The Rise of the Digital Society, Generation Z, and Management Challenges in the 21st Century: A Review Essay

Many scholars believe that the nature of management and bureaucracy did not significantly change from what it was in the Egyptian civilization some ten thousand years ago, or in medieval church and kingdoms about one thousand years ago, or in the emerging days of industrialization about two hundred years ago. The older civilizations of Egypt, India, China, Greece, and Rome were built around complex bureaucratic organizations. The era of oriental despotism was vastly organized around hydraulic bureaucracies. But in no stage of civilization, man’s societal existence remained so deeply embedded into organizational bureaucracies as it is at the present time. A modern society has been rightly described as an “organization society†[1] and modern man as an “organizational man†[2]. The prototype of modern organizations emerged when medieval kingdoms began to disintegrate paving the way to the rise of modern states, and large-scale industrialization began to replace the traditional family-centered modes of production at the beginning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Systematic studies on the nature of bureaucracy and management also began with the birth of social science in the nineteenth century.