Liquid Organization

Zygmunt Bauman and Organization Theory

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Monika Kostera, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Monika Kostera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415706629
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134579624
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Widely known as a leading intellectual, Zygmunt Bauman's thinking is often categorized as sociology or philosophy. But his work has been hugely influential in other fields as well, not least within organization studies. From increasing management control and growing standardization of work activities, to the increase in uncertainty and insecurity experienced by contemporary workers, organizations themselves are becoming ever more ephemeral entities. Bauman's themes: globalization, liquid modernity and postmodern ethics are arguably fundamental to contemporary notions of organization and management and his thinking has never been more relevant.

However, despite the obvious and continuing influence of Bauman's ideas on business studies, there has been no comprehensive attempt to chart his impact on organization theory. In this innovative and insightful collection, an international selection of leading management scholars explore key topics in current organizational discourse, including networked organizations, control and ambiguity, technologies, work and responsibility, extending Bauman's liquid modernity to the "liquid organization".

The book will be essential reading for scholars and academics and students in management and organizational theory, and also sociology, managing culture and organizational ethnography.

1 On adiaphoric organizations and adiaphoric organizational members

Tommy Jensen

Introduction

Essentially, I see two main stories emanating from my reading of Bauman’s work. First, there is the philosophical exploration of morality and more specifically what moral responsibility is, its meaningful relation to what it means to be a human being, and the individual moral requirements that emerge from this. Second, there is the sociological exploration of how organized contexts may be an infertile soil in which individual responsibility cannot flourish. This second theme includes analyses on different spheres of society (legislators, producers, consumers) and on different analytical levels (from the worker, consumer, family, on to community and industrial organization, to consumer society and the political economy). Through Bauman’s philosophy and sociology I will sketch out in this chapter some general features in contemporary organizations and their members and relate this to the matter of moral responsibility.

In the next section of the chapter I put forth a view on human beings as morally ambivalent and discuss what moral responsibility asks of us as human beings. Here, I present two consequences for organization studies. First, instead of expending too much energy on assumed pathological people we should worry more about ordinary men and woman who, by acting ‘normally’, can turn into perpetrators and bystanders. Second, the assumption that organizational bodies can possess moral concern needs to be abandoned; moral concern cannot be stretched beyond the individual.

Next, horrific events, such as the Holocaust, are shown to be an inherent feature of modern societies – not an exception, nor an anomaly. The analysis arrives at the suggestion to organization studies to consider normal organization as being capable of producing horrific events.

The following two sections deal with the political economy and work ethics in solid and liquid modernity, respectively. It is argued that despite the changes going on within the solid phase of modernity, the content and the role of work ethics essentially remained the same. In liquid modernity, however, the political economy and work ethics have undergone dramatic changes which means that the content and role of work ethics have followed suit – work ethics has been invaded by consumer aesthetics, while organizations have turned into liquid organizations that resemble society as a whole.

An examination of the key organizing principles in liquid organizations follows. Fundamentally, it must be asked what has become of bureaucracy and panopticon. In this section I also observe some hesitancy on the part of Bauman and argue that his sociological account of the Holocaust needs to be reframed in the context of what I call mobile bureaucracy and mobile panopticon. The argument ends in assessing liquid organizations as adiaphoric organizations – organizations that declare organizational action as exempt from moral judgement and moral significance. Turning then to the individual organizational members, in the same section, it is argued that as the role of being a consumer becomes ever more central to participation in organizations, we should also consider the (disastrous) possibility that adiaphoric organizations are actively supported by liquid and adiaphoric organizational members. Definitions of liquid organizations and liquid organizational members are also proposed in this section.

The chapter concludes with a postscript in which I suggest an interpretation different from Bauman’s of Huxley and Orwell and their relevance to liquid modern times. Through this rereading hope in human curiosity appears.

Human beings as morally ambivalent

Both love and hatred, both goodness and evil seem to be legitimate residents in the house managed by moral responsibility. All are ‘inside jobs’ of responsibility. The primal moral scene is strewn with ambivalence. … Most horrifyingly, the sum total of ambivalence seems to be immune to all the efforts to trim down and, if anything, to grow – much like the fire-spitting heads of the dragon known to multiply through being cut off. To act morally means to face up to that incurable ambivalence.

(Bauman 1995: 66)

According to Baumanian ethics, moral responsibility is a realm in which there exists no corresponding deterministic or probabilistic cause and effect (Bauman 1993, 1995). Therefore, and as the quote above suggests, moral is permeated with ambivalence because ‘The dividing line between good and evil’ can never be drawn (ibid. 1995: 64). An examination of Baumanian ethics reveals an ethics that is at odds with the Western ethical canon, and current rationality of society – ethics as a written, rule-founded canon with robust demarcations between good and evil, right and wrong (cf. Jonas 1984).

