reviews Book Reviews 87 Book Reviews Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School Pr., 2000. 320p. $25.95, alk. paper (ISBN 0-87584-762-5). LC 99-49068. An odd experience, but one that more and more reviewers no doubt find themselves having, is that of receiving an assigned title and belatedly discovering that every­ one else seems to have already read the book. Indeed, many of these individuals have provided testimonials for the dust jacket and perhaps even reviewed the title themselves. In this particular case, no fewer than ten eminent blurbistes have checked in before the reviewer has even had a chance to sample the first page. Among these are power-thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama and Robert D. Putnam and even the lesser-known ones are at­ tached to prominent think tanks, the larg­ est and best-known research universities, some very powerful corporations, quasi-governmental agencies, and some of our nation’s most prestigious founda­ tions. Perhaps the authors have been on book tours and done the television talk-show circuit as well, where they had their faces made up, their wardrobes ex­ haustively monitored, and their images scrupulously doctored for mass con­ sumption. What is a mere book reviewer in an obscure professional magazine to make of all this? Add to this that the title already has been reviewed in Chronicle of Higher Edu­ cation, TLS, and Publisher’s Weekly, and the ordinary reviewer begins to feel a little like a tourist on the set of a Holly­ wood movie. Perhaps the root of the dis­ comfort is the realization that the English-speaking intelligentsia, having decided to stop criticizing the establish­ ment and more or less join it, also have decided that it is time to welcome and encourage those who, like John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, want to de­ velop the critique of electronic reason from the inside and who thus have no reason to fear be­ ing labeled as Luddites. This may be what distinguishes The Social Life of Information from certain works with which it might be profitably compared, such as Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information [San Francisco: City Lights], a 1995 book edited by James Brook and Iain A. Boal that has a dis­ tinctly countercultural flavor. None of this is in The Social Life of Information, which is written very much in the style of the businessman-turned-intellectual, warning colleagues that they are really way too simple-minded. Thus what we have here is a case of a message, some of which we have heard before, but in a very different context and with a differ­ ent impact. So perhaps two cultures of critique are emerging in response to the increasing hegemony of automation in late indus­ trial society, corresponding loosely to the countercultural and the more mainstream points of view. The former wants, broadly speaking, to call into question the whole idea of using machines to replace human labor and both presupposes and devel­ ops a theory of alienation based on that concern; however, the latter wants to use machines more efficiently and more in­ telligently and shows no interest in philo­ sophical issues such as liberation. Very much in this latter category, The Social Life of Information appears as a kind of administrator ’s companion. To reverse Marx’s famous old saying, their business is not to change the world, but to under­ stand it. The chief danger, the authors argue, in today’s highly automated and information-intensive environment is the development of tunnel vision, which pre­ vents both designers and users of high­ 87 88 College & Research Libraries information technology from under­ standing that information always has a social context that surrounds it and con­ ditions its use. Thus the main question addressed by the book is neither infor­ mation nor knowledge, but both in rela­ tion to their wider context. A closely re­ lated and very persistent theme is the ten­ dency for the logic of information use to push aside long-term questions and con­ cerns, causing us to fall into a myopic preoccupation with the short-term won­ ders of the digital age. Although the au­ thors generally steer clear of theory as a speculative tool, there is an underlying suggestion of a dialectic between the short term and the long term, each somewhat blindly preparing the way for the other, like the shifts of the political pendulum that keep us alternating between contrast­ ing points of view with a clocklike regu­ larity. For this reason, they suggest, many well-known trend analyses often turn out to be much too infocentric. Forecasts of decentralization, disintermediation, and the flattening of hierarchies, for example, often turn out to be much oversold be­ cause information is not autonomous, and exists in a larger and more determining social context. As work in many sectors of the economy becomes more automated and more information intensive, the or­ ganizations in which this work is done often become increasingly top heavy ad­ ministratively and managerially, despite the periodic efforts to curtail this. This is probably because the adoption of new ways of doing things often increases over­ head and administrative cost and thus requires more centralization of control to make sure that a firm’s assets are used wisely. In any case, it is clear from