Review of “Bad for Democracy”
Posted on | August 23, 2008 | No Comments
In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.
American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism.
Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.
In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise - although thorough - counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment.
As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated - those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government - had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.
With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it - which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office - has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.
Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.
However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency - an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic - that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined.
We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair - where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election - with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency - which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.
As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.
Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a "Decider," as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.
The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities - a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government - the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.
People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.
In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:
Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.
The emergence of social knowledge - facilitated through the device of web based communications - is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.
Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect.
Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.
All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy - a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities - is not only a deontological ideal - a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable - but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.
In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:
Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another.
What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.
The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.
Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations - similarly to the starfish and the Apaches - cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems - or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.
The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations - or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics - possess a dual function:
Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog - a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public - in order to coordinate their activities.
Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection - those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards - we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.
As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites - which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm - following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.
However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms - the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity - the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.
Tags: Russell Cole
Tags: American Colonies > American Democracy > American Mythology > Behavioral Habits > Citizenry > Collective Representations > Colonialism > Continual Improvement > Dana D Nelson > Democratic Ideals > Democratic Principles > Governability > Historicity > Master Narrative > Orthodox History > Political Structure > Preponderance > Radical Democracy > Ratification Of The Constitution > Solidification
A New Gilded Age
Posted on | August 16, 2008 | No Comments
A new Gilded Age is upon us. The rich are accumulating vaster stores of wealth while those who work and toil to subsist are benefiting little from the current trends of economic growth. Wages for laborers situated in the middle classes have remained stagnant since the inception of the Reagan era, and de- spite assurances from pundits, run-of-the-mill economists, and Third Way neoliberals that the economy is growing and that these positive trends should benefit all sectors - both labor and capital - the middle class is working longer and harder in order to simply maintain its level of material existence. According to the mythology of the free-market, the removal of trade restrictions, opening both consumer and labor markets to American capitalists, will result in outsourcing to less expensive labor markets.
This process will improve productivity; thus, freeing capital for new and innovative ventures in the American economy that promise to generate higher skilled and higher paying jobs for the American la- borers, who might have been displaced from outsourcing, but through education the American worker will acquire the necessary skills to procure these more lucrative occupations. Therefore, according to the dominant socioeconomic narrative, free-trade - as well as unfettered immigration; both legal and illegal – will benefit all members of American society. Despite the intransigency of the quasi-governmental spokesmen - who assume official capacities as corporate sponsored journalists - who reverberate in a relentless chorus the preemptive narration of inter- connected economic events, there are a number of empirically unsubstantiated functions glossed over in this over ly simplistic causal model. First and foremost, the skeptical student will find little in the way of empirical evidence for the proposition that the capital that is freed by virtue of elevated productiveness will, indeed, be reinvested in the American economy. As globalism continues to materialize, the flows of capital are no longer largely contained within national borders. As it currently stands, there is a scarcity of research in transnational financial f lows. This, taken in conjunction with the fact that America no longer possess a monopoly on the creative class of labor, indicates that the displacement of American labor might not necessarily be coupled with the domestic cultivation of new occupational opportunities. Furthermore, the wage stagnation that has affected American labor, stretching back nearly three decades, testifies to the inadequacy of the supply-side model when it comes to predicting economic pa terns in the new global order. The adages and maxims populating the taken-for-granted rendition of th American economy, its processes, as well as its prospects in the context of emerging conditions needs t be reevaluated in order to assess whether these explanations and predictions still hold sway; or, better if they ever provided us with valid understandings of economic affairs with which to begin.
In concurrence with the onset of a new American Gilded Age, we are witness to a new political condition that has been enacted by the very innovations that serve as catalysts, accelerating globalization to its present frenetic pace. The innovations in communications that are stacked upon foundational Inter- net infrastructures consist of transactional conduits provided by broadband and wireless technologies. Through the device of Web facilitated communications, an emergent form of social organization is taking shape that has been characterized as Networked. Or, the Network Society, as Castells would have it, generates relations among social counterparts who occupy positions as nodes in the matrices of relations constituting social networks. The associations between and among the agents positioned in social networks are plastic and adaptable, whereby new social configurations can take form when society finds itself faced with new environmental contingencies, such as when the economy experiences one of its frequent market disruptions due to the introduction of a new technology that undercuts previously preemptive technological stacks. This networked condition is often hailed by neoliberal economists, who perceive it as a prerequisite for a quickly advancing, technologically driven world economy. Although there is certainly a measure of truth to the assessments proffered by neoliberal economists and policy-makers, there is another aspect to the Network Society that I will treat, which – as I will at- tempt to demonstrate – marks political possibilities that have potentially radical consequences. The collapse of geography has certainly accelerated process, but not all of the patterns of social change are contained to the economy. The introduction of Web based communications possesses the possibility – due to the instantaneousness of messages that are transacted among counterparts disparately situated over spans of geography; spaces that have become essentially epiphenomena – of fusing together social nodes that have been, heretofore, prevented from interacting in a modality that reflects immediacy.
