His magnus opum crystallizes 200 years of success literature into seven universal and timeless habits that underlie personal success, albeit it is also a powerful and provocative instrument for personal change. Especially the first half of the book the author succeeds in making you part of his personal journey into what he calls “true north” principles of a character ethic. Character ethic attributes the success of an individual to his or her integrity, humility and courage. Whereas the modern thinking of the post World War years, has shifted the basis for success to the personality ethic. This perspective claims that success is an effect of personal mastery of applying the appropriate tools and techniques. It alludes to the dyadic model of Saussure (1984) about a sign, which is composed the signified and the signifier, the inner concept which it represents and the material how concept is packaged.

In order to restore the balance of success as seen as a virtue of character ethic, instead of a superficial recipe prescribed by the personality ethic, Covey (1989) sets forth seven habits supporting individuals to achieve the former objective. These seven habits can be divided into two groups of three. The first group of habits promotes private victory – or when we learn to become masters and disciples of our own destiny, whilst the second group promotes public victory – when we are able to build trustworthy and meaningful relationships that benefit all. The last habit called ‘Sharpening the Saw’ focuses on ‘learning in doing’ (Wenger, 1998) in the other habits, to consciously and competently improve their application and utilization.The habits are focusing on private victory are:

Be Proactive
Most people spend time and energy on things they cannot control, e.g. ‘how am I expected to report about my teams performance, if the we are still awaiting a corporate reporting tool’ or ‘as long as the governance is not clear, it is not clear what is expected of me’. This is the so-called circle of concern, whereas highly effective people tend to forget these issues and focus on the topics that reside in their circle of influence. And it is surprising how easily you can expand your circle of influence by maintaining a proactive attitude – just do it – and especially a pragmatic attitude – 80/20 rule (Koch, 1998)

Start with the end in mind
Start always with painting the stars you are aiming for, instead of dwelling along the river. Choosing the former or the latter clearly leads to a distinct mode of action. The interesting point to realize here is that problems are not bound to context, but the individual experiencing or acknowledging the context. And within that context problems need to be solved, that immediately limits your thinking (e.g. “No, we cannot go-live within two months, due to the lack of hardware that we requested”). However, key is to trigger the power of imagination. If we live in the land of plenty what would then be summit – and beyond! By drawing this clear dot on the horizon, we tend to transcend our limitations, and than reengineer back which dot would precede the current dot – until we arrive back to a dot that is remotely connected to our current problem situation. In the end we have a clear roadmap with activities to achieve an ambition that not only solves our problem, but also introduces a learning curve outside our comfort zone.

Put first things first
This habit has it origins in time management concepts. There is a naturally tendency for people to liken fire fighting, solving escalations – jump in, fix and move on etc. Covey (1989) calls these the Quadrant 1 activities, representing urgent and important issues (escalations, deadline driven topics, seagull management, personal requests). This leads to a never-ending and upward-spiraling workload that eventually distracts us from more process oriented actions to control our workload and prioritize between the incidents to avoid them becoming escalations. This concept also underlies the basics of Release Management process, in which the change workload is balanced in periodic slots according to resource capacities, based on a procedure to objectively or mutually agree urgency and priority. Covey calls these the Quadrant 2 activities, representing non-urgent but important issues (processes, agenda creations, SOPs, stakeholder management, genuine interest). We have no real choice when it comes to Quadrant 1 activity because Quadrant 1 operates on us; that is, activity which falls into this category must be done. The real choice is when it comes to Quadrant 2. We can choose to spend time here or not but Quadrant 2 is the key to getting things under control. Time for Quadrant 2 activity will be freed up, by diminishing time spend on urgent but unimportant activities (direct tweets, what apps, phone calls, emails) from Quadrants 3 and the non-urgent and unimportant (expense accounts, hypes, excel formula work, cc-mail, open meetings) activities from Quadrant 4.

Having these three habits it immediately reminds me to Wenger’s (1998) triad of imagination, engagement and alignment that represent his modes of belonging that trigger social learning. Triggering learning is a clear mode for success, in which imagination was already literally cited, whereas engagement can only become out proactive behavior, and alignment refers to an ordered sequence of doing things

The habits for public victory are those successes that are the fostered by the communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) you are part of, and transcend the delivery capabilities of yourself. They are shared victories where you help and are helped by other people.

Think Win/Win
The best example of this habit that I can think of is the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Dixit & Nalebuff, 1991). The book Strategic Thinking from which the following excerpt contains many more diamonds.

Suppose that in Russia during the Stalin era, a conductor of an orchestra was traveling by train and was reading the score of the music he was to conduct at his next engagement.  Two KGB policemen watched him reading and, thinking that the musical notations were some secret code, arrested him as a spy.  The conductor protested that it was only Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, but with no success.  On the second day of his imprisonment, an interrogator walked up to the conductor and said confidently, “You had better tell us everything you know.  We have caught your friend Tchaikovsky, and he is already talking.”

The KGB had, in fact, picked up a man whose only offense was that he was named Tchaikovsky, and they were subjecting him to the same kind of intense  interrogation.  If the two innocents withstand this treatment and confess nothing, they will both get off with a relatively mild three-year sentence (the standard punishment at that time for doing nothing).  On the other hand, if the conductor makes a false confession and implicates Tchaikovsky while Tchaikovsky holds out, the conductor gets a  reduced sentence of one year and Tchaikovsky gets the maximum sentence of 25 years  for being recalcitrant.  Of course, the tables will be turned if the conductor stands firm and Tchaikovsky gives a false confession and implicates the conductor (25 years for the conductor, one year for Tchaikovsky).  If both give false confessions and implicate the other person, then both get a reduced sentence of 10 years.  If neither one of them confesses nor implicates the other, they each get three years.  These options are clearly laid out for the two prisoners, who, of course, are never allowed to talk to each other.

The conductor reasons as follows: He knows Tchaikovsky is either (a) confessing and implicating him or (b) holding out.  If Tchaikovsky confesses and implicates him, the conductor gets 25 years by holding out, but only 10 years by confessing and implicating the other person, so it is to his advantage to confess.  If Tchaikovsky is holding out, the conductor gets three years if he holds out and only one year if he confesses and implicates Tchaikovsky, so it is to his advantage in this scenario to confess and implicate Tchaikovsky.  Thus, confession is clearly the conductor’s best strategy.

Tchaikovsky is no dummy; he’s sitting in his cell doing the same mental calculations.  He comes to the same conclusion.  The result is, of course, that both men confess and implicate the other and are sent to Siberia for 10 years (the KGB have played this game many times and know they will get something on both men, regardless if it is true or not, and be able to fill their quota of prisoners).

When the two men meet in the Gulag Archipelago, they compare stories and realize that they are both innocent and that they have been duped.  If they had both held out and said nothing, they each would have gotten only three years instead of the 10 they wound up with.  However, the temptation to get sent away for only one year by confessing and implicating the other was so overwhelmingly tempting at the time that they could not resist, and thus were in for 10 years.

Synergise
Not my cup of tea
 

However, what is lacking in his – and other – discussions is a critical view on the human behaviour that is displayed daily on these social mediums. The majority of social software praises dogmatically emphasises on the outcomes if the intended functionalities are used as designed, or paraphrasing Jones (1992) the design-by-drawing qualities, which is obviously not common practice. Examining social software, by adopting a realistic evaluation perspective (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) and thus refraining from its prophetical non-witnessed abilities, can teach us a lot of its actual use, and the underlying mechanisms that explain that use. Along with its use, also its accompanying unintended consequences are food for thought, which Jones (1992) denoted as the design-without-a-product qualities. If you ask me, I do believe in the fantastic connective and stumble upon abilities of social software, unprecedentedly witnessed on the Internet regarding its ease and scope. Yet, it remains rather an electronic replicator for those things that already signify (fluid) modernity.

Liquid Modernity

The fundaments of early beginnings of modernity relied on the quintessential virtue of rationality, which could be influenced by the elements of order and routine. The virtue of rationality was that it allowed for imageries of social engineering (Bauman, 1989). Order, the first element, was necessary to structure and simplify practice, while the second element of routine riveted the continuity and durability of these practices. Routines and order solidified social structures, and especially cemented individuals into communal sharing relationships. Communal sharing is a kind of sociality in which people treat some dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social domain in question. Central to the communitarian relation is the use of shared resources, shared socials, shared sufferings and well-beings and collective responsibility (Fiske, 1992) or as Bauman (2000) calls it, the ‘public sphere’. The solid public sphere led to an risk-minimal infrastructural, that was capable of providing the needs for large quantities of people, ranging from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, varying from shelter at the minimal extreme up to self-actualization at the opposite side (Maslow, 1943). Notwithstanding, the rise on the ladder was governed by a solid public sphere, where intentions could be shared and where we could learn from each other. The ultimate rise on the ladder was liberation of doing and being.

Contradictory, liberation can never be a collective affair, but an individual affair. Someone’s fighting for freedom, is another one’s terrorism. While solidified structures, like routines, are repressive in the sense that they (un)consciously constrain value-free decision making, they also reduce complexity enabling individuals to deal with the weight of information processing and decision making. Thus absence of structure, might be ultimate liberation, and thus individualization, yet is lies the burden of complexity reduction at the individual. At the same time, structuration plants the seed for individualization. In these ‘modern’ times, individuality prospers, with its Enronian excrescences running rampant, at the expense of deteriorating public, community spaces. And although the era individuality is acknowledged generally, its alleged inherent liberation is a deceit. Liberation can never be attained, but ever be aspired. This freedom is both a utopian and dystopian outlook, e.g. how to decide if the whole world is still blank. Self-actualization then is gradually morphing from being a finite objective in itself to becoming a volatile road.

Shopping metaphor: Unattainable longings

Nowadays individuals in capitalist societies are not overly concerned with securing their propagation, or shelter, but moreover with decisions regarding who we are and want to become, which becomes an increasingly solitary expedition. In this section I will introduce the shopping behavior as a way how individuals construct their identity.

“It has been said that the spiritus movens of consumer activity is no longer the measurable set of articulated needs, but desire – a  much more volatile and ephemeral, evasive and capricious, and essentially non-referential entity than ‘needs’, a self-begotten and self-propelled motivate that needs no other justification or ‘cause’” (Bauman, 2000, p.74). Desires have noting to do with current needs, but rather with future identifications. And with the proliferation of the global infrastructure, desires can be attained to almost instantaneously, thus future becomes near-today.

Identity becomes a consumable image that can be shaped (for the individual and for his or her environment) at will, by expressing oneself via objects (Woodward, 2007). One’s identity can now be ‘shopped’ together via the signifiers contained in objects; by wearing an woolen Italian style suit, two tone leather shoes with long nose, with a crisp silk tie, knotted Firenze style, with a slim fit shirt tone-sûr-tone, one indisputable actively shapes ‘or shops’ his or her identity, yet he will never become his or her identity. So, in these modern liquid times, we need to have the ‘competences of a skilful and indefatigable shopper, in this world of ostensibly infinite ends’ (Bauman, 2000, p.76). With regard to creating an inexhaustible road that triggers a plenitude of ‘unattainable longings’ to precipitate consumption, desires are ideal mediators, because desires liberates consumerism from achievable objectives like needs or pleasures that are called desires (Bauman even introduces wishes as an even more unattainable and utopian concept).

