The use of an uncontrolled vocabulary or natural language as it is sometimes called, has long been the traditional method of assigning a title to a file.
Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any…
Abstract
Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any time during the last four decades, there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Stanford University faculty and doctoral students interested in studying organizations. They have been scattered across the campus, often in small groups within larger schools and departments. They have been based in the Sociology Department and the Organizational Behavior and Strategy areas at the Graduate School of Business. There were always a handful at the Education and Engineering schools, as well as a scattering of individuals doing related work in Psychology, Political Science, and Anthropology. In spite of their numbers, before the Stanford Center for Organizational Research (SCOR) was founded in 1972, many of these faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students felt rather isolated. They had little contact with colleagues across campus who shared their interest in organizations and little collective clout when resources were being distributed.
The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an ethnographic study that used object biography with an archival collection of police surveillance files, the Police…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an ethnographic study that used object biography with an archival collection of police surveillance files, the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files, housed at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center in Portland, Oregon.
Design/methodology/approach
Document analysis, participant observation, semistructured interviews, and object biography were conducted over four years, from 2013 to 2017.
Findings
Using object biography with the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files uncovered numerous personal and public relationships that developed between people and this collection over several decades as well as how these records acquired, constructed, and changed meanings over time and space.
Originality/value
This paper argues that the biography of objects is a useful way for studying the relationships records form, the values people assign to them, and how people and records mutually inform and transform one another in shifting contexts of social lives. Recognizing records as having social histories and applying object biography to them contributes to and grows the greater biography and genealogy of the record and the archive—a genealogy important not only for discovering something about the lives of those who create, encounter, steward, and use records and archives but about our shared human experience.
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Economic ideas are the product of contemplation, but also of our economic lives. In the history of ideas, Gérard Debreu’s shining book of 1959, Theory of Value, represents the…
Abstract
Economic ideas are the product of contemplation, but also of our economic lives. In the history of ideas, Gérard Debreu’s shining book of 1959, Theory of Value, represents the pinnacle of purity in contemplating economic life. Rather than contextualizing this oeuvre through his intellectual life, as is usually done, this essay describes his axiomatic analysis by contextualizing it through his economic life. What do we learn about Debreu’s axioms on consumption when thinking of his own consumption? What do we learn about his theory of value when thinking of his own values? Historiographically, this approach permits the use of a widely neglected source in the history of economics: anecdotes. Epistemologically, blending axioms and anecdotes offers a description of how axioms regulate an economic discourse. Finally, this essay offers a language for the material dimensions of economic life that are so underexposed in Debreu’s own work.
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In their original invitation, editors Kaye Schoonhoven and Frank Dobbin urged the contributors to this volume to be substantive and scholarly in their approach to their essays. I…
Abstract
In their original invitation, editors Kaye Schoonhoven and Frank Dobbin urged the contributors to this volume to be substantive and scholarly in their approach to their essays. I have tried to honor their request by summarizing the results of a programmatic line of scholarly inquiry on a thorny academic problem. It is also a problem of enormous and enduring real-world importance: As the world continues to confront divisive and escalating conflicts over how to share increasingly scarce global resources, we need to have a better understanding of when and why people are willing to cooperate to solve such problems.
This paper offers a conceptual discussion of repetition and joy in the context of information and their relation to the good life.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper offers a conceptual discussion of repetition and joy in the context of information and their relation to the good life.
Design/methodology/approach
Joy is defined as an integrative element of the good life which can be achieved through repetition. This may be surprising, given that our most ready-to-hand associations with “repetition” are negative in tenor rather than positive. Building on the work of repetition theorists Søren Kierkegaard and Gertrude Stein, we can discern three different forms of repetition: that looking backwards (e.g. rereading), that looking forwards (e.g. art-making) and that looking inwards (e.g. chiasmus). Throughout this paper, information-related examples are given and discussed as vignettes that move the conversation forward.
Findings
These examples lead to a nascent theory of why the repetition of information can spark joy and not just tedium. First, its stability and predictability that instill comfort in us. Second, its unifying force that brings us to experience wholeness. Third, its invitation to keep the repetition going through creation, further helping us feel part of the world. And finally, its paradoxicality—as strict repetition is impossible—which requires change, paving the way for satisfying surprises and delights.
Originality/value
Repetition is a ubiquitous and theoretically interesting phenomenon when it comes to information, and though it is implicit in some information science research, it has not yet been theorized directly. Moreover, this paper connects this issue to an emerging “positive” orientation in information studies.
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We examine the emotional lives of the loyal opposition: those who remain steadfast in their duty-oriented, deontological ethical commitment to their workplace organization, but…
Abstract
We examine the emotional lives of the loyal opposition: those who remain steadfast in their duty-oriented, deontological ethical commitment to their workplace organization, but are in conflict with the dominant, utilitarian ethical view emphasizing practicality and revenue. When one is an “outsider” or even an “outcast” due to their deontological ethics, this conflict between personal and organizational ethics can result in a wide variety of emotions ranging from fear and sadness to alienation, and even rarely, to joy. Using qualitative methods, we analyze interview and observational data sets from two distinct populations within different workplace organizations: non-profit human service workers and faculty members who teach ethics in business schools. In both data sets, negative and positive emotions were experienced by participants immersed in a workplace environment characterized by ethical conflict. Though tension between the deontological and utilitarian ethical positions generated powerful emotions among the employee populations, it was not necessarily detrimental to the organization and in fact seemed to have a constructive, steadying influence. Ethical conflict can be constructive, function to make an organization stronger, and contribute positively to organizational success. The likelihood of positive outcomes increases if the emotional work entailed is sufficiently recognized and addressed.
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Mike Zundel, Anders La Cour and Ghita Dragsdahl Lauritzen
George Spencer Brown is best known for his book Laws of Form, which elaborates a primary algebra of distinctions and forms capable of dealing with self-referential equations…
Abstract
George Spencer Brown is best known for his book Laws of Form, which elaborates a primary algebra of distinctions and forms capable of dealing with self-referential equations reflective of paradoxes in logic. The book has received little attention in mathematics, but it has greatly influenced cybernetics, communications, and ecological theories. But Spencer Brown also published poetry and stories, often under different names, and he practiced as a psychotherapist. Our chapter elaborates the utility of Laws of Form relating to organizational paradox before considering Spencer Brown’s other works in relation to his mathematics. Invoking philosophy, psychoanalysis and art, we suggest that these indicate a further distinction that sets all forms against the “nothing”: a wholeness or unity from out of which all distinctions, all words, meaning and life – but also all silence, nonsense and death – emerge in paradoxical opposition. Reading Spencer Brown not through the prism of mathematics, but as an evocative invitation to engage with the fissures that animate art and human life, highlights the paradoxical interplay of organization and violence; and how tragedy, suffering, sympathy and love should be more prominent in organizational research.