From Forms of Knowledge to Forms of Practice: Comparing Educational Activities with Activities in Society

It is very difficult to make meaningful distinctions between practices in the classroom and practices in business, or public services. In each case, stakeholders engage in activities with rights, responsibilities, positions, roles and obligations. As a result of interventions there usually are changes in the patterns of responsibilities, obligations, rights, etc. These are observable to the extent to which communications and practices reveal some kind of transformation. When such change has occurred, we may well say that individuals have ‘learnt’ something (although what is learnt is sometimes hard to say!)

The question is how the changes to patterns of rights, responsibilities and obligations can be compared across different domains, how the causes for such changes may be compared, and how the causal factors behind such changes can be explained.

At its simplest level, a methodology has to make three levels of comparison (shown in the diagram below). Comparison A (below) is a comparison of outcomes: what are the changes to positions, rights, obligations, understandings relating to an activity? Comparison B is a comparison of the activity and its associated information and technology: how do the constraints relating to one context of comparison relate to the constraints of another? Comparison C is a comparison of the contexts between the two situations: how are the normative constraints of the context similar or different?

Explanations for outcomes must account for the relationship between context and intervention which leads to outcome in each case. Effective explanation will be applicable to both comparable situations.

These levels of comparison relate to different kinds of constraint which are operating, and these in turn relate to the different foci of explanation that need to be produced. For example, comparisons A and B require an understanding of the constraints applied by technologies and the constraints applied by a particular activity or task which may need to be performed by the technology. This maps onto the material dimensions  and interpersonal communications. Comparison C requires an understanding of the deeper social structures which will further constraint practice and affect the ways in which interventions have causal power.

For an operational laboratory, some control over the kinds of activities to design to test certain explanations must also be considered. This means making a mapping between activities within education and activities in the world outside. In turn this requires a generic typology of activities within education.

Constraint analysis may provide a way of doing this. The music lesson is different from the French lesson. In reality, the constraints that bear upon learners and teachers vary. There are constraints that bear upon acting in the classroom, there are material constraints that bear upon students in the music lesson which are different from the material constraints that bear upon students in the English lesson. There are social constraints emerging from the dynamics between peers within the classroom, and so on. Activities conducted within the French classroom and the music classroom are fundamentally different in type. Each activity constrains in different ways. These constraints may be thought of as material or informational?

Determining Activity Constraints

When considering any kind of activity, a number of different stakeholder views must be considered. Each stakeholder has particular roles, responsibilities, rights and obligations. The network of things that connect the different rights and responsibilities for each stakeholder can be mapped, together with the different things that constrain each stakeholder. Stakeholders together may well constrain each other. Each of these rights and responsibilities may be represented in terms of different kinds of constraint.

In trying to distinguish different aspects of activity within the classroom, we propose to track three aspects of constraint which map onto the different levels of experience collected in the explanatory section  of the project. Considering the aspects of material constraint, social constraint and constraints imposed by any particular activity, we can create a three-axes graph upon which different stakeholders may respond to questions concerning how they feel about particular aspects of their experience.

On the above axes, it is possible to situate different “triangles” on axes which represent different freedoms of constraint. For example, in triangle A, there is freedom to use any kind of tooling possible (or no tooling), there is freedom to exercise any kind of activity from any authority, however, there is a strong normative constraint which forces everyone to behave in a similar way. Free play activity in the school playground for example (whilst nothing is ever completely free from material constraint). The absence of any overt authority, but the strong constraint of social context would produce the kind of behaviour seen in religious communities. (Team games would produce this kind of social constraint.)

In triangle B shows free choice of activities, freedom from social norms, but constraint in the choice of tools. The school example of this is to provide technical tools which are mandated for classroom purposes, but activities are open providing they are performed through the tools. Various forms of electronically-mediated resource-based learning may fit into this. In business, such an extreme might be represented as technocratic management.

In triangle C, there is freedom of constraint with regard to tooling, freedom from social norms, but there is constraint in the activities that are coordinated. The demand that a person might be told to achieve a task in whatever way is possible would be representative of this kind of situation.

