Archive for September, 2006

I’ve noticed that I’ve recently been reprimanding a number of students for selective and partisan use of evidence. I’ve been finding myself writing a lot of comments like:

Academic writing bears a special burden for dealing honestly and explicitly with critics - we’re not allowed to disregard evidence because it’s inconvenient for the conclusions we would like to draw.

Or, more extensively:

Academic writing is a very specific kind of persuasive writing, which involves a strong burden of (1) demonstrating that you are capable of evaluating opposing positions in a sober and balanced way, and (2) making very clear and explicit distinctions between what you believe, and what you can prove. The authors you review do not all believe [x] - and, even if you were to cherry pick authors who did believe [x], the broader literature would not agree. You will have more credibility, in an academic context, if you begin with a more neutral description of the state of play - introduce a question or a debate in the literature that demonstrates that you are making a serious effort to understand all sides. You can then, of course, try to make the strongest case you can make in favour of your preferred position. In an academic context, however, your strongest case must be based on evidence and reason, not emotional appeals…

Like so many problems that manifest in student assessment, this one is at least partially iatrogenic. Earlier in the term, I kept receiving essays with conclusions divorced from whatever argument might take place in the body of the essay. A student would, for example, write some description of the literature on a topic, followed by a conclusion that broke with this description to say something like: “Personally, I never thought that [x] was a good idea.” No explanation. No evidence. No culmination of the previous analysis. It was as though many students believed that there was some sort of strange performative requirement, unrelated to the other, equally strange, requirements for an academic essay: somewhere toward the end, I must declare where I personally stand…

I tend to tackle this problem by drawing a strong distinction between what, for classroom purposes, I call a “stance” - a declaration of what the student personally believes, disconnected from the evidence and analysis used in their essay - and an “argument” - which, for classroom purposes, is an attempt to persuade the reader to draw a particular conclusion. Academic essays require arguments, not stances. Students must ensure that there is some intrinsic and transparent logical connection between the argument they make, and the structure of evidence and analysis in the essay as a whole.

The sudden proliferation of evidentiary sleight-of-hand in student essays is, I suspect, a byproduct of this strategy: students are beginning to understand that they are supposed to persuade the reader to draw a specific conclusion, but haven’t quite grasped that not all is fair in the academic version of love and war…

So now the task is to get students to cultivate a critical agnosticism toward their academic work - to persuade them to engage empathically and seriously with evidence critical of their preliminary conclusions, and to be honest about the weaknesses and uncertainties within their own position. This task is made somewhat more difficult by the low level of exposure students have to academic writing that functions this way: formal, rigorous academic writing is often perceived as too difficult for the early years of university training, and the most common models of academic writing and speech that are purpose-designed for entering students (textbooks, lectures, “public intellectual” texts, etc.) are not usually the best models for this kind of critical agnosticism, even in the best circumstances.

My personal preference, to be honest, is to assign more difficult readings that are representative of the style of thinking and writing we want students to learn, and then to work with the students to get their reading skills to the level that they can manage these pieces - I think, on balance, it makes the instructional task easier, and doesn’t cause the students to wonder why they are being held to standards that are not modelled by many of their source texts… Since I haven’t designed the courses I’m teaching into this term (and, even when I do have full control over my courses, often don’t have sufficient advance warning to change the reading lists substantially), I fall back instead on modelling what I can during classroom interactions, and writing missives like the ones above…

I received an email query about my conference paper which, among other things, asked:

can I ask what problem did you think you were addressing. is it the problem foundationalists worry about ie., how do we reliably/certainly ground our critique and/or our transformative practice??

I thought it was worth reproducing the question and part of my answer here (I’ll leave aside for the moment that it’s probably not a fantastic sign if my paper didn’t communicate what problem I was addressing… ;-P This isn’t the reader’s fault, but mine…). I took the question - perhaps incorrectly - as a question not solely about what I was trying to do in this specific paper, but about what I am trying to do overall - how this and other bits of work fit into a broader intellectual framework. I don’t think the answer I gave was complete, and I’m not going to expand it further here at the present time, but I thought it was still worth posting my response:

I’ve sort of shoe-horned the piece into the conference framework, which means that the introduction doesn’t provide the best way “in” to the topics I’m discussing. To step back from the paper in a life-project sort of way:

(1) I do have an interest in the issue of how we “ground” knowledge, but my intuition - if I can figure out a good language for discussing this, which is what I’m trying to play with a bit in the paper - is that this doesn’t require a move to foundationalism. My sense is that, if we think a bit more seriously about certain dimensions of recent historical experience, we’ll find that - at least at the Kantian/Habermasian level of very abstract categories of perception and experience - we can identify widely-shared historical experiences that handily explain why certain forms of perception and thought are so widespread now - even when the historical record suggests to us that earlier societies did not perceive the world in the same way.

