Corporate Transformations: Designer Culture, Designer Employees and `Post-Occupational' Solidarity

Abstract

This article argues that the new corporate culture currently being constructed in the corporate institution of work has wide social implications. The interplay of post-industrial technologies, new organizational practices and wider social influences is effecting changes in corporate production and culture. In particular, the integration of knowedge and work tasks and employee flexibility enabled by the `smart' technologies is generating new forms of work organization and blurring occupational boundaries. It is argued that the deliberate reconstruction of corporate culture deconstructs the culture of industrial workplaces as it simultaneously attempts to compensate for the loss of forms of social solidarity typical of industrialism. Industrial corporate culture is replaced with a designer., `simulated' culture that requires and produces a shift in employee identification and industrial solidarities. This empirically based interpretive essay discusses some of the social effects of the corporate reconstruction of culture and its displacement of a primary locus of industrial society's social solidarity. It proposes the emergence of a post-industrial, `post-occupational' social solidarity.