Digifesto

Tag: managerialism

June 12, 2020

A philosophical puzzle: morality with complex rationality

There’s a recurring philosophical puzzle that keeps coming up as one drills into the foundational issues at the heart of technology policy. The more complete articulation of it that I know of is in a draft I’ve written with Jake Goldenfein whose publication was COVID delayed. But here is an abbreviated version of the philosophical problem, distilled perhaps from the tech policy context.

For some reason it all comes back to Kant. The categorical imperative has two versions that are supposed to imply each other:

  • Follow rules that would be agreed on as universal by rational beings.
  • Treat others as ends and not means.

This is elegant and worked quite well while the definitions of ‘rationality’ in play were simple enough that Man could stand at the top of the hierarchy.

Kant is outdated now of course but we can see the influence of this theory in Rawls’s account of liberal ethics (the ‘veil of ignorance’ being a proxy for the reasoning being who has transcended their empirical body), in Habermas’s account of democracy (communicative rationality involving the setting aside of individual interests), and so on. Social contract theories are more or less along these lines. This paradigm is still more or less the gold standard.

There’s a few serious challenges to this moral paradigm. They both relate to how the original model of rationality that it is based on is perhaps naive or so rarefied to be unrealistic. What happens if you deny that people are rational in any disinterested sense, or allow for different levels of rationality? It all breaks down.

On the one hand, there’s various forms of egoism. Sloterdijk argues that Nietzsche stood out partly because he argued for an ethics of self-advancement, which rejected deontological duty. Scandalous. The contemporary equivalent is the reputation of Ayn Rand and those inspired by her. The general idea here is the rejection of social contract. This is frustrating to those who see the social contract as serious and valuable. A key feature of this view is that reason is not, as it is for Kant, disinterested. Rather, it is self-interested. It’s instrumental reason with attendant Humean passions to steer it. The passions need not be too intellectually refined. Romanticism, blah blah.

On the other hand, the 20th century discovers scientifically the idea of bounded rationality. Herbert Simon is the pivotal figure here. Individuals, being bounded, form organizations to transcend their limits. Simon is the grand theorist of managerialism. As far as I know, Simon’s theories are amoral, strictly about the execution of instrumental reason.

Nevertheless, Simon poses a challenge to the universalist paradigm because he reveals the inadequacy of individual humans to self-determine anything of significance. It’s humbling; it also threatens the anthropocentrism that provided the grounds for humanity’s mutual self-respect.

So where does one go from here?

It’s a tough question. Some spitballing:

  • One option is to relocate the philosophical subject from the armchair (Kant) to the public sphere (Habermas) into a new kind of institution that was better equipped to support their cogitation about norms. A public sphere equipped with Bloomberg terminals? But then who provides the terminals? And what about actually existing disparities of access?
    • One implication of this option, following Habermas, is that the communications within it, which would have to include data collection and the application of machine learning, would be disciplined in ways that would prevent defections.
    • Another implication, which is the most difficult one, is that the institution that supports this kind of reasoning would have to acknowledge different roles. These roles would constitute each other relationally–there would need to be a division of labor. But those roles would need to each be able to legitimize their participation on the whole and trust the overall process. This seems most difficult to theorize let alone execute.
  • A different option, sort of the unfinished Nietzschean project, is to develop the individual’s choice to defect into something more magnanimous. Simone de Beauvoir’s widely underrated Ethics of Ambiguity is perhaps the best accomplishment along these lines. The individual, once they overcome their own solipsism and consider their true self-interests at an existential level, come to understand how the success of their projects depends on society because society will outlive them. In a way, this point echoes Simon’s in that it begins from an acknowledgment of human finitude. It reasons from there to a theory of how finite human projects can become infinite (achieving the goal of immortality to the one who initiates them) by being sufficiently prosocial.

Either of these approaches might be superior to “liberalism”, which arguably is stuck in the first paradigm (though I suppose there are many liberal theorists who would defend their position). As a thought experiment, I wonder what public policies motivated by either of these positions would look like.

