Tag: accademia

had I been wrong ?

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, projects

or is it just the world that took a wrong turn?

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… I share the general and underlying gist of your concern: there had been a historically specific background against which the work emerged and consolidated. And it consolidated by elaborating, by deeper collective reflection on the conditions that provided the womb from which it is the off-spring, and with the firm conviction to cut off the umbilical cord, the provider altering, being carrier of the venom, ready to kill his child which he would have preferred to be still-born anyway. What is the answer? Is there only one answer?
One reply is very common, and a kind of standard object of sociological investigation: aim on growth in order to be sufficiently strong in order to stand up and resist – again and again the danger of being poisoned had been revealed – now walking, after the umbilical cord cut-off the problem comes while walking: It is not possible without rest, and even rooting is necessary – the striking leg depends on the supporting leg, and as harder as you one wants to strike, as stronger the supporting leg has to be. Not biologist nor professional player are needed to know: sooner or later the one leg gets in the way of the other, and by the very nature of this process, it is the supporting leg that will gain dominance. – The problem with [the project] is that we forgot that cutting off the cord, still left us on the same poisoned soil on which we now try to walk.

The alternative: aiming on inner strength, remaining a small group, or at least prioritising a healthy strong diet and movement, not per se growing in seize. Call it developing instead of growing, sturdily walking, instead of running with the support of narcotics (of course, these narcotics are called antibiotics, and the like), faster though not sustainable, and less and less able even to survive without the drugs.
Dilemmas, dichotomies, contradictions, hopelessness, challenges, choices, facing bills that need to be paid … understand it as you like, coming statistically to the end of my life, I am wondering, if I have to question my first real child, baptised “Die Organisation”, though brought on the way with the second name “Eine Analyse der modernen Gesellschaft”. Inscribed had been the thesis:
Kurzum: gefordert ist die Erfassung genau diese komplexe Widersprüchlichkeit, in der Organisationen (ent-) stehen und die sie selbst bilden – sowohl in sich als auch in ‘Beeinflussung ihrer Umwelt’. Es geht mit anderen Worten um die Erfassung von Organisationen als vergesellschaftete und zugleich vergesellschaftende Gebilde, die sich durch Strukturiertheit und Prozessualität auszeichnen.**
As so often, we can learn from one of the disciplines dealing with nature. In her book “Chaos Bound. Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science”, Katherine Hayles states on page 221
Consider, for example, how conceptions of gravity have changed over the last three hundred years. Gravity is conceived in the Newto­ nian paradigm very differently from in the general theory of relativity. For Newton, gravity was the result of mutual attraction between masses; for Einstein, it was the result of the curvature of space. One might imagine still other kinds of explanation, such as a Native American belief that objects fall to the earth because the spirit of Mother Earth calls out to kindred spirits in other bodies. But no matter how gravity is conceived, no viable paradigm could predict that when someone steps off a cliff, she will remain spontaneously suspended in mid-air. This possibility is ruled out by the nature of physical reality.

And now it nevertheless seems that another hybrid is trying to emerge. While we do not know about Schroedinger’s cat before the box is opened, while it is thus important to make use of the openness and indeterminacy as we do know that hybrids are so far only found on burial sites …

The [project’s] growth-path reminds me a bit of what is frequently said about the cobbler: that he wears the worst of all shoes. Being scientists we may have to think about it when it comes to the knowledge and ability to deeply reflect as the braingear we use when thinking as the rambler disposes of when walking.
May be this metaphorical way of writing inspires to some thinking, and may be it encourages to return to another crucial element of what [the project] had been about: a really collective exercise of a day growing and going together, instead of bringing individuals together for a common walk for a while ….
So long, courage …
Peter
**
In short: the challenge is to capture precisely this complex contradictoriness in which organisations (en-) stand and which they themselves form – both in themselves and in ‘influencing their environment’. In other words, it is a matter of recording organisations as socialised and at the same time socialising entities which are characterised by structure and process.
(Herrmann, Peter, Die Organisation …: page 6 (machine translation)

How serious(ly stupid) they are

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia
… or: the de-academisation of academia.
The other day I received a mail – one of many of this kind, though this time I have had a closer look as it had been addressed to
Dear Xiaoming,
with
Greetings from Journal of Accounting and Marketing!!
Bit strange – though I get admittedly occasionally mixed up with names of my Chinese colleagues, Xiaoming did not ring a bell at all. Also admittedly I (= Peter) published recently something on accounting, I was a bit surprised as my take on accounting is not necessarily that which suits the mainstream. Anyway, I was reading on. The usual rubbish and spam. Noting about three different URLs is surely not a matter suitable for establishing trust. The fact that the URL fur submissions is a hidden behind the term MARKETING is surely not suggesting that all this is about serious academic stuff. Also their reference to something that I supposedly wrote, read by them with great interest and appreciation …
Well, Mrs. Nancy Lisa, Managing Editor, Journal of Accounting & Marketing … E-mail: accounting@journalinsights.org – you surely deserve more and other than a personal reply, marking your stupidity. You would even deserve more than a blog-post …. (though you may read this also with great interest and appreciation … – One day you may even have to read your-journals …
******
… and still there is a big
As bad as such publishing spammers are, there is another dimension to all this: the de-academisation of academia. Another example, side by side with others mentioned  earlier, we may also look at
about whom The Economist reported a while back. There is an interesting detail that deserves attention:
… one study found that for every dollar spent to comply with government rules, voluntary spending on bureaucracy totalled $2 at public universities and $3 at private ones. Robert Martin of Centre College in Kentucky, a co-author of the study, says the real reason for the growth in spending is that administrators want to hire subordinates, thereby boosting their own authority and often pay, rather than faculty, over whom they have less power. Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s.
Should we be surprised to see that
[o]ne result of all this is growing “resistance, anger, grumpiness, and eventually backlash” to the proliferation of diversity officials.
Well, in this light Nancy is probably just a poor person, not willing and not able to see that she is actually a cogwheel of a machinery that is not much else then a mafia of today’s time. – … scrupulous … stultification!