[This is the third post in a series on Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine. See also Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.]
Writing courses aren’t typically lectures; they rely heavily on discussion and interaction with students, and missing that engagement makes it more difficult to do well. At their best, our courses model the practices of thinking, reading, and writing that we ask our students to undertake on their own when we assign them writing. That’s the traditional rationale, anyway, for why our course sessions matter.
And it’s why we find ourselves as teachers crafting attendance policies. In an ideal world, our students would look forward to coming to our classes—they (the classes) would be interesting and engaging, students would anticipate them, and such policies wouldn’t be necessary. Back here in the real world, of course, they are, and we have to ask ourselves questions like how many absences begin to affect not only a student’s ability to engage with the course but the vibe of the course itself. There’s a tacit element of class attendance: in the best courses, the teacher and students become a community of writers, (relatively) comfortable with one another, able to dig more deeply in discussions, and willing to have frank discussions about writing, what works and what doesn’t, how we can make our work better, etc. If students are dropping in and out of the class unpredictably, such that it always feels like a group of strangers, then it’s never going to cross that threshold. I’ve had classes at every point along that spectrum, ones where the students wished that it could continue after the semester ended, as well as some where they couldn’t wait to put it behind them.
By and large, teachers can’t blame themselves for those failures, any more than they deserve credit for the successes. We frankly have very little control over which way a group of students will go, particularly when it comes to course attendance. Students can get ill, struggle with schedule conflicts, become overwhelmed, and/or sometimes things just don’t click. My point is that rather than spending lots of time managing individual students’ attendance, or adjudicating the difference between excused and unexcused absences, most of us just settle for an attendance policy in our syllabus.
This is probably more than you ever needed to know about attendance, but I raise it here as a familiar example for one of the overriding themes of The Unaccountability Machine. And that’s accountability itself, which triggered my interest in Davies’ book in the first place. Davies writes about “The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa.” The implied drama of this law plays out on a daily basis around us: some people will blame the wait staff, the gate agent, or the person behind the counter when (and despite the fact that) that person has no ability to affect the decisions that anger or inconvenience us.
And that is by design. Davies talks about how “decision making-systems,” including we ourselves, can attenuate or amplify accountability. And part of what he’s critiquing is the extent to which our profit-obsessed economic agents have removed as much accountability from the system as possible. They accomplish this through the creation of what he calls “accountability sinks,” processes, procedures, or rules designed to remove humans from the loop (and thus any responsibility for the results). One advantage is that the sink functions “to absorb unwanted negative emotion,” as those negatively affected “progressively realise that the human being [they] are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy.” As we’re often all too familiar, as human beings who will find themselves embedded in these sort of systems, it can be equally the case that “something is fundamentally unfair” at the same time that “there’s nothing that we can do.” Davies explains that “This property of there being ‘nobody to blame’ is the definition of what constitutes an accountability sink.” Rightly or wrongly, the smooth performance of the system is prioritized above the people affected by it; “it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.”
At the same time, though, accountability sinks are ultimately necessary. As with my discussion of attendance, “the purpose of making policies [is] to reduce the amount of time and effort spent making decisions on individual cases.” You can spend more time with the edge cases (those highly unlikely exceptions to the rules) if the rules themselves account for the vast majority of applications (you can also ignore them entirely, and some do). Accountability sinks streamline systems by simplifying the environment, by supplying policy that accounts for a great deal of variety amongst those individual cases.
I’m going to write a bit more about this in my next post, but I wanted to note here that scale1 is an important part of this as well (and why I’m spending so much time on this). Part of what happens as organizations grow is that they acquire multiple scales: “the whole purpose of having different levels of organisation is so that you don’t need to communicate all the information from the lowest levels to the highest.” Those levels, in other words, function as a version of accountability sinks. For example, we have department policies about attendance that individual instructors can incorporate, and of course our policies align with those of our college and the university as a whole. Stepping into the role of department chair has immersed me into procedural intricacies and complexities that I only vaguely understood beforehand. As Davies explains, “the different levels of systems aren’t necessarily aware of each other,” and they don’t need to be, as long as there are clear paths from one level to the next.
The idea of scale introduces another flip side to the question of accountability. When I first entered graduate school and began to teach, I really valued the freedom to organize my classroom, readings, and assignments the way I wanted. But I also learned that this made me accountable for those choices. There’s freedom, too, in working with constraints—adapting to a shared curriculum, for instance, can reduce the cognitive overhead, the “amount of time and effort spent making decisions.” When we’re coordinating and prioritizing limited/scarce time and effort, accountability sinks can make it easier. New teachers can save themselves a great deal of time by relying on pre-existing materials and the advice of those more experienced (rather than reinventing the wheel). In my notes on Davies’ book, I wrote that accountability sinks are one way that organizations translate effortful (System 2, to borrow Daniel Kahneman’s heuristic) thinking into automatic (System 1) response.2
And this provides a good way (for me) of thinking about how my life has changed as department chair. In many (many!) cases, I find my office functioning as the accountability sink for my colleagues, particularly when students (and/or their parents) wish to dispute the results of their courses. I’m also much more conscious of how my “superiors” operate in that fashion for me. Much of the job has been learning how different scales are responsible for various categories of decisions. Another significant portion involves holding discussion with colleagues at different scales in order to sort out who’s permitted to make those decisions. And sometimes, I find myself tasked with educating colleagues at one scale about what happens at another, and how certain decisions may have foreseeably negative (if unintended) consequences. As my predecessors understand all too well, I’m doing these things so that my colleagues don’t have to, and most of that has to do with accountability, decisions, and information.
I know that this post has probably sounded a bit more bureaucratic than is normal for me, but I wanted to try to spend some time pinning down exactly why this book has appealed to me. I hope that comes across. I think I’ll do one more piece on Davies, where I follow up on my footnotes and talk about how these ideas from cybernetics connect with my project.
I’d argue that Davies’ book describes what happens when synecdochic or scalar thinking metastasizes. He writes that “Implicitly, every rule is a model of the world–you can see both a model and a rule book as a relationship between causes and effects, inputs and outputs.” That may be the most direct line I can draw between his work and my own.
This is another hint as to how I see Davies connecting up with the other stuff I’ve been writing about here. His point is that the more distance that accrues between those who make decisions and those who are affected by them, the more likely it becomes that it will take crisis and upheaval to effect change. The parallels with contemporary politics should be obvious (and Davies touches on this late in the book).