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Title: Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work by Joyce K. Fletcher ISBN: 0-262-56140-9 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 22 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Understanding knowledge-intensive work
Comment: This book contributes to our understanding of gender and work, and this is important. But I want to draw attention to this book's more general value for anyonet concerned to understand the changing nature of work in our times.
Today, as more and more work situations involve knowledge-intensive, fluid environments where the old principles of command-and-control are ineffective, those of us connected to such environments are scrambling to understand how to achieve effective performance in a game where the only thing we know about the rules is that the old rules don't apply. In this scramble, we are continually brought back to the most fundamental question of organizing: what actions produce value; what actions are irerelevant to or destructive of value? Dr. Fletcher's book has the potential be important in helping us to act purposefully and successfully to create effective systems in this turbulant environment.
What we see as `real work' reflects only a portion of the work-related activity in organizations. For the most part, it reflects the portion that was of interest to the employers who created the industrial system of the early part of this century. As we face the challenges of knowledge-intensive work in fluid, underdetermined and rapidly changing environments, we are being forced to create another reality of work. The critical factors for working successfully simply do not lie within the area lit by the spotlight of industrial reality. But how do we take off blinders we have worn for a century to see things differently?
I can think of no better way than to challenge our thinking with explorations of what, for lack of a better term, I might call alternate realities. Dr. Fletcher's book is such an example. While it is highly informed by theory, it is a case study and illustrates its points with dozens of concrete examples. For the reader with an open mind who is prepared to be challenged, this book should stimulate a better understanding of how we might come to see the critical-but-hidden qualities that determine the success or failure of knowledge-intensive work.
More importantly, Dr. Fletcher demonstrates that what is invisible is not merely overlooked. It comes to be invisible as the result of systematic processes that `disappear' it. The lesson for us -- whether we understand it specifically in regard to gender or with reference to other factors shaping work in our time -- is that we cannot merely change organizations by `thinking outside the box' (to use a particularly unoriginal cliche for original thinking). We must first learn to SEE the box, to see the forces that sustain the box, to resist and change those forces.
At the turn of the last century, work was re-invented by employers, workers and experts on organizing, who produced a new reality of work. At the turn of the present century, this process is happening again. In this book, Dr. Fletcher makes a potentially important contribution to this immense, but necessary, task.
Roy Jacques, author `Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge From the 19th to 21st Centuries'
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Title: The Difference "Difference" Makes: Women and Leadership by Deborah L. Rhode ISBN: 0804746354 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women by Virginia Valian ISBN: 0262720310 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 05 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Women on Power: Leadership Redefined by Sue Joan Mendelson Freeman, Crhistine M. Shelton, Susan Carolyn Bourque, Christine Shelton ISBN: 1555534783 Publisher: Northeastern University Press Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Female Advantage by Sally Helgesen ISBN: 0385419112 Publisher: Currency Pub. Date: 01 April, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Understanding Organizational Behavior With Infotrac: A Multimedia Approach by Debra L. Nelson, James Campbell Quick ISBN: 0324100779 Publisher: South-Western College Pub Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $90.95 |
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