Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Mark de Rond on the Boat Race
Mark de Rond, author of The Last Amateurs, talks about the Boat Race and what it can teach about assembling the perfect team in this video produced by Cambridge University:
Monday, 13 October 2008
In the Radical First Person
“In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder … [Where] the individual consciousness of the writer is paramount. The reader thereby becomes privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value.”
I aborted the above from the introduction to a nice collection of Harper’s stories by the magazine’s editor Roger D. Hodge. The book, “Submersion Journalism”, gives name to a genre of writing “from the inside”; where unsanctioned reporting seeks to provide an antidote to spin, and where a premium is paid for tales told “from a distinct point of view rather than pretend to some ideal of objectivity.”
And there, in a nutshell, is the Amateurs' perspective - and point.
I aborted the above from the introduction to a nice collection of Harper’s stories by the magazine’s editor Roger D. Hodge. The book, “Submersion Journalism”, gives name to a genre of writing “from the inside”; where unsanctioned reporting seeks to provide an antidote to spin, and where a premium is paid for tales told “from a distinct point of view rather than pretend to some ideal of objectivity.”
And there, in a nutshell, is the Amateurs' perspective - and point.
Monday, 1 September 2008
The Relevance of Rowing for Business
The celebrated Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race is both a public spectacle and a long-standing trial of strength between two rival universities. Over a quarter of a million spectators watch the race from the banks of the Thames, while a guestimated 120 million TV viewers follow the twists and turns, triumphs and tragedies of this private match, held each year between late March and early April. The first Oxbridge race took place in 1829 and, with the exception of the first and second World War years, the race has been held continuously since 1856.
It is on that four mile and 374 yard length of tidal river, between Putney and Mortlake, that the outer limits of human performance are explored, where two student crews row alongside each other until one of them decides it can no longer win. It is the ultimate varsity race.
What is the enduring appeal of this extreme sporting challenge? Is it that the protagonists represent two of the world’s oldest and grandest institutions - the intellectual homes of Nobel laureates, philosophers, mathematicians and politicians? Is it the secrecy surrounding crew selection and race preparation? Or is the enduring appeal of this British sporting institution due to the sharp contrasts it throws up: at once passionately amateur and yet holding to professional standards, exhibiting mutual respect yet intense rivalry too, where it’s all about taking part but where the pain of losing is both physical and mental, and laid bare for all to see?
Comparisons
Differences between Cambridge University rowing and business are easy to spot. Not all teams have as clear and unchangeable an objective as the Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC). Founded in 1828, it exists for one reason only: to defeat Oxford in the annual Boat Race. Moreover, not all business teams can cherry-pick their membership. CUBC begins its season with around 40 keen athletes, from which it needs to select one crew of eight, plus a coxswain. Also, physical training has a degree of transparency not often found in business. Whereas everyone involved can see what weights you are lifting and how fast you are on a rowing machine, in typical business teams it is rather more difficult to isolate individual contributions.
Nevertheless, rowing contains some surprising similarities. Firstly, it requires a superb sense of coordination – something that remains relevant irrespective of whether you are doing the same thing (as in rowing) or are engaged in different, but complementary, activities. If, for example, the success of one’s work depends upon the input of others (as it so often does), the better coordinated the team is, the more efficient and successful it should be.
Secondly, Cambridge oarsmen – just like members of business team – are intelligent individuals, impatient of jargon or ‘management speak’. They easily see through any attempt at manipulation. Thirdly, rowing is an environment in which cooperation and competition co-exist in a necessary but socially often awkward relationship.
And, finally, rowing crews and business teams alike suffer from the Ringelmann Effect. Based on a set of experiments conducted in the 1880s and 1970s, Ringelmann and subsequent researchers discovered the inverse relationship between team size and individual effort due to a combination of increased coordination costs and social loafing. In other words, as more and more individuals are added to a team, the contribution of each individual team member decreases as they find it increasingly more difficult to coordinate their efforts with others and easier to get away with suboptimal performance.
Six parallels
But there may be further parallels between crews and teams. Here are six that we think are most relevant to the workplace:
1. What makes them good makes them difficult too. Cambridge oarsmen express individuality in wishing to remain on the coaches’ radar screens but togetherness in building team spirit. They are strong-minded yet rife with self-doubt, masculine yet unafraid of male intimacy, extraordinary in some ways yet so very ordinary in others too, ever prey to thinking that they can do always what they can do sometimes. For what makes them good makes them difficult: they are smart, which makes them have near-perfect faith in their intuitions; they are quick thinkers, meaning that they can be bad listeners; they are intolerant of failure, theirs as well as that of everyone else; they take an extraordinary level of performance as given; they will rarely admit to being wrong, and have little idea of the sort of impact their attitude has on others. As with most generalizations there are many exceptions to this characterization. But by and large Cambridge rowers are alphas, painstakingly cultivated yet a raw and instinctive cast of alpha males in a Dead Poets Society world.
