Tag Archives: requests

Ask as Ideological Blinder

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I started the Asking Project several years ago, out of irritation. The nominative use of the verb “ask” grates on my ears and, in organizations, it presents an illocutionary act of bad faith: an attempt by superiors to disguise orders or commands as requests. There is no negotiating an order issued in this form. You might talk about how you’re going to accomplish the task set for you, but not whether you are going to do it. No bids counter the ask, as they do on the trading floor, and refusal would amount to insubordination. 

In Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson finds the same bad faith gesture — and denial of an unwelcome truth — in the theory of the firm (here, as set out by Alchian and Demsetz in 1972). 

The question the theory is supposed to answer is why production is not handled entirely by market transactions among independent, self-employed people, but rather by authority relations. That is, it is supposed to explain why the hope of pro-market pre-Industrial Revolution egalitarians did not pan out. Alchian and Demsetz cannot bear the full authoritarian implications of recognizing the boundary between the market and the firm, even in a paper devoted to explaining it. So they attempt to extend the metaphor of the market to the internal relations of the firm and pretend that every interaction at work is mediated by negotiation between managers and workers. Yet the whole point of the firm, according to the theory, is to eliminate the costs of markets — of setting internal prices via negotiation over every transaction among workers and between workers and managers. 

Instead of allowing for negotiation, asks and bids, which it (rightly) sees as inefficient, the theory of the firm offers a hierarchy where managers have open-ended authority, or what Anderson sometimes calls “ incompletely specified authority.” Anderson herself muddles things a bit when she introduces this point: 

The key to the superior efficiency of hierarchy is the open-ended authority of managers. It is impossible to specify in advance all of the contingencies that may require an alternation in an initial understanding of what a worker must do. Efficient employment contracts are therefore necessarily incomplete: they do not specify precisely everything a worker might be asked to do. 

The larger point here is that presenting orders as requests — the ask —  is another “ideological blinder,” to use Anderson’s term: it borrows the jargon of the stock trader and market relations to describe (authoritarian) governance relations. Instead of the republican freedom that pre-industrial market advocates envisioned, workers are managed, or governed, as teams: 

The theory of the firm explains why [market relations among equals, or “anarchy”] cannot preserve the productive advantages of large-scale production. Some kind of incompletely specified authority over groups of workers is needed to replace market relations within the firm….in the great contest between individualism and collectivism regarding the mode of production, collectivism won, decisively. Now nearly all production is undertaken by teams of workers using large, indivisible forms of capital equipment held in common. The activities of those teams are governed by managers according to a centralized production plan. This was an outcome of the Industrial Revolution, and equally much embraced by capitalists and socialists. That advocates of capitalism continue to speak as if their preferred system of production upholds “individualism” is simply a symptom of institutional hemiagnosia, the misdeployment of a hopeful preindustrial vision of what market society would deliver as if it described our current reality, which replaces market relations with governance relations across wide domains of production.

 

The Burgundy Ribbon Rule

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BurgundyRibbonsCalPERS

Another rule, and for the time being, at least, I am happy* with the wording here: an abuse of asking almost always presents an abuse of power.

Take the case of burgundy affair at the public pension fund CalPERS, as documented by Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism.

This past fall, documents obtained by Smith show, CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost “asked the CalPERS senior leadership team to wear burgundy to show their support for her” as she faced questions about representations she had made regarding her educational background before and after she was hired. Burgundy ribbons were set out in break rooms with messages urging the “Team” to wear one in a show of support. “No pressure and no problem if you do not want to do this,” the message reads, “it is completely voluntary.” Completely.

“This is obviously inappropriate,” writes Smith,

since a request made by a CEO is effectively an order. CalPERS executives and employees are civil servants, not Frost’s personal retainers. As an expert on managerial and political conduct reacted:

I don’t even know what category to put this in. A scandal-plagued boss orchestrating support by inventing gang colors and pressuring employees to wear them? What happens to the employees who don’t perform this ritual of fealty? Should they be polishing their resumés and practicing their swimming skills?

