Stewart Clegg: Organizations for Liquid-Modern Times: Navigating Change in Today’s Workplaces

Speaker A: Welcome to the first of two special episodes in our Work now and in the Future Tools for Thinking podcast series. Today we're joined by the renowned Professor Stuart Clegg, a leading sociologist and organizational theorist from the University of Sydney's School of Project Management. Professor Clegg will dive into a fascinating Organizations for Liquid Modern Times, a uh, concept that redefines how we think about the ever changing dynamics of today's workplaces. For additional materials and resources, visit www.aalto.fi fi futurework and navigate to the podcast section. Now. Without further ado, let's welcome Professor Stuart Clegg. There is a question about, um, you pointing out that, um, management and organization studies, organization studies in general is kind of lacking general social theory. Why do you believe organizational researchers should prioritize social theory and what impact could it have on the field?

Speaker B: Oh, that's a good question. Um, I think it's the impact that its absence has had, which is my first concern. And possibly this is something which is partly biographical. Um, my first degree was a long time ago in the 1960s at the University of Aston, and I specialized in sociology. And um, I loved sociological theory. I read it widely and I think that that de reading that was done then set me on a track to, to always approach issues from a theoretical perspective. Uh, I think it gives a depth of understanding that it isn't there in just working within the parameters of a, uh, management or an organization theory. It enables one to connect local situations to more global concerns. C. Wright Mills put it very nicely once when he said it allows you to connect, uh, private issues to public troubles. And uh, that's a very nice, a very nice formulation. Not that I'm always looking at public troubles, but it's the question of trying to connect and of trying to think outside and beyond the case. Um, you know, when I read some of the people that I most admire, um, in the field, this is what they do. And um, there's a second associated thing actually as well. Uh, if the state of sort of organization and management theory today is become incredibly balkanized and macroized, it's uh, you know, you'll need somebody, they'll say, I'm an institutional logics person, or I do institutional work, uh, or I do institutional entrepreneurship. And each one of those probably hasn't got a clue what the other is doing. They haven't got a broad concept of institutional theory and they're not really aware of where institutional theory might fit into a gamut of approaches going back at least to Weber. So I think it's important to have that understanding of social theory. That's the first reason. The second reason is social theory can add so much. Um, I was recently talking to a group of project management students on a webinar last week and um, we were talking about uh, liquid modernity and Sigma's work. And the point I was making to them was that if you look at Bauman's work on liquid Modernity, Liquid Society, and especially you look at his last book, uh, Retrotopia, then it's almost a prescient, um, it's a prescient understanding of where we sit in 2024 with the swing to retrotopic reactionary right wing governments which is occurring globally at the present time, uh, even in Finland I believe and uh, you know, one or two holdouts. But um, it certainly seems to be, to be happening. And if you think about the whole ideology of make America great again, then it's very much a retrotopic backward look to an imagined past which will produce a future in practice which I suspect will not correspond to that which the people who voted for it imagine it that it will be. There are so many contradictions and paradoxes built into the model of it. Now all of that's there in or for me. I understand all of that to be there in Bauman's work. So I find this a really. Siegman was a friend and also my favorite social theorist. So uh, I tend to be a little biased, let's say same because I admire the man uh, so much. But yeah, I mean I think that if we want to understand what's happening in the world right now, social theory, good social theory really helps us do so.

Speaker A: I couldn't agree more. And I've also recently heard someone say that the management theories of the present don't really um. Well the ones that have been circulated that don't really meet the realities of managing at the moment or certainly not.

Speaker B: I mean I've never thought most um, management or organization theory to be very much hasn't got much to do with reality largely because of the methods that are used. Um, you know using questionnaires asking people to give you accounts of things is not reality. It's accounts and accounts differ greatly from reality. Um, one of the fundamental influences on my thinking was um, reading Garfinkel's studies in ethnomethodology and reading a methodological text and over many many years being a very good friend, uh, of one of my best friends is David Silverman. And I find David's approach really, really Refreshing, which is that we have to look empirically at real data and real data is the data that would have happened even if you were a dead sociologist. You don't create it yourself by asking people questions. It's data which is material, it's embedded, it's real.

