894 Reading notes: SNA

Pioneers of Social Network Analysis

A social network diagram displaying friendship ties among a set of Facebook users

By Kencf0618, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The historical background of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is interesting, and Scott’s (2010) account is mostly clear. Unfortunately, however, Scott gets ahead of himself and backtracks at times, so note-taking can be a challenge.  Because he is less than systematic with sticking to his chronology, it also difficult to nail down exactly who did what.  At any rate, the main story appears to be as follows.

Harvard researchers of 1930s began exploring group behavior, particularly in work settings such as factories. They used sociograms to visualize these relationships.  These researchers also discovered the importance of “cliques,” small, non-kinship groupings that are personal and informal.  They discovered that it was productive to diagram and examine these social sub-groups using matrices and beginning to think of them in terms of networks.  They also looked at the relationships between members of cliques, noting the centrality or peripherality of members.  Radcliffe-Brown was one of the key theorists in this early work. In the later 1940s, Homans, another Harvard sociologist, began to synthesize early network approaches, as up to this point theorists with similar methods had not combined their efforts.  Using his synthesized framework, he reinterpreted earlier studies.

Manchester University anthropologists who were looking at tribal and village societies were influenced by Harvard’s Radcliffe-Brown.  But, according to Scott, “they sought to develop his ideas in a novel direction.  Instead of emphasizing integration and cohesion, they emphasized conflict and change” (p. 26).  A key figure was Max Gluckman who looked at African tribal societies in terms of how power operated to maintain stable structures or generate change. In the 1950s, John Barnes took the idea of social network as more than a metaphorical concept and tried to apply it in “a more rigorous and analytical way” (p. 27).  At this point, other scholars began to turn to mathematics and graph theory to develop more rigorous analyses.  Bot, a Canadian researcher studying in the UK, discovered the salience of network ideas and applied them to a study of relations between relatives, friends and neighbors in Britain.  She discovered Barnes’ research and the resulting synergy led to “a major theoretical innovation in British social anthropology” able to “consolidate their advances with further lessons from the American researchers” (p. 29).  Another of these Manchester researchers, Mitchell, was largely responsible for bringing in mathematical approaches, and he also emphasized the internal complexities of network relations, for example, those that involve “a transaction or exchange” (p. 31).  Thus, we began to see the idea of flow within networks. He also looked at the durability and strength of relationships within the network.  A weakness of the British model, however, was to see network models as limited to interpersonal relations and not applicable to general areas of sociology.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s at Harvard where social network analysis really took off.  Here, too, researchers had tinkered with mathematical approaches and now this approach was taken further.  By using SNA to look beyond community settings, they were able to demonstrate its relevance in a more general way.  One important early study, for example, looked at how people learn about job opportunities.

An interesting thing to note in this narrative was how many of the figures “discovered” ideas about network relations and network concepts without realizing that someone else had done, or was doing something similar.  Yes, some of them discovered each other with resulting breakthroughs and theoretical synergy, but it was common for people to apply models in various ways before linking up with what others were doing.  I guess it means that when there are productive connections to be made (note the pun), more than one brain will get there.

Interestingly, people in different fields are still “discovering” that network approaches fit their research interests.  I came across a TED Talk by Nikolas Christakis, a Chicago physician and sociologist who discovered that social network analysis showed interesting effects in the spread of medical conditions such as obesity. He discovered the relevance of the network of social relations in a particular aha moment in an early study and became obsessed with the analysis of social networks and their effects on behavior.

Networked: Some musings

Screenshot from La Paz, Latino community advocacy organization in Chattanooga (click for site)

The main claim that Rainie & Wellman (2012) advance in Networked is that social networks are changing with changing social structures and a more technologized society, but they are not disappearing.  In other words, we are seeing traditional community linkages organized around one’s neighborhood or church affiliation being replaced with linkages that may be more ad hoc and less tightly knit but still able to perform many of the social roles that human beings crave.  The resulting model the authors call “networked individualism.” However, “networked individualism is both socially liberating and socially taxing” (p. 9).  It offers great flexibility but demands time and skill spent in seeking and maintaining connections.  Furthermore, people place even more value on some personal, face-to-face interactions to complement their digital lives and selves.  Digital technologies extend social networks and allow more efficient sharing of information.
This reading makes me think of a research study that I would like to do someday.  A few years ago I spent a day volunteering with a community organization that advocates for the Latino community in Chattanooga.  A significant portion of the community are immigrants from Guatemala, and for this event, the Guatemalan Consulate from Atlanta had sent staffers up to help Chattanooga residents update their Guatemalan passports and register children born in the United States.  However, because many members of this community are illiterate or marginally literate, we volunteers were there to help them fill out the paperwork, even though some of us were non-native speakers of Spanish.  It was an eye-opening experience for me because I found myself working with a community that is doubly cut off from the larger English-speaking community.  First, they are linguistically distanced from the English-speaking majority.  Second, they are at least partially cut off from many Spanish language resources that require literacy that they do not have.  From time to time during my PhD program, I have thought about how interesting it would be to do a study of this community in terms of how they are rhetorically connected. For example, how do they find out that the consulate staffers are coming if they don’t read posters or emails?  Are there announcements on Spanish radio? I am sure there is also word-of-mouth, but where or how do they make these conversational connections? How do they know each other? What role do cell phones play? What are the centers of their community?  How do they share information?  What role do their literate children play—especially since these children are acquiring literacy in a language that does not target this community?  Rainie & Wellman focus on  networked people in the developed world, but I can’t help thinking of communities like this one that occupy many of the same physical communities that we inhabit but have very different patterns of networking and social interaction.

