The Mentoring Scheme

After the business with the apprentice, the mill made mentoring a formal scheme: every newcomer paired with an experienced mentor. The scheme was thoroughly written. The mentoring period is one year; each month the mentor fills in a mentoring record; at the end the apprentice sits an appraisal, and if he passes, the mentor receives a mentoring allowance. Someone proposed adding an item to the appraisal: “identifies with the mill’s craft tradition.” Someone proposed that when an apprentice stays three full years after his period, the mentor should receive a further “Mentoring Success Bonus.” Someone said only people with ten years’ service could be mentors; the young could not mentor the old.

A year in, some things had happened that the scheme had not foreseen. Another veteran on the floor, who had repaired equipment for more than twenty years, had never got the hang of the new monitoring software. A young man who had been at the mill six months sat beside him at lunch and taught him, step by step. It appeared in no mentoring record. In another pair, the apprentice said halfway through that he wanted a different mentor: he wanted to learn electrical work, and his mentor was a fitter. The scheme had no item for “changing mentors.” In yet another pair, the mentor taught everything except fault diagnosis. During the mentoring period the apprentice was not allowed to learn from the maintenance crew on the side, and his appraisal was in this mentor’s hands. Every time he ran into a fault, he had to come back to him.

What can an institution do about cultivation between people, and what can it not? What should it give, what should it leave unsealed, and where should it stop? The fourth ought: an institution lets cultivation between those inside it happen.

Leave Room, Seal No Road

The ought has two halves: leave room, and seal no channel. And two “nots”: it does not require cultivation to happen, and it does not register “mutual cultivation” as anyone’s accountability.

Why leave it to people among themselves? The institutional layer, as the last essay said, can manage not to colonize but cannot reach the pure kind of cultivation; that kind exists only in relations. How Is Institution Possible says the same thing from the other end: “what co-construction requires is mutual non dubito among subjects; the framework’s non dubito does not achieve co-construction on the members’ behalf.” The framework’s office is to keep open the positions where co-construction can still happen. This ought brings that office to cultivation: the kind between people, an institution cannot make. What it can do is stay out of the way, and keep the way there.

Leaving room. The young man could sit beside the veteran at lunch because the two men’s shifts overlapped at midday, and the floor had a table where everyone ate together. Small things like these are room. How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible names one function of cultivation as preserving sufficient blank space for a person before any rupture, and names one of its institutional conditions as not handing all of a person’s time and attention to a single institutional goal. From that: what an institution can do for cultivation is not to fill every hour and all attention, and to leave places where people can run into one another. How much room, by relational thickness: the mill organizes most of the floor workers’ time, so it must say what is left in it; it organizes nothing of the household downstream’s life, so in that relation this half has little content.

Sealing no channel. This half does not vary with thickness. The mill may not forbid two people to keep company because their dealings are not in the mentoring record; it may not log an apprentice’s wish to change mentors as “refusing his assignment.” Rights Theory says cultivation “preserves the subject’s positions of refusal, interruption, and self-reconstitution”; How Is Institution Possible, setting out the floor no member can be stripped of, lists the same things: a member can raise dissent, can refuse without losing all ground of his position, can exit without the exit being artificially sealed. Put together and applied to cultivation between people: of the channels of refusing, revising, leaving and changing direction, the institution seals not one. (That application is this series’ own undertaking.)

And the two “nots.” The mill does not require cultivation to happen. It can register concrete things for a mentor: do a given operation with the apprentice so many times a month, give feedback on time, explain the principle when asked. These are accountabilities, with source, content and registration. What it cannot register is “produce a cultivated apprentice,” and it cannot write “colleagues cultivate one another” into anyone’s job description. A person being cultivated, avowing his own law, cannot be a result to be compelled; task output and skill are checked separately.

The Time It Ran the Other Way

The scheme imagined one shape: the mentor high and the apprentice low, the mentor giving and the apprentice receiving, for a year. The young man at the lunch table turned it upside down: this time the one who gave was the younger. Teaching someone a piece of software is help; whether it was cultivation is judged separately, by what actually opened up in the veteran in that matter, not by who taught whom. What the case shows first is something else: who can give whom conditions is not settled by seniority.

That is not surprising. People in the same institution do not have to go looking for one another; they are already in it together. And they are not all acting by their own law. So the help and cultivation between them will not follow a chart. It can be lopsided; it can come one occasion at a time: this time one lifts the other a little, next time the other way round, or neither lifts anyone. “The same institution” means a shared entanglement; it does not require being in one place. Two people on different shifts who never meet are in the same institution.

