that could easily flare up otherwise.

While management had suspected there were problems, the visual representation of the network diagram clearly showed the extent to which these issues were impeding the ability of the overall group to effectively leverage the expertise of its members. (113)

What’s interesting on the next level down are the warrants that make the network diagram such an effective argument. The value stated here is the “ability of the overall group to effectively leverage the expertise of its members.” Scattered throughout our readings are a number of similar values and goals: to understand how people “create and share knowledge” (119), to make interactions “visible and actionable” (119), “to better manage knowledge for “improved innovation and competitive advantage” (“Knowledge Networks” Krebs), to locate resources and sources of expertise within groups for problem-solving, to establish the roles of participants with an eye to using them more effectively (“An Introduction” Krebs), and so forth. Acceptance of these values as common goals by workers lends the diagrams their cogency. Conversely, qualities like clustering (in the maps) and isolation are identified as negatives. Prophets in the wilderness need not apply.

The backing for these warrants lies in deeper values, which I think we could locate in the godterms “productivity” and “expediency.” The latter is from an critique by Steven B. Katz (“The Ethic of Expediency,” CE, 1992) pointing out how the institutional ethic of “getting things done” can occlude the ethic of why we are doing them and whether or not they should be done in the first place. Is it fair to say management discourse typically asks how human behavior can benefit work life, while it falls to philosophy to ask how work can be made a more meaningful part of human life? To a cynical worker, I could see that SNA would just crop up as the latest float in an endless parade of schemas used by managers since the 1950s to exploit human potential.

However, rays of light. Throughout the articles there is another strain of discourse that reflects a warmer, fuzzier side to networks, a recognition of some of the realities of human social interactions: that members must be willing to participate and become engaged for a network to function well, that they must trust other members, that informal relationships are important, that it takes time to develop trusting relationships. The question remains whether the sponsors for these studies will really make room for any of these insights. I wonder what the old hippie utopian phantasts at the Coevolutionary Quarterly would have done with SNA.

And, of course, the question arises about knowledge-sharing within our own network of writing teachers, within the Writing Program, within academia, where perhaps we’d like to think that knowledge is more of an end in itself than a means.