Some historical theories, of course, try to do this sort of thing - but my sense is that they tend simultaneously to be too concrete - focussing on kinds of practices that empirically just do vary more widely than the forms of perception and thought the theories are trying to explain - and, at the same time, try to explain far more than can be explained through this kind of theory. I do think we have a level of quite broadly distributed historical experience that exerts a noticeable influence over what we do, and that getting a handle on this level of historical experience might be useful in a Habermasian/understanding-why-certain-political-ideals-resonate-widely kind of way - but theorising this (although I think it’s an important thing to do, and will cast light on specific dimensions of contemporary experience) also leaves an enormous amount unexplained - and this limitation needs to be explicitly acknowledged within the theory…

(2) I also have an interest in intellectual and social “fads” - these historical moments where certain topics suddenly become very exciting, and where the flaws of earlier forms of thought suddenly become very visible and easy to perceive. Again, my intuition - and here, too, I’m searching for a good vocabulary to describe what I’m after - is that these fads often have something to do with very tacit shifts in social practice which, since we don’t “think” with part of ourselves and “do” with another part, also involve small shifts in our concepts and perceptions. Concepts and perceptions, though, are portable - once we stumble across them, we tend to have a go at applying them to a whole range of other practices and experiences - and the more we do this sort of thing, the more plausible the new concepts and forms of perception become - because we’re effectively terraforming our social environment in their image…

(3) I have an interest in the way in which these sorts of issues make it easier for us to make certain kinds of fundamental mistakes (the sorts of mistakes we find so easy to perceive in the works of previous generations - missing obvious empirical and analytical objections to particular bodies of thought).

(4) Finally, I have an interest - which I’m currently trying to explore through a piece on Adorno - in the psychological consequences of the tension between potentials suggested by a very abstract level of historical experience, and more concrete restrictions on practice…

The other day, I stopped in to a cafe I visit occasionally, looking for a quick coffee. I placed my order, but background noise kept me from making out some additional bit of information that had never been required before. The conversation went something like:

Barista: “So, would you like WHZZZRRRRvroom? Or regular?”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Barista: “WVZZZZZZ? Or regular?”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Barista: “FrZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ? Or regular?”

Conscious of the growing queue behind me, and guessing that we were having some kind of conversation about the size of my coffee, I opted for what I thought was the safe, neutral option: “Uh… I’ll have a regular.”

My safe, neutral answer, however, earned me a startled dirty look from the barista. I then had to suffer through the scorn of the next two people in line, who both decided it was appropriate to look directly at me while saying, “Well… I’ll have the fair trade coffee, thanks…”

I returned to the same coffee shop this morning, to find that my autonomous decision-making skills are no longer trusted at this establishment: I placed my order, only to have the barista inform me: “You’ll have fair trade coffee.”

Yes sir. And like it.

Just wanted to post a few quick thoughts about my reactions to the Governments and Communities in Partnership conference thus far. The conference is divided between refereed academic papers and practitioner presentations (often combined in the same panel, but still distinct presentation types) and, because I’m using the conference to learn about regional issues that reflect trends at my own field site, I’m generally choosing workshop sessions that tilt heavily toward the practitioner side. I have therefore managed to miss many academic papers that would have interested me - but that I can also easily track down post-conference, when the papers are published… I may comment on some of these papers at a later point…

Still, I’m finding myself reacting to the academic dimensions in the practitioner presentations (which isn’t completely surprising, since many of the practitioners also have a substantial academic background, or are working in tandem with research academics). One striking thing, to me, is how many papers view “theory” as a synonym for a sort of classificatory device - so your “theory” is something that allows you make definitions that then make it possible to draw grids, or sketch points along continua, in order to classify and organise various empirical observations. So, for example, a presentation might offer definitions of a “network” and of a “bureaucracy”, and then report back on which dimensions of particular organisations fit into the “network” box, and which fit into the “bureaucracy” box…