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June 7, 2020

Managerialism and Habermas

Managerialism is an “in” topic recently in privacy scholarship (Cohen, 2019; Waldman, 2019). In Waldman’s (2019) formulation, the managerialism problem is, roughly: privacy regulations are written with a certain substantive intent, but the for-profit firms that are the object of these regulations interpret them either as a bothersome constraint on otherwise profitable activity, or else as means to the ends of profitability, efficiency, and so on themselves. In other words, the substance of the regulations are subjugated to the substance of the goals of corporate management. Managerialism.

This is exactly what anybody who has worked in a corporate tech environment would expect. The scholarly accomplishment of presenting these bare facts to a legal academic audience is significant because employees of these corporations are most often locked up by strict NDAs. So while the point is obvious, I mean that in the positive sense that it should be taken as an unquestioned background assumption from now on, not that it shouldn’t have been “discovered” by this field in a different way.

As a “critical” observation, it stands. It raises a few questions:

  • Is this a problem?
  • If so, for whom?
  • If so, what can be done about it?

Here the “critical” method reaches, perhaps, its limits. Notoriously, critical scholarship plays on its own ambiguity, dancing between the positions of “criticism”, or finding of actionable fault, and “critique”, a merely descriptive account that is at most suggestive of action. This ambiguity preserves the standing of the critical scholar. They need never be wrong.

Responding to the situation revealed by this criticism requires a differently oriented kind of work.

Habermas and human interests

A striking about the world of policy and legal scholarship in the United States is that nobody is incentivized to teach or read anything written by past generations, however much it synthesized centuries of knowledge, and so nothing ever changes. For example, arguably, Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (KHI), originally published 1972, arguably lays out the epistemological framework we would want to understand the managerialism issue raised by recent scholars. We should expect Habermas to anticipate the problems raised by capitalism in the 21st century because his points are based on a meticulously constructed, historically informed, universalist, transcendental form of analysis. This sort of analysis is not popular in the U.S.; I have my theories about why. But I digress.

A key point from Habermas (who is summing up and reiterating a lot of other work originating, if it’s possible to say any such thing meaningfully, in Max Weber) is that it’s helpful to differentiate between different kinds of knowledge based on the “human interests” that motivate them. In one formulation (the one in KHI), there are three categories:

  1. The technical interest (from techne) in controlling nature, which leads to the “empirical-analytic”, or positivist, sciences. These correspond to fields like engineering and the positivist social sciences.
  2. The pragmatic interest (from praxis), in mutual understanding which would guide collective action and the formation of norms, leads to the “hermeneutic” sciences. These correspond to fields like history and anthropology and other homes of “interpretivist” methods.
  3. The emancipatory interest, in exposing what has been falsely reified as objective fact as socially contingent. This leads to the critical sciences, which I suppose corresponds to what is today media studies.

This is a helpful breakdown, though I should say it’s not Habermas’s “mature” position, which is quite a bit more complicated. However, it is useful for the purposes of this post because it tracks the managerialist situation raised by Waldman so nicely.

I’ll need to elaborate on one more thing before applying this to the managerialist framing, which is to skip past several volumes of Habermas’s ouvre and get to Theory of Communicative Action, volume II, where he gets to the punchline. By now he’s developed the socially pragmatic interest to be the basis for “communicative rationality”, a discursive discipline in which individual interests are excluded and instead a diversely perspectival but nevertheless measured conversation about the way the social world should normatively be ordered. But where is this field in actuality? Money and power, the “steering media”, are always mussing up this conversation in the “public sphere”. So “public discourse” becomes a very poor proxy for communicative action. Rather–and this is the punchline–the actually existing field of communicative rationality, which is establishing substantive norms while nevertheless being “disinterested” with respect to the individual participants, is the law. That’s what the legal scholarship is for.

Applying the Habermasian frame to managerialism

So here’s what I think is going on. Waldman is pointing out that whereas regulations are being written with a kind of socially pragmatic interest in their impact on the imagined field of discursively rational participants as represented by legal scholarship, corporate managers are operating in the technical mode in order to, say, maximized shareholder profits as is their legally mandated fiduciary duty. And so the meaning of the regulation changes. Because words don’t contain meaning but rather take their meaning from the field in which they operate. A privacy policy that once spoke to human dignity gets misheard and speaks instead to inconvenience of compliance costs and a PR department’s assessment of the competitive benefit of user’s trust.

