Skip to main content

How can smart people be so stupid?

By RK
It is very frustrating when you look through your notes on a academic, hi-liter marked "something written by a smart person" paper and you find the word "Really?!!" scrawled next to something.
For some reason, the first half of Mumby's piece annoyed me no end. It didn't seem to go anywhere - seemed like a glorified summary. I concede that he may have partly had that in mind when he set out to prove that organizational processes are fundamentally mediated by power, but "Really??!!!" In addition, it didn't help that he mentioned the penchant of org. comm. scholarship for believing (even if it was in the past) that "organizational behavior is viewed as explicable through mathematical, economic models of decision making, hence making power irrelevant as an explanatory construct".
It is fascinating to me that in a world where people need no proof for any Messiah or Swami's message of the Lord, they still act like they need proof for interactions and processes which seem so obvious to the non-academe.

p.s: This is why I intensely dislike the "scientific" label. I am not saying it does not work, it just does not work for me. Only a "scientist" would ever be self absorbed enough to hypothesize about whether something as ritual and simplistic as power relations exist in any human interaction.

------------------------

On another note, I was watching a piece on the situation in Tibet and the progression of the history of this strategic location in Asia, when the words of the Power Elite were brought to life. They were reflected in the actions of the CIA which funded guerrilla warfare in the region (against the PRC) and conveniently withdrew their support when China emerged as an economic superpower and threatened to terminate trade relations with America if it did not stem its support for the Tibetan cause. Slowly, but surely, I could see the insidious nature of this triangle of power, with the economic, military and the political seeping into and saturating policy action. No matter how loudly or emphatically Michael Stipe sings about Tibet in D.C., we end up dancing to the tunes of the truly powerful.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Purdue's Professional Revolutionary

By RK
In light of the discussion we had during our advisee meeting on Friday about being strategic in our means as critical scholars I was struck by the words of Lenin who emphasizes the role of the intellectual. He says, "The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals." (pg. 74) This idea of the bourgeois socialist intelligentsia as an instrument of raising consciousness and fomenting dissent is an ideal one I am sure but in contemporary times we, the academics, forming a substantial part of the "intellectual elite", occupy a unique position which forces us into ...
6 comments
Read more

Whose means justifies their end?

By
I spend a lot of my time teaching and disciplining children now-a-days and through these experiences, I have found many similarities in the ways that Marx and Engel construct their arguments for communism and against capitalism, most of which are shaped around the concept of deflection. First, let me provide an example from which my conclusions are built, all of which are inducted from daily experiences. I know that my experience is nothing novel or new, especially if anyone reading this has had the pleasure of working with large groups of kids. In a classroom there is supposed to be only one goal, one guider, and one “law maker” and that lovely job title has been bestowed upon me, the teacher. In trying to achieve my one goal to teach multiplication, I tell every student to be quiet and do their work. While not paying attention, I hear several of the students talking. When I look up, I single out the first one that I see talking (lets call him Crandon). I tell Crandon, “If you continu...
7 comments
Read more

Is participation just a rhetoric?

By
Participation and participatory strategies are used in different spaces globally to involve communities and ensure their voices in the discursive space. The culture centered approach foregrounds active participation of community members in the construction of shared meanings and experience (Dutta, 2008). Basu and Dutta (2009) underline the importance of participation of community members in the enunciation of health problems as a step toward achieving meaningful change. My experience with participatory projects involving children and community members also bears testimony to the importance of participation in impacting society; effecting a sustainable social change. But at the same time, this question looms large in my reflexive spaces that "Is it all just a co-optive process as the structural issues have remain untouched?" Basu and Dutta (2009) discuss different approaches of participation, critique the top down participatory campaigns and provide an alternative theorizing o...
2 comments
Read more