how many is too many?

"The earth is full." Or so the NYT writer suggests, citing a new book from Paul Gilding about "Why Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World," as well as work by the Global Footprint Network suggesting that current consumptive rates require 1.5 times the earth's resources (i.e., 1.5 earths) to be sustainable. there are two major points from this article on which I'd like to comment.

first, this excellent point:

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

right on. this is not the first commentary to suggest that the growth-based capitalist approach is simply not viable. I do appreciate, however, the suggestion of an alternative, an (economic) model based on happiness, or perhaps on joy or fulfillment. there are a couple challenges here, though.

first, happiness or (or self-actualization or what have you) are not easily measurable in a traditional quantifiable manner (gross national happiness meter not withstanding). this nice thing about money is that you can count it, and it's much harder to build a model, economic, or otherwise, based on something that's difficult (if not impossible) to count.

second, I appreciate the vision of a "happiness-driven growth model." even if it were clear what such a model looked like, I wonder, how do we get from here to there? that is, how do we effect the transition from a consumption-driven model to a happiness-driven model? visions are nice, but actionable incremental steps seem, at least to me, vital to any real social change.

third, I wonder about the ways in which knowledge, and wisdom and understand, about how to be happy (or joyful, etc.) gets passed on. while the article linked above seems to suggest that the change will come rapidly and wholly, I suspect this kind of a socio-cultural-economic shift may instead take many generations to occur. modern society has done a fantastic job of passing on certain types of knowledge, mostly those that can be explicated in writing (scientific, technical, academic, etc.). however, we're not as good, at least it seems to me, at passing on experiential, tacit, or lived knowledge. in some ways, this is reminiscent of Quinn's argument about takers and leavers, but I think it cuts very deeply to fundamental questions not only about how we know that we know what we know (i.e., epistemological questions, questions of knowledge production), but also questions about knowledge transference and understanding. perhaps, a change to a happiness-driven model might be predicated on a change that incorporates and appreciates multiple ways of knowing into modern society.

the second major point on which I'd like to comment is this question of the number of earths required to sustain current practices. it seems as if most work along these lines asks, essentially, given the number of people and our current ways of living, how many earths would it take to sustain us? when the answer is greater than one, the response is often that we should change our ways of living. that is almost certainly the case, but is it the whole story? is it possible that we should perhaps also entertain the notion that the reason we need more than one earth's worth of resources is because there are simply too many people for one earth? this is a very difficult (if not impossible) question to answer. however, sometimes answering the question is not as important as asking it, and I often wish that this question were asked more often.

how we know: epistemological foundations of information systems research

I just finished reading a pretty fabulous paper: Orlikowski, W.J. and Baroudi, J.J., 1991, Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions, Information Systems Research, 2(1): 1-28. basically, they do a survey of 155 papers from 1983 – 1988, arguing that the large majority adhere to a positivist approach, a small minority follow an interpretive approach, and none adopt a critical approach. the reason this paper rocks so much is the cogent, clear, concise, summaries it provides of these three epistemological traditions, citing both strengths and weaknesses, complete with case examples of each. quick overview:

positivist – reality exists external to the researcher, and phenomena of interest accessible to through observation via sensory organs or measuring instruments; “the phenomenon of interest is single, tangible and fragmentable;” “he researcher and the object of inquiry are independent;” “nomothetic statements, i.e., law-like generalizations independent of time or context, are possible” (Orlikowski and Baroudi, p. 9); the goal is the discovery of general laws or universal principles.

interpretive – “reality, as well as our knowledge thereof, are social products and hence incapable of being understood independent of the social actors (including the researchers) that
construct and make sense of that reality;” assumptions and potential limitations clearly stated up front; “the aim of all interpretive research is to understand how members of a social group ... enact their particular realities and endow them with meaning” (ibid., p. 13); “the researcher in part creates the reality she is studying” (ibid., p. 15).

critical – “social reality is historically constituted;” rather than studying or explaining reality, “critical researcher attempts to critically evaluate and transform the social reality under investigation” (ibid., p. 19); a major component is exposing, and likely attempting to overturn, currently unseen or unvoiced assumptions and hidden contradictions; “interpretation of the social world is not enough. The material conditions of domination need also to be understood and critiqued” (ibid., p. 20); major focus on socio-economic class, labor relations, and the conflict therein.

another summary and comparison with other work can be found here. the article is quite insightful and chock full of demonstrative examples. I highly recommend you go read it.

furthermore, it was particularly useful for me, as I’ve recently been thinking through a lot of related issues, often via questions of legitimation of knowledge construction and enactment of disciplinary rigor. the paper did, as most good papers do, also help raise some further questions.

much of the paper describes how these epistemological stances apply to information systems research, arguing for their various applicability or inapplicability to social phenomena. for example, the positivist approach asserts that “organizations... have a structure and reality beyond the actions of their members” (ibid., p. 9), whereas an interpretive approach would assert that the organization’s structure exists because of its enactment by its members. I was left wondering, how do these various epistemologies apply to physical or natural sciences? there is some allusion to the growing idea in such sciences that positivism is something of a myth, but I think such treatment is beyond the scope here (potentially belonging in an STS paper). I wonder, how would interpretive particle physics or critical evolutionary biology look and feel? how would natural/physical sciences change if, rather than believing that they were discovering the true nature of reality, scientists instead believed that they were actively creating reality? would it simply be an acknowledgment of the social process involved in scientific investigation, or would there be deeper, more substantial changes?

