Essentially Contested Concepts

This is another cool idea, similar to the "invincible rhetoric" concept I discussed in my previous posting. The idea was initially expressed by W. B. Gallie in 1955, and then revisited by John Kekes in 1970.

Essentially Contested Concepts (ECCs) are "Big Concepts" like the following: art, love, morality, reason, nature, democracy, culture, knowledge, science, truth etc. The concepts are vague, ambiguous, highly general, and also highly valued. There is constant debate over the proper use of these terms, such as whether or not a particular installation of objects is "really art" or not. Very often, people will disagree over how these ECCs should be used. Each side in such a dispute feels that they are making the proper use of the term, but they are also aware that the other side does not agree with them on that very point. Nonetheless, neither side is prepared to concede the term to the other side, and pick a different term that better captures their side of the distinction. Instead, they go to war over who gets custodianship of the ECC.

Gallie described 7 conditions which together define an ECC. I review them here:
1) It defines some kind of valued achievement.
2) That achievement must be internally complex, with many parts adding up to make the whole achievement.
3) HOWEVER, there are several possible ways to interpret HOW the sub-components contribute to the end value, and these interpretations need not be consistent with each other.
4) The achievement itself must be adaptive or modifiable, capable of being expressed differently in different circumstances.
5) The ECC must be simultaneously used both defensively and aggressively - when you take a stand and say "art is x", you are consciously aware that some people say "art is y", and your articulation of your position includes an opposition to theirs.

These first five points describe what an ECC is, but they fail to distinguish ECCs from other concepts around which communication is merely radically confused. Gallie's solution to this problem was to appeal to history - to an ideal exemplar that everyone can agree to as an example of the concept (point 6); and this exemplar must also be internally complex, so that the final performance of the concept depends on the performance of composite activities in ways that are not clearly straightforward (point 7). The exemplar provides the indisputable shared point of reference that distinguishes an ECC from an idea that is merely confused, but yet that example too is complex enough to be essentially contested.

Kekes offers 6 conditions for something to be considered an ECC:
1) ECCs signify some kind of voluntary activity - they involve conscious human conduct and choices. Thus their essential defining characteristic can be thought of as either the activity itself or its goal - the means or the ends, or both.
2) ECCs are evaluative, and the conflict over them is value-charged, with participants putting great weight into which side will prevail because of the evaluations that will be implied.
3) The contest over an ECC will be in the interests of the participants, because the single concept being disputed concerns their best way of satisfying their needs and achieving their goals.
4) Like Gallie, Kekes states that the goal-directed activities that can be classified as instances of an ECC must be internally complex, with many elements each of which plays a role in the performance of that activity. These elements have certain qualities - one element must be something the agent does or has, and could stop doing or having without ceasing to be an agent, and the elements do not each have value of their own (they do not achieve a piece of the goal in isolation). Only the goal state is evaluated, and the constituent activities gain their value from that fact.
5) The component activities must be variously accessible - people will disagree about how significant each element's contribution is to the overall performance.
6) Despite all of this dispute at component levels, participants in the debate have to agree about the general description of the domain they are contesting, and they must share the core problem that prompts the debate in the first place. (This general agreement takes the place of Gallie's appeal to history.)

It seems to me that ECCs and invincible rhetoric are related - both are produced in part by human source-monitoring limitations. These source-monitoring limitations may be caused by general working-memory limitations, or as a side effect/pathology of our capacity to generalize across exemplars. At any rate, if we cannot all agree on how to weigh all the source components of the final goal-achievement, then we are likely to choose explanations that we like based on some extrinsic preferences or some general bias.

This has my Spidey-sense humming... there is some kind of shared pattern here...

W. B. Gallie's paper was in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-56] pp. 167-198, and in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. John Kekes' paper was in Philosophy and Rhetoric 10(2) [Spring 1977].

