The capability approach (CA) developed by Amartya Sen focuses on the enhancement of people's capabilities, i.e. their real freedom to choose a life course they have reason to value.Applying the CA to the organizational context, the focus of human resource management is transformed, shifting away from the needs of the organization to the freedoms of the individual. This shift happens also inside the so-called 'liberated companies,' firms with an organizational form that allows employees the complete freedom, along with the responsibility, to take any actions they decide are best. In this paper we show the contribution of the capability approach for management and for organizational ethics by focusing on this innovative model of 'liberated companies.'

Scholarship has highlighted tensions arising from the ‘new management ideology’, an attempt to infuse formal organizations with community, informality and equality. Proposals to ‘liberate’ companies have been received with a mix of scepticism and hope for their emancipatory possibilities. While the tensions arising from such proposals are known, less work examines the practices by which they are mediated in the workplace. Taking a ritual perspective, we argue that rituals’ unique capacity to mediate oppositions makes it a powerful tool in the new management toolbox. Examining a liberated enterprise initiative in a French multinational company, we analyse how rituals structure, disavow, segment or maintain organizational tensions. While rituals constituted neo‐normative controls, we also discuss the emancipatory possibilities for rituals in holding open unreconciled tensions and preventing closure. We discuss the implications for understanding neo‐normative control through rituals, outlining a future research agenda for the study of rituals in new management.

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In the last decade, advances in technology have transformed the way in which we work, making it more and more fluid. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the fact that the border between work and non-work is disappearing. Many people, indeed, often work even on weekends. Moreover, a large number of workers continue working outside their home or their office environments. For example, it is more and more frequent to see managers or employees engaged in work calls in airports, public transport, cafés, hotels or other 'liminal spaces'. These spaces have become a part of workers' daily routines and contribute to building their identities in a changing world. In this article, I consider the concepts of liminality and of identity, as discussed in the literature. Then, I examine the construction of workers' identity in these 'places of passage'. I focus, especially, on what happens both in public transport and in other 'places of passage', such as cafés, airports and railway stations.

This article aims to explore the changes in the organizational culture of public administrations following the implementation of performance-related pay-PRP systems. The work explores the switch to an explicit remuneration system through the implementation of incentives and focuses on the effects, positive or negative, this has had on the ethos of public administrations. Data from a survey carried out among private and public employees in a specific area of Southern Italy are used to analyze how the shift from an implicit to an explicit remuneration system has impacted the public servants' ethos. Due to the application of PRP, public servants are now expected to be compensated based on their performance. The ineffective management of incentives in public administrations affects the intrinsic motivation of public employees and may lead to moral disengagement. While the previous literature has focused on the practical challenges and limitations of PRP, less has been written about how PRP has changed the culture of public administrations. This article shows how PRP can change the traditional ethos of ABOUT THE AUTHORS