When asked to serve on the TAMARA Editorial Board, we were honored. To be able to work and theorize with colleagues in such diverse and important fields as organizational science, critical postmodernism, green theory and left economics was a rare treat. We come from the tradition of "critical pedagogy." For us, critical pedagogy stands at the nexus of critical/postmodern/poststructuralist theories, multicultural theories, cultural studies and struggles for social justice and a progressive politics within education. And truly, we expect to learn more from our TAMARA colleagues and submitters than they will from us. And to then be asked to react to the important research presented in "Think Global, Act Local," by de Cieri, Wolfram Cox & Fenwick, was even more of an honor; for these researchers truly "push the envelope" of organizational science-specifically, by examining "critical participation" within the context of "strategic international human resource management" (SIHRM). In this essay, we choose to react to de Cieri, Wolfram Cox & Fenwick by going "old school." For us, critical pedagogy began with el abuleito, intelectual, Compañero Paulo Freire. While he was Brazilian, and we are Chicano and European American, as left educationalists, we feel an enduring political, cultural and educational bond with Freire. Although he died in 1997, his connection to all educational progressives, and all who are interested in advancing struggles for social justice and dignity among all women and men, we must always remember the legacy and importance of his years of living his theory and theorizing his practice.
Understanding the parameters of modernism and the characteristics of postmodernism has been the goal of specialists and thinkers in the modern world. In recent years, the development of these epistemological modern and postmodern parameters and characteristics has attracted the attention of educational philosophers. In this article, an effort is made to analyze the educational ideas of some very influential thinkers such as Lyotard (1979), Frazer(1989) Penely (1989)), Hirsch (1987), Rortri(2002) and Curren (2003)as the foundations of modern and postmodern eras through a descriptive method. To this end, the relevant educational epistemological approach is scrutinized by dint of concepts such as definitions, principles, aims of education, parameters of critical and 'boundary' education, curriculum development and methodologies of modernism as well as postmodernism. The findings of this article elucidated the fact that paying attention to educational pluralism, multicultural conventions, creation of probable rather than absolute and certain knowledge are the outstanding features of postmodern educations. These features can illustrate the claim for fostering active and critical citizenship in the local, national and international arenas. Moreover, the findings of this study show that the rejection of all generalization and homogeneous perceptions and appreciations of social critical discourses are the essential building blocks and important aims of postmodern education. This leads to the practice of democracy based on interdisciplinary fields rather than on separate subjects(in the postmodern era). This aim is obtainable through the interrelated networks of group learning 'at school', and the 'university of life' as a 'small community' in critical education. Such a postmodern curriculum produces rather than consumes knowledge and it is iconoclastic not conformist and structuralism. The other result gained from postmodern education is the application of hermeneutic not dilectic modernist model. Based on the post modern criteria, the system of education must distance itself from the mere utilitarian, and instrumental criteria and embrace the postmodern touchstones of the citizen's critical and democratic attitudes, and mentalities
Many journalists describe the Zapatistas' use of media events to influence international public opinion in favour of their organization and its aim to achieve indigenous land reform as the “first postmodern revolution” (Carrigan 2001, 417). These journalists are not simply using a catch phrase, the Zapatista rebellion can be understood to be a postmodern movement in three different ways of examining the social theory: 1) as a polemic against another theory, 2) as a mode of discourse, 3) and as a guide to action (Simmons 2004). The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) stands as a postmodern polemic against modernism, and globalization. It has asserted itself as an alternative and opposing political force to the Mexican government. The postmodern mode of discourse can explain how the EZLN uses language and new technologies, over guns, to communicate their group's objectives to the repressive Mexican state authorities and to the world at large. However, postmodernism can be a poor guide to action due to its aversion to ideology. The Zapatista rebellion as postmodern revolution is an ongoing struggle and may never achieve its full objectives.
On Friday, April 8, 2005 in Philadelphia, PA at the Standing Conference for Management and Organization Inquiry (SC'MOI), a panel of female sports experts was gathered to answer some interesting and difficult questions regarding females in sports. The panel consisted of the following: Ms. Lynn Tighe, Associate AD/SWA, Villanova University; Ms. Kim Keenan-Kirkpatrick, SWA, Lafayette College; Ms. Dei Lynam, Sports Anchor Reporter, Comcast Sportsnet; Ms. Karen Kopecky, Sports Marketing Manager; Ms. Ryan Heiden, Premium Services Event Manager, Philadelphia Eagles; Ms. Jamie Braunwarth, Compliance Assistant, Atlantic 10 Conference; and Ms. Connie Hurlbut, former Sr. Director of WNBA for Basketball Operations and Patriot League Executive Director. The historical perspective and attitudes of these women varied as did their years of experience and stages of their respective careers. For the purpose of this article the panelists were broken into two groups which were the experienced group (15 or more years in the sport industry) and the up-starts group (5 or less years in the sport industry). Both Ms. Heiden and Ms. Braunwarth were considered up-starts while the remaining panelists were experienced.
