I
It’s a truism that narratives dominate public policy and management. No more so than in the promise of there being beginnings, middles and ends to this in medias res of complex, uncertain, interrupted and conflicted.
But narrative structures have far more widespread impacts than just those associated with the conventional beginning/middle/end storylines. There’s always been, for example, argument by adjective and adverb. The story goes that Georges Simenon, having finished the typescript of one more novel, would call his children and wave it before them, saying: “What am I doing, little ones?,” to which they would respond in unison, ‘You’re getting rid of the adjectives, papa.” Oh, were that true for the policy advocates writing today!
Or, more formally, consider the importance of differences in narrative structure between a policy brief and a policy report. It’s not just that a policy brief is shorter than the report upon which it is based. Things are left out in the former for reasons other than its shorter length.
A policy brief and a policy report are different genres, like a novel compared to a play. Their respective styles, voice, conventions, audiences, and even what they take to be details (formally, their granularities) differ significantly. This means that what’s narrated in one but not repeated in another have implications for policy and management. Indeed, that a brief and a report have been written for different audiences, fulfilling different requirements and expectations, would be a banal observation, where it not for this single fact: While any two genres differ, what each genre takes as “the specifics”–to repeat, the respective granularities–are nevertheless both relevant for real-world policy and management activities.
II
I now want to delve into how other differences in genre matter for specific policy and management. I’m particularly interested in how different genres pose specifics that are, obviously or less so, actionable with respect to policy and management. I turn now to nine examples of what I mean and their “So what?” implications.
1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic’ as a genre limitation of the interview format
2. The genre of wicked policy problems
3. Catastrophized cascades
4. The genre of policy palimpsest
5. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy
6. Journalism, academic articles and the profession, policy analysis
7. The formulaic radicalism of academic articles in search of policy relevance
8. An infinite regress for the purposes of “So what?” explains nothing
9. How being right is a matter of genre
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1. “‘It will be unimaginably catastrophic’ as a genre limitation of the interview format
I
Our interviewees have been insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest as nothing like it had occurred there before. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.
Fair enough, but not enough.
So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is predictably unimaginable to them. The M9 earthquake isn’t totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. Rather it is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.
II
I however think something else is also going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.
American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:
David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list
Elsewhere Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.
III
I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot while answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is, “unimaginably catastrophic” is not untrue, while however without having to specify how true. Such is the statement’s recourse to argument by adverb.
So what?
“Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”—this, here, being something about a catastrophe “desperately very” indeed.
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2. The genre of wicked policy problems
Recast wicked (that is, intractable) problems of policy and management as part of a longstanding genre in literature, which enables very different statements and competing positions to be held without them being inconsistent at the same time. Literary and cultural critic, Michael McKeon, helps us to do so:
Genre provides a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the “solution”) of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible. The ideological status of genre, like that of all conceptual categories, lies in its explanatory and problem-“solving” capacities.
In McKeon’s formal terms, “the genre of the novel is a technique to engage epistemological and socio-ethical problems simultaneously, but with no particular commitment than that.”
Intractability appeared not only as the novel’s subject matter but also by virtue of the conventions for how these matters to be raised. The content is not only about the intractable, but also its governing context is as historically tangled and conventionalized as that of the English novel.
So what?
I am not saying wicked problems are fictitious (even so, there is the well-known truth in fiction). Rather, I am arguing that pinning wicked problems exclusively to their content (e.g., wicked problems are defined by the lack of agreed-upon rules to solve them) misses the fact that the analytic category of wicked problems as such is highly rule-bound (i.e.., by the historical conventions to articulate and discuss such matters, in this case through novelistic means).
How so? Return to the scholarly attempt to differentiate “wicked” and “tame” problems into more nuanced categories. Doing so is akin to disaggregating the English novel into romance, historical, gothic and other types. But such a differentiation need not problematize the genre’s conventions. In fact, the governing conventions may become more complex for distinguishing the more complex content, thus reinforcing the genre as a bottled intractability.
If wicked problems are to be better addressed, altogether different conventions and rules—what Wittgenstein called “language games”—will have to be found under which to recast these. . . . well, whatever they are to be called they wouldn’t be termed “intractable, full stop,” would they? Declaring something a wicked problem creates The Ultimate One-Sided Problem—it’s, well, intractable—for humans who are everything but one-sided.
