The first of its kind, this coursebook examines the work of the future. Work in the Digital Age: A Coursebook on Labor, Technology, and Regulation focuses on certain technologies: the platform economy and gig work, big data and people analytics, gamification, artificial intelligence and algorithmic management, blockchain technology, drones, and. Reinventing the C-Suite. There is a fundamental mismatch between the way we organise our senior management teams and the way modern commerce has evolved.
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Your Rating:. The palaces of consumption, like the workplace cages, are made of glass. As we said earlier, it is also a distorting medium in which light is reflected and refracted, creating illusions and false images.
Looking into glass, it is sometimes easy to mistake your own reflection as the image facing from behind. Finally, glass is a framing medium — its mere presence defines that which lies behind it as something worthy of attention, protection and display. The glass palace of consumption revolves around deliberate display; it is a place where the gaze of the prospector meets the look of the prospect.
In this glass palace, new fashion trends can be spotted, new badges can be identified, new lifestyles can be explored and new identities can be experimented with. Within such palaces, there are subtle forms of coercion, enticement and control exercised over the consumer under the illusion of choice and freedom. Like the docile queues of Disneyland, once enticed into the cathedrals of consumption, consumers are captive.
They have no choice but to observe, to look, to desire, to choose and to buy. Glass palaces of consumption can all too easily be mistaken for glass cages. Of course, glass cages look quite different to those outside; they look glamorous and full of enticing objects.
Those denied access, through their lack of resources, mobility, looks or whatever, feel truly excommunicated. To them, being inside the cage represents real freedom. For those inside the glass, on the other hand, the hungry faces of those outside is a constant reminder that there are far worse places in which to be. Inside too, consumers are frequently separated from objects which they cherish by invisible barriers created by the limits of their buying powers — there are cages within the palaces and palaces within the cages.
The myth of California has become commodified, a managed fantasy, like those which Ritzer has highlighted in his work. But the hegemony of such fantasies is not unopposed. Once again, the concept of voice suggests a way of looking at the dynamics of the glass palaces of consumption in a richer light. As my own work with Tim Lang highlights, consumers are becoming ever more unmanageable, eccentric and paradoxical.
Casualization of work and career reinforces casualization of consumption. Consumers increasingly lead precarious and uneven existences, one day enjoying unexpected boons and the next sinking to bare subsistence.
Consumption itself becomes fragmented, spasmodic and episodic. As Bauman has argued, In the life-game of the postmodern consumers the rules of the game keep changing in the course of playing.
The sensible strategy is therefore to keep each game short — so that a sensibly played game of life calls for the splitting of one big all-embracing game with huge stakes into a series of brief and narrow games with small ones….
To keep the game short means to beware long-term commitments. Not to get tied to the place. Not to swear consistency and loyalty to anything and anybody. Not to control the future, but to refuse to mortgage it: to take care that the consequences of the game do not outlive the past to bear on the present. Bauman, 24 This then seems to parallel the life-game of postmodern workers, whose strategies are summed up as entailing flexibility, reinvention and movement, in short as amounting to tactics.
Tactics are not planned in advance, nor do they serve an overall design, but they unravel as life does, with its accidents, misfortunes, boons and breaks.
It is out of such episodes that all of us construct and reconstruct our fragile selves, moving from glass palace to glass cage, at times feeling anxiously trapped by it, at others feeling energised and appreciated, and at others depressed and despondent.
This then is the argument. Using Sennett and Ritzer as our guides, we took two paths that deviate from long- standing Weberian themes.
Sennett argues that the Protestant work ethic has dissolved under the regime of the flexible workplace with its demands for adaptable, quiescent employees, its replacement of visible, tangible work with manipulation of images and signs and its supplanting of traditional values of loyalty, sacrifice and long-term commitment. The result is a corrosion of character, with an attendant inability to construct meaningful life narratives and identities.
Ritzer, for his part, highlights the continuous shift from work to consumption as a source of meaning and identity, identifying the cathedrals of consumption as spaces where consumers are lured and enticed with a profusion of well-orchestrated and minutely managed fantasies. He argues that this represents a re-enchantment of the world, thus undoing the disenchantment brought about by rationalizing modernity.
This re- enchantment encourages individuals to express themselves by embracing life-styles, icons and signs. It is itself the product of rationalization, albeit one in which rational calculation and planning are applied to spectacle, image and experience. I argued that both of these approaches, compelling as they are, tend to present too monochromatic accounts of contemporary organizations and culture.
Using the twin metaphors of glass cage and glass palace, I suggested that both pose certain unique constraints quite distinct from those we encounter at the high noon of modernity , generate a distinct malaise and afford certain unique consolations.
They also present distinct possibilities of contestation and challenge. Shared features of glass cage and glass palace include an emphasis on display, an invisibility of constraints, a powerful illusion of choice, a glamorization of image and an ironic question-mark as to whether freedom lies this side or that side of the glass.
Above all, there is an ambiguity as to whether the glass is a medium of entrapment or a beautifying frame and a constant reminder of the fragility and brittleness of all that surrounds us. For every celebrity trapped in a glass cage and for every employee dreaming of a glass palace, there are many people in every part of the globe struggle in sweat-shops, offices without air-conditioning and factories hidden from view. When the goings-on in the Oval Office of the White House can be rehearsed in minuscule detail in front of an entire nation, it may well be that the era of the iron cage has finally given way to the era of glass.
Old forms of entrapment and suffering do not appear so threatening any more. But ambivalence, confusion and anxiety are features of our age as they have been of previous ones. In the last resort, the fragility of human experience is not the result of the flexible workplaces and fragmented consumptions of our age, but rather the product of its confrontation with different cages across historical eras.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. Hall and P. Du Gay eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, Clegg, S. London: Sage. Fiske, J. London: Unwin Hyman. Gabriel, Y. Grey, C. Hirschman, A. Hochschild, A. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jermier, J. Knights and W. Nord Resistance and Power in Organizations. London: Routledge. Knights, D. Jermier, W. Nord and D. Knights eds. Resistance and Power in Organizations.
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