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Scale
In the 1970s, the fertile decade that gave us the Partridge Family and the “inoperative statement,” Americans encountered the philosophy of E. F. Schumacher, author of the classic Small Is Beautiful. Foundation and nonprofit writers, perhaps more susceptible to the cult of smallness than their counterparts in the profit-making world, seem to have held on to the book’s mystique well past its silver anniversary. Nowadays you can hardly find anyone in the civic or philanthropic world who is willing to say a kind word for anything that dares to be big. Yet that doesn’t hold foundations back from the reasonable, often urgent, hope of extending good programs to more people, attracting more money for them, and helping them reach more places, deploy more personnel, and just generally do more good. Fortunately, no one has to describe any of that as growth, or expansion, or enlargement. They can call it SCALE. In the foundation world, small is still beautiful, but SCALE is beautifuler.
It may seem small of me to point this out, but everything — whatever its size or shape or reach — has scale. Even the humble amoeba scores a place on some fine-gauged scale or other. The weird but common expression GOING TO SCALE suggests the kind of staggering quantum transformation that normally only theologians or particle physicists would understand: something of utterly no dimension that bursts, suddenly and spontaneously, into a solid, measurable mass.
The insistent use of GOING TO SCALE is, I admit, merely a figure of speech, and a classic one at that. Rhetoricians call it metonymy: describing something (in this case, size) by referring to something closely associated with it (the scale by which it’s measured). Using SCALE that way is not an offense against proper English, but against clarity: How far away is “scale,” and how will we know when we’ve “gone to” it? Is the thing in question supposed to get really, really big, or just bigger than it is now? Is “big” even the point? Might some other scale — say, that of quality, financial security, renown, or innovation — be the one we’re “going to”? When asked this question bluntly, an admirably honest foundation officer answered that these other scales are irrelevant, and only size matters. But he went on to explain that urging his grantees to grow would be impolitic. “Growth,” he all but whispered, “is something Enron did. We don’t do that. We go to scale. Sometimes in a handbasket.”
Sector
An arts funder refers to grants for “experimental work in the dance sector” (note: not in dance, which maybe wouldn’t be experimental enough). A policy institute laments the lack of support for a new idea “in the political sector” (but not among politicians or among voters, or among whoever it is that inhabits the nebulous political sector). There was a time, not so long ago, when everything in public affairs took place in an arena — the political arena, the welfare arena, the health care arena. People may have become uneasy over the ancient Roman connotations of that cliché (and thus gave it the thumbs-down, so to speak). Now the arenas are crumbling, the gladiators have taken up mathematics, and everything’s a sector.
Judging from The Oxford English Dictionary, SECTOR had only a narrow range of meanings, strictly geometrical, for about 14 centuries, starting from its late Latin origins. It referred to a segment of a circle or sphere, radiating from the center outward, and to the various mathematical processes for measuring such things. By the 18th and 19th centuries, as mathematics came to be used in more and more fields, SECTOR grew to refer to anything shaped like a slice of a circle or sphere, or to things whose form or function could be calculated by using the same techniques as for measuring a geometric sector. Astronomers used it for portions of the celestial spheres, entomologists for wing spans and flapping mechanisms, optometrists for fields of vision. Lots of other scientists came to apply the calculation of circle- and sphere-segments to their work, in ways that any mathematician would probably have understood. And then along came the military.
Sometime during the First World War, it seems, generals stopped thinking of their fronts as lines (a pattern that had produced little more than bloodbaths) and instead envisioned pie-shaped wedges, with a command center at the pointy end and forces fanning out from there. It took only a few decades for this idea to make the metaphorical leap into economics, a field that spent most of the 20th century in thrall to the language of both mathematics and warfare. Starting with two canonical sectors (public and private), the economic pie-slicing proceeded to four by the time of the Great Depression (manufacturing, agriculture, services, and government).
It wasn’t long before there was a sector of the economy for nearly every activity under the sun. Today, Manitoba’s Agricultural Department devotes a page of its Web site to the state of the dry beans sector. A course at Berkeley helpfully applies the Ricardian model of international competition to the soyburger and beer sectors, among other things. A trade group for companies that make disposable wipes is seeking an analysis of the “wet-toilet sector” (no, it’s not a joke). Next to all that, the idea of a dance sector or a political sector hardly seems farfetched.