Forage-ability

I believe that the shopping metaphor not only demonstrates the everlasting longing for more (as Bauman’s book on Liquid Modernity beautifully illustrates), but it also contains the natural forage-ability. Forage-ability is deduced from the verb ‘foraging’, or the idea of leading the cattle out to pasture at fresh meadows. Yet, mammals are attracted to certain meadows within eye sight or miles away because of availability and familiarity, regardless of the presence of other environments that might contain more nutritious or delicious grass. With the departure of solid collectivity and the emergence of fluid individuality, also forage-ability becomes an individual ability. In this section I will illustrate how foraging behavior is present in social software.

Looking at today’s society of abundance, everybody skims magazines, or more traditional news papers, to deicide what information is read worthy and what is not, while accepting the obvious fact that what is not read today will be batch processed in the near future (in which the batch processing varies from postponing, forgetting or discarding etc.). Because of the profusion of information generation Y is burdened under constant pressure to balance which information to process, while dealing with augmenting information spaces at a logarithmical speed. The massively popular site Youtube grows at a rate of 20 hours of video upload per minute (Hodgin, 2009). Thus every minute we watch we consciously discard alternatives, for which the leeway cannot be made up for. Every minute we watch on Youtube, we discard 1200 alternatives, the exponential formula would look like Σ γ = (1200 – η) ×1200 ^(η-1) (in which η is the amount of minutes you watched video on Youtube, and γ the amount of minutes need to watch all alternatives). Thus after 15 minutes of Youtube video you would need to borrow 2,8 years to catch up (with regard to the formula the upload speed and quantity are not a ceteris paribus, so it would cost you even more years to remain op top of it). Thus rational decision making becomes an ever more difficult quest, because the two omissions; information is insufficiently codified and excessively diffused, requiring a peak load of entropy (the required human energy to make a well informed decision) within a maximum of chaos (the required complexity that needs to be reduced to make a well informed decision).

In other words we need to forage to deal with social media, and as with foraging we do this at known spots. If we return to our metaphor of foraging by mammals, we observe that they come in flocks and consume the grass of these stretches, without giving anything in return. Within human practices denote this behavior as lurking. Lurking often has a negative connotation (Millen, Feinberg and Kerr, 2006; Klamma, Chatti, Duval, Hummel, Hvannberg, Kravcik, Law, Naeve and Scott, 2007), but perfectly augments the ‘shopping’ metaphor. In social software lurking is also a common practice; discovering new artists on Last.FM, without voting on lists; reading others profiles on LinkedIn, without giving recommendations; checking out old classmates on Facebook, without commenting on their photos; and moreover citing articles on Wikipedia, without contributing to articles. Just like on Amazon, when you ‘lurk’ abstracts of books and recommendations.

Experts often acclaim that social software (re)introduced the public sphere in a digital form. Millions of people come together on electronic squares like Facebook, Hyves, MySpace etc. And although we attach almost mythical powers to these new forms of sociality, social software does not shape social relations. Actually, these so called public sphere are in reality are individual traces, that do not bind in any form or have durable qualities. Just like the mammals, having share no social bond, except an opportunistic one of lurking.

Also the act of contributing is not of an equal social relation, it is often about logic of the gift (Mauss, 1972). By detaching us from the illusionary prospect of rational decision making, we find us selves more often making decisions based on traces (Huizing, 2002). Or to find our nutritious fields we act upon traces. Traces are reifications of streams of activities, or ‘activities and behaviors that people leave when they interact in [digital] environments’ (Wikipedia, 2010). Powerful applications of these traces are recommendation or ratings by others, yet research focus solely on buying decisions (Senecal and Nantel, 2004; Smith, Menon, Sivakumar, 2005), while I believe it determines all our behavior. In order to cope with this abundance, dealing with information-intensive practices is commonly a practice of discovering a pattern to inform follow up decisions. The use of patterns is based on our ‘human’ forage-ability.

An important part of social software for me, is knowing what others bought.

Although

meadows

Not contribution is the power of social software sites, but lurking.

Being able to attract meadows for foraging is

Bauman coins contemporary modernity with

supplements that ‘liquid modernity’ is a more adequate term for this ‘shopping’ mechanisms governing modern social behaviour online and offline.

I found this ‘shopping’ mechanism, which I will explain hereafter, an especially strong metaphor for the case against the alleged utopian powers of social software. Social software actually perfectly illustrates the fast paced shopping for the unattainable. Nowadays individuals in capitalist societies are not overly concerned with securing their propagation, but rather with decision dilemmas within omnipresent time, space and information restrictions.

Logic of the gift

Shopping metaphor

Acting on these traces is then rather phenomenon guided by social criteria, rather then economic criteria. In real life this can also be observed in shopping practices.

So how does this translates to actual behavior on social software sites.

Immers, rationaliteit impliceert dat voorafgaand aan besluitvorming een optimale afweging wordt gemaakt tussen de alternatieven, en het ‘bounded’ geeft aan dat het optimum verstoord raakt door biologische en sociale eigenschappen

are not afraid ofThe core issues of an individuals shift from gaining the necessary needs for survival to consuming everything.

surviving the fittest to consuming . shifts from safeguarding essential needs to realizing desires. The fundaments of modernity rested on the quintessential elements of order and routine. The element of order was necessary to structure and simplify practice, while the element of order struck the continuity and durability of these practices. This led to an risk-minimal infrastructural, that was capable of providing the needs for large quantities of people, ranging from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, stating shelter, to the top, stating self-actualization. Yet, climbing the ladders of the hierarchy, self-actualization is emerging from being a finite objective in itself to becoming a road on the way through. And this quest for self-actualization is filled with uncountable, and for that reason also untamable, desires.

Mechanisms of recognition. No ventures to initiate new connections, only dewellings to understand ‘wat mensen doen’ of known connections (Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield, 2006).

Shopping behavior

Utopia Thomas More

Theory of emptiness, waiting for a pulse, the refresh is more important than the message.

Test

Lurking is about the touching products, really love to touch products in a store, read their inscriptions and then put them back in a rack.

et’s look first at the online shopping metaphor:

1. You go into a store and pick up a basket.
2. You walk round the store and put whatever you need into the basket.
3. You take the basket to the checkout and pay for your purchases.

There’s nothing difficult about that.

In academic terms Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) revolves around the relation between the moral indifference and the social configurations of modernity, being essential pointers in the fertilizing and occurrence of the Holocaust. His elaboration stands out because of its sociological Weltanschauung. Although its publication date – 1989 – might suggest obsolescence, I strongly recommend this briljant book to those interested in explanatory studies into the mechanisms of social engineering and organization. It also provides a critical – and perhaps healthy – stance against the general lauding of the heirs of Scientific Management. Even contemporary literature remains praiseworthy towards the bureaucratic configurations for yielding rationality and efficiency (see for instance Boisot, 1999 on entropy minimization and value maximization and Mintzberg, 1989).

In his treatise Bauman opposes to the social scientists that visit the Holocaust is a failure of modernity, not a product, of modernity, by arguing that the fertile soil needed to foster the genocide, is inherent to the characteristics of modernity. To substantiate the latter, Bauman holds that the Holocaust should not be seen as a temporal aberration by civilized society, but the Holocaust is the ‘hidden face’ of civilized society. The hidden face, is the apparently deviant behaviour, that manifests itself under stressful events, like kidnappings, that is essentially part of the same face.  In combining Wenger (1998) and Goffman’s (1959) terms it can be seen as a imbalanced duality, where the natural behaviour is automatically front-staged, at the expense of the deviant behaviour, that is back-staged, while natural and the deviant behaviour are essentially part of the same identity. Modern society did not cause the Holocaust, but certainly it did not prevent it. As Bauman puts it, the Holocaust was “a legitimate resident in the house of modernity” (Bauman, 1989, p.17).

Modern society was the advocate and guardian of the bureaucracy, being the rational instrument to maximize the efficiency of a ‘judenfrei’ Reich. Bauman projects the rationalization and its consequences of bureaucratic organizing on Weber’s theoretical analysis of the rational bureaucracy (Weber, 1978). Weber defined this organizational configuration as “a hierarchical organizational structure designed rationally to co-ordinate the work of many individuals in the pursuit of large-scale administrative tasks and organizational goals” (Weber, 1968 cited in Fairclough, 1989, p.212 from Janssen, 2009). Weber regards bureaucracy as the most the most efficient and technically superior form of organisation, precisely because it relies on rules not men, on a hierarchy of offices, not on a network of personal relationships. The execution of bureaucracies is essentially a perpetuum immobile, which also implies that it ensures it continuity by recreating an ever swelling appetite for administrative ‘fueling’. And while Hitler necessitated his objective of an Aryan Reich, implicating the cleansing of all impurities, especially the Jews, it was up to the bureaucratic apparatus the devise the means. At the start the bureaucratic apparatus formalized distinctions, subsequently it engineered the segregation of Jews, thereafter it designed deportation of the Jewish people across the borders of the Reich, while in the end the bureaucratic apparatus rationalized the extermination of the Jews. The bureaucracy recreated its own functional means. This latter also contests the so called ‘internationalist views’ of Hitler, while favouring the ‘functionalists view’, in explaining the Holocaust.

Although Weber’s appraisal of the bureaucracy appears to be positive, he also envisioned the negative consequences of bureaucratic perfection. Its property of alienating worker’s from ‘their’ final end product, because of the specialization of work, leads to moral indifference (even by ‘normal’ workers). This characteristic is also known as mediating action, relating to how each link in a long chain of events allows the person on one end to distance him/her self from the final outcome. The moral context is related to your action, but by the authorization of your superiors. With regard to this case Bauman refers to Milgram’s experiment, in which subject is authorized by the scientist to gradually intensify the administration of an electrical shock to the a victim that can only be heard, with the legitimacy that administering shocks serve the victims learning capabilities (Milgram, 1963). Milgram discovered that subjects would continue to administer (lethal) shocks, as long as  physical proximity was eliminated, actions were routinized and shocks were authorized by higher rankings.

We already introduced on the numbing forces of authorization, the other two routines and proximity are elaborated next. Routinized practices ensure cutting out the ‘choice’ part of a situation where a moral choice should normally be made. The ability to choose an appropriate action can be considered as learning, distinguishing routinized practices from epistemic – or, learning – practices (see Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001). By doing the same thing, over and over again, one is able to act without thinking and moral conundrums gradually fade away.

Proximity needs not only to be physical, but can also be instigated by classification or objectification. Identification and objectification of participation and non-participation leads to the erection of ‘communal’ boundaries, leading to the emergence of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ identities. Medical metaphors, like germs, cancer, slimy and pests, as employed by the Nazi regime, related the Jewish identity to something harmful to the German community, subsequently structuring the perceptions and understandings (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) of those fitting the Aryan category. These steps (ultimately) build images of groups that are supported by the system and groups that are less fortunate within the system (e.g. Übermensch versus Untermensch and the system is off course the Nazi regime). Visible reifications, like stars of David, ensured instantaneous categorization – and thus segregation – by the supported groups.