Inspired by Ch. 4: The Mobile Revolution

Reading Deluze & Guattari: Musings on French scholarship

Impressions of Deleuze & Guattari

Photo shot in Collegedale, TN, 2013

Interestingly enough I borrowed Deleuze & Guttari (1987) from a colleague after hearing Theories of Network students talk about rhizomes while I was taking Phelps’ class.  I didn’t yet know that I was going to take the class.  Because the writing style was so surreal, though weirdly not in the totally annoying way that the hypertext people were—or was I biased to like Deleuze & Guattari so I overlooked the fact that it is hard to get traction in this text?  At any rate, after reading Barthes, Cixous, Foucault, and Guattari (Three Ecologies), and Latour, I have begun to wonder about style in French scholarly writing and disciplinarity in French academia.  As far as the former, I don’t mean that these scholars have similar styles because they don’t.  They do, however, seem to have styles that feel less tethered, more sweeping, less step-by-step systematic compared with Anglo-American scholarship.  As far as disciplinarity, I keep finding French scholars who are very hard to pin down in terms of discipline.  Is Foucault a historian, a philosopher, a discourse theorist, a social scientist…?  Are Deleuze and Guattari psychiatrists, literary theorists, social theorists, philosophers…? I suppose the answer is yes. All of the above.  Latour is an anthropologist and a sociologist.  Castells, coming from the French tradition, is a sociologist and a communications scholar.  But British or American scholars don’t seem to have the same range, though they do, at times, changes departments or fields.  My functional linguistics professor in my MA program at UT Arlington, Susan Herring, now does computer-mediated discourse analysis as a professor of information science at Indiana University Bloomington.  Still, arguably that is not a big change.  So what is it with the French scholars?  Does it have to do with university administration or with tracking within the educational system or something else?  Or maybe I need to think of a few American or British scholars who range broadly.  W.J.T Mitchell?  Gunther Kress? Donna Haraway? Gregory Bateson?

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. S. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Scott, J. (2010). Social network analysis: A handbook. Los Angeles, Calif: Sage.

894 Reading notes: Castells 2

The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-Timers

In The Rise of the Network Society, Castells examines various aspects of network society, including in chapter 4, consideration of how the information society has changed the world of work.  One reason for making work a key topic is the claim that “the process of work is at the core of social structure” (p. 216). 

            Castells argues that a valuable way to trace the ways that information networks have transformed work is to look at statistics related to employment and occupational structures for a number of advanced societies.  For that reason, the first main section of the chapter is “the historical evolution of employment and occupational structure in advanced capitalist countries: the G-7, 1920-2005.”  To support the discussion, the chapter also includes a lengthy appendix where the data are captured in charts. In fact, before Castells wades into the data, he makes another rhetorical move, namely, to challenge the commonly held beliefs about how so-called information societies have changed the world of work.  He notes the predictions of “classical theory of post-industrialism,” (p. 218) to wit, that knowledge provides the key source of productivity permeating economy, that the economy will decrease the creation of the products of manufacturing and shift to service jobs, and that “occupations with a high information and knowledge content in their activity” will be increasingly valued (p. 219).  He argues that all three of these premises need to be qualified.  In reference to the first point, he notes that knowledge was also important in driving the manufacturing economy. Related to the second, although shifts have been conspicuous in advanced economies, plenty of manufacturing continues globally and also remains important even in  advanced economies. Finally, the shift not only fosters the development of highly-skilled knowledge jobs but even more the proliferation of low-skilled jobs.  It is the middle that is disappearing.  Later in the chapter he takes a more detailed look at the second and third of these modifications to the usual narrative, but at this point, he moves back to a discussion of the data from the G-7 countries. 

            His basic road map is to look at the evolution of each economy, to compare the relative importance of the types of service within that country, and to conclude by looking at the trends of employment as correlated with “post-industrial societies” by other researchers.  Along the way, I noted a few points that particularly caught my eye, for example, the fact that fast food employment is not as pervasive as sometimes assumed (only 4.9 percent of total employment in USA, for example) (p. 230).  A more striking feature was that Castells points to a fair amount of variation between different countries.  In broad terms, the UK and USA are similar, Japan and Germany are similar, and France and Italy lie somewhere between the two models.  In other words, the consequences of cultural, social and political practices in these countries have played out in different ways.  The usual explanatory models fit the American case more closely because the commonly discussed model, namely, that manufacturing jobs have moved off-shore and service jobs have increased, was a “theorization of the evolution of the US employment structure” (p. 233).  To capture one difference, Japan has maintained greater stability in terms of manufacturing jobs than the US.  Another difference involves levels of self-employment. Self-employment has fallen in the USA and slightly in Germany and Japan while France and Italy retain stable levels of self-employment. Self-employment has increased in Canada and UK. Again, the USA does not serve as a model for what must automatically happen in information economies.   

            The information society has made the labor force less stable and more flexible in many ways globally, however. Whatever the model—whether an advanced society looks more like Japan or more like the US—the overall principle is similar, argues Castells. “As technological and organizational innovations have allowed men and women to put out more and better product with less effort and resources, work and workers have shifted from direct production to indirect production, from cultivation, extraction, and fabrication to consumption services and management work, and from a narrow range of economic activities to an increasingly diverse occupational universe” (p. 243).

            Globally, labor has also become a more interdependent dynamic system.  In other words, for the US to move away from manufacturing, for example, means that someone else has to be doing it.  Each model has an “employment structure… [that] reflect[s] their different forms of articulation to the global economy and not just their degree of advancement in the informational scale” (p. 246).  Castells argues that this articulation of the global market means that there should be new approaches to analysis in order to capture “the sharing of technology, the interdependence of the economy, and the variations of history in the determination of an employment structure spread across national boundaries” (p. 247).  All regions and most countries are seeing an “intensification of labor mobility” and advanced economies are seeing pervasive immigration (p. 249-250).  However, human capital does not flow as freely as financial capital. International migrations are indeed increasing, but constraints apply.  Interestingly, Castells notes that “there is indeed a global market for a tiny fraction of the labor force, concerning the highest-skilled professionals in innovative R & D, cutting edge engineering, financial management, advanced business services, and entertainment, who shift and commute between nodes of the global networks that control the planet” (p. 250-251). 
            My brother Mike has been able to take advantage of the global market for these types of workers.  His experiences, in fact, illustrates several of Castells points in the chapter.  After a number of years working for Intel in programming and database management, Mike leveraged his Intel experience into job offers in Kuwait, Hong Kong, and Manila.  He chose Manila, working in IT for Deustche Bank.  This also illustrates the role of multinationals as an example of growing interdependence of labor across global networks, one of three ways that Castells mentions that global labor is moving across and affecting workers across national boundaries.  The other two manifestations Castells mentions are international trade and its impacts across countries “both in the North and in the South” (think outsourcing, for example), and global competition and flexible management with its impact in countries (p. 251).  While my brother Mike worked in Manila, he decided to try to start a business in the Philippines developing Smart Phone apps, taking advantage of the same low labor costs that are attracting outsourcing to the Philippines. For various reasons, this venture did not succeed, so Mike moved on to a contract job for Intel in Malaysia.  Since then, he has worked in Berkeley, California, and from the beach in Puerto Rico, both as a private contractor whose skills are in demand and who can work from anywhere he has a good internet connection. 

