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Book Review: Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography, and Skin

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can only be understood as a relation between people. A useful starting point is the distinction between formal and informal secrecy, but the authors are not trying to open a… Click to show full abstract

can only be understood as a relation between people. A useful starting point is the distinction between formal and informal secrecy, but the authors are not trying to open a neat dualism. Formal secrecy can be ‘structural’ without being formalized and professional claims to mastery over certain sorts of knowledge can make concealment into a routine protection of mysteries. Similarly we might regard felicity at the veiling and unveiling of formal and informal workplace secrets as a skill which helps you get along in the workplace, or the concealment of a particular status (as gay, for example) as a necessary navigation of the formalized informal, as in ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. The metaphor of architecture runs through the book, though it would have been nice to see a little more done to move around within it, or beyond it. Walls, corridors, rooms and the opening and closing of doors all suggest structural metaphors for being inside and outside, but the features of buildings do not determine the multiplicity of practices that happen within them. Indeed, the metaphor they have chosen might encourage the reader to think about a rather static ontology of organizing, mistaking the building for the process of organizing. When Costas and Grey write of secrecy as being part of the ‘epistemic architecture’ (p. 115) of organizing, they are really pushing towards something more profound. That is to say that, as Mary Douglas would have it, organizations are thought made durable, and secrecy is how institutions think (1987). Extending Costas and Grey’s claims then, perhaps beyond what they themselves would find comfortable, it seems to me that the construction and maintenance of boundaries is crucial to organizing. The idea of transparency in organizing, laudable in many ways, belies the fact that the control of information, and hence the production of secrecy, is constitutive of formal organization. Of course secrecy can exist outside formal organizations, as in the example of the lying lawyer who is also a lying father and husband, but formal organizations cannot exist without secrecy. The completely transparent organization would not be visible as an organization. In an age of conspiracies, when most people assume that organizations always lie, this book adds a great deal of nuance to that piece of cultural common sense.

Keywords: review surface; cosmetic surgery; surface imaginations; book; imaginations cosmetic; book review

Journal Title: Cultural Sociology
Year Published: 2017

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