Co-Operating in New Ventures—Instead of Fighting over Old Football Rivalries
October 6, 2008
by Robert A. Letcher, Ph.D.
In a previous column, I mentioned my amazement over how reflective writing often makes me. A road trip this past weekend reminded me that writing isn’t the only way I get myself reflective; and I needed a reminding, because health problems, high gas prices and low income have driven me to drastically reduce the frequency, length, and duration of such trips.
I suppose that Yogi Berra may have explained at least some of the connection between reflecting and road-tripping when he said, “You can see a lot just by looking.” Road trips afford extended opportunities to “look”—and not just to look at what’s “out there”, either. The sine qua non of a road trip—a vehicle—creates a safe, “in here” space that not only allows me to just look at what’s “out there”, but also allows me to look at my own “in here”, in hope of seeing just how I go about looking at what’s “out there”. Looking into my own “in here” is more than just looking: it’s also an opening to learning.
This essay is about some learning that occurred to me on my recent (and admittedly, short) road trip from Columbus to Ann Arbor. As many readers may know, there is a major rivalry between universities located in the two cities. I was born in eastern Ohio, in a small, once-thriving, now-dying steel town. I am a two-time alum of the university in Ann Arbor. But, some of my best friends graduated from the one in Columbus. So, I internalize the rivalry.
I moved to Ann Arbor in the early 1970’s, because of the progressive politics practiced there, and the quality of the university. While there, I admit to getting caught up in the rivalry between the two schools, including screaming, “Go Blue”, and drinking Labatt’s Blue on Saturdays in the Fall, and hating Woody Hayes year ‘round. It’s easy to get caught up in such things—and, I did… for awhile.
Meanwhile, the demise of steel was well underway back in Pittsburgh, near my home town. And, closer to my then-hometown, Ann Arbor, the demise of the domestic auto industry had already gotten underway. I recall the business magazine cover sarcastically asking which of GM’s nearly identical looking products was the Cadillac (or was it a Chevrolet?). Then Michael Moore lampooned Roger Smith in Roger and Me, after which GM’s board bailed out GM, basically by paying Smith to retire.
It was during this period that I started wondering about insanities around the Ann Arbor-Columbus rivalry. There were better ways to spend time than drinking myself stupid cheering for my school’s football players to beat the other school’s players stupid: the modern equivalent of “fiddling while Rome burned”.
Some years later, I found myself studying for the doctorate at a university in the Finger Lakes region of New York—OK, Cornell. There, I read John P. Hoerr’s, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry (1988). It’s a painful but well-told story that helped me understand a formative part of my life.
One of Hoerr’s anecdotes for some reason came back to me on the recent road trip I mentioned above. Hoerr recounted how football rivalries among and between steel towns along Pittsburgh’s three rivers served to divide people as workers; and, how that—whether inadvertently or intentionally (on the part of mill owners, stockholders, managers, and such)—helped divide people as citizens. Such division reduced the capacity of citizens to organize public resistance to corporate strategies for such things as investment and disinvestment, R&D, labor relations, to mention a few. In time, the accumulation of all those things made steel production in Pittsburgh. And, in the words of one everyday worker whom Hoerr quoted for his title, “…the wolf finally came”.
That was all running through my head as I crossed into Michigan. Football rivalry divides people? Check. Common challenge looming for entire region, not just for each of the two states separately? Check. Fallen-behind, technology-wise? Check. Beyond that, one of the cable news channels in Ohio regularly broadcasts a commercial sponsored by the Michigan Economic Development Authority which is clearly intends to persuade companies now located in Ohio (where the commercials are aired) to relocate to Michigan.
My point is by now clear: instead pouring our brain cells into hating the people on the other side of the border, the two groups would do well to save some brain cells for cooperating, innovating, organizational risk taking, and the like. Before that wolf finally comes to both states!
Comments
11 Comments »
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Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm
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How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely
This is something that is used to train mental health providers. They have a board game. The only criterion for winning is getting the most goods to market. You are given a fixed set of resources [trucks] and a truck can be used to either block the opponent from going to market OR to get your own goods to market but not both. A path blocked is blocked for everyone - no one can use it or the truck that blocks it. So to block the opponent costs you both a truck and a route you could otherwise use for getting your own goods to market. Remember the ONLY criterion for winning is getting the most goods to market. Impeding the other guy does not win for you. Yet in every game I saw played, every team went for blocking the opponent with at least half of their fleet. Cooperation was only proposed by one person in all the games I saw played and she was shouted down by her team mates.
What you are proposing is apparently a very difficult procedure for humans. Smacking down the opponent seems to occur to us before even our own benefit. I see it every day.
How would you propose we start learning to put co-operation on the table?
~Norla
Acculturation IS difficult to overcome. Were all the “players” you observed Westerners?
Have you ever seen non-volleyball played non-competitively? Volleyball is the only game I know of that can be played that way. How? By having only one, twelve-person rotation, rather than two, six-person rotations. Does that give you any ideas? I’ll have to think more about it. [But i do have something moving now!]
Thanks for asking.