Having said this, where there is constraint in two dimensions, we look down the axes. In the case of constraint of constraint of tooling and constraint of norms, we get axis 1, where there is freedom of activity, but normal constraints and tooled constraints. Such an instant would be an online game where individuals can freely explore (e.g. World of Warcraft).

What about the kind of constraint where there is constraint in activity, constraint in tooling, but individuals can act without worrying about others? In such a case there is a case of individual problem-based learning, or personal investigation with given models.

What about the kind of constraint where there is constraint of activity and constraint of norms, but freedom in the choice of tools? Such a situation would produce activities where there are divisions of roles and responsibilities (as in roleplay), but within each role, there is flexibility as to how those roles might be executed.

Against the three axes, there are questions which can be asked of stakeholders. They are:

1. To what extent are you free to use the tools you want?
2. To what extent can solve the problems you have to solve without reference to those around you?
3. To what extent can you solve your own problems and engage in your own activities?

Each of these questions may be answered according to a Likert scale.  The dimensioning of the triangle is useful because it enables us to make distinctions about different kinds of activity. It also enables us to make comparisons of similar kinds of activities in education and what happens in industry.

However, the structures of constraint bearing upon activities are recursive. For example, where there is strong constraint in one dimension, those activities which result in that constraint can also be analysed for the constraints that bear upon them. In this way, for both educational  activities and for activities outside education, we can analyse and map webs of constraint.

MOOCs, Status, Economics and Fairness

One of the great problems in thinking about the funding of education is the fact that economic life, from where the resources to fund education must be found, is difficult to separate from the processes of learning which we all undergo continually. The fact that some of that learning takes place in institutions with a particular status, and studying at which leads to 'status awards' (degrees) to individuals for which they have to pay large sums of money, is not an indication of a 'market' in learning. It is a market in status. MOOCs are not telling us about learning. They are telling us about status. Currently the vast majority of those engaging with MOOCs already have relatively high social status.

When the education 'market' is understood like this, it is little wonder that MOOCs are in the trough of disillusionment right now. What kind of status is associated with studying in a MOOC? Mary Beard's critique of them the other day (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26431790) was really an expression of worry that the MOOC would become a barrier to opportunities for certain individuals to increase their status. Resources would be diverted to establishing a 'false' status-increasing instrument (the MOOC) which actually served to enhance the status (and relative inaccessibility) of prestigious face-to-face education. I think the broad thrust of her argument merits serious attention. Because education is so confusing and so contested, it is easy to get side-tracked into an argument about the wrong thing (learning), when the thing that really matters (status) is overlooked in the interests of those who wish to preserve it.

What do we mean by status? John Searle, in his recent work of social ontology (see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Social-World-Structure-Civilization/dp/0199576912 ) proposes one way of looking at this. He argues that human beings have:

“the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question"

By 'capacity', Searle means that individuals can declare status. This move of linguistic reductionism is in line with his earlier work on Speech Acts, but his acknowledgement that institutions are created through the declaration of status adds a powerful new twist to his general theory of the constitution of the world through language, and one which ultimately admits to the inadequacies of simple linguistic reductionism, and the importance of taking social structures as 'givens'. In effect, we might say, status is a given - it's there, real, substantial. Functions of declaration are given at a different level, but equally real. Status has causal powers, tendencies, etc; functions have causal power. Through this route, there isn't much difference between Searle's position and a less linguistically reductionist position as is articulated in Critical Realism (for example).

Universities declare status. They create a division between themselves and the rest of society. This division is a division relating to rights, duties and obligations. If we want to compare MOOCs with the rest of education, we have to look at the associated rights, duties and obligations in each. Revealing differences emerge. The whole point with MOOCs is that the duties and obligations relating to students are simply not there: it's laissez-faire education. The obligations and duties bear upon the providers of the MOOC. They must make their lectures and activities available and organise effectively the assessments of the students. Who gains status in this? Answer: the people who subject themselves to the rights, duties and obligations! That's not the students, but the providers of the courses.

