I

Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how populations left behind self-organize by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own.

What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche that critical infrastructures hold in this group adaptive behavior.

II

In some cases, the group-organization of groups takes place because there is little government presence, infrastructural or otherwise beforehand, let alone as the disaster unfolds. If there is electricity or tap water afterwards, it is intermittent. Hospitals remain few or too far. In these situations, the only thing between you and death is you. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in some low-income countries.

Self-organizing groups, however, is also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in high-income countries. Increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are witnessed, in particular, among front-line infrastructure staff and emergency managers,

I want to suggest that group adaptation in these latter cases differs in at least one under-acknowledged respect.

A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. This niche of critical infrastructures is already established. Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads.

III

So what?

Two photographs show people organizing themselves to remove the rubble outside. If I’m right, the function served in each could differ significantly, depending on role that reliable critical infrastructures have had up to the disaster. It’s important to know that this picture, and not that other, is of removing rubble from the only road to the water treatment plant, for example.

Why is that important?

These days we’re told it’s important to dismantle capitalism. Well, major disasters dismantle physical infrastructures all over the place. And yet the infrastructures are always treated as part of capitalism writ large and modernities writ small.

If capitalism has colonized crisis into every nook and cranny of the world, it’s hardly useful then in explaining the presence or absence of the institutional niche just mentioned. You’re better advised to look to complex adaptive systems theory, rather than current power theories, for insights into real-time responses and their immediate aftermath.

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For more on the limitations of theories of power (direct, indirect, dispersed), please see Part III of When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene). See also section II.28 of the Guide discussing other examples of “thinking infrastructurally”.

“What if the rise of China,” [Jerry] Zee poignantly asks, “were to be approached literally, through the rise of China into the air?” Amidst official and popular accounts of China’s authoritarian ruling, Zee’s Continent in Dust is a striking example of how to write about China and Chinese politics otherwise. The book focuses on how weather events—specifically, those involving dust, aerosols, and particulate matter—are sites for political breakdown and emergence, revealing that the Chinese political system is anything but static.

Zee opens the book with a story of a resettled ex-herder family, whose herds have allegedly overgrazed pastures in inner Mongolia. This, in turn, has resulted in the spread of dust storms, or “wind-sand” (feng sha 风沙).2 Controlling the dust flow has become a state priority, and so these ex-herders have adapted: having left behind their old jobs, they now drive civil servants across fragile dunes, airdrop seeds, and stabilize sand. These state-contracted environmental engineering jobs, however, are only “semipredictable,” leaving the ex-herders caught in “a state of constantly frustrated anticipation.”

Still, how does this offer new insight into China at large? Because, by following the dust, Zee reveals that the plight of these ex-herders is not because of the popularly accepted idea of “a neoliberalization of the socialist state.” Instead, the wind-sand shows how bureaucrats view ex-herders as both a source of “social instability” in rural frontiers and as an on-demand workforce that can furnish state sand-control programs. In other words, ex-herders represent China’s “experiment in governing,” swept in an atmosphere of “windfall opportunities for work and cash,” a departure from the declining pastoral economy. This story is not about the rise of neoliberal China but, instead, the “delicately maintained condition of quietude” deemed harmonious and stable enough for the Chinese state.3

https://www.publicbooks.org/protean-environment-and-political-possibilities/

Hands-on work is necessary to cultivate the awareness that architecture cannot be contained within the plot of land.

The way I came to this awareness was cleaning the facades of buildings with my own two hands. This work constitutes the ongoing series The Ethics of Dust, which I began in 2008. These artworks emerged from the intersection of architecture and experimental preservation. I wanted to preserve the dust that would normally be thrown out, because it seemed to me, intuitively at first, that this dust contained important information about architecture’s environmental footprint. This dust, which you can see deposited as dark stains on facades, comes in large measure from the boilers of buildings, as well as electric power plants and traffic. The smoke produced as a byproduct when we heat, cool, and electrify buildings is as much a condition of possibility for architecture as concrete or steel. The airborne particles we call smoke or dust are therefore an architectural material. Yet smoke cannot be contained inside the plot of land. To manipulate this material requires new ways of caring for architecture that encompass this larger territory. It invites us to imagine how to care for the atmosphere as an airborne built environment.

https://placesjournal.org/article/repairing-architecture-schools/

What if the built environments of the many different pastoralists include all manner of dust from herding livestock, cooking in the compound, lorries rushing down dirt roads, the ongoing drought, intermittent sand storms and the sudden dust-devils? What if architectural schools are moving from a pedagogy of new construction (think: development) to repair and renovation of the already built? What do these new generations of faculty and students offer by way of advice to really-existing pastoralists today?

One answer from the last citation: “It is important, also, to listen and learn from communities who inhabit the buildings and environments that need repair, because they know best what is broken.” To put it another way, only in a some versions of particulate matter is dust broken.

According to human reason, guided only by the light of nature, these people lead the more happy and freer life, being void of care, which torments the minds of many Christians: They are not delighted in baubles, but in useful things.

Thomas Morton (1637) writing about his experience with Native Americans in his book, The New English Canaan. This was the first book the Puritans banned in America.

It is little recorded that some early English colonists to America either ran away to live with Native Americans or refused to return from captivity when given the chance. One writer put it that these reluctant colonists enjoyed the “most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail upon us”. Famously, an early French Jesuit found Native American customs “afforded me illumination the more easily to understand and explain several matters found in ancient authors”.

Just imagine the entire lot of colonists ran away to live with Native Americans, once realizing both that better practices had already been found and that colonization was altogether a ghastly prospect by comparison. Now that’s a counterfactual!

