Changes in organizational management

In the realm of work and organizations, critical contrast is now being focused on modernism and post-modernism. I also believe that the gradual switch from the former to the latter workplace standard can provide an idea of how much change work and organizations endured in this generation. Grint (2005) ascribed ‘ certainty, stability and consensus’ to modernist organizations vis a vis their opposites of ‘ instability, uncertainty and dissensus’ to the post-modernist ones. Grint’s three sets of opposite words generalize the paradigm shift from modernism to post-modernism in the course material depiction of structural change from rigid bureaucracies to flexible organizations; the consumption trend from mass markets to niche markets; from technological determinism to technological choice; from differentiated, demarcated and de-skilled to highly de-differentiated, de-demarcated and multi-skilled jobs; and from central and standardized to complex and fragmentary employment relations, based on Knights and Willmott (2006). Although the current model of organizational processes has revolutionized society and industry in more ways than one, I do, however, also acknowledge Harding’s (2003) argument that the so-called modernist epoch was never ‘ superseded’ (Jameson, 2002) and has not gone away, but metamorphosed into the ideals we know now as post-modernist to ‘ fill voids of understanding that exist in the modern world’. Viewed in this sense, the transformations we perceived do not necessarily change, but continuity, which in a way animates Weil’s (1968, cited in Grey, 2005) remark that ‘ the future is made of the same stuff as the present’. It appears, therefore, that the continuity required of recording a change practically renders a complementing effect to change and continuity, as explicated by Zurndorfer (1989). As to being change or continuity, my stand is that each occurrence in an organization, whether planned or incidental, describes a continuum where significant change is a milestone which defines the continuity of the history of the organization.