A Backstage Sociologist

“Was McLuhan Right? Gutenberg’s Galaxy and the Future of the Book”

Sunday, December 6, 2009, 4:00 pm at The Book House in Dinkytown

If you are in the Twin Cities area, put Sunday, December 6, 4:00 pm on your calendar. I would like to invite you to an event that should be lively and entertaining. I am flattered to be on a panel of folks far more distinguished than myself. I anticipate a provocative discussion. The forum is designed to maximize audience participation.

The Book House in Dinkytown is sponsoring a public conversation on the future of the book entitled “Was McLuhan Right? Gutenberg’s Galaxy and the Future of the Book.” How do new technologies, like Kindle and e-Books, change the experience and culture of reading?  Will the physical book become obsolete?  What ramifications will this have for the publishing industry, libraries, bookstores and authors?

Just to add to the sponsor’s blurb, this discussion is not just about books versus alternative forms of reading. The larger question is whether we are at the end of a 500-year epoch that Gutenberg’s printing press and mass literacy helped shape and define. This is the essence of McLuhan’s assertion—are we moving from a print to an oral galaxy? It should be an interesting conversation.

Featured Speakers:

* Monte Bute, Associate Professor, Sociology, Metropolitan State University
* Don Lepper, founder of Book Mobile and Stanton Publication Services
* Eric Lorberer, Editor, Rain Taxi
* David Noble, Emeritus Professor, American Studies, University of Minnesota

I am an experiential creature. When I find myself facing an existential dilemma within a group or an organization, I draw upon the populist hunches I’ve refined over the years—and then I take action. Only later do I indulge in reflecting upon that experience. The following few paragraphs are meant to provide context and give meaning to the circumstances and social interactions captured in the exchange of e-mails recorded below.

Minnesota has perhaps the most over-centralized system of public higher education in the nation. With the best of intentions, former Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe in 1991 orchestrated a consolidation of three independent systems—state universities, community colleges, and technical colleges—into an über-bureaucracy called the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU).

Moe and his legislative colleagues were oblivious to the unintended consequences that would follow. Established in 1995, MnSCU is now fittingly ensconced in the palatial and well-secured Wells Fargo Bank building in downtown St. Paul. This behemoth has now mushroomed to over 500 bureaucrats who implement policies and dictate procedures to its 32 member institutions.

MnSCU is governed by a Board of Trustees, all of whom have been appointed by Governor Tim Pawlenty. The board is dominated by business leaders, including current and past executive directors of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and the Minnesota Business Partnership. The implicit philosophy that guides the board’s leadership is that MnSCU’s mission is to provide the vocational training that meets the needs of Minnesota employers.

Given this ideological bias, cost-benefit analysis trumps all other criteria for teaching and learning. The business model that the Trustees promulgate, and MnSCU’s minions implement, is one of mass production for mass education—resulting at best in employable masses, and at worse masses who are unemployed.

The good employee is, consequently, a well-trained worker bee. As you might imagine, the leadership qualities fostered by a traditional liberal arts education are, at best, an afterthought. The development of well-educated persons and well-informed citizens still does occur on our local campuses but in spite of, not because of, the Trustees and their over-staffed chain of command.

The first European universities were established in the 11th and 12th centuries in Italy, France, and England. By the 13th century, Peter Abelard had established at the University of Paris the progenitor of the modern college and university. Modeled on the medieval guild, Paris was founded on the principle of autonomy, a federated and self-regulating community of teachers and scholars.

Paul Goodman wrote The Community of Scholars in 1962. He saw an unbroken lineage between those medieval institutions and contemporary colleges and universities. He argued that there is one dominant ancestral trait in the genealogy of higher education: “The community of scholars is self-governing, and has never ceased to regard itself as such.” Nearly a half century ago, Goodman had already pinpointed the most toxic threat to this venerable tradition.

Will the community of scholars survive its present plague of administrative mentality? The ultima ratio of administration is that a school is a teaching machine [online learning is the latest iteration], to train the young by predigested programs in order to get pre-ordained marketable skills . . . Such training can, and must, dispense with the ancient communities, for they are not only inefficient but they keep erasing or even negating the lessons.

Am I living in Catch 22, or is it One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

Monte,
I received notice that you would like LIB 301 or LIB 218 for the following classes for Spring 2010 as a special request:
SSCI 452/01
SSCI 501/501G

Unfortunately these two spaces are designated as conference and meeting rooms rather than classrooms.  Without getting into detail, there is a negative impact on our state utilization data when we use these as classrooms and the fact is our room allocations do not include them.  If you are looking for small seminar spaces, I suggest FHL119, FHL120, or FH L121.  We would be happy to work with you on assigning one of these spaces.
Jean Alaspa
Educational Services and Special Events Director

Jean,                                                                                                                                                                                                    Please understand that you are merely the recipient of this message [my e-mail was also copied to top administrators and faculty union leaders]. I realize you are only the messenger and are not responsible for this decision. Nevertheless, the implications of your message are an affront to every teacher and academic program at the university.

The values embedded in this decision to suddenly take two precious classrooms off the grid to meet the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system’s (MnSCU) perverse notion of education should be reprehensible to the leadership of any university worthy of the name. I only ask Metropolitan State’s administrative leadership one question: whose side are you on?

Let me see if I’ve got this right. The university is in perpetual crisis over the shortage of classroom space. This is particularly true for space appropriate for seminars—there may now be none left on the St. Paul campus. Suddenly, we take two of these rooms out of circulation, to be used only episodically for meetings and left sitting empty for the vast majority of the time. Why? So we can improve the illusion of space allocation efficiency.

This is an absurd shell game—we are developing well-educated citizens, not producing widgets. The space allocation policies of the MnSCU Board of Trustees, none of whom to my knowledge has ever taught a college class, result in policies and procedures that resemble the accounting system of Enron.

The tail again wags the dog. It is outrageous that MnSCU utilization data requirements dictate the use of Metro State’s classroom space. Senior seminars should be held in seminar rooms.  Once more, bureaucratic priorities trump teaching. Are we here to help, to the best of our abilities, students learn? Or are we here to meet the cost-benefit analysis of some bean counters who were obviously sleep-walking through their own education?

