I work for an organisation that is famously averse to using job titles. they are not on business cards nor in most email sigs.
I work with a lot of people overseas and when you are on the phone and don't see them introduce themselves it can be very easy to get mixed up with names, when you are trying to match emails with 12 internal names, with the voices on the call, with who is directly respsonsible for what, and if more than one are in the same department, who is senior to whom. (it's not that it doesn't matter - the belief behind not using job titles may be some utopian idea that we are all equals who all pitch in with our brilliant ideas - but when it actually comes to it, they haven't escaped actually having particular responsibilities or levels in a hierarchy and all the normal pitfalls associating with getting this wrong still apply)
Anyway. Recently we have all had (horrible in my case) photos taken, and little head shots attached on our email system. So now, you can't tell what dept the person emailing you is in; you can't work out if they are senior or junior; you can't tell anything else about their formal work role; but you get this little head shot that tells you what the person looks like.
I really object to this. Not knowing what people look like per se, as we all have bodies and it is only geographical accident that we don't sit in the same room with them. but with privileging this meat-gut-feeling sort of information over the formal information that shows how much work and experience a person has behind them, what their qualifications are etc - in other words, their job title. In a context in which we are all swimming about, desperate to find out what the hell everyone does, it seems horribly retrograde that you don't get automatically given the information "chief accountant" but you do get "female, pretty and petite". And it seems to be basically an invitation to make assumptions based on the shonky ape-prejudice we all carry about, because it is only the provision of information, hard fact ("this is Yewonde Ankitola. She is our senior corporate counsel") that you can get obscure what the ape brain is putting in place in the absence of anything else "good looking black girl").
None of this is deliberate of course. It just hasn't been thought about in these terms, because the people who put this sort of thing in place are very comfortable with this whole "relationship" based way of doing things, which means going around making animal judgements about who you feel comfortable with, making them feel comfortable with you, and basing your business around connections with them. So anything that works on this animal level is seen as friendly, practical, helpful, reasonable. "it's all about the relationship" is something that gets said several times a day in my office and it gives me the willies because what I hear is "it's not about being clever, fast, organised, creative, honest, analytical, original. It's about making some fattish arrogant bloke with a SAHW who never challenges him, and no female friends, like you"