Reflexivity

“Are you with that RID group?” I was chatting with the hotel staffer who was so proud to have delivered our waitlisted refrigerator. When I answered, “Yeah,” he exclaimed, “You people are all right! You can stay as long as you like!”

Cat (”It’s 5:00 somewhere!”) and I arrived the night before the conference began, which allowed a bit of reconnoiter before the press of nearly 3000 conference attendees reached full peak. This is the largest conference in the organization’s history – which means it is the largest gathering of sign language interpreters ever, anywhere in the world. The conference program includes workshops on linguistics, ethical decision-
making, and interpreting in medical, legal, educational, and social service settings, among others. There are interpreters here from across the United States, Canada, and Colombia (Welcome!), as well as representatives from the National Association of Black Interpreters, the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters, the World Federation of the Deaf, and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD). I have already said hello to interpreters and Deaf colleagues from my training days in Indiana, professional work in Vermont and Massachusetts, the Allies conferences . . . the sense of ‘coming home’ is palpable: a quality that is both poignant and comforting.
From casual conversations to professional presentations, I am re-encountering familiar themes from the past and noticing new permutations. Technology is big Big BIG and there is so much to say about the unfolding practices of using video relay services, including scandal (an FBI investigation into fraudulent billing), and the reduction of face-to-face interaction. One workshop participant in the NAD forum on “Trends and Challenges within the Interpreting Profession,” described it like this:

“With video relay Deaf people have the choice to turn on and turn off an interpreter in an instant . . . We see many young Deaf people who don’t want to be bothered by a relationship with an interpreter, they want to be able to turn us on and turn us off.”

Spoken language interpreters at the European Parliament know all about that! What’s different is that they have always worked through a machine as their main mode and smaller face-to-face type settings are the anomaly (they call it whispering). Meanwhile, what sign language interpreters have going for us is the active involvement of consumers, something which the system of interpretation in the European Parliament is designed to minimize. NAD President Bobbie Beth Scoggins, along with two Board Members, Judith Gilliam and Nancy Bloch, ran an impressive forum which elicited many interesting observations from the hearing and Deaf interpreters present. They set a great stage for the public signing of the “Memorandum of Understanding” between the current Presidents of RID and NAD formalizing the commitment to collaboration and reaffirming the commitment of the two organizations to work together that was initiated in 1994.
As I watched the three Deaf community leaders respond to questions, comments, and suggestions from the audience, I was struck by themes that remain unchanged… and by the steadfast refusal of Bobbie, Nancy, and Judith to be dragged down by the persistence of problems. Instead, they choose to celebrate success and focus on attainable goals for the future. The NIC certification testing, for instance, is the result of a hard-won cooperation from RID with NAD. When I entered the field, RID was so institutionally resistant to Deaf criticism that the NAD went about creating its own separate certification system. Now the NAD is focusing on the increasing professional status and diversification of employment possibilities for well-educated Deaf people in every field imaginable – this requires more highly-skilled and specialized interpretation services, and expands the reality of Deaf people becoming professional, certified interpreters themselves.

Her statement is a play on the famous statement by George Veditz, who claimed, “As long as there are Deaf people on the Earth, there will always be sign language.” The two quotes reveal the tenor of respective eras: Mr Veditz lived in a time of international bans on sign language, miscegenation laws, and forced sterilizations to try and eliminate Deaf populations. I always wonder about the absence of hearing consumers from most of the conversations about sign language interpreting, but I realized today – perhaps more clearly than ever before – that hearing people do not have to be here advocating for the quality of interpretation. “Not needing to be here” is sure evidence of institutional, status-based power. But the absence of the third party in interpreted interaction consistently warps comprehensive understanding of the intercultural communication practice of participating in simultaneous interpretation.
Meanwhile, Ms Scoggins lives in a time when technology makes language difference seem easily surmountable. The attitude that just because a hearing person is auditorily equipped to learn languages, then they simply should, is a manifestation of the privilege of the powerful. Why should minority or immigrant spoken language speakers not receive interpretation when needed?
There were other highlights and lessons of the day. I caught the first hour of Paula Gajewski-Mickelson’s “preliminary preliminary” (smile) report on how interpreter training programs (ITPs) are teaching and training “ethical fitness.” I had lunch with Larry, Mo, and Curly (supposedly from Kentucky), who accused me of wanting it all (I do, I do!) but did not tell me about the knife (I don’t think I really want to know!) Current RID President Cheryl Moose described going to her first RID convention in 1993 in Evansville, IN, where I also contributed my first-time attendance to the grand total of 475. RID gained our 15,000th member recently, a Deaf interpreter from Chicago, Mr. Vanous Washington.
Finally, nothing could have outshone Ms. Lillian Beard – neither in the film footage shown by Bill Moody nor her own irrepressible, one hundred-year-old self on stage. She told us everything we need to know about how to do this job, based on her decades of work as a volunteer until her first paid assignment – as the first interpreter to pull a shift at the historic meeting in 1964 at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana when RID was born.
“I learned a lot,” she said, “by not feeling that I knew it all.” The audience applauded nearly every statement she made, recognizing in her simple diction the truths that motivate us to help each other serve each other and together accomplish what none of us can do alone.

