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If I am reading you right, as a matter of principle, you and your colleague's Change Lab work is non-profit, a university handles any money paid for labor or overhead (if anything is paid at all), results are made available to both management and workers and others locally interested, when possible a trade union is involved, results are published in publicly available sources, when possible at least some of these publications are scientifically peer-reviewed, and the methods and procedures used in the studies are made available for anyone to evaluate. Is this a fair restatement of your principles?
This is certainly quite different from the characteristic way I understand that the usual business management consulting firm operates. Booz-Allen, one of the older US firms doing this kind of consultation, was in my factory shop for a few weeks once in the 1990's, and I had a chance to get to know some of these consultants and talk to them about what they were doing. Just as you suggest, Yrjö, on every single point you raise, they did just the opposite of what you do. Interestingly, since part of their job was to interview workers on the shop floor, observe meetings that workers attended, etc., they did the best they could to portray themselves as acting in everyone's best interest. But when I talked things over with them, they were honest enough to admit to all the points you make about such operations.
Nevertheless, Yrjö, I am still pondering the difficult question, despite the many principled differences that you point out between these two kinds of approaches, whether or not a well-meaning scientific organization coming into a capitalist workplace to make analyses and recommendations is still **objectively** doing a form of "business management consulting." In other words, this essential relationship, advising the capitalist of how to make a profit, increase productivity, etc. still holds, no matter how the organization may or may not be compensated, with whom or in what manner it shares its results, what recommendations it winds up making, or how sympathetic it may be with the workers.
I am retired now, but while I was a machinist at a large airplane factory I wound up doing a lot of work on many process improvement teams and projects. Personally, in my involvements, except of course for the aspect of publishing scientific papers, I consciously followed the same basic principles you outline. Intuitively, all my union co- workers did. Things like using transparent data collecting methods, sharing whatever information was assembled, openly discussing the various points of view that were raised, disclosing what recommendations wound up being made, etc. etc. were always done in ways that everyone who wanted to know about what was going on could discuss and debate. I certainly made a point of this, perhaps more consciously than most, but so did many others. It came naturally for the workers to talk these things over openly and frankly.
However, we were never under the illusion we were ever doing anything but advising management. Management always got the final word. Sometimes we had something of a voice, but we never had a vote on the final outcome. Decision-making was exclusively the right of management. In fact, that point is even explicitly made at the beginning of our union contract.
Below I am going to reflect a little about my experience with workers doing process improvement activities in a factory. Just as I asked if a Change Lab or other such scientific group is doing a form of "business management consulting" when it makes analyses and recommendations, it is fair to ask if workers on a shop floor are also actually just doing essentially that when they suggest improvements. So I am asking this same question not only about the Change Lab but about my own past activities, and those of my coworkers. I will reflect on some of my experiences in considering this question.
To be merciful and summarize my thoughts for those not wanting to read too much farther (this is already a long post), I will explain my reasons, which will be based on my perception of the reality of capital, and answer that yes, I think even workers are indeed just doing a kind of "business management consulting" when they engage in process improvements. But this doesn't mean they shouldn't do it when they feel so inclined, I will suggest, it just means that what they are doing should be called what it really is. At the same time, Yrjö, I think you make some very good points about the differences between the kind of principled, worker-oriented, materialist-based approach a Change Lab takes, and what a couple of Booz-Allen dudes fresh out of graduate school are really doing when they conjure up a bunch of charts and reports for local managers about how to increase productivity. So perhaps a different term is warranted. I'll return to that.
So here are some reflections on my experiences ...In the 1970's when I first started doing industrial work, the idea of workers having a "voice" in production was, relatively speaking, unheard of. In my airplane factory there was a "suggestion" system, which would pay up to $10,000 for an idea (usually you were very lucky to get $25). But that wasn't a voice, and was usually just a way for one of the manager's friends on the shop floor to get a big bonus. However, this general lack of "voice" in production processes began to change in the 1980's.
My company got very interested in things like "productivity circles" and "process improvement teams" in the mid to late 1980's as part of their general "lean manufacturing" initiative, which in my neck of the woods would wind up going on for about 15 years, more or less accomplishing its aims within the constraints of their existing factory machinery upgrades, possible process improvements, and essential social relations, by the early 2000's.
