Monika Kostera

Friendship, a mutual and profound relationship, permeates history of human culture and occurs in all social situations, including professional and informal human activities. In organizations, it devel­ops through processes of communication and generates a communication culture of kindness and support. Organizational friendship enhances work engagement and satisfaction, as well as helps to promote individual ends. This article investigates the more vital significance of friendship in alter­native organizations. Such organizations, operating at the margins of the currently dominant profit-oriented business model, offer a plethora of insights of possible structures and practices. Our ethno­graphic qualitative research shows the implications of workplace friendship as organizing principle. It helps to make organizations more humane, and redressed the moral imbalance, so prevalent in contemporary organizing and management. This has important implications for any kind of com­munication, creating social awareness around important themes related to management and organ­izations. Patterns of friendship are meaningful for organizing and organizations and their most vi­tal significance concerns the area of social communication.

JEL: Z130

Many recent publications hold a dark view of contemporary business administration and its context. The current state of capitalism and corporate management is described as zombie (Harman, 2009), ghostly (Roy, 2014) or, in the most benign appraisal, sick but not dying (Tomlinson, 2010).  At the same time, business schools, textbooks and popular management books remain wedded to a reductive view of social interactions, drawing inspiration as well as authority from a century of socioeconomic triumph as well as from the rigid definitions of management relations as handed down by the founding figures of the discipline. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s (1969) refiguring of Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, we revisit the haunted spaces of popular management books, using the situationist method of dérive to invoke the ghosts of foundational thinkers for  inspiration and, possibly, exorcism. The aim of this excursion is to propose strategies for communication about some old ideas of management which still can be regarded as vital, even though the contemporary forms may have become morbid (Fleming, 2017). 

The contemporary business education has been promoting competition to the detriment of cooperation. This is unfortunate, given the magnitude and complexity of the current crisis facing humanity: a situation which urgently requires cooperation. Based on an ethnographic study of IT management consultants, we propose a practice-based framework for education and training rooted in humanistic management principles to remedy this lack.