The virtual communities that can form – and, indeed, have already formed – can expand their networks in order to leverage resources more prolifically. It is also worthy of mention, that the quality instantiated by social networks, that we might cal l plasticity – which facilitates adaptation, according to accounts put forth by economists who relish the development of the casual labor market – also serves a positive function in the context of the emerging politicized networks that are being cultivated in civil society. Through the interplay of locality with the condensed condition engendered by virtualism – localized enclaves, in a state of isolation from physically distant counterparts who might qualify as peers, only qualify as dumb nodes – can transform into smart nodes by virtue of their extended contacts that have formed by within the expansions of collapsed geography.
These political networks are decentralized in nature with points of high concentrations formed around foci of convergence, such as localization. By this, I mean to point out that the immersion of a node in a network introduces the node to a system of relations where it can intercept vastly more streams of information; thus, in human terms, supplying it with additional knowledge, allowing it to better contextualize its actions. Therefore, in terms of oppositional politics, this process – what has been referred to as glocalism – manufactures an oppositional politic, which can adjust to the contingencies embedded in localities while continuing – via a decentralize modality of social organization – to loosely coordinate the actions among various concentrations in the overall network of resistance.
Tags: Uncategorized, academe, economics, populism
Tags: American Economy > Assurances > Borers > Capitalists > Causal Model > Current Trends > Economic Events > Empirical Evidence > Gilded Age > Globalism > Higher Paying Jobs > Labor Markets > Laborers > Material Existence > Middle Class > Narration > Necessary Skills > Pundits > Rsquo > Spokesmen > Trade Restrictions
American incarceration industrial complex
Posted on | July 8, 2008 | No Comments
Shay’s Home is an organization that devotes its efforts to providing services for women and young males who have been processed through the incarcerate system.
Oftentimes, individuals who exit from these institutions are exposed to conditions, which prove to be circumstances that lead to their re-incarceration. Ostensibly, being introduced into a social condition, where one has no means by which to obtain or restore stature in society, where they would have access to socially legitimate recourses for the procurement of resources, compels behaviors that can result in future convictions and reentry in the penitentiary system.
The inaccessibility of life-opportunities results from the stigmatizing legacy that is entailed by a conviction record, which permanently follows these women and young individuals, who are relegated to a class of sub-citizenry, where their behaviors are channeled into corridors, where the possibilities they possess allow for no exploits that are deemed socially legitimate. They are compelled to make decisions that will only lead to their return to the confines, whose doors are not only open, but situated at the bottom of a slippery slope that proves impossible to ascend.
Imagine the encumbrance - metaphorically comparable to a scarlet letter - resulting from the persistence of a record that never ceases to punish and certainly fails to rehabilitate, for, indeed, the legacy of the sentence imposes limitations that cultivate the very behaviors the sentence is intended to correct.
R Cole
Tags: Russell Cole, Uncategorized, critical sociology, disciplinarian knowledge, sociology
Tags: Circumstances > Citizenry > Confines > Conviction Record > Convictions > Corridors > Encumbrance > Exploits > Incarceration > Legacy > Life Opportunities > Persistence > Possibilities > Procurement > Recourses > Reentry > Scarlet Letter > Shay > Slippery Slope > Stature
Abstract to Radicalism in Informationalism and the Network Society
Posted on | July 1, 2008 | No Comments
Abstract
A working paper currently embodying the initial stages of analyses, which were created in reflection to observations gathered during ethnographic research conducted upon third-party sociopolitical movements in American society. The research included participant observation in a Midwestern State Green Party , as well as the Populist Party of America . I layout some of the major themes that have emerged during the research and analysis performed during the execution of this project. Most importantly, I examine the possibilities for radicalized sociopolitical movements in American society that have been engendered through the proliferation of Internet communications. I contend that this new form of representational space offers a potential for publicity that is unprecedented. This is due to the absence of the institutionalized gate-keeping devices that have operated as regulatory mechanisms for a dialogical process, where access to the modes of representation has been a privilege enjoyed by the few and often the elite. Such editorial devices have served as a filter, preventing discursive forms that have fallen outside the normative grids underlying discourse that embodies the interests of standpoints, who have historically controlled representational spaces and, consequently, the publicity of public spheres belonging to American social formations. My participation in radicalized sociopolitical movements came to assume a capacity where I contributed to Internet media campaigns that sought to exploit the insights of the new paradigm in Web based programming, Web 2.0, and its instances of Social Media. I argue that Social Media and the design patterns, according to which Social Media are devised, are extensible to the domain of practical knowledge development - belonging to Public Sociology.
Tags: Russell Cole, Uncategorized, ethnography, sociology
Tags: Abstract > Design Patterns > Editorial Devices > Green Party > Internet Communications > Introduction > Knowledge Development > New Paradigm > Participant Observation > Practical Knowledge > Programming Web > Proliferation > Public Sociology > Public Spheres > Radicalism > Regulatory Mechanisms > Representational > Social Formations
Crashing the Gates of the Academe
Posted on | July 1, 2008 | No Comments
There appears to be a slight stir regarding the impending irrelevancy of traditional academic journals and the formalized processes they enact when formulating their contents, which, of course, consist of submissions made by contributors to the field. The specific social process that is followed during the decision making regarding whose work merits publication - referred to as peer review - is conducted by established members of the discipline, who assess the scholarly merit of submissions according to the standards that they adopt, propagate and revision.