Speaker A: Couldn't agree more. This is um, yes, I'm in complete, full agreement. My own thesis is an ethnography and I been struggling with this, ah, a lot. I completely agree. And I don't believe in this power of asking people questions when you kind of embedded your thoughts in there so that they will tell you what you basically are building them to hear. So. Couldn't agree more. But you already touched on um, Bauman, and I have a next question for you on Baumann. So let's um, move to that which kind of has to do with all of this that we're anyway talking about here. So you've been discussing, analyzing organizations through Bauman's concept of liquid modernity, um, talking ideas about like, lightening of organizations, the reenterization of capitalism and situational organizing. What challenges and opportunities does this shift present in, in your mind? And what does it demand from employees, um, for them to succeed in such an environment?

Speaker B: It demands a great deal from employees. Put this together with work that's been done by um, uh, Jerry Davis, Gerald Davis, who is an American organization theorist who's done a number of studies pointing out how in the heyday of post war US Capitalism, the American corporation was, ah, a quasi mini state. Uh, it provided career, uh, it had pensions associated with it, it would have medical benefits and it would have a career structure. It was something in which people uh, could make their lives with some certainty and some degrees of confidence. Now clearly there was a downside to all of this. It was a place full of masculine bias. It was not a world which particularly welcomed women in other than uh, service roles. Um, there were very, very few women in positions of the managerial authority. We're talking about the 1950s, 1960s. Okay, well what's happened since about the mid-1970s? I think that historically, I would probably date the changes as being precipitated by the stagflation that occurred in much of America and Western Europe after the end of the Vietnam War and its debt financing by the US Government. It was then that, um, the fixed exchange rates began to be dropped. Money became a much more liquid, uh, thing. It was no longer tied to gold. And neoliberal economic ideas began to overtake what had been the predominant Keynesianism of the previous Period. So the neoliberalism was, it was in this. No, it was not initiated by either Raven or Thatcher. They became the hallmarks of neoliberalism. Actually the reason I'm in Australia is because of neoliberalism. Um, in 1976 I was uh, coming off a postdoctoral scholarship and looking for a job. And unfortunately in the summer of 1976 when I was looking for a job, the International Monetary Fund, uh, made an emergency intervention into the British economy, loaning them £3.6 billion with the injunction that they had to impose monetary discipline on their public expenditure. And so actually monetarism had been introduced into the British economy under the then Callahan government prior to the advent of Mrs. Thatcher. I mean she, she just put the skids, uh, you know, the scapes on it. So what was the impact of this? Well, it was firstly, ah, a sort of disaggregation of the state. I was saying to someone the other day, um, I was educated by the state. The state provided the gas and the electricity and the water to my parents house. The state brought all the mail to the house. None of those things would, would necessarily be the case today because you know, the garbage was taken away by the state because they were all public sector employees. So the major effect of neoliberalism was to disaggregate, to decompose the public sector and to introduce contractual and private relations into many areas of social life. Okay, so what happened to the careers that people used to have in those old bureaucracies? Well, they're not what they were. Uh, I mean, things ain't what they used to be. Um, in that reality, the new reality is one of, um, much more opportunity perhaps if opportunity to be constantly hustling for projects and, and hustling for jobs, um, opportunities for forms of self employment which are not really so much self employment, they're just kind of a way of offloading lots of responsibilities that employers used to have onto the employee by calling them contractors. And I'm thinking here of things like Uber and all the ubiquitous restaurant, um, uh, delivery bicycles and scooters and motorbikes. The advent of the platform economy has accelerated all of this greatly. Because the platform economy does two things simultaneously. One, it pulls power to the center because it creates. Successful platforms are always monopolies. Um, they always have a more or less monopoly control. So it pulls power to the center and to the individuals that control, uh, that platform. But at the same time it kind of under the guise of empowering individuals, which to an extent it does do because it gives people the choices to make decisions about how and when they work, but in a historic sense, not necessarily in the sense of that person's biography, but in a historic sense, it disempowers them from employment opportunities that might have uh, existed in the past. Is that clear?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: No, I thought I was getting muddled there.

Speaker A: No, no. And I'm also thinking that this again kind of accentuates the first question, the idea that, you know, when, when we talk about organizing work, management doing that in a vacuum, like not M. Not if you like not applying social theory. And the change that's taking like organizations and management don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in the context of the present societal order. And if you don't introduce that into your thinking, into your theorizing, um, and your understanding, then you don't really know. You can't see the cause and the effect. And I think that here you kind of accentuate it nicely that. Yes. What's happening around that.

