Artifice

“It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible.” - Baudelaire, C., 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Phaidon Inc Ltd., p. 33

Nature, Information, and Economy

“If nature acts informationally as well as energetically…then might it not be our incurable anthropocentrism that makes us persist in believing that ww are the sole and privileged recipients of whatever meaning naturally available information imparts?

If data processors other than man are to be found in nature, and If these are indeed discovered to be producers and exchangers of meaning as well as of raw data…the codification, abstraction, and diffusion of data will thus turn out to be fundamental expressions of the way that nature, as well as man within it, chooses to economize.”

- Boisot, M.H., 1995. Conclusion. In Information Space: A Framework for Learning in Organizations, Institutions and Culture. Routledge, pp. 430–446., p. 446.

Imagination

“But Imagination is also the ‘most scientific of the faculties’. By this seemingly paradoxical statement Baudelaire meant that the Imagination alone is, by its nature, capable of penetrating beneath the surface of appearances and detecting hidden analogies between different material manifestations, different modes of perception, and different levels of existence. The Imagination, in fact, is that capital faculty of the creative artist whereby he is unable to see all in one synoptic glance, and thus to order his work in such a way that the topical shall co-exist with the eternal, the natural with the supernatural and the moral with the metaphysical.” - Mayne, J., 1964. Editor's Introduction. In Baudelaire, C. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Phaidon Inc Ltd, pp. xi–xvii., p. xiii

Leadership and the role of computational objects

I completed my full doctoral proposal today, submitted it, and will be defending it on June 1, 2012. For those of you who have been reading this blog, I have used it primarily as a means to store quotations from the books and papers I have been reading in the process of preparing the proposal.

Below is the abstract from my proposal. If anyone has any questions about the research, please feel free to contact me directly.

Leadership is a central topic in business and one that organisations invest heavily in. Despite the tremendous influx of computational objects in the workplace and their use as part of the mediating framework through which organisational life is enacted, very little empirical research exists exploring the relationship between leadership practice and computational objects. This represents a significant gap in both practical and theoretical knowledge the present research will contribute toward closing. The proposed exploratory study seeks to enquire, scrutinise, and analyse the phenomena of leadership practice and its associated forms of mediation to both understand and highlight its ramifications. Through an anthropologically-grounded work practice study, it seeks to make a contribution toward a theory of leadership that includes the role of computational objects.