Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Relatedness and BlogHer

One of the reasons I used the word relatedness in my blog title when I began it is because of a women's task force I participated on in the early 1990s, when I was at Digital Equipment Corporation. The basis for the task force was a concern about the retention of talented women in the software engineering group, and the potential for improving the work environment such that women could achieve their full potential. The task force was called, in fact, the Stone Center Task Force, because we were also the "DEC project" for the Stone Center, whose research based on the work of Jean Baker Miller continues today at the Wellesley Center for Women at Wellesley College. I am often, in my research and practice in social networks asked if women are better at networks. Often, I say, "Often."

When I say, "often," it is because the research from the Stone Center suggests that women have a more relational view of the world and this has profound implications for understanding the differences between men and women. Baker Miller's groundbreaking book, Toward a New Psychology of Women, written in 1987, argued eloquently that because the study of psychology was based on studies primarily of men (by men), that women were frequently diagnosed with psychological disorders merely because they were different. "Men and women are different," she said. By the mid1990s, and after the publication of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1993) and the popular Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus (1992) we no longer questioned this politically incorrect assertion.

Now there is BlogHer, which I am late to find, but finding resonant. It is a global, web-based community of women bloggers, whose mission is to "create opportunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education, and community." A nice article by Maura Welch appeared in today's Boston Globe. (I actually found the article while browsing BlogHer, not the other way around, in case you were curious.)

It's too soon to tell whether BlogHer will have the same impact on me as those bi-weekly dialogues which were searingly personal and ultimately personally transformative. But it's definitely time to tell Maureen Harvey, who initiated and led that task force, what a difference it made in my life. Reminds me of a terrific quote of Virginia Woolf I'm saving for Net Work: "I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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