Hi For those of us wondering whether/how the silo metaphor translates: In Japan a *tako-tsubo [octopus pot]* is used to capture those invertebrates; once an octopus climbs into the pot it cannot escape. Tako-tsubo is used in Japan as a metaphor for people who join a government ministry, a company, a discipline, a specialty, a club, etc and then form few other ties. [Takotsubo has been translated as squid pot and fox hole.] * This article discusses difficulties of introducing ICT education into traditional takotsubo (discipline-based) university curricula: Murata, Kiyoshi, and Yohko Orito. "Three Challenges for Japanese ICT Professionalism." _Proceedings of ETHICOMP 2008_ (2008): 577-585. www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/M%20and%20O%20E2008.pdf * See also references to takotsubo in this discussion of the so-called otaku generation in Japan: "Allein, aber nicht einsam" die otaku- Generation: Zu einigen neueren Trends in der japanischen Populr-und Medienkultur Volker Grassmuck in: Norbert Bolz, Friedrich Kittler, Christoph Tholen (Hrsg.), _Computer als Medium_, Wilhelm Fink Verlag Mnchen 1993 http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.d.html -Older English version [without the takotsubo reference]: "I'm alone, but not lonely" Japanese Otaku-Kids colonize the Realm of Information and Media A Tale of Sex and Crime from a faraway Place. Volker Grassmuck (Dec 1990) http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.e.html * In 1961 a prominent Japanese political scientist, Masao Maruyama (1914-96) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masao_Maruyama_%28scholar%29 described Japan as a takutsubo society in his _Nihon no shiso_ (Japanese Thought). Iwanami Shoten, 1961. See also: - J. Victor Koschmann review of "Maruyama Masao, Nihon no Shis Seidoku (An Explication of Japanese Thought by Maruyama Masao), by Miyamura Haruo. Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2001, 224 pp., _Social Science Japan Journal_ 5, no. 2 (2002): 267-270 http://ssjj.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/2/267.short - Hori, Masaharu. "Japanese public bureaucracy in the era of globalisation." _Ritsumeikan Law Review_ 21 (2004): 1-18. http://202.175.64.236/en/conference_doc/a1/a1_011.doc http://www.asianlii.org/jp/journals/RitsLRev/2004/1.pdf Cheers, Sharon Sharon Traweek, UCLA Gender Studies & History Departments, with strong ties to the Anthropology & Information Studies Departments, as well as the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. My PhD is from the interdisciplinary UCSC History of Consciousness Program. [As you can see, unlike many academics, I do not fit into a takotsubo.]
Fascinating! This metaphor conjures someone unwittingly trapped in their 'silo', rather than someone barricading themselves in. I'm interested in the sense of agency (or lack thereof) in this whole set of metaphors. Often the implication seems to be that some outsider (management consultant) needs to break down the barriers and free the hapless inmates. Janet On Aug 3, 2013, at 4:55 40PM, Sharon Traweek wrote:
Hi For those of us wondering whether/how the silo metaphor translates:
In Japan a *tako-tsubo [octopus pot]* is used to capture those invertebrates; once an octopus climbs into the pot it cannot escape. Tako-tsubo is used in Japan as a metaphor for people who join a government ministry, a company, a discipline, a specialty, a club, etc and then form few other ties. [Takotsubo has been translated as squid pot and fox hole.]
