51. Getting It Done, Or Your Gift For Mine? – An Echo from the Philippines

Posted on August 13, 2011 by thormay

On a stopover in Manila a while back, I wan­dered into a book­shop, look­ing for some­thing that could give me a fix on “the” cul­tural mind­set of the Philip­pines. This is a coun­try with which I have had only brief con­tact. It was a silly aim, like pick­ing up one of those books with a title like “Inside China” or “Under­stand­ing Aus­tralia, the Lucky Coun­try” or “Secrets of the Roman Empire”. What you always get is a car­i­ca­ture, an acci­dent of some writer’s meet­ings and prej­u­dices, even if it is a pretty car­i­ca­ture. But prob­a­bly that’s all we get out of life any­way. You have to start some­where. In this case, I picked up a vol­ume called “Becom­ing a Guru”, which turned out to be an elite insider’s wry view of admin­is­tra­tion in the Philip­pines. His core theme was the per­va­sive fail­ure of “imple­men­ta­tion” in the Philip­pines, as opposed to grand plans and announce­ments. The author was one Dr Ramon Katig­bak, whom I thought of writ­ing to in order to probe a lit­tle more deeply. Unfor­tu­nately, he had just passed away. I wrote my unad­dressed let­ter any­way, with a nar­ra­tive seep­ing out that had less to do with the Philip­pines directly than with the cussed­ness of human man­age­ment gen­er­ally – a favourite per­sonal topic that if gifted with an ounce of com­mon sense, I would have put aside years ago in favour of wine, women and song.
Con­tinue read­ing →

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50. Why Write A PhD?

Posted on July 13, 2011 by thormay

note: here are fur­ther arti­cles deal­ing with the research process and the con­nun­drums of PhD study : Piss­ing On Every Lamp Post : the para­dox of schol­ar­ship; The Doctor’s Dilemma – Read­ing ver­sus Active Expe­ri­ence; How To Get The Degree You Want, or Are You A Fake?; with­rawal from PhD can­di­da­cies (Thor May) in 1988 & 1996;let­ter of PhD com­ple­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of New­castle, 2010;dis­ser­ta­tion, Lan­guage Tan­gle, 2010; some ref­er­ences from other writ­ers are at the end of this piece. Why Write A PhD? is dupli­cated on http://thormay.net here

Most of the dis­cus­sion here was writ­ten to myself in 2009. It was done as I fin­ished off what was to finally be the doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion which one par­tic­u­lar assem­bly of exam­in­ers and uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tors felt that they were able to accept. Their impri­matur would per­haps influ­ence my pub­lic cred­i­bil­ity, for what that was worth.  That is, what­ever else I wrote or said might have a higher stand­ing in the future for those within the aca­d­e­mic sub-cul­ture. Of course, I myself did not change a whit (not even in terms of ego enlarge­ment). It was also crys­tal clear that the great­est num­ber of fel­low humans found the term “PhD” or “Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy” either entirely mean­ing­less or a fresh cause for treat­ing its owner with sus­pi­cion. My cul­tural roots were after all in Aus­tralia, a spot famous for swag­ger­ing anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism. The ulti­mate Aus­tralian put-down is to call some­one a “know all”. There is never a short­age of  “know-noth­ing” char­ac­ters ready to cut any likely “know all” off at the knees. Oddly, the know-noth­ings become quite timid when faced with actual, com­plex prob­lems them­selves. ( These Aus­tralian cul­tural habits can clash vio­lently with the East Asian approach, where peo­ple think it is polite and morally right to “give face” to the other guy). Com­ing out of the Aus­tralian soup, my own engage­ment with the whole doc­toral enter­prise had always been ambiva­lent, even at the end, and some flavour of that self-doubt may be evi­dent below. I have pub­lished the doc­u­ment because oth­ers are at this moment going through the tor­tur­ous process of won­der­ing about their com­mit­ment to writ­ing a PhD. This may help them to crys­tal­lize their ideas, whether or not they agree with the sen­ti­ments I express.