Virtual Teams, Distance Work, Silence and Resentment

I work in Distance Ed, and I've been working on distance/virtual teams for a long time. The unique problem with distance work/distance management, I think, is the lack of shared context. When you all work in the same office, you know when someone is sick, on vacation, overloaded or working to a deadline on something. So if they do not respond to a request of yours right away, you understand. When you don't have that contextual information, then when somebody doesn't get back to you, the reason is a mystery. You just get a sense that the person is unreliable, or thinks you are unimportant. Then you resent them for that.

Basic attribution theory suggests that this is a natural way to respond when lacking contextual info, but it is very destructive on virtual/distance teams!!

One way around this is to spend time at the beginning of a distance collaboration with everybody together in one space, to synchronize everybody's internal sense/mental models of themselves, each other, the team, the task and the timeline. Then you have to meet face-to-face periodically to re-synchronize and keep your collective "groove" fresh.

Here's something I wrote elsewhere on this topic:

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Advantages of Collaboration at a Distance over Collocated (local) Collaboration (Shunn et al., 2002):

On virtual teams:

- Info sharing can be more even (all members have more to share, because as a group they have access to more/more varied information sources, by virtue of being in different contexts)
- Wider influx of ideas, wider variety of mental models (same idea as above)
- Less tendency for groupthink, regionalism, conformity
- Asynchronous communications more thoughtful, measured and complete than live conversation, and better-structured for persistence and re-use
- Asynchronous communications tend to be more durable
- Collaboration of any kind involves a rhythm of social integration and then going off to do solo work - the "solo" part of this work cycle unfolds with less disruption when collaborating at a distance

However:

- Frequent face-to-face meetings are important, esp. at beginning of a collaboration (e.g. weekly)

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WHY?
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DISTANCE COLLABORATION DISRUPTS INTERACTIVE GROUNDING

Copresent collaborators can build the common ground that will sustain the successful distance collaboration, through dense and rich interactions.

In copresent communications, they can coordinate conversational turn-taking, respond to the precisely timed conversational cues of their collaborators, repair misunderstandings in real time. As a result, the mental model each collaborator forms of the other collaborators' communication styles, frames of reference, assumption bases and cognitive processes, greatly facilitating coordination during solo work phases.

Collocal meetings inculcate task, team and context awareness. "People keep up with information about the demand for their work in the real world, how particular tasks are progressing, what fellow workers are doing, who is communicating with whom, what equipment is out of order, and many other details of the collaboration that concern them directly or tangentially. Here we distinguish between awareness of the task (e.g. what steps have to be taken next…) and awareness of the collaborative team (e.g., who knows what among the members…). Developing and maintaining this team awareness is much more difficult in distributed teams than collocated ones.

Task awareness, which includes collaborators' beliefs about the overall project, including its history, current status, and future directions, is crucial for successful coordination. When collaborators divide work, they need to monitor their partners' activities for personnel management and to understand the impact of their partners' progress on their own work. This monitoring can help people determine when and which collaborative actions are required (e.g. whether it is time to nag someone to complete his or her section of the project). The granularity with which collaborators need to maintain task awareness differs depending on the nature of the task…

Team awareness, on the other hand, refers to collaborators' beliefs about both stable and changing attributes of their partners. Detailed and accurate models of each other's knowledge, skills, and motivation help collaborators assign tasks appropriately and solicit and offer appropriate help. Collaborators share beliefs about project roles and responsibilities, interdependencies among team members, the current status of each person's assigned tasks, their availability for interaction, and the like…Equally important, when team members are collocated, they can passively monitor activities going on around them and pick up relevant information without explicit communication… This passive monitoring of other's activities aids collaboration… [e.g.]members of a team pick up information about each other while training side by side, which allows them to allocate tasks more effectively.
Not only do collocated teams pick up information implicitly, but they also share a context that helps them accurately interpret this information… the lack of shared context leads to misattributions for behaviour, resulting in poorer coordination and distrust. For example, one member may send another mail asking for an update, but does not get a response because the recipient is on vacation. In a distributed team, the lack of shared context often led to ambiguity about interpreting silence, which in turn resulted in failures of coordination and distrust… failure to respond to mail was attributed negatively to the person (that person is unreliable) rather than to the situation (the mail did not get through or the team was on vacation). By contrast, in a collocated setting, vacation schedules and availability would likely be known." (Kraut et al., 2002 p. 153-154)

THE IMPLICATION of the first study is that when collaborators take the time up front to build shared cognitive models through interactive grounding, then they can better withstand the corrosive effects of distance collaboration, and reap the rewards of distributive work efforts.

