Economic models of the traditional and well-known sense usually describe either manufactured physical goods or services performed, both of which are scarce resources: only so much grain can be grown, for instance—or widgets churned out of an industrial plant, or pipes plumbed by professionals. Short of espionage, even the market for Information was tied to the cost of materials and availability of produced goods such as printed books, pressed records, or spooled movies. In other words, though the Information was created once and itself remained unchanged, the marginal cost of creating copies of that Information was the sum of the materials, labor, and transportation costs used the produce, package, and ship the finished physical good to a store or warehouse.

Since the copyright on these forms of Information lasts for so long, it is more useful to look at the patent system as an economic model of the fixed costs of producing or selling Information. In the pharmaceutical industry, as has been the case for some time, companies can and routinely do spend a billion dollars on the research and development of a new drug (Moran, 2003, p. 25); the protection of a patent, however, is only good for 20 years from the filing date, so the company must attempt to recoup its expenses and produce a profit while it has a monopoly on the particular drug in question. The cost of manufacturing the drug is often vanishingly small, but the medication is priced well above marginal cost—it must be—because its fixed costs are so high, regardless of how many units of the drug it actually sells.

The accelerating migration from the analog storage of Information in the form of printed books or newspapers, pressed records or compacts discs, or boxed movies, to a form of digital storage and networked transmission which can operate independent of a central producer, has not only brought up ethical dilemmas with respect to copyright and media “piracy,” but also hauled into the spotlight the economic model wherein price is set so high above the marginal cost, since this now applies to virtually every good available for purchase (or, for that matter, available for pirating) on the Internet. Of particular concern is digital music, whose placed in the zeitgeist began with Napster in 1999 and remains today with the Apple iTunes Store. As well, “e-book” readers such as Amazon’s Kindle are now bringing the same controversy over marginal cost to the book market, heretofore largely untouched by the move to digital media, the same of which cannot be said for their counterparts in the periodical industry.

In a perfectly competitive economy, price falls toward marginal cost. Since digital goods have a marginal cost near to 0 (as distinct from the cost of the first unit), traditional economic wisdom would indicate that the price of such goods should fall dramatically, taking into account the additional cost of transmission and storage. In “Free!” Chris Anderson asserts that each piece of equipment “does more and more for less and less, bringing the marginal costs of technology in the units that we individuals consume closer to zero” (2008).

Apologists for software and other media piracy, along with more pragmatic technologists with an economic bent, often quote writer Stewart Brand, who once famously opined “Information wants to be free”. Less frequently mentioned is the entire quotation, which is “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other” (1985, p. 49). In other words, the economic cost of Information is not equal to its marginal cost, but this is not a revelation: no other industry in the world has enjoyed a configuration such as that. Anderson himself admits that attempting to offer a good at a price equal to its marginal cost cannot make (and will likely lose) money in a two-party market system. Only new synergies or “cross-subsidies” can generate an economic profit if these digital products are priced at their marginal cost (2008).

From Edison to Jobs

Though the indisputable leader in digital music sales is iTunes, having sold more than 2 billion songs since 2003, its smaller competitors number in the hundreds, and now include among their number such industry giants as Amazon.com (Feng, Guo, & Chiang, 2009, p. 243). Apple’s decision to charge a flat fee of $0.99 per downloaded song essentially set consumer expectation for price; Amazon, effectively a price-taker when it entered into the market, charges the same (though it offers a slight discount for purchasing whole albums as opposed to individual tracks), if only because attempting to charge any more would virtually guarantee the venture fails.

The low price charged doesn’t necessarily reflect the low marginal cost of producing the digital content in question. In all likelihood, the price point is set to attract those who would otherwise acquire the content illegally—that is, for a price of $0 (Smith, 2005). The ethical aspects of piracy and its causes and effects within the new economics of digital media are well beyond the purview of this paper, but it is clear that consumers who would never steal a physical good from a brick and mortar store are more than happy to acquire digital music without compensating the label or the artist. There exists the possibility that this phenomenon is a strange moral quirk, but more than likely it is a subversive economic reaction to the perceived low marginal cost of the goods. The consumer’s ease in acquiring the good, after all, is some reflection of the publisher’s ease in creating or duplicating the good. RIAA-funded reports to the contrary (which treat each illegal download as a lost sale), there is no good evidence that a consumer willing to “pirate” a song would also be willing to pay for it at any price point, be it $0.99 for a song from iTunes or $20 for an entire physical album. Paradoxically, however, there is evidence that people who illegally download music already spend more on legal music purchases than average (Shields, 2009), which would indicate that the rise of music piracy is simply what happens when the marginal utility of a track is less than the price set by its controlling firm. In the pre-digital era, this would have indicated a non-sale, but now demand for this kind of good can be independent of its price, since supply is effectively infinite.

From Gutenburg to Bezos

Though a relatively recent phenomenon, the rise of e-books is precipitous. Spencer Ante reports that Amazon sold more digital books than printed books last Christmas, which for Amazon entails a relatively small digital download to an electronic reading device that the customer already owns (2010, p. 50). At current prices, publishers net the same profit on both digital and printed books, but economic gravity is already dragging some prices down; in Amazon’s case, some new or best-selling e-books are $8, compared to as much as $35 for the hardback version of the very same Information. Though some of that price difference has to do with the larger marginal costs of the bound book, it’s long been common knowledge that publishers, like record labels and movie studies, exercise heavy price discrimination on new materials. Those willing to pay $35 for a new book do so because they are willing to pay that high amount either for the physical quality of the book or the privilege of reading it now instead of a year later, when the paperback edition is released. Libraries, too, will usually buy their initial stock of the books at an inflated price, quieting cries of alarm that the free use of books will ruin profits. For this reason, publishers such as Harper-Collins are delaying the publication of e-books for several months after a new hardcover’s release. Jeffrey Trachtenberg (2009, p. B2) notes that threat of competition from cheap digital media is a very real one for book publishers; however, this trend appears to be nothing more than market forces at work.

Amazon appears to pay publishers about half the cost of the new hardcover, regardless of which edition was solid: at first glance, this seems like a losing proposition in the case of digital downloads (Ante, 2010, p. 51). However, while the cost of Amazon’s “supply” of e-books may be close to the marginal revenue of selling them, the company also has little fixed costs associated with storing or shipping the data. As well, in Amazon’s case, the company is receiving revenue from the not-inexpensive Kindle e-book reader. This, then, might be an inverted instance of Chris Anderson’s Gillette-inspired bundling concept (2008). Rather than use cheap hardware and expensive data, Amazon sells expensive hardware and data as close to inexpensive as current economic models will allow.

Books and periodicals, like music, may benefit from an old but upward-trending concept known as bundling. Given a large product pool with a small but non-zero marginal cost of production, they can maximize profit as Hitt and Pei-yu describe in “Bundling with Customer Self-Selection” (2005, p 1481, 1491), citing the well-known marketing schemes of Colombia House as well as the newer pricing models of Netflix. In the case of technical book publisher O’Reilly, the bundling or subscription model has raised profits by about 20% (Ante, 2010, p. 51).

From Scarcity to Abundance

Traditional publishing models are predicated upon the idea that all of its aspects are essentially scarce resources: the physical media upon which Information is disseminated is itself scarce or at least costly, and the Information itself is a scarce resource which, because of its ostensible uniqueness, has no likely substitute good. Digital media not only reduces the marginal cost of goods to near zero, but it also raises the supply to near infinite. Whereas once record labels and publishing imprints decided who or what appeared on the scarce shelf space of stores, these same companies now essentially compete against independent artists or authors who have more power to self-publish, and for lower prices, than ever before. In fact, the lower prices apparent in the digital economy may to some degree reflect the new, more intense competition that has become its hallmark.

The situation now resembles or is coming to resemble a case of monopolistic competition, albeit one in a state of extreme transformation. The number of producers in the market is now effectively infinite (taking traditional firms and self-publishing individuals together, and implying that individuals can act as multiple producing and consuming agents both alone and as organizations), and though some firms are currently exercising their market dominance (such as Apple setting a standard $0.99-per-track price), the ever-present threat of piracy ensures that prices will tend to be set low. A low marginal cost of production and surplus of human creativity insures that market entry and exit are easy. Finally, though it is true that specific songs by specific artists are technically unique, they are ultimately unique in brand, but substitute goods in genre. A consumer looking to purchase ten rock songs may have his or her need met by any ten in a thousand songs available. The result is that consumers discount more heavily when substitute goods are available but not when purchasing unfamiliar products, according to Clemons (2008, p. 13).

Yet another character of monopolistic competition that was impossible ten years ago is now rapidly becoming more realistic: perfect information, wherein consumers know all goods being sold, their differences, their prices, and even what profit a firm makes from them, could not have existed for such a wide array of goods in the years before the Internet generally and powerful search engines specifically. While traditional firms have relied on the popular 20% of products sold (market “fat spots”) to subsidize the less profitable 80%, this latter “long tail” is now the focus of considerable economic and marketing attention, and is the center of Anderson’s argument regard low-margin economies. More to the point, it is also the focus of more consumer attention, now that better information availability has improved access to the long tail.

Clemons (2008) speaks to the changes being wrought by increased access to information. Citing online price-comparison engines, he argues that these services essentially “discover” the correct market price for a good (as opposed to a producer setting it), much like the NYSE (p. 15). The kind and quality of product offerings will also change to reflect the more perfect consumer information. His summary of pricing changes is clear:

[C]onsumers’ willingness to pay is a function of the competition discount, the compromise discount, and the uncertainty discount, all of which have changed because of change in consumers’ informedness. Margins on most commodity offerings have collapsed[.] Pricing strategy has been transformed, and consumer behavior in the presence of informedness has been the principal driver (p. 33).

The implications are large for both consumers and producers alike. In the long term, technology of this sort will change how firms do business; just as the Industrial Revolution radically transformed the developed world from an agrarian economy to an industrial one in a minimal span of years, so too will the move to a digital economy of Information both fast and transformative. Regardless of high fixed costs, lower marginal costs due to improved technological will lower price, especially when products now compete against a growing niche market of goods that are given away for free. Anderson (2008) suggests that pricing in the digital economy will dip drastically low for Information and increase the cost of physical goods. A summer blockbuster movie, for example, may cost pennies, but popcorn will cost as much as ever—until that science-fictionalized day comes when technology gives us an unlimited supply of physical resources, as well. The net effect will be two separate but cross-synergizing economies, one for traditional physical goods with non-negligible marginal cost, and one for digital Information which, once expressed, automatically creates an effectively infinite supply of itself.

References

• Anderson, C. (2008). Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Wired, 16, 3. Retrieved March 5, 2010, from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
• Ante, S. E. (2010, January 11). Trying to Avert a Digital Horror Story. BusinessWeek, 50-52. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (47279438).
• Brand, S. (1985, May). Keep Designing. Whole Earth Review, 44-57.
• Clemons, E. K. (2008). How Information Changes Consumer Behavior and How Consumer Behavior Determines Corporate Strategy. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25, 2, 13-40. Retrieved April 3, 2010, from Business Source Elite (34879420).
• Feng, Y., Guo, Z., & Chiang, W. K. (2009). Optimal Digital Content Distribution Strategy in the Presence of the Consumer-to-Consumer Channel. Journal of Management Information Systems, 25(4), 241-270. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (38419436).
• Hitt, L. M., & Pei-yu, C. (2005). Bundling with Customer Self-Selection: A Simple Approach to Bundling Low-Marginal-Cost Goods. Management Science, 51(10), 1481-1493. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (18676603).
• Moran, M. (2003). Cost of Bringing New Drugs To Market Rising Rapidly. Psychiatric News, 38(15), 25. Retrieved April 2, 2010
• Shields, R. (2009, November 1). Illegal downloaders ‘spend the most on music’, says poll. The Independent. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/illegal-downloaders-spend-the-most-on-music-says-poll-1812776.html
• Smith, T. (2005, September 20). Apple CEO blasts ‘greedy’ music labels. The Register. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/20/apple_jobs_piracy_pricing/
• Trachtenberg, J. A. (2009). Harper-Collins Delays E-Books. Wall Street Journal, 254(137), B2. Retrieved April 2, 2010, from Business Source Elite (47053417).

The laws that protect the creation of content are manifold and complicated—even byzantine. America has copyright protection, which applies to concrete expressions of information, trademark protection, which protects distinctive symbols or verbiage associated with a legal entity, and patent protection, which protects “(1) processes, (2) machines, (3) manufactures or (4) compositions of matter” and is perhaps the least understood of all the various kinds of intellectual property protection (Guntersdorfer, 2003).

The explosion of the Internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has thrown into stark relief both the legal problems associated with protecting content in a digital age as well as the ethical issues inherent in the existing process for acquiring official intellectual property protection and the rights afforded involved parties in a redress of grievances. Copyright law specifically has come into public consciousness primarily due to the popularity of filesharing: for all intents and purposes, the advent of modern filesharing was the 1999 arrival of Napster, a program which allowed anyone to exchange digital copies of music online, for free. Legal problems eventually forced Napster to shut down (Ante, Brull, Herman , & France, 2000), but its legacy leaves not only alternative modes of filesharing, but a whole host of new web-based content creation engines that toe the lines of fair use.