How then do you craft a high performance team from a dysfunctional group of high performing individuals? It’s never going to be easy, though the following suggestions may help: don’t fall into the trap of cow-towing to these individuals (after all, everyone else does); confront them, if need be, with concrete examples or ‘hard’ data on their performance; be patient and empathetic as they argue their case (which may include blaming circumstances, or others, for their failure to perform), but be resolute. Remind them regularly of why this team exists and what you expect of them in very specific terms.
2. To collaborate effectively may require you to give up what you know has worked for you in the past. As with many organisations, the Cambridge squad is composed of various nationalities. This is relevant to the extent that rowing styles differ across the globe – from Canada to the US and Germany to Great Britain. These differences can be slight but, given the degree of coordination required in a crew, important. What this effectively means is that one is asking decorated oarsmen to give up a technique they know made them go fast in the past, and to adapt to that quintessential Cambridge style – something which takes some time getting used to. This can create much insecurity as rowers who might have been top dogs in their respective national squads are now slowing down their crews.
3. High performance crews, like business teams, are often characterised by tensions. However awkward this may feel at times, it does not mean they are dysfunctional. Far from it. And here is why. In most teams competition and cooperation co-exist, as do trust and vigilance, control and autonomy, unilateral and democratic decision-making, confrontation and compromise. The only way for rowers to compete effectively for a seat in the Blue Boat (or the crew that races Oxford) is to cooperate seamlessly with the very same individuals they are competing with.
Take the example of seat-racing as a selection tool. Here two crews of four race each other over a 1500 metre course. After finishing times are noted, two individuals (one from each crew) will swap places. The crews race each other again over the same course. Again, two individuals swap places after which the crews are raced once more. This process continues until the coaches are satisfied that they have been able to isolate the contributions of each rower to a crew. What this means, of course, is that oarsmen can only make their crews go fast by coordinating perfectly with those they were competing with only minutes ago. And what is true in rowing is often true in business too: competition must still weed out the inefficient and keep the fire at the heels of those involved. Yet cooperation is imperative to achieve organisational objectives. It too can improve efficiency in distributing information. Control likewise ensures efficiency even as autonomy may make organisations more creative. Trust is good but dangerous in the absence of vigilance. Thus these tensions must coexist. They are an ordinary characteristic of extraordinarily healthy teams, though sources of considerable anxiety.
4. Conflict occurs even as people agree on what’s important and why, and try hard to coordinate their efforts with others. It sometimes takes the shape of disagreements on how particular goals are best achieved, or it results from simple misunderstandings. What is striking is the degree to which crew and team members alike often resort to questioning each other’s intentions when faced with conflict. Behavioural science suggests that this is partly because we tend to think that our views of the world are more common than they actually are, or that we often believe ourselves to have access to an objective reality that those around us, if only they were more rational or clairvoyant, would have too. And yet experience tells us there are few things more destructive or alienating than for one’s intentions to be called into question. Our work with the Cambridge squad suggests that reality is actually often more benign than they think it is, leaving them with few justifications for paranoia. Imagine how much more efficient organisations would be if only they were to accept that the intentions of others are more often good than bad?
5. Individual performance is only ever meaningful in the context of a specific crew or team. What is interesting is the degree to which the performance of individual rowers can fluctuate depending on (i) who else they row with, and (ii) whether the seat they’ve been assigned caters to – or minimises – their self-concept. Some oarsmen, for example, dislike rowing with people they don’t rate, causing them to subtly under-perform. Or they fail to give their best if they feel undervalued by having been placed in, say, the middle section of the boat rather than the more technically demanding stern and bow sections.
These issues raise dilemmas for coaches and managers alike. After all, should one cater to someone’s ego to get the best out of him or her? Can this be done successfully without setting a precedent? Or should one fight that ego in the interest of fairness to the rest of the group?
6. Sometimes it makes sense to sacrifice technical ability to gain social skills in the interest of team performance. This would seem counter-intuitive in a sport as technically demanding as rowing. However, a socially gifted individual may help provide the glue to keep the crew together and thus minimise the Ringelmann Effect.
For example, the 2007 Cambridge crew included one oarsman who was included in the crew not based on his individual technical skills but because he seemed able to get a higher level of performance out of the rest of the crew. His affable personality was able to defuse conflict and help the crew gel socially.
There exists an interesting parallel of this in the management literature. In 2005, the Harvard Business Review carried an article provocatively entitled ‘Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks’. In it, the authors examined trade-off decisions made by managers when recruiting: does competence trump likeability, or vice versa? Unsurprisingly, most responded that it would be considered unprofessional not to hire the most competent for the job. However, in practice, managers more often sided with likeability as a criterion, suggesting that personal feelings play an important role in forming job-oriented relationships.
