Mugged
gordonr
success nourishes hope
Frosted web (by gordonr)
Frosty (by gordonr)
1945 … office of tomorrow! (by x-ray delta one) via Timo Elliot http://timoelliott.com/blog/2011/11/the-office-of-tomorrow-from-1945.html
Fall
organization: thing-like something
The word “organization” appears to be an abstraction in its own right. If we use it in the sense of “the organization of festivities” then the word means the multitude of actions and efforts that are necessary to have the party be a success, before, during, and after the actual party. If we use it in the sens of “the organization has been in existence for 5 years” then we are referring to a group of people who have been something together in some context for the last five years. Or, are we in the first instance referring to something which is not part of the party, and in the second instance to a thing-like something which in some fashion can be identified as existing outside of ourselves and our own behaviour?
Posing the question in this different manner defines the limits of organization as shorthand for a dynamic complex of people, interactions and behaviours on one side and organization as homogenous entity on the other; one that can grow or sell or produce, separate from the dynamics that to us seem necessary to make that possible. To people who reify the organization, it is a given, somewhere they go to and return from. In its non-reified form, the organization is a process that people participate in, where you accomplish something by your own behaviour, and from which you receive something in return as a result of the many different types of behaviours of others.
To people whom reify an organization, it is a thing that will exist for the long term, offering its stable security through its structure, its buildings and its expreessions in the shape of its products. When non-reified, the organization seems more like a group of people having access to an assortment of means used by each for their own and each other’s ends, where daily changing interactions take place, where ambiguity becomes more visible and each day is just as different and unpredictable as all the others. People whom reify the organization refer to it as an immutable thing. In looking at it from the non-reified perspective it represents somewhere you work hard to achieve some stability among all that movement. To those whom reify, much behaviour is taboo, other behaviour required, and even more behaviour is absolutely essential in achieving one’s own ends. Someone who has not reified the organization will avoid certain behaviour out of empathy, but will be perfectly capable of transgressing against existing imperatives by way of an intervention.
How people get lost in organizations, Martijn van Oorscheot & Michiel Hogerhuis, 2006, Eburon
What I call Platonicity, after the ideas (and personality) of the philosopher Plato, is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined “forms,” whether objects, like triangles or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what “makes sense”), even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures.
Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do. But this does not happen everywhere. I am not saying that Platonic forms don’t exist. Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications. The difficulty is that a) you do not know beforehand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.
The Platonic Fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mindset enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide.
Nokia E-72
Nokia N-95
Nokia 5190
When the city operates as an open system – incorporating principles of porosity of territory, narrative indeterminacy and incomplete form – it becomes democratic not in a legal sense, but as physical experience. In the past, thinking about democracy focused on issues of formal governance, today it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation. Participation is an issue that has everything to do with the physical city and its design.
Tomas Saraceno, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009. via http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/217
When social scientists add the adjective ‘social’ to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that , later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with the use of the word as long as it designates what is already assembled together, without making any superfluous assumption about the nature of what is assembled. Problems arise, however, when ‘social’ beings to mean a type of material, as if the adjective was roughly comparable to other terms like ‘wooden’, ‘steely’, ‘biological’, ‘economical’, ‘mental’, ‘organizational’, or ‘linguistic’. At that point, the meaning of the word breaks down since it now designates two entirely different things: first a movement during a process of assembling; and second, a specific type of ingredient that is supposed to differ from other materials.
What I want to do in the present work is to show why the social cannot be construed as a kind of material or domain and to dispute the project of providing a ‘social explanation’ of some other state of affairs. Although this earlier project has been productive and probably necessary in the past, it has largely stopped being so thanks in part to the success of the social sciences. At the present stage of development, it’s no longer possible to inspect the precise ingredients that are entering into the composition of the social domain. What I want to do is to redefine the notion of social by going back to its original meaning and making it able to trace connections again.
The professionalized cognitive and occupational styles that were refined in the first half of this century, based in Newtonian mechanistic physics, are not readily adapted to contemporary conceptions of interacting open systems and to contemporary concerns with equity. A growing sensitivity to the waves of repercussions that ripple through such systemic networks and to the value consequences of those repercussions has generated the recent reexamination of received values and the recent search for national goals. There seems to be a growing realization that a weak strut in the professional’s support system lies at the juncture where goal-formulation, problem-definition and equity issues meet. We should like to address these matters in turn.
haggis
