The duality of hoidays

Quoting my dear friend, Anichka: “Hello Two Thousand and Ten! You be good now.”  This is my first post in the new year and I would like to use this opportunity to share a short semi-theoretical observation.

There was an article in the NY Times titled “Saying No, No, No to the Ho-Ho-Ho.”  The article is about people who have decided not to celebrate Christmas in 2009.  People did it for various reasons, but the following quote from Renata Rafferty, a 53-year-old philanthropy adviser, I think summarizes the overall sentiment.  She said that she decided not to stress herself by “conforming to some tyranny of the ‘shoulds.’”

I think this idea of the “tyranny of ’shoulds’” is a great example of social structures as those are defined in the Theory of Structuration.  We do things because this is the way it is, because we are used to.  This is how we grew up doing them and we do not think much about their meaning or why we partake in that specific activity.  People celebrate Christmas (or any other holiday for that matter) in a particular way because they should and because they grew up doing it that way.  People in many places over the world shop away the month of December, just because this is “expected” and constantly reinforced.  For example, until recently, once of the jewelry counters in a local mall, had a sign saying “Accessorize your love this Christmas” and that was the leitmotif of the entire holiday season elsewhere.

However, ideas such as those presented in the NYT article, are an example of reflexive monitoring of our behavior.  It provides a collection of opinion where people are discursively reflecting on their behavior, which in turn allows them to change it. The fact that this reflection is discursive allows others (like me, and now you reading this post) to reevaluate their behavior regarding that structure.  The interesting part in my eyes, that if you read the comments to the article you can see that this discursive reflection is used by some to reinforce their current behavior (particularly for those who don’t like what they see the holiday has become) or to alter it (the article was an “aha” moment for some of the readers) – all this happens in the context of how each one of those people is celebrating Christmas and how they grew up thinking about it (read, duality of structure).  Moreover, for yet another category of readers, especially those who like Christmas and the way it is celebrated, this discursive reflection caused to look for an alternative explanation as to why they think it should be kept the way it is.  Overall, there can be a great number of different reactions, but all of them would be fueled by the same reflective mechanism.

I think this is a really nice and interesting example of how the structuration works.  What do you think?  I only hope that I am not that owner of a hummer (theory) who views everything as nails (structuration).

Governance, gardening, and structuration

I truly hope that I am not becoming like in that saying “when all you have is hammer, everything looks like a nail,” but I do feel that I observe more and more implicit references to the Theory of Structuration.  Earlier this week, I started a semester long fellowship at the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center in the School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and as part of getting familiar with the center’s activities I finished reading a report from a conference organized by the head of the Center, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger.

The conference, named after a place in Switzerland, called the Rueschlikon Conference on Information Policy in the New Economy.  It is a gathering of a small group of policymakers, industry leaders, and academics, who come together to discuss issues related to information governance.  The meeting in 2007 was dedicated to issues of information governance and the report, compiled by Ken Cukier, is titled “Governance as Gardening“.  Behind this metaphor stands a number of observations, particularly:

“In the past states regulated domestically, and international accords were sought.  But because technology advances quickly, states cannot keep up. So new, non-governmental mechanisms and institutions to govern information globally are taking shape. As online communities evolve, they establish their own norms and practices: the rules are emergent. Ironically, the rules are shaped by the community, but the properties of those communities are shaped by the rules” (emphasis added)

and consequently:

“Rather than something something that can be known at the outset, implemented and followed with minor adjustments, regulation must constantly evolve, adapting to new environment. In this respect, we need to think of information governance as ‘gardening’ rather than ‘engineering.’  This is not new in nature, but novel in scope and pace, for which today’s agents, mechanisms and institutions are unprepared.”

What I see in this observation is the realization of the duality of policymaking processes. Quoting from my dissertation proposal:

“…the policymakers react to unintended consequences created by diffusion and adoption of new technology and at the same time they set the agenda and provide guidance for future technological developments that impact social structures and institutions.”

As it is mentioned in the last sentence, these dynamics are not new, but they were made more vivid due to the growing dominance of information technology, or in other words, attempts to systematize processes of communication.  Not surprisingly, this duality is the most visible in the area of information governance, where the matter of regulation is an inherent component of the processes of policymaking itself.  As Cukier writes at some point:

“… there is a paradox behind the governance of information: rather than learn the rules and play the game, we need to play the game to learn the rules”

Even though I think the report sometimes delves into semi-deterministic arguments (see the first quote  above), and as such neglects the duality of technology itself, it is really exciting to see that a conversation between practitioners and researchers yields observations similar to what is going to be at the basis of my dissertation.  Moreover, they used Internet Governance as one of the prominent examples where such duality of policymaking is taking place.