Posts filed under 'Pomo Periscope'
Pomo Periscope XVIII: “The French Don’t Care What You Actually Say as Long as You Pronounce It Correctly”
| Nicolai Foss |
This line from My Fair Lady seems to be an accurate summing-up of the emphasis on rhetorics, conversation etc., a branch of pomo, in certain quarters in economic methodology and related fields and disciplines. Or, so Robert Solow argues in a review in the latest issue of the always-interesting Journal of Economic Methodology of Arjo Klamer’s Speaking of Economics; How to Get Into the Conversation (here is a site dedicated to the book, and here is another review).
Essentially, Solow criticizes those who engage in the conversation talk for not adding any substantive insights on the level of meta-theory (whether positive or normative). ”I have real doubts,” he says about the utility of describing the practice of academic economics as a ‘conversation’ or a bunch of simultaneous conversations. . . . My claim is that it does not advance the serious understanding of what academic economists are up to, and its relation to what the economy is up to” (p. 94). He sums up by saying that “In the end, I did not find find the proposed connection between postmodernism and contemporary economics convincing. Maybe theories with little or no application, theories about chaos and complex systems, and theories that leave practical people clueless about the economy (those are all Klamer’s words) have something to do with the architecture of Frank Gehry or the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, but the connection needs work” (p. 95). It seems so.
Add comment 9 May 2009
Pomo Alert: New Management Journal Special Issues
| Peter Klein |
We haven’t raised the pomo periscope for a while, but two recent management journal special issues call for its return. The June 2008 issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management contains a symposium on “Recreating/Recontextualising Entrepreneurship,” which includes such articles as “Accidental Ventures — A Materialist Reading of Opportunity and Entrepreneurial Potential” and “Transduction and Entrepreneurship: A Biophilosophical Image of the Entrepreneur.” Then there’s the new issue of ephemera, with the theme “University, Failed” and articles like “Institutionalizing Critique: A Problem of Critical Management Studies,” “Epistemic Convenience,” “I Wanted to Be an Academic, Not a ‘Creative’: Notes on Universities and the New Capitalism, and “We Are All Workers: A Class Analysis of University Labour Strikes.” Hoo-boy.
1 comment 23 December 2008
Write Like Toni Morrison
| Peter Klein |
Remember the Universal Translator? Peter Wood, in like manner, provides a useful guide to translating regular English prose into the style of Nobel-prizewinning author Toni Morrison, probably the most frequently assigned writer on US college campuses. The basic rules:
- Misuse common phrases
- Embrace inconsistency
- Omit words to create more forceful expression
- Mix up parts of speech
- Chop in self-conscious micro-sentences
He provides some wonderful examples. For instance, this office memo:
Just to remind you, I will be out of the office Tuesday to meet with our supplier, Acme Explosives. Please finish your work on the 2Q budget and let the account rep know that Mr. Coyote’s order will be shipped Thursday.
becomes
The reminding can’t wait the hurry of it. I explain. I know you know of Tuesday, I and Acme Explosives is soon together meet. You can please work, perhaps, the budget’s second quarter, and knowledge the account rep of Mr. Coyote’s Thursday shipment.
Wood also reminds us that Morrison is “the undisputed master of wandering verb tenses” and that she “knows how deftly to insert evocative foreign terms.”
But it is the anachronistic little details that are Morrison’s signature. My favorite occurs late in the book: “Ice-coated starlings clung to branches drooping with snow.” This is the 1690s, two centuries before the eccentric bird lover Eugene Schiffelin introduced starlings to the U.S. by releasing sixty of them in Central Park.
Schiffelin had no idea how the birds would proliferate, crowd out native species, and form enormous squawking, twittering, whistling flocks that seem to fill up whole forests. Starlings seem to propagate as fast as clichés and to descend like clouds of effusive blurbs on overpraised books.
2 comments 22 November 2008
Random Thoughts from the AoM
| Peter Klein |
Back now from the AoM conference in Anaheim. Random thoughts:
1. The Critical Management Studies Division (yes, it really exists) featured, as a keynote speaker, none other than Ward Churchill, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado (fired in 2007 for professional misconduct). His talk: “On the Banality of Managerial Efficiency: The ‘Eichman Question’ Revisited.” Apparently the Late Unpleasantness (1, 2) did not disqualify him from this eminent academic honor. I did not attend the talk but was told he was “impressive.”
BTW, if you’re wondering about this division of the Academy, look no farther than the CMS website:
The Critical Management Studies Division is a forum within the Academy for the expression of views critical of unethical management practices and exploitative social order. Our premise is that structural features of contemporary society, such as the profit imperative, patriarchy, racial inequality, and ecological irresponsibility often turn organizations into instruments of domination and exploitation. Driven by a shared desire to change this situation, we aim in our research, teaching, and practice to develop critical interpretations of management and society and to generate radical alternatives. Our critique seeks to connect the practical shortcomings in management and individual managers to the demands of a socially divisive and ecologically destructive system within which managers work.
