A recent article about business responses to global warming highlights the extent to which hierarchical thinking can respond adequately to rapid changes in the climate. 

And it neatly illustrates the preoccupations of a hierarchical world-view, as understood by grid-group cultural theory.

The article, written by Leon Gettler, centres on the increasing role of ‘Chief Carbon Officer’ in businesses. 

'The job of the future will be the chief carbon officer, or CCO. That's because global warming is no longer an environmental issue.'

According to grid-group cultural theory, first established by anthropologist Mary Douglas, and expanded by numerous writers in several different disciplines, there are four fundamental world-views, related to social group strength and rule maintenance. The hierarchist position is ‘strong grid, strong group’. In other words it is both highly group-orientated and highly regulated. For this way of thinking, the crisis (any crisis) is less about external factors and more about who is in charge, and how the social structure is to be maintained.

When new data becomes available it needs to be assimilated into the existing structure in such a way as to answer the question, who is responsible for this, and what is their position in the pecking order?

In government we have seen in recent years the creation of new climate change portfolios at a ministerial level. Where exactly these portfolios sit is highly revealing. For instance a solution to climate change from a hierarchist point of view is to create a minister and a department for climate change. But tellingly  this will usually be a fairly junior position, and the department thus created will not typically be at the heart of government. One example would be a ‘Department of Environment and Climate Change’. From a hierarchist perspective, once this  is established the crisis is over. We now know everything that really matters: who is responsible and how senior they are.

This may seem an extreme characterisation, but this approach is evident in the article:

There are two major drivers of the change: legislation, and market forces coming from customers, investors and reputation.

It’s very similar in business, as the article  demonstrates. The crisis of climate change is easily depicted primarily as a crisis of roles in the organisation. The proffered solution is a Chief Climate Officer. One can guess how senior such a role is likely to be, at least initially. When the job title is ‘Chief Finance and Carbon Officer’, there may be some leverage, but the hierarchical nature of the organisation will tend to minimise the possibility of this happening in order to maintain the existing hierarchy as far as possible.

Not the only game in town

But the article also shows that hierarchy isn’t the only prism through which to view climate change responses.  It cites a recent initiative of Wal-Mart to introduce an environmental ‘scorecard’ for its suppliers.

The scorecard has suppliers rating themselves on such areas as product/packaging ratio, greenhouse gas emissions, recycled content, transportation, renewable energy and innovation. From February, the world's biggest retailer started using the scorecard to grade suppliers and make buying decisions.

Grid-group theory is useful because it enables people to see a little bit further than their own world-view and recognise that there is more than one way of doing things. This can be uncomfortable since the four world-views described by the theory are mostly mutually exclusive; they tend to define themselves in terms of their antagonism to one another. But this discomfort may be considered worthwhile if it results in a broader vision and more wide-reaching action.

Company structures and career paths shift with global warming Leon Gettler

The Age August 20, 2008

Supposedly, Australians are leaving Second Life in droves.

It seems, though, the researcher Kim MacKenzie's words were taken out of context, and she's fed up about the media looking for 'Second Life is dying' stories.

Beating the Ghost Town effect

Reading about the ghost town effect, and having experienced it myself in eery lone visits to Australian landmarks, it’s clear that Second life could have done with a few more European-style urban planners or American new urbanists on the team. They would have pointed out that endless sprawl leads not to a feeling of spaciousness but to isolation. Second Life is effectively a lesson in the pitfalls of suburban sprawl taken to its dysfunctional conclusion. To enter Second Life is the online equivalent of moving from Boston or Seattle to Phoenix, Arizona, or from London to Adelaide. It isn’t that there are no people, just that the residents are spread out over an unfeasibly large area. The ghost town effect is a direct consequence of trying to abolish the scarcity of ‘land’. The saving grace here is that it is in fact already possible to do the opposite – to recreate online the super dense urban slum, that allows maximum, if not optimum, conviviality. Second Life already contains a reconstruction of Hong Kong’s famous and no longer existing Walled City – a city quarter that was in its heyday the densest spot on earth. In SL it's mostly empty. But In a virtual environment one can have all the benefits of density – connection, liveliness, collaboration – with none of the pitfalls – open sewers and hacked power supplies. Now all that’s needed is to lead people to that kind of space by culling the suburbs. It may seem a bit harsh for those users who prefer to camp out on their exclusive islands in splendid isolation and have no visitors, but the commercial alternative for Second Life is Second Death. Fortunately, Linden Labs is already planning to introduce zoning. It's a start.

