“Syriana” and Successive Marxist Theory Essay Example for Free

â€Å"Syriana† and Successive Marxist Theory Essay Stanley Aronowitz and William Difazio’s work on contemporary Marxist theory following and analyzing Fordism views of labor as a means to exploit and control workers is very interesting when applied to the film, â€Å"Syriana†.   Their ideas illuminate the problems with Fordism (referring to Henry Ford’s method of car production) and its technological effects on control of both workers and their time. Creating â€Å"endless† work through technology and its reach beyond the workplace (cell phones, internet, etc) and, also, alienation from the social processes outside of work, such as in the family and community are part of this Marxist theory. Their idea, also, points to Capitalism used to exploit people, through a dogma or ideology of the need to perform this meaningless and endless work.   Aronowitz and DiFazio believe that when people are free from a menial, controlled, and exploitative environment, then only then can they be free to become part of the social processes outside of work and in the rest of the world around them. The exploitation of all the main characters in â€Å"Syrianaâ€Å", through their various jobs and the contrasting roles of other members of their family, who had more time to â€Å"play† is central to this thesis.   There were four dyads that should be highlighted throughout the film to make this point.   When freed from meaningless work, many different roles can be seen, when exploited by it we can see opposite roles.   George Clooney’s character â€Å"Bobby† is an example of a worker, who was exploited by his employer (the United States CIA). His job life consisted of constantly working for this organization with a mention from one of his former co-workers that he has been â€Å"used† and he probably never even knew why. He states that he never did need to know.   He is used as a â€Å"fall guy† for this organization when an operation goes awry.   This exploitation is an example of what can happen when a worker is constantly alienated from all other processes going on around him.   His son, in contrast, shows interest in â€Å"playing†, in going to college, rowing, and in girls.   He claims to want a normal life, the opposite of what his father has.   But, in the end, when â€Å"Bobby† is under investigation and free to make his own choices, he chooses to do what he believes is right in saving a prince that is to be assassinated.   Only when he is free from his exploiters, can he be free to make his own choices. Another dyad is that of â€Å"Bryan† (Matt Damon’s character) and his son â€Å"Maxâ€Å".   Bryan is an energy analyst and, through Aronowitz and DiFazio’s idea of endless work, Bryan is asked to and agrees to working on his son’s birthday.   While Bryan is working, the family is playing, and this in a very strong point to this thesis, proves fatal.   His son is killed in an accident, caused by technology and its imperfection. If it were not for both technology and endless work, the son, â€Å"Max† would still be alive.   In an interesting twist to this, â€Å"Bryan† goes on to work as an advisor for the same visionary prince that â€Å"Bobby† tries to save.   When â€Å"Bryan† is freed from his analyst job, he goes on to work for this visionary in an attempt to help change the world for the better. â€Å"Bryan† mentions the slow pace of the Persian people and how their work ethic seems different and slower.   He sees this as a sharp contrast to his position that led him to endless work and his son’s death. Two other dyads should be examined and that is of   â€Å"Bennett† the attorney for a powerful oil company and his father and that of a Pakistani, who calls himself â€Å"Johnny† and his father.   Both of these fathers are out of work and have more time to think and play.   â€Å"Bennett† spends so much time working that he cannot see the harm he is doing, though his father has time to think and drink (excessively) and he disagrees with his son’s work.   This shows the negative side of unemployment and disengagement with civil life, which can occur if one does not apply themselves to using their capabilities. â€Å"Bennett’s† father does show his son negative attention, which is all he can do.   Similarly, â€Å"Johnny† desires money to bring his mother to be with his father and he.   The father is shown playing and enjoying the freedom from meaningless work, while â€Å"Johnny† searches for something meaningful.   In a negative twist to this â€Å"Johnny† is recruited and exploited to be a suicide bomber and then his life does have meaning, but it is in his death.   Without this dogma of the meaning of work and the need for commodities, these dyads would not be so complicated.   Work and the idea of â€Å"meaningful† work puts a rift in these families and causes social disease (alcoholism and religious extremism).

