Organization for Liquid-Modern times?

Abstract

In an unpublished manuscript that Zygmunt Bauman wrote around the year 2008, Bauman’s overall theory of liquid modernity is sketched in relation to recent types of organization. He describes a shift from classical ‘managerialism’ to the ‘experience economy’, resulting in organizations characterized as eclectic and nonlinear. Ambiguous consequences of this transition follow for individual organization members. The most important trait of and expectation for liquidly modern employees will be their flexibility. Workplaces made seductive and attractive, with food, sport, bike racks and stylish informality, create a fragile cocoon for the elite of knowledge workers. For Bauman, such employees’ materialize love and happiness by buying things, resulting in more working hours to gain the money required to purchase further things in a ‘vicious circle’. The less qualified cannot access either these things or similar working conditions, which is one critical dimension of these recent transformations. Managerially, practices in flexible organizations continuously keep elite employees in a state of uncertainty and urgency. Bauman closes by embedding these tendencies of organizations’ new voraciousness in his overall theme of liquid modernity, as he points to unintended consequences of lighter and more flexible organizational forms. The manuscript is accompanied by a commentary, in which Stewart Clegg, one of the leading scholars in recent attempts to connect Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity with management and organization studies, contextualizes the work.