These incidents smack of underlying panic. Frost is working overtime to shore up her position as CEO in the face of fully deserved questions regarding her long history of misrepresentations about her background, which include committing perjury in Washington on a gubernatorial questionnaire. Not only is Frost pushing her subordinates far too hard to back her up, since they can only do so much for her and coercing them will diminish their good will, she is also showing a lack of a sense of professional boundaries….

Frost’s burgundy campaign may well have crossed the line into creating a hostile work environment. One senior staff member who came to the office and saw the “dress burgundy” request too late to comply issued a written apology. Similarly, when “asked” to wear burgundy to an offsite, one [employee] who wears only black and white felt compelled to buy a burgundy outfit to comply…

…word clearly got around quickly, including the notion that non-compliance was risky.

I am still fussing over the word “presents,” and I’ve considered “masks” and variations in that direction, as well as “declares,” “represents” or “signals.” That one abuse (presenting an order as a request) almost always carries the other with it — almost always, because I don’t want to get caught up right now in handling exceptions — is the essential thing.

You can read my other posts about asking here.

*Postscript: On reflection, I might prefer this much more straightforward and concrete formulation: when someone presents an order as a request, look for an abuse of power. That way, we don’t have to worry too much about motives, or figure out whether the person doing the asking is trying to get away with something. It falls to the person being asked to watch for abuse, and conduct herself accordingly. (Being asked for something, or to do something, turns the ethical spotlight on you, or at least requires you to share it with the person doing the asking. This is your moment.) In a case like the present one, and in most superior-subordinate relationships, calling out abuse may be impractical. Subordinates will bury grievances, reluctantly comply, or pretend not to have been aware of the request. The subordinate’s dilemma in this case registers a failure of governance; a failure of governance at the highest reaches makes itself manifest at even the lowest levels and in the most trivial matters (the wearing of a ribbon). More immediately, presenting orders as requests hijacks power, creates distrust (after all, we can’t help but wonder about motives), and makes people prone to dissemble. All this thwarts collaboration, or the power to do things (to act) together.

Renault’s Hedge

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The Attorney General’s letter says that he is resigning at the president’s “request,” but that of course is a euphemism. He never had the choice of not complying, or negotiating a different outcome, as he would if this had been an authentic request. Reports say Sessions wanted to stay on at least until the end of the week, but John Kelly hustled him out the door.

It’s a common ruse to disguise orders or commands as requests. Turning the verb “ask” into a noun — “the ask,” “my ask” — is one form this abuse takes. The euphemistic use of “request” is another.  In my work on asking, I’ve given this euphemism a name: Renault’s Hedge, after Captain Louis Renault in the movie Casablanca.

Rick’s Cafe. Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains, tries to mediate between Major Strasser and the resistance leader Victor Laszlo.

The scene seems like a piece of stage business that brings together the film’s main characters for the first time, only to have them arrange to come together at a later date. But the whole scene is a carefully scripted and choreographed negotiation of “authority,” from the soldier’s salute (in recognition of Strasser’s rank) at its beginning to the polite bows at its end. Throughout, witticisms, pleasantries, good manners and the norms of Casablanca cafe society serve as a hedge against Strasser’s power of command. 

STRASSER : I should like to discuss some matters arising from your presence on French soil.

LASZLO: This is hardly the time or the place.

STRASSER: (hardening) Then we shall state another time and another place. Tomorrow at ten in the Prefect’s office, with Mademoiselle.

LASZLO: Captain Renault, I am under your authority. Is it your order that we come to your office?

RENAULT: (amiably)  Let us say that it is my request. That is a much more pleasant word.

LASZLO: Very well.

Renault and Strasser bow shortly.

The improbable thing, of course, is that Renault’s hedge works, at least well enough to end the standoff (and Laszlo is, at this point, no longer sitting but standing face-to-face with Strasser).

It works in part because the film presents Strasser satirically as a striver, a Nazi brute pretending to be a civilized European. It also works because Rick’s Cafe, like Casablanca itself, is a place where the authority of the occupiers can be contested (think only of the scene in which Laszlo leads the singing of “La Marseillaise”). Polite repartee is still possible here: Victor Laszlo can mock Nazi occupation and subjugation to German authority as a “privilege” he has never accepted, and take refuge in decorum (“this is hardly the time or the place”) when Strasser tells him he should like to question him.

At the same time, this recourse to civility is always fraught with jeopardy. Here, it allows Renault to soften Major Strasser’s order, and all but compel Laszlo’s appearance. Renault’s Hedge gives cover to a moral retreat.

Six Questions about Asking and Sophia AI

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The company that makes Sophia, Hanson Robotics, has become adept at linking different, highly-specific algorithms like image recognition and speech transcription in a way that mimics what humans might be doing when we hear a question and formulate a response.
–qz.com

Sophia AI’s mimicry of “what humans might be doing when we hear a question and formulate a response” is mostly “theatrics,” Hanson Robotics CTO Ben Goertzel openly admits. That is probably why Sophia AI has so far found her most receptive audiences on TV talk shows and in corporate theater, where she won’t have to undergo too much scrutiny. But with the launch of singularityNET, which promises to put “Sophia’s entire mind…on the network,” Hanson says that “soon…the whole world will be able to talk to her.”

I would offer that talking “to” Sophia AI — or using Sophia’s chatbot function — is still a long way from conversation in any meaningful sense of the word, because it does not involve talking with a second person. This inconvenient truth about Sophia AI has not prevented the Saudi government from naming Sophia the first “robot citizen” of the Kingdom (and the grim irony of “a robot simulation of a woman [enjoying] freedoms that flesh-and-blood women in Saudi Arabia do not” was not lost on the Washington Post); nor has it prevented tabloids from screeching about Sophia stating she would like to have a family.

If personhood is setting the bar too high, I’m content to consider merely how Sophia AI handles asking. This would involve some of the considerations I’ve been exploring in my posts on The Asking Project: what we “might be doing” (as the writer in Quartz puts it) when we ask or hear a question; what’s involved, and what’s at stake, when we address others with a request or demand; and how these and other interrogative activities might be involved in our (moral) status as persons.

For starters, here are half a dozen questions about asking and Sophia AI that occurred to me after watching her video performances. I suspect there is a clear answer to the first, and the remaining five require some extended discussion.

1. What syntactic, grammatical or other cues (e.g., intonation) does Sophia AI use to recognize a question, and distinguish it from a declarative statement?

2. Can Sophia AI distinguish a request from a demand? A demand from an order? If so, how is this done? If not, what does this shortcoming indicate?

3. Will Sophia AI ever refuse to comply with a request? Leave a demand unmet? Defy an order? If not, how should these incapacities limit the role of Sophia or any AI?

4. Could a demand ever create in Sophia AI a sense of obligation? If so, what might this “sense” entail? Can we speak coherently of AI rights, or even place limits on AI’s role, without first developing this sense?

5. Will Sophia AI ever be capable of deliberating with others and reaching consensus or agreement?

6. What would be required for Sophia AI to deliberate internally? To be capable of asking herself?

Another Abuse of Asking

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I’ve been interested for a while now in the way asking works: what exactly are we doing when we ask what to do (what we should or ought to do) and when we ask things of each other (when we make requests or demands)? For the most part, my posts on what I’ve called, for better or worse, the power of asking have focused on the abuse of asking, the confusion of asking with orders that are not open to deliberation, or the issuing of commands in the guise of requests, as when people use the nominative “ask” but aren’t asking anything at all.

When I talk about “abuse” in this context I mean, for starters, that these confusions and ruses and other kinds of indirection make asking an “act professed but hollow,” as Austin puts it in How To Do Things With Words. In Austin’s scheme, abuse is just one kind of infelicity, and I don’t want to be too strict about it, or pretend that the term covers all the instances in which asking does not come off as it should; but I’m drawn to talking about abuses of asking in part because I think it’s important to point out that acts professed but hollow may not only be insincere but also lack moral seriousness, in the sense that moral seriousness requires taking others seriously, giving them moral standing as second persons to whom one is accountable and answerable.