The exclusionary properties instantiated by this internal decision making process, only including the input of those who are already recognized as dominant members of the profession, is rapidly becoming obsolescent, due to the publicity that is provided by online venues of representational space. This availability of representational space that is not controlled and distributed by an oligarchy of alleged experts - and we certainly have no reason to suspect that they are anything other than experts, since they are also charged with determining what qualities are consistent with one’s possession of expertise - has already motivated in one case a formidable figure in mathematics, from Russia, to bypass the peer review of the academy, and, instead, publish his work directly on an online journal.
These are important developments for the following reasons:
The products of academic research should be freely available to the people who fund it. In short, if my taxes are responsible for the funding of research - such as my taxes contributing to the budget of state universities - then I should not have to pay Blackwell - or, even worse, Nature - to read the conclusions derived from the research I have, in part, paid for. Additionally - and this is related to the erosion of the powers traditionally wielded by the oligarchs of disciplinarity - the pursuit of knowledge should not be predicated upon professional membership; rather, it should be founded upon a social condition that is open and inclusive, engendering a positive attitude toward epistemic pluralism, where social identities and individual biographies are not parsed, for purposes of determining who exhibits the semiology of professionalism, when assessing the merits of the work. Instead, in the tradition of Popperian philosophy, objectivism should be the measure determining the inclusion of contents into the agreed upon knowledge belonging to any particular field of study.
Tags: Uncategorized
Tags: Blackwell > Conclusions > Decision Making Process > Discipline > Erosion > Gates > grass roots democracy > Internal Decision > Nbsp > Oligarchs > Profession > Publicity > Representational > Scholarly Merit > State Universities
A Rebuttal to the Green Party’s Position on Illegal Immigration
Posted on | June 30, 2008 | No Comments
I apologize because I do not have the URL to the op-ed piece that was written by the liberal economist, Paul Krugman, who is positioned as a full professor at Princeton; however, I can assure you that in his last column he unequivocally stated that the empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that illegal immigration is having a deleterious impact on the classes of unskilled laborers in the country. Furthermore, he mentions that the health care system, which is already a joke, with which to begin, is additionally burdened by this influx of illegal immigrants.
I teach at an inner-city, state college, and I can assure everyone, that the ethnicity that is most affected by this flood of illegal immigration, almost unanimously concurs - based upon their own experiences - with the aforementioned conclusion. Therefore, I must raise the issue of why, exactly, do advocates of illegal immigration desire to maintain the repressed and impoverished conditions of the inner-city, African-American communities? I am so thoroughly disgusted with the PC name-calling that is conducted by these advocates of boarder-crimes and black-market employment practices that I now have trouble maintaining my composure when engaged in discussions concerning this issue.
Russell Cole
To attempt to draw an association between the deception involved in leading this country into war and the current attempt to curtail the flood of illegal immigrants, who are exported from Mexico by the elite classes of that nation, is nothing less than a prodigious act of ideological treachery, which is tantamount to the chicanery involved in propagating the need for invading Iraq. This is not only ironic; it is profoundly hypocritical. Furthermore, it is demonstrative of why the Green Party, which should be a catalyst for grass-roots democracy, fails to achieve any populist support.
For whom do you speak when you advocate saturating the unskilled labor market?
Well, I think that the revelations about the interests that fund the various illegal-immigration activist organizations provides a strong hint as to the answer to the preceding question: It is major corporations, such as Walmart, Nike, and so on, that are funding these organizations. I would conclude,therefore, that you certainly do not speak for the under-privileged classes in this country. Rather, you promote the interests of elites in Mexico and corporate elites in this country. Whenever you find yourself approximately on the same side of an issue as the Bush Administration, you can rest assured that you have completely lost touch with the needs of the working man and woman in this country.
Russell Cole
In response to more platitudes proffered in support of the undemocratic decision-making processes that generated the Green Party’s official position, appealing for an open-boarder with Mexico, I would like to start out by asking who, exactly, is involved in the massive conspiracy to divide the Green Party by raising issue with the exportation of more poverty to an America that is already saturated with poverty?
If any of the leaders of the Green Party momentarily departed from their perpetual effort to promulgate an impression-management that projects a hippie-bong-circle Utopian naivety, and actually looked at the empirical evidence regarding this issue, they would be forced to realize that illegal immigrants are not simply farm-workers. Instead, they are assuming capacities in all of the industries that exploit unskilled labor.
You claim to speak for all workers; however, once gain, you have failed to offer any consideration upon the impact that illegal immigration is having upon the most vulnerable segments of the American working-classes.