I suppose this is bothersome from the legal perspective because it’s a bummer when something one feels is an important accomplishment of one’s field is misused by another. But I find the professional politics here, as everywhere, a bit dull and petty.

Crucially, the managerialism problem is not dumb and petty–I wouldn’t be writing all this if I thought so. However, the frustrating aspect of this discourse is that because of the absence of philosophical grounding in this debate, it misses what’s at stake. This is unfortunately characteristic of much American legal analysis. It’s missing because when American scholars address this problem, they do so primarily in the descriptive critical mode, one that is empirical and in a sense positivist, but without the interest in control. This critical mode leads to cynicism. It rarely leads to collective action. Something is missing.

Morality

A missing piece of the puzzle, one which cannot ever be accomplished through empirical descriptive work, is the establishment of the moral consequence of managerialism which is that human beings are being treated as means and not ends, in contradiction with the Kantian categorical imperative, or something like that. Indeed, it is this flavor of moral maxim that threads its way up through Marx into the Frankfurt School literature with all of its well-trod condemnation of instrumental reason and the socially destructive overreach of private capital. This is, of course, what Habermas was going on about in the first place: the steering media, the technical interest, positivist science, etc. as the enemy of politically legitimate praxis based on the substantive recognition of the needs and rights of all by all.

It would be nice, one taking this hard line would say, if all laws were designed with this kind of morality in mind, and if everybody who followed them did so out of a rationally accepted understanding of their import. That would be a society that respected human dignity.

We don’t have that. Instead, we have managerialism. But we’ve known this for some time. All these critiques are effectively mid 20th century.

So now what?

If the “problem” of managerialism is that when regulations reach the firms that they are meant to regulate their meaning changes into an instrumentalist distortion of the original, one might be tempted to try to combat this tendency with an even more forceful use of hermeneutic discourse or an intense training in the social pragmatic stance such that employees of these companies put up some kind of resistance to the instrumental, managerial mindset. That strategy neglects the very real possibility that those employees that do not embrace the managerial mindset will be fired. Only in the most rarified contexts does discourse propel itself with its one force. We must presume that in the corporate context the dominance of managerialist discourse is in part due to a structural selection effect. Good managers lead the company, are promoted, and so on.

So the angle on this can’t be a discursive battle with the employees of regulated firms. Rather, it has to be about corporate governance. This is incidentally absolutely what bourgeois liberal law ought to be doing, in the sense that it’s law as it applies to capital owners. I wonder how long it will be before privacy scholars begin attending to this topic.

References

Benthall, S. (2015). Designing networked publics for communicative action. Interface, 1(1), 3.

Bohman, J., & Rehg, W. (2007). Jürgen habermas.

Cohen, J. E. (2019). Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism. Oxford University Press, USA.

Habermas, J. (2015). Knowledge and human interests. John Wiley & Sons.

Waldman, A. E. (2019). Privacy Law’s False Promise. Washington University Law Review, 97(3).

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June 5, 2020

some PLSC 2020 notes: one framing of the managerialism puzzle

PLSC 2020 was quite interesting this year.

There were a number of threads I’d like to follow up on. One of them has to do with managerialism and the ability of the state (U.S. in this context) to regulate industry.

I need to do some reading to fill some gaps in my understanding, but this is how I understand the puzzle so far.

Suppose the state wants to regulate industry. Congress passes a bill creating an agency with regulatory power with some broadly legislated mandate. The agency comes up with regulations. Businesses then implement policies to comply with the regulation. That’s how it’s supposed to go.

But in practice, there is a lot of translational work being done here. The broadly legislated mandate will be in a language that can get passed by Congress. It delegates elaboration on the specifics to the expert regulators in the agency; these regulators might be lawyers. But when the corporate bosses get the regulations (maybe from their policy staff, also lawyers?) they begin to work with it in a “managerialist” way. This means, I gather, that they manage the transition towards compliance, but in a way that minimizes the costs of compliance. If they can comply without adhering to the purpose of the regulation–which might be ever-so-clear to the lawyers who dreamed it up–so be it.