Speaker B: So the reason, the reason it precipitated my move to Australia was that I couldn't find a job in the uk. So I was offered one here and I thought, hey, the sun shines, the beaches look good, I'll give it a go.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I think everybody's careers are a bit of uh, a sort of coincidence in some way or another. And the context plays a role in that. But yeah, um, we continue a little bit about the subcontracting that you already mentioned. This kind of, um, well, I don't know, the new arrangement of work that's taking place through platforms. For example. We talk about also fragmentation of work, um, subcontracting hybrid work and um, individualized project based tasks. We see in our uh, data that we've been collecting recently that when we ask people about hybrid work, they talk about hybrid work. But when you look at what they actually do, they just sit home alone. So it's like it's not hybrid. They don't go around, they stay in one place, it's just home. They not with other people. Um, so, um, what do you think, um, in terms of one of the things that's worrying the companies, for instance, that we work with and people that are conscious of the changing working life. What's worrying them greatly is the sort of shared reality, the common experiences and the sort of. Or what we all know is improving all jobs, the sharing, the social, the being together. So how do you feel? Um, what do you think? Um, how can organizations still foster common experiences? How can we. Or is Organization losing its purpose altogether.

Speaker B: Organizations. I mean, let's start from basics. The modern concept of an organization is the legal individual. It's a legal fiction that assumes that an organization is an individual that enables that legal fiction to enter into contracts of various kinds with people and other entities, often contracts with other legal fictions. So what we have seen is a decline in the number of contracts entered with individuals and an increase in the number of contracts that organizations tend to create with other legal entities. A very good example of this is, say, Apple, which is actually not such a huge organization if you look at what goes on in Cupertino. But could it succeed? Could it be an organization without the Foxconn million employees in China and elsewhere that provide all of its parts? No, it couldn't. So are they part of that pool? Well, not legally, but the relation is so symbiotic, so integral, so interpenetrated that, uh, it would be impossible for that not to be the case. Then there's a question that you, uh, raised. But working at home or working in the organization, a lot depends on the nature of the work. Um, for many, you know, many creative workers, I mean, it was Virginia Woolf who wrote about the importance of a room of her own. Having a room of one's own. I spent in my life writing, and so, you know, which is a creative exercise. And this space that you've seen me in is the room where I do most of it. I still go into my office. Uh, well, I don't have an office at work. I go into the open plan space at work maybe once, sometimes twice a week, but not much more than that. And I think if I look at many of my colleagues, they have a similarly disaggregated relationship with the office. I mean, they're there on days for meetings, or we always have. We have kind of like a social day on Tuesday where everybody, uh, meets and has lunch together. So, ah, everybody can catch up. And when, you know, there's all the digital affordances that come through the screen, uh, which enables you to connect. Um, the kind of creative worker, though, tends to be not the normal person working on organizational routines because essentially, being an artist, a, uh, painter, a sculptor, a writer, a musician, all of those are, uh, very creative activities. They're activities that can be done in conjunction with others, but are usually done in rehearsal and in practice on, um, one's own. The necessity for social interaction is much more intense when the nature of the work is much more routinized. And the essence of organization is to drive routines as Far into the system as possible. And so makes the routines bearable and tenable are the social interactions that are engaged in and around the world. We've known this ever since Donald Roy told us about Banana Time in that lovely little ethnography from what, 70 years ago or so. So to the extent that organizing becomes permanently distributed. And the people at the end of the distributed organizing are engaged in highly routine activities, I think it's not a very healthy situation because they're only focused on the screen, on the work, on meeting the very, very demanding systems of surveillance which are coming through the screen and touching, uh, and coming through the keyboard or monitoring the keyboard. And so the opportunities for that social engagement are limited A. Because there's usually no one else around when you're doing this. Because you want to keep the kids out of the room and everybody else may be out working somewhere else. So the health consequences of this, both in terms of bodily health, in terms of not moving around, not exercising, not walking from one place to another very much, um, and the mental health of being socially disengaged from those forms of situational society in which one is ordinarily embedded, I think are not positive. So again, it's a little bit like I been just working on a paper today, sent off to the Journal this morning, another paper on artificial intelligence. So you can't, you know, you can't close the door on this stuff. Things are not going to go backwards. But um, we have to take some care as to how we do it. So increasingly there are ah, moves. Some moves are fairly draconian. Uh, some organizations are demanding that people come into the office five days a week. Other organizations are setting a sort of minimal, uh, office, um, uh, attendance. Maybe not statutory, but perhaps normative. And um, I think for as long as we are employed by organizations, working for organizations, then it is important to maintain the social integration. Social integration is um, an often neglected aspect of um. Of organizational analysis. There's a great deal about systems and system integration, but not so much about social integration. But uh, without processes of social integration, uh, the system integration will come a cropper, I, uh, suspect one way or another.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: So the question.

