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How a disciplinary paradigm teaches us to see and not see

I read two articles today back-to-back, though they came from different sources. They represented completely different world views and the conceptual distance between their respective disciplinary paradigms was breathtaking.

The first article came to me via a regular email from the IEEE Computer Society. It was by Phillip Laplante on cultural factors in software development. The article discusses Geert Hofstede’s work on five dimensions of social norms that could be used to characterize any culture. These dimensions are power distance index (PDI), individualism (IDV), masculinity (MAS), uncertainty avoidance (UAI), and long-term orientation (LTO). Each of these dimensions exemplified by choices in software process, for instance:

Are software engineers in low-LTO countries more likely to favor a code-and-fix approach to formal methods? Are software engineers in high-LTO countries more likely to favor spending more time on requirements engineering and less on testing?

Laplante is part of a task force charged with developing a professional licensure examination for software engineering. Consequently, he is wrestling with the question of whether it is reasonable to have the same exam in every region. His interest in Hofstede’s work is driven by the desire to be culturally sensitive. He gave data for five countries and asks questions such as:

Would software engineers in Malaysia (PDI = 104) use fewer techniques (such as reviews) that require higher management participation than in Ireland (PDI = 28)? How widely are group reviews (and the concomitant criticism) used in the US, where individualism is high (IDV = 91) versus in India (IDV = 48)?

I wasn’t especially interested in the work on the licensure exam, but I was intrigued by the Hofstede dimensions. I thought it was pretty interesting that culture could be distilled down to five dimensions and wondered how I could use this in my research.

The second article was forwarded to me by a colleague. It was a news article from the Program in Human Rights at Stanford University on a talk by a faculty member, Kentaro Toyama on ten myths about technology and development.

There is a lot of interest right now in humanitarian technology, and information and computational technologies for development (ICT4D). At the last CHI conference, there was a notable number of papers on this topic. Also, I co-authored a paper with Don Patterson on this topic.

Each one of Toyama’s myths resonated with me, so it’s hard to choose favorites, but here are a few.

Myth 3: ‘Needs’ are more pressing than desires: A high proportion of the income of the very poor goes on what Western observers might view as ‘luxury’ items: (music, photos, festivals & weddings) rather than ‘basics’ such as healthcare.

Myth 6: ICT undoes the problem of the rich getting richer: In contexts where literacy and social capital are unevenly distributed, technology tends to amplify inequalities rather than reduce them. An email account cannot make you more connected unless you have some existing social network to build on.

Myth 8: Automated is always cheaper and better: Where labor is cheap and populations are illiterate, automated systems are not necessarily preferable. Greater accuracy may be another reason to favor voice and human mediated systems.

Toyama caused me to seriously re-assess my reaction to the first article. There’s no way that Hofstede’s dimensions would help anyone trying to make their way in or design for the developing world that Toyama described. Laplante’s article belied an engineering mind set, where people are instruments, i.e. operators of machines and machine processes, who are in turn instruments of the machine. Toyama’s myths belied a humanist mind set, where people are fully-fledged autonomous individuals who live in a context.

As a positivist, Hofstede is trying to look for rules and generalizations about people. He’s trying to turn them into abstractions in a model, which can then be used to reason with. Furthermore, he’s turning the context into an input.

In contrast, Toyama is exquisitely sensitive to people as individuals in a context. Context is all. He’s trying to get you to really see what’s there, rather than your preconceived notions (or your model) tell you should be there.

It occurred to me if you take either point of view, you would never see the other, because of the blinders inherent in each. An engineering viewpoint is what gives rise to the misconceptions that are Toyama’s myths. By the same token, someone with a humanist viewpoint working in context-specific ICT4D would never arrive at a set of five dimensions for characterizing national cultures.

So, is one viewpoint (engineering vs. humanist) better than another? Part of me is very uncomfortable with looking at people and machines merely as instruments. I am much happier looking at people as loving-feeling-dreaming-jumping persons. But at the same time, I’m not sure that poets would design the best technology.

The solution is to be multi- or inter-disciplinary. Becoming steeped or indoctrinated into more than one discipline allows one to see the limitations and assumptions built in each disciplinary paradigm. I often say that asking someone to describe their own culture is like asking a fish to describe water. If you’ve never been out of your culture or water, you’d never see it.

This sentiment is echoed in a blog post that I also read today by Jim Coplien where he writes about the relationship between (software) engineering and the arts. “Cope” takes the middle ground and argues for the importance of both. I’ll let him have the last word.

