Publish What You Pay (PWYP) is an organisation that campaigns for resource extraction companies to publish all royalties and other payments made in the countries in which they work. It is largely focussed on companies working in poorer countries where corruption is less subtle than we are used to and where governments often secretly negotiate…
Month: September 2012
Dignity at work???
If you google ‘dignity at work’ you get a bunch of websites against bullying and harassment in the workplace. But I have met plenty of people who are not bullied or harassed in the workplace who still give the impression their work, roles or treatment at work are not dignified. There are a lot of…
Lovink and organised networks
I picked up Lovink’s book Networks without a cause quite by chance in the library the other day and discovered him talking about ‘organised networks’. Most participatory platforms emphasize a model of weak links (think ‘friends of friends’) that attract a community just to ‘hang out’, conveniently for the corporations that exploit our social relationships….
Notes on 19th September 2012
Today I spent the day researching and documenting the involvement of multinational mining corporations with horrendous paramilitary groups in Colombia. I noted that, while the facts are known, each incident in which a company is involved in death threats and murder is written off as a ‘mistake’. And yet it keeps happening. On the street…
The view from the top
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who does a technical job for a large company that has brought him into contact with the senior management. His initial description of their behaviour was ‘fascistic’. I asked him to qualify this and he said they appeared to be driven by a sense of duty so hardline…
Valve and the structure of corporations
This post a copy of an email from Daz – some replies to follow below. This was an interesting read from the perspective of a relatively new employee at Valve, a games company, with regards to his view of Valve as a non-capitalist firm with no management hierarchy: Why Valve? Or, what do we need…
The Good Banker
The other day I met a woman just starting a career in banking in Spain, a country even more screwed by its banks than we are. She made the following statements: The problem with banks is that they have bad people at the top. We change the people at the top but it doesn’t change…
The ‘limits of possibility’ of organisational and social reform
A Prof. Erik Olin Wright here talks about the conviction that it is impossible to challenge the nature of ‘capitalism’ (whatever we take that to mean) itself, through incremental institutional reforms within our current economic system. This is claimed by much of the far left, essentially for ideological reasons. His conclusions for the whole lecture…
Orson Welles the accidental radical?
In this video Orson Welles makes a proposal for an organisation. The video is worth watching from about 1.30. The description of the organisation starts at 4.28 if you are particularly time-poor today. While hedging about his proposal with all kinds of caveats to show that what he is suggesting is not based on radical…
Does Avaaz make good use of social media?
What Avaaz and the likes of 38 degrees have done recently is use the internet and social media to build large national/global networks of campaign activists who can be called upon at a moments notice to do this or that. This is probably a good thing. But is Avaaz as innovative as it could be?…