On The Margins

Tuesday August 10, 2004

[ Art (هنر) ] To each sex its own door hammer!

Proper greetings require prior identification of the person one greets before one opens the door for the purpose of greeting that person.

Electronics has solved this problem for apartment buildings. Curtains and little spying eye pieces on doors have done the same for detached homes. In some cases, when the detached home has a fence or a wall surrounding it, people may resort to electronics instead.

Matters stood differently when people lived quieter, more meditative lives.

	To the left, you can see a picture of the Boroujerdis' Mansion. It was built about 200 years ago by a famous merchant of Kashan, Iran, named Haj Seyed Jaefar Boroujerdi and bears great importance in view of its architectural style and paintings. The frescoes of this mansion were painted by Sani-ol-Molk Ghaffari Kashani (founder of a painting school in Iran) and the great Kamal-ol-Molk, the miniaturist. There are scores of these mansions in Kashan, many of them under repair and maintenance work.
	Women knocked on this door as they entered the Boroujerdis' mansion.
	. . . and men on this one . . . The two different door hammers make different sounds to inform the residents of the house so that appropriate welcome could be given and received. I distinctly remember our ancestral home in Ardabil, where I visited during the summers until I was 12 or 13. It had exactly the same two-hammer door panels, one for the ladies and one for the gentlemen. That ancestral home was sold when I came to the U.S. I visited it last summer. On the land, where the old house once stood, a monsterous (to me, not the builder) modern building had been erected. It was the 3rd house on the same land since its sale 25 years ago.
	One of the surviving side doors of the Boroujerdis' mansion has the same two-door, ladies' and gentlemen's sides.
	Negin, my daughter, hammers on the ladies' side of yet another door in Kashan.

2004-08-10 21:53:57.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Society ] Individuals in Organizations

Chester Barnard provides the following account of the "individual" in organizations:

The individual human being possesses a limited power of choice. At the same time he is a resultant of, and is narrowly limited by, the factors of the total situation. He has motives, arrives at purposes, and wills to accomplish them. His method is to select a particular factor or set of factors in the total situation and to change the situation by operations on these factors. These are, from the viewpoint of purpose, the limiting factors; and are the strategic points of attack. The Functions of the Executive (1938)

Barnard starts by noting our limited power of choice. Earlier in his book he amplifies on this theme connecting choice to context (i.e. "factors of the total situation") one is acting in. The structure of action is then decomposed into motives, purposes and will. In terms of actual practice of acting, he notes that individuals usually select a factor or a set of factors in the "total situation" to affect. For example, say you don't like your career path. It could be because of where you are, what you're doing, who you're reporting to, the goals or the team. One can change one or a set of these factors. Which actual factor is selected depends on one's total situation. Next Barnard discusses purpose. Purpose determines one's goal. From the point of view of one's goals, some factors may be limiting. Those factors are exactly the ones that will be selected for change.

That's a brief summary of Barnard's views on "individual" actors in an orgniazation.

In the next post, I'll summarize his views on what moves individuals in an organization to adopt group purposes.

2004-08-10 16:53:36.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Society ] Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998

There's a nice, compact 18-page document published by the U.S. Copyright Office that summarizes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.

On Lessig Blog, guest writer Congressman Rick Boucher writes how DMCA went too far in restricting fair use in the digital era. He summarizes consumer-rights and scientific research exemptions to DMCA he and Congressman John Doolittle of California have introduced.

2004-08-10 12:14:31.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Society ] The Functions of the Executive: Chester Barnard and the Theory of Organization

In my last semester at the Haas School of Business, I had the good fortunate of studying transaction cost economics (TCE) with the master: Oliver Williamson. He was a wonderful advisor, and although I had already read many of his essays, he guided my more extended readings and helped me gain a better understanding of the fundamental concepts of TCE. I started several ideas with him and finally settled on writing a paper that gave a transaction cost economics account of the bullwhip effect in supply chains. It was a fascinating exercise and learning experience. (Earlier on this weblog, I have written a brief account of the bullwhip effect, investigating it as a consequence of technological specialization and within the context of North's theories on the structual evolution of economic institutions.)

There was one book whose reading Williamson highly recommended to me: The Functions of the Executive by Chester Barnard. That book was first published in December of 1938. I have a copy of its 2002, 39th printing in my hands.

I've written about Chester Barnard and Oliver Williamson earlier, including a brief mention in a piece on Douglass North.

Today and possibly tomorrow, I'm going to extract a short summary of the first part of Barnard's book on The Functions of the Executive.

I think the material is important to anyone who works within a cooperative system, a business organization or any other kind of association.

2004-08-10 07:55:13.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.