Glass Cages and Glass Palaces: Images of Organization in Image-Conscious Times

Abstract

Max Weber’s metaphor of ‘the iron cage’ has provided an abiding image of organizations during the high noon of modernity. But these organizations—rigid, rational and bureaucratic—may no longer be sustainable in our times. Instead of a preoccupation with efficient production and rational administration, management today is increasingly turning to the consumer as the measure of all things, a consumer who seeks not merely the useful and the functional, but the magical, the fantastic and the alluring. Management of organizations thus finds itself increasingly preoccupied with the orchestration of collective fantasies and the venting of collective emotions through the power of image, in what Ritzer has named the cathedrals of consumption, such as shopping malls, tourist attractions and holiday resorts. The core thesis of this paper is that decline of Weber’s iron cage of rationality has exposed us neither to the freedom of a garden of earthly delights nor to the desolation of the law of the jungle. Instead, I propose that the new experiences of work and consumption allow for greater ambivalence and nuance, for which I offer the twin metaphors of glass cages and glass palaces. As a material that generates, distorts and disseminates images, glass seems uniquely able to evoke both the glitter and the fragility of organizations in late modernity. The metaphor of the glass cage suggests certain constraints, discontents and consolations quite distinct from those we encounter at the high noon of modernity. Shared features of the glass cage of work and the glass cage of consumption are an emphasis on display, an invisibility of constraints, a powerful illusion of choice, a glamorization of image and an ironic questionmark over whether freedom lies inside or outside the glass. Above all, there is an ambiguity about whether the glass is a medium of entrapment or a beautifying frame.