The notion of organizational control has been a constant theme in the construction and representations of euromodern1 organizations. The discourse of control has been justified in organizational theory on a variety of counts, such as the need to eliminate stubborn “soldiering” by recalcitrant employees (Taylor, 1911), the inducement of collaborative enterprise (Barnard, 1938), the curtailment of opportunist practices in organizational transactions (Williamson, 1985), the management of bounded rationality (Simon, 1957), the development of adaptive mechanisms (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), the facilitation of diverse organizational conversations (Srivastava & Cooperrider, 1990), the management of organizational knowledge (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), or even the need to create a paradigmatic consensus in organizational research (Pfeffer, 1993). On the other hand, mainstream theories of organizational control have been critiqued as being coercive (Braverman, 1974), insensitive to noncontractual trust-based control systems (Perrow, 1979), or unmindful of the fundamental causal determinants of conflict (Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). Scholars have pointed to the enacted nature of organizational reality (Weick, 1979), the constructed nature of academic practices (Canella & Paetzold, 1994), and the anthropocentric biases that have dominated management research (Shrivastava, 1996), thereby seeking to destabilize the platform of positivism on which much of the mainstream discourse of organizational control stands.

Toward a Postcolonial Reading of Organizational Control

China finally underwent its modernizing (i.e., with increased labor productivity and incomes) agricultural revolution in 1980 to 2010, through dynamics unlike those of most other previous agricultu...

China’s Hidden Agricultural Revolution, 1980–2010, in Historical and Comparative Perspective

Matatu 1 Culture: Nairobi's Three Dimensional Space
Our every day lives can also be seen as stories, as narratives, in which we act out our lives and construct our identities.
(Berger 1995:165)
1.0 Elements of the matatu culture matrix.
In this introductory chapter, I seek to map generally the issues that lie at the core of this study, indicate the perspectives from which the study has approached its subject as well as highlight key questions that have been addressed in subsequent chapters. An appropriate beginning point then is to explain the term "matatu culture."
1.1 Definition of terms.
Matatu culture is the combined range of activities and symbolic acts, verbal or written, either deployed upon the vehicle or embodied by matatu workers and passengers in their interaction upon the space constituted around the material culture object known as matatu. Its worldview is governed chiefly by the fact that matatu work is a predominantly male youth occupation.2 Music, DVD movies shown in the duration of a trip, stickers, icons of film, music and football stars drawn on the vehicle's exterior surface,3 hip hop fashion, humor, idiom and gestures used by crews and passengers, attitudes towards other road users and disregard for the Highway Code are key ingredients of matatu culture. It is a culture that thrives on the hybridization of semiotic codes as diverse media, languages and attitudes are brought to capture and express experiences and worldviews.
After Hebdige, I view culture as any "systems of communication, forms of expression and representation" (1979: 128,161) of which the combined oral, visual, auditory and written items deployed on matatu are examples. Hence, matatu text means crews' quotidian expressive acts and forms manifested through such elements as stickers, dress, language, pictures, gestures and music, variously or in combinatory sets. Even though subcultures generally enact values that differ from those of the mainstream (Bauman 1992: xiv-xvi; Fiske 1992: 25; Dundes 1987:149- 150), as an example of such, matatu culture discourse is ambivalent in the sense that it is also couched within mainstream patriarchal practices and views on crucial issues like gender and (male) control over property.
Passenger responses to the culture are part of matatu culture in that they help to circulate its ethos and values within public discourse, with personal experience narratives being a relevant instance of such responses. I use the term sign to refer to any object, action, image or sound that embodies meaning either within itself, outside or in juxtaposition to other objects, images and sounds. As texts, such signs point to other meanings in other texts. An agglomeration of such visual, oral, auditory signs, among others, which might seem disjunctive when taken as a unit because of their disparate media, make up texts just as individual items like sayings, swear words, gestures or designs on the matatu have been treated as texts in themselves. Without doubt, behavior such as pick-pocketing, extorting sexual favors from female passengers whose fare has been stolen on a matatu by a conductor's accomplices or the physical confrontations between crews, passengers or, on the other hand, competing matatu crews lies in the region of criminality. As such, an assessment of matatu work as crime does not lie within the scope of this study; it is only pertinent to the extent that it sheds light on the general transgressive behavior that shapes the subculture's character.

Identity Politics in Nairobi Matatu Folklore

We believe that dancehall music’s more sexually explicit lyrics, labeled “slack” and maligned as evocatively misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic, mirror historically discordant social and economic tensions that entangle men and women in contested couplings, and thus render sexuality an instrument of socioeconomic power. Applying an ethnomusicological analysis, this paper fills a void by situating the slack Jamaican dancehall/ DJ lyrics within a revitalizing indigenization socialization perspective. By probing the cultural roots of this increasingly popular yet disparaged musical tradition that disturbs moral etiquette, we hear sexual bravado and counsel on love that betray important gender codes. For a particular social class, gender socialization nurtures a cultural consumer lovemap inscribed by a harsh economy during a particular point in time.