Bob,
I have seen t-ball played and have played non-competitive tennis myself. Non-competitive tennis is fun, hard work, and fascinating to watch. The aim is to keep the ball in play and prevent everyone from missing. So when the non-competitive thing works, it is educational and entertaining. But putting it into action in a political arena is mind boggling. Statesmanship among nations I can see it working. In a legislature after the body is elected it would work. But during an election I see some barriers to using a co-operative approach.
Norla
Norla–thanks again for asking. I have approached this situation as an exercise in trust-building and learning, which are better seen as entailing mutually constituting efforts In such efforts, success is NOT assured, can’t be taken for granted.
If something comes from the initiative I just referred to, you may receive a request for reporting on it.
Bob
When you have a response we’ll be happy to publish it. This is such an important issue and goes to the absolute bedrock of humanity’s fight for survival against it’s only enemy - itself.
I can see cooperation between sovereign states, but only if the sides agree to work to understand the opposing arguments. Basic negotiation: what’s in it for either party. The tendency to block the opponent and avoid cooperation, is simply the Carl Rove strategy. The mantra today is that negative campaigning “works.” Cooperation is on the outs in school volleyball, political campaigning, negotiation with one’s own ALLIES, and in the UN. It’s sort of like the irrationality of stock market swings and panics: If it has caught on, it will continue if only because it has caught on. The condition has become so starkly recognizable that even anthropologists (famous for obfuscating with jargon intended to clarify) have reduced all clash-of-values, “world-view,” acculturation and frames of reference to one over-arching concept: That of the “other.” A question might be whether focusing on this overarching concept of “otherization” can help us understand how to develop regimes of “cooperation.” Interesting seminar, folks!
Karl Rove strategy is one of the most frustrating in the world. Yes it works - but EVERYONE, including Karl, would come out better if he were cooperating instead of combating. Of course, life is not a simple zero sum game and cannot be lived in the laboratory, not even the social science lab. But I have seen the results of switching from combat to cooperation and it’s phenomenal. If you can get both sides to enter into the cooperative stance, more is accomplished toward everyone’s goals.
I heard the argument the other day that “negative ads work” and therefore should be used. The young woman gave the example: “You’re talking about them. You’re listening to them. You’re debating them. They work or you would not be doing that.” Which means that she, and others like her, simply do not SEE the alternative. They only see the win/lose scenario and what ‘wins’ for one or the other. That is the only setting in which “negative ads work”.
Cooperation is a concept that goes against human nature. It is not the way evolution happened. From the paramecium on up, animals compete for existence. Paramecium Joe eats the food and thus grows and dominates the food supply area obstructing Paramecium Bill. Thus Joe wins and procreates and more little Joes are born with the same intelligence level as the current Joe and go on to become plumbers who make idiotic racist comparisons between Barack Obama and Sammy Davis Junior.
THAT is the level at which the human race is continuing to operate. “I win you lose” is the way life works. Our intellect and our compassion have yet to raise us above that level of understanding.
When I try to discuss the effectiveness of co-operative strategies with many political people, they only see it as “What if I co-operate and the other guy doesn’t? Then I lose.” And they simply cannot seem to get past that.
So for me the BIG question in this is “How do you get both sides to give co-operative strategies a try?”
Thanks “g” for your comment. It may be that the otherization you mention–which i take to be the reecognition that different starting points and different lifeways leads to different ways of apprehending/valuing what is “out there”–is the primary sine qua non of coming together notwithstanding those differences. As i see it, thanks to long-time teacher-to-me Donald N. Michael, social engineering won’t and can’t work; only “future responsive societal learning”, which necessarily includes acknowledging others in ways we must still learn how to do–only that can work.
Bob
Bob-
“Social engineering” is a perjorative term for any attempt by authorities, or anyone with the power or opportunity, to change group behavior. The term is used by people who see flaws in the establishment plan, or who resent some of the ramifications. Actually any planned change is in trouble when the “target society” is called just that: a “target society.” Further, the plan is in trouble when key persons of influence within that society feel exclused from the plan, and when the “target” result ultimately does not belong to society members. This covers a whole lot of ground. Illusions that, in Iraq ca. 2008, “the surge is working” owe much to the work by Gen. Petraeus and a cast of many professionals. But the basic premise of the surge and “human terrain systems” (the DoD label alone is enough to turn off anyone in the “target society”) is from outsiders, is politically loaded, contains unsolvable issues stemming from the plan’s military origins, both real and perceived, and could lead to future violent revitalization movement phenomena.
Is that jargon-laden enough for you? The premise that no “human engineering” can work, whether it’s narrowly conceived with overarching inclusiveness, or whether it’s heavy-handed and imposed from without by one’s “betters,” is too broad. Planned change can work if all parties like the changes, and the changes don’t conflict with other societal values or practical matters. The cushy-soft terms, “wants and needs” have been used to describe what planned change must address. Job attendance has been an issue in “planned social change.” I can think of a Navaho example off the top of my head.