Abuses might take the form of a well-meaning effort to soften commands, so that people don’t feel pushed around or ordered about. That might seem like a harmless management ploy. But to allow that this professed asking is really a nicer way of commanding is to admit that abuses of asking can also mask real power relations. They don’t afford interlocutors equal standing or a share in power, or even the freedom to answer “no,” as genuine deliberation or serious conversation about what to do might.

An illustration is provided by what North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum said just this Wednesday past, before the police moved into the Oceti Sakowin Camp:

Our big ask for tomorrow is that, you know, anybody that’s remaining in the camp, we want to make sure they know that they have an opportunity to voluntarily leave, take your belongings, remove anything that you think might be culturally significant, and we’ll help you get on your way if you need to do that.

This “big ask” followed an eviction order issued by the Army Corps of Engineers that was backed by heavily armed, militarized police. Those who did not take the “opportunity to voluntarily leave” were arrested and forcibly removed. Governor Burgum might have chosen to present what is essentially an ultimatum as a request in order to seem fair and reasonable, or to defuse a tense situation. But it’s curious — isn’t it? — that it wasn’t just the governor who indulged this bureaucratic habit of speech. The governor’s spokesperson later made the same request: “We ask those that are remaining to pack up their belongings, to take off,” he said, and again repeated the offer to “help” with transportation.

Neither he nor the governor wanted to be giving orders, apparently. If their statements on this occasion can be set down as abuses of asking, that abuse is hardly the worst charge to be leveled against the governor of North Dakota in this situation. And to parse Governor Burgum’s language or that of his spokesperson on this occasion probably isn’t the best place to start reflecting on all that just went down at Standing Rock. But it’s important, I believe, to be look at what was said on this occasion and what was actually meant, how power presented itself and how it actually went about things.

The two are not even close.

The governor and his spokesperson were not asking anything at all. They were disguising not just an order but a threat of violence as a request, and publicly refusing to take responsibility for what might ensue. Apparently, they weren’t the ones giving the orders. By asking, or pretending to ask, they washed their hands of the situation. In essence, the governor said that it was up to the water protectors at the camp to keep the forces under the governor’s command from doing violence to them.

It is a classic example of the abuser’s refrain: don’t make me hurt you.

Answering ‘The Ask’ with a ‘Huh?’

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I’ve written a number of posts about “the ask” and why we should insist that ask is a verb, but I haven’t said much about the provenance of the ungainly nominative “ask” or taken its origins into account.

“The ask” is not the revival or survival of an archaic or medieval form, as one writer in the New York Times suggested. Far from it: it’s a piece of stock trader’s jargon that crept from the trading floor into bureaucratic conversation. On Wall Street, “the ask” is shorthand for the minimum price a seller sets for a security. The difference between the ask and the bid, or what a buyer is willing to pay, is known as the spread; and the spread is one pretty reliable measure of market liquidity. 

Presumably, when someone uses the term “the ask” or “my ask” to direct work or coordinate action, he expects (or pretends to expect) the second person, his interlocutor, to counter with a bid, as if conversations produced a workable measure of practical liquidity — or a measure of what’s practically possible — in the difference between what one person wants to do and what another wants or is willing to do, or what each thinks ought to be done.

We can sketch a model: the ask would invite the bid and the bid would meet that invitation with an offer. And we can develop this rudimentary model of conversation a little more by exploring the etymology of the word “bid” — itself the substantive form of a verb with roots in Old Teutonic, where *beudan means to stretch out, reach out, offer or present; and by extension beodan or boden in Old English and bede in Middle English come to mean to announce, proclaim or command. So here, again, an ask-bid model might confer some power on the bidder, or help create the appearance of parity, a sharing of command between petitioner and respondent, asker and bidder. What we are going to do is what we together command, or what will fall within the spread, span or scope of our shared command.

