Organizing between a rock and a hard place

And isn’t organization theory itself increasingly stuck between a rock and a hard place? Instead of core competencies, functional units and divisional organization we have fractured identities, outsourcing in and insourcing out, virtual viruses messing up our interfaces and insane project managers desperately looking for that one controllable moment. Let’s just accept that we’re all displaced now, lounging in the airport-lounge (Augé, 1995), left at the station, and stuck in the K-hole of our choice (Warren, 2005). Let’s not mind. Fuck, let’s rejoice in this. Whereas classical organization theory was obsessed with boundaries and buffer zones, maybe the organization theory of tomorrow has to be a theory of borderlands and de-militarized zones (O’Doherty et al., 2007)? No longer is organized man necessarily the man in the organization (or the woman for that matter), rather it’s a man (or an Other) who decided to tell the boss to take this job and shove it, and went walkabout. There, not really anywhere, the gals from the fourth floor have set up a picnic (they’re serving their old boss’s kidneys, gently braised). A waiter, used to running between the organization of the kitchen and the organization of the dining room, quickly traverses the space, almost knocking over a recently fired but very happy man. And all the while, someone somewhere is torn apart from loving more than one.