The strong case for biodiversity? They are us.

“For animals, as well as plants, there have never been individuals,” write Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred Tauber in The Quarterly Review of Biology — the 2012 paper, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals” (abstract, pdf):

Our aims in this overview are to: outline the data demonstrating that animals are symbiotic complexes of many species living together; demonstrate how a thoroughly symbiotic perspective opens important areas of research and offers fundamentally new conceptions of the organism; and explore what this new evidence means for biology, medicine, and for the conservation of biodiversity.

“Like all visible life forms, we are composites,” writes Dorion Sagan in the 2011 Society for Cultural Anthropology paper, “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New ‘Facts of Life'” (book, text, video):

Margaret McFall-Ngai … has proposed that the immune system evolved not to eliminate pathogens but to select for symbionts in the microbe-packed waters of our metazoan ancestors. The immune system in its origin may thus be more like an employment agency, recruiting desired species, than like a national security state, recognizing and refusing entry to guard the fake purity of the Self.

“We argue that interactions between animals and microbes are not specialized occurrences but rather are fundamentally important aspects of animal biology from development to systems ecology,” write McFall-Ngai and 25 coauthors in the 2013 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, “Animals in a bacterial world, a new imperative for the life sciences” (abstract, pdf).

These papers describe what might be called the strong case for biodiversity. It’s not merely that species and functional diversity are critical to ecosystem processes. It’s that they are us. Other species are human kin. “The self,” as Tauber writes in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “is polymorphous and ill-defined.”

See also: Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis and Donna Haraway on “a new-new transdisciplinary synthesis.”

Patterns of social organization and interaction vary from culture to culture, from one social context to another, from one generation to the next. In any particular culture or context, established patterns signal and enforce appropriate action.

Such patterns — i.e., institutional patterns — have been conceptualized in various ways, at various levels of resolution.

One notable approach is called institutional logics. Recently, anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour weighed in his own approach, published as both book and augmented website. It’s called An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns.

“The institution is back,” declares Latour. Indeed, institutional analyses, syntheses, re-imaginations, and transpositions are critical to the development of social patterns that better support the flourishing of life.

In this post I’ll introduce logics and modes, while pointing out a couple of comparisons.

Last month at orgtheory.net, sociologist Bayliss Camp offered a personal introduction to institutional logics, reflecting on his experiences in moving between social contexts, from academia to government (“Research outside the academy part II: some background and reflections on institutional logics”):

Finally, I would note that when considering a career in government service, it is useful to think about the implications of the grand logics of different types of organizations (cf. Weber 1922; Dobbin 1994; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Meyer and Scott 1983; DiMaggio and Powell 1991).

We all know, for instance, that those working in for-profit businesses generally judge a given person’s performance through monetary means. It is only more rarely that we reflect on the fact that those working in government agencies tend to judge personal performance through metrics of power. In my experience, it is rarer yet that we admit the truth about academic institutions: that people are judged almost entirely in terms of reputation (and not just one’s own, but more broadly that of one’s advisor as well as one’s institutions, both past and present – see Etzkowitz, Kemelgor and Uzzi 2000).

Switching from one field to another usually necessitates that one be prepared to operate under a different set of institutional rules and expectations. In the case of moving from the academy to the state, this means (among other things) caring much less about what people think about one’s work, and caring much more about making things happen.

Camp mentions three institutional types — government, business, academy — and describes the norms of performance relevant to each. In the 2012 book, The Institutional Logics Perspective, by Patricia Thornton, William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury, these three are called state, market, and profession. (Four others are family, community, religion, and corporation.)

Here’s how Thornton and colleagues characterize them as ideal types:

institutional logics: ideal typesIdeal types are, well, idealized, and any particular organization or system or “institutional field” might be understood as combining “multiple, fragmented and contested” facets or dimensions from among logical types (Schneiberg and Lounsbury, 2008, pdf).

This, then, is the connection to Latour’s approach. The facets or dimensions from which institutional logics are composed — the meta-logics, one might say — are what Latour calls “modes of existence.”

