In the modern hi-tech world, there is an ongoing elimination of the distinction between psyche and the environment, between waking and dreaming, between the conscious and the subconscious. When these important boundaries are blurred, people start to lose a sense of themselves. We argue that the Web dramatically speeds up this process. Cyberspace embodies the sudden, hyperreal dynamics of the dream. The conventional rules of time, space, logic, and identity are suspended. The surrealism, simultaneity, and instantaneous change that occur in the dream are embodied in the Web
The Web is rapidly becoming the major medium through which people communicate, make decisions, and even construct their social identities. For some organizations (e.g., Amazon.com and CDNow), the Web is already the dominant forum for business transactions. Making sense of the Web, to the extent that postmodernism facilitates this comprehension, will be essential for insightful organizational practice. The Information Age organization and its stakeholders inhabit the Web. Business research fields (such as consumer behavior, organizational design, and information systems) are based on investigations of corporations and stakeholders interacting in North American Industrial Age settings. The Web eradicates much of this theory, just as the disintegration of the Soviet Union swept away established foreign policy. Now, we need to develop theories of management that incorporate national culture and a networked cybersociety. Postmodernist thinking is a stimulus for fashioning new theories of management and business practice.
The Web confronts modernism because it is a major shift that shakes the very foundation of established management thought. The dominance of broadcast (push technology) has been usurped by the Web (pull technology), and the receiver has taken control from the sender of the timing and content of messages. In the world of advertising, the control of time and space has shifted hands. The trend to decustomize service has been reversed as the Web facilitates mass customization (see ). Services are being fragmented to support one-to-one interaction. New firms, the anti-foundationalists, can threaten the establishment within months of their birth (e.g., Netscape threatened Microsoft, and Amazon.com is still a major threat to Barnes & Noble). Understanding postmodernism is not an easy task, but then again, understanding the consequences of the Web is a major intellectual challenge. Reflecting on postmodernism and its themes should help managers make sense of this new cybersociety.
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