1. Are PhD’s Really Orig­i­nal?

The inter­nal rules in uni­ver­si­ties rules which define a PhD invari­ably say that it must be an orig­i­nal con­tri­bu­tion to human knowl­edge. Ground break­ing dis­ser­ta­tions have indeed been writ­ten from time to time. In fact though, few PhDs amount to some grand, orig­i­nal con­tri­bu­tion to human knowl­edge. Many dis­ser­ta­tions do include fresh assem­blies of data, which may or may not be use­ful to some­one. How­ever, the inter­pre­ta­tion of the data found within these doc­u­ments is rarely orig­i­nal, except in a triv­ial sense.  Con­tinue read­ing →

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49. Cultural Operating Systems – Thoughts on Designing Cultures

Posted on September 5, 2010 by thormay

This (non-aca­d­e­mic) arti­cle cov­ers a lot of ter­ri­tory, noth­ing less than the “cul­tural oper­at­ing sys­tems” within which we live, how they have changed, and how they might be changed. There is a kind of arro­gance in toy­ing with the ele­ments of ‘big pic­ture’ issues like this. Nev­er­the­less every­one has sub­merged opin­ions or prej­u­dices or assump­tions on how it all works. By drag­ging his own sub­con­scious dregs into the light of day, this writer nei­ther hopes nor expects to change the world. Rather, this is an open invi­ta­tion for any reader to reflect and match their ideas against those of oth­ers.

1. Rev­o­lu­tion as cat­a­stro­phe: When it comes to kingly mat­ters, the dis­tance between the ruler and the ruled has rarely been doubted by either party, though in the cold light of day, both are nor­mally loath to change places. The French rev­o­lu­tion, and the Rus­sian rev­o­lu­tion to fol­low, not to men­tion com­mu­nist China’s ver­sion of rev­o­lu­tion, the Irani theo­cratic rev­o­lu­tion, America’s ‘shock and awe’ ver­sion of democ­racy in Iraq, and any num­ber of other pirou­ettes, have all been awful reminders that instant changes in the body politic are an open sesame to the most mur­der­ous brutes in the asy­lum. Rev­o­lu­tions of the swash­buck­ling vari­ety make nice TV epics, but for mere humans they are usu­ally a retreat to bar­barism. Con­tinue read­ing →

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47. The Contest for Competence (updated August 2013)

Posted on January 15, 2009 by thormay

If some peo­ple don’t break the rules some­times, then a nor­mal soci­ety will cease to func­tion. Break­ing the wrong rules for the wrong rea­sons is like break­ing legs though. And if every­one breaks the rules, then a soci­ety will dis­in­te­grate. A para­dox? Yes. See how this cake is baked…

The vec­tor in play is the scarce resource of com­pe­tence. Most peo­ple doing most things are mar­gin­ally com­pe­tent at best, and this is in every area of human activ­ity, taken in its aggre­gate. Any given indi­vid­ual may be good at one thing – cook­ing, music, his job, what­ever – but the aggre­gate of peo­ple doing any of those activ­i­ties will be indif­fer­ently capa­ble. In fact, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber will be seri­ously inca­pable, and they may do dam­age out of pro­por­tion to their num­bers. There will be a small num­ber who are bril­liant at this par­tic­u­lar thing.

The scarcity of com­pe­tence holds true in even the best edu­cated soci­eties and pro­fes­sions. Med­ical doc­tors, for exam­ple, are very, very often down­right dan­ger­ous (e.g. Null et al 2003: “Death by Med­i­cine”). Doc­tors are not unique in this mat­ter. A ten year study across multi­na­tional com­pa­nies showed that only 10% of man­agers are effec­tive (Bruch and Ghoshal 2004). Appar­ently all the hoopla of “Human Resource” man­agers makes lit­tle net dif­fer­ence. We could eas­ily extend this cat­a­logue of net incom­pe­tence into every trade and pro­fes­sion. Over­all how­ever, the bal­ance is pre­sumed to be more neg­a­tive in those com­mu­ni­ties where edu­ca­tion is deval­ued and oppor­tu­nity is not equal.