Sources

Axtell, J. (1985). The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford University Press: New York.

Connolly, C. (2023). “How America’s first banned book survived and became an anti-authoritarian i” (accessed online at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-americas-first-banned-book-survived-and-became-an-anti-authoritarian-icon-180982971).

Knox, B. (1993). The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.

A recent version of The New English Canaan in which the epigraph appears can be found at https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/new-english-canaan-part-i

I

The danger in stopping short by organizing around failure probabilities and consequences sundered from each other (the defining topoi of “risk”) is the illusion of control via risk management. Stranded at your cognitive limits, you don’t realize what you have before you are little more than contingencies associated with aftermaths. If you think otherwise, acting as if you had causal understanding means having to ride uncertainty when you think you’re managing risks.

It’s worth asking then what would risk management look like if we started from our cognitive limits rather than assume we manage risk because our certitudes no longer hold. This means having to take seriously our cognitive limits and biases.

For example, the Fundamental Attribution Error has been defined as: The failure to recognize and explain human behavior by reference to situations in which the person finds himself or herself. If so, are appeals to an absolute priority of universal human rights over the irreducible particularities of being an example of mistaken attribution? Or is one human right to commit that error?

II

Spreading risk in investment focuses on whether or not risks are allocated across a diverse portfolio so as to minimize losses or instead is concentrated in one type of investment or risk. This strategy is taken to be a positive if the risks and/or types of investment are uncorrelated.

Even then spreading risk does not automatically make for less uncertainty. Why? Because risk is a very old, very overwritten policy palimpsest in the public and private sectors. A paragraph like the immediately preceding reads legibly—nouns and verbs appear in order and sense-making is achieved. But none of the previous inscriptions are pane-clear and entire because of the intervening the layers, effacements, and erasures about risk and its management.

That is, words and concepts are grabbed and patched together from different contexts and times in this palimpsest, intertwined and re-assembled for present, at times controverted, purposes:

. . . . .risks spread out……….to minimize losses or instead…………concentrated. . . uncorrlated

Now, that too is “spreading risk”! Albeit considerably less positive.

I

It’s long recorded that control room operators in key critical infrastructures prevent, often daily and unbeknownst to the public, major accidents and failures. Because these do not occur, are not recorded as savings to the public weal.

This track record of saves matters when justifying proposals for wholesale replacement or upgrading of these systems because failures or accidents do happen from time to time. As if the latter costs are considered reason enough to jettison the system without regard, however, to the losses in savings incurred in the jettisoning.

II

Not starting with the saves is far more than a methods problem. It takes us to the entire notion of “problem” as a starting point for major policy and management.

In my profession, policy analysis, asking “What’s the problem?” is the first step in an analyzing an issue.

As reasonable as that may sound, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that preventing something from becoming a problem is therefore a major part of that analysis and policymaking as well. This applies to reliability professionals wherever they are, from pastoralists to control room operators. Nor is this anything like news. “Is not the best policymaker the one who makes changes before the problem emerges?”

Source

Martin Reuss (1988). “The Myth and Reality of Policy History”. The Public Historian 10(1): 41 – 49 (p. 42).

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 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)

The terms China, Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are used to describe the current government of China under General Secretary Xi Jinping. ‘China’ is not intended to refer to the country itself with the entirety of its peoples and cultures.

Recent first footnote of a peer-reviewed journal article

One of the questions that helped precipitate the research on highly reliable socio-technical systems was: Why aren’t there more normal accidents, given technologies are so tightly coupled and interactive?

A symmetrical question has been posed by the high reliability research since then: Why aren’t there more real-time control rooms or operations centers, given there are so many reliability mandates, critical services and hazardous technologies?

One answer suggests itself: There are in fact more control rooms than people suppose, if the persisting dearth of control room research is any guide.

If a researcher only ever studies one political context, then the horizons of explanation are constrained because of selection bias. If one only studies the United States, without comparison to other countries, then this leads to a sample selection bias where one cannot answer why the United States has comparatively high poverty. To paraphrase [sociologist and political scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset], poverty scholars who only know one country, know no country.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10446494/

For a time, my reading centered on histories of ideas, like those of progress, improvement and the Enlightenment. Once I started reading Isaiah Berlin, there was no going back. That was the pull side of being attracted to abstractions.

Being pushed to abstractions has been a different matter. Discussions about all those varieties of capitalism, realpolitik, and modernities, to name just three entangled constellations, are unsatisfactory for me, when they stop short of recording the actually-existing practices on the ground. So I am pushed further by being compelled to contextualize these abstractions.

To put it differently, what is “insufficiently abstract” for me is the weird undifferentiation that comes with the comparative absence of histories of the highly various and contingent practices at stake when filling in the details.

Note: “comparative” absence of details, not “total” absence. For an example of the kind of history of ideas that goes further by identifying and comparing practices associated with those ideas, I can think of no more formidable book than the recent: Michael Sonenscher (2023). After Kant The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. Princeton University Press.

When I first became interested in livestock herders in Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands. Fifty years later the refrain is the herders are marginalized–marginalized in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency.

May I suggest a more positive and apposite analogy:

The illuminators [of medieval manuscripts] enriched the margins of the page, conventionally an empty space, with figurative, vegetal or abstract elements. Sometimes the marginal images were merely decorative, at other times they functioned rather like visual footnotes or sidebars, as serious or comic commentaries on the text. . .

Jed Perl (2021). Authority and Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York

Pastoralists continue to illuminate what others persist calling “the margins.” Indeed, pastoralists are our counter-public for that point.