What it does seem, however, is meaningless. If wet toilets and soyburgers are sectors, then everything’s a sector. That is why the word can now be removed from nearly any sentence without changing the meaning a whit — proof-positive that it has taken its place among the emptiest words in the whole jargon sector.
Setting
"All the world's a stage," says Jaques in As You Like It, to which American social scientists and public policy aficionados add in chorus, "and all the scenes and places merely settings." There must be something of the frustrated playwright in the denizens of modern foundations and think-tanks. Wherever they look, they see not buildings or locales, but only settings. For example: "When care is available at all," writes someone in a foundation health program, "it is normally in institutional settings." Not in institutions? (Or better yet, in hospitals?) .IP 5 "Many lower-income youth currently receive balanced nutrition only in educational settings." Not in school? "Recreational programs are provided in community settings." That would be sports, we presume, in the neighborhood?
In every case, besides being redundant, SETTING is both more vague and more cumbersome than the simple word it replaces. Perhaps the writers intended their "settings" to include more than the specific places suggested here. Maybe there are "educational settings" that are not schools. There might even be "institutional settings" that aren't institutions. But if so, few readers are likely to guess that fact, much less to conceive what all those other, unnamed settings might be. SETTING adds nothing but unresolved (and possibly spurious) mystery-a useless hint of undisclosed scenery lurking somewhere in the wings.
Signage
It's strange -- in a culture supposedly so enthralled by youth -- that we seem to prefer our vocabulary, like our whiskey, well -aged. We never like to say "words" when we can say "verbiage" (even though that changes the meaning to something far more disdainful than most people intend). We don't lay sewer lines, we prefer sewerage (even though that confuses people who think you mean sewage, the rank stuff that runs through the sewers). People who sell newspaper advertising measure their ads not by the number of lines of type they occupy, but by their lineage (even though an outsider might confuse this with some question of genealogy).
The popularity of "signage," like that of these other coinages, seems to lend some kind of dignity or expansiveness to the meaning of the ordinary word. The fancier term seems to announce, "we don't just lay sewer pipes or paint signs -- there's a big, exquisite, sophisticated system to it" -- which is true, I suppose, though often irrelevant. Nine times out of ten, when you see "signage," it just means signs. The tenth time, it probably means "a system of coordinated signs" -- which am.
Site
With related grants scattered among many locations, foundations often find it necessary to compare the experience of grantees in one site to that in another. A typical case: "Progress in Columbus has been significantly faster than in any other site." Fine. That is exactly the inanimate meaning-referring to a location, scene, or physical situation-for which the Latin word situs and all its European successors have done excellent service. So useful has this lineage been, in fact, that its simple locational meaning survived pretty much unmolested through a couple of millennia. Then weird things started happening, as in the haunted nurseries of certain horror movies: The inanimate began to speak. Sites acquired a voice ("Sites report several delays," says one report, following later with "Many sites have expressed a desire..."). Ever since, the disembodied chatter from SITES has become deafening.
Some sites speak more than others. Amid the pressures of the Persian Gulf War, as the press carried its daily load of leaks and pronouncements attributed solely to "The White House," General Colin Powell started referring to the source of these statements as "the house that talks." But the White House is far from the only instance of muttering masonry. By the 1980s all sorts of architecture, places, settings, positions, situations, and even mere attitudes had found their voice. ("We convened a meeting of all the sites in the third quarter of 1998," said a recent foundation paper, "and several centers requested additional meetings on at least a quarterly basis.")
This usage would be merely funny, were it not for the often deliberate obfuscation hiding behind it. Why would buildings, places, and "sites," rather than people, indulge in so much babbling? For precisely the reason that so frustrated General Powell: Someone is hiding the real source of the babble. That may be normal in power politics, but it is destructive in places like foundations, whose second most valuable currency (after money) is information, discussion, and intellectual exchange. Sometimes, it is simply too much trouble to identify who, exactly, "reports," "requests," "expresses desires," or whatever. Occasionally the source is obvious, and at other times it's unimportant.
