This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Web of Science (9) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Kallinikos, J. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

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 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.

Key Words: bureaucracy • contingency • employment and organizational forms • human agency • selectivity • work

Organization Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, 595-618 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0170840603024004005


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				T. J. Watson Work and the Sociological Imagination: The Need for Continuity and Change in the Study of Continuity and Change Sociology, October 1, 2009; 43(5): 861 - 877. [Abstract] [PDF]

				A. Styhre Management Control in Bureaucratic and Postbureaucratic Organizations: A Lacanian Perspective Group Organization Management, December 1, 2008; 33(6): 635 - 656. [Abstract] [PDF]

				B. Kleymann, H. Malloch, T. Redman, and J. Angot The Dynamics of a Variably Coupled Social System: The Case of Les Compagnons du Devoir Journal of Management Inquiry, December 1, 2008; 17(4): 381 - 396. [Abstract] [PDF]

				G. Delmestri Streams of inconsistent institutional influences: Middle managers as carriers of multiple identities Human Relations, November 1, 2006; 59(11): 1515 - 1541. [Abstract] [PDF]

				J. Kallinikos The Social Foundations of the Bureaucratic Order Organization, January 1, 2004; 11(1): 13 - 36. [Abstract] [PDF]

				D. L. Collinson Identities and Insecurities: Selves at Work Organization, August 1, 2003; 10(3): 527 - 547. [Abstract] [PDF]