embeddedness

This blog post is part of a series on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article on how social activism during the Civil Rights era is categorically different from activism using social media. Malcolm Gladwell’s controversial piece in this week’s New Yorker is shaking things up, as he’s advocating that social media doesn’t lend itself well to social activism. He cites examples of how social media only fosters surface-level, low-commitment actions based on weak ties and that social movements, like those pushing for civil rights, require hierarchies. I disagree. Others have, as well, as John Hudson has compiled over on The Atlantic. I’ll focus on Gladwell’s take on weak ties in this post, which I find problematic due to his sweeping generalizations of ties and their potential in guiding everyday life. The Nature of Ties Gladwell claims that social media fosters weak ties::

“There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”

Others have critiqued this by stating that social media tools {like Twitter and Facebook} can foster more than weak ties. Network structures are combinations of both weak and strong ties. The organizational research of Brian Uzzi at Northwestern {see image above} found that there are dangers of being overembedded {too many strong ties leading to insularity} and being underembedded {too many weak  or arms-length ties leading to a lacking of social structure}. Gladwell’s critique on this front hinges upon characterizing all networks as underembedded networks. There’s another issue here, which is the content of the tie. Ties can be characterized as strong or weak, but they can also be multiplex, i.e., representing a complex relationship that has more than one channel. For example, a tie can be characterized by flows of different types of capital, e.g., social, economic, political, etc., with varying degrees of strength. Social media campaigns can and do tap into networks and use people’s multiplex ties to increase engagement. Hearing about an issue through someone in your network is often more persuasive than from media and advertising, so there’s great potential here, but going from a social media campaign to action, let alone social change, is far from automatic.

My next post will address the issue of motivation and social media. Gladwell doesn’t think social media motivates people, but drives participation. I question this puzzling sweeping generalization.

Should higher education be thought of as a public infrastructure?

While in many European countries, higher education was often treated as a public good, a market ideology is increasingly being allowed to allocate access to it. The rationale is that higher education is well-suited to market mechanisms. It’s scarce, not everyone wants it, and is often available at a price. Recent trends towards market capitalism and neoliberal economics have globally hastened the transition towards a market-based view of education. Is this a good thing? Are there market failures?

First, there are political pressures in many countries to reduce public expenditures in higher education. Exploring configurations of public-private funding makes sense. In terms of market failures, or potential failures, one big issue with respect to higher education is the uncertainty of outputs. Higher education offers no express guarantees or warranties. One of its characteristics is that it has “credence qualities”, i.e., those which are hard to gauge even after purchase. Many services have credence qualities, such as consulting or legal or medical advice.

While assessment tries to address this quality issue, Mark Granovetter’s work on embeddedness shows that auditing functions are often subject to social and political forces. In a sense, assessment is really only as good as the localized culture.

Impacting the quality issue are market forces. Higher education institutions compete for students and there is a upward limit on price. The “business” of higher education tries to increase efficiencies to lower costs, by increasing “productivity” {e.g., larger class sizes} or utilizing part-time labour, graduate students, or lower-wage online instructors. The Nordic experience is one where national quality assurance agencies allow universities to develop their own quality initiatives, factoring in the multidimensional nature of quality and institutional contexts. The result is a diversity of approaches that allows flexibility, but also has sanctions for non-compliance.

I think one of the worst places for higher education to be is having an identity crisis with factions supporting radically different views. Teaching versus research can be a dichotomy, but I’ve also seen institutions struggle over going from having regional status versus national status, i.e., “we want to be great.”

Twitterversion:: Higher education & regulation.Does market ideology & the “business model” clash w/quality & accountability?#ThickCulture http://url.ie/5o75 @Prof_K

Song:: Bishop Allen-‘Charm School’

I’ve been thinking about José’s blog on Luther’s Freedom (2/19), which reminded of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (PESC).

I find many of these ideas to be interesting.  The idea of Luther’s Reformation as a catalyst for change in terms of social relations in markets is pretty heady stuff.  I see the Reformation as the obvious move away from the [ideas/ideals] of the Catholic church (and its take on absolution and salvation, which was often criticized from within), which also marked a shift (in my opinion) a new era of spirituality, going from a more commutarian approach to an individualistic one, particularly under Calvinism.

After the Reformation, salvation was divorced (no pun intended) from leading a Christian life.  Pascal’s wager was irrelevant, as man could not influence God.  Nevertheless, through work could man serve God.  One’s profession was one’s calling.  It was later developments in Protestantism, i.e., John Calvin, where one couldn’t know for sure if they were saved, BUT success might be an indicator of it.  Hence, the Protestant work ethic was born.  It gave people meaning, as opposed to wallowing in nihilism due to not knowing one’s eternal fate.  Actions became centralized around the individual.  Community wasn’t dead, but status and legitimacy were now focused more than ever towards personal success.

Slouching towards late capitalism (or postmodernity), spiritual life was usurped by the profane.  The final fall of mediaeval asceticism?  The ascendance of a bourgeois ideology?  Materialism filled in the gaps of meaning.  (S)he who dies with the most toys, wins?  Brands become the symbols/totems that hold meanings.  Nike = transcendence.  Coca-Cola = global community.  Apple = cool rebellion.

While I find Weber’s PESC to be interesting, I think that the main idea is that the cultural context matters when it comes to determining the roots of the various flavors of capitalism, which is being fleshed out with recent research.  One could write a paper on the Shintoist ethic and the divine spirit of capitalism to explain the rise and fall of Japan, layering how feudal structures were thrust into capitalism under Meiji and how, decades later, overembedded networks of people and organizations were both a boon (70s-80s) and an albatross (90s-00s) to economic growth.  Cultural context.

• Is the trajectory of Protestantism responsible, at least in part, for our current era of materialism?
• Was the trajectory inevitable?
• If so, what does this say about Luther’s freedom?

image:  “Difference between the Protestant and Catholic church service” Cranach the Younger