Some com­pe­ten­cies are straight­for­ward to eval­u­ate. You can change a bicy­cle tyre or you can’t. Oth­ers have shift­ing cri­te­ria: for exam­ple, when can you be judged as “flu­ent” in a for­eign lan­guage? Yet other com­pe­ten­cies are loaded with value judge­ments: is this or that president/prime min­is­ter com­pe­tent or not? As the com­plex­i­ties of mod­ern soci­eties mul­ti­ply, these judge­ments become more dif­fi­cult.

Very often, as mem­bers of one cul­ture, soci­ety or nation we judge rival groups to be com­pe­tent or incom­pe­tent. This has major con­se­quences for deci­sion mak­ing in both busi­ness and gov­ern­ment. From these com­par­isons, we may wish to reform our own soci­ety, or that of oth­ers. Com­pe­tency at reform is amongst the most dif­fi­cult of all endeav­ors. If you want to change the world, then change what chil­dren wish for mea­sured against what chil­dren learn they can have.

By ten years of age I think that most chil­dren have at least a good work­ing model in their mind of how their par­ents con­strue the world, its val­ues and its oppor­tu­ni­ties. They might con­tinue to eval­u­ate that model, and not unusu­ally reject at least parts of it for a while. Some­times dra­matic life expe­ri­ence will turn those expec­ta­tions upside down (e.g. chil­dren in wars). How­ever we also know that cul­tures have extra­or­di­nary per­sis­tence, and are extremely dif­fi­cult to re-engi­neer. Inescapably, each child must learn to man­age change as part of grow­ing up. Often that is not easy. Some­times it is cat­a­strophic. Nature puts sex on top of the parental tem­plate, and fools chil­dren into think­ing it is the most impor­tant thing of all. Yet all the striv­ing for sex­ual con­quest and its sub­li­ma­tions is also shaped and dri­ven by the child’s acquired parental tem­plate of how the world works. Some parts of that tem­plate, like love and nur­ture, are found every­where, though twisted in many ways. Many other things are mag­ni­fied by this cul­ture or that. The acquis­i­tive obses­sion is one, nar­cis­sism another. Through­out the whole growth process are oppor­tu­ni­ties for suc­cess and fail­ure, acquired skills for com­pe­tence or a resigned con­vic­tion of being no good at this or that.

Much of the evil in the world comes from attempts to con­ceal or com­pen­sate for incom­pe­tence and fail­ure. The man­ner of han­dling fail­ure is one of those keys to the heart where learn­ing begins before 10 years of age. If we could only learn to value doing what­ever we do as well as we can, then much that is ugly would van­ish. Can we learn as chil­dren to respect those who do a good job above those who have a big house and three cars in the dri­ve­way? Can we wish not to despise the own­ers of big houses, but to admire the skill of the car­pen­ters who made them?

These dilem­mas over how to find and focus our small reserves of com­pe­tence are as old as the human cav­al­cade. Only the avail­able tools have changed. The con­test between soci­eties and groups, ancient or mod­ern, is not about ‘cap­i­tal­ism’ and ‘com­mu­nism’, or all the other ‘~isms’ . It is about the strug­gle to cap­ture the scarce car­ri­ers of com­pe­tence. They may be bought by cash or pres­tige. They may be kid­napped by civil pow­ers or by orga­nized crime. They may be lured into a closed sys­tem such as both clas­si­cal and mod­ern Chi­nese offi­cial­dom (i.e. as man­darins, in that case by exam­i­na­tions), and there­after kept in a cage to ser­vice some elite. There are a myr­iad of other traps and lures to have the com­pe­tent do what oth­ers lack the where­withal to man­age.