I ask that every administrator receiving a copy of this e-mail tour the three rooms that Jean suggests. These large lecture classrooms are entirely inappropriate for the purpose of senior seminars. I also suggest you read the appropriate literature about the importance of space in the process of teaching and learning, particularly for seminars. If you are unfamiliar with that literature, I would be pleased to develop a reference list for you. In lieu of that, let me quote the foremost proponent of the seminar format during the last half century, Mortimer Adler:

The seminar should be the very antithesis of the ordinary classroom or lecture hall, in which the teacher or lecturer stands in front of auditors who sit in row after row to listen to what he has to say. That kind of room may be ideal for uninterrupted speech and silent listening, but it is the very opposite for good two-way talk in which everyone is both a speaker and a listener.

Educational facilities should be a means to the ends of teaching and learning; at Metropolitan State, teachers are rapidly becoming mere factotums for the ends of a bunch of Suits in the Wells Fargo Bank building who know as much about quality education as GM executives knows about quality cars.
For your edification,
Monte

Dear Monte:
Thank you for your message.  When we met on Thursday afternoon and you remarked that you were about finished with indignation, I was thinking of your latest message, rather than Philip Roth’s latest book (Indignation) and rather hoped things had cooled down.  But your message deserves a response and what follows was drafted, principally, by Barbara Keinath, who has a good, working knowledge of the issues involved in the situation about which you wrote.  This message is sent in behalf of both Barbara and me.

Your response to Jean Alaspa (who is very clear about working with you to find appropriate space for your classes) is, in part, right on target. It is also, in part, based on an incomplete understanding of the complex relationship between the use of our current classrooms, the MnSCU Space Utilization Score, and the need for more and more kinds of classrooms.

You are on target in reminding all of the importance of the physical environment to the teaching and learning environment. A room designed only for lecturing to a large number of students does not lend itself well to a seminar course. Your quote from Mortimer Adler says it well. The desire to match the room to the pedagogical needs of the course and instructor is one we all share.

Unfortunately, we have neither the numbers nor the kinds of rooms we need to achieve that desire for every course and every instructor. Further, we operate within a larger system that has the authority-and uses it-to establish processes and measures. And that is where a better understanding of the relationship between use of classrooms, the MnSCU Space Utilization Score, and our ability to get new buildings and classrooms becomes useful.

As required of all MnSCU institutions, we have designated some rooms as classrooms, some as labs (computer, science, etc.), and some as meeting or office space. The room you requested for your courses has always been a designated meeting/conference room. Although it may sometimes have been used as a classroom, it has never been designated as such.

One of the important factors in MnSCU’s ranking of institutional requests for new buildings and classrooms is the Space Utilization Score, which is a measure of the extent to which we fill our classrooms with courses and students. Only rooms designated as classrooms are considered in the Space Utilization Score, which means that scheduling a course into a room designated as a conference room, instead of in a designated classroom, results in a lower Space Utilization Score.

A lower Space Utilization Score means, potentially, lower ranking of our requests for new buildings and classrooms and delays in new construction (e.g., the classroom/office building we have been trying to build on the site of the condemned structure on the Saint Paul Campus),  which leads to a continuation of the status quo number and kind of classrooms. Obviously, this is a simplification of a complex process, but I trust it serves to convey the notion that Metropolitan State is better served if we can improve our Space Utilization Score.

That said, and coming back to your main point, the learning environment is important. As Jean Alaspa’s message to you indicated, she would be glad to work with you to identify the best available classroom space to meet your teaching needs and your students’ learning requirements for spring semester and beyond. If you are interested in doing that, please let her know.
Thank you.
William J. Lowe
Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dear Bill.
Your intuition was correct. As John Maynard Keynes might have put it, my “animal spirits” have diminished considerably since the original e-mail. Your response is a most rational and reasonable one. However, this rationality and reasonableness in response to the catch-22 that MnSCU and Governor Pawlenty have placed us in may, in fact, be the irrational compliance of a subjugated and cowed institution.

I chose the title of Joesph Heller’s novel to describe our situation with considerable forethought. One explication of the meaning of that novel’s title is as follows:

The title is a reference to a fictional bureaucratic stipulation which embodies multiple forms of illogical and immoral reasoning. That the catch is named exposes the high level of absurdity in the novel, where bureaucratic nonsense has risen to a level at which even the catches are codified with numbers.

MnSCU’s Space Utilization Score (SPS) may be, in itself, a catch that is “codified with numbers.” Even if we were to suppose that this is a rational and reasonable system, it remains impotent except as a means of punishing Metropolitan State. Let us not forget, the rationality of a bureaucracy counts for nothing when confronted with the animal spirits of the legislative process. Long before most of you were here, Governor Carlson first vetoed the building that was going to somewhat alleviate our classroom shortage. Despite our high rankings according to MnSCU’s bureaucratic stipulations, our classroom building has since been vetoed two more times. Before we engage in “happy talk” about the upcoming legislative session, remember that Gov. Pawlenty’s animal spirits toward Rep. Alice Hausman, St. Paul, and Metropolitan State show no signs of abating. Truth be told, it is highly unlikely that this building will be funded before the bonding bill of 2012.

What is to be done until 2014 when that building may finally be completed? We need to exercise our own subversive creativity to overcome this catch-22. Like the Cowardly Lion, Metro State needs to overcome its fears and find the courage to truly fulfill our mission of teaching and learning.

The needs of the faculty and their academic programs have been held hostage by MnSCU and the legislature process since the mid-1990s. Enough is enough. There is nearly unlimited demand for classroom space in St. Paul. The Social Science Department. is just one example: we are allocated one classroom most nights of the week. We could easily fill three classrooms each night on this campus. This pattern would likely be replicated by nearly every program based on the St. Paul campus.

