I’ve been reading a book I picked up at a used bookstore called Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. It may take me a while to get through it all, as it’s not really on my reading list, and I just grabbed it as it appeals to my interest in social structures. But in the introductory argument for Organizational Theory as a field of study, there is an interesting passage that touches on one of my earlier posts about ownership.

We will fail to perceive the importance of organizations for our lives if we view them only as contexts– as arrangements influencing the activities of individual actors. Organizations must also be viewed as actors in their own right, as corporate persons, to use Coleman’s phrase (1974). They can take actions, utilize resources, enter into contracts, and own property. Coleman describes how these rights have gradually developed since the Middle Ages to the point where now it is accurate to speak of two kinds of persons– natural persons (such as you and me) and corporate or juristic persons (such as the Red Cross or General Motors). The social structure of the modern society can no longer be described accurately as consisting only of relations among natural persons; our understanding must be stretched to include as well those relations between natural and corporate persons, and between corporate and corporate persons.1 In short, we must come to “the recognition that the society has changed over the past few centuries in the verv structural elements of which it is composed” (Coleman, 1974: 13).

The wife of a Chinese dissident is suing Yahoo, Inc. for providing identifiable evidence to the communist government that imprisoned her husband for writing anonymous editorials critical of China’s communist rule.

From Wired News:

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling’s Beijing duplex. She’s cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He’s been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it’s a technical issue. This is the day he learns he’s wrong.

Wang picks up the phone: “Yes?”

“Are you home?” asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.

“Yes.”

The line goes dead.

Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door – 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu’s hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it’s done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.

Yahoo! isn’t the only search engine company guilty of conforming to the rules of communist countries in exchange for access to their marketplace. According to the article, Google also censors certain phrases on its Google China search engine that relate to subjects such as freedom and democracy that the Chinese government prefers its citizens not learn about.

It’s an interesting notion that, ostensibly, the rights our government recognizes for its citizens are God-given and do not dissolve when an American travels to another country, and yet there is no system in place to ensure that big American companies follow the same rules where civil rights are concerned when offering their products to other countries as they would have to follow here. The implication is that either our government believes the people of other countries are innately less than Americans or that our government no longer believes such rights are innate at all. It could be argued that while the US government may recognize those rights it has no jurisdiction for protecting the rights of foreigners, but even so, it does have an obligation to ensure that American businesses do not engage in practices that violate those rights anywhere.

Legal experts are doubtful of Yu’s chances in court. But her presence in the United States puts an inescapable human face on the pain caused by the uneasy alliances American technology companies have forged in the last five years with China’s repressive regime. These partnerships are the price of admission to China’s booming market, but they are not without their casualties.

One more thing to add in connection with my last post about Telling The Truth:

A critique of postmodernism applies to the subject matter of this weblog as postmodern thinking seeks to break down the integrity of rational thought and reasoned argument. Capitalism, in its purest form, is an embodiment of reason as king of determination. As such, a culture infected by postmodern thinking will inevitably cause Capitalism in the society where that culture thrives to deteriorate.

Lynne Cheney’s 1995 work, Telling The Truth, is a remarkably balanced and well supported critique of the impact of postmodern thought on American institutions. Wife of current Vice President, Richard Cheney, she was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986-1992, and she holds a PhD in English.

The book, divided into seven chapters, is written very much like an academic text– every statement supported by evidence and cited. (There are, in fact, more than 35 pages of citation in the End Notes section.) Each chapter examines a different facet of postmodern infiltration of American institutions, including colleges, primary and secondary education, media, law, and, of course, politics. I will quote just one passage from Cheney’s book and let it stand for all the book contains:

That there are no true stories, but only useful ones, no overarching principles, but only the interests of the moment, are ideas now deeply embedded in our culture. We are not the first society in which this has happened; and damaging as the consequences are for us, they have been far more destructive in other places, in the Soviet Union and in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, for example. Nonetheless, there are things that we can learn from the experience of others; and first and foremost among them is the relationship between truth and freedom.

… When we find ourselves faced with situations that violate good sense– whether it is how our children are being taught or how our legal system is abandoning the principles that have long undergirded it– we should, each of us, speak out about what we see. We should not let ourselves be intimidated by seemingly sophisticated statements about how there is no reality and thus no truth… Complete objectivity may be beyond our reach, but we can achieve a significant degree of it, certainly enough to understand that social arrangements are mutable and to make reasoned judgments about how the ones our society has chosen measure up. Faced with demands that those arrangements change, citizens of a democracy should demand reasoned argument and make clear that invective and name-calling do not fall into that category.

If there is one criticism I have of Telling The Truth, it is that Cheney tends to credit too heavily Michel Foucault with advancing the idea of reality as a social construct. He did, of course. But by the time Foucault was writing I, Pierre Riviere, Peter Berger had already written The Social Construction Of Reality, which is an important text in the field of sociology and is completely apolitical.

Despite that small criticism, Cheney examines her subject with very little political bias, citing incidents of postmodern damage at both ends of the political spectrum. More, she does so thoroughly and supports every claim and example with citation. The book is widely criticized by socialists and postmodern champions, as is expected, but of the critiques I’ve read, they have all been rife with the “invective and name-calling” Cheney rightly places outside the arena of rational discourse.