The politics of copyright is, despite its complexity, relatively straightforward and beyond the purview of this writing. More relevant to the machinations of the world of business are patents, which tend to pertain to the inventions and processes that drive economic engines. While some companies, such as Coca-Cola, eschew the legal—albeit ephemeral—benefit of patents in favor of strict secrecy, the legal mechanism is still quite popular: the United States Patent Office grants between 175,000 and 195,000 patents every year (“U.S. Patent Statistics,” 2009).

Ideally, patent mechanisms act as a function of market efficiency: by protecting corporate or industrial investment in Research & Development, it promotes economic growth, protects ingenuity, and rewards success; most patent law even allows for the eventual “freeing” of the patent after set duration—now usually twenty years (Heisey, King, Rubenstein, & Shoemaker, 2006, pp. iii-v, 4-7). What has come to pass since the 1970s, however, is a new scope of invention—specifically, computer software—that the existing patent protection mechanism is ill-equipped to handle. The critical question this raises is such: to what extent can the granting of patents for software be considered ethical? Conversely, if this is not the case, to what degree is it unethical or antithetical to proposed ideas of market efficiency?

It is vital to illustrate the very important distinctions between copyright and patent when it comes to computer software. Programs consist of written code (called “source code”), usually in a high-level programming language, which is at least partially intelligible to a human reader: this code, like any other written work, is subject to copyright. When portions of the source code to Microsoft’s Windows® Operating System were stolen and distributed on the Internet (Lemos, 2004), the case was one of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, on par with selling bootlegged DVDs. All source code must eventually be “compiled” to create the usable form of software that can be run on personal computers; the compilation process turns source code into a series of 1′s and 0′s, which the computer uses to runs billions of mathematical operations per second. Abstractions aside, all computer programs are little more than large lists of math problems which produce a desired result. Software patents are, at heart, an attempt to gain a “monopoly” on this math (Guntersdorfer, 2003).

“Many politicians [...] don’t understand what software patents do. They often think patents are similar to copyright law [...], which is not the case,” writes noted open source software1 advocate Richard Stallman (2005). He proposes a hypothetical scenario wherein literary concepts can and are patented, and Victor Hugo is unable to write Les Misérables because some lucky entity has acquired a patent for “a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and subsequently changes his name.” There exist, he insists, patents for such simple things as a progress bar, or accepting online payments via credit card.

To such opponents of software patents, the very nature of patents is inherently unethical in this area of creative content: rather than protect the ingenuity and effort of intellectual investors (so to speak), it rewards those who seek to manipulate the legal system in order to monopolize generic or overly-broad concepts.

In order to examine the ethical ramifications of patents, some working ethical precepts must be established. Specifically:

1. Economic efficiency is an ethical good insofar as it contributes broadly to the public welfare, within normative moral constraints (Schultz, 2001, pp. 12-14).
2. Intellectual investment, in the form of corporate research and development or personal ingenuity, can and should be rewarded with an as-yet unspecified right to profit from said effort. This, besides being an ethical good in and of itself, directly contributes to principle #1 (“Are Efforts”, 2001).
3. The right to personal property, including intellectual property within reasonable bounds, is unambiguous and unabridged.

In addition to the aforementioned points, several more may be offered which are relevant to the discussion of computer software:

4. The labor efficiency offered by computer software (as well as its attendant effect upon the overall economic good), may be assumed of equal importance to the economic good of content creators—i.e. interoperability, work efficiency, and accessibility of data is at least as important as the right of technologists to individually profit (Lenk, Hoppe, & Adorno, 2007, pp. 91-92).
5. The unencumbered public availability of processes or information previously under patent protection,whether by design (read: open source software or open specification) or expiration of patent), is considered an unambiguous public good (“Are Efforts”, 2001).
6. Patents which are overly broad—including those which infringe prior art—have an unnecessarily depressive effect upon both technological progress and the economy as a whole.

As Bessen and Meurer (2008) note, patent litigation has rapidly outpaced other business-related litigation since the 1980s, second only to copyright litigation, and that mostly due to more or less legitimate claims of filesharing-related infringement (p. 127).

Whether software patents are helpful or ethical at all is more to the point. Allison, Mann, & Dunn (2007) quote principal witnesses at a 1994 patent hearing: “Software should not be patented, not because it is difficult to do so, but because it is wrong to do so”; “[t]here is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, not a single iota, that software patents have promoted or will promote progress” (1581). The authors conclude that policy debate now shies away from the common idea that the patent system is broken and unfair: the hue and cry, especially from software companies who ostensibly rely on patents, is to require a technical contribution—that is, implementation aside from a theoretical business method (1621-22).

Early patent law recognized that software seemed inherently unpatentable because it was little more than structured math (Guntersdorfer, 2003; Klemens, 2006, p. 4); mathematical formulae, were they to be subject to such “protection,” would be prohibitive to innovation and damage the public good. Mathematics, fundamentally, isn’t subject to ownership any more than other means of describing reality, such as physics or chemistry. Because software patents can describe not simply a method for obtaining a result, but the very idea of obtaining that result—for instance, Stallman’s example of the patent for credit card payment, irrespective of the code used to construct the process—they have ceased to reward innovation and instead hamper technological progress, deny certain freedoms (to those, like Stallman, who aspire to such principles in software), and have a necessarily depressive effect upon economies and livelihoods, in contravention of principle #6.

Klemens (2006) points out that the very worst patents are often cited as an argument against the ethicality of all software patents: his favorite example is a patent granted in 2002 for three short lines of JavaScript code, a language available for use since 1995 (p. 2). It would be unfair, however, to judge all software patents, or the patentability of software, based upon a portfolio of errors by the United State Patent and Trademark Office. Is there any ethical good that may be derived from software patents broadly?

It is necessary at this point to consider principle #4, which weighs the ambiguous claim of programmers or businesses upon a technology or technological idea against the immeasurable claim of other businesses and the consuming public to interoperability. This piece is being written in a file format called Open Document Format (compare to Microsoft’s “OLE2″ format, used in its popular productivity suite, reflected in “.doc” and “xls” files), in a free program called OpenOffice.org. This program also has the ability to open, edit, or create documents in Microsoft’s proprietary format; were OpenOffice.org not under the protection of the large software vendor Sun Microsystems, it is likely that the developers of the program would be sued for patent infringement, since Microsoft has a number of patents which ostensibly pertain to the OLE2 document format.

The chilling effect that such a legal situation has upon development of third party programs which can interoperate with Microsoft’s file format is well-known in software development circles. It effectively means that Microsoft is remunerated twice: one stream of revenue comes from the sale of its productivity suite (the quality of which directly affected the ubiquity—and market force—of OLE2 files), and the other—due to patents upon the data structures of OLE2—from companies which choose to license the specification rather than risk legal battles.

There is little question that Microsoft deserves the first stream of revenue, which is related to a copyrighted product (a “physical” good) that it sells; that some portion of the sales may have to do with the ubiquity (read: business necessity) of its file format is aside from the point. The fact that the company’s patents effectively prohibit competition by making interoperability cost-inefficient is, while a net economic good for Microsoft, an ethical downfall for everyone else. Lawrence Lessig, a well-known proponent of more “open” practices pertaining to intellectual property, insists that although official case law has yet to demonstrate the validity of the previous statement as measured by favorable judgements, common sense and observation indicate that these kinds of patents primarily serve as a way to keep “early innovators” safe from later, third-party progress (Babcock, 2005).

Assuming some unquantified validity to Microsoft’s patents upon its OLE2 format, how does that compare to a public need for unfettered access to interact with that format? Rawls argues unequivocally that justice “does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many” (1999, p. 3). In the tradition of Omelas, so Rawl’s sense of justice is inflexible (or so he supposes) when it comes to the inalienable rights due every man. Interoperability and the public good, Rawls may argue, are important, but should never be sacrificed if the right of the programmer/inventor to profit from his intellectual labors is to be infringed.

The hypothetical dystopia described has no boundaries: it is essentially a view of a communistic system in which the right to personal property is negated in favor of public benefit from shared resources. Though a different argument entirely, such systems have failed to produce thriving communities achieving a critical mass in the lengths to which it will go to redistribute wealth. However, the argument against software patents is not, at heart, a call for intellectual property to be redistributed to bolster a common good. Even if the dense calculus of utilitarianism was shown to be unarguably true, no ethical principle mandating the forcible forfeiture of IP is likely to be justified by any mainstream ethicists. The argument against software patents is that they do not represent intellectual property at all, but rather a manipulation of the legal system to achieve particular economic ends; it is possible, since the criteria do not require implementation, to patent software which hasn’t been written (Klemens, 2006, pp. 3-5).

The question initially posed was the degree to which patents are ethical or unethical. Assuming that Rawls’ theory of justice as morally paramount—as embodied in principle #3—is significantly correct, and understanding the particular vagaries of software and its algorithmic nature, certain conclusions may be drawn.

First, existing copyright laws do well to cover a content creator’s claim to his or her labor; these laws cover—and are perfectly sufficient for—the assertion of ownership over computer programs, which are themselves physical expressions/implementations of content. In this way, the right to personal property, intellectual or otherwise, is unabridged.
Second, the application of this principle into software written under the auspices of business allows proper remuneration for investment, and contributes to overall economic efficiency and therefore a public, moral good.

Third, within this ecosystem of software, patents are extraneous, serving no apparent purpose other than artificially extending the existing copyright protection to cover content which has not been written, cannot be written, or can be written in different ways (and properly so).

Unambiguously, then, software patents are unethical, serving to abridge the rights of content creators to implement general principles in software code, to enter into competition with existing market constituents and improve the market, and to raise the overall quality of the software ecosystem—and, by extension, allow the public benefit from these improvements.

References

• Allison, J. R., Mann, R. J., & Dunn, A. (2007). Software Patents, Incumbents, and Entry [Electronic version]. Texas Law Review, 85(7), 1579-1625. From Business Source Elite (25978301).
• Ante, S. E., Brull, S. V., Herman, D. K., & France, M. (2000, August 14). Inside Napster. BusinessWeek, 112-120. Retrieved March 15, 2009, from Business Source Elite (3394425).
• Are Efforts to Extend Patent and Copyright Laws Good for Business or Good for Society? (2001, July 4). Retrieved March 17, 2009, http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=363
• Babcock, C. (2005, April 7). Stanford Law Professor Raps Patents As Barrier To Innovation. InformationWeek. Retrieved March 26, 2009, http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160502321
• Bessen, J., & Meurer, M. J. (2008). Patent failure. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Guntersdorfer, M. (2003, March 21). Software Patent Law: United States and Europe Compared. Retrieved March 17, 2009, http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/2003dltr0006.html
• Heisey, P. W., King, J. L., Rubenstein, K. D., & Shoemaker, R. (2006, March). Government Patenting and Technology Transfer. Retrieved April 13, 2009, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err15/err15.pdf
• Klemens, B. (2006). Math you can’t use: patents, copyright, and software. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
• Lemos, R. (2004, February 12). Microsoft probes Windows code leak. Retrieved March 19, 2009, http://news.cnet.com/2100-7349_3-5158496.html
• Lenk, C., Hoppe, N., & Adorno, R. (2007). Ethics and law of intellectual property. Burlington: Ashgate.
• Patent Asserted Against JPEG Standard Rejected By Patent Office As Result Of PubPat Request: Public Interest Group’s Review Results in Broadest Claims of Forgent Networks Patent Being Ruled Invalid (2006, May 26). Retrieved March 16, 2009, http://www.pubpat.org/Chen672Rejected.htm
• Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Hardvard University Press.
• Schultz, W. J. (2001). The Moral Conditions of Economic Efficiency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stallman, R. (2005, June 20). Patent absurdity. The Guardian. Retrieved March 17, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jun/20/comment.comment
• U.S. Patent Statistics Chart Calendar Years 1963 – 2008 (2009, March 26). Retrieved March 27, 2009, http://www.uspto.gov/go/taf/us_stat.htm

Though its origins wend all the way back to 1971, it was not until the 1990s, after a successfully IPO, that Starbucks became the household name. One can trace both its precipitous proliferation as well as its near-singlehanded revival of the gourmet coffee market over nearly fifteen years, but as of 2008, Starbucks’ business model and its brand have taken blows. Despite all this, Starbucks seems to continually rank in the top tier of admired companies, even improving its ranking in Fortune’s “Top 100 Companies to Work For” poll (Levering, 2005; Levering & Moskowitz, 2008; “Top 20,” 2008). Its story is a textbook case of clever marketing, opportune timing, and the ultimate consequences of market saturation and dilution of brand.

History

The first Starbucks store opened in Seattle in 1971, though at the time it was known as “Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spices” (“Company Fact Sheet,” 2008). Though it had become a well-established brand in the Washington area by the 1980s, it was the work of Howard Schultz which turned it into the Starbucks known today. When he bought the company in 1987, he merged it with his own Il Giornale espresso bars, which introduced the idea of baristas serving lattes and cappuccino (Pendergrast, 1999, pp. 367-68, 370-72). Its early competition came from Gloria Jeans Coffee Beans, a Midwestern franchise that was much larger than Starbucks at the time.

