Computers and Communication

One of my interests since I first became a PhD student was the process of organization through computers. I am actually not sure where this interest comes from precisely as I haven't had a huge amount of experience organizing with others over computers. When I was in undergrad, I took a course called Organizational Communication which I found extremely interesting. The focus of the class was mostly on the ways in which we fail  or succeeded at communicating within organizations. An example in class was how poor communication has led to helicopter crashes or accidental shootdowns.

A part of this course was focused on groups that communicate over the internet. The course was taught by a researcher that studies Wikipedia and the course was partially taught through the Human Computer Interaction group. After taking this class, I became more interested in this topic, literally in the academic sense. I still don't participate in much internet organized work and am notoriously bad at keeping up with friends. While I was working on a book chapter about the rise of the globally distributed group, I was part of one as my adviser spent some time at other schools. This was a period when I severely lost my way in my focus and ended up going through one of the roughest paper proposals I think there has been in my program.

I'd like to discuss some old, but interesting work on the way that people use computers to interact with one another. Sara Kiesler is a prolific and diverse researcher. When I first met her, she discussed how she had recently returned from a trip to Africa where she was interested in their nascent educational system and acted as an adviser. She taught us interviewing techniques, how to engage with subjects and find out what their true reasons were for their actions or thoughts. She seems to have a deep interest in increasing the quality of life for people wherever they are and through many different mechanisms.

She was part of a group of researchers that were interested in how the internet would influence the lives of those that had ready access to it. In this study, the researchers gave internet access to a large number of families in the Pittsburgh area for free. The researchers then looked at the outcomes for each family member and tracked their individual usage. Initially, the signs were not good with several negative outcomes (primarily depression), specifically for adolescents in the household. After more time, however, the positive effects of the internet on the families became more pronounced. Of all possible uses for the internet, the most common was interpersonal communication. The researchers concluded that using the internet to make new ties had a relationship to increased depression but using the internet for other uses decreased depression: http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/progress/index.html

Another interesting study that Sara Kiesler performed that is even older than the Internet study focused just on the nature of the communication that individuals engaged in with one another. In this study, the researchers compared the communications of groups that did a task when the members were either in the same place or communicated over computer text messaging. The use of computers had various effects, positive and negative. Group members were more likely to get angry with one another, make extreme statements, and they had trouble coming to a collective consensus. This was partially that people seem more real when they are in person so it is harder to criticize them so heavily directly. Another way to think about the phenomena is instead that the ability to communicate distributively led the group members to speak their mind more freely.

Another interesting finding was the amount of discussion that was contributed by females in the group. In the face-to-face groups, men were dominant and their opinions were used more as the basis for the decision making process. When the groups instead used a computer, however, the women spoke more and contributed more to the discussion. The researchers suggested that the relative anonymity that the computer mediated communication allowed for let women not feel as self conscious about sharing their opinions. They also suggested that because there were fewer obvious status cues, women weren't in a position where they felt their opinions were less valuable.

Lastly, the researchers were curious if the change in the way people communicate changes the kinds of decisions that they are likely to make (instead of just their ability to make a decision). The researchers found that there was a definite 'risky shift' such that members were more willing to take on ventures that seemed risky if they were communicating online as opposed to face-to-face.

Though this research was published in 1992 (22 years before the publication of this article), we can see that people are using the internet to communicate and engage with one another in the same kinds of ways. Discussions on the internet often devolve into 'flame wars' quickly get off topic, and is full of overly superlative language about the love or hate of particular topics. Risky or at least random decisions being made by groups coordinating over the internet are not uncommon to hear about. It is comforting to a certain extent to consider that we have always found computer mediated communication to be just disconnected from others enough to be incredibly mean to one another. This is not a new phenomenon, it is inherent in human nature. Us humans who have evolved to recognize faces and see truth in one's eyes are sullied by using online communication,...but it does have its benefits. The convenience is unparalleled and studies have shown that we are much more civil when we know who the other person is we are talking to, which is something.

Sensemaking in Organizations

In the Fall of 2010, I was taking a seminar in organizational behavior. It was a morning class, and in a much different format than I was used to. We read what, at the time, seemed like a ludicrous number of papers and then proposed questions we had about each to the professor. The professor then spent 15-20 minutes per paper summarizing and discussing the significance of each paper, answering our questions as he went along. It was a small and intimate class which made the moments that I dosed off that more embarrasing. It was a very interesting class, but the lecture-like format was not engaging enough at 9 in the morning when I had stayed up until 1-2 to read all of the required papers.

One day we read a paper that deeply impacted my perception f how research can be done and explained in organizational behavior. The paper was called "The collapse of sensemaking" by Karl Weick, an influential but controversial individual within the field. Van Mannan argued in the article I mentioned yesterday that the article I am about to describe was extremely powerful but never would have seen the light of day under Pfeffer's system. Pfeffer shot back that Weick was not formally rigorous enough which only stoked Van Maanan's dislike for Pfeffer.

