Re: Comments on a Michael Hardt NLR article

This reminds me of the so-called "community control" for schools programs in
many U.S. cities. Control was supposedly given to locally based groups. And
they did have some control---unless the central school board decided to
overrule them!  But the pseudo-decentralization served two purposes: it gave
the illusion that the local areas have control, and they provided a way for
the centralized powers to evade responsibility by claiming that bad
decisions, "disappeared" money, etc. were the fault of the local units.

Another aspect of this "faux" democracy is the so-called "Japan model" of
"Worker-management circles."  Another way to try to get the oppressed to
participate in their own oppression.



Alan Spector

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Sabri Oncu" <soncu@pacbell.net>
To: "WSN" <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 11:47 PM
Subject: Re: Comments on a Michael Hardt NLR article


> Gert writes:
>
> > TNCs
> > (2) take any modern textbook on international
> > business (training material for future global
> > corporate executives). There you will find that
> > even global corporations are not preaching the
> > centralist model (hierarchy, pyramidal structure)
> > anymore, but networked and matrix models, instead.
>
> Gert,
>
> This mail has nothing to do with the rest of your mail. It is
> just a comment about the above. I say what is called a matrix
> model is garbage. It is just a new name for a sliced and diced
> hierarchy, which is still an hierarchy, or hierarchy of
> hierarchies.
>
> I happen to have read some of those modern text books, known a
> few who write them closely, a few who teach/preach them closely,
> including my own brother, and  a few who attempted to implement
> them. Don't take such text books seriously, at least, no more
> seriously than your own books. I had lived in those matrix
> structures and this is why I say they are garbage. They are no
> better than pyramidal structures because they are pyramidal
> structures themselves. They are just smaller pyramids, on top of
> smaller pyramids, on top of smaller pyramids and so forth. That
> means they are pyramids too. This is how TNCs work. Don't buy the
> lies of those Organizational Behavior professors who write that
> garbage without any real world experience. Their ideas are nice
> on the pages of shiny books. Reality is different.
>
> Best,
>
> Sabri Oncu
>