Books Of The Canon :: Education Learning Teaching Essays

Books Of The Canon It is my contention that students do not read enough. Greater emphasis needs to be placed on reading at all levels of education, especially at the secondary and college level. Many authors from the text, The Presence of Others, discuss the importance of what has been labeled the canon. In this essay I will discuss some of their thoughts and feelings regarding the subject, and will propose a variation of how to change the curriculum. In addition to that, I will examine how I feel the intellectual level of the United States' populace needs expanding. Allan Bloom, Professor at the University of Chicago, claims in his book, The Student and the University, that what is lacking in education is that there is no vision of what an educated human being is. His solution centers around a college curriculum based on the Great Books. "In which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, . . . not forcing them into categories we make up, . . . but trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read."i He then goes on to state that he is aware of many of the objections to the Great Books cult. Some such stated arguments include, "If one only reads Great Books, one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is; and that there is no way of determining who is to decide what a Great Book or what the canon is."ii Although, he states that he agrees with these arguments, he concludes that the curriculum should be centered on the canon, in order to make the university a place of distinction. A professor of Education at UCLA, Mike Rose, argues against a curriculum based on the canon due to exclusionary tendencies. He states that many of his students, and many of the people described in his book, Lives on the Boundary, would not find their lives represented in such books. He Continues to state that ". . . if we move beyond content to consider basic assumptions about teaching and learning, a further problem arises, one that involves the very nature of the canonical orientation itself. The canonical orientation Encourages a narrowing of focus from learning to that which must be learned."iii If the sole agenda is that of a curriculum centered on the Great Books, Rose's point is well founded.

MyAlert Essay

Come 1999, the international mobile data services market was ever so expanding and changing rapidly. Jorge Mata was able to hop on the bandwagon early enough to profit from this business venture as this industry was just at the beginning of a new era that would revolutionize how consumers and businesses communicated with each other. More simply stated, MyAlert was a great business idea, developing a more personalized mobile industry. Mata could not actually believe that such a business model had never been thought of in the past, but did not have to think twice before investing in the MyAlert project, becoming the first company to appear and succeed in the mobile services market in Spain. Flash forwarding to a year after its creation, figures are only representative of the huge success MyAlert was facing in terms of the service and content the company offered its customers. Figures were in the black, and more than 200.000 users were registered to the ‘Alert portal’ witho ut even any substantial advertising expense. Another indicator of a good business idea is whether the creator of the company is able to find any potential investors ready to sponsor his project. In this case, Mata is the first to find enough capital (half a million euros) to launch his project. His ex-CEO at BroadVision also wanted to invest in the project, showing us just how serious and well thought of this business plan actually was. Although the initial funds were clearly insufficient to bring MyAlert at the top of the ladder both domestically and internationally, Mata’s strategy is clear-cut in the sense that the first priority was developing a project with â€Å"a top-tier management and technical team and a sound technological platform to make alerts work at the targeted scale† (p. 2). The company could effectively y use its technological platform to provide a personalized service, that at the time, was crucially needed by customers and companies who wished to stay at the top of the information chain. This was the booming time in terms of new technologies and how they could be adapted to the internet and the mobile phone. MyAlert’s business idea was once again great because it could actually provide this ever so needed information to its end users. By valuing the customer and focusing on what the market needed and will need in the future, MyAlert is a perfect example of how they were able to carry out the latter and grasp a changing environment before it was too late. The main competitive advantages that MyAlert benefit from are seen through their timing and their strong technological platform. In effect, the company benefits from a first mover advantage into the mobile data service industry. With this advantage under their belt, it is essential in for MyAlert to develop an on-going demand for their service. The customer base is large and potentially profitable and the company understood this. As I stated previously, instead of focusing itself on the product/service they deliver to the customer, MyAlert’s strategy is to focus on what the customer really wants from the company. The emotional factors that the customers face are very important because they act as an experience on each individual when they decide to sign up for daily alerts on football, or stock quotes for example. My Alert knows that by focusing on the customer base, by offering them a service that is affordable and useful, positive recommendations will then follow placing them at an advantage vis-à  -vis their competitors. While focusing on the demand aspects are vital, it is also crucial for the company to concentrate on the supply scale for the competitive advantage to be sustainable. Basic services such as alerts on business headlines are interesting but MyAlert’s main wish is to expand their supply with a â€Å"†¦ number of services thanks to agreements with other content and service providers† (p. 2). By growing a significant supply scale, a broader demand from not only individual end-users will arise, but also from sources like corporations and large advertising companies. With all the information above, a value chain of MyAlert’s business model is shown through this diagram: A perfect example of this model at work is when MyAlert enters the European major markets. While replicating the entry strategy that had already worked in Spain, the company broadens its supply scale by offering free advertising services to international companies and then pursuing on to develop tight relationships with these companies so that they can offer them business services. This is a clear example of how the company intentionally expands its supply scale to attain an even larger demand (customer) base. After the dotcom bubble crisis, companies focused on new technologies such as MyAlert, take the hardest hit. Their competitive advantage based on a strong  technology is now under threat and the company has to reevaluate its strategy. I believe the merge with Buongiorno is not only positive for both companies, but a must if MyAlert wishes to stay competitive in the long run. Mauro del Rio basically says it all in his statement as he declares that the â€Å"†¦ two absolute imperatives for ambitious European high tech companies [are]: critical mass and positive P&L† (p.4). MyAlert could no longer expand through organic growth and so this merger is a fantastic idea in terms of bringing new qualified staff, technology assets and know-how. On the flip side, the position the two companies now hold as a whole, allows them to penetrate new markets and develop synergies. The two companies complemented each other very well in terms of My Alert bringing a strong technological platform to the table and powerful ASP services versus Buongiorno being more present in terms of marketing and advertising services. The strengths of one, replaced the weaknesses of the other. A good example of how the two companies complemented themselves really well is by analyzing the services they sold through various business models. In terms of business services, Buongiorno would lead the way offering companies other marketing services such as brand building and customer loyalty. The product range allowed a higher diversification and greatly benefited the company. The above would not have been possible to realize if MyAlert wouldn’t have merged with Buongiorno because of a poorer marketing penetration. When it came to consumer services however, MyAlert would lead the way by actively investing and developing new apps carefully adapted to their customer base thanks to t heir strong technology. Consumer services were the new hit at the beginning of the years 2000’s and Buongiorno! MyAlert was able to establish itself as a clear industry leader. At first, intensively focusing on consumer services was not a clear target for the newly merged companies. The SMS market was in full evolution but many competitors were focusing on the benefits of developing WAP. The portal worked similarly to the WWW navigation, except it was adapted to cell phones. The main point here is that MyAlert had the necessary technology to develop this project and become a global leader but the management team made a wise decision when they decided to focus more on what the consumer actually wanted. WAP-enabled phones had huge potential, increasing to 23% in  2000, but the alarming factor was that only 3% of those users were actually using the new mobile portal. In effect, the company realized that they were found in a value added service market and that their business would mainly depend on what share they could capture from mobile operators when end-users download a song or a logo via SMS, and which marketing budget their customers could channel throu gh them. More simply stated, the company shifted its competitive advantage from a strong technological base to a market driven, consumer targeted base. This business model change allowed the company to develop its own kind of virtual network, linking them to diverse mobile operators’ message centers. As Nomura correctly states, the company could now benefit from its new position and operate its new value chain by having higher punctuality and lower messaging costs. This diversified network the company had built with all the operators, and the flexible strategy they had put into place to be able to adapt to a changing environment, gave them a â€Å"competitive advantage and barrier to entry for any competitors trying† (p.15) to penetrate the market. The evolvement of the business model was a crucial point for the company as they correctly analyzed the market and customer appreciation instead of focusing on a strong service (WAP) that they could’ve developed. If they had chosen this route, maybe things would’ve not been as smooth and successful for them. In this case though, the company was showing positive results and was in a continued search for new businesses and markets to enter while diversifying both in terms of their products and services. This model can only be sustainable, because as Darwin says it best â€Å"if a being wants to survive in a shifting environment, it must evolve at least as fast as the medium itself.† BuonGiorno!MyAlert is perfectly equipped to do so.

