Who Codes Whom?

@daily_barbarian (Geoff Shullenberger) describes René Girard as politically ambivalent.

He codes as right-wing in his insistence on the necessity of social order, but as left-wing in his insistence that any such order is founded on violence.

When I ask who is doing the coding here, and for what purpose, he replies 

People of all sorts who encounter his work and attempt to place it in the conventional categories. I’ve seen many on the left use the first point to call him a reactionary, and some on the right use the second to call him naïve about power.

Quite so. But the fact that other people don't know how to categorize Girard doesn't imply any contradiction or ambivalence on his part. What it does show is that the conventional categories (rightwing, leftwing) are becoming increasingly muddled. (There are several other arguments for moving away from this conventional way of framing politics - for example recent work by Latour.)

But what I want to talk about here is the elision. Instead of people of all sorts code him ..., we get simply he codes. As if Girard is somehow responsible for his own classification.

Classification is a political act, but categories are often treated as objective facts rather than subjective opinions (Bowker & Star). Hence my question about who and why. 

One domain in which the act of coding hasn't always received sufficient attention is in data and intelligence, but this is now changing thanks to great work by @abebab and others. See links to my other posts below.

And in the political domain, commentators are increasingly willing to challenge the coding that underpins certain alleged social facts. See for example Global Media Literacy. And those wishing to politicize the COVID pandemic can find more than enough complexity in the coding of health and pharma data that might support any given measure. (Politicizing such matters is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is itself a political choice.)

---

Anon, Opinion: Beware the data on American right-wing violence (Global Media Literacy, 23 May 2022)

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (MIT Press 1999)

Related posts: Framing a riot (August 2011), Limitations of Machine Learning (July 2020), Mapping out the entire world of objects (July 2020), Near Miss (April 2021), Purpose of Shame (April 2022)

The Corporate Sorting Hat

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers are known as the inventors of a personality instrument known as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It's not a test, its supporters insist, because you can't fail.

Briggs Myers argued that everyone was good at something. The point of the instrument was not only to recognize and value your own strengths, but to appreciate that other people had different strengths and styles. She thought this knowledge would help people work together more efficiently and effectively. During the Second World War, this also meant enabling people of all types to contribute productively to the war effort.

And not complaining, accepting one's rightful position in life, which is perhaps why so many corporations like it. The MBTI combines a simplistic version of Jungian type theory with an immutable division of labour. You are born with one of these sixteen personality types, and this supposedly determines your path. 

Merve Emre notes how MBTI rhetorically intertwines "the fiction of the complete self with the fiction of the happy, hard-working team". Instead of using the instrument (it's not a test) for self-development, it becomes a way of labelling yourself and others, helping to define and reinforce your identity.

If you have difficulties with a partner or colleague, it is probably useful to remind yourself from time to time that they don't have the same view of the world as you do. A fictional explanation, whether it is based on MBTI or astrology, is probably better than no explanation at all, and may allow you to accept that they mean well ("positive intent") rather than assuming they are being deliberately difficult.

And if you believe that these labels are fixed through life, which is what MBTI theory claims, then you should work with the personality you have been given rather than trying to change it.

So why do so many organizations use this instrument? The first answer is perhaps - because it's there. Briggs Myers worked with Edward Hay, the founder of a management consulting firm specializing in personnel management, and this kind of instrument is popular with consulting firms because it allows them to generate apparently value-adding work for their junior consultants.

Perhaps another reason is that bureaucratic organizations like sorting people at all stages in the employment cycle, selecting people for recruitment, promotion and redundancy. Selection by gender or race is no longer acceptable, but selection by personality type apparently is. If you have the idea that people of a particular type tend to be good at sales, then this becomes an enabling prejudice.

Briggs Myers herself had some old-fashioned views on gender and race. The extreme racism in her second novel was considered unacceptable even in the 1930s, and early versions of her instrument differentiated between men and women. She presented Hay with two scoring keys - a "standard" key and a "female" key. It may astound readers of this blog to learn that this resulted in women being type-cast as nurses, teachers, and secretaries, rather than executives and managers. As Merve Emre remarks sardonically, "destiny wasn't biological; it was typological".

 

---

Dean Burnett, Nothing personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test (Guardian, 19 March 2013)

Merve Emre, Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs (Digg, 1 October 2015)

Elle Hunt, What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world (The Guardian, 30 August 2021)

Tim Lewis, Myers-Briggs personality tests: what kind of person are you? (Guardian, 15 September 2018)

Lisa Wong Macabasco, They become dangerous tools: the dark side of personality tests (Guardian, 4 March 2021)

Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)

Related posts: Are Best Practices Obsolete (September 2009), From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices (March 2013), Algorithms and Governmentality (July 2019), Bad Sorting (September 2021)