Paradoxically, we have managed to take every potential seminar room off the grid. Because we have no seminar rooms, numerous non-traditional offerings are placed in classrooms that would be better served and are badly needed as traditional classes. There is still a sign outside the room on 2nd floor of New Main that reads “Senior Seminar Room.” Ironically, it is filled with administrative files. The St. Paul Room, formerly used for seminars, is empty nearly every night of the week, every week of the year. These rooms and L218 and Lib 301, if advertised to all academic departments, would be filled every night of the week. This would free up at least four other classrooms every evening.

If filling these potential seminar rooms nightly punishes us, then perhaps we are no longer in the world of Catch-22—we are actually incarcerated on a ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Best,
Monte

Dear Monte:
Thank you for your reply.  I would have responded sooner, but, particularly at my advanced and accelerating age, it is not a simple to thing to get off my knees and back to the keyboard.  You have pretty well covered the literary and theoretical waterfront, but please do not overlook Jean’s willingness to help to find an appropriate for your courses.

The classroom/office building that we are trying to get built here in Saint Paul will help to make more seminar-style rooms available.  And, as you point out, the history of that project in the last couple of years has certainly not been especially encouraging.  But, since you mention “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, something comes to mind about our efforts to finally get our new classroom building.  Was it not McMurphy who said: “At least I tried.  At least I did that much.”

I am still working on the Cowardly Lion image.
Thanks, again, and all the best.
Subjugatedly yours
William J. Lowe
Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dear Bill,
Thanks for the best belly laugh I’ve had in weeks. I do appreciate your sense of humor in these matters. Like McMurphy, I had little idea of what I was in for when I managed to get my sentence stayed by entering an insane asylum. I anticipate that in the final act my Chair, Nancy Black, will be playing the role of Chief Broom, finally putting me out of my misery and allowing life to go on as usual around here.
Best,
Monte
P.S. Perhaps while we are awaiting the state’s largesse, facilities might creatively search the inventory for two or three “designated” classrooms that could serve as seminar rooms. That will require the purchase or movement of some large oval and/or rectangular tables and the acquisition of 15-16 comfortable chairs for each room. Perhaps some of our well-appointed meeting rooms could provide such resources, replaced, of course, with some uncomfortable chairs, lined up a row. At least then no one would doze off during important staff meetings.

So it goes. (Kurt Vonnegut)

[I violate all the rules for a successful blog. I have occasional pangs of guilt about being an episodic blogger. Defiantly, I sit silently until my conscience leaves the room. I periodically have an impulse to justify my behavior but somehow never find the words to rationalize my sloth. Today a blogger at The New Republic saved me the effort. My only disagreement with his analysis is that I believe his argument applies equally to blog posts. I do hope you still enjoy my occasional essays, even if they may be infrequent and idiosyncratic.]

Writing and Velocity

Damon Linker

Sorry I’ve been silent (again) for so long. In addition to teaching two writing seminars at Penn, I’ve been busy with book revisions. Those are now done, so I should be back (again) to more regular blogging.

Given the glacial pace of my contributions to TNR in recent months, perhaps it makes sense that I’d return with a post about . . . the pace of writing. Back in late September (an eternity ago in Internet time, I know), Ezra Klein—along with Matthew Yglesias, the boy wonder of high-speed blogging—wrote a post about the new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule. Here’s the plan:

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

This inspired Klein to remark on how much easier it’s gotten to write quickly:

Writing doesn’t take very long. Quoting doesn’t take very long. But assembling information used to take an awful long time. It required a lot of phone calls and microfiche and faxes and walking over to Brookings and paging through newspaper archives and begging a source at Gallup. Now it doesn’t take much time at all. That   allows me to be the equivalent of a very fast columnist, and there’s no reason it won’t allow others to become very fast book authors.

“Writing doesn’t take very long.” I suppose not. I mean, I’ve written some long emails in the amount of time it takes me to type. Perhaps the next time I’m starting a book I should open my word processing program, imagine it’s an email, start typing, and keep typing until I’ve gone on for two hundred or so pages, taking momentary breaks to surf the Web so I can gather some needed information along the way. I bet at that rate I could finish it in a couple of months.

But would it be a book? Or at least what, until quite recently, we understood by the word? You know, a lengthy, sustained argument about, interpretation of, or engagement with a topic, one meant to be of lasting value—would my 200 or so pages of typing be that? Would it be worth reading six months—let alone ten or more years—after it was published? Or would it instead be something very different—merely a 55,000-word blog post, as ephemeral as the latest news cycle?

I like blogging. I enjoy its informality and instantaneousness—the way it provides me an opportunity to spout off publicly about this or that outrage of the moment. Opining is fun, and so is ideological combat.

But a book is, or should be, something different: A chance to slow down. An opportunity to raise one’s sights a little higher. To stop focusing so incessantly on the moment and strive, instead, to step back a bit, to take in a wider view, perhaps even to rise above the fray. To reflect instead of react. To ruminate instead of respond.

And what of style? Klein’s statement implies that the only thing that might keep a writer from producing a book in a couple of months is the time it takes to conduct research. As if writing were a process of compiling and arranging lists of facts and figures. Maybe when blogging about public policy, that’s what it mainly is. (Though surely even Klein has paused for five minutes now and then to make sure he nailed a put-down of George W. Bush?) A book can, and should, strive to be more than a list of information. At its best, a book of non-fiction can even aim to be a form of literature.

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

I just returned from four days at the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) annual meeting. While on the flight home, I tried to recall some events that might be timely to blog about. Unfortunately, the two items that immediately came to mind were perennial issues—or in the immortal words of Yogi Berra,“this is like déjà vu all over again.”

First, there remains no market in today’s publishing world for volumes of sociological essays by little known authors, no matter how edifying or well written those occasional compositions might be. There seem to be three genres alone that interest sociological publishers: textbooks (the 800-pound gorilla), empirical monographs, and theoretical encyclicals from superstars. I acknowledge that the lack of interest shown by acquisitions editors for my work might just be due to a lack of merit. But then how would I know? Nearly all the editors I approached refused to review my manuscript solely because it was an anthology of essays. In retrospect, it seems deliciously ironic that my paper submission for the conference landed in a low-status roundtable session—its title, “The Public Sociologist as Essayist.”