Of course this tradeoff relationship is contextual. If one requires brain-surgery, one should care infinitely more about competence than likeability. And a team of only likeable individuals may get little accomplished. However, it might make sense occasionally to trade one technically competent individual for one that is socially more gifted (even if technically less competent) if that improves the cohesiveness of the team.
Will social cohesiveness ensure team success? No it won’t. However, it will allow you to get the most out of each of the individuals involved – and that’s no mean feat.
The process of training and selecting the teams that will compete in 2009 begins soon. They will face six months of intensive coaching to mould them into a winning crew with just one chance to get it right on the day. Luckily, business teams get more than one opportunity to show what they are made of and pull together to achieve success.
It is on that four mile and 374 yard length of tidal river, between Putney and Mortlake, that the outer limits of human performance are explored, where two student crews row alongside each other until one of them decides it can no longer win. It is the ultimate varsity race.
What is the enduring appeal of this extreme sporting challenge? Is it that the protagonists represent two of the world’s oldest and grandest institutions - the intellectual homes of Nobel laureates, philosophers, mathematicians and politicians? Is it the secrecy surrounding crew selection and race preparation? Or is the enduring appeal of this British sporting institution due to the sharp contrasts it throws up: at once passionately amateur and yet holding to professional standards, exhibiting mutual respect yet intense rivalry too, where it’s all about taking part but where the pain of losing is both physical and mental, and laid bare for all to see?
Comparisons
Differences between Cambridge University rowing and business are easy to spot. Not all teams have as clear and unchangeable an objective as the Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC). Founded in 1828, it exists for one reason only: to defeat Oxford in the annual Boat Race. Moreover, not all business teams can cherry-pick their membership. CUBC begins its season with around 40 keen athletes, from which it needs to select one crew of eight, plus a coxswain. Also, physical training has a degree of transparency not often found in business. Whereas everyone involved can see what weights you are lifting and how fast you are on a rowing machine, in typical business teams it is rather more difficult to isolate individual contributions.
Nevertheless, rowing contains some surprising similarities. Firstly, it requires a superb sense of coordination – something that remains relevant irrespective of whether you are doing the same thing (as in rowing) or are engaged in different, but complementary, activities. If, for example, the success of one’s work depends upon the input of others (as it so often does), the better coordinated the team is, the more efficient and successful it should be.
Secondly, Cambridge oarsmen – just like members of business team – are intelligent individuals, impatient of jargon or ‘management speak’. They easily see through any attempt at manipulation. Thirdly, rowing is an environment in which cooperation and competition co-exist in a necessary but socially often awkward relationship.
And, finally, rowing crews and business teams alike suffer from the Ringelmann Effect. Based on a set of experiments conducted in the 1880s and 1970s, Ringelmann and subsequent researchers discovered the inverse relationship between team size and individual effort due to a combination of increased coordination costs and social loafing. In other words, as more and more individuals are added to a team, the contribution of each individual team member decreases as they find it increasingly more difficult to coordinate their efforts with others and easier to get away with suboptimal performance.
Six parallels
But there may be further parallels between crews and teams. Here are six that we think are most relevant to the workplace:
1. What makes them good makes them difficult too. Cambridge oarsmen express individuality in wishing to remain on the coaches’ radar screens but togetherness in building team spirit. They are strong-minded yet rife with self-doubt, masculine yet unafraid of male intimacy, extraordinary in some ways yet so very ordinary in others too, ever prey to thinking that they can do always what they can do sometimes. For what makes them good makes them difficult: they are smart, which makes them have near-perfect faith in their intuitions; they are quick thinkers, meaning that they can be bad listeners; they are intolerant of failure, theirs as well as that of everyone else; they take an extraordinary level of performance as given; they will rarely admit to being wrong, and have little idea of the sort of impact their attitude has on others. As with most generalizations there are many exceptions to this characterization. But by and large Cambridge rowers are alphas, painstakingly cultivated yet a raw and instinctive cast of alpha males in a Dead Poets Society world.
How then do you craft a high performance team from a dysfunctional group of high performing individuals? It’s never going to be easy, though the following suggestions may help: don’t fall into the trap of cow-towing to these individuals (after all, everyone else does); confront them, if need be, with concrete examples or ‘hard’ data on their performance; be patient and empathetic as they argue their case (which may include blaming circumstances, or others, for their failure to perform), but be resolute. Remind them regularly of why this team exists and what you expect of them in very specific terms.
