Stark The Sense of Dissonance

Accounts of Worth in Economic Life
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3100-5
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

What counts? In work, as in other areas of life, it is not always clear what standards we are being judged by or how our worth is being determined. This can be disorienting and disconcerting. Because of this, many organizations devote considerable resources to limiting and clarifying the logics used for evaluating worth. But as David Stark argues, firms would often be better off, especially in managing change, if they allowed multiple logics of worth and did not necessarily discourage uncertainty. In fact, in many cases multiple orders of worth are unavoidable, so organizations and firms should learn to harness the benefits of such "heterarchy" rather than seeking to purge it. Stark makes this argument with ethnographic case studies of three companies attempting to cope with rapid change: a machine-tool company in late and postcommunist Hungary, a new-media startup in New York during and after the collapse of the Internet bubble, and a Wall Street investment bank whose trading room was destroyed on 9/11. In each case, the friction of competing criteria of worth promoted an organizational reflexivity that made it easier for the company to change and deal with market uncertainty. Drawing on John Dewey's notion that "perplexing situations" provide opportunities for innovative inquiry, Stark argues that the dissonance of diverse principles can lead to discovery.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stark, David

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Finanzsektor & Finanzdienstleistungen Finanzsektor & Finanzdienstleistungen: Allgemeines

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface xi

Chapter 1: Heterarchy: The Organization of Dissonance 1

Searching Questions 1

For a Sociology of Worth 6

Entrepreneurship at the Overlap 13

Heterarchy 19

A Metaphor for Organization in the Twenty-first Century 27

Worth in Contentious Situations 31

Chapter 2: Work, Worth, and Justice in a Socialist Factory 35

The Partnership as Proof 36

Distributive Justice inside the Partnership 52

Maneuvering across Economies 64

Epilogue 75

Chapter 3: Creative Friction in a New-Media Start-Up 81

An Ecology of Value 84

The Firm and the Project Form 91

Distributing Intelligence 97

Organizing Dissonance 102

Discursive Pragmatism and Bountiful Friction 108

Epilogue 111

Chapter 4: The Cognitive Ecology of an Arbitrage Trading Room 118

Studying Quantitative Finance 120

Arbitrage, or Quantitative Finance in the Search for Qualities 126

The Trading Room as a Space for Associations 130

The Trading Room as an Ecology 135

The Trading Room as a Laboratory 142

The Pursuit of New Properties 151

Epilogue 153

Chapter 5: From Field Research to the Field of Research 163

From Classification to Search 166

From Diversity of Organizations to the Organization of Diversity 175

From Unreflective Taken-for-Granteds to Reflexive Cognition 183

From Shared Understandings to Coordination through

Misunderstanding 190

From Single Ethnographies to the Broader Sites of Situations 195

Reprise 204

Acknowledgments 213

Bibliography 217

Index 239

Über Autor(innen)

David Stark is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Columbia University, where he chairs the Department of Sociology and directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He is the coauthor of Postsocialist Pathways.