Postomodernism
8 Pages 2025 Words
Postmodernism.
The term postmodernism is used in a variety of ways. On one hand, it has a common language usage, which is so broad and imprecise as to be effectively meaningless. On the other hand has also a rigorous usage which itself seems to have two variants: one as a term used to describe perceived conditions of the contrary world, the other, a term denoting an epistemological critique of modernism. In relation to strategy, the term postmodernism is a useful illustrative device used to suggest that it is a management and/or the world, which has changed, but what has really changed is our understanding of them.
The locus of its ideas has been Europe, and of its development, application, and polemic has been the USA, and beyond that international. Virtually all the hundred-or-more contributors are American academics. For me, postmodernism is infuriatingly multi-dimensional but uniquely represents the paradoxes and reflexivities of modern living, bringing together a range of exciting disciplines to explain and explore experience, meaning and truth.
The influence of postmodernism on management
According to Norman Jackson and Pipa Carter, the influence of postmodernism on management is the emergence of three distinct conceptualisations of the “fact”. They have in common only their rejection – intentional or otherwise- of the modernist conceptualisation of formally logical truth, of the transcendent fact, and the consequent abandonment of a unitary management knowledge rooted in science. In this they offer, on the one hand, a resolution of the embarrassing paradoxes, which have inhibited management thinking in its modernist way, and, on the other, a plurality of approaches to post-modern management
Features of post-modern way of living
The modern and post-modern can be defined through contrasting sets of antinomies (Featherstone, 1988). The post-modern appears to represent a break with the modern, which is defined as being...