Speaker A: Yes it does. I think it's interesting, but I also think that what you're kind of raising there. But I also. What we also think about a lot in our team is that um, like you said, you can't go back. And work has always been changing. And these discussions of what's going to disappear and what's going to be destroyed have always been taking Place at if, like the breaking points of industrial revolutions. And now we're just, you know, if you look back, we can see the same discussions taking place in, when different technologies have entered. So in some ways, yes, it's almost

Speaker B: as if, it's almost as if history has gone into reverse in some ways. Because if you talk about the industrial revolution, I grew up in the west, West Yorkshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, which was the heart of the Industrial revolution. This is where, uh, wool textiles were developed, were exported to the world. But I know from the, um, the villages, uh, around where I grew up that the earliest forms of weaving, uh, were actually done as domestic labor. There was something called the putting out system. What we have today is kind of like a modern version of the putting out system where somebody perhaps on contract works on something at home. And because a merchant gives them material to work, they work on it. Well, this is how the woolen industry was organized before the merchants accumulated a little bit of capital and decided that, hey, if we put all of these people together in a factory, a manufacturer, what they used to call it in the 17th century, then, I'm sorry, the 18th century, then we can exercise a little bit more control over them. Because one of the problems with the putting out system was that, um, you couldn't control the pace of work because it was not under surveillance, nobody was watching it. You couldn't then control the quality of work because the work was produced as pieces. And then, um, I'll come on to the pieces in a minute or two. Um, putting labor into manufactories which were initially powered by water with water mills and then subsequently with steam in steam mills, meant that the merchants, uh, becoming capitalist entrepreneurs, could exercise far more control over the labor process than they had previously. And there's a wonderful, um, real testament to this in the town adjacent to the small town in which I grew up. I grew up about three miles from a place called Halifax in, uh, Yorkshire. And in Halifax there is, uh, something called the Peace Hall. Now it's not a peace hall in terms of war and peace, it's a peace hall in terms of pieces. Because this was an almost Italian age structure which consisted of lots and lots of small rooms in which the merchants would put the pieces which they had collected from the weavers up in the hills in uh, uh, uh, the Pennine hills around there. And it would take them to market and sell. You go on Google, you can see pictures of the Peace Hall. It was renovated with the European Union money, which, uh, of course because of part of what we're all talking about is no longer available to the good citizens of the uk. Uh, and it's a very impressive building.

Speaker A: Yeah, I will go and have a look. But um, I agree that we can. What. Basically what I'm thinking also is that we could learn a lot by looking back and kind of looking at what's happened before when work has changed drastically, when new technologies have come and changed the logics of organizing or managing. And I think that we should be spending a lot more time in thinking about how do this. Uh, you also mentioned that taking care of different kinds of work, different kinds of labor, different kinds of technologies, how to divide the work. And I think that technology researchers of course were criticizing us all the time for saying that you are so critiqueless, just taking everything without really thinking of how. And I think that these lessons from the past would be um, maybe a fruitful way of trying to do things in a more sustainable way.

Speaker B: Um.

Speaker A: Yes, Someone's um, asked you a question about Finland. Well, not really Finland, but the Nordic model. And I know that you're a fan, you mentioned that already. So I'll read out the question as it is sent to me. Finland has a tradition of strong worker protections, emphasize security and stability in both workplaces and society. How does this slow moving Nordic labor regime align, uh, with today's fast paced fluid economy in balancing these traditional structures with emerging needs? Are there potential innovations or new directions we risk overlooking? And I guess this is kind of the same what we just touched on. It's not just bad, it could be good. But what would that good look like?