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3. Catastrophized cascades
The upshot of what follows: Infrastructure cascades and the genre of catastrophizing about large system failure have a great deal in common and this has major implications for policy and management.
I
An infrastructure cascade happens when the failure of one part of the critical infrastructure triggers failure in its other parts as well as in other infrastructures connected with it. The fast propagation of failure can and has led to multiple systems failing over quickly, where “a small mistake can lead to a big failure.” The causal pathways in the chain reaction of interconnected failure are often difficult to identify or monitor, let alone analyze, during the cascade and even afterwards.
For its part, catastrophizing in the sense of “imagining the worst outcome of even the most ordinary event” seems to overlap with this notion of cascade. Here though the imagining in catastrophizing might be written off as exaggerated, worse irrational—the event in question is, well, not as bad as imagined—while infrastructure cascades are real, not imagined.
II
We may want, however, to rethink any weak overlap when it comes to infrastructure cascades and catastrophizing failure across interconnected infrastructures. Consider the insights of Gerard Passannante, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (2019, The University of Chicago Press).
In analyzing cases of catastrophizing (in Leonardo’s Notebooks, an early work of Kant and Shakespeare’s King Lear, among others), Passannante avoids labeling such thinking as irrational and favors a more nuanced understanding. He identifies from his material four inter-related features to the catastrophizing.
First (no order of priority is implied), catastrophizing probes and reasons from the sensible to the insensible, the perceptible to the imperceptible, the witnessed to the unwitnessed, and the visible to invisible. In this fashion, the probing and reasoning involve ways of seeing and feeling as well.
Second and third, when catastrophizing, an abrupt, precipitous shift or collapse in scale occurs (small scale suddenly shifts to large scale), while there is a distinct temporal elision or compression of the catastrophe’s beginning and end (as if there were no middle duration to the catastrophe being imagined).
Last, the actual catastrophizing while underway feels to the catastrophizer as if the thinking itself were involuntary and had its own automatic logic or necessity that over-rides—“evacuates” is Passannante’s term—the agency and control of the catastrophizer.
III
In this way, the four features of catastrophizing take us much closer to the notion of infrastructure cascades as currently understood.
In catastrophizing as in cascades, there is both that rapid propagation from small to large and that temporal “failing all of a sudden.” In catastrophizing as in cascades, causal connections—in the sense of identifying events with their beginnings, middles and ends—are next to impossible to parse out, given the rapid, often inexplicable, processes at work.
And yes, of course, cascades are real, while catastrophizing is more speculative; but: The catastrophizing feels very, very real to–and out of the direct control of–the catastrophizer as an agent in his or her own right.
In fact, one of the most famous typologies in organization and technology studies sanctions a theory that catastrophizes infrastructure cascades. The typology’s cell of tight coupling and complex interactivity is a Pandora Box of instantaneous changes, invisible processes, and incomprehensible breakdowns involving time, scale and perspective.
This is not a criticism: It may well be that we cannot avoid catastrophizing, if only because of the empirical evidence that sudden cascades have happened in the past.
IV
So what?
The four features suggest that one way to mitigate any wholesale catastrophizing of infrastructure cascades is to bring back time and scale into the analysis and modeling of infrastructure cascades.
To do so would be to insist that really-existing infrastructure cascades are not presumptively instantaneous or nearly so. It would be to insist that infrastructure cascades are differentiated in terms of time and scale, unless proven otherwise.
Allow me to end with an extended quote from our own research:
One clear objective of recent network of networks modeling has been finding out which nodes and connections, when deleted, bring the network or sets of networks to collapse. Were only one more node to fail, the network would suddenly collapse completely, it is often argued…
But ‘suddenly’ is not all that frequent at the [interconnected infrastructure] level. In fact, not failing suddenly is what we expect to find in managed interconnected systems, in which an infrastructure element can fail without the infrastructure as a whole failing or disrupting the normal operations of other infrastructures depending on that system. Infrastructures instantaneously failing one after another is not what actually happens in many so-called cascades, and we would not expect such near simultaneity from our framework of analysis.
Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen….Yet individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operation to failure across systems can also take time. Discrete stages of disruption frequently occur when system performance can still be retrievable before the trajectory of failure becomes inevitable.
