Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

The Wall Street Journal recently told the story of a hot young mover and shaker brought into Land's End to restructure the company along postmodernist management lines (undoubtedly, he used other terms for the strategy).

Employees quickly protested the loss of community and sense of family they had felt with the old company. The new structures required workers to be flexible, shift work patterns around according to the quickly changing demands of their expanding markets. In essence, the workers were frightened by the loss of their communal and personal histories as people working in a company with a tradition of community. A worker on a monogram-stitching line, for example, complained that the company began to expect constantly rising output rates regardless of their current standards, workloads, or abilities.

In a rare change of mind, the board fired the brash, young consultant, returning to traditional methods of management.