Compare a traditional university. On gaining admission, students are subjected to a different set of rights, duties and obligations. They must obey the rules of the institutions, do their assignments on time, pass exams, etc. Teachers have rights and duties to give lectures, mark work, etc. But in upholding the compliance with the declared rights, duties and obligations, both teachers and students gain status. The degree of status gained is dependent on the perceived level of duties and obligations to be complied with. The obligations and duties of a degree at Oxford are not the same as the obligations and duties of a degree at Bolton. However, if Bolton was more creative, it could create situations with other kinds of duties and obligations (other than academic ones) which might be seen to be of equal value. For example, if Bolton were to create duties and obligations to serve the local community in some way (maybe through some form of service learning), then this would also serve as a way of increasing the status of the individual.

I'm currently thinking about the Higher Education Academic Record (HEAR - see http://hear.ac.uk/) , which seeks to recognise and validate student achievement outside academic qualifications. This is a good way in which status functions might find rich expression in university participation, and which might serve to translate that added status into the employability of students.

But what of economic life, social life and status? To start with, Searle is explicit that money is a 'status object': "I promise to pay the bearer" is a status declaration. In many ways money can buy status. The big car, house, etc, all articulate some kind of status (even a slightly shabby one!); however, so does the cramped house in a bad area full of books! Increases in status can give rise to greater opportunities to make money. To some extent, the rich get richer because they can afford to buy the status opportunities which give them and their families access to further status-increasing opportunities. But there are limits to this. The rich will tend to want to conceal the advantages they had in acquiring their status (private school will become an embarrassment!). Whilst the real business of being subject to rights, duties and obligations is theoretically open to anyone, it may require a state of ontological security which is easier to have with the emotional stability of a loving family, good schooling, etc.

The problem with information that "connects"

In our computer age we tend to think of information as ‘stuff’: letters on a screen, signals down a wire, codes in the genome, etc. Information is all "screens and switches", on tap – something to be accessed, recorded, played back, absorbed, analysed. Moreover, our experience tells us that information is the join between a state of "not knowing" and knowing. Information is directed at us for a purpose, it is to be made operational - it points to the way of learning. We hope and expect from teachers that they point us towards information. Indeed, in recent educational discourse, it is not uncommon to find the idea of teachers as ‘brokers’ of access to information, where learning itself can be gained purely from immersion in an information environment. Yet, as our discourse has increasingly embraced this kind of approach, supporting our technological infrastructure, the word information is used in a way where it masks what is being talked about rather than reveals it. Technology has changed the way we think. Our discourse is about individual processing of available information, freedom of personal choice, goal achievement: everything which is about the linear connections between states. This way of thinking about information we might call ‘connecting information’.

We have to give, after all, some kind of label to the thing that happens when people talk together. There are words which are exchanged in text messages and emails: what else would you call it? "Information" will surely do. The problem might be that rather than simply accept this label as a label for the connection between people, we then imbue it with causal powers in its own right. At this point, information becomes an actor. Our “information society” is no longer about people, but about the stuff that exists between people. The “knowledge economy” is about the capacity of individuals and corporations to participation in the creation of information. Universities are particularly guilty of this way of thinking. The problem with this is that it stops us asking an obvious question. What does it mean for people to be connected to one another?

Before the information revolution of the 20th century, connectedness was not a way in which people thought. Rights and responsibilities, positions, roles and duties were incumbent upon a person in their society. The connectivity mantra may have emancipated many in society by giving them choice as to which rights and responsibilities they are subject to because they can effectively choose which communities they associate with. But it may well have enslaved them to a technocratic society at the same time. The challenge in thinking about information is to think beyond the connection.

I've been looking very closely at the work of Luciano Floridi recently (I've written about this before). Floridi's work, it strikes me, is very much about 'connection'. He holds to a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information, where information is presented as a mapping function between questions and answers. Floridi wants to connect truth to information: Am I writing this blog? Yes I am! (but 'no, I'm not' wouldn't be information) What's curious about this, however, is that the further Floridi goes in justifying his connection model, the more he is driven towards having to produce a model of agency. Indeed, I'm thinking that his theory isn't a theory of information at all, it is a theory of agency. Of course, this may be an excellent model of agency, but I wonder about the criteria for deciding if its any good or not. Might it be that the criteria for deciding this depends on the coherence of the model of agency with the theory of information? Where does that leave real experience?