Latour’s project is to develop a synthetic typology of these modes — “the things that humans concern themselves with — and the questions they ask themselves.” He currently lists fifteen in total: reproduction, metamorphosis, habit, technology, fiction, reference, politics, law, religion, attachment, organization, morality, network, preposition, and double click.

Another distinction between logics and modes is not in the typologies themselves but in the stance of the writers. Logics writings generally take an academic, third-person stance. Latour’s writing (regardless of one’s opinions of it) takes a moral stance — in contemporary lingo, a transdisciplinary or action research stance. He’s directly engaged.

For example, from the modes website:

How do we compose a common world? Not so long ago, the pro­ject that would have seen mod­ern­iza­tion spread over the whole planet came up against un­ex­pected op­po­si­tion from the planet it­self. Should we give up, deny the prob­lem, or grit our teeth and hope for a mir­a­cle? Al­ter­na­tively we could in­quire into what this mod­ern pro­ject has meant so as to find out how it can be be­gun again on a new foot­ing.

And from the book:

[W]e shall not cure the Moderns of their attachment to their cherished theme, the modernization front, if we do not offer them an alternate narrative made of the same stuff as the Master Narratives whose era is over — or so some have claimed, perhaps a bit too hastily. We have to fight trouble with trouble, counter a metaphysical machine with a bigger metaphysical machine.

I admire Latour’s commitment.

To be sure, logics writings also focus on organizational and social change. The paper I cited above by Marc Schneiberg and Michael Lounsbury, for example, is called “Social Movements and Institutional Analysis.”

Still, there’s a difference between the passive voice and the active one.

For anyone committed to change, the question becomes: How might I be most effective?

Amory Lovins: energy views and values

[Reposted from my old blog, P&P — originally published March 01, 2010.]

Looking back at Amory Lovins’s 1977 Soft Energy Paths, I was struck by his still-relevant list of “basic values”:

Underlying much of the energy debate is a tacit, implicit divergence on what the energy problem ‘really’ is. Public discourse suffers because our society has mechanisms only for resolving conflicting interests, not conflicting views of reality, so we seldom notice that these perceptions differ markedly. …

As a basis for mutual understanding, therefore, instead of leaving my world view to be guessed at (as most energy writers do), I shall make explicit a few of my underlying opinions – not on every aspect of the whole universe of perceptions that must support any coherent view of our energy future, but at least on a few basic values. Attempting this is unusual and difficult but important. Briefly, then, I think that:

  • We are more endangered by too much energy too soon than by too little too late, for we understand too little the wise use of power;
  • We know next to nothing about the carefully designed natural systems and cycles on which we depend; we must therefore take care to preserve resilience and flexibility, and to design for large safety margins (whose importance we do not yet understand), recognizing the existence of human fallibility, malice, and irrationality (including our own) and of present trends that erode the earth’s carrying capacity;
  • People are more important than goods; hence energy, technology, and economic activity are means, not ends, and their quantity is not a measure of welfare; hence economic rationality is a narrow and often defective test of the wisdom of broad social choices, and economic costs and prices, which depend largely on philosophical conventions, are neither revealed truth nor a meaningful test of rational or desirable behavior;
  • Though the potential for growth in the social, cultural, and spiritual spheres is unlimited, resource-crunching material growth is inherently limited (a consequence of the round-earth theory) and, in countries as affluent as the U.S., should be not merely stabilized but returned to sustainable levels at which the net marginal utility of economic activity (to borrow for a moment the economist’s abstractions) is clearly positive;
  • Since sustainability is more important than the momentary advantage of any generation or group, long-term discount rates should be zero or even slightly negative, reinforcing a frugal, though not penurious, ethic of husbanding;
  • The energy problem should be not how to expand supplies to meet the postulated extrapolative needs of a dynamic economy, but rather how to accomplish social goals elegantly with a minimum of energy and effort, meanwhile taking care to preserve a social fabric that not only tolerates but encourages diverse values and lifestyles;
  • The technical, economic, and social problems of fission technology are so intractable, and technical efforts to palliate those problems are politically so dangerous, that we should abandon the technology with due deliberate speed;
  • Many other technologies are exceedingly unattractive and should be developed sparingly or not at all (such as nuclear fusion, large coal-fired power stations and conversion plants, many current coal-mining technologies, urban-sited terminals for liquefied natural gas, much Arctic and offshore petroleum extraction, most “unconventional” hydrocarbons, and many “exotic” large-scale technologies such as solar satellites and monocultural biomass plantations);
  • Ordinary people are qualified and responsible to make these and other energy choices through the democratic political process, and on the social and ethical issues central to such choices the opinion of any technical expert is entitled to no special weight; for although humanity and human institutions are not perfectible, legitimacy and the nearest we can get to wisdom both flow, as Jefferson believed, from the people, whereas pragmatic Hamiltonian concepts of central governance by a cynical elite are unworthy of the people, increase the likelihood and consequences of major errors, and are ultimately tyrannical;
  • Issues of material growth are inseparable from the more important issues of distributional equity, both within and among nations; indeed, high growth in overdeveloped countries is inimical to development in poor countries;
  • For poor countries, the self-reliant ecodevelopment concepts inherent in the New Economic Order approach are commendable and practicable while the patterns of industrial development that served the OECD countries in the different circumstances of the past two centuries are not: indeed, so much have conditions changed that ecodevelopment concepts are now the most appropriate for the rich countries too;
  • National interests lie less in traditional geopolitical balancing acts than in striving to attain a just and equitable, therefore peaceful, world order, even at the expense of temporary commercial advantage.