This seems all quite obvious. Of course it would work this way. If I gather correctly at this point (and maybe I don’t), the managerialist problem is: because of the translational work going on between legislate intent through to administrative regulation into corporate policy into implementation, there’s a lot of potential to have information “lost in translation”, and this information loss works to the advantage of the regulated corporation, because it is using all that lost regulatory bandwidth to its advantage.

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February 28, 2018

interesting article about business in China

I don’t know much about China, really, so I’m always fascinated to learn more.

This FT article, “Anbang arrests demonstrates hostility to business”, by Jamil Anderlini, provides some wonderful historical context to a story about the arrest of an insurance oligarch.

In ancient times, merchants were at the very bottom of the four official social classes, below warrior-scholars, farmers and artisans. Although some became very rich they were considered parasites in Chinese society.

Ever since the Han emperors established the state salt monopoly in the second century BCE (remnants of which remain to this day), large-scale business enterprises have been controlled by the state or completely reliant on the favour of the emperor and the bureaucrat class.

In the 20th century, the Communist emperor Mao Zedong effectively managed to stamp out all private enterprise for a while.

Until the party finally allowed “capitalists” to join its ranks in 2002, many of the business activities carried out by the resurgent merchant class were technically illegal.

China’s rich lists are populated by entrepreneurs operating in just a handful of industries — particularly real estate and the internet.

Tycoons like Mr Wu who emerge in state-dominated sectors are still exceedingly rare. They are almost always closely linked to one of the old revolutionary families exercising enormous power from the shadows.

Everything about this is interesting.

First, in Western scholarship we rarely give China credit for its history of bureaucracy in the absence of capitalism. In the well know Weberian account, bureaucracy is an institutional invention that provides regular rule of law so that capitalism can thrive. But China’s history is one that is statist “from ancient times”, but with effective bureaucracy from the beginning. A managerialist history, perhaps.

Which makes the second point so unusual: why, given this long history of bureaucratic rule, are Internet companies operating in a comparatively unregulated way? This seems like a massive concession of power, not unlike how (arguably) the government of the United States conceded a lot of power to Silicon Valley under the Obama administration.

The article dramatically foreshadows a potential power struggle between Xi Jinping’s consolidated state and the tech giant oligarchs:

Now that Chinese President Xi Jinping has abolished his own term limits, setting the stage for him to rule for life if he wants to, the system of state patronage and the punishment of independent oligarchs is likely to expand. Any company or billionaire who offends the emperor or his minions will be swiftly dealt with in the same way as Mr Wu.

There is one group of Chinese companies with charismatic — some would say arrogant — founders that enjoy immense economic power in China today. They would seem to be prime candidates if the assault on private enterprise is stepped up.

Internet giants Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are not only hugely profitable, they control the data that is the lifeblood of the modern economy. That is why Alibaba founder Jack Ma has repeatedly said, including to the FT, that he would gladly hand his company over to the state if Beijing ever asked him to. Investors in BABA can only hope it never comes to that.

That is quite the expression of feudal fealty from Jack Ma. Truly, a totally different business culture from that of the United States.

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December 7, 2017

managerialism, continued

I’ve begun preliminary skimmings of Enteman’s Managerialism. It is a dense work of analytic philosophy, thick with argument. Sporadic summaries may not do it justice. That said, the principle of this blog is that the bar for ‘publication’ is low.

According to its introduction, Enteman’s Managerialism is written by a philosophy professor (Willard Enteman) who kept finding that the “great thinkers”–Adam Smith, Karl Marx–and the theories espoused in their writing kept getting debunked by his students. Contemporary examples showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the United States was not a capitalist country whose only alternative was socialism. In his observation, the United States in 1993 was neither strictly speaking capitalist, nor was it socialist. There was a theoretical gap that needed to be filled.

One of the concepts reintroduced by Enteman is Robert Dahl‘s concept of polyarchy, or “rule by many”. A polyarchy is neither a dictatorship nor a democracy, but rather is a form of government where many different people with different interests, but then again probably not everybody, is in charge. It represents some necessary but probably insufficient conditions for democracy.

