Chess worlds, Competitive entrepreneurs
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chess players: Laurie Taylor talks to Gary Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, and author of a study into the complex, committed and conflict ridden worlds of chess communities, both amateur and professional. They're joined by John Saunders, chess player and writer. Also, the competitive culture of the self-made man. Simon Down, Professor of Management at Anglia Ruskin University, discusses his study of businessmen whose talk of luxury cars and loads of cash represented a bid to gain a higher position in the hierarchy of their group.
Producer: Charlie Taylor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much, |
| 0:06.2 | much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Right. Shall we get started? You know I only have to hear a couple of bars of that apprentice music in order to remember a former partner who always refused to watch |
| 0:35.3 | the program with me. If I'd wanted to watch a prolonged bout of bullying, I'd have bought myself |
| 0:40.5 | a bear pit, she once told me. |
| 0:43.0 | Well, at the time, I'd justify by voyeurish interest by arguing that entrepreneurship was a key component of economic recovery |
| 0:54.8 | and we should respect those who are prepared to leave their occupational comfort zones for the risks |
| 1:00.2 | involved in going it alone. But where these television participants properly |
| 1:05.5 | represented it, did one really need to be quite so assertive, so individualistic, |
| 1:11.1 | so nakedly ambitious, so callous, so macho in order to be hired as an entrepreneur? |
| 1:16.0 | Did I really actually hear one of them say, |
| 1:19.0 | everything I touch turns to soul? |
| 1:22.0 | Ah, well, a new piece of research... I touch turns to soul. |
| 1:22.8 | Ah, well, a new piece of research on a group of practicing entrepreneurs provides some |
| 1:27.9 | interesting correctives to this picture. |
| 1:30.5 | It's entitled Performing Entrepreneurial Masculinity and Ethnographic Account and its co-author Simon |
| 1:35.8 | Down, who's professor of management at Anglia Ruskin University, now joins me in the studio. |
| 1:41.3 | When I first started reading this I thought this sounds very nice you |
| 1:44.4 | are sitting around in a pub listening to people talking talking to men in a pub |
| 1:48.5 | but a nice sight for research tell me a little bit more about the men you were speaking to in your study. |
| 1:54.0 | Well, there was around 10 men in this group. |
| 1:58.0 | We spent around about 14 visits formally to the pub and we would spend time using iPhones actually to take notes of our evenings endeavors and |
| 2:10.0 | We got to know the men quite well. I mean my co-reseacher already knew the men hence the the access we got and |
... |
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