When I was rolling out this newsletter, one of my first posts was about scale, and returning the topic this past week reminded me that the threat of a second part on the topic has been looming over my site for more than a year now. Scale is one of the things that lurks in the background of much of the thinking that I do, so this is the second episode to at least two different first episodes. So this may either be a long-ish post, or one that I break into a couple of parts.
Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve written plenty about metonymy over the past year, but it’s hard to think about that trope without also considering synecdoche (si-NECK-duh-KEY, rhymes with Schenectady). The two are distinct from each other, but there are cases where they blur together, enough so that folks will often use one when they mean the other. I wrote a bit about this in the post linked above—over time, metonymic associations can become anchored in our minds and become synecdochal. In a lot of ways, this is the modus operandi of most advertising and marketing; the more persistently we see happiness associated with a given product, the logic goes, the more likely we are later to consider that positive emotion part of the product, and purchase it (even if, consciously, we know that’s not how it works).
So while metonymy is a trope that connects two things or ideas based on proximity, synecdoche is the one that establishes a relation of scale, a part-whole relationship. We can think of scales as concentric circles that radiate outward from ourselves: we are parts of families, employees at a given organization, citizens of a particular neighborhood, city, county, state, country and planet. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus turns to the “flyleaf” of his geography book where he’s written
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
As Stephen considers the broader scales of “his name and where he was,” after a brief rumination on the nature of God, we learn that “It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big.” And that’s really the superpower associated with scale: it gives us a way to speak about (and make sense of) organizations, governments, nations, without exhausting ourselves in the process. Rather than trying to hold all of that activity in our heads at once, we can scale it down to a more personal level. And we “scale up” when we consider ourselves parts of a larger whole, whether that be employees, citizens, fans, shareholders, professionals, etc.
I’ve written before (and spoken with my friends endlessly) about how different it is to serve as department chair as opposed to being a member of the faculty, which leads to the other function of scale that I want to consider. The department itself hasn’t changed substantially, nor have I myself, but I’m now responsible for the department at a different scale. I play a much larger role in issues of hiring, performance review, scheduling, curriculum, and organization, and I am often a buffer between the other members of my department and the administrative units that now sit directly above me. I am privy to discussions about budgets, recruiting, student retention, organizational realignment, and strategic planning, much of which I was able to ignore as a faculty member. Or at least, I was able to pick and choose when and where to engage with those issues. Now that I bear a larger responsibility for them, I find that it really has transformed the way I have to approach my work—the rhythm of a semester is very different for me right now, as are the ways that I’ve had to learn how to manage my workload. So the point (“the other piece of things”) of this is that even relatively small shifts in scale are translations. That is, shifting from one scale to another carries with it a certain amount of friction and transformation.
This feels like an obvious point to make, I know, but it’s not necessarily something that we think about. That we might adapt ourselves depending on the audience we’re addressing is something that most of us do unconsciously, with a great deal of common sense. We don’t confront that friction explicitly—we simply accommodate it, even when differing scales require of us radically divergent mindsets. Kenneth Burke has a great example of this in Rhetoric of Motives, where he talks about how a shepherd will go to great lengths “to protect [sheep] from discomfiture and harm,” even though “he may be ‘identified’ with a project that is raising the sheep for market” (27).
[You might recognize, in this example, the same dynamic by which our tech “shepherds” have enshittified the Internet for us.]
I’ve watched a lot of restaurant makeover shows (Kitchen Nightmares, Restuarant Impossible, et al.), and one of the persistent themes of that genre is how, often, restauranteurs fail to understand the pitfalls of scale. If you own an individual restaurant, there’s a good chance that you do a little bit of everything. But what happens when you open a second or third restaurant, looking to capitalize on the success of the first? Your role would have to change. Not only are you taking on many more employees, but trying to do half (or a third) of a little bit of everything doesn’t work. So instead, you need to add in layers of scale, folks who’ll manage the different parts of the business and then report to you. The bigger your picture gets, the more you have to consider that bigger picture, and delegate the detail-level work to others. That’s a different kind of thinking, one that includes articulating the relationships among the employees at different scales. If you watch these shows, it’s low key amazing how many problems can be solved by simple things like weekly staff meetings, so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.
Scale is double-edged in that way. It allows a social organization to grow beyond the individual purview of any single member of it, but that means that very few people will have access to (or control over) the larger picture. The larger the organization, the more individual members need to specialize, and the more organizational scale(s) we need to coordinate those specialists and their activity so that it synthesizes into a mission. Think about all the organizational layers required to field a professional sports franchise, from players, coaches, trainers, and medical staff to facilities maintenance, scouting, front office personnel, etc.
That example provides several illustrative moments where scales conflict. Every year, there are teams where the long term interests of the organization, that might be served by securing high draft picks, come into conflict with the more immediate mandate for coaches and players, which is to win games if at all possible. Or where medical staff are encouraged to clear a player to perform when it risks that person’s long-term health and well-being. The increased number of college football players who bypass their teams’ bowl games to prepare for the NFL draft is another case where we see the tension between scales. The point is that there’s no “right” answer for any of these situations—the propagation of scale across an organization generates these tensions by its very nature. Understanding the world at a certain scale may provide us with crystal clarity, but shifting our position in one direction or another can flip that understanding entirely. (And that’s assuming that we have the luxury of restricting ourselves to a single scale from which to view things in the first place.)
This feels like a good place to break for the next installment. I’ve got more to say, and I need to return to the idea that “love doesn’t scale” eventually. Stay tuned.
As always enlightening and thoughtful. I’m happy to explore adding some new vocabulary and agree that scale is necessary in degrees of responsibility. Looking forward to part 2.