Lean manufacturing - (I know you are very familiar with all this, Yrjö) - refers to a large assortment of newer manufacturing techniques (new since the '50's and '60's) that more or less coordinate all the steps in production so that in-process inventories are kept to a bare minimum, and kept moving very efficiently, while productivity is also kept very high at each step of the process.
To give an illustration of a key aspect of what has come to be called lean manufacturing, my shop made large parts for jetliner wings. It was once the norm for an average part (our shop term for our objects of activity, the thing we produced) to take almost 100 days to be fully processed from raw aluminum to a part ready to be installed on a wing. Including raw parts not yet in work this would mean there would be 4, 5 or 6 months worth of work in the building at any given time. The time span to produce a part from beginning to end is called "throughput" - not a new term anymore, of course, now that these ideas are widespread around the world. After instituting a wide variety of process changes, where many work processes radically changed over the course of about a decade (not everything changed, of course!), "throughput" in my factory building was reduced to about 15 days, more than one/sixth of what it once once. That was actually a remarkable change. These are huge parts, and now there was less than a month's worth of them lying around instead of 6 months. It would be like the difference between having six refrigerators in your kitchen instead of just one. Only in our case it was like clearing many thousands of square feet of floor space and making it a hundred times easier to find and move around parts, which is a big operation involving giant crane systems.
The old industrial method was equivalent to doing say two-month's worth of grocery shopping all at once to cook for a large family, and do the cooking the old way - storing a large inventory, cooking meals which purposely have many leftovers, cooking all day Sunday to have food all week, etc. Think of all the food lying around when you do that in relation to how much is actually eaten at a meal. The lean manufacturing approach in its ideal form is the opposite - it is the equivalent of having the food delivered to you from the grocery store every meal so efficiently that you never have to even put it away, you always use exactly what was delivered, you always feed everyone just what they want, and you never have any leftovers. The ideal is to waste no food or time and the only "inventory" you ever have is the food being cooked.
During those years of converting to "lean manufacturing" the company encouraged workers to engage in process improvement teams while it was trying to figure out how to make many of these strikingly sharp changes. (Each part in my factory went through about 10 to 20 work stations - milling, sanding, forming, chemical treatment, painting, etc. - so the changes had to be highly coordinated and often incrementally implemented across many work processes over quite a few years, and many improvements had to be invented as things progressed.).
The old concept of production was based on the idea that once you set up a work station for working on one kind of part you then spent a few days or even weeks working on just that kind of part. The motivation was to capitalize on long set up times, which were very labor intensive. The new concept was based on the idea that each work station should be able to immediately set up on any part. Set up time reduction - with the goal of zero setup time - is a big feature of lean manufacturing initiatives.
Toyota gets the credit for being the first huge factory system to implement this general concept, so these lean manufacturing techniques are sometimes called the Toyota Production System. There are many other facets to this approach to manufacturing besides just reducing in-process inventory, minimizing setup times, and increasing throughput - for example, scheduling preventative maintenance of the machinery (not waiting for things to break down), process standardization, designing methods for keeping tools organized, keeping supplies always on hand, reducing clutter, etc. etc. Many of these aspects have now become norms for many industries. One small but visual example is the "shadowboard," where every hand tool has a designated hanging place with its outline demarcated. This is now a very commonplace technique, including in retail stores, but not too many years (okay, decades) ago in industrial work this was something you might have only seen in the best organized, most elite workplaces, usually a small job shop, or the personal workshop of someone unusually highly skilled. Certainly not a large factory! In fact, part of the lean manufacturing initiative was about adopting and generalizing the practices of a highly organized handicraftsperson. The preventative maintenance part, on the other hand, remained one of the weak links in my milling machine world, but that is another story - it was apparently still cheaper to let the machines break down.
Computers, as everyone is now familiar, contributed to facilitating various aspects of these kinds of improvements, such as monitoring machine performance, keeping track of the movements of supplies, etc. Many of these changes in industry are now so pervasive that they have been become cultural norms. Some people think of them as the "computer revolution." But it was actually a kind of industrial revolution, significantly increasing productivity in basic industry, reducing by well over half the total number of industrial workers in many trades. My machinist's union local, one of the largest of its kind in the US, dropped, over about a 20 year period, from 45,000 to less than 18,000 members - yet the company was making more airplanes than ever for a while there. Labor force reduction, especially skilled work, was one of the key goals and outcomes of "lean manufacturing."
