September 20, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

What is going on with this wonderful hometown of mine?

When I grew up in Toronto, it used to be proudly called “The City the Works.” And it was. And it did. But not any more. It makes me mad and disappointed and activist. Toronto should be renamed “Broken City.”

Arrgh. I’ve got to get all this off of my chest. It’s been two years of living here and this Broken City bugs me every day. First let me say that Toronto still has so many good things going for it that make it a great place to live. The city itself is incredibly cosmopolitan, a lot of fun, has great architecture, cool politics, good bars and lots of beer choice, a fantastic & accepting attitude, top-notch universities, some great hospitals and doctors, there are diverse neighborhoods, tons of interesting private and public spaces, great walking places, and lots and lots of great people. But this is increasingly becoming a difficult place to live because it is overloaded with people, the prices are way too high, and most of all the public services we are (over)taxed for simply aren’t being provided. It’s a very poorly run city. My many American friends who live in the mighty Land of the Free, you may have gripes, but at least your cities are well-run, organized, and your politicians generally accountable (arguable, yes, but you haven’t seen the other side). Toronto is full of potential, but it’s a fallen city, sinking deeper into the dregs every day.

Here’s my latest gripe. The one that sent me completely over the edge. A couple that we socialize with was telling us that, about a month ago, a huge tree branch fell onto their car. The car was parked on a city street, under a city-owned tree, on a clear day, and this massive branch just cracked, split, and fell on top of the car. It totaled their car. Done. Kaput. They are still driving a loaner vehicle as the shop tries to figure out if they can fix the car or should trash it.

Here’s the mismanagement part. The city of Toronto does not take care of its trees. They don’t prune them, trim them, inspect them, or cut them. After every storm of any windy significance, the street is littered with fallen tree branches–many of them honking huge–all along the sidewalks and streets. Some streets are blocked for days, because they city also takes its sweet time cleaning them up. So there is dead wood hanging all around us. Yes, I mean the politicians and city workers too.

And here’s the kicker. If you wanted to trim the tree, if you had the extra time and inclination to do it, guess what. You can’t. It’s illegal. It’s on city land. So you just need to wait for those dead old branches sitting over your house to topple. They could fall on your car, your house (we know someone that this happened to), your dog, or God forbid your kid. It is insane.

How about this? If you want to cut your own tree, yes, your own tree in your own backyard that you paid for and still pay lots of taxes to own, you can’t. It’s illegal. The city requires you to get their permission and pay for permits even to trim branches off your own tree. You might hurt the tree, they say. This is an environmental move that makes no sense to me. It starts to confuse environmentalism with some sort of urban fascism. And that’s bad for environmentalism, because it radicalizes it and builds resentment.

When I lived in Chicago, we just dialed 3-1-1 if a tree needed trimming. The city came out and did it, free of charge, usually within the same day. Done. Your tax dollars at work. I never felt bad about paying my Chicago city taxes, or my American income taxes for that matter. There was always value there. I’m a consumer, and I got my money’s worth out of the quality public services in Chicago. Why can’t the Toronto government provide value for its (grossly inflated) tax dollar Why can’t the Canadian government? Why don’t Canadian consumers demand more? Is this what happens when you never have a Revolution? You know what? It’s Revolting!

• Why can’t the Toronto government create decent parks for our kids to play in, instead of dirty, weed-filled, run down patches of land, constantly under threat of being developed into high-rises?

• Why can’t the Toronto government do something about the incredibly bad traffic gridlock on the road here? This city wasn’t built for this many people. The public transportation is overcrowded, with rush hour congestion almost unbearable. The public transportation is overpriced and poorly serviced. The car and truck pollution stinks. Getting expensive bi-annual emissions certification for ten million cars isn’t the answer–having far less cars on the road is. We need solutions to move people around this fine city. We need them yesterday.

• Why can’t the Toronto government clean the streets when the snow falls? Or when the leaves fall?

It’s pathetic, this broken city. It once worked so well, It could work well, with some willpower and proper organization, a reduction in bureaucracy and some motivated workers it could easily work again. But Torontonians and Canadians need to start demanding more of their “leaders”–there is no leadership, no accountability for the poor state of this city.

• Why can’t we get a decent bike path here?

• Why can’t we get proper garbage service? Why do the garbage collectors leave the trash bins all over the road? Why do they pick and choose which garbage they will or won’t take?

