ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the importance of developing posthumanist organizations to help resolve some of the issues raised in the preceding chapters. Especially in highly diverse societies, where there is a wide variety of languages and dialects, contestations over which language or dialect ought to be given official recognition or used under what circumstances can emerge. Given the resources and power available to organizations, it is not uncommon to rely on them to help resolve the complex issue of managing ethnic and linguistic diversity. However, organizations tend to succumb to assumptions of modernity, which treat language as a stable entity with clear boundaries, one that bears a historically continuous relationship to its speakers. This leads to a hardening of boundaries between different ethnolinguistic groups, a presumption of unambiguous linkages between a given group and a particular language – all as a consequence of the orientation of organizations towards modernity. Organizations have to wean themselves away from this orientation that, by default, tends to inform their approaches to ethnolinguistic complexity. In contrast, an organization that is posthumanist in orientation will treat such boundaries as historically contingent and flexible, and it will recognize its own complicity in the construction of any assemblage. Posthumanist organizations are thus needed regardless of the issue of automation. By the same token, this chapter shows that posthumanist organizations are also better able to accommodate the increasingly complex roles that automation is playing in the societal use of language and communication.