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Dr Linus Nyiwul’s dissertation defense was conducted almost exclusively in the language of math, with very little generic English explanation for the non-resource management layperson. So I cannot write very much about it, except that it was obvious that his faculty members are excited about the potential of this framework Dr Nyiwul has created for government regulators to exploit market mechanisms by leveraging emissions standards against the needs of firms to attract investors.
There are a couple of premises that Dr Nyiwul builds upon, including a perception that investors would prefer to put their money into “green” companies, and evidence that companies who improve their own environmental management systems experience increases in stock value (e.g., Feldman 1996). Dr Nyiwul described a whole lot of complicated stuff that needs to be properly balanced:

• setting a standard,
• needing to monitor to ensure companies are meeting the standard,
• keeping the cost of monitoring low enough to be reasonable (for government) while
• making the threat of monitoring real enough that companies prefer to comply rather than risk being caught and having to pay the penalty.

Somehow all those things get crunched through some equations that calculate

1. “marginal damage” (whatever this means! it apparently refers wholistically to “society”) and
2. monitoring costs (to the government) and
3. costs of compliance (for the firms)

…. now, where it gets real interesting is when the government establishes two emissions standards: a regular standard (the minimum to be deemed “in compliance” and avoid penalties) and an overcompliance standard – which would earn a special certification proving uber-greenness (or something en route to such glorified status). There is pilot project currently underway, the National Environmental Performance Track (NEPT), which has weaknesses but whose results – plugged into Dr Nyiwul’s equations – demonstrates that TWO STANDARDS IS GOOD POLICY! Not to mention that firms which earn the overcompliance certification have a special marketing asset to appeal to investors. (They have to meet the minimum “regular” standard first, then apply and demonstrate accomplishment of the overcompliance standard.)

There was some fancy problem-framing, as Linus described one finding, saying that it came about in one way if you set the problem up this way, and comes about in another way if you set the problem up that way. (I love the fact that subjectivity can be found in math!) There are some issues with firms getting to self-report emissions (apparently without verification, unless the regulator goes to conduct the actual monitoring?) And there was quite a discussion about looking at the problem endogamously: with free entry into and out of the market. And output and size effects really matter (but cannot be reversed) in terms of the direct and indirect effects of enforcement costs. Yea, I don’t really know what those sentences mean in “real” economic terms, but there may be other things in play at times which can lead to inconclusive results.
but…. drumroll please! Dr Linus Nyiwul concludes, and his faculty agree:

The challenges that issue forth from Dr Nyiwul’s work include (in no particular order):

1. identifying which are the important uncertainties (given that anything could be uncertain except for whatever is under direct regulatory monitoring)
2. defining clearly what “overcompliance” means (if “compliance” means paying the right tax, i.e., reducing emissions in order to minimize tax…. does overcompliance move a firm into a “credit” situation?)
3. how to extend the framework from a single firm to an industry
4. identifying how the framework as it is fits within known policy issues and concerns, and
5. extending the frame beyond emissions to look at a lot of other policy issues.

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For her final oral examination for a Ph.D in Resource Economics, Siny Joseph presented an analysis of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for seafood. I echo the words of the external member of her committee, who said,

Dr Siny Joseph’s field is I.O. Economics – a term that I had to Google after the defense! My complete ignorance of the jargon in this field should alert you to the high probability that I have misconstrued or misunderstood major elements of her work. I will do my best to summarize and hope for correcting comments as needed.

