Introduction: Communication in Management, Work and Society

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. Reality control, they called it…1 These are the words of George Orwell in his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. While management might appear as everlasting — and therefore give the impression it is unending — the dominant managerially guided discourse by and about management itself is shaping not only our memories about management but also how we perceive it. Very much like any other aspect in our socially constructed and socially communicated world the current perception of the world of management and work has been able to establish what Orwell called reality control, a viewpoint that makes us see management very much from a somewhat limited range of perspectives. Similar to Orwell’s Big Brother on the one hand and his hero Winston Smith on the other, these perspectives have always carried different values because they are connected to a human subject — a person — rather than an object. Ever since the philosophical subject—object debate had started in the ancient world of Greece two millenniums ago, the split between subject and subjectivity as well as object and objectivity has fascinated human thinking. With the rise of modernity and Enlightenment the proponents of pure scientific objectivity and pure reason have sought to separate human knowledge from our social existence.2