Starbucks experienced explosive growth during the 1990s and early 2000s, at one point opening new stores at an average rate of several per day. Even well into 2007, new store openings continued apace, until founder Howard Schultz resumed his role as CEO after an eight-year hiatus. Per a leaked memo, Schultz expressed his dismay that the overexpansion had appeared to dilute the Starbucks brand and remove the personal, unique experience from ordering coffee at a Starbucks location (Reuters, 2008).

Design and Branding

Starbucks has become one of the most powerful brands in the world, and its logo synonymous not only with coffee, but often with market oversaturation. The well-known branding of Starbucks today is also the product of Howard Schultz, who changed the franchise’s slightly racier logo when he bought the company in 1987.

A comparison of Starbucks logo: the original (left) and modern (right)

Schultz showed remarkable prescience (or perhaps simply common sense) in doing so: trying to expand the Starbucks brand beyond the more liberal Seattle area would necessarily involve expanding into the more conservative Midwest and South. In fact, when Starbucks attempted to revive the old logo for a limited time during its 35th anniversary marketing blitz, it drew the ire of social conservatives who object to its bared breasts (York, 2008, pp. 4, 33). The end result was a reworked version of the original logo with the mermaid’s hair modified to cover her breasts.

The temporary switch emphasized for some people the inherent quality of the modern Starbucks logo and its brand strength. Wall Street Journal contributer Tom Weber, citing the Seigel+Gale design firm, asserts “Seeing the retro Starbucks logo seems so jarring because the company’s familiar logo is so incredibly good. Distinctive and iconic, it is ultra-recognizable. See a flash of green on a white cup from down the street and you know it’s a Starbucks. Most companies can only dream about that kind of brand visibility” (2008).

During its boom years, Starbucks backed up its familiar logo with a consistent and laudable atmosphere in its stores. The company history paid a premium for the best quality beans it could acquire; one former executive famously wondered aloud why the company did so, rather than buying as low a quality as customers would accept (Pendergrast, 1999, p. 371). Some of this dedication seems to have fallen to the wayside as a result of Starbuck’s explosive growth. Even by 1993, well before Starbucks’ peak, some employees had quit. Kevin Knox, the former manager of coffee quality, complained, “It used to be a product-driven company. Now it’s clearly a marketing-driven company” (quoted in Pendergrast, 2008, p. 373).

Much of Starbucks’ identity and initial market was tied up in just such a high-brow élan; Pendergrast describes its major competitor, Gloria Jeans, as being “thoroughly middle-class,” a market which Starbuck could not at that time hope to wrest away (1999, p. 371).

(Non-)Promotion

The trickle-down effect of trends, however, all but assured Starbucks’ inevitable dominance of the market. According to Pendergrast, the company spent under $10 million during its first 25 years of existence (1971-1996); “Starbucks had become a household word without mounting a national advertising campaign” (2008, p. 378). Alice Cuneo of Advertising Age called it a “word-of-mouth wonder” in 1994. It wasn’t until 2007 that Starbucks attempted its first television advertisement, prompting an indignant hue and cry from some disillusioned employees (“Coffee Jitters,” 2008, p. 24).

Howard Schultz attributes that to a strategy of “[building] up brand loyalty one customer at a time” (1997, p. 246). Also helpful is that Starbucks’ brand is so strong, and its logo so iconic and pervasive, that its customers do the advertising for it, in the form of mugs, thermoses and other paraphernalia emblazoned with the familiar mermaid (Pendergrast, 1999, p. 378).

One public relations front on which Starbucks has never wavered is its philanthropic and stewardship efforts. During 2006, according to its Fact Sheet, it donated $36.1 million in cash and coffee, 383,000 community service hours via company program, made significants efforts to “green” its energy consumption, and participated in Fair Trade initiatives, which seek to pay coffee farmers in poor countries a fair price for green coffee (2008). Starbucks goes to great effort to publicize these data, and why not? Associating a company with charity or charitable efforts is a surefire way to increase both brand loyalty and revenues (Basil, Deshpande, & Runte, 2008, pp. 4-6).

Starbucks’ recent loss of market share can probably be attributed to its overautomation of the whole coffee-making process; as of early 2008, Starbucks operated over 7,000 stores in the US and almost 2,000 in the rest of the world, in addition to an additional 7,000 licensed stores worldwide. The logistics of operating this kind of network prompted Starbucks to eliminate in-store grinding (thus removing the prevalent aroma of beans) and stop pulling espresso shots by hand. Joseph Michelli, a marketing consultant for Starbucks, opined “Management stopped having daily conversations about service excellence. They were so focused on achieving growth, they failed to keep redefining what customers wanted from their experience” (“Coffee Jitters,” 2008, p. 24).

Price

Starbucks’ accelerated growth had successfully effaced the “the romance, warmth, and theater” (Reuters, 2008) from the chain, leaving customers with the purely economic decision to continue purchasing expensive coffee from Starbucks, or buy it more cheaply from Starbucks’ up-and-coming competitors like Dunkin Donuts.

To some, the idea of paying $3 or $4 for a cup of coffee has always been absurd, but the idea is deeply entrenched in the collective consciousness now, and Starbucks has always been willing to exploit the economic marvel of price differentiation in order to extract a maximum possible amount of money for its product.

According to Tim Harford, “[Starbucks] will serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it” (2006). The drink in question is the “short” cappuccino, which is smaller in volume, lower in price, but contains the same amount of espresso as the “tall,” which is the smallest size listed on the menu. Though Starbucks maintains that the short size is not listed on the menu due to space constraints, it is actually strategy based on a very economic common principle called price differentiation. By selling large and expensive drinks to any customers who are willing to pay for them, Starbucks is maximizing its profit, but it also allows for less “price-blind” to purchase a smaller, cheaper beverage as well, rather than lose those customers altogether to a different, less expensive store (Harford, 2006).

This, however, is largely the product of Starbucks’ market dominance, which has been waning significantly in the last few years. According to Brian McManus, an assistant professor at the Olin School of Business, “The bottom end of any market tends to get distorted. The more market power firms have, the less attractive they make the cheaper products” (quoted in Harford, 2006). With the average markup on coffee at around 150%, there is a lot of room to undercut the market leaders on price (Harford, 2007, p. 5).

Place

In much the same way as Starbucks (like most businesses) exploit price differentiation, so location is an equally important factor. One is likely to find Starbucks at critical junctures in morning commutes and high-traffic areas—metros, lobbies, downtown streetcorners—because of the relative scarcity of supply in such locations (Harford, 2007, p. 4); additionally, the mere presence of a Starbucks storefront or kiosk in such a place serves the secondary purpose of advertising. As Harford says, “The main reason that Starbucks can ask $2.55 for a cappuccino is that there isn’t a shop next door charging $2.00.” Part of Starbucks’ market dominance, he concludes, has to do with how well it has expanded; though it is easy to criticize Starbucks for perhaps taking the notion to extremes, it is a perfectly plausible explanation that Starbucks’ ubiquity—a bad word to those who believe Starbucks went astray by growing too fast and losing its personal touch (“Coffee Jitters,” 2008, p. 24)—has a great deal to do with why customers have traditionally been willing to pay its high prices. It is also why profits in such prime locations are relatively low after paying rent (Harford, 2007, p. 6).

Some of this might also explain why Starbucks started to buck its existing trend of moving into a historic storefront and is instead throwing up prefabricated buildings—or was, until it began to slow new store openings and close some existing stores in unprofitable areas (“Coffee Jitters”, 2008, p. 23).

Context

Some place the blame for Starbucks’ recent woes squarely on the economy, which has been somewhat deflated for several years now, reaching its nadir (so far) in 2008. At a time of $4 gas, customers are less likely to pay for a $4 latte, preferring instead a $2 coffee with cream from Dunkin Donuts, or even just brewing their own coffee at home. While this may be true, Interbrand CEO Andy Bateman points out that even in a recession, a $4 latte on the way home from work “is not an expensive purchase” (“Coffee Jitters”, 2008, p. 26).

Starbucks has not just been losing on issues of price, however. According to the marketing consultant firm Brand Keys, Starbucks now lags behind Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds in the quality/taste category, and behind Dunkin’ Donuts in service/surroundings, despite Starbuck’s wireless internet service and comfortable chairs (“Coffee Jitters”, 2008, p. 26).

Conclusion

Given Starbucks’ current state of affairs, its encroaching competition from below, and an economic climate (at least in America) which would seem, on the face of it, to preempt impulse purchases of expensive coffee and espresso drinks, how can it best turns itself around and begin to show a profit again?

One sensible idea comes from Matthew DiFrisco, and analyst at Oppenheimer & Co, New York, who suggests rolling back many of the food items Starbucks has attempted to roll out. Starbucks, aside from pastries, has never been a vendor of food; it is not its core competency, and it seems likely that the overhead involved in providing a new and different product will detract from what the brand has always been about—coffee. “It didn’t drive business during off-peak hours, and added an unnecessary complexity to an already busy time,” according to DiFrisco (quoted in “Coffee Jitters,” 2008, p. 25).

Similarly, Starbucks would do well to stop wasting money on mass advertising and rely on the same kind of marketing that played a part in its meteoric rise. McDonalds and Dunkin’ Donuts shouldn’t worry Starbucks, because as long as the latter remains faithful to its core market, the former two cannot compete.

There are no signs that Starbucks as a brand has diminished much at all: its ubiquity and the strength of its trademarks are all waiting for its operations to get back on its previously successful track. The current economic woes which may be contributing to its slump in market share should be the catalyst that inspires the company to remember what made that brand so strong and pervasive in the first place.

References

• Basil, D. Z., Deshpande, S., and Runte, M., “The Impact of Cause-related Marketing on Nonprofit Organizations” (2008). Partnerships, Proof and Practice – International Nonprofit and Social Marketing Conference 2008 – Proceedings. Paper 21.
  http://ro.uow.edu.au/insm08/21
• Coffee Jitters. (2008, November 11). BrandWeek, 40, 22-26. Retrieved December 1, 2008, from Business Source Elite (35262014).
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In the inchoate years of the 21st century, the nominal ideas behind Frederick Herzberg’s “Two-Factor Theory” have been largely cast aside in their want of experimental validation, but the late psychologist’s ultimate conclusion—that “job enrichment” is a good and necessary function of management—is certainly alive and well, albeit superseded by more complete theories about the idea (Miner, 2005, pp. 61, 73-74). In a period of a global “flattening” of cultures and economies (to borrow Thomas Friedman’s nomenclature), when fears about job security are on the rise, long-term career goals are sinking into the dusk latitudes, and cynicism about outsource-happy management and inequality is worse in the United States than it has been since the Gilded Age, how can organizations elicit more than a minimum of effort from their employees, short of threatening or scaring them into hyperkinesis?

Recognition as Extrinsic Motivator

Former General Electric C.E.O. Jack Welch is no stranger to dismissal as a motivator; his “20-70-10″ rule functions as a proverbial Sword of Damocles for the business world, wherein during each evaluation cycle, the top 20%, middle 70%, and bottom 10% of the workforce are determined and dealt with accordingly. The top 20% is rewarded, and repeat offenders for the bottom 10% are let go (2006, p. 108). The fate of low performers in the workplace is an important topic, but outside the scope of motivational trends in general. The areas of concern for the author are the proper emolument (not necessarily monetary in nature) of top performers and also the cultivation and motivation of the middle 70% to improve; this latter group, after all, represents the largest likely ROI, given an inexpensive and efficient method of motivation.

Welch, though he seems to have little patience for the dregs of the organizational barrel, is adamant about what is required to motivate: “No company, large or small, can succeed over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it” (quoted in Gallo, 2008). Gallo, in keeping with Welch, insists that public recognition is the zenith of non-monetary motivators, citing several anecdotal examples (2008). This is not a recent addition to the nomological network; Herzberg included such recognition as a Motivation factor in most instances (Herzberg, Mauzer, and Snyderman 1959/2004, pp. 44-46, 49). This phenomenon is well-known to the technology industry, which sees much of this experience in the phenomenon of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS, by its common acronym); the Apache web server (which powers well over half the sites on the Internet) is a free product, programmed mostly by volunteers and hobbyists who receive no monetary compensation. Intrinsic motivators such as technical challenges, as well as the recognition within the programmer subculture, are enough to keep development of the program very active.

In currently high-performing employees, recognition of this sort tends to reinforce the employee’s endogenous motivations and moves his or her perceived locus of control further inward, according to Malhotra, Galletta, and Kirsch (2008, pp. 290-91, 294); this virtual collapse of the intrinsic and the extrinsic is a sort of psychological short-circuit to the employee’s sense of self-actualization. In normal employees (what Welch may categorize as the middle 70%) who may or may not experience as high a degree of intrinsic motivation as the most creative or most energetic employees, recognition may activate more basic motivators such as vanity. In both groups, there is likely to be a combination of the two.

Job Enrichment and Non-monetary Incentives

As organizations grow in complexity—the large and monolithic bureaucracies of wartime IBM, for instance, give way to equally large but decentralized technology firms like Microsoft or Google—it becomes all too easy for the artifices of corporate oversight or regulation to rob competent employees of their autonomy. Though few studies have shown experimentally or observationally a direct causal link between control systems and employee motivation, Drake, Wong, and Salter note that volumes of research have shown such relationships between empowerment (an internal “perceived locus of control,” to retain the parlance of the endogenous/exogenous motivator studies) and task motivation—ultimately, to overall institutional effectiveness (2007, p. 71).

