Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’ is one of the most famous metaphors in social science and has left an indelible mark on organizational analysis. There is a problem, however. Weber never mentioned an ‘iron cage’ or an ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’. This is a mistranslation of the German phrase stahlhartes Gehäuse by Talcott Parsons in the first English publication of The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism . It should read ‘shell as hard as steel’ or ‘steel-hard casing’. And it has nothing to do with bureaucracy. Could we be overlooking insights about contemporary workplaces that only a correct translation of Weber’s stahlhartes Gehäuse can reveal? Perhaps. I am not suggesting we abandon the ‘iron cage’ metaphor. My objective is simply to examine whether a literal reading of stahlhartes Gehäuse offers any additional insights for studying contemporary organizations.
Gender-based violence (GBV) remains prevalent within music festivals despite increasing industry attention to safety and prevention. Existing research has focused primarily on festival attendees and interpersonal risk, with far less attention paid to the workers who sustain festival environments and respond to harm as it unfolds. Drawing on feminist phenomenology and an ethnographic study of UK music festival, this paper develops the concept of organisational disorientation to explain how GBV becomes difficult to recognise, interpret and sustain as organisational knowledge within carnivalesque festival environments organised around pleasure, movement and atmosphere. We argue that the carnivalesque smokescreen creates the conditions under which organisational disorientation becomes possible. The study draws on 24 trauma-informed interviews with festival workers alongside embodied ethnographic fieldwork conducted across five UK music festivals while leading a welfare-based GBV response team. Findings show that workers encountered GBV through three interrelated dimensions of disorientation: bodily, interpretative and procedural. Harm was often sensed bodily before it became organisationally actionable, while disclosures were redirected, minimised or absorbed into processes prioritising continuity, reputation and ‘vibe’ management. The paper makes three contributions to feminist organisational studies. First, it extends Ahmed’s concept of disorientation into organisational analysis to show how violence becomes obscured through organisational conditions. Second, it shifts festival and GBV scholarship towards the labour and relational work of frontline workers positioned within masculinised organisational structures. Third, it theorises the carnivalesque not as a neutral backdrop to violence, but as an organisational arrangement shaping what can be recognised and responded to as harm.
Recent studies of alternative organising have returned to utopianism as a way to imagine desirable organisational futures, making a difference in the real world through utopianism. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering the nature of desire that is evoked when imagining utopian futures, and the relationship between fantasy and reality in such desiring. Bringing Frederic Jameson’s writing on utopia into dialogue with ideas of desirable futures and real utopias, we offer an account of desire combining the specific representational and literary forms and conventions of utopian writing with psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and alterity, to argue that utopia should not simply be understood in terms of planning alternative organisations which might become a concrete, future reality. Rather, analysing the way in which fantasy and desire function in the utopian form, we argue that utopian representations are not ‘realistic’ in the sense of an actionable plan, but that this does not render the desire of utopia politically ineffective. By operating directly on desiring in the present, utopian fantasies can ‘educate’ desire, and enable political action, without constituting an image-object whose attainment or realisation would satisfy that desire. Such a motive-force is needed to effect real organisational transformation but need not realistically represent the future organisational state it would move towards.
The UK boasts the world’s second strongest higher education (HE) system. Unlike most other HE systems globally, employment in UKHE is characterised by the absence of tenure and the preponderance of fixed-term contracts, which can significantly impact working conditions and the exercise of academic freedom. Yet, the relationship between fixed-term employment and academic freedom remains empirically under-researched. This study explores the ways in which academic freedom for research is shaped and constrained by UKHE organisational practices. Drawing from the open text data gathered from 195 fixed-term respondents in a survey distributed to University and College Union (UCU) members that overall gathered 2028 responses, the article provides a novel explanatory lens with which to understand how university organisational practices can stymie academic freedom for research. Through application of the concept of constitutive effects to the ways in which universities instrumentalise time as a managerial tool, the paper identifies three barriers to academic freedom for research that institutions create for scholars employed fixed-term, conceptualised here as (i) employers not permitting faculty time for research at the contractual level ( no time permitted ); (ii) employers timing scholars out from research through workloading practices ( timed out ); and (iii) employers wasting faculty time with institutionally mandated research-adjacent tasks (time wasted ). Through this conceptualisation, the article illuminates how UK university organisational practices can undermine academic freedom for research for those employed on a time-limited contractual arrangement, and highlights the risks to academic freedom in countries that are adopting a UK-style model.