Floridi has yet to produce a theory of learning. He may not believe one is needed. Yet in terms of real experience, the capabilities of individuals to make sense of available information appear to be widely divergent. This has real consequences, not least in the economic and political domain. The domain of yes/no questions and answers is no doubt an important aspect of information (Luhmann agrees with this too). But there is so much more to our agency.

Life processes are morphogenetic. If the information in the genome is the same kind of stuff as the information on the computer screen, then we can say that the biological information plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis of the organism. We don't know exactly how. Indeed, the 'field theories' of morphogenesis which predate the discovery of DNA have better explanatory power than the genome sequencing nonsense that we are surrounded by today. But moreover, the images on the computer screen also play a role in the morphogenesis of society. Once again, we don't know how.

Ethical Issues in the development of the University: An Apologetics of Love and the challenge of Governance

The motto Cardinal Newman chose for his coat of arms was "Heart speaks to heart". For a figure whose intellectual grounding grew out of the rarified scholasticism of Oxford, whose high minded ideals of what a University is have provided sound-bites for every Vice Chancellor who wants to add gravitas to their latest managerial wheeze, heart (as opposed to brain) is perhaps surprising. But Newman's intellectual journey is about discovering the heart. It is a different kind of 'speaking' that he articulates: not the speaking of the BBC's 'nation shall speak unto nation', whose latent message is "we're going to teach you all to be British!" Hearts do not speak like that. It is a tragedy that our Universities behave as if they acknowledge the BBC's interpretation of 'speaking' and not Newman's - they've even found clever ways of measuring the effectiveness of their 'speaking', and rewarding individuals who speak the loudest!

When a person has been bereaved, we look them in the eye and feel something of the pain they feel - because deep within our own psyche, we know this sorrow is universal. And when we say "I'm sorry for your loss", we may also know (particularly if we have experienced grief ourselves) that this simple utterance in this particular moment really means something. Hearts speak when we know we are not alone.

The problem for our Universities currently is that they have been increasingly indulging in a process of social atomisation. Rather than seeing themselves as communities of people (teachers, learners, administrators) who collectively are not alone, they increasingly see individual members of the community as replaceable functionaries whose purpose is to deliver to a "customer base" of students whose fees bolster the universities coffers. We might not unreasonably ask Does "belonging to the university" increasingly now mean little more than "being paid by it" or "getting a degree from it"?

Social atomisation is a process which has become endemic in our society. We might date its current manifestation to Thatcher, although it has always existed to some extent. It is the product of a kind of individualism which affirms the rights of individuals to "choose" who they work for, or with, and where people are encouraged to be ever-mobile and dynamic in their careers. It is a kind of individualistically-driven egomania where nobody abides anywhere, nobody's commitment extends beyond that which suits them, and 'social responsibility' becomes redefined as compliance to legal and professional frameworks rather than vocation.

The real question here is "whose will?" Social atomisation is an erosion of a universal, all-embracing will. Christians would call this the "will of God". The fact that the will of the individual is not the universal will underlies the struggle of all democratic societies since ancient times. Powerful individuals will want to present their will as the will of the people, but individual ego misleads the powerful into a delusion which ultimately catches up with them. The universal will eventually expresses itself (if perhaps only briefly before it is distorted again): we see it in the Ukraine now. But we are frequently reminded that the will of the individual is not universal or true. I attended the funeral recently of a one of the catering staff in my university and there was standing room only in the church. She was much loved, and the need for people to be together was profound despite the apparently modesty of her position in the institution. That is an expression of the universal will.

