Comments on: Schematic of a French political system

By: Shakthi

Shakthi — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:17:26 +0000

hey…i really like your blog and your thesis. i’ve been trying to draw a diagram of sorts of my area of proposed study as well…did you send the diagram to your grant reviewing committee? how did that go?

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:47:09 +0000

Eli, I’ll try to get back to you on this. Also, have you tried http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ?

By: eli

eli — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:20:13 +0000

Thanks, Sue, this is very helpful! I’m not sure that my diagram even has a very consistent key, though the diagramming software that I used suggested that circles were for processes (I’m not even sure now what it said rectangles were for). But in the next iteration I will make sure of that, and I’m eager to look up Turner’s chapter.

By: Sue Wright

Sue Wright — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:01:15 +0000

I’m also working on a diagram to try and represent the process of classifying and quantifying research ‘outputs’ as a basis for the introduction of differential research funding between universities and within univesities in Denmark. I’m also a novice at this kind of diagram but I’ve found the work of ‘institutional ethnographers’ around Dorothy Smith in Canada extremely helpful. They also try to relate everyday life to institutional structures and what they call ‘ruling relations’. Two things they would add to your diagram are, first, the texts that mediate these relations, either as one-off documents (eg consultative documents) or as new techniques for ordering relations (e.g. new forms of reporting, accounting or evaluation). Second, they include a time line (and when exploring reform processes, there’s an issue about how to represent one-off events and recurrent activities that gradually take on a new shape). They also have a more standardised meaning for squares, circles, thick, dotted lines etc – yours needs a key. I’m struggling to find a good guidebook to their ‘mapping’ techniques in institutional ethnography. The best example of its use in practice that I’ve found so far is Susan Marie Turner ‘Mapping institutions as work and texts’ in Dorthy Smith (ed) 2006 Institutional Ethngraphy as Practice (Rowman and Littlefield).

By: eli

eli — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:16:43 +0000

Thanks, Mike. I’m curious: does this diagram seem roughly plausible to you? I mean I know you don’t know the empirical details about French higher ed, but does it seem to you that the diagram is logical? Are there other things you’d want to see added in a future iteration?

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:10:50 +0000

Diagrams like this are clarifying. Too often, academia does not reward clarity.

By: eli

eli — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:23:29 +0000

Note to self: it’s not a diagram that aspires to reveal anything extremely surprising. The point here is to schematize and simplify the common sense functioning of an institutional situation so that the structure of the obvious becomes evident.