Autopoiesis is a fascinating word.
Poiesis literally means “to make” or “fabricate” in ancient greek, and serves as the root for words related to production or formation. In the 1970s a biologist coined the term autopoiesis to refer to any biological system that given the correct components, will act to maintain or reproduce itself. The term was loosely used in the sciences, but took on a slightly more fertile life when people fleshed-out the symbolism of the word, and started applying it in social science contexts. It aptly took on the job of describing cultural and symbolic power structures that worked within people and society to reproduce themselves: racism, sexism, fetishes and cultural tropes are reasonable examples of this. Derrida changed the world by pointing out the elementary fact that all ideological structures contain within themselves the idea of their own deconstruction. There are other less visible examples of this process: for instance, the themes surrounding economics are often as much narrative fiction and human psychology as they are legitimate statistical or reproducible science, yet its regarded as a largely infallible guidepost for decision-making.
over the past eight months since my graduation, I’ve become singularly and often unpleasantly familiar with the dominant form of implementation in government: employment.
The word was amalgamated into so many social sciences and varied forms of system-thinking precisely because it reflects a truth in each. Forms of autopoiesis live in other related words as well – ‘inculcation’ in sociology and anthropology; ‘discourse’ in literary theory. Jargon exists in academic fields because we need a shorthand to express commonly-used ideas, and the fact that most fields have a shorthand for the concept that structures of thought replicate themselves through people is pretty telling regarding the ubiquity of this concept.
So how does this relate to public policy in general?
Like every policy idea the critical twist lies not in the theory, but in the implementation. And over the past eight months since my graduation, I’ve become singularly and often unhappily familiar with the dominant form of implementation in government: employment. The fact that human beings replicate patterns that they find valuable is natural, and the fact that we find the patterns that produced us as valuable is similarly natural. So there isn’t a terrible surprise in finding that people often hire people who replicate their experiences, or who remind them of themselves. I can’t imagine that any person would not naturally tend to trust the pattern of experiences that produced their own self.
although the effort is being made to balance people by life experience, little effort is made to balance departments on the basis of values, preferences or education
This brings me to what I want to talk about: In broad strokes we know this happens because of the need every government has for a program of affirmative action, or equal employment between races and genders. So in a department hiring for specific needs, although the effort is being made to balance people by life experience, little effort is made to balance departments on the basis of background, skills and success. While advocating seriously for increased enrollment of disadvantaged students in post-secondary education, a professor of mine casually noted that he only hired people who got As, as that served as an excellent metric for measuring output. This is how autopoiesis enacts itself in employment: through proxy evaluations, judgements, and approximations.
The effect on Cost-Benefit Analysis
Policy in the Province today is heavily based on cost-benefit analysis, and on economic theory. I am a graduate of a rigorous program designed to impart the principles of analysis and evidence-based decision making to students. However when my cohort – varied in age, in education and in background hit the employment market it became uniformly evident that those that were outliers in some way had a far more difficult time. People who weren’t at the academic top, or those who were older, or had backgrounds in the arts or the social sciences had a more difficult time finding work. People who didn’t excel in the specific areas of quantitative analysis were often frozen out of work, even in areas in which quantitative analysis was rare. I learned that policy positions even in areas like the arts and culture are most often hired on the basis of academic performance or economic or quantitative skill. It seems natural to do so. “Of course” you would hire someone who excelled at numeric analysis to do work on numeric analysis. Except that when you flip the equation around and think about it from the end result you end up saying things like “This environmental scientist will excel at quantifying the value of this theatre funding”. By prizing the skill you want to replicate, you aren’t valuing the person who’s performing that skill, and the perspective it’s coming from.
When studying the concept of cost-benefit analysis there are certain arguments that predicate all others. One of those basic principles is that you necessarily bias any examination of evidence with your own judgements as to what weight to give to what data. A practitioner is supposed to rely on data specifically to avoid his own biases, but this merely shifts any unconscious bias to the realm of evidence collection. A government of economists and data scientists will gather certain evidence to do with arts policy, and weight it in a certain way. It’s just what happens. Or to use another germane case; a child-care program devised by people who only wish for economic gain will jettison data about what’s best for children.
Economists tend to hire those that are good at economics; people who excel academically tend to hire those who excel academically. When you stretch this over a whole group, you get a series of people who have tendencies in these directions.
I’ve ventured the opinion earlier that a government who hires only the excellent will generally fail to anticipate the actions of those that don’t excel, and this is another form of that failure – a gentler and more everyday form that results from tendencies that span whole organizations. Economists tend to hire those that are good at economics; people who excel academically tend to hire those who excel academically. When you stretch this over a whole group, you get a series of people who have tendencies in these directions. For example, a group of economic experts as a whole might have an extremely poor overall ability to calculate the value of arts or humanities. Once I spoke to a high-ranking official in a non-governmental arts organization, who told me that in his opinion there were almost no arts policy officers in the Province who understood the arts at all. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that statement, but I do understand how a government could iterate itself into splitting from certain points of view through hiring and hiring and hiring according to best practices, until differences are cultivated out. People will hire people they understand, with abilities they respect, until in the end the policy officers might fail to intellectually resemble the people they try to serve. That gulf of understanding might just be what separates a successful initiative from a failed one.