But the habit of using SITES to refer to unnamed people is deadly. Give this usage enough sway, and grantees with different views quickly find themselves lumped into talking "sites" that somehow speak for them without their knowledge or even agreement. Far better to say "several grantees in various places report" this or that, rather than to imply (no doubt inaccurately) that all grantees in all "sites" are unanimous. Similarly, to say that one or two "sites" accomplished something significant is not merely to deny credit to the people who really did the accomplishing. Worse, it denies everyone else accurate information about how things were accomplished, and by whom. One thing is certain: The site accomplished nothing whatsoever.
Social
Nowhere in philanthropy and public policy is the cult of the financier more evident than in the gluey adjective SOCIAL. The term is now stuck onto every gilt-edge buzz-word from the New York Stock Exchange to the Harvard Business School: social capital, social investment, social leverage, social dividends, social entrepreneur (q.v.). This fixation may have begun with a useful little metaphorical insight by, among others, Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone argues that the wealth of societies is measured not only in their financial assets and human skills, but in the social glue that encourages trust and interaction among members. The depletion of this last form of wealth, "social capital," spells trouble for modern America, in Putnam's argument.
All's well up to that point. But as happens so often, one evocative metaphor soon becomes an unstoppable fad. What began with capital has affected every other noun known to capitalism, so that by now every financial doodad in the Accountant's Handbook has gone SOCIAL. This would be merely a cliché like so many others, if it weren't for the belief -by now widespread in the foundation world-that all these pinstriped coinages have real meanings, and must be imposed on grantseekers as criteria for selection. To qualify for support from many foundations, applicants now must show how they intend to build social capital, earn social returns, increase social productivity, and so on. All too often, grantees understand that this simply means they must dust off last year's grant proposals and rewrite the old points in this new Socialese.
Space
Put away the science fiction books; we’re not talking about that kind of space. The new, trendy meaning of SPACE is more inner than outer, and it’s a close cousin to ENVIRONMENT: an undefined region of thought and attitude (cue Rod Serling) in which certain desirable things occur. Think of the last time you heard someone say: “We need to create a space for such-and-such a discussion.” Or: “This idea really belongs in the such-and-such space.” “Our goal,” a foundation officer said at a meeting on after-school programs, “is to enlarge the whole space for thinking about how kids spend their day.” “This program,” said another, “opens up the child development space to an array of new participants.” On another topic, a foundation report trumpets “a new strategic space” for building start-up civic organizations. Most of the time, this sense of space seems to delineate a circle of conversation or realm of ideas where the floor is open to a given category of thinking or points of view.
The word has come, in some sort of trendy, post–New Age sense, to suggest a place of intellectual welcome, where certain people or schools of thought (but not, in truth, everyone) can let their hair down and express their more troublesome or unvarnished thoughts. Grantmakers are especially prone to creating “spaces” where they and their grantees can discuss things not fit for the tender ears of the wider world. Thus far, this touchy-feely sense of SPACE is more likely to turn up in conferences and management retreats than in writing. But its roots seem to lie primarily in the therapist’s office — the only space where this nebulous word has real meaning.
Stakeholders
In most civic and charitable projects, the people with a "stake" in the results are legion. When people try to improve schools or health care or Social Security, who has a "stake" in the results? Answer: All of us - every last woman, man, and child. Half the time, STAKEHOLDERS is a passable substitute for "all the living, and even a few of the dead." As such, in any practical context it is useless noise.
The only explanation for the spectacular success of STAKEHOLDERS in the philanthropic demimonde is that the word sounds tantalizingly like its cousin "stockholders." For those with a painful, gnawing envy of Wall Street and all its blandishments, the desire for stockholders must have the merciless pull of an addiction. (Funny, that: Most actual denizens of Wall Street would be delighted to give their stockholders the heave-ho, as long as they could hold on to the capital.) Among Wall Street wannabes, a word that gives the thrilling feeling of stock without the nuisance of actually paying dividends would naturally be a big hit. For those with a chemical dependence on the gibberish of high finance, STAKEHOLDERS is something like methadone: It eases some of the craving, without inflicting the harmful side-effects of the real thing.