The combinative effect of routines and proximity is substitution of moral responsibility with technical responsibility, in that action is considered isolated and standing on its own and the prime judgement of that action becomes a measurement of efficiency. This effect can also be recognized in contemporary organizations that use Balanced Score Cards. ‘In case of Balanced Score Cards localized meanings are aggregated into objective steering mechanisms for organization’s management (or as Wenger likes to call them: constellations). To accomplish these corporate aggregates relentless data-shredding is necessary to simplify and objectify complexity. What becomes of these aggregates then are rather restricted representations of communal activities, and do not provide insight about the practices that took place’ (Hoogenboom, 2009).

The fact that the Jew was ‘figurated’ as ‘a disruptive slime to be removed from societies aspiring an ordered structure’ is not solely related to the absence or presence of anti-Semitism during the reign of Hitler, because the latter was omnipresent. Jews were a group that was treated differently during the ages. Also the Diaspora, implicating that Jews were a non-national nation, and therefore considered as boundary spanners within various communities or nations, or seen as a ‘foreigner inside’, proposing a threat for nationalistic idealists (like Hitler). Note also the transition from Jews as indicator for Judaism (being a religion) to ‘the Jew’ as inherent property of people, that is genetically determined and thus can not be cured, but only removed. Herein lies the essence of racism, “It posits undesirable characteristics of a group of people as an essential element of their being – and completely unchangeable” (Moody, 2007).

The image of categorizing groups under command and control, selecting superiorities while removing deficiencies, to socially engineer the materialization of the perfect society, is also known as the gardening society, or denotes as ‘design as a process’ (Jones, 1992). Paradoxically this goal fuels fertilizes both modernity and racism. And once the belief sets in that ‘the Jew’ could not be cured, the realization of a Judenfrei Reich moved from expulsion to extermination. Although racisms can feed natural hatreds, instigating riotous pogroms against outsiders (as coordinated during the Kristallnacht), rather general resentment against Jews existed in Germany, decelerating the materialization of a Judenfrei Reich. Without modern civilisation, there would be no Holocaust… it was a by-product of a modern drive  to a fully designed, fully controlled world.

‘The bureaucracy’ or ‘the market’ is often seen as a metaphor for an organization or an organizational structure (like the government), however it can also be projected on societies, to explain their inner workings, as Bauman shows. The bureaucratic apparatus of the Nazi regime also made sure to firmly insert its tentacles into the existing Jewish communities, while – at the same time – sealing off these communities by cutting through all lifelines with the outside, ‘healthy’, world as illustrated above with the acts of participation and non-participation. These tentacles existed of direct ‘save what you can’ orchestrated predominantly by the Nazi officials and ‘their’ marionettes from the Judenräte. In order to control their victims, the nazi’s need to make sure that the Jews would behave predictable. Within this sealed off Jewish communities members from the Judenräte were forced to create a ‘predictable market for survival’. In order to predict behaviour, intentional stratification was carefully established within these communities, while privileges were designed to ensure movements to more privileged positions – or at least postpone demotive trajectories. “This led to the rejection of solidarity in the name of personal or group privileges (which always, albeit indirectly, meant consent to the principle that not all members of the marked category deserve to survive, and that differential treatment should follow the duly assessed ‘objective’ quality) was prominent not only in the inter communal relations” (Bauman, 1989, p.133). Apparently, the playground was designed as a zero sum game, aimed at provoking primal tendencies toward self-preservation; a choice favouring A, automatically neglected B, however only A matterd (which wryly paved the way towards the objective of efficient destruction of the Jews). In this system, the class structure mattered (while corruption and treason made sure that class structure would never function optimally, damaging those captured in that system). Although Bauman not explicitly mentions it, it appears that the moral objections as a result of proximity between killer and victim, were overcome by the Germans by forcing Jews to deal with this dilemma. After the inhumane and impossible selections were enforced, by an impaired the community’s leaders, the relentless and non-affective bureaucratic apparatus took over to rationalize all horrors, in the name of authority and technical responsibility.

I found myself literally captivated by Zygmund Bauman’s book, hours faded away and on many occasions I found myself postponing my night’s sleep, which is a rare quality for significant academic treatises. It is a realistic evaluation of the mechanisms of authority, rationality and modernity (especially with regard to the gardening society), that also have its relevance in contemporary society and organizations. The objectivistic approach to organizing, in which all intersubjective construction of meaning of human action is carefully stripped away, or its existence is perhaps (un)intentionally and (un)consciously left out of consideration. This leads to rationalistic views on organizing and coordinating, which also prevails in organizational design nowadays, which its focus on financial decision making, performance driven metrics, functional specialization and layering in competences.  Although associating these minor design fundamentals of contemporary organizations  with the horrendous atrocities that irrevocably stick to ‘design’ of the holocaust, yet, being able to recognize the patterns in an early stage and able to make a distinctive evaluation, is exactly what knowing and learning is about (see Huizing, 2007). Thus, a critical stance – which in not causally translates into a negative stance – towards bureaucratic and objectivistic organizing principles, heightens your perceptive – and perhaps cautious – senses to provocations of distancing proximity, of habitual routinization,  of gradual substitutions of moral responsibility for technological responsibility or of objectification and thus dehumanization within contemporary organization.

• Bauman, Z. (1989), Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge, Cambridge: Polity Press;
• Boisot, M. (1998), Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press;
• Goffman, E. (1959), The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City, New York: Doubleday;
• Huizing, A. (2007), “The Value of a Rose: Rising above Objectivism and Subjectivism”, in: Huizing, A. & Vries, E.J. de (eds.), Information Management: Setting the Scene, pp. 73–90, Oxford: Elsevier Science;
• Jansen, K. (2009), Bureaucratie en de Holocaust, verbonden in de geschiedenis, InfoNu.NL (last visited December, 31 2009);
• Jones, J.C. (1992), Design Methods: Seeds of human futures, 2nd edition, London, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.;
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors we live by, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press;
• Milgram, S. (1963), “Behavioural Study of Obedience”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 67, pp. 371–378;
• Mintzberg, H. (1989), Mintzberg on Management: Inside our Strange World of Organisations, Chicago, Free Press;
• Moody, J. (2007) Lecture Notes for Soc 138: Theory & Society, Undergraduate Social Theory, Duke University Department of Sociology (last visited December, 31 2009);
• Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny (2001)
• Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley, University of California Press;
• Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Meaning, Identity and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

A special word of gratitude should be addressed to James Moody for his excellent reading notes (part 1 and part 2) on Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust.

• Social Learning, what are the constituents for social learning and how does it work.
• Designing for learning, if communities of practice are the configuration for learning, how can we design for learning.
• Understanding social media, Wenger’s theoretical concepts can help us understand and recognize the pitfalls and challenges of social media to live up to its claims of supporting epistemic practices and self-actualization

* This structure needs to be subjected to further scrutiny

College 1 – Introduction (October, 28^th)
Introduction course and staff;
Positioning this course in relevant traditions;
Aims of this course and intended way of working;
Assignment: <>

College 2 – Social Learning Theory (November, 4^th)
Read Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (pp.1-41)

Recapping of previous week;
What is social learning;
Introducing practice;
Introducing identity;
Relevance of Wenger;
Assignment: <>

College 3 – Design (November, 11^th)
Read Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (pp.223-277)
Read Buchanan, R. (1992) ‘Wicked Problems in Design Thinking’. Design Issues, vol. 8, no. 2 (spring) (pp. 5-21)

Recapping of previous week;
What is design;
Traditional design for learning;
Design for participative learning;
Relevance of design framework;
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College 4 – Practice (November, 18^th)
Read Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (pp.43-142)

Recapping previous week;
What is practice;
Practice as meaning;
Practice as community;
Practice as learning;
Practice as boundary;
Practice as locality;
Relevance of practice-based approach;
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College 5 – Identity (November, 25^th)
Read Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (pp.143-221)
Read Smith, G.W.H. (2007) ‘Goffman, Erving (1922-82)’ in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, volume IV (Ed. George Ritzer), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing (pp.1995-1999).

Wrap up previous week;
What is identity;
Identity in practice: Participation and non-participation;
Identity formation: Modes of belonging;
Being identity: Identification and negotiability;
Relevance of identity;
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College 6 – Social Media (December, 2^nd)
Read Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (pp.223-277)
Read Knorr Cetina, K. (1997) ‘Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies’. Theory, culture & society, vol: 14, no. 4 (pp. 1-30)

Mystery guest explaining mechanisms of Social Software
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College 7 – Rounding off (December, 9^th)

College 8 – Oral Examination (December, 16^th)

College 9 – Oral Examination (December, 23^th)

Whereas the first part of Wenger’s book (that deals with Practice) gained massive attention in academic undertakings, it is my belief that the second part (that deals with Identity) remained relatively unnoticed. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that this part is also more difficult to read an to put into practice, or with the fact that the issue of identity remains are rather ‘wicked’ concept (please care to read the previous post if you want to understand wicked).

The need to introduce identity next to practice, is to delve deeper in how people become, instead how people engage. The theory on practice described how people engage with each other in group formation in order to learn, and took as beneficial the community of practice. The theory on identity will bring back the person into focus, and explain how persons experience become and become themselves in order to learn.

Identity in practice
Identity and practice can be seen as a duality, because practice requires engagement, engagement requires participation, participation requires recognition and recognition requires identity. People shape and acquire their identity in the engagement in practice. The social processes construing your identity resemble thus those that construe practices:

Identity as negotiated experience (meaning)
An army member’s identity is reified based on the stripes he has on his shoulders and the medals of honor he wears on his chest. However, in absence of institutional reification, participating in the act of graffiti spraying also shapes one identity as ‘who is who’ and sets the toys (unskilled newbees) apart from the kings (those revered by other artists).Identity is thus experienced by gaining a label and acting upon it, it is ‘a way of being in the world’ (p.151). Identity in this sense varies from the psychological belief, that ‘identity is […] an individual’s comprehension of him or herself as a discrete, separate entity’ (Wikipedia, 2009).  ‘Identity in practice is defined socially, not merely because it is reified in a social discourse of the self and of social categories, but also because it is produced as a lived experience of participation in specified communities’ (p.151). Identity then is a layering of events of participative experience and reificative projections.

Identity as community membership (community)
Membership  alerts us of our competence. Within the community we are eligible to fully participate, yet at the boundaries we are confused and are not able to participate, which shapes our identity.

Identity as learning trajectory (learning)
Identity is not an object, but temporal and a constant becoming. Via diverse trajectories we unfold our identity, like peripheral trajectories (legitimate participation at the boundary – apprenticeship), inbound trajectory (newcomers participating to become full members – new hires day), insider trajectories (inward movements to become core members – leadership development), boundary trajectories (boundary spanning actions to act across community borders – international rotation program), outbound trajectories (moving outside the community – outplacements). Trajectories often help us in sorting out what matters and what does not, which actually becomes significant learning. Trajectories actually enable people to learn outside the locality of their practices and thereby expand their identity.

Identity as nexus of multi-membership (boundary)
Identity until now is discussed as having one single representation; “your identity, instead of your identities”. However, we do not participate in a single community of practice, but in a multitude of them, yet our identities might differ; “As a salesman he really uses aggressive negotiation tactics, however as a father he is persuaded by rational reasoning”.  Thus it might appear if we have fragmented identities. Our identity is a nexus of multiple trajectories, that partially overlap, conflict, clash or reinforce with each other. While these multiple trajectories reflect multiple identities, it’s the actual nexus that reflects our idiosyncratic individuality. In order to cope with this inherent fragmentation our identity needs constant reconciliation between the tensions of opposed trajectories in order to temporarily coexist. Learning is all about reconciliation, not only by being able to interpret new information, but also must revisit their competence and identity; “You get introduced at your in-laws, who support other religious beliefs”.