You can’t study everything, but conquering complexity requires first a human outlook, then a social perspective, and finally a grounding in the arts. A good liberal arts education can raise your awareness about the human side of the world and about what matters to people. A grounding in user experience why the design of a computer interface (or any machine interface) is important and why it is hard. Psychology has everything to do with good computer system design. Literature and history can offer you cultural perspectives that make it easier to work into a shrinking world market. Architecture can help you articulate the complexity of design.

What did Solomon know about motherhood anyways?

There is a famous story in the Hebrew Bible about how Solomon adjudicated a dispute between two women both claiming rights to a child. The story is intended to show how wise Solomon was.

1 Kings 3:16-28 (New International Version, ©2010)

A Wise Ruling

16 Now two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. 17 One of them said, “Pardon me, my lord. This woman and I live in the same house, and I had a baby while she was there with me. 18 The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us.
19 “During the night this woman’s son died because she lay on him. 20 So she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. 21 The next morning, I got up to nurse my son—and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn’t the son I had borne.”

22 The other woman said, “No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours.”

But the first one insisted, “No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine.” And so they argued before the king.

23 The king said, “This one says, ‘My son is alive and your son is dead,’ while that one says, ‘No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.’”

24 Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought a sword for the king. 25 He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”

26 The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for her son and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!”

But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!”

27 Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.”

28 When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice.

This story, and the interpretation of it, drives me nuts. It feels very unfair and imposes a very narrow view of how a mother should be have. It emphasized the self-sacrificing aspect of motherhood and makes this an expectation of all “good” mothers. Why is it not possible for a “real” mother to prefer that her child die than go to some one else? Someone who might not be a good mother, such as a child abuser or drug addict? At the same time, I would be very sympathetic to a mother who has been looking after a demanding, colicky baby and has become completely fed up with the situation. Long term sleep deprivation (I’m talking months here, not days or weeks) is a nasty thing. I could see King Solomon’s offer to divide the child in half being the last straw– “You want him? Fine. Take him.”

It would be more productive for all concerned to think of “mother” as a verb, and not just a noun. Mother, the noun, is like a job title. It’s static. Once you give birth, adopt, foster, or marry into a child, you are given this label. It does not say anything about how, or even if, you fulfill any of the duties of the position.

Mother, the verb, is an action that needs to be performed over and over. It’s a process that needs to be sustained on a daily basis. You do this by caring for and nurturing someone, by paying close attention to their emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual needs.
Some of us have a mother (the noun), who isn’t very good at mothering (the verb). Maybe they were too young or immature when they had us. Perhaps they may were struggling with their own demons of mental illness or addiction. Or they were in need of a mother themselves. For people like us, Mother’s Day can be awkward and bittersweet.

Some of us have people in our lives who are good at mothering, but aren’t necessarily mothers (the noun). We may have had a relative, teacher, or neighbor who looked after us when we needed it. Men can mother too. The stay-at-home dad in my family is proof of that.

So, what did Solomon know about motherhood anyways? Did he give birth to a child? Was he responsible for the care and feeding of a child on a daily basis? How many nights has King Solomon stayed up walking the floors with a baby who won’t stop crying? There is little historical evidence to answer these questions definitively. But it would be fair to answer in the negative. Raising children tended to be women’s work and not in the job description for a royal prince. (To be fair, not necessarily work for a royal princess or queen, either.)

So did Solomon get it right? We don’t know. But if Solomon were alive today and making judgments using the same categories, it’s more than likely that he wouldn’t have. It’s not as easy to be wise, when you’re not living in a narrative, people are not stereotypes, and categories are in flux.

The trouble with categories

I previously blogged about how troublesome categories can be in my post on an area of India where people were being pressured to declare themselves either Hindu or Muslim after centuries of practicing a hybrid religion. These issues of categories seems to come up on our modern age where it’s necessary to put people into on group or another, so they can fill out a form or fit into a field in a computer database. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote about precisely this phenomenon in “Sorting Things Out“.

Here’s another example of the problems that arise when it becomes possible to categorize things at a finer granularity than in the past. This story from the BBC reports on how an “Arctic Map shows dispute hotspots.” New technology has allowed us to map the Arctic more precisely than before. As a result, circumpolar countries have more “facts” that they can use to argue over national boundaries. Fortunately, being cold-weather cultures with Northern temperaments, these countries will likely settle things in an orderly fashion.