The problem with social atomisation is that it ignores this. It is inherently paradoxical in presenting the collective will (an aggregation of individual wills) as in some way universal. But whilst the abstract idea of the collective as universal is untrue, legal frameworks established around abstract ideas gradually replace deeper ontologically grounded experience. A good example of this is the evolution of corporate governance codes: the Hampell report of 1998 states unequivocally that "The single overriding objective shared by all listed companies, whatever their size or type of business is the preservation and the greatest practical enhancement over time of their shareholders' investment" (I'm grateful to Hugh Willmott for highlighting the importance of corporate governance codes). This is a marked evolution of earlier codes of corporate governance which considered shareholder influence to be far less important (even destabilising) on effective corporate governance. The 1975 Corporate Report from the Accounting Standards Steering Committee (see http://www.ion.icaew.com/Talkaccountancyblog/18825) argued that privileging shareholders in governance was considered extreme by the majority of companies. Since then an individualistic shareholder-oriented abstracted model of effective accountability has become dominant. This overrides the real domain of corporation politics. Because it is abstract, it is easily subverted by powerful influences within the corporation which can eventually defend reneging on the advice of earlier corporate codes such as those contained in the Cadbury report (to which the Hampell report is a response) which warn against any single individual having powers of decision. The social atomisation to shareholder return in turn makes workers functionaries to produce this aim, each one rewarded according to the extent to which they serve the goal, and being replaceable by any other individual similarly motivated by self-interest. Cohesion and corporate identity are swallowed up by the will of the director who pretends to be fulfilling the corporate mission by meeting shareholder wishes. The heart goes out of the thing and we end up with HBOS, Enron, RBS, etc. Indeed, such failures bear similarity with Robert Maxwell's business empire, which was the prompt for the Cadbury report in the first place.

Universities don't have shareholders. They do have boards of governors, whose contentment is most easily satisfied by the financial reports from the institution. In uncertain times, the greatest succour to governors will be the establishment of healthy financial surpluses which, it will be deemed, will off-set any irregularities in the student recruitment to institutions. The governors become a kind of shareholder, with the surplus acting as a kind of 'dividend of trust'. Social atomisation then works to see all university activities as functional in terms of securing the trust of governors. As trust is secured, so is the position of the Vice Chancellor. Lecturers must engage by keeping their learners contented enough to maintain enrolments: they will be rewarded by being allowed to keep their jobs! But maintaining learner enrolment is not an educational objective. It is not even a necessary condition for learning. The sufficient condition for learning is that "heart speaks to heart" - it is the realisation of the universal will - and of course it doesn't have to happen in a university, although one might hope that it does.

This is the essence of the ethical problem of universities. Social atomisation replaces the "heart speaks to heart" of powerful and authentic conversations between teachers and learners with false conditions of maintaining enrolments, meeting learning outcomes and building surpluses. The cancer is in the fact that the more the false conditions dominate, the less possible it becomes to reach any kind of authenticity. The ethical problem is that there is no half-way-house between the individual will and the universal will. The more governors heed the doctrine of surpluses and atomisation, the less able they are to perform their governing duties of care towards universal things that bind the institution together. They themselves become atomised. Eventually it all falls apart.

Not sure I'd want to be in a governor's shoes when that happens. But no doubt it will be the cue for a new governance report into university management!

Technology and Thinking (Part 5 of a Short Introduction to Thinking about Education and Technology)

If there is a central theme to this introductory course in thinking about education and technology, it is 'constraint': the idea that our questioning about the worlds of education and technology are constrained by institutions, discourses, technologies and (frankly) other people.

In the first week, I asked you to think of a question, and then to think of all the questions around that question which give rise to you asking the question in the first place. This is not only a good exercise for thinking deeply and searchingly - it is also an exercise in the identification of constraints.

In week 2, I suggested an approach to reading which was similarly about identifying the constraints bearing upon other authors as they try articulate their ideas on paper. Writing is hard, and the PhD is fundamentally about writing. Writing is also shaped by constraints, and reading is very often about finding those authors (many of them dead) whose constraints relate to your own.

In week 3, the issue of writing itself was dealt with. The exercise here was to examine the process and experience of writing as something where ideas from the mind find externalised expression. Externalising things allows us to play with the things we create, and in doing this, we can improve our writing (moving sentences around, for example). It's in this process of rejigging of things that we become more aware of the constraints bearing upon us, and become more capable of thinking them through (I think as I write this; I write to think).