The dispensation of empowerment and autonomy is one of the central tenets of job enrichment—distinct from job enlargement, which seeks merely to add responsibilities—a long-known but too-little-appreciated tactic of organizational behavior that, in essence, seeks to grow the job with the employee (Miner, 2005, pp. 76-77). Spreitzer identified two particular antecedents to feelings of empowerment, namely a connection to the organizational mission, and a context in which to view personal performance (1995, as cited in Drake et al., 2007, p. 75). The experimental context of Drake et al., however invalid it may seem due to its unbelievable mission statement (consisting, to all appearances, of “to make as high a profit as possible”), underscores the correlative relationship between task motivation and overall performance, and also between task motivation and perceived impact of work (2007, pp. 83-84). The population of this experiment consisted only of entry-level workers (p. 72), not any managerial or supervisory positions, which likely slanted its results against significant causal or correlative relationships; blue-collar or entry-level workers are statistically the most likely to resist forms of job enrichment and internalized extrinsic motivators (Miner, 2005, p. 73).

According to the Hacker-Lawler theory of job enrichment, employees will work effectively toward an institutional goal only insofar as it aligns with their personal goals; since contemporary literature downplays the importance of “hygiene” factors in supplying the needed motivational incentives (Miner, 2005, pp. 76-77), this usually comes in the form of “Engagement with the Mission.”

It is farcical to think either that all employees will buy into the organization’s mission statement (even presuming it is meaningful and relevant), or that encouraging such buy-in will necessarily evince an increase in efficiency or raw productivity. Writing for BusinessWeek, Liz Ryan emphasizes the power of hygiene factors (such as the 2008 Q3-Q4 economy) to overwhelm the capacity of feedback, praise, or engagement as a motivator (2008, p. 13). Satisfying hygiene factors, such as competitive pay and benefits, a socially-engaging work environment, and job security is increasingly difficult, due to both economic fluctuations and the cutthroat nature of the recent trend of global markets and outsourced jobs (especially entry-level jobs). Failing the ability to offer all of these things (or even assuming them), she writes, “lose the corporate happy talk and be honest with employees” (p. 13).

Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model, the spiritual successor to Herzberg’s notions of job enrichment, identifies five motivating traits inherent to a job: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback (Miner, 2005, p. 78). Herzberg’s original writing on the subject included such examples as empowering the employee to schedule his or her own work (within constraints), giving the employees small budgets and direct responsibility for costs within the the context of their work, and making sure that the ultimate recognition for results is kept as part of the job, instead of shifting to a supervisor or a departmental level (1976, as cited in Miner, 2005, p. 66). These satisfy the latter two parts of the Hackman-Oldham model (responsibility for outcome and recognition for outcome, respectively), but not necessarily the first three, which deal much more with perceived meaningfulness of the task; in this case, the connection to organization which Spreitzer belabored, as well as the complexity and variety of the task, must satisfy the the remaining traits. The distinction as made by Pugh and Hickson (2007, pp. 236-37) is important; adding more iterations of the same task or introducing similarly “undemanding” work will not suffice. These kinds of new tasks require some measure of autonomy or self-governance, and must have the necessary recognition and requisite learning built in.

Job Satisfaction as Mediator

Economic trends are only one proximate cause of job satisfaction, which Crede, Chernyshenko, Stark, Dalal, and Bashshur define as the amalgam of everything from such distal factors as economy to extremely localized factors such as “disposition”—that is, intrinsic motivators (2007, p. 517). Importantly, they argue that any framework which seeks to measure, predict, or explain employee motivation and satisfaction must necessarily extend to factors which “influence the perception of organizational actions,” and not simply quantifiable or objective measurements (p. 516). Since job satisfaction in some way mediates the difference between objective job characteristics and employee response, this is an important piece to consider (pp. 516-517). Crede et al’s conclusion is that antecedents of job satisfaction experience too much unique variability unless multiple antecedents are addressed simultaneously—that is, unaddressed approaches to job satisfaction, and ultimately employee performance and behavior, tend to act as limiting agents. Even the if the extrinsic factors most proximal to an employee are addressed, endogenous motivators (“dispositions,” in Crede et al’s parlance) may yet affect the end result (pp. 532). In any case, it would be difficult to isolate purely extrinsic and purely intrinsic motivators, since they rarely exist in isolation (Malhotra et al., 2008, p. 291)

Practical Applications and Implications

Outside of the vacuum of theories, what does any of this tell managers about how to motivate employees and cultivate the workforce to its maximum potential? Given the aforementioned environment of slimmer margins, corporate cynicism, and concerns about long-term sustainability, what is the best way to apply the theory of job enrichment?

As is so often the case, the Google corporation provides an obvious example. At once a financial powerhouse, a technological titan, and a media darling, Google has become synonymous with the “right” way to run a company. Their policies have historically been rich grist for the mill of both technology pundits and business reporters alike: at little or no cost to them, employees are given benefits such as free (excellent) food, health care, ski trips, car repair, recreation rooms, and unlimited sick days (Lashinsky, 2007, pp. 72-73). These are extrinsic factors which, on the face of it, satisfy only hygiene factors, and will therefore increase motivation and performance only asymptotically. As one piece of Google’s broader approach toward attracting and keeping the best minds in the industry, however, it builds a sense of community and a mutual relationship of value and respect between the organization and its employees. Take, as a notable example, Google’s “20%” policy, which demands that employees spend a fifth of their time on a separate pet project of interest (p. 77). Gmail, Google’s web-based email offering, was just such a project. This kind of job enrichment satisfies task variety, fosters the perception of autonomy insofar as an employee is free to choose the direction of the project, and of course results in both internal and public recognition if the project is promoted to Google’s canonical offerings.

Similarly, Google’s famously simple mission statement—”Don’t Be Evil”—is precisely the sort of organizational goal that encourages employee buy-in (though Google’s sex appeal as a business and a think tank doesn’t hurt).

Yet even Google, which is to the 2000s what Microsoft was to the 1990s, faces and occasionally fails at these same organizational problems. The loss of top executives and engineers to new, perhaps more exciting startups is problematic (Montalbo, 2008, p. 29); though hardly hemorrhaging talent yet, Google is taking steps to prevent just such fate by looking at sabbaticals and lateral movement, among others (Lashinsky, 2007, p. 78). Yet it becomes inevitable, now that Google employs well over 15,000 people, that less individual recognition is forthcoming, more work focuses on the maintenance of established products rather than the development of new ones, and the economics of providing its legendary benefits to a much larger workforce becomes problematic.
At Google, autonomy is still the most widely-followed tenet of job enrichment. According to Mantalbo, Craig Neville-Manning, Google’s engineering director, stresses the importance of autonomy for employees even as Google as an organization takes on more of the structure (and strictures) of a much larger company (2008, p. 33).

The continued trend toward a global economy increases the supply of cheap labor across all industries. As such, more emphasis is placed on the most creative, highest-performing, and most dynamic employees, who, though likely self-directed by endogenous motivators, still require continuous job enrichment in order to stay engaged. While pay and benefits are both important and necessary, they are—in terms of job satisfaction and performance—secondary to true job enrichment. This is good news for cost-conscious organizations, but the corollary is that effective management may be even more difficult to accomplish, especially in an organization which subscribes to the more traditional view that employees are inherently lazy and wasteful unless coerced otherwise.

References

• Crede, M., Chernyshenko, O. S., Stark, S., Dalal, R. S., & Bashshur, M. (2007). Job satisfaction as mediator: An assessment of job satisfaction’s position within the nomological network [Electronic version]. Journal of Occupational & Organizational Psychology, 80(3), 515-538. from Business Source Elite (26978346).
• Drake, A. R., Wong, J., & Salter, S. B. (2007). Empowerment, Motivation, and Performance: Examining the Impact of Feedback and Incentives on Nonmanagement Employees [Electronic version]. Behavioral Research in Accounting, 19, 71-89. from Business Source Elite (23952103).
• Gallo, C. (2008, May 23). Motivate Your Employees Like Jack Welch. BusinessWeek. Retrieved November 17, 2008, from http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/may2008/sb20080523_761806.htm
• Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (2004). The Motivation to Work (7th ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. (Original work published 1959)
• Lashinsky, A. (2007, January 22). Search and Enjoy. Fortune, 155, 70-82. Retrieved November 19, 2008, from Business Source Elite (23657847).
• Malhotra, Y., Galletta, D. F., & Kirsch, L. J. (2008). How Endogenous Motivations Influence User Intentions: Beyond the Dichotomy of Extrinsic and Intrinsic User Motivations. Journal of Management Information System, 25(1), 267-299. Retrieved October 27, 2008, from Business Source Elite (33245054).
• Miner, J. B. (2005). Organizational Behavior I.: Essential Theories of Motivation and Leadership. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
• Montalbo, E. (2008, October 20). Growing Pains for Google. ComputerWorld, 42, 28-33. Retrieved November 19, 2008, from Business Source Elite (35001302).
• Pugh, D. S., & Hickson, D. J. (2007). Great Writers on Organizations (3rd ed.). Hampshire: Ashgate.
• Ryan, L. (2008, September 22). Managing Amid Economic Uncertainty. BusinessWeek, 13. Retrieved November 21, 2008, from Business Source Elite (34588441).
• Welch, J., & Welch, S. (2006, October 2). The Case for 20-70-10. BusinessWeek, 4003, 108. Retrieved November 18, 2008, from Business Source Elite (22469902).

As a professional working in Information Technology, I often encounter hesitation and trepidation on the part of functional users to engage my employer’s information system, an ERP system known as Banner. The engagement of technology—especially for older generations of users, in which was not inculcated the idea of information systems (i.e. the Internet) as pleasurable or entertaining—has been a focus of information systems and organizational behavior research for some time. In much the same way as MacGregor’s landmark work (Montana & Charnov, 2000, pp. 251-52) split the concept of innate employee behavior into two extremes—essentially wicked and lazy on one end, earnest and self-actualizing on the other (“Abrahamic,” to borrow Herzberg’s phrase)—so traditional IT adoption research has rather myopically divided all impetuses for system use into either endogenous or exogenous antecedents of behavior.

Malhotra, Galletta, and Kirsch’s “How Endogenous Motivations Influence User Intentions” expands upon and empirically tests Deci and Ryan’s organismic integration theory (1985, as cited in Malhotra et al, 2008, p. 269). The proposed model ostensibly offers a better prediction of actual system use than the traditional “Motivational Model,” which accounts in large part for the existing dichotomy of external factors, such as reward for work, and internal factors such as the inherent joy of performing the task (1992, p. 111-1132, as cited in Malhotra et al., 2008, 270). Malhotra et al. rightly question the continued validity of such a model, citing the inherent variability of the effect of extrinsic motivators on different groups of people as well as the possible interplay of extrinsic and intrinsic factors of motivation (2008, p. 270). While perhaps useful as a rule of thumb, or popular as a crass generalization, this existing dichotomy “seems to have limited our understanding of user motivation” (2008, p. 270).

Admittedly, some of this is a difficult sell: Malhotra et al. strain to find examples of such an “endogenous notion of volitional extrinsic motivation,” finally offering such internal thoughts as “good employees do not play computer games as work” (2008, p. 271), an idea which inhabits several strange belief schema at once. With very little prestidigitation, such an example an internalized external motivator can be externalized once more by tying it deftly to fear of reprisal or loss of other purely extrinsic motivators. Because it is extraordinarily difficult to map such internal representations and—as the authors themselves note—to consistently calculate the effect such external motivators, internalized or not, this is a very precarious concept. In the case of their rather poor example, the idea of a good employee is either entirely an intrinsic motivation, or it is an external demand: that the ultimate damnation possibly comes in the form of self-reprisal rather than external punishment (to wit: one’s own goals for baseline accomplishment meet or exceed institutional goals but fail to meet internalized representation of said accomplishment) in no way necessitates that this motivator be extrinsic in nature and internal in representation.

Venkatesh, Brown, Maruping, and Bala (2008) speak to this in a limited fashion by reinforcing the theory of “behavioral expectation,” which takes into account not only an employee’s internal schema of beliefs (called “behavior intention”) but also the extrinsic factors which are subject both to change and to amorphous degrees of influence on intrinsic motivations (p. 486). Their findings indicate a weak relationship between the internalized belief systems of behavioral intent and the frequency and intensity of system use but a strong relationship with intensity alone (p. 497).

What strikes me as fundamentally odd about Malhotra et al.’s study is the semantic ambiguity. The authors’ eventual semantic summation of intrinsic and extrinsic stimuli (or more importantly, the dynamic between the two) is “perceived locus of causality,” or PLOC (2008, p. 271), usually a dialectic reached by some internal confluence of motivations. This perceived locus of causality is by necessity an internal representation; as such, the authors find it grounds to argue that unequivocally extrinsic motivators are therefore functions of this concept, and no longer purely extrinsic in nature. This, therefore, is the difference between “volition” and “compulsion” (2008, p. 272); since compulsion may exist anywhere along a wide swath, the authors admit that attempting to identify or measure extrinsic motivation (and therefore qualify the PLOC of which it is constituent) is difficult (2008, p. 274). There exists a relatively small slice of intrinsic motivation, and my experience in the field of information systems would indicate that it—that is, a desire to use the system out of an inward desire to learn and explore it—is almost never to be found in functional (to wit: the majority) of users. Even our so-called “power-users,” who may explore the system and test its capabilities beyond the scope of their stated duties generally do so in the context of an internal goal which is externally motivated—i.e. a job function.

