Michel Foucault’s lessons for business | Hacker News Reader

Michel Foucault’s lessons for business

economist.com

43 pointsthisisit11 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

So this is revisionist fluff. How meta.

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

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

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.

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