Having a field day, efficiently and/or effectively

I’ve written some posts about efficiency, one called “Mastery and Control: a distinction without a difference?”, another called “Efficient versus Effective versus Resilient Social Movements” and a third post over at a new site (still much in beta, it’s about Intellectual Self-Defence) called, imaginatively”Efficiency versus Effectiveness.”

This is part of a good conversation with two other bloggers, Antonio Dias and Johnnie Moore.

The latter has kindly dug out an old post, called “Where to close the Field?”, which starts with

I’ve been reflecting further on the punchy attacks on managerialism made by John Seddon (blogged here). Here are some not massively coherent thoughts.

One of Seddon’s major arguments is that services get analysed by experts and chopped into smaller functional units. Front and back offices are created; some back office functions then get outsourced. Each unit is given its own performance targets. For example, a call centre operator has to clear 60 calls a day. Inevitably, everyone learns to game the system; one way to deal with lots of calls is to cut people off or pass them along – leading to even more calls later etc etc.

He says you need to look at the whole system to design intelligent measures and base those measures on customer needs.

It all makes lots of sense.

and continues.

“Fields” make me think Bourdieu (wikipedia link)…

Field is one of the core concepts used by French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent’s habitus and agent’s capital (social, economic and cultural) (Bourdieu, 1984). Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical (most are subordinate of the larger field of power and class relations).

Bourdieu shared Weber’s view, contrary to traditional Marxism, that society cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources.