Summary

This chapter is about how people form identities in communities through participation and non-participation.  As I understand it, non-participation does not mean not allowed or not accessible to the community.  Non-participation means some sort of interaction, just not in a full or complete way.  If I read Wenger correclty, non-participation provides a source of information about what we are not.  I guess what we are missing out on for various reasons (no desire, no capability, etc). Non-participation is inevitable since we live in and encounter many communities of practices so it is not possible to fully participate in all of them.  There are two types of case of interaction of participation and non-participation.  One is peripherality where some level of non-participation is required to order to enable full participation.  I suppose a good example is job shadowing when you first start a job.  You shadow a more experienced co-worker (non-participation) in order to learn the job so you can eventually do it and contribute (full participation).  The other interaction is marginality, where forms of non-participation prevent full participation.  Wenger then describes that participation and non-participation help define our identities and our relationship to the rest of the world such as what we hold as priorities, what we care about, who we associate with, and what we spend out time on.

The last half of the chapter is related to instituitional non-participation.  Institutional non-participation means how non-participation is carried out based on a community's institutional arrangements such as status, organization, and procedures.  Wenger defines three reasons for this institutional non-participation and how it can define a practice itself.

As a compromise:  Wenger uses the example of the claim processors who refuse to talk about work during their breaks for fears that their identities as individuals will merge with their work roles.  So as a compromise, they non-participate during their breaks because they full participate when they are not on break.

As a strategy: Wenger again uses the example of claim processors who feel that once they are off work, they are no longer identify with being claim processors.  In this way, they have their own seperate identify away from work that helps them put up with the dullness and boring nature of their jobs. 

As a cover:  The claim processors will employ "I just work here" approach to handle angry customers to try to emphasize that they are just regular people who have no allegiences to their jobs as claim processors.  Therefore customers shouldn't get too angry with them personally. 

Critique: 

Like Jina, I had a trouble understanding this chapter.  I did not really understand the configuration of social relations as its relates to participation and non-participation, which is why my summary is pretty light on it.   Wenger sort of just jumps from one point to another and I don't see the connection. 

Connection

This idea of non-participation is actually being relevant to the Fighting 44s right now.  A few days ago somebody posted a thread entitled "What is up with all the ZEROS???????" It reads:

 "I counted about 461 people that registered on here from 2004-2006 that never wrote one post or even answered a post.."

Seeing that the community has 871 members, that is a lot of people.  Dialectic, one of the site founders, replied:

"I think some people just register to check out
the forums they can't access publicly. Also, some might register with
the intention to post, and then they might not get the confirmation
email, as it sometimes goes into Bulk, and then they don't want to
bother registering again."

I can also think of reasons related to Wenger for why these people do not post.  One is that they registered and through reading the forums they found out the Fighting 44s is something they do not want to be identified with or devote their energies to reading or contributing to.  Another reason is that if you are Asian or involved with an Asian American community in the off-line world, then you may wish to seperate yourself from that in the online-world.  Therefore you will non-participate as a strategy. 

I think some of the ideas in the chapter will be easier to follow if we think about there being two activities, A and B. Many of the distinctions in the chapter revolve around the impact of non-participation in A on participation in B.

To distinguish peripherality and marginality:

• peripheral; non-participation in A enables participation in B
• marginal: non-participation in A prevents participation in B

Demands of multi-membership: A is a practice of one community, B of another. To be allowed to participate in B, one has to not do A.

Reading "some degree of non-participation is necessary to enable a kind of participation that is less than full" made me think of consulting companies who swoop in and try to solve a bounded problem for a company rather than getting fully involved in the work. 

It is that aspect of peripherality that allows them to gain a wide-spectrumn of knowledge (being able to free up resources to work on multiple projects as opposed to dwelling into one) and the ability to think "fresh."

Summary and Critique

The concept of nonparticipation is important because it is inevitable that (1) you become outsiders to some (many) communities of practices, and (2) you come in contact with communities you do not belong to.  However, the consequence of non-participation in a community might be trivial unless you ever want to participate in that community.  Furthermore, participation and non-participation do not necessarily define each other and “merely have distinct effects on our identities” (p165). So in this case, participation and non participation sketch only a fuzzy spectrum for “who you are” and “who you are not.”  The spectrum is fuzzy because belonging to one group does not exclude the possibility of participation in the others in the past, now, or in the future.

However, there are cases in which participation defines non-participation and delineate clear the map of identities: They are races, nationalities, ethnicities, religions, social statuses in hierarchical systems (in a given time), and genders.  Writing them down, I realize that they are the major sources of conflicts in the world.  

Application

So I cannot help but think about the use of real names which may reveal mutually exclusive identities mentioned above in online communities.  If  Burkhalter is right, you will rarely change your preconception about races in online communities because you are not able to check physical appearance of a participants when she or he does something against her or his racial stereotype you have.  Then the use of real names will bring more chances of changing preconception about groups of people you do not belong to?  

I think the use of real names will bring mixed effects: 1) you will be more likely to evaluate one’s postings through your templates about races, genders, and nationalities from the start. There are many examples this may be beneficial. On the other hand, there might be no benefit of blind evaluation about postings.  2) A range of authors who make significantly different postings from your expectations will change your preconception about the group authors belong to.  3) You may not pay attention to postings by authors who belong to group you are not interested or you dislike.

Here I become to think use of real names will not necessarily decrease the usefulness of a reputation system in online communities.  For instance, you may need an incentive mechanism to prevent the last scenario above where it is not desirable. 

Identities of non-participation
    Non-participation is an inevitable part of living in a landscape of practices.  On mixi, the landscape of practices manifests as communities the users have built.  You come into contact with communities you do not participate in when you see their icons on a friends home page, or when a member of such a community refers to his group in a response to one of your journal entries.

    Sometimes, participation and non-participation interact to define each other.  For example, a novice unable to understand a conversation between old-timers is significant because the experience of non-participation is aligned with a trajectory of participation. Im thinking of my own experiences trying to learn Japanese, and all the conversation I didn’t really participate in because I couldn’t keep up.  

    Peripherality:  the main mode is participation, but some degree of non-participation is necessary to enable this.
    Marginality:  the main mode is non-participation, defining a restricted form of participation.

Sources of participation and non-participation
    Trajectories with respect of specific communities of practice
    Multimembership: Particularly in communities that define themselves in contrast to each other

Institutional Non-participation
    Relations of non-participation are mediated by institutional arrangements.  Like a company that has access controlled door locks, and only lets you get off the elevator on the floors you have business with.  The complex interplay between participation (these are floors of the same company which I work) and non-participation (I have never been to these places, I am not allowed in these place) seems to be what Wenger means when he talked earlier about participation and non-participation interacting to define their importance.  He would say that my inability to go into blocked off floors in communities I am not related to at all is far less relevant and interesting to my identity.
    Mutual compromise of non-participation:  you give my your money and ill give you my time.  This keeps the communities separated, like in Wenger’s example of management and workers.
    Non-participation as strategy:  to prevent one aspect (work) from taking over their whole life they have to not full participate in the community around that aspect
    Non-participation as cover:  “I just work here” I am getting confused, because this use of the word “non-participation” seems more like ‘ignoring a customer’, or ‘not engaging with another person’ and this is different from the way Wenger uses this term earlier to mean ‘not fully engaged in the community’.

Non-participation as practice
    Instantaneous legitimacy obtained by remarks about looking forward to the weekend of wishing it were four o’clock.  I would much rather have work with an inward trajectory, where aspect of non-participation are aligned with future participation, and not guises to prevent me from being unhappy about work (ie waiting for the weekend to come).  From this angle, I can really see the distinction between peripherality and marginality in non-participation.   

OK, although I'm the first one to write, I won't summarize since I have few questions to ask in order to understand what he is saying in this chapter.

1. Marginalization

Is marginalization a product of non-participation among old-timers? Or is non-participation a bad product of marginalized people (which in this case considered equal to old-timers)?

2. Non-participation

So, I see that non-participation can be understood in three different context:

1) one is within the same community where the participation of oneself is happening (e.g., new-comers vs old-timers: you don't have to do this yet since you are a newbie)

2) second is across different communities there are communities you engage in and those that you don't (e.g., I'm not one of them)

3) your participation or non-participation in a community is within another larger realm of a bigger community. (e.g., Although I may say that I am actively participating in April 10 lecture blog, I may be non-participating in 684 blog in overall)

So, we see that there are these different configurations of social relations in different levels that we can understand about non-participation. However, I only see Wenger explaining non-participation in the context of 1). Did I not understand the chapter, or did I not understand the three different context above, or did Wenger really only described in the context of 1)?

In chapter 7, Wenger talks about the significance of the interplay between non-participation and participation. Full participation, full non-participation, peripherality, and marginality are the degrees that people participate. By experiencing these, people begin to learn to extend the range of the 'world' that their identities care about.

I think one thing that Wenger has to emphasize more in this whole discussion of identity is the "coherence of identity (p. 165) " for us to better understand this chapter. Through of experience of being participants, non-participants, perpherality, and marginality, people come to realize some "coherent" aspects of them regardless of their degree of participation in the communities of different kinds. And these coherent/consistent aspects of them compose their identity. The perceived identity is considered as true "identity" only when it is applied in a consistent way in any situation.

In this chapter, I came up with two questions regarding the lukers again.

Q1. In relation with marginality , I want to bring up the question about the lurkers. Can they be considered as marginality (participation restricted by non-participation) ?

Q2. Are we going to let them lurk around the community for the sake of the whole society where people possess multimembership across diverse and interlocked communities in the world?

It's very possible I'm missing something, but the distinction between the two parts of this chapter seemed fairly clear to me, at least in the sense that the first part concerns situations in which a person is basically free to determine his or her level of participation in relationship to a community.

But the institutions of the second part are taking away an important part of that voluntarism. The most obvious example would be, of course, a person's need for a steady paycheck or for benefits which effectively removes their ability to end membership in the community of their place of work--unless they're willing to risk a potentially serious period of financial instability and uncertainty. There seems to be a real difference here.

One thing I would add to Wenger's discussion of institutions is that they also have trajectories of their own, in the sense that the leaders of the institution may sometimes adopt new strategies to sustain or improve the institution's position in regard to other institutions. A change of strategy at that level can radically and abruptly redefine the 'paradigmatic trajectories' available to other members of the institution.

I was amused by Etienne's insistence that "what we are not can even become a large part of how we define ourselves" (164). As though he needs to tell us this after using it as his modus operandi for the whole of the text. Defining himself by what he is not, over and over again. But I guess it's important to him. I thought David's application of non-participatory analysis to the Fighting 44s was especially well executed.

So, peripherality and marginality (my take, anyways):
Peripherality seems to be more about choosing less-than-full participation, and recognizing that non-participation can support that choice. Marginality (as in marginalization) is more about being prevented from participating fully (when you actually want to) by some from of non-participation. (At Alinsu, the claims processors were - later on in their practice - restricted in their actions by not being able to engage fully with the context of the COB forms.)

Wengers runs through the different ways that non-participation plays out at Alinsu, and recognizes that non-participation impacts deeply on practice when it is "mediated by systematic institutional arrangements" (Wenger 171).

WikiStats: WikiStats could be implemented to make low- or non-participation visible. However, I'm having trouble seeing when this would be desirable. Most of Wenger's examples seem to carry a theme of non-participation working due in part to its collectively-endowed invisibility. When non-participation is a compromise or a strategy, the claims processors expect that management will in some way support the non-participation because it keeps the wheels turning. An analogous situation could be a classroom or corporate wiki where the administrator overlooks occassional low contribution from individuals in order to respect that members of the CoP need breathing room every once in awhile... WikiStats could formalize that: ("If a user makes less than 5% change to an article for more than two weeks, send the manager an email.") But I'm not sure what else to do with it...

Following the format of my chapter 6 entry...

Reading notes

- Are there different degrees of non-participation? On p. 165 Wenger claims that realizing that I'm not a member of the claims processors CoP is "inconsequential." But I'm not a member of the SI PhD students' CoP, a realization that seems much less inconsequential to me, given the opportunities to participate in it. My non-participation in that group is a much larger part of my identity than my non-participation as a claims processor, is it not?

- Ah, he seems to be getting at this question with his definitions of peripheriality and marginality (165-6)

- Difference between peripherality and marginality "must be understood in the context of trajectories"

More to come...

In-class notes

Participation and non-participation

Non-participation enabling or getting in the way of participation. Marginal non-participation in A prevents you from participating in B (makes you marginal to B). Peripheral non-participation in A allows you to begin participating in B (as a peripheral participant).

If community B defines itself in contrast to community A, then non-participation in B is required to participate in A. I'm thinking of this as an opportunity cost proposition: participating at SI means my non-participation at CMU.

Peripheralizing non-participation: is there an example?

Paul's example: doctoral student representative organizing the visiting days for prospective PhD students. If all the grad students are complaining about the program, and you do not participate in that complaining, then you are more likely to be selected to be the doctoral student representative.

Marginalizing non-participation in the same example

Same example as above: the person who doesn't join in bashing the program wouldn't be invited to the poker game with the complaining PhD students.

Institutional non-participation

Paul's explanation: not about what the institution does/doesn't do, but whether the individual chooses to participate in the institution's activities.

Compromise is an agreement between the individual & and institution about what activities the individual will participate in and when.

Strategic non-participation is a way for indiv. to get what they want by not participating in institutional activities, even if it marginalizes them or makes their participation less interesting.

A CoP can support each other in types of non-participation in institutional activities as a part of the practice of the community.

Non-participation in Cool Running

anyone who non-participates in the Newbie Cafe but arrives at the community and goes striaght to a forum that matches their skill level would be close to a marginal non-participant in the Newbie Cafe.