Gordon's "The Work of Corporate Culture"

Gordon's article discusses culture, race, and diversity management. In short, it takes the following form.

1. Diversity management has the power to de-emphasize racial and cultural discrimination. Because we will all be so busy working towards economic goals, we won't be able to worry about cultural differences. Hey, wait a minute...should our society really be focused so heavily on economic goals?


2. Forget that idea because diversity management takes an ahistorical approach to diversity. Many current issues of diversity are rooted in tenets that are central to diversity management.
   • For instance, utilizing the talents of a diverse culture is a main tenet of diversity management. Hmmm...economically poor cultures are really good at working for almost nothing...does diversity management condone this type of synergy?


3. Thus, Gordon shows us that diversity management isn't all it's cracked up to be. His argument is more nuanced and robust than this, but the idea should be clear. He makes sense; any time the word management is used with the social, there may be a power issue.
   • Nix that; he quotes Foucault; there has to be a power issue. :)


4. He ends by saying that diversity management is happening in academic institutions as well as corporate society.
   • Since he just demonstrated the problems with diversity management, it appears he's providing a warning to academia

This article seems like a reiteration of old ideas. Although the ideas presented seem important, what is being added to the current discussion that Avery is engaging? Repetition is important for the creation of social knowledge, but this article lacked a "so what?" factor for me.

Slaton's engineering article

Slaton's article presents two different stories of engineering and minority education. In the first section, a well meaning university president attempts to diversify an engineering program and create a strong school by capitalizing on skills and abilities of minorities. Unfortunately, his conservative approach leads to less-than-desirable results.

In this case, by resisting the introduction of remedial level classes in higher education, he effectively limited the potential of the school by not including students that had not received comparable training to non-minorities. Unfortunately, in many cases, the reasons for the lack of education prior to higher education is related directly or indirectly to events and environments that are intricately related with the minority culture.

In the second case, Slaton describes a story of a minority centered University flourishing because their main funding sources (CARR and NASA) allow enough time for the school to create an infrastructure that supports the research that these funding institutions desire. Slaton depicts this school as fundamentally different than the first school in her article. In this instance, the school makes little attempt to diversify, but time and resources are given to students, faculty, and staff in order to produce results that are valuable for the community.

I'm forced to wonder why this is a story that is intricately tied to racial diversity. The cases described could have occurred regardless of race. I believe the more important point may be that rationalistic control over education is not the one and only way to run a school. The cultures that created minority disadvantage in both cases are not specific to minority; they are specific to disadvantaged cultures. That is, power runs through discourse in any human environment; it may be more important to look for those that are suffering rather than those who are popularly seen as different.

Bowker/Starr on ICD

Sorting Things Out contains an extensive section describing the classification of ICD. The factors that way heavily on its use and adoption are discussed through historical analysis. We're shown that the ICD is altered when its pragmatic to do so. That is, when recognition of a physical manifestation is useful to recognize, it is added to the ICD.

I particularly enjoyed the analysis of aging through the analysis of disease within the ICD. In summary, Bowker/Starr argue that the ICD depicts the human life as full of activity during the first moments of life, followed by a fairly uneventful and timeless life, and then death. Their point is that if we look at the ICD, we are given no clue that age effects health; the ICD is more concerned with acute description of disease. The reasoning they provide is that the ICD is used for identification of acute symptoms, not description of human health.

Bowker/Starr also discuss the space within the ICD: a characteristic they argue is present in any classification system. The discussion of the vermilion border of the lip describes the uncertainty of the ICD in describe the body, and some of its coping mechanisms. Frankly, this is an ingenious analysis. The space within a classification is difficult to describe because it is the absence of presence. Bowker and Starr do a fantastic job of providing an example.

In my previous post, I indicated that the book was easier reading than Memory Practices in the Sciences and it has turned out to be true for the rest of the book. The cases are interesting, and the analysis, although clever, is rarely difficult to understand.

Bowker/Starr - Chapter One

In this chapter, the methods used by Bowker/Starr for analysis of existing infrastructure are laid out. The cases they provide make a strong case for the salience of the upcoming chapters. I have one reservation so far: They're analysis seems to way heavily on cognition (they claim pragmatism and cognition) and perception of reality and how this cognitive analysis leads to classification and standardization.

IMHO, perception is based largely on the pre-classification of things. The vocabulary that currently exists will lead toward what will be noticed and what will not be noticed. There case for the space in between classification where things 'don't exist,' seem to provide some grounding for this theory. Are the spaces in classification created by a lack of vocabulary? Is the classification that is created derived from existing vocabulary or bootstrapped from existing vocabulary? How do social lexicons and pidgin languages effect these classifications? I'll be looking for these questions to be addressed in the future.

On a side not, the asides continue to be amusing. The 'irate' passenger and the angry harley owners provide breaks in the text that keep the reading light and alluring. These are possibly good literary tools to think about for personal writing in the future.

Bowker/Starr - Introduction

My first experience with a Bowker book was Memory Practices in the Sciences, which was a rather painful experience. Although informative, the book was difficult to read, and not always interesting. The introduction to Sorting Things Out, is very different: It was fun to read (especially the X-Files intro) and I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

Maybe a reason that it is more interesting is that the subject matter is largely about historical medical classification. For me at least, death and disease is morbidly more interesting than the documentary practices of geologists that was featured in Memory Practices. Perhaps another his co-author, Starr, adds a writing style that is more approachable. I'm looking forward to the rest of this book.

As a side note, I'm kind of hoping that there is a little more discussion about the historical death of the classification 'death by wolf.'

Retailers, Employers, and Consumers

Chapter five: The chapter where the video store becomes "Cheers."

Greenberg's book is tinged with nostalgia. His overview of the community that is built around an item like the video cassette is enlightening and provides a new way of examining historical artifacts, but the chapter is also heavily dependent on accounts of people that provide nostalgic accounts. I'm a little wary of the accounts: how could things have been so wonderful. When I think back on high school, I tend to forget a lot of the frustrating aspects of it, and I feel like this story might be missing another side (Again, perhaps related to the porn industry - see previous posts).

U-Haul

U-Haul was selling video tapes. The chapters for this week just keep getting better and better. I wonder if the next chapter reveals that the porn industry is connected to U-Haul distributors. :)

Porn and Video

Rather than take action through the legal system, however, the film’s financiers (who were connected with organized crime) simply had their “associates” visit theaters where bootleg copies of the movie were playing, offering theater owners the chance to continue showing the film for half of the box office receipts. As Eric Schlosser notes, “Few theater owners refused this offer.” [pg. 72]

If only the rest of the retail industry worked as dynamically as the porn industry. These are people who know how to push their product (not that they really need much help) and capitalize as much as possible.

Hobbyist Culture

"This seems to be the fate of most enthusiast cultures – they carry within themselves the seeds of their own irrelevance to mainstream culture." [pg. 53]

That's an interesting idea. The groups that pride themselves in their difference, by virtue of being drawn together in this manner, also destruct themselves by their difference. They either become too esoteric, out-dated, or they lose interest in the tie that binds once other groups pick up on the thing that made them special.

Beta Tapes

[pg. 38] $15 - $30 for a 1 hour blank beta tape? Brutal.