Planned change can work also if imposed from without over years until all resistance quits through fatigue. The trouble with this last example of “victory in Iraq” success is that generations of resentment may fester and grow into new movements months, years, or even decades later. A good example of “successful” cultural bludgeoning is the near absence of surviving angst over 800-plus years of Celtic subjugation in Auld Britain. There’s a clever Welsh language revival in street signage, and lots of scholarly and popular interest in Welsh language and history, but nothing that rose to the level of Irish violence, which had lots of more modern stimulus anyway.
One could go on, but I’ve long since run beyond my sources, both available and unavailable.
New Age ideas against condescending “planned change” aren’t far off, but they are seldom backed up by existing research. Research is GOOOOD. Generalized labeling (”social engineering”) CAN BE accurate, but it becomes more interesting when you dig deeply into the basis and actually analyze the results, most of them pretty bad.
George
Hello George — and thanks again for commenting. Also, thank you for sharing your name. I must say that it would be great to have this conversation live. I think are probably much closer in our views then this e-mail exchange suggests.
For example, and thus to begin with, I have a hard time thinking of postmodernity, which I take to be your view as well, given in your comment in your earlier post concerning “other”. I’ve always said that a full stomach and an empty stomach are on equal footing phenomena logically, but there is still an important difference — and I committed my effort to filling empty stomachs.
On the other hand I don’t see a good way to avoid what I see as an avoidable aspect of being human: people are different; they learn differently; they value differently, and as a result, apprehend or see differently. And I despair over trying to span such differences. Yet, as Don Michael said to be in a private conversation: it’s not that it will work, if that nothing else has a chance to work.
Before I go any further, I want to assure you that my mention of social engineering was not intended — which is to say I did not intend it as — a slam on you. Let me explain… I was an engineering student from 1967-1971 and again from 1973- 1975. In the interim I designed fast breeder reactors. In 1975 I took advantage of an opportunity at the University of Michigan to switch to public policy studies, and a program specifically intended to attract science and engineering and mathematics students into public policy. At this very moment still I can remember and feel house sure I was that I could figure out how to make things right. I recall thinking of myself sitting down at the social steering wheel and optimizing everything using all the rational techniques I learned. Over the years since then, and largely beginning with my first class from Don Michael, I began to learn how foliage that was. Over the years, I’ve been paying my dues for not fitting in. I feel that I have little to gain by offending you and I hope I haven’t offended you.
Your comments actually change as time when I have been working to present Don Michael’s ideas on societal learning to a local Futurists group — so it really has been on my mind. I’ve always been an influence so strongly by Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach: “the philosophers have understood the world, in many ways; the task, however, is to change it.” That motivates my efforts every day. So yes I don’t like to sit around and talk about “the other” ether — at least not for its own sake. I just they vet it’s impossible to have major social change without considering what other people think. And I do think it’s possible to have major social change at a level lower than that of sovereign state’s.
I’m sorry, but I must run off to a meeting. I will try to get back onto this subject later.
Bob
No offense noticed and none taken…:-)
Interesting that you came from an engineering background and actually observed the shift in world view from “know-how-can-do” (ultra Western/North American) to social-analytical.
That’s classic.
I’ll be preparing an intro to cultural anthropology class via Central Texas College’s Gatesville PRISON campus, Jan-Apr 09. I can handle it, budget-wise, because I earned (that’s EARNED) a civil service retirement, kept some health (knock on wood) and can afford saltines….
Rumor has it that inmates often make great college students. All the standard stats on % of American population incarcerated, false imprisonment, actual dangerous individuals, etc. make for a situation in which my teaching experience might resemble some form of social work or sociological fieldwork.
Our society, particularly in central Tejas, fails to take such subjectmatter seriously, and they relegate the new hire to the prison campus. Perhaps it’s a step toward a more “conventional” college teaching role, and I may find I actually like it. But for now it’s a start perhaps.
The point is: I’ll be concentrating on the concept of social organization, learning, and change, with all the can-do’s and can’t-do’s…..You know the “concept” of culture, the “perspective” needed to view differing cultures/societies as objectively as possible.
The postmodern view has merit in such a situation, because we necessarily view these differing phenomena from the standpoint of our own world view (you’ve probably heard the standard German term for this, if you’ve been exposed to this academically,… but I’ll spare you. Its initials are “Weltanschauung,”….. oops. it slipped out….. meaning literally “world view.” Thus we bias our objectivity by simply observing and writing our observations down in English.
The reason postmodernism doesn’t do us much good except in a purely theoretical sense, is that its proponents overstate the case. Following a postmodern script, we can’t justify our pursuit of anthropology to the society that pays our salaries, grants, bills, etc.
(Example: How do we explain ourselves to a Yani Indian who wanders out of the California backcountry in 1910, and who believes he “is” a wood duck? Not in any Western objective sense, but in the Yani sense. Verdict? We really can’t, at least not right away. See Kroeber’s work (early 20th C.) on Ishi).
I hope some of this manages to make sense. I’m writing fast, “shooting from the hip” running off at the keyboard and moving on here. But again, have no fear, I was commenting on my understanding of where your understanding comes from. And in my experience most engineers tend to look down at anything that’s not set in logical “positivist” concrete (ie, tech, western science….)… so… we’re stuck.
What to do?……Oops, there I go again with “do.” one can’t “do”….
gt