Glass Cages and Glass Palaces

Images of Organization in Image Conscious Times

JANN TEO
JACQUELINE TAN
Company
QUN YAO YIN
LOGOZHANG
RUIXIAN
 Weber and Bureaucracy

1. Iron Cage

2. Glass Cage

3. Glass Palace
 BUREAUCRACY-IRON CAGE

• Metaphor of modernity
• Bureaucratically organized social order
• Colonized Bodies
• Highly rational
 BUREAUCRACY-IRON CAGE

E.g EDUCATION
McDONALDIZATION
 GLASS CAGE

•Shifting of Western society from concrete

organization to fragile work arrangement/ organization
•Mechanism and production driven to spectacle,
image and consumption driven
 GLASS CAGE

•Transparency =Surveillance
•Employee/ Colleagues
•Manager
•Image-Critical gaze of Consumers
•Fragile
•Brand easily tainted
•Highlights on importance of
emotional displays
and appearances
 GLASS CAGE

•Deeper controls
•Cultural
•Ideological
•Structural
•Technological
•Spatial
 GLASS PALACE

•Container of highlighting its distinctive features

•Hide the reality of entrapment
•Fantasy
•Emphasize on what it has rather than the
constraints
 Flexibility vs. Rigidity

 Flexibility applies to individual, organizations and

entire society
 Antidote to Weberian Bureaucracy.
 Consumption: mass forms vs. niches;
technological determinism vs possible
technological choice; differentiated, de-skilled jobs
vs. de-differentiated, multiskilled jobs; fundamental
relation vs. complex and fragmentary relations
 Whether Weber’s and Freud’s analyses apply to
our time?
 Problems with Flexibility

Flexibility promotes short-term,

opportunistic outlook among employees.
Undermines trust and loyalty
insecurity and fear
Spasmodic and fragmented careers
Employees lose and confuse on the goals
and direction
 STRENGTHS

1. 2. 3. 4.

Efficient Systematic Vertical Fixed

set of rules, chain of Monetary
Control command, Salaries
Unity form Fairness
of
direction
 WEAKNESSES

1. 2. 3. 4.

•Irrationality
Oligarchy- Inflexibility, De- Weakening of
Iron Cage Internalization Humanizatio Traditional &
n
Religious Moral
Authority –
Values
Of Efficiency
Pre-dominate
 Critics on glass cage/palace

 Controls operating through language, emotion, space and

exposure (Same efficient as iron cage?)
 New forms of entrapment and opposition
 Intrude into people’s privacy (Enclosure to customer, fellow
employee and managers)
 Does transparency imply fair and just?
 Any cultural conflict?
 Bureaucracy still in the glass cage?
 Aesthetic labor: value added or dehumanization?
 Glass cage: a real transparency and openness?
 Fragility of contemporary control system?
 Is it applicable to the whole world?