Reading Corner 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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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).

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.

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.

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.

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".

US edition Viking Penguin. UK edition Fourth Estate, London. 1998.
 

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.

Two excellent books published at around the same time, tackling similar issues from quite different perspectives.

MIT Press 1997

Hirschhorn is an expert on the unconscious culture of organizations, and is one of the leading lights of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. His book explores the psychological and interpersonal demands of the 'post-modern' organization, and argues for a social policy of forgiveness and 'second chances'.

See also Marris96, tackling similar issues from a quite different perspective.

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.

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.

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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