Virtual Canuck picks up my posting about crews, teams etc but takes issue with my position, I quote: So I don’t think that Snowden’s use of the term crew to define a subset of groups really moves us forward. It turns out that the author (Terry) along with one Jon Dron has already created a taxonomy of groups, networks and collectives which is more than adequate for the field. interestingly they quote my two statements on the unique features of crews in full. However their failure to take those features into account and their general assumptions about taxonomies indicate that either I did not explain myself well, or they are wedded to their three fold classification and do not want to brook any challenge. On the assumption that the former is the case, I will clarify the statements and deal directly with their comments on crews, after a general discourse on their three fold classification which I find unhelpful (this is not simple retaliation, I really don't like it).
Now for starters I do not buy the idea that you can classify types of groups/community or whatever. Whenever a group of people come together physically or virtually there will be aspects of community, networks etc etc. These are overlapping sets, and the nature of the overlap will shift depending on context. I argued that all communities (a phrase not used by Terry and Jon) are networks, but not all networks are communities. In saying that I am pointing to the obvious fact that to exist as a community some form of network has to be in place, but that a commercial network or other transaction network, does not have to be a community.
Now some of this is of course tied up in definitions. Terry and Jon (I am resisting the temptation to swap the first letters of their names and change an n to a m) define groups as people who know each other, have expectations for cooperation, know they are members of the group and have some form of acknowledged structure. In contrast networks have membership which changes, leadership and structure are emergent and are dependent on interaction to persist. Collectives seems an obscure concept defined as less personal and are created by aggregation, analysis and exploitation of information generated by us as we engage ion both individual, group and network activities.
Now there are several objections to this, even before we come to the question of crews with which I will finish. Firstly there is massive confusion here between the informal and the formal. T&J seem to be defining groups as formal, networks as informal. If this is the case why not use those words? You could dress it up a bit and use the anthropologists' distinction between rule based and ideation based cultures. You could talk about emergent authority, but in essence you would be talking about informal and formal system. In any common sense meaning of the words groups and networks can be both formal and informal (I am using groups here generically). So not only do I think this distinction is unhelpful, I think it is confusing given their language, if they changed the language and made it a tension, or dialectic not a categorical distinction then I would support it.
That leads to my second objection to their use of "collective". Now in my cultural context a collective is a group who come together with a common purpose. The Co-op movement, a farmers collective etc. These have aspects of community, and some aspects of team along with networks. They are not less personal, and they too may be formal and informal.
My substantial objection however is to the categorisation evidenced in their final paragraph. They want to decide the social into three categories (Groups, Networks and Collectives) which could be broken into finer designations or aggregated, but I think they are distinct enough to help us sort out the hundreds of Web 2.0 tools being created and hopefully provide conceptual clarity as we harness these tools to support useful learning activities. So despite earlier weak questioning of the value of taxonomy, at its heart we have a desire to divide the social into three categories and link technology to those categories. Aside from the unusual definitions of common place words to maintain this somewhat artificial separation, there also seems to be an assumption that Web 2.0 tools can be fitted to those categories. Now I can see why they are doing this. The desire to make things neat and tidy seems irresistible to many, although it should be resisted. In general technologies at the level of Web 2,0 are fragmented in nature (unlike ERP systems for example) and their use is likely to be emergent, not structured, with novel and unexpected uses of tools being common place but the nature of which can not be forecasted. All attempts to categorise run the danger of limiting our imagination and T&J's seem to be heading in that direction.
NOW TO CREWS:
I referenced two distinct features on crews. Firstly, that people are trained in role, and expectation of role instantiating that role with ritual. Secondly that the crew only exists for a short period of time before it dissolves, and then reassembles with different people occupying the roles but with the same expectations. A crew is clearly a formal community which require investment in training and considerable social reinforcement over time. I suggested that we had neglected crews in organisational work and hold to that suggestion.