Therefore, according to your logic, which proposes that the support of a policy that negatively affects the conditions of any worker is an attack upon all workers, you have positioned yourself as a culprit of the crime you have introduced into discussion, due to your callousness in respect to the plight of the African-American Underclass. As usual, the Green Party is the brave defender of PC niceties, generated from the ideology of identity politics,
As usual, the Green Party is the brave defender of PC niceties, generated from the ideology of identity politics, Russell Cole
Russell Cole
Tags: Russell Cole, Uncategorized, immigration
Tags: African American Communities > Boarder > Chicanery > Deleterious Impact > Economist Paul Krugman > Ed Piece > Elite Classes > Empirical Evidence > Employment Practices > Full Professor > grass roots democracy > Green Party > Health Care System > Illegal Immigrants > Illegal Immigration > Invading Iraq > Paul Krugman > Rebuttal > Unskilled Labor > Unskilled Laborers
Information Technology and the Sociology of Organizations
Posted on | June 30, 2008 | No Comments
From perusing the literature there appears to be a tendency to assess the impact upon an organization, resulting from information technological adoption, according to either structural alterations that are engendered by the new resources or by the elevation in the organization’ performance. Although the former of these two considerations seems to be a proper mode of inquiry, the latter lacks clarity and definitive sense, since the criteria, which one would assume to consist of the quantifiable dimensions of the organization’s output, are left undefined and detached from the cultural realities embedded in the social organization that is under examination.
Case in point, in my younger years I would often work in warehouses, typically as a Teamster, during the summer or periods where money was in short supply. From my experiences, the productivity of the organization, which can be delineated as the warehouse, itself, was not a concern of mine or any of the other employees. We only contributed to a level of output that would prevent punitive actions, taken against the union workers. We certainly did not pay notice to improving the efficiency and performance of warehouse to any extent that exceeded the bare necessities, which we calculated as the minimum level of output that would prevent interdiction by management.
Consequently, there were competing interests embedded in the differing practices of the wage-earners as opposed to the management. Therefore, which organization is a sociologist to render in his or her descriptions resulting from his or her observations; the organization as it is understood and interpreted by management, or the organization as it was conceived within the ethos of the laborers? Further, was the warehouse a single organization or was it a network that instantiated relationships between and among its nodes that calls for a far greater level of analytical sophistication than what is conventionally applied within the context of the practice of organizational theory. Of course, one could contend that the organization is certainly to be perceived according to the managerial interpretive pattern, since their interests often coincide with the interests of the capitalists who have legal claim to the property and materials.
This angle of analysis might lead someone to the adoption of a neo-Marxist organizational theory. However, what are we to make of social events, such as the Homestead riots, where the workers most definitely considered the steel plant to be a resource belonging to something akin to the commons. Carnegie’s claim to proprietorship was in conflict with the laborers understanding of the plant, who did not see themselves as alienated from the commodities being manufactured nor the modes of production used to produce the commodities. The plant was theirs. It was a extension of the community, and the zeal demonstrated by the Homestead residents who successfully out shot the Pinkerton assassins, who were hired to by Carnegie to seize the plant from the union members.
As a result of these considerations, we must reevaluate the core of organizational theory, and the accuracy of the concepts and patterns of interpretation that are typically deployed by organizational theorists when endeavoring to come to terms with social interactions that are thought to constitute social organizations.
Russell Cole
Tags: Russell Cole, Uncategorized, critical sociology, disciplinarian knowledge, ethnography, sociology
Tags: Alterations > Bare Necessities > Case In Point > Clarity > Elevation > Information Technology > Interdiction > Laborers > New Resources > Proper Mode > Punitive Actions > Realities > Sociologist > Sophistication > Wage Earners > Warehouses
Is the Web 2.0 Bubble about to Burst?
Posted on | June 30, 2008 | No Comments
Is the Web 2.0 Bubble about to Burst?
After reading your remarks concerning the impending bubble burst of the Web 2.0 Internet sector, I was immediately reminded why people are critical of economists: You have a tenacity for conducting vulgar forms of reductionism that render the phenomenal field you are investigating absent of the preponderance of social dynamics that influence the trajectories and outcomes taken by these forms of human interaction. The distillation of empirical subject matter is performed so that the considerations for which you do account are compliant within the narrow framework of presuppositions that structure economic research.
There are far more motivations for individuals and collectivities to continue to propagate on the Internet instantiations of Web 2.0 than merely the incentive of wealth.
Speaking for myself, I contribute to the establishment of platforms that engender collaborative social knowledge building because it reflects an interest of mine – not geared toward maximizing profits – but oriented toward the promotion of public spheres that embody the attributes that I evaluate oftentimes over my personal fortune; namely, social democracy. Consequently, to reduce your analysis to the narrowly extended scope of economic variables that enamor the rigid minds of economists, limits your ability to foresee other possible outcomes that are generated by conditions excluded from your analysis. To make my point, I wonder what your prediction would have been for the early open-sourcing projects that arose in opposition to the corporate ownership and privatization of knowledge associated with computer science and computer programming?
GNU, in all likelihood, would have suffered from the same negative forecasts from people who possess a similar business-minded closed worldview. However, economic variables did not eliminate open-sourcing, rather open-sourcing dramatically changed the landscape of the programming industry, creating a robust alternative to IBM and Microsoft, which continues to increase in market share. In short, economics were not the determinant of the path followed by open-sourcing; economics were the consequent, as many open-sourcing projects matured to the point that they were in a position to offer alternative services to businesses, through their ability to tailor their code to the particular needs of a consumer while remaining open-source, which added a layer of security for investors since they could correct faults in the programming. As far as Business 2.0 goes, we will have to wait and see. However, I suspect that it will soon be bombarded with competition emanating from the open-source community that is forming around Web 2.0.