This article revisits and seeks to add to some of the author's earlier work to highlight, once again, the manner in which art is able to return our gaze and induce critical reflection. In line with Herbert Marcuse's notion of "The Great Refusal", it is suggested that art has the potential to help us 'see' anew that which is familiar, the everyday, the banal. Drawing upon the work of the surrealist art movement, the paper highlights the manner in which an "estrangement-effect" is created that gives us sufficient distance to reflexively consider the taken-for-granted. The techniques used by the surrealists are shown to have their parallels in the work of some who occupy a 'space' in the field of organisation studies. The author argues the case that the field of organisation studies needs to recognize and protect this space of refusal.
This article is a critical presentation of the discourse on US imperialism, covering the work of both pro- and anti- imperialists. It presents the contrasting theory of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, to who "U.S imperialism" is far from an accurate description of the current from of sovereign power . Despite the popularization of the notion of a new American imperialism our reality is becoming one of a single network of various forms of sovereignty, novel in scope and intensity, not only colonizing territory, but controlling communication, freedom of movement, knowledge and truth.
This article reports the author's experience of working in telesales. Through a call center, the case study company sells home improvements. The article describes the everyday organizational life of the telesales unit. Using this autoethnographic experience, the article analyses the organization of work-time in call centers. In particular, the article probes how commission constitutes a form of piece-wage. This piece-wage assists the manipulation of working hours. It does so by masking their extension. To understand this, the article appliesthe conceptual tools of Marx’sCapital. Marx directs attention to how capitalists organise time in the pursuit of surplus-value. The autoethnographic account explores the application of this to call-center work. Flexible working arrangements and zero-hour contracts extend work-time. A pay framework based around commission and performance-linked piece-wages conceals this.In the case study, there is an absence of technology as productivity-raising measure or means of control. This challenges existing Foucauldian approaches to call-center work. It suggests that traditional forms of capitalist domination-the contract, the wage, time organization- are highly relevant to the call-center context.
Increasingly, organization and communication scholars are paying critical attention to the materiality work/life. In this vein, this paper explores the connections between job segregation, object relations, and the performance of work belongings. In particular, it speaks into the question: how do object relations constitute segregated job belongings? Drawing on data from a year-long, comparative ethnography of barbers and hairstylists, the analysis focuses on barbershop and hair salon mirrors and the complex relations produced by barbers’ avoidance and hairstylists’ engagement of this common object. Specifically, these object relations were found to not only differentiate job belongings, but also materialize erotics (pains and/or pleasures) in the constitution of job segregation. The paper closes with implications of these findings for studies of materiality, especially in terms of how object relations and pleasures summon and segregate working bodies and jobs.
The paper provides an analysis of mechanisms leading to the commodification of emotions. Describing key cultural processes, characteristic of the culture of late capitalism -- psychologization of an individual subject and economization of social spheres of life -- I identify the relation between emotions and the market in each of those processes. I argue that in order to intentionally engage emotions into work and market-oriented activity, they need to be rendered objects of a “specific kind of expert knowledge, characteristic of new “specialists of emotions.” Construction of the knowledge on emotions requires their detachment from an individual subject, their ontologization and commensuration. However, operationalized and designed emotions need to be authentically felt and experienced by an individual, since the affective engagement is expected to generate, directly and indirectly, an economic outcome. Therefore, the detachment of emotions requires complementation with its mirror mechanism - reattachment of emotions into a subject. In this review paper, I depict both mechanisms, using examples from the fields of HR management, marketing and market research.
While professional identities (like all identities) are largely discursively accomplished, the specific contextualized components which constitute “sounding professional” are often poorly understood, or indeed recognized more often in their absence. This presents an interesting challenge to those tasked with learning these ways of talking in securing a job, for example graduate students in a professionally-oriented MA program in sociolinguistics. This paper considers the linguistic process of presenting a professional identity, with particular focus on the resume as a very carefully constructed storyworld in which every linguistic choice (i.e. referring expression) contributes to positionings that construct and convey identity. Just as with any story, through the choices that we make in highlighting one aspect of a job over another “our identities as social beings emerge as we construct our own individual experiences as a way to position ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations” (Schiffrin 1996).
