Posthuman Management
Posthuman Management

Author: Matthew E. Gladden

Publisher: Defragmenter Media

Published: 2016-08-07

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1944373063

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What are the best practices for leading a workforce in which human employees have merged cognitively and physically with electronic information systems and work alongside social robots, artificial life-forms, and self-aware networks that are ‘colleagues’ rather than simply ‘tools’? How does one manage organizational structures and activities that span actual and virtual worlds? How are the forces of technological posthumanization transforming the theory and practice of management? This volume explores the reality that an organization’s workers, managers, customers, and other stakeholders increasingly comprise a complex network of human agents, artificial agents, and hybrid human-synthetic entities. The first part of the book develops the theoretical foundations of an emerging ‘organizational posthumanism’ and presents frameworks for understanding and managing the evolving workplace relationship between human and synthetic beings. Other chapters investigate topics such as the likelihood that social robots might utilize charismatic authority to lead human workers; potential roles of AIs as managers of cross-cultural virtual teams; the ethics and legality of entrusting organizational decision-making to spatially diffuse robots that have no discernible physical form; quantitative approaches to comparing managerial capabilities of human and artificial agents; the creation of artificial life-forms that function as autonomous enterprises competing against human businesses; neural implants as gateways that allow human users to participate in new forms of organizational life; and the implications of advanced neuroprosthetics for information security and business model design. As the first comprehensive application of posthumanist methodologies to management, this volume will interest management scholars and management practitioners who must understand and guide the forces of technologization that are rapidly reshaping organizations’ form, dynamics, and societal roles.

Organization Studies and Posthumanism
Organization Studies and Posthumanism

Author: François-Xavier de Vaujany

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-05

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1040011721

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This book aims at exploring the reception of critical posthumanist conversations in the context of Management and Organization Studies. It constitutes an invitation to de-center the human subject and thus an invitation to the ongoing deconstruction of humanism. The project is not to deny humans but to position them in relation to other nonhumans, more-than-humans, the non-living world, and all the “missing masses” from organizational inquiry. What is under critique is humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism, exceptionalism, and speciesism in the context of the Anthropocene and the contemporary crisis the world experiences. From climate change to the loss of sense at work, to the new geopolitical crisis, to the unknown effects of the diffusion of AI, all these powerful forces have implications for organizations and organizing. A re-imagination of concepts, theories, and methods is needed in organization studies to cope with the challenge of a more-than-human world.

Posthuman Cyberware
Posthuman Cyberware

Author: Matthew E. Gladden

Publisher: Mnemoclave

Published: 2017-08-20

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 1944373179

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You don’t know how far you can trust what you see or feel or remember, because it could all just be a byproduct of your neural implant or illusions fabricated by a neurohacker. Self-evolving computer viruses and stray nanorobotic swarms have taken up residence in the components of your robotic prosthetic arm. Battles over access to neurocybernetic enhancement, life-extension biotech, and immersive VR paradises are fragmenting humanity into new strata of haves and have-nots. You can never tell whether the full-body cyborgs that you see in the street belong to military units, megacorps, or bands of hackers-for-hire… or maybe all three at once. Such near-future cyberdystopias provide the perfect setting for a hard-SF roleplaying game campaign. But how much reality lies beneath their surface? Could a human mind really learn how to operate a full cyborg body that has wheels or wings or dozens of robotic tentacles, or would it be too ‘alien’? If relatively small changes in brain temperature can cause behavioral impacts (or even brain damage), is it advisable to implant a heat-spewing miniaturized supercomputer in someone’s cranium? A neural jack that lets you instantly download new skills sounds great, but could such a thing actually work? And which of your cognitive functions could a hacker take control of by compromising such a device? If you’ve ever thought about any of these questions when designing or running an adventure, then Mnemoclave’s Posthuman Cyberware Sourcebook series is meant for you. It’s designed especially for GMs who want to give their campaigns a grittier edge and loads of surprises that’ll keep their players on their toes – and for serious gamers who want to map out the potential and limitations of their characters’ cyberware from a new perspective. This first volume in the series offers an introduction to the use of neuroprostheses for sensory, cognitive, and motor enhancement and explores distinctions between posthuman and transhuman cyberware. It’s not simply a tale of artificial eyes with telescopic night vision or combat-grade cyberlimbs but also a blueprint for the development of neuroprosthetically enhanced imagination, emotions, and conscience and the creation of human-synthetic hive minds. The volume considers neuroprosthetic devices’ human hosts in their three roles as sapient minds, embodied organisms, and social and economic actors to explain how cyberware can be employed either as tools for personal empowerment and liberation or mechanisms of enslavement and zombification. The book serves as a resource for designing campaigns or one-off adventures set in worlds with a cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, or biopunk milieu in which posthumanizing cyberware exists and societies are tilting toward the dystopian. The text includes dozens of special inserts with plot hooks, character traits, equipment descriptions, and ideas regarding setting and atmosphere that help you incorporate the material directly into your game, regardless of which rule system you’re running.