Russell Cole
Tags: Russell Cole, Uncategorized, disciplinarian knowledge, economics, sociology
Tags: Bubble Burst > Distillation > Economic Research > Forms Of Human Interaction > Industry C > Instantiations > Internet Sector > Maximizing Profits > Narrow Framework > Personal Fortune > Preponderance > Presuppositions > Programming Industry > Social Democracy > Social Knowledge > Trajectories
Delusional Optimism regarding Distance Learning
Posted on | June 27, 2008 | No Comments
The current enthusiasm concerning Public Education - facilitated through online communications - seems charged with a naive optimism, that neglects to perform considerations concerning the altered field in which the agents interact, effecting a condition, where the embodied aspects of dialog are stripped from the affair. The modifications in the form of the educational praxis, in all likelihood, result in somewhat similar; perhaps, improved in some respects; although, in all probability, debilitated in regards to other modes of assessment - all of which constitute dynamics that create an entirely different scenario, culminating into a social event that needs to be evaluated according to its own terms and specifications.
First off, disembodied pedagogy lacks the awareness, engendered through physical intimacy, where participants can gage one another’s understanding the messages sent. The to-and-fro motion of the game is void of the implicitly acknowledged modes of impression management that provide the pretext under which the communications are continued with the persisting intent in which they were incepted. The expression of bafflement or surprise is not immediately visible to the counterpart, so such alienation between the subjectivities cannot be quickly repaired, creating a lapse in the spans of intersubjectivity, which might impair the transfer of knowledge to the point that it is inefficient beyond redemption.
Further, we cannot conclude that the level of understanding is necessarily measurably distinct from embodied pedagogy, but it appears to be assessed according to altered metrics that entail an incommensurability between the evaluative standards use when appraising the respective forms of education. The instructional modes curricula completion cannot be compared effectively, because the entailments imposed by the curricula cannot be assumed consistent.
If I were a doctor who practiced forms of surgery and one was to enter into the office of my practice, only to see a degree presented on the wall referencing Phoenix University as the source of my education and training, I should suspect quite a substantial degree of apprehension instantiated by the potential client. Such a reluctance on the part of the potential patient to undergo the surgery that I have been prepared to perform by virtue of my education over the Internet is motivated by good reason: Without embodied interaction and training, one cannot acquire the implicit knowledge required to recognize the conditions that must not be present in order for a type of technology to be successfully performed. Knowing when always involves knowing what, and such an ability necessitates knowing more than what is referenced in the contents of the descriptions included in the pedagogy. Tacit knowledge has long been acknowledged as a component to education, and one cannot presume tacit knowledge to be cultivated by the student - to the same degree or the same form - during the pedagogical exchange involving communications assuming the format of two-dimensional representations transmitted in electronic discourse.
Pursuant to the above analyzes, the current trends in Higher Education institutions - especially when sociology is concerned - are regrettable due to the lack of understanding of different consequences enacted by the distinctively structured forms of instruction. Further, the people responsible for instituting these organizational transformations are not trained in the qualitative modes of sociology necessary to examine such differences between the forms of intercourse. All to quick are we to adopt Philistine expediencies, while lacking the prudence associated with the diligent execution of informed foresight.
Russell Cole
Tags: Uncategorized, academe, critical sociology, disciplinarian knowledge, education, sociology, sociology of knowledge
Tags: Alienation > Counterpart > Curricula > Doctor Who > Educational Praxis > Entailments > Impression Management > Incommensurability > Instructional Modes > Intersubjectivity > Likelihood > Metrics > Modes Of Assessment > Naive Optimism > Pedagogy > Physical Intimacy > Pretext > Public Education > Redemption > Spans
Restoring to Populism its Dignity
Posted on | June 27, 2008 | No Comments
After becoming versed in this typically neglected aspect to the American story [Populism and the People’s Party], I became fixated on the truly unique poignancy it deserved in any narration of American sociopolitical history; one characterized, in most every other instance, as a historical rendering that has obfuscated class; economic inequality; as well as stratifications extant within sociopolitical institutions; all of which can be conceptualized – although they rarely happen to be – along patrician and plebeian dimensions. This stratification has persisted for so long and it has had such a profound influence upon the cultural codes circulating through American social formations that it has gone unmarked in the preponderance of American discourse.
It should not be understated the impact that implicit sociocultural traditions have upon the surface reality, the veneer of American politics. As Tocqueville pointed to, Americans rarely voiced radicalized sentiments toward their sociopolitical institutions and their operations. In fact, as he considered, American democracy – in the form it assumed – might not be possible without such willing obedience among the population of America.
The deferential posture that Americans have been conditioned to assume in relation to civil and political institutions reinforces this lack of discursive treatment of a society divided along elitist and commoner lines. American history, by and large, has been accounted for under the pre-determinacy of Whiggishness, discounting enduring quasi-caste distinctions as if they are temporal aberrations, epiphenomena to an underlying narrative that ultimately tells of America’s advancement toward an increasingly democratic condition. There are, of course, notable exceptions to American Whig renditions of history, such as A People’s History of the United States. However, another treatment of these issues is by no means a contribution to an already saturated field of political sociological inquiry.