I find this to some degree a largely irrelevant when discussing information system use, since such system use is usually mandated by employment but entirely volitional insofar as the employee has chosen to fulfill said employment and in the nature prescribed by the information system. However, the flexibility of PLOC allows for it to account for and describe such flux states as an “introjected PLOC,” wherein a user’s desired action does not match the system’s mandated action (2008, pp 272-273). At the University of St. Francis, Banner is usually the cause of such states, since it represents the absolute nadir of human interaction design. While this makes the use of Banner unpleasant, and results in an elevated level of required support and training, it has not in our experience actually lowered use of Banner by those functional users whose job requires it. This is precisely what Venkatesh et al. refer to when they introduce “behavior expectation” into their proposed nomological framework. Behavior expectation is “an individual’s self-reported subjective probability of his or her performing a specified behavior, based on her or her cognitive appraisal of volitional and non-volitional behavioral determinants” (Warshaw and Davis, 1984, p. 111, as cited in Venkatesh et al., 2008, p. 484). Behavioral expectation, in accounting for the user’s internalized representation of extrinsic, non-volitional factors (to wit: the often confusing or counterintuitive nature of a given information system), has influenced a new conceptualization of system use. Their research indicates that when mediated by measures of behavior expectation, there arises no discernible relationship between external factors (“facilitating conditions” in their parlance) and actual system use (2008, p 494-95), meaning that regardless of the qualities of an employee’s perceived locus of control, their behavior with respect to mandatory use of an information system can be accurately predicted insofar as the employee understands the relationship of the system to his or her job.

Vaske and Grantham report that measurable intelligence leads to varying results in perceived locii of control; specifically, intelligent individuals tended to report higher levels of control (1990, p. 58). Vaske and Grantham posit a particular conceit on the part of intelligent people, in that they believe there are fewer variables outside of their control; in addition, internal causality becomes the default attribution for successful experiences, while external causality remains the scapegoat for failure (1990, p. 58), reinforcing that there is a consistent dichotomy persisted by individuals between their intrinsic and extrinsic forces, even if there is a nebulous area wherein those two mingle, outside the scope of the individual’s self-analysis. Malhotra et al. use this as their first hypothesis (2008, p. 274).

Vekantesh et al. (2008) warn against drawing any conclusions based on this sort of experimental data, citing the “productivity paradox,” the theory that greater system use is not equatable to greater productivity (p. 499). Indeed, all this talk of motivations has drifted far away from what is perhaps the more pressing question to managers, namely “What will maximize productivity?” Is work done out of fear of retribution, termination of employee, ridicule of peers, or the motivation to more respect and better salary substantially different from that done out of technically curiosity or some other elusive intrinsic motivation? To their credit, Malhotra et al. (2008) do consider this possibility, measure breaking down initial adoption and continued use of a given information system (in their case, Blackboard, a web-based course management system) based on the composite reliabilities of various PLOC categories and other factors (p. 281-82). This, of course, is an experiment with immediate interest to the University of St. Francis as a whole, since its Information Technology department will be moving to Blackboard in 2009. Given a population who is not required by employment, but rather by education requirements, the confluence of personal and educational (in this case substituting for intrinsic and extrinsic, respectively) factors is of great importance, since we may to some degree predict the success of our online learning program on the relationship of motivation to continued use. In fairness, I cannot think of any theoretical student who would continue taking classes online only because he or she enjoyed the look of Blackboard and so fulfilled a peculiar internal drive, but for those students who generate introjected PLOC (perceived locii of control) from their interaction with the system, the difference may be enough to potentially reduce enrollment. For a system which, though mandatory, is part of a larger structure which is volitional, the quality of the information system, and the University’s approach to managing and promoting it, is potentially a thousand- or million-dollar issue.

Malhotra et al. (2008) ultimately conclude that “motivation may influence behaviors in more complex ways… [than] this simple dichotomy [between intrinsic and extrinsic factors]” (p. 290). Like Venkatesh et al. (2008, pp. 497-98), they suggest that while behavioral expectation is a reliable predictor of usage than quantifiable extrinsic factors, which seems not only correct, but obvious to anyone who has worked either in management or in an capacity relating to information systems. However, Malhotra et al. (2008) appear to suggest that extrinsic motivators almost never exist in isolation, but almost always as internal representations interpreted by a particular employee. I take issue with such a characterization, as I believe it relies too heavily on a particular sampling of a particular kind of employee in a particular kind of organization. Perhaps most the beneficial conclusion, though surely not the most novel, is the emphasis of an introjected PLOC’s negative effect on a user’s attitude and future intentions with respect to using to system (p. 291).

References

• Malhotra, Y., Galletta, D. F., & Kirsch, L. J. (2008). How Endogenous Motivations Influence User Intentions: Beyond the Dichotomy of Extrinsic and Intrinsic User Motivations. Journal of Management Information System, 25(1), 267-299. Retrieved October 27, 2008, from Business Source Elite (33245054).
• Montana, P. J., & Charnov, B. H. (2000). Management. Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s.
• Vaske, J. J., & Grantham, C. E. (1990). Socializing the Human-Computer Environment. Bristol: Intellect Books.
• Venkatesh, V., Brown, S. A., Maruping, L. M., & Bala, H. (2008). Predicting Different Conceptualizations of System Use: The Competing Roles of Behavioral Intention, Facilitating Conditions, and Behavioral Expectation. MIS Quarterly, 32(3), 483-502. Retrieved October 27, 2008, from Business Source Elite (33436540).

The relatively inglorious origins of organizational behavior as a field of study began as little more than queries into potential ways to improve productivity and reduce human variability—this at the advent of mass production as practiced today, with Henry Ford’s mechanized production line leading the charge. By the middle of the 20th century, organizational behavior as a codified field of study began to shift to a sort of organizational psychology, dedicated not to eliminating or marginalizing the human factors associated with production, but rather controlling and tempering them. The idea that employees were not only human, but complex persons with the capacity for actualization, began to some degree with the work of Elton Mayo (Pugh & Hickson, 2007, p. 217), but realized some shade of its existing form after World War II, lead by researchers such as Frederick Herzberg.

Herzberg spent the last half of his life as a professor at the University of Utah. Prior to that, he had served in the United States Army, later joining the staff of the Psychological Services of Pittsburgh, during which he and his colleagues began to compile data for what would eventually become The Motivation to Work, a landmark publication which proposed what would become known as the “Motivation-Hygiene” or , more colloquially, the “Two-Factory” theory. This data, in its most complete form, spanned twelve separate rounds of interviews and investigations and included the answers of over 1600 respondents, and used a relatively new and liberal form of interview.

Typical interviewing techniques limit themselves to boolean or narrowly-defined answer domains, so as to make compilation/tabulation easy and limit extraneous or unusable responses to a relative minimum. It is worth noting that Herzberg’s research methods involved more informal questioning which, he reported, produces very different or more revealing answers (Herzberg, Mauzer, and Snyderman 1959/2004, pp. 35-36). Furthermore, Herzberg predicted reporting biases in his study’s respondents, and so employed elements of the Critical Incident Technique, rather than a more structured list of questions which he felt would not adequately capture the required data; neither, he reasoned, would “so-called objective measures” like employee turnover or absenteeism, since there is not a readily-discernible causal relationship to be found in that kind of data (Herzberg et al. 1959/2004, pp. 16, 21). Specifically, Herzberg’s line of questioning asked for “a time when you felt exceptionally good or a time when you felt exceptionally bad about your job, either a long-range sequence of events or a short-range incident” (Herzberg et al., 1959/2004, p. 35).

Pugh and Hickson summarize the Motivation-Hygiene theory in a single sentence as “[T]he events that led to [job] satisfaction were of quite a different kind from those that led to dissatisfaction” (2007, p. 234). In other words, Herzberg’s theory proposed that job satisfaction was not a single continuum with “low satisfaction” on one end and “high satisfaction” on the other; rather, there are two continua which lay at angles to each other, one which indicates Motivation and one which represents Hygiene, to use Herzberg’s parlance.

The constituent qualities of the Hygiene continuum are concerned primarily with the maintenance of the job, such as working conditions, administration, and salary, and while necessary, are limited in their ability to increase job satisfaction; their notable absence, however, leads to job dissatisfaction (Pugh & Hickson, 2007, p. 235). These sorts of factors may be considered roughly equivalent to the lower levels of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs—that is, the needs upon which is predicated the continued physical and political existence of the worker. In a later work, Work and the Nature of Man, Herzberg grouped these needs as those of an “Adam” view of man, concerned with “primary drives” (as cited in Miner 2005, p. 64).

The more philosophically-weighty of these continua is the factors of Motivation, which acts independently of Hygiene, and may be roughly equated to the upper levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, including such things as professional accomplishment, growth, self-actualization, and esteem. This, to return to Maslow’s Biblical terminology, is the “Abraham” conception of humans (Pugh & Hickson 2007, p. 235). To understand this metaphor, one must consider the capacity for achievement and self-realization of Man qua child of God. The paradox inherent to these Motivation factors is that the most important of them are invoked the least frequently, since they tend to be monolithic, and evince over longer periods of time.

These two sets of traits, Herzberg says, “must be constantly viewed as having separate biological, psychological and existential origins” (1966, p. 56, as cited in Miner 2005, p. 64). This is the linchpin of the Motivation-Hygiene theory’s novelty; these two separate continua can function independently of one another, and are not opposites. The opposite of job satisfaction is merely no satisfaction, as opposed to active dissatisfaction. In Herzberg’s studies, 81% of factors which contribute to job satisfaction are described as Motivators (growth and development), while 69% of factors which contributed to job dissatisfaction were described as Hygiene (work environment and compensation). During the course of Herzerg’s twelve investigations, these numbers stayed remarkably consistent (Pugh & Hickson, 2007, p. 235).

It is important to note that while Herzberg believed satisfiers and dissatisfiers to be distinct groups, they are in some sense interdependent If the hygiene factors of an occupation are not adequately met, motivators such as potential advancement or the raw appeal of the job’s responsibilities lose much of their ability to motivate (Montana & Charnov, 2000, p. 241). Similarly, a job which meets or even exceeds the requisite hygiene factors but provides no opportunity for growth, advancement, or professional self-realization will not attract or keep creative, motivated people.

The middle section of Maslow’s hierarchy, between the factors dealing with maintenance and those dealing with actualization or realization, is “belonging,” a nebulous region comprised of interpersonal relationships. Herzberg believed this to be a region of overlap in his Motivation-Hygiene theory, since some measure of a sense of community is inherent to work environment, and must be satisfied as a basic maintenance characteristic of the job. Deeper relationships, esteem from the community of employees, and specifically “supervisor-subordinate” relationships reside in the domain of motivation factors, according to Montana & Charnov (2000, p. 240)

As part of the practical application of his theory, Herzberg introduced the concept of job enrichment, which is the calculated addition of new aspects, dimensions, or responsibilities to an employee’s job that allow for his or her continued growth. The distinction as made by Pugh and Hickson (2007, pp. 236-37) is important; adding more iterations of the same task or introducing similarly “undemanding” work will not suffice. These kinds of news tasks require some measure of autonomy or self-governance, and must have the necessary recognition and requisite learning built in. Having carefully delineated what characteristics of a job satisfy which of his theory’s two factors, Herzberg’s later research and writing specifically focused on job enrichment, since he perceived motivators as much more important factors once the basic hygiene factors had been met (Miner, 2005, p. 72).

So-called orthodox job enrichment is the addition of motivation factors without any additional hygiene factors. Herzberg’s examples include such things as empowering the employee to schedule his or her own work (within constraints), giving the employees small budgets and direct responsibility for costs within the the context of their work, and making sure that the ultimate recognition for results is kept as part of the job, instead of shifting to a supervisor or a departmental level (1976, as cited in Miner, 2005, p. 66).

Part of the Two-Factor theory’s longstanding appeal, despite challenges to its validity, is its immediate utility to Human Resources practitioners or I/O psychologists. Miner (2005) refers to its “religious, ethical, and moral overtones” as being directly applicable and even desirable to the office of management (p. 73). What may be its strongest selling point in an institutional sense, however, is the practical conclusions one may ultimately draw. Because the Two-Factor theory describes maintenance factors as ultimately asymptotic when it comes to engendering job satisfaction, and because so many hygiene factors can be directly tied to costs—salary, benefits, environmental quality—as opposed to the more intangible motivator factors, decision-makers who are worried about rising costs may place strict limits on these costly items with a philosophical and managerial impunity.

The Two-Factor theory for modern managers and academics is largely invalid; citing the “virtual absence of tests [—] since 1971,” Judge and Church insists that the scientific evidence after Herzberg’s initial publications has “effectively laid the Herzberg theory to rest” (2000, as cited in Miner, 2005, p. 72). Part of the complaint against Herzberg’s theory is how heavily it is predicated upon the validity of the critical incident method it used in data collection. Miner (2005) posits that at least insofar as the hygiene-to-dissatisfaction correlation is concerned, the participant response was subject to and likely influenced by defense mechanisms. The sort of experimentation required to validate the theory, which is not altogether wrong, has yet to be done, despite a long span of years (p. 72).

