This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion
(excerpts from readings, outlines of issues,
links to resources, etc.). The materials
are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page
is subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
11/2/04
)
Special Double Issue on
"The 21st Century Corporation"
(21-28 Aug. 2000), From concluding
editorial, "The 21st
Century Corporation":
"Innovation
builds profits . . .
In an information
economy, companies
can gain an edge
through new ideas
and products that
increase in value
as more people use
them. . . .
But the emphasis
is on "temporary."
Knowledge-based
products and networks
can quickly disappear
in a burst of Schumpeterian
creative destruction.
So corporations
must innovate rapidly
and continuously."
Peter Senge, from The Fifth
Discipline (1990), pp.
12-13
Postmodernism
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
(1979), pp. 64, 66, 81
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism
and Consumer Society"
(1983), on pastiche (p. 114)
and schizophrenia (pp. 120
ff.)
But what
would happen if one no
longer believed in the
existence of normal language,
of ordinary speech, of
the linguistic norm (the
kind of clarity and communicative
power celebrated by Orwell
in his famous essay,
say)? One could think
of it in this way: perhaps
the immense fragmentation
and privatization of modern
literature—its explosion
into a host of distinct
private styles and mannerisms—foreshadows
deeper and more general
tendencies in social life
as a whole. Supposing
that modern art and modernism—far
from being a kind of specialized
aesthetic curiosity—actually
anticipated social developments
along these lines; supposing
that in the decades since
the emergence of the great
modern styles society
has itself begun to fragment
in this way, each group
coming to speak a curious
private language of its
own, each profession developing
its private code or idiolect,
and finally each individual
coming to be a kind of
linguistic island, separated
from everyone else? But
then in that case, the
very possibility of any
linguistic norm in terms
of which one could ridicule
private languages and
idiosyncratic styles would
vanish, and we would have
nothing but stylistic
diversity and heterogeneity.
That
is the moment at which
pastiche appears and parody
has become impossible.
Pastiche is, like parody,
the imitation of a peculiar
or unique style, the wearing
of a stylistic mask, speech
in a dead language: but
it is a neutral practice
of such mimicry, without
parody's ulterior motive,
without the satirical
impulse, without laughter,
without that still latent
feeling that there exists
something normal compared
to which what is being
imitated is rather comic.
(p. 114)
Renée (pseud.),
Autobiography of a Schizophrenic
Girl, with analytic interpretation
by Marguerite Séchehaye;
translated by Grace Rubin-Rabson
(New York: New American Library,
1970, c1951) — as quoted
in Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism
and Consumer Society,"
p. 120:
I remember
very well the day it happened.
We were staying in the
country and I had gone
for a walk alone as I
did now and then. Suddenly,
as I was passing the school,
I heard a German song;
the children were having
a singing lesson. I stopped
to listen, and at that
instant a strange feeling
came over me, a feeling
hard to analyze but akin
to something I was to
know too well later—a
disturbing sense of unreality.
It seemed to me that I
no longer recognized the
school, it had become
as large as a barracks;
the singing children were
prisoners, compelled to
sing. It was as though
the school and the children's
song were apart from the
rest of the world. At
the same time my eye encountered
a field of wheat whose
limits I could not see.
The yellow vastness, dazzling
in the sun, bound up with
the song of the children
imprisoned in the smooth
stone school-barracks,
filled me with such anxiety
that I broke into sobs.
I ran home to our garden
and began to play "to
make things seem as they
usually were," that is,
to return to reality.
It was the first appearance
of those elements which
were always present in
later sensations of unreality:
illimitable vastness,
brilliant light, and the
gloss and smoothness of
material things.
—cf., Arif Dirlik, "The Postmodernization
of Production and Its Organization: Flexible
Production, Work and Culture," in
his The Postcolonial Aura: Third World
Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), pp. 186-219
The Postindustrial
and Postmodern "New"
(Jameson, pp., 115-16, 117) But then,
a paradigm of historicism: (p. 123)
Katherine Hayles, p. 15
William Paulson on Judith Schlanger,
pp. 157-58, 159
Theory of the Mid-20th-Century
"White Collar" Class
Jürgen Kocka, White
Collar Workers in America, 1890-1940:
A Social-Political History in
International Perspective,
trans. Maura Kealey (London:
SAGE, 1980)
C. Wright Mills, White
Collar: The American Middle
Classes (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1951)
Richard Sobel, White
Collar Working Class: From Structure
to Politics (New York: Praeger,
1989) (on the developing "proletarianization"
of white collars)
Theory
of the "New Class"
Daniel Bell, "The New
Class: A Muddled Concept," Society
(Jan.-Feb. 1979)
Val Burns
"Class Structure and Political
Ideology," Insurgent
Sociologist 14, no.
