Stephen Dunne

Bio: Stephen Dunne is an academic researcher from University of Edinburgh. The author has contributed to research in topics: Figurational Sociology & Business ethics. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 37 publications receiving 512 citations. Previous affiliations of Stephen Dunne include University of Leicester.

Book Review: On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation by Luc Boltanski:

Abstract: May 1968 continues to cast a long shadow over radical social movements. Then was a time, those who say they were there persistently lament, during which the radical imagination held optimistic sway, where the impossible could still be demanded, when the beach beneath the streets wasn’t posited and pursued by Pied Pipers alone. Those days of hope are now long gone, dentured mouths lament, giving way to the pessimism of Generation X, the pragmatism of Generation Y, and the cynicism of what might eventually come to be known as Generation JJB. Emancipatory critique can no longer emerge, it seems, given what reality has gradually but irreversibly become. All that is left for us to do now, it seems, is to have a pint and a whinge and be done with the whole lot. A nice new pair of Nikes probably wouldn’t go amiss while we’re at it though. Luc Boltanski knows only all too well how that once great populist spirit of social critique became progressively and eventually defanged. His co-authored New Spirit of Capitalism demonstrated in exhaustatively depressing detail how the impassioned pursuit of alternatives to capital became the very basis for capitalist re-constitution, post-1968. Whereas that book took the evolution in business and management thinking and practice as the basis for a predominantly empirical narration of how critique has been co-opted by the representatives of capital, his most recently translated offering challenges critique’s co-optation by capital along undoubtedly polemical lines. The book seeks to provoke action on the part of its audience—social theorists—to renew their links with the inherently critical nature of their vocation, on the one hand, and to renew the links of their vocation to broader social movements, on the other. Its argument carries weight beyond sociology, of course: herein exists an argument which critical management studies (CMS), as well management and organization studies more generally, cannot afford to ignore. Summarily, On Critique offers a quasi-biographical account of a prominent tradition of French critical social theory, undergirded by the biographical significance of the events of May 1968 upon that tradition’s leading contemporary proponent. Against the romanticizing nostalgia which serves to make frustrated epigones out of us all, and against the poisoned chalice of fatalism offered to us by The New Spirit, this is a book which re-affirms the possibility of critique as well as underlining the renewed need for it. Contextually, the book is based upon a series of lectures Boltanski gave at Humboldt University (on the invitation of the Centre Marc Bloch) and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (on the invitation of Axel Honneth) towards the end of 2008. Politically, the backdrops of thesis 11 and critical theory are entirely reliable scene setters since, over the six incrementally related chapters collected here, Boltanski demonstrates how he and his colleagues continue to 430571ORG19410.1177/1350508411430571Book ReviewOrganization 2012

Response to Kilminster Figurational sociology without the sophistry

Abstract: The moment I mistake ‘How dare you!’ for a legitimate argumentative ground will hopefully arrive after I have stopped writing. If everybody felt the same we probably would not have features like this. It is for the reader to decide whether such a situation would be for the best. Confronted with my relatively banal suggestion that philosophical erudition does not amount to a distraction, Richard Kilminster consigns my so-called bombast to the pits with all the invective of a tyrant scorned by a slave, defiantly pleads the opposite, and warns contemporary sociologists away from philosophy, that ‘empty husk’, that mere plaything of the intellectual historian. Faced then with my equally prosaic suggestion that non-philosophers are well advised to keep their peculiar anti-philosophical counsel to themselves, he loudly lambasts such reticence, psychoanalysing it as a resentful consequence of my not having yet become liberated from ‘the terrible burden of philosophical doubt’. The ad hominem attack – the sanctuary of the sophist – is deployed throughout. Perhaps philosophy is to blame for my doubting that which others have the good fortune of taking for granted. One of the many afflictions I owe to philosophy, for example, is a persistently nagging scepticism toward the value of debates which occur with scare quotes placed around the word logic. Written within such a fundamentally paradoxical situation, this piece simply provides a swift disarming of the attacks made upon my person before briefly restating my original argument. The first 6 paragraphs of Kilminster’s spleen-vent follow a disgruntledly patronizing trajectory which eventually culminates in a brief restatement of my original argument. Those who know his work find much they will have already grown accustomed to: the

经验与教育 = Experience and education

Abstract: Experience and Educationis the best concise statement on education ever published by John Dewey, the man acknowledged to be the pre-eminent educational theorist of the twentieth century. Written more than two decades after Democracy and Education(Dewey's most comprehensive statement of his position in educational philosophy), this book demonstrates how Dewey reformulated his ideas as a result of his intervening experience with the progressive schools and in the light of the criticisms his theories had received. Analysing both "traditional" and "progressive" education, Dr. Dewey here insists that neither the old nor the new education is adequate and that each is miseducative because neither of them applies the principles of a carefully developed philosophy of experience. Many pages of this volume illustrate Dr. Dewey's ideas for a philosophy of experience and its relation to education. He particularly urges that all teachers and educators looking for a new movement in education should think in terms of the deeped and larger issues of education rather than in terms of some divisive "ism" about education, even such an "ism" as "progressivism." His philosophy, here expressed in its most essential, most readable form, predicates an American educational system that respects all sources of experience, on that offers a true learning situation that is both historical and social, both orderly and dynamic.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Abstract: How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The archaeology of knowledge

Abstract: We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.