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The contribution that anthropology can make to the practical adaptation of environmental knowledge and practice to improve organization in western societies is discussed. The study not only focuses on the agency of the colonized but the total economic, social, cultural and environmental context of inscription.

This paper argues that our understandings of ourselves as gendered, as either masculine or feminine, are a power effect of the contemporary discourse of gender difference. The main premise of the paper is that this social construction of gender allows for gender difference to be resisted - and the form of resistance analyzed here is gender-inappropriate dress. Two forms of gender-inappropriate dress - male transvestism and female power dressing - are discussed in the paper and argued to present a particular kind of challenge to our discursively constituted sense of the rigidity and mutual exclusivity of the gender divide. This analysis is used in the conclusion to offer some critical comments regarding the strand of organizational analysis which argues for a 'feminization/re-eroticization' of the workplace. KEY WORDS: gender; discourse; transgression; dress; transvestism; power dressing., TICK ... is going to have the most trouble .... He owns more frocks than his two companions put together. He opens a rather large bag and stuffs in a [...]

This paper explores case material to show the extent to which non-organizational experiences of violence can shape subsequent behavior within organizations. These connections are not commonly considered either in the study of organizational behavior or of managerial practice, because behaviors from other arenas, adaptations, and responses, can be reproduced many years away from the source of anxiety. These behaviors are widespread, patterned, cyclical, and carry an inevitability about them that cannot be modified simply by changing behavior alone. The paper concentrates on examples where the extent of pathological behavior is easily seen, but the processes which surface are common mechanisms of 'ordinary' human behavior and more attenuated experiences of violence within organizations operate similarly. These processes are discussed through the work of object-relations theorists, Julia Kristeva, and recent theorists of masculinity, arguing that bureaucracies seek to deny the emotional dimension of their behavior and decision-making which creates emotion as an abject phenomenon, denied but present, ever potentially resurgent, never addressed as reality. Men are caught up in this web of societal and organizational denial because of their traditional dominance in formal organizations and the historical association of masculinity and rationality, compounded by the dynamics of male psychology. However traditional symbolic associations between men and physical violence introduce a problematic contradiction, and societal, cultural, and organizational arrangements tend to support and facilitate the psychodynamics of denial which deals with this contradiction by producing narcissistic and addictive responses. This is illustrated by a discussion of film, novel, and biographical data. The paper finally argues that men in organizations need to come to terms with the unacceptable in themselves and their experience in order to break this cycle of reproduction of dysfunctional behavior., KEY WORDS: abjection; violence; masculinity; management; addiction; organization. INTRODUCTION Violent behavior can take many forms -- extremely physical, sexual, intimidatory, psychological, intense, infrequent, impulsive, sustained, planned, ritualized, official, encultured, verbal, [...]

A study is conducted on effects of ethnography and its post-modern developments on organizations. Postmodernism is shown to affect ethnography by complicating the processes of description, reference and establishment of authority in ethnographic texts. Postmodernism provides a 'literary' instead of 'scientific' models of texts wherein descriptions are active constructions instead of neutral recordings. Ostensive reference is also replaced by evocation. The development of deconstructive ethnography based on the theories of Jacques Derrida is presented. Deconstructive ethnography uses theory to give new life to subordinate terms to problematize the dominant understanding and re-create awareness in coventional conciousness. Deconstruction also demystifies social and organizational interactions without using theoretical or moral standards.

In this paper we introduce Bergson's philosophy of "action, process and movement" and its relevance for social science and the study of organizational culture. Bergson's philosophy of change argues against the spatialisation of thought in which phenomena are broken down into discrete components to be numbered, sequenced and manipulated: rather he argues for a view of time as qualitative; intuition as situated within experience rather than about it; the importance of the body in social experience and the importance of morality and religion in social life - in short and embodied conception of culture. Bergson's culture is socialised time actualised in experienced duration or durée - culture is always in motion, and does not need culture clash to drive change, but cultural expression and formulations are not, which runs counter to functionalist and psychoanalytic views of culture. Creativity, or the élan vital , is the human impulse to organise, but to improvise rather than to locate, divide and control. Culture grounded in experienced time and driven by the élan vital is in ceaseless motion - it is duration because its is en-dured as a multiplicity rather than as a unity. Where heroic leaders in treatments of organizational culture invite us the change our place in the world, in Bergson's thought they invite us to change out time - our qualitative experience of duration. We examine these arguments through a review of Bergson's work, concluding that Bergson's resonates with postmodern approaches to culture which shift our attention from signification to implication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the textuality of organizations. Concepts of social science as a text, social action as a text, even organizations as texts, and research accounts as fictions, narratives or forms of storytelling are no longer unfamiliar. The textual nature of social science is now increasingly recognized and used as a means of critiquing those ploys and ruses which go into creating and maintaining the power of normal science. Across the complete terrain of the academic disciplines, the concept of their textual nature is being used to unsettle foundations that contemporary disciplinary practice rests upon, and by which it is comforted. Organizations are also changing at an arguably unprecedented rate to prove fruitful ground for textual analysis. Organization studies as a field is positioned at the interface between theory and practice. Texts, verbal and written, are an important form of social action, and are often attempts at social and organizational intervention. Organization studies, even in its most positivistic variants, itself often rests on an unacknowledged use of textual material. A theoretical reason for extending textual analysis in organization studies is that foundations of positivistic social science, still dominant in much of this area of endeavor, have been illuminatingly and devastatingly critiqued in philosophy and other areas of the social sciences.

Problems of perspective, proximity and distance, objectivity, and self-interest perpetuate tensions in the social sciences. In positivistic research, still dominant in the organizational sciences, attention has been concentrated on the eradication of bias in the researcher. The effects of this approach have extended into areas where it is implicit and remains unrecognized, particularly in the tradition of "reflexive sociology." The focal problem here is one of self-knowing and declaration. Focusing on distanciation, the problem of stepping outside one's data, is an alternative perspective. Esthetic approaches to this issue demonstrate that the processes of fictionalization are endemic to the interpretation of data and the production of research accounts. Language is the central element in creating accounts which are constitutive of the world rather than revelatory of its essence, and hence are partial and persuasive versions of reality. This is discussed with reference to the work of organizational and occupational ethnographers. It is argued that research accounts are inescapably an order of fiction, representations of a world which is unknowable in any "objective" sense. However, the process and products of social science have a dehumanizing effect on social research in failing to recognize this. This cannot be countered by humanist strategies (e.g. self-declaration, confessional, etc.) which preserve misconceptions of authenticity but by exploration of what Lyotard calls the inhuman, those subliminal aspects of experience which are at or beyond the boundaries of articulation. This needs to be done by a greater incorporation of other forms of investigation of the human condition-literature, poetry, art, music-which habitually work at or on these boundaries into the form and processes of "normal" social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]