Historically, the postmodern corporation achieved a kind of apotheosis with the failure of the collectivist "command" economic structure of Soviet Russia and the eastern bloc countries. Until the collapse, free enterprise capitalism had a contrasting foil against which to function; now there is no other medium to look at. If postmodernism has its roots in a Marxist analysis of capitalist society (in The Frankfurt School), it ironically has its fulfillment in the "virtual" organizations of a global capitalism, made possible by the rich and quick movement of information in an electronic environment.
For those early critics of modernist culture, this turn of events, were they here to see it, would have to appear maddening. The postmodern corporation shows evidence of a power to generate wealth and to concentrate control in ways that have not been seen before--because they operate in an age of information unique in history.
This power emerges at a time when the postmodern sensibility reduces the traditional role of the state vis-a-vis the corporation, especially in liberal democracies such as the US. The suspicion of profit and competition, perpetuated in Marxist socialism, has retreated as the modernist arrangements of capital and labor have lost their traditional balance. The state used to mediate and control on behalf of a total citizenry; one conjures up memories of Harry Truman and even Jack Kennedy fulminating against big business hegemony. Such a role is largely gone. Government itself has become a process of seeking some kind of postmodern mimesis in the absence of a universalizing commitment of any kind. That quest, pursued in the fishbowl of ubiquitous media coverage, turns out to be a lame effort to mimic the perceived mosaic of the culture in the make-up of government. It has the effect of leaving corporations to carve out the shape of a new society devoid of the influence of any civic ideal grounded in human need: they are let alone for the accumulation of capital.
In these conditions, the postmodern corporation appears certain to fail by itself to mediate the social and political distress generated increasingly in the postmodern environment.
The tragedy of the Balkans offers us a bizarre international symbol of the potential for human misery inherent in the postmodern temper. On the American scene, the decline of a broad middle class with steadily improving conditions and the rise of an increasingly dysfunctional underclass are short-term signs, at least, that the corporate miracle will not, in itself, make the distribution of social equity its business.
That cannot but call the postmodern corporate arrangement to a critical account sooner or later. The terms of the call may well be post-Marxist; they will definitely be postmodern. That is, we look for postmodern praxis to come into the scope of postmodern critical theory. This expectation harbors a hope (anachronistically modernist, perhaps) that progress within postmodernism can continue to occur. Certainly change can occur. We need to ask whether the concepts that undergird the postmodern corporation so effectively can turn critically upon the corporation itself for correction in the face of its shortcomings as a vehicle for ethical redress in the society.
There is a potential for seeing despair in this question. For the postmodern corporation, in an environment that allows it free play, shows the capacity to "commodify" nearly anything in the human experience. And the critical theory of postmodernity is not overflowing with the power to embrace human need: human need as such partakes of the problematic in a theoretical environment that cannot acknowledge anything common to all of us.
Whatever its potential for helping humanity or for hurting it, the postmodern corporation, as it evolves in the heated atmosphere of electronic information technologies, demands our attention. We need to understand why it flows as it does; and from a careful analysis, we may discern avenues for development.
Meanwhile, "agility" is the word of the day. Vertical integration is passe. Competitors make the best partners for a customized market in a virtual relationship. Being virtual, organizations require minimal capital investment and may evaporate as soon as the market shifts. The corporation is at the ready all the time to react with novelty to the ever-developing call from the customer for service.
In this new text, this new world of new words, the social imperatives of modernism become incoherent. "Ma Bell" symbolized the corporation of the post-World War II hegemony. The connotation of protectiveness in the motherly reference rang true to a generation of white collar loyalists. They have long since been outplaced in the downsizing frenzy of the new corporation. (We want to think of them as having been put out to pasture, but the bucolic tone is much too benign for these times.)
The frazzled young people who have taken their places live near an edge and know the daily thrill of not falling off. Where their predecessors ran the risk of becoming dullards in the climate of organizational conformity--the price of security--these corporate denizens run the risk of wearing out their nerves prematurely in the uncertainty and indifference of organizational agility.
Somehow, postmodern sensibility will probably evolve to the point where it can incorporate concern about them without completely contradicting itself. But that means that the postmodern corporation has a tough evolutionary cycle just ahead of it. So too, we suspect, does the polity of nations, which in the end will be unable to avoid a mediating role of some kind, newly cast.