Imagining Organizations

Performative Imagery in Business and Beyond

Paolo Quattrone, Nigel Thrift, Chris Mclean, Francois-Regis Puyou, Paolo Quattrone, Nigel Thrift, Chris Mclean, Francois-Regis Puyou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136664991
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Organizations rely extensively upon a myriad of images and pictorial representations such as budgets, schedules, reports, graphs, and organizational charts to name but a few. Visual images play an integral role in the process of organizing. This volume argues that images in organizations are 'performative', meaning that they can be seen as performances, rather than mere representations, that play a significant role in all kind of organizational activities.

Imagining Organizations opens up new ways of imagining business through an interdisciplinary approach that captures the role of visualizations and their performances. Contributions to this volume challenge this orthodox view to explore how images in business, organizing and organizations are viewed in a static and rigid form. Imagining Business addresses the question of how we visualize organizations and their activities as an important aspect of managerial work, focusing on practices and performances, organizing and ordering, and media and technologies. Moreover, it aims to provide a focal point for the growing collection of studies that explore how various business artifacts draw on the power of the visual to enable various forms of organizing and organizations in diverse contexts.

Part I

Making Things and Practices (In)visible

1 Transparency or the New Invisibility

The Business of Making Connections

Barbara Maria Stafford

1.

Money is talking

to itself again

in this season’s

bondage

and safari look,

its close out camouflage.

Hit the refresh button

And this is what you get,

Money pretending That its hands are tied.

2.

On a billboard by the 880,

Money admonishes

“Shut up and play.”¹

“In those days I would wrap myself up in someone else’s personality, a set of clothes that I not only tried on but wore, as if I had none of my own—I did but they didn’t yet fit; I was lost in the folds or I was too bound, or the colors weren’t right: too faded, mismatched—I preferred someone else’s” (Treat, 2009, p. 116).

The classicist Richard Seaford recently made the fascinating argument that the sixth-century Greek polis was the first society in history (with the possible exception of China) to be pervaded by money. He interprets this innovation as having had the unsettling repercussion of generating a sense of limitlessness responsible for suffusing and eventually undoing the city-states. Further, he identifies the revolutionary aspect of the notion as being that universal power resides not in the individual but in some elusive circulating material substance. Significantly, in the wake of this invention, a novel moral economy came to underlie both the abstract system of Ionian philosophy (that is, the possessive idea of the cosmos as a Zeus-ruled dominion) as well as the birth of tragedy (with its solitary heroes alienated from their closest kin and from the predatory gods, whose playthings they become.)²

Curiously, however, he does not link this extreme isolation of the individual, flailing away in a tyrannical and arbitrary monetary society, to the reverse of the same coin. I mean the fact that bottomless insatiability, personal greed, and the launching of succeeding epochs of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” was predicated precisely on a supposedly connective system of business exchange. Today, the atomic unit of consumption resides not in metallurgy but in the physics of intangible data. Digital information supposedly allows you to fulfill all your needs, deregulating and disintegrating the integrated subject through text snippets and other fractioning rituals. Involuntary distribution and redistribution within a vast information technology (IT) system is not the same thing as voluntary performance.

But, ironically, Seaford’s stark vision of the destruction of internal depth by the external forces of accumulation and the rise of indeterminacy no longer derives merely from devaluing speculation. I suggest, instead, that the contemporary resistance to any unitary or integrative category is paradoxically the product of an age of bundling connectivity. Our era is obsessed with figuring out and secretly managing the isolated consumer’s relationship to clicks. This simulation of the partial user—partial because it omits imagination, kinesics (body language), paralanguage (pitch, tone, and wordless noises), and other ambiguous nonverbal cues such as the emotional power of touch—coexists alongside the exaggerated rhetoric about the Internet as an open, not opaque, communicative tie that always binds. Our culture is characterized, then, not just by its hostility to closure but by the questionable myth that countless fragmentary selves are transcendently gathered together in some hypermediated communal space that they democratically control.

