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“Organization Theory: Genealogy and Neglected Themes”. STEWART R CLEGG. Overview: The futures of power. The end of history’ Shrinking space: eclipsing time Extending business globally Anticipating resistance? Simulation and identity in the electronic Panopticon
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“Organization Theory: Genealogy and Neglected Themes” STEWART R CLEGG
Overview:The futures of power • The end of history’ • Shrinking space: eclipsing time • Extending business globally • Anticipating resistance? Simulation and identity in the electronic Panopticon • Expanding identities filling space • After 9/11 • From a risk society to a state of insecurity • Elites in a shrinking space and an expanding state of insecurity • Frameworks with which to think about the future of power • The conceptual futures of power • Resistance, political apathy, and transfers of power • The future of legitimacy • Research questions
Shrinking space • The eclipse of time through virtual media. • Once there was a limited and secure set of identities planted in firm hierarchies in the social space, these are now expanding, proliferating, and complicating the nature of the social space such that it becomes simultaneously shrunk by over-crowding and much more difficult to navigate because of increasingly confusing signs. • Social spaces that once were only colonized on the colonizers terms are now counter-colonized in ways that threaten the security of these spaces. The buffering spaces of the social have shrunk.
Simulation of identity from data traces • Size of clothes worn • Habits (smoking) • Arrest records • Lifestyle preferences • Hobbies (whether and what the individual collects) • Religion (affiliation and denomination) • Homeownership • Characteristics of residence (size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, sale price, rent and mortgage payments) • Type of automobile owned • Characteristics of automobile owned (year, make, value, fuel type, number of cylinders, presence of vanity or special membership plates) • Whether the individual responds to direct mail solicitations • Contributions to political, religious, and charitable groups • Membership in book, video, tape, and compact disk clubs • Mail order purchases and type • Product ownership (beeper, contact lenses, electronics, fitness equipment, recreational equipment) • Pet ownership and type • Interests (including gambling, arts, antiques, astrology) • Book preferences • Music preferences • "Socialites" • Social Security Number • Shopping preferences • Health information, including diet type, allergies, arthritis, incontinence/bladder problems, diabetes, hearing loss, prostate problems, and visual impairment, birth defects • Marital status • Financial situation (solvency, creditworthiness, loan amounts, credit cards) • Date of Birth • Sex • Age • Household income • Race and ethnicity • Geography • Physical characteristics, such as height and weight • Household occupants (whether an individual has children) • Telephone number • Utility usage (electric or gas usage, telephone usage, cable or satellite usage, Internet subscription, celluar phone usage) • Magazine subscriptions • Occupation • Level of education • Whether an individual is likely to respond to "money-making opportunities" • Congressional district
What can profiling do? • Companies collect information derived from a number of resources to build comprehensive profiles on individuals in order to sell dossiers on their behaviour. Companies also "enhance" dossiers that they already own by combining or "overlaying" information from other databases.
Drug surveillance http://www.frontlinediagnostics.com.au/
Credit card transactions Phone records (Customer Proprietary Network Information or "CPNI") Credit records Product warranty cards The sale of magazine and catalogue subscriptions Public records Online and offline purchase data Supermarket savings cards White pages Surveys Lottery and contest entries Financial records Property records Census records Motor vehicle data Automatic number information Profiling is the recording and classification of behavioural traces
Genetic testing • Issues • Safety of sampling • Reliability of predictions • Risks of misunderstanding implications • How extra information is handled • Third party interests • Insurance companies • Employers • Requirement of informed consent • Need for genetic counselling • What is ‘good enough’ to offer to patients?
A framework with which to think about the institutional futures of power
Questions for the futures of power • How will organizations preserve and enhance individual freedom and initiative while relentlessly engineering new managerial institutions that strengthen narrow circles of powerful individuals monitoring the organization from the top? How will they combine a structural and a minimalist agenda? • How are organizational leaders going to embody the growing societal and political dimensions of their activity? Put differently, the transformation of leadership from a set of managerial practices and rules to a set of institutional capacities implies that we think about power in organizations as a means to educate, socialize individuals, to create and sustain identities … and to consider the role of elites as governing institutions instead of merely managing organizations.
Research questions • What will be the ways of binding the changing political commitment of individuals to new demands of power and of political communities in organizations that both colonize an increasing amount of their life-world and offer a diminishing sense of security? • What will be the power of moral ‘things’ in the design of political structures and in the production of political leaders for organizations in the future? • What will be the new balance between directive and soft power? • How will organizations act as increasingly political subjects in a world where the changing relations between states and markets increasingly empower non-state actors and disempower individual consumers bewildered by the confusions of alleged choice?
More questions • How can we reconcile the parameters of a Habermasian ideal speech situation as the form of democracy that respects the humanity of people with the functional necessities of divided, specialized labor and centralized administration? • Can the political imagination usher in changes correlative with the new distributed forms of technology that are now available? • The pen and the typewriter gave us bureaucracy; can virtuality give us democracy?
The state of insecurity stretches out ahead of us as far as the mind can envision. It’s organizational implications are not incidental, given existing tendencies to hyper-surveillance
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