E. Roe and P.R. Schulman, Risk and Reliability, 2016, Stanford University Press,
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4. The genre of policy palimpsest
I
The notion of “policy palimpsest” arose early on in policy studies, but never gained much traction. Its upshot is that current statements about complex policy issues are the composites of arguments and narratives that have been overwritten across time. Any composite argument rendered off a policy palimpsest reads sensibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved—but none of the previous inscriptions or points are pane-clear and whole through the layers, effacements, and erasures. Arguments have been blurred, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes.
By way of example, consider what was a longstanding commonplace: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism has come to mean total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.”
In reality, that statement was full of effacements from having been overwritten again and again through seriatim debates, vide:
“……totalitarianism has come to mean…….total control of politics ,citizenry and economics………”
It’s that accented “total control” that drove the initial selection of the phrases around it. Today, after further blurring, it’s more fashionable to rewrite the composite argument as: “Nazi and communist totalitarianism sought total control of politics, economics, society and citizenry.” The “sought” recognizes that, when it comes these forms of totalitarianism, seeking total control did not always mean total control achieved. “Sought” unaccents “total control.”
II
Fair enough, but note that “sought” itself reflects its own effacements in totalitarianism’s palimpsest, with consequences for how time and space are re-rendered.
Consider two quotes from the many in that policy palimpsest, which are missed when it comes to the use of a reduced-form “sought”:
I always thought there must be some more interesting way of interpreting the Soviet Union than simply reversing the value signs in its propaganda. And the thing that first struck me – that should have struck anybody working in the archives of the Soviet bureaucracy – was that the Soviet leaders didn’t know what was happening half the time, were good at throwing hammers at problems but not at solving them, and spent an enormous amount of time fighting about things that often had little to do with ideology and much to do with institutional interests.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n23/sheila-fitzpatrick/a-spy-in-the-archives
The camp, then, was always in motion. This was true for people and goods, and also for the spaces they traversed. Because Auschwitz was one big construction site. It never looked the same, from one day to the next, as buildings were demolished, extended and newly built. As late as September 1944, just months before liberation in January 1945, the Camp SS held a grand ceremony to unveil its big new staff hospital. . .
Inadvertently, [construction] also created spaces for prisoner agency. The more civilian contractors worked on site, the more opportunities for barter and bribes. All the clutter and commotion also made it harder to exercise full control, as blocked sightlines opened the way for illicit activities, from rest to escape. . .
Some scholars see camps like Auschwitz as sites of total SS domination. This was certainly what the perpetrators wanted them to be. But their monumental designs often bore little resemblance to built reality. Priorities changed, again and again, and SS planners were thwarted by supply shortages, bad weather and (most critically) by mass deaths among their slave labour force. In the end, grand visions regularly gave way to quick fixes, resulting in what the historian Paul Jaskot, writing about the architecture of the Holocaust, called the “lack of a rationally planned and controlled space”. Clearly, the popular image of Auschwitz as a straight-line, single-track totalitarian machine is inaccurate.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/being-in-auschwitz-nikolaus-wachsmann/
I am not arguing that the quoted reservations are correct or generalizable or fully understandable (the quotes come to us as already overwritten). I am saying that they fit uncomfortably with popular notions “local resistance,” when the latter is about “taking back control”
III
So what?
So what if time and space are in a policy and management world are (re-)rendered sinuous and interstitial, in a word, anfractuous rather than linear like a sentence? It’s a big deal, actually.
It means that no single composite argument can galvanize the entire space-and-time of a palimpsest. It means matters of time and space are always worth another look with each argument we read off of a major policy.
For instance, the preceding entry noted how “catastrophic cascades” are described as having virtually instantaneous transitions from the beginning of a cascade in one infrastructure to its awful conclusion across other infrastructures connected with it. But in the terminology presented here, a catastrophizing cascade isn’t so much a composite argument with a reduced-form middle as it is a highly etiolated palimpsest where infrastructure interactions taking more granular time and space have been blotted out altogether.
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5. Policy as memoir, memoir as policy
Some of you may remember when the orbiting twins of “freedom and necessity” shone bright on the intellectual firmament. Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the second you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity.