The utopian ideal of a “best soci­ety”, the kind fan­ta­sized in reli­gions, ide­olo­gies and polit­i­cal elec­tion speeches, might be one where there is a free mar­ket to trade com­pe­tence, a mar­ket con­strained only by restric­tions on intent to harm oth­ers, and leav­ened by val­ues of trust, good­will and gen­eros­ity. It would be a mar­ket where every per­son was at lib­erty to max­imise their own com­pe­tence, and where their abil­i­ties attracted real respect, not sim­ply accord­ing to their wealth or power.

We know of course that ‘best soci­eties’ do not exist, even as we strive for them. In the mean­time, and here’s the rub, we have to deal with soci­eties where the intent to harm oth­ers, phys­i­cally or psy­cho­log­i­cally, is not only per­mit­ted but man­dated in many forms. We have do deal with, and in, soci­eties where con­for­mity is imposed and pro­pa­gan­dized for the pur­pose of keep­ing in power indi­vid­u­als and groups whose main nour­ish­ment is an addic­tion to the nar­cotic of power, how­ever ruth­lessly obtained and exer­cised. We have to deal with the world as we find it.

In deal­ing with the daily world, yet remain­ing true to our objec­tive of valu­ing com­pe­tence, it may well hap­pen that we have to break this ‘rule’ or that. A strict adher­ence to pre­scribed meth­ods may lead to incom­pe­tent out­comes. The judge­ment is not an easy one, and never has been. As the old say­ing has it, ‘laws are for the obe­di­ence of fools and the guid­ance of wise men’. Rules though are human cre­ations, somebody’s tool for enforc­ing their idea of a desir­able real­ity. In 1987 I had just arrived as a new uni­ver­sity lec­turer in the small island state of Fiji when the mil­i­tary leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, walked into par­lia­ment and announced the end of democ­racy. “Accept the new real­ity”, he advised, “go home”. Well, not so quickly mis­ter. There are times when we have to make our real­i­ties, or try to, and break some rules if nec­es­sary, even at risk. Rabuka him­self had done just that.

Often it is not the cod­i­fied laws, or the dic­tats of coup lead­ers, that are most dif­fi­cult to accept or reject sen­si­bly. More often we are entan­gled by those invis­i­ble bands of steel, the unspo­ken rules of behav­iour that define ideas about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in every cul­ture, or what works and what doesn’t. It is our unex­am­ined assump­tions about accepted wis­dom which bind us. Indeed, life is even harder than that. Above all, none of us now lives in a sin­gle cul­ture. We switch roles. We are work­ers and investors, tourists and hosts, dri­vers, cus­tomers, vot­ers, par­ents and stu­dents, who knows what else … all at once. In some roles we feel per­son­ally com­pe­tent and in some we do not. We travel in con­cen­tric as well as inter­sect­ing bands of cul­tures where black and white shift with the speed of a mov­ing spot­light.

There may be times when the whole show falls apart. We get it wrong. Maybe an entire soci­ety gets it wrong. Spin fails. Con­fi­dence is lost, and we can’t buy it back with a fist full of dol­lars. The chasm beck­ons. Then what? Our ances­tors have been here before. Fight­ing paral­y­sis and fear, instinc­tively we look around for the mas­ter of a weapon in which we can trust, a light sword of the imag­i­na­tion. Char­la­tans may step forth, magi­cians, ped­dlers of faith and holy bones, pop­ulists and wannabe dic­ta­tors. In the end, if our instincts serve us right, we will look for guid­ance to the teacher who offers com­pe­tence and good­will, for these are the skills and qual­i­ties we need so des­per­ately to rebuild again in our own minds.