Extrapolating from the wikipedia entry and my limited exposure to other disciplines, Industrial Organization explores the economic interaction between two dynamic forces:

1. the strategic behavior of firms (which I believe is the purview of my friends specializing in strategic management) and
2. the structures of markets (statistical analysis like I’ve never seen!)

Given my lowest-score-in-the-cohort competence in all things math, most of the substance of Siny’s analysis and discussion with her Committee Members occurred in a language I cannot even pretend to understand: replete with “k-bars,” and K’s with subscript L’s and H’s, “thetas” and fixed parameter values composing profit maximization formulas… Go grrl go! Her findings, however, were described in comprehensible English – and they are fascinating.

Seventy percent of seafood purchased by consumers in the U.S. is imported; of these imports, 80% comes from less developed countries. COOL (Country of Origin Labeling) is legislation introduced in the 2002 Farm Bill, and implemented with seafood in 2005, with the idea that food quality and food safety are linked with where the food originates. Coincidentally, COOL is being extended to more foods this year with continuing debate over exemptions and on-going criticism of delays, making Dr Joseph’s research findings immediately relevant. Regarding seafood, huge sectors are exempt: restaurants and other food service providers, specifically, and products deemed to be “processed.” In general, then, COOL applies to the seafood you buy in a grocery store or market to cook at home.
It seems the first major task in an I.O. economic analysis is to define the boundary between what is included and what is excluded from the study. Siny focused on the US market, presumably because the boundaries could be readily established. (In a case study on shrimp, she explained the distinction between a “covered” and “uncovered” market, explaining she’d had to go with the former – specifically an undifferentiated market – because the mathematical expressions for the latter were unmanageable. Basically (I think!) this means using idealized equations rather than ones more representative of real life.) Generally, Americans will assume that seafood of domestic origin is of higher quality than seafood of foreign origin, and consumers are most willing to pay the costs of labeling during and immediately after food scares – so that they (we, smile) can make (at least) this basic differentiation.
But (I kept thinking to myself) – labeling after a scare doesn’t do much to protect consumers during the scare and of course has no contribution to risk prevention whatsoever. So why isn’t labeling just done, as a matter of business habit? “Because,” Dr Joseph explained, “firms can masquerade low quality seafood as high quality when consumers don’t have all the information, and that’s where the profit comes from.” She and her committee members debated nuances of the statistical measurements, recommending and justifying choices of particular statistical tools, but did not question Siny’s basic finding that (now, with only three years of info available) the greatest profit comes under what’s called “voluntary COOL” (which does occur with some seafood products), followed by partial implementation of COOL (the status quo), and drops the lowest under “total COOL” – an ideal she recommends because “real consumption is greatest when there is full implementation of COOL.”
The rub for me during the whole presentation is the use of this indicator called WTP: Willingness to Pay. What I’d like to see is a complementary WTP2 (squared) equation: Willingness to Profit. Somehow the whole debate seems framed with WTP2 as an unquestionable given – companies have the inalienable right to maximize profit and consumers have to pay for safety. It just strikes me as wrong; at least out-of-balance. Firms can afford to pay much more than any individual can! Anyway, Siny’s Committee engaged vigorously with her findings: “I like the story you’re trying to tell,” said a professor by speakerphone, wondering about pursuing the angle of diversion, and all of them wondering about policy recommendations based on these findings.
There was a measure of “Total Welfare” that supposedly mixes the best consumer outcome with the best business outcome…. and Dr Joseph did present some evidence that companies would label voluntarily under certain/specific conditions (of known/demonstrated consumer demand?), but for the most part companies are trying to duck this completely. For instance, shrimp traders are required to label unprocessed shrimp, so they would rather do something that qualifies as “processing” in order to avoid labeling. Doesn’t it cost to do that, too? Honest – I get very confused! Why is one type of cost preferable to another? I think someone needs to institute an equation such that consumer WTP cannot exceed 1/2 the square root of the actual incurred cost apportioned over the entire volume in order to somehow link a decrease in the firm’s WTP2 (willingness to profit) with the increase consumers are willing to pay. (Which is probably why I’m not an economist.)

Nonetheless, even if the current data is not totally amenable to a single clear and concise argumentative point, I definitely agree with Siny’s committee member: “I like your plan of attack.” I want to be able to argue convincingly that the government (through legislation) should be on the consumer’s side – not only in the grocery store, but I would also like to be able to confirm the quality of seafood purchased in restaurants.
Keep it up, Dr Siny Joseph!

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