Speaker B: Oh, well, um, I can only speak in very general terms. I've been to Finland a couple of times, but uh, I'm certainly no expert.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: what I find um, important in the various Nordic countries that I'm familiar with, and I'm familiar with them all to some extent is a strong tradition of workplace democracy. Uh, a strong tradition of um, of co. Determination, Um, a strong tradition of um, fairly flat relations in terms of hierarchies.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Absolutely. That an absence of imperative command and more a meeting of um, different agents and agencies to try and derive a consensus about the ways to go forward. Um, now there is no a priori reason why those positives, which you think they are positives and I think they are positives. There's no a priori reason why those positives should disappear in a fast moving digitized world. In fact, in many ways digitization produces affordances that can make these things uh, happen better. What depends what's vital here is political will and political spirit. Um, if the will to protect what is there as a legacy of positivity, if that will is relaxed, then many rapacious interests which will not necessarily have the interests of democracy at a workplace and organizational level in mind will take advantage of it. And um, whether that happens, uh, or doesn't happen, will happen or won't happen, I don't know. I'm not a soothsayer, I don't believe in prediction. So I don't know what the future future holds. But I do think there are reasons to be cheerful and reasons to be cautious. Um, uh, well we've talked about the reasons to be cautious already.

Speaker A: But what about the reasons to be cheerful? What were the possible uh, opportunities um for innovation, economic growth? Because it seems to me that um, what this question is getting at also a co balancing act that um, there's a lot of advocation for micro entrepreneurs and small business owners. But then having, having said that it's proven difficult in this ah Finnish setup as well. So um, kind of like thinking in terms of traditional structures uh and um, if we start, if we instead of thinking of things as like good or bad and the traditional good and new bad, try to think both and then what could be the new opportunities, the reasons to be cheerful in the liquidization, in the fragmentation, in the fluidity. Can we look in the history? Is it something else? What do you think?

Speaker B: There's a book which has been quite influential in um, political economic circles in recent years or these sort of social democratic ones um, by an Italian um uh political economist Masucato and she talks about um, um the mission economy and she looks at the way in which. She looks at the way in which the NASA as the mission was capable of achieving uh so many great things. And she argues in her work that um uh we need to have an enabling state once again and the green transition affords an opportunity for such an enabling state because there are many opportunities for innovation at um, a local level which if it's able to access funding and support from the state, if it's able to build networks using the affordances of the state could probably be much more successful than if it could not. So maybe there is a potential marriage between um social democratic enabling states focused on missions such as building a green economy, a green society, um, and there is no more profound mission than that of saving the species and the planet from um, you know, roasting. So yeah, I mean I think there are some possibilities but I don't think it's can. I don't think it can come from one side or the other side. I think you have to try to have a fusion of who. Yes.

Speaker A: And right now like you said, the political climate is not really, it doesn't really look like the,

Speaker B: it will change. I mean the thing about politics is that uh, events happen, things uh, change and they change very rapidly. I mean, so in four years time there'll be another election in the United States and who knows what will happen then. And I mean the United States is so important because it sets, it sets the tone for the rest of us just about regrettably. They don't have um, elections or they do have elections but they're sham in uh, some of the other larger economies. Your near neighbor for instance, which yes must be quite threatening living next to your near neighbor.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, I guess what we're used to it try not to think about it, can't focus on it because then you just become frozen. But yeah, I think you're right and I think that here again we can, we can. If we look back we can see that the history has always gone in waves. That you have the rise of fascism and then after that the different kind of period. It's just that we had a long period of peace here in between, of certain. And I guess you're right and that's one thing to focus on is feeling somehow down.

Speaker B: Well certainly if we think of long waves then the long wave, the long arc of neoliberalism is clearly in recession now. Where it will go, where it will end up is unclear. On the one hand we've got the mission economy prospects of people like Masukato, which the Starmer government in the UK are weekly behind, which the EU is, um, if it ever got its, really got its act together I think would be, would be behind. But then you've got the kind of, you know, the retro mercantilism that's characteristic of Trump and the many acolytes that you know, um, the Bolsonaros was now thankfully gone and the um, the guy in Argentina, um, you know, and the Hungary or ban. So you know there is a choir that sings uh, a chorus to the Trumpian uh, melodrama. So that means, I mean we don't know where that will end up. You know, we have to be optimistic because yeah, we have to be optimistic.