Terry likes the nautical reference, even though I talked about planes, and argues that a educational class is a crew as they may wear uniform, goes through rituals and are time bound. This is the only specific argument offered and to be brutal it is a nonsense. Any group of people who have to live together for a period (such as a class, a management course etc) will go through a process of team formation and yes there may be ritual (it is a part of being human). However this is radically different from a crew on a ship, in a plane, among firefighters. No one in the class spends a year or more being trained in their specific roles, they are in the class for a year, not the typical eight hour watch or duty period, the class members do not assemble into different crews during the course of year. The rituals are not formalised into check lists and procedures? Need I go on? If Terry is right in his criticism then I would expect to see formal training courses to allow someone to be a school bully, bullies would rotate on watch periods to make sure they are fresh and concentrate on their tasks. Their confusion of the formal nature of roles, and the informal assumption of roles/archetypes parallels their earlier failure to understand the tension between the formal and the informal.
There are different perspectives and ways of looking at social systems. There are also some useful dialectical statements (informal - formal) which can help provide perspective (note I said dialectic not category). There are some distinct forms (such as crews, transaction networks and others) which partake of general qualities but are also distinct. All of this requires a more open attitude, an avoidance of three fold classification systems and a tolerance of mess.
Comments (6)
Let me just paraphrase your distinction: the "team" consists of team members who perform their respective role/style (Belkin) depending on their personality preferences in the context of the other team members: "relatively", so to speak. The crew, in contrast, consists of crew members who - beforehand, typically by training - have become experts at their particular role, they do something together by acting out their predefined roles. In a way, "absolutely".
This clearly resonates with me with respect to my experience in practice, the only problem is that what you call "crew" is what in my environment is called "team". And renaming/rebranding might be too difficult. (It's even worse: sometimes a small department with a head and five people doing the same thing but dividing up the work are called a "team".)
And the network? I don't think that it belongs here, at least not on the same level. While these labels resonate "empirically", good enough to be used in practice with some value, they do not yet make a sound theory IMnotsoHO.
First: they are all third person perspectives, oberservers' categorizations. When I work together with others, I don't care much about the respective box that any scholar puts me or us. But that's the weaker argument - I could just be ignorant and the scholars' taxonomies are correct.
The stronger argument - not sure if I go too far: I would re-state your "all communities are networks, but not all networks are communities" hierarchy to: the network is the medium, any community is a (particular) form. The medium contraints what is possible as a form, but it does not determine it. So the various types (be it 3 different ones from T&J, or whatever, call them what you or they like) are particular, contingent instances of the forms that are possible in that medium network. And there is a huge number of possible forms - much more than can ever be realized. Yet, not everything is possible.
And anything labelled "2.0"? I think, in this context: it grows the medium, thus acts - quite unspecifically - on the medium, not on the particular form. So even more becomes possible - potentially. This is on stark contrast to the notion that one might categorize different 2.0 tools, and map them to the previously categorized (on the same level) variants of aggregated people (groups, networks, communities, collectives, whatever).
Posted by christianhauck | November 25, 2007 9:13 PM
Posted on November 25, 2007 21:13
The medium as the network (slowly) becomes the meaning that is created together (different forms of groupings, with perhaps different names depending on formality or not of roles, for different kinds of meaning ?), with which to carry forward the next iteration of meaning or response ?
Just thinking out loud ...
Posted by Jon Husband | November 25, 2007 11:04 PM
Posted on November 25, 2007 23:04
I have posted a few longer comments at http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/19009.html but I have to say that I like the 'crew' sub-classification. It is a useful metaphor and helps to distinguish some sorts of organisation from others. I agree that it is important to consider multiple forms of what Terry and I call 'groups'.
I think you misunderstand our use of the term 'collective' though - more on this in my post. We are using it in the Star Trek Borg sense of the word, not the farmers' sense. It is about such things as tag clouds, collaborative filters, recommender systems, visualisation tools, social navigation and so on that apply algorithms to sets of human-generated data and, by feeding them back, in turn influence those humans to behave differently.
There are a few other misunderstandings that I mention in my blog - do pay a visit. I have a bad feeling that guest comments have been temporarily turned off by the system admins due to an invasion of blog spammers - sorry if that's the case, but I guess we can continue the dialogue here or on Terry's blog!