Regardless, I will burden you no longer with what Mills called “private troubles.” However, I suspect a linkage exists between my private trouble and the second topic I want to discuss—the public issue of status distinctions within sociology. An irreverent unveiling of our profession exposes this dirty little secret, a duplicity long shrouded in a complicity of silence.

I have been attending these meetings for 16 years. At my first meeting in 1994, I lacked the veil of socialization conferred by a sociology graduate program. My participant-observations of this alien culture were those of an uninitiated but street-savvy stranger; in other words, I wasn’t yet house-broken. With each annual pilgrimage, I re-affirm the reliability of my initial findings. If I had to provide an abstract for this work in progress, it would read as follows:

There is no discipline so morally sensitive to social inequality, or as analytically rigorous at unmasking the social machinations that create and perpetuate these inequities. Conversely, there is no profession so hypocritically insensitive to a specific form of social inequality within its own ranks, or as intellectually inept at recognizing how its taken-for-granted presuppositions and practices create and perpetuate this particular caste system.

I published an early synopsis of this “research” project in 2004 as a column in “Footnotes,” the official newsletter of the American Sociological Association. By the time I landed in Minneapolis on August 11, 2009, I had concluded that little has changed in ASA since that original essay appeared. The oligarchy is still alive and flourishing, and the business of enforcing latent status distinctions continues unabated.

LET 50 FLOWERS BLOOM

I attended my first meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1994. I went to Los Angeles as a middle-aged outsider, hoping to gain a little disciplinary knowledge from the natives. For five days, I was mesmerized by phenomena that were not listed in the official program—a perpetual display of Goffmanesque rituals of deference and demeanor.

These customs are by no means limited to this tribe of sociologists. All academic disciplines are defined by what Robert K. Merton called their manifest functions. The obvious and intended function of scholarship is the production and dissemination of knowledge. These professional practices also have what Merton identified as latent functions, consequences that are unintended and frequently unrecognized. The scholarly enterprise has one latent function that dares not speak its name—status stratification.

The professional culture and reward structure of our discipline have evolved gradually over the past half century and are now so much the taken-for-granted-reality that most sociologists are oblivious to their functions. Ralph Linton once observed that the last thing a fish in the depths of the sea would discover is water. The late Stanley L. Saxton was a particularly perceptive denizen of the deep. In A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology (1993), he noted, “The conditions of work for a small but powerful minority of sociologists at research universities need not and should not imprint the whole discipline” (p. 247). Unfortunately, they do. The practices of this disciplinary elite have produced a stratification system for both individuals and institutions within the profession of sociology.

Those who believe that the existing academic labor market is a meritocracy might well challenge my central assertion. Defenders of the status quo do not lament this latent function of status stratification. In fact, they claim that whatever prestige is bestowed upon these luminaries is richly deserved. What fairer system could be devised for the manifest function of knowledge creation than one that rewards “the best and the brightest?” In addition, I might well be accused of sour grapes. What am I but a provincial from the periphery who has failed to measure up?

It is not so much the reward structure that I question, but rather how this social order manages to perpetuate itself. I question that an oligarchy of sociology departments at research universities holds sovereignty over the entire discipline. How does this occur? Let me give you just one example.

ASA is the premier professional association for the discipline. All ASA officers for 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 come from schools belonging to the Carnegie Foundation’s most selective category of research universities. Only 150 of nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States are included in this exclusive club. With just a couple of exceptions, the members-at-large on ASA’s Council for those two years also possess this rare pedigree.

Defenders of the status quo will argue that these leaders won competitive elections. True, but if we examine the Committee on Nominations for those two elections we would find that those doing the nominating are disproportionately affiliated with the same elite institutions as those whom they nominate. A similar analysis of the Publications Committee speaks volumes as to why all the current editors of ASA journals are also from Carnegie’s most restrictive list of research universities.

The manner in which this disciplinary elite defines and privileges a certain type of scholarship—and the “conditions of work” that it entails—is the linchpin of supremacy. The old bromide about how one gets tenure now holds true for promotion, external professional recognition, and even superstar status: publish, publish, publish. The highest rank accrues to those doing esoteric research, with subsequent authorship in prestigious journals and academic publishing houses. This “gold standard” diminishes other types of scholarship, reduces teaching and service to second-rate activities, and reproduces a regime of status stratification within the discipline. If most rank-and-file sociologists continue without question to concede this criterion, it only serves to legitimize the oligarchy’s dynastic succession.

An outsider to the disciplinary canon, Alfred Schutz, developed a sociology of knowledge that poses an alternative to this elitist paradigm of practice. He distinguished between scholarship aimed at the “expert” and scholarship directed to the “well-informed citizen.” American sociologists once saw the well-informed citizen as their primary audience. Conversely, the disciplinary elite today sees fellow experts as their only audience.

How do we restore sovereignty to that large majority of sociologists who toil under a more populist paradigm of practice but remain second-class citizens within the profession? The state professional association is one important venue. As an apprentice to the craft, I found congenial homes, first in Sociologists of Minnesota (SOM), and later in the National Council of State Sociological Associations (NCSSA).

I was welcomed by colleagues who refused to be constrained by the “expert” model but were engaged in scholarships of integration, application, and teaching. I was mentored by master teachers who prided themselves in conducting three to five sections of undergraduate classes each semester, devoted to developing a sociological perspective in students who may never take another course in the discipline. These folks practiced service the old-fashioned way; a “good citizen” took on those often-thankless tasks on campus and in the community that needed doing.

I am only saying aloud what has long been whispered. The intent of this essay is to initiate a conversation, a dialogue of equals. Sociology’s latent function not only divides us but also hinders our ability to engage wider audiences—we need to practice what we preach. We invite more of our research university colleagues to join us in state organizations, just as we have joined you in the ASA. Our local associations and practices might make, once again, our discipline relevant to the well-informed citizen. Let 50 flowers bloom.