2. To collaborate effectively may require you to give up what you know has worked for you in the past. As with many organisations, the Cambridge squad is composed of various nationalities. This is relevant to the extent that rowing styles differ across the globe – from Canada to the US and Germany to Great Britain. These differences can be slight but, given the degree of coordination required in a crew, important. What this effectively means is that one is asking decorated oarsmen to give up a technique they know made them go fast in the past, and to adapt to that quintessential Cambridge style – something which takes some time getting used to. This can create much insecurity as rowers who might have been top dogs in their respective national squads are now slowing down their crews.
3. High performance crews, like business teams, are often characterised by tensions. However awkward this may feel at times, it does not mean they are dysfunctional. Far from it. And here is why. In most teams competition and cooperation co-exist, as do trust and vigilance, control and autonomy, unilateral and democratic decision-making, confrontation and compromise. The only way for rowers to compete effectively for a seat in the Blue Boat (or the crew that races Oxford) is to cooperate seamlessly with the very same individuals they are competing with.
Take the example of seat-racing as a selection tool. Here two crews of four race each other over a 1500 metre course. After finishing times are noted, two individuals (one from each crew) will swap places. The crews race each other again over the same course. Again, two individuals swap places after which the crews are raced once more. This process continues until the coaches are satisfied that they have been able to isolate the contributions of each rower to a crew. What this means, of course, is that oarsmen can only make their crews go fast by coordinating perfectly with those they were competing with only minutes ago. And what is true in rowing is often true in business too: competition must still weed out the inefficient and keep the fire at the heels of those involved. Yet cooperation is imperative to achieve organisational objectives. It too can improve efficiency in distributing information. Control likewise ensures efficiency even as autonomy may make organisations more creative. Trust is good but dangerous in the absence of vigilance. Thus these tensions must coexist. They are an ordinary characteristic of extraordinarily healthy teams, though sources of considerable anxiety.
4. Conflict occurs even as people agree on what’s important and why, and try hard to coordinate their efforts with others. It sometimes takes the shape of disagreements on how particular goals are best achieved, or it results from simple misunderstandings. What is striking is the degree to which crew and team members alike often resort to questioning each other’s intentions when faced with conflict. Behavioural science suggests that this is partly because we tend to think that our views of the world are more common than they actually are, or that we often believe ourselves to have access to an objective reality that those around us, if only they were more rational or clairvoyant, would have too. And yet experience tells us there are few things more destructive or alienating than for one’s intentions to be called into question. Our work with the Cambridge squad suggests that reality is actually often more benign than they think it is, leaving them with few justifications for paranoia. Imagine how much more efficient organisations would be if only they were to accept that the intentions of others are more often good than bad?
5. Individual performance is only ever meaningful in the context of a specific crew or team. What is interesting is the degree to which the performance of individual rowers can fluctuate depending on (i) who else they row with, and (ii) whether the seat they’ve been assigned caters to – or minimises – their self-concept. Some oarsmen, for example, dislike rowing with people they don’t rate, causing them to subtly under-perform. Or they fail to give their best if they feel undervalued by having been placed in, say, the middle section of the boat rather than the more technically demanding stern and bow sections.
These issues raise dilemmas for coaches and managers alike. After all, should one cater to someone’s ego to get the best out of him or her? Can this be done successfully without setting a precedent? Or should one fight that ego in the interest of fairness to the rest of the group?
6. Sometimes it makes sense to sacrifice technical ability to gain social skills in the interest of team performance. This would seem counter-intuitive in a sport as technically demanding as rowing. However, a socially gifted individual may help provide the glue to keep the crew together and thus minimise the Ringelmann Effect.
For example, the 2007 Cambridge crew included one oarsman who was included in the crew not based on his individual technical skills but because he seemed able to get a higher level of performance out of the rest of the crew. His affable personality was able to defuse conflict and help the crew gel socially.
There exists an interesting parallel of this in the management literature. In 2005, the Harvard Business Review carried an article provocatively entitled ‘Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks’. In it, the authors examined trade-off decisions made by managers when recruiting: does competence trump likeability, or vice versa? Unsurprisingly, most responded that it would be considered unprofessional not to hire the most competent for the job. However, in practice, managers more often sided with likeability as a criterion, suggesting that personal feelings play an important role in forming job-oriented relationships.
Of course this tradeoff relationship is contextual. If one requires brain-surgery, one should care infinitely more about competence than likeability. And a team of only likeable individuals may get little accomplished. However, it might make sense occasionally to trade one technically competent individual for one that is socially more gifted (even if technically less competent) if that improves the cohesiveness of the team.
Will social cohesiveness ensure team success? No it won’t. However, it will allow you to get the most out of each of the individuals involved – and that’s no mean feat.
The process of training and selecting the teams that will compete in 2009 begins soon. They will face six months of intensive coaching to mould them into a winning crew with just one chance to get it right on the day. Luckily, business teams get more than one opportunity to show what they are made of and pull together to achieve success.