in the discussion of the interpretive perspective, there is a distinction between the “weak” and the “strong” view. in the weak view, positivist and interpretive approaches are suited to understanding different phenomena in different ways and producing different types of knowledge. the two can complement one another. the strong view, on the other hand, rejects the very grounds on which positivist research is predicated and does not believe that it can produce valid knowledge. the notion that the two are different lenses through which to perceive different aspects of related phenomena I find appealing, but I can also see why, due to the rather different philosophical commitments involved in each, it might be difficult to reconcile findings from positivist and interpretive studies.

the critical approach emphasizes “totality, which implies that things can never be treated as isolated elements” (ibid., p. 19). phenomena being studied must be understood in terms of the social, historical, cultural, political, and other contexts that cause them to come to be. however, it seems that, ultimately, everything is related to everything else. how, then, does one practically scope a study? arguably, the point of totality is that context is not just context (i.e., with the text), its text, the thing being studied itself. taken seriously, totality seems to pose a major problem in terms of tractability.

I also noticed, as Orlikowski and Baroudi point out, that the critical approach focuses very heavily on socio-economic class, labor relations, capital, and markets, often at the expense of “other factors such as race and gender” (ibid., p. 23). this is clearly related to the problem of totality; not everything can be taken into account, your analytic focus must be somewhere. furthermore, it makes me wonder if “critical” is in some ways a politically correct, though thinly veiled, guise for “Marxist.”

Orlikowski and Baroudi’s major point is that none of these epistemological stances is perfect—each has its strengths and weaknesses, philosophical commitments and founding assumptions—and the job of the researcher is both to be aware of the impacts of choosing a particular stance, and to acknowledge the validity of alternative stances. I couldn’t concur more. especially coming from a highly interdisciplinary field, some of the major tensions I see arise from epistemologically-oriented issues, though they sometimes come in the form of methodological critiques.

however, I was also left wondering, must a researcher commit entirely to a given stance, with both its strengths and weaknesses? or is there the potential to hybridize these approaches, doing so with a conscious and reflective eye to knowledge production? for example, could you conduct a quantitative survey, informed by positivist methods, that takes into account an interpretive perspective and seeks to achieve critical destabilization of the current social order? similarly, could you build a computation system, using tools and techniques developed under a positivist paradigm, but deploy (and potentially evaluate) that system in a way that foregrounds users’ interpretation of the system and of their reality as experienced with and through the system, specifically focusing on using those experiences to critique the status quo for both users and designers of the system? yes, this is a bit of a silly hyperbole, but it’s meant to make an important point: why do we have to accept all the baggage of a single approach? can we not learn from analyses such as that of Orlikowski and Baroudi in order to advance our reflective knowledge production? perhaps obviously, I think the answer (in my part of the information science/studies world) is a tentative yes, but I’ll leave explication of why and how for another post.

local knowledge and knowing in the doing

about a year ago, I saw Lost in Translation. it's really an excellent film, but what I found most striking was the depiction of being an American visiting Japan. I was there for a conference back in 2006 (and incidentally took my phd qualifying exam while staying in Hakodate, but that's another story), and I found myself watching various scenes say, "yeah, that's exactly how it feels." watching the movie felt like being a lone American traveling in Japan.

however, the other people with whom I watched the film weren't quite as taken with it. only afterward did I consider that none of them had been to Japan or any non-western country (here, I'm counting most of western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand as "western"). I suspect that part of the reason they didn't care for the movie is that they couldn't particularly identify with it. the plights of some of the characters certainly transcend the particulars of the situations that brought them to Japan, but the particular aesthetic, the feel, the experience of watching the film resonated with my experiences in Japan so strongly that I saw that as one of the film's greatest strengths, its ability to so perfectly capture and express that experience.

I've recently been doing a bit of research about blog readers. one particularly striking thing I've noticed during this process is the difference between reading about blogs (and virtual communities and online identity); no matter how many times I'd read Nardi et al. or boyd or Miller and Slater or any of these other folks, I never could have gained the understanding I got from actually doing the research myself. rather, I could never have gained the same kind of understanding from only reading. I draw at least two important conclusions.

first, there is no substitute for actually "getting one's hands dirty" doing research. I heard it suggested recently that, often, it doesn't matter what you set about to research, as long as you research something, because even if you think you know what you're studying, you're going to wind up working on something different. to that I'd might add that even if a large majority of your results are reiterations of those from previous studies, you as the researcher come to know those same results in a different way (perhaps even more fully) than the way you would know them from reading alone. this sort of knowing, the "knowing in the doing" or what Schon calls knowing-in-action, seems impossible without the doing.

second, it makes me wonder about the place and purpose of scholarly writing as a means of sharing ideas. it's not that the type of knowing that comes from reading isn't valuable. rather, the author/researcher, because of her or his unique experiences, understands what s/he knows in a way that the reader cannot, unless of course the reader has had similar experiences. granted, there is a sort of deeper philosophical issue about how we can ever come share meaning, but I'm going to side step that for the moment in favor of something slightly more pragmatic. if the major method of disseminating knowledge in academia is writing papers, and the kind of knowing/understanding that comes from reading is different from the kind of knowing/understanding that comes from doing, why not have more of an emphasis on doing, especially doing together? I think this sort of emphasis on doing is at work in various places, but it doesn't seem to be fore-fronted as much as might be beneficial (this is probably also my bias towards constructivist/constructionist learning coming through). rather than having conferences consist of presenting papers, lets get together and do studies together, analyze data together, theorize together, design together, and generally engage in our practices and concomitant (collaborative) knowledge construction together.