ABSTRACT
Speaking in very broad demographic terms, there are two groups of workers ascendant in the emerging post-industrial order of world capitalism.2 One is the ‘nouveau proletarian’, the burger flipper, personal service and/or contingent worker. The other is the so-called ‘knowledge worker’, the quasi-professional worker who does not contract to deliver a discrete product (as does the selfemployed contractor) but whose discretionary action cannot be controlled by now-traditional methods of managing human ‘resources’. This chapter will focus on the latter group, but has implications for the study of the former. My argument is that, through a process of social forgetting, the industrial roots of today’s assumptions about the rights and responsibilities of the worker, the meaning and role of the organisation in society, and even the meanings of human ‘nature’ have been lost. This has been exacerbated by the dominance of a physical science model for organisational inquiry which eschews the production of narrative knowledge about organisations, aspiring instead to a paradigmatic science of measurable, testable knowledge. In this drive, historically and culturally bound
assumptions and problems have come to be reified as fundamental variables of human interaction. Before we can proceed to create useful knowledge of the post-industrial, I will argue, we must proceed in what I have only half-facetiously termed a necrological manner, to become aware of and to dislodge the ‘dominant but dead’ (Calás and Smircich 1987; Habermas 1983) corpse of positivist-industrial knowledge that is lying upon us.