Critical Posthumanism: Cloned, Toxic and Cyborg Bodies in Fiction
Critical Posthumanism: Cloned, Toxic and Cyborg Bodies in Fiction

Author: Pelin Kümbet

Publisher: Transnational Press London

Published: 2020-12-25

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1801350043

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Focusing on three representation of posthuman bodies as cloned bodies in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), toxic bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and cyborg bodies in Justina Robson’s Natural History (2004) from the theoretical perspectives of posthuman definition of what it means to be human, this study discusses the changing concept of the body. In this context, the integral and dynamic connection between a human body and the world is of special significance, which opens up new possibilities to reconfigure the human body that is no longer conceded separate from the nonhuman world but embodied in it. Each of the novels significantly displays the in-betweenness of humans by making them interact with chemical substances, machines, and other nonhuman entities, and shows how clear-cut distinctions between the human and the nonhuman bodies have collapsed.

Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh
Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh

Author: Matthew E. Gladden

Publisher: Defragmenter Media

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1944373225

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This book develops new insights into the evolving nature of organizations by applying the methodologies of posthumanist thought to the fields of organizational theory and management. An emerging 'organizational posthumanism' is described that makes sense of the ways in which forces of technological posthumanization are reshaping the members, personnel structures, information systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external environments available for use by organizations. Conceptual frameworks and analytic tools are formulated that diagnose the convergence in the capacities of human and artificial actors generated by new technologies relating to human augmentation, synthetic agency, and digital-physical ecosystems. As the first systematic study of these topics, this text will interest scholars and students of organizational management and management practitioners who grapple on a daily basis with the forces of technologization that are increasingly powerful drivers of organizational change.

The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education
The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education

Author: Chris Steyaert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-17

Total Pages: 567

ISBN-13: 1317918681

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The position and role of the business school and its educational programmes have become increasingly prominent, yet also questioned and contested. What management education entails, and how it is enacted, has become a matter of profound concern in the field of higher education and, more generally, for the development of the organized world. Drawing upon the humanities and social sciences, The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education imagines a different and better education offered to students of management, entrepreneurship and organization studies. It is an intervention into the debates on what is taught and how learning takes place, demonstrating both the potential and the limits of what the humanities and social sciences can do for management education. Divided into six sections, the book traces the history and theory of management education, reimagining central educational principles and outlining an emerging practice-based approach. With an international cast of authors, The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education has been written for contemporary and future educators and for students and scholars who seek to make a difference through their practice.

Posthuman Glossary
Posthuman Glossary

Author: Rosi Braidotti

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-02-22

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 1350030260

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If art, science, and the humanities have shared one thing, it was their common engagement with constructions and representations of the human. Under the pressure of new contemporary concerns, however, we are experiencing a “posthuman condition”; the combination of new developments-such as the neoliberal economics of global capitalism, migration, technological advances, environmental destruction on a mass scale, the perpetual war on terror and extensive security systems- with a troublesome reiteration of old, unresolved problems that mean the concept of the human as we had previously known it has undergone dramatic transformations. The Posthuman Glossary is a volume providing an outline of the critical terms of posthumanity in present-day artistic and intellectual work. It builds on the broad thematic topics of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, eco-sophies, digital activism, algorithmic cultures and security and the inhuman. It outlines potential artistic, intellectual, and activist itineraries of working through the complex reality of the 'posthuman condition', and creates an understanding of the altered meanings of art vis-à-vis critical present-day developments. It bridges missing links across disciplines, terminologies, constituencies and critical communities. This original work will unlock the terms of the posthuman for students and researchers alike.

