Month: November 2020

bookmark_borderBoundary Maintenance and Culture

Posted on by ErikaRS

Cultural appropriation is a topic I come back to regularly. Not all examples of cultural borrowing constitute cultural appropriation. Yet there are some examples of cultural borrowing that are offensive to members of the culture borrowed from.

One lens we can use to think about cultural appropriation is that of boundary maintenance. All groups have a boundary. The boundary may be hard and clear: employment is a group membership that is documented and legally constrained. The boundary may be soft and fuzzy: membership in the Jane Austen fandom requires merely a certain self defined amount of interest in Jane Austen and her works. Most boundaries fall somewhere between.

If a particular element of a culture is part of the boundary maintenance mechanism, then taking on that element as an outsider can be seen as cultural appropriation. Taking on boundary maintaining elements can cause harm. (Note: I am not claiming this is the only type of cultural appropriation.)

It can lead to the incorrect impression that one is a member of a group. Whether or not this is harmful depends on how strictly the group defines its boundaries. Pretending to be part of a reasonably coherent group can harm its reputation . Pretending to like an author will likely just result in confusion. However, it is important to realize that falsely pretending to be a member of a group can be legitimately considered harmful by members of the group.

The second harm is that it can harm the group’s structural integrity by weakening its boundary. This is the sort of harm that comes, for example, from culturally demeaning Halloween costumes. By taking cultural markers of pride and identity and making them frivolous, the group loses access to some of the elements that define them as a group.

The second, in my opinion, is the more harmful aspect of cultural appropriation. When cultural appropriation weakens the sense of connection within a group, then it is harming the ties that create community and strengthen society.

Note that weakening groups via appropriation is a technique activists sometimes use intentionally. For example, gay men hijacked the #ProudBoys hashtag used by a white supremacist group of the same name. Since not all groups create community and strengthen society, it is valid to try to dissolve such groups, and appropriation is a tool in the activist’s toolbox. However, it’s worth acknowledging that such uses are indeed an instance of cultural appropriation.

bookmark_borderArchitectures and Change

Posted on by ErikaRS

Modular Flexibility

One of the many important ideas in The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker is that the shape of most systems can be thought of as modules connected by an overarching architecture. The architecture constrains the modules. However, individual modules can often be changed fairly flexibly.

Most of the time, modules can be swapped out without broader effects. In biological systems, this might look like a species replacing one source of food with another. However, some changes will have rippling consequences, although those effects might take time to realize. A technological example is that the introduction of the personal car eventually led to broad changes in how we build roads, shopping areas, homes, and more.

For the most part, though, architecture is a given and innovation must occur within the constraints of the current architecture. Even modular changes which eventually result in architectural changes start as modular changes whose effects ripple out over time (often in hard to predict ways).

We can take a leadership lesson from this. From our place in the system, there are some things we can change and other things we cannot change. There are modules and there is architecture.

These architectural influences can be subtle. For example, in a software organization, whether or not to pair program may seem like an individual, modular decision. However, whether or not pair programming actually work depends both on technical tools for collaboration and social tools for recognizing work (e.g., promotion structures). Tools and incentives matter.

Other decisions, such as which editor to use, are more modular. Choices are constrained by the architecture (most companies would not want developers to use unvetted cloud editors), but there is a lot of flexibility. (That said, the right answer is a vi variant, of course.)

When we want to enact change, we can use this lens to think about what aspects of our desired change are modular and which are architectural. By identifying the modular elements, we can empower ourselves and others to effectively pursue change.

(It is possible to intentionally use modular changes to try to trigger architectural change. This is extremely powerful. It is also inherently impossible to control, so it requires a willingness to give up predictability which is hard for most of us.)

Nested Architectures

Although I speak of “the” architecture and its modules, most architectures are nested. A module at one level of abstraction is often an architecture at a lower level of abstraction. An architecture becomes a module at a higher level of abstraction.

For example, phones and laptops can be seen as modular computing devices at one level of abstraction. Yet each is itself an architecture which consists of physical technologies such as circuit boards, batteries, cameras, etc.

From a leadership perspective, what I as a middle manager see as a module may be architecture to the individual contributors I work with. And what I see as a architecture may be a module to my VP.

The same is true for structures of society. We often pit the idea of centralized control against individual or small group control. However, a better way to look at it is that every group has a scope, within which some changes are modular and some are architectural. To make architectural changes, smaller scoped groups need to come together into some larger structure, whether that be a loose coalition of aligned interests or a more permanent centralized structure.

But bigger is not unambiguously better. Larger scoped groups have trouble effectively changing deeply nested modules. They have too little insight into the important details. They are likely to optimize for the wrong thing, destroying value in the process. (There’s a connection here to the idea of legibility from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State for those familiar with that work.)

The goal of groups with broad, often centralized, scope (such as the federal government) is to set the architecture which defines the ways that smaller scoped groups can be effective. They should shape the environment rather than trying to shape outcomes.

That conclusion isn’t new. However, what I think is worth reflecting on is that this is all happening in the context of nested structures where each layer can relate to different elements in either an architectural (constrained) or modular (changeable) way.

By realizing that it is architectures all the way down we can move from the false dichotomies of large vs small and individual vs collective to a more nuanced understanding that we all have to work within a mix of contexts which provide differing degrees of constraint and flexibility.

bookmark_borderSunlight Is the Best Fertilizer

Posted on by ErikaRS

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

When bad behavior goes unchecked, it will grow and fester in secret. By exposing bad behavior, the system will be forced to clean it up.

This is part of how high trust systems maintain cooperation. As discussed, for example, in Eric D. Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, in high trust societies, the general expectation that people will behave in trustworthy ways leads to people making more cooperative choices. Since people are not perfect, a high trust society also punishes those who violate cooperative norms. In these cases, exposure—sunlight—is a key factor in maintaining trust.

However, it does not follow from this that any and all exposure is good. Another observation from The Origin of Wealth is that when individuals perceive themselves as being in a low trust society, they will avoid cooperative actions. This becomes a feedback loop. The perception of being in a low trust society can lead to the reality of being in a low trust society.

What does that have to do with exposing bad behavior? At any given time in a high trust society, there is uncooperative behavior going on. Under usual conditions the system can easily survive these shocks. Bad behavior is punished and everyone else continues to cooperate.

Now imagine a world where every infraction is publicized for all to see. (We might call that world The Internet.) All of a sudden, people see uncooperative, low trust actions happening ALL. THE. TIME. This environment, which is actually behaving as a functional high cooperation environment starts to feel like a low trust, low cooperation environment. And because people act based on the norms they see around them, more people will start acting as if they are in a low cooperation environment, creating a feedback loop of decreasing trust.

This means that, contrary to what one might think, widely publicizing bad behavior in a high trust environment (rather than just punishing it locally) can turn it into a low trust environment. The change is not caused by the uncooperative acts—remember, the system is designed to absorb a low enough rate of those. The blame goes to the publication of those acts.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but only as long as people are unwilling to have their actions exposed to the light. Overexposure normalizes uncooperative behavior, leading it to multiply.