Kafka on gender, organization and technology: The role of ‘bureaucratic eros’ in administering change

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that Kafka's novels are satirical portraits of the workings of 'bureaucratic eros' in gendered organizations. In Kafka's tragi-comical fiction, a sexually perverse and uncreative 'bureaucratic eros'the opposite of the 'poetic eros'administers highly sexualized gender relationships in hierarchical organizations: law, bureaucratic regulation, administration and execution are expressions of the male officials' sexual desires. Given the lustful manifestations of 'bureaucratic eros', Kafka reveals that organizational and technological change is not some process of rationalization (as Max Weber suggests), but, instead, must be poetically understood as metamorphosis. In Kafka's comical portraits of metamorphoses, the remnants of old myths, old desires, tribe-like organizational forms and primitive uses of technology continue to operate in distorting, disorienting, sexually perverse ways. Thereby, 'bureaucratic eros' brings about an incomprehensible world of lawlessness and anxietya deplorable condition that, Kafka suggests, can only be overcome by fleeing administrative dictates, into the aesthetic sphere.

Novel Thought: Towards a Literary Study of Organization

“…One common – representative – mode of engagement has been to juxtapose Kafka and Weber in order to deepen our understanding of the concept of bureaucracy (Hodson, Martin, Lopez, & Roscigno, 2012; Jørgensen, 2012; Warner, 2007). In an aesthetic, more radically literary register, Kafka’s depiction of bureaucracy’s meaninglessness, incomprehensibility and self-referentiality has provoked explorations of organizational confusion, disorientation and perversity (Ossewaarde, 2019), of the uncanniness of organizational space (Beyes, 2019) and of the experience of organization in the digital age (Czarniawska, 2019; Keenoy & Seijo, 2010), and it has led to ‘Kafkaesque’ empirical inquiries into administrative life (McCabe 2015; Clegg, Pina e Cunha, Munro, Rego, & Oom de Sousa, 2016). The way Kafka’s thinking and writing circles around the groundless grounds of organization has been presented as reflections of organizational bootstrapping avant la lettre (Ortmann, 2019).…”