2. You know how all stereotypes are based on elements of truth? I noticed that the receptions hosted by groups and organizations dominated by economists (such as the BPS Division) tended to have cash bars, while those dominated by psychologists and sociologists (e.g., anything to do with organizational behavior) tended to have open bars. (more…)
1 comment 14 August 2008
The Urban Toilet
| Peter Klein |
That’s the title of SCA 90.001, offered this semester at New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Professor Harvey Molotch’s syllabus, writes Ben McGrath in the New Yorker, “reads almost like a parody of Allan Bloom’s worst nightmare, bringing the jargon of gender and ethnic studies, city planning, and industrial design to bear on the most euphemized of subjects.” The reading list includes
- Jo-Anne Bichard, Julienne Hanson and Clara Greed, “Please Wash Your Hands.” The Senses and Society 2(3): 385-90.
- Barbara Penner, “A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London.” Journal of Design History 14 (2001): 35-52.
- Mitchell Duneier, “When You Gotta Go.” From Sidewalk.NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999.
- Lee Edelman, “Men’s Room,” in Joel Sanders, ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. Princeton Papers on Architecture Series. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
Apparently Clara Greed, of the World Toilet Organization, is a major player in the field. In class one day Molotch read aloud something by Greed about “the restroom revolution which is going on in the Far East.”
“Does she use the phrase ‘Far East’?” a young woman asked, sounding incredulous. “It’s really Western-centric, obviously.”
“O.K., so Clara stepped into that one, but she’s otherwise good on toilets,” Molotch said.
Thanks to Travis Kavulla for the pointer.
Add comment 2 March 2008
Pomo Periscope XVII: Intellectual Property as Narrative
| Peter Klein |
[T]here remains a dissatisfying lack of a comprehensive explanation for the value of intellectual property protection. This is in part because the economic analysis of law tends to undervalue the humanistic element of intellectual property. This Article aims to fill that void. It offers a new explanation for intellectual property rooted in narrative theory. Whereas utilitarianism and natural rights theories are familiar, there is at least another basis for intellectual property protection. This Article contends that all the U.S. copyright, patent and trademark regimes are structured around and legitimated by central origin myths — stories that glorify and valorize enchanted moments of creation, discovery or identity. As a cultural analysis of law, rather than the more familiar economic theory of law, this Article seeks to explain how these intellectual property regimes work the way they do.
This is from Jessica M. Silbey’s paper, “The Mythical Beginnings of Intellectual Property,” in of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology working-paper series. Postmodernism has had a growing influence in legal theory since at least the critical legal studies (CLS) movement of the 1970s. Proponents of that movement, according to the Legal Information Institute’s dictionary, “believe that logic and structure attributed to the law grow out of the power relationships of the society. The law exists to support the interests of the party or class that forms it and is merely a collection of beliefs and prejudices that legitimize the injustices of society.” (more…)
1 comment 9 December 2007
Pomo Periscope XVI: An Unusually Honest Journal
| Nicolai Foss |
It might be that the most popular category of posts on O&M has the same name as this journal — but, seriously, would you read a journal that is this explicit about its aims, content, readership, etc.? Then again, if you do you might be exposed to nifty little nuggets like this delicately titled piece. Or, you might be able to join a conference where
Researchers, activists and media-artists meet on the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing September 11th-20th 2005.
The conference “Capturing the Moving Minds” gathers a pack of people … artists, economists, researchers, philosophers, activists … who are interested in the new logic of the economy, the new form of war against terrorism and in the new cooperative modes of creation and resistance, together in a space moving in time. Spatially moving bodies and bodies moving in time (through the different time zones) creates an event, a meeting that not really ‘is’ but ‘is going on’.
The nonsense continues in the same vein; read the rest yourself. One thing is certain: This will not be the last time that the Periscope zooms in on Ephemera!
4 comments 29 November 2007
Relevance and Practice
| Steve Phelan |
Peter, thank you for the warm introduction. In addition to 15 years in academia, I also had another life working in strategic planning in major corporations in Australia and undertaking the odd strategy consulting gig. I’ve also had the pleasure of teaching executive courses on four continents.
In all this time, the most common critique I encounter is the lack of relevance of academic courses to the “real world”. I am sure that many readers will agree that the 1980s and 1990s were an exciting time to be a strategy practitioner or researcher. The work of Porter and Barney (among many others) brought a level of rigor to the discipline that promised to revolutionize the practice of strategy.
