Tilly’s book on violence taught me something.  Keep a watch out for the work in progress of building boundaries between or withing groups. Tilly, since he’s working on violence, calls the people who do this work “political entrepreneurs and violence specialists.” I encountered a particularly excellent example of this today.

Until I got to this section in the piece I didn’t realize that boundary activation was part of the author’s agenda.

For my purposes, it’s irrelevant what boundary was being reenforced here. I want to focus on the tool, not what’s getting built. So I’ve modified the example. The boundary is now dogs and cats. The author is a cat.

In dog activist circles, prestige and legitimacy often accrues to those who most successfully express an oppositional identity. The way the equation works within the movement is that the more opposition you express, the more canine you become. Anti-cat racism within the pack is largely perpetrated by people-such as Fido who are insecure in their own canine identity. Hence Fido indicts the fluffy cat Army by fabricating a new, even more disturbing atrocity, thus raising the stakes on canine grievances, in order to garner acclaim as a real dog activist whose legitimacy is beyond question. Given the canine movement’s anti-intellectual environment, few are likely to bother tracking down Fido’s citations, especially considering that his core audience is already primed to believe such accusations against the cat government.

You gotta admire the structure of that beast. It heightens a boundary while suggesting that boundary activation (aka oppositional identity) is vile. Most of the meat of the sentence is devoted to suggesting that Fido is insecure, not a real activist. That the dog community is anti-intellectual and “unlikely to bother”. It reenforces the value of the cat side by suggesting that they aren’t lazy, that they are intellectual. It then creates a sense of urgency by reminding us that dogs have an army and, oh no, a government. Marvelous!

Note also how the political entrepreneur is projecting his own insecurities. This kind of projection is very common in the boundary building trades. He’s right of course. Prestige and legitimacy, inside of group, often does accrue to those who do this work.

Scott Rosenberg’s posting on why corporation aren’t likely to embrace blogging is excellent, as far as it goes.

My first reaction to his posting was that it misdiagnosis the forces which undermine blogging in a corporate context. The sticks he shows people getting hit with are big sticks; fines, firings, etc. Yes that happens, but long before that happens much smaller sources of negative feedback come into play.

I was often bemused at how, when I worked for a large firm, my colleagues would project their circumstances into my blog postings. Sometimes that could get downright dangerous though. Particularly if they believed I was revealing some secret. Sometimes it was a secret I didn’t even know!

The human mind is amazingly willing to draw analogies between this and that.

One of Scott’s examples is a club fining a member for airing dirty laundry. One of the functions of a club is to create a bubble of privacy. That privacy allows the club to efficiently resolve problems without engaging the entire planet in the dispute resolution. Members that shift the venue of dispute resolution out of the club, into another domain, violate club loyalty and should expect to bear a cost when they do that. It’s romantic nonsense to pretend that isn’t the case.

Corporations are full of such bubbles. Managing them is the greatest puzzle of middle management. Superiors pay subordinates to solve problems; they don’t pay them to advertise or up level those problems. It’s very difficult for teams to find the right balance between keeping the problems inside the bubble where they can be worked on efficiently and revealing them more widely so they can find aid and help from others. That’s made doubly subtle due to the nested and overlapping of these bubbles. One striking example of that is corporate law. There are very strict rules about how news can be revealed if a company is publicly traded. There is always a strong undertow of competitive one-upmanship going on. Gossip and frivolous and/or cruel point scoring. It’s amazing information flows at all in large organizations.

Of course, we are traveling thru a very major shift in how we talk to each other.

Yeah, some of the reaction to blogging is just Luddite fear of new technology. I’ve certainly seen middle managers of that kind. They reaction to the idea of blogging as a scheme to displace them from their seat in control of the story. Spinning a yarn for peers and superiors. Such dudes are dinosaurs.

But behind that is something deeper and more fundamental, a shift in how the bubbles of private spaces are managed.

The talented middle manager runs a very complex communication membrane around his group. That talent was learned over years and years of practice – lots of little sticks and carrots. Most people don’t have these skills. People without these skills often assume the skills are evil. That’s a puzzle. Just as we are being forced to re-architect how that craft is performed a large number of folks dis those most expert in the craft.

The build out of corporate blogging will be slow. Two groups need to climb a steep learning curve. The organizations need to discover why this is a good thing. They will need to discover rules that allow them to manage it – paxis. But also the corp. bloggers will need to learn at least a gallon or two of the 55 gallon drum of knowledge a talented middle manager knows.

Matthew Langham uses the term Architectures of Participation; delightful; I wonder if it’s different from my more aggressive term talent scrapping.

I used to hate shopping. Now I enjoy it as a form of sport, a game. It isn’t necessarily a good hobby. I spent a few hours on Friday saving 4 dollars! Your amazed, I can tell. I used a sniping tool to bid on 6 identical auctions. I got the object the fourth lowest price in recent history!

So, yesterday I’m shopping for our lodging in Vancouver. At one site where power shoppers hang out I found a reference to BiddingForTravel.com. This is where the folks that play the PriceLine game hang out. (PriceLine is a site that sells surplus travel goods – you name your price and if they can find a vendor willing to take that price a deal is made.)

Originally, I’m sure, the folks that set up Bidding For Travel where just a bunch of power shoppers having some fun hanging out with like minded people; and getting bargins and on vacations. I suspect they yearn for those good old days. Today this is a really amazing site full of discussion boards for each city, hotel, region, etc. etc.

But, to the point of this posting.

When a fun community like this succeeds it becomes valuable. That value draws to the community – trouble! For example people that like to play power games are attracted because they see the power the community has aggreageted. I wonder how often Price Line’s lawyers call the people that run this site; or if Price Line’s bought them yet.

Another kind of trouble is the huge swarm of clueless newbies show that show up at your door. In effect a denial of service attack.

Groups when faced with these threats begin to lay in some organizational muscle to deal with them. Well at least those that survive do. This kind of muscle demands craft knowledge that’s usually different than the craft knowledge that brought the group together in the first place. So it’s often a bit painful – growing th at muscle.

I particularly liked the way that Bidding For Travel addressed how to deal with the swarm. First they did the usual thing. They wrote a FAQ. But then they did something wonderfully clever. They introduced a magic ritual. If the newbie can’t navigate the magic ritual then they ignore them.

The magic ritual is in the FAQ; so you have to read the FAQ. It is a marvalously ornate ritual that in effect helps to teach the newbie the lessions in the FAQ. In effect it’s a quiz that proves that you red the FAQ.

Before asking for help in the forums you have to answer 14 questions about your situation. Many of these questions involve doing some searching on the web. A treasure hunt!

Oh, look! The mail just arrived … rebate check for $15!

Brad DeLong informs us that:

“Paradise” is derived from the Old Persian word for the wall around an enclosed, irrigated garden. Xenophon mistook the word for the enclosing wall for the word for the garden-park itself, and here we are.

I don’t see that explicitly in the OED; but it’s too delightful. Oh, and I agree that the New York Times better tear down their garden wall if they want to remain the paper of record.