• Why can’t we order things from other countries without being taxed on it? Why won’t mail order businesses like Amazon and eBay work properly here? Why is the mail service so terrible?

• Why can’t we get mail every week day? Instead, we get it every other day. In the USA, we get it every day but Sunday, regularly. Why is that?

I won’t even talk about the Health Care House of Horrors here. That’s a full enough topic for another blog. Or two.

Yes, I’m confusing Toronto issues with Canadian issues with Provincial Ontario issues. Hey, I’m griping. In expanding and ever-widening circles. Broken city in a broken country. It’s dismal and sad to see.

It is broken, broken, all broken. And the shame goes to the people who run it, and the people who live in it and let it be run into the ground in this way. What can we do, together, to change it?

Today, the Canadian dollar broke through and made it to parity with the US dollar for the first time in 30 years. But have we seen the significant savings of the Canadian dollars climb? The cost of imports from the USA has sunk 15 percent since the beginning of the year, but the savings have not been passed on to consumers. They’ve been kept by Canadian businesses. Why? Because the country is run by oligopolies and local monopolies, and complacent Canadians and the weak government here won’t compel businesses to do what’s right. They never do. American wouldn’t take that sort of nonsense, not for very long. Canadian have become highly proficient at it.

All that needs to happen in for Torontonians and Canadians to start to organize, to say things aren’t right, and to start to put their own houses in order. I hope, I truly hope, that we do it, and soon. When should we meet to get this going?I hope it’s before the next branch falls on one of us.

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September 19, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

In the last post I drew on some interesting current thinking about the role of theory, academics, and universities in meeting contemporary challenges. As I write this, I find my thinking on the topic broadening to consider any sort of problem solving context, whether in a university, in a business, or in the public domain. I think we can start to apply these criteria more generally to the way we seek to answer a range of different questions.

Today, I’m going to continue to develop on these ideas by explaining on how consumer and marketing research (or more generally many other kinds of social scientific research) should have three dimensions, facets, or “faces,” and that it must communicate in relevant language to three different types of constituents or readers:

• (1) intersubjectively to fellow academics, theorists, other thinkers (yes, even laypeople), and all systematic builders of organized arrangements of understanding;

• (2) subjectively, to the feeling, emoting, empathizing and sympathizing audience who wants context with their content, interest and entertainment with their information; and

• (3) collectively, with criticism and directionality to those with a sense of purpose, objectives, and social goals. I’ll continue this discussion in my next posting.

We’ll discuss each one in turn, beginning with the way that they investigate their issues and contexts, moving next to the methods they use to investigate these issues and contexts, and then following up with the all important communication of results through the representation of the research.

THE INTERSUBJECTIVE DIMENSION

Investigative Contexts.

My Thesis Supervisor, Stephen J. Arnold of Queen’s University, and I used to have some great talks over great beer in the century-old Grad Pub in Kingston. Queen’s has that air of an old university that encourages engaged retrospection, long thoughtful conversations and, yes, the imbibing of mead. I’d often ask him, “But Steve, what *is* consumption? What does that mean.” He’d smile at me, like I’d just unlocked some important doors, and tell me, “Rob, consumption is Life. Consumption is Everything.” It seemed too easy. There was literally every topic out there in the world to study, and I was one of the very few interested in using whatever method at all suited studying them. I was like the guy with the Electric Harvester 2.0 in the Land of Low-Hanging Fruit.

All sorts of “consumption” occur in the real world of human interaction, from watching television, eating a multigrain Subway sub and taking a vitamin to driving and shopping to using a condom, posting on a web-page, or recycling. These Consumptions are located in a complex social network. Abstract knowledge about these consumptions is wrapped in representation and is also located in another complex social network.Just how complex and wrapped up is it all? Well, Figure 1 is just a start to try to and presented these different layers and constituents that come into play once we start to try to understand consumption.

So how do we think about gaining knowledge in this world? Originating in the objectifying and problem-solving intellectual traditions of the German Historical School, intersubjective epistemologies guide us in this realm of “really real” consumption. They seek to adapt perspectives drawn from the study of materials and the natural world to the study of human affairs. Think Consumer Research as Physics.

• An example: Consumer meets ad for Brand Q. Ad affects consumer. Consumer buys Brand Q.