(more…)
7 comments 19 November 2007
Pomo Periscope XV: Orientalistic Pomo
| Nicolai Foss |
One of most influential modern disciples of pomo was the late Edward Saïd, a follower of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. His famous, highly problematic, but surprisingly widely accepted thesis in Orientalism concerns the (alleged) European construction of the Islamic orient as a something radically different from Europe, a construction that developed from the 18th century on and became an instrument of European colonialism and imperialism vis-a-vis the Orient. However, the construction was just that, a mere construction; “Orientalism” was at best a mirror of Europe and not of the Islamic “Orient.” (Here is an intro to the critique of Saïd, and here is a forthcoming bashing). (more…)
Add comment 13 October 2007
Pomo Periscope XIV: Queer Economics
| Nicolai Foss |
Here. I am speechless.
21 comments 28 September 2007
Pomo Periscope XIII: The Theology of Relativism
| Nicolai Foss |
OK, time to revitalize our successful Pomo Periscope series (seriously, the PP posts are among the most read O&M posts). I am reading Roger Scruton’s recent brilliant A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism at the moment. The book is an extremely articulate expression of true Burkean conservatism, and very far indeed from both neoconservatism and libertarianism. Anyway, these days Scruton seems unable to write anything without lashing out at pomo. Luckily, because what he says is correct and it must be said. (more…)
3 comments 28 August 2007
Incoherence Is Bad For You but Good For Us
| Steven Postrel |
I just finished reading David Hull’s remarkable Science as a Process (1988), and was struck by one of his arguments. One of his claims (not his major thesis) is that while each scientist strives to make his own work coherent and internally consistent, overall progress only occurs because the views of every school of thought and every discipline are somewhat incoherent. (more…)
3 comments 4 August 2007
Pomo Periscope XII: Was Hayek a Pomo?
| Nicolai Foss |
It is well known that some Austro-libertarians have had a love-hate relation with the Left. The late Murray Rothbard quite actively flirted with the rather extreme Left for a substantial period in the 1960s (for an amusing historical account, see this). From the 1980s one manifestation of this perhaps latent Austrian tendency has been a flirtation with post-modernist currents that usually have a strong leaning to the left (for Rothbard’s hilarious take on this, see here). (more…)
2 comments 5 June 2007
Pomo Periscope XI: Clive James on Sartre
| Peter Klein |
Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre, from Slate’s series of excerpts from James’s book Cultural Amnesia.
Skeptics might say that a knack for making duplicity look profound was inherent in Sartre’s style of argument. Students who tackle his creative prose in the novel sequence The Road to Freedom or the play Kean (his most convincing illustration of existentialism as a living philosophy) will find clear moments of narrative, but all clarity evaporates when it comes to the discursive prose of his avowedly philosophical works. But it should be said in fairnesss that even English philosopher Roger Scruton, otherwise a severe critic of Sartre, finds Sartre’s keystone work Being and Nothingness a substantial work; and Jean-François Revel, who took Sartre’s political philosophy apart brick by brick, still admired him as a philosopher who earned his own credentials, without depending on the university system for his prestige. But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre’s first and most famous treatise shows all the signs of his later mummery. Where Sartre got it from is a mystery begging to be explained. It could have had something to do with his prewar period in Berlin, and especially with the influence of his admired Heidegger. In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.
Sartre’s admiration for Communist regimes, even after their atrocities were laid bare, is also emphasized. And there’s this: “After Camus died prematurely in a car crash, Sartre’s gauchiste vision was the style setter of French political thought, founding an orthodoxy that still saturates French intellectual life today and, to a certain extent, continues to set a standard of engagement for intellectual life all over the world.” (HT: Right Reason)
Add comment 3 April 2007
Pomo Periscope X: Foucault Deconstructed
| Peter Klein |
This week’s Times Literary Supplement includes Andrew Scull’s review of a new translation of Foucault’s History of Madness, the book that launched the French philospher’s public career. (HT: A&L Daily.) The first English edition, Scull notes, had the great merit of brevity, if not accuracy.
Madness and Civilization was not just short: it was unhampered by any of the apparatus of modern scholarship. What appeared in 1965 was a truncated text, stripped of several chapters, but also of the thousand and more footnotes that decorated the first French edition. Foucault himself had abbreviated the lengthy volume that constituted his doctoral thesis to produce a small French pocket edition, and it was this version (which contented itself with a small handful of references and a few extra pages from the original text) that appeared in translation. This could be read in a few hours, and if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident. The pleasures of a radical reinterpretation of the place of psychiatry in the modern world (and, by implication, of the whole Enlightenment project to glorify reason) could be absorbed in very little time. Any doubts that might surface about the book’s claims could always be dismissed by gestures towards a French edition far weightier and more solemn — a massive tome that monoglot English readers were highly unlikely, indeed unable, to consult for themselves, even supposing that they could have laid their hands on a copy.
