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98 books match the query 'Control' and 5 start with e

cover of Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control

Edited Clean Version

Technology and the Culture of Control

Raiford Guins

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Where is censorship in the age of digital technology?

Not long ago it would have been an absurd idea to purchase a television, CD or MP3 or DVD player, computer software, or game console with the intention of limiting its capabilities. However, as Raiford Guins demonstrates in Edited Clean Version, today’s media technology is marketed and sold for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver.

TVs equipped with V-chips, Internet filters, editing DVD players, clean-version CDs and MP3s, and game consoles with parental control features can block out, monitor, disable, and filter information. As Guins argues in this provocative book, consumers now find themselves in new relationships with their everyday media in which they inscribe their viewing, listening, and playing experiences with self-prescribed and technologically enabled values and morals. Censorial practices are not so much enacted on media by regulatory bodies today as they are in our media technology.According to Guins, these new “control technologies” are designed to embody an ethos of neoliberal governance—through the very media that have been previously presumed to warrant management, legislation, and policing. Repositioned within a discourse of empowerment, security, and choice, the action of regulation, he reveals, has been relocated into the hands of users.
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cover of Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

Gideon Kunda

Temple University Press, 2006

Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew—has been revised to bring it up to date. In Engineering Culture, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated "corporate culture." Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life, excerpts from in-depth interviews and a wide variety of corporate texts to vividly portray managerial attempts to design and impose the culture and the ways in which it is experienced by members of the organization. The company's management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members' minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self. In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company's fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today.
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cover of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century

Escape Routes

Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century

Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos

Pluto Press, 2008

Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.

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cover of Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia

Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia

A. Terry Rambo, Kathleen Gillogly, and Karl L. Hutterrer, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1988

The authors consider the ways in which the high degree of ethnic diversity within the region is related to the nature of tropical Asian environments, on the one hand, and the nature of Southeast Asian political systems and the ways in which they manipulate natural resources, on the other. Rather than focus on defining the phenomenon of ethnicity, this book examines the different social evolutionary contexts in which the phenomenon is manifested.
Companion volume to Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia (Michigan Papers no. 27).
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cover of Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior

Explanation and Power

The Control of Human Behavior

Morse Peckham

University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Explanation and Power was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The meaning of any utterance or any sign is the response to that utterance or sign: this is the fundamental proposition behind Morse Peckham's Explanation and Power. Published in 1979 and now available in paperback for the first time, Explanation and Power grew out of Peckham's efforts, as a scholar of Victorian literature, to understand the nature of Romanticism. His search ultimately led back to—and built upon—the tradition of signs developed by the American Pragmatists. Since, in Peckham's view, meaning is not inherent in word or sign, only in response, human behavior itself must depend upon interaction, which in turn relies upon the stability of verbal and nonverbal signs. In the end, meaning can be stabilized only by explanation, and when explanation fails, by force. Peckham's semiotic account of human behavior, radical in its time, contends with the same issues that animate today's debates in critical theory — how culture is produced, how meaning is arrived at, the relation of knowledge to power and of society to its institutions. Readers across a wide range of disciplines, in the humanities and social sciences, will welcome its reappearance.

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