Nordal Akerman: The Necessity of Friction. - Review - book review

Organization Studies, May, 2000

1998, Colorado: Westview Press. 320 pages.

Friction is what keeps us from realizing our goals. It is what compromises all our plans, sometimes making them unrecognizable. It defies our wish for perfection and constantly surprises us with new elements or resistance. It constitutes the divide between dream and reality. However, friction is also what gets us moving, a necessary incentive to achieve progress. Nothing can start if it cannot push off something else. By blocking or delaying the easy solution, friction makes for a richer, more varied world. If it stops schemes from being completely fulfilled, it also stops them from going totally awry. To the modernist project, with its one-sided rationalist pretensions, friction is unambiguously bad -- and so it is being disposed of at an increasing speed. The currency markets are one example, cyberspace another. This means that there is less and less time to pause and rethink, while the vulnerability of societies is aggravated. In The Necessity of Friction, scholars tackle this concept of friction. A number of scientific fields are engaged: physics, philosophy, economics, architecture, organizational theory, artificial intelligence, and others. Together, these contributions form an attempt at analyzing the intriguing, yet elusive, subject of friction as a metaphor.