From the extended edition, published now in English for the first time, we learn that Foucault’s primary sources were narrow, outdated, and superficial. (more…)
Add comment 24 March 2007
Pomo Periscope IX: Pomo in the US Campaign Season
| Nicolai Foss |
The first major viral video of the campaign season appears to be this one. Perhaps the most disturbing fact about Hillary is her continued use of the pomo lingo of “getting the conversation started.”
Add comment 20 March 2007
Pomo Periscope VIII: Jean Baudrillard “Dies”
| Nicolai Foss |
Apparently, it happened Tuesday last week, but I didn’t notice until this morning: Pomo-thinker Jean Baudrillard has fallen victim to the Keynesian long run (see this). Baudrillard became famous for his notion of hyper-reality, and for his habit of indicating the (media) manufactured nature of events by an extensive use of quotation marks (the most notorious example being the “Gulf War”). He was the author of sentences such as this one: “Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes” (quoted from this classic piece). And here is an example of a profound contribution to political philosophy: “All of our values are simulated,” he told the New York Times in 2005. “What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom.” The problem now is what to make of media reports of his death. A simulated reality?
1 comment 10 March 2007
Pomo Periscope VII: Are We All Pomos Now?
| Nicolai Foss |
As I noted in the first post in the Pomo Periscope series, pomo is increasingly placing its tentacles within the very citadels of reason, that is, economics. However, so far only rather peripheral areas have been invaded, such as the history of economic thought.
Case in point: Ernesto Screpanti and Stefano Zamagni’s An Outline of the History of Economic Thought (OUP, 2005). (more…)
Add comment 2 January 2007
Pomo Periscope VI: Performativity
| Nicolai Foss |
Teppo Felin at orgtheory.net has an excellent post today on Donald MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets — a book that has received praise from Michel Callon, Karin Knorr-Certina — and Paul Samuelson!
As the title of the book indicates, the book puts our old friend here at O&M — reflexivity (cf. this post) — to work in the context of the interplay between financial markets and financial economics. It sounds as if this will be a great read for the Ferraro-Pfeffer-Suttons of this World. (I haven’t read the book yet myself, so I cannot judge the accuracy of what Teppo says about it). (more…)
Add comment 14 November 2006
Pomo Periscope V: Motivation Theory Under Attack
| Nicolai Foss |
As we know pomo is placing its tentacles virtually everywhere. Having long ago attacked and partially conquered organization studies, pomo is now increasingly visible in the organizational behavior field. Here is an extract from the blurb for a recent book, The Passion of Organizing: (more…)
Add comment 1 November 2006
Pomo Periscope IV: A Rothbard Classic
| Nicolai Foss |
Pomo had no greater enemy than the late Murray Rothbard. Here is a hilarious comment on “the hermeneutical invasion of philosophy and economics,” which was originally published in 1989 in the Review of Austrian Economics (and published a bit later in Danish translation by yours truly in the rather short-lived Danish Austrian economics journal, Praxeologica). (more…)
1 comment 30 October 2006
Pomo Periscope III: From Sex and the City to Spengler
| Nicolai Foss |
Although it lies somewhat outside the scope of the Pomo Periscope (cf. this and this), Steven LaTulippe has an interesting commentary, “Statism, Post-Modernism, and the Death of the Western World,” at LewRockwell.com that simultaneously blasts post-modernism and defends cultural conservatism, while reaching from “Sex and the City” (here is another great blasting of that show) to Oswald Spengler. It is a bit like “Scruton light.” (more…)
Add comment 30 October 2006
Pomo Periscope II: Recommended Reading
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is an old but excellent paper by the great French sociologist Raymond Boudon, “The Freudian-Marxian-Structuralist (FMS) movement in France: variations on a theme by Sherry Turkle,” Revue Tocqueville, vol. II, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 5-24. (Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t seem to exist online, but your library should be capable of getting it for you). The paper is highly recommended, not only for its dissection of the FMS, but also because so much of what says about the FMS fits more contemporary pomo trends perfectly. (more…)
Add comment 18 October 2006
Pomo Periscope I: “Economics and Narrative Form”
| Nicolai Foss |
Here at O&M we try to keep a keen eye on pomo tendencies in economics and management (e.g., here, here and here). Indeed, we do this with such frequency that we, as of this post, will have a regularly occurring feature — The Pomo Periscope.
We kick off by letting the Periscope zoom in on a “Call for Papers on Proposed Panel on Economics and Narrative Form, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, Georgetown, 03/07.” Here is the full call: (more…)
10 comments 17 October 2006
