Mike O'Malley

From 1897 through about 1912, film producers would shoot their footage and then make a contact print of the entire film on a roll of photographic paper. Mailed to the Library of Congress, these rolls of paper established copyright. The films document a very busy world indeed. They show people thronging streets, working, shopping; they show crowds shuffling through gates at Ellis Island or welcoming returning war heroes. More than just documentary, the films include satire ad commentary on the nature of life at the turn of the last century. In these early films, which almost never run much longer than two or three minutes, the camera almost never moves—no zooms, pans, or fast cuts or clever editing. But the screens are never still, full of action and movement. They document great disasters and everyday events, the dynamic world of the turn of the last century. These very early films played almost entirely to a working class audience. Indeed, when middle class observers began noticing this new phenomenon, the “movies,” sweeping working class neighborhoods they saw it as both fast paced, as a “get thrills quick” medium that played magical games with time and space, and also as a dangerous soporific. They show a busy world, but they show confusion about what “busy” means

Good management is an ethical concern. The case of Los Angeles, California's 1990's charter reform activities provided an opportunity to evaluate the ethical consequences of the city management's corporate ideas by examining the assumptions, methods, and results of LA's activities, This dissertation employs Grounded Theory/Crisis Management to ascertain the degree to which the city's charter reform activities responded effectively to their initiating crises. ;The dissertation begins with an overview of LA's historical values which yields a portrait of a city dominated by a private ethos overseen by a typically structured, yet feudalistic, municipal government. The riots of 1992 revealed that the city had foundational civic problems which required its social management assumptions be questioned. Still, rather than respond to this legitimacy crisis, city managers chose to react to a legal crisis because their corporate cultural understanding knew how to supervise a legal crisis but was inadequate before a legitimacy crisis. This resulted in a rationalizing reform process which was overly narrow, obscured beneficial signals, and did not enhance the city's crisis preparation. ;Further evaluation of the themes of consensus, 'government as machine', and Neighborhood Councils demonstrated that charter reform became a contest between groups of the accepted management oligarchy's elites which was packaged as consensus. Using a mechanical approach to reform, pre-packaged relationships between ideas and groups thereby blocking certain warning signs, devaluing others, and identifying possible scapegoats. Finally, LA's new neighborhood council system lacks sufficient independence to create the required dynamic tension to serve as a check on these hegemonic civic managers. ;The dissertation concludes that the best hope for improved corporate performance lay in the inclusion of three design elements currently missing from LA's civic management system: holism, self-examination, and transformation. These elements are characteristics of the study of social ethics. In conclusion, systems theory of management is employed to integrate these missing social ethical elements into corporate management and to create two speculative models of civic management