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Reading Corner
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This page is designed to honour
our
sources of insight and inspiration.
There are some writers who deserve to be more
widely read, and some essential thinkers who demand to
be taken seriously. Some urgently topical material
is filtering far too slowly into the common
domain, while some vital material from the
past has been unjustly put aside. Many
writers are put in boxes, misunderstood
and
trivialized. |
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Jon
Elster. Alchemies of the Mind - Rationality and the Emotions
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
For
at least two decades, one of Elster's goals has been to undermine and enrich
the simplistic notions of rationality and choice found in economics and
political science, and this is the latest of many books displaying his
unique combination of rigorous analysis and poetic sensitivity, In this
book, he analyses such phenomena as the transformation of one emotion into
another, the guise or disguise of emotion, self-deception, and the complex
systems of motivation and self-esteem. He draws on moral philosophers from
Aristotle to Le Rochefoucauld, and takes many examples from literature
(especially Jane Austen).
Bruno
Latour. Aramis or The Love of Technology.
Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press,
1996.
A
brilliant, original and stylish book, by a deep and thoughtful writer.
Describes and analyses the twists and conflicts of a typical R&D project.
Jacques
Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.
Translated by Eric Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press,
1996.
Freud had a lot to say about the memory of the individual. But what
about the memory of organizations and institutions? (Derrida mischievously
asks awkward questions about the way psychoanalytic institutions construct
a memory of Freud to validate present work. All organizations have myths
about their origins.) And what is the relevance of this to computerized
data storage and the Internet? Derrida's style is wide-ranging, exploratory
and provocative, and I was provoked.
Albert
Borgmann. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A philosophical
inquiry. University of Chicago Press, 1984.
An excellent study of technological change, already a classic, which
makes Heidegger's ideas on technology surprisingly readable. Borgmann introduces
what he calls the device paradigm, in which technological progress increases
the availability of a commodity or service, and at the same time pushes
the actual device or mechanism into the background. Highly recommended.
Kevin
Kelly. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and
the Economic World
UK edition is published by Fourth Estate, London, 1994.
Out of Control is a wide-ranging and
excellently researched compendium of large complex systems. Kelly has found
interesting parallels between a variety of disciplines, from biology to
computer science, and from mathematics to government. Kelly ends with what
he calls The Nine Laws of God - nine principles which he claims to find
in the design or growth of all large complex systems, both "natural" and
"artificial".
Kevin
Kelly. New Rules for the New Economy: 10 ways the network economy is changing
everything.
US edition Viking Penguin. UK edition Fourth Estate, London.
1998.
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A systematic analysis of the strategies
for successful business in the new world. This is the open, distributed,
connected, chaotic world he described in his previous book, Out
of Control.
New Rules for the New Economy is a much
thinner volume than Out of Control. It explores some of the business paradoxes
of the Internet, and turning the Nine Laws of God into a more practical
set of rules-of-thumb for being successful in a networked world. Think
of it as a pattern language for e-business. |

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Two excellent books published at around
the same time, tackling similar issues from quite different perspectives.
Larry
Hirschhorn. Reworking Authority: Leading and Following in the Post-Modern
Organization
MIT Press 1997
Peter
Marris. The Politics of Uncertainty.
Routledge 1996
When I read Peter Marris' latest book, I became very concerned about
organizations that maintain a double boundary. Like a mediaeval castle
with an outer wall and an inner stronghold, the modern corporation has
a "lean and mean" core (the noble family), plus a loose feudal community
of contract workers, fools, freelance consultants and other outsorcerers
(sic), which it will defend only if it feels like it.
Marris offers an analysis of socioeconomic risk, based on a combination
of Marx and Bowlby. I was carried along by his moral indignation, but I
remain unconvinced by his logical argument. Nonetheless, it provides a
very interesting contrast to Larry Hirschhorn's
book.
Nano
McCaughan & Barry Palmer. Systems Thinking for Harassed Managers.
Karnac Books 1994
A short and simple introduction to systems thinking, firmly embedded
in the practice of management and consultancy.
Addison-Wesley kindly sent me three
books - two standard texts on patterns,
and the following one on design.
Terry
Winograd et al. Bringing Design to Software.
ACM Press and Addison-Wesley 1996
Not just a collection of essays about
software design, but an interwoven and integrated text by several leading
software thinkers and practitioners.
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