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Today’s NYTimes article about the Park Slope Food Coop addresses an issue that plagues many organizations. How do you motivate members to keep contributing, rather than just “free riding” off the efforts of other, productive members? According to the article, rather than rely on paid staff like most grocery stores, the Park Slope Food Coop runs mainly on members’ efforts. To encourage members to contribute, the Coop relies on a dual carrot and stick approach. The carrot consists of access to desirable produce and goods at lower prices. The stick consists of having to make-up double shifts for every missed shift during a designated time period, or risk being dropped as a member (errant members can re-apply once if they pay the membership fee again). But, as the article points out, certain kinds of members can easily fall on the sidelines. Single parents, those with partners who do not want to work in the coop, those with demanding jobs, etc. are at a disadvantage.

Burning Man, like other organizations that rely upon volunteers, has faced similar issues, although it hasn’t adopted the approach of the Park Slope Coop. Volunteer coordinators recognize that some volunteers might get distracted, particularly during the event, and plan accordingly. In other cases, organizers realize that some tasks have to be compensated to ensure that the work will get done according to their satisfaction. For more on this topic, see chapter 5 in my Enabling Creative Chaos book.

The Japanese concept of kaizen was one management fad that swept manufacturing plants in the U.S. Under kaizen, workers are expected to continuously improve their work process for efficiency. Sounds good, right? However, researchers have documented how kaizen usually results in the intensification of work. Employees work an increasing number of tasks at maximum capacity at breakneck speed, often for little or no added rewards. Laurie Graham, who worked as a covert participant-observer at a car manufacturing plant that introduced kaizen, teamwork, and other new practices, argues that such practices are intended to enhance managerial control, without any corresponding benefits for the workers (see On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu: the Japanese Worker and the American Worker, 1995, ILR Press).

This past weekend, I finally saw creative use of kaizen for a higher purpose: inspiring thoughts about how we can re-imagine everyday urban life. Since the 2010 Burning Man theme is “Metropolis,” one artist set up a participatory art project at this year’s New York City Decompression, a post-Burning Man event. The artist provided instructions for kaizening life in NYC: think about how to improve NYC, write your suggestion on a shim, and tie your suggestion to one of three possible hanging sculptures. Most participants’ suggestions involved general mandates, such as more “love,” “improve the MTA (public transportation),” and “more cookies.” One of the few specific instructions, along with a drawing on the reverse, is below. Is Australia ready to make some exports?

Where I live, littering is not an uncommon act: a person will deliberately drop a bag of fast food waste onto the curb for someone else to clean up while a garbage can waits within 20 feet. Each day, the high-rise housing projects develop a small ring of debris along their buildings’ perimeters as a few residents drop trash from their windows (I’m not sure why: maybe their garbage chute/elevator doesn’t work, or residents are afraid to go into the hallway, or an alternative explanation that I am loathe to think about), which hard-hatted workers will clean up. The sidewalks are riddled with darkened pieces of gum and the occasional unmentionable.

Burning Man is a relief, if only for a few days. While volunteering with Media Mecca, I helped to sort and crush cans for recycling and picked up other moop (matter-out-of-place) during each shift. These daily clean-up efforts are especially important since the Burning Man event practices Leave-No-Trace (LNT). Since there is no garbage collection service, participants need to pack out their own garbage and belongings. In addition, the event site must be returned to a condition considered acceptable by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which manages the Nevada Black Rock Desert. As mentioned in a past post, Burning Man organizers are willing to use shame to get event participants to clean up.

After surveying the 2009 event site for moop, the Department of Public Works has put up a color-coded map. Green areas were deemed acceptable, yellow areas needed some work, and red areas were bad. Theme camps in the red and yellow areas will probably face social pressure to clean-up, or they may not be welcomed back.

Click on this photo to zoom in:

If New York City was mapped accordingly, areas of my neighborhood would probably be a deep, intense red.

This year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics are Oliver E. Williamson and political scientist Elinor Ostrom.

In organizational theory, we teach Williamson’s transaction costs economics (TCE) as a prelude to Mark Granovetter‘s work on embeddedness. To help students understand Williamson’s question about whether one should rely upon spot contracts or form an organization to handle transactions such as buying supplies or services, I ask students to imagine what their lives be like if they each had to negotiate with each professor about how much to pay them before each lecture. Upon reflection, students usually conclude that they would rather pay a set tuition to the university, which employs professors such as myself to run classes and other staff, such as the registrar to keep records and provide other needed services. This thought experiment quickly drives home the point that organizations had advantages over contracts for certain kinds of exchanges.

Back in the late 1990s, I read Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990, Cambridge University Press). I remember thinking that her work on how groups negotiated access to natural resources could help us understand open source, communes, and other collectives.

For other bloggers’ reactions to this year’s selection, click here, here, and here.

Congratulations, Williamson and Ostrom!

One of the interesting difficulties I have had with this research is re-contacting several interviewees and other people who helped with my research, so that I could gift them with my book and catch up on changes in their lives. While a social networking website has made this search process much easier, particularly when one person is linked with a cluster of other people, a few people are not so easy to find, particularly if their names have changed (or if they go by Burner names) or if they have lost contact with others.

During the past few months, I was stumped by how to reach three persons (Sasha Malchik, Ami Katz, and Marat Garagutdinov) who had done the 2005 Trainspotting art project, as their art project webpage had expired, and I could find no mention of their names online. About two weekends ago, I was at a birthday party attended mostly by Soviet ex-pats in Queens, NYC. When we veered onto the topic of Burning Man, one person mentioned that their friends had worked on art project involving a train station. So that’s how I found the Trainspotting artists! So, who knows what information you can find in the backyard of Queens? 🙂

Read my thoughts on the use of ethnography, a form of research in which a person observes and/or participates in activities, as well as the conduct of research more generally in a guest post on orgtheory.net. Enjoy!

One reader emailed me the following question: “What foundation texts would you recommend for a burner with very little knowledge of sociology and anthropology?” I’ve polled my colleagues, and here are several suggestions for where to start your journey to understanding society. In a future post, I’ll make additional suggestions for readings on organizations.

Sociology
In sociology, the three foundational theorists are Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. Much of subsequent research has built on these three theorists’ perspectives.

If you’re reading on your own, my colleagues suggested starting with the following works:
C. Wright Mills. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. Mills helps readers make links between seemingly “individual” experiences to larger societal issues.

Erving Goffman. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Ever wonder why everyone pretends to not notice when someone farts or commits a similar faux pas? Goffman shows us how we work together to smooth over such interactions. If you like this book, you’ll probably also enjoy Goffman’s other works, including Stigma and Asylums.

W.E. Dubois. 1978. On Sociology and the Black Community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. One of the founders of studies on inequality and race and ethnicity, with the aims of rectifying inequality.

Religion
Emile Durkheim. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. See why the “Man” may be a totem for a community!

Knowledge
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Learn how concepts, ideas, categories, common sense, etc. become taken-for-granted and unquestioned.

Post-modern theorists
Michel Foucault. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Jean Baudrillard. Books such as The System of Objects critique the place of consumption.

Communities and nations
Benedict Anderson. 2006. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. How do people conceive of themselves as a connected community, especially as a nation?

Anthropology (citations provided via a colleague and fellow Burner and religious studies scholar Lee Gilmore – since I’m not in an expert in these areas, I’ll present most without comment)
Mary Douglas’s books include Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Some organizations scholars like her 1986 How Institutions Think.

Anything by Edward E. Evans-Pritchard.

Anything by Clifford Geertz. In particular, his 1977 “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books) is a good place to start.

Anything by Claude Levi-Strauss.

Anything by Bronsilaw Malinowski. For example, his 1989 A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. This anthropologist’s diary reveals the ambivalent feelings and physical distress that a researcher might experience while in the field.

Marcel Mauss. 2000. The Gift. W.W. Norton. Understand how gift-giving reinforces ties among persons.

Anything by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.

Anything by Victor Turner, including The Ritual Process.

Good luck on your journey!

Ever wonder why a researcher is madly typing or scribbling down notes? Why she asks questions in a particular way?

For those of you who are interested in learning more about the conduct of qualitative research, including observations and interviews, please see my latest guest blog post at orgtheory.net. In this post, I suggest books and articles.

In an earlier post, I shared a link to Craig Duff’s piece, “5 Things Cities Can Learn From Burning Man.”

One reader wanted to know more about the fourth lesson, when Larry Harvey talks about “shame [being] more efficacious than virtue.” Rather than speculating, I emailed Craig Duff to ask him to elaborate on that point. Duff emailed back to explain that Harvey was referring to how Burners practice “Leave No Trace,” in which they pack out their own trash. In the past, Burning Man organizers would publish a “list of shame” identifying theme camps by name that had left behind debris. Fellow Burners would then chastise those camps. As many active Burners know, reputation matters. The “stick” of (potential) public humiliation is enough to compel some people to comply.

On the other hand, what’s even more compelling is Burning Man’s innovative use of “carrots.” That is, people think of creative ways to make otherwise dreary activities – like recycling or picking up trash – fun and even enjoyable. In my book, I talk about the origins and intent of Recycle Camp, which collects and crushes aluminum cans. Co-founder Simon Hagger wanted to make the activity of recycling fun for people, so he built a special pedal-powered contraption to crush cans, and he also gave mallets for people to hand-crush cans. He said that some people seemed to imagine their least favorite person, such as their boss, as the target while whacking the cans. (Managers, take note: maybe you can kill two birds with one stone: sublimate your underlings’ unhappy feelings into recycling.)

Recycle Camp still continues that tradition today. Check out this photo of Recycle Camp from this past event, 2009:

Volunteers bicycle around the city to collect cans, and people also bring their cans to Recycle Camp. The fellow at the left is transferring collected cans into a container, which he will then dump onto the sorting table. At the sorting table, people push recyclable cans towards the middle, where a person (in this photo, the guy wearing the white vest) pedals two large wheels that crush the cans for recycling.

So there you have it: Burning Man’s version of the carrot and the stick. To close, Duff’s take-away point for cities is to “foster…virtue, even if you have to shame people into it.”

In the past week, I’ve guest-blogged two posts about conducting research on orgtheory.net. These two posts cover areas that often don’t get discussed in academic publications, partly for lack of space, partly out of convention. Click here for: “gaining access to organizations.” Click here for: “Research, the IRB, and Risk: “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.”“