Last week, I focused on methodology and value. Methodologies are often represented as 'research recipes', but actually they are different world-views. World views themselves are dependent on the ways that the world constrains the way we look at it. If academics were deeply critical, they would never simply adopt a methodological recipe and call it 'research' (although so many do!). Instead, they would deeply examine their problem, using the different world-views of methodologies as ways of asking more penetrating questions until they find their own methodological synthesis.

Now it is time to examine one of the major constraints that bear upon us, shapes our world-views, blinds us to aspects of reality, and even changes the way we write and think - this is technology.

In this week's exercise, I want you to make a short (2 minutes) video of a space where you spend a lot of time.

1. Identify those things around you that you consider to be technologies
2. How are they important to you?
3. What would your life be without them?
4. What do you have around you which you don't consider to be technology?

The point in doing this is to highlight the extent to which lives are lived immersed in technologies. This presents lots of questions, which I discuss in my video. Technologies excite us, and as they do so, so we change the way we think. Our expectations of the world change when we see something really cool (like, for example, the Oculus Rift which I discuss in the video). There are challenges to understanding how this happens, and what its effects are.

We see dramatic social changes resulting from technological change: think about how everyone's head is stuck in a smartphone in waiting rooms or on public transport. Or how we all now use email. How did that happen? Do you remember people thinking "this will never catch on" a few years ago? Will it always be like this from now? What will be next?

The problem with social change produced by technology is that, unlike social change produced through politics, nobody votes for it. It just happens, and it changes our lives.

Some of the social changes produced by technology can be challenging for individuals and society. For example, think how many jobs now don't exist because they have been replaced with technologies. How many public services are cut-back for online services take their place? Is an online service the same as something face-to-face? Is the village store the same as Amazon.com? How can the village store compete? Technologies encourage a kind of rationalising way of thinking where people appear to become more like cogs in the machine. Human beings become 'instrumentalised' in some grand design of a 'system'. In whose interests is this done?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger worried about this aspect of technology. He argued that living with technology was the dominant way of being in the modern world. He called it "enframing". He worried that technological thinking was a way of thinking whereby the real world was only viewed through a frame which showed the resources that could be exploited by technology. The Cybernetician Heinz von Foerster expressed this concern quite neatly when he said: "we have allowed existent technology to create problems it can solve."

Heidegger believed that the only people who do not think in this way are artists, and poets in particular. Is he right? As a musician I think about this a lot: musical instruments are among the earliest of human technologies. Do they enframe?

But what we have today seems new. The fact that all the data from the use of online tools gets fed back to global corporations to be aggregated and analysed is a new development in society. What does that mean for democracy and politics? Whose interests are served by these technologies? Who wins? Who loses? These are hard questions, and perhaps our greatest current challenge is that we lack the intellectual means to be able to probe them effectively. Our technologies are so complex that whilst we know we are constrained and manipulated by them, we struggle to articulate exactly how this happens, which leaves us powerless in the face of technology's inexorable "progress".

UCLAN's Psychology Protest and Reading the Fear of Managerialism

In my course on 'thinking about education and technology', I have focused on the concept of 'constraints' of thought and decision. When we read anything, when we write anything, when we make any kind of decision, we are subject to constraints: these are the things that we cannot think. This is useful to remember as we think about the behaviour of management. A typical example of things going on in Universities today is demonstrated by UCLAN's attempt to reconfigure (!) its psychology department, and thanks to a FOI request, the emails between senior managers have been released. Current staff have decided to go public. We need to study what is happening to our universities, and the courage of these staff should be commended as an example to all of us. See http://psychprotest.blogspot.co.uk/

Managements everywhere have to make decisions. How do they do this? What are the constraints that bear upon them as they do this? Management will often ask "why do you think we (or more usually, I) made this decision?" and seek to justify it. But this is the wrong question. The real question to answer is "when there are so many options, why did we not do anything else?" The answer to that question is the constraint that bears upon decision-makers that blinds them to alternatives.