Satellite internet connection makes office on beach a possibility

Mike working, Rincón, Puerto Rico, December 2015 

A key theme for Castells, however, is that the flexibility of markets offered by information networks actually has a powerful effect on the internal labor market within advanced economies.  Castells notes that “while America is an extreme case of income inequality and declining real wages among the industrialized nations, its evolution is significant because it does represent the flexible labor market model at which most European nations, and certainly European firms, are aiming” (p. 299).  In other words, it is precisely the fluidity within the global labor market that has created an hourglass-shaped polarization in the United States.  In fact, the process is not always a matter of simply adding low-paid, service jobs at the bottom of the pay scale.  It turns out that the “managerial/professional labor force” is growing faster than the class of “semi-skilled service workers” in the US.  However, skill level is obscured by the fact that these jobs may be clerical and sales jobs that are also not highly skilled and not necessarily well-paid. “Thus, while there are certainly signs of social and economic polarization in advanced societies, they do not take the form of divergent paths in the occupational structure, but of different positions of similar occupations across sectors and between firms” (p. 235).  Technology has sometimes not decreased jobs but replaced higher priced workers for lower priced ones, effects with clear gender and race correlations: “while machines mainly replaced ethnic minority, less-educated women at the bottom of the scale, educated, mainly white men began replacing white men in the lower professional positions, yet for lower pay and reduced career prospect than those which men used to have” (p. 266).  Such trends were sometimes obscured when job titles were tweaked to sound more impressive while pay and benefits were unimpressive. 

Meanwhile, the countries that attracted manufacturing jobs also have seen the effects of the information society lead to dramatic internal changes.  An example that Castells gives for the second of these is factories in China’s Guangdong province that were populated by rural migration in the mid ‘80s and the 1990s.  I saw this in a striking way in the late 1990s riding a train across Guangdong.  This southern province has traditionally been of great agricultural significance for a country as populated as China is, so it was amazing to me to see a great deal of fallow land and overgrown rice paddies from the train window.  This was striking because in Sichuan, the province where I was living at the time, every bit of land was cultivated.  I remember seeing cornfields that were not more than three or four rows wide tucked into hillsides in Sichuan.  As Castells says, “In sum, the more the process of economic globalization deepens, the more interpenetration of networks of production and management expands across borders” and thus, the greater its effects on internal labor dynamics within each country (p. 254).

Yokahama, March 2013

Beyond the trends in terms of what jobs are created and where, Castells also looks at how an increasingly networked society has also impacted working time, job stability, and “the social contract between employer and employee” (p. 282).  Flexible job arrangements are increasing globally.  For example, Japan has been known for lifelong job security attached to employment in major companies.  However, Japan has a “dual labor market logic” in which “it has combined the benefits of the commitment of a core labor force with the flexibility of the peripheral labor market,” namely, foreign workers, day laborers, and part-time female workers.  In fact, women part-timers are extremely important in Japan, where the typical pattern is that women work before marriage and then later return to the workforce part-time after raising children.  Castells also believes that the lifelong employment will decrease in Japan because of same trends affecting countries like the US, namely, shortened work life within companies, age discrimination for younger, cheaper workers making upper mobility trajectory much shorter, and as a result, decreasing job stability. An increasingly interdependent global system also means that trends in one country can affect practices in other countries.  As a matter of fact, says Castells, “the indirect effects of such tendencies on the conditions of labor in all countries are far more important than the measurable impact of international trade or cross-border direct employment” (p. 255).  He goes on to point out that “this model is not the inevitable consequence of the informational paradigm but the result of an economic and political choice made by governments and companies selecting the ‘the low road’ in the process of transition to the new, informational economy, mainly using productivity increases for short-term profitability” (p. 255).  In an increasingly interdependent, rapidly-changing world, the lure of short-term certainty is likely to be attractive almost everywhere than long-term possibility.

References

Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

894 reading notes: Castells 1

What is the Network Society? 

The prologue defines what Castells means by “network society”, names Castells’ main themes, and offers a brief historical survey of how the network society evolved through the key events of the computer and information revolution.  I offer one quote that serves as both a manifesto and statement of purpose for the trilogy:

 “I believe in rationality, and the possibility of calling upon reason, without worshipping its goddess. I believe in the chances of meaningful social action and transformative politics without necessarily drifting towards the deadly rapids of absolute utopias. I believe in the liberating power of identity, without accepting the necessity of either its individualization or its capture of fundamentalism. And I propose the hypothesis that all major trends of change constituting our new, confusing world are related, and that we can make sense of their interrelationship.  And, yes, I believe, in spite of a long tradition of sometimes tragic intellectual errors, that observing, analyzing, and theorizing are a way of helping to build a different, better world. Not by providing the answers—that will be specific to each society and found by social actors themselves—but by raising some relevant questions” (p. 4).

One of the most significant themes for Castells is how the network society reshapes identity.  In the network society where social interactions may be distributed and associations unstable, identity becomes more elusive, yet increasingly important for building meaning. As Castells argues, “Identity is becoming the main, and sometimes the only, source of meaning in an historical period characterized by the widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural expressions. People increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are (p. 3).  The first volume of this trilogy, The Rise of the Network Society, appears to lay the foundation for investigation of identity that Castells is also keenly interested in.  Due to the daunting size of the books, I don’t know if I will get around to reading the second volume, but I do think the ideas that Castells raises are worth investigating.