(This article was first published in Professional Manager, Volume 17, Issue 5, September 2008: http://www.managers.org.uk/client_files/user_files/Ekiko_4/PM%20Septembe%20keynote.pdf)
Another short article on the link between business and rowing can be found in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review, Vol 86, No 9, p. 28 (2008)
Another short article on the link between business and rowing can be found in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review, Vol 86, No 9, p. 28 (2008)
Tuesday, 19 August 2008
Olympic medals for Rowing Blues
It's often been said that rowing Blues (those who have competed in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race) are comparable to oarsmen of international stature. A look at our recent Olympic record suggests why this is so.
The coxless four that took Britain’s third successive Gold on Saturday included three Blues: Oxford’s Pete Reed (2005) and Andy Triggs-Hodge (2005) and bowman Tom James, the former Cambridge oarsman (2003, 2005, 2006 & 2007). (Tom, incidentally, plays a major role in The Last Amateurs as President of the CUBC.)
The British crew that took silver in the Men’s Eight included Cambridge Blues Josh West (1998, 1999, 2000 & 2001) and Tom Stallard (1999, 2000, 2001 & 2002), Oxford’s Colin Smith (2004 & 2006) and was steered by Dark Blue cox Acer Nethercott (2003, 2004 & 2005). They were beaten by an impressive Canadian boat that featured another Oxford Blue, Jake Wetzel (2006).
What makes these athletes so fascinating? Is it their invincibility? Their god-like nature? Their unrelenting commitment to physical hardship? Or is it something else altogether?
The British crew that took silver in the Men’s Eight included Cambridge Blues Josh West (1998, 1999, 2000 & 2001) and Tom Stallard (1999, 2000, 2001 & 2002), Oxford’s Colin Smith (2004 & 2006) and was steered by Dark Blue cox Acer Nethercott (2003, 2004 & 2005). They were beaten by an impressive Canadian boat that featured another Oxford Blue, Jake Wetzel (2006).
What makes these athletes so fascinating? Is it their invincibility? Their god-like nature? Their unrelenting commitment to physical hardship? Or is it something else altogether?
I wonder if, rather than their invincibility, it is perhaps their humanity that binds our fate to theirs. After all, they are so very like us. Their achievements may be Phelpsian to be sure but that's not what makes them a source of fascination. Rather, it is that they are, like us, vulnerable: flawed, irritable, intolerant, impatient, insecure. Lovable.
(A good source of Boat Race information is found at www.theboatrace.org)
(A good source of Boat Race information is found at www.theboatrace.org)
Why I Wrote What I Wrote...
People have asked me why I wrote what I wrote and why I wrote it the way I wrote it - rather than in another way. Why not write a scholarly monograph instead? Why spend two years generating something that doesn't "count" for REA (Research Assessment Exercise) purposes? Why not focus on inducing general principles instead, or maybe some sort of model or analytical framework? Perhaps an algorithm even?
The answer is quite simple, really. I wanted to try and give readers an authentic sense of the visceral and highly emotional world of Cambridge University rowers. So much of our world is intuitive and primeval and emotional - think of fear, hope, lust, ambition, prejudice, cowardice, exhaustion, gratitude - and yet this is precisely this sort of stuff that gets lost (or is ignored) in academic writing.
Thus, the book is deliberately evocative rather than scholarly. That said, the ethnographic research on which it draws is rigorous. I went to great pains to identify my role and perspective as these evolved throughout the seven-month period. Though ethnography will never be free of impartiality, these references to myself allow the reader to see the observer and his subjects co-evolve.
Nowhere is this relation between subject and observer more poignantly expressed than in David Lodge's academic novel Small World:
The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl’s underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends – but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The vagina remains hidden within the girl’s body, shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set into motion by the stripping. Staring into the orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplating beauty; gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins.
As it happens, I did actually try to write myself out of the story, and might have got away with it too. The result would have been the one masquerading for the many, a particular voice mistaken for the megaphone of a society. It would have been dishonest.
There is thus a strong subtext to the narrative. There are several, in fact. Depending on the reader’s background and interests, it can be read as a realist sports book (in supplying a warts-and-all account of the 2007 Cambridge Boat Race crew), as a business book (as it articulates important traits of high-performance teams), as an ethnography (specifically designed to tease at the boundary of ethnography and auto-ethnography, as well as a gender ethnography), as an example of C. Wright Mills’ ‘sociological imagination’ (in highlighting the temporal and dialectical nature of high-performance teams), or even as something far more existential.
Or you can just enjoy it for what it is.
