rates, 2) detention causes recidivism, 3) the prison cannot fail to produce delinquents, 4) the prison encourages the organization of delinquents, 5) the conditions to which free inmates are subjected necessarily condemn them to recidivism, and finally, 6) the prison indirectly produces delinquents by throwing the inmate’s family into destitution (pp. 265-268). In short, punishment is not intended to eliminate offenses, but rather to distinguish them, distribute them, and use them (p. 272). Penality provides illegalities with a general economy (p. 272). If we were to continue this line of inquiry, perhaps we might go in the direction of seeing discipline and punishment in terms of moral boundaries (cf. Lamont, Anteby).

Perhaps more tellingly, Foucault asks: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (p. 228).  Later he concludes: “The power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating” (p. 303). “It functions as a normative power… The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge… [E]ach individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements” (p. 304). The discipline society is a normalizing society.

Foucault concludes that the prison is not subordinate to or the instrument of the law, the court, the codes or the judicial apparatus (p. 307). “It is the court that is external and subordinate to the prison” (p. 308). However, the prison is not alone in the center. It is linked to a whole series of “carceral mechanisms” — “intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort — but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization” (p. 308). In closing Foucault gives us an imperative, a warning, a question: “We must hear the distant of battle… of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society” (p. 308).

I just finished watching Lawrence Lessig’s fascinating “Getting the Network the World Needs” in which he first summarizes 20th century cultural discourses (i.e., text, photography, film, music, etc) as being essentially either Read Only (RO) or Read Write (RW).  With the exception of photography, Lessig sees the 1900s as largely passive and RO, and thus more or less consistent with the predictions of Sousa and Huxley at the start of the century.

At about 20 minutes, he gets to the heart of his talk: copyright laws.  “Copy-right” laws regulate the right to make copies.  He summarizes these regulations as differentiating between free uses, regulated uses and a thin sliver of fair uses.

For example, reading, giving and selling books are all free uses.  However, today we live in a network economy.  In this world, the use of copyrighted works implicitly requires that we copy those works.  Unlike the 20th century in which culture was passively consumed, in the 21st century culture is actively produced/created.  Thus, 20th century copyright laws + 21st century network platforms have produced a world of unintended consequences (ala Merton?) whereby the (re)production and (re)creation of culture entails de facto the violation of copyright laws.

One result has been a decade long copyright war (about 33 minutes into the video).  It is a war of prohibition waged against filesharing.  It is a war which has not reduced filesharing, but has simply labeled our children as criminals.  He notes that apparently our children do not pay attention to Supreme Court rulings, because its decision to side with the copyright enforcers has in no way deterred filesharing.  His working solution (at about 37 minutes) is a 2X2 matrix which differentiates between professionals vs. amateurs and copies vs. mixes.

Professionals must clearly have copy-rights if they are to have any incentive to create.  However, amateurs should be free to remix these works.  It is the intersection of amateur-copies and professional-remixes that Lessig sees as gray areas (are these Moral Gray Zones ala Anteby?).  In terms of the amateur-copies, what are the limits to how many copies an individual can make?  e.g., Can I share my “favorite” songs with my 10,000 “friends” on Facebook?  Where do we draw the line on copies by amateurs?  In terms of professional-remixes, at what point does an amatuer remix turn commercial?  e.g., If my YouTube mashup goes platinum who should share in the profits?  When does an amateur remix turn professional?

Clearly these are questions of value — and thus squarely within the realm of my research interests.  Indeed, it is the questions raised by these gray areas that intrigue me.  In particular, Lessig asks what does justice look like in a world where free markets meet free culture?  One solution he poses but then immediately criticizes is the Darth Vader approach to fan mashups taken by George Lucas.  In this case, Lucas owns the commercial rights to everything fans have created, even their original works, an approach Lessig equates to digital “sharecropping.”

Ultimately, Lessig concludes that the copyright wars must be stopped, and that we must pursue peace (sue for peace?) – through changes in our copyright laws.  For him, abolishing copyright laws is not the answer.  At the same time, he argues that in the 21st century the existing 20th century system of copyright laws can never work.  Maintaining them will mean either revolution or the end of creation.  Here he draws a parallel between the copyright laws and the Soviet Union.  For Lessig, only by updating our copyright laws can we save another generation of children from being labeled as criminals for simply enacting culture.

Over the weekend I finally had a chance to try out my Kindle 2.  Although I have still not found a satisfactory way to convert PDFs of academic journal articles into readable Kindle files, I am very pleased with the formating of books available through ManyBooks.net.  And while most of the content on ManyBooks comes directly from Project Gutenberg, one important difference is the option to download .AZW files, which is Kindle’s native format.  

So far I’ve downloaded over 50 books from ManyBooks — all for free – ranging from the complete works of Williams Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe to the Declaration of Independence and the 2007 CIA World Factbook. ManyBooks also offers a selection of copyrighted titles that are licensed through some flavor of open content license.  For example, I downloaded Eric S. Raymond’s (1996) The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Cluetrain Manifesto. Of course, it is doubtful I’ll be reading most of these titles anytime soon.  But with 1.4 GB of storage, they are now at my fingertips.

