Wednesday 9 June 2010
Apple to Enter the Ad Business
0 comments Labels: advertising, apple, apps, appstore, iPad, Iphone, Steve Jobs
Monday 7 June 2010
Big Bonus = Better Performance?
Saturday 26 December 2009
This Post is About...
Wednesday 9 December 2009
COP15: What do People Say?
COP15 has officially started. Great hope for what is being decided in Copenhagen. In the editorial office of the Lonely Donkey Blog I had a discussion with myself and decided that I had to post something about it. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon! Actually , to be honest, I am not writing anything, only pointing at a couple of interesting links (in my opinion) discussing about the climate conference.
1. Is Copenhagen the Best Place for the UN Climate Change Conference? An article appeared on FastCompany where the author ask himself and his readers if Copenhagen is really the a good place to host the conference. Apparently Denmark is not that green; or maybe it is?
2. What is China saying in Copenhagen? A blog entry taken from Freakonomics Blog written by Stephen Dubner disussing the role of China.
3. The Copenhagen Climate Conference. Green Enough? A nice diary of what is happening at COP15 from The Economist website. Apparently the whole thing is less interesting that we would expect. (thanks to Simone Moriconi for the link)
4. Political ill wind blows a hole in the climate change debate A little piece written by Tim Harford criticizing the approach taken by the world leaders.
Enjoy Responsibly!
PS: a lot of noise is being made about this whole thing of lowering our CO2 emissions. Someone suggests that much cheaper and quick approaches are possible. I had written a post on this interesting approach. You can find it here
0 comments Labels: Climate Change, COP15, Copenhagen, Global Warming
Sunday 6 December 2009
Identity, Discourse and Organizations: Managism
In the last post I had promised to write a piece to make what I had written there a bit more concrete. Here I am! I want to discuss the implications of a certain type of discourse on managers’ identities. The managism discourse can be defined as:
An everyday discourse at the hearth of which is the belief that there is a distinctive managerial expertise based on a body of objective management knowledge which managers should apply to enable them rationally to design, maintain and drive organisational systems in the same way that expert engineers design, maintain and drive machines. (Watson, 2006)
Think about it: almost all management books, MBAs promotional material and similar stuff tend to advance a similar discourse. Let us analyze the possible implications. Watson calls managism an “operating faith”; he says that one function of it is to comfort people and basically give them the sense of security they need in order to cope with the complexities of the profession. Watson tells us how the rhetoric used by this promotional material works as many stories do: “it builds up anxieties in the reader and then implies that these anxieties will be overcome by the purchase of the product”. The product being the book or the MBA program.
We have therefore briefly discussed the implications of the managism Discourse on managers’ identities. Of course, one should also understand that, luckily, there is space left for choice. In fact, as discussed in the last post, there are many contradicting and competing discourses on which we can draw. People are still active agents and therefore are not completely constrained in their actions. As Watson (2006) writes “there is a mixture of choice and constraint”. Different people make sense differently of such texts, depending on their identities, past experiences, etc… Since there are many different Discourses, there is room for choice, but sometimes the space may not be enough we could say. In fact, I think that it may be very difficult to step away from certain Discourses when living in a certain world (e.g.: business world) where they are so dominating. The managism Discourse is probably the strongest one and, I have to admit, that I also tend to be trapped in it when I think of the implications of undertaking a career in business.
0 comments Labels: discourse, identity, management, managism, organizations, Tony Watson
Tuesday 1 December 2009
Identity, Discourse & Organizations
0 comments Labels: discourse, identity, Karl Weick, management, organizations, Tony Watson