The article is very, very different from what you typically see in academic literature. It is a narrative about the Mann Gulch disaster that holds some information to its chest in order to make the impacts of the revelation of Weick's theory that more convincing. The article has nearly 2500 citations according to Google Scholar. There are no formal hypotheses, no statistical anlayses, but it's also not quite a theory paper. It is a kind of paper that I have only seen Karl Weick write. I mentioned the argument between Pfeffer and Van Maannan to a professor at my institution about their discussion of Weick's style. I do not remember the specifics, but they were clear that his pursuits are only possible after tenure and that few besides him can write these narrative theoretic pieces.

The paper begins with a description of the Mann Gulch disaster. Weick relies on a book "Young Men and Fire" written by Normal Maclean who interviewed survivors of the event.  As a very brief summary, a group of young firefighters parachuted into a forest where a fire had been reported. Their role was to act quickly to prevent the fire from spreading by digging fire lines as well as repairs damage from a fire. The men unfortunately were unprepaired for a large active and fast moving fire. They found themselves in a position where fire was rapidly approaching and they needed to act fast to survive. 13 of the 16 men died that day. Of those that survived, two found a way through a rock crevice, the other survived by lighting a brush fire at his feet and lying down in the ashes. The actions of this last individual, Wagner Dodge, led Weick to begin his theorizing about the collapse of sensemaking within this group of men.

Sensemaking is the way in organizations act in ways to create order in their environment through their actions based on their purpose and culture. The theory of sensemaking apparently arose as an alternative to focusing just on the decision making process itself (as proposed by March of the Carnegie School). In other words, the organization's actions are in response to the way reality is perceived in order to maintain their perception of reality. Weick's primary argument is that the actions of the firefighters were in line with their incorrect perception of reality and when they were faced with a new reality, they were unable to 'make sense' of the situation. Their training became useless because they were no longer in a situation they could understand. Dodge was able to make sense of the situation when others could not and essentially set a fire line where he stood. This prevented the fire from coming as close to him as the ground was already burned. His command to the others to join him in the fire seemed to go against their identity as firefighters.

I don't want to get into the details of the paper as it is extremely dense and it is certainly worth a read. This paper is particularly important to me because of the way it is presented. It is intuitive and rigorous within the setting. Even though there is no data, you can tell that an extraordinary amount of thought went into the construction of the paper. I don't use sensemaking in my research and I'm not sure I agree with it in opposition to other concepts that it somewhat collides with (like the Carnegie School) but damn does WEick make a good argument.

Coding (in the social science sense)

I often wish that science did not occasionally use the same word to mean the same thing. In this case, the thing is coding. When the majority of people think of coding, they probably think of writing computer code. Those who write computer code are called coders and all is right with the world. But there is another kind of code that we use in social science much more often, qualitative coding. This essentially means that you take some output, communication, interview, etc. that cannot be directly translated into numbers and you create a scheme to do that translation. It could mean that you create a list of possible topics and match each sentence in an interview onto those topics. Going through this process can give you a quantitative idea of what a person was discussing.

I have already introduced one form of coding in one of the previous posts. Liang, Moreland, and Argote developed a kind of coding scheme to measure transactive memory in 1995. In that case, 2 individuals watched a video and rated the level of coordination, credibility, and expertise within the group overall. This measure was not as taxing as some versions of coding but it still requires 2 individuals to watch videos of all the groups and make a judgement. Once the two coders have finished, their codes are compared using a formula like cronbach's alpha. Cronbach's alpha determines how consistent the raters are at judging the same thing, in this case the groups i the videos.

Then we come to my personal difficulty using coding in my work. I have used coding for several projects, including some where the thing we were measuring was, I felt, objective. Therefore, using multiple coders is useful to help pickup on when one person missed a specific thing, but not to compare groups based on the coder's perception of their qualities. In my case, I say count the number of times this thing occurs. One coder sees 5 but the other only sees 3. The one that sees 5 may objectively be correct, but something like Cronbach's alpha just sees this as an inconsistency between the coders when the actual problem is either attention or honest mistake.

Whenever I start a coding process, I typically dread starting and looking at the outcomes because I just feel that the mistakes are arbitrary, that I don't need the coders to do this correctly, or that the coders are just not doing a good job. It's frustrating. But, it's frustrating in a way that feels unnecessary.

Machine learning has started being introduced which provides a more objective way of looking at a set of hard to quantify data though it may not do as a good a job as a person can. I think that, in the near future, machine learning will begin supplementing person coding when there are large data bases available. I think that this is a good way forward and also I like that it may reduce my personal reliance on other people. It becomes impersonal, removed from the imbued meaning of the words, and disconnected from theoretical constructs. But it is a slave that reduces the need for the me to act mechanically, which is something I suppose.