ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the fast capitalist version of the world as a specific, ideologically loaded 'story', but a story that may very well become true, especially in the absence of competing and equally powerful alternative stories. It then presents the 'absences' and 'silences' in fast capitalist texts, areas in which these texts gloss over the complexities of the real world. Fast capitalist texts are a mixed genre: a mix of history and description, prophecy, warning, proscriptions and recommendations, parables (stories of success and failure), and large doses of utopianism. The management rhetoric and ideology of fast capitalism, centered on the newly 'enchanted', (because 'meaningful'), workplace is, however, 'easily vulnerable to abuses of power and [to] the elaborate manipulation of people and values': The promise of the enchanted workplace is a promise of meaning, with the corporation as the mediator between work and the self.