Interestingly, in my factory building, as these major changes, or newer forms of "doing business," as management called it, became normalized, the improvement teams involving workers correspondingly dwindled away and disappeared. The company shifted its attention from developing new ideas about rationalizing and humanizing collective production processes to how to increase productivity, especially individual performance. From "lean" manufacturing initiatives, shop floor management reverted to the more traditional framework of "leaning on" the workers as hard as they could. Workers tend resist this kind of thing as best they can, of course. In my shop, they held their ground pretty well in the 1990's, but some of their ability to resist has begun to slip away a bit over the last ten years. Some of that has taken the shape of the company gaining concessions in union contract clauses that cover work relations and processes, such as now allowing vendors (outside suppliers) to bring materials directly from the street to machines, and a number of other erosions of union power on the shop floor.
I have touched on this little history spanning about 30 years to bring up a key point. First, though, a word on the two sides of this overall cycle with regard to how capital involves workers in process improvement.
Sometimes capital finds it in its interest to engage labor in certain kinds of process improvement. Generally speaking, whenever new equipment was brought into my shop they would initially throw extra labor at it. For example, I was part of the startup of a whole new half a billion dollar building in 1994 that installed brand new equipment that made my parts, introduced new forms of automation, etc. They threw lots of labor at that whole new site, just as they had at other capital projects. When they did that, there would be a period where they would let us talk things over, try to figure out how to best run the new equipment, experiment with it, develop new processes, do some training, etc. This equipment, which in my case included huge computer-operated mills with long tooling beds to hold the parts, needed all kinds of adjusting, tuning, adapting, modification. So there was a lot to do there. New equipment and tooling often requires new kinds of smaller tools, and in skilled work that usually means the workers themselves need to be involved in choosing and designing them - no one else is going to know what is needed. These dynamics are the case in any kind of work, but they can get more exaggerated in a large factory, especially if it is the only producer of a certain product.
Eventually, management comes up with solutions that best fit its never- ending profit motive, the equipment budget gets trimmed to a minimum, and the extra labor gets whittled away. There is always "process improvement" going on in a modern factory, so that aspect never entirely dies away. But after a while, once the capital investment settles down for the long haul, the opinions of the workers become less and less valued. The team meetings become fewer and farther between. Suggested improvements are looked at more skeptically. Team leaders, if there are even any teams remaining, are more and more often selected based on their ability not so much to help with improvements, but to represent the daily productivity demands of the boss.
And as we all know, and this needs to be mentioned as part of the overall picture, the world began entering a global economic crisis in the early part of the first decade of this century - a kind of crisis that has not been seen since the late 1920's and early 1930's, and perhaps ever, and may continue to deepen for a long time. This new economic reality has had very visible effects on relations between workers and management in my old factory, such as very real threats by the company to move large operations to other states or countries if they are not given more concessions.
So now to my point. My point here is that the workplace, in the last analysis, is really all about the relentless struggle of capital against labor, about the constant demand by capital for profit. There is no way to escape this reality - not within the workforce, not within management, nor even by an outside organization. There is no "no-man's-land" or "collective" change agency that can transcend capital and achieve some higher level of human relations - not without a socialist revolution, anyway (or perhaps, in theory, some kind of retrogression to feudalism or some kind of earlier society). Short of these alternatives, capital, as I see it, rules the world today. There may be times when the managers of capital may throw some money around and allow workers to talk some things over, make some suggestions, improve some processes. There may even be times where a few workers may get to do a lot of that. I personally was kind of fortunate that way, in that it kept things off and on interesting for me over the years. And perhaps sometimes management may even bring in some progressive scientists from the outside to contribute some of their methods and imagination, which in turn may temporarily empower some of the workers to participate in these improvement processes more effectively, and perhaps, together, they may help make some viable improvements that makes things better for some workers.