these trends that informatization can increase, not decrease, administrative control and often causes more centralization. Another factor here is that as work becomes more information intensive, the problems of gathering and distributing information tend to be largely performed electronically, but the problem of absorb­ ing all the new information is a social and January 2001 human problem, not an electronic or me­ chanical one. Further, the great speed of the machine cannot be matched by the necessarily deliberate pace of mature hu­ man judgment. This leads the authors to an informative discussion of what econo­ mists have called the productivity para­ dox. In looking at economic growth in three distinct periods beginning in 1948 and ending in about 1998, a nice, round fifty-year period, analysts have noted that investments in information technology and productivity appear to be related in­ versely and not directly, as we might ex­ pect. Thus, although investment rates have grown steadily over this stretch, pro­ ductivity has fallen from an impressive 2.5 percent in the period ending about 1973 to about 2.0 percent in the period ending in 1998. Part of the answer to this is that pro­ ductivity gains typically require several decades, or even more, to register, so they do not show very clearly until long after key innovations have been implemented. However, the trouble is that in a market economy, where almost constant innova­ tion is the rule, the fabled payoff never quite arrives; rather, it is usually displaced by a new set of innovations being brought to market. Thus, perhaps the real para­ dox is not so much that technological in­ vestment seems to hold us back but, rather, that periods of innovation must somehow be balanced by periods in which societies assimilate a group of in­ novations and make the most out of them before moving forward to another set of changes. Thus, the paradox can be stated as the idea that innovation requires tra­ dition. But one can hardly imagine a gen­ eration of management gurus saying this! The analysis abounds in useful and memorable distinctions, some borrowed, some invented. For example, borrowing from psychologist Jerome Bruner, the au­ thors capitalize on the distinction between learning about something and learning to be something, or learning a set of roles. Borrowing from philosopher Gilbert Ryle, they apply the famous distinction be­ tween “knowing that” and “knowing Book Reviews 89 how” to do something. Both of these are applied with great insight and are used to help introduce a nuanced concept of “practice” involving a complex web of human and electronic interactions, which shows that it may well be possible to learn about something or to accumulate the fac­ tual knowledge of knowing that some­ thing is true or false by relying heavily on information retrieval and processing. However, this will add virtually nothing to anyone’s knowledge of how to be or become something or to anyone’s actual ability to know how to do something. One may accumulate an enormous amount of information about primates, for example, and thus become impressively learned in the sense of “knowing about” and “know­ ing that.” But becoming a real expert and a field researcher must be learned by working with other people who have ex­ perience that they are willing to pass on to the novice. In short, these are social and cultural processes and can never be re­ duced to problems of information trans­ fer. Somewhat more originally, they also distinguish between communities and networks of practice, a contemporary variation on the old distinction between the local and the cosmopolitan contexts, which helps explain the complexity of moving from invention to innovation and the interrelationships between firms or organizations and occupational groups. A community, on the one hand, is char­ acterized by face-to-face interaction, shar­ ing a common work site and a common organizational context or perhaps, more poetically, a common sense of place. But most workers also are connected to a wider world of colleagues they often con­ sult, and this attaches them, on the other hand, to a network of people who do not work with them or live in the same geo­ graphical area and with whom they do not interact on a daily basis. Both are in­ tertwined in today’s complex environ­ ment. Another original distinction is that be­ tween “sticky” and “leaky” knowledge (i.e., knowledge that is hard to share or transfer versus knowledge that is hard to control and is appropriated by someone outside the original context of invention and turned into a lucrative innovation). A great example here is Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the inven­ tion of the graphical user interface, which got stuck inside Xerox whose principals did not appreciate its importance because they were focused on the lucrative busi­ ness of producing photocopiers. As a re­ sult, it leaked to Apple, which then turned the invention into an innovation. For an example of how the authors relate their distinctions well, consider the relation be­ tween communities and networks and the phenomena of sticky and leaky knowl­ edge. What stuck inside the Xerox com­ munity leaked out, via larger networks of expertise, and became part of the Apple community. From the viewpoint of these companies, it is a story