If you just show your passport, strong credentials from
your government for demonstrating that it is really you,the
agent will gently accompany you to the huge line in front of the
economy counter. On the other hand, if you extract the
frequent-?¬‚ier card from a partner airline and you wave its
golden shine, you will happily enjoy the privileges derived from
having poured a stupid amount of cash into ?¬‚ight fares last year.
What happened? It was youall the time, but in the latter case it
went much better. The reality is that in the business context, and
maybe in all contexts except ethics and philosophy, identity is
an operational concept. Identity is the set of true facts about a
subject that are relevant to the given context.
You might think that the preceding example is spoiled by an
implementation detail. If the queue attendant would have
searched your name in the database, instead of just inspecting
the passport, surely he would have discovered that you are a
gold member! Unfortunately, this is not the case. In our
example, your frequent-?¬‚yer membership is associated with a
partner airline, and hence it is in the partner airline??™s database.
Your name does not appear in the database of the airline you
are ?¬‚ying with, or, better stated, it appears associated with the
status of simple passenger (see Figure 1-14), a detail derived
from the business relationships you maintain.
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