Coming to Terms with Populism
As both a result of my new interest in an organization that called itself the Populist Party of America as well as a family history - although fairly distant at this point in time - that included political participation in populism - I began researching the history of this movement, which presented itself in its fullest embodiment in the form of the People’s Party. After becoming versed in populism, I was awe struck at what appeared to be an under treated anomaly when in taken in the purview of the overall course of American sociopolitical history: a narrative that persistently omits accounts of sociopolitical and economic inequality; a lack of criticality that contributes to a facade of civic egalitarianism originally manifested in what has become the persisting mythology of Jeffersonian republicanism. This false ideology configures a conceptualization of American political relations, which neglects to recognize the influences had upon political opportunity by the material conditions belonging to the economy.
The Jefferson’s early articulation of Libertarianism exclaimed the virtues of the citizen agriculturalist; a body collectively composed of citizens who stood side by side one another in lateral sociopolitical uniformity. Thus economic class was left unconceived in the Jeffersonian account of American sociopolitical relations, and, needless to say, such an account failed to address the impact that economic inequalities, or class, had upon the feasibility of each citizen coequally affecting the public policies of the American state[4].
Populism – as it was incepted in economic affairs of the Midwestern and Southern farmer in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century – was an emergent pattern of economically directed intellectualism, which – through processes of its development – came to identify itself as a political movement with a more prodigious agenda than mere economic reform. Furthermore, it was a consequence of organic intellectual social processes. By that, populism culminated largely out of social mechanisms that existed independently from the institutional guard belonging to the Academe and other vested interests. Of course, populism was affected by Marxism, and, on occasion, in some of its expressions, it appeared proto-Marxist. However, the populist critiques of the economy and, in particular, the finance and monetary systems proved to be not only original and penetrating, but, additionally, they ultimately served as the precipitants of economic reforms that had lasting legacies.
For instance, the contemporary conceptualization of the free-market is heavily indebted to the populist movement in America. It was through populism that legislative fixtures intended to promote free-market competition, such as anti-trust and anti-monopolistic statutes, came to regulate the practices of capitalist interests. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that it was through populism that the modern conception of the free-market came about. Even more, it was due to its emphasis upon a competitive market[5] that the Democratic Party was amenable to the infusion of the populist ideology into its platform, which would come to mark its public disposition throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. I realize that many students of American political history would delineate among the Populist era: the period when Bryan was the leading figure; and the Progressive era – associated with Wilson, as well as, the New Deal, which, of course, was the domestic policy of FDR. No matter, as John Gerring has demonstrated through a careful content analysis of American Party rhetoric, the consistencies among the three proposed eras out-weighed the significance of the differences demonstrable in the three proposed historical periods of Democratic Party ideology.
Many discount the ethical accomplishments of the People’s Party, which was the first to embrace multiple racial identities; the first to include women in its organizations, prior even to Women’s suffrage; and the first to demand in a recognizable voice the democratization of various political institutions that had been, till then, the decision-making province of political elites. Recourse to the denial of populism as an event that demonstrated advanced ethical and moral sensibilities on the part of its conceivers, promoters, and adherents is typically sought through citing aspects of the multi-faceted social critique leveled by populism, with the intended result of identifying internal inconsistencies in the populist ideology.
For instance, one of the more prevalent criticisms of populism is that it reflected a racial tolerance while, concurrently, possessing a nativist agenda. However, this criticism speaks more of the lack of analytical faculties by those who make such a claim as it points to the lack of sophistication in the populist social critique formed in reflection of the American gilded age. I am always dumbfounded each and every time I find myself explaining to detractors of populism that there is no a priori analytical relationship between nativism and racism. Although there might be empirical relationships between the two conditions, where nativists tend also to be racists, this has nothing to do with the People’s Party, per se. America was already a multi-racial society prior to populism’s emergence, and the nativist policies taken up in the advocacies of the People’s Party were not latent with racial discrimination. Objecting to undesirable immigration is not necessarily predicated upon race. Instead, as in the case of the People’s Party, it was based upon the impact that particular elements of any society might bring about if permitted to migrate to the United States.
Additionally, and this should be apparent to anyone who has expended any efforts, at all, when attempting to come to terms with American immigration – despite the conventional wisdom, belonging to American economics – which we are persistently instructed to embrace and believe – immigration does not proportionally benefit all sectors of the economy. One such group that certainly does not experience positive outcomes resulting from immigration consists of those who dwell in the middle and lower tiers of the labor market. Immigration both diminishes the value of labor in every sector of the economy to which its skills happen to apply, as well as, posing obstructions to the successful formation of cooperative institutions, either constituting organized labor, or qualifying as the financial cooperatives, such as credit unions, that leverage the monetary resources of those who are excluded from the many implicit trusts that dominate the financial industries controlled by organized-capitalism.