THE RISK to virtual organizations such as our own is that we fail to recognize the strategic importance of building a cohesive group through real-time, face to face interactions, and so many of our distance interactions will be compromised by insufficient shared grounding.

REFERENCES:
Kraut, Robert E., Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan and Jane Siegel, "Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work" p. 137. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Schunn, Christian, Kevin Crowley and Takeshi Okada, "What Makes Collaborations Across a Distance Succeed? The Case of the Cognitive Science Community", p. 407. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

When you Hate the Job you Always Wanted

Okay, I finally found that article I was looking for in the first ever post to this blog. It's Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science Volume 15—Number 11: 787-793. They wanted to see how compensation effected the effort people put into a task. Standard economic wisdom suggests that they more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.

Their proposal is that there are two kinds of markets: monetary markets and social markets. Different kinds of goods and services may be associated with each market, but more to the point, the form of compensation offered differs as well. When you offer to pay someone, you signal that you want to situate the transaction in the economic modality. If you offer to pay friends for helping you move apartments, they may get royally and truly offended! However, stocking your new fridge full of beer and ordering in pizzas will be gladly accepted - unless you mention the price! If you do that, you are trying to put a money-value on the asset of having friends who will help you. You will, in a sense, be rejecting them from the social market, driven by reciprocal altruism, esteem, social standing/reputation, social network position, and all the rest.

They continue:

[This h]ypothesis...1 also predicts a distinction between exchanges in which payment is not mentioned (‘‘not paying at all’’) and those in which individuals are told explicitly that they will not be paid (‘‘paying nothing’’). Whereas not mentioning payment is likely to cause individuals to consider themselves to be in a social-market relationship, telling individuals explicitly that they are not getting paid is likely to cause them to consider themselves to be in a money-market relationship. Our framework predicts that not paying at all in the context of social market relationships can create higher levels of incentives than low levels of compensation in the context of money-market relationships, a prediction that is shared by many other accounts (Bem, 1965; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000b; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).

This means, they point out, that "Effort in exchange for no payment can be higher than effort in exchange for low monetary payment." Strictly economic rationality would not predict this, but strictly economic rationality has been slow to pick up on the impact of social exchange behavior on economic exchange behavior. I remember when I was in Fiji for awhile, and in some of the marketplaces where native Fijian businesses were predominant, there were signs all over the place telling vendors not to sell good on verbal credit! (I.e., a vague promise to repay the vendor later, somehow.) In the traditional Fijian village economy, the social exchange market dominates material exchange, and so a lot of the culture gives expression to social exchange values. In a modern cash economy, however, people had to learn to insist that business be business, and that payment be made.

I think some of us are biologically more sensitive to different kinds of signals of gain or loss. I for one basically don't notice money, don't think of it, would rather not think of it, etc. I care what my salary is, but mainly as an indicator of social status, and of how valuable my employer considers me as a resource. I love doing a good job, though. I love the recognition that comes from it, but I would far rather professionalize my work. I prefer to make my salary a background indicator of my social standing and status, and to then ignore it. When I do good work, I want it to be for intrinsic reasons - because I value good work, and because I have a will to constantly improve things, etc. I want to present my work to others, to discuss it with them, to gain recognition and to thereby gain social sanction to continue my apparently valuable work. However, getting paid for every product I deliver is profoundly de-motivating. I'd almost rather not work at all.

Weird but true.