The biggest constraint is FEAR: the "Mind killer" as Frank Herbert noted in Dune. What are managers frightened of? Like the rest of us, we can start with the fear for their jobs. This fear will be proportional to their own ontological security, their own sense of confidence in their abilities, their confidence in being able to "deal with life" if they find themselves without a job, and so on. Basically, the less talent a manager has, the greater their fear of unemployment will be. Of course, fear also concerns their ability to maintain high standards of living and the family expectations (which carry their own constraints) that bear upon them. Managerial salaries have risen dramatically in recent years, and this will increase the associated risks of losing their position. It increases fear, and bad decisions which result from fear further compounds fear.

Then there are personal constraints beyond money and security: the things individuals like - fast cars, personal entertainments, getting drunk; or the things individuals don't like - the French (say!), broccoli, economy class travel. These too will create orientations of thought and decision which will blind individuals from examining all options.

Around these constraints lie the economic constraints of the institution: the structural changes in university finance, the uncertainty of recruitment, the necessity to have some kind of surplus, and so on. All staff are told about are these constraints. Yet these are merely a veil over the deeper human concerns that underpin the personal lives of managers. I'm interested in exploring methods of analysis of management behaviour which can reveal the extent to which this is the case: deeper personal constraints are the 'dark matter' of the University, and understanding its efficacy, and producing evidence for its operation is an important development in our understanding of managerial behaviour more generally.

It amuses me to think of David Willetts meeting with University Vice Chancellors, when Willetts will receive a ministerial allowance on top of his basic salary as an MP, which will be dwarfed by the salaries even of VCs for relatively modest institutions like my own. But high salaries = high stakes = big fear = bad decisions.

How does somebody with a big salary and a position to defend mitigate their risks of losing their job? First of all, they will surround themselves with people who agree with them. Preferably people who are more frightened of losing their jobs than the person at the top. That effectively puts a 'talent embargo' on managers surrounding the top figures. Anyone with integrity and a strong academic reputation would be more fearless, act with less constraint, and - frankly - be more of a threat to a fearful top dog than a help. Untalented subordinates on high salaries are malleable.

But there are deeper structural consequences of fear. The subordinates of managers act with more constraint than the person at the top, because they too are paid beyond their competence: the boss, if he or she is cruel and clever, will ever-so-often remind them of their defects and their dependence on pleasing him or her.  The result is a very strong and self-reinforcing ring of steel round the leader. Subordinates, being more fearful, are less likely to listen to people on the ground: their ears will be focused only inwards. Their nerves will jangle in trying to manage the emerging crisis on the ground as staff 'squeal' (a popular term for the complaint of exhausted lecturers) with trying to appear strong and on-message to the senior management. They will demonise staff on the ground as they seek to shift blame for problems away from themselves. One hopes that the double-bind schizophrenic situation of these people excites the academic interest of the psychologists in UCLAN!

The deep problem with this 'deafening' of management is that the only way any of us manage the constraints that bear upon us is by listening to each other. Listening not just to the people we like, or the people who think like us - they are not terribly useful in terms of handling constraints. It's the people who disagree with us, the people we don't like - they are the most important to be listened to. The human defence mechanism against constrained and pathological thinking is compassion, love, honesty and openness. Greed, ambition, lust, money and power all work against this.

It all makes for disastrous management, funded by students, where all regulatory and accountability mechanisms have been corrupted by managers, where students get a raw deal in studying in institutions where staff keep smiling through gritted teeth and desperately try not to let their depression show. Despite their self-certified competence and professionalism, management are so subject to constraints that their decisions will almost always be worse than the decisions of anyone else whose common sense would not be constrained by such forces - anyone whose compassion, love, decency and openness has not been corrupted by the poison of money and power. Curiously, this is really a systemic phenomenon: these are not inherently bad people - although they may behave badly in the circumstances they find themselves in.

The UCLAN emails deserve close study.
 

More on Art and Science: Sheldrake, Dawkins and Musical Creativity

I had a discussion yesterday about my previous post on the difference between the arts and the sciences. Basically, the question was "aren't scientists creative?"