* This article discusses difficulties of introducing ICT education into traditional takotsubo (discipline-based) university curricula: Murata, Kiyoshi, and Yohko Orito. "Three Challenges for Japanese ICT Professionalism." _Proceedings of ETHICOMP 2008_ (2008): 577-585. www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/M%20and%20O%20E2008.pdf
* See also references to takotsubo in this discussion of the so-called otaku generation in Japan: "Allein, aber nicht einsam" die otaku- Generation: Zu einigen neueren Trends in der japanischen Populr-und Medienkultur Volker Grassmuck in: Norbert Bolz, Friedrich Kittler, Christoph Tholen (Hrsg.), _Computer als Medium_, Wilhelm Fink Verlag Mnchen 1993 http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.d.html -Older English version [without the takotsubo reference]: "I'm alone, but not lonely" Japanese Otaku-Kids colonize the Realm of Information and Media A Tale of Sex and Crime from a faraway Place. Volker Grassmuck (Dec 1990) http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.e.html
* In 1961 a prominent Japanese political scientist, Masao Maruyama (1914-96) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masao_Maruyama_%28scholar%29 described Japan as a takutsubo society in his _Nihon no shiso_ (Japanese Thought). Iwanami Shoten, 1961. See also: - J. Victor Koschmann review of "Maruyama Masao, Nihon no Shis Seidoku (An Explication of Japanese Thought by Maruyama Masao), by Miyamura Haruo. Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2001, 224 pp., _Social Science Japan Journal_ 5, no. 2 (2002): 267-270 http://ssjj.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/2/267.short - Hori, Masaharu. "Japanese public bureaucracy in the era of globalisation." _Ritsumeikan Law Review_ 21 (2004): 1-18. http://202.175.64.236/en/conference_doc/a1/a1_011.doc http://www.asianlii.org/jp/journals/RitsLRev/2004/1.pdf
Cheers, Sharon Sharon Traweek, UCLA Gender Studies & History Departments, with strong ties to the Anthropology & Information Studies Departments, as well as the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. My PhD is from the interdisciplinary UCSC History of Consciousness Program. [As you can see, unlike many academics, I do not fit into a takotsubo.]
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
The inmates do not necessarily feel trapped, because their silos are often so big that they can spend their entire careers in one without feeling any constraint to do "their thing." Take IBM for example. One can spend their entire career in sales and never deal with any other part of the firm and do just fine. Within a sales division, they could also spend years within one geographic region, and again do just fine. A bigger problem is that there is so much work to be done within a silo that even if one wanted to poke their nose outside their silo, there might not be enough hours in the day to do that. So size of silos is something we should recognize as a factor in "silo centric" behavior. The reason in business, at least, that silos get a bad rap is because collaboration across silos holds out the promise of optimization of costs and mission, innovation, better performance, lower operating costs, etc.--an assumption that can be both true and also absolutely false, depending on circumstances. Then there is culture. Take a university, for example. You can have a history department occupy the fourth floor of a building, and the economics department on the third, and sociology on the second, and have a situation where (a) nobody knows each other across those three departments, (b) that is OK with them and (c) no collaboration in teaching cross-disciplinary classes, collaborations in research and publishing. That might even apply to a small college, such as the one I attended, which at the time had only about 875 students and a tiny faculty to match. This is a fascinating subject you raise. Having spent 38 years at IBM at various levels or management and in numerous jobs (including doing strategy and work and managerial optimization consulting) I can assure you the questions you raise are profoundly important to literally millions of managers around the world, and the subject of extensive discussion in the business literature, although often without using the word "silo," but clearly in the minds of the authors. On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 7:18 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote:
Fascinating! This metaphor conjures someone unwittingly trapped in their 'silo', rather than someone barricading themselves in. I'm interested in the sense of agency (or lack thereof) in this whole set of metaphors. Often the implication seems to be that some outsider (management consultant) needs to break down the barriers and free the hapless inmates.
Janet
On Aug 3, 2013, at 4:55 40PM, Sharon Traweek wrote:
Hi For those of us wondering whether/how the silo metaphor translates:
In Japan a *tako-tsubo [octopus pot]* is used to capture those invertebrates; once an octopus climbs into the pot it cannot escape. Tako-tsubo is used in Japan as a metaphor for people who join a government ministry, a company, a discipline, a specialty, a club, etc and then form few other ties. [Takotsubo has been translated as squid pot and fox hole.]