That doesn’t seem so bad, on the face of it: at the very least it sounds as if people on both sides can give and get in return. “The ask” holds out the promise of some share in power, or at least more flexibility than command-obedience would seem to allow. That might help account for its widespread use in the first decade or so of the twenty-first century. Ideas about organizational hierarchy are changing, and people have begun to pay outward homage, at least, to the idea that command and control is not necessarily the most effective way to run an organization. In bureaucratic settings, the imperative of command is taking on interrogative affects: the ask makes an order sound more like a request, softening the power one person actually wields over others.

The model has lots of shortcomings: for one, it reduces human relationships to market transactions — and that’s a serious and thorny problem, one I hope to say more about in a future post. But the main trouble with the ask-bid model is simply that it tells us very little about how conversation actually works. Conversations are never so neatly regimented and sequenced as this bureaucratic model makes them out to be, and as I wrote in another post, much of which we might regard as background noise or “beside the point” in a conversation is just as important, if not more important, than the putative point. There’s never just “an ask”; all parties to the conversation are continuously asking and offering, requesting clarification or confirmation, making representations of the other, shifting attention to and from the matter of joint interest, situating, interrupting and re-connecting with each other.

Generally, we’re making it up as we go along, together, and all of that joint effort counts much more than we ordinarily acknowledge. We don’t merely counter asks with bids or requests with offers; we also work together to organize, represent and sustain the conversation as a social act.

A paper published last week by Mark Dingemanse and others at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics stresses this theme. In ordinary conversation, the authors observe, interlocutors ask for clarification and correction about once every 1.4 minutes. This “other-initiated repair” is a central feature of all human conversation; and the cues one uses to initiate repair demonstrate care for the interlocutor and for the “social unit” of the conversation.

There are three main ways interlocutors initiate repair. Interjections like “huh?” are “open requests” for clarification. Asking speakers to repeat what they said (“who”?) are “restricted requests.” Repeating back what the speaker said (“he hit a homerun?”) are described as “restricted offers.” All three are regularly used with the same frequency no matter what language we happen to be speaking and despite differences in grammar and syntax. (For the paper’s authors, this lends support to the hypothesis that there are universals at work in all human language; but rather than get hung up on that point, I prefer simply to appreciate their observation that interlocutors are working constantly together, making repairs on the fly.)

Abbot and Costello's 'Who's on First?' routine is a brilliant send up of other-initiated repair.

So instead of a simple ask-bid or request-offer model, we need a much looser and less linear model in which all parties to a conversation are constantly running requests and offers and making interjections in no particular order or sequence, and so frequently and effortlessly that we don’t even notice we are making them. Requests, offers and interjections might even go unanswered; but they are no less effective for all that. These are cooperative cues and gestures, markers of the conversation as a social act.

(This is, by the way, why,so-called “conversational” interfaces built for digital assistants like Siri are still nowhere near conversational. What the manufacturers of these devices really mean is that you can address your digital assistant — give an order or make a request — in ordinary language, and it will follow. But even if the assistant is designed to say “I did not understand your request, please repeat it” or something along those lines, it’s not producing anything like the steady stream of other-initiated repairs involved actual conversation, where interlocutors are reading each other’s minds and correcting misreadings as they go.)

Conversation recreates and demonstrates joint commitment. That’s what’s really missing from the ask-bid model: human relationship. Asker and bidder, seller and buyer, don’t have a shared project beyond the exchange they are negotiating; their contact with each other can end once the transaction is made, and one or both can just walk away if they don’t agree on price. After all, both the asker and the bidder seek advantage over the other, rather than mutual gain or shared advantage that is the spur, aim and outcome of serious conversation. After the deal is done or abandoned, the bidder is free to pursue his ends and the seller is, too, even if they will be working at cross purposes.

On the other hand, people who are in a conversation about what to do have already committed to doing something together. They’ve committed to acting together, to social action and to a social subject: a “we.” We keep our commitment by repairing as we go. We act together even when we have irreconcilable differences about the way things are or what to do.