None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential were nowhere different from each other. But the macro-doctrinal and personal-experiential are, I want to argue, conflated and treated as one and the same in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.
II
Recently, Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, makes the point directly:
Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/mere-belief/?src=longreads
Memoir in this shift ends up, in Tisdale wonderful term, as a “grand reveal.” Of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds also to be affordances and enablements.
To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one meaning at the expense of the other meanings allied to. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”
So what?
To rewrite a once-popular expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eye-witnessing what is right in front of us. One thinks of George Orwell’s point: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
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6. Journalism, academic articles and the profession, policy analysis
When it comes to the policy relevance of journalism and my profession, policy analysis, it’s been a matter of genre differences for as long as I can remember.
The journalist article starts with the victim, when policy professionals want to know upfront not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce said victimhood. For my part, I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people, after all!
And to be clear about the “So what?”. No need for academic articles to lead with: We are currently living in an age of multiple closely interconnected and intensifying crises. There is growing awareness that questions of diversity and representation matter in scholarship. Conservation is at a crossroads. Numbers occupy a central place in global governance.
Rather, tell us upfront something we don’t know and their implications, in order that different types of readers for policy relevance have energy to scan the rest. We’re not asking these authors to simplify. We’re asking them to tell us what they conclude or propose so we, these different readers, can decide whether or not their analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell us upfront because we may find we have something better to recommend—including different media for putting them.
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7. The formulaic radicalism of academic articles in search of policy relevance
A third problem is Formulaic radicalism. This is an attempt to project a veneer of political and intellectual dissidence while ultimately relying on highly established tropes which often lead to unsurprising conclusions. Contemporary research is generally formulaic but [critical management studies, CMS] adds the critical flavour. It often does so by giving phenomena – no matter how benign – a negative framing.
Studying ‘resistance’ gives a progressive, even heroic flavour to a topic. One way CMS researchers do formulaic radicalism is by using conventional formats but include some markers of radicalism. The author may seek to express radical and critical ideas while complying with ‘mainstream’ conventions. Such a move can help to indicate that a study is clearly positioned in an academic subfield, guided by an authoritative framework, and informed by a detailed review of the literature.
Next the research outlines a planned design, a careful data management strategy (sometimes using data sorting programs and codification), and a minor section of ‘safe’ reflexivity. The authors summarize findings, outlines how they add to the literature (and sometimes the author-ity [sic]) and offers a brief conclusion (not saying too much outside the chosen and mainly predictable path). The form should matter less than the content, but this highly domesticated form tends to weaken the impact of the substantive content. The norm of presenting a number of abstracted, short interview statements does not always help to reveal any particularly novel insights.
In the text, there are frequent nods to critical aims such as exploring power, supporting emancipation, recognizing resistance, or generating reflexivity. However, the formulaic presentation of findings often undermines this [“So what?”] and leads to modest insights.
André Spicer and Mats Alvesson (2024). “Critical Management Studies: A Critical Review.” Journal of Management Studies (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joms.13047)
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8. An infinite regress for the purposes of “So what?” explains nothing
Stop fossil fuels; stop cutting down trees; stop using plastics; stop defense spending; stop being imperialist; stop techno-solutionism; start being small-d democratic and small-p participatory; dismantle capitalism; transform cities; save biodiversity; never forget class, gender, race, inequality, religions, bad faith, identity. . . and. . .
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9. How being right is a matter of genre
In public policy, the wish–so often unfilled–is for the right person at the right time in the right job doing the right thing.
In poetry by contrast, we have Louise Glück’s poem, “Crossroads,”
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
Given the poem’s theme, the shortening of lines from three to two is so RIGHT! Here the answer to question, “So what by way of right?” is the answer, “What else but these last two?”
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Other sources
Caute, D. (1971). The Illusion: An essay on politics, theatre and the novel. Harper Colophon Books, New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London.
Jenkins, K. (2023). “Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality” (accessed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW4-VT_ZTJw)
McKeon, M. ([1987] 2002). The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London.
Moretti, F. (2013). The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. Verso: London and New York.
https://www.ft.com/content/ac63ae0e-227a-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0184767820913797
http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene
Consider the frequent statement: Having completed the analysis, I wrote the memo with my recommendations.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 