Identity as relation between local and global (locality)
See multi-memberships.

If we project these identity processes onto social media manifestations, we uncover ample directions for improvements. The first related to the objectification of such an rich concept as identity: Social networking sites tend to project identity as static self-images reified on profile pages. Social media tend to use rather naïve institutionalized reifications, based on input, instead of social structures or ranks. Social bookmarking sites might indicate you’re an expert on hemoglobinopathy because you were the first one to have tagged it. The second relates to the intend of humans to retouch their identity. Wenger holds back that identity might not always be a product mimicking reality. On social networking sites we often see a tendency by people to finger or ‘front stage’ their identity. Front stage is a term by Goffman (1959) to elucidate that part of the self that the individual seeks to gain a positive reaction from others; where expression hopes to meet the expression given off. Hyves profiles often display model-like images, conforming to public images of beauty. The back stage can be conceived of as a private space, where the individual may in fact not be giving a dramaturgical performance, but rather is the closed to what that individual may “truly” be like.

Participation and non-participation
‘We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in’ (p.164). Obviously, not all non-participation would affect our identity, only those non-participations we encounter upon because they are aligned with trajectories of participation. For instance, when first year economic students start a conversation with sociological PhD students, both will experience regimes of non-participation.

The experience of non-participation can be triggered via marginality and peripherality. There is a subtle difference between the two. Marginality has a negative connotation. It is about being restrained to engage in trajectories to broaden one’s  understanding, thereby confining the tapping into new resources and repertoires to participate in other positions or other communities. Peripherality has a positive connotation. It is about fulfilling trajectories that enable participation in more senior positions, as a way to become a full member. In order to trigger marginality and peripherality design of communities of practice need to afford for trajectories, boundary relations and multi-memberships and institutional non-participation. Trajectories have already been discussed in the previous post Learning in Practice on Learning.

Boundary relations and multi-memberships
Multi-memberships can also give rise to coexisting identities of participation and non-participation. For instance, when you buy a new laptop it is operated, either by Apple, Linux or Windows. Engaging in one of them, actually excludes you from another user community. Or when you become a Team Lead, you are neither one of the guys from operations, nor are you seen as fully fledged member by higher management.

Institutional non-participation
Institutional policies, salaries, being non on mailing lists, being bound to rigid procedures contribute to marginalization, resulting in an experience of non-participation. Not only institutions can instigate non-participation, also members can willingly subject themselves to non-participation. For instance non-participation as compromise. Because of the availability of a company’s call center agents, its agents made a trade off to not join the team meetings at once, but those that don’t, receive the minutes. Or, because mentally disabled people are not delegated to their supervisory team meetings, they have their own meeting of which the minutes are a fixed item on the agenda of the supervisory team meetings. Another form of non-participation is non-participation as strategy, which has to do with de-identifying yourself being part of an assignment, but a function, makes it possible to leave to door at 5 ‘o clock, instead of working over hours to finish the assignment. A last strategy is non-participation as cover. Although working for Enron, not identifying yourself with the Enron Management Board, but ‘front staging’ yourself as an administrative wage slave, legitimates your insensitivity to the swindles practiced by Board.

Modes of belonging
To make sense of the process of identity formation we need three modes of belonging. Because you cannot define your own identity independent of your social structures, it is important to know how we can belong in order how our identity is formed. In order to belong to a community of practice we already introduced engagement. In order to go beyond we also need imagination and alignment. Identities of workers are influenced by picturing their job within the broader context,  and by aligning their activities with the policies and guidelines used within their organization.

Modes of belonging (Wenger, 1998, Figure 8.1, p.174)

Engagement
The work of engagement is about forming a community of practice. Engagement is bounded to time and space limitation, you can not possibly engage in endless relations, because we can only be at one place at a time and dispose only a finite number of hours per day (off course we aim for realistic relations, instead of rather the superficial on-off associations mediated by social networking sites). The backfire of a narrow view on engagement is that it will lead to an monogamous practice of insulars. Engagement is all about relating to each other in an endurable and pleasant way, however it could also lead to blocking of brokering and avoiding discontinuities by doing away with deviating insights.

Imagination
The work of imagination is the ability to disengage, ‘expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves’ (p.176). Wenger provides an insightful example about two stonecutters, in which one tells to the other “I am cutting this stone in a perfectly square shape”, while the other responds “And I am building a cathedral”. At the level of engagement both activities might seem similar, from the perspective of imagination their experience of what they are doing is quite different. The backfire of imagination is that it can also lead to overconnecting to broader structures. This phenomenon is very recognizable in highly theoretical works, relying heavily on the mechanism of abstraction. If these work have no or minimal references to our living reality, the reader will feel they have to assume the correctness of the statement, because of the lack of a viable frame of reference, leaving the reader in a state of uprootedness.

The power of imagination is what Weber (1947) underestimated when studying bureaucracies, and claimed that factory workers loose their biding with the product their working on, in which they ultimately loose their individual freedom. However, the lack of imagination is not inherent in the design of the bureaucracy, but in the design of their practices.

Alignment
The work of alignment is to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. Alignment also transcends time and space limitations, yet by coordinating energies, actions and practices. It often has to do with institutionalized styles and discourses dealing with the way something needs to be done.The backfire of to much alignment is that it becomes prescriptive thereby impoverishing the community’s ability to think for them self  and negotiate their own meaning. Most of us use electronic tax declarations as a convenient aid, while on the other side we do not fully understand its logic, and have to surrender ourselves to the program’s outcomes.

In the writing of theses we see all three modes of belonging in action.  Within the Maatschap all members are – amongst others – bonded to each other because of their passion for design, sociality and social media. Because of the lectures (a combination of both participation of teaching and reification by presenting slides) this leads also to students engaging in these themes. Before they can start writing their thesis, imagination needs to be aroused, to connect two or more themes together. Perhaps one of the themes of the Maatschap, like sociality, and another residing in the curriculum of the IM faculty on organizing, value, ontology, epistemology etc. Imagination is about conceptualizing the role of sociality in a broader context of society, and its – previously unknown – influence on value. To make sure that the theses meet up to University standards and are written conform in an academic logic and structure, alignment is accomplished by challenging students to use the soft systems methodology, as a way of dealing with the indeterminateness of many of the concepts they use, without relentless shredding of richness. Alignment also eases the examining of the theses’ quality.

Identification and Negotiability
Next to belonging to a community of practice via engagement, imagination and alignment, and thereby being conscious of your relation is not enough. Although you might identify yourself as a thesis student, because of the interplay between engagement, imagination and alignment, you also have to understand what it means to write a thesis, thereby understanding issues of academic competence, writing styles, relevancy, et cetera. Thus next to identification, we also need to work out what it means to be a thesis student, which is called negotiability. Identify formation is thus a dual process of identification and negotiability.

Social ecology of identity (Wenger, 1998, Figure 9.1, p.190

Identification
To explain the figure a bit more. The left part of the figure sets out identification. Identifications is who or what we identity with ‘by creating bonds or distinctions in which we become invested’ (p.191) through the modes of belonging described above. Our identification is based on both the communities we belong to and the forms of membership (or non-membership) we have within them. Engagement, imagination and alignment all three contribute to the process identification.

By engaging in practice, identification takes place in doing. By engaging in a certain task, people will recognize  each other as participant, thereby we give live to our social selves. By taking part in a soccer match, people naturally coordinate and take on them the various roles needed for successful soccer, the fast one becoming an attacker, those that have tactical insight become mid-fielder, those that play flat out and aren’t as gifted with the ball become defender, and the one that lacks soccer qualities is appointed as goalie. All their qualities come to the fore in doing.

Next to engagement, also imagination plays an important role in identification.  The whole celebrity industry and media industry we see on MTV is maintained by people actually imagining that by watching the stars you actually become closer to them, it yields a sense of affinity. So, you can really identify with them and understand what and how they feel. Social network sites led us to believe we have thousands of friends and are wired cosmopolitans (which may be partially true, but realistically seen we continue to act local). Management literature makes us belief that companies can be caught in two-by-two matrices and we imagine companies can be governed via the Demming cycle, Kaizen, business process redesign, ITIL3, balanced scorecards, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, et cetera. We tend to forget that all these practices are soft systems, not being objects that can be managed on its own, like a policy it needs to be propagated and its adherence requires change, all of these aspects are not captured in the actually policy itself, but in the imagination!

The latter is identification through alignment. Alignment can actually transplant the identity of enterprises to become part of the identities of participants. In most companies is usual to work with key performance indicators as a way to identify yourself with the responsibly with the company as a whole. Alignment comes with a form of power, that is vested in both allegiance and compliancy, which can also break to the extreme, which ultimately led Winston Smith to mentally capitulate himself to Big Brother (Orwell, 1948).

Negotiability
The right part of the figure sets out negotiability. Negotiability is ‘the ability, facility and legitimacy to contribute to, take responsibility for, and shape the meaning that matter within a social configuration’ (p.197). Thereby we make sense of how we perceive a certain situation. This is one of the difficulties with the transfer of ‘complex’ knowledge, because the receiving party does not get all your intentions, he is not able to make sense of it in a way you meant it. Therefore he will accept and reproduce, but not internalize and rediscover. Just like identification, negotiability is related to the social configuration we belong to and the membership we have within them. The first contains the economies of meaning, the pool we can tap into, the latter contains the ownership of meaning, or the legitimacy we have to cast our meaning as true.

Wenger uses the concept economies of meaning to indicate that especially boundary objects or concepts used on various departments in the organization, will have various local meaning that are all equally true. For instance, although organization might have implemented an incident management process, for each an everyone participating in the process it has a different meaning (one sees it as a coordinating mechanisms, someone else as his daily job, someone else as a communication outlet, others an a priority setting process, and perhaps others as a cry for attention).  Thus a plurality of perspectives are involved in the negotiation of meaning. Ownership of meaning is ‘the degree to which we can make use of, affect, control, modify, or in general, assert as ours the meanings that we negotiate’ (p.200). Ownership does not imply someone having absolute saying about how a meaning should be interpreted, but that have the legitimacy to (re)negotiate meanings. Ownership of meaning  refers to the example on the transfer of ‘complex’ knowledge, that you are able to fully appropriate that knowledge, thereby possibly alienating it from others, by displacing the original meaning and thereby changing the economies of meaning.

Negotiability through engagement is about producing proposals for meaning and adopting these. A striking example is given by Wenger, who reminds us of babies, and how they need to engage in babbling conversations in order for them to acquire the language.  For successful engagement is necessary that adoption and production go in tandem, because else those contributing and others gaining ownership of meaning leads to marginality.

Imagination too can be a way to appropriate meaning by making scenarios. In the Middle Ages bards used to wrap their moralistic message in a hymn, fables or fictive story. Anthropology  is all organized around the enterprise of understanding other times and cultures and appropriating their meaning in a vicarious way, whether this process of appropriation through imagination does justice to the original meanings or betrays them (p.204). A negative tradeoff of this phenomenon can also be that people imagine that ownerships of meanings belong elsewhere, a common though when changes are happening, which can lead to marginality.

