Kym Thorne

Designing virtual organizations? Themes and trends in political and organizational discourses

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the contemporary fascination with seemingly new, benign and transcendent virtual organizations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper extends Gerlach and Hamiltons investigations and critique into virtuality within the genres of business restructuring and science fiction.Findings – The paper unravels a purposeful, enveloping consciousness that masks both neo‐liberal fictions and postmodern fantasies dominating the virtual organization discourse. This paper finds that practical examples of de‐physicalized, technologically transcendent virtual organizations, crucial to this virtual consciousness, do not exist or are fundamentally different from expectations. The paper finds that the presumed new epoch of global capitalism, based on the productivity unleashed by virtual organizations, is illusory. The paper concludes that once virtual consciousness is penetrated not only are the material and ideological aspects of virtual organizations unmasked but it is possible to loc...

Borders in an (In)Visible World: Revisiting Communities, Recognizing Gulags

Duplicity and propaganda constitute much of the emerging discourse on a “borderless” “new world order.” Deconstructing neoliberal propaganda is one issue. Understanding other colluding discourses is another. Postmodern rhetoric has yet to understand its complicity in refusing to acknowledge and critique the totalizing discourse of neoliberalism and there are dangerous currents to be negotiated in the fatuous collapsing of globalized “end of history” posturings with those of “borderless worlds.” This paper explores the implications for public administration of “borderless” identity and community. This exploration questions the privileging of the “borderless” new world order as discourse and practice that eliminates all alternative approaches to public administration, identity and community. Events at the Guantanamo Bay and Christmas Island Gulags demonstrate the purposeful (re)-emergence and persistence of borders. The challenge for public dministration is to escape the illusions and impractical schemes presented by neoliberal interests which benefit from making the visible invisible, borders non-borders, communities non-communities and persons non persons.

Learning to Play the "Pea and Thimble" Charade?the Invisible and Very Visible Hands in the Neo-Liberal Project: Towards a Manifesto for Reflexive Consciousness in Public Administration

This paper explores the mutual interest of the Post-modern and the Neo-liberal in sustaining a globalized, virtual and individual-sovereign consciousness. This paper explains how the ubiquity of the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of management charade is fundamental to sustaining an Epochal discourse which masks Western, especially U. S., imperialism and the expansion of forms of Corporate Imperialism. This paper provides a manifesto for a reflexive consciousness in Public Administration theory and practice attuned to the verities and high stakes involved in restoring Public Administration in an (in)visible time of exceptional fear and hubris.

The USA PATRIOT Acts (et al.): Convergent Legislation and Oligarchic Isomorphism in the "Politics of Fear" and State Crime(s) Against Democracy (SCADs)

The irrelevance of habeas corpus and the abolition of “double jeopardy,” secret and protracted outsourcing of detention and torture, and increasing geographic prevalence of surveillance technologies across Anglo-American “democracies” have many citizens concerned about the rapidly convergent, authoritarian behavior of political oligarchs and the actual destruction of sovereignty and democratic values under the onslaught of antiterrorism hubris, propaganda, and fear. This article examines synchronic legislative isomorphism in responses to 9/11 in the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union, and Australia in terms of enacted terrorism legislation and, also, diachronic, oligarchic isomorphism in the manufacture of fear within a convergent world by comparing the “Politics of Fear” being practiced today to Stalinist—Russian and McCarthyist—U.S. abuse of “fear.” The immediate future of Anglo-American democratic hubris, threats to civil society, and oligarchic threats to democratic praxis are canvassed. This article also raises the question as to whether The USA PATRIOT Acts of 2001/2006, sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, are examples, themselves, of state crimes against democracy. In the very least, any democratically inclined White House occupant in 2009 would need to commit to repealing these repressive, and counterproductive, acts.