Jon (or Tom/Jerry, depending on your preference)
Posted by Jon Dron | November 26, 2007 3:16 AM
Posted on November 26, 2007 03:16
I'd like to continue the argument that Dave notes above that our 'taxonomy' doesn't serve a useful value. I won't get into the evidence from biology and most other natural sciences that illustrate why defining classes, finding instances and non instances helps us understand - even complex behaviours. But I will give an example. Many of us find it useful to be able to classify clouds. Not to reduce their complexity, their beauty or our ability to control them, but rather so that we can better understand and predict the weather. All cirus clouds do not look alike and the sky may have various types of clouds in existence, but being able to identify and count instances can help us predict tomorrow's weather. The same with emerging web 2.0 applications. They have inherent and further support emergence of different affordances. Some are likely to be more effective in some social contexts than in others. If thinking about social learning aggregations in terms of groups, networks and collectives (or even crews) helps participants and leaders to harness and mold these tools so as to learn more effectively, then these sorts of heuristics can be very useful.
Moving next to Dave's concerns that groups and networks are differentiated solely on the basis of informal versus formal, seems to miss the point. I can think of informal groups -such as the way we interact as we figure out how to clean up the lunch room we share at work. Work teams as well can be more or less formal. Alternatively networks can be formalized as for example the network of doctors (or other professions) all of whom are accredited by some formal licensing body and may formally organize professional development organizations. I will grant that networks are generally less formal than groups, but I think differentiating the two on that basis misses the familiarity, role responsibility, and organizational models that differentiate groups and networks.
Finally, Dave completely misses the point on crews and groups. I never said that all educational classes were crews or that classes trained people for years at certain tasks - these are all further delineations of the crew concept that Dave has added. All I said was that in our taxonomy or classification a crew is a particular kind of group. There are many groups that have evolved specific roles and behaviours appropriate for certain contexts and crews are a good example.
But again thanks for the discussion. More is needed, even if we think the goal is to reduce complexity!!
Terry Anderson
Posted by Terry Anderson | November 26, 2007 9:09 PM
Posted on November 26, 2007 21:09
I will reply at more length later (mainly to Jon's longer post) but as a holding operation and mainly in response to Terry.
My gut feel is that you have a neat classification that works for you, but will not sustain challenge
Posted by Dave Snowden![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/nav-commenters.gif)
|
November 27, 2007 1:22 AM
Posted on November 27, 2007 01:22
This post really interested me, as I had a stab at some similar definitions and a taxonomy a few years back. I was trying to determine the relationships between these "collectives", how they handle information, and the sorts of media and systems that one might use to support them.
I cannot recall all the terms and definitions that we used, as I would have to go and dig out some of my old research notes. However, I do recall we had some of the following notions in the material:
a. We distinguished between a team and a group. For us a team had a degree of formality, a defined purpose, and some notion of permanence. It was therefore possible to train both individuals and the team to operate more effectively as a tightly-knit collective (i.e. team training).
b. A group had something which related the members to each other, but this binding factor could be very loose, and the membership and the collective could be very temporary - which is why I have problems with terms such as "virtual teams" - as in many instances I think they are more akin to what might be defined as a "virtual group".
c. I cannot recall what term we preferred for a larger grouping - but we had a notion of something which was much grander in scale than a team or a group such as an organisation, collective, community, or enterprise - but all terms such as these create difficulties, notably because of the variety of connotations that each of these terms has, leading to endless debates on definition.
With hindsight, I wonder if it would be better to have a set of "parameters" or "dimensions" of collectives - and thus different mixes of properties will end up creating different sorts of collective. We can argue about what are appropriate names for these mixes - but at least it might be possible to agree on the classes.
Potential dimensions might include:
* Scale
* Formality
* Strength of relationship between members
* Degree of structure
* Rigidity and fluidity of role definitions
* Degree of consensus or disagreement on the objectives of collective (commonality of intent)
Not sure I have these right - as the above dimensions may not all be orthogonal to each other. Discuss?
Posted by Peter Houghton | November 29, 2007 1:43 AM
Posted on November 29, 2007 01:43