Network Society made visible

Family reunion, Iowa, 2013

An ANT View of Chapter 1: The Information Technology Revolution

As I read chapter 1, the thoroughness with which Castells traced the connections reminded me of Actor Network Theory.  Latour (2005) emphasizes the importance of noticing where things are made.  For example, he proposes that “whenever anyone speaks of a ‘system,’ a ‘global feature’, a ‘structure’, a ‘society’, an ‘empire’, a ‘world economy’, an ‘organization’, the first ANT reflex should be to ask: ‘In which building? In which bureau? Through which corridor is it accessible?” (p. 183)  Castells also seems aware of the importance of delineating where things happened.  He talks about where were things made (i.e. laboratories, garages, etc.).  Details of place were not the only details that Castells includes that reminded me of the sorts of things that ANT notices.  He also discusses some meetings that mattered.  He describes the influence of key individuals.  He traces inventions and ideas and connects them to their effects.  This includes the invention of the transistor, integrated circuit, and silicon chips, development of computers, creation and development of internet, development of networks, fiber optics, and biotechnology breakthroughs.

He talks about what human interactions came together to make things happen.  He notes where humans and objects/ideas came together to make things happen.  For example, telling the standardization story is important for understanding how details can matter.  That is, Castells talks about the development of HTML, TCP/IP protocols, and URLs, all of which were influential in allowing computers to find each other and communicate.  This standardization was essential for generating the distributed and cooperative development of the internet as we know it.

In broad terms, some of these factors that came together to bring about the information technology revolution, include “key sources of talent” from France and Germany, “scientific discoveries” that “originated in England, France, Germany, and Italy,” particularly related to electronics and biology, “the ingenuity of Japanese companies” which has been “critical in the improvement of manufacturing processes,” and the key role of California as a hotbed of electronics innovation in the 1970s, driven by a juxtaposition of several factors—individual pioneers who settled there, the development of companies, relationships with universities such as Stanford and Berkeley, San Francisco visual creativity, and the momentum synergized by all of these, attracting talent from many countries (p. 61-66). 

Interestingly, in most countries electronics industries have developed in the same locations where heavy industries had flourished in earlier periods.  The USA is distinctive in that Silicon Valley was not previously a manufacturing center.  In other places the role of the state is important, such as in Japan.  A point that Castells makes is that social development can’t be assumed to operate in the same ways everywhere.  However, it is important for several ingredients to come together to create synergy.  That is, Castells notes that “the metropolitan character of most sites of information technology revolution around the world seems to indicate that the critical ingredient in its development is not the newness of the institutional and cultural setting, but its ability to generate synergy on the basis of knowledge and information, directly related to industrial production and commercial applications” (p. 67).
One other thing that I drew from this whole discussion is that the network society is not placeless. It is, in fact, situated in material ways.  Of course, throughout the information network, there are also actual things—not everything is “virtual” in the sense of not being real.  Even wi-fi and 3G signals exist in the world in ways that are tangible for all their invisibility. 

Synergy illustrated

Display from Hillsboro, Oregon exhibit

Photographed in 2005

To conclude my summary of the chapter, the foundations of the network society are:

• First, “that information is raw material” which acts on information itself.  Information was important in the Industrial Revolution—but it acted on technology.
•  Second, it is pervasive because information “is an integral part of all human activity” (p. 70).
• Third, “networking logic” is acts to “structure the unstructured while preserving flexibility” (p. 71).
• Fourth, flexibility is a core value: “what is distinctive to the configuration of the new technological paradigm is its ability to refigure, a decisive feature in a society characterized by constant change and organizational fluidity” (p. 71).
•  Fifth, things are become increasingly integrated into one system that subsumes everything. “Thus, micro-electronics, telecommunications, opto-electronics, and computers are now integrated into information systems” (p. 72).  I think of my cell phone.  When I traveled, I used to carry a cell phone, a camera, a laptop, books, pens, notebook, a map, a Sudoku book… Now I could, and increasingly do, just take my smart phone. 
• Next step, nanotechnology. Biological and micro-electronic integration (p. 72).

Who is Manuel Castells?

Looking for more information about Manuel Castells, I found an interesting trivia item about him on Wikipedia.  Apparently, the  “the 2000–2014 research survey of the Social Sciences Citation Index ranks him as the world’s fifth most-cited social science scholar, and the foremost-cited communication scholar.” (This is an interesting claim, but I couldn’t help wondering if the list of communication scholars included McLuhan and Ong.  Also, I would like to know who the top four most cited social science scholars are.  I would put money on Foucault, at least.)  An interesting biographical about Castells that came up in several sources was that Castells earned his degrees in France after being driven from Spain as a university student because his anti-fascist beliefs would have gotten him arrested.  After receiving his doctorate in sociology from the University of Paris, he taught in France and at two institutions in the United States, namely UC Berkeley, in sociology, and USC, in communications. 

It is easy to find interviews of Castells online.  In fact, the introduction to one interview (Rantanen, 2005) notes that each month Castells averages one media interview and one keynote speech somewhere in the world.  Incidentally, this author also noted that Castells had given more than 300 papers in 43 countries.  In an interview at Berkeley (Kreisler, 2001), Castells talked about how the idea of social change drew him to sociology as a discipline, partly motivated by his politicization in Spain as a teenager.  He says, “I was driven to the necessity for social change, first in Spain and then later in France.”  In this interview he also talked about how a desire to do more grounded, empirical research led him to Berkeley.  “In 1979, after I had been professor in Paris for twelve years, I accepted a professorship in Berkeley. One of the main reasons that I moved to Berkeley is that what I really was interested in was combining empirical research with theorizing.”  French scholars are more interested in theory whereas Castells found America almost too empirical.  Castells wanted to bring the two together.  “What I think is central in my intellectual activity is that I do what some people have called ‘grounded theory.’ That is, I literally cannot think without observing and understanding what's going on in the world.”  In his (2005) interview with Rantanen, Castells also brings up methodology.  “I think that the now fading mania of deconstructing and reconstructing, in fact playing with words, has seriously damaged our understanding of the world at a critical time. Now that we seem to have survived this fashion, it is time to get back to serious work, hoping that one generation of students has not been lost.”

