Constance Perin

Books
My new book "Shouldering Risks" extends my longstanding concern with the ever-proliferating division of labor into professional specialties, each with its own vocabulary and concerns. How does this remarkable cultural dimension of high ndustrialization influence the production and synthesis of knowledge, our ways of thinking, and our daily practices? "Shouldering Risks" searches out the ways that “organization” and “management” conceal what actually goes on among professionals in corporate and industrial enterprises.

My previous three books exemplify that concern, each in its particular way.

"Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in
America" (Princeton University Press, 1977) examines the ways that developers and mortgage lenders think about the moral meanings of community, credit, and character.

"Belonging in America: Reading Between the Lines" (Univerity of Wisconsin Press, 1988) follows the
professional middle class into suburbs, to examine its
engagement with boundaries so familiar in the landscape of our lives that we take them for granted: the lines we draw between family and friends, friends neighbors, adults and children, humans and dogs, ewcomers and oldtimers, women and men.

My first book, "With Man in Mind: An Interdisciplinary Prospectus for nvironmental Design" (MIT Press, 1970) has recently been added to The Classics Collection Series of the MIT Press, available for downloading.
"With Man in Mind" examines the ways that planners and architects think about the people to inhabit the places and spaces they design. The book suggests ecologically oriented concepts that join people-in-environments to become the grounds for designers’ three-dimensional thinking.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?type=10&mcid=1

Articles
Again, ways of thinking -- and not thinking -- across
professional bondaries and value systems in various settings appear throughout these articles.

This article, “Organizations As Contexts: Implications for Safety Science and Practice” (1995) suggests
another unit for the analysis of professionals' collaboration and exchanges.
Environmental and Industrial Crisis
Quarterly Vol. 9 (2), pp. 152-174.

“The Reception of New, Unusual, and Difficult Art” (1994) explores the cultural implications of conceptual boundary systems through the responses of European and U.S. critics to a remarkable and beautiful exhibit of “the art of the insane,” paintings and drawings spontaneously made by patients in European asylums in the early 20th century. Collected by the Swiss psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, the art, housed at the University of Heidelberg, made its first public appearance on a European tour in 1980, and the next year the exhibit came to the USA. This article expands on the catalog essay I wrote for that tour. A .pdf file is available from me on request.
Michael Hall and Eugene Metcalf, eds., "The Artist
Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture," pp. 172-197. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

“The Communicative Circle: Museums As Communities” (1992), based on interviews, asks how museum curators,
exhibit designers, educational staff, and visitors play off each other's knowledge and aims. A .pdf file is available from me on request.
Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Steven Lavine, eds., "Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public
Culture," pp. 182-220. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, as nformation technologies began to infiltrate corporate domains and reroute professionals’ work and self-concepts, they and their bosses began to experience the new meanings computers bestow on time and space and on their relationships with colleagues and families. These articles approach various facets of that cultural shift.

“The Moral Fabric of the Office: Panopticon Discourse and Schedule Flexibility” (1991), in Pamela S. Tolbert and Stephen R. Barley, eds., "Research in the Sociology of Organizations," Volume 8, Organizations and Professions, pp. 243-270. Greenwich, Ct.: JAI Press. See .pdf file at upper right.

“Electronic Social Fields in Bureaucracies” (1991),
in Communications of the ACM, V 34, N 12 (December),
pp. 75-82. .pdf available on request.

“Work, Space, and Time on the Threshold of a New
Century" (1998). In, P.J. Jackson and J.M. Van der Wielen, eds., "New International Perspectives on Telework: From Telecommuting to the Virtual Organisation." London: Routledge. pp. 40-55.

An unusual intersection of specialists began to take hold in the 1990's to provide stock market analysts and investors with alternative approaches to evaluating a company's worth and promise. Specialists in corporate governance joined with accounting practitioners and scholars and executives to define “nonfinancial measures” that provide “balanced scorecard” of the elements of a company's value, taking into account such cultural and social goals as environmental awareness, employee diversity, customer loyalty, and the quality of employees' work, careers, and home life.
Some of the story of that movement is in “Making More Matter at the Bottom Line” (1998), in "Corporate Futures," Limited Editions, V. 6, editor, George E. Marcus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 63-88.

The following articles discuss a range of issues, some within cultural anthropology itself, some from my earlier work in environmental design and planning.

1981 "Dogs as Symbols in Human Development." In, Bruce
Fogle, ed., "Interrelations Between People and Pets"
(Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas), pp. 68-88.

1977 "The Symbolic Landscape: Authority and the American Way." In, Dennis Alan Mann, editor, "The Arts in a Democratic Society" (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press), pp. 43-57.

1975 "The Role of the Social Sciences in Architecture and Planning." In, Bela C. Maday, editor, Anthropology and Society (Washington, D.C.: The Anthropological Society of Washington), pp. 44-64.

1975 "Social Governance and Environmental Design." In,
Basil Honikman, editor, Responding to Social Change New York: Halstead Press), pp. 47-54.

1974 "Social Order in Environmental Design." In, Jon Lang et al, editors, Designing for Human Behavior (Stroudsburg, Pa.: Dowden, Hutchinson, & Ross), pp. 31-42.

1986 "Speaking of Tradition and Modernity: A Review Essay on `Habits of the Heart' and Recent Work in American Culture." Journal of Cultural Anthropology, V. 1, No. 4, pp. 425-446.

1967 "A Noiseless Secession from the Comprehensive
Plan." Journal of the American Institute of Planners,
September 1967, pp. 336-347.

1967 "Some Interests of the City Planner in Social Science Research." Journal of the American Institute of Planners, March, pp. 114-116.