I remember a moment in college when our professor explained how bureaucrats gain control over dissidents in the organization.
“It’s what Harold Lasswell referred to as ‘selective partial incorporation,'” he said.
That moment came back to me while reading Rachel Toor’s terrific philippic against bad academic writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In class, I could hear the scribble-scribble-scribble around the table. I was always one of the biggest scribblers. You could use my notes to reconstruct any class. But I stopped short here.
Selective partial incorporation? What the . . .
1. Selective: You pick one or more people in the organization to buy off. You;re going to bribe them — or, to use the language of the collective action literature, offer them “selective inducements.”
2. Partial: You don’t engage your targets in all of the important affairs of the organization, just enough to get their cooperation.
3. Incorporation: You bring them inside your tent.
“Oh,” I said in my loud way, “you mean buying ’em off!”
After a brief moment of silence, with 12 sets of eyes darting back and forth from me to the professor, the professor agreed.
“Why, yes, Charles, if that’s the way you want to put it. It’s a little crude, but I guess that’s the point.”
The way I see it, bad academic writing and speech stem from two major sources: the Breakdown Problem and the Fake Razzle-Dazzle Problem. The expression “selective partial incorporation” is a good example of both.
The Breakdown Problem occurs when you’re analyzing all the factors that contribute to something. Take a simple example: To explain the concept of force, you need to understand the concepts of mass and acceleration (f=ma). To understand mass, you need to understand density and volume (m=dv). To understand acceleration, you need to understand velocity and time (a=dv/dt). To understand velocity, which means the rate of change of position, you need to understand the displacement and time (v=Δ x/Δt). On and on we go, defining one simple term with two or more other terms.
When my professor talked about “selective partial incorporation,” he was trying to break down the concept of the bribe and put it in the context of government bureaucracy. Each word contributed something to the idea.
But along the way, the real meaning of the term got obscured. You hear “selective partial incorpioration” and you can’t really picture the process of buying someone off. It’s too abstract for such a flesh-and-blood aspect of politics.
When academic writing gets filled up with this kind of vocabulary, the real meaning of everything can get confused. Even when all the experts understand the arcane language — when all political scientists, for example, understand that ‘selective partial incorporation’ means bribing — you shut out a broader audience.