Results tagged “language” from Uncivil Society
I just read the following in a recent appeals court opinion on the scope of the interstate commerce clause regarding civil commitment to a federal prison:
In 1937, Felix Frankfurter wrote: "If the Thames is 'liquid history,' the Constitution of the United States is most significantly not a document but a stream of history. And the Supreme Court has directed the stream." Felix Frankfurter, The Commerce Clause 2 (1937). With regard to the Commerce Clause, that stream has not been straight. Rather, it has been bending.
Above: a Latin quote on a converted prison in Amsterdam admonishes that "a wise person does not piss into the wind."
Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker of Eyak--RIP.
If you want to understand a major influence on my understanding of and advice to the social enterprise movement, read this useful new research paper from Santa Fe: "Language is a complex adaptive system."
Sony has taken over Grand Central, sponsoring the Kaleidoscope light show & the AQUOS Experience LCD tree. Well, OK, not a tree, but an ecumenical "tower."
As in, you know, Babel.
Anyway, for a sense of how the tree looks and sounds, watch below. You might also want to check out this video for the whole tree, though the music is washed out by the crowd noise.
As you might suspect, that's not the only reason I spent time around this particular holiday tree. No, what particularly grabbed me: the charitable tie-in and accompanying PR about the AQUOS Experience as a "symbol of hope." Perhaps the hope & charity part would be more convincing if it dropped the biz-speak, such as the references to "each individual consumer" and "enhancing the holiday atmosphere in the terminal."
I also like the explanation, in the blurb just linked above, as to how the affiliated charity's Green Collar Project "aligns well with Sony's core vision of creating energy-saving and energy-creating products"--as if making products that actually *consume* energy is just an unfortunate accident.
Anyway, here's the beginning of the official explanation of the charity connection:
Sharp designed the AQUOS Experience, which will be on display throughout the month of December, enhancing the holiday atmosphere in the terminal. As part of this initiative, Sharp will be making a significant donation to The HOPE Program, a charity that equips its participants with the skills they need to find, keep, and advance in jobs. With Sharp's donation, The HOPE Program will be able to launch the "Green Collar Project," a new program to help people find green collar jobs in an environmental field. This will not only allow participants to become economically self sufficient, but will also help preserve the environment.
"We created the AQUOS Experience as a symbol of hope, especially important during this holiday season, and chose to work with The HOPE Program to help those who are out of work," said Doug Koshima, chairman and CEO, Sharp Electronics Corporation.
"Sustainopreneurship" is unsustainable, just another example of how do-gooders lacking self-awareness ride semantic waves.
Because that's what people want--monetized justice. As for bazaar-style negotiation, you do realize that there are imbalances in power, resources and knowledge that create systemic bias in the outcomes, right?
Cripes, people. Think about what you're saying.
People, don't you realize how empty this parroted biz-speak sounds after the crash?
"Life is defined by form."
That's the theme of the exhibit in the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, a compelling fusion of commerce and art. I'll have more to say about it when I'm not preparing for class, but for now I'll say simply that if you're in NYC and are interested in the dynamics of corporate identity, it's worth checking out.
No surprise to anyone who has read my academic work, my favorite art in the pavilion was Sidewalk, which shows the image of a cityscape in pools of water off the street. "I've always preferred the reflection of things to the things themselves."
And self-identified social entrepreneurs--if you don't see the connection between this exhibit and charity/business hybrids, you really need to think about what you mean by the term. For "social enterprise" to be coherent, it has to signify something more than just "things we like."
The current financial crisis understandably has some do-gooders concerned. Organizations that relied on hefty returns from cutting-edge investments can no longer rely on Wall Street to fund existing programs. News reporters and nonprofit leaders are bleeding barrels of digital ink assessing the potential impact on donations, and charities that relied on debt financing are likely to face some difficult times.
These are no doubt important issues, but the effects of the crisis do not stop with money. It also shapes how people think. Capital markets morph from safe bets to slot machines. Investment bankers become villains. Entrepreneurship seems too risky for hard times, while government grants replace earned income as the symbol of sustainability.
Whether these responses are wise is open to debate, but the unavoidable fact is that they exist. People think about business one way during a bubble and another after it bursts--a response with deep roots in the way we're coded to see success and danger.
While this response may have a measurable impact on cash flow, it has even greater implications for how people perceive social enterprise. The movement has yet to grasp the extent to which it is as much a product of the bubble as subprime loans and credit-default swaps--it's not just a coincidence that do-gooders started talking business when business was good. At the peak of the bubble this gave the movement a rhetorical advantage, but as the economy tanks, this same language can make the social entrepreneur seem untrustworthy, defined by profit, self-interest and the very business practices that created the problems charity now has to solve.
For social enterprise to be more than a passing fad, we must re-think what it means and why it matters. Is Social Enterprise Sustainable? provides my own answers to these questions. I've put it online in both the print version and a director's cut series of blog posts with illustrative pictures and video. It's the first in a series of related projects, so if you read even just a part of it please feel free to share your own thoughts!
Social enterprise suffers from a serious design flaw: it focuses attention on commerce as the defining trait of a medium ostensibly distinct from commercial values. The peak of a business cycle can mask this--business becomes associated with success, and the relative contrast between types of business helps maintain the integrity of the charitable form. But the economy crashes, the commercial elements become more distinct--the social entrepreneur seems preoccupied by profit, self-interest and the business practices that created the problems we now need to solve.
A sign of the cultural shift to which social entrepreneurs need to adapt: the resurgence of business as the villain in popular entertainment.
