Chapter 3 From Individualism to Post-heroic Practices in Organizational Research

One of the central questions to which organizational research has yet to find a satisfactory answer concerns the concept of the individual in a context where the central subject matter deals with issues of community, groups, social practices, and the nature of social processes in communities of practice. This chapter seeks to show the ways in which the apparent contradiction between concepts of the individual and those circumscribing social practices and social processes is a fabrication resulting from the ubiquitous, the deeply ingrained (culturally and historically), and the generally taken-for-granted understanding of individuality. More generally, the central problem would seem to be that what is taken for granted — and, in that sense, experienced as real and true — becomes, with the passage of time and changed circumstances, politically incorrect, socially incompetent, or totally drained of meaning. One only has to bring to mind the once-credible principles of lifelong employment in a given company and of clearly defined gender roles, or the traditionally sanctioned ideal of the nuclear family. In each of these cases, an axiomatic understanding existed, which was never questioned and which, at one point in history or in a given cultural context, was held to be real and factual.