This view of power seems evidently correct in most political units within the United States. Now I am wondering if I should be reading Dahl instead of Enteman. It appears that Dahl was mainly offering this political theory in contrast to a view that posited that political power was mainly held by a single dominant elite. In a polyarchy, power is held by many different kinds of elites in contest with each other. At its democratic best, these elites are responsive to citizen interests in a pluralistic way, and this works out despite the inability of most people to participate in government.

I certainly recommend the Wikipedia articles linked above. I find I’m sympathetic to this view, having come around to something like it myself but through the perhaps unlikely path of Bourdieu.

This still limits the discussion of political power in terms of the powers of particular people. Managerialism, if I’m reading it right, makes the case that individual power is not atomic but is due to organizational power. This makes sense; we can look at powerful individuals having an influence on government, but a more useful lens could look to powerful companies and civil society organizations, because these shape the incentives of the powerful people within them.

I should make a shift I’ve made just now explicit. When we talk about democracy, we are often talking about a formal government, like a sovereign nation or municipal government. But when we talk about powerful organizations in society, we are no longer just talking about elected officials and their appointees. We are talking about several different classes of organizations–businesses, civil society organizations, and governments among them–interacting with each other.

It may be that that’s all there is to it. Maybe Capitalism is an ideology that argues for more power to businesses, Socialism is an ideology that argues for more power to formal government, and Democracy is an ideology that argues for more power to civil society institutions. These are zero-sum ideologies. Managerialism would be a theory that acknowledges the tussle between these sectors at the organizational level, as opposed to at the atomic individual level.

The reason why this is a relevant perspective to engage with today is that there has probably in recent years been a transfer of power (I might say ‘control’) from government to corporations–especially Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple). Frank Pasquale makes the argument for this in a recent piece. He writes and speaks with a particular policy agenda that is far better researched than this blog post. But a good deal of the work is framed around the surprise that ‘governance’ might shift to a private company in the first place. This is a framing that will always be striking to those who are invested in the politics of the state; the very word “govern” is unmarkedly used for formal government and then surprising when used to refer to something else.

Managerialism, then, may be a way of pointing to an option where more power is held by non-state actors. Crucially, though, managerialism is not the same thing as neoliberalism, because neoliberalism is based on laissez-faire market ideology and contempory information infrastructure oligopolies look nothing like laissez-faire markets! Calling the transfer of power from government to corporation today neoliberalism is quite anachronistic and misleading, really!

Perhaps managerialism, like polyarchy, is a descriptive term of a set of political conditions that does not represent an ideal, but a reality with potential to become an ideal. In that case, it’s worth investigating managerialism more carefully and determining what it is and isn’t, and why it is on the rise.

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December 6, 2017

beginning Enteman’s Managerialism

I’ve been writing about managerialism without having done my homework.

Today I got a new book in the mail, Willard Enteman’s Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology, a work of analytic political philosophy that came out in 1993. The gist of the book is that none of the dominant world ideologies of the time–capitalism, socialism, and democracy–actually describe the world as it functions.

Enter Enteman’s managerialism, which considers a society composed of organizations, not individuals, and social decisions as a consequence of the decisions of organizational managers.

It’s striking that this political theory has been around for so long, though it is perhaps more relevant today because of large digital platforms.

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December 2, 2017

How to promote employees using machine learning without societal bias

Though it may at first read as being callous, a managerialist stance on inequality in statistical classification can help untangle some of the rhetoric around this tricky issue.

Consider the example that’s been in the news lately:

Suppose a company begins to use an algorithm to make decisions about which employees to promote. It uses a classifier trained on past data about who has been promoted. Because of societal bias, women are systematically under-promoted; this is reflected in the data set. The algorithm, naively trained on the historical data, reproduces the historical bias.

This example describes a bad situation. It is bad from a social justice perspective; by assumption, it would be better if men and women had equal opportunity in this work place.

It is also bad from a managerialist perspective. Why? Because if the point of using an algorithm were not to correct for societal biases introducing irrelevancies into the promotion decision, then it would not make managerial sense to change business practices over to using an algorithm. The whole point of using an algorithm is to improve on human decision-making. This is a poor match of an algorithm to a problem.

Unfortunately, what makes this example compelling is precisely what makes it a bad example of using an algorithm in this context. The only variables discussed in the example are the socially salient ones thick with political implications: gender, and promotion. What are more universal concerns than gender relations and socioeconomic status?!

