Reflexive Organization and Radicalized Modernity: Revisiting the Organization–Society Nexus

Abstract

Organizations and societies have changed. Bureaucracy, as modernity’s form of organization, has transformed into a reflexive organization, coordinating the conditions of system reproduction in time–space with increased reflexivity. Simultaneously, modernity with capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization as its institutional dimensions radicalized; reflexive organizations as one of its driving forces and the reflexive organization as the new organization model. Today, reflexive organizations are the most ubiquitous and powerful agents in our societies, separating and integrating activities, practices, and occurrences in new time–space arrangements and sets of social systems together with others, fueling modernity’s dynamism and global scope and letting our societies resemble an engine without a driver, erratically running in directions we cannot foresee. To identify and understand these changes and their impact on our current world, we develop a research framework informed by Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory that upgrades social systems to the core of structuration theory and adds the reflexive mode of organization and a strategic perspective to Giddens’ theory of modernity.