Centering: All choice moves through the apex of the pyramid. Centering causes silos (vertical chains for submission of approvals and signatures) that slow down implementation. Monetary systems, production systems, and decision systems can all be centered.

Construction: An interpretation that privileges one view over another. Construction can be a term, metaphor, theme, trope or an entire story that casts people in a particular perspective. It can be a plot, dichotomy, dimension, or scenario. In the Vietnam War, "domino theory" was a construction. Common words like "cycle time" can be constructions that coaxes us to look at efficiency instead of alternative interpretations, such as "slack time" or "break time."

Control: Control happens through elite and dominating cadres of executives in back rooms as they chomp on cigars. Besides elite control, there is control by being regulated and institutionalized in what Michel Foucault calls the capillary network of disciplinary and punishment mechanisms that operate from one end and layer of the bureaucratic firm to the other. Foucault makes the point that rather than being controlled by some invisible elite, we are complicit in our own control. We self-observe, self-discipline, and self-control.

Decenter: Resources (material, informational, and symbolic) including choice and discretion get channeled through the center. De-centering removes the center position in a network and installs a multiplicity of centers that struggle and compromise to control organizations and the people trapped in them.

Deconstruction: A method to analyze and recognize constructions. To deconstruct is to take apart, turn inside out, dismantle, reverse, and distort a construction. In deconstruction, we look for excluded voices, exceptions to rules and prescriptions, and for hidden exploitations left between the lines of a story or other construction. Deconstruction assumes every story has many sides, most of which are understated in a story (See Appendix A).

Difference: The postmodern turn is a search for and a celebration of differences. "Vive la difference!" Diversity is an asset, not a cost or something to be controlled or exploited. It is postmod to assume that increasing the heterogeneity of viewpoints, pathways, involvements, relationships, and constructions will free us cogs from the modernist project.

Differential status: Executive officers are at the top, managers and staffs are beneath them. Workers, customers and suppliers litter the bottom of the pyramid. Gender and race can also be categories for differential status.

Discourse: Discourse can be as simply as conversation and as complex as philosophy essays. Even in an essay, the writer is in discourse with the reader. For Bakhtin, the Russian novelist, we speak with a and we listen with a multiplicity of voices. A speak as professor, man, husband, father, rebel, and environmentalist. You listen as student, male or female, rebel, conformist, etc. The discourse therefore is multi-layered and multi-voiced. Organizations are a struggle of pre-mod, mod, and postmod discourse.

Essentialisms: Big words psychologists use to categorize and dehumanize humans. Essentialisms are micro theories that stereotype (even if unintentionally so) classes or groups of people by their essential-personality traits, essential-types, or essential-behavioral patterns. Myers-Briggs, for example says my essential is an "intuitive-thinker" who sometimes acts as a "sensing-thinker," but never as a "sensing-feeler." Postmods do not but in to other people's categories of who we are. "All labels exploit."

Exploitation: People use other people in ways that brings them power, control, and profit while those being exploited get less and less. Inequity, unfairness, injustice, mixed with some naive or pre-meditated sleeze is part of exploitation. Exploitation can be sexual, racial, colonial, paternalistic, and bureaucratic. In every social structure, some group of people manage to exploit other groups of people. Many managers practice exploitation while mouthing words like "empowerment" and "human resource management."

Factory-bureaucracy: A combination of Max Weber's bureaucratic rules, positional pyramid, and chain of command with Frederic Taylor's and Henry Ford's factory system. Weber wanted bureaucracy to end the exploitation and inequities of feudal governance. Taylor wanted to end the "systematic soldier" and goldbricking he saw workers doing that exploited owners and managers by dividing the work force into "those who think" and "those who work." Ford sought to regiment labor through mechanized and automated work processes. The combination of factory and bureaucracy is an authoritarian, inflexible, hierarchical division of labor in a mechanistic manufacturing machine. Postmods do not see Japan's so-called "flexible manufacturing system" as much different than traditional factory-bureaucracy.

Marginalizing: Ignoring or discounting other people's reality by constructing and positioning them in ways undercut their equal participation. Women in traditional paternalistic marriages are denied equal say over their own body, family funds, and shelter. Racial minorities get less play in historical accounts than majority races. There is a saying: "the person with the sword writes the history and makes all the rules." To find the marginals, look for the points of struggle, resistance, and conflict in organizations. Marginals occupy the borders, the shadows, the spaces between and beyond the main and central and dominant discourse. In textbooks, marginal topics like "ethics," "ecology," and "diversity" are put into little boxes, endnotes, or trailing chapters.

Modernism: Also referred to as "Mod." Excluding the stories and voices of the dominated by ignoring anything that does not fit the progress myth which institutionalizes privilege and marginalization.

Narrative: A story or account. People narrate in conversations and in written texts.

Norm: Average. The normative worker is the average worker. The normative manager is the average manager. In either case, the point is discourage performances that are too weak or too strong, so as to increase standardization and predictable control. Organizations encourage us to be average, not to be deviates, not to rebel, and certainly not to innovate. To norm someone, is also to capture them as an average category, something that is predictable and controllable.