Apparently, this libertarian belief in the individual as free agent continues to reign despite the sea change in the way consumers currently encounter the Web. Machine intelligence has moved from the grand vision of anthropomorphic automata and carnivalesque devices to innumerable “Turks” concealed inside the online Chess-Player’s mysterious cabinet (Riley, 2009, pp. 368–369). Public debates and distraught concern over online privacy have spiraled as data companies proliferate.

Telemarketers have always known a great deal that we would rather not have them know about how we conduct our offline lives: income, credit score, debt, home ownership, favorite charities. But the ongoing and exponential explosion of the browser universe—with its free-floating digital bits begging to be coupled—has reached terrifying proportions. Some of these data-amassing companies (such as Acxiom and Datran Media) are beginning to closely connect buyer’s offline with their online interests. As a New York Times front-page story recently proclaimed business is literally getting “deeply personal.”³

Despite the obfuscation, a strong visual presence is central to conducting business on this occluded and darksome NET and not just because of the prevalence of advertising. Its true clout derives from a specious business ethics bandying about the fetching concept of “transparency” while muddying the Web’s oceanic depths. Not a day goes by without further revelations concerning behind-the-scene market manipulations, Ponzi schemes, the liquidation of securities, various hedge-fund ruses, global intrigue, or just one more civil fraud case. Fiction apparently trumps plausibility every time.

For the moment, I want to single out the pivotal image of connectivity from this treacherous swamp. The electronic technology enabling invisible “behavioral tracking”—in which marketing companies lurk and log activities such as the Web pages users visit, the ads they click, and the terms they search for, then consolidate them into an “identity” that gets sold to linking marketers—is itself not new. Unseen tracking procedures involve a cookie being placed surreptitiously on the hard drive of a computer so that the unsuspecting user now roams the Internet cookie in tow, unknowingly announcing what sort of consumer he or she is. What gets innocently declared are things like one’s age group, income level, home address, magazine subscriptions, and even public records. Persistent cookies, it seems, make it almost impossible for any user to go online without eventually being tracked, profiled, and quietly compared and connected to other unaware users—unless a deliberate effort is made to discover and delete or disable them.

Just as people who eat a lot of raw jalapeno peppers eventually become desensitized to mouth burning and eyes stinging, one has to wonder if there is such a thing as chronic economic desensitization. One neural theory about the development of a dietary tolerance—to capsicum in the case of red hot chilis—is that a neurotransmitter gets depleted so that people respond less vigorously to the initially painful ingredient the more they are exposed to it.⁴ Is there a similar numbing effect in the matter of our growing exposure and becoming accustomed to hidden linking practices? The conjunction of volatile online with offline data occurs when it is least expected, for instance while someone routinely registers on a Web site or intentionally or even unintentionally just clicks onto a marketer’s e-mail message. To be sure, the two leading companies claim that the cookie data they collect is anonymous and sold as such to advertisers on Facebook or Yahoo. Yet who has not been struck, when browsing those sites, by the aptness of the personalized pop-ups directing products to one’s own real-world shopping habits!

Of course, sophisticated buyers should not be surprised that any time they release information into the great beyond of the Internet, that someone or, more likely, some thing, will automatically collect it. But it is also true that the ideal of a much-vaunted transparency refers only to the user’s access to information, not to what is done to it behind the scenes. Even if no information gets posted, maintaining a low profile is a challenge. Internet security specialists sagely advise that the best rule of thumb is that you prevent private data from getting out there in the first place. But how does one manage this feat given the fact that on Snitch.name, for example, users can enter their own name or someone else’s and watch as the site culls information from dozens of search engines, social networks, and directories?⁵ As Paul M. Schwartz, a privacy expert and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley states “Interactive media really gets into this creepy Orwellian thing, where it’s a record of our thoughts on the way to decision-making … We’re like the data-input clerks now for the industry.”⁶

Additionally, one must reckon with other clandestine optical technologies, as well as the problems attending them. These, too, involve worrisome linkages made by invisible tracking devices. Walt Disney Company’s secretive new research facility in Austin, Texas, uses eye-tracking goggles to reveal how users respond to variable-sized ads. What ties these two selling phenomena together is disguise masquerading as transparency. Data-gathering and consolidating companies, as we have seen, measure and deduce online and offline habits from how many times people click on advertisements as well as on other items. Deception, in the case of the Disney research, derives from a different level of concealment. It is not the user’s appetite—ostensibly for this or that television sports program (created by American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), or Disney XD)—that is being tested but, rather, his reaction to how small product banners can visually become and still draw the viewer’s attention.

