A loosely defined philosophical movement which has become increasingly influential in the social sciences as of the 80's. A way to look at the world that rejects rationality and objectivity. It concentrates on the ways in which human beings attempt to shape reality and invent their world. For postmodernists reality is socially constructed, for this reason their is not one reality but multiple realities.
Contrary to postmodernism is
modernism. Modernism is the objective and realist world as seen in the Classical approach or Culture-Excellence approach.
For postmodernists, knowledge is relative and not absolute. It focusses on the ways humans 'invent' their worlds, especially through language and cultural innovations.
The nature of language is differently seen by postmodernists. For a postmodernist, language gains its meaning and significance through its placement within social interchange. Words fail to make sense until there is at least one other person to give value to their meaning.
Postmodernist organisations are characterised as flexible networks, in niche markets, in which employment relations are complex and fragmentary, and choice in technology.
Importantly, postmodernism has no single approach to organisations. The breadth of postmodern approaches vary from naive to radical and hybrid approaches.
Postmodernism has three implications for organisation theories:
Culture: Postmodernists view the results of attempts to manipulate and change culture as generally unpredictable and sometimes undesirable.
Reality: The particular view of reality is created and maintained by the role of power and politics. Postmodernists acknowledge that in most organisations there are competing views of reality. Dominant coalitions typically wield their power and political processes to ensure their conception of reality becomes the legitimate and accepted view.
Choice: Organisations, in postmodernist view, have a wide degree of choice about what they do, how they do it and where they do it. This contradicts the modernist view of 'one best way'.
Critics of postmodernism fall in three camps:
Those who claim there has never been a fully modernist era and claim their cannot, be a 'post' modernist one.
Those who maintain that the current developments in society are merely an extension of what has gone before rather than any significant break.
Those who accept that the world is entering a new age but believe globalisation is its defining characteristic.