• Another example: aggregate consumer behavior that predicts how consumers will respond to a promotion like a coupon or a free night’s stay, or that pull out patterns of shopping behavior from scanner panel data (a consumer who buys three or more cans of Campbell’s soup is four times more likely to buy a large package of napkins in that purchase as one who doesn’t; it’s a correlation; who cares why?). Complex models, like Consumer Particle Accelerators. Experiments with everything held constant except the one variable of interest. That sort of Capital K Knowledge about Consumers and Consumption.

As we talk about investigation of consumer culture, trying to get at this ever-so-sticky realm of the really real gets trickier and tricker. What about culture, after all, is “Real”? Well, there are meanings that have (despite what postmoderns tend to assert) some general stability and significance. There are meanings of symbols, there are meanings of rituals or practices, there are linguistic elements and their meanings. In short, there is a whole symbolic vocabulary, and a set of institutions and processes that go along with it, that people treat almost as solidly as the tables in front of them.

Decoding these meanings, unraveling these processes, then becomes a verifiable undertaking, one in which we can assert that we have found meanings, language, practices, and institutions that are “really real.”

• Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine, in one of those dreadful brain-mapping studies, that we could actually map out the associative neural net that surround a person’s meaning set. Say it is the meaning set surrounding Paris Hilton or Carlos Camejo (you know, the guy who didn’t die). Those meanings, those connections, “really” exist, not only in some inscribed-on-the-brain sense, but in the way that they affect a range of responses from knowledge and memory association to eye movement to erotic arousal. Now, if we could map another person’s association, and another’s and another’s, we could eventually come up with a knowledge of overlapping meanings. The one’s that overlap the most would be culturally shared meanings, like Paris Hilton is Rich and Stupid, or Carlos Camejo had one hell of a bad trip when he woke up under the knife during his own autopsy. These meanings really exist. They are shared in intersubjective dimension between people. We can really get at them somehow. We can verify them. They are really real. That’s the intersubjective perspective in a nutshell.

I’ve tried to build all of these perspectives into Figure One, which is at the top of this posting. In creating Figure 1, I’ve tried to pay heed to the fact that Consumption Studies takes place in an institutional and industrial context. We are working here in Universities that are, in a very real way, “factories” for the production of something called “knowledge” and also “knowledge workers.” The two chief products of a University are research papers and workers.

As Figure 1 illustrates, I consider the material and discursive resources of the industrial field to be an important intersubjective context. Studies of actual marketers doing actual marketing are still somewhat rare in Marketing Research, which always strikes me as strange. There are some good articles, but not nearly enough of them. Yet businesses are the main staging area for marketing practices. They create, influence, and respond to the consumption meanings that circulate in the wider social system. And, because consumption meanings center on objects created by businesses, they are subjects of intense commercial scrutiny. The model says that we need to pay attention to the way that industrial contexts interact with other contexts relevant to the presentation of research, such as with the institutionalized context of the research field, including its objectified literature, traditions and practices. So the role of consulting comes into play here. The role of students and MBA programs comes into play. So too do grants and research foundations and bodies. They all have an influence on the research that is done and the type of research that is seen as legitimate and worthwhile—both in terms of methods and in terms of topics.

Investigative Methods.

Let’s turn to methods. Given that we’re philosophically inclined in the intersubjective dimension in objective sorts of problem-solving, then we are drawn to use intersubjective methods that study the harder, realer elements of the social world. The intersubjective aimis to uncover shared patterns and the “pattern of the patterning” of consumption meanings.

This is Science As We Know It, right? To do it, we need systematic techniques that are concerned with the refutability, universality and replicability of knowledge claims. This leads to nomothetic techniques that view knowledge about consumption as separable from the individuals who contain it and the individuals who investigate it.

As illustrated in Figure 2, the abstract analytic coding and interpretation of empirical data elicited in interviews (e.g., Thompson, et al. 1989), projective tasks (e.g., McGrath, Sherry and Levy 1993), questionnaires (e.g., Sirsi, Ward and Reingen 1996) and field observation both offline (e.g., Belk et al. 1988) and in the virtual world of the Internet (e.g., Kozinets 1997, 2002) can all serve this function, as can the analysis of artifactual data used by techniques such as semiotics (e.g., Mick 1986), literary criticism (e.g., Stern 1989, Scott 1994), and historical methods (Smith and Lux 1993).