2 (Summer 1987): 5-46
"The Discovery of the
New Middle Class," Theory
and Society 15, no.
3 (1986): 317-49
Guglielmo Carchedi,
"Class Politics, Class Consciousness,
and the New Middle Class," Insurgent
Sociologist 14, no. 3 (Fall
1987): 111-30
Barbara and John Ehrenreich,
"The Professional-Managerial
Class," Radical America,
Part 1, 11 (March-April 1977):
7-31; Part 2, 11 (May-June 1977):
7-22
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear
of Falling: The Inner Life of
the Middle Class (New York:
HarperCollins, 1989)
Alvin W. Gouldner, The
Future of Intellectuals and
the Rise of the New Class: A
Frame of Reference, Theses,
Conjectures, Arguments, and
an Historical Perspective on
the Role of Intellectuals and
Intelligentsia in the International
Class Contest of the Modern
Era (New York: Seabury,
1979)
Andrew Ross, "Defenders
of the Faith and the New Class,"
in No Respect: Intellectuals
and Popular Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1989), pp.
209-32
Erik Olin Wright
Classes (London: Verso,
1985)
Erik Olin Wright et
al., The Debate on
Classes (London: Verso,
1989)
Theory of "Professionals"
Burton J. Bledstein,
The Culture of Professionalism:
The Middle Class and the Development
of Higher Education in America
(New York: Norton, 1976)
Philip Elliott, The
Sociology of the Professions
(New York: Herdern and Herder,
1972)
Eliot Freidson, Professional
Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization
of Formal Knowledge (Chicago:
Univ. Chicago Press, 1986)
W.J. Reader, Professional
Men: The Rise of the Professional
Classes in Nineteenth-Century
England (New York: Basic,
1966)
Theory of "Intellectuals"
Pierre Bourdieu, "The
Corporation of the Universal:
The Role of Intellectuals in
the Modern World," Telos
81 (1989): 99-110
Philip Elliott, "Intellectuals,
the 'Information Society' and
the Disappearance of the Public
Sphere," in Media, Culture,
and Society: A Critical Reader,
ed. Richard Collins, et al.,
(London: Sage, 1986), pp. 105-15
Seymour M. Lipset,
"American Intellectuals: Their
Politics and Status," in Political
Man: The Social Bases of Politics,
ed. Seymour M. Lipset, pp. 332-71
Philip Rieff, On
Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies,
Case Studies (Garden City,
NY: Anchor /Doubleday, 1969)
Edward W. Said, Representations
of the Intellectual (New
York: Vintage / Random House,
1994)
Philip Schlesinger,
"In Search of the Intellectuals:
Some Comments on Recent Theory,"
in Media, Culture, and Society:
A Critical Reader, ed. Richard
Collins, et al., (London: Sage,
1986), pp. 84-104
The
Academic Intellectual
Thomas Bender, Intellect
and Public Life: Essays on the
Social History of Academic Intellectuals
in the United States (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1993)
Pierre Bourdieu, Homo
Academicus, trans. Peter
Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1988)
Russell Jacoby, The
Last Intellectuals: American
Culture in the Age of Academe
(New York: Noonday / Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1987)
John Guillory
"Literary Critics as Public
Intellectuals: Class Analysis
and the Crisis of the Humanities,"
in Rethinking Class,
ed. Wai Chee Dimock and
Myron T. Gilmore (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1994),
pp. 107-49
"Preprofessionalism: What
Graduate Students Want,"
Profession 1996 (New
York: MLA, 1996), pp. 91-99
(argues
that the current "preprofessionalism"
of literature graduate students
under the gun of the sparse
job market--as attested
by the perceived need to
publish and give papers--is
an extreme form of the "phantasmic"
desires of the literature
profession generally, caught
as it is in the paradox
between its long-term decline
in social centrality and
its imitation/internalization
of mainstream organizational
and productivity norms;
also links the present hyper-politicization
of literary studies to its
social marginality)
Bruce Robbins, Secular
Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism,
Culture (New York: Verso,
1993)
Jeffrey Williams, "The
Romance of the Intellectual
and the Question of Profession,"
in Henry A. Giroux with Patrick
Shannon, eds., Education
and Cultural Studies: Toward
a Performative Practice
(New York: Routledge, 1997),
pp. 49-64
The
Function of the Contemporary University
(very selective list drawn from
the Palinurus bibliography on Contemporary
Reflections on the University
(see also the "Featured Controversies"
section of Palinurus)
Stanley Aronowitz and William
DiFazio, The Jobless
Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma
of Work (Minneapolis: Univ.
of Minnesota Press, 1994) (esp.