Revelations of cultural consumer lovemaps in Jamaican dancehall lyrics: An ethnomusicological ethnography

This article begins by reviewing the past three generations of postwar U.S.-based China research in terms of the central problematique of the most influential scholarship of each generation, and then goes on to place those into the larger context of the past three centuries of Western thought about China. The purpose is to demonstrate how the either/or binary of the West versus China has governed the questions asked and not asked by those influential scholars, and how it has shaped the main answers proffered, sometimes even when they violate available empirical evidence. The article argues that the interpenetration of the Chinese and the Western, with reinterpretations and syncretizing no less than tensions and contradictions, is in fact the basic given reality of a modern China; an either/or choice between the two is not possible in reality, only in theoretical construction. An insistence on the latter is what has given rise to violations of empirical evidence. A truly China-centered approach is not to s...

Our Sense of Problem Rethinking China Studies in the United States

Prahlad, Sw. Anand. 2001. Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $50.00 hc. $22.00 sc. xxiv + 302 pp.Nearly all studies of reggae music and its Rastafarian "roots"-and especially those studies that focus more on Rastafari-emphasize its aesthetic, cultural, and religious contexts, rather than making specific, serious analyses of reggae's radical political critique of modernity. While there has been a fair amount of academic publication on reggae discourse in the United Kingdom and in the Caribbean, there has been little serious academic interest in reggae and Rastafari in the United States, except as a sociological, anthropological, aesthetic, or perhaps syncretic religious phenomenon. Swami Anand Prahlad's Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music is a decided turn away from previous reggae scholarship; Reggae Wisdom is among the first studies by a United States critic to take seriously the question of what reggae musicand "roots" reggae in particular-means. However, as Prahlad makes clear from the start of the book, the question of interpretation in reggae is often a multivalent and subjective one: "I love its infectious beat, its spiritual strength and its insistence on telling the truth in as raw and naked a fashion as possible. I love its spiritual militancy: I believe it is the most militant music of the twentieth century. . . . And I love that one of the most fundamental elements in reggae is the use of proverbs" (xviii). By focusing on the use of proverbs in reggae, Prahlad not only foregrounds both personal and social interpretations for reggae discourse, he also provides a highly teachable way of introducing students to the serious study of reggae music as a cultural and ideological expression.While specifically addressed to folklorists, and those interested in the cultural function of proverbs, Prahlad's book is also an invitation for students and teachers of literature to take reggae seriously as an object/text of research, much as jazz has been embraced by many fields in the humanities, including English (xxiv). Although Prahlad intends to focus on the use roots reggae makes of particular proverbs-to understand better the meaning of particular proverbs within cultures of the African Diaspora-he also seeks to better understand the meaning of specific roots songs and the intentions of their artists/performers. Reggae Wisdom has three main sections. The first two sections comprising the body of Prahlad's book are six chapters that analyze roots reggae by way of individual proverbs. The third section is an especially comprehensive and pedagogically useful set of five appendices cataloging proverbs used in roots reggae, names of artists/performers that use these proverbs, and an interview with Keith Porter (a member of the Itals, a roots group Prahlad singles out as being one of the greatest and most consistent users of proverbs [141]).In the first three-chapter section of Reggae Wisdom, Prahlad focuses on the broader Rastafarian, ideological and rhetorical, and Jamaican cultural implications for analyses of proverb use in reggae. Emphasizing the ideological influence of Rastafari upon the proverbial elements of roots, Prahlad opens with a chapter on "The Original Man," a discussion of the "contextual frame" that informs and inspires the "roots" subgenre of reggae. That Rastafarians are "straight from creation"-as Andrew Tosh puts it in "The Original Man"-is perhaps the most essential Rasta "knowledge" to imbue the content of roots. Spiritual and ideological, this concept of "anciency" not only means that Rastas are reincarnated souls of Israelites and biblical prophets stretching back to Genesis, but more generally and politically that "anciency [also] implies purity, righteousness, and a natural state in which human beings are in touch with their full intuitive powers and innate intelligence, where they are in harmony with the natural world" (12). All other ideological and living practices of Rastafari extend from anciency, such as valuing "knowledge" over "belief," recognizing African nationalism and "pan-African" identity, acknowledging the divinity of Haile Selassi, decentralizing government and religion, refusing "wage slavery" and commercialism, adhering to a vegetarian diet for a vital life, etc. …

Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music

Literary and cultural criticism of the last twenty years has increasingly turned away from taxonomies of "Right" and "Left" and toward the problem of the relation of "global" to "local:' Paul Gilroy describes this shift with regard to the study of race in literature and culture in his interdisciplinary The Black Atlantic: Regardless of their affiliation to the right, left, or centre, groups have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of"black" and "white" people. Against this choice stands another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, m tissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. (Gilroy 1993, 2) Gilroy's project exemplifies a move in literary and cultural criticism towards an analysis of the relation of individual subjectivity to a network of groups that include, among others: race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and disability. The "more difficult option" that Gilroy proposes is to localize, to particularize the almost inherently bi-polar nature of the global. While it might appear (particularly in light of the near-disappearance of communism and the relative decline of socialism, especially in Europe) that criticism and theory have, in the main, become "post" political, they are instead concerned with a different politics, governed by a collage of seemingly postmodern "identities." The postmodern individual's relation to the social might seem to disintegrate, but Gilroy's point is that the locality of subject is composed of varying mixtures of global social forces, which amount to more than the sum of their parts. Left and Right, as they have been developed in the West, are of course spatial metaphors, which represent the domain of politics to be linear. Before modernity's preoccupation with representing politics in binary spatial metaphors in the late eighteenth century, politics was thought to negotiate the domains of the individual and the social. Aristotle opens his Politics with this definition: "Observation shows us, first, that every polis . . . is a species of association, and, secondly, that all associations are instituted for the purpose of attaining some good-for all men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good" (1946, 1). Prior to modernity, politics concerns the practice and development of a mutually beneficial relationship between society and those who qualify as individuals. Progressively collapsing the space between individual and society, the modern Left/Right political model finds its origin, in part, in the ancient, mythic conflict between sacred (valoriation and reification of tradition) and profane (revolution and leveling) that accompanies any development in what Aristotle calls "association." During their eighteenth-century formation, neither the Left nor the Right makes much attempt to distinguish between the individual and society; each is a function of the other in both conservative and revolutionary politics. In the ideology of the Right, the individual's "freedom" is championed, yet society retains the power to regulate certain necessities, such as private property and the "free" market. On the other hand, for the Left, the individual owes her existence to society-"individualism" is an ideological function of conservatism-yet the revolution is led by a privileged "vanguard" and the cult of personality The late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury "debate" in the rising international Left between "communists" and "anarchists" presages the late twentieth century critical shift from a taxonomy of Rightness and Leftness to analyzing distinctions between discourses of individual and society Poet lay Parini's Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics, literary historian Theodore Ziolkowski's The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises, and cultural critic Andrew Ross's Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice each represent one of the three major moves that dominate political, literary, and cultural criticism in the final twenty years of the twentieth century: valorizing subjectivity, balancing subject and society, and championing social identity. …

Beyond the Left and the Right

Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2000. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Albany: State University of NewYork Press. $62.50 hc. $20.95 sc. xix + 353 pp. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $57.95 hc. $19.95 sc. xiii + 294 pp. Much as other politically motivated cultural movements that have struggled to define a just relation between the inchvidual subject and society, postcolonial studies has debated and fought over the relative value of particularities (the "local") and universals (the "global") since the field opened in the late 1970s and early 80s. Frantz Fanon-- a postcolonial forerunner, psychoanalyst, and political activist-opens the second chapter of the prescient Black Skin, White Masks on this point, Man is motion toward the world and toward his like .... Every consciousness seems to have the capacity to demonstrate these two components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making superstructure on my whole vision of the world. (1968,41) The several positions that have developed to define this relationship between subject and society are indicative of two emerging factions competing to represent postcolonial studies. During the first two decades of postcolonial studies this competition appeared to pit modernists versus "postmodernists," who have argued (with some success) that modernism's veneration of "universalism" is politically conservative and predisposed to "eurocentrism."Yet both of these perspectives, despite disagreements over ideology and interpretation, have tended to focus on the role of cultural identity in the postcolonial situation. In the last five years however, economic theories of the postcolonial scene have coalesced and are earnestly competing with theories of identity for methodological and ideological dominance of the field in the twenty-first century. Like other fields dedicated to studying the politics of marginalized texts and cultures, postcolonial studies has rapidly developed its own canon that says a good deal about what it means to describe something-be it a period, a culture, a subject or text, a politics, etc.-as "postcolonial." Because this canon includes scholarship from sociologists and anthropologists, literary and cultural critics, political activists and analysts, and psychoanalysts (among others), the field has rapidly developed an interdisciplinary character. Questions about what "postcoloniality" means should be answered by an analysis of how a "postcolonial canon" has come to be formed and who belongs to this twenty-odd year old field. Put another way, who are the theorists who represent the multivalent field of"postcolonial studies" and how have these figures come to be recognized as such (and by whom)? Recent books by Patrick Colm Hogan and Neil Lazarus propose and develop Marxian approaches to postcolonial studies, which they describe as being heretofore dominated by "poststructuralism" and other "postmodern," identity-based political agendas. As Hogan and Lazarus see it postcolonial studies is vexed by political contradictions that have troubled the field from its very inception, rendering it ineffective. Their books are intended to revise and refocus postcolonial theory and praxis on nationalism rather than the transnational, on universal otherness over identity or race, and on economics instead of mimicry because of what Lazarus notes to be "the conspicuous absence, until very recently, of any credible or legitimated Marxist position within the field of postcolonial studies" (1999, 12). The opening paragraph on Lazarus's intentions for the book could also be used to describe Hogan's project: "It is intended as a self-consciously Marxist contribution to the academic field of postcolonial studies-one capable of suggesting a credible historical materialist alternative to the idealist and dehistoricizing scholarship currently predominant in that field" (1999, 1). …

Clifford T. Manlove

Papers

Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music

Beyond the Left and the Right

Towards a Dialectic of Identity and Economy in Postcolonial Studies