Bruno Latour, systems thinker

Critiques of systems traditions and approaches have included Ida Hoos (Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique), Robert Lilienfeld (The Rise of Systems Theory : An Ideological Analysis), and — to my mind, significantly — Jean-François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge).

Intriguing then that anthropologist Bruno Latour makes peace with systems thinking as preface to his new project An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, which is published both as book and as “augmented” AIME website.

From the website FAQ, “Is AIME a system?

Ob­vi­ously, the pro­ject is sys­tem­atic in the sense that it has been car­ried out for over twenty-five years and sys­tem­at­i­cally pur­sued so that once a mode has been de­tected it is cross-ref­er­enced with all of the oth­ers modes.

How­ever, if by sys­tem it is meant that there are no other modes and that their de­scrip­tion is com­plete, ob­vi­ously AIME is not a sys­tem at all (com­pared to Hegel’s for in­stance) but firstly a re­ca­pit­u­la­tion of cer­tain ‘val­ues’ most cher­ished by some of the in­for­mants in­ter­ro­gated by the au­thor. This is to en­sure that in the long run it is not trans­formed into a sys­tem but rather, that it has been con­ceived as an in­quiry opened to many other co-in­quir­ers other than the first one.

On the whole, we think it is im­por­tant that an in­quiry into such an im­por­tant topic as the an­thro­pol­ogy of moder­nity be sys­tem­at­i­cally pur­sued as each mode re­acts to how an­other mode is un­der­stood. So, the post­mod­ern ob­ses­sion for avoid­ing sys­tem­atic­ity at all costs, runs against the clar­i­fi­ca­tion that we wish to ob­tain.

I’m starting a new tradition: favorite talk of the year. Here’s mine for 2013 — Donna Haraway at Arizona State’s Institute for Humanities Research. What’s yours?

By “favorite” I mean (based on the Sound Opinions guidelines) simply that: this talk (1) is a 2013 video or audio shared online, and (2) is the one that I watched or listened to more than any other this year. I check out a lot of talks, but Haraway’s stream of ideas and associations kept me coming back multiple times.

Here are a few choice sections (from the talk on Vimeo):

~16:15
Marilyn [Strathern] was the one who taught me: It matters what ideas you use to think other ideas with.

It seems like a very simple thing to say.

It especially matters what-ideas-you-use-to-think-other-ideas-with if one of them is not in control of the other, if they reach into and interrupt each other, if the result of using ideas-to-do-ideas-with destabilizes both in ways that change the name of the game for the possibility of ongoing-ness, accountable to the power structures of the encounters and the entanglements.