Negotiability through alignment is about affecting the meaning that is anchored within a given social structure or institution. Process implementation is an example that is really about negotiability through alignment. The objective is to negotiate the different meanings of how people execute a process and make people conscious of the activities they do, an dhow they fit within a broader institutionalized practice. Here we also see the move from web1.0 to web2.0, as the trend is commonly labeled. In the old days the web applications lacked adaptability and were solely usable to execute routine tasks (thus generating alignment without negotiability).  Nowadays, with social media residing solely on the empowerment of its user base, users are equipped – and even in charge – to set what is important and what’s not and comment on others, setting meanings by engaging with others (thus negotiability through pure forms of engagement).

Because of our fast pace and changing society, ever increasing adaptability and competences need to be gained via processes of (social) learning. Albeit, understanding what design is, and how to design learning infrastructures is key in fostering the virtue of learning. Learning is a rich phenomenon, implying that it is impossible to objectively pinpoint the variables necessary to achieve successful learning. Or in other words learning is ‘indeterminate’ and therefore a ‘wicked’ problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973). To understand what this means, it is important to recognize that indeterminacy is quite different from undetermined. Indeterminacy implies that there are no definitive conditions or limits to design problems (adjusted from Huizing, 2009). Rittel and Webber (1973, p.15) defined wicked problems as “a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing”. With some characteristics the wickedness is easy to grasp, yet difficult to deal with:

• Wicked problems have no definitive formulation, but every formulation of a wicked problem corresponds to the formulation of a solution;
• Wicked problems have no stopping rules;
• Solutions to wicked problems cannot be true or false, only good or bad;
• In solving wicked problems there is no exhaustive list of admissible operations;
• For every wicked problem there is always more than one possible explanation, with explanations depending on the Weltanschauung of the designer;
• Every wicked problem is a symptom of another, “higher level,” problem;
• No formulation and solution of a wicked problem has a definitive test;
• Solving a wicked problem is a “one shot” operation, with no room for trial and error;
• Every wicked problem is unique, and;
• The wicked problem solver has no right to be wrong-they are fully responsible for their actions.

This inevitably leads to the wisdom that learning cannot be designed, but it can only – at the very best – be designed for. Practice itself is not amenable to design. In other words, one can articulate patterns or define procedures, but neither the patterns nor the procedures produce the practice as it unfolds. The latter coincides with the axiom that learning is a tendency, inherent to human nature (p.226).

Design is defined as “systematic, planned, and reflexive colonization of time and space in the service of an undertaking” (p.228). Wenger also states that design is about “producing affordances for the negotiation of meaning, but not the meaning itself”. This statement adheres more closely to definitions postulated by popular design theorist, like Buchanan and Jones. Buchanan (1992, p.14) states that design “the conception and planning of the artificial”. As this definition elucidates, is that design is about conceiving and planning of all things created by humans (instead of by nature) that is currently non-existent. Jones (1992, p.21) defines design as “to initiate change in man-made things”. Both articulate the difficult problem to create something that needs a certain result, yet is has no predecessor and it is a single shot, in that in cannot be designed anew. Thus any bits of design theory could us with the arduous task of design. Furthermore, the need for a fresh perspective on learning was already justified in the previous post:

“Perhaps more than learning itself, it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention” (p.9). Wenger argues that our ‘modern’ conceptions of learning are indoctrinated with classroom settings, exams and cognitive teaching styles. Learning in these conceptions, is not seen as a process, but as object that can be decontextualized and fired when necessary. It leads us away from objectivistic simplifications, towards more subjectivistic wickedness, and although the latter teaches us that no simple recipe for success exists, the first is even more deceptive because it arouses false expectations (Huizing, 2007). Wenger argues for a more realistic adoption and expectation of learning, and challenges us to rethink learning, by introducing a ‘new’ social learning theory that is centered around social participation, being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities (p.4

In building an architecture for learning, Wenger sums up four spaces of affordance that provide a designer with necessary design interventions. These design interventions are dualities that need to be balanced to spur learning. For instance, By reifying and participating we create objects and unfold these which lead to ‘epistemic practices’ (Schatski, Knorr Cetina and Von Savigny, 1997). For instance in the class room assignments are handed over (reifications), that need to be answered – and perhaps challenged – in small groups (participation), which leads to learning practices around the paper summarizing questions. These dualities or dimensions offer spaces to look at design problems. The dualities that need to be addressed in learning are:

Four dimensions of design for learning (Wenger, 1998, Figure 10.1, p.232)

Reification and participation (a duality to negotiate meaning)
Social software make a great case for these design dimensions. For instance FlickR is in itself a reification of an photoalbum, display window and discussion fora, yet FlickR requires the act of participation by its members, to actually add value to these static photo’s by adding new series, new comments, replying on others favs et cetera. Yet, in order to structure the act of participation FlickR provides the tools via its website. This ultimately results into object-centered sociality pure sang, in which people sustain their group formation and actually experience FlickR as an object “to live with” (Turkle, 2007). This becomes the case with Hyves and youngsters, which really need Hyves to maintain and organize their social life and identity.

Designed and emergent (a duality based on time)
As is the case in Last.FM it was originally designed as ‘the last radio station you ever need’. However its users started using Last.FM not as a radio station, and so it emerged as a social recommender of music, to find kindred spirits and other artists they might like, based on collections and recommendations of others. Last.FM reacted by rebranding its website as ‘the social music revolution’. Thus although the website is a result of design, the practice awakening on the website is actually a response. The uncertainty behind it, is because of the wickedness of this design, because, response and result mutually influence each other, and not necessarily reinforce each other.

Local and global (a duality based on the spatial position of a practice)
The global is a constellation of interrelated practices, yet a designer can only directly influence the locality. This argument lies very close to Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory in that the localities are constantly renegotiated by members of a community, yet they are restrained because of rules, policies, agreements of the global. Yet by acting locally and brokering with other localities, they ultimately influence the global, which in itself needs to adept to changing localities.

Identification and negotiability (a duality dealing with power)
Identification is about how people define their  membership with a group, while negotiability is about the meaning we attach to this membership. With regard to this duality we can think of Digg. Members can identify themselves with the Digg community by adding posts to the sites, in which they are seen as professional amateurs in casu journalism and perhaps editors in setting the title page. However, the members can negotiate the meaning of Digg’s posts, by the rather naive option of ranking, called ‘digging it’.. Thus both ways set the meaning of a post for its readers (in terms of importance).

Besides a perspective on design interventions, and choosing your focus, we also need modes of belonging that help people participate and interact in social learning systems. Especially we need to design facilities for belonging. We already discussed engagement as mode of belonging, but Wenger also introduces imagination and alignment as additional modes of belonging.

Three infrastructures of learning (Wenger, 1998, Figure 10.2, p.237)

Engagement refers to the active involvement in processes of negotiation of meaning (p.173). Facilities for engagement should focus on:

• mutuality: The possibility to affiliate with others and perform joint tasks. For instance, we can observe the act of mutuality on  Kenniscafé, on which members can start a ‘kring’ on a certain theme and set off a discussion.
• competence: The ability to relate to others, because of subject matter expertise. For instance Expert Exchange brokers between problem owners  and solution seekers, based on competences indicated on profiles.
• continuity: The encounters with both explicit repositories and implicit trajectories. Although the explicit repositories are easily found, for instance the best practices of ITIL, the implicit trajectories are often the use of apprenticeship and generational encounters. This is rather difficult to facilitate in social software.  E-Learning should behave in this way, but the medium is far to naïve to deal with these rich complexities.

Imagination refers to the creating of images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating form our own experience (p.173). Facilities for imagination should focus on:

• orientation: The ability to be conscious of a certain situation and to clearly demarcate the situation. The example that comes to mind is the early use of tag clouds by Del.icio.us, a way of visually structuring information so that helps people to judge the relevancy and completeness of topics.
• reflection: The sensitivity to deviations between the current situation and alternative/ideal scenarios (according to theory, general opinion or your own best guess). Social software works a lot with algorithms to find ‘similar’ themes, posts or objects, which could trigger and simplify reflection.
• exploration: The quality to combine aspect of the current situation and the alternative scenarios to create opportunities for improvement. Although competence is inherently human, Last.FM, Hyves and LinkedIn increasingly provide facilities of exploration, by triggering the mechanism of surprise ‘you might be interested in’, ‘others also found this’, ‘are these also colleagues of’ et cetera.

Alignment refers to the coordination of energy and activities in order to fit within broader structures and contribute to broader enterprises (p.173). Facilities for alignment should focus on:

• convergence: The “the double process by which information artifacts and social worlds are fitted to each other and come together…a process of mutual constitution” (Star, Bowker and Neumann, 1997, p.4). Although this definition deviates from Wenger’s vision, in that it sees convergence not solely as a process of bringing together the interest of many to channel towards a common interest, but as a process of objects and practices reciprocally influencing each other
• coordination: The process of standardizing processes via norms, while providing feedback loops to correct anomalies.
• jurisdiction: The use authoritative sources to issues of legitimacy and truth. Social software especially attempts to avoid the use of jurisdiction, but relies on the negotiation of meaning to settle issues. For instance Digg.com opposes to authoritative setting front pages news, as exercised by established news papers, instead it provides a voting mechanisms to set news on its front page.

Combining both the design interventions with the modes of belonging, leads us to a learning architecture to design social configurations that foster learning (like learning organizations, communities, of practices, social networks or other spatial arrangements).  Martin Kloos his Master thesis already illustrated the practical relevance of Wenger’s learning architecture, by applying it to various classes of social sofware, like blogs, wiki’s and social bookmarking, to ground his hypothesis that social software offers ample facilities to support the formation of communities of practice and triggers learning. It has also been applied in a similar setting by Hoogenboom, Kloos, Bouman and Jansen (2007). A short introduction can be found here.

Learning Architecture with three modes of belonging (Wenger, 1998, Figure 10.3, p.240)

Wenger applies his design interventions and modes of belonging to two practices, that of organizing and educating. Wenger claims that education is about opening up new dimensions for negotiation of the self (p.263). By emphasising on identity formation, instead of acquiring instrumental baggage – as is commonly done in classical educational theories, one might wonder if education is a privilege or obligation solely at the start of our lives, or should it actually be an enabler for identity formation throughout our lives?

To (re)design learning from this perspective Wenger refers to its four design continuums to intervene, and its three modes of belonging to form our identity. The first duality on reification and participation brings back the age old question on how many text book are required for students to enable learning, and if the former is left out, how much participation is prerequisite to understand any written content. Although it might be possible to reproduce reified knowledge, yet one might doubt the actual ownership of meaning by the students. Thus the challenge for educational design is about balancing reificative material and participation, instead of relying on mechanisms of information transmission and acquisition. The second duality on designed and emergent and illustrates that teaching and learning are not necessarily synchronous. Lectors have to reckon unintended consequences of teaching, while learning is an emergent process which rely on more processes than learning. The third duality focuses on global and local. While teaching takes place in a localized practice, their competence should fit within the broader structures of organizational practices and relevancy. The fourth duality focuses on identification and negotiability …

More to follow

Introduction
“Perhaps more than learning itself, it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention” (p.9). Wenger argues that our ‘modern’ conceptions of learning are indoctrinated with classroom settings, exams and cognitive teaching styles. Learning in these conceptions, is not seen as a process, but as object that can be decontextualized and fired when necessary. It leads us away from objectivistic simplifications, towards more subjectivistic wickedness, and although the latter teaches us that no simple recipe for success exists, the first is even more deceptive because it arouses false expectations (Huizing, 2007). Wenger argues for a more realistic adoption and expectation of learning, and challenges us to rethink learning, by introducing a ‘new’ social learning theory that is centered around social participation, being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities (p.4). This actually differs them from the more passive configuration of communities, however when the word community is used I will refer to communities of practice (CoPs).