Castells interviewed at UC Berkeley in 2001

Another theme that I found interesting from the interviews involved Castells’ theoretical orientation.   He was originally a Marxist but later moved in different directions.  He told Rantanen (2005), “I ceased to be a Marxist when I realized that most of the questions I was interested in could not be understood by using Marxism. I could not understand, for example, gender, urban social movements, the differences between nationalities and languages by using class as my sole analytical tool.” He goes further. “For me class is the least fruitful way to look at social change nowadays... But I am still interested in social change, power relations and technology, which are all Marxist concerns. In the early 1960s we were anarchists. If I had to choose now which to oppose, capital or the state, I would still say the state.”  In an interview when he received Norway’s Holberg Prize, Castells emphasizes his persistent interest in power relations.  Asked what themes were most important over the course of his career, Castells answered, “My analysis of power. This has been the overarching theme I have studied in my works, in many contexts and in different domains of society. Power in the city. Power in and by information technology. Power in globalization. Communication power, that is the power and counterpower built in the media and in the Internet networks.”

I found the biographical information on Castells and information about his intellectual influences helpful in understanding the ideas in his book.  There were a few things that were interesting to me because of my own research interests that did not relate to the network society—like Castells ideas on disciplinarity.  It is perhaps not surprising that a scholar who has moved from one field to another after becoming well-known as a scholar would not place too much emphasis on discipline, but in fact, Castells finds disciplines problematic.  As he told Rantanen (2005), “The disciplinary boundaries are extremely damaging. That’s why I always found myself more comfortable in interdisciplinary departments. And in the end you really need to invent new analytical tools for yourself.”  I am not sure that I necessarily agree that disciplinary divisions are damaging, but I do find myself fascinated by scholars who move across disciplinary boundaries.  It seems to me that scholars from the French tradition, as Castells is, do move more fluidly across disciplinary boundaries, and this is something I find fascinating.  It also seems to align with the sorts of big picture problems that scholars such as Foucault, Guattari, and yes, Castells tackled.

Castells interview on Spanish television:

In case you want to improve your Spanish 

or just want to know what he sounds like in his native language

References

Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

Holberg Prize. (n.d.).The Holberg Prize interview with Manuel Castells.  Retrieved from: http://www.holbergprisen.no/en/manuel-castells/interview.html

Kreisler, H. (2001). Identity and change in the network society: Conversation with Manuel Castells. Retrieved from: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Castells/castells-con0.html

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rantanen, T. (2005). An interview with Manuel Castells. Global Media and Communication, 1(2), 135-147.  Retrieved from:  http://www.giovanninavarria.com/pdf_docs/castells/castells-gmc-Interview.pdf

3D Representation of Network Society

Global Labor Force as Network

                My 3D representation of the global labor force comes from chapter 4 of Castells, “The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-timers.”  I started with two models of advanced economies (Anglo-Saxon countries, on the one hand, and Germany and Japan on the other) as well as the developing world.  These were represented as metaphorical regions, although they are not, in fact, geographically clustered.  These are the three cans with the flags on them.  Although they are only metaphorical, within the model, they can also be seen as physical entities that are larger than nodes because each country within the categories has its own economy, labor force, and internal social networks.  Castells does not believe that there are hard and fast distinctions between these categories of advanced economies, incidentally, and I also do not mean to imply that in my model.  However, he did distinguish the Anglo-Saxon countries (primarily the USA and the UK) from Japan and Germany in the way that the labor force is allocated between sectors and the way development has proceeded.

The labor sectors are represented by three nodes connected to each can, three chopsticks inserted between nested cans.  These nodes are (1) managerial and professional, (2) manufacturing and (3) services.  Obviously this is also an oversimplification.  The blue tape connects the manufacturing sector of the different models, so that I could represent the fact that manufacturing jobs have shifted from the Anglo-Saxon regions to the developing world.  This is shown by placing wider sections of tape next to the can that has attracted the manufacturing jobs, namely, the developing world. Notice that this is less so for Japan and Germany, who, according to Castells, have maintained a larger portion of the economy in manufacturing.  The yellow threads connect managerial and professional nodes across regions. The number of strands has some correlation to level of exchange.  This exchange could be in terms of migration, say, Europeans moving to Silicon Valley, or in terms of multinational postings, say an American working for Boeing in China.  I suppose it could also represent possible outsourcing of knowledge work, but I wasn’t thinking too much about this last source of exchange and therefore it is underrepresented in my model.  The silver flags connected to the services nodes mostly do not connect to other regions since service jobs tend to be more localized.  Nurses and waiters still have to be physically present to provide their services.  I did put a few strands of gray thread from the services sector of the developing world to the Anglo-Saxon region to show that in the US and Britain, immigrants often move into the lowest skilled of these jobs.  The beans in the cans, incidentally, can represent the labor force in the represented countries.  The cables are supposed to represent the materiality of informational networks.  In other words, there are undersea cables and satellite systems and so on that support the internet, global finance networks, wireless communications and all the rest of the network society that undergirds the global economy which in turn directly affects how the global labor force is deployed.

Below are two additional pictures of my 3D representation.

894 Reading Notes: Neurobiology

Brief summary of video

The embedded video is an appealing feature of the content-rich online textbook (animations, unfortunately, did not work for me)

Research is revealing more about the mechanisms for neuron firing and in turn, adding to our knowledge of how memory functions.  New imaging techniques are playing a vital role in helping scientists visualize these processes.  One key finding is that new neurons do emerge even in adults.  Other research is showing how neurotransmitters work within reward pathways and how this mechanism relates to addictive behaviors.  

