Hence, behind the flattened and more humane workplace still lurks the dialectics of forces of production and relations of production presented at the beginning of this chapter. In a study on corporate culture in high-tech industries, Gideon Kunda (1992) concludes that the dehierarchized management style prevalent in this setting elicits more, not less, control over workers. These corporations, argues Kunda, employ a set of managerial policies “designed to minimize the use and deemphasize the significance of traditional bureaucratic control structures . . . and to elicit instead behavior consistent with cultural prescriptions. Thus, Tech’s jobcategory and compensation systems . . . are grounded in the unchanging bedrock of traditional employment practices. However, they are complemented by additional policies specifically designed . . . [among other things] to remove some of the symbols, and realities, of status, supervision, and formal control” (Kunda 1992, 218–19). Formal control in the high-tech corporate environment, Kunda maintains, is substituted by a “softer” normative control (Kunda 1992).
TECHNO<sub>L</sub>OGY AND C<sub>L</sub>ASS CONSCIO<sub>U</sub>SNESS
The digital discourse juxtaposes two sets of narratives: On the one hand, there are the emancipatory narratives that highlight the individual empowerment of the digerati resulting from the decentralization, dehierarchization, and the flattening out of relations within the workplace. On the other hand, there are the narratives that stress the extent to which the integration of these new characteristics into the capitalist corporation makes its workings more beneficial. For example, mobility increases the freedom of both workers and organizations by facilitating flexibility. The Archimedean point for both of these processes is network technology, which makes work not only more humane (from the point of view of the process) but also more rational (from the point of view of the end result of accumulation). This argument has been most eloquently articulated in the work of Daniel Bell.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age