Gazi Islam & Roberta Sferrazzo

New management ideology and liberated companies

Contemporary organizations are encouraging employees to find enjoyment in and through their work, promoting practices and discourse emphasizing employee self-realization, happiness, participation and self-expression. Seeing in this proliferation of well-being narratives a shift in forms of managerial control, some have referred to this phenomenon as the “new management ideology”[i]. Scholars have attributed different labels to identify the organizational practices belonging to the new management ideology, such as “neo-normative”[ii], “high-involvement”[iii], and “enchanting”[iv]practices, among others.

Amidst the broader scope of new management ideologies, the “liberated enterprise” was formulated as a transformative leadership movement promoting humanistic and egalitarian practices[v]. Liberated enterprises suppress formal procedures and controls such as time clocks and organizational charts, but also make deep cuts into middle management and radically restructure organizational hierarchies. Liberated enterprises emphasize leaders as “culture keepers”, rather than hierarchical figures. These elements of liberated enterprises make liberating leadership a contemporary prototype of the new managerial ideology.

Nevertheless, new management’s humanistic discourses generate multiple tensions and ambivalences associated to what “liberation” really means in such contexts. On the one hand, critical literature has examined how neo-normative controls operate and result in heterogenous or conflicting subjective positions. Yet we know little about the mobilization of material practices to work through the tensions produced in such situations. Through our recent qualitative study in the Journal of Management Studies, we argue that rituals practices are important to understand how new management ideologies are realized in organizations, and to understand the tensions of new management more broadly.

Rituals’ functions in our empirical investigation

Rituals are be defined as discrete enactments, with beginnings and ends, that enact collective beliefs or values[vi]. As underlined by several scholars, rituals can maintain or transform normative orders because of their deep embedding in tensions, such as those between stability and change, individual and group, freedom and work. This aspect of rituals makes them an ideal analytical lens to study the tensions of new management, with its own ambivalent mix of order and freedom.

Through our empirical investigation, we studied how rituals mediate the tensions of new management, in the context of a French multinational company, KingFish[vii], in its pretensions to transform itself into a “liberated enterprise”. We discovered that control at KingFish worked through promoting self-expression and the promise of community. Nevertheless, KingFish’s self-described movement towards liberation gave rise to tensions, of which we identified two overarching forms: a hierarchy-equality tension around issues of participation, sharing, and informal climate, and a profit-flourishing tension around the productivity and well-being implications of the new management style.

With these tensions in mind, we were struck by the frequency with which people spoke about rituals throughout the company and the importance they gave to ritual moments. From the diversity of events and their functions, we began to explore the different rituals in the interviews, asking managers to elaborate on the rituals. Based on our findings, we constructed a theoretical framework to describe the process by which tensions become ritualized and how such ritualizations reflect distinct approaches to tensions in liberated companies. More specifically, we identified four broad functions around tensions – subordination, disavowal, segmentation and agonism – that were distributed unevenly across different ritual forms. Specifically, while some rituals worked to promote unity and suppress tension, (subordination, disavowal), others maintained tensions by keeping their terms separate (segmentation), or living with and valorizing the tension itself (agonism).

A future research agenda

In our paper, we covered a wide array of rituals, from rare, important events to everyday rituals of interaction. This broad survey allowed us to delineate broad functions to different kinds of rituals,  appropriate for early stage theorizing around a heterogeneous phenomenon. However, ritual studies have excelled specifically in contexts of thick ethnographic description[viii], and to gain a fine-grained understanding of the mediation properties of specific rituals, such thick empirical approaches are recommended in future research.

Based on our paper’s contributions, we invite future research on how rituals function in contemporary workplaces more broadly, and in liberated companies specifically. How different forms of ritual and ritualization practices channel tensions, and with what organizational effects, remains in need of study. More broadly, however, this mediating function may reveal deeper attempts by management to deal with underlying structural tensions inherent in contemporary business practices. Rituals within new management may be emblematic of the attempts to make organization work in context of ongoing tensions, and the variety of ritual forms may be diagnostic of what kinds of tensions exist and how they are directed towards certain solutions. We believe that theoretical and empirical research in this direction would be highly valuable.

[i] Chiapello, E. and Fairclough, N.L. (2002). ‘Understanding the new management ideology: A transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new sociology of capitalism’. Discourse and Society, 13(2), 185–208.

[ii] Fleming, P. and Sturdy, A. (2011). ‘“Being yourself” in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control’. Human relations, 64(2), 177-200.

[iii] Ekman, S. (2014). ‘Is the high-involvement worker precarious or opportunistic? Hierarchical ambiguities in late capitalism’. Organization, 21, 141–158.

[iv] Endrissat, N., Islam, G. and Noppeney, C. (2015). ‘Enchanting work: New spirits of service work in an organic supermarket’. Organization Studies, 36(11), 1555-1576.

[v] Carney, B.M. and Getz, I. (2015). Freedom, Inc. How Corporate Liberation Unleashes Employee Potential and Business Performance. New York: Somme Valley House.

[vi] Islam, G. and Zyphur, M.J. (2009). ‘Rituals in organizations: A review and expansion of current theory’. Group &

Organization Management, 34(1), 114-139

[vii] This is the company’s pseudonym we used in the article.

[viii] Bell, C. (2009 [1997]). Ritual: Perspectives and dimensions. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press.