“If it weren’t for all of you I would have lost my mind at my job.” Its a familiar refrain that I hear at lots of small conferences and, occasionally, on Twitter backchannels. Its an amazing compliment to hear that your weak tie with someone means so much, but its also an immensely troubling prospect. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of highly trained professionals have serious misgivings about their professional associations, their home institutions, and maybe even their life’s work. I had heard variations on this theme most recently this past week when I helped out at the (really, really cool) Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace Conference hosted here in Troy, New York. The conference was attended by an array of people: engineers, educators, activists, and social scientists like myself. Some people worked in industry, others in academia, and a significant portion worked for NGOs like Engineers Without Borders. And again, I just want to reiterate: No single person said the exact phrase above, and I certainly don’t want to (mis)characterize any of the attendee’s personal feelings about their jobs or work. Rather, what I witnessed at ESJP is more accurately characterized as a feeling of “coming home.” Think of it as the positive side of the same disaffected coin. This anecdotal trend was in my mind when I read this Seattle Times article about social scientists finding new and inviting homes in tech companies. Are social scientists finding better intellectual homes in industry than in academia? Or am I connecting two totally separate phenomena? Is it just the pay? More to the point: can social scientists do more and better things for the world working in Silicon Valley than the Ivory Tower?
Social scientists of all stripes —from qualitative anthropologists to quantitative sociologists— are using their skills and (sociological) imagination to develop new iPhone apps and xBox hardware. Personally, I’m pretty torn on whether or not this is a good thing. I think all social scientists should be working toward a more egalitarian society through a better understanding of our shared human condition. Can someone do that by making sure we never see the likes of Clippy again? Kinda…? How does the profit motive factor into the scientists’ methods? What does this do for social science departments if the well-known end game for graduate students (or even undergraduates) is a life redesigning the Office software suite? Here are some tentative answers:
Social scientists working in product design labs have the potential to bring about real and immediate benefits to underserved groups. Linda Layne, in the edited volume Feminist Technology, describes through example how home pregnancy tests could benefit from the observations of social scientists:
At first glance, it appears that a home pregnancy test takes power/knowledge out of the hands of experts and places it in the hands of women. Notably, opposition to these kits came from professional laboratory technicians who saw the tests as undermining their authority. However, despite the fact that these tests boast a very high accuracy level, accounts by users and representations of use in popular culture indicate that they are not considered authoritative by women or healthcare providers.
…
If we adopt a liberal feminist stance and concede that more choices are better and that commercially available, hormone-based kits will hold some benefit for some women under some circumstances, then we should work to improve them to better serve women. AT present, even though home pregnancy tests measure hCG levels, they do not reveal this level to the user. Even the expensive digital ones do not actually tell women what their hCG level is, only whether it is high enough to indicate a pregnancy is likely. The actual level (especially tracked over time by using repeat tests) can be an important indicator of many things, including whether a pregnancy is likely to end in miscarriage.
Layne goes on to describe the range of technologies and practices used to determine whether one is pregnant or not, and how a test that gives actual hCG levels empowers women in a way that helps them understand their bodies beyond a decontextualized elevated hormone level. Its important to note that the technology itself isn’t necessarily the fix, rather design interventions change how products and users configure one-another (to borrow a phrase from Ruth Schwartz Cowan). This is a crucial distinction: The designed technology is not fixing a social problem, rather social observations are informing the design of a technology that has social influences in the world.
When I pondered whether or not one could make an Anti-Racist Reddit, I was thinking along similar lines. Could social scientists equipped with Nancy Fraser and Sandra Harding redesign Reddit in such a way that majoritarian voting was just one of many ways stories got to the front page? How do we make a better “report abuse” button on Twitter? Should different Facebook users have access to completely different privacy settings? These are the sorts of problems and questions that Silicon Valley social scientists might sort out. Unless, of course, their bosses don’t want them to.
This is the big question: would social scientists actually use their positions in industry to make more egalitarian social networks and more empowering products? Of course there’s always the “for whom?” question when it comes to products and services. Social scientists that study technology know that it isn’t just the people that own, use, or consume goods and services that are affected by their existence. iPhones effect everyone, including those that do not own one or are part of the global assemblage that produces them. Acting in this space as a social scientist butts up against all sorts of confusing and complex social phenomena: the profit motive, techno-utopianism, ludditism, and consumerism just to name a few. For now it suffices to say that such roles are highly contingent. Working for Elsevier is categorically different from working at Microsoft Research Center. I’m not even convinced that working in academia versus working for a corporation is a morally or ethically meaningful distinction.
When weighing the overall gains and losses of social scientists in the for-profit section, we should keep in mind that universities are not bastions of anti-capitalism or mutual aid. Even if you aren’t working in a department that is directly funded by DARPA or Dow Chemical you’re still materially benefiting from your University’s ties to those organizations. As a social scientist you’re probably not getting paid as handsomely as your colleagues in aerospace engineering, but would your employer be solvent without those contracts? Of course corporations and governments have produced a situation in which universities have become financially reliant on problematic institutions, but for the purposes of individuals choosing in the here and now where the greatest good can be done, I think how we got here is a moot point.
