{"id":618,"date":"2009-05-26T08:40:44","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T08:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=618"},"modified":"2009-05-26T08:40:44","modified_gmt":"2009-05-26T08:40:44","slug":"commuting-in-the-age-of-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/commuting-in-the-age-of-email\/","title":{"rendered":"Commuting in the age of email"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you believe, as the prevailing social metaphor would have it, that this is the Age of Information<\/em>, then you could easily imagine that the main purpose of human interactions is to request and provide information. \u00a0That seems to be the implicit assumption underlying Lane Wallace’s discussion of commuting and working-from-home\u00a0here<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Wallace is surprised that anyone still travels to work, when information can be transferred so much more readily by phone, email and the web.
\nBut the primary purpose of most workplace interactions is not information transfer, or this is so only incidentally.\u00a0 Rather, workplace interactions are about the co-ordination of actions \u2014 identifying and assessing alternatives for future action, planning and co-ordinating future actions, and reporting on past actions undertaken or current actions being executed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To engage in such interactions about action of course involves requests for and transfers of information.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To the extent that this is the case, such interactions can be and indeed are undertaken with participants separated in space and time.\u00a0\u00a0 But co-ordination of actions requires very different speech acts to those (relatively simple) locutions seeking and providing information: \u00a0speech acts such as proposals, promises, requests, entreaties<\/em>, and commands<\/em>.\u00a0 These speech acts have two distinct and characteristic features \u2014 they usually require uptake<\/em> (the intended hearer or actor must agree to the action before the action is undertaken), and the person with the power of retraction<\/em> or revocation<\/em> is not necessarily the initial speaker.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0An accepted promise can only be revoked by the person to whom the promise is made, for instance, not by the person who made the promise. So, by their very nature these locutions\u00a0are dialogical acts, not\u00a0monolectical.\u00a0\u00a0 You can’t meaningfully give commands to yourself,\u00a0for example, and what value is a promise made in a forest?\u00a0 Neither of these two features apply to speech acts involving requests for information or responses to requests for information.
\nIn addition, inherent in speech acts over actions\u00a0is the notion of intentionality<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If I promise to you to do action X, then I am expressing an intention to do X.\u00a0 If your goals requires that action X be commenced or done, then you need to assess how sincere and how feasible my promise is.\u00a0 Part of your assessment may be based on your past experience with me, and\/or the word of others you trust about me (my reputation).\u00a0\u00a0 Thus it is perfectly possible for you to assess my capability and my sincerity without ever meeting me.\u00a0 International transactions across all sorts of industries have taken place for centuries between parties who never met; the need to assess sincerity and capability is surely a key reason for the dominance of\u00a0families\u00a0(eg, the Rothschilds in the 18th and 19th centuries) and close-knit ethnic groups (eg, the Chinese diaspora) in international trade networks.\u00a0 But, if you don’t know me already,\u00a0it is generally much easier and more reliable for you to assess my sincerity and capability by looking me in the eye as\u00a0I make my promise to you.
\nBloggers and writers and professors, who rarely need to co-ordinate actions with anyone to achieve their work goals, seem not to understand these issues very well.\u00a0 But these are issues\u00a0are known to anyone who actually does anything in the world, whether in\u00a0politics, in public administration\u00a0or in business.\u00a0\u00a0 One\u00a0defining feature of modern\u00a0North American\u00a0corporate culture, in my experience, is that most people find it preferable to make promises of actions even when they do not yet have, and when they know that they do not yet have, the capabilities or resources required to undertake the actions promised.\u00a0 They do\u00a0this rather than not make the promise or rather than making the promise conditional on obtaining the necessary resources, in order to appear “positive” to their bosses.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the famous “Can Do” attitude at work, and I have discussed it tangentially before<\/a> in connection with the failure of the Bay of Pigs;\u00a0\u00a0its contribution to the failures of modern American business needs a separate post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you believe, as the prevailing social metaphor would have it, that this is the Age of Information, then you could easily imagine that the main purpose of human interactions is to request and provide information. \u00a0That seems to be the implicit assumption underlying Lane Wallace’s discussion of commuting and working-from-home\u00a0here.\u00a0\u00a0 Wallace is surprised that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,19,23,40,62,65,66,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argumentation","category-corporate-culture","category-decision-theory","category-joint-action-society","category-planning","category-post-industrial-nomads","category-project-management","category-team-working","p1","y2009","m05","d26","h08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}