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Introduction
Since, the 1980s, management ideas and vocabularies have turned decisively toward the “soft” attributes of human subjectivity. A new equation between corporate performance and the total involvement of the person in work has become the underlying principle of management strategies and tactics. With the advent of “organisational culture”, “human resource” and “knowledge” management, managerial practices have focused upon the self as a preferred site for intervention.
Among the favourite techniques deployed in the attempt to enrol the whole person, ludic (play) technologies occupy an undisputed place. From training sessions to entire corporate culture setups, work is being reconfigured through play and, increasingly, work is represented as “play”. This paper offers an interpretation of this new mixture between play and work from a cultural‐historical perspective. Our analytical approach is informed by existential phenomenology as a philosophical matrix. From it, we draw our main understanding of the cultural relationship between management practices and ideas, on the one hand, and the macro‐social and cultural environment of modernity in the twenty‐first century, on the other (developed in more detail in Costea et al., 2006).
Our argument is relatively simple: the turn to a “soft” version of “subjectivity” in management over the last 25 years is not just superficial mumbo‐jumbo; rather, it reflects profound features of the late modern worldview. Current management ideas and practices reflect very clearly the rise of a new “divinity”: the “Self” the centre of modern culture and the ultimate reference point of all modern value systems. This new sense of self is omnipresent in the images of what we term “pop‐modernity”: from reality television, to the workplace, the modern individual has a right to “fun” to pleasure, has an ultimate entitlement to a “24/7” hedonistic existence. It is thus not just any sense of what it means to be a human being that is at stake in the modern assertion of “selfhood” as the ultimate purpose of existence. It is the pleasure‐seeking, “happy” smiling, entertained, satisfied, spending customer‐person that is central to current modern culture (with its associated economy of mass‐production and mass‐consumption).
That is why the mysterious figure of the Greek god Dionysus, presiding over the highly ritualised frenzies of mass‐consumption, comes readily to mind. Is pop‐modernity the time of Dionysus' return?...