Henry Clinton s First Stop On His Life - 1210 Words

Henry Clinton (1730-1795) Henry Clinton was born April 16, 1730, in Newfoundland, Canada. Sir Henry was the son of Admiral George Clinton and grandson of Sir Francis Fiennes Clinton, who was the 6th Earl of Lincoln. Although nobody knows much about his childhood, we know that as a young child, Henry was influenced greatly by his father. His father joined the navy before the birth of Henry, and impacted his son as he grew up. His father then became the governor of Newfoundland. Even though his father encouraged his son to join the Navy, young Clinton set sail into a military career. He rose quickly in rankings and continued to fight in war. In 1772, he married the wonderful Harriet Carter. They bared five children together. Sadly, while giving birth to the fifth child, Harriet passed away. Henry Clinton’s first stop on his journey to find a career was being in the local New York militia during 1948. Henry was greatly influenced by his father to join the military, and he did. In 1951 he traveled to england to join the British army. In 1758 Henry ranked up to lieutenant colonel in the British army. Two years later Henry was serving as an aide-de-camp to Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick during the Seven Years of War. Henry pursued his dream of being in the army, and continued through it his whole life. By the winter of 1777-1778, Sir Henry had become Commander-in-Chief of the British army in North America. This promotion took place during the American Independence war. WhenShow MoreRelatedAccomplishments And Failures Of George Washington1765 Words   |  8 Pagesbecoming the first president of the United States.   He faced many failures, but by overcoming them, he made many great achievements.   Although, he faced hardship and failures, he did not let those get in the way of his goals.   He became one of the greatest presidents of the United States of America. 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