This is clearly a pressing problem in a barracuda-competitive market saturated with smart machines (the Web, digital video recorders [DVRs]), overturning how we view television and thus shredding the entertainment industry’s formerly successful money-making (from commercials) model.⁷ But what of developing brain research on something even more elusive: all those millions of people who do not pause to click at all but whose eyes nevertheless flit across the screen. What can one tell about their neural activity while they are watching commercials?

Many of the favorite sites on the Web are supported by advertising. Art, film, media, and design historians, as well as visualists more generally, should therefore take note that behavioral psychology as well as neuroscience is trying to find out what sorts of configurations draw and hold the viewer’s attention in a range of differently scaled electronic media: spanning banner ads, prerolls (those shots that play before a video), animated ads, live-action, and watermark ads.

To add to the dizzying complexity, this heterogeneous experiential media gets performed on variable and increasingly more intimately sized platforms, ranging from large plasma screens, to bookish Web pages, to sleek cell phones. There is a new physiognomics implicit in such law-seeking scientific research. This semiotic analysis of corporeal signs was redefined in its modern form as well as systematized in the late eighteenth century by Johann Caspar Lavater. Supposedly rigorously scientific, Enlightenment physiognomics minutely analyzed the arrangement of facial structure to a deeper explanatory and predictive purpose than had been done in antiquity and, notably, again during the seventeenth century.

Its aim was to seize an individual’s most private inner characteristics from inadvertently betraying outward marks and to prognosticate from them about future actions.⁸ Behavioral tracking thus is a sort of online physiognomics. To be sure, present -day analysis does not seek to probe the anatomical shape of the skull, or the tilt of a nose, or the wrinkles creasing a forehead. Rather, it attempts to make precise behavioral forecasts from a digital “portrait” whose revealing habits have been covertly assembled.

This patching together of elusive patterns—the electronic traces left by our paths of noticing—creates a decentralized and distributed subject. Not only is eye-tracking equipment deployed. A vast armamentarium of medical apparatus further dismembers the individual beholder: heart rate monitors, skin temperature readings, and the analysis of facial expressions via probes attached to cranial-maxillary muscles. Seizing whatever still remains invisible or inscrutable in the contemporary world demands, among other things, the collection of ever more intimate data concerning the kinds of images capable of capturing and retaining the fickle viewer’s wandering gaze. Just like the behind-the-scenes maneuvering with concealed cookies, then, to sell ultrafast new media platforms entails ever-finer analyses of unsuspecting viewers’ cognitive and perceptual functions and, ultimately, must deploy stealth devices.

Given this sharp-sighted media climate, Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger worries about the loss of “social forgetting” and the interminable recording of our every moment in a networked society rife with archived blog postings and dating sites. His chief concern is that we have created so many amnesia-proof tools that perhaps we need to design software that grows misty, erases like human memory, and can ultimately forget. In his book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, he refers mainly to social software where embarrassing things we said or ridiculous images we created years earlier might come back to haunt us since electronic files are so easily retrievable (Mayer-Schoenberger, 2009). Although intentional forgetting is a wonderful concept, it does not get at the problem of the exponential cobbling together and merger of online with offline data and the use of this information by businesses that have no intention of ever committing it to oblivion.

This brings me back to the Greeks. The hubris of predictability saturate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Imagining Organizations: An Introduction
• Part I Making Things and Practices (In)visible
• Part II Imagining Technologies and Technologies of Imagination
• Part III Publicity Brand, Icons and Humor
• Part IV Inscriptions, Emotions and Passions
• List of Contributors
• Index