Speaker A: Mhm, I agree. We already touched on the hybrid and flexible models of work, um, um, but now this is more like directly um, on your work, um, the rise of hybrid and flexible work models is challenging the traditional thinking around organizational structures. What's your view in how organizations can maintain collective purpose and solidarity in the sort of fragmenting setup?

Speaker B: Well, there's a dual process occurring which is one of both decomposition and recomposition. So it's important not just to focus on either side of that dialectic because things never stay the same, Never. They're always changing, they're always decomposing and recomposing. And we have to be able to analytically try and pull out what the threads of decomposition are, what the threads of recomposition are. And there's no point getting. Yeah, we. The important point is that it's always in process. So whatever the situation may be today, it. It won't be like that. At some point, any point, any point in the future, near or far, things are always changing. And so our thinking always has to be changing too. Because the whole point of being a social scientist is to reflect on the changing realities that one is living in and through, or looking at the changing realities that one and others have lived through. Because I think a historical organizational perspective is very important as well as a contemporary one.

Speaker A: I think that's just a challenge in terms of the organizational realities because people like to think that things stay the same. When you look in the sort of

Speaker B: many, many years ago, when I was first, uh, thinking about these things, a paper I wrote in 1981 in the ASQ it came out of a book I wrote, uh, the previous year. The paper didn't come out of the book, but the ideas did. I use the geological metaphor. It seemed to be that organizing is a sedimentary process. There are sediments of the past that they may not be visible, they're not on the surface, but they still in here, in the processes, um, if we dig deep enough, we find elements of Taylorism and scientific management in contemporary organizations and contemporary work, we tend to think of something that happened at the beginning of the 20th century, the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. But it's pervasive and, uh, it's endured, it's changed as well, but its traces are still evident.

Speaker A: So in other words, kind of realizing that, I guess. Am m I interpreting you right if I say that? You're kind of saying that it's not either or it's both. And it's like the solidarity is the fragments, at least of it remain. And as we look at organizations as a process, liquid process maybe, but still a process, uh, that's always changing, has always been changing. So it's not the question of Something being gone and something starting but all these elements being there and maybe some of them getting more attention, more weight at the given situation but then having faith in that they don't go away even if we sometimes hope that they would.

Speaker B: I think that's absolutely right. And um, both and is to index paradoxes. And I think when you do have um, simultaneously you have dialectical processes of decomposition and recomposition going on. Tensions arise and paradoxes will follow. And um, it's um, you know thinking of the social construction of reality through uh, the lens of the paradox is I think quite fruitful and um, useful. It's one that I've used on a number of cases with colleagues.

Speaker A: Yes, agreed. Well maybe one more, few more questions and then we start wrapping up for today. Um, on your circuits, uh, of power in modern organizations. Um you highlight the interplay between rules, agency and structures. How could, or what's your idea of this framework helping us to understand the challenges and opportunities posed by gig work and platform based economies?

