It used to be so nice... Organizations and the myth of the origins
Ruud Kaulingfreks, University of Humanistics Utrecht and Leicester
René ten Bos, Radboud University Nijmegen
Although organizations are constantly preoccupied with their position in the future, this does not mean they are directed to the future. On the contrary. Organizations seek to perpetuate the present. The preoccupation with the future in organizations has to do with a conception of future as a threat that must be overcome. Organizing then can be seen as the activity directed to stopping the flow of time in a frozen present. It is this preoccupation with extending the present that forces to put everything into a time perspective. A linear history takes centre stage and evaluates all situations in its own light. Nietzsche made clear how inhibiting the weight of history can be. How history prevents us from living our own time. This also applies for the future. If we have to put all events in a linearity of history, then its weight will merely be a burden to us. Foucault worked this conception of history out in his genealogical studies. The central question here is whether it is possible to look at a particulartime from the perspective of those who lived then, that is to say, from the perspective of that time itself. Or does history coerce us to evade the temporal and to perpetuate the present?
In organizations, strategic management is routinely thwarting the unexpected. In doing this, it stands in the way of entrepreneurship and puts the planning in front of reality. If organizing is an attempt to perpetuate the present, then the origins of an organization, we will argue, are perceived by its members as the best time. The result is that the present is paradoxically conceived both as something to be preserved in future developments and as a loss with respect to the 'wild and adventurous', entrepreneurial years of the beginning. As Nietzsche told us, the past weighs heavily on us. This weight preserves a myth of freedom and originality that somehow has been lost and might never be retrieved. For Nietzsche, this applied to culture. We maintain that it holds for organizations as well.