Amerika

Organizations are defined as:

The word means a collection of resources that are working together somehow to achieve a common purpose. When we talk about an organization, we are usually referring to a group of people.

A sociological description is:

Humans are social creatures. Since the dawn of Homo sapiens nearly 250,000 years ago, people have grouped together into communities in order to survive. Living together, people form common habits and behaviours—from specific methods of childrearing to preferred techniques for obtaining food. In modern-day Paris, many people shop daily at outdoor markets to pick up what they need for their evening meal, buying cheese, meat, and vegetables from different specialty stalls. In Canada, the majority of people shop once a week at supermarkets, filling large carts to the brim. The Parisian Roland Barthes disdainfully referred to this as “the hasty stocking up” of a “more mechanical civilization” (Barthes 1977).

What this boils down to is that humans always form organizations that then consist of a structure and a culture. Structures can change and cultures can also change, but without either part, the organization then becomes “mechanical.” Mechanics replace people in the structure meaning that the organization is being hollowed out:

Hollowing out is a phrase used to describe conditions and trends in the economies of developed nations that are the result of many middle-class, blue-collar manufacturing jobs being outsourced to developing countries. The outsourcing, or “offshoring,” of both manufacturing and low-level service jobs, is considered one of the predominant trends in the global economy over the past 20 to 30 years.

However, it’s not just jobs going overseas that have “hollowed out” manufacturing industries in the US and other developed nations. Increasing automation has drastically reduced the number of employees required in manufacturing operations.

Today, rapid technological changes are boosting efficiency in the manufacturing sector. In particular, product life cycles are becoming increasingly shorter without compromising quality. Also, the flexibility and responsiveness of technology help boost employee productivity.

It’s the robots, more so than cheap labor overseas, who’ve “stolen” the jobs of many people who once thought their union contracts virtually guaranteed them a secure, well-paying job for life.

It was never the intention of automation to reduce jobs; the intention was to increase production which was supposed to be the purpose of a manufacturing plant. But automation was quickly overpowered by production engineering which aimed at increasing not so much production but production profits by reducing jobs. The executive managers then implemented the cherry on top by using MBA university students to improve dividends for shareholders, obviating the need for having a plant at all.

This not only affected organizational structures, but also the culture of society when the naturally occurring economic middle-class was hollowed out. This resulted in changing a productive society to a financialised society without anyone noticing that revenue is more important than profits and that society changed its structure and culture to ideology and crowds.

It appears that post-modern society is purely political consisting of an ideological ruling class governing the politics of crowds.  This means that culture is irrelevant, and that structure is also irrelevant demonstrating not just a hollowed-out society but an Empty Organization without values.

The horrible prospect of a total lack of identity, ideas and purpose is the final phase of intelligent life.

Tags: empty organization, ideology, productivity