Comments on: Politics of Nature part 2

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || The Design of Business, by Roger Martin || January || 2010

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:25:42 +0000

[...] connections everywhere, as I think that the knowledge funnel could be seen as another form of Latour’s Collective process or Moore’s [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Organizational Cognition || November || 2008

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:26:55 +0000

[...] of its constituents, learns. To use the framework of Latour, conversations are where we can see the organizational Collective perform the Consultation process, where it grapples with an outside influence (what Latour calls “Perplexity”). Seeing [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Playing the infinite game || March || 2008

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:26:37 +0000

[...] that science was not about discovering the Truth, because Truth is a contingent entity (shades of Latour’s “Constitution”). The goal of science is instead to continue doing science, to continue expanding the realm of [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Politics of Nature part 3 || May || 2005

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:28:08 +0000

[...] Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to handle the meeting of two collectives, and then move on to how this work ties into some of my previous thoughts. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Learn and latch || December || 2006

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 01:12:43 +0000

[...] The ideal organization (or person or entity of any sort) has parts of their existence which are devoted to trying new experiences and new ways of doing things without worrying about how those new experiences will integrate with what they have. Then if some of the new experiences seem useful, they adopt those experiences and build them into their processes. Now that I think about it, this describes Bruno Latour’s idea of the Collective, where new elements ask for admittance to the Collective via spokespersons, and then the Collective has to decide whether to accept the new elements and reconfigure itself so as to integrate those new elements. Man, it really is all the same idea. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Creating the Collective || July || 2006

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 03:02:01 +0000

[...] What implications does this have? Managers often complain that they don’t do anything, that they spend all of their time talking and in meetings. I think this viewpoint makes it clear what they are doing – they are the social glue that makes the organization an organization. They are the spokespeople for the company as collective (see last year’s post for details on the collective-forming process). They bring the social traces that bind the company together into being. They may be “just talking”, but talking is what builds social cohesion, what continues to create the network anew. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Reassembling the Social, by Bruno Latour || July || 2006

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 23:16:15 +0000

[...] He believes that ’society’, as a concept, is a premature assemblage of entities. It has not been collected together with due process, as described in the process of creating a collective. Because it is assembled too quickly, it smooths over the bumps and ignores the things sticking out when it tries to jam everything together. These inconsistencies are what first gave Latour in his study of science the hints of the path forward. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Latour-ian Networking || June || 2006

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 14:10:43 +0000

[...] Every object, every person has a story to tell. To treat something as just an object is to cut it off from its history, to try to make simple what is complex, to not fully give its voice a chance to be heard in the assembling of the collective. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Communities of identity || June || 2006

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 02:06:14 +0000

[...] P.S. I finally got enough downtime this past weekend for my brain to start functioning again! We’ll see if it lasts long enough for me to write up the several posts I sketched out, but I had some interesting ideas, and also got through a third of the way through the new Bruno Latour book, Reassembling the Social (Latour blew my mind last year with The Politics of Nature). So yay – we’ll see how long this surge of energy and brain power lasts. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Three realizations

Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Three realizations — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:08:24 +0000

[...] While I can see the attraction of the End Times, I think I prefer Latour’s outlook, where instead of being special because everything has collapsed to a single reality (Rapture or Singularity or whatever), we are part of an ever-growing, ever-learning collective. We face obstacles, we learn from them and adjust to them, and we go on. Humans have been around for a long time, and while it’s tempting to think that we are the apotheosis of evolution, a hundred years from now folks will be mocking us the same way we mock the scientists who said they understood everything in the universe five years before quantum mechanics was discovered. [...]