Citizenship or Vassalage? Organizational Membership in the Age of Unreason

Abstract

In his article `Organizations and Citizenship' (1997), Martin Parker observes that what he terms `new style management' has placed, high on its agenda, the fostering of a subjectively embedded, `normative commonality' within the work organization. From this observation he develops an argument which, drawing upon the conceptual resources of classical political theory, seeks to equate such developments with the possibility of a renewed project of workplace democracy. This article argues that not only has Parker misappropriated these concepts, but that his `reading' of contemporary developments within the domain of management discourse and practice, misinterprets the trajectory organizational life is likely to take under their influence. Drawing upon Minc's `New Middle Ages' thesis (1993), I argue that, rather than the outcome being a radical democratic utopia, premised upon rational argumentation, responsibility and autonomy, what we are witnessing is the emergence of an essentially anti-modernist project. One which seeks to colonize the potentiality for subjective rational autonomy, through the propagation of a mystical and symbolic dependency upon the personified organizational lifeworld.