Maddening Jargon, Jargon Madness: Another Note on “The Ask”

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I recently had a brief exchange with Deborah Mills-Scofield about a blog post she’d written on HBR.org entitled “The Power of Your Network Is the Ask.” I didn’t take issue with her argument in that post. I focused, instead, on her use of the phrase “the ask,” an insidious piece of corporate jargon I’ve written about before.

Mills-Scofield was gracious and good-humored about the whole thing. Our exchange on HBR.org and on Twitter sent me back to some of the ideas I’d entertained in my original post – about asking, taking initiative and action – and I decided it would be a good idea to find some more examples of business people using “the ask.” I thought some new attestations might help me think a little more about this locution: What does it express? What does it keep from being expressed? How does it change the request? The relationship? The results?

Forbes.com seemed like a good place to start looking for examples. I expected to find CEOs and managers quoted by the magazine’s writers, and my plan, such as it was, was to start skewering and lambasting and mocking them and calling them barbarians – or something along those lines, I wasn’t exactly sure. Instead, I found something puzzling: Forbes writers themselves were pushing the word.

For instance, a contributing writer offers this advice on seeking a promotion: “The most important part of asking for a promotion is preparing ahead of time. When you make the ask, you’ll need to prove (with specifics) that you’re ready for the next step” [italics mine].

Seeing the word used in this way, I wonder if this nominative use of “ask” has roots in Wall Street jargon, which sometimes designates the lowest price of a stock offer as “the ask price,” and if the person asking for the promotion here would be surprised to discover that she had represented herself in these dehumanizing terms. In any case, it appears that the editors at Forbes are not too worried about these ugly metaphors, and not very scrupulous when it comes to what’s a noun and what’s a verb.

Examples abound. Here’s Meghan Casserly, a Forbes staff writer, in an article that promises to disclose “The Five Secrets of Successful Silicon Valley Women.” Watch what happens to the verb “ask” in the space of two short paragraphs (emphasis mine):

“We know too surely that women ask for too little money when seeking funding for their businesses,” says [Deborah] Perry Piscione, but she’s seen the women of Silicon Valley start to self-correct when they approach the investors of Sand Hill Road. “The strategy is asking for twice as much as you believe you’ll need.”
But it isn’t just in fundraising that Perry Piscione says Silicon Valley women excel in the “ask.” Several years ago friend and venture capitalist Heidi Roizen mentioned she was having trouble adding another corporate board seat to her resume. “I sort of shyly asked her if she’d be okay admitting this to the women at an Alley to the Valley event,” she says, thinking Roizen might be embarrassed to share that she was struggling. Roizen’s response was the opposite. “She said ‘Of course I want to talk about it!’”

Maybe one of the things that makes “serial entrepreneur” Deborah Perry Piscione so successful is that she uses verbs as verbs. Hard to say, but it’s clear who’s doing the reifying here: it’s Casserly, not Perry Piscione. I suppose it counts for something that Casserly puts “the ask” in quotation marks: she’s quoting, or thinks she’s quoting, the lingua franca of the Valley. Maybe so, or maybe the only people who talk that way in the Valley are those who see human interactions as mere transactions.

That’s really the point. It’s worse than annoying: this kind of jargon grates on the ear because it offends the soul. Words matter – in magazine articles, in negotiations, in every day relationships; people are not indifferent to the words you use. “Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee,” wrote Ben Jonson. And “the ask,” as I suggested in my first post on the topic, shows among other things that you don’t have much interest in asking, or in the true power of asking, at all.

Sure, we slip and we are lazy, or we try to talk like we belong to the club, but it’s important to to catch ourselves. To their credit, the editors of Forbes themselves nominated “the ask” for the magazine’s Jargon Madness 2013, a bracket elimination of “head-splitting corporate speak”. “Ask (n.)” was eliminated in the first round, losing out to “Rock Star.” I guess some things are more annoying and more offensive than others.