Of course, they are. At least, good scientists are creative - and they're the only scientists we should take notice of. But science suffers from a disease inflicted on it by education where creativity and curiosity can get shunned in favour of a kind of 'scientific fundamentalism', when the 'cannon' of established practices, experiments, equations, evidence, "established facts" and rigid thinking take hold in exam questions and research council awards - all of which is attenuative of reality. The deep problem is that science cannot afford to attenuate reality - the consequence is disastrous policy. That it often does so is because of its own discourse, the power relations within academia and the egos of academics. So much of science is delusional for precisely the reasons that Rupert Sheldrake got into so much trouble for saying recently:
 

The question for society is "which science do you want?" - the science of Sheldrake - a creative, curious, critical science which is always pushing the boundaries of explanatory frameworks, or the science of Richard Dawkins? Who is more scientific? Who is more critical? The criticism of the scientific community is that Sheldrake isn't scientific. What does that mean, exactly? (I don't really want to elevate Dawkins to the status of 'scientist' because even by the standards of normal science, his scientific achievements are actually rather modest - but he represents, along with people like Ben Goldacre, a dominant view within science)

Of course, Sheldrake is a showman. But he knows a thing or two about religious fundamentalism, and he's right to spot it in the scientific establishment.

The show that Sheldrake puts on is interesting. His target scientists will no doubt complain that his critique doesn't go anyway - it's not practical. "This stuff works, damn it! - we don't need to think about it" - and (frankly) it's too hard. Sheldrake is not inventing new concepts. He is delineating a space of critique - a ground for inquiry. It is in critical activity like this that we can see the connection between artistic thinking and scientific thinking.

The problem that Sheldrake's got is that the religious zeal and dominance of dogmatic science is as real as the things he is suggesting are not explained by it.  He can be an artist and delineate the form of absence left in the shadow of science, but unless he embraces the semantic codification, the egos (which he himself possesses in abundance!) that sits at the heart of dogmatic science and the industrious technological and empirical activity that follows from it, he will remain on the fringes. Here perhaps we can see how the question of the relationship between the arts and the sciences tells us about the difference between politics, knowledge, power structures and individual human experience.

"Do ideas have form?" was another question I was asked, when I made the distinction between science articulating ideas, where art articulates form. Yes, behind an idea is a form - much like the critical form that is exposed by Sheldrake. At some point, however, the form is codified and is semantically represented. At least, this happens to part of the form. It is impossible to articulate a form with an idea, and semantic representations take on their own life as they are interpreted in different ways. The form of an idea has to be experienced: this is what we try to do in teaching. If a concept comes to represent a form, it eventually becomes detached from it. Then dogmatic science will grasp it. (There's probably something to say about Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos and Feyerabend here - but that's for another post!!)

Codification is an interesting thing. Art needs codification as well as science - particularly performance art, where there is a necessity to coordinate performers. Musical notation does this job. The concretising of the expression of form is the hard part in composition. Getting the notes down takes such a long time. Why bother? Why not just improvise? Because the articulation of deeply coherent and complex musical structures is not possible within the flow of an improvised performance. Improvisation (however good the improviser - and some are remarkable) is a slide, not a ladder. I have always struggled to create ladders: how to stay focused, how to make decisions, how to coherently articulate what I want and stick to it.

It's recently occurred to me that the arts are not different from one another. To me, everything is music. So my latest strategy for "sticking to the task of codifying and articulating my form" is to create pictures of my notes of notes for my pieces...

 

With this I can focus, and work out the parts of what I want to say. There is a process whereby I can discover my form. But this is situated against the backdrop of the world in which I live. I have struggled to focus simply because of the sheer range of things that grapple for my attention. My solution is a response to the attentional problem. It may be that the techniques of artists are not eternal. They are situated within their social context. Which makes me think about the techniques of scientists...

 

In trying to coordinate myself in the articulation of a musical form, am I being scientific? Possibly - but perhaps in a similar way in which Sheldrake is being scientific in articulating his critique - which to "normal" science isn't scientific!