Problems upon problems

So I'm designing an online course for some clients of mine, and I have a problem. The course is boring! I am boring myself while writing this course, God only knows how boring the poor students might find it. This won't do. I have to re-think my design plan.

There is a lot of buzz about using narrative principles to structure courses, so I surf around the web and my design library at home. Here is what I figured out.

We very commonly design courses within an overall "problem-solution" pattern. We describe some problem in the world that our students will face, and present the knowledge to be gained by the course as the solution.

I think a simple problem-solution frame is too simplistic to hook and engage the narrative imagination of students (or anyone else for that matter). There is no suspense. The solution is too pat. Too near at hand.

You start to draw on the appeal of narrative by making a very simple shift in your design plan. You heap problems on top of problems at the top-level of the design plan (sub-problems don't count, they have to be top-level).

For example, I was just designing a course for an online MBA program. The topic was organizational lifecycle analysis. My initial problem-solution frame went as follows:

No single management approach is good for all situations. The top management priorities for one firm might be very low on the list for another firm. Furthermore, within any organization, there is a multitude of different units, teams, projects, intiatives and so on, all of which may require different things from managers. The question, "How will you know what to do in each situation?" Organizational lifecycle analysis can help, in these various and sundry ways...

Basic problem-solution, not very dramatic. But wait!

Once you complicate, frustrate, or oppose this solution, making it impossible to attain the result right away, then your course plan starts to exhibit some drama!

...However, just knowing about lifecycle analysis is not enough. There are all kinds of barriers, structural and cultural, that can prevent you from bringing lifecycle problems to the attention of the management team, and further barriers that can prevent you from implementing solutions to lifecycle problems...

Gasp! The goal is in jeopardy! We have entered the drama zone.

For this reason, we will also study tools for overcoming these barriers, to solve lifecycle problems and improve communication on the management team, so that in the future you will be able to anticipate such problems and prepare for them, driving organizational change instead of letting it drive you.

I think that compounding problems on top of problems like this, of holding out a goal but then raising doubts about our ability to reach it, these create more complex problems that are more engaging, more story-like. They are complex enough to hold learner interest. Simple problem-solution design frames, I think, are too simplistic. The sales job they do is too blatant and too on-the-nose. More complex, story-like design frames with some risk and some challenge are much better choices - especially for online education, when the risk of having students drop out is so high.

Procrastinology

I'm still kind of hooked on this 2-motivational-systems idea... I am trying to figure out the conditions that will help me be motivated to reach short-term, mundane goals. Noodling around online, I bumped into descriptions of Lacan's model of the psyche. It's a tripartite model like Freud's psychodynamic model. The three parts are the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

The Real is inexpressible in language, and since the human subject is made in language, it is lost to us. Think of Helen Keller before she had words. It is a state of being driven by primal needs. In the Imaginary register, we no longer have raw needs, but rather a demand - the demand for wholeness, and thus the demand that the other be incorporated into the self. Think of Nietzsche's master-slave dynamic, where the powerful do not even realize that they are powerful because being powerful means you get your own (ego) goals met, and you never have to think to much about why. Those in a subservient position, however, are aware (and resentful) of the actions of the powerful, and they are able to counteract that by making the powerful self-conscious of their power and its enabling conditions. I think that Lacan's demand is like this bid from the less powerful to be like the more powerful. A bid for externally-supported narcissism.

The imaginary stage is all about image, identitifications, self-image, narcissism, ego-ideals, heros and idols, etc. Romantic attraction is heavily played out in the imaginary register.

The symbolic register is all about linguistically-constructed social entities. You are who it is said that you are, in all of the recording devices of linguistic society (including the brains of other people). Extramarital affairs are good examples of a conflict involving the real and the imaginary at war with the symbolic. According to names, to laws, to the explicit social understanding of roles, and so on, person A is married to person B. Person A has no business getting sexual with person C.