But in my experience times when workers are given such voice are only temporary and ephemeral, and usually only happen during general upswings or periods of investment. In a big factory, over time you get to see a little more starkly what is really the case in all workplaces in capitalist society, whether the economy is in an upswing or a downswing, or what form work takes - be it in a small business, large corporation, school, public hospital, or government agency. And that case, as I see it, is this: that capital functions like an enormous, constantly beating, all-pervasive, heartless black hole. This is the defining power in all workplaces in capitalist economies. Capital directly or indirectly rules over all human social relations in the world today. When someone uses the term "economy" or "economic" or "socioeconomic" in contemporary terms they are referring in some way to capital. Capital is by far the most powerful human entity on the planet (with the sole exception being its great opposite - labor - which is even more powerful, or can be). Capital subsumes all social relations under its powers - directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly, and whether people are conscious of it or not. Capital is not found only in factories - it is just a little more obvious there. And it is fascinating to watch. In a factory one can see how its powers are insidious, all-consuming, and hideously relentless. How it has no respect for the living. How it doesn't care who gets injured. How it cares nothing about safety. How it cares about nothing but profit. How it knows no distinction between war and peace. How it cares nothing about repression, racism, sexism, human rights, economic crises, famines, epidemics, environmental destruction, the non-sustainability of resources. That it only knows that it must exploit labor and extract surplus value. That it is dead labor ruling over the living. Private property ruling over human need. Leisure classes living off the toiling classes with no regard for the future. Liberal and far-sighted thinkers are often appalled at these results of capitalism. They may seek to moderate it, slow it down, smooth its edges, try to arrange for a more humane form of capitalist economic organization. But capital itself has no such ethic. It has no such concerns. It is a dagger that pierces the heart of every living human being and every social system - **and every activity system** - around the globe. It forces all active humans, and all human activity, to live and behave according to its demands.
OK, so I'll get off that soapbox. This is just the classic historical materialist perspective, straight from Marx and Engels. My experiences in these factories just made their perspectives about the relations between capital and labor a little more visible than one usually gets to observe. The principles are the same anywhere.
So how does this relate to the question of whether to call Change Labs "business management consulting"?
On one hand, I think, Yrjö, that you justifiably argue that Change Labs are something different from the usual outfit this term refers to. Just as workers working on a process improvement, such as designing a new hand tool, or recommending that management purchase some equipment may initiate changes that could help make their workday easier, and perhaps safer, and doing this could empower them to think a little more deeply about their work processes and social relations, a Change Lab could help push such processes along even further. It could help sharpen existing conceptual tools, and introduce some new ones. Moreover, a Change Lab can do something more - it can share these experiences at the level of public democratic scientific discourse, further empowering certain kinds of intrinsic working class processes by seeking ways to generalize them. I think these are all valid points.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake, in my opinion, to hope or suggest that helping give workers some additional voice in workplace process improvement somehow changes their **relationship** to capital. This point is key. The relationship between capital and labor, according to this argument, remains the same. In this sense, any process improvement activity, whether by a for-profit consulting firm, a group of worker-oriented scientists or just a team of shop floor workers, is really just a form of "business management consulting." The only "power" these workers (or others) at best have is to collect some information, talk it over, and make some recommendations. Whatever personally motivates these workers, such as making things safer for themselves, and they may indeed improve their health accordingly (for example, get rid of a toxic chemical), it is still ultimately also a form of serving capital, of improving profits, of complying with the dictatorship of capital in the workplace. That is what it means to work in the first place. You are making profits for the boss. I know this first hand - I've been there! Done that! LOL Process improvement is just a form of rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. Perhaps it will keep you a little more out of the rain for a few days, but eventually ...
This doesn't mean, in my view, that workers shouldn't take advantage of having some voice when offered it, or that scientists should not get involved with process improvement efforts in workplaces when they can. I think the principled worker-oriented basis that you describe, Yrjö, for scientists to use when they get involved in work places is a fine model. I would like to see other social scientists emulate it. I think what I did was basically okay, too - I essentially followed the same principles, although maybe sometimes I went a little over the top with some of the privileges I sometimes enjoyed. (For example, there were periods, when I was working with more than one shift, when I was allowed to self-determine what hours I worked, as long as I worked a full shift myself. My coworkers always said "Why not? Go for it!" and so I did.) My point is, as workers, when we are given a voice, when we get the chance to practice speaking and thinking, we should take advantage of it. Limited as these opportunities usually are, these are good things for the oppressed classes. And it is a good thing when progressive scientists and workers can work together.
But again, we need to be clear on the difference between thinking up a tool to help the boss make a profit - and thinking about how to organize a strike or demonstration, how to reach out to other workers about pressing social issues, etc. etc. One ultimately serves capital, and the other empowers its historical opposite, the working classes and their allies. This is the kind of fundamental distinction in motive and activity object that I think CHAT can make, and which I believe the Change Lab approach, in principle, strives to make.
