The emergence of Indochina in the French imagination was articulated in both representational and institutional modes. Representation involves the transmission of colonial ideals through more obtuse means; that is, through literary texts, travelogues, exhibitions, film and advertising. However, these textual sites feed from and invest in a material situation, which was the institutional arm of colonialism. Indochina was institutionally articulated in cartographic maps and surveys, in the new social spaces of cities and towns, in architectural and technological forms, through social technologies of discipline and welfare and in cultural and religious organisations. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, across a number of textual sites, the representation and institutionalisation of Otherness through the politics of space in the French colony of Indochina, Indochine in this sense becomes a spatial discourse. The French constructed a mental and physical space for Indochina by blanketing and suffocating the original cultural landscape, which in fact had to be ignored for this process to occur. What actually became manifest as a result of this projection stemmed from the French imagination. Just as the French manipulated space, language also underwent the same process of reduction. The Vietnamese script was latinised to make it more 'useable' and ‘accessible’. Through christening the union of Indochina; initiating a comprehensive writing reform; and renaming the streets in the colonial cities, the French used language us another tool for 'making transparent'. Furthermore, the colonial powers established a communication and transport network throughout the colony in an attempt to materialise their fictive (artificial) vision of a unified French Indochinese space. The accessibility and design of these different modes of transport reflected the gendered, racial and class divisions inherent in the colonial establishment. At the heart of representing and institutionalising Indochina was the desire to control and contain. This characterised French imperial ordering of space in the city and the rural areas. In rural areas land was divided into small parcels and alienated to individuals or worked into precise grids for the rubber plantation. In urban centres the native quarter was clearly demarcated from the European quarter which functioned as its modern, progressive Other. The rationale behind this segregation was premised on European, nineteenth century discourses of race, class, gender and hygiene. Influenced by Darwinian and neo-Lamarkian theories of race, this biological discourse identified the 'working class', 'women' and 'the native' as not only biologically but also culturally inferior. They were perceived as a potential, degenerative threat to the biological, cultural and industrial development of the nation. In the colonial context, space was thus ordered and domesticated to control the native population. Coextensively, the literature which springs from such a structure will be tainted by the same ideas, and thus the spaces it formulates within the readers mind feed on and reinforce this foundation. Examples of gender and indigenous narratives which contest this imaginative, transparent topography are analysed throughout this thesis. They provide instances of struggle and resistance which undermine the ideal/stereotypical level of architectural and planned space and delineate an alternative insight into colonial spatial and social relations. The fictional accounts of European women and indigenous writers both challenge and reaffirm the fixity of some of these idealised colonial boundaries. In various literary, historical, political, architectural and cinematic discourses Indochina has been und continues to be depicted as a modern city and exotic Utopia. Informed by the mood of nostalgia, exotic images of Indochina have resurfaced in contemporary French culture. France's continued desire to create, control and maintain an Indochinese space in the French public imagination reinforces the multi-layered, interconnected and persistent nature of colonial discourse.

Organising is the general process by which we structure our world. It is a process that goes beyond social ordering by involving also the technical and the natural realms. Further, it is a process which involves us all. All the time. This dissertation focuses on the organising of business enterprise, more specifically, the organising of food distribution. It is study of formative events in the history of ICA, a major Swedish food distributor. The study provides a detailed account of the development of Hakonbolaget, one of four purchasing centres that formed ICA. Primarily, it accounts for Hakonbolaget´s efforts to establish a modern, rational food distribution system in the 1940s and 1950s. The thrust of these efforts was directed toward three areas of rationalisation: internal operations at the wholesale warehouses, retail operations, and wholesale-retail interaction. Incidentally, these were also central themes in the public debate about the growing costs of goods distribution in Sweden at the time. Through its efforts, Hakonbolaget realised a number of new solutions and established something of a model for modern food distribution. A model that came to characterise operation within ICA from the 1960s and well into the 1990s. Drawing on work within the sociology of science and technology, a conceptual vocabulary is developed for analysing the process of organising. This vocabulary suggests that organising can be regarded as a framing process – as attempts to define and realise sociotechnical situations. The inherent instability of such situations makes stability rather than change a puzzling observation. Consequently, change processes should be regarded as efforts to stabilise situations. Such efforts are closely linked to the establishment of metrics and the generation of representations. In addition to traditional social aspects of organising, the vocabulary also directs attention to the whole heterogeneous materials that surround us. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2001