Interesting facts from the chapter

• I hadn’t thought about it before, but I found it interesting and useful to consider that the brain basically has three functions, namely, to take in sensory information, to process information (i.e. everything from reflexes to higher order cognition) and to “make outputs,” meaning primarily to control the muscles and allow movement.
• It is interesting that neurons use both electrical and chemical information, and that there are at least fifty neurotransmitters.  I also found it interesting that “most neurons release only one type of neurotransmitter.”
• I’ve always found myelination fascinating, particularly the fact that the myelination process around adolescence may be responsible, in part, for the critical window for language learning and also is implicated in some of the interesting aspects of teenage behavior.  Apparently the teenage years are also when t the fine tuning of the emotional controls in the brain is completed.  I once read a book about brain changes in adolescence and early adulthood.  These years and the toddler years are apparently some of the most important for brain development.
• I’d forgotten that, in fact, most of the brain is made up of other cells besides neurons.  “For every neuron there are about ten to fifty supporting cells, called glial cells, in the brain.... They perform many vital tasks, including removing dead neurons and debris, releasing critical growth factors to neurons, and acting as insulating material for the neurons.”   
• The chapter says that “a signal traveling through the brain often involves many neurons, each making so many connections… the activation of a single sensory neuron could quickly lead to the activation or inhibition of thousands of neurons.” Add to this the fact that for each moment of experience the brain is receiving a variety of sensory perceptions, making cognitive connections, and controlling movements.  Each of these activates different parts of the brain.  Impressive!
• I did not realize that long-term memory requires the synthesis of new proteins, though I did know that long-term memory involves plasticity which refers to physical changes in the brain.  I guess it makes sense that this would be accomplished through protein synthesis.  Incidentally, I had read about the cab driver studies before.  I also once read that illiterate adults who were taught to read showed differences in their brain scans.  Different experiences different brains!

Making new neural connections, Taiwan, 2004

• Finally, while I did know the difference between declarative and what the chapter is calling “reflexive” memory (also called procedural, I believe), I did not know that the two types of memory use different neuronal circuits.  I found this an intriguing fact.

Neurology and networking: Terms and commentary

(Quoted definitions from Annenberg Learner, Rediscovering Biology, Neurobiology unit glossary)

Action potential—“A nerve impulse; a traveling wave of positive voltage that is propagated along a neuron.”  We have been talking about what moves along networks.  In the brain, what moves is electrical impulses.  A lot of people believe that memories are stored somewhere in the brain when, in fact, memories involve the simultaneous firing of a multitude of neurons in different parts of the brain.
Hippocampus—“A region of the brain associated with both short-term and long-term memory formation. Also the site of long-term potentiation (LTP).”  It sounds like the hippocampus plays some role in directing and shaping how neurons fire together.  Perhaps we could in a very crude way think of it as something like a router?

Membrane potential—“The difference in voltage between that inside the cell and its surroundings.” It is the membrane potential that makes activation possible.  The chemical processes that cause neurons to fire are impressively complex.
Neurogenesis—“The formation of new neurons from precursor stem cells.” A particularly interesting finding in recent years has been the possibility of neurogenesis throughout the lifespan.  To put it in another way, the network is more capable of renewing itself than we had believed. 

Neurotransmitter—“A molecule that travels across the synapse and, by binding to the receptor on the postsynaptic neuron, influences its probability of firing.”  Put simply: essential brain chemicals.  It is amazing that the brain can work as rapidly as it does while being depending on the release and uptake of chemicals that cross the gaps between neurons.  Another fascinating point is that the brain uses a number of different neurotransmitters for different purposes.  I imagine dopamine is the best known, and of course the video mentions dopamine.  I once read a book about how alcohol and caffeine act on the brain and dopamine was a player.  If I remember correctly, caffeine doesn’t activate dopamine directly, but instead suppresses the suppressor of dopamine.  The book, incidentally, was Buzz:The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine by science writer Stephen R. Braun.   

Reuptake—“The recapture of neurotransmitters in the synapse by the presynaptic neuron.” This one impresses me, too.  Of course it is necessary to recapture and recycle the neurotransmitters to maintain the system.  A few years ago, I took a physiological psychology class (as a free class at my current institution, one of our employment benefits).  I don’t recall all of these details of the process, but I do remember that they were impressively complex, and it is interesting to refresh my memory of that. 

Image adapted from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrite#/media/File:Complete_neuron_cell_diagram_en.svg (public domain image)

Synapse—“A functional connection between two neurons where information can be exchanged.”  There aren’t too many terms that connect very obviously to the networks that we have been discussing this semester.  When we conceptualize a computer network or a metaphorical network, we tend to think of things connecting directly.  Ignoring the fact that all materials—even solids—are mostly made up of spaces between molecules, we have, I think, imagined things touching.  It is interesting that in neural networks things do not touch; there are gaps between the synapses which the neurotransmitters cross to fire the neurons.  I wonder whether this idea might not be productive in our metaphorical conceptualizations of networks?
Voltage-gated channels—“Ion channels on the cell membrane that will open or close depending upon the voltage.” This is another essential feature of the system.  It is interesting to think of the vast network of neurons that makes up the brain.  To consider that each synapse has multiple channels through which neurotransmitters pass is a whole other layer of complexity within this system.      

References

Annenberg Learner. (2016). Neurobiology. Rediscovering Biology. Retrieved from
http://www.learner.org/courses/biology/textbook/neuro/index.html

894 Proposal Round Two

When I originally proposed my object of study, I chose to examine a genre situated within an academic discipline because I am interested in looking at how disciplinarity constructs discourse and knowledge.  I am also interested in genre theory.  Therefore, I proposed to examine the genre of the academic interview. In other words, I have been considering published interviews of scholars, normally by another disciplinary practitioner and typically featured in a disciplinary publication, such as a professional journal.  When I started, I saw this as situated within the disciplinary matrix and thus, an artifact within a network.  Since working with several theories, I am now inclined to view the genre as a mediating node.  That is to say, I have not changed how I see the genre situated in a network, but I have fine-tuned my understanding of how it functions between other elements within the disciplinary matrix, or network.  (I don’t know it I am conceptualizing the technology correctly, but “router” seems like a possible metaphor.)

