
Michel Foucault’s lessons for business - thisisit
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/06/23/michel-foucaults-lessons-for-business
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hasbroslasher
This is like 3 Foucault quotes and the rest is an overview of Alphabet, AWS,
and other tech firms. It would've been interesting to hear about how his other
theories relate to the business world. Not that the article isn't correct in
some sense, but the connection to the man's writings is pretty barebones. Low
new information density here.

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ucaetano
While I dislike most postmodern philosophy and a good chunk of Foucault's, the
core of the article is based on the concept that if you can define how pieces
of an industry are named and grouped, you will hold power over how that
industry developes.

That is aligned to how Foucault deals with taxonomy: if you have the power to
name things, you have power over how people perceive things.

So you shouldn't focus just on your own business when naming and segmenting
your company, but also on the lasting impact that such actions will take on
competitors, partners and customers.

Edit:

And you can extend and link this to Dawkins' Meme concept. "Discourse", as
used by Foucault, carries a similar (but distinct) concept as the Meme, with
the key difference that while Meme talks about an idea (communicated or not),
discourse references the communication of such an idea.

So building up on the meme-gene comparison, if a meme is a cultural equivalent
of a gene, then discourse is the cultural equivalent of the procreation, or
dissemination, of an idea.

So, if you can control discourse, you're controlling the creation and
dissemination of ideas, you can control how others perceive your company.

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hasbroslasher
> While I dislike most postmodern philosophy and a good chunk of Foucault's,
> the core of the article is based on the concept that if you can define how
> pieces of an industry are named and grouped, you will hold power over how
> that industry developes.

I'd say there's plenty about postmodern philosophy to dislike outside of this,
but I also don't think that this take from Foucault is inherently postmodern.
The concept of the "true name" in Abrahamic mysticism is humorously really
closely related to Foucault's taxonomy - if you know the true name of a spirit
or demon, you can control it in the same way that you can control the image of
your business through taxonomy.

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inputcoffee
One of the interesting aspects of Foucault's take on power was that it was
constitutive.

To put it another way, the company that reclassifies what it does, or uses a
new taxonomy may actually be trying to change itself by doing so and may
succeed.

The big difference between the taxonomy a company constructs, and the kind
that historians construct, of course is that companies have a real measurable
output -- profit -- that they have to achieve.

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foop123
According to Foucault, there is no such difference as the one you posit, only
a relative difference in time-scale.

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crsv
This whole article seems borderline nonsensical. It's taking outlier companies
and shoehorning them in to fitting a cursory take on Foucault's work for the
sake of entertainment.

It's not a lesson or meaningful or helpful in any way, which was ultimately a
huge disappointment for me as the reader.

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russtrpkovski
SEC plays a role in asking companies to disclose more information on business
segment revenue

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sec-tell-us-more-about-
all...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sec-tell-us-more-about-all-this-
money-2018-04-19)

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TooBrokeToBeg
> Mr Bezos changed its taxonomy by “breaking out” AWS, its cloud-hosting
> business

So this is revisionist fluff. How meta.

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andrenth
Tech has enough word salad already, no need for Foucault.

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pteredactyl
Yes, let's conflate Foucault's postmodernism with modern tech capitalism.

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tomcam
To understand the folly of using long-dead social theorist Foucault for the
reading of economic tea leaves, let's turn the tables. "Doug McMillon's
lessons for writing literary criticism." McMillon is the CEO of Wal-Mart. Each
was equally qualified to write about the other.