So, playing with Marilyn’s phrase: It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds.

Marilyn defines analogy in a particularly interesting way. She practices the art of comparison — a rather dangerous thing to do. It’s supposed to be a 19th-century comparative ethnological thing to do.

Marilyn practices the art of comparison and analogy in the sense that she defines analogy as the bringing together or colliding together — or however they got together — of entities, beings, worlds, ideas, systems that are dissimilar, so that one holds still long enough to be an extended metaphor for investigating the other.

That’s the practice of comparison in Marilyn’s hands — and that’s the practice that I’m going to try to engage tonight in the rest of this talk.

~38:55
Relations in multispecies cosmopolitics work by indigestion and infection, rather than reproduction — that’s the most important thing to remember. Making worlds, and coming to be accountable to each other, and finding out who is kin to whom, looks more like indigestion and infection, than it does like reproduction.

~42:35
The new synthesis, the evolutionary synthesis, the modern synthesis — that I think is still the strongest apparatus of science within the Anthropocene — couldn’t handle three critical things, from a biologist’s point of view: microbes, development of embryology, and symbiosis. Those three things almost never appear in the writings of the architects of the modern synthesis.

Symbiosis, development, and microbiology were literally indigestible — and are the key fleshly doings, within which the ecological, evolutionary, developmental, historical, technical, political new-new synthesis that I am proposing takes place.

~45:15
Transdisciplinary knowledges for a new-new synthesis: eco-evo-devo-histo-techno. … Our worlds are trans-ing in remarkable ways. …

We understand that “interdisciplinarity” isn’t quite what we’re talking about. But something is going on here that is more [like] redoing the codes of each other, trans-ing each other — in sexualities, in cognitive apparatuses, in the flesh. And that these trans-ing apparatuses are producing our kin and our tools.

Climate and Cultural Theory

Four rationalities of cultural theory

[Reposting a popular article from my old blog, P&P — originally published March 09, 2010.]

To what extent do you agree with each of the following?

• I am more strict than most people about what is right and wrong.
• I prefer simple and unprocessed foods.
• Making money is the main reason for hard work.
• I feel that life is like a lottery.

These statements come from a survey by Karl Dake (1991). Responses were used to measure alignment with particular worldviews, as depicted in the typology of “four rationalities,” above.

According to Dake’s analysis, being more strict than others would indicate a tendency toward a hierarchist rationality; preferring simple and unprocessed foods signals an egalitarian rationality; money making as a primary motivation describes the individualist; and a life-as-lottery view belongs to the fatalist.

Similar categories are familiar from a wide range of social-psychological literature: Max Weber’s types of rationality; Jane Jacobs on the commercial and guardian syndromes; Amitai Etzioni and others on communitarian thinking; Alan Page Fiske on authority ranking, market pricing, equality matching, and communal sharing; and so on.

The matrix pictured here, adapted from Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson (1990), is one presentation of a typology of worldviews called cultural theory. It plots acceptance of social controls (on the vertical axis) and levels of social commitment (on the horizontal axis). In the quadrants, the worldviews or rationalities depicted are alternatively described as archetypes, ways of life, social solidarities, and myths or caricatures of nature.

“We postulate that these four ways of life are in conflict in every conceivable domain of social life,” write Michael Thompson and Marco Verwell (2004). “Each of the four ways of life consists of a specific way of structuring social relations and a supporting cast of particular beliefs, values, emotions, perceptions, and interests.”

“In the end, every type of social conflict is about types of organization,” writes anthropologist Mary Douglas (2006). “Why do we settle for four types? Because this model is at once parsimonious and it is comprehensive. A hundred, or a million, types of cultural bias may be out there. But for explanatory value three, four or five types of social environment are enough to generate three, four or five distinct cosmologies.”

“Each rationality will generate its own distinctive engineering aesthetic: its own definition of the good, the beautiful and the socially desirable,” write Schwarz and Thompson (1990). “Our concern, therefore, should not be with which one is right (for that would be to insist that just one rationality had access to ‘the truth’) but rather with which is appropriate to the task at hand.”