Strategy
STRATEGY comes directly from the Greek strategía - "the office or command of a general" - and for centuries had clung loyally to that military meaning, until the dawn of the Industrial Age and all its perversions. Even then, until well into this century, the word preserved some consciousness of its high calling and, most important, of the crucial military distinction between STRATEGY and TACTICS. Even in the terms' most metaphorical applications, until recently, the two meanings knew their rank and kept their place. "Etymologically," as H. W. Fowler summed it up in 1926, "STRATEGY is generalship, and TACTICS is array."
That distinction-if only it were preserved with any kind of integrity-would in fact allow STRATEGY to perform useful service far outside a military context. Like many retired generals, STRATEGY has a place in public service, so long as it does not pretend to be what it is not. In the social sciences, for example, there is great benefit to discussing and charting the broad movements of resources toward carefully selected targets and goals, by contrast with the on-the-ground deployment of those resources in particular places, numbers, and circumstances. The former is what's meant by STRATEGY; the latter is TACTICS. But, rather like PARAMETER, STRATEGY has been conscripted into doing its brother's work. By now, virtually every decision, large or small, general or local, pins stars on its shoulders and struts about claiming to be STRATEGIC.
Many foundations and government agencies (perhaps envying the decisive world of armed combat, where an enemy once vanquished usually remains dead) have taken up STRATEGY with the giddiness of a soldier on leave. At its worst, STRATEGY in foundation parlance refers to transparently tactical decisions about particular grants, recipients, amounts, and points of intervention. A while ago, for example, a foundation "strategy" paper lamented that community organizations and foundations "often do not think through strategies for leveraging additional support, or how to sustain needed funding up front." Discussing what such "strategies" might be, the paper talks about better performance measurement, avenues of accountability, and matching funding requests to outcomes. Those are indispensable calculations, but they are tactical, not strategic. They concern how to array and command forces more effectively according to an already-determined battle plan, against an already-determined target.
But the main problem with STRATEGY is not that it is too often misapplied. Rather, like many retired generals of recent years, it has developed an aura of indispensability and universal relevance that grows wearisome even when it is not really out-of-place. It is possible - and indeed, for centuries it was normal - to discuss plans, goals, and resources without invoking STRATEGY at all. Because the word is becoming obligatory in many circles-such that no planning discussion is regarded as complete without it-the use of STRATEGY needs to be treated with the greatest distrust. It should, in fact, be treated the way the U.S. Constitution treats all generals-subject, ultimately, to a civilian review, answerable to ordinary people who are less at home with the argot of the war room and more likely to want their information in plain speech.
Structure
File this rickety concept next to SYSTEM, another word that often stands in for any actual description of how real people and activities relate to one another or how they work. Like the fake-but-reassuring facades in a Potemkin village, the trendy use of STRUCTURE is meant to give an impression of solidity, of interlocking parts forming a well-built whole, supportive elements mortared firmly to one another according to an elegant plan. You come upon phrases like “enriched career enhancement structures” and you might find yourself nodding with reassurance, pleased that something so rich and sturdy is holding all those “career enhancements” together. You may not even notice that “career enhancements” is a fairly mushy expression all by itself. You probably figure, reasonably enough, that it’s some kind of reference to advanced training, professional mentors, postgraduate scholarships, and maybe some other things. But someone who’s not accustomed to hearing this mumbo-jumbo day in and day out might well ask: What’s the difference between all those training things and a “career enhancement structure”? Does the structure introduce some scheme of relationships, some rules and tight connections, and a neat set of blueprints (perhaps one of those unusual step-by-step ones) to govern it all? What would all that consist of? Who would build it, from what, for whose use? Ask those questions, and you are likely to be branded a troublemaker and thrown out of the Potemkin village on your, um … substructure.
Structured/Crafted
The ancient verbs "arrange," "shape," "organize," "put together," and "prepare" are out, chucked aside among the dowdy detritus of the cool, corporate New Age. Today, everything with any structure at all is STRUCTURED, and anything that reflects the least craft must therefore be CRAFTED. The former word, at which The Oxford English Dictionary sniffs "not common until the 20th c.," is now so common that no writer who purports to be serious or sophisticated in the 21st c. can do without it. The word has passed the 1990s' ultimate test of chic: There is a brand of underwear called STRUCTURE, and as a standard of celebrity for high-fashion words, that is the equivalent of marrying royalty. The verb TO CRAFT-to which the OED's British editors give the ultimate brush-off "chiefly U.S."-has indeed all but overrun American usage, in every context from art to brewing (where "craft brewed" is now a euphemism for "has some detectable flavor").