Research Representations

Finally, how does this intersubjective knowledge get presented to people? In representing the intersubjective position, scholars tend to use the familiar abstract thematic formulations and models concerned. The models and theories would be concerned more with constructs than with context, in the interest of parsimony and in the fulfillment of rhetorical tradition. These formats of concise traditional modes of knowledge presentation are standard in the harder social sciences like the natural sciences, physics, economics, and even that soft-but-wants-to-be-hard science, psychology. Thus the familiar format - literature review, theory, method, findings, conclusions, references-is the norm in all of marketing and consumer research’s top-tier journals.

Situated within an objectified, “omniscient,” distanced narrative stance, this form of research tends to present knowledge from a system-level view that suggests if it doesn’t actually assert generalizability and universality. There are neat and tidy concepts and relations. The text tends to be written in an impersonal third person formats as if it is written about someone else: “Consumers believe,” “Consumer’s say that their culture is…” “They practice,” “It responds.”

Because procedural elements are highly significant to intersubjective representations, we can expect detailed invocations of procedural rigor. These rigor concern attempt to rhetorically minimize the impact of the reflexivity of the consumer researcher. In judging the research, these have been among the most significant evaluative elements of this form of research [e.g., see Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) “trustworthiness” criteria invoked by Wallendorf and Belk (1989) but later abandoned by Belk; see also Hunt (1991, p. 42)]. The end objective is for the representation to accurately render, or accurately correspond to, the social consumption reality it presumes to represent.

In the next blog posting, we’ll talk about the Subjective Dimension of Research.

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September 18, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Recently, a lot of the scholar-bloggers (we need a new term for that breed: schloggers? scholgers? bloggademics?) that I read regularly and whose work I respect have been talking about the role of theory and academics in the world. Henry Jenkins and Grant McCracken, two of my “usual suspects” have been writing cutting-edge posts that questions our scientific theory-as-usual thinking.

On September 14th, Grant McCracken wrote one of those wonderfully introspective essays for which he is famous that looked at how his intellectual mechanism tended towards a scornful attitude for those who “don’t get it” and how this locked out further investigation and even meaningful communication. Examining “the meta-pragmatics of scorn” he found that “scorn depends upon a presupposition, and this presupposition has the effect of making us assume the very things we are supposed to be surfacing for study.” This is so true. Once we start looking down at others who don’t understand, we ourselves stop learning. And it’s even more amazing to me that this attitude is particularly prevalent among academics, we who are supposed to be continually learning and open-minded (that’s the goal, no, really it is). Yet as Gant points out, we are often so busy “congratulating one another” for how smart we are that we completely railroad our own efforts to continue thinking and problem solving.

He then went on to a deliciously discerning comparison of academic cultures are Harvard Business School and McGill University. At Harvard they engaged in plainspeak and faculty were unafraid to ask for or offer clarification of what they meant. “Very smart people were expected to interrupt other very smart people, when they did not understand. But in the cultural studies world at McGill, questions of this kind seemed to happen. No one ever asked for terms to be defined or arguments to be clarified. There was a prevailing feeling that “we all get this” and that a request for clarification was therefore unnecessary, even gauche, perhaps even a declaration of intellectual deficiency.” And at “McGill people spoke in the abstract language of a high altitude postmodernism, complete with rhetorical stunt flying” that was meant to impress rather than inform.

The differences seem stark and familiar. Have you ever been “treated” to a presentation by someone who was so smart they couldn’t explain to you what they were saying? Ever heard an expert who was so far beyond your intelligence that she or he couldn’t translate his knowledge into things that mattered in your world? Ever been put down for not knowing, or asking a question, rather than taught? There’s a problem in academia. And as Grant rightly points out, scorn, disdain, and the closed nature of specialized language are big parts of the problem.

On September 10th, Henry Jenkins wrote a blog posting on the interface between academics and the real world. He began by talking about how powerful, applied theory has historically had three important components, all related to the idea of disparate communities and cultures making meaningful and purposive contact. First, the “network forums” where formerly separate social and intellectual communities could knit together. Secondly, the “contact zones,” the places where different subcultures of researchers and thinkers were brought together. Third, the “border languages” that researchers created and used to spread their ideas from one discipline to another.