I first came across cultural theory in the Resilience Alliance compendium, Panarchy (see: “Not Wrong, Just Incomplete”). In fact, Schwarz and Thompson credit RA founder Buzz Holling’s “myths of nature” as a primary source of inspiration.

With positions on climate hardening, references to contradictory worldviews are popping up in the mainstream media (See NYT and NPR), but the story itself is hardly new.  “Underlying much of the energy debate is a tacit, implicit divergence on what the energy problem ‘really’ is,” wrote Amory Lovins in 1977’s Soft Energy Paths. “Public discourse suffers because our society has mechanisms only for resolving conflicting interests, not conflicting views of reality, so we seldom notice that these perceptions differ markedly.”

Here is a cultural theory-based interpretation of climate worldviews:

  • The hierarchist’s story (nature perverse/tolerant): International protocols and national commitments are needed to address the tragedy of the atmospheric commons and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
  • The egalitarian’s story (nature ephemeral): The underlying problem is consumption (resource throughput). Precaution, lifestyle simplicity and grass roots action are the most effective responses.
  • The individualist’s story (nature benign): To address climate change, rely on laissez-faire markets to spur competition and innovation. The benefits of climate change may even balance out the costs.
  • The fatalist’s story (nature capricious): Natural forces are beyond human understanding, much less human influence.

A fifth worldview, called “nature resilient” (Thompson, Ellis & Wildavsky 1990) or “nature evolving” (Holling, Gunderson & Ludwig 2002) is sometimes pictured at the central intersection of the axes, overlapping each of the others – we might say, in the language of psychologist Ken Wilber, transcending and including each of the others.

Thompson, Ellis & Wildavsky label the bearer of this worldview “the hermit.”

Holling, Gunderson & Ludwig characterize the nature evolving worldview as flexible and adaptive. Holders of this worldview actively experiment with new institutions, seeking to gain insights. Diversity, modularity, redundancy, feedback are key principles of institutional design (see resilience thinking).

References
Karl Dake. 1991. Orienting dispositions in the perception of risk: An analysis of contemporary worldviews and cultural biases.
Mary Douglas. 2006(?). A History of Grid and Group Cultural Theory (pdf).
C. S. Holling, Lance Gunderson & Donald Ludwig. 2002. In Quest of a Theory of Adaptive Change. In Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems.
Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson. 1990. Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology and Social Choice.
Michael Thompson and Marco Verwell. 2004. The Case for Clumsiness (pdf).
Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis & Aaron Wildavsky. 1990. Cultural Theory.

To follow this line of research, see the Cultural Cognition Project, especially Dan Kahan’s blog.

Paul Thagard: the self as a multilevel system

Paul Thagard - muiltilevel mechanisms

Numerous theorists have described complex systems — have described life — as comprised of levels of organization.

Examples include Kenneth Boulding’s 1956 hierarchy of complexity (framework, clockwork, control system, cell, plant, animal, human, social organization, transcendental system), James Grier Miller’s 1978 living systems theory (cell, organ, organism, group, organization, community, society, supranational system), and Tim Allen and Thomas Hoekstra’s 1992 description of the “conventional biological or ecological hierarchy” (cell, organism, population, community, ecosystem, landscape, biome, biosphere).

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Paul Thagard takes a similar approach. His central focus is the human self, which he describes as a fourfold, multilevel system of interacting mechanisms: molecular, neural, individual, social.

Thagard:

I propose that the self is best understood as a multilevel system, encompassing mechanisms that interact across four interconnected levels: social, individual, neural, and molecular. Each of these levels can be understood as a subsystem consisting of environmental influences, component parts, interconnections between parts, and regular changes in the properties and relations of the parts. This approach rejects both the holistic view that higher levels are autonomous from lower levels and the individualistic view that higher levels can be entirely explained by mechanisms at lower levels. I use the term multilevelism to stand for the view that attention to multiple levels avoids the implausible assumptions and consequences of both individualistic reductionism and holistic antireductionism.