The relevance for rethinking learning, is that modern societies come to see learning as a pivotal element in its existence and dealing with its increasing complexity and velocity . We wish to take charge of our learning competencies, thus our perspectives on learning matter. The relevance for deepening our theoretical knowledge, is that theory helps us to understand the inherent mechanisms of learning and not only its effects. After all nothing is more practical than good theory (p.9)

Wenger’s social learning theory has four premises about the nature of knowledge, knowing and knowers:

• We humans are social beings;
• Knowing is a participating in pursuing an enterprise;
• Knowledge then is a matter of competence accomplished in pursuing these enterprises; and
• Meaning is what learning is to produce.

These assumptions translate into an integration of four components, being that of community (= social configuration that uses participation to pursue a joint enterprise), meaning (= our ability to experience our life and world as meaningful), practice (= a way of talking about shared history that can sustain mutual engagement in action) and identity (= our being and becoming situated in the context of communities). For explanatory purposes, I believe Schatzki’s definition of practice is more eloquent compared to Wenger. Schatzki (2001, p.11) defines practice as “a materially mediated nexus of activity where understanding and intelligibility are ordered, a central phenomenon of human/nonhuman life”. This definition highlights the essential component of practice; the duality between reification (’materialization’ in Schatzki’s definition) and participation (which Schatzki describes as ‘activty’), to instigating negotiation of meaning (which Schatzki denotes an outcome, being ‘ordering of understanding and intelligibility’).

Components of a social theory of learning: an initial inventory (Wenger, 1998, Figure 0.1, p.5)

To position Wenger’s social learning theory within the broader field of social theories – focusing on learning as participation, its position on the vertical axis is situated between the extreme of Giddens’ (1984) structure and agency, the first gives primacy to institutions and norms guiding our actions, the latter giving primacy to the dynamics of agency and intended and unintended consequences of actors  guiding action (p.13). On the horizontal axis its theory is situated between practice and identity, the first address the production and reproduction of specific ways of engaging with the world, the latter addresses the social formation of the person and markers of membership within social configurations.

Two main axes of relevant traditions (Wenger, 1998, Figure 0.2, p.12)

We also have multi-memberships with various (or constellations of communities), which are integral parts of our life. This makes learning, as being active in various practices, a integral and continuous part of our daily activities. Memberships are about belonging, yet belonging differs from participation, therefore boundary trajectories, like legitimate peripheral participation, facilitates being and becoming legitimate and active members.

Communities of practice are on Wenger’s homepage defined as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”. Although communities of practice are familiar phenomena, articulating them helps us to set various objectives for this course*, being:

• Social Learning, what are the constituents for social learning and how does it work.
• Designing for learning, if communities of practice are the configuration for learning, how can we design for learning.
• Understanding social media, Wenger’s theoretical concepts can help us understand and recognize the pitfalls and challenges of social media to live up to its claims of supporting epistemic practices and self-actualization

* These three objectives need to be subjected to further scrutiny

The Concept of Practice
Communities of practice are social configurations that support learning, by facilitating practices that reflect the pursuit of a shared enterprise and social relations. Wenger pragmatically defines practice as “what members develop in order to be able to do their job in a livable climate” (p.47). Yet, the fact that I denote the latter definition as pragmatic, already illustrates that this definition does not captures the fundamental depth we appreciate, in order to recognize and differentiate.

Wenger has a habit to illustrate all theoretical concept, by extensively making use of dualities. Dualities are “a pair of elements that is always present in different forms and degrees, not a spectrum that indicates movement from one pole to another” (p.67). A duality can be characterized as a creative tension. This is also the case with practice, thus practice are not merely reifications of working arrangement or processes, but practices also play part in mediating to resolve conflicts, carrying communal memory, guiding newcomers, creating habitable atmospheres. Practices have no agency on their own, yet practices connote doing, and by this doing members’ practices help them in ordering their social context, as described in the previous sentence. Practices include both explicit components (procedures, norms, metaphors) and tacit components (subtle non-verbal cues, intuitions, assumptions). Furthermore practice is not related to something practical, practices could also involve theoretical discourses and outcomes (p.48).

Meaning
The practice taken place within communities is not only about getting a job done, but it is also about giving meaning. Although the practice of creating a limited edition of a Mont Blanc Meisterstück pen is about melting a nib, moulding and polishing the raisin, preparing the filler mechanism etc., the meaning for its owners is al about subtle delicacy, writing superiority, exclusive scarcity, relating yourself with the successful and the famous etc. This is what Huizing (2007) would denote as the symbolic value, the exogenous value constructed – and residing – in the social, outside the object’s inherent properties or ‘material’ value. Wenger states practice is “about meaning as an experience in everyday life” (p.52).

Negotiation of meaning
Although situations appear familiar, by having different conversations, interpretations or impressions (or generalizing: human engagement in the world), meanings are continuously renegotiated anew. And although the word negotiating may resonate clear cut outcomes, these can also be impartial consensus, for instance in situations we denote ‘wicked’ (especially to grasp the impact of wickedness on design thinking, reading Buchanan (1992) opens your eyes). Like Latour (2007) argues in his actor-network theory, by renegotiating a meaning elements, relations or descriptions shift leading to new a new network of elements, relations and descriptions of which we have an impartial understanding, exposing other structures of lacks and wants (Knorr Cetina, 2001), requiring new unfolding of meaning, instigating an epistemic practice.

Participation
Negotiation of meaning is based on the tension (or duality) between reification and participation. Participation is “the process of taking part and also to the relation with others that reflect this process” (p.55). Furthermore, Wenger holds that participation requires mutuality or agency by human actors, thereby explicitly excluding non-human actors (in contrast to Latour’s actor-network theory). Besides, participation does not necessarily refers to harmonious relations, but can also refer to conflictual, competitive or political relationships. Participation shapes not only the individual, but also the collective (or community). And participation is not only active in actual doing, but also remains slumbering outside doing, and affecting the practice.

Reification
Reification is “treating an abstraction as substantially existing […] or a concrete [material] object” (p.58). In daily live we reify endlessly, e.g. when using metaphors (war on terror, axis of evil, freedom of speech is to say 1+1=3) or conceptions (like culture, democracy, organization) to capture a situation. By reification the practice are congealed into fixed forms, opening the practice up for (re)negotiation of meaning. Although reification is a powerful tool to stabilize practices, it is a double-edged sword, in the sense that it is also about shredding context and thus simplification of richness.

Our experiencing meaningfulness - or negotiation of meaning - is captured in the interplay of reification and participation. Although reification of a best practice is nice, it requires participation to actually realize it and make sense of it, but in participating users will uncover new uses (meanings), by which the process will be adjusted (into a new reification), influencing participation anew, and vice versa, setting of a potential perpetuum mobile. Thus by means of these three central issues negotiation of meaning, reification and participation we can engage in practice, en ultimately form communities of practice.

Community
Because I believe that Wenger is not quite clear about his association between community, practice and his three dimensions: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repertoire, I will share some thoughts of mine on this topic. I believe that this association is about durability. Thus in order to make a practice durable, it needs to be located in a nexus of relations. This nexus of relations is called a community. Yet, the emergence and resilience of a community of practice requires conditions of sustaining mutual engagement, having a joint enterprise and sharing a repertoire. This does not means that meeting these conditions safeguards lasting stability, but its does ensure adaptability. Although the three dimensions mutually reinforce and constitute the other, I believe that there is a logical order, namely mutual engagement leads to a joint enterprise, and a this in turn leads to a shared repertoire. The dimensions will be explained now in more detail:

Mutual engagement
“Practices exist because people are engaged in actions whose meanings they negotiate with one another” (p.73). Thus it is about constructing and reproducing the relationships (often called memberships) for doing things together. Engagement can be enabled by providing the right settings or objects. With regard to the role of objects Knorr Cetina (2001) would explain this coherence via the emergence of object-centered sociality resulting in an epistemic practice. Yet, it is the right level of coherence that transforms mutual engagement into a community of practice.

Although Communities of practice are structures do deal with the inherent complexity of their context, they are not merely stable structures of homogenous thoughts and actors. Uncertainty, and thus richness, is added in mutual engagement by both diversity and partiality. Diversity is the fact that working together, and relating to each other, leads to constructing an unique identity individually (heterogeneity), as well as creating collective ways of doing things (homogeneity). Partiality is the fact that within communities we have complementary or sometimes overlapping competences, thus we need mutual engagement to be ‘complete’. O’Dell and Grayson (2001) neatly illustrated this partiality in their book ‘if only we knew, what we know’. “A shared practice thus connects participants to each other in ways that are diverse and complex” (p.77), in ways that are not only harmonic or cooperative, but also utilitarian, economic, power-related et cetera.

Joint enterprise
A joint enterprise is the result of mutual engagement. This also implied that it is not imposed, like in a mission statement or management letter, it is the negotiated result of participants of a community of practice to deal with the situation as they experience it.

Although a joint enterprise offers direction to members, members’ individual way of realizing this enterprise might be profoundly different. This also does not deny that their joint enterprise is not solely up to the execution of that community, it is situated within a broader system that limits and influences it. However, these external and structural influences are always mediated, and thus given meaning, within the community of practice. Thus their practices contain intended local understandings to meet institutional wants, but unintended understandings to circumvent bureaucracy and control. The joint enterprise also realizes mutual accountability, or commitment towards a shared objective. This accountability is sometimes reified into standards and policies, for instance, but can also be sensitivity to appropriate behaviour within the community, with the objective “to push the practice forward, as much as to keep it in check” (p.82).

Shared enterprise
After both group formation has taken place, in which actors have a truly social relation with each other (social relation as denoted by Fiske (1992) in that individuals are prepared to reciprocally adjust their behaviour towards the expectations of the other), and a common direction has been set out to deal with a situation, a durability can be further enhances by having a shared repertoire. A shared repertoire are all “resources for negotiation of meaning (p.82) […] that a community has adopted during its existence, and which have become part of its practice” (p.83). Shared repertoires have an inherent ambiguity to support negotiation of meaning; recognizable artifacts reflect the history of mutual engagement, but they serve renegotiation in new situations or at instances of non-clarity. Shared repertoires thus support a community in directing energies and in coordinating the renegotiation of meaning, and as a result render communities of practice durable.

Learning
The negotiation of meaning is a temporal process, and so is a community of practice. For a community to be durable, it is dependant on is capability to sustain learning. As Wenger argues, from this perspective “communities of practice can be seen as shared histories of learning” (p.86). Such a history is the result of the continuous diverging and converging of participation and reification.