Of more immediate interest to me are about a dozen books by scholars such as Henri Bergson, William James, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and so forth. In fact, yesterday I cruised through the first third of Pragmatism, a series of seven lectures delivered by William James at the Lowell Institute in Boston and Columbia University in New York, between November 1906 and January 1907. And it is here that I began to appreciate the power of open content, in particular, the power of Kindle + Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks + Google Books. 

In Pragmatism, James (1907: 46) credits C. S. Peirce’s 1878 article in Popular Science Monthly as the first to introduce pragmatism into philosophy. Curious about what Peirce had to say, I first went to Google.  Dissatisfied with the results, I tried Google Books. After a few minutes of searching, I found Popular Science Monthly Volume 12 November 1877 to April 1878. As it turns out, during this 6 month period Peirce published a series of 4 different articles, including “How to make our ideas clear,” the paper cited by James.

Through Google Books, I downloaded the entire volume (about 30MB).  Then using Acrobat Professional, I extracted each of the 4 articles as separate files, ran OCR on them, added these PDFs to my collection of research on the philosophy of pragmatism, and created citations for all 4 in EndNote. All this without ever setting foot in the library. Long live open content.

Citations:
James, W. 1907. Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Accessed from http://books.google.com/books?id=7cIZAAAAYAAJ.

Peirce, C. S. 1878. Illustrations of the logic of science. Second paper: How to make our ideas clear. In E. L. Youmans & W. J. Youmans (Eds.), Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (November 1877 to April 1878): 286-302. New York: Appleton. Accessed from http://books.google.com/books?id=ZKMVAAAAYAAJ.

In tracing the concepts of institution and taken for granted in Husserl’s work, especially The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, I was struck by the fact that Husserl seems to clearly describe a concept we might now label as the moment of inversion (Latour & Woolgar, 1986).

Although moment of inversion is not a phrase Husserl uses, the concept is clearly Husserlian.  Crisis speaks repeatedly of the “art of measurement” and its role in “externalization,” a process through which the sensible qualities of an object are externalized and substructed, i.e., put on the surface and made to cover up, while the original senses are pushed under or buried. The result is an inversion through which idealities, quantities and symbols become an index to realities, qualities and senses.  A world of formulas replaces the world of forms.

We can even suggest a preliminary definition of the moment of inversion as: “The surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable - our everyday lifeworld” (Husserl, 1970: 48-49).

Citation: Husserl, E. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

One of our MGMT 590 assignments was to summarize a classic article or book for the class.  For my classic I chose Anthony Giddens’ (1984) The Constitution of Society.  The book brings together in one place an approach to social science - structuration theory (ST) - which Giddens had begun developing in earlier works.  In one sentence structuration theory’s thesis is that: Structure is both the medium and outcome of action.

Theoretically, structuration theory’s focus is on understanding human agency and social institutions, i.e., the social world (p. xvii).  For Giddens, doing so coherently requires that the dualism between objectivism and subjectivism “be reconceptualized as a duality - the duality of structure” (p. xxi; see also Cohen, 2000).  The result is not “interpretive sociology,” not “structural sociology” (p. xxi), and not “methodological individualism” (p. xxvii).

The rules and resources drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of system reproduction… The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality” (pp. 19, 25).

Methodologically, social practices are the locus of this duality; they are “at the root of the constitution of both subject and social object” (p. xxii). For structuration theory, practices are the central unit of analysis (Cohen, 2000: 95, 96), and they are always situated in time and space (p. xxii, xxiv).  For Giddens, one implication of putting time and space at the heart of structuration theory is a need to rethink arbitrary divisions between sociology, history and geography (p. xxi).  In sum, structuration theory privileges neither the individual nor the collective, “but social practices ordered across space and time” (p. 2).

Empirically, studying structuration “means studying the modes in which such systems… are produced and reproduced” as a result of the activities of situated actors (p. 25).  Structuration theory can guide such research by drawing attention to (1) “the routinized intersection of practices which are the ‘transformation points’ in structural relations;” and (2) “the modes in which institutionalized practices connect social with system integration” (p. xxxi).

Download Book Summary (52k .pdf)

Citation: Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

I was one of the discussion leaders this week in APLNG 581.  My discussion centered on Fairclough’s (2000) application of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to the discourse of welfare reform under Tony Blair and his New Labor party circa 1997.

Because this article was quite dense — both conceptually and empirically — my summary drew attention to three areas of focus.

1. First is the issue of genre.  Who has control and how is it framed (unilateral vs. shared)?
2. Second is the issue of discourse.  Who is present and who is absent?  Of those present, who is speaking and who is silenced?

3. Third is the issue of style?  How are the positions among participants related.  

Download Article Summary (877k .pdf) 

Citation: Fairclough, N. 2000. “Discourse, social theory, and social research: The discourse of welfare reform.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4: 163-195.

