fetish of change, The

Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science, 2003 by Grey, Christopher

There is no reason to think that the present time is one of greater change than in the past, nor that we are the first people to experience change as being unprecedented. Or, to put it differently, and perhaps rather better, there is no basis upon which it would be possible to sustain or evaluate such claims. Who is to say that the changes associated with the microchip are faster or more far-reaching than those associated with the printing press? What dimensions of change are we talking about? For whom? Is it possible to attribute causation to particular technologies anyway, given that these are part of a network of social relations which are part and parcel of the inventions and discoveries to which they give rise?

What we do know is that there is a tendency to look back to the past as a 'golden age' now lost by the travails of time. For example, detailed research on the history of fears about crime (Pearson, 1983) shows how there has been a recurring pattern of beliefs that 'twenty years ago' we lived in a period of stability, order, and morality. In terms of management and organisations, there seems to be a belief that there has been a fundamental shift from the 'good old days' of stable bureaucracies and mass markets of the 'first industrial divide' (Piore and Sabel, 1984) to the present turbulence of 'crazy ways for crazy days' (Peters, 1994). Recent research has identified the phenomenon of 'organisational nostalgia' (Gabriel, 1993), whilst some of the laments for bureaucracy (du Gay, 2000) seem to forget how the growth of large bureaucratic corporations after, especially, 1945 brought forth many contemporary critiques of the changes they wrought (e.g. Whyte, 1955).

Indeed, in many respects one would hardly classify the post-war order as one of stability, whether economically, politically, or technologically. The received wisdom of postwar stability (which usually seems to mean from 1945 until the oil crisis of 1974) rather conveniently ignores, inter alia, the space race; development of computers; the Cold War; the arms race; de-colonisation; the Korean and Vietnam wars; the feminist movement; major waves of immigration and emigration; major shifts in youth culture and the relations between generations. It is not clear that these constituted a 'stable environment'.

Let me shift the analysis for a moment from the general to the personal - and these are by no means separate realms, for the one invariably constitutes the other. In 1945, my father was an agricultural labourer in Britain. In 1948 he had travelled thousands of miles to work in large-scale mechanised agriculture in Canada. By 1952 he was up to his neck in mud fixing tanks in Korea. Around the same time, my late father-in-law was fleeing the Bulgarian secret police, hanging beneath the Orient Express from Sofia in mid-winter. After various periods as a prisoner in Tito's Yugolavia and International Camps, he escaped to France, an illegal immigrant with no money, no friends, and barely any clothes. I don't think that either of these men would have recognised the picture of post-war stability found in the textbooks.