Fordism vanished; it’s that the dominant approach to capital accumulation took on a new cast as Fordism receded. Outlining that new style of capitalism is the aim of this chapter. The ascendancy of communicative capitalism What post-Fordism summoned was a new model of value generation. No doubt communicative practice has always been intimately tied to working and organizing; none of the features of the Fordist approach to production and capital accumulation are possible without the flow of meanings accomplished in and through communicative practice. Indeed, as I
“Corporate purpose” has become a battleground for stakeholders’ competing desires. Some argue that corporations must simply generate profit; others suggest that we must make them create social change.
Leading organization studies scholar Timothy Kuhn argues that this “either-or” thinking dramatically oversimplifies matters: today’s corporations must be many things, all at once.
Kuhn offers a bold new Communicative Theory of the Firm to highlight the authority that creates corporations’ identities and activities. The theory provides a roadmap for navigating that battleground of competing desires to produce more responsive corporations.
Drawing on communicative and new materialist theorizing, along with three insightful case studies, this book thoroughly redefines our understandings of what corporations are “for.”
ongoing spectator sport. Frequent collective performance of the growing scroll of shared grievances—replaying the classic hits and trying out new material—ensures that his persona stays synonymous with The Right People, who are the wronged people. We The People becomes Me The People , which also happens to be the clever title of Urbinati’s book. The door swings open to demagoguery, but it was unlocked with infrastructural keys. It thrives on audience democracy, or communicative capitalism Especially after that last feature, you may be wondering how mass
the petition, especially concerned that it was carried out in the public eye ( Roach, 2022 ). Coinbase provides a vivid case, one that highlights the challenges communicative capitalism (particularly its affect capture and branding themes) presents to firms. Moreover, it illustrates the ontological multiplicity running throughout this book: what is Coinbase, and what is its purpose – or, rather, what are its purpose s ? As analysts, do we simply defer to the articulation of purpose offered by the CEO, or do we acknowledge that promises of value and claims to
The previous chapter argued that our present era is marked by communicative capitalism. The three practices presented there, emanating from the precarity and meaning indeterminacy observers note, are increasingly the logics through which firms operate and capital accumulation occurs. The question with which Chapter 1 concluded was how scholars might investigate how a firm’s purpose – the corporation’s wanting – is fashioned under this spirit of capitalism. A corollary question for OS thinkers is to wonder how well our theorizing prepares us to make sense of
firms, when they are costly for others to mimic, when alternative resources are understood to be inferior, and when an organization enjoys unique operational advantages ( Barney, 1996 ; Sirmon, Hitt, & Ireland, 2007 ). The resources desirable under communicative capitalism might not fit this formulation well. As I pointed out in Chapter 1 , communicative capitalism urges firms to provide consumers with the emotional and aesthetic experiences they (have been conditioned to) desire. As authority machines, firms desire attachments with elements of the surrounding
The preceding chapter presented the two dominant approaches to theorizing the firm and outlined why they’re inadequate to grasp the problems of purpose under communicative capitalism. As suggested there, the key shortcoming is their limited (and limiting) models of organizing and communicating in a world where conceptions of value are the result of a wide array of forces and participants bound up in complex practices. This chapter is the first step in developing an alternative. Building on the requisites for an organization theory responsive to the shift toward
to coordinate with other holders of specific assets; this is the background potentiality against which economic theories of the firm are established. And the proliferation of intermediary organizations making a platform enterprise possible, as noted in Chapter 1 , suggest that a network of many such contractors could be a viable model. But capitalism in its contemporary guise needs firms , and not merely because they provide legal configurations that shield participants from liability. Under communicative capitalism specifically, firms provide (a) a common
about the firm’s founders or strategic managers; it is about the assemblage through (and because of) which the firm and its wanting emerges. And rather than starting with the firm as a focal entity and then tracing its connections with other participants, it makes sense to turn the issue around. If, as the CTF argues, firms are the result of assemblages – if they are necessary devices for encompassing assemblages to (re)produce communicative capitalism – one might instead ask how desires flowing through the assemblage guide and direct the creation of particular
to say, you are not its author, even when it comes directly from your body and affects your identity ( I am this ). I get that it seems like your own response; your body delivered it, after all. Doesn’t that make it authentically yours? Not exactly, but branding campaigns want you to think so. Boiled down, branding is how communicative capitalism works. This is the main difference between brand and identity. 32 The former works through less conscious impression, a sense of something, whereas the latter is produced through more conscious reflection. Different