Panoptic: Includes in one view, everything that is in sight. A panoptic tower, for example, was frequently used in prisons and concentration camps to keep every prisoner in view. In Victorian workshops, "overseers" sat on high stools to gaze the many rows of workers. Panopticism increases when there is one-way gazing: they can see your every move, but you can not see them. If you set up control such that workers never know when the boss will stick his head in the door, or look over your workmanship, then the panoptic (gaze) gets internalized. We learn to gaze ourselves and the panoptic tower and high stools can be removed (a cost saver) and our behavior is just as controlled as before.

Performativity: People are "human resources" to be used by the system in order to maximize system efficiency, production control, capital return, and administrative flexibility. Lyotard (1984) looks at the downside of "maximizing" productivity and treating humans as mere "capital resources." Feminists argue that maximizing efficiency by performativity may increase quality and lower costs, but at the uncalculated and externalized cost of mother earth. Performativity is a narrow and myopic view that discourages diversity, autonomy, flexibility and openness because it interferes with maximizing the bottom line.

Positivism: Treats human experience and people like objects. All knowledge and truth is based on empirical and factual evidence. It is a system of philosophy originated by Auguste Compte in which observable facts are scientific and unobservables are subjective and speculative, and therefore unscientific.

Positivized: When a social scientist or even a bureaucrat converts and captures a person as an array of numbers or a list of categorical terms that can be put into a file. The positivized person has been reduced to a set of normative data points.

Postmodern: Also referred to as postmod. Postmodern is constructing or resurrecting the stories and voices of those excluded, marginalized, and exploited in the modernist project. Postmod can be affirmative in the assumption that exploitation can be countered by more enlightened and empowering administrative and human relations practices. On the other hand, there is skeptical postmodernism, where any formula for fairness and justice can be exploited into a routine of higher performativity, and render any postmod prescription into a modernist command and control tool. This is why postmods avoid solutions.

Pre-modern: Also called pre-mod. Pre-mod is a discourse rooted in the pre-industrial era of American extending back into feudal culture. Fraternities and sororities, as well as Supreme Courts and University Trustees exhibit discursive practices rooted in pre-modern times. The plus side of pre-mod is the sense of craftsmanship and strong sense of community. On the negative side there is slavery, bondage, religious repression, and torture. The modernist project attempted to move beyond pre-mod, but it is our view that much about society in general, and business organizations, specifically, is still quite pre-mod.

Privileging: A construction that benefits one group of people at everyone else's expense. In any social system, some people have more advantage, favor, rights, exceptions, and equities than other groups. Privileged people do not play by the same rules.

Progress Myth: The belief that through technology, training, or education that somehow society is getting better off each year. Skeptics argue that society is not moving forward to perfection. There are many pre-modern practices, such as an appreciation for crafts people and artisans, as well as ways of living that did not consume near as much mother earth resources that deny the progress myth. Proponents of the progress myth point to the many labor saving advantages of technology like computers and fax machines and accuse those who stand in the way of being Luddites. But maybe the Luddites, that group of workers in England (1811-1816) who smashed new labor saving textile machinery to protest their reduced wages and under-employment were right.

Story: A story is a communication between two or more persons during which a past or anticipated experience is referenced, recounted, interpreted, or challenged (Boje, 1991: 111). Stories can be as terse, coded, and abbreviated as when you tell someone else "you know the story" and without unfolding the story, they get the whole story. Or, story can be an entire storyline, complete with plot, characters, dialogue, climax, opener, and a moral point. How coded or how extended the story is, depends on context: do you know the person well enough to assume they can fill in the blanks; do you trust them enough to tell them the whole story; do you have time; do you have the right to tell this story?

Surveillance: Also called "the gaze." Michel Foucault's work focuses our attention on any device, no matter how well-intended, that collects information, observation, and data on our person. With every ounce of gaze, we lose our freedom and our privacy. A simple mechanism like MBO (management by objectives) can collect info on our movements, contacts, and thinking that can be exploited to control and to docilize our behavior. Surveillance gets "internalized" when we are conditioned to gaze our own thoughts and actions.

Totalism: Writing a total history from one view, usually white-male, while leaving out all "other's" stories. Totalism privilege one particular and usually narrow point of view. The postmod approach is to deconstruct a totalism to include many and often conflicting accounts from many perspectives. Many voices have been left out of history in ways that privilege some and marginalize and even exclude or expunge many others.

Universalisms: Big words sociologists use to dehumanize human beings. A universal is a grand and macro principle or theory. It is a sweeping statement that glosses a whole lot of differences in many local accounts. Universalism is so focus on the whole grand scheme or grand narrative, that the diversity of perspectives gets trampled. Postmods deconstruct universals by pointing out exceptions, exclusions, contradictions, and inapplicabilities.

Valorize: To fix or control the value of something or some category by setting it up on a pedestal. Empowerment, for example, is a term that has Mom and Apple Pie connotations, but can be used to cloak more exploitive practices. When we valorize we make something have a sacred or ideal quality and can forget to check it out critically.

Voice: When you have a voice you speak and get heard. When you are voiceless, you are mute and silent. Even when you speak, without voice you have no impact. To be voiceless is a deprivation of your ability to speak from your own person. In every social structure, some voices are heard, others speak but are not heard, and some do not speak at all. The exploitation is when your lose your voice and others begin to speak for you or even through you. Can you voice your opinions openly and honestly? When do you speak what the organization prefers you speak? If you are female, do you get to speak as a female or as a male?

White male voices: They have traditionally drowned out all "other" voices.