Negotiability is non-negotiable

I’ve just started reading Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life by the historian of science Theodore Porter, and so far it’s fantastic. The first chapter discusses how, in the days before the metric system, even units of measure were negotiable. Porter gives two examples. One example comes from Poland, where the size of a unit of land would sometimes vary based on the quality of the soil, to make adjustments to equalize the amount of productive land, rather than simply the area of the land.

The other example Porter gives is about the reference vessel that towns would use to as their local definition of a bushel. You might think that defining a specific vessel as the bushel would give a fixed definition, but there was still flexibility. The amount of say, grain, or oat, that could be poured into the vessel could vary, depending on how it was poured (e.g., whether the material was “flattened” or “heaped”, the height it was poured from). This allowed people to make adjustments on the actual volume that constituted a bushel based on factors such as quality.

We humans have to build systems in order to scale up certain kinds of work: we couldn’t have large-scale organizations like governments and corporations without the technologies of bureaucracies and other forms of standardization. This is the sort of thing that James Scott calls legibility. But these formal systems demand fixed rules, which can never fully accommodate the messiness that comes with operating in the real world. And so, the people at the sharp end, the folks on the ground who are doing the actual work of making the system go, have to deal with this messiness that the system’s designers did not account for.

For these people to be able to do their work, there needs to be some give in the system. The people need to be able to exercise judgment, some ability to negotiate the boundaries of the rules of the system. Every human system is like this: the actors must have some amount of flexibility, otherwise the rules of the system will prevent people from being able to achieve the goals of the system. In other words, negotiability in a system is non-negotiable.