Monthly Archives: October 2015

protecting authentic human interaction

These are two real-life examples that arose during the recent conference on Responsiveness. (My thanks and apologies to the colleagues who told these stories.)

  1. A recruiter sits all day at the tables near a major airport’s McDonalds restaurant, screening prospective workers. One of her questions: “Is the customer always right?” The correct answer is “yes.” Anyone who says “no” is rejected for the job. The recruiter is screening primarily for a cheerful attitude toward customers.
  2. The philosophers at an urban public university get into arguments with the woman who handles their reimbursements, challenging the fairness or wisdom of the university’s reimbursement policies. She finds the philosophers annoying, or worse.

I understand these as two examples of the same phenomenon. There are settings that encourage and expect authentic human interactions. In such settings, when you’re asked, “Is the customer always right?” you will probably say “No,” because–let’s face it–some customers are wrong. And if you’re asked, “What do you think of the university’s reimbursement policies?” you will say “They’re stupid,” if they are.

But other settings expect people to play instrumental roles within systems. For instance, it is better to treat every McDonalds customer as always right and just give them another hamburger if they have a problem with the one they got. That is best for the company’s bottom line. It follows that it better to say, “The customer is always right” when a recruiter asks you that question in an interview. Likewise, you should recognize that the poor person who has to handle your reimbursement requests is just doing her job and not get into a philosophical argument with her about the rules.

We do need both kinds of settings. If everything were authentic, we couldn’t organize large-scale human interactions. When passing through O’Hare, I am interested in getting my fries quickly, not deliberating with anyone about their quality. A university needs rules for reimbursements; it can’t hold a seminar on everything. I would posit that even in a just society, where power was more equally distributed, there would be instrumental interactions.

But the problem is the deliberate encroachment of the instrumental interactions into the supposedly authentic ones. Chairs and tables are set up outside of an airport McDonalds to make it look like a place where peers or relatives can sit together to talk. But in that space, a recruiter is asking “gotcha” questions to screen employees. The state university advertises itself as a place where people can have free and honest discussions about important matters, but its bureaucratic systems require employees to play circumscribed roles. Even though we need markets and bureaucracies, there is a pervasive danger that business and bureaucrats will take over authentic spaces in order to profit from them.

I have tried to write this whole post without jargon or name-dropping, but I mean it as an almost perfect illustration of Habermas’ thesis that systems are colonizing the lifeworld.

See also: soft skills for the 21st century workplace: empowered teamwork or emotional labor?,  Habermas and critical theory (a primer) and Habermas illustrated by Twitter.

does service boost employment?

(Cross-posted from the CIRCLE site) Yesterday, Wendy Spencer, CEO of the Corporation of National and Community Service (CNCS), announced $923,000 in research grants to increase the nation’s understanding and knowledge about the importance of volunteering, national service, and civic engagement in America.

CIRCLE was awarded one of the grants: $143,296 to explore whether including AmeriCorps service on resumes increases the employment prospects of AmeriCorps alumni.

Previous research suggests that participation in civic engagement activities, such as membership in AmeriCorps State and National programs, can have positive labor market outcomes for young people and that hiring managers see volunteering as relevant when making employment decisions. A study by CIRCLE director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, University of Wisconsin Professor Chaeyoon Lim, and me found that rates of civic engagement were strong predicators of employment growth after a recession. A CIRCLE study by Andrea Finlay and Constance Flanagan found that service experiences were linked to academic success for young adults.

However, it is not known whether being able to list AmeriCorps service on a resume increases prospects of employment. CIRCLE will conduct a randomized experiment to investigate this question. We will create fictitious resumes for applicants and will vary the service experiences and how they are described to see which forms of service and which ways of presenting it are most attractive to hiring managers.

CIRCLE director Kawashima-Ginsberg said, “High-quality service is beneficial for the people who serve as well as the communities they serve in. Hiring managers should treat challenging service as valuable preparation for the workforce. We will find out whether they do.”

excluding oral history from IRB is a win for the First Amendment, but doesn’t go far enough

Don Ritchie reports,

On 8 September 2015, a 20-year struggle culminated in a ruling from the US Department of Health and Human Services that specifically excludes the following from human subject regulation: “Oral history, journalism, biography, and historical scholarship activities that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected.”

I see this ruling as a vindication of First Amendment rights, but I don’t think it should be limited to the four named forms of research. People have the right to talk to others and to communicate what they learn. People also have the right to be talked to. In almost any form of talk, it is possible to violate ethical principles or even laws. For instance, you can commit fraud, libel, conspiracy, or harassment by speaking. But a government requirement to seek prior approval for talk is highly problematic on constitutional grounds and violates liberal principles.

I want to emphasize that I have no personal problem with seeking Institutional Review Board approval for my own research or that of my team. We get IRB approval many times a year. Our own IRB is professional, efficient, and helpful. We have never been rejected or significantly delayed. We have the capacity to handle the paperwork without hardship. My objection is not to our IRB but to federal policies–and I worry about the practical impact on other people in less fortunate circumstances.

Imagine the editor of a newspaper in a police state whose local police authorities are unfailingly polite and helpful, actually trying to support her journalism. This editor must seek prior approval for all her reporting, but it is given cheerfully and quickly. Nevertheless, her freedom has been abridged, as have the rights of the people she might choose to interview. And there is a potential for more concrete harms if the local police are not so benign.

Some Q&A’s:

What about the Tuskegee experiments and other violations of basic human rights conducted under the name of “research”? These are horrifying cases but they do not centrally involve speech. They involve giving or withholding physical treatments. They should be strictly regulated. (By the way, I would also favor the regulation of talk therapies that are comparable to medical procedures, but I don’t think surveys or interviews constitute therapies.)