As I noted in my original proposal, I hope to explore disciplinarity and discourse in my dissertation.  I have been planning to examine assignment genres because I am interested in how disciplinary identities are constructed.  I imagined that assignment genres would not be practical for this course, so I chose to look at another academic genre that I thought would be important for arguing disciplinary values, namely, the academic interview. 

Why examination of the interview genre would be important within English studies can be argued from several angles.  Trivially, investigation of various genres remains a fairly robust research area within rhetoric and not much has been done on academic interviews, a fact that I learned in preparation for the second case study.  But beyond shining a light on yet one more genre, the study of academic genres adds value for increasing our understanding of how disciplinary values are inculcated.  Charles Bazerman, David Russell, John Swales, Christine Casanave, Paul Prior and a number of other scholars have looked at related questions.  Often this is part of an English for Specific Purposes research program or writing across the curriculum (WAC) initiatives.

As I have said, I started with the assumption that the interview is situated within a network.  Part of the reason for that is that I did have some exposure to Syverson and to the genre theorists, both of whom have a somewhat ecological understanding of writing—at least an understanding of the rhetorical situation.  I was also influenced by Bakhtin’s ideas about discourse and intertextuality, so it seemed axiomatic to me that there was a genealogy of ideas implicit in every interview. 

One thing I am less sure about now compared with my original proposal is that I then believed that the interview genre does not do boundary work because it is internal to the discipline.  I imagine that the impetus to do boundary work is lessened compared with some of the genres I have looked at in the past, such as the departmental website, but I do think disciplinary practitioners might argue for the inclusion of new research objects or make forays into other disciplines.  Scholars who are interviewed are often innovative thinkers who are probably even more likely than the average disciplinary practitioner to argue that neglected or new areas, fresh methodologies, and interdisciplinary connections ought to be explored within the discipline, and thus redraw the boundaries.  I might add, here, that I have not explored how—or whether—network conceptualizations might be compatible with discussions of boundary work.

Original proposal

I would like to examine interviews of key figures within discourse studies, rhetoric, and related fields as a genre that engages disciplinary discourse, and would probably be productively engaged through network theories, both because of its dialogic nature and because of its connections to concepts and influences within (or outside of) a field.

My goal for my dissertation is to explore disciplinary discourse and identity, probably through the lens of assignment genres.  In other words, I intend to examine how professors create classroom genres designed to mentor students into thinking as professionals within their disciplines.  For the last few semesters I have been exploring disciplinary discourse in various ways. I have particularly been interested in boundary-work, in addition to acculturation and identity. For example, several semesters ago I looked at three landmark documents in oceanography presented to the National Academy of Science specifically to lay out how oceanography should position itself as a discipline and what it could accomplish by establishing its boundaries in this way. Last semester I looked at how "new media" or "digital media" are being disciplined as new departments or within English and communication/journalism departments by looking at the boundary-work done by program introduction pages on departmental websites.  Because it is not practical to look directly at assignment genres this semester or to interview faculty about how they design assignment genres, both of which would require IRB approval, I propose to examine interviews (in professional peer-reviewed journals or similar sources).  An interview does not exactly do boundary-work since it works within a discipline for disciplinary practitioners, but I still think it offers an interesting way to look at genealogical connections within disciplines, connections between concepts, and ways that disciplines may be appropriating from other discourses.  It also can give me a chance to hear from key theorists whose ideas I might want to explore for my theoretical framework for my dissertation. This would be a bonus.

894 Reading Notes: Ecology

Unpacking a definition of ecology

Because I have been interested in applying the concept of ecology as a theoretical construct since I took Dr. Phelps’ Productive Theory Building class last summer, I started reading the Cary Institute’s information about ecology by unpacking their definition of ecology and applying it to writing studies in a tentative sort of way.  According to their definition, ecology is “the scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy and matter.”

I started by supposing that if writing studies is not scientific study, it should at least be a systematic study of processes.  Next, I asked myself what processes might be entailed.  Also, once texts are written, how are they distributed?  Of course, to be distributed, they need to be created.  Thus, how are they produced, shaped and then distributed?  What types are there? Why these types?  What generates, shapes, and guides the distribution of these types (genres)?  Next, I considered the concept of “interactions,” the next item in the definition.  Texts interact.  Writers interact.  Readers interact.  Literate activity, then, involves complex interactions.

Finally, I endeavored to apply the idea of “transformation and flux of energy and matter,” by assuming, first, that we might metaphorically connect this to Foucault’s discursive formations.  In other words, “energy” may correlate with cultural capital, with ideas, with, if you will, knowledge.  Ideas have consequences. Ideas are picked up and carried away.  They are shift and change as they collide with other ideas.  Ideas live at different levels and big ideas, like forces, can attract or propel many smaller ideas.  Last, “matter” in the world of semiosis can be, indeed, matter.  Writing uses objects and technologies, which in turn, shape what is communicated and how.  These are things that can be grasped and examined, seen and touched.

I also looked at the Cary Institute’s unpacking of their own definition to stimulate a few more ideas. They start by calling attention to various “unique” aspects of their definition, such as “a starting focus on organisms, aggregations of organisms, or systems incorporating organisms or their by-products.”  Organisms in writing studies probably correlate most obviously with the main organism at issue in all social theory—human agents.  Starting with a focus on human beings in terms of their “aggregations,” we can draw in ideas like that of community, of collective, or more specifically even, discourse community.  Looking at “systems” we might consider education and literate activity more specifically.  Looking at “byproducts,” we might then reach texts in whatever sense we wish to take the term, broader or narrower.  In any case, texts are inarguably the “by-products” of human activity.

The next point was “the bounding of ecology by both the biological and physical sciences.” I’m not sure that we can take this very far metaphorically, except to note that literate activity like ecology overlaps multiple disciplines, reaching from the general human sciences of sociology, psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics, to mixed or specialized fields like economics, geography, political science, education, literature, communication, and so on, and even extending, arguably to the natural sciences, at least in minor ways. 