* This article discusses difficulties of introducing ICT education into traditional takotsubo (discipline-based) university curricula: Murata, Kiyoshi, and Yohko Orito. "Three Challenges for Japanese ICT Professionalism." _Proceedings of ETHICOMP 2008_ (2008): 577-585. www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/M%20and%20O%20E2008.pdf
* See also references to takotsubo in this discussion of the so-called otaku generation in Japan: "Allein, aber nicht einsam" die otaku- Generation: Zu einigen neueren Trends in der japanischen Populr-und Medienkultur Volker Grassmuck in: Norbert Bolz, Friedrich Kittler, Christoph Tholen (Hrsg.), _Computer als Medium_, Wilhelm Fink Verlag Mnchen 1993 http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.d.html -Older English version [without the takotsubo reference]: "I'm alone, but not lonely" Japanese Otaku-Kids colonize the Realm of Information and Media A Tale of Sex and Crime from a faraway Place. Volker Grassmuck (Dec 1990) http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/otaku.e.html
* In 1961 a prominent Japanese political scientist, Masao Maruyama (1914-96) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masao_Maruyama_%28scholar%29 described Japan as a takutsubo society in his _Nihon no shiso_ (Japanese Thought). Iwanami Shoten, 1961. See also: - J. Victor Koschmann review of "Maruyama Masao, Nihon no Shis Seidoku (An Explication of Japanese Thought by Maruyama Masao), by Miyamura Haruo. Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2001, 224 pp., _Social Science Japan Journal_ 5, no. 2 (2002): 267-270 http://ssjj.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/2/267.short - Hori, Masaharu. "Japanese public bureaucracy in the era of globalisation." _Ritsumeikan Law Review_ 21 (2004): 1-18. http://202.175.64.236/en/conference_doc/a1/a1_011.doc http://www.asianlii.org/jp/journals/RitsLRev/2004/1.pdf
Cheers, Sharon Sharon Traweek, UCLA Gender Studies & History Departments, with strong ties to the Anthropology & Information Studies Departments, as well as the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. My PhD is from the interdisciplinary UCSC History of Consciousness Program. [As you can see, unlike many academics, I do not fit into a takotsubo.]
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
-- James W. Cortada Senior Research Fellow Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota jcortada@umn.edu 608-274-6382
Absolutely. There are many valid reasons to stay within a specialized area. A technical fix is not going to solve the incentive problem. This reminds me of some work a student of ours did on why scientists don't share data, even when they have said they are in favor of sharing. One issue was trust: Can I trust the recipient not to scoop me with my own data? Can I trust them to reciprocate? Another was the work required to "clean up" the data to make it usable by someone else. Information tends to be more local and less transparent/standardized than IT enthusiasts like to admit. (Jennifer Tucker, "Motivating Subjects: Data Sharing in Cancer Research" (Virginia Tech, 2009)) On Aug 4, 2013, at 10:25 01AM, James Cortada wrote:
The inmates do not necessarily feel trapped, because their silos are often so big that they can spend their entire careers in one without feeling any constraint to do "their thing." Take IBM for example. One can spend their entire career in sales and never deal with any other part of the firm and do just fine. Within a sales division, they could also spend years within one geographic region, and again do just fine. A bigger problem is that there is so much work to be done within a silo that even if one wanted to poke their nose outside their silo, there might not be enough hours in the day to do that. So size of silos is something we should recognize as a factor in "silo centric" behavior.
The reason in business, at least, that silos get a bad rap is because collaboration across silos holds out the promise of optimization of costs and mission, innovation, better performance, lower operating costs, etc.--an assumption that can be both true and also absolutely false, depending on circumstances.
Then there is culture. Take a university, for example. You can have a history department occupy the fourth floor of a building, and the economics department on the third, and sociology on the second, and have a situation where (a) nobody knows each other across those three departments, (b) that is OK with them and (c) no collaboration in teaching cross-disciplinary classes, collaborations in research and publishing. That might even apply to a small college, such as the one I attended, which at the time had only about 875 students and a tiny faculty to match.
This is a fascinating subject you raise. Having spent 38 years at IBM at various levels or management and in numerous jobs (including doing strategy and work and managerial optimization consulting) I can assure you the questions you raise are profoundly important to literally millions of managers around the world, and the subject of extensive discussion in the business literature, although often without using the word "silo," but clearly in the minds of the authors.
-- James W. Cortada Senior Research Fellow Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota jcortada@umn.edu 608-274-6382
Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor Science & Technology in Society Virginia Tech
Communications of the ACM, the flagship magazine of the ACM, which reaches approximately 100,000 subscribers, occasionally takes existing oral history transcripts and edits them severely into short articles for publication in the magazine. Moshe Vardi, the editor in chief of CACM, is seeking an historian who might have an interest in editing the 71 pp. oral history transcript of Juris Hartmanis, a Turing Award winner in the theoretical computer science area, into a several page long article. The oral history was conducted (by me on behalf of the ACM History Committee) several years ago at Hartmanis's office at Cornell University. I am not available to do the edit job myself, by I will be slightly involved as the person who manages all historical articles for CACM. You will get a byline in CACM and a chance to write a brief preface to the article. If any of you are interested, please send email to me at bill@ischool.utexas.edu. Thanks, Bill Aspray
participants (4)
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Bill Aspray -
James Cortada -
Janet Abbate -
Sharon Traweek