Yet if CRAFT is "chiefly U.S.," it earns no official welcome on these shores, either. The authority on U.S. English, the generally lenient American Heritage Dictionary, has no patience with the word's most common meaning: to put something together cleverly or write effectively. The AHD delicately brands that sense of the word as a "usage problem," on the grounds that it portrays thinking and writing as, in the AHD's phrase, "a kind of handicraft," like stitching potholders or making angels out of toilet-paper rolls. A craft, in the most common sense, is a manual skill that can be taught and mastered by any reasonably coordinated person. In the fancier and more pretentious modern uses of CRAFT, that is the opposite of what's intended. Used in the fashionable way, the word defeats its own purpose. (An even older definition, "to deal evasively or deceptively," slips an unintentional self-revelation past modern writers who insist on "crafting" things.)
But the real problem with both these words has nothing to do with nuances of meaning. The problem is that they're everywhere, like overexposed sports celebrities with too many endorsement contracts. They have that starved look of the desperately publicity-hungry, a "hey-look-at-me" quality that has rubbed the shine off whatever glamour they once possessed. Anyone looking for a refreshing way to describe something that is nicely put together or carefully prepared would do well to try two genuinely unusual expressions sure to provoke surprise and admiration in any reader: "nicely put together" and "carefully prepared."
Supports
A typical sentence in a grant memo reads: "The initiative will ensure that necessary services and supports are community-based." In this context, SUPPORTS shares the main appeal of CAPACITY: it means everything at once, and specifies nothing. (The context in which the word may have the most vivid meaning is in the realm of undergarments, about which the less said the better.) Most often, the word means nothing at all, but simply adds verbiage to an otherwise thin and unsatisfying mumble-a writer's equivalent of Hamburger Helper.
Yet most foundation and nonprofit writers are not trying just to mutter random vacuities. They actually do mean to communicate something. They are simply unaware, it seems, that their meaning will forever remain their secret unless they come up with a more specific word than SUPPORTS. Might the quoted sentence have been referring to community-based counselors? doctors or nurses? child-care centers? lenders? police officers? It could just as easily mean any and all of these things. But the writer probably meant only one or two of them. It would have been best to say which ones.
Sustainable
In the predecessor to this essay, we argued that most jargon is born in the technical laboratories of experts who are exploring new territory. There, it has a useful-and sometimes even noble-job to do, describing new or unfamiliar ideas. So when environmentalists and economists first applied SUSTAINABLE to certain forms of development and methods of harvesting natural resources, they had something precise and significant in mind. The best of them could tell you, with great specificity, what they considered to be the "sustainable" method of fishing for tuna or culling a forest. Whether they were correct about those things was a question that reasonable people could debate, because there was a definition of SUSTAINABILITY that both sides, supporters and opponents, could grasp and reckon with.
Unfortunately, the environmentalists had picked a word that already had a number of other meanings in occasional use. So the minute their new meaning caught the public imagination, it took no time turning up in every subject that wished to borrow the political or scientific cachet of environmentalism. Suddenly, no one wanted a sturdy or durable program any more, they wanted a sustainable one. Expenditures could no longer merely be affordable, they had to be sustainable. Skills taught in school couldn't just be lasting, they had to be sustainable. Anything, in short, that made it past autumn's first frost was now sustainable. Any connection to the survival of whales or rain forests had been lost for good.
This perfectly illustrates the price we pay when a crisp, technical term becomes a mushy cliché, when commonplace ideas masquerade as technical esoterica. There is nothing more sophisticated about a "sustainable" budget than about a stable one, though writers who use SUSTAINABLE that way evidently hope to be taken for savvy and wise. Yet while they are tossing the word around for empty effect, its usefulness in its original context starts to dissolve. Is "sustainable" development near the Everglades merely development that will survive the first flood? No, that wasn't supposed to be the meaning at all. But thanks to (forgive the expression) the watering down of the original term, the important, old meaning has been... well, washed away.
