Freedom, work and organizations in the 21st century: Freedom for whom and for whose purpose?

Abstract

This article critically interrogates the meaning of freedom and its current and potential relationship with social relations in and around work as introduction to this special issue. This interrogation is vital given neoliberalism’s evaluative promise for more individual and corporate freedom, while concurrently limiting the conditions for the experience/expression of freedom of workers. Consequently, there are concerns about working for “private governments”, workers being subject to electronic surveillance, and workers increasingly caught up in structural disadvantages (i.e. precarious work) that contribute to growing unfreedom. Rather than reproducing abstract principles around freedom, this article and special issue advance a contextually sensitive emergence of freedom. We explicate this emergence as (i) alternative experiences of freedom, (ii) alternative conceptions of freedom, and (iii) alternative modes of organizing. To inspire future research, we extend these themes to suggest that treating freedom (i) as pluralist/relational and (ii) as having the capacity for world-making has meaningful implications for how work is organized and for whose benefit. We advocate an explicit turn to non-neoliberal values (e.g. collectivism, solidarity, human dignity, respect, and recognition) to enable more relational versions of freedom that can serve as a basis for freedom as world-making at work and in society.

Reading The Technological Society to Understand the Mechanization of Values and Its Ontological Consequences

“…From a practical perspective, we can imagine the possibility of alternatives-to contemplate a new beginning (Arendt, 1958(Arendt, /1985-that avoids us having to live in an eternally technical state of mind. Instead of striving for optimal rationality and efficiency only-a condition in which decisions are made without regard for people-there is a need to rediscover and reclaim values other than formal rationality alone (Lindebaum et al, 2022). The feedback loop in Figure 1 underlines this thinking, as it highlights that through ontological reinvigoration we can reestablish a sense of value plurality previously lost to "technique.…”

Union collective action, social movement unionism and worker freedom in New Zealand

“…Assuming that "freedom is good, and more freedom is better" (Lindebaum et al 2022(Lindebaum et al , 1854, an expansive social-movement-unionism project based on radical democracy may provide more "available options" for worker freedom in the workplace and beyond. It may also address, to a certain extent, the barriers to preventing the loss of worker freedom, in concept and practice.…”

Guest Editors’ Introduction: New Challenges to the Enlightenment: How Twenty-First-Century Sociotechnological Systems Facilitate Organized Immaturity and How to Counteract It

“…We note, however, that today we are already at least one level of complexity above Foucault’s social and political realities of the twentieth century: the gradual replacement of state paternalism by big data technologies—or, in sum, what Zuboff defines as the Big Other—is having new systemic effects on the life of human communities. We do, however, learn from Foucault (1982: 791–92) that between power and anti-authority struggle there is a dynamic relationship that can be reversed—and that recovering human freedom against totalizing systems is “a permanent political task inherent in all social existence” (see also, more recently, Lindebaum, den Hond, Greenwood, Chamberlain, & Andersson, 2022: 1864–66, on “world-making” in their relational concept of freedom).…”

“…In addition to the individual-focused organized immaturity and related subphenomena addressed by the further articles in this Special Issue, we see particular merit in further exploring the collective side of organized immaturity (the collective side is also emphasized in relational concepts of freedom based on interactions of individuals with others; see, e.g., Arendt, 1959Arendt, /1968Lindebaum et al, 2022). This is also where our conceptualization moves beyond Kant's (1784) initial notion of immaturity as a property of the individual and seeks to contribute a consistent sociophilosophical explanation and critique of the phenomenon.…”