The Catch-22 organization: Living with austerity, bureaucracy and absurdity in a public sector organization

Abstract

Through an empirical study of austerity-driven transformation in a Local Government Authority, this article makes three contributions to the emerging critical literature on paradox. First, it draws on Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 as an addition to the burgeoning scholarship that uses the fiction of Kafka to analyse bureaucratic organizations. Second, it focuses on the experience of paradoxes for those on the frontline, which has been neglected in the paradox literature. Third, it introduces the concept of absurdination, which refers to a subjectivity that reflects the tension between rationality and absurdity in the workplace, which can generate unease, anxiety, frustration and disillusionment. Absurdination indicates that management need to learn from the experiences of those on the frontline and yet, paradoxically, it also points to the obstacles to doing so. Rather than ameliorate paradoxes in ways that reproduce the status quo, it suggests that we must learn to question it.