So, to bring this back to the original question, it seems to me to be fair to come up with a different description for Change Labs than to just lump them in with "business management consulting." None of your principles, Yrjö, are captured in that phrase. But insofar as process improvements are being engaged in, some of the motives and activity objects must also serve capital, so that truth is also there. It is a highly contradictory situation, and I can very much testify from personal experience to that! I don't yet have an offhand suggestion for an alternative term, but I'm thinking. Anyone have any ideas? Thoughts, Yrjö?
- Steve On Sep 13, 2010, at 2:16 PM, Yrjö Engeström wrote:
A brief response to Steve Gabosch:Business management consulting is a rather big for-profit industry. Some of its basic characteristics are: (a) consultants do it to make profit, (b) they produce their analyses and recommendations for management, not for the entire working community of a client organization to share, (c) the analyses and recommendations are proprietary and confidential, they are typically not published, (d) the methods and procedures used by the consultants are not subject to critical peer review.Every project I undertake to study an organization, including projects which use the Change Laboratory as their method, follows a set of entirely different principles, namely: (a) it is not conducted to make profit; when the target organization agrees to fund some part of a project, it does so by entering into a research contract with my university, and the money received (besides the overhead) is spent on the salaries of members of my research group, typically doctoral students and postdocs, (b) the knowledge we produce in a project is made available to the entire working community of the organization, usually with special emphasis on trade union representation in the monitoring of the project, (c) the analyses and findings are published, preferably in peer-reviewed journals and books but also in more popular publications, (d) our methods and procedures are made explicit, published, and subject to critical peer review.Cheers, Yrjö Engeström Steve Gabosch kirjoitti 12.9.2010 kello 23.42:Yrjö, along with Peter I have also had the apparently false impression that doing things like setting up a Change Lab in a hospital is a form of business management consulting. The goal of helping to "construct settings more conducive to collective productivity" was explicit in articles I've read, and that seems consistent with essential goals of business management consulting. I've heard this conception of the Change Lab mentioned at least verbally by many people, including myself. This description is not meant to be anything but an objective description of essential relationships. I worked in a factory for years, and if someone had set up a Change Lab, it would have looked and acted exactly like business management consultants interacting with people on the floor. Such interactive projects did appear periodically, sometimes led by Japanese "lean manufacturing" oriented consultants. I suspect others besides myself have used the same reasoning to view the Change Lab as a form of business management consulting. No one, of course, wants to misrepresent anything. Would you please set things straight? Other than methods of arriving at suggestions and recommendations, what is the difference?- Steve On Sep 12, 2010, at 5:02 AM, Yrjö Engeström wrote:This is a brief comment to Peter Smagorinsky's message, copied below.Quixotian attacks on triangles have been a relatively common genre for some years now. I usually do not get involved in those discussions because I don't find them productive. However, I am slightly bothered by the following sentence in Peter's message: "Engeström, at least from what I've read, employs it [the 'triangle framework'] as a consultant to business management to help construct settings more conducive to collective productivity."Since I have never done business management consulting, I would like to know on what readings Peter might be basing his statement.Cheers, Yrjö Engeström ----- smago kirjoitti 10.9.2010 kello 22.29:http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCAMike Cole is heading out on vacation, and so asked me to start the discussion of the MCA article "Construction of Boundaries in Teacher Education: Analyzing Student Teachers' Accounts," which the electorate identified as this issue's paper for us to consider on the network. I didn't know that Mike actually took vacations. But I did agree to help launch this discussion, and help to sustain it once it gets going. I have done a number of studies with similar populations to those featured in this article-that is, I've studied the transition that teachers make when moving from their university preparation through the first year of full-time teaching. I've also been part of a university teacher education program in English Education (which is the teaching of literature, writing, and language; it is not ESOL) for the last two decades, and before that regularly mentored student teachers in my jobs at secondary schools in the US. So I do have some familiarity with the issues at stake in this article.One difference: Jahreie and Ottesen use what they call "Cultural- Historical Activity Theory" to motivate their work, and I once did too. But as CHAT has gravitated to Engeström's interpretation and exposition via his Triangle, I have moved away from this orientation and now only claim to use Vygotskian principles to formulate my analyses. So if I were to pose an opening question that perhaps might appeal to those who aren't interested in teacher education, it would be: What is CHAT, and which version of it do we invoke when we claim to use it? Cole's Cultural Psychology did include the famous Triangle, yet seemed very ecumenical in drawing on a host of sources so that it was not the centerpiece of his conception of CHAT. Engeström's system seems more closed to me, involving a specific set of terms and constructs all bound in The Triangle. Perhaps because I entered this field through the writing of Vygotsky and Wertsch (and Engeström is clear in the introductory chapter to Perspectives on Activity Theory that Wertsch is not an activity theorist, nor are Lave and Wenger), I don't equate Engeström with either Activity Theory or CHAT, and have disavowed that nomenclature in my more recent work. So what is it about the Triangle that has become so alluring that it has squeezed out other compelling conceptions of Leont'ev's reformulation of Vygotsky's work so that it shifts attention from the individual-in-context to the collective itself? I find this shift to be particularly troubling in U.S.