One of my main goals in this book: to help you to take a few moments and see yourself through someone else’s eyes. You may think to yourself, “Why should I care about others’ perceptions of me?” On the fl ip side, I ask, “Why should they care about your perceptions of them?” You see, in a civilized society, our attitudes and behaviors affect each other. The old saying is still true, no one is an island. I also want you to see yourself not only as your “own person,” but as an individual from a particular cultural background. As a result, you will discover indeed your culture is jam-packed with pros and cons, and contradictions, just like the other person’s. Perception is not always the same as reality. It is OK to hang on to the positive, and let go of the negative aspects of your upbringing or background. Likewise, when you find yourself in a new country you do not have to adopt all attitudes and behaviors you see practiced there. In this book, I highlight some of the main observations that I have made after traveling and living in different parts of the world, as a participant and observer. I use satire (not so much sarcasm), and some levity to help paint a clearer picture of my experiences and observations of specifi c aspects of human nature and behavior, specifi cally in the Dominican, and American cultures. Isn’t it a great feeling when you are able laugh and learn, simultaneously? Sometimes a good, old belly-laugh (even at yourself) is exactly what the doctor ordered to get you out of a depressing or lackluster mood. ~ Marlene Louis Blyden~

Reality and Perception and Your Company's Workplace Culture presents a demonstrable path for navigating the change-management process from beginning to end while fully detailing its obstacles and its triumphs. The book presents the view of a fictional 100-year old company called Acme Gyroscope, which is a family owned and run business, and the reader sees how the operation was ruled with an iron hand by the outgoing CEO. When the son of this current CEO assumes the role, he finds that the processes and culture within the organization are not quite as rosy as he thought they were. The new CEO finds that there is a wide divide between what is believed and what is real. The story follows the new CEO and his team as they uncover the problems that exist and discover solutions with the help of the Change Maestro who is an expert on understanding the difference between reality (see the problems, feel the problems, and create the new normal) and perception (preconceived notions of causes and solutions to problems). Utilizing the TLS (Theory of Constraints - Lean - Six Sigma) Continuum toolbox, the Change Maestro takes the management team through the process of resolving the issues at hand and assists in creating a new normal for corporate culture and problem solving. Presented in ten chapters, each representing points on the critical path, it walks the reader through the change process to its conclusion reaching the final point -- the argument for the new normal corporate culture for long-term strategy and survival.

What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective (‘doing things with’) that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.

This book suggests that the realities we take as 'real' are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always, 'virtually real', that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences.

Realistic' is a term of everyday use and a word that non-academics use frequently and unguardedly in talking about pictures. Roughly, it can be taken to mean that the depiction is like the real thing of which it is a depiction; more specifically that the depiction is like the real thing with respect to its visual character. When we examine the world of sentient beings, some portions of it are certainly thought to be governed by `necessity'. There are, to begin with, the effects of the interplay of human beings with nature -- their own bodies and what is external to them. Our personal perceptions of the world influence us on many levels. Our perceptions mandate our expectations, thoughts, emotional reactions, and even the physical terrain of our nervous system. Our perceptions therefore shape the person we are when are alone and with a group. It includes what comes to your mind when you see a tree; the thoughts that manifest when thinking about Africa; the emotions that unfold when confronted with new ideas, and so on. You understand the world through your perceptions of it. The way your world view, reality tunnel, mental filter, or perception is constructed has been theorized on for years, and it is closely related to the nature. Of course there are many things that influence the way you see and feel the world. This book examines the practices that illuminate reality as always virtually real, that is simplified and artfully produced. It also shows how the sense of reality that we make is however real in its consequences. Behind all these behaviours and mindsets are value systems. When people adopt and believe things without bringing a conscious mind to the subject, they give up their individuality. They let others do their own thinking for them, and in the case of culture, essentially adopt a kind of religion. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life.

Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle. Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices. Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.