I teach at a public university where legendary tales still circulate about the school’s early years as an experimental college. I once did an inquiry into that epoch. The puzzle, I discovered, centered on the institution’s origins: Did the Minnesota Legislature actually authorize such a radical experiment? According to Andrew Abbott, “We learn that switching questions is a powerful heuristic move.” Instead of asking why this occurred, I asked how it came to be. As a sociologist, that move seems be have been a fatal faux pas.

I wrote that case study as a historical narrative. Readers who were generalists found the tale compelling and self-explanatory. Sociologists? Not so much. While most disciplinary colleagues praised the storytelling, nearly all found the study lacking in explanatory power. Even though I was examining an anomaly, they faulted the inquiry for a lack of theoretical “payoff.” They at least wanted the story to be a “deviant” case of something, anything.

I acknowledge that this tepid response from professional sociologists may have been due to the paper’s lack of merit. Nevertheless, this experience has generated some methodological observations that may have value, regardless the article’s worth. To give the reader a quick and dirty synopsis of the narrative’s plot, here is the abstract for “Genesis of a Utopian College.”

Before its doors even opened in 1971, a renowned educational leader had proclaimed an obscure state college in Minnesota to be “perhaps the most innovative institution of higher education in the United States.” This historical case study seeks to explain how possibly this could have happened? Paradoxically, the genesis of this utopian college was, in fact, only the consequence of a long process of politics as usual. The narrative traces a series of actions that established this utopian college, particularly highlighting a successful process of acquiring and exercising power in turf wars at the state legislature and in the Byzantine politics of higher education’s bureaucracy. The plot’s denouement features one past and one future vice president of the United States intervening as midwives for the new college. The eventual establishment of the school led to an outcome that the state’s legislature and higher education bureaucracy had neither intended nor anticipated.

When seeking to explain events like this, most sociologists abhor anomalies and aberrations. My colleagues typically ask, “Why did this thing happen?” They then proceed to seek a categorical generalization that applies to all similar cases. Anomalies and aberrations need not apply. Andrew Abbott uses a hypothetical vignette to capture this “Standard Model.” Sometime in the future, writes Abbott in Time Matters, a scholar is struggling to reconstruct how sociologists thought in the last half of the twentieth century:

The people who called themselves sociologists believed that society looked the way it did because social forces and properties did things to other social forces and properties. . . . Sociologists called these forces and properties “variables.” Hypothesizing which of these variables affected which others was called “variable analysis.” . . . In this view, narratives of human actions might provide “mechanisms” that justified proposing a model, but what made social science science was the discovering of these “causal relationships.” (2001:97)

I sent an early draft of this article to a prominent sociologist of higher education. She graciously read and commented on the work. Not surprisingly, she wrote that while the paper was “an interesting start in writing an analytical history of Metro State. . . . I would suggest more analytical attention to the social, economic and political environment for the founding and continuing development of the college.” She also sent along a monograph that she had written about another educational organization, “which delineates some of the social conditions that might have been relevant to the founding and development of MMSC” (Personal correspondence).

What was her point? My paper lacked theoretical generalization. For her, “analytical” and “social conditions’ were code words for causal explanation. She was expecting me to “explain” the genesis of Metropolitan State by showing that “because a certain enabling condition was in fact in place, what happened was quite within the realm of possibility and need not have occasioned surprise.” (Dray, Philosophy and History 2nd ed., 1993:27).

What might be some of the social conditions that would give my Metropolitan State narrative a more analytical flavor? The list would include the demographics of the baby boom generation, the evolution of a credential society, the student revolt of the 1960s, the progressive nature of Minnesota politics, the post-World War II affluent society, the rise of mass education, and the development of the multiversity. The conditions I list above certainly had contextual relevance for my case study, but a dubious search for a casual condition or independent variable among them provides little explanatory power for this surprising occurrence. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis once quipped, “Aren’t all variables dependent on other variables?”

Her comments led me to set aside the manuscript for several years. In “Genesis of a Utopian College,” I had written a narrative history of an unanticipated outcome. The philosopher M.C. Lemon captures the essence of her critique: “The accusation—for such it is—against narrative history is that it is naïve.” Most social scientists, philosophers, and even some historians argue that the narrative is non-explanatory of its subject matter:

Consequently, we do not even envisage the possibility of a form of explanation other than causal. In fact, a non-causal form of explanation appears to us to be anomalous, even a contradiction. . . . The narrative, on the other hand, refers to the dialectic of structure and agency and asks: ‘What situation and series of actions resulted in the occurrence of E?’ (Mahajan, Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences,1992:95

I was seeking just such an explanation for this aberration. That this new college became a radical experiment was indeed unexpected. The question I sought to answer is, “How could this outcome have happened?” The historian Richard Evans concisely states my rationale: “Consequences are often more important that causes.”

Howard S. Becker provides a roadmap of my research strategy:

Assume that whatever you want to study has, not causes, but a history, a story, a narrative . . . On this view, we understand the occurrence of events by learning the steps in the process by which they came to happen, rather than by learning the conditions that made their existence necessary. . . . This is not just a matter of saying the right words, “process” instead of “cause.” It implies a different way of working. (Tricks of the Trade,1998:61)

Politics is the processes of acquiring and exercising power in order to attain public goods. Legislative and bureaucratic politics are embedded in structural and temporal contexts that constraint the actions of actors. This case study examines how a masterful bureaucratic politician acquires and exercises power in this contentious world of state politics. A three-year campaign for a new state college was just one acquisition in his larger quest for power. What needs explanation is how this particular college metamorphosed into a unique utopian experiment.

No one in 1968 could have imagined that Metropolitan State would become a utopian college. “What situation and series of actions” produced this result? How can the plotting of such a succession of events satisfy the demand that a narrative provide an explanation of its subject matter? The maverick economist, Albert O. Hirschman, offers a powerful warrant for narrative explanations.

In “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding,” Hirschman targets “the tendency toward compulsive and mindless theorizing.” He argues that “an impatience for theoretical formulation leads to serious pitfalls.” To make his point, he contrasts two books about Latin America, both written by young North American scholars. The most important difference he finds is in the cognitive styles of the two authors.