- based scholarship in which the Triangle is often thrown up on conference screens but never put to any evident use in the research reported. For Scandinavians and others from nations with more collectivist orientations, the adoption of a wholeheartedly Marxist approach makes better cultural sense. And with that I will move to the article in question, authored by faculty members from the University of Oslo.Jahreie and Ottesen's article concerns the conflicting demands of the different settings faced by student teachers-those who are at the end of their university teacher education programs and beginning to transition to school-based teaching positions by apprenticing under the mentorship of a full-time teacher, ideally one who is a "master" teacher (but as I know from experience, this is not always the case). In my reading of the paper, I see an effort to use Engeström's terminology to account for processes involved when student teachers engage with established members of different settings that inevitably provide different "objects" for activity: the university with its effort to produce a particular kind of teacher, and the schools with their efforts to produce a particular kind of student. A second general question I would pose is: From what I can tell, most countries have settled on a very similar model for teacher education: general education coursework, specialized disciplinary course work, education course work, field experiences, student teaching, and then the first job. Given that this model seems to occur worldwide-amidst nations of different emphasis, orientation to learning, economic structure and process, history, demographics, and so on-what broader activity setting seems to suggest this approach as the most efficacious in the preparation of new teachers, regardless of national character and culture? In the U.S. there are presently moves afoot to provide alternative pathways to teaching careers, but most university programs follow this sequence. Apparently this process, with expected variation, is universal. But why?To return to a separate point emerging from this same general observation: The authors say (p. 231) that "The object of the activity for the [university Department of Teacher Education] is student teachers' learning trajectories. The object of activity for the schools, however, is pupils' learning." Actually I think it's more complicated than that, at least in the schools, where a primary problem facing educators is agreeing on the purpose of education. Even "student learning" is a highly contested construct, one that creates the sort of boundary problems elaborated in this article. In schools, it's often the ability to perform on tests, while in the "progressive" university environment, it might involve learning more about the self and how to express or explore it. Or something else. For some people, schools exist to socialize young people into adult roles, often based on the economic circumstances of their families. For others they should promote upward mobility. Or learn a trade, or become better informed citizens, or learn to follow authority, or learn to question authority, or learn how to memorize information, or learn how to construct knowledge, or learn how to answer questions, or learn how to pose questions, or do any of many other things. I've referred to this problem as the "mixed motive" of the setting of schools, one that can shift from teacher to teacher, which complicates the idea that the "object of activity for the schools is student learning." Another question thus might be, For complex settings like schools, how do we know what the object of activity is? (I'm using the authors' language here; I'm more comfortable with Wertsch's use of "motive" [1985] to describe the overriding teleological goal toward which activity in a setting is directed.)I'll pose one final question before inviting others to contribute to the discussion: What are the perils involved in using The Triangle as an a priori framework for studying activity? Engeström, at least from what I've read, employs it as a consultant to business management to help construct settings more conducive to collective productivity. To what degree can it then be extrapolated to other kinds of settings that do not share the business environment's relatively closed-ended motive (to produce and sell widgets, etc.)? When the objects/goals/motives are less amenable to agreement, how appropriate is The Triangle as a template for understanding activity, or promoting activity of a certain sort? When the transfer of The Triangle involves a great leap, as from a post office to a school, to what degree might it serve as a Procrustean Bed rather than a useful heuristic for understanding activity? (Procrustes was an Attican thief who laid his victims on his iron bed. If a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched the body to fit; if the victim was too long, he cut off the legs to make the body fit. In either case the victim died.)OK, that's enough of a starter kit. Please join in and feel free to ignore what I've written and launch something else, or help me clarify my confusion regarding the questions I've raised._______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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