It seems to me that Lacan's insights could map nicely onto MacLean's triune brain hypothesis: that the Real could involve the lower "reptilian" brain and its role in controlling motivational systems, the Imaginary could involve the intermediate "mammalian" brain - the limbic system and its richer associational control over motivation, and the Symbolic could involve the highest brain - the isocortex in its specifically human configuration.

This point of contact might let someone interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis from a neurobiological point of view begin to cross-correlate the two literatures. The results might be interesting. New findings in neuroscience will be relevant for psychoanalysis, but mappings between the two discourses are needed.

I should mention in passing that Ichak Adizes, the inventor of a business intervention methodology that I have worked with in developing online management courses for Management Vitality, also uses a tripartite scheme that could be mapped to this triune structure. This is the distinction between what is, what we want, and what should be. Management teams can get into trouble when they confuse these three evaluations, believing that what they wish were true really is true (even though it is not). This can mislead decision-making processes.

So many ways to scratch at this itch. I wonder how to understand it all...

All of this flows from my curiosity around my own procrastination, hence the title of this post. "Procrastinology" was a coinage for me, but I'm not the first. Googling this term gives me four pages of hits as of the date of writing this post (17 Aug 2006).

When Pay Ruins Everything

Virgin post... what a feeling of freedom, and irrelevance! Do the two go together, I wonder? Are the relevant always burdened?

Blogging is great! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. You see, I suffer from an illness. You might have it too! Basically, my problem is my attitude towards work. My work is important to me. I like working and I like producing good output. I want to exercise my talents, and I have various kinds of writing contracts on the go that let me do just that. Those projects are actually really quite interesting - producing texts and documents that seem like fun to put together.

However...

As soon as I do this thing I enjoy (writing) for money, the project takes on all the appeal of calculating my income taxes. I just can't get motivated to do it! Rather than doing that writing task I have agreed to do for money, I goof off, doing other writing tasks (like blogging) that I feel more like doing, just for fun.

Getting paid for something you love can totally ruin the experience.

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many different investigators believe that humans have more than one motivational system, and these systems may compete in various ways.

One of these distinctions is prominent in social exchange theory (SEC). SEC distinguishes between social exchange and economic exchange. Social exchanges ares based on trust, mutual aid, the joint production of public goods, social networking and social standing. Economic exchanges are based on contracts and on the profit principle. It may be the case that some of us are much more plugged in to the social motivational system than the economic one. Sexual selection may have had a role in shaping that social motivational system, making it more developed than it might otherwise have become... Googling "social exchange theory" opens the door to this little world.

Other people define two motivational systems differently, e.g. a "hot" (emotional) and "cool" (instrumental/rational) system, or an "approach" system and a "withdraw" system. People for whom money ruins the pleasures of work may be more hot/approach types, rather than cool/withdraw types. We may have an insufficient fear of poverty, perhaps. Or perhaps the systems overlap each other differently - we don't get hot for instrumental gains, but rather for social status and networking gains, or something.

Of course, a venerable distinction in the world of motivational studies is the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Some of us may be so strong on the intrinsic motivation (e.g. high task-involvement and high control over our work) that extrinsic incentives actually ruin our motivation. In that case, managing people like us would involve surrounding us with the type of work we want to do anyway (which happens to be what our employers also want), and giving us enough money to feel important and respected (but not have that money connected to any specific task or project). Salary would be better than piecework, perhaps, for workers like us. Then we would need a social environment where we could distinguish ourselves, winning all of those social rewards (prominence, eminence, status, respect... etc.) which are the real things that motivate us...

This is exactly how the university system works, come to think of it! (Also possibly the entire country of France.)

It would be interesting to try to design or imagine a university-like company. Genetech apparently works this way: Employees don't get assignments, they get "appointments." ...Genentech awards sabbaticals to stave off burnout. To keep creativity alive, both it and Google encourage their scientists and engineers to spend fully 20% of each workweek pursuing pet projects.

Of course, blogging is pursuing a pet project, but for now I pursue it under the cloud of guilt. The shame, the shame...

I guess it's time to get back to work.