Within the first few pages of his book Payne presents us triumphantly with the key to the full and complete understanding of the Colombian political system. The rest of the book is a demonstration that the key indeed unlocks all conceivable doors of Colombian political life, past, present, and future. Womack, on the other hand, abjures any pretense at full understanding right in the preface, where he says that his book “is not analysis but a story because the truth of the revolution in Morelos is in the feeling of it which I could not convey through defining its factors but only through telling of it.” “The analysis that I could do,” he continues, “and that I thought pertinent I have tried to weave into the narrative, so that it would issue at the moment right for understanding it.” (Interpretative Social Science: A Second Look, 1987:179)

The Metropolitan State narrative is neither naïve nor is it non-explanatory; it is simply incommensurate with the “Standard Model” of sociology. Narrative and causal explanatory models reflect two divergent cognitive styles. Variable analysis, no matter how nuanced, is incapable of adequately explaining the contingent nature of improbable and non-repeatable outcomes. It was only in the telling of the tale that I could make intelligible the process of how a unique constellation of events made this genesis possible. A thick description of each specific situation and the ensuing series of actions provides the analytic rigor required to explain how possibly this anomaly occurred.

Some quixotic members of my profession have fostered an image of the public sociologist as a romantic swashbuckler—the sociologist as community organizer, public policy guru or “organic intellectual.” In an article appearing in Academic Matters and Inside Higher Ed, a Canadian sociologist suggests a more realistic alternative to these charades. Robert Brym’s “Why I Teach Intro” is an elegant endorsement of teaching as a genre of public sociology.

The truth is that most sociologists who promote these activist fantasies are wannabes. Self-delusion, however, is not limited to this discipline; these reveries are perhaps even more widespread in departments of literature and cultural studies. When I hear folks who have spent their entire adult lives in academic monasteries prattling on about organizing and advocacy, I recall Marx’s nostalgic utopia:

While in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes . . . it [is] possible for me to do one thing to-day and another to-morrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepard or critic.

Becoming a community organizer or a public policy advocate is not a hobby. Last week I spent two days meeting with legislative leaders. Over the weekend, I exchanged e-mails about legislative strategy with the Speaker of the House. Last evening I testified at a legislative town hall meeting. Yet I harbored no illusion that I was practicing a profession. I was merely being a good citizen—and, by my lights, a public sociologist. I encourage sociologists to engage in citizenship whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself. However, do not delude yourself by conflating the practice of citizenship with the practice of professional organizing.

Before becoming an academic, I spent 20 years mastering the craft of community organizing. I spent those years learning a skill set: mentoring leaders, building organizations, researching issues, developing strategies and tactics, speaking and writing for public audiences, and exercising political moxie. Drawing upon the work of the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, I now chart that half of my adult life as an experiential learning process, a slow and anxiety-ridden progression from novice to master.

Dreyfus has spent nearly 30 years refining a typology of skill acquisition that has applicability to everything from basketball and chess to professional practice and intellectual dexterity  (On the Internet, 2^nd ed.). He structures the learning process into a useful continuum of six stages. Growth is a gradual transition from rigid adherence to rules to an intuitive mode of reasoning that resembles Aristotle’s concept of “practical wisdom.”

The first three stages—novice, advanced beginner, and competence—are generally accomplished by instruction and practice. To successfully advance through these three stages requires only the limited commitment of a layperson. This first package of skill acquisition describes the civic repertoire of a reasonably competent citizen. To move through the second level of acumen—proficiency, expertise, and mastery—requires a deep allegiance to craft and an apprenticeship to one or more masters.

In other words, if you really want to be a community organizer or an “organic intellectual,” give up tenure, find a mentor or two, and embed yourself in a couple of grassroots organizations for a decade or so. If not, then perhaps a more humble definition of public sociologist is in order.

While there are a variety of venues for this modest rendition of public sociology, Michael Burawoy has identified the one skill that best suits the vast majority of sociologists seeking a more public practice: “Students are our first public.” Anyone with aspirations as a public sociologist should first dedicate themselves to the craft of teaching as a vocational calling. Dreyfus provides a useful guide for those perplexed about the requisite skill acquisition.

A professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, Brym has made a poignant case for humility when professing public sociology—becoming a masterful teacher is virtue enough.

A version of this essay first appeared in Academic Matters.

Why I Teach Intro

By Robert Brym

You probably recall that in George Orwell’s 1984 the authorities bring Winston Smith to a torture chamber to break his loyalty to his beloved Julia. Perhaps you do not remember the room number. It is 101.

The modern university institutionalizes Orwell’s association of the number 101 with torture. Faculty and students often consider introductory courses an affliction.

I suspect that colleagues award teaching prizes to 101 instructors partly as compensation for relieving themselves of the agony of teaching introductory courses—a suspicion that first occurred to me last year, when I shared an award with the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of Pain, much praised for its relief of suffering.

Why, then, do I teach introductory sociology? My colleagues have been too polite to remind me of the alleged downsides, but they are well known. First, teaching an introductory course is often said to be a time-consuming activity that interferes with research and writing—the royal road to prestige, promotion, and merit pay. Second, it is reputedly boring and frustrating to recite the elementary principles of the discipline to young students, many of whom could not care less. Third, the 101 instructor performs supposedly menial work widely seen as suited only to non-tenured faculty members, advanced graduate students, and other personnel at the bottom rung of the academic ladder. Although I understand these arguments, I do not find them compelling. For me, other considerations have always far outweighed them.

In particular, teaching intro solves, for me, the much-discussed problem of public sociology. Some sociologists believe that working to improve human welfare is somehow unprofessional or unscientific. They hold that professional sociologists have no business drawing blueprints for a better future and should restrict themselves to analyzing the present dispassionately and objectively. However, to maintain that belief they must ignore what scientists actually do and why they do it. Sir Isaac Newton studied astronomy partly because the explorers and mariners of his day needed better navigational cues. Michael Faraday was motivated to discover the relationship between electricity and magnetism partly by his society’s search for new forms of power.