The slide above is from a 2011 presentation, “Changing Minds About Climate Change”; the quote is from a 2012 paper, “The self as a system of multilevel interacting mechanisms”; and the video below is from a 2008 talk (“Changing Minds About Climate Change”) at the Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation.

Understandings of transformation

Just what is this thing called transformation? I’ve been looking at a new paper and recent book that both seek patterns of understanding.

One approach in the paper, “Social science understandings of transformation,” by Katrina Brown, Saffron O’Neill, and Christo Fabricius — part of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) “World Social Science Report 2013” — surveys definitions of transformation across social science domains. Adapted here:

understandings of transformation

One approach in the 2010 book, Organizational Transformation for Sustainability: An Integral Metatheory, by Mark Edwards — which Bill Torbert, in his foreword, calls a once-in-a-generation “field-defining scholarly statement” — describes a review of paradigms in the organizational transformation literature, with conceptual lenses related to each. Adapted here:

paradigms of transformation

Social science research for global change

With the release of the International Social Science Council (ISSC) “World Social Science Report 2013,” I’ve been looking back at the 2012 ISSC report, “Transformative Cornerstones of Social Science Research for Global Environmental Change” (pdf).

The report aims to set out “a charter for the social sciences, a common understanding of what it is that the social sciences can and must do to take the lead in developing a new integrated, transformative science of global change.”

Most thought-provoking are the report’s “illustrative questions,” a few of which I’ve selected here:

  • How do we account for and track the influence on global change processes of dominant neoliberal thinking and the marketization of all social life?
  • What role do social and cultural identities play in peoples’ ability to cope with and recover from the impacts of global change?
  • What are the consequences of global change for the basic social fabric of life: for institutions such as the family, welfare systems, legal rules, rights and duties, or private-public interactions?
  • What does change mean to different people and different groups?
  • What would realistic, feasible constructions of alternative social systems and lifestyles look like; what new leitmotifs would we need to guide change towards such systems?
  • What sets of values, beliefs, assumptions, interests, worldviews, hopes, needs and desires underlie different responses to global change and drive different visions of the kind of societies we should be striving to build?
  • How can we best bring a normative agenda – one that foregrounds obligations, duties and responsibilities to the poor, to the vulnerable and to future generations – into the legitimate space of scientific expertise, policy and practice?
  • Is the global scale of governance still relevant when it comes to forward looking action on climate change?  What would constitute real, authentic, meaningful participation by multiple actors and how can we ensure it?
  • Do we need radically new political regimes and forms of democracy and, if so, of what kind and are they feasible?

Chris Argyris: norms of competence and justice

Single- and double-loop learning

Business and learning theorist Chris Argyris passed away last weekend. He was widely known for his model of single-loop and double-loop learning.

Numerous visualizations of this model are available online. Still, I find they often lack a couple of key features.

One is the clarity of Gareth Morgan’s interpretation, which I’ve adapted here from his book, Images of Organization.

Another is a significant detail about the nature of the assessments in steps 2 and 2a. Argyris described this process as a comparison of one’s monitoring and sensemaking (step 1) against prevailing standards and norms (single loop), a process that may then lead to a reflexive consideration of whether prevailing standards-norms are appropriate or not (double loop).

What’s generally left out of other visualizations (including Morgan’s) are the specific standards-norms against which we assess our actions. According to Argyris, these must be competence and justice. In On Organizational Learning: Second Edition, 1999, he labeled these two, along with confidence in one’s competence, as “metavalues.”

Argyris:

Managers are unlikely to be effective if they do not strive to increase the seamlessness between their designs for action and the actions themselves. They must be concerned about the validity of their claims. They must be concerned about the justice of the methods they use in managing.

These same metavalues are also key in the scientific community. Science requires human beings who are concerned about conducting competent research. Science thrives on scientists who are legitimately confident in their competence. Social science as an activity of inquiry will not last if social scientists are not concerned with justice.

See also: Social learning and competence.