{"id":5618,"date":"2009-01-30T12:19:06","date_gmt":"2009-01-30T12:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5618"},"modified":"2009-01-30T12:19:06","modified_gmt":"2009-01-30T12:19:06","slug":"micro-politics-in-a-committee-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5618","title":{"rendered":"micro-politics in a committee room"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spent two days of this week with a federal advisory committee, deciding what questions to ask on certain official surveys. I was struck (as I sat with my colleagues in an underground hotel room), that various combinations of  &#8220;discourses&#8221; were governing the discussion:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A bureaucratic discourse. We were operating within an elaborate structure of bureaus and offices, contractors, and committees, each with its own roles and powers. This structure can be visualized as a hierarchy or a flow chart or (alternatively) as a temporal sequence. (First the Background Variables committee reviews the instrument, then it goes to the Governing Board. Etc.)\n<li>A legislative discourse. Various federal laws govern the collection of data from kids. Unlike the rules of a bureaucracy, these statutes are miscellaneous and incomplete. There is a law against asking kids about certain sexual activities, for instance. That law just stands there on its own, trumping all other considerations.\n<li>A business discourse. Much of this work is conducted by for-profit or non-profit corporations. They are governed by bids, contracts, and budgets.\n<li>A statistical discourse. Many of our decisions are influenced, or even determined, by statistics. For instance, a question is bad if it doesn&#8217;t produce an interesting variation in responses. A set of questions is better if it produces responses that correlate with one another.\n<li>A psychological discourse. Questions about human attitudes, cognition, and responses to stimuli arise repeatedly and are sometimes settled by appeal to lab research.\n<li>A discourse of kids and schools. Great authority is (rightly) accorded to commonsensical generalizations about what happens in kids&#8217; lives or in their schools. People say things like, &#8220;They all text each other nowadays. Does that count as &#8216;writing&#8217;?&#8221; Many participants are parents or grandparents and like to mention their own offspring.\n<li>An academic discourse. Many of us are professors or deans, so issues about college teaching, graduate students, grants, sabbaticals, and tenure arise from time to time.\n<li>A computer discourse. The data are no use unless they are stored on computers in useful ways. We often discuss details about how the data are organized and analyzed.\n<li>A discourse of upper-middle class travel. We have all gathered in Washington, DC&#8211;most of us traveling by plane and staying in a Holiday Inn. We go out to a restaurant together for dinner. There is much chatter about food, flights, and weather.<\/ul>\n<p>Each of these discourses confers power or status. If you wanted to get a particular item included on the survey, you could probably improve your chances by impressing colleagues with your savvy as a traveler or by talking like a knowledgeable parent&#8211;or by letting everyone know that you have downloaded the previous years&#8217; data and done a fancy statistical analysis. In other words, status transfers (I suspect) from one domain to another.<\/p>\n<p>It strikes me that some people gravitate to issues that can be decided by applying rules. They are relieved, for instance, when a decision can be made automatically by superimposing the rules of statistics and the bureaucratic structure. Other participants chafe against such limits and feel comfortable making case-by-case value-judgments.<\/p>\n<p>Some people jump at the chance to express opinions when their favored discourses arise. If you&#8217;re a statistics jock, you speak up whenever an issue is statistical. If you have a nine-year-old at home, you mention anecdotes relevant to the fourth-grade data. It&#8217;s partly about making pleasant conversation, partly about contributing good insights&#8211;and partly a matter of status and power. This is not to say that everyone is trying to maximize their influence. Some are sincerely modest and diffident. But power is present.<\/p>\n<p>No setting could seem <em>less <\/em>like the &#8220;agonistic&#8221; political spaces that impressed Hannah Arendt. She admired ancient Greek agoras and revolutionary assemblies in which people expressed their inner selves in heroic speeches and deeds. I&#8217;ve been hanging out with nerds in a hotel conference room. But politics is everywhere, and that&#8217;s not a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent two days of this week with a federal advisory committee, deciding what questions to ask on certain official surveys. I was struck (as I sat with my colleagues in an underground hotel room), that various combinations of &#8220;discourses&#8221; were governing the discussion: A bureaucratic discourse. We were operating within an elaborate structure of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}