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Sennett's Theoretical Analysis

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Sennett takes readers on a cook’s tour with his latest work, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation, under the guise of at least theoretically attaining a working understanding of “balance between cooperation and competition”. Getting past his irritating turgid verbosity, the reader is left realizing Sennett’s intention to “practice cooperation on the page” (Sennett, 2012, p. 30) was nothing more than a fashionable moot point. Efforts in the West to arrive at a workable intercultural competence continue to be plagued with severe classism, scientific and academic arrogance, and unconsciously ingrained ideas wherein talking the talk without having to walk the walk is the greater reality. Sennett succeeds in offering a …show more content…

In discussing inequality online, he makes this word choice: “ownership of online tools – computers, mobile phones or iPods and iPads” (Sennett, 2012, p. 145). That is starkly different from saying “computers, mobile phones, or MP4s and tablets”, or even the inverse of saying “MACs, iPhones, or iPods, and iPads”. The combination of the two considering the disparity in “MAC and iPhone” versus “iPods and iPads”, seems to show the unconsciously ingrained classism that hinders the very concepts of reducing resentment, anger, and inequity. The privilege in Sennett’s luxuriant verbosity alone is …show more content…

He brilliantly affirms that “short-term teamwork, with its feigned solidarity, its superficial knowledge of others and its squeezing, contrast dramatically to the Chinese social bond of guanxi…” (Sennett, 2012, p. 169). His choice in wording this phrase raises questions about what exactly he is suggesting concerning the social bond found in guanxi. The lack of mutual respect oozing from the pretense to appropriate a fetishized form of guanxi makes the bottom fall out of the framework of the social triangle’s relationship to cooperation from complete lack of understanding intercultural competencies. Perhaps Sennett would recommend the donning of the social, protective mask he refers to in the book so as to take yet one more thing from the Other in historical Western fashion. One could fall into the deception of having read this work and believing that some great understanding or knowledge has been gained, yet without acknowledging Sennett’s numerous contradictions and his feeble concoction of developmental psychology and socio-biology, the fruition of intercultural competency will remain something well-meaning folk claim to embrace and desire but lack in skill to achieve. As society becomes more globalized, intracultural communication will be an absolute necessity. Perhaps now I grasp

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