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Of Power, Control, and Hegemony

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The overarching theme for this week's reading dealt with power, and in my understanding control and hegemony as well. One super power now prevails over the rest of the world - the USA, or even more precisely, the US military and the neoliberal dimensions/agendas.

I read Mumby's essay where he talks about a multitude of topics, with organizational power and structure as the compass for all discussions. I cannot say I enjoyed or engaged with all of it, but those that I did for some reason seemed very rhetorical to me. Reflexively, I guess part of this dismissive attitude I developed towards Mumby came from what I have heard about him and his scholarship.

I could relate to and engage more with the Amsden (2008) essay where he uses the examples of shopping malls around the country, and questions the production, reproduction, and transformation of power, control, and perhaps co-optation. Before reading this essay, I knew about the neoliberal agendas and how power is used implicitly to co-opt people/groups in order to propagate the capitalist agendas. But after reading this essay I could not help but feel surprised at the microlevel of power enforcement and the hegemonistic ways of forced inclusion of certain groups into the dominant groups.

I wonder if things are similar in other parts of the world or not, especially in the shopping mall scenarios, where there is an attempted shift from the "private" to the "public" behaviors and control. I look forward to seeing more discussions on this in the class room.
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