ABSTRACT
The relatedness of individuals to their work organizations has changed radically in the past couple of decades, the result of a changing global environment in which uncertainty and technological advances have become paradoxical partners. Information and communication technologies appear to promise more certainty in the control of business operations, “organizational knowledge”, and employee performance, yet despite this, people’s experience of working life is of greater uncertainty and of having less control over their futures. Experiences of fragmentation have also increased, as the picture drawn by one employee of a global services firm clearly shows (Figure 1). Small and large enterprises have responded by changing internal structures of roles and relationships, employment arrangements, the location of their production or service operations, and universally getting rid of so-called “non-core business”, which usually means mass sackings of staff. There is another paradox, perhaps, in the shift to larger, more powerful organizational units, such as global corporate mergers, while at the same time over-valuing entrepreneurial individualism and its focus on individual performance. Connectedness and survival are central themes in this kind of environment.