Speaker B: Well firstly Circus of Power wasn't in the book Modern Organizations. It was in the framework, um, it was in Frameworks of Power. And I published a second edition of that uh, last year. And uh, I used the model a lot uh, in the new concluding chapter on a history of the Present where um, I looked at some contemporary, some contemporary concerns. The contemporary concerns that I looked at were COVID 19, the climate crisis and um, uh, uh, the war in Ukraine. Um, I think that um, the model worked very well. Let me just say a little bit about the model itself sometimes gets misunderstood. Some people seem to have understood it as. Because I drew a diagram with three levels or layers in it. Although I never called them levels or layers. They assumed it's a structural model. It's not a structural model, it's a processual model. And there's no, there's no hierarchization between the different circuits. The circuits are in my mind, um, flowing, uh, flowing together. Uh, flows do flow together and the circuits flow together. Uh, that was a major break with all the prior theorizing about uh, power which had been heavily influenced and came to a conclusion in Stephen Lukes's work with the notion of there being three dimensions to power. Well I developed the circuit's model as the antithesis of the three dimensions of power because I wanted to say that we're not dealing with structure, we're not dealing. And um, I didn't want to arrive at the point at which I accused Lux of arriving at as uh, having preserving his liberal decencies while eating his Marxist cake. Because he basically smuggles in a conception of false consciousness when he talks about real interests. Uh, the third dimension of power operates when people don't realize what their real interests ah, are. Well that's the German ideology, that's 19th century Marxism. And uh, it's profoundly disrespectful to uh, everybody who may um, not agree with the theorists. So it's a theoretically very arrogant uh, position. I didn't want to embrace such position. But I do believe that we're all practical theorists. And um, there's my ethn methodology coming out again. We're all engaged in uh, practical theorizing, uh, in the world. And as part of that we try to structure situations, context, organizations, relations in general in ways that um, suit our interests, that are advantageous to us. And to do this we try to enact what in um, the philosophy of science is called standing conditions. Standing conditions are what make experiments work. Standing conditions that ensure that the water, uh, that you're using is distilled, that the acid is pure, but the test tube is not contaminated. The vacuum chamber is completely vacuumed. Vacuumed doesn't uh, have any air. Um, so I think we're practical experimentalists relationally trying to construct the standing conditions that will enable us to maintain or to achieve those kinds of relations that, that we want to do. And a lot of organization is like that. Organization consists of trying to stabilize a set of standing conditions as structural constraints which. Well, they're structural constraints rather than structural enablements. They're forms of rule, forms of regulation, uh, which um, try to fix us in positions and in place. But I wanted to show that a theory of power has to be both a theory of social order. How is social order possible? And if it's a theory of social order, it also has to be a theory of social change. Because you have to ask the question, how is social disorder possible? Why do things change? How do things change? And um, I argued that um, the most economical way of uh, exercising power is precisely what everybody from Hobbes onwards had identified. It said the A is getting the B's to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. It's a causal relationship. But those causal relationships have a lot of architecture, uh, around them, which I've just been talking about. But also they also need to be knitted into a circuit of facilitative power and a circuit of dispositional power. And the circular facility. Power is about um. It's about the ways in which meaning. Meaning is made and fixed. It's about the way in which meanings can be refixed. It's um. I use the metaphor of fixing. I took it from photography, where you fix a negative into an image. Uh, because I like the fluidity of uh, that metaphor. Nobody would understand it these days because we don't use negative images. But that's where it came from. Changes can come there through changes in sense making, changes in meaning, which will fix new. What I took from Kellon, obligatory passage points. Um, for example, uh, we've just seen with the Trump election a massive turn against what the Americans call the DEI industry. But the DEI industry had fixed a whole set of obligatory passage points organizationally in terms of, um, gender, um, uh, ethnicity, sexuality. Those obligatory passage points are likely to change now. They changed to institute dei. They're likely to change. They're probably already changing now. So what's happening there is that, um, sense making is making a different sense of the meanings that already been established. But, um, there are also forms of, um, innovation that can occur where you get changes in disciplinary techniques, changes, um, In the things that matter. And the things that matter can change as a result of highly, uh, uh, uh, wholly unpredictable events. And in the original version of Frameworks of Power, I took as my example of that the spread of the bubonic plague in Europe, uh, in the 14th century, which changed the balance of power between feudal lords and peasants. And the uh, Norwegian rat, the ratus novetricus, which uh, carried uh, the plague virus, uh, decimated the European population by about 50% in some places, uh, changed the balance of power. The rat, the flea, the virus. They were actors, really, really important actors. So I'm also quite influenced by actor network theory, as you can see. So I wanted to construct a way of thinking about the world which would enable me to include all of those things. And so that's what I did. Um, so I, you know, um. I think I call. I call the actors the external act of the unknown, unknown actors. Exogenous environmental contingencies. I don't really like that term anymore. I prefer to think of them as, um, unknown, unknown actors. But, uh, the COVID virus, of course, is uh, another great example of that. And I wrote about that in the most recent edition. I'm sorry, I've forgotten what the question was.

