Postmodern Organization Theory

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Introduction

As the theme of my essay I have chosen to find out what our contemporary society must not forget in order to be able to make organizational theory evolve well into the 21st century. For this task I have decided to take a look back to Aldous Huxley’s modern dystopia “Brave new world”, that warned against totalitarian regimes that intended to suppress individuality in order to advance the interest of the state in its time. Even as those regimes might not be a direct threat nowadays we can eerily conclude that some aspects of it are quite accurate for the times we live in. According to Phillip Yancey who suggested that “there is a much more subtle enemy inchoate within each of us - a natural tendency for people to trade autonomy for comfort, safety and amusement.” This for the most people does not set off alarms but I will argue that it is the most basic requirement that has to be met in our day and age in order to tackle the wide range of issues that we face at the crossroads leading to the future, whether we talk about humanity or organizational theory itself. I think the novel gives us the perfect opportunity to draw parallels with our contemporary society, and see what must be corrected within post modernity based on how things evolved over the course of history and from prophetical books like Huxley’s even as at his time it was only intended to be satire. In the World State people are controlled by technologies like genetic engineering, sleep-learning and drugs like soma to satisfy needs and gently induce masses to enjoy their servitude. If one were to describe postmodernism in just a word or two, "skepticism" and "relativism" would probably best capture the overall ethos of its adherents. Deep skepticism about...

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... fall within certain parameters, as do all Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Some members of the lower castes are actually groups of identical clones, thanks to "Bokanovsky's Process". Such physical and cognitive standardization of the human race is the true source of the Controllers' power. Postmodernists would, naturally, be appalled at the World State's abuses of power and rigid systems of social stratification. Such abuses are, however, made possible by the postmodernists' own ideas of the subjective nature of reality and the malleability of truth and the "texts" of history. Ironically, despite breathtaking technological advances, life has not become more meaningful, it has become less so. This reflects postmodern disillusionment with the progress of science and reason ("Postmodernism"), as well as the concern with language as a weapon of the ruling class. .

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