Even though the idea of distinct continua has fallen by the wayside, there are aspects of Herzberg’s theory which are still valid and have been institutionalized to a degree (Miner, 2005, p. 73). Job enrichment is an eminently applicable concept; however, it struggles within the context of the Two-Factor theory, as it finds necessary support in only one half of the theory. Miner (2005) cites research which indicates that even under ideal conditions, as much as 15% of test subjects exposed to such job enrichment show no response; the Two-Factory theory, he continues, provides no basis for predicting how or why such results may occur (p. 73). Furthermore, the Two-Factory theory is not intrinsic to the concept of job enrichment.

Though some reviewers like Miner (2005) suggest lingering personal and experimental support for the theory (p. 73), Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, at least in its comprehensive form, finds little solid ground on which to stand in the modern field of Organizational Behavior. Insofar as its most salient portions are useful, they have to a great degree been superseded by theories (such as the Job Characteristics theory) which more adequately describe concepts such as job enrichment (p. 74). While convenient in a practical sense, the Two-Factor Theory is fatally flawed in that most of its experimental basis did not take into account the bias of self-reporting, or eliminate enough external variables to convincingly split motivation and hygiene factors into entirely separate continua.

References

• Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (2004). The Motivation to Work (7th ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. (Original work published 1959)
• Miner, J. B. (2005). Organizational Behavior I.: Essential Theories of Motivation and Leadership. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
• Montana, P. J., & Charnov, B. H. (2000). Management. Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s.
• Pugh, D. S., & Hickson, D. J. (2007). Great Writers on Organizations (3rd ed.). Hampshire: Ashgate.

Several weeks ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associates maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read accounts like Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Iraq from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion, and its message seems congruent with the cries that have been heard since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.

Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. The most important “string”—to borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in the story of Iraq’s fall is the similarities to the ailing Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.

The invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003, but it was many years in the making—arguably as far back as the original Gulf War. At that time, the first President Bush had foregone a removal of Hussein from power, noting that an invasion of Baghdad would have forced the United States into a position of control in Iraq, alienating Arab allies in the region and generally precipitating a disaster of every conceivable sort—a possibly “barren outcome” (Bush and Scowcroft 489). Bush Senior’s reaction to Iraq was a measured response that sought to establish a precedent for international aggression, a policy fresh from the lessons of the Cold War and Soviet belligerence. In fact, the United Nations was continuing this admittedly cautious policy in 2003, when it refused support for President George W. Bush’s intended invasion of Iraq, supposedly to relieve Hussein of his nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs, no evidence of which had been found at that time by Hans Blix and his team of U.N. weapons inspectors. To date, no evidence of recent illicit weapons programs have been found, save for a specious reference to “Weapons of Mass Destruction-related program activities” (George W. Bush 3), prompting a noisome revision of the United States’ motivations for invading Iraq, namely the removal of the tyrannical Hussein and the installation of democracy and its incumbent responsibilities of self-determination for the Iraqi people. These are perfectly valid reasons, but unacceptable ex posto facto. Journalist Christopher Hitchens cites with some vindication the story of Mahdi Obeidi, a senior scientist under Hussein, who was ordered in 1991 to bury in his backyard the components of a gas centrifuge, an item used for uranium enrichment (Love 464). Hitchens seems to view this as proof positive that Hussein intended to become a nuclear power, but in all fairness there are a number of other rogue states—North Korea being the primary example—with weapon programs considerably more advanced than the buried bits of a centrifuge, but this does not provide a pretext for unilateral invasion. If it did, the United States would have the ludicrous responsibility of toppling governments all across the Eastern hemisphere.

The soi-disant “coalition of the willing” announced by Colin Powell just before the invasion was a motley collection of member nations whose roll included social democracies such as Britain and Denmark as well as less illustrious states like Uzbekistan, which harbors a repressive dictator of its own. Notably absent were any important nations of the Middle East, even those which had sided with the United States in the first Gulf War. It need hardly be stated that the United States’ essentially unilateral aggression against Iraq only exacerbated the region’s antipathy for the former’s continued support of the “Zionist entity” of Israel, but in much of Europe as well, public opinion took on a veritable distaste for America—a nation which had, less than two years prior, the sympathy and support of the entire developed world (Schifferes 2-3).

The ambivalence of the Iraqis to the presence of the United States in their country was nothing new to anyone except perhaps Dick Cheney. The Vice President’s prediction that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” (11) was not the blatant error that it is often made out to be, however: coalition forces were in some cases greeted with joy and gratitude (Hitchens, “How to Ruin” 2); in other cases, with a smoldering ambivalence and suspicion; in others, with downright hostility, but all these attitudes coalesced into the latter as the occupation languished and it became clear that the Iraqis had merely exchanged a malevolent despot and a tenuous infrastructure for anarchy, civil war, and a devastated infrastructure. Iraqis understood this beforehand: however much of a surprise the ensuing violence was to the architects of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, it was a simple causal relationship to those in Iraq. At one point, Garrels’ guide/translator (called a “minder”) admitted that “people are not afraid of a U.S.-led war because they believe Americans will only target Saddam and government sites, not ordinary people. However, [...] Iraqis are afraid of the aftermath, assuming the country will fragment and dissolve into a vicious civil war” (46). Except perhaps among the Baathist elite, there was no ambivalence about Saddam Hussein: on the subject of their dictator, most Iraqis could agree that he was a repressive, megalomaniacal tyrant with a brutish, iron-fisted regime reminiscent of the nadir of Stalinism. His tyranny, however, was the only thing holding the country together: no collective “Iraqi” identity graced the arbitrary boundaries set by the British in 1917; no religious harmony united the fiercely-opposed Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurdish communities.

Before the invasion, Iraq was in many respects a floundering country, and this was believed to be not only the fault of Saddam—his multi-billion-dollar expenditures for his war with Iran in the 1980s having largely bankrupted the nation—but also the United Nations and the United States by proxy, whose embargoes in the 1990s strangled economic growth, made affordable and available health care a patent impossibility, and turned Iraq’s culture very much inward; Hussein, though his government was more or less secular, had used the relatively recent upward surge in religious conservatism to his own ends, exacerbating tensions between the Shi’ites and Sunnis (as well as the Kurds and the Christian minority) and generally fomenting a bastard form of nationalism or Pan-Arabism (Garrels 55). What little was imported into Iraq was the result of the United Nations “Oil for Food” program, which died a messy death in 2003 with the start of the invasion and charges of corruption, the truth and impact of which will vary depending on the source. All told, something approaching $65 billion worth of oil was sold in exchange for basic necessities like food; as much as $1.8 billion may have been lost in kickbacks and other schemes by Saddam (Langenkamp 1).

This legacy of corruption would continue even well into the Iraq War, but it would unfortunately be perpetrated by American companies serving as third-party contractors in the rebuilding process. As early as 2004, reports of mismanaged property, missing funds, and fiduciary misconduct were being leveled at contractors such as Halliburton and its business unit, Kellogg Brown & Root. Regardless of the implications of suspicious business connections (some of which were facile and others of which are the vagaries of American politics), the financial management of the U.N.-created “Development Fund” and the billions of tax dollars being funneled into reconstruction seemed a monument to inefficiency and waste (Miller 188-189). In the case of the much-maligned Halliburton, T. Christian Miller writes “The company delivered, but wasted a lot of money doing it” (82). Clearly, there seemed to be no coherent vision for Iraq’s future, nor any sort of comprehensive oversight of the literal warzone pursuant to Hussein’s involuntary abdication. None of the ensuing chaos mitigated the fears and suspicions of the war’s opponents, and the fact that the United States’ immediate priority in post-coup Iraq were the Oil Ministry fostered much distrust among already-ambivalent Iraqis (Garrels 202). Hitchens asserts that oil is, in fact, worth fighting over (“Fault Lines”), and his point is of course true in practical terms: the United States feared that retreating hostile forces would set fire to oil fields and detonate oil reserves, bruising the international market and introducing an enormous logistical problem as it did in the aftermath of the first Gulf War (Garrels 126). The lack of a simple good/evil binary in Iraq—despite the best efforts of certain ideologues to convince Americans otherwise—makes it impossible to successfully balance the necessities of realpolitik with the sort of public relations campaign that the region’s inherent anti-westernism would require of the occupying powers.

Like the Soviet Union, Iraq’s sudden and violent transition from despotic regime to pro forma democracy seems to have been done with little or no regard for the economic and political realities of such a transition. The Soviet Union had the advantage, at least, of changing from within, but the invasion of Iraq smacked to many of imperialism or unjust coercion: even to Iraqis, and not merely dovish Americans and Europeans, the categorical imperative for the war seemed to be oil (Garrels 26-27, 64, 202). If a lowly NPR correspondent, under the strictures of a paranoid government, could separate such wheat from the chaff of official party soundbytes with nothing more than interviews with taxi drivers and students, it begs the question: why was the United States not prepared for such hostility and the inevitable struggles for religious primacy? Why was the onus upon the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power?—Saddam Hussein who, though undoubtedly a monster, had reached a sort of uneasy provisional stability despite the strain of embargoes. Importantly, U.N. embargoes tended to hurt only the general populace of Iraq: for loyal Party members, money and comfort was still no issue: Garrels makes mention of dealerships selling expensive Mercedes which must only be patronized by oil barons and Baathist elites (53). “While this family [with whom Garrels stays during the initial combat operations] and their friends blame Saddam Hussein for many of their problems and believe that Iraq does need a change, they resent what they see as American arrogance… They are clearly caught in the middle” (130).

The American motivation for attack remains a problem that hasn’t been explained away by the President’s on-camera jingoism: he may have convinced a slim majority of Americans to support his politics, but the situation in Iraq has deteriorated in complete disregard of Bush’s high ideals. Whence, then, the supposition of America’s legitimacy as a liberating power, especially after half a century of careful political tiptoeing? Hitchens proposes four criteria by which a nation forfeits its sovereignty, submitting as well that Iraq met all four prior to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The first is invading sovereign neighbors, as was the case with Kuwait in the first Gulf War; the second is genocide, as was again the case with the state-ordered massacre of Kurdish villages; the third is the violation of nonproliferation treaties, which Iraq’s clandestine attempts at a nuclear program ostensibly indicate; the fourth and final is the state sponsorship of international “gangsterism,” which Iraq is supposed to have done in a variety of ways (“Fault Lines”). The problem with Hitchens’ assessment is that the sparse evidence for recent WMD research and manufacturing requires a rather great leap to assume an explicit violation of nonproliferation treaties; the fourth item, as well, is famously false insofar as the 9/11 Commission Report found no evident link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (334), though likely true in that Iraq was and still is a nesting ground for terrorism. The implicit problem, however, is that there are a great many countries in the region which abet “gangsterism”—for instance, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran—as well as one infamous example—Iran—which claims to have not a single, disassembled centrifuge but rather 3,000 fully functional ones (“Iran” 1).

Working under the assumption that Iraq was indeed culpable for all the requisite trespasses, and the United States was justified in its military action, however premeditated,—this is not necessarily a difficult stretch to make—cognizant lookers-on must still then question not the purported moral authority or practical necessity of invasion, but the relative insouciance with which it was executed. Garrels make a critical point, as sketched with small interviews from people in unspoken places, that there is more to a nation than the despot—be he benign or malevolent—who controls it. That the invading forces did not see this was the fundamental mistake made both before and after the short span of “major combat operations” which sent Saddam into hiding. Iraq was a quagmire long before George W. Bush came into office, and it was a complex set of factors which led to its sorry state: much blame can be laid at the feet of the despot; some can be laid at the feet of petty but deep-rooted religious rivalries more at home in the Dark Ages than the 21st century; still more blame can be laid at the feet of an misaimed embargo, a myopic war plan, and a general lack of concern by the “coalition of the willing” for the well-being of the very people it seeks to liberate. Like the failed “Hearts and Minds” campaign in South Viet Nam during the 1960s and 70s, winning a foreign war has as much to do with popular appeal as it does with military strategy. It seems as though the more effectively the military does its job of rooting out the phantom of terrorism, the further Iraqis are estranged from the ostensible benevolence of the West. The very idea of popularity seems to have been a foregone conclusion inside of a year: Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek said, “The insurgents may not win many hearts and minds, but that’s not the point. Their fighting force is based on a shamelessly cynical alliance between Qaeda-inspired religious fanatics and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s gang of enforcers. [...] For the insurgents, Iraq has become a war without rules, and yet the militants also score big propaganda victories every time Americans break their own codes of warfare” (35). With the spectre of Abu Ghraib still looming, the political and civil-rights limbo of Guantanamo Bay still festering, and the historic free elections deepening the cleft of religious and cultural divides with political power, it seems unlikely that comprehensive peace is an implausible goal under the current circumstances—so say Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush’s close friend and advisor, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor and noted Cold War historian. Fundamentally changing the odds in Iraq would require either a commitment of money and troops far beyond the pale of Americans’ current mood or a change of paradigm with regard to control of operations (A12).

