orgcomania

Now where the heck was I?

I've always found it a bit ironic that the university is one of the most hierarchial organizations you can find around anymore. Here we are supposedly teaching and researching on the cutting edge and yet the structure of our organization would be obsolete in a free market setting. No organization that had to compete to survive could afford the layer upon layer that the university (not to mention the system layer above that) uses. I'm not talking about just UWL here. It has been true for virtually all of the eight or so universities and colleges where I have taught.

One of my few dissapointments in this edition of the text is that have revised chapter seven so that it is "alternatives to hierarchy" instead of "postmodern perspectives on organizations" that it used to be. Postmodernity is a conceptually challenging idea but I truly believe that it helps explain the way things are in the world very well.

Karl Marx summed up postmodernity with the short but powerful expression "all that is solid, melts into air." In other words, the authority and certainty that we feel about the world is subject to challenge and sudden, often unexpected, dissapearance. Any and every reality is open to question. Things that seem sure to endure forever don't. Postmodern change is all around us. From the political arena, for example, the traditional view is marriage is between men and women. Quite suddenly this has been called into question. From the social arena, phones were always linked to places--the phone in your home or office, a pay phone booth. Now phones can be anywhere. I saw a cartoon yesterday that makes a joke about this suddenly changed reality. Two vultures are sitting on a cactus in the middle of the desert. Next to them is a car that has obviously broken down from the heat, there is a puddle of water under the radiator and steam coming out of the engine. The driver of the car is sitting with his back against a rock talking on his cell phone. He is saying "yeah, I'm in the middle of nowhere! It will take you two hours or so to get out here." The punch line is one vulture saying to the other "I hate all this technology, it is just ruining nature." Cartoon descriptions aside, the postmodern point is that anything we believe to be true, no matter how obvious it might seem, can change in a moments time.

In organizational communication the postmodern aesthetic or approach has led to fundamental challenges to our assumptions about how people organize. The text talks a lot about team based organizations and that is surely one aspect of this view. The previous edition of the text had an extended example of a BMW plant organized on postmodern principles. The plant was organized in a circle so that each group of employees could see the other groups. All employees at all levels (company president to janitor) wore the same white uniform. The sign above the employee entrance read "Welcome to BMW. We are an information-processing and communications company that, as a happy-by-product, shares in the building of fine automobiles for world markets." Not your normal automobile plant by any means. In fact, long held assumptions about how automobiles are built are strikingly called into question.

Another example of postmodern organization removed from this edition of the text is the Nordstrom's employee handbook. The handbook is one page, front and back. The handbook has one rule "Rule 1: Use your good judgment in all situations" then says "There will be no additional rules." Finally, the handbook concludes "Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time." Obviously a lot of longstanding rules and assumptions about employee handbooks had to be tossed out to create this one.
As Marx says "all that is solid, melts into air."

I'm confident your life has been changed by the postmodern aesthetic. Everyone's has. What many people don't know is that the sudden change and upheaval they experience has an organizing explanation behind it!