The answer is quite simple, really. I wanted to try and give readers an authentic sense of the visceral and highly emotional world of Cambridge University rowers. So much of our world is intuitive and primeval and emotional - think of fear, hope, lust, ambition, prejudice, cowardice, exhaustion, gratitude - and yet this is precisely this sort of stuff that gets lost (or is ignored) in academic writing.
Thus, the book is deliberately evocative rather than scholarly. That said, the ethnographic research on which it draws is rigorous. I went to great pains to identify my role and perspective as these evolved throughout the seven-month period. Though ethnography will never be free of impartiality, these references to myself allow the reader to see the observer and his subjects co-evolve.
Nowhere is this relation between subject and observer more poignantly expressed than in David Lodge's academic novel Small World:
The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl’s underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends – but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The vagina remains hidden within the girl’s body, shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set into motion by the stripping. Staring into the orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplating beauty; gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins.
As it happens, I did actually try to write myself out of the story, and might have got away with it too. The result would have been the one masquerading for the many, a particular voice mistaken for the megaphone of a society. It would have been dishonest.
There is thus a strong subtext to the narrative. There are several, in fact. Depending on the reader’s background and interests, it can be read as a realist sports book (in supplying a warts-and-all account of the 2007 Cambridge Boat Race crew), as a business book (as it articulates important traits of high-performance teams), as an ethnography (specifically designed to tease at the boundary of ethnography and auto-ethnography, as well as a gender ethnography), as an example of C. Wright Mills’ ‘sociological imagination’ (in highlighting the temporal and dialectical nature of high-performance teams), or even as something far more existential.
Or you can just enjoy it for what it is.
Friday, 20 June 2008
The Dark Night of the Ethnographer's Soul (Part II)
You are, no doubt, familiar with the jibe that there’s more truth in fiction than non-fiction. Though that always seemed to me correct intuitively, I think I now appreciate why.
In my inbox lies a recent email (it matters not who sent it / don't ask / I won't tell):
……………………………………………………………………..
Date:
From:
To: “mark de Rond”
Subject: The book
Mark,
I am sure you are aware I have always vigorously opposed the publication of this book and many who are aware of its existence feel the same way. It shows up what is currently wrong with the organization and it is extremely distasteful to me to read much of what you have written or implied.
I do not like you - you know that - and the less said or written further is probably best.
……………………………………………………………………..
What I am to do with this? More relevantly, what does it tell me about scholarship in the ethnographic tradition? Aside from re-affirming that I’m not universally liked (and here I wished I had the skin of an elephant but am as vulnerable as most), what does it bode for truth telling in ethnography?
I am reminded of Bronislaw Malinowski’s controversial A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term (or rather Clifford Geertz’s references to Malinowski). This diary is said to contain a meticulous record of time spent by Malinowski observing natives, and revealed a quite different world from that described in his authoritative text on the Western Pacific. And it was this diary, said Geertz, that blew the straw house of ethnography to bits, leaving its author accused of doing the dirty on the discipline. As Geertz wrote, most of the shock arose from the discovery that Malinowski was not, to put it delicately, an unmitigated nice guy. He had rude things to say about the natives he was living with and rude words to say them in. He spent a great deal of time wishing he were elsewhere.
Presumably Malinowski didn’t care – he was dead by the time his wife published his diary. The controversy they triggered, however (he by writing and she by publishing it) points to a persistent difficulty in the practice of ethnography: to what extent are those doing the observing able to commit their observations to paper? Need ethnography – to be useful from a scholarly point of view – not reflect rough edges, daubs and warts, holes patched up but not yet repaired, irritability and instability - all that and more as well as of course the poetic and pretty sacredness of human organization?
If so, does our writing then not invariably involve hurting the feelings of some (even inadvertently), disappointing some by not giving their views more prominence, desecrating what yet others hold as sacrosanct? Provided of course all is done for the sake of scholarship, and with the necessary disclaimers of partiality and imperfection?
I’m aware that this problem may be peculiarly ethnographic. I also realize that those more entrenched in the field may properly place my experiences as novice. Be that as may – they are not therefore less poignant
In my inbox lies a recent email (it matters not who sent it / don't ask / I won't tell):
……………………………………………………………………..
Date:
From:
To: “mark de Rond”
Subject: The book
Mark,
I am sure you are aware I have always vigorously opposed the publication of this book and many who are aware of its existence feel the same way. It shows up what is currently wrong with the organization and it is extremely distasteful to me to read much of what you have written or implied.
I do not like you - you know that - and the less said or written further is probably best.
……………………………………………………………………..
What I am to do with this? More relevantly, what does it tell me about scholarship in the ethnographic tradition? Aside from re-affirming that I’m not universally liked (and here I wished I had the skin of an elephant but am as vulnerable as most), what does it bode for truth telling in ethnography?