Barring a semantic quarrel, it would be accurate to call the war in Iraq so far a “failure” insofar as it has not produced any of the desired dividends: lasting peace, stable oil, democratic influence, or efficacious disarmament. The only considerable goals which have been achieved are the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the implementation of divisive elections. Understandably, the great hope for the Middle East is not a short-term armistice, but rather a long-term process whereby the benefits of secularism, self-governance, and civil liberty will osmose through the Arabian peninsula; however, the approach to the War in Iraq, in all its various and sundry guises, critically misunderstood what was plain as vanilla to anyone familiar with the region. Garrels summarizes the situation succinctly: “Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge” (218). This statement describes almost the entire Middle East: there is no simple binary that fits the looming crisis there, as the region is comprised of very subtle differences which tend to elude the grasp of unconcerned foreigners, even though they are entirely clear to its inhabitants. This, in part, was the catalyst for the disaster that the War in Iraq has become, but it should not have been unexpected or surprising: Garrels understood it, as did most of her colleagues. The lesson at work here is that aid without understanding is little more than conquest.

Works Cited

• Bush, George, and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• Bush, George W. “State of the Union.” Washington, D.C. 20 Jan. 2004. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html>.
• Cheney, Dick. Interview. Meet the Press. MSNBC. 14 Sep. 2006. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/>.
• Hitchens, Christopher. “How to Ruin an Occupation.” Slate 5 July 2005. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://www.slate.com/id/2121996>.
• —. Love, Poverty, and War. New York: Nation Books, 2004.
• —. “Fault Lines: Rights, Wrongs and Responsibilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine and The Nation.” Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund, Berkley. 8 Dec. 2002.
• “Iran ‘enters new nuclear phase’” BBC News 9 Apr. 2007. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6538957.stm>.
• Langenkamp, R. Dobie. “Putting Oil-for-Food in Perspective.” Jurist. 2 Nov. 2005. University of Pittsburgh School of Law. 11 Apr. 2007 <http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2005/11/putting-oil-for-food-in-perspective.php>.
• Miller, T. Christian. Blood Money. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
• National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
• Nordland, Rob, and Babak Dehghanpisheh. “Rules of Engagement.” Newsweek 29 Nov. 2004: 34-36.
• Priest, Dana, and Robin Wright. “Scowcroft Skeptical Vote Will Stabilize Iraq.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 2005: A12.
• Schifferes, Steve. “US names ‘coalition of the willing’” BBC News 18 Mar. 2003. 4 Apr. 2007 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2862343.stm>.

Love, Poverty, and War by Christopher Hitchens

Anyone who’s frequented my blog to any significant degree knows that I am (mostly) a fan of Christopher Hitchens. I find him an excellent journalist, as well as a man of scruples, a great lover/scholar of literature, an iconoclast of the highest order, and an all-around interesting writer. Most importantly, he neither requests nor offers any alliances except to the principles he holds dear: liberty, civil liberty, intellectual vigor, and the rooting out of corruption.

Of late, you might know Hitchens for his unapologetic support of the invasion of Iraq. He’s been a talking head on a variety of networks—FNC included—to proffer his justifications for the war. But Hitchens has been around a long time: you might recall his screed against Mother Teresa, his contempt for Bill Clinton, or his struggle to oust and prosecute Henry Kissinger for war crimes (all three of this subjects have been tackled in books by Hitchens). He’s written in a variety of contexts—more than I ever realized—and this collection of essays seeks to offer a decent cross section of that canon.

The book, as the title might indicate, is divided into three sections.

1. Love • This section consists mostly of Hitchens’ passions—that is, reviews of famous literature or books or history. It begins with a lengthy essay about Winston Churchill (through the lens of several biographies and books and history) written for Atlantic Monthly. It continues along that vein, jumping from introductions of Huxley’s Brave New World to contextual criticism of Rudyard Kipling, to reviews of other literary criticism. It spans a wide gamut, but it’s a side of Hitchens that is rarely seen except to owners of n^th-anniversary reprints of select novels or subscribers to Atlantic Monthly or a ragtag collection of literary journals. It’s not the best lit-crit I’ve ever read, but it’s still damned interesting.
   • Americana • As a postscript to the “Love” section is a series of articles dealing specifically with American culture. One long essay, I believe for Harper’s, recalls Hitchens’ journey across historic Route 66 in a Corvette, and reminds me more of Bill Bryon’s The Lost Continent than anything by Hitchens.
2. Poverty • This section is a catch-all for any of Hitchens’ polemics that aren’t Iraq-related. A screed against Mother Teresa, for instance, as well as an extraordinarily poignant piece about an execution he witnessed in Missouri (and of course capital punishment in general). These are some of his most reflective pieces, even if they contain at points a fair amount of ire. Remember that Hitchens isn’t one to pull any punches.
3. War • “War” is, as one might imagine, predicated entirely upon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it is further bifurcated into a “Before September” section, which consists largely of early-90s pieces about the first Gulf War—and a notable argument about Montenegro during the conflict in Yugoslavia—, and an “After September,” which chronicles some of Hitchens more immediate responses to the attack, more measured pieces months later advocating military responses, and finally a few articles dealing with the invasion of Iraq.

I’m sorry to say that the final essay, for all its merits, strikes me as a somewhat jingoistic, “Iraq: A Country on the Move!” sort of fluff piece. It’s a soft end, I think, and not one that holds up well several years later, when prospects aren’t as bright and sunny as Hitchens makes them out to be. Still and all, one has to respect Hitchens’ clarity of argument—I find that my own opinions have been tempered somewhat by his writing—and the nuance and skill with which he approaches his subject. Love, Poverty, and War is a mere sampling of Hitchens’ incredible archives, but it’s the sort of compilation I’ve been looking for, since I’m not a regular reader of anything but his Slate articles. If you’re a Hitchens fan, or just want to see what he has to say, give this one a chance.

Though America’s days of colonization had been over for roughly half a century by the time two resounding explosions in the far east violently christened the Cold War, the newly-global political system set in motion a novel U.S. foreign policy of economic and diplomatic pressure in developing countries (though shared to varying degrees by both its allies and enemies) which would later be turned into the pejorative “cultural imperialism.” This phrase is not entirely without merit, but neither is it always applied fairly, for in many cases the influx of U.S. dollars was good for all parties involved, and a change in culture was predicated entirely upon a more stable economy and not a purposeful imposition of “Western” values. If America qua Imperial Power had been dormant for 50 years, then, whence the accusations of cultural imperialism?

Much of this has to do with the concentration of political, economic, and military clout in a mere four superpowers. Meanwhile, according to Guy Pauker, “The Middle East, Southeast Asia, tropical Africa, and Latin America are apt to remain power vacuums during this period, owing to their lack of unity, political instability, economic stagnation, and cultural heterogeneity” (Qtd. in Hook and Spanier 80). Hook and Spanier believe that that U.S.’s fear was not of Soviet military control—though this was very much a pressing concern—but the possibility of Communism spreading, like a disease, into vulnerable nations and turning them into oppressive dictatorships in the process, as seems the wont of most communist regimes, at least if history is any indication (82). Indeed, these fears were likely well-founded, as such a thing had already happened to China, and like its sire the Soviet Union, it had lost millions of its exploded population in ill-thought national reforms.

So many nations in the aforementioned areas, though, were ripe for reform—real reform—and so began the international tension. Hook and Spanier are right to note that Western capitalist countries were at a disadvantage: historically, it was capitalist countries, in the throes of mercantilism, that colonized so many of these developing areas—French Indochina, Belgian Congo, British India—and so even post-colonial capitalist nations were viewed with a great deal of suspicion (86). It should be added, though Hook and Spanier do not directly say so, that communism, by contrast, had the advantage of appearing as a purely populist movement, democratic in a way that Western democracies could not be due to the inherent disequilibrium of free markets. The authors do note, however, that nowhere in the sparkling promotion of Communism qua egalitarianism were mentioned “the force, massive terror, and staggering human costs” (82).

The authors believe that it is in large part due to the vulture-like watchfulness of warring superpowers that so many newly-independent nations fell into the trap of military dictatorships or indefinitely-prolonged juntas (87). This is true, but it is necessary to remember that many of these countries also faced population explosions at a time of economic depression and social unrest: the tendency of interim revolutionary governments to retreat into the fastness of martial control had as much to do with the broad and dismissive strokes of a desperate ruling party as it did from the political leers of foreign powers.

After all, the US was in large part content to leverage its economic power passively, channeling money into pro-democratic nation-building exercises in post-war Europe, a practice set in motion by the Marshall Plan. To a great extent, the economic boost provided by foreign investment was enough to keep these countries securely capitalist, and the Marshall Plan is generally heralded as an unprecedented success in peaceful nation-building (or nation-rebuilding, as the case may be). Hook and Spanier are quick to note, however—and this becomes the crux of the argument for the United States’ culpability in the “casualties,” so to speak, of the Cold war—that aid outside of Western Europe was more often than not military aid and selective in the extreme (91). It need hardly even be pointed out that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, both proxy wars between the United States and the U.S.S.R/P.R.C., were hardly the sort of passive economic buttressing of the early Cold War but rather a direct military response to direct Communist aggression in the region. Thus, the authors assert, the suspicion of the United States as a post-colonial colonizer was replaced by the equally-harmful view of the United States as a briber, offering aid with the tacit demand that the receiving government openly “associate themselves with U.S. Cold War policies” (92).

The authors’ second argument for U.S. culpability comes from its hypocrisy with respect to issues of race, having officially ended its own policies of segregation as late as 1964 and green-lighting South African apartheid until the roar of international outcry finally ended the practice in the early 1990s. (Hook and Spanier 92). Certainly, the history here is appalling, but likely as not the racial discrimination had little to do with developing countries insofar as it relates to the Cold War. Communist countries were just as likely—if not moreso—to engage in the same sort of behavior, even if their public stance looked to drawing divided races into the egalitarian envelope of Communism (Borstelmann 136-138).

What seems more important, and this becomes Hook and Spanier’s third and final point, is that the United States was particularly ignorant of the dynamics of class struggle in these nations. It “tended to equate [revolutions] with communism [and] Washington’s reaction to the communist threat was to support almost any regime, no matter how repressive, if it claimed to be anticommunist” (93). This led to support for a number of failed governments overseas, as well as a whole host of amorphous dictatorships and so-called “banana republics” in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s—a shameful portfolio which includes the infamous Iran-Contra scandal (101). If there was any policy more telling of America’s primary concerns than its policy of propping up violent but diplomatically-friendly dictatorships in Latin America, it has yet to be heard. This, in an ocean of rhetoric about ideology, is the sole domain of Cold War realpolitik—political action intended not to do what is best for the constituents of a nation, but to keep it under the wide thumb of U.S. control and safely align it on the side of Democracy. The authors make a case for America’s 1954 intervention in Guatemala as being indicative of general policy (101); however, the case can also be made for the ultra-conservative military junta in Argentina, which received clandestine approval from the United States—or at least from then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who also played a similar role in Chile’s 1973 coup d’état (Duncan 1).

American lawmakers, who “stubbornly identified reform with revolution, and revolution with communism, largely thwarted the best intentions—perhaps—of Kennedy and his Alliance for Progress (Hooks and Spanier 102). It was in this context that the U.S. entered into its long and storied political battle with Cuba, which included such highlights as the failed “Bay of Pigs” invasion—another CIA-backed coup d’état—and the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” a tense few days in which the world teetered on the brink of mutually-assured destruction as Washington and Moscow (with Cuba as a hapless and haughty proxy) played a game of diplomatic chicken in which Washington won by a hairsbreadth.

Hook and Spanier’s text seems to dwell overlong on the United States, although it seems implicit that the Soviet Union’s involvement was very rarely as nuanced as its Western counterpart’s, but rather tended to be almost entirely aggressive and militaristic, no doubt buoyed by a string of aggressive leaders—first Stalin, then Khrushchev, and finally the more feckless Brezhnev—and the hyper-belligerent stance that typified Soviet-era politics. Meanwhile, the United States attempted to tread a dangerous path that would satisfy its ideological mission of fairness and independence while also extinguishing the slow burn of communism in developing countries around the world. The unintended consequence of stopping communism at all costs was the continued “high level of economic distress, political repression, and social unrest” (103).

It is a matter of some debate whether or not these contentious countries would have been better or worse off with communism officially installed. Certainly, at least a few of the revolutionary countries in Latin America and in Africa would have adopted a socialist or communist government by popular decree, which admits the possibility that they would face horrors the likes of which the Soviet Union and China have seen despite their general economic success. Would this have been a better result for these developing countries? Especially in Africa, where so many Sub-Saharan nations are still mired in debt, disease, corruption, and violence, it is possible that the Command Economy of communism would have galvanized the local economy and brought some much-needed infrastructure, but it is just as likely as not that the tendency of communist regimes to become dismissive, corrupted, and bloated would be no different than the hodgepodge of warring tribes that seems to have run of the continent now. Hook and Spanier appear to give very little thought to the hypothetical scenario in which the Soviet Union expanded, unchecked, into the economically-desolate places of the world. As China has proven, it is exceedingly possible to become and remain an both an economic superpower—and a diplomatic friend—under the auspices of communism, its continued repression and human rights violations notwithstanding. Although the authors do not seem to consider this, they do ultimately conclude that, while this sort of frantic “containment” may have been justified in the early days of the war, it became quite clear, after a number of disastrous interventions and the very sudden buildup of a mass anticommunist hysteria fueled by the looming threat of nuclear war, that the United States’ aggressively defensive foreign policy was not working. Still, it continued well past the additional disasters of Korea and Vietnam, and clearly it continues even today as the fear of communist agents has been succeeded by the fear of terrorism, and the U.S. attempted to install a West-friendly government in Iraq, so far accomplishing little more than stirring up local resentment and bolstering the indignation of terrorist-friendly countries or factions within countries.

