Organization Representation

The representation of organizations and working life in the popular media signifies, but also helps shape, contemporary practice and institutions. Organization-Representation unravels 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. Representations in Hollywood movies, ethnographic and documentary films, children's literature and the popular and `quality' press replicate the power structures they supposedly describe and consequently help shape contemporary realities. This volume offers rich insights into the relations between cu

The representation of organizations and working life in the popular media signifies, but also helps shape, contemporary practice and institutions. Organization-Representation unravels 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. Representations in Hollywood movies, ethnographic and documentary films, children′s literature and the popular and `quality′ press replicate the power structures they supposedly describe and consequently help shape contemporary realities. This volume offers rich insights into the relations between culture, power and work. It goes beyond such purely ontological questions to show convincingly that a critical analysis of the relationship between popular culture and the nature of organizational life enhances our understanding of both.

The concepts of social sciences, social action and organizations as texts, are no longer unfamiliar ones. The use of language in social analysis has made researchers acutely aware of the importance of language use, not only to contain and express experience but also to create second order accounts of these experiences. This way of using language to shape our knowledge and guide social action, it is urged, makes social action and organization a 'text'. Text/Work is an innovative exploration of our understanding of the textual nature of organizational life, and considers the consequences of textual nature for organization studies. How can organizations be profitably written into textual forms? This is a bold investigation into a challenging and exciting area of study.

Cataloging standards practiced within the traditional library, archive and museum environments are not interoperable for the retrieval of objects within the shared online environment. Within today’s information environments, library, archive and museum professionals are becoming aware that all information objects can be linked together. In this way, information professionals have the opportunity to collaborate and share data together with the shard online cataloging environment, the end result being improved retrieval effectiveness. But the adaptation has been slow: Libraries, archives and museums are still operating within their own community-specific cataloging practices. This book provides a historical perspective of the evolution of linking devices within the library, archive, and museums environments, and captures current cataloging practices in these fields. It offers suggestions for moving beyond community-specific cataloging principles and thus has the potential of becoming a springboard for further conversation and the sharing of ideas.

This book is about building metaphorical bridges--all sorts of bridges. At the most basic level, it concerns the bridges that individuals build to understand the events that they experience--the bridges that connect the events in the mind's eye. At another level, it is about bridges that interconnect findings and theoretical frameworks concerning event comprehension and representation in different age groups, ranging from infancy to adulthood. Finally, it is about building bridges between researchers who share interests, yet may not ordinarily even be aware of each other's work. The success of the book will be measured in terms of the extent to which the contributors have been able to create a picture of the course of development across a wide span in chronological age, and across different types of events, from the fictional to the actual. The individuals whose work is represented in this book conduct their work in a shared environment--they all have an intellectual and scholarly interest in event comprehension and representation. These interests are manifest in the overlapping themes of their work. These include a focus on how people come to temporally integrate individual "snapshots" to form a coherent event that unfolds over time, to understand cause and effect, and to appreciate the role of the goal of events. Another overlapping theme involves the possibility of individual differences. These themes are apparent in work on the early development of representations of specific episodes and autobiographical memories, and comprehension of complex events such as stories involving multiple characters and emotions. The editors of this volume had two missions: * to create a development span by bringing together researchers working from infancy to adulthood, and * to create a bridge between individuals working from within the text comprehension perspective, within the naturalistic perspective, and with laboratory analogues to the naturalistic perspective. Their measure of success will be the extent to which they have been able to create a picture of the course of development across a wide span in chronological age, and across different types of events--from fictional to actual.

In July, 2008, the International Association for Assyriology met in Würzburg, Germany, for 5 days to deliver and listen to papers on the theme "Organization, Representation, and Symbols of Power in the Ancient Near East." This volume, the proceedings of the conference, contains 70 of the papers read at the 54th annual Rencontre, including most of the papers from two workshop sessions, one on "collective governance" and the other on "the public and the state." As the photo of the participants on the back cover demonstrates, the surroundings and ambience of the host city and university provided a wonderful backdrop for the meetings.