Saatchi & Saatch launches a salvo against the green "straightjacket." One small step for Saatchi; one giant leap for social enterprise becoming the next so-called traditional charity.
Here we go again . . .
Above: a poster for the Vendy Awards, a project of the Urban Justice Center designed to promote its Street Vendor Project:
[I]n recent years, vendors have been victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life†crackdown. They have been denied access to vending licenses. Many streets have been closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups. They receive $1,000 tickets for minor violations like vending too close to a crosswalk -- more than any big businesses are required to pay for similar violations.
The Street Vendor Project is a membership-based project with more than 750 active vendor members who are working together to create a vendors' movement for permanent change. We reach out to vendors in the streets and storage garages and teach them about their legal rights and responsibilities. We hold meetings where we plan collective actions for getting our voices heard. We publish reports and file lawsuits to raise public awareness about vendors and the enormous contribution they make to our city. Finally, we help vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans.
In recent years, the social enterprise movement has more-or-less succeeded in associating "local" with "virtuous" in relation to commercial business. The Street Cart Project reflects similar semantic play, contrasting the mobile cart to a fixed structure.
Once again, design plays a role in our ethical perception. Separate carts distract from the issue of common corporate ownership, as do compelling stories of plucky individuals making a living on the streets. Moreover, note the winner of the People's Choice Vendy, the Dessert Truck--while a crowd favorite among professionals and the upwardly mobile, it's also part of a broader trend of gentrification within the street vendor industry. Replace a old diner with a gourmet dessert shop and New York is dying; flood the streets with Food Network friendly carts and you're a champion of the dispossessed.
Just got back from the Watchmen screening at Time Warner. The movie really does seem to have waited until Zack Snyder could direct it--his play with time is ideal for this story, making the film as much a personal statement as an adaptation of someone else's book. The Q&A that followed the screening was equally engaging, particularly when it explored translating visual vocabulary across media and balancing multiple interests within a collective creation.
But, as always, what most engages me at events like this is meeting a bunch of interesting people. One thing that shone throughout the evening was the passion everyone felt for their work--Zack and Debbie Snyder, Paul Levitz, Dave Gibbons, the Time Warner archivists and the publicity team made the evening feel like much more than a promotional preview.
And that's exactly how such events should feel, because that sense of something more is exactly what art conveys.
"I don't know what was so "Great" about the Depression, but that's the name they give it."
So the stock market rises on news of a government bailout and new limits on securities transactions.
With the stock market (for the moment) stabilizing, does that mean the market rhetoric of social enterprise is stable as well?
No.
The situation is far more complex.
In a nutshell, the rebounding confidence in the economy is a response to the infusion of external unearned support.
That's not so much faith in the market as the entire system. Were there renewed faith in the market--and its metaphors--the surge would have recurred without the rescue plan and the news of government intervention would shake investor confidence.
Let's put it in the market language of social entrepreneurs.
Social enterprise C is humming along selling cookies made by prisoners. People wise up that the cookies suck and that they're only buying 'em because of the charity. C's ex-customers start stocking up on Pepperidge Farm instead.
Sales plummet, and it looks like C will go bankrupt.
But hooray, at the last minute a foundation gives C a million dollar grant and C goes on selling its cookies.
That's not a validation of the self-sustaining triple bottom line. It's traditional charity.
UPDATE: Paul Kedrosky pretty much sums up the market situation:
I should be happy, I suppose, but I'm mostly depressed and dismayed. While something is necessary, it's tragic that it has had to come to this, and the political and economic fallout will be gigantic and long-lasting.
And Robert Reich:
Another major step toward socialized capitalism.
Another nonprofit law class done, another day explaining legal language in ways that (I hope) make sense to non-lawyers.
Speaking of which, if you're into international aid--and to a certain extent nowadays in do-gooder-land, who isn't?--I've been enjoying Alanna Shaikh's Blood and Milk, the source of the nifty graphic above. Alanna offers a no-BS perspective on popular buzzwords as well as useful advice for folks who are or wannabe in the field.
It's an area of the charity biz for which I've long had a particular interest, even if the actual day-to-day reality can be a bit disconcerting. Alanna's reflections on pretentious expats are spot on--the post about suffering reminded me of my time in Russia when it was making the transition from scarcity to abundance. Mimetic consumerism, not noble self-restraint, became the order of the day.
One of the things we chat about in my entrepreneurship class is the repurposing of old media in new contexts. The candle flips from illumination to atmosphere; the horse, from engine to entertainment; the museum, from gateway to the new to mausoleum for the old.
Above: the faux bookstore facade of new Lower East Side hotspot The Eldridge, home of the apparently recession-proof $32 cocktail.
The place has already turned away one would-be patron — a book collector who spotted a certain tome in the window that he had spent 25 years looking for. Sorry, buddy, not tonight.
Russell T. Davies, producer & writer of the utterly wonderful Doctor Who revamp, has a new book called A Writer's Tale, excerpts of which are appearing in the London Times. There's a lot of good stuff in here for anyone who makes a career out of self-expression--"A hundred versions of me, and every single one sounds like a fool" echoes my own inner voice after I give a talk, no matter how successful--but the following rumination on the writer's voice is particularly noteworthy:
You ask how a writer finds their voice. Now, that's a question!... Gaining a voice, whatever that is, comes with experience and practice - and the writing, again, is indivisible from the person. Your voice tends to be something that other people talk about, about you. It's not something that you think about much yourself, and certainly not whilst writing. I never - never - sit here thinking, what's my voice? You might as well ponder, who am I? It is, in fact, exactly the same thing. You can wonder your whole life and you'll never get an answer to that.