 

Ref­er­ences

Bruch, Heike & Sumantra Goshal (2004) A Bias for Action. Har­vard Busi­ness Press. Sum­ma­rized online by Cyril Pereira in the Asia Sen­tinel, 21 Feb­ru­ary 2012 : “Only 10% of man­agers effec­tive? What a shock!” at http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4255&Itemid=629

Gary Null PhD, Car­olyn Dean MD ND, Mar­tin Feld­man MD, Deb­ora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD (2003) Death by Med­i­cine. A three part report online at http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/11/26/death-by-medicine-part-one.aspx . Based on Kohn L, ed, Cor­ri­gan J, ed, Don­ald­son M, ed. (1999) To Err Is Human: Build­ing a Safer Health Sys­tem. Wash­ing­ton, DC: National Acad­emy Press; 1999

 

 

Bio: Thorold (Thor) May has taught Eng­lish lan­guage and Lin­guis­tics in Aus­tralia, Ocea­nia and East Asia for thirty-five years. His inter­ests extend well beyond aca­d­e­mic lin­guis­tics and teach­ing how­ever. He has a spe­cial fas­ci­na­tion with the dynam­ics of social change. His doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion, Lan­guage Tan­gle, dealt with lan­guage teach­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity. Many of its con­clu­sions were exten­si­ble to knowl­edge worker pro­duc­tiv­ity in gen­eral.

Con­tact: thormay@yahoo.com (pub­lic e-mail and spam trap)

Web­site:  The Pas­sion­ate Skep­tic http://thormay.net

Research Papers:

1. Mendeley.com –  http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/thorold-may/

2. Academia.edu – http://independent.academia.edu/thormay

Blogs:

Thor’s lan­guage teach­ing notes  http://thorslanguageandteachingnotes.byeways.net/
Thor’s new China diary http://thormay.net/ChinaDiary2/
Thor’s unwise ideas http://thorsunwiseideas.byeways.net/
Thor’s videos & record­ings http://thorsvideo.byeways.net/
Thor’s Aus­tralian spaces http://thorsaustralianspaces.byeways.net/
Thor’s short cuts http://thorshortcuts.byeways.net/

 

All opin­ions expressed in Thor’s Unwise Ideas and The Pas­sion­ate Skep­tic are entirely those of the author, who has no aim to influ­ence, pros­e­ly­tize or per­suade oth­ers to a point of view. He is pleased if his writ­ing gen­er­ates reflec­tion in read­ers, either for or against the sen­ti­ment of the argu­ment.

“The Con­test for Com­pe­tence ” © copy­righted to Thor May; all rights reserved 2012

 

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37. Some Mysteries of Language Learning

Posted on May 2, 2005 by thormay

Thor May
2005 – 2012

An expert is a fool a thou­sand miles from home. Hav­ing suc­cess­fully failed to learn about nine lan­guages, I’m a vet­eran lan­guage learn­ing imbe­cile, always a thou­sand miles from suc­cess, and an eter­nally hope­ful begin­ner. I’ve also had the cheek to teach my native lan­guage to hope­ful novices for over thirty years, which some­times leads them and oth­ers to mis­take me for a wannabe guru. The sheer hypocrisy of this dilemma should con­demn me to embar­rassed silence forever, yet I per­sist prob­ing the rea­sons and reme­dies for my own lan­guage learn­ing incom­pe­tence. After all, my exas­per­ated search is surely shared by mil­lions of oth­ers. The dis­cus­sion which fol­lows is infor­mal, but makes seri­ous points. It builds on an orig­i­nal e-mail exchange with a cor­re­spon­dent in 2005. 

 [illus­tra­tion cour­tesy of Dr Phap Damwho unlike me made a suc­cess­ful tran­si­tion into the world of another lan­guage.]

