Summary
Contents
Subject index
The representation of organizations and working life in popular media signifies--but also helps shape--contemporary practice and institutions. The studies presented in Organization/Representation unravel the complex social relationship between organization and its representation, offering new insights into the interaction between the popular images we create and receive and the power relations that govern society, working life, and culture. The volume shows how the boundaries between each of the categories are blurred to the extent that it is misleading to make assumptions about where “representation” begins and “organization” ends. Rich insights are offered into the relations between gender, power and work, and how the popular media--in which they are represented--may function as a two-way mirror. The different media of cinema, documentary film, children's literature, and even the cyber-world of computerized image, replicate the power structures they are supposed to describe and may help create or at least shape contemporary realities. Several of the contributors to the volume end by questioning some of the basic ontological distinctions between “fiction” and “reality.” Critical analysis of the relationship between popular culture and organizational life enhances our understanding of both. Scholars, researchers and students of organizational theory, sociology of organization, cultural studies, and gender and organization will find a rich source of case examples and illustration, together with the challenging perspective of a new frame of inquiry.
Masculinity and Madness
Masculinity and Madness
Figure 10.1 Kiss of Death, 20th Century Fox, 1995
Opening Titles
Freeways stretch towards us and into the horizon. A slim line of monorail snakes alongside speeding streams of automobiles. Images of power and freedom. Intimations of modernity. Icons of progress. Masculinity.
It is a fine, bright day and the camera holds everything in view. The slow pan along concrete supports of the ‘raised’ freeways might be the opening shots of any film, but, instead of moving on to new terrain, the close-ups linger. Gradually, as the camera holds the same ground, huge rusting heaps of scrapped automobiles come into view, mile after mile, just below the surface of the freeway. Modernity is being placed alongside its ‘normal atrocities’.
Barbet Schroeder's evocative opening of ...
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