The dead-end of ad-hocracy

ABSTRACT

Since the 1960s ‘ad-hocracy’, an approach to organizations that values provisionality and is especially advantaged by new technological systems, has been understood as a ‘radical’ challenge to the rigidity of bureaucratic institutions. This essay argues that commonsense championing of the temporary, the anti-institutional, and the flexible in corporate, political, educational, and daily life established the conditions that preordained the disastrous handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Most hazardously, a powerful strain of Left critique also advances on a comparable tack, one that too easily embraces temporary and flexible organizational structures over lasting institutional ones, resulting in unintended ideological support for ‘ad-hocracy’.

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic
• conjuncture
• ad-hocracy
• gig economy
• labour
• education
• collective action

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 Elsewhere, I have charted the discursive emergence of our contemporary technological situation, with special focus on the role of education. See, Acland (2012, 2017).

2 It’s not surprising that it took a television critic, Emily Nussbaum (2017), to nail this dimension early on in the Trump presidency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles R. Acland

Charles R. Acland is Distinguished University Research Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal. His most recent book is American blockbuster: movies, technology, and wonder (Duke University Press 2020). Ted Striphas, John Erni, and Darin Barney provided generous and exceptional commentary, for which I offer my thanks.