The next few points can be dismissed with fairly quick comments.  For example, “the breadth of subject matters within ecology” simply reminded me that rhetoric and writing studies as conceived more ecologically have also attained more breadth than in the past.  Because I didn’t know the terms biotic and abiotic when I first read the article, I’ll skip the next couple of points.  However, the fact that “the relationships between organisms and the physical world can be bidirectional” definitely makes sense for writing studies.  It reminds me of the structuration theory of Giddens (1984).  Agents change society, society changes agents.

Applying the core idea of ecology to writing studies could be productive.  Again to quote, “the disciplinary focus is on ‘processes’, ‘interactions’ and ‘relations’ rather than on the physical entities per se.” I think that this idea could be a game changer for writing studies.  In other words, the focus will not only be on humans as writers (not process studies, like all those 1970s and ‘80s studies), nor as subjects with identities (postmodernism), nor on texts as standalone products, but rather on the flux and flow between multiple texts, between texts and world, between text and writers, between cultural concepts and texts, and all of the above as mediated through genres.  I think we can also embrace this notion: “The hallmark of ecology is its encompassing and synthetic view of nature, not a fragmented view.”  All in all, it was at least interesting for me to think about the ways that ecology might be a productive metaphor for my purposes, and this article was interesting to think with.

Some terms from Spellman

Etymology from Spellman (p. 4)

photo taken in Puerto Rico, December 2015

Spellmen offered a collection of terms that I may find useful when (or if) I apply ecology as a theory.  In fact, I didn’t realize that he offered a glossary until I got to the end of chapter 1, so my notes here come from the body of the chapter rather than the glossary.

• Abiotic—Means “non-living”
• Habitat—Refers to the“physical and biological environment in which an organism lives” (p. 14)
• Niche—Defined as “the role the organism plays in the environment” (p. 14), it is metaphorically linked to “profession” by Odum (see p. 15).
• Homeostasis—Can be defined as the “dynamic balance... maintained among all biotic and abiotic factors” (p. 15).
• Ecosystems—“Defined as a geographic area and includes all the living organisms, their physical surroundings, and the natural cycles that sustain them. All of these elements are interconnected…the major ecological unit in nature” (p. 15)
• Autotropic—Meaning “self-nourishing,” this “component does not require food from its environment but can manufacture food from inorganic substances” (p. 15).  An example is photosynthesis.
• Heterotrophic—Autotrophic components serve as food for heterotrophic ones.
• Population—“A population in an ecological sense is a group of organisms, of the same species, which roughly occupy the same geographical area at the same time” (p. 62).

The Three Ecologies: A summary

What is driving Guattari’s essay is the sense that overpopulation, capitalism, mass media and other forces have converged to create an “ecological disequilibrium” that “will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface” if action is not taken (p. 19).  The only solution is “an ethico-political articulation,” namely, the three ecologies, “environment, social relations and human subjectivity,” which together he calls ecosophy (p. 19-20).  This program will only succeed if it “brings about an authentic political, social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets” (p. 20).  Some consequences of the disequilibrium to which he is referring is that even communist countries have succumbed to “mass-media serialism,” that underdeveloped countries have seen “the long-term establishment of immense zones of misery, hunger, and death” caused by global capitalism (p. 21), and that developed countries have seen “chronic unemployment and increasing marginalization” of large parts of the population, along with “an exacerbation of questions relative to immigration and racism” (p. 22).  The hope that he articulates here is that “social ecosophy will consist in developing specific practices that modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family, in an urban context or at work, etc.” (p. 24).  At the same time, “mental ecosophy will lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries of life and death,’” which will lead individuals from the homogenizing forces of the mass market, media, fashions, and pop culture.  

Quotes I Like

This is a long quote, but for me, it captures the main idea of Syverson.  Interestingly, I first read this excerpt last summer, and I was interested to see that this passage had caught my attention then, too:  

“I would argue that writers, readers, and texts form just such a complex system of self-organizing, adaptive, and dynamic interactions. But even beyond this level of complexity, they are actually situated in an ecology, a larger system that includes environmental structures, such as pens, paper, computers, books, telephones, fax machines, photocopiers, printing presses, and other natural and human-constructed features, as well as other complex systems operating at various levels of scale, such as families, global economies, publishing systems, theoretical frames, academic disciplines, and language itself. For my purposes, then, an ecology is a kind of meta-complex system composed of interrelated and interdependent complex systems and their environmental structures and processes. And my principal question is this: Can the concepts currently emerging in diverse fields on the nature of complex systems provide us with a new understanding of composing as an ecological system?” (Syverson, 1999, p. 5)

The following quote from Spellman (2008) seems valuable to me not only because it captures a key idea about ecology as a science, but because it also reminds me of Bateson’s ideas from last week and because the emphasis on relationships here demonstrates why “ecology” has been a productive metaphor for some in writing studies.  

“Ecology shows us that each living organism has an ongoing and continual relationship with every other element that makes up our environment. Simply, ecology is all about interrelationships, intraspecific and interspecific, and on how important it is to maintain these relationships—to ensure our very survival.” (p. 6)

“We need to ‘kick the habit’ of sedative discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to be able to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of views of the three ecologies” (p. 28).  This quote reminds me of a political blog by Matt Taibbi where he traces Donald Trump’s current success in his presidential campaign, ultimately, to the dumbing down effects of television.

Which leads me to another quote, which I’m afraid will indicate my political bias:  “In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City” (p. 29)—and entire swaths of delegates?

A final quote on the same theme: “It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity” (p. 29).  The shrill and mean-spirited political discourse that we’re seeing these days made me feel that this quote was quite apropos. 

References

Cary Institute. (2016). Definition of ecology. Retrieved from http://www.caryinstitute.org/discover-ecology/definition-ecology

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guattari, F. (2012). The three ecologies. London: Continuum.

Spellman, F. R. (2008). Ecology for nonecologists. Lanham, Md: Government Institutes.

Syverson, M. A. (1999). The wealth of reality: An ecology of composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.