Today, many scientists routinely and proudly acknowledge that their job is not just to interpret the world but also to improve it, for the welfare of humanity; much of the prestige of science derives precisely from scientists’ ability to deliver the goods. Some sociologists know they have a responsibility beyond publishing articles in refereed journals for the benefit of their colleagues. One example is Michael Burawoy’s 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, a gloss on Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, in which Burawoy criticized professional sociologists for defining their job too narrowly and called for more public sociology. Still, many sociologists hold steadfastly to the belief that scientific research and public responsibility are at odds—largely I suspect, because they are insecure about whether their research is really scientific at all, so feel they must be more papist than the pope.

Setting such anxieties aside, one is left with the question of how to combine professional pursuits with public responsibility. One option is conducting research that stimulates broad discussion of public policy. Some of my colleagues study how immigration policy limits the labour market integration and upward mobility of immigrants; others how family policy impairs child welfare; and still others how tax and redistribution policies affect inequality. To the degree they engage educated citizens in discussion and debate on such important issues, they achieve balance between their professional and public roles.

I have chosen a different route to public responsibility. I have conducted research and published for a professional audience, but I have also enjoyed the privilege of addressing hundreds of thousands of members of the public over the years by teaching Sociology 101 in large lecture halls and by writing textbooks for intro students in several countries. As Orwell wrote, communicating effectively to a large audience may be motivated by aesthetic pleasure and egoistic impulses. Who among us does not want to write clear and compelling prose and to be thought clever for doing so? But in addition, one may want to address a large audience for what can only be deemed political reasons.

In 1844, Charles Dickens read his recent Christmas composition, The Chimes, to his friend William Charles Macready, the most famous Shakespearean actor of the day. Dickens later reported the reading to another friend as follows: “If you had seen Macready last night—undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read—you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power.” I understand Dickens. I, too, relish the capacity to move and to sway a large audience to a desired end because it signifies that my influence will not be restricted to a few like-minded academics and that I may have at least some modest and positive impact on the broader society. I find most students burn with curiosity about the world and their place in it, and I am delighted when they tell me that a lecture helped them see how patterned social relations shape what they can become in this particular historical context. On such occasions I know that I have taught them something about limits and potential—their own and that of their society. Teaching intro thus allows me to discharge the public responsibility that, according to Burawoy and others, should be part of every sociologist’s repertoire.

In Marx’s words, “it is essential to educate the educators”—especially those who persist in believing that teaching intro bores, frustrates, interferes, and suits only the academic proletariat.

A famous experiment, repeated, produces the same result. What next, the Zimbardo Experiment? In today’s New York Times, the following editorial column by Adam Cohen appeared: Four Decades after Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain.

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to.

For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we have learned in the last 45 years, Americans are still as willing to inflict pain out of blind obedience.

The Milgram experiment was carried out in the shadow of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann had the world wondering how the Nazis were able to persuade so many ordinary Germans to participate in the murder of innocents. Professor Milgram devised a clever way of testing, in a laboratory setting, man’s (and woman’s) willingness to do evil.

The participants — ordinary residents of New Haven — were told they were participating in a study of the effect of punishment on learning. A “learner” was strapped in a chair in an adjacent room, and electrodes were attached to the learner’s arm. The participant was told to read test questions, and to administer a shock when the learner gave the wrong answer.

The shocks were not real. But the participants were told they were — and instructed to increase the voltage with every wrong answer. At 150 volts, the participant could hear the learner cry in protest, complain of heart pain, and ask to be released from the study. After 330 volts, the learner made no noise at all, suggesting he was no longer capable of responding. Through it all, the scientist in the room kept telling the participant to ignore the protests — or the unsettling silence — and administer an increasingly large shock for each wrong answer or non-answer.

The Milgram experiment’s startling result — as anyone who has taken a college psychology course knows — was that ordinary people were willing to administer a lot of pain to innocent strangers if an authority figure instructed them to do so. More than 80 percent of participants continued after administering the 150-volt shock, and 65 percent went all the way up to 450 volts.

Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University replicated the experiment and has now published his findings in American Psychologist. He made one slight change in the protocol, in deference to ethical standards developed since 1963. He stopped when a participant believed he had administered a 150-volt shock. (He also screened out people familiar with the original experiment.)

Professor Burger’s results were nearly identical to Professor Milgram’s. Seventy percent of his participants administered the 150-volt shock and had to be stopped. That is less than in the original experiment, but not enough to be significant.

Much has changed since 1963. The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority. Institutions that were once accorded great deference — including the government and the military — are now eyed warily. Yet it appears that ordinary Americans are about as willing to blindly follow orders to inflict pain on an innocent stranger as they were four decades ago.

Professor Burger was not surprised. He believes that the mindset of the individual participant — including cultural influences — is less important than the “situational features” that Professor Milgram shrewdly built into his experiment. These include having the authority figure take responsibility for the decision to administer the shock, and having the participant increase the voltage gradually. It is hard to say no to administering a 195-volt shock when you have just given a 180-volt shock.

The results of both experiments pose a challenge. If this is how most people behave, how do we prevent more Holocausts, Abu Ghraibs and other examples of wanton cruelty? Part of the answer, Professor Burger argues, is teaching people about the experiment so they will know to be on guard against these tendencies, in themselves and others.

An instructor at West Point contacted Professor Burger to say that she was teaching her students about his findings. She had the right idea — and the right audience. The findings of these two experiments should be part of the basic training for soldiers, police officers, jailers and anyone else whose position gives them the power to inflict abuse on others.

Regular readers of this blog will recall the claim I made last summer that Reinhold Niebuhr has been a formative influence on Barack Obama’s worldview (see http://contexts.org/monte/2008/08/15/obamas-theologian-and-the-party-of-irony/). That op-ed article has been expanded into a much longer review essay in the current issue of Contexts.

I was pleased to discover yesterday that I was not alone in predicting a Niebuhrian credo in an Obama presidency. In the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, the dean of American religious historians makes a similar case for the president-elect’s new administration.

Martin E. Marty is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history in the Divinity School for 35 years. Marty is the nation’s foremost Protestant scholar and an advocate of “public religion” (an interesting sidebar is that he is the father of Minnesota State Senator John Marty).