Con­tinue read­ing →

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32. A Harvest of Souls – Talking to Those Other Fools

Posted on November 6, 2004 by thormay

“They had the infor­ma­tion, but not the knowl­edge” – David Ignatius in the IHT, dis­cussing infor­ma­tion over­load in the CIA; 30 Octo­ber 2001

Com­mon wis­dom on the net­works is that George Bush won the 2004 Amer­i­can elec­tion by har­vest­ing the souls of America’s lumpen pro­le­tariat. This was made pos­si­ble because almost alone amongst West­ern democ­ra­cies, Amer­ica has a large com­mit­ted reli­gious con­stituency, and any con­stituency, whether it be for reli­gion, foot­ball or col­lect­ing bot­tle tops, is a hon­ey­pot for the polit­i­cally ambi­tious.

There is a kind of self-evi­dent truth about the polit­i­cal potency of reli­gion in Amer­ica. How­ever, I think it is a sur­face truth which misses some under­ly­ing insights. Are ordi­nary Amer­i­can peo­ple really so dif­fer­ent from ordi­nary Euro­pean or Aus­tralian peo­ple? Yes, these Amer­i­cans are famously igno­rant of the wider world. They are insu­lar in their ideas, but polite to strangers. They are quickly offended, and ruinously liti­gious. They are spec­tac­u­larly self-indul­gent with their diets, lifestyles and the pro­lifi­gate use of mate­rial resources. These char­ac­ter­is­tics may be extreme, but none are unique. The pre­ced­ing descrip­tion could fit any num­ber of my Aus­tralian coun­try­men.

Indeed, Aus­tralians have also just re-elected a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment. As in Bush’s Amer­ica, that gov­ern­ment was essen­tially elected by so-called mid­dle and lower class peo­ple even though the declared and covert poli­cies of the gov­ern­ment arguably run coun­ter to the inter­ests of the work­ing elec­torate. Aus­tralia is not a coun­try given to overt reli­gion : about 15% of peo­ple go to church reg­u­larly, and the towns are dot­ted with empty churches (like much of Europe).

Bush did indeed use the reli­gious elec­torate, but was that his secret weapon? I think not – not at base. The instru­ment used so effec­tively by Bush, and by his Aus­tralian alter ego, Howard, was the latent anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism which per­me­ates much of both cul­tures. In the Amer­i­can case, the Bushites were able to marry anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism to a faith based move­ment. Faith cor­rupts, and absolute faith cor­rupts absolutely. Bush and Howard were utterly men­da­cious in manip­u­lat­ing anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism as a pop­ulist weapon, but that is not the point.

The point is that anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism is not equally avail­able in all cul­tures for polit­i­cal mis­use. There are parts of con­tem­po­rary Europe and else­where where it is not a social hand­i­cap to be known as some­one with an excep­tion­ally effi­cient brain. There are places where indi­vid­u­als who chal­lenge accepted wis­dom are not con­sid­ered cul­tural lep­ers and polit­i­cal trai­tors.
Con­tinue read­ing →

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30. The End of War

Posted on September 12, 2004 by thormay

In 1066 William the Con­queror hacked down a few British natives and did a neat takeover job on merry Eng­land. He wasn’t the first or the last to throw the dice for glory like this. These days his kind is best kept amused by build­ing, raid­ing, mar­ry­ing and betray­ing those vir­tual king­doms known as busi­ness cor­po­ra­tions. The teem­ing hordes of career offi­cers and foot sol­diers, whose sex­ual fan­tasies are met by serv­ing some other mas­ter, are also cor­ralled behind the cor­po­rate logos of com­pa­nies great and small.

The remain­ing testos­terone of the swag­ger­ing male is mostly mopped up in a hardy trek between the fridge and TV couch, as vic­ar­i­ous heroes slog it out in mass spec­ta­tor sports, and cin­e­matic mus­cle-men prac­tice mass slaugh­ter in Hol­ly­wood or its badge-engi­neered TV stu­dio clones from Shang­hai to Buenos Aires to Tim­buktu. The shadow of female aggres­sion half over­lays the male ver­sion, like a Venn dia­gram, and half arcs into its own silk and frilly ver­sion of sex­ual con­quest, com­pe­ti­tion and exploita­tion.
Con­tinue read­ing →

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