It is so much at odds that I would like to characterize Baumanian ethics and his framing of moral ambivalence as resembling Jean-François Lyotard’s ([1979] 1987: 65–66) postmodern condition of paralogy; moral responsibility has to be carried out outside logic because it is not logically comprehensible at all. Or to express it as a dictionary entry: ‘Paralogos: unexpected and unreasonable; Paralogism: reason contrary to logical rules or formula; Paralogize: to draw conclusions not warranted by the premises’ (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 1986). What then does moral responsibility demand from human beings? Treading in the footprints of Lévinas (1969), Bauman argues for an unconditional duty, despite the fact that the demands of individual human beings on others are always unspoken and radical. The moral demand then basically is about ‘safeguarding and defending the uniqueness of’ other individuals and implies that one should not consider a person ‘any more as a specimen of a species or a category, but as unique’ (Bauman 1995: 51–2, 60).

As the Baumanian moral landscape is permeated with ambivalence, eliminating the usefulness of pre-written and finalized manuscripts, moral responsibility becomes ‘synonymical to freedom’ (Bauman 1995: 64). Moral responsibility is then not about crafting and obeying rules but about discovering plots and constructing stories as events unfold (to this reader Bauman takes hold of and bends Nietzsche’s (1997) ‘artist’ in a similar way as Rorty (1989) does to enable him to arrive at his ‘ironist’). Bauman’s position is that no matter how great the hardship confronting us we can always choose to exercise our freedom of authorship and actorship (Bauman 1995). Consequently, even if social contexts and contingent situations help us to explain human conduct and through them we can understand why (and even feel sympathy, sorrow, or pity) individuals faced with hardship choose to act in certain ways, it does not exempt them from moral guilt. Moral redemption is not a way out in Baumanian ethics (ibid. 1989).

According to Baumanian ethics not only is moral responsibility ambivalent, so too are human beings. There is no predestined path, an inner faculty within us, staking out an either good or evil authorship or actorship (cf. Rorty 1989). Thus, Bauman (1989) takes the view that any human being can gradually become accustomed to being a perpetrator, someone who performs horrific deeds, or an active bystander (who avoids seeing, listening and feeling). This is central to Baumanian ethics and the point at which the academic system wants to force it to a halt; namely that ordinary men and woman are capable of carrying out horrific deeds if the circumstances are ‘right’, without even recognizing that their deeds could be deemed ‘evil’, ‘bad’, ‘immoral’, and so on.

Organization studies are no exception to this. Most organization scholars are aware of the importance of social organization and its possible impact on human conduct, but yet the assumption of a core human faculty, a predestined pathway towards either good or evil, is maintained, explicitly or implicitly. The ‘few-rotten-apples-in-a-reasonably-healthy-fruit-basket’ belief is strong – that there is an unknown, but essential, number of human beings who, whatever systematic arrangements and measures are provided, remain locked onto the certainty of a bad path. The best solution, then, is to identify and get rid of that part of the population that is deemed to be pathological – i.e. the ruthless, sadistic, organizational men and women (see e.g. Boddy et al. 2010).

Furthermore, organization studies does not only avoid Bauman’s philosophy on human moral ambivalence, it also refuses to recognize other significant studies alerting us to the case of ordinary men and women and of moral ambivalence. Included among some essential contributions that basically take the same ‘ordinary men and women’ position as Bauman, but whose core consequences are ignored by organization studies, there is Arendt ([1963] 1994), Milgram ([1974] 2005), Zimbardo (2004, 2008), Browning (1998), Welzer (2005) and Neitzel and Welzer (2013). Evil is banal, Hannah Arendt concluded about Adolf Otto Eichmann who, during the Nuremberg trials, stated that he never had laid a hand on a Jew, that he was just following orders, and, not without pride, that he was a skilled bureaucrat (he also claimed to be a righteous Kantian). A troublesome fact was of course that he was found to be (psychiatrically) normal by psychiatrists employed by the Israeli state (Arendt [1963] 1994). Fifteen years earlier Arendt pointed out that when organizing the masses, Heinrich Himmler in the early stages of organizing what would become the Holocaust recognized that ‘most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventures, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men’ (ibid.: 338).

In 1963 Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram asked psychologists for their expert opinion on how many of his willing participants would prove to have pathological disorders. Their estimates were significantly higher than the actual results, according to Milgram ([1974] 2005). A selection process was carried out to recruit (as) normal persons (as possible) to participate under the fabricated condition that they were to deliver punishments (in the form of electric shocks) to another person in order to record how their learning capacity was affected. When the participants could not see, touch, smell or hear the victim (a hired actor) 65 per cent delivered the highest shock possible, marked XXX, 435–50 volts. When they could hear the victim, who started to bang on the wall after 300 volts, but silenced after 315 volts, this number decreased to 62.5 per cent. When the participants were in the same room as the subject, and thus could see, touch, smell and hear them, this number shrank to 40 per cent. However, when participants were ordered to take a subject’s hand and force it down onto a table (the medium through which the shocks were administered) 30 per cent went all the way. At lower levels the percentage rates were much higher; despite the conditions of the experiment all the participants except one agreed to deliver shocks up to a range of 135–80 volts, marked ‘strong shock’ (ibid.: 35–7).