I am reminded of Bronislaw Malinowski’s controversial A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term (or rather Clifford Geertz’s references to Malinowski). This diary is said to contain a meticulous record of time spent by Malinowski observing natives, and revealed a quite different world from that described in his authoritative text on the Western Pacific. And it was this diary, said Geertz, that blew the straw house of ethnography to bits, leaving its author accused of doing the dirty on the discipline. As Geertz wrote, most of the shock arose from the discovery that Malinowski was not, to put it delicately, an unmitigated nice guy. He had rude things to say about the natives he was living with and rude words to say them in. He spent a great deal of time wishing he were elsewhere.
Presumably Malinowski didn’t care – he was dead by the time his wife published his diary. The controversy they triggered, however (he by writing and she by publishing it) points to a persistent difficulty in the practice of ethnography: to what extent are those doing the observing able to commit their observations to paper? Need ethnography – to be useful from a scholarly point of view – not reflect rough edges, daubs and warts, holes patched up but not yet repaired, irritability and instability - all that and more as well as of course the poetic and pretty sacredness of human organization?
If so, does our writing then not invariably involve hurting the feelings of some (even inadvertently), disappointing some by not giving their views more prominence, desecrating what yet others hold as sacrosanct? Provided of course all is done for the sake of scholarship, and with the necessary disclaimers of partiality and imperfection?
I’m aware that this problem may be peculiarly ethnographic. I also realize that those more entrenched in the field may properly place my experiences as novice. Be that as may – they are not therefore less poignant
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
The Dark Night of the Ethnographer's Soul
I’ve something on my mind – something that has preoccupied me ever since starting my ethnography of the Cambridge squad. It is at once a great source of embarrassment and an intellectual challenge. Try as I might, I cannot remember a time when I dreamt as vividly as during my fieldwork. In contrast to most ordinary nights, these dreams were far from innocent. Oftentimes I’d wake up feeling parched, pooped, confused – haunted by the ghosts of last night’s dreams and wondering why they’d suddenly become so vivid, so menacing, so wounding? Who were these vengeful shadows from the netherworld floating in and out of my head, and why are they here? Was I not allowed some reprieve from the excessive introspection and worry that enveloped me like candyfloss since joining the squad? Like Philip Larkin’s mum and dad, the squad ‘fuck you up / They may not mean to but they do / They fill you with faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’
How can it be that a healthy soul gives, in dreams, the strangest, the most incoherent, the most illogical manifestations, and afterwards, when awake, performs its function again in the most normal way? (Rignano, 1920)
These musings are a stab at untangling the clutter that are my thoughts. A handful of sociologists to date, including Loic Wacquant (author of Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer), have made inroads into formulating a carnal sociology – or an attempt to describe the subject’s world ‘by immersion’. This approach is, Wacquant argued, a radical departure from conventional ethnography. For it embraces the view that our subjects are first and foremost embodied, carnal beings of blood and flesh who relate to the world in passionate ways. This calls for a manner of research that recognizes and takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life, such as Wacquant’s boxing gym or my rowing squad.
To the seasoned sociologist, my interpretation of Wacquant’s vision no doubt seems superficial – in which case I’d happily stand corrected. That said, it has very strong intuitive appeal. As a carnal sociology my recent work has serious drawbacks, the most relevant being that of me being unable to ‘partake’ of the training in the way Wacquant could – and did. After all, Boat Race preparation requires a level of skill and fitness that come only with many years of dedicated training and coaching. The best I could do was to participate with them in core exercises and, in lieu of their physical training, to row and train and compete with a less competent city based crew instead. It’s not perfect, but probably as good as it gets given the nature of the beast.
What interests me (coming to the point) is the extent to which a carnal sociology might usefully incorporate subconscious experience? After all, dreams were often regarded as truth-telling oracles in times past and, like it or not, we spend a significant portion of our lives unconscious. More relevantly, dreams may well serve as an important compliment to conscious reality. That, at least, was Jung’s view in seeing dreams as spontaneous self-portrayals, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. (It is partly here that Jung deviates from Freud’s thesis on dreams as wish-fulfillment). Jung took dreams to be diagnostically valuable facts. Should we as ethnographers?
I believe it was C.S. Lewis who suggested that dreams do not suddenly cease to exist when unmasked for the delusions they are upon waking. Nor is the experience of everyday life snuffed out when descending into sleep. The two worlds are unmistakenly distinct and yet somehow related. This would seem particularly true in ethnography, where dreams might serve to highlight vital links between the observer and the observed. (This link may not be altogether different from that described in Damasio’s Descartes Error in linking emotion to reason, for instance, where emotion may increase the saliency of a premise and, in so doing, bias the conclusion in favour of this premise). But what precisely is this relationship? And how important is it in the research process?