For some approaches and pedagogies, I think employment with for-profit enterprises might actually be better than universities if for no other reason that your work might actually effect more people. The hard part is making sure what gets propagated isn’t compromised by problematic interests. Right now, I think academics have a lot of bad options and a handful of acceptable ones that zigzag across academia and industry. Color me naive, but I think the excellent options —the new sorts of organizational forms that will shatter academia as we know it— are right around the corner. So long as we can seek each-other out and come together in small groups through in-person conferences and social media we can build our own academic homes and let the old bureaucracies wither away.
Comments 6
Sam Ladner — August 21, 2013
Bravo, David, for this thoughtful and thought-provoking post. As a social scientist currently working in tech, allow me to share my insights.
You ask, *would* a social scientist use their powers for good, as it were, when designing technology? The answer is unequivocally YES. I have countless examples of how and I my colleagues have suggested more egalitarian methods for gathering user insight, for example, not to mention clearly laying out the implications of a hyper masculinized tech design. I have also repeatedly used the term "exploitation" in my discussions of productivity software, and have even gone as far to talk of technology's role in the "iron cage."
Yes, social scientists DO bring to bear their training, everyday.
Your concern is warranted, however, in that joining any organization means navigating its structure/agency tension. Not every sociologist will be able to insert overtly feminist design principles into everything they do. Not every anthropologist will be able to defeat cultural hegemony by tweaking user manuals.
But as you rightly point out, they're not doing that in the university either. Far from it! In the private sector, most university researchers are inaccessible in terms of language, open access, and even social networks. Worse, however, is that many social scientists openly eschew any contact with practicing technologists for fear it will contaminate their purity. This does nothing to improve technology design, not to mention the growing irrelevance of social science in mainstream discourses.
Thank you for writing this and thank you for grappling with the question.
Letta Page — August 21, 2013
Embedded sociology! Always useful in any organizational setting, so far as I'm concerned.
Thomas Wendt — August 21, 2013
As someone who works primarily in industry, I'm always surprised when I speak with new graduates from sociology and anthropology departments who are surprised that they can find meaningful work in industry. My surprise is just the opposite: why aren't MORE of these people considering technology design as a career path?
When I graduated (psychology and comparative literature), and after the total sum of student loans caused me to abandon grad school plans, I began work at a marketing agency doing digital strategy. Many humanities graduates ask how I "sold" my academic experience in the industry space. It's not that big of a leap, actually. Gathering, organizing, reading, interpreting data...recognizing patterns...determining recommendations and conclusions...suggesting the best steps to make next...it's the same in academia and industry.
On a certain level, one might argue that recent trends toward design methods that stress user feedback are actually creating a more egalitarian market. Instead of creating objects and then convincing people those objects are desirable (Ford model), tech is increasingly creating objects based on existing market signals (Toyota model). Of course, there are problems with this approach, but sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, media theorists, etc. have all had a hand in this shift.
Academia and industry have a lot to learn from one another. The increase in academics moving toward industry is part of the inspiration for praxicum.com (shameless plug)
robinjames — August 24, 2013
Great post! As I was reminded in a series of faculty meetings this week, your point that the academy is not a place of virtuous, oppositional resistance to capitalism and the State, but that it IS capitalism and the State (hell, I'm an employee of the State of North Carolina)--is SO important. We've all already "sold out," so nobody has too much moral or intellectual high ground from which to criticize other people's choices.
But then as a philosopher I also think about this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/
...btw this guy and Collin McGinn, it may just be that philosophers are especially awful and should not be let out in any context, academic or non-academic. ;)
In Their Words » Cyborgology — August 25, 2013
[...] “academics have a lot of bad options and a handful of acceptable ones that zigzag across academia and...” [...]
Nik Pollinger — September 4, 2013
I agree, great post.
I appreciate your non-judgemental stance and recognition that there isn’t a clear dividing line between the academic and corporate spaces…but many in academia carry on as if there were and as if they are on the ‘right’ side of it.
Apart from this fundamentalism, they forget that many social scientists don’t have the option of furthering a career in academia. According to Spencer et al. 2005 there are no academic positions at all for a third of anthropology PhDs: http://www.theasa.org/news/careers_research.doc
If the academia they leave behind isn’t always welcoming about their new path, then it has to be said that business at large still does not ‘get’ what social scientists or the liberal arts at large can bring – in a general sense in terms of critical thinking skills or in terms of knowledge specific to the included disciplines.
Here’s a video showing what I mean: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/where-is-the-money-going-to-in-education-_7EzDSJaRPioJ~UuL74V~g.html. The guy on the right is a knucklehead but unfortunately he, with allies in politics, is winning the debate as reflected in funding decisions and student choices. I was amazed to find out that in the US in 1979, federal grants for science were worth five times those for the humanities, increasing to 200 times in 2011. Between 1966 and 2010 the number of American bachelor’s degrees in liberal arts subjects such as language, history, and the classics halved to seven percent.
We’re having this debate about a lack of appreciation from business and politics over on the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference site right now, where I write (as here) in a personal capacity: http://epiconference.com/2013/blog/why-it-not-enough-be-engineer
Many of us at the EPIC conference later in September will therefore be fighting on two fronts – trying to convince our academic brethren that we are doing worthy work whilst trying to convince business (and politics) that we can contribute to the bottom line. In this sense EPIC is like one of the special spaces you mention people carving out.