Indeed, the recent revelations concerning the use of Visas for the import of labor to be employed in the technology sectors of the economy reinforces the conclusion that immigration is not advantageous for labor. Despite the conventional wisdom, as it turns out, the overwhelming preponderance of Information Technology workers who are allowed entry into the United States are in the lower strata of the technocratic hierarchy comprised of Information Technology laborers. Therefore, America is not taking in the best and the brightest; rather, corporate America is merely increasing productivity by importing cheap labor that is only qualified to work in the most entry level of positions in an organization’s IT infrastructure. This – topped with the fact that wage stagnation, in recent history, has been an enduring feature of the employment market for the middle and working classes – indicates that immigration is only beneficial for those who dwell in the higher socio-economic tiers of American social relations; the ownership classes belonging to corporate America.
Another ill conceived critique of populism consists of instances where commentators remark upon the internal inconsistency of populism’s anti-statism along with many of its ‘socialist’ sentiments. It is true that populism called for the nationalization of the railroading industry as well as the banking industry. However, unlike what nearly amounts to ideological absolutism on the part of contemporary Libertarians, the populists were not constrained when devising possible solutions for social problems by a conviction that all instances of government should be curtailed, even in scenarios where the absence of government intervention appears to create a more undesirable social condition. Additionally, populism and its instances of economic cooperatives is more an expression of anarchistic sensibilities than anything approaching socialism. Certainly, no one can credibly contend that organic cooperatives intended to extricate the American farmer from his social positioning that amounted to serfdom was motivated out of an affinity of statist institutions. Indeed, it was only until such endeavors proved to be ineffective against the trusts that had been established by organized-capitalism that the populist movement became politicized.
This is not to say that populism – especially when taken up by the Democratic Party – did not come to reflect a pro-statist position on the majority of matters qualifying as issues of public concern. Nevertheless, this ideological posture on the part of Democratic populists was perceived as a necessity in order to guard against the publicly harmful excesses of what came to be called “predator elites” in the economy. To paraphrase The Great Commoner; also known as William Jennings Bryan:
Men are the creation of God. Corporations are the creation of man, and what man creates man can destroy.
In respect to this – which can be identified with less ambiguity as the regulatory measures needed to quell the popularly harmful greed of the corporation – that the adoption of a pro-statist approach toward public policy reveals its real character: Government was a device of necessity, and the pro-statism of the Democratic populists should not be conflated – in its interpretation - with the authoritarianism embodied by the Whig-Republicans and their mercantilist conception of political and economic social relationships.
Finally, what more that can be said about populism arises from an inference that is generated from mechanisms that are alien to the processes of scholarly research, but deserves mentioning, nonetheless. The populist movement seemed to stimulate the activation of ethical dispositions belonging to the social characters of those who would come to be participate in this movement. Individuals, whose ideologies had been immured in white supremacist backdrops, eventually identified with African-Americans, as social agents with whom they suffered the exploitations engendered by common same social conditions. In fact, there are accounts of former slave owners coming to advance the causes of African-Americans by serving as chairs to African-American farmer alliances.
Therefore, rather than specifically addressing fabricated shortcomings of the People’s Party, it is more worthwhile for a student of political sociology to treat the aspects belonging to this movement that set it apart from nearly all other facets of the American experience. Specifically, what strikes the attention of the epistemic agent – who is not predisposed to dismiss the accomplishments of the various farmer alliances and the People’s Party, which they came to establish – is the fact that these dissolute, degraded, and politically inexperienced agrarians could come to mount the most redoubtable third-party insurgence to the duopoly embedded in partisan politics in the whole of American history.
Families in the Midwest and South – who dwelled in a social condition where observances of women and children afoot in bare feet was commonplace – arose from a state of sociopolitical ignorance to one of penetrating insight and criticism upon American social relations. Even more, the political ideology developed by populists was emergent, composed from intellectual processes that were organic. Additionally, the populists were faced – when developing this intellectual formation – with constructing their own social institutions through which their knowledge could be manufactured as well as disseminated. Journals needed to be published and circulated. Traveling lecturers had to be trained and financially supported. Financial schemes had to be creatively fostered a deployed in an attempt to coerce other economic agencies into bargaining directly with the farmer alliances, so that the trust under which the crop-lean system[6] was actualized and enacted could be overcome. Finally, populism transcended sections – which were the by-products of superficial material conflicts in American society, such as white supremacy and its opposition to African-American interests – in order for African-Americans as well as Southern Whites to attend the same gatherings and applaud enthusiastically as the political orator explained racism as an instrument used by Southern elites to deflect the attention of the farmers from their real adversaries, whom Blacks and Whites commonly faced.
