When Women Lead
Does gender really matter in leadership? In terms of stereotypes, various psychological studies show that men gravitate to the hard power of command, while women are collaborative and intuitively understand the soft power of attraction and persuasion.
In information-based societies, networks are replacing hierarchies, and knowledge workers are less deferential. Management in a wide range of organizations is changing in the direction of “shared leadership,” and “distributed leadership,” with leaders in the center of a circle rather than atop a pyramid.
Modern leaders must be able to use networks, to collaborate, and to encourage participation. Women’s non-hierarchical style and relational skills fit a leadership need in the new world of knowledge-based organizations and groups that men, on average, are less well prepared to meet.
Forget Networking. How to Be a Connector
We all know people like them, people who seem to know everyone. They’re always able to help — or if they can’t, they know someone who can. You meet them for the first time and in 15 minutes, you’re talking with them like you’re childhood friends. They’re successful, smart and funny, with a likable touch of self-deprecation. And they’re interested in everything.
Who are they? Connectors.
Perhaps one of the most important attributes of a connector is a willingness to help and to reach out even if there is no obvious or immediate payback.
Sharing – Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age
In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world.
An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy, analyzing it rather as the modern form of long recognized rights to share in culture. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works.
Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living
What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors, Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis‘ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy.
Read also: From Being to Doing. The Origins of the Biology of Cognition
Deconstructing Academe – The birth of critical university studies
Over the past two decades in the United States, there has been a new wave of criticism of higher education. Much of it has condemned the rise of “academic capitalism” and the corporatization of the university; a substantial wing has focused on the deteriorating conditions of academic labor; and some of it has pointed out the problems of students and their escalating debt. A good deal of this new work comes from literary and cultural critics, although it also includes those from education, history, sociology, and labor studies. This wave constitutes what Heather Steffen, a graduate student in literary and cultural studies with whom I have worked at Carnegie Mellon University, and I think is an emerging field of “critical university studies.”
Autopoiesis in organization theory and practice
“Autopoiesis in Organization Theory and Practice” considers the potential of autopoiesis theory to provide a new unifying framework for the study of organizations as systems and of organizational phenomena as emergent phenomena. The papers in this volume integrate open systems theory with the pioneering work of Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis in biological systems. Viewing organizations as living systems opens a powerful new perspective for describing, explaining, and even predicting organizational phenomena across the full spectrum of organizations and environments, from stable to highly dynamic. This collection of papers brings into focus both the great potential and the important challenges facing organizational thinkers in building new organization theory and deriving new principles for management practice based on autopoiesis theory. The topics include the fundamental features of autopoiesis theory, the key conceptual issues surrounding the use of autopoiesis concepts in representing and analyzing organizations as living systems, and the practical applications of autopoiesis theory in designing organizations and managing organizational processes.
Autopoietic Systems: A Generalized Explanatory Approach
This paper is intended for readers familiar with Humberto Maturana’s theory of autopoietic systems and with the still unresolved debate concerning the existence of non-biological autopoietic systems. Because the seminal work of the Chilean biologist has not yet been fully and correctly understood in other disciplines, I consider that it is necessary to offer a more generalized concept of the autopoietic system, derived by implication from Maturana’s grounding definition.
The above-mentioned debate is rooted in a deficient application of some rigorous distinctions, definitions, and epistemological considerations introduced by Maturana when he coined the term “autopoiesis.” Some researchers think that social or economic organizations could be considered as autopoietic systems of a higher order because they appear to behave autonomously and be self-organized and self-producing. However, in practice some precise distinctions would need to be verified through observation in order to claim properly their autopoietic nature. These distinctions were defined by Varela, Maturana and Uribe in 1974 as a set of six decisional rules (“MV&U rules”) whereby an observer may possibly justify this stand. My aim is to pinpoint clearly the basic cognitive tasks that an observer should perform in order to ascertain such a claim.
Twenty Thousand-Year-Old Huts at a Hunter-Gatherer Settlement
Ten thousand years before Neolithic farmers settled in permanent villages, hunter-gatherer groups of the Epipalaeolithic period (c. 22–11,600 cal BP) inhabited much of southwest Asia. The latest Epipalaeolithic phase (Natufian) is well-known for the appearance of stone-built houses, complex site organization, a sedentary lifestyle and social complexity—precursors for a Neolithic way of life. In contrast, pre-Natufian sites are much less well known and generally considered as campsites for small groups of seasonally-mobile hunter-gatherers. Work at the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic aggregation site of Kharaneh IV in eastern Jordan highlights that some of these earlier sites were large aggregation base camps not unlike those of the Natufian and contributes to ongoing debates on their duration of occupation. Here we discuss the excavation of two 20,000-year-old hut structures at Kharaneh IV that pre-date the renowned stone houses of the Natufian. Exceptionally dense and extensive occupational deposits exhibit repeated habitation over prolonged periods, and contain structural remains associated with exotic and potentially symbolic caches of objects (shell, red ochre, and burnt horn cores) that indicate substantial settlement of the site pre-dating the Natufian and outside of the Natufian homeland as currently understood.
Nomads, Knowmads, Noumads
Nomads have very special relations with space. They go from location to location but never make a location their own. Something is missing from their maps. We may call this missing element a concept of territory, or, a sense of belonging, or, constancy, stability, perhaps conformity? There is a profound difference in how nomads conceive of distances. This difference does not apply only to physical distances, because of the complicating relations between space and consciousness. Nomadism, therefore, is not merely a life style. It is rather a style of mapping, a singular system of complicating relations between space and consciousness that brings about the dynamic expression of one’s freedom. For freedom is the primary and only vocation of real nomads.
As the nomad is evolving into the knowmad and as the knowmad will be evolving eventually into the noumad, we are witnessing the inevitable ephemeralization of spaces, of mappings and their corresponding expressions. In all spaces we are witnessing the eternal return of the nomad, of the knowmad of the noumad, a repetition of the singular element of freedom, a necessary sameness which is profoundly and positively different.