It seems to progress we would need a couple of things: an ontology of dreams, and (possibly) a theory of behaviour as encased in dreams. Should dreams be treated as data, as bias or as analysis? Can they be considered data in the same way we consider interviews or first-hand observation data? If so, what are they data about? About the subject? About the observer? Or about the relationship between observer and subject?
Or are dreams best treated with contempt – as a source of bias – in colouring observations and analysis? Even in this case, it would seem important to recognize this (much like we confess to other potential sources of bias in reporting research).
Or are dreams active participants in analyzing data? To what extent do they help crystallize what we (think we) see?
None of this suggests that I believe dreams have special powers. In my particular case, the dreams were often of the anxiety kind (never pleasant), forcing me to think much more deeply about what it is to be a man in a men’s world, what masculinity entails, about the relationship between masculinity and affection, about the role of affection and humour as mediating the often awkward but inevitable tensions between cooperation and competition, trust and vigilance, narcissism and altruism, in pursuit of the sacred and the profane.
I have some thoughts on the above, but no firm answers. (Perhaps you do.) That said, intuitively I feel very strongly about the importance of acknowledging dreams in writing carnal sociologies – though I’m less clear on what this acknowledgement comprises.
How can it be that a healthy soul gives, in dreams, the strangest, the most incoherent, the most illogical manifestations, and afterwards, when awake, performs its function again in the most normal way? (Rignano, 1920)
These musings are a stab at untangling the clutter that are my thoughts. A handful of sociologists to date, including Loic Wacquant (author of Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer), have made inroads into formulating a carnal sociology – or an attempt to describe the subject’s world ‘by immersion’. This approach is, Wacquant argued, a radical departure from conventional ethnography. For it embraces the view that our subjects are first and foremost embodied, carnal beings of blood and flesh who relate to the world in passionate ways. This calls for a manner of research that recognizes and takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life, such as Wacquant’s boxing gym or my rowing squad.
To the seasoned sociologist, my interpretation of Wacquant’s vision no doubt seems superficial – in which case I’d happily stand corrected. That said, it has very strong intuitive appeal. As a carnal sociology my recent work has serious drawbacks, the most relevant being that of me being unable to ‘partake’ of the training in the way Wacquant could – and did. After all, Boat Race preparation requires a level of skill and fitness that come only with many years of dedicated training and coaching. The best I could do was to participate with them in core exercises and, in lieu of their physical training, to row and train and compete with a less competent city based crew instead. It’s not perfect, but probably as good as it gets given the nature of the beast.
What interests me (coming to the point) is the extent to which a carnal sociology might usefully incorporate subconscious experience? After all, dreams were often regarded as truth-telling oracles in times past and, like it or not, we spend a significant portion of our lives unconscious. More relevantly, dreams may well serve as an important compliment to conscious reality. That, at least, was Jung’s view in seeing dreams as spontaneous self-portrayals, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. (It is partly here that Jung deviates from Freud’s thesis on dreams as wish-fulfillment). Jung took dreams to be diagnostically valuable facts. Should we as ethnographers?
I believe it was C.S. Lewis who suggested that dreams do not suddenly cease to exist when unmasked for the delusions they are upon waking. Nor is the experience of everyday life snuffed out when descending into sleep. The two worlds are unmistakenly distinct and yet somehow related. This would seem particularly true in ethnography, where dreams might serve to highlight vital links between the observer and the observed. (This link may not be altogether different from that described in Damasio’s Descartes Error in linking emotion to reason, for instance, where emotion may increase the saliency of a premise and, in so doing, bias the conclusion in favour of this premise). But what precisely is this relationship? And how important is it in the research process?
It seems to progress we would need a couple of things: an ontology of dreams, and (possibly) a theory of behaviour as encased in dreams. Should dreams be treated as data, as bias or as analysis? Can they be considered data in the same way we consider interviews or first-hand observation data? If so, what are they data about? About the subject? About the observer? Or about the relationship between observer and subject?
Or are dreams best treated with contempt – as a source of bias – in colouring observations and analysis? Even in this case, it would seem important to recognize this (much like we confess to other potential sources of bias in reporting research).
Or are dreams active participants in analyzing data? To what extent do they help crystallize what we (think we) see?
None of this suggests that I believe dreams have special powers. In my particular case, the dreams were often of the anxiety kind (never pleasant), forcing me to think much more deeply about what it is to be a man in a men’s world, what masculinity entails, about the relationship between masculinity and affection, about the role of affection and humour as mediating the often awkward but inevitable tensions between cooperation and competition, trust and vigilance, narcissism and altruism, in pursuit of the sacred and the profane.
I have some thoughts on the above, but no firm answers. (Perhaps you do.) That said, intuitively I feel very strongly about the importance of acknowledging dreams in writing carnal sociologies – though I’m less clear on what this acknowledgement comprises.
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