But from a managerialist perspective, promotions should be issued based on a number of factors not mentioned in the example. What factors are these? That’s a great and difficult question. Promotions can reward hard work and loyalty. They can also be issued to those who demonstrate capacity for leadership, which can be a function of how well they get along with other members of the organization. There may be a number of features that predict these desirable qualities, most of which will have to do with working conditions within the company as opposed to qualities inherent in the employee (such as their past education, or their gender).

If one were to start to use machine learning intelligently to solve this problem, then one would go about solving it in a way entirely unlike the procedure in the problematic example. One would rather draw on soundly sourced domain expertise to develop a model of the relationship between relevant, work-related factors. For many of the key parts of the model, such as general relationships between personality type, leadership style, and cooperation with colleagues, one would look outside the organization for gold standard data that was sampled responsibly.

Once the organization has this model, then it can apply it to its own employees. For this to work, employees would need to provide significant detail about themselves, and the company would need to provide contextual information about the conditions under which employees work, as these may be confounding factors.

Part of the merit of building and fitting such a model would be that, because it is based on a lot of new and objective scientific considerations, it would produce novel results in recommending promotions. Again, if the algorithm merely reproduced past results, it would not be worth the investment in building the model.

When the algorithm is introduced, it ideally is used in a way that maintains traditional promotion processes in parallel so that the two kinds of results can be compared. Evaluation of the algorithm’s performance, relative to traditional methods, is a long, arduous process full of potential insights. Using the algorithm as an intervention at first allows the company to develop a causal understanding its impact. Insights from the evaluation can be factored back into the algorithm, improving the latter.

In all these cases, the company must keep its business goals firmly in mind. If they do this, then the rest of the logic of their method falls out of data science best practices, which are grounded in mathematical principles of statistics. While the political implications of poorly managed machine learning are troubling, effective management of machine learning which takes the precautions necessary to develop objectivity is ultimately a corrective to social bias. This is a case where sounds science and managerialist motives and social justice are aligned.

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November 26, 2017

Recap

Sometimes traffic on this blog draws attention to an old post from years ago. This can be a reminder that I’ve been repeating myself, encountering the same themes over and over again. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because I hope to one day compile the ideas from this blog into a book. It’s nice to see what points keep resurfacing.

One of these points is that liberalism assumes equality, but this challenged by society’s need for control structures, which creates inequality, which then undermines liberalism. This post calls in Charles Taylor (writing about Hegel!) to make the point. This post makes the point more succinctly. I’ve been drawing on Beniger for the ‘society needs control to manage its own integration’ thesis. I’ve pointed to the term managerialism as referring to an alternative to liberalism based on the acknowledgement of this need for control structures. Managerialism looks a lot like liberalism, it turns out, but it justifies things on different grounds and does not get so confused. As an alternative, more Bourdieusian view of the problem, I consider the relationship between capital, democracy, and oligarchy here. There are some useful names for what happens when managerialism goes wrong and people seem disconnected from each other–anomie–or from the control structures–alienation.

A related point I’ve made repeatedly is the tension between procedural legitimacy and getting people the substantive results that they want. That post about Hegel goes into this. But it comes up again in very recent work on antidiscrimination law and machine learning. What this amounts to is that attempts to come up with a fair, legitimate procedure are going to divide up the “pie” of resources, or be perceived to divide up the pie of resources, somehow, and people are going to be upset about it, however the pie is sliced.

A related theme that comes up frequently is mathematics. My contention is that effective control is a technical accomplishment that is mathematically optimized and constrained. There are mathematical results that reveal necessary trade-offs between values. Data science has been misunderstood as positivism when in fact it is a means of power. Technical knowledge and technology are forms of capital (Bourdieu again). Perhaps precisely because it is a rare form of capital, science is politically distrusted.

To put it succinctly: lack of mathematics education, due to lack of opportunity or mathophobia, lead to alienation and anomie in an economy of control. This is partly reflected in the chaotic disciplinarity of the social sciences, especially as they react to computational social science, at the intersection of social sciences, statistics, and computer science.