He cites Fred Turner’s book about Stewart Brand: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. There’s a powerful quote about Vannevar Bush, the MIT Professor and administrator Vannevar Bush who got FDR to fund the National Defense Research Committee during World War II. At this point, things began to gel in a very interesting way. Powerful convergences started to happen between corporate, government, and academic research, driven by the contingencies of wartime and the brilliant organization of the sponsors. Here’s the cite about “Rad Lab,” about the creation of a powerful new context for multidisciplinary research at MIT.

It brought together scientists and mathematicians from MIT and elsewhere, engineers and designers from industry, and many different military and government planners. Among these various professionals, and particularly among the engineers and designers, entrepreneurship and collaboration were the norm, and independence of mind was strongly encouraged. Formerly specialized scientists were urged to become generalists in their research, able not only to theorize but also to design and build new technologies. At the same time, scientists and engineers had to become entrepreneurs, assembling networks of technologists, funders, and administrators to see their projects through. Neither scientists nor administrators could stay walled off from one another in their offices and laboratories; throughout the Rad Lab, and even after hours, in the restaurants and living rooms of Cambridge, the pressures to produce new technologies to fight the war drove formerly specialized scientists and engineers to cross professional boundaries, to routinely mix work with pleasure, and to form new, interdisciplinary networks within which to work and live.”

I find this description very instructive. What drove them was “the pressures to produce new technologies to fight the war” and what it produced, organizationally, was boundary spanning and “interdisciplinary networks.” As we ponder the biggest challenges our species is likely to ever face, the growing environmental crisis, our human clash of civilizations, and all of the social fallout that is going to come from it, I believe that we are going to need resolve that resembles wartime resolve. We focus best in time of crisis. That’s good because we do have a big set of collective crises on our hands right now.

Henry Jenkins went on to write about the pragmatic way that his students engage with theory, as opposed to the way it is discussed in other “Big Ten institutes.” Here’s what he said:

In a liberal arts classroom, students tend to circle a theory like a pack of raptors and rip it to shreds in the course of a discussion, leaving only the tattered bits on the table, or they choose sides, some embracing, others critiquing the theory, and butt heads together like charging rams, to see which one can withstand the pressure. At MIT, the tendency is to tinker, to take the theory apart, reduce it to component elements, and then reassemble it again in a better form. It is a brainstorming and problem solving culture: a theory is only valuable if it allows us to do something we want to do and the test of a theory is its applications in the real world.

That latter possibility sounds like a good business school discussion to me. If anything, there’s another possible modality to this beyond the ripping, choosing sides, and reassembling styles. That is the outright disinterest or rejection of theory that can sometimes be seen in practical programs like business schools. “Oh no, not another *theory*…” In those cases, theory is seen as irrelevant, as a mere erudite ivory tower exercise. B-school students and even faculty can harbor a sort of anti-intellectualism that is a type of impatience, a ready-shoot-aim action orientation, but might also just be a type of cover for intellectual laziness. I haven’t seen a lot of that, but I have seen enough of it to be alarmed.

Henry also talk about his program, the Comparative Media Studies program (of which I’m proud to say that I am an Affiliated Faculty member) and its emphasis on “applied humanities.” He see that the programs goal is to figure out “what the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences might have to contribute to helping our society adjust to a profound and prolonged period of media change. The goals of the program are activist, and derive from an intellectual acceptance: “to embrace and promote the emergence of a more participatory culture.”

The means are also fascinating and nothing short of revolutionary. Henry says that to achieve the goals of the CMS program, he has created a “lab culture” for the humanities at MIT. Building on the MIT tradition (I really like the way Henry uses the venerable MIT brand in his postings; he’s not only a great brand manager but a great co-brander as well), he has done several things to bring classroom learning out of the classroom and into the world:

• created centers and labs which emphasize experimentation and research
• organized conferences which bring together researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds
• had students and faculty participate in larger national networks and projects which bridge between different spheres of activity

Then, and this is extremely important, he talks about how the CMS program places and emphasis on public communication of ideas. This step is so critical and yet it’s virtually ignored by most academics. Why don’t we talk about communicating to the public? Why are so few academics good at or interested in it? Why do we tend to be so insular? A key, as Henry states, is “to strip our language of specialized terms or concepts that might impede its ability to circulate within these larger social networks.” In other words, write so that your neighbor could understand what you are writing. That’s what has attracted me to doing ethnographic research. Although the most closed-minded of my colleagues criticize me for doing “journalism” rather than “science,” the upshot of my work is that I can share it with the average reader, they can read it, and they can understand it and perhaps work with its implications.