Beyond Natural Resources to Post-Human Resources
Beyond Natural Resources to Post-Human Resources

Author: Peter Baofu

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-09-18

Total Pages: 704

ISBN-13: 1443867063

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Are natural resources really so limited that, as Mahatma Gandhi once famously said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed”? (TE 2012) This limiting view of natural resources can be contrasted with an opposing view by John Maynard Keynes, who “summarized Say’s Law as ‘supply creates its own demand’” but then “turned Say’s Law on its head in the 1930s by declaring that demand creates its own supply,” so whenever a demand exists, there will be resources to create the supply. (EN 2012) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), natural resources, in relation to both diversity and discontinuity are neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Needless to say, this challenge to the opposing views of natural resources does not mean that natural resources are unimportant, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to natural resources) like conservation biology, environmental management, ecological economics, political ecology, environmental ethics, adaptive management, genetic engineering, Malthusianism, and so on are not worth studying. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Rather, this book offers an alternative, better way to understand the future of natural resources, especially in the dialectic context of diversity and discontinuity—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the resilient theory of natural resources) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about natural resources in relation to diversity and discontinuity from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate.

New Horizons for Industry 4.0 in Modern Business
New Horizons for Industry 4.0 in Modern Business

Author: Anand Nayyar

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-02-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 3031204433

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This book discovers what it will take to reindustrialize the previous industrial powerhouses in order to offset the advantages of cheap labor suppliers dominating the industrial sector by exploring the current situation of the production, processing, and manufacturing industries. The Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Cobotics, Automation, AI, 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, SDN, Blockchain technologies are outlined in this unique and comprehensive book, which has true potential for professionals, researchers, policymakers, and book users. New Horizons for Industry 4.0 in Modern Business encompass trends in business and technology globally that may completely alter how manufacturing and production are conducted. What you will discover: Learn about the Industrial Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet. Learn about the technologies that must develop to support Industry 4.0 and what is being done right now to make that happen. In this book, the topic of Industry 4.0 is covered in detail, and it even moves on to concepts of Digital Twins to boost output and create Industrial Internet of Things. With the development of new digital industrial technology, or "Industry 4.0," it is now feasible to collect and analyze data from many machines, resulting in processes that are quicker, more adaptable, and more efficient, producing things of higher quality while spending less money. The manufacturing revolution will boost productivity, alter economics, promote industrial development, and alter workforce demographics, ultimately altering the competitiveness of businesses and areas. Although advanced digital technology is being employed in manufacturing, Industry 4.0 will completely change how things are done. Greater production efficiencies will result, and conventional connections between suppliers, manufacturers, and consumers—as well as between people and machines—will shift. Industry 4.0 is changing the business process. This disruptive technology is radically changing the way businesses/manufacturing is conducted. It will give machines that little bit of intuition with the help of robotics, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality—that will help them do mindless and repetitive jobs without human intervention, allowing humans to focus more on their core competencies.

Posthuman Knowledge
Posthuman Knowledge

Author: Rosi Braidotti

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2019-08-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781509535262

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The question of what defines the human, and of what is human about the humanities, have been shaken up by the radical critiques of humanism and the displacement of anthropomorphism that have gained currency in recent years, propelled in part by rapid advances in our knowledge of living systems and of their genetic and algorithmic codes coupled with the global expansion of a knowledge-intensive capitalism. In Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti takes a closer look at the impact of these developments on three major areas: the constitution of our subjectivity, the general production of knowledge and the practice of the academic humanities. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist theory, she argues that the human was never a neutral category but one always linked to power and privilege. Hence we must move beyond the old dualities in which Man defined himself, beyond the sexualized and racialized others that were excluded from humanity. Posthuman knowledge, as Braidotti understands it, is not so much an alternative form of knowledge as a critical call: a call to build a multi-layered and multi-directional project that displaces anthropocentrism while pursuing the analysis of the discriminatory and violent aspects of human activity and interaction wherever they occur. Situated between the exhilaration of scientific and technological advances on the one hand and the threat of climate change devastation on the other, the posthuman convergence encourages us to think hard and creatively about what we are in the process of becoming.