When I say that this is striking, I don’t mean that it’s surprising - theory-as-classification-system is, I suspect, a far more common understanding of sociological theory than, say, the kind of theory that I do. I find it striking, I think, because I often find myself personally confused about what these gridlike classifications systems illuminate, that thick description wouldn’t illuminate more effectively… I have a very similar reaction to social scientific work that takes what are essentially everyday observations and writes them in an “algebraic” style, when there is no actual math taking place: I’m happy for people to use equations to model human behaviour, but I’m not sold on the value of taking something that could just as easily be described in ordinary language, and translating that language into something that “looks mathematical”, but can’t actually be manipulated mathematically. To me, this has all the disadvantages of mathematical modelling (that someone has to learn your specific symbolic system to understand what you’re talking about), with none of the power…

And yet, gridlike classification systems (and, to some audiences at least, “mathlike” renderings of essentially non-mathematical observational data) do have a visible power when they’re presented: people do empirically - you can watch the effect cascade through the room - seem to find it clarifying to be told that government agency x falls closer to the “network” side of the continuum, while private company y falls more toward the “bureaucratic” side… I suspect the power has something to do with the “collective effervescence” of the experience - with the shock of recognition that something that you might have noticed about your own organisation, or other organisations, but had regarded as an essentially private and idiosyncratic interpretation, in actuality connects up with experiences that resonate far more broadly.

This recognition of shared experiences is valuable - although, by itself, I’m not sure it helps us orient ourselves better, so that we can choose better actions… Among other things, I’m concerned that the widespread recognition that, e.g., lots of people are thinking about networks - lots of people share an aesthetic that experiences networks as energetic and flexible and creative and marvelous in all dimensions - without an analysis that helps us understand why this experience is so common now, can contribute to the juggernaut of unreflexive transformation… But, of course, I would think that… ;-P

I am genuinely curious, though, about the “cash value” of this classificatory approach to social science research - which I acknowledge is far more common than the kind of theory I like to do. (I also recognise, of course, that refining definitions and abstraction from thick description is also important for the kind of theory that I do - I’m not trying to claim that my approach to theoretical work shares nothing with more conventional approaches.) I understand the value from a corporate or management perspective: once you’ve decided, for example, that you want to decentralise decision-making, it can be handy to know where decision-making remains highly centralised. But from an academic analytical perspective - from the perspective of grasping a phenomenon, understanding it, making sense of it: are we actually any closer to achieving these goals, when we’ve decided how we want to classify a phenomenon?

But this question is probably asked from a fairly idiosyncratic viewpoint - it could equally be asked whether we’ve really understood something when, as in the kind of theory I prefer, we’ve understood its contingency: how it came into being, and how it is currently being sustained. To me, of course, a knowledge of historical contingency provides a means of orienting ourselves to action - a means of knowing something about the possibilities and constraints open to us at a particular point in time. On the field of historical action, however, grids and definitions - as articulations that help to ossify interpretations of our historical moment - have dramatic practical effect by channeling perceptions of the current moment into deeper and more precisely defined grooves… So maybe the question is more what the “cash value” is of a form of theory that constantly tries to swim upstream against this kind of historical current…

For the next few days, I’ll be at a Melbourne University Centre for Public Policy conference, ambitiously titled Governments and Communities in Partnership: From Theory to Practice. I’ve mentioned previously that the paper I’ll be delivering there doesn’t exactly meet the ambitious “from theory to practice” goal posed in the conference title. Looking back over my paper to try to figure out how to speak to it at the conference, I notice with some amusement that the introduction to the paper follows the form: “Have you heard about this really interesting and important question? Yeah - that one - the one this conference is supposed to be about? Yeah - I agree - that question is just absolutely fascinating… But I’m not going to discuss that question here.” I then spend my allocated 8000 words, not even answering a different question, but instead just trying to figure out a good question to ask…

For any local readers who might be at the conference, my panel is on Monday afternoon at 1:45 - PM Workshop 8: Perspectives on Communities. I approach this panel presentation with some trepidation, as I appear to be the first paper off the rank and, strangely, don’t seem to say anything about communities… I’m not even completely sure I offer something that could properly be called a perspective… We’ll hope those in attendance don’t have high expectations that the first paper in their panel will actually have what one might call a… connection to the ostensible topic…

My intention is to blog a bit over the next few days about things I hear and read from the conference (best laid plans and all of that…).

The conference program is available online.