Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

198 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
centered capitalist institution. the second that that sphere was permeable and
in fux because employees hailed from many localities around the world and
because, as a multinational, the corporation always was operating in someone
else’s backyard. Culture was something around which a company had to defne
itself (Motorola culture). Yet, in the global age, “home” was complex and
mobile, refective of the world’s many diasporas—of people, individually and
en masse, following the fow lines of capital. home inhered in individuals even
as they moved (with Motorola employees themselves an example) and in those
places from which they came. Motorola and home cultures were oppositional
and profoundly interpenetrating. 32
Uncompromising Integrity’s preoccupation with culture—perceived as
variegated and everywhere, in specifc geographical places, in institutions
(including Motorola), in individuals, and pulsing through the many channels
of the media—had a corporate history. It encapsulated more than 15 years of
high-level managerial attention to the global. It led executives in the late 1980s
to create a hybrid academic-corporate institution—Motorola university—to
engage and comprehend the fauna and fora of culture-world. this book was
a product of that—a Motorola university press publication! Lest this example
seem quirky and isolated, note that it exemplifed a larger trend: over a decade,
from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, more than a thousand corporate universities
were created in the united States—all of which were a response, in one fashion
or another, to the perceived challenge of culture and semiotics to transnational
business practice. 33
the biography of the lead author—r. S. Moorthy—makes concrete some of
the issues of identity and politics embedded in these developments. Born into an
Indian family and raised in poverty in Malay, as a young man he found work in a
Motorola facility in that country. his professional life at Motorola became one of
reconciling his origins in a place with a specifc history, one tied to colonialism
and the new globalism, with the purposes and outlooks of a multinational frm.
he found a way to marry his interests with Motorola’s culture preoccupation
and he came to play a major role in establishing Motorola university, creating a
subunit of that enterprise, the Center for Culture and technology.
this vignette only is meant to suggest the complicated and non-obvious
ways in which social boundaries got created and negotiated and how semiotics
constrained and enabled this process at diferent levels of corporate activity. as
one instance, consider this graphic (see fgure) outlining the manufacturing fow
for the Iridium project, one that required a transnational “virtual factory”—
32. a particularly cogent analysis of culture in its post-1970 global dimensions is Zygmunt Baumann,
Culture As Praxis, pp. vii-lv.
33. For an overview of this trend from a policy perspective, see Stuart, Cunningham, et al., The
Business of Borderless Education (Canberra:Commonwealth of australia,department of education,
Youth, and training, 2000).