The Contemporary Significance of Populism
Recently, I had listened to a service given by a Unitarian Church in New York, which commemorated the outing of the Pentagon Papers. At this service, I became audience to descriptions of the subversive inner-workings of activists responsible for the publication of these documents, which were entered into the Congressional Record by Gravel, and, finally, published in book form by a Unitarian publishing syndicate. I was struck by words that were spoken in reference to Gravel that remarked upon an aspect to American culture where Americans are taught – from the time they assume comfort upon a parent’s lap – to, “avoid looking silly,” or foolish; to avoid orating that which strays beyond the comfortable parameters of orthodoxy. According to the wisdom embedded in this shared stock of social knowledge, not adhering to such standards would render the speaker as suspect to aspersions labeling him or her as a crackpot or a voice from the margins of society to be dismissed, because he or she conveys sentiments that are outside of the recognizable: the familiar domestic environment qualifying as the mainstream.[i]
In contrast to the insightful words spoken of Gravel and his current candidacy for the Democratic Nomination, in recent weeks, I have also heard a speech given by Bill Clinton during the memorial for Arthur Schlesinger. Clinton’s - in remarks that can only be interpreted as self-congratulatory - lauded Lincoln, who had also given oratory at the theater where the service was being held, for attempting to reach out to the, “Great American center,” prior to the collapse of the Nation into civil war. According to Clinton, Lincoln’s initial attempt to avoid confrontation, by remaining amenable to slavery as long as it did not extend into new territories and states, demonstrated an understanding of the great American center and how it allows for progress to be made during intervals belonging to a larger cyclical pattern; where the mushy middle of American politics would slightly tip its balance toward the Left or toward the Right. During instances where the Left was favored, small, incremental steps of progress could be made. However, it required a savvy leader who could continue to appeal to the middle, in order to coax the Country in the right direction without inciting a backlash by introducing proposals that were too radical, which would entail too abrupt a departure from the trails that had already been worn into easily transverse paths.
What are we to make out of these two contrasting stylizations of political existentiality? It is in respect to this question - more than anything else - that has led me to firmly believe that populism has a role to play in the development of the sociology of democracy. My understandings of populism are primarily derived from the historian, Goodwyn, who possessed the uncommon tenacity for summarizing the necessary antecedents for an authentically democratic insurgency to unfold: First, a group must obtain the institutional autonomy needed to formulate a conceptualization of sociopolitical mechanisms operative in a political structure, which foments in contradistinction, and in to varying extent, opposition to the preemptive orders of knowledge and the sociopolitical institutions that are arranged under the cloak of legitimacy derived from these hegemonic discourses. However, as Goodwyn wisely points out, such a development - an alternative episteme - is not, in and of itself, sufficient for democratic insurgency. In America in particular, there is a long untreated - yet, all too pervasive - posture of deference habitually assumed by commoners in relations to the established institutional guards of sociopolitical power. Without a shaking off of the deference toward institutions of the old guard encumbering the shoulders of those - who have long been conditioned to internalize the identity of plebiscite - the provision of an alternative interpretation of the Human Condition - currently embodied in the way things stand - would fail to incite the mobilizing of masses.
According to this parsimonious and elegant rendering of the necessary conditions for a democratic insurgency to take root, Goodwyn goes on in his minor masterpiece, A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt, to catalog the events that culminated in the establishment of the People’s Party. The process that resulted in the type of psychic characteristics necessary for democratic insurgency was a slow incremental process, involving quite a few setbacks and failures on the part of the various farming alliances as they initially endeavored to extricate their members from the crop lien system, which basically amounted to a trust comprised of financial interests along with manufacturing - both of which maintained credit as well as distributional relationships with local town agents, who dealt directly with the farmers. These relationships that were established and protected by the these interests precluded the farmers from entering into the necessary financing arrangements for them to bypass the insufferable arrangements imposed upon them by the local town agents, who extorted as much as possible from the farmers each time the farmer was forced to obtain credit for the oncoming year.
It is in these considerations that Web 2.0 assumes significance. The democratization of representational spaces in civil society fosters both the intellectual autonomy necessary to form alternative sociopolitical interpretations as well as the political self-respect necessary to abandon to the deferential posture assumed in relation to the institutions of the old guard.
[1] The Green Party has associations with other Green Parties that exist in other states around the globe. However, these relationships are loosely defined and often more symbolic than anything else.
[2] The Populist Party of America is a micro-party that was incepted 2002, and is based in Las Angeles. At this point in time – with some exceptions – it is a virtual community that is radicalized. The exceptions consist of activism – involving activities such as the distribution of literature – that has taken place in the Las Angeles area.
[3] Grounded Theory is the approach that is typically assumed by sociologists who perform ethnography
[4] As Charles Goodwyn has pointed out, the Jeffersonian ideology was a major obstacle to the political radicalization of the populist movement.
[5] Free-trade was a staple of the Democratic ideology during the period when it opposed the mercantilist protectionism of the Whig-Republicans.
[6] The crop-lean system was enacted by the trust of economic relationships assumed by financial firms, manufacturers, and local town agents, who extorted farmers for as great as a share of the yearly productions of agricultural commodities by withholding credit that was necessary for the farmer to procure the manufactured supplies that were a requisite for planting and harvesting in the oncoming season.
[i] The Pentagon Papers Then and Now: Unitarian Universalists Confronting Government Secrecy
http://www.uua.org/events/generalassembly/2007/presentations/30971.shtml; UUA
Tags: Uncategorized, populism, sociopolitical movement, third party
Tags: Aberrations > American Democracy > American Politics > Commoner > Economic Inequality > Elitist > History Of The United States > Patrician > Poignancy > Political Institutions > Population Of America > populism > Preponderance > Profound Influence > Renditions > Social Formations > Stratification > Surface Reality > Whig > Willing Obedience