Realistic Hope and Hopeful Realism

The election of Barack Obama says—about America and to the world—that it is open to “realistic hope” and “hopeful realism.” Those two two-word phrases paraphrase themes from the mid-century theological great, Reinhold Niebuhr. I mention him because President-Elect Obama is influenced by him and quotes him (as did President Jimmy Carter, the other theologically literate president of our time). Niebuhr is a formidable and sometimes formidably difficult thinker, and some cynics suggest that when politicians quote him, they are just posing Columnist David Brooks checked up and found that Senator Obama could discourse intelligently and expansively about Niebuhr. It is clear to those who know Niebuhr and who read and observe Obama, that he has internalized some Niebuhrian motifs.

I am singling out the combinations of “hope” and “realism” because the nation and the world needs a dose of hope, and hope has been a main theme of Obama the author, who used the word in a book title, and who accurately sensed the need and a hunger for hope. This is as true of a demoralized nation as it is of much of “the world” as it looks on forlornly to a forlorn America. Those of us who have been visited with e-mails from around the world since Tuesday report to each other how consistently correspondents testify to and exemplify a quickening of hope once again.

If “hope” is so manifest also now, after the election, why burden it with the word “realistic?” Or, if you start out with the “realism” that candidate Obama always displayed and will do more so as he begins to come to terms with the presidency in a time whose problems do not need enumerating, though they do get listed by virtually all commentators? Answer: realism can be so realistic that it can breed cynicism, or, as one wag put it recently, we observe that “the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out.”

“Realistic hope” is a caution against utopianism, naive idealism, the claiming of bragging rights, or politically “not knowing to come in out of the rain.” As author, community organizer, law school professor, state and U.S. senator, and presidential primary candidate, Senator Obama tirelessly invoked and promoted hope–and always coupled his invocation and promotion with cautions. We hear it all the time: righting wrongs and charting new courses in a dangerous world and with a destroyed economy allows no chance to relax and sit back.

Niebuhr liked to quote Psalm 2:4, where the Psalmist witnesses to a God who sits in the heavens and laughs, and holds the pretentious and conniving powerful “in derision.” Yet he kept reminding us that the same God held people responsible and did not dishonor human aspiration.

So: the election of the first African-American president, a choice that went beyond the wildest hopes of most of adult America is only a part of the “hope” package the nation will be opening in the months ahead. And the election of THIS African-American to the presidency means a turning to a leader who may be young, but wasn’t “born yesterday.” His reading of Niebuhr and his experience and observation of life as it is lived in complex times will show up in his “realistic” activity. Or am I too hopefully naive even to hope that this will be the case? Realistically: no.

This post first appeared on the opinion page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Thursday, October 9, 2008.

His strategists decided that lawn signs don’t matter. His supporters aren’t happy.

Obama volunteers across the nation are wondering why they cannot get lawn signs for distribution. Signs are an important political ritual in their communities, and they need them to generate a visible cascade of support for their candidate. While their stories vary, what they share is growing frustration with their state and national headquarters.

The sign problem is not due to a shortage of funds, bureaucratic bottlenecks or incompetence. It is deliberate; Obama’s senior staff decided long ago that lawn signs were inconsequential and a waste of resources.

From chief strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe down to state and local campaign officials, the party line has been consistent: Lawn signs don’t vote. Well, neither does a TV ad.

As the election nears, the decision to blow off lawn signs is provoking discontent among Obama supporters. Recently these simmering grievances boiled over in the Washington Post and on national blogs like Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight.

Bill Hillsman is the maverick media adviser who helped design the upset victories of Sen. Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1998. In a recent interview with the Minnesota Independent, Hillsman addressed the unrest among the rank and file.

“The problem with the campaign was that people thought they were walking on water, and they weren’t really willing to listen to any advice coming in from the outside. It’s been a very top-down, command-and-control type of campaign, which is different from what a lot of people expected it to be. They expected it to be very much a grass-roots, broad-based dialogue type of campaign, and it’s turned out not to be that way.”

Since day one, the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign has been retail politics: volunteer recruitment, door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and voter registration. These grass-roots tactics led to stunning successes during the primary season.

Even so, this game plan worked best in caucus states. Large primary states like California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio exposed the shortcomings of the strategy. Clinton’s wholesale politics proved superior in those elections.

Virginia has been particularly hard-hit by a shortage of lawn signs. Yet when the campaign headquarters finally received several thousand signs, the Washington Post reported, it decided to give Obama signs only to volunteers who had knocked on at least 40 doors.

The organizing experiences of a blogger from Missouri refute this logic:

“This isn’t the primary where you are calling on motivated people; this is a general election where you are calling on average voters and you are lucky to get people to go vote and you are really lucky if they want a sign to show their neighbors how they are going to vote.”

The Obama campaign will turn out record-breaking numbers of young and new voters. It will also get the Democratic base to the polls. Nevertheless, this alone will not win the presidency. Independents will decide this election and, as Hillsman highlights, you win their hearts and minds with wholesale politics.

“In order to get independent voters, you can’t get them by field work or volunteer organization or grass-roots organizing, because they don’t exist on any lists. You can’t really mail to them. So the best way to get them is through mass communications, and the Obama campaign has proved to be not that adept in mass communications.”

Presidential campaigns are ultimately about influencing public opinion. There is a mass psychology operating during the last 30 days of a presidential election. During the endgame, wholesale politics trumps retail politics.

If you doubt that axiom, witness McCain’s decision last weekend to go all negative, all the time. McCain’s chief strategist is Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt. A master of the politics of fear, Schmidt is turning Halloween into a monthlong event. Brace yourself: For the next 30 days, the campaign will saturate the media with ghouls and goblins—costumed, of course, as Jeremiah Wright the “anti-American racist” and William Ayers the “terrorist.”

Will Axelrod’s and Plouffe’s decision to double down on door-knocking succeed? I hope Hillsman is wrong, but given his political moxie, I will not be betting the farm on an Obama victory.

© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.