A preface: I'm studying computer science, and one of the things that the department tries to emphasize is a sense of community, both within the students and faculty and connecting to the rest of Furman and Greenville. This post is one part extension to our presentations and one part expression of frustration that I'm trying to collect in anticipation of course evaluations (and a bit of insomnia to boot).
Several groups during our presentations about community involvement and engagement proposed some system of replacing or adding a sort of class or program in which students took on a project with a significant portion of involvement with an issue or project in the community. This semester, I've had an opportunity to see this play out in a way in the Software Engineering course. Our class was split into four teams to tasked with realizing two community proposals for apps, one of which belonged to one of our esteemed community engagement panelists. By doing so, we would be helping to produce concrete products in the Furman community that otherwise might not exist at all. I think that this idea falls well within some of the proposed systems for community engagement structures that were proposed by the class.
Unfortunately, I think that this model is flawed (at least in this context). For the duration of the project, I have felt completely disengaged, even if the community members feel otherwise. I think that this is an example of the role of personal drive in an engagement project. Under normal circumstances, developing an app on commission is extremely lucrative activity that provides an obvious motivation on the part of the developer, even if they don't necessarily have an interest in the project. On the other hand, being assigned the task and paying for the privilege by way of tuition does not, especially for someone who was uninterested in the project to begin with. In the interest of full disclosure, I had been approached individually about one of the projects last year and chose to decline the offer.
I feel that my experience would be shared by a significant portion of Furman students under some community engagement plans that were presented in class as I think that passion is an extremely important intangible component of a successful community project, and absolutely differentiates an assignment from an engagement. For added relevance to our recent reading, I think that this also serves as a criticism of central planning.
It's interesting, and I think you are right that in some ways the central planning model focuses on a bureaucratic set of incentives, not financial ones. These are not totally without their effectiveness, but it seems like they actually are fear based rather than love based, to put it in Machiavellian terms. The state functions primarily on fear, and certainly this is the main incentive the soviet model used. But to achieve true excellence, perhaps love is the only motivating force.
ReplyDeleteWe actually also touched on incentives in that class as well, where individual incentives (satisfaction with work, work/life balance, opportunity to develop oneself) become even stronger than financial incentives after a certain point in the context of skilled labor. I think that involving that idea in the central planning vs. markets comparison brings the concept of scale into the picture in the sense that the larger the scale of the economy, the better central planning seems to work (at least concerning my experience with a form of central planning on a small scale).
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