3 minute read
CATEGORIES
from Evolve N°5 - ENG
by MAIRE
BUREAUCRACY
LITERARY AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES When was bureaucracy created?
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Napoleon signed the law that instituted prefects (local government representatives), on 17 February, 1800. The state system, with its army of bureaucratic and administrative officials, was born.
Which writer invented the literary genre called the “White Collar Novel”?
In 1844 Honoré de Balzac published Les Employés, a long story that was run on the pages of La Presse in which he describes the nature of the white-collar employee and sustains that “Bureaucracy is a gigantic mechanism moved by Pygmies.”
Speaking of turnaround and the need to redefine corporate culture, which book invites managers not to be afraid of eliminating “obsolete trappings”?
Who says elephants can’t dance? by Luis V. Gerstner Jr., the man who helped rebuild IBM, bringing it back from the edge of the abyss to be, once again, leaders in their market.
Why is bureaucracy often referred to as being “kafkaesque”?
Writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), born in Prague, is the author of The Process. It is the distressing novel about a bank official named Josef K. who is overwhelmed by the excesses of bureaucracy. That is why today the word kafkaesque is synonymous with paradoxical, shocking, absurd.
What does “Writing with a human voice” mean?
It means writing text with a clear sentence structure and not “clinging to gerunds like bureaucrats”. Conceived of by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger (professionals, economists and pioneers of the web) in 1999, the Cluetrain Manifest is a 95-point essay that anticipates the impact of the internet on markets and organizations.
The first six theories are eloquent:
1. Markets are conversations. 2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. 3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. 4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. 5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice. 6. The internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
What is the name of the novel that describes the life of a group of U.S. tax agency officials from the Midwest?
The unfinished posthumous novel was called The Pale King, written by David Foster Wallace. The common thread linking the main characters is their need to face the “intense tediousness of their work” in a highly hierarchical and bureaucratized workplace.
“Bureaucratese is the anti-language”, the title of a long article published in the newspaper Il Giorno on 3 February, 1965 declared. Who was the author?
This refection was written by Italo Calvino in response to Pier Paolo Pasolini regarding the debate on the linguistic dynamics of those years, which were characterized by great cultural and economic transformation.
Which films portray bureaucracy as a defining theme of the plot?
The Terminal by Steven Spielberg, with Tom Hanks whose character is obliged to live in an American airport for months due to a bureaucratic loophole.
Fantozzi of Luciano Salce, with Paolo Villaggio in the role of a humble and unlucky office worker, ignored by his colleagues and afraid of his bosses.
Tucker. The Man and His Dream by Francis Ford Coppola. The true story of a man who dreams of creating an innovative automobile company but is driven to failure by political pressure and the interests of multinational automobile corporations.
Ikiru (aka Vivere) by Akira Kurosawa, a film that tells the story of the suffering of a bureaucrat from Tokyo and his search for the meaning of life.