Hook and Spanier, despite a minor Western slant that is excusable for an American textbook—even a postrevisionist one—seem to judge America’s foreign policy fairly and accurately. Their harshest criticisms of the United States may be forgiven if for no other reason than they as historians are afforded better hindsight than the politicians of the era, who by comparison were fatally myopic but likely well-intentioned on a much grander scale known only to them.

Works Cited

• Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line. Boston: Harvard UP, 2001.
• Campbell, Duncan. “Kissinger approved Argentinian ‘dirty war’” The Guardian 6 Dec. 2003. 1 Feb. 2007<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1101121,00.html>.
• Hook, Steven W., and John Spanier. American Foreign Policy Since World War II. 17th ed. Washington, D.C: CQ Press, 2007.

The aspect of an operating system most often overlooked is its filesystem, the method by which data is stored to more permanent media—most often a magnetic hard drive. On any relatively modern Windows system, the only choice is NTFS, a complex, proprietary filesystem that provides excellent performance. Since variants of Unix—and Linux, which continues to gain market share, especially in the server market—are very popular, it is increasingly likely that IT administrators will have to choose a *nix filesystem for use on mission critical servers. There are many Free (libre) high-performance file-systems for Unix systems which, compared with the standard ext2/3 filesystem (Second or Third Extended Filesystem), provide faster access to data at the price of a higher risk of data loss. For configurations which can eliminate the points of failure that lead to this risk, high-performance file systems like XFS, JFS, or ReiserFS offer comparable or better benchmarks than Microsoft’s NTFS, without the vendor lock-in.

XFS was originally developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. for their IRIX variant of Unix. As such, it is the oldest journaling filesystem available for Unix systems (Robbins, “Part 9″ 1). In 2000, it was made available under the GPL for Linux. The first 2.4-series Linux kernel with native support was 2.4.25 (Tosatti 1), though it suffers from limited speeds for parallel buffered writes—around 300MiB/s. The 2.6 kernel series allows much greater speeds, in excess of 1GiB/s, according to Dave Chinner and Jeremy Higdon of SGI (1).

XFS is a 64-bit journaling filesystem with support for volumes (and files) of up to 9 exabytes. It has support for extents, a feature shared by other high-performance filesystems that the “basic” ext2/3 filesystem for Linux will not have until the inclusion of ext4, which only recently began development. Like Microsoft’s NTFS, XFS is based on B+ trees, which significantly improves search times and space allocations (“Open Source XFS for Linux” 2).

XFS displays good performance, especially for large files, but its continuing drawback seems to be that it can cause data loss in the event of a power outage or other catastrophic system failure. A major contributer to XFS’s performance numbers and its inherent danger has to do with the way it aggressively caches delayed writes to RAM. Under ideal circumstances, this leads to more intelligent allocations and faster writes to disk; in the case of an event which produces many small temporary files, XFS may never need to write those blocks at all. In the event of a system failure, however, there is the potential to lose a lot of data (Robbins, “Part 9″ 4). This author’s personal contact with three developers of the renowned Debian distribution of Linux reveals that they all experimented with XFS and lost or corrupted data due to either bugs or outages; as a result, they have reverted back to ext3, the preferred filesystem of many Debian and kernel developers. Importantly, these were workstations without redundant storage or power, but this underscores the need for proper hardware if XFS is to be used.

Similar to XFS is JFS, though it is technically known as JFS2. The origins of JFS stretch back to IBM’s proprietary Unix, AIX. JFS as it is known to the Linux world is the second generation of JFS, which first shipped with OS/2 Warp in 1999. At this point, a snapshot of the source was “opened” to the Linux community for porting (Gordon and Haddad 2). JFS has been a part of the 2.6 kernel since its development, but enjoys only limited official support from some vendors like Novell/SuSe and Red Hat; in addition, it is only available for the 2.4 series in the form of patches against the kernel source (3). It has, however, enjoyed successful use in carrier-grade Linux platforms for use in the telecom industry (7).

One of JFS’s most appealing factors, despite its average raw performance, is its recovery time—the very thing that makes it enticing for carrier-grade platforms. It journals only metadata (other journaling filesystems write data and metadata to the journal by default), so it boasts a sub-second recovery time. It is a 64-bit filesystem that supports file and partitions in the petabyte range, and it too uses B+ trees for its indices (Best 2). In addition, it is considered one of the computationally cheapest filesystems available, making it an excellent choice for servers with only moderate computing power.

One other filesystem that has enjoyed a long and storied existence is ReiserFS, a very fast solution optimized for many small files. “ReiserFS” refers to the third version of the filesystem, which is no longer being actively developed Reiser4 is a somewhat controversial new filesystem, still in development, that boasts very fast speeds and a database-like nature, hearkening back to BeFS’s relational database model of storage. Because Reiser4 is stable but still experimental, and has yet been denied inclusion into the Linux kernel proper (and may or may not ever find its way into the 2.4 series still being used in data centers across the globe), it isn’t as yet a serious contender for the world’s hard drives. The deprecated ReiserFS, however, enjoyed hundreds of thousands of adherents. It remains the default filesystem of many Linux distributions, including Novell’s SuSe Enterprise Linux—that is, until October of 2006, when the project officially selected ext3 as its new default mode (Shankland 1).

ReiserFS debuted in 2001 with version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel. At the time, it was the most advanced journaling filesystem available, offering metadata-only journaling before JFS was finished being ported. Its age is apparent now, however, in that it only has support for 8TB files and 16TB volumes, a fraction of the scalability offered by some of its more modern competitors. It is built around a modified B+ tree (sometimes called an S+ tree or a B* tree), and was unique at its introduction in its approach to allocation: it allocates blocks flexibly instead of in fixed amounts (Robbins, “Part 1″ 3-4).

Like XFS, ReiserFS does logical journaling instead of physical-block journaling, which means that data integrity is second to performance: in the event of a failure, cached data will be lost. What’s more, ReiserFS has gained some notoriety for actually corrupting data even further when its tree is rebuilt is run after a crash. Theodore Ts’o, who developed the ext2 and ext3 filesystems, warns that all filesystems that do logical journaling are high-risk without high-end hardware and redundant power (2). Furthermore, ReiserFS performs well in speed, but tends to consume more CPU cycles than its competitors, which has been empirically proven in benchmarks. Jeff Mahoney, a developer who maintains ReiserFS code for SuSe says, simply, “ReiserFS v3 is a dead end.”

If data integrity was the only concern for the IT professional, the obvious choice would be ext3, as it provides reasonable performance and data security by default: even its most secure mode doesn’t seem to impact its performance. However, certain situations require filesystems with more robust performance; ext3′s numbers simply won’t do. Luckily, there are a number of excellent benchmarks published that easily illustrate the relative performance benefits of these filesystems. As Ts’o cautions, however, filesystems which perform aggressive caching and logical journaling can be misleading in benchmarks because of the artificial nature of the test. “[Logical journaling] takes much less space, so you can pack many more journal updates into a single disk block. For filesystem benchmarks that try to saturate the filesystem’s write bandwidth, and/or that also have very high levels of metadata updates, XFS and ReiserFS will tend to do much better than does ext3. Fortunately, many real-world workloads don’t have this characteristic, which is why ext3 tends to perform just fine in practice in many applications, despite what would appear to be much worse benchmarks numbers, at least for some benchmarks” (2).

Testing done by Chinner and Higdon for SGI show XFS as having by far the highest throughput and efficiency to rival that of ext3. ReiserFS has the lowest throughput and the lowest efficiency. JFS and the extended filesystems fall somewhere in the middle for throughput and rank well for efficiency (6).

A comprehensive benchmark done in April 2006 by Justin Piszcz using Debian’s testing branch is the clearest look at the performance of these filesystems running under modern software. There are two important factors in measuring pure performance: speed and CPU utilization (efficiency).

In terms of the speed of file operations, Piszcz saw ext3 trailing behind and Reiser4, the experimental new filesystem intended to replace ReiserFS, also delivering an underwhelming performance. For XFS and JFS, the two journaling filesystems with enterprise pedigrees, the latter has slightly more impressive numbers. It is unknown how the benefit of a RAID array would affect these results. For CPU utilization, JFS is the clear winner, consistently using the least amount of resources; XFS was for the most part comparable to ext3 (5-26).

M. Benoit’s exhaustive benchmarks using Bonnie++ and IOZone reveal a number of interesting things with regard to the 2.6 kernel of Linux. He concludes that either JFS or XFS offer the best balance of speed and security: XFS seems to perform slightly faster, but JFS utilizes far fewer CPU cycles than any filesystem tested. Benoit only recommends using ReiserFS if the server will be handling a large number of extremely small files (Benoit 1; Ivers 4).

One other point that Benoit broaches with regard to mission-critical servers is that certain filesystems benefit from SCSI drives more than others. Since SCSI drives tend to be a staple of large datacenters, it’s more than likely that a prospective IT administrator will end up dealing with one. According to Benoit’s benchmarks, JFS and ext3 benefit the least from a SCSI drive as opposed to an EIDE drive; Reiser4 benefits the most, though it remains to be seen how it will perform when it becomes stable (1).

Benoit makes perhaps the most important point of all: “Only a fool would base his/her decision on benchmark results from a single source” (1). Each filesystem has strengths and weaknesses: its appropriateness for a given server’s storage unit has everything to do with what’s being stored, how important it is, and what kind of data center it’s running in. Benchmarks can give a rough idea of where a filesystem sits in the performance hierarchy, and certainly they might help to illustrate existing bugs or compatibility problems that will affect the decision to adopt a given filesystem, but the real test of a filesystem should be done on the hardware in question, and only after a careful analysis of the server’s needs.

It is impossible to accurately compare the performance of a *nix file system against Microsoft’s NTFS: there are too many “X factors” that would skew the data one way or the other. Certainly, it need not be proven that NTFS has the necessary scalability and performance to be placed on very active servers: Microsoft’s own website is a perfect example. However, for occasions which require running a *nix box, it is important to know that there are a number of flexible, stable filesystem that can fit just about any need, and even more are coming: Sun Microsystems has proudly unveiled a new 128-bit filesystem called ZFS, which has ostensible data limits that would be physically impossible to reach; it is available for Sun’s Solaris variant of Unix, and is being ported to work in the userland of other variants like Linux. Whatever the technical requirements of the IT community, the programmers and hackers and developers of the world continue to push the envelope in the realm of free (libre) software.

Works Cited

• Benoit, M. Linux File System Benchmarks. Ed. M Benoit. Oct. 2003. NetNation. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://fsbench.netnation.com>.
• Best, Steve. “JFS overview.” DeveloperWorks. 1 Jan. 2000. IBM. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-jfs.html>.
• Chinner, Dave, and Jeremy Higdon. “Exploring High Bandwidth Filesystems on Large Systems.” SGI Developer Central. July 2006. SGI. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/papers/ols2006/ols-2006-paper.pdf>.
• Gordon, Steve, and Ibrahim Haddad. “IBM’s Journaled Filesystem.” Linux Journal 1 Jan. 2003. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6268>.
• Ivers, Hans. “Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch.” Debian Administration. 21 Apr. 2006. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388>.
• Marcello, Tosatti. “XFS merged in 2.4.” Linux Kernel Mailing List 3 Dec. 2003. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/8/35>.
• “Open Source XFS for Linux.” SGI Developer Central. 1 July 2006. SGI. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/datasheet.pdf>.
• Piszcz, Justin. “Benchmarking Filesystems Part II.” Linux Gazette Jan. 2006. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html>.
• Robbins, Daniel. “Advanced filesystem implementor’s guide, Part 1.” DeveloperWorks. 1 Jun. 2001. IBM. 28 Oct. 2006
  <http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs.html>.
• —. “Advanced filesystem implementor’s guide, Part 9.” DeveloperWorks. 1 Jan. 2002. IBM. 28 Oct. 2006
  <http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs9.html>.
• Shankland, Stephen. “Novell makes file storage software shift.” CNET News. 12 Oct. 2006. CNet Networks. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://news.com.com/Novell+makes+file-storage+software+shift/2100-1016_3-6125509.html>.
• Sharma, Mayank. “Novell will switch from ReiserFS to ext3.” Linux.com. 12 Oct. 2006. Open Source Technology Group. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/2120204>.
• Ts’o, Theodore. “ReiserFS.” LinuxMafia KnowledgeBase. 4 Dec. 2004. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.html>.

Appendix A

Tabular data from Justin Piszcz’s filesystem benchmarks

Appendix B

Graphical data from Justin Piszcz’s filesystem benchmarks