Linking 3D with 2D

Having said that, the real problem with all these virtual spaces is

that they fail to link up with the everyday experience of using the internet. In other words there is a great conceptual wall between 3d virtual environments, whose organising metaphor is ‘world’ and the web, whose organising metaphor is ‘book’. The film maker Peter Greenaway has said he thinks film, and by extension television, is still primarily a textual medium rather than a visual medium, a claim which sets in context his interest in expanding what he calls ‘visual literacy’. This comment is even more true of the Internet, which is married to text to an unhealthy extent.

It isn’t that text is in any way ‘bad’. It’s simply that by being controlled by this conceptual scheme – book versus world - some of the many already existing visual capabilities of the Web are overlooked.

Avoiding built-in isolation

When Google announced it was introducing a new virtual environment we could perhaps have anticipated an enhanced version of Second Life. Instead what they delivered was Lively, a severely cut down version. Basically, Google chat users can create their own visual chat rooms in which to host their online conversations. So from this angle, we still have a disconnect. Google’s offering is not bad, but it amounts to a series of isolated spaces that use a spatial metaphor in a limited way. Not so much a virtual world as a set of unconnected virtual bedsits.

Eventually, the many virtual environments out there (in there) will begin to connect and coalesce. Like the door at the back of the wardrobe that leads to Narnia, there will soon be portals from and to Second Life and Google and, crucially into which the standard text-based experience of will be embedded.

An example of how this could work is given by Australian company, ‘ExitReality’. Of the virtual environments so far established, theirs has most fully grasped the concept of integrating the 3D web with the 2D web. The aim is to make virtual environments like Second Life integrate seamlessly with text-based social web environments such as Facebook. In stitching up the web in this way the potential of both the book metaphor and the world metaphor is greatly enhanced. The 2D web becomes attractive at last; the 3D web finally becomes useful.

Virtual business environments

Looking at this kind of environment - one in which avatars meet and share documents, mail, and many other media in a spatial environment - gives me this thought:

In the very near future employers will be competing for ‘visually literate’ employees on the basis of the attractiveness of the virtual filing room. They’d better get building.

Meanwhile here's a look at 50 virtual worlds...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/0CijdlYOSPc&hl=en&fs=1]

www.metaversejournal.com

http://jvwresearch.org/ Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Magic requires rules. Here is what anthropologist Marcel Mauss has to say:

‘Far from being the simple expression of individual emotions, magic takes every opportunity to coerce actions and locutions. Everything is fixed and becomes precisely determined. Rules and patterns are imposed. Magical formulas are muttered or sung on one note to special rhythms …Gestures are regulated with an equally fine precision. The magician does everything in a rhythmical fashion as in dancing: and ritual rules tell him which hand or finger he should use, which foot he should step forward with. When he sits, stands up, lies down, jumps, shouts, walks in any direction, it is because it is all prescribed. Even when he is alone he is not freer than the priest at his altar… Moreover, words are pronounced or actions are performed facing a certain direction, the most common rule being that the magician should face the direction of the person at whom the rite is aimed.’

Marcel Mauss, General Theory of Magic [1950] tr. Robert Brain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p.58. Quoted in Ian Hunt 2002, ‘Escape Routine’ accessed at http://www.simonpattersonart.com/essays/essays_escape.html

The Thinking Anglicans website, http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk, is worth a look. Curiously I have been unable to locate its sister website, unthinkinganglicans.org.uk and wonder if there might be any takers out there. While the dnsserver claims: ‘the domain name does not exist’, I am tempted to ask whether this statement is epistemologically defensible.