Both reification and participation fulfill important roles in case of learning via aspects of remembering and forgetting. A museum is actually a reified legacy of our ancestors, and thus supports remembrance. By participating in a museum, we interpret or rediscover its collection and store it in our memories, again support remembrance. On forgetting Wenger is not quite clear, but it appears that renegotiation of meaning, replacing previous meanings, by re-appropriating reifications or because of shifting frames of mind meanings get altered, is actually a source of forgetting.

The duality of reification and participation also forms a source of continuity and discontinuity of practices. With regard to participation boundary trajectories within the community of practice leads to (dis)continuities. The shifting of core members to other communities, or demoting them towards the boundaries of a community, or visa versa members shift from the edge towards the core of the community, e.g. because of traineeships (which are a form of legitimate peripheral participation), promotions or job rotation. Also reification can be a source of (dis)continuities, via the introduction of idiosyncratic structures or objects, e.g. because of implementing a no-claims bonus system or internet self-service. This could lead to a radical transformation of the practice, thereby discontinuing the previous one.

The duality of reification and participation also serves internal politics, by “affording control over the kinds of meaning that can be created in a certain contexts and the kinds of person that participants can become” (p.93). Reifications can ensure shifts in certain directions by means of policies, standards and norms. Participation can ensure clockwise movements, for instance by using charisma, or displaying discrimination, or showing friendship.

Engagement in practice is the source of learning, actually you learn the practice. There is a natural link between the nature of competence and the process in which it is to be acquired, instead of being put in a classroom to learn, independent of their value and use in practice. Wenger argues that we can speak of learning, when we “change our ability to engage in practice” (p.95). Or more popularly stated, learning is the ability to distinguish, upon which we can act. The fact that learning is in constant state of flux (perhaps the need to learn is everlasting, however what we (need to) learn is surely ephemeral), is reflected in emergent nature of communities of practice. Communities have no form start and end dates, but will linger as long as the necessity of learning is recognized and sustained by its members, which makes these communities highly perturbable as also resilient.

Boundary
As is the case with meaning, also communities of practices are situated within a broader system, whose practices can not be fully understood independently of other practices. Often practices are a result of setting them apart from other practices.

Participation and reification not only play a part within the community of practice, the duality also plays a part outside the community. Reification can establish expressive markers of membership to demarcate a community of practice, for instance the hells angles tattoos, alumni groups, the striped suits of management, Goths dressed in black. Yet participation can also shed boundaries, by excluding outsiders or using a subtle jargon.  As may be clear, these boundaries do not necessarily follow institutional boundaries.

In order to bridge these different communities, both participation and reification can be used, as long both have ‘multi-memberships’ or legitimacy within multiple communities.  In case the emphasis is on reification, Wenger discusses the use of boundary objects, in case of participation Wenger uses brokering.

The first type of continuity across boundaries can take place by introducing a reification of a community that can serve another community. This is what Star and Griesemer (1989) defined as a boundary object, ‘an object that serve to coordinate the perspectives of various constituencies for some purpose’ (p.106). These boundary objects connect communities of practice without they having a shared practice, but use forms of reification to bride disjoint forms of participation. For instance, an ERP system connects various departments, and it can act as a conversation piece, without having an explicit shared practice (they know of). When a boundary object serves multiple constituencies, each has only partial control over the interpretation of the object, as is the case also with the ERP system (A sees it as billing engine, another as JIT, another as call center support tool etc cetera). Although objects belong to multiple practices, they become boundary objects if perspectives needs to be coordinated.

Regarding the design of these artifacts that bridge boundaries, Wenger provides some bright remarks. For instance, although designers consider the use of an object (which is why they call them ‘users’), an artifact is always an object used within a practice or used between practices. Therefore designing IT is not about using IT, but enabling for participation with IT. In the current landscape of social media as IT-based systems, Wenger’s design matters, even become even more important. Living up to the promise of media as being social, its success depends entirely on being able to trigger mechanisms of sociality.  Sociality as mentioned before is the tendency to associate or form groups (see for a more detailed elaboration on design for sociality the ICIS 2007 award winning paper by Bouman, Hoogenboom, Jansen, Huizing and De Bruin, 2007)

The second type of bridging of boundaries can take place via brokering. Brokering is the use of multi-memberships to transfer some element of practice into another. Multimemberships does not entail brokering, but boundary spanning (Levina and Vaast, 2005).  Pragmatically stated: Brokering contains doing something based on something you bring along. Brokers reside at the boundary of a practice, in order to avoid to become full members, in which they lack the ability to unobtrusively participate in other practice. Yet, at the same time they need to avoid that they are being rejected as intruders. Brokering is about managing the coexistence of multi-membership and non-membership. The competences of brokers include reconcile ignorance, translate interpretations, coordinate conflicts and laying participative connections.

Albeit Wenger makes a difference between brokering and (boundary) objects, it is my belief that it should be seen as a duality, an inextricably  interplay that need depend on each other. I already illustrated in my thesis (Hoogenboom, 2006) that brokers need objects to connect, and objects need brokers to signify. Perhaps also both should not be seen as duality but in perspective of Latour’s (2007) sense of mediation, in that both ‘materialize a network of agency comprising multiple actors (including community members, but also the objects they use), which collectively produces something different from what any of its components can produce’  (Harris, 2007).

Next to discussing the forms (reification and participation) through which members engage in other practices, Wenger also discusses the various ways of assembling that enables mutual engagement. Wenger distinguishes two categories of assembling, which have to do with temporality, namely boundary encounters and boundary connections.

Boundary encounters are ephemeral connection, which take place via:

• One-on-one encounters (having a rendez-vouz with someone);
• Immersions (visiting on the job), and;
• Delegations (which are really exchange programs).

If the connections become more durable, Wenger calls these connections boundary connections. Boundary connections come in three tastes, via boundary practices, overlaps and peripheries.In case of boundary practices a temporary practice is set in which members get a specific role, in order to fulfill the joint enterprise within that community.  In reality this can be seen as project teams or task forces. The danger of these boundary practices that they become so self-involved, that they become a community of practice in their own right. The latter is not  harmful in it self, but seen from a boundary encounter perspective it is, because its original justification was to connect practices. In case of overlaps there is not a specific boundary enterprise, but two practices actually overlap. For instance although an organizational has multiple service desk, all share the practice of incident registration and call handling. In case of peripheries communities of practice that connect with the rest of the world by providing peripheral experiences. These peripheries can be thought of as observing a senior while doing his job, or – in a more rich setting – an apprenticeship. But in this case mutual engagement is become progressively looser when moving from the core to the boundary of the community. If boundaries are considered sources of discontinuity, peripheries can be considered are sources of continuity.

Wenger points to the fact that ‘boundaries and peripheries are woven together’ (p.120), the claim should be that it is (again) a duality. Because of peripheries you experience boundaries, and because of boundaries you experience peripheries. As you become a trainee – which is a essential form of legitimate peripheral participation –  you often notice the boundaries and your non-belonging to a community. However, it can also be seen as a position where ‘outsiders’  are kept to prevent them moving further inward. For instance people keep seeing you as trainee, precluding you becoming a full member.

‘By weaving boundaries and peripheries, a landscape of practice forms a complex texture of distinction and association, opening and closing, limits and latitude, gates and entries, participation and non-participation’ (p.121).

Locality
‘Calling every imaginable social configuration a community of practice would render the concept meaningless’ (p.123). In this chapter Wenger investigates a meaningful level of analysis to study communities of practice. Practice, and thus communities of practice, is always local. Denoting broader configurations like culture, organizations or social networks communities would be misleading because it would overlook the substantial multiplicity and substantial disconnectedness. Communities often exist because of a tightly coupled fabric of members, artifacts and routines, whereas organizations are constellations of loosely coupled local practices.

Communities of practice are neither about interactions, because these constitute single events, and neither about global configurations, because these structures inhabit discontinuities, inevitably demarcating idiosyncratic practices. What makes the concept communities of practice impossible to pinpoint, is the fact that these are ‘soft’ systems. Soft systems are conceptual systems that are configured within our own conception, avoiding a priori and objective assessment of all variables (Checkland and Poultner, 2006). This also implies that these ‘systems’ refute any deterministic managerial control (like exercised in case of ‘hard systems thinking’). Thus communities can not be designed, they can only be designed for. Thus meaning is only meaning to someone, and different for everyone. Thus communities only exist in our head as a conceptual phenomenon, a are not a real phenomenon we can spy, we can only spy its traces. Yet, to provide some ‘sharp’ edges on this ‘soft’ concept of communities of practice, Wenger lists indicators:

• Sustained mutual relationships – mutual engagement;
• Shared ways of engaging in doing this together – mutual engagement;
• The rapid flow of information and propagation of innovation – joint enterprise;
• Absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an ongoing process – mutual engagement;
• Very quick setup of a problem to be discussed – joint enterprise;
• Substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs – joint enterprise;
• Knowing what others know, what they can do, and how they can contribute to an enterprise – join enterprise;
• Mutually defining identities – mutual engagement;
• The ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products – shared repertoire;
• Specific tools, representations, and other artifacts – shared repertoire;
• Local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter – shared repertoire;
• Jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as the ease of producing new ones – shared repertoire;
• Certain styles recognized as displaying membership – shared repertoire, and;
• A shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world – joint enterprise.

In order to understand larger structures, like organizations, cultures, nations, in terms of communities of practice, Wenger introduces the concept of constellations of interconnected practices. Constellation refers ‘to a grouping of stellar objects that are seen as a configuration even though they may not be particularly close to one another, of the same kind, or of the same size’ (p.127). Constellations are necessary to create continuities – in the form of durable interactions – among these communities, which can be a result of boundary objects, brokering, boundary practices or elements of styles and elements of discourses. I have to say that I am rather puzzled about why Wenger explicates the latter two, instead of capturing them as examples of shared repertoire. Anyway, styles can be seen as imitative ways of behaving, while discourses are about the importing of elements from outside crafts or expertise.

What is interesting that Wenger attemps to reorient the locus of contemporary literature from structuralist theories towards practice-based theories. The dogmatic focus on themes like globalization, outsourcing and merging, appears to render focus on communities of practices insignificant in favor to studying constellations. Albeit, constellations are actually embodiments of practices, in which each practice acts autonomously and each influences their overarching host. Thus a practice-based approach sitting between the micro (actions of the individual) and the marco (actions attributed to the structure) is a quite feasible undertaking, in comparison to studying ants (the individuals) or the non-communicative (the corporate). Understanding both levels of the local and the global and their inherent duality, provides even more insight.

As a first example, think of social software. Our social software solutions reflect these dogmatic fixations on constellations. Straightforward ways of engagement, as seen in communities of practices, are ignored in favor of rather ill-socialized conceptions of participation. In Hyves forming a group of friends is executed by the singular event of accepting an invitation. This event reflects a rather naïve outlook on such rich processes as ‘living together’ or ‘being friends’ (it is rather about ‘association’ or participation). A more realistic conception of relation would take the ephemeral character of relations into account. To re-affirm the existence of a relation between people continuous work and interaction is required (which is actually more about engagement). Because of their ‘hard’ outlook on ‘soft’ phenomena these technologies also tend to ignore the subtle nuances of localized meaning and relations. They tend to generalize towards a universal reification of relation (in LinkedIn you are either linked or you’re not, while displaying notions of proximity and temporality would provide a richer repertoire). Perhaps it is legitimate to wonder what makes these representations of social software actually ‘social’.

