Deadly Documents
Baywood Publishing Company Inc (Verlag)
978-0-89503-802-9 (ISBN)
The initial chapters of Deadly Documents provide a historical ethnography of the SS technical bureau by closely describing the institutional and organizational cultures in which it operated and relating organizational stories told in postwar testimony by the desk-murderers themselves. Then, through examination of the primary material of their documents, Ward demonstrates how this Social Darwinist world of competing Nazi bureaucrats deployed rhetorical and linguistic resources to construct a social reality that normalized genocide. Ward goes beyond the usual Weberian bureaucratic paradigm and applies to the problem of the Holocaust both the interpretive view that sees organizations as socially constructed through communication and the postmodern view that denies the notion of a preexisting social object called an “organization” and instead situates it within larger discourses.
The concluding chapters trace how contemporary scholars of professional communication have wrestled with the Nazi case and developed a consensus explanation that the desk-murderers were amoral technocrats. Though the explanation is dismissed by most historians, it nevertheless offers, Ward argues, a comforting distance between “us” and “them.” Yet, as Ward writes, “First, we will learn more about the dynamic role of everyday texts in organizational processes. Second, as we see these processes—perhaps inherent to all organized communities, including our own—at work even in the extreme case of the SS Technical Matters Group, the comforting distance that we now maintain between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is necessarily diminished. And third, our newfound discomfort may open productive spaces to revisit conventional wisdoms about the ethics of technical and organizational communication.”
Ward, Mark
Preface by Mark Ward, Sr.
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1: Can Genocide Be Regulated?
An Ontological Shift
Revisiting the Final Solution
Sample, Method, and Chapter Organization
The Importance of the Study
CHAPTER 2: From Darwin to Death Wagons
Origins of European Anti-Semitism
The Rise of Racial Anti-Semitism
Development of the Gas Vans
Operational Challenges in the Field
CHAPTER 3: The People’s Community
Organizations as Open Systems
Unifying Principles of Institutional Culture
Aspects of SS Organizational Culture
Lines of Organizational Authority
German Bureaucratic Document Protocols
CHAPTER 4: The Participants and Their Motives
Personnel of the Gas Van Program
Individual Relationships and Motives
CHAPTER 5: Documents for Destruction
Setting Up the Analyses
Introducing the Documents
CHAPTER 6: A Community of Killers
Constructing the Rhetorical Community
A “Safety” Narrative and Protean Metaphors
Discovering Organizational Genres in the Texts
Rhetorical Community in Organizational Contexts
Visuality in the Rhetorical Community
CHAPTER 7: Discourse of Death
What Discourse Analysis Can Add
The Killers’ Use of Linguistic Resources
Reconstructing an Organizational Discourse
CHAPTER 8: Revisiting “Expediency”
Boundary Work in Action
Lanzmann and the “Why” Question
Implications of the Lanzmann Alterations
CHAPTER 9: Bridging the Boundaries
An Ahistorical Consensus?
Expediency Without Ethics
Protecting Rhetoric and Rhetoricians
Safeguarding Science and Civilization
Converging on a Comfortable Distance
What the Orderings May Reveal
CHAPTER 10: Some Ethical Implications
A Bias for Explanation
Prescriptive and Descriptive Ethics
Afterword: The Reality of Words and Their Aftermaths
Steven B. Katz
References
Index
| Reihe/Serie | Baywood's Technical Communications |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Amityville |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 385 g |
| Themenwelt | Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Kommunikationswissenschaft |
| Technik | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-89503-802-1 / 0895038021 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-89503-802-9 / 9780895038029 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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