Power, Knowledge and Virtuous Organizations: Virtuous College and Virtuous War

This essay will explore the links between power, knowledge, and the discourse of technological virtue in two cases of organizational innovation: the Land Grant College movement of the 1850s and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) of the 1990s. Both movements can be seen as responses to ontological or spiritual rifts that opened between how we live and how we recognize goodness in ourselves. In the case of Land Grant Colleges, there was a realization that God's gift of an abundant continent upon which to faithfully labor and prosper was being despoiled by labor and prosperity. Scientific agriculture was intended to restore Americans to virtue. The Revolution in Military Affairs likewise might be seen as an attempt to maintain images of virtue under difficult conditions. James Der Derian characterizes virtuous war as a neural network which links virtual technologies, military hardware, entertainment, global surveillance, and information with the ethical imperative to inflict virtuous violence from a distance with minimal American casualties. This essay will explore the question of how public administration might respond to the discourse of virtuous power/knowledge.