Managerial definitions reduce attention to a tool for action

Evidence

Now a classic on business school syllabi across the country, management consultant gurus Davenport and Beck’s blowout bestseller, The Attention Economy (2001), says this: “Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action.” … But on the whole, this formulation is rigid and mechanistic. If awareness is not attention until we act upon it, then our attentional life is therefore only ever a cascade of incitements. Davenport and Beck’s account sets aside the question of “what attention can be” and replaces it with an always-already-instrumentalized definition: Attention is a task-directed TOOL. To be used. It is reflex and trigger. Track and click. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts the instrumental definition (attention-as-tool) that this chapter will oppose.
• XREF: The instrumental definition read as the enabling condition for the extraction regime the reader is auditing.