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A nice blog post about Baudrillard and consumer society

More to Read!

Graduates Employment and the Discourse of Employability

Rethinking school choice: limits of the market metaphor

The Incidence and Effects of Overeducation in the U.K. Graduate Labour Market

On the Cultivation of Quality, Efficiency and Enterprise: An Overview of Recent Trends in Higher Education in Western Europe, 1986-1988

Academic Identities and Policy change in HE

The Use of University Rankings in the United Kingdom

Factors affecting likelihood of applicants being offered a place in medical schools in the United Kingdom in 1996 and 1997: retrospective study

An analysis of an admissions system: can performance in the first year of the dental course be predicted?

The Personal Statement as an Indicator of Writing Skill: A Cautionary Note.

Readings in Applied Microeconomic Theory: Market Forces and Solutions (chapter 15 - Spence and signalling)

A Theory of Signalling During Job Search, Employment Efficiency, and "Stigmatised" Jobs

Article to read

Communication Research, Vol. 24, No. 6, 593-630 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/0093650297024006002
© 1997 SAGE Publications

The Person as Object in Discourses in and Around Organizations

GEORGE CHENEY

CRAIG CARROLL

Natural persons (i.e., real people as opposed to "corporate or organizational persons") have come to be treated—often implicitly but sometimes quite explicitly—as mere objects (or in other cases not treated or mentioned at all) in some of the more popular and influential ways of talking about "doing business." Although we recognize that certain dimensions of this problem are not new, this article deliberately focuses on the dark side of the current push toward greater efficiency, competitiveness, and so-called customer responsiveness in the world of work by highlighting specific examples from public discourse in and about organizational life. We provide illustrations of the person as object in five categories of organizational activity: organizational operations, labor and employment, marketing and customer service, corporate governance and investor relations, and competition and market globalization.

The Third Way

This is the transcript of a lecture given by Niall Dickson, BBC Social Affairs Editor, to the Institute of Directors of Social Affairs, in 1999.

It outlines the main threads of the Third Way as CORA; Community, Opportunity, Responsibility and Accountability. It asks whether the ideology is possible, how it is working in practice and draws particular attention to the lack of ideologiacl commitment to the public sector.

On reflection I think that this relates to the idea of 'emptiness' in that 'it doesn't matter who does the job' as long as its done well. It is pragmatism, but scribbles over a culture of public service that underpinned the work done. Now culture is ignored, and yet if the only cultural leadership coming from the government is target culture, it is ultimately devoid of meaning that would provide professional identity and some sense of intrinsic motivation.