of loss versus gain. But in a larger sense, everyone gained be­ cause a new product got developed and distributed; long-term gains here eclipse shorter-term losses. (A great irony here is that after benefiting from a nice leak from PARC, Apple then attempted to make the discovery sticky by refusing to license its operating system.) For libraries, librarians, and particu­ larly library administrators and trustees, these lessons already have proved to be very hard to learn and do not seem to be getting any easier. In libraries and infor­ mation centers, the productivity paradox is as glaring as it is anywhere else, per­ haps more so, as administrators invest lavishly in hardware and software but hesitate to add more staff to help users exploit the technology. Similarly, the great investment in information technologies has not made libraries any less hierarchi­ cal or less centralized. Information con­ tinues to flow primarily from the bottom of the organization to the top, the primary difference being that the flow is faster and richer than before. The truth is, as we should have known all along, that infor­ mation technology does not really do any­ thing by itself but, rather, is a reflection of who is controlling it. 90 College & Research Libraries There are other lessons that apply to libraries, one of the more important of which is both political and economic in origin. Because the Cold War is over, mar­ ket capitalism has acquired a hitherto unknown hegemony; and because net- worked information technology, though largely a creation of the federal govern­ ment, is developed in the private sector, entrepreneurialism has acquired an un­ precedented prestige. For many, it sup­ plies a fundamental cultural and ethical framework increasingly embraced by a wide variety of professionals who once looked to independent intellectual and critical models of our high culture. Intel­ lectuals, and many writers as well, ea­ gerly try to become businessmen, and many librarians seem bent on joining them. But our ability to profit from books such as The Social Life of Information de­ pends very much on our ability to resist this temptation. Clearly, there is much to admire and learn from here, but there is nonetheless a kind of Victorian faith in progress and problem solving through invention, inno­ vation, and exploitation of the market. I suspect that the key underlying assump­ tion of the book is that networking is an unquestioned good. Although there can be little doubt about how useful electronic networks can be, we need to be able to frame a larger context in which we can evaluate how networks function, some­ thing like the systems theory of the Ger­ man writer Niklas Luhmann. Perhaps then we could recover some of the pri­ vacy and security of the stand-alone mod­ els of the past and the connectivity of the network models of the present and the future. Thus there may be a particularly relevant connection between networking and the productivity paradox, but unless we can find this larger context, we would never be able to see it.—Michael F. Winter, University of California-Davis. The Collaborative Imperative: Librarians and Faculty Working Together in the Informa­ tion Universe. Eds. Dick Raspa and Dane Ward. Chicago: ACRL, 2000. January 2001 158p. $24, alk. paper (ISBN 0-8389-8085-6). LC 00-028392. The Collaborative Imperative addresses a broad, amorphous, but clearly important, aspect of academic librarianship—coop­ erative working relationships with class­ room faculty. The editors, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Wayne State University and the coordinator of instruc­ tion services at Central Michigan Univer­ sity library, also cowrote three of the chap­ ters, which seems particularly appropriate given the subject matter. Wisely dispensing with the need to es­ tablish the importance of collaboration, the book quickly moves on to deal with both the theoretical and practical aspects of collaborative undertakings. The central themes of the work are the need for ac­ tive listening, creative dialogue, and the kind of mutual trust and respect that can grow only from personal connections. The primary focus of The Collaborative Imperative is on projects that go signifi­ cantly beyond the scope of librarian–fac­ ulty interactions generally expected in realms such as bibliographic instruction and collection development. These more common forms of interaction are identi­ fied in the book as “cooperation” or “co­ ordination,” and although they are ad­ dressed throughout, most chapters as­ sume these kinds interactions already exist. Much of what is said in the book is relevant to these less complex forms of interaction and might serve to enhance them, but it is the overt hope of the au­ thors to inspire more ambitious, “out-of­ the-box” collaborative projects. The book consists of eight diverse chapters that collectively deal with a broad range of different aspects of col­ laboration. Conceptual and psychologi­ cal issues share the pages with accounts of successful programs, tips for success­ ful collaboration, and other more concrete information. As in any compilation of texts by different authors, the whole is somewhat uneven and written in very different voices. Each chapter, however, clearly revolves around the central theme, and by dealing with different facets of the