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The purpose of this paper is to understand the persistent ambiguity of socialization practices in US and Swedish organizations, which promote a mature work identity while infantilizing their employees.

Application of the insights from modernist authors' analysis of modernity as experienced by a human subject within professional organizations (Gombrowicz and Musil) and as responsible for proliferation of layers of reality (Eco), to contemporary practices of socialization.

The conflict between the need to conform to the corporate culture and the temptation to subvert them for creative or destructive purposes results in production of a “person without qualities,” and in the rise of the contemporary form of hyperreal infantocracy, which requires sophisticated irony in order to deal with organizational practices.

Paying more attention to literary analysts of contemporary condition such as Gombrowicz, Musil, Eco, and Kundera will allow to understand paradoxes of contemporary organizing beyond the limits of traditional social sciences.

Combating apathy and disillusion among both employees and human resource management practitioners requires a reconceptualization of the programs of organizational socialization in terms of a sustainable and responsible corporate citizenship.

Few authors have managed to mine the humanist heritage in order to salvage insights, which might have practical implications for a more balanced, sustainable, and humane organizational reality.

In this paper the author aims to examine his own life and work in order to understand how an ethnographic sensibility emerges and develops.

The paper examines the personal and institutional context in which his book Engineering Culture: Commitment and Control in a High Tech Corporation was researched and written, from formative moments in his life that led him to the study, through the process of finding, entering and exploring his field, to the acts of interpretation and writing that culminated in the book.

The paper illustrates the institutional pressures that constrain conceptual and methodological freedom and undermine the logic of inquiry, and suggests ways of circumventing them. It also illustrates how interpretation is rooted in symbolic resources developed over a lifetime that are far beyond a grounding in social theory, and shows the intricate connections between question formulation, data collection, interpretation and writing that transcend the standard approaches to teaching and executing social research.

The paper offers a revealing behind‐the‐scenes view of the process of ethnographic inquiry, challenges the accepted view of the method and offers practical advice to researchers, teachers and students.

Corporate culture is a spirit formed by the shared values of the individuals in the organization that has potential to make the library more than the sum of its parts, both positively and negatively. It is the vehicle by which the organization defines itself, for both itself and the clientele, with the purpose of providing the best service possible by sharing a vision of the organization as an organic whole. It operates through the power of peer influence rather than direct vertical authority. This paper takes a holistic approach to a concept that is more complex than it first appears; it addresses the molding of corporate culture, not as a management function, but as a complex and deep system, being in effect the soul of the organization, which resides in the motivation of each individual and which, therefore, requires a special kind of leadership.

A normative hurdle needs to be taken of moving beyond claims that relationship(s) of exploitation (neo‐Marxism) and bureaucracy (neo‐Weberian) are determinate, and that there is nothing new under the sun. Descriptive research is needed into what is new in the knowledge work economy/society. New relationships between self and organization demand the rethinking of logocentricism. In knowledge work, management by content mobilizes the self via individualist and creative work. An organizational (epistemic) regime emerges where the claim on the self is total. Ethnographic research has revealed self/organization identification, wherein the identification of the two leads via divergence and conflict to (organizational) fragmentation. Kunda has shown that self/organization identification can endanger the self through burn‐out and an unhealthy fixation on work. Establishes that identification between self and organization can endanger necessary boundary objects threatening requisite meanings and structures.

In this chapter, we underscore the enduring importance of research on work, workers, labour markets, and the places and spaces of work. We then examine the particular and valuable contributions that come from ethnographic research in providing detailed studies of work, particularly when these are situated and interpreted in their wider socio-political contexts. We discuss the key dimensions of ethnography before overviewing the contributions to the volume. The volume presents cutting-edge ethnographic research on contemporary worlds of work and the experiences of workers from a range of contexts including an alternative community, working online, the gig economy, and the hospitality industry. Alongside novel empirical chapters, the collection includes the reflections of ethnographers with regards to, for example, the experience as a young female management researcher working amongst journalists in a media firm, personal feelings of precarity within and beyond the field, and how to navigate the challenges of researching inequalities ethnographically.

The purpose of this paper is to review emerging approaches to field studies of organizing that aim to avoid the problems of traditional methods and techniques.

The paper is based in pragmatist philosophy and constructionist perspective. Within this frame, the paper starts with a brief history of fieldwork methods in organization study, continues by diagnosing their shortcomings in the light of contemporary developments, and ends by reviewing promising approaches to studying contemporary organizations.

Young researchers are warned about possible risks and gains from experimenting with new methods.

The potential value of the paper is in its function of a guide for organization scholars looking for innovative approaches to their study object.

The purpose of this paper is to examines the history and goals of online instruction in higher education by linking them to the neoliberal agenda emerging at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Here, the author argues that the move toward more online, socially mediated instruction in higher education is symptomatic of larger socio-political and economic constraints that have been placed upon the academy.

The author demonstrates the practical impact of neoliberal shifts in higher education with the emergence of the online for-profit institution – The University of Phoenix. Here, the author shows the ways in which the advent of the internet, together with the expansion of social – both individual and institutional – networks, come together with neoliberal shifts in government to simultaneously render the university both more and less relevant as an institution. The author limits analysis to the language of connectivity and networking evident in online educational settings to highlight more directly the broader shifts in taking place in the contemporary academy surrounding the tension between professional integrity and institutional marketability produced by the proliferation of online, for-profit colleges and universities.

In part four, the author argues that the institutional response to this state of affairs has been to both expand and limit the mission of the university from a space of formal education to a site of biopolitical production, where students come not merely to earn a degree in anticipation of landing a job, but also, to learn to configure and manage themselves.

In the concluding section, the author explores the professional implications of these changes through an analysis of the popular professor rating site – Rate My Professors.

The approach the author takes in this paper enables us to more closely exam the ways in which neoliberal mandates for quantifiable measures of institutional “effectiveness” center on a fundamental restructuring of the instructor-student relationship toward a service model wherein the instructor becomes the manager of emotions whose goal is connect with students and so model the kind of affective flexibility and resourcefulness they in turn will requires when joining the workforce.