A second example of the detachment of  the local and the global is seen in the use of Balanced Score Cards (BSC). In case of BSC’s localized meanings are aggregated into objective steering mechanisms for organization’s management (or as Wenger likes to call them: constellations). To accomplish these corporate aggregates relentless data-shredding is necessary to simplify and objectify complexity. What becomes of these aggregates then are rather restricted representations of communal activities, and do not provide insight about the practices that took place.

While this might appear as a plea for localism and practice-based understanding, it is rather a plea to honor to apparent duality between the local and global to make sense of learning, practice, meaning, negotiation etc. And having the right level of analysis, being it a community of practice or broader configuration, like an organization, might help us in understanding these processes, whilst we need not neglect one in favor of the other.

This presentation highlights the importance of the concept of object-centered sociality to explain the apparent natural behavior of its users, being active on social media, to provide guidance for designers. This includes avoiding over- and under socialized stereotyping by offering more realistic – in concreto post humanistic – perspectives.

In this triptych, the first part illuminates the concept and importance of sociality, being the tendency to associate or form groups. By doing this we also attempt to shift the focus from functionality towards sociality as the design objective in social media.

The second part about sociality also forms our rationale to explain why we actually  engage in constructing and reproducing our social relations (on blogs, wiki’s and other forms of social media).

The third and last part explains the layered structure of constructing and renegotiating meaning (popularly devised as “nowledge sharing” in social media. In case of facilitating knowledge workers via social software, which was the central theme of the ICT Societeit, we hold that the construction and reproduction of “social” relations is pre-conditional for any knowledge construction to take place, which we can see evolving on forums, comment sections of popular blogs or on discussions around photo-editing techniques on Flickr.  As social relations are pre-conditional to “knowledge sharing”, which also illuminates why intranets with their over socialized image of “enabling everybody to contributed to the collective” will not work, because of their lack of focus on the relation. Yet, we tend to stretch this stance even a bit further, by claiming that we hold that the construction and reproduction of relations is only viable in case we acknowledge the role  of non-human objects involved. Stated differently: In order for an association between two or more people to bound, via interaction, objects are needed as “social glue”. Yet, in order for the glue to remain sticky, and to not dry out, we do not need commodity objects as glue, but knowledge objects (Knorr-Cetina, 2001).

In this case knowledge objects are open-ended and question generating, by their unfolding objects are partial representations of that object, in which the partial leads to the feeling of lacks and wants – being called structures of lacks and structures of wants – which trigger those involved in or around that object to fix those lacks, which requires them to discover new “partials” of that object. These partials can be seen as the layers of an onion that is being peeled, with every layer unraveling new information and the views on that object, which ultimately are “matters of concern”, that enable discussion, interaction and negotiation of meaning. Thus in to facilitate durable relations, that let us engage in epistemic practices in which we actually learn, we need knowledge objects for the stickiness.

Although not part of this presentation, if we extend our predominantly Knorr-Cetinian line of reasoning towards a more Latourian line of reasoning, the emphasis on objects will increase. Furthermore,the differences in standings of objects and subjects should then need to be nullified, and we should even talk about human and non-human objects. Furthermore, the discussion also bring into question the agency of objects and even the actor-network in which these objects play a role: The social is a unique constellation of non-human objects (for instance social software), human objects (sometimes referred to as subjects) or other objects (which also everything that plays a role in that moment in your relation, thus including context as an actant -as Latour would phrase it – or the tables we sit on, the computer actually facilitating us at the moment et cetera) that is only visible in group formation. However, these ideas need some further pondering…

We hope this presentation will inspire others… and thanks to the ICT Societeit for inviting us to their platform.

It can be viewed directly on slideshare, via Curious Case of Sociality (Revisited for ICT Societeit Zoetermeer)

Lecturing at the University of Amsterdam, I became enthralled by the stories about his focus on practices, floating between the extremes of structure and agency. This duality of structure is about how practices are formed by structure, and how agents” continuous recurrence of practices lead to embeddedness, fostering fossilization that underpins structure. These regenerated structures in turn influence practices, institutionalizing the perpetuum mobilae. Often his theory is simplified into the simple questions, are our actions exogenously determined by the social structure we live within or are we free agents exerting endogenous powers on our own destiny, thereby forming our structure.

These theories can be applied to help us guide our thinking about various IT-situations, e.g. information management, knowledge management or organization management. These terms do not capture the essence because of their objectivistic connotation, by which they dilute their inherently wicked nature (Buchanon, 1992). A salient feature of wicked problems is that they can not be solved, ”they rather can be designed around” (Paconowsky, 1995).

Information Management
Discourses about Information Management often focus on IT for IT, or what kind of information systems should be made available to support business processes. Often, we have to acknowledge that a one size fits all technology does not hold up to a realistic view of the organization. Different organizational processes, require different treatment. Yet ultimate social stratification leads to personal information management, which requires one size fits one person technology. However exploiting this vision, neglects the (in)formal organizational/social relations and meaning ambiguity that agents have. Thus both options are not feasible, but often exercised in organizations.

Behold, it is improper to conceive of a social system merely as the product of either deliberate human action or of institutional forces (Orlikowsi, 1992). Both the perspective of the structuralist (focus on structure) and of the symbolic interactionist (focus on the agent) do not help us out in this case. It is as Huizing (2007) argues that both extremes will never fit, we need to search for the middle-range theory (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) that explains what works, for whom, in what circumstances.

Giddens (1986) claims that the level of practices is the suitable level of analysis. In the case of Information Management, IT should support not corporate level, not agency level, but the praxis of groups. Then, this means dissociating oneself from ERP based approaches, in a way that structure-systems can not solely exogenously determine behavior and use of the tool. However, the exogenous or structure perspective predominantly prevails (Gartner, 2008) exemplifies this, resulting in macro-approaches towards Information Management. However, at the same time, one needs to disassociate oneself from agency based approach, that claims that users determine the use of and behavior towards any tool. This endogenous perspective leads to micro-approaches towards Information Management. Attempts to rigidly unite this dualism has already proven a fallacious in communistic legacies (individuals reign the country, within the constraints of a Five-Year Plan).

We already claimed that middle-range Information Management could help us in this dilemma. Focus on the practices of groups or – what has been in vogue since the turn of the century – Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998). We see social software navigating towards that middle-range. Professional blogs enable groups within call centers to support their daily activities, we see online knowledge cafes supporting the practices of peers, we see wikis supporting collaborative writing expeditions, whilst all these social tools have one thing in common: They do not have the ambition to support the entirety, just the community.

Yet, besides uncritically singing social software praises, it is may be named paradoxical that the focus of contemporary social software is tilting toward community (see al the networking scions, with their metaphors of ”connecting” and ”collecting”, ”like LinkedIn, Hyves, Facebook, Del.icio.us ), while neglecting – or at least discounting – the rest of the concept, its reason d”être, its practice.

Knowledge Management
The use of Giddens’s theory of structuration, and more specifically the duality between objectivism and subjectivism has already been elaborated, far more eloquently and legitimate than I can do, by Ard Huizing. In his discussion of The value of a rose: Rising above objectivism and subjectivism (2007b) and Objectivist by default: Why Information Management needs a new foundation (2007a). Although object or document oriented knowledge strategies might seem obsolete, claims like the need for ”capturing knowledge” still prevail in Boardrooms. These claims neglect to reflect realism in knowledge practices; no one has ever seen knowledge, let alone having actually catch it in his ”mental fishing net”. And if managers still attribute realism to these customs, than he or she should not be unsympathetic to equate knowledge managers to data entry typists.

Just like I held at the previous section on Information Management, these quests should not blindly follow totalitarian approaches towards knowledge explication (objectivism), or solo approaches that dogmatically revere uniqueness of meaning (subjectivism). Knowledge quests should be embedded in the practices of negotiation, within the constraints of a mutually purposeful enterprise.

Organizational Management
In organizational restructuring practices we often see exploits of structure- or agency-perseverance. In case of fusions or restructurings organizational blue prints are often designed from a structural perspective, in this case the hierarchic structure is leading for the redesign. Popular afterburners like culture programs or social capital programs (Coleman, 1988) again illustrate the structuralist dogmas that are associated with organizational redesign.

The other perspective of organizational restructuring is operated by employee or resume characteristics. Employee lists in this case led to individual placements. Work councils pay close attention to these trajectories. Both are not ideal from a knowledge based perspective, both neglect the practices that underlie human capital (Wenger, 1998).

Again I would like to advocate a practice-based perspective reckoning the daily work processes and procedures.

About practice
Although the importance of practice might be acknowledged, defining and demarcating the concept remains quite slippery. That”s why definitions vary, but it has to do with stable routine enactments in which human and non-human elements interact (Gherardi, 2006), or ”socially recognizable forms of activity, done on the basis of what members learn from others” (Schatzski, Knorr Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001, p.19). And especially the networked character of a practice makes its rather illusive.

Giddens (1986) states that practices are largely embedded in an agent”s practical consciousness – like inventing a new fabric process – and not necessarily discursive consciousness – like processing a familiar service request . This is exactly the reason why these can not be extracted from resumes or moulded by structure, because both require a high level of expliciation, or discursive consciousness, while lacking the necessary practical consciousness. Thus focusing on the shared forms of activity of members, which might not be immediately expliciated by them and thus are consequently left out of professional resumes or knowledge repositories, should be the focus for information management, knowledge management, as well as organizational redesign – or perhaps more generally stated all social nexuses.

Thus a slightly different approach would perhaps require more effort, and might not present a smooth path to happiness… But it might turn out that this lens is necessary in social contexts to preserve the essence that underpins all organizing; a social practice that has a multilateral reciprocity and requires and practical understanding of members to achieve an intended result, which might bring also unintended consequences, that could not be obtained otherwise.

In our article, we advocate a new ontological and epistemological approach towards social software systems from a business perspective. Social software is in need of its own theoretical and epistemic foundation, as we observe a trend towards ill-conceived and possible hazardous reapplying of mechanistic IS/IT patterns of thinking towards a new and exciting class of business applications. We notice a move towards all-embracing theoretical concepts in which auction management systems, like eBay, or syndication services, like Listserv, neatly fit into the ’social software’ categorization. It even seems that if a software application has any capability of communication or interaction, it is likely to be labeled ’social software’. Yet, if (nearly) everything is social software, the concept looses practicality and scientific relevance. We aim for the best of both worlds: applied IT with the rigor of modern information systems and the relevance of contemporary social software. Ultimately, we hope for social software to stand up to its promise as a formative context for organizational learning.

Scientific literature is remarkably scarce for such a widespread real-life phenomenon. The current state of research and theory focuses primarily on e-learning or social software as a research tool. This lack of research seems strange considered from an IS/IT perspective. In the era of the networking knowledge worker, we need to understand and overcome the mismatch between the inherently social character of the knowledge worker´s practices and the functionality-oriented tools that support these quests. Today´s users of the often free public social software services are tomorrow´s designers, managers, decision makers and users of business support systems.

The presentation can also be viewed via Slideshare: