What is collaboration?

A recent article in the New York Times documents the apparent rise of groupthink as a fashionable and desirable path to creative, success, and acheivement. The article claims that there is a prevailing trend towards collaboration that has been forced on an unsuspecting workforce. Despite this push for collaborative activity, the author argues that many of the best creative work occurs in solitude (or at least individually).

This article intrigued me. In the psycoology department where I study, the prevailing theoretical position is that humans are, by nature, essentially social creatures. Now, this is somewhat different from the claims made in the article. There, the emphasis was on collaboration as a more effective mode of work. The theoretical claims about humans essentially social nature instead argue that the higher thought processes characteristic of human beings are social, or communicative in nature. This view is derived primaril from Vygotskian theory which holds that thought is an inverted version of language. Children first learn to communicate with others, and then they turn these communicative skills inwardly on themselves, engaging with themselves as a subject. Vygotsky also claims that thought processes that occur within individuals are not essentially different from interpersonal communication (e.g., having a conversation).

Much of this can be related harmoniously to the (claimed) prevailing zeitgeist that stresses collaborative, social activity as the site of the most productive work. As revealed in the Times article, businesses are setting up their offices to maximize collaboration. This involves knocking down walls and creating areas for joint activity.

What the article (as well as its claimed zeitgeist) as well as Vygotskian social psychology are missing is the distinction between different types of social/collaborative activity. The result of people working together is not a single type of human activity, but can instead be broken down into two broad categories. The first is simple interpersonal dialogue, i.e., formal or informal interactions with others in which thought processes occur between two people. This is surely what Vygotsky had in mind when he talked about interpersonal psychological processes, and it seems to be what many businesses are trying to foster by redesigning their workspaces. Vygotsky is very accurate in claiming that this type of interaction is very similar to individual thought processes. When we bounce ideas off of others and get their reactions, we are doing much the same thing we do when we consider ideas alone in solitude. In both cases, there is a dialogical structure.

This type of social interaction is not the only result of collaborative activity. There is another way in which humans collaborate which, while considered in many fields (particularly sociology), is often grouped in or ignored in the individual-group debate. This second form of interaction is that which occurs when groups of collaborating individuals work together to form a group that is an agent with properties not found in its individual members. Individual people carry out the actions that comprise the activity of the grounp, but a logic emerges from the whole with a purpose that is not necessarily held by any individual member. These "higher purposes" should be distinguished from the unintentional side effects of action which are a feature of any type of action (In doing things for a purpose, there are bound to be side effects that we did not anticipate and which may or may not conform to our motives in performing the action in the first place).

The emergent actions that I'm talking about don't represent the goals of any individual members of a collaborative group. They are the product of the combined actions of the members. Furthermore, the group may be structured in such a way as to ensure the continued carrying out of the component actions which comprise the whole, meaning that the whole becomes something of an adaptive, "living" system. This type of activity is beautifully illustrated by the bank in The Grapes of Wrath, which Steinbeck describes as a monster that eats money:

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”

The bank in this instance is in many ways the outcome of collaboration, but it is so qualitatively different from other forms of interpersonal activity that it makes no sense to group it in with them. Collaboration between two people does not necessarily result in a level of organization that has demands and interests that are separate from the individual people. With an organization such as a corporation, we begin to see such a level of organization.

The Demand-less nature of the occupy movement

Perhaps the most defining feature of the occupy movement in relation to other social movements is its lack of formal demands. This is something that has been both attacked and lauded. Critics say that formal demands provide a unified goal for action, and a way to measure the progress of the movement. Others claim that the lack of demands is a strength of the movement. They say that whatever demands would have to be made by the Occupy movement cannot be formulated given the current discourse. Therefore, the discourse must be changed (which they imply can be done with the demand-less movement). Some of the most articulate support for the lack of formal demands ironically came from The Onion, which, in a satirical piece, issued a call for demands to give the rest of the country a basis for rationalizing reasons to ignore the movement.

Yet, to really assess the lack of demands it is important to go beyond questions of what demands in general can or cannot do. These questions treat the movement as a scientific experiment by exploring the unique role that formal demands might play if they were present in the movement and everything else were precisely the same. The problem with this approach is that it treats the movement and its potential as somehow independent of the lack of formal demands. A more useful approach is to explore how the lack of demands has contributed to making the movement what it is.

I would like to consider the possibility that the lack of demands is uniquely well suited to the current state of the world, specifically the highly interconnected world of Occupy protesters who have virtually unlimited access to vast amounts of information. Just a generation ago, access to information was comparatively limited (to say the least). Information was available through televisions, radios, as well as books and information centers like libraries, but this availability was drawn out over time. Information was not "at our fingertips" but rather available to those who were willing to go out of their way, using a good deal of time to get it.

When we first consider the difference between now and then (a generation ago), the state of affairs concerning information then seems vastly inferior to now. The limited availability of information seems prison-like, preventing full awareness of the collective knowledge of human society. Yet, things are never this simple. The availability of information in a "print" society provided a context in which human action developed. By this I don't just mean learning how to use books or learn about the world from other people. I mean ways of consolidating one's thinking and turning knowledge into social action. There are norms for doing this. The process of learning about something and then reacting to what has been learned occurs in certain ways. We decide to act at a certain point in the learning process.

These norms are adapted to contexts with a certain availability of information. When that context changes, the norms must change with it. At this point in time, those of us who regularly use the internet are at the intersection of habits designed for a very different "information landscape" than the one that we live in. Information is ubiquituously available, yet we continue to act in ways that reflect a world of limited information.

The connection to the Occupy movement is not at all obvious from this, so I will spell it out. The lack of demands in the Occupy movement is the first indicator of the emergence of a new standard for social action. The lack of demands allows for participants in various discourses to join the movement and develop its meaning on their own terms, while simultaneously (through their participation) negotiating a collective meaning for the movement on a scale previously never seen.

This is not all. The ubiquity of information makes it more difficult to form a definite opinion on a particular topic. Previously, this had been facilitated by the difficulty of obtaining information, and the resulting tendency to make do with what one had and to synthesize it into a coherent body of thought. Now, with more information available than ever before, such a synthesis is continuously put off by the emergence of new information that challenges (often completely) one's previous assumptions. This makes a single, unified position difficult to reach, especially in matters of economics and politics which are massively complicated. The beauty of the lack of demands in the occupy movement is that it is impervious to these threats because of its vagueness. Members of the movement are not unified by specific principles that may have questionable lasting power. Instead, they are unified by an ever-shifting, malleable sense of purpose which allows for adaptation and development.