Speaker A: No, that's okay. You're opening this up really well and will be interesting for the listeners. Yeah, what we're getting at is that if you think about this framework, now that you've nicely illustrated here, how could you. What do you think how can this help us understand the sort of challenges uh, and opportunities that we're now facing in this gig work platform based economy

Speaker B: One of the papers that I wrote during um, Covid was with a colleague from Portugal, another colleague from the United States. Uh, it was about um, um, a platform called OSMX M which was open source medical supplies in the early stages of the um, COVID virus. Um, hospitals, basic hospitals supply things like face masks and gowns, surgical gloves on, adjusting time process. But in a virus, when we know what the contagion was like just in time ceased to work. So the OSMS platform was something that was innovated uh, as an open source platform and very very quickly had pulled in thousands of fab labs and, and and uh, small entrepreneurs who were producing, uh, turning their gin factories into spirit factories to, to make um, um, you know, whatever it is you wash your hands with like during COVID surgical spirit, um, similarly, um, they began to develop ah, masks and eyepieces and gowns. Now the problem was how do you do this? Well, the web became a clearinghouse for designs and the designs could be tested and authorized as being ones that had uh, a, a degree of legitimacy. And uh, it was an enormous, uh, enormously important actor in the early stages of COVID because it managed to get safe and secure personal protective equipment to first responder workers which probably will have saved some of their lives. And um, so that's a really good example of how the platform economy uh, can work. Because the platform economy there brings in all of these um, communities of practice which are distributed globally, supplying local markets because uh, they're not huge corporations. They don't have a supply chain, they don't have shipping contracts. So they're working very much at the level of the local market. But they're getting what's necessary and needed to the places where it's needed. And they're doing it quickly and they're doing it to design specifications that work pretty well. So that's a very democratic and um, I think uh, inspiring use uh, of the platform economy. But conversely, as I said earlier, the platform economy can become a uh, it can become a space in which um, I mean someone like Elon Musk would argue that um, uh, X, as he now calls Twitter, is um, a platform that respects freedom of speech, that freedom of speech is its raison d', etre. Because anybody can say anything on the platform, but it produces a sewer of misinformation and disinformation, um, of bile, of viciousness, of intolerance, of nonsense, of People's personal truths, which is just nonsense. I mean, so there's nothing inherent in the technology that means what the technology should be. The same technology can be used one way or it can be used another way. So the point of juxtaposing those two ways of using the same technology is to say, hey, it's not the technology that's the problem. It's how we situate it, how we use it, what kind of circuits of power we construct around it.

Speaker A: Fantastic. That's a really great, uh, closing statement. But I'm still going to ask you one more question that I'm going to ask everyone, which is basically that you've already kind of answered it. So you just revisit what you've said. I guess you've answered it, because I'm asking everyone in the end that, okay, um, in the light of all of this, and in the light of all of your hugely impactful and interesting work and organizing, like, if you have. When you're looking forward and thinking of the ways work is now changing, are you a pessimist, an optimist, a realist, a something in between and why, in terms of what the future holds for us in the world of work?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, it depends on the time of day. That could be all of those things.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know. But if you choose one position for the final. Yeah, well,

Speaker B: I would try to be. I would hope to be an optimistic realist. And, um, I mean, to be a pessimistic realist is already almost to concede defeat. And, um, I don't think that the job of the engaged public intellectual is to admit defeat, but, um, it's to be engaged, um, and to try and do it with the best intellectual rigor and theoretical acumen that you can muster. And, um, yeah, of course, there would be lots and lots of reasons not to be cheerful, but, um, I can't remember how many reasons to be cheerful Ian Jury and the Blockheads had in that great song. But, uh, I'm sure that we could muster sufficient reasons to be cheerful to make us want to, like Jackson Brown's Pretender, get up in the morning and get it on again. You know, to do it all again. Uh, that's so important. You know, you have to have a degree of optimistic realism to want to keep on doing that. If you live in a state of pessimistic realism, there might be someday when you think, well, I just don't feel like getting up and doing it all over again. And that can be a very, very, very, very evil thought. Bad thought it can lead to all sorts of depression and psychosis and suicides and things like that. So yeah you have to keep the spirits up, be an optimistic realist, temper the opposite of the realism.

Speaker A: And that also goes nicely with your previous thought on terms of technology in itself is not bad. It's how we apply it, what we do with it. So if we and try to remain optimistic and cheerful maybe we find ways of using the technology that are better for us. Maybe not, I don't know. But um, thank you so much for this um super inspirational and interesting talk. I could continue a lot longer. I'm just thanking you a lot for on um behalf of the association of all the students that have been looking forward to your podcast and thank you so much. Thank you for listening. The podcast is in collaboration with Aalto's Future Work project, the Finnish association of Work Life research and the Work 2030 program.