Already Elswhere
- Play, identity and speed in the business world

Foreword
About two years ago a study titled "Leadership and Organizing in Internet Companies," was started at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Leadership at the Stockholm School of Economics. The reason the project focused on Internet companies was due to the large interest many social scientists were showing for how technology affects the structures of society, and how people work and live. A number of sociologists have tried to study society "from the outside," and through extensive statistical material, have tried to obtain an overview and reach conclusions about the society currently under development. The other reason the study focused on Internet companies was to increase knowledge of society, and the method used was almost the opposite of that of macrosociology. Instead of trying to get a bird’s eye view, the study’s purpose was to crawl into the network society. Individual companies were studied using a more anthropological approach that included using participant observation methods during long periods of time. People at the Internet companies were studied almost as though they were inhabitants of a South Pacific island that until now had been only a spot on the map. The purpose of taking part in the daily lives of a specific Internet company -- which in this book is called Quickompany -- was to try to get closer to the people who worked there. From notes, interviews, participating in project work and attending meetings, coffee breaks and parties, an alternative perspective was allowed to develop. The goal was to obtain the most multifaceted view possible, by meeting with representatives from all business areas in the company, or, better said, "the network." Thus, it would be possible to show what kind of organizational principles exist, how ideas are generated and abandoned, how identities are created, and what roll fashion and new trends play in the Internet world. Quickompany is in reality called something else. The reason for making the company anonymous is to protect the integrity of individuals at the company. It also keeps the interpretations from being about one single company, and instead points to business phenomena and developments through time.

At around the same time researcher Lars Strannegård at CASL was observing, documenting and taking part in the daily work at Quickompany, the artist Maria Friberg was spending large amounts of time sitting in a restaurant in the core of Stockholm's IT world. She regularly and systematically interviewed and studied businessmen -- how they walked, talked and how they were dressed. She registered her observations without rigorously documenting them. Still, her approach, by being systematic and well-regulated, had major similarities to many of today's social science methods. Her initial knowledge of businessmen and the economy was low, and thus, her studies had an entirely different angle of approach from that of the researcher at the School of Economics. She was fascinated by the persons who radiated as much power, decisiveness and order as they did insecurity, stress and powerlessness. She thoroughly studied and reflected upon the business people and their life conditions. Her interpretations of her observations turned not only into a series of photos, but became an important addition to her artistic production. By focusing on a very limited socio-economic group -- adult, white men who were employed, were entrepreneurs or were executives -- she believed she could say quite a bit about society as a whole.
Thus, in this case, the researcher's and the artist's areas of study, and methods, ended up having a nearly complete overlap. The only obvious difference existed in the different claims: scientific versus artistic. Scientific claims have earned legitimacy through a modern rhetoric about science and the scientific method. Intuition, emotions and aesthetics don't fit into the modernistic view of science -- instead it's systemic clear methodology, and logic, which rule the scientific sphere. The potential knowledge that is contained in artistic work is of another type. It gains no legitimacy through the systematic gathering of data, but rather through its ability to create emotions, experiences and new insights. This division has been questioned for decades, but remains stuck in the many fields social science. The modernistic claim for truth excludes intuition and aesthetic experience as ways of obtaining knowledge.

But that which stands out as the common nominator in both the scientific and artistic method is the usability of knowledge and experience. It's only when knowledge or experience do something that things get interesting. But usability can be judged only by the individual reader or observer.
Approaching an area of study with two separate methods can shed light on a phenomenon from different angles. This doesn't have to involve the breakdown of a genre, but rather a collage of fragmentary images and many approaches toward understanding a phenomenon. In fact, maybe the kaleidoscopic society that is currently developing must necessarily be explained and commented by using fragments.

The following pages are an attempt to shed light upon life in contemporary society through studying the lives of organizations and the business world. The pages consist of two distinct parts: texts and images. The text belongs to the researcher; the images to the artist. Both parts rest upon fragments of ideas based upon interpretations of the conditions of business life and daily work in an Internet company. In the artist's case, the images came about after studying people in both public and private situations. In the researcher's case, meetings, publications, internal and external files and access to Quickompany have all been documented during a one and a half year period (October 1999 -- April 2001). It's from here the quotes and text fragments that appear on some pages have been pulled. Interviews and field notes have been copied, and the quotes are thus clips from specific times and places. Presence at the company, observations, interviews and documents have been selected, interpreted and placed in relation to other publications and ideas.
The result is a number of complete texts and images that can be read and seen on their own, separate from one another. At the same time they hopefully create a richer, more detailed interpretation of organizational behavior and life conditions in the remarkable realm known as the "network society."

Lars Strannegård
Maria Friberg