Can’t you do just as much damage with words as with physical interventions? First of all, yes, you can. But that is a problem with free speech in general, not particularly with research. Journalists and bloggers can do more harm than professors because their audiences are bigger. A thoughtful argument for free speech acknowledges the potential for harm but still defends the First Amendment. Second, the kinds of harms that researchers do with words tend not to be prevented by IRB approval. Social scientists do the most damage when they argue for terrible policies, like mass incarceration, invading Iraq, or slashing taxes in order to raise revenues. IRB have no relevance to those examples. And third, prior censorship is not the best way to handle harmful speech. It is better to criticize, punish or remediate speech after it occurs. Prior censorship puts the burden in the wrong place and gives too much power to the regulators. It prevents information from even being collected, thus precluding speech that might turn out to be highly valuable.

What about research on children and prisoners? When a research subject is vulnerable, the ethical demands rise. I am not unalterably opposed to IRB review of research involving minors and prisoners. However, I remain skeptical even in those cases. First, children and prisoners have the right to be studied and to be understood. Although they can be harmed by research that (for instance) violates their privacy, they can also be harmed by rules that discourage scholars from studying them. Our presumption should favor speech, not block it. Second, prior review is only one possible approach to protecting vulnerable populations. Another option is to publish rules that guide matters like obtaining permission from minors and prisoners and then subject scholars to sanctions when they violate those rules. Again, prior review is dangerous because it prevents information from being collected, and that power can be abused.

Won’t universities be vulnerable to lawsuits unless they closely monitor their researchers’ interactions with subjects? I do not understand the relevant law well enough to know whether, if Prof. A harms a subject by interviewing her, Prof. A’s institution could be liable for damages. But even if that is the case, the solution is not to require prior permission for research that involves talk. I’d rather see the law put all the responsibility on Prof. A.

Free speech is under threat in universities today. One little part of the threat is political correctness of various sorts, which leads to short-sighted policies and decisions. But much larger threats are bureaucratic: the erosion of tenure, excessive IRB review, too much influence by funders, too much control by central administrations who are too risk-averse and too concerned about reputation. The HHS decision about oral history and journalism is a step in the right direction, but I fail to see the distinction between these forms of talk and many others that are still reviewed by IRBs.

responsiveness as a virtue

(Milwaukee) I’m at a conference about responsiveness, which uses the following as the opening definition, for discussion:

Being responsive (primarily to others, but we might also think about being responsive to the non-human world) involves being open to being moved or transformed by what others convey and do, especially in the course of the shared activity of living together (which includes working out the terms by which we live together).

I wrestle with two questions: 1) Is responsiveness a virtue? (Could we say that someone was too responsive?) 2) Should we understand responsiveness in terms of change? For instance, do we need to see a change in a person’s opinions—or at least in her understanding of another person’s opinions—to infer that she was responsive?

Both questions arise in cases when someone fails to change her mind at all when exposed to another person’s views. Could that failure to change reflect a reasonable lack of responsiveness? Or could we say that she was responsive, yet the other person simply failed to be persuasive, so there was no change?

There are also circumstances when people genuinely change their opinions, yet they don’t quite seem “responsive.” For instance, perhaps a person is deeply insecure or subservient and comes to believe what others say just because they have said it. I am not sure that counts as responsiveness—or if it does, then responsiveness is not a virtue.

For what it’s worth, I am inclined to think that responsiveness is a virtue—meaning that it is intrinsically worthy, even though it can be trumped by other virtues. For one thing, we can be wrong; so being responsive means being open to correction. In that sense, responsiveness shouldn’t be measured by whether we change; we must simply be open to the possibility of changing. But second, responsiveness is a virtue because it means receptivity to the world and to other people, or mindfulness. It is a condition of having a rich inner life and of enjoying the world around us. For that reason, I am inclined to think that responsiveness is a virtue for all people; even those who suffer worst from injustice are better off being responsive, to the degree that is possible.

Finally, I suspect that whether a person is responsive is probably a function of some combination of:

  1. The circumstances of the discussion. (How many people, how much time they have to talk, why everyone is present, who is represented, etc.)
  2. A person’s tendency to be responsive or unresponsive, which is perhaps a trait we can teach.
  3. The person’s views–for instance, Stalinists are less responsive than liberals.
  4. The topic: some subjects are more amenable than others to being discussed in responsive ways.

crowd-sourcing information as a form of civic work

(Milwaukee, WI) Beth Noveck has been a leader since the 1990s in connecting online, collaborative knowledge-production efforts (tools like Stack Exchange) to government, and vice-versa. She has pursued that cause both as a scholar and as an Obama Administration official. I have not yet read her latest book, Smart Citizens, Smarter State, but Andrew Mayersohn’s review lays out important issues. This is a quote that mentions me, but I recommend Mayersohn’s whole article:

The ultimate goal of Smart Citizens, Smarter State is not simply a more competent regulatory state, but a transformed relationship between government and the governed. To policymakers and bureaucrats, Noveck makes the case that soliciting citizen expertise can make governance more effective; to democratic theorists, Noveck argues that providing expertise is a genuine form of civic engagement, and that it can help remedy the “broken, staccato rhythm of citizen engagement today” with something more substantive and sustained.

Noveck is right to suggest that we should start to think of providing expertise as another form of engagement like protesting or voting. Tufts University’s Peter Levine estimates that at least one million Americans are members of organizations that practice “open-ended discussion, problem-solving, education, and collaboration with diverse peers” such as the Industrial Areas Foundation and the League of Women Voters. Levine argues that such people are an important constituency for a more participatory democracy, since they have already seen it work in practice and developed the skills involved. Noveck’s proposals would greatly increase their numbers and, perhaps, begin to accustom a portion of the public to the idea that governance can and should be collaborative.