The Imperative of Reason and Rationality: A Politically?and Historically?Aware Netizen's Rejoinder

This paper deals with the celebrity-like status accorded to U.S. public administration theorists, in context and out of context. The Friedrich-Finer debate of 1940/1941 is re-visited not only in a comparativist re-casting of the democratic project and the vacuum of Weberian discourses but also in the context of the emerging, Neoliberal agenda of the role of the agentic Sovereign Individual within the globalizing grand narrative of cyberspace.

Symposium The Dismal (Delusional and Dangerous) “Science” of Economics and the “Capture” of Public Administration: Does History Repeat?: The Multiple Faces of Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Global Financial Crisis

The global financial crisis (GFC) should be considered the reassertion of a physical economics that cannot be fluxed indefinitely by criminogenic elites. This article distinguishes the late twentieth-century domination of a dephysicalized, post-Keynesian, neoliberal monetarist New World Order economics and contextualizes the reemergence of interventionist, Keynesian economics to counter the GFC. This article critically examines the post-GFC return to Keynesian public administration. This critique develops a distinction between a capturable Keynes easily assimilated to neoliberal agendas and an uncapturable Keynes not so easily subverted to such agendas or diverted by calls for more transparency within the economic and financial system. This article warns about the dangers inherent in economic fundamentalism, not only the self-destructive market fundamentalism evident in the GFC, but also any unthinking adoption of Keynesian thought.

Accounting control and performance measurement in a teamworking environment

Flexible organisations are widely perceived to be essential in sustaining competitive advantage in an uncertain world, where innovation is explosive and coming from unexpected directions, where consumer preferences change rapidly and where global competition is increasingly the rule. Empowered teams are a major part of the current shift towards flexible organisations, but so far relatively little attention has been paid either to the impact that this will have on accounting controls or on the appropriateness of traditional measures of performance. This paper explores alternative models of teamworking and uses evidence from three actual cases to point to both problems and potential solutions.

Corruption, criminality and the privatised state: The implications for accounting

Abstract This article introduces concepts of corruption and how they translate into state crimes against democracy and economic state crimes against democracy. This article argues for an approach to corruption that goes beyond individual psychology to consider the systemic purposeful actions of dominant elites to protect and advance their interests. This article also contends that contemporary accounting is enveloped within a corroding political, economic and financial system that advances the interests of neoliberal elites.

Advice to a Young Person Concerning Theory

or nonabstract, theory matters. Theory has central value to every one of us. Theory is used to understand and construct our world and our existence within this world. Theory is an essential part of how we collectively and individually seek to dominate our world and control our existence. As Terry Eagleton observes, “we can never be ‘after theory,’ in the sense that there can be no reflective human life without it” (2003, p. 221). Now more than ever we should understand the danger of misusing theory for ideological purposes and not adjusting our thinking to new circumstances. As John Maynard Keynes warned us, we may be forever at the mercy of some dead (and wrong) economist and his or her economic theory (Skidelsky, 2009). Naomi Klein (2007) demonstrates how neoliberal free-market monetarist economics was used by external and internal interests to exploit “developing economies.” Even after the global financial crisis (Thorne, 2010), when monetarism and the neoliberal agenda should be long gone, the “age of austerity” is with us, and the world, especially Europe, is rife with “purist” neoliberal/monetarist solutions being imposed with devastating consequences. Administrative Theory & Praxis / September 2012, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 462–468.

Midnight in the Garden of PA

Intellectual “traditions” are traceable to and from any number of sources made salient by the prescient historiographer. Distinctive from the arts and sciences from which it draws, public administration scholarship is inextricably defined by zeitgeist; for such scholarship must, one way or the other, come to terms with “what is to be done” in the face of any number of pressing, real-time dilemmas. In this respect, the Minnowbrook “tradition” derives in major part from soul-searching efforts among public administration scholars following the revelations of the Kerner Report of 1968 into “civil disorders” occurring over the previous few years in major metropolitan areas across the United States. These “disorders” were, in fact, the eruption of profound desperation and rage surging from decades of double dealing by U.S. and state governments in matters of race and civil rights. Not mincing rhetoric, the report found