Week 3, blog 3
For the blog entry on web lecture Metaphors & Culture, I will talk about “Hegemony.” Hegemony is deeply rooted in the critical approaches to organization that views organizations as instruments of domination that enhances the interest of elite members of the organization at the expense of all the other members. Hegemony refers to domination of one group over another and creation of power relationships in such a way that those who are oppressed accept and contribute to the further oppression.
From my personal experiences in the information technology field, I can see Hegemony happening more in high-tech industries where certain groups emit power through their technical know-how and know-what over those groups of employees who are not technically savvy. For examples, the group of programmers and developers who make the actual software products can create a dominating relationship with product managers and the marketing group. Due to their lack of technical knowledge and lack of posing technically challenging questions, the product managers and the marketing group is more likely to accept the explanations and demands of the programmers/developers which can continue to build on to the dominating relationship. As a result, product managers and marketing group contributes to their own oppression.
I have also seen Hegemony at SJSU, where the University Computing and Telecommunications (UCAT) department plays the dominating group over the group of department administrators, professors, and students who basically buy in to what ever is put on table for them to choose from without challenging the status quo because UCAT is in a better position to defend their technical infrastructure, products and decisions. With continual agreement to UCAT practices, the other university groups described above fuel their own oppression.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree that Hegemony appears often in technological branches of organizations. I even have noticed that I will let someone who is technologically savvy take over whenever I have questions about anything electronic because I sometimes feel technologically challenged. My computer crashed a couple of months ago and we took it to Geek Squad and were completely shocked at how they treated us. They lied to us about when they would start working on the computer and then refused to look deeper to see if they could salvage any files. We ended up having to take it to a friend of a friend who was able to help. But the Geek Squad totally used us and then charged us for doing nothing but expected us to be so stupid that we would not be able to understand anything and realize they were using us. It can be frustrating to have that type of domination occurring but in an organization I believe it can also bring out the true leaders of the company.
ReplyDelete