I'm working on an EU bid at the moment which is concerned
with creating a platform for researching the social and political ecologies in
institutions, companies and societies. Slightly ironically my department has
been experiencing first-hand some of the pathologies which result when the
ecologies of an institution get unbalanced or it becomes monocultural. However,
this seems to be the order of the day in many Universities these days. Our job
is to make sure that we put ‘these days’ behind us and hand on a more healthy,
diverse and better-governed education system to our children. Anyway, rhetoric
is fine, but what about the practicalities?
First of all, I think that in understanding political ecologies
we have to understand the dynamics between people who are fundamentally
different in all sorts of ways, and yet who find ways of working together and
making decisions. In more technical language, this is the difference between
the mutual information between people (the “working together”) and the
flexibility, or dissipations whereby energy and information is lost to the
environment - apparently wastefully. Whilst most universities seem to want to
turn themselves into efficient bureaucracies, encouraged by government
bureaucracies like the QAA, the best things in education (like the best things
in life) are exuberant, playful and superficially wasteful. The key message of
ecology is that waste isn't wasted: dissipations drive ecological dynamics
because they are where growth comes from. Moreover, the most important
analytical element is not the individual, but the relationship.
In a political ecology, dissipations are more prevalent in a
diverse environment. This is partly because it is more wasteful to devote time
and energy in maintaining one’s identity in the face of those who would
challenge your identity. It highlights the fact that the relationships in a
diverse environment are the driving force, not the attributes of individuals. I
have been interested in finding analytical methods for identifying this kind of
situation.
My first starting point was to look at ‘big data’. Big Data
takes rather shallow snapshots of the behaviour of individuals (those aspects
of behaviour which are exposed in brief engagements online) and aggregates
them. Although what happens in this process is a homogenising of the individual,
if we take enough homogenised individuals it appears that we can begin to
identify the ‘important things’ or the ‘things that matter to (some) people’.
When we see the results of techniques like Topic Modelling, we are amazed
because they accord with the things that we individually believe really are
important! Big data is a bit like the mirror on Snow White’s Stepmother’s wall:
it will tell us what we want to hear. Despite being able to identify trends,
Big Data can’t really expose the deep interpersonal dynamics because it
abstracts away so much of the individual.
Can we get further if we assume that people know what’s
important to them? Why don’t we just ask them, rather than trying to
algorithmically calculate it (clever though it is!)? However, when we think
about what’s important, what’s striking is that it is not a single thing, but a
structure which connects the most important thing to the least important things
via things which are semi-important. What’s important is an ordered list. Now,
when we look at the relationships between people, and we look at the different things
that matter to them, what we are really doing is comparing two ordered lists.
This is relatively easily done using statistical measures
for rank correlation like Kendall’s Tau and Spearman's Rho. With each of these
techniques (and they produce different results in different situations), we can
calculate an index of the ranking of ‘important things’ between different pairs
of individuals. What the index tells us is effectively how much people have in
common. However, it also indicates something else: what the biggest point of dispute
is.
For big disputes between individuals (i.e. priority rankings
which are fundamentally different – particularly at the extremes), there will
be considerable defence by each individual of their position. This effectively
is a dissipative activity. What will the result be of these dissipative
dynamics? Individuals will seek new opportunities to either reinforce their
position within the institution, or look to move into a different social
context where they might be more effectively integrated.
I'm thinking about this as I'm looking at what’s happening
to my department. The mutual information between us and our host university is
decreasing rapidly. The priority lists of “things which matter to us” are
increasingly divergent. The dissipative dynamics cause growth beyond the bounds
of the native habitat. Sometimes that can be a good thing - but it's natural and unnatural at the same time.
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