Similarly, Christopher Browning (1998) and Harald Welzer (2005) conducted a historical examination of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which was infamous for its part in the ‘Final Solution’, the purging of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, and for the killing of approximately 40,000 Jews. Like Milgram, they concluded that only a fraction of those involved (approximately 5–10 per cent) could be assessed as pathological (see also Neitzel and Welzer 2013).

Finally, we turn to Philip Zimbardo, renowned for his prison experiments (Zimbardo 2004), who has continued to raise concerns about human moral ambivalence and, what he calls the Lucifer effect, through which ordinary men and woman are turned into cruel perpetrators (ibid. 2008). He travelled to Brazil to carry out an investigation into state torturers. He discovered an organization that had developed selection processes, similar to standard human resource management procedures, to screen out the sadists (and suchlike). The reason for which such procedures are necessary is surprising – a sadist would not do the job properly. He or she would prioritize his or her sadistic lusts over the requirements of the task. Inevitably, therefore, the victim would die before confessing. It would appear that only normal people could do the job properly (ibid.).

So a first consequence for organization studies can be presented. Inspired by Bauman we can shift our focus and worry less about the small number of people who may have pathological tendencies and turn our attention to the 90–95 per cent of ordinary morally ambivalent people, who struggle to find relevant, workable answers to the question of what moral responsibility is, its meaningful relation to what it means to be a human being, and the individual moral requirements that emerge from this.

Moving on to the second consequence for organization theory, it is often assumed, when discussing how to ensure responsible organizations, that organizational bodies (treated as an assembly of human beings, governance structures, rules, guidelines and policies) and human collectives can have moral concern. Artificial bodies as well as human collectives are indeed ‘vehicles’, and importantly they are powerful sources, for taking negative (avoiding doing harm) as well as positive (solving ethical dilemmas) responsibility. However, Baumanian ethics shows us that it is an ontological mistake to stretch moral concern beyond the individual (see also McMahon 1995 on this matter). Consequently, individual organizational members must pave the way for and carry out changes within the ‘ethical’ modus vivendi prevailing in organizations; it is in these people that we have to place our hope for responsible change of practice (for a similar point, yet with an exclusive Levinasian approach, see Bevan and Corvellec 2007).

Normal organizations capable of producing horrific events

The increase in the physical and/or psychic distance between the act and its consequences achieves more than the suspicion of moral inhibition; it quashes the moral significance of the act and thereby pre-empts all conflict between personal standards of moral decency and immorality of the social consequences of the act. With most of the socially significant actions mediated by a long chain of complex causal and functional dependencies, moral dilemmas recede from sight, while the occasions for more scrutiny and conscious moral choice become increasingly rare.

(Bauman 1989: 25)

One century before Bauman, Ferdinand Tönnies ([1887] 2001) argued that the emerging society in the late nineteenth century essentially seemed to detach people. The transformation that he studied suggested to him the fading out of the social fabric – Gemeinschaft – in which people ‘stay together in spite of everything that separates them’ being gradually replaced by an industrialized, capitalist, society – Gesellschaft – where people ‘remain separate in spite of everything that unites them’ (ibid.: 52). Modern society, according to Tönnies, breaks the bonds that exist between people and the web of togetherness is being corroded, as is the joint sharing of experiences and collective efforts to foster caring for fellow human beings.

Bauman has been heavily influenced by Tönnies’ thinking and nowhere is this influence more evident than in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). We are tempted to regard the Holocaust as an anomaly – a bizarre, horrific event that will never happen again. According to Bauman we should hesitate before coming to such a conclusion. The Holocaust appears to be an integral part of our recent history, the Gesellschaft era, when ordinary men and women were successfully turned into perpetrators and bystanders through normal organizing: i.e. order-giving, order-taking, procedures and protocols, division of labour, specialization, bureaucratic language, professionalization, loyalty to the group and the pitying of superiors, career opportunities, the reduction of human beings into quantitative traits, profit motives, technical considerations and means-end reasoning (Bauman 1989; Browning 1998; Welzer 2005). As Bauman (1989: 150) suggests, ‘the story of the organization of the Holocaust could be made into a textbook of scientific management’, or as prisoner no. 174,517, Pri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Towards sociological compassion: an introduction
• 1. On adiaphoric organizations and adiaphoric organizational members
• 2. Liquid modernity, the owl of Minerva and technologies of the emotional self
• 3. Life in the liquid organization: control and ambiguity in organizational experience
• 4. Consuming work: aestheticization and the liquid employee
• 5. Liquid collaboration
• 6. Liquid university
• 7. On fluidity and flow in the networked space of human service organizations: understanding liquidity and organized welfare praxis
• 8. Liquid times for the entrepreneurial identity non-profit organization
• 9. Transcending liquidity: towards a new embeddedness
• 10. Liquid responsibility: ambivalence and professional judgement in organizations
• 11. How to regain trust, if it is at all possible?
• 12. A paradoxical attempt to freeze liquid modernity by liquidity: the return of fate
• Index