As it relates to memory, Edmund Husserl’s (1970/1954) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology differentiates between retention and recollection.

Husserl argues that “The world exists as… a spatiotemporal world in which each thing has its bodily extension and duration… its position in universal time and space… Perception is related only to the present.  But this present is always meant as having an endless past behind it and an open future before it… If we consider perception abstractly, by itself, we find its intentional accomplishment to be presentation, making something present… But in this presence, as that of an extended and enduring object, lies a continuity of what I am still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no longer intuited at all, a continuity of retentions, and in the other direction, a continuity of protentions… Yet this is not, like memory in the usual sense of intuitive recollection, a phenomenon which openly, so to speak, plays a part in object and world apperception” (p. 160).

For example, to understand the experience of music, we have to understand retentions and protentions.  Without retention of the just-played-notes and protention of the almost-played-notes, Husserl argues there would be no music, only a sequence of notes unrelated to one another.  Thus the phenomenology of music suggests that the present moment is not a single moment, but a continuum of the moment along with its retentions and protentions, without which perception would be unable to make something present.

In contrast with retention and protention, which make things present, recollection brings the past (i.e., a present which has passed) forward as an original intuition, that is, as an original experience.  In doing so, recollection gives intentional meaning to the past, even though perception itself (i.e., the flowing-static present) lacks such meaning.  Similarly, expectation is an anticipatory recollection, an intentional modification of perception towards the future as a “present-to-come” (p. 169).  In both cases, Husserl sees recollection as a rerecognition.  Recollection is an a-perception, that is, not a perception.  Thus, recollection is not the memory of a perception, but something else.

Importantly, perception gives us “only the temporal mode of the present” (p. 168).  In turn, “the present points to its horizons, the temporal modes of past and future” (p. 168).  While perceptions are the “first prefigurations of temporalization,” these “remain in the background” (pp. 168-169).  It is recollection (and expectation) that “represents the beginnings of new dimensions of temporalization, or of time and its time content” (p. 169).  These temporal dimensions are quite apart from the temporalization which gives to each entity its spatiotemporal presence.

Citation: Husserl, E. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Included in my stack of reading for today was Yakura’s (2002) article on Charting Time.  The paper’s primary contribution is the idea that timelines function as temporal boundary objects. As a boundary object, timelines are both plastic enough to adapt to the local needs of multiple interacting parties, and yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across interaction sites (Star & Griesemer 1989).

Below I summarize the key arguments of the paper:

• Measuring time (i.e., clocks) is distinguished from charting time (i.e., timelines)
• Timelines are ubiquitous and taken for granted in organizations
• Timelines rest on the assumption that time can be represented in standardized, invariable, context-free units (i.e., monotemporalism)
• However, time in organizations is characterized by the side-by-side existence of many different types of time, socially constructed out of diverse human experience (i.e., pluritemporalism)
• Monotemporalism and timelines are one approach to achieving coordination in spite of this diversity and pluritemporalism
• Timelines are visual artifacts used to render time (the ultimate abstraction) as concrete and visible
• Because of their artifactual quality, timelines function as temporal boundary objects, a nexus for interpretation and negotiation (i.e., timelines are both interpretively flexible and robust)
• Unlike other boundary objects, timelines embody the key elements of narrative: a beginning, middle, and ending, and a focal topic
• For good or ill, timelines cause people “fill in” or envision what will happen even when the future is uncertain and unpredictable

A few other take-aways:

• Organizations built around monotemporal (i.e., Newtonian) conceptions of time are likely to face tensions because time is rarely interpreted the same way throughout an organization
• Within an organization different temporal orders both unify and differentiate various occupational groups, allowing them to work in concert despite different interpretations of time
• Time and culture may be inseparable. A change to one may implicate changes to the other. For example, in attempting a culture change, organizations may inadvertently rupture their existing temporal order, and in the process destroy the ability for people from different orders to come together
• Similarly, time is integral to critical measures of performance and success. Changes to performance measurement systems may produce similar inadvertent effects (e.g., the implementation of Six Sigma or other management practices)

Citation: Yakura, E. K. 2002. “Charting time: Timelines as temporal boundary objects.” Academy of Management Journal, 45: 956-970.

One of this week’s APLNG 581 Discourse Analysis readings deals with the use of demonstratives (this, that, and it) in the context of spontaneous oral discourse between native English speakers.

The article’s main argument is that traditional explanations for choice of demonstrative (this, that, it) as a function of the proximity/distance of a referent from the speaker do not adequately explain the distribution of demonstrative tokens in natural conversations. An alternative dynamic explanation is proposed which accounts for choice of demonstrative as a function of a speaker’s personal stance towards their listeners, and the referents being discussed. According to the model, demonstratives provide an index of the degree of focus a speaker is asking of listener and in so doing disclose assumptions speakers have of their listeners.

Download Article Summary (19k .pdf)

Citation: Strauss, S. 2002. “This, that, and it in spoken American English: A demonstrative system of gradient focus.” Language Sciences, 24: 131-152.