Chap. 8, "A Taxonomy of Teacher
Work")
Michael Berube and Cary
Nelson, Higher Education
Under Fire: Politics, Economics,
and the Crisis of the Humanities
(New York: Routledge, 1995)
Resources
on the Dearing Report (UK)
(the 1997 report that initiated
the legislative agenda in Britain
to restructure higher education)
(Alan Liu)
Todd Gitlin, "The
Liberal Arts in an Age of Info-Glut"
(1998) ("When information
piles up higgledy-piggledy—when
information becomes the noise
of our culture—the need
to teach the lessons of the
liberal arts is urgent") (Chronicle
of Higher Education)
John Guillory, Cultural
Capital: The Problem of Literary
Canon Formation (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993)
Jean-François Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1984)
J. Hillis Miller, Black
Holes (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1999)
Martha C. Nussbaum,
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical
Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1997)
Bill
Readings, The University
in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)
Peter F. Drucker, Innovation
and Entrepreneurship (New York,
NY: Harper & Row, 1985)
John Micklethwait and Adrian
Wooldridge, The Witch Doctors:
Making Sense of the Management Game
(New York: Times Books, Random House,
1996)
Robert B. Reich, The
Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves
for 21st-Century Capitalism
(New York: Random House, 1992) [first
pub. 1991; new Afterword in 1992]
Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual
Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations
(New York: Doubleday, 1997)
Michel Vilette,
L'homme qui croyait au management
(Paris: Seuil, 1988)
Restructuring,
Reengineering, and Downsizing
Michael Hammer & James Champy,
Reengineering the Corporation:
A Manifesto for Business Revolution
(New York: Harper, 1993)
Robert M. Tomasko, Downsizing:
Reshaping the Corporation for the
Future, rev. ed. (New York:
American Management Assoc., 1990)
Team Work
Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas
K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams:
Creating the High-Performance Organization
(New York: HarperBusiness, 1994)
[first pub. 1993]
Mike
Parker and Jane Slaughter, Choosing
Sides: Unions and the Team Concept
(Detroit: Labor Notes / South End
Press, 1988)
Diversity
Management
Lee Gardenswartz and Anita
Rowe, Managing Diversity:
A Complete Desk Reference and Planning
Guide (Burr Ridge, Illinois:
Irwin, 1993)
William B. Johnston and Arnold
H. Packer, Workforce 2000:
Work and Workers for the 21st Century,
prepared for the U. S. Department
of Labor (Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hudson Institute, June 1987)
R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr.,
Beyond Race and Gender: Unleashing
the Power of Your Total Work Force
by Managing Diversity (New York:
AMACOM, 1991)
Corporate
Culture
Terrence E. Deal and Allan
A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures:
The Rites and Rituals of Corporate
Life (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1982)
William G. Ouchi, Theory
Z: How American Business Can Meet
the Japanese Challenge (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1981)
Thomas J. [Tom] Peters and
Robert H. Waterman, In Search
of Excellence: Lessons from America's
Best Run Companies (New York:
Harper and Row, 1982)
William Henry Leffingwell,
Scientific Office Management
(Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1917)
William Henry Leffingwell and
Edwin Marshall Robinson, Textbook
of Office Management, 2nd ed.
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943)
Business in the
Fifties
C.
Wright Mills, White Collar:
The American Middle Classes
(New York: 1951; rpt. Galaxy, 1956)
William
H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization
Man (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956)
The
Information Technology "Productivity
Paradox," c. 1979-1995
Thomas K. Landauer, The
Trouble with Computers: Usefulness,
Usability, and Productivity
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995)
Stephen S. Roach, Technology
Imperatives (New York: Morgan
Stanley, 1992)
Paul A. Strassmann, Information
Payoff: The Transformation of Work
in the Electronic Age (New York:
Free Press / Macmillan, 1985)
Information as Symbolism
J. Feldman and J. March,
"Information in Organizations
as Signal and Symbol" (1981)
Andrew J. Flanagin
"Internet Use in the
Contemporary Media Environment,"
Human Communication Research,
27 (2001): 153-81
"Social Pressures on
Organizational Website Adoption,"
Human Communication Research
26 (2000): 618-64
Information Technology "Prophecies"
Michael Dertouzos, What
Will Be: How the New World of Information
Will Change Our Lives (New York:
Harper, 1998)
Bill Gates, The Road
Ahead, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin,
1996)
The
Increase in Hours of Work
Juliet B. Schor, The
Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure (New York:
HarperCollins, 1992)
Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes
Home and Home Becomes Work (New
York: Henry Holt, 1997):
In studying a paradigmatic business
where middle managers and others
increasingly give up home time for
work time, Hochschild observes:
"In a cultural contest between work
and home . . . the workplace is
winning."
Herbert S. Dordick and Georgette
Wang, The Information Society:
A Retrospective View (Newbury
Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993)
=
recommended)