Work, Human Agency and Organizational Forms: An Anatomy of Fragmentation

This article is concerned with the changing premises of human involvement in organizations underlying current employment and labour trends. The appreciation of these trends is placed in the wider historical context signified by the advent of modernity and the diffusion of the bureaucratic form of or...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:Organization studies Jg. 24; H. 4; S. 595 - 618
1. Verfasser: Kallinikos, Jannis
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Berlin SAGE Publications 01.05.2003
Sage Publications Ltd. (UK)
Sage Publications Ltd
Schlagworte:
Agency and Structure
Agent (Philosophy)
Anthropology
Appreciation
Bureaucracy
Employment
Flexibility
Forecasts and trends
Free agency
Human agency
Modernity
Occupational mobility
Occupations
Organization
Organization theory
Organizational behavior
Organizational Structure
Segmentation
Social aspects
Social role
Studies
Trends
Work
Work environment
Workplaces
selectivity
contingency
human agency
work
employment and organizational forms
bureaucracy
ISSN:0170-8406, 1741-3044
Online-Zugang:Volltext
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:This article is concerned with the changing premises of human involvement in organizations underlying current employment and labour trends. The appreciation of these trends is placed in the wider historical context signified by the advent of modernity and the diffusion of the bureaucratic form of organization. The article attempts to dissociate bureaucracy from the dominant connotations of centralized and rigid organizational arrangements. It identifies the distinctive mark of the modern workplace with the crucial fact that it admits human involvement in non-inclusive terms. Modern humans are involved in organizations qua roles, rather than qua persons. Innocent as it may seem, the separation of the role from the person has been instrumental to the construction of modern forms of human agency. An organizational anthropology is thereafter outlined based on Gellner's conception of `Modular Man'. Modernity and bureaucracy construe human beings as assemblages of relatively independent behavioural modules that can be invoked individually or in combination to respond to the differentiated character of the contemporary world. While the occupational mobility and organizational flexibility currently under way presuppose a model of human agency that recounts basic attributes of the modular human, they at the same time challenge it in some important respects.
Bibliographie:SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 14
ObjectType-Article-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0170-8406
1741-3044
DOI:10.1177/0170840603024004005