http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7913 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/42423 Executive coaching : crafting a versatile self in corporate America Ozkan, Esra In recent years, coaching has become a major form of personal and professional development service offered to executives to help develop leadership skills, enhance performance, and remediate patterns of problematic workplace behavior. This dissertation examines the emergence and development of executive coaching in the United States as a new form of professional expertise. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research, the majority of which took place in New York City, this study analyzes the ways in which executive coaching brings together theories of individual psychology and of organizational efficiency in order to increase functionality and productivity at work. Executive coaching is: a) a new form of professional expertise, b) a management tool to increase productivity and efficiency at work, c) a window to changing notions of the self and personhood in America and, finally d) an access point to the corporate world. This study explores these four dimensions of executive coaching. I argue that the emergence of coaching is a product of and a response to a fast changing business environment where continuous improvement is required to adapt to the volatility of changes. Change in the larger context (corporate settings and business environments) is not to be resisted or criticized but to be enabled through the change of the self. This dissertation illustrates and explains the grounds of a shift away from systemic approaches and systemic criticism towards individualistic approaches. Coaching emerges in and becomes an illustration of a neo-liberal economy that emphasizes constant retraining of a self that is versatile, pragmatic and fragmented. Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-218). http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17844 The archive of place : environment and the contested past of a North American plateau Turkel, William Joseph, 1967- This is a study of the role that the interpretation of material evidence plays in historical consciousness and social memory. It consists of three case studies from the Chilcotin Plateau in the west-central part of present-day British Columbia. In each, a conflict in the mid-1990s over the nature of the past and its relevance for the present allowed underlying stories to emerge. As different groups struggled to control the fate of the region and its resources, they invoked very different understandings of its past, understandings based in part on the material traces that they found there. Taken together, the case studies illustrate the fact that there is an extensive division of interpretive labor when it comes to the material evidence of the past. Like other kinds of labor, this interpretation takes part in a political economy. Studies of material evidence are done to further the interests of individuals or groups, are valued and exchanged with one another, and are important in the delineation of property rights, the enforcement of laws and the justification of ideologies. What emerges is not an authoritative or univocal environmental history of a place, but rather a contest to find a past which will be usable in the present and future. The constant interpretation of material evidence allows people to situate themselves with respect to place, time and other people. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (p. 310-337). http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40976 Modeling proteins, making scientists : an ethnography of pedagogy and visual cultures in contemporary structural biology Myers, Natasha This ethnography tracks visualization and pedagogy in the burgeoning field of structural biology. Structural biologists are a multidisciplinary group of researchers who produce models and animations of protein molecules using three-dimensional interactive computer graphics. As they ramp up the pace of structure determination, modeling a vast array of proteins, these researchers are shifting life science research agendas from decoding genetic sequence data to interpreting the multidimensional forms of molecular life. One major hurdle they face is training a new generation of scientists to work with multi-dimensional data forms. In this study I document the formation and propagation of tacit knowledge in structural biology laboratories, in classrooms, and at conferences. This research shows that structural biologists-in-training must cultivate a feel for proteins in order to visualize and interpret their activity in cells. I find that protein modeling relies heavily on a set of practices I call the body-work of modeling. These tacit skills include: a) forms of kinesthetic knowledge that structural biologists gain through building and manipulating molecular models, and by using their own bodies as mimetic models to help them figure out how proteins move and interact; and b) narrative strategies that assume a teleological relationship between form and function, and which figure proteins through analogies with familiar human-scale phenomena, such as the pervasive description of proteins as "machines." What I find is that these researchers are not only transforming the objects of life science research: they are training a new generation of life scientists in forms of knowing attuned to the chemical affinities, physical forces and movements of protein molecules, and keyed to the tangible logic and rhetoric of "molecular machines." (cont.) This research builds on concerns in the feminist science studies literature on modes of embodiment in scientific practice, and contributes to studies of performance in science by examining visual cultures as performance cultures. In addition, I incorporate historical studies of the life sciences to map the making of the protein-this intricately crafted entity whose forms and functions, I argue, are recalibrating scientific expertise, reanimating biological imaginations, and reconfiguring the very contours and temporalities of "life itself." Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-277). http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/10807 "Datum for its own annihilation" : feedback, control, and computing, 1916-1945 Mindell, David A. (David Avram) Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1996. Includes bibliographical references.