Lest this all seem like an argument for the mathematical certitude of totalitarianism, I have elsewhere considered and rejected this possibility of ‘instrumentality run amok‘. I’ve summarized these arguments here, though this appears to have left a number of people unconvinced. I’ve argued this further, and think there’s more to this story (a formalization of Scott’s arguments from Seeing Like a State, perhaps), but I must admit I don’t have a convincing solution to the “control problem” yet. However, it must be noted that the answer to the control problem is an empirical or scientific prediction, not a political inclination. Whether or not it is the most interesting or important question regarding technological control has been debated to a stalemate, as far as I can tell.

As I don’t believe singleton control is a likely or interesting scenario, I’m more interested in practical ways of offering legitimacy or resistance to control structures. I used to think the “right” political solution was a kind of “hacker class consciousness“; I don’t believe this any more. However, I still think there’s a lot to the idea of recursive publics as actually existing alternative power structures. Platform coops are interesting for the same reason.

All this leads me to admit my interest in the disruptive technology du jour, the blockchain.

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November 6, 2017

Why managerialism: it acknowledges political role of internal corporate policies

One modern difficulty with political theory in contemporary times is the confusion between government and corporate policy. This is due in no small part to the extent to which large corporations now mediate social life. Telecommunications, the Internet, mobile phones, and social media all depend on layers and layers of operating organizations. The search engine, which didn’t exist thirty years ago, now is arguably an essential cultural and political facility (Pasquale, 2011), which sharpens the concerns that have been raised about their politics (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000; Bracha and Pasquale, 2007).

Corporate policies influence customers when those policies drive product design or are put into contractual agreements. They can also govern employees and shape corporate culture. Sometimes these two kinds of policies are not easily demarcated. For example, Uber has an internal privacy policy about who can access which users’ information, like most companies with a lot of user data. The privacy features that Uber implicitly guarantees to their customers are part of their service. But their ability to provide this service is only as good as their company culture is reliable.

Classically, there are states, which may or may not be corrupt, and there are markets, which may or may not be competitive. With competitive markets, corporate policies are part of what make firms succeed or fail. One point of success is a company’s ability to attract and maintain customers. This should in principle drive companies to improve their policies.

An interesting point made recently by Robert Post is that in some cases, corporate policies can adopt positions that would be endorsed by some legal scholars even if the actual laws state otherwise. His particular example was a case enforcing the right to be forgotten in Spain against Google.

Since European law is statute driven, the judgments of its courts are not amenable to creative legal reasoning as they are in the United States. Post’s criticism of the EU’s judgment in this case is because of their rigid interpetation of data protection directives. Post argues a different legal perspective on privacy is better at balancing other social interests. But putting aside the particulars of the law, Post makes the point that Google’s internal policy matches his own legal and philosophical framework (which prefers dignitary privacy over data privacy) more than EU statutes do.

One could argue that we should not trust the market to make Google’s policies just. But we could also argue that Google’s market share, which is significant, depends so much on its reputation and users trust that in fact it is under great pressure to adjucate disputes with its users wisely. It is a company that must set its own policies, which do have political significance. It has the benefits of more direct control over the way these policies get interpreted and enforced in the state, faster feedback on whether the policies are successful, and a less chaotic legislative process for establishing policy in the first place.

Political liberals would dismiss this kind of corporate control as just one commercial service among many, or else wring their hands with concern over a company coming to have such power over the public sphere. But managerialists would see the emergence of search engines as an organization among others, comparable to other private entities that have been part of the public sphere, such as newspapers.

But a sound analysis of the politics of search engines need not depend on analogies with past technologies. This is a function of legal reasoning. Managerialism, which is perhaps more a descendent of business reasoning, would ask how, in fact, search engines make policy decisions and how does this affect political outcomes. It does not prima facie assume that a powerful or important corporate policy is wrong. It does ask what the best corporate policy is, given a particular sector.

References

Bracha, Oren, and Frank Pasquale. “Federal Search Commission-Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search.” Cornell L. Rev. 93 (2007): 1149.

Introna, Lucas D., and Helen Nissenbaum. “Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters.” The information society 16.3 (2000): 169-185.

Pasquale, Frank A. “Dominant search engines: an essential cultural & political facility.” (2011).

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