Controlling Words (original) (raw)
Related papers
A conservative revolution in French publishing
One translators' preface The French original of this text was first published in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126-127 (March 1999), pp. 3-28, under the title " Une revolution conservatrice dans l'édition ". Our translation into English has been carried out to address the needs of graduate students and researchers working in the field of Translation Studies, who are increasingly aware of the need to integrate sociological perspectives into their work. To suit the needs of this particular readership, the syntax in the translation is considerably simpler than that of the original. We have cut many sentences into two, three or sometimes four; we have remove most clefts; we have replaced many dummy conditionals (" If it is true that… ") with straight affirmations; in short, we have removed many of the features that make the French text remarkably abstruse, even within the corpus of Bourdieu's writings (according to one reviewer, this particular text is " scarcely comprehensible and decidedly unpleasant "). So if you think the English is hard, try the French. In so doing, we have removed a set of formal features that were perhaps not entirely gratuitous in their original context. When launching this assault on the literary institutions of his day, Bourdieu took care to show that he too knew how to write. He was no merely descriptive sociologist; his work had every right to enter high humanist culture, indeed the Olympus of literary universals that he opposes to the merely commercial concern of the larger publishers. In sacrificing much of the style (syntax, but not terminology), we rob the text of part of its defensive arsenal. We have thus obscured the extent to which Bourdieu's text is part of its own object. With some irony, the sociologist excludes " publishers of social sciences " from his field of investigation, even though his own publisher, the traditionally Catholic Le Seuil, is still very much included. Similar irony might be found in the way Bourdieu's text moves from the apparatus of apparently solid sociology, statistics and all, to final overt backing of the most naïvely idealist notion of literature possible, allied with that of all the innocent small publishers whom he occasionally appears to consider pathetically lost. Bourdieu positions himself aloof from the world of bestsellers , ridiculed as being Americanized, as not revealing anything about social relations, and as being for women. Yet women return in a second role, as the semi-heroic owners of the small publishing houses closest to the sociologist's own ideals. This would seem a very French defense of literature as an exception culturelle, an area not subject to the normal rules of commerce and certainly not open to free international trade. Almost despite the sociology, Bourdieu takes root within the literary field he seeks to analyze. We have chosen this text because it is one of the very few sociological studies of the literary field that explicitly analyzes the role of translations. We would not, however, suggest that the study meets all the standards of solid sociology. First, on the empirical level, the survey was carried out in 1996 on only 61 publishers (56 in the graphs), without any serious attempt being made to justify the selection of this
Politiques de communication, 2022
For its tenth anniversary, the French academic journal Politiques de communication is organizing an international colloquium whose ambition is to propose an overall reflection on "the grip of communication" in the structuring of contemporary social spaces. The "grip of communication" is not a new question for social science research. Its ideological, political, economic, technical and organizational dimensions have been explored. In a cumulative perspective, the first ambition of this colloquium is to propose an assessment of the works on the evolution of social practices and representations of communication and their organizational implications. It also proposes to question the social relations of domination - of gender, class, "race", generation - of which communication is a tool and sometimes a revealer. In what proportions and according to what variable modalities is this "grip" of communication exercised (or felt), according to the specific logics of a given social space? Is the professionalization of communication a form of rationalization of the work of legitimization or of symbolic domination? Does the extension of the practices of communication take part of a growing subordination to economic and political interests? Is it a resource monopolized by a few institutions or people with better resources? On the contrary, is it also observed - and with what ambivalences - in the militant, scientific or artistic practices of contestation of the social order? The need to capitalize on the numerous contributions of the social sciences is in line with the desire of the journal Politiques de communication to open up new avenues for research. These new ways are established by the exploration of objects having escaped until now the investigations of the research, but they can also be drawn in the course of a renewed work of problematization and distancing that highlight the induced effects of communication in social universes already well studied. Researchers from different social science disciplines are invited to participate in this collective critical enterprise. The expected proposals should, on the one hand, present an explicit construction of the object around this "grip of communication", and on the other hand, mobilize and rely on rigorously constructed empirical data in order to avoid the risk of speculative denunciation. Proposals for papers should be sent before June 15, 2022 to the following address: colloque.emprise.communication@gmail.com Short (about 450 words), they should present their object of study, the theoretical framework, the problematic and the empirical elements. They will be careful to explain the critical dimension of the approach and indicate what they wish to show/demonstrate. Papers can be submitted in French and English The authors whose proposals are selected will participate in the colloquium and, at the same time, will submit a written version of their paper, which will be reviewed for publication in the anniversary issue of the journal. The proposals will be selected by the editorial board of the journal Politiques de communication. The committee will make its decision by July 15, 2022. For the publication of a special anniversary issue of the journal, papers should be written in a format that corresponds to the journal's format and sent to the conference organizing team by November 15, 2022.
Control through Communication' in a Comparative Perspective
2006
In the United States between 1870 and 1920, in The Netherlands and in Germany between 1880 and 1930, business and government agencies adopted new technologies for the production and reproduction of documents, their storage and retrieval. New technologies and genres of downward communication, upward reporting, and internal correspondence were introduced to enhance control through communication. The office became an “innovation junction” of technologies, creating new functions and a new office hierarchy that was reflected in office buildings, lay-out, and furnishing. Technology was an enabling and promoting actor, but not the primary cause of innovation. Committed managers played an important role in introducing new communication technologies. National and international networks of records management specialists and providers of office technologies were equally important. Recognition of the history of control through communication may contribute to understanding current and future ada...