Synergy
This ostentatious word means nothing more than "working together." It's just the Greek prefix syn-, meaning "together," stuck onto the word for "work," ergon (which gave us the recent coinage ergonomics ). It can apply just as perfectly to ham-and-rye or bat-and-ball as to more ethereal stuff. There's absolutely nothing occult about it. So why is it whispered all over philanthropy in the awestruck tones normally reserved for exorcisms? Apparently because those who use the word believe (or maybe wish to pretend) that they are invoking some sort of powerful mystical fusion, something understood only by Tibetan monks and particle physicists. The dispiriting reality is that they are simply substituting an ancient Greek word for more common, and better understood, English ones, like "cooperation" or "common effort."
We take the charitable view that those who use SYNERGY this way are unaware of the false pretenses under which it travels. They are, we presume, hapless victims of a lexical confidence scheme. The author of the following sentence, for instance, would no doubt wish to have received a timely nudge in the ribs before committing this absurdity to paper: "A second benefit of this venture will be the synergies it produces in the cultural, political, and social climate of the surrounding community." Can't you just see the acolytes readying incense and rose petals for this impending ritual of climatic metamorphosis?
Likewise, someone should have warned the author of this one: "The program has excelled in synergizing the efforts of other community institutions around the community center." This bears all the marks of something out of a Kung Fu movie: Come forward, nimble warrior, and be synergized if you dare.
Finally: "The goal of this partnership will be to take advantage of synergies with health care and educational institutions." You have to wonder whether that sentence originally said, "We're going to work with hospitals and schools," and someone told the author to make it a bit more ... professional.
Systems
This is not just a word, but a world-view-and an impressively ancient one, by the fleet-footed standards of most buzz-words. SYSTEMS, as in the anthropologists' catch-phrase "systems thinking," goes back at least to the 1940s, when no less than Margaret Mead was apparently involved in its coinage or promotion. It applied, then as now, to the discipline of understanding and analyzing human organization, whether social or industrial. And it no doubt still has some far narrower meaning in the more rigorous academic circles.
Elsewhere, though, SYSTEMS has sometimes become little more than a catchall euphemism for "how things get done." It is an honest term with many dishonest uses. Thus it is that "systems reform," that touchstone of modern philanthropy, was recently derided by a frustrated grant-seeker as meaning nothing more than "changing the way things get done around here." That frank definition admittedly yanks a few unneeded plumes out of the feathered bonnet of systems reform. But it goes a bit far.
The popularity of SYSTEMS is not based just on a pilfering of its anthropological cachet. The word is so popular because, used for its proper purpose, it is practically without synonyms. Dr. Mead, who was a fairly clear writer and a brilliantly clear thinker, did not need fancy words to make herself seem important. She did, though, need a word that would describe the many-headed organism that people become when they weave their separate tasks and ranks and enterprises into a larger functioning whole. She used SYSTEMS because she needed it. And so do many others.
For example, when writing about schools and their regulatory superstructures, one can refer to "districts" or "hierarchies." But in describing the formal universe that comprises all the districts, institutions, boards, and bureaucracies in a city or state, it is most concise and accurate to use "education system." There is no other term for it. We are talking about something much too formal and regimented to be captured by the (admirably modest) phrase "how things get done in education."
The trouble with SYSTEMS is that it has too many friends, and it is constantly being lured into bad company. The mere fact that a process is complicated, has many parts and participants, or serves multiple purposes doesn't make it a system. The business of making a soufflé is a stupefyingly complicated and delicate procedure, but it is not a "system" in any sense that Margaret Mead would have understood. Neither are most organizations, government agencies, or Tax Code provisions "systems" in that strict sense, however much they may require the genius of a Margaret Mead to explain.
Strictly speaking, a system emerges when many independent actors engage in a mutually reinforcing collection of endeavors, the whole of which may be unknown to its various participants, and produce results that no individual players sought to (or could) produce on their own. The challenge for users of SYSTEM, therefore, is not automatically to find a more ordinary word. The challenge is to make certain that the putative "system" is really worthy of the name. If so, then the word isn't jargon; it's a technical term, properly applied. |
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