That is where “only ten years’ service and up may mentor; the young cannot mentor the old” goes wrong. It ranks people by seniority and then settles by rank who cultivates whom. The discipline here is not to sort people by identity. Moral Law states it for how institutions match events: “A subject may, in different events, be at different layers — layer-matching is event-level, not permanent.” Mentoring can weigh seniority for some things — safety around the equipment, say. But to fix “who cultivates whom” by seniority is to turn something that happens one occasion at a time into a permanent table of identities.

What the institution can do here is not block the time it runs the other way. The young man needed no mentoring record to certify what he did; and the mill should not treat it as not having happened because it is not in the record, or as someone stepping out of place.

Three Places Where Support Turns into Demand

The mentoring scheme is a form of support, and support can slip, without anyone noticing, into demand. Where the line falls has to be said by first saying what it rules out: providing conditions does not complete a person’s own avowal on his behalf, and does not take ownership of what he becomes as its price. What is ruled out is requisitioning a person’s constitution, not every institutional demand. Concrete conduct can carry accountabilities that stand on their own — turning up on time, following the operating rules — whether or not mentoring counts as support.

Meaning Theory drew three negative boundaries for support: “If a relation seals off the other’s channels of refusal, revision, exit and change of direction; if it converts the conditions it provides into ownership of the other’s first-person constitutive results; or if it declares, on the sole basis of my judgment of success, that the other’s constitution has been completed — then at those positions it is no longer support.” That passage concerns one person supporting another and issues no norms; applying it to arrangements a construct sets up is this series’ own undertaking. A support arrangement that meets one of the three situations below has overstepped the blank that support leaves. That does not mean it has crossed a line. It means it can no longer pass inspection under the name of “support,” and must be checked against the boundary it touches.

First: it seals off a person’s positions of expression, revision, exit or change of direction because he refused or raised dissent. The apprentice who asked to change mentors raised a dissent. How Is Institution Possible puts it among the floors: “A member can raise dissent, and can raise it somewhere.” If he raised it through a channel the mill opened, it may not bring reprisal on him — the sixth essay’s business — and docking his appraisal or ending his contract for it hits that, which no route of review can mend afterward. If he raised it some other way, the penalty is still checked for whether it keeps dissent from being raised, or leaves it nowhere to land. If what he refuses is one particular arrangement within mentoring — not following a certain crew, say — an appraisal mark can be a consequence, checked against the threshold of the second essay. Changing mentors, ending a stretch of mentoring, is checked by its own source. The trouble comes when the request itself is logged as “refusing the mentoring arrangement,” or when he is left no road but staying under this mentor. “Refusal may have consequences, but it may not be the cancellation of the position itself.” What must be kept is “all ground” of his position, which this series reads as the ground on which he is recognized, in this position, as someone able to answer, to refuse and to leave. Changing mentors or ending a mentorship does not cancel that. Meaning Theory gives the test in finer grain: a relation that treats the other’s refusal, restatement or change of direction as grounds for declaring his constitution invalid, or seals his channels on that account, can no longer be described as support at that point.

Second: it turns resources or evaluation into conditions that compel the other to take a direction from outside as his own law. Putting “identifies with the mill’s craft tradition” into the appraisal does exactly that. Whether a person can do the craft can be tested; whether he identifies with it is his own affair. Three things must be kept apart here, as the last essay forecast. Expecting an output is one: of course the mill runs mentoring hoping to turn out people who can do the work. Requiring a specific action by agreement is another — serving two years after the mentoring, say, or repaying part of the training costs — which touches the cost of exit and is checked against the second essay’s threshold, sealing or only consequence. Compelling a person to avow a direction for his life — taking “a man of this mill for life” as his own resolve — is the third. Only the third is ruled out; an expectation of output does not by itself prove that such a replacement has happened.

Third: it locks the supported person into having to go on depending on the giver. The mentor who taught everything but fault diagnosis. Not teaching one thing is not yet this: mentoring has stages, a mentor’s skill has edges, limited help has edges. Meaning Theory’s test is headed: “That the other is able to unfold without revolving around me is the hardest test in this row.” It then fences the test so it is not read too far: the test is not that he must in fact leave; “able” is constitutive independence, not real-world self-sufficiency; it does not require the supporter to provide resources without limit. Limited help, given as needed and stopped when the need is gone, sits perfectly well with the other being free to change direction. No mentor need teach everything he knows to keep clear of this.

This pair reaches the third place because of two other things: during the mentoring period the apprentice may not learn from the maintenance crew, and his appraisal is in the mentor’s hands. What to teach and not teach, plus no learning elsewhere, plus the appraisal in his hands, add up to exactly this: the apprentice has no road that works without passing through this mentor. The question is about that structure, not about what the mentor intended. With only the “not teaching” and neither of the other two, the risk of dependence is worth checking, but it cannot be booked as this.

What can be registered is accountability of the “seal no channel” kind. The scheme can give the post that coordinates mentoring an accountability: when an apprentice asks to change mentors, answer within a week, and give reasons. A company charter in the appendix of How Is Institution Possible writes a close cousin of this for employees: “Do not shut down the channel of being questioned.” (The appendix there is a worked illustration, not part of the argument; it is cited only as testimony pointing the same way.)

“We Are One Family”

In the scheme’s second year the mill put up a banner: “We are one family.” At year’s end it held a team-building event and had every crew write up “Our Story.” Arrangements like these cannot vouch that a “we” has formed. Whether they give people a chance to meet, and whether they force people to identify, are checked separately. An institution can let people meet, speak, refuse and leave; it cannot produce a “we” between two people. The framework’s commitment is one thing, actual mutual recognition between people another, and the first does not achieve the second for them.

This has to be said because institutions easily mix up what they can do with what they cannot. A banner, a team-building day, an “Our Story” leave at most one more chance for people to run into one another. If the mill takes them as proof that a “we” already exists — or goes further and writes “identify with us” into a requirement — it has moved from leaving room to the second of the three places.

Captured

By the scheme’s third year some things had changed shape. One mentor had brought up seven or eight apprentices, and they had closed ranks on the floor: rosters needed his nod, the year-end commendation list needed his recommendation, and anyone not of one mind with him found his work hard going. Mentoring had become dependence. The year-end peer review, meant for colleagues to say what each did well and badly, had become a matter of who stood with whom. Review had become taking sides.

Arrangements left for cultivation between people can also be taken up to amplify what does harm. The economics series says it plainly: “Bad institutions exist”; an institution can be captured by some of its people and used to amplify harmful behavior instead of restraining it. That passage is about a whole institution captured; here it is one arrangement inside an institution, a narrower case. The way out it offers — that a person who recognizes a bad institution leaves the markets it governs — this series does not take, for two reasons. This series takes the construct as its normative object; “recognize it and leave” is an exit for persons, not an ought for constructs, and one person’s being able to leave does not dissolve the construct’s burden of explaining and correcting what it set up. And some of the people inside cannot leave at all: the interior includes those its acts reach who have no way to avoid it.

What to do once an arrangement is captured is more than this ought can answer by itself. Mentoring turned into dependence meets the third of the three places; review turned into side-taking, if it pushes someone out of his position, meets the first and second oughts; how the problems the arrangement has produced are registered, and who must explain them, is the sixth essay’s business. This ought says only this: an arrangement that leaves room is not exempt from questioning because its intent is cultivation.

Leaving and Staying

Someone had proposed that when an apprentice stays three full years after his mentoring, the mentor gets a further award, named the “Mentoring Success Bonus.” The name makes staying the mark of successful mentoring. The series’ answer: cultivation between people does not count the other’s identifying with this institution and staying in it as success; nor does it take his leaving as certification. What is criticized is the name, certifying cultivation by retention. Setting a reward for retention is another matter, checked for its source, the cost of exit, and whether it seals off change of direction. Paid to the mentor, it gives the mentor a stake in the apprentice not leaving; that is looked at under the third place: does it put one more step in the way of changing direction that cannot be climbed?

Meaning Theory places the boundary of support here: “Within the boundary of not infringing the positions of other subjects, the other may use the conditions I provide to go in directions I did not foresee, do not approve, and even no longer need me for.” If the apprentice who wanted electrical work ends up an electrician at another mill, his mentor has not failed. If another apprentice stays at this mill all his life and becomes a fine fitter, his mentor has not failed either. Both pass the test. What fails is something else: rewriting a disagreement as the other’s constitution being invalid, or certifying on his behalf that it is complete.

Meaning Theory speaks of one person supporting another, and its “me” is the supporter; from “no longer revolving around me” to “not staying in this mill” there is still a step. The requirement on the construct drawn from it is this series’ own: the arrangements a construct leaves for cultivation between people count neither staying nor leaving as success. The last essay said the construct’s own help moves toward withdrawing; this one says how the construct keeps from bending the kind of cultivation that happens between people. The two point the same way.

As for the lunch table: the young man and the veteran, the software, no record anywhere. The mill’s share in it was a midday overlap in two shifts and a table everyone could sit at. The fourth ought asks for little more than that those stay.