Henry also talk about the current MacArthur Foundation current initiative on Digital Media and Learning. The CMS Project nml is one node in this much larger network of researchers. But here is some of what they are doing:

• field work and ethnography on young people’s existing practices

• developing curricular materials to support new media literacies

• rethinking the place of the library within an information culture

• forming after school programs and experimental schools

• designing and distributing computer and video games designed to foster computational and design skills

• editing and publishing books to guide parents and policy makers

• creating and maintaining a blog to insure the circulation of these ideas to the larger public

This is a fantastic model of a project that enables intellectually meaningful connections between various scholars, thinkers and connected projects. And it has also done a good job publicizing the efforts and products of the research and thinking. Motivation has also been a key outcome. As he says, “Above all, MacArthur has instilled in us a sense that what we are doing can make a difference in the world.”

I think we need more programs like this one in business schools. I’m certain that many of my colleagues are working on programs like these, and I’d love ot hear more about them. Many of the programs I’ve seen tend to have some of the puzzle pieces in place, but miss some of the most important other aspects. Many of them, for instance, will work with big business to try to solve their problems on an intellectual, but will do very little to actually build workable tools, or even better communicate the fingings to larger constituencies, or to have particular social goals.

One of the things that I like about the CMS program is its combination of a wide social purview with a narrower, academic focus.

What might a program that looked at “applied consumer research” or even “applied CCT (Consumer Culture Theory)” look like? What if our goal were to try to figure out what Marketing Science, Consumer Research, and the Social Sciences might have that could contribute to helping our society adjust to a profound and prolonged period of industrial, technological, and cultural change. What if we took on some explicitly activist goals of our own “to embrace and promote the emergence of a more ethical and environmental business and society.”

In this last objective, I’m drawing on a wonderful book that I’m currently reading called Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University by Michael M’Gonigle and Justine Starke. M’Gonigle is Professor and Eco-Research Chair at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and Starke is a Research Associate, also at U. Vic.

Their book talks about the University and tracks its history and origins over 900 years as a medieval site of philosophical and sacred understanding. Right now, they argue convincingly that Universities are largely tools of the corporate world, sources of corporate ideas and training grounds for the world’s managerial elite. Yet, tracking the many reforms and social movements that have come out of university campuses throughout history, they see much more potential in Universities. Examining numerous initiatives across North American and Europe, they believe that we are on the cusp of developing a “planetary university” a university reinvented to be at the forefront of the sustainability movement, creating new democratic, participatory models and working systems of local and global innovation that can deliver on promises of social and ecological betterment.

It is these sorts of questions about the role of the academy and of research in the real world that concern me right now.

I’m theorizing about what our theories—particularly our theories of business and management studies—can and should be. It boggles my mind that a number of universities are now devaluing the most practically oriented top-tier academic journal (Journal of Marketing) because it is “too managerial.” This is a sign that our academics are becoming overly theoretical and irrelevant, an overreaction away from the overly pragmatic approaches that marked the earliest history of the field of management studies and marketing. But it couldn’t come at a worse time. The world is changing incredibly quickly: culture is intermixing in volatile and amazing ways, business is frothing and morphing, consumption is pushing into new frontiers, technology is being injected deeper and deeper into the human core, and environmental signs of rapid and unwelcome change are all around us. This is a time when we all need to be thinking about practical issues, boundary spanning, bridge building, motivation, change for the better.

This is powerful stuff, and it segues into and is a part of my discussion about a new Consumption Studies. Drawing on these ideas, I aim to continue to develop this notion about research having three dimensions, facets, or “faces,” and that it consequently must communicate in relevant language to three different types of constituents or readers:

• (1) intersubjectively to fellow academics, theorists, other thinkers (yes, even laypeople), and all systematic builders of organized arrangements of understanding;

• (2) subjectively, to the feeling, emoting, empathizing and sympathizing audience who wants context with their content, interest and entertainment with their information; and

• (3) collectively, with criticism and directionality to those with a sense of purpose, objectives, and social goals. I’ll continue this discussion in my next posting.

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