Beyond happy families: A critical re-evaluation of the control-resistance-identity triangle

Like several of her co-workers, Angie believes herself to be unique-unlike the “typical” Hephaestus employee. And, like several of her co-workers, Angie feels uneasy, guilty even, for criticizing the company to an outsider, an academic researcher. Keeping it all in the family-what better proof could there be that the corporation has turned itself into a family? At a simple level, one gets the impression that corporate culture, with its gurus, its buzzwords and its techniques, has realized the dream of old Human Relations. It has transformed the corporation into a proper normative community, a source of meaning and companionship, one ignorant of any political realities in capitalism or of any tedium and alienation at work. Instead of being cogs in vast impersonal machines (too inflexible and conflict-ridden to survive in these days of “extraordinary technological change and highly competitive global environments”), individuals have their proper place in it, just as in a family. This is a discourse of flexible, flat, caring organizations, organizations fit for our times.